Socially Challenged

picture by massdistraction

There are some very splendid things about working in an Investment Bank and one of them is the personal training that we receive in the good years.

I've worked in the City a long time and there have been very many good years; and I have received a lot of personal training. Some of it I even remember.

So this morning there I was in the hustle and bustle of the breakfast-time canteen, only slightly knackered after my 8.5km pre-work run and entirely focussed on toasting my reward bagel (pumpkin seed, to be lightly done with butter and marmite), but the toaster was running too fast - or too cool - so that the conveyor belt was delivering a flow of hot-but-still-raw bread products, each retrieved with increasing impatience by their owners and returned for a second, or even third, passage through the deeply disappointing inferno.

And so I was tut-tutting with rest of them and huff-puffing with the best of them, and then for some reason I remembered my old coach and the well-meaning, if uncomfortable, challenges she used to set me: like smiling at strangers, just for the hell of it; and a little bit of nostalgia, or recklessness, or madness must have crept over me for suddenly, and quickly before I could change my mind, I turned to bloke behind me (two slices of unappetising, limp white sliced bread, third time through) and I smiled brightly and said: 'Huh, well it may be annoying for us, but anyone with a hitherto unfulfilled craving for very warm, but yet completely uncooked bakery goods must be having a great morning"

And he smiled back warmly and said "They sure must be" and then turned away from me to claim as it tumbled from the conveyor his steaming but still totally white bread and as he did so he muttered quietly, but perfectly distinctly under his breath, 'wierdo'

I should realised that he was the dangerous, humourless type, from the bread.

Obsession

picture by A5 Magazine

Does everyone have free will or just some of us, some of the time?

Last week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts a disparate group of collectors were taken by the hand and led gently up the slope of obsession to the precipice of madness.. whence they were invited to peer over the edge.

It was part of series called the Philosophy of the Overlooked (faintly ironic that it was a sell-out, then) and we were all there - well, I was there - to understand why people collect and perhaps (having been known to be a collector from time to time) to understand ourselves

And also, it must be said, because Mrs Botogol and I have joined the ICA and I want to get my money's worth.

The ICA had invited the audience to send in pictures of their collections and these were displayed overhead before the talk started, and then they showed us this film, which I would recommend to anyone who has ever alphabetised their CDs, catalogued their books, or stared forlornly at a garage full of stuff, wondering where it all came from (it's 20 minutes, and if you prefer you can watch it in HD here)


POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo


After it was done the collectors shifted their feet a little, there were some coughs of the "I am with you, but not of you" type, and we all looked around at each other wondering which one of us it was who collected the knives.

Do OCD sufferers have free will? They don't seem to have free will - not even to themselves and I wonder if seeming (to oneself) to have free will is no more or less than actually having it, and conversely to feel that free will is lost, is to lose it. In other words: No, they don't.

Or perhaps, some people might say: they should simply pull themselves together.

The panel smiled and articulated and opined, distancing themselves carefully from the subjects of the film, and certainly no one in their right mind could accuse Anita Zabludowicz of having anything other than the freest of will of the most expensive kind.... But still, but still.. a careless reference to continuing her collection 'to see what happens to my life' had unnerving connotations of a force just slightly beyond her control, and when she said it the phrase 'I could die like this', from Hampton's marvellous short film, echoed in my mind.

Poisoned Apples and Other diversions

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

Fictionalised story of two great thinkers (Charles Darwin, Robert Fitzroy) whose minds and ideas spiral around each other's through their parallel, intertwined and tortured lives.

Their ideas changed the world but the world didn't thank them for it; with genius came madness, sadness and suicide.

Funny, Distracting, Absorbing, Inspiring 9/10



A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

Fictionalised story of two great thinkers (Alan Turing, Kurt Godel) whose minds and ideas spiral around each other's through their parallel, intertwined and tortured lives.

Their ideas changed the world but the world didn't thank them for it; with genius came madness, sadness and suicide.

Funny, Distracting, Absorbing, Inspiring and self-referential 8/10

The odd thing: I picked up this book hard on the heels of Thing of Darkness, thinking it would make a change.

Zombies

By dcassa.

Wifey wonders how she slipped so easily from one persona to another; last week I was wondering whether I had a persona at all, or whether I was rather a multiplicity of different selves co-existing in a single body united only by a common set of memories,

I asked Mrs Botogol: "Do you think each of us is a coherent single self, or do you think we all contain a multiplicity? Different people, if you like, in the same body?"

