Fall Color

My wife and I just returned from a 3-day trip to visit friends and take in the fall color.  The trip took us north to US Hwy 2 from Duluth, MN to Wakefield, MI and then south to Winchester, WI.  My home town is on that route and I have driven HWY 2 both ways to Minnesota and Michigan hundreds of times.  When you are an old man like me with a personality like mine – that means a lot of associations along the way.

The overriding themes seemed to be feeling grateful, being lucky and particle spirituality.  I have posted about my blue-collar origins in the past.  Much of that comes down to railroads, mines, relatives I never met, and the thousands of people I have interacted with.  The railroaders include a grandfather and a great-grandfather and three more recent railroad employees - my father, brother, and uncle.  My earliest introduction to Hwy 2 was driving with my family to Ironwood, MI 30 miles away to pick up my father. He would drive a freight train down to the Fox River Valley, sleep on a locker room bench overnight, and then return to Ironwood rather than our home town.  I never found out why he was never delivered to his starting point.  I was always focused on the image of that hard wooden bench he was sleeping on - especially as he got older and started to look more fatigued.

Railroad jobs were highly valued.  The pay was good if you could work, but there was a seniority system that strung a lot of people along.  It seemed like a prolonged residency program – all of the work and inconvenience and none of the rewards.  There was plenty of work in the local switch yards that my father could rarely get because of that system.  Instead, he worked 40 hours in 4 days and slept on a bench 2 nights per week.  Six decades later that still raises a lot of questions for me and there is nobody around for the answers. 

Apart from the work-related trips, we would drive over to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (UP) to buy margarine.  Until 1967, Wisconsin had a law that banned adding yellow food coloring to margarine.  Without it - the sticks of margarine were an aesthetically unappealing white in color.  We drove over to Michigan to get the yellow stuff.  Wisconsin became the last state to repeal that law in 1967.           

Hwy 2 starts as an exit off US35N in Duluth. The freeway drops quickly down a long hill to that exit.  From that hill you can see the Richard I Bong Memorial Bridge.  It is an impressive piece of engineering and it seems to be aging well.  We lived there my first three years out of residency training as part of a National Health Service Scholarship arrangement.  I really liked that city even though the lake kept it cold.  When I lived in Duluth, I was a member of the Duluth Speedskating team.  Before we had ice we would do dry land training out to the middle of the Bong Bridge.  Rhythmic side to side motions from an extreme flexed position at the waist.  It was done at night in darkness, in the gales of November, uphill to the middle of the bridge – the highest point -  and back down again.  There were about a dozen of us following a coach who was my age at the time.  By the end of the month, we were on a 400m oval of ice that we flooded ourselves.  

In the summer, I would cycle to my office across the Bong.  That involved 5 miles on the Skyline Drive in Duluth until I could drop down a steep avenue to the bridge.  There were days when I imagined myself in a movie – cycling over Lake Superior to and from work.  It was that unreal.

I am reminded of my cycling escapades along this route. On my first attempt I thought it was going to be an easy romp down an old railroad right of way right 60 miles into my home town.  The trail was about 100 yards north of Hwy 2.  Railroads are built on a bed of gravel called ballast that is tightly packed to support the immense weight of trains.  The ballast is about 18-24” deep.  There are about 3,240 wooden ties per mile and each tie is about 9” x 9” x 96” or 4 cubic feet.  The rails rest on those ties.  That means when the rails and ties are removed about 6 inches of loose gravel covers the surface.  When I took an undersized mountain bike down that trail it was quite a mess.  It is impossible to move forward when your wheels are buried in gravel.  You can go about 6 feet and eventually collapse to one side or spin out and fall over.  I made it about 27 miles and got picked up in Maple by my wife.  My second attempt was on a road bike that involved cycling over the Bong on my usual route but taking Hwy 53 south from Superior to Pattison Park and then county roads east and north to Poplar, WI.  From there is was all Hwy 2 and battling heavy traffic for the next 47 miles into my home town. Looking back both of these cycling adventures were foolish.  That is affirmed by the lost of two of my friends.  Both were experienced cyclists.  Both killed while cycling. I will never put myself in high traffic areas again.

