Monthly Archives: November 2011

Join me on the Empanada Dreamboat

Posted in academia, beliefs, Burning Man, consumerism, language, neuroscience, NLP, philosophy, poetry by

Courtesy of Ester Harlow

In my previous post “I (verb)  my views of (noun), open to (noun)” I talked about Jonah Lehrer’s chapter on Gertrude Stein in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and how language has this built-in structure in our brains. Sentences make sense, even if they seem nonsensical, as long as they follow the basic grammatical rules.  I continue my intellectual crush on Lehrer, by examining it from a different angle.

One thing that seems to mark children’s books is flirting with the absurd. Think about the images and the context of Dr. Seuss. He ties up his images and underlying message (often telling children to think outside the box and that anything is possible) with a nice rhyme structure, so that it seems easy to swallow and quite innocent. The concepts and images in The Lorax, or Horton Hears a Who are often absurd, but Seuss keeps them within the defined language structure so we accept them. From Oh! the Places You Will Go:

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.

That is the brilliance of Dr. Seuss. He is teaching children independence and to question everything, under the guise of a children’s book. Children are little half-baked biscuits at the age they read Dr. Seuss, and these messages are being ingrained in their concept of reality. By the time we are adults, we remember Dr. Seuss fondly, but all the limiting beliefs about what is possible is ingrained in us too, and hard to shake.

I’ve been reading into the concept of hyperreality, the postmodernist idea that our consciousness cannot discern reality from fantasy. Umberto Eco uses Disneyland as a prime example. (For the record, I am fascinated with Disney, and love it. I completely respect Walt Disney and his ability to separate the dreamer and the critic). Disneyland is this artificial world, made to feel more realistic than real life. Think about the documentaries Disney creates – documentaries on nature, chimpanzees, etc. We go and watch this documentary that tells us what nature is like, instead of going and experiencing it. Disney has created an illusion of what reality is, and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality, with its carefully edited footage.

The interesting thing is that although Disney is supposed to be for children, adults love Disneyland.  Adults go to Disneyland and remember the wonder and awe they felt as children, exploring worlds for the first time. They reject reality (with paying bills, horrible bosses, poverty, war, crime, etc) for this illusion of reality, and want to revert back to being children when none of those horrible things existed yet.

At my first year at Burning Man (2010) I thought about writing children’s stories, for adults. I envisioned each part with an drawing explaining it, like in children’s stories. I don’t know what these mean – I was just writing fast, writing the first thing that popped in my head without thinking – of if they are “good,” or even make sense, but they amuse me.  Gertrude Stein’s experiments on the structure of language reminded me of my own thought experiment. These are a few of the stories I wrote:

Three days go by before Clara realizes she’s still hiding under the bed.  The dust devils led her down to their lair, lavishly furnished with alabaster staircases and canvas doorknobs, Knock one and a half times to enter through the clock, but the duck doesn’t wait for pencil nubs, since the horseteeth-banker stole all the post-its.  Yellow post-its are for things you are supposed to forget, while lucid zephyr post-its time travel to the doors of exotic Cincinnati, where a polar bear wearing diapers will steal your wallet.

And:

Monkeys are close to whales since they both have 10 tales. Each tale has its own stripes, but white stripes blend in with the porcelain toilet sink, heavy with toxins and kool-aids, razors ready to crash and burn before outing Aunt Marge for spiking the holiday raisin razor.  Spiky sharp razor teeth are the only way to cut through cream cheese and apathy, rubies being better for dilution of the watch.

And (my favorite):

Green is the color of gold honey, dripping slowly along powerlines and grasshoppers, needling for needlework, working wonders.  The man with the snowy beard sipped a latte on his soapbox, but alas, they voted him off the island, and sent him adrift, floating on copper coins and rainbow sherbet, trickling down in oily splendor, flags ablaze, mushroom caps on chaps, galloping down the empanada dream boat.

What is interesting is that I wrote those before I even thought about hyperreality and adults wanting to revert back to children, rejecting their own reality. I guess, being at Burning Man,  I was tapped in to what our society is feeling now in this postmodernist phase. What is Burning Man except a rejection of our current state of society, and a desire to create a new one?  The difference between Disneyland and Burning Man though is that Disneyland seems to be spoonfeeding us only the good, capitalizing on our desire to revert back to children when the world seemed good and easy, without offering ways to bridge that gap between reality and the reality it creates. Burning Man seems to celebrate the inner weirdo, in a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking explosion of art, creativity, and self-expression, but doesn’t necessarily give us the structure and discipline needed to implement ideas into action in the real world. Many people go to Burning Man, let loose for a week, and then return to their corporate jobs, still working within the same reality that they wanted to escape. The key to real change is by implementing what we learn from these escapes into our notions of reality now. No one else is going to build your bridge for you.

