Jeffrey Winke, Coquette (a collection of sensual Haiku)
The erotic is the arousal of our sexual sense through the slowing of attention. The erotic is sexuality, not sex. The erotic refuses to rush past. It rebels against compartmentalizing sexuality to sex, or the bedroom, or erections and orgasms. It slows us down, takes notice, can happen beneath the covers, in a crowded restaurant, cooking a meal, or over a game of chess.
The erotic pays attention. It notices a fold, a texture, a scent, a nuanced gesture with a wink of delight. The erotic is neither the whip nor the whisper, but the lingering of attention to how either, or both, strikes the senses.
Stop the rush of time to notice that peach’s texture as you take your first bite…
…and the feel of a pair of fresh nylons slipping up over your legs…
…and how her hands work the knife when slicing a fresh vegetable.
Lean in and whisper to your spouse, lover, or friend when it would be just as easy to speak in your normal voice. Lay in bed before your morning shower, attuning yourself to the sparrow, neighbor’s voice, and that passing car. And when you finally step into that shower, notice where skin-pleasure inclines you to let the water fall.
The erotic requires no end other than drawing a moment out with a sensory detail. The erotic can see the universe in a grain of sand and satisfy a craving for love through the subtle touch of the hand. “We are obsessed with an insatiable appetite for ever more vivid sensations,” Isabel Allende writes in her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. “…a subtle caress, the pleasure of skin against skin, or of sharing a peach is not enough anymore.”
The erotic is our body electric carefully listening, touching, tasting, smelling – stopping time and refusing to not take notice.
If you’re someone who sees poker as a game of luck, then chances are you’re not a very good poker player.Elite poker players are master psychologists.They know themselves — their tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses.They read other players.They understand the probabilities behind their choices.
A great poker player understands that luck is a part of the game, but Lady Luck is not where he or she rests their hopes.When taking a chance, playing a bluff, raising, or folding, the best players understand the probabilities, the psychology of the game and the other players.At the drop of a hat, they can tell you why they played their cards the way the did.
*Your greatest enemy is denial.We deny the truth about our own abilities.We exaggerate our wins, and fail to register our losses. We chase weak cards, or sit at games where we have no hope of winning.We tell ourselves stories that a flush is easier to draw than it actually is, or that we lose because we’re just unlucky, or someone else is luckier.Or, we fall prey to betting a hand that we know has no chance of winning because…well…just because.
*You should understand yourself more deeply.Why do you play the way you do?What are your tendencies?How does your style of play affect other players around you?Do you blame others, lousy luck, make excuses? Or, do accept responsibility when you have no chips left at the end of the day?
* Focus on other players.Are you self absorbed?Weak players fixate on their own hands.They think only of themselves. Strong players study the players around them, their tendencies, their talk, and what their talk says about them.They engage the other players as much, if not more, than their own hands.Who is he?What moves the way she plays her cards? They get to know the other players intimately.
*Playing styles are caused by and reveal people’s desires and fears.What do you want?Why are you playing this game with these people?What are your fears?How many times in our life do we get hijacked by wishes and fears — we chase that one card denying it’s poor probability, or we fold with a winner?
*Think visibly.Make your assumptions and thought processes explicit.Great poker players talk to themselves, at least in their own heads.They can tell you what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Great poker players live mindfully, attending to each check, raise, and call made, as well as each card dealt and how it changes the whole table. They play knowing that the last hand, win or lose, has little to do with the cards in front of him.
*One of the best ways to improve your results is to change your style.Change it up.If you tend to be loose and aggressive, tighten up.If you tend to hold back, push forward.Great poker players don’t have a one size fits all style.They are continually adjusting to the players in this game, and this pot.
In life, success is not always about winning or losing, but how effectively we navigate the bumps, opportunities, and good and bad chances that fall our way.There are times when that great hand we are dealt, falls short. There are other times, we win on a bluff that was better not taken.Either way, don’t fool yourself that the failure or success of one hand means anything.Until that last hand in life is dealt, there’s always another hand to play.There’s always room to improve our game.
Great poker players are self-aware, conscious of who they are for better and worse, take responsibility for their own results, understand probabilities, aren’t given to superstitions, don’t play in games they’re not suited for, and are brutally realistic about the hand they are dealt and the game they are playing.
Gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to walk away.
Watch Daniel Negreanu talk himself out of a winning hand!
Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains. With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise. Buddhists call it our monkey-mind.
In any given hour we’re besieged by hundreds of thoughts. Most of these thoughts are the same thoughts we had the hour before. And, the hour before that. The same thoughts over and over — for hours, days, weeks, and even years. Sometimes they just come on their own. Sometimes, we coax the more compelling of the bunch so we can poke and prod them over and over.
The more we think something, the more likely we’ll think it again. That’s a neurological fact. To the brain, thought is an action. To think a thought, then to think it over and over, we strengthen that circuitry. Fire it up, baby! Soon, it’ll glow at the slightest provocation. And if fear attaches and catches hold, instinctively we’ll fix to it. Feed it. Nourish it. Hold onto it and watch it grow.
Fear is one of those feelings that’s in love with itself. It will take the slightest sign of trouble to justify and amplify it’s own existence. And, if that sign isn’t there? It will make it up. It scans the world, our imagination, our memories for it’s reason to be, because…well…that’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s a feature, not a bug. Why? When it comes to survival, it’s better to be wary, wrong, and live, than to take your time to be accurate and end up as somebody else’s meal.
Genetically speaking, physical survival is king. Yet, our psychological lives are tied to this very same survival system. These days, most of us can go a lifetime without ever having to run for our lives. Instead, we have deadlines. Mortgages. Car breakdowns. Hundreds of unanswered e-mails marked “urgent”. Our freedom from physical danger allows us the privilege to exercise our threat response on bosses, co-workers, lovers, kids, husbands, and wives.
We’re free now to imagine all kinds of threatening possibilities to stir up that monkey cage. Even better, let’s put that threat sometime in the future when there’s nothing we can do about it. Watch our monkey-mind agitate. Imagine that fear coming to get you sometime next week — the body will react as if it’s right in front of your face!
And if we forget that we were afraid? Oh right! Let me get back to that! We’ll conjure it back. We’ll encourage our own obsessiveness over our envies, our grievances, our jealousies, our losses. We’ll do it in future time where they haven’t yet happened. It will happen. It will…it will…it will. Now, we can sit bracing ourselves while tied to our helplessness. We’ll sit. Wait. Stew within the electro-chemical buzz. We’ll find meaning in all that brain noise.
Shhh…listen…there are messages in that static.
How we love to rattle our own cage only so we can watch our monkey-thoughts scream, hop about, and agitate.
Would you consider a one in one million chance occurrence a miracle? Perhaps you’re traveling in China. You’re marveling at the Great Wall. Beside you — a fellow traveler with whom you strike a conversation. In minutes, you discover that he or she lives in the same city and graduated in the same year (albeit different high school). Moreover, your birthdays are within the same week and you both love peanut butter on celery. What’s the chance of this! And if he or she happens to be attractive and you happen to be available, you can’t help but believe that Fate has reached down to touch the moment.
One in one million. That’s the definition of a miracle worked out by Cambridge mathematician J.E. Littlewood. Using simple math and a few suppositions, professor Littlewood figured that we should expect one miraculous occurrence every 35 days. In essence, these chance occurances upon which we are inclined to place so much meaning, may not be that unusual at all.
Littlewood started with the supposition that we are alert and active for at least 8 hours a day. (That means hours NOT passively staring into our TV or computer screens!) Secondly, we experience roughly one event per second. Therefore, in 35 days, we will have experienced 1,008,000 events – 8000 more events than what we need to experience that one in a million miracle! Here’s the math.
