1. Margaret Atwood

A summary of her thoughts: She uses different parts of her brain to write fiction and poetry. The fiction brain was the one that plans things in life, writes lists and the poetry brain was more connected to math and music i.e. symbols, and that it required a lot of space around it in order to create. Fiction writing, she said, was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration whereas writing poems required the reverse. She can pound at fiction every day, but not poetry. She needs to walk for poetry.

2a. Arthur Rimbaud – A Season in Hell

This is a good quote on Synaesthesia: I invented the colours of the vowels… I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language which would one day be accessible to all the senses.

Comment: I will deal with synaesthesia in the book and how it is important to metaphor. Note that Seasons in Hell is also marked by its endless cycling between manic ups and depressive downs, even in one page.

2b. Arthur Rimbaud

I ended up regarding my mental disorder as sacred.

Comment: this is a very common feeling among artists, that the mood disturbances are where the art comes from, and because many artists consider themselves their work, they consider their mood disturbances ’sacred’ and refuse the help of others, not to mention being reluctant to take medicines for them.

3. Carl Jung

[A poet] “is objective and impersonal – even inhuman – for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being… [sacrificing] happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”

Comment: a sobering thought; however, mistaking one’s work for oneself, leads to a lifetime of not being happy with one’s self, which need not be the necessary outcome. The book will deal in more depth with this issue as part of the personality and mood disturbances of the artist/writer.

4. Robin Skelton

[at 17 in 1942, regarding writing The Grail, it is] an instance of inspiration for I remember distinctly how the words seemed dictated to me entirely by some inner voice. Indeed I only understand what I had been writing about after I had finished the poem and read it as I would the work of any unknown poet… [as in automatic writing, Robin's term]

Comment: this seemingly innocuous statement has crucial concerns for the subject of where, in the brain, art is generated. The scientific community, even in 2007, does not believe that art can come from anywhere other than the conscious creative part of the right frontal cortex. (They have pointed out that certain specific abilities lie elsewhere, of course, and accept the conventional wisdom that art is from ineffable sources and that the subconscious mind (my term) plays an important role).

5. Jason W. Brown

It is natural to think that objects are offered up to consciousness with the self the spectator of a passing show, while in truth, consciousness and the self are deposited in the course of perception. The self is a residue of constructs within a perception left behind as the object moves outward.

Comment: As counterintuitive as the quote may sound, it is the current scientific conception. This means that we are in a period of radical reconstruction of the view of the human mind.

6. Ralph Ellis

Art teaches us to get beyond this [drawing instead what we conceptualize that we ought to be seeing] almost complete dominance of habitual categories, and to see things more freshly, both in the perceptual and in the emotive sphere. Rather than reinforcing our preconceptions, it forces us to see how they affect our view of reality.

Comment: this is because perception is active rather than passive, and begins with activity in the subconscious emotional brain areas, that we have connection to, but cannot directly perceive.

7. Robin Skelton

All art is juxtaposition, placing images beside each other in such a way as to suggest previously unnoticed or unimagined relationships. In making collages I attempt to discover relationships… The exact meaning is something I do not think about; I am only concerned that the final combination of images should hint at possible interpretations so that any one collage may have a slightly different significance for each observer. My titles are suggestions rather than assertions and I rather dislike the necessity of providing such lablels.

Comment: Another view on artistic creation and the role of the viewer in the creation of his/her own art through observation and interpretation.

8. ee cummings

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.

Comment: all writers/artists know this one. As in: sure you can be an artist, but get a real job first.

9. J.A. Goguen (JCS, V7, 2000)

The method of science calls for precise repeatable measurements, and for an objectivity that excludes all subjective factors on the part of the experimenter. This is very different from the method of art – indeed, it is nearly the opposite. That artists directly engage their subjectivity in their work is one of the few assertions that is very widely held among the highly diverse plethora of contemporary artistic movements. Moreover, repetition (at the time of creation) is anathema to most artists…

Comment: Goguen’s paper is the introduction to the second volume on art and the brain. He does an excellent job of bringing together the major theories of art that have emerged since the time of Aristotle, including ones from non-western traditions, and that, for at least the last century, artists have left the scientists, philosophers, psychologists and critics well behind. If you want to understand the context of the current debate on ‘what is art’ this is a good ten page summary.

10. Edvard Munch [The Scream, for example]

They [his mental troubles] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and [to get rid of his mental troubles] would destroy my art. I want to keep these sufferings.

Comment: As it turns out, far from being incompatible with artistic achievement mental pathologies are often integrated by artists within the fabric of their lives. Munch’s view is typical. In other words art comprises such a large component of personal structure and self-esteem that many artists refuse treatment for serious mental illness for fear of losing art and hence themselves.

11. Roberta Tucker (JCS 11, p8)

…where science and philosophy describe, literature evokes, provokes, makes us feel, experience things. Literature’s approach is an experiential, not a logical, one. It seems to work more closely to the way we are discovering certain functions in the brain seem to work vs. the way logic (or the scientific method) works.

Comment: This is an interesting question because current science is revealing that the third of a second required between seeing and acting is mediated by the subconscious ‘emotional’ brain (not the unconscious mind), and that all perception is an active process started by the subconscious brain. This implies that all science (a repeatable, measurement process) and logic are started by the subconscious brain where we have no consciousness.

12. Roberta Tucker (JCS V11, p7)

Literature also admits it is fiction and yet claims profundity and value. How can one take it seriously? Because we understand that the brain functions by means of fictions. Everything is a translation, transposition. Chemical and electrical changes in the brain are the the flower one sees and smells. What is memory but constant reconstruction? What is the unconscious? Every abstraction is a fiction. It’s why we need logic and the scientific method – to get around these tendencies. And then we take it seriously because humans engage in it, even scientists and philosophers.

Comment: the other thing to remember is that one early step in a baby’s development is recognizing that an object it sees from one angle is the same one seen when the baby moves and sees it from a different angle. The process of learning this and making a representation, is fundamental to human thought. It is the first step in making an abstraction, and, more importantly, is in itself a metaphor, meaning that metaphor is fundamental to human thinking.

13. (Dec 21) Robert Lowell

It’s terrible… to think that all I’ve suffered and all the suffering I’ve caused might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.

Comment: Lithium. In the same column of the Atomic Table as sodium. Imagine that

14. (D 21) Dylan Thomas

I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s a record.

Comment: Booze is the writer’s drug. According to Wikepedia (assuming we can trust Wikepedia), this often quoted quote isn’t true, or so the publican in New York who served Dylan up the drams has said.

15. (D21) Hugo Wolf

I would like to hang myself on the nearest branch of the cherry trees standing now in full bloom.

Comment: a not uncommon obsessive compulsion of the highly creative.

16. (D 21) Virginia Woolf

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again… I can’t fight any longer.

Comment: and so saying, then filled her pockets with stones and walked deeply into the river.

17. (D 21) Vincent Van Gogh

The root of the evil lies in the constitution itself, in the fatal weakening of families from generation to generationi… the root of the evil certainly lies there. And there’s no cure for it.

Comment: Manic depression and other affective disorders are genetically disposed, but the life of the person also is important. Lithium compounds, carbamazepine for example, were not available in van Gogh’s time.

18. (D 21)Leo Tolstoy

The thought of suicide came to me as naturally then as the thought of improving life had come to me before… And I quit going hunting with a gun, so that I would not be too easily tempted to rid myself of life.

Comment: Good thing. Ain’t no guns in my life.

19. Julia Kindy (JCS 6)

Painting and sculpture must be experienced in their actual form and not in reproduction. One can never understand the all-encompassing, radiant atmosphere of a Mark Rothko painting, for example, unless standing in front of it. The scale alone of a Rothko canvas is meant to relate directly to the body, so that the painting can be ‘absorbed’ by more than the eyes. It is a direct physical experience. Looking at a reproduction is meaningless.

Comment: This speaks to the active nature, and multi-sensory theory of perception. Similar words could describe the experience of reading a poem.

20. E. Myin (JCS, 7)

The visual system, rather than being a source of rigid constraints, becomes itself an exploratory tool, directed towards the goals the artist sets for herself…. In the end, the self-conscsious perception and creation of the artist appear as ever more flexible capacities to modify lower level capacities.

Comment: This is even more obvious when the art in question is literature – poetry or prose, some steps removed from sight.

21. Paul Cezanne (Gasquet, 1927/91)

An art which does not have emotion as its principle is not an art… Emotion is the principle, the beginning and the end; the craft… the execution is the middle…

Comment: This means that the artist needs to pay attention to the sub-conscious as that is where emotions reside, a place where we have no consciousness.

22. Johnathan I. – Nuclear Sunrise

[The painter, after becoming profoundly colour blind, could only see black and white, realized] I felt if I couldn’t go on painting, I didn’t want to go on at all.

Comment: again, the intimate relationship between identity and the art of the individual. Happily, he went on painting – all in black and white.

23. Paul Cezanne (Rewald 1995)

…nature… is the necessary basis for all artistic conception… the knowledge of expressing our emotion is no less essential, and is only to be acquired through very long experience.

Comment: Hear, hear.

24. R.L. Solso (JCS, V7, 8/9, etc)

Experts from a wide range of areas, such as mathematics, music, photography, poetry, architecture… may exhibit specialized patterns of cerebral activity [as measured by fMRI] related to their expertise. Such studies… will answer some important questions about experts, ‘gifted’ people, and the origin of talent.

Comment: So we can use an MRI to show in images how a poet’s/writer’s thoughts differ from those of a non-poet/writer. We have the technology.

25. Jackson Pollock (Solso)

Painting is self discovery. Every good painter paints what he is… I am nature.

Comment: he also maintained that the source of all his imagery was the subconscious. His method of creativity was, as they say, psychic automatism. This means that he intended to work without any conscious control on what he was doing – in the drip paintings, for instance.

26. Shakespeare

The lunatic, the poet, and the lover are of imagination all compact… Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.

Comment: Most writers will know that in Shakespeare’s time love was considered a disease, a fever. And, of course, the quote is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This quote speaks to the creativity/madness issue, as in, to be great you must be mad.

27. Socrates

The demon

Comment: a divine gift granted to a few individuals (poets, philosophers, priests) so they can speak with the gods. An early view that tends to associate creativity, madness and religion. Little wonder that we, 2700 years later, have this view: it is our history, our myth.

28. Aristotle (Problemata XXX)

Homo melancholichus

Comment: a person (poet, artist, politician) gifted with sublime capacities and inextricably prone to madness. This means that the madness is the liability or the price the artist has to pay to do the art. Note the quotes of Rimbaud, Munch, etc. that many artists are quite willing to pay that price.

29. Sylvia Plath

When you are insane you are busy being insane – all the time…. When I was crazy that was all I was.

Comment: Plath was manic-depressive. And this shows she recognized that once off the deep end into psychosis, there was no creativity. We all know that she committed suicide, because of Ted, but no doubt because of the MD thing, too.

30. Graham Greene (1981)

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can mange to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear [sic] which is inherent in the human condition.

Comment:

31. Patrick Lane

…and my poems, the broken ones that will never / be seen. These I keep for myself. They are / the other silence, the one that sings to me / when my friends are gone and the night / moves with great slowness in my hands.

Comment: This is what you do for the poems that cannot live on their own.

32. Paul Klee

[I want to] …be able to improvise freely on the keyboard of colours: the rows of watercolours in my paint box.

Comment: While the association of mathematics and music is obvious, the association of music and painting should also be. How many bad movies have been saved by a good score? Possibly a synaesthetic mechanism; a sub-conscious mood.

33. Vassily Klandinsky

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Comment: a close friend of Klee. Both were musicians as well as visual artists.

34. Richard E. Cytowic (Ione)

Both synaesthesia and the artistic experience are ineffable, and both indescribable by language.

Comment: Perhaps

35. Richard E. Cytowic

[Furthermore] …when we say that art speaks to the depths of our souls – it speaks to that greater formless part of ourselves of which we have no awareness.

Comment: Precisely. The sub-conscious. Whether we have anything as grand as a soul is another question.

36. Kandinsky

[When listening to Wagner in1896] I saw all my colours in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.

Comment: Synaesthesia. Note the similarity with the Rimbaud quote way above.

37. Amy Ione discussing Michael Marmor’s Degas Through His Own Eye, 2002

…despite Degas’ assertion that inner vision determined the nature of an artist’s work, his decreasing visual acuity resulted in precisely the kind of crudeness in composition clinically associated with retinopathy. This is particularly evident when we compare the flawless rendering of his early work with the grotesque figures he painted at the end of his life.
Comment: This is a spectacularly serendipitous expression of mature artistic belief and subsequent counter analysis. After all, Degas would be well aware that his late, for example, Madame Alexis Rouart and Her Children, faces were ugly in comparison with his own paintings done earlier in life. In the face of this obvious discrepancy, he still maintained that inner vision determines the work.

38. Michelangelo

The greatest artists have no thoughts to show that / Which the marble in its superfluous shell does not contain / To break the marbel spell is all that the hand / That serves the brain can do.

Comment: The art is in the stone, the artist just releases it – a frequent description of the artistic process. I am surprised that Zeki, a very bright fellow indeed, sees this as saying the form of the art is in the sculptor and he/she carves this into the stone. (p88, JCS, V6, 1999).

39. Ralph Ellis

…the eyes continually dance, with thousands of micro-movements per second [saccades], and that without this active, self-generated movement, the eye could not see.

Comment: This means that we are constantly looking out to the world, not waiting for it to come at us. This is active perception, mediated by the subconscious. This is fundamental to human consciousness.

40. bill bissett

I am devoted to the tactile sense of language. When I look at letters, I see pictures. Some poets are more devoted to the meaning as representational, but that’s not my objective.

Comment: Synaesthesia. A different sense of the word representational from the one used in the science world. From our favourite Canadian poet from a different planet. “Raging, excellent, lightning, magic rainbows.”

Comment: Synaesthesia. A different sense of …whatever.

41. Alison Abbott

Where long term memories for tunes are stored is… less clear, but they are remarkably resilient: once we have learnt a melody we rarely forget it.

Comment: This supports my contention, that will be a footnote in The Brains of Poets, that the tremendous memory potential we contain can be simply seen in the huge amount of trivial info we have, as in: each of us knows 5,000 pop songs.

42. Elvis Presley

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

Comment: Thank you, thank you very much.

43. (Mar, 08) Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power)

The most marked trend in paranoia is that towards a complete seizing of the world through words.

Comments: He wasn’t intending to align paranoia with poets, but see how it fits, it fits.

44. Chinue Achebe

Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

Comment: Art is about meaning, fundamental meaning.

45. Lorna Crozier

There is a kind of logic that sound creates—that rhythm creates and that metaphor creates—which is the essential logic that lies at the heart of a good poem. It’s a kind of thinking, of proposing, of reasoning that can teach us the most because it’s done at a level beyond thought.

Comment: yes, exactly.

46. Rainier Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of a terror we are just able to endure.

Comment: If beauty is the beginning of terror, or loss, then it is connected to deeper parts of the brain than the pleasure centre, not that that is a bad place, but that there is more, much more to art.

47. Mark Changizi,

Animals who move or are in a world that moves around them – as long as there are things moving somehow relative to you – will be selected to have perceptions that are true. We have about a tenth of a second delay between the time light hits the retina and the time of resultant perception, which is considerable given that you move 10 centimeters in that amount of time even if you’re only walking one metre per second. That means that if you didn’t compensate for this neural delay, anything you perceive to be within 10 cm of passing… would have just passed you by the time you perceive it. You’d always be seeing the world as it was a tenth of as second earlier and seeing what the world looks like 10 cm behind where you in fact are – if you hadn’t run into whatever it is you’re looking for.

Comment: so we are more and more in the past the faster we go? Like riding in a plane or rocket. And what does the word ‘true’ mean?

48. Amy Ione, JCS, 10, 2, 2003

… [his] Timeaus was particularly successful in spreading Platos teleology and his rejection of sensation and observation in favour of reason… the approach he outlined is still employed to ask and answer questions about the mind, sensory experience, perception and the relationship between empirical knowledge and what is oftern designated as ‘true knowledge’.

Comment: There are two issues here: how great an effect Plato has had in shaping what the western world does and thinks about the mind for more than two millennia; and, the fallacy that I call: even bright people make dumb mistakes. What Amy Ione means is that, it’s dangerous to accept received knowledge, as in Plato, as ‘true’ and then use his ideals to prove theories about the empirical world.

49 Wallace Stevens

Reality is the product of the most august imagination.

Comment: quite the reversal from the present neurobiological, and not to mention common sense, model that reality is what comes at us. Imagination is where the conscious and the subconscious are their most creative.

50. William James

The systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.

Comment:

51. Henry David Thoreau

The poet writes the history of his own body.

Comment: The idea here is that man is his body and the mind is part of the body. No Cartesian duality here, at least in this quote.

52. Walt Whitman

This is the female form;

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a
Helpless vapour – all falls aside but myself and it;

Comment: Whitman believed that the body and soul were the same, and that the body not only was the soul, but that the body was all, and so one looked to what the body felt to feel what the soul felt. Today, I would draw your attention to the sense of smell, in this quote from, I Sing The Body Electric, as in the electricity of the nerves, and that smell is what attracts, pheromones, and so on – the one sense that the nerves pass directly to the subconscious.

53. Marya Fiamengo

“All art,” the French poet Mallarme writes, “aspires to the condition of music.” Poetry is the music of language.

Comment: Music as primal, a hearing thing. And poetry, yes… What matters to Fiamengo, who taught for 31 years at UBC, is that poetry “affirms the validity, integrity and sanctity of the human spirit.” Marya, born in 1926, wrote this comment in 2008, the kind of vision that a person comes to in advanced years.

54. Jonah Lehrer

Nottebohm, in a series of remarkably beautiful studies on bird brains, showed that neurogenesis was required for bird song. To sing their complex melodies, male birds needed new brain cells. In fact, up to 1 percent of the neurons in the bird’s song centre were made fresh every day.

Comment: Furthermore, it only works in free birds in nature. Animals in cages do not grow new brain cells. In other words, every three months, the entire bird song centre is new.

55. Jonah Lehrer

The hippocampus … modulates learning and memory, is continually supplied with new neurons, which help us to learn and remember ideas and behaviors. Other scientists have discovered that antidepressants work by stimulating neurogenesis … implying that depression is ultimatel ycaused by a decrease in the amount of new neurons, and not by a lack of serotonin.

Comment: there are antidepressants being developed that target production of new brain cells, something that has the potential to change humanity, because everyone will want to take them. Talk about soma for Pfizer.

56. George Eliot

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience.

Comment: Chaos theory stresses the indeterminantcy of life, even DNA, even our brains from day to day. We are neither free nor determined. And art suggests various solutions in its various possible explanations, which is a mark of great poetry. One could argue that the brain is a great poem, because it is linguistic indeterminantcy (to coin a word).

57. Thomas Kuhn

Until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way, the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.

Comment: Ah, but the difficulty is apprehending that the new fact is a material new fact, that is, one that will result in a paradigm shift in science, or simply a pretender to such grand changes of heart by scientists. Also of interest here is that nature has not changed, it is simply the scientists point of view that has changed. Most readers will realize that this is essentially a zen point of view.

58. Jonah Lehrer

A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.

Comment: This unsettling truth was discovered by Joseph LeDoux, in 2000. He showed that giving a rat a chemical injection that blocks the process of remembering a memory – fear after a noise, similar to the Pavlov dog thing – that the original memory also disappeared. This means that memories are not settled, or ‘things’ sitting on a shelf in a pigeon hole waiting to be retrieved – the way we think of memory. In fact when you remember something, you are beyond the true memory of the actual that affected you, for example the taste of cinnamon is not the same thing as a memory of it, and as you remember remembering it, you actually change your memory and do so every time you remember something , because the act of remembering is laying down a new memory.

59. Emile Zola

The novelist must become a scientist, “employing the experimental method in their study of man…” in an effort to, “describe man as he really is… ” and the writer must “disappear, and simply show what he has seen. The tender intervention of the writer weakens a novel and introduces a strange element into the facts which destroys their scientific value.”

Comment: Thank goodness this was said more than 100 years ago in the late 1800s, rather than now when it would have been used to discredit a lot of other writing from a scientific perspective that believed in the reductionist perspective that art is describable totally by neurobiology and the rules of physics. On the other hand, though, the pushing of the novelist out of sight with the intent of presenting what the artist has seen, has that ring of modernism going post.

60. Immanuel Kant

The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

Comment: This assertion predates current science that says light in the eye is split to V1 in the visual cortex concerned with edges/lines, and that that goes to the right frontal area to immediately focus the data and eye on form.  We see what we want to or expect to see. The line in a nonfinito painting by Cezanne, Mount Sainte-Victoire, for example, that suggests the presence of a mountain is interpreted as such by the mind, even though there is only a quick line on a canvas and a lot of white space.

61. Arnold Schoenberg (composer)

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

Comment: This is an illustration of a common sentiment by artists (this one in 1908). But, note, that it is from the time after when there became a middle class that could read and had some money to buy things, and thus after the time when the rift between art and society occurred.

I should add that Schoenberg, and then Stravinsky were the guys who invented dissonance and where the 20th century love affair with atonal music came from. Interesting to think that cubism arose not that much later, which many might think dissonance in visual art.

62. Igor Stravinsky

[Daring is] …the motive force of the finest and greatest artist. I approve of daring: I set no limits to it.

Comment: This is an expression of the ache an artist feels in order to create, the agitation, the necessity to go beyond one’s limits, and creation is seen as endlessly new art, rather than repeating the art of the past. Quite the opposite of science which is all about repeatability – (and interestingly, that Ludwig points out that the artist and the scientist have the most similar personalities of all the other kinds of professions out there). And Stravinsky prised reinventing himself continually through his career. This is the equivalent, in poetry, of trying to write to a completely new aesthetic every time, perhaps every book, the poet writes.

63. Jonah Lehrer

We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness. How do we escape this neurological trap? By paying attention to art. The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has had before. And while the poet must struggle to invent a new metaphor and the novelist a new story, the composer must discover the undiscovered pattern, for the originality is the source of the emotion. If art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it.

Comment: While several possible comments come to mind, I will make only this: think of the time before art and society separated, the time when art was paid for by kings and queens and the church.  By being paid for, the artist was using his vision in service of he who paid the bill for thousands of years. Now, after a literate middle class has arisen with income and time to spend, art severed the connection, in the past couple of hundred years. It is only in this recent past that artists have been able to get on with the ongoing restless always changing task of taking humanity where the mind should go.

64. Charles Darwin

Language is an instinctive tendency to acquire an art.

Comment: ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.’

65. Gertrude Stein

There is only one language.

Comment: this scientist, doctor, writer wrote a fancy sort of gibberish about the rules of language a century ago. But she recognized what Chomsky did 50 years later: there is universal grammar; the minds of all have the instinct, or deep structure, if you wish, for language.  Even the deaf children from Nicaragua developed sign-language grammar when brought together in the first deaf school in the 1980s. In her Tender Buttons, for instance, it made clear that the reader only becomes aware of the grammar/structure of language if language was subverted.

66. Gertrude Stein

I found out there is no such thing as putting them [words] together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense. I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.

Comment: In other words language has a deep structure and universal grammar. It also means that this deconstruction of language does not have to be done again.

67. Virginia Woolf

The mind receives a myriad of impressions. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday… Let us [novelists] record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

Comment: This is a 20th century concern, the self, the consciousness of the human mind, in this case the fragments are brought together and constitute that flowing thing we call the self, and, of course, the style of her and Joyce and Faulkner was stream of consciousness, Ulysses for the former, and The Sound And The Fury (yes, yes, Absalom, Absalom, too) for the latter.

68. T.S. Eliot

The poet is not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality.

Comment: objectification, removing from the poet the desire to express a unified soul, on the grounds that we don’t have one, just bits and pieces of current thought.

69. Steven Pinker

Human intelligence, with its capacity to think an unlimited number of abstract thoughts, evolved out of primate circuitry for coping with the physical and social world, augmented by a capacity to extend these circuits to new domains by metaphorical abstraction.

Comment: This is the linguistic version of the story of metaphor development. Pinker goes on to say that most metaphors are ‘deader than a doornail’.  That’s true, but there are lots of other ways that metaphors get developed: by the representation process in the first year of our lives; by synaesthesia; by the association of different categories of thought, and so on. Do read the metaphor chapter in The Stuff of Thought. It shows that our usual talking is riddled with thousands of cliche metaphors, that we have forgotten were cliches to those who coined them and to the millions of people who have used them over the years. There are many amusing, ho-hum metaphors in the chapter.

70. George Lakoff

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Comment:  So, everybody thinks and speaks metaphorically. But poets do so extraordinarily or novel-ee a basic component of creativity.

71. Steven Pinker

The view from language shows us the cave we inhabit, and also the best way out of it. With the use of metaphor and combination, we can entertain new ideas and new ways of managing our affairs. We can do this even as our minds flicker with the agonists and antagonists, the points and lines and slabs, the activities and accomplishments, the gods and sex and effluvia, and the sympathy and deference and fairness that make up the stuff of thought.

Comment: See my book review on: The Stuff Of Thought

72. Steven Pinker

[our ideas, feelings and attachments] and our ability to combine them into bigger assemblies and to extend them to new domains by metaphorical leaps goes a long way toward explaining what makes us smart.

Comments: What we poets knew all along.

73. Plato

He has a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin and bloodshot eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears – deaf as a post – and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.

Comment: Plato got the old rational emotional mind thing going with his metaphor of the mind being a chariot pulled by two horses and being controlled by the rational mind. One horse is good, the above one is bad. And man, the charioteer, must struggle to keep reason ascendant over emotion.

And there is a long list of other philosophers who are also from Christian religion Europe, like Descarte, Kant and so on, all believed in reason over emotion and the separation of body and mind. Current science still has adherents to this old fallacy – Ramachandran, Zeki and so on.

74. Plato

If the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail, then we can lead a life here in happiness and harmony, masters of ourselves.

Comment: and so, Plato laid the ground work for our western tradition, some 2,400 years ago, and even today of rational mind over irrational emotion. Of course, the mind is now seen not so much in these opposite poles but in in a collection of drives moving toward the ways we go and the decisions we make. As a person with a degree in philosophy, I am always stunned to find how much wasted thought there has been from a philosophic point of view. At the time, I was being steeped in British Empiricism, that thought the rest of the world simply substandard. I read on my own: Wittgenstein (one of their own, ignored!), Sartre, Kierkegaarde, Heidigger, Husserl, Confucius, The Upanishads, Kant and etc. holed up in my frozen hall of residence, sitting in a sleeping bag and reading by the yard.

75. Freud

The events of human history are only the reflections of the dynamic conflicts among the id [irrational, bad, emotion, the pleasure principle] and ego [rationality, reason, strength to fight the id], which psychoanalysis studies in the individual – the same events on a wider stage.

Comment: Same old, same old.

76. Goya

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

Comment: reason alone produces monsters.

77. Jonah Lehrer

Over time, Freudian psychology lost its scientific credibility. Discussion of the id, ego and Oedipus complex were replaced by references to specific areas in the brain; Viennese theory gave way to increasingly exact anatomical maps of the cortex. The metaphor of the Platonic chariot seemed woefully obsolete.

Comment: The slow shift of paradigms by thoughts acting in time. Leaves in their lives.

78. David Hume

[Reason is] the slave of passions.

Comment: and you thought he was the square Presbyterian who concluded the sequence of Locke and Barkley (sp) that set British philosophy much more rationally above the rest of the philo-world. And showed primarily that what we experience of the world has nothing to do with the world only with sense data in our heads and bodies.

And you thought his weighty tome, A Treatise On Human Nature, had its only purpose to be combined with The Alexandria Quartet and the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy and used to keep your door open on a stiflingly hot day. Hmm.

79. Joseph Ledoux

…consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it’s a slave to everything that works beneath it.

Comment: remember the subconscious? When we say we are thinking, say of choosing a pretty mate, we are feeling what we want, driven by our emotions, the limbic system with all its lust and violence, and blood and the death of the bull in the dusty ring.

80. Salvador Dali

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.

Comment: Dali with his wilted watch and slow, bored appreciation of time, was right. Great artists are not mad, at least not when they are producing art. They may well be mad at other times, Robert Schumann’s highs and lows correspond exactly with his output of art; highs produce huge output of music; lows correspond to zero music. But these bi-polar extremes are both useful to the artist.

81. Read Montague

You’re probably 99.9 percent unaware of dopamine release, but you’re probably 99.9 percent driven by the information and the emotions it conveys to other parts of the brain.

Comment: dopamine is the pleasure/attention chemical released from brain cells in the anterior cingulate cortex. It is instantaneously transmitted all over the brain by spindle cells that connect the entire brain together. So a tiny beginning can have a huge immediate consequence in what we feel and what we do.

Most importantly, the spindle cells that instantly transmit the feeling to all areas of the brain are present only higher primates. And humans have 40 times more of these long, slender cells. This is one proof that tiny fluctuations in our emotions have huge effects on what we do.

82. Sting

Music is a mystery, it doesn’t end.

Comment: Poetry is about possibility, and perhaps this makes it close to melody, but then, what would a visual artist say? I think the emotion thing is the connection. One interesting thing about Sting in the documentary: The Musical Brain, is that the corpus callosum lit up in an MRI of his brain doing music. That part of the subconscious mind is about moving information from the left and right hemisphere back and forth, integrating melody with words. And this is something that distinguishes a good musician from someone who just plays, the CC does not light up.

Sting found looking at his brain with the lit up parts rather creepy. It was scary, ugly, Martian to him, perhaps an early notion, but his comment was that knowing how it works may make it that he can’t do it. So, he would not pay attention to it.

83. Jonah Lehrer

The activity of our dopamine neurons demonstrates that feelings aren’t simply reflection of hard-wired animal instinct… human emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells, which are constantly adjusting their connections to reflect reality. Everytime you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Our emotions are deeply empirical

Comment: What this means is that the almost three millennium-long western penchant for reason over emotion, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Judeo-Christian religion, isn’t even in the ballpark for telling us what the brain actually does.

84. Jonah Lehrer – How We Decide

When you compare a modern human cortex to [sic] any other primate, or even to some of our hominid ancestors’, the most obvious anatomical difference is this swelling at the fore. The Neanderthal, for example, had a slightly larger brain than Homo sapiens. But he still had the prefrontal cortex of a chimp. As a result, Neanderthals were missing one of the most important talents of the human brain: rational thought.

Comment: This is right above your right eyebrow, just behind the skull bone. This is the spot where we conceive of rationality, consider. And this is what Antonio Egas Moniz, with two little slits in the skull, cut off from the rest of the brain and won the Nobel Prize for in 1949. He had performed the first frontal lobotomy (1935), a thoroughly disgusting thought as it is of the same magnitude as capital punishment, or the general in Vietnam who held the pistol to the skull and killed the wincing ‘gook’ on television sets all over the world.

85. Aristotle

Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to become angry withthe right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.

Comment: A lot of thought is required to do this, as well as the strong emotion mediated by the amygdyla, that all feel. The other side comes with a lot of experience. Think of the shaping part of making art. Doesn’t Aristotle’s thought sound a great deal like a seasoned artist – not in the burst of creation – but in for example, the Manet (?) squiggles that just represent the mountain that he came to later in life.

86. Mavis Gallant

I never thought I would be unsuccessful [but] I don’t want to turn what I have done and who I am into my work. They are two separate things. Because [writing] comes out of another part of you, your brain, your system.

Comment: Gallant was turning aside praise in an interview and saying that writing was not about herself. And one who is on that same pedastel as Tolstoy, Munro and Trevor – as prose writers. And not interested in herself being the subject of biography, though she is editing a juicy tale for publication after she’s dead. A good plan, for memoirs have a way of being flat when those you know and love are, or you, alive.

87. Mavis Gallant

I didn’t want that life. I wouldn’t have been able to write.

Comment: she is talking about not having had a lasting marriage and children. The passion of an artist, that other things don’t get in the way.

88. Antonio Damasio

When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions.

Comment: This is in the 2005 preface to Damasio’s classic book regarding the role of emotion in conscious thinking, Descartes Error, 1994. This surprising conclusion that helped turn our reason over emotion paradigm from the past three millennia, means just what it says: emotion is a normal part of our conscious, and unconscious, reaching of conclusions. If not involved, lack of emotion leads to such strong negative outcomes that a person can be completely unable to function in their lives.

89. Antonio Damasio

… there seem to be no permanently held pictures of anything [in our minds]… If the brain were like a conventional library, we would run out of shelves just as conventional libraries do… memory is essentially reconstructive.

Comment: it is the emotional presence an artist brings to his/her internal images that make them burn and live in frames and on pages. While emotion is present in everyone, the ‘pastiche’ of what we feel strongest about, makes an artist special, not the pastiche, but the rendering of it in a certain medium, like say, words, for poets.

90. Antonio Damasio

The evidence on biological regulation demonstrates that response selections of which organisms are not conscious and which are thus not deliberated take place continuously in evolutionarily old brain structures. Organisms whose brains only include those archaic structures and are devoid of evolutionarily modern ones – reptiles, for instance – operate such response selections without difficulty. One might conceptualize the response selections as an elementary form of decision making, provided it is clear that it is not an aware self but a set of neural circuits that is doing the deciding.

Comment: And yet, it is those old centres that give rise to the fundamental below the surface feelings that contribute to, along with conscious creativity, etc., to the artist being able to produce art, by the connection with and accessing what is below consciousness.

91. Wallace Stevens

The reader bacame the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.

Comment: where the book is. The transformative power of poetry.

92. Emily Dickenson

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch-
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

Comment: Walking through consciousness.

93. Antonio Damassio

In the cerebral cortices… there is an ever-changing pattern of neural activity. There is nothing static about it, no baseline, no little man – the homunculus – sitting in the brain’s penthouse like a staue, receiving signals from the corresponding part of the body. Instead there is change, ceaseless change.

Comment: This is the answer to one of the so-called hard problems of a representational view of how the brain works. There is no little man that caves back into another little man, and so on. Instead, there is only active perception and our experience of it as a side issue we call consciousness.

94. Antonio Damassio

We cannot fool ourselves anymore than we can fool others when we only smile politely… This may be the very good reason why great actors, opera singers, and others manage to survive the simulation of exalted emotions they regularly put themselves thorugh, without losing control.

Comment: Pages 142 – 149 of Descartes Error will be of interest to actors, and how they push their emotions, feelings and behaviour to do convincing work. This patch also discusses the Lawrence Olivier approach of portraying an emotion and the method approach of actually making yourself feel something for it to be convincing. In the latter approach, this pushing one’s self internally, for example, crying, and doing the scene over and over to get it right on film would be very draining.

95. Leo Szilard

The creative scientist has much in common with the artist and the poet. Logical thinking and an analytical ability are necessary attributes to a scientist, but they are far from sufficient for creative work. Those insights in science that have led to a breakthrough were not logically derived from preexisting knowledge: The crative prosses on which the progress of science is based operate on the level of the subconscious.

Comment: Yes.

96. Jonas Salk

[creativity rests on a] merging of intuition and reason.

Comment: Yes.

97. Antonio Damassio

From an evolutionary perspective, the oldest decision-making device pertains to basic biological regulation; the next, to the personal and social realm; and the most recent, to a collection of abstract-symbolic operations under which we can find artistic and scientific reasoning, utilitarian-engineering reasoning, and the developments of language and mathematics. But although ages of evolution and dedicated neural systems may confer some independence to each of these reasoning/decision-making ‘modules,’ I suspect they are all interdependent. When we witness signs of creativity in contemporary humans, we are probably witnessing the integrated operation of sundry combination of these devices.

Comment: And think, cave art from Europe and Australia may be as much as 50,000 years old. We have been doing art for a long time. It is that important to us, to our preferences, to our emotions (sorry, feelings, if you are AD)… what came first, talking or art?

98. Emilie Glazer

Eysenck (1993) proposed one of the most influential thories in the field. He claimed that his psychoticism (P) personality dimension is directly related to creativity, the association being mediated by high divergent thinking and low inhibition, governed by raised levels of nervous system dopamine.

Comment: The dopamine component is the making of connections rapidly without much mediated conscious thought. It is also about the body, and intuition. So, you have ability to be original and at the same time suppress negativity to such creative thoughts and with high ‘reward’ and intuitional emotion.

99. Emilie Glazer

[Jamison] suggests that each mood experienced in affective disorder provides specific contributions to creative ability. Mild manic periods enable high energy, rapidity, flexibility and fluidity of thought, the cognitive aspects of hypomania parelleling imaginative thinking. Depressions allows the meticulous refinement, focus and organization of the wild ideas formed during the manic period. Fluctuating between these two mood states allows the infividual to experience a range of human emotions, placed in  the unique position to express basic human universals, facilitating an empathic relationship with the audience.

Comment: Her conception is one of the well known capsulizations of the useful aspects of bi-polar disease, when I person is not laid out by the full blown ends of the spectrum. But the last clause doesn’t seem valid to me as a poet. I don’t write for an audience other than for the most literate possibility out there. A fictional audience at best. Poetry is for the self, connection with others is another issue entirely.

100. Antonio Damasio

The minimum neural device capable of producing subjectivity thus requires early sensory cortices (including somatosensory), sensory and motor cortical association regions, and subcortical nuclie (expecially thalamus and basla ganglia) with convergence properties capable of acting as third-party ensembles.

Comment: This view of subjectivity, as in, I think of myself, does not suffer the receding homunculous problem of the representational view of the brain. It also, in my view, starts to give a description that ‘objective’ science might have an in to subjectivity to study it, something that has engendered a lot of dispute in science circles. In addition, it also gives a mechanism whereby some higher animals can be seen to have subjective knowledge of themselves. Humans have an additional second order of ‘narrative capacities’ by virtue of our language.

I would add one more thing: as we grow through baby-hood, one of the innate concepts that comes on stream is, as they say, the ‘theory of others’, meaning that we understand that those faces out there, of our mother and father, are different from ourselves. They are outside of us and are their own objects. My suggestion here, is that the subjective may arise simply as an offshoot of understanding there are other people, something that occurs long before we can speak.

101. Rene Descates

… I think, therefore I am… From [this] I knew I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me’, that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.

Comment: A classic quote from Descartes. Such a clear, intentional division between body and mind. And the western world has held such notions for three millennia leading up to and beyond Descartes. We still believe it. Science is Voltaire’s out of wed-lock child. And we believe science… with good reason.

102. William Faulkner

The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Comment: While Faulkner was talking to other writers, it would be nice to take this quote and give it broader application, as in, to all of men. There is another question: Faulkner was not a poet, so how does he know this, meaning, can we trust him? That depends on the use we put this quote to.

103. Leon Tolstoy

All happy families are like one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Comment: minds react to pain and pleasure in different ways. The two states are not mirror images.

104. VS Ramachandran

Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience.

Comment: this counterintuitive thought came from his using a mirror box so amputees would see their real limb projected onto the end of the limb they have lost, and that they experienced loss of pain, loss of ‘frozeness’ and felt control over the non-existing limb. This means that we don’t need a real limb, or body to feel pain or any other sensation. We just have to see it because the brain produces a map of sensation for it. And because the body images of our limbs are perfectly projected onto our actual limbs, making it impossible to distinguish our body image from our body. This explains that zen thing of being out of your suffering body in your mind. It also suggests that if we project on our mind the image of ourselves as a brilliant poet, or anything else, for that matter, we believe it and act that way to, presumably, create much better poetry. p 186 Doidge

105. David Zieroth

Some poems come unbidden, from somewhere that remains hidden but active, that odd combination that I once despaired of knowing more about but am now content to let be, grateful its “is-ness” has chosen me.

Comment: that elusive thing, though he goes on to say, he has more prosaic sources from conversations with non-poets and so on.

106. David Zieroth

I write for myself. I write to find out what I know, how well I know it, how best to articulate that knowledge, what delights I might encounter along the way and which directions I couldn’t have imagined had I not begun—that eureka moment of chthonic connection, that golden thread. I write to keep in touch with the mystery of poetry, that power beyond reason.

I also write for the perfect inner ear of the perfect listener.

Comment: Yes, we write for ourselves and the perfect reader.

107. Eric Kandel

Psychotherapy changes people, “through learning, by producing changes in gene expression that alter the strength of synaptic connections, and structural changes that alter the anatomical pattern of interconnections between nerve cells of the brain.”

Comment: this is brain plasticity at its basic level: individual nerve cells, individual synapses. These change. And you can change them simply by willing it so, as is done in a shrink’s office. That is why you can become better at something, such as poetry, particularly if you are a poet already. This is because will, or focus on right prefrontal activities is only part of the poet’s package. But will is very important.

108. Norman Doidge

When we read, the meaning of a word is stored or ‘mapped’ in one sector of the brain; the visual appearance of the letters is stored in another, and its sound in yet another. Each sector is bound together in a network, so that when we encounter the word, we can see it, hear it, and understand it. Neurons from each sector have to be activated at the same time – coactivated – for us to see, hear and understand at once.

Comment: The complexity of understanding a word. Consider that there are also symbol languages like Cantonese, and hieroglyphs like Egyptian and Mayan and that there are languages that you can only hear, thus you do not understand them through a ‘letter’ on a page.

109. Grafman

… if you take a million people, and you look at the same areas of their brains, you will see those areas more or less committed to performing the same functions or processes. They may not be in the exact same place. And they shouldn’t be, because each of us will have different life experiences.

Comment: Grafman is talking about normal development. But, say, you only had the right half of your brain, if you could speak and read, that means the normal functioning of the left side of the brain actually resided in the right side. The point is the age at which it happens… But what this means is that normal ‘plasticity’ guarantees that every person is different from the rest of the world, and in fact, because border area neurons get taken up with events you are thinking about right now, that you are not the same person from one minute to the next, much as a river is the same but never the same. This is yet another exceptional discovery, much like the one Human Genome discovering that 80% of our brain genes are junk, that point to our thinking being, like chaos theory, like fingerprints, that each is unique, but the brain is constantly changing you to someone else. And you thought memory was real.

110. Ken Robinson

IQ tests can even be a matter of life and death. A criminal who commits a capital offense is not subject to the death penalty if his IQ is below seventy. However, IQ scores regularly rise over the course of a generation (by as much as twenty-five points), causing the scale to be reset every fifteen to twenty year to maintain a mean score of one hundred.

Comment: Scary. The real point Robinson makes is that IQ tests are limited focus tests of limited focus educational interest in ability to read and do math. This is a holdover from the industrial revolution. Getting rid of IQ tests means changing the education system, and The Element argues for change.

111. Henry James

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind…. If you change your mind, you can change your life.

Comment: You can become a better poet simply by framing your mind so as to become better.

112. Norman Doidge

Read the last few pages of The Brain That Changes Itself, Appendix 1, p 308 -311. They deal with Marshall McLuhan’s concepts about media and the connection with brain plasticity. In short, media are an extension of our senses, and they implode into us.

Comment: We wear our brains outside our bodies.

113.

]]> http://www.dcreid.ca/?feed=rss2&p=24 0 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=60 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=60#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:58:16 +0000 D. C. Reid http://www.catchsalmonbc.com/dcreid.ca/?p=60 This is the first few chapters of one of the books I am writing about the brains of poets, delving into the science and the art of poetry. No other site is synthesizing these very different worlds. See also: bibliography (under brains) for reading materials. I am, for instance, quite a way yet from the issue of creativity, and its relationship with mental illness. See Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire.  Coming now: I am writing a second book that cuts to the chase, and in the first chapter tells you how a poet’s brain does what it does.  Check out: brain bites, first items, intended to be short decisive ways to check your creative abilities.

BRAINS ARE HERE!!! Both Creepy and Amazing. Click on brains and zoom through tissues!

For great books of poetry, up and to the left: home. See other neat things for a creativity exercise, and random poetry aesthetics, June 29, 2009.

And go to Amazon.ca for my book reviews. Look under brain book reviews above - updated Dec 24, 2009

And NEW: The Poet’s Personality - Do you have what it takes to be highly creative in words, Aug 14, 2009. Do you recognize yourself below?

The Poet’s Personality – this post will grow and grow.

Creativity - a poet is highly creative, and highly creative with words. An alternative would be an accountant – not creative but far better at working with other people and the steadiness to look over figures all day. The word artist and creativity are taken as synonymous in the  literature. And the closest profession, researchers in the natural sciences – isn’t that interesting – do not have creativity scores as high as poets.

Lack of Latent inhibition.

Higher than average scores on the psychotic scale appear for poets, and the higher the ability (there is a problem here with definition) the greater the score. It’s an adaptive behaviour that favours creativity. As in it buttresses other important characteristics of sense of independence and nonconformity, in other words it is very important for the poet to believe in him/herself – another word for this is arrogance, and thus the ability to disregard personal circumstances associated wtih poverty because the belief in the poet’s self is so high. Do note that lots of artists do make a living, mostly at other jobs.

Being self absorbed, having defocused attention (Simonton) that results in negative priming and latent inhibition, thereby enabling ideas to enter the mind that would normally be filtered out during information processing (Eysenck, 1993). Does that sound familiar? Without doubt. And, the less restrictive mode of information processing is also associated with openness to experience, a cognitive inclination that is positively associated with creativity. Have you ever asked a poet his/her opinion on something. Chances are you got back many opinions, many of which might well contradict other of the opinions offered up.

High ego strength and self-sufficiency. That is needed to walk off the cliff to creativity and ignore criticism (though I’d say poets are ultra-sensitive to criticism, by other poets. The rest they ignore, like family requests to earn a living).

Meta-cognitive control. This means being able to take advantage of bizarre thoughts rather than bizarre thoughts taking advantage of the poet. Non-highly creative people shove such thoughts out of their heads as they recognize their negative influence and refuse to think of them – like an OCD.

Capacity to exploit unusual ideas and recognize their worth from a poetic point of view.

IQ of 120. You don’t have to be brilliant to be abrilliant poet, but being 120 is a highish level. It’s the mixing togehter of subjects and words that is more important than braininess.  So poets have sufficient information processing powere to select, develop, elaborate and refine original ideas into creative contributions. Creative means the production of something out of nothing.

Association of high creativity with psychopathology -( see Andreason, Simonton and Ludwig). Poets tend to have similar personalities to those with mental diseases, particularly manic depressive illness. This allows for periods of high creativity during mania and zero creativity in the depressive phase, that is, if it isn’t too low, is useful for rewriting. Are you, for example, already taking lithium based pills for bipolar disease or anti-depressants for depression. Also associated is alcoholism, depression and suicidal behaviour. Alcohol is the writer’s drug. Ludwig quotes an 87% rate of famous poets with mental diseases – I think this is high as other studies are around 50%, an extraordinarily high rate in itself. Psychotic behaviour and schizoprenia have so morbid an effect that high creativity is not associated with these diseases. Note that when the mental disturbance takes hold, creativity is pretty much completely destroyed. So you can’t be crazy when you are creating, but the more creative the poet the greater the correlation with mental disturbances. As i have said: take those pills if you have to.

Creativity: mental ability and willingness to think outside the box, to explore novel, unconventional and even odd possibilities; to be open to serendipitous events and fortuitous results and to imagine the implausible  or consider the unlikely. The personality traits to do this are above.

Poets act alone. Artists operating in formal, classical or academic styles will operate under more constraints than artists working in more expressive, subjective or ‘romantic’ styles. For example, a member of a symphony.

Genetic component.  Mental pathologies and higher creativity have genetic dispositions. For example, typically the family of an artist has higher levels of mental issues. On the other hand, your family life may contribute to having the personality traits associated with creativity. Nurture.

More to come… Ludwig

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Chapter 1: How the Brain Works

The brain is a flower on what we do not know.

- D.C. Reid

If the brain were a book it would be a very strange one. It would be strange because the brain is very old and very young. The old part is hidden from our view. We can only feel its rumbling, subterranean energy. For this reason, virtually the entire book of the human brain would be empty. The young part, where we think, and consider and speak, all the things that we think of as human, is so recent, it would take only one page to be written. And that would be the sum total of what we call consciousness, the holding of the skull in the hand and considering. One whole book of emptiness. One short page of print.

That one page of our brain is the story at the end of our evolution. In one short span of 100,000 years, humans have been lifted from the animals and plants of our home we call the Earth. In that time the red mush that is our conscious brain has bloomed so ferociously it has blown the eight bones of our skull apart. So strong is this jello-ish matter that, as it has grown, it has required a bigger skull to house it. The human brain has made wholesale changes to our primate skull. Our growing brain has blown our skulls much like a plastic balloon, several inches forward; several inches up, and over, our eyes; several inches to the side and above our ears; and several inches backward. It’s growth has allowed for a safe hard structure that has allowed the brain to bloom with the gift of being aware of itself. From our consciousness has arisen much of what we think of as human: the speaking, the wondering, the watching, and the ethical discriminating. These are the things a brain can do once it can take itself in its own hand and think about itself. And it is so recent and it is so violent and it contains its own deterrent fragility, that it is a flower. The brain we know is a flower. It is also commonly known as the cortex.

The rest of the book of our brain, the vast empty pages, is the summary of all the long years that have gone before. In its long span of 250,000,000 years, the brain of earth’s animals developed, from fish to frog, from frog to reptile, to mammal, to primate to human. To the last page where the print is contained. All the preceding pages are empty. They are empty because there is no awareness in them. The half of our brain, the lower half, supports the more recent flower of consciousness. While there are nerve endings that go down from where we think, there are far far more that rise without thought, and so for the quarter of a billion years that the base of the human brain has been evolving, it had and still has no consciousness. That means that the pages of the human brain are empty, white, one after the other, until the last blip of evolution. And so, the brain: is a flower on what we do not know. This, the lower, subconscious part of our brain is commonly known as the mid-brain, cerebellum and brain stem.

If you remember nothing more from this book than the phrase I have used to sum it up, you will have given yourself the entire subject in one line. But do read on. There is more, much more, to be said.

Interesting Quote: It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we well ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever expain the immateriality of our consciousness. Jonah Lehrer, 2008

I. The Subconscious – What We Do Not Know

A. Learning To Love Your Internal Iguana

Some very bright scientists (1) wanted to figure out when, in time’s slow progress, emotions arrived in the brains on this earth. So they hired some very special people. These people were experts in fondling iguanas. I don’t know what kind of person likes to do such things, and I don’t know how you as an employer distinguish a good fondler from a bad fondler, but I know that they needed someone with a steady hand.

They needed someone with a steady hand because science, unlike the arts, is based on anyone – anyone good enough – being able to reproduce experiments that are used to figure things out, by doing the same fondling that any other scientist has done, is doing or could do. That is the essence of science: reproducible experiments giving reproducible results. The scientists reasoned that since emotions elicit higher body temperature – in essence a fever, what love has often been said to be – a disease – and higher heart rate in humans, then it might well do so in some animals not as high on the evolutionary ladder. They also reasoned that there might come a point where no matter how lovely the fondling, that the fondled animal would not respond. So they decided to choose animals at distinct stages in the evolution of animal life on this small planet in its lonely corner of the sky. They chose a: fish, frog, reptile and mammal.

I don’t know how you fondle a fish, but I can tell you from the results of the experiments (that you could do at home if you were clever enough), that no fish changed temperature – as measured by sticking a thermometer up its anal vent, nor did its heart rate change. (I know if I were a fish, my heart rate would change if two alien hands were on my slime covered flanks, but theirs did not). And when they moved on to fondle a frog – a good example of an amphibian – they also found that their anal thermometer did not indicate a rise, nor did the frog’s heart rate rise.

Interesting Sidebar Tidbit: In Shakespeare’s day, and in his work, love was often considered a disease. Sonnet 147, starts, for example:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,

And ends, my words and thoughts for you are making me crazy:

For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night

But when they came to the iguana – a good example of a reptile – the results changed. When the scientist fondled the iguana and put the thermometer up its anus, the reptile’s body temperature rose. Its heart rate increased as well. Scientists agree (1) that these bodily reactions can be taken as prototypical emotions, as in: this is where the human emotions that we have today got their start. This is because when you measure body temperature and heart rate in all animals above the level of reptiles – mammals, birds, humans – all rise after fondling. Consider your cat when you pet it, consider when someone you like to get close to you fondles you. You get warm and well, you get the picture.

Now, since there is no consciousness in animals below humans (well, add in a few higher mammals like cats, dogs, chimpanzees, whales, etc.) this means that emotions are below the level of consciousness. This does not mean that when we feel glad, sad or etc. we are not consciously feeling these emotions. We are feeling these emotions. What it means is that because emotions arose in a brain that had no consciousness, that when the human brain exploded from the reptile/mammalian brain to grow the four cortex regions that are responsible for conscious awareness, emotions continued to reside in the reptilian part of the brain. We have nerve access to these regions, but, there is no consciousness within the emotion centres below the level of consciousness. I use the word subconscious for this part of the brain, rather than the more commonly used word, unconscious, because the latter has so many different meanings (2).

Now, those bright scientists who were keen to get in touch with their internal iguanas came up with another interesting experiment. They were able to show that the basis of human decision-making resides in the part of the brain below the level of consciousness. They kept their happy iguana in a glass tank with a roasty toasty heat light, a saucer of water and a bowl of tasty nutritious food right there among the warm rocks and etc. that iguanas like. But these scientists knew something else about iguanas: they prefer to eat lettuce rather than the perfectly satisfying food in their bowls.

The scientists extended the cage so there was a portion that was unheated as well as the heated portion. The iguana stayed in the heated part and did not venture forth into the cold part of its tank because, as we all know, reptiles can’t raise their own temperatures as easily and as high as mammals can. So Mengele, er, the scientists put some lettuce in the cold part of the tank. The question was whether the reptile would move from where its needs were satisfied and where it was warm to nab the lettuce.

Once the lettuce was put in the cold part of the tank, the scientists sat there in their lab coats with their white pads, watching the iguana. First it eyed the lettuce, scratched its chin, then moved through the cold tank to eat the lettuce. The scientists were overjoyed. Their work showed that reptiles have the ability to act on preferences; this is not a situation of learning because it has food, water and warmth where it is residing, the things it needs to happily survive.

Interesting Sidebar Fact: The brain is actually deep red, not grey and white. Check out the rotating brain on dcreid.ca. It has not been preserved in formaldehyde and thus is its original red colour, not grey and white as we have always been taught.

What they didn’t tell us is what I want to know: did the iguana grab the lettuce and move back under its sunlamp or did it just stay put and eat the lettuce in the cold? I would race back to the rays if I was an iguana, but the scientists didn’t think about this one. They felt they didn’t need to because the moving from warm to cold was clear evidence that the iguana, without ‘consciousness’, was able to weigh up alternatives and move after the tasty food. I asked lead scientist, Michel Cabanac, this question and he got in touch, saying that the tank was rigged up so that the iguana could not get back to the warm part of its enclosure, so it had to really make a decision about the lettuce. He also said that it would be a fascinating experiment to see whether the iguana would go back to the warmth with the food, if it could, meaning taking the tank obstruction out.

What the iguana experiment suggests for humans, and this is almost so fantastical as to be beyond belief, is that we have no conscious control over the process that prompts us to make conscious decisions. In other words, our conscious thought cannot get anywhere without the subconscious part of the brain, the cerebellum, and the floor of the midbrain telling it to get going.(3) This notion is so counterintuitive that the whole western world has been built on the notion that this is not so it. We have spent the last three millennia, since the time of Aristotle, and then Plato, and his relentlessly repeated theory of the forms, trying to be rational, scientific. Remember how long our tradition has preferred reason over emotion, has, mistakenly, labeled males as rational and female as emotional, and thus males need to have control over females. All of this has been wrong, all a mistake, 3,000 years of civilization – and more. And we have done away with it in one paragraph and parenthetically (consider how small a part of the world, even today, believes and actually acts upon the notion that men and women are equal).

And there is good evidence that the subconscious controls the conscious in humans in the same way. There was an unfortunate fellow, ‘Elliott’, who had an operation to remove a tumour from the front of his brain. A large amount of surrounding brain tissue was also removed. Afterwards, although Elliott was of the same IQ, his memory was intact and he could follow the train of logic in a calculation and so on, he had disastrous consequences in life, for example, he went bankrupt due to becoming involved in business dealings that others would not enter. An important neurologist, Antonio Damassio (4), gave him a battery of tests and found that he had impairment in the emotional centres of his brain. This inability to ‘feel’ things resulted in him being unable to make decisions.

Any human like Elliott, would find life intolerably difficult due to not being able to make decisions. Not only would work be impossible, such a person would not be able to make it out the door in the morning. The person could, for instance, choose five sets of clothing to wear for the day, but because the person’s ability for preferences was removed – remember the iguana preferring lettuce – he or she could not choose among them, and the day would end right there – a fundamental problem, indeed. The subconscious part of the brain where preferences lie was cut off from Elliott’s consciousness. Think, then, how useful it is that the sub-conscious part of our brain that has existed for 99% of the time that there have been brains on this planet is there, just waiting and willing to offer up its help even though we don’t consciously know it exists. Hence, we should learn to love our internal iguana.

And, our iguana does some other things just as interesting as being the marionette below the stage. For example, there are many kinds of brain issues that can affect our ability to see things. There are several dozen ways that lesions in the brain can interrupt the flow of visual sense data and our perception of it. This is commonly known as being blind. However, there is a portion of blind humans that can nevertheless do some pretty remarkable things even though they can’t see. Blindsight is the term given to such abilities. These include: being able to act upon visual information, such as dodging bullets or other nasty things, even though the person cannot see the objects consciously. This is because some of the nerves that are part of the complex system of brain cells that run back from the eyes go directly down to the subconscious part of the brain, while the rest move to the back of our conscious brain to be made into an image.

The nerves that run down into our internal iguana are very helpful. We would not know of their existence and those with blindsight confirm that they cannot see anything. But the subconscious nerves produce action. The bottom of the brain sends out signals to move the body away from danger, including crouching, standing behind a tree that you cannot see and so forth. Thank goodness for our internal iguana, a subject that we will return to when we discuss the special abilities of writers and how to get the most out of our brains. In the meantime learn to love your internal iguana. You need to. It is fundamental to poetry and to all art.

And cavalierly, let me sweepingly suggest that we, meaning the western world, and all of everyone else on the planet with similar views, will make an important shift in our understanding. Our conscious brain has been and is a monument to evolution, but we are not using all of our brains. The western tradition of intelligence and the ongoing cracking open of nuts and figuring out their contents by our reasoning, hard focus, mental calculus, the abacus beans clicking, is not where we ultimately must go, even though the technical achievements are necessary and even grand. Let’s boldly go.

Interesting Sidebar Tidbit: The brain has 100,000,000,000 cells, each of which has 1,000 to 10,000 connections with other brain cells. The rest of the body has 100 trillion cells. All develop from one cell in less than nine months in the womb. Amazing.

II – The Conscious - The Flower

The most obvious place to start thinking about things is in the conscious part of the brain, which is, after all, what distinguishes human beings from virtually all of the rest of the animal life on earth. Lots of advanced vertebrates (means backbones made of bone) have brains, they just don’t have the huge explosion that the human brain does. Think about a popcorn kernel. Think about it after it bursts. Now think that that latter image pretty much sums up what has happened to human brains. A brilliant, ferocious, rampant, fragile 3.5 pounds of mush we can crush in our hand. And yet, it has made the pyramids, the multi-syllabic Mayan language hieroglyphics, the Sistine Chapel and sent spaceships to Jupiter by blowing ions out their back ends. And that is just the beginning of what the human brain can do. At the end of the chapter, we’ll put into perspective the big mental achievements of the 20^th century: quantum mechanics, sense data, a little bit of relativity, and the notion that consciousness is a by product of looking around.

But first, what is this flower on top of what we do not know? It is largely made of skin cells, and so it has those nice sounding fat words: omega-3s and -6s in abundance. That is because when the human fetus develops from the one cell of union, it divides and divides like a fugue until it reaches around a trillion cells. On the way, it folds over like a crepe and seals inside some of the outside skin. This turns into, among other things, the spinal column and the brain. The brain grows from zero cells to almost 100 billion cells in less than the nine months. Amazing. And each of these cells can be many inches long, though so narrow we could not see one held up to the light between a pair of chopsticks.

We all know that the brain is white and grey matter, even though this is not at all true. The reason we know this is that scientists have told us this. But, they forgot to tell us one little thing: that the little mis-speaking or failing to mention, is that scientists have messed so much with the brain in order to preserve it, say in formaldehyde or alcohol, that the process has taken all the colour out of our brain as it exists in the human body. Talk about the process of science changing what it is that it studies by studying it, which, of course, science says it does not do. That little criticism aside, you will be interested to know that the human brain as it exists in our living heads is actually a very deep red. Think of how alive that means it is with blood vessels and how that allows us to use those very cool MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging machines) to make 3-D colour images by keying in on microscopic increases in blood use.

Now, the part of the brain that has exploded is the conscious part of our brain. It has divided into four main areas and all the frilly little folds are what allow it to have all those huge number of cells of which we can’t see a single one. These areas are for reasoning, considering (the frontal lobes that hang out over your eyes and behind them), talking, reading, arting (temporal lobes that take up space above and a little forward of your ears) getting your body moving (parietal lobes just off the tops of your ears); seeing (occipital lobes, everything behind your ears inside the skull above the beginning of your neck). In addition all areas of the conscious brain can store memory, perhaps the single most important thing that proves to each of us that we are unique and have extension through the years of our lives. I have the hope that in the face of all the hardness there is in life that your memories are good ones and that they sustain you. These four parts of the mind are really what we think about when we think about what is human. And they have grown, let me remind you, in the past 100,000 years on top of the mammalian brain, which sits on top of the reptile brain which overshadows the amphibian brain and the last little remnants of fish brain, in, perhaps a small good word, so close to the meaning of a small body of landlocked water: the pons.

Sidebar Image: The Human Brain

A very simple image showing where the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital lobes are, and also beneath them what we can see of the floor of the midbrain, and below, the cerebellum, pons and brainstem. Oh, and the skull of a sheep.//

Had these four areas of the mind not shoved their way rudely into the world, the human skull would have looked much different. Take your two first fingers and touch them just under your nose, then slide them back across your cheeks to just the top of your ears (where your glasses wrap around if you are as blind as I am) and then have them continue around your skull so they touch behind your head, just above your neck. What you have just drawn on your head is the shape of your skull had our subconscious brain not had the wherewithal to send out its tendrils of white (really red) to push their palms against the inside of our skull. And that shape – the original shape – is the same shape as that of a sheep. We would look and think like sheep. Baaad.

Why did this growth happen? Ah, that is an interesting story, but one I will leave to the third chapter. This chapter is about the main things our brains do, in language that doesn’t put you to sleep – the third chapter may well do that. Instead, let’s move onto another beginning: the human mind must have something to think about. The information that it uses comes from three sources: it comes into the brain from outside the body; it comes into the brain from inside the body; and, it comes into the brain from inside, well, itself.

A. Information from Outside of the Body

The information that comes into the brain from outside the body, comes through the conduit of eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. These special organs have been organized by the powers of nature to be on your head in the part of your body that is thrust into new situations, making having sense organs in this special spot very, very useful. And right behind them is the brain, also nicely located by the powers of nature to bring all the sense data together and process it. Skin all over the body, particularly that on the hands, face and genitals brings loads of information about our tactile connection with the world into the brain, too.

Sight

Let’s look at sight first. Sight is our most important sense and that is why the back of the brain, the entire back of the brain is devoted to processing light. One of the oddities of sight is that light comes into our eyes and the liquid pools we call corneas reduce the entire world into an image less than the size of your thumbnail. And, interestingly, that image is presented to the back of the eye, the retina, upside down. But, our brains, behind the eyes, in processing the image, interpret it as right side up and we don’t even know either is happening, very interesting. If you want to see how odd it would be to see the world the way the eyes see it – upside down – put a magnifying lens in front of each of your eyes and try to walk down the street. At first, it is very confusing, but the experiments (6) that have done this show that quickly we learn to adapt and can carry on with images that come in upside down and are turned right side up in the eyes and then reinterpreted as upside down in the back of our brains against the back of our skull where we scratch our heads at something unusual and puzzling – just like this.

As both predator and prey our eyes, and most other animal’s eyes, have to be able to distinguish some fundamental things about what is happening in the world outside. The most important thing is to see movement of what wants to eat us and what we want to eat. And right among the first modules inside the back of our skulls is one, V1 that distinguishes lines or borders, comparing them with any that cross the others, which is, of course, the very fundamental task of determining movement, which is very useful whether you are interested in eating someone else or avoiding the same fate yourself. Any relative movement the conscious brain picks up and pays a lot of attention to, but that is getting ahead of the story./////

Though we cannot see like an eagle that has part of its retina flipped out in front of the blood vessels supplying it, our brains can do many neat things with light that stimulates the retina to produce electrical changes in the nerves behind them. The outside half of one eye and the inside half of the other eye are displayed on the back of the brain on the same side as the outside half of the eye, meaning the left outside is displayed on the left, and the right on the right.

Vision is by far our most important sense and thus has received the most attention from scientists. Millions of words have been written about sight and hundreds of millions have been spent on research. Semir Zeki (7) is one of the foremost researchers and has spent the past 30 years looking into sight. What he has found, you can also take a look at. His lab very quickly forwarded a good review article to me and you can read it, too. Just be prepared for lots of technical language and concepts. Now, the visual brain at the back of our skulls has 30 different modules that determine, for instance, general scanning, angles, colour, lightness and darkness, shape, depth perception, movement and so on.

Our eyes move in complex motion at all times, searching out information from our environment. These saccades, which are subconscious, are for the purpose of informing us of what is out there. We think that we look and see everything, but this is not true. When we are not directing our eyes to a particular part of the outside world, these saccades, which are so rapid, that the eye move thousands of times per second, are picking up. We can, of course, direct our eyes, overriding the subconscious attention focusing part of our brains, to pick up something important, for example, a car approaching as we consider walking across a street.

But the point I want you to remember is that sight is not at all like a camera, or cell phone, or DVD. It is not a record of what is out there and it cannot be played back like a recording. It is only a record of what among the small amount of what is out there that the eye sees, and the small amount that the brain wants to view, and virtually all of what is coming at our eyes is either unseen or is disregarded or is forgotten. This will be a familiar refrain in this book.

Smell

Smell is the only sense that comes 100 percent into the sub-conscious brain. And since we smell that cinnamon, we smell that curry and we smell that rose, this means that smell is instantaneously moved – well in about a third of a second – from the sub-conscious lower part of the brain into the conscious upper conscious. The question is why does smell, unlike all the other senses, all the other sense data from outside the mind and body come first and completely into the subconscious. It does so because the recognition issues are fundamental and clear.

Smell determines, among other things, prey, predators, kin, offspring, mood and readiness for sex. All male mammals smell females to see whether they are ovulating and thus ready for mating. The scent has pheromones in it and the subconscious mind recognizes this and prepares the sexes for the important act, the posture in rats that scientists like to call lordosis. Sounds like a disease for the English upper classes. Little wonder that attraction seems to come out of nowhere but can lead to the most important place: creating one more of your kind to carry on when you are gone.

The other thing about smell is that it is the easiest sense for us to understand how odd it sounds for it to be described as it is: smell is electricity. And all the other sense data are, electricity, too. That is because our one hundred billion brain cells are covered in those nice sounding fat words and the little gaps between their padding is jumped by electricity, the potential between potassium and sodium. (We will get into neurotransmitters later in the program).

The smell of pine, the turps as they are called, come into our noses and settle on cells that translate their chemistry into electrical patterns. That is because nature has made our brain do very complex things with a very simple thing: the electron that exists around its atom like an afro wig. The pattern of the ocean at dawn, the scent of a baby’s head, the blood of Christ are all represented by electrons assembled in slightly different patterns. The pattern then moves down the rest of the cell into the brain and the brain deals from the first cell of our eyes, or ears or nose, taste bud or skin as electricity.

Consider, also that the memory of, say, the smell of ammonium, is also stored as electricity. And as you don’t think about smelling salts constantly this means that we need memory to bring the smell and our instant reaction back to us is also existent completely, endlessly and without alternative as electricity, and in a pattern that we do not need to have on our minds at all times, thank goodness. When you touch the skin of your partner and look inter their eyes, all of this is electricity – like the endlessly streaming numbers of the Matrix. Fascinating.

Hearing

Humans don’t have particularly good hearing and the expression should be dumb as bats because bats are able to hear their little chit-chits in the dark bounce off and return to them so well they can navigate, flying with their eyes closed (so it doesn’t matter if they are blind as, well, bats), and can also tell where targets are, how big they are and whether they are likely to be tasty and should be grabbed by a toenail or two. While this has to be admitted, human ears are interesting, too.

First, though, you can prove to yourself just how poor your human hearing is while you are lying on the couch idly channel surfing until you find something worth watching. Cup your hands behind your ears while watching The Simpsons, er, I mean an educational lecture on rocket science on PBS. If you push your ears forward, you will find that the sound gets much louder. You can even make it louder by bringing your fingers forward together and rounding them out in front of your ears. What you are doing is becoming much more acute in both volume and direction, as well as being able to dissect out interesting bits of the white sound that comes at you for your attention. This is exactly the way the ears of many animals work, such as horses, arctic foxes and wolves: they can be rotated, aimed and etc.

Most people can’t wiggle their ears and we don’t need to. What our ears are good at is discriminating almost identical tonal information received in short batches. This is another way of saying: language; which is one of the fundamental aspects of being human. We are irrevocably social animals, even though our consciousness makes each of us essentially alone in the universe. Ears are only part of the human equation that makes us able to transfer information from one person to the other and thus take on the collective value of knowledge of all people, even those from before we were born and make predictions of those who are in our future. But this is getting ahead of the story.

Let’s get back to ears. Individual human ears lie on either side of the face. This makes our bodies, as scientists like to say, symmetrical, that is, from a line drawn from our forehead head to our five hole, each side is a mirror image of itself. Each side could be folded together and exactly meet and disappear into the other side. Each ear receives its sound and sends most to the other side of the brain next to the ear on the other side. If you were to take a quick look in there, though, you would find that the two equal sides of the conscious upper brain don’t act exactly the same.

The left side deals with naming of things, and identifying objects and is more associated with skill at words than the right. The right side picks up rhythm in the sounds we hear and is better at discriminating fine differences in what is heard, for example, the mood of a mother as she calls for her child. Her tone is different based on her knowing the child is close; is angry at what the child may have done; is looking anxiously for her child; or is suffering the beating that is oxytocin, the chemical that makes all parents agonize when their children are taken away. And the melody that is getting them back is the same as the sound of water or notes from a piano that when taken together projected through time form a pleasing whole.

The right side is good at music. And we will find that when the mouth and its lips and its tongue and our vocal chords are brought together, much as a symphony of individual instruments is conducted by the parts of our brain on the inside of each of our temples in front of our ears, and continue to do so through the feedback of our own voices to our ears to ourselves, that it is good at something else. These parts of our upper brain behind the tips of our fingers rubbing just where the hair falls from the side of our faces do something extraordinary: understand language. And each side of the brain is not the same as the other. The left has bulges where the right does not, and were you to slice off the top of a head like an ostrich egg, you would be able to see that each side is not its mirror image. You have come to language and we will return for it is fundamental to our being human and to many of our most important methods of understanding the world: art.

One last thing. And though our ears that are not up to those of bats, whales nor birds that can hear insects beneath the bark of trees, for their purpose, in humans, they can do amazing things for us. You probably remember Pythagorus (circa 500 BC) as the fellow who gave us the aa plus bb equals cc to describe the lengths of the three sides of a triangle. But you probably don’t know that he, way back then came up with the way music is played in the western world today, more specifically he came up with a scale of eight notes that is represented on the pianos in its tones and semitones, being the white and black keys. And in the time of Mozart this octave, say from C to C (C is the white key with two black keys on its right hand side) was played with all the quarter tones and that is the basis of the unusual sound of a harpsichord that for the same eight notes, has 32 individual keys. Think how difficult it would have been to talk some kid into taking harpsichord lessons. Piano is easy in comparison. And consider this, based on the Pythagorean scale, an eight bar melody – a typical pop song, Let It Be, by the Beatles for example, has a 12 bar melody – there are 10 to the 48^th power of possible tunes, an immense number, each tune of which our ears can discriminate.

Taste

Taste is much like smell. The chemicals in say, ice cream, on the tongue fit within the taste buds’ ball mitts in such a way that each flavour makes for a distinct pattern of electrical charges that zoom off on their nerve arms to the brain at about 186,000 miles per second. And taste distinguishes good things to eat, potentially poisonous things and can be used today as a useful way to reprogram a brain that has been injured or where a sense has been lost.

Dr. P. Bach-y-rita (8) suggested in the 1970s that brain areas could be made to do different functions from what they normally do. At the time, he was thought a nutbar because everyone believed that brain functions could not vary. But today, his area is one of the most useful in practical terms because his worked spawned the area of research that we know of today as brain plasticity. In fact, his colleagues (9) have developed a small ‘paddle’ that sits on the tongue. It is connected to a headband that senses light and transmits it to the device with fairly good resolution. This has enabled blind people to walk through an obstacle course without hitting things because the pattern on the tongue in essence is the same thing as sight. More spectacularly, this paddle that acts through our taste buds allowed the blind person to ‘look’ at and pick up a tennis ball from a table then look across an open space to find a garbage can. Then the blind man tossed the tennis ball into the can. Amazing.

These findings have been extended to other types of sensory and brain problems. For example, one female patient had had brain damage to the reptilian part of the brain at the back and on the inside of the lower part of the skull. As a result she could not keep her balance when on her feet and simply fell over. With the paddle in place, she was able to stand erect, walk, and in due course ride a bicycle. Interestingly enough, in her case, the result was incorporated in her brain because she was able to stop using the paddle that sat on her tongue.

Touch

The world also communicates with our brains through the skin all over our bodies. In mammals the warmth of furry bodies touching one another sets off the rumbled pleasure of lions, and we humans hug one another on meeting, and even in sleep seek out our partners’ bodies. We tend to forget this sense organ is the body’s largest, perhaps because our sight is so prominent. Touch may well be much more important in an animal that cannot see or hear. Consider that a snake’s touch is largely in its stomach plates and that it’s sense of taste is so acute that its forked tongue senses small packets of photon heat coming its way – usually meaning small mammals.

I’d like to illustrate one of the important brain concepts that is counterintuitive, that applies to touch. We tend to think that everything that we touch is informing us uniformly on our bodies, but this is not true. There are not only regional differences, there are differences among sub-groups of tactile experiences. You can prove this to yourself easily by taking a little rubber stamp that is perhaps two square centimeters and has rows and columns each millimeter, or 20 of each. This means there are 400 small squares comprising each ink-stamped spot. You will find, if you stamp the square on the back of your hand, the palm of your hand, arm, cheek or anywhere that you choose, that you do not feel touch sensations uniformly all over your body.

Next you have a few probes for touching each tiny square to see whether you feel it. These probes, each a point, has a property that you are testing. For example, you have a hot one, a cold one, a touch one, a sharp one and an electrical one. Each of which you test in the following way: you touch each of the one millimetre squares with say the hot probe. You have the same two centimetre square stamped on a piece of paper and put an X in each square millimetre when you feel the heat. Then you go back and do it with the cold probe, putting an X on another stamp on a piece of paper and so on.

You will be amazed with the results. Not only does each different probe produce a different pattern on its respective paper stamp from all the other probes, but each square on its different part of our body’s also differs from its own pattern derived from the same probe somewhere else. This is why we feel different things more or less in different parts of our body’s. Because our eyes are very important, the tiniest grain of grit causes so much pain that we have to stop everything and deal with it. Similarly, as gonads are important for continuing the human race, pain receptors are in high supply and register in the male brain as agony. On the other hand, the back of our arm or shin is not at all as sensitive. Put some grit on it and many of us won’t even feel it.

The point is that the body does not feel everything the same in all of its parts; this means that we don’t feel everything that the world could be doing to inform us through our senses, in this case, touch. That is the concept. And another thing, look at the paper results that you have generated and you will be surprised that in some only 25 % of the little squares will have an X in them, meaning the body has deliberately evolved away from feeling everything, everywhere, even pain. None of the senses pick up everything there is to be picked up and we will return to this below.

The Sixth Sense

The sixth sense is the one that we seldom feel. It is the one that got put on the shelf some 12,000 years ago when the human race moved from being prey objects to being animals of the town and farm. And so we no longer need or feel it, now, as in our civilized lives we have no animals that can track us down and attack and kill us. Sabre tooth tigers may still exist, I am sure, but they are in the same skins as ours and so our own aggression or retreat is done so without the worry that some would like to bite on our ankles… and ribs and livers and so on.

But I understood the sixth sense when after a long family and the end of that, I returned to where I have spent most of my life: in the wilderness, not of my making, like the years of Wintston Churchill’s life, when he was out of power, but the land and water and trees that when we walk away from civilization we walk into the land of our ancestors. Into a time of our ancestors. And what I found was this: while walking head down down the river I now call my own, I was taken by an unshakeable feeling of terror, a feeling that my life was in threat. And the feeling was so overpowering that I wanted to drop all of my gear and simply run at full speed the many miles back to my car and its safety.

Since that day I have felt that feeling hundreds of times, that eerie, malevolence of something being on my own skin, me about to be destroyed. And it finally came to me, that what was happening was that animals in the forest were looking at me, with intent. It was the eyes of bears and wolves and cougars; even elk, though grass eaters, they can kill you if they want. I have been charged by bull elks and with their voluptuous male racks nine feet in the air and as much as eight feet across are as much to be feared as any other animal that might do you harm. I have asked many others who also spend a lot of time in wilderness whether they have felt the feeling and they have all agreed that it is a weird and almost overpowering fear. But it arrives not from the eyes, nor from the ears.

This is the sixth sense and it is one, as I have said, that we no longer need, so few of us walk far into the wilderness that was our ancient home. But the instinct or sense still remains and it is one that the scientist’s don’t address – not many carnivores in their university labs – but they should, because we have this sense. And my sense is that it is an early warning system routed through the amygdala which is our centre for processing big emotion. But how it works on us, I do not know, that something watching us can make us fearful. But it does happen. And it must have other uses in our current life.

I would add that this may be the same sensory apparatus that some commentators mention. _______(10) for instance, has pointed out that visual art, for example, a Mark Rothko painting, works not simply by sight, but by its very immenseness and the consuming colour, it’s weight coming at you. But would you feel it with your eyes closed? I don’t know. I will sent her an email and let you know what she says.

Before moving on, let me add two more sensation events that do not seem to be caught within the five sensory apparatus scheme that we often use to describe receiving information from outside of the body. First, as a person who has fished for 50 years, I have experienced an event in freshwater fishing for coho salmon that seems to me to defy the usual explanations of the way we receive information. Coho bite with great abandon in times of high rainfall because that is the time the side streams that they spawn in have the greatest likelihood of being filled with water – these are days of as much as three inches of rain. During this period I have had almost berserk action for many hours. Then I lift up my head because something has changed, and then realize that the bite period is ending, and the fish do stop biting within five minutes and may not bite again that day. The question is how do I know that, how do I come to know it, what is the sensory apparatus. I have asked other highly skilled anglers if they have experienced this phenomena and they have said yes.

Second, I have also noticed in freshwater fishing for salmon, most commonly for pink and Chinook salmon, that change in air pressure – falling – signals an almost instantaneous end to a bite period. Periods of sustained high pressure also slowly kill the bite over several days, but not in the snap of the fingers time of rapid dropping air pressure. So, how do humans feel such a thing as drop in air pressure through, again, the five senses we have, or are there more than five senses. Another similar example is those with arthritis or other joint ailment, feel rain coming on as much as two days before it happens. They do so based on increased pain in the body. How does coming rain make it’s effect. I don’t know but the point is that there are many different sensation events that don’t seem to be connected with our conventional explanations.

Information from Inside the Body, but Outside the Brain

Millions of nerves are firing in our bodies every second. Much of this activity is relayed to the spinal column and/or the brain. Much of the activity we are not aware of and much of it we can either be or not be aware of. All of this type of information from our little toe to the last follicle on the top of our head sends its information as electricity down and up nerve cells into the brain where it is ‘apprehended’ and a response is generated either without thought or after much consideration.

I put apprehended in quotation marks intentionally. That is because there is great debate on the nature of consciousness (12) in scientific circles, and without. It is common, for instance, for people, and within many religions to suggest that, an animal, say a fish has awareness because it will take action on threats, location of food, presence of spawning behaviour, and so on. The explanation is that there is more than one kind of awareness and we have to distinguish between them or much is lost. The first kind, is more simply a response to a stimulus. This is easy to see in a robot that is made to ‘neutralize’ threats. Such a robot would be able to recognize an enemy by visual record which automatically results in bullets being fired until the threat is, say, without pulse. In this case we would not call the robot either aware or conscious. The response is without consciousness and without thought.

The fish is like the robot. But as we have seen, higher animals, starting with reptiles do have a kind of awareness and can make decisions to nab the lettuce, and so do mammals, birds and primates, which includes us. But what we humans have is another kind of awareness and that we call consciousness; it is the ability to consider oneself, and is only found in animals that have the kind of brain structure that allows this, and this is pretty much only humans and a few higher animals. As mentioned it chiefly resides in the right frontal part of the brain.

Now, let me get back to the other type of information that comes from the body to the brain. This is chemical in nature, and includes many many substances, chiefly, hormones. There are, of course, many others, including glucose, or sugar, that is the brain’s only food, and of course there are those nifty omega-3s and -6s, alcohol, substances that alter perception and on and on.

So, to sum up, the information coming into the brain from inside the body is either a chemical substance or it is electricity, just like the brain itself generates and uses.

Electrical Information from the Body

Every second more than 10,000,000 nerves fire in our bodies and this electricity that is generated runs along the arm of the nerve into our spinal column and up into our brain. I say 10,000,000, but it is probably more, much more, as you will see. For example, every second nerves fire all over the body in little cells that in firing, indicate where our body is in three dimensional space.

Typically, these little cells send off in total 6,000,000 records of electrical information every second. Every second. Think how many that is in a single day: 518,400,000,000. And we can either pay attention to them or not. It doesn’t matter whether we pay attention because the rest of our systems that account for where our bodies are can easily carry on without our thinking. Whether you are standing at a mike giving a talk on how our brains work, and I do this from time to time, or are sitting in a chair listening, or watching TV, walking down the street, sneaking the channel changer from your partner or watching a neighoubour talk to someone in the next yard the nerves are firing. They give the brain an accurate indication of where you are. If you are playing soccer, you would have an intention to move a certain way and kick the ball, etc. largely without considering consciously where your body is in three D space. The same is true of the acrobats in Circ de Soleil.

Here is the interesting part: the brain is specifically designed to deal with these subconsciously or have the override system of consciousness monitoring them. But, whether we are conscious or not of this half billion bits of electrical information, the result for this information is the same. That result is that we forget it all. The brain is designed to forget all of this information, unless of course it is highly important, say, the sweetness of a professional golfer’s swing.

Now, there are a whole lot more nerves firing in our body that our mind does not consciously pay attention to. These include things like the beat of our hearts, breathing – which we can control for short periods, but which fall back into regular rhythm as soon as we stop – digestion of food in our stomachs and 29 feet of intestines, elimination of waste, the growth of new blood cells, body temperature, the rate of metabolism, interest in, well, sex, moving your arm to scratch an itch, our six senses as we have discussed above, the pattern of our eye movements, the saccades that we have mentioned. You get the picture: my figure of 10,000,000 nerve firings in our body is very low even though it is a high number. I will take up this notion of the brain not using this information again, below, under memory. It is vital to your understanding of how the brain works to know this.

Chemical Information from the Body

The brain has interfaces where it will accept chemicals from the blood locking into place on a cell and thus cross into the brain and make an effect. The most important of these chemical are hormones. Hormones are simply chemicals produced in the body (and a few in the brain) that travel with the blood in arteries until they bond with the brain. Sex hormones fall into this class of chemical. Typically produced in the ovaries or male gonads (and some other places) these chemicals include estrogen, progesterone, androgens, testosterone, cortisone and related compound molecules.

But there are many more: ones to regulate growth, to control the amount of water in the blood, production of milk, to stimulate the production of red blood cells and so on. The point is that all these chemicals produce an effect on the brain, to stimulate more hormones, to affect mood and various vegetative functions. All of them result in the stimulation of electricity in brain cells that then passes down the long arm of its shape to interact with other cells in tandem. So, chemical information results in electricity and/or more chemicals.

There are two other classes of chemicals: those carried in the blood, and there are thousands of these, and those that affect mood, as in drugs. I have lumped the first class together but you should know that this is just for convenience; these chemicals can be diverse in nature from simple sodium and potassium mineral atoms, to far larger, complex proteins, sugars the brain’s food, oxygen for oxidation reactions – what is commonly called the baddy oxidants – HDL and LDL that we are all familiar with for its carriage of cholesterol, also related to the sex hormones, small atoms that regulate the acid base level of the blood, antigens to diseases and so many more that it would take several pages to put them on paper.

The latter class, drugs – and I include most prescription drugs above -, have many different effects on the brain. Primarily they act on many parts of the brain from the conscious frontal parts, to subconscious parts, to the pleasure centre and have resulting addictive qualities. We are all familiar with their names: nicotine from tobacco, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, LSD, the recent ecstasy and other illegal and legal ones; for example, oxycontin is a pain reliever that is abused for its heroin-like effects. These chemicals are abused or used in rituals and religions for the effects they have on thought, their trips. These chemicals are vitally important to the moods of artists and poets, and we will return to them later in the book in Chapter ___, when we discuss writers’ moods and mood disturbances [look at the next post on the home page: Lecture Notes, for a list of the chapters and topics in this book].

Information from Inside the Brain

The third place that the brain gets information or stimulus from is from inside of itself. There are three different forms that this information takes: our old pal, electricity, hormones that originate in the brain, and, neurotransmitters.

By far and away the highest amount of information in the brain is electricity that is passing down cells and groups of cells on its way to other places to be looked at, to influence, to initiate or to simply contribute to higher level waves, for instance alpha waves that do ___. During development before and after birth, certain cells begin to associate with one another and when one cell spikes with electricity, so does the one beside, provided there is a connection (more commonly known as a synapse), or the one ahead or behind the cell. And over time, with use, the connections get strengthened and thus the related cells come to perform a certain function and fire together in order to achieve it. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. With 100 billion, we have a lot of cells to work with.

For example, every parent will know the emotions that pass across a baby’s face and eyes as it swims into the world in the first few months of life. It takes about 6 months before the eyes come completely into focus on what is out there, and inside the brain there is a growing facility with dealing with visual information that comes at the brain. In a few months a baby will focus on its parent, and if you slowly stick the tip of your tongue between your lips and repeat it your child will too, and will keep on doing until it nearly drives you crazy (and this goes on for the next twenty years, and those of you with girls, get set for age 14. Good luck.) Repetition of the pushing the tongue out, something that is also related to feeding and thus is instinctual as well, sets the track of electricity in motion to burn that circuit into the connected brain cells.

You might think that sticking out your tongue is a pretty trivial thing to explain the complexity of how the electricity in your brain whirling from cell to cell results in something as grand as the human mind. But no, it is exceptionally complex and so is the rest of the electrical brain. Let me explain. First there is the intention in the subconscious part of the brain to get the eyes to focus on the parent’s tongue (and, of course, before this, the baby, must first recognize the parent), the image has to be generated in those 30 sub units of sight at the back of the brain, then the apprehension of the image must occur, and then the mind must ‘decide’ to take some action, in this case, to send information to the pre-motor areas of the brain and then to the motor centres of the brain, to then control the tongue, the lips, the cheeks, larynx and so on, then to monitor the movement to be sure that the instruction sent is being carried out, which includes bringing back the feedback of monitoring the movements of the muscles and so on, and then to complete the loop with continuing the movement, then stopping it, and then pulling the tongue back in. Finally, the baby sticks the tip of its tongue out over and over and over again, a marvel to its mom or dad, and then, of course, it needs its diaper changed and we are into another complex series of ‘recognition’ and execution. You get the picture.

The next type of information in the brain is hormones that get generated in the brain itself, that is, chemical substances. Many of these, such as ones that influence water removal from the body in urine, or growth of the body are carried by blood vessels to their target organs in the body and have their function there. Hormones released in these bodily cells as a result of brain released hormones go back to the brain to turn off the release of the brain hormone that started the process. This is called feedback, a term we all know. Some, though, have local function, those for instance that can be formed in a lower part of the brain and are carried up to higher a higher centre in the brain. Typically, as you can understand, hormones that affect the body don’t necessarily affect our thoughts.

Oxytocin is an interesting hormone that is released primarily from the brain. It affects, among other things, the production of milk in breasts and the contractions in the uterus resulting in birth. But it also has great effect on our emotions, that is, in the brain. And it is the chemical by which humans are pinned to the wall by grief over the loss of a partner, parent or child, the latter, perhaps the worst thing that can happen to any human being. So hormones from the brain need to be understood to affect the brain greatly, though all are simply chemicals carried in the blood stream, as we have discussed earlier. Of interest to the curious, many hormones produced in the brain move down our brain cells at 3 mm per day before they are released. Some cause immediate effects, for example, adrenaline that gets our attention in the snap of a finger to take some action to wipe out a threat, say someone who may try to steal our child, or flee, as in a good reaction to being presented with a bear in the woods.

And then there are neurotransmitters. These chemicals are produced primarily in the brain and they have effect by migrating between brain cells across narrow gaps called synapses that connect one brain cell to another. Electricity comes down the cell and when it hits its connections with other cells it makes little purses of chemicals open up. Some make it all the way across the opening and fit like keys into locks on the other side, as in the next cell. This results in electricity shooting off down the arm of the next cell purposely striding off to make something happen.

We are all familiar with the names of many neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, glutamate (yes, like, MSG), norepinephrine (very similar to meth-amphetamine) and there are many less well known chemicals like acetylcholine. You are probably familiar with the expression serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. In certain artistic mood disturbances serotonin released from one brain cell to another is taken out of the gap too quickly and mental diseases like depression result. The more commonly known anti-depressants have their function in the brain to make the neurotransmitter stay in the gap between cells longer, thus making depressed people have a more healthy headful of thoughts. The trade-named products include, among dozens of others: Zoloft, Celaxa, Paxil (don’t give any of this one to kids as they can get suicidal in a week), and everyone’s most well known blue sky drug: Prozac. We will return to neurotransmitters later in the book in Chapter ____, when we talk about writers’ moods and mood disturbances.

… let me add one thing here and then we will also return to it later in the program. The mammalian part of the brain – warm blooded, furry animals like dogs, cats and us – is known as the limbic centre. This sits below our conscious brain and on top of our subconscious brain. It is mainly concerned with the hormone systems common in mammals, for example, our body temperature is regulated by the limbic system which is a dramatic improvement on the next lower group of animals, reptiles. We don’t have to spend hours of the morning building up heat to allow us to zap after something we want at high speed. The limbic system, do note again, is also subconscious.

Chapter 2: Realms of the Human Mind

Consciousness

Well, finally, we get to talk about consciousness, the mind state that most humans would agree is what makes us human. The reason we are at this stage is that now, having talked about the information from out side the body, from inside the body and from inside the brain, we have the complete, absolute, sum total of all and every kind of sense data, to use Bertrand Russell’s old term, that the brain, conscious, unconscious or subconscious gets to work with and do its deed. There are no other kinds of information coming into the brain. None at all. Zero. Zip. Nada.

The first thing is to know where consciousness exists, that is, where in our heads do we, as in each of us individually, reside. Can you take your first left finger (if you are left handed) or your first right finger (etc.) and actually point at your skull and find that behind the bone is where you are. The answer is yes. And the story is interesting.

But first let me tell you the parable of the frog. Frogs are great hunters and when the tongue zaps out faster than the eye – our eye- can see, then the fly disappears and you say, whoa, that’s one fast dude frog. And you are amazed at the intelligence of the frog. And while you are wondering on what that says about us, the fellow in the white lab coat, distributes a layer of dead flies around the frog, and you’re thinking I don’t think he can eat that many, when the frog just sits there. It does not zap after any one of the flies. In fact the frog will sit until it dies without eating any of the flies around its feet. Why is this you ask? It is because the frog does not recognize that the dead unmoving flies are food. In other words it has no intelligence at all, nor consciousness, and has no abilities anywhere near to our own, which are only granted to us because of the flowering of our brains in the past 100,000 years. So consciousness is only part of a being that has the same brain structures as us. That is true even though many believe that, say, a rock, or any other object shares in the understanding of its beingness (being for itself rather than of itself, JBPS) is simply untrue.

And think of the 40,000 poor human beings a year that in the 1950s were given frontal lobotomies in the States – by hitting an icepick just over one eye and separating the frontal lobe on that side and then hitting it just over the eye on the other side. Such a waste. Such a sickening waste. Perhaps even worse than the waste of war. The human does not seem to be able to get beyond its wars. And the frog cannot get beyond the prey recognition abilities of its great big eyes that register movement exceptionally. And so there is more than one definition of awareness or consciousness and the issue of definitions we will return to below (I keep saying this and I keep meaning this). As a final thought, you might like to know that it was Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist who invented the frontal lobotomy, and to our surprise won the 1949 Nobel Prize for medicine proving he could calm behavour by cutting out a patient’s frontal lobes. The ‘white cut’ led to tens of thousands of people turned apathetic automatons, suffering incontinence, epilepsy and confusion. JFK’s sister Rose was one of the poor people who was given a white cut. Very sad.

Now, back to consciousness. The arrival of consciousness takes about two years from the time a baby is born. Consciousness is the ability to think of one’s self thinking about one’s self. In other words it is a two level thing. First there is awareness of the information coming into the brain then there is the ability to combine them and arrive at an outcome, for example, first you see the baseball and the batter, then you decide to throw the ball. This seems simple enough but is far more complicated than the baby that stuck out its tongue a few pages ago. But, this same baby, like all human beings comes from a state of no awareness into the state of understanding two things: that it is a being and that there are other beings outside of it. These are also called the theory of I and the theory of others.

And you can connect with your understanding of yourself very easily. Take that first finger that has been hanging in space for a page or two and think of where you are thinking. Having spoken many times to many people and groups at conferences, I can tell you that most people, when asked to point a finger at where they are, as in, where am I, will point right between their eyes. Interestingly enough this is where Zen says the third seeing eye exists, that was discovered many thousands of years before western science came along with its tables and graphs to fix the tabula rasa. In other words you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know where you’re thinking from.

Actually, right between the eyes is not quite where the I centre of our brains is. It resides just over your right eyebrow behind a centimetre of bone in the front part of your brain. It comes on stream about the age of two – and along with ego is responsible for the terrible twos that toddlers have and that parents suffer. Before this, a human child does not think of itself as a distinct thing, and even earlier, if you put your hands in front of your face, and then move them aside, each time you do it, the baby will think that you have suddenly appeared, not that you were existing through time, and behind your hands.

The I centre is the powerful part of our conscious mind that western nations have used for the past 5,000 years to take the tremendous technical leaps forward: use of language, tools, architecture, social systems, economy as in money and so on. If you are sitting there deciding what shall I do today, the I you are talking about resides less than an inch behind your finger tapping above your right eye, you are talking about your I centre. Without that structure of your brain, you could not do this. If a bullet or an icepick severs the connection between this centre and the rest of the brain, you cease to be the human being your were in the millisecond before the calamity.

Roughly at the time that the I centre is developing in a young child, another closely aligned fundamental feature of our brains and thus minds is also coming on stream, and that is, as above, understanding that there are other people in your world. It is located in your brain just behind… your left eyebrow, a larger part of the left half of your brain, but located in the front of your head. The important point is that our brains contain, because of their structure, the billions of cells that over the last 100,000 years have bloomed from the subconscious mind, both the concept of I and of others that is fundamental to the social animal that we are. And with these two centres is the sense of free will that the western world has championed since the sixth century BC in Hellenic Greece. It is a cultural imperative, a culturally prescribed sense, though it need not be. For example, all of individuality is sham, unreal in the Zen tradition, and in the Islamic, as it exists today, is the attachment to role or expected behaviour, favoured over individuality. But that is digressing.

The point of this is that our brains the actual structure of the cells and the cells they join makes us unable not to conceive that we are an individual and that we are among other individuals like our selves. This renders the belief of solipsism, that we are the only person in the universe and we make all others from our own mind, an impossibility, even though a great deal of western philosophy has had difficulty with establishing, that to understand I and to understand others therefore I am. These areas of consciousness are where the memories that we have are considered, and do think of Hamlet, though not of his fatality with the skull he knew in his hand, exist. They are the result of electricity, they are electricity and they are influenced by hormones, they are influenced by what we perceive and they are influenced by our genetics and by the society and the time in which we live in it.

Ethical discrimination, for instance, is a high-level thought process, that of law, of being fair, of being guilty, of shame, perhaps the strongest of the negative emotions. And they result from more basic emotions like fear, love. These arise in the subconscious, they arise in the iguana brain. Facial expressions are understood to have meaning. Fine discriminations.

Finally, consciousness is the residue of perceiving, not the other way around, that consciousness is a stream and directs perception, as paradoxical as that may sound. But first, let’s talk a bit about memory, and then return to the oddness of reality and its unreality.

Memory

Memory is probably the most important constituent of the function of a brain that makes us say, yes, I am, because I have a long continuous stream of remembrances that form the past of my life. They follow or lead from one another to the other much as water does in the earth on its way forward gathering more and more until it is a great river. And if we lose our memories, as happens in critical accidents, when the brain is concussed, or shot through, or from the inside out alzheimers or other degenerative diseases weaken out memories and our ability to use them together, from amnesia, from strokes where brain material is destroyed by lack of oxygen or drowned by blood, or we get old, our memories departing is pretty much the same thing as losing ourselves. And it is sad and sobering to see someone you have known your whole life do something as simple as get out of a car, and not be able to find their way from the one side to the other where they live in their own home. And there are the memories of our children, of our graduating, being married, the summer days of long ago when we swung from ropes over the gently greening river that you remember, the first girl or guy with whom you slept. These are the mental objects of our lives.

Memory is what defines us as human to ourselves. And when we lose it we lose ourselves. But in early life there is a long phase when we have virtually no memories, too, because the cells of our mind and their organization are still taking place. I would like to tell you that the fundamental ability of the flower of our brain is to think on the objects it contains in it self. These objects are memories, parts of memories, objects of thought. But though this is the case, we do not have memories of when we first discovered these objects. That is because they were being developed before we had, well, good memories, but they were what our mind focuses on.

…Let me begin this explanation with a beach ball. Picture your typical plastic blow up white ball with yellow blue and red panels. Then place it on the carpet in front of a baby. What the baby sees, when it does see, meaning is capable, is this whitish shape with some colour on it. Now take the baby and put it down on the carpet on another spot. When it sees the ball, it will take notice, but, and here is the clincher, but it will not realize that the two balls it has seen are in fact the same ball. It thinks that each is a different ball, because each has a different colouration based on where it is viewed from. A baby actually has to have its mind grow enough to recognize that both of the balls, and even from every spot that it sees from on the carpet or in your arms is actually all the same ball.

The process of making this discovery is being able to understand that each and every image are of the same ball, as simple as it sounds. To do this it has to form a simple concept, to make a representation of the ball, and understand that the ‘sameness’ is the binding force. In other words, the very fundamental basis of human thought is metaphor. That is, in this apparently simple case, that two different objects of thought are the same. That is the simplest definition of a metaphor that one can come up with, the more common definition in adult poets being the ability to see an association or relation in two separate categories of thought. But it gets its start in babies, as our most basic conceptual tool.

Once the representation of the beach ball is understood to mean that all views of a ball are views of the same ball and not of different balls, one more step is require, and that is making an abstraction. But first, a digression to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher that all intellectuals like – after they have been meaningfully confused by western rational empiricism during their days at university. He said it this way, to explain this idea of epistemology that has foxed people in the long tradition of Locke, Barkley and Hume. …And to give you an idea of how difficult the current scientific debate gets when trying to define an existent human being; Joseph McCard (8), has come up with the term: Dynamic physical entity identity. My that’s deep, the important part being the DPEI ‘ “may be termed action which is conscious of itself”, as we have been saying. But as the British philosophers pointed out that each object of perception can have an infinite number of ‘views’ to a DPEI and thus you see the difficulty that must be overcome by a baby in its search to understand the world that its brain is getting to the verge of understanding, as in growing and developing.

Now, there is one more step. And that is forming an abstraction from a number of representations. As we come on stream as human beings from a baby that cannot even hold its head up to, say, the DPEI of the physical skill of a ballet dancer, we have to cross the second step. That step is to understand something about, for example, round objects. A child comes to understand that a beach ball, a soccer ball, a golf ball, a marble, a glass eye, are all round. And understanding that round objects roll, is a concept derived from bringing up the representations of different round objects, understanding that the basketball and the snowball, will roll. Thus the concept of round objects roll is an example of thousands and thousands of concepts we humans come to know.

And here is the important point. If we take two different objects and understand how they have characteristics that are the same, this is the same process, at a more junior stage, as developing a metaphor. In other words, the human mind is built on metaphors, as the most fundamental levels of thought are developed. Little wonder that poets have such a great ability to relate different categories of thought – the mind is built on metaphors – and this is how the human mind comes to understand itself and the world at this most basic level.

Now, you may have liked this discussion under consciousness, rather than memory, but there is a reason for discussing it here. That is because memory, which we think is a mental entity (engram) that is from our past that endures over time, but we cannot get to having memories until we can understand the basic objects of our outside world and inside world are the same. We cannot form useful memories before this step, that takes place in our brains in the first two years of our life.

Before discussing that perception is active versus passive, which is a crucial distinction (1/3 sec), let us take a look into memory itself. What for instance does it mean that we have a memory of our childhood, included in mine a place to swim as kids where a rope hung out over the Ghost River west of Calgary, Alberta, the milkyness of the water and the sun sifting through green trees.

We tend to think that our memories are real, which of course they are not, it is we who continually change, not the world, a Zen sentiment that all share as they grow into mid-life, and the few friends that remember what we were part of, have their own memories that are not the same as ours , and also unreal, and soon, for we all die, those memories cease to exist. We also tend to think that memories are discreet bundles of information that are stored in our heads for retrieval as the distinct remembrance of all of the scene we took part in. That we had a sunburn, that it was getting late, that our skin when we emerged from the water was covered in goose bumps. That we could smell a barbecue of steaks and see its smoke drifting through the trees making the sun into hazy rods that leapt from the trees.

Let me disabuse you of these common sense beliefs. There are three things we need to know: that we dream 24 hours a day; that dreaming is when we lay down memories; that we forget 90 % of what happens to us; and that our memories are in many many parts of our brains and these change as we age and the emotions that we feel are generated at the time we think them, they are in the present, not the past.

It was Karl Jung (and others) who came to understand that we dream 24 hours a day. Our consciousness when we are awake obscures the fact that we are still dreaming. And dreams have an important characteristic: they don’t operate completely by the rules that we find in our days, for example, we may be able to fly in a dream, or drink a river dry, or run away from danger, only to have a tree we are climbing fall down, and then we run to the next with danger behind and the next tree falls down, in other words in a danger and frustration dream we experience events that do not operate by the rules of physics that we have come to understand that our world operates by. Why is this? It is because the rules of logic, the refusal to accept magical solutions, the sieving out of the oddnesses in our sensing of the world is mediated by the right frontal lobe close to the I centre and thus, it disallows our believing that such events happen. But, and here is the important point, when we are sleeping, these centres are turned off and, the odd events, for example, singing a song underwater all night long, can occur because our sergeant at arms is not at his post.

Now, the next important thing to know is that dreaming is where we lay down long term memory. Short term memory is stored in the conscious brain, but long term memory is laid down by the subconscious mind – and it often takes as much as three years. All of which is done subconsciously where we have no conscious control over what we are thinking. In other words, our memories, what we consider to be the most important aspect of our personal humanness, are completely out of the control we consciously have as to their contents and our emotional reaction to them. This is completely counterintuitive to the western mind that favours rationality and science, but it is true. And once you accept that it is true you understand the world in a greatly different way. That, for instance, what we remember is not a factual account of what happened, it is only what our subconscious mind has established in the conscious part of the brain, as per our most fundamental emotional drives. So we are not what we think we are, or what we remember is not what actually happened. This conceptualization will have dramatic consequences on medicine and law in the decades to come, but I am not interested at the moment of examining that digression.

Here is the next great kicker about memory: our brains are structured to only ‘see’ a very little of what happens to us. Remember the saccades that the eyes move in. These micro movements that happen on their own, make our eyes dart around what is in front of us, short distance, long distance, moving objects etc. They do not, like one of those red eyes in stores, take in and record everything. It is our emotions that make the eyes move – and they are subconscious – and if you think about it, you will find that in a memory of an event for example, if the mind were really to record like a movie what happened then our memory of say the day we were married or confirmed or whatever, would be 12 hours long. And of course our memory is not like that, it is select little bits. In fact, our memory is much like looking into the things that happened and the high points, like placing the ring on the finger, the now I pronounce you man and wife, the person falling into the wedding cake and so on, come back, but not the rest of the 12 hours and not that our eyes recall everything in our visual field, not every face, not every name, nor every suit and dress and their colour and the times we went to the bathroom and the number of squares of paper we used, nor the number of triscuits we ate, the arrangement of everything on the bridal table, the napkins, the carrot and crudités and so on. These things would be in a camera recording, but they are not in our memories, in fact, even a camera recording would not get everything, because it is not programmed to recognize a face and assign a name to it. Our memories are selective, highly selective, we do not remember everything that happened. So the human mind is limited, intentionally in its memories because we do not have to remember so much flotsam.

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Here’s the deal on the fallibility of memory: remember those six million nerve firings a second that tell the motion centre of our brains where our body is in 3-D space? Ah, well, virtually every second of every hour of every day and then night, we do not pay attention to any of it. We can, if we want to, pay attention and then direct our foot to move out in space, and take the leg with it and when to move the body forward and then to put the foot down and let go and fall forward into the foot on the pavement. But they are then lost, lost completely, and as before, if we were to form a memory of them, the memory would be another 12 hours long, and then there is the 12 hours when we are asleep and so on. So our minds forget are refuse to accept into consciousness 6,000,000 nerve firings time 60 seconds per minute time 60 minutes per hour, times 24 hours in one – only one – day.

So we forget 518,400,000,000 3-D nerve firings every single day. That is more than five hundred billion firings we don’t accept into memory each day. And that is five times more than every brain cell in our heads. The point is that our memory is not designed to be a recording, like a video camera. And, of what we do remember, and of course, this is all of what happens to us, excepting all those five hundred billions of nerve firings, it has been estimated that we forget 65 % of it in one week. This is intentional, that is the way our minds are constructed, so it is not bad that we forget 90% of what happens to us; it is the way we are built. Oh, and in case you are wondering about photographic memories, these aren’t like camera recordings either, they are just very good memories about what happens, but, again they are little bits and pieces of what happened, even the fellow (12) who could mnemonical remember big chunks of the telephone book, that doesn’t mean that he could remember a great deal more about the day itself, if he wasn’t applying his categories to remembering it. He just had a very good memory, it was not photographic.

How Memories are Stored

Now, the next subject is just how are memories stored in the brain. That is a fascinating story and in brief the answer is that memories are not stored as a single item but as hundreds of items that are brought together. And here is how it is done.

Let’s say that you were the child of an abusive parent. And a small incident happens. At some point during a conversation a friend of your father reached out to shake your hand. You put forward your right hand, with a glove on and shook the man’s hand. He shook it and the conversation continued. At the end of the conversation the friend shook your father’s hand but when you put out your gloved hand he did not shake it.

Afterwards, as your father was driving you away in his car he erupted at you telling you you were the most useless son of a bitch and kept screaming at you until you retreated into the back corner of the back seat crying.

Your memory of such an event is extremely complex, and, contrary to what lawyers would have us believe, changes over the decades after the event. To give you this example, it was late in the day, and long shadows from the houses were falling across the driveway where you stood, and your face was in half light sun coming into one of your eyes. You register that you could not tell the man’s face because you were blinded by the light.

You were not listening very closely because the conversation was about some technical matter that both men understood, but you did not. Instead, you were blowing air from your mouth because it was cold, you saw no snow on the ground, but the angle of the sun made it later in the afternoon, in November before the first snow had fallen. Your breath condensed before you in the air and floated a little distance before melting into the air. You had a new maroon ski jacket full of down and you were very warm in your new gloves that were leather, with a red maple leaf on the backs of the hands and they were very cool, and you were so glad to have them because all the kids at school had them. They were necessary to be part of the crowd, and useful as you all went skiing on the weekend.

You put your tongue on the zipper where it was pulled up to you chin, but your tongue did not stick, so it was not very cold. A November cold you thought, and put your hands behind your back just like your father was doing and so on…

Now, this tale could be told with more and more detail of what you were experiencing from outside your body, what your were daydreaming about inside your mind, and the feelings you had, though they were far below your conscious thought. You had learned that having emotions was a bad thing. You were expected to do the right thing in all circumstances and to completely ignore your feelings, but at this stage of your life you did not understand this. You would later, though.

But let me now just pick out one small detail – tonguing the top of the zipper and show you how huge it becomes to remember and thus that all memories are almost unimaginably large. You were sticking your tongue out of your mouth and had to from time to time wipe a little bit of moisture away from your lips with the sleeve of your new coat, where it became cloth to fit snuggly on your wrist. Your tongue you stuck out only half its length because the zipper was tightly up to your neck which you liked because you had always disliked having a cold neck and behind it was a turtleneck with a logo from the sports club you belonged to and where you were taken for dinner as a treat and where you learned to play badminton, not that good when in competition with members, and that was something that your mind pushed down, because it meant being useless and you were ashamed of being useless as your father had let you know. And even though your high school always won the city championship and you never lost a game in the city tournament, you do not remember this only that there were 30 guys in front of you on the leader board and you were in shame.

So you were tonguing because you felt less than other people, and because it occupied your mind when you were feeling this. You touched the zipper at its top and memorized that it had two identical side pieces and a higher centre piece because that was the part of the zipper that you pulled up to your chin. You noticed that there was a taste of peanut butter on it and this was because on the way to school one day you had eaten your lunch before arriving at school you were just so hungry. You ate it in this coat and a small bit had touched the zipper of your new cool coat. So you then put your tongue out even further to pass down the rest of the top of the zipper, to test whether you had slopped some peanut butter down there. But, no, there was no taste down there only the mint from the gum you were chewing. So you brought your tongue back in a bit and were slowly, methodically eliminating every molecule of peanut butter on the top of your coat. In so doing, you were being clandestined as you know your father would know that you had been messy and was sure to give you a rough time and you were resenting him in the moments you were tonguing the peanut butter away, but you did not have a memory of this because you had been taught to eliminate any conscious thought of being ashamed of yourself and it resided underneath the layer you had put there so that you would not feel his anger, would not feel your uselessness and it was then that the man stuck out his hand and you quickly moved to shake his hand because your father would be looking and you did it for him. To be accepted, to do as he did, and try for his approval even though you were not conscious of this and would not realize for decades later when you were in therapy that you have always thought you could think, do or say anything that was right and so you hid behind a layer that insulated you and mounted an approval delusion with a being far above you who was looking down and approving of everything that you did. But as you tongued the last molecule of peanut butter away, you knew you were leaving water on the neck of your coat and that your attempt to cover it up had failed. You knew your father would notice and then he would be mad… we could stretch this one instant out longer and longer but there is no need. The point is that you would forget by the time your father exploded at you that all these thoughts had been pouring through your head and also, as you cried, you knew you were completely useless even though you pushed this out of your conscsiousness.

This does have a good outcome even though you would remember nothing other than your father screaming at you, because many decades later your shrink would listen to you tell him that you were always two people, and he would observe, that that was because you needed a defense against the abuse and so this big part of your personality was simply a delusion. He suggested putting the word ‘I’ in every general sentence, instead of referring to it in third person. The first time you did you began to cry, but this was a good thing because it was the first part of healing, the feeling of the pain of uselessness. Some years later when you father was pushing his walker around his house you realize you are no longer angry because the pain had been brought up, dealt with, acknowledge and then could disappear.

The important point, though, was that your memory of the time was almost infinitely large, yet you had forgotten it in the moment you heard your father’s voice screaming.

The sense data of the experience is gone. No one ever had told you to take your glove off and so you had no idea that that was necessary. And now, everytime you shake someone’s hand with a glove on, and he has a glove on because it is cold, this stirs you to remember the Proustian nature of the infinity of the moment the many decades before. And now your realize that your hate and anger were over your life were the outcome of abuse, but you have forgotten about the cold, the coat, the shadows, the tongue, the peanut butter.

How Memories are Stored

Memories are trimmed down conscious and subconscious thoughts about the what that happens to us. It is directed by the little almond of the brain, the amygdala, which is largely responsible for the great emotions that are attached to our thought.

Potential memory material is sent to the subconscious part of the brain, the brain floor the reptilian brain, that underlies the great flowering of consciousness in the flower that has bloomed consciousness on top of the phylogenetic tree of the evolving brain.

This material is broken down into little bits. For example, the wetness of your tongue as you licked the zipper on your coat. From the subconscious, 24 hours a day the brain beavers away at developing long term memory. The bits are thrown up into small areas of the conscious brain 24 hours a day. This process is unconnected to conscious thought and thus our memories are not, as mentioned, veridical or camera records, they are what the mind wants to remember.

The smallest bits of memories are electrical circuits among as little as 100 brain cells in the conscious brain arranged in a hexadecimal order. For example, the liquid on our tongue, the taste of metal, the temperature of the metal, the peanut butter taste, the bit of toothpaste on the zipper, the taste of the paint on the zipper, the plastic feel of the paint, the feel of warm air on our tongue, the feel of cold air on the tongue, the coldness of the air, the warmness of the exhaled air… I’m sure you get the picture: exceptionally small parts of the overall memory.

This process takes as long as 3 years, the subconscious floor of the brain throwing up the gazillions of little bits, and their connections into consciousness part of the brain. And remember in the example, the person was a very introverted person and thus the brain activity was huge in addition to the sensed information. And this process lays down memory in the 100,000,000,000 brain cells and what the brains wants to retain it does so by your consciously thinking about the parts and each time you think of it, it makes the net a little stronger, as in a few more cells are added to it. And as mentioned, it is dreaming, 24 hours a day that lays down long term memory, without our consciously thinking about it at all. Note that the conscious part of our brain is turned off in sleep, and not attending to dreaming during waking hours, hence our memories are not in the slightest a ‘trace of what actually happened.’

And over the decades your rethinking of something, that is mediated by the subconscious brain and emotions are added at the time of thinking by the amazing amygdala. But remember, just as we forget the cat’s eyes on the road as we drive down the highway, so do we forget and change our recorded memory. It coats the experience with the emotion that it is dealing with at the time we think it, so that in no way do our memories actually contain what we could have experienced, nor are they static; they change.

Eidetic memory (photographic memory) also falls into the same class, as this very good memory is only a small percentage of what there was for us to direct our senses to experience.

Then there are specific molecules of memory, that we will get into a little later in the book.

How Memories are Retrieved

Our brain stores a billion memories. These memories comprise what we think of ourselves, and, if they disappear, for example, when you have a seizure, or alzheimers, or a brain injury or it is simply that you are over 50 and it is after 4 in the afternoon when you remember nothing, we and others think that it is I ourself that has disappeared. So memories have a way of contributing to our sense of self, what it is that has continued through time from our early memories of childhood until this very moment when we are reading this book and considering that this is so. In fact, if your think about it, our memories constitute who we are, for without them we are, as in, exist, be, no longer.

And a fundamental issue is how it is that we come to place our attention on the memories that we want to think about. For example, remember as a child being on a windy dock on a lake and leaning into the wind on the end. This has a setting in a real place at a real time and the sense that this is in the past and about ourselves. And in this thinking it is hidden that the beginning motive that sets the whole process in motion is the subconscious mind that we have no conscious thought in.

There has been a long history of scientists (11, eg Domassio, etc.) understanding that if we want to think about something in our mind, say we are sitting on a chaise lounge that slowly swings in the late afternoon sun and into our consciousness comes an image of playing kick the can as kids, of a child who hid so close to the can, he could not move for fear of being spotted, but was so close as to almost be able to reach out and kick the can.

We think that we have been thinking about our past and how this past seems no longer to exist, even though we have this memory of it. But what is actually happening is that before we have this dreamy series of thoughts, that underneath, the subconscious mind at the bottom of our brains has been directing our attention to these memories and because we are not conscious of our subconscious, all we are thinking about is the dreamy seemingly un related images of playing in the dying light of day as a child, perhaps at a lake in the summer, where the whole gang assembled after dinner until the night was too dark to allow anymore play.

But that dreamyness only seems this way because we are not attending to it as, for example, if we were at work, and needing to concentrate, or had become aware of the sexuality of a woman’s ear right next to us though we may not know her, or that the flichering tongue on the ground is a poisonous snake and we get a jolt of adrenaline to be hyper attentive and take defensive action. No.

The dreamyness of the situation is only because our conscious mind is not aware of itself directing our attention. Underneath, however, the subconscious mind is directing us, to memories of a certain flavour, of childhood, of the past, of the quality of light falling into the lake, that there was the sound of a mosquito and then it ended, meaning that it was biting your leg, but you could not move… we could make this scene go on as long as a Proustian moment takes a thousand pages. But we don’t have to. All that is needed to be understood here, is that the subconscious mind is working overtime to direct the conscious mind to reacquire memories of a childhood kind.

Now, you may be interested to know how long it takes for this to happen. Let us move on to perception and the same process that makes us remember something controls our looking out and sensing out our world.

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Perception is Active

There are two current views of how we perceive things. One is that perception is passive: light enters our eyes and the images of the football game come into our head from the television and then we watch the game until the ads come and then race to the fridge for a beer, and be back in place just as the last ad ends and the game goes on.

Not so surprisingly, such a view of how we perceive the outside world, seems pretty accurate for describing us lounging on the couch idly flipping the channels on the changer to find our game or whatever. And this is called the representational view of perception and the other way of describing it is that it is passive.

And there is a long long list of neurobiologists who look at perception this way, notably Semir Zeki and VS Ramachandran (12), though there are many more. And this is largely because they come at the issue as scientists interested in how the eye works and how the electrical stimulations run from the eye to the back of the brain and the various sub-modules of sight put the colour, shape, hue, movement and so on together to make an image. Then, the theory says, the mind considers the image and takes action. And, of course, the argument goes, the same process occurs with all the other senses. Take hearing for instance. One understands far less about the football game on television if the sound is turned off, having then, to pick it up only by sight, which results in the mind being confused or grasping at meaning, and settling for less than it could have gotten with the sound turned on. Now, if one were a football player, the other senses, most importantly touch is always left out of a football game on television. The football player lying on the couch would be going ouch when the quarter back is crunched face first into the ground because of his experience of so doing.

But there is another view: that perception is active. Remember those thousands of small eye movements that take place every second, saccades? They have important explanatory value here. We have no control of them but the eyes are darting around exceptionally fast and onto different objects and focusing up close and then far back, thousands of times per second. The directing impulse is, again, the subconscious mind – OR THE EYES WOULD NOT MOVE – that is the brain structures at the bottom of our brains. They make the eyes do these small movements, as many as several millions every hour of our day, much as they make our stomachs take over breaking down food and presenting it in small small pieces for our intestines to absorb into our blood stream. The movements of our bowels are the same, the beat of our hearts, too.

So in our couch potato example, how does the subconscious motivate our conscious attention. First it monitors our stomachs and our thirst centres, making us get off the couch to get that beer. It also makes us avoid, say the dog in our path, push the door open, run to the kitchen avoiding walls, doors and other objects, and directs us to push out our hand to open the fridge door, look for a beer, push things aside to get it and do all the rest in reverse to arrive back at the couch just as the ads end, because the sense of unease about missing any of the action that we get is what the subconscious mind is using to make our conscious mind do the things that we want to do.

The other important piece of information is that it takes the mind a third of a second to pay attention to something that we see with our eyes. It may not seem of great significance to wait a third of a second to perceive something, but a few examples of what it would impair make it clear that it makes a whole lot of difference. The obvious problem would come when we are traveling through space at any given speed. Driving down the highway, flying a jet plane, traveling in a rocket, would become impossible. This is because we would be traveling faster than we can perceive what is coming at us and at all times we would not be able to see what was coming at us, a turn in the road for instance, and we would drive off.

There is ample scientific proof (13 Ellis) now that indicates that the subconscious brain is ‘meeting’ the incoming information from our senses through ‘pushing’ the conscious part of our minds to pay attention. If we did not pay attention to, say, a snowball coming our way, we would not duck, move, put our hand in front of our face and so on. This is because if you don’t perceive the snowball you won’t take any action. And one needs to have had experience with snowballs – or, say, mass growing in our visual field, which is the same thing – indicating to  for the subconscious to have developed the preference for us not to get beaned by one, because it could hurt, etc.

Remember that preferences are prototypical emotions that were fully developed at the evolutionary level of reptiles, probably between amphibians and reptiles for those who want to be precise. That means that your friendly inner iguana is the original motive force for all conscious thought. Now, once conscious thought has been stimulated and it cruises along in its magnificence thinking things out, do remember that at all times the subconscious is down there below consciousness but giving the push the emotional significance of what we do and what happens to us. This is hugely important to art, because artists regularly distort our basic categories of subterranean thought. We will return to this crucial issue later in the book, and return at length.

To summarize in another way: ‘our emotions gear us up for action and then we search and scan the environment for relevant perceptual clues’ (13). And we cannot perceive what we have not previously paid attention to.

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Footnotes:

1. Cabanac, M., Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol 6, 1999. There is an extensive bibliography on the end of this review article, including many articles by Cabanac in scientific journals. Interestingly, Cabanac, works at Laval University in Quebec, Canada.
2. Subconscious – below consciousness, below the floor of the midbrain. I use this term because the more commonly used term: unconscious, has too many meanings, for example, one can be unconscious as a result of being asleep, in a coma, ingesting substances or alcohol, be unaware of things, the Collective unconscious, being clued out, repressing thoughts, having amnesia, alzheimers, or simply because you are more than 50 years old and it is later than 5 pm, and so on.

The issue of differing academic specialties and even differing groups of people can result in the same words having different definitions. And a great deal of argument ensues before some non-charged words are developed. For example, the iguana lettuce research points out that once there are emotions, the animal has some awareness to act on preferences. Now, awareness, is a word that is usually thought of as a kind of consciousness. On the other hand, a gun that has a camera, and shoots bullets any time an insignia of an enemy is registered, cannot be considered conscious, but in what, if any, sense is it aware. And the literature gets into long involved discussions of ‘pleasure’, emotion and thus necessary consciousness in a lizard’s brain. I won’t get into this, but the reader needs to be aware that there are definitional problems all over the literature on the conscious brain.

1. Ralph Ellis, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol 6, 1999.
2. 4. Antonio Damassio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Picador, 1995. Damassio’s work is central to the argument of this book, providing evidence that the subconscious is of fundamental importance, though we have no conscious thought in it.

POETS: LOOK AT THIS!!! Here are some  suggestions for you to pay attention to regarding your brain. It will make you a far better poet. Updated April 22, 2010. Look below ‘Brains of Poets: Pay Great Attention to:’

SEE NUMBER 59. INVENT YOUR OWN LANGUAGE GAME, JANUARY 2010

Brains of Poets: Poets, Pay Great Attention to (Note, this is a first draft and in no particular order. It needs refinement and flesh. Many more suggestions to come.):

SEE NUMBER 58. TO BOLDLY GO. TECHNIQUE OF THE MONTH, NOVEMBER, 2009

SEE NUMBER 1. SMELLS. TECHNIQUE OF THE MONTH, DECEMBER, 2009

1. Smells - this is because all smells go directly to the subconscious brain before we actually sense the smell. No other sense does this. Because we shower everyday and use scented products we no longer have ‘human’ smells. But the brain has been active for a quarter of a billion years in the smell department. For example, dogs and cats smell people and other animals. We are not aware of our own pheremones though we are almost unable to not respond to another person who’s scent we smell. But for poets, the real point is an avenue into the subconscious. We drop as many as 200,000 flakes of skin each day. A hound, a wolf can follow the trail all day long. Think that a predator is onto your smell. Smell everything in your world. A newspaper. An orange. A baby’s head. One day you will write the smell.

2. Subconscious – don’t think too much. Your intuitions are right on. Believe this, and go with what feels most right. Instinctive preferences are associated with positive feelings, rational brains search for reasons. Art is not about 2 plus 2.

3. Right Prefrontal Cortex

4. Anterior singulate and basal ganglia

5. Amygdyla

6. Left hemisphere – Wernicke, Broca

7. Pressure, anger just before a huge creativity burst. Right hemisphere, language centres, superior, temporal gyrus, like a dam breaks. This small part of the right side of your brain is particularly good at generating creative associations that lead to epiphanies. The ‘juice’ from the burst is that pleasure centre dopamine thing, though.

8. Finding your voice – one of the developmental steps in a poet’s career is finding the way you speak in poetry the best. Charles Limb’s jazz research shows that when musicians improvise, the ‘I’ centre – behind the right eyebrow – is switched on. That means a poet does his/her best work when they speak from their innate voice. So, do develop your understanding of what the you in you is trying to say.

