tv Charlie Rose PBS January 30, 2014 12:00am-1:01am PST
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>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin this eve ming with scott stossel, the editor of the "atlantic" magazine who has written a fascinating new book called "my age of anxiety." >> i'm 4 years old so for most of my life i've endeavored with great intensity to try to hide my anxiety because i thought it was either shameful or that somehow admitting it would compromise my professional standing. one of the things i wrestled with in the book and i talk about in the book in talking to my therapist, you know, i wanted to try to explore the nature of anxiety and look at all of the possible causes that might have led to my own and effect trying on different theories of anxiety. in doing so i'm, in effect, coming out as anxious after having hidden it for many years. >> rose: we continue with e.l.
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doctorow. his new book is called "andrew's brain: a novel." >> andrew came to me as a figure standing in the snow and holding a -- an infant swaddled infant in his arms in front of a door with the snow coming down on his yankee ball cap. and that's the image that came to me and it was some urgency to it as he was waiting for this door to open. and i found myself writing that and then i had to figure out what was going on and that's how the book developed. >> rose: we conclude this evening with a conversation with billy joel at the piano recorded as he was preparing for a new year's eve performance. >> "piano man" is pretty simple. it's mostly the melody doing the work, which i'm singing. the hands just do -- ♪ ♪
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captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> the behavioral treatment program we have here is based on what's known as extinction. extinction is a scientific process by which people can get over their fears. >> rose: an estimated 40 million people in the united states suffer from an anxiety disorder. the aflexion has affected everyone from charles darwin and emily dickinson to bill russell and barbra streisand. anxiety's prevalence is matched
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by its tendency to be misunderstood. journalist and author scott stossel has struggled with anxiety for most of his life. his new book tells his personal story and offers a history of anxiety from medical, cultural, philosophical and experiential perspectives. it's called "my age of anxiety: fear, hope, dread and the search for peace of mind." i'm pleased to have scott stossel at this table. welcome. >> thank you for having me. >> rose: here's what david brooks said about you, because you were one of the recipients of the sidney award which he gives every year to the best magazine pieces that he sees.
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does that describe you? >> in some ways i think it does. a lot of my colleagues -- i'm 44 years old. so for most of my life i've endeavored with great intensity to try to hide my anxiety because i thought it was either shameful or that somehow admitting it would compromise my professional standing and one of the things i wrestled with in the book and i talk about this in the book and in talking to my therapist, you know, i wanted to try to explore the nature of anxiety and look at all of the possible causes that might have led to my own, in effect trying on different theories of anxiety. in doing so i'm in in effect, coming out as anxious after having hidden it for many years. it's actually sort of a signature khark wrist i can of people who many people who suffer from anxiety, particularly panic disorder,
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that there is a vast gap between the outwardly projected and often to the individual sufferer false feeling outward veneer of confidence and competence and the inward fear, the inward feeling of terror, sang tiety, dread, incompetence and so one of the characters in the book is a therapist named dr. w. talks about how a symptomut also a cause of anxiety is something called impression management. for those of us-- and there are 40 million of us who suffer with it-- the act of trying to conceal your anxiety from friends, family, colleagues, actually -- that is itself a symptom but it's also a cause because it takes effort to hide -- >> rose: so therefore is this cathartic for you? >> we will see. i always thought i was pretty good at concealing the anxiety but i didn't really know to what degree i succeeded. my family, my wife, people close to me, my parents knew about it.
