In bad news for proponents of the “inner life,” a study in the current The Journal of Neuroscience suggests that “the normal brain activity of daydreaming fuels the sequence of events leading to Alzheimer’s”:

Researchers at Washington University and the University of Pittsburgh used five imaging techniques to map the brains of 764 people. The subjects fell into three groups - people in their 20s, and older people with either early-stage dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease.

When they compared images, they found that parts of the brain involved in musing, daydreaming or recalling pleasant memories in young people were where evidence of Alzheimer’s disease appears.

According to evolutionary psychologists, people tend to seek out mates with features similar to their own. Likewise, cartoonists often seem compelled — without any explicit self-awareness — towards drawing characters who resemble themselves, as if their own face and body were humankind’s de facto template. The range of human features becomes a series of small deviations from the same starting point, which, when averaged, regress to self-portraiture.

Then again, this is only a theory, as suspicious as any theory emerging from the academic cess pool of evolutionary psychology. All the same, I recently found a rare picture of reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson on a photo gallery of famous cartoonists, and, well, look-what-we-have-here: Watterson’s an exact composite of Calvin’s Uncle Max and Calvin’s dad, down to the folds of their clothing’s fabric and the angles of their elbows:

[Have other examples of artists resembling their creations? Share them with me at cupofchicha at aol dot com.]

Related Reading: “And Then I Realized Why She Looked Familiar”

Last night, I found myself at a bar, arguing with a writer I’d just been introduced to. Given our personalities, we were bound to find something to disagree on, but the topic that we disagreed on first was the work of Ben Marcus, a Brown MFA, currently teaching at Columbia, who’s known (or, in most circles, avoided) for his experimental, aka ‘difficult,’ fiction. The real worth of writing, the writer argued, needs to be judged on its ability to communicate, and Ben Marcus, simply, is opaque.

I asked him if he didn’t think Marcus’s work communicated a feeling of unease or disorientation.

Yes, he said, but what’s the worth in that?

(I was feeling aggressive — and aggression, being rare for me, gives me the impression of adventure. So, I pressed on:) If you admit that Marcus does communicate something, I’ve got to wonder if you care more about what’s being communicated than the success of communication — which is a different argument than the one that you were just making.

Maybe, yes, he’s communicating something, the writer said. But what I meant was that he doesn’t engage with the world. That’s what good fiction does.

The world? I laughed. What’s the world?

Talk about relativist, he said. Talk about abstract. The world is … what it isn’t is someone like DeLillo or David Foster Wallace or Ben Marcus going on about the difference between brown and white cardboard for ten pages.

Brown and white cardboard are still part of the world. Everything is part of the world, I said. And when I hear people use that word, I wonder if they’re claiming what they think matters most in the world is the world.

(The argument continued, and I went home later than I meant to.)

————————————————————————————————————————-

I still don’t have bookshelves in my apartment. Right now, I’m sitting in my living room, looking at the twenty-three moving boxes that hold my books. In my world, there’s not much else besides cardboard.

Since I leave clothes on the floor, and rarely remember to wash dishes, and haven’t made a bed in years, my boyfriend’s made it clear he doesn’t want me unpacking 400-something books without a place to put them. But when he’s not looking, I slice the packing tape with a kitchen knife, hoping the box I’ve chosen randomly has the book I’m missing. Everyday, I think of a new book to miss. And, lately — since last week — I’ve been missing Derrida — the writer who, in college, more than any other writer, I counted as my own.

————————————————————————————-

The writer at the bar claimed I was being too abstract when I asked him what he meant when he said “the world.” But I think he’s got it backwards. Words and phrases like “communication” or “the world” are hopelessly abstract, and a question shouldn’t be called abstract for pointing that out and demanding definitions.

What Derrida’s texts encourage is a lack of complacency with abstractions, and the values hidden in them. Some may call poststructuralistm Anti-Humanist because it points out that words like “universal” and “human” are often political, cultural, and — to my mind — manipulative — undermining people’s right to disagreement by claiming a Truth that only the immoral or elitist among us could ever wish to reexamine.

Derrida’s texts may be difficult to follow — what can you say clearly when you’re interoggating the accepted clarity of abstract concepts? — but the questioning he inspires is also very simple. A playwright could turn him into a modern-day Socrates — disorienting his companions with simple questions that point out tautologies and find the fracture lines in arguments.

—————————————————

I was never studious enough to become an academic. And, due to vanity or its opposite, I prefer critiquing my own thoughts to critiquing others’ (even if, in the long run, others’ thoughts might sharpen self-critique). So, I’m sure that I had classmates who read more Derrida than I did, and understood him better, too. But, like children pick favorite numbers and favorite colors — as if numbers and colors could inspire a natural alliegance — I picked Derrida as “my” contemporary thinker. The choice was only partly intellectual; it was largely autobiographical.

Continue reading "Presence vs. Derrida"

From BBC News:

Jacques Derrida, one of France’s most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74.

Derrida, who suffered from cancer, died in a Paris hospital on Friday night.

… Derrida, who was born into a Jewish family in Algeria, published his ground-breaking work in the 1960s and went on to achieve enormous influence in academic circles, especially in America.

But in 1992, staff at Cambridge University in the UK protested against plans to award him an honorary degree, denouncing his writings as “absurd doctrines that deny the distinction between reality and fiction”.

Derrida also campaigned for the rights of immigrants in France, against apartheid in South Africa, and in support of dissidents in communist Czechoslovakia.

He was so influential that last year a film was made about his life - a biographical documentary.

At one point, wandering through Derrida’s library, one of the filmmakers asks him: “Have you read all the books in here?”

“No,” he replies impishly, “only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully”.

I’m surprised by how sad the news makes me. Too sad, actually, to write a proper post about it. I’ll try again later.

