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bits and bobs off the internet
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Monday
forgive the crap entry titles of late. I wrote the last 3 posts while away and sent them off last night so used the day as the title to keep them clear. But now I am stuck for a more exciting title for today.
Last night, I had a hot, stuffy journey on the train, listening to the end of "Crossing Bounderies" at long last, and feeling the usual anxiety when travelling.
When I got home, R was still there - I woke him up. He had lost my keys and he thought I was not due till Tuesday so we both got a fright. My door is the unusual kind which you have to lock when leaving - and if you have no keys, you can only leave by leaving the flat unlocked. He thinks he lost the keys on the road between here and the corner shop. I now have to contact the housing association for permission to cut a new key to the stair door. This was a sheer pain a few years ago and I hope things have improved by then.
I also have to arrange vet appointments for Diva - new lumps have appeared. Yes, I am worried. She isn't. Both cats slept with me last night, it was lovely. But I did not sleep much - took ages to nod off, woke a few times, finally fell asleep around 4 and woke at almost 9, not wanting to move - but I knew if I stayed in bed, I would certainly have problems tonight. So I was sensible and got up.
Feel overwhelmed by what I have to do today - nothing major, just getting on top of the jobs I need to do. And the rain is coming down outside and it looks dark and gloomy out there. Feeling a need to talk myself through this - hence this entry.
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Gene may help doctors identify patients at risk of schizophrenia
Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology : app5
Gene may help doctors identify patients at risk of schizophrenia
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 24 October 2005
Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding the biological basis of schizophrenia, the most common severe mental illness in Britain. The findings could result in earlier diagnosis in children and young people, and lead to the development of new drugs and better treatment.
A study has found that a genetic defect in some people can trigger a dangerous increase in levels of a natural brain chemical called dopamine, which may lead to schizophrenia.
Although the discovery applies to only a small proportion of people who develop the illness, scientists who conducted the study believe it could result in a fundamental shift in the understanding of the condition.
"The hope is we will one day be able to identify the highest-risk groups and intervene early to prevent a lifetime of problems and suffering," Allan Reiss, of Stanford University in California, said. "As we gain a better understanding of these disorders, we can design treatments that are more specific and effective."
About one in 100 people will suffer from schizophrenia at some time in their lives and the annual cost to the nation in health care is estimated at more than £2.6bn.It is characterised by changes in thoughts, perception and behaviour, and typically strikes people in their 20s or early 30s. One in five sufferers make a full recovery but an equal number need expensive, long-term treatment. The rest recover in part but may suffer relapses.
Scientists do not know what causes schizophrenia but there is strong evidence for a biological or genetic basis.
The general population has a 1 per cent chance of developing the illness. The risk increases to 10 per cent for the close relatives of a patient, and for identical twins rises to 47 per cent if one is already diagnosed.
The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, investigated 24 children who suffered from a genetic mutation known as a deletion on one chromosome. It is known that about one-third of children with this deletion to part of chromosome 22 will develop schizophrenia. The deletion occurs in one in 4,000 births.
"We have strong evidence that this deletion is a major risk factor for the development of schizophrenia or related psychotic conditions," Dr Reiss said.
The study found one of the genes on the part of the chromosome that is missing is responsible for a protein that degrades dopamine, a critical chemical messenger, or "neurotransmitter", in the brain. Children with the deletion suffer higher-than-normal levels of dopamine, interfering with what scientists call the "Goldilocks effect", when it is important not to have too much or too little, but just enough dopamine.
The scientists followed the children for five years. As expected, about one-third developed schizophrenia in that time. "Although this deletion probably causes less than 5 per cent of schizophrenia cases, it's the only well-defined genetic risk factor we have right now," Dr Reiss said.
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happiness, happiness, the greatest gift?
Independent Online Edition > Health Medical : app5
Focus: Are you happy?
If so, well done. If not, don't worry - scientists now believe they can identify the keys to a contented life, thanks to an amazing experiment in the Berkshire town of Slough, soon to be shown on BBC2. Author of the book of the series Liz Hoggard reports, while, right, experts offer their tips for attaining happiness
Published: 02 October 2005
Can you learn to be happy? With 13 million prescriptions a year written for new-generation anti-depressants in Britain, this is no longer a question just for philosophers. Neuroscientists, sociologists, economists and public policy experts are increasingly focusing on the nature of happiness, and how to increase it. Positive psychology, a new school at the cutting edge of the discipline, claims that not only can science identify the components of a happy life, but also that we can all "learn" how to be happier.
