Invisible Cities

Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.

Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges’ suds.

I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.

— Italo Calvino

Ordinary feats of memory

It’s difficult to get a handle on just what a hundred trillion synapses can hold.  Our daily experience is all about fallibility, missed cues and failures to find names and facts at the moment we need them. 

Last week, I heard Martha Argerich sit down at the piano and play two piano concerti back to back, both big, complex and sometimes dissonant works, perhaps 20,000 notes, in order and precisely timed.  I think of this feat as comparable to the medieval religious scholars who would commit to memory the Bible.

If you manage your computer’s hard drive, or you’ve tried to attach files to emails, you’ve discovered that visual information is the most demanding for raw memory bit-power.  Last month, a study published by MIT psychologists demonstrated that our brains record the visual information around us in unexpectedly rich detail. 

Oliva and her students showed subjects nearly 3,000 images, one at a time, for three seconds each. In tests the same day, they were shown pairs of images and asked to select the exact image they had seen earlier...

Subjects were tested with three types of pairings: two totally different objects; an object and a different example of the same type of object (e.g. two different remote controls); and an object and a slightly altered version (e.g. a cup that is either full or half-full).

Against all expectations, subjects’ recall rates on the three types of memory tests were 92 percent, 88 percent and 87 percent, respectively. “To give just one example, this means that after having seen thousands of objects, subjects didn't just remember which cabinet they had seen, but also that the cabinet door was slightly open,” Brady said.

Computer memory is now so cheap that storing vast libraries of information is routine.  The problem for programmers is to organize this data with multiple, independent indexing so that facts can be retrieved as they are relevant to a particular situation.  Apparently, our brains experience the same embarrassment of riches.

Article from MIT News Office
On-line demo

Some random headlines from Science Daily

Compassion meditation may improve physical & emotional responses to psychological stress

Meditation can lower blood pressure

Mindfulness meditation slows progression of HIV

Relaxation response influences expression of stress-related genes

Compassion meditation changes the brain

Psychotherapists who practice Zen meditation are more effective

Cancer survivors more likely to use meditation  and relaxation

Meditation associated with increased grey matter in the brain

Science and society

‘If medicine is to fulfill her great task, then she must enter the political and social life.  Do we not always find the diseases of the populace traceable to defects in society?’

— Rudolf Virchow, born this day in 1821, was one of the fathers of scientific medicine.  He lived at a time when the rudiments of cell biology were just being discovered through the microscope, and was the first to figure out where cells always come from (other cells!).  He characterized the mechanisms of cancer and advocated tirelessly for socialized medicine.

Virchow helped put to rest persistent superstitions about diseases being caused by ‘humors’, but he missed the importance of bacteria, and consequently the role of hygiene in prevention.

     ‘The intervals between the great revolutions of mankind must be shortening.’

Symmetry

I love stories of geniuses who snub the establishment, yet in the end the establishment is forced to acknowledge their ideas.  Garrett Lisi is a Maui surf bum who has a vision of how all the known elementary particles fall into a spectacular symmetric pattern in 8 dimensions.

Watch his talk at the TED conference

Nature 1, Civilization 0

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
“This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

~ As You Like It, Act II Scene 1

Microcosm

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, born this day in 1632, played with glass rods in a hot flame, pulling on the ends, then sorting through the tiny spheres that dropped off, testing for optically accurate objectives.

“I’ve spent more time than many will believe looking through my microscopes, but I’ve done it with joy, and I’ve taken no notice of those who have asked, why take so much trouble with something so small?”

Van Leeuwenhoek sold draperies for a living.  Building microscopes and observing what was at their other end was always his hobby.  He reported having seen ‘animalcules’ in drops of rain water, and fibers in muscle tissue.  It would be another 200 years before it was discovered that van Leeuwenhoek’s microbes were paramount agents of disease and symbiosis, the foundation of every ecosystem.

‘Let the censorious whispers of the old be to us as worthless as the gold of fools.’

Dominick Argento writes music that is ‘lyrical’, which is to say that he doesn’t torture singers with unsingable melodies, nor demand that listeners hear his works 30 times before their appeal becomes manifest. 

Argento the ‘Minnesota romantic’ has been a prof at the University of Minnesota for 50 years, and has a reputation that defies the stereotype of the temperamental artist.  He is friendly, devoted to his students, in love with the same wife for 40 years.  His music is passionate, fresh and accessible.

MPR Radio interview (2004)
Listen to two short movements from I Hate and I Love on the ancient poetry of Catullus:  One    Two    performed by the Dale Warland Singers.

Dominick Argento turns 81 today, and is still creating.

Reincarnation

UVa Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson launched his career by questioning the assumption that adults cannot change.

He became best known for collecting stories of children who remember past lives.  Beginning in the 1960s, Stevenson made trips to India and Tibet, interviewing children and their parents, investigating facts about their past lives that they had no ordinary way of knowing.

These children supply names of towns and relatives, occupations and relationships, attitudes and emotions that, in hundreds of cases around the world, are unique to a single dead individual, often apparently unknown to their present families. But the fact is, the people the children remember did exist, the memories that the children claim can be checked against real lives and their alleged feats of identification verified – or contradicted – by a variety of witnesses.  (Tom Schroder, Old Souls)

Stories of prophetic dreams birthmarks that echo injuries from another life

Born on Halloween, 1918, Ian Stevenson passed into another life last year.