Contrasting Expressions Behind Two Views of Independence

A contrast caught my eye the morning I began to write this blog post.  I usually write essays several days or even a few weeks before they are posted.

One was this month’s cover story in High Country News, an excellent magazine about issues along the Rocky Mountains westward, where my family’s genes now go back eight generations.

Written by a progressive, it explores both sides of the great gun debate from the perspective of gun-lovers and gun-nuts on both sides. The author also provides industry statistics showing that the “gun culture is dying.”

I’m a political Independent.  I grew up with guns and I own a couple of old rifles and a German WWII pistol, all family heirlooms, but I fall on the “more sensible background check” side of that debate.

One disturbing quote attributed in the article is that “a liberal who happens to like guns is still an enemy.”  I assume that is meant to cover Independents too, but it provides insight into extremists.

Some of the best research on gun owners is found in surveys by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

It shows that “more and more guns [including assault weapons where are classified as “modern shooting rifles” or MSRs] are being purchased, but they’re being sold to the same shrinking group of middle-aged white men.”

As I was reading this, a Google Alert brought my attention to a letter apparently written by “Joe the Plumber” of the McCain-Palin campaign’s 15-minutes of fame.

Apparently, in light of one of the latest mass murders he gently warned the parents of those who died that “your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

You can’t hold him against westerners.  The closest he has come to being one is working in Ohio to build western-utility Jeep Wranglers like the one I drive and during an Air Force stint in Alaska near where I once lived.

As obnoxious as his statement is, it illustrates that a lack of empathy more than any level of gun control may be the problem behind mass killings, according to research cited by essayist Mark Manson.

It is only one way that gun extremists today are troubling. And part of it may be genetic.

High Country News was founded back in 1970 by Tom Bell, a Wyoming rancher and decorated WWII hero who turned 90 last month.

He was a contemporary rancher of my father, growing up across the Tetons from the one where he and I were born on a spread down the Wind River Range of the Rockies.

This is the setting for northern Wyoming transplant Craig Johnson’s series of “Longmire” mystery novels and the A&E TV series of the same name, although it uses northern New Mexico as a stand-in.

While flying bombers similar to the one in which my dad’s cousin and closest friend Edward was shot down and killed, Bell lost the sight in his right eye.

Coming home to Wyoming he earned a master’s degree in wildlife conservation and game management but always found solace in the wide open spaces his family settled there in 1878.

But by the mid 1960s as I was graduating from high school, Bell began to organize groups to counter the blight occurring throughout the Rocky Mountain West.

One Bell creation, High Country, is still well known today for investigative reporting on various issues.

I guess wannabes such as the Nevada cheapskates along with their assault rife toting posse (sorry, “modern shooting rifles”) would consider Tom an enemy based on that earlier quote.

The difference in these two kinds of westerners occurred to me recently as I read about a purposeful sequel contrived a few weeks later in San Juan County, Utah.

That’s the area that takes in the southeast corner of Utah below Moab and includes parts of Canyon Lands National Park. Think of country similar to the back drop for John Ford westerns or Easy Rider or Forrest Gump for that matter.

Toting those same “modern shooting rifles,” a group with a similar sense of entitlement deliberately drove ATVs down into a canyon where a federal agency ban was protecting fragile Native American archeology.

Not everyone seeking mechanized access across our “commons” is like that, though.

Up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, snowmobilers have been volunteering to carry GPS units as a way to better inform land closures to protect endangered species.

Recent studies find that the difference between Tom Bell and for that matter me, and those deliberately desecrating the public lands in the west, may come down to how we express a dopamine D4 receptor gene we all have, named DRD4.

In variations or mutations from individual to individual, this gene is linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dysfunctional “thrill seeking” such as unprotected sex and various addictions such as gambling and alcohol.

University of Michigan researchers from various disciplines including business have now found that people like Tom Bell see the world as interdependent because they have a variation or allele 6 times greater than those who see their independence as trumping any harm their actions bring to others.

In his fascinating new book entitled Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives – and Our Live Change Our Genes, neurogeneticist Dr. Sharon Moalem describes how our behavior, our experiences and even the food we eat can inform genes differently in people.

It is possible that Tom Bell’s service to his country during a time rampant with fascism, as well as the way he was raised, his field of study and witnessing a desecration by individuals and corporations, might inform his variation of that gene differently.