Earlier this year, in the biggest social experiment of its kind, six happiness experts from these various disciplines took on a daunting task: to make the people of the Berkshire town of Slough happier. They worked with 50 volunteers, attempting to raise their capacity for joy through a programme of experiments and community-based activities - everything from workplace counselling to meditation in a graveyard (awareness of death makes all of us keen not to waste life) and a smile campaign. The results will be screened next month on BBC2 in the series Making Slough Happy.
The volunteers were a mixed bag, including a DJ, a landscape designer and a teacher. Slough was chosen because it is such a multicultural community (and possibly because of Ricky Gervais's The Office). The volunteers' happiness levels ranged from people who had battled serious depression to those who considered themselves averagely happy. They worked to a manifesto of 12 points similar to the ones shown here, drawn up by the experts, who included the Radio 2 psychotherapist Brett Kahr and Dr Richard Stevens, former head of psychology at the Open University.
While there was some scepticism (Slough Council has reserved judgement throughout the project), the feedback from the volunteers has been very positive. According to musician Graeme Nash, "Everyone has immersed themselves in the project and taken something away, even if it's 49 new friends. Every morning I get up now and think, 'Start each day as if on purpose'."
Positive psychology - or the science of happiness - emerged in the US in the late 1990s. It turned the traditional discipline on its head by focusing on how people flourish rather than how they become depressed. In the past the goal was to bring patients from a negative state to a neutral normal. Positive psychologists believe they can increase our happiness by identifying and using many traits we already possess - kindness, originality, humour.
Underpinning all of this is a new consensus that our capacity for happiness is not dominated by our genetic inheritance and our experiences before the age of five. In fact, these factors contribute only around 50 per cent to our happiness potential. The rest is under our control. The brain can be "programmed" for a higher base level of happiness using techniques such as fast-forward thinking (where you screen "a film" of a negative event faster and faster in your mind until it dissolves) and cultivating "flow" activities. These are hobbies or skills where we completely forget about time and are most uniquely ourselves (as in "in the flow") - anything from cooking to rock climbing.
Very happy people, psychologists say, are more sociable and more agreeable than the average, but otherwise they are not particularly extraordinary. They are neither more beautiful nor more successful than the rest of us, and they do not appear to have more pleasurable life experiences. If you want to be like them you need to pinpoint exactly what makes you happy and incorporate more of it into your life.
And that doesn't mean asking for a pay rise. Once our basic material needs have been met, additional money and status have little effect on reported levels of happiness. (Researchers found virtually the same level of happiness between the very rich on the Forbes 400 list and Masai herdsmen. The reason for this is that the human brain becomes conditioned to positive experiences.) Nor do youth, education or a high IQ contribute to happiness. Illness doesn't exclude you from happiness: a US study found that more than 80 per cent of people who were paralysed in all four limbs considered their life to be above average in terms of happiness. They could enjoy their meals, their friends, watch the news. The factors that reflect most strongly in surveys, over and over again, are family, community and trust in fellow human beings.
If you want to be happy, get married. Smug marrieds enjoy better mental and physical health and live longer. If you're single, cultivate a "para-family" of friends, ex-lovers and colleagues. Have as much sex as possible, but be choosy. Psychologists have calculated that the optimum number of partners in a year is one. Having a child can bring joy, but it can also wreck a relationship. More important are friendship, fulfilling work (paid or unpaid) and pets.
Relationships are crucial, but they need to be intimate. Talking only about impersonal topics does not prevent loneliness. You need to let go and engage in high levels of self-disclosure. And be warm - people won't think it's odd or weird. Happy people are good communicators who use every available channel to convey their positive nature. Even touch is part of their armoury because it prompts chemical changes in the brain.
Giving is a clear road to happiness. The founding father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, has identified three distinct components of happiness: the pleasant life (a glass of wine), the good life (work, romance, hobbies) and the meaningful life (using personal strengths in the service of something larger than you, such as politics, religion or community action). All contribute to wellbeing but it is the meaningful life that is the key to long-term joy. Without it, sooner or later, you will look in the mirror and ask, "Is this all there is?"