What if someone tapped in to society’s desire to revert back to childhood, and created children’s stories for adults that re-wired their brains into thinking of ways to solve the problems that they are trying to escape from in reality? What if I did that?  Of course, Burning Man shows us that people are hedonistic creatures, drawn to pleasure.

As Gertrude Stein asked, “Why should a sequence of words be anything but pleasure?”

Hunter S. Thompson Likes Mermaids. Maybe.

Posted in film, literature by

The other night I went and saw “The Rum Diary,” the new screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s book. Johnny Depp, when he was hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson for the making of the movie ”Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” actually stumbled across the manuscript that the author had written when he was 22. There is one scene in “The Rum Diary,” where the character Paul Kemp is paddling around in a boat in the ocean at night, and this girl, the love interest, pops up from the water while she is having a moonlight swim. Paul Kemp says “I thought you were a mermaid.”  This scene struck me. I realized that I had seen this image of the mermaid, this archetype, in Thompson’s writing before.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there is this one line that goes:

“It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”

To me, mermaids are seductive creatures, but not as seductive and dangerous as sirens. I read about what the mermaid archetype traditionally symbolizes in a dissertation excerpt by Krista Lauren Gilbert. She noted that the mermaid archetype in myth and legend is traditionally understood as a unified divide. It is a symbolic confluence of human and fish, maiden, mother, and crone, and a unique vision that encompasses consciousness as a single perceptual event.

“The mermaid archetype’s invitation into the depths of consciousness, while not always benevolent, is in service of transformation….The mermaid archetype is found to act in service of transformation by formation of relationship of the individual psyche with the world soul… The mermaid archetype’s familiarity with the depths of the unconscious fix her as central to the pyschological experiences of depression, which is discussed in this study as a longing for rememberance and reconnection with the vivifying and transforming aspects of this archetype.”


At this point I was going to write something about how Hunter S. Thompson struggled with trying to unify his conscious and unconscious, and looked to the mermaid as inspiration since it appeared more than once in his writing. The mermaid was his muse. Of course drugs and alcohol were also his muses, but I was going to write something here about this hidden side of Hunter S. Thompson, this vulnerable side, celebrating women, the strange and mythical creatures they are. 

I had written all that in a draft of this post before I took a plane flight down to San Diego to visit some friends. On the flight I started talking to a guy seated next to me, and I mentioned Hunter S. Thompson, and he said he was reading The Rum Diary. (By the way, how weird is that – I write a post about The Rum Diary and then the same day strike up a conversation with a stranger who was currently reading it? Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not…)  I had heard that the writer for the screenplay took significant liberties, so I asked how Thompson introduced the girl in the movie, the mermaid. Apparently, there is no mermaid reference at all in the book!  The screenplay writer completely added the mermaid!

At this I looked into what people said about the differences between the the book and the movie.  Critics noted that the movie just never delved deep enough into the characters, that it wasn’t true to Thompson’s work.  The film adaptation of The Rum Diary shows a highly scrubbed Paul Kemp, painting him the conventional hero. Apparently there is even bits in the book about how Kemp imagines raping the girl, and then later rejects her when she is raped by others because the delicate illusion of her beauty is ruined. To me this seems like it would be highly important to character development and you would leave something like that in the script.  In the movie there is only the mere suggestion that the girl gets raped, and she never changes in Kemp’s eyes.

How strange that Hollywood felt the need to clean up Thompson’s work. Was it an attempt to re-paint him as some sort of hero himself, instead of a tortured, drug-addled artist? And this whole scene about the mermaid… it obviously rang true since I had thought it was Thompson himself using the mermaid archetype in his early work as well.  Did the screenwriter want to make women, the traditional muse, Thompson’s muse as well? It’s almost like Hollywood wants to re-frame Thompson as more of the traditional hero in our minds, instead of letting him be known and respected for his actual work. Johnny Depp was close friends with Hunter S. Thompson and one of his biggest supporters. I don’t understand how he could support, let alone be the driving force, in such an inaccurate re-telling.

Possibly though, Thompson had come so far from his young self as the 22-year old journalist in the story, that Depp recognized the need to pay homage to Thompson’s beginnings. As Hunter S. Thompson has almost become a caricature of himself as the Gonzo journalist, living life by going over the edge, Depp felt the need to portray Thompson’s beginnings with a sense of nostalgia, portraying his first novel through rose-tinted glasses, showing respect for Thompson’s work highlighting the differences between a young Thompson and the Thomson we all know and love. Apparently after the novel was found, Thompson was unable to edit it, his life of politics, drugs, and alcohol having hardened him to the point that he no longer recognized his voice at 22. The mermaid image was one from his later work. It appears that the screenwriter tried to put more bits of Hunter S. Thompson back in the story, make it more “Thompsonesque,” while still maintaining the naivite of youth. It just makes the whole thing seem contrived though.

It appears that Thompson was anticipating the future when he wrote in The Rum Diary,

“He had come so far from himself that I don’t think he knew who he was anymore.”

Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire

Posted in academia, philosophy by

I recently picked up Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire, a book that reveals 101 different celebrities and public intellectual’s answers to the famous questionnaire. Contrary to popular belief, Proust himself did not create the questionnaire; in fact, it was a popular parlour game among the novelist’s bourgeois crowd in Paris. Vanity Fair took up the game in 1993, revealing select insights into the psyche of these celebrated figures (or so the snippet at the beginning tells me).

Some of my favorite answers:

Margaret Atwood’s motto: “Nolite te bastardes carburundorum.” [Don't let the bastards grind you down].

Hugh Hefner’s favorite names: “Brande, Sandy, and Mandy.”

George Carlin’s favorite hero of fiction: “I’m not interested in make-believe people.”

If Johnny Cash were to die and come back as a person or thing, it would be: “Dust on the wind.”

I decided to fill out the questionnaire myself last night. These are my answers, at the tender age of 26, at 1:30 am, after drinking a bottle of cheap champagne, and inundating myself with Cheez-Its (the Cheez-Its strike again!):

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Curling up with a good book and a cup of cocoa on a dreary day, in a pink Snuggie.

What is your greatest fear? Falling up stairs and popping out my front teeth.

Which historical figure do you most identify with? Joan of Arc, minus the whole chopping off hair, hearing voices, and pretending to be a boy thing.

Which living person do you most admire? Oprah

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Indulgence

What is the trait you most deplore in others? Closed-mindedness

What is your greatest extravagance? Nothing. I can justify anything.

What is your favorite journey? The day’s journey. I die every night and am reborn in the morning.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue? A sense of morality.

On what occasion do you lie? When it should be the truth.

What do you dislike most about your appearance? My weight. It shows a lack of control. Indulgence.

Which living person do you most despise? Jim Bob Duggar. Are you freaking kidding me? 20 kids? They are just sliding out of your poor wife’s bruised vagina at this point, you misogynistic loon.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “It’s all relative.”

What is your greatest regret? Taking AP Physics instead of Art 3 in my junior year of high school.

What or who is the greatest love of your life? Myself, so far.

When and where were you happiest? Several little moments when I stop and remember that I am happy.

Which talent would you most like to have? Singing

What is your current state of mind? Wishing I had more champagne.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I wish I was left-handed.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? I wish we were taller.

What do you consider your greatest achievement? Not killing myself yet.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? Spandex. I think Pauly Shore said that.

If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? A puppy that always gets loved and pampered.

What is your most treasured possession? Rare and special things that fit into little boxes.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Knowing that you chose to hurt someone but you could have stopped it.

Where would you like to live? California. Why leave? We have everything.

What is your favorite occupation? Writers. They harness the truth through language.

What is your most marked characteristic? I appear taller because I carry myself well.

What is the quality you most like in a man? Manliness, without being a dick.

What is the quality you most like in a woman? Acceptance of femininity, without being a push-over.

What do you most value in your friends? Honesty, uniqueness, true to themselves.

Who are your favorite writers? Hunter S. Thompson, Jane Austen, Allen Ginsberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Neruda.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction? James Bond

Who are your heroes in real life? Hugh Hefner, Nelson Mandela, Deepak Chopra

What are your favorite names? Madeline, Cole

What is it that you most dislike? People who think they are wittier than they really are, bits that are too squishy.

How would you like to die? Happy and ready.

What is your motto? We shall find peace, we shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Everyday Truths

Posted in beliefs, consumerism, NLP, science by

Courtesy of C4Chaos via Flickr

I wrote in my previous post about the concept of Universal Truth. I have been wondering about the nature of reality, the universe, Truth in such an abstract way… my mind has even been jumping to alternate realities, the infinite, parallel universes, and the implications for man because there is no Truth to hold us back. It’s all rather dizzying.  Maybe this is why the great thinkers of our time indulge in alcohol. They need to take the edge off of so they don’t send themselves hurtling over the cliff.

Tangent: That thought led to me google “drunk philosopher” and I found a 1997 article from Esquire entitled “The Drunken Philosopher,” where one of the writers wrote a series of essays on selected topics while he drank to see if the great writers and thinkers were brilliant in spite of their alcoholism, or because of it. More on this to come.