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but when advanced galleys of the book started circulating around the office of the "atlantic" where i'm the editor, i had a whole series of people lining up to come into my office to say, a, i had no idea and, can i just give you a hug? which was very nice but also uncomfortable but also made me realize that i had done a better job of concealing it. >> rose: the most important question is what conclusions did you come for you in terms of how you became and how you'd begun to have to live with anxiety? >> i spent a lot of time and i have a whole series of chapters where i try on each of a number of theories for why this might be the case. so, for instance -- i mean, fundamentally anxiety is a normal human emotion that is part of the human condition and when it functions appropriately it functions to keep us alive. it's effectively the fight or flight response and in a state of nature if you're being chased by a saber tooth tiger or confronted by a member of an enemy tribe it is in your
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interest to have that physiological response that, you know, the blood flows to your muscles. >> rose: adrenaline. >> adrenaline and cortisol. but when you -- those of us who suffer from anxiety disorders, even people who don't, when you were in situations where that's not appropriate it's -- or where it's disproportionate to the threat it can feel like this horrific almost like your body's been hijacked by this -- your thought processes and your physiology. you feel shaking, sweating, gastric distress, tingling in your fingers. but in terms of what actually causes it -- i spend one whole chapter looking at the traditional freudian idea of that it's all about your mother, you know? that -- and actually -- also talking about the work of a mid-century british psychoanalyst named john bobly who developed attachment theory and he had compelling evidence that one's early experience with your caregiver and the nature of
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that relationship goes a long way to determining how secure and safe in the world you'll feel as an adult. so i read this whole chapter and there's evidence from displaced world war ii victims who were separated from their parents to he did this thing called -- he did these experiments where he would watch kids in a laboratory setting and see what happens, how they related to their children, he developed this whole typology of attachment styles and people who had insecure attachment styles with their mother were much more likely to develop anxiety. then he looks at -- and subsequent people looked at rats and they would show that rats whose mothers -- rat pups whose mothers engaged in a sufficient amount of licking and grooming actually would reduce the reactivity of their h.p.a. access, the hope thalamus, pituitary adrenal access and calm them down. so i finished this chapter and i think i had a very loving overprotective mother, she tried her best but she was astonishly
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overprotective. and i thought this is clear proof my mother cause mid-anxiety. then i look at genetics research piling up at an astonishing degree. there are hubs if not thousands of studies that come out looking at various candidate genes that contribute to this or that aspect of anxiety or depression and my own view is that one's general predisposition to have an anxious temperament is largely woven into your genome. and now that's not wholly determinative overlaid on top of that can be how v you experienced trauma, what was your upbringing, what's the life experience? what's the culture you living consist in and there's a good argument that the culture we inhabit is anxiety producing. but my own view shared by jerome kaeugen who's a psychologist is that it is largely woven into the genes. >> rose: that would be my theory just based on, as i said to you earlier, the whole range of connections to the brain. the mo molecular contribution ta lot of brain diseases.
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>> so, for instance, they're now looking at -- they're studying -- for many years what psychiatrists and researchers tried to study is what makes clinically psychopathological people ill? now they're looking at well, maybe it's more productive to look at what are people who are unusually resilient against these things, what makes them? and so they studied this trait called resilience and one of the most fascinating studies is that they've identified a neurotransmitter called neuropeptide y. n.p. y . so army rangers and navy seals go through this sere test where you're subjected to, in effect, all but torture. >> rose: sleep deprivation. >> cold and all that. and this one researcher has looked and he can determine in advance who will pass and who will not by taking blood assays of their level of neuropeptide y. and if you are high in neuropeptide y you're almost immune to developing post-traumatic stress disorder and you're much more likely to thrive in these situations.
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now, that said, the army's also studying, you know, you can learn resilience and cultivate understanding ways for how can you develop this as a psychological trait. >> rose: it's interesting. i'm literally on chapter one the first page and you quote freud saying "there's no question that the problem of anxiety in a today inial point is a today inial point at which the most various and important questions converge. a riddle whose solution will be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence." that from freud in 1933. this is what you start with and i caught this and i just thought wow.
