In yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, James Wood reviews the new Flaubert biography.  It’s a natural call, because Wood sees Flaubert as a hinge figure for the development of ‘self-consciousness’ in literature (more on this below), and because of Wood’s official (i.e. disputed) status as the last true literary critic.  Flaubert’s reputation matches up here quite well: the supreme stylist; the dogged aesthete; the urbane man of letters; the tireless reader and writer; the champion of aesthetic autonomy; the first diagnostician of our modern dilemma – Flaubert was born to die, to make way for his own legend.  That said, to make an invidious historical comparison, Wood’s style is far more self-consciously literary and concerned to brandish tropes than Flaubert’s ever was: ‘dipped in futility,’ ‘the great pool of death,’ ‘a long siege on his talent.’  Where the air of death surrounds Flaubert at this juncture in the history of reading, Wood’s analyses of literary style in the pages of The New Republic, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, etc., give off the less powerful aroma of anachronism.  As n+1 so cattily remarked, Wood seems to want to be his own grandfather.

In a larger way, a funereal atmosphere seems to hover over the entire present ‘literary world,’ consisting of ten or so literary magazines, the review pages of a few newspapers, the populations of graduate creative writing programs, and that class of rich-in-cultural capital people who find it important to read, say, The Corrections, to remain ‘part of the conversation.’  I think members of that version of literary culture represent themselves wrongly as the sole defenders of the realm, and that the dour pronouncements they make about the state of literature are narrow and misguided.  The death certificate can’t quite decide which is the primary cause: the hateful mass market, the decline of reading, the rise of movies, the rise of video games, the loss of some essential seriousness, the inadequate stewardship of ‘our’ culture.  (And just whose culture is it over which one feels a sense of ownership?)  The stance is one of bemused detachment at this fallen world we live in, combined with an an unspoken assumption that literature and not movies or music is the true culture, and an exaggerated respect for the cultural achievements of the novelists of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.  Nostalgia for the literary accomplishments of prior eras I understand – what interests and confuses me is the rhetoric of ‘dying literature,’ ‘the last critic,’ etc.

And why Wood?  The general trajectory one can extract from his writing is a fairly hoary narrative about how novels achieved self-consiousness in fits and spurts beginning roughly with Austen, truly emerging with Flaubert, and peaking with Henry James and Virginia Woolf.  I don’t entirely disagree with his thumbnail, but the exclusivity of this narrative is unwarranted.  First of all, self-consicousness, however you define that, is far from unidentifiable in the novels of Sterne, or Fielding, or, for that matter, Cervantes.  Second, the progression of literary styles from realism to modernism in the novel is a compelling story, but only one among tens of such narratives in comparatist literary history.  Why not erect the development of prose nonfiction in eighteenth-century periodicals as the crucible of modernity, or the egotistical sublime of the Romantic poets, or really go out on a limb and advocate for Shakespeare?  The question, then, is not so much with Wood’s particular but unremarkable story of past greatness, as with the enshrinement of that story, and of Wood as a figure, as melancholic touchstones for our dissatisfaction with the state of the world today.

My hypothesis is that the exaggerated mourning for lost cultural greatness is a strangely self-deluded form of wielding authority.  That is, the bemoaning of literature’s lack of importance today, of the dearth of ‘serious’ (another keyword) readers, is mostly emitted by people who are, paradoxically, both the most widely read and the most self-abnegating of belle lettrists.  What Wood and Franzen and The Believer and even n+1 share is that sense of coming at the fag-end of a period.  They are our cultural coroners, except I don’t think culture is dying.  As with Harper’s magazine’s shrill doomsaying, their real complaint is of their own insufficient authority.  As designated hitters for what counts as literature in U.S. culture, they wield considerable influence and even function as a coterie at times.  But the nostalgia for an imagined golden age tells me something else: that they believe that the culture-at-large stubbornly refuses to give them the chance deservedly to impose their quite narrow cultural tastes.  Unspoken lies an uneasy feeling that thirty years ago, style that wears itself like a merit badge and world-weary, paternalistic maleness should have been enough to guarantee lionization.  We were groomed to rule, but somewhere along the way the kingdom shrunk from Western culture to a sub-principality of Oprah-land.  As a counterexample, consider a figure very like Wood but who writes about movies: Anthony Lane, young, prose-stylish, British, retrograde, doesn’t suffer under the weight of literature’s supposed prior dominance.  What is delusive about this bunker mentality is that this country’s most widely circulated magazines are far more likely to publish a piece by Rick Moody or Dale Peck than by Fredric Jameson or Franco Moretti.

