The Touro Communication Club Notes - #122–June 30, 2010
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The 6/30/10 meeting will be our last for the summer. The Club will go on vacation until the Fall semester. Because of the Jewish holidays, our first Club meeting will be on Wednesday, October 13 – same place, same time, new and old people. See you then!

Contents:

1. Quotations about “Emotions: Anger - Fighting Fury”

2. Upcoming Club program: “Emotions: Anger - Fighting Fury”

Wednesday, June 30, 2010 @ 2 pm in Room 223

3. Logical Fallacy of the Week # 12 – “The Red Herring”

4. A Note to Communicators: “Emotions – The Motor of Our Decisions”

5. Upcoming Conversations

6. Possible club topics – please add your topic to the list

7. What happened last week: “Getting Organized”

Six Quotes about Anger

“There is nothing more galling to angry people than the coolness of those

on whom they wish to vent their spleen.”

Alexander Dumas père. 19^th century French novelist and playwright

“Never write a letter while you are angry.

Chinese Proverb

“Anger as soon as fed is dead -
'Tis starving makes it fat.”
~Emily Dickinson, 19^th century American poet

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it

at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

Gautama Buddha. Ancient Indian spiritual teacher, c. 563 BCE to 483 BCE.

“Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.”

Robert Ingersoll, 19^th century American orator and political activist

“Anger is only one letter short of danger.”

Popular saying

The Touro Communication Club

2 pm - Wednesday, June 30, 2010– Room 223

“Emotions: Anger: Fighting Fury”

Anger is a familiar emotion to all of us. We may recognize it others, but do we recognize it in ourselves? Anger appears in many packages: loud and boisterous, soft and icy, a slowly escalating intensity, etc. Clues to recognizing triggers of anger are present but are often overlooked by the angry person and the target of the emotion - a person, an object or an idea. We cannot hope to fully understand this emotion in one session, but we’ll try to discover how many ways the emotion of “anger” manifests itself in ourselves, in others, in the world. With luck, this will be a cool and dispassionate discussion about a very hot topic.

Logical Fallacy of the Week #12: “The Red Herring”

Have you ever noticed that people often don’t answer the question posed? It happens in everyday conversations, in class, in political punditry in the media.

Most of the time, a “Red Herring” can be unintentional, but in a political situation – a job interview or a television debate –the device can be a deliberate distraction to divert the direction of the discussion or change the topic.

Depending on the question, the response can often be a “Red Herring,” an incredibly frequent logical fallacy which appears in a number disguises:

· A response that does not answer the question, but changes the topic.

· A response that introduces a different topic, often completely unrelated to the original question

· A response to another statement that skews the original statement by changing emphasis or introducing weak or irrelevant evidence.

Beyond the question and answer exchange, a Red Herring may be part of a larger point of view which introduces unrelated and dubious statements to support a point of view. Much of the current political discourse on almost any controversial topic – immigration, health care, the financial meltdown, etc.

The media explosion in the last decade with the Internet, radio, television, print has created an unmonitored almost laissez-faire environment in which we the consumers must be aware of what is being thrown at us. The citizen-listener must learn to sharpen their acoustical “crap detector “(source: Ernest Hemingway).

With its roots in the Middle Ages, the term derives from a fish, a herring or kipper which has a red cast to its flesh and smells. An acute listener can smell something fishy. When you sense something is “fishy” about a situation, your olfactory senses are at work.

Alfred Hitchcock, the late filmmaker, uses the Red Herring device often to scare his audiences. The tension is slowly building in the scene, the outcome is uncertain and dangerous for the hero and suddenly a car screeches unexpectedly. Audiences lift out of their seats at this clever manipulation of their emotions. We feel sheepish for falling for the trick, yet safe despite being fooled.

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.A Note to Communicators:

Emotions – The Motor of Our Decisions

As much as our education would to persuade us that we are rational beings, daily empirical evidence and recent research tells us that our emotions are the engine of our lives.

Why do we know so little about emotions? Our education has placed a premium on reason. We can understand reason. It is calm, logical and “reasonable.” If reason is the measure of all things that we value, then emotions are sooooo “unreasonable.” They appear to be unpredictable. We have to put them in a box to control them.

Let me draw an analogy,

• Our body is the automobiles of our beings;
• Our brain is the driver of our automobile and
• Our emotions are the engine of our reasons.

We need the motor of emotion to get us through our daily routines. If we don’t have any emotion about anything or anybody, we begin to atrophy. No passion – think emotional support – for a point of view, the point of view dies. Too much passion and the project dies. Or, passion guided by reason allows for success.

While emotions are not at the center of our education, they are certainly the core of any entertainment – play, movie or soccer match. We watch, suspend our disbelief and, if we are to believe Aristotle, we become purged of these destructive behaviors.

Now that the soap operas have disappeared, we have to look for our emotions on the reality shows or on American Idol. When Dr. Phil or Tyra Banks have a case to entertain us, we can get embroiled in someone else’s emotions. Because television emotion is safe, we can turn it off and go about making dinner with no consequences.

This short missive can hardly do justice to the topic of emotions, but it might be instructive to give some context for why we continue give short shift to emotion

It’s not surprising that most of the statements about reason are made by men. Sadly, men have controlled everything since the beginning of time. The Greek philosopher, Plato, does allow that emotions exist. We should use logic and reason to channel our emotions to create something constructive that leads to truth.

Rene Descartes, the 18^th century French philosopher, is in the same camp. He argues, “I think therefore I am.” (“Je pense quand je suis.”) Thinking is the only way to function in a man’s world.

Our education teaches us to ignore emotions and focus on “Critical Thinking.” In our classes we focus on one-third of our learning system – the head. We ignore other two-thirds - the emotions and the body - in our biased learning.