The most rewarding part of that trip was pulling into my grandmother's driveway and walking in to see her with my three young cousins.  My grandmother was always worried that I cycled too much.  I did not want to add to that by describing any of the close calls.  I made a joke instead and my youngest cousin laughed the loudest and the longest.  It was an infectious laugh that made the rest of us laugh. I think about that every time I see her - 30 years later.  

There was always plenty of sports related travel both ways on Hwy 2.  Football, baseball, basketball, track, canoeing, and kayaking.  We drove over two rivers that I had canoed and kayaked multiple times, including one where I was almost killed twice in one day.  The Montreal River was not very visible from the road.  I was guessing it is fairly tame this time of the year.  In the spring it moves 1800+ cubic feet per second down a steep gradient through a narrow canyon with steep rock walls.  In some stretches the gradient looks like you are going down a staircase.  If you go down in that water, there is no way out. The day I tried it with the friend I was driving to see and 4 novices in 3 aluminum canoes I was trapped against the bottom by a canoe full of water and then an aluminum canoe wrapped around a boulder holding me down. I was lucky to get loose – twice.  

I think about the games played not so much about the scores or seasons. I was quarter miler in high school and think about a qualifying heat I ran in Ironwood. I was trying to run a sub 50 second quarter mile and failed. I really knew nothing about running or training.  When I finally started learning about the biomechanics of running and realized I could train indefinitely – I beat that time at age 45 on the high school track in my hometown. 

I thought about football practice and weight lifting back in those days. How much more or less am I lifting now as an old man? In high school we used homemade weights fashioned out of concrete set in coffee cans at the ends of an iron bar.  I think they were estimated to weigh 60-80 pounds.  Our weight-lifting area was behind the spectator bleachers on the football field.  I still get a mental image of all of my teammates and the expressions on their faces going through practice.  I remember who went on to college and where they ended up.  I remembered who is no longer with us and the last time I talked to them.   I remember how hot it could get and how bad all of the equipment smelled.  At times I think about what I would have changed over 50 years ago on those fields.

And then it is on to other friends.  I drive past a courthouse and think of my friend who took care of it for decades. He never owned a car and would either walk or cycle to this building to makes sure it was running right – even on the bleakest winter night.  As we were driving up Birch Hill - headed east outside of Odanah I had thoughts about coming down that hill in the opposite direction in a 1963 Plymouth Valiant.  My friend Bob – had his father’s car and decided to see how far it could coast from the top.   It was a standard transmission.  He reasoned it would coast a long way.  It’s the kind of thing that teenage boys did before there was an Internet and Smartphones.  I tell my wife the story about a guy from my hometown who was coming down this hill one night on his new Norton Interceptor when he decided to put the kickstand down and crashed.  But the hill is most famous as a line of demarcation between the mild to moderate snowfalls of Wisconsin and the epic ones of the UP.

All the while music is playing in the background.  Rock music by the decade from a streaming service.  No more cassettes or CDs. Just tell the phone what you want.  In the past - we had to carry separate briefcases just for the media. I used to be able to sing along to the falsetto parts but no more.  I can strain to hit "Goin' Up the Country" on a good day but no more Steve Perry or old time Robert Plant. I start talking about vocal ranges of rock singers.  I know Grace Slick is a contralto.  I think Jim Morrison was an alto – but might be wrong.  Lately I have been playing his tracks over and over again. I have seen many videos of his band mates praising his lyrical ability. His song Soul Kitchen started playing spontaneously at home as we were leaving.  The music cuts out several times as we go off the grid reminding me that we are streaming and not listening to downloads.

