142. Igor Stravinsky

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Igor Stravinsky - From Proust Was a Neuroscientist

p123 ...While the crowd at the premier [of The Rite of Spring] assumed that beauty was immutable -- some chords were just more pleasing than others -- Stravinsky knew better. An instinctive modernist, he realized that our sense of prettiness is malleable, and that the harmonies we worship and the tonic chords we trust are not sacred. Nothing is sacred. Nature is noise. Music is nothing but a sliver of sound that we have learned how to hear. With The Rite, Stravinsky announced that it was time to learn something new. [If this doesn't lead to jazz and my guitar gods, I will be surprised.]

His faith in our mind's plasticity -- our ability to adapt to new kinds of music -- was Stravinsky's enduring insight. When he was first composing The Rite, in Switzerland, testing out its dissonant chords on his piano, a young neighborhood boy got into the habit of yelling, "That's wrong!" at his window. Stravinsky... knew the brain would eventually right his wrongness. The audience would adapt to his difficult notes and discover the beauty licked inside his art. As neuroscience nowknows, our sense of sound is a work in progress. Neurons in the auditory cortex are constantly being altered by the songs and symphonies we listen to. Nothing is difficult forever.

The Birth of Dissonance 
...

Where has this book been all my life?

p125 [Stravinsky studying under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov] ...The problem facing modern music, Korsakov said, was simple: orchestral music had become boring. Wagner's vaunted ambition had been largely replaced by cheerful pastiche, most of it written for the ballet... The modern composer was trapped by the past. For this reason, the revolution in sound would have to begin with an act of deconstruction...

p126 The modernist coup d'etat occurred in 1908, when Arnold Schoenberg decided to abandon the structure of classical music... Before Schoenberg, every symphony followed a few simple rules. First, the composer introduced the tonic triad, a chord of three notes. This chord was the invisible center of the music, the gravitational force that ordered its unfolding. Next the composer carefully wandered away from the tonic triad, but never too far away. (The greater the acoustic distance from the tonic, the greater the dissonance, and too much dissonance was considered impolite.) The music always concluded with the tonic's triumphant return, the happy sound of a harmonic ending.

Schoenberg... began daydreaming of "the day when dissonance will be emancipated," when the symphony will be set free from the easy cliches of the eight-note scale...
...

p127 In the program that night, ["Schoenberg's String Quartet no. 2 in F-sharp Minor, written in 1908"] Schoenberg tried to explain the logic behind his "pandemonium." He needed freedom from form because musical form had ceased to mean anything. "The overwhelming multitude of dissonances" could no longer be suppressed or censored...

Waves of Noise
...

p129 ...while every sound starts as a temporary pattern of hair cells, that's only the beginning of listening. In the time it takes to play a sixteenth note, the sensory rumors heard by the ear are rehearsed again and again inside the brain. Eventually, the sound reaches the primary auditory cortex, where neurons are designed to detect specific pitches... the auditory cortex focuses on finding the note amid the noise. We tune out the cacophony we can't understand... When these selective neurons in the auditory cortex become excited, the vague shudders of air finally become a musical note. 

p130 ...Music is the pleasurable overflow of information... the mind... stops trying to understand the individual notes and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the notes. The human auditory cortex pulls off this feat by using its short-term memory for sound... to uncover patterns at the larger level of the phrase, motif, and movement. This new approximation lets us extract order from all the notes...

It is this psychological instinct -- this desperate neuronal search for a pattern... that is the source of music... We continually abstract on our own inputs, inventing patterns in order to keep pace with the onrush of noise. And once the brain finds a pattern, it immediately starts to make predictions, imagining what notes will come next. It projects imaginary order into the future, transposing the melody we have just heard into the melody we expect...

The Tension of Emotion
... Tonal music... begins by establishing of melodic pattern by way of the tonic triad. This pattern establishes the key [which sense of key?] that will form the song... A key or theme is stated in a mnemonic pattern, and then it is avoided, and then it returns, in a moment of consonant repose.

p131 But before a pattern can be desired by the brain, that pattern must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes the auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present, it is annoyingly boring... The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. The auditory cortex rejoices... 

