Big Brother9 is launched this evening on C4tv. Earlier blogs of mine have revealed my interest in this reality tv show. Please do not confuse my interest with approval of life styles and behaviour of most participants. My interest is in human psychology and group dynamics displayed in an entertaining and educational format. What is here thrust in your face is what you can also find in more 'polite' society if you dig just below the surface. Some aspects of human psychology and social interaction are universal in the 'unredeemed' human. This is an opportunity to study the different type of 'human animal'. It is an experience comparable to that of visiting a zoological park.
"Big Brother 9 starts tonight and MTV can exclusively reveal some clues to the contestants identities...
One Housemate does stand-up comedy
One Housemate has been deported from America
One Housemate is a DJ
One Housemate is a Buddhist
One Housemate is Muslim
One Housemate wears a watch worth £13,000
Three Housemates have children
Three Housemates were born outside the UK
One Housemate has appeared in a film with Hugh Grant
One Housemate has had a breast enlargement
One Housemate has never watched Big Brother
The eldest Housemate is 42."
Big Brother: Blind man, breast implant woman and Buddhist in the house
By John Bingham(Telegraph)
A woman with breast enlargements, a Buddhist and a DJ are among contestants entering the Big Brother house as the reality television show begins its ninth series.
A total of 16 housemates - the highest ever - have been lined up for the 13-week run.
They also include a stand-up comedian, one woman deported from the United States and - a blind man.
Another of the housemates has appeared in a film with Hollywood star Hugh Grant and one is a reject from another reality show Popstars - the programme which created Girls Aloud.
Programme makers hope to push the boundaries further than ever and, with new super-sensitive microphones, the contestants will have nowhere to hide.
Never far from controversy, the Channel 4 programme suffered from flagging ratings last year.
The spin-off celebrity version was cancelled last year in the wake of racism and bullying rows.
Instead, digital channel E4 screened Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack, a new format for the series. It managed to pull in only 600,000 viewers on average.
Programme makers hope this series will give the format, which made a household name of Jade Goody, a new lease of life.
Some housemates will have to endure sleeping in a dormitory-style bedroom and could even find themselves spending time in a "jail" but others will enjoy a luxury room.
Not for the shy, the house also has a bathroom with a transparent wall.
The housemates will also have to work for their keep - growing potatoes and carrots in the garden.
Davina McCall will be hosting the programme which begins at 9pm on Channel 4. Viewers will have their first chance to evict a contestant on Friday June 13.
Last year's winner was Brian Belo, who beat the bookmakers' favourites, twins Sam and Amanda Marchant.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
The power of music
Oliver Sacks: Tales Of Music And The Brain
Alan Yentob meets neurologist and writer Dr Oliver Sacks, who has made the study of the brain his life's work.
Neurologist and writer Dr Oliver Sacks has made the study of the human brain his life's work.
His many acclaimed books (including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings), are filled with the compelling stories of his patients. "Although I seem to talk about illness and damage and problems, my real theme is survival, how people manage to transcend often triumphantly," he says.
His latest book, Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain, explores the lives of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary neurological conditions and how music works in their minds in strange and surprising ways. Alan Yentob talks to the charmingly awkward and devoted physician about the miraculous power music has on the human brain and travels to meet some of his remarkable case studies.
In upstate New York, Alan encounters the inspirational Matt Giordano who has suffered from severe Tourette syndrome nearly all his life. It's a condition which made him violent as a child and has continued to overpower him with involuntary movements or tics. Kathy Giordano, Matt's mother says how, "he would come home from school and spin in a circle on the floor for around two hours at a time and he’d be crying 'Mummy, Mummy help me, help me', but if I tried to stop him he'd get angry at me because he needed to complete the tic". Amazingly Matt has found a way to stop his tics: by playing the drums. Now he leads a drumming workshop to help others with Tourettes.
Then there's Tony Cicoria, a respected orthopaedic surgeon who was struck by lightning in 1994 and suddenly developed an insatiable passion to play the piano. Before the accident he had no interest in classical music and or the piano. Afterwards his urge to play was obsessive. "For a long time I thought certainly that the only reason that I was allowed to live was because of the music." Alan meets Tony as he prepares for the first public performance of his The Lightning Sonata, inspired by the events which have changed his life.
