1. Read the following short story.
2. Write a one page, single spaced response answer to the following question: What was Vonnegut trying to say with this story?
Turn your TYPED written work in on Monday.
HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.
"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."
"Um," said George.
"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."
"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.
"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.
"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."
George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."
"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."
"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."
"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."
"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"
If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.
"What would?" said George blankly.
"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?
"Who knows?" said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."
"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."
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"Harrison Bergeron" is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Project Due by Friday...upload your one page response to this space on the blog
http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/interactive-map
Today, you get to solve a problem. You have just been elected president of Mexico. Congratulations. You get to run the country, but you must also solve a problem: drug violence.
Today, you get to solve a problem. You have just been elected president of Mexico. Congratulations. You get to run the country, but you must also solve a problem: drug violence.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Book Review of Epiphany
A collection of opinions from disgruntled students
Some people enjoy judging books by their covers and although the book “Epiphany” has a lovely cover, it’s not nearly as enjoyable as it appears. Elise Ballard’s book “Epiphany” is a collection of stories from a variety of people she conducted interviews with. She gave each story the unique voice of the person who was interviewed. The reader gets a sense of each contributor’s personality, philosophy, and history. There is an atmosphere of overly sentimental themes throughout Ballard’s book. The reader is quickly guided into a subtle version of the self-help genre.
This book could have been improved with the inclusion of research based ideas. The addition of examples of epiphanies which did not turn out well for the person having the experience could have been used as well. An example would be moving to Hollywood and retiring as a waitress without a SAG card, who enjoys simple, everyday conversations with people rather than applying make-up every day and acting in front of a camera. The writing structure was an issue as far as organization is concerned. Random thoughts seemed to occur throughout her paragraph introductions for a good majority of interviews.
This book may lead readers towards other genres of literature i.e. “Dostoevsky” or “Bukowski.”The epiphany of the class is that Ballard’s future works should be avoided if they involve written word.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Natural Intelligence
Outside Magazine, June 2011
Get Your Mind Dirty
In 2005, the author introduced us to the idea of childhood nature-deficit disorder. With The Nature Principle, he's back with a prescription for adults.
By Richard Louv
PERHAPS YOU RECALL A TIME when you took in more of the world. You were new and the world was new. As a boy, I would go out in the woods and sit under a tree, then lick my thumb and wet each nostril. I had read somewhere that people—perhaps pioneers or American Indians, I don't remember—did this in order to keen their sense of smell for approaching game or danger. I held perfectly still, my back against rough bark, all of my senses waiting. And slowly, animal life returned. A rabbit appeared under a bush, birds swooped low, an ant went on a walk-about over my knee. I felt intensely alive.
Can we be new again? In 2005, when my book Last Child in the Woods was published, I wasn't prepared for the movement that would follow, and for the reaction of adults when they considered their own lives.
In the book, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder—not as a medical diagnosis but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation, nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book's publication, I heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.
One day after a talk in Seattle, a woman literally grabbed my lapels and said, "Listen to me: adults have nature-deficit disorder, too." She was right, of course. As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights are touched by the natural world. While individuals can find immeasurable joy in a great work of art, or by falling in love, all of life is rooted in nature, and a separation from it desensitizes and diminishes us.
That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture. However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.
While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance intelligence. At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative.
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing along with biodiversity. At the same time, our culture's faith in technological immersion has no limits. We sink ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking accounts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines designed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders; of computer-augmented reality. We even hear talk of a posthuman era in which people themselves are optimally enhanced by technology. Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves?
By contrast, I believe the future can be shaped by what I call the Nature Principle, which holds that in an age of environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of nature and balance the virtual with the real.
The skeptic will say that this prescription is at best problematic, given the rate at which we're destroying nature, and the skeptic will be right. This is why the Nature Principle is about conservation but also about restoring ourselves while we restore nature; about bringing back natural habitats where they once existed or creating them where they never were—in our homes, workplaces, cities, and suburbs. It's about the power of living in nature—not with it but in it.
The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.
