Philip K. Dick's Been Dead For 30 Years and I Don't Feel So Hot Myself

30 years and nine or ten days ago, Philip K. Dick died.

But first let me tell a little anecdote from the annals of neuroscience. One of the giants of 20th century behavioral neurobiology, Norman Geschwind, a great generalist, was teaching at Harvard. He'd developed many pathbreaking theories about localized functions and neurological diseases. One day a hotshot resident saw a new patient, a young man. His prior diagnosis was temporal lobe epilepsy. The resident took the young man's history, noted the medications, dosages, asked him a bunch of questions, then went to Geschwind, who was with a bunch of other interns. This resident probably wanted to show up the great Geschwind, because it was Geschwind's theory that temporal lobe epilepsy was marked by four tell-tale signs: humorlessness, neophobia, hypergraphia, and an excess of interest in religion, particularly in the philosophy of religion and belief. But when the resident asked the young man with temporal lobe epilepsy if he was religious, the young man said no. The resident told Geschwind I think maybe you're wrong about TLE: He writes a lot, seems fairly serious and humorless, and afraid to try new things, but this kid says he's not religious. He doesn't fit your profile. Geschwind couldn't believe it and immediately went to meet the young patient, the other residents in tow.

Geschwind, to the young man: Are you religious?
Young man: No.
Geschwind: Why?
At this point, the young man launched into an hour-long disquisition on Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian, the problems brought up by Martin Buber in his book on God's treatment of Job, inconsistencies in The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc. He had to be stopped in his speech.

Now, back to Philip K. Dick, whose science fiction books questioned the nature of "reality" and brought up sociological questions about epistemology rather than the physics of space travel. He was often quoted as saying his one unique contribution to science fiction was the idea of the android that thinks it's really a human, which you've all seen in movies by now. (Ex: Blade Runner.) Speaking of movies: if you're reading this, thinking, "Why am I reading about some guy I've never read, or barely heard of?," you may not know it, but you're a fan if Dick, if only via the movies. See this article from Cracked, on how Dick's insanity/writing has influenced film...

Here's a variation on an old joke: A guy is being interviewed for a job and everything's going fine. The interviewer says, "Sounds good. Just one more bit of business and we're through. I have to ask you a few basic questions about mental health. Have you ever been depressed, agoraphobic, felt alienated and angry, been hospitalized for a nervous condition, used psychedelic drugs, felt a sense of depersonalization, or suffered from anxiety, vertigo and dizzy spells?"

And the applicant replies, "Hasn't everybody?"

Only with Philip K. Dick (PKD), it wasn't a joke. He'd felt all this by his late teens. He'd been hospitalized. He dropped out of Berkeley High School because of dizziness and anxiety. This was the late 1940s, and it seems likely that a well-meaning doctor prescribed PKD amphetamines in the early 1950s. By the time PKD died he'd written over 40 novels, very many short stories, essays, thousands of long letters, and a sprawling, massive thing now called The Exegesis, in which PKD tried to make sense of an overwhelmingly odd mystical experience he had in the early 1970s.

                              Vid-montage of PKD's bibliography in 2 minutes, 22 seconds

To coincide with the 30 years since PKD's death, a version of The Exegesis has finally been released to the general public. See reviews HERE, HERE, and HERE, for example. Okay, the book's release date was last November, but the buzz over it really got louder in time for PKD's death date, March 2nd. (And how the editors managed to whittle PKD's unique "book" down to only 944 pages is a marvel, but I digress...)

Since his death, PKD - once thought of as a "hyper-paranoid pulp fiction hack" - has become one of the most lucrative writers for Hollywood, his worldwide readership has flourished, and there seems no end of scholarly books and articles on him. Irony? In 1950s Cold War Unistat he'd crank out three novels per year, at three cents a word, for science fiction paperback publishers who thought of the genre as "the golden ghetto."

Note in the Slate article I link to above PKD is quoted as saying the "best psychiatrist I ever saw," Dr. Harry Bryan, told him he couldn't be diagnosed "due to the unusual life I led."

Anyone who has read a handful of PKD novels and some biographical data (I heartily suggest Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin, although some Dickheads will protest) cannot help but get the feeling of something unheimlich about PKD. But what was "really" going on with him, from a neurobiological standpoint?

The neurotic young man who is prescribed speed by a doctor, and who then goes on to write over 40 novels (18 in the decade of the 1950s!) while slowly coming unhinged (speed seems more than enough, right?) always seemed like the best guess. In an interview David Jay Brown did with cyberpunk founder Bruce Sterling in Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, Sterling suggest PKD should've done psychedelics instead of speed. I think PKD's weirdness started long before that, and any drugs he did would only be self-medicating. Just my opinion, as of the date above...

PKD had about as many ideas about himself as one could possibly imagine, so if the Reader is inclined to go with that, fine. I have always thought it remarkable that so many of his friends, friends who are writers themselves, acolytes, and exegetes, seem to think the question of PKD's "disease" relatively unimportant. The fact is: he wrote some staggeringly wonderful work, and has touched the lives of untold millions.

But weirdos like myself like to ponder. I have talked to people who assumed PKD did too much acid. He's often thought of as a counterculture writer from Berkeley and the Bay Area. But according to Greg Rickman's Philip K. Dick In His Own Words, a work based on interviews with an astute admirer, PKD only took LSD "two or three times," and not until 1967. His output was already prodigious and weird before that.

Sutin discusses the possible TLE of PKD on pp.231-233 of the aforementioned biography.

Not long ago the prolific and superb non-fiction writer Clifford Pickover came out with a book titled Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen, which attempts to diagnose people like Telsa, Newton, the mathematician Paul Erdos, Einstein, Theodore Kaczynski, and many others, based on the latest understandings from neurobiology. Pickover pegs PKD as having temporal lobe epilepsy, and I wish Dr. Geschwind were here to weigh in, but he died in 1984, before reaching the age of 60.

Pickover cites the hypergraphia and the philosophical religiosity (in full-flower in the just-released Exegesis), and Pickover - unquestionably some sort of genius himself, with a PhD from Yale's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry who pours out one fascinating non-fiction book after another, have a look at his works soon, if you haven't already - hasn't totally convinced me about PKD's temporal lobe epilepsy. According to Geschwind, those with TLE also tend to be markedly humorless, and PKD seems to have had a sense of humor, amid paranoia and other health issues. He seems to have shared a few laughs with Robert Anton Wilson, and they found humor in many of the same conspiracy theories and others' theorizing about conspiracies.

Also, according to Geschwind, PKD should've been neophobic if he had TLE, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that. Certainly he had problems with agoraphobia, but he also had five wives. And he seemed fearless in trying to understand the uber-extraordinary things that happened to him, including a bizarre burglary of his house.

It could be that the problem with fitting a life into DSM-IV-like terms is to take words as things, to fall into the trap of essentialism. And to forget that almost all neurobiological oddities fall on a continuum. And then maybe PKD's "best psychiatrist" was right: PKD can't be diagnosed due to the unusual life he led...

In the end, I'm with most of PKD's "Dickhead" admirers: all this seems trivial when you wade into the Work, and what it does to You. When I picked up Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and then most of the rest of his oeuvre, I was never the same. That was the most I could've asked of PKD, and he delivered in spades. As Sutin writes, "How far do such speculative diagnostics and groupings take us?" And then Sutin quotes William James: "To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life."