Work on your mind. We assume our darkest thoughts are gospel truth, but pain, fear, boredom, embarrassment are merely different types of information stored in the brain. If you can learn to interpret this information differently - seeing that it is sometimes partial or biased - you can train yourself to "think" happier. Our reflexive habits - what we say to ourselves when something goes wrong - are usually distortions: bad habits of thought produced by unpleasant experiences in the past. Change them by thinking about what goes right on a daily basis. It could be anything from a great haircut to a compliment.
Dark thoughts are often overreactions. Is there a less destructive way to look at this? If, for example, someone rejects you, try saying, "He finds me annoying" (a specific explanation) rather than "I am annoying" (a universal explanation). Of course, reframing - learning to recognise and dispute pessimistic thoughts - takes practice. Research shows that it takes 21 days to create a new habit pathway in the brain, and a further 63 days to consolidate what you have learnt. It sounds corny, but the other mantra of positive psychology is to count your blessings. Make a deliberate attempt at least once a day to reflect on some of the good things in your life and your brain will become happier.
Stop comparing. In the West, what sociologists call "reference anxiety" has become a disease. We constantly compare what we have with others and find what we have wanting. Start looking at people who have less instead of more. Olympic bronze medallists have been shown to be happier than silver medallists - they have got into the top three rather than just missed the top slot.
Sometimes positive psychology sounds like the art of the blindingly obvious. Be nice to people and they'll be nice back. Count your blessings. But it works. The simple truth is people who care about others are happier than those who are more preoccupied with themselves. As Slough volunteer Graeme Nash observes, "There's one thing that's equal to all of us: and that's the amount of time we have available. We've got to make sure that 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour a day is spent on some sort of positive action, connecting with the community around us. You can't just sit back and wait for the knock on the door for happiness to walk in. You've got to go out and find it."
'How to Be Happy: Lessons from Making Slough Happy' by Liz Hoggard is published by BBC Books, £14.99, on 20 October
TEN STEPS TO HAPPINESS
Have sex. It makes us feel wanted and admired, also increases production of endorphins (natural opiates) by up to 200 per cent. Works with a partner or solo.
Switch off the TV. The average mood watching sitcoms is one of mild depression. Things that get you moving make you happier.
Eat carbohydrates. Research shows they increase levels of serotonin, which regulates your mood. Good-mood carbohydrates are found in pasta, oatcakes and fruit.
Spend an hour talking to your partner. Happy couples exchange emotional information hundreds of times a day. It might be a look, a gesture, a text.
Smile. It releases feel-good chemicals, and other people will be attracted to you.
Phone a friend. Think of friendship like a bank account in which you need to invest as well as borrow.
Savour life's joys. Take "mental photographs" of good moments to keep you going in more stressful times.
Walk a mile. Exercise produces a feeling of euphoria.
Choose a 'happy' profession. Hairdressing topped a recent survey. Next happiest were the clergy, chefs, beauticians, plumbers and mechanics.
Volunteer. Sing in a choir, start a community garden.
A C Grayling
Our idea of happiness is thin
Our modern idea of happiness is rather thin. For Aristotle, happiness meant well-doing and wellbeing, flourishing, satisfaction and achievement. It was a very rich notion. Today people think about winning the lottery and sitting on a beach all day. In the past, people thought of happiness as an epiphenomenon added on to something you were engaged in, like leading an honourable life. It's the thing that happens while you're busy doing something else, like raising children.
A C Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His latest book is 'Descartes - The Life of René Descartes and Its Place in His Times', published by Free Press
Saira Khan
People want to feel they belong
People crave recognition and responsibility, not money. They want someone to say "Well done", to feel they belong to a community, and I don't think many corporations understand that. People email each other two desks down because they're too scared to talk to each other. Having confidence, knowing where I'm going in life - they make me happy. Faith is important. The Muslim community isn't particularly homogenous, but when you go to a place of worship, you know you're sitting next to someone who shares the same belief.
Saira Khan was runner-up in the BBC2 series 'The Apprentice'. She is writing a self-help book, 'Push for Success'
Nigel Planer
It comes from achievement
This morning I was happy because I was at home and up early, and for an hour while there was silence in the house I got on with a rather complicated book about Plutarch. To disappear into something - that is good. I think that happiness has something to do with feeling in control. Self-esteem is important, but that can only come from having achieved something. The mistake we've made in the West is trying to have self-esteem without the achievement. This idea that there are no winners or losers - the end of competitive sport, for example - means nobody ends up with any self-esteem.
