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BrainFunctioning

I just read this in the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/health/psychology/26EXEC.html?th

"Lack Direction? Evaluate Your Brain's C.E.O. By RICHARD C. SALTUS

"You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack the ability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion, and you cannot resist immediate temptations in favor of later better rewards......"

I'm seeing more and more discussions like this these days.... Neurobiologists are 'discovering' new 'abnormalities' to explain 'socially undesirable' behavior. Then, will we find a pill to 'cure' it?

So, how much of this is accurate -- and how much of it can be explained by different types, styles, preferences,.....?

DianeGibson 8-26-03

A very funny friend of mine commented on a Franklin planner / Covey type getting organized workshop with tools & etc. He said:

"That type of thing works very well for the kind of people who can do that type of thing."

The problem with reading about this kind of thing in the press is that journalism really has only two stories:

• My, how horrible!
• My, how wonderful!

Any insight gets pushed through the horrible / wonderful filter, and voila, it's a crisis, or an emergency, or some such.

Personally I like the idea of control bands, which creates a nice visual for folks with SPC backgrounds. There's a nominal value, perhaps "average" and there's a range of variation. There's some amount off of nominal where deviation changes from just a detail to a problem, or an advantage. Some people are super-organized. They're nice to have around if they can turn it off when need be. Some people are super-disorganized. They're nice to have around if they can get organized when need be.

That kind of subtle distinction doesn't fit well with "My, how horrible." or "My, how wonderful."

-- JimBullock 2003.08.26 (Often disorganized but not horribly so.)

I choose to view my current round-ish shape as a fine adaptation for living in marginal climates during the last ice-age. An adaptation to the current food supply - practically unlimited in amount and variety - and social preferneces in my culture might have each grain & hopps power drink move my form toward the svelt and subtly buff profile currently in fashion. A century or so ago, my portly shape would have been culturally preferred - a sign of abundance and riches. Ideally beer would reverse male pattern baldness, and adjust height toward the cultural optimum as well.

When we get really clever we can tune our genetics toward the fashion of the moment. As long as that choice is constrained to one lifetime, that seems OK to me. I'm pretty sure however that future generations would be no more enamored with our choices of fashionable genes than they would enjoy inheriting this generation's tattoos.

I tend to take the spasms of defecto-vision with a large grain of salt (For which most of us have a built-in craving, which is a little bit dynfunctional when the salt supply is unlimited.) Our structure is our structure. The fashions of diagnosis and pathology flail about whatever we have and inherit as a norm. Real change takes longer than the news fad cycle, by several orders of magnitude.

-- JimBullock, 2003.08.26

MikeMelendez 2003.0827

I find it troubling the extent to which 'wellness' is increasingly defined in terms of a decreasing pattern of acceptable behaviors (nothing new, but still getting worse, it seems) AND where the behaviors outside of the limited range can be so easily put into the 'disease' or 'handicapped' category. This has come to mean, in many instances, that somehow that person is less than human and less valuable -- an easy way for society to dismiss individuals. If we combine the major cutbacks in caring services (HMO's + decreasing government funding + twisted bureaucracy where there is $ +...) with an increasing number of people/behaviors defined as outside the bounds of acceptable..... where will that leave us?

And, hell, I am a strong "J", and therefore inclined to believe the argument, at a reactive level!

DianeGibson 8-30-03

It'll leave us with more people on the dole, or at least deserving of special consideration. If I can get my foibles legislated into creating a protected group, you can't touch me - it's not my fault. That particular labeling problem cuts both ways, creating exclusions and exclusions.

As for the labeling part, that's just lazy thinking. Happens all the time. Fortunately people are pretty ineffective most of the time, so they can't do a lot of damage when they are confused.

Specifically about labeling of mental function, as near as I can tell we aren't even close to the strength of labeling of mental dysfunction as was popular in around the late 1950's to maybe the 1970s in the US. From my reading, it seems that there was some very, very frightening stuff that went on then.

- JimBullock