text:
Report me and my cause aright
Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2
The Catchline
|Volume XXIV, No. 1
|November 2005
What a meeting it was! On behalf of the ARJD, I extend the warmest thanks to our hosts Robert Williams and Carol Ellis CBE QC. The fact that it went well was due in large part to their hospitality and the work that went into organizing the meeting by Ed Jessen, Lloyd Hysan, Cliff Allen, the Education Chair, Leah Walker, and the members of the Executive Committee. As many of you know, Ed Jessen and Lloyd Hysan were unable to attend the meeting, but others stepped up to the plate. Wilma Grant's support was indispensable as was that of Nathalie Bourque, my assistant, who easily did a month's worth of work in five days. The support of our vendor colleagues, as usual, was fantastic.
The education meeting was great. David Kenworthy, who has seen courts from the perspective of a reporter and a judge, had some great "war stories" to share with us. Senior Master Robert Turner gave us a wonderful recitation of the history of the recording of judicial decisions, and the role of the textbook. He even brought samples, some of which were very old. He spoke to us a bit about his role as the Queen's Remembrancer, and that in itself was very interesting. I think our association has found a new friend! After lunch, we heard from another speaker on law reporting - Craig Rose, with LexisNexis UK, whose talk dovetailed nicely with Master Turner's. The next speaker, Joe Wilson, gave us a crash course on constitutional reform in the UK with an emphasis on the new Supreme Court. The last speaker was Fynette Eaton, whose work with NARA will be of use to Association members. I presented each of the speakers with a gift - a commemorative book about the Supreme Court of Canada, with a note of thanks. We capped the day's event with group photos - one with just members and one with members and guests. The photos turned out well, and are posted on our website.
Thomson West sponsored our Thursday night visit to the Tower of London, an unbelievable treat. Edith Lavin organized a walking tour of the Inns of Court, for the Friday morning. It was a really different twist on the usual tour of courts - we were all great walkers it would appear. We are just delighted that Edith is now on the executive board. LexisNexis sponsored a bus tour of the highlights of London for the Friday afternoon. We had the privilege of going to Gray's Inn on Friday evening for a reception hosted by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales. Gray's Inn was most spectacular, especially the Hall with some stained glass windows that date back almost 600 years. There is a large wall (which they called a screen) at the end of the Hall that is reputed to be made from timber from a galleon of the Spanish Armada and a gift from Queen Elizabeth I.
The business meeting was interesting. Cliff Allen had some insightful feedback regarding what our new members hope to get from the Association. This will provide us with much useful material for discussion over the upcoming year. We had some discussions about our 25th anniversary, and Janette Bloom has agreed to visit Henry Lind and see what he might have in storage that we could use for an anniversary book. The nomination report was made and the new slate of officers is Barbara Kincaid as President, Ed Jessen as Immediate Past President, Wilma Grant as Vice-President, Edith Lavin as Secretary and Tim Fuller as Treasurer (for life or until retirement).
We were treated by LexisNexis to a wonderful cruise on the Thames River with great views, great food, great wine, great music...well you get the drift. After a brief business meeting on Monday morning, it was back to the reality.
It's a new Court year, and I wish you all the best. Please send me your suggestions for our meeting in Kansas City. Your executive board will be meeting in Washington at the United States Supreme Court on November 18, 2005, and we would welcome your input.
Barbara Kincaid
The Role of the Textbook
in the Common Law
Senior Master of the Supreme Court and Queen's Remembrancer
The Role of the Textbook
Good morning. Your Association does me a great honour in permitting me to attend this your 3rd International Symposium.
We are all beneficiaries of the great Common Law tradition. Though we owe to our forefathers an exceptional debt; in part three isolated events have fashioned the development of this extraordinary heritage.
Forgive me if I speak solely from an English viewpoint and for seeing the Law Report and textbook as but two threads of a common strand.
In 1100 AD, William Rufus built Westminster Hall, which became for 700 years the seat of the three Common Law courts of Exchequer, King's Bench and Common Pleas thus creating a legal complex in close proximity to both judges and lawyers.
In the 1340's the lawyers the Masters at Law acquired lodgings or Inns in the former hospicium of the Knights Templars on the banks of the Thames and the townhouses of Lord Grey of Wilton and Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln just outside the City Walls, thereby forming a close association with each other and for the better instruction of their pupils who lodged in the Chambers of their Masters. Thus the tradition of oral instruction was founded.
And due to an accident of history our judges and courts chose to reject the straitjacket of a codified civil and criminal jurisdiction but instead choose to rely on a system of precedent which in turn depended on the dedication of the lawyer case reporters.
It was Lord Bingham at your Millennium Symposium at Cambridge who reminded us that in our Common Law system, the decisions of the judges are the source of law controlled by the doctrine of precedent.
Throughout these past 800 years the Office of the King's Remembrancer created on Michaelmas Day 1164 which I have had the honour to hold for ten years has witnessed this growth and development.
We choose not to rely on thesis and abstract theories in the manner of the Roman tradition which in turn led to the civil law practice of our European colleagues. Instead we taught our students of law to heed the practices of the courts, to understand the use of Writs and Forms of Action and to listen to the arguments of the Serjeants at Law and to follow the judgments of the justices on the bench. It was a very pragmatic and practical approach, which has stood the test of time and produced Century after Century a vibrant legal system in tune with the needs of the society it serves.
And to keep us all abreast of the state of play in the courts, we have relied on our law reporters and our textbook writers.
"The literature of a profession is a guide to the state of its intellectual development", wrote Professor J.H. Baker, a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge and the Downing Professor of the Laws of England in his Introduction to English Legal History, (2002).
We have been very fortunate in England by the wealth of material outlining the growth of our legal system and especially in the extent to which the early lawyers reported the cases decided in the Courts and the textbook writers produced comprehensive but useful distillations of the various disciplines.
Possibly the first and most fascinating work was the text book written in about 1177 by Richard FitzNigel, Bishop of London, and a judge of the Court of Exchequer. He gives in the Dialogus de Scaccario an account of the working of that court in the graphic form of a viva voce discourse between a pupil and his master. Without this textbook we would know little of the practical workings of a medieval court. But perhaps the gem in this book is the opening passage where the author writes:
"In the twenty-third year of the reign of king Henry II, while I sat at the window of the tower which is by the river Thames on the east side of Westminster Hall".
This window and its view could be found today were it not for the 19th Century addition of the Pugin and Barry Houses of Parliament which now block the view but an Elizabethan map of London in the Queen's Bench Masters' corridor shows clearly that tower.
It was followed by the first book on the Common Law, Glanvill with his Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England at the start of the 18th Century. Its significance is that it concentrated on the precedents set by the Writs issued by the courts rather than on seeking to give an account of the decrees, which established the Law. This set the development of our legal system on the path of following precedent rather than seeking to follow a formal code of laws.
In contrast a textbook on the substantive law was written in the form of Bracton who too wrote "On the Laws and Customs of England" but there was a difference. Written twenty or so years after the collation of forms of Writs in Glanvill, it might have led England down the Continental path of developing a Code of Laws based on Roman and Canon Law with the academics leading the field. Perhaps fortuitously, the book was written too early in the development of our legal system and was not up dated over the centuries by the judges and lawyers.
Instead the legal commentators concentrated on the manner in which the courts conducted their business and the development of the cause of action based on the forms of Writ. Thus the lawyers and the Courts preferred to follow the precedents of the courts and thereby these reports of the Forms of Action took preference over a legal system based on a codified series of laws.
From about 1250 the arguments and decisions of the judges were recorded in the reports known as the Yearbooks. Individual authors were not known during the Middle Ages. With the advent of printing the practice grew of identifying those who had compiled the reports. These were in reality the early textbooks to which all lawyers referred for their guidance.
However it remained sufficient for counsel in court when citing a previous authority to say that he would "vouch the record", thus establishing the practice which continues to this day of requiring the reports to be signed by a member of the Bar.
The Named Reports developed during the Tudor and Stuart reigns continued to be the means for circulating the decisions of the courts amongst the legal fraternity until the 19th Century. Some of the textbooks of the day were of very poor quality often useless to many as they contained no index or list of contents.
Nevertheless there were attempts to collate the Law into a coherent text book or books and there were two men whose writings have had a lasting impact on the development of our system of legal education and the reporting of decisions so as to enable the courts and the judges to work within a settled and established legal system.
Although published posthumously, Sir Matthew Hale, former Chief Justice, wrote the History of the Common Law (1713), An Analysis of the Laws of England (1713) and The History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736). His achievement was to organise and present the material from the past in a manner which allowed it to be better understood.
But the greatest work of the 18th Century was Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69). Many lawyers to this day pride themselves in possessing a set of "Commentaries" as part of their private library. This work was the first connected and comprehensive survey of the laws of England since the 13th Century and Bracton. Sir John Baker describes it as the last survey of the old common law and the first legal textbook.
The 19th Century however saw the birth of the true modern legal textbooks with the publication of a plethora of books often written by young or disappointed lawyers with nothing better to do and anxious to earn a living outside the courts.
Some have stood the test of time and many will recognise some of the following:
Woodfall's Landlord and Tenant (1802)
Archbold's Pleading, Evidence and Practice in Criminal Cases (1822)
Chitty on Contracts (1826)
Byles on Bills of Exchange (1829)
Williams on Executors and Administrators (1832)
Some of the titles in the Common Law Library series published by Sweet & Maxwell illustrate the development of various disciplines of civil law.
