Stop Thinking Research Articles

Song of the Andoumboulou: 154

Song of the Andoumboulou: 154 Nathaniel Mackey (bio) “What flashes past will be known as Late Arcade,” Sister C explained, she the oracular traveler new to our group. Steal-Away Ridge kept our feet in place as we looked out at the hills below. We were back at polis’s roots it seemed. . . The one sea lapped eventually west as we wound our way down, a spiderlike left hand descending the strings were it a bass we rode. When we got there Pescadero sat stranded in the sun, the mescaline hum the foothills had been an unlikely shush. . . A place of panic Sister C dubbed it, quiet as it was no matter, eucalyptus light likewise. We were back at polis’s roots we couldn’t stop thinking, miscue no matter the thought was, back in some begin-again lurch. We said forget it, we said polis never liked us. “Never likeded us,” Netsanet laughed and said. . . She was keen on what would not fall apart we could see, intimate- ing Nub rushed in regardless. Quag’s return a re- turn to Quag the reports had it, the late buzz on the radio the news’s hard loop, flies caught in our ears it seemed. An emergent puzzle piece all hands would be burned by it might’ve been, Pes- cadero sat stranded in the sun, the sun setting on water, watery faces panic elicited sown on the sea. . . Thus it was none of us wanted to be there after sun- set, none of us wanted to access polis’s roots. Polis was the police Netsanet reminded us, remanded us to all we already knew. Something seen in a face pelvic savvy grew sweet on, something in a face af- fection tugged at, polis’s retreat, closed-eyed an- nulment night an- nounced [End Page 19] Sister C stood white as a ghost, never more naked, no coat of color in sight’s way. What we saw in her face was its critique of sight’s tease, musing’s forfeiture, straw we grabbed at, grope no matter we might. “Say something,” it said, unremitting, “Say something,” meaning to or not. “Say something,” the it underneath it also said. . . “Dreamt I woke up dreaming dream’s defeat,” we all said at once. We held our noses at the polling place. Not to get weary she counseled us, weary though we already were. No one worth voting for to vote for, we broke into a dragged-foot walk. It was a slow commencement walk, dirgelike, polis’s roots’ recall. . . Polis was a wall we remembered, polis was to keep others out. We made our peace with the passing of things caroling complaint, peace our bulería belied. Piled rocks, rock pile, part spill, part rumba, peace with the passage of time. Polis’s would-be reign armed against it, slow tread we gave ourselves over to, up to, monuments’ erosion we re- hearsed. . . A mimetic walk it was we walked, rocks’ wear, stone’s erosion. “Dear Sister C, assist us,” we pled. “Hallowed be your heavenly girth, sweet midriff, almond-eyed address, fleet regard. . .” Skin’s graduation and bone’s bore down on us, more than we could see or sur- mise [End Page 20] Our slow dance at the polls unfolded no matter. . . They closed early after opening late. . . Sister C was Our Lady of Moot Outcome, beg oth- erwise though we did. Was that all there was we wondered, we who were to be bodiless one day, a paean to the boon bodies were all there real- ly could be. So it was we saw it, extolling underarm sweat, calling it sacred sweat the longer we walked. . . Sister C was a mock muse wagging her finger. The whiff we caught coming off it cut like a knife. As if that was all it all came down to, as though arrest were an un- expected perfume. Inside she hoisted a cheer for her body’s abidance’s musk we could see, Sister C who sat at a table hawking pamphlets, books and brochures, by now not white as a ghost any-. more . . We caught sight of her shapely calves under- neath the...

Deep in Debt: A Review of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Deep in Debt: A Review of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Rediscovering the human and forgetting the natural in economics and finance

When did finance stop thinking about behaviour? The ascendency of the “rational man” model of finance has been strongly influenced by the notion of markets as being akin to natural systems. The question rapidly changes from asking when did finance stop thinking about behaviour to when did finance start thinking about itself as the motion of bodies in a vacuum? It is “the illusion of free markets” that creates the fundamental intellectual difficulties that made the “human” aspects of finance so quickly disappear during the 20th century, only the burst upon the scene when their absence gave rise to such damaging ideas, policies and laws. This paper will look briefly at how the desire of economics and finance to join the canon of natural sciences produced a discipline that slowly cut away the very ground it stood upon.