I think about my relatives along the way – the ones with the greatest impact on my life. My life story is one of many tragedies and I start to think about life being tragic.  I have the recurrent thought – “You did not really plan anything – you were just lucky.”  As usual I can’t disprove it.  At no point in my early life along this highway did I say to myself: “You need a plan to (go to college, get a job, join the Peace Corps, avoid the draft. etc).”  My early life was a series of desperate last-minute decisions.  I had to do something.  In some cases, the decisions were failure based. In some cases like a high lottery number when I was 1A during the Vietnam War draft - luck was clearly a factor.  In some cases, I was just moving along to the next failure.  I think about those failures and what I was like at the time. I think about how everything seemed to fall in place after those desperate decisions.  My life seemed out of control until I was in my thirties. 

And whenever I think about that random walk through life, I always end up thinking about my undergraduate professors.  They were people who believed in me and they were not shy about saying it.   They were people who had clear life plans and philosophies and knew how to live life.  They were people very comfortable about living life outside of a blue-collar world. They were people who the friends we were visiting and I later agreed were the best people you could ever meet.  It is still a mystery to me how I thrived at a small, now defunct college by identifying with those professors and realizing I had a genuine knack for academics.  We did summer projects along Hwy 2.  The focus was water chemistry leading us to remote rivers and creeks – in some cases driving down logging roads.  As we drove down those roads we talked about the Watergate scandal.  We took hundreds of water samples and then ran all of the analyses ourselves back in the chem lab - in triplicate.  In biology classes we sampled the insects and plankton living in streams and rivers and did all of the taxonomy.  It opened up a whole new level of thinking in the place where I grew up.

At some point in the trip my mind wanders to composite particles and elementary particles.  A few years ago, I discovered that protons and neutrons lasted a trillion trillion years (10⁵⁰ to 10⁵² years).  Almost all of the protons were formed when the universe formed.  The protons in my body are 13.8 billion years old and they have plenty of life left in them.  If I am cremated 96% to 98% of my body is oxidized or vaporized as carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen gas.  My protons are back out into the universe to live again - for billions of years.  If I am buried it takes slightly longer but the same process prevails in the end. That seems like a spiritual process to me, but I am trying to get opinions from experts.  From my own reading it seems consistent with what Spinoza called a single unified and infinite substance identical with God.  He saw individual humans as temporary perturbations in the infinite substance.  I am part way through 2 books on particle physics and the origins of the atoms in the human body from the cosmos.  During a recent phone call with one of my undergrad classmates, he thought my reading and connections to protons over 50 years after our last chemistry class together was quite humorous. 

As we drive through Ironwood, Hurley, and Bessemer – the last time I was here Hwy 2 was just 2 lanes wide.  Now it is 4 lanes wide with a lot of traffic.  Just to the north is Copper Peak – a ski flying hill.  It has been out of business for 20 years but it is being rebuilt with a large grant.  My wife and I watched a ski flying competition there back in the 1980s.  There were three guys from my hometown standing behind us that day. One of them was the funniest guy I ever knew. He was killed in a car accident a few years later.  One of the other guys was the nicest guy I ever knew.  He died in an industrial accident about 10 years later.  The third guy is still alive. He was responsible for my first dental crown when he elbowed me in the mouth playing basketball and broke tooth number 24 in half.  I get an image of all of us standing there, talking, and joking.

When we get to Wakefield, I think of the first time I was there as a kid to visit my aunt and uncle.  My uncle worked in a copper mine setting explosive charges.  As we drove around Sunday Lake to find their house, I remembered a spillway on the opposite side of the lake but did not look for it this time.  We still had 22 miles to go down S. County Hwy 519.   The fall color along that route was spectacular and I don’t know why.  The weather there is probably subject to what is happening on both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.  At some point big lakes bring the baseline temperatures down, especially in low lying inland areas.       

When we finally arrive at our destination – we are greeted by a couple I have known since 1970.  We stayed in touch through the lean times, the industrious times of medical careers, and now in retirement.  We caught up on families, common interests, activities, and the medical infirmities of aging or as my friend put it “an organ symphony”.  Among the four of us we have 4 knee replacements, 1 shoulder replacement, 1 hip replacement, 3 ablations for arrhythmias, a pacemaker placement, and various other necessary surgeries.   Nobody is upset about it.  The general attitude is do what is necessary to keep going.  There is some reminiscing but not a lot.  I want them to do as well as they want us to do.  The two days we spend there flies by and we are back on Hwy 2 headed home – hoping to see them a lot sooner next time.  On the road again I think of how important this relationship has been.