So literature, then, or at least a particular idea of it, seems to have become a narrative of decline whose retelling celebrates one’s refinement and sensitivity, one’s belief in what is of true value, and one’s allegiance to the superiority of an imaginary time before theory, before globalization, before now.  It’s as comfortable as a wool sweater.  One can see why Flaubert excites reviewers such as Wood: here is the one writer whose famously toilsome life of writing was rewarded with immortality.  Premature obsolescence becomes posthumous greatness.  He is the human allegory of the value of art beyond and in opposition to economic value.  (Not for nothing does Bourdieu identify Flaubert as the key figure of the nineteenth-century French aesthetic field.)  Praising Flaubert’s style, his adaptation of descriptive prose into a vehicle for a deliciously ambiguous form of seeing the world, allays not Bloom’s anxiety of influence, the need to kill the poetic father, but the anxiety of inheritance, the need to see oneself as the true heir of the revered father.  It’s a telling reversal, in that a vital artistic tradition should be much more eager to dethrone than rethrone canonical forbears.  It is a form of reading Flaubert’s will, and finding one’s own name as the beneficiary of all that (cultural) capital.

All of which is a shame, because on the matter of literary style, Wood is very good.  Like Hugh Kenner before him, he has a talent for the producing something literary out of talking about literature.  And he is also illuminating on his authors, in the case of Flaubert identifying the strange contradiction between his constant satirizing of the bourgeois life and his deep immersion in it.  (It’s precarious realism, satire perched on the edge of mimesis, and you want to cheer as Flaubert keeps keeping his balance.)  But Wood stops there, as though he were the only person still having this conversation, like a jellyroll archivist.  The last critic, indeed.  But lots of people are talking about Flaubert, only in ways that are also informed by whole schools of thought that swam right past Wood.  I saw a lecture on Flaubert only two months ago by Sara Danius, the Swedish translator of Jameson, which treated many of the same issues as Wood, only it attempted to connect Flaubert’s aesthetic practice not only to a geneaology of novelists, but to his historical period itself.  D.A. Miller, the author of Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style, likewise makes the study of style into more than an anachronistic internal affair.

It’s on the relation of style to history that I think Flaubert continues to fascinate.  Sentimental Education (which is the true masterpiece, not Bovary) is the story of how a life is shaped by historical events of the grandest variety, but which can only be dimly sensed by the protagonists, absorbed as they are by the petty and familiar dramas of their own lives.  Even those characters who are politically and intellectually engaged are shown to have at best a limited purview on the conditions of their existence, while much action is taken for completely quixotic reasons that have nothing to do with their outcomes.  The novel is a tour-de-force of contingency, starting with the famous first scene, in which our hero Frederic first glimpses his great obsession, Madame Arnoux.  That Flaubert’s own life was marked by such a obsession fascinates, but Frederic’s cowardly and utterly sympathetic disappearance during the most epic moments of 1848 shapes the novel as much negatively as the pursuit of Madame Arnoux does positively.  In a novel saturated by looking at things, Flaubert is at pains to show the difficulty of seeing anything for what it is, and at many moments suggests the pointlessness of trying.  But conscripting Flaubert into playing the absent father in our own anxiety dreams about the death of literature and the marginality of writers ignores another drift of his work, not the one toward the autonomy of style, but toward seeing past the sentimental towards a world that is only ever represented but no less real for that fact.  A longed-for wholeness and a fallen world are by no means the special burden of recently disenfranchised social elites; they are, to paraphrase another nineteenth-century French novelist, illusions to be lost.

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Sughra Raza. Brown Girl. 2002.

Acrylic on canvas.

