• I have been arm-wrestling for a few weeks with my stats programme and trying to get it to do what I want it to do. Unfortunately we are speaking different languages to each other and it is being a bit clunky. Or we both are. I know that every bit I learn is an improvement but it’s hard to ‘feel’ that when it feels that the machine is taming me rather than I it. That kind of thinking will hopefully be flushed out of me after a good dinner and looking out of the window instead of into a screen.
• Let’s just say that the ‘easy statistical test’ I mentioned last time is still a while off and I am getting a tennis elbow from polishing data. On pause until Monday.
• These weeks have been particularly busy because as well as all this, I had lots to do preparing a series of workshops for the Art MFA students at Goldsmiths. These came up after one of the staff had come across a blog of mine - a kind of rant by a despondent health professional at the beginning of the pandemic (that you can find here)
• It was thought the students might be interested in the journeys of ‘one of them’ transitioning to the sciences, and care is a debated topic at the moment. I couldn’t say no, even though it is intimidating having been away from their world for over 10 years. Every field has their language and translating is hard.
• However, the occasion reminded me of a text by Gregory Bateson where he describes the different approaches to problems between art and medical students - and how important it is to meet minds that are not ‘tamed’ in the sciences. The problem he presented them was this: he presented them with a shell, and they were meant to come up with a reason why the shell definitely belonged to an animate living being, as if to convince someone who has no prior knowledge of the world. While the medical students found it challenging to answer the question without using science, the art students were more tuned to other ways of appreciating objects, through form, patterns etc, that came in handy.
• Different people bring different baggage, and what I was suggesting in my blog was that the problems emerging from the pandemic were to be tackled by people outside of the medical field. If we are to find better solutions to disease and to support wellbeing then this can’t be the responsibility of one sector only.
• So we’ve been talking about definitions of the biosocial, which come very naturally to them, and reading some anthropology, some Robert Wallace, and some anti-psychiatry.
• We’ve been trying to redefine rehabilitation as a process that is the responsibility of everyone, and it has been joyous to spend time with people who are happy to wander through different fields of knowledge, to question their methods, and to integrate them.
• Here are a couple of the ideas emerged, grounded in a view of the individual as mutable and dependent on its environment. Perhaps when the workshops are over I will share more of them.

(sorry for the different sizes, I.. forgot how to do it)

• Which brings me to my final point. To be able to follow the metamorphoses of an individual throughout their life in the world, to understand not only their present but how the past works on and into the body, is pretty magic. Which is why I will shut the computer for now but happily go back to my stats and the work on those longitudinal studies next week - which are a pretty good way to tap into all this.
• Hope you are all keeping well, safe and happy.