Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  His newest book, Hysteria: The Biography, is a volume in our series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at for the next few week (read previous posts in this series here).  Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment. In the excerpt below Scull looks at the spectacle hysteria patients provided, specifically the displays by Jean-Martin Charcot.

It was Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93), the august Professor of Pathological Anatomy and later of Diseases of the Nervous System of the Paris Medical Faculty, the leading international neurologist of the nineteenth century, who made hysteria a spectacle and a circus.  It was a scandalous circus that attracted the attention of  tout Paris, one that regularly featured scantily clad women disporting themselves in unmistakably erotic cataleptic poses, or writhing and moaning in ways that mimicked orgasms on a public stage, before an understandably rapt audience – an audience soon drawn not just from the highest ranks of French society, but also from those attracted to Paris by news of these extraordinary Leçons du Mardi.  The photographs of these occasions, captured in carefully staged arrangements before the supposedly objective lens of the camera and thus transmuted into indelible visual representations for a vastly greater virtual audience, have survived for later generations to inspect, and have become iconic images of a disorder seen as at once sexual and feminine.

Yet Charcot thought of himself, and was acknowledged by his contemporaries, to be no nineteenth-century Mesmer, no marginal charlatan catering to depraved appetites (among patients and audience alike), but on the contrary a sober scientists, a man of genius, one of the leading contributors to the newly emerging science of the brain.  His accomplishments first in internal medicine and then as a neurologist were legion, and had brought him czars and princes, great merchants and bankers, as his clients, in the process making him a very rich man.  And, while his most famous patients were women, he personally insisted…that hysteria was not solely a female malady, but, on the contrary, could be diagnosed and detected among the male of the species.  Hysteria was, he confidently declared, a disorder of the nervous system, not of the female reproductive organs.  It was, moreover, as real and as somatic a disease as any of the other neurological catastrophes he had earlier elucidated….

…Charcot had his favorites, those who returned time and again to put on multiple, often increasingly elaborate, performances.  None was more famous than Blanche Wittman, the queen of hysterics, a performer who luxuriated in her role.  Perhaps the most famous single image of a hysterical patient is an 1887 painting by André Brouillet that captures Charcot presenting Blanche, his pet hysteric, to members of his neurological service.  She swoons over the outstretched arm of his assistant, Joseph Babinski, her pelvis thrust forward, her breasts barely covered by her blouse and pointing suggestively toward the professor, her head twisted to the side and her face contorted in what looks like the throes of orgasm.  (Freud kept a copy of this painting, which dates from 1887, in his study in Vienna, and again in London.)

Wittman was admitted to the Salpêtrière in 1878, and remained there for some sixteen years, performing on command.  After her discharge, she became Marie Curie’s laboratory assistant, and eventually was poisoned by the radium she was working with. In consequence, both legs and her left arm had to be amputated…

The Iconographies, the collections of photographs of the performers who made up the circus, circulated widely and disseminated the Charcotian vision of hysteria to an audience who could only virtually witness the Parisian scene.  They did much to fix the image of hysteria in the public mind, and perhaps to spread suggestively what purported to be neutral, naturalistic recording of a neuropathic disorder.  The photograph (at least before the age of digital manipulation) carried the illusion of providing the truth, a direct and unmediated portrait or even a mirror of nature, the instantaneous representation of what passed before the lens of the camera.  But the limitations of lighting, and the technical requirements of picture-taking with wet collodion plates, or even the later silver gelatino-bromide coating, made for long exposures, sometimes as long as twenty minutes per plate.  Perhaps appropriately, given that Charcot’s posthumous critics…viewed his clinical demonstrations as fraudulent, the “objective” photographs that recorded the pathologies were themselves necessarily staged, posed, and manufactured constructions whose status as “facts” is as slippery as the live demonstrations they purport to record.

Charcot was not alone in exploiting his patients, in treating them as so many specimens rather than as suffering human beings.  The disdain and the callousness were a feature of the whole clinico-pathological tradition, something that American medical students visiting Paris for instruction viewed with dismay as early as the 1830s.  As feminist historians focused their attentions on hysteria as a female complaint, and perhaps the product, as some them speculated, of an inchoate, inarticulate protest against the roles in which Victorian women were imprisoned, Charcot’s serial exploitations of these poor creatures, his willingness to expose them repeatedly to the prurient gaze of his audience at whatever cost to their emotional well-being drew fierce criticism and reproof.  But those same moral failings were visible to Charcot’s contemporaries, and were the subject of bitter commentary, even from the literary figures such as Tolstoy and de Maupassant.  A Madame Renooz, in the pages of the Revue scientifique des femmes, protested about his “sort of vivisection of women under the pretext of studying a disease for which he knows neither the cause nor the treatment.”…

…And yet Charcot, as the feminist historian Elaine Showalter acknowledges, cannot be easily typecast as a crude misogynist, for he adopted liberal positions by the standards of his time on women’s rights, and his students and externs included women training for the medical profession.  Moreover, one of Charcot’s more striking departures from the conventional wisdom of his time had been his insistence that hysteria was not just a female disease…

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University.  She was recently named one of 2009’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by UTNE Reader. Her most recent book, Staring: How We Look captures the stimulating combination of symbolic, material and emotional factors that make staring so irresistible while endeavoring to shift the usual response to staring, shame, into an engaged self-consideration.  In the original post below she looks at end-of-life issues and the health care debate.

