In depth article about Burnout

There's a very in depth article directed from MindHack about Burnout.

Burnout was coined by psychotherapist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974, when it was used for social workers or caring professions. At that time, burnout was considered a noble affliction. Freudenberger analyzed the reason why those people who work to help others feel such way:

Because many of these people were idealists, and because they worked with the hardest-luck cases, they were highly susceptible to disillusionment. Those who burned out were not only physically and mentally exhausted; they were cynical, detached, convinced their efforts were worthless. They held themselves in contempt. Worse, they held their clients in contempt. They began to loathe the same people they originally sought to help.

However burnout has spread from caring professions to other sectors, often those prestigious professions such as wall street traders, professors, high level managers, lawyers and so on. Barry Faber, professor who researches burnout of teachers defines burn out as "the gap between expectation and reward"

In the study from Michigan University, they found younger surgeons have emotion exhaustion than older surgeons. The reason suspected is that

Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wal

They also found married people (as long as their marriages are good) and people with children burn out less than those who are not.

Our society is designed in a why people are fed with inflated expectations. Especially the rewarding system to lure young employees to work hard to get stock offers and climb higher. The intention is to make people to work harder, even to an extend that they can't physically or psychologically afford.

Ironically, burnout has turned the most potential people to opt out. Some companies now work to avoid losing these talents. Some researches found people from the most desired professions turn them into studying religion at the average age of 37.

Milton Moskowitz, co-author of Fortune magazine’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For,” keeps a mini-compendium of things that companies do to prevent burnout. Intel, for example, allows its employees to take an eight-week sabbatical once every seven years. (Of course, most Europeans take this much vacation every year, but still.) The managers at Boston Consulting Group place their consultants in a metaphorical “Red Zone” if they work 60 hours a week and send someone to come talk to them if the trend continues. And once a quarter, Dow Corning has a no-meetings week.

Where does this article lead us? I am not sure I can put myself in the burnout population. (they say its 10% of every profession in the US) But certainly I can see myself on the edge of becoming one on the list. (or already is?)

There are really things we need to ponder about. How to achieve the balance between losing our passion or losing our mind? Are we going to admit that comprise is a virtue? (anyway we often are disillusioned about what we should believe) If you're goal is to have a long way on what you believe in, it probably would be a better way to go.

Mirro Neurons 在文學上的意義

這樣子談也許太過牽強。

不過我還是想說一下。

我在看Umberto Eco的智慧女神魔法袋中，我的生命中的第一夜那章。他談到他去參觀西班的某個天文館，館方為了歡迎他，模擬了Eco出生那一天的星空。

他很感動地寫到：

重新再體驗一之，那種驚訝感受如此獨特讓人欲仙欲死，或許同樣的感受會發生在其他人身上，或許有一天會發生在所有人身上，但那片蒼穹，那些星星，重新回到那一刻那樣的排列組合，再一之屬於我，完全屬於我，與其它人無關。

看著這段文字，不禁讓人身歷其境地感受到在一個無光的夜晚看到滿天星斗的振撼與無盡感。

鏡像神經元談的是當我們看到別人的某些動作，我們腦部相對的動作區也會有反應。其它的研究則發現當我們僅在心理想像我們看到、聽到時，不需要真的有實體刺測，視覺區域與聽覺區域也會有反應。這樣推演下來文學所創造的經驗似乎是這樣的：

文字->想像->（鏡像神經）->腦中的情感網絡（到底是由心到身還是身到心目前尚未有定論）->個人感受

每每想到我們所經驗的種種不過是腦裏連結的展現，而並非對實體世界的「真實」理解，就對很多事情有了不同的看法。原來「記憶」並沒有真假之分。

She

I started to realize the difference between us.

She needs changes when things don't work out. If she can't change the specific things bothering her, she changes other stuff, as if there's a tremendous energy accumulated somewhere inside going to explode if nothing is done.

