Phineas Gage: Stuff Happens

The horrible accident of Phineas Gage became a case for brain scientists to study, but for me he also represents something else. In the long history of the world it has happened as people kneel in prayer. It can occur as we gaze at a seagull, feeling ocean breeze on our cheeks, or as we enjoy orange juice and the bright feathers of a cockatoo on the patio. Above all, we want our lives to be predictable, within our control, and they seem to be for a while but one day the biopsy comes back positive for pancreatic cancer or we didn't see the car that ran a red light.

It happened to Gage one sunny Vermont day. On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage, a handsome 25 year old railroad foreman would have his life changed forever. He would go down in history as the Gage who was no longer Gage.

Known Unknowns

I can thank Donald Rumsfeld for the term "known unknowns." Indeed, there are known unknowns.

That much I know, though I can never show it to you.

But think about this. Thoughts come as perceptions. They are perceived.

The perceiver cannot be found. Whatever is located when searching is only another object of thought. Perception remains, out of reach as that which is aware of the search and the thought object.

To establish a model for discussion, consider this. We cannot see black holes but we can see the gravitational lensing they cause around astronomical objects. Black holes are inferred phenomena.

Argentina to Alaska in A 1928 Graham-Paige

Take an adventurous young couple. Add a 1928 Graham-Paige Model 610 Touring Car. Put them in it pointed north out of Buenos Aires.

Wilder Penfield, Brain Maps, with V.S. Ramachandran and The Man Who Mistook His Foot For A Penis

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed pioneering experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. During extensive brain surgeries, he applied electrodes to different regions of the brain and stimulated them. He then asked patients what they felt. He recorded and correlated sensations, images, even memories, as reported by the patients. By this means he mapped the brain and found, for example, that the brain area involved with lips and fingers occupies as much space as the area which handles the entire trunk of the body.

Elly Beinhorn, The Most Famous Aviatrix You Never Heard Of

Mention Elly Beinhorn to somebody today and he or she will look at you blankly.
Not so, in the era between World Wars One and Two. During the twenties and thirties, hers was a household name on many continents. She was an aviatrix, a daring young woman in the mold of Amelia Earhart. Like other such women of her time, her goals were not properly feminine. Yet as she became famous, people said her flying skills were exceeded only by her femininity. That was it, a most unwomanly thing. She wanted to fly an aeroplane around the world. Alone. Her mother wept and her father threatened to send her to a psychiatrist, but an aunt had died and left Elly a little money.

William James Sidis: The Smartest Person Ever?

The following essay is about William James Sidis, whom Robert Persig (Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) discusses in his novel, Lila. Sidis's one great passion in life was collecting street car transfers.

The account comes from a web page I saved to my hard drive. Before uploading it, I checked it and found it dead, but still want to give credit, so here is the obsolete URL--http://members.aol.com/popvoid/TOC.html. Jim Morton, the essayist, uses Peridromophilia as a term for Sidis's love of street car transfers.

Peridromophilia Unbound:William James Sidis
By Jim Morton

The great geniuses of mankind are often said to be "born ahead of their time." William James Sidis, on the other hand, seems to have been born out of his time completely; on the wrong world, in the wrong dimension. Perhaps someday the world will understand "Willie" Sidis's strange genius, but that day is far off indeed.

Notes from "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from The Biology of Consciousness," by Alva Noë

Are you your brain, or something else?


In this book Alva Noë presents his well-informed view of modern thinking and research on consciousness and the brain. He does not subscribe to the mainstream consensus.

Albert Einstein on Free Will and Ramana Maharshi on Freedom and Destiny

"If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will." Albert Einstein

Scientists in general accept that the universe is a closed system, deterministic and explainable by physical processes involving cause and effect. Yet we all experience the feeling that we can choose between option A and option B.

A Gloomy Prospect: Poverty, IQ, & Emergent Systems

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion. Democritus, 470 BC-380 BC*. Modern particle physics has broken things down even further and at CERN in Switzerland the Higgs Bosun ("God Particle") at the Large Hadron Collider is believed to have been found.

Down-to-the-nitty-gritty just doesn't work in some cases. It's called reductionism, and in its place we have a relatively recent concept of emergent systems.

Born With Half A Brain, She Has Compensated

"Michelle Mack has turned medical thinking upside down.

Born with only half a brain, Mack can speak normally, graduated from high school and has an uncanny knack for dates. . . .

G.K. Chesterton's Christianity & The Nightmare of The Modern World

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) stood 6 feet 4 inches and weighed 290 pounds. During WWI he was asked by a lady why he was in London and not at the front fighting the Hun, to which he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am." Chesterton once told vegetarian George Bernard Shaw, "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England." Shaw shot back, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it".

Confirmed?: Legends of Humans and Near-Humans Walking The Earth

The Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children. Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats." Legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries.

The Martian Inside Your Head

Years ago Reader's Digest published a series of hugely successful articles by J.D. Ratcliff, all beginning with "I am Joe's ____." Fill in the blank: heart, brain, pancreas, etc. The articles explained complicated body organs in simple terms for lay readers. The one on the heart began, "I’m certainly no beauty. I weigh 12 ounces, am red-brown in color, and have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of —well, let’s call him Joe. Joe is 45, ruggedly good-looking, has a pretty wife, three children and an excellent job. Joe has made it."

The Apollo of Gaza

You are a fisherman, name of Jouda Ghurab, on the Gaza Strip and earn give or take seven dollars a day selling what you catch with a net. In August 2013 you dive into the waters off the strip, looking for sardines, squid, and bream, when you see something. What you see will turn out to have great international implications and will involve Hamas, charged by Israel as a terrorist group.

Richard Halliburton at Nineteen and for the Rest of His Brief Life

He was the popular icon of an era, the handsome, debonair Princeton man, the admirer of Rupert Brooke and Lord Byron.  He found adventure and exotic lands while others slaved for the dollar.  He fulfilled his dream and his fame spread.  Today, his books are still found in libraries—pages brown and tattered, perhaps—but they remain on shelves.

Ramana Maharshi, The Early Years: Gabriele Ebert's Biography

Carl Sagan was humbled by the vastness of the universe and in his Cosmos series he reminded us repeatedly that the universe is not about us, dust motes dancing for a moment before falling away.  Unlike Sagan, Ramana Maharshi told us that we are here to stay, but not as we think we are. Like Sagan, Ramana saw the human ego as a bit of ephemera but, unlike Sagan, not as something alive. That, Maharshi might have said, is not bad news, but good news.

Real Men, Social Cooperation, and the Gap In Jack London's Thinking

Jack London was a brilliant man, brilliant but uneducated.  Although a fiction writer, his own life had more experience in it than many a  rousing novel.

The Man Who Found Einstein's Brain in Two Mason Jars inside a Cardboard Box

Steven Levy said that he had an almost religious experience when he found it in Wichita, Kansas.

How Your Brain Is Hard-Wired: The Trolley Problem

Here is an old favorite among moral philosophers, a thought experiment that reveals something about human nature. As a thought experiment it is divorced from everyday reality and is designed to illicit the reasons conscious or unconscious as to why people would do certain things. In this case, it is a clever device to make you think in a certain way and to discover your motives for an action. Understand that in a thought experiment you have no other options than those given you. You cannot read into the experiment your own novel twist to solve it, otherwise it would be useless as an intellectual exercise. There are no trick solutions nor any hidden information. Determine what you would do in both illustrations 1 and 2.

Study the two illustrations and think about the consequences of each possible action. Then ask yourself what you would do in each of the two cases. What would be your reason for doing it?

After you are finished, read on.

Richard Halliburton's Personality

"I'm very grateful, because I wouldn't take $1,000,000 for it." Richard Halliburton

In the human scheme of things, some are born lucky, some less lucky, and some unlucky.  None of us chose to be born nor did we choose the circumstances of our birth.  Among many possibilities, we could have come into the world as American, Canadian, Scottish, French, Mexican, Afghan, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, African, or Mongolian.  We could have had wealthy, middle-class, or poor parents.

We are born into chance.

Richard Halliburton, Pancho Barnes and John Wayne

In his life Richard met many unusual people but maybe the most remarkable was Pancho Barnes and she is worthy of note because of her personality and character.  She had two precepts in life: When you have a choice, choose happy, and Nothing exceeds like excess.  She lived on her own terms and cussed like a test pilot. Unable to get a divorce from her minister husband, each Sunday she climbed into her plane, took off, and dove down over his church, buzzing it with the engine’s roar drowning-out morning services.

He Found Freedom His Way

More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and walked away from the economic system that made him a wage slave.  He offers a subversive version of living,

On Finding Work You Love

~Follow your bliss. (Joseph Campbell)

~You’ve got to find what you love. (Steve Jobs)

~Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.  (Henry David Thoreau.)

~The above statements are bullshit. (Me)

What's Wrong with TED Talks

~I, and many people, think it's way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED.

~My TED talk is not about my work or my new book – the usual spiel – but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work.

The first reason is over-simplification.

~Let me tell you a story. I was at a presentation that a friend, an astrophysicist, gave to a potential donor. I thought the presentation was lucid and compelling (and I'm a professor of visual arts here at UC San Diego so at the end of the day, I know really nothing about astrophysics). After the talk the sponsor said to him, "you know what, I'm gonna pass because I just don't feel inspired ...you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell."

At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine?