Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d
Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
“I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
This first stanza from George Herbert’s (1593-1632) most famous sonnet, Holy Sonnet’s X, reflects on Love gently persuading us to love once more. The metaphysical poets were consumed with how we might express the deepest emotions lightly, and the search to understand the physiology of those emotions has long been a goal of medicine.
The history of emotions has been a chequered one. Rather than talk about elements, or humours, or a full history let’s jump in with the person considered by many scientists to be the Einstein of the 19th Century, Charles Robert Darwin (1809 -1882). British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said “What Galileo and Newton were to the Seventeenth Century, Darwin was to the Nineteenth.”
Darwin’s scientific methodology was a superb mix of observation, analysis, and deep, deep thought. His written output, including publication, was very prolific, and wide-ranging. They included works on the variation caused to domestic animal by selective breeding, books on orchids, geology, tributes to fellow scientists, manuals on the scientific method, including in 1849 the wonderfully entitled On The Use Of The Microscope On Board Ship.
The work that bears directly on our topic was published in 1872, with a second edition edited by Francis Darwin in 1890 The Expression Of Emotions In Animal And Man. It has a precursor in 1867 and 1868 when Darwin published three works that are grouped as Queries About Emotions. By the time Darwin comes to 1872 he has developed a keen interest.
The Expression Of Emotions In Animal And Man is divided into fourteen chapters. The first three cover the general principles of emotions and Darwin then goes from the introduction on to discuss emotions in animal in chapters 4 & 5, which many pet owners should love to read, and then turns to man, looking first at Suffering and Weeping (Ch.6); Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair (Ch.7); Joy, High Spirits, Love, Tender Feelings, Devotion (Ch.8); Reflection, Meditation, Ill-temper, Sulkiness, Determination (Ch.9); Hatred And Anger (Ch.10); Disdain, Disgust, Contempt, Guilt, Pride etc; Helplessness, Patience, Affirmation And Negation (Ch. 11); Surprise, Astonishment, Fear, Horror (Ch. 11); Self-attention, Shame, Shyness, Modesty: Blushing (Ch. 13) and finally, a final chapter for conclusions.
It is a fascinating read. The full-text is available online with all of Darwin’s publications and a vast number of letters and correspondence at Cambridge University’s Darwin Online Project. Dr John Van Whye and his team have done an outstanding job; and well deserve the 20 million hits the site has received to date.
Darwin’s work was incredibly influential from the earliest days of psychology. Even the William James, as well as E Thorndike, and John B Watson, and then finally B F Skinner of the behaviorists, as well as Ivan Pavlov, along with Vladimir M Bekhterev, Pavlov’s arch nemesis (Who made a very important contribution to neuroscience through his work on the hippocampus and memory), were all deeply influenced by Charles Darwin’s work. There is an excellent book that covers the tale by Robert Boakes called “From Darwin To Behaviorism” (Cambridge University Press 1984).
To quickly illustrate the point, Darwin’s précis of the first chapter reads as follows: “The three chief principles stated–The first principle–Serviceable actions become habitual in association with certain states of the mind, and are performed whether or not of service in each particular case– The force of habit–Inheritance–Associated habitual movements in man–Reflex actions–Passage of habits into reflex actions– Associated habitual movements in the lower animals–Concluding remarks” One can see the origins of operant conditioning, think Pavlov’s dogs, here!
At the same time that Darwin was studying the outward appearance of emotions Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880), a French anatomist was looking for emotions from the inside out. Paul Broca, as he preferred to be known, has from an early age shown exceptional aptitude. He was enrolled as a medical student when he was only 17 and graduated by the age of 20. Even given that his father was a doctor himself it is still a remarkable achievement. By the time he was 24 he had been appointed professor of surgical pathology at Le Sorbonne.
He is best known for identifying the key speech area, named after him, and which
along with the Wernick area, discovered by Carl Wernicke, (1848-1905) make up the two main language processing units in the brain.
However, as significant, and possibly even more so, was Broca’s discovery of the limbic pathway. The limbic pathway looks like a loop running from the hippocampus just above the brain stem at the bottom of the brain. If you took a picture of the brain and drew a ring from bottom center, then went back, and then up forward and round, it would pretty much look like the limbic pathway. the important thing to note is that it transverses many functional areas of the brain - in other words, it has a big effect.
Broca began firstly with otters. And he thought that the olfactory tract and smell were directly involved. But he also know that in animals without smell and so olifactory tract, e.g. dolphins, the limbic tract was still fully developed. He wrote:
“. . . il constitue dans le manteau une division primaire, une division fondamentale qui est plus qu’un lobe, qui renferme d’ailleurs plusieurs lobes, et que le simple nom de lobe ne caracteriserait pas suffisamment: je l’appellerai done le grand lobe limbique.”
Broca never achieved full support for his idea that here was the emotional tract until 75 years later when the Papez
Pathway was discovered by American neuropathologist and MD James Papez (1883 - 1958). He took the accumulated evidence and began working on the problem. He developed his hypothesis by injecting rabies into animal brains and seeing how it progressed. He was a particularly brilliant lecturer according to accounts with a special interest in paralysis. The Papez circuit is one of the main pathways of the Limbic system and is responsible for emotions. It also plays a major role in memory.
The limbic pathway runs through much pf the brain’s main influencing architecture for homeostasis and cognition. For example, the cingulate gyrus takes care of blood pressure and heart beat, but also plays a role in attentiveness. Both motivation to succeed and fears are in the amygdala, sleep, sexual arousal, hormonal release are in the hypothalamus, and the thalamus itself. The best analogy I have heard of the thalamus is that if the frontal cortex is the boss, doing all the thinking and solving, then the thalamus is a super-secretary as there along with the cerebellum all afferent (incoming) signals get cleared.
1. Language and Reasoning 2. Frontal Eye Field and Speech 3. Emotions and Personality
Ok, So what does this mean for us? How does knowing the anatomy of an emotion help us to deal better with our emotions? Well, it does have an important health aspect as the Limbic pathway is known for its influence on the endocrine system, as we discussed on days one and two, and lights up during sex through its connections to the nucleus accubens - the brain’s pleasure center, and is one of the main hitting points for drug effects. As it is also attached to the amygdala, as we discussed on day two, the fight /flight center, and the hippocampus the memory center (Think of a hippo running through a camp, and picture that it has the letter M for memory tattooed on it), we begin to see how recreational drug use creates wild euphoria, followed by depression, or the need for another feeling kick, and affects the memory. The one thing we have learned from the limbic system is that a happy brain is a healthy brain.
This brings up-to date with Dr Martin Seligman. As the main influencer in a key movement in modern psychology, positive psychology, he is a hugely influential and an important figure in psychology. A former head of clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania, and President of the American Psychology Society. He was also named the 13th most cited psychologist of the 20th Century Why? Well, his work has led to psychology being about positive prevention and well-being rather than dealing with the problems that humans have. Traditional fields of clinical, forensic, criminal, development, cognitive etc; have all integrated his approaches. It is very important to note that the field of positive psychology and happiness, more accurately called eudaomonia, is founded on rigourous scientific principles and is not some self-help, folk-psychology movement.
There is a wonderful video, which pokes fun a the difference a century in psychology has made, of a Seligman’s learned optimism on an elderly patient: Sigmund Freud. It is fun, but also very instructive.
As we learn more and more about happiness, well-being, and positiveness we see something: empirical proof from fMRI scans that happy brains produce healthier bodies it keeps the body in better homeostasis. As we discussed on day one and two the HPA-axis produces stress hormones, and it sees the limbic pathway balances or augment this depends depeding on whether we are happy or depressed. Extraordinary really. Happiness is the key to a healthy life.
Tomorrow, we will look at our known strategies that can be used in positive psychology, in particular Appreciative Inquiry, to understand that stress is conquerable.
Day Four: Strategies for happiness, as opposed to strategies for stress
So let’s build on yesterday’s post and ask what is happening at various levels biologically in the body? What is going on? What will help to really understand the physiology of stress?
Today, we’ll look at how the body gets stressed, step by step.
Tomorrow, we will definitely be through the looking glass, and begin looking at moods, emotions, the limbic pathway, and the neuropsychology of stress.
We approach the rabbit hole. Deep breath folk. Ready? Let’s go!
On the first day of the course we saw that proteins called hormones are produced by your glands (Endocrine system). These not only keep your body’s internal environment in balance (Homeostasis) but also can knock it out of balance as a reaction to internal and external counterproductive stress (The HTA axis).