New Scientist, reporting today on recent synaesthesia research, suggests that the condition “may rely more on the plasticity of the brain than on any genetic predisposition,” introducing the possibility “that all of us are capable of having a synaesthetic experience.”

Reading the article (while still persuing the possibility of equating the desktop environment to mental [dis-]order), I was reminded of how unhappy I was when Mac OS X was introduced without 0S 9’s ability to color code folders. And I imagine synaesthetic Mac users were less happy still:

One man, JF, for instance, had always thought of days and months as having colours. Instruments in an orchestra and even his pay scale at work were also colour-coded in his mind.

Interestingly, each of these (mis-)associations has its own name; chromafacetia, for example, specificies the experience of associating persons or personalities with colors, while chromagraphemia describes the subjective coloring of graphemes (letters, numbers, punctuation).¹

Synesthesia, though, extends beyond the color-coding of sensations. “The word synesthesia,” Mixed Signals (a synesthesia website) reports, “is used to describe a number of different conditions, ranging from smelling sounds, in which two basic senses come into play, to something as abstract as perceiving sexes with graphemes.” The site’s list of synesthesia terms & types specifies only a portion of the possible combinations: geusopsia (sight —> syn taste), phonopsia (sight —> syn sound), phonobaria (weight/pressure —> syn sound), morphochronia (unit of time —> syn shape/movement/texture), and geusalgia (pain —> syn taste).

In a sense, the language of synesthesia expands the vocabulary available for literary analysis of metaphor. Though studies report that “no two synesthetes with the same form of synesthesia have a total — or even very partial — match-up of associations between stimuli and synesthetic responses” — a finding that implies synesthestic associations lack the descriptive quality of apt/artistic metaphor — “synesthetic metaphor” is a standard literary term for “language that transfers imagery from one sense to another.”² And its obvious parallals to the creative process — in particular, the “divergent thinking” psychologists claim creativity requires — have inspired a large range of artistic projects examining or recreating the physiological condition.

Continue reading "shades of thought: synesthestic inquiries"

Jessica Lee Jernigan summarizes and comments on the recent NPR segment, What Comes First: Speech or Thought? Here’s an excerpt from her post:

Two researchers—Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard and Sue Hespos at Vanderbilt—used conceptual differences in English and Korean to explore the possibility of abstract thought in infants. At the heart of their study was this conceptual distinction: English uses prepositions like “on” and “in” to describe the relationship between two objects; Korean, on the other hand (to use a rather Anglophonic metaphor), distinguishes between objects that have a “loose fit” with another object and those that have a “tight fit”. For an English-speaker, a cup sits on a table; for a Korean-speaker, the cup has a loose-fit relationship with the table. For an English-speaker, a pea is in a pod; for a Koreans-speaker, a pea has a tight-fit relationship with its pod.

So, anyway, these researchers found that babies raised in English-speaking homes were able to recognize the tight-fit/loose-fit dichotomy, while English-speaking grown-ups were not. …Thus, in the words of Spelke, “These findings suggest that humans possess a rich set of concepts before we learn language. Learning a particular language may lead us to favor some of these concepts over others, but the concepts already existed before we put them into words.”

More information on the study is also available here.

The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.

It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”.

It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate.

In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person”.

Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.

It’s nice to see the media’s love affair with rankings — data’s MSG — finally make its way over to a more arcane, academic subject matter. But, just as People’s round-up of reality TV’s hottest bachelors seems to favor the rodent-like, this new survey, carried out by Today Translations, fails to mention its biases. As a reader of Language Log points out, “… the notion of a ‘most untranslatable word’ is inherently ill-defined anyway. Surely you need to fix the target language to decide what the most untranslatable word would be.”

For the first time ever, Psychology Today contains a kind of awesome article. Here, a few highlights from the magazine’s report on trends in baby-naming:

• “The current crop of preschoolers includes a few Uniques…” Sad paradox.
  
• “New parents rattle off diminutives and acronyms as if reciting scales. ‘I wanted a truly awesome, convertible name that could collapse into a normal name. Something like Charles Henry Underhill Grisham Sernovitz, because CHUGS would be a great college nickname,’ says Andy Sernovitz, 33, whose son Charles Darwin Grisham Sernovitz was born last November.” 1. CHUGS is not a normal name. 2. If names are fate, what assholic parent gives the gift of Rush & liver failure?
  
• “‘I hated my name when I was a kid,’ Wven (pronounced you-vin) Villegas, 29, says. ‘I stood out for all the wrong reasons. But I decided that if my name wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, then I wouldn’t be the same, either. Now I love my name so much that I had it tattooed on my right arm.’” That’s the arm most people use for masturbation, right? (And I thought tattoos of ex-es were bad news.)
  
• Here’s your Best American Short Story entry, in a nutshell: “Nakazawa cites the cautionary tale of a young woman who was adopted from China by a white American couple who gave her a Chinese-sounding name. As a teenager, the girl began researching her heritage and discovered her name was not, in fact, Chinese. She was devastated.”
  
• “Michael Mercer, an industrial psychologist and co-author of Spontaneous Optimism, recalls a former co-worker who had interpersonal and legal problems: ‘She changed her name to Honore, and it was her way of mutating from someone who goofed things up to someone who is honorable.’” Obviously, Spontaneous Optimism can have consequences.

Related: The most popular baby names from 2003 are now available at the Social Security Administration’s website. Meanwhile, BabyNames.com irresponsibly alerts expecting parents to the possibility of naming their new arrivals after such LOTR characters as Fangorn, Farmer Maggot, and Wormtongue. (Last two links via Maud.)