Derek Paravicini is blind, autistic and needs round-the-clock care. He is also a musical savant whose astonishing talent leaves Alan speechless. He can listen to a complex piece of music just once, before playing it back faultlessly and has thrilled audiences around the world with his talent and musical skill.
These extraordinary people bring to life the pages of Sacks latest work.
This intimate film follows Alan Yentob as he investigates the amazing impact music can have on the human brain. Inquisitive to understand more he even offers himself up as a guinea pig and has an MRI scan to find out how his brain functions when listening to different types of music, which has some surprising results! Even neurologist, Professor Lawrence Parsons, who carried out the test is shocked by Alan's extreme neurological response to his favourite piece of music.
Oliver Sacks: Tales Of Music And The Brain, BBC One, 3rd June 2008, 10.35pm.
Alan Yentob meets neurologist and writer Dr Oliver Sacks, who has made the study of the brain his life's work.
Neurologist and writer Dr Oliver Sacks has made the study of the human brain his life's work.
His many acclaimed books (including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings), are filled with the compelling stories of his patients. "Although I seem to talk about illness and damage and problems, my real theme is survival, how people manage to transcend often triumphantly," he says.
His latest book, Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain, explores the lives of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary neurological conditions and how music works in their minds in strange and surprising ways. Alan Yentob talks to the charmingly awkward and devoted physician about the miraculous power music has on the human brain and travels to meet some of his remarkable case studies.
In upstate New York, Alan encounters the inspirational Matt Giordano who has suffered from severe Tourette syndrome nearly all his life. It's a condition which made him violent as a child and has continued to overpower him with involuntary movements or tics. Kathy Giordano, Matt's mother says how, "he would come home from school and spin in a circle on the floor for around two hours at a time and he’d be crying 'Mummy, Mummy help me, help me', but if I tried to stop him he'd get angry at me because he needed to complete the tic". Amazingly Matt has found a way to stop his tics: by playing the drums. Now he leads a drumming workshop to help others with Tourettes.
Then there's Tony Cicoria, a respected orthopaedic surgeon who was struck by lightning in 1994 and suddenly developed an insatiable passion to play the piano. Before the accident he had no interest in classical music and or the piano. Afterwards his urge to play was obsessive. "For a long time I thought certainly that the only reason that I was allowed to live was because of the music." Alan meets Tony as he prepares for the first public performance of his The Lightning Sonata, inspired by the events which have changed his life.
Derek Paravicini is blind, autistic and needs round-the-clock care. He is also a musical savant whose astonishing talent leaves Alan speechless. He can listen to a complex piece of music just once, before playing it back faultlessly and has thrilled audiences around the world with his talent and musical skill.
These extraordinary people bring to life the pages of Sacks latest work.
This intimate film follows Alan Yentob as he investigates the amazing impact music can have on the human brain. Inquisitive to understand more he even offers himself up as a guinea pig and has an MRI scan to find out how his brain functions when listening to different types of music, which has some surprising results! Even neurologist, Professor Lawrence Parsons, who carried out the test is shocked by Alan's extreme neurological response to his favourite piece of music.
Oliver Sacks: Tales Of Music And The Brain, BBC One, 3rd June 2008, 10.35pm.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Human Traces
One of the advantages of living in community is the constant flow of information and education through the interests and recommendations of others. Some times there is just too much to cope with as re books to read. A recent loan which I don't have the time or stamina to get through (over 600 pages of small print in paperback) but nevertheless is on a topic that does interest me I deal with through internet research and report.
This way madness lies
Ambitious study of psychiatry in its infancy
Human Traces by
Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson
Sebastian Faulks made his reputation with a series of haunting novels dealing primarily with war and its effects on individual lives, most notably with Birdsong and Charlotte Grey, which were hailed, justly, for their ability to combine the consideration of complex moral and social issues with intricate plotting and page-turning readability.
His new book breaks somewhat different ground and focuses on issues of sanity and cognition. Like his earlier work, it is structurally intricate, yet intensely focused on the lives of individuals. However, the questions he elects to consider in Human Traces are more abstruse than those which dominated his previous novels, making the integration of ideas and narrative a considerably tougher technical challenge.
The novel's two heroes were born in 1860, the year after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In the opening chapters, both are 16 and both undergo experiences which convince them to become doctors. In each case, their reasons for so doing are profoundly involved with the life of an older and less fortunate sibling.
