John Cleese on Creativity

Pessimism is learnt by suggestions

Some folklore stick to heart as they are sweet embodiment of hard-learned lessons, that people want to pass on. I guess, the following Hazaragi folklore was everybody's favorite, when they were young and weren't getting why teachers are so annoying,

There was a Mullah in the village, who was teaching Quran to students but he was really hard, when it came to misspellings. He was punishing students by beating them with sticks and students were looking for a way to get rid of him. One of the students comes with a solution. Next morning, when they go to mosque, the Mullah asks as usual the students to come forward one by one and read aloud, their lessons. As the first student arrives, he asks Mullah, why  he looks so pale today? Does he feel fine? Mullah gets angry and beat him with stick and replies, I am perfectly fine. But all the students repeat the same questions on their turns. Mullah becomes curious that he might be looking pale as everyone is not only noticing it but inquiring about it. When the students leave, he looks himself in the mirror and finds to his amazement, that he really looks tired and pale. In coming days, the students repeat the same practice and each day that Mullah looks himself in the mirror, he finds that the paleness is becoming more evident. Moreover, by each passing day, he feels really tired and exhausted. So, he starts looking for a remedy. After a week or so of persistent suggestions, the Mullah really gets sick enough to not be able to come to mosque and students get rid of him. It was just a suggestive disease.

Well, it might appear only a folklore but by reading Jane Brody's article, "A Richer Life by Seeing Half Glass Full", it reminded me of this story that was my favorite, when I was young but didn't have the courage to practice it. In fact, we do it often to others, mostly without knowing it, by discouraging them with our "suggestive rationales". 

I understand that, genes play a role in optimism and pessimism but it is also now known, that most of them are learnt. So, if there are prevalent pessimism, no doubt, it will affect most of people so in an age, when people are tightly connected and messages pass very quickly, there is a need for a more responsible and more careful behavior in suggesting things. 

Inspired by Facebook?

Two modern side effects of rapid technological developments and related modern life styles have emerged as increasing number of obese people and addiction to social networking sites, especially Facebook. Recently, the role of the brain reward system in food addiction and social network addiction have become popular to explain a lot of whys in this regard. Although, researchers are trying to find the genetic basis for obesity but there are evidences for links between brain reward system and obesity. 

In "Your Brain on Facebook", David Rock discusses the link between our brain reward system and popularity of Facebook. Our brains are evolved to be social and don't miss a chance in thinking about others even if it gets a chance of few seconds to be not engaged. Facebook uses two aspects of our brain, thinking about others (connecting with others and what they do) and our brains reward system by its "Like" button. 

Although the reports like those of two previous paragraphs are amusing to learn about but my interest is in something else. If brain reward system is so manipulative of our behaviors that it can hurt our health, education and even social lives, then can the brain reward system be used for something more positive? In fact, the answer is Yes. It is not just food or the social networking that are addictive but also "things that we like to do" or make us feel good doing that are linked with brain's reward system. Just if we make them habit, then they become our real strength and even lead us to fulfill our dreams. In fact, brain is an amazing organ in the sense that it usually change the reality. The mental reality is usually not the same as the external reality and it is not the virtual reality that is mostly products of mental realities are so different and addictive. 

Just as Facebook uses two aspect of our brains, linking with others and brains reward system, if we design what we "like to do" to link with others then, it would definitely ending up  boosting our performances and sharpening of our skills.

The reason that, I am saying that we can use, the phenomenon of Facebook addiction, as a model to reinvent our behaviors, and use it in our advantage is because, Facebook has emerged as a parallel mental ecology to those of earlier ones like culture. By parallel, I mean, culture is still dominant force in shaping our behaviors however, the cross-cultural and self-reflective environment of Facebook is introducing new behaviors that are at times go beyond social norms.

This means, if we create a parallel environments that are more productive then consumptive environment like that of culture and Facebook, we can use it to our advantage. The brain's attention is a limited resource and if it is not managed well, it will be wasted mostly.

There are 200,000,000 neurons in the mouse brain and only very small fraction of them - about 10,000- are dopamine neurons. Despite of making a very small fraction of neuron, they are proved to be very powerful in shaping behaviors of the mouses.

A comment on neutrality

I really like to be neutral but I do feel that option is not available. In fact, neutrality is a self-deception, if it is not an intentional lie (Silence is not neutrality). The only thing that can be neutral is nature. Humans is not neutral even if they claim so... As it is a short comment on neutrality, so I try to exclude my wordings and include as much as I can of others words (It might not be a good practice to compliment my opinion with theirs but somehow, I thought it suits here) 

"There is no such thing as problem. It is situation"... I heard it is a Jamaican proverb (I am not sure as the wordings do not match?)..So, what if the situation that we are in, is much bigger than us, tied to millions of people, as are in political situations? What should be our response, as it is not the situations but our responses to them that define us? At least, neutrality is not an option. One of my favorite Pakistani drama artist, Sania Saeed - She has a well rounded, graceful personality and acts naturally- says, "Cars don't run on neutral gears (unless, you push or pull them - that is definitely not a good option-).. every acts are political even if one chooses to be neutral" ...