When a relationship broke up, she often cut her hairs. Then she has a house. Spending money doing different decorations here and there had saved her from mundane life. Since the world is designed in a way that things never work out the way we want, she also often changes her relationships. If she can't change anything outside, she changes something inside violently.

It's almost impossible to know when she started desiring such huge control of her life. Maybe it started when she moved out from her parents' place in senior high school. Oh... maybe it was even earlier when she took walks alone in school yard as age of 10, when other kids were just playing together at class breaks.

Is it possible that she had understood that she's deemed to be lonely. The world schema was built inside her that she was left unnoticed. Is it possible that she was so used to live in a one man's world, so she's so used to control the characters in such a closed world?

Every now and then I bump into her by accident. She seems to shrink a bit every time I meet her. I couldn't help pitying her when I see her tangled eye brow, messy hair and shabby outfit. I feel sorry that this world is so narrow, so uni-dimensioned that she's not meant for it. How much I wish I could introduce her a place where she can make friends and smile again.

What I can promise her is to keep searching for such a peaceful place with real blue sky and huge meadows. She can enjoy sunshine in every quiet afternoon. I just hope she won't be devoured by the huge black and void world inside here before I find the right place for her.

Dream of loosing a car

Had a vivid dream this morning before I woke up.

I saw the house where I lived before I worked in Shanghai. The house was rebuilt on a old brick house site of my grand parents'. I moved there since freshman, until I came back from Shanghai. I started to get to know the world when I moved there. I had my first heart break in the university. I lived with different roommates, got grant to study aboard, started a job in NGO after coming back from Edingurgh. I bought a car and went to work in electronic industry. My life avendture seemed start from there.

The place and time represents the first ten years when I started to build my onw self.

In the dream I had early this morning, I was moving things with some other people in the alley where the house is. It's an hill side apartment. There's an alley leading to the house from the main road. The alley is so narrow that only allows one car passing each time.

In my dream, there were many people that I am acquainted with. Everyone was so busy moving things. I went to drive my car inside the alley preparing for loading. There was another car after me going to do the same thing. I left the car door unlocked and got out to help moving.

After a while, I saw the car behind me driving in. It was odd since I knew my car blocked the alley. So I went out to find my car missing. We set out everywhere to look for the car. But its nowhere to find. I remember I am not so panicking but in some way confused.

I woke up and looked in the internet for dream interpretations. In the Dream Dictionary, it says:

Car To dream that you are driving a car symbolizes your ambition and your ability to navigate from one stage of your life to another. Consider how smooth or rough the car ride is - that suggests how easy or hard your path will be to your goals. Also consider whether you are driving the car or are merely a passenger because that indicates whether you take an active or passive role in your life. If you are a passenger, it can also mean your knowledge will earn you good fortune, especially if the car is expensive.

What about loosing a car if driving a car symbolizes the ambition and ability to navigate? Does that mean I lost my ambition and capability?

In Spitrillquill, it says:

LOST** The meaning of this dream is literal. You are lost in your life, adrift. Something is gone from your life -- Love, Career, Spirituality. The SETTING of your dream, where you are lost, holds the answers to your salvation....LOSING SOMETHING PRECIOUS is a variation of the LOST dream; the object lost being the key to the dream.

Given the current situation of my life, this dream seems a close representation of what might be really going on. I am not a superstitious persion. However the more I get to know the complexity of human brain, the more I believe what we experience now mostly has its related activities in the brain.

The internal experiences are the respresentation of the stimuli from external physical world. I believe dreams are also one kind of representations of the external world. What kind of representations are more true? It will be a difficult philosophical question.

How more are you aware of your self? Your brain might tell

Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness

How much are you aware of yourself?

When I start doing meditation, I often sense my body moving along my pulses. I could even see my leg moving with my heart beat when I am just merely siting with my leg cross. When I tie my hair back, I can feel it straining my head causing headache.

Even without doing any formal psychological test, I know I am a sensitive person. I can sense my mood changing with the amount of sun light. I know I tend to be moody when it's a gloomy day. No matter how hard I try, it's just hard to stay positive all the time.