Lesen unter der Diktatur. Die estnische Spielart des Totalitarismus

The Poetics and Reception of Hidden Resistance: the Estonian Game of Totalitarianism. Where, with whom or with what does totalitarianism begin? An answer in the spirit of Hannah Arendt would be: at the moment when people stop thinking; at the moment when they allow themselves to be turned into instruments of a totalitarian regime. By what means does a totalitarian society achieve that moment?What means does a person have to fight against such an instrumentalization at that moment? What are the means of writers, whose essential nature should be that they never stop thinking? How does a writer working in a totalitarian society manage to create a free space, a place to think, in a situation governed by a single way of thinking that can only be expressed in one language: that of totalitarianism? How does a reader create his or her free space for thinking? What do reading and writing mean in a society that prohibits or hinders free expression and thought for authors and readers?Totalitarianism does not work everywhere in the same way. European history alone has seen different forms of totalitarian power, its ways of ruling depend on the socio-historical development of the society. Literary reactions to totalitarian power are also different: totalitarianism in Nazi Germany was different from that of DDR, which, in turn, was different from practices in Soviet Estonia.In my article, I approach these questions from a very personal perspective, remembering my own reading experiences in the totalitarian society of Soviet Estonia. I can only discuss the years from 1983 to 1985, because earlier I read children’s literature, and afterwards the Soviet regime was already falling apart.I will study communication between readers and authors in the totalitarian society and thereby determine the main difference between the factors that shaped the reading situation in Estonia and the DDR. In Estonia, readers and authors were able to outsmart the totalitarian rule thanks to the cultural continuity based on a symbolic language (rooted in cultural memory), which owes its existence to the fact that totalitarianism was perceived as something foreign, something speaking another language. In the DDR, the poetics of resistance had to be built on a different foundation, since the national culture of the past as a source of identity had been devalued by recent history and was not a suitable basis.

Ontología del cuerpo y estética de la enfermedad en Jean-Luc Nancy: De la téchne de los cuerpos a laapostasía de los órganos

Jean-Luc Nancy travels through the body as a Summa, as a corpus, it subtracts the bio-teleological horizon of the body for delivery to the event horizon, which means stop thinking about a body organized on the basis of a purpose separate from each other thereof. Nancy develops a philosophy of the body which reverses the generally accepted interpretation around the place (subordinate) of the body in the constitution of the modern subject. Hence, Nancy insists that "we have a body but we are one body." Thus the new ontological and epistemological status of the body not only make new forms of subjectivity, but also a "new flesh". So at the boundaries between natural and artificial raises the possibility of thinking in a fragmented body, a body whose organs have been emancipated, as Deleuze and Guattari called the Body Without Organs. As will the knowledge of the entire body and is never absolute, but modal split, and the best form of speech acts such knowledge is of a Corpus precisely mapping, an inventory of areas of the body that provides a set of approaches, revealing what Nancy called himself "body signs". Thus we are interested in Corpus is not all organic but detached parts and possible, in multiple relationships. In parallel, examine the post-humanist thought, developed by Sloterdijk, their philosophical sources and technical means, then, from there to address the problem of otherness, the reconfiguration of subjectivity and ontology of the body such as is proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy. This will review the phenomenon of anti-technology hysteria, the metaphors and eschatology of the disease, deepening the experience of a transplant recipient to finish discussing the ethical implications of this sort of ontology of the body that begins to take shape, a modal ontology - if you will-because the body is related more positions, tensions, and weights, with essences or substances