Here we need to switch attention to an overall picture and take into account along with hormones. the real main signaler of what happening in the body: the nervous system, or more accurately, the nervous systems. In addition to the hormones the complex array of nerves throughout the system send signals to the brain and stomach.
The body is dvided into two main nervous systems. The Central Nervous System (CNS) and The Peripheral Nervous Systems (PNS). The one deals with stimuli, the other manages the automatic functions. In banking terms, the front office and back office as it were; the public face and the administration. Without either, like any good organization, the organization will cease to function. CNS and PNS are fine for anatomy. But we want function.
So for function we call the CNS The Somatic Nervous System (SNS) and the PNS The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).
As their names suggest the somatic deals with bodily movement (Soma=body Gk) stimuli (Skin, eyes (optic nerve), taste etc;). And the autonomic with those responses which are automatic.
You would not want to have to think about making your heart beat, or lungs work etc; but, along when need the heart beat increases or decreases, the stomach works or relaxes the autonomic nervous system (ANS) send the necessary instructions.
The ANS is further divided into three: sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric divisions. The enteric system is found in all life with a nervous system and handles the digestive tract.
The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) can be seen at work when we relax, switch off, and calm down. Look for things like smaller pupils, slower breathing, even signs of hunger as it works on the digestive system too.
The human body also has The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) that give us, in the famous words of Walter B Cannon in 1915, the fight or flight response. Considering, as we discussed on day one, he also coined the term hoeostasis, you could say he was onto a good thing in terms of the history of medicine.
As we are all too much aware with the fight/flight response the heart rate speeds up, blood pressure increases, adrenalin (epinephrine) from the adrenal glands floods the system and gets our bodies ready for action. At what do we do? We sit still in our office chairs and have a meltdown.
Flight in the shape of a pair of running shoes and an MP3 player is a much better deal.
So, the SNS is our bad boy here. It triggers the limbic pathway, which runs throughout the brain and handles emotions, (More on this on day three), and this in turn releases the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Andrenalin (HPA axis) reaction (Discussed yesterday) that floods the body with cortisol.
It doesn’t even take, literally, a second to upset us.
Experiments have shown that before the eye can consciously register a bad image, (By flashing for a microsecond a group of photos that would create discomfort in a normal person faster than then the eye can register them), the body at the HPA axis is working. This means it begins to react to danger even before we are truly aware of it. It is one of the biggest problems in the workplace and modern society is that we are constantly stimulating these responses through noise and time demands.
Anyway, the HPA axis combines to releases protein hormones called glucocortisoids from the adrenal gland.
The two most important glucocortisoids are cortisol, (also called hydrocortisone), which is really important to our discussion, and we will return to in detail in a short while and dexamethasone, which is absolutely the saint and good guy here.
Dexamethasone is used to help rheumatoid, cancer, and brain tumors. You may even have had some if you had a bad facial reaction if your wisdom teeth have been taken out. Dexamethasone simply reduces swelling. It can even be used to control the pituary-hypothalamus and reduce cortisol, but this in only currently recommended for extreme measure, such as Cushing’s disease, where the cortisol is out of control and results in growth in the pituatary gland. This is outside the realm of accepted variances for normative stress, and is rare. It can be caused by taking steroids. I am looking at its use as a anti-inflammatory medicine for daily stess and will report back on that, better is to avoid adrenal cortisol overload in the first place. More on that below.
Cortisol is, in our current understanding, the most important hormone that regulates homeostatis, our inner state.
Now cortisol in moderation is vital for life, without it you die. It stimulates the conversion of proteins to glucose (So foods to energy, for example), raises blood sugar, and promotes glycogen, a super-sized polymer of glucose as it were, which is essential for the liver to function and control metabolism, the release of energy (in conjunction with the thyroid and the hormone, thyroxine).
The liver is the power station then converting the fuel into electricity. It also, with the kidneys, detoxes the body. Obviously, this is all good.
And very, very bad when it’s goes wrong.
If the adrenal gland receives messages from the brain via the pituitary gland to overproduce then the trouble begins.
You may recall that one of our symptoms of stress from yesterday was an enlarged liver or spleen.
In view of what we’ve just said about the liver, let’s make a scientific observations - Oops.
For as the liver regulates the body’s need for energy, and the spleen, produces the lymphocytes, or white cells, necessary to combat disease, we begin to see that stress literally shuts down the body’s immune system. And the handy helper in crime?