I’m finally feeling brave enough to link to my newest blog, simply called Another. Initially, it was meant to be a diary, a dumping grounds for posts that felt too personal and self-indulgent to inflict on this Cup’s readership. But the new blog changed genres and became something more specific when I realized that the only posts I’m hesitant to put here are the ones dealing with depression; and so, Another became a “literary” mental health blog, focusing on the relationship between writing and depression, but also linking to abstracts of clinical studies, essays about therapy, and reviews of recent and relevent books.

Some posts that may (or may not) appeal to this Cup’s readers include

• a long essay about the rhetoric we use when linking creativity and mental illness. The essay is partly a response to the latest spate of articles on James Kaufman’s silly paper, “The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young.”
  
• an account of my changing relationship to writing, titled I Married Language (And Now She Doesn’t Want to Fuck Me).
  
• an excerpt from Chase Twichell’s essay, “Toys in the Attic: An Ars Poetica Under the Influence,” in which Twichell discusses the subtle effects that depression and anti-depressants can have on the writing process.
  
• a series of reflections on memory, memoir, and emotion. (“When I write about the past, I don’t preserve it; I lose it; I experience autobiography as sacrifice.”)

Scott McLemee links to the first two installments of his Zizek Watch column for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, a passage from the second column:

And so in February, when BBC Radio broadcast a program called “The Art of Laziness,” Mr. Zizek appeared on it as a uniquely qualified expert. He criticized programs that teach relaxation techniques. “If you look closely at their leaflets,” he said, “they tell you first that we are hyperactive and should learn to withdraw. But next, the second paragraph, they always say: ‘This way you will relax and be even more productive.’”

(This reminds me a bit of the advice so often doled out by women’s mags: women should be self-sufficient, since that’s what attracts men. Anyway, continuing:)

Alluding to the surrealist thinker Georges Bataille, Mr. Zizek denounced “the hidden economy of ‘I am lazy a little bit so that I will work better.’” Instead, he offered the example of residents of Montenegro, an earthquake-prone area of the former Yugoslavia. The local ethnic stereotype is that inhabitants of the region are utterly shiftless.

“The zero-level standard joke about laziness is how a Montenegro guy masturbates,” he said. “He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in, and waits for the earthquake.” The pleasure that Montenegrins take in telling the joke seems to Mr. Zizek to be the correct attitude toward both laziness and political incorrectness.

*Edgar Bergen, via Charlie McCarthy

Splinters links to Jonathan Rée’s “excellent radio series” Journeys in Thought with Nietzsche, which I plan to listen to soon.
My fondness for N. comes and goes. At thirteen, I bought Beyond Good & Evil and loved it, but the love had less to do with its ideas than the pride I felt in reading it and being seen reading it; even if my classmates had never heard of Nietzsche, I thought the book cover by itself conveyed a stoic intellectualism. (Nowadays, unfortunately, it would probably be mistaken by 9th graders for this.) But then, during my senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I made the common mistake of dating a prospective philosophy major, one of those deeply maladjusted and unhygienic boys who invariably decides, somewhere between the ages of 18 to 20, that Nietzsche is a kindred spirit, and mistakes each conversation for another opportunity to give a long-winded misreading of N. Later in college, single and free to love N. without inciting post-coital speeches on the superman, I signed up for a seminar in continental philosophy and bought most of N.’s books. But halfway into the semester, I got a raging case of mono and had to drop my classes, and ever since have associated the uncracked spines of N.’s books with sickness and failure. And, in general, when it comes to books, I try to avoid a recognition of my avoidance of them by continuing to avoid them.

Earlier this month, though, I reread parts of Tony Davies’ Humanism while composing a blog post, and came across several great passages by or about N. Among them, this, which makes me very excited to listen to Jonathan Rée’s broadcast:

Unlike other philosophers, before and since, [Nietzsche] offers his ideas not as truth-statements but as poetic fictions, parables, images, which he makes no attempt to separate from his own mood, temperament and personal circumstances. Indeed, he argued that all statements must be read as metaphors of a particular disposition — physical, psychological, or digestive (he himself was a vegetarian). … The only grounds that remain for distinguishing between statements are the strength, authenticity, and beauty with which they are uttered: their ‘will to power.’

Psychology Today, drawing on the results of a new survey on shyness, discusses solutions for shyness, and technology’s ability to exacerbate it.

The irony of a World Wide Web packed with endless amounts of information is that it can also be isolating. As individuals head to their own favorite bookmarked sites, they cut out all the disagreement of the world and reinforce their own narrow perspective, potentially leading to alienation, disenfranchisement and intolerance for people who are different.

In addition, the shy are more vulnerable to instant intimacy because of their lack of social know-how. Normally, relationships progress by way of a reasonably paced flow of self-disclosure that is reciprocal in nature. A disclosure process that moves too quickly—and computer anonymity removes the stigma of getting sexually explicit—doesn’t just destroy courtship; it is a reliable sign of maladjustment. Shy people tend either to reveal information about themselves too quickly, or hold back and move too slowly.

Continue reading "Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things you'd like to."

we’re always likely to place emphasis on the unintended one.

Continue reading "whenever a word has two possible meanings,"

“Often women are characterised as being very co-operative, very kind-hearted and not competing directly,” Fisher told New Scientist. “But there’s been a fair bit of work on how women are indirectly aggressive.”

For example, she says: “Rather than saying ‘I’m going to beat that woman up because she looked at you’, it’s ‘Oh my goodness, look how fat her ankles are’!”

That’s what I say, too, whenever I catch elderly, female Russian immigrants giving Sam the eye.

Kluver-Bucy Syndrome: “Damage to the front of the temporal lobe and the amygdala just below it can result in the strange condition called Kluver-Bucy Syndrome. Classically, the person will try to put anything to hand into their mouths and typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it. A classic example is of the unfortunate chap arrested whilst attempting to have sex with the pavement. Effectively, it is the ‘what’ pathway that is damaged with regards to foodstuff and sexual partner. As Ramachandran puts it, ‘they are not hypersexual, just indiscriminate.’”