9. Pay attention to what your ‘I’ centre is saying. The jazz improvisation experiment means that at your best you are playing your ‘I’ centre, literally, playing yourself. Pay attention to your attention when you do your best work. This is not the same thing as developing your voice. This is about your best work. Music and poetry are very much the same, as all poets know. And poetry is an improvisation with 26 letters; music, our music, with 8 tones.

10. Accept a high level of fear. If you are on the edge making bug time progress, sorry, big, (I couldn’t resist that typo) you will be very afraid, of being able to do the poetry, of being able to be good enough, of being able to get better and not simply repeat yourself. Accept the fear as something good, and use it to scare yourself into being better. This is the prefrontal cortex doing the take over and be a conductor of your mind to go where you want to go. Think of fear as a very very good thing. Get scared as shit and use it.

11. Understand what kind of fear you have. There are kinds of fear that are not useful. Being blocked is fear you can’t do it anymore. Figure out what ritual you need to go through to solve being blocked, for example, if you have been writing a whole lot, a natural result is to be blocked. So walk away. I have another approach: I commit completely to the feeling of fear of never being able to write poetry again. It’s devastating, and I say, yes, this time it’s actually true. I will never ever be able to write again, give me Hemingway’s shotgun. In that terrible feeling comes another, that, the work can be done again. But if I resist giving away my complete identity, there is no new work for me – I have to go through the crater. Find your method.

Another kind of being blocked is to tell yourself that you can only write about X and that you must suppress thoughts of Y, and that the time you have is exceptionally important, and must be used properly. Take boundaries away from your writing process. They block you.

Another kind of fear is choking. This results from thinking too much about what you are doing and then what you write is crud, and this blocks you because you know it’s bad. Instead focus on a ‘holistic cue’. You find this cue by focusing attention during a time when you are writing well and think of a word or phrase that describes the movement of your thought. When you are choking from too much thinking, say your cue. It will help you get back on track.

12. Focus on your feelings. When you are reading poetry and it’s blowing you away, that is what you should feel like when you are writing your best. When you look at when you have written your best, ask your self how you were feeling at that time. Then know, that everytime you look at your own work and you have that feeling that it is spectacular, or that you know it’s right, that’s the feeling you should have. The more you do this, over the years, the more you know when your brain is in the right feeling mode, and when, it wears out and you should walk away from your poetry, so you don’t ruin it.

Please note this is not the same thing as when the fall downshift in light puts you in a depressive mode that fosters rewriting. It is not the same thing, if you go through mania and depressive cycles rapidly, though that can be used for switching from writing new to revising old.

13. Find your silent mentor. Ask yourself who are the most important poets that stimulate you to write. P.K. Page once told me that Yeats did it for her. Sylvia Legris returns to Paul Celan. Patrick Lane helped me at the most important moment for me. Carolyn Force (Angel of History) has helped me immensely. But I pay attention to a lot of new young Canadian poets because they are ultra-current and reflect our info chaos world. Find who means the most to you and who you would most like to write like.

14. Believe what you believe; you will writer better. If you believe that a pet rock makes you write better, or whatever, the right prefrontal cortex makes it so. Put the rock beside you. This is the placebo effect. The rational part of the mind, once it believes something, will make you do better or worse, depending on your belief about the subject. The explanation does not matter, nor whether it is true or not, it is onlythe conscious belief that is. For example, if you believe wearing a tortoise shell bracelet works for you, by gum, you will discover that it does. So do it.

15. Closely aligned with 14., develop rituals that make you write better poetry. This is one of the great understandings of religion. For example, if you believe in and undertake the ritual of oos-im-itch, a preparatory ten day process of the Nhu-chah-nulth First Nations, you will hunt better; if you believe in the covenant developed in Deuteronomy, you will believe in a single God that rewards for your acts toward a better Jewish faith; the swung incense of the Roman Caotholic signifies purification. Each of these rituals has a significance to the person who performs it or believes it. It becomes a central positive influence for you.

16. Rewrite with Juice. Typically, the best time to rewrite is the winter when the depressive phase of creativity takes over and you can focus down without fighting your manic mind. But, after you figure out – by paying close attention – to when you rewrite best, pay attention to the various parts of your mind that affect your decisions. These decisions are vital because we tend to strip words away when rewriting far more commonly than we add and you can ruin things easily (copy and paste the poem to the end of your manuscript before rewriting it) by making the decisions we make.

Three parts of your brain strongly affect your decisions: Prefrontal cortex is the consciousness part that brings your ‘felt’ suggestions forward for a decision. But the nucleus accumbens is a key to the dopamine cascade system that gives you positive rewards while the insula produces negative reactions to the words you are creating and changing during rewriting. Both of these produce felt emotions that you cannot change. Poetry is mysterious and so are emotions that you cannot change. So, with your attention favour the two limbic structures that give you positive and negative feelings about the changes you are making. If you consciously favour your unconscious juice, you will make better rewriting decisions.

17. Write what you most strongly feel. It makes little sense to write poetry with rational thought – as though a poem’s greatness could be ascertained on an X and Y axis graph. Do rip out that page, as in The Dead Poet’s Society – disengage the rational brain. This would be intuitive to most poets – but I once had an engineer tell me I should rewrite with a pencil so that I could erase the previous words and insert the new better ones – wrong. It’s the soup of words that’s important. But develop your consciousness assessment of both the adverse and positive reactions that your mind is having to what you are doing. Get in touch with how strong your emotions are, and then go with them. It is the consciousness of your emotions that you need to develop.

18. Pay your dues and get better. Surprising as it may seem, the prefrontal cortex responsible for conscious thinking is not the repository of your years of writing poetry. The mind learns only by experience, making mistakes and learning from them, and that is a dopamine cascade thing that the mind uses to learn, and the more time you spend at writing the better you will get, even if you don’t have a lot of talent. Pilots are trained in simulators not because they reason their way through problems, but because they internalize a method of thinking and reacting when in a crisis. Write like you are in a crisis. And trust the huge library of experience you are building the more you write poetry.

19. Cycle your moods rapidly. This one is not for the faint of heart. Once you can easily detect your dopamine circuits and averse feeling circuits, make a habit of making them cycle deep into the one and then the other. Alcohol is the writer’s drug. It both lubricates and deadens. If it’s sex, then have lots of sex, with different partners, carefully, or not. And so on, with an emphasis on figuring out the activities that make you a better poet and then saturating your life with them. The down side on this one is the great personal risk you put yourself and others through trying to get better and have longer periods of high creativity. For example, many poets take lithium based pills or anti-depressants. If you want a high creativity period, stop taking the medication. But, remember, without the pills all creativity will stop as you may shoot out the end to psychosis or become mentally catatonic, not to mention commit suicide. Be extremely careful in pushing your mind around by changing medication/substances/liquids, as it’s very typical for artists to refuse to take pills because the poetry is associated with identity, a very dangerous mix. Go back and eliminate substances/liquids while retaking medications – doing so will not take the poetry away in the long run, even though your mind powerfully tells you that it will. Do distrust your instincts on this one.

20. Will your way into a better poetic brain (This is not the same thing as 17.). As completely unbelievable as it may sound, you can actually become better at poetry by force of will concentrating on becoming better. This is not like putting a gun to your head and telling yourself to get better, but as the transcendentalists say: favour the thoughts naturally arising from your mind that make you more creative. This process can be used for improving at anything you want, but we are poets here and we adapt this for our use. It turns out that simply turning and facing where you poetically want to go and saying yes, you can do this, actually stimulates the growth of new brain cells in your poetic brain.

21. Don’t overlook the obvious. A good OCD can be a grand thing. Do obsessive compulsive things like repeating words that rhyme, repeating words with alliteration, repeating words that link one kind of noun with another kind of noun, or verb or modifying a noun  with an adjective not normally associated with it – commonly known as metaphors. And do it over and over and over. Your focus on words, their connections, their sounds working with the sounds of other words is the essence of poetry: an obsession with words. For rhymes, here is a simple example: take the word ‘give’ and change the first letter starting at the beginning of the alphabet and working right through to the end. Then make combinations of two letters to add to the ‘ive’, working through the alphabet. Then three. and so on This can be an endless preoccupation with the basis of words – something that is very high on the personality list for poets. At the same time this is much the same as  self possession, self-absorption, also an important part of the poetic personality. Self-absorption is all about being in one’s own head, detached from those around you. This is the space that a poet needs, and it is important to personality, the characteristic of finding the rest of life irrelevant – one can tolerate being poor for instance (something that virtually all poets are), if one is very self absorbed. You just don’t notice it.

22. Love those serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, you will be a better poet. There is growing evidence that certain anti-depressants – the ones that make synapses slower to take up neurotransmitters – work on mood by primarily making the brain grow new brain cells (even though they are known to be SRIs). Should you be looking for a pharmacological fix to take you out of lows where you are blocked and can’t work, consider trying a cycle through the SRIs to bring you up into a depressive phase that allows your mind to work quicker in the periods when you reshape and redraft initial poems.

23. Never settle for the obvious.

24. Describe the same thing five different ways. You are highly creative. If you see something, anything, make five images or word clusters to describe it, do it for everything you pass and everything you feel all day long. Describe it as you see it. As a photograph. These five combinations are images, the main building blocks of western poetry. These combinations are the same thing as word riffs where one word spawns the next and this the next and so on. This is a process of self-lubrication, the equivalent of singing scales.

25. Court strong emotions so strong you can hardly stand them. This is like walking in a room of poisonous snakes. You can get killed very quickly, but the heightened emotions you have, which you can’t stay at long, the brain can’t take it, are the basis of work that blows your brain away.

26.A Lay parts of your mind fallow. Let them rejuvenate to give you that artesian flow that sings. Know when you have used a part of you to its absolute extent. And let it go. For now.

26.B Think of your mind as having many centres of creativity, not just one, hence, part of your mind is primed for more work at all times. This helps with being blocked, too.

27. Nmonic Devices. Another method to work better is to associate a ‘thing’ with your best work. Similar to the point in 14, above. If you have, say, a bald eagle’s pinion feather – all dark brown, by the way – that you think will help you write better, always take it into the room or conceive it in your mind when you are working. If you can remember the times where the nmonic device has helped you work better, then you already have something you believe in. It is believing in the device that makes it work, even if it is imaginary, for example, a waterfall that exists only in your mind, or an imaginary animal, say, a unicorn. Looked at from the other direction: when you are working well (and, of course, you need to have listened to yourself for some time to know this), bring your unicorn into your mind. That coats your nmonic device with being successful. So it helps you the next time you call it up while you are working. This point is not the same thing as developing rituals, which you should also do, though they both work by priming the dopamine spindle cells which is the basis of experience.

28. Develop your mind’s segue abilities. So, when you can’t do one type of work, switch instantly to other work of a different category. For example, if you have more than one manuscript on the go at different stages of development, move from one to the other instantly, so you do not waste time, something there is too little of. Add to this that, for example, reading poetry makes you want to write, that it is a segue in itself, and do it immediately, and give yourself permission not to feel guilty (if you do) for your pleasure. Enjoy the change like sex. On the other hand, if your mental rituals include a period of moping around, for instance, as an important part of your method, then you ignore seguing past this part of your process. Of course, the point here is: knowing how you work best, understanding, listening, watching, tasting yourself.

29. Think of writing poetry as sex. This is a self evident truth. Think of poetry as a drug (like heroin or cocaine). This is also a self evident truth. A poet is moved most easily by poetry than most anything else. Given the economics of being a poet – not much – the elevation of poetry very highly is a necessary condition of the poetic mind.

30. Think of poetry as life. Think of poetry as the sun. Think of poetry as:_______ . In other words, make poetry the biggest positive thing you can have in your existence.

31. Keep repeating your memory and feelings when you write your best poetry. The repetition is hugely important. This primes the memory, to make the memory stronger, and because memory changes every time you remember something, the more you put your mind to remembering, the bigger and more memorable the memory becomes. Note that no memories are true, so it is important to imbue your memories with what you want them to be. The dopamine, spindle cell arrangement is where our intuitive memory lies, and it is built by having ’successes’, this is what is being positively affected by repeating a memory. You make it ‘true’. And, the act of remembering something overlays a new memory on top of what you remember – not an intuition issue.

32. Pay attention to the dreams you have while you are awake. We dream 24 hours a day, but due to the intensity of being conscious, do not ’see’ our waking dreams. Dreams have attenuated logic because the consciousness centre is turned off in them. This is like synaesthesia, which is the ability to join two different sensory modes, a kind of metaph0r, and a good thing for poets. Dreams also are the undercurrents of what is most important to us emotionally. So, in addition to paying attention to sleeping dreams, be aware of waking dreams. This is a skill that must be developed because consciousness overshadows waking dreams. But the payoff is having a conduit to the most important emotions of your life, a very important constituent in poetry. Anthropomophism is for example a stock in trade for poets, and is also a synaesthetic process, and one that represents what is under neath our beliefs. Beliefs sit on and depend for their existence on our emotions.

33. Make combinations of things that are not usually thought of together. A simple example would be writing down a list of 50 nouns (adjectives, verbs, etc.). Then go through from the beginning and take the first noun and put it together with each of the other 49 one at a time. This is categorization, and the novel combinations are the ones that help develop your creativity. This is a creativity exercise, but it is also the creation of metaphors, and you are lubricating your mind to produce new, different and original combinations, something that is fundamental to poetry. And, the combining part is conscious right prefrontal cortex stuff, but your feeling about the relative goodness of a combination is from the subconscious, where all good poets have to go.

34. Tap into your subconscious when your brain is new. Write down a list of ten different ideas each of which you would like to develop into a poem – on slips of paper. When you first wake, throw the slips and the one that goes the farthest, you write down as a poem in a freefall form, and then move on with the rest of your day, and come back to the poem later. When you first wake, or your attention is low your subconscious feelings are let through with greater freedom. This item is a method to make your mind do something when the gates of creativity are more open. It also gives you greater access into primary processes of thought.

35. Drink booze, write great poetry. This one is so obvious it hardly needs mentioning. Alcohol is the poet’s drug. It loosens inhibitions, grants confidence, enables trying on things that you would normally not connect, it lubricates the mind, it destabilizes the mind. In the long run, though, it kills you.

36. Shifts in mood. When your mood shifts, your underlying mind is doing something different from what you are currently thinking about. Get in the habit that when this happens, that you write something down immediately. All poets know the writing on match books, paper towels even themselves when something hits them. But if you develop your ability to attentionally recognize mood swings, you will far more quickly tap into when you should work based on the cycles of your mind. It is the shift that is important, not what the particular emotion is.

37. Write when you are weeping. Again this one is about tapping into the big emotions you have. Weeping is great emotion, and, just as importantly, about release of emotion. Alternatively while you write, if you are, say, angry, hurt, put your mind into that thought completely so that you begin to weep – the method acting approach. You will write with a weird logic, a prerequisite for great poetry. Just bang on those keys. Hate your oppressor even if it is illusory.

38. Simultaneously consider multiple subjects particularly opposites. Give yourself several subjects, objects, moods, images and think about them all at the same time. This is the nuclear fusion of making atoms combine. You can’t help but come up with novel ideas.

39. Feel what your body feels. What mood is your body in? Find out. Pay attention to moving through the clouds to what is behind them. Your body is hard wired into intuition and what it feels or what you think makes it give you messages of how it feels.

40. Eat foods that affect your moods or dreams. Such foods include, for some: tomato sauce, pizza, spiced meats. Figure out the ones that do this for you, particularly for wilder dreams. They are the undercurrents you are working to connect with, so influence them.

41. Give thanks for the mystery of your best poems. This one is for those who feel they don’t want to understand how to write better poems because it may make them less frequent or not as good. If you think your process is magic, then honour the magic. It is a ritual, and it makes you feel good about the poetry you do write well. Say it out loud, with conviction.

42. Hold in your mind subjects that make you have strong contrary feelings. An obvious example would be a lover who has left you or slept with another. On the one hand you love, on the other you hate. Or belief in religion that you are unsure of. Or a moral view that you have not lived up to. Or a rose because it was offered by a traitor or enemy. It is the disturbance from normality that is useful. It allows for much greater creativity.

43. Create an imaginary being who speaks to you in strange ways, and values you very much. This one is clearly one that goes over the border into psychosis or schizophrenia, so be careful. If you hear voices in your head believe them, though know also that they are not true. If you can yank yourself back from the being, you are creating the powerful currents that make creativity come spontaneously.

44 a. Believe in a god. Much like the last item, this is about creating a supernatural being because so doing accesses the same thinking process that underlies creativity.

44 b. Hold tight to a positive delusion. If you have created a god that sees you as the best thing in the universe, refuse to let it go. While you consciously believe this, your body is not confused. It will send you endless messages of conflict. These are positive because they crash into the positive feelings and thoughts you have. Conflict leads to creativity.

45. Develop a compulsion to understand the entire world. This one strikes me as more related to the work a novelist must do. On the other hand, the compulsion, factor, is again accessing the emotional side of your nature. And being focused on the entire world makes you an intense person, ever striving to understand. Intensity is akin to the manic flights of high creation wherein you believe you are convinced you have deep insights into human beings and the world, coupled with a huge output of poems. In addition, intensity of focus is making the conscious right prefrontal cortex, where conscious creativity arises, aware at a high level, hence the conscious part of creativity, directed creativity, is already on demand to go.

46. Exercise. You want your mind to write great poetry? Then exercise your body. That is because moods are most strongly affected by how your body interprets and influences emotion and thus attention… which is the most important feature in the conscious part of your mind that boosts creativity.

47. Value the close people in your life. Humans are social beings conditioned from almost the word go. If you value the close people in your life, going out of your way to think of them, you are making a connection with your subject matter. You are also preventing loneliness, alienation, depression. This matter subconsciously strokes your conscious creativity by having your body send its positive messages to where you are most attentive.

48. Think of your self as a time lapse of clouds and sun rushing across a landscape. This sense of always being new every second is in fact how consciousness actually works: our self is created in every instant. This is the same as continuously and always blooming. Creativity is artesian. Blowing out of you as fast as it can. Now write poetry.

49. Indulge your fantasies in many different projects. The important part is to have the many different projects going at one time. It is clear from classical brain plasticity experiments that the more different things you do, the greater your creativity. It also means as much, in rats as a 25% volume change in specific areas. It makes many areas of your brain associated with poetry work far better.

50. Play your most favourite music while you write. Some, like me, are so stimulatable ,that I cannot do this. But, you may be able to do this, and what you are doing is stimulating your I centre which is where your best poetry comes from. It also affects your entire brain. Scientists have found that chickens prefer from all the choices, Pink Floyd, to listen to. Their brain proteins, involved with making synapses, as in new connections start changing in as little as two hours.

51. Do what you think will make the most difference to improving your poetry. The odd truth of it is not simply believing in yourself and improving as noted above, but in following your strongest beliefs about writing. For example, I know someone who says that they write their best poetry based on the feelings they have that come from their stomachs. Learn to recognize and do and redo what you discover. Since all feelings are in the brain, the stomach is not where they come from, but who cares. If it works, do it, believe it.

52. Think that you write from every place in your brain. Imagine as you are writing that the lights are coming on in your head and as you do it, the lights spread out so that your entire brain becomes lighted inside your skull. This will actually increase the size of the areas of your brain that do do the deed. You don’t need to know them, just the way to make it happen. This is putting brain plasticity into action.

53. Ask yourself how you are responding to every situation you are in. This does two things: it makes you self-absorbed, a very important part of a poet’s personality; and, it makes you think far more and far more quickly, so that you can keep up, to the feelings that are instantly revealing themselves to you, so your creative brain is quicker, and, okay there is a third, it gives you a vastly greater amount of personal experience to draw on when you write.

54. Imbue everything around you with feeling. For example, tell yourself that the rock/tree/insect/ etc. next to you is happy, sad, angry, wistful, droopy, hungry, insatiable, rational, aggressive, psychotic, smart, dumb, young, middle-aged, old, dead, insensitive, a jilting lover, a new parent, etc. etc. etc. This is being anthropomorphizing, an absolutely vital part of the poet’s tool bag. And it facilitates thinking in new ways about everything – creativity.

55a. Focus your attention on poetry. You will write better if when you read someone you really like, you focus your attention and keep it high as you read and reread, as well as figure out how the poetry works and does what it does. Generally, attention focused on what you want to achieve makes it happen. The brain plasticity protein BDNF works in a number of ways to make this true. The process is actually changing your brain to make it more in tune with what you want it to do.

55b. Focus your attention on moving objects with your mind. The purpose is focusing your attention as that improves the system for new learning and a positive feeling about it. And the focus required to think you can move say your coffee cup makes you focus far more than if it were something you could do easily, like move words around in your head. Then turn your turned on brain to your poetry.

56. Take stimulants. A big dose of caffeine will help a person pull an all nighter before an exam. The same chemical can open up the brain’s effortless ability to learn (nucleus basalis), for example, remember long chunks of poetry, and be able to write more poetry. But be very careful with this one because there comes a point with caffeine where you get strung out or crash and all that you have learned/written disappears. The same can be said for more dangerous stimulants like speed, crystal-meth and so on, so be very careful, and I am not suggesting you take them. The same can be done by putting an electrode in the right part of the brain, which of course is not an ethical doctor’s procedure at present. In the long run, though, and a Brave New World subject, specific drugs will come on the market that you can take to open that effortless learning period that allows children to learn so much, so quickly, and apply it to writing far better poetry.

57. Learn a New Language. Or better yet, invent one. Learning a new language turns on our abilities to, well, learn, with a far greater ease and alacrity, like when we were children and after less than a year of rote we began picking up 30 new words a day. Also, a new language has enough differences that it forces you to look at your own language’s conventions in an entirely new way, or take the conventions of that new language and ‘push’ English (if that is your language) to make it say things the same way. We don’t for instance, break nouns into feminine and masculine, or take one word and inflect it five different ways to give different meaning or change the noun instead of changing verbs to handle the complexities of time shift (past, present, and etc). Then try translating another language’s poetry. The process  of finding meaning in English comparable with another language is highly creative and very difficult – the perfect kind of exercise to stimulate your own poetry.

58. To boldly go. Project your thought right through your forehead or right between your eyes. Take your time to feel your power. Then close your eyes and hold out your hands. Imagine you are keeping in the air by the emanations of your hands the most crucial truths of mankind and keeping them safe from all the evil in the world. Hold them there and feel yourself doing this. Now realize that the truths are your own poetry. Now write. (nucleus basalis). Do this every time you write. Make it a ritual.

59. Invent your own language game. You and the other participants develop 12 rules of language – anything goes. The Game Master, who is not a participant of the game, but whose decisions must be obeyed, ranks the rules from the simplest to the most complex. The first rule must be observed in the first week; in the second week, the second rule must be obeyed; and so on. The Game Master decides whether the one word you are allowed to add to the growing poem at one time, and the next player the second, and so on, meets the rule to be observed. You cannot disagree with the Game Master, only choose another word until the Master says yes to your choice; then the next player chooses. At the end of the game, the Game Master is changed for the next game. The best way to play is by Blackberry, Email, Youtube, or etc., so that a game can be played 24 hours a day, 24/7, though 9 am to 5 pm, is long enough. Aim to log several dozen by each participant a day. The Game Master saves the ‘poem’ to an email,  so you can observe your game’s progress. By the end of ‘term’ (a university term is roughly 12 weeks), you will find your dexterity with words, grammar, diction, past and future tenses, etc. dramatically improved. This is so because your language game makes your brain change, and be able to do far more complex things in your real life poetry. This is a plasticity game of great power.

60. Make poetry an obsession. This one works in a number of ways. If you think about poetry several hours a day, your writing will improve. If you read poetry several hours a day, ditto. If you memorize poetry several hours a day, etc. If you read about your favourite poets and imagine yourself as them, you will write better poetry. The more you do it, the more it will work, and, when you pass over that threshold where you lose the ability to judge whether you are doing it too much you are in that crazy territory where your writing jumps up a quantum leap. Mine this because shortly thereafter you will write crud and need to stop. Try and stay on the edge until you cannot take it anymore. And, again, be careful because slipping too far over that edge is going past creativity into an OCD and then the more useless poles of mental diseases. Think of your brain as malleable and that you are changing its shape constantly.

61. Right poems upside-down or reversed. Write a poem by looking at the computer screen’s image in a mirror, or upside down, if you can so rig mirrors, or can actually write with a pen upside down. The left pre-frontal cortex normally exerts control on the right side, but it is not good at reading things that are backward or upside down. The right side that  is normally inhibited or shaped or led by the left is not constrained because the left cannot understand what you have done. You will instantly be able to write poems better. The same principle applies if you are trying to write music, paint, sculpt and so on. For poetry, this is a surprising outcome, because most language skills are on the left side as well. Interestingly enough, rhyming is a right side thing, and conscious creation is also a right prefrontal activity.

62. Find people who like what you do and that you admire. The point of this is that you are at highest creativity when you feel valued, when you think you are right, when you are so confident that you are over-confident. The corollary to this one is to: Run away from people who do not like you. Waste no time with an idol who doesn’t like you. There is no point banging your head against a wall. For, example, if a magazine consistently turns you down, move on, don’t waste your confidence trying to get someone who is not interested in you get interested in your work. It wastes your creativity. Think this way: if you don’t get along with someone, group, magazine, etc., identify it/them and cross them off your list. Move to the light. That is where your creativity lives. This is one of the hardest things that I have had to learn. Isn’t that silly, something that to most comes as easy as opening their eyes.

63. Break with your past. Never be satisfied. If you have sycophants, you must move on. The crack that breaks you open is where the quantum leap comes from. This is also fear. Fear is good. Jump off that cliff into what you do not know. If you are satisfied, you are writing below the level you have in your brain. If you have done your degree, move on. If you have done workshops, move on. If you have done a writing group for over a decade, move on.

64. Learn the rules, then break the rules. This is your right hand brain being freed of the left hand brain. This is the same thing as really being experimental. A poet cannot experiment until he or she can write the rules and conventions. If you can’t do what is normally done, you cannot do anything new. If you can’t do it, understand it, as the second best practice.

65. Pursue your goals until they break you. This is for very goal directed artists, those who need ribbons on the mantelpiece, glowing review, a mountain. Don’t roll the stone up, pick up the mountain and bring it home. It is yours. It is too much for you. When you break, you will write your best poetry. It’s the clash of the opposite emotions, again, and a way to reach them for the writer who has method and their outcome mapped out.

66. Imagine doing anything that you want to do without any constraint. While you are imagining this, for example, jumping off a cliff, which is disturbing, or making love with someone in front of an audience, which is enjoyable, or building a house of cards that will not fall down. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. What matters is that you can do it with the constraints of logic or social convention or whatever. When you are doing this, you are creative. Creativity is about putting together something novel, or new, for you, or coming up with conclusions you would not think of, if, for instance, there was no gravity, then you would not need, a glass to drink water. You would simply pour the water into air and it would hold there as a sphere because water molecules orient to one another and have surface tension. Creativity is about lack of inhibition, your brain telling yourself not to do something. So if you imagine yourself doing something without constraint, you have put your poet’s mind into its creative phase. Imagine you can fly and then you can.

67. Concentrate on your body. Ask yourself how your body feels. Think about your legs, and stomach, your heart, if you could control the beat, your lungs, your brain, your fingers and toes. The reason is that it puts you in touch with your intuition, which is the centre of much poetic luck. Concentrate on trying to feel what emotions your body is in. Spend the time. Remember that your body informs how you feel about things in your conscious mind – and it is also a kind of memory, that is one of the purposes of the dopamine system (appallingly called the pleasure centre, an expression you should eschew). The mind takes stock of what the body tells it and makes decisions based on that.  You are making a connection with magic, and if your poetry performs magic, how can you get any better than that?

68.

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Coming Soon: The Poets Personality

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Brains of Poets: The Main Categories:

1. Some Interesting thoughts about the brain.

2. How we think the brain works and how it really works.

3. The brains of writers/poets and the special abilities they have.

4. How best to use your abilities in your own writing.

5. Writers’ moods and mood disturbances and how to best use them in your writing.

1. Some Interesting Thoughts About The Brain

The brain is a flower on what we do not know.

- D.C. Reid

The Human Brain

1. The brain is deep red, not grey and white as we have always been taught.

2. The brain has 100,000,000,000 cells, each of which has 1,000 to 10,000 connections with other brain cells. (The rest of the body has 100 trillion cells. All develop from one cell in less than nine months in the womb).

3. An element of memory uses about 100 brain cells. Each cell can be part of many elements of memory and with 100 billion brain cells, memory is virtually endless. (A trivial example: each of us knows more than 5,000 pop songs and, with a bit of direction, can sing the tunes and sing the words). If you laid all our brain cells out end to end, they would stretch 700,000 miles.

4. Our conscious brain deliberately forgets or will not deal with more than 90% of what our senses and body tell it.

5. The conscious flower on top of our brain has evolved so much in the past 100,000 years that it has blown the eight bones of our skull apart so that today our skulls are several inches higher, forward, sideward and rearward than they used to be. Had this not happened, our skulls would look much like those of sheep.

6. All of our emotions are sub-conscious, meaning that we have no conscious thought in our emotions, thus they comprise the: what we do not know, and are the most important part of our brains.

7. The most important things about brains are: sensing, vegetative functions, sex, bringing up offspring, eating, physical safety, rage.

8. The most important things about human brains are: I and others, consciousness, language, religion, decision making and ethical discrimination. The human brain, unlike all others, is not fully developed until 20 years of age.

9. Humans have more than 7,000 facial expressions of our emotions. Most animals have one, and the rest seldom more than a half dozen.

10. The scientific tools that have allowed the explosion of knowledge in the past ten years are: MRI, PET, CT scans, TMS, GSR, EP-MRSI.

11. Based on the Pythagorean scale of eight notes, an eight bar melody yields 10 to the 48th power of possible tunes, all of which we can discriminate.

12. In one second the brain produces millions of firing patterns, for example, images.

2. How We Think The Mind Works – A Day in the Life of you or me or Anyone

…dreaming about this cute babe (hunk) and just as we’re getting to somewhere interesting, drat, I wake up and it’s all just been nothing as it recedes away from me, and, huh, where was I, oh, and who am I… ah, caffeine… as in, I love my coffee and my coffee loves me, and now I am me, oh, and I have a family, and my body cleans and repairs itself and I’m choosing clothes and nixing this tie with the brown stuff that tastes good but looks bad. Now I am walking down the street looking good and, hey that turkey with the stinking, screeching car almost hit me, grrr, almost gave me a heart attack, and then I see someone and remember him/her, sort of. Then I get to work and I talk, I work, my brain hurts, and thank God, it couldn’t have come soon enough: I get to go home and boy my dinner smells good, I watch TV and all of a sudden the lights go zzz… dreaming about this cute babe (hunk)…

Do note that the way we think the mind works is a whole lot shorter and simpler than the next part: how the mind really works

2. How the Mind Really Works

First: a little history of the brain: fish, frog, reptile, mammal, human.

1. Dreaming

We think we dream from time to time in our sleep and remember some of them. Freud, Jung and other therapists have had a lot to say about our strange and wonderful sleeping dreams. But, in fact, we dream 24 hours a day, as in through the whole time we are awake. The intensity of our consciousness prevents our being aware of our dreams while we are awake, just as, by analogy, the sun obscures the stars in the day with its brightness.

The most important purpose of dreaming – which arise from our subconscious – is to lay down long-term memory. The subconscious part of our brain throws up bits and pieces to our conscious brain to see whether they stick. Note that the conscious part of our brain is turned off in sleep, and not attending to dreaming during waking hours, hence our memories are not in the slightest a ‘trace of what actually happened.’

2. Babes and Hunks

Even before birth, female (xx) and male (xy) humans are different from one another – because of genetics. It goes like this: male fetuses secrete testosterone and this influences their own brains and the mother’s metabolism, making her body make changes in return, that also influence male fetuses. Darker, more exuberant hair from her belly button down, is a visible example of an effect brought on by male fetal testosterone.

Gays and lesbians are also determined by birth, as there is a polarity from male to female that results in a spectrum of masculine and feminine brain characteristics.

Later, attraction to types of faces intermingles with the even later attraction to members of the ‘opposite’ sex, that develops at puberty.

As every human being is different from every other human (even though we are all the same) attraction to an individual is specific, in its range, to that individual.

Then, of course, there is sex.

3. Interesting – Sex

The only purpose in any plant or animal being alive is to produce at least one more of its kind. Beyond that, most other purposes support procreation, such as taking care of young, and beyond the staying alive imperatives, like eating and safety, the rest is really the decision of human beings to be a certain way and to believe certain things based on the parameters of our minds.

4. Waking Up

The subconscious mind flicks the switch and our minds swim up into consciousness. The focus, the attention, the seeing out are the important components of our sun of consciousness – as soon as we have caffeine, of course.

5. Nothing – dreams disappearing

Our conscious focus makes it appear that dreams are disappearing.

6. I am Me – the human

The concept of I usually arrives in humans in our second year, along with the corollary concept of Other People. With these, consciousness wakens.

Where are we thinking from and residing in our heads? In our right frontal lobe just above our eyebrow is the centre of consciousness, and I and others.

This development renders the concept of solipsism (there is only one brain in the world: mine) one that moves from a philosopher’s topic to one held only by someone with a mental disability.

7. Family – Sociability

Humans are warm, fuzzy, social animals whose greatest achievement is conversing with one another in a complex way.

8. Body – the 90% we don’t know about

Virtually all of our bodily functions happen without conscious thought, for example, food digestion, getting rid of wastes, heart beat, breathing, walking, standing still, temperature regulation, hunger, all of our brain below the conscious cortex, as in the fish brain, brain stem, reptilian brain and limbic system. See DF Watt’s paper, p 197, JCS, V6, 1999 for an exceptionally good succinct table for the location of subconscious thought.

For example, every second we receive in the subconscious part of our brains more than 6,000,000 nerve impulses from golgi-tendon-apparatus distributed all over our body, to tell us where our body is in three dimensional space.

9. Choosing – subconscious

Without the subconscious part of the brain we are unable to make decisions as simple as which tooth brush to pick up in the morning to brush our teeth, as in, preferences. We would not get out the front door to go to work without the choosing done by the subconscious mind.

Choosing and the beginning of emotion occurred in reptiles, 250 million years ago. Discuss iguana fondling and the odd scientists who are good at it.

The west has a long history of preferring reason and rationality over emotion. The facts are that subconscious emotion controls, or allows the process of reasoning. Without the subconscious, no rational thought is possible. Ain’t that interesting.

Now, think of this one: prior to women’s liberation, males were considered rational and needing to take care of emotional women. All of that has been a mistake. Think of how much of the world’s population still believes this and that women must take a submissive role. Very sad.

10. Taste – electricity

Doesn’t it sound odd to say that all tastes are electric? But all tastes are converted to electricity before they are considered. Oh, and the brown stuff on the tie was gravy, but in parents of young children, it is Cream of Wheat and other kinds of goosh.

11. Looks bad – Representation, active passive

Perhaps the most fundamental issue of consciousness being debated today is: are we passively receiving the world through our senses, or are we actively searching out what we want to find out there.

I side with the active. And this side contains the important understanding that the self is a product of the act of perception, which seems hard to believe, based on what we have always believed which is, I am here so what’s coming my way?

As babies, it takes several months to understand that the beach ball we see from one spot is the same beach ball we see from another angle. This is the process of making a representation which means that our brains are most fundamentally about making metaphors. The issue of abstraction from representation, another step in human thought, also is at its most basic description, a metaphor, too.

12. Walking – with and without thinking

Our reptilian brain is so good at things that it will take us down a street, navigate stop and go signs, while we carry on conversations, even juggle while not even thinking about walking. We can, of course, consciously override this, as in not wanting to walk on cracks, but then our conscious control can fade away.

13. I feel good – neurotransmitters

Feeling good is the result of the correct amount of chemicals between brain cells, and their activating or not activating the next cell. Some of the chemicals are dopamine, serotonin, acetlycholine and, surprisingly, glutamate (as in MSG) and other amino acids (the building blocks of proteins).

14. Stinking – smell

Smell is electric too, as are, sight, hearing, taste and touch. But smell is the only sense that goes directly into the subconscious brain, suggesting that there is a powerful reason for doing so, for example, pheromones, kin, prey and location identification. Do note that smell then ascends to the conscious brain, which is why we consciously, for example, smell cinnamon and later can identify the memory of cinnamon (or, say, licorice, onions, garlic, ice-cream, dill, root beer, cheddar cheese) when none is around but we want to think about it.

And this one goes far back evolutionarily speaking because salmon can return from their ten thousand mile ocean journeys to the gravel within 100 yards of where they hatched many years before.

15. Screeching – hearing

Hearing is the only sense that takes place, well, between the ears. Screeching or any other dangerous sound immediately alerts the big emotion centre of the subconscious brain, the amygdala.

And if you were listening to a pop-song, you are simultaneously discriminating speech on your left hemispheric side and discriminating melody on your right, as in thinking in two places at once, without being aware of it.

16. Grrr – the amygdala

Fight, flight, rage, aggression, fear, all the high level emotions are mediated by the subconscious amygdala, the size and shape of an almond. Amazing.

17. Heart Attack

Part of the 90% of our nerve stimulus that the brain does not consciously deal with, is heart beat, and the plaque of our arteries, along with other things. That is why we have to identify in advance, impending heart attack by, heart pressure, pain in the left arm and so on.

18. See – vision

Though we cannot see like an eagle that has part of its retina flipped out in front of the blood vessels supplying it, vision is the most important sense in man and has received the most attention from scientists. Millions of words have been written about sight and hundreds of millions have been spent on research.

Everything we see we do so upside down. Our brains interpret it as right side up. In fact, the visual cortex in the back of our skull has 30 different modules that determine, for instance, angles, colour, shape, movement and so on.

Our eyes move in complex motion at all times, searching out information from our environment. These saccades, which are subconscious, are for the purpose of informing us of what is out there, such as animals that may want to eat us, or are a threat, or the location of food.

19. Remember – memory

Memory, calling memories up, thinking about memories and then acting on them are fundamental to human thought. But the first step, our sensing is not merely a recording like a video tape, but a complex process of selecting, ignoring and reducing the information. And, in a week we forget 65% of what of the small percentage of potential information our brains have chosen to retain. Our brains are structured this way, and if they were not, we would be overwhelmed in short order by the information that we could have paid attention to.

Then, the process that lays down long term memory, takes the subconscious, uncontrolled part of our brains, as much as three years to lay down up into our conscious brain, by throwing bits and pieces up to see whether they stick. What remains is what we want to think, and the following act, of bringing up memory, is mediated by the amygdala. It coats the experience with the emotion that it is dealing with at the time we think it, so that in no way do our memories actually contain what we could have experienced, nor are they static; they change.

Eidetic memory (photographic memory) also fall into the same class, as this very good memory is only a small percentage of what there was for us to direct our senses to experience.

Then there are specific molecules of memory.

20. Talk – language – universal grammar

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. The famous dictum by linguist, Noam Chomsky, has been used, among other things, to show that all human languages have the same, universal (vertical) grammar and that the ability – meaning a brain structure – to understand language came before actually being able to speak – also another brain structure.

In comparison, there are no other animals that have a language with syntax, even ones who are able to identify a vocabulary of words, like dogs, primates, whales and so on.

Language is for the purpose of communicating between different minds, and it is inextricably bound with our being social, even the hermits among us.

21. Work – mental

The conceptualizing, blocks of memory shifting, analyzing, considering, our aching backs and arms and legs and so on that comprises work, our conscious thought, even when we sit back and ponder, are what the flower on what we do not know is for.

22. My brain hurts – migraines, the I centre

The most common place for migraines to occur is in the frontal lobes where consciousness – the I centre – resides – little wonder – and in the temporal lobes at the back where the visual centres are located.

23. God – religion

Among the most pervasive aspects of humanity are our beliefs in religion, its morals, laws, guiding history and its rituals. The major religions from west to east are: Christianity/Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Zen and Confuciusism. And there are hundreds of other religions. We believe. And we believe in higher beings that we cannot perceive in any way.

Mike Persinger, a Canadian researcher, has found a very precise spot in the right frontal hemisphere that when stimulated by an electric probe gives you an instant experience of godhead. Cool.

Conscious dying may give an individual the perception of gliding toward a light, and peace because as the body’s systems shut down, mental noise declines.

24. Watch – vision

Television watching can be pretty passive, unless you are an unredeemable channel surfer with ADD, like me.

25. ZZZ – sleep

As in, this lecture is putting me to sleep. But before I sleep, I must remember one thing: the brain is a flower on what we do not know.

Brains of Poets – Lecture Notes Repeat after me: The brain/is a flower/on what/we do not know

The Brain

1. Explosion of research – MRI/CT/PET
- qualia abstract

2. Splitting of bones
– put your fingers under your nose – sheep
- up is conscious – down is subconscious
- preferences, iguanas

3. I centre
- take your finger and point it at where you are in your head – Zen
- I and others – 2 years

4. Perception is active vs passive
- saccades
- consciousness is deposited in the process of perception
- Mona Lisa – face recognition -limitation of brain behind perception

5. Language centres
- purpose – social animal
- left hemisphere
- Broca
-Wernicke

6. Thinking
- representation, abstraction
- baby
- two levels
– basis of thought is metaphor

7. Dreams
- 24 hours a day – Jung
- connection with memory
- lack of conscious control – weirdness – effect on memory

8. Memory
– subconscious
– no conscious thought in subconscious brain
- memory construct
- amygdala

9. Brain intentionally forgets 90% of what comes at it
– tendon apparatus – six million
- saccades – only perceive 10% of what is out there
- we forget 65% in one week

10. Sex – imperative to leave one behind

The Brains of Writers

1 Colourless green ideas sleep furiously – Noam Chomsky
- universal grammar – vertical – speaking before language
- regular people/prose writers
– poets

2. Language centres
- Broca
- Wernicke
- conscious centres
- speaking in tongues
- writing different

3. Metaphor
- categories of thought
- a rose — is a grenade
- pruning
-synaesthesia – 50% at 5
- Arthur Rimbaud

4. Bricks and mortar versus ‘magic’
- novel is drawn out metaphor
- Margaret Atwood quote
- point of view, time scheme, plot, characters, narrative

5. Poets – right brain dominance – tension clearing

6. Creativity
- right frontal cortex – refusal to accept subconscious
- synonymous with artists
- left handedness
- automatic
- I create the art
- I am a medium
- I reveal the shape already in the stone
- play

7. CT scan of non-poet and poet on reading a poem, viewing a metaphor

8. Anthropomorphism

The Brains of Other Artists

1. Musicians

2. Visual Artists

Using Your Writing Talents

1. Intuition

2. Subconscious

3. Dreams
- from subconscious
- no interference by right frontal

4. Writer’s personality – Ludwig
- obsessive compulsive need
- writers’ block – fear
- identity of I and art – Edvard Munch

5. When to write and rewrite
- winter – depressive
- summer – mania
- spring and fall – change in light -
- chaos, deep personal stress

6. Finding your voice

7. Finding when you write best
- different genres
- during emotional stress, upheaval, change, death, loss of child, marriage
- first drafts, don’t stop self, want unfettered thought with their subconscious emotional attributes
- mental games – words Lane, syllables, hub caps

Writers Moods And Mood Disturbances

- I Drink Therefore I Am

1. Ludwig – 87% of well-known poets, 1 in 5 suicide
- 1 in 20
- 1 in 3
- 1 in 2

2. Alcoholism, depression, manic-depression (bi-polar), psychosis, schizophrenia (dopamine disorder, Jonah Lehrer, p42)

3. Manic-depression and creativity
- cycling of mood – Simonton, Ludwig

4. The molecules of mood
- proteins, APP
- neurotransmitters
- ingested substances – alcohol, drugs

3. The Brains of Writers/Poets and the Special Abilities They Have

Dead Poets Society – ripping out the page of the graph that charts a poem’s greatness.

One Word: The brain responds differently to a single word according to whether it is heard, seen, written down, spoken or considered among other words it could be related to. Not to mention the fine discriminations of memory and the consideration of each letter, whether capitalized or small, or from a language of symbols, not letters.

1. Synaesthesia – seven times more common in artists, poets and writers

2. Blind sight

3. Right hemispheric dominance for poets.

4. Wernicke’s area – language recognition

5. Broca’s area – production of speech

6. Metaphor, pruning in youth, representation, abstraction, cross bridging of cells for different purposes, how common it is: loud tie, association of different categories of thought. how to test for it: An MRI test – present poetry and a metaphor: rose is a grenade to a poet and non-poet and note how differently they light up.

7. The issue of creativity – prefrontal cortex versus subconscious. Obsessive compulsive need to write. Humour of the literature equating art with creativity. Identity of I and art. Ludwig: 87% of well-known poets suffer mental disorders, and 1 in 5 will commit suicide.

8. The issue of what is art and what is an artist

9. Intuition

10. Dreaming (David Kahn)

11. Memory

12. Poetry and Prose are not opposite ends of a pole, rather they are different in kind, so…bricks and mortar (characters, time scheme, structure, point of view) versus artesian wells. Poets interest in possibilities of words.

13. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Poet’s, prose writer’s, and non writer’s reactions

14. Upside down Mona Lisa

15. Boobie, kiki

16. PET scans of an artist’ and non-artist’s brain while making art.

17. MRIs of a poet and non-poet when a metaphor is presented

18. Abstraction from representations

19. Facility with different categories of thought.

20. The poet and the writer personalities. Writer’s block is fear, and is so debilitating because of association of identity with the art. Anthropomorphising.

21. All speech is a fiction because it is a summary.

22. Literature is a way for a writer to search for a solution to the problems of existence, to develop, to try to persuade others, to change the way we think. Writing for the non-writer is often therapy, a way to slow down the mind and examine, say, a trauma, to work out a problem, while seldom being good literature.

23. Autism

24. Left handedness

25. Plasticity

26. Art extends through time – music, reading

27. Dreams

28. Memory overlap

29. Intelligence – most great writers are intelligent but not geniuses. This means an IQ of at least 120, rather than 170. Creativity is also related to IQ up to 120, but then the two attributes diverge.

30. Mental games to maintain sharpness

31. And so on…

6. Collateral Issues

1. The mind is so different from the way we think it is and we can now change so much of it that there are big changes coming for society: ethics, medicine and law.

2. Issue of different definitions of words used in different disciplines, for example, metaphor, symbol and taking the role of the other.

3. The humour in the academic conversation about art and artists, but not wanting artists to be involved in the conversation because, apparently, they have nothing to offer.

4. I am translating science speak into real people speak. Hand out Qualia abstract.

A New Case for Free Will

The Human Genome Project of the early 1990s deciphered human genetic material – all 26 chromosomes – completely. One of the surprise observations is that while we need about 90 million base pairs for the 100,000 proteins in our bodies, the popbeads on the chain, if you will, we actually have about 3 billion or more than 3000% more than we need. And it turns out that more than 95% of our genetic material is simply junk that has no real purpose. Furthermore this material is in a constant state of being added to or snipped off or jumping chromosomes, not to mention floats around in our cells unbound when not connected with the rest of us. in addition, most of the pairs can result in different products in our bodies.

This means that at any given moment, we are not the same person at any other moment. It also means that our sameness is the same as a river of water or time. We look at the river and it changes completely as it flows past us, yet it is the same river at all times. More tomorrow.

Footnotes:

(1). The Beatles – 500, Rolling Stones – 50, John Denver – 100, Paul McCartney/John Lennon – 50, Eagles – 50, America – 25, Michael Jackson (and family) -50, U2 – 50, Gershwin – 25, Gwen Stefani – 25, Phil Collins – 25, Super Tramp/Peter Frampton – 25, Fleetwood Mac – 50 (1025), Police – 25, Sting – 20, Brian Adams – 30, Leonard Cohen – 25, Doo Wop songs – 50, Frank Sinatra – 25, Tony Bennett – 25, Elton John – 50, The Who – 25, Kenny Rogers – 25, Celine Dion – ?, Elvis Presley – 50, Santana – 25, Madonna – 25, Doors – 25, Jimi Hendrix – 25, Led Zeppelin – 25, James Taylor – 25, Hall and Oates – 25, Duran Duran – 25, Bee Gees – 100, Disco songs – 75, Johny Cash – 20, Neil Diamond – 50, Roy Orbison – 30, Willi Nelson – 25, Paul Simon – 75, Joni Mitchell – 20, Queen – 25, Rod Stewart – 20, Tom Cochrane – 20 (1010), Bob Dylan – 50, Neil Young – 50, Crosby/Stills/Nash/& Young – 25, Dire Straits – 30, Bruce Springstein – 30, Eric Clapton – 30, Dixie Chicks – 25, Shania Twang – 25, Beach Boys – 30, Eurythmics – 20, Prince – 20, Sarah McGlaughlan – 20, David Bowie – 30, Whitney Houston – 25, Pete Seeger – 100, Bob Marley – 20, Dolly Parton – 25 (555), Cher – 25, Britney Spears – 25, George Michael – 20, Wham – 20, Woodie Guthrie – 20, Cheryl Crowe – 20, REM – 30, Pink Floyd – 25, heart – 20, Johny Cash – 20, Bruce Springstein – 40??, Led Zeppelin – ??, Cyndi Lauper – 15, Jann Arden – 15, Rod Stewart – 30, Tom Cochrane – 20, Billy Joel – 25, Enya – 25, Dire Straits – 20, Phil Collins – 20, Beach Boys – 30, George Harrison – 15, Doors – 20, Jimi Hendrix – 20, Cat Stevens – 25, Van Morrison – 20, Barry Manilow – 20, Stevie Wonder – 25, Barry White – 20, George Winston – 20, Bon Jovi – 20, Los Lobos – 15, Tom Waits – 20, Olivia Newton John – 25, Linda Ronstadt – 20, (750) Boy George – 15, Sade – 15, Depeche Mode – 20, Oasis – 15, Def Leopard – 20, Dido – 15 (100)

10 song bands: Cowboy Junkies, AC-DC, Kiss, Van Halen, Guns ‘N Roses, Crash Test Dummies, Lionel Ritchie, Britney Spears, Kurt Cobain, Bon Jovi, Culture Club, Huey Lewis and the News, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Darren, Counting Crows, Alice Cooper, Tom Petty, Blondie, Christina Aguilara, Sinead O’connor, The Guess Who, Bachman Turner Over Drive, Lenny Kravitz, 230 Pat Benetar, Tina Turner, Kylie Minoghe, Avril Lavigne, Pink, Mariah Carey, Beyonce, Destiny’s Child, janet Jackson, Chakira, Jennifer Lopez. Mamas and Pappas, Ian and Sylvia, Indigo Girls, Maroon 5, Arlo Guthrie, The Osmonds, Sonny and Cher, Tom Jones, Moody Blues, Carpenters, Nazarath, The Band, Credence Clearwater Revival, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Boston, The Monkeys, Carole King, Chris de Burgh, Procal Harem, Joe Cocker, (320), Joan Baez, Joan Collins, Peter Paul and Mary, Bruce Cockburn, 10 CC, The Cars, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Don McLean, Black Sabbath, The Motley Crue, Van Halen, Kid Rock, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Oasis, Sid Vicious, Kurt Kobain, KD Lang, Jennifer Warnes, Sinead O’connor, Tom Petty, Janis Joplin, Alanis Morissette, Counting Crows, Prince, (250), The Cure, Annie Lennox on her own, Flock of Seagulls, Coldplay, Smashing Pumpkins, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Peter and Gordon, The Everly Brothers, The Rascals, The Searchers, The Zombies, Marvin Gaye, Chad and Jeremy, Dusty Springfield, Eric Burden and the Animals, (160)

5 song bands, Roberta Flack, Tears for Fears, Seagulls, Hootie and the Blowfish, It’s a Beautiful Day, Donna Summers, The Kinks, Deep Purple, Kim Mitchell, Pussy Cat Dolls, Long John Baldry, Doug and the Slugs, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Lulu, Christal Gale, Otis Reading, Herman’s Hermits, James Brown, 90, Kingston Trio, Yardbirds, Loving Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield,, Lost City Ramblers, Natking Cole, Great Big Shiny Sea, Platinum Blonde, Sha Na Na, (45) My Morning Jacket, Cranberries, Petula Clark, Bobby Darren, The Association, Manfred Man, Marianne Faithful, Lulu, Small Faces, Tremelos, Spencer Davis Group, Smokey Robinson, The Miracles, The Hollies, The Byrds?, Jeremy and the Pacemakers, Jackied de Shannon, Wilson Picket, The Temptations, Los Bravos (100)

1 song bands: Mungo Gerry, Twisted Sister, Men Without Hats, 99 Red Balloons

1010 + 1025 + 555 + 130 + 230 + 310 + 90 + 3350 July 31, 4275 + 100 + 160 + 100

Jazz: Blue Moon

Classical: In the Hall of the Mountain King, Charge of the Valkries, Flight of the Bumblebee, The William Tell Overture, The 1812 Overture,

Other: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Mario Lanza, Nana Mouskourie,

Marching Bands:

For those who can’t commit to looooong chomps of text, some neat, discrete things about the poet’s brain – and yrz 2.

How Big Can I Think?

Well, thinking capacity is almost endless. It is the number of joinings (synapses) between brain cells that grants capacity. How many synapses are there in your head? Think of it this way: a 10 followed by at least a million zeros. Think of the universe as small. That is because when you add every particle in the universe together you can think of it this way: a 10 followed by 79 zeros. Your head is larger than the universe. Poets like this – oh, and lesser men, too. If you knew this was a title by Irving Layton, you are likely a poet right now.

Cloudism

Four people are looking at a cloud. Ask them what it looks like.

A: a cloud.

B: I don’t know.

C: It doesn’t look like anything.

D: Well, an elephant, a kite, God reaching out to touch Michelangelo, a balloon, the moon on a string, a long winded language, a tassle, hair of the most beautiful woman in the world, where you put words in cartoons, the dagger of Damocles, a nuclear bomb, a hurricane, but, wait, now its changing, and its disappearing like Men Who Stare At Goats, it is growing its way to the horizon, it sees me not anymore, though I see it changing and changing like a river that flows away…

Answer: Yes, of course, the imaginative D is the poet, multiple comparisons, willingness to do the deed, in fact was already doing it before you asked the question. C is someone with no imagination whatsoever, like an actuarial (a person who has less sense of humour than an accountant, and spends the day correcting the figures in tables that insurance companies use to restrict access to medical services in the USA). B is a baffled type A who needs some ritalin to slow down enough to have imagination. A is a person who has no right hemisphere in their brain. The person can identify the object clearly and quickly, but cannot bring to bear the brain cells that help make comparisons with the millions of representations found in the brain, assess their closeness and make a verbal answer.  C would tell you the chances of randomly finding an A in four people is 0.00003%. Then C would add that finding a B in the four with the same problem is smaller than your chances of winning the lottery even if your life lasted several million years. You correct C, pointing out that A is a type A obsessive compulsive who has been working for a decade without a break.

DCR way back when in another life as a snazzy dressing financial analyst, Treasury Board Staff, Ministry of Finance, BC

Too Dumb to be a Poet? I don’t Think So:

The IQ of a good poet is about 120. This means intelligent but not a genius. Einstein was plus 170. Don Cherry is 75 – sorry Don.  Dr. Eric Kandel figured out that a marine snail called Aplysia could learn and have longterm memory even though it is as dumb as a barnacle, and won the Nobel prize for doing so. Aplysia have nerves a millimetre in diameter which is huge huge, and he showed that if you touched its siphon ( it withdrew, meaning muscle action is linked to ‘intention’ to be safe) ten times they found physical changes in these big dumb nerves. This is short term memory. If they touched the siphon ten times in four sessions a few hours or even a day apart, the nerve changes lasted several weeks. This is long term memory. This animal has no IQ, so pretty much any human has what it takes to be a rudimentary poet, even Don Cherry. Get to 120 and you can be great – not a difficult level to achieve. But, IQ is only one needed mental attribute, and Don lacks many. Read the next test to find out more…

Are You a Poet? Simple Test:

Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

Here is how people with different minds interpret Noam Chomsky’s little phrase.

A. Non Writer – this is dopey, on to the next thing.

B. Prose Writer – well, at least it is grammatically correct.

C. Poet - yeah, cool, I can just see those colourless ideas, and they’re green too like the ocean or a forest where you look into the distance where you have last come from and there you find the fingerprints of what you have laid down on the trail to your present self and they are like rain from a lime coming down each one in the ball of creation and they’ve been acted upon by green men or green monsters or other from the peat moss creature related to the black lagoon and with their arms of jet engines that poke holes in the sky so fast that the sonic booms can’t catch up to shake them from their slumber… yeah, I can see all this and more, why there’s so much more in there, there’s…

D. Linguist – every human language has universal grammar, thus the ability to understand language came before the ability to speak.

If you picked C., you have the mind to be a poet. And if you had already come up with your own imagination so filled with possibility before getting to the first choice, and so couldn’t get to  any of the choices, you probably are a poet right now. And if you thought, geez, what I just thought up is way better than what C. thought, then you are probably a poet of great standing, or one with no standing.

What does this mean? It means that the brains of these people are different, even the poet and prose writers have different brains. And poets and poets.

Are you a Poet? Another Simple Test: Stroooperism

The Stroop Test: three little words: blue, green, and, red are printed on a screen while you lie in an fMRI. They are randomly printed in different colours and you have to put down the ‘colour’ of the word, not what the word says. The fMRI shows very clearly that the brain struggles with disregarding the simple answer of reading the word, and the work that needs to be done to over ride it and say the colour of the word.

Poets have never been tested – I volunteer! I think that the poetic brain would either be bad at overriding the speech recognition part of the brain – left hemisphere – because it is so overwhelmingly developed and spawn thought in innate creativity centre, rather than the right front brain consciously overriding it, or, that its synaesthetic abilities would show result in the same thing. Or that the pleasure centre of the brain would kick in and the poet goes off into a kaleidoscope. Or that TS Eliot would be perfect because he was a ‘clark’ as they say in England. Ot that…

Are you a Poet? Yet Another Simple Test

The candle test: you have candles, matches, thumbtacks and are to attach the candle to a corkboard. (But, wax won’t stick to cork and thumbtacks shatter candles. So, no, the obvious solutions won’t work). The poet’s solution is to light the candle then burn the corkboard, put the cork out, melt the wax into the burnt cork and stick the candle to it.

But here’s what the poet missed: I didn’t catch in the initial written instructions that the stuff was in a cardboard box. The correct solution, apparently, is to melt the wax onto the cardboard, attach the candle to the cardboard and attach the cardboard to the corkboard with a thumbtack. Hmm.

The poet also missed whether he was told in the written instructions whether the corkboard was vertical or horizontal. He assumed the latter, but if told it was the former, he would have run a thumbtack down the candle’s length to score it, tacked a horizontal line of thumbtacks to the corkboard, lighted the candle and melted wax onto the thumbtacks and then stuck the candle horizontally, on the score mark, on the thumbtacks. Presto.

And not even getting that there was a cardboard box, the poet takes the thumbtacks and sticks enough into the corkboard as wide as the candle, then melts the wax on the thumbtacks and puts the candle on the wax.

And not getting there was a cardboard box, the poets digs a hole in the coarkboard the size of the candle with the thumbtacks, melts the wax to the back or wall and so on…

And not getting the box thing the poets goes to the bathroom, and gets the mirror, puts it so it reflects the corkboard, melts the wax to the mirror and attaches the candle to the image of the corkboard…

The poet could go on, but his/her/its mind has wandered on…

ADHD – No Problem

One of the ‘diseases’ of great note in recent decades is attention deficit disorder. These kids can cause lots of havoc in classes by being impulsive, disruptive, non-stop talking, mood swings and have parents get into giving them one of a slew of new medications to calm them down.

While this ‘disease’ seems to have come from nowhere and one fears long term problems for the child, the facts are that this won’t happen. That is because ADHD is caused by a slow development of the the right prefrontal cortex – as much as 3.5 years slow – the part of the brain that reasons and exerts control over other activity. Children grow out of ADHD when this part of the brain catches up. So don’t worry.

Are you a Poet? Yet Another Simple Test – GSR

When hooked up to a galvanic skin conductance machine – a lie detector – your heart rate changes and sweat production on your skin changes when presented words like rape that have strong meaning for people. A poet, were a scientist to hook the poet up, would show reactions off the chart for words that others don’t show any response to whatsoever, say: blue sky, tree, dog, swimming. And the response would go on longer, due to the word riffing thing that poets do without even thinking about it.

The Poet’s Stone

While many like to think that everything is aware, consider this: with the cells behind your right front eye, you can direct your attention to the rock in your hand and what it signifies to you. The stone does not have these cells, so it cannot look back and do the same to you. Ponder its, well, stoneness and when the poet describes it, it is the mind and the world, told in human words. Stoneopomorphism. Stone on.

Are You a Poet or Novelist or Both? Another Simple Test

Being a poet is imbued with believing and putting into everything you see, like your stone, human emotions, your emotions. This means that your brain centre for ’sympathy’ is so over developed that you can’t think of the world without putting yourself into it – superior temporal sulcus. But this is not the fundamental of being a novelist. The fundamental emotion of being a novelist is voice appropriation, not putting emotion into objects, but reproducing people, a form of memory. (?)

The Brain is a Metaphor Machine

Poets will be happy to know and others will be surprised to know that the brain is, at its most fundamental level, a metaphor machine. While we will discuss metaphors from many different angles in the book, here is the dope on how the brain works at its most basic level.

In the first months of life, human babies, first swim out of their own milieu and the searching brain comes to focus on what is outside the eyes, and make connections back into the brain that tells it these things are for viewing and a baby’s attention, as it comes on stream, will become focused on what is out there.

What is out there, first of all for the mind, are objects, like a parent’s face or mouth, and, to pick an example, something like a beachball. Surprisingly, the brain does not recognize that the beach ball, seen from one angle is the same as the one seen from a different angle. For example, if you move the ball in front of the baby, at first it does not regconize that the ‘two’balls are actually the same ball.

In order for a baby to realize that the ball is the same ball no matter where it is in the room, it has to form a representation of the ball. That process is combining two or more images of the ball into ‘one’ representation. Thus a brain at its most fundamental level is a metaphor machine, because a metaphor is associating two different categories of thoughts; combining two or more ball images constitutes the process of making a metaphor.

We don’t usually think of this as the usual definition of metaphor but it is the building block level that all humans go through in the first six months of life, and, if you think about it, all visually-receptive animals, need to recognize a ‘thing’ as the same thing from any angle. That means that the notion of metaphor or pre-metaphor can be the result of a very simple, non-c0ncsious, awareness. That is how far back it goes. Think half a billion years back. There are, of course, many more complex associations of multiple images or thoughts, too, and we will get into them later.