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that's anxiety. >> this is anxiety. >> rose: a great moment in your life, nothing to worry about. >> well, there shouldn't have been anything to worry about and this is what happens, as i said earlier. you get hijacked and, you know, i was not, as they say-- and i they in the book-- present in the moment because -- and i had been very excited about the wedding, thrilled to be marrying my wife and here she comes down the aisle and by the time she actually gets up to the alter i'm not only sweating profusely, my best man is handing me handkerchiefs to mop my brow but i've also begun to shake and so she-- who is aware of my anxiety-- is trying to hold me
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up and i'm trying to conceal it. and this is the nature of anxious thinking so i'm having this panoply of physiological responses. i'm afraid i'm going to faint or vomit or die and i've got our wedding readers are facing me in the church and i'm looking at them and i can see them looking at me with what i believe to be growing alarm and i think oh, my god, they think i'm going to pass out. and i'm thinking "this is going to prove to everyone i'm not worthy of marrying my wife." and the minister can see i've got this sheen of flop sweat on me and he's halfway through the ceremony and he mouths to me privately "are you okay?" and, you know, the truth was i was not at all okay but i would have felt mortified if we had to, like, call off the proceedings so i somehow muscled through it. my wife is physically holding me up. i get through the wedding and i survive and then as i say in the book, i sort of am consumed for the next three days by this self-lacerating despair because here is one of these epic moments in your life and i was
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not present, not able to focus. and this is a signature quality of anxiety, too, instead of focusing on the task at hand you -- it's -- you narcissistally turn inward and focus on the symptoms of anxiety and how other people are perceiving it. it can be quite debilitating and detracting. >> rose: how many years somethat that. >> 14 years ago this coming july. >> rose: 14 years later how are you different? >> well, as we were saying earlier, i mean, in some fundamental way i'm not different in that, you know, my genome, which was -- i talk in the book about my great grandfather who was dean of harvard college in the 1940s and was to all outward appearances and in fact in actual fact an extremely effective administrator and professor and somewhere around his 40s and 50s he sort of had a series of mental breakdowns, seized by acute anxiety, ended up being institutionalized multiple times, underwent electroshock therapy. the idea being that -- obviously
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i am not him, i'm four generations removed from him but you see when you look at families once there is one or two members of a family with an anxiety disorder you'll start to see the entire family tree stippled with this. so at some fundamental level i am exactly the same. i have the same genetic predisposition to what jerome kagan and harvard college would say. high reactive temperament. little things. i have a high-reactive physiology and -- but having spent years in therapy and nearly ten years researching and writing this book i have much better understanding not only of the neuromechanics of what it is that is causing these horribly unpleasant emotions and some perspective, too. i think -- you know, i have a phobia of flying and i'll be flying across -- a couple years ago i was flying across the rockies and i was reading a book about the neuroscience of anxiety and i thought oh, so this is really just bubblings of
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neurotransmitters in my brain. this gives me perspective, i shouldn't worry about this. then we hit turbulence heading over the rockies and at that point any perspective i have that is immediately -- my fight or flight response overrides everything and my body takes over. but i do think that -- >> rose: and how did it affect you? >> in that moment? >> rose: yes. >> it's terrifying. i sit there popping dramamine and, you know, paging the flight attendant to bring me another scotch and if i have enough of them i'm okay but that's not actually an adaptive way of dealing with it. and it's quite grueling and tiring to have to be worrying about these things all the time. but i will say that one of the other things researching this book is that i look deep into the history and i was really -- it was really striking. i had some sense of this before i began the research but not complete understanding of to what degree the most famous researchers into human psychology were themselves motivated by their own anxiety. so dig sigmund freud had this horrific train phobia as a young
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boy and this motivated him to look into this. william james suffered the what we would today call panic attacks. charles darwin embarked on his journey on the beagle around the world and wanted to be a naturalist. by the time he got back many people believed he was afflicted by acute anxiety and it's unclear that actually -- his anxiety may have been a service because it enabled him by keeping him cop fined to his house for years at a time focused on working on this book. not just these famous people but you read back and you begin to see that hypocrisies in 4th century b.c. or galen the roman physician or the most prominent british physician of the 1700s, they all of them are contending with dozens if not hundreds of these patients and dealing with this themselves. and this is woven into the human condition and maybe not so much a source for shame.
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that's something i wrestle a lot with in the book, too. that today the stigma attached to mental illness has diminished but it's not gone. particularly for men. there was an incredibly striking quote i came across posted on the gun sights in -- allied gun sights in malta during world war ii were these signs and it said "if you are a man you will have the self-respect not to allow yourself to display an anxiety neurosis or show any fear. and this is sort of this -- i think a basic societal norm that for a man to show vulnerability or weakness or cowardice is a moral failing. and to some degree i agree with that myself which is why i feel these aspects of shame. and yet at the same time what we now know about the neuroscience of this stuff and the genetics of this stuff is not so different from diabetes. we don't say -- or gout. you don't judge someone as a moral failure for suffering from diabetes or parkinson's or other
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things like that. >> rose: which has both genetic and environmental influences. >> as does anxiety, yeah. >> rose: as does anxiety. exactly right. so how many people have come up to you because they -- you have written this book and have been these magazine excerpts and there have been articles written about you to say almost quietly and softly, "me, too." >> at this point i would say well over a thousand. and that -- it ranges from friends and colleagues of mine who -- one of my colleagues came up to me after she read the excerpt in the magazine, she shared her history and family history and she said "everyone is going to come up with you and share their secret crazy." so i had that from colleagues. plenty of random people. and to me i thought there might be some of that effect but i didn't realize -- i've had just via facebook and e-mail and twitter and people sending me letters just saying in effect thank you, either, a, i had no
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idea that what i was feeling was something that other people suffered and that i'm not alone or that you have put into words what i've been feeling my whole life or my son heard you on the radio and said "please write down the names of these phobias because i've been trying to explain to you this is what i've been suffering." including some celebrities who i won't name who have said that they suffered the whether it's public speaking phobia or various other anxieties that i talk about. so i will say one story. she said this on twit sore it's public record but remember paw lena pour sko +*ef have. >> i've done an interview with her. >> rose: in the 1980s i would subscribe to "sports illustrated" and a couple weeks ago i was looking through twitter and i saw that she followed me on twitter and i thought that can't be her. so she tweeted and said "scott, if only you'd written this book 30 years earlier, better late than never but this is so helpful." and i wrote back to her and said
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"if you'd written me 30 years earlier i think you would have cured me of my anxiety forever." she said no, no, no, because we're twins emotionally. so even being a supermodel having supermodel good looks and millions of dollars is no protection against anxiety. >> rose: so where's the hope? >> the hope is in, a -- i mean, for me what i was trying to do with this book is -- i set out trying to find a cure and i had this idea that i would have this dramatic arc and that i would -- i've tried every therapy under the sun and i thought i'll come out the other end cured and what a great dramatic arc that would be. and yet i sort of undertook the book and year one i'm anxious, year two, i'm anxious, year three, i'm still anxious. that's not an arc, that's a flat line. but then i started to think, you know, actually there are ways i can come to terms with this by coming out with it and not having it be a mark of shame.
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but also starting to recognize that there are things that copresent with anxiety that are quite adaptive. and that -- as i was saying earlier, anxiety itself is adaptive. there were these two harvard psychologists in 1908 who developed this theory where they looked at animals and humans and said if you look at a bell curve and anxiety runs from here to here and optimum performance runs from low performance here to high performance here, if you're too anxious and you're way over here you'll not perform effectively. if, on the other hand, you're way over here and you are not sufficiently anxious, that is to say your adrenaline isn't pumping, you're not engaged, you will also not perform. you need the goldilocks just right level of a little bit of anxiety. so it's learning to trying to manage the anxiety, try to have the optimum level of anxiety. i will say, too, that there is so much -- the head of the national institute of mental health talks about how anxiety is one of the areas where a lot of the most exciting cutting-edge research about
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tying brain to mind and molecule to emotion and gene to temperament is most cutting edge. and one of the things i was struck by in the book was the history of psychofarm kolg and a lot of the drugs that are now common antidepressants were developed as insecticides or rocket fuel or penicillin preservatives and nobody knew how they worked. we're developing a better understanding of the mechanism by which those work and further more the combination of genetic research and psychofarm khropblg cal research is determining that if you suffer from anxiety-- and you don't-- but if i did they could look at my genome and say this drug will be more effective than this other drug. and one hopes that down the road there will be more and better effective treatments. >> it's interesting, i don't suffer from anxiety. i've suffered the a lot of other problems but not that.