Cotard’s Syndrome: “Named after a French psychiatrist Jules Cotard, this syndrome is characterized by the patient believing that he is dead, a walking corpse. This ‘delusion’ is usually expanded to the degree that the patient might claim that he can smell his own rotting flesh and feel worms crawling through his skin.”

Capgras’ Syndrome: “Brilliantly described by Ramachandran, Capgras’ syndrome is another neurological syndrome that is often mistaken for insanity. The Capgras’ patient will typically identify people close to them as being imposters - identical in every possible way, but identical replicas. Classically, the patient will accept living with these imposters but will secretly ‘know’ that they are not the people they claim to be.”

—-From A Collection of Unusual Neurological States, found via Quiddity

Danger Blog! posts an excerpt from a profile of Stephen Fry:

One of Fry’s heroes is acting legend James Cagney.

“When he was in his late 80s he was learning a seventh language, he was reading Russian and French literature, sailing his yacht, building things. It was this amazing list.

“Cagney was asked how he could retain such an interest in life. His answer was, ‘I guess it’s because I never give a second’s thought to myself.’

“That’s a wonderful lesson and really so un-American. Most Americans think the key to happiness is thinking about yourself.”

I didn’t realize interiority was a specifically American phenomenon. Or that temperment is a willed philosophy.

Yesterday, I read at Maud’s that Alain de Botton’s newest book, Status Anxiety will appear in the U.K. next month and in the U.S. in May. A three part documentary, based on the book, will be broadcast starting Saturday March 6th on Channel 4 in the UK, and in Australia on the ABC starting Sunday, June 20th. Three clips are available online. Judging from them, the documentary is a fair multimedia translation of de Botton’s work: the author v.o.’s summaries of major philosophers’ work over kitschy visuals and Muzak.
I have an awkward relationship with de Botton’s work. On one hand, I relate to his project of using fiction to write essays, of privileging ideas over plot and character; in this sense, de Botton has been a role model or — here, admitting my vanity — a competitor with the advantage of being born before me. From an old identity theory interview:

RB: I read Kiss & Tell. That was essayistic?

AB: Well, yes. I think so. Really, it was a reflection on different ideas. The point was not the plot so much as the ideas in it.

RB: Well, it more closely resembles fiction than what you have gone on to write since then.

AB: Exactly. Nevertheless, it wasn’t totally straight fiction and I suppose I was just trying to move closer to what I felt was where my real interests lay. Which is in a non-fiction structure but which can allow for a certain amount of personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel.

On the other hand, my love for his work is purely theoretical. The experience of reading it is painful. His ideas, in my opinion, hit their marks but bounce off them, too flimsy to penetrate. In examining everyday life in simple language, the risk is that precision will give way to banality, and the reward is that the subject matter will unearth observations that are both unusual, new and fresh, and honest, familiar, true. De Botton is as banal as he is earnest, and as earnest as he is superficial, overly content that his structure and his aims are more important than his writing and ideas.
In his interview with Birnbaum, de Botton responds to American critics’ accusation that his books “dumb down” philosophy:

RB: I wonder if the reason Consolations of Philosophy was critically rejected here was because the homegrown philosophy of the USA is pragmatism, which eschews 19th century models of philosophical systems?

AB: With all due respect, I don’t think that’s at all the reason. The real reason is that it was felt by highbrow critics to be uncomfortably close to the dumb side of America. So that there is this terrific fear on the highbrow coterie, “Where is that line between the good guys and Hollywood, the bad guys, Disney etc.?” I think with the Proust book they felt, “Here’s a guy, he is actually flirting with the idea he is lowbrow, but actually he’s clearly high brow. P-r-o-s-t, P-r-u-s-t, we don’t know how the word is pronounced, but clearly this must be highbrow even though he’s playing around.” So they went along with the joke. And suddenly I come along with The Consolations of Philosophy, which was written in a very similar way, but somehow people felt, “Well, actually he’s gone too far.” So this is like Who Moved My Cheese, Tuesdays with Morrie, or whatever that guy is.

RB: Philosophy for Dummies?

AB: Exactly. So there was that charge. It surprised me as a European. Here I am being accused of dumbing down America. This was on the part of Americans who presumably had their philosophical training in that rather austere analytic school of philosophy. Emerson’s view of philosophy has disappeared from the American campus. You could not now take an Emersonian view of philosophy. That was a kind of irony because the guiding figure behind The Consolations of Philosophy is, in a way, Emerson. But Emerson has disappeared off the curriculum. His style and the idea of a democratic language with which to address ordinary issues has disappeared. In the reception to my book one can make a mini history of American intellectual attitudes.

Though I’m better read in continental philosophy than I am in analytical, I find it interesting to think that something in American culture is inimical to de Botton’s style. My guess: because we do have Philosophy for Dummies and Hegel in 60 Minutes (that one’s sitting on my bookshelf), we might not have the same need as other cultures for more popularized philosophy. And, given that Philosophies for Dummies wins no acclaim, and garners no major reviews, we’re not sure why books like The Consolations of Philosophy should. But I’m open to other theories. Anyone out there a die-hard de Botton fan?

The Guardian on ‘Kant’s wild years’: “But according to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not such a dry stick after all. Far from being a dour Prussian ascetic, the great metaphysician was a partygoer. He enjoyed drinking wine, playing billiards and wearing fine, colourful clothes.” Further details affirm that Kant did, in fact, attend parties as a clown, that wild motherfucka.

“Children have long suspected it, and now research confirms it: homework is a waste of time.”

Via the never aging Caterina, I found the ethical philosophy selector. My top 5 matches (percentages are curved):

1. Kant   (100%)  
2. John Stuart Mill   (94%) 
3. Jean-Paul Sartre   (89%)  
4. Jeremy Bentham   (69%) 
5. Aquinas   (60%)  

Kant and others are described here, and the descriptions remind me why I don’t take ethical advice from online quiz results.