Introduction

Introduction Carol Zitzer-Comfort (bio) It seems impossible that three years have passed since Malea Powell chaired a session titled “Digital NDNs” at the 2008 MLA convention; however, here we are in 2011 sharing work that began in that thoughtprovoking, engaging session. As always, Malea created a session that was timely and innovative. First, Rick Mott presented an intriguing and visually fascinating overview of his use of digital literacy and technology in teaching Leslie Silko’s Ceremony. Second, Nancy Strow Sheley and I discussed using digital technology to bridge and connect classrooms in Long Beach, California, and in Nicosia, Cyprus, as our students in these different locales shared readings and commentary on American Indian literature. After the presentations, the room broke out in lively discussion. It was obvious that many people in the session, particularly Margaret Noori, were doing fascinating, cutting-edge work involving digital technology in their teaching of American Indian literatures and languages. This MLA session was just a beginning glimpse into the world of “digital NDNs.” Coming away from the session, I couldn’t stop thinking about the excitement generated by this timely topic. Even during the session, several of us discussed the possibility that SAIL might be interested in publishing a special issue on the joining of digital technologies and American Indian literature; thus, the seeds for this volume germinated. This issue could never have come to fruition without the patient assistance and guidance of editors James Cox and Daniel Heath Justice and, of course, the vision of Malea Powell. [End Page ix] The contributors present the ways in which twenty-first-century technology can be used to augment our teaching in meaningful, authentic ways. Margaret Noori, who is well known to all SAIL readers, presents an overview of how she uses technology to teach Anishinaabemowin. It was largely Meg’s excitement and innovation that compelled me to pursue the publication of this issue. Her essay focuses primarily on the development of the site Noongwa e-Anishinaabemjig: People Who Speak Anishinaabemowin Today, which is hosted by a server at the University of Michigan. This site continues to expand with the ever-changing world of language and technology and is an exciting space where scholars and students join together to teach and preserve Anishinaabemowin. As Noori points out: To see and save language, people have always relied on technology. At first it may have been the fire that kept the storyteller and audience together after dark or warmed the women singing beneath the moon. Today, technology is a myriad of tools and systems allowing language to transfer concepts of identity, complex instructions about the universe, arching narratives, whispers of love, or plans for war. Language is still, and has always been, united with technology. Rick Mott presents the development of groundbreaking, digitally motivated teaching in his paper, “Ceremony Earth: Digitizing Silko’s Novel for Students of the Twenty-first Century.” Like many of us teaching American Indian literature, Mott faces students who lack the background knowledge and context necessary to develop a full reading of many texts that we teach. As Mott notes: Many students I have taught, especially those who are non-Native, get frustrated when they read Leslie Silko’s canonical Native American novel, Ceremony. Not only do they struggle with Silko’s disruptions of linear temporality and her collapsing of binary oppositions, they also struggle with the novel’s geographic and cultural location, which is wholly unfamiliar to most of them. [End Page x] Mott has created a wealth of resources to provide his students with ways to better situate and contextualize Silko’s work. His essay “provide[s] background and context for this location-based, multimedia project, including reasons why digital literary artifacts attached to specific geographic points on geobrowsers are so appropriate for teaching Ceremony.” Gabriel Estrada presents a wholly different way of infusing the latest digital technology into his teaching of American Indian literature. Estrada’s article, captivatingly titled “Native Avatars, Online Hubs, and Urban Indian Literature,” draws upon and expands the earlier work of Susan Lobo and Jennifer Ladino. In his introduction, Estrada notes that what his “essay adds to Lobo’s and Ladino’s sentiment is a sense of...