So what if the situation is bigger than a single person's capabilities? So far, I have seen two suggestions that I have liked; It is an opportunity to change ones' situation - "When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves"....Viktor E. Frankl - ....(We normally do not go for very bold and basic changes unless we do not run out of all others options)... Do not react hastily (From my personal experience, I can say that reactionary acts mostly backfire) ...

Well, as we do not have any scale for timing of response that distinguishes sanity from insanity, I like an alternative suggestion by Omar Khayam's (Famous Persian Poet) teacher to him, "For a boy to become man, he has to do three things, see things, write well and do not tell lie"... Seeing things help only for partial understanding of situations and to get more clearly, one needs to think and I don't see any better way for an organized thinking than writing...

And last do not worry (Just to calm down nerves)... The world is not going to end (Even, if it is ending for someone, others still have ways to make it a good one..  A charming example is "Internet users shower dying man with letters"  )..... George Soros says, "The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside."... I agree with that..

Just one thing more, the situations that we are in are mostly caused by us and even if the nature has a role in it, it stays neutral. So it is upon us to not be neutral... "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.".... Karl Sagan

So, in short, I think, situations are not natural and we can't be neutral, reactions are bad options are we have not to act alone and just for ourselves as we are tied together either we like it or not...

Saadat Hassan Manto’s Oxygen for Pakistan

What commonly known about him is that he was 35 years older than Pakistan, wrote neutrally about India-Pakistan partition and had freaked out the “nobles” with his “filthy” works like کھول دو    ;Open it - and       ٹھنڈا گوشت   ;Cold Meat – and died at age of 42 suffering from Cirrhosis and poverty. His often quoted reply to his critic, “If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers.”…

Frankly, I am not in a position to write about Saadat Hassan Manto because I am not familiar with all of his works. As a coincidence, I read some of the Manto’s stories when I was reading Khalil Gibran’s works and I found them very close to each other in the sense  that both were detached from their birthplaces, lived in poverty, somewhat tried to demystify the human characters but were very slow in their descriptions of their experiences (at least in stories that I read… and it is just my personal judgments and my judgments might be very partial ) and all these things cumulatively made me not to follow their works anymore. I feel that the main reason for my decision was that at those times, I was feeling a big gap in human achievements regarding human mind and other sciences. To me, mankind had failed to understand themselves in systematic manners as they have understood and organized their knowledge of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics, History and Social Sciences. The absence of a systematic understanding of human’s behaviors in general and human mind specifically have kept the doors of mystery still open. The patchy insights scattered through works of writers with good observations were leaving me with a choice to go after writers with more direct, simple but condensed observations. I didn’t have the patience to skim through thick piles of works to get some insights. So I was skipping writers with prolific use of words but with less condensed insights. Hassan Manto and Khalil Gibran were falling in this category for me…

OK, if I had not developed an interest in reading Manot then why am I describing him now?

People are rediscovering Manto

Two weeks ago, I was with my other classmates in the microscopy room to observe live anaerobic bacteria that we had cultured over almost in a month in the tubes with headspace of nitrogen to avoid oxygen exposures. Oxygen is poisonous to anaerobes. After placing a drop of culture on slide, we were observing the anaerobic bacteria freaking out by exposure to oxygen and were running randomly here and there. Observing this on the large screen, it was first time I was feeling sorry for those bacteria and meanwhile revisiting my perspective about the discoverer of Penicillin (weapon of mass destruction for bacteria)…

Pakistan soon after independence intentionally moved towards making the Pakistani society anaerobic (conservative) and writers like Saadat Hassan Manto, whose stories were making holes in this bubble were freaking out those who were considering oxygen (a direct and demystified observations) toxic for society in general. Now, that society have totally run out of oxygen and people are suffocating… there are some strong desires to make some oxygen available. But oxygen is already so scarce.

Saadat Hassan Manto died on spring of 1955 just when Pakistan was only 8 years old. This year (2012), Hassan Manto has become 100 years old and Pakistan has become 65 years old. It is no surprise that, why Pakistan has failed to produce another Hassan Manto in more than half a century after his death? The answer is simple. In a society that “self-deception” is more than welcomed and contradictions are rationalized under name of honor and loyalty, one can’t expect the blossom of healthy and courageous minds. Manto was able to observe and write in the earlier days, when Pakistani society still had the spirit and openness of British India but that unfortunately didn’t last long.

I see mushrooming of articles, audio and video reports in English newspapers and on BBC Urdu and I understand the strong desire for come back of Manto but the chances look bleak unless the present bubble of “self-deception” bursts and people once again breathe in an open atmosphere…  

                

                                      BBC Urdu celebrates Manto's 100 birthDay