It's never too late

Mary Fasano, at age 89, earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, taught himself ancient Greek in old age to master the classics in the original.

At 90, architect Frank Llyod Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum.

At 78, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal spectacles.

When Pablo Casals, the cellist, was 91 years old, he was approached by a student who asked, " Master, why do you continue to practise?" Casals replied, "Because I am making progress."

In studies of creativity, H.C. Lehman and Dean Keith Simonton found that while the ages 35 to 55 are the peak of creativity in most fields, people in their sixties and seventies, though they work at a slower speed, are as productive as they were in their 20s.

Learning new things play a role in being happy and healthy in old age, according to George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who heads up the largest, longest ongoing study of the human life cycle, the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

He studied 824 people from their late teens to old age from three groups: Harvard graduates, poor Bostonians and women with extremely high IQs.

He concluded that old age is not simply a process of decline and decay. Older people often develop new skills and are often wiser and more socially adept than they were as younger adults. These elderly people are actually less prone to depression than younger people and usually do not suffer from incapacitating illnesses until their final illness.

- Excerpts from The Brain That Changes Itself.

The Brain That Changes Itself

I'm reading this interesting book on how people with brain damage have had their lives transformed by the remarkable discovery that our brains can repair themselves through the power of positive thinking. 

Will post brain factoids or other interesting things I uncover along the way as I read the book.

1. The ability to recognise shapes depends on a brain function quite different from those functions required for drawing or seeing colour; it is the same skill that alllows some people to excel at games like Where's Waldo. Women are often better at it than men, which is why men seem to have more difficulty finding things in the refrigerator.

2. In Elizabethan times, lovers were so enamoured of each other's body odours that it was common for a woman to keep a peeled apple in her armpit until it had absorbed her sweat and smell. She would then give this "love apple" to her lover to sniff at in her absence.

3. We now know from brain scans that three parts of the brain are involved in obsessions (chapter on people with obsessive-compulsive disorder).
- We detect mistakes with our oribtal frontal cortex, part of the frontal lobe, on the underside of the brain, just behind our eyes.
- Once the cortex has fired the mistake feeling, it sends a signal to the cingulate gyrus, located in the deepest part of the cortex. This triggers the dreadful anxiety.
- The "automatic gearshift", the caudate nucleus, sits deep in the centre of the brain and allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next, as happens in OCD, the caudate becomes extremely "sticky".
Brain scans of OCD patients show that all three brain areas are hyperactive.

With obsessions and compulsions, the more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it.
"The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling."

4. How to truly master new skills. After a brief period of practice, as when we cram for a test, it is relatively easy to improve because we are likely strengthening existing synaptic connections. But we quickly forget what we've crammed - because these are easy-come, easy-go neuronal connections and are rapidly reversed. Maintaining improvement and making a skill permanent require the slow steady work that probably forms new connections. 

I'm immensely fascinated by psychology, especially abnormal psychology and neurology as well as the nature of geniuses because I like things that deviate from the norm. I'm interested in why and how they deviate from the norm. It's also a study of God's creation in a way. :-)

Breaking ranks

I just recently finished a book - Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. This part was a hard read for me because it made me realise that very few have what it takes to either do the right thing or choose not to do the wrong thing. Lord, I pray that if ever in my life, there were to come a time when I am faced with such a situation, I would be among the dozen who would stand up and break ranks because I choose to preserve my soul.


On July 13, 1942, the men of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, stationed in Poland, were awakened at the crack of dawn and driven to the outskirts of a small village. Armed with additional ammunition, but with no idea what to expect, the 500 men gathered around their well-liked commander, the fifty-three-year-old major Wilhelm Trapp.

Nervously, Trapp explained that he and his men had been assigned a frightfully unpleasant task and that the orders came from the highest authorities. There were some 1800 Jews in the village who were said to be involved with the partisans.

The order was to take the male Jews of working age to a work camp. The women, children and elderly were to be shot on the spot.

As he spoke, Trapp had tears in his eyes and visibly fought to control himself. Concluding his speech, Trapp made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men did not feel up to the task that lay before them, they could step out.

After a few seconds, a dozen men stepped forward. The others went on to participate in the massacre. Many of them, after they had done their duty once, vomited or had other visceral reactions that made it impossible to continue killing and were then assigned to other tasks. Almost every man was horrified and disgusted by what he was doing.

Yet, why did only a mere dozen men out of 500 declare themselves unwilling to participate in the mass murder?

In his seminal book, Ordinary Men, historian Christopher Browning describes his search for an answer. He points to several causes, such as anti-semitism, conformity with authority, fear of retribution from other officers etc.

He concludes that there is a different explanation, based on how men in uniforms identify with their comrades. Many policemen seemed to follow a social rule of thumb:

Don't break ranks.

In Browning's words, the men felt a strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out even if conforming meant violating the moral imperative "don't kill innocent people". Stepping out meant losing face by admitting weakness and leaving one's comrades to do more than their share of the ugly task. For most, it was easier to shoot than to break ranks.

Browning ends his book with a disturbing question: "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behaviour and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

From a moral point of view, nothing can justify this behaviour. Social rules, however, can help us understand why certain situations promote or inhibit morally significant actions.

Up to the mountain by Patty Griffin

Just came across two beautiful renditions of this song by Patty Griffin.

- By Patty Griffin

- By Kelly Clarkson

I went up to the mountain

Because you asked me to

Up over the clouds

To where the sky was blue

I could see all around me

Everywhere

I could see all around me

Everywhere

Sometimes I feel like

I've never been nothing but tired

And I'll be walking

Till the day I expire

Sometimes I lay down

No more can I do

But then I go on again

Because you ask me to

Some days I look down

Afraid I will fall

And though the sun shines

I see nothing at all

Then I hear your sweet voice, oh

Oh, come and then go, come and then go

Telling me softly

You love me so

The peaceful valley

Just over the mountain

The peaceful valley

Few come to know

I may never get there

Ever in this lifetime

But sooner or later

It's there I will go

Sooner or later

It's there I will go