Behavior

Exuberance

Kay Jamison celebrates a positive life force.

In an interview in Sept 2004 with Kay Jamison PhD, this writer asked if she ever had her moments when she turned off the phone, drew the blinds, put on Beethoven’s Seventh, and pretended she were Isadora Duncan.

Now what kind of question is that to ask of a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, a celebrated researcher and author and mental health advocate, recipient of a McArthur genius grant and other awards far too numerous to mention?

Kay Jamison Discusses Exuberance

We go back in time to April 2002 to the DRADA Conference at Johns Hopkins and Dr Jamison’s talk she gave there. We have "given sorrow many words," she told the conference, "but passion for life few." Exuberance, she went on to say, "takes us many places," with "delight its own reward, adventure its own pleasure." But exuberance and joy are also fragile, "bubbles burst, cartwheels abort," all part of the yin and yang of emotion, as "joy with no counterweight has no weight at all."

Dr Jamison was reading from a draft of a book she was working on at the time, just out this week. The book is called "Exuberance: The Passion for Life," a long-overdue look at the positive life force that resides in all of us, the antidote to her previous "Night Falls Fast" on suicide. If "Night Falls Fast" constitutes the lugubrious march to the cemetery in New Orleans funeral processions, "Exuberance" is the joyous homeward journey, when the monotonous drone of the dirge gives way to life-affirming jazz in all its polyphonic glory. Together, these two works represent the equivalent of a treasured boxed set into human nature, a masterpiece of scholarship, insight, and literary elegance.

Dr Jamison’s book starts out with Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest US President, whose life, according to a friend, was the "unpacking of endless Christmas stockings." Said Kipling, after a meeting: "I curled up on the seat opposite and listened and wondered until the universe seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner." (See also TR and John Muir.)

In her Johns Hopkins talk, Dr Jamison described TR as "hypomanic on a mild day," an observation that did not make it into her book. Rather, she sees exuberance as a temperament, equivalent to enthusiasm which in Greek means a god within. "Happy is he who bears a god within," she quotes Louis Pasteur, "and obeys it." But our species, she reminds us, is well-served by a variety of temperaments. "The joyous, and not so," she points out, "need one another in order to survive."

In our phone interview, Dr Jamison stressed that exuberance comes in degrees. The people in her book tend to experience it in supersized dimensions, but even those who are depressed can catch it like a contagion. "Joy infects," she writes. "Expressive individuals strongly influence the moods of those who are unexpressive."

Notwithstanding her observation of exuberance as a temperament, the author cites a 1980 study of hers where 35 bipolar patients reported positive benefits to their illness, including increased sensitivity, sexuality, productivity, creativity, and social outgoingness. Virginia Woolf, who is best remembered for her madness and suicide, tends to be forgotten as the person who lit up London’s Bloomsbury group. Said a colleague: " I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two excellent glasses of champagne. She was a life-enhancer."

Loose Cannons and Crushing Put-Downs

But Dr Jamison cautions there is the danger of crossing the line into being too exuberant for one’s own good (earlier in the book she cites the fictional example of Toad of "Wind in the Willows" and his celebrated string of car wrecks). And when mild mania ratchets up into full-blown mania, we don’t need an expert to tell us what can go wrong. Moreover, exuberance has its dark side, for example when the adrenaline rush of combat can transform into wanton bloodlust. General Patton, she reminds us, was literally a loose cannon, who encouraged his troops to take no prisoners, rape German women, and butcher civilians (which predictably steeled the resolve of the enemy and cost Allied lives).

As much as society benefits from exuberant people, the world is also wary of them, Dr Jamison points out. In "The House at Pooh Corner," Rabbit and his cronies conspire to give the "too bouncy" Tigger a personality makeover and turn him into "a different Tigger altogether ... a Humble Tigger ... a sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger." Happily, the plan backfires, but that is not often the way things turn out in real life. In our interview, Dr Jamison pointed out that because kids are so up-front with their emotions, they leave themselves wide open to crushing put-downs.

In her book, Dr Jamison mentions the disturbing trend toward eliminating recess in schools. Play is critical in the development of kids and young mammals, she says, from ensuring a fully-functioning nervous system that outlasts its warranty to acquiring the intelligence and skills they will later put to use as adults. Over-regimenting kids’ lives, she confirmed in our interview, can have enormous consequences for our society.

Adults at Play

Since childhood play has a biological purpose, this would explain why adults are positive stuck-in-the muds by comparison. (Bad comparison - when’s the last time you frolicked in the mud? And in your good clothes.) Kids have the luxury of play under the protection of adults, Dr Jamison explained to this writer. Later, it becomes their turn to provide that same level of comfort and protection to their offspring. Nevertheless, some adults manage to retain their childlike capacity to respond in wonder to the world around them the rest of their lives. Writers and artists and musicians are the most obvious examples, but Dr Jamison in her book feels a special affinity to scientists. This stems from growing up in a household where her father, a scientist, surrounded himself with ebullient colleagues who shared her own youthful enthusiasm for the wind and stars and fireflies and on and on and on.