Fruits indeed.

Philip K. Dick: READ HIM!

Lots of good audio stuff on PKD here.
"Ragle Gumm"'s blog on PKD here.
Ted Hand's blog-journal, with lots of good PKD insight, is here.
PKD's 5th wife, Tessa, blogs here.
Philip K. Dick and Religion.
An interview with PKD by Frank C. Bertrand, who follows this blog
Philip K. Dick Fan Site

Neuroscientist/Public Intellectual Dr.V.S. Ramachandran on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (10 minutes):

William S. Burroughs and Giambattista Vico on Immortality, and Other Ragtag Observations on Death

First: A Gnostic: Simon Magus
In Jacques Lacarriere's little gem of a book, The Gnostics, he's discussing the diffusion of gnostic ideas "along the great routes of the Orient," on "the road to Samaria," and the wonderfully odd figure of Simon Magus, one of history's uber-heretics. His ideas contradicted the ideas of the Apostles quite radically. For what would turn out to be the orthodox view, the Apostles said a human's soul is immortal, no matter what he or she does; we are all condemned for eternity to burnish or tarnish that soul, know the depths of hell, or paradisical delights. Simon preached, or railed rather thus: We all have a fragment of God in us. We are special creatures because, for example, we can use language and reason. But these are potentialities, not eternal. We must use it or lose it. (In the 20th century, we found that if a child was not exposed to any language by age seven or so, their brain's innate language acquisitive feature soon dissipates. And who really "reasons" much even these days?) Simon says: we have the capacity for speech, grammar, and geometry...but it's up to use to seize the day and work that stuff, get really good at it. The point is: we have the capacity. Simon seemed to think we also had the capacity for immortality, but time's a wastin': let's get to it, figure it out...

We must cultivate an attitude towards our aptitudes. That spark of he Divine in us is not eternal. It can only become eternal if we feed that spark, make it into a fire. Otherwise, we revert to nothingness.

And here's how the eloquent Lacarriere unpacks Simon Magus's heretical view of immortality: "For the gnostic, the die is cast, here, before death. (No wonder Simon Magus was hated by the orthodox! - the OG) Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to the melancholy Jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening on to immortality or the void." (p.49)

Another gnostic heretic, Valentinus, is quoted: "Make death die."

It is because of the Gnostics, the Sufis, the Taoists, much of Buddhism, some mystical Judaism, and some Hinduism and certain Christian mystics that I find a line of the so-called "new atheism" interesting, and that line says something like, "Religion is too important to be left to the believers, the faithful." See Alain de Botton's views in this article, which also mentions Nassim Taleb.

It would seem the Extropian/Transhumanist manifestoes echo certain things some gnostic sects were already groping towards, in the first two centuries of the Common Era.

A Quick Thought and/or Inchoate Koan
Let's say the worldwide army of scientists working on the Death Problem solve it. A few huge key findings fall into place, the rest is like knocking over dominoes, and WHAM!: we've got immortality. Is this something like Sisyphus pushing his stone all the way to the top of the mountain, and over the edge, finally, wiping his hands and going home?

Burroughs and Vico
After Norman Mailer published his book Ancient Evenings, Burroughs, from roughly 1972 till death, showed a Mailer influence with an Egyptian-based death as mythic antagonist, which comes out in unique Burroughsian full-force with his use of the "seven souls" one has and must deal with correctly in the afterlife, largely derived ultimately from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here, have a listen to Ol' Bill reading from his novel The Western Lands, accompanied by the fantastic electronic-world music of Bill Laswell's band Material:

Here's the lyrics as WSB reads them; he added a few bits here and there as improv, like "Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama." I confess the first time I heard this piece I went into an altered state, and when WSB says the first three souls are immortal and go back to heaven for another vessel, but the last four souls must "take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead," I was floored. O! The primal poetry of it all!

My blogging colleague Oz Fritz is all over this soul-after-death bardo trip, and I eagerly refer to his recent post HERE.

Throughout Burroughs's dazzling oeuvre, there's an obvious obsession with memory and vital, sexual young men (some of this for obvious reasons); but he also liked to remember himself as young and vital when he was an old man. He thought and wrote about death in ways that few of the candidates for Great American Novelist did. And apparently, from at least around the time of the appearance of the book that would make him famous, Naked Lunch, in 1959, he'd dreamed about afterlives. Personally, I do not think much about an afterlife, possibly because of my overweening materialism and non-religiosity. But I'm fascinated by what cultural anthropologists have told us about the various beliefs about death. Someone once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize." When it comes to religious ideas about life and death I see them as sort of collective artworks, and who knows? Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, and some of these ideas are "right"? How hilarious! How ironic! How...marvelous to contemplate.

Back to Burroughs.

In his book from 1995, (he died in 1997), My Education: A Book of Dreams, WSB recalls a dream he'd had right after Naked Lunch was published:

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of the intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been----" Static... Fades into the distance... "Flight..."


Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet." 


The semantics of "education" seem vital here: by 1959 WSB had long dropped out of Harvard, where he studied medicine and anthropology, and had travelled and written a couple of novels and many later-to-be-published letters of literary delight to weirdos like myself. Aside from formal education, he had earlier astonished young Ginsberg and Kerouac with his erudition, and shaped their thinking - and other notable "Beat" types - mostly via his learning of Arcane Things and WSB's spectral presentation of himself. It's easy (and valid, methinks) to surmise the dream's semantics of education had to do with imagination/narrative/tapping into post-terrestrial circuits of brain/magick/experimentation.

It was much later that WSB began to concentrate on the cosmi-comic high drama of Death as the Adversary, like a character in multifaceted forms. And he drew from many sources regarding this, not just the Egyptians. Emotionally, a very strong actuating force for his thoughts about death had to do with his beloved cats. I recall reading once - I forget where - that Burroughs thought nuclear annihilation would be particularly horrible because then his cats would die.

(At this point in my rambling little blogspew I'm quite tempted to link to articles on cats and taxoplasmosis and its potential to make humans quite a bit odder than they would've been, if only for the irony of someone I thought was maybe Unistat's greatest writer during the second half of the 20th century, and who used the metaphor of language-as-virus extensively, but I will just link this and you go ahead and make of it what you will. Hmmm...Ezra Pound loved cats too, feeding them all over Rapallo...)

Yes, but what about Vico? He had something to say about immortality and the afterlife too? Of course he did.

Vico thought a looming large and distinctive feature of human law, as opposed to natural law, was that we humans bury our dead. And with ceremony. (We have good reason to believe Neanderthals did too, but there was no way Vico could've been on to that.)

Vico:


Let us imagine a brutish state in which human corpses are left unburied as carrion for crows and dogs. Such bestial behavior clearly belongs to the world of uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities, in which people wandered like swine, eating acorns amid the rotting corpses of their dead kin. This is why burials were rightly defined in a lofty Latin phrase as "the covenants of the human race," foedera humani generis, and were characterized less grandly by Tacitus as "exchanges of humanity," humanitatis commercia."

Then Vico enumerates many books he's had the privilege to get hold of, about peoples from far-flung areas of the world. What all these books prove is that "all pagan nations clearly agree in the view that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and wander around their corpses: which is to say, souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal." Vico doesn't have much at all to say about what happens to anyone's soul after death. But I do like his proto-ghost/zombie vision idea. I like it in the same way Burroughs talks about the at-times treacherous roads to the Western Lands. I don't "believe" it, but it makes for tremendous poetry.