Democracy thrives on polarized debates, theatrical performances that try to convince citizens about how to spend their dollars and place their votes. Statements get especially extravagant when we are discussing important policy issues that affect such sensitive personal issues as how we take care of each other when we are sick, vulnerable, hurt, or dying. Our recent debate about health care has flared especially intensely about end-of-life and life ending issues. That the inevitable outcome of life is death is a hard pill for us all to swallow. Health maintenance is a more comfortable and cheerful topic for us ever optimistic Americans than the uncompromising truth of our impending mortality.

One of the more vivid concepts to emerge from the health care debate is the provocative concept of pulling the plug on granny. The image of our granny shorn from life-sustaining sustenance, care, and support cuts both ways, calling up tender sympathy in some and tough pragmatism in others. A forlorn granny is code for the larger issue of how to make difficult decisions about not just distributing resources but who we think deserves those resources. In other words, the figure of granny lets us consider who we think of as deserving and valued fellow citizens, of who we want to be in our human community.

One way we frame this is through a cost-benefit analysis about what we imagine to be high or low quality of life. One reason we might pull the plug on granny is that the quality of her life seems low to those of us who are not old sick, or disabled. Moreover, we understand Granny to be using up more resources than she is contributing to society. People on both sides of the healthcare debate have brought forward the most extravagant example from history of where evaluating the quality of other people’s lives can lead. Between 1939 and 1942, the Nazi regime undertook an official euthanasia program. More recently questions of life quality and resource distribution sprang forward with the revelation that a number of grannies and other significantly disabled people at a hospital in New Orleans might have been euthanized during the Katrina disaster. These troubling occurrences, one then and the other now, remind us of the continuing communal struggle to decide what the Democratic premise of equality among citizens might actually mean.

The contemporary British version of our American granny is the physicist Stephen Hawking, whose imagined low quality of life based on his significant disability starkly contrasts with the value of his contribution as a brilliant scientist. Hawking is an exception, of course, to the usual way we consider the grannies of the world. Those who offered up Hawking has an example of a person whose plug might be pulled by a reformed healthcare system were surprised when Hawking claimed that the British healthcare system have provided him with the plugs he needed for a quality life through which he made his important contributions.

The late Harriet McBryde Johnson, who was a civil rights attorney and advocate for disability rights, made public a discussion about plug pulling with the Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, who has advocated euthanizing disabled newborns as a form of moral pragmatism when parents get a child they would prefer not to have. Johnson, who like Hawking lives with significant disabilities, put herself forward in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in 2003 to present the public with the story of how someone we imagine us having a very low quality of life in fact has a very high quality of life. In doing so, she offered us an opportunity to think through how we distribute resources and what a valuable life might be.

People like Stephen Hawking and Harriet McBryde Johnson–as well as our frail grannies, Katrina victims, and disabled German citizens under fascism– remind us that the conversation about who should and should not be in the world– to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase– is an urgent and confusing one today.

Today’s healthcare debate and it’s polarizing icons points to a less dramatic and often unnoticed contradiction between two opposing currents in American culture today. On the one hand is the endeavor to integrate people with disabilities into the public world by creating an accessible, barrier free material environment. On the other hand, is the medical mission to eliminate people with disabilities from the human community. What we might call the “integration initiative” arises from a rights-based understanding of disability and occurs through legislative and policy mandates such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and 2009. In contrast, the “elimination initiative” arises from the idea that social improvement requires elimination of devalued human qualities and cons of people in the interest of reducing human suffering and increasing life quality and building a more desirable citizenry.

This contradiction in beliefs has filled the contemporary American public landscape with both fewer and more people with disabilities. For instance, wheelchair users now enter public spaces, transportation, employment, and commercial culture on a scale impossible before the legal mandates of the 1970s began to change the built environment. At the same time, medical technologies increasingly identify and eliminate through selective reproductive procedures potential wheelchair users born with traits such as spina bifida, which often requires wheelchair use for effective mobility. In another example, people with developmental and cognitive disabilities are now educated in integrated, mainstream educational settings which accommodate their educational needs rather than in segregated institutions. Simultaneously, medical technology routinely selects fetuses with Down syndrome or trisomy 21 in pregnancies to evaluate for termination.

The point is that not just what we do with granny’s plugs but how we imagine granny’s life reaches out beyond the nursing home room and into our shared world, affecting who we are and want to be as a human community.

