The Voices In Your Head

First, some background. Synesthesia is a surprisingly common condition that causes two different sensory pathways to interact in unusual ways. Synesthetes may perceive letters as having dedicated colors, or numbers as having personalities. Read more here. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is a neurologist: a doctor, a researcher, and an occasional Radiolab guest. Listen to him explain how he performed the first ever phantom-limb “amputation” here.

John Colapinto, in New Yorker profile of Ramachandran last May, found him speculating about the nature of creativity:

The most common synesthesia is number-color. Ramachandran believed it was not coincidental that the fusiform gyrus, where number shapes are processed in the brain, lies next to the area where colors are processed. He suspected that a cross-wiring in the brain, similar to that in phantom-limb patients, was responsible. Brain scans confirmed his hunch: in synesthetes, there are excess neural connections between the two brain centers. This suggested to Ramachandran that the syndrome arises from a defect in the gene responsible for pruning away the neural fibres that connect the various centers of the brain as it develops early in life. “What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?” Ramachandran asked me. “The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It’s called metaphor. So what I’m arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely throughout the brain, you’ve got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it’s a very phrenological view of creativity.”

It can feel uncomfortable to examine the biology behind creative talent, which we’ve always treated as kind of magical, or divine. But science addressing questions that philosophers and priests once had a monopoly on is a wonderful thing. Nothing is more fascinating or important to us than our own nature, and beginning to build real, concrete knowledge about it is an enormous blessing. Reading about neurology leaves me awed, excited, and impatient. The brain is so marvellously complicated, as are the questions we ask, that our best efforts fall far short of sating our curiosity.

One of the most magnificent puzzles is consciousness itself: why we’re aware of our own thinking, and how we came to be this way. It’s a favorite subject for people who believe that some mental phenomena exist outside physical, testable reality, those who jeer at evidence-based approaches to these unknowns. But Ramachandran is willing to speculate on consciousness, too. Like his hypothesis about metaphors, these ideas are likely wrong, one of the many errors that “trial and error” requires. Still, it’s provocative stuff:

Mirror neurons play a role, he thinks. “One of the theories we put forward,” he said, as he packed up his bag, “is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else’s behavior, putting yourself in another person’s shoes, looking at the world from another person’s point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This, I claim, is the dawn of self-awareness.”

I confess I find this possibility absolutely thrilling, especially compared to vague, untestable stories about “supernatural” mechanisms. But of course it doesn’t matter that it’s an appealing story; we have to figure out ways to challenge it, test it, until we know whether it’s true or false. “What we’re hoping,” Ramachandran says, “is that we can grope our way toward the answer, finding little bits and pieces, little clues, toward understanding what conciousness is. We’ve just scratched the surface of the problem.”

Amid insights on vision, autism, and the brain’s body-image map, one last passage caught my eye. “You know that when people think to themselves you get unconscious movement of the vocal chords?” Ramachandran asks. (It’s fun to try to notice this.) Well.

In the case of schizophrenia, whose sufferers often complain of “hearing voices,” Ramachandran suspected damage of deficit in a sensory mechanism in the vocal chords which, when normal people think, sends a signal to the brain indicating “This is simply a thought; no one is actually saying this.” If this mechanism was damaged, the subconscious movement of the vocal chords could be interpreted as an outside voice speaking in one’s head.

“By the way,” Ramachandran continued, “I have a theory that if you take people with carcinoma of the larynx, and you remove the vocal chords, and they think to themselves, they may actually start hallucinating. A prediction.”

A prediction. That’s where we start. Isn’t it great to be alive now?

Gladwell on Drinking

I don’t know how he does it. Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has managed to sound original, insightful, and entirely common sense.

Turns out we misunderstand the effects of drinking: it doesn’t simply remove inhibitions.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assesments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center—and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Drinkers get loud and rowdy because they respond to signals sent “by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows that say that young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy.” This means that intoxication in a different setting, with different rules and different expectations, presents very differently.

The article recounts several fascinating experiments and case studies that demonstrate this effect. Gladwell concludes that our efforts to “moralize, medicalize, and legalize” alcohol abuse are ultimately less effective than providing “a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”

Read the piece here (abstract only without subscription, unfortunately) and check out more of Malcolm Gladwell’s work here (including full articles, 1996-2009). He really doesn’t need the plug—I already seethe with jealousy at this guy’s career—but the writing’s just so good.

Look for future admiring posts: Gladwell on underdogs, Gladwell on invention, Gladwell on entrepreneurs…

My Teenage Dream Tonight

What is there left to say about Lady Gaga? Our minds are made up; we savor or dismiss the music, and all the rest, without blinking. But there are always stories worth finding. John Seabrook writes:

Kenny Gorka, who booked the Stephani Germanotta Band, as the act was called, recalled recently how he met Germanotta. She telephoned him pretending to be her own publicist, raving about this incredible new talent. “She lied to me, talking about how great Stephani was in the third person,” he said. “But it was enough to pique my interest, and I brought her in for an audition and booked her.”

The future Ms. Gaga was nineteen at the time.

On Death and Dancing

This summer, just after Michael Jackson died, I took a walk with my mom in Inwood park. She remembered a fight she got in with a friend over custody of the “Thriller” LP decades earlier. We had once seen a French breakdancing troupe perform; asked after the show about inspiration, every single one of the young dancers said that it was watching Michael Jackson on TV as kids that made them want to dance. I had written about Jackson’s impact in revolutionary Iran a while back. My mom and I tried to imagine all the similar stories we knew people were telling each other that day.

Mourning “requires other people,” according to Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst. Meghan O’Rourke, writing in The New Yorker this week, explains:

Today, Leader points out, our only public mourning takes the form of grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen… This grief is the same as the old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity their individual losses. As a saying from the Yangtze Valley (where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.” When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus. Our version is more mediated. Still, in the Internet age, some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online grieving communities, establishing virtual cemetaries, commemorative pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared.

Public wailing and ritual black clothing have largely dissappeared, but we’re always inventing new ways to organize public mourning. My favorite product of the Jackson grief gale last summer was Eternal Moonwalk, which stitched YouTube clips together to create a surreal and powerful testament to the King of Pop’s influence.

Keep your eye on the countries named at the bottom of the screen. Watching the same dance step (executed with hillarious inconsistency) performed by so many disparate people somehow feels sublime, holy. It’s not the man, compromised and creepy as he was, that moves me. It’s us— connected, as always, by similar experiences of joy and grief, and now connected by cameras and satellites and software, status updates and text donations. Making mourning public, as it should be, once again.