The end of the section of The New Science in which Vico here discusses burial as a human law, culminates with this quote from Seneca:

"When we discuss immortality, we must grant considerable importance to the consensus of humankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the underworld. I follow this general belief." (section #337)

Nietzsche On This Topic...
...Seems to lead us by some sort of circumambient commodius vicus of recirculation to Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and back to a quasi-Simon Magus-like gnostic view. In section #58, Fred N. rails against the quasi-Neoplatonic "life is better up there" crowd, where the real immortality lies. For these weak, unimaginative folk, the Good Life is to be found after death. And before orthodox Christianity became the master of Rome, Epicurus had already battled against these types. I will leave it to the better minds who know the gnostics (such as Simon Magus) and Nietzsche to say just where and how they diverge with regard to immortality, but clearly, in The Antichrist, Fred N. doesn't dig the Christian version either:

"One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but "Christianity," by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation."

Final Thoughts: Professor George Carlin
"When I die I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I want to be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away." - N&S:9


"If I had my choice of how to die I would like to be sitting on the crosstown bus and suddenly burst into flames." - N&S:10


"Isn't it time we stopped wasting valuable land on cemeteries? Talk about an idea whose time has passed: 'Let's put all the dead people in boxes and keep them in one part of town.' What kind of medieval bullshit is that? I say, plow these motherfuckers up and throw them away. Or melt them down. We need the phosphorus for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious." - N&S:79

Life Extension Notes

Completing the trifecta of Leary and Wilson's SMI2LE vision of a way out of technological materialism with no goal, no telos, is Life Extension. This one's a whole ungainly ball of wax, and I will have to do multiple posts on it over the coming months in order to feel like I've said anything substantial about it.

I previously posted on Space Migration HERE.
My stab at Intelligence Increase ("I" squared) was HERE.

Cellular Level
From my current view, the most exciting and radical research on life extension is the hard slog done at the level of the cell. According to some statistics, the combination of ever-faster computers and the fact that there are more scientists doing research now than at any time in history - by far! - means that key findings about how and why we age, how we can slow it down, stop it or even reverse it, are immanent. (Let us define "immanent" as something like "in the next 15 years," just for kicks, although many in the field will say that's being conservative!)

Around 1961 cytogerontologist Leonard Hayflick and his colleague Paul Moorhead defined what is now commonly called the "Hayflick Limit": they proved that cellular DNA can only replicate about 60 times during a lifetime; with constant replications, mistakes are made, gunk gets into the next generation, and accumulates over time. I heard one theorist describe it as like when you or your friends bought a Beatles record and taped it for friends. Then they taped it from the tape they were given, then those friends taped it from the taped tape, etc: after awhile you got a copy that sounded like crap. Well, when we get to be around 75, our cells are filled with gunk, the machinery has started to break down (I've seen the carburetor used as a metaphor a lot here too), and the processes that keep our hearts, brains, livers and other good stuff...rust and break. (We probably sound as bad as a washed-out Beatles tape, too.) We die. It seems we're programmed to be like that.

There are plenty of Very Bright People who think we can defeat these programs.

So far, the only proven method of extending life is to slow metabolism, which for humans means caloric restriction, or to eat less. The less food/calories, the less to metabolize, the slower gunk and noise accumulates at the cellular level. The problem with this is that it's really not very fun. I think Woody Allen put it best when he said that - I paraphrase from memory - "If you want to live to be 100, you need to give up all those things that make you want to live to be 100."

There's gotta be a better way. And it looks like there are a few prospects. I'll cover a few.

Sidelight: The literature on life extension is so extensive, it's easy to find oneself in a rocky and sedimented terminal morain. This precariousness seems heightened if the reader is a non-specialist, and who's more non-specialist than an overweening generalist? Still, I have found a few hot rocks. They seem to shimmer brilliantly. I call each one a possible fleck from the Fountain of Youth. Let us call each item a "de Leonite clue."


Here's a possible de Leonite: ELLPs. What are they? They're Extremely Long-Lasting Proteins, and they were recently found on the surface of the nucleus of a neuron by researchers at the Salk Institute's Molecular and Cell Biology Lab, led by Martin Hetzer. What's the big deal? Well, most proteins last for a few days at most. The ELLPs that coat a cell last a lifetime, and they're part of the NPC, or Nuclear Pore Complex. Okay, look at the cross-section of the cell above and note things called "microtubules," "microfilaments," and "plasma membrane." A cell needs to both protect itself from outside bad stuff and to let in outside good stuff - to put it like a nine year old. The Salk researchers found that bad stuff can happen because these ELLPs that coat the outside of the cell walls of a neuron like marble, erode over the years, and this is probably how a lot of gunk (there's our carburetor metaphor again) gets into cells. Another way of putting it: the gate keepers of the cell break down over a lifetime and allow toxins to get in, damaging DNA, and let us not even talk about the nasty stuff that happens when your DNA is damaged.

The results from this research could lead to better ways to treat or avert neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Hetzer's team were told the research they undertook would be too bold, difficult and expensive to conduct. You probably didn't hear about this in the "news" because it didn't contain enough blood, Beiber, ballgame or Beyonce.

Seriously, this is major stuff, because no one really knew ELLPs were what they were. Read more about it HERE.

Q: What are sirtuins? And what do they have to do with me?


I'm glad you asked. They are Silent Information Regulator Two proteins that act as enzymes, and were linked to life extension around 1986. Mammals have seven types of sirtuins, and Sir1 has been linked to the reason why caloric restriction works to slow aging. It gets really dodgy from here on out, for the OG.

How cool would it be if we could find something that would activate the Sir1, without having to constantly feel hungry? When we start to starve - or we restrict our caloric intake by 30%--40% - as the theory goes, some genes kick in and protect us against the stress of being hungry, and protect our cells and vital organs. These are the sirtuins. Here's where red wine comes in: it looks like, when we drink certain red wines that contain resveratrol, that it activates a gene-complex very Sir1-like, and has the same effects as caloric restriction. Instead of caloric restriction/quasi-starvation, drink a hearty glass of red zinfandel! Sound too good to be true? (Wait for it...)

 MIT professor Leonard Guarente has been at the forefront of Sir1 research, from caloric restriction to providing a theoretical platform for new anti-aging drugs based on his (and other's) sirtuin findings. Glaxo-Smith-Kline paid $720 million for a company called Sirtrus, and...here's an article from two years ago. It's not going as well as we'd/they'd hoped. In many articles, Dr. Richard Miller, a professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan and critic of the sirtuin hypothesis, has been saying that the relatively simple story of the sirtuins was too simple, that sirtuins are probably just one of very many systems in cell-signaling that influence aging. But Guarente is holding firm, recently publishing a long paper on the miraculous potentials of the sirtuins.

Meanwhile, research on the other sirtuins is hot - there's potentially gold in them thar genes! - and for the sufficiently geeky, see HERE (Sir6 linked to longer lifespan!), HERE (researchers in London seem to see a chimera in the sirtuin hunt vis a vis longevity?), and HERE, for starters. Note this last article suggests mutations that increased sirtuins were linked to anxiety and panic disorders. I think the sirtuin road led to a terminal morain for this reader. But I will still pay attention to anything that might come up. You never know what Sir5 might have in store for us, for example. The sirtuins may yet yield a dynamite de Leonite/piece of the puzzle.