Anyways, I was doing a bit of shopping today, browsing the stores in Santana Row (an upscale shopping area near my house). I quite enjoy shopping and especially at this time of year. There always seems to be an electricity in the air, a buzz in the stores, as the colors turn and the holiday items come out. I was browsing through Anthropologie (a store I’ve always liked because of the name…. see my previous post “I (verb) my views of (noun), open to (noun).”) And what do my eyes settle on right away? Oprah’s book Words that Matter: Everyday Truths to Guide and Inspire.  

JESUS CHRIST UNIVERSE. I felt like I had been hit over the head with realization, in one big “oh duh” moment.  It literally took my breath away.

It is the everyday truths that are the ones we care about the most, because it is the ones that effect on a day to day level. My Truth may be different than your Truth, but that’s okay, as long as we know and believe our convictions and they work for us and within society. I believe there is this spectrum of Truth. For the longest time no one knew that the Sun was the center of the galaxy. Every one knew the Sun revolved around the Earth, based on the Ptolemaic model.  And then Copernicus discovered otherwise and published his ideas in the early 1500s . And he was ridiculed and criticized by scientists and the Church. And it wasn’t until Kepler and Galileo Galilei proved his thoughts mostly right that every one realized that they had been wrong.

But maybe Copernicus really liked beef stew and felt that was the best dish, and Kepler thought that lamb was the way to go. They had different Truths on every day matters that didn’t impact their overall views of where society’s views needed to head. This is the key. We need to put aside the differences in beliefs that don’t really matter in the long run.

I started thinking about my Everyday Truths, the ones that matter to me. I have always loved quotes. I love finding a quote that completely sums up my mood and situation, and is true for me at that very moment.  There are some quotes I loved before, but they don’t hold true for me anymore as I change. And that’s okay. I like to honor the past and my previous ways of thinking, and know that it served as a stepping stone for where I am now. I am going to amass a list of my Truths, my little bits of knowledge and wisdom that serves me as a person. And then I am going to print them up on little bits of paper and tuck them into fortune cookies, so when I am feeling down I can give myself a present.

So of course, as our belief systems are entirely arbitrary based on the society we are in, there are dangers that your Truths fall outside the spectrum (I’m thinking cults, child molesters, people we deem “delusional”). These beliefs can limit and harm others. But then there are people whose beliefs fall on the opposite end of the spectrum – those people who believe they can change the world for better, uplift people… the visionaries and innovators of our time. And as these people change the world, society collectively catches up with their ways of thinking. We are on the verge of great shifts in thinking about what is possible. It’s a very exciting time.

I am reminded of how much I loved Shel Silverstein as a kid. One of my favorite poems is “Listen to the Mustn’ts.”

Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

This is one of my Everyday Truths. What ones did you learn as a child?

De-bunking Plato: Math is an invention, like language

Posted in academia, beliefs, language, neuroscience, philosophy, physics, science by

Courtesy of Stig Waage via Flickr

I just started reading Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Sounds awesome right? Totally up my alley. I’ve heard his premise before – that beliefs come first, and then we rationalize the belief after to make it true. Once we form a belief, the brain starts looking for and finding confirming evidence to support those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost (that whole dopamine thing that I talked about in previous posts), which accelerates the process neurologically, and round and round it goes in a feedback loop until the belief becomes a truth. Shermer calls this process “belief-dependent realism,” patterned after the philosophy of science developed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow called “model-dependent realism.” Model-dependent realism basically says that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When the model is successful at explaining things, we tend to say it’s “absolute truth.” Shermer pushes this thought one step further, arguing that “even the different models of physics and cosmology used by scientists to explain, say, light as a particle or light as a wave, are themselves beliefs, and when coupled to higher-order theories about physics, mathematics, and cosmology, form entire world-views of nature.”  All models of the world, not just scientific models, are foundational to our beliefs, and belief-dependent realism means that we cannot escape this epistemological trap.

Disclaimer: I am still trying to understand my own beliefs, and understand that they are constantly changing based on new information. But writing about them and talking them out helps me process the information. If I can explain them in a concise way, then it means that I have a better understanding.  I also recognize that since this whole feedback loop is hardwired into my brain, I’m only confirming previous beliefs I already held, but maybe couldn’t articulate as clearly. I’ve been on a neurological kick recently, so it makes sense that I would find the solution to reality in neuroscience. My brain gathered the evidence to confirm my own personal belief about the world.

I started thinking about our belief systems and Truth. We all hold a myriad of different beliefs about the world, based on our own experiences. I’ve often grappled with the concept of universal truth. Is there a universal truth, or is everything subjective, based on our own experiences? Am I merely putting my own subjective reality on a universal truth? One truth we all hold as an absolute or universal truth is mathematics. Mathematics is a priori. We didn’t create mathematics. The syntax of mathematics was invented, but the mathematical principles already existed. This seems to be an easily accepted Truth by some, but for some reason it doesn’t sit right with me.

In my previous post I wrote about how the structure of language is hardwired in the brain, but it is up to the individual to choose the specific words to use based on the context and individual expression. Mathematics though – there can be no interpretation. The variables and meaning of the numbers might change, but in this reality, 1+1=2.  I started asking myself, why? Why is 1+1=2, and not 1+1=3?

I then found an article from 1998 in the New York Times called “Useful Invention or Absolute Truth: What is Math?”  BINGO. Apparently a lot of people are as concerned with this as I am!  (That was a joke – people have been debating the nature of Truth for as long as we’ve had rational thought).  The article discusses how modern science and mathematics is based on Plato’s idea that numbers and mathematical law are ethereal ideas, existing outside of space and time. We base all our science – physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics – on this idea. However, there is a new school of thought that treats mathematics as a human construct, like language or religion. It appears that mathematics is hard-wired into the brain through evolution.  Scientists have traced the basis of arithmetic by studying brain-damaged patients who have lost basic number skills. (It is important to study how things don’t work to figure out how they work). There is an area of the brain called the inferior parietal cortex, a poorly-understood part of the brain where visual, auditory, and tactile signals converge. This region apparently is also involved in language processing and distinguishing left from right, the article says. “Mathematics is, after all, a kind of language intimately involved with using numbers to order space.”  As the article reveals,

Numbers are not Platonic ideals but neurological creations, artifacts of the way the brain parses the world. In that sense they are like colors. Red apples are not inherently red. They reflect light at wavelengths that the brain, as it was wired by evolution, interprets as red.

So when people are born with a rudimentary hard-wiring of mathematics in the brain, they are able to evolve their thinking of mathematics quickly. This is how the higher mathematics, from algebra to trigonometry, to fractal patterns, were created. The subsequent generations are able to build upon the thinking of the previous generations, based on the hard-wiring in the brain. The human mind was able to look at the body, and time and space, and create first simple math to explain this world. As the theory goes, primitive people developed numbers by playing with rocks and counting their toes. No wonder we like number systems based on 10: We have 10 fingers and 10 toes. Our world is three dimensions, plus time. We developed mathematics as a way to orient ourselves in this world. (Our mind is able to do things now like triangulate and orient ourselves spacially).

I am reminded of Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver, which had a great impact on me as a child. The novel is set in a utopian society where they have decided to eliminate pain and suffering by converting to “sameness.”  The boy, Jonas, is selected to be the next Receiver of Memory, the person who stores all the collected memories of the time before Sameness, in case they are ever needed to aid in decisions that others lack the experience to make. There is one scene that particularly stood out to me. After Jonas has received his first memory, things start changing. A sled, a girl’s hair, an apple… they all had a same different quality. The Giver explains to him that Jonas is starting to see the color red. There used to be a time when everything in the world had color as well as shape and size. The Giver explains that in order for the society to gain control of some things, it had to let go of others. I remember how much this passage stood out to me, because I thought it would be horrible to eradicate beauty in the name of conformity and control.

As Shermer explains in The Believing Brain,

“Believe change comes from a combination of personal psychological readiness and a deeper social and cultural shift in the underlying zeitgeist, which is affected in part by education but is more the product of larger and harder-to-define political, economic, religious, and social changes.”

I believe we are on the brink of a great shift in the underlying thinking that has shaped our view of the world. As we scientifically explore this universe and our place in it, we are doing so with the idea that mathematics is the universal language. If we ever encountered life outside this planet, we would be able to communicate with our mathematics. As the New York Times article notes,

”If the alien species had evolved in an environment similar to ours — say, a world composed of distinct, movable objects — then most likely its brain would have incorporated, through natural selection, the same regularities about the external world as we have,” …”Thus, it would have a very similar arithmetic and geometry.

”But now, suppose that the alien species has evolved in a radically different environment, like a fluid world,” he continued. ”Then knowledge of movable objects would not be essential to its survival, while knowledge of fluid mechanics, vortices, etc. would be. I believe that this hypothetical species would have internalized in its brain regularities strikingly different from ours. Hence it would have radically different mathematics.”

The conundrum of course is that we are still approaching this within our model of the world. There are probably concepts that we haven’t even come close to imagining. But I suppose you have to start somewhere.

Steven Hawking does not believe time travel is possible. Yet. He has several reasons, including the fact that no one has ever come from the future. This opens up the possibility for multiple realities and different dimensions, and I won’t go into all that right now. But the problem though with Steven Hawkings’ theories is that he is still working within our model of reality that we have created. What would we be capable of if we hard-wired an understanding of different dimensions? Where would we look for life if we collectively understood that our mathematics, our universal truth, is just a by-product of evolution and living in 3D plus time? What would we be capable of then?

