Wrong Planet » Bram Cohen

Raising up the Self: A WrongPlanet Interview with Nathaniel Branden

Alex Plank — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:16:15 +0000

Nathaniel Branden is best known for, and will probably always be defined by, his relationship with Ayn Rand and his pioneering psychological work in promoting healthy self-esteem. He first wrote extensively about the importance of high self-esteem for successful psychotherapy in 1969, in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem. Since then, he has written many other volumes on the subject, including Breaking Free, The Disowned Self, Honoring the Self, How to Raise Your Self-Esteem, Taking Responsibility and what is considered to be his capstone on the subject, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. In Dr. Branden?s introduction to that book, he writes: ?It would be foolish for me to declare that I have now written my final report on ?the psychology of self-esteem.? But this book does feel like the climax of all the work that proceeded it.?

Read on for Andrew Williams interview with Dr. Branden!

Dr. Branden has been in private practice since the 1950s. He is currently based in Los Angeles, CA, near the headquarters of The Branden Institute for Self-Esteem. His and his wife, Devers, also work as life-coaches–work that dovetails with Branden?s work on building self-esteem. As he explains on his website (www.nathanielbranden.com): ?Traditional therapy is about excavating and neutralizing negatives. Life coaching is about liberating positives. It is about putting the client in touch with his or her own wisdom and creativity. To quote one life coach, ?Life coaching is about designing a future, not about getting over the past.??

Andrew Williams (WrongPlanet): For those unfamiliar with your work, what led to your interest in self-esteem and researching ways in which to increase it?

Nathaniel Branden: I began practicing therapy in the 1950s, and people would come to me with a wide variety of problems, and I kept looking for any possible common denominator among these complaints. And I was struck that there was a common denominator, and that was an underdeveloped self-esteem. And that that was not a problem like other problems, like anxiety or depression–it was at a much deeper level, the way a person experienced himself. I began to think about what self-esteem is, why is it so important, what does it depend on, what can we do to nurture and develop it? And that led to my first book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem. Then, as my studies over the years kept opening up more and more understandings, I wrote a series of books that more or less reported on what I was working on in that time of my life–all of this coming to a climax in 1994 when I published The Six Pillars, which is my most definitive work on the subject.

AW: I?ve become interested in what I call the three A?s: ADD, autism and Asperger?s syndrome, especially since I was diagnosed with one of them. Given that self-esteem can be a major problem for people diagnosed with these conditions, do you suggest special types of self-esteem work for people with these conditions?

NB: Well, the first thing I want to say is the importance of communicating to people that self-esteem pertains only to that which is under our volitional control. And that we have to make a very clear distinction as to what is within our power and what is not within our power, so we don?t blame ourselves for limitations or problems over which we have no control.
The next related, but practically-oriented observation, is doing exercises such as I describe in my books for deepening self-acceptance, because what these people need is the willingness to accept the reality of their difficulties, not enjoying them or embracing them, but not letting them become grounds for self-castigation, either. In other words, accepting, doing what one can do about it, but not giving oneself a bad time or having self-deprecatory thoughts.

AW: It seems to me that although a safety net, Federal or state-created, would be a nice thing–we all get in over our heads sometimes–the true goal of every human being is self-reliance. Do you think that we, as individuals and as a species, will achieve that goal?

NB: Well, obviously some do, and many don?t. Some people live very self-responsibly, and other people live more passively and are more into blaming. I think that people who operate at a high level of self-responsibility have better self-esteem and are more likely to be survivors. People who are waiting for somebody else to save them don?t tend to have successful lives.

AW: It?s my understanding that sentence completions first came into use as a diagnostic tool, like Rohrschach blots and word associations. What gave you the idea of using sentence completions as a therapeutic tool?

NB: Boy, that?s really tricky. I just liked experimenting with them. I kept inventing new stems and then I began to notice that people were having emotional reactions afterwards, as if I might have taken them through some very intense experiences, but done in a sentence-completion way. People often felt relief, they often gained interesting insights, their perspectives sometimes changed on the event that we were exploring. So it got me thinking about the self-healing potential of sentence completion, and then it was just an issue of experimenting and experimenting and trying different things.

AW: What psychiatrists and psychologists do you think are doing groundbreaking work today? I would give as examples yourself, Dr. Siebert for his role in creating what he calls resiliency psychology and Dr. Peter Breggin, for his skepticism regarding the biological psychiatry model that all mental disorders are neurochemically based and can be treated solely as such.

NB: I?m very interested in work in the field of energy psychology. That?s the work I?m most familiar with, where I see very radical things going on. One of the great books on the subject is by Donna Eden called Energy Medicine. That?s what I?ve found most helpful to me in the last decade or so.

AW: There?s an old clich? that someone who acts as his/her own l

AWyer has a fool for a client. Do you think the same is true of people who act as their own therapists, using your books or those of the so-called cognitive therapists as their tools?

NB: No, I don?t judge that. It either helps a person or doesn?t help a person. If it helps them, I?m not going to laugh at that. Whatever works.

Anyone interested in trying Dr. Branden?s sentence completions can go to his website.

The post Raising up the Self: A WrongPlanet Interview with Nathaniel Branden appeared first on Wrong Planet.

Bram Cohen makes deal with Hollywood

Alex Plank — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 13:17:37 +0000

“According to an AP story at Yahoo News, Hollywood studios announced an agreement with Bram Cohen, an aspie who created the popular BitTorrent file-swapping technology, that will keep him from helping users find pirated copies of movies online. The agreement requires BitTorrent to remove Web links leading to illegal content owned by the seven studios that are members of the MPAA. The agreement is a major breakthrough in MPAA’s anti-piracy efforts. BitTorrent has been one of the major targets of MPAA’s anti-piracy tirade. However, Cohen’s engine is far from the only tool used to find pirated BitTorrent files online. A handful of other online engines can search BitTorrent-specific sites, and ordinary search engines can also be used to find BitTorrent files.”
Hollywood hopes that an agreement with the creator of BitTorrent software, popular for downloading pirated movies over the Internet, will reduce illegal traffic in online films.

The agreement negotiated Tuesday requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to remove Web links to pirated versions of movies from his Web site, bittorrent.com, effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films.

The agreement involves connections to content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America.

“BitTorrent Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so,” Cohen said in the statement. “As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from bittorrent.com’s search engine.”

The deal will not prevent all illegal copies from being swapped using the BitTorrent technology. Cohen said during a news conference that even after links to files are removed from his search engine, some files could still be found using other means such as google.com.

The agreement means bittorrent.com will comply with procedures outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Cohen’s site will not prevent links to illegal files from being posted. But after a studio complains about the file, BitTorrent will notify the offending computer owner and remove the link from its search engine.

The agreement represents the latest effort by the entertainment industry to discourage illegal Internet downloads. It also demonstrates Cohen’s sensitivity toward Hollywood’s piracy problems, making him potentially more attractive to studios for future deals related to movie downloads.

Cohen said Tuesday he has been talking to studios about possible deals.

“We will have content distribution announcements in the future,” he said.

MPAA Chief Executive Dan Glickman said he met with Cohen in July after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that studios could pursue claims against another service, Grokster. Glickman said his staff had been holding talks with Cohen even before that ruling to see “how we can work collaboratively and not be at each other’s throats.”

Glickman said his efforts, including Tuesday’s announcement, would not stop piracy, but would send a signal to other technology companies that studios are eager to work on legal downloading alternatives.

“We want to make as many movies commercially available online as possible,” Glickman said.

Cohen disclosed in September his company had raised $8.75 million in venture funding to develop commercial distribution tools for media companies.

The BitTorrent technology pioneered by Cohen — and used by an estimated 45 million people — assembles digital movies and other computer files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet. Its decentralized nature makes downloading more efficient but also frustrates the entertainment industry’s efforts to find and identify movie pirates.

The agreement with Cohen would not prevent determined Internet users from finding movies or other materials using tools or Web sites other than Cohen’s, but it removes one of the most convenient methods people have used.

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Why Hollywood Loves BitTorrent – CNN

Alex Plank — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:35:09 +0000

Google News reports:
Why Hollywood Loves BitTorrent
CNN - 1 hour ago
… The other is a personal one: Cohen suffers from Asperger’sLink to article

p2pnet.net

Why Hollywood Loves BitTorrent
CNN - 1 hour ago
… The other is a personal one: Cohen suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism that makes concentrating on technical details a snap, but picking up …
Bit Torrent creator stitched up Inquirer
all 5 related

The post Why Hollywood Loves BitTorrent – CNN appeared first on Wrong Planet.

New WrongPlanet.net Asperger’s Interviews: The creator of BitTorrent

Alex Plank — Mon, 09 May 2005 20:41:37 +0000

Bram Cohen

While reading an article entitled “The BitTorrent Effect” which appeared in the January 2005 issue of Wired Magazine, I was surprised to find out that the creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, has Asperger’s Syndrome. After finishing this article, I became determined to track down Cohen and ask him some questions about how Asperger’s Syndrome has affected his very successful life. I finally found him on IRC and was able to interview him about how he has dealt with Asperger’s Syndrome. I’d like to thank Mr. Cohen for taking the time out of his busy schedule to answer these somewhat personal questions.

Cohen started working on BitTorrent in April, 2001. Since the release of this technology in the summer of 2001, it has quickly grown into one of the most preeminent file distribution methods, especially among open source products such as Linux. The decentralized nature of BitTorrent allows an individual or company to share its files without needing to worry about bandwidth demands. Every client downloading a file from the network will usually donate part of its own bandwidth which, when added up with all the other donwloaders of the particular file, becomes quite a lot, making it much faster than technologies such as Gnutella (or Kazaa).

Because there is already a plethora of information about BitTorrent, this interview takes a different approach and focuses entirely on Cohen’s Asperger’s Syndrome. Cohen’s story is extremely inspirational to those of us who do have Asperger’s, and will probably be so even to those without Asperger’s Syndrome (Sorry, Asperger’s makes it hard for me to tell what other people will think, so I’m only guessing that it will be ;-). I know that many of you with Asperger’s Syndrome may be at a low point in life, but this is only temporary! Bram has been there too and now he is one of the most respected figures in the computer science field.

Bram Cohen

WrongPlanet.net: How has Asperger’s helped you with your programming?

Bram Cohen: Oh, heh, I dunno. I tend to get obsessed with technical problems, and have a very long attention span, which are obviously good traits for being a programmer, and seem like Asperger’s traits, but [because of] not having an almost-identical-except-no-asperger’s version of myself, it’s hard to compare.

WP: How was life at school?

BC: I hated school, and dropped out of college. I got picked on a lot in school, and had a lot of trouble making friends.

WP: I know the feeling.

BC: One thing about school – I always had this attitude that I was in school to learn, and attempted to do whatever was involved in that process, while school had this attitude that I was there to earn grades, which I couldn’t care less about. Unsurprisingly, my grades weren’t very good.

WP: That’s been true for me as well. I tend to have trouble focusing on anything that I’m not interested in. Do you have this problem?

BC: Yes, I’m extremely bad at working on things which seem pointless (uninteresting I can mostly deal with). It’s caused problems for me at some workplaces, particularly when the whole job was to maintain a garbage legacy codebase.

WP: So you taught yourself the languages that you know?

BC: My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That’s more a function of my age than anything else though – back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.

WP: How did you meet your wife? [Many of us with Asperger’s tend to have trouble with romantic relationships.]

BC: I met my wife because she knew someone I worked withh, I don’t want to go into more detail than that.

WP: I understand and that’s perfectly fine. How has Asperger’s influenced your attempts to find a job [or work at one]?

BC: In terms of work I’ve always had a Bad Attitude in that I won’t work anywhere which requires me to work strict hours or follow a dress code. I don’t know if that’s an Asperger’s thing or not, I think it’s just being reasonable.

WP: A lot of us would agree with you on that. Do you have anything else you’d like to add [about Asperger’s Syndrome in general]?

BC: About Asperger’s in general, I’d like to comment that I never really identified as having it until I started to learn some basic social signaling and realized just how bad my problems had been.

It’s very frustrating now, because I can remember events in my life well enough to be able to realize now what people were thinking at the time, even though I had no idea what was going on back then, but of course there’s no way of going back and explaining it to myself.

WP: A lot of people seem to feel that way when they find out later in life. What do you have the most difficulty with in social situations?

BC: There’s no single thing which causes problems, it’s a general missing skill set of being able to read faces, and being able to express thoughts on one’s own face properly (there are other social cues, of course, but in my case I learned starting with the face, and everything else was easy from there).

I still sometimes get tired and just completely lose it. I try to not make eye contact when that happens. Fortunately people are very accepting when one seems to ‘snap out of it’, so if I act weird around someone one day then reasonably interactive the next they generally figure that I was just tired or distracted or something

WP: This is totally unrelated and more of a question I ask to anyone I speak to: What operating system do you prefer?

BC: I hate dealing with computers in general, so I’m typically OS-agnostic, I’ve most recently been abused by a windows machine, so I hate that the most for the moment.

WP: Ha ha. Well I don’t want to take too much of your time away from you. Thanks for the help!

BC: You’re welcome.

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Bram Cohen and the Bittorrent Effect

Alex Plank — Fri, 06 May 2005 08:42:12 +0000

Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever.

“Bram will just pace around the house all day long, back and forth, in and out of the kitchen. Then he’ll suddenly go to his computer and the code just comes pouring out. And you can see by the lines on the screen that it’s clean,” Jenna says. “It’s clean code.” She pats her husband affectionately on the head: “My sweet little autistic nerd boy.” (Cohen in fact has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.)

Find the full article at Wired.com here

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