In the past few years, I have touched on semantics on this blog and the increasingly well-worn phrase: “The map is not the territory.”  My territory as I have outlined it involves extended connections to people at almost every fork in a 274-mile stretch of road.  There are so many of these connections they can be overwhelming, especially considering the emotional aspects.  With a few exceptions it is impossible to estimate the impact of all of these people on my life.  I am always happy to see them and I miss them when I don’t.  Some people reading this might be surprised.  I am considered to be a loner and asocial on the surface but I don’t think many people really are.  Especially if they have an active memory and can recall the details of what happened to them on Hwy 2 or anywhere else. 

They are just quieter…

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplementary 1:

I tried to capture some of my personal experience - the way I think most of the time as I went along this trip.  It has a lot of room for improvement - but at the same time it covers a lot of ground.  I debated constructing a diagram of all the people I would think about along this route and probably will at some point laying it over the route on the map.  I also wanted to provide details of how semantic memory automatically created meaning from these relationships but will defer that to another time. I could not include everything and that may seem paradoxical for a guy with few apparent relationships.  

Supplementary 2:

Some people might argue that my associations and experiences in locations has nothing to do with a map.  The experience of the geography is also different.  The best example I can think of is the Blueberry Store.  With my hundreds of trips on Hwy 2,  I could always count on seeing the Blueberry Store on the west side of Maple, WI on the south side of the road.  Over the decades of my life it went from being a weathered appearing general store to a run down appearing store to an abandoned store.  It was eventually demolished in 2019.  Even though I never went inside - it was a familiar landmark and every time I drive by - I remember what it looked like.  Every time I drive past that empty lot - I see mental images of the Blueberry Store.  Not ghosts - real mental images. 

References:

1:  Wenliang Li ,The proton’s next secret. Science 393,663-664(2026). DOI:10.1126/science.aek0574

2:  Spinoza, Benedictus de. "Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata." In Opera Posthuma. [Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz], 1677.  (Grapevine Kindle edition and translation – Benedictus de Spinoza.  Ethics. 2023.

Lies, Damn Lies, And Normal Brain Function

I have listened to the past 48 hours of constant criticism and speculation about the implications of what is generally described as a "lie".  News anchor Brian Williams made a statement about remembering that he was shot at in a helicopter in Iraq and forced down after it was hit by a rocket powered grenade.  That statement occurred on an interview with David Letterman and several other venues over the past 12 years.   The actual section of the video is from the 2:50-7:20 of the 18:14 clip.  In the interview he was entertaining, self effacing and talks about himself as being an "accidental tourist".  He rejects Dave's suggestion that he be looked at in a different light because of this incident and praises the volunteer troops and emphasizes that he hopes the troops get what they need when they return home.    The statement and previous clips (3) have been scrutinized by various sources.  Today there are also a number of places looking closely at other statements for similar errors or possible "lies".  Conspiracy theorists always want to prove that there is a pattern.  The formal press and the blogosphere generally wants to see successful people fail in some way.  There are many stories suggesting that this has implications for Williams credibility as a journalist.

Notice how I slipped the word "error" in there.  One of the preconditions for classifying a statement as a "lie" is that it is a conscious effort to mislead.  Mistakes are not technically lies although I have been in settings in medical training where trainees were punished for mistakes and treated as if those mistakes were lies or at least the product of a significant character flaw. A little context is always relevant.  Williams typically reads the news every night for the past 11 years.  He has read more information during those broadcasts than most people will every speak to their colleagues and coworkers in a lifetime.  All of that information is probably vetted by another editor and the person entering the text.  He has presented that information in a way that has led him to have the reputation as being a very reliable source of news.  Secondly, he is under a great amount of scrutiny, much more scrutiny than an average person would expect because he is constantly recorded and easily recognized as a celebrity.  Finally, what can he be expected to gain from intentionally telling a misleading story.  What is his possible motivation?  He clearly dismissed Letterman's attempt to make it a big deal and immediately made it a story about the volunteer forces and returning veterans.  All of these factors seem to be ignored in the typical analysis of the statement and his apology.    

