Georgia O’Keeffe: Blue and green music, 1921
*
THE LANDSCAPE INSIDE ME
IS NOT THE LANDSCAPE AROUND ME
and a ditch on each side,
Two white butterflies
flit over the tall nettles.
stands a wooden cross.
tap lightly on the weathered wood,
as if knocking, asking
to be let in
into the Everlasting.
Now I speed on wide freeways,
sky-level interchanges.
Tell me, am I still
on the road to Damascus.
~ Oriana
*
Mary:
Your poem is lovely, and reminds me of the kind of thing I miss most about religion...the small graces, the beauty, not only of the churches and music and rituals, but the simple things, like your roadside cross, like our May altars and May processions. I always felt Mary someone I could pray to when I still prayed, a woman. A mother. Someone who suffered terrible loss. The most beautiful part of the faith.
*
SCOTT AND ZELDA: ELEANOR LANAHAN ON HER GRANDPARENTS' LOVE LETTERS
~ The fairy tale began when Scott and Zelda met in 1918, at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama. Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald was among the many soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Sheridan, awaiting orders to fight overseas. Zelda, gifted with beauty, grace, high spirits, and expert skills of flirtation, was one of the most popular belles in the region.
Her earliest letters to Scott are distinctly girlish. She sounds awash, agoggle in love. Young women of the South, barely free of their Victorian chaperones, still cultivated an utter femininity, a “pink helplessness,” as Zelda calls it. She also refers merrily to her desire for merged identities, for Scott to define her existence. In taking a man’s name, a woman assumed his whole identity, including his career and his social standing—an abject dependency that today would make both sexes wary. Zelda’s declarations of loneliness, of her “nothingness without him” might be alarming to the modern reader, but they are reflections of the time. The Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was not even ratified until August 1920.
In Montgomery the ratio of soldiers to young women was tipped heavily in favor of the women, and competition was fierce among suitors. Scott’s insecurity about losing the woman who had captured his heart is reflected in her mail. Because his side of the correspondence is underrepresented, I’m taking the liberty of including the poem that opens The Great Gatsby, one that few people know he wrote, because he attributed it to a fictitious poet, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers:
To win her hand, Scott certainly wore the gold hat and bounced.
The Fitzgeralds arrived in New York for the kickoff of the Roaring Twenties. In the boom years, it seemed, the entire city was having one big party. The ticker tape had barely settled along the Fifth Avenue parade route from welcoming the troops home from World War I when Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, astonished his publishers and sold out of its entire first printing. A week after publication, on April 3, 1920, he and Zelda were married.
23-year-old Scott, an overnight celebrity, told the press that his greatest ambitions were to write the best novel that ever was and to stay in love with his wife forever. With instinctive media savvy, the newlyweds set about giving America a fresh image of itself as youthful, fun-loving, free-spending, hardworking, and innovative. And they weren’t too sophisticated to plunge in the Plaza fountain or to spin to their hearts’ content in the hotel doors. Scott described the excitement of those early days in the East: “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” And he recalled (an important and too often overlooked ingredient to this fairy tale) “writing all night and all night again.”
My mother [Scott’s and Zelda’s daughter, Scottie] was born on October 26, 1921, and was immediately assigned to the care of a nanny. “Children shouldn’t be a bother,” Zelda explained. On the subject of the domestic arts, when Harper & Brothers asked Zelda to contribute to Favorite Recipes of Famous Women, she wrote:
See if there is any bacon, and if there is ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy.
*
Scott’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was published a few months after my mother’s birth. The Fitzgeralds were still enraptured. Scott inscribed his first edition to Zelda:
Scott
St. Paul, Minn.
Feb 6th 1922
A lock of Zelda’s hair, bound with a blue ribbon, was pressed inside the cover, where it remains to this day. During the early years of their marriage, Zelda seemed content to toss her talents aside and become a reckless and decorative wife, although a jovial strain of competition ran through a review she wrote of The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune:
~ To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Fortysecond Street, and also if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and also if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years.
. . .
It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home. ~
Scott’s use of Zelda’s letters is sometimes cited as evidence of his gross misappropriation of Zelda’s talent. At the time, however, it was generally considered a husband’s job to be a provider, and a wife’s job to tend to amenities. Maybe Zelda wanted to give herself a bit of credit for authorship, but at this point there was no serious rivalry between them. A reporter interviewed Zelda a year and a half after the review appeared. For fun, Scott posed several of the questions:
“What do you want your daughter to do, Mrs. Fitzgerald, when she grows up?” Scott Fitzgerald inquired in his best reportorial manner, “not that you’ll try to make her, of course, but—”
“Not great and serious and melancholy and inhospitable, but rich and happy and artistic. I don’t mean that money means happiness, necessarily. But having things, just things, objects makes a woman happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes. They are great comforts to the feminine soul.”
Later, in France, where my grandparents were immersed in an entirely artistic crowd, Zelda’s ambitions sparked. For three agonizing years, she threw all of her creative energy into ballet. That a married woman would try to establish her own artistic identity was unusual, and the strain of such physical discipline, begun at the late age of 27, is thought to have contributed to Zelda’s exhausted mental state.
*
When she suffered her first breakdown, ten years after the wedding, in 1930, the fairy tale ended. Her first letters from the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland, and Scott’s first letters from Paris, are bitter, blameful reinterpretations of their whole relationship. Very little was understood about the nature of Zelda’s suffering. Treatment for schizophrenia, identified as an illness only 19 years earlier, was in its infancy. No helpful drugs existed, only grim and largely ineffective therapies.
By this time, my grandfather’s alcoholism was also full-blown. It’s no secret that F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most famous alcoholics who ever lived. But he was a “high-functioning” alcoholic, which made it even more difficult for him to acknowledge or treat his problem. In 1931, little insight had been gained about the negative effects of alcohol. Alcoholism was not regarded as a disease so much as a shameful weakness of character. The AA program, as millions now know it, wasn’t founded until 1935, and it did not become widespread until several years after Scott’s death.
Although no one knew the cause or cure for either of their maladies, there was much reproach. Mrs. Sayre blamed Scott for drinking too much and for not providing stability for her daughter. Scott blamed Zelda’s mother for spoiling her. He also blamed Zelda for being too preoccupied with ballet, while she blamed him for his drunken carousing. Their confusion is poignant, especially when Zelda begged forgiveness for whatever mysterious part of it was her own fault.
The myth persists that Scott drove Zelda crazy. My mother, who was eight years old when Zelda was first hospitalized, and who visited her mother in various clinics over the next 17 years, wrote to a biographer: “I think I think (short of documentary evidence to the contrary) that if people are not crazy, they get themselves out of crazy situations, so I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father’s drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking. I simply don’t know the answer, and of course, that is the conundrum that keeps the legend going. . . .”
In 1932, Zelda, yearning to earn her own way in the world, wrote a novel, Save Me the Waltz. Before showing it to Scott, she rushed it to his agent. Scott was understandably irate. It had taken her only a few months of furious activity to write the book. He had been working on Tender Is the Night for several years, had torn up draft after draft, and had read her various passages from it. Clearly, Zelda anticipated that Scott would not want her to use exactly the same material that he was using in Tender Is the Night—the years they had spent in France and her own mental breakdown.
Her project inspired their most fierce territorial struggle. At issue was their individual right to use their shared autobiographical material. Scott was also furious that Zelda had named a character Amory Blaine, after the protagonist in This Side of Paradise. He was certain, as the bill-payer of the family, that her wholesale borrowing would lead to ridicule from his readers and financial ruin. In the end, Zelda removed the parts of her manuscript that overlapped (or, to Scott’s mind, were directly imitative of) Tender Is the Night.
One admirable thing about my grandparents was their ability to forgive infinitely. In the end, Scott helped Zelda with revisions of her novel. He also arranged publication of various articles she wrote and helped produce her play, Scandalabra, written when she was an outpatient in Baltimore. When Zelda began painting seriously, he arranged an exhibition of her work at a New York gallery.
I don’t purport to understand my grandparents better than they did themselves. Nor do I believe in latter-day diagnoses, based only on letters and art. Nonetheless, I’ve been exposed to many amateur diagnoses of my grandmother: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or simple depression. A therapist at a panel I recently attended took the microphone and proceeded to give definitive diagnostic code numbers for my grandparents’ disorders, apparently comfortable diagnosing both of them on the basis of letters and biographies. Perfect strangers have volunteered with straight faces that Zelda had all the talent and Scott simply stole her ideas—an injustice that, of course, drove her crazy!
Zelda had many periods of lucidity and she was never declared legally insane. Her illness had many phases. When she was well, she wrote lyrical, haunting, loving, and nostalgic prose. When she was ill, she sent terribly convoluted warnings to friends about the Second Coming. The strain on Scott was enormous. He tried to be both father and mother to his daughter, to provide the best possible treatment for his wife, and to keep the family financially afloat. But, as he admitted publicly in The Crack-Up, he now faced his own emotional bankruptcy. The wellspring of his story ideas had dried up. Until he was hired as a scriptwriter by MGM, he faced despair.
A trait of Scott’s, made crystal-clear in these letters, was his tendency to overmanage, and, occasionally, to be downright domineering. My mother felt he would have made a fine headmaster of a school. The summer before she entered Vassar College, he warned her:
~ You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. . . .
To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been). In your career as a “wild society girl,” vintage of 1925, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it—it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are “going somewhere,” your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I would prefer. ~
Scott wrote weekly to my mother [Scottie] at college. Rather than send her $50 allowance once a month, he insisted on sending her a check for $13.85 every week, probably as a vehicle for his missives. He told her which courses to take, what extracurricular activities were worthwhile, whom to date, her duties toward Zelda, what to read, and how to wear her hair. He critiqued her behavior, her academic performance, and her choice of roommates. Clearly, he loved Scottie very much and his self-confessed desire to preach now had an outlet.
From California, Scott also wrote to Zelda, loyally, warmly, and sometimes perfunctorily. During the last three years of his life, while working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and, later, on his fifth novel, he began an affair with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Sheilah gave a healthy structure and domesticity to Scott’s last years, but he never completely relinquished his love for Zelda. “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known,” Scott wrote to her after their last trip together in 1939, “but even that is an understatement.”
I believe, as did my mother, that Scott and Zelda stayed in love until the day they died. Perhaps it became an impossible and impractical love—part nostalgia and part hope. Perhaps it was a longing for a reunion of all the best qualities in each other that they had once celebrated, and the happy times they had shared, but it was a bond that united them forever. ~
*
*
HOW LANGUAGE SHAPES OUR EMOTIONS
~ When Bara parents on Madagascar tell their children to show tahotsy, or label their children’s behavior as tahotsy, they introduce their children to the cultural goal of obedience in the hierarchy. When an Ifaluk mother calls on her young son to show fago, she introduces him to the emotion that is marked by taking care of another person; she implies that throwing a piece of coral rubble at your two- year- old cousin is incompatible with fago.
Similarly, when American or German parents label their own or their children’s behavior as angry, they introduce their children to concepts of blame, personal accountability, fairness, and also to the goal of defending your autonomous rights. Once their children show some maturity, Japanese parents teach them omoiyari (roughly, empathy): episodes of omoiyari will be highlighted, or carved out, in everyday life.
A child’s learning of an emotion word is not so much starting to recognize their own deep mental states, to which a caregiver does not have access after all, as it is to connect a cultural concept— tahotsy, angry— to an unfolding episode. Parents constantly provide their children with emotion concepts to disambiguate what is going on. Especially towards the second year, when children start using emotion concepts themselves, parents use emotion words very often. In one study, urban Japanese mothers used an emotion word between once and twice per minute during interactions with their two- year- old sons. The more emotion words caregivers use, the more emotion words their children learn.
Parents point out when the child is angry, warn them when they are angry or are about to get angry, or describe a protagonist in the book as looking angry. Imagine an emotion concept such as anger as a container of particular types of emotional episodes. Once this container is in place, your parents and others point out different instances of anger. Eventually, you may understand instances of anger all by yourself. All these particular instances will then be stored as part of the container of episodes that “anger” is.
With every new experience— every episode of “anger” that you encounter— the particular emotion concept of anger gets an update. In the end, anger will be filled with experiences you sample during your life. This means that the anger category, even within a culture or within an individual, is not homogenous. It does not refer to a single state. Rather, it consists of many different episodes: “angry” when your mom challenged you in a rough-and-tumble fight, and you lost against her; “angry” when your friend took your toy and you pushed him to get it back; “angry” as your mom was scolding you for treating her with disrespect. “Angry” becomes the container of the many episodes that, in your culture, count as anger.
Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, in describing exactly this process of concept learning, points out that emotion concepts make connections between different emotional episodes that, on the surface, have little to do with each other. Minangkabau parents using the word malu (roughly translated as “shame”) draw the connections between “being- shy- as- a- stranger- approaches-you,” “feeling- bad- about- not- obeying- your-mom,” and “being- publicly- mocked- for- improper- behavior,” even though these episodes may feel different, look different, and have different antecedents, and behaviors attached to them. By categorizing them as malu, the child learns to connect a large range of situations that urge different behavior.
Similarly, American parents teach their children that “happy- about- getting- praise- for- turning- the- book- right- side-up,” “happy- about- winning- a- game,” “proud- about- being- a- good- student” all belong to the same category of “pride” (colloquially referred to as “feeling good about yourself”), even though these instances of “pride” arise in different situations, call for different action, and probably “feel” different to some extent. By teaching our child emotion concepts, parents attach culturally shared meanings and goals to these episodes. By naming an episode malu, parents imply that deference is called for; by suggesting that the child should “feel good about themselves,” they indicate that individual pleasure and being in control are of utmost importance. By learning what “emotion” they have, children become aligned with their parents’ (and their cultures’) meanings and goals.
But that is not all: as a member of your culture, you get a jump start. Early in life, when you start learning the emotion words in your language, these words are containers partly stocked. It is not that every child, with the help of their parents, needs to start all over again assembling instances of “anger” or malu. Emotion words come with the emotional episodes from your culture’s collective memory as well as collective insights about these emotions. You learn them by talking to others, by hearing the collective wisdom about these emotions, and by observing how they are used in public life. It is this collective knowledge that scaffolds your own experiences.
*
The emotion concepts of your language structure your experience. They are the tools that your parents use to help you make sense of ongoing events, including your own responses. They also prompt appropriate behavior. What if the emotion concepts vary across languages? And to what extent do we know this to be the case?
The first thing to know is that not all languages have a word for “emotion” itself. The category, as we think we know it, is historically new, and geographically unique. This is a problem, because it makes it harder to even know what concepts to compare across cultures. In some languages emotions are grouped with other sensations such as fatigue or pain, in others they are grouped with behaviors.
The Turkish respondents in my word-listing study were an example of the latter, listing as emotions such behaviors as crying, laughing, helping, and yelling. The Himba in Maria Gendron’s research are another example of a community where behaviors are included in the category of emotions; they saw the communality of emotional faces in terms of behaviors (not mental states): “all laughing.” In deciding which emotions are different across cultures, it is important to realize that there is no universally shared way of drawing the boundaries around the domain of emotions. This makes the comparison across cultures all the more complicated.
Even without considering the difficulty of deciding what exactly counts as an emotion concept, it is clear from the outset that not all English words will have translations in other languages. Emotion vocabularies in some languages— such as Chewong in Malaysia— count as few as seven emotion words, and other languages count in the thousands, with English containing more than two thousand emotion words. There is no question, therefore, that languages organize the domain very differently, and make both different kinds as well as different numbers of distinctions.
Can we find good translations for the most important categories of emotion? Many languages fail to make the distinctions that seem obvious in English, such as those between anger, sadness, love, and shame. Some of the most central emotion concepts (as we distinguish them in English) share a word in other languages: for example, native speakers of Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda, use the same word, okusunguwala, for “anger” and “sadness.” Native Luganda interpreters had a hard time making the distinction between anger and sadness in English.
Similar blends of anger and sadness are found in other languages. Turkish- minority respondents in my research in the Netherlands used kızmak to describe an anger that was permeated with sadness, and that typically occurred in intimate relationships in which high expectations had been disappointed. Kızmak does not come with aggression, but rather with ignoring or avoiding the other person.
In Indonesia, the Nias do not clearly distinguish between anger and envy. The expression afökho dödö (literally, “pain- hearted”), a focal emotion word among the Nias, refers to a range of emotions, including offended, spite, resentment, envy, malice, and ill will. It also refers both to “acts of spite and the sentiment.” Another blurred distinction is the one between sadness, love, and empathy. The central Ifaluk emotion fago is translated as “love,” yet shares features with sadness and compassion. The word for “love” in Samoan, alofa, also means sympathy, pity, and liking.
My Turkish respondents used üzüntü not only for their own ill fate but also for the ill fate of close others. By doing so, elements of empathy were mixed in with sadness. Thus üzüntü prompted reaching out and being kind to others, in addition to crying, the inability to do anything, and wanting to be helped. My informants told me it is a celebrated emotion in Turkey, and this makes sense from the point of view of the social nature of the emotion.
Many languages lump shame and embarrassment together. The Japanese word haji refers to both shame or embarrassment, and does not clearly distinguish between the two. The Bedouins mentioned earlier use hasham to describe an even larger range of feelings: shame, embarrassment, shyness, and modesty or respectability. Among the Ilongot in the Philippines, betang similarly refers to shame, timidity, embarrassment, awe, obedience, shame, and respect.
Not all languages have words for emotion concepts which, in English, are considered important. A recent article in Science surveyed emotion lexicons in almost 2,500 languages grouped into six large language families. The researchers, psychologists Kristen Lindquist, Joshua Jackson, and their colleagues, focused on twenty- four English concepts— among them “anger,” “love,” “happy,” “proud,” and “grief.” Cross- cultural similarity in emotion concepts would have minimally required that all languages (100 percent) had words that corresponded in a one-to-one fashion with the various emotion concepts that are so clearly distinguished in English. The only term that came close to 100 percent was good (feeling good): almost all languages had a distinct word for it. ~
https://lithub.com/what-science-can-tell-us-about-how-we-express-ourselves/?fbclid=IwAR2xV-bTP_ntug2z_BOJlZCP7nR353b2YNiyQhdE06VCC84LzzuPx8V2glk
Oriana:
In Polish the most common word for "angry" also means bad, evil, wicked. Context indicates which meaning is meant. Still, something of a condemnation seeps through -- being angry is not a good thing.
WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE IMPOSSIBLY TALENTED
~ If it weren’t for an actress and a pianist, GPS and WiFi might not exist.
In the late 1930s and early 40s, Hedy Lamarr was already the toast of Hollywood, famed for her portrayals of femme fatales. Few of her contemporaries knew that her other great passion was inventing. (She had previously designed more streamlined aeroplanes for a lover, the aviation tycoon Howard Hughes.)
Lamarr met a kindred spirit in George Antheil, however – an avant-garde pianist, composer and novelist who also had an interest in engineering. And when the pair realized that enemy forces were jamming the Allied radio signals, they set about looking for a solution. The result was a method of signal transmission called ‘frequency-hopping spread spectrum’ (patented under Lamarr’s married name, Markey) that is still used in much of today’s wireless technology.
It may seem a surprising origin for ground-breaking technology, but the story of Lamarr and Antheil fits perfectly with a growing understanding of the polymathic mind.
Besides helping to outline the specific traits that allow some people to juggle different fields of expertise so successfully, new research shows that there are many benefits of pursuing multiple interests, including increased life satisfaction, work productivity and creativity.
Most of us may never reach the kind of success of people like Lamarr or Antheil, of course – but the research suggests we could all gain from spending a bit more time outside our chosen specialism.
Even the definition of “polymath” is the subject of debate. The term has its roots in Ancient Greek and was first used in the early 17th Century to mean a person with “many learnings”, but there is no easy way to decide how advanced those learnings must be and in how many disciplines. Most researchers argue that to be a true polymath you need some kind of formal acclaim in at least two apparently unrelated domains.
One of the most detailed examinations of the subject comes from Waqas Ahmed in his book The Polymath, published earlier this year.
The inspiration was partly personal: Ahmed has spanned multiple fields in his career to date. With an undergraduate degree in economics and post-graduate degrees in international relations and neuroscience, Ahmed has worked as a diplomatic journalist and personal trainer (which he learnt through the British Armed Forces). Today, he is pursuing his love of visual art as the artistic director of one of the world’s largest private art collections, while also working as a professional artist himself.
Despite these achievements, Ahmed does not identify as a polymath. “It is too esteemed an accolade for me to refer to myself as one,” he says. When examining the lives of historical polymaths, he only considered those who had made significant contributions to at least three fields, such as Leonardo da Vinci (the artist, inventor and anatomist), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the great writer who also studied botany, physics and mineralogy) and Florence Nightingale (who, besides founding modern nursing, was also an accomplished statistician and theologian).
From these biographies, and a review of the psychological literature, Ahmed was then able to identify the qualities that allow polymaths to achieve their greatness.
As you might expect, higher-than-average intelligence certainly helps. “To a large degree that facilitates or catalyzes learning,” says Ahmed. But open-mindedness and curiosity are also essential. “So you're interested in a phenomenon but you don't care where your investigation leads you,” Ahmed explains, even if that pushes you to delve into unfamiliar territory. The polymaths were also often self-reliant – happy to teach themselves – and individualist; they were driven by a great desire for personal fulfillment.
These qualities were also combined with a more holistic view of the world. “The polymath not only moves between different spheres or different fields and disciplines, but seeks fundamental connections between those fields, so as to give them a unique insight into each of them,” says Ahmed.
Like any personality traits, these qualities will all have a certain genetic basis, but they will also be shaped by our environment. Ahmed points out that many children are fascinated by many different areas – but our schools, universities and then employment tend to push us towards ever greater specialization. So many more people may have the capacity to be polymaths, if only they are encouraged in the right way.
That idea tallies with the work of Angela Cotellessa, whose PhD at George Washington University involved interviewing modern polymaths about their experiences. (Her criteria were slightly less stringent than Ahmed’s – the participants had to have had successful careers in at least two separate domains – one arts and one science – and self-identify as a polymath.)
Like Ahmed, she found that traits like curiosity were essential. But she found that they also needed high emotional resilience to pursue their interests in the face of external expectations. “Because we live in a society that tells us to specialize, and these are people who didn’t do that – they forged their own path.” Many people may lack the necessary self-possession to fight those norms.
THE POWER OF CROSS-POLINATION
There are, of course, some good reasons why we might be hesitant to pursue multiple interests. One is the fear that we might spread ourselves too thinly if we devote ourselves to more than one avocation. With a divided attention, we would fail to achieve success in any domain – the idea that the “Jack of all trades is the master of none”.
In reality, there is some evidence that developing diverse disciplines can fuel creativity and productivity. So while the pursuit of a second or third interest may seem like a distraction, it can actually boost your success in your primary field.
As David Epstein has also reported in his recent book Range, influential scientists are much more likely to have diverse interests outside their primary area of research than the average scientist, for instance. Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They are also 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be a musician.
Ahmed and others in the field argue that it works a bit like cross-pollination, with the ideas in one field serving to inspire innovations in the other.
It is telling, for instance, that Antheil had previously worked on scores involving synchronized self-playing pianolas, and together he and Lamarr drew on the mechanism of those instruments to come up with their anti-jamming device.
This is also something that Ahmed observed in the biographies of history’s greatest polymaths. “Polymathy is the optimal path to creativity because, by its very nature, it requires you to be diverse in your experience and your learning,” says Ahmed. He says this is evident in the talents of someone like Leonardo da Vinci – whose knowledge of anatomy, mathematics and geometry improved the precision of his paintings, and whose visual imagination fueled his creativity in mechanical engineering. “These things fed off one another.”
SWITCHING SUBJECTS
If you feel tempted to live a more polymathic life, Ahmed suggests that you can use your time more efficiently to make space for multiple interests.
There is now a growing recognition that, when concentrating on any complex endeavor, the brain often reaches a kind of saturation point, after which your attention may fade and any extra effort may fail to pay off. But if you turn to another, unrelated activity, you may find that you are better able to apply yourself. Shifting between different kinds of tasks can therefore boost your overall productivity.
Some evidence for this comes from research in education. Studies of students in many different disciplines – from academia to sport and music – have shown that, after a certain amount of practice or study, we stop learning so efficiently. We can therefore make better use of our time if we regularly switch between skills or subjects. The same goes for studies of problem solving – you will find more solutions to a task if you return to it after looking at something completely different, rather than simply spending ever more time on the same question.
Wannabe polymaths can use this to their advantage by alternating between their interests – ensuring that they are using their brains at maximum efficiency in each domain, while avoiding wasted effort after they have reached that cognitive saturation point.
“You can get into the zone and be very productive up until a certain point, then you need to change your activity in order to come back to it in an optimal state,” says Ahmed. “So I know, for example, that if I was exclusively an artist or a painter, then I wouldn't be as productive because I would experience diminishing returns – I'd require external stimuli in order to allow me to get over a block.”
Albert Einstein, who was an accomplished violinist and pianist as well as a physicist, apparently used this approach. According to his son and daughter, he would play music whenever he faced an intractable problem, and would often finish the performance by saying, “There now, I’ve got it”. It was a much better use of his time than continuing to fruitlessly agonize over the maths or physics.
NURTURE YOUR INNER POLYMATH
All of which suggests that polymathic abilities may be within the reach of more people than we had once assumed. And even if we don’t reach the heights of someone like Leonardo da Vinci, we will still find some benefits from widening our interests, rather than relentlessly pursuing a narrow specialism.
And we have many advantages compared to the polymaths of the past. The internet, after all, is now full of free online courses in many different disciplines, and it is easier than ever to hook up with an expert teacher through apps like Skype even if they are based hundreds of miles away. “We have a unique opportunity to produce polymaths – especially in places where polymathy would have never been possible,” says Michael Araki, who researches polymathy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
Ahmed agrees that it’s time for more of us to embrace those possibilities. He emphasizes that many of society’s most pressing challenges – such as climate change – require highly creative problem-solving that crosses multiple domains, and polymaths may be the best people to find those solutions.
Many people, he says, associate polymathy with the historical Renaissance men. “But it is more relevant today than it’s ever been.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191118-what-shapes-a-polymath---and-do-we-need-them-more-than-ever
*
ELVIS PRESLEY AND HIS CLOTHIER
~ Before Elvis Presley was "The King," he was a "dirt poor" usher at a movie theater in Tennessee with dreams of making it big.
The high school student, then 17, would often admire the window of a clothing store called "Lansky Bros." located in the heart of Memphis’ music district. The shop was a favorite among musicians; B.B. King was a known regular. During one summer in 1952, owner Bernard Lansky saw this "young, skinny kid" who easily stood out on the street.
Presley’s transformation from timid aspiring musician to rock ‘n’ roll icon with Lansky’s help is chronicled in Baz Lurhmann’s biopic titled "Elvis," in theaters now. Hal said he not only saw the film three times – with a fourth screening already planned – but actor Austin Butler, who starred as Presley, visited him while he prepared for the role that would skyrocket him to fame.
"It’s a fabulous movie – Baz and his team did an incredible job, and we were just so tickled to be included in the movie," said Hal. "We were part of Elvis’ life. It was a short one, but he encountered so many people during that brief time, and he never forgot them. I’m just thankful that the Lansky connection was a part of that story. And Austin did his homework. We shared some time with him and Baz. They visited the store in September 2019. Austin really grew up since then and my God, he did an amazing job. He’s got a great career in front of him.”
The patriarch passed away in 2012 at age 85 in Memphis. Today, Hal and his daughter, Julie Lansky, are determined to keep the family business – and musical legacy – alive. Lansky and his brother Guy first started their retail business in 1946 with the help of a $125 loan from their father. It began as an Army surplus and uniform store, but by the early ‘50s, Lansky focused on high-fashion men’s clothing. Lansky and Guy parted ways in the ‘80s, and the store moved from Beale Street to the Peabody Hotel a few blocks away.
Most recently, Hal and his daughter teamed up to write a children’s book titled "Come On In, Young Man!" in hopes of sharing their father’s story with a new generation of Presley fans.
"This is our 76th year in business," said Hal. "We’re having fun with what we’re doing. My dad always believed in people. He always said you meet the same people going up the ladder as you do going down the ladder. So treat everyone with respect.”
Presley never forgot the simple kind gesture Lansky gave him. For his high school prom, he splurged on black pants, a pink coat with a pink-and-black cummerbund.
"Every time Elvis got paid, he’d come in maybe once a week and buy a pair of pants or a jacket – something simple," said Hal. "But he just kept coming and coming. And then one day, he said, ‘Mr. Lansky, I’m gonna be on a national TV show.’ My dad said, ‘That’s great Elvis! What show is that gonna be?’ Elvis replied, ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ My dad just went ‘Whoa!’ Back then in the ‘50s and ‘60s, that was a huge deal. It was like the ‘American Idol’ of our time. My dad started showing him some clothes. But then Elvis looked at him and said, ‘Mr. Lansky, I got a problem. I don’t have any money.’ My dad told him, ‘Elvis, you do have a problem, but I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you some credit, but you better pay me back.’"
Presley agreed and thanked Lansky profusely. Hal said his father tuned in to watch Presley perform in his new flashy threads – and was stunned by what he witnessed.
"My dad had never seen or heard Elvis perform," Hal chuckled. "He knew Elvis was destined for stardom. And we like to take credit for the black and pink look he wore. Back then, young men did not wear pink. If they did, they were thought of as being too feminine. And of course, everybody wanted to beat Elvis up because he looked a little bit feminine for that time, and he was taking everyone’s girlfriends away! But Elvis was determined to stand out. He knew what he was doing. And he was confident in his appearance. That changed everything."
According to Hal, Presley remained a loyal customer even after achieving stardom. Lansky was not responsible for the sequined jumpsuits that Presley adopted during his Las Vegas years, but the demand was still there.
"Elvis became so famous that he couldn’t come to our store without getting mobbed," Hal recalled. "We had to open the store at night just so he could avoid the crowds and shop. But we also delivered him clothes to Graceland. I became known as the delivery boy to the King. I would bring all the clothes he ordered. And let me tell you, Elvis loved to shop, so I was making deliveries quite a bit. I remember I had a station wagon just full of clothes. I would ring his doorbell, and it was just magical. I saw Elvis at the top of the stairs, and he came down each step just so regal. He would have his hand in his pocket where he carried a little white revolver – Elvis loved guns. It freaked me out a bit, but Elvis was just so happy. I don’t think he was necessarily happy to see me, but he was happy to see his clothes.”
"I remembered he ordered all of these long leather coats with fur to match the hat and collars," Hal continued. "He walked into the dining room, swung open the doors and just showed off his clothes. He was so proud of his new outfits. That was quite exciting for me to see. I don’t know how long I was there, but it seemed like an eternity. It was all in slow motion. But I remembered Elvis was so cool. He looked good in anything. And I think he knew it."
Hal said that his favorite story his father loved telling was the time when Presley first sold a million records.
"They gave Elvis a Messerschmitt, this three-wheeled German car," said Hal. "Elvis brought over the car to the shop to show my dad. He said ‘Mr. Lansky, look at this car!’ Elvis was just so proud of himself that he finally made it. Well, my dad said, ‘Elvis, when you’re finished with that car, I want it.’ A couple of months later, Elvis traded in that car for a two-and-a-half-hour shopping spree in our store. He remained loyal to the end."
It was 1977 when Hal said he and his father were at a coffee shop in Dallas, Texas. Someone rushed in exclaiming, "Guess what? Elvis died!"
Presley was found unconscious in his Graceland mansion. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead at age 42.
We were just devastated," Hal admitted. "We took the next plane out to Memphis. You always remember where you were when you heard Elvis died… And when we saw the body in the casket, we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”
It was Lansky who chose the white suit and blue tie Presley wore to his grave. The patriarch later said, "I put him in his first suit, and I put him in his last suit."
Hal said that over the years, his father loved sharing his memories of Presley with whoever would stop by his store. Today, they still receive plenty of letters and visitors from around the world. He also noted that his family has remained in touch with Presley’s.
"Elvis was a decent man," said Hal. "He didn’t have a bad bone in his body. He was a practical joker, a Southern gentleman. And he was so generous. He used to write checks anonymously to charities because he genuinely cared, not because he needed the publicity. His story was a remarkable one – a sad one – but there are so many parts to it.”
For Hal, Presley never really left the building.
"I’m glad this movie is out to show the younger generation the impact Elvis had not only on Memphis or even music but on the world," he said. "It’s amazing how much power Elvis still has today.” ~
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/elvis-presley-bernard-lansky-austin-butler
Elvis Presley and Bernard Lansky; note the reflection in the multiple mirrors
Oriana:
This is a heart-warming story. A little kindness and respect shown to a poor young boy leads to a lifelong friendship. Bernard Lansky was a beautiful person.
Elvis realized that his appearance was an important part of his persona. And who doesn't feel more self-confident when they know they are well-dressed?
*
DOES THE EASTERN PART OF GERMANY STILL FEEL LIKE A DIFFERENT COUNTRY?
~ I drove through both parts of Germany again this year. There is a noticeable difference in atmosphere.
East Germany has smooth, great roads, and looks far more scenic, because all the old buildings and tree lined country roads were preserved and not torn down during the concrete-happy 1960s. So, it looks very neat and pretty now. But there is no life there. No young people, no vibrant and crazy shops, no buzz. And when you talk to the people, you somehow reach for your asthma spray instinctively. The place feels constrained, closed minded.
West Germany is its usual self, full of life and hubbub and graffiti and hoons and punks and eccentric shamanic types talking to their spirit animals while doing yoga in a park. All that against a backdrop of not always amazing looking architecture and a decaying infrastructure. It’s quite alive and wild in an intellectually anarchic kind of way, with plenty of garish commerce mixed in. Totally international, too. You can get by speaking English in Bavarian hicktowns these days.