Also in the Economist, medicine factors in race:

LAST month researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Mississippi Medical Centre published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had studied three versions (or alleles, as they are known) of a gene called PCSK9. This gene helps clear the blood of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), one of the chemical packages used to transport cholesterol around the body. Raised levels of LDL are associated with heart disease. The effect of all three types of PCSK9 studied by Jonathan Cohen and his colleagues was to lower the LDL in a person’s bloodstream by between 15% and 28%, and coronary heart disease by between 47% and 88%, compared with people with more common alleles of the gene.

Such studies happen all the time and are normally unremarkable. But this was part of a growing trend to study individuals from different racial groups and to analyse the data separately for each group. The researchers asked the people who took part in the study which race they thought they belonged to and this extra information allowed them to uncover more detail about the risk that PCSK9 poses to everyone.

Yet race and biology are uncomfortable bedfellows. Any suggestion of systematic biological differences between groups of people from different parts of the world—beyond the superficially obvious ones of skin colour and anatomy—is almost certain to raise hackles.

In the Economist:

[I]t is misleading to talk of women’s “entry” into the workforce. Besides formal employment, women have always worked in the home, looking after children, cleaning or cooking, but because this is unpaid, it is not counted in the official statistics. To some extent, the increase in female paid employment has meant fewer hours of unpaid housework. However, the value of housework has fallen by much less than the time spent on it, because of the increased productivity afforded by dishwashers, washing machines and so forth. Paid nannies and cleaners employed by working women now also do some work that used to belong in the non-market economy.

Nevertheless, most working women are still responsible for the bulk of chores in their homes. In developed economies, women produce just under 40% of official GDP. But if the worth of housework is added (valuing the hours worked at the average wage rates of a home help or a nanny) then women probably produce slightly more than half of total output.

The increase in female employment has also accounted for a big chunk of global growth in recent decades. GDP growth can come from three sources: employing more people; using more capital per worker; or an increase in the productivity of labour and capital due to new technology, say. Since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the employment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased productivity. Carve up the world’s economic growth a different way and another surprising conclusion emerges: over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.

Via Crooked Timber, The Couscous Kid over at Aaronovitch Watch has an extensive review of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 posts).

Tracing Berman’s arguments back to his sources isn’t always easy. There’s a “Note to the Reader” at the end that lists a few of the works consulted, but Berman habitually cites books without providing page references, and that irritates. (Terror and Liberalism doesn’t have an index, either, and that also irritates.) Sometimes you don’t need to chase up his references to find fault with the book. He calls Franz Ferdinand the “grand duke of Serbia” on p.32, for example, and he’s become the “Archduke of Serbia” by p.40, when he wasn’t either; Franz Ferdinand was the Archduke of Austria, and Serbia lay outside the Habsburg lands. (Funny, though, that the errors in basic general knowledge should come to light when it comes to dealing with Serbia and Sarajevo, of all places.) But much of the rest of the time, it’s an interesting exercise to compare what Berman says with what his sources say. I haven’t done this comprehensively in what follows (even I’ve got better things to do with my time), and I’m not saying anything in what follows about the two chapters on Sayyid Qutb because I haven’t read any of his works and don’t know much about him, apart from what Berman tells me, and, as will be clear from what follows, I don’t think Berman’s an entirely reliable source. But I have done a bit of checking around with some of the books that I’ve got to hand. How does Berman use his sources? Often carelessly, and not especially fair-mindedly, as we shall see.

In debates over creationist doctrines, evolutionary biologists often are hard-pressed to explain how nature could make something as intricate as the human brain. Even Alfred Wallace, the 19th century biologist who discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin, could not accept that such a flexible organ of learning and thought could emerge by trial and error.

No two brains are exactly alike, despite their overall anatomical similarity. Each brain changes throughout a lifetime, altered by experience and aging. Even the simplest mental activities, such as watching a moving dot, can involve slightly different areas in different people’s brains, studies show.

Underlying every personal difference in thought, attitude and ability is an astonishing variety of brain cells, scientists have discovered.

more from the LA Times here.

The neoconservatives now pretty much argue that they’re the new anti-totalitarian liberals. They more or less accepted the principles of the New Deal in the ’50s and ’60s, and largely feel that they’ve carried on the tradition of liberal interventionism. What I’d like to know from you is this: what part of Schlesinger, Truman, and Scoop Jackson’s lunch have the neocons not eaten?