I want to get into telomeres and telomerase, but first a word from an Oracle, AKA Kaku:

Stop me if you've heard this one, or just bear with me: each one of our chromosomes has a sort of "cap" of base-pairs that can be visualized like a shoelace: if you didn't have that little piece of hard plastic at the end of your laces, everything would shred and tying your shoes would be an unpleasant task. A telomere is one of these caps. It strongly appears that, with each cell division over a lifetime, the cap gets shorter. End of telomere = haywire/Hayflick Limit. Cells can't repair, eventually TAFUBAR.

Now: there are two classes of cells that don't age: your germ/sex cells (sperm/eggs, which is good, or your baby will be born looking as old as you!), and our old nemesis, the emperor of all maladies, cancer. Cancer can just go on dividing forever! It's immortal! (Not all cancer cells, just...enough. Oy. As Professor Carlin wrote in Napalm and Silly Putty, "If you live long enough, everyone you know has cancer.") Until it - cancer - kills itself by killing its host (us or our loved ones). Let's not worry about cancer's problems. It's doing just fine for now.

So what makes sex and cancer cells immortal? Telomerase. Both germ and cancer cells produce the enzyme telomerase, which keeps the telomeres intact when cells divide. Can we come up with telomerase therapy that will effectively arrest aging, or potentially reverse some of it? Dr. Michael Fossel thinks so. He thinks it's about ten years away! (Other Big Brains I've read say 50-100 years and we'll have telomerase therapy. Aubrey de Grey says about 100 years, and that guy usually seems optimistic to me. Speaking of Mr. de Grey, get a load of him if you haven't already. There are endless videos to be found if you like this one:

Axiological Level
What really interested me about what de Grey says here about those opposed to longevity research - mainstream media people who seem to regard it as faintly ridiculous or science-fiction-y and throw in the word "immortality," and gerontologists. This last I found very interesting, because de Grey seems to perceive those engaged in regenerative medicine as knowing things the gerontologists do not. Which I find totally plausible. If one reads Leonard Hayflick, one rapidly sheds any optimism for notable improvements in human lifespan soon; Hayflick is a heavyweight in the field of human lifespan studies and he's not exactly sanguine about our prospects for immortality, to put it mildly. But I wonder if de Grey is rather talking about temperaments of researchers? Just note the impression the fields have on your own disposition towards improving human lifespans: "gerontology"....""regenerative medicine"? At what point do we reconcile these two, if ever? It gets weirder.

I think it has to do with axiology, the study of our basic values. We build whole worlds of thought, political systems, ideologies, laws, and dreams on the basic building blocks of our own values. And where did we get these values that are so important to us? It's a difficult question. I've written on axiology HERE and HERE, but I have barely touched the surface of the idea.

One of the major founders of Transhumanism, Max More. Check out what he has to say between 5:26 and 8:07:

This gets to a recent book review I read in Reason magazine. I have not read The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science In America, by Jonathan D. Moreno. Not yet. Ronald Bailey's review seems to extend the values issues that Max More brought up after his famous Free Inquiry  article from 1993, between "humanists" and "transhumanists," this latter group who were enthused about More's ideas probably not even self-defining themselves as "transhumanists" at the time. Coupled with Aubrey de Grey's gerontologists vs. regenerative medicine researchers (and IT professionals, libertarians, and Canadians), now we have the "biopolitics" of strange bedfellows: biocons, who object to things like embryonic stem cell research on strictly "moral" grounds; and egalitarian leftists, who see a disaster in runaway advanced new biological techniques: only for the rich, non-egalitarian, and lacking in human dignity. In this article, "biopolitics" is defined as "the nonviolent struggle for control over the actual and imagined achievements of the new biology and the world it symbolizes."

(I analyzed Rick Santorum's views on bioethics vis a vis this wider conversation and will charitably designate him as some sort of "paleobiocon." I think I'm letting him off easy, too.)

The Reader has to decide where they stand on this stuff. Where are you, bio-ethically? The more I study this stuff, the more difficult it gets. On principle I like the idea of Unistat starting out as a country that values very highly new knowledge. And the history of the 19th/early 20th century Progressive movement and eugenics is sobering. On the other hand, I see Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan as prophetic (ironically!): we now live less and less in the old linear, Bell Curvey "Mediocristan" and more and more in Extremistan: the rich have gotten wildly richer and almost everyone else has stayed the same or has fallen lower. And I don't see much brightness on the horizon. Just look at the overtly bought elections. Just look at the appalling decadence in the basic fact that: the banks did what they did to our lives, got bailed out, and Obama has not been able to put in place any regulations with teeth to speak of, four years later.

However, as Taleb goes to great lengths to emphasize: we can only notice where there's risk/fragility built into a system and try to minimize it. All other bets about the future are off. No one knows. Certainly not "experts"!

I tend to be with Moreno's "bioprogressives," who welcome new advances, even if I probably won't be able to afford them. Hell, I can't even afford basic health insurance now...

Speaking of Taleb: "Don't talk about 'progress' in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness." - p.7, Bed of Procrustes


David Jay Brown's marvelous book of interviews, Mavericks of Medicine: Conversations on the Frontiers of Medical Research (2006) was an overwhelmingly stimulating read this past week - on this subject of life extension and other topics - and is largely to blame for the gap between my last post and this one. Highly recommended! (It's dedicated to Robert Anton Wilson, too.)


To end on a lighter note, Professor Carlin thought that "Dying must have a survival value. Or it wouldn't be part of the biological process."

Ray Kurzweil - no relation to Peter Bogdanovich that I know of - on aging and supplements, for a minute and 40 seconds: "We can't rely on 'being natural,' that's not good enough..."

Books, Borges, and The Library of Babel

I recently read yet once again Borges's very short story, "The Library of Babel," mostly for its invocation of an ineffable infinitude. The first time I read this story it knocked me on my ass, and it haunted my daydreams. Imagine a library that contained every book ever written, every book that would ever be written, in every language, including a book that was your autobiography, a book that would vindicate our lives, that probably many books were written in code, and if you could just learn how to crack it, things would come together, yet no one has ever been able to decipher any codes; a book that was the key to all the other books, and a legend of a Librarian who knew this book...but almost all of the books are filled with gibberish, random letters thrown together, and presumably innumerable copies of Don Quixote, every one with one letter or punctuation mark different from the others...and there is no order...

I find that I think of this library quite often, and if enough time has passed between one reading of the piece (it seems more like a piece than a "story" to me), then my imagination has glommed onto one or two ideas in the piece at the expense of others, or I find, upon a new reading, that my memory, probably influenced by the vertiginous aspect of the piece, has invented something new that's not really in the piece, but seems plausibly aligned with its spirit.

                                     Escher, of course. I see Borges's Library here, too.

The Wikipedia article on Borges's piece links the original idea of the stupendously massive number of possibilities of books to 13th century philosopher-magician-mystic Ramon Llull's imaginary device, called now a "Lullian Circle" that could generate a near-infinity of possibilities. The metaphor of the library has proven absurdly fecund, and I've stopped keeping notes whenever this monstrous library is used by a contemporary writer to get a point across. I think some of us are enchanted-unto-haunted by the notion of infinity.