8 hours x 3600 (seconds per hour) = 28800 (events per 8 hour day)
28800 (events) x 35 (days) = 1,008,000 ( events per 35 days)
Of course, the more active your life, the more varied the events you’re likely to encounter. We might say on a purely mathematical basis that traveling to China, or hiking the Appalachian Trail,
Appalachian trail
or frequent walks around your town, will afford more opportunity to experience those monthly miracles than spending hours, weeks, and even months sitting in front of your computer screen.
Keep in mind, however, that neither Littlewood, nor anyone else, will be able to tell you what, exactly, those miracles might be.
One more small requirement for encountering a miracle? You have to be on the lookout for one.
Imagine. You are running. The sun warms your skin. You feel the drumming of the pavement against the bottoms of your feet. Your arms move in rhythm to your steps. Beads of sweat trickle down your forehead. Smell the freshly mowed grass. Birds flutter and chirp along the tree lined street. An occasional car passes. You hit stride. You are running with more energy than you’ve ever run before. A feeling of health and animal pleasure glow inside your body.
If you stayed with the above fantasy, the same regions of your visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic brain circuits lit up as would have if you really were taking that run. It’s the same if you imagined tapping out a pattern with your fingers, hitting a tennis ball, or imagining your cat hop onto your lap.
We’ve known for some time that experience changes the function and structure of our neural wiring. We call this learning. But what has become increasingly evident is that thinking alone, with no input from the outside world, can also change the physical structure of our brain.
Researchers asked one group of subjects to visualize practicing a 5-finger right-handed piano exercise over and over again for several hours. They were not to touch the keys, but only imagine themselves doing so. The same regions of the brain that controlled the right fingers expanded in the same way as those subjects who were instructed to actually practice the piece touching the piano.
The mere thought of doing something has the capacity to change your brain structure, and thus your performance. It’s something that sports psychologists have know for a long time. If you can see it, you’re training your brain and your body to make it happen.
Researcher Gary Klein found that imagination, or mental simulation, is one of the most important decision making tools for combat commanders, fireman, chess masters, ER doctors, ICU nurses. In the heat of the moment, experts don’t follow rules and procedures. Nor do they use formal logic. Instead, they create mental images based on their experiences. As one fire commander confided, “To be a good fire ground commander, you need to have a rich fantasy life.”
Klein writes, “he was referring to the ability to use the imagination, to imagine how the fire got started, how it was going to continue spreading, or what would happen using a new procedure. A commander who cannot imagine these things is in trouble.” (1)
Visualization is not just for athletes or experts under fire. It can be a crucial tool for navigating your day to day, especially if depressed, anxious, or finding yourself facing some uphill battle. If we practice the scene in our imagination and build into the fantasy as much positive emotion as we can muster, then we have brought ourselves several steps closer to accomplishing whatever challenge is before us. If you can see it, you are crucial step closer to making it happen.
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(1) Klein, Gary. Sources of Power. US: MIT Press, 1999. (p. 45.)
Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. This slogan was uttered by Timothy Leary to 30,000 hippies in Golden State Park. It was 1967 — prelude to the Summer of Love. Hippie culture and the language of psychedelia broke from our television sets right into our suburban living rooms.
The Age of Aquarius has given way to the Age of Silicon. Where once LSD and psilocybin churned the neural circuitry of a few hippie brains, now my entire species is being doused by the continuous humming, buzzing and bleeping of pockets, purses, and hip-holsters alive with electronic gadgetry. Cellphone? Check. Blackberry? Check. I-pod? You betcha!
Plug in, turn up, and tune out suburbia. And suburbia is everywhere.