Mistakes like this are commonplace.  In the past month, I have had two very bright young colleagues recall my unusual eating habits from dinners that recently occurred.  One of them recalled me eating a large piece of prime rib, the other frog legs.  I have not eaten beef in 30 years and have never eaten an amphibian.  In those events my colleagues did not recall a feature of the event and there was a misattribution based on that lack of recall.  In many situations, my usually excellent memory does not match up with the recall of others from the same situation.  In 1975 (or so) I was in the Hotel Jacaranda in Nairobi, Kenya with a few of my Peace Corps friends.  We were all seated around a large rectangular table getting ready to order dinner.  I was particularly jumpy that night and when a waiter bumped into my elbow, I reflexively dumped a cup of cocoa on a friend sitting immediately to my right.  When I say dumped, I mean about 16 ounces of warm liquid poured right on top of his head and over his glasses.  I was very embarrassed at the time, but the incident was apparently forgotten by the other 5 friends sitting at that table.  I tried to revisit that event with my friend a few years ago and according to him - it never happened.  Whose recollection of the incident is likely correct, a person who has an associated memory of being embarrassed about it or the person who would just as soon forget about it?

None of my anecdotes matches one that is probably self aggrandizing to some extent but their are similiar examples in the literature.  Eye witness testimony comes to mind.  You are a star witness in the case and the fate of the defendant hinges on your testimony.  Psychologist Daniel Schacter points out in his book (1) that more than 75,000 criminal trials are decided each year on the basis of eyewitness testimony.  A recent analysis comparing eyewitness testimony to DNA evidence suggested that eyewitness testimony was mistaken in 90% of cases.  A more recent review (2) suggests that the number may be closer to one in three.  I have testified myself in courtroom situations where I was told by attorneys that I would not have to speculate on a specific question.  I was asked that question anyway, but with enough experience I knew the correct response was to say that I could not answer the question.  I have always wondered about what happens when people are witnesses in important cases and they have the expectation that they need to come up with an answer to every question whether they have an answer or not.  I am sure that I have seen this happen in real courtroom testimony.  That stress in combination with imperfect human memory has the potential to create a new story or at the minimum information that creates more noise than signal.

The second aspect of the Williams scenario involves the binding of certain events in the correct order across a number of situations.  Watching the NYTimes montage in reference 3 illustrates what I am  talking about.  Earlier footage clearly illustrates that he was on the ground with helicopters that had taken small arms fire when he landed in a helicopter that was probably doing what he described in the  Letterman clip.  Is it possible that this was binding failure?  Schacter's definition of which would be "the gluing of the various components of an experience into a whole.  When individual parts of an experience are retained but memory binding fails, the stage is set for all kinds of source misattributions....".   It is easier to recall actions and scenes presented together but significantly more difficult to recall which action occurs in which scene (4).  That experimental finding is interpreted to mean that information about scenes and information about actions are stored in different parts of the visual memory system (4).  Further binding is adversely affected by age (5) and other sources of interference (6) with both the features of a scene and the bindings.  Psychiatrists who keep detailed notes on their patient encounters will easily observe these binding failures and different histories being given at different points in time.  It is also likely that the longer you live, the more you will encounter this phenomenon in your own life.

