the power of positive drinking

A friend of mine sent me this talk by Martin Seligman on happiness. I don't have as positive a view on the disease model as Seligman does, though I found the rest of the talk valuable and useful. The topic of the talk is that mental health professionals shouldn't just focus on making their patients less miserable but should help them achieve happiness. To this end Seligman and other researchers have been studying the different kinds of happiness, how people achieve them, and what the upsides and downsides of those approaches are.

Seligman divides happiness into three kinds. (There are hundreds of ways to be unhappy, but there are three ways to be happy!) There's the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life.

The pleasant life is the seeking of pleasurable experiences, things like good meals, good times with friends. People who achieve this kind of happiness are often very social. The problem is that these sorts of pleasures are hard to keep hold of.

The good life is the seeking to be at one with whatever you're doing, to be caught up in the "flow" of the activity. This is when you're engrossed in what you're doing, so that you're not really feeling anything at all.

The meaningful life is when you seek to be part of something larger than yourself. You're not looking for pleasure or to get lost in some activity. What's important is that your life serve a higher purpose.

I think everyone strives after all three of these to some degree, though one seems to predominate. (In my case it's the pursuit of the meaningful life.) And there are suggestions for how better to achieve your goal, depending on which path suits you best.

In general I like the idea of strategizing for happiness. Like Seligman, I don't believe the purpose of life is to simply decrease your misery. If all you want to do is decrease your misery, you'll probably succeed at that but nothing more. If your goal is to be happy, then you stand a better chance of being happy than if you never planned for it. In other words, accepting a limitation is a good indication that you'll never surpass it. It's one reason I'm against the disease model of mental health. It negatively impacts our expectations of ourselves and limits our possibilities.

It was novel to see someone approach the subject in a scientific way. Clinical and research psychology has largely been devoted to diagnosing and treating mental illness, which means that the entire field of positive psychology has been left for new agers, life coaches, and motivational speakers to address. While I don't think all of it is bunk, it has to be a turn-off for anyone sober-minded. And while I'd say I'm more into the power of positive drinking than positive-thinking, I am a pretty self-directed person, and I am interested in concrete things I can do to better understand myself and the ways in which I can succeed. So I found this talk rewarding for that reason.

personal genomics and the future of health care

There was something else interesting in this Steven Pinker article I linked the other day. I don't typically find myself agreeing with Pinker because even while he admits there are problems with behavioral genomics, he sticks to his guns nonetheless in claiming that almost all our behaviors are inherited. The findings of geneticists leave me more ambivalent and agnostic with regard to such claims. Nevertheless, he's always thought-provoking, and I found the following suggestion very interesting:

"Depending on who has access to the information, personal genomics could bring about national health insurance, leapfrogging decades of debate, because piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers, or in which at-risk customers can load up on lavish insurance."

Since one of my hobbies is trying to make social and political predictions from technological developments, I got excited when I read this.

It's a plausible idea. Private health insurance in the United States is currently based on the idea that private insurance companies don't know what's going to happen in the future, so they spread their risk across a large pool and bet on an average outcome between sick and healthy. This necessarily means that if you have a prior condition, you're going to have a hard time getting coverage. All other things being equal, an HMO will take a bet on you, but if they already know you're going to get sick, that's a different story. It's also the reason why a health insurance mandate was part of one of the health care bills last year. It seems unfair to make people pay for health insurance, but assuming the system is left the way it is (with health care provided through the free market), then that's the only way to control costs. You need to have everyone in the same basic pool so that the sick and the healthy average out. That's also part of the reason why health insurance premiums are going up by 39% for so many people in California. If healthy people opt out of health insurance because they don't think they need it, that shrinks the pool and leaves more unhealthy people in it. So the premium goes up.

