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_________ _________ Dr. Vertegaal's group is also implementing these findings to facilitate user interactions with large groups of computers such as personal digital assistants and cellular phones. The eye contact experiment used computer-generated images from actors who conveyed different levels of attention (gazing at the subject, gazing at the other actor, looking away, and looking down). These images were presented to the subjects, who believed they were in an actual three-way video conferencing situation, attempting to solve language puzzles. The researchers concluded that people in group discussions will speak up more if they receive a greater amount of eye contact from other group members. There was no relationship between the impact of the eye contact and when it occurred. "The effect of eye gaze has literally fascinated people throughout the ages," says Dr. Vertegaal, whose paper, Explaining Effects of Eye Gaze on Mediated Group Conversations: Amount or Synchronization? was presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. "Sumerian clay tablets dating back to 3000 BC already tell the story of Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, who had the power to kill Inanna, goddess of love, with a deadly eye," says Dr. Vertegaal. "Now that we are attempting to build more sophisticated conversational interfaces that mirror the communicative capabilities of their users, it has become clear we need to learn more about communicative functions of gaze behaviours." Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote any part of this story, please credit Queen's University as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021122073858.htm In a message dated
11/25/2002 5:03:50 AM Eastern Standard Time, n.j.c.bannan writes: The
act of singing, when entered into such as to capture most efficiently
the flow of breath and the resulting resonances perceived both aurally
and as sensations in the hard tissue able to respond, also 're-sets
the face'. hb: very intriguing. nb: This is why I have found it so extraordinary
that the proposals as to musical origins of human communication, especially
language, which one finds in nineteenth century authors such as Darwin,
Helmholtz and Nietzsche, were barely carried on in, for instance, post-Saussure
linguistics, yet remain alive and well throughout twentieth century
voice teaching from the final publication of Garcia through to the synthesis
of science and practice one encounters in Sundberg and Thurman. I would
urge anyone wanting to develop their understanding of this phenomenon
to talk to an effective, scientifically-informed singing teacher. Linguistics
and social psychologists seem, by comparison, barely interested in the
means by which language is physically produced. So 100 years of research
has been inhibited by a prevailing orthodoxy which Science of the Soul
should prove to be a cul-de-sac. Nicholas In a message dated 11/25/2002 5:03:50 AM Eastern Standard Time, n.j.c.bannan writes: [snip] I would urge anyone wanting to develop their understanding of this phenomenon to talk to an effective, scientifically-informed singing teacher. Linguistics and social psychologists seem, by comparison, barely interested in the means by which language is physically produced. Yes. Modern linguistics is a very abstract & disembodied discipline - no doubt at least partially due to the influence of Chomsky and of the computer metaphor. For obvious enough reasons, clinicians are more interested in speech production. --
Crises of confusion and stress drive humans to seek out others with whom they can talk out their problems and get a sense of comfort-plus, if they're lucky, a way of solving the catastrophe du jour. The balance between the amygdala and the hippocampus produce the phenomenon of the extrasomatory extensions of self-going to others to interpret the uproar going on just a few inches behind the verbal brain. That, in turn, drives us into the web of the collective intelligence. In looking for a shoulder we can cry on, we contribute our confusion as a new bit of data the group can ponder and from which it can learn. Groups that learn this way out-survive groups that don't. And groups that learn this way succeed in building the most adaptive culture, the most adaptive system of overarching beliefs and the most adaptive kit of the micro-sayings that help empower the members of a society…phrases like "now we're operating on the same page," "he's not with the program," "I've got to get my act together," "shit or get off the pot," "she blindsided me," "he's jerking me around," "stop fucking with my head," and "out of the frying pan into the fire." Come up with the clichés that fit your situation and you may well be able to get the hippocampus off it's ass and put it back to work gagging that pain in the touchas torture-master, the amygdala. Lederman, Regina P., Relationship of anxiety, stress, and psychosocial development to reproductive health Vol. 21, Behavioral Medicine, 09-01-1996, pp 101-112 In a message dated 11/22/2002 4:59:28 AM Eastern Standard Time, n.j.c.bannan writes: [snip] nb: The idea of 'emotional space' whereby empathetic responses can transform through a kind of emotional 'Chinese Whispers' is quite important to my view of what happens in choral singing - and, indeed, in many of the forms of musical transmission represented both by both audience experience and active participation (Alf Gabrielsson is doing some good work on this). hb: neat. please send me any information you can on this. have you looked into the work on "emotional contagion"? Bill Benzon's Beethoven's Anvil hypothesizes that those playing music and experiencing it together are attuning their brains. The implication to me is that the waves, pulsations, web patterns or whatever we choose to call them going through individual brains may add up and produce an overarching pattern, an emotional sense of the group's identity, one that transcends individual emotion and thought but that each individual can feel, can sense, can bend and give in to, thus tuning the individual further into the collectivity and amplifying the uber pattern.
To study emotion,
spirituality, and the brain, you have to study it in its natural context--a
social world in which the phantom presence of others haunts us even
when we are walking in isolation or fast asleep in bed. The brain is
a node in a social web. Howard Db We want you to focus on how the brain makes a mind..or what is in the physicality and physics and chemistry of the brain itself that impacts the formation of world view, value systems, vmemetic codes etc. etc. We want to show the relationship between the organic brain and the "evolution" of mindsets...survival sense, magical self, egocentric self, saintly self, strategic self, sensitive self, integral self etc etc. Most of the people in the session..about 70...come from the intangible, invisible, and so-called consciousness tradition. We are trying to show that both chemical and talk therapy will be useful.. The mind/brain question. The chemistry of culture. The impacts of chemistry and culturey hb; this is a wonderful mandate, one I will ponder mightily. Don, every chemical and neurobiological reaction in the brain is hooked deeply into sociality. No brain is an island. Even the private self is a mechanism that connects us to others--and to the superorganism, that vast cultural emergent thing. Pheromones, hormones, and synapses all make us part of a family and a team. Even the architecture of the brain is sculpted by our intercourse with others, a connectivity that begins while we are in the womb, continues when a newborn automatically focuses on its mothers eyes and the eyes of strangers, and procedes to make brain cells thrive when an infant detects smiles and makes them die when the baby senses frowns or worse, indifference. Does this approach work for you? Memes begin to take hold in the womb. From roughly the sixth fetal month on, the infant lives in a world of memewebs and emotional connection. Those are the shapers of its brain. hb: Amphetamines &
cocaine mock dopamine Eysenk's introverts
& extroverts Adaptive unconscious-we can feel good or bad without knowing why depending influenced by a pheromone we never smelled, a touch of the arm we never felt, or a layout of the room we didn't see look further into gnrh morphing in the waters of the womb changing a society
is going to involve playing the games subcultures play more than changing
a culture en masse Howard In a message dated 10/29/2002 2:08:39 PM Eastern Standard Time, Dpincus216 writes: Subj: Re: Jaak on Burger Kinds. Date: 10/29/2002 9:23:28 AM Eastern Standard Time From: jpankse Sent from the Internet No, no, no David. . . it is clearly the "burger-kind" module, since evolution can operate much more effectively on more general purpose functions, at least in the cortex, than on brand-name specific ones. Of course, Doug's points on the weaknesses of brain imaging are well taken, but every technique has flaws. Only the convergence of evidence, using multiple approaches, helps us see clearly. . . at least scientifically. Also, I note that Logothetis has an excellent argument that fMRI only detects inputs into an area and not outputs. Logothetis, N.K. (2002). The neural basis of the blood-oxygen-level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging signal. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 357, 1003. Anyone who has done fMRI knows that group means often hide the true magnitude of individual brain effects, and averaging down to a few voxels only gets at some type of mis-leading epicenter for certain brain functions. For instance, in our own first fMRI study, just finsihed, sad music had no significant group effect on the human brain, even though each individual exhibited quite substantial individual changes. Still, some insights are emerging, as with correlations between areas, across individuals, suggesting generalizable functional causal relationships. Also, PET, in many hands, has been superbly effective in highlighting subcortical sources of emotions long highlighted by research on the brains of other animals (i.e., Damasio et al and Blood &Zatorre's work), with the most recent spectacular subcortical arousals during air hunger from Peter Fox's lab (two papers in PNAS, last year. . . can dig up exact refs if anyone is interested in admiring those massive subcortical arousals). One remarkable thing about all of the above findings is that when people begin to really feel the emotions, the cortex tends to become deactivated in many regions, as many subcortical areas gets increasingly aroused. Lovely! And that should be a big lesson for the fMRIers. . . as well as giving us some understanding, perhaps, of the kinds of Dionysian (old god!) experiences that Howard has described when masses of people move into the frenzy of a shared emotion. God Modules? I would not put it past neuro-evolutionary tinkering, that some kinds of group social-belief urges (at least for general motivations, such as the desire for meat, albeit not for arcane specifics, like the desire for Burger Kings) were constructed into the homonid brain as a way to insure group solidarity, which could more effectively ward of various dangers than mere individual initiative. By this, I have no wish to minimize the importance the importance of religious experiences, but to only indicate that our scientific knowledge about such matters, especially with the emergence of the half-truths of the new fMRI and PET phrenologies, is comparable to the following: A blonde was sitting in a law class when the professor asked her if she knew what the Roe vs. Wade decision was. She sat there for quite a while pondering this question and, finally, she sighed and said, "I think that is the decision George Washington made prior to crossing the Delaware river." Smiles, Jaak I think that he means the 'Burger King Module'. Skip the mayo. I would also like to second Doug's point about the imaging is biased towards the high energy cortex. Richard Lane presented data in New York last month 'finding' emotion in the cortex based upon his scans for exactly these reasons. You only see what your eyes will tell you. Best, David I also think, more seriously, that functional imaging has been BADLY oversold in terms of what it can really tell us about the neural substrates for almost anything. Not only it is completely correlative (not causal, even in the press releases by its most ardent boosters), but there is MUCH more individual variability in regional task activation than the functional imagers would have most of us know (which raises a host of disturbing questions most imagers would rather not get into); third, differential metabolic activations across tasks require a resting or control state subtraction paradigm (what is the control state in the brain?, because resting isn't really resting as Raichle has shown), and fourth, the differential resting vs. activation paradigm is always going to favor cortex which evolved largely in a metabolically high energy milieu of warm bloodedness, vs brainstem regions, which evolved for the most part in the metabolically challenged phylogeny of coldbloodedness. There has never been a SINGLE functional imaging study that attempted to compensate for the huge differential metabolic jumps the cortex is capable of vs. the relatively puny differential metabolic activation states of say, PAG or VTA, the hypothalamus, or any number of brainstem nuclei. If they did, I suspect that our functional imaging studies would look very, very different. Additionally, functional imaging tells us less than one might think about the real distributed network of transiently integrated local systems that underpin a particular process, as brain regions can be activated but have primary inhibitory activity or primary activating activity on connected systems. Only combined with other methods, including particularly animal models, can the contributions and limitations of functioning imaging be made clearer. But it has been so brilliantly sold, and bought by many as THE technology for understanding brain function. Doug _________ ________ "In the Third Testament we take a different tack. We return the soul to the cosmos. And we make it central not just to religion, but to science. In a sense, we make the human spirit once again the center of the universe." Hb: Returning the soul to a picture of the entire cosmos, from its first Big Burp to its present pitting of humans against each other in war, has been my quest since the age of thirteen. It's also been my goal to liberate human will and wonder to turn this world ever more fruitful, ever more creative, ever more a nourishing nest for the sort of evolution that's produced by curiosity, passion, imagination, and invention rather than by the spilling of blood. Today we finally know enough about the nature that has birthed us to intone the truths of science in a way that makes the soul sing. With knowledge and emotion linked together we can have what the god of the old testament willed us--dominion over the earth and all we see--but dominion through collaboration, not through devastation. We can have the leaping, dancing will of Neitzsche. We can surf the waves of evolution and revel in our mastery, but only if we understand the churning crowds of molecules that make the tides on which we ride. The secrets of crowd power, of turbulence in flow, of swirls that made the galaxies and whirls that swamp and evelate the human soul; the secrets of revelations and of ecstasies, of depressions and of insecurities; all these have a cosmic connection, a parallel in bosons and in leptons; a root in atoms, molecules, and their connections; all these are the things I seek. Know the crowd to ride the crowd. Know the crowd to join it when you please. In the roiling of the crowds is the secret to the universe and the secret to our inner mysteries. With these words I offer you my creed. Howard _______________________________ Redfield had one
of the biggest-selling books of the mid-90s with his Celestine Prophecy.
In a follow-up volume (The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide),
the author clarified his novel's meaning. He called explicity for a
reversal of the materialist rationalism of the last 500 years and for
a return to the spiritualism of the Dark Ages. Only when individuals
turned in upon themselves and underwent spiritual change could humanity
undergo the millenial transformation awaiting it at the turn of the
21st century. In a sense, Redfield was right. For too long mechanistic
science had turned its back on numerous internal phenomena. Yes, pscychologists
and psychoanalysts had speculated about the world within our hearts
and minds since the late 19th century, when Sigman Freud and William
James began to probe the soul. But experimental psychology had soon
reduced the individual from a sentient being to a piece of machinery,
a Skinnerian black box. However that mechanism had changed dramatically
in the 1960s, when researchers covertly began diving into their interior
experience with the use of psychedelic drugs, and when imminent experimentalists
like Solomon Snyder had returned from their "trips" with insights
which they tested in the lab. By the time Redfield wrote, a rich body
of scientific information had revealed layer after layer of the soul
in operation--exploring emotions like jealousy, love, eros, depression,
rage and even the ultimate mystery: consciousness itself. But Redfield
ignored the mushrooming science of the soul, and lauded instead the
'80s fascination with crystals, shamanism, tarot, flying saucers and
other magic talismans. Like the helpless creatures of the dark period
he romanticized, Redfield wanted us to abandon our efforts at scientific
mastery and passively bathe in false hopes and our own internal stew.
Redfield was by no means alone. Nor did he intend to be. His second
book was written as the basis for workshops which would spread word
of his writing, increase his sales, and most important, reshape the
perceptions of those he reached to believe in such miracles as coincidence
and the beckoning of a hidden spirit manifest beneath the surface of
this world. The very coincidences which scientists and statisticians
had demonstrated arose from our tendency to focus on the one event out
of a thousand which by chance brings two things together at the same
time, Redfield wanted us to see as the hand of an invisible spirit.
He literally wanted to reintroduce the "suspicion"-ridden
modes of misperception from which the Renaissance had once freed us.
Crowed Redfield, "Freed from our 500 year long secular preoccupation,
we are now pulling together a consensus about our higher spiritual nature."
"Mysterious coincidences," he declared triumphantly, are "the
central feature of our whole new way of approaching life." This is a man with
a publicity machine and the meat to feed it. hb: I suspect that topology
or something of the sort may prove more useful. For years, I've been
writing about hurricanes in the brain--temporary but large scale whirwinds
of formful, integrated activity. Walter calls these things mesoscopic
patterns. And you've written about the weather in the brain. I suspect
we'll find weather maps up there. But one person's way of synching with
another's map may have an entirely different topography and topology.
However they'd both share a common beat--and perhaps a common fMRI--an
activation of the same brain chunks. One way to go may be to follow
the thread that Condon dropped and to use an antique method, electro-encephalography,
to see if a bunch of people at a wild party synch their brains. Let's
face it, you hit it on the nose when you hinted that at the very least
people dancing together have to share common muscle rhythms, and those
rhythms are generated by motor centers in the brain. Hence the motor
centers have to throb in synchrony. Lord knows what other areas those
motor centers recruit into the interlink between people, especially
when cued by the trappings of "letting loose" that are a part
of any party, fed further by the group mood, and shaped by a bit of
lyric, melody, and well-known subcultural way of interpreting the music.
bb: Beyond that, just the right mathematics appeals to young hotshots.
That was surely a part of the Chomsky¹s appeal; he made linguistics
a mathematical discipline in the image of the up-and-coming mathematics
of computing. We need to appeal to the mathematics of complexity, networks,
and evolutionary game theory. What I did in Beethoven¹s Anvil was
provide one or two key notions that take us a significant way to that
end. hb: I get very wary when mathematicians step in and impose an artificial
structure that obscures the facts. We need more Nikko Tinbergens--more
observation of natural things happening in natural environments. But,
heck, we need all approaches simultaneously. We are after very big game.
The walls between disciplines have to go down. And either/or games have
to go too. hb: be careful not to make Sue Blakemore's mistake. She's
made no mistakes from the point of view of PR and book sales, none at
all. And she is a delight as a human. But talking science with her is
painful. She's taken on a big subject but can only think of it in terms
of a micro-definition of imitation. Imitation is a broad spectrum subject--it
includes strange thinges like picking up on a general principle, say
writing, then reinventing it radically in a different culture, this
time with squiqqles that stand for the sound "c" instead of
the object "cat." Kroeber documented this form of building
on a hint. But it doesn't fit into Susan's defintion of imitation. So
despite its critical importance to mimetics, I'd imagine she can't take
the phenomenon on. On the other hand, we may be able to overcome that
narrowness with what seems at first like our big disadvantage. You are
able to narrow things down. I widen things to a degree that drives you
nuts. I don't know about you, but I get huge hunks of critical stuff
from your thinking. I imagine that you occasionally get something of
value from mine. We can cover far more territory because of our differences
than we could if we were each out on our own. In other words, narrow
to whatever degree you have to to get results. I'll widen to accomplish
my goals. And between us we'll cover more bases than we could alone.
hb: this is why we must do something i have no idea of how to do--get
your book established as THE textbook on music. Global Brain is being
taught at a course at The New England Institute. And both Global Brain
and The Lucifer Principle have been used as course material at universities
from Germany to Australia. Heck, the Lucifer Principle has even been
used as course material at high schools. But this is all by accident.
How to make it happen deliberately is beyond me. Howard But that¹s
enough for now. www.howardbloom.net Howard In a message
dated 11/19/2002 10:31:18 PM Eastern Standard Time, dsmith06 writes:
Perhaps the pertinent question is, why is religion such a hot topic
generally? Perhaps psychologists and neurobiologists are simply focussing
the light of the zeitgeist through the lens of their disciplines. Maybe
this question can be raised at the upcoming conference on Religion,
Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology that Rob Haskell and I
are organizing ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom Tuesday, November 19, 2002 10:52 PM Subject: Re: science's religious fascination An intense desire to study religious emotions through the lens of science hit me when I was thirteen and when I realized I was an atheist. I wanted to study the emotions in vivo--to feel them deep inside of me. I was sure they were in there ready to ignite even though my religion was scientism. It isn't the immanence of death that's led me to this fascination. It's a curiosity about life. Did any of the rest of us get hit with this sort of imprinting experience early on? Howard In a message dated 11/19/2002 11:16:31 PM Eastern Standard Time, shovland writes: A lot of these scientists are Baby Boomers like us, and are facing the same existential issues. Their parents are dying off at a faster and faster rate, and so are their peers. They have been kicked in the gut by the terrorism of recent years. In short, their souls are hungry, and their materialism or scientism is not providing much comfort. Many of them grew up going to a church of some kind, but their interest is not the same as that of people who flee back into the arms of mainstream religion. And it may be that their work has taken them to depths where the ideas they were taught in universities, the prevailing orthodoxy, is inadequate. Steve Hovland In a message dated
11/19/2002 11:06:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, waluk writes: Any idea
why religion has become a hot topic amongst psychologists and neurobiologists
hb: Some form of generational imprinting. But on what? What was going
on in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that riveted the emotions of our generation
of scientists to passions, spirituality, ecstasies, art, and belief?
What stamped these seemingly anti-scientific emotions into our awareness
when we were young? I suspect that imprinting points, passion points,
major moments in our youth have induced us to bring the full range of
human feeling from the shadows into the limelight of scientific attention.
But made that imprint on us? Was it the beat generation and its focus
on art, poetry and Zen in the 1950s? Was it the impact of the psychedelic
sixties and its hunger for Maharishis? Was it the 1970s hunt for Eastern
enlightenment that pulsed through books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance? I don't know. Morty Ostow, is a member of David Pincus'
list and a founding member of The Science of The Soul Initiative, a
group that I've been putting together. Dr. Ostow said in an email on
David's Visions of Mind and Brain list that we should keep personal
histories out of our discussion of the science of religion and art,
the science of emotional expression. Morty is an expert in religious
topics and their scientific connections. He's written or edited four
books that touch on the topic: Judaism and Psychoanalysis; Myth and
Madness: The Psychodynamics of Antisemitism; Ultimate Intimacy: The
Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism; and Jewish Mystical Leaders and
Leadership in the Thirteenth Century. But I think the key to Geraldine's
question--and to our real understanding of the the spirititual need--lies
in our biographies. It lies in the personal history that shaped our
emotional lives. When we put our personal histories together, we will
find a common theme. We'll see a zeitgeist in the making. And through
analysis of that zeitgeist, we'll see how the geist--the mass spirit--of
other generations may have been conceived. We may even find a lens to
which to see how a German holistic movement with concerns very similar
to ours arose in the 19th Century. Howard
Hb: it's in those moments that you find your soul, Clem. I've had them too, but only while performing. never alone. they're the power of collective attention or of inspiration pulsing through you. inspiration is a flame that comes from the others buried inside of us, others we've reinvented to forge our own passions and identity. ________
Even those who hate the star are tuned to him or her. Hatred is a form of attention and bonding. It makes the demon we despise a constant figure in our eyes, a measure we ape by inversion-by trying hard NOT to be what the star represents to us. Some of us are fans of a celebrity. Some of us are anti-fans. But each of us measures a small amount of what we are by where we stand with relationship to a star. I suspect that this, by the way, doesn't just apply to the stars of pop and film-to Jennifer Lopez and to Adam Sandler-it applies to the style and stance of science stars. A great many of us in the psychological sciences have been tuning ourselves to Steven Pinker in the last month or two. I've seen online scientific groups drop nearly everything they've examined in the past to argue the pros and cons of Pinker's latest book-The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Whether they like Pinker or not, a great many evolutionary thinkers and psychologists are currently molding their thoughts around the framework Pinker has built, and are using their opinions of Pinker to scaffold their public identity. Think of the impact Pinker, Lopez, and Sandler are having on the generation that's currently ingesting imprints that will guide it for the rest of its life. To those of us who are older, the infatuation with Pinker-loving and Pinker-bashing or with guessing who J-Lo will marry is a passing thing. To folks five years old, thirteen years old, and 21 years old, Pinker, Lopez, and Sandler are making a permanent impression. They're figures who the "young and impressionable" will measure themselves by for the rest of their lives. Pinker may be young to me, but to those reaching awareness during the current burst of Pinker-glory, Steven is an ancestral figure, an eminent graybeard in the making. Howard Retrieved December
05, 2002, from the World Wide Web How many times have you or a friend started a conversation with: "Have you heard the latest?" "Regaling colleagues with a juicy story is sharing a vital human resource -- gossip." When you see a person huddled in a corner with a friend telling him some piece of rumour about a common acquaintance, remember this is grooming. It is also gossip. It is letting him know he is important enough and liked enough to be trusted with a confidence. The subject of gossip is increasingly attracting the attention of social psychology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, sociolinguists and social historians. Even philosophers are being drawn into the debate. Numerous books, essays, articles and studies are published annually, and college courses are being taught on numerous campuses. At Oxford University they do not even camouflage the title of the academic course. It is simply a course on Gossip and attendance is at its maximum. British psychologist, Robin Dunbar PhD, in his latest book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, introduces a provocative theory of why humans came to have language. His argument, now embraced by many enthusiasts, is that verbal communication evolved from a need to indulge in small talk (gossip), leading to social cohesion and mitigating social conflict. It does what primatologists have long claimed grooming does for baboons. How language began has always fascinated us, and though his theory may be a trifle stretched, it will please the supporters of gossip. Geoffrey Miller proposes that language evolved as a courtship device, yet he agrees with Dunbar that language is mostly gossip, and embraces the theory that gossip is grooming. While mutual grooming of primates stimulates production of endorphins (the body's natural pain-killing opiate) it is highly likely that the vocal grooming of gossiping has similar beneficial, physical and psychological effects increasing serotonin in the brain. By gossiping we may be effectively giving ourselves the natural equivalent of small doses of morphine or amphetamines. Space technology brought with it the e-mail, fax, Internet, and the mobile phone, all facilitating our need to communicate and enjoy frequent "grooming". The mobile phone provided an antidote to daily pressures, functioning as a therapeutic activity, a stress- release in a modern fragmented world. The surprise in a recent study has shown that men gossip at least as much as women, especially on their mobile, the modern medium for gossip. Thirty-three per cent of men indulge in mobile gossip almost every day, versus 26 per cent of women. They gossip about the same subjects as women, but men prefer to call it "shop talk", revolving around work, sports and politicians. Women will not be surprised to learn that men tend to talk more about themselves than women do. All tabloid journalism
is an extension of the gossip network. Some, such as Edward Eggleston,
go so far as to claim that all "journalism is organised gossip".
Tabloid journalism holds us to a rigid code of right and wrong, much
more so than the proper press. Because, while it may be more ruthless
and cruel, it honours all the established ethics of behaviour. Do not
lie, cheat, steal, or kill, or you are held to task on the pages of
the tabloids. Research on human conversation has shown that about 2/3
of gossip is devoted to social topics, personal relations and personal
problems. A surprising finding is that only 5 per cent of gossip is
negative. While we gossip mostly about our friends and people around
us, celebrities, such as stars in film, TV, sports, royals, politicians,
because they are familiar to us through media inundation, become as
close to us as someone we know and should care about, e.g. figures like
OJ Simpson, Princess Diana, Bill Clinton -- and therefore we gossip
about them. Even in institutions of research and learning, at the headquarters
of multinational companies in their common rooms and restaurants, conversation
does not focus on matters of weight, such as politics, business or intellectual
and cultural issues. Most of these topics occupy 2- 3 per cent of conversation,
the rest is -- well -- gossip. Whatever the scientific theory, we gossip
because we enjoy it. Let's face it, gossip is fun! With all the studies
emphasising the beneficial effects of gossip however, we cannot dismiss
it as altogether harmless. The dark side of gossip is malicious, vicious
and negative directed to those who cannot defend themselves. It is distasteful,
compelling us to develop tricks of subtlety and skill appearing to be
sympathetic and charitable to the victim we are destroying. "Judge
not that ye be not judged" was not said in vain. Gossiping tends
to have a boomerang effect: "When you gossip negatively, you become
associated with the characteristics you describe, ultimately leading
these characteristics to be 'transferred' to you. You must watch out
for this "transference". There is no denying that gossip has
destroyed lives, broken hearts, wrecked homes, relations, friends and
communities. So while you can enjoy the endorphins of a gossip session,
it can curl its ugly head and bite. Remember the transference theory
and the boomerang effect. If you can't think of anything nice to say,
say nothing at all, for words can kill and so can gossip. The tongue
can manufacture poison for which there is no antidote. © Copyright
Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 28 Nov.
- 4 Dec. 2002 (Issue No. 614) Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/614/pe2.htm
But, as I mentioned in an earlier email, Einstein saw clear explanation AS A SCIENTIFIC IMPERATIVE. And Einstein was the ultimate scientist--an outsider, an oddball, a man who'd been written off as having a shabby and substandard mind, but a man with vision...a vision that stabbed through what Herman Melville calls "the pasteboard mask" on the surface of things and found a deeper reality. Unlike many of our colleagues, you, Paul, have a great deal to say. You have a unique form of vision. You can see math as clearly as others see their fingernails and their toes. You've been able to do this since you were a child. It's as if the rest of us only saw visible light, and you saw, with no difficulty whatsoever, infrared and ultraviolet light. Your vision would be dazzling. You could see at night. You could see the strange ultraviolet visions of a flowers signals, its critical information, that bees see. But you'd have to tell us blind folks what was clear to you, or you'd miss out on vision's reason to be. You'd fail to be what you can be--an antenna of human culture, a brilliant seer of new visions that add to the collective enterprise we call culture. Yes, you can choose to leave behind traces that only a few can read. But a mind like yours should never be lost that way. Never, Paul. Never. Your contribution would be enormous if you wrote in Discover Magazine vocabulary...in the vocabulary of the best science magazines of our era, Science 86 (from the AAAS) and The Sciences (from the New York Academy of Sciences). All of the following statements make my mouth water. But all call for clear explanation: pw: One does not need to introduce fermions-ex-deus-ex-machina at a higher level of organization in order to have the emergent behavior. That being said -- it HAS been tremendously convenient (both in Lagrangian systems and in network automata ala Wolfram) to have one specific higher-level concept -- topological charge -- embedded in the system dynamics, to make particle-like stuff emerge hb: now this, the following, is vivid English. Are you saying that a symmetry break--one in which two things are separated by a membrane, a firmament, a clear dividing line--is not the way this cosmos works? Are you saying that time exists precisely because of assymetry? That this cosmos has a tilt that runs from the past toward the future, with a little backward leakage? If you are, you are inadvertently supporting the elephant in the room, the theory everyone has been kind enough not to comment on because of its obvious amateur stupidity--The Toroidal Model of the cosmos, The Big Bagel. The Big Bagel calls for a kick that sends one universe spinning assymetrically in one direction, and another spinning assymetrically in the other. Together these two cock-eyed, assymetric planes of being make what I mentioned last night, a shape like a wok with its lid on. More accurately, they make a doughnut, a torus, a bagel. The angry kick of god is the big bang--a non-Hoylesian way of starting things. For those who don't know, Paul and I both grew up eating and breathing cosmology. The brilliant explainer who made things clear to Paul was Sir Fred Hoyle, a man so good at making the most complex things clear to untutored minds that he had his own TV and radio shows in Britain. Hoyle was a terrific self-promoter--a very necessary thing if you feel you have ideas of importance to convey. But, most important, Hoyle was the creator and champion of the steady state model of the cosmos--a model in which matter is continually erupting from I'm-not-sure-where. I grew up fascinated by another great explainer--George Gamow, a creator andchampion of Big Bang theory. So Paul and I see the cosmos differently. We FEEL it differently. Why? Because of passion points, imprinting moments, glomming with all our energy onto role models who shape our very core and soul. This is transgenerational communication. I suspect that Hoyle, like Gamow, opened a cornucopia of thoughts of previous theorists and explainers and made them glisten for the two of us. Through these minds who were eager to bend and entertain us with their insights, we were given the works of Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Cantor, and a host of other ancestors. This is the sort of cross-generational communication that makes the weave of information in a social system perk. That's true whether the social system is a colony of a trillion intercommunicating bacteria, a community of bees, or a community of human beings. I also suspect some aspects of it are true in the community of atoms that make a mote of space dust, a galaxy, a bursting, photon-bleeding sun, and all the wonders the preceded humanity. But we are human Paul. You and I are the Hoyles and Gamows of my son's generation and of his sons too--if we choose to be. You can and must become a Hoyle. He's in your bones and ordering you to do for others what he did for you. And Gamow is doing the same for me. Howard >>FIQFT might be described as the following picture: >> >>"In the beginning, God created the universe. He created it in perfect >symmetrical harmony, >>symmetry following the ancient images of Euclid, for a four-dimensional >world. >>He rolled the dice endlessly to decide what to put where. >> >>"And then he looked out upon his work, and decided it was not good, >that it was >>like a hopeless Christmas tree. So he gave it a good kick, which spun >it around ninety degrees, >>and left the scene forever. >> >>"The direction where he gave it a kick we now call 'time.' The kick is >called a Wick rotation." >> >>In fact, most true FIQFT calculations (those which are not reducible to >the old second quantization) >>actually proceed by simulating this picture on a computer. >> >>It is interesting to ask whether this picture admits a truly axiomatic >formulation, >>I doubt that such an axiomatic formulation exists anywhere in the >literature, >>but I suspect it can be done after all. At least that's what I suspect >this week. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >>In a message dated 5/23/2003 7:49:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, >paul.werbos writes: >> >> >> Hi, Howard! >> >> >>hb: Paul, it's good to have you back. >> >> >> >> pw: The original Lagrange and Hamiltonian formalisms were like >strict gradient-based local optima. Therte is some analogy between the >new FIQFT extensions and the simulated annelaing kind of mathematics >people use to try to overcome local minima... which is basically the >foundationof creativity in intelligent systems. >> >> hb: Paul, this sounds fascinating can you explain it to >me? What's FIQT? What's annelaing mathematics? What would be the >opposite of a gradient-based optima--aside from a gradient-based >minima.Can you tell me in word pictures? >> .howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf >> >> ================================== >> >> Sorry to have taken so long to reply. >> My first impression was that I needed to write something in >English, pedagogical, >> to elaborate on what a Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are. They have >been fundamental >> to almost all basic physics for some time. (Kurakin and Wolfram are >exceptions. >> SOME its-from-bits modelers would start out by trying to avoid the >usual reliance on Lagrangians. >> But... most high-power mainstream physicists would say the search >for the "theory of everything" >> is essentially the search for the true Lagrangian of the universe.) >> >> But... looking at your questions, maybe you did already did get the >basic idea... >> >> When I talked about a "gradient-based maximum" of a function f(x) -- >> I am thinking of a function f whose value is always a real number, >and a VECTOR x >> taken from an N-dimensional vector space -- >> I am thinking about a "local maximum of f." We could say that f has >a local maximum >> at point x if there exists some finite number u >0, such that f(x) >is greater than >> f(y) for ALL vectors y "close enough to x". "Close enough" is >defined to mean >> |x-y|<u. >> >> In fact, there is a huge literature out there in applied >mathematics on how to find >> minima and maxima of a function f. One of the oldest methods is the >"method of steepest descent." >> In that method, you start out with a GUESS x0. Then you calculate >the gradient of f >> at x0. The "gradient" is just a vector which points uphill... it >points in the direction >> where f increases most rapidly. You move uphill as far as you can, >generarte a new x, >> and keep repeating the process. This kind of gradient-based
>optimization will take >> you reliably to a LOCAL maximum
or minimum of f. But when you get >to the top of a foothill, >>
it will not tell you how to jump off that foothill to a bigger >mountain
nearby. The gradient doesn't >> tell you where the mountain is.
This is a practical issue of >pervasive relevance in engineering
>> and in physics, and even in evolutionary theory. In my view,
it is >of pervasive importance >> to understanding why humans
often seem highly irrational; many >cases of human irrationality
are >> really just cases of lack of creativity -- lack of ability
to think >or work one's way out of a kind >> of local optimum
in behavior. >> >> Notice that I am talking about a function
f(x) which is >"deterministic" -- no white noise >>
in the discussion so far. >> >> Classical physics used Lagrangians
and Hamiltonians in a >deterministic way. Thus even in Lagrange's
>> version, when he thought the universe was maximizing something,
he >was really just using >> the assumption that the universe
finds a local maximum. But in the >theories we have >> used
for a long time, it is not even a local maximum or minimum but >a
kind of "saddle point," >> which looks like a mximum
in some directions and a minimum in others. >> >> --- >>
>> Then add noise. >> >> Simulated annealing is one
of many methods now used to >> look for a true global optimum
-- the peak of the highest mountain >-- for a function f which may
>> have many local optima. It is like a gradient serach but with
white >noise deliberately added, >> in order to encourage a
certain amount of exploration. (Many >believe that "novelty
seeking" in humans >> is likewise a kind of genetically-programmed
tilt towards a kind of >exploration...) >> >> Functional
INtegral Quantum Field Thoery (FIQFT) looks a lot like >classical
Lagrangian field theory, >> BUT WITH white noise added!! As if
the universe were maximizing BUT >doing some simulated annealing!