DISCUSSED: comfort reading, middle school narcissism, hypochondria, hypergraphia in The Midnight Disease, ex-boyfriends’ mental issues, the mind/body divide

Earlier this week, some of my favorite bloggers posted lists of their top “comfort reads.” Given the rate at which I buy books, three times the rate at which I read them, I rarely allow myself to revisit old books; so, I don’t have “comfort books” so much as I have a “comfort genre.”
That genre: psychological, psychiatric, or neurological studies of writers and the writing process. I first started reading these books when I was thirteen, and I can track changes in my personality by my choices within the genre.

Continue reading "on the mind: the comforts of hypochondria"

A friend of Spalding Gray recently recounted to me Gray’s battle with depression, which culminated in electroshock therapy. (Here’s a quick online summary of Gray’s battle.) The other people with me at the time were surprised to learn electroshock, or electroconvulsive, therapy still exists; maybe they’d recently read The Bell Jar (“Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.”), or they associated ECT with lobotomies: relics of a deluded and regrettably experimental era. ECT, though, is still used, often as a last resort for depression (esp. the catatonic variety) or prolonged episodes of mania.

Continue reading "shrink rap sheet"

Continue reading "Q: What is this image?"

This article is so amusing, I have to post it in full. (Thanks goes to Mark for the find.)

Death Stalks Poets
Verse Writers Die Younger Than Other Writers

All eager-lipped I kissed the mouth of Death.
— U.S. poet Gwendolyn B. Bennett

Dec. 11, 2003 — Death is drawn more to poetry than to other forms of writing, an intriguing study finds.

Poets die sooner than playwrights. Playwrights die sooner than novelists. And novelists die sooner than nonfiction writers, according to a study by James C. Kaufman, PhD, of California State University. The study appears in the November issue of Death Studies.

Kaufman combed through biographical references to come up with birth and death dates for writers in four different cultures: North America, China, Turkey, and Eastern Europe. The data spans millennia — one Turkish writer was born in the year 390. Kaufman made an effort to control for the fact that life spans have increased over time and across cultures.

“Both male and female poets had the shortest life spans of all four types of writers, and poets had the shortest life spans in three of the four cultures,” Kaufman says in a news release. “Only in Eastern Europe did poets squeak past playwrights by a few months, and that difference was not statistically significant.”

Why might poets die sooner?

“Some of the reasons why poets have [been] found to be more likely to suffer from mental illness … may also be applicable to why poets are more likely to die young,” Kaufman writes. “Poetry may appeal to people who are more likely to be self-destructive.”

But there’s also a more prosaic explanation, Kaufman acknowledges. Poets tend to achieve fame earlier than other kinds of writers. That puts them in the history books at a younger age — and gives them a better chance of being young when they die.

Kaufman, however, prefers the explanation that fiction writers die younger because fiction is lonely work. Playwrights interact with directors and actors; journalists must interview and interact with newsmakers. Fiction writers have only the blank page.

“This study may reinforce the idea of poets being surrounded by an aura of doom, even compared with others who may pick up a pen and paper for other purposes,” Kaufman concluded. “It is hoped that the data presented here will help poets and mental health professionals find ways to lessen what appears to be a negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and health.”

1. The phrasing here (: “That puts them in the history books at a younger age — and gives them a better chance of being young when they die”) makes fame seem like getting an Oscar, holding it up to the crowd, and then going backstage.
2. “Kaufman, however, prefers the explanation that fiction writers die younger because fiction is lonely work. Playwrights interact with directors and actors…” But, yo, the first paragraph clearly states, “Playwrights die sooner than novelists.”
3. The “negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and health”: hahahaha.

The next study: how reading poetry can make healthy American citizens consumptive. And: how an aura of doom looks a lot like a cloud of cigarette smoke.

The NY Times asks, “Why do we sleep?”. No one knows, but sleep deprivation supposedly causes real damage.
Elsewhere, a writer with questionable internet research skills endorses Uberman’s sleep schedule: “The Uberman’s sleep schedule revolves around forcing yourself to rely on six twenty to thirty minute naps spread throughout the day for your daily dose of sleep. I stuck to thirty minute naps, currently having them starting roughly at 2 AM, 6 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and 10 PM every day.”
Strangely, it sounds just like my own sleep schedule, if one switches time spent sleeping and time spent awake.

This site was originally designed for a class at Purdue University, but any internet straggler can take its quizzes. You can test yourself in Narratology, Psychology, or Postmodernism, and can use the answer key as a short theory refresher or introduction.

Last week, I mentioned Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, which argues that “the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline.”
David Frum responds, “Murray underscores this assertion by challenging his readers and listeners to name even one artistic or scientific achievement … of the past 50 years that will still matter to people in the year 2200.” Here’s Frum’s list, “in no particular order, of 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:”

1. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
2. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao.
3. The paintings of Jackson Pollock.
4. The Godfather I & II
5. C. Milosz, The Captive Mind.
6. West Side Story.
7. M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
8. The collected “I Love Lucy.”
9. VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
10. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA.

All these years, I thought Skinner raised his daughter in a box. Instead, he invented a climate-controlled crib for her, which, depending on your news source, was photographed in either Ladies’ Home Journal or Life, and caused readers who looked at the picture but didn’t read the article to think Skinner was experimenting on his daughter.
Most people are less interesting than we give them credit for.

The Economics of Suicide
Why trying to kill yourself may be a smart business decision.

Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don’t seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become “cheaper” after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it’s forced on you.

Suddenly the calculus of suicide has become even more complicated. Now attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn’t too successful. But this conclusion alarms suicidologists: Treating suicide as a logical act runs counter to everything they have been advocating for the past 40 years.

From the BBC: “The Andy Warhol Authentication Board has decreed that only artworks the artist was directly involved in producing can be considered a Warhol original, according to reports in the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph in the UK.”

Continue reading "Campbell's soup can still make money, right?"

Published on Oct. 21 by HarperCollins and accompanied by a publicity release optimistically anointing it “his most ambitious and controversial work yet,” “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950” is well timed to stir debate. At a moment of considerable East-West tension, when the phrase “clash of civilizations” has rarely had greater currency, Mr. Murray has issued what he says is a mathematically precise global assessment of human achievement, a “résumé” of the species in which Europeans like Shakespeare, Beethoven and Einstein predominate and in which Christianity stands out as a crucial spur to excellence. Equally provocative, he maintains that the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline. [More>]

I wonder if there’s some kind of tautology at work here: achievement is measured from the perspective of countries that have been most influenced by the West, and so the West is shown to have had the most achievements. Can achievement be distinguished from influence, and can influence exclude political, economic and historic circumstances? I haven’t read the book; maybe it has interesting answers to these questions.

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Among other things, this line of inquiry has led Loewenstein to collaborate with health experts looking into why people engage in unprotected sex when they would never agree to do so in moments of cool calculation. Data from tests in which volunteers are asked how they would behave in various ”heat of the moment” situations — whether they would have sex with a minor, for instance, or act forcefully with a partner who asks them to stop — have consistently shown that different states of arousal can alter answers by astonishing margins. ”These kinds of states have the ability to change us so profoundly that we’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person,” Loewenstein says. [more>]

more optical illusions.
The illustration (above) isn’t a particularly good example of the genre; usually the brain clicks back and forth between two visual interpretations, but here, the double-image merges into one, women and skull. It’s that failure that made me post this picture; the optical illusion seems to fail on purpose, because artists with the most simplistic message are often the most insistent. Vanity is the flip-side—the optical illusion—of an unstated and lonesome fixation on mortality. It’s banally morbid, but has an emotional effect on me; I don’t know why.

The Optical Illusion Exhibition, by the way, is only one of many exhibitions at the Neuroscience Art Gallery, which I found by reading Lee W. Potts’ The Eyes Have It.

For a long time— ever since I read the New Yorker article that featured it— I’ve been lusting after psychologist Paul Ekman’s FACS, a Facial Action Coding System. Unfortunately, though, I could never afford it; FACS costs US$260.00 plus shipping.
But now Ekman has summarized and repackaged FACS as METT, The Micro Expression Training Tool, and SETT, the Subtle Expression Training Tool, each selling for $30. Wired News has more information on Ekman and his new products.

Often, magazine profile writers claim that, unlike other profiles of a celebrity, their profile has found the key to unlocking that celebrity’s life. That key is always a generic abstract principle— courage, hard work, family trauma, etc. In the case of the NY Times Magazine profile of Sofia Coppola, the abstract principle is “good taste,” which the profile conceptualizes as effortless but trained, individualistic but group-oriented, and timeless but timely.
Here, some clips from the profile (left) and some commentary on the idea of taste, drawn from an old college paper of mine and a random website (right):

She has inherited many of [her father’s] talents — his taste, his ability to surround himself with talented friends, his ambition and entrepreneurship. [Marc Jacobs on Sofia:] “She loves fashion and music and art and film, and she is able to combine them in a way that all seems to be quite natural.”	In 18th century England, as the Early Modern yielded completely to the Modern, “taste” emerged as the new and dominant form of capital. And while taste foregrounds subjectivity to the detriment of traditional symbols of class standing, it has also become a manifestation of class standing that “naturalizes” class.
This day, and most days, she had carefully chosen all aspects of her life, detail by detail, in what appeared to be an effortless manner.	“Because it is misperceived as spontaneous and disinterested, taste functions as an effective instrument of class domination and reproduction. The definition of “good taste” is part of [the struggle] for the monopolization of symbolic violence, which arbitrarily imposes as natural and legitimate the evaluative standards and perceptual categories of the dominant class.
[Zoe Cassavetes on Sofia:] “I said, ‘Do you want to have dinner?’ She said, ‘O.K., do you want to go to Jean Lafitte?’ — which was a bistro on 58th Street, where I went all the time. When she said Jean Lafitte, we had an instant bond. We spoke the same language.” ”My first impression of Sofia,” Jonze recalled recently, ”was that she was quiet and graceful. And that she had taste, and when I say taste, I mean judgment in really subtle things. She always knew the feeling she wanted to convey in everything she did. And that’s true taste.”	“Mastering the complex and subtle nuances of good taste requires a long process of familiarization. Since this process is carried out primarily within the family and in elite schools, good taste only comes “naturally” to upper class children who have long been exposed to it. In everyday interaction, displays of a taste for “difficult” objects signal membership in the privileged class while a taste for common, vulgar, or less refined ones betrays membership in the dominated class.” [more>]

Robert McCrum, musing over film and literature’s return to the classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, asks,

How many stories are there to tell in the world? One school of thought holds that there are just 10 archetypal tales around which novelists spin more or less elegant variations. I remember being persuaded, years ago, that there were as few as seven basic plots at the heart of our literature, or was it three?

Or, my own question: What if we only recognize a narrative as a story if we’ve heard it called a story? Or: What if our definition of “story,” more prescriptive than descriptive, limits the number of stories that can be told? (But also, in defining something abstract, such as art or literature, aren’t we always prescribing its qualities?)

From Eclogues: “…you have to love an indie band which rhymes ‘Derrida’ and ‘Antarctica’, as Winnipeg’s The Weakerthans do in ‘Our Retired Explorer’. (’ Thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida/But I must get back to my dear Antarctica .’) The video for this song features a guy dressed up as Foucault…”

CREATIVE genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work. [more>]

For example, Koppel’s group found that the single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-”I”, ”you”, ”she”, ”myself”, or ”yourself” and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-”a,” ”the,” ”that,” and ”these”-as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like ”more” or ”some.” As one of the papers published by Koppel’s group notes, men are also more likely to use ”post-head noun modification with an of phrase”-phrases like ”garden of roses.”

It seems surreal, even spooky, that such seemingly throwaway words would be so revealing of our identity. But text-analysis experts have long relied on these little parts of speech. When you or I write a text, we pay close attention to how we use the main topic-specific words-such as, in this article, the words ”computer” and ”program” and ”gender.” But we don’t pay much attention to how we employ basic parts of speech, which means we’re far more likely to use them in unconscious but revealing patterns. Years ago, Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, unmasked Joe Klein as the author of the anonymous book ”Primary Colors,” partly by paying attention to words like ”the” and ”and,” and to quirks in the use of punctuation. ”They’re like fingerprints,” says Foster. [more>]

Churches are hospitals for sinners, rather than hotels for saints.

Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it’s a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence — and the functioning of the human brain in general. [more>]

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French Algerian Jew, studied under Althusser and “became the most famous member of a group called the nouveaux philosophes who turned against Marxism.”

He is rarely referred to by his full name, and is known instead as a brand: BHL. He is like an unfathomably French combination of Melvyn Bragg, J.K. Rowling and David Beckham. If Bernard-Henri Lévy didn’t exist, you couldn’t possibly invent him. [more>]

According to the soulmate calculator, I’ll have to meet 420,547 American single males between the ages of 18 and 45 before I can meet my mate.

Or, to speed up my search, I can put to use some of the site’s dating advice. To increase my “meeting frequency/exposure,” I should “give [my] lover framed pictures of [my]self and make him/her display them in his/her office.” Or, “If [I am] stuck in an unwanted relationship, [I should] refer to [my] lover as ‘a friend’ when he/she is not with [me].”

The site, solvedating.com, assumes that dating, like a mathematical problem, can be solved — as can love. Its author writes: “I have created a mathematical model that could predict and explain all human behavior pertaining to love.” Click here for the mathematical model. Or, read pieces of its resulting manifesto:

“Men prefer women who are shorter than them. Women prefer men taller than them. [That] explains why men prefer younger women and women prefer older men.”

“Very moody people will fall in love faster and more frequently. [That is the] reason why people use wine, scented candles, lingerie, and romantic music.”

“Crack or heroin addicts will have a harder time falling and being in love.”

Even though the applied math is eye-catchingly wrong, I don’t really think this site’s a joke.

From the site author’s personal homepage (previous link):

I have passed up some good women in the belief that she exists. Yes, they will make good wives and mothers. That’s like settling for a “B” or “C” grade. I need at least an “A”. After gathering their profiles and crutching their numbers in my wife model, I find that they are “not statistically significant”.

Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research

* A history of the senses has emerged, demonstrating how changes in values and assumptions have reshaped the nature of the sense of smell while, at the same time, diminishing its role in the sensory arsenal. Modern Westerners are now viscerally disgusted by odors people used to accept, because of changing ideas about cleanliness and the body.
* Various approaches to the history of emotion have shown how basic formulations have altered, with significant implications for the ways that emotions are handled by society and experienced individually. Indulgence in grief in 19th-century America turned, by the 1920s, into aversion, so much so that deep feeling denoted a need for therapy.
* Many diseases, as well, have at least partially been explained through cultural construction. The fascinating work on the emergence of modern anorexia nervosa has shown how changing beliefs about mother-daughter bonds promoted new forms of unconscious rebellion around food as a cherished family symbol, with new standards of beauty supplementing those reactions.
Such achievements, of the cultural turn at its best, clearly indicate that we should not reverse directions too fully, even as faddish interest declines. Initial sketches, as in the history of the senses, are still being elaborated, and there is much more to be learned. But limitations in the impact of the cultural turn also provide food for thought as we consider what should come next.

What type of brain do you have? According to Baron-Cohen’s theory, a person (whether male or female) has a particular ‘brain type’. There are three common brain types: the female brain, the male brain and the balanced brain. A key feature of the theory is that your sex cannot tell you which type of brain you have. Not all men have the male brain, and not all women have the female brain. The central claim of this new theory is only that on average, more males than females have a brain of type S, and more females than males have a brain of type E.

How male or female is your brain? Continue reading "the balanced brain"

New Scientist interviews Joe Griffin, “who says there is a way to lift depression in a day”:

How can you deal with serious depression in just a day?

The important thing is to know how depression is manufactured in the brain. Once you understand that, you can correct the maladaptive cycle incredibly fast. For 40 years it’s been known that depressed people have excessive REM sleep. They dream far more than healthy people. What we realised - and proved - is that the negative introspection, or ruminations, that depressed people engage in actually causes the excessive dreaming. So depression is being generated on a 24-hour cycle and we can make a difference within 24 hours to how a person feels. [more>]

The NovaDreamer, only $300, gives you unlimited lucid dreaming. This could be the end of nightmares as we know them (last link via quasimeta).

The cognitive differences start with basic sensory perception. In one study, Michigan’s Taka Masuda showed Japanese and American students pictures of aquariums containing one big fast-moving fish, several other finned swimmers, plants, rock and bubbles. What did the students recall? The Japanese spontaneously remembered 60% more background elements than did the Americans. They also referred twice as often to relationships involving background objects (“the little frog was above the pink rock”).[more>]

17th-century poet John Dryden [wrote]: “Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally’d.”

Just how they are allied, of course, is a matter of intense interest, to the mentally ill, their families and their doctors. An entire smorgasbord of relevant topics, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, theatre, musical and dance pieces — many of them performed by troupes whose members are themselves victims of mental illness — is now underway (until March 30) at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre.

Produced by the Workman Theatre Project and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, it’s being billed as the world’s largest festival of Madness and Arts. [more>]

Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I’m one of those people. Here’s why:

1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.
2. Mental illness can inhibit creation, but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.
3. Madness may be an interpretation of stimuli that fails to rely on conventional contexts for understanding stimuli. Art may be, in part, the process of making things new. Then, both rely on disassociating from convention— but one is a partial disassociation, still able to reference itself in terms of convention, and the other is a disassociation so complete, reference is impossible.

related entry: And, still not Van Gogh, May 25, 2002.

17th-century poet John Dryden [wrote]: “Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally’d.”

Just how they are allied, of course, is a matter of intense interest, to the mentally ill, their families and their doctors. An entire smorgasbord of relevant topics, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, theatre, musical and dance pieces — many of them performed by troupes whose members are themselves victims of mental illness — is now underway (until March 30) at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre.

Produced by the Workman Theatre Project and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, it’s being billed as the world’s largest festival of Madness and Arts. [more>]

Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I’m one of those people. Here’s why:

1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.
2. Mental illness can inhibit creation, but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.
3. Madness may be an interpretation of stimuli that fails to rely on conventional contexts for understanding stimuli. Art may be, in part, the process of making things new. Then, both rely on disassociating from convention— but one is a partial disassociation, still able to reference itself in terms of convention, and the other is a disassociation so complete, reference is impossible.

related entry: And, still not Van Gogh, May 25, 2002.

Two artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris approached me with their Wellcome-sponsored “On the Scent” project, which is an installation/performance project to investigate the potential of smell to trigger memories and emotions… . There will be four chambers: reminiscence, false scents, making scents and on the scent. “Reminiscence” will be a sort of olfactory museum of smells from different times and cultures, designed so that people will encounter a range of familiar and new odours depending upon their age, ethnicity and place they grew up in. [more>]

Get to the fourth paragraph.

The territorial imperative of modern specialists is a minor issue compared with the difficulty of grasping how the ancients understood emotion. The English word “anger” has connotations overlapping reasonably well with the Latin ira (as in “irate”). But things grow more complicated in classical Greek, which possesses an extremely rich vocabulary of anger, making firm distinctions among states we treat as similar.

No free-born Greek citizen would ever confuse cholos (experienced by women, children, the poor, and the sickly) with menis (the wrath of gods or heroes). The righteous indignation of nemesan had nothing in common with the experience of orge, a sort of full-body fury, impossible to conceal from others, in which violent retribution became an almost biological necessity.

The semantic differences imply social norms distinct from our own, and suggest, in turn, that angry feelings were experienced in a different way. [more>]

Curiously, boredom seems to be a modern ailment. The word didn’t even exist in the English language until after 1750, says Patricia M. Spacks, author of “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 1995). “If people felt bored before the late 18th century, they didn’t know it,” she writes.

Once the concept had a name, it became universal. Philosophers ruminated over it. Teenagers whined about it. And psychologists churned out a blizzard of research.

“When we are bored,” one scholar concluded, “our attitude toward time is altered, as it is in some dreamlike states. Time is endless, there is no distinction between past, present and future. There seems to be only an endless present.”

One of the more unexpected findings is that the best cure for boredom might be … more boredom.[more>]

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? If so, do you tell this person he is “too serious,” or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.[more>]

Random thoughts on this article:
1) I rarely get lonely, and so call myself an introvert. But I think loneliness is the healthy impulse to spend time with people. The more time I spend with people, the less depressed I am; my inability to feel loneliness is faulty wiring.
2) When I was younger, I felt I lost my “authenticity” by spending too much time with people. What was important were my thoughts regarding myself; these thoughts were my stability, and by putting myself in social situations, I threatened this stability by spending too little time self-reflecting. (Self-reflection had to feel totalizing; too much action and my reflection couldn’t contain it.)
3) People will hate me for saying this, but I think introversion may be an intellectual justification for (the, okay, yeah, normative idea of) social anxiety.

Catharine’s paper, “Monstrosity and Temporality: The Aesthetics of Futurity in
Kleist’s Penthesilea,” has been accepted by a Yale German grad. conference on Heroes and Villains. Die Glückwünsche (sp?).

University of Michigan researchers asked 900 high school students which Breakfast Club character they best identified with, and tracked the students into their early 20s. “As it happened, these thumbnail descriptions were remarkably helpful in charting their lives after high school and college, Eccles reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research.” I assume the study’s point is that people enact the type they’ve assigned themselves, rather than that people are smart enough to pick their right type.
The types, if you haven’t seen the Breakfast Club recently, are ‘Jock,’ ‘Princess,’ ‘Basket Case,’ ‘Brain’ and ‘Criminal.’ The study proudly reports that “One in four [of self-identified] Basket Cases said they had gone to a psychologist by age 24, compared with only 6 percent of the Jocks.” Because, as we know in the Midwest, only basket cases go to shrinks.
Related entry: High School Reunion

The seventh of the many philosophical systems of India recorded by Paul Deussen (Nachvedische Philosophie der Inder, 318) denies that the self can be an immediate object of knowledge, “because if our soul were knowable, a second soul would be required to know the first and a third to know the second.” The Hindus have no historical sense (that is, they stubbornly prefer to examine ideas rather than the names and dates of philosophers); but we know that this radical negation of introspection is about eight centuries old. Schopenhauer rediscovers it around 1843. “The knower himself,” he repents, “cannot be known precisely as such, otherwise he would be the known of another knower.” —Borges, “Time and J.W.Dunne,” Other Inquistions 1937-1952

Posted by nchicha on January 29, 2003, 11:29 PM | Comments (6)