I am always wondering what I did wrong to make me so sensitive to the external world. Can't I just be like those who don't care other people's responses, those who are so sure about themselves?

It turns out that I might have 'something' in my brain which makes me more 'aware' of myself. Researchers in the Institute of Neurology of University College London had discovered people who have bigger right anterior opercular region and anterior insula / OFC region can have better sense of their heart beat. (details refer to the original research) They also find positive correlation between the Hamilton anxiety scale and heart beat detection task.

What's the relation between senses of physical state and emotion experiences? It is a long standing theory proposed by William James and Carl Lange. It's called James-Lange theory of emotions. Briefly speaking, the theory suggests that our experience of emotion arises from our perception of body responses to external emotive stimuli.

This research is supportive to the James-Lange theory of emotion. It also extends its inference to the "personal emotional tendency". One can't help thinking that maybe we just can't get away the hardware structure of our brain.

There are some questions I would like to ask though:

1. The physical responses related to emotion are not only heart beats but also other responses. For people who are more aware of their heart beats, are they also more aware of other physical responses?
2. In the experiment, there's no emotional cues. Subjects are only asked to attend to their own heart beats. Will there be differences when emotional stimuli with different valence have different activation in the associate areas?
3. However how much is it determined innately? Are those areas developed after social interaction? What's the nature of neural plasticity in those areas?

Below is the abstract of the research

Influential theories of human emotion argue that subjective feeling states involve representation of bodily responses elicited by emotional events. Within this framework, individual differences in intensity of emotional experience reflect variation in sensitivity to internal bodily responses. We measured regional brain activity by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an interoceptive task wherein subjects judged the timing of their own heartbeats. We observed enhanced activity in insula, somatomotor and cingulate cortices. In right anterior insular/opercular cortex, neural activity predicted subjects' accuracy in the heartbeat detection task. Furthermore, local gray matter volume in the same region correlated with both interoceptive accuracy and subjective ratings of visceral awareness. Indices of negative emotional experience correlated with interoceptive accuracy across subjects. These findings indicate that right anterior insula supports a representation of visceral responses accessible to awareness, providing a substrate for subjective feeling states.

Self-destruction amygdala & Autism

News from nature: A hyperactive amygdala may cause its own self-destruction.

Madison 大學，Richard Davidson的研究團隊最近發表一項研究結果，表示自閉症患者的杏仁核較非自閉症患者小。杏仁核一向被稱為恐懼中樞，因為它在人類的恐懼情緒反應中扮演重要的角色。Autism的研究者發現患者在辨視人臉的情緒反應上有障礙，其中杏仁核的功能有關鍵性角色。

這個研究進一步地證實了一個假設，當腦部的一些功能過度工作（overworked），它會攻擊自己的細胞。

研究發現，杏仁核萎縮的程度與自閉症兒童罹患該病病的時間長度相關，而杏仁核萎縮的程度也與該病症的嚴重性有正向相關。

The results are consistent with the theory that a hyper-excitable amygdala in young autistic children may result in cell death and the shrinking of this part of the brain....

Research paper: Nacewicz BM, Dalton KM, Johnstone T, Long MT, McAuliff EM, Oakes TR, Alexander AL, Davidson RJ. Amygdala volume and nonverbal social impairment in adolescent and adult males with autism. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2006 Dec;63(12):1417-28.

The true peace

.. arises when one stops hoping.

