The "reading" of minds (Disturbing? Wonderful? AI is certainly significant...)

On Twitter, the explanation from Siqi Chen@blader:

·
Mar 3

"okay so AI can literally read our minds now. a team from osaka was able to reconstruct visual images from mri scan data using stable diffusion. first row is the image presented to the test subject, second row is the reconstructed image from mri data. wild. "

"New Book Details the Lives of Vincent van Gogh’s Sisters Through Their Letters"

L to R: Anna, the eldest van Gogh sister; Elisabeth, or Lies; and Willemien, the youngest, who was better known as Wil (Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Wikimedia Commons under public domain)

  

"Much ink has been spilled about Vincent van Gogh’s relationship with his younger brother Theo, an art dealer who steadfastly supported the painter’s career even as his mental health deteriorated toward the end of his life.

Comparatively, far less has been said about the lives of the artist’s three sisters: Anna, the eldest; Elisabeth, or Lies; and Willemien, the youngest, who was better known as Wil. Now, reports Dalya Alberge for the Guardian, a new book by Dutch art historian Willem-Jan Verlinden seeks to help rectify this imbalance.

Aptly titled The Van Gogh Sisters, the upcoming release draws on hundreds of previously unpublished letters written by the three women, many of which are printed in English for the first time. (A Dutch version of the book was initially published in 2016.)

As Verlinden writes on his website, the work “provides an impression of the changing role of women in the 19th and early 20th century, of modernization, industrialization, education, feminism and the fin de siècle, of 19th-century art and literature, and—of course—of Vincent’s death and his meteoric rise to fame.”

Read more from Nora McGreevy article at The Smithsonian Mag.

Tonight: "Hope and humour in times of Coronavirus"

Co-writer of the brilliant comedy Seinfeld, Larry Charles is in conversation with Srećko Horvat from DiEM25 tonight at 7.00PM CET.

 40 min live conversation + 20 min Q&A with Larry Charles

"We call it TV because we like retro-futurism. But it's much more than TV. In times of global pandemics, DiEM25 is launching a special online and completely free program to understand the current crisis and offer tools and hope to get out of it stronger and more united in building the World After Coronavirus. Everyone will be able to join and pose questions, suggest next topics and next guests! 

THE LOCATION

Online

This discussion will take place on Zoom and also be streamed on the DiEM25 Youtube channel. We will send a link to all Registered participants, so please Register."

"The great human paella" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia today magazine

Walk around any medium sized town in this part of the world and you will see something different.

Compared to say, Britain or the USA, here on the average wall in public places, there is a lot of space that is used for posters which are not commercial advertising.

Apart from the sometimes humorous and succinct graffiti and crammed Informatico Ciutadana boards, blank vertical spaces are often being utilised for letting people know about various events, festivals and not-for-profit performances.

The number and range of groups and organisations that do not follow the "post no bills" credo still surprises (and impresses) me even after more than a decade of living here. What this suggests is that there is a collective consciousness that goes well beyond clicking the "Join" button on a Facebook group. It shows that there is a genuine interest and involvement with what goes on outside ourselves.

The cult of fear

In stark contrast to this, as Lewis Thomas identified as early as the 1970's, in countries like Australia and the USA, people have instead become obsessed with their health -- the private world, not the public one.

He believed there was "something fundamentally unhealthy" about this "loss of confidence in the human body" and saw much of this attitude being created through (apart from the obvious) such seemingly unlikely sources as television medical dramas and those shows where the central human dilemma is illness.

I would say that the "cult of fear," meaning fear in general, is what keeps alive entire industries. It feeds self-obsession.

This in turn has infected that species of person whose mind is never too far from the state of their own body. They can be heard in San Francisco or Melbourne cafes talking about how their last purely organic meal affected them or how they are desperately craving some holistic yoga therapy. They are not only looking for power over their own physical domains but over fear of ageing and inevitable decay.

As Lewis Thomas pointed out, the "healthy hypochondriacs" should not distract us from more urgent problems. Thirty five years ago he correctly foresaw that preoccupation with personal health would be a worrying distraction. Just outside the limits of our flesh and bone, he observed that "the whole of society is coming undone."

On a more optimistic note, it makes me happy to see that others enjoy what I enjoy. The journalist Vicente Molina Foix recently wrote about travelling in the Madrid Metro:

“I like to see the juxtaposition of various skin colors, and hear the melody of incomprehensible languages, as the train of the future approaches on the rails of life.”

