What I've Been Reading. Prison or Playground?

TL;DR: 1. I like to have unread books on hand for when I'm sick or society collapses.

2. American football is really mean, and that's no secret.

3. Our brains like to take the short cut, but that makes us boring old fogeys. Let's mix it up! Take some mind-altering drugs, or, like, lie down in the grocery store (just for a minute) or something.

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Having been caught out by Covid without a lot of books to hand, and libraries and my thrift bookstore closed, I changed my policy of not keeping a ton of books around. (I'd been trying to keep possessions to a bare minimum, living as I was in a small space and, at that time, one block from a public library.)

When the store reopened, I started bringing home all sorts of books I might someday want to read. Am I ever glad!
Home sick with a cold, I have lots to choose from to read all day.
These are what I've been reading.
Off and on for a while now, I've been dipping into By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review, [archive here of the NYT series].
Monday I read [much of] The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis (2006, 2009 ed. with movie-tie in cover);
And, Tuesday, Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018)

I've never understood when people say they already own too many books that they haven't read.  ? ? ? But that is a good thing. Books are not like fruit you have to eat or it goes bad. They are like seed corn--stock to grow the future. Get you some.

"One’s library should contain not just what one knows, but much more of what one doesn’t yet know. “Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
This passage comes from Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book all about the human tendency... to overvalue the known and undervalue the unknown."

The Blind Side blindsided me.

So... speaking of the unknown--did you know that football players intend to and some even want to hurt their opponents? Even beyond hurt--maybe/sorta/kinda kill them?

Hahaha, where have I been, right? Everyone knows that, I'm guessing.
I learned it reading The Blind Side. I'd picked the book up at the store because Ira Glass said in his By the Book interview that Lewis is "the greatest living nonfiction writer."

I've seen some movies based on Lewis's books, and he can make a boring topic fascinating. The role of analytics in baseball? Who cares? Not me, but Moneyball engrossed me.

I'd never read anything by Lewis though. A lot of his books get donated--they're published in the kazillions--but when I went looking recently because of Glass, I only found The Blind Side. I don't care about football, but that's the great thing about good nonfiction--it can make you interested in almost anything.

I skimmed a lot of the football talk in the book unless it followed a person. Quite a lot of it did though. Great storytelling.
The main thing I learned that interested me is, as I said, that some football players intend to hurt their opponents--and to cause fear, which damages an opponent's performance. (Hurt is better than "injure" because injured players are taken off the field, while hurt players keep playing, but not as effectively.)
And . . . that football recruiters look for athletic kids who grew up (are growing up--they're in high school) in emotional and physical deprivation because these kids often have the perfect psychological make up: angry and aggressive.
And, that some of those kids become athletes who enjoy doing more than causing hurt--they want to maim and destroy.

No wonder we Americans love football!

I feel like I shouldn't be surprised. That all makes sense, even from the little I've passively gleaned about American sports. But I was surprised. Maybe what most surprised me is that this is not a shamefully guarded secret--it's right out in the open.

I was only disappointed that Lewis didn't look closely in the book at the religious side of the story. He mentions but doesn't explore the role of faith in the rich, white, Christian couple's lives and how it led them to take in a below-poor Black kid who turns into an NFL player. Religion/faith doesn't seem to be Lewis's interest. It's a big interest of mine, but that's not really a criticism of the book--it's fascinating, with more than enough to be going on.

Prison or Playground?

Speaking of religion--I agree with Michael Pollan's take on it in How to Change your Mind:
the experience of awe and mystery is the root of religion. It arises from "the quest to free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment".

People like Jesus or Buddha who experienced something like a psychedelic trip start--or spark--religions. Then, in the way of things, those religious systems become rigid--like we as individuals tend to become more rigid as we age--more like a prison.
Like in the quote up top--we have a tendency "to overvalue the known and undervalue the unknown".

The secret is to keep one's own brain (soul) flexible, comfortable with the unknown--more like a playground. People who do that in religious contexts might get labeled mystics or saints or bodhisattvas. Outside religion, artists, writers, free spirits, . . . or just GFWs--giant frikkin weirdos.

Pollan looks at how psychedelics (specifically LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms)) can help people whose brains have become inflexible, kinda stuck in place, through trauma and mental illness.

Some of you who comment here know more about all this than I do! I've never even done psychedelics. I'm sure not trying to educate anyone here--I'm trying to make sense of for myself.

As an older person, I was especially interested to read Pollan on why the brain defaults to the easy answers. It's more efficient. And as we age, we have this huge library of answers we've already learned.
I hear  sometimes how much I/we speak in scripts. Agreed upon scripts. Obviously some of that's great. We could use more shared scripts that ease social encounters. Manners, people!

But when that's how we think... Ergh. There was an old woman in a nursing home where I worked whose body was permanently curled into a fetal position. She was so rigid, you could have picked her up by her toes and nothing on her body would have bent. (She died soon after I met her.)
I've met people--of all ages--whose brains were almost like that--they had no bend, no softness, no opening... Everything was script. (That's one definition of a cult--a system that supplies you with all the answers.)

How to stay flexible?

 "The psychedelic experience may... create an opportunity in which the old stories of who we are might be rewritten."
There are other ways, as Pollan talks about, just briefly.
I'm interested because I'm not likely to do psychedelics.
Spiritual practices such as meditation and fasting, also extreme sports, sleep deprivation.
He doesn't mention sex that I noticed (I skimmed a lot of the chapters I wasn't interested in), but that can be a route.