Frederick Grinnell is Professor of Cell Biology and founder of the Program in Ethics in Science and Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. His newest book, Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic offers an insider’s view of real-life scientific practice. Grinnell demystifies the textbook model of a linear “scientific method,” suggesting instead a contextual understanding of science. Scientists do not work in objective isolation, he argues, but are motivated by interest and passions.  In the article below he looks at a recent article in Nature about defining death.  Read previous posts by Grinnell here and visit his website here.

An editorial in Nature (1 October, 2009) entitled “Delimiting death” supports the proposal to reconsider the legal definition of death. “Ideally,” writes the Nature editor, “the law should be changed to describe more accurately and honestly the way that death is determined in clinical practice.” The current definition uses the criteria: (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. However, assessing ‘irreversible’, ‘all functions’ and ‘entire brain’ becomes to some degree a matter of physician judgment. In cases involving organ procurement for transplantation, the physician is under pressure to obtain donor organs that are as fresh as possible. The situation becomes conflicted. “Physicians know that when they declare that someone on life support is dead, they are usually obeying the spirit, but not the letter, of this law. And many are feeling increasingly uncomfortable about it.”

The Nature piece might be dismissed as adding nothing new to the discussion except for the provocative, two part, conceptual definition of death that the editor proposes: (1) “the person is no longer there” and (2) “can never be made to return.” The first part of this definition helps makes clear the symmetry between the most contentious issues of modern bioethics – endings and beginnings of life. The person is no longer there; we can harvest the body for organs. The person is not yet there; we can harvest the body (embryo) for stem cells.

Franz Rosenzweig’s metaphorical description of death — “His I would be only an It if it were to die.” –no longer is just a metaphor. The meaning of human death emerges according to the organization of human life. For a newly formed embryo, death means loss of viability of a single cell. After several cell divisions, loss of viability of a single cell no longer equals death. Rather, death becomes equivalent to development arrest. After 3-4 months of gestation, once the cardiovascular system develops, it becomes reasonable to speak of cardiovascular death. After 6-7 months, once the central nervous system develops, it becomes reasonable to speak of brain death. After development of modern life support systems, once machines can replace heart and brain functions, it becomes reasonable to speak of the person and the body as separated entities. Modern medical technology has succeeded in separating the I from the “living” It. Modern social thinking remains conflicted about accepting this separation.

Using Nature’s conceptual definition of death as a point of departure is unlikely to produce a more easily implemented legal definition of death for two reasons. First, nobody knows the answer to the question “Where is the person?” Indeed, trying to answer this question has become the central focus of cognitive neuroscience research with no consensus in sight except that – which would return us to the current definition of death — the person will be gone after cessation of brain function. Those who support using human embryos for research up to 14 days of embryo life select 14 days not because they know when the person has arrived but rather because they agree that before day 14 the person could not yet have arrived. Second, both from technical and practical points of view, the statement “can never be made to return” will add the word ‘never’ to the ambiguous list of other terms, i.e., irreversible, all functions and entire brain, about which the Nature editor complains. Therefore, given the inherent ambiguity, trying to decide the moment of an organ donor’s death with certainty will continue to have the potential to create a conflicted (or so it might feel) situation of choosing to sacrifice one life to save another. Clinical judgment still will be required as always is the case in the practice of clinical medicine.

If changing the legal definition of death cannot solve the practical problem, is there an alternative? One approach might be to change the informed consent process so as to involve organ donors more explicitly in the choosing process. Some donors will want to gift their organs only after certainty of death. Their wishes oblige physicians to act cautiously in declaring death, even if it means potentially reducing the value of the organs. However, other donors might view themselves as more involved participants whose advanced directives encourage their physicians to act to maintain the value of their organs, even if doing so means instructing the physician to obey the spirit and not necessarily the letter of the law. Instead of deriving a new definition of life’s end as proposed by the Nature editorial, we should aim for better public understanding of how modern medical technology has made defining life’s end so difficult.

Joanna, Intern

In The Thought that Counts: A Firsthand Account of One Teenager’s Experience with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Jared Douglas Kant tells the story of how he was diagnosed with OCD at the age of 11 and dealt with the disease as an adolescent. Kant is a Clinical Research Assistant at the Massachusetts General Hospital Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Clinic and Research Unit. Written alongside psychologist Martin Franklin Ph.D., Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, & Clinical Director, Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, and science writer Linda Wasmer Andrews, a freelance health and psychology writer, The Thought that Counts serves as a guide for teenagers struggling with OCD and is part of the Adolescent Mental Health Initiative series created through a partnership with The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. In the following excerpt, Kant describes his new understanding of obsession in light of his struggles with OCD.

When I was younger, the word “obsession” made me think of infatuation. If a boy fell head over heels for a girl, spending an extraordinary amount of time and energy daydreaming about her and hanging on her every word, people would say, “He’s obsessed with that girl.” Naturally, it didn’t occur to me to use the same word to describe the peculiar thoughts I was having. But as I later realized, there’s a big difference between the everyday meaning of obsession and the scientific definition.