So, yes. Two different countries. ~ Chris Ebbert, Quora
Christopher Westburry:
Berlin too is still somewhat divided, though. You can even see differences in the voting behavior between east and west Berlin. The East has been known for going for either left-wing or far-right parties while the West is rather going for center-right to center-left parties. And even the streetlights in Westberlin are brighter and more modern than the yellowish ones in Eastern Berlin.
Rick Blumenberg:
If you moved from Hamburg to Munich you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in a different country. Same could be said of Cornwall & Scotland or Texas & Maine. Coming back to Germany: yes the East is different from the old West and it will take at least another generation to even out those differences. Having lived in both parts I’d say that it is one country with very different people, ideas, attitudes & priorities — but still one country.
Colin:
Dresden is a vibrant thriving city of culture where the infrastructure is being systematically modernized, beautiful buildings mostly from The Belle Epoque and some from Der Jugendstil are being restored and new construction is taking place all over the city.
The city is full of young people, an entire generation born in the Bundesrepublik with the mindset of the modern Dresdener, cheerful polite and full of optimism.
I come from Süddeutschland and the only differences I see are, apart from accents, structural. Considering that the former GDR has 45 years of development to catch up on with the West, they are doing a remarkable job.
Romy Möller:
I grew up in East Germany and live now in West Germany. There are two main differences.
1) Young people from the eastern part had difficulties getting a job and relocated to those parts where job are available such as Berlin or West Germany (18 if my classmates left my school town, 15 of them either to West-Berlin or to West Germany or also to Austria and Switzerland. So young people went away, old people stayed. That way no vibrant life can be felt in East Germany. Also there is a higher level of unemployment there. Money for a good life is not there.
2) People who stayed there felt not as part of West German culture. They kept the East German culture instead. Sometimes they even felt lost in the new system. Old people adapt to changes less than young people. So the differences of both cultures are alive and strongly perceivable.
Hans Petersen:
The nice roads are only the main ones, though. Drive a little in the country and you get a different picture. Not only bad roads, but bad houses. Some people are still living in the hastily put together shacks built to accommodate the East Prussian refugees. In the winter, there is still that characteristic brown coal smell in the air from coal ovens, including the dirty and from the sour rain half eaten away masonry. Can be a truly depressing place, especially in the rural towns with little tourism or industry.
*
COULD THE WAR IN UKRAINE TURN INTO WWIII?
~ Let’s start with the simplest and starkest difference of all.
Unrestrained great power military conflict is almost 100% guaranteed to eventually include the use of WMD. Everyone knows this. There can be no winners.
In 1914 each side was secretly sure that it could WIN. Actually most of them had pretty rational reasons to think that was the case, ironically Russia being the most major exception… I mean, Germany WOULD have been victorious if they had followed Schlieffen’s plan to the letter, and almost defeated France even though they didn’t. Obviously France, Britain, and Italy actually DID win.
The point being, the outright military struggle in this case will remain contained within Ukraine. NATO seems fairly rational and while it has good reasons for its actions, they COULD actually tolerate a sub-optimal outcome within certain parameters (IE western Ukraine remains independent). Russia is STRONGLY disincentivized from widening the war (you think they have logistical problems NOW).
They also realize point one above, and the whole thing is now simply a game of ‘chicken’ in which Putin is dared to push ever closer to the point where his own power structure, or public, boots him from power, hoping that Zelenskyy’s ability to martial the Ukrainians into fighting eventually falters (or he dies, or NATO gets bored, etc.).
This war won’t expand, not by the route of conscious deliberate action by either side. What WOULD expand it would be some sort of crazy incident, like some mishap in the far east which destabilized things with the Japanese, something like that. ~ Todd Harter, Quora
Charles:
If Putin, unable to win by conventional means, drops a nuclear bomb on Ukraine, would the West really retaliate, also using nuclear weapons?
Oriana:
That’s the biggest unknown, isn’t it?
One thing we do know is that Putin is not suicidal. He clearly wants to live. Also, it takes more than one person to press that fabled "red button." That is really the main security we have. One person may indeed have a death wish and the desire to take the whole world with him; but the others whose participation is required are not likely to be in the same mood.
I felt somewhat reassured by the last paragraph of this article: “This war won’t expand, not by the route of conscious deliberate action by either side. What WOULD expand it would be some sort of crazy incident.”
Crazy incidents do happen: history is full of them. We can only hope and pray to be spared this time. Speaking of history, many experts invoke the example of how Hitler wasn’t stopped when there was still time — but now we can recognize that pattern of escalating land grabs, and behave differently. True, there should have been a much stronger response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but now Putin’s insane imperial ambition is on full display.
Putin’s army is not in any way comparable with Nazi Germany’s superb army, which at the beginning also had more advanced weapons than any other country’s military. This time the West is ahead and should win — barring a “crazy incident” that would trigger nuclear warfare.
*
NEW from Senior U.S. Defense Official on the war in #Ukraine:
~ Russia has committed nearly 85% of its military to the war in Ukraine… It has removed military coverage from other areas on their border and around the world.
Russia is presently launching tens of thousands artillery rounds per day. “They can’t keep it up forever,” the official said. “They have expended a lot of their smarter munitions... Their capabilities are getting dumber.”
Official adds fight for Donetsk will “likely last through the summer,” with Russia achieving slow gains at high cost.
Official says Russia is “using rolling barrages,” but Russia still has not figured out how to use combined arms effectively.
Official says with the help of HIMARS, Ukraine has taken out more than a hundred “high-value” targets, attacking Russian command posts, ammunition depots, air-defense sites, radar and communications nodes, and long-range artillery positions.
Russia is taking hundreds of casualties a day. Among Russia’s military fatalities have been “thousands” of lieutenants and captains, “hundreds” of colonels, and “many” generals. “The chain of command is still struggling," the official said. ~ Nicholas Schifrin
*
DO RUSSIAN CITIZENS KNOW WHAT PUTIN IS DOING?
~ TV is like Russian people’s portal into a parallel reality of Truth, Wisdom and Justice with a God reincarnate at the helm. TV possesses a truly religious sentiment to Russians that medieval Orthodox Church with their dark temple interiors and incense burning can only aspire to.
The greatest illusion tens of millions of Russians fell for is the unholy mumblings of a pathological liar and richest man in the world and his crooked friends actually give a hoot about their well-being, or the country they have sucked dry.
War in Ukraine has been shown on TV as a non-stop military parade, in which courageous, well-organized Russian Army is marching from victory to victory, tanks rolling, fighter jets flying, defeating Nazi enemies, wiping out their aviation, artillery, and tens of thousands of infantry men.
Daily shelling of apartment blocks in Kharkiv and Nikolaev target “command centers” and “centers of decision-making” that kills “three hundred Nazis” here and I just read the news that a Kalibre strike in Odessa Oblast “liquidated 200 Ukrainian marines.”
Numbers are always round — 100, 200, 300. Or, “more than 100”, “more than 200”, “more than 300.” No collateral damage is ever incurred, that’s because Motherland’s missiles are so good.
Blown up shopping malls are always somehow empty, or closed. Photos of razed apartment blocks, well, that’s Ukrainian soldiers using civilians as “living shields,” or “Ukrainian army bombing themselves” and other targets are weapons caches or premises with “hundreds of Nazis hiding, all of them dead.”
The list of captured towns is always at least ten items long. Same settlements get captured three or four times.
Russian Army also regularly destroys HIMARS. Before they showed up in Southern and Eastern fronts, my friend Nikolai messaged me to repeat what he saw on TV about Americans having not a single weapon more powerful that what Russian Army got.
After weapons cache were taken out, one after another, Russian Ministry of Defense began to “destroy” them as well as warehouses that contain ammo.
Liberal pundits are waiting with bated breath when the official number of HIMARS eliminations exceeds the number of units that are currently in Ukraine.
This has already happened with Bayraktars and military planes. Russian Army have destroyed more of them than the Ukrainian Army has ever had in 30 years.
This is a rendering of HIMARS from above. Just another lie in the endless series of bullshit from Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Propaganda. ~ Misha Firer
News Update from TASS: “Ukrainian HIMARS so primitive they shoot logs from sawmill instead of missiles”
Markus Brinkmanis:
I think that the Russians know very well what Putin is doing. All this propaganda just gives them an excuse to pretend that they know nothing.
George Flammer:
“None so blind as those who will not see.”
Nic Albani:
Russian soldiers should be made aware that they will NOT be heroes in an unjust war in this life or the afterlife. The heroes are those who protect people, protect their homes and livelihoods from invaders.
Max Ruedy:
Television is now the opiate of the masses
Pavel Aseyev:
Many younger people don’t watch TV. It’s pretty much useless.
Older generation, on contrary is addicted to TV. In home of my parents TV is switched on 20 hours per day, 7 days a week, and when I came there for vacation I always felt uncomfortable because of infinite stream of aggression, idiotism and conspiracy theories (they watched mostly news, political talk shows, and channels on supernatural, psychics and similar BS). After a week of staying at them I usually started feeling unexplained fear of vampires and desire to hate all people, especially those from western countries.
Jeff George:
Margot Gulliford:
Russians didn’t want a war, Putin did. If they supported the war Putin wouldn’t have had to make it a crime to call it a war or to protest. They would have free access to world news and not state controlled propaganda. Some of the soldiers claim they were told this was a military exercise” not that they were going to war. But like in another country we know, there are those that blindly believe and repeat everything they are fed.
*
DOES PUTIN WANT TO RESTORE THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE?
~ European leaders are still treating Putin’s madness as a sunk cost of doing business with Russia. “Our partner is clinically insane, but we have to save his face, because we love his gases.”
Yes. Few were taking this seriously, until it was too late, and he began to blast towns and cities in Europe into rubble.
Right from the start, the main focus of Putin’s criticism has been kleptocracy. He kept consolidating more power in his hands to steal more.
Alexei Navalny was at the forefront of this one-dimensional appraisal of Putin: he is amassing a huge fortune, which he shares with his friends and family, sucking Russia dry.
This has been the main narrative in the Western media that alleged that Putin is a kleptocratic dictator of a gas station with nukes.
The narrative was pushed onto Russians through liberal media unaware that their heads were filled with bitterness and “hurt” over glories of the lost empire.
Low income and the lack of indoor plumbing were secondary to people who have never properly learned to value material pleasures like Westerners.
It turned out that in his heart, Putin was first and foremost a megalomaniac communist, just as millions of his supporters.
Policy makers in the US stuck with simplistic thought construct of kleptocracy and were constantly misunderstanding Putin.
However, from Second Chechnya War to Georgia War, to his Munich Speech, and on to annexation of Crimea, Donbas, Syria, Wagner Group messing in Africa, another pattern has emerged: after Putin restored Russian economy he began to project Russian power outward culminating in a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s loyalties and faith are still with the empire, now defunct, which, in his mind, he was given a chance to resurrect by taking away freedoms from his people and waging bloody wars of conquest of the neighbor countries.
And so to him too, money has become secondary in his single-minded pursuit of imperialism and ending American hegemony for once and for all.
His shamans, for a twenty million dollar fee, confirmed that indeed such is his destiny.
Ukraine was the most important republic in the Soviet Union.
