Gesundheit!

Gesundheit! You just sneezed. If sneezing is contagious, does the simple act of saying, “Gesundheit!,” make one sneeze? There you go again – Gesundheit! – I guess it does.

We learn our behaviors through imitation and repetition. We learn our behaviors through imitation and repetition.

As the paragraph above demonstrated, we sometimes repeat a behavior without knowing why. In primary school, I discovered the works of the behaviorist, B. F. Skinner. [Before that, I read books by psychology and psychiatry “gurus” such as Freud, Adler and Jung but always felt their works about the animal mind (especially, the human mind) missed the vital aspect of animal behavior – after all, we do not respond to other persons’ thinking but to their behavior, either immediately in their presence or delayed by communications devices (notes, letters, telephones, televisions, computers, etc.). Thus, to me, the Freudian focus on what occurs at the thought level reflects more about the history of human culture and the expected behavior of specific humans in a given culture/subculture than it does the actual functioning of the whole human body, including the brain (and unfortunately, the almost universally accepted concept of a mind sitting somewhere in the area behind our eyes and between our ears).] I felt relieved that someone else agreed with me that a “mind” does not exist. Or, at least if we’re going to study humans, we should look only at their behaviors and not build elaborate schemes for second-guessing how a person’s brain (synapse-based storage and processing system) was arranging and rearranging sets of symbols in a higher-order, invisible mind.

Today, the people in the world who are tuned in to their local media outlet are responding to the news that Barack Hussein Obama will be the 44th President of the North American continent’s political organization called the United States of America. If we observe the people’s behavior, we see a range of facial expressions, vocal cord utterances and arm, torso and leg movements. We respond to their behaviors in various ways, including my typing this blog one-handed while holding a sleeping cat in the other arm.

But my responding to the outcome of the election does not concern me. Instead, my interest lies in our behavior in the days ahead. With a new U.S. Presidential administration moving into the White House in 2009, we can change our behavioral patterns of the past and establish new ones. We can stop repeating behaviors that have no purpose other than to show we still use our bodies to imitate, store, retrieve and repeat learned behaviors.

As you get a moment away from your daily set of normal routines, use this change in Presidential officeholder to look for new behaviors that will change and enhance your daily life:

· Turn off the television or step away from the computer to give an evening to greeting a neighbor you’ve never met before and learn about one of his/her unique behaviors/skills like fly fishing, flower arranging or painting; turn around and teach that behavior to someone else on your next “free” evening.

· Take an inventory of your work skills to see if there’s a skill such as file sorting, carpentry, or negotiation you could offer and teach to a volunteer / charitable organization; teach that skill to someone else and then get that person to teach it to another.

· Teach your child a behavior that he or she can use to make life better for anyone, including how to sew a button, change an automobile tire or cook a simple meal on a stove; then get your child to teach that behavior to someone else.

In other words, we can do a lot for each other when the contagious behavior we share is more than just sneezing. Hope we run into one another at a neighbor's house or local charity one day soon. And I know you'll recognize me when I hear you sneeze, because you know what I will say. No, it's not "Gesundheit!" – it's "Teach me more!"