This sounds like a love affair from In Search of Lost Time. This is the pattern of the recurring love theme starting with Swann & Odette, and then repeated with Gilbert and finally Albertine. Can that be a coincidence? A work structured like a piece of music that shares the pattern of denied fulfillment?. 

...the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the fifth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, opus 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with -- but not submission to -- expectations of order... If E major is the tonic, Beethoven plays incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He preserves an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

p132 ...Music is only interesting when it confronts us with tension, and the source of tension is conflict. Stravinsky's insight was that what the audience really wanted was to be denied what it wanted. 

[In The Rite]... Dissonance never submits to consonance. Order does not defeat disorder. There is an obscene amount of tension, but it never gets resolved. Everything only gets worse. And then it ends.
...

[In The Rite]...We do not know what notes will come next. And this makes us angry.
...

Why is music capable of inflicting such pain? Because it works on our feelings directly. No ideas interfere with its emotions. This is why "all art aspires to the condition of music."... When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why.

 Here is a performance of The Rite of Spring,

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141. Cézanne & Gestalt

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Cézanne continued

The Blank Canvas
p116 When Cézanne began his studies in the blank canvas, science had no way of explaining why the paintings appeared less vacant than they actually were. The very existence of Cézanne's nonfinito style, the fact that the brain could find meaning in nothing, seemed to disprove any theory of mind that reduced our vision to pixels of light.

The Gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century were the first scientists to confront the illusions of form that Cézanne so eloquently manipulated. Gestalt literally means "form," and that's what interested Gestalt psychologists. Founded by Carl Stumpf, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer... the German Gestalt movement began as a rejection of the reductionist psychology of its time, which was still enthralled with the theories of Wilhelm Wundt and his fellow psychologists. Wund had argued that visual perception is ultimately reducible to its elemental sensations. The mind, like a mirror, reflected light.

But the mind is not a mirror. The Gestaltists set out to prove that the process of seeing alters the world we observe. Like Immanuel Kant, their philosophical precursor, they argued that much of what was thought of as being out there -- in our sensations of the outside world -- actually came from in here, from inside the mind. ("The imagination," Kant wrote, "is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.")... According to the Gestaltists... everyday illusions [like vase/silhouette] were proof that everything we saw was an illusion. Form is dictated from the top down... the Gestaltists began with reality as we actually experienced it. [Like Kant, they are, I believe, saying that we aren't in a position to say anything about the thing-in-itself.] 

p117 Modern neuroscientific studies of the visual cortex have confirmed the intuitions of Cézanne and the Gestaltists: visual experience transcends visual sensations... If the mind didn't impose itself on the eye, then our vision would be full of voids... we each have a literal blind spot in the center of the visual field. But we are blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world.
...

p119 The shocking fact is that sight is like art. ["surrounded by artifice"] What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas, which is the brain. When we open our eyes we enter an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex...

...[The visual experience] is art, and not science, that is the means by which we express what we see on the inside. The painting, in this respect, is closer to reality. It is what gets us nearest to experience. When we stare at Cézanne's apples, we are inside his head. By trying to represent his own mental representations, Cézanne showed art how to transcend the myth of realism. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Cézanne made the fruit so real that it ceased to be edible altogether, that's how thinglike and real they became, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness." The apples have become what they have always been: a painting created by the mind, a vision so abstract it seems real.

Postscript

We were celebrating the completion of work on our building last night, so I didn't get around to posting this. I'll post two sections today.

Next - 142. Igor Stravinsky

140. Cézanne & Zola

Previous - 138. Paul Cezanne

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Paul Cézanne continued

There's a nice summary of impressionism on pages 100-101, but I'm not going to copy it.

p103 ...Cézanne had stopped worshiping light. He found the impressionist project -- the description of light's dance upon the eye -- too insubstantial. ("Monet is only an eye," Cézanne once said, with more than a little condescension.)... He had stopped arguing with the camera. Instead, in his postimpressionist paintings he wanted to reveal how the moment is more than its light. If the impressionists reflected the eye, Cézanne's art was a mirror held up to the mind.

p104 ... Cézanne discovered that visual forms... are mental inventions that we unconsciously impose onto our sensations... No matter how hard he tried, Cézanne couldn't escape the sly interpretations of his brain. In his abstract paintings, Cézanne wanted to reveal this psychological process, to make us aware of the particular way the mind creates reality. His art shows us what we cannot see, which is how we see. 

This is related to Annie Dillard's "tree with the lights in it" from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek.

The limits of Light
...Particles of light alter the delicate molecular structure of the receptors in the retina. This cellular shudder triggers a chain reaction that ends with a flash of voltage. The photon's energy has become information. [Footnote: "...the photons cause the sodium ion channels inside our photoreceptors to close, which causes the cell to become hyperpolarized..."]

...in our evolved system, the eyeball's map of light is transformed again and again until, milliseconds later, the canvas's description enters our consciousness. Amid the swirl of color we see the apple.
...

[I'm not going to copy the scientific quest for how we see.] p106 ...Hubel and Weisel became the first scientists to describe reality as it appears to the early layers of the visual cortex. This is what the world looks like before it has been seen, when the mind is still creating the sense of sight. 

Not sure about the use of "mind" here. Maybe the under-mind -- that Operating System level I've talked about before.

The Rocks Above the Caves at Chateau Noir.

It's as if [Cézanne] broke the brain apart and saw how seeing occurs... Cézanne's painting [above] is not about the sky or the rocks or the trees. He has broken each of these elements into their sensory parts, deconstructing the scene in order to show us how the mind reconstructs it.

...Cézanne... [creates] the entire picture out of patches and strokes... His impasto paint calls attention to itself, forcing us to see the canvas as a constructive process and not a fixed image... Instead of giving us a scene of fully realized forms, Cézanne supplies us with layers of suggestive edges, out of which forms slowly unfurl...

p107 This is the abstract reality represented by the neurons of the V1... The cells of the visual cortex, flooded by rumors of light, see lines extending in every possible direction. Angles intersect, brushstrokes disagree, and surfaces are hopelessly blurred together. The world is still formless, nothing but a collage of chromatic blocks... Before we can make sense of Cézanne's abstract landscape, the mind must intervene.

...From the earliest levels of visual processing in the brain up to the final polished image, coherence and contrast are stressed, often at the expense of accuracy.
...

[Here we get more about how the brain processes visual data into what we see, leading to a review of Oliver Sacks's Dr. P, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.]

p109 ...when Dr. P was given a rose, he described his conscious thought process to Sacks: "it looks about six inches in length. A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment." But these accurate details never triggered the idea of a rose. Dr. P had to smell the flower before he could identify its form. As Sacks put it, "Dr. P saw nothing as familiar. Visually, he was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions."

To look at a Cézanne painting is to become acutely aware of what Dr. P is missing. Staring at his postimpressionist art, we feel our top-down process at work. It is because Cézanne knew that the impression was not enough -- that the mind must complete the impression -- that he created a style both more abstract and more truthful than the impressionists... 

In the section on impressionism, the author mentions the visual problems many of them had. I wonder if Cézanne had anything in common with Dr. P?

p110 ...While [Cézanne] deconstructed his paintings until they were on the verge of unraveling, his paintings don't unravel, and that is their secret. [Like Thelonious Monk?] Instead they tremble on the edge of existence... Until Cézanne sold a canvas -- and he rarely sold anything -- he continued to edit his brushstrokes, trying to edge closer to the delicate reality he wanted to describe. [A recurring theme, here.] His work would become thick with paint, with layer after layer of carefully applied color...

...he wanted to give the brain just enough to decipher, and not a brushstroke more. If his representations were too accurate or too abstract, everything fell apart. The mind would not be forced to enter the work of art. His lines would have no meaning.