Now, I’m not a Luddite grinding my axe in anticipation of some anti-technology uprising. But something is unsettling about all this bleeping. As a psychotherapist, I’ve noticed a drastic rise in psychological troubles tied directly to the hows, whens, and whys of technology usage. Whether it be cyber-gaming, cyber-love, endless interruptions of one’s personal life by e-mail, cellphones and text messages, people feel their flesh-and-blood lives have indeed been broken into. One personal friend of mine counted with horror that he’d spent the equivalent of a full seven months out of his year locked inside that 3 by 4 foot space around his computer screen. (And that didn’t include work hours!)
It was Marshall McLuhan who taught us how the form of a medium, more than its content, alters our senses. All of this electric circuitry plugged into our ears and before our eyes has morphed into an extension of our central nervous systems - a kind of technological skin we can now wear to restaurants. We even live our lives and conduct our relationships inside of these gadgets.
How many times have I tried to leave my cell phone at home, or not check my e-mail for the umpteenth time, or avoid plugging into one of the many technological contraptions that I keep around for my comfort and entertainment, only to find myself feeling as if tweaked by a phantom limb. Try it. Notice how long before the panic sets in.
I braced myself. I committed. My cellphone would remain on SILENT. No walking, nor driving when using it - and away from public. I’d portion my e-mail to twice a day. And watch that internet surfing! For the first 36 hours I went through something I can only characterize as withdrawal - anxiety, restlessness, emotional hand-wringing. But once I slipped free from the urgings of my technological skin to graft itself back in, low and behold, it’s as if I’d awakened to my real skin. I came to an eerie sensation that I’d come back into my body.
Beam me back down, Scottie.
Timothy Leary’s slogan didn’t really mean that we should drop out of the world and do a lot of drugs. His urging was that we do what it takes to open our minds to everything in and around us.
Tune in — interact with the world. Externalize, look around.
Turn on — activate your neural and genetic equipment. Access the layers of consciousness that are available by virtue of your human wiring.
Drop out — free yourself from all those unconscious and involuntary commitments not of your choosing. Amen!
We humans evolved over a span of a few million years hunting and gathering within wide-opened African savannas. Our senses evolved to respond to a simpler, yet more physically demanding pleistocene world. We’ve plugged ourselves into all of these comfort-gadgets for only a microsecond in relative time. Our genetic wiring has not adjusted. It’s making us all a little crazy.
Still, technology is not a devil I’ll ever want to exorcise completely, even if I could. These layers of technological devices are woven intricately into my day to day, and I must admit their benefits. No, this is a devil with whom I’ll have to dance. I’ve grown too accustomed to writing on a computer to ever go back.
Besides, where would I stop if gripped by some whack-brained effort to extricate myself completely? The manual typewriter? The quill? Chisel and stone? And how I still love surfing YouTube, and the intimacy of my I-pod where I can saunter down the street shuffling from Sinatra, to Talib Kwali, to Zepplin and Incubus. As for the cell-phone, nothing frees me up more when I need to touch base with my kids or confirm whether it’s chicken breast “with or without the bone.” It’s time for a strategy — for hard fought middle ground.
Marshall McLuhan reminded, “there is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” For me I need stop and think at every point when I have that urge to plug in. It’s to be my new norm, not an exception — to live more hours unplugged than plugged so I not forget the play of the flesh and blood world upon my senses.
What’s that? It’s a real voice. A real set of eyes. A real person un-mediated by some byte of technological wizardry. Everyday I remind myself with this reworked mantra from the Summer of Love, “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”
Face-to-face eye-gazing. Remember that?
So when that cell phone rings or that e-mail flags demanding some immediate response? “Sorry, man - you’ll have to improvise. I’m unplugged, right now.”
Col. John Boyd knew a thing or two about life and death decisions under conditions of rapid change, uncertainty, and ambiguity. As a fighter pilot he bet any taker that he could maneuver onto his tail position and shoot him down within 40 seconds. Most of the time it took less than 20. He never lost the bet. Boyd was arrogant, brash, cocky, and always testing limits – whether airplanes, people, ideas, or the military bureaucracy, itself. To some he was a crackpot. To others he was one of the greatest military and strategic thinkers of the 20th century.
