Psych-Out

Samual Awaking Eli,  George de la Tour

2:48 am.  For no apparent reason, we’ve awakened.  “Four more hours,” we think, then toss to our other side.  If lucky, sleep overtakes us for the rest of the night.  If not, we lay there fretting about the loss of sleep, thus cheating ourselves – not of sleep, but of the wee hours.

Segmented sleep may be more natural to us than a continuous eight hours. In his book At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch writes, “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”

Anthropologist Carol Worthman studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations where artificial light is minimal, if not absent all together.  From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night.  Other anthropologists have found that in some African villages, Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, life after midnight is surprisingly lively with newly roused adults and children.

Could it be that there was an evolutionary advantage to segmented sleep?  Life in the open savannas was brimming with nocturnal predators.  Periods of nightly awakening may have been crucial to our survival.

The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau

Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. As part of the experiment, he let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted.

By the fourth week, subjects averaged 3-5 hours of solid sleep, followed by an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness.  Then, they returned to sleep for another 3-5 hour sleep period.  Such a pattern of interrupted sleep has been observed in other wild animals.

What did our pre-modern european relatives do during that time of our first awakening, or as some would call it, the watch?  First of all, few of us fretted.  We viewed that time as natural to our nocturnal stirrings.  We’d smoke tobacco.  Tend a fire.  Pray.  Study.   Talk with our bedmate.  Copulate.  Some of us would leave our beds;  some would not.  Benjamin Franklin would take “cold air baths” or sit naked in his chamber and read, or write.

Godfried Schlalcken (1643-1706)

It was a time for magic, for mischief, for light domestic work, or for reflection. This time “twixt sleepe and wake” is semi-conscious.  As Nathaniel Hawthorn insisted in The Haunted Mind, it was a time “where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly present.”  In 1692, the Hammersmith minister John Wade complained it was a time of “unsettled independent thoughts,”  “vain unprofitable musing,”  and “devising mischief.”

Dr. Wehr likens this intermittent period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness with a physiology all its own.  In the wee hours, silence is magnified, our thoughts concoct schemes and plans, we pull together far reaching connections, and our minds seem as if primed for self- reflection.

Maria Magdalena, George de la Tour

Next time you awaken in those wee hours – slip out of bed, wander the darkness of your house, sit in your favorite chair, perhaps light a candle, or brew a cup of tea.  Take out that notebook and draw, or write in your journal.  Soak in the sensibility of that forgotten segment of time lost to our age of time schedules, computer screens, i-phones, 24-hour cable news, and artificial light.  Tell yourself that it’s not a time of lost sleep, but merely the night’s first awakening.

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Read: Ekirch, A. Roger, At Day’s Close.  W.W. Norton & Co.  2005.

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. This slogan was uttered by Timothy Leary to 30,000 hippies in Golden State Park. It was 1967 — prelude to the Summer of Love. Hippie culture and the language of psychedelia broke from our television sets right into our suburban living rooms.

The Age of Aquarius has given way to the Age of Silicon. Where once LSD and psilocybin churned the neural circuitry of a few hippie brains, now my entire species is being doused by the continuous humming, buzzing and bleeping of pockets, purses, and hip-holsters alive with electronic gadgetry. Cellphone? Check. Blackberry? Check. I-pod? You betcha!

Plug in, turn up, and tune out suburbia. And suburbia is everywhere.

Now, I’m not a Luddite grinding my axe in anticipation of some anti-technology uprising. But something is unsettling about all this bleeping. As a psychotherapist, I’ve noticed a drastic rise in psychological troubles tied directly to the hows, whens, and whys of technology usage. Whether it be cyber-gaming, cyber-love, endless interruptions of one’s personal life by e-mail, cellphones and text messages, people feel their flesh-and-blood lives have indeed been broken into. One personal friend of mine counted with horror that he’d spent the equivalent of a full seven months out of his year locked inside that 3 by 4 foot space around his computer screen. (And that didn’t include work hours!)

Who needs LSD? We have Youtube.

Age of Aquarius, from electronica

It was Marshall McLuhan who taught us how the form of a medium, more than its content, alters our senses. All of this electric circuitry plugged into our ears and before our eyes has morphed into an extension of our central nervous systems - a kind of technological skin we can now wear to restaurants. We even live our lives and conduct our relationships inside of these gadgets.

How many times have I tried to leave my cell phone at home, or not check my e-mail for the umpteenth time, or avoid plugging into one of the many technological contraptions that I keep around for my comfort and entertainment, only to find myself feeling as if tweaked by a phantom limb. Try it. Notice how long before the panic sets in.

I braced myself. I committed. My cellphone would remain on SILENT. No walking, nor driving when using it - and away from public. I’d portion my e-mail to twice a day. And watch that internet surfing! For the first 36 hours I went through something I can only characterize as withdrawal - anxiety, restlessness, emotional hand-wringing. But once I slipped free from the urgings of my technological skin to graft itself back in, low and behold, it’s as if I’d awakened to my real skin. I came to an eerie sensation that I’d come back into my body.

Beam me back down, Scottie.

Timothy Leary’s slogan didn’t really mean that we should drop out of the world and do a lot of drugs. His urging was that we do what it takes to open our minds to everything in and around us.

Tune in — interact with the world. Externalize, look around.

Turn on — activate your neural and genetic equipment. Access the layers of consciousness that are available by virtue of your human wiring.

Drop out — free yourself from all those unconscious and involuntary commitments not of your choosing. Amen!

We humans evolved over a span of a few million years hunting and gathering within wide-opened African savannas. Our senses evolved to respond to a simpler, yet more physically demanding pleistocene world. We’ve plugged ourselves into all of these comfort-gadgets for only a microsecond in relative time. Our genetic wiring has not adjusted. It’s making us all a little crazy.

Still, technology is not a devil I’ll ever want to exorcise completely, even if I could. These layers of technological devices are woven intricately into my day to day, and I must admit their benefits. No, this is a devil with whom I’ll have to dance. I’ve grown too accustomed to writing on a computer to ever go back.

Besides, where would I stop if gripped by some whack-brained effort to extricate myself completely? The manual typewriter? The quill? Chisel and stone? And how I still love surfing YouTube, and the intimacy of my I-pod where I can saunter down the street shuffling from Sinatra, to Talib Kwali, to Zepplin and Incubus. As for the cell-phone, nothing frees me up more when I need to touch base with my kids or confirm whether it’s chicken breast “with or without the bone.” It’s time for a strategy — for hard fought middle ground.

Marshall McLuhan reminded, “there is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” For me I need stop and think at every point when I have that urge to plug in. It’s to be my new norm, not an exception — to live more hours unplugged than plugged so I not forget the play of the flesh and blood world upon my senses.

What’s that? It’s a real voice. A real set of eyes. A real person un-mediated by some byte of technological wizardry. Everyday I remind myself with this reworked mantra from the Summer of Love, “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”

Face-to-face eye-gazing.  Remember that?

So when that cell phone rings or that e-mail flags demanding some immediate response? “Sorry, man - you’ll have to improvise. I’m unplugged, right now.”

“Conversation has to explore new territory to become an adventure.”
Theodore Zeldin, Conversation

A great conversation casts a spell.  You know the kind of conversation.  Where time disappears.  There’s no place else you’d rather be.  Like a great meal, it fills us.  Like an aphrodisiac, it excites us. Through the interweaving of words, thoughts, and ideas, something within us changes.

The Bean Feast, Jan Steen

A great conversation is improvisational.  It strikes as if out of nowhere:  often late at night; or, within the soft flickering glow of candlelight; or, woven within the tastes, textures, and scents of that great meal.

I found myself in one of those conversations, in a dining car on a train from Ann Arbor to Albuquerque.  We were an unlikely quartet of strangers tossed together by the train’s 7:30 dinner seating schedule –  an elderly couple from Oregon who’d never before left their state; a tattooed, face-pierced death metal avenger with a Morbid Angel t-shirt; and, me.

Our table talk twisted and turned across the dusky cornfields of Iowa over two bottles of wine.  No expectations of a future, and no shared baggage from  the past, the four of us laughed heartily at life, at ourselves, while wondering aloud about each other.  There was an ever present curiosity about our divergent philosophies and life experiences peppered with musings about the likes of Ozzie Osborne, Sinatra, Led Zepplin, and Elvis.

Opening scene:  Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train

Great conversations are filled with the unexpected.

Theodore Zeldon in his book Conversation writes, “conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts:  they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought.  Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards.”

There are plenty of books that teach the how-to’s of conversation.  Like trying to follow a manual on how to make love, however, you’ll fail without the right spirit and mood.   You can’t coax that great conversation without a sense of safety, mutual respect, acceptance, and curiosity.  And, according to Zeldon, what matters most is courage.  Courage to speak one’s mind.  Courage to be open to new ideas, and new ways of thinking.   Courage to acknowledge differences.  Courage to listen.

My Dinner with Andre, by Louis Malle

These truths hold for friends, co-workers, spouses, lovers, parents and their children. How many dinner times turn miserable because of iron-fisted commands about what is and isn’t acceptable to say, think, and feel?  How many relationships start to falter for fear of letting slip, or just hearing, those private, yet exciting little thoughts that slide against the grain of convention?

Conversation flourishes when the table is set as a safe place to make discoveries about the world, to discuss them, and digest them.  And, when there’s no cause for fear.

You want to open the possibility for more talk in your life? Loosen the reigns.  Keep at bay your fears of what you might say, or what you might hear.  Nurture the qualities of spirit and mind that make for great conversation –

well-informed, sympathetic, interested in life, moderate in response, curious about differences in life experiences;  be attentive, good humored, have a sense of proportion, don’t preach, don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t be argumentative; be original, broad-minded, charitable, unselfish, considerate, flexible, poised, enthusiastic, and, don’t forget, always a trifle whimsical.

Dangling Conversation, Simon and Garfunkel (Youtube by Starlightmoonflower)

Col.  John Boyd knew a thing or two about life and death decisions under conditions of rapid change, uncertainty, and ambiguity.  As a fighter pilot he bet any taker that he could maneuver onto his tail position and shoot him down within 40 seconds.  Most of the time it took less than 20.  He never lost the bet.  Boyd was arrogant, brash, cocky, and always testing limits – whether airplanes, people, ideas, or the military bureaucracy, itself.  To some he was a crackpot.  To others he was one of the greatest military and strategic thinkers of the 20th century.

Boyd read extensively.  Mathematics.  Physics.  Genetics.  Biology.  Anthropology.  Sociology.  Political and military history.  His intellectual grasp of scientific and philosophical ideas was expert.  He found connections everywhere.  In a conversational flourish, he might weave together Marx’s theory of alienation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Mendel’s genetics, and throw in Sun Tzu, quantum physics and Michael Jordan’s slam dunk for emphasis. Boyd believed that learning how to think sharply, deeply, and quickly was a prerequisite to our ability to adapt to complex, uncertain, and ever changing circumstances.  His motto may well have been, “Think sharply and innovate, or die.”

The basis of Boyd’s philosophy of adaptability is that we must stay open to survive.   Living systems are open systems, communicating continuously with the outside world.  We communicate to gather information, knowledge and understanding, as well as replenish our life energy.  If we close ourselves in and the wider world out, we cripple our capacity to adapt, and eventually die out as a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.

When under fire – whether it be through misunderstandings, failings, bad breaks, setbacks, disappointments – our tendency may be to isolate ourselves to the security of a more certain physical, emotional, or intellectual space.

We hide out in our living rooms, we close ourselves off from other people, we fix ourselves to our secure biases about other people and the world, failing to let ourselves be challenged by new information.  What we gain in temporary sense of safety and security, we lose in the potential of stretching our capacity to not only adapt, but even thrive in face of uncertainty, ambiguity and change.

Boyd’s key concept was the OODA loop.  It was a strategy of staying engaged both physically and mentally during times of uncertainty.

Observation: gather information from the world by means of experience and your senses.  Pay special attention to information that runs counter to your experience or expectations.

Orientation: Analyze and synthesize the information to form  a perspective from which to guide a strategy of action.

Decision: Determine a course of action based on how you’ve chosen to orient yourself to the situation.

Action: Play out the decision, while continuously adjusting according to how the world responds.

For Boyd, a life that always works out, a life without loose ends, or failings, or humiliating defeats, or blown fuses would not be a life worth living.  We need challenges.  We need to be pushed.  Without problems to solve, and setbacks to overcome, we would become automatons — life’s furniture rather than creative, thinking agents of change.

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To read more about this amazing personality see:

Coram, R. (New York). Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War. 2002: Little, Brown, and Company.

Hammond, G. T. (2001). The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.