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Can your intellect save you in a pandemic? Zena Hitz on her new book 'Lost in Thought'

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

Release Date: 06/30/2020

The Statistics Expert who's helped two Nurses overturn their Serial Killer Convictions on Appeal show art The Statistics Expert who's helped two Nurses overturn their Serial Killer Convictions on Appeal

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

Psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud talks in-depth to Professor Richard Gill - one of the key experts who has helped overturn two recent nurse serial killer convictions You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. The article below...

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Lucy Letby - the untold story from the key prosecution expert witness - Dr Dewi Evans talks to  Dr Raj Persaud show art Lucy Letby - the untold story from the key prosecution expert witness - Dr Dewi Evans talks to Dr Raj Persaud

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

Psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud talks in-depth to Dr Dewi Evans - one of the key prosecution expert witnesses about the Lucy Letby case You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. ...

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Which member of the UK Royal Family was most mad for sex? Historian and coach Anne Scoular explains show art Which member of the UK Royal Family was most mad for sex? Historian and coach Anne Scoular explains

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. Born in New Zealand, Anne fled at the earliest opportunity to England, where her roots and heart lie. She co-founded Meyler Campbell in 1999 and continues to work tirelessly to...

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Best-selling author Johann Hari talks to Psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud on where has all our attention gone? show art Best-selling author Johann Hari talks to Psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud on where has all our attention gone?

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. All over the world, our ability to pay attention is collapsing. In the US, college students now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and office workers on average manage...

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Alexandra Durnford Executive Coach talks to Dr Raj Persaud about coaching and personal change show art Alexandra Durnford Executive Coach talks to Dr Raj Persaud about coaching and personal change

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app.   A London-based executive coaching & mediation practice. I founded Byron & Wilf to coach clients to think, communicate and behave in a way that improves their ability to...

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Diet and Fitness Guru Rosemary Conley talks to Dr Raj Persaud about the psychology of motivation show art Diet and Fitness Guru Rosemary Conley talks to Dr Raj Persaud about the psychology of motivation

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. Rosemary Conley CBE is one of the UK’s most successful diet and fitness experts with 50 years’ experience in helping people to lose weight and get fitter. Rosemary Jean...

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Jane Janse Van Rensburg Addictions Therapist talks to Dr Raj Persaud about why addicts become therapists show art Jane Janse Van Rensburg Addictions Therapist talks to Dr Raj Persaud about why addicts become therapists

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app.   Jane Janse Van Rensbury is an addictions therapist at the famous White River Manor Clinic in South Africa. Here she talks to psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud about why the field...

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Roxana Cardos Business Psychologist talks to psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud on the psychology of personal strengths show art Roxana Cardos Business Psychologist talks to psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud on the psychology of personal strengths

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. Roxana is a Business Psychologist with 10 years of experience working in fast-paced organisations. She is passionate about the human dynamics of successful people, especially...

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The Psychology of Music with Rock Legend and Executive Coach Peter Cook show art The Psychology of Music with Rock Legend and Executive Coach Peter Cook

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. Peter Cook helps you navigate uncertain business futures for a better world. He fuses three passions: Business, Science and Music, in 18-year-long overlapping cycles: 18 years...

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The Psychology of the Greatest Cad and Bounder Ever in the World - Dr Cosmo Duff-Gordon defends his ancestor - the first man to get off the Titanic show art The Psychology of the Greatest Cad and Bounder Ever in the World - Dr Cosmo Duff-Gordon defends his ancestor - the first man to get off the Titanic

Raj Persaud in conversation - the podcasts

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app. Dr Cosmo Duff-Gordon is an eminent psychologist who created a completely new clinic that specialises in treating addicts - but his ancestor is the infamous Cosmo Duff-Gordon who it...

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More Episodes

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rajpersaud.android.rajpersaud

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything
and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure …
  

Lost In Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life is newly published by Princeton University Press. In it I defend intellectual activity–reading, thinking, studying, pondering–as worthwhile for its own sake, and as a key part of human happiness. You can order it at the Press (50% off until June 28), with free shipping. Or, order it from Barnes and Noble or find it at your preferred bookstore.

Reviews

“The life of the mind”, Jonathan Marks, Wall St Journal.

“Surviving solitude: Why is quarantine reading so difficult?”, Elayne Allen, The American Interest.

“Cultivating the inner life in the time of COVID”, Flagg Taylor, National Review

“Reader with a cause”, Sophie Duncan, Literary Review.

The real value of an education”, Jennifer Frey, Classical Learning Test blog.

The intellectual vocation“, Josh Hochschild, First Things.

