BackgroundHeavy media use has been linked to sleep problems in children, which may also extend to the infancy period. While international parent-advisory agencies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, advise no screen time before 18 months, parents often do not follow this recommendation. Research on Italian infants’ early access to media is sparse, and only very few studies have investigated links with sleeping habits.MethodTo address this gap, we examined concurrent associations between parent-reported surveys of child technology use (...) and sleeping patterns. The Italian version of the 60 item Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure Survey, developed as part of a larger international study,, the Brief Screening Questionnaire for Infant Sleep Problems Sadeh, 2004) were completed online by 264 Italian parents of 8- to 36-month-olds and a subset completed the Parenting Stress Index Abidin, 1995) between April 2017 and April 2018.ResultsMore devices located in the child’s room and the more time spent watching TV or using an iPad were associated with less hours of sleep at night. Furthermore, more time spent watching TV or using a smartphone, as well as the number of devices in the room was associated with going to sleep later at night. Instrumental media use was associated with less sleep.ConclusionLike other countries, Italian infants have high levels of exposure to media, and differences in media patterns were associated with sleep patterns. Cultural factors influence both instrumental reasons for media use and sleep practices. Further research should explore how media use may serve to regulate emotion as a function of both contextual factors and individual differences. (shrink)

BackgroundIn China, undergraduate students face both academic and career selection pressures, sleep is an important physiological process for them. Investigate the physical exercise, sleep quality of undergraduate students in the education stage in Xuzhou City, and analyze the factors affecting their sleep quality, to promote the health education and psychological health of undergraduate students.Materials and methodsThe Physical Activity Rating Scale-3, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and the demographic information questionnaire were used to survey a whole-group sample (...) of four undergraduate colleges and universities in Xuzhou by cluster sampling, the general characteristics including gender, grade, height, weight, domicile, race, economic income, etc., were collected, and the data were analyzed and processed using chi-square tests and multi-factor logistic regression.Results3,366 valid questionnaires were collected from four undergraduate colleges and universities, including 1,355 males and 2,011 females. The detection rate of exercise in Jiangsu Normal University was lower than that in other universities, and the detection rate of sleep disorders was higher than that in other universities. Xuzhou Medical University, the highest detection rate of large exercise, Xuzhou Institute of Technology, the lowest detection rate of sleep disorders. There were significant differences in the detection rate of large amount of exercise among college students of different genders, grades, body types, and majors. There were significant differences in the detection rate of sleep disorders among college students with different gender, grade, family economic status, daily cell phone use time, cell phone purposeless usage, and exercise level. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that grade, family economic status, cell phone use time, cell phone purposeless usage is the main influencing factors of sleep disorders in college students.ConclusionThe sleep problems of undergraduates are serious, especially in Jiangsu Normal University. Scientific and appropriate exercise is an important measure to solve the sleep problems of undergraduates. Colleges and universities should actively carry out health education, college students living habits such as cell phone use should be guided training. (shrink)

ObjectivesIndividuals register and react to daily sensory stimuli differently, which influences participation in occupations. Sleep is a foundational nightly occupation that impacts overall health and development in children. Emerging research suggests that certain sensory processing patterns, specifically sensory sensitivities, may have a negative impact on sleep health in children. In this study, we aimed to characterize sleep in children with and without sensory sensitivities and examine the relationship between sensory processing patterns and sleep using validated parent- (...) and child-reported questionnaires. We hypothesized that children with sensory sensitivities will exhibit more difficulties with sleep.MethodsWe recruited 22 children with sensory sensitivities and 33 children without sensory sensitivities to complete validated sleep and sensory processing questionnaires: the Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire, Sleep Self-Report, and Sensory Profile-2.ResultsChildren with SS had significantly more sleep behaviors reported by both parents and children compared to children with NSS. Specifically, children with SS had higher frequencies of sleep anxiety, bedtime resistance, and sleep onset delay. Spearman’s ρ correlations indicated significant positive correlations between parent- and child-reported sleep. Children with SS showed a larger association and greater variability between sleep and sensory processing compared to their peers. Significant positive correlations between parent-reported sleep behaviors and sensory sensitive and avoiding patterns were identified for both children with SS and NSS. Child-reported sleep behaviors were most strongly associated with sensitive and avoiding patterns for children with NSS and seeking patterns for children with SS.ConclusionWe present evidence that sleep is impacted for children with SS to a greater extent than children with NSS. We also identified that a child’s sensory processing pattern may be an important contributor to sleep problems in children with and without sensory sensitivities. Sleep concerns should be addressed within routine care for children with sensory sensitivities. Future studies will inform specific sleep intervention targets most salient for children with SS and other sensory processing patterns. (shrink)

Although researchers have investigated the impact of social isolation on well-being, the recent quarantines due to COVID-19 resulted in a social isolation environment that was unique to any examined in the past. Because sleep is one of the endogenous drives that impacts short and long-term health and well-being, it is important to consider how social isolation during the COVID-19 government-mandated quarantines affected sleep and sleep habits. A number of researchers have addressed this question during the last (...) 2 years by examining several concepts related to possible changes in sleep during the quarantines. To best understand these recent results, the current mini review provides a background on the pre-pandemic literature on the effects of social isolation and loneliness with a focus on sleep and then summarizes the recent literature on sleep and sleep habits. In general, sleep was negatively impacted for many people during the pandemics but not all. One group that seemed to benefit from the pandemic in terms of sleep patterns, were younger people who could more easily adapt their sleep times to match their internal chronobiology. Given the potential broad impact of sleep on health and well-being, better understanding how social isolation impacts sleep is an important consideration for individuals, work organizations, and governments. (shrink)

BackgroundSleep is a strong predictor of quality of life and has been related to cognitive and behavioral functioning. However, research has shown that most autistic people experience sleep problems throughout their life. The most common sleep problems include sleep onset delay, frequent night-time wakings and shorter total sleep time. Despite the importance of sleep on many domains, it is still unclear from first-hand accounts what helps autistic people to sleep. The purpose of this study (...) is to explore together with autistic adolescents their sleep-related practices before bedtime and during the day which contribute to a good night’s sleep.MethodsFifty-four autistic adolescents collaborated with an academic researcher in a novel adapted photo-elicitation methodology, rooted in a Lifeworld framework. The adolescents were invited to collect and analyze their data. The data were also presented in a community knowledge exchange event.ResultsSeveral self-reported practices that facilitate better nocturnal sleep were identified. Those were organized into two thematics: Evening/bedtime factors and Day time factors. These included practices such as personalized sensory and relaxation tools before bed and during night-time, engaging in a range of physical activities during daytime and accommodating personal time to engage with highly preferred and intense focus activities and hobbies. It also included spending time in predictable and fun ways with family members before bedtime.ConclusionThis is the first time that a study uses a novel methodological approach based on personal accounts elicited by photos rooted in a Lifeworld framework to describe personal sleep-related practices before bedtime and during the day to identify a “good night of sleep” in autistic adolescents. The outcomes from the current study showed that sleep facilitating factors are in a direct contrast to the sleep hygiene recommendations. Therefore, it is thus important for the sleep practitioners and healthcare providers to move beyond providing standardized sleep hygiene interventions. A Lifeworld led care model that pays attention to personal experiences, promotes sense of agency, evaluates both autism-specific strengths and struggles could and should complement biomedical approaches.Lay SummaryThis is the first study to examine autistic adolescents’ self-reported sleep habits and factors which facilitate autistic adolescents’ sleep by employing adapted photo-elicitation interviews. This study is innovative in at least three ways. First, it examines the factors that may facilitate a good night’s sleep through personal accounts of autistic adolescents. Second, this is the first sleep study to adopt a collaborative, flexible approach to understanding positive sleep factors in the lives of autistic adolescents. This study employed a personalized approach into collecting, categorizing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data allowing autistic adolescents and the researcher to work together across key stages of data collection and data analysis. Third, we adopted a theoretical framework that allows us to consider autistic adolescents in both agency and vulnerability positions when it comes to their sleep difficulties. Our results highlight that sleep should be treated individually and in relation to the environmental and personal factors that affect each autistic person. Hence, researchers and professionals may benefit from working collaboratively with autistic adolescents with the aim to identify individual strengths and adopt a positive narrative around sleep. Furthermore, it is important to further examine both the daytime and evening factors that may affect bedtime and the quality and quantity of sleep as well as the role of intense focused interests and physical activities that cultivate positive feelings and help autistic people to relax before bedtime. (shrink)

