Arcimboldo: Winter *
TOO LATE
Too late now to look for houses,
to give readings, to flirt, to eat blueberries,
to dance the polka—or just to be in the
Serbian-American club in Duquesne
near that horrible McKeesport, near
that horrible Kennywood Park, and take
a sip, a bite, and half fall off my
stool, and grab her and whirl for fifteen
straight, or just to feel her breasts
against me and to loosen my tie, or just to
drive home slowly, sometimes even
on the streetcar tracks themselves,
that 68 trolley I loved so much, the
love seats and the rattling glass windows.
~ Gerald Stern
Oriana:
Perhaps that’s the way life past a certain age could be summarized: “too late.” It’s too late to go back to college and get that degree we once coveted; too late to destabilize one’s life by seeking a new marriage or career. It’s difficult to fully engage in anything because there is no building toward the future. At its most pessimistic, this is the attitude that life used to be an adventure; now it’s a burdensome remainder after one’s real life has ended.
As Coleridge says,
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
Indeed, there comes a dramatic divide. In youth, thinking about the future is usually a pleasant activity, no matter how unrealistic the rosy expectations: the dream job, the dream partner, the dream home and family. We think about the future and feel exhilarated. Years later, we think about the future and become depressed. Now, in order to avoid depression, we simply mustn’t think about the future, increasingly filled with illness and ever-lessening capacity to enjoy the activities that used to give life its zest and purpose. Now, as Stern’s poem states, it’s “too late” to dance the polka.
And yet most humans seem to be wired for survival at any price — for not giving up, for being sustained by even the smallest pleasures. And something in us says yes to these lines by Whitman:
Sounds of the winter too,
Sunshine upon the mountains—many a distant strain
From cheery railroad train—from nearer field, barn, house
The whispering air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn,
Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of flail,
And old man’s garrulous lips among the rest,
Think not we give out yet,
Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.
~ Walt Whitman
“Think not we give out yet.” There are those who manage to find satisfying post-retirement activities — be it woodworking, cleaning the beach, or volunteering at the animal shelter.
The time to “give out” eventually does come, but not yet. And before it comes, there are memories, returning at random, sometimes bringing great pleasure. We could weep over not being to dance the polka anymore, but the better choice is to rejoice in the lived memory that at one time we could — and did.
The Polka became popular in the 19th century. Here is a couple dancing the polka, c. 1840*
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Oriana:
This wonderfully summarizes the essence of Notes from the Underground — and also hits on a hidden universal in the human nature. Let the world go to hell as long as I can have my Earl Grey tea first thing in the morning. We need to have our favorite X (in the US, usually coffee rather than tea, but supply your own favorite). Afterwards, we can ponder the big questions.
There are those who regard Notes as Dostoyevsky's best work. It's certainly his most avant-garde one. Milosz complained that those who come to D through Notes first are later disappointed by the amount of religion in D, his tremendous wrestling with belief vs doubt, reason vs faith, the problem of evil. But D's religious thinking was not the traditional type. Akhmatova called both Dostoyevski and Tolstoy "heresiarchs" (a word-play on "patriarch" and “heretic”).
*
If there is a counterpoint to both Ivan and The Man from the Underground, it would probably be the saintly monk in The Brothers Karamazov, Brother Zosima.
FATHER ZOSIMA’S THEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM
~ “Father Zosima believes, like theistic existentialists, that faith has no objective proof but can only be confirmed by a subjective experience. Madame Hohlakov asks Father Zosima how she can get back her faith in immortality and be able to prove it. Zosima responds that “there's no proving it, though you can be convinced of it.” He further states how to have convincing faith:
~ By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and constantly. In so far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt. (64)
** But here is the problem with “loving all men” (quoted on Patheos):
~ A lady is confessing to a wise elder, Father Zosima, that she doesn’t think she could really “actively love,” since she always wants recognition and reward. Here’s Zosima’s reply:
“I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor,” the elder remarked. “He was then an old man, and unquestionably intelligent. He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with a sorrowful humor. ‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience.
As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,’ he said.‘On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.’” ~
**
Thus, for Zosima, faith is obtained, increased, and confirmed by inward subjective experiences of actively loving.
Father Zosima emphasizes subjectively experiencing the joy of life and courage, a characteristic of theistic existentialism. When pronouncing a blessing on his beloved disciple Alyosha, Zosima expresses the importance of living life fully, “Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it—which is what matters most” (Dostoyevsky 275). A “rapturous ‘thirst for existence' is a keynote of existentialism” (Carlson 164).
Zosima says that only the elect are given the gift and inward feeling of ecstasy that comes from loving all men (Dostoyevsky 312). Zosima also emphasized to his listeners to sincerely pray, for “there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage . . .” (308). This inner strength “which comes from a subjective experience or awareness is also associated with theistic existentialism” (Carlson 164).
Father Zosima emphasizes subjective experiences and subjective interpretations as are characteristic of theistic existentialism. In his last speech to the Fathers and teachers prior to his death, Zosima rhetorically asks “What is hell?” Instead of replying with a literal interpretation of the Bible, he responds that “it is the suffering of being unable to love” (Dostoyevsky 312). His response is a subjective interpretation of “eternal punishment” (Carlson 164), and he shuns the “talk of hell fire in the material sense” (Dostoyevsky 313). He sees hell as “spiritual agony”: a “suffering that is not external but within” that longs to actively love but cannot (313).
Furthermore, after Zosima's death, the acetic monk Father Ferapont, who is antagonistic to Zosima and claims to see devils lurking everywhere, derides Zosima saying that he “did not believe in devils” (323). Therefore, though Zosima loves the Bible (283), he evidently does not regard some historical stories as literal such as when the Bible portrays the reality of devils and has Jesus casting them out of people. Emphasizing subjective experience and interpretation, Zosima is in line with theistic existentialism.