Cortisol and the corticosteroids, of course. (Which does sound dangerously like the name of a third year medical school cover band?).
So, first we need to understand, in more detail, how cortisol is produced, and what it normally does. Then we can see what it does to us when it goes haywire. Then we’ll ask what controls are known.
Firstly as we said yesterday all hormone processes start in the brain.
In the hypothalamus, above the brain stem, there lies The Paraventricular Nucleus (PVN). It is small (Well, tiny actually: the brain is absolutely amazing!) area near the optic chiasm.
It contains bundles of neurons, one is called The Magnocellular, and the other, The Parvocellular.
They both produce those protein hormones.
These then move to the pituitary gland.
The magnocellalar produces two hormones, the oxcytocin and vasopressin.
Oxytocin is sometimes called the love/social hormone as it is released when we feel friendly. It is also the neurotransmitter released during sex. (No, I’m not getting into the research parameters on the discovery of that one here either). It is also crucial in neuopsychology for pairing, bondin,g and friendship overtures.
Vasopression, which helps the body retain and dispel water through the kidneys, also contracts blood vessels and caillaries.
Both, when you stop and think about it are important in stress control.
Firstly, we need to look at the more important, for the purposes of toady’s discussion, the parvocellular region.
It produces three main hormones: CRH (Corticotrpin-releasing hormone), and vasopressin. The third, TRH (Thytropin-releasing hormone) that stimulates the thyroid. It is the first two we are interested in.
CRH and vasopressin combine to produce ACTH (Adrenocortiotropic hormone), which we talked about yesterday. ACTH causes the reaction in the pituitary gland that then talks to the adrenal gland, which then responds by releasing cortisol.
So can we do anything about this. Well, firstly, try to restore homeostasis. Highly effective and recommended non-pharmaceutical actions include deep sleep, long walks, calm, calm, calm, breath, and avoid caffeine. Caffiene aggrevates cortisol, which is actually at is strongest surge first thing in the morning. So that early morning cup of coffee is a jolt rather than a help. The cortisol comes in at around 30 minutes after waking, often making us think it’s the coffee.
Alternatively, you can be a woman. This helps enormously.
Professor Shelly E Taylor, UCLA.
Professor Shelly E Taylor, of UCLA, who was awarded the William James Fellow Award in 2001 by the American Psychology Society, and is the author of the marvellous “The Tending Instinct” says “Woman show more often a “tend-befriend” rather fight-flight response”. This can easily be proven: at the end of working day a woman will lose her stress by talking, or getting involved with her close relationships. Men, on the other hand, put on their iron masks and withdraw for as long as it takes, or allowed. Or explode.
There is evidence to suggest that oxytocin (mentioned earlier), which calms us, is negated by male hormones, but amplified by estrogen (the female hormone) meaning woman are born calmer.
Secondly, a visit to a doctor is recommended: missing annual cholesterol and blood pressure checks are a pretty good reason as to why doctors can’t cure people. GO!
Finally, for people showing the physical symptoms of stress a Cort-Stim (Cortrosyn Stimulation) blood test, which tests the adrenal response with an injection of ACTH and looks for an appropriate cortisol response. It’s taken from the elbow or hand, and generally a high-carb diet is recommended the day before followed by six hours of fasting before the test itself.
For most cases, steps one and two are enough.
Now that we have an overview of the biology of stress we are ready to move into the more commonly understood meanings of stress, as both positive in negative, in the moods, emotions,and the limbic pathway and the neuropsychology of that.
Day Three: Yeah Baby, Yeah! Moods, Emotions, the Limbic Pathway and Neuropsychology
Friday, Jan. 25, 2008. Rush Medical Center, Chicago - neurosurgeon, Demetrius Lopes, holds up a Penumbra stroke vacuum system.
This is a tiny vacuum cleaner for the brain, and is the newest treatment for stroke victims, promising to literally suction out clogged arteries to get blood flowing again.
Now the question is how to tell which patients are good candidates for the proceedure? As illogical as it may sound, unclogging isn’t always the best option to treat strokes, due to systolic and diastolic pressure and so bloodflow in sensitive areas. Strokes remain the No. 3 killer in the US and the UK.