"Please don't call me Mrs Botogol when we are at home, dear" she said.

At the ICA opinion was mixed: Rita Carter believed she has no free will and no self. "I, zombie" if you will - I am a zombie and so is my avatar. I didn't agree, but it's such a nihilistic viewpoint that is rather difficult to take issue with: arguing with a self-identified zombie is like arguing with the SatNav. I wished I hadn't praised her book, but comforted myself that perhaps I probably couldn't help it.

On the panel Raymond Tallis gallantly declared his faith in Rita Carter "I believe you have a self" he said and I was surprised to find myself on Tallis's side, arts against science, as Carter frowned at him (rather ungraciously I thought, but then it must he hard for her, surrounded by unthinking zombies acting mechanically and without imagination. A bit like being at work)

I jotted down random nuggets from each speaker. The most intriguing was the idea of different-sized selves (mania being swelling of self, and depression a diminution). The most confounding was the question of whether we are still ourselves when we dream...ouch.

The most amusing factoid (ie it appeals directly to my prejudices) is that, apparently, when a Myers-Briggs test is repeated there is only a 25% chance of finding the same personality type.

That would explain it then.

All on the spectrum now

Last Monday I took some time out from the Triathlon Training that is increasingly dominating my days, my nights, my waking thoughts and - worst of all - my blog, to go to a lecture.

It was two hours, I calculated, lost for training. In that time I could have:

• swum 7 x 100m off 3 minutes, and
  
• run the 5.5km treadmill programme at level 4 (level 5 if they would only keep the bleeding gym at the 19° that they are supposed to) and
  
• had another attempt at the tantalising 1 hour barrier for the bike home (PB 1h05)

Ah well. The event was Autism Nation - a panel discussion on autism at the ICA. The star of the show was the clever, intellectual and urbane Simon Baron Cohen, but stealer of the show was the fierce, opinionated professional talker-of-down-to-earth-common-sense Dr Michael Fitzpatrick. Alt-views were provided by the intensively unautistic Marti Leimbach while the genuine real-life autist Kamran Nazeer loomed impassively from the edge, carefully refraining from eye contact with the rest of the panel who, quite naturally, ignored him.

The panel waxed lyrical all evening, and on my note pad I jotted down a page of their original thoughts; thinking back on it over the week since one thought in particular struck me - in terms of sociability and ability to communicate our tolerant, inclusive modern society has quite raised the bar in terms of what is considered normal: Nowadays children in quite ordinary schools are expected to participate in drama, hold and attend parties, talk about sex and sexuality in the classroom (talk in the classroom, I mean, of course, not talk about sex in the.... you know what I mean!) they are expected to be able to engage meaningfully with people of astonishly diverse backgrounds and avoid any scarily intensive hobbies, all in order to be considered normal. Behaviours that would have been considered quite usual in 1957 are, in 2007, plotted carefully on the all-embracing, all encompassing autistic spectrum.

What is autism? Simon Baron Cohen identified four traits
- difficulty socialising
- lack of empathy/interest in others
- intense interest in a narrow range subject
- repetition


It was an interesting evening, and exactly a week later I was still thinking on it as I splashed out my life-threatening 500m in the pool and pounded out a tedious 5km on the treadmill.

Between the two, I practised transition: I got out of the pool and took out my racing top [super-wicking, dry-quick, ultra light; no armpit holes £84.99] from my locker and laid it out carefully on the floor in front of me, flat and untangled, just as it will be in the race, with the back rolled up just a little bit. Then I stood up straight and stared at it for a moment, and visualised.

Water dripped slowly from my arms to the floor, I could quite distinctly hear the hum of the air conditioner and I could smell the sweat of the changing room and the chlorine on my skin.

Slowly and deliberately I counted to three and then - to the astonishment of my neighbours - I burst into life and hauled the top over my head and, writhing desperately, managed to haul the tightly rolled fabric down my damp back. Immediately it was on, I dropped on ground, toggled up my trainers, then leapt to my feet and put my cycling helmet on. And stoppped my watch.

A sudden hush had descended on the changing room.

"Blenheim Palace?"asked my neighbour?
"Thames Turbo, said I,
"Word of advice", he said, not unkindly, "Put an arm in first, before it goes over your head. Much faster that way"