Here is a man at ease with one of the biggest changes to European and Spanish life in the last few decades. He is not afraid of the new. The cult of fear has seemingly bypassed him. Instead, Molina Foix has realised that this continent is becoming one great human paella with a tasty mixture of fresh ingredients.

Those Europeans who make the effort to appreciate the benefits of migrants from across this odd little planet will be doing little more than opening up their senses.The continuing mixing of cultures is one of the great success stories of human history and closing ourselves off from the results of migration is as pointless as trying to ignore the music from a neighbour’s radio drifting into our ears.

Migration will not end. The human animal that adapts best to the changes in its surroundings will continue to be the human animal that thrives.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2018.]

"Cohencentric" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

Finishing a long biography of the long, long life of the singer/songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, something occurred to me the other day. 

Here was a man who had toiled away on his work year after year, suffering from regular periods of depression, only to become commercially successful across the globe after the age of sixty.

Cohen had been a well-known figure in his native Canada and much of Europe since the 1970s but that massive market of the USA had largely ignored the richly dark and sombre images that filled his music and writing; this despite the fact that he has lived in California on and off for most of his now eighty one years on the planet.

What I admire, just as much as the penetrating insight of his wordcraft, is Cohen’s resilience against the storms of our existence (his father died when he was only eight years old) and his resolute persistence in being the artist that he wanted to be. He was, and most probably still is, an extremely generous man who rarely took on the egotistical trappings of the standard popstar.

After being born into a wealthy family, he always lived in small houses and in fact spent many years of disciplined silence and contemplation in a Buddhist monastery. Over time, he learned to embrace his own imperfections and saw that this was how the universe is constructed too. 

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” he wrote: a phrase now used by a number of psychologists to counsel their patients.

For much of his free time though, Cohen had been a womaniser and used drugs such as speed and alcohol to keep him going but in his later years the love of a wonderful woman collaborator helped him find a satisfaction and contentment that eludes so many of us in middle-age. 

More than almost any other contemporary singer, he was intent on bringing female singers from the background into sharing centre stage in his recordings and his songs benefit greatly from this.

Around the same time he had every dollar of his earnings stolen by a former lover (whom he had trusted) and an accountant who exploited her. After years of gruelling court cases he was able to get back some of his money but reluctantly, he went back on the road to tour again after a decade and a half of avoiding playing to live audiences. 

To his surprise, this time he loved it in a way he never had before. The wider public loved it too, as shown by his sell-out world tours since 2007 (that included Zaragoza-born band member Javier Mas.)

Always a spiritual man and often superstitious (his outlook combined his family’s Judaism with aspects of Hinduism and a taste for bible myths) today, he remains an inspiration to writers and musicians as diverse as Judy Collins and Jeff Buckley. 

There are over three thousand versions of his songs recorded by other artists. One of the most beautiful songs of the twentieth century was at least partly written about Leonard Cohen. I must have listened hundreds of times to the soaring vocals of Joni Mitchell in “A Case of You”:

“On the back of a cartoon coaster

In the blue TV screen light

I drew a map of Canada

Oh Canada

And I sketched your face on it twice.”

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2016.]

"What can Spain do to tackle its growing suicide problem?"

"Suicides have hit a record high for a third year running, and are Spain’s main cause of unnatural death...

Experts call for a national strategy to curb the rising number of people taking their own lives."

Read more from source at El Pais in English.

"The Wind-Water Sickness" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Japanese "onni" (devil) mask]

How do you get sick in Japan?

According to one Japanese teacher that I once talked to, a Mr Shiroi, he caught a cold because the school that we both used to teach at was in an “unfavourable” north-east position, when compared to his house. He had been working at this school for four years, he informed me, and had got sicker much more often than at his previous school, which was in a northwest direction. This was a ‘good’ location relative to where he lives, so he rarely found himself in less than perfect health.

 

Mr Shiroi told me that this extraordinary superstition was called fu-sui (wind-water) and has its roots in Chinese Confucian times, having a fairly committed belief amongst about 1 in 20 people in Japan, Mr Shiroi estimates. In China, he thinks it is over 10 per cent still.

Naturally, in our conversation I offered the opinion that it is actually germs that cause diseases, but this is only the ‘direct’ cause, he maintained. From this ancient nonsense, it seems that you can predict where the harmful things are, but they will only take effect on you if you have arrived at your destination from certain directions.

I contended to him that if somebody catches AIDS for example, it is because they shared a needle or bodily fluids with an infected person. In Mr Shiroi’s view it is also because they were ignorant of the warnings that, with special insider-knowledge, can be found.