I find it very interesting that the memory of The Giver came up while I was writing this. I assume it was triggered by the image of the red apple, the symbol of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, in both the New York Times article, and in The Giver. It had such an impact on me as a child because of the emotional response to the beauty of the image and the feelings of what it would be like to lose that beauty. Part of me (the hard-wired part that draws connections) feels like it can’t be coincidence that I would stumble across an article with the same imagery of something that so deeply effected me and my beliefs as a child. But that’s the point – my brain is designed to make those connections and seek out the information that supports my beliefs. It just happens in funny and unexpected ways.

I (verb) my views of (noun), open to (noun)

Posted in academia, beauty, language, neuroscience, NLP, poetry by

Courtesy of Violet Blue via Flickr

I have been thinking a lot about language and words lately. As a kid I had certain words that I loved. I loved the way they sounded, and often I loved the meaning of the words themselves. I kept a list, and would add to it every time I stumbled across a new one. I would let the words slip over my tongue, repeating them over and over in my head and outloud. Superfluous. Tryst. Bumble. Flabbergasted. Jabberwocky. Penchant. Nexus. Connundrum. Antiquated. Sly. Hope. Love. Magic. Quixotic. Antebellum. Morose. Wit. 

In Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, he talks about Gertrude Stein and how she experimented with the structure of language. Even when she wrote rambling, nonsensical writing, it still remained grammatical. As Lehrer puts it, “our language has a structure, and that structure is built into the brain.” 

We all remember the parts of speech from grade school exercises. Sentences work like mad libs. You need nouns, verbs, modifiers, prepositional phrases, all that jazz. It’s up to the individual to choose the verbs and nouns to create the sentence based on the context. Although we pretend our words are transparent – “like a layer of glass through which we see the world,” as Lehrer notes, our words are actually opaque. The words are just arbitrary signifiers for the real objects.

But then why do words carry such significance? The key is in this structure. As Darwin noted, “Language is an instinctive tendency to acquire an art.”  Words are like paint. It is the individaul expressing himself through this structure, choosing which words to use. Words are subjective and symbolic. ”They are tools, not mirrors,” says Lehrer.  

The problem though is that because words are subjective, they are up to interpretation based on our own background and the context. My definition of one word could be completely different than your definition. This is especially true for big ideas that are hard to pin down, like “truth,” or “freedom” or “justice.” We try to create one common understanding with tools like dictionaries and thesauruses. But even the definitions of words differ from dictionary to dictionary, and the definitions are based on words themselves, which are obviously subjective and up to interpretation. Dictionaries and thesauruses can only get us so far; the definition of a word is a moving target, based on our own view of the world.

I watched a TED Talk given by Aimee Mullins the other day. Aimee Mullins is an athete and activist who brings attention to what it means to be disabled. She was born without fibula bones, and had both her legs amputated at one year old. She first received world-wide media attention by being the first amputee to participate in NCAA sports, going on to break several World Records using her prostetic sprinting legs. In her TED Talk, “The Opportunity of Adversity,” she discusses the definition of the word disabled.  She looked at a thesaurus, and the entry read,

“Disabled, a., crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for,  done-in, cracked-up, counted-out; see also, hurt, useless, weak. Ant. healthy, strong, capable.”  Webster’s New World Thesaurus: Print Issue, 1982.

She was shocked with this entry, and thought about what a radicially different view she would have with herself and the world if she had internalized, during her formative childhood years, this definition and meaning of the word “disabled,” a label she applies to herself. Imagine how soul-crushing that would be to a little girl to learn that people view her as weak, and useless, that she has nothing to offer society.

In neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) we learn that our language shapes our view of reality. Our neurological system regulates how our bodies function and language determines how we interface and communicate.  The interplay of these two affects our view of the world, our thinking, and our behavior and beliefs. We have a structure of language innately hardwired in the brain, but our expression, our word choice, is entirely subjective. It is influenced by our beliefs about what the word means. It is our art.

I remember going to a teen retreat with my entire high school where we camped out and discussed diversity, racism, and sexism. One of the exercises we did was to collectively write down all the racial slurs and stereotypes that we could think about for men and women, gay and straight, and Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and Whites. Some nervously laughed at each stereotype and slur. Some laughed for real. I hadn’t heard most of the terms at that point in my life (thank you homeschooling), and was surprised at some of the stereotypes the kids were coming up with. They hadn’t even occurred to me before. The exercise was interesting and attempted to point out to the students how hurtful stereotypes are, but instead of eradicating these beliefs or creating any real shift in thinking, I now knew about 100 new stereotypes.