The Wiki article links to ideas from Kant, kabbalah, and Quine. The philosopher Daniel Dennett is mentioned also, with regard to DNA permutations and what was/is possible; if you read Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea and the "Library of Mendel" you get an insight into the dizzying possibilities of the mathematics of genetic mutation. Similarly, Robert Sapolsky used Borges in discussing the idea of biological convergence in The Trouble With Testosterone. In Richard Preston's book Panic In Level 4 there's a story - true! "non-fiction" - of two Russian brothers, the Chudnovskis, both mathematicians, whose driving ambition is to use as many computers as they can to carry out pi  to...just an absurd number of places, really. And Preston invokes Borges's idea: what if, somewhere in the vast depths of the seemingly random pi, there's suddenly a mathematically-proven explosion of non-randomness? Getting involved in infinity seems to attract the weird ones. Show of hands? (Or does infinity's clutches render one, over time, less sane?)

One of my favorite books to pick off the shelf in my quite-finite library is Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which runs to nearly 1100 pages. It's an astonishing work; get your hands on it, if only for half an hour someday. Collins writes about present-day intellectual life and says:

"The totality of knowledge today resembles Jorge Luis Borges's circular library, with endless volumes on endless shelves, and inhabitants searching for the master catalogue buried among them written in a code no one can understand. But we can also think of it as a magic place of adventurously winding corridors with treasures in every room. It suffers only from surfeit, since new and greater treasures are always to be found. Borges's image has the alienated tone characteristic of modern intellectuals, but the underlying problem is the inchoate democracy of it all, the lack of a master key." (pp.41-42)

Supposedly Gertrude Stein once said something like, "There ain't no answer. There never was an answer. There ain't never gonna be an answer. That's the answer." This lack of a key seems to me the key, the answer to the riddle of this particular sphinx. We will make and construct, like a teeming mass of bricoleurs, our knowledge. Has fantastical knowledge already appeared and been criminally neglected, for whatever reason? I suspect it has. We must expect such things, however sad.

A funny thing about Borges: it seems the sufis have been claiming him since the 1960s as one of their own. A well-stocked library will yield multiple titles that link him with sufis. Which I accept on the face if it. I've read a couple of those books. But then, I accept sufis indiscriminately. Philip K. Dick was said to have been reading Borges at the end of his life, according to PKD acolyte Gregg Rickman, in his Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words. Erik Davis, in my eyes one of our three best writers on contemporary esotericism, or as he calls it, "occulture," has argued that magical realism - commonly linked with names like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, had as its forerunners Borges and H.P. Lovecraft. (See Book of Lies, edited by Richard Metzger, p.139)

For fellow Robert Anton Wilson scholars, he named Borges as an influential "experimental modern" writer, along with Joyce and Faulkner, in an interview with Charles Platt in 1983 or so. In a letter to his friend Kurt Smith, RAW compares Borges to Wilde and Yeats. (!) In his book Chaos and Beyond, he mentions Borges as "avante garde" along with Joyce and William S. Burroughs. In an issue of his magazine Trajectories RAW lumps Borges in with a large cast of guerrilla ontologists, tricksters, postmodernists and others he calls "codologists."

Hakim Bey, AKA Peter Lamborn Wilson, definitely a sufi of some sort, writes in Immediatism, "Books? Books as media transmit only words - no sounds, sights, smells or feels, all of which are left up to the reader's imagination. Fine...But there's nothing 'democratic' about books. The author/publisher produces, you consume. Books appeal to 'imaginative' people, perhaps, but all their imaginal activity really amounts to passivity, sitting alone with a book, letting someone else tell the story. The magic of books has something sinister about it, as in Borges's Library. The Church's idea of a list of damnable books probably didn't go far enough - for in a sense, all books are damned. The eros of the text is a perversion -- albeit, nevertheless, one to which we are addicted, & in no hurry to kick."(pp.34-35)

This nails me pretty well, and links with a long line of drug-like-addled, Lotus-Eating book-readers, intoxicated by the text, at times finding what we so laffingly call "real life" a tad wanting, when it comes to the worlds in books, our habitations of, as Hamlet said when asked what he was reading, words, words, words...

Well, I had wanted to write about a number of things having to do with books - as my title says - and yet I've been carried away by Borges and his damned infinitude. In one of my all-time favorite books on reading, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, he talks of his time spent reading aloud to blind Borges, and that reading aloud changes a text one has already read, but reading aloud to a guy like Borges, who chose the text, was another thing entirely. "Reading out loud to the blind old man was a curious experience because, even though I felt, with some effort, in control of the tone and pace of the reading, it was nevertheless Borges, the listener, who became the master of the text. I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven, for whom there was no other responsibility than that of apprehending the country outside the windows. Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible." (pp.18-19)

Manguel says while reading, he was constantly reminded of other texts to compare the current one with, or to note the similarity of emotions evoked by this text and that one. He quotes another Argentinian writer, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who says, "There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery." Manguel then notes that Borges did not believe in systematic bibliographies, and encouraged this sort of adulterous reading.

                                 Holland House, West London, after a Nazi bombing, 1940
                                 I've always loved this picture. Stout chaps, those! Stiff 
                                  upper lip and all that doncha know? Wot? Stoic as all hell!

Max Ernst: Une Semaine de Bonte'

Translated to English usually as A Week of Kindness, sometimes as A Week of Grace, Ernst's 1934 book Une Semaine de Bonte' (<-----the images are in a PDF linked there, highly recommended you glance through if you've never seen it!) is subtitled "A Surrealistic Novel in Collage" in my Dover edition, and it's one of the most wonderfully weird books I've ever read. Indeed, "reading" this book seems akin to the reading of Ezra Pound's ideograms, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a William S. Burroughs cut-up novel such as Nova Express, studying Egyptian hieroglyphics, and you get my point. It's demanding.

                                          Max Ernst: Oedipus Rex, 1922. 

The entire "novel" consists of pre-existing images in wood-engraved illustrations that Ernst tweaked with technical virtuosity; the resulting images, which are framed in sections with a putative theme of the seven days of the week ("Seven Deadly Elements": mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight, and possibly falling women?), and other bizarre framing devices, such as characters with heads from Easter Island statues (Thursday and blackness), and a bevy of men with bird's heads, which I find particularly disturbing. Ernst liked bird-men, and even called his bird-man alter ego "Loplop," and "he" appears throughout Ernst's work, and even merges with the work of other surrealist's work, such as Andre Breton's.

                                            One of my favorite images from the book

The only writing part of the text consists of the framing devices, and quotes from proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry, Dadaists (Thursday features this quote from Jean Arp: "The stones are full of entrails. Bravo. Bravo."), and surrealists.

This "novel" of collages was concocted in about three week's time, in Italy, where Ernst stayed with friends, lugging a suitcase overflowing with images he'd cut out/collected from mail order catalogs, popular French novels of the late 19th and early 20th century, and some of Gustav Dore's work. Ernst takes a pre-existing engraved illustration and inserts other images in a cut-and-paste method, in which, during the printing process the visual demarcations of cut-paste are virtually eliminated, yielding a look of fantastic technique and profoundly bizarre imagery. The challenge to the reader - and it's quite a challenge - is to "read" each image, juxtaposed with the ones from the same "day," and attempt to make "sense" of it. (Or is this precisely what you aren't supposed to/cannot do or try?)

                                                   What the...?