MANY OF US DESIRE a fuller life of the senses. We city dwellers marvel at the seemingly superhuman or supernatural abilities of "primitive" peoples like the Australian Aborigines but consider those talents vestigial, like that remnant tailbone. Here's another view: such senses are in fact latent in all of us, blanketed by noise and faulty assumptions.
Ever wonder why you have two nostrils? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did. They fitted undergraduates with taped-over goggles, earmuffs, and work gloves to block other senses, then set them loose in a field. Most of the students could follow a 30-foot-long trail of chocolate perfume and even changed direction precisely where the invisible path took a turn. The subjects were able to smell better with two functioning nostrils, which researchers likened to hearing in stereo. And they found themselves zigzagging, a technique employed by dogs as they track. "We found that not only are humans capable of scent tracking," said study researcher Noam Sobel, "but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of [other] mammals."
What else can we do that we've forgotten? Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including blood-sugar levels, empty stomach, thirst, and proprioception (awareness of our body's position in space). In 2009, researchers at Madrid's University of Alcalá de Henares showed how people, like bats, could identify objects without needing to see them, through the echoes of human tongue clicks. According to the lead researcher, echoes are also perceived through vibrations in ears, tongue, and bones—a refined sense learned through trial and error by some blind people and even sighted individuals. It's all about hearing a world that exists beyond what we normally mistake for silence.
This brings us to the so-called sixth sense, which to some means intuition, to others ESP, and to still others the ability to unconsciously detect danger. In December 2004, as the devastating Asian tsunami approached, Jarawa tribespeople of India's Andaman Islands reportedly sensed sounds from the approaching wave, or some other unusual activity, long before the water struck the shore. They fled to higher ground. The Jarawas used tribal knowledge of nature's warning signs, explained V. R. Rao, director of the Anthropological Survey of India, based in Calcutta. "They got wind of impending danger from biological warning signals, like the cry of birds and change in the behavioral patterns of marine animals." In the Jarawas' case, the sixth sense may be the sum of all the other senses combined with their everyday knowledge of nature.
In separate research, the U.S. military has studied how some soldiers seem to be able to use their latent senses to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The 18-month study of 800 military personnel found that the best bomb spotters were rural people—those who'd grown up in the woods hunting turkey or deer—as well as those from tough urban neighborhoods, where it's equally important to be alert. "They just seemed to pick up things much better," reported Army Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, who worked on the study for the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. "They know how to look at the entire environment." And the other enlistees, the ones who'd spent more time with Game Boys or at the mall? They didn't do so well. As Burnett put it, they were focused on the proverbial "screen rather than the whole surrounding."
The explanation may be partly physiological. Australian researchers suggest that the troubling increase in nearsightedness is linked to young people spending less time outdoors, where eyes must focus at longer distances. But more is probably going on here. Good vision, acute hearing, an attuned sense of smell, spatial awareness—all of these abilities could be operating simultaneously. This natural advantage offers practical applications. One is an increased ability to learn; another is an enhanced capability to avoid danger. Still another, perhaps the most important, is the measurement-defying ability to more fully engage in life.
BUT LET'S BE REALISTIC. Even if we're lucky enough to have bonded with nature when we were young, maintaining that bond is no easy thing. Information has infiltrated our every waking minute. Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital displays. Screens pop up in airports, coffeehouses, banks, grocery-store checkout lines, even restrooms. Advertisers hawk DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians' offices. This info-blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition: continuous partial attention.
There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion without a force to balance it creates a hole in the boat, draining our ability to pay attention, think clearly, be productive and creative. To combat these losses, our society seems to look everywhere but the natural domain for the building of better brains, whether through supplements like ginkgo biloba or nootropics—so-called smart drugs—like Ritalin, the amphetamine Adderall, and Provigil. Some people need such medication, of course, but overreliance on these substances remains a massive experiment with long-term side effects that have yet to be determined. And an immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.
Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature's healing effect on the mind in the 1970s. Findings from their nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. It can also help reboot the brain's ability to think. The Kaplans and their team followed participants in an Outward Bound–like program, which took people into the wilderness for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterwards, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physical activities, like rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.