Vidas occultas“, Daniel Capó, The Objective (in Spanish / en Español)

press.princeton.edu/ideas/escape-from-quarantine

Escape from quarantine

By Zena Hitz  May 12, 2020

Like many professional intellectuals, books were my original escape. I was a strange child with abrasive manners, and real life was lonely and chaotic. I read ceaselessly, anything I could get my hands on. I read on the bus from school and got off, walking while still reading. My father and I went to the library on Sundays; there was an eight-book limit, so I took eight, and brought back the eight I finished last week. I laid waste to the rotating wire rack that held the young adult section and moved onto the fiction my parents liked.

In college I learned to read difficult books, to find a beachhead of clarity in a sea of words and to work my way out from there. Brutal honesty was required: if I didn’t understand something, I had to ask. Otherwise I’d be at sea in the classroom, nodding without agreeing, hearing without learning, caught in a pretense for which there was no honorable way out. Voicing uncertainty was the only way to connect. I developed a habit of uncertainty and then a taste for it. I discovered then that I could also get lost in puzzling through something, in finding patterns and parallels, tracking references, analyzing passages.

When I began trying to articulate the value of intellectual life, of reading and thinking, I was drawn to stories about the intellectual lives of prisoners. Consider Malcolm X, who was arrested in 1946 for theft and sentenced to eight to ten years in prison. At the time of his arrest, he lived a life dedicated to pleasures high and low: music, dancing, gambling, women, drugs. When he was released in 1952, he was a different man, impassioned and forcefully honest, devoted both to his new Muslim faith and to fighting for a better life for African-American communities. In the intervening six years, he had read most of the prison library: the Bible and the Qu’ran, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and the histories of European and African peoples. He felt his old ways of thinking disappear, “like snow off of a roof.” He filled his letters with verse, writing to his brother: “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.” He described his time in prison in another letter as “a blessing in disguise, for it provided me with the Solitude that produced many nights of Meditation.”

There are many such stories: Andre Weil, Simone Weil’s brother, undertook a major mathematical proof while in a French prison in 1940; Antonio Gramsci produced voluminous writing, despite excruciating physical suffering, while imprisoned by Mussolini. Irina Rutushinskaya, a Russian dissident imprisoned in the 1980s, wrote poetry on bars of soap with matchsticks and washed it away when she had memorized it. She wrote out the poems on cigarette paper later to be smuggled to the West. The poems, the proofs, the notebooks, and the speeches cast a light that obscures the brutal suffering in which they originated. Through them we share indirectly in the escape that these prisoners found in themselves.

Much of the known world is now in enforced isolation, prying these stories loose to the surface. Isaac Newton, we are told, discovered calculus while quarantined, and Shakespeare managed to squeeze out King Lear in similar circumstances. And yet despite my years of intellectual training, and despite having written a book on the value of withdrawn inwardness, like most everyone else these days, I am unable to read seriously or to think. I am anxious and continually distracted. I would give anything to be able to lose myself in thought—but it feels impossible. What accounts for the gap between the determined, thoughtful prisoners and ourselves?

I can’t be sure, but I can speculate. The difference is surrender. To get to the inner depths, one has to give up on controlling one’s surroundings. For that, uncertainty has to give way to acceptance. We have to be able to say: “This is all there is, right now. What can be done with it?” But it is nearly impossible to say such a thing, much less to mean it, when we live and breathe uncertainty, when anxiety about the future is far more salient for us even than isolation.

We face an additional challenge that previous generations of isolati did not. Even apart from quarantine, a major sector of the economy is built to profit from our distraction. We live in environments designed in their smallest details to draw our attention, as Matthew Crawford catalogues in The World Beyond Your Head. Those of us (however privileged) who are able to work online have very little margin to escape. Anxiety is the perfect engine to churn the seamless slurry between our metrics-driven work and our chosen distractions. Our screens wall us off from ourselves.

T.S. Eliot warns that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, and he is right. Distraction can be medicinal or wise. Nor can we continually punish ourselves for not having the discipline to recover elements of our education that might help us, or for not turning to our own library with the determination that Malcolm X took to his. What then can we do?

We can lower our expectations for ourselves, and face our anxious uncertainty with honesty and courage. We can seek out a beachhead, a base of operations, a time of peace however small, and work our way out from there. That said, the surrender that we need is frankly a gift of grace.

Fortunately, grace runs in channels. We will run ourselves down. The ultimate moment of exhaustion and despair may furnish the seed that blossoms into a new focus. Beyond the screens lie realms of wonder, truth, and connections with others that reach to our depths. We all know this. Let’s face each moment with all the clarity we can muster and wait for the door to open. 


Zena Hitz is a Tutor in the great books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she also lives. She has a PhD in ancient philosophy from Princeton University and studies and teaches across the liberal arts. Website: zenahitz.net Twitter @zenahitz