>> The simulated anneating would allow it to "tunnel"
from one local >maximum to another. >> >> But.. it's
not so simple. It's LIKE what I just said, but factors >of "i"
thrown in in ways >> that make it incompatible with any notion
of reality (or even with >axiomatic >> mathematics, last I
heard). >> >> FIQFT is basically today's most orthodox modern
latest formulation >of quantum mechanics, >> the "language"
in which the theory of everything is assumed to be >written. >>
The mainstream idea today is that the theory of everything equals >FIQFT
plus >> the choice of the appropriate Lagrangian. >> >>
But I myself am not entirely mainstream. I suspect that we can do a
>bit better than today's FIQFT, >> particularly in how we explain
the process of quantum measurement >and the role of time. >>
>> Best, >> >> Paul Prince at the age of five seeing his jazz-piano-playing father onstage during a rehearsal, centered in the spotlight and surrounded by beautiful young women? There's a sexual component to all these experiences. There's an emphasis on being at the center of mass emotional attention. And there's a knowledge--even to a five year old--that the person he's imprinting on embodies the essence of sexual attraction--sexual attraction taken to the point of mass female hysteria. Did the world conquerors of the first few generations of Moslems after Mohammed's death imprint on something similar? Did Arab kids imprint on the verbal tales of other Arabs who had gone from living in the dusty, dry cities of Mecca and Medina to luxuriating in Persian and Byzantine palaces with harems of hundreds of girls? Did other young Arab boys imprint on tales of the desert bedouins who had lusted for conquest and had often landed the same sort of prize? Does the idea of 70 virgins fired with all of their might to serve the sexual organs of a teen Palestinian drives him to become a suicide bomber today? Is this why Palestinian mothers find their kids willing to dress as suicide bombers starting at that golden imprinting age of five? Kids at the age of five, Freud tells us, are highly sexual. My blond and pretty daughter, at the age of five to seven, went down the street to visit a blond little boy and, I later discovered, locked herself in the closet with him so they could take their clothes off and compare their body parts. Other kids "play house" or "play doctor" to gain the same experience. Then came yet another imprinting age in my daughter--when she hit the age of twelve and asked me where I kept the set of books that Maurice Girodias had given me. Girodias was the master-publisher of pornography. He'd been the first to publish the books of Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov. He was known for his boldness and his superb taste. I'd visited him several times in my early days of fieldwork in mass behavior. At that point may "in" came from founding a commercial art studio, so I made many an appointment to show Girodias my artists' portfolio. Girodias became very fatherly and one day gave me a complete set of one of his book series--erotic novels all in covers of pink. Where were the pink books, my daughter wanted to know. She and a female friend pooled their allowances and purchased a copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. They read the paragraphs over and over the way monks study the Bible. Then they pooled their cash again and bought The Happy Hooker. I, by that time, had managed to sneak even further into mass culture. I was the editor of a rock magazine. When my daughter learned that Xaviera Hollander, the Happy Hooker herself, was in my office, she went nuts. She called and called begging me to introduce her to Ms. Hollander. My daughter even swore she would make the ultimate sacrifice. She'd give up the sex idol she'd imprinted on at the age of five--Paul McCartney--give him up totally, if only I'd give her a word with her new role model, her role model of her puberty, the human at the center of her new Passion Point. Were there pheromonic elements in these experiences? Yes for some--like getting naked with the boy down the street. No for others. But were the old pheromonic hooks from the days of suckling playing a covert role even in the visual and literary passions of these kids? I suspect that youngsters masturbating establish a ritual location and a ritual way of courting and satisfying their sexuality. We hear of bathrooms being used for the masturbators' privacy. Does the odor of the room, the smell of the Playboy magazine, or the odor of a Joan Jett poster become a permanent cue that rouses sexuality? What role do pheromones play, if any, in the odor of a magazine? What roles do pheromones play in a ritual in a bathroom, a bedroom, or a bedroom walk-in closet filled with a mother's rich variety of shoes? The answer could be that there are pheremones all over the place in a bedroom, a bathroom, or a closet. We have a bunch of puzzle pieces here. They all play a role in imprinting points, in shaping our engines of motivation, our manias, our infatuations, our aspirations and ambitions, even our lifetime satisfactions--should we be lucky enough to achieve a few. How do we fit them all together--the pheromonal, the visual, the shape of a forbidden sight--a woman's ankle in Victorian times, a woman's sexual organs opened almost gynecologically--they used to call it a touch of pink--in the case of the kids of the post-Bob Guccione, Sr./Penthouse era. How do we fit this nesting of imprinting points, one within the other, first at the breast or bottle, then at the age of five, again at the age when puberty first bursts, and once more at what seems another critical period--roughly fifteen or sixteen when we imprint, I suspect, on leaders and new subculture heros. These new heros and the ideals they stand for drive us into idealism, activism, or passionate new beliefs. Konrad Lorenz was deeply concerned with the teen imprinting on a new culture-god, a new leader he'd seen when Hitler was on the rise. Lorenz was equally concerned with the changes that mass teen imprinting can make in history. Is it a mistake to say these imprinting points are nested, much as the reptilian brain is wrapped around the brainstem, the neomammalian brain is wrapped around the reptilian brain, and the human brain forms a thin shell wrapped around the neomammmalian layer. The brain builds like an onion, one skin after another developing. Does imprinting work in much the same way? And where is the research on this stuff? Freud kicked it off with his theory of sexual imprinting stages. Is anything happening with this research today? I've had a very hard time finding hard science on these key points in the development of emotion so deep I call it soul. But I do know from my field research that these passion points exist. Not only do they exist, they makes us who we are. If we build on them in our adult lives, we can have moments of fiery satisfaction. If we wander from them, we lead lives of quiet desperation. Howard Subj: Re: steatopygea (the gene for a beautiful butt) Date: 10/21/2002 7:47:21 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: jkohl To: HowlBloom Sent from the Internet In a message dated 10/21/2002 12:05:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kendulf writes: Nice points, Jim! Note, however, that pornography arouses without smell when canned as videos or film etc. In short, vision is very powerful in us - as are the chemical seducers you are drawing attention to! Cheers, Val Geist Excellent point, Val. Seemingly a nail in the coffin. But Jim's suggestion is so rich in potential insights that I wonder if we can find situations in which the impact of pheromones on what we "see" can be demonstrated unequivocally. Howard and Val Actually, this is more a nail in the coffin of the visual approach to physical attraction. There is no evidence that pornography arouses us without arousal being conditioned to olfactory input. What? Everyone says. Same thing I get when I say there is no non-olfactory basis for visually perceived physical attraction. What? The impact of pheromones on what we "see" is readily demonstrable and it is unequivocal. Pheromones directly alter hormone levels by acting on gene expression in the hormone-secreting nerve cells that direct the concurrent maturation of the central nervous system, the reproductive system, and the neuroendocrine system. By direct effects on reproductive hormone levels during development, the biological link from pheromones to arousal is demonstrated unequivocally, because there _must_ be a hormonal change that precedes/accompanies arousal. Pheromones are present in any social-environmental context; require no interpretive effort; and elicit instant effects on reproductive hormones. Until proof that human pheromones elicited the same hormonal responses found in other mammals, there may have been some doubt about the importance of human pheromones to our sexual response cycle. There is no doubt now; the only doubt remaining is how visual input, in and of itself, affects our sexual response cycle, if it does. Also, there is no evidence that even begins to suggest a direct effect of visual input on reproductive hormones during development. Furthermore, there is no evidence that men and women "see" things differently, since there is no evidence of sexual dimorphism in the visual pathways. Without sex differences in sensory processing; without sex differences in a hormonal response to sensory input, you cannot get to sex differences in behavior. Besides, there is
no mammalian model for visually perceived sexual attraction. Scent is
required, good looks aren't. This is what makes it easy to trick other
mammals into copulatory behavior with a conspecific of the same sex;
a conspecific with gonadal hormone production disabled, but that has
exogenous olfactory cues added to the skin--and several other tricks.
So, what is responsible for the luteinizing hormone and testosterone
surge that men (and women) experience while watching erotic videos?
It _must_ be pheromonal conditioning. Pheromonal conditioning of our
hormone response also explains why homosexual males get aroused by watching
erotic films featuring male-male interaction. The heterosexual response
is detailed in an article at the following URL: http://www.nel.edu/22_5/NEL220501R01_Review.htm
The male homosexual response is detailed in Parts 1 and 2 of an article
published in Across Species Comparisons in Psychopathology (ASCAP).
Part 1 was published in June and contains all the neuroendocrine details.
Part 2 will be published next month and contains all the neuroanatomical
details. These neuroscientific details are difficult to understand without
a fairly sound basis in biology. But the visual explanation for physical
attraction/ arousal offers no explanation for biologists who are inclined
to say _What?_ when someone says we humans are much more dependent on
visual input when it comes to human sexual arousal. And a visual explanation
is very unlikely to explain male homosexuality, or for that matter bisexuality,
transsexuality, or any odor-related paraphilias (rubber, leather, shoes,
undergarments etc.) We only think these things are visual because we
don't have to think about olfactory conditioning of our visual response;
it just happens. Jim Howard In a message
dated 10/22/2002 5:42:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, kendulf writes: Howard
and Jim: I very much appreciate Jim's clear exposition of the manner
in which pheromones prime and condition our cognitive system to be receptive
to visual adaptivre sexual stimuli. Hoerver, even in the absence of
pheromones emminating from a female, males still get aroused by appropriate
visual stimuli. I have been through too many trapper cabins and dwellings
of isolated single men or isolated men not to have noticed the piles
of Playboy magazines in the corners and the centerfolds tacked to door
and ceiling etc. Secondly, do we glance at pretty girls only after a
breeze drifts thier pheromones our way? Or do we ignore pretty girls
downwind? Of course not! Vision frees us from the limitations of air-born
messages, and so do our auditory senses. And then there is the tactile
sense.... Howard In a message dated 10/22/2002 8:54:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, kendulf writes: Subj: Re: [h-bd] Re: steatopygea (the gene for a beautiful butt) Date: 10/22/2002 8:54:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time Dear Jim, JK: "I can't tell whether we agree that pheromones condition the visual response" We agree! JK: "The fact that arousal occurs to visual input alone is not disputed" We agree here too. You have expressed yourself well and you have given us a detailed picture of the mechanism conditioning - I said cognitive system - you said visual system. I think we mean much the same. Clearly, you have done here some very original, insightful work. Thank you for discussing it with us in detail. Now, let us please get to some additional clarification. Desmond Morris and his suggestion that, in the visually strongly orientated, plains-dwelling hominid that we are, breasts mimic butts. Visual mimicry, is key here. Morris, suggestion was not taken out of thin air. It was not flippant, not meant to be sensationalist or offensive (as it turned out to be to some), but is an insight rooted in comparative zoology, the same kind of evidence that we use in much of our speculation about evolutionary processes and results. The evidence for this mimicry resides thus in comparable structures, where the visual similarity between structures on the breast and structures on the butt, is strong and so obvious that the relationship between the two is not in doubt. Not even by naive observers. Morris was very well acquainted with primates, and if you are well acquainted with primates, you cannot miss the astonishing diversity of color patterns, be such from naked, pigmented skin or from hair. These are used flagrantly in directed displays by their bearers. That is, there is no doubt that A is addressing B, and B is responding. Display in active troops is every where. And central to these displays is the presentation of these specialized, because uniquely developed, colorful and to our eyes, showy organs. And Morris was aware of Geladas. These are denizen of the open grasslands. They feed on grass. It's their specialty. They are highly visible and subgroups unite into large "selfish herds" as a means of minimizing predation. That's not irrelevant, because it has very deep consequences on visual appearance, weaponry and behavior. And it's not irrelevant because we too had a long episode in selfish herds in the savannah, before we were Homo in the tree-less plains. Geladas and humans have thus - distant - ecological cum evolutionary similarities. Geladas face each other commonly, therefore they communicate sitting upright face to face, breast to breast. Both, males and females, have a startling breast display, a large patch of naked red skin, visually enhanced by white hair framing it in the male. In the female that red skin protrudes into nipples centrally. Peripherally, the red patch is surrounded by large, showy skin beads. These skin beads become even more showy, as does the breast patch, when the female moves into estrus. And so does here vulval patch plus the same kinds of skin beads surrounding it, as surround the breast patch. Breast and butt, color and skin beads change simultaneously with estrus, as well as with arousal. Breast and butt pulsate in tune. Morris analogy was not arbitrary. Humans have not evolved in breast/butt resemblance as far as Geladas. However, resemblance there is and it is resemblance beyond mere superficiality. And that resemblance does not exclude other explanations. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message
----- From: "J. Kohl" Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 4:05
PM Subject: Re: [h-bd] Re: steatopygea (the gene for a beautiful butt)
>Val Geist wrote: > >>I very much appreciate Jim's clear
exposition of the manner >>in which pheromones prime and condition
our cognitive system to be receptive >>to visual adaptivre sexual
stimuli. Hoerver, even in the absence of >>pheromones emminating
from a female, males still get aroused by appropriate >>visual
stimuli. I have been through too many trapper cabins and dwellings of
>>isolated single men or isolated men not to have noticed the
piles of Playboy >>magazines in the corners and the centerfolds
tacked to door and ceiling etc. >>Secondly, do we glance at pretty
girls only after a breeze drifts thier >>pheromones our way? Or
do we ignore pretty girls downwind? Of course not! >>Vision frees
us from the limitations of air-born messages, and so do our >>auditory
senses. And then there is the tactile sense.... > >Val, >I
can't tell whether we agree that pheromones condition the visual response.
>The fact that arousal occurs to visual input alone is not disputed.
Pheromones >do not need to be present because the arousal is a conditioned
response; hormonally >driven--by pheromones altering levels of hormones
from day 1 of life outside the >womb. In this regard, vision does
not free us from the limitations of other >sensory input, it merely
allows us to think that our sexual response cycle is >not dependent
on olfactory conditioning. The key issue here is that conditioning >occurs
over a lifetime of experience. Your focus on adult male arousal, outside
>the context of developmental behavior, makes this issue less clear.
I've seen >this focus/problem before, and wonder how to best avoid
it -- up front, in my >posts. > >Jim The lines are a lot blurrier than at first glance they seem. Here's another fact of life--at least so far as current knowledge goes. Take a bit of the Murchison meteorite, grind it so its biochemicals are freed from the prison of rock, put the dust in water, and, voila, the biochemicals--the carbon-based atomic assemblies--join up almost instantly into bubble-like envelopes. The same sort of biochemicals that appear in the Murchison Meteorite pop up in the strangest places in this cosmos--hot interstellar clouds, cold interstellar clouds, spicules of ice, and, in all probablity, in many other dust-nooks, stone-crannies, and gaseous vapors drifting within galaxies and nebulae. This hints that membranes may have been around long before the molecular assemblies that ancestored dna. The molecules that made these envelopes were driven to gang up by the fit of their electromagnetic peculiarities. Why such very non-random welding points should exist is another question for another day. The question I haven't seen covered is this--what form of sociality did these proto-membranes show? Did they, too, gloop together, and if so, driven by what? Surface tension--an emergent property of molecules in a social gathering is one possibility. And as membranes evolved--as they grew more complicated--what sort of surface signals did they use as their way of flagging others to come or go? I suspect that if they did communicate in this pre-biotic way, they used a strategy akin to that of knotted biomolecules--arrays of electromagnetic slots and notches that became receptor sites, food-swallowers, execretion passageways, and entry-points for information carrying molecules like cyclic AMP. vg: Sensitivity to a rather narrow range of the electro-magnetic wave spectrum did occur. Yet I wonder how much direct electrical communication did occur between microorganisms. hb: aha, I see we are riding the same train of thought. vg: Cells are very active electrically on their surfaces. Some organisms, like electrical fishes, have gone here whole hog! Your layout is nice and logical, and what goes on sub-atomically in living beings is still a mystery. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 3:43 PM Subject: Re: steatopygea (the gene for a beautiful butt)--and information signalling Val and Jim--You've done more wonderful thinking to advance an important line of thought. Now see what you think of this. The initial attraction signal of this cosmos appeared in the first instant of the big bang when the strong force and the weak force pulled together protons and neutrons, then induced them to gather in teams of two or four. Roughly 100,000 years later, 100,000 abb (after the big bang), there was a signalling system revolution. On the growing space time manifold the first signals of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion appeared--the electromagnetic forces. Those, along with gravity, the strong force, the weak force, and possibly negative energy (gravity's dark side, sometimes known as quintessence) remained the cues of congregation and separation for several billion years. (We as yet don't seem to know how many billions that might have been. The field of nucleocosmochronology hasn't quite pinned the dates down yet, at least not so far as I can see.) Gradually from the death throes of stars and from the death of stars that followed in the old stars' wake, there emerged macroteams of protons and neutrons--the nuclei of 92 elements in a cosmos that had started out with only two--hydrogen and helium. Then the signalling forces of electromagnetism took on a whole new role--pulling together something very new--macromolecules--organic molecules, the molecules of life. Roughly 3.85 billion years ago, the first life forms on our planet generated yet another massive signalling system change. In addition to electramagnetic craving, they flagged each other to approach or scoot away by broadcasting a molecular signal, a chemical gradient, a molecular exchange. Thus a new language of attraction and repulsion entered the scene. Chemical lures and warnings remained the basis of signalling for roughly the next 3 billion years. The system was comparably slow. There's a speed limit to how fast a chemical broadcast in a liquid or a damp spot on a rock can go. The really surprising turnaround came approximately 13.5 billion years after the Big Bang-- 550 million years before today, when multicellular organisms found new ways to put the signalling systems of the cosmos through a radical upgrade. They no longer relied on slowly seeping chemicals into their surrounds. Instead they communicated their attraction and repulsion signals using photons (light) and sounds. Sight and sound were a huge leap from what had come before. But they offered far more than had a mere chemical outpour. They offered midrodifferentiations in threat and sex displays. Photon and sound made room for virtuosity, for differences so creatively arrayed that the new visual and vocal cues to come hither or stay away separated species, made some take the lower path, and others go a higher way. The biodiversity of multicellular animals we trumpet today is a product of fourteen billion years of innovation in attraction and repulsion, in signalling systems, in communication, information, and the power of display. Howard In a message dated 10/22/2002 8:54:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, kendulf Dear Jim, JK: "I can't tell whether we agree that pheromones condition the visual response" We agree! JK: "The fact that arousal occurs to visual input alone is not disputed" We agree here too. You have expressed yourself well and you have given us a detailed picture of the mechanism conditioning - I said cognitive system - you said visual system. I think we mean much the same. Clearly, you have done here some very original, insightful work. Thank you for discussing it with us in detail. Now, let us please get to some additional clarification. Desmond Morris and his suggestion that, in the visually strongly orientated, plains-dwelling hominid that we are, breasts mimic butts. Visual mimicry, is key here. Morris, suggestion was not taken out of thin air. It was not flippant, not meant to be sensationalist or offensive (as it turned out to be to some), but is an insight rooted in comparative zoology, the same kind of evidence that we use in much of our speculation about evolutionary processes and results. The evidence for this mimicry resides thus in comparable structures, where the visual similarity between structures on the breast and structures on the butt, is strong and so obvious that the relationship between the two is not in doubt. Not even by naive observers. Morris was very well acquainted with primates, and if you are well acquainted with primates, you cannot miss the astonishing diversity of color patterns, be such from naked, pigmented skin or from hair. These are used flagrantly in directed displays by their bearers. That is, there is no doubt that A is addressing B, and B is responding. Display in active troops is every where. And central to these displays is the presentation of these specialized, because uniquely developed, colorful and to our eyes, showy organs. And Morris was aware of Geladas. These are denizen of the open grasslands. They feed on grass. It's their specialty. They are highly visible and subgroups unite into large "selfish herds" as a means of minimizing predation. That's not irrelevant, because it has very deep consequences on visual appearance, weaponry and behavior. And it's not irrelevant because we too had a long episode in selfish herds in the savannah, before we were Homo in the tree-less plains. Geladas and humans have thus - distant - ecological cum evolutionary similarities. Geladas face each other commonly, therefore they communicate sitting upright face to face, breast to breast. Both, males and females, have a startling breast display, a large patch of naked red skin, visually enhanced by white hair framing it in the male. In the female that red skin protrudes into nipples centrally. Peripherally, the red patch is surrounded by large, showy skin beads. These skin beads become even more showy, as does the breast patch, when the female moves into estrus. And so does here vulval patch plus the same kinds of skin beads surrounding it, as surround the breast patch. Breast and butt, color and skin beads change simultaneously with estrus, as well as with arousal. Breast and butt pulsate in tune. Morris analogy was not arbitrary. Humans have not evolved in breast/butt resemblance as far as Geladas. However, resemblance there is and it is resemblance beyond mere superficiality. And that resemblance does not exclude other explanations. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message
----- From: "J. Kohl" Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 4:05
PM Subject: Re: [h-bd] Re: steatopygea (the gene for a beautiful butt)
>Val Geist wrote: > >>I very much appreciate Jim's clear
exposition of the manner >>in which pheromones prime and condition
our cognitive system to be receptive >>to visual adaptivre sexual
stimuli. Hoerver, even in the absence of >>pheromones emminating
from a female, males still get aroused by appropriate >>visual
stimuli. I have been through too many trapper cabins and dwellings of
>>isolated single men or isolated men not to have noticed the
piles of Playboy >>magazines in the corners and the centerfolds
tacked to door and ceiling etc. >>Secondly, do we glance at pretty
girls only after a breeze drifts thier >>pheromones our way? Or
do we ignore pretty girls downwind? Of course not! >>Vision frees
us from the limitations of air-born messages, and so do our >>auditory
senses. And then there is the tactile sense.... > >Val, >I
can't tell whether we agree that pheromones condition the visual response.
>The fact that arousal occurs to visual input alone is not disputed.
Pheromones >do not need to be present because the arousal is a conditioned
response; hormonally >driven--by pheromones altering levels of hormones
from day 1 of life outside the >womb. In this regard, vision does
not free us from the limitations of other >sensory input, it merely
allows us to think that our sexual response cycle is >not dependent
on olfactory conditioning. The key issue here is that conditioning >occurs
over a lifetime of experience. Your focus on adult male arousal, outside
>the context of developmental behavior, makes this issue less clear.
I've seen >this focus/problem before, and wonder how to best avoid
it -- up front, in my >posts. > >Jim _________ --The greasers were the kids from lower class families who tended to wear leather jackets and put most of their energies into souping up a specific form of display device-the engines of their automobiles and their motorcycles. The bigger the engine and the greater the horsepower, the bigger its owner became. --The heads were middle class and upper middle class kids who had taken to the Bohemianism of the age (1970-1971)-hippiedom. Here status and display came from what drugs you'd taken, how cool your attitude, philosophy, and adventures were, how much close those adventures carried you to the iconic, counting-coup touchpoints of counterculture heroism, meaning you adhered to the strictness of a vegan diet or a macrobiotic menu and knew fine details only an inner circle could recite-like all the evils of sugar and all the values of sprouts. --The heads gained status from the number of things they could do that would outrage their parents. Many of these activities elicited screams like the following from an irate mom or dad: "Turn that god-damned noise off before I come down and bash your brains out. I don't know how you kids can call that screaming music." The third subculture, the preppies, were upper middle class and upper class kids who won points in just the opposite manner, by being the perfect sons and daughters every parent prays for. They played tennis brilliantly-and when they did so-they're tennis whites were immaculately clean and pressed. The tennis courts often belonged to mom and dad and were out in the humongous swatch of land that some referred to as a yard, others as an estate. The sons were top athletes at the games that elevated or depressed the local public or private high-school's collective soul-baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and even a smidgeon of soccer, which at that time was still a British affectation. AND the kids consistently came home with report cards full of As. Their teachers loved them, but might have been appalled at the cruelty of their snobbish snootiness…had they but opened their eyes to it. And their guidance counselors jockeyed to get them into Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The guidance counselors of the heads prayed for mercy and pointed these altered-consciousness addicts toward Antioch, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and, at the very worst, Bard. But here's the point. Each kid was seeking an identity, asking with agony "who am I"? What does the question, "Who am I?" mean? It means what group do I belong to? What pre-scripted path in life is mine? Who is the hero-the athlete, tough guy, rebel, scientist, or rock star-who will give me my sense of me? Who will give me a role model that defines me? What group and pre-defined role will give me a home? In other words, the brain was open and seeking attachment just as it does with baby goslings when they hit their imprinting moments and focus on the nearest moving object as mom…then follow it around for the next year or so and finally, when their hormones spout, want a mate that looks like mom or a mom-substitute, like Konrad Lorenz and a basketball. My job, as the editor of a rock magazine, was to give them the role models they needed, the ones whose lives, values, aspirations, attitude, and music fit the opening of a mind that's hit imprinting hunger-a brain needing to reshape itself around a social model, a celebrity or even a role model like the one I'd fixed on at roughly the age of 12.5-dear old Albert Einstein. Why would kids have trouble identifying the emotions of others? Because their brains are going through changes filled with emotions and the images of others more than others' reality. These are brains seeking what in French would be called their emotional point d'appui-their grappling point-which goes back to that word identity. Adolescence is an imprinting period, one of the three-to-five major brainshifts in life that give us what I call our Passion Points. Remember, this is just a guess. But another fact fits in. During adolescence the brain is creating unity from a jumble. It is connecting cerebral organs that previously operated with a good deal of autonomy. It's yoking them to a tamer, a restrainer, and a maker of what we call personality-the pre-frontal cortex, the executive center and perhaps the ultimate cerebral creator of identity. Howard http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992925
Teen angst rooted in busy brain 19:00 16 October 02 Exclusive from New
Scientist Print Edition Scientists believe they have found a cause of
adolescent angst. Nerve activity in the teenaged brain is so intense
that they find it hard to process basic information, researchers say,
rendering the teenagers emotionally and socially inept. Teens can fail
to see the impact of their actions (Image: PHOTONICA) Teens can fail
to see the impact of their actions (Image: PHOTONICA) Robert McGivern
and his team of neuroscientists at San Diego State University, US, found
that as children enter puberty, their ability to quickly recognise other
people's emotions plummets. What is more, this ability does not return
to normal until they are around 18 years old. McGivern reckons this
goes some way towards explaining why teenagers tend to find life so
unfair, because they cannot read social situations as efficiently as
others. Previous studies have shown that puberty is marked by sudden
increases in the connectivity of nerves in parts of the brain. In particular,
there is a lot of nerve activity in the prefrontal cortex. "This
plays an important role in the assessment of social relationships, as
well as planning and control of our social behaviour," says McGivern.
Western turmoil He and his team devised a study specifically to see
whether the prefrontal cortex's ability to function altered with age.
Nearly 300 people aged between 10 and 22 were shown images containing
faces or words, or a combination of the two. The researchers asked them
to describe the emotion expressed, such as angry, happy, sad or neutral.
The team found the speed at which people could identify emotions dropped
by up to 20 per cent at the age of 11. Reaction time gradually improved
for each subsequent year, but only returned to normal at 18. During
adolescence, social interactions become the dominant influence on our
behaviour, says McGivern. But at just the time teenagers are being exposed
to a greater variety of social situations, their brains are going through
a temporary "remodelling", he says. As a result, they can
find emotional situations more confusing, leading to the petulant, huffy
behaviour for which adolescents are notorious. But this may only be
true for Western cultures. Adolescents often play a less significant
role in these societies, and many have priorities very different from
their parents', leading to antagonism between them. This creates more
opportunity for confusion. "One would expect to observe a great
deal more emotional turmoil in such kids," he says. Journal reference:
Brain and Cognition (vol 50, p 173) Duncan Graham-Rowe Howard this is from Doug Watt. ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj:RE: nature of religious searching Date:10/9/2002 10:21:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time Dear Group I am realizing that some aspects of the debate or dialogue about the nature of religion feel a little bit like the various blind men inspecting different portions of the elephant. Arguing about the putative hegemony of one of these features or issues is really not such a productive approach and I hope we don't go down that path. We are all talking about intrinsically related dimensions of the problem. Wonder (which I did talk about as directly and closely related to the experience of reverence), information reduction (the need for a finite brain to 'crunch down' the infinite world and universe that it confronts), and the operation of the brain's attachment systems are all slices of the pie, and one could argue all related. There is a wonderful picture in Lang's affective picture series of an infant looking up, probably at a mother or father, with a combination of wonder and joy on its face. This picture prompted a whole train of associations, and the argument that religion's quest for connection and belonging in an awesome, and at times, seemingly impersonal Cosmos had much in common with this childhood reaching out in wonder towards the face of a caretaker, smiling back at it, in a prototypic attachment process. Information reduction is intrinsic too this, in that early templates for relatedness and connection, for example, that we are "children of God", in the conventional Western theological language, guide certain kinds of cognitive operations in which we confirm some sense of 'place' or belonging in the world, some way in which the world brought us forth 'intentionally' to so speak, and nurtured us. Yes, I would agree with David that WONDER is really core to all this, that we seek something 'out there' like the infant reaching out to touch the face of the loved and needed other, and this seeking potentially opens us to experiences of awe and reverence for what we discover in the world, in others, and in ourselves. Best to all, Doug Douglas F. Watt, Ph.D. Director of Neuropsychology Quincy Medical Center Quincy, Boston University School of Medicine _________ In a message dated 4/2/2003 12:49:26 AM Eastern Standard Time, royc writes: Hmmm... It's been a while since I sent you one of my late-night, 'thinking aloud' emails, so, here we go. First of all, I apologize that it's been so difficult for us to connect phone-wise. I'm seriously wide open this week, it being Spring Break and all (though I have so much homework that I'm basically just trying to catch up a bit, so I'm here). hb: roy, this is a hot opportunity. Call Stephen (718 622 2278) and set something up. I have guests tomorrow (friday) and something on Saturday, but Sunday or Monday may be free. But this makes me wonder...is there really time in your schedule to work with me? rc: I am sanguine that we'll get it together soonly. I've been tag-team reading Brian Massumi's 'Parables for the Virtual' (one of the densest texts I've ever plowed through) and Steve Aylett's 'Slaughtermatic' (which was recommended to me by Steven Shaviro) hb: legal director of the ACLU? Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto? rc: and working on my own fiction a bit. I'm also kicking around ideas for my masters thesis (more on that in a minute). Anyway, I think I've found the core of my own personal research method: it all stems from fandom. When I was 15, I started making zines. their content revolved around BMX, skateboarding and music. hb: neat. and at ten I co-founded a newspaper and created a cartoon stip based on the adventures of a vegetable super hero--Super Celery. Note the mix of feminine kitchen-stuff and masculine properties. What does this say about my early personality? Serious need to splice the genders together. One known as a mental disorder, now a mental and emotional advantage. Jeez, Roy, I'm 300 emails behind and you have stimulated me to riffing. You're good at catalysis. rc: I traded with kids form all over the country. hb: wow!!! rc: Each zine opened doors to bands, ideas, and more zines. hb: double wow. this is terrific. In the vast oeuvre of to-be-published Bloom literature, this is called finding your passion points, your imprinting points. It's one of the secrets to artistry and passion in life. rc: A few of these were put out by people at the BMX magazines of the day -- people I looked up to a great deal. Their zines in particular were windows into new stimuli of all kinds. I learned here to take note of names, bands, producers, artists, etc. hb: obsessions are incredibly useful. I've been watching them at work in my kid and have come up with evolutionary explanations of where the trivia-obsession comes from and what it does for the evolution of culture. rc: This is how I learned research for I find myself doing the same thing today (i.e., through the notes in books, acknowledgements, references, etc.). The connection is completely obvious to me now. Brief digression: The first zine I received from one of the magazine types mentioned above (Andy Jenkins) had a picture of this crazy robot called a 'Walk-Peck' machine. The picture's caption credited the machine to Matt Heckert at Survival Research Laboratories. I recently met and spent several days with Matt Heckert (and I've become very familiar with SRL in the past few years, even meeting Mark Pauline last year). So, for 17 years I knew Matt Heckert's name from this old copy-machined publication circulated through the BMX zine world. Weird. hb: wow. neat. rc: I've started work on isolating a thesis idea. I think I have my thesis chair picked out and the idea is in a form that's almost ready for the pressure of his eyes. I'm looking at a dialectic of mediation along two continua: on one hand mediation (via language, technology, nonverbals, etc.) brings us closer to events and each other (e.g., it is enabling), on the other hand, it adds another level of abstraction in between every communicative action (e.g., it is distorting). rc: ummmmm, Roy, when I take a wirecutter in my hand and use it to snip some speaker wire, do I distort my hand or extend its capabilities? When I then use the metaphor of the wirecutter to explain something to you, does that metaphor give me new powers or cripple me? Yes, it shapes things. That's why I use it. Am I hungry for new metaphors and new hand tools? You bet. But each one empowers me in new ways. As for the shape it gives to what might have otherwise been chaos, hip, hip, hooray? As you can see, I'm in sharp disagreement with the post-modern program of seeing everything as a hidden form of manipulation. Would it be good to see how the metaphor of a mountain stream influenced and eventually misled physicists when it was applied to electricity by Ben Franklin? Thinking of that running stream, he called electricity a current and a flow. Do electrons really flow the way water in a stream does? Not at all. Do physicists remember that the words "flow" and "current" are based on a metaphor? No. Can most physicists answer the question of whether an electron flowing in a direct current would actually move from the power-generators in Niagara Falls to the lightbulb above my head then would return to Niagara Falls? No. I've asked them and the answer is no. So metaphors can trap us if we forget that they are: metaphors: and tentative approximations, hypotheses. But are metaphors inherently harmful? No, not in my opinion. Never throw a grace, a wonder, a blessing, or a tool away. And never see it as a curse. There you have it--Bloom on postmodernism. Reinventing capitalism (now available in pdf form at t http://www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf) is actually in part an argument against the entire anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-joy approach of the deconstructionists--whose work I find useful, but whose gloom and dystopic criticism of society I find phony. Why don't they simply admit their Marxism so we can test the implied alternative they use to generate their critiques? The two great experiments in their alternative led to the deaths of 80 million people during the 20th century. Good hypothesis, but in the lab of human history--in Russian and China--Marxism failed. However I must admit that there wouldn't be room for my cosmic and social optimism if the guys on the other end of things weren't watching out for things like the environment (I could care less, I'm a technophile) and manipulation (which is very different than the critics imagine it to be). YOU HAVE GOT ME DOING IT AGAIN--riffing, rc: I want to develop a model that gets at a unified theory of mediation along these two vectors. I'm not sure if this is too much to tackle yet, but we'll find out soon. Incidentally, I lifted the kernel of this idea from Steven Johnson's book 'Interface Culture' (but he doesn't quite take it as far as I want to). hb: hmmm, let me see if I can give you a Bloomian alternative. Here's a take on epistemology and semiotics I wrote to my friend Paul Werbos, a mathematician/physicist/computer-emulation genius at NSF a few days ago. It's the sort of thing I write every couple of days and need to get edited, fact-checked, and published with the aid of the mystery person I'm hoping you might recommend: Paul--I've been thinking through your proposal that the only reality we have to work with is the internal representation of reality within us, whether we express that reality in math or in poetry. And that since science works with math, the only reality is math. I hope this doesn't mangle your meaning beyond recognition. However we carry multiple representations of reality within us. And we exist in a social sea whose currents power and shape our representations of reality. An example. I was just filing one of your commentaries in my computer notes. My notes are divided into 3,700 chapters (they're material I'll refer to when writing chapters for future books). These chapters inter-relate. To show the inter-relations, I put endnotes on one chapter pointing to the other chapters it ties in with. Your commentaries cover many bases, from math, quantum physics, and consciousness to the nature of what is real--metaphysics. So the material I just inserted in one chapter relates to 24 other chapters in my lifetime oeuvre (the grand unified theory of everything in the universe including the human soul). Keeping track of what you're doing when you're setting up 24 endnotes that need to be repeated in 24 different places is hard. When your kid is next to you trying not to do his homework, it's even harder. So to keep track of what I'm doing when I'm threading 576 crosslinks is more than my short-term memory can handle. Meaning it's more than the representational system that is my short-term memory can track. So how do I keep from getting muddled, befuddled, and losing my place as I go along? I use a counting system I've inherited from my culture--one that's been created by folks in India, by Arab traders, and by Western upgraders. That number system is representational system number one. I translate these endnote numbers into something mysterious called volition or intentionality--the desire to set up my endnotes and to do it in a way that fits my representation of my future needs. That's representation number two (volition) and representational system three (my vision and my feel for my future necessities). I shift the desire to keep track of the footnotes to the right brain areas that handle math. That's representational system four. This gets shifted to my motor neurons. Representational system five. My motor neurons send signals to my tongue. My tongue waggles the air, and I count out loud. "One" I say to myself as I squidge in endnote number one. "Two" I say to myself as I slot in endnote number two. "Three," I say to myself as I try to keep track of where I am in this 576-step process. What am I doing? I'm compensating for the limitations of the representational tool of my short-term memory. Short term memory=representational system six. My awareness of the limitations of my short-term memory may well be representational system number seven. The air my tongue just wobbled travels roughly eight inches and reaches my ear drum. My ear drum (the tympanic membrane) shivers in tune with the shivers of air...with the shivers of sound. The eardrum translates those shivers into mechanical motion within the bones of my ear (the auditory ossicles)--representational system number eight. The three bones of the ear slosh the fluids of the inner ear--representational system number nine. The slosh moves hairs (stereocili) in the cochlea, which break down the frequencies of the sound and analyze them. This translation or analysis is representational system number nine. The cochlea's translation is turned into flows of electrons and chemicals in the vestibular nerve--representational system number ten. The vestibular nerve sends this signal flow, a flow in a language radically different from that of the tongue, to what I assume is a part of the brain that I can't access without this very indirect way of going from one brain part to another. Presumably my talking out loud uses this outboard-back-to-inboard path to recruit a part of the brain I can't reach by simply thinking, hoping, or wishing. It gets an auditorily-oriented part of my brain to come to the rescue of the brainbit called me. This extra bit of hard-to-reach brain helps "me" remember which number endnote I'm on. Let's call this auditory corner of the brain representational system number eleven. Then there's the batch of representational systems embodied in the way my fingers type the keyboard (number twelve and maybe much, much more). There's the additional representational system of machine language and programming that gives my computer its capabilites. (Representational system number thirteen.) The sum of all this is translated into a system of phosphorescent pixels on my monitor. (Representational system fourteen.) These enter via my eye and its millions of sensory neurons and are translated through roughly four different representational systems to the the alphabet (thank you Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans), to my language (time to thank a few hundred generations of Romans, Indo-Europeans, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and French), and to the mix of thoughts from numerous philsophers, physicists, mathematicians, textbook writers, etc etc all of whom had to talk out loud to keep track of what they were doing and enlisted at least fourteen representational systems to do so. So filing your words of wisdom and writing this email to you is the result of hundreds of thousands of representational systems in tens of thousands of brains, even though all I have available to me is the fourteen-or-so representational systems of immediate sense perception involved in compiling my cross-link-endnotes...the connections of my trains of thoughts, yours, and those of Planck, Einstein, Freud, Spinoza, and a few thousand others. If we got very diligent, I am certain we would discover that each of my fourteen "internal" representational systems (with their outboard loop--talking out loud to myself) can be traced back to some beast that used it as a new add-on, a new way of compressing the past so it could decipher the future and spread it out as a map, a representation, of what was around the next corner or around a corner a hundred turns down the line, then turn it into a string of volitions, a train of acts of will, a skein of decisions or intentions on which its life would eventually depend. We are the cosmos
compressed in numerous ways, using far more systems of past-compression
and future-projection that we think, using far more languages than we're
aware of, modeling our corner of the universe in numerous ways and tapping
a myriad of those models simultaneously. If we are the cosmos compressed,
can we unfold the entire history of the cosmos from within ourselves?
No, we have to consult our fellow creatures, fossils, layers of rock,
and the stars. And what do we find? All of these are puzzles whose keys
we can discover, codes whose secrets we can hack and comprehend. Which
is the representation and which is the reality? How many representations
are in a single sense-perception? How many would there have been if,
in addition to speaking out loud, I'd helped my short-term memory by
counting with my fingers? Does a single immediate sense perception exist?
Or is it part of a web, a mesh, a jangle of brain and body, stars, quarks,
and society? Howard rc: I've also been thinking a lot this week about
your own 'Reinventing Capitalism' and hope to have some interview questions
ready for you soon. hb: great. rc: Sorry to dump so much on you at once,
Howard. Hope you are well, hb: this was a terrific bit of mental pleasure
and mental exercise. Onward--Howard The proportion of
all adults who are young and experimental has become so low across Europe
that marketing new ideas will be much more difficult in future.' When
the CD collections of 40-year olds were analysed, it was discovered
that there was a point where their tastes 'froze in time' as they stopped
buying new music and started buying compilations instead. Their attitudes
will send worrying signals to the Government and broadcasters as they
seek to increase the number of people switching to digital radios and
televisions. There is already evidence that interest in digital TV has
reached a 'plateau' at 50 per cent of the population. Mobile phone companies
expect customers soon to 'upgrade' to phones featuring pictures of the
caller. However, the new research suggests there may be much more resistance
to such innovations than previously believed among people who think
their existing phone works perfectly well. 'Advertisers will have to
become much more subtle,' said Silvester, whose researchers spoke to
focus groups of all ages for advertising agency Young & Rubicam.