In scientific terms, an obsession is a recurring thought or mental image that seems intrusive and inappropriate, and that causes anxiety and distress. It’s different from simply being preoccupied with a cute classmate or a favorite hobby, because even after obsessive thoughts start causing serious problems, the person feels powerless to stop thinking them. At some point, the person realizes that the thoughts are controlling him or her instead of the other way around.

Obsessive thoughts aren’t just exaggerated worries about real-life concerns. Instead, they’re overblown fears and anxieties with little basis in reality. Yet once these thoughts push their way into someone’s mind, they refuse to leave no matter how hard the person tries to push them out.

Consider my obsession with images of disease, for instance. Flipping through magazines as a boy, I sometimes came across disturbing images of plague and pestilence, such as flies buzzing over open sores. When I saw such pictures, I carefully avoided touching them. Occasionally, though, I would make a mistake. My finger would drag across the ink on the page until it hit one of the infected people. Whenever this happened, I screamed inside. I ran to the bathroom, slathered myself in soap, and turned the hot water up to boil. I was steaming, and I must have looked like a lobster by the time I emerged from the bathroom.

My reaction to touching the images illustrates another critical point: Obsessive thoughts lead to intense anxiety about something bad or harmful that the person fears will occur. The anxiety is so strong that the person feels compelled to do something – anything – to get relief and ward off the feared consequence. That’s how compulsions, such as my excessive hand-washing, are born. From a scientific standpoint, then, a compulsion is a repeated act, either behavioral or mental, that a person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession, to keep something bad from happening or to reduce the associated distress.

Dr. Karen Dill is a social psychologist who studies mass media, particularly violence, gender, and racial stereotyping, as well as positive aspects of media.  Her new book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence, argues against the premise that just because we understand that mass media stories are fantasies, they cannot affect our realities.  In the excerpt below Dill introduces her argument, showing us how fantasy can indeed influence reality.

When I discuss the effects of exposure to mass media with various audiences, one of the comments I hear most often is that anyone old enough to “know the difference between fantasy and reality” is not affected by media content. In other words, fictional stories do not influence us because we “know they are not real.”  This fantasy/ reality argument represents a major misunderstanding of the psychology of the media…

First, let’s look more closely at the words “fantasy” and “reality.”  When an adult says she knows the difference between fantasy and reality, how is she defining each word?  I think by fantasy she means fiction.  According to dictionary.com, the word “fiction” has a variety of meanings.  Fiction can mean a creation or an invention of the imagination.  Fiction can mean a lie…When someone says media do not affect him because he knows the difference between fantasy and reality, I think he means by “reality” that people and situations on TV are contrived or invented.  We know, for example, that the TV show Friends was a fictional story about the relationships and exploits of a group of twenty-somethings.  In what ways is the story based in fiction rather than fact?  Well, the adult audience is aware that the people in the stories are actors who are paid to play parts… The friends’ dialogue is the creation of professional writers.

…When we watch a fictional TV show, we’re essentially imagining “what if” these were real people and these situations and events really took place… to the extent that we believe these characters and their circumstances and relationships are plausible and valuable, we take an interest in them.  To the extent that we buy into the fantasy, we are drawn into the show.

So where does the reality come in and what is a more meaningful definition of “reality ” in this context?  The reality of a fictional story is not whether it is fantasy or a creation; it is whether it is believable and attractive…  Paradoxically then, the best kind of fantasies are the ones that strike us as in some way real or genuine.  I think one of the joys of experiencing really good fantasy and fiction is the very fact that they allow us to imagine “what if”- to feel as though a very interesting or gratifying story could be true.

…Studies have shown that if you build false information into a fictional narrative, people actually come to believe the false information.  For example, in one study, German college students read a fictional story called “The Kidnapping” into which either true or false information had been inserted.  A control…group read a comparable story without the assertions inserted.  One true assertion was that exercise strengthens one’s heart and lungs.  The false assertion was this statement’s opposite – that exercise weakens your heart and lungs.  Results showed that the college students were persuaded by the factual information in the story regardless of whether the information was true or false… These researchers also studied a phenomenon called the sleeper effect – that persuasion through fictional narratives increases over time as the source of the information becomes remote.  While at first the students’ confidence in their newly formed attitudes was relatively low, two weeks later their confidence had returned to baseline levels.  What this research shows is that we can be persuaded to believe false information that is inserted into a fictional story.  Also, over time, we forget where we learned this information and our confidence in its truth increases…

The theory explaining why people are persuaded by information in fictional stories is called transportation.  People reading a book, watching a movie or TV show, or playing a video game become transported, swept up, or lost in the story, even feeling like they themselves are part of the story.  This is one of the appealing properties of media.. When a fictional story transports us, we are persuaded rather uncritically because transportation decreases counterarguing (questioning assertions) and increases connections with the characters and the sense that the story has a reality to it.  Engaging with a story means we have suspended our disbelief, and this facilitates our persuasion to points of view embedded in the story…

This discussion of fantasy and reality reminds me of a funny story line from the movie Galaxy Quest.  Galaxy Quest is a good-natured spoof of popular science-fiction and its fans.  Basically, Galaxy Quest asks what if Star Trek were real?  In the film, the actors who play science fiction characters become embroiled in a real-life encounter with aliens and spaceships… the “commander” enlists the help of some extremely devoted fans he’s met at a sci-fi convention.  Earlier in the story the fans had indicated that they knew the spaceship and its crew’s adventures weren’t real.  However, when the commander needs their help, he tells them the news that those things that were supposed to fantasy really are real…I think fans of Star Trek…found this scene amusing because they’ve personally experienced what it’s like not only to wish that the fictional universe really existed but actually found it so compelling that somewhere deep in their psyches it really is real to them..