Boyd read extensively. Mathematics. Physics. Genetics. Biology. Anthropology. Sociology. Political and military history. His intellectual grasp of scientific and philosophical ideas was expert. He found connections everywhere. In a conversational flourish, he might weave together Marx’s theory of alienation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Mendel’s genetics, and throw in Sun Tzu, quantum physics and Michael Jordan’s slam dunk for emphasis. Boyd believed that learning how to think sharply, deeply, and quickly was a prerequisite to our ability to adapt to complex, uncertain, and ever changing circumstances. His motto may well have been, “Think sharply and innovate, or die.”
The basis of Boyd’s philosophy of adaptability is that we must stay open to survive. Living systems are open systems, communicating continuously with the outside world. We communicate to gather information, knowledge and understanding, as well as replenish our life energy. If we close ourselves in and the wider world out, we cripple our capacity to adapt, and eventually die out as a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.
When under fire – whether it be through misunderstandings, failings, bad breaks, setbacks, disappointments – our tendency may be to isolate ourselves to the security of a more certain physical, emotional, or intellectual space.
We hide out in our living rooms, we close ourselves off from other people, we fix ourselves to our secure biases about other people and the world, failing to let ourselves be challenged by new information. What we gain in temporary sense of safety and security, we lose in the potential of stretching our capacity to not only adapt, but even thrive in face of uncertainty, ambiguity and change.
Boyd’s key concept was the OODA loop. It was a strategy of staying engaged both physically and mentally during times of uncertainty.
Observation:gather information from the world by means of experience and your senses. Pay special attention to information that runs counter to your experience or expectations.
Orientation: Analyze and synthesize the information to form a perspective from which to guide a strategy of action.
Decision: Determine a course of action based on how you’ve chosen to orient yourself to the situation.
Action: Play out the decision, while continuously adjusting according to how the world responds.
For Boyd, a life that always works out, a life without loose ends, or failings, or humiliating defeats, or blown fuses would not be a life worth living. We need challenges. We need to be pushed. Without problems to solve, and setbacks to overcome, we would become automatons — life’s furniture rather than creative, thinking agents of change.
“Improvisation is based on building from what is already given, accepting it, and taking it one step further,” writes comedian Andy Goldberg. One of the first rules of improvisation, any improvisation, DON’T DENY. Accept what’s been established. In improvisational comedy, denial is “refusing to give up a preconceived notion of what is going to happen next in a scene.”(1)
Denial stops action. Denial is our refusal to accept the unfolding moment.
Saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker never stopped mid-riff if he didn’t take to a particular chord. His saxophone flourishes wove themselves throughout whatever augmented 7th or diminished 9th flashed his way. Another bird, basketball legend Larry Bird, never stopped action mid-game to complain, “I don’t like the way you’re defending me!” Whatever the defenses threw against him, he found a way.
Both birds were great improvisers. They excelled at playing the moment. Playing the moment is the second golden rule of good improvising. Every action builds from the previous one. Each response leads to the next. Goldberg writes, “You can’t be so busy thinking about what you are going to say or do next that you miss what is going on.”
Keith Johnstone, another master of comedic improvisation writes, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged.” Why? Because good improvisers accept all offers. (2)
Great improvisers are great listeners. Their senses are ever alert to what’s in front of them. A basketball player scans, a chef smells and tastes, a musician hears. Great improvisers don’t deny what’s in front of them. They don’t resist it. They don’t sit back brooding and wishing things were different. “Bring it on!” is their mantra.
Rock climbing pioneer Arno Ilgner talks about “hoping” and “wishing” as passive mental states that bleed off our capacity to respond in the immediate. (3) When on a difficult part of a climb it’s useless to escape into wishing that a particular hand or foot hold be different. You still have to push past. (See Lynn Hill climbing video below.) Yet, it’s a trap into which we all can fall. How often do we sit fixated on a past conversation, or replaying a long gone moment, or wishing that we weren’t in the spot we were in and that things will somehow magically turn out differently?