This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Sleep is shown to be important for our understanding of Sloterdijk’s project as an index of his subject’s larger, hidden complex of inertias, habits, and corporeal requirements and processes that dominate subjective life and that exist outside the mastery of ego and consciousness. The essay explores this thesis by considering a series of figures that appear in Sloterdijk’s writings and interviews: the philosopher Heraclitus with (...) his dismissive remarks on sleep, the insomniac Emil Cioran, the sleepwalker in Romantic thought. As the essay develops, it shows how, given such a subject formation, anthropotechnics is properly conceived as a management of the subject’s automatic processes to trick or repurpose or redirect them to work in concert or coincidence with the anthropotechnical project, rather than against it. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an argument strengthening the view of Norman Daniels, Bruce Kennedy and Ichiro Kawachi that justice is good for one's health. We argue that the pathways through which social factors produce inequalities in sleep more strongly imply a unidirectional and non-voluntary causality than with most other public health issues. Specifically, we argue against the 'voluntarism objection' – an objection that suggests that adverse public health outcomes can be traced back to the free and voluntary choices (...) of individual actors. Our argument proceeds along two lines: an empirical line and a conceptual line. We first show that much of the empirical research on sleep supports the view that those with fewer opportunities are those who have poorer sleep habits. We then argue that sleep-related decisions are not of the same nature as most other lifestyle choices, and therefore are not as easily susceptible to the voluntarism objection. (shrink)

This article argues that corporate management in the United States has expanded its scope beyond office walls and encompasses many aspects of workers' daily lives. One new element of corporate training is the micromanagement of sleep; self-help books, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and consulting firms currently advise workers and supervisors on optimizing productivity by cultivating certain sleep habits. Although consultants and self-help books make specific recommendations about sleep, most medical research is inconclusive about sleep's benefits (...) for human performance. Using the ideas of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as a philosophical backdrop, this article examines the complex and often contradictory links between self-help, medicine, and corporate governance. (shrink)

There are growing concerns that increased screen device usage may have a detrimental impact on classroom behaviour and attentional focus. The consequences of screen use on child cognitive functioning have been relatively under-studied, and results remain largely inconsistent. Screen usage may displace the time usually spent asleep. The aim of this study was to examine associations between screen use, behavioural inattention and sustained attention control, and the potential modifying role of sleep. The relations between screen use, behavioural inattention, sustained (...) attention and sleep were investigated in 162 6- to 8-year-old children, using parent-reported daily screen use, the SWAN ADHD behaviour rating scale, The sustained attention to response task and the children’s sleep habits questionnaire. Tablet use was associated with better sustained attention performance but was not associated with classroom behavioural inattention. Shorter sleep duration was associated with poorer behavioural inattention and sustained attention. Sleep quality and duration did not act as mediators between screen usage and behavioural inattention nor sustained attention control. These findings suggest that careful management of the amount of time spent on electronic screen devices could have a beneficial cognitive impact on young children. The results also highlight the critical role of sleep in enhancing both behavioural attention and sustained attention, which are essential for supporting cognitive development and learning. (shrink)

This paper examines the forms of life established through the visual governance of the Australian social security mobile app —the Express Plus Centrelink app. It is argued that the app exceeds established accounts of juridical and administrative power. The app involves a seeing that is not public, a responding that is not writing and a de-materialisation of an institution and its disciplinary apparatus. It is argued that the app creates proto-literate subjects that are required to respond to a real-time sequence (...) of images in a highly structured and circumscribed manner to become complicit in the digitalisation of their life. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that making accurate passage of time judgments (POTJs) for long-time intervals is an important cognitive ability. Different temporal domains, such as circadian typology (biological time) and time perspective (psychological time), could have an effect on subjective POTJs, but few studies have investigated the reciprocal influences among these temporal domains. The present study is the first systematic attempt to fill this gap. A sample of 222 participants (53.20% females; 19–60 years) filled in the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (...) for the measurement of time perspective, the reduced version of the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (rMEQ) for chronotypes, and an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing sleep habits during weekdays and the weekend (for social jetlag). The POTJ was measured using a modified version of a pictorial timeline presented at five different moments. Also, participants judged how different temporal expressions were related to the past, present, and future along a 7-point Likert scale. After confirming the association between eveningness and present-hedonism orientation and morningness and future-orientation, we found that evening-types produced higher scores for future expressions. The subjective POTJ expressed in minutes was predicted by Deviation from Balanced Time (DBTP), present-fatalism orientation, and social jetlag. Finally, the rMEQ score, past-positive orientation, and DBTP predicted the difference between subjective and objective POT. The results are discussed offering an explanation in terms of the interconnections between circadian typology, individual time perspective, and the sense of the POT, suggesting the multicomponent nature of the concept of time. (shrink)

It is estimated that one in ten U.S. adults suffers from chronic insomnia. If left untreated, chronic insomnia reduces quality of life and increases risk for psychiatric and medical disease, especially depression and anxiety. There are two forms of insomnia: secondary insomnia, in which it is comorbid with another condition such as psychiatric disorders, chronic pain conditions, or cardiopulmonary disorders, and primary insomnia, which does not coexist with any other disorder. This treatment program uses cognitive-behavioral therapy methods to correct poor (...) sleep habits. CBT has been proven in multiple studies to improve sleep hygiene by reducing time spent in bed before sleep onset, reducing time spent awake after first sleep onset, and increasing the quality and efficiency of sleep. Developed by the authors, this evidence based treatment can be used for both primary and secondary insomnia sufferers. Patients are first given information about healthy sleep and the reasons for improving sleep habits, then a behavioral program is developed to address that patient's specific sleep problems. Use of sleep logs, assessment forms, and other homework allows client and therapist to work together to develop an effective sleep regimen tailored specifically for each client. Finally, several sessions are dedicated to increasing compliance and problem-solving.TreatmentsThatWork represents the gold standard of behavioral healthcare interventions!BL All programs have been rigorously tested in clinical trials and are backed by years of researchBL A prestigious scientific advisory board, led by series Editor-In-Chief David H. Barlow, reviews and evaluates each intervention to ensure that it meets the highest standard of evidence so you can be confident that you are using the most effective treatment available to dateBL Our books are reliable and effective and make it easy for you to provide your clients with the best care availableBL Our corresponding workbooks contain psychoeducational information, forms and worksheets, and homework assignments to keep clients engaged and motivatedBL A companion website offers downloadable clinical tools and helpful resourcesBL Continuing Education Credits are now available on select titles in collaboration with PsychoEducational Resources, Inc. (shrink)

Hegel argues that madness should not be understood as it had been traditionally, viz. ‘sleeping while awake,’ the intrusion of sleep or unconsciousness on waking, conscious life, but that rather madness must be understood as an inescapable possibility of waking life, and a constitutive part of consciousness itself.