Thrillers, Detective Stories, and Bloody Narratives

Thrillers, Detective Stories, and Bloody Narratives Bryant Simon (bio) Beverly Gage. The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Illustrations, appendix, notes, and index. 416 pp. $27.95. As I read Beverly Gage’s engaging, smart, insightful, and crisply written new book, I couldn’t stop thinking about J. Anthony Lukas. Before he took his own life in 1997, Lukas stood tall as one of the nation’s preeminent historians. Trained as a journalist, with apprenticeships at the Baltimore Sun and New York Times, he wrote sprawling, dramatic stories for a wide, yet still well-informed audience. He wrote epic tales built around fully fleshed-out characters, both the famous and the not-so-famous. The men and women that interested him the most typically found themselves embroiled in and affected by revealing and explosively violent moments: the death of a troubled New England socialite lost in the darkness of the counterculture, the vicious opposition to busing in Boston, and the 1905 murder of an Idaho governor.1 In his essays and books, Lukas crafted what Gage has called in another context (borrowing a phrase from the historian Robert Darnton) “incident stories.”2 Lukas would take a moment, a flash point from the past, freeze it on the page, then show how the people caught up in the incident got there: how their experiences—and even more, how their ideas about justice, race, and class—brought them to this point and conditioned them to respond and think about the event the way they did. Recreating this milieu and with it an emotional connection with the past, much more than contributing directly to historiography, was his intention and mode of operation. When it came to the storytelling itself, Lukas took long, meandering trips deep into the past. Lukas was, in fact, the master of the backward journey. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning study of the Boston busing battles, Common Ground, he told the richly detailed and carefully documented stories of three families—one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one African American—ensnarled in the conflict. To explain the thoughts and actions of his hard-scrabble, reactionary white Charlestown characters, he went back to Ireland: to the bogs, to the famine, and to the heavy-handed rule of the [End Page 114] countryside in the seventeenth century. Again, in his version of history, what matters in the past is how characters—people—came to understand the world they lived in at the moment that Lukas is trying to comprehend, although he usually tied his books up—as his subtitles suggested—in some larger, somewhat vague moral lesson about the nature of class or race in America. In her new book, Gage works in a similar, if significantly slimmed-downed, fashion. Following the incident story arc and plotline that Lukas used in his very last book, Big Trouble, Gage’s The Day Wall Street Exploded is, in many ways, a traditional detective story (and it is more like this than it is a traditional university press historiographic monograph). Gage starts with several bodies and devotes most of her book to trying to solve the case. Along the way, she draws on familiar understandings of the past to tell us about the complex motivations and rich backgrounds of her characters. The story begins just before noon on September 16, 1920. Someone steers a horse-drawn cart up to the sidewalk outside the headquarters of the financial capital of the United States, the House of Morgan. Just as the driver parked, thousands and thousands of office workers, clerks, and stockbrokers criss-crossed the streets and strolled the sidewalks, grabbing something to eat and hurriedly doing errands on their lunch breaks. As the clock inched toward twelve, a bang sounded. Dynamite launched hundreds and hundreds of lethal shards of metal shrapnel through the air. The projectiles tore at people’s limbs. Walls crumbled and glass shattered. Moans and wails could be heard for blocks. When the police and doctors made their final tally, they added up twenty-six dead and many more maimed and injured. Given the proximity of...

Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life (review)

Reviewed by: Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life Ann Ronald Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life. By Nancy Lord. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 231 pages, $24.95. When I opened the pages of Rock, Water, Wild, I reconnected with an old friend. I’ve never met Nancy Lord, never had a conversation with her. But I’ve read all of her nonfiction books—this is her fifth—and have liked every one of them. Her prose is smart and smooth, provocative and powerful. What I like best about Lord’s essays is her ability to extend nature writing beyond the confines of the trees and sky. Her words get down to the minutiae of flora and fauna; she quotes a range of authors, alludes to scientific data, describes geology in depth, and—most important—she asks key philosophical questions about the relationships humans have with an ever-changing environment. The latter strength is what I most appreciated in Rock, Water, Wild. For example, when floating down a wild Alaskan river, she identifies what has changed and what has stayed the same, even as she ponders an expanded mining site where pollution most likely will alter the landscape irrevocably. The mine sits in British Columbia; its discharge will affect Juneau. That’s a conundrum Lord cannot personally solve but can bring to the reader’s attention. Likewise, issues of bear habitat preservation. Likewise, questions of fishery rules and regulations. A trip to Russia raises questions about whaling policy and simultaneously transcends the language differences with something as simple as a fishing pole. Lord challenges the reader to think beyond the narrow confines of the conservation movement by acknowledging its real-life implications and also by embracing a natural world in flux from generation to generation. One of my favorite essays takes Lord and her partner back to the site of Fishcamp (1997), her first Alaskan book. The life they led there no longer exists—salmon netting is too unprofitable, Nancy and Ken are no longer in their twenties, their beloved neighbors are gone, the underbrush is overgrown, the beach well-nigh abandoned. Thoughts about life’s natural transitions abound in this essay, always tied closely to the scenery and its inhabitants, animal and human. As is often my experience with Lord’s prose, when I finished the piece, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and the questions it raised. If anything, Rock, Water, Wild is more philosophical than Lord’s previous books—a trait that bodes well for her future writing. I do hope she stretches herself in that direction, because [End Page 99] occasionally she revisits old haunts without moving beyond their original confines. The complexities of Native languages, for example, are explored in Fishcamp and then repeated in Rock, Water, Wild. The same holds true of the Harriman expedition so thoroughly experienced in Green Alaska (2000) and of whaling trivia in Beluga Days (2004). Lord’s writing is more compelling, I think, when she moves the context farther, and further. Nonetheless, I recommend Rock, Water, Wild. Most of it is quite new, an accomplished collection of essays that challenges the reader in evocative and sometimes surprising ways. Ann Ronald University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association