Rock Climber, Lynn Hill
Survival expert and trainer John Wiseman knows a thing or two about improvising. “When facing a disaster it is easy to let yourself go, to collapse and be consumed in self-pity,” he writes. “But it is no use giving up or burying your head in the sand and hoping that this is a bad dream that will soon pass.” (See PsychOut post entitled Shame.) Stay confident. Accept your circumstance. Use everything in front of you to the fullest. (4)
In life, we all find ourselves in tough spots or in new and unfamiliar circumstances. When there, don’t deny. Accept the moment. Keep your senses engaged. Take what’s given. Think of the two Birds. Improvise!
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1) Goldberg, Andy. Improv Comedy. Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1991.
2) Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.
3) Ilgner, Arno. The Rock Warrior’s Way. La Vergne, TN: Desiderata Institute, 2003.
4) Wiseman, John “Lofty. SAS Survival Handbook. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
I often spend my evenings writing. Well, while writing, I found myself thinking about your first game experience with the JV team tonight. One of the strongest mental qualities anyone can cultivate is learning how to turn a disappointment into an advantage. It’s part of what I call resilience – resilience meaning the ability to recover quickly after difficult circumstances. If fed and nurtured it will take you far in life.
I know those feelings of heartbreak, anger and embarrassment when you sit the bench the entire game. It’s a good thing to let yourself feel those feelings. Don’t block them out. Use their burn to feed that hunger you have to be out there on that court. Playing hungry motivates, encourages risk, boldness, and strength of spirit.
Hungry players make things happen for themselves and their teammates. Harry Sheehy — the once basketball coach and now athletic director of Williams College — wrote that every player should have the experience of working their tails off for a whole season while having to sit the bench. It creates mental toughness, a strong work ethic, along with humility and respect for the game.
Those who are given their chances easily, without having to work hard for them, are those who will have a harder time later in life when facing challenges, obstacles and setbacks that require hard work and perseverance. You’re learning what it is to bust your butt with no guarantee of succeeding, but are choosing to do it anyway. It’s a quality to admire and that will take you far.
Watch Mugsy Bogues, 5′3″ NBA player (warning: uncensored strong language)
It’s no lie, as a small guard you will have to work three times harder, play three times smarter, and be three times tougher than everyone else out there. So be it! Keep at it, challenge yourself, challenge your teammates, hone every aspect of your game in the secret of the practice court — away from the fans, your friends, and the public eye. When your opportunity comes you will be ready. (And it will come. It’s only the first game of a very long season.)
There have been many times in life I’ve had my back against the wall, or I’ve faced setback, embarrassment, or disappointment. It’s the lessons I’d learned facing these moments in my sports life from which I’ve drawn to pull me through.
Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Bulls, and now coach of the Lakers once said, “There’s more to life than basketball, and there’s more to basketball than basketball.” If you never a play a minute the whole season (which won’t happen), yet keep pushing yourself just the same, you’ll learn life lessons that will take you far beyond the high school basketball court.
I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put him together again
with the patience of a chess player.
On October 3, 1974 Anne Sexton was unable to pry out the broken pieces. She closed up the garage, turned the ignition key, and waited for the waft of carbon monoxide exhaust to carry her off toward that “pint-sized journey” into death.
Anne Sexton
Was Anne Sexton’s suicide an inevitable result of parental hostility, or a child’s life gone astray? Was it alcoholism, bipolar disorder, her genes, or caused by some chemical imbalance that might have been corrected if Prozac, or Wellbutrin, or the right combination of Lamictal and Abilify were available then?
We like certainty. We like tidy explanations. We prefer our answers to “why” wrapped in simple, easy-to-organize, packages. “It’s in your brain” makes as much sense as finding causation in child-rearing, toilet training, or that kid who bullied you in 5th grade. A chemical imbalance? It’s enough to make us feel comfortable taking the pill because at least, now, we have a digestible explanation for “why.” We’ll call it a useful little lie.
