Gifts: Giving w/o spending.

For years the frenzy of holiday purchasing ramped up. More each year. Last year retailers sold less than in 2007. Now, predictions for national retailers is another drop for 2009. But, small, independent, locals seem to be growing. There is another aspect of this change that can't be measured by retail sale. The new gift paradigm. Gifts of ideas, gifts of technology -not gadgets, processes or techniques- and the gifts of understanding; these uplift the soul, enhance the culture, and degrade the toxic effects of compulsive consumption.

When I started to write about patience about 10 days ago I was not completely sure where the topic would go. Now, as the holiday season from Thanksgiving to Christmas (a season we called Advent when I was young) starts w/ the ghastly named Black Friday, I realize patience is just another intangible gift that can be recycled and repurposed and regifted. You can teach yourself and others to be patient. Simple techniques like breathing thru your nose or sipping rather than gulping when you thirst can build your ability delay gratification of your desires.

Gifts of intention, reflection, will-power, integrity, passion, respect, and commitment are often more appreciated than you would think when you present them with dignity and understanding.

• Try a new gift paradigm today!
• Share your ideas with me and other who read my blog.

The Wisdom of Santa

Play: When games intrude on work.

Once evolution started to build on core brain parts such as; the medulla, cerebellum, pons, the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, etc. and creatures started to use the cortex for executive function, we learned to play. I speculate that play; exertion for sport, fun or enjoyment as opposed to work for food, shelter, or procreation, is one of the earliest human impulses. I believe play is central to our curiosity and wonder. Without play I don't think we would have begun the search for meaning or origins.

When we play instead of work we are postponing biological imperative to engage in frivolity! How can this be good for furthering our genes? How can playing enhance our survivability as a species? When we decide to play a game or engage in physical exertion for fun we are tuning our brains and our bodies.

The limbic system of the brain - aspects that mediate between strictly autonomic nervous reactiveness of the brain stem & the control functions of the cortex & are shared with most mammals, monotremes, & marsupials - provides us with amazing new capabilities. We can see that is us in a mirror. We can imagine what someone else might be feeling simply by observing their posture. We can envision the world thru the eyes of another. When I wrote about empathy as the first gift of human civilization I pointed out that people now are trying to portray humans in the context of the law, as unfeeling machines. I argued that this was a mistake.

I make this digression because I want to argue that play helps to increase the links between the cortex and the r-complex at the core of our brains. We build our skills in human emotion when we play! It gives us the chance to try out ideas, personalities & new styles without as much risk because it is a game. Football is better than war.

• Play more, fight, die, & stress less.

Wait for Food: Intensify Deliciousness

Think about waiting to eat food on a holiday like Thanksgiving. If you're like me and you love eating. If you invest a lot of time and thought in your food, waiting to eat can be very hard. When dinner is served, if you can stay calm and enjoy the event; savor the smells & tastes, drink slowly from the chalice, breath deep the air of festivity, you will have a greatly enhanced experience. A thoughtful, intentional waiting builds anticipation while adding to the delicious experience of food.

• Wait calmly for & eat slowly the feasts of holidays. They always taste better that way.

Waiting means we believe the future will come.

If you stop to think, when we wait for something it is implicit acknowledgement that we expect the future to happen. In other words, we have an expectation of a future event. This is an awesome advance for a species to make. To have a brain big enough to imagine a future is really different. Most creatures on earth live for the moment. (Ironically, an entire industry now exists to help people live in the moment.) People, most likely when we learned to throw, learned to predict the future. This brought us into the future in more ways than one.

• Waiting, the beginning of planning.

Patience: the gift of delayed gratification

At my household we celebrate the mid-winter holiday from December 20 or 21, 'til about January 13. In America today we are already weeks into a consumer frenzy called Xmas. The third Walmart Holiday ad came in the Sunday paper this weekend. Santas across the globe are talking about their gigs starting. I take deep breaths & hope to stay calm during the next several weeks. I'm rehearsing to sing in the choir with Open Eye Figure Theatre's Holiday Pageant.

When we learned to wait, to be patient, we built several strong, new connections in our brains that serve us today in ways we are only beginning to understand. Patience is ultimately the basis of economy. A look at the word economy reveals the notion of managing a household: in other words food, shelter, & offspring or dependents. If a strong economy means the ability to eat well, live & sleep well, and bring great kids into the world then patience gives us real advantages.

