Prospero's Books

This is your brain on Shakespeare

Britain's Telegraph reports a study that shows beneficial brain activity while reading Shakespeare. The study, led by Philip Davis of Liverpool University, finds that "the Shakespeare sparked activity across a far wider area of the brain than 'plain' text, with the greatest concentration in a key area associated with language in the temporal lobe known as the Sylvian Fissure."

The researchers say that the study provides "valuable lessons for the education system and for older people who want to keep their minds active."

Thanks to News on the Rialto for the referance.

Irrational season's greetings!

One of my favorite Christmas poems, by Madeleine L'Engle:

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild,
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There'd have been no room for the child.

Have an irrational season!

The Real Evolution Debate

The debate over evolution isn't just between Darwinists and creationists. The January-March 2007 issue of What is Enlightenment identifies fully a dozen camps in "The Real Evolution Debate," arranged in a continuum from the scientific to the spiritual. I've added, in parentheses, the most familiar (to me) spokespersons, from those listed in the article:

• Neo-Darwinists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett)
• Progressive Darwinists (Sean Carroll)
• Collectivists (Lynn Margulis)
• Complexity Theorists (Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, Ervin Laszlo)
• Directionalists (Robert Wright)
• Transhumanists (Ray Kurzweil)
• Process Philosophers (Ian Barbour, Alfred North Whitehead)
• Integralists (George Leonard, Ken Wilber)
• Conscious Evolutionists (Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme)
• Esoteric Evolutionists (Colin Wilson)
• Theistic Evolutionists (John Polkinghorne)
• Intelligent Designers (William Dembski)

The article, by the magazine's editors, reveals a bias toward the Integralists by placing them at the central, most emphatic point in the accompanying diagram, in much the same way that American maps of the world used to place the Americas in the center, with the great Eurasian land mass chopped in half at the margins. But the article does seem fair in its account of each position, and includes helpful lists of major works and influences.

(Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Teilhard de Chardin appears as an influence in three of the twelve camps.)

Stories in 2-D, 3-D, in real-world spaces

A weekend at Walt Disney World (a secret passion) reminds me of the power of story.

When Disney Imagineers design an experience, they always begin with a story. That practice began with Walt himself, for whom the story was always the first priority. When the first “dark rides” at Disneyland—Snow White, Peter Pan, Mr. Toad—were being designed, Walt rejected the steel wheels used for dark rides at other parks. “We’re trying to tell a story in those rides,” he is quoted as saying. “We need quiet cars.”

That attention to story has continued. At Walt Disney World, for example, a safari ride becomes a search for ivory poachers in an African game preserve, a roller coaster becomes a limousine ride through Los Angeles traffic to a party, and a water park becomes the melting remains of a freak Florida blizzard. “Storytelling is the world’s oldest profession,” says Bran Ferren, former Disney Imagineer, “and Disney tells stories in 2-D, 3-D, in real-world spaces.”

Into the labyrinth of our own selves

Also in the Fall 2006 issue of Parabola is an interview with Karen Armstrong, perhaps the world's most popular scholar of religion and myth. She talks of the human need for mythos:

When a child dies, we want a scientific explanation but that's not all we need. We need some kind of different kind of thinking that helps us deal with the turbulence of our inner world at such a time. Myth is an early form of psychology. There are all these stories about gods going down into the underworld to slaughter demons. We all have to learn how to negotiate our unconscious worlds. We have to go into the labyrinth of our own selves and fight our own monsters.

We've always been aware that there are two ways of approaching truth, one through reason and science and the other through an intuitive knowing. The word mythos comes from the Greek word which means to close the mouth or close the eyes. Mystery and mysticism come from the same root. So they are associated with a sense of darkness, with going into a realm where you don't see very clearly, where things are more obscure and will remain obscure. It is also a realm of silence rather than wordy thought. We approach this kind of knowing in art. At the end of a great symphony or when you've listened to a great poem there's often nothing to say. You're being pushed beyond rational thoughts and distinctions into a silent intuitive space (21-22).

The hunger to know what will take place

In the Fall 2006 issue of Parabola, storyteller Laura Simms explains, as clearly as I've ever seen it explained, the power of stories to take us beyond familiar ways of thinking:

The images of myth and story instigated by the voice and words of a teller of a tale can reveal a perception that is natural, inherent, and vast, where the brilliant hues of things as they are, or the coexistence of opposites, can be felt. In the tale, this process is disguised as a continuous thread of narrative events. It is received moment by moment by listeners as image and experience rising on the spot. This reception hangs on the storyteller's ability to engage the mind of the listeners and to let the natural process of listening become active. It trains the mind to appreciate the knowledge of the heart (67).

And later:

When heard or read, . . . events [in a story] are imagined and accepted by the listener, whose mind has made word into visual thought and is wondering what will happen next. The usual thought process that questions the logic of this and that is suddenly accepting the odd events of the tale. The hunger to know what will take place has replaced the usual need for logic. This suspension of disbelief, or expansion of thinking, propels the reader onward (68).

Deep ancestry

My wife, Bette, and I recently treated ourselves to National Geographic's Genographic Project Kits. The kits make it easy to submit cheek scrapings for DNA analysis, as part of the society's Genographic Project. The results provide a wonderful perspective on one's place in the great human story.

In Bette's case, mitochondrial DNA carries the chronicle of a 150,000-year chain of mothers and daughters. That chain begins with "Mitochondrial Eve," an African woman who was the ancestor of every person alive today. Around 80,000 years ago, one of Bette's maternal ancestors left Africa, and from there the story continues through the Middle East into Western Europe, until one brave woman made the long voyage to North America.

My ancestral record is etched into my Y-chromosome, which fathers give to their sons. Like Bette, I'd be seen as a WASP, though I prefer to think of myself as a Welsh Celt, not an English Anglo-Saxon.

So my DNA results surprised me.

I'm a member of "haplogroup E3b." Like Bette's—and everyone else's— my ancestral story begins in Africa. But my paternal ancestors didn't leave Africa until just 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. And they stayed long in the Middle East, to become the first farmers.

Today, most men in my haplogroup live around the Mediterranean, making up 10 percent of all Spaniards, 12-13 percent of northern and southern Italians, 20 percent of Sicilians, 20-30 percent of Balkans and Greeks, and a whopping 75 percent of North Africans. By contrast, I share my haplogroup with only 3-4 percent of Irishmen and 4-5 percent of Englishmen.

So am I descended, perhaps, from a Roman soldier who came to Britain under Claudius in 43 A.D.? Or a Moorish trader bringing goods to the island from North Africa? Or an stonemason brought to Britain from Italy to help build the great cathedrals?

Of course, each of us has many thousands more ancestors than just those along our mother-daughter or father-son line. Even so, the Genographic Project can map vividly one of the trails on the journey that led to our birth.

The science of the whole

My Lodge Vitruvian brother Chris Hodapp, author of Freemasons for Dummies, has posted an intriguing passage from Chapter 2 of Tolstoy's War and Peace. One paragraph of that passage is particularly apt for this blog. A Mason is speaking to Pierre:

"The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it."

Book of the Year

The 2006 Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Jeff Hoke's The Museum of Lost Wonder. My sole criterion for the award: it's the book this year I most love and most wish I could have written.

Erik Davis writes of the book

Jeff Hoke’s The Museum of Lost Wonder is a soulful delight—an alchemical workbook designed to remap the connections between science and poetry, matter and psyche, philosophy and comic books.

And Ode magzine says

The Search for Wonder Ends Here.

Jeff Hoke's beautifully illustrated book The Museum of Lost Wonder is about everything—from psychology to alchemy, from science to magic, from star systems to death. Hoke is an American visual artist inspired by artifacts of the 16th and 17th centuries.  He creates a super-natural ambience, reconnecting the dry, rational view of the contemporary world with the magical perspective of the ancient alchemists.  The book is a treasure trove that can be endlessly explored in search of surprising facts, strange images, thought-provoking ideas and exciting experiments.  Hoke continually manages to stimulate the imagination so that nothing is what it seems to be and everything is enchanted.  The book is an experience.

The Museum of Lost Wonder is truly a museum in a book, with seven cut-and-assemble models that bring its rich graphics into the third (and even fourth) dimension.

For a more detailed look at the book, please visit its site.

Needed: a Dante for the Hubble

At Science Musings, Chet Raymo meditates on the various "billions" that are needed to describe life and the universe. Science, he writes, "lays before us a stupendous story of creation—a gigamyth—sweeping in its grandeur, myriad in its dimensions, and we can only shake our heads in incomprehension." He concludes:

I have the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph as the desktop on my computer. The photo is the deepest view we have ever had into space. It shows a part of sky equal to the intersection of crossed straight pins held at arm's length. The shutter of the camera was open for a total of 11.3 days. Nearly 10,000 galaxies are visible in the photo. The most distant galaxy in the photograph is about 12 billion light-years away.

The Hubble photo is before me as I write, filling the margins of the screen around the edges of my word-processing document with hints of gigatude.

Each of the specks of light on the photograph is a galaxy of stars and planets. Within each speck there are a thousand billion universes such as the one that Dante traversed in the Divine Comedy. And the grandeur of that cosy little universe stretched Dante's powers of description.

Who will take us on an equal tour of the universe of the Hubble and teach us to feel at home? Carl Sagan gave his best shot but he was not Dante's equal. We await our first great gigapoet.