Day One: Introduction to the Neuroscience and Medicine of Stress
Welcome to Business Intelegant’s five day open course on stress, moods, the brain, and the neuroscience behind it all. There also plenty of sites on stress, aren’t there? But not that many that really get into the meaning of it all in well, a deeper way.
What will help us to understand the neurobiology - and what is going on? What’s happening to our physical bodies? How and why does it alter our mental state? What does it do at a, literally, fundamental level to our cognitive abilities? How do those various hormones, neurotransmitters, and proteins react, and what are they anyway? How can our understanding change?
So, let’s go instead deep into the human brain and suggesting some tools that will define stress more clearly, and show how understanding the physiology of stress makes a difference.
Before we get there we’ll need to look at an aspect of the history of medicine in the first half of the twentieth century.
Or rather one man.
Hans Selye (1907 - 1982)
Hungarian-Canadian Endocrinologist
Hans Selye was born in Hungary in 1907. He may be considered the first to understand, evaluate, and promote the meaning of stress. He even coined the term stress, much like the founder of organization development, Kurt Lewin, (see Business Intelegant’s iGuru guide) coined the word feedback in 1930s from the fact that output feedback to input allowing for self-correction in electrical circuits, from engineering. Obviously engineers use the word stress. Measured in Pascals, in continuum physics all matter is subject to forces (Gas, liquid, plasma, solid) and so stress. In tensile physics, it has come to mean how much pressure a body can withstand before it breaks. And we all get that analogy.
Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878)
The Father Of Modern Physiology
More correctly Selye borrowed from homeostasis as developed by the father of modern physiology Claude Bernard in his famous statement “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d’une vie libre et indépendante.” (A stabile internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life). Homeostasis is more than just how the body controls its temperature, it is how a system, open or closed, regulates its internal environment. And your body is an open system. Food in - Non-food out for starters.
Walter Bradford Cannon (1875 - 1945)
Walter Bradford Cannon, another major influence on Selye, invented the term, homeostasis, in 1932, in his book The Wisdom of the Body. There is a wonderful page on Walter here.
Selye had begun, as early as his second year in medical school to wonder about forces on bodies, internal and external. It is important to note that he never considered stress to be en emotive word, it was simply an indicator that something was happening, good or bad. For example, simply flexing a muscle is stress, as is a feeling of anxiety. Both exert forces.
Selye experimented on mice with various toxins and noticed that even though they developed different diseases they seemed to share some fundamental symptoms, which we will come to in a moment. These are the symptoms of stress, or the General Adaptive Syndrome.
Selye went on to notice the same held good for humans: many different diseases, but the same symptoms boxes were consistently there along with those symptoms peculiar to that specific disorder. He died in 1982, having set up with Alvin Toffler (See Business Intelegant’s iGuru Guide for more details) and Richard Earle, the Canadian Institute of Stress.
For an outstanding personal reminiscence of Hans Seyle look no further than fellow Hungarian Dr Istvan Berczi’s wonderful accounts of his experiences. Just wish all webpages were so good at recording personal history.
OK. So far, so good.
So, what are the symptoms we’re talking about?
Well, Selye describes these, based on observation. He noted that before any major disease was fully apparent patients
“felt and looked ill, had a coated tongue, complained of more or less diffuse aches and pains in the joints, and of intestinal disturbances with loss of appetite.” They also generally “had fever, enlarged spleen or liver, inflamed tonsils, a skin rash.”
So, what are these symptoms caused by? That’s the right question. We have a set of observable symptoms, all common, across the sample population (Our observed patients), who then all go on to develop different conditions.
So, our first conclusion, is that it’s something that’s happening internally.
Generally, but not always, as a result of external stresses.
How do we know that?
Because some sick people with the same diseases seemed to not develop these symptoms, and the observation was that they seemed far more at ease. But we’re jumping some 10 years ahead of ourselves.
His initial observation was that their homeostasis was better. They were, literally, more in control.
Ironically, he was only a second year medical student and admitted quite cheerfully that with more education he would have had no interest in these general symptoms. His intelegant moment lay in the question: why in the history of medicine had so little thought been given to the “syndrome of just being sick”. He observed later in life that it was only observation and deduction, and could have been made anytime after the Renaissance.
Even more ironically, his ideas were poo-poo’d by the supervising staff at medical school. Until ten years later. Like any good scientist he never forgot his Prague patients.