Nigel Planer is a comedian, author and playwright
Justin Cartwright
A sense of rightness in yourself
The "pursuit of happiness" is enshrined in the US constitution. But pursuit in those days meant "following" the path of happiness, not making it the object of life. Americans have come to think they have a right to be happy, and that someone else should help them. There is still a lingering feeling in Europe that happiness is associated with evil - that you will have to pay for it - but we are becoming more like the Americans. I think happiness is a sense of rightness in yourself - that you are doing what you should be doing. Obeying your conscience. You can't defer happiness.
Justin Cartwright is a novelist. His latest book is 'The Promise of Happiness'
Virginia Ironside
Being relaxed is important
Happiness is never something you are going to have permanently. You glimpse it out of the corner of your eye while you are doing something else, usually something nice for somebody. Being relaxed is important - I don't think it is possible to be happy and tense. Accept who you are and that you're just as horrid and nice as other people. And try to live in the present - one of the most difficult things known to man, but I think that is happiness. I'm not happy very often and I'm very aware of it when I am. It is not something extraordinary or blissful, simply a feeling of "I am here and I am me".
Virginia Ironside is an agony aunt and author
Lionel Blue
People who can give are happy
I think of the medieval theologian Peter Abelard's definition: heaven is when you get what you've always longed for and, when you've got it, it will be as nice as when you still wanted it. When I visit hospitals, the people who can give are happy. If you look into the world with hate, then the world will be hateful, but if you look into it with a reasonable amount of trust, people will justify your trust. Most religions try to answer why people should be good. And what most people really want is the answer to "how can I be happy?". The two questions end up by being the same.
Rabbi Lionel Blue is a writer and broadcaster
TAKE OUR HAPPINESS TEST
How healthy is your life balance?
1. Money is the most important thing in my life. More specifically getting it, keeping it and not letting any of my so-called friends get their grubby little hands on it.
Agree (a) Disagree (b)
2. I feel valued at work. My colleagues welcome my pithy contributions to water-cooler debates, and my boss thinks I am a genius. And I hardly ever get asked to do the tea run.
Agree (b) Disagree (a)
3. My life seems stuck in a rut. I am bored, stupefied, fed up and jaded. If there were a prescription for ennui I would be on 10 a day.
Agree (a) Disagree (b)
4. My friends never disappoint me. They also think I am pretty cool. They are smart people.
Agree (b) Disagree (a)
5. Nobody knows the real me. Kurt Cobain did. But then he died.
Agree (a) Disagree (b)
6. I dread Mondays so much my mood sinks by teatime on Sunday night. The Antiques Roadshow has acquired Ibsenesque qualities of gloom.
Agree (a) Disagree (b)
7. I often find myself doing things that totally absorb me. Sometimes I find myself so involved in my napkin collection that I clean forget to eat.
Agree (b) Disagree (a)
8. I argue with my partner but I respect his or her point of view. WE like philately, baking bread together and long walks by the sea.
Agree (b) Disagree (a)
9. Things usually work out for me the way I want. This is because I deserve it, of course.
Agree (b) Disagree (a)
10. I have the capacity to change my life. On the other hand, why would I?
Agree (b) Disagree (a)
Mostly As
You keep trying to change the external conditions of life - new car, new house - but find nothing works. Remember that in experiments, people who feign high self-esteem begin feeling better about themselves. Try to put greater intimacy into your friendships: you may think nobody understands but people actually enjoy sharing confidences. After all, it worked for Morrissey, didn't it?
Mostly Bs
Congratulations, you have a healthy life balance - but then you knew that. You invest energy in friends and family rather than status and fill your time with pleasing activities. Optimistic people often think they are more powerful than they really are, which is no bad thing. You're probably a fun person to be around. Just not for the poor buggers who answered mostly As.
Katy Guest
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Health & happiness - Day 1
The secrets of happiness - Health - Times Online
September 19, 2005
Times2
The secrets of happiness
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Health & happiness - Day 1
Our correspondent has devoted his life to studying this elusive emotion. He believes he has found the key
Happiness has been a puzzle to me for about 60 years, ever since 1944, when Europe was coming apart at the seams. My father was a consul in Italy and my mother, sister and I had gone to live with my grandparents in Budapest. I was ten years old and I watched with astonishment as relatives and friends who were wealthy, educated and well-connected suddenly turned into scared refugees in a land turned topsy-turvy. Walking out of the house could get you a stray bullet from the Nazi invaders, or from one of the Allied fighter-bombers cruising above. And each day the Soviet armies were pulling closer. In this mindless milieu, it seemed obvious to ask: “Why can’t seemingly sane adults live happily?” My trust in grown-ups, in the wisdom of culture, tradition and authority, suffered a severe blow. No longer able to take “normal” life for granted, I resolved to understand what happiness was and how best to achieve it.