'Perceptions of quality and social responsibility may be the only things
that will appeal to older people in future.' In the meantime, apparently,
we should expect more advertising featuring old pop songs - such as
the current use of Human League's 'Don't you want me?' to promote the
Peugeot 206 - as big companies attempt to persuade middle-aged consumers
to recapture the zest of their youth. · Additional reporting
by Nicholas Randall Howard In a message
dated 8/17/02 2:54:40 AM Eastern Daylight Time, john skoyles writes:
JS:I have a feeling that touch is the royal road into his heart HB:I
strongly suspect you're right. JS: The limbic system has layers linked
to language making most it inaccessible to words and only "touchable"
by skin on skin. Recall a post I made sometime back about memory: kids
playing with a toy when asked 12 months later used the vocubulary they
had back then not that they had acquired in that last year. But it is
not only memory that gets frozen with language development - so do our
emerging emotions. The age you discover security as a self separate
from another you limbic system gets frozen in the communication stage
you were at that time. Since this happens around two - that means it
is not academic but a few simple words, peek-a-poo play and lots and
lots of touch. In falling in love, getting that interaction in which
you communicate basic attachment emotions, you have to talk to the other
as the "kid" they were at the time the limbic system laid
down its circuits for such emotions. Hope these ideas are not too cryptic
by their brevity. John ________ Hb: in other words,
kids imprint on their mothers. It was a heady time in America, despite the first world war. Trains had made travel fast and luxurious. Newer and faster locomotives were being introduced all the time. Then came the roaring twenties. My dad entered adolescence, and I suspect began to have artistic leanings. So part of his soul, his passion, was a questing mode imprinted during good times. But that mode was buried by something that hit when he was 21--the depression. That was the big imprinting experience for both my mother and him. The Depression set them permanently into fasting and feeding modes. They didn't seek adventure--much as my dad would have loved to. They sought security. Security comes with toeing the line--conventionality. My dad's only concession to his hidden nature--his earlier imprinting on travel--came when he'd finally become prosperous enough to take a long vaction once a year--a three-week auto trip. He'd pile us into the car and drive with outrageous delight from Buffalo, NY to Mexico, to LA, to the Canadian Rockies, to Florida. It was glorious. Then he'd return to feeding mode, dedicating himself seven days a week to making a living. So the imprint that established his psycho-phenotype hit when he was twenty. But it was one phenotype grown around another, another that it stifled and contradicted. Of such strange wars of passions are souls made. That's how the grand sweep of geopolitics, intergroup tournaments, ingenuity, and the economy mould the passions at our core and mold the human brain--another subject for another book--Passion Points: Three Scientific Journeys Into the Mists of Self and Soul. Meanwhile, I grew
up in the lush 1950s. The prosperity that came with difficulty to my
parents was the norm for me. It was the norm when I was a little kid.
And it became even more the norm when I was 18 in 1962 and helped start
the hippie movement. Unlike my dad, I was lucky. The passion points
of my childhood were in tune with those of my adolescence and early
adulthood. I imprinted on (or was genetically predisposed to?) a questing
mode. It'll never leave me. Dorion, this is why each one of my unwritten
(and already written) books is like a tile in a mosaic. They all interrelate.
The challenge I'm up against is getting them all out in my lifetime.
Al--these are interesting speculations. At the beginning of the Meditations, Descartes said he'd wanted to sit down and strip away all the truths he believed in, to imagine them all as the lies of a trickster demon out to bamboozle him, then to see what he could resurrect from this chaos of negation--what he could say with absolute clarity was true. So the initial impulse or vision may have hit him when he was a young soldier. Then he says he had to wait until he was older, well-ensconced, able to be alone, and had leisure time before he could live out the thought experiment that had obsessed him. So the question is, where was he when performing this destruction and reconstruction of reality? Meanwhile, you've pointed out the value of passion points--key imprinting points that form the life goals into which an individual can breathe the most fire and in whose pursuit he can come vividly alive. Frankly, the goal of putting together a panoramic overview of the sciences and arts hit me at sixteen while I was working in a cancer research lab. The insight that "to he who hath it shall be given, and from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away" hit me late on a Friday night, walking in the cold, stone-cobbled and stone-walled streets of Jerusalem, utterly friendless and alone, absorbed in the depression that endless solitude rouses. The sky was lit with cold, cold stars, and the cobblestones were splayed with the light that came from the small windows of the apartments behind the solid wall of stone that lined both sides of the street. From within those apartments came the singing of orthodox jewish families gathered around dining room tables with white linen tablecoths and candles to celebrate the arrival of a goddess of joy--the queen of the sabbath. I could hear the songs, see the light, but could not participate. I was shrivelling because i had not. Those within were thriving because they, indeed, had. What did they have and what did I lack? Social warmth. So social warmth's presence and absence has a powerful impact on the human emotions--that was the insight gleaned from pain. Two passion points--one
I fixed on at the age of sixteen, another that I fixed on at the age
of 19--those have powered, primed, and pumped my work ever since. I
suspect that Descartes was living out a similar passion point--an imprinting
point--when he tried to strip himself of life's givens so he could see
what was left, what one thing was irrefutable. And you may have hit
on the time when the fixation twisted itself indelibly into his self,
his soul, his motivational system, his personality. Howard The idea of passion points--imprinting moments in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood--comes from my work with rock stars. Musical artists easily fall into the one-hit wonder pattern. They put out a song that soars on the charts, release, perhaps, one more, then they disappear forever from the public eye, never to be seen--or heard--again. My goal was to give rock and r&b artists an enduring career. The first task was to do a four-hour session--or several--in which we went through the artist's life story from the very beginning on up to the present, searching for what I thought of in those days as the artist's soul--the source of personal passion, of the unseen self--that roared and danced in her music, her lyrics, and her stage performance. The performing and creating personality is often one the self of daily life doesn't know. The everyday self is the one that goes through the automatic rituals of "hello, how are you?" "fine, thank you, and how are you?" It has a full arsenal of clichés with which to deal with most situations that involve what TS Eliot calls preparing "a face to meet the faces that we meet." (Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959, covers this aspect of self pretty thoroughly.) But another self reveals its existence in lyrics, music, and performance. It is often a separate personality, an interior god of sorts, a self that reveals its form only in ecstatic moments--when a piece of music "writes itself" or when in the throes of a stage performance the singer "loses himself" and is caught up in a transcendent experience. I went through the story of an artist's life with him hunting for the moments in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood that had sealed themselves into the web of emotion that made the hidden god of creativity and of ecstasy. If I could find the passion points, I could find the hidden self. I then introduced that self of ecstasy to the everyday self, the self of hellos and how are yous. From the moment of discovery on, I did everything in my power to keep that artist in touch with the hidden self. I also told him or her that he owed his audience not just his songs and his performances, but his life. By revealing his life and articulating his passions he could reveal others to themselves, he could validate them in their moments of madness or confusion, he could bring order and out of the chaos of his listeners' emotions. Give your audience just a glimpse of your emotional self, and you become a one hit wonder. Come to know that self and reveal it to your audience year after year-through its changes and growth--and you become an icon, a figure who helps interpret others to themselves, takes others out of themselves, and validates feelings multitudes have had but have been afraid are insane. What is insane? Feelings that have no social acceptance, no words to describe them, no validation of an other, no mirror of recognition in others' eyes or words. If an artist gives this validation and transcendence to others, he saves their souls. He makes what seemed lunatic sane. He yanks others out of their moments of trouble and gives them instants of joy. Give your emotional self to others and they will hold you in their heart for a lifetime. Al Cheyne suggests a relationship between Descartes' living out of his passionate self--the self of an imprinting moment--and the revelations of saints. I agree with him. The inner gods are easily described in secular terms. They can be described and explained via psychology, evolutionary theory, sociology, and the other tools with which we work in science. They can also be described in the parallel languages-the isomorphic metaphors--of poetry and religion. But the trick is more than just understanding where the inner gods come from (passion points), it is to invoke them. The real goal is to make those gods come alive, to make them thrive, and to help others achieve their own revelations and mystic ecstasies. However one must
do this while suppressing one of the most potent inner gods of all-the
god of violence, hatred, and war. One must unleash the gods of wonder,
of light in darkness, and of creativity. Howard mdm: in the study of mythic story forms, there is the notion of a "special world." typically, a would-be hero, like luke skywalker, is lured into a mysterious milieu that allows for a complete break with his or her past. in luke's case--the world of the jedi knights. i'm wondering about the importance of the special world in shaping the rebel/outsider. hb: I've gotta think about that. Did I copy you last night on the further lengths to which I took the thoughts you'd stirred up--the bacterial and cosmic connections? To me, the special world is the realm of disconnected fragments floating in the zeitgeist. We outsiders have few real friends, and, in a way, few real parents. So there's a soup of others we've never met in our heads. And what do they implant in us? Attitudes, ideas, approaches to life. We put together the offerings and gifts of these fantasy families, these fantasy friends, mentors, and mindtribe members, and what do we get? If we're lucky, the future. The future embedded in our bones. Or, more precisely, the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the future imprinted in the synaptic connections, the whorls and neural whirwinds of our mind. Finding our soul, finding our fantasy fathers, brothers, lovers, sisters, and mentors in our real life, is our quest. If we find it, we can find a future for which the minds of others have hungered with a hunger that stays silent and merely gnaws, knowing no words, no fulfillment, or home. We outsider artists--scientists, painters, poets, preachers, or politicians--are culture makers. We tie the disconnected threads together and offer a completion to those who've rejected us, the insiders, those who succeed within the norms that defeat us. In a strange way, we transcend the old norms and point the way to the new. We break from our fathers then recreate them in new forms. But in Bloomean theory, most forms of transcendance take us into the mysteries of others, the emergent forms generated by those who with us or before us remake our culture. Mystic uplift takes us to the center point of the others who give the current culture reality. It feels like a nimbus of light, but it's a nimbus of collective attention that seizes us. When St. Theresa had her transports they were the ecstasy of being pierced, praised, and ignited by a lover, Christ. And that lover carried with him all the massed attention of Christendom. When the Germans participated in torchlight parades or watched the men who carried the flames, they too felt lifted far above the normal realm. They could merge in the glory of a whole more real than themselves--the overarching soul of the nation and its people, the volkgeist. Others and the center of attention come alive when we lift and soar above our selves and are carried by a force, a destiny, a power that dwarfs our normal lives. Outsiders seldom
experiencethe focused attention of tens of thousands in real life--at
least not in the beginning, in their first creative phase. Insiders
seldom do either, which is why they periodically long for a purpose
for which they'd gladly risk their lives. But performers feel massed
attention in reality, and their transports defy belief.
How does the mind choose which others to follow and which to not. Is it simply imprinting--a person saying or doing something at a moment when our psyche (and presumably our the neural mechanism of our brain) is open, seeking, and ripe? What does the conscious us have to do with it? Are we excuse makers for the implants of others working secretly within us? I know I'm a lifelong Democrat because my dad was. Most of my friends on the New Left are "progressives" because their parents where what a previous age called "pinkos". Who else has left tracks in my mind that I cannot and do not want to erase? My father again, who taught me when I was five that lying was taboo, that one must have integrity, that one must even reek of it if that's what it takes to sustain it. My father who when two girls were attacked in the park across the street from my home when I was nine rushed to their defense and saved them despite the fact that he was just a little guy and one who never, ever fought, but would have literally sacrificed his life to do what's right. The authors of the first science book I opened in my living room at the age of ten...authors who spelled out an ethos of truth at any price, even death; who said, find the wonder in the everyday; question what others take for granted; when you pour milk into a glass, watch what others don't seem to see--the pattern in the splash, the light and its patterns in the glass. Those authors made Galileo, someone I could not identify with, a glassy icon whose influence I follow despite the fact that he has somehow denied me a sense of his emotions, his humanity. Isaac Asimov, George Gamow, and Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, who began my education at 12. Albert Einstein--who was someone utterly open to me as a human being when I was thirteen and who through his books opened his heart to me. He also ordered me never to write in jargon. A true genius, he said, is not the man who is able to mouth incomprehensibilities. He's the man able to make the incomprehensible clear and even mouthwatering to someone of normal intelligence with just a high school education. Yes, Einstein got me because like me he was so busy with his curiosities that he often walked out of the house in his pajamas, forgetting to put on his clothes before heading off to his office at Princeton to lead a perfectly normal day. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, who provided me with the arguments I needed to tear down religion when I discovered I was an atheist at the age of thirteen. My tribal forefathers, the writers of the Bible--a book whose bloody nature disturbed me tremendously, but whose appeal to others fascinated me. Isaiah, whose example
inspired me. William James, who gave me the seething, wonderful passions
of mysticism, served up on silver tray of science. Louis Untermeyer,
whose anthologies of poetry helped me see that religion expressed instincts
and emotions inside of us--gods and demons in our psyche--but expressed
these things with poetry. All these hit me at once and twisted into
a knot I can't forget when I was thirteen. Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl
and lifestyle (as portrayed in the pages of Time Magazine) bit deep
into me with recognition of a place for me when I was fifteen. Jack
Kerouac, whose adventures I tried to emulate. Henry Luce who shaped
my vision of Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac. The authors who gave me zen
Buddhism, the filmmakers, novelists, and heaps of musicians who gave
me Yoruban trance ritual when I was fifteen. Edward Weston--the photographer---whose
pictures taught me now to see what science preached so powerfully--the
patterns that made the mundane seem surreal, surprising, fresh, muscular,
soft, seductive, unrecognizable, but to the emotions instant sources
of arousal. (for good Weston's, see http://www.edward-weston.com/prints_ew.html)
TS Eliot and Edna St Vincent Millay, whose poems hit me hard and stayed
with me as guides when I was sixteen. Nietzsche and Aristotle, whose
books joined that mix almost immediately. Phil Fish, a biochemist, who
was assigned to me as a mentor when I worked in a cancer research laboratory
at the age of sixteen. Phil had spent three years trying to synthesize
one molecule--and he clearly had another two years to go. With Nietzsche
in my veins, I felt I didn't want to be a mole digging all my life at
one dark hole, but wanted to soar like Zarathustra's eagle over the
mountaintops and see, not just one dot, but the entire cosmos of science
spreading out beneath me. These were my passion points--my moments of
imprinting. Why? Because I will never part from their lessons, their
commandments. Never. That is what my will says. My will holds me to
my masters and I willingly give myself over every day to the small tribe
of them. All dead men and women. Most of them people I never met. They
are the spirits of my intellectual and emotional ancestors inside me.
And if I am ever untrue to them, I will tear the very fabric of my self.
So what is me and what is will? It's them. It's others. But, oh, how
deeply, seethingly, it is me! Howard Howard, each person can find more power and drive my discovering her/his own creation myth. Yours includes the inspirational story of your modestly-sized father protecting innocent person from evil doers - experience that becomes a passion point for you, and turns to be a howard bloom creation myth. the myth becomes part of your image of who you are, a fearless person unconcerend with his own safety. This might be worth a chapter in the book - discovering your own family myths that inspire you. Hummm???? Lynn Johnson 1/27/02 "A dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unobtainable, but this moment is directly connected to those childhood imagings. For anyone who is on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage, it is possible. Thank you." ~~ Russell Crowe, "Best Actor" Oscar Acceptance Speech, March 25, 2001, sounding ominously like Howard Bloom. _______________________________ _______________________________ When the person
years later gets handed an Oscar, those moments of first emotional flight
to that goal get recalled: much as when we arrive somewhere, we briefly
recall the moment of departure when we first set off. hb: alas, when
the moment of fulfillment comes, the oxcar is handed over, and the star
goes home, that's when the real trouble begins. depression...big time
depression over having filled a life's goal and having no goals left.
but goal deprivation and structure deprivation are subjects for another
time. Howard >In the lengthy interviews--some taking as long as three
days--I did with >the stars, something else seemd to raise its head--there
were specific >experiences at the age of roughly five, twelve, thirteen,
and fifteen or >so, that had made an indelible mark--fixing the passion
that would drive >these people for the rest of their lives. Is there
research on human >imprinting that would support this concept? Any
ideas on its validity >or lack thereof? -- Susan Carey, one of the leading experts on human concept development, dropped over with David Berreby a few weeks ago. My ten-year-old newly adopted son Walter the Wonder dropped in a short time after the two of them arrived. The presence of this august assemblage triggered the following thoughts about concept formation and lifelong emotional orientation. Our concepts are usually based on metaphors. Those metaphors frequently come from the things with which we've grown up. I grew up with Tinkertoys, so Tinkertoy metaphors spring easily to my mind. My guess is that they came easily to the minds of Watson and Crick too, since the DNA spiral is often depicted in Tinkertoy terms. (Tinkertoys were introduced at the American Trade Fair in New York in 1913, fifteen years before Watson was born. ) My guess is that metaphors about what we call the "mechanism" behind things come from processes we've thrown ourselves into with both our motor and visual neurons-knots we've tied, machines we've run, games we've played, and pebbles we've thrown into ponds so we could watch the ripples spread. Other metaphors come from things we've seen, seeds growing, plants flowering, sunrises and sunsets, stars in the night sky. And yet others come from our social interactions, the structures of authority in society, and our basic instincts to gather, to bond, to make appeasement gestures to those above us and dominance gestures to those we feel are inferiors. Muscular metaphors help us grasp things like the four forces-gravity, electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, etc. Game metaphors are popular in evolutionary psychology, where Prisoners' Dilemma has become an intellectual addiction. Mechanical metaphors appear when we liken brainwork to the functioning of a computer, the operation of a solar system to clockwork, or the generation of a universe to the workings of a blind watchmaker. Walter has just pointed out that we should add an additional category of metaphor-one that describes a simile he invented today. Walter went to a tennis lesson. After it was over he was asked how it had gone. He answered that he had come in to the lesson like raw egg white and emerged from it like meringue. Had Walter ever seen an eggbeater whip egg whites and sugar until they crested in meringue peaks? No. When he was small, he'd eaten meringue and asked how it was made. The description had lodged in his brain-imprinted, so to speak. Something he had seen only in imagination came into play years later as a conceptual tool. This is a prime example of what Susan Carey calls "bootstrapping." A muscular vision conjured by mere spoken words-an abstraction based upon the application of a host of culinary and mechanical inventions-had become a device for expressing the essence of improvement in a whole new way. Talk about iterations based upon iterations and concept formation as iterative compression…oi vey. But I digress. A Digimon game is a palm-sized gizmo roughly the size of a squashed egg (egg metaphors runneth over today). Thanks to extraordinary microcomputing power, it has approximately 66 pixels with which it portrays over 80 different dramatis personae in at least eight different landscapes. But there is something decidedly alien about Digimon's fictional figures. They bear no likeness to creatures we've ever seen. The characters of Digimon and Pokemon games-250 of them, in Pokemon's case-are all represented by pictographs-Chinese characters, to be precise. Or so Walter tells me. John Skoyles and others have pointed to research indicating that a pictographic form of word-representation exercises different parts of the brain than are brought into play by the phonetic alphabet. This has been proposed as one of the reasons Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children do so much better than Western children at mathematics. The pictographic alphabet tugs at those parts of the brain-probably in the right hemisphere--that underlie both the understanding of imagery and of number concepts. Walter has learned to read Chinese pictographs-tiny symbols so esoteric to an older generation that Susan Carey and I could not tell the difference between one character and another (even though I've been making the effort sporadically for over a month). According to an article I've placed below, by obsessing on Digimon, Walter has also learned a game that stresses cooperation and nurturing, not just the mindless destruction of Western video games. A child is born with twice the number of neurons that he or she needs. Those that are called into vigorous play by his or her culture are preserved and given the privilege of making multitudinous synaptic connections, the favorite form of influence in the microworld of the brain. Those neurons that the culture and/or home life don't exercise simply die away. With this form of surgery, culture shapes key aspects of the brain. This shaping may well account for much of the imprinting that determines our perceptual approaches and our deepest passions later in life. Walter is growing up in a world of Japanese and Chinese pictograms, and is engaged in forms of strategy far different from the brawn-conquers-all approach in Arnold Schwarzenegger films or the strictly-rational-brain-is-the-way-to-go promoted in Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. As a consequence, when Walter grows up, his range of metaphors, their character and their quality, are likely to be far different than ours. His understandings and his contributions may well produce paradigms even us would-be paradigm-shifters in this group cannot conceive. Even his brain will be different than ours have come to be. What a brave and wondrous thing it would be to see things through his eyes-through his eyes now and through them when they've got 50 years of 21st Century adventure frothing with inspiration above their optic nerves. A final word on
concept formation from Gerard Manley Hopkins (well, more or less on
concept formation, but definitely on seeing things anew), then onto
the footnotes giving the data I've used to whip this harangue together: 13. Pied Beauty GLORY be to God
for dappled things- And áll
trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. Nintendo. Pokemon World FAQ. http://www.pokemon.com/faq/faq_02a.html, downloaded 6/14/01. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1175/2_33/59643421/print.jhtml, downloaded 6/13/01 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to article page To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from FindArticles.com, located at http://www.findarticles.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Psychology Today March, 2000 Pokemon Craze Challenges Docs.(Brief Article) Author/s: Rebecca Segall Every hour, somewhere in America, child mourns the loss of her Pokemon collection to a bully. The obsession with Pokemon trading cards--and the violent lengths to which kids will go to get them--is puzzling. Some overwhelmed school officials have banned the cards altogether. In response, psychologists are trying to unravel the mysteries of this Japanese-born frenzy and are beginning to recognize its appeal. It's all in the numbers, says child psychologist Christine Wekerle, Ph.D., referring to the way kids memorize the names, spellings and shared characteristics of the 151 characters. "This is where kids are at--they like ordering, computing and categorizing, so the whole Pokemon fantasy is cognitively appealing." It's also developmentally appealing. Yuka Nakajima, C.S.W., a New York-based children's social worker who uses Pokemon cards and lingo to communicate with her small clients, says Nintendo's Game Boy Pokemon video game--which inspired the card-trading mania--plays on human instincts. "After kids come up with a strategy to catch a Pokemon, they then have to train and nurture it as it evolves," she says. There are few video games which exploit this profound, emotional aspect of human psychology, experts say. In this way, Pokemon is a uniquely positive video game. As described on the Tokyo-based Niki Hospital Web site, edited by psychiatrists: "The Pokemon game teaches beneficially negotiations as kids fight toward common goals and try to beat the house." But Nintendo can only take indirect credit for the psychological components of the game. "The maker fashioned it from his own creative childhood thoughts," says Perrin Kaplan of Nintendo. Not from his college psychology classes. ------------------------------------------------------- http://www.hasbro.com/consumer/history/tinkertoy.htm, downloaded 6/13/01 Tinkertoy® Construction Sets History Spokes, spools, rods and reels . . . Playskool's Tinkertoy® Construction Sets, the tools of America's tinkerers are 85 years old! America's original construction toy and the all-time favorite among kids of all ages celebrated it 80th birthday in 1993. Tinkertoy® Construction Sets are one of the truly classic toys of all time. They have driven the imaginations of children for generations, proving that fun and stimulating toys never lose their appeal. The possibilities for construction play are endless with Tinkertoy® Construction Sets. In 1992, to freshen up in preparation for the big 80 event, Playskool unveiled a major redesign to this classic toy of motion and construction. The new, all-plastic Tinkertoy® sets feature brightly-colored, easy-to-assemble parts that allow kids to build bigger structures than ever before. Each set includes instructions to create vehicles that really roll, tall towers and even free moving Ferris Wheels. Tinkertoy® Construction Sets are the invention of Charles Pajeau, a stonemason from Evanston, Illinois who established The Toy Tinkers company. Inspired by watching children play with pencils, sticks and empty spools of thread, Pajeau developed several basic wooden parts which children could assemble in a variety of three dimensional abstract ways. Nearly one million sets were sold in the production years following its introduction at the 1913 American Toy Fair in New York. Playskool acquired the Tinkertoy® line from Child Guidance in 1985. the following will give an idea of the personalities and nuances of emotion used in Digimon: "Simply Sincerity."
(webpage devoted to one Digimon character, created by a fan in the Christmas
Islands-which should give some idea of the global nature of the Digimon
characters' appeal) "We act as
though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when
all that we Name: Mimi Tachikawa Mimi is one of
the younger digidestined. Used to being spoiled and taking things easy,
she Along with the
other children, Mimi was somehow transported into the digital world,
given a Mimi, largely due
to her immaturity, is one of the less appeciated characters in Digimon, Oh what pains we
humans undergo to knit with others, to connect as modules in a larger
intellect than our own--the combined IQ of the group, the ability of
our group, in turn, to have a self, a soul, an identity that helps it
fit with other groups, be deemed indispensable, and to glisten with
enough difference to get attention and seem special, even desirable,
to others. Groups within groups within groups. We are crowds of 100
trillion cells fitting into groups of fives or tens or billions of other
beings. Yet in it all this orchestrated mob of zillions there's a role
for self. Self is one of the orchestrators. It's a maker of social cell
adhesion. ac: For Peirce, what is specifically human about human consciousness
is just that which is shared. For Peirce the self was a sign and as
such took its meaning from its place in a network of signs. The Jamesian
notion of the isolated self Peirce took to be crude and self-defeating
notion. To be a self is to be a member of, and play a role in, a community.
If there are parts of the self that are not communicable or play no
role in the community they are superfluous and temporary. In this sense,
Peirce seems to me to be at the opposite pole of the romanticism. hb:
yes and no, not when you consider that a romantic tends to his personal,
emotional fires until they blaze. A romantic becomes inebriated by the
burst of his internal passion's flames. But the sparks from which these
innner fires rise are the passion points, the imprints left by humans
whose examples shaped us powerfully as we grew. Our obsessions are traces
of others we once felt with full emotion. Even the animal instincts
we rouse in our romantic phase are traces of others left not merely
in our brain but in the genome from which the brain is formed. ac: Peirce
also argued that our sense of our own personality is essentially the
same as our sense of the other's personality. In the language of later
schools of thought, he is saying we have no privileged access to ourselves.
The positive corollary of this is that, far from being isolated from
others, we can have greater insights into their personalities they themselves
have. hb: the essence of the extrasomatic extensions theory of self--that
we often need to go to others to complete the passage of data from the
limbic system to the frontal cortex merely inches away. ac: Peirce's
writing on the self are scattered through his writings, mainly on semiotics,
but have been collected together in a book by Vincent Colapietro: Peirce's
approach to the self, 1989, SUNY. hb: sounds very useful. Many thanks,
Al. OK, the results on Bill's test are in, thanks to a book by Peter Hobson and the reviews now popping up. In autism, males outnumber females four to one. Below, along with my original bizarre thoughts on grid versus group, males and females, structure deprivation, and autism, is a roundup of articles on Hobson's book. Hobson and I part
company when he proposes that the ability to handle language and symbols
is based on our ability to feel the emotions in another human's face.
But I'm all for his notion that the social attachments we make in our
first eighteen months-and the peculiar form they take--may determine
the nature of our passion points, our emotional imprintings, the sources
of our creativity. Howard Full text http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns23515 Cradle of Thought Peter Hobson Hardcover - 304 pages (22 February, 2002) Macmillan; ISBN: 0333766334 AMAZON - UK (20% Discount) http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0333766334/humannaturecom/ Reviews The Sunday Telegraph, March 24 2002 ... a charming and gentle book... Robert Hanks , The Daily Telegraph Admirably clear, broadly persuasive .packed with appealing anecdotes about the loveable things kids do and say Steven Rose, Sunday Times Any parent reading his account will recognise that it makes sense Simon Baron-Cohen, Nature An outstanding scholar and passionate about his subject Jeremy Holmes, The Royal College of Psychiatrists A consummate story-teller. This book rates with the very best of popular scientific writing Synopsis A brilliant new book about the origins of thinking. In it, Peter Hobson, a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and the University of London, examines how thought develops in infants, on the subsequent differences in the quality of thinking between individuals and what this suggests about the place of thought in the history of evolution. At its heart is a radical new theory which tackles head-on the ideas of people like Stephen Pinker. Hobson firmly refutes the notion that thinking is turned on by biologically per-determined 'modules' in the brain, but that it arises from the nature and quality of the relationship between parent and child in the first eighteen months of life. Drawing on twenty years of clinical experience, on case histories and experimental and clinical research, this will be a controversial book not only in scientific circles, but also in its contribution to the wider parenting, IQ and nature/nurture debates. Accessible, authoritative and extremely readable, this is a major work of popular science. From the Inside Flap Imaginative and creative thought is what distinguishes humans from animals. It is what defines us as Homo Sapiens. What it means to have thoughts, and what gives us the remarkable capacity to think, have been subjects of debate for centuries. In The Cradle of Thought Peter Hobson presents a new and provocative theory about the nature and origins of uniquely human thinking. A prevailing opinion on the acquisition of thought and language is that babies are born with pre-programmed modules in the brain. But this is too narrow and too simplistic an explanation. Professor Hobson's radical view is that what gives us the capacity to think is the quality of a baby's exchanges with other people over the first eighteen months of life. As part and parcel of an intellectual revolution in the second year, the child achieves new insight into the minds of itself and others. Human thought, language, and self-awareness are developed in the cradle of emotional engagement between infant and caregiver; social contact has vital significance for mental development. Professor Hobson draws on twenty years of clinical experience and academic research as a developmental psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He follows the thread of mental development over the first eighteen months of a baby's life both to describe and to explain the emergence of thinking; he shares startling insights into mental development gained from his studies of autism; and he shows how from infancy to adulthood, disturbances of thinking may be rooted in troubled early relationships. Finally, he pinpoints tiny but momentous changes in the social relations of pre-human primates from which human thought sprang. In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Peter Hobson shows how very early engagement with others fosters the child's growth out of the cradle of infancy and into the realm of human thought and culture. About the Author Peter Hobson is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College, London. He works clinically as a psychotherapist with adults as well as being the Director of the Unit for the Study of Lifespan Development. He is author of many original research publications and has written one previous book, Autism and the Development of Mind. ________ Retrieved July 11, 2002, from the World Wide Web http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4380353,00.html Love is a many-moleculed thing Studies of the brain from Joseph Ledoux and Peter Hobson promote competing visions of nerve cell signals or social interaction as the key to our behaviour, but are they missing the point? Lewis Wolpert Sunday March 24, 2002 The Observer Synaptic Self Jospeh Ledoux Viking £20, pp406 The Cradle of Thought Peter Hobson Macmillan £20, pp307 The brain is a wonderful territory for scientific exploration but those who study it are only a little way in from the frontier. There is an enormous area of unexplored territory. To be blunt, there is a great deal that we don't understand about the way it works. The bottom line of Joseph Ledoux's Synaptic Self is that we are our synapses. Synapses are the tiny gaps between nerve cells across which chemical signals pass from one nerve cell to the next. These can stimulate or inhibit the nerve cell from firing and it is the combined influence of many inputs that determine if it does fire. But the nerve cell is just one of billions - there are a thousand million synapses in a piece of brain the size of a grain of sand - that connect in complex circuits. How these circuits behave determines how we feel, think and behave, and this is ultimately determined by what is happening at the synapses. Ledoux describes the molecular bases of these processes in often rather technical detail; and the description of brain development is unfortunately seriously flawed. Much attention is given to the hippocampus which plays such a key role in many brain functions, particularly memory, and the amygdala, which is at the heart of emotion. Ledoux considers the relation between what he calls the mental trilogy - cognition, emotion, motivation - and this brings into play an investigation into memory, both that which is readily accessible, and that which is not. He is at his best on emotion, the subject of his excellent book The Emotional Brain, and his studies on fear using animal models are of particular importance. He also describes the new research that may be unlocking the molecular basis of love by studying voles - one of the few monogamous mammals. The chapter on synaptic sickness is also excellent and he rightly disparages what he calls the soup model which sees mental illness as due to chemical imbalances. Instead he emphasises circuits, like those involving the amygdala, which play a key role in depression. But he does not provide any explanation for that very common and disturbing feature of depression, somatisation, which results in unpleasant physical symptoms. Peter Hobson is a psychoanalyst and it is to his credit that the special verbiage of that profession does not pervade his very clear writing in The Cradle of Thought. His aim is to understand the mental life of babies in order to understand how we think - including being creative and, most important, being able to interact in a social manner. In order to do this he devoted much attention to where the process of mental development is abnormal, and thus focuses on autism. His studies lead him to the view that it is the infant's emotional engagement with other people, particularly the mother, that is most important for normal development and he dismisses the importance of the genes in controlling how the brain develops and so functions during childhood. The most characteristic feature of autism is the child's lack of a theory of other people's minds. The classic test for this involves putting a sweet in a red box in front of John and Mary and then sending Mary out of the room. The sweet is moved to the blue box and John is asked where Mary will look for it when she returns. If John is autistic he will say Mary will look in the blue box as he cannot understand what Mary would really think. Such children have severe social behaviour difficulties. Hobson sees the relation with the mother as fundamental and that the development of thinking is influenced by the caregiver's emotional relations with the infant. There is the implication that the failure to properly relate is the cause of autism and the tendency towards autism in blind children is used as support for this view. The evidence from those who work in this area, however, is that the cause of autism is not to be blamed on the failure of the mother and that genetic factors are important; three-quarters of autism sufferers have mild to severe mental retardation, and there is evidence for brain abnormalities. A different view from Hobson's is that because many suffering from autism have special skills in, for example, maths and music, their mode of thought is biased towards local rather than social thinking. The cause of autism remains unknown as does the reason why many more boys are autistic than girls. While covering many aspects of the brain both authors miss what to me are essential features. First, the only function of the brain from an evolutionary point of view is to control movement and so interaction with the environment. That is why plants do not have brains. Second, what makes us different from all animals is that we have causal beliefs and this is what enabled humans to make complex tools - it is technology that has driven human evolution, not social interaction. Retrieved July 11, 2002, from the World Wide Web http://ehostvgw8.epnet.com/ehost.asp?key=204.179.122.140_8000_1052992219&site=ehost&return=n&custid=nypl&IP=yes&profile=web&defaultdb=aph Result 1 of 4 [Go To Full Text] [Tips] Title: Murdering to dissect. Subject(s): CRADLE of Thought, The (Book); HOBSON, Peter; AUTISM -- Book reviews; NON-fiction -- Book reviews; BOOKS -- Reviews Source: New Statesman, 3/25/2002, Vol. 131 Issue 4580, p50, 2p, 1c Author(s): Skidelsky, Edward; Cowley, Jason Abstract: Reviews the book 'The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking,' by Peter Hobson. AN: 6404511 ISSN: 1364-7431 Full Text Word Count: 1434 Database: Academic Search Premier Print: Click here to mark for print. View Item: Full Page Image [Go To Citation] Section: books MURDERING TO DISSECT For all the advances of science, we are no closer to understanding the essential mystery of the self. But perhaps the strange world of autism offers clues. THE CRADLE OF THOUGHT: EXPLORING THE ORIGINS OF THINKING Peter Hobson Macmillan, 296pp, £20 Discounts at www.newstatesman.co.uk Of all the sciences, psychology promises most but delivers least. Its aspiration is the oldest and most basic of all; it is the aspiration, as the Delphic Oracle put it, to "know thyself". Yet how much progress has modern psychology made towards this goal? Yes, we know more about the processing of spatial information in the hippocampus than we did 50 years ago, and much else besides. But in knowing all this, do we really know any more about ourselves? Do we not still turn for self-knowledge to the old authorities, to novelists, philosophers and theologians? Or if we turn to psychologists, it is to those whose status within the discipline is, for that very reason, suspect. It seems that psychology, in becoming an exact science, has lost sight of its central, defining goal. It can no longer fulfil the Oracle's mandate. Peter Hobson is well aware of these paradoxes. He has unusually broad experience for an academic psychologist; he is a practising psychotherapist and is well read in philosophy and poetry. His aim is to restore psychology to the status of a humane discipline; he wants to study the whole person and not just disjointed faculties. He quotes Wordsworth's famous lines about our "meddling intellect" that "misshapes the beauteous forms of things" and "murders to dissect". All this is very much in the old tradition of German romantic psychology, which arose in opposition to the associationist psychology of Locke, Hobbes and Hume. It insisted that our experiences cannot be broken down into collections of sense data, but always constitute, even at the most primitive level, a total "Gestalt", or form. This applies in particular to our experiences of other people. We do not have to infer that other people have thoughts and feelings; we just see that they do. A baby's first experiences are not of meaningless sounds and patches of colour, but of soothing voices and friendly faces. The human world is not built up out of non-human elements; it is there right from the beginning. But attractive as it is, this theory has always found it hard to win scientific credibility. Science, as Max Planck put it, tries to measure all things measurable and to render all unmeasurable things measurable. But how can one render a happy face measurable? There seems to be no straightforward correlation between changes on the physical level and changes on the psychic level. A slight alteration of the eyebrows, and the happy face has become a sarcastic face. Or has it? It all depends on your interpretation. Many psychologists have concluded that it is best to ignore emotions and other inner states altogether, and to concentrate purely on measurable behaviour. This conclusion is methodologically unimpeachable, yet it deprives psychology of its distinctive subject matter -- the psyche. Everything that is human about the human world seems to slip through the net of scientific method. Hobson is aware of the dilemma, although he is far from resolving it. Hobson pursues what it is to be human by investigating a group of people who are in many ways distinctly unhuman -- autistics. Autistics are not always retarded; they may be exceptionally intelligent. Their specific problem is understanding other human beings. It is only with great difficulty that they learn to recognise human beings as human beings, distinct from mere things. "I really didn't know there were people until I was seven years old," said a young autistic adult. "I then suddenly realised there were people. But not like you do. I still have to remind myself that there are people." Autistics, in other words, have to "work out" that there are other people. This is what Descartes and many other philosophers following him thought that we all do. But the very strangeness of autistics demonstrates that this is not how most of us relate to others. It illuminates, by contrast, how our knowledge of other minds is direct, not inferential. Hobson quotes Wittgenstein: "My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul." Autistics, you might say, are of the opinion that other people have souls. To demonstrate this, Hobson devised an experiment that could almost have been inspired by a remark of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein noticed that it is very hard to detect the expression of a face drawn upside down, even if it is accurate in all its physical details. Expression, in other words, is not simply a summation of physical details; it is a total "Gestalt". Hobson asked two groups of children, one autistic and one non-autistic, to sort upside-down faces according to their expression. The autistic group performed much better. This is because, Hobson concludes, "the 'emotions' were no longer recognisable as emotions when the faces were presented upside down. Effectively, the task was reduced to one of pattern or feature recognition." The exercise having thus been rendered meaningless from an emotional point of view, the autistics had the upper hand. The experiment is a beautiful demonstration of how philosophy and experimental psychology can corroborate one another. However, Hobson's ambitions go beyond the rather easy demonstration that autistics have difficulty understanding other people. He wants to show that this difficulty hampers their understanding of symbolism. Autistic children, he notes, do not engage in symbolic play like normal children. They will not spontaneously pick up a matchbox and pretend it is a car; they instead spend their time in meaningless, mechanical rituals, such as spinning a wheel. Hobson offers an interesting explanation for this. To use symbolism is to treat one thing as another thing. Our ability to do this is based on our capacity to step outside our minds, to see things from another person's point of view. From about the age of 12 months, normal infants can "shift perspectives" in this way. They can identify their mother's attitude and incorporate it into their own attitude. This is precisely what children with autism cannot do. Hobson argues that this basic human capacity for empathy prepares the ground for language and all other specialised forms of symbolism. "One can use symbols only if one has the kind of emotional life that connects one with the world and others." Emotion is, as the title of the book suggests, "the cradle of thought". Hobson's target is the prevailing view that language is governed by a specific "module" or "programme" in the brain. First suggested by Noam Chomsky, this theory has had a powerful influence. It is associated with a picture of the mind as divided into discrete faculties, each controlling a separate aspect of thought or behaviour. These various faculties can then, in theory, be modelled using computers. All this is anathema to Hobson's romantic holism; it is, in Wordsworth's phrase, murdering to dissect. Hobson's underlying ambition is to demonstrate that language is not governed by a specific module in the brain, but grows out of a general symbolic competence rooted in our ability to form relationships with people. It is the product of nurture, not nature. All this has a nice, New Age feel to it. One wants it to be true. But it is contradicted by one simple fact that Hobson himself mentions in passing without, astonishingly, noticing that it refutes his theory. Many autistic children actually do learn to speak. Many others don't, but that doesn't matter. Were Hobson's theory true, it would be impossible for any autistic child to speak, because no autistic child has the kind of emotional life that is, in Hobson's view, a precondition for the use of symbolism. That autism does not preclude speech is in fact a powerful point in favour of the very theory Hobson is trying to refute. If language can remain relatively unaffected by a more general impairment in emotional and symbolic competence, this strongly suggests that it is governed by a discrete module. Some autistic children can even, as is well known, perform remarkable feats of computation. All this suggests that emotional and intellectual ability form a less cosy unity than Hobson wishes us to believe. The mystery of other people: Dustin Hoffman played an autistic man alongside Tom Cruise in Rain Man ~~~~~~~~ By Edward Skidelsky Edited by Jason Cowley Edward Skidelsky is a lead reviewer for the NS Copyright of New Statesman is the property of New Statesman Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: New Statesman, 3/25/2002, http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2002/05/03/1019441427714.htm
smh.com=sydney morning herald [SMH Home | Text-only index] The Cradle
of Thought Date: May 4 2002 Reviewed by Charles Fernyhough THE CRADLE
OF THOUGHT By Peter Hobson Macmillan, 356pp, $66 For those of us nostalgic
for the nature/nurture debate, these are lean times indeed. Where we
used to have arguments about whether minds are born or made, we now
have evolutionary psychology: the doctrine that our minds work the way
they do because nothing, not even thought, can escape the pressures
of natural selection. We have genes for this and genes for that: schizophrenia,
sexual orientation, even grammar. It has become rather unfashionable
to suggest that the way we end up, psychologically, depends at least
in part on what happens to us. There was a baby, but it was thrown out
with the bathwater. In this important and timely book, Peter Hobson
sets out to rescue this baby. His central thesis is that thinking develops
through an individual's interactions with other people. For example,
he looks at the vexed question of how children come to understand other
people's minds. Drawing on an impressive mix of psychological experiment,
psychiatric case study and philosophy, he considers how the workings
of our minds are directly perceptible through our expressions and behaviours.
As Wittgenstein argued, we can see the emotion behind a facial expression,
just as we can see the fear or surprise in another person's bodily behaviour.
We can see minds, because we can respond to people. And we can respond
to people because we are biologically equipped to do so. At least, most
of us are. In order to explain how minds work out right, you could do
worse than look at how minds go wrong. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,
as well as an experimental psychologist, Hobson is able to combine ingenious
experimentation with careful clinical observation. This versatility
is most striking when he considers the syndrome of childhood autism.
Sufferers of autism have profound difficulties in understanding other
minds. Rather than seeing this as a failure in the switching-on of some
innate mental module, Hobson argues that it is a result of such individuals'
inability to engage with other people from the earliest days of life.
Hobson is one of the world's foremost authorities on autism, and his
fascination with his subject can sometimes threaten to overbalance the
book. As he admits, we do not yet know enough about autism to be certain
of its significance for normal development. This can lead to an occasional
sense that the author is overplaying his hand, especially when the reader
is trying to negotiate a mass of new experimental detail. Another problem
lies in the vagueness of Hobson's term "thinking". Psychologists
try to understand many different varieties of thought, some primarily
verbal, some visual, which will presumably be variously influenced by
different kinds of experience. In attempting to distil his rich mixture
for a general audience, Hobson is, perhaps not surprisingly, unable
to do full justice to this richness. Of course, explaining the origins
of human thought is no mean task, and it is a measure of the success
of this book that the reader is pushed to want more answers to more
questions. We are in rare company here. Hobson's intelligence, elegance
of expression and wide-ranging learning have given birth to a body of
work that is nothing less than a vision of how we come to be what we
are. Above all, this is a book about feelings: the feelings that underpin
our understanding. The author's humanity shines through, and leaves
us with a satisfying sense that science and emotion don't have to be
strangers to each other. Charles Fernyhough is a novelist and developmental
psychologist. In a message dated 97?12?04 00:03:43 EST, StefT writes: << In a message
dated 97?12?03 03:45:54 EST, HowlBloom writes: << Several books
have shown how even the liberated slaves of the south clung to their
plantations after the Civil War and attempted to maintain the vestiges
of their old way of life, often going to work as paid employees of their
old owners. >> The same thing happens when people who have raised
injured or orphaned animals or birds attempt to "let them go back
to the wild." Training and/or a lengthy period of transition may
be required to work it out. This tends to be true even if the animal
never adjusted well to captivity. >> Ralph Holloway to
IPP 12/6/97 < Here is where I have trouble . You would think from
this discussion that liberated slaves simply had a range of good economic
choices, but because of ethological attachments, decided to stick with
the old ways. I imagine that there were liberated slaves who knew damn
well that there were no other opportunities "out there" but
to continue with their old lives, with wages or not. >>
jb: But societies generally self-deceive only upwards. A seeming exception may be the "blame America first" model now so fashionable in Western academia post-Vietnam. Do you know of any historical precedents for the scope of this phenomenon? Or historical precedent for the degree to which we idealize victimhood? I don't. Seems like a real anomaly. Healthy self-scrutiny comes to mind, but the "blame America first" mentality goes way beyond that, embracing at many levels what Samuel P Huntington calls "cultural suicide." I suspect that it's the same collective idealization as always, with content having shifted from the all-powerful and all-just heroes of post-WWII, to an equally exaggerated image of social beneficence. We're gradually discovering that we were and still are a nation built of real people made of clay who have done and still do some really nasty things -- like all real people -- and it's not acceptable to simply be real. ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom Subject: Re: ancestor worship A very important point, Lor. There are apparently hooks and eyelets to the presumably instinctual patterns that allow us to pass information from one generation to the next and so on down a chain that stretches through the centuries. We validate what we do by referring to ancestors--even in science, where we use the names of Darwin, Hubble, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, and Bohr to bolster our own assertions constantly. We celebrate holidays that remind us of the birth of Christ, the birth of George Washington, the Revolutionary War and what it stood for, and many others. Those are the eyelettes, the parts of us that need to drink the ancestors in. Then there are the hooks--our need for immortality. The need that drove Achilles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon to gain a fame that would live as long as men told fables of great warriors. The need for immortality that motivates poets, writers, filmmakers, theorists, and research scientists. These are the hooks that we extend, hoping that the eyelets of future generations will snag them. The instincts that have made human society a new form of long-term memory storage and compression device may be more than I at first thought. Howard In a message dated 6/7/2003 1:29:27 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Euterpel66 writes: I imagine that this question has taken on more urgency as you are approaching your 60th birthday this month. 60 years on the planet! Yikes! As we age, we gain insight, maturity, and a rich spiritual awakening which we'd gladly trade for money or sex any day...Ok, now for the serious stuff. The golden age and nostalgia all have to do with selective memory, don't they? But the question remains, "what is the golden age with which we are so nostalgic about?" Most often the good times of our selective memory have to do with what has plagued your understanding of it, The Self. From the time we are born to our mid twenties, the self undergoes individualism. During puberty, this psychic process, just like physical growth, takes a giant leap. It is confusing and scary, but more importantly, it is looking in a mirror and realizing that what I see is not a reflection of my parents, an illusion, or someone else, but it is ME. What could be more validating? Because this realization is so important, the imprints become the foundation of our life experiences. This imprint becomes our soul. In the novella, The Pearl, by John Steinbeck, Kino, the young fisherman, who finds the Pearl of the World, says, "the pearl has become my soul." What he means is that when he looks into the surface of the pearl, he sees himself. He sees his future, his ambitions, his dreams, his inner being. If he throws it away, as everyone who loves him wants him to do, he will lose his soul. Our pinnacle of individualization becomes our golden age. We revere it and look back to it because it validates who we have become. We do likewise with our ancestors because we know we will die. We don't want to die, but knowing we will, we don't want to be forgotten. If we create a Valhalla or heaven or even a return to this life, we won''t die. If we worship and revere our ancestors, and pass on this meme to our progenitors, we will not be forgotten. One of the things that my children expressed they feared most about Jeremy's death was that they would forget him. Something forgotten disappears as if it had never existed. This would mean a forgotten self never existed. If they forgot Jeremy, they themselves would eventually be forgotten, unacceptable to the self. Lor "...if men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be wise enough to be crows." ---Henry David
Thoreau In a message dated 6/6/2003 10:18:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
HowlBloom writes: The first is why we perpetually look back to a golden
age, why we harken back to the good old days with nostalgia and periodically
try to resurrect them, forgetting how filled with uncertainty and dread
they'd been when we'd run through them before. Lifeforms have been carrying
around ancestral knowledge ever since the days of our bacterial ancestors
3.5 billion years ago. But the wisdom of the ancestors has been compacted
in the genome. Bacterial colonies can work together to add new knowledge
to their genome by reengineering it when a crisis comes. Multicellular
animals have lost the ability to rapidly retool their genes. Humans
are the first multicellular creatures to cart around ancestral wisdom
in a quickly-upgradeable form-in symbols, stories, myths, holy books,
tv shows, and secular volumes that carry the air of high authority.
We know that human brains have developed strange genetic properties.
Brains carry language templates, for example. They carry Noam Chomsky's
and Stephen Pinker's deep structures…bio-rules of syntax and grammar.
I suspect that human brains also carry a batch of instincts that keep
ancestral wisdom alive in us. If we're Hopi Indians, we think about
our ancestors and the truths they gave us on a regular basis. Our ancestors
are in the stars, speaking to us every night. If we're Sioux Indians,
we commune with our ancestors too. But our ancestors, if I remember
Black Elk Speaks correctly, are in the clouds. The Chinese used to leave
food at the tombs of their ancestors. Roman aristocrats kept worship
rooms dedicated entirely to ancestral memorabilia, including masks that
kept alive the form of their ancestors' faces.
________ _______________________________ In a message dated 10/30/00 10:11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, pearcejwrites: The whole ms is
but a brief skirmish with the underlying idea that culture hb: hmmmm. I see it as our goal--yours, mine, and that of other culture makers--to bring spirit more and more to life via cultural means. Literate culture is only 6,000 years old and is still in its infancy. Back in the days of Homer and the oral beginnings of the Old Testament, many cultural scripts gave humans only a very crude way of grasping their inner lives . Today we have crept ahead in our vocabulary of self-understanding and have made spirit a bit more capable of manifesting itself in the material world. But there is a long, long way yet to go. If you and I don't pave the road--and invent the new scripts and other forms of expression humans need so badly--who will? Within my narrow perspective
science and religion are both cultural expressions and hb: I think the
two need to find more common ground. that's been my aim for the last
40 years or so--or one of them. the next scientific challenge is to
help us understand the gods and spirits humming and roaring inside of
us. So a new virtual reality--whether it's that of buildings and meals, of reading, writing and printing, or of cyberspace--can literally alter the genetics of humanity. How? By killing off folks in countries that haven't adapted to these newfangled upgrades of human capability, and favoring the survival of those who slip into the new virtual jetstreams with ease. That's what's happening these days with AIDS in Africa and floods in Bangla Desh and Mozambique. Disasters wipe out far more humans in lands without access to good transportation, communication, and the world wide web. the South Africans, Bangal Deshis, and Mozambiquans who remain relatively immune to these godawful acts of nature are those who HAVE mastered the internet, the airline ticket, and the ability to stay in a foreign hotel. how did they get the money for such things? whether they're plutocrats, kleptocrats, or entrepreneurs, they've mastered the modern tools of empowerment that make running a large scale societies social and political structure work--no matter how creakily. So in poor countries, natural selection wipes out those who do no have the privileges--and powers-- of modernity. Then there's the fact that virtually anything you buy forms part of the badge with which you announce to others whether you are like them or not. Similar macaques and chimps are happiest associating with others like them. However they have to find like-minded individuals within societies of between six and 150 individuals. You can advertise your identity to thousands simply walking in a mall. And on the intenet, you can find your way to like-minded humans as far away as Siberia, Saudi Arabia, or Singapore. jpm: So, instead of making public spaces for given interests companies can make public spaces to create interest, create consumption. The given: people like to be around each other -not they have a given interest. hb: here's a squib on the basic need to find others like us from global brain-- Experiments show that humans are drawn to those who share their attitudes on religion, politics, parents, children, drugs, music, ethnicity, and even clothes. They'll do everything from standing closer to their kindred-in-belief to marrying them in preference to someone other factors tag as a more likely candidate for matrimony. Beliefs are not just rallying flags, but symbols of emotionality. And emotion-flooded souls--like those filled with misery--love company. Social psychologist Stanley Schachter told one group of college girls they'd receive a painful shock. He explained to another how enjoyable the electrical surge would be. Then he gave the girls a choice of spending the time before their voltage-dose in a waiting room with a bunch of other young women about to undergo the same amps and watts or in a room by themselves. Twice as many of those who thought they were about to be tortured wanted to nestle in the comfort of a similar-fated gathering. We mammals are uncannily good at gravitating toward those who share our hidden joys and woes. This talent for emotional homing crops up among beavers, wolves, and even deer. In the rhesus monkeys Harry Harlow studied, it's particularly astonishing. When it came to mating, those who'd been raised in isolation fell for others also brought up in quarantine. Those who'd spent their youth in cages wooed other victims of captivity. Now here's the topper. Some of the monkeys had been lobectomized. Though none were handed pictures of each others' brains, those with similar neurosurgery managed to sniff each other out. So subtle were the differences detected by the simians that even researchers couldn't spot them without a careful study of medical and rearing charts. ------- Notes (more jpm and hb tossing ideas about with abandon after the notes. see below.) . Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: How and Why People Agree on Things. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984: 170; M. Claes, L. Poirier. "Characteristics and functions of friendship in adolescence." Psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent, 36:1, 1993: 289-308. Human sociobiologist Daniel Freedman observes that San Francisco kids of different ethnic backgrounds play together until they're ten, then separate and cluster with their own kind. (Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach. New York: The Free Press, 1979: 138.) . Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: How and Why People Agree on Things: 169-170. . G.W. Evans and R.B. Howard. "Personal Space." Psychological Bulletin, October, 1973: 334-344. . K.R. Truett, L.J. Eaves, J.M. Meyer, A.C. Heath, M.G. Martin. "Religion and education as mediators of attitudes: a multivariate analysis." Behavior Genetics, January 1992: 43-62; C.R. Cloninger, J. Rice, T. Reich. "Multifactorial inheritance with cultural transmission and assortative mating. II. a general model of combined polygenic and cultural inheritance." American Journal of Human Genetics, March 1979: 176-98; C.T. Nagoshi, R.C. Johnson, G.P. Danko. "Assortative mating for cultural identification as indicated by language use." Behavior Genetics, January 1990: 23-31; M.E. Procidano, L.H. Rogler. "Homogamous assortative mating among Puerto Rican families: intergenerational processes and the migration experience." Behavior Genetics. May 1989: 343-54. . Stanley Schachter. The Psychology of Affiliation. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1959; I. Sarnoff and P.G. Zimbardo. "Anxiety, fear, and social affiliation." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 61, 1962: 356-363. The Sarnoff study reveals the inner-judges of the previous chapter at work. Fear is the alarm which mobilizes individuals who feel they can control what's about to hit them. The fearful seek the company of those who share their terrors so they can confront their crises as a team. Anxiety, on the other hand, is the paralysis of those who feel that overcoming danger is impossible. While the fearful band together, the anxious isolate themselves, sending out repulsion signals which increase their loneliness. Internally, the anxious are torpedoed by such self-destruct mechanisms as chronic and corrosive stress hormones. These are the tools the utility sorter uses to deactivate an individual who no longer feels he or she is of social use. With ruthless efficiency, inner-judges impel a dysfunctional module to toss itself away. . Harry F. Harlow. Learning To Love. New York: Jason Aronson (publisher), 1974: 85. . Harry F. Harlow. Learning to Love: 142?3; S.J. Suomi, H.F. Harlow, J.K. Lewis. "Effect of bilateral frontal lobectomy on social preferences of rhesus monkeys." Journal of Comparative Physiology, March 1970: 448-53. jpm: Competition btw subcultures -you're talking about subjects here. You can't have one subject -there must be a subject & an other against which the subject defines itself. Like, skaters hate rollerbladers, vice versa. hb: good point. jpm: Heterosexual & homosexual are considered binary opposites -Freud called homosexuals "inverts." Let's talk definitions: to be simple: "Men do not wear earrings" -therefore, if an individual who appears to be a man wears an earring he must not be a man. Men do not have sex w/ men, etc. Surely, people associate sexuality & gender identification -so a man cannot be a man if he has sex w/ another man? Not likely. This shows the definitions we use are not black & white. Trivia: the term "heterosexual" was coined after "homosexual." hb: interesting. jpm: Before "homosexual" became an Other identity "heterosexual" was not an identity at all. hb: so language can resculpt our perception of reality. jpm: If two men had sex most people would have said, "Rich & Mich are gay"; they would have said "Rich did x, y & z to Mich & isn't that q." hb: actually, they would have said "Rich has committed sodomy with Mich." The church viewed this as a sinful offense against the deity. I believe during many periods, the penalty was death. jpm: My main criticism: companies create consumer identities to sell products. Public interest in x is incorrectly considered a given. hb: again, companies surf the unspoken waves of human need. they don't create that need. it behooves those of us intrigued by human nature to find ways of comprehending in our theories the unexpressed needs that seemingly useless goods address . jpm: Re: coffeklatch layout. I rarely talk to people in book stores. I think most Americans are unfriendly & don't like to talk. Coffeeklatch look a lot like restaurants. They'd be much more successful as social spaces if people believed they could meet people there --either thru architecture &/or through cultural convention. hb: how about through those marvelous japanese beepers that allow one kid marching through the crowds on a tokyo street to send a message to a strange boy she's just seen that she'd like to meet him? this is one device that can radically resculpt one of the most important realities in which we humans live--our emotions. isolation is devastatingly painful. these japanese gizmos are isolation breakers and relationship creators. jpm: Strangely, most people date, for instance, thru bars while drinking -the Western mind might be so against contact that it thinks a Dionysian loss of control is the only time appropriate to be friendly. hb: the bar and drinking rituals fill precisely that need to meet. that's what the tv show cheers was all about. here we are far more like wild dogs than like chimps. chimps eat and drink in isolation. pack dogs do it in groups. so do humans. jpm: I've also noticed people think friendly people are sketchy -especially not goodlooking men -people are scared these days -& often not w/o reason. jpm: Re: awakening other's creativity. A hard question. One thing I do is not make my songs very difficult to play. I happen to like formal simplicity but I took special care to make my songs easy b/c I think my songs will appeal to basically normal kids who like to think of themselves as offbeat. If they like my songs & have never played they will play greater ease & not get discouraged. hb: fabulous idea, jean-paul. this is really a gift to others--an act of microempowerment. congratulations, you have just become a capitalist, an entrepreneur, and a person capable of business as self-revelation and secular salvation. by looking inside yourself to see what you most enjoy, you're scooping up ice cream cones of musical enjoyment for others. jpm: & if they do well, noticing I only use 5 chord progressions & not yet being experienced song writers, they will say, "He only uses 5 chord progressions -I can do better than that" Kids start a band -instant positive social group based on creativity & production w/ productive consumption of other people's songs. hb: fabulous. jpm: Eventually, the band writes songs that probably aren't as good as mine but they think are better b/c they are more varied. Then they get better & realize it's very difficult to rewrite the same 3 songs 20 times & have no one be able to tell & that it is ironically innovative. Then they learn how to write songs like I write them -then they write songs better than mine as I have written better songs than they bands I like hb: another vital contribution--no matter how small--to the advance of the cultural project--the grand enterprise that billions of humans have contributed to over a period of between 35,000 and 2.5 million years. you are providing the shoulders of giants on which new generations--or perhaps just your contemporaries--will stand. jpm: -having been one of these kids. In visual art -my taste runs towards abstraction though. One critique I get about minimalist art a lot is, "I could do that" or "my kid could do that" & I say, "Well what's wrong w/ that?" -instant democratization of art & de-intellectualizing & de-mystification of abstraction. & encourage people to always be involved in personal projects, not "what's new" or what the latest product is. hb: one of the most remarkable things is that you are doing this while absorbed in a postmodern subculture that prizes mystification and obscurantism. the culture of semiotics has several interesting characteristics. first, it uses literary metaphor and claims that it's not metaphor--it's the only legitimate reality. that is, it transforms all experience into an equivalent of reading squiggles of ink and assigning them meaning. then semiotics puts forth its ideas in a jargon even the initiate has trouble comprehending. obscurity is generaly hieratic--that is it is a priestly jargon designed to exclude outsiders. dense jargon is the language of a would-be elite. the ubiquitous use of consumerism as an enemy, strangely, is another attempt at elitism. it tells the public that popular pleasures are moronic, and that only initiates know what is good for that disembodied mass known as "the people." I probably have some of this wrong, so by all means correct my mispercetion. Your expression of the basic concepts of semiotics in clear English is aremarkable accomplishment . Is this a sin as inacceptable as sodomy once was to the church? are you in danger of excommunication from the postmodern camp? jpm: Re: video games. Very interesting -I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I've been playing a videogame at Arion's house. Navigation thru 3-D space is an obvious thing kids learn -I think the kids growing up w/ 3-D games will relate to the world in a much different way than either you or I do. hb: there was a notion back in the '80s, when MTV was still new, that the quick-cutting in music videos would alter the way kids perceive, making them impatient with information delivered at less than blizzard-speed. I wonder if any studies have been done to see if such a perceptual alteration occurred. I just did a few searches and didn't find any. so we'll have to leave the perceptual hypothesis an open question...and an interesting one. jpm: Consider that movie cuts probably inform rapid cutting & narrativizing of dreams (possibly movies are actualized dreams -it might happen the other way). Then 3-D games are making the actual world (that has the impression of 3 dimensionality w/ stereoscopic vision) put into a 2-D TV screen. You hit on my question about representation -the fixed number of pixels hallucinate a real world the player images/creates w/ his mind. Watching DVDs for the first time was disconcerting b/c my brain has to work less to represent the pixels into something narratively & generally meaningful -until I learned the DVD's economic info structure the medium drew attention to itself. My reference to Pokemon in the last message was to trading cards -I think collecting things trying to have "the whole set" when the company will always make more is worthless hb: it's a harmless way to become a part of a group and to exercise one's hierarchical instincts. traders of the same sort of cards have an instant ice-breaking device--their common interest in the cards. the mere fact that the cards are designed for trading makes potent social devices, bits of cardboard carrying an imperative to meet with others--friends and strangers alike--for swapping, selling, and buying. and the attempt to get a full set of a set of some special kind exercises the urge to top others...but does it without the last resort of the hierarchical instinct--violence. jpm-if anything it shows you that you can't have "the whole thing" hb: there's another way to look at it. people desperately need goals, reasons to get up in the morning. pokemon card collecting gives them that. it also assures that those goals are recognized by others--fellow pokemon collectors--as meaningful. & that it might actually be undesirable b/c you can be very happy enjoying the thing you have b/c it's perfectly good & w/ everything there'd be nothing to do. Another thing I don't like about videogames & pornography (what do they have to do w/ each other? It's coming!) is they give a sense of accomplishment w/o really having accomplished anything. When you beat the 18 bosses are you really a hero? hb: the magic words here are "w/o really having accomplished anything." us rational types are too often blind to what something IS really doing. I'd guess that beating the eighteen bosses does some very important things. take a look, for example, at the research on play we were considering in the group a few weeks ago (or was that months?). Essentially it said that the human organism needs a certain amount of play and experiences play deprivation if it doesn't get it. Deprive a youngster--be he dog, chimp, or human--of play and he will make up for precisely the amount of time lost. he'll just do it when he's an adult and you can't stop him. if play is built that deeply into our biology, it must have a purpose. and it does. to exercise the basic instincts with which we come equipped at birth--and to challenge them in new ways. that's why what we play with ceases to be fun when the novelty wears off. and that's why the pokemon style game with the 18 levels of gaming and the innumerable sub-levels is good at what it does. it provides just the right mix of novelty and familiarity to keep you hooked. and it gets hard enough to keep challenging you even as you gain in skill. it is an abstract skill hooker upper. David Berreby, quite some time ago, came up with yet another adaptive value of this sort of thing. when kids run through fantasy scenarios, they are practicing for unknown real-world challenges. every animal alters its environment. and the enivironment alters on its own. even the simple social environment of the planktonic communities I posted an article on several days ago goes through constant shift, tossing out new combinations and permutations that have never been seen before. an organism has to be prepared to meet the most unlikely of circumstances if it's to survive. horror films and videogames are precisely the sort of exercise for the unlikely we will need to confront the unimagined. or, to put it differently, useless fantasies are the imagination's way of anticipating the flukes, flicks, and floggings meted out by a capricious universe. jpm: If you masturbate looking at pornography have you really gotten laid? hb: no, but I know a lot of women who tell a man they're not interested in sexually to jerk off so he can lower the testosterone level of his conversation. sexuality is another built-in behavior that needs its exercise. it's better to have your way with a playboy centerfold than to rape the girl next door. jpm: Same w/ prostitutes -you might have technically gotten laid but you have no social bond to show for it. hb: my feeling has always been that prostitutes should be given the same social recognition as, say masseurs or physical therapists. they're performing a vital social function and should be praised, not scorned for it. if prostitution were decriminalized, women in the biz wouldn't need their pimps, "protectors" and business managers who get them hooked on drugs and cut them up. jpm: Videogames provide adventure in a world where people are either too lazy to be adventuresome or they don't think it's possible. hb: they provide adventures of kind unavailable in the real world. when I was founding a pr firm in the record industry, i had more adventure during my thirteen hour workdays than I could take. after being nuked by relentless realities, nuking enemy rocket ships on an Atari set late in the evening was a blessed about face. jpm: Get on a random subway & ride to a random stop -you'll have an adventure. & porno allows sort-of sexual gratification w/o having taken the time to meet someone human heart beat -narrative to live right there -but the song is a safe narrative. Non-representational art doesn't work symbolically, doesn't try to be anything but the material it is -hence "more true" than art where the form tricks you to foreground content? Weird/dissonant art can be good too b/c discord can point out interesting things ("other things" "Others" etc.) jpm: Re: History & spirit. I disagree w/ Hegel's dialectical approach b/c it discounts other forms of expression, art, culture, etc. & considers them "below" hb: admittedly Hegel's idea of spirit manifesting itself in the material world is focused on the materialization of a unified German state, something Hegel could only dream of. (The German state didn't come into being until roughly 50 years after Hegel wrote his Philosophy of History.) But I never noticed Hegel putting down art. Even if he did, his concept of the dialectic--one idea provoking a counter idea, then a synthesis arising that incorporates the two--turns out to have validity in many a situation. in fact, you invoked an aspect of it when you said that a subject defines himself by opposition to an other. that's thesis and anitithesis. synthesis is just around the corner. by the way, whatever Hegel felt about the arts wouldn't negate the validity of his insistence that history is spirit becoming flesh. the german state Hegel was so anxious to see existed only in the imaginings of Hegel and many other Germans. Otto von Bismarck would turn that dream into a reality in 1871. Dreams and imaginings are spirit, and they can and do usher in new material forms. jpm: -but it uses The Other to define its spirit negatively. "Absolute spirit IS" he wants to say, but he neglects, "Absolute Spirit is not x, y, z…" which is necessary to define something. hb: let's leave what spirit is blank. in each of us it's different. in each of us it shifts from moment to moment. and in the culture as a whole it's in constant flux as well. spirit is an anticipation of and director of change. it's ironic that such a future-forming device should be planted in the human emotions at a primal, infantile, instinctual level. what's most deeply personal to us, our passions, are directiy connected to other humans and to the external world. what inflames us most powerfully usually does so by touching on emotions built into us by 3.5 billion years of evolution and by the key imprinting experiences of our infancy, childhood, and youth. Every imprinting experience connected us deeply to something outside of us. And the genetic legacy that provides our emotional template carries the imprint of billions of years of interaction between the dna system and its obstacles and opportunities. the personal is strangely public, and the public is strangely personal. We can't escape interactivity, nor do we want to. Pokemon-style games, trading cards, and other useless stuff allow us to revel in mini-orgies of interactivity. jpm: Recording technology doesn't allow me to get my ideas out of my head -it allows them to be. Period. hb: yes...and, um, also no. when I was a thirteen year old listening to jazz obsessively, I walked the sidewalks of my hometown, Buffalo, NY, improvising jazz riffs that never were, but only in my mind. There was no way to share them with others. I couldn't sing or hum on key. And I'd been tossed out of violin, piano, and trombone classes for because my fingers were astonishingly inept. I'm still waiting for the recording device that will allow a total klutz like me to get the music out of his head and into loudspeakers. Meanwhile, inexpensive synthesizers and computer music programs have made that sort of thing possible for an ever-growing number of humans. In all probability there's a musical program available--or already present on my computer--that would allow even me to simply type the notes then hear them. technology and consumerism often facilitate the transubstantiation of spirit into flesh. jpm: The city programs your walking b/c you can't walk thru a wall; but certainly you design architectures for specific uses -so we program architectures & then they program us by constituting identity. Herodotus has a funny bit about this in The Histories. Egyptian men pee sitting down & women standing up -to a Greek this is very weird b/c one definition of people is "Men =one who pees standing" & "Woman=one who pees sitting." This cultural difference shows definitions are not rigid & how architecture (in general) programs us after we program it. I am only as smart as my word processor. W/o music technology I would not be able to do what I do at all -that's good technology -I use it creatively -I am productive -I have fun. hb: great!!!!! Re: psychotherapy -these days they give hyperactive, probably creative children Ritalin & quiet children Prozac. No need to talk about your neurosis that arises from too much time if we change your brain to make it work in a regimented way -in the capitalist machine. hb: what's the difference between having to work in a capitalist machine, a socialist machine, or a hunter-gatherer machine? the idea that hunter-gatherers have to work a mere four hours a day to earn their living was disproved way back in the early 1980s. those poor men and women have to work roughly the same hours as any of the rest of us. what's more, i'd be willing to bet that the stooping and bending to yank plants out of the soil or to pick up mongongo nuts produces what are now called "repetitive stress injuries." jpm: Well-mannered people can make things for the corporate monkey but they will not be creative. hb: almost all the british bands i got to know--famous, creative ones--were able to get their start thanks to day jobs working for the corporate monkey. the corporate monkey not only fed and clothed them, but created an availability of inexpensive musical instruments made in low-wage countries like Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and China. the corporate monkey in the form of multinational capitalist enterprises has also provided me with the computer devices on which I'm typing you this--gizmos with components made in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, the U.S., and China. Monkeys can be very pleasant creatures. Which doesn't mean we should excuse their nastier moments. We shouldn't. jpm: But it's better than it was: until the 60's hyperactive & bratty kids were given eggshell lobotomies. I agree w/ you Completely -but we face another problem: getting kids off drugs & interested & busy. hb: a very, very important statement--and a very productive way of putting it. You're positing that these kids are missing meaningful, goal-oriented activity. Contemporary psychology quacks have gone too far! 2 year olds on Prozac?! That kid is going to think of his identity as himself on Prozac -he won't recognize himself without it -Bingo: a consumer for life! What happened to Jesus when he returned in The Brothers K. -killed. Nietzsche -one of the best activists & most ethical people in his time -they said he was nuts. To de Sade who tried to expose corruption & hypocritical prudishness -- I don't do it for them -I do it for me. You can't & maybe shouldn't expect anything from anyone & living for others is probably a bad idea b/c they will just kill you for your opinion. Afterall, Christ didn't make Christ popular -Paul did. You don't need to die -you just need a great PR man who tells everyone you did hb: wonderful point. ideally those of us who create new insights or gizmos need to be aware of our obligation to not only come up with stuff that will empower others, but to market what we've come up with. Good intellectual workout, Jean-Paul. All thanks--Howard
Klien's Bottle....are
you kidding? I got hooked on the connection when I was thirteen--in 1956. How many of us imprinted on this theme in those long-gone days, and why? Was it because the tools of science were finally moving in such a way that we could feel the immanent possibility of explaining religious emotions scientifically? My quest began with the goal of digging down to the bubbling cauldron of the undermind where the gods lurked and bringing the deities to the surface with words and scientific tools. But it was a bring-em-back-alive expedition. I wanted to be able to feel the mystic emotions and know how and why they were generated. I wanted to have my religious pie via science and eat it too. Even more crazily, I wanted to be able to go through religion's exaltations and ecstasies as an atheist--someone who knew that god was a symbol for an internal possibility within all of us, not a being in the sky. Judging from the growing literature on the subject, there's a whole bunch of us hung up on this topic. Generations can be imprinted with a sense of mission. Many of the rock artists I worked with back in the days of my fieldwork had shared a common imprinting moment--watching Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, hearing the girls scream, and realizing at the age of five or so that that was their dream. That Elvis moment had stamped itself indelibly on the soul of a generation. The Beatles' Ed Sullivan appearance probably had the same effect on yet another generation ten years later. Albert Einstein
was the celebrity who I and some of my friends in science imprinted
on. Einstein made a great point of his religion--and of describing how
the vision of the theory of relativity had come to him as if it were
an act of revelation. Something inside of Einstein had cooked up the
notion of riding a light wave at light speed and being flattened in
the manner of a Lorenz contraction. It wasn't reason that gave Einstein
the theory of relativity. Albert used imagery, muscular sensation, and
a St.-Theresa-style of mystic exaltation. Could Albert's impact on the
cerebral kids of the 1950s have something to do with the interest in
the science/religion intersect today? Howard hb: it's a very sticky way to glue members of a cohort together globally and to create a new zeitgeist for a new generation--and I mean sticky in terms of global emotional cohesion and synchronization, as well as in the more obvious manner. mr: But also in time. I remember an old man telling me he fancied Claudette Colbert (born in 1905!) so much. hb: I was about to explain this to my new ten-year-old son, Walter the Wonder, last night. It's something I've been working on for the last four years--the grandfather effect (a phrase purloined from Jim Brody, who uses it to refer to a very different notion). In rebelling against our parents, we tned to pick up on the cultural remains of our grandparents. Which explains why I hate the dishes we received as wedding presents last night. They reflect the ornate aesthetic of the early 40s, the things my parents and grandmother had when I was three or four years old. I loved the stuff Hugh Hefner promoted in the 50s--Danish modern.--which was more in tune with the streamlined hyper-modern art deco of the 1920s and early 30s. There's a whole Bloomian theory about cultures as oscillating search engines--swinging their collective attention from one side of the track to the other--that, needless to say, traces this primal phenomenon from the big bang up to the present. mr: I'd hardly heard of her but didn't have to settle for the wrinkly crinkly photo's of senescent CC, but could watch an old movie and see for myself that she was indeed gorgious. hb: wonderful material, Marcel. You are helping me write bits of an upcoming book. mr: Paralized superman (Chris R) once played in a film with plot of falling in love with someone who lived when he wasn't born. hb: oh, yes. hmmm, I've read the book and seen the film, but can't remember the name either. mr: I just have a box with letters, photo's and other memorabilia (like resistance-newspapers he distributed during WWII) of my granddad who died in 1979, but my son can in a box that's ten times smaller have everything I've written (which is 10,000 times more than my granddad ever wrote), my electronic diaries & electronic library plus my DNA. If he took the trouble he'd almost be able to recreate me (cloning and controlled rearing) but he won't think it worthwhile. Good for him. hb: the big trick,
one I was discussing last night with my fiancee--is that our old digital
notes and writings may not be readable by the technological gizmos of
2030 or 2040. My fiancee showed me photos of her childhood last night.
They were delicious. I wondered why I didn't have any from mine. Then
I remembered--my parents had a gorgeous, art-deco, Argus folding camera.
They never used it. My father had taken a big leap into the latest technology--portable
movie cameras. He shot 8mm film of everything we did. Then the projectors
for the film went out of style, no one thought of saving the old film
reels, and, so far asI know, they were lost. I had a similar problem
in 1992. I sketched out the rudiments of a computer system for my public
relations office in 1976. However computers didn't become sufficiently
affordable until 1983. At that point, I set up a seven-computer system
based on Kaypro computers. Kaypros ran on an operating system my computer-journalist
friends assured me would never go out of style--CPM. Apparently even
journalists can occasionally make mistakes. CPM disappeared sometime
around 1991--to be replaced by DOS and, later, Windows. I had a computer
custom-built to use both CPM and Dos, then gradually transferred the
huge amount of material I'd accumulated for The Lucifer Principle book
series (of which Global Brain is only book number 2) over to Dos. Some
material was lost--and it's irretrievable. But today, none of the old
floppy disks are readable by available machines. What's just as bad,
the old floppies have deteriorated and are a mess. To top it off, the
custom-built DOS-CPM computer died a long time ago, and the one man
who could resurrect it--the person who bu9lt it for me--has gone out
of business and disappeared. The same thing is likely to happen to VHS
tapes in the near future...replacement by digital technologies. So pick
your storage mediums carefully. If they can't be read by the human eye,
they may not be readable at all. mr: Still, space and time have lost
much of the meaning they once had. hb: Marcel, you are a wonderful source
of stimulation, ideas, and the tales that make ideas come to life. Howard
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