Potpourri

Now that potpourri is legal in Colorado, it's only a matter of time before it is in California.  Anticipating that, here's a potpourri of links from 2013 and early this year that I didn't get to in thematic posts.

For Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Pirates fans, here's a great story about Pirates manager Clint Hurdle.  I can go on about what's wrong with Pittsburgh, pro sports and the lamentable level of American profundity but this is a Pittsburgh story that says a lot about what is best about the place.  There are just enough stories like Clint Hurdle to justify realizing that there's a certain special character about this city.  Some other reports note various characteristics, such as healthful living  here (though I hate to link to Queen Ariana's slave quarters) and articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series retrospective on the past 30 years: the increase in green spaces, and the overall change from "hell with the lid off" to a perennial "livable city."

                                   
Some years ago I read and "reviewed" the books that came out of several years of the Mind and Life conferences convened by the Dalai Lama, bringing together scientists and Buddhist practitioners to see what could be learned by both that went beyond the limits of each.   Brain scientists in particular were interested in meditative states attained by trained and veteran Buddhist meditators.  I've followed some of the ongoing work in this area since.

Most of what scientists have "proven" with brain imaging etc. simply confirmed what meditators observed.  But this study caught my attention: that meditation could influence gene expression.  How genes are "expressed" and interact in given situations is the new frontier of gene research, now that the prior belief that the presence or absence of particular genes determines everything is no longer tenable.  Gene expression may turn out to be much more important, in the still mysterious complexity of our beings in the world.

Research on some bones of Neanderthals made news late in 2013.  One conclusion: "The ancient DNA reveals a long history of Neanderthals interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia".  Another study of bones suggests that Neanderthals had the same vocal capacity for speech as modern humans.  These studies are among those that suggest a closer relationship among earlier human species.  As one of the researchers of the latter study said, "Many would argue that our capacity for speech and language is among the most fundamental of characteristics that make us human. If Neanderthals also had language then they were truly human, too."

This may remind us that we tend to err towards the extremes.  Either earlier human species (or other animals, or even other nationalities of humans) are entirely different, or they are entirely the same.  Our conception of our human ancestors seems to have been expressed and then set in cartoon stone with the Flintstones.  But there's much to learn about ourselves from a more accurate idea of real life, now and hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Paul Shepard in particular repeatedly made the point that the human history we know is a small fraction of human time--10 thousand out of hundreds of thousands of years.  That span of time is when we evolved, and yet we know little about how we responded to those early environments, and therefore in large measure what we actually are now.

Finally, a couple of stories in the political realm.  The first is an under-reported but significant story about the alleged complete lack of security for President Obama at the Nelson Mandela memorial.  Coming so close to the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, this was chilling.  And even more troublesome was the lack of attention it got.

The others are Cold War history revealed, sort of.   One story: For Nearly Two Decades the Nuclear Launch Code at all Minuteman Silos in the United States Was 00000000.  It's about how the military undermined the attempts by JFK and other "civilians" to install safeguards against accidental or premature launching of nuclear missiles, and ipso facto, apocalypse.  Though this particular revelation has since been disputed, it is of a piece with others, for example, in recent books on JFK and/or the Cuban Missile Crisis.  General Jack D. Ripper was not entirely fictional.

Another looks at the Soviet side, and a submarine commander who "should" have but did not start a nuclear exchange.  As we look back we ask, do we actually think we are less crazy now?  Look around.  What we are is more complacent.  Assassination, even nuclear war are still present possibilities, and we ignore them at our peril.  We should read these stories and reflect, because a huge element in our complacency is not understanding what these things would really mean.

Last but not lease---happy birthday, Kath!

On Dreaming Up Daily

When we consider our forms of entertainment, we really ought to include dreaming. There is this theory--which I arrived at independently but which apparently goes back at least as far as Freud--that says the function of dreaming is to keep us asleep. To do that, dreams become fascinating and powerful--imbuing images and scenes with hyperreality and infusing them with joy, or keeping us gripped by strangeness, anxiety, fear, horror, and keeping us involved with surprise, dangers, opportunities, tasks and complexities. In other words, by keeping us entertained. We're so involved that we don't want to wake up, so the body and brain get a little more time for rest and self-maintenance.

I'm prompted then to wonder, which came first: the dream picture, or the picture on the cave wall? The story told, or the story dreampt?

As to where dreams come from, or what they consist of--we can be pretty sure of at least one source of subject matter: memory. We dream in the form of pictures and stories (as well as other forms perhaps not so easily named), and the content often includes memories. Dreams sometimes seem to recover memories we didn't know we had. Dreams certainly combine pieces of memory, by putting together people from different times and places in our pasts, for example.

We know of course that amnesiacs can't remember the past. But did you know that they typically can't conceive of a future? That was a mystery that inspired some brain research, including a new study which shows that, at least in some basic ways, remembering the past and envisioning a future are interrelated.

This study seems to show this in a limited way, especially focused on the body's imagining (or imaging) a personal future--perhaps on "daydreams" of a personal future. But it does suggest a possible answer to the conundrum of why people can't envision a future strongly enough to work towards it (if it's a good one) or prepare to deal with it (if it's a possible future disaster, for instance) or forestall it, so it won't happen or won't be as bad as it could be without preparation.

Memories can be very strong, as can dreams. But we do seem to have a built-in means of anestitizing them, called forgetting--which can mean forgetting how something feels as well as whether it happened. This could well be a way to keep our attention available to present threats and opportunities. But if we forget too much--even too much of how we felt, and how an event affected everything--we can't imagine the full meaning of something like that being repeated in the future.

