Just one of the guys . . .

21. Ultimate Causes

2010-01-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

From Advice for a Young Investigator (tr. Swanson). The book is a revised publication of Cajal's speech upon induction into the Academia de Ciencias Exastas, Físicas y Naturales on December 5, 1897:

"Another commonplace worth repeating is that science cannot hope to solve Ultimate Causes. In other words, science can never understand the foundation hidden below the appearance of phenomena in the universe. As Claude Bernard has pointed out, researchers cannot transcend the determinism of phenomena; instead, their mission is limited to demonstrating the how, never the why, of observed changes. This is a modest goal in the eyes of philosophy, yet an imposing challenge in actual practice. Knowing the conditions under which a phenomenon occurs allows us to reproduce or eliminate it at will, therefore allowing us to control and use it for the benefit of humanity. Foresight and action are the advantages we obtain from a deterministic view of phenomena."

It is continually fascinating to me to read about Cajal's humility. He believes that the drilling human intellect will never penetrate some final, first layer of causes. I think it is fair to call this unknowable knowledge "divine," in Cajal's vocabulary and association. His satisfaction with his cosmic situation is, in my opinion, a facet of his unique genius. I have excerpted from his explanation of his religious beliefs here, beginning at "Let us console . . ."

To understand a religious man you must understand his religion. Cajal was not traditionally devout, but was undeniably formed in some part by Catholic education. (I find this in his section of his Don Quixote essay where he argues that pain is the "Whip of Emotions"). He believes in something higher; something that may be material, but will never materialize. Her name (and it is certainly feminine for a Quixote such as Cajal) could be Nature (or Truth). She is a scientific God, in that she behaves deterministically. To know her is to make a discovery, at which point a "veil is lifted from before (the) eyes," to quote Cajal's autobiography Recollections of My Life. The scientist is "minister of progress, priest of the truth, and a confidant of the Creator" (Advice).

I must identify Cajal's God in order to understand his life, I said it at the beginning. And it's coming into focus.

20. Knowing, Creating & the Ideal

2010-01-04T00:29:00.004-05:00

I found a couple of passages in Charlas de café (1921) that I decided to translate. The first is a perfect articulation and ordering of mental capacities:

"Creating and knowing. — It is good to know the name and properties of all the flowers, but it is even better to create a new flower."

On his famous "questionnaire," Proust gave (in my opinion) his most brilliant answer to the following question: "What is your favorite flower?" Hers, wrote Proust. In that spirit, I chose an image of the favorite flower of a female friend. Calla Lilies. I love the liquid words as much as the flowing image. But what's the difference anyway, if we are to create the new? Cajal created a a beautiful little garden in the brain. His caution against encyclopedic knowledge echoes that of the Taoists and Goethe, to use two not un-related examples. He never appreciated the rote memorization he was forced to practice as a youth in school. His excelled visually; he would gaze at a slide until his memory had finished its coding, and then he would go outside for a walk. When he returned, he was able to perfectly draw the intricacies of nerve cells. I believe the word for this is "eidetic memory." Cajal was motivated by discovery, by progress. It is important to find a balance between introspection and expression.

But what is progress? Does it really exist? Can we ever gain a full understanding of the universe and our place in it? Cajal treats this potentially defeatist doubt in the second passage with his trademark grace and humility:

"Ideal of science. — Because we live in full mystery, struggling against unknown forces, we try as much as possible to clarify it. We are not disheartened by the poverty of our effort before the great and innumerable problems of life. Our arduous labor concluded, we will be forgotten, like the seed in the furrow; but something will console us, the consideration that our descendants will owe us part of their joy and that, thanks to our initiatives, the world, that is, that miniscule part of Nature, object of our strivings, will turn out to be a little more agreeable and intelligible."

Cajal's relationship to his ideals interests me. He is fiercely romantic, a Quixote deep in his heart, and yet he cultivated a psychological harmony that allowed him to maximize his talents in this world. His professional life was so fulfilling that one might say it approaches the ideal for an investigator. But in essence, Cajal seems to be saying that the ideal is much more prosaic. It is ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but ultimately progress is continued, Nature remains. By lowering himself, he achieved heights. He contributed, like other giants in the history of human thought, to the grand narrative of progress. His paternal instinct is apparent in the quote, so it is indeed fitting to call him the "father of (modern) neuroscience."

I'll translate some more passages of this length later this week. After a few months of writing this blog, I'm still not sure who actually reads it. I don't expect or require an audience. But if you are out there, reader, I would love to hear what you think. I'm deeply involved with Cajal, so everything I learn about him is interesting to me. I would love to hear what stimulates you, reader. Because learning is only half the battle; I have to convince people in the humanities that Cajal is an important figure. Of course I think it's an easy sell, but that means nothing.

Happy 2010.

19. The Beautiful Brain

2009-12-25T03:34:00.003-05:00

I contributed a short essay to a new website about the relationship between art and science, The Beautiful Brain. It's called "Interdisciplinary Relations: On Consilience" and addresses the new theory of literature called "Literary Darwinism." I evaluate the currently debated question of whether art is an adaptive trait or an evolutionary by-product. I may write more pieces for the site in the future.

18. Quotes & Quotes

2009-12-10T23:57:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been using Spanish Google because I can often track down word definitions that are hiding somewhere on the Web. In this alternate, Iberian universe I found a great resource: a website commemorating Cajal's 150th birthday. It even has an English translation!

Anyway, this site cited two other sites that got me excited. They are quotation databases. And who doesn't love a good quotation? Many of these are from books that I have, but it's taking me a long time to work through them. I thought I'd share:

"Remove yourself gradually, without violent breaks, from the friend for whom you represent a means instead of an end."

"You don't have enemies? Is it that you never told the truth or never loved justice?"

"It is not worse to commit an error, but to try to justify it, instead of taking advantage of it as providential notice of our lightness or ignorance."

"Of all the possible reactions before injury, the most skilled and economical is silence."

"We scorn or hate ourselves because we do not understand because we do not take on the task of studying ourselves."

"The art of living a lot is to resign yourself to living little by little."

"Sympathy is very frequently a sentimental prejudice based on the idea that the face is the mirror of the soul. Unfortunately, the face is almost always a mask."

"Ideas do not last long. One must do something with them."

"Glory, in truth, is nothing other than a postponed obscurity."

"The weak succumb not for being weak, but for ignoring that they are it."

"Only the madman incapable of choosing his dreams and the sick man whom pain prevents from sleeping.

Here's to insomia . . .

17. Ochenta años and La mujer

2009-12-03T23:41:00.006-05:00

I'm polishing my translation of "El quijote," which I think is a really interesting essay. Cajal was undoubtedly a lover of literature, and he had an important relationship with reading. Cajal has a few important concepts in the essay. One is tipo de humano or "type of human." The closest critical term that we have might be Jung's archetype. But I decided not to use that word in translation because it would be anachronistic and it's spoiled with connotations. I simply use "type" and think of it as a more poetic "Type-A/Type-B." Don Quixote's type is idealist. Cajal was himself quite quixotic and it shows in his passionate language. Sancho Panza is Don Quixote's emotional counterweight. In a different book, Cajal agrees with Charles Richet that "the idealism of Don Quixote is combined with the good sense of Sancho in men of genius."

Cajal acknowledges that Don Quixote is insane, disturbed. What is the diagnosis? Some sort of obligada abnormalidad mental "compulsory mental abnormality." But Cajal's tone is not medical. He successfully weaves a narrative that includes biographical information about Cervantes.

In the section titled "Cervantes, Incorrigible Quixote" Cajal credits other critics, "Cervantists," for their revelation of Cervantes' own story. Cervantes was well-off and had high aspirations. Then, as a soldier, he was imprisoned in Seville, where Cajal believes the genius of Cervantes was sculpted. The last section of the essay is called "The Whip of Emotions," where Cajal argues that pain is an "awakener of souls and instigator of energies." His last image is a strangely beautiful one:

"Comparable to swarms of marine noctilucas, whose phorsphorescence excites itself upon impact of the propeller of a ship, the lazy brain cells only ignite their low light with the whip of painful emotions. Perhaps the privileged brain of Cervantes needed, likewise, to arrive at the tone and boiling of sublime inspiration, of the sharp sword of pain and the spectacular grieving of misery."

It is interesting to note that Cajal was educated in a school system whose motto could be described with the idiom "La letra con sangre entra." (in other words, corporal punishment). Cajal himself was literally imprisoned, locked in the basement in school, and so there is parallelism to Cervantes.

These are very powerful words and it's a wonderful essay and I'm still doing my best to do it justice.

I received two more Cajal books this week: El mundo vista a los 80 años" and "La mujer." More on that later.

16. La psicología de los artistas & the Art of Translation

2009-11-26T15:43:00.000-05:00

The other day I received a small package from Spain. It was the third edition of a work titled La psicología de los artistas, by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. It includes a number of pieces, including an account of Cajal's childhood as told by his brother [and fellow neuroscientist] Pedro, letters written by Cajal himself, and a literary essay concerning Cervantes's Don Quixote. To my knowledge, the content has never been translated into English. Therefore I am endeavoring to do so, starting with that essay titled "El quijote y el quijotismo," written in 1905 in commemoration of the publication of "the immortal book" [to use Cajal's words].

So far I have translated [roughly] roughly all of the first half: "El quijote." It is a fascinating piece from a refreshingly extra-disciplinary perspective written in the romantic style that captured Cajal's heart at a young age. Here is the first paragraph:

"Universally admired is the eminent moral figure of the noble la Manchan don Alonso Quijano el Bueno; converted to knight-errantry by suggestion of silly chivalresque books, he represents, as it has been said a thousand times, the most perfect symbol of honor and altruism. Ever Anglo-Saxon in nature, so given to imagining energetic and original characters, he invented a most exquisite persona of indomitable individualism and sublime self-denial."

Cajal considers "el Quijote," literally "the Do-Gooder," an archetype. In fact, one of the sections of the essay's second part is called "Representative Men. Men of the Species." A key word in the above paragraph is "suggestion" [sugestión], which is a most powerful notion. Cajal was fascinated by the popular pseudo-science of hypnotism—he even conducted his own investigative experiments on the topic—because of its apparent influence on the mind. Suggestion, then, is a weapon of falsity. Golgi and other proponents of the reticular theory were given to such convincing aspects of un-reality as ego and convention. Moreover, I love the phrase "sublime self-denial." Although it refers to Quixote's insane ignorance, it also has serious spiritual implications.

Now, what is most interesting about this essay in my opinion is that it is implicitly personal. Cervantes's classic was one of the treasures the teenage Cajal found in his neighbor's stash of romantic materials. But, then, Cajal objected to the author's treatment of his hero. Cajal was himself quite quixotic, and that quality would never truly leave him. In his autobiography, he refers at least twice to the famous character. By the time he wrote Advice for a Young Investigator, Cajal agreed that a combination of the temperaments of don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Indeed, Cajal calls one of the essay's sections "Salute to Sancho Panza," "prodigious incarnation of the tranquility and goodness of the soul." Though naturally an idealist, like his sympathetic literary hero, Cajal understood the necessary balance of healthy character. One must control "el Quijote."

This critical essay, which relies on a biographical and psychological reading, is an extremely insightful one in my opinion. So far, I think it is definitely worthwhile given the genius of its author. We'll see what happens when I finish translating and polishing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

15. Vision & the Brain

2009-11-13T14:37:00.004-05:00

There has been a considerable gap between posts. I finished Recollections of My Life a while ago, but have been unable to write about the final part. As the author advanced his narrative to the time of his writing, old age, I was moved by his grace and humility:

"I have aimed that my life should be, so far as possible, in accordance with the counsel of the philosopher, a living poem of intense action and of secret heroism on behalf of scientific culture. Poor is my work, but it has been as intense and original as my slender talents permitted"[595].

Thereupon, I was motivated yet again to try to one day illuminate this man's life and work. Cajal's narrative is weak and at times boring; he would admit as much. But he is not a literary man. Perhaps a different treatment of the material would yield a different result. Scientifically, there is a staining method called the Ehrlich method. In Chicago, a man jokingly said "How wonderful, we have been graced by the illustrious Dr. Ehrlich!" A funny coincidence.

