That Sensitive Life

the art and science of human sensitivity

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Reading Behavorial Science, Another Caveat

Self testing…

Anyone who wants to quantify whether or not they are highly sensitive person, i.e. have sensory processing sensitivity, can go to Dr. Elaine Aron’s website www.hsperson.com and take the “Are You Highly Sensitive?” self test. Believe me, Cathy and I each easily exceeded the criterion of 14 true responses. In addition, for research purposes, the Arons have also developed a standard 27-item HSP scale, as well as a 6-item and 12-item scale, for evaluating sensory processing sensitivity. The individual questions are worded slightly differently although, in my opinion, the thrust of each questions is unchanged. Also, the responses are made on a scale of 1 to 7, rather than simply true or false, allowing further quantification of the responses. Despite these refinements, however, all of these tests are questionnaires and remain subject to all of the problems inherent in self-reporting instruments.

… equals self-reporting

Self-reporting is associated with a host of uncontrollable issues which affect one’s responses and skew results. These range from mood, “I’m having a bad hair day…” to outcome bias, or, “I know I’m highly sensitive, and I want to prove it.” Furthermore, self-reporting even comes with its own, scientifically recognized bias. This is Social Desirability Bias… the tendency of respondents to answer in a manner that will be seen in a favorable light by others.

Over the years, I have amazed myself with my own responses to personality inventory questions. No matter how truthfully I answer in the moment, certain aspects of my type or temperament seem to shift back and forth as the years pass. In fact, at some deeper level, I wonder to this day if I, or any of us, know ourselves well enough to tell the “truth” for each and every question we might be asked, or for that matter, the same “truth” each time a question is repeated. No matter how sincere we are or hard we try, truth may be a thing of the moment, colored by past experience and the passage of time, rather than a fixed entity.

“Know thyself,” the Greek aphorism, has always held a deep fascination for me… to the end that I question whether, even in the best of all possible scenarios, we can ever truly know ourselves. It seems to me that at any given moment I am the amalgam of a wide spectrum of mood, emotion, and behavior… at times surprising even myself… and here I am, so to speak, in front of this questionnaire trying to express who I am as though it were all I am.

Baumeister, Vohs, and Funder have published one of the best summaries in the scientific literature addressing issues of self-reporting as opposed to the observation and measurement of actual behavior (http://rap.ucr.edu/baumeisteretal2007.pdf). Written in an accessible style and without inflammatory rhetoric, the authors lay out the problem researchers face when studying social and psychological behavior.

This is not a perfect world, so…

In scientific research, at any point in time we are stuck with the tools we have. When they are applied fairly, when the results are appropriately evaluated, and when the results can be reproduced or replicated, our body of knowledge of the world, and our place in it, has most likely been enlarged or clarified. Were it not so, the advances in knowledge made in even one lifetime would not be possible. Therefore, in my opinion, it is not that scientific research has pitfalls that is problematic, it is that the media, and those of us who read and listen to it, accept too much at face value and proceed to parrot this received information without sufficient appreciation for the probability it will be modified, or even refuted, over time.

These two blogs, I hope, have provided a foundation for the skepticism necessary for reading science. Now, I hope, we can begin to enjoy some of the insight science has brought to light about the world of the highly sensitive person.

—Sherman Souther

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LONGBOATS

On the other side of a beach formed from stones, washed of sand, a gray sea swallows the setting sun. Over pints of bitter, close to a salt-streaked window, men repeat to one another stories of boats and hounds. On occasion, they glance out through the gloam, to the darkening hill and a cemetery filled with others not born to their ancestors.  Across the road, far back from windows of uneven glass, reflecting the dusk, women quietly knit from knots of dull wool. They talk of the boy with thick, yellow curls who cries out in the night about sails formed from red diamonds. Such cloth these women have never seen, although one recalls a family myth about the day the howling dogs went silent.

—a prose poem by Sherman Souther

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Scientific Research: Reader Beware

I remain awed by of the scope of science, and I have a favorite illustration. Take a look at the chart, “The scale of the universe mapped to the branches of science and the hierarchy of science.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#cite_note-1) The flow of logic and mathematics into physics and chemistry and on to cellular and functional biology before ending in psychology and sociology fascinates me…all of this continually augmented by the ever growing mass of information about the natural world and the human condition… and all produced by research. Most often, the results of this research are presented at scientific meetings and published in scientific journals. Both of these activities are presumably peer-reviewed, and the information is eventually translated into the media experience which now envelops us.

Most of this work is well done. We would not have progress, as we know it, without it. But simply because scientific papers are reviewed, published, and popularized does not necessarily make their research reproducible. It does not necessarily make them well evaluated. It does not necessarily, in fact, make them without bias, accurate, or even honest. All of this work is done by people. As people, we have limits. For example, until we develop new tools for exploration, we are limited by the ones we have. As people, we are susceptible to error of all types. The list is long. Also, as people, we also have individual needs, and some of us have less integrity than others. Hence the need for skepticism and doubt. Let’s dig a bit deeper…

Results and Reproducibility

Many authors use “reproducible” and “replicable” synonymously. Not all, however, and here is both some of the delight and some of the frustration I have with language. Chris Drummond is an expert in machine learning at the National Research Council of Canada. He argues that replicating studies does not advance knowledge in the same way reproducing them does, nor are they good science. (http://www.site.uottawa.ca/ICML09WS/papers/w2.pdf)

Drummond’s thoughts on what is good science and what is knowledge are provocative and instructive. And even if his distinctions prove little more than semantic rhetoric, our observations, ideas, and results need substantiation in some form if we are to act with confidence.

