10 Feminist Poets You Should Know
1. Maya Angelou- “Phenomenal Woman”
2. Anne Waldman- “Matriot Acts, Act I [History of Mankind]”
3. Carol Ann Duffy- “Queen Kong”
4. Margaret Atwood- “Siren Song”
5. Lyn Hejinian- “My Life” (excerpt)
6. Alice Walker- “Our Martyr”
7. Katha Pollitt- “In the Bulrushes”
8. Susan Howe- “Rückenfigur”
9. Carolyn Kizer- “Fearful Women”
10. Marge Piercy- “To Be Of Use“
(Source: flavorwire.com)
I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
George Orwell, Why I Write
(Source: thepocketmouse, via teachingliteracy)
(via loveyourchaos)
Einstein’s Insight into Human Nature
Detailed descriptions of Albert Einstein’s thinking process were discovered in his correspondence with his close friend Maurice Solovine, who was a student of philosophy. One day Solovine suggested reading and debating the works of great authors. Einstein agreed enthusiastically and soon mathematician Conrad Habicht became involved in what was to be known as the “Olympia Academy.” Often their meetings, held in Einstein’s flat, would last until the early morning hours where the three discussed issues while eating hard boiled eggs and smoking pipes and cigars.
Among the topics that intrigued them was thinking and believing. How do we think? Why do we believe what we believe. Einstein intuitively knew that thinking is speculative and how personal beliefs and theories distort what we observe. Once he observed jokingly, “If the facts don’t confirm your theory, change your facts.”
Einstein explained that psychologically, our beliefs and axioms rest upon our experiences. There exists, however, no logical path from experience to an axiom, but only an intuitive connection based on our interpretation of the experience, which is always subject to revocation. These interpretations shape our beliefs and perceptions which determine our theories about the world. Finally, our theories determine what we observe in the world and, paradoxically, we only observe what confirms our theories which further hardens our beliefs and axioms.
At one time, ancient astronomers believed that the heavens were eternal and made of ether. This theory made it impossible for them to observe meteors as burning stones from outer space. Although the ancients witnessed meteor showers and found some on the ground, they couldn’t recognize them as meteors from outer space. They sought out and observed only those things that confirmed their theory about the heavens.
We are like the ancient astronomers and actively seek out only that information that confirms our beliefs and theories about ourselves and the world. Religious people see evidence of God’s handiwork everywhere; whereas, atheists see evidence of the absence of God everywhere. Conservatives see the evils of liberalism everywhere and liberals see the evils of conservatism everywhere. In fact, you do not need to watch and listen to either Fox or MSNBC because you already know what their position will be on any given political issue.
Many of us are taught that belief is the result of reasoned thought which informed you and then you chose to believe or not believe. But actually, your beliefs are shaped by your subjective interpretations of your experiences. When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you, and then you choose to do something and do it. But actually, the way you think and what you think is determined by your theories about yourself and life. Thought controls you more than you realize.
[..]
Imagine that a group of curious bees land on the outside of a church window. Each bee gazes upon the interior through a different stained glass pane. To one bee, the church’s interior is all red. To another it is all yellow, and so on. The bees cannot experience the inside of the church directly; they can only see it. They can never touch the interior or smell it or interact with it in any way. If bees could talk, they would end up arguing over the color of the interior. Each bee would stick to his version, not capable of understanding that the other bees were looking through different pieces of stained glass. It’s the same with us when we end up arguing with someone about a theory or a belief. Both individuals are looking at the subject through their stained glass interpretation of experience.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
“Happiness is only real when shared.”
(Source: pulsarae, via thestreetphilosopher)
Memory-Improving Gene Tied to PTSD
Inkfish:
A superior visual memory is the best friend of artists and competitive card memorizers. But to people who’ve lived through traumatic events, it might be the enemy.