_Not exercising as much as you should? Counting your calories in your sleep? Feeling ashamed for not being happier? You may be a victim of the wellness syndrome._ In this ground-breaking new book, Carl Cederström and André Spicer argue that the ever-present pressure to maximize our wellness has started to work against us, making us feel worse and provoking us to withdraw into ourselves. The Wellness Syndrome follows health freaks who go to extremes to find the perfect diet, corporate (...) athletes who start the day with a dance party, and the self-trackers who monitor everything, including their own toilet habits. This is a world where feeling good has become indistinguishable from being good. Visions of social change have been reduced to dreams of individual transformation, political debate has been replaced by insipid moralising, and scientific evidence has been traded for new-age delusions. A lively and humorous diagnosis of the cult of wellness, this book is an indispensable guide for everyone suspicious of our relentless quest to be happier and healthier. (shrink)

Background The purpose of this study was to examine whether extended use of a variety of screen-based devices, in addition to television, was associated with poor dietary habits and other health-related characteristics and behaviors among US adults. The recent phenomenon of binge-watching was also explored. -/- Methods A survey to assess screen time across multiple devices, dietary habits, sleep duration and quality, perceived stress, self-rated health, physical activity, and body mass index, was administered to a sample of (...) US adults using the Qualtrics platform and distributed via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Participants were adults 18 years of age and older, English speakers, current US residents, and owners of a television and at least one other device with a screen. Three different screen time categories (heavy, moderate, and light) were created for total screen time, and separately for screen time by type of screen, based on distribution tertiles. Kruskal-Wallis tests were conducted to examine differences in dietary habits and health-related characteristics between screen time categories. -/- Results Aggregate screen time across all devices totaled 17.5 h per day for heavy users. Heavy users reported the least healthful dietary patterns and the poorest health-related characteristics – including self-rated health – compared to moderate and light users. Moreover, unique dietary habits emerged when examining dietary patterns by type of screen separately, such that heavy users of TV and smartphone displayed the least healthful dietary patterns compared to heavy users of TV-connected devices, laptop, and tablet. Binge-watching was also significantly associated with less healthy dietary patterns, including frequency of fast-food consumption as well as eating family meals in front of a television, and perceived stress. -/- Conclusions The present study found that poorer dietary choices, as well as other negative health-related impacts, occurred more often as the viewing time of a variety of different screen-based devices increased in a sample of US adults. Future research is needed to better understand what factors among different screen-based devices might affect health behaviors and in turn health-related outcomes. Research is also required to better understand how binge-watching behavior contributes impacts health-related behaviors and characteristics. (shrink)

For years people have been waiting for a book that merges the abstract Eastern philosophy of inner peace with the scientific applications of quantum physics. Well, that book has finally arrived! The Secret of Quantum Living is a straightforward guide that offers profound spiritual insights and a practical, easy-to-apply process for healing and harmonious living. Join Dr. Frank Kinslow on a journey to deep inner peace through what quantum physics calls the "implicate order." Within the pages of this powerful book, (...) you will learn Dr. Kinslow's process of Quantum Entrainment® (QE) and discover how to enrich and enliven all areas of your life. You'll be able to resolve problems or challenges you face by applying QE to your finances, your relationships, your sex life . . . and even your eating, sleeping, and exercising habits. You will also uncover ways to dissolve anger issues, negative thinking, physical pain, and emotional discord. And the great news is that anyone can practice QE! It doesn't require previous training, and it's so simple that a child can do it. The Secret of Quantum Living is fun to read and exciting to apply. You'll begin seeing results from your very first session. Give it a try . . . you'll be surprised how quickly the process works for you! (shrink)

Since the publication of Nikolas Rose’s ‘The Politics of Life Itself’ there has been vivid discussion about how biopolitical governance has changed over the last decades. This article uses what Rose terms ‘molecular politics’, a new socio-technical grip on the human body, as a contrasting background to ask anew his question ‘What, then, of biopolitics today?’ – albeit focusing not on advances in genetics, microbiology, and pharmaceutics, as he does, but on the rapid proliferation of wearables and other sensor-software gadgets. (...) In both cases, new technologies providing information about the individual body are the common ground for governance and optimization, yet for the latter, the target is habits of moving, eating and drinking, sleeping, working and relaxing. The resulting profound differences are carved out along four lines: ‘somatic identities’ and a modified understanding of the body; the role of ‘expert knowledge’ compared to that of networks of peers and self-experimentation; the ‘types of intervention’ by which new technologies become effective in our everyday life; and the ‘post-discipline character’ of molecular biopolitics. It is argued that, taken together, these differences indicate a remarkable shift which could be termed aretaic: its focus is not ‘life itself’ but ‘life as it is lived’, and its modality are new everyday socio-technical entanglements and their more-than-human rationalities of governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Body Hidden WithinTara ChapmanBeing “fat” was not a choice. It was my life and it slowly happened over time. Being obese is a disease that I have struggled with my entire life. I am 36 years old, nearing 37.I might not have eaten the right foods, but I didn’t overeat. I grew up eating typical American food and continued to cook that way into my adult life. I (...) ate eggs and toast for breakfast, sandwiches, chips and a few cookies for lunch, or leftovers, and some kind of meat and potatoes or pasta for dinner, with a canned vegetable. I very seldom ate fresh vegetables, but I did like summer fruits. However, those are filled with natural sugar and are only in season for a few months out of the year. I didn’t eat out, other than having my daily Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino on the way to work five days a week. I didn’t load my plate up with food. I ate less than my brother, sister and parents who are smaller than me. I took exercise and fitness classes all through college and knew what I was supposed to do. I exercised over the years, only to quit because I never lost weight and got discouraged. I would feel [End Page 93] better physically; however, I just kept packing on the pounds, which took a toll emotionally.By November 2012, I topped the scale at 291 pounds and could barely fit into my size 22 jeans and 3xl tops. I would sweat uncontrollably because of all the extra weight I was carrying around and could barely make it up the ramp at work or a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. Because I would sweat profusely, my wardrobe consisted of white or black shirts. I had to hide the sweat stains. I had high blood pressure and cholesterol. I was on medication for both. My insulin levels were all over the boards. I knew that when I was shaky and my levels were high, it was time to eat. I would control my type II diabetes by eating a small piece of candy, which would instantly control my shakes. I would follow the candy up with a meal. My diet and exercise habits were causing me to have terrible headaches. In my early 20’s, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Besides having ovarian cysts and unbalanced hormones, the major issue with PSOC is unexplained weight gain and not being able to lose it. My health was spinning out of control and I secretly knew it. I just didn’t know how to fix it or what to do.I had to do something and I needed help. I didn’t want to die by the time I was 40; and the path that I was on was leading me to an early grave. I could hear it in my mom’s voice every time I talked to her. She knew something was wrong; she would try to talk to me about it and tell me I was going to have a heart attack. She would tell me how worried my dad was. I wouldn’t listen. I began to sleep more and more every day after work and on weekends. I had to take naps almost daily because I was so exhausted and had no energy. I didn’t know what to do. I was depressed and felt like I was alone. Nobody in my family understood and my friends couldn’t relate to what I was going through. I was fat and they weren’t.I heard about a special clinic that focused on women’s health issues from a co–worker. Under the close watch of the clinic’s doctor and her medical staff, I began a therapeutic lifestyle change on February 27, 2013. I had no expectations because I had always been obese. I had never lost weight, so why would this be any different? This lifestyle change includes committing to a healthy diet of high protein, vitamins and supplements, balancing hormones for PCOS and exercising. However, before I could begin changing my eating habits... (shrink)