A third of industries of RSFSR were located there, and it had the largest economy of the republics, and had the most population with the majority speaking Russian as the first language. Ukraine was a natural victim of aggression.
Choosing to paint Ukrainians as Nazis is ironic as during Putin’s KGB service in Dresden, he helped draft ultra-right nationalists to push back against Western influence in DDR, and as president, he supported financially far-right nationalist parties and groups in Europe.
“The globalist, supposedly liberal ideology which underlies it is increasingly acquiring the features of totalitarianism, holding back creative pursuit, free historical creation,” Putin claimed the other day.
Thus, special military operation is a ‘creative pursuit.’ Conquest of a sovereign country is a ‘free historical creation.’
Russia is free and democratic, and the West is totalitarian. ‘Globalists’ are holding him back from free expression of fulfilling his destiny to rebuild the Soviet Union.
Putin, certainly, will not stop, and it’s already clear that he's thrown sovereign Russia along with its economy under the bus of his delusions, and instead of re-creating an empire, his escapades will lead to another collapse of the Russian state. ~ Misha Firer
Gerbitopex:
Now Russians think Ukrainian Army is GMO.
Chris Chiapella:
Just like the Soviets believed that AIDS was concocted in the West as a biological weapon that escaped from a laboratory….
But of course, Soviet society wasn’t affected because there was no homosexuality there. The only people who did get it were social deviants who must have fraternized with immoral Westerners.
Similarly, the Russian Army is invincible. The only thing that is delaying its inevitable, total victory in Ukraine is the meddling of devious Western scientists creating superhuman warriors in Ukraine and arming them with sophisticated weapons. But fear not, loyal serfs: Mother Russia’s moral superiority will ultimately shine forth and deliver a devastating blow to the decadent West.
It’s a playbook as old as humanity, but perfected in Russia:
If at first you don’t succeed, concoct an elaborate excuse to explain away your failure.
Ryan O’Connor:
To get anywhere near the outflow of gas to China as Russia sells to Europe they'd need new pipelines that will take years to build, travel thousands of km further than the European ones and rely on western tech.
Russia's current pipelines to Europe especially those in Siberia need to keep flowing at all times or they start to crack and freeze and one crack disrupts a multi thousand km pipe.
Russia's massive rail network relies on cassette bearings made by Germany and USA.
Advanced microchips needed for a lot of modern equipment both military and civilian are a partnership between Taiwan and USA. Russians have been stealing chips from Ukrainian washing machines and household goods because they are running out of them.
Yes China can provide most basic consumer goods but there are a lot of major pieces of the Russian economy that rely solely on western tech and there is no proof China is helping evade western sanctions. The only thing we know for sure is China is buying some gas and oil at a steep discount.
Tim Cooper:
He’s stolen too much now to restore anything. The kleptocrats have amassed about USD10k for every Russian citizen. That’s not going on armaments but yachts, dachas and dodgy bank accounts.
Adam Jolly:
The best possible ending might be Russia breaking up into smaller states, where it’s harder for one person to gain control of *all* the gas money.
Mats Andersson:
I have a sneaking suspicion that the end will be unexpectedly quick—the Russian troops don’t want to be there, and when they have to turn, it might turn into a panicked stampede. There are already reports that they have had to use the old Soviet tactics of firing at their own retreating troops to stop them from fleeing the battlefield.
Mary:
Indeed there is a huge propaganda machine recreating events to suit the narrative Putin wants — the war is against evil Nazis, the glorious Russian army is moving from success to success, soon the glorious Russian Soviet states will all again be reunited as a world superpower.
We have seen how a mythology of lies can succeed in our own country, even crazy, ridiculous lies. It should not be surprising that a false narrative of recovering a lost splendor, even a lost splendor more imaginary than real, can succeed with the people of Putin's Russia...a people already nostalgic for a past they remember as great, even though in reality it was not. These are folks that miss Stalin, miss the old stability of the Soviet state, the glory of sacrifice that won the Great Patriotic war, and the scientific wins of the USSR in the space race. All now ashes in the mouth...certainly for Putin, and possibly for many many more.
Oriana:
It's about the ego, both the collective national ego, and Putin's personal ego. Putin was allegedly mortally offended when Obama said that Russia was a regional superpower (rather than a world superpower, as Putin deludes himself into thinking.)
In Putin's version of reality, the fact that most of the world is against Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine only shows, in a quasi-religious way, that Russia's vision of itself as superpower is correct. Putin grew up as a devout communist, in an era when the Soviet Union really had a deadly military and was feared. Ah, to be powerful and be feared! Perhaps those who say that Putin is compensating for his small physical stature are mostly correct (humiliating, to have other heads of state literally looking down at him).
*
BRUTAL CRIMES ARE A RESULT OF BRUTAL CIRCUMSTANCES
~ In the early 1970s, criminologist and lawyer Yakov Gilinsky became the first Soviet academic to study deviantology — the study of deviant behavior and its causes. He was the first researcher in the USSR to study how socioeconomic factors influence crime and suicide rates.
Today, Gilinsky continues to teach and work in St. Petersburg. Bumaga spoke with Gilinsky about the likely effects of the war, his childhood in besieged Leningrad, and how he and his colleagues evaded the Soviet censors. With Bumaga’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of the interview.
For most Russian researchers over 60 or so, restrictive working conditions are nothing new. 88-year-old Yakov Gilinsky, for example, worked for decades as a criminologist in the Soviet Union — a country that was officially free of crime.
While studying at Leningrad State University, Gilinsky received some useful advice from one of his professors, Mikhail Shargorodsky: “You can write whatever you want. But in the foreword, you have to refer to Comrade Lenin, and in the afterword, you have to mention the most recent Community Party Congress.”
Gilinsky followed that recipe a few times for his early works, but he didn’t like the dishonesty — plus, it wasn’t always enough to get his research published.
“In Leningrad, and in the RSFSR, you weren’t allowed to publish any numbers, including statistics or research findings, so we usually published our articles in Estonia,” he said.
Gilinsky’s research interests included crime as well as “deviant behavior,” including drug addiction, prostitution, and suicide. He studied, and continues to study, the link between criminal legislation and the behavior it aims to reduce.
“Nobody [in Russia] thinks about the peculiarities of postmodern society, such as how they influence crime and suicide, or how socioeconomic inequality affects those things,” Gilinsky said. According to his research and that of most other criminologists, certain types of laws almost inevitably lead to a rise in murder, suicide, and theft — and that's a bad sign for Russia’s near future.
SUMMONING THE EXECUTIONER
According to Gilinsky, there’s currently a global trend of countries decriminalizing as many things as possible. Though it might seem counterintuitive, he said, decriminalizing an act rarely leads to an increase in that act.
“When people make a decision to do something, they don’t look at the criminal code first,” he said.” The last thing they’re thinking about is whether there’s a law against something; they don’t even think of the punishment. That’s why the German professor Jescheck, one of the foremost authorities on criminal law in Germany [...] wrote about the necessity of abolishing criminal law as something incompatible with human and civil rights.”
Russia, of course, is a glaring exception: in addition to lawmakers criminalizing various kinds of speech, the country’s withdrawal (and expulsion) from the Council of Europe in March paved the way for a revision of its decades-old moratorium on the death penalty. The effects of that revision, Gilinsky, would be “numerous and far-reaching.”
“[First of all,] they would start sentencing undesirable people to it [the death penalty]. And [secondly,] as statistics show, the rate of serious crimes would grow.”
The perverse effects of the death penalty, Gilinsky said, are well-established — and a number of sociological and legal thinkers throughout the centuries have asserted that its internal logic is unsound from a justice perspective.
“Cesare Beccaria wrote about this in the 18th century,” said Gilinsky. “According to him, brutal crimes are the result of brutal state policies. ‘I don’t understand,’ he wrote, ‘how a government trying to curtail murder can commit murder itself.’ Karl Marx, too, wrote about the inadmissibility of the death penalty and the consequences of brutal punishments, using statistics. In one of his works, he used numbers to show how when an execution for a crime is carried out, there’s a spike in that same crime. Brutality from the state leads to brutality among the people.”
The pattern has held true in more recent centuries as well. “Argentina and Austria were some of the first countries to abolish the death penalty [which they did in the 20th century]. In both countries, the rates of the crimes that had previously been punishable by death went down,” said Gilinsky. “In Russia, the last death sentence was carried out in 1996. From 2001 to 2021, the murder rate decreased by a factor of 4.6. Do we really want to reinstate the death penalty?”
If Russian lawmakers were really concerned with reducing crime, according to Gilinsky, a more effective strategy would be to pass legislation aimed at reducing inequality. After all, he said, most crimes are committed by people without a stable income source.
“All of humanity and the population of every single country is divided into people who are included in social, economic, political, and cultural life, and people who are excluded from it. [...] The excluded make up the main social base of deviant behavior, because when people find themselves excluded, they’re more likely to die by suicide, commit a crime, turn to alcohol or drugs, and so on.”
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Gilinsky was born in 1934. Some of his earliest memories are of the Siege of Leningrad; he was in the city itself for the entirety. He recalls bodies in his building’s stairwell and shrapnel falling to the ground, but, while the experience did leave him a pacifist, he said it didn’t leave him with any great lessons to pass on to the younger generation.
“It’s impossible [for them] to understand. Right now, when I think about the blockade, it sometimes feels to me like it didn’t even happen,” he said. “In the 1941-1942 academic year, I entered the first grade. I really didn’t like school, and I disliked children even more — I tried my best not to talk to them. For me, my comrades in the first grade were scarier than the German bombings and shellings.”
Gilinsky spent his childhood devouring books. After some difficulty enrolling in university due to state-sponsored anti-Semitism, he finally managed to enroll in Leningrad State University’s law department after Stalin’s death.
Thus began a career full of endless workarounds and rule-bending. For decades, Gilinsky engaged as much as possible with the research his foreign colleagues were doing. In the 1970s, he established the field of “deviantology,” or the study of deviant behavior from a legal and social science perspective, in the USSR, and has since been known as the father of the field in Russia.
Gilinsky has also been a fairly outspoken advocate of LGBT rights for decades. He recalled the Christopher Street Day demonstrations — analogous to pride parades — on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt in the Gorbachev years. The current climate for LGBT rights in Russia, he said, is a far cry from even the openness of the 1980s.
“This is a frightening moment,” Gilinsky said. “There’s a return to pre-revolutionary, imperial attitudes. We’ve already gone far back into the 16th or 17th centuries in terms of political positions. This [state-sponsored homophobia] is one of them.”
One of the more positive 21st-century changes he’s witnessed has been Russia’s crime reduction, which is part of a global trend.
“I can say with certainty that the turning point occurred in 2001-2006. In 2001, the rates of murder and other severe crimes went down, and in 2006, we saw it with all the other crimes: there was a decline in theft, burglaries, and robberies by a factor of somewhere between six and ten,” Gilinsky said.
But he expects the days of increasing safety may be over.
“As I’ve already said, most of the people who have committed the crimes in the criminal code are people without permanent income sources. As a result, the economic crisis and unemployment will have an effect. Though we have to remember that this is hypothetical,” he said.
While crime didn’t start falling until the aughts, Gilinsky said the 1990s were the only decade when he felt “completely free” living in Russia — and he wishes he had left when he still felt able.
“When it was possible to travel anywhere, write anything, and publish anything, what reason was there to leave? Despite all of the authorities’ mistakes, we had freedom. And now it’s too late — it’s beyond us,” he said.