When it comes to “whys” of human emotional sufferings, the truth is as elusive as it is messy. In the world of psychiatry, causation is a chimera. (1)
psychotic chimera
If there’s anything that modern neuroscience says for certain about the human brain, it’s to keep our humility. One human brain has over 100 billion neurons, 109 trillion synapses, and hundreds of thousands of interconnecting circuits. There are no biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs to distinguish Anne Sexton’s brain, from that of the Dalai Lama, or your neighbor next door who washes his car every weekend and obsesses over his front lawn. Yes, we’ve learned much in the last 10 or so years. But even then, we’ve not scratched the surface of understanding the workings of this magnificent, and at times troubling, organ.
“In a dot of brain no larger than a single grain of sand, 100,000 neurons go about their work at a billion synapses.” Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind
Drug companies have marketed the idea that depression represents a chemical imbalance — a decreased availability in the brain of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Before you jump on the wagon and proclaim your own chemical imbalance, however, consider that there are no tests to date that assess the chemical status of a living person’s brain. There are at least fifteen different serotonin receptors. We have little idea what these receptors actually do, or how they may relate to any psychological state. In fact, it is now estimated that there may be over 100 neurotransmitters, and most psychotherapeutic drugs affect many more neurotransmitters than were initially suspected.
As for genes? Every day we read some article about scientists uncovering a gene that causes shyness, or depression, or fearfulness, or talkativeness, or sexual promiscuity. One gene, one behavior. But, genes do not produce either behaviors or mental states. Genes carry instructions for producing amino acids and proteins, and then assembling these proteins into enzymes and anatomical structures.
Yes, somewhere down the line these structures, whether they be neurons, brain circuits, or the number, kinds, and functioning of synapses, are faintly related to what we do and how we feel. It’s never just one gene acting alone, however, but in concert with other genes. Even our genes have to be switched on or off by a chemical reaction caused by a specific environmental influences — like being spanked, or falling in love, or getting divorced, or reading the Brothers Karamazov, or taking LSD. How this all works to cause anxiety, depression or schizophrenia, we have only the faintest of clues.
Elliot Valenstein, in his book Blaming the Brain, reminds that there is no way that a mere one hundred thousand genes can determine the precise configuration of 10 trillion synapses in the human brain. Genes may build the structure of the house, but it’s our collection of experiences that furnish it, decorate the walls, landscape the yard, create the mood, whether chaotic, calm, or melancholic – in essence, make a life our home. (2)
Does it mean we should shun the help offered, whether it be talk therapy, pharmaceuticals, or some combination thereof? Of course not. Ask the tens of thousands who have been be mercifully spared the fate of the worlds’ Anne Sextons. Poet Jane Kenyon wrote:
We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again
like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.
I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
were I used to buy milk and gas.
I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,
and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking (3)
Neither does it mean, however, we accept tidy, spoon fed explanations. The paradox is that psychiatry has been slightly better at solutions than causes – though the solutions are often hard fought, partial, and not without sometimes troubling trade-offs.
All Anne Sexton poems are from: Sexton, L. G. (Ed.). The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. 1999: Mariner Books.
(1) Michael McGuire and Alfonso Troisi, in their book Darwinian Psychiatry, remind: “….some persons with depression grow up and live in adverse social environments while others do not; some come from families in which depression is common while others do not; and significant individual differences in depression-causing physiological systems have been reported. What is more, some respond to one type of anti-depressant medication but not to another; some do not respond to any type of medication but do respond to electroconvulsive treatment; and some do not respond to any known intervention.” (Quoted by Andrew Solomon in Noonday Demon, p. 401
(2) Valenstein, E. S. (2000). Blaming the Brain. New York: The Free Press.
Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains. With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise. Buddhists call it our 