That’s an important purpose of the book, to argue against that idea, and I would say a couple of things. The first is that the recognition of American fallibility is a very critical element of the liberal tradition, very central to Niebuhr’s thinking, which then became an important element in the Truman administration. That idea manifests itself internationally in a sympathy for international institutions, a belief that while it’s possible that the United States can be a force for good—indeed, that America must be a force for good in the world, which is certainly what neocons believe—that America can also be a force for evil. That since America can be corrupted by unrestrained power, America should take certain steps to limit its power and to express it through international institutions. That, I think, is the first element of the liberal tradition that has been lost in neocon thinking.

The second element that’s been lost, I think, is the recognition that America’s ability to be a force for good in the world rests on the economic security of average Americans. The early neocons had a certain sympathy for the labor movement, and the labor movement was a very important part of Cold War liberalism, because the ability of the United States to be generous around the world really depended on the government’s willingness to take responsibility for the economic security of its own people. Of course, that would have to mean something different today than it did in the 1950s. But widespread economic security remains a very important basis upon which the United States can act in the world, because it maintains the support of the American people for that action. I think that has been lost in neocon thinking since they adopted the—as I see it— quite radical economic ideology of the American Right.

more from the interview at the Atlantic Unlimited here.

On April 17th, to mark the centennial of the birth of the playwright Clifford Odets, Lincoln Center Theatre will open a new production of “Awake and Sing!,” Odets’s first full-length play and the one that made him a literary superstar in 1935, at the age of twenty-eight. In the years that followed, this magazine dubbed Odets “Revolution’s No. 1 Boy”; Time put his face on its cover; Cole Porter rhymed his name in song (twice); and Walter Winchell coined the word “Bravodets!” “Of all people, you Clifford Odets are the nearest to understand or feel this American reality,” his friend the director Harold Clurman wrote in 1938, urging him “to write, write, write—because we need it so much.” “You are the Man,” Clurman told him.

more from The New Yorker here.

On a blazing blue afternoon last winter, I met the Spanish expatriate novelist Juan Goytisolo at an outdoor cafe in Marrakesh. It was easy to spot the 75-year-old writer, sitting beneath an Arabic-language poster of himself taped to the cafe window. He was reading El País, the Spanish newspaper to which he has contributed for decades. Olive-skinned, with a hawk nose and startlingly pale blue eyes, he had wrapped himself against the winter chill in a pullover, suede jacket, checked overcoat and two pairs of socks.

Considered by many to be Spain’s greatest living writer, Goytisolo is in some ways an anachronistic figure in today’s cultural landscape. His ideas can seem deeply unfashionable. For him, writing is a political act, and it is the West, not the Islamic world, that is waging a crusade. He is a homosexual who finds gay identity politics unappealing and who lived for 40 years with a French woman he considers his only love. “I don’t like ghettos,” he informed me. “For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we’s.” The words most commonly used to describe his writing are “transgressive,” “subversive,” “iconoclastic.”

more from the NY Times magazine here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If, like me, you are in the business of ideas, the presidency of George W. Bush is a dream come true. That is not because the president is fond of the product I produce; on the contrary, he may be the most anti-intellectual president of modern times, a determined opponent of science, a man who values loyalty above debate among his associates. But governance is impossible without ideas, and by basing his foreign and domestic policies on so many bad ones, President Bush may have cleared the ground for the emergence of a few good ones.

Two recent books by writers long identified with conservative points of view — one dealing with foreign policy, the other with domestic concerns — suggest just how bad the ideas associated with the Bush administration have been; America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press,2006) and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (Doubleday, 2006).

More here.

From The Loom:

At the Loom we believe that the path to wisdom runs through the Land of Gross. We do not show you pictures of worms crawling out of frog noses merely to ruin your lunch. We do not urge you to check out these freaky videos of worms crawling out of frog mouths and fish gills merely to give you something to talk about at the high school cafeteria table tomorrow (Dude, you totally will not believe what I saw…) These images have something profound to say.