Mr Shiroi then went on to inform me that all the important variables in fact changed on the night before ‘Setsubun,’ (which was only two nights before our discussion.) You see, the turning point for which directions are favourable is midnight on this ‘real’ New Year. Setsubun (literally "sectional separation") is a timed-honoured Japenese custom that marks the beginning of spring and is based on the solar calendar, not the lunar calendar used by the western world. A man puts on an onni (demon) mask and is chased out of his own house by the rest of the family who throw beans at him yelling the Japanese equivalent of bad luck out, good luck in! It is still practised in most Japanese households, he told me.

More interesting to me though were this otherwise well-educated man’s theories about predictability of natural phenomenon. I asked him if it was not only people’s houses and workplaces that came under the influence of this “cosmic compass.” Did it affect relationships? For example, if someone who was born in the town of Uji, south of Kyoto, and they married someone from say, Kameoka to their north-west, did this mean that their bond would be a successful one?

He believed it did, explaining to me that it is actually even better to marry a partner further along the same axis line. This struck me as another absurdity, particularly when taken to its logical extension. I argued that, according to his theory here, it would have been better for him to have married a woman from the very tip of Chile in South America rather than his current wife. “Oh, but you have to balance the idea with practical concerns,” he squibbed. I asked him what his wife thought about this. He said “Well, I got married before I learnt about these ways.”

I knew that just last year he had traveled to Morocco. He had previously told me that he liked it very much but that his wife never wanted to go back there again. Now, he filled me in, that particular tip of Africa had been the ‘second best’ possible place to travel to. It had been at times very difficult to find somewhere to go outside of Japan that was relatively “safe.”

Following these principles was limiting to his options, it seemed. I told him that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy had experienced similar problems with a different brand of superstition.

[This article was first published under the title "How do you get sick in Japan?" in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2016,]

"Male suicide on rise as result of austerity"

"Young males between the ages of 10 and 24 have committed suicide in growing numbers as a direct result of austerity measures brought in across Europe following the 2009 recession."


Read more from ScienceDaily source here.

How happy is Spain?

Measuring happiness is a very subjective act but it's fascinating to see that "the 10 countries with the largest declines in average life evaluations typically suffered some combination of economic, political and social stresses.

Three of the countries (Greece, Italy and Spain) were among the four hard-hit Euro-zone countries whose post-crisis experience was analyzed in detail in the [most recent and extremely comprehensive] World Happiness Report."

"Germanwings, depression and blame" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

The recent Germanwings airline tragedy has naturally been the focus for countless media stories. Many of us in Catalonia know people who were acquainted with victims and their families but there is another personal aspect to the crash that seems to provoke strong reactions in those who have no direct connection to it.

Because most of the developed world now travels by air at least a few times a year, we are aware, at least semi-consciously, that every time we step on board a flight we are putting our lives in the hands of a small number of people - most particularly the pilots. It’s understandable and even maybe logical that we look for something or someone to blame when a plane is the cause of 150 deaths. Our instincts for justice demand an explanation. Now it has become clear that the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, made a conscious decision to commit suicide/mass-murder and used his plane as a weapon. We also know that Lubitz had suffered from a severe depressive episode while training to be a pilot in 2009 and was receiving regular medical treatment right up to the day that he plowed the plane into a French mountain. According to his former doctors this treatment was for physical problems, not psychological ones.

What we do not know though, and most probably could never know is exactly why he chose to end his own life in such a horrific way. Lubitz had reportedly told an ex-girlfriend “One day I will do something...and everyone will then know my name and remember me.” This gives an egotistical motive for his actions but does not adequately explain much else. One of the most important points that arises here, and one that a lot of media has distorted or missed altogether, is that depression does not create homicidal maniacs.

A depressed person is actually highly unlikely to take others with them to the grave and the vast majority of people with depression do not hurt anyone because suicide is the main extreme risk, not violence. In this same column in December last year I wrote that “Today too, there are increasing numbers of people who are not only acknowledging their own depression or mental illness but are speaking openly about it in public forums and in the media.” Unfortunately, Andreas Lubitz was not someone who believed that he could do anything like this and apparently went to great trouble to hide his interior struggles from his employers. If he had found the right help, he and his unwitting victims, almost all of them strangers to him, might well have lived.