He has one piece of advice for younger Russians:
“Leave. Russia has no prospects for the next several generations.” ~
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/12/brutal-crimes-are-a-result-of-brutal-policies
Mary: THE CRIMINAL WORLD IS A MIRROR OF THE SYSTEM PRESIDING OVER IT
It is interesting that brutal laws sponsor, rather than restrict brutal crimes. It seems so counterintuitive, even though we know severe laws about punishment do not deter criminals, it is hard to accept that these harsh laws actually lead to an increase in crime. Perhaps severe punishments, such as the death penalty, are not deterrents simply because criminals do not expect to be caught, always see themselves as too clever, as the exceptions who elude the law. And perhaps a brutal state is brutalizing, and the criminal world is a reflection in the underworld of the brutality of the state itself. The criminal world a mirror of the system presiding over it.
Think of the order of power in a criminal organization like the mafia, an organization Putin's kleptocracy is often compared to. Criminals produce a world ordered by criminality, where power belongs to criminals, just as the corruption of stealing produces a society of thieves, and the corruption of lies produces a society of liars. Theft and lies are normalized and all pervasive, crime is simply the expected and the usual. The basic stance in such a world is cynicism, the basic acts theft and lying...the way to survive in a criminal and corrupt state. Resistance simply gets mowed down, poisoned, thrown into prison, sent to Siberia, or pitched out a window.
Oriana:
Brutal societies indeed have brutal laws and brutal crimes, as we saw in the Middle Ages, and later in Nazi Germany, and now in Putin’s fascist Russia.
*
DID LANGUAGE BEGIN WITH GESTURES?
~ One idea has proven particularly resilient: the notion that language began as gesture. What we now do with tongue, teeth and lips, the proposal goes, we originally did with arms, hands and fingers. For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe longer, our prehistoric forebears commanded a gestural ‘protolanguage’. This idea is evident in some of the earliest writings about language evolution, and is now as popular as ever. Yet even as the popularity of the ‘gesture-first’ theory has surged, its major weakness – a flaw some consider fatal – has become all the more glaring.
Early proponents of ‘gesture-first’ ideas appealed to the intuition that bodily communication is primitive. In his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac imagined a boy and a girl, alone after a deluge, struggling to invent language anew. He described how the boy, wanting to obtain some out-of-reach object, ‘moved his head, his arms, and all parts of his body’, as if trying to acquire it. And the girl got the message. A scene very much like this can be readily seen today, of course: a baby in highchair wriggling in the direction of a toy just beyond her grasp. Part of the primitive aura of gesture – for Condillac and other early thinkers – stemmed from the observation that gesture precedes speech in infancy. Before children can talk, they point, nod, wave and beg. Perhaps, goes the logic, the development of language in our species followed this same sequence.
Anthropologists of the 19th century widely championed gesture-first theories, citing other intuitive arguments. Garrick Mallery – who saw gesture as a ‘vestige of the prehistoric epoch’ – noted that it is much easier to create new, interpretable signals with one’s hands than with one’s voice. Imagine ‘troglodyte man’, he wrote in 1882. ‘With the voice he could imitate distinctively but the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he could exhibit actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, with their derivatives and analogues.’ In more modern terms, it is easier to create transparent signals with gesture – signals that have a clear relationship to what they mean. This observation has since been borne out in lab experiments, and it remains one of the most compelling arguments for a gestural protolanguage.
In the 20th century, scholars held on to these intuitive arguments for gestural theories, while also introducing new sources of evidence. One thinker in particular, Gordon Hewes, deserves special credit for this advance. An anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Hewes had an encyclopedic cast of mind and an unusual zeal for questions about language origins. In 1975, he published an 11,000-item bibliography on the topic. But it was his article ‘Primate communication and the gestural origin of language’ (1973) that would initiate a new era of ‘gesture-first’ theorizing.
Chief among the article’s contributions was the idea that we should look closely at the communicative proclivities of primates. In the preceding decades, several attempts had been made to see if apes might be able to learn human language. In one case, a couple adopted a young chimpanzee named Viki and treated her ‘as nearly as possible like a human child’. By the age of three, she had a number of human-like tendencies. She liked building block towers. She loved playing with the phone, holding the receiver up to her ear. But, as the couple noted, ‘she seldom says anything into it’. All told, Viki was reported to speak just three words – ‘papa’, ‘cup’ and, after some physical assistance in forming her mouth correctly, ‘mama’.
Vocal language, it would seem, was out of reach for apes. But gestural language proved to be another matter. Another couple carried out a similar home-rearing experiment with a different chimpanzee, Washoe, but used manual signs borrowed from American Sign Language instead of English words. Washoe’s linguistic capacities blew past Viki’s. She ultimately mastered some 350 signs – nowhere near the level of a human signer, of course, and with none of the grammatical sophistication, but impressive nonetheless. Subsequent studies teaching signs to other apes – including Koko, a gorilla, and Chantek, an orangutan – enjoyed comparable successes.
Hewes also drew on the emerging understanding of primate communication in the wild. Primate vocalisations, he noted, are largely involuntary, not directed to a particular audience, and only ‘meagerly propositional’. Primate gestures, by comparison, seemed richer. Though the data available to Hewes on this point were scant, work in the time since has confirmed his hunch. Chimpanzees use a wider set of gestures than of vocalizations, and seem to use those gestures more intentionally. Bonobos, for instance, will use a ‘come here’ beckoning gesture and watch their audience closely for a reaction. If they don’t get the response they want, they’ll make it again. Chimpanzee vocalizations do appear to be under some voluntary control – they’re not just reflexive emissions – but not to the same extent. The same asymmetry is seen in the flexibility with which these types of signals are used: ape vocalizeations are strongly tied to a stereotypical context, but their gestures are less so.
The takeaway from observations of primate communication is not that ape gestures have all the hallmarks of human language – far from it. It’s that, compared with the mouth, the hands seem to be better soil for the seeds of language. Central to contemporary discussions of language evolution is the notion of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees – a now-extinct species perhaps 5 to 10 million years old. Given what we know about primates today, we can confidently say that this ancestor had gestural and vocal abilities much like those of modern chimps. Which means its hands were more language-ready than its mouth – as Hewes put it in 1973, the manual medium was the ‘line of least biological resistance’.
Hewes continued advocating gesture-first theories into the 1980s, and he occasionally surfaced new sources of evidence. In one paper, he drew attention to a human peculiarity that few had made sense of: our palms and fingernail beds are lighter than the surrounding skin. (This contrast is more obvious in people with darker skin but is also evident when people with lighter skin are deeply tanned.) No other primate seems to show ‘palmar depigmentation’ of this type – a fact that Hewes checked for himself by visiting zoos. He speculated that this uniquely human feature had evolved to increase the visibility of our gestures. He seems to have been imagining a scene around an early hearth, the hands of some prehistoric storyteller flashing in the firelight.
In the decades since Hewes, the popularity of gestural theories has swelled. Leading figures in the cognitive sciences have now published their own variants in prominent venues. What might once have been called a single gesture-first theory is now best considered a family of related proposals. One branch maintains that early gestures consisted primarily of ‘pantomime’ – that is, those transparent gestures that re-enact or depict and thus resemble what they mean. Another branch posits that pointing is the most likely ur-gesture, citing the fact that it is the first to be acquired by children.
Perhaps this rising popularity is not so surprising. When we pull together the best arguments for gesture-first theories and lay them out, the picture is indeed compelling. There’s the fact that gesture emerges prior to speech in a child’s life. There’s the fact that the manual medium seems to be superior at creating transparently meaningful signals. There’s the fact that our last common ancestor with chimpanzees likely had the equipment to eventually create a sophisticated system of manual signals, but not vocal ones. And there is also a key existence proof: contemporary sign languages. With all the power and subtlety of spoken languages, sign systems show us that the voice is not the only viable vehicle for our species’ most distinctive capacity.
Now we come to the problem: today, speech predominates. People gesture, but their gesture is clearly a secondary supplement. People also sign but, outside of deaf communities, they favor speech. So, if language did get its start in the hands, then at some later stage it decamped to the mouth. The vexing question is: why? Already in the 18th century, Condillac appreciated the difficulty of this problem. ‘With the language of action at that stage being so natural, it was a great obstacle to overcome,’ he wrote. ‘How could it be abandoned for another language whose advantages could not yet be foreseen?’ This is now known as the problem of ‘modality transition’. To his credit, Hewes fully acknowledged it, and every gesture-first proponent since has had to address it in some way. Can it possibly be explained?
According to some, the short answer is no. The sign language researcher Karen Emmorey at San Diego State University argues that the very existence of sign systems – which are, again, as fully and complexly linguistic as spoken systems – undercuts the idea of a gestural origin for language. She reasons that if language had first built a home in the hands, it would have had no compelling reason to leave. Thus, it must have been spoken from the start. The Dutch psycholinguist Pim Levelt has reached a similar conclusion, calling gestural theories a ‘persistent misconception’ and ‘wasteful’. For humans to go through a gestural stage, he wrote in 2004, would be like ‘building a car by first building a ship and then removing the sail, putting it on wheels and adding a combustion engine’.
The burden of proof is clear. To remain viable, gesture-first theories need an account of the move from hand to mouth. And this account would need several pieces. I like to imagine modality transition as a kind of epic journey, one that our protagonist – language – might have been on for hundreds of thousands of years. As with any journey, the protagonist would need a reason to go and a means of getting there, a why and a how. Let’s take these two parts in turn.
First, a reason to go. Discussions of why language left the hands often take a scorecard format, a tallying of the putative advantages of speech over gesture. A first supposed advantage, it has often been said, is that speech is abstract. Spoken words for the most part bear an utterly arbitrary relationship to what they mean – the word ‘tree’ doesn’t resemble the physical form of a tree. Visual forms such as gesture, goes the argument, are not arbitrary in this way – and hinder abstract thought as a result. But the argument is specious. Hand movements can be motivated – as we’ve seen, this is one of their virtues. But they can also be as fully arbitrary as spoken words, as seen in the ‘peace’ gesture, for example, and in the countless opaque signs in sign languages.
A second supposed advantage is that speech is better in the dark – that, as Levelt put it, gesture is ‘functionally dead during, on average, 12 hours a day’. This is probably overstated. As Emmorey points out, modern signers get by without much problem, even in dim lighting, and can use tactile forms of signing – that is, signing in contact with another’s skin – in a pinch. Our prehistoric ancestors likely didn’t spend many waking hours in pitch-black. Rather, they would have used fires for warmth, cooking, illumination and protection from predators. And, whether or not there’s anything to Hewes’s palmar depigmentation story, hand movements can certainly be seen by firelight.
Another advantage of speech, it has been argued, is that it frees the hands for other activities. But, here again, this is likely too swift. Signers don’t seem to have much of a problem with this, using one-handed signs when necessary. And though most of what we think of as gesture takes place in the hands, critical visual signals can also be produced with the head and face – pointing, affirming, questioning. The list of putative advantages of speech goes still further. But this kind of ‘rear-view mirror’ reasoning is inherently shaky: we know the outcome and are motivated to explain it.
As Tecumseh Fitch – the author of an authoritative survey of language evolution research – has pointed out, we can also readily come up with advantages of gesture. For instance, it is more discreet than speech; it can thus be used during hunting without alerting prey, or around the fire without alerting predators. It’s a more directed signal, in contrast to the broadcast nature of speech. It is better suited to noisy environments. It is more available when eating – in fact, speaking while eating poses a choking hazard. The scorecard begins to look like a wash.