Every time I leaf through Une Semaine de Bonte' I become overwhelmed by each image. But that's me. Your results may differ. But that may be a seminal point here: every reader brings to the text themselves and interaction with the images. In a way that seems fundamentally different to the opaque texts featuring WORDS I mentioned above (Pound, Joyce, Burroughs), making sense of a single image seems challenge enough; "reading"/making sense of just one "week" of images seems well-nigh impossible, and perhaps that's the main reason no one that I've ever seen or read about, has ever produced a complete critical analysis of the text. A hardcore Freudian named Deiter Wyss produced (I've not read it) a detailed  and heavily Freudian-jargoned analysis of the first day of the book (mud and the Lion of Belfort). And that's it. The book is that weird and unheimlich.

The surrealists were outraged and outrageous, especially about the state of politics. In order to hold a mirror up to what they saw, they drew upon free-association and dreams and Freud, erotic imagery at times lurid, scenes of violence, anti-clericalism, and anything that would be seen as that which must be "repressed" by the superego: crimes of passion, torture, executions and suicide, and depictions of the emotional aspects of class warfare between rich and poor. As Ernst conceived and assembled his anti-rationalist collage phantasmagorical "anti-novel" in Italy, the Nazis in his native country had condemned all of his work, which no doubt influenced the must-be-seen-to-be-believed disturbing imagery of Une Semaine de Bonte'. 


Because each page-image in the text is probably met by an individual nervous system trying to decode a metaphor from one's fixed stock of (largely unconscious) metaphors, trying to "make sense" of the text, readings seem to inevitably be pixillating; Ernst's virtuosity in juxtaposition, coupled with an implementation of the surrealist program, make each pictatorial "metaphor" so complex and uncertain - a function of mathematically ultra-dense information that verges on "noise" in the nervous system - that any one reading would seem to be as individualistic as the reader her-him-self.

Obviously, another way to "read" the text is by just letting the images wash over you; don't even try to decipher what may lie hidden beneath. I've gone this route too. It leads to odder-than-usual dreams later during sleep.

Speaking for myself and my own readings of Ernst's novel of collage, the main reason I dip into it and attempt the "read" it is because it reliably induces an altered state of mind. It's a cost-free (once the book's bought) buzz. It breaks mental set, gets me out of my "self" and opens me back into that sense of wonderful weirdness and the sheer marvelous of...something lurking outside ordinary "reality." I think this is all the real religion we need. There seems a strong sense in which no one can truly "know" Une Semaine de Bonte'. This kind of thing seems to make some people outraged or feel threatened by the disturbingly uncanny weirdness; some seem to feel vertigo and they don't like it. My nervous system is exhilarated by this uncanniness. I like not being able to "figure it all out." I like the repeated attempt. I like the buzz.

Alfred Jarry, the Dadaists (one said what they were doing was a reaction to the news that people were being bombed from airplanes) and the surrealists were in the avant about questioning technological rationalism in the West. All this wonderful new technology, and yet: an up-tick in mass warfare and killing, and poverty among riches. An artist's protest: use anti-rationality to try and make people feel-then-think in a new way.

Has the jury returned with their verdict on how successful the surrealists and their popular accomplices were?

Brief Scattered Notes on Max Ernst (1891-1976)
He had an authoritarian father, strict religion as a kid. Where have we seen this story before? Ernst was a self-taught painter, and around age 18 visited insane asylums and became interested in artwork by the mentally ill. While ground zero for Dada was in Zurich, Ernst opened a chapter in Cologne. He went to Paris in 1922 and collaborated with anarcho-surrealist/then communist/then libertarian socialist poet Paul Eluard, and lived in a menage a trois with Eluard and his wife. Eluard started to get spooked by this arrangement and took off to Monaco, then Saigon. The three reconciled. Ernst was married a bunch of times, captured by the Nazis twice. The first time Eluard helped him get away, the second time Ernst was helped by Peggy Guggenheim,  who helped him get to Unistat, and whose own biography is almost too marvelous to believe. Ernst was married to Guggenheim from 1942-46. Ernst and Man-Ray got married in a double ceremony in Beverly Hills in 1946, to Dorothea Tanning and Juliet Browner, respectively.

Friends, collaborators and accomplices of Ernst include Miro, Diaghilev, Breton, Giacometti, and Klee. Ernst appeared in Bunuel's 1930 film L'Age d'Or.


How do I sum up my experience "reading" Une Semaine de Bonte'? I think I'll quote one of the inspirations for the Surrealists, "Lautreamont" (died: 1870), who once wrote, "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing-machine with an umbrella on an operating table."

This video contains a recording of Ernst, from the 1960s, talking about the artist's response to outrageous politics, etc: It's less than 45 seconds:

Quasi-Brief Foray Into Intelligence Increase

Propelled by some net-friends and Wilson and Leary's "SMI2LE" acronym (for their futuristic vision of Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension), I covered some of the latest on space migration HERE. When it came to tackling intelligence, I rapidly realized I'd been plopped into a dense thicket of Amazonian foliage, vines and tendrils ensnaring me, a thick canopy of green blotting out the sky, save for some filtered sunlight here and there, no compass, no radio...I couldn't even define "intelligence" to my satisfaction. I have run across some fairly good stabs at defining It, but nothing stood out as clearly the "best" definition. It seems intelligence is one of those things we "know" when we encounter it - in others or in our ourselves - but have a rather rough time of capturing it in all its glory and detail.

I suspect, when I feel this way, that I had made a bad assumption. Intelligence seems such a wonderfully grand thing that I'm a bit relieved we can't pin it down. 

We have tried to look at what intelligence is not, and we rapidly spiral down to the contemplation of stupidity. This gets us somewhere, but it seems to fall short. In a late 1970s essay by Robert Anton Wilson, called "The Abolition of Stupidity," (see The Illuminati Papers), RAW writes, "Voltaire, of course, may have been exaggerating when he said that the only way to understand the mathematical concept of infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity; but the situation is almost that bad." Later on in that same book, in an essay titled "Stupidynamics," we come upon one of my many collected definitions of intelligence: "High intelligence is the ability to receive, integrate and transmit new signals rapidly. (This follows from Wiener's Cybernetics, especially his classic definition, 'To live well is to live with adequate information,' and from Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication.)"

As I mulled the definition problem, I found I gravitated towards ideas that had to do with making social life better, and thinking in wider and wider systems. It's easy to say intelligence ought to further the prospects of continuing human life in its cities, ecosystems and general environment, in perpetuity. A sort of species-wide Darwin test.

I really like a definition I copped from Andrea Kuszewski, in an article that originally appeared in Scientific American last year, but which I found at the page for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Ms. Kuszewski writes: 

"Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over six characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging." Her entire piece is a must-read. When I read her piece I confess I felt sorta dull. When I took in her five Big Things (Seeking Novelty, Challenging Yourself, Thinking Creatively, Doing Things the Hard Way, and Networking) and their links, I thought, "Jeez, I really have my work cut out for me..."

I have found so much Good Stuff in my researches into trying to find the State of the Art of "intelligence" I can only mention a few. One could make Intelligence Increase the topic for a blog and do nothing but write about that for a year and never get close to exhausting the topic. I'm sure there are people who have done that, indeed. But this overwhelming feeling both curls back upon itself and points back at the topic itself and - check it for yourself - people interested in getting smarter seem to very quickly want to get smarter in their own games, the ones they're already pretty good at. Note Ms. Kuszewski on "Challenge Yourself": once you get good at one game, abandon it for another. 