The worm in question is the gordian worm or horsehair worm, Paragordius tricuspidatus. It has become famous in recent months for its powers of manipulation. The gordian worm lives as an adult in the water, where they form orgiastic knots. They lay eggs at the edge of the water, which can only mature if they’re ingested by insects such as crickets. The worms feed on the inner juices of the crickets until they fill up the entire body cavity. In order to get back to the water, the gordian worms cause their hosts hurl themselves into ponds or streams. As the insects die, the worms slither out to find the nearest mating knot.

More here.

Arthur Danto on the 2006 Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night”, in The Nation:

The Biennial 2006 is in one sense exemplary: It gives a very clear sense of what American art is in the early twenty-first century. American art has been increasingly autonomous in recent times, and in large part concerned with the nature of art as such. To be sure, it has explored issues of identity politics and multiculturalism, and sometimes worn its political virtues on its sleeve. But gestures like Serra’s reflect artistic decisions, not something in the culture that the art passively mirrors. Even at its most political, the art here does not project much beyond the conditions of its production.

It would thus be a mistake to look to “Day for Night” for a reflection of the spirit of our time, much less a critique of what is wrong with the state of the world. By raising such expectations, “Day for Night” sets itself up for failure–through no fault of the art on view. Much of the work is smart, innovative, pluralistic, cosmopolitan, self-critical, liberal and humane. It might not aspire to greatness, or take much interest in beauty or in joy. But in general, the art in the Biennial mirrors a better world than our own, assuming, that is, it mirrors anything at all. Indeed, if contemporary art were a mirror in which we could discern the zeitgeist, the overall culture would have a lot going for it. The art doesn’t tell us that it is not morning in America, and we don’t need it to. We know that by watching the evening news.

In the Guardian, Orhan Pamuk writes about Gentile Bellini’s portraits of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.

…Gentile Bellini’s “voyage east” and the 18 months he spent in Istanbul as “cultural ambassador” that is the subject of the small but rich exhibition at the National Gallery. Though it includes many other paintings and drawings by Bellini and his workshop, as well as medals and various other objects that show the eastern and western influences of the day, the centrepiece of the exhibition is, of course, Gentile Bellini’s oil portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror. The portrait has spawned so many copies, variations and adaptations, and the reproductions made from these assorted images have gone on to adorn so many textbooks, book covers, newspapers, posters, bank notes, stamps, educational posters and comic books, that there cannot be a literate Turk who has not seen it hundreds if not thousands of times.

No other sultan from the golden age of the Ottoman empire, not even Suleyman the Magnificent, has a portrait like this one. With its realism, its simple composition, and the perfectly shaded arch giving him the aura of a victorious sultan, it is not only the portrait of Mehmed II, but the icon of an Ottoman sultan, just as the famous poster of Che Guevara is the icon of a revolutionary. At the same time, the highly worked details – the marked protrusion of the upper lip, the drooping eyelids, the fine feminine eyebrows and, most important, the thin, long, hooked nose – make this a portrait of a singular individual who is none the less not very different from the citizens one sees in the crowded streets of Istanbul today. The most famous distinguishing feature is that Ottoman nose, the trademark of a dynasty in a culture without a blood aristocracy.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society has been receiving more attention, in Time Out New York and The New York Times. Having seen them a few times, all I can say is if you haven’t, you should. You can finding listings of their next gigs, and recordings of some of the pieces, over at the Secret Society blog. From the Times:

DARCY JAMES ARGUE’S SECRET SOCIETY (Tuesday [April 18th]) As the name implies, this 18-piece big band is calibrated for maximum intrigue, with a sound that suggests Steve Reich minimalism as well as orchestral jazz in the lineage of Bob Brookmeyer (one of Mr. Argue’s mentors). The ranks of the band include such hale improvisers as the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, the tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and the trombonist Alan Ferber. 10 p.m., Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, between Houston and Bleecker Streets, Lower East Side, (212) 614-0505; cover, $12. (Nate Chinen)

Brad Delong explains why he’s decided to experiment with video posts on his blog…

in video.

Cosmologists like big ideas. After all, their chosen subject is nothing less than the universe itself – how did it start, what is it made of and how will it end? Some of these big ideas have catchy names, such as the big bang, but others are more prosaic. However, these names can be misleading. Cosmic inflation, for example, might sound dull, but it is actually one of the boldest ideas in the history of physics and astronomy.

In a nutshell, inflation is the term used to describe an extremely short period of turbocharged expansion that happened immediately after the big bang. Moreover, after years of trying, astrophysicists have just reported the first experimental evidence that inflation actually happened. Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-workers made the breakthrough after a painstaking analysis of three years of data from the WMAP satellite.

more from The Guardian here.

F. Scott Hess appears in many of his paintings — perhaps most provocatively in The Painter and His Daughter (2003) and Riverbed (2004) — suggesting that they are all self-portraits in principle. In Time, Mind and Fate (all 2005), the mature, hard-eyed Hess appears in softer surrogate form, without his Mephistophelean goatee and moustache, as though he were a callow youth just starting his career as a painter (the clean-shaven painter pictured is, in fact, Hess’ student) and thus innocent as to the ways of the art world rather than a seasoned veteran of its wars, holding his own in it. Hess has described himself as a “reluctant realist,” and realism is not a fashionable position, suggesting that Hess casts himself as an alienated outsider, all the more so because his realism is grounded in Old Master craft and intelligence. And, even more subtly, in an Old Master formalism — more complicated, devious and expressively insinuating than modernist formalism — that informs the narratives which mask it. For Hess is as much a formalist — and a not-so-reluctant one, as I hope to show — as a realist. Like Old Master realism, Hess’ realism speaks in symbolic tongues and formal paradoxes, which is not exactly to speak plainly.

more from Donald Kuspit at artnet magazine here.

For decades, the world has been haunted by ominous and recurrent reports of impending demographic doom. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian manifesto, The Population Bomb, predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and ’80s. The Limits to Growth, published by the global think tank Club of Rome in 1972, portrayed a computer-model apocalypse of overpopulation. The demographic doom-saying in authoritative and influential circles has steadily continued: from the Carter administration’s grim Global 2000 study in 1980 to the 1992 vision of eco-disaster in Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance to practically any recent publication or pronouncement by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

What is perhaps most remarkable about the incessant stream of dire—and consistently wrong—predictions of global demographic overshoot is the public’s apparently insatiable demand for it. Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s disaster tale both sold millions of copies. More recently, journalist Robert D. Kaplan created a stir by trumpeting “the coming anarchy” in a 2000 book of the same name, warning that a combination of demographic and environmental crises was creating world-threatening political maelstroms in a variety of developing countries. Why, of all people, do Americans—who fancy themselves the world’s pragmatic problems-solvers—seem to betray a predilection for such obviously dramatic and unproved visions of the future?

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

Taken together, the works selected by Verso embody the creation and development of a dissenting tradition that set out to question and subvert the established order. Yet while this was once the prin-cipal strength of these thinkers, it has become something of an Achilles heel. A collective reading exposes all that has gone wrong with radical thought in the 20th century. Traditions, and intellectual traditions in particular, rapidly ossify and degenerate into obscurantism. They have to be constantly refreshed, renovated and reinvented. It is time that radical thought broke out of its confining structures. It is time to put Adorno’s anxieties about mass culture and media to rest; to move forward from Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s postmodern relativism to some notion of viable social truth; and for criticism to stop messing about with signs and signifiers, and instead confront the increasing tendency of power towards absolutism.

more from the New Statesman here.

From Science:

The summer Olympics only come around every four years, and for elite athletes vying for a spot on their national teams, failure to qualify can be crushing. Now, researchers have taken a look at how the brain deals with dashed Olympic dreams. Their findings hint at a possible explanation for why athletes who’ve suffered tough losses often have a hard time getting back on top of their game.

Not surprisingly, the swimmers rated their own videos more wrenching to watch. And their brains showed signs of their emotional pain, with heightened activity in the parahippocampus and other emotion-related areas that have been implicated in depression. (None of the swimmers had a prior history of depression). Moreover, the premotor cortex–a region that plans actions such as the arm and body movements needed to swim–seemed to be inhibited when the swimmers watched their bad race, the researchers reported here 9 April at a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. To Davis, this suggests that bummed out athletes might perform poorly because their premotor cortex isn’t sufficiently fired up.

More here.