Over time the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. Paying conscious attention to something demands voluntary effort, they found, which can erode mental effectiveness and get in the way of forming abstract long-term goals. "A number of symptoms are commonly attributed to this fatigue," Stephen Kaplan and his colleague Raymond De Young wrote in 2002. "Irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have a magnified effect on our behavioral choices."
The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue is involuntary attention, a kind of "fascination," which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: for instance, the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine and allow the opportunity to explore. Furthermore, they found, the natural world is a particularly effective place for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue.
One reason for this might be right beneath our feet. A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, found that a common soil bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The natural bacterium in question, Mycobacterium vaccae, is usually ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few weeks, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that the M. vaccae we come in contact with all the time in nature may "play a role" in learning in mammals. Smart pill, meet smart bug.
Taking this even further, can time in nature nurture genius itself? Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it's the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.
When public-radio commentator John Hockenberry reported in 2008 on research at the University of Michigan that indicated greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, "two of the most brilliant people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in the woods on the Princeton campus."
The science here is both incomplete and encouraging; we do know that, because of the brain's plasticity, moments of growth can happen throughout life. And so can the creation of new neurons, the brain cells that process and transmit information. It's reasonable to speculate, then, that time spent in the natural world, by both restoring and stimulating the brain, may lead to bursts of new neurons. Nature neurons.
SO DOES THIS MEAN that we should dispense with electronic media entirely? No, and for most of us that would be close to impossible. But we can cultivate a third way.
When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of video games—more than I was comfortable with. Occasionally, they'd try to convince me that members of their generation were making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much time texting, video-gaming, and so on, they were wired differently. In response I pointed out that my generation said something like that about recreational drugs. That didn't work out so well.
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the breakneck pace of technological change is creating what he calls a brain gap between the generations, and this gap is opening in a single generation.
Small and his colleagues used MRIs to study the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates complex information and short-term memory and is instrumental in decision-making. Two groups were tested: experienced, or "savvy," computer users; and inexperienced, or "naive," ones. While doing Web searches, savvy users had dorsolateral areas that were quite active, while in the naive users the dorsolateral area was quiet. As the Canadian magazine Maclean's reported, "On day five, the savvy group's brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts."
Teenagers' brains are particularly malleable, apt to be shaped by technological experience. Is this a good thing? One view is that people who experience too much technology in their formative years experience stunted development of the frontal lobe, "ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode," as Maclean's put it.
More optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking is creating the smartest generation yet, freed from limitations of geography, weather, and distance—pesky inconveniences of the physical world. This vision calls to mind the sci-fi speculation of the 1950s and '60s that people would someday be freed from physical limitations and that, as they evolved, their brains—in fact, their heads—would grow larger and larger, until members of our species or what it becomes (Homo google?) just float around in space. We're not floaters yet. In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that "they don't know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events"— despite all that available information.
But here is a third possibility, and the one I prefer: the hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking is to live simultaneously in both the digital and physical worlds, using computers to maximize our powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite our senses and accelerate our ability to learn and feel—combining the resurfaced "primitive" powers of our ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.
Putting the Nature Principle to use in our lives won't, of course, be just about neurons and intelligence. A whole river is gathering force, its headwaters fed by science. New branches reach outward, producing exciting career possibilities: biophilic design, reconciliation ecology, green exercise, ecopsychology, place-based learning, slow food, and organic gardening. Generous future historians may someday write that those of us alive today did more than survive or sustain—that we brought nature back to our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our families.
Few today would question the notion that every person, especially every young person, has a right to access the Internet, whether through a school district, a library, or a city's public Wi-Fi program. We accept the idea that the divide between the digital haves and have-nots must be closed.
But recently I've been asking another question of people: Do we have a right to walk in the woods?
Get Your Mind Dirty
In 2005, the author introduced us to the idea of childhood nature-deficit disorder. With The Nature Principle, he's back with a prescription for adults.
By Richard Louv
PERHAPS YOU RECALL A TIME when you took in more of the world. You were new and the world was new. As a boy, I would go out in the woods and sit under a tree, then lick my thumb and wet each nostril. I had read somewhere that people—perhaps pioneers or American Indians, I don't remember—did this in order to keen their sense of smell for approaching game or danger. I held perfectly still, my back against rough bark, all of my senses waiting. And slowly, animal life returned. A rabbit appeared under a bush, birds swooped low, an ant went on a walk-about over my knee. I felt intensely alive.