Over the last decade, attention has crawled from out of the shadows into the philosophical limelight with several important books and widely read articles. Carolyn Dicey Jennings has been a key player in the attention revolution, actively publishing in the area and promoting awareness. This book was much anticipated by insiders and does not disappoint. It is in no way redundant with respect to other recent monographs, covering both a different range of material and developing novel positions throughout. The book (...) might have been called The Attending Self, since Jennings defines attention as mental prioritization controlled by the self. This invocation of the self is among her central innovations, and may prove to be the main source of controversy. I will highlight points of contention here, but want to emphasize at the outset that the book is essential reading for anyone interested in attention. Jennings also contributes to a range of other debates, which will help a broader audience appreciate the importance this topic.After a brief introduction, Jennings provides “a philosophical landscape” of attention (chap. 2), tracing the concept through history. This is an invaluable achievement that will be welcomed by both newcomers and veterans. Jennings exhibits enormous breadth, covering areas that contemporary philosophers of mind tend to neglect: medieval philosophy, Buddhist thought, and phenomenology, to name a few. We also get perspectives on attention from core figures in the Western canon, such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, as well as thinkers who gave the topic a more political inflection: Mary Wollstonecraft and W. E. B. DuBois. Jennings surveys contemporary literature as well, locating recent work in these older lineages. Some authors get more treatment later in the book (e.g., William James and Wayne Wu). Overall, Jennings provides the best overview of this history I have seen. She proves that attention is not a new topic, but one with deep roots and one that can inform current debates; Jennings draws on these roots throughout. I would love to see a companion piece surveying scientific theories, including “gain control” and “biased competition,” which get little airtime in the book. Some recent philosophical theories are under-explored as well, including Chris Mole’s concept of cognitive unison (Jennings discusses other aspects of his view), Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian’s exploration of attention’s diversity (we get a touch of this), and my own proposal that attention is a gateway to working memory (not mentioned here). That said, no extant survey is more complete.Chapter 3 begins with the empirical claim that attention is regulated by slow brainwaves, and then takes up two issues. The first is mental causation. Endorsing moderate emergentism, Jennings argues that slow brain waves are causally efficacious even though they are not reducible to lower-level processes. (The metaphysics and neuroscience are presented accessibly, aided by three appendixes.) Second, Jennings argues that these slow brain waves indicate that attention is controlled by the self. As someone who was never moved by the mental causation problem—I don’t think overdetermination threatens efficacy—I would have welcomed more development of this second issue. For one thing, in linking attention to subjective control, Jennings eschews the idea that there can be purely “bottom-up” attention driven by stimulus features alone. This goes against the orthodoxy in attention science, and makes it hard for her to accommodate phenomena such as “pop-out,” or the commonsense idea that attention can be “captured” by a sudden flash or loud sound. For another thing, I wanted to hear more on why Jennings relates slow brain waves to the self. Does this include the slow waves that occur during deep sleep? Is there even such a thing as the self? Is there one self or many? How do slow brain waves reflect our interests, projects, values, self-conceptions, autobiographical narratives, or social identities? Does the social self invoked by Wollstonecraft and DuBois gain a foothold here? The whole chapter campaigns against metaphysical reductionism, but arrives at a perspective on the self that will strike some readers as highly reductive.In the fourth chapter, Jennings sheds further light on her conjecture that attention involves the self by advancing the thesis that attention endows sensory information with meaning. On the face of it, this may sound implausible. Object recognition, reading, and many other meaning-involving processes can take place outside of attention and outside of consciousness. But Jennings has a richer notion of “meaning” in mind. She develops the idea of “subject unity,” which is imposition of structure on perception that reflects the interests of the perceiving subject. This, she claims, is what brings perception into the space of reasons. Along the way, she has interesting observations about binding, feature integration, and demonstrative reference. The material is highly original, and Jennings’s postulation of interest-based perceptual organization is compelling. At the same time, one might wonder whether interests are really relegated to the ambit of attentional control. Consider the cocktail party effect, wherein one’s own name captures attention. This implies a preattentive filter that reflects our interests. Emotionally charged words, facial expressions, and dangerous objects also work this way, and social biases can operate preattentively as well. If these reflect our interests, then meaning may arise outside attention.Jennings’s fifth chapter explores the relationship between attention and consciousness. Some authors have argued that attention is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Jennings focuses primarily on the necessity claim. She does not systematically review the empirical literature here, but she addresses some of the key findings, and effectively rebuts studies that allege to find consciousness outside attention. She does not rest her case there, however. Instead, she identifies a new class of examples that purport to establish the possibility of consciousness without attention. Her central example she calls “conscious entrainment,” which is what we experience when engaged in habitual or skilled activities. Other possible examples touched on in the chapter include hypervigilance in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), passive movie watching, dreaming, and “attentional neglect.” These states all involve intense focus, Jennings admits, but not attention. To some readers this may sound contradictory. Isn’t focus a kind of attention? Don’t these states of absorption involve stimulus selection and enhancement of relevant features, suppression of distractors, and other hallmarks of attention? Jennings says none of this is tantamount to attention. Recall that she thinks attention is controlled by the self. In these cases, we are invited to imagine that the self takes a passive role: control is either ceded to the world (movie watching) or to previously mastered routines (skills and habits). Thus, Jennings’s claim that there is no attention in these cases hangs on her contentious thesis that attention requires a controlling self. One might also push back by arguing that, in some of Jennings’s allegedly selfless examples, the self remains involved. Skilled activities and hypervigilance, for example, can reflect personal interests.Skills and hypervigilance get more airtime in chapter 6. There, Jennings turns to questions of responsibility—a neglected topic in attention research. The chapter begins with a manslaughter trial in which the teenage plaintiff was given a light sentence because the judge evidently believed that the teen’s ADHD compromised his ability to control his actions. The example may be a bit triggering for people who have a personal relationship with this diagnosis, but, putting that aside, Jennings uses it to introduce the important concept of attention-based control. With reduced control, Jennings argues, comes reduced responsibility. I am inclined to see ADHD as involving dysregulation of attention (difficulty disengaging and dividing attention, for example) rather than diminished attention, but that can still be characterized as an issue with control of attention; therefore ADHD still illustrates Jennings’s point that there is a link between responsibility and control of attention. This, it turns out, is only half of her story. Having argued for this link, one might expect Jennings to follow Wayne Wu, who contends that attention is necessary for action, and hence for responsibility. She does not. Instead, she says argues that responsibility can also arise in cases of “strategic automaticity.” This brings us back to skills. When skills are deployed, action is governed by learned pairings between stimuli and responses. The choice to exercise a skill requires attention, so attention is needed for being a responsible agent, but once a skill kicks in, attention is no longer required, and one can be held responsible for actions performed skillfully—thus attention is not required for responsibility tout court. Jennings addresses an opposing view (defended by Wu, Ellen Fridland, and Barbara Montero), according to which skills involve “automatic attention” rather than no attention. Jennings worries that this move will collapse the distinction between attention and other kinds of selection and filtering that occur throughout the nervous system, including the retina. She says that the attentional interpretation of skilled action is at odds with the lack of top-down reweighing of sensory inputs, regulated by lateral frontal cortex. These objections to automatic attention warrant response. My own view is that attention involves broadcasting to working memory, so retinal filtering is ruled out. Jennings’s insistence on top-down reweighing will not move those who believe attention can be purely bottom-up. For all that, I side with Jennings in wanting to allow for responsibility without attentional control. I think we can be responsible for implicit biases, for example. I also think attentional control is insufficient for responsibility, as when we act under duress.Jennings offers fresh perspective on the nature of attention, and its role in meaningful perception, consciousness, action, and responsibility. Each chapter can be read separately, but they hang together well, and each reflects her thesis that attention is essentially linked to the self. Though I am skeptical of that strong claim, we would do well to follow Jennings in regarding attention as interest-laden interface between mind and world. I look forward to a sequel in which attention is related to richer conceptions of identity, and where the political consequences of this link are actively explored. Meanwhile, one can hardly fault Jennings for covering too little. She tackles a remarkable range of topics, from metaphysics to ethics. Her arguments throughout demand response, repay careful study, and propel the field forward. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo examine body image perception and the associations of body dissatisfaction with socio-demographic and lifestyle factors among Saudi women attending fitness centers in Riyadh.MethodsSaudi females aged 16 years and older were recruited from 12 randomly selected fitness centers in Riyadh, using stratified clustered sampling technique. Height and weight were measured to calculate actual body mass index. A previously validated instrument was used to collect socio-demographic and lifestyle variables including physical activity, sedentary behaviors, sleep and dietary habits. Stunkard Figure (...) Rating Scale silhouettes were used to assess perceived and desired body shape.ResultsThe participants had a mean age of 29.2. The majority were not married, with no children and had college degrees. While 63% were overweight or obese, nearly 40% of women underestimated their perceived body shape. The majority of respondents were dissatisfied with their body shape including 68% of normal weight women. Females who had BD were significantly older, had higher BMI, reported more weight loss attempt and had expended less time in vigorous and total PA than those who were satisfied with their body shape. However, when adjusting for socio-demographic variables, logistic regression analysis revealed significant associations of BD with higher BMI, shorter membership duration of fitness club, and reduced dairy products and energy drinks consumption.ConclusionExcept for BMI and decreased dairy products and energy drinks consumption, many lifestyle behaviors did not associate with BD among Saudi females attending fitness centers. The findings can inform healthcare providers when intervention strategy is implicated for females with BD. Future studies should compare the associations of BD with lifestyle behaviors between males and females attending fitness centers and seeking weight loss. (shrink)