Benjamin wrote his "Treatise on the law of sale of personal property with references to the French Code and the Civil Law" in 1868 at a time when such matters were of considerable importance to the affluent Victorian middle classes. Bullen & Leake wrote their Precedents of Pleadings in 1860 at the height of the Victorian reforms into the conduct of civil litigation and Phipson wrote his textbook on Evidence in 1892 shortly after the implementation of the Judicature Acts and the opening of the new Royal Courts of Justice in 1882.
These are still the cornerstones of the modern series of textbooks published in the Common Law Series.
The 18th and 19th centuries also saw the reporting of cases by some very professional reporters foremost of which was Sir James Burrow, the Master of the Crown Office of the King's Bench Division, a post still to be found in the Royal Courts of Justice.
Eventually the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting was set up to produce a professional and authoritative series known as the Law Reports. These drew their authority from the introduction of shorthand to enable the judgments to be recorded accurately and their submission to the judges for correction. They used well-written and accurate head notes and reported the pleadings, the evidence, the findings of fact, and the arguments of counsel. The authors were still members of the Bar but their identities were less well known.
One of the great Victorian Master of the Rolls, Lord Lindley, formulated a very sensible guide for what to report and what not to report.
Report: 1. All cases which introduce or appear to introduce a new principle or rule. 2. All cases which materially modify an existing principle or rule. 3. All cases which settle or materially tend to settle a question upon which the law is doubtful. 4. All cases which for any reason are peculiarly instructive.
Do not report: 1. Those cases which pass without discussion or consideration and which are valueless as precedents. 2. Those cases which are substantially repetitious of what is already reported.
However without legal publishers there would be no legal text books. Today Sweet & Maxwell have a thousand titles in their Professional Catalogue 2005. Two hundred years ago in 1800, Stephen Sweet published his first legal text book "Parker's Reports of Cases in the Court of Exchequer" from 3 Chancery Lane and on the fly sheet described himself as a Law Book Seller. Two years later Joseh Butterworth published "Woodfall on Landlord and Tenant". Alexander Maxwell a book auctioneer moved to Bell Yard which is now overlooked by the Royal Courts of Justice and in 1811 started publishing legal text books. Alexander Maxwell clearly profited in his business as in 1830/1831 he received a Royal Warrant from William IV which appointed him as a "Law Book Seller in Ordinary".
The USA was visited by Henry Sweet following the death of his father in 1841-- it appears to have been a profitable market for law books -- often I fear, pirated editions.
During the past Century, the law library of a member of the Bar would consist of a number of text books relevant to the particular disciplines in which he practised together with a set of reports. He would endeavour to have his own or a shared access to Halsbury's Laws and Statutes and he might subscribe to one or more of the series of reports such as the All England Reports or the Lloyds Reports and the Criminal Appeal Reports or even the Industrial Tribunal Reports in addition to his own set of Law Reports. But the more conservative of the judges would receive all these in their courts with reservations. They would expect at least a citation to come from the Law Reports or from a recent Weekly Law Report, which were the day-to-day reports from whose parts 2 & 3, the Law Reports were eventually to appear after they had been submitted to the judges.
The great advantage of these reports was the careful selection of relevant and useful authorities with well-written head notes. Occasionally a decision at nisi prius or first instance might be overlooked and only reported years later or sometimes a Court of Appeal judgment might be missed. This made the task of counsel so much easier. Solicitors would seldom refer to authorities in their instructions to counsel. The collation of the facts and the instructions of their client were seen, as the provence of solicitors whereas the research of the law and the authorities was the provence of counsel.
It was alongside this range of law reports that the textbook played its essential part. The law report was just one isolated decision, which needed to be seen in the wider context of the particular discipline. Some textbooks were treated as student guides and though much treasured by the budding lawyer, were only the stepping-stone to the much more profound and respected practitioner's authority. Thus a young law student might have passed his Bar Finals in Crime having studied Smith & Hogan yet on joining chambers nothing but Archbold would do in the Crown Court.
Neither the Common Law nor the Statute Law makers of Parliament have ever chosen to codify the law in the sense that the Civil Law jurisdictions have sought to achieve.
Perhaps the nearest to this end have been the two great series of legal encyclopaedias Halsbury's Law of England and Halsbury's Statutes. First published between 1907 and 1917-under the general editorship of that great Lord Chancellor Lord Halsbury who had served in that Office between 1885-1886, 1886-1892, and 1895-1905. It has retained the tradition of being reissued under the name of subsequent Chancellors though now that this distinguished Office has been all but subsumed by the political ministerial title of Secretary of State, the authority of that former office has been diminished. It is perhaps fitting that the current General Editor is Lord Mackay of Clasfern who held the Office of Lord Chancellor from 1987 till 1997 and was the first Scottish Law Officer to do so. His move from the Dutch tradition of Scotland to the Common Law of England was a remarkable achievement a credit to the ability of our systems of law to cross-fertilise.
In a less well-known manner, Atkin's Courts Forms has as a preface to every title, a comprehensive review of the law and practice relevant to the title, mini encyclopaedias in themselves.
As we enter the 21st Century we are able to witness the advantages and disadvantages of the new age of technology.
Today the legal scene is very different from that even of our father's generation. All the courts now publish either on the web or elsewhere their decisions. There are no less than 24 courts listed by the Supreme Court Library from whom in some form their decisions can be obtained. Most either for a fee will provide a hard copy or will make the judgments available on the web free of charge. I believe some 3,000 to 5,000 judgments are made available in England and Wales by superior courts of record, thus making the task of the law reporter and textbook writer worse by the day.
However, the Victorian judges usually gave their judgments verbatim and extempore in the more leisurely days of the 19th Century and managed to condense them to ten pages at the most. Nowadays it is not unusual to find 100 page judgments given in the Court of Appeal as judges now become accustomed to copy and paste in large sections of the authorises cited to them and include the chronology set out in counsels' written submissions. None try to provide the comprehensive and discerning head notes of the Law Reports which gave a brief resume of the facts and issues and set out the findings of the court in short form, which has been such a boom in the past. We have moved from the A-H margin identification letters to the numbered paragraphs and even lines of the modern reports. The advocate preparing his written submission and his oral presentation has to wade through so much dross just to find the gem that he needs to win his submission. It is here that he has to rely on the judgment and learning of the textbook writer.
Whereas the lawyer 50 years ago was able to keep himself abreast of the latest developments in the law by reading his Times each morning and peruse on a weekly basis the Weekly or All England Reports depending on his personal preference, the lawyer of today is faced by a tsunami tidal wave of uncontrolled and indigestible material.
It is in this minefield that the lawyer has to search for the pearl amongst a thousand pebbles truly the proverbial needle in the haystack. Hence today the textbook writer comes into his own.
The textbook writer needs to take advantage of the following qualities of this form of communication:
(a) An authoritative distillation of the law and practice of a particular discipline.
(b) Ease of reading the printed page is still so much easier to absorb than the computer screen.
(c) Confidence in an acknowledged authority courts readily heed the editorial comment and commentary of such titles as the White Book, the volumes in the Common Law Library, Halsbury's Laws and the like.
(d) Regular updates and supplements.
But in some respects little has changed over the centuries for the lawyer and the judge:
(1) Both are still bound by the principle of stare decisis and the precedents of superior courts.
(2) Each is looking to one or more levels of a higher court for a precedent which will guide them to make a submission or decision on a particular point of law.
(3) Neither has the time or energy to study all the relevant reports in his discipline.
(4) Often just one or two reports are all that need to be identified in order to decide a case.
(5) From these cases it may be just one or two sentences from a judgment that the Court will need to rely upon for its decision.
A perfect example of this facility is the White Book. First published in 1883 as the Annual Practice, then as the Supreme Court Practice and now as Civil Procedure, its distinctive white cover has gained it world wide the common reference as the "White Book" none would dream of referring to it by any other description.
It seeks to set out the Civil Procedure Rules and then provide a commentary written by a team of editors drawn from all walks of the legal world. Under the direction of a Lord Justice of Appeal it includes the entire Senior and Chief Masters, a number of High Court and Circuit and District Judges, corps of solicitors, barristers and the staff of the Supreme Court and that is not an exhaustive list. Perhaps no one volume has such worldwide recognition. Some jurisdictions still retain twenty-year-old editions as their standard form of reference where their own procedures have remained frozen in time.
The wheel giving access to vital legal knowledge has gone the full circle from the day on which Richard FitzNeal penned the opening sentence to the Dialogus de Scaccario whilst sitting by the window in Westminster Hall in 1177 to the room in chambers of the young barrister in the Temple or the glass-walled skyscraper of the solicitor's office on Canary Wharf. All were seeking an answer to the latest legal conundrum.
The ability to find an easy reference to the width of the duty of care or the latest practice in the Commercial Court for staying proceedings for ADR as set out in Vol 1 of the White Book, is the raison d'etre for the text book writer's art and in this country we are very well served by some of the World's greatest textbooks.
But we must remember that legal textbook writers need source material and that can only be gained from reported cases. Hence the role of the Law Reporter is pivotal in our great tradition of Common Law both here in England and Wales and across the Pond in the States and in Canada.
Robert Turner
August 2005
How I Spent My Summer Vacation --
a Senior Olympian's Perspective
Editor's Note: On a tip from Sheila D'Ambrosio and with the intent of showing that ARJD members are certainly not one-dimensional individuals, I pleaded with Bilee Cauley to share with us the following story.
