Michael Symmons Roberts on Science and Poetry

Michael Symmons Roberts talks to New Scientist (2007) on science and poetry.

'The Box' (poem read in the above video) from Corpus (2004):

In case of catastrophe,
winter can be recreated
from this skeleton of leaf.

All the bitter subtleties
of crab apple are tangled
here, as is the DNA

of dew-point calibration
of the second when a tree
lets go, the recipe for clouds

on the horizon like a new
born mountain range,
like north itself.

And with the leaf,
this relic box contains
a hair curl from a child

to reconstruct humanity,
though all the lights and currents
of his soul are lost to us.

Spores, antennae, claws,
the box will hold all evolution.
It will be full and empty.

More of his poems from The Poetry Archive.

Jonah Lehrer on Porn

The Neuroscience of Porn:

Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

Further information: Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind 'the great leap forward' in human evolution by V.S. Ramachandran

The STANDUP Project

The STANDUP project (System To Augment Non-speakers' Dialogue Using Puns): Collaborative project between the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, funded by EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). The project began in October 2003 and ran until March 2007.

The Gay Brain

The Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström research on cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects has been generating a lot of online discussion.

Neuroanthropology has more extensive links and discussion:

Trying to shoehorn sexuality into one socially and politically charged box just does not work well from an anthropological point of view. As one example, men in some cultures go through different life stages, and in some of those stages homosexuality is the normal way of being, whereas at other times heterosexual relations are the norm. .... On the neuroplasticity and experience/behavior side, this type of approach generally leaves out something every consenting adult knows. Sex matters! The experience of a sexual encounter helps shape our desires, our pleasures, our associations.

Reviewing Cognitive Enhancers

Which Cognitive Enhancers Really Work: Brain Training, Drugs, Vitamins, Meditation or Exercise?: Brilliant entry that discusses in brief current research in cognitive enhancement techniques such as the popular Nintendo DS brain training softwares, drugs, nutritional supplements, meditation and exercise.

The End Doesn't Justify the Memes

Mind Hacks lists two TED talks on memes:

• Daniel C Dennett on 'the awesome power of memes'.


• Susan Blackmore on 'memes and temes'.

Months ago, reading up on this area of study, memetics seemed worth considering (especially Blackmore's passionate explanations). But after reading Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (2000), a collection of essays by experts from different fields on this new discipline, edited by Richard Aunger. I was quite disappointed that in Dennett's foreword he says 'I am not entirely persuaded by any of the chapters in this book'. (vii)

Of the nine contributors to the collection five object to the idea forwarded by memeticists:

• Rosaria Conte makes a most polite assessment of meme literature using the social cognitive perspective. She praises advantages of the field and describes some disadvantages but focuses on one unsatisfactory aspect: the conceptualization of the requirements of memetic processes.



• Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson conclude that memes are not 'a universal acid' (one of Dennett's metaphors in Darwin's
  Dangerous Idea) and assert that 'population thinking is a better mousetrap'. (161)



• Dan Sperber's objection has to do with memeticists not having empirical evidence to support their claims that '...in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties for other elements of culture that they replicate.' (173) He ends by saying 'imitation, even if not ubiquitous, is of course well worth investigating. The grand project of memetics, on the other hand, is misguided'. (173) But there's hope in studying imitation.



• Maurice Bloch puts forward the previous arguments against the diffusionists by American and British critics:
  
  
  1. Memes like traits don't spread like a virus but are 'continually and completely made and unmade during communication' (I still have to read more on this) and;
  
  
  2. Culture is not a single isolable type which means that transmission of it is of many types. (201)
  
  
  He simply thinks that memes don't exist and Blackmore (whose 'The meme's eye view' essay argues strongly for memes) hasn't presented convincingly her case.



• To this Adam Kuper agrees by concluding that '[memetecists have] yet to deliver a single original and plausible analysis of any cultural or social process'. (187)

Coriana Six provides a more thorough assessment of the collection (December 2007).

In Blackmore's The Meme Machine and most of her articles found online, it is easy to take Bloch's side. Blackmore is quite passionate about her study but most of her research is speculative. She has an article in Aesthetica Magazine (July 2006) called Memes, creativity and consciousness:

We are the meme machines that culture is using for its own propagation. No wonder the planet is in such dire straights; we have unwittingly taken on this parasitic new replication system and it is spreading all over the globe, using up all the natural resources. This is how I became interested in the role of art and creativity. We may think that human consciousness is what makes us creative, but on this new view, all creativity is an evolutionary process. Just as elephants and the AIDS virus were novel creations of genetic evolution, so all of music, literature, and art are novel creations of memetic evolution. We human meme machines copy old memes, mix them up in our heads, and spew out new combinations--the most creative of us being the best copiers and recombiners of memes.