I will be reading Cajal's final two non-scientific books: Charlas de café [Café Conversations] and El mundo visto a los 80 años [The World Seen from 80-Years-Old]. They must be ordered from Spain and I am broke, but traveling for a freelance job next week. Patience is a virtue.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been using a great resource that my father found for me. In a set of DVDs called "Understanding the Brain," from the series "The Great Courses," Vanderbilt University professor and neuroscientist Dr. Jeanette Norden teaches neuroscience. I am a third of the way through the course and feel that I have already learned a great deal about the anatomy and physiology of the brain. The last two "lectures" have dealt with the vision system. I was struck by this axiom:

"Vision is a construct of the brain."

As it turns out, the eye provides very little information to the brain. Although it has about 100 million photoreceptors, only one million neurons transmit to a place called the lateral geniculate nucleus [LGN], which projects to the visual cortex at Brodmann's area 17. [Blah blah, but writing helps me cement the knowledge]. There, and at other higher-order places, the brain begins to form a percept that we experience as "sight." What's more, I was amazed to learn that we technically have a constant blind spot, a gap in the macula [neural sheet at the back of the eye] where the optic nerve exits. The brain merely fills in that blank. Therefore, vision is an entirely personal and subjective experience.

I have said that one of my main questions about Cajal concerns his vision. How did he look at tissue from the brain and see neurons, whereas the rest of the field saw a reticulum? Well, the neuron was always there. He merely [merely, ha!] had developed a brain that could construct the proper percept. How did he develop that brain? I have ideas, but I will save those. Remember, though, that "man can be the sculptor of his own brain." And:

"A persevering and deliberate effort is capable of moulding and organizing everything, from the muscle to the brain, making up the deficiencies of nature and even overcoming the mischances of character--the most difficult thing in life"[4].

Finally, Dr. Norden discussed our perception of color. She said that there are no blue cones in the fovea, our main visual part [we are "foveate" animals, with high visual acuity] at the center of the macula. When we look directly at something "blue," it is our brain that creates the color. Blue, therefore, is a state of mind. But of course, Picasso and the jazz men understood this . . .

Thanks! And special thanks to DW [and AH] for helping to guide me through an eclipse. Literally, it can be quite formative, as Cajal explains of 1860. Metaphorically/creatively, the same.

14. Cajal & Goethe [Briefly, Again]

2009-11-04T14:15:00.000-05:00

The two diverge at the end of the road:

"And it is useless to affirm, with Goethe and many modern thinkers, that the search for final causes has no sense; that our task is to determine the how and not the why"[456].

[See: the beginning of Faust I]

Although he admired the German genius, Cajal was a completely classical thinker. I believe he belongs to the school of thought, the Western branch of which was founded by Heraclitus. Lao-Tzu provides a relevant Eastern reflection, in my opinion. I will trace this swerving path of influence somewhere else. There is a distinct philosophical mode, nearly perfected in the intellectual practice of these great men.

I am meeting with an extremely talented artist tonight, Pablo García, to discuss ideas. With a grant from Spain, he is preparing a Cajal-inspired visual art exhibit while studying at the School of Visual Arts. I had the pleasure of seeing a few slides of his work in Chicago; it is wonderful. I look forward to talking to somebody who shares my passion for this material.

13. Confucius vs. Kerouac: A Brief Interlude

2009-11-02T02:02:00.003-05:00

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!'" -Jack Kerouac, On the Road

"The Master said, 'If you cannot manage to find a person of perfectly balanced character to associate with, I suppose you must settle for the wild or the fastidious. In their pursuit of the Way, the wild plunge right in, while the fastidious are always careful not to get their hands dirty.'"
-Confucius, Analects, 13.21

I find this juxtaposition to be perfectly hilarious. Next to Confucius, the wise grandfather, does not Kerouac seem the child? But the question is: childlike or childish, to use Friedrich Schiller's brilliant distinction from his essay called "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry?" Here are lines from Schiller's famously inspirational poem, "Ode to Joy:"

45 Joyful as His suns are flying
46 Across the Firmament's splendid design
47 Run, brothers, run your race
48 Joyful, as a hero going to conquest.
49 As truth's fiery reflection
50 It smiles at the scientist

Cajal, the scientist, had a fiercely romantic heart, yet he succeeded in cultivating a more or less balanced mind. From Recollections: "ideas, like the white water-lily, flourish only in tranquil waters"[404]. I am finishing up that book, and will then post on the final section. I close with Confucius, on joy:

"The Master said, 'One who knows it is not equal of one who loves it, and one who loves it is not the equal of one who takes joy in it.'"
-Analects, 6.20

12. Recollections [III] and Philosophy

2009-10-26T23:39:00.005-04:00

The first part of Cajal's Recuerdas de mi vida is essentially the aubiographical bildüngsroman of a young romantic. Think of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, very much a mocking indictment of idealism. But unlike Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's pretentious protagonist, Cajal reaches the full potential of maturity. Though his name signifies the mythological artificer of wings, Stephen Dedalus fails to fly, whereas Cajal stays grounded all the while, with his eyes turned down to the earth. In this post, I will focus on Chapter II of Part II of Cajal's book: "The Story of My Scientific Work." Notice that Cajal believes the story of his life to be his work concerning nature, and not his personal development.
During the years from 1884 to 1885, Cajal published a collection of scientific articles called "The marvels of histology" in a professional weekly in Zaragoza that was edited by a classmate and friend. Rather popular, these writings were re-printed in a journal in Valencia, where Cajal then lived and worked. Cajal reveals that these outputs were "overflowing with fantasy and ingenuous lyricism"[293], and seems embarrassed by them. Thus, he detached himself, signing the pieces Doctor Bacteria, a name that he "used for [his] philosophic-scientific temerities and [his] semiserious critiques"[293]. Also, we know, for his fiction: Vacation Stories. It is clear that Cajal, ever self-aware in his maturity, neatly separated the functions of his mind. On the one hand, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was a gifted scientific scholar; on the other hand, Doctor Bacteria was a mediocre literary artist. This duality, emergent from his childhood and youth, defined his intellectual existence.

But Cajal had an undeniable flare for the philosophical. In my last post, I vowed that I would silence my own ideas in favor of Cajal's. In Chapter II of his autobiography he presents some beautiful and honest ideas from his early career. One concerns our composition:

"'This uniformity in the composition of organic tissues, liquid as well as solid, in the muscle as well as in the nerve, in the stem as well as in the flower; this precise repetition of the same melodic theme forms the primordial truth of histology'"[295].

Then, acknowledging the threat that this internal multiplicity poses to individual unity, Cajal consoles with a powerful appeal:

"'Can it be that within our organic edifice there dwell innumerable inhabitants which palpitate feverishly, with impulses of spontaneous activity, without our taking any notice of them? And our much talked of psychological unity? What has become of thought and consciousness in this audacious transformation of man into a colony of polyps? It is certain that millions of autonomous organisms populate our bodies, the eternal and faithful companions of glories and of toils, of which the joys and sorrows are our own; and certain also that the existence of entities so close to us passes unperceived by the ego; but this phenomenon has an easy and obvious explanation if we consider that man feels and thinks by means of his nerve cells and the not I, the true external world, already begins for him at the frontiers of the cerebral convolutions'"[295].

In other words: I am my brain.

Next, he discusses competition using the example of spermatozoa, only one of which can succeed. He calls this a "depressing truth (the universal struggle):"

"Thus, as in every civilized nation the vital competition is done away with or greatly attenuated by the division of labour which makes the citizens have common interests and aspirations, so also in the organic state, thanks to the foresight of the nerve cells, to the allotment of function rôles, and finally to the suppression of idleness and of excessive individual liberty, etc., the struggle disappears or is moderated, appearing only when the communal nourishmen (of organs or cells) is seriously threatened from either internal or external causes"[297].

Politically, Cajal was a socialist. Here we see why; he would like government to operate like healthy nerve cells. It should be noted that all of his intellectual positions were formed from under a microscope.

Cajal also addresses individual death in a world where nature is concerned only with the life of the species:

"'A single life, however great it may be, even though ennobled by the fires of genius, signifies nothing in the eyes of Nature. That a whole town should succumb; that entire races should be annihilated in the struggle for existence; that zoological species formerly powerful should be sacrificed in the barbarous battle matters little to the controlling principle of the organic world. --The essential thing is thing is to win the conflict, to reach the goal which is the final objective of organic evolution'"[298].

Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act V, Scene Five:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing"

The latter never looked through a microscope, but there is more than one way to find at truth. Cajal's material observations are especially convincing, though.

Lastly, I will transcribe Cajal's biggest idea. It is for those who have made it to the end of the blog. Enjoy:

"'Let us console ourselves with the consideration that if the cell and the individual succumb, the human species, and above all the protoplasm, are imperishable. The accident dies, but the essential, that is the life lives on. Comparing the organic world with a tree of which the trunk is the original protoplasm, of which the branches and leaves represent all the species produced later by differentiation and improvement, what does it matter that some twigs are broken off by the storm if the trunk and the basic protoplasm persist with unabated vigor, giving promise of shoots of ever greater beauty and luxuriance? Critically speaking, there are no independent individuals, alive or dead, but only one single substance, protoplasm, which fills the world with its creations, which grows and ramifies and moulds itself temporarily into ephemeral individuals, but which never dies. In our being there moves still that ancient protoplasm of the archiplast (that is to say, the first cell which appeared in the cosmos), the point of departure, perhaps, of the whole of organic evolution.

. . .

This protoplasm filled both space and time with its creations; it crawled in the caterpillar, dressed itself with rainbow colours in the plant, adorned itself with the crown of intelligence in the mammal. It began unconscious and ended conscious. It was the slave and plaything of the cosmic forces and it ended as the driver of nature and the autocrat of creation.

. . .

Has it reached its limit and exhausted its fecundity in the human organism or is it keeping in its portfolio plans for still higher organisms, for beings infinitely more intelligent and understanding, who are destined to rend the veil which covers first causes and to do away with all the laborious polemic of scientists and philosophers?

. . .

Who knows? Perhaps this demigod, protoplasm, will also died on that sad, apocalyptic day when the torch of the sun is quenched, when the embers in the heart of our globe become cold and there remain upon its crust only funerary debris and barren ashes! Day of horror, solitude filled with anguish, night of utter darkness, that in which, with the light of the Universe, the light of thought is extinguished! But no! This is impossible! When our miserable planet is worn out and frigid old age has consumed the fire at its heart, and the earth becomes a glacial and unproductive desert, and the red and dying sun threatens to overwhelm us with everlasting darkness—organic protoplasm will have attained the culmination of its work. Then the king of Creation will abandon forever the humble cradle which rocked his infancy, will boldly attack other worlds, and will solemnly take possession of the Universe!'"

Have a good night.

11.

2009-10-25T23:07:00.002-04:00

There are tens of thousands of words on this blog, neatly arranged. They represent my best attempts to share the soft, weak thoughts that I have tried to shape into elementary sentences. But I feel that this blog has thus far been no more than a convenient repository for my own crude ideas, which are irrelevant and unfounded. I stared this blog for Cajal, and I must remember to engage his materials and resist my theorizing. He is the wise one, and I am ignorant. I need to listen and read more, and talk and write less. And I must elevate my studies, my work, above the quotidian chaos of decision-making and personal life. There is so much noise and distraction in the world that hinders our progress.
But eleven is a new beginning; from now on, I will train my focus on research topic: the unification of artistic and scientific thought, as seen in the life and work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. He was a complicated man with flaws and defects. Yet he overcame in order to achieve intellectual greatness. In the process, he gave the world an abundance of truth. My working thesis is that his discoveries re-direct the light of Truth like mimetic mirrors, clear, refined glass surface in which we might see and understand ourselves clearly and acquire the natural wisdom of self-knowledge.

My next post will address the second part of Cajal's autobiography: "The Story of My Scientific Work."

10. Recollections [II] and Romanticism

2009-10-23T18:02:00.008-04:00

First, a word about the quote I have permanently added to the page. In his writing, Cajal quotes and cites Goethe perhaps more than any other literary figure. This is a man who mistrusts most in the humanities. But, of course, Goethe is one of the greatest writers who has ever lived, having penned the romantic The Sorrows of Young Werther [so powerful that it is believed to have contributed to the rise in a generation's suicide rate] and the classic Faust [the protagonist seeks that which, "deep within it, binds the universe together"(382-3)]. The symbol of the rainbow in Faust II, Act 1 is as brilliant as in The Book of Genesis itself. But few know that Goethe was also a scientist; his most fascinating work was on color theory [no surprise, now, that he chose a rainbow as the "changing-unchanged" element, rising above this wordly turbulence]. I propose a definite intellectual kinship between Cajal and Goethe, both of whom undertook joint investigations of science and art and, in the process, dissolved the artificial barrier between the two. As young men, both endured phases of intense romanticism, but their greatest and most enduring contribution to the progress of human understanding came later, in maturity. The two geniuses agree on many things, including the faith in work and the futility of words. Perhaps one day I will venture a more in-depth comparison. But for now, I'll just joyfully read Faust once more. When I open the book, light pours out. That is despite the fact that it is more or less impossible to understand what is going on in that chaotic closet drama. Quite an achievement!

For my bar-mitzvah in May 200, I received a book from our dear family friends. Their patriarch was a distinguished philosopher, Milton Munitz, whose first work on cosmology my mother helped publish. I remember that Milton was a warm and lovely man who happened to be brilliant. The book that his family gave me was called The Story of Philosophy, by Brian Magee [DK Publishing, 1998]. I just found it; I have it here before me. I opened the book, after ten years, to find the publisher's information and saw this inscription:

"Dear Ben, May you always search deeply for wisdom."

I loved this book even though I did not understand it. One of my favorite philosophers was Søren Kierkegaard [I think I liked the swashbuckling slash through his first name's "o"]. Once, at the dinner table, I was talking about some idea I had read and my sister put down her fork emphatically and said "I DON'T CARE ABOUT KIKIKI!!! SHUT UP!" All of us had a big, healthy laugh. I love my sister because senses bullshit and will not stand for it. I still have read no Kierkegaard. Some guy in my Dostoevsky seminar at Middlebury invoked his name and drew a triangle on the board one day but it was too much of a stretch; I was hardly listening. One can get lost in the language of philosophy. Cajal describes it as a "mania."

Anyway, looking in this book, Kierkegaard "proposed that the individual is "the supreme moral entity and that decision-making is the most important human activity -- through making choices we create our own lives"[209]. I agree with this, and so would Cajal. So maybe there is a [hyper]link here. But the real reason that I mention Kierkegaard is not to name-drop, or for association, but because I found a great quote from about genius:

"There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal."

This is very insightful stuff. The first kind of genius is the one our discourse features most prominently. It is a very romantic concept of genius. Just look in your mind right now and describe what you see. Or, all we might need to do is think of the immediate associations. Or we could look on the wall or Facebook profile of a number of young people for Jack Kerouac's famous quote: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to etc." etc. etc. blah blah blah it's the Benzadrine talking. Pure emotion, like a drug, fast-acting but not long-lasting. But it feels great. Yes, it is always great if girls put your picture on their wall. Or tattoo your words on their arm.

I will admit: Also for my bar-mitzvah [an unexpected theme of this post] I received a copy of On the Road from my mother's best friend of fifty years for my bar-mitzvah. I devoured it. Me and three friends planned a cross-country trip. We found a wooden box, to which we each contributed a dollar-or-two a day, and buried it under our favorite graffiti tag [REBS] near the bus stop. [It was promptly stolen].

But for the love of a Literary God, when we talk about this important mania, romanticism, let's start to remember Nietzsche's even more beautiful, but less sexy quote, from Thus Spake Zarathustra:

"For I would rather have din and thunder and stormy cursing than this deliberate, dubious cat calm; and even among humans the ones I hate most are the soft steppers and half-and-halfs and dubious, dawdling drift-clouds."

[Oh boy . . . you feel the charge going through you? I do. Those are powerful, focused words. Because Nietzsche is such a careful wordsmith, that word "hate" is throbbing with real feeling like an angry heart. Most importantly, though he is an eminently skilled crafter of sentences, Nietzsche's stylization does not overtake his meaning. His words are solid and sweet, like hard candy. And I believe that naturalist imagery is always more purely accessibly than any other. Lightning is Nature's ultimate Roman candle. Sorry, Jack. I will still and always love you, like an old girlfriend].

As a youth, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was as romantic as the protagonist of some nineteenth century French novel. In fact, he loved those books, which he found in his neighbor's house. His father, a "pure intellectual," did not allow fiction, or any fanciful flights of imagination for that matter. This included drawing, one of Cajal's gifts. Cajal had a "madness over drawing"[41]. In a truly hilarious episode, his father sought the advice of an artistic expert in order to paralyze his son's dreams. The only man available was a traveling house painter who was in town to whitewash the church's fire-burned walls. Young Santiago, eight years old, timidly presented drawing of an Apostle. The categorical verdict: "What a daub! Neither is this an Apostle, nor has the figure proportions, nor are the draperies right -- nor will the child ever be an artist"[40].

But Cajal's art was not merely a hobby, it was a fever. He was addicted to the experience of Nature, "the intoxication of the aesthetic instinct,"[130] and would often take long walks by the Aragon river and contemplate adventure. "I gave rein joyfully to my romantic dreams and consoled myself for my sentimental solitude"[61]. In fact, the author uses a completely new vocabulary to describe his feelings, as though he were a different person under their influence. His words are from the vocabulary of sickness, learned, perhaps from his father. He regarded these indulgences as "frivolity and irregular behavior"[154]. Eventually, hepronounces himself "cured of his artistic madness"[129].

He describes himself as having a "foolishly quixotic character"[213]. [More on Cajal's relationship to the Spanish hero at a later date]. Other terms: "determined and troublesome artistic tendencies"[99], "incorrigible idealism"[104], "dreamy sentimentality"[85]. Cajal was a very emotional youth, but, eventually, his powers of reason prevailed. I am learning a lot about his psychology and look forward to learning more as I receive more material. Apparently, in his youth, Cajal wrote poetic verses and an adventure novel; I have inquired as to their whereabouts. It is essential to remember that Cajal never lost his instincts, he only controlled them. As he says: "natural impulses, when they are very strong, may be modified somewhat, and often concealed themselves, but are never obliterated"[44]. Ain't that the truth!?

In the second part of the autobiography, I look forward to reading about Cajal's incorporation artistic instincts into his scientific work. This is the nature of my investigation. It must have been a delicate balance.

9. Recollections [1] and Kieslowski

2009-10-22T05:39:00.015-04:00

There is more than one way to treat life, the softest tissue. The most beautiful memoir that I have ever encountered is Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; the most truthful autobiography that I have ever read is Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Recuerdas de mi vida [Recollections of My Life, The MIT Press]. That vital document, is divided into two parts. The first, "My Childhood and Youth," accounts for the primitive history of a great mind. Cajal's literary method is pure illumination, including honest admission of imperfection. But it is the evolution of his elemental insight that drives the narrative, written truthfully and, at times, beautifully. [Sometimes it is naturally so].

The greatest personal influence on Cajal's development came from his father, Justo Ramón y Cajal, a traditional, self-made doctor. From his father, Cajal acquired the traits of character to which he claims to owe "everything that [he] is"[4]. These traits are:

"a profound belief in the sovereign will; faith in work; conviction that a persevering and deliberate effort is capable of moulding and organizing everything, from the muscle to the brain, making up the deficiences of nature and even overcoming the mischances of character -- the most difficult thing in life"[4].

Moreover, Cajal's father presented to him "the beautiful ambition to be something worth while, and the determination to spare no sacrifice for the fulfilment of my aspirations, nor ever to deviate from the direct path on account of secondary motivates or minor reactions"[4-5]. By the end of his life, when he wrote Recuerdas, Cajal understood the inherent beauty of the our endeavors for meaning, the importance of nearly monastic dedication, and the proper judgment of importance. And, concerning his career, a dogged resolution will later focus his scientific vision. These are the foundations of his character. "There is no doubt that, aside from hereditary influence, the ideas and example of a father are factors of decisive importance in the education of his children," Cajal states, "and therefore are essential determinants of their tastes and inclinations." The relationship of Cajal to his father is undoubtedly the principle external formative force upon his plastic brain. No understanding of Cajal's life and work is complete without a paternal examination.

But Cajal was also compelled by an inborn force he more than once calls the devil: the childish instinct to make mischief. It began naturally and innocently but became downright delinquent. "In the realm of the inclinations and tendencies of my mind," Cajal writes, "I was, like the majority of youngsters brought up in the small towns, an enthusiast for the open-air life and a tireless cultivator of games of strength and agility"[15]. This leads to an unconcern for the closeting classroom and a compulsion for physical activity that brings Cajal harsh punishment, even imprisonment, during his youth. "I was in my childhood a wayward creature, excessively mysterious, secretive, and unlikable," he admits[16]. But while the stories of his scampishness are entertaining and endearing [think of Antoine in Truffaut's Les Quatres Cents Coups], they are counterproductive to his success. Such is the process of growing up after all, a process of pushing against one's self although it feels as weighty as the world.

Cajal experienced this human struggle, but I will save the retelling of anecdotes. I am concerned here and now with his mental life. So, Cajal believes two predominant natural inclinations lent to his character "a somewhat strange aspect"[16]. I would forego humility and say "special." These are: "the investigation and contemplation of natural phenomena and a certain incomprehensible antipathy for social intercourse"[16]. Cajal is a naturalist thinker and writer; his sublime descriptions of walks along the Aragon River, a central and transformative metaphor in his life, are as fine as the finest literature. He writes, beautifully:

"Often, through long hours of contemplation I fell into a sweet lethargy; the gentle murmur of the ripples and the splashing of the water as it glided over the pebbles paralyzed my pencil, insensibly clouded my eyes, and produced in my brain a state of subconsciousness favorable for fantastic recallings of the past. The sound of the stream acquired little by little a quality of martial trumpets and the swish of the wind seemed to bear from the blue shores of the past the voice of tradition overflowing with heroic ballads and golden legends[61-2]."

The man gave his attention to the infinitely small. Even the physical descriptions of his characters in Vacation Stories are testament to this devotion to detail, which reminds me of Proust and Nabokov. Yes, his inter-personal intuition, as he readily admits, is not as shining [he awkwardly refers to his father as his "progenitor"]. But in his case, it hardly matters.

Cajal explains that at the age of seven or eight occurred three events "which had a decisive influence upon [his] later ideas and feelings"[19]. This sort of scientific organization makes factual research easy and breezy. These events almost symbolize themselves; a writer only has to add tiny but valuable insights and thin but sturdy bridges. The three events were:

1) "the commemoration of the glorious victories in Africa"[19], after the 1860 victory over the Moroccans at the Battle of Tetuan. This was a national apotheosis, and the initiation of strong and important patriotic feelings in Cajal. In the beginning, this included antipathetic instincts towards Moroccans, "the other." But later, he writes, he corrected this defect: "As time passed and I gained in understanding, I came to realize that, in respect of unjust and impetuous aggressions, all peoples are alike"[19].

2) "the falling of a thunderbolt upon the school and the church of the town"[19] which, I hardly believe, happened just as the children were "in the midst of the deep abstraction of the prayer . . . 'Lord deliver us from all evil'[19] and killed a priest. "For the first time there crossed my mind, already deeply moved," Cajal writes, "the idea of disorder and lack of harmony"[23]. The chaotic intervention explains Cajal's aversion to spiritualism, whose Good God he believes is falsely featured to be "a most tender father and a sublime artist"[23]. Fortunately, Cajal explains, he was not distracted by abstraction; he continued "strengthening the mind by continuous observation of the spectacle of nature"[24]. He exhibits an unflagging material focus.

3) "the eclipse of the sun in the year 1860," about which Cajal admits he had doubts. "Will science be mistaken?" he asks. But the moon appeared as predicted, as though the scientists had pushed it there. Scientific method managed to gain understanding of the unknown. His father drew his attention to "the kind of fear and of indefinable anxiety which takes possession of the whole of nature" when an event so seemingly "opposed to reason" occurs. How can nature be ignorant of our interests? This is Job's teleological, but essentially self-centered, question.

Summarily: "The eclipse of 1860 was a brilliant revelation for my youthful intelligence. I now realized that man, helpless and unarmed before the irresistible power of cosmic forces, possesses in science a heroic redeemer and a powerful and universal instrument of foresight and dominion"[25].

This is what a prophet of science saw and felt.

For more on these ideas, I direct you to perhaps the most powerful piece of cinema I have ever seen, the first installment of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's masterpiece The Decalogue, ten short filmic interpretations of the Ten Commandments. When a young boy and his father [like Cajal and his] choose to have faith in science, the message, from Deuteronomy 5:6, turns out to be quite different from Cajal's: Lo y'yeh l'cha elohim achairim, al pani [Thou shalt have no other gods before Me]. So thought-provoking and brilliant. Trois couleurs is a work a serious genius, too. Caveat spectator; they are profoundly moving of the innermost physical mechanisms, wrenching the heart and stirring the soul. Like the best art, they incite powerful feelings.

Interestingly, it seems to me that Kieslowski's teleological meditation, upon the existence of a cruel God, affirms Chaos theory. In his film, scientific calculation is a futile contrivance of man that fails to predict volatile nature. Cajal's interpretation of the uncontrollable, on the other hand, is positivistic. The Neuron doctrine, the fundamental idea of modern neuroscience, seems to affirm the absolute belief, which Cajal learned from his father, in free will as a tool to achieve progress. I propose a basic, but amoral, tension between Neuron theory and Chaos theory. In the brain of each individual, this struggle is constant. As capable beings, ourselves like the gods we have imagined, we have the potential to either create or destroy. I gather that the Hindu God Vishnu can represent creation and destruction. Inventors of religious story have understood this dual nature of the cosmos and the self [this is not reductive: one part of the philosophy allows for infinity].

For the utterly awful fear of God is really a fear of one's self, of that part that might "transgress." Look at how our species continues to destroy each other and our planet; we can get sick and do sick things. We invented the Apocalypse. See the warfare and the warming. The Bible contains a warning about our human nature that Kielowski inverts and updates. But the message is the same: we ought to be constantly aware of our relationship with the universe and our own ideas. Good art is reflective in that way, as a pool or a mirror. It illuminates experience, so that we can understand what exists and may impossibly attempt to define the word impossible. Cajal and Kielowski interpret omnipotent God in opposite ways, as Progress and as Chaos. Along the unraveling line of time's balled yarn, I hope that we shall at some point eventually know who reigns supreme. In the meantime, the artist must find a way to make these two chords, one major and one minor, Progress and Chaos, concord and then he must play for as long as he humanly can.

That's enough for now. I have only covered a small number of chapters from Recuerdas. Still to come are Cajal's affairs with art and his reflections upon death. I am truly enjoying this book. Cajal's fiction was admittedly [by him] mediocre, but so far his autobiography has real literary value. I will continue to share his insights. Thanks.

8 1/2. Pilsen

2009-10-20T12:12:00.006-04:00

In this half-post, I wanted to share the personal experience of my trip. I was lucky to stay with a warm, friendly couple named Lindsey and Justin in the awesome Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. It is an area with heavy Mexican influence and one that boasts incredible art, sprayed all over what seems, while walking, to be every singe wall. When looked at together, the buildings resemble a row of an old homeless man's teeth, each shaped uniquely and sharpened by the weathering world. One could study them for a long time; there are countless stories ready to be told. In short, the place has character. And so I admit that I love Pilsen, and here is why:

THE HOOD

THE MURALS

THE STATION

So there it is. But the last thing that I want to say is: God bless CouchSurfing!

8. Ha'aretz & España

2009-10-20T02:12:00.012-04:00

This morning I had the distinct pleasure of breakfasting with Dr. Illana Gozes, Professor of Clinical Biochemistry at Tel Aviv University, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, and President of the Israeli Society for Neuroscience [ISFN]. She is here presenting her research on Plasticity and Memory with a poster called "PolyADP-ribosylation is required for long-term memory formation in mammals." The work, which she told me is "out of left field" [my favorite field!], has exciting implications for Alzheimer's treatment. One found protein is currently undergoing clinical trials.

Dr. Gozes kindly invited me to the gathering of the ISFN tonight at the Hilton Chicago. Unfortunately, I could only spend about twenty minutes noshing and mingling. Some Israeli scientists had put up their posters at the event, and I spoke to a fellow named Volodya Yakolev about his, called "Learning to recognize numerous images." There are many Israeli abstracts that interest me as topic for potential articles, especially "Exploring the brain mechanisms of courage," from U. Nili and Y. Dudai of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Have scientists finally discovered what the poor Cowardly Lion lacked? Can we prevent this horrible disorder in the future?!? After all, lions should be fiercely pensive or pensively fierce, as in the title photo of this blog and the statues in front of The Art Institute of Chicago that I offered in post seven.

After the Israeli gathering, I traveled to Spain. I mean, I traveled to the Hyatt Regency Downtown to meet with Dr. Javier DeFelipe, Professor at the Instituto Cajal in Madrid and lead author of the new book "Cajal's Butterflies of the Soul: Science and Art" [Oxford University Press]. I bought my copy today; it is a stunningly gorgeous work with two-hundred-and-eighty-eight indelible images. Anyone who is in need of content for their coffee table, this is it. The illustrations are just breathtaking, purely and simply and, of course, naturally. It is expensive, but invaluable. I highly recommend it; there is brilliant text as well.

Dr. DeFelipe and I spoke for about twenty minutes before his presentation. He told me about the Instituto Cajal and their materials, and invited me to come to Madrid in order to investigate the "Legacy of Cajal" exhibit, which, although now homeless, includes letters and drawings. Apparently, there are now a couple of people excavating and translating Cajal's letters, which include correspondences with rival Nobelist Camillo Golgi. I was excited to learn that within the next three years there will be an English collection of Cajal's letters.

Dr. DeFelipe then gave an elegant presentation about Cajal's scientific art, or artistic science. Dr. DeFelipe quoted Cajal: "Only artists are attracted to science." The small audience chuckled, but this is not paradoxical, and that is precisely the point. I am currently one-hundred pages into Cajal's autobiography Recollections of My Life [The MIT Press]. In it, Cajal recounts his childhood obsession with art, which greatly disturbed his rigid, traditional father. In order to put an end to his son's untenable dream, Cajal's father solicited the opinion of the only "expert" around: a house-painter visiting the town of Ayerbe in order to whitewash the church's fire-damaged walls. Cajal timidly presented to the man his drawing of an Apostle. The house-painter proclaimed: "This child will never be an artist!" Cajal was eight years old. That gentleman was oh-so-wrong.

Moreover, Cajal made literary contributions to scientific language, coining numerous poetic, but truthful, names and descriptions of the human brain. He called our tangled web of neurons selva temerosa, or "dark and frightful jungle." Pyramid cells, which stand closely together in columns, the cells that I assume were the ones imaged in the Blue Brain Project movie I mentioned in an earlier post [Four] that I saw, he called las mariposas del alma: "butterflies of the soul." Thus, my favorite term and DeFelipe's title. Cajal called the little protrusions from dendrites, which Golgi and others dismissed as unimportant [but nothing is secondary in Nature, Cajal writes in Advice], las espinas, or "the spines," because they look like a rose's thorny stem. Que linda . . .

Dr. DeFelipe also made a memorable reference to Michelangelo. About his famous "Angel" statue, the Italian master said: "I saw an angel in the stone and carved until I set him free." So it is with our plastic brains, as well. As Cajal says in Advice, "man can be the sculptor of his own brain." I guess that we possess an Uncarved Block [P'U], to use a Taoist concept I learned long ago in a lovely book by Benjamin Hoff called The Tao of Pooh. It holds this potential for change in our brains, the plasticity that fascinated Cajal. Dr. DeFelipe will be sending me his own article from a few years ago in Nature Neuroscience called "Cajal and Plasticity." From his own disturbing educational experience, which I will relate in my next post, Cajal knew that, when treated rightly, the brain can be shaped over time. But he did not believe, theoretically, that the existing idea of the rigid reticulum would allow for such give-and-take. This was long before he became the first scientist to illuminate the material mechanisms, neurons, that facilitate the plasticity that defines our humanity. After learning about my specific interests, Dr. DeFelipe was adamant that I would love this particular article, which talks about all of this and more. I trust him.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal's true gift was vision. He uses the verb "to see" so often in his writing, a likely unconscious technique that reveals his chief concern. Cajal understood that the eye interprets external reality, that knowledge is necessarily removed. This is no tragedy, though. Cajal's clarity allowed for faithful representation of our world. According to Cajal, there is no ordering art and science. After all, to restate his egalitarian principle, nothing in Nature is secondary. According to Cajal, art and science are "pieces of reality." Just pieces, sharp pieces, to an infinite puzzle.

I had an excellent time in Chicago, although the conference events were difficult at times. Thirty-thousand people can overwhelm a novice, no matter how tall he is. Plus, I am now nearly broke. But I learned a lot, and that was my goal. Moreover, I leave here with renewed focus on my goal: to discover the secret to Cajal's clarified vision, and to learn how one might live an intelligent life in this world. Now I must procure a grant in order to facilitate this process.

My team of experts [sorry, I guess cable news has penetrated my vernacular], now includes Dr. DeFelipe, who has offered to guide me to certain materials and help me with a formal letter of support. I am very grateful for this. He also introduced me to his colleague Virginia, a visual artist herself. Along with her boyfriend Pablo, who now studies at the School of Visual Art in New York City and is preparing an exhibit on Cajal, Virginia prepared some spectacular content in Dr. DeFelipe's presentation and the book itself, I believe. I look forward to meeting Pablo back in NYC.

Also, sometime soon, I will be doing a podcast for a new series of neuroscience-themed content for the lay public that Noah is launching. More on that when there is more on that . . .

I will post next about Cajal's autobiography, which is fascinating. He is a more-than-capable writer; some of his rapturous descriptions of the outdoors are truly sublime.

Thanks for reading, Mom!

7. Sun's Day & Bus #51

2009-10-18T23:44:00.007-04:00

Like an East-born extrovert with round face all alit on his Name Day, the Chicago Sun showed itself at all Times this morning. Paradoxically, it reminded me of my first night in town. I sat alone at a bar self-spoon-feeding ice-cream and watching the Yankees game when a friendly, forthright, forty-year-old blonde began to mock me. "How's your sundae?" she teased.

Shining . . . shining.

Today's morning lecture, titled "Moving in an Uncertain World," was delivered by Daniel Wolpert, from the University of Cambridge. He applied Bayesian probability models to explain how the brain predicts and prescribes action. The inter-disciplinary nature of this conference continues to fascinate me. Creative scholars like Wolpert cross-pollinate multiple fields with potent data and information. Wolpert's research shows that the brain processes prior knowledge [e.g. memory] in addition to data [e.g. sensory input] in order to produce "beliefs" or, in mathematical language, "probabilities." Bayes's Rule is:

P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)

__________

P(B)

P( ) means "probability of" and | means "given."

Then, in a deft, symbolic switcheroo, he plugged in the appropriate neuroscientific concepts, where:

A=state
B=sensory input

Now substituted:

P(state|sensory) = P(sensory|state)P(state)

___________________

P(sensory)

The expressions translate thusly:

The posterior of the equation, P(state|sensory), is the belief after, the brain's product after synthesizing information. P(sensory|state), the likelihood, represents the noise in our own senses, the information that makes the process unnecessarily complicated, I guess. P(state) is prior belief, the statistics of the task. In other words, if I are preparing to hit a tennis ball, my brain uses the information from every tennis ball that has ever been hit to me by that opponent. In predicting what will occur, Wolpert proves that we ought to shift towards the mean of prior, to compensate for the "noise" of likelihood. If a good tennis player usually hits the ball to the baseline, I ought to shift there despite the fact that the naked probability dictates that it will arrive towards the center of the court. "Noise" is a fundamental limit on performance. Don DeLillo's novel "White Noise" comes to mind. His protagonist leads a difficult life, while the television at times spews voluminous nonsense in the background. Good thing that is not the case today . . . ha! Again, good art intuitively understands human phenomena. The languages are just different. One is true, one is fiction. So what? Brian Boyd's argument, through which I am slowly making my way, convincingly asserts that art is an adaptive trait. I will get to that all once I finish the book.

Anyway, I tried to pay excellent attention to Wolpert's lecture, and it exhausted me. SO, I decided to skip some lectures [Bueller? Bueller?] and take a cab to the Art Institute of Chicago for A Sunday Afternoon on Michigan Avenue. After a day and a half of arid, acronymic description, I sought some rich artistic expression to revitalize my soul. Monet and Picasso's interpretations of the human being in the universe are just as valuable as scientific discovery; one cannot exist without the other. As an Adidas commercial tautologically proclaimed: "Only greatness equals greatness." Greatness understands it, with a paint brush or a microscope. Greatness transcends. Greatness is never forgotten? Not always . . .

Toward the end of my her ninety-five-year-long life, my beloved Bubbie developed dementia. It was a slow process; she began forgetting in her mid-eighties. But at that time, early on, there was one seemingly insignificant fact she always knew. When she traveled to Israel [in the early 1960s], she rode Bus #51 to her cousins's house. We were all amazed. #51, she said each time we asked. I chalked it up to her devotion to detail. But it was hard not to wonder: How could she remember this, but forget something monumental such as her husband's premature death?

Well, now I know why, because science does. Richard Morris explained in his lecture "Brain Systems of Learning and Memory." I am sure that only a handful of people in the whole auditorium understood the entire presentation. But I was able to hook on, most likely because of my own memory, to this one hold. It had long been thought that long-term memory of inconsequential events did not exist. But Morris challenged this with two undermining words: not always. OK, here goes my attempt at an explanation. In experiment, strongly-tetanized neural pathways in the presence of a low concentration of something called KN-93 fail to stabilize. In other words, "important" events are prevented from being encoded by the brain. When, immediately following this, a second pathway is weakly-tetanized, its receptors bind to proteins left-over from the failed first attempt. Morris used the word "paradoxical" to describe this. Just think: a failed memory of the love-of-your-life could contribute to the indelible image of an unromantic fact of daily-life. The former is lost forever while the latter lingers on. Because, after the receptors from the weakly-tetanized pathway bind to the first pathway's proteins, long-term potentiation [LTP] stabilizes. Memory is formed. My Bubbie's memory, now mine, of Bus #51 immediately struck me as a perfect example of this. Who knows what important information, forever lost, produced proteins that paved the way for the Bus. Cajal says that there is no primary and secondary in Nature; every link in the chain proves equally valuable. Morris's findings on memory support this egalitarian theory.

A former SUNday school teacher, my Bubbie was my first teacher, supervising penmanship drills when I was young. I am proud to say that I still pen elegant characters, even in the notes I wrote during a lecture that reminded me of her. I loved her and am thankful for my memories, all that remains from nearly a century of life. I will not soon forget her; she keeps springing spritely up off of my trampoline hippocampus.

Plus, her daughter is my mother and I am my mother's SON, who likes to play with words.

Thanks for reading.

6. Magic & the Midwest

2009-10-18T02:29:00.000-04:00

On page three of his Advice, Santiago Ramón y Cajal cites the German physicist Emil du Bois-Raymond, writing:

"We must resign ourselves to the state of ignoramus, or even the inexorable ignorabimus."

My Society for Neuroscience badge might as well have read Benjamin Ehrlich: Ignoramus. Instead, I received a yellow [no positive associations, after reading Dostoevsky], non-member badge with my comparatively lowly degree: BA. As I said, one ignoramus, among thirty thousand scientists. But, as one of my many basketball coaches over the years once told some of us kids, "God gave you two ears and one mouth. Do you know what that means? [No answer]. It means you should do twice as much listening as you talking." Today I listened at least twice as much as I talked, and scribbled more notes than I thought possible.

One of my religious school teachers once told me a story about his friend the College Philosophy Student. This fellow wrote a paper arguing that when you get on a plane, and the cabin rattles, and the shades are down, it is necessarily (that word again) taking off from the ground and flying through the air from Point A to Point B. The professor marked the paper an F. It is impossible to logically disprove even the absurd counterargument. But we can certainly imagine it. They close the windows, shake the cabin, and change the scenery. Philosophically speaking, then, flying could be an illusion. [Now, it can be validly argued that such an abstract technicality does not really matter. But that is another story entirely].

These are the types of questions I anticipated from the first lecture of the conference, called "Magic, the Brain, and the Mind." The two performers/speakers were Eric Meade, mentalist, and Apollo Robbins, thief. Meade spoke about manipulating remembrance by planting false memories [Proust is rolling in his grave]. Meade also mentioned the work of Elizabeth Loftus. But there was little science in his presentation; he ended by urging the audience to investigate some of the phenomena he and other magicians had noticed during their careers.

Robbins spoke about controlling attention and inducing lapses of focus. He claimed a "grift sense," a sort of biofeedback that allowed a good magician to receive information from his audience and adjust. The three aspects he noted were proximix/personal space [putting the mark on defense], movements [misdirecting], and interior dialogue [confusing]. He ended by misquoting Albert Einstein, saying "Reality is an illusion, but a good one." [Actual quote: Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one]. All in all, I would have rather just watched Les Mozarts des pickpockets. Neither presentation was so substantive.

Next, I attended the Public Symposium: In Celebration of Darwin: Evolution of Brain and Behavior. This was fascinating, although at times too technical for me [and many others, whom I noticed were bored or confused]. In the introduction, the speaker framed the event by altering the famous Theodosius Dobzhansky quote: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." The speaker proposed that the same could be said about neuroscience.

All presenters offered brilliant data for arguments about behavior, function, and evolution of the nervous system. All integrated the discoveries and conclusions of their peers. Molly E. Cummings from the University of Texas at Austin spoke about monogamy. Only 3% of species are monogamous. Ecology predicts monogamy; when resources are sparse, creatures bond in pairs. Something must cue the brain to the environment. That something is the neuropeptide arginine vasopressin [AVP], which acts is an antidiuretic hormone, affecting water balance. In voles, AVP corresponds with time spent huddling with partners. Then it got complicated [re: V1a receptor, 334 allele], but Cummings eventually used inter-specific analysis to draw sound conclusions about human behavior. Monogamous tendency is genetic. And our microsatellite region upstream of the AVP gene shows variation, as in voles. I was scribbling so fast I am still not sure that I understand, but it was awesome.

Lastly, as an example of intra-individual [within a lifetime, phenotypic] evolution, Cummings spoke about maternal care, citing the work of Michael Meaney with Norway rats. It seems that Lamarckian theory is making an "exciting" comeback in the field of evolutionary biology. FASCINATING! Parental investment is defined as "any investment that increases the offspring's chance for survival at the cost of the parent's ability to have more offspring." It is a question of now versus later. Data show that better quality mothers, rats who perform the behaviors licking and grooming of offspring with higher frequency, produce offspring that are in turn higher quality mothers. And genotype does not predict this; quality of the rearing mother does. Change is affected in the stress region of the brain upon emotions such as fear. The chemical process of methylation, which prevents gene transcription, occurs with high frequency in low quality mothers, and with low frequency in high quality mothers. It is variation in care of offspring that determines adult phenotype. Epigenetics allows for plasticity in environment without a DNA change. Again, I caught everything that I could.

Ralph Greenspan of The Neurosciences Institute spoke about fruit flies, with whom humans share genes, cellular mechanisms/pathways, and synaptic plasticity. He spoke about aggression, a behavior that underlies humans and fruit flies despite their different anatomies. One of the regulatory systems for fighting is called the Y system [in flies, NPF], which also governs courtship, sensitivity to alcohol, and feeding. The same suite of behaviors occurs in diverse species, a fact which, combined with a couple of other facts that I did not understand well enough to repeat [one has to do with EGFR ligand regulation of sleep/wake cycles, the other has to do with the hypothalamus and pars intercerebralis being "cousins"], leads Greenspan to conclude that there is a common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates. In fact, he concluded his talk with a poem by William Blake, "The Fly" [Greenspan stopped after the second stanza, I give here the entire poem:

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

The evening lecture was called "Origins of Abstract Knowledge: Number and Geometry." It was delivered by Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University. It was brilliant; I have pages and pages of notes. Her goal is to arrive at a natural number and natural geometry, which would apply to everything, lie beyond perception and action, and be uniquely human. Her research, and the research of others in the field, is tireless and scrupulous. She revealed that there are two core systems of numbers [1-3 objects and sets, with approximate cardinal values] and two core systems of geometry [navigation and form analyses]. There were found to be five signatures of performance in human infants: ratio of dependence [newborn 1:3, 6 mo. 1:2, 9 mo. 2:3], modality and format invariance, addition equals comparison [by the same ratio as signature #1], the ratio in substitution is less than that of addition, and number is linked to length.

The same signatures are present in human adults. Ratio=approx. 7:8, all other signatures present. They are also present across cultures [i.e. remote Amazonians], which means that it is fair to say they are universal. In the brain, this corresponds to activity in a region of the parietal cortex hIPS [in humans]. Monkey IPS responds in the same way. Something theoretically big is building here.

Then Spelke talked about four important findings in humans. The first deals with symbolic arithmetic, during which fMRI testing shows activation in the same region [hIPS]. The second: better students are shown to have sharper nonsymbolic number representations [they tracked fourteen-year-old students from kindergarten and controlled for things like verbal ability]. Third: before kids learn symbolic arithmetic, they draw on the approximate number system to solve symbolic number problems. Last: children who are better at nonsymbolic arithmetic go on to greater achievement in first-year school math.

Non-human animals also have a system founded on nonsymbolics. But this system is inevitably incomplete because it has no exact cardinal values and no operation of "adding one." SO, enter the second core system of number, small, exact number of objects. There are limits: set sizes of only up to 3, must be cohesive objects [i.e. no piles of sand], and it offers no explicit cardinal values [ball and ball, not 2 balls].

Guess what? Studies show that children combine these systems when they master verbal counting. It is language that synthesizes abstract knowledge. Intuitive conclusion, but nonetheless cool for a writer to learn.

That's it. I'm exhausted. Thanks!

5. Vacation (II) & the Prince of Denmark

2009-10-12T09:47:00.006-04:00

The woman next to me was snoring. That's right, snoring, in the middle of Hamlet! Apparently, tragedy bores some to sleep.

I had excellent, centered orchestra seats for Saturday's Broadway performance of Shakespeare's classic. Between that woman's steady, equine, nasal choking and the untimely, shrill, trilling laughter of the rest of the audience, I tried to remind myself that in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare's new plays were rowdily attended by all segments of society, even the dreaded "riff" and "raff." These days, the Bard of Avon is usually confined to an Ivory Tower. But I believe in the shared artistic experience. I took a class in college on the television show The Wire, the most brilliant and inspirational series in history, as great as many great films and novels. We viewed every single episode together, as a class. I had already seen all the content, but, in the company of my peers, I appreciated new aspects of the work, especially humor. I suppose the same phenomenon of collective viewing occurs at the theater. Hamlet is indeed fermented in the fast-acting, black serum of sardonicism. I only think that, in a perfectly valid humorous reading, more of Shakespeare's jokes are on the Prince of Denmark himself than Law's overly-demonstrative, Vaudeville/Hollywood command-of-expression allowed. But I have no objection to jokes on a serious stage; any Jewish person could tell you that humor is an adaptive trait. Without laughter, the best medicine, chasing down to our sensitive stomachs, the public might not want to swallow such an intoxicatingly depressing pill as Hamlet. A few particularly pessimistic peptides:

I have of late, but / wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all / custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems / to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy / the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, / appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent / congregation of vapours[2.2,297-305. I cite from the Arden edition, 2001].

[I hope nobody thought that they were there to see Memphis. The lines mingled outside. Many people do visit Broadway on vacation, after all].

Speaking of "vacation," the fourth story in Santiago Ramùn y Cajal's short-fiction collection Vacation Stories, titled "The Corrected Pessimist," happens to pertain to Shakespeare. The protagonist, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor named [rather uncreatively] Juan Fernández, is a paper thin re-creasing of Shakespeare's archetypical origami swan-prince, with some spilled-inky shades of Moliere's "Misanthrope." As the story begins, Cajal immediately reads us in on the case. We are told that Fernández is "suffering from a fresh wave of nausea toward life and indifference toward society"[122]. He has ceased to practice medicine and begun to neglect his friendships. For slight, self-affirming pleasure, he reads Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, pictured left, who share his negative opinions. In short, the protagonist is feeling what jazz men would call "blue." "For unhappy Fernández," Cajal summarizes, "life was a tasteless, endless bad joke that Nature was playing for no apparent reason or purpose"[123]. And, on top of it all, his career is a failure and he is unsuccessful in love.

At the climax of his misery, at four o'clock in the morning, Fernández drearily discourses on doom. "Humanity, which arose from death, must end in death," he states[128]. He calls the Sun an "unfeeling, habit-ridden star"[128]. Then he directly addresses a divinity, whom he calls the Prime Mover, asking a theodical question: "Why did you create the enemies of life, the cruel insidious pathogenic bacteria"[128]? Furthermore, Fernández claims, we had no chance of combating these diseases because our senses and intelligence are weak and faulty. Man himself is "as weak and overwhelmed as some bird transfixed by a snake"[130]. All in all, the speech lasts four outrageously pessimistic pages before finally finishing with two disillusioned exclamations: "What a cruel sarcasm! What a bloody irony"[130]!

However, "the Corrected Pessimist" suddenly pivots when, like Goethe's Faust, Juan is visited by an insightful, inciting spirit. After his final words, thunder roars, and the shadow of an old man appears in a purple cloud. "I am the spirit of science," the man says, "sent by the Great Unknown to enlighten men's minds and sweeten the sad fate of every living creature, in gentle gradations"[131]. He lists the different names that different men have called him: intuition [philosopher], fortunate coincidence [scientist], inspiration [artist], and luck [merchant]. The spirit of science speaks wisely and from a divine perspective, telling Juan that he and our species are "merely the means, rude links in an endless chain, simple terms in an endless progression"[131]. Moreover, according to the spirit, we will never understanding the whole course, for "the Cosmos is a great system of hieroglyphics, of which scholars from each epoch will laboriously decipher only a few phrases"[132]. After setting the scale straight by focusing on our smallness, the spirit of science decides to give Juan a gift. "Once and for all," the Spirit says, "you are going to lose your innocent illusions . . . [you] will see objects within [his] normal focal range as though they had been amplified a thousand time"'[138]. This sight will last for one year.

And so Juan sees the world as never before. Cajal writes that "[Juan's] eyes had been turned into microscopes, though not by changing the optical dioptrics"[139]. He sees particles in motion, including disgusting bacteria in his love's breath. Instead of the continuuous, mosaic world, Juan lives in the discontinuous, crystal world[141]. Because of this vision, he has been transformed into "an extraordinary being, a portentous genius"[140]. His life changes dramatically. He is now a well-suited scientist. His former love now becomes his wife. They are successful within the species; they produce one progeny. What's more, they are even happy! For Cajal, life is how one sees the world; his own vision was the primary tool of his own genius.

Alas, in Hamlet, the protagonist meets a different, more emotional spirit that alters his vision: his father's ghost. Immediately before the ghost's arrival, in Act 1, Scene IV, Hamlet speaks to Horatio and Marcellus about his uncle, the king, Claudius:

So, oft it chances in particular men/ That for some vicious mole of nature in them, / As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty/ (Since nature cannot choose his origin), By their o'ergrowth of some complexion, / Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, / Or by some habit, that too much o'erleavens/ The form of plausive manners -- that these men, / Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, / Being Nature's livery or Fortune's star, / His virtues else be they as pure as grace, / As infinite as man may undergo, / Shall in the general censure take corruption / From that particular fault. The dram of evil / Doth all the noble substance ofte dout / To his own scandal[23-38].

When it appears, Hamlet calls the ghost, whom he has given his own name, an "old mole"[170]. Truly, this dram of vision will, henceforth, dout Hamlet's noble faculties to a scandal of revenge. Shakespeare understands that Hamlet's sickness is inside himself; more specifically, we know it is in his brain.

Shakespeare's poetic mimesis of grief and depression in Hamlet, an investigation of mind and madness, shows his supreme empathy, the most active and important quality in storytelling. But he also thought much like a scientist. Take, for example, this quote from The Merchant of Venice.

"Tell me where is Fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head"[3.2,63]?

We now know the answer: the head, which my father always facetiously calls "the principal instrument for thinking." Later this week, thirty thousand people will be attending a conference devoted to the jewel inside that head case, the brain, which constitutes two percent of our body weight but demands roughly twenty percent of our resting energy. I will be a humbled one in those Chicago crowds. I will write updates from the annual Society for Neuroscience conference every night, starting Friday. I am still figuring my conference itinerary now, but it so far includes lectures titled "Magic and the Mind," "The Origins of Abstract Knowledge," and, of course "Cajal's Butterflies of the Soul, Science and Art." There will be a wealth of knowledge there.

Again, thanks for reading! I've ordered Cajal's 600+ page autobiography, Recollections of My Life, and will write about that book after I return from Chicago.

4. Vacation & Imagination

2009-10-08T20:09:00.002-04:00

Let us not now speak of how I got my copy of Vacation Stories by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. What matters is that I got it, and I am so, so glad that I did. A legendary genius scientist's attempts at the feat of literary fiction make for a truly fascinating book. The compilation containing five meaningful stories but, in fact, Cajal wrote twelve tales, all early in his career; but seven were lost. The remaining pieces went unpublished for twenty years on account of their author's insecurities, both professional and personal. For example, Cajal thought that his deployment of rebellious themes might disqualify him from funding in the blind eye of bureaucracy, and, moreover, he insisted they were wholly without literary merit. Santiago Ramón y Cajal is the first author I have ever read wishes his own work to a mythical sleep of oblivion. In the preface to the collection, he rationally criticizes his own work like a thorough doctor. And he is right to do so; his novice narratives lack technique and craftsmanship. But, nevertheless, they are intensely thought-provoking pieces of science fiction in which the author's genius is a bright and radiating fluorescent glow. In the 1905 publication of Vacation Stories, Cajal called himself "Dr. Bacteria." That was one year before he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Apparently, he was a polymath with a sense of humor. This, it is fair to say, was a rare and brilliant man.

Of course, a rare man would write a rare preface. The preface to Vacation Stories indeed is unlike any other preface I have ever read. Essentially, in his pre-performance speech, Cajal forgoes grandiloquence, speaking instead softly. He restrains himself from using any rhetoric; I am especially struck by the absence of hyperbole. On the whole, his writing is eminently controlled. The result is a relentlessly honest voice that speaks about itself and the world in the same, smooth tone. Sometimes, harshly but beautifully, like a gust of wind, he sings. The following is his sweetest verse:

"In human consciousness, as in the heavens, stars seem to keep shining even after they have been extinguished for some time"[14].

No, the words are not precious. Sure, the poetry could use polish. It is simply a statement. But the words are but a vessel for the idea, which is itself translucent and celestial. For feelings persist even past reason's argument, Cajal explains. I sense fertile soil of metaphor beside that delta of truth. For as we walk forward through life, in a shadowed valley or anywhere, we are at times inclined to look up at our emotions, those burning but noble human phenomena, those distant lights of loving memory. Perhaps New York City is a harsh place because its people cannot feel the stars at night.

In the preface, instead of unduly magnifying his own or anyone else's literary achievement, Cajal trains his microscope onto the nature of art. Here, his scientific description of the creative process sounds rather unspectacular. It is "the exclusive work of a few wheel in the cerebral mechanism, or in other word," Cajal writes, "the motor discharge of some neglected fallow fields in the brain"[1]. "Neglected, fallow fields." I cannot wait to read the line in Spanish; I am curious to hear it as lyric, to see if Cajal was a musical thinker and writer. After all, I cannot check his iPod playlist. There must also be connotative layers. But what the line appears to mean is, despite what so many have said, art is not eternal. There is no possible immortality this way, the way that a writer such as Faulkner suggests when, in his 1949 Nobel Prize banquet speech, delivered after decades of apocalyptic human devastation, he powerfully asserts that the soul of man will endure. What a speech; his Southern voice, like a death row inmate's last glass of bourbon, chills the spirit. I, for one, am happy that Faulkner was not too drunk to give it. But although beautiful, the central idea is not materially true. It implicitly assigns evolutionary meaning to art, referring to it as a survival mechanism. Is he scientifically correct? Some seek to prove so. Brian Boyd, Nabokov expert, wrote a book called "On the Origin of Stories," which just arrived at my home. In it, he argues for art as an adaptive human behavior. The scholarship falls within a theoretical segment sometimes called "literary Darwinism." I have not heard good things. Like most theorists, who float so far from any textual tether, these folks appear to be light on fact and heavy on theory, which is only ever as heavy as hot air. I may not read a word of it, but rather look towards more serious scholars, of which Boyd happens to be an example. His epic, two-volume biography of Nabokov ["The Russian Years" and "The American Years"] is as scrupulous as the picky subject himself would have demanded.

Back to "neglected, fallow fields;" it is a prime example of an inconvenient truth. The quote describes that our essence is not pure white, or glimmering gold, or double platinum, Its color would not appear at all poetic unless someone is poet enough, as Rilke says, to call forth its riches. And that is what it will take, going forward truthfully. Because the fact remains that the most foundational column of human life, the cerebral cortex, supporter of consciousness itself and perceptive awareness, memory, attention, thought, and language, is weak and gray. But oh how it can light up! I just watched an incredible short movie by the scientists of the Blue Brain Project, a mission led by Dr. Henry Markram in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their models of Cajal's neurons are based upon algorithms of necessity, but from these root truths so much beautiful knowledge can grow. In the movie, a simulation swooped around and through the middle of a neuron, dense and complicated as a ball of rubber bands, each one lighting up a different color as its synapse fired. The music was Strauss's An der schönen blauen Donau op. 314 [a.k.a. "The Blue Danube"], a perfect choice, with its waltzing call-and-response, like the central system's reflex mechanism, from violins to winds [to my ear]. Never has strict and simple necessity sounded so wonderful. The movie was scientific art, certainly more advanced and sophisticated, but no more true or creative, than Cajal's drawings over one hundred years ago.

But Cajal himself refuses to acknowledge this greatness, instead he presents himself with old-fashioned humility. This honest and peaceful perspective informs everything Cajal writes. In the preface, for example, he completely unironically criticizes his own stories. It is not a hollow, postmodern joke; the man has respect for quality literature. He perceives ideal forms, they just exist materially. If Cajal was between Plato and Aristotle on Raphael's School of Athens fresco, in that scene at the vanishing point, the European intellectual Mount Rushmore, he would be pointing not at the sky and not at the ground, but at his own internal holy temple, his brain, with a curious finger [check out my profile picture. Finger at the side of the head! Is it a gun!? Oh my God! Should we be afraid? No, he is thinking]. But despite his belief, Cajal is nonetheless fascinated by the splendid mechanism that is art. This manifests itself in Advice, in the form of quotations from thinkers as oppositionally disciplined as Goethe and Sir Isaac Newton. Here, in the preface, Cajal even sticks his sniffing, but decidedly not upturned nose into a pile of literary theory. "Pure desire that the protagonists be more like real men than symbols," he writes, "and that they offer the passions, defects, and limitations of real flesh-and-blood people"[xxiii]. Thus, he exalts the realistic narrative as the conditioned choice of our natural will. Cajal's own mediocre work, of course, contradicts his qualitative artistic philosophy, but since he himself freely admits his flaws, there is no good reason for me to further criticize. There is so much more to analyze.

But allow me a brief digression for the sake of healthy argument [what can I say? I am trained]. Vladimir Nabokov famously said that "Art is a divine game." Being scientifically minded, he observed the material world in precise detail, down to the smallest, brightest butterfly's wing. His writing reflects this perfect understanding of appearance, microscopic in focus. He knew certain things about the world so intimately and well that hubristically he felt he could re-create them using the same mechanism, altered artistically. And, despite the mythologically advised-against Icarian danger, he managers to fly like a patterned kite, in my opinion. The kite is imagination, which "flies--we are its shadow on the earth," according to Nabokov, who, not surprisingly, is concerned with light. He is the boy who makes shadow puppets in the lamplight. To him, identities are not shades as in the Underworld, but shades of infinite color. Because of this possibility, it is a positive and healthy philosophy. It follows that Nabokov claimed, rather proudly, priggishly, even, to have never had psychotherapy. His particular algorithmic worldview worked for him. In Lolita, he invents love without age and, by humanizing Humbert Humbert, summarily offers a great, classic romantic novel. In Pale Fire, he uses words as self-reflective mirrors to set-up a show of bouncing, colored lights--characters, events, and actions, that change meaning with every turning page. In Despair, he gymnastically stretches the archetypal doppelgänger theme, a psychological one, thus making it as plastic as our brains themselves are. But in the end, just as each author before him, Nabokov based the plot on the timeless theme of plotting, in this case to kill. He did not need to worship internal structures in order to accomplish his aesthetic goal. Like the best jazz musicians, Nabokov quickly mastered the classical form, and then innovated. He ceased digging deep, like the hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's famous critical scheme, in order to build and design in an individualized fashion, like a beaver. There are, then, three types of thinkers: the hedgehog, who knows one thing, the fox, who knows many things, and the beaver, who knows how to build things. I have heard and read that the beaver is perhaps the only animal, other than the human, who changes its environment to suit its personal needs. Call me crazy, go ahead, but does this beaver's face not look a bit like Nabokov's own?

If an author lives in the philosophical, forested neighborhood, possessing a truly intelligent worldview, as Nabokov surely did, he may build his own damn dam/house. One may not care for Nabokov's design, but then, one can always go to Shakespeare's place. It is expansive and there is plenty of room inside. Cajal could not have anticipated Nabokov's innovations of artistic progress, and would have dismissed it, anyway, as artifice. But that is a matter of taste, and there ought to be no hierarchy in that individualized, sensory realm. Moreover, I disagree. Realism is not a necessity in art, but a style. Only neuro-realism is a necessity, a clear, consistent, and connective vision of the world as emanating from the material of one's unique brain, which is incessantly adapting but gradually evolving. Is there depth to that? Who knows, in truth. Depth, after all, necessarily has a subjective, relational definition. It depends where one is situated. The virtue, then, is not depth, but truth.

It must be said that one of Cajal's mental gaps is his lack of imagination. The characters, plots, and themes of his stories are unoriginal. But someone who is outdoors, as Cajal longed to be and often was in his developmental years, does not need to think about summoning it from within. Rationally, it makes sense that a materialist, brain dense with reality, would have this unnecessary impulse underdeveloped. But the British author Graham Greene wrote insightfully, in The Power and the Glory, that "hate is a failure of imagination." I believe this is true; a profoundly negative view of something, or someone, represents a lack of empathy. Without the tendency of empathy, a materalist cannot incorporate the foreign element into the realm of the possible. I do not yet know about Cajal's specific biases, but I am sure that he had them, as all human beings do. He himself understood the inescapable power of suggestion and followed the pseudo-science of hypnosis with great interest throughout his life. Cajal was an ardent nationalist, which makes his focus narrow and self-determined. And it must also be said that, in the Biblical tradition, Cajal does not appear to accept women as equals. He was married for fifty-one years, but in Advice he describes a wife as more or less a glorified laboratory assistant. While the specifics of Cajal's biography remain mysterious to me, his work contains some clues. I will not judge him until I have all of the facts of his life's case.

Some of these facts are hidden in Vacation Stories, a book in which Cajal keeps his tales true to his own life. Not surprisingly, then, all of his protagonists are scientists. Obviously Cajal knows the type. Allowing exceptions, he explains that the psychology of scientists is "essentially amoral and profoundly egotistical"[xxii]. This follows logically because if their truth is definitively material, not ideological, then they necessarily must believe in free will of tangible bodies because truth lives inside of them. It is in their brains, not in abstract relationships. But he could have merely said "independent," which would have subtracted the impulsive charge. There is intention here; Cajal knew the value of a well-chosen word. It is the currency in his scientific Utopia. But I believe Cajal's assessment is true because it matches my intuition; as a species, knowledge and experience tell me that we do tend towards selfishness [around New York City, anyway]. Since the end of the Victorian Era, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the institution of marriage has weakened considerably. Today, in America, fifty percent of marriages end up in divorce. Is this a manifestation of a selfish gene? In the future, there could be a "cure for selfishness." I could imagine a word in which a human being could perhaps choose his psychology pharmaceutically, if it has not already be irreversibly pre-selected by genetics. But with no moral imperative of kindness, no mitzvahs or "Golden Rule," this is no longer a traditional problem. I see no traditionally moral solution to the issues wrought by this inevitable progression. Perhaps morality has will be annihilated [or has it already been?], as Nietzsche suggested. Perhaps there we must indeed revaluate our values. The only ethic, going forward scientifically, appears to be truth. But I imagine that there will be blood in the process. Excuse me, but it is hard to read science fiction without thinking about ethics, especially if one went to middle- and high school"The Ethical Culture Fieldston School." But I am convinced that Cajal intended these questions.

After declaring his hypothesis of character, which necessarily includes the data of his own self, Cajal's first story examines a scientist's relationships. The thematic mode is romantic vengeance. The protagonist of "For a Secret Offense, Secret Revenge" is a half-of-a-hundred-years-old scientist who works for a vague laboratory called "Research." Again, I must note that Cajal has transgressed against himself. His character in this story if far from flesh-and-blood; he is barely bones. Yet the man is on fire. Cajal writes that "disquieted at night by the devouring fever of investigation and the desire to emulate glorious reputations." This idea of illness ought to be read in conjunction with the "Diseases of the Will" chapter in Advice. Cajal's father was a doctor who wanted his son to have his same career. His relationship with the medical profession is an interesting one that I hope to further explore. For Cajal studied anatomy at his father's university [Zaragoza]; the two worked together dissecting cadavers. Meanwhile, Cajal used all of his money to buy an old-fashioned microscope and used it to open up his own laboratory. When he had finished studying and working in his father's field, he got his license to practice medicine. I suspect that this was entirely ceremonial; Cajal never practice medicine at home [he was previously, however, a military doctor during wartime in Cuba 1874-5, but more on that in a later post], and probably never had such an intention. There must have been an emotional reason that he followed this course, and iteration of love for a father, perhaps.

Speaking of love, in "Secret Offense, Secret Revenge," Cajal calls making love the "perennial preoccupation in life"[2]. This is a perfectly rational statement that is flatly true. It even aptly carries subtly mountainous connotations of struggle, stress, and burden. But in my opinion, from where I am sitting, it lacks depth. Naturally, I believe we can experience love in two ways. I offer the Allegory of the Swimming Pool. In the shallow end of pool, all grown people can manage to keep their feet on the ground. But superficial aspects of the body, above a certain point depending on height and posture, are easily discernible. Those people never get all wet, but always get at least a little bit wet because, after all, you cannot swim unless you are in the pool. That pool is clear and reflective; it is the gene pool.

The second type of lover will allow his feet to leave the ground. He is not flying and he never will, but he knows that. Nonetheless, he wades slowly towards the deep end. It is frightening but it is freeing. People in the deep end communicate more immediately but also more lastingly, with the sense of touch and the sound of echo. I remain amoral; neither lover is "better." Cajal seems to have a super-rational view of love and marriage. Again, I must learn about his life experience. For he says, shockingly, that for scientists "a woman represents at the most--a fleeting disturbing episode that occurred in their youth"[18]. Of all the emotions, love is the one most informed by experience. There must be something going on here, a combination of his genetics and his conditioning. I need to know the things that happened to him. For Cajal, in the voice of his narrator, which may or may not be his own, calls emotional, passionate love "irredeemable illusion." In this view, it is a natural chemical phenomenon that merely helps us pass along our genes. Scientists and lovers, he says, are motivated by personal gain, but in fact work only for the good and glory of the species. Of course, he is right, except for the rare but boring case of pure altruism [see: Dostoevsky's "perfectly good man," Prince Myshkin in The Idiot]. But I ask: What accounted for this understanding and acceptance? Did Cajal ever swim in the deep end? Let us not forget the young, fictional sage Michael "Squints" Palledorous from the movie "The Sandlot," who risked drowning for a kiss, a magic moment that lasted a lifetime. He and Wendy had nine children!

That is all for now. I am in New York City through the weekend. I am looking forward on Saturday to seeing Hamlet on Broadway starring Jude Law. I will write about the rest of Vacation Stories, and perhaps the Boyd book, if it is terrific, as theoretical criticism is once every Haley's Comet [see: George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky]. Also, Boyd is coming to the 92nd Street Y for a joint lecture on Monday, November 16, the day before Nabokov's posthumous manuscript, The Original of Laura, is released. I am very excited to read that book, as well as Boyd's theory. I respect him immensely. I look forward to hearing him speak, if I can get a ticket.

It's all about the glasses.

Thanks for reading!

3. Declaration & Advice

2009-10-05T23:09:00.013-04:00

I know that I want to spend my life studying and writing, as independently as possible.

In my second post, I explained the origins of my current project, which concerns the legendary Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. After I learned the most basic information about Cajal, I thought to write down the following question: HOW DID HE SEE IT SO CLEARLY? Camilo Golgi, distinguished and respected Italian scientist who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Cajal, looked into his microscope at a brain tissue sample and believed he saw a cytoplasmically continuous cell network from a single source. Cajal looked at the same material and correctly discovered neurons. How might one explain his clarified vision?

With this question firmly in mind, I began Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator [Bradford, 1999]. The cover is a dark photograph of the stern scientist. His white hair-and-beard, unified at his temples, is interrupted only by a few fine black hairs around his small mouth. One side of his face is, on my copy, inscrutibly shadowed. But, almost exactly in the layout's center, his right eye stares out, directly at me.

In Advice, Cajal outlines how to become and be a successful scientist in nine chapters. The thin volume contains incentive and instruction, poetry, polemic, and proverb, warning and wisdom. One might call Advice "The Scientist's Bible." Cajal directs his words at the neophyte scientist, simultaneously explaining and fulfilling the important role addressed in his last chapter, "The Investigator as Teacher." Immediately, at the start of the work, Cajal states that the sources of all knowledge include "observation, experiment, and reasoning by induction and deduction"[1]. His main target in this, the introductory chapter, is the study of metaphysics. "When the human intellect ignores reality and concentrates within," he writes, "it can no longer explain the simplest inner workings of life's machinery or of the world around us"[2]. He is concerned with that which is material and dismisses that which is spiritual. "Chimera" is a favorite word of his; he uses it more than once in both Advice and Vacation Stories. Indeed, Cajal has a well of classical knowledge from which he draws throughout the text.

I was not surprised, then, to find that Cajal shares an aspect of the worldview of Heraclitus. "Nature is a harmonious mechanism," the Spaniard writes[17]. He later describes the feeling of scientific discovery as "the supreme pleasure of experiencing how the wings of the spirit emerge and develop, and how when working harmoniously we overcome difficulty to dominate and subdue elusive nature[49]." Interestingly, and quite beautifully, Cajal here employs Biblical vocabulary in order to describe the ideal relationship of man to nature. The word "dominate" [as a noun, beedgat] and "subdue" [v'kheevshuah] famously appear in The Book of Genesis[1:28]. That passage has been highly controversial because of its potentially destructive interpretations. In Biblical Hebrew, one of the two terms connotes rape. Yes, this is an over-reading, because Cajal here refers only to the tame, theoretical realm of ideas. But his unconscious incorporation of Biblical language is nonetheless noteworthy. The generation of that language from within his brain indicates at least a traditional religious influence and at most a traditional religious belief. More data will show me exactly where he exists on the spectrum of faith.

The comparison between Advice and The Bible is surely valid, though. After all, it is a Western work. Moreover, there is evidence of far more than intertextual borrowing from religion. In the chapter titled "Intellectual Qualities," Cajal describes the scientist in many different and quotable ways. He is, Cajal writes, "minister of progress, priest of truth, and a confidant of the Creator"[49]. The scientific intellect must be "devoted entirely to understanding something of that mysterious language that God has written in nature"[ibid]. Cajal even offers a vision of what I think it is fair to call the anti-Apocalypse, in other words Utopia, our special triumph: "when science has been completed," he predicts, "each phenomenon will have its correct name, after its relationship to general laws has been firmly established[54]. In Genesis, God allows Adam to name all of His creations. Does Cajal think that Adam did so incorrectly? When the prototypical, symbolic man [adam] "Adam" becomes the ideal scientist, humanity may enjoy a Paradise. There, we might plant our own Tree of Knowledge. I do not yet have any knowledge about Cajal's opinions towards Christian doctrine, but I can infer that he perceives divinity in our universe: Truth.

Truth seems to be Cajal's God. In the fourth chapter, "What Newcomers to Biological Research Should Know," he provides a sublime description of the moment of discovery, which might be called revelation. "It seemed as though a veil had been lifted from my soul," Cajal writes[64]. This line made me shiver; I know that the scientist understands the beautiful poetry of emotion. Indeed, Cajal frequently addresses and alludes to art and artists. "All outstanding work," he writes, "in art as well as in science, results from immense zeal applied to a great idea"[7]. Later: "scientists like artists are judged by the quality of what they produce, not by the speed of production"[24]. Yet, over and over, he disparages art, calling it essentially ephemeral and abstract. Cajal is a devotee of the "religion of detail," as was Nabokov, I would argue[22]. I do not necessarily agree, therefore, with Cajal's cruel casting of artists as Pharisees. But I must find out what accounts for his low opinion of the realm of art, especially if I am to discover some deep connection between it and the firmament of science.

In terms of creative connectivity, I consider the literary equivalent of Cajal's Advice to a Young Investigator to be Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke was Cajal's contemporary. A comparison between the two works would be fruitful, I believe. Do their worldviews have anything at all in common? I read Letters on a Mediterranean ferry from Athens to Santorini, Greece, where Rilke's words changed my emotional life as they have for so many readers. People love that book. I know because somebody stole my copy. I can now say, however, that Cajal's Advicechanged my intellectual life just as considerably.

When one enters the house of a religious man, he must respectfully follow the customary rules. While I investigate Cajal, I will try as hard as I can to conservatively obey the "Scientist's Bible" despite the fact that I am uncomfortable with parts of it [i.e. his views on marriage "if women are evil . . . then" and his views on writing "achromatic over chromatic"]. Because then, after I thoroughly analyzed the data, I may tackle my big questions.

Cajal explains that there are two types of hypotheses: legalistic and mechanistic reduction. "The new observation can be dealt with logically in terms of pure mechanism," Cajal explains, "and entered humbly into the equations of dynamics." He writes that this method is common in physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Or, in material terms: matter/energy/force, substance, and space. One more translation, an approximate one, to literary language: people/experience/relationships, emotion, and God. I feel that if I explore these three definitive areas of Cajal's life with focus and discipline, following the man's own code of life, then I will be able to plug the data into the equations of dynamics. In my language, words, Heraclitus offers the most fundamental axiom: "All things change." Hopefully I can illustrate Cajal's role in the cosmos in order to answer my two real, burning questions: How should one use a brain? How can one live an intelligent life?

Thanks for reading. I will post later this week about Cajal's work of fiction, Vacation Stories.

2. Genesis & Overview

2009-10-03T19:53:00.027-04:00

This is the story of how this project began:

I have known my friend Noah Hutton for ten years. We met on the first day of orientation to the seventh grade, that eve of the two-year-long nightmare called Middle School. We immediately chose to bunk together on the class trip to Cape Cod, where we each invented a code name for our respective love interests. His was "Sowcow." We both failed. In our senior year of high school, we captained our basketball team to the state championship in the Small, Unathletic Private School Division [SUPSD]. In the final game, our opponent chose to play a 2-3 zone, packing the defense into the painted area so that our center and I could not get the ball. They dared our perimeter players to fire. Noah was our fourth or fifth offensive option, but he helped shoot us to a title. He is a brilliant guy, a talented director, a quiet romantic, and a tough, active defender who occasionally stumbles in response to quick and tight change-of-direction dribble moves. Most importantly, he is a brother in the search for cosmic wisdom.

Noah majored in art history at Wesleyan University. However, about halfway through his collegiate experience, he became intensely interested in the field of neuroscience [some believe this relates to the few concussions he received on the basketball court, the last of which erased a month's worth of Chemistry knowledge, or so he claimed]. Although he graduated in May with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history, Noah took a number of neuroscience courses while at school. By graduation, his intellectual focus had finished its migration upwards and inwards, to the material brain.

I graduated from Middlebury College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literary Studies, a comparative literature program modeled after the former "great books" Humanities course at Columbia University. At the start, I was given a "comprehensive" reading list that included the major works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Vergil, Ovid, Lucretius, Dante, Boccaccio, Pirandello, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Borges, Moliere, Baudelaire, Proust, Goethe, Kafka, Mann, Wang Wei, Cáo Xuegin, Lu Xún, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Joyce, Emerson, Melville, Faulkner, Murasaki Shikibu, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Natsume Soseki. Plato, Aristotle, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, and Freud were considered "background readings." I was also supposed to read one text in its original language; I chose to read The Bible [Amos, Samuel II, and, most wondrously, The Book of Genesis] in Ancient Hebrew. Senior year included an oral examination (one hour), a comprehensive written examination [eight hours], and, as a gift for high marks, a one-semester thesis of at least thirty-five pages. Needless to say, it was quite an intense intellectual and emotional experience. As Professor Stephen Donadio, head of the program, said to our senior colloquium: "You don't read the books, the books read you." [Professor Donadio does not know this, but I consider him to be my de facto rabbi, as well as my teacher and friend. I suppose he now knows this. But one should not keep kind words secret. He truly thinks the game, is a willing passer and a staunch defender, has a great shooting touch, and is a natural coach on the floor]. By graduation, my focus was deeply into art and, specifically, literature, which in so many ways defined me. I loved it with all of my heart.

[No, I did not read every single novel, play, and poem. It is impossible, and not just for temporal reasons].

After graduation, Noah and I did some freelance video work, for contract, on the Jersey shore. The drive was two hours either way. Our active and curious minds frequently challenged each other, but there was rarely argument and never upset. We were finding our ways in the "real world." But what was real, anyway? Once, after work, Noah's car had reached a stop sign and we needed to get to the New Jersey Turnpike to go north. But initially, neither of us could retrieve from our minds the precise directions. I was sure that I could not remember; I declared that my opinion would be nothing more than a blind guess. I did not care in which direction we proceeded because at that time I believed potential adventure to be everywhere. Put simply, I wanted to be lost. Noah thought that we ought to turn left. If we turned left, he said, we would find the New Jersey Turnpike. Contrarily, I said that we would not necessarily find the New Jersey Turnpike if we turned left, even if it had always been there. Necessarily . . . that deterministic piece of language, quite a beautiful word, actually, now that I think of it [five syllables, two swiftly sibilant, and the same suffix as many a woman's name], was the wedge that split apart two old ideologies: materialism and spiritualism. I am simplifying and summarizing the essence of the debate; it was a two-hour ordeal.

There was never anything interpersonal to resolve [I did call science "boring," but I meant only most the writing, and only to me. Plus, I had read Proust, can you blame me! Apology is the panacea of friendship. And, finally, to each his own]. Then, that night, intellectual reconciliation arrived digitally. I received an email from Noah. It had no words, only a link to the Wikipedia page of some Spanish guy with too many names. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who some call "the greatest neuroscientist of all time," but some hyperbolize, especially on the World Wide Web. Cajal discovered the neuron, which rang a bell, in my memory neurons [I suppose]. He had considered them "butterflies of the soul." Very poetic, very Nabokovian. I was intrigued. Then I looked at his striking drawings, which looked like lightning striking a tree but I could not tell where was the lightning and where the tree. But a bush was burning in my brain.

I quote the impromptu local news appearance [Middlebury banned Wikipedia as a citable source and T.V. crews arrived for the scoop] by my former teammate and roommate and current friend Kyle Dudley [superhuman in the clutch, excellent long range shooter, improbable but effective right-handed floater, good dribbler, unmotivated defender, weak left hand, absent rebounder, a great sportsman, reliable free throw shooter, ideal teammate, and champion] when I say "I love Wikipedia! I use it all the time!" I indulged my referential brain and hyperlinked around the Net for a while. It seemed to me that this man, Cajal, had naturally managed to fuse Science and Art, the two disciplines within which the two old ideologies are carefully guarded. This was July, or August.

Then, one night in September, I was sitting in my office [the garage] listening to Philip Glass talk about creativity in an iTunes U feature that my father [sharp shooter, unselfish with the ball, quick and creative off the dribble, more or less uncoachable but a winner] had recommended. Something clicked, I do not know what. I was high, literally and figuratively. It was four o'clock in the morning and I called Noah and said lots of words really fast and that was that. The project was born.

In a 2003 interview with The Paris Review, printed in their 50th anniversary edition [featuring art by my friend Aurore . . . I swear it's as though this blog fits together like a "This is Your Life" puzzle], Professor Donadio said: "Readers deeply committed to literature are likely to be rather wayward readers." In the Vermont-based magazine "Seven Days," he elaborates:

"Writers are certainly wayward readers. The way reading works--once nobody gives you a reading list--is, you're drawn to things that you need to find, somehow."

I can now say certainly that he is correct. My intuition has led me to a Spanish neuroscientist. I do not know the first thing about neuroscience [although iTunes U, which should also be known as "Free Knowledge," is an invaluable resource]. I have only just begun my research. This material is incredibly rich.

This week I received a fortune cookie that said: "You will find that you cannot enrich yourself except by enriching others." I will begin sharing some of the thoughts and questions that Cajal's writings manage to awaken in my novice mind. My next post will concern his Advice for a Young Investigator. I have also been reading his book of short-stories, Vacation Stories. I will address those in the post after next.

Thanks for reading!

1. The Name & an Introduction

2009-09-30T18:00:00.044-04:00

Last spring, I learned that my great-great-uncle on my mother's side was a famous Talmudic scholar in "the Old Country." He wrote prolifically, and pacifistically. His name was Shmuel Tamarit [Samuel Tomares], but his pseudonym was Echad Ha'Rabanim [One of the Rabbis]. He is so obscure that I cannot even find him on the Internet. If that is indeed the case, I am thrilled to bring him into the twenty-first century. I want to inherit and embody his peaceful humility. That is what he represents to me. Plus, his ideas must be kept alive.

I just finished reading the Fragments of Heraclitus [Penguin, 2001]. I will be reading it at least once a day until further notice. It is quite Talmudic in itself; the words, though few, demand intense study. Brooks Haxton, the awesome poet who teaches at Syracuse University [and is married to the sister of our dear family friend Vivian] translates:

63

While cosmic wisdom
understands all things
are good and just,
intelligence may find
injustice here, and justice
somewhere else.

I want to cultivate intuition that can can sense what is good in the universe. The question, of course, is how? Examples of successfully advanced men and women are rare and special. But there is no end. Goethe said that man is eternally striving. Brooks Haxton, in his poem "Thy Name," writes:

"OK. Let’s not call what ditched us God:
ghu, the root in Sanskrit, means not God,
but only the calling thereupon."

Ralph Bronner, son of the antibacterial idealogue Dr. Bronner, claimed to know an Indian gentleman who said "God is the search for God." One example of a legendary [but un-quixotic, more on that in the future] searcher of cosmic wisdom is the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal [b. 1852 - d. 1934]. He sought the divine, and his story is so classically human.

Cajal received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 "in recognition of [his] work on the structure of the nervous system." Actually, he split the award with an Italian named Camilo Golgi, who invented the silver nitrate stain that allowed human eyes, with the aid of a microscope, to access our brain cells. But when Golgi looked into the microscope, he believed that he saw a reticulum, or a net of cells connected to a single source. This was the prevalent view in the scientific community at the time. Cajal, however, had a slightly different, but infinitely clearer vision of the same samples. Cajal's findings, published in his Nobel lecture, confirmed a marginalized theory called the Neuron Doctrine, proposed by Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz [or Heiny, I imagine, for brevity] in 1891. Our brains contain billions of independent and discrete cells, neurons, that receive signals and transmit information. In other words, there is no simple order determined by a single source. That causes tension in the brain [we surely know this experientially], but as Heraclitus writes:

From the strain
of binding opposites
comes harmony.

Cajal was also an extremely gifted artist. Moreover, he wrote a philosophical tract [Advice for a Young Investigator], a book of short stories [Vacation Stories], and a memoir from old age [Memories of My Life]. There are other books, and countless research papers written in Spanish and translated, in some fortunate cases, into English. Here are two of his sketches:

I will be in Chicago from October 17-20 to attend the annual Society for Neuroscience conference and to meet with Dr. Javier DeFelipe from the Cajal Institute in Spain before his lecture called "Cajal's Butterflies of the Soul: Science and Art." That is the very phrase that endeared Cajal to me when I first discovered him. He seems to possess the same fine, aesthetic sensitivity as Vladimir Nabokov, whom I studied tirelessly last year for my thesis paper. In addition to being a genius writer [and chess master], Nabokov was a renowned lepidopterist. He saw butterflies, too.

I am concerned with such unique combinations of scientific and artistic thought. I am so excited to learn more about a discipline, neuroscience, that I have never studied in school. I hope and expect that there will be some memorable lectures in Chicago. I have set up this blog in order to share the knowledge and experience that I will enjoy at the conference.

I will be posting from time to time, maybe once or twice a week. I will give updates on my Cajal project as it progresses. I am trying to move and shake.

I welcome any comment. I went through every setting to make sure that this might be a place for open communication. This is a forum for ideas.

First: Marc Chagall's "The Praying Jew," 1923. [Photo from the Art Institute of Chicago].
Second: Johannes Moreelse, "Heraclitus," who was often called "The Weeping Philosopher."
Left image: Cajal's drawing of a neuron [1899] © Herederos de Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Right image: Cajal's drawing of the six layers [A-F] of the mouse neocortes [1904]
Butterfly: Nabokov's drawing for his wife, Véra, in a copy of his second published work, Al'manakh: Dva puti [An Almanac: Two Paths], printed privately in St. Petersburg in 1918