Father Zosima emphasizes a faith based on subjective experience, the joy of life, and a non-literal interpretation of some historical passages in the Bible. Zosima can therefore be classified as having a world view of theistic existentialism.” ~
A late 19th-century samovar made in Tula, Russia, a metalworking town south of Moscow. The very first samovar factory opened in Tula in 1778. As demand for samovars grew, the town became almost synonymous with the production of the giant hot-water urns.*
~ “New technologies allowing us to interrogate tumor cells each one at a time points to stalled development at the root of several high grade brain tumors in children,” added Nada Jabado, MD, PhD, a professor of Pediatrics and Human genetics at McGill University. “We name this the Peter Pan Syndrome as these cells are stuck in time unable to age and this is what causes these tumors. The challenge is now to identify how best to unlock these cells promoting their differentiation, and allowing for normal processes to take over.” ~
https://www.genengnews.com/news/origin-of-childhood-brain-tumors-discovered/
Oriana:
Childhood tumors as “Peter Pan Syndrome.” Just one example of how famous works of literature have a way of popping up in all kinds of fields. Not surprising — famous literary characters are an important part of the human heritage. Robinson Crusoe, Dracula, Captain Ahab, Frankenstein’s Monster, Miss Havisham, Anna Karenina, Raskolnikov, Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, King Lear, Falstaff, Achilles, Helen of Troy, Cassandra, Faust, Gretchen, Alice in Wonderland . . . the list goes on.
Returning to the Peter Pan Syndrome of childhood brain cancer: this seems to be the problem of cancer in general. For whatever reasons, cells refuse to grow up, age, and die. Within a mortal body, cancer is immortal.
**
KARL POLANYI’S MORAL ECONOMICS: HOMO MORALIS VERSUS HOMO ECONOMICUS
~ “Polanyi’s view of the world began in the epicenters of the Hapsburg Empire. It is one of the paradoxes of Polanyi’s life and work that he would decry the effects of nineteenth-century capitalism even as he was the heir of its sibling, cosmopolitan liberalism. Born in Vienna in 1886, he grew up in Budapest, the son of Jewish bourgeois parents who saw Judaism as a relic of shtetl or ghetto ways, a hangover from the East. The promise of the Jewish Enlightenment was this: citizenship in return for assimilation. His grandfather and father accepted the deal. Polanyi’s father, Mihály, a successful engineer, made sure that his children grew up in a capacious flat on one of Budapest’s toniest streets.
And yet the ties to Jewish circles were never completely untethered. Polanyi went to the Minta Gymnasium with a scholarship from Jewish philanthropists. His grandfather on his mother’s side was a rabbinic scholar who had translated the Talmud into Russian. Polanyi was therefore raised just outside the radius of Jewish tradition, a world he knew but could never belong to.
For the rest of his life, Polanyi searched for new communal bearings, new roots for an increasingly rootless life. As he fled Budapest for Vienna in 1919, he converted to Christianity, possibly sensing that a minority in the new national frenzy of post-1918 Central Europe was a dangerous thing to be, and that he should merge into the national Volk. Years later, in the freeze of the Cold War, he would claim that “it was the Jews that brought Christianity into the world, and this was a terrible burden. For, it brought into being the trepidation of conscience: the Jews had brought this burden into the world but then walked away from it!” They were guilty not for the death of Jesus but for “rejecting the teachings of Jesus, which are superior.”
There is a certain parallel here between Jews in the ancient world and liberals in Polanyi’s world. One might say that he saw that in Christ’s time Jews had cleared the ground for the Christian gospel. Centuries later, liberalism had done likewise. It created the conditions for what Polanyi often called a “new Christian unity.” Just as the old Christian unity stood on the shoulders of Judaism, according to Polanyi the new Christian unity was climbing on the shoulders of liberalism. What that emerging unity lacked, however, was an understanding of itself, a narrative to replace what he regarded as a wasteland of market integration and individualism. Christianity gave him an ethical vocabulary that at once lambasted liberalism while adopting its universalism.
Meanwhile anti-Semitism destroyed the hearth of Central European assimilation dreams. It drove Polanyi into exile; it took away parts of his family. As Gareth Dale notes in his illuminating biography, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (2016), the Jewish Question was a seam of unresolved issues. The moral economist hovered between his collapsing old worlds—the Jewish and the liberal—and his struggles to find a source of light for a new world.
Red Vienna
Marxism was a potential resort. It appealed to many who considered liberalism responsible for the bloodshed of World War I and, on its heels, the fascist blight. Polanyi would have an ambiguous relationship to Marxism, however. Its collectivism was a draw, but its underlying materialism was not. Polanyi never subscribed to the Second International’s orthodoxy. He helped found the Hungarian Radical Party before World War I sent him to the Russian front as a cavalry officer. Wounded, he convalesced in Budapest when Mihály Károlyi launched the First Hungarian People’s Republic. For a few furtive months in early 1919, Polanyi was close to power—as close as he would ever get. It ended with Béla Kun’s Soviet takeover; the republic turned a crimson shade of red.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic was a debacle. Appalled at what he regarded as the naïveté of the revolutionaries who thought they could create utopias out of abstract ideas, Polanyi left for Vienna to become a journalist, starting a life as the wandering un-Jewish Hungarian. The Austrian capital was home to a remarkable experiment in municipal socialism, with public housing, kindergartens, and public recreation for all. Here was a feasible model for solidarity, a secular heir to Christian unity. It failed. With some justification, Polanyi would accuse unrepentant “economic liberals” for having forced Red Vienna to its knees before the false altar of austerity. In a fascinating and little-remarked appendix to chapter seven of The Great Transformation, Polanyi likened the destruction of Red Vienna to the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century, which had destroyed the Christian charity of England’s poor laws. Neither the community of the squire’s village nor working-class Vienna could withstand “the iron broom of the classical economists.”
In late 1933, Polanyi, a socialist without a party, left for England. It is revealing that Polanyi blamed liberals for the collapse. The fact that Vienna was a cosmopolitan city surrounded by conservative resentment and clerical zeal to clamp down on urbane modernists did not figure into his story. This obsession with liberal failures and his blind spot for reactionary nationalism would only grow with time.
He would not embrace Marxism, Zionism, nationalism, liberalism, conservativism—all the traditional -isms that defined the ideological wars of the century. By the late 1930s, he was convinced of the corrosive effects of the nineteenth-century system that had severed the economy from other spheres of life and submitted human needs to the market. The consequences, as he wrote to his brother Michael, were “murderous,” for the dominance of the market prepared the world for fascism, “the most obvious failure of our civilization.” Any new humanist philosophy had to start with “freedom from economics.”
Hunger Games
The Great Transformation was originally called Origins of the Cataclysm, which then became Anatomy of the 19th Century. These would have been more vivid, and more accurate, titles. But they were bleak, and did not convey his ambition to create an epic about capitalism that would convince readers that the last thing the world needed in 1944 was a restoration of old liberal ways. This had been the mistake of 1919; instead of reforming a liberal civilization, the postwar’s architects tried “recasting the regimes that had succumbed on the battlefields” and built Europe’s tomb.
Those “regimes” were the products of the first modern globalization, which Polanyi describes in the astonishing opening chapter of The Great Transformation. The rise of the world economy rested on four “institutions”: a balance of power between states; the international gold standard; the liberal state; and the self-regulating market, which produced “unheard-of material welfare.” This great transformation was responsible for “the hundred years’ peace,” but it was also a “stark utopia”—stark because of its brutal physical and moral consequences, utopian because it depended on greats acts of will and denial of the reality of social and economic life. The commodification of land, labor, and capital was the result of an organized, wrenching dislocation from collective moorings in “the traditional unity of a Christian society.” Societies with markets ceded to market societies, bent to live and die in exchange.
The Great Transformation’s invective follows the ways in which old feudal collectives, guilds, corporations, and craft circles—the staples of Romantic attachments to a telluric past—became treated as commodities by the market, in Polanyi’s words, “commodity fictions.” His epic centered on the way the poor, severed from the land, got stripped of their access to charity. A rising middle class won the right to vote in 1832. In Polanyi’s reading, the poor lost their “right to live” two years later with the Poor Law reform. Unable to count on subsistence from parishes under the Speenhamland system, they lined up at the gates of the workhouse. “No government was needed to maintain this balance,” Polanyi noted of the cruel twist of the self-regulating market; “it was restored by the pangs of hunger on the one hand, the scarcity of food on the other.”
There was nothing natural about this process. “Free markets,” he wrote, “could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course.” But—and here’s the rub—political economists campaigned to tell a very different story, and invent an increasingly elaborate set of theories about laissez faire. It became the new creed, a creed so powerful that all subsequent anti-laissez-faire legislation got treated as an interference with or perversion of the natural course of events. In his lectures from the late 1930s, he indicted the founders of the dismal science, Robert Malthus and David Ricardo: “Misery was regarded as nature’s cure, and any act of humanitarianism as a crime against humanity since it must necessarily increase their sufferings.”
What started as an uprooting from communities of reciprocity and redistribution and the victory of individual gain came full circle with welfare systems, both democratic and authoritarian, in the 1930s. The market restoration of the 1920s had failed. Gold collapsed, the old balance of imperial powers fizzled, the self-regulating market produced mass unemployment, and the liberal state got swept away. Now, Polanyi argued, the marketplace was being restored to its rightful place at the service of society. “Undoubtedly,” he noted, “our age will be credited with having seen the end of the self-regulating market.” Managed currencies, protectionism, and make-work declared the arrival of moral economy.
The Great Transformation is riddled with problems. Fred Block and Margaret Somers, who have done so much to chart the outlines of a Polanyian approach to sociology, have identified one particular tension at the core of the work. On the one hand, Polanyi argues that the liberal age had disembedded the economy from wider social systems. On the other, Polanyi implies that the market always rests on legal, intellectual, and political conditions—that supply and demand never operate freely. Polanyi wants it both ways.
Sensing his discordance with his time, Polanyi turned away from the present, receding to focus on the economic history of ancient and tribal societies where Homo moralis played a larger role in the epic of humanity. In these areas, Polanyi’s influence was—and continues to be—profound.
But if moral economics does not want to get paved over again, it will have to find a way to get beyond the stark dichotomies that have fueled its passion, as if we must choose between ethical community or economic interdependence, morals or markets.
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/jeremy-adelman-polanyi-failed-prophet-moral-economics
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~ “Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements but as the single human invention he calls the "Market Society".
A distinguishing characteristic of the "Market Society" is that humanity's economic mentalities have been changed. Prior to the great transformation, people based their economies on reciprocity and redistribution across personal and communal relationships. As a consequence of industrialization and increasing state influence, competitive markets were created that undermined these previous social tendencies, replacing them with formal institutions that aimed to promote a self-regulating market economy.
The expansion of capitalist institutions with an economically liberal mindset not only changed laws but also fundamentally altered humankind's economic relations; prior to the great transformation, markets played a very minor role in human affairs and were not even capable of setting prices because of their diminutive size. It was only after industrialization and the onset of greater state control over newly created market institutions that the myth of human nature's propensity toward rational free trade became widespread.
The great transformation was begun by the powerful modern state, which was needed to push changes in social structure, and in what aspects of human nature were amplified and encouraged, which allowed for a competitive capitalist economy to emerge. For Polanyi, these changes implied the destruction of the basic social order that had reigned throughout pre-modern history. Central to the change was that factors of production, such as land and labor, would now be sold on the market at market-determined prices instead of allocated according to tradition, redistribution, or reciprocity. He emphasized the greatness of the transformation because it was both a change of human institutions and human nature. ” ~ Wiki
Oriana:
Neoliberalism has also been called “market fundamentalism.” But is there an alternative to this revival of the Gilded Age laissez-faire and corruption?
~ “Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and center have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.
Every invocation of Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilize people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis.
Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.
What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo program, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
Oriana:
It’s interesting how religious thinking has intermingled with economic theory. First, capitalism was linked with Protestantism, which praised wealth as a sign of being among the Elect. Now, certain voices, including that of Pope Francis, are clamoring for the kind of economy that doesn’t just serve the rich. “Inclusive prosperity” is a summary of that ideal.
But we have to make sure that this “inclusive prosperity” does not destroy the environment. I believe that in the long term the shrinking of the human population will resolve many environmental problems by the end of the century — but some argue that that’s too late.
The challenges are huge, monstrous. It is clear, however, that we won’t get very far by advocating trickle-down economics and preaching that “greed is good.” We do need a moral ideal if we are to move forward, rather than ever backward into the rapaciousness of early capitalism.
ECONOMICS AFTER NEO-LIBERALISM: “INCLUSIVE PROSPERITY”
~ “We live in an age of astonishing inequality. Income and wealth disparities in the United States have risen to heights not seen since the Gilded Age and are among the highest in the developed world. Median wages for U.S. workers have stagnated for nearly fifty years. Fewer and fewer younger Americans can expect to do better than their parents. In 2017, life expectancy in the United States declined for the third year in a row.
The tools of economics are critical to developing a policy framework for what we call “inclusive prosperity.” While prosperity is the traditional concern of economists, the modifier “inclusive” demands both that we consider the whole distribution of outcomes, not simply the average (the “middle class”), and that we consider human prosperity broadly, including nonpecuniary sources of well-being, from health to climate change to political rights.