I share a similar background with the instigator of that recent Utah showdown.  Raised 600 miles apart in the Rocky Mountain west, we both graduated from BYU.

We both descend from the earliest Mormons who settled along the Rockies six or seven generations ago.  In the 1870s, one of my ancestors also created settlements along the Colorado Plateau shared with San Juan County.

A decade or so ago, we each served as presidents of Rotary Clubs in two different parts of the country.  Though we obviously have different interpretations of what’s racist, we both recite the Rotary 4-Way Test, an ethical guide.

The counties where we were raised in Utah and Idaho respectively, are set aside in “commons” for all Americans, his a fourth and mine a third.

We both enjoy the outdoors, mine from astride a Harley with views of the open road and scenic preservation, his tearing off road on an ATV.

So what makes me sign up with Robert Redford while he apparently fancies himself after the Edward Abbey character in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang?

Why do I see the federal government as stewards on behalf of the people rather than as a capricious and arbitrary enemy apart while he apparently agrees with the executive director of Gun Owners of America that:

 "The government's out of control, and all three branches are united against the people and the Constitution." 

The difference between us may very well come down to how our experiences have modified or expressed our DRD4 gene, an indicator of a sense of interdependence in some and extreme independence in others.

I’m as stubborn and independent and functionally narcissistic as they come, but in me that gene stops short of the point where my actions might harm other people, a conservative principle forgotten today.

I hate to think that one day some of us on the “interdependence” side will be forced to stand up shoulder to shoulder against those who disrespect public lands and agents just trying to do their job.

And just because I give a damn about others or trust in the law, don’t think for a minute I won’t.  As the article in High Country notes, there are “gun nuts” on both sides of this debate.

Okay, “stand down cowboy.”

Where did you stash the firing mechanism for that old Winchester .32 Saddle-Ring?  Like I said, “gun nuts” on both sides.

The Biophilic Convergence of Art, Nature, Science & Place

Even in the remote Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho where I was born and spent my early years there was no shortage of national heroes as I entered grade school in 1954, but none was more famous than scientific researcher Dr. Jonas Salk who had produced a vaccine against polio two years earlier that was being tested nation-wide that year with the inoculation of school children.

He was right up there with war hero and President Dwight D. Eisenhower and sports heroes of mine at the time including some who were from or playing in Idaho such as Elgin Baylor, Jerry Kramer, R.C. Owens, Harmon Killebrew and Vernon Law.

Salk, who would never win the Nobel Prize and was rejected by the National Academy of Sciences, would rival in fame two of my other national heroes at the time, Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson as well as two then-college heroes Johnny Unitas and Jim Brown, and a couple of high school basketball stand-outs you may have heard of, Jerry West and Oscar Robinson, all destined to be legends.

Polio had ravaged the nation during the first half of the 1900s, even afflicting a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1921.  But it wasn’t until 1938, six years after FDR was first elected President of the United States, that research into a cure and prevention began in earnest, just as Salk was entering medical school at New York University which didn’t have the quotas common at the time for students of Jewish origin.

In the months before I was born, Jonas Salk, a descendent of Russian-Jewish ancestors and with whom I would share the middle name “Edward,” was just settling into basement quarters at the University of Pittsburgh where he had been promised a research lab of his own to work on a cure for polio.

Sometime after I was born and four years before polio would strike 58,000 people in a single season, more than any other communicable disease, in an effort to clear his mind and escape that cramped, basement space, Salk sought respite in the Italian village of Assisi.

There dominating the landscape stood the 13th-century Franciscan monastery, named in that place of his birth and burial for  Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone, Saint Francis of Assisi.

Salk credits the rooms, spaces and views at Assisi with providing the inspiration and fresh ideas he would use to pioneer the first vaccine for polio.

I don’t know if Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, the new Nobel laureate in the sciences who does his research at Duke University in my adopted home of Durham NC is as inspired by art as much as he is by sports, but Salk certainly wasn’t unusual in his interest in the arts such as architecture.

Studies led by Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, a physiology researcher at Michigan State University have looked into the role of avocations in the arts behind creative scientific discoveries among Nobel laureates in the sciences as well as members of the Royal Academy and the National Academy of Sciences compared to the general public over the more than a century.

Even back in 1947, as Salk was settling into his less than inspiring basement digs at the University of Pittsburgh, a poll of eminent scientists across the nation confirmed that “80% strongly recommended fine arts training as an essential element of scientific education,” a finding not rigorously tested and validated until Dr. Root-Bernstein’s study.