Kay Jamison’s Heroes

Dr Jamison told this writer that scientists, contrary to public perception, are enormously inventive and creative. Her list includes Snowflake Bentley (who wrote of the beloved snow crystals he photographed, "was life history written in more dainty or fairy-like hieroglyphics?), Michael Faraday (who pioneered electricity and commented, "nothing is too wonderful to be true"), the physicist Richard Feynman ("the ultimate scientific galumpher" whose work was play to him), and James Watson (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, who, "in pursuit of an idea is an unnerving mix of exuberant intuition and deadly logic").

A case study of scientific exuberance in action is Robert Farquhar, of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and mission director of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendevous spacecraft, which in 2001 successfully landed on the asteroid Eros. "I can’t understand why they pay me to do what I love," he told Dr Jamison. His enthusiasm gave him the staying power to persevere over the NASA bureaucrats, who would have been satisfied with a mere orbital mission. His colleague, Andrew Chen told Dr Jamison that exuberance endows one with the resiliency to handle inevitable rejections and bounce back, though he confessed it can also scatter one’s focus.

In an article in Science, Dr Chen wrote:

"Watching that event was the most exciting experience of my life. I was asked immediately afterwards how I felt, and I mumbled something about being tired and happy, but I missed the point. I realized afterward what I should have said: it was like watching Michael Jordan on the basketball court, when the game is on the line and he is in the groove. One miracle after another unfolds, and we are left stunned and speechless. When we learned that the spacecraft had not only landed on the surface, but was still operational, we hardly knew what to think."

Following the Eros project, Dr Chen confessed to a kind of postpartum depression, at a loss for something new to throw himself into, but even as he made this admission he began waxing eloquent to Dr Jamison over geological anomalies on the asteroid’s surface ("I’m beginning to get intrigued.") and over "this airplane-to-Mars thing."

Women

In response to this writer’s question if there is a difference between male exuberance and female exuberance, Dr Jamison replied that a number of studies have found that the trait is far more common in boys and men than girls and women. From an evolutionary perspective, she told this writer, a group’s survival may have depended on the male’s capacity for adventure and exploration. But at the same time, society also has a way of squashing women, which women in turn wind up doing to themselves. Thus it was important to Dr Jamison that women be included in her book, especially in her favorite category:

When astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin attended Cambridge in the 1920s, her gender prohibited her from receiving a degree. At Harvard, she was denied an academic appointment and had to settle for the position of an assistant. While there, she produced seminal work showing that most objects in the universe are composed primarily of hydrogen. According to Dr Jamison, Payne-Gaposchkin’s exuberance was critical to overcoming the obstacles put in her way. Harvard eventually awarded her the full professorship she deserved and Cambridge finally conferred on her the degree she had earned 30 years earlier.

Katy Payne, a research associate at Cornell’s Bioacoustics Research Program is best known for her studies of the songs of the humpback whales and how elephants communicate with sounds too low for humans to hear. In her book, "Silent Thunder," she wrote: "Standing alone in a field where wildness crowded up yellow and green against our garden and house, I said out loud, ‘This is the happiest day of my life and I’m eleven.’"

Couldn’t Agree More

Almost the way I feel when I turn up the swing band music real loud and put on my tap dancing shoes. (Seriously, I love big bands and I do own a pair of tap shoes.) So now you can guess where this is headed. "You are going to see why I saved this one for last," I warned Dr Jamison in our interview. Then came the Beethoven-Isadora Duncan question and thankfully no hang-up click.

Rather came a laugh and her equivalent to an Isadora Duncan moment - pulling down 25 books all at once from the shelves in hot intellectual pursuit, part of the never-ending thrill of her lifelong voyage of discovery instilled in her by her scientist father. Dr Jamison is as open about her exuberant temperament as she is about her bipolar disorder, and it shows in her latest book, from insights as novel as each of Bentley’s snowflakes to prose that sparkles like the very best champagne (invented by the English, of all people, she reminds us in her book).

Way too often, psychiatry focuses on human failing and pathology. Dr Jamison’s "Exuberance," by contrast, is refreshingly upbeat and life-affirming, from the joyous tobogganing of pandas to Louis Armstrong’s inspired trumpet to the spirit of adventure in whole populations boldly seeking new lives on a strange and distant shore. As Dr Jamison reminds us, exuberance is infectious and her new book is no exception. You might want to start out on a small dose - say 30 pages a day and build up gradually to 60 pages.

If this works well, don’t be afraid to crank up the Beethoven real loud and dance like you’ve never danced before.

Oct 22, 2004, reviewed Feb 10, 2008