During the subsequent teenage years of searching, all the obvious answers fell short. Religion and philosophy were too dogmatic — after all, they had not helped to prevent the war. Literature and the arts seemed mere palliatives to the otherwise wretched human condition. Then, in my late teens, I stumbled upon the teachings of Carl Jung, a man whose psychology confronted human frailty head-on. Unlike adult institutions such as the Church or school, this was not hypocritical, neither was it dogmatic. Like science, it seemed open to growth and improvement.
No surprise, then, that I decided to study psychology. But on arrival at the University of Chicago 50 years ago, I was dismayed to find that academic psychologists were trying to understand human behaviour from what they learned from rats in the lab. Inadvertently, my vocation had been called. Having decided to try to achieve personal happiness, I became more ambitious. I resolved to build my career on trying to discover what made others happy also. Initially, I studied people whose lives appeared to be free and creative — musicians, artists and athletes. Here were people who devoted their lives to doing things they liked, rather than things that reaped external rewards. I expanded the study by inventing a system called “experience sampling method”. A random sample of people were asked to keep an electronic pager for a week which was programmed to beep eight times a day at random times. Every time it did so, they wrote down where they were, what they were doing and with whom — and filled out a numerical scale charting how they felt, how much they were concentrating, etc. This system has now been used on more than 10,000 people and the answers are consistent: as with those living creative lives, they were happiest when in a state of concentration.
Thirty years of research and 18 books later, I have proved that enduring happiness is quite different from what most people think it is. It is not something that happens. It is not something that can be bought or hoarded. These conclusions have been confirmed over the years by those social scientists brave enough to venture into the uncharted waters of happiness research. Their surveys showed that wealth and comfort are not sufficient conditions for a happy life. Nations where the per capita GNP is less than £10,000 are generally lower in happiness than nations above that threshold. This suggests that a minimum of material comfort is necessary.
But below and above that dividing line, the way people assess their happiness has very little to do with how much poorer or richer they are. Multi-millionaires report being only infinitesimally happier than their poorer fellows, while people living in poverty are often quite happy. Over the years, I came up with the expression “flow”: a term to describe the common denominator among those people who deemed themselves happy. The most obvious component of happiness, I found out, is intense concentration, which is the main reason that activities such as music, art, literature, sports and other forms of leisure have survived. The essential ingredient for concentration — whether it happens when reading a poem or building a sand castle — is that it involves a challenge that matches one’s ability. The only solution to achieve enduring happiness, therefore, is to keep finding new opportunities to refine one’s skills: do one’s job better or faster, or expand the tasks that comprise it; find a new set of challenges more appropriate to your stage of life.
Paradoxically, the feeling of happiness is only realised after the event. To acknowledge it at the time would only serve as distraction — the rock climber would lose his footing, the chess player his game. Out of all the moments pinpointed by people I have interviewed, their best are with hindsight. Just as a smell might evoke a memory, happiness is realised in its aftermath. As I look back at a life devoted to happiness, I often wonder whether I have achieved it. Overall, I think I have and my belief that I held the keys to its secret has helped immeasurably.
Ironically, my unhappiest moment was when I achieved what most would consider success. When my book Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happiness took off, I had to fight complacency and reclaim serenity. As I get older, I find myself reinventing challenges. I gave a lecture to businessmen during the recession of the 1990s. What affected them most, they said, was an inability to nurture the young talent they believed would be their legacy. When I asked Dr Jonas E. Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, his main aim in life, he answered “to become a good ancestor”. The ultimate challenge, perhaps, and one to which, in old age, I rise willingly.
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Maths isn't just for textbooks
Independent Online Edition > Features : app4
"Maths isn't just for textbooks
Nowadays it's the inspiration for films, novels and art. But where do footballers' shirts enter the equation?"
By Boyd Tonkin
Published: 15 August 2005
The progress of mathematics abounds in tall tales and unlikely stories. And they don't come much more improbable than this. Outside, the July sun of the Aegean is hammering down on a coastal hotel in Mykonos. Inside, America's most charismatic statistician addresses a gathering that can boast several of the world's top mathematicians as well as a motley assortment of science writers, novelists, historians and theatre people. And what is he doing? He's performing a card trick.