In the eyes of many, the turn toward neoliberalism is closely associated with economic ideas. Leading economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were among the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society, the influential group of intellectuals whose advocacy of markets and hostility to government intervention proved highly effective in reshaping the policy landscape after 1980. Deregulation, financialization, dismantling of the welfare state, deinstitutionalization of labor markets, reduction in corporate and progressive taxation, and the pursuit of hyper-globalization—the culprits behind rising inequalities—all seem to be rooted in conventional economic doctrines. The discipline’s focus on markets and incentives, methodological individualism, and mathematical formalism stand in the way of meaningful, large-scale reform. In short, neoliberalism appears to be just another name for economics.
Clearly markets rely on a wide range of institutions; they are “embedded” in institutions, as Karl Polanyi would say. But how should those institutions be designed? As we grapple with new realities created by digitization, demographics, and their impacts on labor markets, questions about the allocation of property rights among different claimants become crucial.
The same kind of institutional indeterminacy pervades all other policy domains. Which labor market institutions minimize job insecurity without jeopardizing employment creation? How do we best provide social protection without blunting economic incentives? What kind of financial regulations ensure financial stability without blocking financial innovation? What kind of monetary and fiscal rules are best for an open economy? Economics does not provide a fixed answer to these questions. Instead, it highlights the potential consequences of different arrangements.” ~
http://bostonreview.net/forum/suresh-naidu-dani-rodrik-gabriel-zucman-economics-after-neoliberalism?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=cc7c091d96-MC_EMAIL_Reading+List_12_7_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-cc7c091d96-40729829&mc_cid=cc7c091d96&mc_eid=97e2edfae1
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Oriana:
Ultimately, for me, it's about the injection of humanitarian values into the system, rather than profit being the ultimate value.
Mary:
These economic theories give me a headache. They always seem less a science than a system of propaganda. The mere idea of a free market is itself problematic in more ways than the fiction that this is a "natural" state. The deck is and always has been stacked. The commodification of everything as a form of property is not "natural" not inevitable and certainly not necessary . We even have "intellectual property" now..that can be treated legally like any other form of property. It is no natural law but a cultural assumption that everything imaginable can be owned, bought, sold, marketed.. its value determined by the market itself. We don’t share ideas, we own, buy and sell them...think of things like scientific research and development...fragmented and shaped by ideas of property and ownership...leaving scientists rivals in securing positions and monies and rights and patents to theories, discoveries, inventions and ideas. Think of the time wasted securing all these property rights, and securing the funds to continue doing science at all.
Consumerism becomes an obligation, a way of life, and a burden, wasting time and energies that we might better use in problem solving, creative work, or simple enjoyment. The demand is for continuous economic growth, unfettered and unregulated. In the biology of living cells this kind of growth is found in cancers, not in normally behaving cells. Look at the endless, unnecessary and ultimately burdensome proliferation of products--not one type of soap, or cereal, or toothpaste, not even two, or twenty, but hundreds, crowding the aisles and shelves, all screaming to be chosen. It becomes a burden to choose between them, "shopping" comes closer and closer to being a full time job. Most of the differences in these products are minor and nonessential tweaks, aimed at attracting buyers with a sense of personalization...of catering to your unique personal taste and requirements. All a ploy to convince you you need these products, and they will deliver beyond their simple utility, becoming tools to indicate status, fulfill dreams, make us happy.
In reality, these fabrications can do nothing of that kind, and we are always left still wanting, ripe for the next new ad campaign, locked into a cycle of inauthentic desire, eternally chasing satisfactions that will always remain just out of reach.
Oriana:
Keynes made a persuasive case for consumerism (demand-side economics), but . . . everything comes with a price, especially when it comes to the destruction of the earth to produce what — plastic bags?
Research shows that money does in fact buy happiness, but only up to a certain level of income — currently it’s about $80K/year. And here I am, nowhere near that level, driving a 20-year-old Toyota. Fortunately I have no desire for a new car — unless an electric one. But it’s not a consuming (pardon the unintended pun) desire. I’d much rather have interesting experiences. And here too studies have shown that people get more lasting pleasure from investing in experiences rather than in things.
Whether those with little education and inner life can come around to the view that it’s better to “buy experiences rather than things” remains to be seen. There are some signs: the minimalist houses and apartments that eschew clutter, boomers warning that getting rid of the deceased parents’ possessions is a huge chore — so don’t burden your own children with it: trash or donate your excess now.
The main thing is to stop worshipping the market as magically self-regulating. It isn’t.
You make a good point about scientific research often being strangled by economics.
I agree that it’s all a giant headache — both the economic theories and the economy in practice, in daily living. We’ve reached a point of excess complexity, so even an educated person can’t comprehend all the factors involved. Hannah Arendt warned that this feeling of incomprehensibility and helplessness signify a susceptibility to fascism’s oversimplified messages.
But I do like the idea of “inclusive prosperity.” The economy should be about meeting the basic needs of all, not just the few. Imagine, economics with moral ideas in it!
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WHEN ICE SHEETS MELT, SEA LEVEL RISES GLOBALLY, DROPS LOCALLY
What happens when a big glacier like the Greenland Ice Sheet melts?
Three things happen. One is that you’re dumping all of this melt water into the ocean. So the mass of the entire ocean would definitely be going up if ice sheets were melting—as they are today. The second thing that happens is that this gravitational attraction that the ice sheet exerts on the surrounding water diminishes. As a consequence, water migrates away from the ice sheet. The third thing is, as the ice sheet melts, the land underneath the ice sheet pops up; it rebounds.
So what is the combined impact of the ice-sheet melt, water flow, and diminished gravity?
Gravity has a very strong effect. So what happens when an ice sheet melts is sea level falls in the vicinity of the melting ice sheet. That is counterintuitive. The question is, how far from the ice sheet do you have to go before the effects of diminished gravity and uplifting crust are small enough that you start to raise sea level? That’s also counterintuitive. It’s 2,000 kilometers away from the ice sheet. So if the Greenland ice sheet were to catastrophically collapse tomorrow, the sea level in Iceland, Newfoundland, Sweden, Norway—all within this 2,000 kilometer radius of the Greenland ice sheet—would fall. It might have a 30 to 50 meter drop at the shore of Greenland. But the farther you get away from Greenland, the greater the price you pay. If the Greenland ice sheet melts, sea level in most of the Southern Hemisphere will increase about 30 percent more than the global average. So this is no small effect.
The last time we were as warm as we are today, the ice sheets that we think of as the least stable disappeared.
What happens with melting in Antarctica?
If the Antarctic ice sheets melt, sea level falls close to Antarctic. But it would rise more than you’d otherwise expect in the Northern Hemisphere. These are known as sea-level fingerprints, because each ice sheet has its own geometry. Greenland produces one geometry of sea level change and the Antarctic has its own. Mountain glaciers have their own fingerprint. This explains a lot of variability in sea level. It’s also a really important opportunity. If you have people denying climate change because they say there’s geographic variation in sea level changes—it doesn’t go up uniformly—you can say, “Well, that is incorrect because ice sheets produce a geographically variable change in sea level when they melt.” You can also use that variability to say this percentage is coming from Greenland, this percentage is coming from the Antarctic, and this percentage is coming from mountain glaciers. You can source the melt. And that’s an important argument from a public-hazard viewpoint.
Why is the source of the melt important?
If you’re living on the U.S. east coast, or Holland, you don’t need to worry what global average sea-level rise is doing. I was in Holland a few summers ago and was trying to convince the Dutch that if the Greenland ice sheet melts, they have less to worry about than the Antarctic ice sheet melting. But it doesn’t register. When I give public talks, people just shake their heads. They don’t believe it when I show this bull’s-eye around the melting [Greenland] ice sheet, which is an area where sea level will fall. Our intuition is built from walking along a shoreline or turning a tap on. It isn’t from considering what would happen if a major large-scale ice sheet melts.
Why are you so confident that the world’s glaciers, including the polar ice sheets, will keep melting?
One way to understand where we’re heading in this warming world of ours is to run a climate model. The other way is to look to the past and ask what the ice sheets did the last time we were this warm or a little bit warmer. We’re currently in an interglacial—a warm period between glacial cycles. If humans weren’t warming the climate, Earth might be poised to enter into another Ice Age in the future. The last interglacial prior to the present one was about 120,000 years ago. Of course, 120,000 years ago, humans weren’t having any impact on climate. That was natural climatic variability.
What did the ice sheets do the last time the climate was this warm?
The last time we were as warm as we are today, the ice sheets that we think of as the least stable disappeared, albeit over a protracted period. So why should we expect that the issue is going to be any different in the next few hundreds to thousands of years? There’s no reason to believe it, unless we do something to reverse what we’re doing.
What do Roman fish tanks tell us about sea levels?
Wealthy Romans at the time of Augustus were building fish holding tanks. The fishermen would come in with the fish, they’d put them there so that the fish were fresh when they ate them—they wanted to keep them alive for a few days or weeks or whatever. The Romans were engineers, so they built these fish tanks at very precise levels relative to sea level at the time. You didn’t want the walls to be too low because at high tide the fish would swim out; you didn’t want it to be too high because you wanted tides to refresh the water within the tanks.
Kurt Lambeck, a professor at the Australian National University, recognized that by looking at the present day elevation of those fish tanks, we could say something about how sea level had changed over the 2,500 years since then. If sea level over the last 2,500 years was going up at the rate that it went up in the 20th century, those fish tanks would be under 4 meters of water—12 feet of water—and I can assure you they’re not. You can see them. You can walk along the coast, they’re visible. What that tells you is that it is impossible that sea level went up by the rates that we saw in the 20th century for any extended period of time earlier than that. Sea level has not gone up over the last 2,500 years like it has in the 20th century.
What can records of Babylonian eclipses 2,500 years ago tell us about climate change?
When we look at eclipse records, we can say “here’s when a Babylonian eclipse was recorded.” Now, I can do a calculation and ask when that Babylonian eclipse should have occurred if the present rotation rate of the Earth had stayed constant in the time between the eclipse and present day. And you can do that for Greek, Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese eclipses, and this is what a professor in the U.K., F. Richard Stephenson, did. He tabulated, as others did before him, a large suite of such eclipses that show a clear slowing of the Earth’s rotation rate over the last few thousand years. Say you have two clocks synchronized 2,500 years ago. One kept time perfectly and the other was connected to the Earth whose rotation rate was slowing. Over 2,500 years, they would go out of sync by about four hours. That’s kind of the level of slowing. So what we know is that the Earth’s rotation rate has slowed over the last 2,500 years. But the Earth’s slowing isn’t what we would predict exactly.
Why would you expect the Earth’s rotation to slow at all?
I published this paper in Science Advances on something called Munk’s Enigma. What we showed is that it comes from three different effects. One is what’s known as “tidal dissipation.” Tides crash into the shoreline and each time they do they dissipate energy, and for a variety of reasons they slow the Earth’s rotation. Another thing we talk about is that there is a very subtle coupling between the core of the Earth, which is iron, and the rocky part of the Earth, the mantle, which acts to change the Earth’s rotation rate we see sitting on the surface of the planet.
Is it like the friction of the fluid in a car’s a transmission; it has to do with how viscous the connection is between the inner and outer parts of the planet?
It’s not friction, but it’s pretty darn close. It’s the fact that you’ve got one fluid moving against another fluid that’s moving at a different rate. If they come out of sync, their rates will influence each other. But it is as you say, a connection.
So, this is another effect. We have the tides crashing in and what geophysicists would call core-mantle coupling. We can predict both of those pretty accurately, but you’re still left with a difference and that difference is due to the ice age and we model that. We’ve got tidal dissipation, core-mantle coupling, and now we add the Ice Age Effect, which I’m the expert on. And lo and behold, when I add that to these other two effects, I get precisely the four-hour slowing I saw.
What is the Ice Age Effect?
The Earth is growing more spherical because 20,000 years ago we had a lot more ice at the poles. When ice sheets were at the poles they kind of squished the Earth from both poles and the Earth flattened a little bit. When those ice sheets melted, that flattening started to rebound and we’re becoming spherical, so our spin rate should be increasing, like a ballerina or a figure skater. The ice age correction is a speeding up of the rotation rate.
So these three factors—core-mantle coupling, post ice rebounding of poles, and tidal dissipation—explain changes in the speed of the Earth until the 20th century. What’s happening now?
We want to take that same ice age model and correct for 20th-century changes in Earth’s rotation. When we do, we get a difference that we haven’t explained yet. So now we say; well, maybe that’s due to polar ice sheet melting or polar glacier melting.
The way to do that is to go to the IPCC, their last assessment report, and look at the calculation of mountain glacier melting, because those tabulations suggest that the ice sheets weren’t changing that much in the 20th century. Ice sheets have only really started to melt in the last 20 years or so, but the glaciers were popping off all through the 20th century. We take that glacier melting that the IPCC tells us, compute its effect on rotation, and one effect would be to slow the Earth’s rotation just like the figure skater, and compare it to these ice-age corrected observations.
Is water moving off glaciers, slowing the Earth’s rotation, this time analogous to a figure skater putting arms out?
Right. Glaciers are mostly near the axis. They’re near the North and South Poles and the bulk of the ocean is not. In other words, you’re taking glaciers from high latitudes like Alaska and Patagonia, you’re melting them, they distribute around the globe, but in general, that’s like a mass flux toward the equator because you’re taking material from the poles and you’re moving it into the oceans. That tends to move material closer to the equator than it once was.
So the melting mountain glaciers and polar caps are moving bulk toward the equator?
Yes. Of course, there is ocean everywhere, but if you’re moving the ice from a high latitude and you’re sticking it over oceans, in effect, you’re adding to mass in the equator and you’re taking mass away from the polar areas and that’s going to slow the earth down. That’s the calculation we did. We also computed how those glaciers would affect the orientation of poles. In both cases, when you do that calculation and you compare it to this ice age corrected satellite and astronomical observations, you fit them precisely.
What we showed in this paper is that when you look at the modern data on rotation and you correct for ice age, you have a leftover, and that leftover is precisely what it should be if it were due to the kind of melting that global change scientists believe happened in the 20th century.
This is an entirely different way to show that ice sheets are melting. It’s a very good way because if you’re looking at Greenland and you say, “Oh, it’s melting in the southern sector, I can see ice diminishing,” you don’t necessarily know what it’s doing in the northern sector. You don’t get a good integrated view of what the Greenland ice sheet is doing. But rotation doesn’t care about north vs. south, it just cares about how much mass is moving from Greenland into the oceans. And so rotation provides what a scientist would call a really elegant integrated measure of the mass balance of polar ice sheets.
There are so many interesting problems in our science that you can see with your eyes. But your eyes can fool you. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, used to start his physics lectures by showing students their intuition could take them a long way. They could do things just through intuition that would get them roughly the right answer. Then he used to throw some counterintuitive examples at them. Then he said, “This is why you need physics. You need to understand when your intuition might go wrong.” I firmly am a Feynman acolyte. There are some things that you can explain, but as a scientist you’re always going to face things that are counterintuitive. You’re never going to understand that water is falling near an ice sheet from your everyday experiences of the bathtub. You need to bring in something more; in this case, Newton’s second law of gravitation. You have to bring in physics; otherwise, you’re never going to explain that.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-our-intuition-about-sea-level-rise-is-wrong?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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YOU ARE NOT LAZY, BORED, UNMOTIVATED. YOU ARE AFRAID
~ “I don’t know you, but I know this: You have internet access, and enough time to spend some of it reading.
It sounds obvious, but this tells me two more important things about you: One, you’re in the top half of humanity’s wealth distribution, because the other half of the world’s population isn’t even online yet. And two, since you’re here, you’re likely fighting a very modern human fight. You’ve probably already got the basics covered — food, a roof over your head. For you, the obstacles to a better, happier life aren’t all concrete. You’re trying to defeat more abstract enemies: laziness, boredom, self-doubt, procrastination.
Here’s the thing: All these concepts are one and the same. And there’s only one way to deal with them.
You’re not lazy. You’re not bored. You’re not unmotivated. What you are — what all of us are — is afraid. And the best advice for overcoming fear is the bland three-word sentence Nike turned into the most successful marketing slogan of all time (after slightly tweaking a serial killer’s last words): Just do it.
You’re not unmotivated
“I’m not motivated” is never a true statement. Not motivated to do what? Work? In that case, aren’t you motivated to avoid it? Every action human beings ever take is driven by some kind of incentive, whether it’s money, or happiness, or peace, or satisfying your conscience. Your motivation may not always be obvious, but it’s always there.
If you hate every second of the workday, you’re not unmotivated to change your job. But you haven’t, which means there’s something holding you back. For some reason, it feels like you can’t make the change. It’s too hard, requires too much effort, makes you too vulnerable to rejection. So you don’t even try. But that’s entirely different from not being motivated, and it’s only a sign that it’s time to dig into this feeling.
You’re not bored
I once struck up a chat on Tinder with a woman who was a scrum master and a physiologist. She was in business school, but, really, she wanted to study fashion and launch her own creative company. In short, she was a fascinating person.
When I asked her why she even used the app, she spoke the most common lie in the world: “I’m bored.”
How do I know it was a lie? Because no one is ever bored anymore. There’s no reason to be. Most of us don’t even choose to try. We’re 100% connected, 100% of the time.
We just pretend to be bored so we can keep filling our days with meaningless distractions, like small talk on Tinder, because we know what lies beneath the stillness: existential dread. Go through the door of boredom, and that’s what you’ll find.
The great scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal once said: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” You’re not bored. You’re terrified of being alone with yourself in your own head.
You’re not lazy
Laziness is the scapegoat of everyone who’s trying to capitalize on your claim of “being bored.” “You’re not bored — you’re boring!” is what they’ll tell you. You need a hobby, or a calling, or a $250 fitness program with a personalized meal plan.
This, too, is nonsense. Laziness, like boredom, doesn’t exist. As psychology professor Devon Price has explained on Medium: “No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details.” What looks like laziness or self-sabotage, he wrote, is almost always something else — a lack of confidence, an unmet need.
Once again, it’s not a lack of motivation, an inexplicable unwillingness to act, that obstructs your path to success and happiness. It’s the invisible boundaries in your head that you’re tripping over — sometimes without ever moving at all.
Medicating the symptoms
Laziness, boredom, procrastination — all of these are symptoms of the same disease.
My dad once told me this story: A colleague was driving to an appointment with a customer. As he was overtaking a truck, the truck moved into his lane. Seeing his car get crushed from the passenger side and compressing towards him, his animal instincts kicked in. Unleashing an ancient roar at the top of his lungs, he ripped out the gear lever of his automatic gearbox with one hand.
Clearly, we’re not talking about breaking off a knob on your radio. It’s a heavy, difficult-to-break piece of machinery. That’s the power of fear. It can make you do unimaginable things.
Now imagine turning this same power not onto your physical environment, but against your own mind. That’s what we tend to do when faced with a struggle — we take this unbelievable source of raw power and turn it on ourselves. We do it by self-medicating, by concocting and treating powerful symptoms, like laziness and boredom. Instead of seeing everyone rip their gear levers out of their cars, we see them staring at their phones on the subway, or procrastinating on a deadline by bingeing TV, or getting dragged into dumb fights on social media. We’re all afraid of something; we just choose to medicate that fear differently.
The dog that keeps on chasing
The number of things you can be afraid of is endless.
You’re afraid of dying early from a plane crash or an armed robbery or a natural disaster or a newly discovered parasite, even though the odds strongly suggest you won’t. You’re afraid of being alone because of existential dread, but also because it looks weird and gets weird looks, and if your parents haven’t asked why you’re still single yet, your friends most certainly have.
You’re afraid of writing the first chapter of your book, because who thinks that’ll ever work out? But you’re also afraid of wasting 10 more hours watching Game of Thrones, especially now that you’ve already seen the whole thing twice. You’re afraid of never being rich, but not nearly as much as you’re afraid of losing whatever you already have.
I could keep going all day. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking stupid, fear of losing something or someone, fear of fear, fear of wasting time, fear of not being good enough, smart enough, attractive enough.
In order to deal with all these fears, you could buy a new book from a new guru each week, collect a stunning array of probably-placebo supplements on your shelf, churn through organizational systems and mantras and resolutions. Or, you could wake up and realize that all these fears are the same thing. Fear is the same dark creature that’s always plagued us, and it will continue to invent new tricks till kingdom come. You have to find a way to live in spite of it.
That dog is going to keep chasing you until you die. And some days, it will get to you. But you have to keep moving. Forever. The day you run into the bright light at the end of the tunnel, I want you to look back and give the finger to that dog trailing behind.
The cure
I’m no more qualified to talk about fear that any random guy you’d meet on the street. I don’t have a degree in psychology, or even formal training as a writer. But, like you, I have lived with fear my whole life. And, somehow, I’ve still arrived in a place where I have a job I love, lots of time to spend how I want, and a general sense of happiness. I have my own issues to resolve, but I feel okay taking life one day at a time. And that’s what it’s about. Beat the dog again and again. And again.
My theme for this year is ‘focus.’ Across all areas of my life, I’m trying my best to drill down to what really matters: projects, people, how I manage my time and my energy.
And the one thing that has helped me show up consistently in spite of fear is some version of Nike’s annoyingly obvious slogan: Just Do It.
Because besides being annoyingly obvious, it’s also universally, inescapably true. “Just Do It” isn’t an elegant solution. It’s not dismissive or snobby, but empowering and humble. It’s motivation. Inspiration. Action. Energy.
People don’t realize how deep this slogan is. “If it were that easy, don’t you think everybody would ‘just do it?’” No, no, no. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about something Marcus Aurelius told himself 2,000 years ago: “You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible — and no one can keep you from this.”
If all we did was focus on the task right in front of us, we’d accomplish 99% of our goals and then some. Sure, we’d still have to pause and reflect on occasion, and not all goals would turn out to be worth chasing in the first place, but we’d get there.
This is everything. The whole strategy. You don’t have time for big picture concerns when you’re doing. And I don’t mean running around all day like a rat in a maze. I mean steadily engaging and re-focusing on the task at hand.
“Just Do It” as a strategy
A strategy is a long-term approach to getting what you want. It’s a set of behaviors you’re committed to, a line of principles you’re unwilling to compromise.
Using “Just Do It” as the strategy, the operating system of your life, means committing to figuring it out on your own. You chase your goals based on what you believe in. If you think art should be free, then make art for free and get sponsors or donors. If you don’t believe in remote work, rent an office and hire locally.
“Just Do It” is the best advice because it’s the only advice that works.
When I started writing, I gave lots of specific tips in my articles: how to set goals, have a morning routine, be productive. But specifics are full of hindsight bias. I’m only giving you the final 10% that worked, and that worked for me in particular. The messy 90% of the journey that led me there? I left that out completely.
And my specific advice is only going to work for a tiny fraction of people who happen to be in the right place at the right time and for whom it will click immediately. Everyone else who still needs to go through the random 90% in their journey will be left out in the cold. Still feeling alone, still stuck with their fears. Except now, they’re disappointed too.
“Just Do It” may not be perfect, but at least it clears the air from the start: Yes, you are alone, but you also have everything you could ever need to figure things out. You will make many mistakes, but since no one on this planet can give you the perfect answers to the questions created by your own unique circumstances, choosing for yourself and continuing to move forward is not just the best thing you can do, it’s also the only thing.
“Just Do It” as a tactic
A tactic is a short- to medium-term course of action that helps you live up to your strategy. “Just Do It” as a tactic is refusing to let everyday hurdles get to you, while relentlessly focusing on the next, smallest action you can control.
Your boss didn’t like the presentation? Fine, do it over and show her again. You’ve run out of clients and your freelance business never really got off the ground? Fine, shut it down and start from scratch. Ghosted on Tinder? Fine, delete the app and try another way of meeting people. The faster you can re-center after completing something or getting rattled, the better.
Again, this isn’t to say you should never rest, or that you’ll never have moments where the dog creeps back around the corner and stares at you with unblinking eyes. It’s to say that, with this focus on moving forward, you’ll feel more confident in handling it when it does.
Make a promise to yourself
You’re not unmotivated. You’re not lazy. You’re not bored. You are afraid. We are all afraid. And yet, we are still here. So every day, choose to be here, moving forward.
https://forge.medium.com/youre-not-lazy-bored-or-unmotivated-35891b1f3376
Kandinsky, Movement I, 1935 — I like the exhilarating energy *
WE HAVE TO DIE TO KNOW WE WERE HAPPY~ ARISTOTLE
The first, happy year with M, he said to me, “If I had to die right now, I wouldn't mind. I could just go anytime. “ I knew what he meant: life had finally granted him the fulfillment he wanted. He was so sated with happiness that he felt calm and accepting — and willing to let go of life with gratitude.
I knew, because even at a very unhappy time in my youth I experienced a similar serenity and a similar perception of being ready to die, even though I was only 28. Just before my most serious surgery, I realized (an unforgettable minute when it all flowed to me) that, for all the misery I’d also experienced, life had given me great gifts and blessings. I had known great love; I didn’t know motherhood, but I didn’t resent it because now I didn’t have to worry about leaving an orphan. I had had the best of literature, art, and music; I’d seen gorgeous scenery; my Polish summers were a paradise of nature, even the time I got chased by hissing geese that nipped my shins.
I felt reconciled to the possibility of dying, even though I hadn’t yet “done” anything to speak of. That was irrelevant somehow. I felt peaceful and accepting: life had been generous to me; I didn’t feel cheated.