Researchers in Switzerland and Germany guessed that people with a better memory might be more susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder, their minds clinging stubbornly to horrific events in the past. But studying the memories of people living with a mental illness is difficult, since the disorder itself might affect their memory. So when the researchers went on a hunt for genes that are linked to both memory and PTSD, they began in a healthy population.
[…]
Among the healthy Swiss population, the better-memory A allele was more common than the worse-memory G allele. But among the Rwandan refugees, the opposite was true: The better-memory gene variant was the rare one. If it were more common, PTSD symptoms might have been even more frequent among the displaced Rwandans.
The genetics of mental illness are tricky to untangle, and what merits a diagnosis in one culture might be normal in another. Studies such as this one, though, could reveal who’s most at risk for certain symptoms. And if scientists can figure out how exactly the genes in question are acting in the brain, we might see new drugs that can treat some of these symptoms—or prevent people’s memories from turning against them in the first place.
(Source: inkfish.fieldofscience.com)
A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full
NYTimes:
The definition of an optimist:
Someone, like me, who plans to get more done than time permits.
Having failed to achieve the impossible, someone, like me, who is sure everything will somehow get done anyway.
A more classical definition from the Mayo Clinic: “Optimism is the belief that good things will happen to you and that negative events are temporary setbacks to be overcome.”
In one study, adults shown to be pessimists based on psychological tests had higher death rates over a 30-year period than those who were shown optimistic. No doubt, the optimists were healthier because they were more inclined to take good care of themselves.
Unlike Voltaire’s Candide, I’ve yet to be stripped of my optimism, though there are clearly forces in this country and the world that could subdue even the most ardent optimist.
I am a realist, after all, and I do fret over things I may be able to do little or nothing about directly: economic injustice; wars and the repeated failure to learn from history; our gun-crazy society; the overreliance on tests to spur academic achievement; and attempts to strip women of their reproductive rights.
But I’ve found that life is a lot more pleasant when one looks at the bright side, seeing the glass half full and assuming that reason will eventually prevail.
Not Just About Being Positive
Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — is the antithesis of optimism. In a book called “Breaking Murphy’s Law,” Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, explained that optimism is not about being positive so much as it is about being motivated and persistent.
Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found that rather than giving up and walking away from difficult situations, optimists attack problems head-on. They plan a course of action, getting advice from others and staying focused on solutions. Whenever my husband, a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, said, “It can’t be done,” I would seek a different approach and try harder — although I occasionally had to admit he was right.
Dr. Segerstrom wrote that when faced with uncontrollable stressors, optimists tend to react by building “existential resources” — for example, by looking for something good to come out of the situation or using the event to grow as a person in a positive way.
I was 16 when my mother died of cancer. Rather than dwell on the terrible void her death left in my life, I managed to gain value from the experience. I learned to apply her lifelong frugality more constructively, living each day as if it could be my last, but with a focus on the future in case it wasn’t.
Yes, I saved, but I also chose not to postpone for some nebulous future the things I wanted to do and could, if I tried hard, find a way to do now. And I adopted a very forthright approach to life, believing that if I wanted something badly enough, I could probably overcome the odds against me.
When I applied at age 24 for a job as a science writer at The New York Times, an interviewer said I was foolhardy to think I could be hired after just two years of newspaper experience. “If I didn’t think I could do the job, I wouldn’t be here,” I told him.
It turned out to be just what he wanted to hear, and I was hired. Since what I loved most was researching and writing articles that could help people better understand science and medicine, I stayed focused on my goals and declined opportunities to move up in the organization by becoming an editor.
Research has indicated that a propensity toward optimism is strongly influenced by genes, most likely ones that govern neurotransmitters in the brain. Still, the way someone is raised undoubtedly plays a role, too. Parents who bolster children’s self-esteem by avoiding criticism and praising accomplishments, however meager, can encourage in them a lifelong can-do attitude.
With the right guidance, many of the attributes of optimism also can be learned by adults, Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found.