Benjamin Bloom virtually codifies the importance of reason in his famous Taxonomy of Learning with his impressive hierarchy of cognitive learning levels. To his credit, Bloom does acknowledge the Affective and Kinesthetic learning channels, though they are not as nearly well developed.

Emotions have been the province of the arts - theatre, poetry, painting, sculpture – even music. In that contest, the artist could control them. Emotions could be made to appear real, but since they were invented and “pretend,” then serious people could enjoy them at a distance without having to really understand them.

However, in the latter part of the 20^th century, a number of authors began to address emotion as a separate entity from reason. Bloom’s own 1956 taxonomy allowed that we did learn three channels, but gave predominant emphasis to Cartesian reasoning – the cognitive function.

Sociologist Erving Goffman published his landmark, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” in1959 which provided the foundation for understanding how human beings put on a mask to hide their internal emotional life when in public.

Howard Gardner’s 1983 classic, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” blew apart the rigid SAT-enforced dichotomy of I.Q. as being just math and verbal abilities.

In 1994, psychologist Paul Eckman presents develops his influential “The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions” and goes on identify the 43 muscles in the face that produce emotional affect. His work is now on popular display with the television series, “Lie to Me.”

Although reason is still the dominant mode of understanding, emotion receives an enormous boost in 1995 with journalist Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” which provides the intellectual framework for an elementary understanding of emotions.

That history is fine, but it doesn’t address our need to understand emotions on a daily basis. What do we do when we get angry? How do we cope with being afraid? How do we understand falling in love?

In future Communication Club discussions, we will explore this emotional thread, looking at one emotion at a time. We begin with one of the most prevalent emotions – anger.

UPCOMING CONVERSATIONS:

See you in the fall!

What about one of these topics?

“Repetition”

“Meaning”

“Why Does History Repeat Itself?”

“Heroism”

“Concentration”

“Coping with Adversity”

Student Poetry showcase

“Empathy”

“Connecting the Dots”

Role play of cynical people

“Cold Calling in Sales”

“He’s Just Not That into You”

“Money”

“Critical Listening Institute: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’”

“Criticism – Giving and Receiving”

“Logical Fallacies”

“Freedom II”

“Gender Communication II”

“SPAR Debate”

“Distraction II”

“Negotiation II”

“Imagination II”

“Rodney King: ‘Can’t we just get along?” II”

“Political Savvy”

And dozens of others!

Compare the notice of the session with what really happened!

What happened on Wednesday, June 23, 2010?

“Getting Organized: First Things First”

How do I prioritize? What rationale do I use? Which system best suits me? How do I measure my improvement? An invisible part of everyone’s life is being organized. As our lives get busier, we need to be organized. No one starts off being organized. Some learn more quickly than others. The business people are usually ones who are very organized without being overbearing. We’ll try to identify the tricks people employ to keep their lives together. What about distractions? We’ll talk about how increased pressure affects our organization. This should be a very practical session.

Newcomer Yangchen Lama participated vigorously as another newcomer Derek Smith observed the goings-on. Familiar faces included Lorinda Moore, Nina Davila, Warren Kunz, Markus Vayndorf, Jean Missial, Charles Mason, Chui Hing Yau and Hal Wicke.

The question, “what is organization?” got a variety of responses.

· I am a Type A person with Type B tendencies

· I must clean up everything before I do anything.

· OCD? (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) – Not really. Things just have to be orderly.

· I’m just the opposite. I let things go and only clean up when I have to.

· My father is completely obsessive about arranging everything before he does any.

· My, this is a Psychology club, not a Communication club.

To the question, “Do you have a plan for your activities and follow that plan?” everybody had an opinion.

· Everything is dynamic.

· There is a great impact of being disorganized.

· What about putting up with the disorganization of other people?

· Everybody is always rushing about at the last minute.

· What about a wedding? Graduation? A funeral is worse because you can’t prepare for it.

An anecdote of a sign a printer had put up over his cash register:” An emergency on your part does not necessitate an emergency on my part.”

Hal handed out a blank piece of paper and asked the group to write down all their thoughts as they occurred. [The exercise comes from the French Surrealist poet Andre Breton who promoted “automatic thinking” in his poetry to bypass logic.]

After a few minutes, he has the group what they noticed?

• “I repeat the word ‘need’ a lot.”
  “I’m all over the place.”
• “I wrote about the mathematical connection to this discussion.”
• I’ve got to prioritize.
• What about Murphy’s Law? (What can do wrong, will.)
• Murphy is my friend.
• Prepare for Murphy.

Since Lorinda was in charge of the ushers for last week’s organization, she shared some of her planning for crowd control.

Jean talked about his planning for crowd control for an event for Louis Vuitton who sponsored a birthday party for Kanye West. He was quite blunt with the sudden friends of Kanye who wanted to crash the party.

Hal asked, “Are you organized?” Yes or no. No one seemed to give a clear answer. The discussion seemed to drift in a number of directions.

· You’ve got to be prepared for the unpredictable.

· A discussion about healthy food.

· You’ve got to be pro-active.

· Some discussion about President Obama’s meeting with General McChrystal that day and what might happen.

· Most people thought McChrystal should be fired. [He was.]

· Warren Kunz announced the formation of a Math club in the fall.

· I like to come to the Communication Club to explore ideas.

Although the entire discussion was upbeat and energized, the focus seems to blur after about an hour and a half. This is indicated by the frequent change of topic.

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We always have a great time exploring these issues. So often our daily life never focuses on these Communication issues. If you have something you want us to discuss please let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

Next time bring a friend. The Communication Club is always an open discussion, limited only by time. Everyone gets a chance to speak. All opinions are welcome. Here is an opportunity for students to challenge professors’ views outside the class without any homework or assignments. You just have to show up and listen and talk if you want.

Hal Wicke