Think, blink or sleep on it? The impact of modes of thought on complex decision making

This paper examines controversial claims about the merit of "unconscious thought" for making complex decisions. In four experiments, participants were presented with complex decisions and were asked to choose the best option immediately, after a period of conscious deliberation, or after a period of distraction (said to encourage "unconscious thought processes"). In all experiments the majority of participants chose the option predicted by their own subjective attribute weighting scores, regardless of the mode of thought employed. There was little evidence for the superiority of choices made "unconsciously", but some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices. The final experiment suggested that the task is best conceptualized as one involving "online judgement" rather than one in which decisions are made after periods of deliberation or distraction. The results suggest that we should be cautious in accepting the advice to "stop thinking" about complex decisions.

Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Switching From Cognitive Therapy to Behavioral Activation in a Case of Chronic Treatment-Resistant Depression

Several recent investigations have demonstrated that Cognitive Therapy (CT) and Behavioral Activation (BA) are both efficacious treatments for depression (Butler, Chapman, Forman, & Beck, 2006; Dimidjian et al., 2006; Dobson, 1989; Gloaguen, Cottraux, Cucherat, & Blackburn, 1998; Hollon, Thase, & Markowitz, 2002; Jacobson et al., 1996). This investigation focuses on the treatment of Mr. X, a 62-year-old man with chronic treatment-resistant depression and comorbid personality pathology. After a course of 21 sessions of CT, treatment was switched to BA. We present daily mood data from 147 days of each treatment. Generalized least squares analyses of these time series data demonstrated that BA was associated with improved mood and these results were supported by clinical observation of improved functioning during the course of BA. We hypothesize that efforts at cognitive restructuring had an iatrogenic effect on this client and paradoxically triggered depressive rumination; these failed efforts provided further evidence in support of his underlying defectiveness schema. We also speculate that this client's dependent personality ran counter to CT's emphasis on autonomous homework assignments. Future randomized clinical trials are needed to investigate if nonresponders to CT benefit by switching to BA.

"Just stop thinking about it": Effects of emotional disengagement on children's memory for educational material.

Children regulate negative emotions in a variety of ways. Emotion education programs typically discourage emotional disengagement and encourage emotional engagement or "working through" negative emotions. The authors examined the effects of emotional disengagement and engagement on children's memory for educational material. Children averaging 7 or 10 years of age (N=200) watched either a sad or an emotionally neutral film and were then instructed to emotionally disengage, instructed to engage in problem solving concerning their emotion, or received no emotion regulation instructions. All children then watched and were asked to recall the details of an emotionally neutral educational film. Children instructed to disengage remembered the educational film better than children instructed to work through their feelings or children who received no emotion regulation instructions. Although past research has indicated that specific forms of emotional disengagement can impair memory for emotionally relevant events, the current findings suggest that disengagement is a useful short-term strategy for regulating mild negative emotion in educational settings.

A “Triple W”-Model of Rumination on Sadness: Why Am I Feeling Sad, What’s the Meaning of My Sadness, and Wish I Could Stop Thinking About my Sadness (But I Can’t!)

Depressive rumination has been found to be a critical factor in the onset and maintenance of depression [for a recent review, see Nolen-Hoeksema, In C. Papageorgiou, & A. Wells (Eds.), Depressive rumination: Nature, theory, and treatment (pp. 107–124). Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2004], but an issue still to be resolved is whether some aspects of depressive rumination are more damaging than others. Some studies have found depressive rumination to have a single factor, others describe several dimensions. This study addresses (a) whether a single or multi-factorial model is most appropriate, and if so, (b) which aspect of depressive rumination is the most pathological. In Study One, a measure of depressive rumination, the Rumination on Sadness Scale (RSS; Conway, Csank, Holm, & Blake, Journal of Personality Assessment, 75, 404–425, 2000), was given to 152 students (128 women). Reliability and validity for the RSS was corroborated. The RSS was then used to further investigate the multi-component nature of depressive rumination. Confirmatory Factor Analyses on the RSS revealed a three-factor solution; “ruminating about the reasons for my sadness” (Causal Analysis), “ruminating about the meaning of my sadness” (Understanding), and “uncontrollability of this ruminative thinking on my sadness” (Uncontrollability). In order to strengthen the three subscales, eight new items were added. Four items of the original RSS were deleted. In Study 2, using this extended scale (Leuven Adaptation of the Rumination on Sadness Scale; LARSS), the three-factor model was replicated in a second sample (N = 219). Depressive symptoms and the tendency to suppress negative thinking (Wenzlaff & Luxton, Cognitive Therapy and Research, 27, 293–308, 2003) were associated with Uncontrollability of ruminative thinking. Results confirm the importance of distinguishing different components in depressive rumination and tentatively suggest that the meta-ruminative factor, uncontrollability of rumination, is particularly problematic.