The statistics show that most murder-suicides happen in domestic settings, and involve a male and his spouse. Murder-suicides involving pilots or in gun massacres are, in fact, a great deal rarer. Lubitz himself then does not fit a standard type or pattern but I would speculate that he was a man (75% of suicides are men) who was overwhelmed with the complications of a high-pressure job and was desperate and confused. In an extravagant gesture, he had just bought matching Audi’s for himself and his current girlfriend, who was pregnant.

There is a real danger that Lubitz’s violence unfairly creates a greater stigma for those who have psychiatric problems and that men in particular will be less likely to talk to mental health professionals or even family and friends. I have had a limited, short-term personal experience with depression and would hate to see a major tragedy like this one lead to a deeper code of silence about the difficulties of the human mind.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2015.]

"The best of times?" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Has there ever been a better time to be alive in the history of our tortured, super-intelligent species? 

At the press of a few buttons we have virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the last several hundred (or is it thousand?) years available. And it is available fast.

We have the answers to a billion conceivable questions and we can communicate almost instantly with the majority of people on the planet, language barriers excepted. 

For many of us, our taste buds can be stimulated by the food from dozens of cultures who, just a few short years ago were out of reach, either geographically or economically. 

In this increasingly mixed European society, young people have started to grow up sitting next to others from Asia, Africa and assorted parts of the wider continent and for them this is as natural as mother's milk.

On top of all this, there is a gentleness that in so many senses did not exist just a generation ago. 

A man can be intimately involved in the care of his baby or child without automatically being a figure of gossip or ridicule. He can be the main cook for his family and not be thought of us somehow suspect. 

Finally too, homosexuals are more accepted or at least tolerated in the majority of circles, rather than being chemically castrated as some were less than seventy years ago (in the UK for example.)

Today too, there are increasing numbers of people who are not only acknowledging their own depression or mental illness but are speaking openly about it in public forums and in the media. 

Such a development was virtually unthinkable merely a decade ago. 

Equally though, the average women in the developed world has a wider horizon than ever before. Her place in the workplace is now barely questioned at all, though she may still be paid less than a man or have trouble getting a full-time position or promoted according to her ability.

Yet despite this progress, despite the modern mind being freer from superstition and religious dogma than probably any time in history, what do we also have?

Underneath the shiny towers of vanity there is a great, putrid sewer stench of injustice. 

There is the distinct sensation of a nausea without relief and that comes from having both your eyeballs open and your ears unblocked. Anyone who chooses to not be ignorant knows, as Leonard Cohen wrote, "the deal is rotten." 

And all those signs of enlightenment that came to view in the the first half of the 20th century now have a faded quality and there is a hollow ring to the chants, songs and poems of social movements.

Throw into this mix the fact that the warming of the earth continues at pace. 

It is only those who genuinely don't understand or politicians who have been bought out by the polluting industries that do not accept the truth of the overheating globe that we walk on. 

Or think of the wealth that flows through financial systems. Shockingly, the 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion. 

And what else?

There's the vacant look of history's books

Slave labour and murder thy neighbour

Greed as a virtue and carers that hurt you

This is the present we have

We see the limp hand of the state and rape-a-date

The power of one at the point of a gun

And the good times are back with daily Prozac

This is the future that right now we have

See that liar's smile when the truth's on trial?

This is the justice we have.

Living and laughing in ignorance bliss

We have fashioned a world exactly like this.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.]

"One of every 10 euros spent on healthcare in the EU is for treating depression"

Here is another logical consequence of recent economic and political decisions...

"The increase in cases of depression in recent years is caused by the economic crisis and the associated problems of unemployment, among others..."

Source (in Castellano) here.

"Land, bread and peace of mind" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Photo: Javier.

If any political slogan ever summed up the basic needs of the human animal, it was Lenin's call to revolution in Russia almost a century ago: "Peace, Bread and Land!" 

Today in Europe, would these essential elements be much different?

The "land question" is still one of the biggest for the average person only partly because we all must have some kind of shelter from nature's more extreme forces. 

How we are housed, where we are housed and by what means we pay for our housing partly decides how much stress you have to live with or how much comfort you live in. 

If you are renting, the landlord or landlady remains as critical a figure as they were a century ago and despite theoretically better legal rights for tenants, gross exploitation of renters continues in Barcelona, just as it does in Paris, London or Milan.

If you are fortunate enough to be paying off your own dwelling to the bank (as my partner and I have been doing for the last three years) then there is obviously the pressure of ensuring that your income is enough to do this every month...while also putting food on the table. 

Sometimes, I wonder if there is still an echo from feudal times in this great housing dilemma. 

In England for example, it is simply scandalous that an estimated 50% of total land there is still unregistered. 