Among the ideas and themes in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy with apparent bearing on the treatment of depression in our own times, four are the subject of the present chapter. First, these herbal and other remedies were to be taken as part of a broader regimen of which no single part could be omitted. The regulation of exercise, fresh air, sleep, diet, evacuation, and feelings, believed to together keep the bodily humors in healthy balance, demanded habits and practices (...) that were essential accompaniments to one another and to other measures. This was eclectic and holistic healing, only effective when combined. Second, adhering to this regimen was, for the most part, the individual’s own responsibility: it was an extensive self-help program. Third, it was preventive medicine, thought to ward off the symptoms of melancholy before they became entrenched and difficult to treat. And, finally, underlying and reinforcing these practical recommendations were ideas about the causes of, and remedies for, melancholy that are consonant with some recent challenges to the application of mainstream conceptions of disease in today’s medicine when it comes to the treatment of depression. Inasmuch as he seems to eschew “common cause” etiological models, Burton’s account corresponds more closely to the network-based models beginning to be proposed for disorders of mood or affect. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sigewiza’s CureJennifer H. Radden (bio)Keywordsbiopsychosocial model, Hildegard of Bingen, associationist presuppositions, causation, power of suggestionSuzanne Phillips and Monique Boivin provide us with a sympathetic and compelling account of how the various elements of Hildegard’s sophisticated amalgam of ritual, magic, religion, dietary and other medical remedies, caring, and community, formed a seamless cure for Sigewiza’s affliction. Whether Hildgard’s approach reflects an early instance of the biopsychosocial “model” is a separate (...) claim, and may be challenged. But that her ministrations somehow effected a cure in this case seems—if not without a doubt, then very likely.Descriptions of Sigewiza’s condition, with its “clumping together of blackness and steam” caused by a “constellation of humors,” echo those of other medieval writers speaking of the humoral disorder of melancholia—at that time an encompassing category for a range of symptoms and syndromes that would today be assigned as different mental disorders. In these descriptions a variety of explanations for mental illness are quite typically introduced, including biological, social, supernatural, dietary and astrological ones. Phillips and Boivin take care to point out that Hildegard was not offering her remedies as alternatives, but rather proposing them as at work jointly and in a range of causal directions, exhibiting mutual influence, and feedback loops. As these authors say, multiple explanations “were often held simultaneously... in reference to a specific case” (Phillips and Boivin 2007, XX). And the factors that might cause the system to move out of balance are many: food, emotions, the soul, the mind, actions, and spiritual forces. So although deeds may cause bodily changes and their psychological accompaniments, “problems in the diet might affect the humors which would then have psychological effects, which demons might... use as opportunities to cause further trouble in the spirit, mind, and body” (Phillips and Boivin 2007, 365).What first struck me about Hildegard’s description of these many distinct causes interacting in complex ways is its compatibility with the multi-causal accounts of depression (and other mental disorder) frequently proffered in our own time. Daily habits (e.g., diet, sleep and exercise regimes), genetic predispositions, including biological states of fragility, external events, experiences of loss, social roles, and cultural beliefs—not to mention spontaneous recovery, and placebo effects—are all regularly implicated in the onset and course of conditions such as depression.Still, the similarity to these modern causal accounts may be somewhat misleading and we must beware of overstating it. In favoring and pressing on Hildegard’s holistic understanding, moreover, Phillips and Boivin perhaps insufficiently emphasize significant dissimilarities between Hildegard’s and our contemporary accounts.It is the interaction between the various elements making up Sigewiza’s cure that is most noteworthy [End Page 373] in this account, as Phillips and Boivin recognize. Yet that relationship itself seems in some ways surprisingly problematic: difficult for us to make sense of, and profoundly unmodern. Granted, we think we see the way these approaches probably influenced how Sigewiza felt and responded; but it is not so clear how Hildegard saw things. Like a lot of thinking in medieval times, Hildegard’s account provides us with glimpses of an understanding of the world that today looks prescientific and in that respect, almost precausal. (So, to the extent that the biopsychosocial model is understood as a causal one, the case of Sigewiza may exemplify it only inexactly.)It is not merely the range and type of causes, including supernatural and astrological ones, in accounts such as Hildegard’s that distinguish it from today’s analyses. It is also the reliance of such accounts on what seems to be a different metaphysics, one of associations or qualities.Associationist presuppositions can be found in accounts of health and illness from before, during, and long after, Hildegard’s time. Three examples of this pervasive, but puzzling thinking serve to illustrate. The melancholiac’s perceived swarthiness and darkened skin color—regularly noted from the time of the Greek physicians and an established part of the medieval iconography in images of melancholy—were not, or not primarily, thought to be a causal result of the darkness of his bile, as one might suppose. Instead, this coloring seems... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 353-355 [Access article in PDF] Emotions and Narrative Selves Valerie Gray Hardcastle In their commentaries, both Phillips (2003) and Woody (2003) agree that the affective side of personhood needs to be better addressed in narrative views of self. In their arguments, they focus mainly on how a patient or a subject is here and now. In contrast, Kennett and Matthews (2003) take a (...) longer view and argue for the importance of a diachronic unity for selfhood. This commentary seeks to integrate these views by discussing how emotions are central to building our personal sense of unified agency. 1Phillips and Woody are right: most philosophical discussions of the narrative view of self are overly cognitive and focus too much attention on our linguistic story-telling abilities and not enough on what it is like to be a person experiencing the world. This is too bad, for it is our affective reactions that drive our personal life narratives. Consider: of all the experiences in the world, we only chose a small subset to become or represent who we are. I regularly eat cold cereal for breakfast before heading off to work, but if you ask me to describe myself, I describe my work or my children, not my breakfast-eating habits. Why is this? I identify with my work, my family life, or my play, but not with my sleeping patterns, the trajectories I chose when I drive, or how I brush my teeth. How is it that I have selected the former activities to highlight in my self-stories, but not the latter?I maintain that I choose the former because I have strong affective ties to them, ties that I do not have to driving routes or personal hygiene. And these ties are what determine what gets into our narratives of self. Actually, my claim is stronger than that. I believe that our emotions not only color what we do but they also allow us to act in the first place (this discussion is greatly expanded in my forthcoming book).Humans delight in pretending that our most prized and most humanly attribute is our forebrain, which houses, we also pretend, our capacity for rational thought. Since Plato at least we have held that subduing our passions to the iron rule of reason is our supreme aspiration; it is the ideal for human cognition. Ironically, we think that the more we are like Star Trek's alien Mr. Spock, the more human we really are.But what would life really be like with an overdeveloped forebrain and without emotion? Let us consider more carefully what it is we really prize about being human. We can rationalize well, it is true, but we do so in the service of personal goals. As Aristotle reminds us, we have practical rationality; we have means-ends reasoning with a point. This is just another way of saying that it is imperative that we identify what is important to us prior to cognizing.Obviously, one might scoff, we need an end to engage in means-ends reasoning. But often, I think, what having an end entails is not well appreciated. These days it is fashionable to believe that our fundamental ends—survival and reproduction—are set by our biology and that all [End Page 353] other ends (or most other ends) derive from them in some fashion. Maybe this story is true, but it obscures how ends—whether they be hardwired in or they come later—function in the human psyche.At a bare minimum, that we have particular ends tells us that we have to tag our abstractions, interpretations, and matched patterns with valances—some things are good, some things are bad, and some are indifferent. Tagging our experiences thus is just what it means to have emotions; we are reacting affectively to our world around us. And it is these reactions that determine which inputs we respond to and which we ignore. We literally cannot move about in our world without emotion. I think, perhaps, that this fact is what Phillips and Woody are... (shrink)