‘Stop Thinking of Culture as Geography’: Early Childhood Educators' Conceptions of Sociocultural Theory as an Informant to Curriculum

The discourse and concepts associated with sociocultural theory have become increasingly important in discussion associated with early childhood education and curriculum at a theoretical level since the early 1990s. However, the extent to which such ideas have been adopted and understood by early childhood educators at the level of practice remains unclear. This study reports the findings from an investigation aimed at examining the understandings of sociocultural theory held by a group of early childhood educators and assistants without previous in-depth exposure to the discourse and concepts of sociocultural theory. The findings suggested that the educators initially interpreted sociocultural theory in multicultural terms. As opportunity to explore their ideas continued, this understanding shifted to one in which the educators saw sociocultural theory as related to the children they taught within their educational contexts. Questions were raised by the educators regarding the extent to which sociocultural theory challenged their existing sense of self as teachers.

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How antipsychotics work: The patients' perspective

Background While much is known about the neuropharmacology and objective efficacy of antipsychotics, little is known about how these drugs act on psychosis from the patients' perspective. Most previous studies of the patient's perspective have focused on drug tolerability and acceptability—rather than their effects on psychosis per se. Methods The authors examined how antipsychotics work from a patient's perspective by analyzing their responses to a subjective questionnaire. Ninety-one patients with schizophrenia (cross-sectional component) and eight neuroleptic naïve patients (before and after treatment, longitudinal component) participated. The patients' responses to the questionnaire were analyzed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and general linear models. Results Analysis of the patients' responses showed that from their perspective the drugs were substantially more effective in: “help deal, help stop thinking, and make the symptoms not bother” rather than “take away” or “change my mind”. This differentiation was clear in the raw data and was supported by a formal PCA. Two underlying factors–the first termed detachment and second eradication–explained 71% of the variance in the patients' perspective on how antipsychotics work for them. Neuroleptic naïve patients, who had no prior exposure, expected drugs to help with both detachment and eradication, but, changed their mind with just 6 weeks of experience with the medications. Conclusions From the patients' perspective the action of antipsychotics is best characterized by a detachment from symptoms—rather than an eradication or elimination of symptoms. They have more wide-ranging expectations prior to antipsychotic exposure, but, even 6 weeks of exposure is sufficient to change their mind in favor of detachment. This finding is consistent with some of the very earliest ideas that antipsychotics produced a state of “indifference” and is also consistent with the more recent, neurobiologically informed notions that antipsychotics work by dampening the salience of psychotic symptoms.

The Cognitive Psychology of Missed Diagnoses

Cognitive psychology is the science that examines how people reason, formulate judgments, and make decisions. This case involves a patient given a diagnosis of pharyngitis, whose ultimate diagnosis of osteomyelitis was missed through a series of cognitive shortcuts. These errors include the availability heuristic (in which people judge likelihood by how easily examples spring to mind), the anchoring heuristic (in which people stick with initial impressions), framing effects (in which people make different decisions depending on how information is presented), blind obedience (in which people stop thinking when confronted with authority), and premature closure (in which several alternatives are not pursued). Rather than trying to completely eliminate cognitive shortcuts (which often serve clinicians well), becoming aware of common errors might lead to sustained improvement in patient care.

MSJAMA. Pain and forgetting.