Now, you might not look at a disabled person and pass judgment and think they are “crippled,” “helpless,” or “useless,” but collectively, these definitions are wrapped up in your word choice of labeling someone “disabled.”  Like in a mad lib, all those negative definitions of “disabled” could be slotted in to what you are saying. Maybe you slot in one definition, but since it is subjective, when you communicate with another person, they slot in their own definition.

Aimee Mullins advocates for a new definition of disabled, one that celebrates the rising of the human spirit and using adversity to change and grow and better yourself.   It is only with these paradigm shifts in thinking that we can evolve past all the stereotypes negative connotations that are associated with a word. Merely pointing something out as a problem only the first step. Unless you are going to implant a new definition and create that shift in thinking, you are just going to go in circles around the problem. More and more people will be aware of the problem, making it bigger, without creating a solution.

My favorite person in the world, my grandmother, was disabled. She was blind and confined to a wheelchair, and had other health issues. She was the most beautiful and wonderful person I know, caring, compassionate, and genuinely good.  She had been a nurse, caring for special cases such as a boy in a bubble, and burn victims. She had a quirky nature about her, like Lucille Ball, and loved when I read outloud to her. But I still looked at her as broken. I hope to God she didn’t look at herself that way. 

Maybe if I had a different definition of “disabled,” as a child, it would have been on my list of favorite words too.

Climbing down from the soapbox: A new angle

Posted in beauty, consumerism, neuroscience, poetry by

Courtesy of roadsidepictures via Flickr

Every morning I have a cup of coffee with artificial sweetner. I know it’s bad for me, but I do it anyways. At work we have Sweet ‘N Low.  Sweet ‘N Low is the bubblegum pink packet (with the Pink Panther as a mascot) with a musical staff and sheet music. Even though I use this product every day, I never wondered before where it got the name “Sweet ‘N Low.”  Wikipedia to the rescue.

Apparently Sweet ‘N Low was invented in 1957 by the guy who invented, but failed to patent, the sugar packet, Benjamin Eisenstadt. He was the first guy to market and distribute the sugar substitute in the powdered form. According to Wikipedia, “the name ‘Sweet ‘n Low’ itself derives from an 1863 song by Sir Joseph Barnby, which took both its title and lyrics from an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, entitled ‘The Princess: Sweet and Low.’”

Upon learning this, I had a flash of anger. I couldn’t believe that this artificial sweetner, this CANCER in a packet, took its name from lines of poetry! I felt tricked, cheated into liking the sugar substitute because it was tapping into my innate desire for beauty. Those devilish marketers! How irresponsible and manipulative to play into people’s emotions and steal lines from the great Tennyson himself and use it to POISON the American people! I was about to go on a tirade about how we need to collectively fight back against this manipulation and abuse when my rationality kicked in and I realized that in 1957, we didn’t know that sugar substitute was linked to cancer.

Benjamin Einstadt and his son Marvin probably picked the name because of the play on words: “Sweet” and “Low Calorie.” It probably reminded Ben of the song, which was popular around the time he was a kid. Maybe he knew the Tennyson poem before the song, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe they didn’t think that deep into the whole thing. At this point I wondered what else there was on this Einstadt guy, and found the book “Sweet and Low: A Family Story” by Rich Cohen (hurrah for Google books). Cohen, the grandson of Einstadt, discusses how the family picked the name. The entire thing was a carefully outlined marketing plan, based on Ben’s love of the song, picking pink to stand out on the table, and using whimsical iconic labeling. As Cohen notes, “It has become a classic, as much a symbol of plastic America as the soup cans of Andy Warhol.”  

At this point I was going to to into something here about the dangers of artifical sweetners, its neurological effects, and how we should be careful to understand marketing ploys. And even if the Sweet ‘N Low people didn’t know then that their product is linked to cancer when they created it, the American consumer needs to take responsibility for his own health knowing what it does now.  And how I learned something about the dangers of getting carried away with emotion since I started to climb on my own soap box before my rationality came into check. And I might have even gone in to something about the Occupy movement, and how although I believe it’s super important to speak out, it seems most people don’t even know what they are speaking out against. It’s just trendy to jump on the bandwagon.

But instead of all that, which of course quickly bounced back and forth in my mind, the take-away I settled on is the beauty in understanding the origins of something. Artifical sweetners – these little cancer packets – didn’t start out that way. It was a family business, built on the American dream. The family was all immigrants in Brooklyn, trying to make it, and hitching on to the diet craze that was sweeping America. As Cohen puts it,

The money and the product and the people all come from Brooklyn, but it’s more than that. It’s the longing of the borough, the collective energy of the millions of immigrants who flooded Brooklyn at the beginning of the twentieth century. The diet craze that turned Sweet ‘N Low into a household name is a concrete manifestation of that longing. Diet cola, the bathroom scale, Sweet ‘N Low – it all comes from Brooklyn, the cradle of a new culture, the culture of the new body, with its quest for complete freedom: freedom from history, freedom from exclusion, freedom from fat, freedom from the bad bodies of our anscestors. It’s the longing that created the fortune and destroyed the family.