The scene now switches to Canada, where Selye lived the rest of his life. And he got lucky. His real interest by this time lay in the endocrine system. Think glands.
The clever thing about glands is they work whether there are nerve endings between organs or not. They are molecules that signal each other. You could say that the glands are the flight towers and the molecules the planes and they’re going from a specific airport to airport. They’re carried in the blood.
They include steroids, (Androgens, estrogens, glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, progestagens), peptides and proteins (Lots of amino acid residues including, for example, insulin from the pancreas, follicle-stimulation, and any hormone from the pituitary gland - more on that later), and the rather significant amines (Such as noreprephine, epriphene, dopamine, and throxine) which are floating around the brain and perform the marvelous trick of being neurotransmitters too. (They make the neurons fire across the synaptic gap and so create the electricity that makes our brains, well, conscious. Smart, huh!)
So Selye looked at these symptoms and the endocrine system. And had his Eureka! moment. Being a good scientist he did test it for on while on small, furry creatures, and his initial hunch was confirmed. Yes, hormone release, when thrown into overload causes the unhealthy symptoms of stress.
He had also observed that some general medical care seemed to help everyone: easily digestible foods, keeping the room at a comfortable temperature, relaxation etc;
The genius was to put it all together.
He recognised that stress symptoms were caused by the hormonal overload which was augmented by a non-caring environment.
That on it’s own was significant.
But luck and hard work really do make for good inductive reasoning. Selye was trying to hard isolate hormones in from the placenta at the time. Here, I’ll let Istvan Berczi tell the tale:
“For a while it was thought that the adrenal enlargement and involution of lymphoid organs was specific for a particular hormone, but attempts to purify it always failed as the activity was lost. At some point it occurred to Selye that this, in fact, could be a nonspecific response to noxious agents, and, indeed, when he performed the control experiments, that was the case. He published a short note about his findings in Nature in 1936. During the same year a longer article was published by him in The British Journal of Experimental Pathology, where he demonstrated that the involution of the thymus was in fact mediated by the adrenal gland as it was absent in adrenalectomized animals if stressed. His experiments in chickens revealed that the Bursa of Fabricius is also extremely sensitive to steroid hormones.”
In other words, he had found out that it was not one hormone, or even one gland, and that was what had been confusing everyone, but rather the work of a combination of glands. More work followed between 1936 and 1946, he published an overview as a paper The general adaptation syndrome and the diseases of adaptation in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology, which identified the ternary causes of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal glands all working together. A triple whammy as it were.
So here goes:
You get stressed because:
The hypothalamus (It is the base of your brain and acts as the link between the brain and the endocrine system)
talks to
The pituitary gland, which releases ACTH (Adrenocorticotrophic Hormone) into the bloodstream and is pea-sized and sits at the base of the brain and is responsible for control of homeostasis - ah!)
Which activates the adrenal glands, just above the kidneys, to release the villain of the piece, corticoids.
Well, following the Intelegant Awards of 2007, honestly thought that nothing could beat Morgan Stanley’s stunning Christmas turkey. After all, nothing goes to show what a really dedicated collective team effort can achieve like a negative profit of $8,000,000,000. Good job guys.
But, as we all know to really mess things up it takes but one truly committed individual.
The kind of losses that make African debt look minuscule couldn’t happen again within six weeks of each other, could it?
Mais oui!
In a move so financially stunning that is makes the Titanic look like Timmy losing his rubber duck in his Friday night bubble bath, rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, has single-handedly cost one of the central pillars of French banking Société Genérale a stunning $7 billion.
Vraiment, faît accomplie…
Even Yasuo Hamanaka, who previously held the personal record losing some $2.6 billion in 1996, while trading copper commodities at Sumitoma, must be green as Cu2O with jealousy.
I guess it’s one record where you’re glad to lose the title?
But I also bet that Jerry boy won’t hold the title for as long this time…
Isn’t it time that someone took compliance as a healthy option - rather than bad tasting medicine?
After all, you and I might have stopped at say $2,000,000,000 - but then again, why don’t go, literally, for broke if no-one’s watching?
While this is an outstanding effort to wipe out one of the more important European banks that should have taken strategy of M. Porter proportions, he appears to have failed to actually detonate the Big Bertha of a bomb that these losses should. Unless you count a takeover - which does look likely. Oh. Merde.