Reading this should convince any artist that memeticists like Blackmore 'overstand' the creative processes. In his recent Enlightenment lecture at the University of Edinburgh, Steven Pinker was asked his opinion of memes. His reply: after 32 years, the study of memes has yielded no great progress. In How the Mind Works (1997) he says: '...a complex meme does not arise from the retention of copying errors...[but] because some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity, and composes or writes or paints of invents something'. (209)

---

Mind Hacks also reports that in 2006 Dennett had a falling out with fellow Darwinian Michael Ruse.

Some of the exchange can be found in When evolutionists attack, where Ruse says:

'I am a hardline Darwinian and always have been very publicly when it cost me status and respect--in fact, I am more hardline than you [Dennett] are, because I don't buy into this meme bullshit but put everything--especially including ethics--in the language of genes.'

The Study of Memory

The origins of the study of memory: Focusing on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus. This begins Cognitive Daily's History Week entries (inspired by this fun challenge for science bloggers).

[other History Week entries] A baby's psychological development at six months | Gestalt-o-mania

Famous People and Their Contributions to the Study of Memory: Featuring Ivan Pavlov and his famous dog, Karl Lashley, Donald Hebb, and William James.

Darwin a Plagiarist?

Mail-boat record 'proves Darwin stole his original ideas from a Welsh scientist’: 'Professor Gaastra’s great contribution was that he was able to show that two crucial letters written by [Alfred Russel] Wallace between October 1856 and March 1858 arrived in Britain long before Darwin admitted they had. Wallace’s ideas appeared in Darwin’s work soon afterwards.'

Darwin 'ripped off' theory of evolution: According to author Roy Davies, former head of factual programming for BBC Wales, new evidence demonstrates that Charles Darwin stole his theory of evolution from a Welsh scientist working in Indonesia.

The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime:

[The book] examines how Darwin struggled for years in scientific dead-ends until he was presented with the solution to the greatest scientific puzzle of his day by a naïve naturalist collecting beetles in a tropical jungle. So began the conspiracy by which eminent scientists promoted the ideas of Darwin ahead of those of Wallace in order to achieve ever-lasting fame for their greatest friend. Using extensive research about contemporary shipping time tables and Darwin's own correspondence, the author challenges the commonly-held belief that Darwin scored a scientific breakthrough when in reality he used another man's insights for his own benefit, and committed one of the greatest scientific crimes in history. [This book] is a true story about deceit and deception and stands as an outstanding metaphor for the idea of survival of the fittest.

The Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund: 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the Darwin and Wallace’s discovery of natural selection, yet although this is probably the most important anniversary in the field of biology (and beyond), we are aware of very few events planned to mark this momentous occasion!

Pride and Prejudice...and Autism

So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice (2007):

[This book] looks at eight seemingly diverse characters in Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, who display autistic traits. These characters--five in the Bennet family and three in the extended family of the Fitzwilliams--have fundamental difficulties with communication, empathy and theory of mind. Perhaps it is high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome that provides an explanation for some characters' awkward behaviour at crowded balls, their frequent silences or their tendency to lapse into monologues rather than truly converse with others.

Book review by Michael Giffen: There's a danger when we apply clinical disorders to persons or characters we don't understand or don't like. Look at what critics who never knew Patrick White did to him and his novels.

High among the frontier problems between psychoanalysis and criticism, C.S. Lewis notices some critics use psychoanalysis to infer the pathology of an author from his or her work, which results not in literary criticism but in pathological biography.

Dan Sperber on Cultural Transmissions

An Epidemiology of Representations (July 2005): A talk with Dan Sperber.

Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.

Neurology of the Arts

Neurology of the Arts: Painting, Music, Literature (April 2004) edited by F Clifford Rose: This book is the first attempt to provide a basis for the interaction of the brain and nervous system with painting, music and literature....The section on literature relates to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle, James Joyce, and the poetry of one of England's most famous neurologists, Henry Head.

[pdf] The Neurology of Art--The Example of Giorgio de Chirico by Julien Bogousslavsky:

Blanke and Landis emphasize how a neurological condition undoubtedly influenced the work of one of the greatest modern artists. Since a disease may help understand artistic features, and art may help understand the manifestations of diseases, further studies in the 'neurology of art' would certainly be interesting and useful.

Style follows content: On the microgenesis of art perception (November 2007) by M Dorothee Augustin, Helmut Leder, Florian Hutzler, and Claus-Christian Carbon: While effects of content were present at all presentation times, effects of style were traceable from 50 ms onwards. The results show clear differences in the microgenesis of style and content, suggesting that in art perception style follows content.