Some studies show that athlete students are more likely to engage in health-risk behaviors with negative health consequences, while others suggest that they lead a healthier life than their non-athlete peers. Given these inconsistent results, this study aims to compare health behaviors, depression, and perceived health status between athlete and non-athlete students, and explore the associations between health behaviors and health outcomes. An online questionnaire survey including Heath Habits Scale for five health-risk behaviors and five health-promoting behaviors, Patient Health (...) Questionnaire-9, and 5-point scale for perceived health status was conducted in Beijing Sports University in March 2021. Data from 372 athlete students and 252 non-athlete students aging from 18 to 22 were included in this study. Chi-squared tests and t-tests were used to determine differences between athlete and non-athlete samples, and logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the associations of health behaviors with depression and perceived health status. The significance level was p < 0.05. The results show that compared with non-athlete students, athlete students perform better in health habits, report lower proportion of depression and higher proportion of good health. Health behaviors, such as getting adequate sleeping, participating in vigorous physical activity, overeating, and smoking, were significantly associated with health outcomes of athlete students. The findings may contribute to the better understanding of health behaviors in athlete students and warrant continued attention on mental health and health habits in this population. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adolph Meyer’s Psychobiology in Historical Context, and Its Relationship to George Engel’s Biopsychosocial ModelEdwin R. Wallace IV (bio)Keywordspsychobiology, integrative models of psychiatry, biopsychosocial modelBefore addressing the importance of Adolf Meyer and the question of his impact on the biopsychosocial model of the psychoanalytical internist George Engel, let us tersely sketch the history of functionalism in medicine/psychiatry, and of the nineteenth/early twentieth century’s progressive abandonment of it in favor of (...) basic science reductive models of “disease,” not illness.FunctionalismWhereas Hippocratic physicians diagnosed diatheses in terms of humoral excesses or deficiencies, their primary emphasis was on the ill person. They began with careful histories of the patient’s complaints and his or her daily life course, customary activities, typical foods and beverages imbibed, and the exacerbation or relief of symptoms associated with any or all of these. They also asked questions about his physical and social environment. They carefully looked for any clinically pertinent signs, and might physically examine the patient or his excretions. When they arrived at a diagnosis (say, an excess of yellow or black bile, or of blood or phlegm), they would educate the patient about it and discuss possible approaches. Although leeching, emetics, or purgatives might be prescribed, “dietetics” was the core of the treatment. Much more than recommendations about dietary intake, this involved conversations about “lifestyle” management in general: exercise, fresh air, habit changes, and perhaps bathing in mineral waters or spas. If the patient were “melancholic” (which then included what we would now consider a variety of psychiatric disorders), he or she might be prescribed daily swimming and other forms of vigorous exercise, conversations with a philosopher, [End Page 347] attendance at theatrical comedies, or even referral to an Asklepian temple for “incubation sleep” and priestly dream interpretation. Often doctors worked closely with physical trainers, to whom they sent their patients. In short, their orientation was holistic (“mind”/”body” integration), directed first and foremost toward an individual ill person.In the second century, C.E. Galen, despite his humoral and anatomical pathologies, was similarly holistic or functionalist. He resorted to a variety of physical examinational methods while also attending to the patient’s mental/emotional status. He described one case where he was attending a woman for syncopal episodes. His examinations of her included his customary attention to the pulse. During one evening session, a servant entered and happened to mention that he had just seen the handsome Pylades dancing. Suddenly her pulse became irregular and she fainted straight away. This led Galen to consider love sickness, and perhaps not humoral or organ pathology. He tested his hypothesis during subsequent visits. Whenever another dancer or actor was mentioned, her pulse remained regular and her sensorium alert, but when Pylades was mentioned the irregular pulse and fainting recurred. Because she was married, Galen realized her insoluble conflict, and treated her accordingly.From the fall of Rome until the rise of University Medicine in the later Middle Ages, medical lore and doctoring was in monastic hands—each monastery had its clerical medic, who might also attend outsiders. They were attuned to the traditional triad of major mental disorders—mania, melancholia, and phrenitis—which they explained somatically. However, they also encountered lesser mental/emotional disorders for which they developed their own nosology. “Scrupulosity,” for example, characterized a committed monk with an unrealistic sense of sinfulness and guilt—which often drove him to self-mortification such as flagellation, hair shirts with chains underneath, and so forth, for which the remedy was kindly pastoral counseling. “Accedia” was akin to our “dysthymia,” whose sufferer was affected by sadness, lassitude, and impaired capacity to carry out the monastic routine. This was viewed as straddling the boundary between sickness and sin. Routine physical labor (“occupational therapy”) and prayers, confession, penance, and “pep talks” were prescribed.When universities with medical schools arose in the latter Middle Ages, students’ educations were mostly bookish and theoretical. Hippocratic and Galenic somatic orientations were still preeminent. (Vesalius would not publish his illustrated anatomical text until 1543.) Dietetics and purgatives, bloodletting, and so on were still favored treatments. Nevertheless, doctors gave considerable time and attention to their patients as ill... (shrink)

The exceptional pandemic due to the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has obliged all Italians to stay at home. In the literature, there are evidences that traumatic global events, such as natural catastrophes and pandemic, have negative effects on the physical and psychological health of the population. We carried out a survey to analyze the physical and psychological conditions of Italians during the pandemic. Due to the severe limitations in moving during the phase one lockdown, the survey was administered by internet. (...) Results show that Italians followed the provisions established by the Italian government to avoid contamination, but 43% of them declared to have suffered from physical symptoms, in particular migraine, sleep disorders, persistent exhaustion, and difficulty of concentration. They have great fear to be contaminated or that relatives or friends can be contaminated, and they actively take actions to avoid contamination. Participants declared that they had suffered a lot of inconveniences due to restrictions in their movements, and that their life habits were strongly changed. They spent their time at home in different activities, but their psychological well-being was strongly impaired by the lockdown. The level of anxiety tripled, in relation to the prepandemic period, and 30% of males and 41% of females declared to have severe levels of depression. Participants with high levels of optimism and hopefulness show a stronger resilience against anxiety and depression. In addition, there is a negative correlation between anxiety and depression and the five factors of personality. These results show that psychological diseases must not be neglected, and that people in lockdown do need support for their psychological health, also with the help of internet and communication technologies. (shrink)