People lie and people forget - so what?  In the final analysis, very few observers have access to all of the information necessary to determine what is a lie and what is not a lie.  By definition the only discriminating factor is a conscious awareness on the part of the liar.  I have no access to information more than anyone else and no conflict of interest when it comes to Mr. Williams or NBC.  The current situation requires some reflection on why it has the appearance of being so important.  Is it possible that this is a case of faulty recall and misattribution?  I think it is and most of the analyses to the contrary are not based on how human memory works.  There are a number of questions that can be asked about these analyses.  Why is there an opinion based on very scant information?  Is it possible that emotional bias is involved in the complex decision-making of the author?  Is the author denying the fact that these kinds of experiences have happened to them?  Or is jumping to conclusions an aspect of the author's character that they would just as soon not look at?  Is it really that surprising that thousands of journalists and bloggers want to add their own sensational spin to this story?

Those may be much more relevant questions than the one being asked today.



George Dawson, MD, DFAPA


References:


1:  Daniel L. Schacter.  The Seven Sins of Memory.  Houghton Mifflin Company; Boston, 2001, 272 pp.

2: Wise RA, Sartori G, Magnussen S, Safer MA.  An examination of the causes and solutions to eyewitness error.  Front Psychiatry. 2014 Aug 13;5:102. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2014.00102. eCollection 2014. Review. PubMed PMID: 25165459

3:  Jonathan Mahler, Ravi Somayia, Emily Steele.   With an Apology, Brian Williams Digs Himself Deeper in Copter Tale.  New York Times February 5, 2015.

4: Urgolites ZJ, Wood JN.  Binding actions and scenes in visual long-term memory.  Psychon Bull Rev. 2013 Dec;20(6):1246-52. doi: 10.3758/s13423-013-0440-1. PubMed PMID: 23653419.

5: Pertzov Y, Heider M, Liang Y, Husain M.  Effects of healthy ageing on precision and binding of object location in visual short term memory.  Psychol Aging.  2014 Dec 22.  [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 25528066.

6: Ueno T, Allen RJ, Baddeley AD, Hitch GJ, Saito S. Disruption of visual feature binding in working memory.  Mem Cognit 2011 Jan;39(1):12-23. doi: 10.3758/s13421-010-0013-8.  PubMed PMID: 21264628.


Supplementary 1:  

It  turns out that I was able to think of a better anecdote after I penned the above post.  On Tuesday September 11, 2001 I was doing what I did every morning as an inpatient psychiatrist for 23 years.  I was sitting in a team meeting with all of the representative disciplines including social work, occupational therapy and nursing.  At about 8:15 a nurse came in to give us a report and she happened to mention:  "We just heard that a plane hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City.  It's on the news right now."  When she said that my recollection was that I said: "If I was there right now I would be trying to get as far away as possible.  That was a terrorist attack and there may have been something else on that plane."  The rest is history, but for the purpose of this post did I really make that statement?  I had just tried to run an early Internet campaign for US Senate and one of my overriding concerns was terrorism.  My campaign could be best described as an abysmal failure.  I seemed to be one of the few people in the state interested in terrorism.  Almost everyone else had been concerned with spending the imaginary federal surplus, something I considered to be the product of capital gains taxes on the Internet stock bubble.  For that matter, do I really remember all of the people in the room at the time?  I am pretty sure I do, but it would not surprise me at all if I struck up a conversation with somebody who I thought was there only to learn that they were not.  Nobody who I thought was in the room ever approached me after the incident and asked me about my statement.  I took that as pretty good evidence that I should keep my mouth shut.  I also remembered something I read about Harry Stack Sullivan.  He was a psychiatrist who specialized in the interpersonal psychotherapy of people with schizophrenia.  He had a number of therapy experiences that he wrote about that were very striking and unique.  In his writing at one point he said that he realized that he just needed to stop writing and talking about those experiences because he could not say for  sure what had actually happened versus what was embellished.  I always remembered that cautionary note as well as the slang term "power story" from my youth in the North.  A power story was assumed to be an embellished story to make one look good.  A typical response might be (in a mildly sarcastic tone): "OK Paul Bunyan - where is Babe the Blue Ox?"  It is probably not a good thing to be remembered as the psychiatrist who tells power stories unless you are retired and sitting in a bar in northern Wisconsin.