Can we be new again? In 2005, when my book Last Child in the Woods was published, I wasn't prepared for the movement that would follow, and for the reaction of adults when they considered their own lives.
In the book, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder—not as a medical diagnosis but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation, nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book's publication, I heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.
One day after a talk in Seattle, a woman literally grabbed my lapels and said, "Listen to me: adults have nature-deficit disorder, too." She was right, of course. As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights are touched by the natural world. While individuals can find immeasurable joy in a great work of art, or by falling in love, all of life is rooted in nature, and a separation from it desensitizes and diminishes us.
That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture. However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.
While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance intelligence. At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative.
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing along with biodiversity. At the same time, our culture's faith in technological immersion has no limits. We sink ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking accounts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines designed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders; of computer-augmented reality. We even hear talk of a posthuman era in which people themselves are optimally enhanced by technology. Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves?
By contrast, I believe the future can be shaped by what I call the Nature Principle, which holds that in an age of environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of nature and balance the virtual with the real.
The skeptic will say that this prescription is at best problematic, given the rate at which we're destroying nature, and the skeptic will be right. This is why the Nature Principle is about conservation but also about restoring ourselves while we restore nature; about bringing back natural habitats where they once existed or creating them where they never were—in our homes, workplaces, cities, and suburbs. It's about the power of living in nature—not with it but in it.
The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.
MANY OF US DESIRE a fuller life of the senses. We city dwellers marvel at the seemingly superhuman or supernatural abilities of "primitive" peoples like the Australian Aborigines but consider those talents vestigial, like that remnant tailbone. Here's another view: such senses are in fact latent in all of us, blanketed by noise and faulty assumptions.
Ever wonder why you have two nostrils? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did. They fitted undergraduates with taped-over goggles, earmuffs, and work gloves to block other senses, then set them loose in a field. Most of the students could follow a 30-foot-long trail of chocolate perfume and even changed direction precisely where the invisible path took a turn. The subjects were able to smell better with two functioning nostrils, which researchers likened to hearing in stereo. And they found themselves zigzagging, a technique employed by dogs as they track. "We found that not only are humans capable of scent tracking," said study researcher Noam Sobel, "but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of [other] mammals."
What else can we do that we've forgotten? Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including blood-sugar levels, empty stomach, thirst, and proprioception (awareness of our body's position in space). In 2009, researchers at Madrid's University of Alcalá de Henares showed how people, like bats, could identify objects without needing to see them, through the echoes of human tongue clicks. According to the lead researcher, echoes are also perceived through vibrations in ears, tongue, and bones—a refined sense learned through trial and error by some blind people and even sighted individuals. It's all about hearing a world that exists beyond what we normally mistake for silence.
This brings us to the so-called sixth sense, which to some means intuition, to others ESP, and to still others the ability to unconsciously detect danger. In December 2004, as the devastating Asian tsunami approached, Jarawa tribespeople of India's Andaman Islands reportedly sensed sounds from the approaching wave, or some other unusual activity, long before the water struck the shore. They fled to higher ground. The Jarawas used tribal knowledge of nature's warning signs, explained V. R. Rao, director of the Anthropological Survey of India, based in Calcutta. "They got wind of impending danger from biological warning signals, like the cry of birds and change in the behavioral patterns of marine animals." In the Jarawas' case, the sixth sense may be the sum of all the other senses combined with their everyday knowledge of nature.
In separate research, the U.S. military has studied how some soldiers seem to be able to use their latent senses to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The 18-month study of 800 military personnel found that the best bomb spotters were rural people—those who'd grown up in the woods hunting turkey or deer—as well as those from tough urban neighborhoods, where it's equally important to be alert. "They just seemed to pick up things much better," reported Army Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, who worked on the study for the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. "They know how to look at the entire environment." And the other enlistees, the ones who'd spent more time with Game Boys or at the mall? They didn't do so well. As Burnett put it, they were focused on the proverbial "screen rather than the whole surrounding."
