146. Virginia Woolf

Previous - 145. Gertrude & Noam

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Proust Was a Neuroscientist

I need to get the rest of the book up before my book club meeting tomorrow, so I'm publishing a bunch of posts at the same time. Sorry. This should be on top, but below you will find posts on Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky.

I don't know when I will resume but I will return to Vertigo and Candide.

Virginia Woolf - From Proust...

p169 ...Woolf's revelation was that we [as selves] emerge from our own fleeting interpretations of the world. Whenever we sense something, we naturally invent a subject for our sensation, a perceiver for our perception. The self is simply this subject; it is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences... "We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." ["In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1]
...

p170 ...she also acknowledged the strange utility of her [mental] illness. Her incurable madness -- this "whirring of wings in the brain" -- was, in some ways, strangely transcendental: "Not that I haven't picked up something from insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they've done instead of religion."
...

p171 ...After each depressive episode, she typically experienced a burst of creativity as she filled her journal with fresh insights into the workings of her own "difficult nervous system."... [Sounds like Adrian in Doctor Faustus.]

p172 What Woolf learned about the mind from her illness -- its quicksilverness, its plurality, its "queer conglomeration of incongruous things" -- she transformed into a literary technique... Although the self seems certain, Woolf's writing exposes the fact that we are actually composed of ever-changing impressions that are held together by the thin veneer of identity...
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p175 ...The self emerges from the chaos of consciousness, a 'kind of whole made of shivering fragments." ... 
...

p176 Woolf's writing never lets us forget the precariousness of our being. "What does one mean by 'the unity of the mind.' " Woolf wonders in A Room of One's Own, "it {the mind} seems to have no single state of being."... Although the self seems everlasting -- "as solid as forever" -- it lasts only for a moment. We pass "like a cloud on the waves."

... He [T.S. Eliot] believed that the modern poet had to give up the idea of expressing the "unified soul" simply because we didn't have one... 

p177 ...Experiment after experiment has shown that any given experience can endure for about ten seconds in short term memory. After that, the brain exhausts its capacity for the present tense, and its consciousness must begin anew, with a new stream. As the modernists anticipated, the permanent-seeming self is actually an endless procession of disjointed moments.
...

Those interesting corpus callosum splitting experiments where there are actually two competing "selves" in our head, are mentioned here.

Emergence
p180 ...If we know nothing else, it is that we are here, experiencing this. Time passes and sensations come and go. But we remain. [Descartes's I think therefore I am]
...

...The secret, Woolf realized, was that the self emerges from its source. Emerge is the crucial word here. While her characters begin as a bundle of random sensations... they instantly swell into something else... The impersonal sensation is always ripening into a subjective experience, and that experience is always flowing into the next one. And yet, from this incessant change, the character emerges... In her fiction, the self is neither imposed nor disowned. Rather, it simply arises, a vision stolen from the flux.
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p181 Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention. We bind together our sensory parts by experiencing them from a particular point of view. During this process, some sensations are ignored, while others are highlighted. The outside world gets thoroughly interpreted... 
...

p182 But how do we endure? How does the self transcend the separateness of its attentive moments? How does a process become us? For Woolf, the answer was simple: the self is an illusion. This was her final view of the self... The self is simply our work of art, a fiction created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole "theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen." If it didn't exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author.
...

p183 Lesions in the V1 only cause conscious blindness, a phenomenon [Lawrence] Weiskrantz named "blindsight." Although these patients think they are blind, they can actually see, at least unconsciously. What they are missing is awareness... blindsight patients are unable to consciously access what their brains know. As a result, all they see is darkness.


p184 ...On various visual tasks they perform with an aptitude impossible for the totally blind... While they have no explicit awareness of the light, they can still respond to it, albeit without knowing what they are responding to...

...their consciousness has been divorced from their sensations. Although the brain continues to "see," the mind can't pay attention to these visual inputs... Blindsight patients are sad evidence that we have to transform our sensations -- by way of the moment of attention, which is modulated by the self -- before we can sense it. A sensation separated from the self isn't a sensation at all.

I disagree with what is in bold in that paragraph. They are true statements for the "conscious self" or the "mind" but not for the totality of the being-in-our head. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but unless you are willing to subtract all the unconscious aspects of our selves -- like how we can fall in love at first sight -- then I will stand by it.

These experiments, on the contrary, seem to prove the opposite: The brain (or under-mind) is aware of more than the self is aware of. Not only do these sensations remain, they are processed up to the point of their being made available to the self-consciousness. As strange as blindsight is, is the process of the brain passing information to the mind without the mind knowing where it's coming from really that different from other things we seem to "know" without understanding how -- like we can, apparently, know when a woman is ovulating or that the person across the dance floor would make a perfect life partner.

If anything, the blindsight experiments prove that there is a more profound level of intelligence below the level of our conscious selves.

Here's a BBC piece that makes a similar point.

... Your head contains a hundred million electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
...

...and biology. I have in mind evolution. "You" may be a ghost riding a biological machine, but the cells of that machine follow the rules of evolution.

I was thinking about all this at the gym this morning and it occurred to me that multiple personality disorders, schizophrenia, amnesia and the like, should be collectively termed diseases of the self. "I think therefore I am" is the fundamental statement of the philosophy of the self, and this is true even if you have to add a MPD amendment like, "We think therefore we are." But this tells us nothing about reality in general, despite what Descartes intended. The statement is just as true if the self is no more than a helpful creation of the brain. The usual problems people have suggested for our being mentally unable to understand the mind of God, could equally well apply to our understanding the logic of the brain that creates "us." 

Lily

p185 The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes. The self is no single thing, and yet it controls the singularity of our attention...
...

Coda
...

p196 We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us how to live with mystery... 

A little more about this book and this author. The book was published in 2007 -- so Lehrer hasn't been following my blogs and answering most of my questions about things like dissonance. And the dust jacket has this to say about Jonah Lehrer, "is editor at large of Seed magazine. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and in the kitchen of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He has written for the Boston Globe, Nature, NPR, and NOVA ScienceNow, and writes a highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex."  
 

Real estate sales in this Brave New World

When I consider a space to live in I try to imagine what I would do with it given my stuff and my abilities. I moved into my present (tiny) place largely because it was an interesting challenge. In over 20 years the place has had a number of different looks, as I accumulated family furniture. (Now I kind of wish I had followed young Marcel's example in In Search of Lost Time and found a nice brothel to give the furniture to.)

But (in so many different ways) I am not normal, and the thing to do now if you want top dollar in a hot market is to pay people to "stage" the space. I just toured the newly staged lower level unit in our building and it looks amazing. There's no doubt in my mind that it has never looked better -- and probably will never look this good in the future. There are some obvious (and some less obvious) shortcomings of the space, but what you see now is how bright and perfect everything looks. The staging acts as a distraction, you see the staging instead of the space.

If I was considering buying the unit I would have to mentally remove all the staging to try to get an idea of what I was really dealing with. Most people won't go to that trouble so they will judge the place by how great it looks now... which is not what they will be buying. None the less, at the price it's listed at, they will be getting a good deal, given the location, as long as they don't need a car. And just to give you an idea of how crazy the housing market is here, this, problematic, 450-480 sq ft space (a variety of number are floating around) is listed for a half million dollars. Though the regular association dues are very reasonable for Nob Hill. If I were the realtor, that's what I would plaster on all the signs.

Next - 147. Certifiably a Geezer

135. August Escoffier

Previous - 134. Neural plasticity

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August Escoffier - From Proust Was...

I'm going to take this from the top later, but I have to record this first impression,

p70 ...Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru... our expectations of what the wine will taste like "can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself."

I had to note this passage because of its obvious political and sociological implications, but the wine aspect is also interesting. What I left out is the experiment in which wine experts were unable to notice that what was served as a red wine was actually a white with food coloring, or that what was served to them as a Grand Cru and a vin du table, was in fact the same wine. 

Because I know I don't have any taste when it comes to wine, I tend to order either the house wine or the cheapest wine on the list, just to see if it's drinkable. Often I find the cheapest wine is the one I like best (not always). So, is that because I'm determined to find it a hidden gem, or simply because I have no taste when it comes to wine? 

When I realized this chapter was about the origin of "modern" French cooking (and isn't it interesting that Escoffier was publishing his works at the same time Einstein was publishing his works on Relativity? I would have thought this kind of cooking went back much further than Special and General Relativity) I thought this was something I could probably skim since I can't even eat any of this food. Instead, it was amazingly interesting and the neurological aspects of smell are a great extension of other things about the brain I've learned in the past year. Now to resume at the beginning,

p53 At the heart of Escoffier's insight... was his use of stock. He put in it everything. He reduced it to gelatinous jelly, made it the base of pureed soups, and enriched it with butter and booze for sauces... "Indeed, stock is everything in cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory meal." What every other chef was throwing away -- the scraps of tendon and oxtail,the tops of celery, the ends of onion, and the irregular corners of carrot -- Escoffier was simmering into sublimity.
...

p54 Escoffier's emphasis on the tongue was the source of his culinary revolution. In his kitchen, a proper cook was a man of exquisite sensitivity, "carefully studying the trifling details of each separate flavor before he sends his masterpiece of culinary art before his patrons." Escoffier's cookbook warns again and again that the experience of the dish -- what it actually tastes like -- is the only thing that matters...

p55 Deglazing was the secret of Escoffier's success. The process itself is extremely simple: a piece of meat is cooked at a very high temperature -- to produce a nice seared Maillard crust, a cross-linking and caramelizing of amino acids -- and then a liquid, such as a rich veal stock, is added. As the liquid evaporates, it loosens the fronde, the burned bits of protein stuck to the bottom of the pan... The dissolved fronde is what gives Escoffier's sauces their divine depth...

The Secret of Deliciousness
This is the story of Kikunae Ikeda and the discovery of "umami" and MSG. In short, despite the prevailing wisdom that the human tongue can only taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour, Ikeda was convinced there must be something else, which turns out to be umami -- Japanese for delicious. 

p56 ... To be precise, umami is actually the taste of L-glutamate (C5H9NO4), the dominant amino acid in the composition of life. L-glutamate is released from life-forms by proteolysis (a shy scientific word for death, rot, and the cooking process)... [Escoffier's] genius was getting as much L-glutamate on the plate as possible. The emulsified butter didn't hurt either.
...

p57 Glutamic acid is itself tasteless. Only when the protein is broken down by cooking, fermentation, or a little ripening in the sun does the molecule degenerate into L-glutamate, an amino acid that the tongue can taste....
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p59 Everything from aged cheese to ketchup was rich in this magic little amino acid... (Salted, slightly rotting anchovies are like glutamate speedballs. They are pure umami.)... Umami even explains... Marmite... (Marmite has... a higher concentration of glutamate than any other manufactured product.)
...

p60 And of course, umami also explains Escoffier's genius. The burned bits of meat in the bottom of a pan are unraveled protein, rich in L-glutamate. Dissolved in the stock, which is little more than umami water, these browned scraps fill your mouth with a deep sense of deliciousness, the profound taste of life in a state of decay.
...

p62 ...We love the flavor of denatured protein because, being protein and water ourselves, we need it. Our human body produces more than forty grams of glutamate a day, so we constantly crave an amino acid refill...

The Smell of an Idea
Now we get into how important smell is to the enjoyment of food. And he starts with Marie-Antoine Carême who didn't care what his fancy meals tasted like if they looked spectacular.

p62 ...Before Escoffier began cooking in the new restaurants of the bourgeoisie (unlike his predecessors, he was never a private chef for an aristocrat), fancy cooking was synonymous with ostentation. As long as a dinner looked decadent, its actual taste was pretty irrelevant...

p63 ...While Carême feared heat (his lard sculptures tended to melt), Escoffier conditioned his diners to expect a steaming bowl of soup... "The Customer," Escoffier warned in his cookbook, "finds that the dish is flat and insipid unless it is served absolutely boiling hot."

What Escoffier inadvertently discovered when he started serving food fresh off the stovetop was the importance of our sense of smell. When food is hot, its molecules are volatile and evaporate in the air. A slowly simmering stock or a clove of garlic sauteed in olive oil can fill an entire kitchen with its alluring odor...

p64 ...Escoffier aspired to a level of artistry that the tongue couldn't comprehend. As a result, Escoffier's capacious recipes depend entirely upon the flourishes of flavor that we inhale. In fact... the hint of tarragon in a lobster veloute, the whisper of vanilla in a creme anglaise, the leaf of chervil floating in a carrot soup -- are precisely what the unsubtle tongue can't detect. The taste of most flavors is smell.

Here there is a lengthy description of smell from the neurological perspective, most of which I'm skipping.

p66 ...the demi-glace our nose knows is actually composed of many different aromas. Neurons all over the brain light up, reflecting the hodgepodge of smells simultaneously activating our odor receptors... Within a few milliseconds of being served the demi-glace, the mind must bind together the activity of hundreds of distinct smell receptors into a coherent sensation. This is known as the binding problem.

But wait: it gets worse. The binding problem occurs when we experience a sensation that is actually represented as a network of separate neurons distributed across the brain. In the real world, however, reality doesn't trickle in one smell at a time. The brain is constantly confronted with a pandemonium of different odors. As a result, it not only has to bind together its various sensations, it has to decipher which neurons belong to which sensations. For example, the demi-gace was probably served as a sauce for a tender fillet of beef, with a side of buttery mashed potatoes. This Escoffier-inspired dish instantly fills the nose with a barrage of distinct scents... Faced with such a delicious meal, we can either inhale the odor of the dish as a whole -- experiencing the overlapping smells as a sort of culinary symphony -- or choose to smell each of the items separately. In other words, we can parse our own inputs and, if we so desire, choose to focus on just the smell of potatoes... Although this act of selective attention seems effortless, neuroscience has no clue how it happens. This is known as the parsing problem. [Synesthesia! And autism.]

p67 Parsing and binding are problems because they can't be explained from the bottom up. No matter how detailed our maps of the mind become, the maps still won't explain how a cacophony of cells is bound into the unified perception of a sauce... Neuroscience excels at dissecting the bottom of sensation. What our dinner demonstrates is that the mind needs a top.

I'm going to break here and finish up this chapter in my next post.

Vertigo

I've already quoted (122. Venice) the passage where the guy talks about how, "The audience no longer understand that they are a part of the occasion..." but this is such a huge part of how the world has changed since the introduction of recorded music, then radio, then TV. Life has gone from being a performance to being a media stream. The average person -- by which I mean someone who can't be described as the "talent" -- has left the stage and, at most, occasionally takes a seat in the audience. And this isn't just about "society" as it also includes poor people who used to congregate on stoops and porches -- so we should probably add air conditioning and the automobile to the evils contributing to the new reality. 

In general, today it is only young people eager to mate that take the trouble to venture out onto the stage in this way. And a vestige of "society." I'm as bad as anyone when it comes to staying home and minding my own business. It takes something really special to get me out. And it's not like there aren't things to do here. I'm not even sure I would have been different in the past. I do identify with characters like Mr Bennett in P & P who's content to retreat to his library and has to be dragged to the occasional ball by his wife.

Next - 136. The wine-in-itself

130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Previous - 129. Travelers

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Call me Nostradamus...

Yes, I am sore today. Putting on and taking off my jacket now comes with sound effects. 

I compounded Having finally made it to the gym; Being sore the day after the gym; and Discovering that the local (Chinatown) branch library isn't open until 1pm on Fridays (noticed when I tried to open the door at Noon) to excuse my ignoring both my budget and diet for lunch. Since I needed to hang around for about an hour, I went to my usual North Beach haunt (Caffe Puccini) for something different (their eggplant sandwich) and a glass of red. Now I'm worried about the place as it was empty at the lunch hour.

Proust Was a Neuoscientist

By Jonah Lehrer - Houton Mifflin Company 2007

My reason for going to the library was to pick up a copy of our next book club book. I would have been happy if the book had only been about Proust, but in fact Proust is just one of the artists sampled for their contributions to neuroscience.

From the Prelude
The author writes about his days as a lab technician,

pix It was simple manual labor, but the work felt profound. Mysteries were distilled into minor questions, and if my experiments didn't fail, I ended up with an answer. The truth seemed to slowly accumulate, like dust.

At the same time, I began reading Proust. I would often bring my copy of Swann's Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences. For me, his story about one man's memory was simply that: a story. It was a work of fiction, the opposite of scientific fact.

But... I began to see a surprising convergence. The novelist had predicted my experiments. Proust and neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing.
...

pxi We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions...

pxii The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff.... 


Walt Whitman
I learned two interesting things reading this first section: The phrase "Leaves of Grass" is a printing term where "leaves" are pages and "grass" is "compositions of little value." The other interesting thing is that Whitman continued to revise both his poems and his book (adding more to it) from 1855 until just before his death in 1891. When his body was examined after his death it was discovered that nearly every organ in his body was ravaged my tuberculosis.

So what I now want to know is how does what he wants to say in 1891 differ from what he wanted to say in 1855, and how much of the change is a result of age and illness? Has anyone published an edition that includes both versions so you can see the young and old poet juxtaposed?

This would be interesting for any writer, but the reason he is included in this book is because he is "a self-described poet of the body..." who argued that "... the soul is made of flesh." To the extent that this is true, the soul -- and thus the poetry -- of a young and healthy man must vary a great deal from the soul of an old and very ill man. How could it be otherwise? 

Vertigo

Have I mentioned how interminable Sebald's paragraphs are? They sometimes go on for pages. And they may cover a number of subjects and include what could be many transitions. You come to a point that should be a good place to stop and resume later, but there is no paragraph break to make it easy to relocate your place. It occurs to me now that I just need a post-it to use to mark where I'm stopping. 

We just came to the point where he finally makes his way to Verona and checks into a hotel under the name of someone from the 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fullmerayer. Fullmerayer was from a town on the other side of the Alps (and Austria) from Sebald's hometown in Bavaria. They certainly have something in common, though I'm not sure what Sebald is getting out here. (As usual.) Fullmerayer is an interesting character but Sebald merely adopts his name for a moment. He doesn't say any more about him.

Candide

P109 ...He [Voltaire] has been inspecting his new estate at Ferney and finding that there is more involved than the cultivation of plants. He has acquired peasants who depend on him. What is the state of the community? Half the land lies fallow, the curé has celebrated no marriages in seven years, the countryside is depopulated as people rush to nearby Geneva. Taxation (especially the salt-tax) destroys those who remain; either the peasants pay and are reduced to abject poverty, of they evade payment and are clapped in jail. ‘It is heartbreaking to witness so many misfortunes. I am buying the Ferney property simply in order to do a little good there. . . . The prince who will be my liege lord should rather help me to drag his subjects out of the abyss of poverty, than profit from his ancient feudal rights....

P110 This is a new voice in Voltaire’s letters. We have seen how many times he had sought to intervene on the social or political scene and been frustrated. Here at last the right opportunity in time and place comes to hand. By acquiring seigneurial rights he is freer, he says, than when he possessed only his home in Lausanne and his ‘country cottage {guinguette}’ in Geneva, where the people were ‘a little arrogant’ and the priest ‘a little dangerous’... Already before he is even installed at Ferney he has taken up the cudgels against the curé of Moens, who is the malefactor extorting money from Voltaire’s peasants and forcing them to sell their own lands...

P111 At the end of 1758, Voltaire tells d’Argental with pride that he has created for himself ‘a rather nice kingdom’ (D7988). At last he has his new principality: he is now both roi and philosophe. His installation at Tournay on Christmas Eve 1758 was of fitting dignity and pomp,with sound of cannon, fife and drum, all the peasants bearing arms and girls presenting flowers to his two diamond-bedecked nieces. ‘M. de Voltaire’, writes a spectator, ‘was very pleased and full of joy . . . He was, believe me, very flattered’... As Candide begins to enjoy, a few weeks later, the success which has never deserted it, so too does Voltaire enter at last into his kingdom. In his sixty-fifth year, François-Marie Arouet has finally realized himself as M. de Voltaire. [Footnote: François-Marie Arouet is the name of an insignificant Paris bourgeois; M. de Voltaire (wherever his name comes from) is a gentleman, a seigneur, a person of European repute.]

So when Candide speaks of cultivating his garden he really does have in mind a good Tory existence. And I suppose Ford Madox Ford’s having Christopher turn his back on Groby is to make his point that, in the bourgeois age of the Great War, there is no longer a place for the seigneur. In the 20th century one can only cultivate a very small, private garden and even then it must be supported by trade (the antique business).


But now I must turn to the other book that shares the name of its protagonist: Faust. You can see Goethe ending his book with Faust also cultivating his garden -- ripped from the sea and funded by piracy. What I haven’t repeated above are the passages about how Voltaire disliked the British Navy because they were interfering with his trade -- capturing and selling either ships he had an interest in or ships carrying cargo he had an interest in. I also skipped the passage about his attack on the slave trade (and the sugar trade) which was inserted in Candide at the last moment. Ferney wasn’t ripped from the sea, but I suspect Voltaire’s wealth (all wealth) came with some unsavory write-offs. Mephisto’s Violent Men always have a hand in these transactions. Still, to give Faust his due, his intention was similar to Voltaire’s. But just as Voltaire was participating in the economic system that would soon lead to the French Revolution, Faust’s efforts caused as much harm as they offered future promise. Faust really is Goethe’s Candide in some ways.

Next - 131. Walt Whitman