On a wider level, while relatively few inhabitants of the planet ardently seek to get off the planet and there seems a fascinating backlash against longevity/immortality, almost everyone seems to want to be smarter. Or they profess that. (What happened to so many of them?) Which I find curious.

                                                Howard Gardner: there are multiple 

                                                types of intelligence. I love his history of

                                                cognitive science, called 

                                                The Mind's New Science, even if it's a 

                                                tad dated by now.

I like Professor Howard Gardner's ideas about many different types of intelligence, and how much of it seems innate, then nurtured. The IQ tests mask cultural assumptions made by overly geeky types who seek to measure everything. Linguistic, logical-mathematical, and spatial abilities RAWK, don't get me wrong. But Gardner says bodily kinesthetic intelligence has commonly been overlooked. Geniuses here might be Baryshnikov, the gold medal winners in gymnastics, Michael Jordan, Gretzky...

Then there is musical intelligence. You know it when you hear it. I have learned that to cite certain examples of musical intelligence is a set-up for inadvertently pissing off your interlocutors: you will leave out some Genius they love, and music gives us great spiritual satisfaction in an often cruel universe. It's like dissing God. Not gonna go there. Fill in your favorite musical geniuses. You have your reasons and I promise you, they're good enough for me. 

Gardner was/is also part of a larger movement in recognizing Emotional Intelligence, and this topic seems to have just gotten hotter and hotter every year since around 1975. In the hardcore neurosciences, it's now a slam-dunk to assert that an adequately operating limbic system/emotional brain is essential in making rational choices, personally and socially. How do we know this? Short answer: there are plenty of IQ-smart people with limbic deficits, and they can't implement their logical-mathematical skills to the point where they can run a full, well-lived, reasonably "happy" life. The neurological literature is filled with extreme cases. If your hippocampus was damaged, you can't make long-term memories. One of the best books I've read on this topic is Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error.

Memory. Hmmm...I've just finished reading a rousing great, unfathomably wonderful book by a young hotshot journalist named Joshua Foer. It seems he fell in with a bunch of "mental athletes" who compete against each other in what seem like impossible, astonishing feats of memory. I will take the time to plug Foer's book from 2011, Moonwalking With Einstein. (see 3 minute video at the end of this post, too) Foer, in a sort of gonzo-style journalism, decides to become one of these mental athletes, and trains hard, and becomes, in one year, one of the top memorizers (or mnemonists) in Unistat. 

But it's the creativity behind the tricks these guys use to memorize a recently shuffled pack of cards in two minutes, or memorize a previously unpublished poem of many pages, pages of random words (record: 280 in fifteen minutes!), lists of binary digits, lists of historical dates, names, faces...

Think about what memory means to you. It sort of goes a long way in identifying who you "are," doesn't it? 

But then again: if you look at really good Jeopardy! players (one reader of this blog won $10,000 on the show); they have fantastically good semantic intelligence. This can be described as knowing free-floating pieces of knowledge, ideas that are out of space/time. As Foer puts it, knowing that "breakfast is the first meal of the day" is semantic memory; knowing you had eggs for breakfast yesterday seems to be processed in the nervous system differently, and is called episodic memory. Then there is procedural or non-declarative memory: even people who have damaged limbic systems and can't make long-term memories can still knit you a sweater, ride a bike, climb the stairs, etc. This is all incredibly mysterious, but we're learning. And I'm getting away from my subject.

One thing that rivets me regarding improving memory: when I looked at literature spanning roughly 1967 to 2005, there was no end of literature on drugs that would be coming that would markedly improve our memories. And some of you who have tried some of these drugs? Please feel free to weigh in in the comments section. I'd love to hear from you. 

                                           A rendering of Cicero. Photo by Maro Prins

But Foer and his colleagues used tricks that were from drawn originally from a book written between 86-82 BCE: Rhetorica Ad Herennium, but if you want to read it go to Amazon (or better yet, your local public library?) and look for Cicero's little red Loeb Classical Library edition, which contains Latin/English. This was the first book to go over the "memory palace" idea, which lasted until Gutenberg, then slowly died out. Before our modern era, memory training was a basic aspect of ethics, character building, having a worldly mind, attaining virtue. After the mass-production of books - epigenetic memories - memory faded. Why expend the effort to remember when you know where to find it outside your own nervous system? It's got a Library of Congress number, a Dewey number, you can Google it, etc. 

As Foer says, after mass printing really got going, "memory techniques that had once been a staple of classical and medieval culture got wrapped up with the occult and esoteric Hermetic traditions of the Renaissance, and by the nineteenth century they had been relegated to carnival sideshows and tacky self-help books..." 

You're thinking, "I love Giordano Bruno and all that, but gimme the new memory drugs!" I hear ya. 

But please consider a look at Foer's book. It's wonderfully entertaining, and he shows you how it's done. I found it seductive. And it has a good bibliography. 

I have no space/time here to cover the scientifically proven benefits of yoga, meditation, aerobic exercise, or the magickal art of writing for transformation. On to drugs.

Okay: this topic too seems far too extensive, so I'm going to limit it to what I've read about ADHD drugs being used "off-label" by college students, and to the ever-increasingly almost too-good-to-be-true testimonials about Modafinil/Provigil. 

Possibly 1 in 10 college students use Adderal or Ritalin as "mental steroids" (see "Cognitive Enhancers Are Not 'Cheating'") in order to perform better on tests and writing assignments. Which is interesting, but the side effects are obvious to anyone who reads up on this stuff, and we wonder why Provigil isn't made more widely available. Read Johann Hari's tale of what Provigil did/does for him. He ends the piece on a probably prudent conservative bend about the drug, but other articles mention people who study this stuff, use it themselves, and don't seem all that afraid of the long-term effects. 

Smart Drugs seem to be finally arriving, folks. And one thing that interests me relates to the marijuana legalization story (and cannabis has been shown to have some enhancing effects, too, but I would digress too much if I went on that route): some of these stories emphasize what Leary once called "cognitive liberty" (see The Economist, here: "minimizing harm" and "maximizing the freedom to choose"); this argument has not worked for cannabis. So far the "we may need to go laissez faire in order to help the economy improve" argument hasn't worked in California, where cannabis is the number one cash crop. But this "economy" argument is being used for cognitive enhancers, and of course, I agree. Here's one example. The optimism I find refreshing.

Wikipedia's article on Nootropics (AKA "smart drugs") is HERE.

Erowid has trip reports, other articles, etc, on smart drugs HERE. 

The Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute's site is HERE.

For the philosophically inclined, check out the quiet battles going on regarding technologically enhanced cognition, whether via computers and/or drugs, and "extended cognition." Being a bookish dude, I see the "Google is making us stupid"- like arguments. I am for some reason continually astounded by how many people I come into contact with who seem to think because they've got Siri, GPS, a MacBook Pro, and a smart phone...that they're "smart." Especially after reading about memory. What an illusion! Many of the people running around with these gadgets are preposterous dullards, without seemingly any sense of history or ideas, or wit. They are well-dressed, well-equipped apes. With bad manners. And they drive recklessly. 

On the other hand: extended cognition isn't some viral theme that will fade by the first day of summer, and many who are decked out with all these fantastic gadgets know how to use them appropriately. I've seen young people who were astonishingly witty, inventive...intelligent....using this stuff. I cannot tar everyone unfairly, just because I'm not enamored of a GPS or Siri/Internet/email in your pocket. (See Kuszewski's article above on "doing things the hard way.")