Early this summer I had the wonderful experience of participating in the Senior National Games (also known as the Senior Olympics). The games, held every other year, were held in Pittsburgh this year, which as most of you know, is my hometown. Last year in Montgomery I qualified to represent Alabama in four cycling events at the Pittsburgh games: the 5k time trial, the 10k time trial, the 20k road race, and the 40k road race. To qualify to represent your state in an event at the national games, you must earn gold or silver in the qualifying event. Because of time constraints, I competed in only two events in Pittsburgh the 10k time trial and the 20k road race. Many of the participants are retired and spend all day every day training, so you get some idea of what the competition was like. My training consisted of (in addition to editing opinions, which did me little good in the cycling events) hill repeats a few nights a week, a long ride with sprint intervals on Saturday, and time trials on Wednesday nights.
The courses for both the time trial and the road race were hilly long and steep climbs. Luckily, I had driven the courses in a car with my niece when I was in Pittsburgh in May, so I did some hill-specific training rides. My niece actually asked me during the drive if I could climb the hills on a bicycle! Climbing them would not be the problem, I assured her; climbing them at race pace, however, would be! Descending on the hills was also tricky; after the time trial my bike computer noted my top speed on the curvy descent at 48 miles per hour-a record for me.
Over 12,000 athletes participated in the games, which included team and individual sports, e.g., track and field, swimming, tennis, basketball; over 1400 participated in the cycling events. Being around these athletes was inspirational. The athletes ranged from 50 years old (the minimum age for a senior olympian) to 100+. The oldest woman participating in the 10k time trial was 85! One of the men from Montgomery who participated in the 55-59 age group noted that men in the 80-84 age group were beating his time-trial time. He turned to me and said, "I thought this would get easier!" It was truly inspirational to see healthy, active people in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties enjoying the competition and the comradery.
The other amazing aspect of the cycling events was the bikes. Wendell had given me a new carbon-fiber bike as a Christmas/anniversary/birthday/Valentine's day gift, which I love and which was a great help in competing. However, most entrants had at least two such bikes: one devoted to time trialing and one to road racing. Let me just note that the wheels on some of the time-trial bikes cost over $3,000. Poor me, I had to use one bike for both events.
Okay, you ask, so how did I do? I finished in the middle of the pack in my age group (55-59) in the time trial, and I finished eighth for a place on the podium in the road race. I felt pretty good about it since my only other road race was the qualifying race the year before!
Even more fun than the competition, however, was being with friends and family. Wendell and several of our friends from Montgomery, some of whom were competing and some not, made the trip to Pittsburgh. My sister arranged many entertaining events for the group, including a Pirates-Orioles game at PNC Park, where my name was on the Jumbotron: "Congratulations Senior Olympian Bilee Cauley!" Don't, however, be looking for my picture on your box of Wheaties yet!
In an attempt to make this article somewhat relevant to the business of reporting, I will say Pittsburgh did an excellent job of hosting the Senior Olympics. Friends who have participated in several of the senior national games said that Pittsburgh was by far the best venue best local support, plenty of planned events, great organization, and wonderful, knowledgeable volunteers. If Pittsburgh can do such a great job hosting the influx of 30,000 athletes and their families and friends, imagine how much fun we'll have at our annual meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009!
One last word for those other seniors among us: if you swim, run, bike, or play tennis or even badminton, start practicing. The 2007 Senior Olympics are in Louisville, Kentucky.
New Members
We welcome three new active members to the ARJD. Ralph W. Preston is the Reporter of Decisions for the Ohio Supreme Court. Francois Boivin serves as Legal Editor in the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeals of Canada. Stephen W. Kenyon is the Clerk of Court and Reporter of the Idaho Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. You are encouraged to attend our meetings and to become involved as ARJD officers or committee chairs.
Also, we welcome as a new retired member, the former Assistant Court Reporter at the Supreme Court of Ohio, John Manchak.
Education: C. Clifford Allen, Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Court of Massachusetts
Electronic Publishing: William B. Jones, Jr., Supreme Court and Court of Appeals of Arkansas
Honors: Richard D. Ross, Kansas Supreme Court and Appeals Court
Membership: Kathryn M. Bann, Superior Court of Pennsylvania
Nominating Committee: Shauna Thomas, Supreme Court of Montana
Site Selection Committee: Lloyd M. Hysan, Supreme Court of the United States
Website Committee: Charles A. Ashe, New York State Reporting Bureau
The twenty-fifth annual meeting of the ARJD will be held on August 3-7, 2006, in Kansas City, Missouri. The Executive Board has approved the Fairmont on the Plaza Hotel in Kansas City as the site of our meeting. The room rate is $139 per night. Further details will be distributed in the spring.
Celebrating Benjamin Franklin's 300th Birthday in Philadelphia
A major exhibition will be held in Philadelphia to celebrate the Tercentenary of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is the first founding father to turn 300. To coincide with the 300th anniversary of his birth, an international traveling exhibition, Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World, will make its premiere from December 15, 2005, through April 30, 2006, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The exhibit was conceived and created by the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, a federally commissioned consortium of five Philadelphia institutions with ties to Franklin. Members include the American Philosophical Society, The Franklin Institute Science Museum, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Philadelphia plans a Birthday Bash for Franklin on January 17, 2006, with related special events, promotions, and exhibitions. After its debut in Philadelphia, the exhibition will make stops in St. Louis from June 8 to September 4, 2006; in Houston from October 11, 2006, to January 21, 2007; in Denver from March 2 to May 20, 2007; in Atlanta from June 26 to September 23, 2007; and in Paris from November 1, 2007, to February 28, 2008.
President: Barbara Kincaid
General Counsel, Law Branch
Supreme Court of Canada
Vice-President: Wilma Grant
Manager, Publications Unit, Office of Data Systems
Supreme Court of the United States
Secretary: Edith V. Lavin
Supreme Court Attorney
Supreme Court of California
Treasurer: Truman S. Fuller
Reporter of Decisions
Supreme Court of Washington
The Catchline
Editors: C. Clifford Allen
Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
Edward W. Jessen
Supreme Court of California
Layout: Denise Lynch
Supreme Court of California
Volume XXIV, No. 1 November 2005


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our family on Easter (because I haven't posted this enough places on the Internet yet)
{thanks to my lovely sister-in-law, Sarah for snapping the picture.}
jomegs: a little slice of my life
our family chronicles
this week we welcomed two extra kids into our family for several days. Yesterday, Little Girl and Jack took some time for a hot chocolate break in the midst of a Play Doh mess.
Five years ago today, pretty much right at this minute, I was walking down the aisle on the arm of a very handsome tuxedoed man. First as Johanna Henderson on the arm of my dad, then back down as the new Mrs. Johanna Puelston with Kyle. It was a beautiful fall day, much like this one. The colors in the trees were as bright as the smile on my face that wouldn't quit. I was HAPPY. I mean, CRAZY HAPPY. I was marrying the love of my life! And we were going to be together forever.
Today I am still so very happy. The past five years have honestly been wedded bliss. Not without bumps along this beautiful road called Life Together, but so chock full of blessing that I cannot for one minute dwell on the brief moments that have been hard or painful. In fact, those moments have shaped and helped us in ways that the super great days can't hold a candle to.
The first three to six months of marriage were the bumpiest. We had to learn and study each other as we lived life side-by-side after a long-distance courtship. God worked mightily in both our hearts to teach us to extend His bountiful grace to one another, to love even when it was hard and to let the little things slide. The bumps smoothed out and with great support, wisdom from those around us and lots of praying for each other, marriage just got better and better.
I was thinking today that this is probably the life I pictured four years ago when we celebrated our first anniversary in beautiful California. A house, a couple of kids (one that has yet to appear to the outside world!), a continuation of Kyle's funky, but lovable work schedule. But its SO much better than I could have imagined. And we're better off in so many ways than on the blissful day our marriage began. God's grace has been working in small and huge ways to bring us to a place of deepness and maturity in lots of areas of life.
So basically – I'm blessed beyond anything I could have pictured on the day I thought was the happiest day of my life. 🙂 It's a joy to share life with my best friend and lover. I'd do it all over again in two seconds, Kyle!
wow. My blogging skillz have gone OUT the window, apparently! Considering its practically the middle of August and I haven't said a word or even posted a picture. Gasp.
This summer has just been crazy. I feel like its been one big event that requires all of my attention one right after the other. Shew! But I'm finally feeling like we're in the home stretch…my Crossings friends are coming this coming weekend and then the next Big Thing is my sister-in-law Sarah's wedding in the middle of September. ahhhhhh – big sigh.
We just returned from a WONDERFUL week Up North. Old favorites like cliff jumping (but not by me), hiking, World's Best Donuts, smoked fish and cheese for lunch on the river landing, Sven and Ole's pizza (oh. so. good.), throwing rocks into Grand Marais harbor and other traditions were indulged in. New memories were made with an epic sunset harbor boat cruise courtesy of the US Coast Guard and one Jesse Sullivan, fantastic live music on the roof of Gunflint Tavern on a chilly night, collecting 8 stamps in our State Park passbook and receiving our first patch (we only have 64 more to visit before we've seen 'em all!) and visiting Grand Portage, MN which is on the Canadian border. What a great time!
And the best part was being with our family. Jackson really loves his aunts and uncles and grandparents, all around. I don't take it for granted that we can see them as often as we do and make memories together like we did this past week. It's fun too that the Puelston extended family is growing so much this year with two in-laws and a new baby joining the mix by November. 🙂 Happy happy!
So that's our August so far – recovering from July's insanity and vacation. Hurrah for a lighter schedule of events for the rest of the month and the chance to enjoy the last weeks of summer in Minnesota.
and to sneak in "foto friday" – here's one of my favorite "artistic" shots I took this week. This is at the Grand Portage National Monument and is a replica of the fort that once stood there in the fur trading days of yore.
My friend Rosanna is a gem. When she moved here almost 5 years ago, we had no idea we'd become such good friends…or that she'd still be here five years later. The plan was a little shorter time in MN, but I am very glad God extended it and I've had her in my life for these years. Even when she and her husband Rob and son Jude leave for the wild West in October, we'll stay close by any means possible. It's just that kind of friendship – not one to be given up on just because distance gets in the way. 🙂
With our first pregnancies, our due dates were mere weeks apart. This time around, I'm further ahead by 15 weeks. I'm hoping our little missy makes her appearance before they move, so Rosanna can hold my sweet girl. We're also betting on the fact that since Rosanna is so much sicker this time (like I was), she is having a girl too, but we won't know that for a couple weeks still.
At any rate, its been so wonderful to share life with this beautiful woman. 🙂 The other day a mutual friend commented "I love how you guys do everything together!" And its true! We were married within weeks of each other and became newlyweds at the same time, started a small group with our guys and another couple (the awesome Gulbransons…I'll talk about my dear friend Jes another time!), introduced each other to new music/places/fun, had our boy babies, did the new mom thing together, went to a MOMS group together, vacationed to Tahoe together, and now we're awaiting the births of our second bebes. And believe it or not, we did NOT plan to match when we both showed up wearing the same. exact. dress. the other night. lol.
Many a fun girls night out has been had, many a cup of coffee and conversation at Starbucks and Caribou, many a chat on our couches, some tears shed as we bring our burdens to the Lord together, and many a laugh as we share the latest funny thing that our kid has done. I credit Rosanna with my vastly improved sense of style and makeup skills – she's my personal shopping consultant and makeup guru. 🙂
Much has happened and changed in our lives over the past five years, but God's love and faithfulness has remained constant and is evident in our lives. I will, without a doubt, miss her to pieces when she's far far away in NV and CA, but thank God for FaceTime and text messages and Facebook and phone calls. Love you, Rosanna dear!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Below you will find a rich collection of answers to common questions or issues about meditation, mindfulness, neuroplasticity, and well-being that have been submitted to Dr. Rick Hanson.
Below you will find a rich collection of answers to common questions or issues about meditation, mindfulness, neuroplasticity, and well-being that have been submitted to Dr. Rick Hanson.
In a general sense, we actually need and use all of the brain's capacity. The idea that we use just 10% or so is a myth. We would not have evolved an organ that uses 20-25% of the oxygen and glucose in our blood – even though it's just 2-3% of our bodyweight – if we (and our ancestors) did not need every bit of it. That said, many people do not make the best possible use of their talents, skills, values, and opportunities. To me, that's the much greater loss.
We can increase the brain's functional capabilities by protecting it (e.g., avoiding or reducing injuries, toxins, drugs and alcohol, and stress) and by internalizing beneficial experiences – helping them get encoded into lasting changes in neural structure and function – in order to grow more inner strengths such as resilience, gratitude, self-compassion, kindness, insight into oneself and others, and overall well-being.
Unfortunately, this isn't a process that will give us true "superpowers," but doing so leads us to being happier ourselves and more helpful to others. To me, that's a really wonderful superpower! There are also many examples of people who have really gotten the most out of their brain and body through intense training in music, sports, dance, or meditation, and developed some remarkable abilities because of it.
There is a lot of fMRI research in which the prompt to the subject in the scanner is reading a text. Many of the texts used are emotion words or passages. So there are many examples of reading producing brain activity that is consistent with the experience the subject reports while reading the text.
More specifically, if you mean reading about an experience per se, I don't know of any specific studies about that, but there well may be. Bottom-line, if you read about an experience – say, a memoir of combat or rock-climbing or bar-hopping or commodities trading . . . or similar passages in fiction – and have a sense of that experience yourself while reading about it in someone else, then apart from the hypothetical influences of transcendental factors, by definition that mental experience must map one-to-one to underlying neural activity, and in the regions of the brain that represent that kind of experience (e.g., right hemisphere for imagery).
A parallel to reading would be imagining different experiences or behaviors. You might be interested in Sharon Begley's book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, in which she reports a study that piano players who simply imagined playing a certain piece of music for sustained periods grew cortex in motor regions of the brain that handled those particular finger movements.
This article of mine might also be helpful: //www.rickhanson.net/wp-content/files/MindChangingBrain.pdf
Biological evolution in humans takes thousands of years to show effects. On this time scale, the brain is indeed still evolving, but slowly. But cultural evolution can be very very fast (as anyone born in the 20th century has seen!). I am hopeful that our growing understanding of the three pounds of tofu-like tissue between our ears will lead to more evolved ways of treating each other.
I don't know much about goose bumps except that they are a vestige – "piloerection" – of ancient sympathetic nervous system (SNS) responses to stress, typically used to have the hair of an animal stand up so as to look larger and more threatening. Thus people get goose bumps sometimes when they are scared. Of course, the SNS can also activate with positive arousal, such as the experience of goose bumps during meditation.
To begin with, I think it's easy to make category errors in confusing the metaphorical and the physical heart. The heart sounds warm and fuzzy while the brain sounds gushy or "head-y." So it's tempting to ascribe heartfelt feelings/inclinations to the physical heart even though it's actually the brain that (still somewhat mysteriously) constructs those feelings and inclinations as experiences in our field of awareness.
As to the physical heart and the brain, there is interesting research on heart rate variability from Dacher Keltner, Heartmath, and other sources. I think sometimes there is an overemphasis on the heart's influence on the brain and thus our experience of things like warm and loving feelings. Still, clearly there are feedback loops in which cardio-pulmonary processes regulate neural and thus mental activity. In effect, through Heartmath or related methods (e.g., metta practice in Buddhism, devotional practices in Hinduism), one can use the mind to affect the brain to affect the physical heart, which in turn affects the brain, which causes the mind to feel more peaceful/loving/happy. I have not seen research to this effect, but it is certainly plausible that changes in a person's mental state – such as becoming more loving – involve functional and structural changes in the neuro-fabric of the heart.
Polyvagal theory is also a tremendous resource that indicates linkages between the heart and lungs and the "social engagement system."
I am sorry to hear about the possibility of a neurodegenerative disease.
With respect, I'd offer that multiple things can be true side by side: mental activity changes the brain, mindfulness practice has many benefits including altering brain structure and function, and sometimes illness or dysfunction still comes our way. For me, acquiring an illness is nothing to be guilty about! Instead of the self-criticism implicit in guilt, self-compassion is called for, and gladness and self-respect for all the good practices you have been doing over the years.
Last, I am not aware of any research on this (though there might be some I don't know about), but to me it is plausible that repeated mental training focused on what might be deteriorating (such as memory or motor control) could have benefits, at least in slowing the progression of illness or in strengthening compensatory factors or processes.
Unfortunately, I can't give any specific advice. But I could offer these general ideas:
It seems plausible (without any research evidence) that training in the mindful discernment and internalization of increasingly subtle experiences of various kinds of reward (e.g., gratitude, beauty) just might help to sensitize dopamine receptors and related activity so that as dopamine supplies diminish as Parkinson's progresses, a person might still be able to experience positive mood and the sense of reward, or at least reduce the rate of decline.
I'm not sure what is meant by "neural reductionism" here, but if it includes the popular notion of "reducing consciousness to brain processes", then I think there are different levels of analysis and different categories of causes that need to be explored. I don't think the behavior of mice and hawks in a meadow "reduces" to the chemical processes in their bodies, let alone the quantum processes, but there is certainly a relationship between one and the other. Absent a resort to supernatural or transcendental factors, of course immaterial mental activity including consciousness – whether in humans, monkey, mice, or lizards . . . even spiders – must "reduce" to underlying material phenomena in the sense that the latter are necessary enabling and constructive conditions. But this does not mean that powerful ideas such as cultural helplessness or profound feelings such as love are "merely" electrochemical processes any more than the hunting behaviors of hawks are "merely" molecular processes. If you're interested, check out some articles on Neurodharma in the Wise Brain Bulletin, which try to get at this; also my article The Mind, the Brain, and God.
While I'm not a specialist in this area, the one thing I have heard is the potential value of neurofeedback – especially from someone who has a lot of experience with it. Perhaps you could find a good person in your area. I presume you are working with medical professionals, too.
When using mindfulness as a recovery tool from an TBI, remember that persistence, gentleness, and curiosity are important factors. Persistence means a steadily increasing capacity for cognitive exertion. This will take effort and stamina but in the end it pays off. Maintain a gentleness towards yourself throughout the recovery process, with patience and perseverance, and keep curious about new possibilities or practices that will maintain your momentum towards recovery.
Meanwhile, to me common sense would include good brain health practices in general: try to disengage from stress as much as possible, look for opportunities for positive emotions, avoid toxins, and take high quality fish oil – and avoid any blows to the head.
It sounds like you have a tic – and the medical fact is that almost everyone, me included, has these little motor habits. The most important thing is to try not to be anxious, stressed, or self-conscious about them. This secondary "collateral damage" cost of the tic is usually the worse thing about them, so try to relax, accept yourself, and keep things in perspective.
Additionally, if you want, you could talk with a therapist specifically about it. Perhaps it increases when you feel tense or there is some other trigger you could be mindful of. Then, as you notice the trigger, you could deliberately bring attention to that part of your body and interrupt the pattern of the tic, and perhaps also disengage from the trigger itself.
From a brain science perspective, tics are perfectly normal, simply a motor habit that gets accidentally acquired. The key to changing them is to disrupt them and acquire a different motor habit such as simply speaking in a normal way without the lip movements.
I am no specialist in head injury, but what I have seen myself or heard from people with more experience includes:
The hippocampus seems to be the key site in the human brain for neurogenesis (new baby neurons), though a recent study has raised questions about this finding. If neurogenesis in the hippocampus is indeed the case, exercise/activity stimulates neurogenesis, and complexity and stimulation help keep those new neurons alive and promote them getting wired into neural nets.
Existing neurons in the hippocampus can make new connections with each other, and with other parts of the brain. Other parts of the brain can help out to compensate for, say, a less-than-optimal hippocampus. For example, if a person knows that stress and trauma have made them prickly, presumably related in part to wear and tear on their hippocampi (two of them in the brain), then that person could draw on an intact prefrontal cortex to slow down and buy time and be less reactive.
Meanwhile, do mindfulness to disengage from negative reactions, and focus on taking in the good to replace them with resilient well-being.
The HEAL process and the practices within it can be applied to any experience – including somatic and emotional experiences during movement, yoga, dance, Chi Gung, etc. – to increase its registration in the nervous system and thus the lasting gain from it. People may understandably value certain states such as those had while moving compared to other states, such as those had while sitting, and thus look for ways to have them. But once that more beneficial state is occurring, the question remains as to how much durable value it will leave behind in the body in the acquisition of beneficial traits. Just because a state of being is more somatically or emotionally rich – such as during yoga or somatically oriented psychotherapies – does not necessarily mean that it will lead to more lasting beneficial changes in the body. We need to add the installation phase of learning, which produces lasting change for the better. The installation phase of learning is like the forgotten step-child in psychology, coaching, and human potential trainings – which is why it's been a primary focus on mine: getter better at installation is where the greatest opportunity lies for steepening the growth curves of most people.
Neurofeedback can indeed sometimes be helpful. The key is to find an experienced practitioner and then give it one or a few sessions to see if it makes a difference.
You might like Heartmath's Inner Balance program, biofeedback-oriented to train a calm and resilient heart-lungs system.
I am not a specialist on substance abuse and dependence. The thoughts expressed here are informal and tentative, and I encourage you to explore these topics with true experts.
A lot depends of the total history of alcohol consumption, and personal factors such as age, weight, and gender. The long-term effects of mild consumption (in terms of weight, gender, etc.) on the brain may be fairly limited and relatively quickly reset after sobriety. Then the effects of no longer drinking would be felt more through psychosocial pathways (e.g., experiencing a loss of "fun" or stress relief) than through physiological pathways – though this is a very informal tentative uneducated view.
Long-term moderate to severe drinking (defined relative to the particular individual) could affect neurochemistry in a variety of ways, as discussed in these articles:
I doubt there is any particularly clear information about how long it takes to return key neurotransmitter systems back to their original healthy activity. It's hard to assess neurotransmitter activity in humans . . . and how informative are invasive studies of rats?
The practical takeaways from the neural implications of alcohol consumption would be in sobriety to:
Of course, there are other useful actions in sobriety besides the neurally-informed ones noted above.
I use the word "mind" the way it is essentially used, most of the time, in neuroscience, to refer to the entirety of the information represented within the nervous system. We are surrounded by examples of different materials representing immaterial information: the physical hard drive of your computer stores and operates upon the non-physical information in your documents, music, and pictures; physical sound waves carry the intangible meanings of the words we use; and so on. In the same way, the brain represents, stores, communicates, and transforms the information that comprises the mind. Most of this information is forever outside awareness.
In effect, the mind is what the nervous system does, headquartered in the brain.
There may be a transcendental X factor – call it God, Spirit, or by no name at all – at work in awareness, in the mind in general, or in the universe altogether. Personally, I experience and believe that this is the case. But even without this possibility, the dots that connect mental activity and neural activity are getting clearer and clearer – giving us many opportunities to develop and use increasingly precise and powerful ways of using targeted mental activity to stimulate and therefore strengthen the neural substrates of wholesome states of mind.
For me, the mind/brain (nervous system) distinction is at bottom the distinction between immaterial information and a material substrate that represents it. I think information is real and natural while being immaterial – but information requires a material substrate. And in the nervous system, unlike a chalkboard, information in turn shapes neural structure; the mind changes the brain.
In ways that remain mysterious, somehow the realm of immaterial information becomes experienced phenomenology – for octopi and cats as well as people.
And there could be transcendental X factors at work as well.
People sometimes loosely locate my work under the umbrella of territory. Still, the way I would describe it is that I emphasize building psychological resources, based on using positive neuroplasticity to change the brain for the better, that people can use for healing old pain, being more effective in daily life, having more satisfying relationships, experiencing more well-being, and – if they like – growing in their own chosen spiritual practice. This approach is always grounded in realistic thinking, not "positive thinking," and a fundamental self-reliance.
From a third person perspective, one can observe that there is a continuous "when something first happens" in any material process (which includes both matter and energy), such as the moment when the bat strikes a baseball, or the position of the ball in flight at any instant of time. One can also have a sense of the mathematics of calculus related to the instantaneous position and vector of the ball. And one can have some understanding of the complex neural processes underpinning any moment of consciousness. In other words, as processes occur, there is a (metaphorical) "front edge" to them, that instant when something first happens.
From a first person perspective, one can be mindful of experiences as they appear and then change, and in their changing, how they end in some sense. Here, too, there is that instant when something first appears in consciousness. There are many studies of perception related to this. More generally, this aspect of phenomenology seems inherent and obvious, that there is an ongoing "appearing" in awareness of the next perception, thought, image, desire.
So, putting the third and first person perspectives together, it seems that both objectively and subjectively, there is a "front edge of now." Perhaps the entirety of time has already been made and our perceptions simply "slide" along it. Nonetheless, at every moment in that sliding there is always the next thing that is encountered – as something that is happening or experienced – and that next thing is in effect the front edge of the sliding.
Check out this book for some more on the physics.
I was trying to say that the brain is "close" (i.e. proximal) to the mind . . . while also nodding in the direction of the fact that a brain is sufficient for a basic kind of mind – such as the experiences and information processing of, say, a monkey or a lizard – but for a truly human mind one also needs other enabling and facilitative conditions, such as exposure to language and other aspects of human culture.
I've found the work of Evan Thompson, specifically his book Mind in Life, to be deeply useful both intellectually and personally on this issue.
Taking in the good is a foundational practice that compensates for the brain's preferential encoding of negative experiences and builds inner resources. More fundamentally, I am interested in naturalizing Buddhist psychology in a frame of evolutionary neuropsychology and operationalizing states and factors of non-craving (broadly defined in the Buddhist sense) in neuropsychological terms.
I'm using a conceptual framework that draws on polyvagal theory, Higgins work on promotion/prevention, and other work to posit three core motivational systems in the brain – Avoiding harms, Approaching rewards, and Attaching to others – which have two primary "settings."
When a person experiences that his or her core needs are met for safety, satisfaction, and connection (tracking the three motivational systems), the related system tends to default to its Responsive setting, in which there is little or no basis for craving in that system; in this state, the body refuels and repairs itself and the mind rests in a basic sense of peace, contentment, and love (again, tracking the systems).
On the other hand, when the person experiences that one or more core needs are not being met, the related system shifts into its Reactive setting, there's a fight-flight-freeze stress response cascade, the body burns resources, and the mind shifts into a basic sense of "hatred," "greed," and heartache (using two of the traditional Buddhist mental "poisons" in broad terms and tracking the three motivational systems).
While Reactive bursts can be adaptive, especially under the conditions in which our ancestors evolved, chronic Reactive states create significant allostatic load as well as a lot of unnecessary anxiety, irritation, frustration, drivenness, envy, interpersonal disturbances, and shame. Consequently, repeatedly taking in the good both down-regulates Reactivity and increases Responsivity in the moment plus gradually internalizes a felt sense of needs met as well as inner resources that together help stabilize a person in the Responsive mode even during challenging conditions, thus over time undoing many of the underlying neuropsychological causes of craving and thus suffering (broadly defined).
These distinctions about the brain – fight or flight response, primitive/reptile brain, emotional brain – are used a lot these days, but they're inherently fuzzy.
The amygdala does initiate the fight or flight response through inputs into the hypothalamus (triggering the hormonal part of that response) and to brainstem control centers of the sympathetic nervous system (triggering the neural parts of that response). Some aspects of this response are emotional but some are not; and, complicating the distinctions further (among the fight or flight response, primitive/reptile brain, and emotional brain), some emotional shadings the amygdala is involved in don't activate the fight or flight response. For example, the amygdala is involved in positive emotion processing. Some parts of our emotional life don't involve the amygdala at all. See the complexities, here, in terms of the categories?
Plus, reptiles have a functioning basal ganglia, which is part of the subcortex on top of the brainstem and very involved in motivation, and to some extent, emotion. In the brainstem, there are nodes that can produce rage and fear, as well as nodes with oxytocin receptors (social system). The brainstem participates in emotion, and the so-called reptile brain is more than the brainstem: so, more complications. Also, the cortex is very involved in emotion, it's not just the subcortex and brainstem: complications cubed!
"Amygdala hijack" just means that the thalamus inputs into the amygdala with sensory information (like positive "carrots" and negative "sticks") arrives before those inputs get to the prefrontal cortex. So the amygdala gets a second or two head-start over the cooler reasoning processes coming down from the prefrontal cortex. Also, more generally, the brain as a whole participates in "emotional hijack" that goes beyond the amygdala alone. The amygdala part of the emotional hijack is often overstated: it's just a small head start. Still, in cases of prior sensitization of the brain due to trauma, that head start could make a big difference.
Overall, I think there is a natural and fine flow in the culture in which there is an initial enthusiasm for a subject and overstatement and blurring of distinctions, and then a second wave comes through to clarify things. That's what's happening with these fields now.
As the brain evolved, it was critically important to learn from negative experiences – if one survived them! "Once burned, twice shy." So the brain has specialized circuits that register negative experiences immediately in emotional memory. On the other hand, positive experiences – unless they are very novel or intense – have standard issue memory systems, and these require that something be held in awareness for many seconds in a row to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage. Since we rarely do this, most positive experiences flow through the brain like water through a sieve, while negative ones are caught every time. Thus my metaphor of Velcro and Teflon – an example of what scientists call the "negativity bias" of the brain.
The effects include: a growing sensitivity to stress, upset, and other negative experiences; a tendency toward pessimism, regret, and resentment; and a long shadows cast by old pain.
Basically, I think the evidence is that both are true: there is an ongoing trickle of background anxiety to keep us vigilant, and there is also a strong inclination to default to the "responsive mode" of being peaceful, happy, and loving when we are not disturbed. Putting these two apparent facts together, I think the trickle of anxiety prompts us to scan for threat, but if we find that all is well for now, then we default to the responsive mode, and then this cycle repeats itself a moment later. For me the pragmatic point is to discern real threats and address them, while also recognizing the strong bias from evolution to look for threats behind every bush and thus appreciating the importance of exerting compensatory influences in a variety of ways, from inner practices such as I focus on to social support and (hopefully) decent health insurance.
Several times a day, take in the good by really savoring a positive experience for 10-20 seconds or more. (The second chapter of Just One Thing is about this.)
Over time, much as repeated negative experiences make the brain more sensitive to them, I believe that repeatedly savoring positive experiences can train your brain to internalize them increasingly rapidly – in effect, making your brain like Velcro for the positive and Teflon for the negative.
Great question!
I don't think there are any scientific studies on this particular topic – though there is a lot of general research on the universal nature of the fundamental properties of the human brain, that cross cultures. Interestingly, there is much less genetic variation among the members of the human species than among the other primates; apparently, there were several "choke points" in our evolution when less than 100,000 thousand (and at one point around only 15,000 "Java Men" lived: in effect, they were an endangered species at that time). So we all have pretty similar brains, which all do have an evolved tendency toward threat scanning/reaction/memory storage. Then psychological factors shape the expression of those tendencies, including the loving and positive culture of Bhutan and Tibet. In a nutshell, two things are both true: we have strong tendencies toward negativity and craving, but we also have strong capacities to develop peacefulness, happiness, and love – and I believe these are in fact much stronger! But we must use them, as so clearly the Dalai Lama and others have done.
I think people beat themselves up – which is different from healthy guidance of oneself (which includes appropriate winces of remorse or shame) – for two reasons: too much inner attacking, and too little inner nurturance. These two forces in the mind are out of balance. Why? Multiple reasons, including individual differences in temperament (some people are more prone to anxiety or grumpiness). But for most people the primary sources are what they have internalized (especially as a child) from their family, peers, and culture. Then, once harsh self-criticism has been internalized along with insufficient internalization of self-nurturance, beating oneself up can take on a life of its own, both as simply a habit and as a way (that goes much too far, at considerable cost) to avoid the possibility of making mistakes or looking bad in front of others.
Whole networks of neurons and related and complex physical processes (e.g., neurotransmitter activity, epigenetic processes) are the basis for acquiring fears, including because a person has been on the receiving end of much anger from others. In other words, learning occurs: emotional, social, somatic, motivational, attitudinal learning: enduring changes in neural structure or function due to a person's experiences. Check out Joseph LeDoux and the learning of anxiety and fear.
The amygdala also flags experiences as personally relevant, with a bias in most people's brains toward flagging what is negatively relevant. Then the hippocampus gets involved, tagging that relevant experience for storage. (I'm simplifying a complex process, that also involves other circuitry in the brain.) The amygdala and hippocampus have receptors for various neurochemicals, including oxytocin, and over time these subcortical parts of the brain (two of each, on either side of the brain) can be modified by our experiences; in effect, they "learn," too.
Basically, three things are simultaneously true:
• Being with and letting go of an experience – in a mindful way, spacious, disidentified way – does not reinforce it and in fact helps to release it. "A healthy cry" is a beautiful, vastly important thing
• Being identified with our negative reactions and marinating in them reinforces them
• Positive experiences are not "learned" efficiently so it's useful to deliberately sustain and internalize them
The points you raise are right at the intersection of key questions in working with trauma: does revisiting the material reinforce it or release it?
Check out my slides and texts about "the three major ways to work with the mind." That's where I try to get at these questions.
Probably like many people, I had a sense as a young child that there was a lot of unnecessary unhappiness in my school, my family, and out in the world. But I didn't know what to do about it. Then as I got older and learned about psychology, brain science, and contemplative wisdom, I became excited about the practical tools they offered for using the mind alone to change the brain for the better.
The brain is the final common pathway of all the causes streaming through us to make us happy or sad, loving or hateful, effective or helpless – so if you can change your brain, you can change your life. I have personally gained from these methods (my wife of 30 years says I have become nicer – which could be the toughest test!), and have seen many others get many benefits as well.
My hyper succinct two word answer is: "You bet!"
And to expand a bit: any kind of learning – including emotional, social, motivational, and character learning – must involve changes in the brain. This means that grit – resilience, determination, persistence, hardiness, courage – gets developed through changes in neural structure and function.
We develop more grit through having repeated experiences of determination, endurance, resolve, perseverance, and sheer survival that get woven into the fabric of the brain – and thus one's life.
In practical terms, learning – brain change – is a two stage process in which an activated experience must be installed through some kind of lasting change in neural structure or function. We become happier through having repeated experiences of happiness and related factors that get encoded – installed – into the brain.
Without installation, there is no learning, no change: in effect, the experience is wasted on the brain. This is the dirty little secret in most psychotherapy, human resources training, coaching, addiction recovery, and character education: most hard-won beneficial states of mind are momentarily positive but have no lasting value. That's why many efforts to develop deep inner strengths in people are largely if not completely ineffective: they are indeed being fostered – but without deliberate mindful attention to sustaining them, feeling them in the body, and intentionally absorbing them into oneself, they just don't get encoded much into the brain. The person may have a memory of a harrowing sailing trip or an intense week with Outward Bound, but is still basically just as vulnerable to stress, loss, or setbacks as ever because they didn't "take in" those experiences.
Here is the key takeaway: it is commonplace to activate experiences of love, support, determination, endurance, and tenacity. What is rarer and more important is to bring skillful attention to installing these experiences in the brain so that they have enduring benefit for the person.
The good news is that this skillful attention can be readily developed, as we found in the research on my training in positive neuroplasticity, and as explored in Hardwiring Happiness. But we have to do the work 5, 10, 20 (usually enjoyable) seconds at a time. Then we know in our hearts that we have earned the results – which makes the strength that we develop even sweeter.
Actually, I'd put this a little more broadly: my work – and that of many other scholars and clinicians – is grounded in the general fact of "experience-dependent neuroplasticity," which is the capacity of mental activity to change neural structure.
For example, researchers studied cab drivers who must memorize London's spaghetti snarl of streets, and at the end of their training their hippocampus – a part of the brain that makes visual-spatial memories – had become thicker: much like exercise, they worked a particular "muscle" in their brain, which built new connections among its neurons. Similarly, another study found that long-term mindfulness meditators had thicker cortex in parts of the brain that control attention and are able to tune into one's body.
In the saying from the work of the Canadian psychologist, Donald Hebb: "neurons that fire together, wire together." Fleeting thoughts and feelings leave lasting traces in neural structure. Whatever we stimulate in the brain tends to grow stronger over time.
A traditional saying is that the mind takes the shape it rests upon. The modern update would be that the brain takes its shape from whatever the mind rests upon – for better or worse. The brain is continually changing its structure. The only questions are: Who is doing the changing: oneself or other forces? And are these changes for the better?
In this larger context, my focus is on how to apply these new scientific findings: how to use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better – for psychological healing, personal growth, and (if it's of interest) deepening spiritual practice. I'm especially interested in:
How the brain has been shaped by evolution, giving us problematic tendencies toward greed, hatred, heartache, and delusion (using traditional terms) as well as wonderful capacities for happiness, peace, love, and wisdom. For example, we have a brain that makes us very vulnerable to feeling anxious, helpless, possessive, fixated on short-term rewards, angry, and aggressive. These qualities helped our ancestors survive and pass on their genes, but today they lead to much unnecessary suffering and conflict on both personal and global scales.
"Neurologizing", the deep Buddhist analysis of the mind: what is going on inside the brain when a person is caught in the craving that leads to suffering? Alternately, what is happening in the brain when a person is experiencing equanimity, lovingkindness, meditative absorption, or liberating insight?
Using neurologically-informed methods to help overcome our ancient inclinations to fear, dehumanize, exploit, and attack "them" so that 7 billion of us can live in peace with each other on our fragile planet.
In sum, this brain stuff can sound exotic or esoteric, but in essence the approach is simple: find the neural processes that underlie negative mental factors, and reduce them; meanwhile, find the neural processes that underlie positive mental factors, and increase them. Less bad and more good – based on neuroscience and Western psychology, and informed by contemplative wisdom.
Of course, much is not yet known about the brain, so this approach is necessarily an exploration. But if we remain modest about what we don't know, there are still many plausible connections between the mind and the brain, and many opportunities for skillful intervention for ourselves, for our children and others we care for, and for humankind as a whole.
Great question. Fundamentally, experience-dependent neuroplasticity is the capacity of mental activity to change neural structure. In other words, it's the brain's ability to change based on what you experience.
For example, researchers studied cab drivers who must memorize London's spaghetti snarl of streets, and at the end of their training their hippocampus – a part of the brain that makes visual-spatial memories – had become thicker: much like exercise, they worked a particular "muscle" in their brain, which built new connections among its neurons. Similarly, another study found that long-term mindfulness meditators had thicker cortex in parts of the brain that control attention and are able to tune into one's body.
In the saying from the work of the Canadian psychologist, Donald Hebb: "neurons that fire together, wire together." Fleeting thoughts and feelings leave lasting traces in neural structure. Whatever we stimulate in the brain tends to grow stronger over time.
A traditional saying is that the mind takes the shape it rests upon. The modern update would be that the brain takes its shape from whatever the mind rests upon – for better or worse. The brain is continually changing its structure. The only questions are: Who is doing the changing: oneself or other forces? And are these changes for the better?
My focus is on how to apply the new scientific findings around neuroplasticity: how to use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better – for psychological healing, personal growth, and (if it's of interest) deepening spiritual practice. I'm especially interested in:
• How the brain has been shaped by evolution, giving us problematic tendencies toward greed, hatred, heartache, and delusion (using traditional terms) as well as wonderful capacities for happiness, peace, love, and wisdom. For example, we have a brain that makes us very vulnerable to feeling anxious, helpless, possessive, fixated on short-term rewards, angry, and aggressive. These qualities helped our ancestors survive and pass on their genes, but today they lead to much unnecessary suffering and conflict on both personal and global scales.
• "Neurologizing", the deep Buddhist analysis of the mind: what is going on inside the brain when a person is caught in the craving that leads to suffering? Alternately, what is happening in the brain when a person is experiencing equanimity, lovingkindness, meditative absorption, or liberating insight?
• Using neurologically-informed methods to help overcome our ancient inclinations to fear, dehumanize, exploit, and attack "them" so that 7 billion of us can live in peace with each other on our fragile planet
Brain stuff can sound exotic or esoteric, but in essence the approach is simple: find the neural processes that underlie negative mental factors, and reduce them; meanwhile, find the neural processes that underlie positive mental factors, and increase them. Less bad and more good – based on neuroscience and Western psychology, and informed by contemplative wisdom.
Of course, much is not yet known about the brain, so this approach is necessarily an exploration. But if we remain modest about what we don't know, there are still many plausible connections between the mind and the brain, and many opportunities for skillful intervention for ourselves, for our children and others we care for, and for humankind as a whole.
First, a "buddha brain" is simply one that knows how to be truly happy in the face of life's inescapable ups and downs (I don't capitalize the word "buddha" here to focus on the original nature of the word – which is "to know, to see clearly" – to distinguish my general meaning from the specific historical individual known as The Buddha). The possibility of this kind of brain is inherent in the human brain that we all share; any human brain can become a buddha brain. Therefore, a buddha brain is for everyone, whatever their religious orientation (including none at all).
Second, we all must begin the path wherever we are – whether that's everyday stress and frustration, mental illness, anxiety, sorrow and loss, or depression. In any moment when we step back from our experience and hold it in mindful awareness, or when we begin to let go of negative feelings and factors, or when we gradually turn toward and cultivate positive feelings and factors we are taking a step toward developing a buddha brain. Each small step matters. It was usually lots of small steps that took a person to a bad place, and it will be lots of small steps that take him or her to a better one.
Third, mental anguish or dysfunction can help us grow. They teach us a lot about how the mind works, they can deepen compassion for the troubles and sorrows of others, and, frankly, they can be very motivating. Personally, the times in my life when I have been most intent on taking my own steps toward a buddha brain have been either when I was really feeling blue – and needed to figure out how to get out of the hole I was in – or when I was feeling really good, and could still sense that there had to be more to life than this, and more profound possibilities for awakening.
This question gets at the remarkable fact under our noses all day long: our ineffable thoughts and feelings are making concrete, physical, lasting changes in the structure and function of our brains. Neurons that fire together, wire together. This is learning, including the emotional, motivational, attitudinal and skills learning that is our focus in therapy. In other words, the making of memory – especially implicit memory, the storehouse of emotional residues of lived experience, knowing "how to," expectations, assumptions, models of relationship, etc. distinct from explicit memory, the much smaller storehouse of specific recollections and knowing "about" – the gradual change of the structure and function of the brain.
In this context, any kind of mental change is evidence of neural change. Since neuroscience is a baby science, our current, noninvasive, imaging technologies have limited capacities to measure neural change in human beings – especially given how physically fine, fast, and complex these changes are. You could put five of the cell bodies of a typical neuron side by side in the width of just one of your hairs, and five thousand of the synapses, the connections, between neurons in the width of just one hair.
Nonetheless, even though the ethics of animal research trouble and even alarm many, including me, it is the case that more invasive research on animal learning – including emotional, motivational learning, that has some parallels to therapy – has established many fine-grained details of the ways in which experiences of stress, frustration, and trauma, as well as experiences of caring, success, and safety change the nervous system.
So we presume that neural change must be occurring if there is mental change. In this light, there are now many studies with human beings that show structural and functional changes after interventions such as training in mindfulness, compassion, body awareness, and psychotherapy. The cortex – the outer shell or "skin" of the brain – gets measurably thicker due to new synapses and greater infusion by capillaries for blood flow; key regions are more readily activated; there is also greater connectivity between regions, so they are more integrated and work better together; there are even changes in the expression of genes – tiny strips of atoms in the twisted up molecules of DNA in the nuclei of neurons.
And as your mind changes your brain for the better, these changes in your brain feed back to change your mind for the better as well. As these positive structural and functional changes in the brain occur, people become more capable and happy. For instance, training in mindfulness increases activation in the left prefrontal cortex, which supports a more positive mood.
As to new cell growth, I assume this is a reference to neurogenesis, the birth of new baby neurons, primarily in the hippocampus. We can encourage the birth of these neurons through exercise, and encourage their survival and wiring into memory networks through engaging in complexity and stimulation.
Here's the takeaway: we can be confident in our own lives, and in our work with clients, that our efforts are bearing fruit in actual, physical changes in the nervous system. And since motivation is one of the primary factors shaping outcome in psychotherapy – and in life as a whole – this is heartening, wonderful news.
As you imply, most neuroplasticity is subtle and local, and does not change the overall architecture of the brain. I also think it is possible that there are individual variations in organic capacity for changing the brain, though I haven't seen any studies on that (though they may exist).
I think a good starting point is to consider the vast diversity of human cultures, and the many individual examples of vast psychological changes – for better or worse – over the course of one person's life. These illustrations of great mental plasticity are evidence for great neural plasticity in high impact ways, even if the vast majority of the synapses and circuits of the brain are unchanged.
The takeaway for me from this line of thinking is to appreciate the importance of hard work, of making little efforts each day that add up over time, to change your brain and thus your life for the better. And there's a takeaway in terms of never betting against human potential and the human heart. Most of us have no idea how much we could grow psychologically or spiritually if we really gave ourselves to it, and put at least as much effort into it as we put into our occupation – or even our golf game!
The basic features of a person's temperament or personality tend to endure over time. I'm still a fundamentally watchful, introverted, and calm sort of person – just like I was in grade school.
If I was going to take your challenge and design a program for a major psychological makeover, it would have these elements:
• Understanding, accepting, and fully experiencing whatever it is that the person wanted to change. Otherwise, what you resist, persists.
• Releasing, working through whatever was significantly extreme, pathological, or neurotic in what they wanted to change.
• Growing the "and also" aspects of their personality that are natural antidotes for or resources for the thing they wanted to change. My framework of three needs/systems addressed through antidote experiences has been very helpful to me here. For example, let's say with shyness, I think of this as involving both the safety and the connection needs we have – and thus involving both the Avoiding and Attaching systems of the brain. So I'd look for ways to cultivate "and also" strengths inside such as feeling protected, determined, relaxed, loved, and worthy.
As a broad principle, the brain regions or processes that are activated by an experience are the ones whose structure or function is most likely to be changed by the activation.
Neuroscience is a baby science, with much that's not known. There's much that may be plausible that doesn't yet have a specific study to back it up.
This said, the conceptual, perspective aspects of the practice of reminding yourself mentally that everything is impermanent would tend to engage prefrontal areas that do conceptual processing, and with repetition and conviction, produce lasting changes there, i.e., learning, adopting, developing the habit of a new view.
Also, the physical and emotional relaxation that would come with accepting transience would likely involve decreased sympathetic nervous system activity, increased parasympathetic nervous system activity, decreased stress hormones, and increased reward- and pleasure-related neurotransmitter activity (e.g., dopamine, natural opioids). With repetition, duration, and intensity of the experience, there would tend to be gradual changes in the resting state and responsiveness of these neural processes.
Last, evidence of mental change is evidence of neural change. Otherwise we are left with supernatural explanations. So if a person feels different or acts differently, something must have changed at the level of the body, particularly the brain.
Regarding brainwave optimization, brainwaves just track what is happening, they are not causally beneficial themselves. This said, personal practices (e.g., taking in the good, meditation, relaxing while walking the dog) can optimize brainwaves. I think you are referring more specifically on neurofeedback and things like Holosync that are essentially biofeedback devices/programs aimed at the brain. Generally, I think they are great IF they work for a person. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
From a pragmatic standpoint, bottom-line, does something help or hurt, including compared to alternatives. And of course, once a practice of any kind, including with brainwave devices, has induced a beneficial state (thought, feeling, etc.), be sure to internalize it so it has lasting value, woven into your nervous system.
1. The direct way to grow a psychological resource is to experience ("activate") it in order to "install" it. But sometimes that is challenging or upsetting. So we grow factors of this resource through experiences of these factors that are more accessible. Let's say the direct experience of self-compassion is hard for the reasons you very insightfully identify. But the experience of a factor of self-compassion – such as the concept that justice applies to oneself as well as to others, or the capacity to calm the body when upset – might be within reach.
2. In order to tolerate resource experience Z, we may need to grow resource Y . . . but perhaps experiencing Y is also reactivating and challenging. So then we grow resource X that enables us to experience and grow Y so that . . . we are now able to experience Z and thereby grow it. For example, training in mindfulness (X) could promote the capacity to experience body sensations in general without being flooded (resource Y), and developing this Y could enable a person to experience self-compassion (Z) more directly.
The distinction between 1 and 2 blurs in practice. The main difference is that 2 is more deliberately and planfully sequential, and is a road map for therapists and also for people in general.
There is tremendous evidence in published studies on psychological practices or interventions of various kinds – including the kinds I mention, notably relaxation and positive emotion practices – that they do lead to significant improvements in mental health indicators of various kinds: improvements that do change lives for the better in meaningful ways.
As a personal detail, I worked for a year for a mathematician who did probabilistic risk analyses, and it was a fascinating consideration of levels of evidence for propositions about reality. As is increasingly noted in the scientific community, including the life sciences and social sciences, the dichotomous true/false distinction of "statistical significance/non-significance" is mathematically silly. The crux is how much uncertainty we have about propositions. Then the question becomes, to what extent do certain kinds of evidence reduce uncertainty. By the definition of information, relevant information of any kind reduces uncertainty. Information comes from many sources, most of which are not randomized control group double-blind studies. For example, roughly half of the methods used routinely in medical settings do not have a study behind them, but they are within the standard of care because there are other kinds of evidence for their legitimate use.
I use the word "installation" – my own term, not in common use – as a general term for the process of turning passing experiences into lasting changes in the body, especially changes of neural structure or function. Terms that include installation implicitly (but have larger meanings that include the activation phase of learning) are "learning," "growth," "skills acquisition," "healing," "development," and "memory making" (memory in the broadest sense, including implicit memory).
I call out "installation" to highlight its distinction from "activation" – the temporary mental/neural process that is the basis in the natural frame (distinct from whatever is transcendental) for the contents of the stream of consciousness. This distinction is typically blurred in the use of the terms "learning," etc., which enables an overlooking of the fact that experiencing does not equal learning, and that most experiences lead to no learning, no lasting change.
Personally, I use "installation" because of its information processing, computer-ish, mechanistic, hardware-ish associations. I have found that those connotations are a plus for many people, but for some it sounds too techy, too mechanistic. Other terms could be used as long as we stay clear that there are two necessary and sufficient stages of learning – activation and installation, however we call them – and the first stage alone, experiencing, is necessary but not sufficient for learning.
We also need installation – which many methods do implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, engage but which the fields of psychotherapy, coaching, human resources training, and also mindfulness and compassion training have not focused on in any deliberate and comprehensive way. As a result of this omission, the gain from experiences is much less than it could be, and the learning/healing/growth curves of individuals are much flatter than they could be – which has lots of implications.
Fundamentally, in my view, there are just three kinds of ways to engage the mind, to practice with it productively:
1. Be with it – Observe the mind, experience the experience, feel the feelings, etc. without trying to change anything in the stream of consciousness. Hopefully one does this with an attitude of curiosity, kindness toward oneself, and a certain stepping back – "dis-identification" – from whatever one is experiencing. One could also explore more vulnerable, fundamental, or younger material "beneath" the surface of experience, such as the hurt underneath anger or the old pain from childhood that amplifies or distorts one's reactions. Through being with one's experience it may change, but one is not directly making efforts to change it.
2. Decrease the negative – Here is where we make efforts in the mind to relax tension from the body, vent or otherwise release emotions like sadness or anger, challenge and let go of wrongheaded thoughts, or resist or abandon problematic desires (e.g., wanting to get hammered or to yell at the kids).
3. Increase the positive – Here is where we make efforts in the mind to take skillful actions (e.g., sitting up straighter to be assertive, calling the doctor for an overdue check-up), to encourage feelings like gratitude and compassion, to develop useful perspectives and other thoughts, and to strengthen and commit to beneficial desires such as exercising or not interrupting one's partner.
In effect, if the mind is like a garden we can observe it, pull weeds, and plant flowers. In a nutshell: let be, let go, and let in.
The three ways to engage the mind work together. For example, we need to make efforts to grow capacities to be with the mind, such as self-acceptance, observing-ego functions, or distress tolerance. And we be with the results of our efforts to reduce the negative and grow the positive.
Of the three, the first one (which approximates the conventional definition of "mindfulness") is primary. You can always be with the mind, but you can't always reduce the negative or grow the positive.
There's definitely a place for the common advice people give to just "be mindful." Still, it is important to do more than simply observe the mind.
What happens in the mind depends on what happens in the brain, and the brain is a physical system that does not change unless it gets changed (usually by oneself, if at all). The brain does not generally erase negative patterns simply because we observe them; if anything, its evolved negativity bias makes it retain negative learning. And the brain does not generally develop determination, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, or most any other positive qualities simply because someone is witnessing the stream of consciousness.
Even the Buddha – someone who profoundly valued mindfulness – allocated most of the elements of the Noble Eightfold Path to the second and third ways to engage the mind (i.e., the release of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the cultivation of wise view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, and concentration).
When we are bothered or upset about something, there is a natural trajectory in which we start by being with our experience. Then, at some point, it feels right to start releasing it. Then, at some point, it feels right to start replacing what we've released with something useful and positive. The timing of this trajectory depends on the person and situation. Sometimes you realize quickly what is bugging you, and you shift into letting go of it and moving on to something happier within a minute or two. Other times, something hits you really hard – such as a shocking loss – and it could be months and even years before it feels right to shift into letting go, and then letting in.
Some people err on the side of jumping too quickly into letting go and letting in, but if you do that, those efforts don't have much traction. Other people get stuck in letting be, in just feeling their painful feelings, and not making skillful efforts within their own mind to release the negative and replace it with something appropriately beneficial. I would like to think that my approach balances these elements in a positive way.
Mindfulness and my work on cultivation (let in – the skillful development of inner resources) are completely complementary. One needs to sustain mindfulness for effective cultivation: to turn passing mental states into lasting neural traits (the biological basis for psychological resources). And through cultivation, one develops the mental factors that support mindfulness. Additionally, mindfulness has benefits unrelated to cultivation (e.g., coming into the present moment) and cultivation has benefits unrelated to mindfulness (e.g., developing caring for others, self-respect, gratitude, positive mood, grit, hardiness).
Mindfulness and cultivation are both "experiential" in that both of these are ways of relating to our experience. Of course, our experience includes our thoughts – both verbal and non-verbal – and one can be mindful of thoughts, can have thoughts about mindfulness, and can cultivate beneficial thoughts (such as a sense of perspective on the hassles of daily life).
That whole process is very important, but my own work focuses on the third way to engage the mind: let in. This is the active cultivation and internalization of beneficial states of mind – in the context of the other two ways to engage it.
My view is that there has been a lot of development in both clinical psychology and the spiritual traditions of the first two ways to engage the mind, but not as much development of how to do cultivation skillfully. In particular, we have not really taken into account the implications of the fact that the brain changes – learns – in two stages (from short-term buffers to long-term storage, from state to trait, from activation to installation), and without really doing the second stage (installation), there is little or no learning, little or no lasting value.
So here is where there is good opportunity: developing ways to more skillfully "install" everyday experiences in the brain as lasting inner resources, such as resilience, kindness, happiness, and wisdom.
Your question is deep and important – and the subject of considerable research. Check out what's being done on the default network and mind wandering. Also see Farb's research on the brain's medial and lateral networks; my own take-off on this work can be found in my slidesets on Being and Doing.