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Making My Own Race Card
Tomorrow’s schedule for the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration of Human Rights Week has Michele Norris presenting the MLK Distinguished Lecture, “Our Hidden Conversations.” It’s based on her Race Card Project which produced her new book “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity.” Sena and I probably are not going to…
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Thoughts on “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Sena and I got to talking about a Twilight Zone show we saw over the holidays. It was a 1964 episode, not the regular program but short film that won a Cannes Film Festival award in the early 1960s, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The quick summary is that a Southern plantation owner is…
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Rearranging My Books
The other day, I finally rearranged my bookshelf. I’ve put it off for a long time. While I was doing it, I remembered where I spend the most time in my thoughts. I don’t have a very broad library, which probably illustrates where my mind wanders. It has changed very little over the years. Retirement…
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Dr. Igor Galynker and The Suicidal Crisis Syndrome
I was looking at my bookshelves and found the copy of the book, “The Suicidal Crisis: Clinical Guide to the Assessment of Imminent Suicide Risk.” It was written by Dr. Igor Galynker. It’s a fit topic for this month because September is National Suicide Prevention Month. This brings back memories. I still have a gift…
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The Thing About Identity
I was searching on the web for something about my co-editor, Robert G. Robinson, MD, for our book Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, published in 2010. The reason I was searching for something about him was that I’ve had difficulties finding anything on the web lately about doctors I had worked with years…
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The Lesser-Known Quote by Wonko the Sane
A couple of days ago, Sena and I were playing cribbage and she thought she had a higher scoring hand than she actually did. She immediately realized it and scored it right. She commented that, at first, she thought she saw something she didn’t actually see. I quipped that “First you have to see it.”…
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We Are All Still Learning to Play Pong
I noticed an article the other day about Monash University in Australia getting funding for further research into growing brain cells onto silicon chips and teaching them how to play cribbage. Just kidding, the research is for teaching the modified brain cells tasks. They succeeded in teaching them goal-directed tasks like how to play the…
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Can Robots Lie Like a Rug?
I’ve been reading Isaac Asimov’s book I, Robot, a collection of short stories about the relationship between humans and robots. One very thought-provoking story is “Liar!” One prominent character is Dr. Susan Calvin. If you’ve ever seen the movie I, Robot you know she’s cast as a psychiatrist whose job is to help humans be…
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I’m Reading Isaac Asimov’s Book “I, Robot”
I just got a copy of Isaac Asimov’s book “I, Robot” the other day. I’ve been thinking about reading it ever since seeing the movie “I, Robot.” As the movie opens, you see the disclaimer saying that the movie was “…inspired by but not based…” on Asimov’s book of the same name. In fact, the…
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What Do the Personal Brain Specialists Recommend?
Dr. George Dawson’s post “The Freak Show” reminded me of how coarse and cruel we can be to each other, even when we’re not aware of it. Maybe I should say especially when we’re not aware of it. Dr. Dawson emphasizes the importance of the empathic approach. In the same way, Dr. Moffic in the…
Go Retire Psychiatrist 