It’s early days and one cannot predict these things. Just ask Jerome. Whose obvious predilection for prediction seems destined to fall flatter than an a bevy of bungy jumping elephants with manic-depressive tendencies.
I think we can all safely predict an excellent career for Jerome as author and chat show celebrity. If he survives prison. Poor Jerome. Courage mon ami, the loss of all your friends on Facebook is only temporary - give them a glimpse of a TV camera and those same friends will come running back - just don’t be surprised if they do so anonymously.
I mean there are fair weather friends, then lousy weather, then there’s darn that tornandey just ripped Daisy straight out of her stall and took Mary Lou and the best milkin’ pail with her weather. This is the latter.
The Daily Telegraph reports that it was the death of a father and the break-up of a marriage were the triggers for the behaviour - sounds reasonable - damaged ego plus misery - work becomes everything - must have status as the biggest and best.
Ah, boys and their toys.
Just hoping, seriously, he’s got one good friend to sit up nights with him for the next couple of weeks.
And no sleeping pills.
Methinks, it’s going to be tough for one person to beat this this within another six weeks, but hey, hedge funders are getting ready to move again so you never know…
I am just about to start a five day open course on the neuroanatomy and neuropsychology of stress on Monday here on the blog, and Jerome, mon brave, if you would drop by and read it, and I do think you might be the target profile for such a course, then I solemnly promise you’ll have one friend, well, if an add on my Facebook page doesn’t cheer you up, what will…?
Prof. Richard Restak is a great author and a very good thinker around neuroscience and its meaning in the real world. Here he is speaking on some of the strange things that subliminal messaging does:
I went in for a day at a school in a pretty tough area and as always got feedback. One week later I got this email from a 17 year old:
I just been waiting for this opportunity to thank you for the lesson you gave us for about a week ago. It was amazing. Every word you say makes me more inspired, and my self-confidence isn’t so good, not at all actually, but when you speak and tell us all these things, it all feels so much better.
I guess I just want to thank you, because you give me such an inspiration and you make me feel that studying is really fun, it’s fun to learn. I really do hope that you come back soon I really do.
And that’s why I do what I do: if it makes a difference, and can help one teenager see life as possible instead of impossible, as hopeful instead of hopelesss, as having a future that might actually lead somewhere. It’s always fun to work with those who already understand how life works and just need better tools, but to make a real difference you need to work with those who see it as gray, boring, and crushing…
I look forward to return visit in February very much…
In a study that may significantly advance the understanding of how cognitive-behavioral therapy affects the brain, researchers have shown that significant changes in activity in certain regions of the brain can be produced with as little as four weeks of daily therapy in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
The discovery could have important clinical implications, according to principal investigator Sanjaya Saxena, M.D., Director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, whose findings are published on line this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
“The study is exciting because it tells us more about how cognitive-behavioral therapy works for OCD and shows that both robust clinical improvements and changes in brain activity occur after only four weeks of intensive treatment,” said Saxena.
OCD is an anxiety disorder in which individuals have unreasonable fears or worries that they try to manage through ritualized compulsive behaviors to reduce the anxiety. For example, a patient may experience the urgent need to engage in certain rituals, such as hand washing or repeatedly checking that the oven is off or the front door is locked.
Past studies using functional brain imaging studies of patients with OCD have demonstrated that elevated activity along the frontal-subcortical circuits of the brain decreases in response to treatment with serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) medications or cognitive-behavioral therapy. However, clinical improvement of OCD symptoms was expected to require up to 12 weeks of behavioral therapy or medication treatment, the standard treatments for OCD. Only a handful of studies have looked at how therapy affects brain function, and all previous studies had examined changes over several months of treatment.
Saxena and colleagues at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA made two novel discoveries in their study of 10 OCD patients and 12 control subjects.
“First of all, we discovered significant changes in brain activity solely as the result of four weeks of intensive cognitive-behavioral therapy,” said Saxena. “Secondly, these changes were different than those seen in past studies after a standard 12-week therapeutic approach using SRI medications or weekly behavioral therapy.”
The researchers obtained positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the ten OCD patients both before and after they received four weeks of a therapy known as “exposure and response prevention,” which gradually desensitizes patients to things that provoke obsessional fears or worries.