[Cézanne and Zola were pals back in Aix-en-Provence before heading off for Paris.]

p112 ... [Zola] was the proud founder of naturalism, a new school of literature that aspired to write "the scientific novel." The novelist, Zola declared, must literally become a scientist, "employing the experimental method in their study of man."

...Zola based his fiction [L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece)] on a story stolen straight from real life. The life he stole this time was the life of his best friend. After the novel was published, in the spring of 1886, Cézanne and Zola never spoke...
...

But the real insult came when Zola [in the novel] described Claude's (Cézanne's) art. His abstract paintings, Zola wrote, were nothing but "wild mental activity . . . the terrible drama of a mind devouring itself." Sondoz's (Zola's) novels, on the other hand, "describe man as he really is." They are a new literature for the coming century of science."

...If Cézanne's paintings made our subjectivity their subject, Zola's novels were determined to turn man into just another object. The artist, Zola said, must "disappear, and simply show what he has seen. The tender intervention of the writer weakens a novel, and introduces a strange element into the facts which destroys their scientific value."

To be continued...

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139. Paul Cézanne

Previous - 138. Good prions

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Preparing to paint

This afternoon I took an empty gallon paint pail for a nice walk around the neighborhood. Now, I know what you're thinking, this sounds like one of those strange exercises magazines recommend for the elderly in articles like, "10 Ways To Stay Fit As You Spiral Down Toward Your Grave." But no. The story is different, though no less inane.

Our weather has been "variable" of late. I frequently switch between regular and "rain" pants over the course of a day. And then there are the work pants I put on to do painting (every few minutes, it seems). So my junk -- keys and ID and pepper spray -- are scattered in a variety of pockets. 

Today I was taking advantage of a break in the rain to bolt across town to the paint store, to pick up a quart of the paint our painters ran out of yesterday. I threw on a reasonable pair of pants, found my keys and the pail of paint for identification purposes, and headed for the bus that takes me to that neighborhood. It's a five block walk and I waited 15 minutes for the bus, and as it was arriving I realized I left my transit card and all my ID in another pair of pants. 

I walked back home. Since a late lunch was part of my original scheme, I was now too hungry to wait for another bus to go across town. So now I'm at the nearer of my regular pizzerias-with-good-WiFi. I'll get my paint tomorrow.

Paul Cézanne - From Proust...

p97 ... Reality is not out here waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind. 

p98 Cézanne's art exposes the process of seeing. Although his paintings were criticized for being unnecessarily abstract -- even the impressionists ridiculed his technique -- they actually show us the world as it first appears to the brain. A Cézanne painting has no boundaries or stark black lines separating one thing from the next. Instead, there are only strokes of paint, and places on the canvas where one color, knotted on the surface, seems to change into another color. This is the start of vision: it is what reality looks like before it has been resolved by the brain. The light has not yet been made into form.

... even as his art celebrates its strangeness, it remains loyal to what it represents... Because he gives the brain just enough information, viewers are able to decipher his paintings and rescue the picture from the edge of obscurity...

...What starts as an abstract mosaic of color becomes a realistic description. The painting emerges, not from the paint or the light, but from somewhere inside our mind. We have entered into the work of art: its strangeness is our own.
...

p99 ...The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a natural skeptic of science, [and a synesthete] reviewed a photographic exhibition in 1859 by proclaiming the limits of the new medium. Its accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even -- and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import -- a materialist. In Baudelaire's romantic view, the true duty of photography was "to be the servant of the sciences and arts, but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor suplemented literature. . . . If it {photography} is allowed to encroach upon the domain of the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us." Baudelaire wanted the modern artist to describe everything that the photograph ignored: "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent."

p100 Inspired by Baudelaire's writings and the provocative realism of Edouard Manet, a motley group of young French painters decided to rebel. The camera, they believed, was a liar. Its precision was false. Why? Because reality did not consist of static images. Because the camera stops time, which cannot be stopped; because it renders everything in focus, when everything is never in focus. Because the eye is not a lens, and the brain is not a machine.

These rebels called themselves the impressionists... If the camera captured the dot, the impressionists represented the blur. They wanted to capture time in their paintings, show how a bail of hay changes in the afternoon shadows, or how the smoke of a train leaving Gare Saint-Lazare slowly fades into thin air. As Baudelaire insisted, they painted what the camera left out. 

Chased out of Brain Wash by a sudden incursion of stand-up comedy.

 

Painting

When I paint with a small roller I always try to save the roller cover so I can use it again. This is usually less than successful. I have a small collection of covers that are too stiff and uneven to choose to use, but I can't bring myself to toss out since... You never know what you'll need some day. And now that may pay off.

I couldn't be on site when the painter was finishing his work in our entry, so the last thing I said to him was, "If there's anything you can't get to, make sure it's low on the walls so I can reach it." And there is one low surface I need to paint now that I've bought another quart of the paint he ran out of. But, the biggest problem is at the top of the space in the hardest places for me to reach. 

I know exactly what happened: I watched him using the roller to "feather" the new paint in with the old paint so that the dividing line isn't obvious. But then he sent his assistant up the ladder (I'm guessing) to get the seams where the walls and ceiling meet. And that guy didn't understand the feathering concept. It looks terrible. My idea is to use a rough, small roller cover at the end of a long pole (a longer pole than the one that is no longer in our equipment area but that the painter insists he didn't take!) to feather all the visible lines near the seams. (On the ceiling the line is on the new paint, not where the new meets the old, and I don't even know how he managed that.)

Confidence is moderately high.


Hours later...
Only an utter fool would roller paint from a fresh can onto a wall without first testing if the color matched. Guess who is an utter fool? Me. Guess how closely the new paint matched the old paint? Not very.

I still have some options, and I can't do anything at the moment because the paint store closes early on Sunday?!?! 

My technique did work with what little of the old paint remained, which is even more irritating since I would be done now if the paint was a match. I really need to eat something.

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138. Good prions

Previous - 137. Proust!

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Proust continued

Sentimental Proteins
p93 [This section covers the search for how the brain stores memories. The author focuses on the work of Dr. Kausik Si and Eric Kandel. They focus on a molecule called CPEB with an unusually repetitive amino acid sequence.]
Immediately, Si began looking for other molecules with similar odd repetitions. In the process, he stumbled into one of the most controversial areas of biology. He found what looked like a prion.

Prions were once regarded as the nasty pathogens of a tribe of the worst diseases on earth: mad cow disease, fatal familial insomnia... [which we've read about] and a host of other neurodegenerative diseases. Prions are still guilty of causing these horrific deaths. But biologists are also beginning to realize that prions are everywhere. Prions are roughly defined as a class of proteins that can exist in two functionally distinct states (every other protein has only one natural state). One of these states is active and one is inactive. Furthermore, prions can switch states (turn themselves on and off) without changing DNA. And once a prion is turned on, it can transmit its new, infections structure to neighboring cells with no actual transfer of genetic material.

In other words, prions violate most of biology's sacred rules. They are one of those annoying reminders of how much we don't know. Nevertheless, prions in the brain probably hold the key to changing our scientific view of memory. Not only is the CPEB protein sturdy enough to resist the effects of the clock -- prions are famous for being virtually indestructible -- but it displays an astonishing amount of plasticity. Free from a genetic substrate, CPEB prions are able to change their shapes with relative ease, creating or erasing a memory. Stimulation with serotonin or dopamine, two neurotransmitters that are released by neurons when you think, changes the very structure of CPEB, switching the protein into its active state.

p94 After CPEB is activated, it marks a specific dendritic branch as a memory. In its new conformation, it can recruit the requisite mRNA needed to maintain long-term remembrance. No further stimulation or genetic alteration is required. The protein will patently wait, quietly loitering in your synapses... It is only when the cookie is dipped in the tea, when the memory is summoned to the shimmering surface, that CPEB comes alive again. The taste of the cookie triggers a rush of new neurotransmitters to the neurons representing Combray, and, if a certain tipping point is reached, the activated CPEB infects its neighboring dendrites. From this cellular shudder, the memory is born.