As blogged from these studies recently in Scientific American, “Nobel laureates in the sciences are seventeen times likelier than the average scientist to be a painter, twelve times as likely to be a poet, and four times as likely to be a musician.”

Neuroscientists, as noted by Emily Badger in her article for the new issue of Pacific Standard, are now looking closely into biophilic design.  When Dr. Salk commissioned Louis Kahn in the early 1960s to design his Salk Institute for Biological Studies along the seaside area of La Jolla area on land granted by the citizens of the City of San Diego, California, he sought inspiration from his time at Assisi by asking for “ample natural light, views of the Pacific Ocean, and a vast central plaza."

By 1984, researchers such as Dr. Roger Ulrich began making startling discoveries that confirmed Salk’s beliefs about Assisi, finding that the view from their window was a significant factor in post-operative recovery and the need for fewer painkillers.

It is no surprise then that ten years ago neuroscientists from Salk’s Institute teamed up with surrounding architects to found the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.  In her article Badger quotes one of the founders, Dr. Fred Gage as saying in a speech that “changes in environment change the brain, and therefore change our behavior.”

The late Dr. Salk’s institute has trained 2,700 research scientists and, ironically, five have gone on to win Nobel prizes.  But you don’t have to go to La Jolla to see the influence of architecture on creativity.

Riding a national wave of renewed interest in historic downtowns, Durham’s city center’s adaptive reuse of several million square feet of unique 19th-century brick tobacco and textile factories has fueled its growth as a center for start ups and entrepreneurs, while at the same time, enhancing the community’s emergence over the past 20 years as a top-ranked center for the creative class.

Environment, both natural and built, are crucial to inspiration and creativity.

Why Brain Storming Doesn’t Work

I have participated in a zillion so-called brainstorming sessions in my life and I can't remember one that was very productive.  Now I know why: They simply don't work!

In his concise piece seven weeks ago in The New Yorker magazine, Jonah Lehrer gave an excellent overview.  He starts with a brief history about how the term was coined, coincidentally during the year I was born, by someone who was at the time about the age I am now and who wanted to share some perspective.

One of this gentleman's ground rules was the stipulation that brainstorming sessions must never include critical thinking, criticism or negative feedback.  I've probably heard that a zillion times too.

Within 10 years though that idea was debunked by scientific research, yet it has persisted to this day.  Lehrer summarizes research done as early as 1958 which found that people working solo came up with roughly twice as many solutions as did brainstorming groups, and the solo-generated ideas were judged more “feasible” and “effective.”

But the article is more about when and how creativity works well as a “group process.”  The article is well worth reading and rereading, especially the part about what determines successful Broadway Musical productions, even though that genre is not among my favorites except, of course, for the occasional popular power ballad which is often spawned.

Lehrer is also the author of a great book out just this month entitled Imagine – How Creativity Works.

Last week as I was listening to an excellent interview by Krista Tippett while writing a blog about the difference between intensity and passion, another part of that article in The New Yorker crossed my mind.  It dealt with a study which revealed that people who “debate and even criticize each other's ideas” during brainstorming sessions, are far more creative and generate “nearly twenty-percent more ideas.”

It turns out, based on many studies, that “imagination…thrives on conflict.”  Lehrer quotes the author of one of the studies who claims, “There's this Pollyannish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is to stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone's feelings. Well that's just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive.”

Based on the article, I'm thinking that the problem in Congress and in many state legislatures today is not that there is too much partisan debate but too little.  At the heart of so much dysfunction in those bodies is too little willingness to be exposed to contrary ideas and too little willingness to let them inform changes of opinion.

What if so-called “flip-flopping” is really a very positive ability to seek out and listen to differing opinions and then having the flexibility to let that moderate rather than harden previously-held conclusions. “Flip-flopping” as you know, is a characteristic for which both President Obama and hopeful Republican Party-nominee Mitt Romney are both criticized.

Krista Tippett's radio show On Being still doesn't appear to be carried by the public radio station of which I'm a sustainer, so while I'm working on blog posts I listen to podcasts or read transcripts delivered to me via e-mail , which is far more convenient anyway.

The interview a few days ago with Dr. Rex Jung was entitled Creativity and the Everyday Brain.  Interestingly, Jung is a neuropsychologist researcher who studies both intelligence and creativity at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque.  His inspiration to venture from intelligence into creativity came from his work with the Special Olympics.

I was surprised during the interview to hear Jung also refer to Lehrer’s article in The New Yorker.  Dr. Jung gives a great definition of intelligence as a “superhighway in the brain that allows you to get from point A to point B” and that “with creativity, it's a slower, more meandering process. We want to take the side roads and even the dirt roads to get there, to put the ideas together.”

People I often affectionately call list checkers hate to get off that superhighway and often form opinions with far too little information and devoid of creativity.

But the interview notes that you can't “meander forever.”  Eventually, you need other parts of your brain to form and test hypotheses, something that is equally irritating to list checkers.  Maybe they just don’t like the on-off ramps?

To me, I took the traditional form of brainstorming as meandering far too long and that the part of creativity where hypotheses are formed and tested is what makes sessions that permit critical thinking and evaluation so much more productive.

So I guess that's why I can seem to be equally irritating to both list checkers and Pollyannish creatives.

With all of this in mind, I'll still participate in brainstorming sessions when invited, but also suggest that they be accompanied by individual brainstorming sessions and that, when were together as a group, we are able to evaluate, debate and analyze ideas without getting personal.

I’ll report back on how that goes.  If the original ground rules have persisted more than five decades after they were debunked, I can imagine it may take facilitators to be much more open to contrary ideas before we see brainstorming practices begin to evolve and catch up with brain science.

Thinking About Suicide

Lately I've been thinking a lot about suicide.  A few months ago I learned that the wonderful teenage daughter of my best friend had contemplated harming herself but reached out for help; and vibrant young person in my family, who is slightly older, tried to follow through, partly in reaction to some meds, but thankfully was rescued.

Then this week I attended the funeral of the daughter of another friend, who succeeded in killing herself taking a beloved pet with her.  She was just two years younger than my own daughter and only child.

During the service, an article crossed my mind that I had read only a few days earlier about the new science of emotions.  It was  co-written by Dr. Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  He is also the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center.

The article is a great introduction to a book published this week that he co-authored with Sharon Begley entitled The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them.

It is a fascinating look into not only how we differ in “how we react to what life throws at us” but also how our brains differ and how and why treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy can repair and strengthen those responses.

Listed in the hard copy of the article, but apparently not in the online version, are what the authors identify as the (I’ve added the definitions from the book) 6 Key Elements of Emotional Style:

Resilience – how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity.

Outlook – how long you are able to sustain a positive emotion.

Self Awareness – how adept you are at picking up on social signals from the people around you.

Social Intuition – how well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotional responses to take into account the context you find yourself in.

Attention – how sharp and clear your focus is.

Sensitivity to Context – how good are you at regulating your emotions.

My friend’s teenage daughter is getting better and better and has chronicled her illness and recovery in a remarkable blog that includes the video shown above and linked here.  She has also been written up in her school newspaper.  My young family member has responded very well to cognitive therapy which has helped her regain her trademark resilience and she’ll never accept another prescription with “benzoid in the name.

The article and the book describe the new information revealed by Dr. Davidson’s research about what is happening in the brain when people react the way these folks did and more importantly that it can be reversed.

The new discovery is that emotions don’t run on a circuitry separate and independent of the regions previously thought to pertain exclusively to cognition, reason, and logic.  In fact, emotional style arises partly in these areas.

Resilience, for instance, “is marked by greater left versus right activation in the prefrontal cortex: a lack of resilience comes from higher right prefrontal activation. The amount of activation in the left prefrontal region of a resilient person can be 30 times that in someone who is not resilient.”

Two friends, both former Mayors, have often noted that I am one of the most resilient people they have ever known, something put to the test often in my now-concluded four-decade-long career in community economic development.

However, I didn’t always bounce back so quickly.  Even when board meetings went smoothly, it always took me as a CEO, several hours to rejuvenate.  I can also recall at least two occasions where it took me several days or weeks to recover from a deep, personal loss and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I doubted at the time whether it was all worth it.

But Dr. Davidson has also found a second element at play in the fact that “the more axons you have connecting one neuron to another between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the more resilient you are. The less of this “white matter”—that is, the fewer the highways leading from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala—the less resilient you are.”

The great news is that a person’s emotional style can be changed. Meditative therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy actually “increase activity in the prefrontal cortex (especially on the left side), to strengthen the neuronal highways between it and the amygdala, or both.’

Both the article and the book are well worth reading. There is always hope!