Persi Diaconis, now of Stanford and Harvard Universities, once made his living this way. As a teenage prodigy, he toured the US as junior sidekick to one of the most famous magicians of the age. Then, via gamblers' after-hours talk of odds and probability, the sorcerer's apprentice caught the maths bug and took the first steps towards a career in another sort of spotlight. Diaconis was the expert who unmasked the delusions behind the so-called "Bible Codes" (which supposedly revealed hidden meanings within the text), but today in the Aegean, he's merely baffling his peers.
He chucks a deck of cards towards this highly qualified audience. It's caught by Timothy Gowers, a professor at Cambridge and recipient of a Fields Medal - the maths equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Gowers cuts the pack, takes the top card, then passes it to a neighbouring titan, who himself passes it on. After five cuts, Diaconis asks holders of red-suited cards to stand up. Two do. He then proceeds to tell all five punters exactly which card they hold. Cue a burst of awestruck applause.
How does he do it? Diaconis quips that "magicians aren't allowed to explain their secrets and mathematicians can't explain their secrets". But he tries. The root of card-recognition tricks lies in the De Bruijn Sequences, a branch of what's called "combinatorics" - a discipline with a long history that stretches from the counting patterns used in Indian classical music to the coded instructions for robots used today. The mathematicians grasp the theory easily enough, but the mind-boggling mental speed of the practice still confounds them, and me.
This is a taste ofthe first Mykonos conference on Mathematics and Narrative. Arranged by a group known as Thales and Friends, after the ancient Greek geometer and philosopher who reputedly measured the Pyramids, this unprecedented project to bring scientists and storytellers together was the brainchild of the polymath Apostolos Doxiadis. Worried that the maths he loves has drifted too far out of the cultural mainstream, Doxiadis has already done more than his share of bridge-building. His novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Faber) helps to convey the life-enhancing, and life-consuming, attraction of pure mathematical research.
Rebecca Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist who writes in her fiction about the "essentially tragic" lives of mathematicians, called her pet subjects "as bad as novelists in terms of ego". John Allen Paulos, who writes funny and instructive books, such as Innumeracy, about the misuse of statistics in the media, jokes: "How do you define an extravert mathematician? Someone who looks at your shoes when he's talking to you."
If you want evidence of the problem that confronts them, look no further than today's newspapers. Millions of people now enjoy Sudoku puzzles. Forget the pseudo-Japanese baloney: sudoku grids are a version of the Latin Square created by the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the late 18th century. Yet these legions of amateur problem-solvers tackle puzzles accompanied by the absurd assertion that "no maths is involved". In parts of popular culture, mathematics has become not so much the love that dare not speak its name as the love that doesn't even know its name.
So, as the sun blazed and the sea sparkled off stage, we heard stories about the extraordinary rhythms of breakthrough and breakdown that punctuate the history of modern maths, and stories about the thinking and imagining that mathematicians do on the cutting edge of creation. John Barrow, another Cambridge professor, related the story of how his play Infinities reached the stage. Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford mathematician and Channel 4 pundit, delivered his multimedia gig about the mysteries of prime numbers and the long quest to prove Riemann's Hypothesis. The show took in David Beckham's Real Madrid shirt (a prime 23), some raucous audience participation and Professor du Sautoy himself on a surprisingly sweet trumpet.
Less noisily, Tim Gowers ended his plea for concreteness and compression in mathematical explanations with some favourite passages from Alan Hollinghurst, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen - to highlight the skills that good novelists have and most mathematicians lack.
Of course, some writers and producers have turned to the lives and the works of mathematicians for inspiration. A gifted populariser such as Simon Singh can now sell in the hundreds of thousands - as he did with Fermat's Last Theorem. Sylvia Nasar's bestselling biography of the game-theory pioneer John Nash, and his decades-long mental illness, led to the big-screen adaptation of A Beautiful Mind. This familiar, Rain Man model of the pattern-seeking maths prodigy as a recluse, an idiot savant, or downright barking mad, recurs often - for instance, in fictionalised portraits (such as Enigma) of the computer prophet and Bletchley Park cryptographer Alan Turing. And it even underlies Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, with its Asperger-afflicted teenage narrator, always ready to reel off a series of prime numbers.
Not surprisingly, real mathematicians have mixed feelings about mass-market yarns that present their domain as the stamping-ground of eccentrics, or even lunatics. But, for the most part, they applaud the endeavour to dramatise the human struggle of mathematical reasoning. Only one (absent) literary figure really fell foul of the Mykonos mob: the American writer David Foster Wallace, who in Everything and More wrote not a novel but a purported history of the mathematics of infinity. The computer-science guru Martin Davis counted "86 really egregious errors" in Wallace's book. "Are we so hard up for approval from the humanities that we have to accept this?" he thundered.
And yet the history of modern maths features such a wealth of near-incredible narratives that certain kinds of faction or docu-drama will exert a huge appeal. After all, this is a field that, early in the last century, plunged into a "foundational crisis" that left its finest minds believing that they stood not on solid rock but on shifting sand. Out of that collective breakdown grew ideas about general computing machines that began as the purest theory but ended up as the intellectual inspiration of almost everything we now do with technology. If mathematics counts as the art of reality, then you might argue that its artistic crisis gave birth to the modern world.
This is the theme of the mathematical narrative that Doxiadis and some colleagues will tell next. Collaborating with the Berkeley-based computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou and the Athenian artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna, Doxiadis has been working on a ground-breaking graphic novel about the development of 20th-century maths and its makers, from Russell and Hilbert to Gödel and Turing.
Due in 2007, Logicomix will tell an epic human, and political, story. On the one hand, Papadatos, the project's chief graphic artist, depicts the social turmoil, global warfare and deadly ideologies of the last century. On the other, the core story of maths - as with every other brand of creativity - will often come down to the journey of a single mind alone with its dreams, and its demons. "Like a mathematician," Papadatos notes, "a cartoonist works with paper, pens - and a waste-paper basket."
www.thalesandfriends.org
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Pyschoanalysis...
The Observer | Magazine | On the couch
Pyschoanalysis has been dismissed by certain medical and academic thinking, says Oliver James. But one man is making Freud's legacy fashionable again
Sunday August 14, 2005
The Observer
Traditionally, university psychology and medical psychiatry have found Freud's legacy unpalatable. Yet he has usually been proved right - and these establishments wrong - about many fundamentals: that we have an unconscious, that our care in the early years profoundly affects our adult lives and that therapy is the best treatment for most mental illnesses.
Peter Fonagy is the main reason these fundamentals are increasingly accepted in this country. As professor of psychoanalysis at University College London, he has created a whole department doing research that challenges the establishment on its own empirical, scientific grounds. Now, as co-director of the Anna Freud Centre (AFC), he is spreading practical therapeutic applications of these ideas, from SureStart (government help for low-income parents) to health services, contradicting the idea that analysis is only for the rich.
Fonagy's most remarkable achievement has been to work from within the establishment. For example, he was chair of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice) government committee examining the efficacy of antidepressants for teenagers. He showed that when unpublished drug company results were taken into account, the risks usually outweighed the advantages of such pills for teens (this finding reached the front page of the New York Times and his study was rated its 'paper of the year' by the Lancet).
Likewise, he is forcing the psychiatric establishment to accept the power of modern psychoanalytic treatments. For example, a series of studies (with Anthony Bateman and Marco Chiesa) proved that the most effective treatment for borderline personality disorder is a psychoanalytic therapy he specially developed.
Not only did it work, it was as cost-effective as conventional treatments (pills, cognitive therapy) because it avoided the consequences of failed treatment. Brief use of the initially cheaper but more superficial cognitive therapy for such patients can actually make them worse.
His department is also throwing down the gauntlet to psychologists who regard genes as all-important. With Pasco Fearon, he demonstrated through a twin study that our patterns of relationship are not based on genetics. His studies show that a mother's pattern of attachment when measured during pregnancy predicts the pattern her child will have towards her when it is 18 months old: 'it's the nurture, stoopid'.
His department has also added to the growing evidence that studies of brain anatomy and electro-chemistry support Freud's theories. For example, neuropsychologist Mark Solms studied the bit of the brain responsible for our instinctual appetites. He showed that when it is damaged, dreaming stops: so dreams do express motivations, as Freud claimed.
Especially, through the revamped AFC, Fonagy is dragging the establishment into the 21st century. The message to psychiatry, academic psychology and analysis is simple: much more research should start from studies of the impact of parental care on children; and, hard scientific evidence testing theories should underpin therapies.
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