The explanation may be partly physiological. Australian researchers suggest that the troubling increase in nearsightedness is linked to young people spending less time outdoors, where eyes must focus at longer distances. But more is probably going on here. Good vision, acute hearing, an attuned sense of smell, spatial awareness—all of these abilities could be operating simultaneously. This natural advantage offers practical applications. One is an increased ability to learn; another is an enhanced capability to avoid danger. Still another, perhaps the most important, is the measurement-defying ability to more fully engage in life.
BUT LET'S BE REALISTIC. Even if we're lucky enough to have bonded with nature when we were young, maintaining that bond is no easy thing. Information has infiltrated our every waking minute. Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital displays. Screens pop up in airports, coffeehouses, banks, grocery-store checkout lines, even restrooms. Advertisers hawk DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians' offices. This info-blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition: continuous partial attention.
There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion without a force to balance it creates a hole in the boat, draining our ability to pay attention, think clearly, be productive and creative. To combat these losses, our society seems to look everywhere but the natural domain for the building of better brains, whether through supplements like ginkgo biloba or nootropics—so-called smart drugs—like Ritalin, the amphetamine Adderall, and Provigil. Some people need such medication, of course, but overreliance on these substances remains a massive experiment with long-term side effects that have yet to be determined. And an immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.
Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature's healing effect on the mind in the 1970s. Findings from their nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. It can also help reboot the brain's ability to think. The Kaplans and their team followed participants in an Outward Bound–like program, which took people into the wilderness for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterwards, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physical activities, like rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.
Over time the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. Paying conscious attention to something demands voluntary effort, they found, which can erode mental effectiveness and get in the way of forming abstract long-term goals. "A number of symptoms are commonly attributed to this fatigue," Stephen Kaplan and his colleague Raymond De Young wrote in 2002. "Irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have a magnified effect on our behavioral choices."
The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue is involuntary attention, a kind of "fascination," which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: for instance, the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine and allow the opportunity to explore. Furthermore, they found, the natural world is a particularly effective place for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue.
One reason for this might be right beneath our feet. A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, found that a common soil bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The natural bacterium in question, Mycobacterium vaccae, is usually ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few weeks, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that the M. vaccae we come in contact with all the time in nature may "play a role" in learning in mammals. Smart pill, meet smart bug.
Taking this even further, can time in nature nurture genius itself? Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it's the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.
When public-radio commentator John Hockenberry reported in 2008 on research at the University of Michigan that indicated greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, "two of the most brilliant people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in the woods on the Princeton campus."
The science here is both incomplete and encouraging; we do know that, because of the brain's plasticity, moments of growth can happen throughout life. And so can the creation of new neurons, the brain cells that process and transmit information. It's reasonable to speculate, then, that time spent in the natural world, by both restoring and stimulating the brain, may lead to bursts of new neurons. Nature neurons.
SO DOES THIS MEAN that we should dispense with electronic media entirely? No, and for most of us that would be close to impossible. But we can cultivate a third way.
When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of video games—more than I was comfortable with. Occasionally, they'd try to convince me that members of their generation were making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much time texting, video-gaming, and so on, they were wired differently. In response I pointed out that my generation said something like that about recreational drugs. That didn't work out so well.
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the breakneck pace of technological change is creating what he calls a brain gap between the generations, and this gap is opening in a single generation.
Small and his colleagues used MRIs to study the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates complex information and short-term memory and is instrumental in decision-making. Two groups were tested: experienced, or "savvy," computer users; and inexperienced, or "naive," ones. While doing Web searches, savvy users had dorsolateral areas that were quite active, while in the naive users the dorsolateral area was quiet. As the Canadian magazine Maclean's reported, "On day five, the savvy group's brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts."
Teenagers' brains are particularly malleable, apt to be shaped by technological experience. Is this a good thing? One view is that people who experience too much technology in their formative years experience stunted development of the frontal lobe, "ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode," as Maclean's put it.
More optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking is creating the smartest generation yet, freed from limitations of geography, weather, and distance—pesky inconveniences of the physical world. This vision calls to mind the sci-fi speculation of the 1950s and '60s that people would someday be freed from physical limitations and that, as they evolved, their brains—in fact, their heads—would grow larger and larger, until members of our species or what it becomes (Homo google?) just float around in space. We're not floaters yet. In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that "they don't know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events"— despite all that available information.
But here is a third possibility, and the one I prefer: the hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking is to live simultaneously in both the digital and physical worlds, using computers to maximize our powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite our senses and accelerate our ability to learn and feel—combining the resurfaced "primitive" powers of our ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.
Putting the Nature Principle to use in our lives won't, of course, be just about neurons and intelligence. A whole river is gathering force, its headwaters fed by science. New branches reach outward, producing exciting career possibilities: biophilic design, reconciliation ecology, green exercise, ecopsychology, place-based learning, slow food, and organic gardening. Generous future historians may someday write that those of us alive today did more than survive or sustain—that we brought nature back to our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our families.
Few today would question the notion that every person, especially every young person, has a right to access the Internet, whether through a school district, a library, or a city's public Wi-Fi program. We accept the idea that the divide between the digital haves and have-nots must be closed.
But recently I've been asking another question of people: Do we have a right to walk in the woods?
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
COMMON ERRORS IN CLASS WORK
Just to remind you, we worked in class on two common errors:
1. Commas with a list: 1, 2, and 3.
2. Possessive Apostrophes
1. Commas with a list: 1, 2, and 3.
2. Possessive Apostrophes
Epiphany Assignment
After reading Elise Ballard's book Epiphany, you will have the opportunity to write a 4 page (typed, double-spaced)essay responding to one of the following questions:
1. According to Mehmet Oz, "The goal is to move from just knowledge, which is information, to understanding, which is awareness." (72) Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
2. Albert Einstein had an epiphany that changed his life and the world. How would his epiphany be categorized by Ballard? Are there paralells between Einstein's epiphany and those described in Ballard's book? (obviously, you have to find this story)
3. Ballard desribes epiphanies in their social and spiritual context. Find examples of epiphanies in other areas of life such as business or sports. Explore the meaning of sudden insight in the non-spiritual realm.
4. Chloe Wordsworth writes, "Change has so much to do with our beliefs and how much we are willing to adapt them or let them go and open ourselves to new ones." (175)Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
5. It seems as though many of the stories in Epiphany happen to wealthy, highly materially successful individuals. Is epiphany only something that happens to the upper classes? Critique the book, finding stories of profound sudden insight from other sources.
6. CREATE YOUR OWN QUESTION: THIS MUST BE CLEARED WITH ME BEFORE THE ROUGH DRAFT IS DUE.
KEY DATES:
Typed Rough Draft Due in Class: Wednesday, June 1
No rough draft in class will mean no passing grade on this assignment.
Final Draft Due: Monday, June 6 as you walk into class
Final Draft Due to Turnitin.com: any time on June 6
1. According to Mehmet Oz, "The goal is to move from just knowledge, which is information, to understanding, which is awareness." (72) Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
2. Albert Einstein had an epiphany that changed his life and the world. How would his epiphany be categorized by Ballard? Are there paralells between Einstein's epiphany and those described in Ballard's book? (obviously, you have to find this story)
3. Ballard desribes epiphanies in their social and spiritual context. Find examples of epiphanies in other areas of life such as business or sports. Explore the meaning of sudden insight in the non-spiritual realm.
4. Chloe Wordsworth writes, "Change has so much to do with our beliefs and how much we are willing to adapt them or let them go and open ourselves to new ones." (175)Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
5. It seems as though many of the stories in Epiphany happen to wealthy, highly materially successful individuals. Is epiphany only something that happens to the upper classes? Critique the book, finding stories of profound sudden insight from other sources.
6. CREATE YOUR OWN QUESTION: THIS MUST BE CLEARED WITH ME BEFORE THE ROUGH DRAFT IS DUE.
KEY DATES:
Typed Rough Draft Due in Class: Wednesday, June 1
No rough draft in class will mean no passing grade on this assignment.
Final Draft Due: Monday, June 6 as you walk into class
Final Draft Due to Turnitin.com: any time on June 6
Friday, May 6, 2011
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