Occasionally this theme appears in poetry: in Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” Sexton’s “Starry Night,” Hölderlin’s “To the Fates.” Hölderlin says he’ll enter the world of shadows content after he’s had his fill of singing: “Once I lived as the gods; more is not needed.” Keats and Sexton want to die sated with beauty: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”; “Oh starry, starry night! This is how I want to die.”
And there is Jack Gilbert’s wonderful title: “We Have Already Lived In the Real Paradise.” It’s all in the title; more is not needed.
It’s not dying we dread, but not having lived.
William:
Had that experience once on a snowy mountain top. "If I died right now it would be OK" I said to myself, I was so happy. The exhilarating trek up and a little wine helped.
Oriana:
Just the altitude would have done it. It's exhilarating — all because of less oxygen to the brain, so the capacity for anxiety is turned off. Fortunately "peak experiences" can happen at any altitude. The feeling of total peace and fulfillment is unforgettable — combined with this odd readiness to die because life has given you the best.
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MYELIN AND FORMING MEMORIES
In the Neuron study, first author Patrick Steadman and colleagues in the laboratory of Paul Frankland at the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto, tested the hypothesis that new myelin must form during learning. They did so by genetically altering mice so that a gene called myelin regulatory factor (MRF) is deleted when treated with the drug tamoxifen. The gene is essential for OPCs to mature into oligodendrocytes. Knocking out MRF increased the number of OPCs, whereas the number of newly formed oligodendrocytes diminished.
Now the researchers could test the hypothesis that formation of myelin is necessary for learning by training these mice while preventing them from forming new myelin. They could block myelin formation at any point during training or afterward simply by administering tamoxifen to the mice.
They then probed whether myelin is needed for learning by giving a well-established memory test called the Morris water maze, in which a mouse is placed in a large tub of water in which a hidden platform is submerged just below the surface. The mice quickly learned where that platform was, and they swam directly to it after several days of training. The experiments showed that the mice that were unable to form new myelin were able to learn where the platform was just as quickly as control mice, but when their recall was tested long after training ended, the ones that could not form new myelin did not remember the location as well and had to swim for a longer time to find the platform again. Examining the brain tissue with an electron microscope, the researchers found that more axons were myelinated in regions of the brains of normal mice known to be required for learning the Morris water maze. The researchers now had evidence that myelin is involved in making the long-term memories involved in learning. But they still needed to pin down myelin’s role in recall.
Different types of information must be brought together at the same time to recall, for example, where your home is located—or, for a mouse, the platform in the water maze. Recall requires the integration of memories of sights, sounds, smells, emotions related to your home, and sensations the memory of your home evokes. These diverse types of information are processed and stored in very different parts of the brain and connected by broad-ranging networks that must be activated together to interlace diverse aspects of these memories, ultimately resulting, at the subcellular level, in the strengthening of synapses. This network-centric view of neural functioning has been overlooked by memory researchers narrowly focused on synaptic transmission. But the question still remains of how the arrival time of neural impulses at each synaptic relay point in complex neural networks is established. The brain rhythms of sleep may provide a clue.
The researchers wondered if new myelin might be necessary after the training was over to convert a short-term memory that quickly fades away into a long-lasting memory, a process neuroscientists call memory consolidation. To test that idea, they trained the mice, as before, three times a day for six days and then administered tamoxifen after the training had ended to inhibit myelin formation. When tested 28 days later, the mice that could not form new myelin after the training session performed poorly in recalling where the hidden platform was. If they waited too long after training to inhibit the formation of new myelin—25 days in their tests—recall was not impaired, indicating that a window of time persists after training when new experiences become consolidated into memory. The results suggest that new myelin is part of the process of engraving lasting memories.
MAKING MEMORIES DURING SLEEP
A soldier riding in a jeep in Afghanistan will feel an intense sensation of danger from the risk of a roadside bomb, but will relax riding in a jeep through the streets of his hometown. The hippocampus is the brain’s “GPS” system that determines the location of the body in the environment, but higher-level cognitive functions processed in the prefrontal cortex are necessary to provide the context of whether a location is associated with a friend or a foe. When communication between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex becomes impaired after a traumatic experience, the body’s fear response can be activated inappropriately, causing a person with PTSD to suffer the same intense sense of danger while riding in a jeep at home. Because this type of memory requires long-distance communication between brain regions, it could provide insight into how myelin consolidates memory.
Scientists study this type of fearful learning by placing an experimental animal in a cage where a harmless but alarming electric shock is applied through the metal floor after a warning sound. The animal will freeze in fear later when the same alarm sound is presented in the same cage, even without the foot shock. However, the animal will not freeze in response to the same sound in a different environment, because it is not associated with the induced fear. The communication between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex provides the essential context that sparks the varying reactions. Research by György Buzsáki at New York University discovered that brief, high-frequency oscillations in the hippocampus—brain waves called sharp wave/ripple complexes—convey information by coupling in synchrony with cortical neurons firing rhythmically in what are called spindle oscillations. Promoting this rhythmic coupling can improve memory consolidation.
These unusual waves of rhythmic neural activity are especially active during non-REM (dreamless) sleep, and learning a new task increases this activity. It is believed that this transfer of information between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex during sleep links the memory of place with its context. In my own research, we have found that myelin is important for transmission of brain waves, raising the possibility that the need for new myelin in memory consolidation could promote this shuttling of information between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex by these unusual neural oscillations.
Myelin could play a key role in regulating the speed of transmission of brain waves. If waves of neural activity are not transmitted at the proper rate, destructive interference of one wave with another will disrupt the transmission of rhythmic information in the brain—just as musicians playing out of time will mangle a symphonic work.
Interestingly, changes in myelin have been found during sleep and sleep deprivation. Steadman and colleagues tested whether the formation of myelin during sleep may promote learning by increasing the coupling of brain wave activity by recording neural oscillations in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of mice. They found that when the formation of new myelin was impaired by deleting the MRF gene, the synchrony of brain wave coupling was indeed reduced and the animals performed poorly in invoking the memory of fear learned in the environment where they had been shocked.
Together these studies indicate that formation of new myelin is necessary for learning because it consolidates memories by facilitating the coordinated brain wave activity between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. New myelin also appears to be needed for other types of learning—in improving motor coordination, for example.
Minding the strengthening and weakening of synapses is critical for learning, but so is getting to the station on time to make the right connections, and that’s where nonneuronal cells making myelin to speed transmission through neural networks assist in forming new memories.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deeper-insights-emerge-into-how-memories-form/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
ending on beauty:
Be like the fox.
Make more tracks than necessary — some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
~ Wendell Berry
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