Jacques Rebiere, in the rural poverty of Brittany, has a brother Olivier who is mad and lives locked in the stable. Thomas Midwinter, comfortably off (though his father's business is struggling), has a sister, Sonia, who, as the story begins, is effectively being sold off as part of a business deal. Their lives come to intertwine.
Jacques, due to his experience as an appalled witness of his brother's struggle with his demons, is determined to understand madness and, if possible, to cure it. To that end, he decides to study medicine, above all, the workings of the human mind, a process of mapping which, in the 1870s, had barely begun. When, around 1880, the two young men meet at Deauville, they are instantly attracted to one another and end up sitting on the beach all night, talking with a sudden and drastic intimacy.
Thomas confides that he is profoundly interested in the question of how and when humans became human. This vague, abstract concern is directed and channelled by Jacques's profoundly emotional need to understand and help Olivier, and both young men end up pledging themselves to a life concerned with psychiatric medicine.
When we next see Thomas, he is starting his first job, as assistant doctor in a lunatic asylum. His superior is a man of imagination, but the scale of the problem they face is overwhelming; they must tend 2,000 individuals sorted into a few rough categories such as idiocy, cretinism, mania and melancholia, so there is little to be achieved in the circumstances beyond containment.
Jacques, meanwhile, is in Paris, witnessing Professor Charcot's performances at the Salpetriere. A superbly confident diagnostician and showman, Charcot was in the habit of hypnotising his patients and requiring them to act out their traumas for the edification - or entertainment - of a fashionable audience.
Gradually, the lives converge. Sonia has been repudiated by her dreary husband; they have divorced and she is free to marry Jacques. The trio set up a clinic, in which the wretched Olivier becomes a cherished patient. But as time goes by, the two doctors, linked by so many ties, begin to diverge ideologically.
Both are still concerned with the place where mind and body meet, but Jacques becomes involved with the idea that both mental and physical problems might be caused by suppressed childhood trauma. Meanwhile, Thomas is looking elsewhere and is increasingly convinced that schizophrenia is genetic.
The problem with the novel is that it is alarmingly dominated by expository argument. As the narrative progresses, characterisation falls away, to be replaced by talking heads discussing the nature of cognition, the relationship between man as thinking animal and the human predisposition to madness, which is also unique in the animal kingdom.
Psychoanalysis, like Charcot's grandstanding, falls away as a false lead. The thrust of the novel encourages one to believe, with Thomas, that schizophrenia is so profoundly connected with the capacity for abstract mentation that the disease is part of the price we pay for having minds at all.
Human Traces is replete with interesting ideas and contains some exceptionally fine topographic writing. However, with respect to the usual pleasures of fiction, the reader sometimes feels a little short-changed.
There is a superb passage in which we are suddenly drawn into Olivier's tortured consciousness and forced to perceive the yelling chorus that gets between him and the outer world. We are made to see that, prescient and outside time, he senses the onrushing of the Great War, and Christ-like, offers himself as a sacrifice.
Introspection is brilliantly handled, but in the main, human interactions tend to be schematic and only sketchily realised, and there are some unsatisfactory passages of dialogue. Overall, despite the novel's many felicities, I was left feeling that Sebastian Faulks's desire to present complex ideas and arguments sometimes stretches the fictional form to, if not beyond, its limits.
Author
This way madness lies
Ambitious study of psychiatry in its infancy
Human Traces by
Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson
Sebastian Faulks made his reputation with a series of haunting novels dealing primarily with war and its effects on individual lives, most notably with Birdsong and Charlotte Grey, which were hailed, justly, for their ability to combine the consideration of complex moral and social issues with intricate plotting and page-turning readability.
His new book breaks somewhat different ground and focuses on issues of sanity and cognition. Like his earlier work, it is structurally intricate, yet intensely focused on the lives of individuals. However, the questions he elects to consider in Human Traces are more abstruse than those which dominated his previous novels, making the integration of ideas and narrative a considerably tougher technical challenge.
The novel's two heroes were born in 1860, the year after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In the opening chapters, both are 16 and both undergo experiences which convince them to become doctors. In each case, their reasons for so doing are profoundly involved with the life of an older and less fortunate sibling.
Jacques Rebiere, in the rural poverty of Brittany, has a brother Olivier who is mad and lives locked in the stable. Thomas Midwinter, comfortably off (though his father's business is struggling), has a sister, Sonia, who, as the story begins, is effectively being sold off as part of a business deal. Their lives come to intertwine.