Stephen Hawking 與 Moral Mind

聽到BBC today podcast 對物理學家Stephen Hawking 的專訪摘要（暫時沒有在網路上找到BBC自己的摘要，找到CBS也有這段訪問的部份摘要）。

這個專訪是由BBC的記者寫下他要問的問題，寄給Hawking，一天之後Hawking再把他的回答email回來，就這樣來來回回完成這個困難的專訪。

在BBC today裏摘錄的訪問裏提到，Dr. Hawking認為人類未來要生存的話，需要移民外太空，且是太陽系之外的星系，因為太陽系裏沒有人類可以居住的星球。

但是人類目前要旅行到太陽系外的星系所需要的時間，但人類用如阿波羅火箭旅行的速度到最近的太陽系外的星球要五萬年的時間，對這點Dr. Hawking說，如果使用了「using matter/antimatter annihilation」就可以用近乎光速的時間旅行，似乎移民外太空的遠景就會變成可能。

在摘錄的專訪裏，主持人問他關於別人對他的崇拜讓他幾乎成為科學界的牧師這件事的看法為何。Dr. Hawking的回答是，如果別的科學家對他的看法有不同的見解，別的科學家是會提出來的，而且科學是一個「group work」，每個科學家對科學家都只有對其貢獻一小部份。

聽著合成的聲音說出這些字眼，說實在的，還蠻令人感動的。

不過同事對Dr. Hawking的人格似乎有不同的看法，據說曾經與Dr. Hawking同校的台大物理老師對他的描述，似乎是個常因小事情而情緒激動（甚至於暴躁？），所以同事因為聽了老師談到的這些事情對Dr. Hawking沒有太好的觀感。聽到轉述的例子是如果他的輪椅在校園的通道上卡住的時候，有人想要去幫忙，就會被他大聲斥責。同事對於這樣只顧自己的自尊而不管輪椅卡住擋住後面人的通路這樣的事情非常地不以為然，而且認為大眾被媒體對他的包裝而誤導以為他是一位很和藹的人。

這裏的問題似乎是，一個人如果因為自己的特殊狀況，所以就不管大部份人的需求，是不是道德的。而如果一個人常有某些不道德的行為，我們可不可以說這個人就是一個不好的人？

這讓我想到ABC的All in the Mind 裏對「the Evolution of human morality」的討論裏談及moral grammer。哈佛大學心理學與演化生物學教授Marc Hauser最近出了一本書「Moral Minds - How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong」，認為像Chomsky建議的人類在本能裏就有文法規則一樣，道德也有內建的文法規則。

所以如果問一般人說，可不可以因為個人的特殊狀況，就不管別人的需求呢？我想大部份的人會說不可以（哈，像我也常覺得老闆因為個人情緒不穩定隨便發脾氣這種事情是很機車的）。會不會有人說看狀況呢？這種「看狀況」的說法是後天習得的還是也屬於天生的moral grammer的一部份呢?

說實在的，我並無法判斷Dr. Hawking在物理上面的成就。但是一個人可以在全身肌肉無法動作，無法跟正常人一樣地與其它人進行社會互動，所以有些奇怪的脾氣也是很正常的吧。因為畢竟他所經驗的世界和我們在正常狀況下所經驗的社會是很不同的吧，所以有些我們這些「有正常價值觀的正常人」不能理解的行為也是很正常吧。如果因為這些事情就否定了一個人的價值，其實也是很可惜的吧。那表示我們只能接受「正常社會」下面，有機會「正常」發展的人。另外是我們真的只能聽到關於他的「representation」吧，特別是距離我們愈遠的人，我們所聽到關於那個人的事實就經過愈多層的投射。

我們可以選擇因為事情興我們所經驗不同而進行價值評斷，我們也可以選擇試著用較寬鬆的態度去接納不在常模內的行為反應。但道德觀感如果涉及到人「天生」設計的「硬體」部份（現在很多心理學家跟神經科學家喜歡用hard-wired，表示是生物結構層面上的先天條件），我們仍可以選擇嗎？

也許傾向選擇用寬鬆態度的人也有某種奇怪的神經機制也說不定，所以讓這種人的行為落在常態之外，讓人覺得奇怪不合群？（不過最近看到Gutchess一篇關於不同文化的人，在視覺皮質裏對自然圖象的處理過程有些差異的研究，顯示文化可能會影響到非常早期的圖形處理過程，表示後天的一些因素有可能改變所謂的「hard wire」的部份）