We Can All Fly if We Believe

I just finished re-watching "Michael Clayton." One of the main characters of the movie is bipolar, wigs out in the middle of a deposition, continues to act nuts till his death. But of course, in the midst of his madness, there is truth to which the rest of the characters in the movie are deliberately blind. It's a pretty cool movie, and one of the things that makes it cool is this way that they've incorporated a central philosophical notion: that reality is not objective, that the observer is everything when it comes to understanding the truth. That mental health is perhaps not all it's cracked up to be.

Years ago, I read about an experiment that had been performed on two groups of volunteers, one clinically depressed, one non-depressed. They played games of chance, and after the games were over, they were asked to evaluate what their chances of winning had been during the games. The interesting result was that the depressed people rated their chances of winning much more accurately than the non-depressed people. It's depressed people who have the proper grip on objective reality, the study suggests. Not "normal" people.

How could that be? To me, it goes to the nature of "reality". If reality is an objective truth, then observing it accurately should be the optimal strategy. But science has taught us that species that flourish do so because they have adaptations that give them a competitive advantage. Our "normal" tendency to overestimate our chances of success must somehow enhance our chance of survival.

And this makes sense, if you think about it. Say you're in a bind, and things really look terribly hopeless. If you assess that accurately, you're likely to just sit down and accept your fate. If you assess that inaccurately, you might think your harebrained scheme stands some chance of success and you might try it. Most of the time, you'll be wrong, sure. Squashed like bug. But every so often, you'll beat the odds for having tried. You'll win where the dude with the good grasp of reality will lose. Where all else fails, delusion is king.

This is what "mental health" really means. It means the ability to participate sustainably in the group hallucination that best meshes with the world we've built. What wrong with mental ill-health is not that it's necessarily inaccurate, it's that it's maladaptive. Reality isn't a stationary target; it's a story we're creating as we go along; it has a Heisenberg quality that exceeds its central truth. Life isn't a game of chance with fixed odds. Believing unreasonably in your chance of success helps foster your chance of success.

But it's easy to slip from that notion to the fallacy that mental ill-health is some form of inspired wisdom. Mental ill-health comes in all forms. Maybe depressed people can rate games of chance accurately. Maybe manic people can tap into arteries of courage and hope and energy the rest of us couldn't hope for. Maybe schizophrenics can see patterns in the world around them that are subtle and sublime. Where any of these perceptions stand in relation to some mythical (in my opinion) objective reality is immaterial. The center of the mental bell-curve is where it is because it is the human race's hard-won best survival strategy. It is as built in to our biology as are our fingers and toes.

However, that, also, is no static truth. Today's mental health is today's survival skill. In times of upheaval, of great global shifts, when the center's strategy suddenly starts to fail, it'll be the outliers who will flourish. Who knows, some millenia from now, if we survive that long, "mental health" might be defined completely differently than it is now.

Fitness Program for 40 lb. Dogs

The dog and I have a routine that she dearly loves: whenever I get a chance to lounge on the couch for awhile in the evening, I will put little bits of dog treat in a treat ball, and the dog will roll it vigorously around the floor to get all the treats out. Then she'll bring it back to me and hand it to me, and I'll refill it, and she'll re-roll it, and that'll repeat four or five times until I think she's had enough treats. Then I'll take the ball away from her and hand her one last treat, indicating that the game is over. Usually she understands this and settles down.

But last night, I was doing some paperwork on the couch, so I was sitting there for much longer than normal, and the dog grew impatient to play the game again. When she wants me to start the game, she "berfs" at me -- this very tiny imitation of a bark that she uses to get my attention. "Berfing" was initially a really good way for her to comment on things without barking, so I've always encouraged it, but it has become sort of obsessive in the last year -- sometimes she'll sit in the family room and just berf to herself, which is pretty distracting. She can really keep it up far in excess of my patience, and last night she "berfed" at me for about 50 minutes straight -- about every ten minutes I'd give her a long speech about how she had already played treat ball, and it wasn't good to snack all evening, and it wasn't good to get so in the habit of "berfing" that you don't even notice you're doing it, and for those speeches, she would politely shut up and listen, but then a few moments later, she'd get back to it.

Finally, she figured out it wasn't working (thank GOD). Then, since she didn't have access to the treat ball itself, she decided to try bringing me other things. She brought me her tennis ball. She brought me her marrow bone. She kept repeating this -- I'd take the bone from her and admire it and give it back to her, and she would consider it to see whether I had perhaps put some peanut butter on it, and then she'd take it for a lap around the room (to refresh its powers, I presume) and offer it to me again. Finally, I started ignoring the offerings, and she went a few rounds of just placing it hopefully on the floor at my feet, waiting a moment, then picking it up and "refreshing" it with a lap around the room and placing it at my feet again.

I was working busily away when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that she was carefully placing something new at my feet. It wasn't her ball or her bone; it was bright blue. I stopped what I was doing to look down, and there at my feet sat my five pound exercise barbell. It has a tough sort of "nerf" coating that lets her get a decent grip on it, I guess, and I suppose she thought this yeoman's effort would serve as a heroic last ditch attempt. When I started laughing, I could tell she thought she had hit paydirt, and I know it was very hard for me not to give her treats for her inventiveness. I resisted, but I did congratulate her heartily, and then I put the barbells away so I don't wind up with a toothless dog!