Noting that it is easier to change behavior than emotions, she eschews the popular saying “Don’t worry, be happy.” Instead, she endorses a form of cognitive behavioral therapy: Act first and the right feelings will follow. As she puts it in her book, “Fake it until you make it.”
She wrote, “People can learn to be more optimistic by acting as if they were more optimistic,” which means “being more engaged with and persistent in the pursuit of goals.”
If you behave more optimistically, you will be likely to keep trying instead of giving up after an initial failure. “You might succeed more than you expected,” she wrote. Even if the additional effort is not successful, it can serve as a positive learning experience, suggesting a different way to approach a similar problem the next time.
Framing Your Thoughts
It’s important not to neglect the power of positive thinking. Both Dr. Segerstrom and the Mayo researchers recommend taking a few minutes at the end of each day to write down three positive things that happened that day, ending the day on an upbeat note.
The Mayo researchers offered these additional suggestions:
Avoid negative self-talk. Instead of focusing on prospects of failure, dwell on the positive aspects of a situation.
In college, I would approach every exam, even those I had barely studied for, with the thought that I was going to do well. Time after time, this turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Regardless of the nature of your work, identify some aspect of it that is personally fulfilling. If your job is scrubbing floors, stand back and admire how shiny and clean they look.
Surround yourself with positive, upbeat people. But be aware that if you are chronically negative and always see only the dark side of things, the optimists in your life may eventually give up on you.
Focus on situations that you can control, and forget those you can’t. I would also suggest using voting power, money or communication skills to forward a goal that is beyond your personal control.
(Source: The New York Times)
That so long as we enjoy the light of day, we may greet one another as kindred.
Pueblo Indian prayer
Re-Adaptation: Grand Canyon Country
Artist Bryan Nash Gill creates incredible, intricate designs from large-scale relief prints of the cross sections of trees. The labor is intense, but the art extracted from the rings and ridges is both mysterious and immediate.
Bryan Nash Gill is an artist living and working in New Hartford, Conn. The images are excerpted from his new book, Woodcut, now available from Princeton Architectural Press.
The Brain is What We Do with It
There is yet no consciousness of the brain’s plasticity and thus no awareness of the potentials for development, reorganization. ‘Neuronal man’ has yet to gain a sense of his own freedom.
“Why do we persist in our belief that the brain is purely and simply a “machine”, a program without promise? Why are we ignorant of our own plasticity?” asks Catherine Malabou in her book What Should We Do with our Brain? (p. 9). In it, the French philosopher undertakes nothing less than to articulate a “consciousness of the plastic brain” – trying to open up a fresh perspective on the potentials of the developing, transformative, enabling nature of our central nervous system and thereby attempting to supersede the pervasive, thought-numbing talk of rigid mechanisms and neural determination that still dominates much of the discourses in and around today’s neurosciences.
Malabou’s central claim is refreshingly simple: Current research in neuroscience increasingly reveals that the human brain is plastic and malleable in ways previously unthought-of. In effect, this insight reverses the signature claim of the champions of cerebral subjectivity, transforming the merciless “You are your brain!” into the encouraging, empowering “Your brain will become what you are!” It puts the person back in charge – both of their lives and of their nervous system’s organisation. However, this message has, so far, largely failed to reach an audience, both in science or academia, and in the wider public. “Humans make their own brain, but they do not know it” (p. 2). There is yet no consciousness of the brain’s plasticity and thus no awareness of the potentials for development, reorganization. ‘Neuronal man’ has yet to gain a sense of his own freedom.