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but it's interesting that in times of stress i saoepl to be calmer and i don't know what that is. >> i begin by saying i have an unfortunate tendency to faulter in crucial situations and that is true. and the clinical literature shows that people who are on the anxious neurotic side of the spectrum do tend to break down more easily under stress and there are fascinating studies from world war ii showing that in any troop one-third will break down even before you get to the front, one-third is completely immune to any breakdown and some of them are psychopaths which is not necessarily a good thing and in the middle there's a certain level of -- but i will say in my own life-- and this is again my -- people being so surprised at my coming out as being angst that i am so constantly kind of internally flapped and dealing with -- i talk in the book about how exhausting it is to deal with these irrational phobias and anxieties that i'm confronted with a real problem
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and other people are being angst around me i feel calmer and more able to deal. and there are interesting studies, for instance, from world war ii during the blitz that patients who had been diagnosed as neurotics became less neurotic and felt better during the blitz and that may be because, a, they had something real to be afraid of as bombs were raining down on their head. maybe because they felt less ashamed because everyone else was running around looking as scared as they were. so there may be something to that. >> rose: but at the same time, in moments of crisis i can sometimes -- in different circumstances there will be some kind of physiological change so you feel -- you feel a sense of -- i don't want to use the word anxiety but you feel in a sense that your body is more alert. >> it's the fighter flight response. you're ready to go. and when that happens you've got certain hormones and neurotransmitters flow flowing through your blood. blood flows through your strong muscles so you're ready to fight or flight. your blood flows from your brain away from your stomach. your pupils widen, you can see
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things more acutely. for people who are overwhelmed by this it becomes panic and distress. and i talk in the book about -- there are people who are particularly gifted at thriving under stress. i know you recently were doing a segment about football and i tend to think peyton manning or tom brady or russell wilson, these are people who are unusually gifted at -- and they've done this -- eric goldman who's head of neurogenetics at i think the national institute of mental health talks about there's one gene that has two variants, the worrier gene and the warrior gene. and both are adaptive. if they weren't they would have died out. but the worrier gene is good at worrying about things and keeping you away from danger. >> rose: thank you for coming. >> thank you for having me. >> rose: pleasure to have you here. back in a moment. stay with us. the worldwide weapon was conceived as an a somewhat academic thing some years ago but its years of realization and development since the '80s
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have saoepled to me the work of a moment. coming into being as an astronomical event. >> rose: e.l. doctorow is here. he is without questioning one of our greatest level authors. he writes about reach of american possibility in which plain lives take on the cadence of history. he was awarded the american academy of arts and letters for fiction. his new novel is called "andrew's brain." i'm pleased to have e.l. doctorow back at this table. this is the first front page book review of the "new york times" says: "i've always responded to the history of my times" says the beleaguered narrator of andrews brain. almost ruefully as if he wished it weren't so. he has no choice, responding to the history of one's times is the sworn duty of a character in a novel by e.l. doctorow.
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who has in his half century of writing fiction placed a remarkable number of people-- both real and imagined-- in their history just to watch them respond. >> that's interesting. >> rose: do you agree with that? >> not entirely. (laughs). >> rose: okay, what do you disagree with? >> i don't want to be ungracious but the label of historical novelist is not one i welcome. >> rose: what's wrong with it other than its accuracy? >> all novels are set in the past, if you think about it. and even h.g. wells is science fiction is very victorian some to novels have a wider focus and include public figures and major historical events. some have a narrow focus about family, about personal relationships and so on, but they're all about the past. there's no ontological difference between the two.
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so -- and also my novels are set in different parts of the country. they're set in the dakotas, down south in georgia and carolina and the adirondacks, in new york city. so i feel you might as well call me a geographical novelist as a historical novelist. i just like the word "novelist" without any modifications. >> rose: okay. i mean, responding to the history of one's times is sworn duty of a character in a novel by e.l. doctorow. i'm looking for the word "historical novelist" but i don't see it. >> well, maybe i overanticipated the -- (laughs). >> rose: maybe he says it later. so what you do say in this book is that the book judges the reader somehow. >> yeah. i think this is a -- this is not form lake fiction after you do this kind of work for a while -- >> rose: "this kind of work" is writing novels? >> well, what you want to do is
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find new ways to do it. and that's equivalent to -- i mean writers have been doing that for a long time. james joyce was a beautiful writer of realistic sense of fiction and he went off and then did "ulysses" and then ended up with "finnegan's wake." >> rose: (laughs) they seemed to have done all right, didn't they? >> virginia woolf decided she wanted to write a novel without a plot to fore forgo that device. that convention and she did a couple of times, the one i liked best is "mrs. dalloway. so writers have a feeling that form lake fiction is unsatisfactory and the way this book has turned out i think i do break a few rules and that pleases me. >> rose: who is andrew?