A MAN WITH A BROKEN ANKLE LAY GRIMACING IN THE TRAUMA unit, his crooked foot bulging awkwardly. A self-assured orthopedic resident entered the suite as a nurse administered a syringe full of clear fluid, patting the patient gently on the chest after she had finished. Minutes later, the resident tugged at the man’s foot while two interns applied traction. The man screamed in agony, writhing on the gurney. The procedure left him covered in sweat, weighted down with exhaustion, and battered by waves of pain. Within 15 minutes, all signs of disturbance had vanished. The man’s face held a serene look, a faint smile emerging every now and again. He answered the nurse’s questions calmly, without irritation or any hint of the anguish he felt moments earlier. “So, when are they going to reset my ankle?” he asked. Learning that the procedure was already over, his initial response was disbelief and astonishment, followed by relief as he realized he would not have to suffer having his ankle wrenched back into position. Little did he know that only moments before his moans had echoed through the halls. As a medical student, I have learned to keep my composure through a variety of unsettling situations. I assumed that this was yet another time when I would be best off holding my emotions in check. But later that day, I asked the nurse about the case. Why had the man forgotten the procedure? Why had his agitation evaporated so quickly, even as the bed sheets were still drenched with his sweat? She replied nonchalantly that he had been given midazolam for conscious sedation, further explaining that this drug blocks memory for a narrow window of time. Because the subject seemed so mundane to her, I just nodded, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the case. It seemed everything but ordinary to me. I supposed that the drug had eased the patient’s anxiety and spared him the memory of the procedure. But, then again, I had witnessed the man writhing in pain. Where had that pain gone if not into memory? It was so difficult for me to believe that he had actually forgotten his pain that I began to wonder if I had misunderstood, or misperceived, his “painful” cries. Perhaps there is a benefit to having one’s memory cleared of a traumatic event. In a simplistic way, it seems ideal: to leave behind completely the memory of something terrible so that one is entirely unaffected by the event. Memory is the scaffolding upon which consciousness hangs, and consciousness is the foundation of experience. But is memory the only scaffold? Would traces of the experience emerge in the future, perhaps as vague feelings of anxiety or apprehension, perhaps as a nightmare? Might pain leave a lasting mark outside of consciousness and sensitize neural pathways, predisposing a patient to pronounced or lingering experiences of pain in the future? I found it almost inconceivable that pain could vanish, leaving behind not a ripple. This patient’s initial experience of the pain was unmitigated. Was the pain somehow less real, less harmful because he couldn’t recall it? While I’m not sure of the answer to this question, from the standpoint of the caregiver, forgotten pain must seem a more benign variety. A patient’s complaints are the primary way that his or her pain is registered. If there is no complaint of pain, perhaps there is no pain. Once the procedure was over, midazolam appeared to have functioned as a painkiller, although it is not. Might the drug’s ability to strip the memory of pain and thus silence a patient’s complaints be misconstrued as adequate pain management? Certainly the relief of anxiety about pain is a powerful benefit in itself, but it is not the same thing as relief of pain. While medical professionals may be spared the patient’s complaints of pain, the patient is spared only the memory of it.

The Golden Arches and the Ivory Tower: Creating an Acto on the Corporate University

Between 16 and 25 October 2001, the faculty union of the California State Universities held teach-ins on all the CSU campuses. To support this effort, Mason and her colleagues created Education Inc., or How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love Measurement-Driven Instruction. Research for the play taught them that all levels of U.S. public education are struggling with the destructive effects corporate thinking is having on education.

Why Do We Think? Consequences of Regarding Thinking as Behavior

Cognitive psychologists have made significant progress in explaining how people think. However, relatively little time and energy have been invested in understanding why we think–the factors that make us start or stop thinking, choose and change strategies and solutions. Such questions are linked to motivation and to discriminative and reinforcing stimuli. In this article, the idea that studying thinking as a form of behavior closely connected to antecedent stimuli and consequences leads to potentially important questions that are not presently being studied in the field of cognitive psychology. This is not an argument for reverting to behaviorism–rather, the argument is made that integrating a behavioral perspective on thinking would enrich cognitive psychology.

Leibniz and the Ideas of Sensible Qualities

In order to understand the thoughts of Leibniz it is important to stop putting Leibniz into the convenient pigeon-hole of rationalist, and stop thinking of him merely as the metaphysician and constructor of systems so vividly ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide. Most important of all, one should not attempt to see Leibniz's philosophy as a completely articulated and integrated whole or as built on three or five metaphysical and logical principles. It is better to remember that Leibniz was a very prolific writer, who was interested in the most varied aspects of philosophy, logic, mathematics, natural science, jurisprudence, history and philology: a man who was constantly trying to work out a large number of heterogeneous theories and thoughts. The collected editions of his writings make up more than twenty thick volumes, and these hardly exhaust his manuscripts. Yet this was a man who published only one book in his lifetime.