Learning another language can make you doubt your reality (language is a high-control thing, and switching the rules, you have to loosen your grip).
Me learning Latin: What do you mean you can put the words in any order? What do you mean agricola is a masculine noun? (usually nouns ending with "a" are feminine). What do you mean there's no punctuation?

Art too can create that opportunity:
bink spent a wrenching summer literally re-writing and illustrating her childhood traumas as a series of cartoons. Wrenching, because healing doesn't feel good while it's happening, maybe, but she said she doesn't have disturbing dreams and images arise anymore.
So, there's that.

I don;t know. We talk of these matters in grandiose terms--mystics & mushrooms--but I think it can be quite plain and everyday.
Mindfulness (mind-opening to cosmic consciousness) is being present to washing the dishes. Over and over and always. Or, you know--just sometimes.
Now that's a challenge to the brain that wants to put everything in the dishwasher.

What do you think?

Your Brain on Psychedelics (Is an Air Traffic Control Nightmare)

I love reading about brain science, so I paid most attention to Pollan's chapter "The Neurosciene: Your Brain on Psychedelics". (There's plenty of repetition in the other chapters, so you get the point overall.)

We are asked to "conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine... The sheer complexity of the human brain and the greater number of different mental states in its repertoire (as compared with other animals) makes the maintenance of order a top priority, lest the system descend into chaos".

To keep us from chaos (entropy), brains have developed a "default mode network" that keeps down the noise and gives us a sense of self.
I just made this up so I don't know if it's a good analogy, but I think of it as being like Air Traffic Control.

Psychedelics turn that regulating system off (or down), so you experience that ego death and flood of connections people who take a trip talk about.
Literally, parts of the brain that don't usually connect, connect.
BELOW: The everyday brain connections, left, and on psilocybin, right

If you were Air Traffic Control, the one on the right ^ might drive you insane. And, in fact, living in a high-entropy state all the time is a kind of insanity--psychosis. Pollan warns that if you are at risk for that, you should never do psychedelics because they can let psychosis off the leash.
Darn, I can't find the quote, but one researcher also says he does not recommend psychedelic use for young people.

Precooked Solutions

This psychedelic release, however, can help people who have too much ego control ("low-entropy" states), which shows up in "addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression," and in "narrow or rigid thinking". Thinking may beome more rigid as we age and we rely more and more--for efficiency's sake--on what Pollan calls "precooked" solutions, "stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior" that we've adopted long ago.

Precooked! Isn't that great? Instead of cooking, our brains are just sticking it in the microwave.

The question Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain? Or, Is It a Cosmic "Thing" (Like Gravity)? scientists can't answer at this point.
People who take trips say with certainty that it is a fact that consciousness arises outside of ourselves.
But if your default mode network (ego) is shut down, you would say that, wouldn't you?
Not that it's not true!
Here's the cool thing: consciousness remains an open question. Science doesn't know how/where it arises.
So, whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Tripping on the Playground

I want to stay flexible--not because it's a social benefit to stay current (in fact, that's a turn-off, older people trying to be hip are just adopting another script), but because for myself, I don't want to find my brain stuck in a fetal position. That's painful. And the microwave brain diet is boring. 'Boring old fogey' is a real thing.

I would like to offer myself a mushroom omelette and a reset button.

I wouldn't want to take psychedelics, actually, unless it were on one of the guided trips that Pollan talks about. (They've become legal in the US for research purposes.) I'm fine with the slow playground I'm on.
Art, writing, thinking, playing with the dolls and bears, being in the city...

'Playground' sounds nice, but we know from childhood, many of us, playgrounds can be rough. The biggest psychedelic ('mind-revealing') experience I've had in recent years is something I mention in passing a lot:
seeing a cop in my city kneel on a man's neck until he died---in broad daylight, in a busy intersection.

You could call that a bad trip. I haven't read about the psychological effects of a bad trip--do they help more or less than a good trip?
This one worked really well to rip open my sense of the familiar, and to disorient my sense of self. Talk about vertiginous, I sometimes felt dizzy with it.

Through the Thrift Store Mirror

My workplace has been a trip too, over the past five years. I feel like Alice in Wonderland there--less now, but still sometimes.
The other day, Mr Furniture, who is Black, was complaining that more and more white people shop at the store. (He says it's gentrification, but I think that's a great example of someone parroting an old script. It was true that the area showed signs of gentrification before the uprisings after the cops murdered George Floyd.
But now? Entirely the opposite. Would you, blog reader, buy a house by my workplace? I wouldn't!)

Anyway, Mr Furniture was standing around at work bemoaning to everyone and no one about  the overwhelming presence of white people in his life. White people in the store, white people this, and white people that...
And then he practically wails, "White people call me ON THE PHONE!"

LOL! OMG, I burst out laughing--everyone did.
And yet--yeah! How intimate. White people IN MY BRAIN!

Now, Mr Furniture likes me, a white woman, fine as a person. And I like him.
But if the store's staff were all Black, he'd like that better.
And personally encountering the truth of that is a mind-opener.

Living in the City is my big ongoing trip, I guess. Whether I want it or not, the city is a playground that keeps me awake. Taking the bus. Noticing changing language I hear (slang or languages that aren't familiar like English or Spanish).
And I do want to be awake. I just wouldn't choose the discomfort of not being asleep.
Ha. And there is a human predicament. Like the disciples who couldn't stay awake with Jesus on his last night.
I relate!

Oh my goodness. I have a headache now, but I not sneezed once in the x hours it took me to write this, so I'm declaring myself well enough to go to work tomorrow.

I have no wrap-up conclusion, so I'll just say, have a great week ahead, everyone! You are a child of the universe.