Pinker in Edinburgh

Steven Pinker at the University of Edinburgh's Enlightenment lecture series: In his lecture, Prof Steven Pinker will explore an example of each: everyday metaphor as a window into human cognition; swearing and taboo words as a window into human emotion; and indirect speech-veiled threats and bribes, polite requests, and sexual come-ons as a window into human relationships. 6 June at McEwan Hall.

[video] Pinker's TED Talks lecture on The Stuff of Thought (July 2005): In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds--and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

(Thanks to aliiis for the announcement.)

The Most Important Six Seconds of 1969

The Amen Break (2006): In the year [1969], an American soul group called The Winstons released a seven-inch single called 'Amen, Brother'. Little did drummer GC Coleman know that the eight-bar drum 'break' in the middle of the track would far surpass him in fame and acquire an identity of its own.

The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio by Michael S Schneider: I became intrigued when I saw an image of the audio waves themselves because I immediately recognized the Golden Ratio in the structure of its timing. And I was surprised to find an even deeper relationship to the structure of the human body.

[via gerunding]
Nate Harrison explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop (2004): This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the 'Amen Break. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music--a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures.

[video] Compelling 'Amen Break' variation is Vic Acid, a Squarepusher and Aphex Twin collaboration--the music of This is hell (2006), an animated video clip by Paco Rico.

Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

[via Cosmic Variance, poem] Sonnet 64 by William Shakespeare:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam the Second Law by Frank L Lambert: This web page is for individuals in the humanities and the arts or business and the legal professions so that they can sense the remarkable importance of activation energies in understanding the working of our second-law world.

Two Cultures: Websites relating to the Snow-Leavis Controversy.

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure by Martin Portner. The key principles:

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure by Martin Portner. The key principles:

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

Nice Guys Finish How?

Why Nice Guys Finish Last: Manliness 101 suggests dropping the 'nice guy' act and 'getting with the programme'. Finding a woman should not be the sole purpose of your time. Act naturally as a man and don’t perceive women as better than you, and the good relationships will come.

[via infoshop] Nice Guys Finish First (1987): Richard Dawkins discusses selfishness and cooperation.

Parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Foreign Policy's Public Intellectuals

The Top 100 Public Intellectuals: From the list created of a hundred names compiled by Foreign Policy, the public is asked to vote for five intellectuals. They are some of the world's most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights.

Here is a personal shortlist:

• Noam Chomsky: Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955...a groundbreaking linguist and a prominent critic of US foreign policy.


• Richard Dawkins: Seminal 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, explores the role played by genes in the evolutionary process. He may be better known today for the criticisms of religion and 'intelligent design' theories.


• Daniel C Dennett: Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts University, where his life's work is building a 'philosophy of mind' to explain how human consciousness works.


• Umberto Eco: His dense novels...are a dizzying blend of philosophy, biblical analysis, and arcane literary references. An expert in the burgeoning field of semiotics, he is president of the Advanced School of Humanist Studies at the University of Bologna.


• Douglas Hofstadter [not in list]: College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His rsearch focuses on consciousness, creativity, at the nature of thinking.


• James Lovelock: His great contribution to science is the famous Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth can be thought of as a giant organism.


• Steven Pinker: Johnstone family professor at Harvard University and author of seven books. A frequent essayist, he focuses on language and cognition in his research.


• V.S. Ramachandran: Directs the Center for Brain and Cognition and at the University of California, San Diego. Dawkins calls him the 'Marco Polo of neuroscience' for his work on behavioral neurology.


• E.O. Wilson: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and naturalist, [he] argues that human behaviour can largely be explained by biology. He is Pellegrino university professor emeritus of entomology at Harvard University.

Heterophenomenology and Qualia

Heterophenomenology is Daniel C Dennett's third-person approach to the science of consciousness. It's similar to a method that readers of literature use to believe, detail, and interpret the actions, thoughts, and characters of what they read to form their definitive version of the work of art.

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005) is Dennett's later book on heterophenomenology.

An End to Qualia? Dennett's Defense of Heterophenomenology (Spring 2007): A short review: Dennett goes on the offensive against the 'new mysterians', those who argue that the problem of consciousness is fundamentally unsolvable or requires an explanatory framework outside that used by observational science.

The Dialectic of Narrative: The Pretextual Paradigm of Discourse in the Works of Madonna

[via neatorama] The Postmodernism Generator: Written by Andrew C Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (1996): Alan Sokal's now famous parody essay that was published in Social Text.

More papers on the 'affair' here.

The Abuse of Science: An Interview with Alan Sokal:

'But our dispute is not primarily with philosophers of science. We're more worried about the gross abuses and gross exaggerations of these ideas which originated in philosophy of science but which have trickled down in vulgarised form to anthropology and cultural studies. People just talk about the incommensurability of paradigms as if it were an established fact.'

[wiki] Sokal affair.