On the face of it, it seems like, given the parameters of the current system, making your predispositions toward certain illnesses public would be a horrible idea. HMOs already want to deny coverage to those who have conditions. If they're able to see that you're a bad bet, because you have a 30% chance of developing Parkinson's Disease or a kind of cancer later in life, they're not going to give you coverage even if you are perfectly healthy right now. They'd be able to cherry pick those they wanted to cover and leave the rest of Americans without any insurance whatsoever. A dual-caste system would develop. Like in the science fiction movie Gattaca, there would be "valids" (who could acquire health insurance and possibly other goods in life with ease), and then there would be the "invalids" (who would be denied all those things).

The other possibility—which Pinker alludes to—is that such developments would make the current system impossible. If insurance providers were able to cherry-pick who they wanted, then presumably the system would become so radically unfair that people wouldn't stand for it anymore. Many of those uninsured Americans would also be voters, and they would demand from those they elect a more rational response to these technological developments.

I think it's difficult to make a prediction here. If I understand Pinker's claim, it seems to rest on the idea that people wouldn't tolerate something so unfair and irrational as allowing HMOs to arbitrarily decide who gets health care and who doesn't. Except if you think about it, people already do tolerate that and a lot more in this country. The electorate doesn't just seem indifferent to the idea of the free market deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Many of them feel that any alternative is actually evil. The shrill, persecuted tone of last year's protests and town hall meetings proves that. It doesn't matter to them that our neighbors to the north and our neighbors across the pond have a right to health care and haven't had to resort to howling at the moon and marrying snakes. People put up with and even seem to cheer on a lot of injustice already, even when there are rational alternatives. So I'm not comfortable with the argument that, given some technological development y, therefore social change x. You have to consider these (frankly weird) ideological factors that go into it, too.

Still, perhaps reality has a way of asserting itself after all. Good genes and bad genes are probably distributed evenly across the rich and the poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised. If a new technology has the power to impact not just those without power but also those who make decisions or can easily influence those who can make them, perhaps the irrationality of the system will translate into change in the real world. But the field of personal genomics in all likelihood will make just such a radical, all-encompassing impact. I think there are a lot of factors that will determine what the political and social upshot of all this is, but it's hard not to imagine it changing something fundamental in how we think about the distribution of health in our society.

10 year Blue Brain documentary

I found this today via http://kurzweilai.net:

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Henry Markram is attempting to reverse engineer an entire human brain, one neuron at a time. This piece is an introduction to director Noah Hutton's 10-year film-in-the-making that will chronicle the development of The Blue Brain Project, a landmark endeavor in modern neuroscience.

I think my favorite part of the mini documentary is the end where the music cuts out and you just hear the fans blowing in Blue Gene. So ominous!

I thought a task no less Herculean than modeling the human brain would elicit more enthusiasm from the people doing it, but I had to keep turning up the volume higher and higher. I've seen people speak with more enthusiasm about putting drywall up in a new housing development.

Still, this is one of those things like the Human Genome Project which, once completed, will usher in a revolution in medicine and (maybe far enough down the line) artificial intelligence. Of course people express skepticism over the Blue Brain project. The same thing happened with the Human Genome Project. "It's too complex." And then once it's done, they think "oh that wasn't such a big deal!"

On the other side you have people who are yahoos. I remember talking with an irritating relative of an ex years ago. He kept saying, "It's all genetic! Everything's genetic! Just wait until they finish the genome! It's all genetic!" I gently pointed out to him that the HGP had already been finished (I think this was in 2003). He kind of stared at me silently and then asked, "So what did they find?" "Well," I replied, "it's not all genetic!" You know, don't take up smoking again just yet!

Looking back, though, these are the major breakthroughs that make so many avenues of research and treatment possible. Just a few months ago researchers in San Diego sequenced lung cancer. Scientists will be able to sequence many more cancers over the course of the next few years. Less than 10 years after the sequencing of the human genome, personal genomics has become affordable. One can easily imagine a similar trajectory following the sequencing of the connectome.

Which is good news for those of us who are S-M-R-T, since it turns out the Alzheimers gene makes you a sharp crayon when you're younger. Ah, Mother Nature. Your sense of humor!