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>> andrew is a -- came to me as a figure standing in the snow and holding a -- a swaddled infant in his arms in front of a door with the snow coming down on his yankee ball cap. and that's the image that came to me and it was -- it was some urgency to it as he was waiting for this door to open. and i found myself writing that and then i had to figure out what was going on and that's how the book developed. >> rose: he is a neuroscientist? >> he's a cognitive scientist, yes, of -- in his own opinion, no great distinction. >> rose: uh-huh. and he also suffers from the fact that all his life he's been what i call an inadvertent agent of disaster. an earlier infant it turns out that he administered medicine to
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and the -- it was the wrong medicine and the infant died. as a child he was responsible for a car crash that killed the driver and so on and so forth. so all his life he's had this -- he has this trail of awful things have happened. so he imagines that he is now unable to feel anything which, of course, is a self-delusion because he's very feeling. >> rose: but you make no distinction between real and imagined. >> that is correct. that's one of the rules i've happily broken. you don't know when he's imagining what he's saying or whether he's reporting on what actually happened. the convention of the unreliable narrator, of course, but this really takes it to extremes in that way the book does test the
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reader, does judge the reader. and i -- i just think that fiction can be too comfortable. you know, it is the most conservative of the arts. if you think what's happened historically in music like in 1900, stravinsky's "rites of spring" in art, the impressionists began and then picasso and the cubists and then abstract expressionism and conceptual art. there are always these enormous changes. >> revolutionary and evolution. >> but fiction hasn't moved that much. of course we've gone through a period of postmodern writing but that's rather timid in terms of finding a new way to -- >> rose: but aren't you partly responsible for that? >> well, not -- i came along a little later than the first
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postmodernist, i believe. >> rose: but you're a novelist and you're, as i said, one of our great living novelists. >> i appreciate that, yes. >> so therefore aren't you responsible for the quality of novels in our life? >> well, i'm certainly know.ráte but have you been experimental enough? have you been revolutionary enough? have you tried to break the mold? >> well, it's a matter of personal dissatisfaction you always want to top what you've done in the past. that's the prime motivation. and when something's done, you can't do anything about it anymore, you've got to move forward. >> rose: were you in search of a -- to have a conversation about neuroscience and philosophers of the mind and show their -- in conflict? >> well, i commit this from the point of view of philosophers of mind.
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it's fascinating subject area of philosophical concern and it's the subject of all very mysterious. what has happened historically is that the materialist conception of thinking has taken over from the old corps taoegs dualism. modern neuroscience there's no soul. the soul is a fiction. there's just the brain. but the problem that creates is to figure out how the brain creates feeling, thought, wishing, longing, falling in love and all these subjective state of minds that we think of as consciousness. how does that happen? nobody knows. and there's all sorts of immense amount of activity going on to map brains and figure out these -- >> rose: there's a huge story about in the the "new york times" this last couple weeks. >> so i have a separate thought
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about that. it's wonderful work and if it can figure out what to do about parkinson's disease or alzehimer's disease, that's terrific. >> rose: that's primarily what the motivation is. >> i understand and it's noble and it's necessary. but i've just projected in this book to the point where andrew suggestses supposing we do figure out how the brain works? if that happens then we can build a computer that has consciousness. movie stuff but there are actually some serious people in this field who believe that theoretically that's possible. well, if that ever happens-- and i won't for a long, long time-- if that ever happened all the stories we've been living by are finished. the bible, all those bronze age mythological senses we have of ourselves as human beings are
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gone. finished. that could be as disastrous as an asteroid hitting the planet. >> rose: i've dealt with this scientifically at this table with brain scientists and neuroscientists talking about consciousness and also talking about artificial intelligence and all of that. >> well, i'm giving you andrew's read on this. >> rose: oh, i know. >> that he worries about what happens. >> he's a bit of an his staeurbg. >> rose: you've also got some politics in here, don't you? >> well, i suppose you could call it that. i don't see it that way. it's a very intricate book. things lock into other things. for instance, andrew, his first wife-- whom he's bringing the baby of this-- >> rose: that's the opening scene, isn't it? to the door of his ex-wife. >> to the door of his ex-wife, the baby he's made with his
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lately deceased young second wife and his ex-wife's husband is an opera singer who has performed in boris tkpwaoud november and at one point he calls andrew a pretender because in the history of boris gudinov boris was terrified by someone coming along pretending to be the rightful czar and since he's been -- since he's killed children in order to take them he has some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. so andrew is the pretender and then andrew becomes that other character in the great russian opera "the holy fool." and in that opera boris begs the
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holy fool for forgiveness and the wholly fool stands for russia and the holy fool walks away. now when andrew gets to the white house, which he does and i don't want to go too much into detail. >> rose: there's a george bush like character there. >> oh, i'm sorry you said that. (laughs) but the point is i'm under the -- if someone reads this book 25 or 50 years from now, it won't matter who the model for this character is, it will just be a portrait of moral ininadequacy attached to power. >> rose: the other night you were recently awarded the national book award lifetime achievements award medal for distinguished contribution to american letters. that's a mouthful. as well as the gold medal for the arts by the american academy of arts and letters. you have a lot of awards.