How beautiful is that?? The American dream is summed up in a tiny artificial sugar packet. The irony though is through this search for freedom, Americans became obsessed with the idea of image and diet. Our quest for freedom bonded us into slavery as this idea took a life of its own and became bigger than we ever could have imagined. We created our own monsters.

I believe its important to know the effects of something, and be passionate about it, but maybe if we take the time to learn the cause, we can see it from a different angle. This is where we find the beauty.

And maybe that will make it a little bit sweeter.

 

 

 

The Dark Side of Cheez-Its

Posted in academia, consumerism, neuroscience, NLP by

Courtesy of Kai Schreiber via Flickr

Once again, I notice the ridiculousness of my life. But only when I am paying attention.

Continuing on with thoughts about Jonah Lehrer and his work…. I was reading the chapter on Auguste Escoffier in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, as I was downing a box of Cheez-Its. Basically, Lehrer was talking about how scientists back in the day discovered a fifth taste, on top of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, called umami.  It turns out that the taste comes from a specific molecule, glutamic acid, that becomes L-glutamate (the specific taste we can taste) when it interacts with protein. This is why meat is so delicious. But the problem is that glutamate is an unstable protein, so it must be bound to something else. One Japanese scientist, Kikunae Ikeda, discovered in the early 1900s that it could be bound to salt. This is where MSG (monosodium glutamate) comes from.

Everyone has heard about MSG because it supposedly makes you feel all buzzy and sick after you eat too much of it at bad Chinese food restaurants.  Apparently though, that is all a myth (according to Lehrer and recent research), and you are probably just making yourself sick by over-eating. At this point I realized I had eaten almost the entire box of Cheez-Its. I looked at the label on the box, and sure enough, it listed monosodium glutamate as one of the ingredients. I had unknowingly eaten the entire box (like 12 servings) due to this pesky, albeit delicious, molecule.

MSG has been used as a food additive for over 100 years. It used to be sold in America as Super Seasoning and Accent, since it’s so easy to add a dash to create the illusion of flavor.  Since 1948 the amount of MSG added to foods has doubled every decade. I read one place that by 1972, 262,000 metric tons were being added to foods. (I hate statistics like that since I have no context and don’t know what it means, but let’s just say that it means there is A LOT of MSG being added to processed food… it’s in EVERYTHING). Lehrer notes that embarrassed food manufacturers often hide the addition of MSG by calling it autolyzed yeast extract, glutavene, calcium caseinate, or sodium caseinate on labels. It is also sometimes labeled as hydrolyzed vegetable protein, textured protein, hydrolyzed plant protein, soy protein extract, or ”natural flavoring.” However, there is apparently a difference between naturally occuring MSG and artificially created MSG (something to do with the amino acids being mirrors of each other – like putting the wrong glove on your hand), so that naturally occurring MSG is safer. 

Glutamates are neurotransmitters linked to memory (they only discovered that it was a neurotransmitter in 1994). Apparently though, glutamates are actually toxic to neurons, and in excess, will kill the neurons (stroke victims have an excess of glutamate in their system). But when you eat that bag of chips, you are flooding your system with such an excess that it is causing the neurons to fire abnormally, over-exciting and killing them.  MSG works to trick your brain into thinking that the food you are eating is nutritious, and high in protein since it occurs naturally in protein-rich foods when they are cooked. Also, the excess glutamate gets converted into GABA, another neurotransmitter, which is calming and affects the brain the same way that valium does. Finally, MSG also stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin, which acts like an ANTI-appetite suppressant. When the blood is flooded with insulin, the blood sugar drops, so you think you are still hungry an hour later. So basically, when you are eating something made with artificial MSG, your mind thinks that it is eating nutritious food, its calms you into a happy, valium-like lull, and you over-eat and are still hungry an hour later.  Processed food manufacturers liberally mix in MSG to cut costs (they don’t have to put as much REAL protein in), and to keep people happily munching away, oblivious to the fact they are eating several portion sizes. No wonder America is obese. And I bet there are links to Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases since it relates to your memory.

With this knowledge of how my taste buds (and the Cheez-It manufacturers) had tricked me into over-eating, I put away the box. And proceeded to get a horrible stomach-ache for the rest of the night.

Bam! Cheez-It! becomes Bam! Stomach ache :( And hopefully not Bam! Alzheimer’s.