making order out of chaos

I woke up at 4:04 this morning, rolled over and tapped the following message out in an email to myself:

Making order out of chaos or chaos out of order. Why do humans attempt to systematise everything? We like to feel in control, but how much control do we really have?

Riiiiight...

I've a long-standing love affair with the idea of perception as reality (was sort of my unofficial motto for a while) and the fine, fuzzy line between philosophy and neuroscience. Yesterday, I skimmed an article about whether you can know something without believing in it. The study gave as a rather lacklustre example a student who believed they knew nothing about history, but when asked about dates of important events could rattle off a surprising amount: hence the student knew facts about history without 'believing' in them.

I suppose this translates into ideas of perception and control in that humans tend to feel happier and more satisfied if their self-perception leads them to believe they have a sense of control over their own lives. A well-known example of this comes from Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin's 1976 study whereby nursing home residents were given plants, but only some were given the opportunity to water and look after them.  The residents who were in control of caring for their plants lived longer than those who had no control over the care of their plants. The psychological sense of control was enough to result in an apparent effect on the physical health of the residents.

It's quite remarkable that a sense of control is enough to make us healthier and happier, even if this sense is simply a perceptory illusion. We seek order and control as intuitively and naturally as a falling cat seeks to manoeuvre itself to land on all four feet. We're more likely to seek out or to create a pattern as a means of preserving this feeling of control, even if those patterns are illusory.

From a neurological point of view, it seems better to maintain this illusion of control as it contributes to a happier, healthier individual, but philosophically I find the whole premise uncomfortable. It's sort of analogous to the idea that ignorance is bliss, I suppose. How helpful (from a philosophical standpoint, anyway) is a perception of control if it's only a conceit? I don't know. I'm still working it out. Or at least, evidenced by my 4am sleepy emails to self, my subconscious is...

monsieur, you are a rake, and you shall get nowhere with me

Read an interesting little pop-sci piece this morning on new research in language and the brain. The general swing of the thing was that the more we learn about the brain, the more a strict adherence to localisation of function looks obsolete. I was reading about the argument posited by Friedemann Pulvermuller at Cambridge that certain functions - in this instance language processing - are far more complex and that simply reducing responsibility to the infamous Broca and Wernicke areas provides an incomplete picture. Indeed, Pulvermuller suggests that around two thirds of the brain is involved in language processing. The idea of language being a whole brain experience means that we also understand language in a sensory capacity: when we think of words that have to do with the mouth - licking or eating or kissing - we're also activating areas of our brain that are involved with controlling our mouths, not just our language. Reading the following sentence stopped me in my tracks: we don't just understand words, we feel them. It's so obvious, of course, but having such a clear-cut explanation connects all the dots. Feeling words, not just understanding them - I think this has long been the assumption underpinning my entire view of aesthetics - but I'm not sure whether I consciously realised it until this morning.

What I actually wanted to write about - The ROH production of The Rake's Progress I saw on Wednesday evening - ties perfectly into this idea of feeling words, not just understanding them. I love most genres of music and I especially love going to see live music, but there are few musical experiences where I actually feel moved by the words, moved by the music, as I do with opera. It's not a given and nothing that you can take for granted - not all operas have this unique power though, or at least not for me - but I always find it amusing when my friends say they don't like opera. It's like saying you don't like music, for there are as many different kinds of opera as there are other kinds of music.

I'm still finding out what I like in opera. I love Mozart and Handel, of course, though I'm not such a big fan of the bel canto composers and I didn't really think I was into the German composers, but both Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander rocked my world last year, hence the still figuring it out. My general attitude, though, is to see everything that comes to town, so off I went to The Rake's Progress, mind open.

I won't say that I don't like Stravinsky, but the score was far from music to my ears. And a libretto written by Auden?! While I've written before about how I feel Auden lacks aurality - after my early-morning reading maybe what I really meant is that his words don't make me feel the way I want poetry to make me feel. Auden's words are just words: sometimes they're words that make me laugh or words that make me think, but they are rarely words that move me. Auden's lack of power combined with Stravinsky's 'difficult' music results in exactly the sort of thing I don't want from an opera. Having said that, I can see why Stravinsky and Auden work well together - if you're into that whole atonal, unresolved, jarring sort of modernist music. Personally, I'm not. At least not at the opera, when it's not what I expect - don't get me wrong, though: a bit of well-timed Steve Reich is glorious stuff.

Maybe the performance could have been rescued by a super-human cast, but I thought - apart from Kyle Ketelsen's lovely baritone Nick Shadow - that everyone was horrendously weak. I was surprised that these people were singing on stage at the ROH - no dynamism, no power, poor projection - ouch. That said, the staging was witty and the production was surprisingly funny, but whether this is the right attitude or not, I go to the opera to be moved, to experience those sublime overwhelming sensations that only come from this bizarre combination of human voice and orchestral accompaniment, and for me the music should come first. Unfortunately, visual trickery can disguise neither shoddy performances nor a general lack of feeling.

to sleep, perchance to dream

from the Fallen Princesses series by Dina Goldstein

This is why it's never a good idea to spend the weekend reading only books about neuroscience and Lucan's Pharsalia.

Last night's epic dream:

Things started off innocently enough. I was driving an old beat up car down a dusty, deserted freeway in Phoenix when I pulled the car over onto the side of the road. I got out of the car and walked down a hill, whereupon Phoenix turned into a huge lake in the middle of a tropical jungle. I crossed the lake on a series of primary-coloured plastic stepping-stone box things until they began to crumble into the lake and I had to dive in and swim. Obviously, I couldn't swim with my flip-flops on so I took them off and set them on one of the crumbling boxes while stopping to save a turtle who was trapped inside the box. After swimming for quite some time, it turned out that the jungle lake was actually a water feature at Claridge's (go figure). As I was swimming out of the lake, a bell hop ran up to me carrying my discarded flip-flops and told me to be careful that no one saw me in the lake - it was a protected environment and he didn't want to piss of the eco-people staying in the hotel as part of a big scientific conference. He also mentioned that if the eco-people knew I was swimming in the lake, my funding would be pulled. He gave me a white tuxedo blazer to wear and I began to go about my merry way, when I thought - fuck it, I'm here - so I turned about and went into Claridge's for lunch. Once seated, two preposterously obnoxious children proceeded to terrorise me until I pawned them off on the very charming couple sitting at the table beside me.

After lunch, I went back outside. The lake and Claridge's had disappeared only to be replaced by a landscape resembling the war-torn Afghani countryside, though it turned out to be a video game. Of course in this video game world, civil war was raging and the video game people had managed to trick a group of real world people into entering the video game 'to play' at war. All the men had gone off to fight and the video game women were explaining to the real world women that it would soon be their turn to fight. Some of the real world women began complaining that it wasn't their world so why should they have to fight. At this, the ringleader lady of the video game people turned into a giant jelly baby and knocked six shades of Hades into the women who had been complaining. The ringleader lady kept calling me Ingrid Bergman and asked me what I was going to do, whereupon I made a rousing speech about fighting for liberty and honour. I said that even if we weren't fighting for our own freedom were were still fighting for the cause of liberty and that there was nothing more honourable than the fight for freedom. I screamed 'vivre libre ou mourir' at the top of my lungs and we all ran off over the hill to fight.

Mental.

the science of concentration

Just read this interesting Tierney article on the science of concentration over at the New York Times. Super short summary is that multi-tasking is a lie, our brains cannot fully process two things at once; attention is not really about attention, it is about selection.

It's why I'm now going to turn off my internet, put in some ear plugs (sexy!) - so that I can get some work done in this noisy Edinburgh coffee shop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tier.html?_r=1&global-home