This is one socio-philosophical debate that isn't going anywhere. "Extended Cognition." It seems a close cousin to Richard Dawkins' "extended phenotype."

There was so much more I wanted to touch on regarding Intelligence Increase in 2012, but I may as well end with something so marvelous - and potentially a harrowing paranoia-inducer because it can be done at a distance, with the subject not knowing! - that you'll have something to debate about over drugs and friends this and other weekends: Are we getting close to instant "Matrix"- style learning?

Here's Joshua Foer, talking about his book on memory. It's a little over 3 minutes.

Of the Quantification of Beauty, Part 3

Before I do my usual and write far too much (let's face it: you have better things to do), make sure you come back to the top of this post (which means right where you're reading now), and find out, via some pretty well-established neurobiological data, what your own "Sex I.D." profile is, by doing a series of tests that will last around 20-30 minutes. I've seen a lot of this kind of stuff in my research, but this one is the best. It's HERE. At the bottom, click on "Take the Sex I.D. Test" I'll show you my androgynous results if you're interested...

                                 Miss Venezuela/Miss World 2011: Ivian Sarcos: get a load 
                                                of that "symmetry"!

Sexual Dimorphism and Facial Symmetry
In my previous riffings on beauty and the attempt to quantify it, we found that a certain symmetry seems to hold. But what is "sexual dimorphism"? Basically: males looking "masculine" and females looking "feminine." For example: a guy with a pronounced brow and square jaw with his arm around the waist of a female with big eyes and full lips. This is a noticeably sexually dimorphic couple. But why are these phenotypic characters attractive? Well, it's a hot topic, and Anthony Little and colleagues think they might have the answer. Do the attractive features you see in another indicate 1.) their genetic quality? 2.) fertility? or maybe it's 3.) visual experience simply; seeing someone hot is simply that: it's not about some "occult" or hidden or unconscious signals from the genotype?

Turns out - according to Little and his team - that it's #1 and #2 above. Symmetry and sexual dimorphism  seem linked, too. There seems to be a biological mechanism that links them, not only across cultures, but in primates. Facial symmetry and sexual dimorphism do indeed seem to be markers for health. Another study about females along these lines is HERE. Note this last one has a twist: female facial femininity may be linked to some aspects of disease resistance but not others. There's a test at Little's site and I took it, but it seemed like the silent videos of young people talking, where you rate them on a scale of attractiveness from 1 to 7, loaded far too slowly. His test stuff is HERE.

What about checking out bodies? For going on four years now, 3-D imaging of entire bodies - to more precisely assess symmetries and asymmetries - have been studied at places like Brunel University in London. They developed what they call "body masculinity," which means, roughly and as I understand it: if you're a female you tend to prefer males of greater height, wider shoulders, smaller breasts, and shorter legs; where males look for someone shorter, not wide shoulders, larger breasts (duh?), and longer legs. The researchers there are saying that we may not notice asymmetries, so nature has also plugged in some extra "hints" for us: curvy waist lines, broad shoulders, smooth dance moves, etc.

If you've read Plato, for example, you might be saying to yourself, "What's the big deal with all this hoo-ha about symmetry and beauty and and all that? Plato was writing about it in the 4th century BCE." Yes. But it wasn't a precise "science," as it supposedly is now.

By the way, the bigtime Chinese philosopher Mencius also thought we had an innate feeling for symmetry and beauty. See HERE.

A Dissenting View
Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian says that symmetry and perfection can be disturbing. Yea, but just look at his tiny mug shot next to his column. (Or look at mine, on the right side of this page.) Of course he'd say that, you may be thinking, 'cuz he's no George Clooney/Daniel Craig/nameyourfavoritehunkhere. Right, but I also see his point. Let me elaborate a bit.

I have known women who had big noses and for some reason I found them attractive. I knew a Dutch woman in college who was over 6 feet 2 inches: taller than me, and she had small breasts but she was sort of big-boned and clunky. And I thought she was hot. I could go on with my personal stuff here - a gal with a prominent mole that somehow seemed to improve an average face - but I'll stop. I think I asked myself, "Am I really attracted to these features, or have I picked up a fairly strong vibe that she'd be open to a roll in the hay with me, so I seem to find her flaws 'attractive,' or am I truly attracted to these 'flaws'?"

I don't know, but it seems a good bet that - and this is based on research too - her seeming "open-ness" made me find her flaws engaging.

I like how Burkeman brings up the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, or the beauty in imperfection. But then there's a trick there: we have to decide to not analyze too much if something seems  faux wabi-sabi or not. And as he says, far too many things are (faux) these days.


I've noticed something "disturbing" about my seeming inability to give a beautiful female (stand-up, sketch, sitcom) comic performer the "room" they deserve, as comediennes. I don't like it, it's unfair to Olivia Munn, Aisha Tyler, Laura San Giacomo and a few others. If I find them gorgeous enough, those circuits in my brain seem to inhibit the "hey, that's funny" circuits. It's weird. Every time I see Aisha Tyler, I say to myself, "Now, forget she's that gorgeous. She's funny too. She's hilarious, witty, snide..."
And I fail. Time for another pic, so may as well be Aisha:

                                                                             DAY-um!

The Unit of Measurement of Beauty
It's the Helen. One millihelen is enough to launch a ship; let the math follow from there. I read most of the Wikipedia article I linked to two sentences ago; I didn't see Robert Anton Wilson mentioned; I thought maybe he had coined the "Helen" as a unit of measurement for beauty, but I couldn't confirm. He did make the "Spelvin" the unit of measurement of "sincerity in sexual pleasure," from Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy.

Fashion Models and Barbie
Regardless all this positivistic measurement and biology, there seems at least some aspect of culture that has some gravitational effects on all...this. Let's look at fashion models and how they've changed since 1992. According to this article from Plus Model/Utne Reader, the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average woman in 1992; today she weighs 23% less. Today's models very often meet the criteria for anorexia nervosa. WHO is choosing these models? Is this overweening skinniness being foisted upon the public? Do we really like that look best? Or is the fashion-model business sort of like the Art World: insular and to be admired from outside for their "show"?

Check out the lower half of this article. I find it amusing, but I found almost everything by the late William R. Corliss, amusing. Died in 2011. He was one of the great compilers of information that was representing something against-the-grain, anomalistic, or enlightening in some way. I marvel at a Corliss book. To me, he's right there with Charles Fort. Anyway: Barbie. We have, as a species, selected for these beautiful attributes, and at one long, long time ago, our ancestors were pug-fugly. Ken and Barbie are exteriorizations of our collective yearn for oodles of symmetry and sexual dimorphism. Or something like that. But because of symmetry and sexual choice (mostly by women), we have Barbie (and Ken) as ideals. (There may have been a tricky logical fallacy in there somewhere, so watch out!) And sombunall postmodernist/Culture Studies professors would say Barbie and Ken are about the White Male power structure, but all our symmetry studies say: no...

Because "it's hot in here" only because we have a sense of what "it's cold in here" might be like, I must discuss ugly people - or the non-beautiful, or those with "appearance deficits" - in order to leave this all properly aligned in some way.

Next time. Now go back uptop and do that BBC "Sex I.D. Test" thingy.

Here's Aisha Tyler doing stand-up for 50 seconds, in time for Valentine's Day: