by Caitlin Gianniny

Contributing to the growing buzz around synesthesia, the third episode of HBO’s new series True Detective revealed that Matthew Mcconaughey’s character is a synesthete. Bloomberg Businessweek joined the ranks last month as well publishing an article titled The Mind's Eye: Synesthesia Has Business Benefits by Caroline Winter, discussing how synesthesia can be an asset in the workplace as a tool for cross-sensory design and creativity. As someone with synesthesia I applaud the positive public reception of it as legitimate and not only “non-harmful” but potentially beneficial for those who experience it as fellow synesthete Maureen Seaberg does. Unfortunately, however, the article overgeneralizes findings in research in relation to creativity and the universality of synesthetic experiences.

Due to the higher prevalence of synesthesia amongst people working in the arts (Vladimir Nabokov, David Hockney and Pharrell Williams, to name a few), the question as to whether synaesthesia may predispose individuals to be creative has been raised by synesthetes and researchers alike. Winter highlights “enhancing creativity and innovation” as a “professionally beneficial side effect” of some types of synesthesia, citing a 2004 study from the University of California at San Diego in which synesthetes scored twice as high as controls on Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.

However, a 2008 study conducted by Jamie Ward et al. at the University of Sussex that explicitly examined links between synesthesia, art and creativity concluded that while synesthetes outperformed controls on some measures of creativity these findings do not translate into the cognitive flexibility necessary for creativity per se. “The cardinal feature of creativity is to think beyond the boundaries of existing associative knowledge” and “there is no convincing evidence that synaesthetes are more capable of doing this than other individuals.” Ward et al. suggest that the atypical experience of synaesthesia may bias synesthetes “towards the creative arts” and that this “artistic bias” is confused with creativity.

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Nathan Schneider in Waging Non-Violence:

In the heady early days of Occupy Wall Street, there was a lot of talk about whether this thing was really a movement or something else, something presumably less worthy of attention. In an early Room for Debate discussion at The New York Times, for instance, the eminent social movement scholar Stephen Zunes stressed that “protests are not a movement”; I insisted, in the same discussion, on calling Occupy an “occupation-turned-movement.” To me, the evidence was this: Occupy was confounding the normal political spectrum. It wasn’t just people aligned with what are normally called the left or right, but an assemblage of people who reflected the inadequacy of the right-and-left spectrum for reflecting people’s longings — libertarians and anarchists, socialists and liberals, veterans and peaceniks, conservatives and utopians.

Over time, a more familiar leftist activist culture came to dominate the movement; at right about that time (with the help of coordinated repression) it started losing steam. But I’m reminded of that early movement moment by the release of Joseph Bottum’s new book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. I once met Bottum around his dinner table when he was editor of First Things, an organ of religious neoconservatism; he’s also a writer for The Weekly Standard and an avid science fiction reader. He explains in an interview on the book’s Amazon page (which Paul Elie points to at Everything That Rises):

In some ways, An Anxious Age really began when I was sent out to report on the protestors at Occupy Wall Street — and couldn’t finish the assignment. I could feel a spiritual anxiety about modern civilization radiating from nearly all of them, but I could find no easy way to explain it.

Now, two years later, this book is my answer: Not just those protestors, but nearly everyone today is driven by supernatural concerns, however much or little they realize it. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives — together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation of individuals desperate to stand on the side of morality—anxious to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light.

More here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America's banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world's banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or “modifying,” as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

More here.

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. “Well,” he said, “first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That’s when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I’m really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write.”

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A's in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talents kept them at the head of the class.

More here.

A few days ago, Zujaja posted this article on 3QD, calling into question the value of mammograms. Here is a reply from the American College of Radiology:

According to the American College of Radiology and Society of Breast Imaging, the recent breast cancer screening article (Miller et al) published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) (1) is an incredibly misleading analysis based on the deeply flawed and widely discredited Canadian National Breast Screening Study (CNBSS). The results of this BMJ study, and others resulting from the CNBSS trial, should not be used to create breast cancer screening policy as this would place a great many women at increased risk of dying unnecessarily from breast cancer.

Experts called on to review the CNBSS confirmed that the mammography quality was poor (2). The trial used second hand mammography machines, which were not state of the art at the time of the trial. The images were compromised by “scatter,” which makes the images cloudy and cancers harder to see since they did not employ grids for much of the trial. Grids remove the scatter and make it easier to see cancers. Also, technologists were not taught proper positioning. As such, many women were not properly positioned in the machines, resulting in missed cancers. And the CNBSS radiologists had no specific training in mammographic interpretation. The CNBSS own reference physicist stated that “…in my work as reference physicist to the NBSS, [I] identified many concerns regarding the quality of mammography carried out in some of the NBSS screening centers. That quality [in the NBSS] was far below state of the art, even for that time (early 1980s).”(3)

In this latest BMJ paper, only 32 percent of cancers were detected by mammography alone. This extremely low number is consistent with poor quality mammography. At least two-thirds of the cancers should be detected by mammography alone (4).

More here. [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

From The Economist:

In a paper just published in Science, a group at Harvard, led by Justin Werfel, describes termite-inspired robots that can build things by combining magnetic bricks of a standard size. All their human controller has to do is program them with a few appropriate rules and leave them to get on with it.

Robot construction teams are not, in themselves, new. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have already demonstrated a system which uses remotely controlled flying robots to build things. What makes Dr Werfel’s approach different is that instead of having a controlling force, in the form of a computer program, sitting at the centre telling everything else what to do (as was the case in Pennsylvania), control is distributed throughout the system’s components, which cannot communicate with each other. The robots, which are little wheeled contraptions, do not need to see the bigger picture.

In the case of termites, the bigger picture is provided by natural selection, which has, over the millennia, refined the rules that individual termites obey. In the case of Dr Werfel’s robots, a human designer specifies the desired outcome and, with the help of a program developed by the team, generates the rules that will lead to its construction, with which each robot is then programmed. All that remains is to place a foundation brick to show the robots where to start building.

More here.

Hamzah Saif in Chapati Mystery:

Rap’s transition from the poetry of marginalized African American communities to the mega-hits circulating in mainstream America today draws fierce debate. Consumerism and commodification are frequently found guilty of eviscerating a once-radical movement with the market’s golden handcuffs, swapping its class politics for “mere spectacle.” In contrast, Western popular and academic assessments of rap’s journey beyond American borders, particularly in the “Muslim world,” are markedly inattentive to this commercialism. Instead, this rap evokes a virtually unanimous nostalgia. There, 1986 Los Angeles is found alive in 2013 Lebanon, and New York’s Public Enemy and L.A.’s N.W.A are discovered rhyming through Beirut’s Rayess Bek and Tehran’s Yas. So prevalent is this penchant for locating the dissent lost in American rap in “over there” rap that the Washington D.C.-based think-tank, Middle East Institute, finds Iran’s Ayatollahs battling a reanimated Tupac, and Wall Street Journal has rappers soundtracking revolt from Egypt to Iran. The anachronism of finding 1980’s Ice Cube in contemporary Islamabad can be plausible only if one abundantly ignores the realities of contemporary rap. In a landscape where middle class white purchasers have dictated the contours of the genre’s production since at least 1992, it is particularly absurd to impose upon non-American “Muslim” rappers the romantic notion that their rap is protest. Imagining a resurrection of resistance in “over there” rap shortchanges the breadth of the non-American musical movements. Instead, they are much more productively seen as artists in the peripheral markets of globalized rap. Such a lens appropriately situates the rappers, and accords their work the creativity and artistry it deserves.

Far from culturally-appropriate replicas of bygone American rappers, Middle East and South Asia rappers are creators of an entirely new art, vastly expanding the frontiers of the genre. “It may not have started in our communities, but just like cricket”, says Islamabadi rapper Xpolymer Dar (Muhammad Dar), “we have made rap our own.” Indeed, in Dar’s country of Pakistan, where rap is a growing underground music genre, the ‘80s American rhymes for race and class justice are judged to have little resonance with Pakistani realities. Instead, it is the stylings of hyper-commercialized contemporary artists such as Eminem and 50 Cent that find ears, and have provided the launching pad for contemporary Pakistani rappers.

More here.

Michael Bernath in Harvard Magazine:

This is a dark book about a dark subject. Walter Johnson burst onto the historical scene with the 1999 publication of his influential Soul by Soul, which positioned the slave market as the central institution of the antebellum South, shaping not only the southern economy, but also white self-conceptions and black lives. With chilling efficiency, the book unpacked the practical and psychological difficulties in commodifying what should not be commodified. Johnson sought to reduce slavery to its basic equation—“a person with a price”—and to show how this omnipresent calculation permeated and undergirded every aspect of southern life. In River of Dark Dreams, Johnson deals with some of the same themes, but the Winthrop professor of history and professor of African and African American studies expands them outward in every direction. The new book, too, is rooted in an equation, or rather a conversion—“lashes into labor into bales into dollars into pounds sterling”—one that governed the lives of planters and slaves, shaped the land, development, and society of the Cotton Kingdom, and drove a global economy extending to banks in London and mills in Lancashire. The book is not simply the history of a region (the antebellum Mississippi Valley) or a work of political economy (what Johnson terms “slave racial capitalism”), though it is certainly both of these things. In a larger sense, it is the history of a mentality out of which would emerge a vision of global empire premised upon the commodification of cotton and the human beings forced to tend it.

…Throughout, Johnson seeks to stress the human and environmental resistance that always conditioned white ambitions, and to remind us that on the ground, “The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.”

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Lu Yu (AD 1125-1209)

On the day of Lu Yu's last sickness
a thin coffin was ready,
and two quilts to cover him,
and the gravediggers paid
their work done.
Then he started to write another poem
a short time before death,
about drinking wine again in the village —
He was working on the poem when they buried him,
so that half a line protruded from the earth
in wind and weather's hearing —
With sunlight touching the first young syllables,
the last ones flowering from a dark coffin:
“marketplace the in/drink more One”
The first three words above ground
the last ones wine in the Red Dust.
Near the village of Shanyang
in Chekiang Province…
.

by Al Purdy
from Beyond Remembering-The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. 2000

William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:

Around 1600, a dramatic shift took place in Mughal art. The Mughal emperors of India were the most powerful monarchs of their day—at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they ruled over a hundred million subjects, five times the number administered by their only rivals, the Ottomans. Much of the painting that took place in the ateliers of the first Mughal emperors was effectively dynastic propaganda, and gloried in the Mughals’ pomp and prestige. Illustrated copies were produced of the diaries of Babur, the conqueror who first brought the Muslim dynasty of the Mughal emperors to India in 1526, as well as exquisite paintings illustrating every significant episode in the biography of his grandson, Akbar.

Then, quite suddenly, at this moment of imperial climax, a young Hindu khanazad (or “palace-born”) prodigy named Govardhan began painting images of a sort that had never been seen before in Mughal art. They were not pictures of battles or court receptions. Instead they were closely observed portraits of holy men performing yogic asanas or exercises that aimed to focus the mind and achieve spiritual liberation and transcendence. The results of Govardhan’s experiments in painting—along with a superbly curated selection of several hundred other images from the history of yoga—were recently on view in “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,”a remarkable exhibition at the Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington, D.C., which will travel next to San Francisco and Cleveland.

More here.

From BlackPast.org:

“I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one understands it,” a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage aroused as much curiosity as “Blind Tom” Wiggins. Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, by the time he died Hoboken in 1908, he was an international celebrity and his name was a byword for inexplicable genius. From an early age, it was clear that Blind Tom possessed extraordinary musical gifts. He could imitate, either vocally or musically, any sound he heard. This, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and all-encompassing passion for music, meant that by the age of sixteen, he hovered somewhere between a respected concert pianist and glorified sideshow freak. For the following forty years, he toured the length and breadth of North America, soaking up the sounds of the Civil War and Gilded Age, then baffling audiences with his astonishing gifts. During the tumultuous election campaign of 1860, for instance, he was taken to a political rally in support of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Tom heard his speech and years after he would deliver this oration, capturing not only the senator's distinctive boom and mannerisms, but the crowd's heckles and cheers. Somehow he could recall the sensory snapshot of that moment with sparkling precision. One of his music teachers described how Tom, now a man in his thirties, learned Beethoven's 3^rd Concerto to perfection in the space of an afternoon. He then stunned her by capping off the lesson by turning his back to the piano and playing the bass with his right hand and the treble with his left hand. Somehow Tom could separate the treble from the bass as if they were detached, self-contained streams that were independent of one another. Tom's gravity-defying acrobatics were also cause for much bewildered comment. He would routinely stand on one foot, his body bent forward and his back leg raised to form a “T.” Then he would leap. “It makes one giddy to see him make these circuits,” noted one man, “he comes six inches of the wall but never hits it.” Eccentric, ebullient, and hugely entertaining, nineteenth century audiences did not know what to make of Tom but one thing was certain: the American stage had never seen anyone like him.

Yet today this remarkable pianist is virtually forgotten. His story comes as a surprise to many who consider themselves well versed in African American history. “How is it I've never heard of him before?” is a question often put to me. The answer, I suspect, is that for all his genius, Blind Tom falls short on what an African American hero should be. After emancipation, he remained loyal to his master, electing to remain with him. Even at the height of his career, black newspaper editors kept him at arm's length, thinking him a buffoon who perpetuated negative stereotypes about the black race. Most damning of all, his most famous composition, The Battle of Manassas, tells the story of the great Confederate victory at Bull Run in April 1861. With a track record like this, little wonder some condemned Blind Tom to the ranks of Uncle Tom.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Edward Frenkel at The New York Times:

Math is so effective in describing the world, he says, because physical reality is a mathematical structure. He calls it the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (M.U.H.). What exactly this means is a big question, which is never fully answered. Mr. Tegmark’s argument is that all physical properties of an electron, say, can be described mathematically; therefore, to him, an electron is itself a mathematical structure — as is everything else, including us. “You’re a pattern in space-time,” Tegmark says, and he is not just speaking metaphorically. Well, it’s true that the trajectory of a human is a pattern in space-time, but does it mean that a human is this pattern? What accounts for consciousness, for example? “I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways,” Tegmark says.

I tried to process this information, but didn’t feel much. Let’s go back to the notion of “mathematical structure.” We read in the book that it is a “set of abstract elements with relations between them,” like the set of whole numbers with operations of addition and multiplication. However, there is a lot more to math than such mathematical structures. Objects other than sets are necessary, and they have now become widespread. Moreover, there is an effort underway to overhaul the foundations of math in which set theory is no longer central. So mathematical structures constitute but a small island of modern mathematics. Why would someone who believes that math is at the core of reality try to reduce all of reality to just this island?

more here.