In times where much of philosophy is lacking both a critical spirit and an energising vision, Malabou’s book is a much-needed manifesto coming at the right time. However, in the end it is little more than a manifesto – it is no worked-out study, it does not present much of an argument. Still, this might be what this branch of philosophy is in urgent need of. How long have we waited for sentences like this one: “Even if it is fascinating to observe aplysias, we cannot spend our time in ecstasies over slugs.” (p. 67)? Malabou dares to articulate powerfully an inchoate feeling that many share, but few have so far given sufficient expression: the sense that, despite all the exciting advances and insights into the functioning of the brain, the predominant narratives that are routinely spun, the stories that are being told about neuronal organization are remarkable lacking in spirit, creativity, possibility. Instead, what we are presented with, over and over again, are variations of the same sad tales of rigidity and determination, of stable traits and hard-wired routines, of dumb mechanisms programmed in stone age by the unrelenting imperatives of natural selection. This virus has infected philosophy, as expressed in the lingering-on of the lame spirit and boring habitus of 19th century materialism and early 20th century scientism, superficially ‘fancied up’ with borrowings from modern technoscience with its futuristic machinery and colourful images of “the mind at work”. In short, we live in an academic environment hostile to creative thought, hostile to the new.
Were it only for the boredom of the predominant narratives, we could probably still live with the situation. But according to Malabou, there is more at stake. The lack of a well-articulated consciousness of the plastic brain creates a vacuum that opens the door to ideological infiltration. If you don’t come up with your own narratives and ideas to take charge of your life, others will happily provide ideas and stories for you. In our day, the chief providers of ready-to-use narratives for all areas of human existence are the spin-doctors in personnel departments and counselling companies of corporate capitalism. We witness the rise of a new spirit of capitalism, the soft but unrelenting pressures of globalised economy, the universal demand for adaptability, flexibility, emotional intelligence, creativity, self-motivation, and other ‘new values’ that will further entangle work and life, that will facilitate the near-complete absorption of existence into the corporate culture of the work world. This, then, is the crucial question for Malabou, the leading thread running through her short book:
“Does brain plasticity, taken as a model, allow us to think a multiplicity of interactions in which the participants exercise transformative effects on one another through the demands of recognition, of non-domination, and of liberty? Or must we claim, on the contrary, that, between determinism and polyvalence, brain plasticity constitutes the biological justification of a type of economic, political, and social organization in which all that matters is the result of action as such: efficacy, adaptability – unfailing flexibility?” (p. 31)
The central contrast is the one between plasticity, the watchword of the new brain sciences, and flexibility, the watchword of the new capitalism; and the relation between the two is construed as clear-cut: flexibility is the ugly sibling, the mutated miniature of a hopeful idea – “the ideological avatar of plasticity” (p. 12). If we fail to see and capture the potentials, the realities of the brain’s plasticity, we can rest assured that the open space of possibilities will soon be closed for good by the demands and norms of the new world order: flexibility, functionality, adaptability in the work place, and the ability to constantly relocate and re-connect emotionally – the profile of the ideal employee will be set in stone. “Indeed, what flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, the power to create, to invent or even erase an impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius” (p. 12). The looming prospect of a ‘hostile takeover’ of the promising idea of plasticity by its miniature flexibility is the organizing principle according to which Malabou arranges her material. In this way, she stylizes today’s neuroscience as facing a crucial choice:
“Indeed, without this freeing [of the speech of ‘neuronal man’, J.S.], neuroscientific discourse will have the sole consequence – beyond medical advances – of unwittingly producing criteria, models, and categories for regulating social functioning and increasing daily the legitimation of the demand for flexibility as global norm. To produce consciousness of the brain is not to interrupt the identity of brain and world and their mutual speculative relation; it is just the opposite, to emphasize them and to place scientific discovery at the service of an emancipatory political understanding.” (p. 53)
(Source: creativitypost.com)
Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.
Barbara Marciniak
(via moreofamore)
Gilded Bookends
(Source: amandaonwriting)
Why Are We So Obsessed With Improving IQ?
Does knowing your IQ really matter? A response to David Hambrick’s New York Times opinion piece, “I.Q. Points for Sale, Cheap.”
David Hambrick’s recent New York Times opinion piece—“I.Q. Points for Sale, Cheap”—warns that we should be skeptical of the recent studies that claim to show that intelligence can be improved through training. The title itself suggests that these IQ points can be bought cheaply simply because these gains are likely hollow. The truth is that at this point the scientific community as a whole just isn’t sure whether genuine intelligence can be increased through training.
However, some psychologists believe they have found a way to increase intelligence that only requires hours of training. Here is a summary of that famous 2008 study led by Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl:
“In the Jaeggi study, the researchers began by having participants complete a test of reasoning to measure their “fluid” intelligence — the ability to draw connections between things, solve novel problems and adapt to new situations. Then some of the participants received up to eight hours of training in a difficult cognitive task that required paying careful attention to two streams of information (a version of this task is now marketed by Lumosity); others were assigned to a control group and received no such training. Then all of the participants took a different version of the reasoning test. The results were startling. The authors reported that the trained participants showed a larger gain in the reasoning test than the control group did, and despite the relatively brief period of training, this gain was large enough that it would be expected to substantially improve performance in everyday life.”
The desire to improve intelligence is not new. There have been many large scale attempts in the past which have been unsuccessful. Hence the skepticism of many researchers, including Zach Shipstead, Thomas Redick, and Randall Engle whopublished a thorough critique of the working memory training literature (which included discussion of the study summarized above).
Perhaps we can find ways to improve intelligence one day. However, maybe braintraining isn’t the only way to approach the issue.
As Richard Haier pointed out in my article Could Brain Imaging Replace The SAT?: “The goal of our research is not to replace the SAT with brain imaging. The goal is to understand what it is about brain characteristics that make some people smarter than others. As we learn about brain/intelligence relationships and mechanisms, we might be able to manipulate the brain to substantially increase intelligence using neurochemicals or other means.”
You can go on the web today and find numerous online IQ tests that claim to tell you just how smart you are and many sites even claim that their brain training games will increase your intelligence. If you are really serious, you can find a licensed psychologist to give you an individually administered IQ test. And it turns out that if you’ve taken the SAT or ACT, you can even translate these scores into IQ scores.
However, I think that the reason the desire to improve intelligence has always been popular is because as a society we really care about smarts. The recent article in The New York Times “Can You Make Yourself Smarter?” along with Hambrick’s latest opinion piece shows that trying to make ourselves smarter has become something of a societal obsession. And the key is that we want to get smarter without having to put in much effort. That is why short term training studies are so alluring. However, why are we so obsessed with improving IQ or intelligence? Shouldn’t we be more focused on helping each person use their intelligence to accomplish whatever they are capable of and in the process allow them to develop their skills and abilities more naturally?
Arthur Jensen, when he was asked whether there was any value in knowing your IQ wisely shared the following:
“I’ve never bothered to find out my own IQ, because I don’t know what I could do with it if I knew it. It has been much more useful to me to determine, in relation to my specific goals, what specific things I knew or could do and what things I didn’t know or couldn’t do, and then set about working to learn the necessary things. That done, you go on the same way to the next step, whatever it may be. Your acquisition of knowledge and skills gradually cumulates to some level of mastery in the things of importance for the realization of your ambitions. The notion of some neutral, norm-referenced level of intellectual capacity or potential never crosses one’s mind in the whole process. This doesn’t mean that I could do anything, but I can do what I try to do, with some effort, and I don’t believe that knowing my IQ would ever have been of any use to me in the process of trying to achieve any of my goals. Even if I did happen to know my IQ, I certainly wouldn’t let that knowledge limit what I would try to do.”
So knowing your IQ doesn’t really matter. And don’t be fooled into thinking that online brain training games will increase your intelligence in any meaningful way that will help you pursue your goals. Rather, find something that you want to master and put in the hard work to realize your ambitions. Who knows? Maybe in the process you might even make yourself smarter.
(Source: creativitypost.com)
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