Many parents worry over their children’s gaming habits, but to what extent do such worries match any detrimental effects of excessive gaming? We attempted to answer this question by comparing children of highly concerned parents with other adolescents of the same age. A cohort of parents who identified as highly concerned over their children’s video game habits were recruited for a public study in collaboration with a national television network. Using an online experimental platform in conjunction with surveys (...) of parents’ beliefs and attitudes, we compared their children to age-matched peers in an exploratory case-control study. The scores of children with highly concerned parents on tests of cognitive control and psychological wellbeing were statistically similar to controls, suggesting no selective cognitive or psychological detriments from gaming or otherwise in the cases with concerned parents. The case group, however, did spend more time gaming, and scored higher than controls on problem gaming indicators, which also correlated negatively with wellbeing. Within the case group, wellbeing effects seemed mainly to consist in issues of relaxation and sleep, and related to gaming addiction indicators of playing to forget real-world problems, and the feeling of neglecting non-gaming activities. Where most results of research staged for TV never get published, making it difficult to interpret both methods and results, this paper describes findings and participant recruitment in detail. The relationship between parental concern and children’s gaming is discussed, as is the merits and challenges of research conducted with media, such as TV programs and their recruited on-screen participants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Oppression1Françoise Lionnet (bio)In her disquietingly incandescent poetic novella, La vie de Josephin le fou, completed with the energy of urgency in just two weeks in November 2002,2 Mauritian author Ananda Devi explores Joséphin's relationship with the protective aquatic environment that becomes his refuge from domestic abuse and maternal rejection:J'ai pris l'habitude d'aller dans la mer chaque fois que le monde d'en haut criait trop fort. La mer m'a accueilli (...) chaque fois sans poser de questions, elle avait pas de voix, la mer, que des sons transparents et mouillés, des sons qui vous bercent et vous endorment et vous cicatrisent et vous guérissent….(20)Going into the ocean became a habit every time the world up above would scream too loud. The ocean welcomed me every time, without asking any questions--the ocean had no voice, only sounds, transparent and soaked, sounds that could rock you to sleep and heal your wounds…..(27)The French-language narrative plays with the homonyms mer (sea/ocean) and mère (mother) to underline the nurturing maternal qualities of the deep, which it contrasts with the behavior of the abused and abusive human mother. Caught in a vortex of violence on land where he must always hold his breath and his tongue, Joséphin has developed the ability to survive without much air. This learned ability to restrict his breathing has prepared him for life under water:J'avais pas besoin de respirer. J'avais tellement retenu ma respiration depuis bébé pour pas la mettre en colère… que c'était facile de le faire de nouveau pour rester longtemps longtemps sous l'eau. Vivre là, en captant quelques bulles d'air échappées des coquilles.(22)I didn't need to breathe. I had held my breath for so long as a baby to not make her mad…. that it was easy to do it again, to stay a long long time under water, to live there, off of a few air bubbles escaped from sea shells.(28)In a story that takes on the generic characteristics of the fantastic, Devi thematizes the relationship between social or familial oppression and the physiological constriction of lungs due to oxygen deficiency. Joséphin's (self-)denial of air speaks to us today, eloquently, of an urgent issue that became prominent in the past two years: choking as a form of torture inflicted upon victims of police brutality. The oft repeated slogan, "I can't breathe," militant words of the international Black Lives Matter movement, [End Page 169] have become a rallying cry against oppression. "I can't breathe" is recognizable everywhere as a sign of outrage against gratuitous human cruelty, and in 2020, George Floyd became its most famous contemporary symbol, after Eric Garner's death in a choke hold first drew attention to the issue. Journalist Lonnae O'Neal has discussed Floyd's fate, his tragic last moments, his call to his absent, deceased mother. O'Neal dwells on the words he uttered as he lay in the street: "Momma! Momma! I am through." In her elegy to black motherhood, O'Neal asserts that a dying man's call to his mother "is a prayer to be seen," "a sacred invocation" that expresses the poignant hope that memory and justice will prevail. She invokes Floyd's need to be recognized as a human being, to testify to his humanity with his last breaths, and thus to be remembered as having mattered. Her lyrical prose contains direct echoes of Martinican poet Aimé Césaire's poem "Le cri" in which the narrator forces recognition of his humanity by leaving traces of his "souffle," his breath, in the invisible presence-absence of air:Le vent novice de la mémoire des méandress'offenseÀ vif que par mon soufflede mon souffle il suffisepour à tous signifierprésents et avenirqu'un homme était làet qu'il a crié[…]The wind, inexpert at remembering meandersis stungto the quick that my breathmy breath alone sufficesto signify to allnow and foreverthat a man was... (shrink)

Against the backdrop of an aging global population and the increasing pressure of medical care expenditures for seniors, this paper used a fuzzy regression discontinuity model to explore the effects of retirement on the self-assessed health and objective physical and mental health of older people. Using survey data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, our model addresses some relevant academic controversies. Our sample was comprised of male respondents from government agencies, enterprises, and public institutions. The research explored the (...) impact of retirement on lifestyle habits and included an in-depth analysis of the mechanism through which retirement influences different aspects of health. The results show that: Retirement does not have any significant impact on objective health, including depression and self-care ability, but it does cause a notable decline in subjective health assessment. Retirement shortened the sleep time of respondents, which may account for lower scores on subjective health self-evaluations, but it did not lead to any noticeable improvement in habits which are harmful to health, such as smoking and drinking. Marriage can help alleviate the problems of depression and smoking among older people, and education has a somewhat broader positive effect on their health and lifestyles; however, neither factor helps to improve the sleep problems of older people. Therefore, this paper recommends that efforts should be made to both optimize retirement policies and seek further ways to improve the health of the retired population. (shrink)

While completing a PhD in literature with a focus on the practices of physical and linguistic spaces, I was also working and sleeping at a dilapidated house in a poorer part of Bristol in case I was needed by one of five paranoid or clinically psychotic residents. I gave out medication in the morning, then went home to study in a small rented room. I began to see ritual everywhere - in my professors' routines; my own habits; the behaviours (...) of the mentally ill patients. This paper is the story of a number of madnesses and the problems with reading ritual performance in everything we do. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

Examines Hegel’s insights regarding the complexity and significance of embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel’s anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel’s view, to be human means in part to produce one’s own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, (...) and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel’s account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness. “This book offers a lucid explanation of very difficult Hegelian concepts in clear language, along with a passionate, searing, provocative, and intelligent foray into questions of race and gender.” — Lydia Moland, Colby College. (shrink)

The aim of the study is to determine the association between Behavioral Lifestyles and longevity in the elderly. A search strategy was conducted in the PsycInfo, Medline, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. The primary outcome was mortality/survival. Four variables were analyzed to evaluate the role of potential moderators. Ninety-three articles, totaling more than 2,800,000 people, were included in the meta-analysis. We found that the lifestyles analyzed predict greater survival. Specifically, doing regular physical activity, engaging in leisure activities, sleeping (...) 7–8 h a day, and staying outside the BMI ranges considered as underweight or obesity are habits that each separately has a greater probability associated with survival after a period of several years. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; (...) to rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Sources for Hume's Opening Remarks to Treatise LIVJII Graham Solomon Hume opens Book I, Part IV, Section III of the Treatise with these remarks: Several moralists have recommended it as an excellent method ofbecoming acquainted with our own hearts, and knowing our progress in virtue, to recollect our dreams in a morning, and examine them with the same rigour, that we wou'd our most serious and deliberate actions. (...) Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best where artifice, fear, and policy have no place, and men can neither be hypocrites with themselves nor others. The generosity, or baseness of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or pusilanimity, influence the fictions of the imagination with the most unbounded liberty, and discover themselves in the mostglaring colours. Who were these moralists? One looks in vain in the work of Malebranche, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson for such a recommendation. Did anyone make that recommendation? One moralist who did was "John Shadow," in a letter to Joseph Addison published in The Spectator, no. 586, 27 August 1714. Addison introduces Shadow's letter with the remark that it "is built upon a thought that is new, and very well carried on; for which Reasons I shall give it to the Publick without Alteration, Addition, or Amendment." I quote at length, for easy comparison with Hume: Sir, It was a good Piece of Advice which Pythagoras gave to his Scholars. That every Night before they slept they should examine what theyhad been a doing that Day, and so discover what Actions were worthy of Pursuit to Morrow, and what little Vices were to be prevented from slipping unawares into a Habit. If I might second the Philosopher's Advice, it should be mine, That in a morning before my Scholar rose, he should consider what he had been about that Night, and with the Volume XVI Number 1 57 GRAHAM SOLOMON same Strictness, as if the Condition, he has believed himself to be in, was real. Such a Scrutiny into the Actions ofhis Fancy must be of considerable Advantage, for this Reason, Because the Circumstances which a Man imagines himself in during Sleep, are generally such as entirely favour his Inclinations good or bad, and give him imaginary Opportunities of pursuingthem to the utmost; so thathis Temper will lye fairly open to his View, while he considers howitis moved when free from those Constraints which the Accidents ofreal Life put it under. Dreams are certainly the Result of our waking Thoughts, and our daily Hopes and Fears are what give the mind such nimble Relishes of Pleasure, and such severe Touches ofPain, in its Midnight Rambles. AMan that murders his Enemy, or deserts his Friend in a Dream, had need to guard his Temper against Revenge and Ingratitude, and take heed that he be not tempted to do a vile thing in Pursuit of false, or the Neglect of true Honour... I think it has been observed in the Course of your Papers, how much one's Happiness or Misery may depend upon the Imagination: ofwhich Truth those strange Workings ofFancy in Sleep are no inconsiderable Instances; so that not only the Advantage a Man has ofmaking Discoveries ofhimself, but a Regard to his own Ease or Disquiet, may induce him to accept ofmy Advice... Shadow has been identified as the poet John Byrom by various of the later editors of The Spectator? Of these, D. F. Bond footnotes Byrom's reference to Pythagoras, noting the publication in English of André Dacier's The Life ofPythagoras, with his Symbolism and Golden Verses; together with the Life ofHierocles, and his Commentaries upon the Verses. Bond notes Hierodes' comments on the following Verses: Never suffer Sleep to close thy Eye-lids, after thy going to Bed, Till thou hast examin'd by thy Reason all thy Actions of the Day Wherein have I done amiss? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done? If in this Examination, thou find that thou hast done amiss, reprimand thy self severely for it: And if thou has done any Good, rejoice. Dacier cites Porphyry and Marcus Aurelius... (shrink)

COVID-19 is an acute respiratory illness with higher mortality in older adults. This condition is spread person-to-person through close contact, and among policies employed to decrease transmission are the improvement of hygiene habits and physical distancing. Although social distancing has been recognized as the best way to prevent the transmission, there are concerns that it may promote increased depression symptoms risk and anxiety, mainly in older adults. This cross-sectional study aimed to verify self-concept of social distancing in adults compared (...) to older adults. All participants, over 18 years and residents of São Paulo state, were invited to join this research study by a message application and answered an interdisciplinary questionnaire during the period from May 23 to June 23, 2020. The questions were divided into the following aspects: sociodemographic data, financial conditions, routine-related perception, perception of health, physical and emotional state, and eating habits. The younger adult group was composed of 139 participants, with a mean age of 43.15 years, and the older adult group was composed of 437 participants with a mean age of 67.59 years of both sex. Changes in routine during the period of social distance were reported by 95% of adults and 96.8% of older adults, but adults indicated more significant alterations in routine. Although there was no difference between groups for several aspects, adults revealed greater alterations in sleep quality, evacuation frequency, and more difficulty to perform daily activities at home. Further studies are necessary to follow up the impacts of social distancing among adults and older adults in different socioeconomic contexts to better understand the long-term alterations and the necessity of interventions. (shrink)

A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty gains upon (...) waking, and which is relevant to the conditional chance of heads: de re acquaintance with the awakening itself and the non-locating knowledge that it is an experimental awakening. David Lewis and company are committed to several unjustifiable and unacceptable probability assessments. Previous commentators have in effect confused the information that Beauty undergoes this particular experimental awakening for the information that she undergoes some experimental awakening or other. Lewis in particular thereby illegitimately tips the scales both in favor of heads and in favor of Monday. The Sleeping Beauty Problem is equivalent to a ball-in-urn word problem in elementary probability theory. (shrink)

Sleep and dreaming are important daily phenomena that are receiving growing attention from both the scientific and the philosophical communities. The increasingly popular predictive brain framework within cognitive science aims to give a full account of all aspects of cognition. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the theoretical advantages of Predictive Processing (PP, as proposed by Clark 2013, Clark 2016; and Hohwy 2013) in defining sleep and dreaming. After a brief introduction, we overview the state (...) of the art at the intersection between dream research and PP (with particular reference to Hobson and Friston 2012; Hobson et al. 2014). In the following sections we focus on two theoretically promising aspects of the research program. First, we consider the explanations of phenomenal consciousness during sleep (i.e. dreaming) and how it arises from the neural work of the brain. PP provides a good picture of the peculiarity of dreaming but it can’t fully address the problem of how consciousness comes to be in the first place. We propose that Integrated Information Theory (IIT) (Oizumi et al. 2014; Tononi et al. 2016) is a good candidate for this role and we will show its advantages and points of contact with PP. After introducing IIT, we deal with the evolutionary function of sleeping and dreaming. We illustrate that PP fits with contemporary researches on the important adaptive function of sleep and we discuss why IIT can account for sleep mentation (i.e. dreaming) in evolutionary terms (Albantakis et al. 2014). In the final section, we discuss two future avenues for dream research that can fruitfully adopt the perspective offered by PP: (a) the role of bodily predictions in the constitution of the sleeping brain activity and the dreaming experience, and (b) the precise role of the difference stages of sleep (REM (Rapid eye movement), NREM (Non-rapid eye movement) in the constitution and refinement of the predictive machinery. (shrink)

What degrees of belief does Sleeping Beauty's evidence support? That depends.

Explores deep sleep (susupti), one of the three states of consciousness in Advaita Vedanta, and the major role it plays in this philosophy.

For Aristotle, excellence is not an act but a habit, and Hume regards habit as ‘the great guide of life’. However, for Proust habit is problematic: ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first.’ What is habit? Do habits turn us into machines or free us to do more creative things? Should religious faith be habitual? Does habit help or hinder the practice of philosophy? Why do Luther, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard and Bergson all criticise (...) habit? If habit is both a blessing and a curse, how can we live well in our habits? In this thought-provoking book Clare Carlisle examines habit from a philosophical standpoint. Beginning with a lucid appraisal of habit’s philosophical history she suggests that both receptivity and resistance to change are basic principles of habit-formation. Carlisle shows how the philosophy of habit not only anticipates the discoveries of recent neuroscience but illuminates their ethical significance. She asks whether habit is a reliable form of knowledge by examining the contrasting interpretations of habitual thinking offered by Spinoza and Hume. She then turns to the role of habit in the good life, tracing Aristotle’s legacy through the ideas of Joseph Butler, Hegel, and Félix Ravaisson, and assessing the ambivalent attitudes to habit expressed by Nietzsche and Proust. She argues that a distinction between habit and practice helps to clarify this ambivalence, particularly in the context of habit and religion, where she examines both the theology of habit and the repetitions of religious life. She concludes by considering how philosophy itself is a practice of learning to live well with habit. (shrink)