“This is the primary kind of therapy used for OCD. It teaches patients to pay attention to their internal experiences and tolerate scary thoughts without having to act on them,” said Saxena. “They learn that nothing terrible happens if they refrain from their usual compulsive behaviors.”
The normal control subjects received no treatment and were scanned twice, several weeks apart, and metabolic changes in the brain were compared between the two groups. After four weeks of therapy and without any changes in medication, the OCD patients showed significant improvements in OCD symptoms, depression, anxiety and overall functioning.
The PET scans of OCD patients demonstrated significant decreases in glucose metabolism — a measure of brain cell activity — in the right and left thalamus after treatment. These are areas of the brain involved in OCD and where changes have been seen in numerous past studies after longer-term treatment.
However, the PET scans in this study also showed a significant increase in activity in an area of the brain called the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in reappraisal and suppression of negative emotions. Increasing activity in this region corresponded to the OCD patients’ improvement in clinical symptoms after the four-week course of intensive therapy. Activity in this area had previously been found to increase after cognitive-behavioral therapy for major depression. Therefore, the researchers theorize that response to cognitive-behavioral therapy across a variety of disorders may require activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, according to Saxena.
Additional contributors to this study include E. Gorbis, J. O’Neill, S.K. Baker, K.M. Maidment, S. Chang, A.L. Brody, J.M. Schwartz and E.D. London, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA; M.A. Mandelkern of the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and N. Salamon, Department of Radiology, UCLA. The study was funded in part by a grant from the National Institute for Mental Health.
Adapted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego.
MLA
University of California - San Diego (2008, January 22). Rapid Effects Of Intensive Therapy Seen In Brains Of Patients With Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 22, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/01/080117164133.htm
Diplomacy is a fascinating field in communication - how do we speak meaningfully, even forcefully - and build the relationship?
Traditionally diplomacy has been spoken of in terms of soft and hard power. Hard power is the ability to coerce behaviour, generally through military or economic means. Soft power is the more long-term and is the diplomatic skill of building meaningful alliances and relationships.
In the modern world both may be applicable, but soft power is the preferable path for most problems. Especially for those in non-governmental world. Terms like networking, leadership, team-building, emotional intelligence all put soft power at their center.
If we look back at this course we will see the emphasis is on tools and maxims that help us to become better listeners and better at maintaining long-term relationships. So what do diplomats do well?
I am grateful to those diplomats I spoke to, especailly those in the Copenhagen community who confirmed these ideas and were kind enough to add their contribution and experience. The following were considered essential:
1. A deep understanding of responsibility and what it meant to represent at all times their country.
2. To talk around the issue was as important as talking directly. To make effective and friendly small-talk. Be a relationship builder.
3. To know your position and stick to it. Without annoying the other party.
4. Courtesy, chivalry, and politeness are a sign of strength not weakness. The doors must be kept open.
5. Above all listen. Even at the cost of appearing boring.
6. And the Golden Rule: think first.
All are very intelligent, and essentially quiet people. Many did not come from upper-class backgrounds but worked extremely hard to gain a very good degree in politics, economics, and/or international relations. Most has attended one of the colleges for international relationships. All had a deep love for their work, and felt the privilege of their work very deeply. Most had simply applied for their work from University. All emphasized the need to be transparent, have a background that could be investigated with impunity, and a strong sense of self-control.
What conclusions can be drawn?
A sharp mind is not essential, and in fact can be a hindrance, but a good brain is. A good brain does not outfox the opponent it applies deep and clear thinking in order to maximize the result for the interested parties. It isn’t about being cleverer than the other party; it was relationship building, even when things get tough and difficult.
That a gracious attitude and character count, a lot.
That integrity, and knowing where the sticking points of non-compromise are, is paramount.
I posed a question earlier about how Mexico and Japan are similar: the answer lies in groups: both value the group highly, family, work etc; it is more important to be part of a group than it is to shine as an individual, and to treat the family as a very important.
So as we conclude this course we can say that above all good communicators understand that communication is an art not a science. That genuine respect, friendship, and meaningful relationships lie at the heart of communication more than any theory or proof.
Bladins is one of the best International Baccalaureate schools in the Nordic region. The pupils are bright and have every chance of success. We had a great time together - and they were kind enough to give me a huge cheer and a standing ovation at the end - some of them even came up at the end to say how they enjoyed it - never easy for teenagers! I look forward to more visits - thanks to all involved!