...Every time we conjure up our pasts, the branches of our recollections become malleable again. While the prions that mark our memories are virtually immortal, their dendritic details are always being altered, shuttling between the poles of remembering and forgetting... [I wonder if there's anything about a near-death experience that triggers this system?]

...Swiss scientists... have... discovered a link between the prion gene that causes mad cow disease and increased long -term memory. Essentially, the more likely your neurons are to form misfolded prions, the better your memory is...

...experiments show that the [CPEB] protein can become active for no real reason, since its transformation is largely dictated by the inscrutable laws of protein folding and stoichiometry. Like memory itself, CPEB delights in its contingency.

This indeterminacy is part of CPEB's design. For a protein, prions are uniquely liberated. They are able to ignore everything from the instructions of our DNA to the life cycles of our cells. Though they exist inside us, they are ultimately apart from us, obeying rules of their own making. As Proust said, "The past is hidden . . . in some material object of which we have no inkling."

And though our memory remains inscrutable, the CPEB molecule... is the synaptic detail that persists outside time. Dr. Si's idea... is a molecular theory of explicit memory that feels true... Because it embraces our essential randomness, because prions are by definition unpredictable and unstable, because memory obeys nothing but itself. This is what Proust knew: the past is never past. As long as we are alive, our memories remain wonderfully volatile. In their mercurial mirror, we see ourselves.

I wonder if Lehrer has read Faulkner? What's interesting here is that, while reading this, we compulsively exercise our memory to test what we're reading. The process we are reading about is -- if true -- happening again and again as we remember and re-remember. A trip down memory lane is a chemical workout for our proteins and prions. We are changing the structure of our brains in the same way I'm changing the status of memory bits in my computer's RAM and on servers somewhere as I type these words. 

So, recalling what we learned about taste and smell in the Escoffier chapter, does exercising the mind in this way, make it better at doing this sort of thing? Just as eating more garlic probably makes me more sensitive to garlic (up to a point), does thinking and remembering make you better at thinking and remembering?

It will take a few days (coming up soon) but by mid-summer I will be a trash sorting machine, capable of processing a staggering volume of waste with barely a thought. Is the fact that I automatically approach every problem in an analytical way -- frequently coming up with a clever solution so quickly I get strange looks and have trouble explaining how the solution might work -- a result of my "doing" philosophy on a daily basis? There are clearly limits to what I can grasp (QCD!), but I can "sort" what I can grasp quite readily. This would explain insights I've only arrived at recently of books or subjects I've thought about for decades. (Like my "what victory looks like" military history insight. But both that and my "Napoleon" is really "Napoleon+Berthier" insights were derived from fresh data inputs. My wine-inspired generalization of the Eisenhower strategic view from WW2 was simply seeing that you could apply the same logic to a variety of situations.)

I've also come to appreciate Proust's unplanned approach to writing, as described above, since I find that my best material and insights flow from the writing process and not from "thinking." (This contradicts some of what I just said and also what Lehrer said about "contemplation." When I've re-read my previous blogs, my favorite passages have preceded quotes that support my comments, yet I almost never consciously planned that. I would have to say that what I like best came out when I wasn't thinking... or at least not planning. And this relates to what I recently said about "Mozart" moments being more satisfying than "Salieri" moments: We are pleasantly surprised by "Mozart" moments because they are like working with an inspired partner. Proust, in that passage I've still not been able to find, wrote about the desire to share special moments with another and how the act of sharing actually undermines the moment for us (almost always). But we can, on occasion, share those moments with our unconscious selves. Isn't one of the great appeals of the creation of art the trick of getting our conscious minds out of the way so that "we" can create at a deeper level? And isn't that why our dreams can be so inspired?


After writing the above, I went to the gym and it occurred to me that exercise probably works in a similar way -- the more you do the easier it is. It wouldn't surprise me if we grow more sensitive to endorphens the more we work out. And it wouldn't surprise me if our bodies get better at turning exercise into muscle the more we work out. As a process, bodybuilding is probably not unlike developing a taste for good food or the way we develop memory. And of all of these things, memory seems to be the most permanent. If you don't continue exercising you will lose muscle. If you avoid good food you will lose the taste for good food. But the only way to lose memories is to alter them or for the brain structures to come apart -- which is not normal.

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137. Proust!

Previous - 136. The wine-in-itself

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Memory

Marcel Proust - The Method of Memory

p76 ... Proust knew that every time he lost himself in a recollection he also lost track of time, the tick-tock of the clock drowned out by the echoey murmurs of his mind. It was there, in his own memory, that he would live forever. His past would become a masterpiece.

... Proust used his intuition, his slavish devotion to himself and his art, to refine his faith in memory into an entire treatise. In the stuffy silence of his Parisian studio, he listened so intently to his sentimental brain that he discovered how it operated.
...

... As scientists dissect our remembrances into a list of molecules and brain regions, they fail to realize that they are channeling a reclusive French novelist. Proust may not have lived forever, but his theory of memory endures.

Intuitions
p77 ... He believed that while art and science both dealt in facts... only the artist was able to describe reality as it was actually experienced...

p78 Proust learned to believe in the strange power of art from the philosopher Henri Bergson. [Footnote: Proust... read Bergson's Matter and Memory in 1909, just as he was beginning to compose Swann's Way...] ... The laws of science were fine for inert matter, Bergson said, for discerning the relationships between atoms and cells, but us? We had a consciousness, a memory, a being. According to Bergson, this reality -- the reality of our self-consciousness -- could not be reduced or experimentally dissected. He believed that we could only understand ourselves through intuition, a process that required lots of introspection, lazy days contemplating our inner connections. Basically, it was bourgeois meditation. [Or "taking stock," regieren, from The Magic Mountain. And doesn't this recall Lin Yutang?]

...Proust's thorough absorption of Bergson's philosophy led him to conclude that the nineteenth-century novel, with its privileging of things over thoughts, had everything exactly backwards. "The kind of literature which contents itself with 'describing things,' " Proust wrote, "with giving them merely a miserable abstract of lines an surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality." As Bergson insisted, reality is best understood subjectively, its truths accessed intuitively.

p79 [Compare this passage with Moncrieff. Dodged a bullet there, Moncrieff's translation is at least as good.] 
...

... He actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain. In 1911, the year of the madeleine, physiologists had no idea how the senses connected inside the skull. One of Proust's deep insights was that our senses of smell and taste bear a unique burden of memory:

p80 When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

...smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our other senses... are first processed by the thalamus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past. [I wonder about this in the case of music (hearing) but only a little, smell really is more profound. It is interesting that hearing, sight, and touch are mediated by language. I suppose this is why it is so hard to describe smells.] ...

p81 Of course, once Proust began to remember his past, he lost all interest in the taste of the madeleine. Instead, he became obsessed with how he felt about the cookie, with what the cookie meant to him... 

In this Proustian vision, the cookie is worthy of philosophy because in the mind, everything is connected... Only by meticulously retracing the loom of our neural connections -- however nonsensical those connections may be -- can we understand ourselves, for we are the loom...

The Lie of Yesterday
..."It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile . . ." ...

p82 ... he believed that our recollections were phony. Although they felt real, they were actually elaborate fabrications. Take the madeleine. Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie... we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative. We bend the facts to suit our story, as "our intelligence reworks the experience." Proust warns us to treat the reality of our memories carefully, and with a degree of skepticism...

The strange twist in the story is that science is discovering the molecular truth behind these Proustian theories. Memory is fallible. Our remembrance of things past is imperfect.

...Our recollections are cynical things, designed by the brain to always feel true, regardless of whether or not they actually occurred. 