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does that mean a lot to you? >> well, it's gratifying to get them but you don't think about them very much. if you get an award from your peers that's quite nice. that's great honor. >> rose: john updike, who was on this show 20 something times in response to receiving his old gold medal in which he said he was almost paralyzed by thinking of the great numbers of contemporary writers who know things i can't. >> yeah, he told me that, too and i had told him that it was a well deserved reward. it was a just reward. an award. and he expressed these sentiments to me and isn't it amazing how we all live with such self-doubt. uupdike was a fantastic writer and yet had these doubts about
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himself and that's almost a necessary part of the process of the profession that if you're too confident, too cocky about what you're doing and what you've done you're going to go down. but if your anxieties remain undaunted you'll be okay. >> rose: does it get more difficult or easier? >> it just takes longer as you get older. get a little more thoughtful, maybe. >> rose: debra truesman of the "new yorker" once said about you ""he's the world's literary historian." do you feel like the world's literary historian? >> no, no, i don't. >> rose: you knew she said it. >> it's very nice of her to say that but i see all these books aswmjux÷h@u self-contained. it's possible to string them out in some sort of chronological order and cover 150 years of american life. >> rose: speaking of that "welcome to hard times" "big as
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life" "ragtime" "drinks before dinner" "world's fair ". "city of god" "reporting the universe" creationist, homer and langley. all the time in the world and now andrew's brain. which makes me realize, it might be a good point to make. i've been thinking about cognition for several books. city of god was published in 2000 and it's in there and it's in the march a soldier gets a spike in his head as a result of an explosion and he can't remember anything anymore and he keeps saying "it's all now, it's all now." and then he forgets he said that. and he said "what did i say? >> rose: but that's how advances in brain science have taken place. through injury.
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>> through injury, exactly, yeah. so there's been a preoccupation of mine for a few books. >> this is remarkable. thinking about somethat that is on the cutting edge of the frontier of the future. well, what happens is for some reason i assigned him this profession at the beginning of the book so i had to deliver on that. >> rose: do you know -- go ahead, deliver on that and -- >> well, he has grave misgivings in the sense of feeling that the brain is his enemy or his jailer. and he says at one point how can i think about my brain if it's my brain doing the thinking. there's the immediate self-alienation in the remark like that. and that's because he cannot accept the romance and the comfort of the idea of the soul.
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>> rose: can you pinpoint a moment when this book began? not the writing of it, when the idea -- even though you might have have recognized it at the time? >> well, you have these ideas and you carry them around with you sometimes for years and every once in a while one of them comes up to the fore and it's the only thing you can do and what happened is i remembered a man i knew who had this kind of terrible history that i gave to andrew that he had, in fact, inadvertently murdered his infant child by feeding it the wrong medicine and that he was a good, kind, decent man but it turned out he had this whole trail of disaster. so i wondered about that. how someone who's not evil and not violent and not nasty and not mean and generally negative
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but disposed kindly toward the world and amiable in his nature and how could achieve this awful record in his life? and that's the thought that got me started on this book. >> rose: how long ago was that? >> that was just before i wrote the first line, actually. (laughs) >> rose: the one i just read. thank you. thank you for coming. pleasure to have you here. >> my pleasure. >> rose: as always. >> thank you. >> rose: back in a moment. stay with us. ♪ it's 9:00 on a saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in ♪ there's an old man sitting next to me ♪ making love to his tonic and gin ♪ (cheers and applause)
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>> rose: this is european know. this piano in particular? any particular thing about this piano? >> this piano i've had with me for years. i'm used to the action. it's easy to maintain. and it's -- the guys know how to work with it and get the sound out of it so steinway. >> rose: if you can get a piano, steinway is a good place to go, isn't it? >> steinways are good. >> rose: when you touch the keys-- i once talked to a world champion chess player and he literally could feel the keys. >> feel the pieces? >> rose: yeah, could feel them. do these keys just -- once you put your hands on a piano key. >> a touch technique is important. the feel of a piano is important. you want some resonance out of it. you want to get a little feedback out of the thing. they used to make pianos with ivory keys.
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they don't do that anymore, thank goodness, but there was a reason for that. your fingers sweat when you play. and the ivory actually absorbs the moisture. so you don't get slippery on the thing. now days they're made out of a synthetic material so it can get a little slippery. but this baby's good. >> rose: play me something just to watch the process. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
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>> rose: which is why the sheet music isn't really all that interesting. it's just an accompaniment. >> rose: do you still read music? >> no. i don't read music anymore. >> rose: is it like a foreign language? if you don't use it, if you don't do it -- >> you lose it. looking at music to me is looking at kuehne form. i don't know what i'm looking at. i can sit down and break it apart slowly, but i never learned how the sight read all that well which is a good tool to have in your tool box. >> rose: yes, indeed. how about "my life"? >> left hand for me, it's easy, it's all octaves. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ see i'm playing october w +*eufs the left hand. it's only two notes. >> rose: and you favor your right hand simply because that
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was the way it -- >> well, i'm a righty. >> rose: so if you're right-handed you play more with your right hand. >> people tend to favor one hand or the other. it's weird, i bat lefty but i'm a right-handed guy. >> rose: new york state of mind? ♪ ♪ ♪ note? ♪ ♪ 6- ♪ some folks like to get away -- >> rose: oh, man. yeah. if i had within the sound of my voice a hundred thousand of the most intense billy joel fans
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whawhat would they most want to hear you play? >> probably want to hear "piano man." >> rose: yeah. >> when we were in the u.k. they wanted to hear "up town girl" that was a big hit there. it was princess diana's theme song. i don't normally do it in other places because it shreds my throat. i'm trying to sing like frankie vali and the four seasons. it just kills me but in england we did it all the time. we'll probably do it again in the states. >> rose: just give me a little bit of it. ♪ ♪ ahh ♪ up town girl, she's been living in an white bread world ♪ ♪ as long as than anyone with hot blood can ♪ and now she's looking for a downtown man ♪ that's what i am and i wrote that, i was in my 30s and now i'm in my 60s and trying to hit those same
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notes at this age, not the same. >> rose: river of dreams." >> river of dreams. ♪ in middle of the night ♪ i go walking in my sleep, through the valley of fear ♪ to a river so deep, i must be searching for something ♪ something so someone can find ♪ and it can only be seen by the eyes of the blind ♪ in the middle of the night one of those songs i couldn't shake. i woke up, i had this idea. ♪ in the middle of the -- i said i'm not a gospel singer, i can't write this, go away. and i'm in the shower -- >> rose: wouldn't let you go. >> would not let me go so i said i've got to write this. >> rose: how about an innocent man. >> rose: how abouman. >> an innocent man.
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i was thinking of ben e. king who did ♪ there is a rose in spanish harlem ♪ or ♪ oh, when the night, has come -- ♪ "stand by me me" ♪ and the moon -- and i wanted to write a song like that from the early '60s late '50s. ♪ ♪ ♪ some people stay far aaway from the door if there's a chance of it opening up ♪ they hear a voice in the hall outside, hope that it just passes by ♪ like a ben e. king song. >> rose: for so many people to be able to do what you can do, i mean it's just incredible. to sit at a piano and not only cover those things that you have
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written but you can think and put yourself into the head of the great ones, you know? whether it's beethoven or mahler or bach. >> i like the good stuff. no matter what it is. soul, rock and roll, pop, broadway, classical, jazz if it's good i like it. >> rose: thank you for this. letting me come here and visit you. pleasure. >> thanks a lot. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org
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this is "nightly business report" with tyler mathisen and susie gharib. brought to you in part by -- >> the street.com. founded by jim cramer, the street.com is an independent source for stock market analysis. cramer's action alerts plus service is home to his multimillion dollar portfolio. you can learn more at the street.com/nbr. stocks skid. the market goes from bad to worse after the federal reserve decides to stick with its strategy to wind down its stimulus. despite the recent emerging market turmoil. strong medicine but not strong enough as turkey's massive rate hike fails to stabilize its currency. now the business community in istanbul is frustrated and looking for answers. losing altitude. boeing t
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