But there is at least one key feature of speech that is harder to dismiss: it takes very little effort. Attempts to measure the caloric expenditures involved in speech report that they are essentially negligible. This is both because the movements involved are so tiny, and because spoken words often hitch a ride on our outgoing breath. (Speaking can be thought of as a way of up-cycling an abundant waste-product – air – as it leaves the body.) This is not to say that gesturing or signing is an especially athletic or strenuous endeavor by any means, but it is certainly more expensive than talking – by an order of magnitude at least, Fitch estimates.
Could a small differential in calories really matter? Unlikely as it might seem, it could. Laziness is a remarkably powerful shaper of human behavior – and of human communicative behavior in particular. The study of language has identified few laws but one is known as the ‘principle of least effort’. It explains why the words we use the most are also the shortest; it explains why the signs of sign language become abbreviated over time; it explains why we use acronyms, nicknames and contractions. Even animals show this drive toward more efficient communication, and archaic humans would have been no exception.
It’s plausible then that the energetic efficiency of speech could have, over many generations, compelled a transition from gesture to vocalization. This would supply the why. But what about the how? Via what route could a capacity for meaning-making that developed in one organ be transferred to another, halfway up the body? A possible explanation begins with an anatomical curiosity: in humans, hand and mouth are intimately coupled. There seems to be a hidden yet robust connection between these two body parts – an invisible bridge, if you like – that language could have traversed.
The first evidence for the coupling of hand and mouth begins early in life. In utero, babies often suck their thumbs. Shortly after birth, until around five months old, they exhibit what is called the ‘Babkin reflex’: press on their palms, and they protrude their tongues. Other evidence comes from the brain. It has long been known that neural areas that control mouth movements are oddly very close to those that control hand movements, leading some to propose a shared command circuitry for the two. Recent evidence suggests that these areas are not merely close but, in fact, integrated. Researchers detected a speech signal from neural activity in the ‘hand knob’, a region that – as the name suggests – was thought to be specialized for hand movements.
Beyond babies, and brains, the coupling of hand and mouth can also be observed in everyday behaviors. Darwin noted that ‘children learning to write often twist about their tongues as their fingers move, in a ridiculous fashion’. Work since has documented tongue protrusions in a wide range of activities, not just during writing and not just in kids. The US basketball star Michael Jordan was known for sticking out his tongue while dribbling or dunking the ball. Watch someone thread a needle or unlock their smartphone, and you might see the same. These ‘ridiculous’ behaviors are just one type of what are called ‘hand-mouth sympathies’. A more subtle type occurs when people use their hands while simultaneously producing a vocalization. One-year-olds, for instance, vocalize differently when they grasp a small object versus large object.
Is this coupling of hand and mouth a recent addition to the roster of human quirks? Probably not. Chimpanzees show hand-mouth sympathies, too, suggesting that this ‘invisible bridge’ was very likely already present in our last common ancestor. Thus we have identified a plausible-enough route and a plausible-enough reason to leave. But this, of course, leaves open the question of what a journey along this bridge might have actually looked like.
Any details remain highly speculative, of course. But most scholars agree that a move from hand to mouth would have been very slow. And many now emphasize that the transition was not from a gesture-only system to a speech-only system. That would make little sense, given what language use actually looks like today: speakers gesture with their hands when they talk, and signers gesture with their mouths when they sign. Rather, the transition we seek to explain was from a system in which gestures served as the primary, foregrounded communicative channel, and vocalization was a secondary channel – much as we see in modern chimpanzees – to the other way around. We want to explain, in other words, how speech gained the upper hand.
Proposed explanations have been few and, admittedly, fanciful. Writing in Science magazine in 1944, Richard Paget suggested that language began as manual gesture but was able to switch over to speech because the activities of the mouth unconsciously echoed the activities of the hand. He wrote that when ‘the principal actors (the hands) retired from the stage … their understudies – the tongue, lips, and jaw – were already proficient in the pantomimic art’. The idea was that spoken words first emerged as unconscious, audible echoes of manual gestures. This proposal has been largely forgotten and occasionally derided. In 2010, Fitch described it as ‘one of the more precarious edifices in the field’.
But, in the past decade, Paget’s ideas have attracted a second look. Partly this is because the evidence for hand-mouth sympathies continues to mount. And partly it is because sign language researchers have recently described a class of signs that show exactly the kind of process that Paget had in mind. The mouth is highly active during signing, as already noted. Sometimes signers are mouthing a spoken language equivalent of a sign; sometimes they are producing adverbs. But still other times their mouths are simply mirroring aspects of a concurrent manual sign – exhibiting what is now known as ‘echo phonology’. To take one example, the sign for ‘true’ in British Sign Language involves bringing one hand, positioned above, down onto the other; at the same time, the open mouth is closed. Thus, a movement of the hands is echoed in a much smaller movement of the mouth. If you were to add in a concurrent vocalization, you could get a distinctive hand movement along with a distinctive sound.
It might seem wildly unlikely that language could hop from hand to mouth in this way. Much more work would be needed to flesh out the details of this ‘echoic’ route before we would want to declare it plausible. But this is just a starting point. A goal for the next phase of gestural theories is to develop and refine models of a gradual ‘miniaturization’ process – of a long slog in which humans, by degrees, might have adopted a more compact form of communicative behavior. At some point in this slog, the prominence of gesturing and of vocalizing would have flipped, with speech becoming the foreground channel, and gesture remaining as a background channel. Leaving us, in other words, right where we are today.
Arriving where we are today is, in fact, a major strength of gestural theories. Ever since Hewes, gesture-first theorists have faced a stark burden of proof, of explaining the why and the how of modality transition. But speech-first theorists have their own burden, albeit rarely acknowledged. Any speech-first theory needs to account, not only for how speech could have evolved, but also for why and how speech came to be universally, ubiquitously and automatically intertwined with gesture. Call it the problem of ‘modality addition’. It might be tempting to chalk up our use of gesture to its communicative power, but researchers have found only modest support for this idea. Quaint as it seems, the 19th-century notion that speakers’ gestures are vestigial, like tailbones or goosebumps, might not be so far off.
None of this is to say that the gesture-first theory has prevailed – far from it. Rather, it is to say, first, that the allegedly ‘fatal flaw’ of gestural theories might prove, in the end, to be merely a flesh wound and, second, that speech-first theories have their own problems. Ultimately, questions about modality are just one layer of the larger puzzle of language origins.
Even if we were able to establish some version of a gesture-first proposal as not merely plausible but likely, there would be many more layers to contend with. We would also want to understand how we came by our abilities to read other minds, to sequence and combine ideas, to conceptualize abstractions such as ‘tomorrow’ and ‘truth’. We would need to explain, not merely whether we first conveyed meaning by hand or by mouth, but why we felt an itch to mean anything at all. It is this multilayered complexity that makes the evolution of language the ‘hardest problem in science’ – and also one of the most tantalizing. ~
Children gesturing
Oriana:
My intuition is that speech was primary. The human brain is wired for learning language, something children do without any effort as long as other speakers communicate with them.
But I admit that I have no idea or even a plausible theory about how this "speech wiring" evolved. All we know is that there are "speech areas" in both hemispheres of the brain (not just in the left hemisphere, as was originally thought). The use of gestures is mainly auxiliary.
I am interested in the evolution of language, and in languages in general. Here is the opening section of my poem The First Word:
~ Oriana
Perhaps it's possible to lie using gestures, but no doubt it's more difficult.
Mary:
I wonder why the thinking in the language/gesture proposals all assume that one must have been first, followed by the other, that there must have been one original method of communication. Why not both immediately present together, developing in tandem? Infants produce sounds and gestures. Studies of crows and ravens reveal they use both sounds and gestures to communicate meaning. Their limits are unique to each. For gesture you must be close enough to see, or to touch if the gestures must be signed in the darkness, into another's hand. For speech you can be farther apart, or have a screen between ..something that precludes seeing the signs. The next step in conveying meaning is to communicate over distance and time, and that involves writing.
Certainly each mode of communication has its own degree of abstraction. Gesture or signing being the least abstract, at least in the beginning, where pantomime imitates an action. Speech is more abstract, assigning meaning to sounds. Writing adds a layer, assigning shapes first to concepts, like pictographs, then to sounds, as in alphabets. Each mode becomes both more abstract and more able to communicate complex messages. Gesture, as signing, has enabled more complexity by adopting alphabetical signs, so you can sign pretty much anything you need to say. Writing extends speech through time and space. Even the ravens haven't managed that, though we don't know the extent of their communication abilities.
*
Oriana:
Yes, I can go along with the idea that speech and gestures evolved simultaneously, side by side. Speech is dominant by now, but in remote prehistory it may have held equal place. And now and then a gesture is more powerful than words. In Poland, the obscene gesture of "the fig" was frequently used by the children, even though we didn't really understand its sexual meaning (or at least the little girls didn't). And the gesture of moving one's index finger in a rapid whirling motion over the forehead, above one's right eye, to indicate "crazy" still seems perfect to me, of course just between friends.
So yes, it’s simply common sense based on observation to assume that gestures
and speech emerged side by side, as they do in infancy. There no need
to assume that one mode of communication must have preceded the other.
*
WILL YOU FEEL LONELY IN OLD AGE WITHOUT KIDS?
~ I remember the words of one of my female friends, who said: “Michelle, you are seeking to avoid regret. And it is certain that if you don’t have children, you will have regrets. However, I have two wonderful daughters, and I can assure you that my list of regrets will be far longer than yours when we are old. Because you will get to do many more things in your life because you don’t have children, than I will because I do.
She and I are both much older now and we talk frequently. Her life differs from mine. She has much more family. I have friends and I travel and I write. I have never felt loneliness in my entire life. I am far too busy.
Do I wish I had had children? That’s like wishing I was tall. Sometimes I do, but I’m not. Those are fantasy thoughts, so I give them no attention. I focus on the blessings I have, which are abundant.
And I’m certainly not lonely. ~ Michelle Gaugy
Cyrilla Bauer:
I’m 63 and childless. I lived a life of adventure also. During a time when I had to support a husband, I took a side trip into working in sales for a high end retirement community. I can state for certain that just because you have children, doesn’t mean they’ll definitely grow to be good people who have your best interests at heart. I saw many who wanted to talk grandma out of living a comfortable retirement because it would spend “ their inheritance”. There are no guarantees in life.
Crystal Rivas:
It is also possible to have children who grow up and have no time for you or any interest for that matter. So many things can happen. Birthing children guarantees nothing.
Susan Cunningham:
People who have kids can also have regrets. Kids grown with their own kids who live in the same town and only visit twice a year. Kids grown who visit and abuse their parents and steal money from them. Kids grown who abandon their own kids and leave the elders to raise their grandkids. Just because you have kids doesn’t mean you will not be lonely when you get old.
Kerry:
As for kids -- well you know what happened to Tiresias struck blind.... those who have kids know what it was like before they had kids, and after.... for me, kids were the miracle of love at last.... but differs for each…
*
THE CHALLENGE OF ST. BENEDICT: LEARNING TO DO THINGS RIGHT AWAY
The challenge is to learn to respond immediately to whatever it is time for. ~ St. Benedict (480 - 543). For me St. Benedict is the patron saint of work. But according to the Internet, he is the patron saint of Europe. I wish!
Over the years I’ve learned to do things as soon as I see they need to be done. To hang up clothes as soon as I take them off, to pay the bills as soon as they arrive. No amount of nagging worked in childhood. But as soon as I was on my own, I saw that this makes life a lot easier. I’m not perfect at it — sometimes I plead with myself that I’m “too tired” — but “tired” is mainly a state of mind, and just how much effort does it take to hang a blouse, or make the bed?
I also bear in mind my mother’s words, a piece of advice passed on to her by her mentor: “By wanting to avoid a small unpleasantness, we set ourselves up for big unpleasantness.” Thus, by not cleaning up a spill right away, we may end up with a permanent stain. By failing to confess a small mistake, we may risk losing our job.
St. Benedict considered work a blessing. He came up with the motto ORA ET LABORA — “pray and work.” Benedictine monks became known for their ungrudging capacity to work. “Following the golden rule of Ora et Labora – pray and work, the monks each day devoted eight hours to prayer, eight hours to sleep, and eight hours to manual work, sacred reading and/or works of charity.” (wiki)
Benedict founded twelve monasteries, including the great Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino. 
Painting by Fra Angelico
*
THE CULT OF MARY
~ Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has established Mary as semi-divine—almost a goddess in her own right. Perhaps the one thing holding the Church back is that worshipping Mary as an actual goddess would destroy the concept of monotheism, so dear to the Abrahamic religions. The Catholic Church now venerates Mary as the mother of God, not just as the mother of Jesus on earth, and says that she herself was immaculately conceived, as well as assumed bodily up to heaven.
In the early centuries of the Church, pious Catholics would claim to have seen apparitions of Jesus, but this gave way to claims of seeing apparitions of Mary. One may now pray to Mary as an alternative to praying to Jesus. In other words, Mary has taken a central role in Catholic dogma and practice. ~ Dick Harfield, Quora
Oriana:
Why was Mary assumed into heaven in her body, rather than having her soul go there? Being immortal, isn't the soul more important than the body? But in Judaism you had to be breathing in order to be regarded as alive, actively existent, and in order to breathe you had to have a body. There was no soul in the current Christian sense, i.e. the kind of nonmaterial, mysterious entity that entered the fetus at some point and then left for the afterlife at the moment of death. Instead, there was the “breath of life.” And breath exists only if the body exists. So Mary didn’t really die, according to the Catholic doctrine. She went to sleep (the so-called “dormition” of Mary), and then was taken up to heaven in her physical body.
True, Judaism talks about returning to the “bosom of Abraham,” Where can this “bosom” be found? The only idea I like is that it’s simply a euphemism for being dead. Just as “passed away” is a frequent euphemism for being “deceased” (another euphemism), to say that someone has returned to the bosom of Abraham simply means that the person is dead.
Richard Velric:
“worshipping Mary as an actual goddess” Interesting statement. The main part of the Catholic rosary consists of 5 Our Fathers and 50 Hail Marys (prayers). It would certainly raise a question to an unbiased observer of who is more important.
Oriana:
I was raised in old-time Catholicism, and indeed Mary usually had as many or more candles in her chapel as Jesus. It also seemed that more people prayed to Mary. The reason was no mystery: she was the equivalent of the Goddess of Mercy, accepting all. She never threw anyone into hell. She was the Mater Dolorosa who knew and understood suffering.
In religion lessons, we were specifically advised that if we had committed many sins, or an especially bad sin, we should pray to Mary first, and only later dare approach Jesus.
There were really only two divine figures: Jesus and Mary. God the Father wasn’t mentioned much, not by his full name, and the Holy Ghost (I love that old-fashioned appellation), represented as a white dove, just didn’t have sufficient presence.
Now, however, some theologians have suggested that we have had the era of God the Father, and then of God the Son, and are now entering the Age of the Holy Spirit. But the cult of Mary has never ended. It may have peaked during the Middle Ages, with the greatest cathedrals being dedicated to Our Lady (“Notre Dame”). But even in our esthetically impoverished post-Vatican 2 era, the Catholic church recognizes the special importance of Mary. The nun told us that we had two mothers: one at home, and Mary in heaven. Mary was the ideal mother who would shower us with grace. Her role was not to punish, only to uplift hearts.
The Blue Madonna of Chartres
Kerry: FIVE GODS IN CATHOLICISM
I think there are five “Gods” in RC Christianity — a polytheistic religion— Christ, Mary, Jehovah, Devil, and the Paraclete [the Holy Ghost, especially in his function as Comforter]. And of course many Saint-Gods.
Oriana:
I can go along with that, as long as you put Christ and Mary first, exactly as you did. Yahveh, once he’s split into three persons, becomes difficult to understand. The grumpy old man, full of threats and vengeance, was upstaged by his son (think of all the paintings of Jesus and the relatively few of God-the-Father) — not that he was ever likable, unlike Mary and Jesus.
The Holy Ghost, in his avian transformation, was decorative, but for me very difficult to relate to. Also, it was pathetically obvious that he was tacked onto the Father and the Son only for the sake of the mystical number Three.
Yet there are those who say we are now in the era of Holy Ghost. Yet there are those who say we are now in the era of Holy Ghost. The era of the Son — self-sacrifice — was the Age of Pisces, the Fish. But what does the Holy Ghost represent? Wisdom? Universal acceptance of all, never mind the existence of Hell? The Age of Aquarius?
*
ASIMOV ON HUMANISM
~ “David Frost said, “Dr. Asimov, do you believe in God?”
And I said, “Whose?”
He said, a little impatiently, “Come, come, Dr. Asimov, you know very well whose. Do you believe in the Western God, the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition?”
Still playing for time, I said, “I haven’t given it much thought.”
Frost said, “I can’t believe that, Dr. Asimov.” He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”
(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me.
. . .
I certainly don’t believe in the mythologies of our society, in Heaven and Hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons. I’ve thought of myself as an “atheist,” but that simply described what I didn’t believe in, not what I did.
Gradually, though, I became aware that there was a movement called “humanism,” which used that name because, to put it most simply, Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.
There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven. And what if I’m mistaken? The question was asked of Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician, philosopher, and outspoken atheist. “What if you died,” he was asked, “and found yourself face to face with God? What then?”
And the doughty old champion said, “I would say, ‘Lord, you should have given us more evidence.’”
http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/13/isaac-asimov-religion-science-humanism/?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=bufferdcc89&utm_medium=twitter
*
RISK FACTORS FOR ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
~ There’s not much medical science can currently do to help you if you have Alzheimer’s disease.
But there’s a lot you can do personally to potentially lower your risk of getting the neurological disease in the first place.
A new report from China identifies 19 “life-course practices” that can reduce Alzheimer’s disease risk through behavioral change.
“Nearly two-thirds of these suggestions target vascular risk factors and lifestyle, strengthening the importance of keeping a good vascular condition, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle for preventing [Alzheimer’s],” according to the research review led by Dr. Jin-Tai Yu of Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University.
The review of nearly 400 studies identified higher risk factors such as:
high body mass index (BMI) in late life
hyperhomocysteinemia (high levels of the amino acid homocysteine in the blood)
depression
stress
diabetes
head trauma
hypertension in midlife
orthostatic hypotension (dizziness when you stand up after sitting or lying down)
Lower educational attainment and cognitive activity were also associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Factors that were considered to have less of a role in Alzheimer’s development included:
obesity in midlife
weight loss in late life
physical exercise
smoking
sleep
cerebrovascular disease
frailty
atrial fibrillation
insufficient vitamin C intake
“Behavioral change — more exactly, maintaining a healthy lifestyle — indeed plays an important role in modifying all [the] 19 associated factors,” Yu told Healthline. “However, to achieve the anticipated goals, only behavioral change is not enough, and we do recommend some specific interventions.”
Hypertension, for example, can be addressed through lifestyle changes such as limiting salt intake, quitting smoking, and reducing stress.
“But antihypertensive drugs are inevitable for the patients who [have] already been diagnosed with hypertension,” said Yu. “In addition, some other interventions like nicotine replacement for stubborn tobacco addiction, hypoglycemic drugs for diabetes, anticoagulants for atrial fibrillation, B-vitamin and/or folic acid for hyperhomocysteinemia, are also suggested.”
THE IMPACT OF LIFESTYLE
Keiland Cooper, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, told Healthline that while there are no proven Alzheimer’s risk reduction strategies “there are several lifestyle factors which have been shown to correlate with a reduction in disease rates for certain populations.”
“Roughly two-thirds of the authors’ suggestions revolve around the cardiovascular system, which is in line with multiple studies that have begun investigating the multiple potential risk factors and protective factors of the system which are associated with Alzheimer’s disease,” said Cooper.
“For instance, ACE2, a protein involved with the cardiovascular system, has been implicated as a protective factor for Alzheimer’s disease previously,” he added.
“One of the new and most prevalent risk factors to emerge from this report is hyperhomocysteinemia, which is commonly found in those with B12 or folate deficiencies and much more common in those who consume diets high in meat. [This] highlights the relative importance of including a diet higher in plant than meat protein for Alzheimer’s prevention,” McEwen told Healthline.
McEwen noted that the report also cast doubt on claims that estrogen replacement therapy and acetylcholinesterase inhibitors are effective interventions for Alzheimer’s disease.
“These new findings are incredibly helpful for clinicians, illuminating the necessity to do a deeper dive into their patients’ medical histories and further blood tests to see if their patients present with any of these risk factors,” she said.
“And this study is also incredibly helpful to individuals who are worried about their risk for Alzheimer’s, maybe based on family history, genetic factors, currently experiencing cognitive decline or just want to do everything they can to ensure they won’t get Alzheimer’s as they age,” McEwen said.
“The conclusions made from this study should empower individuals to know their lifestyle choices and behaviors have an impact on their risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, and that early intervention is critical since this disease process starts on average about 15 years before the onset of symptoms and diagnosis,” she added.
“There is more and more evidence that modifiable risk factors play an important role in protecting people from developing cognitive decline as they age, including Alzheimer’s disease,” Keith Fargo, PhD, director of scientific programs and outreach for the Alzheimer’s Association, told Healthline.
“However, with the explosion of research in this area, it can be difficult to sort through all the information,” he said. “This kind of study helps identify which modifiable risk factors currently have the best evidence.’’
“What we are learning is that there are things you can do now to protect your thinking and memory as you age, and with Alzheimer’s prevalence in the U.S. already more than 5 million people — and climbing — the Alzheimer’s Association urges every American to take steps to reduce their risk of cognitive decline,” he added. “It’s never too early to start.” ~
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/alzheimers-risk-factors-lifestyle-changes#The-impact-of-lifestyle
Oriana:
I'm surprised that exercise ended up on the list of less predictive factors. We keep hearing so much about how exercise lowers the risk of dementia. But it could be that older people who deliberately exercise are more educated. They are more likely to engage in mentally challening activities even after retiring (and some never retire as long as they are physically and mentally able to keep working; there are a lot of "overage" college professors, for instance).
What is new here is the emphasis on the importance of folic acid and Vitamin B12. Contrary to the article, B12 is found primarily in animal food (these days, also in fortified cereals):
*
ending on beauty:
FIRST DAY OF WINTER
Afterwards I whispered
I will write about you
have no fear you will not
be recognized
your voice will be wind
your eyes will be clouds
your words the faint wings
of remaining light
~ Oriana
No comments:
Post a Comment