Lost among the familiar

I have this peculiar inability.  I seem to be entirely unable to form mental maps.  I can, thank heaven, follow a regular old map, but without one, I'm sort of perpetually lost.

We visited family in Northampton, Massachusetts over the holidays, a town I've been to many times.  No matter how many times we go, I don't seem to be able to figure the place out.  I was driving on our way home, and as we were winding through the streets of Northampton, I was completely relying on my wife (the woman has an internal GPS system, I swear) to get me back to I-91.

I can't even begin to estimate the number of times I've been lost.  My usual method when I'm lost is to drive in a straight line until I see something familiar, which works okay around Ithaca but would not work so well in, say, Nebraska.  And your definition of "familiar" and mine probably differ somewhat.  You'd think that the stores and so forth in Northampton would be familiar by now, and in one sense they are; in fact, they're too familiar.

All physical landmarks pretty much look the same to me.  In Northampton, there are lots of brick buildings and 19th-century wood frame houses in pretty pastel colors.  Around here, there are fields and cows and houses and silos and so forth.  It's not that nothing looks familiar; everything does.  So, in the previous paragraph, by "familiar" I mean "so weird and stand-out that it's the only landmark of its kind in this entire time zone."  I only know that I'm approaching our exit from I-88, for example, because there is this huge structure -- I think it must be a radio transceiver or something -- that has been dressed up to look like a tree.  It is about twice as tall as all the other, real organic trees in the area, so the effect is not so much "Natural" as it is "Mutant Redwood from Outer Space."  It's unmistakable, and can be seen from about ten miles away.  That is the kind of landmark I need.

So, I constantly feel like I'm lost among the familiar.  When I'm in Manhattan it's especially bad, because almost all the streets meet at perfect right angles, and everywhere there are stores and businesses and people.  And they all look alike.  I think the only two sufficiently stand-out landmarks in Manhattan are Times Square and the Public Library, but if you only have two reference points and are not even all that sure where those are, it's really not all that helpful.

There's also the problem, when I'm on foot, of never knowing which direction I'm facing.  At least when I see the mutant redwood I'm always coming at it from the same direction.  If I'm seeing Times Square, and I'm trying to find my hotel, I have to know (a) what direction I'm seeing Times Square from, (b) what direction the hotel is from Times Square, and (c) what direction I have to turn to be pointed in the direction referenced in (b).  Usually, my choice is (d), walk in a straight line in some random direction and hope the hotel magically appears.  So far, I've been lucky, but mostly that's because when I'm in an unfamiliar place, I make sure to keep Carol less than five feet away from me at all times.  Occasionally, however, Carol will let me walk a little ahead, and just watch to see what I do when I get to a street corner.  This is when things get interesting.

On one visit to Manhattan, we were returning to our hotel from a night at the theater, and I asked Carol what direction the hotel was from our current position.

"North," she said.

So when we got to the next street corner, she informed me that we needed to turn right.  So I did.  And then I said, "Now what direction is the hotel from where we are?"

She looked at me like I'd lost my mind.  "It's still north," she said.

"It can't be," I said, adopting the really annoying Patient Teacher Voice I bring out when dealing with an especially slow student.  "You said it was north before, and then we turned a corner.  It can't still be north."

Carol stared at me, open-mouthed, and finally said, "Um, Gordon?  The position of the North Pole does not change every time you go around a corner."

Oh.  Right.  I guess I knew that.

It's a little frustrating that I was seemingly born without the Directionality Brain Module, but I guess I make up for it by my extra-special Tune-Remembering Brain Module and Name-Recall Brain Module.  All in all, I can't complain.  But if I ever turn up missing, don't be surprised.  You might suggest searching in Nebraska.

Music, emotion, and sex

I discovered the Bach Mass in B Minor when I was a teenager, and vividly remember the first time I listened to it -- I put the LP record on my dad's turntable, turned the volume up to 11 (that's for you fans of This is Spinal Tap) and lay on my back on the floor.  The work moves from dark to light, from driving rhythms to delicate sweetness, and I drowned myself in baroque counterpoint -- a wonderful way to die, I think.

Then came the bass aria, "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus."  It's a wandery little bit, quiet and mellow.  I almost drifted off to sleep.  And then, suddenly, the full chorus and orchestra explode into "Cum Sancto Spiritu."  I'll never forget that moment -- I felt like I had been physically lifted off the floor -- a shiver ran through my whole body.  It was one of the most visceral responses I've ever had to a piece of music.

Now, lest you think I'm some kind of classical music snob, I have to state for the record that I don't just have this kind of reaction to classical music.  Which music will send me into a state of rapture is a question I've pondered frequently, because there seems to be no particular rhyme nor reason to it.  I had similar reactions to Imogen Heap's "Aha," Collective Soul's "Shine," Iron & Wine's "Boy With a Coin," the Harlem Shakes' "Sunlight," OneRepublic's "Everybody Loves Me," Overtone's South African chant "Shosholoza," and the wild, spinning Finnish waltz "Kuivatusaluevalssi" as recorded by Childsplay.

All of which, by the way, you should immediately download from iTunes.

While I still don't understand why certain songs or pieces of music create this reaction in me, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University have now explained how the reaction happens.  In an article published Sunday in Nature, Zatorre and Salimpoor explain that what happens in the brains of music lovers when hearing favorite pieces of music is similar to what happens during sex -- there is a sudden release of the chemical dopamine.  This chemical is a neurotransmitter, and is part of what creates the rush of pleasurable sensation not only while doing the deed, but while listening to Bach -- or whatever music turns you on.  As it were.

Participants in the study underwent PET scans while listening to favorite pieces of music, and researchers found that dopamine was released in large amounts in a region of the brain called the striatum, which is part of the limbic system's pleasure-and-reward center.  Interestingly, the dopamine release started about fifteen seconds prior to a "peak moment" in the music in a part of the striatum associated with tension and anticipation, and then when the climax of the music came, there was a sudden rush of dopamine in a different part of the striatum, one connected to physical pleasure.

Myself, I don't find this surprising at all.  For me, music is all about emotion.  I can appreciate technically fine playing (or singing), but if a song or piece of music evokes no emotional reaction in me, it's not worth listening to.  When I teach music lessons, I've always tried to impress upon my students that when you can play the notes and rhythm correctly, up to the correct speed, you're halfway there; the other half is learning how to express feeling through the music.

I still find it a fascinating, and unanswered, question why certain pieces resonate with one person, and leave another completely cold.  I know that although we like the same basic musical styles, my wife and I have very different taste when it comes to specific songs, and neither of us can really put our finger on why a particular song blows us away, and another leaves us shrugging our shoulders.  I suspect that that is a question that will never be resolved -- it's as personal, and as mysterious, as one's favorite food, favorite color, or (more to the point, apparently!) what one finds sexually arousing.

There's also the question of what possible evolutionary purpose this reaction could have.  Something so powerful, and so universal, must provide some kind of evolutionary advantage, but I'm damned if I can see what it might be.

Despite the fact that there are still questions -- and in science, there always are -- at least now there's a physiological explanation of what's going on in the brain when this reaction occurs.  I find this fun and fascinating, and am glad to finally have an understanding of something I've always experienced, and always wondered about.

And now, I think I'm going to go listen to the Mass in B Minor.

Words, words, words

In Dorothy Sayers' novel Gaudy Night, set (and written) in 1930s England, a group of Oxford University dons are the targets of threats and violence by a deranged individual.  The motive of the perpetrator (spoiler alert!) turns out to be that one of the dons had, years earlier, caught the perpetrator's spouse in academic dishonesty, and the spouse had been dismissed from his position, and ultimately committed suicide.

Near the end of the novel, the main character, Harriet Vane, experiences a great deal of conflict over the resolution of the mystery.  Which individual was really at fault?  Was it the woman who made the threats, a widow whose grief drove her to threaten those she felt were smug, ivory-tower intellectuals who cared nothing for the love and devotion of a wife for her husband?  Or was it the don who had exposed the husband's "crime" -- which was withholding evidence contrary to his thesis in an academic paper?   Is that a sin that's worth a life?

The perpetrator, when found out, snarls at the dons, "... (C)ouldn't you leave my man alone?  He told a lie about somebody who was dead and dust hundreds of years ago.  Nobody was the worse for that.  Was a dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness?  You broke him and killed him -- all for nothing."  The don whose words led to the man's dismissal, and ultimately his suicide, says, "I knew nothing of (his suicide) until now...  I had no choice in the matter.  I could not foresee the consequences... but even if I had..."  She trails off, making it clear that in her view, her words had to be spoken, that academic integrity was a mandate -- even if that stance left a human being in ruins.

It's not, really, a very happy story.  One is left feeling, at the end of the book, that the incident left only losers, no winners.

The same is true of the tragic shooting today of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. 

At the writing of this post, Rep. Giffords is still alive, but an innocent child and a federal judge are both dead because of the shooting.  The shooter, Jared Loughner, is clearly mentally ill, to judge by the YouTube video he had posted (now taken down) and posts on his MySpace page (now also gone).  But at the center of his rage were nothing more than words.  Words, words, words.

His video clip rails against the government, posits conspiracy theories about mind control, claims that America is a "terrorist nation."  He didn't come up with those words himself; others put them there.  Others fed him those distortions, and in his twisted, faulty logic he bought them wholesale.  Loughner himself is, of course, responsible for the shootings; but what blame lies with the ones who, whatever their motives, broadcast the ideologies he espoused?

Sarah Palin's website posts a map of vulnerable Democratic members of congress -- and identifies them on the map with rifle crosshairs.  (See the map here.)  And she's not the only one.  How about Ann Coulter:  "It's the Christmas season, so godless liberals are citing the Bible to demand the redistribution of income by government force."  Or Pat Buchanan:  "If the left hasn't realized it yet, Obama has: liberals have lost the country.  The liberal hour is over in America and the West."  And lest you think that the inflammatory rhetoric comes only from the right, how about Ted Rall:  "Like Jon Stewart's Million Moderate March, No Labels is meant 'not to create a new party, but to forge a third way within the existing parties, one that permits debate on issues in an atmosphere of civility and mutual respect,' say organizers.  Sweet.  Because, you know, you should always be civil and respectful to people who think torture and concentration camps are A-OK."

And, of course, all of these folks want to accomplish two things; to use emotionally-charged language in order to make their own opinions sound unassailable, and to generate such a negative spin on their opponents' thinking that readers are left believing that only morons could possibly agree with them.  The most appalling thing about the coverage of the shooting of Giffords and today's other victims was the immediate volcanic eruption of posts and tweets -- half of them labeling the shooter Loughner as a Tea-Party Ultra-Right-Winger who had attacked Giffords because she was too liberal (based upon his anti-federal statements and his identification of Mein Kampf on his MySpace page as one of his favorite books), and the other half identifying him as a loony leftist who had attacked Giffords because she was too conservative (based upon his stated atheism and his identification of The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books).  A frighteningly small number stated the truth: that Rep. Giffords is a devoted, hard-working woman who wants only the best for her country, and her attacker is simply crazed and delusional.

I'm appalled not just because these political hacks are using this tragedy to hammer in their own views with an increasingly polarized citizenry; but because they are doing this, blind to the end results of their words, just like the Oxford don in Gaudy Night whose dedication to the nth degree of academic integrity made her blind to the human cost of her actions.  Words are tools, and they are using them with as much thought and responsibility as a five-year-old with a chainsaw.

I will end with a devout hope that Rep. Giffords and the other wounded individuals in today's attacks will pull through and eventually be healed completely of their injuries, and that the families of those who died will be able to find consolation in the outpouring of sympathy from the vast majority of Americans who still value compassion over political rhetoric.  And to the ideologues who are using this tragedy as a platform to trumpet their views, I can only say:  shut the hell up.

Her tears, like diamonds on the floor

Crying is one of the weirdest biological phenomena.  Try to think about it from a non-human perspective, as if some benevolent alien scientist came to earth to study humanity.  So picture yourself being interviewed by the scientist, as you are clearly one of the more intelligent native life-forms:

Dr. Xglork:  "So, this crying thing I've heard of.  What is 'crying' and why do you do it?"

You:  "Well, when humans get sad, they start breathing funny, in little fits and starts, and water comes from their eyes."

Myself, I think that our Dr. Xglork would be justifiably mystified at how that sort of reaction makes any sense.  "How does that make you feel better?" he'd probably ask, looking at you quizzically from seven of his twelve eyes, while making notes on a clipboard held in his tentacles.

And yet, it does, doesn't it?  I'll admit, I cry easily.  Somehow guys aren't supposed to be that way, but there's no use denying it.  I cried my way through the last third of The Return of the King, embarrassing my older son to the point that for two years after that he refused to sit next to me in the theater.  I've cried over songs, television shows, and books (I almost had to wring out my friend's copy of Marley and Me before I could return it).

And after you cry, you feel better.  You don't look better, unless you somehow find red eyes and a snotty nose sexy; but you do somehow feel more relaxed and centered.  This universal reaction led scientists to surmise that crying was doing something to the levels of chemicals in the blood, so they did a study in which volunteers were put in a variety of situations that made them cry, and were asked to collect their tears in a vial.  Some were just exposed to irritants, like onions; others were shown sad movies (I'd have needed a bucket).  Then they chemically analyzed the tears to see if there were differences.

And there were.  There were proteins present in the tears we cry when we're sad that are absent in the ones we cry because our eyes are irritated.  This implies an interesting function for crying -- ridding our blood (and therefore presumably our brain as well) of chemicals which are making us feel sad or stressed.  Crying therefore does serve an important function, as our emotional reaction afterwards would suggest.

And just a few days ago a new study became public that sheds even more light on the whole thing.  Friday's issue of the journal Science included an article by Noam Sobel of Israels' Weizmann Institute of Science.  Sobel and his team took the crying study one step further -- they wanted to find out the effects of crying not on the person who was doing the crying, but anyone nearby.

So they collected tears from female volunteers (it being difficult, according to Sobel, to get a guy to cry in a lab; maybe they should have flown me over there).  They then allowed male volunteers to smell the vials of tears, including some vials of saline solution (as a control).

The team's hypothesis -- that there was a pheromone in tears that elicited empathy in others -- turned out to be incorrect.  When shown photographs of sad or tragic events, the men who'd smelled the actual tears didn't rate them as any sadder, or their emotional reaction to them as any stronger, than the guys who'd smelled the saline solution.

The real surprise came when the guys in the study were asked to rate various women's photographs for sexual attractiveness, and they found out that the guys who'd smelled the tears rated all the photographs lower than the guys who'd smelled saline did.  And -- most amazingly -- when given a quick saliva test for testosterone levels, the guys who'd smelled the tears showed lower levels of testosterone than the control group, and when given an MRI, lower activity in the parts of the brain associated with sexual arousal.

So crying, it seems, has a chemical "not NOW, honey!" feature.  This whole thing opens up a variety of questions, however.  First, it makes you wonder how the writers of Seinfeld ever came up with the idea of "make-up sex."  Second, do male tears have a pheromone as well?  Apparently Sobel's team has now found a "good male crier" and is going to see if there's any kind of reciprocal reaction in women -- and I'll bet there is.  And third, and most important -- does this explain the phenomenon of the "chick flick?"  I'll leave that one for you to decide.

I felt the earth move under my feet

I'll bet that you think you know what causes earthquakes.

You probably learned a lot of stuff from your Earth Science teacher in ninth grade about plates and rifts and trenches and magma and so on, and you think that an earthquake occurs when the plates are pushing against each other, and one of them slips a little.

Ha.  A lot you know.

A new study by a fellow named Patrick Regan has found that earthquakes are, in fact, caused by UFOs.

Why should you believe Patrick Regan, you might ask?  Well, to start with, he's the founder of the Northwest (England) UFO Research Society, and has written two authoritative books, UFO: The Search for Truth and The New Pagan Handbook.  (I didn't even know that there was an old pagan handbook, did you?  I always figured that in the olden days, pagans just sort of capered about naked in the woods, sacrificing goats and worshiping oak trees and so forth.  I never knew they had a handbook, although I admit that must have made it easier to figure out if they were doing it right.  "Hey, Prolix!  This is the rain ritual!  After sacrificing the goat, you're supposed to caper about the oak tree in a counterclockwise direction, not clockwise!"  "Dammit, I knew I should have looked it up in the handbook.  What does the ritual mean if you caper in a clockwise direction?"  "Let me look it up."  *brief pause*  "Well, Prolix, if you have erectile dysfunction, you're in luck!")

Anyhow, Pat Regan noted a sudden spate of UFO sightings in Cumbria, in northern England, and predicted that the Brits should be on their toes for earthquakes.  And lo, on December 21, there was a magnitude 3.5 earthquake centered in Coniston, in the Lake District.

Note, too, that this earthquake happened on the Winter Solstice.  Don't expect me to believe that's a coincidence.  Pat either.  You can read about his ideas, if I can use that word rather loosely, here. (One warning for the faint of heart, however; this web page has a very scary photo of Pat holding his UFO book, in which he looks like the scraggly, unwashed, beater-clad, wild-eyed dude you avoid sitting next to on the subway.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

So, what do we have here?  Well, nonsense, but besides that?  What this seems to be is a guy with a fairly weak grip on reality whose hobby is collecting unsubstantiated anecdotes from credulous folks who think they've "seen something weird in the sky," and he's even cherry-picked that data (again, to use the word fairly loosely) by selecting the "UFO sightings" that occur in proximity to a measurable earthquake.  And since both measurable earthquakes and UFO sightings occur every day somewhere, they're bound to occur near each other sometimes.  Aha!  There's a correlation!  Not to mention causation!  Let's write a book about it!

On a more serious note, what bothers me about all this is not that some wacko has a theory.  Wackos always have theories; it's what wackos do.  What bothers me is when, as happened yesterday, something like this gets picked up by the popular media, and it becomes "news."  I'm sorry, Purveyors of Popular Media:  this is not news.  This is at best laughable fiction, and at worst publishing the rantings of someone who is delusional, and encouraging people who are easily duped to believe it just because they've seen it on the Yahoo! news, or the like.  It's hard enough to get people to think critically without the press printing stories like this.  I know; I teach critical thinking, and it's an uphill struggle, sometimes.

So I'd really appreciate it if the media wants to find "odd news" or "local color" stories, they'd stick with cute video clips of cats who like to sit in boxes and stories about would-be suicides jumping off buildings and being saved because they landed in a pile of garbage that the city garbage collectors had neglected to take away.  Stories about woo-woos who've discovered a connection between UFOs and earthquakes just make my job harder, and it's hard enough as it is.  I thank you, and so do the ninth grade earth science teachers.

Curses! Foiled again!

New from the "You'll Think I'm Making This Up, But I'm Not" Department, witches in Romania are up in arms about a new law that requires them to pay income tax on their earnings.

A rewrite of the tax code has included "witch, fortuneteller, and astrologer" as professions that are recognized as generating taxable income.  Now, like any other self-employed person, the wand-and-broomstick contingent will owe taxes on the fees they charge (the tax rate is 16% in Romania).  This, as you might imagine, has caused the Witches' Association of Romania, Local Kollective (WARLocK) to flip their tall pointy hats. 

And you can bet they aren't just going to take this lying down.  They threatened serious action.  Romania's head witch, Bratara Buzea, concocted a magic potion made of cat feces and a dead dog.  Besides the obvious deterrent effect that anything made of cat feces and dead dog would have, apparently this particular potion was meant to bring evil fortune to the lawmakers who voted for the new law.

"My curses always work," Buzea is quoted as saying.  (One source stated that she "cackled" the words in a "smoky voice."  I thought that was worth throwing in there, just for the added color.)  Other witches hurled poisonous mandrake plants into the Danube River, chanting magic spells in the direction of Bucharest.

The lawmakers, of course, couldn't tolerate these kinds of threats.  You don't just aim blobs of cat crap and dead dog at a congressperson, or throw random plants into a river, and somehow get away with it.  So the elected officials who were thus threatened took immediate and direct action; they all came to work wearing purple.

Wearing purple, as we all know, wards off evil.  (It's probably how the Queen Mum lived to such a ripe old age.)  So the government officials came through the dangerous ordeal unscathed after all, which I know will come as a great relief to us all.

It's no wonder there was such a hue and cry.  Creatures of darkness have a long history in Romania, and superstitions run rampant.  Remember that this is where Dracula got his start (so the tax officials might have some competition in the bloodsucking business).  Former Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu even had his own personal witch, not that it did him much good; he was overthrown and he and his wife executed by firing squad.  Maybe his witch ran out of mandrakes or something. 

And in the interest of fairness, it bears keeping in mind that not every Romanian witch was angered at being expected to pay her fair share.  Mihaela Minca, a witch in the town of Mogosoia, supports paying taxes.  "It means that our magic gifts are recognized," she said.  "Now I can open my own practice."

So, all in all, things seem to be settling down.  This is good.  I can imagine that it'd be hard to get anything done with cat poop, dead dogs, and plants being hurled about in the halls of government, not to mention hexes and so forth. (It would, however, make it much more interesting to watch C-Span.)

One has to wonder where all of this will end,  however.  It's a slippery slope.  If "witches, fortunetellers, and astrologers" are now considered as professionals, pretty soon talk-radio hosts, advertising executives, and the members of the cast of Jersey Shore will expect to be recognized as productive members of society.  After that, it's only a matter of time before Ann Coulter is granted "human being" status.

Can the death of civilization be far behind?

Four and twenty blackbirds

It sounds like something from The X-Files.

Shortly before midnight on New Year's Eve, about three thousand Red-winged Blackbirds started falling from the sky, near the town of Beebe, Arkansas.  They were apparently dead before impact; one hit a police car, and another struck a woman out for a late-night walk with her dog.

The types of things this would immediately bring to mind -- poison, for example -- make no sense here.  A poison that only affects blackbirds is ridiculous (although, to be honest, apparently a few Common Grackles were also killed; but still).  If there'd been some kind of aerial spraying of a quick-acting toxin, you'd expect that lots of other animals would also have been killed.  Once this was ruled out, other theories began to circulate -- that the birds had been awakened, and startled into flight, by fireworks, and had flown into buildings; that they had been killed by a weather-related event, such as a high altitude hailstorm; that they had been struck by lightning.

None of these seem to hold water.

The frightened-into-collision hypothesis doesn't match the scatter pattern made by the carcasses; I've seen video clips and still photos (check out a video here) and many of the birds didn't land anywhere near buildings.  There aren't any tall buildings in Beebe, anyhow; and from the apparently random way they have fallen, they look to me like they were killed while still aloft and dropped to the ground, landing wherever they happened to land.  The hailstorm and lightning-strike explanations don't line up with the fact that the birds showed no sign of external injuries; hail strikes hard enough to kill would break bones, and lightning would singe feathers.  They seem to have simply... died, suddenly, mid-flight, and plummeted to the ground.

Necropsies performed today showed that many of the birds had internal blood clots sufficient to kill them; but this is by itself only a proximal cause.  What caused the clots to form?  It's hard to imagine anything that could happen to a bird in flight that could cause internal bleeding, much less something that could happen to cause internal bleeding in three thousand birds more-or-less simultaneously.

All of this has wildlife biologists scrambling for answers, and the townsfolk of Beebe are understandably spooked.  One man, interviewed by the local news, said he's not going to let his children play outside until this is solved.  One might accuse him of overreacting -- but honestly, isn't his fear justified?  I know if I woke up one morning to find my front and back yards littered with dead birds, I'd be more than a little skeeved out.

Me, I'm wondering where this will all go.  I'd lay even odds that we'll never figure out what caused the deaths, and it will be filed amongst scientists as one of those oddball phenomena which were never adequately explained -- and will become fuel to the fire to the conspiracy theorists and the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh types.  Already there are websites claiming that this is a sign of the approaching End Times -- although I don't recall from my reading of Revelations anything about birds dying en masse.

In any case, keep your eye on the news, not to mention the sky.  I'd imagine getting beaned by a dead blackbird would smart a little.