Social commentators note that we seem to be a society that doesn't focus much on the future, and also has little concrete sense of the past. In fact, amnesia is a term they sometimes use. Maybe it's the BUY NOW mindset of a hyper-commercial culture. Maybe it's the tense social ethic of keeping up with the instantaneous--like all the news media hysterically pounding away at one story for a news cycle or two, and then forgetting it completely and moving on to the next absolutely important thing.

Maybe it's even more the constant barrage of information, leaving us no time to do anything but cope with the most demanding, and sort and classify the rest. Overload can obliterate an internal sense of identity, and/ or cut us off from real engagement with others. Overload can shut down memory and numb imagination and yet also blunt our appreciation of the fullness of the present moment. We've got amnesia in all directions.

Well, one of the lessons of life may well be that we're always in over our heads. Dreaming may well be a device to help us out in that regard. But maybe we need to learn from the show as well as let it entertain us. Memory, the moment and envisioning the future are probably all interrelated, even as functions, as skills. Being conscious of that may help us in many ways. So in addition to whatever discipline gets you deeply into the present moment, and whatever time and space you give your memories, don't forget to dream up...and do it daily.

Captain Future's Bookshelf

The Emotion Machine
Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Mind
By Marvin Minsky

Science may begin with wonder and strives ultimately for understanding, but as a practical matter, science is interested in how to do things. Physics formulated a few simple laws (governing how falling bodies behave, for example), which enabled engineering and technology to develop.

So when some scientists set out to create intelligent machines -- "machines to mimic our minds" -- Marvin Minsky writes, they looked for simple laws that govern how our brains work. They didn't find them, he argues, because our brains are "complicated machinery" and we need "to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events." Humans adapt to different environments and situations because our brains are resourceful -- we have lots of different ways to solve problems, and if one doesn't work, we can switch to another. This book is about what Minsky believes those processes are.

continued at The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

The Heart of Light

Western science journeys there, but maybe is still missing the point

From Wired

The Dalai Lama was in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, meeting with President Bush, giving a public talk on the subject of global peace -- and learning about meditation from Western scientists.

Wearing the traditional scarlet robes of a Tibetan monk and a bright orange eye shade emblazoned with a golf-company logo, the 70-year-old leader of Tibetan Buddhism listened intently as researchers at a conference on science and meditation described a growing body of research on the effects of meditation on the brain and the body.

The conference is the latest in a series of dialogues between the Dalai Lama and Western scientists that have taken place since 1987. Organized by the Mind & Life Institute, the conversations were private -- mostly taking place in the Dalai Lama's living room in India -- until 2003, when they were held in front of an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists present at this month's meeting included Richard Davidson, a Harvard University-trained neuroscientist who has done pioneering research on Buddhist monks, and Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor who studies the effects of stress on the body.


They told the Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and an audience of 2,500 about recent experiments showing meditation can strengthen the immune system, prevent relapse in people with depression and lower cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone associated with stress.

All this is pushing the envelope of contemporary neuroscience. "It came as a great surprise to (scientists) that there were such clear neural correlates of meditative states," said Wolf Singer, the director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, who also addressed the conference.

It's also pushing buttons for some scientists. The Dalai Lama's D.C. trip included a controversial keynote address to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Calling the Dalai Lama a "religious symbol with a controversial political agenda," a number of neuroscientists urged the group to cancel his talk.

An online petition opposing the talk turned into a forum for neuroscientists on both sides of the issue to weigh in.

The research is taking neuroscientists into realms not often studied in Western labs. Davidson's team at the University of Wisconsin, for example, is exploring what states like compassion or happiness look like in the brain.

His research shows that Buddhist monks doing a meditation that evokes feelings of compassion exhibit very specific changes in a part of the brain called the amygdala. While much of Davidson's research has been on Buddhist monks with decades of meditation experience, he has also found significant changes in beginning meditators.

Davidson and another conference speaker, Jon Kabat-Zinn, taught employees at a biotech firm a form of meditation called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. After eight weeks, the researchers reported that workers who had received the meditation training had a stronger immune-system response than control subjects, based on their antibody response to a flu vaccination.

While Western researchers are exploring the effects of meditation on physical health, Alan Wallace, a leading Tibetan scholar and one of the Dalai Lama's translators, pointed out that when faced with physical ailments, Tibetans traditionally turned to doctors or healers, not to meditation.

The purpose of meditation, added the Dalai Lama, is not to cure physical ailments, but to free people from emotional suffering.

You can find my report on books resulting from previous Mind and Life conferences here.

The Story of the Future is a Story with Soul

Star Trek is the example, but the future is the story. Why is it that stories like Star Trek (made by coffee shop novelists and Hollywood producers) are the visions of the future we remember, and not the considered forecasts of scientists and professional futurists?

Stories in general were denigrated as fancy lying, until recent decades, when a prominent psychologist and a philosopher found they could unlock empathy and inspire moral imagination, even in medical and law students.

Others began to see even more basic functions for story. Neuroscientists realized that human memories are stored in stories, and soon, that all thinking involves stories. "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought," writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as well as a Professor of English. " Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining."

"Knowledge is stories," wrote Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Narrative is explanation, and explanations are narratives. So in the age of science, writes William Irwin Thompson, "Science is the storytelling of our time. By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here."

But not all stories are created equal. As we know, some stories are better than others. That becomes clear when we go back to the future.

MORE HERE

The Daily Quote

"The great revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."
William James

The Daily Quote

If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
Emerson Pugh