Jacques, due to his experience as an appalled witness of his brother's struggle with his demons, is determined to understand madness and, if possible, to cure it. To that end, he decides to study medicine, above all, the workings of the human mind, a process of mapping which, in the 1870s, had barely begun. When, around 1880, the two young men meet at Deauville, they are instantly attracted to one another and end up sitting on the beach all night, talking with a sudden and drastic intimacy.
Thomas confides that he is profoundly interested in the question of how and when humans became human. This vague, abstract concern is directed and channelled by Jacques's profoundly emotional need to understand and help Olivier, and both young men end up pledging themselves to a life concerned with psychiatric medicine.
When we next see Thomas, he is starting his first job, as assistant doctor in a lunatic asylum. His superior is a man of imagination, but the scale of the problem they face is overwhelming; they must tend 2,000 individuals sorted into a few rough categories such as idiocy, cretinism, mania and melancholia, so there is little to be achieved in the circumstances beyond containment.
Jacques, meanwhile, is in Paris, witnessing Professor Charcot's performances at the Salpetriere. A superbly confident diagnostician and showman, Charcot was in the habit of hypnotising his patients and requiring them to act out their traumas for the edification - or entertainment - of a fashionable audience.
Gradually, the lives converge. Sonia has been repudiated by her dreary husband; they have divorced and she is free to marry Jacques. The trio set up a clinic, in which the wretched Olivier becomes a cherished patient. But as time goes by, the two doctors, linked by so many ties, begin to diverge ideologically.
Both are still concerned with the place where mind and body meet, but Jacques becomes involved with the idea that both mental and physical problems might be caused by suppressed childhood trauma. Meanwhile, Thomas is looking elsewhere and is increasingly convinced that schizophrenia is genetic.
The problem with the novel is that it is alarmingly dominated by expository argument. As the narrative progresses, characterisation falls away, to be replaced by talking heads discussing the nature of cognition, the relationship between man as thinking animal and the human predisposition to madness, which is also unique in the animal kingdom.
Psychoanalysis, like Charcot's grandstanding, falls away as a false lead. The thrust of the novel encourages one to believe, with Thomas, that schizophrenia is so profoundly connected with the capacity for abstract mentation that the disease is part of the price we pay for having minds at all.
Human Traces is replete with interesting ideas and contains some exceptionally fine topographic writing. However, with respect to the usual pleasures of fiction, the reader sometimes feels a little short-changed.
There is a superb passage in which we are suddenly drawn into Olivier's tortured consciousness and forced to perceive the yelling chorus that gets between him and the outer world. We are made to see that, prescient and outside time, he senses the onrushing of the Great War, and Christ-like, offers himself as a sacrifice.
Introspection is brilliantly handled, but in the main, human interactions tend to be schematic and only sketchily realised, and there are some unsatisfactory passages of dialogue. Overall, despite the novel's many felicities, I was left feeling that Sebastian Faulks's desire to present complex ideas and arguments sometimes stretches the fictional form to, if not beyond, its limits.
Author
Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He attended Wellington College and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, although he didn’t enjoy attending either institution. Cambridge in the 70s was still quite male-dominated, and he says that you had to cycle about 5 miles to meet a girl.
He was the first literary editor of “The Independent”, and then went on to become deputy editor of “The Sunday Independent”.
His first novel, “A Trick of the Light”, was published in 1984. 1989 saw the publication of the first of his ‘French trilogy’: “The Girl at the Lion d’Or”. This was followed by his most famous novel, “Birdsong” in 1993. The French trilogy was completed by the “Charlotte Gray” in 1998. “Charlotte Gray” was made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett in 2002. “On Green Dolphin Street” was published in 2001. 2005 has seen the publication of 2 Sebastian Faulks books: “Human Traces” and “The Footprints on Mount Low”. Most of Sebastian Faulks’ novels have a war theme, although this is usually blended with more than a touch of romance.
In 1999, Sebastian Faulks wrote and presented the Channel 4 series “Churchill’s Secret Army”.
One of Sebastian Faulks’ most acclaimed works is the non-fiction “The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives”, a biography of artist Christopher Wood, airman Richard Hillary, and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. “Pistache”, a book of essays, was published in 2006.
Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel is “Engleby” (2007). Sebastian Faulks was awarded the CBE in 2002. He and his family live in London.
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