All too often, the results of published research cannot be achieved by duplicating the original experiments, leaving us in doubt about the validity of the initial work. In 2005 John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, published one of the most cited articles in current scientific literature. The title… “Why Most Published Research Finding Are False.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/) In 2012, “Psychological Science,” the journal for the Association for Psychological Science, devoted an entire section of the November issue to a crises of confidence (http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6/528.full.pdf+html) on replicability in psychological research. And if you think things have recently improved, a massive, collaborative study attempting to reproduce results published in three different, respected psychology journals resulted in only 35 of 97 successful replications. (http://etiennelebel.com/documents/osc(2015,science).pdf) I can’t resist quoting from the end of the summary portion of the article: “…there is still more work to do to verify whether we know what we think we know.”

Research and Peer Review

Peer review has proven a poor filter. A 2013 article in The Economist titled “Trouble at the Lab” (http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble) chronicles the many problems with peer review. These range from the embarrassing consequences of clever stings by a Harvard biologist and another by an editor of the British Medical Journal on through failure by reviewers to conduce their own analysis of the data presented or adequately assess the experimental purpose or design. Moreover, the performance of reviewers declines with experience (http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(10)01266-7/abstract). Would that reviewers aged as well as wine.

Research Fraud

There also are multiple references regarding egregious fraud as well as other dodgy practices in the articles cited. To me, this is the saddest. I do, however, understand the motivation. When I most frequented the research laboratory in the decade between 1965 and 1975, I viewed the authorship or co-authorship of published papers as “academic gold.” Those investigators with an extensive bibliography got jobs, grant money, promotions, and awards. Unsurprisingly, this has not changed. (http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6/528.full.pdf+html)

Intense competition dominates academia. Without integrity, the lure of easy and rapid advancement of one’s career is powerful.

So, How Should We Look at Scientific Research?

Most of us, including me, do not gain information or insight by reading scientific papers. We read or hear the sanitized and popularized received information available from the media, often in multiple formats. This translation further enhances the possibility of error, lack of due diligence, or dishonesty. Maintaining some degree of skepticism or doubt concerning what we are told is important. The philosopher, George Santayama, has given us another, more organic, view of this quality. “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.” (www.philosophicalsociety.com/archives/skepticism.htm)

We all benefit from the insights new revelations give us, yet we need to maintain some reserve regarding them until they are confirmed.

—Sherman Souther

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Subtleties + Survival

One of the ways I’ve managed myself as a sensitive human being is to write. I’ve worked as a professional writer for many years, and in quiet times, I also write in journals, in pixels and on scraps of paper. Writing allows me to relate to the world, to process some intriguing fragments that visit my short-term memory and to express the subtleties that are important for my own survival.

In my work, I am acutely aware of both the expansive communication and the limitations of written language.

I tried to capture this language polarity and the contrast of embodied life in this poem:

BLOOD AT BOYNTON CANYON

In silence, I hear words
calling themselves into lines,
each one her own world,
like a cooling night in the canyon
where a lone standpipe
remains proud yellow
and stationary in the wind.

I’ve known these lines for a long spell—
each a lifetime of momentary redemptions
one layered upon the last
in the race around my veins.

Meanwhile, cottonwoods
weep dry tears and want for rain.
Sun rays carry this evening’s birds
to me—once far away friends
who now need days to sip the water.

—Cathy Capozzoli

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Background Sounds in the Foreground

Sensitivity describes me and my life: my self, my body, my environment, my needs, my dreams. And, most especially, my senses, and how my brain, central nervous system and peripheral nervous system process stimulation, both internal and external.

What is rousing or invigorating for many individuals might be draining for me.

When does stimulation become overstimulation?

Different for each of us, in terms of how we process our thoughts, our lives and our environments. And there can be different overwhelm triggers.

The question might better be: WHERE does stimulation become overstimulation?

A certain place in the human brain, called the Reticular Formation, houses the function of the Reticular Activating System. This screens out background sounds. I’m convinced mine doesn’t work. I hear everything, all the time. After a while, this is draining, and I must retreat to a cave-like environment.

So, why do we live in the city?

Well, we have lived in many different places from islands to mountains to rainforests to deserts. We love the available culture of the urban environment.

But we also need escapes. Simple escapes: we hold our ears in the street, strange homages to passing sirens and garbage trucks. We close windows and doors, run air filters as white noise.

Some escapes are more complex: breath practice, meditation, travel to quieter environments and, for me, writing poetry.

I wrote a poem once in which I tried to capture the exquisite serenity of the early morning, long before dawn:

SILK, AND MILK

Every once in a while,

in the early morning

my butter face

melts to cream

when the earth sighs—

stirs the shadows.

Sometimes, I don’t really know if my practices make me even more sensitive. I do know that I live to consider this more deeply. My exploration is life-long enterprise.

—Cathy Capozzoli

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