Speaking of Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played the role of Lt. Uhuru on the original series, often speaks of another kind of reality her appearance on the show created.  In the fictional universe of Star Trek, people believed in the notions of interracial harmony and equality.  The ship’s officers who were form a variety of racial backgrounds exemplified these values.  Nichols the actress has told of a conversation she had with late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which she told him she was thinking of quitting the show.  Dr. King reportedly responded that she could not because her being in a respected position in this fictional story was affirming and uplifting for African Americans in America…having an African American officer on Star Trek was a real victory for civil rights.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University and the author of many books, the most recent being Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide.  Sunstein presents evidence that shows that when like-minded people talk to one another, they tend to become more extreme in their views than they were before.  He offers a path forward that can help us halt the drift tward unjustified extremism and broaden civic engagement in the public sphere.  In the excerpt below we learn about group polarization.

When people talk together, what happens?  Do group members compromise?  Do they move toward the middle of the tendencies of their individual members?  The answer is now clear, and it is not what intuition would suggest:  Groups go to extremes.  More precisely, members of a deliberating group usually end up at a more extreme position in the same general direction as their inclinations before deliberation began.

This is the phenomenon known as group polarization.  Group polarization is the typical pattern with deliberating groups.  It is not limited to particular periods, nations, or cultures.  On the contrary, group polarization has been found in hundreds of studies involving more than a dozen countries, including the United States, France, Afghanistan, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Germany.  It provides a clue to extremism of many different kinds.

Consider four examples:

1. White people who tend to show significant racial prejudice will show more racial prejudice after speaking with one another.  By contrast, white people who tend to show little racial prejudice will show less prejudice after speaking with one another.

2. Feminism becomes more attractive to women after they talk to one another – at least if the women who are talking begin with an inclination in favor of feminism.

3. Those who approve of an ongoing war effort, and think that the war is going well, become still more enthusiastic about that effort, and still more optimistic, after they talk together.

4. If investors begin with the belief that it is always best to invest in real estate, their eagerness to invest in real estate will grow as a result of discussions with one another.

In these and countless other cases, like-minded people tend to move to a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.  Suppose in this light that enclaves of people are inclined to rebellion or even violence and that they are separated from other groups.  They might move sharply in the direction of violence as a consequence of their self-segregation.  Political extremism is often a product of group polarization, and social segregation is a useful tool for producing polarization.

In fact, a good way to create an extremist group, or a cult of any kind, is to separate members from the rest of society.  The separation can occur physically or psychologically, by creating a sense of suspicion about nonmembers.  With such separation, the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.  Deliberating enclaves of like-minded people are often a breeding ground for extreme movements.  Terrorists are made, not born, and terrorist networks often operate in just this way.  As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.  But the point goes well beyond such domains.  Group polarization occurs in our daily lives; it involves our economic decisions, our evaluations of our neighbors, even our decisions about what to eat, what to drink, and where to live…

Arthur B. Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. His new book, with Kristin L. Wood, is Tools For Innovation which looks at the practical methods that support innovation and creative design, from different ways of thinking and conceptualizing to computer-based tools. In the post below, which originally appeared on Markman’s Psychology Today blog, we learn about how innovation can stem from old ideas made analogous to new problems.

If innovation is going to save the economy, it has to be repeatable. There has to be a consistent method for finding sources of good new ideas. The funny thing is, being creative requires using the knowledge you already have. New ideas are often old ideas wrapped in new clothing. This process of finding new outfits for old ideas is called analogy. Analogy is the ability to find similarities in two different areas of knowledge that don’t seem similar on the surface.

To get started here, let’s try a little exercise. Imagine you have finally started that exercise routine. You have been lifting weights a few times a week. Only now, you are going to have to travel frequently for your job. You don’t want your new exercise program to collapse, and you can’t assume that every hotel is going to have a fitness center. It is impractical to carry heavy weights in your baggage. What can you do?

Take a minute and see if you can come up with a solution.

If you’re like most people, when you’re asked to solve a new problem, it just isn’t clear where to begin. If you have never thought about this problem at all, you might be stuck. Trying to solve a new problem like this often makes you feel as if you’re stuck in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, and you’re not quite sure how to get around.