[Santiago Ramon y Cajal determines that neurons are islands separated from each other by synaptic clefs. Making memories requires new proteins. "The moment in time is incorporated into the architecture of the brain." Other scientists show that memories can be altered, "...we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes." "...every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, a process called reconsolidation... The memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what you remember and more about you... The moment you remember the cookie's taste is the same moment you forget what it really tasted like."]

p85 Proust presciently anticipated the discovery of memory reconsolidation. For him, memories were like sentences: they were things you never stopped changing. As a result, Proust was not only an avid sentimentalist, he was also an insufferable rewriter... [Not unlike Walt Whitman.] Nothing he wrote was ever permanent...

p87 Clearly, Proust believed in the writing process. He never outlined his stories first. He thought that the novel, like the memories it unfaithfully described, must unfurl naturally... [The first draft may "unfurl naturally" but if you are constantly rewriting and editing aren't you imposing an order after that first draft? The musical structure of the work isn't really consistent with an automatic writing model. Now Martha Grimes novels do unfurl naturally, which I enjoy, but that's probably not the best way to create a symphonic epic like In Search of Lost Time.]

p87 For a novel about memory, the plasticity of the novel's narrative was one of its most realistic elements. Proust was always refining his fictional sentences in light of new knowledge, altering his past words to reflect his present circumstances. On the last night of his life, as he lay prostrate in bed, weakened by his diet of ice cream, beer, and barbituates, he summoned Celeste, his beloved maid, to take a little dictation. He wanted to change a section... that described the slow death of a character, since he now knew a little bit more about what dying was like.

...As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now. Synapses are crossed out, dendrites are tweaked, and the memorized moment that feels so honest is thoroughly revised...
...

p88 One of the morals of the Search is that every memory is inseparable from the moment of its recollection. This is why Proust devoted fifty-eight tedious pages to the mental state of the narrator before he ate a single madeleine. He wanted to show how his current condition distorted his sense of the past... Proustian nostalgia... remembers things as being far better than they actually were. But Proust... knew that the Combray he yearned for was not the Combray that was. (As Proust put it,"The only paradise is paradise lost.") ... there is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction...
...

p89 ... memories do not directly represent reality. Instead, they are imperfect copies of what actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograph. Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.

A thought here about the author's comment above that when we remember we lose track of time. I read something recently that claimed humans can't actually multitask. We can really only to one thing at a time, and if we try to do several things at once we are just switching back and forth and each switch requires a degree of re-orientation. The same is true of experiencing time. We can experience our present time or recall our past, but if we recall the past it is overlapping with the present. All your current sensory inputs (including some you may not be consciously aware of) are getting blended in with your memory. You can think of it like a multi-track recording where there's always an open mike in the studio. Playing something back also means recording the ambient sounds of the studio as a new track on the recording. And the memory of the time you were remembering is now a part of that previous memory.

I also need to add a few Wiki quotes about Bergson:

Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background (originally bearing the name Berekson). His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement.^[8][9] His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family^[10] of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski,^[11][12] King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
...

Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education.^[14] Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.^[15]
...

Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the  Harvard  philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:

"So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."

...

The Roman Catholic Church however took the step of banning Bergson's three books, accused of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation)^[16] by placing them upon the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).
...

The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.^[35]
...

The foundation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.^[36] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and  consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.^[37]

Kant believed that free will (better perceived as The Will) could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of our private existence in the universe, separate to water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.^[37] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.^[38] In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.^[39]

Random much?

Was in the middle of my gym routine when it occurred to me that I wasn't sure if I had left the lock securing the painter's stuff in our new little "room" locked or unlocked. I intended to leave it unlocked but in place, but had I? After going back and forth a few times and thinking what a disaster it would be if the painter couldn't get to work on what is supposed to be his last day on site, I decided to go check. This involves walking a total of 12 blocks and climbing the equivalent of a 15 story building... so not a trivial decision.

When I arrived in the laundry room I found the painter stumped by the unlocked lock. I removed it. We talked a little about what was left to do. And I returned to the gym. If I had been sure the lock was unlocked, I wouldn't have returned. Would he have eventually realized he could just turn the lock and remove it, or did I really need to be there? Who knows.

Next - 138. Good prions