Over the next few weeks I expect to write about how our ability to wait: for delicious food; the ecstasy of sex; the comfort of home; the exhilaration of games well played, art well made, songs well sung, dances well danced; or the transcendence of preforming a physical feat, has helped our brains to become better at guiding & planning fulfilling lives.

• Patience, a real gift for the holiday.

Nuance: It's not deception. Clarity: It's not truth

nu•ance (noo'äns, nyoo'-, noo äns', nyoo -) n. 1. A subtle or slight degree of difference, as in meaning; a gradation. 2. Expression or appreciation of nuances: a performance full of nuance. [Fr <>nuer, to shade, cloud < nue, cloud <>nuba Lat. nubes.] – nu•anced' adj.

When I heard Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele proclaim loudly that he was not using nuance but rather was being very clear, I started to think about our understanding of subtlety. A while back, I wrote about the corpus callosum and the links between the hemispheres of our brains. It is easy to get into thought patterns that lead us to believe that ideas, policies and positions are very clearly this or that; black, or white; Right, or Left. In reality this is never the case. There is always degree of nuance.

Look at some of the great debates of the past several hundred years. Aquinas "proved" the existence of God with five proofs. The fifth, a teleological argument that since the universe appears designed to support people, god must have designed it. Like the existence of a watch proves the existence of the watch-maker. 400 years ago last month Galileo popularized the telescope and suggested that the Earth revolved around the sun, not - as the church said - the other way around. He was right. Folks believed the Earth was flat. It is in fact an oblate spheroid.

200 years ago, a boy was born who, in is 50th year would publish a theory so beautiful in its simplicity and insightfulness as to render all of botany, biology, geology, archeology, anthropology, and others in a completely new light! Charles Darwin was right.

150 years ago a couple of beer drinking young Europeans developed a political philosophy based on cooperation instead of cooperation. Recent research is showing that Marx and his benefactor Engles were right. Survival of the fittest doesn't mean "dog eat dog," it means the most able to cooperate will be the species that survives over the one who fights among itself all the time.

Time and time again, religious leaders tell us that something is true only to be proved wrong by the science. As a matter of fact, even facts are suspect. Humans are notoriously poor observers. The notion that there is an objective truth is false. We can't even be sure that anyone else is even conscious.

So back to Mr. Steele:

When he declared that he wasn't being nuanced - as if to say "no nuance here" he did so in a way that made it seem as if nuance was somehow a bad thing. He was being "Clear" as if simply stating his position was better than trying to explain the subtleties of it's implications. In this case he was talking about the health care debate and explaining that he and the GOP were against Government run health care. He went on in the next breath to say that Medicare should be expanded and secured for the future! The interviewer suggested there might be some nuance in the juxtaposition of these two positions. Steele jumped on the interviewer! No, there is no nuance in my position. I'm being very clear! Please, please remember that clarity is not truth or correctness. Nuance often conveys more than clarity. Here's to a complex understanding of our complex problems. Here's to an end of simple but, wrong political positions.

(Begun 9/3/09)

From: Stacyann Chin via C-SPAN|YouTube|Facebook to: YOU!

I am so lucky to know so many different people!

Thanks to Leigh Combs for posting this on Facebook for me to see.

Bullying: The gift of broken discourse.

Well, I've just watched about a dozen public meetings where Members of Congress, Senators and other elected officials have been shouted down by bullies. These folks, apparently schooled by Dick Armey's lobby firm Freedom Works rise to ask questions or just start shouting in the middle of the event with misinformation and smears. They impugn government, the same government that they have worked so hard to destroy for the past 28 years. They shout, bluster and offer no ideas just an all out assault on public discourse. They seem to want to destroy anything that is left of the commons. Oh the humanity!

It's gone from bad - having these lying, greedy, bullies in office - to worse - having these lying, greedy, bullies trying to destroy from without what they couldn't destroy when they held power.

I'm sick to my stomach watching the evidence.

A ranking Senator on the Judiciary Committee has said he will not support Judge Sonia Sotomayor because he's afraid that she could not be objective and fair in the conduct of her job. This despite 17 years of written evidence to the contrary. I call on Jeff Sessions to use this same standard in his deliberations and in the performance of his job. Objectivity! Yes, government by science! Please, Jeff, say you will!

I want my country! I want people who support and defend the Constitution when it calls for a more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defence, general welfare and the blessing of liberty. I'm tired of greedy, lying bullies.

Food storage: 11+ Millennia of Solar Power

We've been storing food for more than eleven thousand years. Granaries over eleven thousand years old have just been uncovered in Jordan. Wow! You have to be glad that people were able to use simple technology to store food, essentially storing the sun's energy for later use. Think of all the great things it allows us to do!

Specialization, new uses for time, art, politics, housing, clothing, food cultivation, domestic animals. The list could go on and on. We owe it all to food storage. We didn't have to spend our time hunting and gathering. We could gather and save! Smooth out the slow times with the abundant. We become more social, able to accommodate larger groups, better learners. I can just imagine the advances that these ancestors made when they could store food! 

Shared life: When we began to change our social gifts

Our culture changed fundamentally when we started to mate for life. I haven't read any dating of this but, I'll guess mating for life started around the time of art, spirituality, language and larger groups (150-200 adult individuals or more) cooperating. I'll also guess that the true shared life is only possible when, to paraphrase Rilke, "we become the guardian of each other's solitude." 

To put this period in perspective, I'll guess it started to emerge from the large brained creature living between 200, 000 and 70,000  years ago. I think mimicry had had its effect on our brains. I think the corpus collosum was sufficiently developed and sexually dimorphous that our social needs met our phenotype needs to push us to mate-for-life scenarios. (it would be interesting to study brains of other mate-for-life creatures and compare them to us alongside our fidelity rates could make a really interesting graphic.) In short, I believe that we learned to live with another for life over an evolutionarily brief period starting about 200,000 years ago lasting to about 70,000 years ago.

I believe we learned our amazing ability to "see the world thru others eyes" during this critical period. Two solid ice ages put us in the mood to mate for life. And, why not? It's an easy way to make and care for offspring that you're "sure or pretty sure are yours." This is also the beginning of our top notch empathy skills (I wrote about empathy in May) Our shared life is our interconnected life. We become dependent and humans are no longer solely individuals. We cannot really be evaluated or judged without consideration for our place in society. 

Sharing life with others is truly a gift we must always give and give well!

What about talking? Gifts in story.

I talked in my St Pat's Day post about Language. Now I've been learning some things about communications that lead me to think the gift of story goes back further. 

Primates of many types understand and respond to language in amazing ways. Many mammals can learn to respond to aural stimuli but some chimps gather the meaning of numerous words and are able to understand them even when they're put together in unique, new ways! Watching a chimp carry a TV out of the enclosure to the prompt, "Can you bring the TV outside?" was instructional. We know that birds understand words and learn to create unique sequences. We know that recent experiments have placed the gene for language into mice. We know that most mammals experience emotions, some as complex as human emotions. So, when are we going to let them vote?

People turned this ability for language into an entirely new thing. I can relate a story or idea to you in a few words and if you grasp the concepts behind the story, you can repeat the story without remembering or even using any of my words. If you know more than one language you most likely can translate my story. This is how human culture has created a new life form on earth. Society. Human society exists as a living organism separate from the individuals that make it up. We've created a monster be allowing a new replicator -like genes- to participate in our culture. The meme builds languages to allow for easier replication of these conceptual life forms.

Wow, we've really got it good don't we?

Dance: The movement of rhythm

I love to dance. I dance everyday. I like to dance with music playing and I like to dance in silence. I dance on foot, I dance on skates, I dance with a partner, I dance alone. The main focus of my dance is movement. I like to envision my body moving in certain way. Then I try to make it happen in real life. Sometimes I see pictures of dances in the NY times and try to imagine making those moves. Always this movement has a rhythm. A flow. Even if my dance is on;y fingers on computer keys.

Everyone should dance, everyday!

Empathy: The first gift of human civilization

IT has to be said as the elected "nay sayers" in Congress start to sing their chorus against any Supreme Court Justice nominee who might have empathy: our ability to see the world thru the eyes of others was the beginning of our transition from cold blooded, killers and procreators to the civilized people we are today.  Yes, empathy, the gift of being able to put yourself into the shoes of others. 

Without being able to see the world thru others eyes we never learn to communicate. We never learn to care for our children, we never learn to govern, we never learn human emotion. Many mammals have an ability for empathy but, it our finely tuned skill at being able to understand what another creature, not just another human, is experiencing that unlocked most of what distinguishes us from reptiles. Empathy allows a mother to nurture her young. Empathy makes mentoring possible. Empathy is a necessary concept behind all economic transactions. 

Please, tell your Republican Senator  your opinion of empathy. It's the foundation of our legal system. From the Ten Commandments to the Koran, to the US Constitution, the primary purpose of these instruments is to codify empathy. Listen to a Senator try and create a dichotomy with Empathy & Legal decision making on opposite sides!

(Why are the the Republicans so opposed to anyone who might display empathy? My guess is John Kyl, the junior Republican Senator from Arizona didn't think before he came up with this amazing way to criticize any potential nominee that our President proposed. 

Of the President, Kyl said, "He believes in justices that have empathy," Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.

Had Senator Kyl thought first I'm sure he would have realized the key place empathy holds in our culture, our community, our government, and our civilization.)

It really makes Santa wonder: What are these leaders thinking? Who are they trying to impress? I remember talk about mainstream values and ideas. We are really getting far out of the mainstream if we take empathy, a basic, core aspect of human existence off the table for any potential Supreme Court Nominee.

Sports: Our bodies' are learning tools.

I've been thinking about writing on this for some time now. Some anthropologists suggest that one reason for the growth in the human brain over the past 3 million years is due in part to our physical expertise growing. As we became better stone throwers our diet could improve because we took down more creatures with our rocks. This made selection pressure to throw more accurately and, because throwing a rock at a moving target requires large amounts of brain capacity, judge the rate of speed and direction of the target, judge the force, direction, and timing of your throw, coordinate these judgements to ensure your rock intersects with the water buffalo temple or neck at a high rate of speed . . . . Our brains grew.

I've taken this idea to new extremes and argued with Mary that I need to go watch football or golf or soccer to research brain growth! While Mary doesn't buy this she is supportive of my daily workouts on rollerblades or skis, my crunches, twists, bends, and lunges. She can see not only changes in my body shape, but my mental capacity is clearly enhanced when I engage in varied activities and have a chance to increase my heart rate for an hour or more everyday.

Couple a better diet with the learning required to engage in new activities, like taking down a water buffalo, & over a few hundred generations we see clear brain growth. This same idea has scientific support on phenotypes as well. The more tuned your body, the better your posture, the stronger your muscles, the healthier your blood, the more active your mind. You can use your physical structure to build a new shape to your body (training) just as you can use your thoughts to rewire your habits. A few five minute "practice" sessions thinking about a new complicated task such as playing scales on a musical instrument will help you with that task the next time you do it physically. Just thinking about doing a thing builds the neurons in your motor cortex allowing your brain to work better the next time you do that thing!

Try it!

Counting time: Joining the magic of number & life's events

Back on Santa's Birthday I talked about the magic of number. How our ability to count beyond one, two, a few and many has allowed us amazing advances. Today, in honor of my beloved's birthday I want to expand on number to the counting of time. I think this might bring us to the origin of SANTA, that bearded gift giver who came at the winter solstice to predict the return of the sun from the south after it seemed to fall almost to the horizon in some northern reaches. Those first Santas brought seeds, and that prediction. They were able to predict the return on f the sun because they had learned to count time.

Counting time seems a simple, unimportant task now but this shared skill allowed some groups of people to thrive while their contemporaries who could not count time floundered. As with all deeply rooted memes, this gift pushes evolution without directly affecting the genome, or the phenotype. It means a slowing of change in physical characteristics and advance for those skilled at manipulating abstract concepts. My goodness! What a gift. Counting time!

Cooked food: The miracle science of energy!

Cooked food came along shortly after we learned to control fire. An ancient gift from real scientists! We used fire to slow cook, sear, roast, broil and bake. We tried new foods. If something made us sick we stopped eating it. The scientific method even before we knew what a method was.

Our diet changed. We spent less time looking for, killing, gathering, and cultivating food. Because cooked food releases much more energy from the starch, carbs, sugars, proteins and fats we had time for lots of other activities. 

Preparing food by cooking or by other methods such as fermenting, drying, sprouting, or soaking is a such an amazing advance I wonder how it came about. If you imagine the ancestors sitting around a fire with a haunch of mammoth or a dead bird you see how simple cooking might have com to be. 

I ate at my local pub the other night, I had a tempeh reuben. This is fermented soy bean cake with sour kraut, swiss cheese on dark rye bread with a side of horseradish and thousand island dressing. The magic of these high energy foods combined in this tasty gustatory treat was enough to make my mind spin. It was delicious. 

When ever you share an evening meal with family or friends, think back to the ancestors who developed cooking. Thank them for sharing.

Music: A gift to move and soothe us

Heard a short piece today on the Science Pod from the AAAS. Music seems to have an evolutionary component and may not be "auditory cheesecake" as Stephen Pinker described. Music might be ingrained in our psyche to provide group benefit of some sort. 

Three different pieces of music were played to the Maffa people from Cameron. They were able to distinguish "happy" or "sad" music despite never having been exposed to outside music forms or influences. The researchers concluded an evolutionary component to musical understanding.

Music is a gift that can soothe our nerves, move our tushes an inform our needs. Early music may have been used to alert or describe. It may have helped tell a story or build rapport with new friends. We all make music whenever we open our mouths. You may not find your child's requests or demands for attention melodious but you're hearing music of human interaction. 

I suspect that after hundreds of thousands of years we've really refined our sense and ear for music. Listen to rap, hip hop, rock, soul, ragtime, R&B, juju, reggae, tango, waltz, rondo, no, butoh, raga, folk, calypso, or any of hundreds of other forms of music, now mixed, remixed and mashed. You will quickly hear similarities and differences. Structure, time signature, scale construction, instrumentation, rhythm and language all participate in our sharing of music.

As our species spread across the planet we turned most materials we found into food, toys, tools, garments, and musical instruments. We've learned a variety of systems to record music to share with others and to teach it to our young.

I expect to have more to say about music in the future. I had to write about it today because, after hearing the new evidence from Science, I'm sure music is vital to our brains' growth and balance.

Ancient gifts. Art: Those magic symbols.

Continuing my thoughts on gifts from the distant past. 

Art: Magic symbols that represented the animals or plants we sought for food. Or, music that recreated the sounds of the forest with special emphasis on dangerous or useful animals. Stories, told with gesture became dance. As with language, a gift that really continues to give benefits to the present day.

When cave painting are discovered in France or ocher in the Great Rift Valley of Africa we confront the symbolic use of materials from peoples who lived tens of thousands of years ago. I'm sure that all the earliest artistic urges left no permanent mark since they were most likely drawn in the sand or ashes, or marked out with rocks, twigs, branches, or leaves. 

The earliest art (by which I mean visual, musical, movement, culinary, agricultural, architectural, or wearable) is probably all lost to scholarship. But, we can surmise that growing brains of people led us to great leaps of creativity. By taking a chance on a crazy idea our ancestors dreamed, thought, or created a new way of living. Gone were the days when we could not imagine the world through the eyes of the others. This ability to see the world as if through the eyes of another put us on the path to hot fashions, really great food, the best and worst TV programs, and a diamond crusted skull from Damien Hirst.

An early gift, control of fire.

While there are many early gifts we've received from our parents, grandparents and beyond, I'm going to focus my first few posts on very early gifts that have really given us rich new ways to live on earth. Breaking and forming stone tools, the use of pigments, and accurate throwing techniques were all clearly old gifts but today's post is about Fire! With the impending spring, fire is an apt starting point to examine gifts from our past.

Residue & evidence of human's control of fire stretches back about 500,000 years. This was a very early gift passed from our ancestors to today. Across human cultures is the tradition of a cooked evening meal. Our control of fire made these cooked meals possible. Fire allows for adaptation to a wide variety of climates and weather and in cooking of food, increased access to easily digestible calories from stored items like roots, meat, & grains. 

Fire a great early gift from our ancestors!

Greetings from Santa Erik

Gifts: my interesting study traipsing across eons of our shared heritage. I've learned so much about sharing and curiosity that I'm thinking I must report my findings in a quiet corner of the web. I'm hoping this blog will include selected occasional posts with my thinking about our gift economy and the magic of human social interaction.