The trick to navigating the foreign country of a new problem is to try to find something else that is like the problem you’re currently trying to solve. To do that, though, you have to do a good job of really describing the problem you’re trying to solve.

What is the problem you’re solving in this example?

You want to have a set of weights that don’t have the weight or the bulk in them while you’re travelling, but can have the weight added at the time you want to use them. Notice, that what we’re doing here is to think about the problem more abstractly for a second. We’re not really talking much about the weight any more except as something to be added when it is going to be used.

Does this way of thinking about the problem help you at all?

What other kinds of things that you know about collapse for storage and carrying, but are filled when being used?

One example is an air mattress. A mattress needs to support the body, but that makes it bulky and hard to carry. An air mattress removes all of the bulk for storage, and then adds that support when it is going to be used by incorporating air, which is pretty widely available.

Air doesn’t have much weight, but water does. So, one way to create a set of weights that you can travel with is to have something that you can fill with water in your hotel room. After you exercise, you can just empty out the weights and store them for later.

These two solutions are analogous. An air mattress is for sleeping. It is big, and soft. It is bulky, but not heavy. Water weights are small and compact. They are heavy. They are used for lifting. They are similar only in the more abstract way that both of them can be transported because they collapse and are filled with their necessary material at the point of use.

The trick to using an analogy is to realize that there are already things that you know about that might help you to solve a new problem.Finding this innovative solution by analogy requires two things. First, the problem had to be described specifically enough to solve it. You’d be surprised how often you are trying to come up with a new solution to a problem and you haven’t really taken the time to make sure you know exactly what problem you’re trying to solve.

Second, you have to search for something else that has already solved that problem. Be willing to search far and wide for a solution. Sometimes, the solution to a problem might be another object or product that you have already encountered. Other times, there are often solutions to problems you’re trying to solve in nature…

I’ll talk more about innovation in my next post.

Arthur B. Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. His new book, with Kristin L. Wood, is Tools For Innovation which looks at the practical methods that support innovation and creative design, from different ways of thinking and conceptualizing to computer-based tools. In the post below, which originally appeared on Markman’s Psychology Today blog, we learn about how goals drive behavior.

Business magazines like Forbes, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, and economic forecasters are united in their belief that economic growth in the US will be driven by innovation. That is, the US and other major economic players will not grow by developing new products and key refinements of existing products that will drive new consumption. This is not news, really. Bringing new ideas to market has long been a centerpiece of economic growth. And that means that Psychology is crucial to the economy.

That’s right. Psychology.

Innovation is driven by new ideas. That means that creativity is at the heart of innovation, and so creativity will drive the economy.

Creativity seems mysterious. We love stories about mad geniuses striving alone in dark labs. We create myths about flashes of superhuman insight that lead to the solutions to difficult problems. We give credit for inventions to single individuals like Edison, Bell, and Marconi.

If creativity is mysterious, then we should be worried about the state of the economy. How can we count on creativity to create growth if it is mysterious and requires heroic figures to occur?

Happily, creativity is not a mystery. The creation of new ideas results from basic psychological mechanisms. Because those mechanisms are well-studied by psychologists, there is much that we can do to teach others how to become more creative. In addition, this knowledge provides us with ways to create tools to support that creativity.

In July of 2009, the book Tools for Innovation came out. I edited this book with my colleague Kris Wood, who is a mechanical engineer. We brought together psychologists, engineers, computer scientists, and people in business to write chapters about basic research that helps us to understand creativity and the tools that can be developed based on that research. In the next few posts, I’ll describe a few of the lessons from this book.

The first lesson comes from a chapter by Robert Weisberg from Temple University. He analyzes a number of examples of creativity, such as Edison’s creation of the kinetoscope (a precursor to the movie projector), Picasso’s creation of the painting Guernica, and the Wright brother’s development of the airplane. He uses these examples to break down a number of myths about innovation.
For example, we tend to give credit to a single individual for an invention. We all know, for example, that the Wright brothers invented the airplane. However, they were working within a larger world community of people who were all working on flying machines. They took note of other people’s failures, such as the death of inventor Otto Lilienthal, who was killed when his flying machine was caught in a gust of wind. This failure led the Wrights to assume that the pilot needed to be able to control the flight of the airplane.

The Wrights were bicycle makers before they started to make airplanes. So they had extensive experience with complicated mechanical devices. This expertise was important as they began to put together an actual device for flying.

Finally, the Wrights looked to the world around them for help in developing the control system for the airplane. Many groups focused on using what was known about steering boats to help steer a plane (that is why the fin on the back of a plane is called a ‘rudder’), but the Wrights read extensively about what was known about bird flight. They decided to have the control system of the plane warp the wings by analogy to what was known about the way that birds fly.

So, the Wright brothers were smart, and persistent, and diligent. They tested their designs carefully. Their invention helped pave the way toward a multibillion dollar industry. But this innovation did not come about because they did things that were beyond the grasp of mere mortals…

Cassie, Publicity

Anthony Scioli is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Keene State College. Henry Biller is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Rhode Island. Their new book, Hope in the Age of Anxiety, is a look at how we can be happy and healthy in a world filled with economic collapse, natural disasters, poverty, and the constant threat of terrorism. In this excerpt, they look at how finding meaning can positively affect your health.

What is meaning in life? Many lengthy philosophical essays have been written on this topic, but one of the most compelling descriptions can be found in a pithy five-page article written by philosopher Robert Baird. In Meaning in Life: Created or Discovered, Baird reduced the meaning-making process to three essential life tasks: cultivating depth and quality in your relationships, committing yourself to projects and goals, and fashioning stories that place your life in an ultimate context. Note that, once again, the big things in life come down to attachment, mastery, and survival, or in other words, hope. Perhaps this is why theologian Emil Brunner proclaimed: “What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life.”

Meaning in life is both a destination and a vehicle. As a destination, a meaningful life can be viewed as a desired end state or goal: every human being has a need to lead a life that makes sense to him or her on a personal level. As a vehicle, meaning making can pave the way to better health: being fully engaged in the flow of life and having a deep sense of purpose can make you more resistant to illness and extend your life. In both senses, the personal meaning in one’s life, like a potentially effective exercise program, usually requires some adjustment if it is to be sustained over time, and for many, that adjustment includes the incorporation of established traditions such as religious faith. But regardless, the meaning that one finds in life supports health because it solidifies hope.

Meaning as a health destination. Meaning is hardly a luxury item for a social animal endowed with prominent frontal lobes and a keen sense of future survival. Meaning is basic to human life. No amount of money or power can take its place. If these earthly gains sufficed, we would never see many of those who have them in spades destroy themselves with drugs, eating disorders, or other self-destructive behaviors. Horace Greeley put it well, “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident . . . riches take wings.”

Meaning as a vehicle to better health. Individuals infused with meaning are well anchored. They have strong relationships, a potent sense of mastery, and an unwavering sense of purpose. In short, they are brimming with hope. What are the health benefits of such deep centeredness? Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed that those of his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz who were able to sustain some sense of purpose were less likely to succumb to illness. More than even food or medical care, a meaning-oriented outlook preserved the immune systems of these survivors.

Psychologist Carol Ryff has been among those who believe that meaning and purpose in life reduces allostatic load, the wear and tear of biological reactivity to stress. To the extent that spiritual beliefs impart meaning, this may be why high religious involvement tends to be associated with fewer cardiovascular crises and greater longevity. In a sense, the meaning-centered individual is less likely to be tossed adrift by what Shakespeare dubbed the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Ryff and her colleagues tested the meaning hypothesis by studying 134 women, ages 61 to 91. They assessed both hedonic (joy and happiness) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning and purpose). Greater meaning and purpose, rather than more joy and happiness, emerged as the better health predictor. Specifically, those who reported greater eudaimonic well-being had lower levels of stress hormones and inflammatory cytokines as well as higher levels of HDL (”good” cholesterol). They also had a healthier body mass index.

The ability to derive meaning is also important for those already diagnosed with a serious illness. Denise Bowes of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and her colleagues conducted detailed interviews of nine women diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “Hope” and “finding meaning” were the two most important factors that determined perceived well-being. As one woman put it, “If you don’t have hope, then you don’t have anything really.”

The role of meaning as an illness buffer seems to be especially important for older individuals. One of us (A. S.), in collaboration with psychologist David McClelland, explored the impact of derived meaning, chronic illness, and age on reported morale in 80 younger (25 to 40) and 80 older (65 to 80) adults. The findings were fascinating. Older individuals were better able to derive meaning from experiences with illness than their younger counterparts. In addition, despite reporting twice as many chronic illnesses as the younger group, the older adults had significantly higher levels of morale. What accounted for this surprising finding? It appeared to be derived meaning. Among older adults, meaning was the strongest predictor of morale, exceeding by a factor of ten to one both the importance of age and the number or severity of chronic illnesses.

Purdy, Director of Publicity

Dr. Robert J. Wicks, author of Bounce:Living the Resilient Life, is also a professor at Loyola College in Maryland. In Bounce, Wicks suggests that simply becoming more self-aware can help us decrease stress and live life more fully. Below, OUP interviews Dr. Wicks about the importance of learning to live with resilience.  Read Wicks’s previous OUPblog post here.

OUP: Resilience seems so important to how you live your life but is it really that essential?

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: Physician and author Walker Percy in one of his novels poses the question: “What if you missed your life like a person misses a train?” Unfortunately, in today’s stressful world with multi-tasking being the norm of the day, this is easy to do—especially for those who fail to pay attention to the forces which strengthen our inner life and help us grow through and from the difficult experiences all of us encounter.

OUP: But can resilience be learned? Some people seem born resilient and others seem to have difficulties dealing with adversity almost from the time they are born.

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: You have a point. Some people do seem more resilient all the way from childhood. However, that is not the crucial issue for leading a fuller life. Each of us has a range of resilience—in other words, the ability to meet, learn from, and not be crushed by the challenges and stresses of life. This range is formed by heredity, early life experiences, current knowledge, and the level of motivation to meet life’s challenges and enjoy each day to the fullest—no matter what happens! However, of even more import than the different ranges people have is their conscious decision to maximize the ways in which they can become as resilient as possible.

OUP: Is part of this resiliency-training, learning ways to avoid stress?

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: Yes and no. Living a full life is more than the absence of negative occurrences or pressures. The sources of all stress cannot—and probably should not—be prevented. Yet, there are ways stress can be limited and, more importantly, as those who study resilience report, the way stress impacts us does not have to be totally negative. As a matter of fact, each of us has an opportunity to become deeper and more compassionate in response to the stressors in our lives if we are aware of some basic practices to: contain and understand stress; seek to be more mindful; are reasonably self-aware; and are interested in learning how to maintain a healthy sense of resilience and perspective.

OUP: How did you get so interested in the concept of “resilience”?

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: For almost 30 years I have dealt with a unique kind of darkness called “secondary stress”—the pressures experienced by persons who are in the healing and helping professions. In observing and working with physicians, nurses, psychologists, educators, relief workers, counselors, and persons in full time ministry, I have observed that especially among the most resilient in these groups, how they experience even the most difficult encounters in life is quite telling.

OUP: In a nutshell, what would be some of the more essential ways to maximize your “resiliency range?”

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: Improving your own self-awareness through using a daily de-briefing program, developing a realistic but comprehensive self-care program, understanding better the practice of “mindfulness”, applying the recent findings on positive psychology, and ensuring that 4 types of friends are present in your interpersonal network would all contribute to strengthening your personal and professional resiliency.

OUP: That last point about needing “4 types of friends” intrigues me. What types of friends are you referring to with respect to becoming more resilient?

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: We all know we need friends. Psychology has also long emphasized the need for an excellent interpersonal network. I think anthropologist Margaret Meade expressed well what everyone knows in their heart when she said, “One of the greatest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” However, who makes up your “personal community” is also an essential element. In my work I have found that for our interpersonal circle to be rich we need, at the very least, four “types” or “voices” present—since one friend may play more than one beneficial role at different points in our lives. These four types of friends include “the prophet” who asks us “What conscious and unconscious voices are guiding us in life?” They also include “the cheerleader” who is sympathetic and supportive, “the harasser” who teases us and helps us laugh at ourselves to avoid the emotional burnout that results from taking ourselves too seriously, and finally the inspirational guides who encourage us to gather all of the information we receive from others so we can put this feedback to good use.

OUP: You also mentioned that resilience can be enhanced by developing a daily debriefing program and a comprehensive approach to self care. Would you give us a very quick sense of what is involved in doing this?

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: In terms of a daily debriefing, I wanted persons to be able to use a similar approach to the one professional helpers use since it has such a long proven track record in allowing them to process their day’s interactions, let go of the daily emotional “hot spots” so these events don’t keep them up at night, and learn from the day’s encounters so this knowledge can deepen them as persons and professionals. If we take out time to become intrigued by our own behavior, thoughts, and feelings, we can avoid wasting energy on projecting all the blame on others, condemning ourselves or becoming discouraged when things don’t change in our lives immediately.

With respect to self-care, each of us needs to have a program or “protocol” that is both comprehensive and doable.

OUP: A final question I have for you is with respect to “mindfulness”. What exactly do you mean by this term and why is it so important with respect to resilience?

Dr. Robert J. Wicks: I remember once seeing by a garden a little sign that was covered with mud. When I scraped the mud away, I saw that it said, “There is always music in the garden amongst the trees…but your heart must be quiet to hear it.”

Psychology, philosophy, and many of the world spiritualities extol the benefits of time spent in silence and solitude. In addition, it is beneficial to have a sense of mindfulness—being in the present moment with a sense of openness—as we move through the day’s interpersonal encounters. Formal mindfulness or meditation can sharpen our sense of clarity about the life we are living and the choices we are making, enhance our attitude of simplicity, let us enjoy our relationship with ourselves more and, as I note further in Bounce, provide numerous other benefits.

The really good thing about mindfulness is that it can be learned. It just takes reflection on some basic guidelines and a willingness to try some simple steps for a few minutes each day. The results can be truly remarkable in how centered and aware we can become. It is really a cornerstone of resilience.

Q: Would you sum up for us the lessons you are hoping people learn from Bounce?

A: The range of resilience is different for each person based on a unique combination of hereditary, psychological and sociological factors. However, if we are truly interested in resilience, the goal is to find ways to maximize our own range of resilience, and in doing so, improve our quality of life and the ability to continually renew ourselves. In studying resilience and putting into practice some basic lessons, we can begin to recognize—as resilient helping professionals have—that it is not the amount of darkness in the world that matters. It is not even the amount of darkness in ourselves that matters. It is how we stand in that darkness that makes all the difference in how we are able to lead our lives.