This means that approximately half the country is owned by families who have inherited large areas of green fields that are not available for possible use as housing. It creates the bizarre fact that English cities are severely over-crowded and the price of a basic flat is well out of reach of the average person.

In Southern Europe the high cost of renting or buying (compared to wages) at least partly explains why in Scandinavian countries only about 4% of 24 to 35 year-olds are still living with their parents. 

In Spain this figure is 37.2%, in Portugal it is 44.4% and in much of Eastern Europe around half of young people have not left the nest. We are witnessing generations who are being denied real independence in their lives.

But when it comes to what is being eaten in and outside the home there is also great inequality. In Spain, the massive rise in demand for donated/charity food has been well documented in the media here and in England there has been an almost 400% increase in the use of so-called "food banks" over the last two years alone. 

I recently explained to some adults I teach that the American slang word for money is "bread," and this gives a particular relevance to the saying that "The more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat."

Strangely enough though, it is now the case that nearly 40% of food grown in the United States of America is never eaten (as their public broadcaster PBS recently discovered.) 

Even allowing for the fact that the average North American consumes more than four hundred times more resources than an African does, the stark absurdity of these numbers cannot explain away how vital food is to our quality of life.

Simply put, land and bread make up a large part of what we call "peace of mind."

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2014.]

How the economic "crisis" kills

Photo: Corbis *from source.

On Monday morning a woman committed suicide in the Madrid suburb of Carabanchel, after receiving an eviction notice.

She was only the most recent victim of a problem that psychologists have been warning about for several years : mental disorders caused by the crisis, mainly due to a rapid increase in unemployment, ending up raising suicide rates.

But, even though there have been numerous studies linking mental disorders and economic crisis there had been no fully-conclusive evidence of it.

Until now.

The crisis has made the suicide rate increase markedly around the world.

A new study published in the British Medical Journal this week says that in 2009, the year after the start of the global economic crisis, the overall suicide rate among men rose by 3.3 %, an increase of approximately 5,000 self-inflicted deaths in all countries analyzed in respect to the expected trend. 

 

In Spain, suicides increased by 7.2% more than expected, but only among men, one of the authors of the study, professor of epidemiology at the University of Bristol, David Gunnell confirms.

In the 20 European countries that already have data for 2010, the analysis indicates an even greater increase in male suicide: 10.8 % more than in 2009.

Researchers from the University of Hong Kong , Oxford and Bristol, found that the evidence suggests that the increase in the number of deaths was observed mainly in the 27 European countries studied (up 4.2%) and in 18 countries in the Americas (6.4%) .

They further stress that their findings are "probably an underestimate of the true impact of the global economic crisis on suicide " because some countries data was not yet available.

In fact , in the 20 European states that already have information on 2010, his analysis indicates an even greater increase in male suicide, 10.8% more than in 2009.

The increase in the suicide rate is particularly high among men in countries where the level of pre-crisis unemployment in 2007 was relatively low (in Spain it was at 8.26% ) .

According to the researchers, this is explained by "the economic crisis and rising unemployment causing more fear and anxiety...and stigma...in countries where unemployment was low, which in turn has resulted in increased suicides."

For scientists, an increase in the suicide rate is usually the tip of the iceberg of emotional distress related to the recession. According to statistics, for every person who takes his own life, about 30-40 try to, and for every attempted suicide a dozen people experience suicidal thoughts.

The impact of the economic crisis on the mental health of the Spanish was investigated by a team of scientists from the University of the Balearic Islands, led by Dr. Margalida Gili.

They published their findings last year in the European Journal of Public Health. According to them, between 2006 and 2010, mental disorders (as seen by primary care physicians) grew significantly. In this period diagnoses of depression increased by 19.4 %, anxiety was up 8.4 % and there was a 4.6 % jump in alcoholism.

The government's austerity policy is causing further loss of jobs, and increasing the risk of suicide, the authors of the study found, but they are cautiously hopeful and insist that this problem has a solution:

"Our findings show that the economic crisis causes a significant increase in suicides, but previous research shows that this risk is not inevitable. Programs to boost the labor market may help offset the impact of the recession on suicide levels, since a successful relocation of the unemployed significantly reduces or eliminates risks to mental health on the unemployment. In times of cuts, countries with limited resources can focus their aid on young men of working age. In many countries, however, government austerity is causing further loss of jobs, which will increase the risk of suicide. Urgent action is needed before the economic crisis causes a further increase in suicides.

My translation from original source here.