Brain Exercise for Poets

Generate a list of 30 nouns. They can be pretty much any word that describes a ‘thing’. Take the first in the list and put it in front of and then behind the next word in line. Then make up a saying based on the two words. This, no matter how improbable the words you come up with, is exercising the metaphor and comparison parts of your mind. This is flexibility, combining different categories of thoughts, willingness to entertain novel or unlikely thoughts. These are all fundamental components of creativity. And, then you put the first word in front of or behind the third word in line. Then the fourth, and so on.

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Great Books Received! Mar 24, 2009

The classic, must read books: Descartes Error, Damasio; and, The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge; along with the newer than new, How We Decide, Lehrer, have been received and are ready to be devoured. Stay tuned for book reviews on these books, here and on Amazon.ca. At Amazon.ca click on DC Reid for all reviews – poetry and brain books.

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Just in time for Christmas, I will be writing a summary of the latest in DNA, chaos theory, and the issue of will (not free will and not will power) in the creative process in the Brains of Poets. Fascinating indeterminantcy, and for those who just can’t give up right pre-frontal lobe creativity, some of what you hanker for.

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Yes, DCR adjusting his visual perceptions, much further back than he can remember.

Managing Visual Perception

Data from the eyes is passed to both V1 at the back of the head for ‘line’ recognition and to the conscious right frontal cortex, that then imposes its requirement to see ‘things’ on V2 (V1 – V5 are used to do the basic processing of light, though there are 30 visual modules). Now, get this, since the conscious brain affects V2 to begin seeing form, we can’t from that point on separate what we ’see’ from outside and what we see from the inside, meaning we have no way of knowing what is real or not. And, since the exact same neurons respond when we see a beach ball out there and when we imagine a beachball inside, we have no way of distinguishing between the two – they are the same. So there is no such thing as an accurate perception of what is out there, never. Isn’t that bizarre.

Philosophers out there will recognize the similarity with the mainstream British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, which proved the same thing a long time before – just by thinking about it.

Eyeball Manipulation – or, ‘we see what we want to see, and disregard the rest.’ [after Paul Simon]

The Lateral geniculate nucleus that runs between your eyes and your consciousness behind your right eyebrow has ten times as many nerves running to the eye from the brain than from the eye to the brain.  In other words, our minds control even what we want our eyeballs to see. And of course, the eyeballs sweep across the landscapes out there in darts, thousands of times a second, those ’saccades’ again [determined by the sub-conscious mind], looking for what we want to see, even when we are not conscious of intending to look for anything. This ‘looking for’ is easy to demonstrate to yourself. Simply look out your office window. You may focus on the lucky find of say, a peregrine falcon, on another nameless faceless bulding tower window ledge, but ask yourself whether you can simultaneously see everything, from say, the water droplets on your window, to the trees below, to the river in the background to the clouds above and every single window with its people and all their equipment and the colours of their clothes and the suits and dresses and socks and shoes. No. This is not the way we see things, but we can see all of those things if we make our eyeballs look for them.

Ask Not for Whom the Protein Tolls…

Sitting on a BC beach leaning on a log contemplating the ephemeral nature of proteins

The average half life of a brain protein is 14 days. That means that every fourteen days half of the proteins in your brain change. And you thought memory hangs around forever. This little fact makes it obvious that a person, his or her personality, is in constant change and in constant development or decay.

When you consider that there are 100 billion brain cells and half of the proteins in each of them change every two weeks, it’s almost a riot in there, billions and billions of protein molecules coming and going every day.

Enlightened Medicine

It was thought that psychosis could be treated by pulling all your teeth to lower your temperature. And, the Nobel Prize for medicine, in 1927, was awarded for the enlightened practice of treating this mental illness by giving the sufferer a shot of a disease, like malaria, tuberculosis or typhoid.  And less than 20 years later, the same prize was given for frontal lobotomies. Isn’t that gross.

Our Ten Second Existence

After sticking his hand in a creek and pulling out his first trout, DCR is understandably very happy, but only for 10 seconds.

Hollywood movies are edited together in about 9 second intervals. Surprisingly, this is about all the time the mind can stand to exist before it must break off to begin another self  consciousness. The interesting part is that we think of ourselves constantly existing in present time, and through time when the brain is actually only capable of  being in the now for 10 seconds and then switches its attention as short term memory evaporates into another bolt of now. Weird.

How We Future Are

In as simple a thing as walking down the street we demonstrate that where we are looking is a precise calculation of probabilities into the future that we don’t even think about. Think this: a big dog is running down the street veering toward the building side. Before he reaches you, you are no longer where he currently is and where he is going to be in the right now. You have done this with no conscious thought, yet your mind has displayed itself as projecting into your own future before it can happen. And so how we future are.

This is the essence of decision: it is not about rationality over emotion. It is neither and it is both. And we do it before it even happens.

The Brain is a Prediction Machine

A second take on this important subject. If the brain is about predicting things, then it is not primarily about reason and emotion – that duality hampers understanding the brain. For example, you open the cupboard first thing to get a cup to make some caffeine. You brain expects that cups to be there because you have a memory of that. If they aren’t there your brain flashes a dopamine bullet around your head thorugh spindle cells, you recognize that what has happened does not agree with what you expect to be true and then you begin looking elsewhere. Ask yourself how many times a day that this type of prediction takes place. Thousands of times and that is our regular life brain process. It is not passive it is jolted awake by things that it doesn’t expect. This detection of mistakes is mediate by the anterior cingulate  cortex. Without it we would keep on opening the cupboard expecting cups to be there. What a waste of our days.

Surprisingly, this is one reason why alcoholics and drug addicts don’t recover from their additions. With a defective gene in this location they can’t learn from their mistakes.

Our Brain on Drugs – Poetry Addicts

On the other hand, anything that makes you feel good bathes your brain in drugs. The nucleus accumbens connects the subconcsiou to the conscious just right under your right eyebrow. This is the positive side of the dopamine cascade. It is so pleasurable that so stimulated you would never recover and ultimately die. This is the effect of drugs on addicts. This is the effect of poetry on a poet: poetry makes them drugged.

You Know Before You Know

Damassio designed the Iowa Gambling Task – four decks of cards, two of which had far higher losses associated with them. People intent on winning start using reaching for the two better decks after turning over about 50 cards and by 80 cards can explain why – slower winnings, but no huge shocks of losses.

Attached to lie detectors (Galvanic Skin Respone machines) that pick up nervousness and anxiety from the skin, a person’s hand starts to get nervous about bad decks after turning over only 10 cards. Amazing. So you know before you know. Pay attention to your most basic emotions if you can. Develop that.

Create Your Creativity

Creativity is about novel solutions and has its genesis in overlooking the ordinary and searching for something outside of this. This means that one has to free up one’s mind from the expectation system constraints and become rewarded for solutions that would leave the less creative feeling awkward and at odds with his/her prediction system. The reward is then that dopaminic pleasure centre surge after having done just the opposite and jolting it the ‘wrong’ way. Look for unease followed by an expansive positive stimulation. This is one reason that there is fear in the creative process. Another reason is that you are aware you are standing on the edge of a cliff and are jumping off into your project. Fear is good. Or, as Orwell would say: fear is happiness.

Write What You Feel Not What You See

This is contrary to the way poetry is taught. That expression: show me don’t tell me, is the way it’s taught and a good way, even though many great writers commonly break this rule, Atwood and Munro, for instance. If you write what you feel after looking you are getting to what is really real for you. If you write what you see, you simply write a list of what your conscious brain can pick apart. Ask youself what you feel.

Learn from your Mistakes

When you are writing poetry, remember when you have your greatest feeling of shame, or fear, or unease, that is mistakes. This means getting in touch with your subconscious and monitoring it like a lie detector. Making a mistake is not a lie, but if you eliminate mistakes this allows you to move forward ‘from the back side’, meaning that this is the side that prevents you over and over again making the same mistakes. This is not a new notion. What is new is how you are doing it – by your feelings.

Success Makes Success

Here is the deal on this one. They found that paying kids in New York for getting higher marks on exams resulted in far higher marks because an immediate money award is the kind of thing the mind pays great attention to. One thing writers have to get used to is unending rejection. But make your successes make you better – focus only on those events – getting published – and this will make you a far better writer.

Consciousness Conference

You might want to attend this conference:

ASIA CONSCIOUSNESS FESTIVAL 5-21 JUNE 2009

Social Approaches to Consciousness Conference

9 June 2009: Senate Room, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Why we need social approaches

The social revolution in the brain and behavioural sciences presents major challenges to western individualistic and physicalistic world-views. Collaborations between brain and social scientists are already transforming our understanding of consciousness, revealing that our commonsense distinction between “subjective” and “objective” experience is a delusion created by the brain, and that all the contents of consciousness are social constructs.

All approaches to consciousness are social

Science and philosophy are cooperative cultural projects: which means that all academic inquiry – including all approaches to consciousness – are social. The difference is that not everyone realises this. Social and cultural analyses are needed to clarify what is going on in consciousness studies, to establish universals of human thought and behaviour, and to expose the collective deceptions that get in the way of rational enquiry.

For information and registration

www.asiaconsciousness.org (click on EVENTS)
0AFor more on Social Approaches visit:

www.socialmirrors.org

Brian Henderson (See his great book, Nerve Language below – shortlisted for the GG)

I’m now thoroughly ensconced and really enjoying it, especially your language use. Lots of on your pulses collisions and power coming off the diction’s radiations. It’s an out of the corner of your eye writing with plenty of speed. Trying to crank up the word to be as fast as the skin (Massumi). P 72, p 84, yes. I think of it as Lorcaian, a kind of Duende art, filled with physicality, irrationality, intense awareness, & awareness of loss/time/death/otherness. Performing a kind of autopoiesis of language. I think in some way we’re driving thru a land of similar poetics, so I’m sending along a couple of things for your reading pleasure.

David Kosub – Speaking of Poetry Blog

David is not a poet, but is that rare sort of person that poetry needs: an interested observer who is willing to put the effort into a poetry blog and do regular reviews and articles for the love of poetry. Thank you, David.

Here are some words: “Like Tim Lilburn’s work, the metabolic rate of Reid’s poems is pitched very high, the effort to meld the poetry’s imagery and the narrative prodigious.” He did not buy the concept of poems/novel, however – the main technical thing the book takes aim at. But you can go and look, and you can find a half hour interview with Carmine Starnino, who comes across as a much better, bright, even modest guy than some of his written criticism would have you believe.

Alice Major – her The Office Tower Tales won the Lowther Award in 2009

Yes, we certainly share a liking for odd, technical kinds of language — nares and virga as well as gelignite. I love ‘virga’ and the idea behind it — rain that never reaches ground. You use that image very effectively. And there are many other striking images throughout — ‘black points of lash’ and the hole of wood under the dusty glass.

We tackle story in very different ways — I hope we get a moment during the League AGM to talk about that. Your fragmentary and provocative approach challenges the reader to make a coherent narrative, or else to let the shards lie unconnected. It brings up interesting ideas about wholeness.

Cynthia Kerkham-Woodman – Palimpsest Press will publish her, The Animal Lying Beside Me

… great title… intriguing, inspiring in its innovation… ‘the slow tongue of night in the tree tops giving way’…

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2008 – 2009 Books

What if red ran out – Katia Grubisic – Gooselane

Every poem in this book is superb. It is the work of a major Canadian poet at the peak of her powers. Reminiscent of Ted Hughes, but without his sense of declarative imperative, if that’s not double-speak, and of John Ashbury, but not too lush, too crammed with invention, not voltage that burns – at least not in a way that’s bad. And I had the sense, that I seldom have, that the book seemed the product of a male mind. Hmm, my failings, no doubt. Great authority, confidence, strong, undeniable narrative drive without being lyrical, occasional poems in the best sense of that expression. They take you easily where she wants you to go with her because she has that incandescent imagination that agrees with itself on where to go and without thinking about it, without it being an issue for the keen reader, you go there with her and discover along the way that you are glad you did. Poetry that is a communication, provided you want that out of your books, but not one that demands it either, muscular, a feral python. Only there is one little problem with all these attempts at words: this is Katia’s first book of poems and she is young. Makes one humble, jealous and thankful, too. Stop listening to my thoughts, you decide:

Oversight

Sharp and white, the moon notches the horizon,
funnels clouds into the early morning
Hoodlums pushing bicycles through alleyways, past gaping

casements. In the sticky heat, lovers conclude the night naked
and not touching. Fruit, rugs, all-nite coffee storefronts elapse. Perhaps
the day will illuminate new absurdities. The buses are full

of men, their apparatus and tired beards, their metal boxes
shiny between scuffed boots. Everyone gets off, everyone
else gets on. The vanished uncurl from rags and boxes, mute

in brooks of garbage juice. No longer full nor numb,
they throw off blankets on the marble ramparts of insurance
buildings, emerge surprised and maybe a little disappointed

to be not dead. The bus runs a red
and the moon slides down between the towers,
not really bothered, not bothering.

This is a book that will win awards, if anyone out there is awake. Dare I note the obvious unusualities: notches, gaping, not touching, new absurdities, apparatus, tired beards, vanished, and the best of all: brooks of garbage juice (let’s all steal that), ramparts, not dead, not bothering.

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2007 – 2008 Books

Note, I only review books I consider excellent, I don’t want to hurt any feelings out there by expressing misgivings, perhaps my own shortcomings, anyway, and my purpose here is to give the poet some confidence when working alone in the poet’s corner on that next book in times of indecision and questioning of one’s own abilities. A confidence thing.

Nerve Language – Brian Henderson, Pedlar Press.

Nerve Language is an example from a very current stream in Canadian poetry: a documentary about a real person in a real time, and a taking licence with the story, along with the strategy of making the notes at the end of the book vital poetry for understanding the rest. This book is about the life of Daniel Paul Schreber, judge in Leipzig in 1894, who went delusional, and came to believe it was his responsibility to save the world. This is a spectacularly jagged book in both images and structural motion, jumping from the nerve language world of Schreber who talked to god and to other spectators of the mental institute. He describes it, for example, as ‘slightly overshooting blood metallic tinsel oxide smell of success.’ This is highly-current, non-lyrical, oblong-rhythmic, consonant-clash, stuffing into one phrase, exact-description words that make the reader dig deep to make a commitment to decipher the text and not fall back on wanting accessible lyricism. Henderson delivers: the fragmentary, the difficult, the asymmetric. Excellent. Raging, as bill bissett would say. In addition, Henderson’s book’s over all structure is so neat and tight that it adds an opposite tension like a tourniquet on the reader’s brain so that the jagged and the bound in conjunction marks this book as better than the rest.

the rush to here – George Murray, Nightwood Editions

At once recognizable as a great book, the rush to here, effortlessly explores the sonnet in all of its permutations and is so neat in its execution, so Shakespearian in its lush authority that it sneaks up on a reader and takes him/her by the throat. There are quotable completely-full-of-themselves epigrams in each and every poem. From Silence is a Dead Language: What you’re looking for is ingenuity / enough to let ambition go: to find / yourself building the simple, the clever, / suddenly satisfied with what’s appearing // at the ends of your much-surprised hands. This is supple, sure, intelligent swelling of incandescence abundance. What impresses is the magic of great poetry captured in one of the western hemisphere’s millennia-long traditional forms, overleaping in one easy – for Murray – step one current retrograde neo-conservative stream in Canadian poetry that holds up structure as the only important consideration in poetry. The rush to here blows that movement completely apart even though it’s not intending to. This guy is so smart so sparklingly clear in his poetic invocations that every line rings as clear as a glass tinged by a fingernail. You want the music to continue and continue in its arpeggio octaves.

Muybridge’s Horse – Rob Winger, Nightwood Editions

I wanted, while I read another 60 books in this contest, for this oeuvre book to be my winner. This is the true story – if that is not an oxymoron – of Eadweard Muybridge, who proved with 50 precisely-timed still cameras, that when running, a horse’s four feet are off the ground during mid-stride; ground breaking work in 1878, that also led to moving pictures. In anyone else’s hands this story could be as humdrum as old yellow newsprint. But Winger starts with fire and just keeps on going. The first poem seeks to capture in words something in mid-motion. It is a very-current-poem-type that seeks to coalesce similar material rather than move in a trajectory from a to b. There is neither a nor b, only the quality of being between be and to be. For example: The time between target and gunshot…[in addition, by reversing the more usual order, the phrase actually implies motion as the sound rushes toward its object] a minute hand jumping to its next hour before the clock can chime… the darkness that happens before any object collides with your face… Thus the whole point of the book is made in the first poem, and in a way one that, in addition, confidently throws away on this page the usual way we write poems as a progression of thoughts as a connecting feature, setting down instead a list of syntactically and subjectly unconnected strings of words. And of course this is only the first poem. The rest is a documentary, novel, panorama of a life, twice as long as the usual book of poetry – every page good, even the ones that are essentially found lists of boxes of photograph titles worked up by an agile infusing intelligence.

This is a book that moves what poetry means along to the next link of the chain; it will last, in the same way that Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid has lasted as one of the best books of poetry of the last half century in this country and one that influenced a whole generation of young Canadian poets. Finally, it has to be said that Nightwood should be given an award for the best designed book of poetry of this decade. One small item: a horse at the bottom of many pages that if you run the pages through your hands like a deck of cards, it gallops.

Thin Moon Psalm – Sheri Benning, Brick Books

It has been said that all poets when they are young exhaust their coming to the world in the metaphors of actualization they contribute to the world of poetry. Once they run out of completely new, original phrases they move on to thematic concerns. If that is so, Sheri Benning is in the middle of her young poet’s life where every phrase is novel, every image startling and surprising in its un-before thought accuracy that older poets will recognize of themselves at an earlier age. Here’s an example: a flute can pull us from our prisons, / can piece together disarticulated days, // but these men strum furiously, their fingers inflamed wicks. / With vein-bulging intensity they shout their songs – // all of the cocked triggers of all the executions… And each of these is brought within the arc that art must conform to to satisfy the mind. These are not simply images that don’t connect with the story within which they fall and rise. On the contrary their shorthand code does connect. The poet moves light fingers between thoughts. Once they are lined up with one another you see the story within which the dissonant lines inevitably must belong. Benning has the puppeteer’s hand, the butcher’s meat cleaver and the beauty of a discarded algorithm. She sees with her phrase-making eye that the ordinary conventional words of our speaking are not great enough to convey the images that she sees. Like Tim Lilburn, she makes startling hyphenated new words of unexpected rhythms to convey what she sees. A gorgeous beauty of original, prairie landscape lyricism. The images spill forth in her need to write and move on because there is more, much more. Benning’s photograph at the end is as jarring and jangly, as her work. Read the book. Look at the picture.

Quick – Anne Simpson, McClelland and Stewart.

Once again this is a book that is sure of itself, a mature, nimble mind of a book that passes from one crystalline phrase to another. Each poem has zero extra material, no slither, as Pound used to say. The crispness is a sign of a decisive, confident mind, and the images it works with so compacted that one can go right on by and then have to come back and make the mind pay attention. The mind is rewarded in this book of poems about the body of a human and of nature. The confusion, the concussion of a near fatal car crash, to the bodily observations of a bee and a human woman. How easily rain forgets us as it softens, pulls back into cloud. How it forgets. A hundred scents ribbon my body this way and that. The bee, of course, is drawn to flowers by scent and Simpson’s lucent mind and touch make clear that the lovely confusions of scent are a problem for the bee. The woman observes it another way: Out of the nothing of daylight comes one watery shape, another. The architecture of what’s heard…. It’s as close as sky gets: fingertips trembling over our upturned faces. Decisive, exact, perfect.

Domain – Barbara Nickel, Anansi.

A highly-skilled, waited-for book from a poet who has already left her mark, in this, her second book of poems. A great series of exceptionally done glosas on Catherine the Great is part of the spine of the book, making the revelation, but only ultimately a detail:The girl pulls the blind and eyes the pills./They’re light as blossoms. Pale eyes.

The work on every day reality , its history, its absentness, its ultimate structure of a life, takes domesticity to a new and clearer place. So many times when poets start out they disappear for a decade in a time when children come to them. Some of them never make it back out, to being a poet. Barbara Nickel has done both and the trip through her and our Domains is a better place for her having born witness to what we see and most of us forget, or worse, think nothing more of ‘the what is happening’, what John Lennon said is ‘what is happening when you are busy making other plans’. I’m glad for us poets that she found her way back out of what happens. We are richer for it. Read: The Storage Room, and you will get what she found, not unapart from the what that has happened to her. The simple, the foreboding, the wrapping in the warm fresh scent of cedar: In the dark I’m all alone and safe, down here/in cedar closet smell and furnace purr, and the mirror’s returning images of different emotions, times and people.

No, read first the lead poems to each section. Each does a nifty trick of tying its last line to the beginning line of the next section’s lead poem. So it is a kind of history of what we live in our own lives – they become the real spine, and a frame for the book in its many parts as though the rings of the years of a tree. The things we do not understand, the mother we remember and then re-remember the years that we are growing. And the Domain is contained, and yet keeps on flowing, memory and witness the subject of our briefness in this world, the intentionality of memory, the artistic whole that gives structure to the dome that we would like our lives to be. Yes.

My mother agrees with the dead – Susan Stenson, Wolsak and Wynn

This is the best fully-accessible book of poetry I have ever read. Not one word too many, not one word too few. A fully realized meditation on real death. The best feature is how Stenson captures in few words her mother’s character, a woman who was a mother in the 1950s and ’60s’, in small town Saskatchewan. Spare and laconic, without sentimentalism. After getting the cancer message, the two confer, write lists, and go through them together, without flinching, well, the mother at least: Book the hall. Buy the coffin/… Fix the zipper on the silk blouse. As though her mother needs to die as she lived, as though there are rules for living, her nose all the way to the paper as she writes, and slowly perfects each letter as though a teacher were watching over her shoulder and there is a need to do it right; this sense pervades the book dense with character, personal idiosyncracies and in its accumulation it is a death that each of us has seen with a person close enough to us that we are forced to pay attention, prepare for the loss.

The Shovel – Colin Browne, Talonbooks

This book should be required reading for every would-be poet. That is because it covers so much ground, so many styles, and is just so endlessly brainy and erudite that before they are allowed to paint with words, all poets should see the entire canvas and tradition within which they will work. After all, anyone who wants to be leading edge, or experimental, cannot do so without knowing what the edge is, and where it is, despite what the poet might think.

All our wonder unavenged – Don Domanski, Brick Books – I have an extra copy that will go to the first person who sends me an email at: dcreid@islandnet.com

This book of poetry is sure, quiet, endlessly inventive in images and thoughts that flow from one phrase to the next in an apparent effortlessness that is, as Dickinson said it: the gift of screws. Hard, hard work by a mature poet who has come to a flowering point in his art. Nature poetry in the best sense of the words. This book deserved the GG.

write and rewrite then shut off the light   roll the great stone
back into place   all flat land after that   all the way to sleep

All poets can appreciate the ease of this writing, that moves gently but with assurance from one small, or large subject to another, as though they and all the other words have to be there, and you go, yes, this is so. We are glad to be reminded what we have taken for granted in the endlessly renewing world. And the simple lyricism that is what so much of Canadian poetry is, is not done so well as here in Domanski’s eighth book of poems. There is much to be learned by many poets in this writing.

A Few Words Will Do – Lionel Kearns, Talonbooks

This book, a selected works, has flow and a mercurial mind of endless felicities. Lovely.

Other notable books from 2007

Fluttertongue 4 – adagio for the pressured surround – Steven Ross Smith, NeWest Press

Like Colin Brown’s book, Steven Ross Smith’s book needs to be read by poets, so they can see one of the dimensions of Canadian poetry. From the bp nichol, Fred Wah sound poetry angle, Fluttertongue 4 is not an easy book. It requires a person to read until they are in synch with the style and then keep going. Throw out conventional structure – no little narrative stories here. This is a book-length poem that intends in its brought together fragments to be a different kind of telling. You have to bring your mind down to the microsopic to take in the perceptions as they come to you, as though you are turning in a circle, eyes coming to light here and then there. There is connecting movement, but it is told through the individual line or two fragment, and comes back to Smith’s wife, his father, his son, a trip to coastal Canada and the repetition of each gives the book passage from beginning to end. sun a low blaze, molten through trees. // i have read a few thousand words since rising, to free them. // was it wind calling? tires on gravelled road? the pressure? These are three back to back stanzas so this has that precision of small, but each is a leaping on or to other and this characterizes the whole book. This is a method for writing poetry that the poet should pick up and understand that it is legitimate, and try to write this way because in doing so is to take a great leap in what you can do. Smith’s book is a style, fleetingly enjambed-takes on what he poet sees, thinks and experiences. Doing things that are hard make a poet better. Even knowing that this kind of poetry exists gives the poet the context within which she or he writes. Do remember that the fragmentary need not be organized for there to be poetry, and even though this is subversive of the artifice of poetry.

Aesthetics Lesson - Christopher Doda, Mansfield Press

This book has a great series of glosas. For the as yet uninformed, the poet takes four lines from a poem, usually one that the poet admires greatly, and posits them above the poem about to be written. The glosa is a four stanza poem with ten lines per stanza. The first line from the quote is the tenth line of the first stanza and so on. There is also a rhyme scheme, if memory serves me correctly, the second line and fourth line together, and then the fifth, ninth and tenth together.

The glosa is an early Renaissance form, developed by the Spanish court poets. P.K. Page brought the form to the attention of current Canadian poets in 1994, in her now seminal, Hologram, from Brick Books and since then the poets of this country have turned out exceptional glosas. There is something about this form, as there is about the sestina, that brings out the absolute best that a poet can do – I think it is the using of the four lines from one’s idols that does it -and Christopher Doda’s glosas are… my search for superlatives comes up short.

And, Doda has added another twist that makes the poems even more difficult. He has written not one, but eight glosas, all are related. In addition to this difficulty, he has, starting with a favourite quote from John Donne, made each successive poem start with the last four lines of the previous glosa as its quote to be worked upon in the glosa form. This means that the fourth line from the Donne quote is the last line in all eight glosas. Added to this symmetry the eighth glosa in Doda’s series ends with the four lines that are the Donne quote that is posited on the first page. Doda’s bookis a good place to start when you are thinking of writing this form.

Found - Souvankham Thammavongsa – Pedlar Press

If you like books that marry content and design well, one real gem, that should take the silver medal for design in 2007 has to be Found. The cover lets you know what the design is all about: space and a few words, so that you focus entirely upon them. The front cover has one silver line on a navy blue background. This book is from her father’s scrapbook – and some of her own words, later – written in 1978 while her parents were living in a Laotian refugee camp. This is a book about understatement.

Souvankham’s father was not literate and his scrapbook could not be called a diary in the usual sense of the word. But Pedlar Press has done a fabulously understated design so assymetric, Asian, so simple that it makes you feel humble in its unadorned, bleak, thin, grey gruel of humanity stunted words of a man who had no words but was compelled to write down the little that he thought. And the photo of Souvankham at the end looks down and away, so that it would be hard to recognize her from the photo. Perhaps it is small because of her father; I don’t know. A few pages before the end, the single downstroke of the cover is understood to mean that on that day, or week or month, he stroke it off and there was nothing to be said. And it was also his record of captivity – when you look at a calendar of each day stroked out, it is a captivity, a striking off of what has been of little value, but is gone.

Read his daughter’s acknowledgements at the back of the book. They will tug at you if you are human, and that will make you want for there to be a place for bare pain reduced to sadness to be kept safe from all the damage of the world. There are many names in this list, and so you will know, that many people feel this way, too. This book is the memory of what is spare. The book will not take long to be read, but it will rest a long time in you once it has been read. This is a good thing. Thank you, Souvankham.

more to keep us warm – Jacob scheier – ECW

One my my chores last year as VP of the League of Canadian Poets, was to be chair of the membership committee. That meant reading about 60 books a year, along with submissions of poems for associate membership. more to keep us warm by jacob scheier was the best book I read. His style is straight ahead speaking of the story he is telling, not lyrical, mysterious or floating, not deliberately elegaic, but telling you what he is thinking: We decorate the past with gin martinis/that night, now, heavy as an olive pit/sinking in your coffee. In this there is the the surpise of the end of the first line and the end of the second. There is much in this poetry that is like this, many surprises which is the mark of an active mind of its own novel perspective on the world.

Most Canadian poets will know that Jacob’s mother was Libby Scheier, a feminist, academic poet who was felled before her time by cancer. And there are those poems in this book that deal with that time for him, and the distance that he has with his father. But they are clear, intelligent, idiosyncratic, in a good way, and moving where his agile mind will take him. There is cleverness, too, with a human side so that it is appealing. And anger: Fuck, I’m not comtemporary enough for publication. I’m too/narrative, too personal. Or, I should just tell CanLit to “go/fuck yourself with your regional aesthetics” But that’s not/subversive enough on a syntactic level. and so on, a short part of a long prosy poem about the state of, apres Howl, poetry. There is angst. Confessionalism that is not embarrassing. Honesty. There is much to be said about honesty, for it is its own crucible and there is much difficulty in bringing that forward for all to see, and a first book that is of uniformly high quality from beginning to end. And it has been short-listed for the 2008 GG, a great accomplishment for a debut book. And funny, too. November 18 brought in the news that Jacob’s book has won the GG for 2008.

And briefly, others that want to be read and should be, too:

The Bindery – Shane Rhodes, Newest Press,
The Bone Broker – Lillian Necakov, Mansfield Press
return to open water – Harold Rhenisch, Ronsdale
The Crooked Good - Louise Bernice Halfe, the best aboriginal book of many a year, and among the best in Canada from 2007
Torch River – Elizabeth PHilips, Brick Books, has the best section on childbirth I have ever read.
The Incorrection – George McWhirter, Oolichan, a book of many different interests, styles by one of the best-loved, by his students, academics in Canada
The Exile’s Papers – Wayne Clifford, Porcupine’s Press, you want sonnets done as easily as breathing, you got ‘em.
this is erth these ar peopul – bill bissett, Talonbooks, another idosyncratic book from Dr. Bill who singlehandedly invented performance poetry way back when
rivers… and other blackness… between us – d’bi’young.anitafrika, Women’s Press, urban, woman of colour, a book that really rocks. Again another stream in Canadian poetry. She’s going to be great.
Notes for a Rescue Narrative – J. Mark Smith, Oolichan
forage – Rita Wong, Nightwood, the first third of this book is highly inventive, using hand writing written around the poems and internet information beside it, poems of environmental outrage, that again, on their own form another stream in Canadian poetry. Read this, again, for what it can teach you about new dimensions in poetry. Wong’s book won the Dorothy Livesay award for the best book of poetry in BC, 2008
Red Bird – Ian Roy, Buschek Books
Father Tongue – Danielle Lagah, Oolichan (many good boods from Oolichan in 2007)

Made Beautiful by Use – Sean Horlor, Signature Editions, a great first book
LIfting the Stone – Susan McCaslin, Seraphim Editions, my choice for the best Christian book of the year
Human Resources – Rachel Zolf, Coach House Press a kinky, computer word generator book, and took the Trillium if I remember correctly

]]> http://www.dcreid.ca/?feed=rss2&p=56 0 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=57 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=57#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:20:13 +0000 D. C. Reid http://www.catchsalmonbc.com/dcreid.ca/?p=57 This post is for cool things not yet written.

It results because I am sometimes ahead of my computer division and I need an extra place to put stuff while the many thousands of them race to catch up. Okay, so there are not thousands of people in my IT division. Here is something better: a creativity exercise that will improve your poetry.

Creativity Exercise

You can help your brain to be more creative. You can do this by simple willing it to be more creative. By will is meant a positive favouring of thoughts of creativity. It does not mean free will and it does not mean will power. How this actually works is fascinating.

What happens when willing yourself to be more creative is the production of new brain cells. In songbirds, for instance, it has been found (1) that in the brain’s song centre there are 1% new cells every day and this is necessary for the bird to sing its complicated songs. And this means that in a little more than three months the entire brain centre is absolutely new.

Primates have been shown to grow new cells continually (2), too, and this includes humans. Both stress and a dull or constraining living environment reduce the production of new brain cells and you should intentionally change such situations in your life. On the other hand, stress is good for focusing the brain on what is happening to you, right now, the incandescence of an image, even though it is bad for memory and bad for creativity. So, you need both.

Here is a simple technique for getting your brain to produce new brain cells. Try to focus your thoughts on the left side of the brain by putting your fingers on your left temple and feel your will asking the speech production and language recognition centres (Broca and Wernicke’s areas) to become better. In addition, for poets, put your right hand’s fingers and thumb on your right temple and ask your brain to give you a highly creative period. The purpose is to open the gate of the right hand brain, much like a dam, to let it flood over both hemispheres and have a spontaneous out-flowing of poetry. Finally, put your first finger of the hand you are most dextrous with on the bone just above your right eyebrow, which is the centre of consciousness and where the concept of I resides. Once again ask your brain to be more creative and feel the power of your intention flowing down your finger into the brain. This does two things: it primes the conscious right prefrontal cortex where conscious creativity comes from; it also let’s the most creative thoughts come out of your brain because poetry, like music jamming and jazz (3), comes from making words that most closely arise from the I centre of your brain.

For both prose and poetry, put your first fingers on either side of your head just behind your ears. Try to aim a positive beam of will from each of your fingers so that its greatest power is inside the middle of your head. This is where the hippocampus is and this area of subconscious brain is where learning and, more importantly, memory are dealt with to the greatest degree. Prose writers in particular need huge memories whereas poets need to combine different areas of remembered thought. The drug fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac and Sarafem, are two such drugs that increase production of new brain cells.

1. Nottebohm
2. Gould
3. Charles Limb

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Take Pills, Get Smart

Many scientists (Gage, Gould, Duman, etc.) have made discoveries that suggest that antidepressant drugs have the most important long term effect of stimulating new brain cell growth, particularly in the hippocampus – the memory centre. And drugs are now being developed specifically for this purpose. This presents the very real probability of most people taking such drugs because who wouldn’t want to be happier (new brain cells make us happy!), more intelligent, have better memories and so on. This is a real life soma for Pfizer. But it also contains the scary notion that the Brave New World is upon us, for we can take pills to change our brains, even when the person does not have a pathological condition – they just want to be better and can be so. Scary. It means changing what we are as humans.

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I have just received Rocksalt which is an anthology of British Columbia poets – Mother Tongue Publishing. There are 108 poets and their poems and their poetics in this book. As the first such book in over 30 years, it is an important one. It will become even more important over time, as it will snapshot a year and hold it in amber. In addition, each writer has written a poetics which is very valuable because it lets other poets know what moves other poets.

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Random Poetry Esthetics

Line Breaks

I was looking to illuminate myself on Carmine Starnino’s New Canon, so that I could acquaint myself with its reasons for feeling that Canada could use a bit of new formalism – writing poems in forms like sonnets, sestinas, etc. I stumbled onto a review by _________ who criticized the movement and the book for a number of things. One of which was a poem by Diane Brebner written not long before she died.

And ______ said that the big wrong things with the poem were its line breaks and its cliches in the place of original images. He did a long critique and I got the feeling that while the expressions were everyday language, there was not much wrong with them, and that more importantly he had missed the important thing which was that Diane was dying of cancer. I found myself writhing in my seat, not just because I had met her just before her finding that out, but because she was writing in the face of imminent death and knew she was going to die in a matter of months. And that made me pay a lot of attention to what she was saying and be a lot more compassionate about common locutions. After all, rancour and criticism mean nothing once your meat putrefies.

And the fellow went through another critique of explaining why her line breaks were all wrong. And that got me thinking: are there such unshakable laws of line changes? Is there a book of rules the poetry police puts out? And I realized that, no, there were no such rules. Creative writing departments all over the country do teach people about line breaks, and there are texts that will go through alternate methods of lineating the same piece. And, though I have taken creative writing at a number of universities, and done decades of workshop stuff, it is some time ago, and one grows for the rest of one’s life past putting down the books. If one didn’t, it would be time to quit writing.

And when I broke from my past, I wanted to write in lines that had no end. As we put poems in books that are seldom past six inches wide – bookstores don’t like to stock them in their shelves – that arbitrary frame limits where lines can go. I wanted to write a number of thoughts and then I would make each thought, each line a stanza, and perhaps as much as three feet wide. What ever was required, one could do it. Just a different visual look, and one that went with saying a completed thought, and then saying the next and so on. That being my aim, it made the page in a book be seen as simply arbitrary and thus the line endings in this method would be arbitrary too, because, in the real poem every single line was accommodated sideways. This means that rules in an arbitrary setting are arbitrary, not within the particular setting, those were esthetic considerations, but arbitrary, limited.

At this point, I had left the world of line breaks I had learned, and no doubt, the young fellow so critical of CS would throw out my work, now – and no doubt, CS would, too. But would he, or they, throw it out ten years down the road? I’m not so convinced. He was pretty bright and the issue is how willing the artist is to break with tradition and stamp it his or her own way. All truths are provisional, and what seems sure after the teaching, unravels over time. But many different considerations go into the types of line changes that one is taught. Usually, lines end on big words, nouns, and begin on small words, prepositions, articles and so on. our English language has its own rhythm and flow – use Latin words in poetry and they jar, though that is not a reason not to use a different language, just make them comfortable with one another or emphasize the jostle. The rules also set natural phrasings apart, they can set up one meaning and then because the line gives way to the next, another and then a mixed meaning occurs and so on. And of course in strictly metred line, the metre itself determines line endings.

I decided that I wanted the big words on the left and the small on the right. I decided that I wanted to end a line on an offbeat, and make a single line be staggered down as it continues on. I also left off the ending words of lines, something that works particularly well with the last line of a poem. I added a first parenthesis in the middle of a line and never ended it (not a new technique as Atwood did it in the ’60s). I wanted a visual structure to a poem that made line endings simply to do with how a poem looks on a page, even if it has no other meaning.I will often take a poem and rearrange it several times until the visual structure works to my eye, a consideration that, again, is an intention outside what would be accepted as conventional line endings.

And I often end lines in prepositions, such as ‘of’. A conventional mind, using the common rules, would toss the poem out for making this mistake. But, and this is the point, if the poem and poet doesn’t intend to use a convention, then the reader, and one hopes for an illuminated reader, must take it on its own grounds.  It doesn’t make much sense to say something is bad if it is not intending to do what you think is good. On the other hand, it’s a good idea to adopt a certain line ending structure for, at least, one section of a book, or a whole book, so that it isn’t confusing because you change your own methods in every poem.

Here’s another thought. When I do readings, I change the meaning of poems by emphasizing different things every reading, changing the emotion in my voice, changing speed, grouping and other verbal differentiating things. This means that the line changes on the page may never coincide with the meaning in a performance, so, being to rigid in one’s rules, in this case, line endings, reduces the possibilities of your poetry which is about as many meanings around a particular, strong meaning as you can handle.

New Formalism – The New Canon (2005) -The Poetry Nazi:  No Soup For You!

Summary

The New Canon is an anthology of younger Canadian poets who write poetry in traditional Western forms, for example, the sonnet. Carmine Starnino is the editor and has championed the use of form. His essay in the book, in a nutshell, makes the argument that: the only good poetry is formal poetry and a Canadian poet has to write in these forms or his or her poetry is bad, because Starnino says this is so. Other forms of Canadian poetry are crummy mainstream image-based, little narratives with little, sound, poetry skills, avant gardisms that move into private indecipherable jokes, or degenerate forms of post modernism.

I think that there are some basic problems with this argument:

I will make some short preliminary comments and then some longer ones:

1. The argument says that Canadian poets need to write in forms. This leaves out poets from all the other countries in their countries and when they come to this one, and even Canadians who move elsewhere.

2. Poetry must be in forms. The problem with this is that it means English/European forms – perhaps a dozen. This neglects that there are more than 1000 different formal poetry ‘templates’ from around the world. See Robin Skelton’s, The Shape of Our Singing, or the Princeton Dictionary of Poetry Forms (not sure of the title).

3. Non-form poetry is bad because Starnino says so. This is the Poetry Nazi response. The problem is that poets refuse doing anything that they are told to. They just won’t do it. And they don’t have to. No one can tell you what to do.

4. The mainstream is crummy imagistic narratives. I agree that the mainstream has its faults, but that doesn’t mean you have to write in forms. (And, virtually all of the poems in The New Canon are strongly narrative driven, just like the Canadian mainstream).

5. You must use sound poetry skills. The problem with this one is that its definition is that sound skills are what you use to write form poetry. It’s circular, and, sound poetry skills depend on the stream of poetry, not on forms.

6. Avant garde poetry becomes indecipherable jokes. While some ‘experimental’ poetry does become ‘insidey’, much does not. The stream will not collapse.

7. Degenerative post-modern poetry typifies the rest. No, there are many streams of Canadian poetry, not simply post-modern. It is also the case that we live in an attention deficit, segue world, of the cell phone and blackberry, where all of human thought can be accessed instantly on the web. Much poetry reflects this.

Now I’ll make some more general comments.

1. The Streams in Canadian Poetry – see below (the next item) for a brief discussion of examples

2. The categorical nature of the argument is disappointing. I have no problem with someone saying: I like formal poetry and here are the reasons why. But moving on another step and saying that all other kinds of poetry are bad is not true. If this step had been left out, I would have felt more comfortable with accepting the argument.

What is below is just a first draft. Please excuse the tone. I will amend that later.

Here are some random thoughts, as I read through:

1. While the essay points out that there have been many anthologies over the years, it disregards them and draws a distinction with only one of them, Dennis Lee’s version from the ’80s. I have a dozen Canadian poetry anthologies on my shelf – several put out since The New Canon, and including Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve’s: In Fine Form, an anthology of formal poetry also published in 2005 – and it’s not fair in one’s argument to not take them into account. If one disallows 90 % of the poetry anthologies out there, as relevant to the argument, it allows for a drubbing of the Lee book and saying that one has shown the flaws of all anthologies. There is no truth in this form of argument. And, one doesn’t have to argue something away, just to posit one’s own thoughts. They can coexist.

2. And then Lee’s book is done away with. It is suggested that Lee’s anthology is ‘too-accommodating’ in spirit. What has happened here is that after eliminating the many threads and streams in Canadian poetry, as not needing to be considered, the argument goes on to say that a good feature is actually a bad one. And then moves on to drawing a distinction between the New Canon and the Lee book as all that matters in the argument, for all of Canadian poetry. I don’t think so.

3. There is also this curious sense that one gets that the argument being developed has a decidedly eastern flavour. By eastern is meant Ontario and Quebec. That tends to eliminate a whole lot of other poetry as well, and sound foreign in the same country in which the rest of us live.

4. Then the suggestion is made that to move forward, that when we write: ‘What conventions will we agree to respect and what will we allow ourselves to wincingly push past.’ The point is that the original expression has nothing to do with cats. It is: herding poets. And it doesn’t matter how clever your argument is, poets just don’t listen and go on moving as forward as their skills and point of view allow them. They write and after wards the description of what they do is figured out by other writers and academics.

There is only agreement in conventions by a group of poets who have similar leanings. Most poets will argue endlessly about those conventions. That is how art moves forward, in the sense that, over time, the art changes.

And, of course, there is the other comment: ask ten poets their definition of poetry and you will get several dozen different versions of the answer. So, someone whose interest is, say, creating a mental effect in the mind of the reader, may have more interest in looking inside their own head and the work of others for clues as to where to go in words to achieve what they do. And someone, who considers a page in a book as an arbitrary edifact, then wants to write a poem that may be only one line going off into side ways space and never end. They may write in traditional forms, but probably not. Trying to be the poetry police, and saying only one approach is valid, is not only wrong, but won’t be listened to by those who have other aims.

5. The reference to Stephen Heighton’s Quarry assessment that the nation has drifted toward poetry slovenliness (as in not in traditional forms) suggests that in six years several styles came and went. If this had said it took 20 years, I might be more inclined to believe it. But, does it seems likely that a style rose for a year, then died for a year, and did this three times in six years. I think not. I would have been more interested in hearing – and still am -words on the view that academia has strongly affected the poetry of this nation by pretty much teaching the writing of narrative, lyrical poetry that tells little stories that move from a to b. I’d say that 75% of what is found in Canadian journals is summed up by the preceding sentence.

6. “If Canadian poetry has been largely a list of prohibitions…”. This is an interesting thought that is not developed. I would like to hear more because I didn’t know there was a list of prohibitions.

7. “These poets are contributing to something bigger than themselves, an event that transcends the limits  and operational bias of this anthology to represent a larger creative blossoming… what we are seeing is a new Canadianism.” It seems to me there is a problem here, and that is that Canadian poetry has many streams – as above – and the recent formalist stream is one of them. It is not better or worse, it is just a stream, like the others. If the argument presented had not taken the extra step of saying the rest is bad, I would have no complaint. It’s fine to note an angle. It’s wrong to add that only it has merit.

7. In choosing poems: “I was after big rhetoric, eccentric detail, arresting phrases. I wanted actively jarring, mood puncturing poems, poems of aesthetic betrayal. Indeed, more than minting every phrase afresh, I wanted poems that egged themselves on, saying: “If it aint broke, break it.”" I am absolutely and completely with Starnino on this front, and would say the same words myself in looking for those that do the spindle cell dopamine cascade thing and just keep on coming like a cross between a horror show and heroin. I do, however, see such poetry in all traditions, not simply those who hearken back to forms from our western, largely European, tradition. But I am getting nagging with such criticism.

8. … and, after all these reservations, why is it I feel a sestina coming on?

9. And why do I know Carmine could argue black into white even though I don’t believe it? He has a great command of the English language and it is fireworks to watch the words in motion.

And The Poets in The New Canon

Oh, and, of course, there is the book of poems. How could I come so far with not even mentioning it? There is much to say. But, coming as I do to the poems, and seeing in them what I would call the fine flesh of a European philosophical argument, not of this centry, or even the last, no, perhaps even before, not as consciously as I would have thought of the forms that Starnino had led one to believe, but for the first 250 pages I am reading, a completely sound choosing of good, narrative poetry with a formal flair, only one or two with the sing songy effect of an aa, bb rhyme scheme and a few, relentlessly metrical feet, virtually all with a sure hand, and some of the more interesting remembrances of words, not before but of the accumulated language of the continent to our right (check out Anne Simpson’s, Seven Paintings of Breughel, for instance, for well-wrought, formal, verse, that has as a common feature with the other flesh, that sentences and the slowing punctuation marks of semicolons and periods, that makes for a non-lyrical progression that gives much of this book its similarity. Sentences that start one place and go to another, and for her that self fulfilling and satisfying sense of not so much the rhythm, but of the internal felicities of rhyme and half rhyme among the lines that cast your mind back to find where this has been set up. Well done. ; or Elise Partridge’s, Book of Steve, or Mark Abley’s, A Wooden Alphabet; the high class, ridiculously low humour of Noah Leznoff; the weirdly photographic, strobic, Sleep Walking, of Susan Gillis, periods ending each of 14 lines, not necessarily sentences;  the pure simplicity of seamless metaphor and double entendre of Jeffery Donaldson’s small Spending Part of the Winter; Bruce Taylor’s agile, quick wit and unerring sense of qualification, poetry lending itself to an entertaining reading; David Manicom’s sure hand and flowing text;  Steven Heighton’s gripping, sickening thing that is warfare, trenchwarfare with others who might be brothers before, but not after, The Machine Gunner; Gil Adamson’s dark and darker, almost unexplained, perhaps connected, similarly war inflicted poem wounds, Black Wing, for example; Eric Miller’s paean to the starling; Patrick Warner’s, any parent’s worst fear, The Bacon Company of Ireland, any human’s inability to watch a death, but not to then eat it; Tim Bowling’s tubercular west coast heron existing from before history was invented to after-man;  Andrew Stenmetz’, Late, an English comedy of manners, just a few days late, and the self-congratulatory, less than delusional, chit-chat that entails before taking the subject for real – in another poem; Michael Crummey’s middle autumn move out into the universe after building the Observatory on Mount Pleasant (1890), an everyday divine thing for someone not so;  Karen Solie’s, Sturgeon, and teenage brutality to an old old mind’s inability to understand and accept it; John MacKenzie’s run on hugely filled world in one small place, Riding The Route For Nature And Health, ’sledgehammers/slamming fractals’ on a bicycle ride to melting facial flesh; the aftermath of breakdown, where one once was young now viewed from the other side of age and mind of Todd Swift’s, Evening On Putney Avenue, and the women he tangentially loves there;  David O’Meara’s, mind of a child, The War Against Television, we were and are concerning our eventual demise, and not really ever getting anywhere in our one finite chance at existence;  the lovely word flow, riff and rhythm of poems you can’t resist wanting every variation even before comprehension of Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s, August sequence that someone had the perspicaciousness to choose for the CBC Literary Award;  the best meditation I have read on west-coast aboriginal past and present begun with another kind of tree and ending, The Vine Maple, from Christopher Patton; Stephanie Bolster’s small painting of the blending a family makes and doesn’t make, her storm front in a glass coffee cup, in, Chemistry; Life, McKenzie and reasons not to do away with yourself after getting sacked. Suck it up and get ready for more of Adam Sol; Ken Babstock’s Palindromic nice touch with half and near rhyme more satisfyingly, to me, on the off beat, going nowhere somewhere near Christmas past and… ; George Murray’s sure touch with the flow of narrative and incandescent imagination in, among the others, The Last Sinner Waits On A Rock For Noah, sound stuff; Suzanne Buffam’s fine sense of how to end on an unexpected, yet prepared for ending, Sweet Basil, for example, discussing the aging of herbs and ending with the growing of girls; the seizure world of Shane Nelson, Bedside Delerium: Family Visit, and a construction accident that takes him and father back to the first crush): finial, jackdaw, permian, stilly, elides, plash, plicking, angelica, valerian, trefoil, colophons, sconce, vouchsafe, sedge, inglenook, adamantine, termagants, flummery, scend, spavined, scrattle, scarps, florentine, bracts, gibbets, cadge, bosky, muzzy, elan, smutchy, fid, … unusual words, a small thing perhaps, but a good thing. And perhaps my unfairness is to have thought that formal poetry would be constrained by a dozen forms, when they are simply starting points for much of this work, though formal it is also.

You must buy this book. And dip into it. Like water, your entry will be everywhere and nowhere. Ignore the essay and you will be fine. Right as rain.

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The Streams in Canadian Poetry

As mentioned, and you can go to reviews under home (above left), in reading over 100 books of poetry to jury last year’s CAA contest, I was struck by how good our poetry is and how many poets write in completely different ways, comprising different streams, that don’t compartmentalize as neatly as Starnino suggests they do. They all deserve to be siphoned up into the mind so that the next time the poet writes, their bigger mind helps them write better poems.

The obvious contrary ’stream’ is that virtually the entire literary tradition of this country is not written poetry at all (written poetry is largely about the past 200 years in Ontario and Quebec, a small portion of the country, and time) but is a verbal language tradition, as in First Nations for the past 10,000 years.

The hard part, I found, after realizing that there was this and many other streams in our poetry, was how to compare the relative goodness of books from different traditions. For example, how do you compare, a verbal performance of aboriginal legend (or a woman of colour’s Caribbean verbal poetry with its beat and dance flow, and etc.) with say, any written poem. That is very hard: is it great poetry of a type and is it so good that it is better than something of a different type, as in: is this particular apple a better fruit than this particular orange, and then, is it better, say, than this pork pie, or this cognac? I found this a real struggle not to disregard books because I was coming to their kind of poetry, for perhaps, the first time. In the end, I found myself disregarding the streams, and my crunched down top ten represented half a dozen different streams that did not relate to one another. I used taste, or as I put it, the juice: what the poetry did to my head.

Here’s another interesting point: the other judge’s – we had no contact, did not even know one another’s names – first short list (we were to arrive at a top ten, and then the lists were compared) had six of the same books in it as my short list of ten.  In other words, the ‘goodness’ of a book is obvious to the reader – even those of different sensibilities (I tend to the associative and fragmentary. The other judge, once I found out the name, is from the narrative lyrical stream that is this country’s dominant stream).

Starnino will be happy to know that both lists were half formalist work. In other words it didn’t make any difference, neither away from the stream or to it, what stream the work was. And our short list of five – combined same choices (the sixth had to be turfed for a technical reason) – was 60% formalist. And our ultimate choice was Asa Boxer’s, The Mechanical Bird, a formalist book. In other words, stream doesn’t matter at all. The poet senses great work.

Very briefly, below, some of the streams, I encountered – and some books crossed boundaries – and one could argue that something, like, say, gay writing isn’t a category at all as any of the poems could be written in different ways. My suggestion is to just pick up the poems novel aspect and put it in your mind. Don’t disregard it. You will be a better poet, and that is what it is all about.

Steven Ross Smith – flutter tongue 4 – sound poetry, no narrative, no form but what the occasional phrase about father, or son suggests organization

Sylvia Legris – Nerve Squall – hyper squeezed, two-word lyricism, Latinate, scientific, word riff, choppy rhythm, must slow mind down and then text jumps out at you.

Anne Simpson – Quick – very good design that fits her high intellect

Brian Henderson – Nerve Language – about the life of a tortured human being – fabulous work, but difficult, fragmentary, oblong rhythms, footnotes

Rob Winger – Muybridge’s Horse – about the life of a particular human being, inventive poem structure, best book design in the decade, like Collected Works of Billy the Kid, see the first poem for the technique of organizing: being between two states, a list of such things

Colin Brown – The Shovel – huge intellect, writing in virtually all the forms out there, fragmentary

Susan Stenson – My mother agrees with the dead – best completely accessible, narrative, lyrical book I have ever read, no extra, not one word too few

Barbara Nickel – Domain – One of our best young women writers – glosa section – the formalist stream

George Murray – the rush to here – all sonnets, marriage of neo-conservative form poetry with spectacular poems

Asa Boxer – The Mechanical Bird – all sonnets, form poetry stream

Chritopher Doda – Aesthetics Lesson – spectacular glosa section based on John Donne

Bill bissett – ths is erth these are peopul – the guy who started performance poetry and writing phonetically, gay writing

Wayne Clifford – The Exile’s Papers – all sonnets written in 19^th century diction

Arlene Pare – Paper Trail – a book about her white collar job – half poetry/half prose, a between streams form.

Louise Bernice Halfe – The Crooked Good – female aboriginal writer and great.

Agnes Walsh – Going Around with Bachelors – accessible, performance poetry and a cd at the end, NL writing

Larry Small – Around the Red Land – NL writing about NL accessible, narrative, lyrical, about the sea

Rachel Zolf – Human Resources – sentence generator poems using internet sites for poems, again office work

Dennis Lee – yesno – tight, stripped, ee cummings, word play, epigrammatic, associations of one word and then move with it

Kathleen McCracken – Mooncalves – poetry and images inspired by one another

D’bi.young.anitafrika – rivers… and other blackness… between us – women of colour and with the influence of Caribbean rhythms and music

David Bateman – Impersonating Flowers – gay writing, not at all in the closet

Susan McCaslin – Lifting the Stone – poems about Christian religion

ThammaVongsa – Found – found ‘poetry’, a diary, and the neatest execution of design used to make the all the poems stand out and be moving in a small format.

There is also poetry that has no language at all in it – unlanguaged poetry – but I did not ‘read’ such a ‘book’. Dub, slam,…

Oh, and, see Carolyn Force’s The Blue Hour, for its 40 page abecedarian poem that has as its only organizing principle that lines are listed alphabetically, it’s all over the map, but the mind puts structure into it to make it comprehensible. You don’t need form to see form.

]]> http://www.dcreid.ca/?feed=rss2&p=57 0 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=54 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=54#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 22:54:56 +0000 D. C. Reid http://www.catchsalmonbc.com/dcreid.ca/?p=54

… music, mathematics and poetry seem to be more closely allied than any of them are to ordinary conversational speech, to prose fiction, or to prose in general. Poetry involves pattern recognition – and so do those other forms of word assembly – but the nature of the patterns appears to be different – closer to those of music and math.

Comment: Check out Charles Limb’s MRI work in the bibliography on this site on the nature of where jazz comes from in a musician – from the I centre. I have asked him whether he will will be doing the same MRI work on poets and he said yes, but in a few years. (I will keep an eye on his research to update you, the reader). In other words, poetry comes from the I centre, and, I think that is why poets, artists identify so much with their art that they refuse to give it up in a world that wants them to get a job and raise a family.

Further, from Atwood:

[Our past] oral cultures swam in a sea of language – rich, aromatic, multiplicitous, exfoliating language. We on the other hand – as a culture at large – live on a comparatively dry shore. This is possibly why poets often feel – to themselves – obsolete, archaic, somehow not modern. They’re told that what they do is a remnant of something human beings no longer need – that we live by technologies and numbers now, and that these technologies and numbers represent the real world, as opposed to the dream world that poets live in, along with lunatics and lovers – of imagination all compact, each one of them – the implication being that the creatures of the imagination are not real.

Comment: The religious cult of science in its current paradigmatic form.

More Atwood:

“The arts”… are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions, not by our minds… it’s… the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Poetry is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is not a pastime or even a duty, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.

Comment: Pay attention to the art and pay attention to the science.

Quote of the Month – July, 2008

Introduction to the Boreal Poetry Garden - Marlene Creates, Newfoundland, Canada – 2008; See: marlenecreates.ca

I want to take you on a walk through the woods to the spots where the poems belong. They’re site-specific poems and, as a rule, I only read them in the particular spot where they arose – I won’t read them in a show-white gallery of a lecture hall. Only here. I hope the spoken words you will hear will enhance your experience and perception of this natural environment.

To some extent, I’m trying to work outside the institutions of the art world. I’m trying to integrate my life and my artwork in these 6 acres of boreal forest, which has resulted in the slightness of my artistic gesture. In responding to the landscape that surrounds me, my work is becoming more and more dematerialized.

All that is needed for the work I’m going to present is our perceiving, sensing bodies and the immediate experiential surroundings – the textures, colours, shadows, shapes and sound of this landscape. Mostly, my body has a silent engagement with these things. But more and more I have come to realize that I do not experience this place without local names sounding in my head. The expressive gesture of speech has texture and rhythm like the material landscape, and is often informed by and tuned to the sounds of the terrain and the beings in it. I find that many Newfoundland vernacular words fulfill a beautiful sonic relationship with this landscape.

Often words are the only means to convey things that my camera cannot capture, like sounds and other fleeting phenomena. My responses to these moments are quite various so I need to warn you that some of the poems are longer but some of them – those which are kind of like haiku – may be over before yo ustart to listen. I’ll tell you when it’s a short one and I’ll leave a space before I read it and a space after it’s over.

The present moment is often thought of as a tiny point between the enormous past and future. I’d like you to gaze around and try to bring all the present into your awareness – so that the present moment swells into a vast expanse while the past and future shrink down. Let the present balloon into something very large that takes in all of us and the circumstances of this place at this time. Take in the material landscape that surrounds us, including the sky above, and try to take it in through all your senses. Let the past and the future dissolve so only the immense present remains. Try to take it in through all your senses. Let the past and the future dissolve so only the immense present remains. See:www.marlenecreates.ca.

Comment: Two things: first, this kind of exploration has nothing to do with the scientific reductionists eight universal laws of art and beauty as suggested by Ramachandran. Marlene’s work may have beauty in it, but she is not searching for that – and it is an intense search, not to mention that as the forest is always changing, so the poems always change, something not addressed in the current scientific view of art: that art, this art, changes every day and over time, infinitely, and, is also cyclical.

As we were walking through the forest, listening to Marlene, Canadian poet, Don McKay and I were musing on the laws, I saying that the R-view says artists use his laws to make their art to make people like it and buy it, and saying that not only is this not in a gallery, that you have to come here, to NF, Canada, and to the land and also to have Marlene read you the poems, to get the art presented to you. And, as we walked on through the forest, Don pointed out, among many other things, that a frame for a painting in a gallery is simply an artifact of necessity because it’s only useful in a gallery. Of course this is true, but the reductionists don’t notice because their understanding of the nature of art is I am sorry to say, without depth. Why is it that intelligent people who grow deeply into their own specialty, think they know deeply another area that they have spent zero time trying to understand?

Second, note Marlene’s deep search into the nature of time and the suggestion that the past and the future need to be shrunk and then the present swells ‘into a vast expanse’. Not so strangely, I am reminded of Einstein, the Doppler effect, and that active perception deposits consciousness, seemingly as a continuous stream, rather than the other way around.

I have had chronic fatigue syndrome for more than 15 years, and have had all the symptoms that one can have. Here is my list of things to do if you have it. Please keep the faith that one day you will be well.

Please look at item 11 for research studies that you may want to enter into.

1. Finding a Doctor

Fifteen years after getting CFS I can tell you that doctors are still as clueless about the disease as they were in 1995. When I first started asking my GP about my symptoms, he sent me to three specialists. All of them sent a note back saying to send me to a psychiatrist. In other words, these four doctors knew nothing about CFS, only that I was a head case and needed talk therapy and anti-depressants. And this took more than a year of my life, in which time I was so sick I could be in bed for a week at a time. That’s seven days so sick all you can do is get up to use the bathroom.

I am sad to say that all these years later, when I run into someone who has chronic fatigue or is floundering around trying to get a handle on how bad they feel, doctors still, at the end of the first decade of the third millennium have no more knowledge than when I was at my worst. Hence you have to go out and find the right person yourself. I am not a person who believes in non-traditional medicine – the explanations, is what I mean. I believe in cures that actually work – but I can tell you that a naturopath or homeopath type ‘doctor’ often can do you some good with natural remedies.

Here’s why: I finally found a doctor who specialized in chronic fatigue. You have no idea the relief you will feel when you find someone who actually believes you have a disease. This is very important, because the medical profession, as mentioned, is pretty useless, even a psychiatrist who will try to talk you down – though his antidepressants might well be a very good idea.

Doctor Hoffer I found by chance in Victoria where I live. His thing, as he was a friend of Linus Pauling, was vitamins – but his believing in me gave me something to hold on to in an awful time. His belief in vitamins is something he shares with naturopaths and herbalists and so on, hence, why they may do you some good. My sister who also has CFS and been sicker than I, found a naturopath in 2009 at a Vancouver clinic: Dr. Agape National Health Centre. Her condition has improved dramatically, particularly her physical abilities, such as climbing stairs.

His regimen included many things, every day, and more than $100 per month: Vitamin C; Oil of Evening Primrose, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, Niacin (vitamin B5?), vitamin A, a B compound Pill, folic acid, calcium and magnesium. I had to take protein supplements, too, because of my allergies to meat. In my opinion, after taking all of these, and more, for five years that the most important ones that stood out for me were Niacin and B12. That does not mean the others are not important, they are, Vitamin C being an obvious one. Linus Pauling would have gotten the Nobel Prize for the third time if he had not been considered nutty in the ’70s – its antioxidant properties.

But the two stood out for me. Niacin gives you the wildest rush for the first fifteen minutes. If you didn’t know that it did that, you would go to emergency, it is that much of a flush and creeping of insects down your neck, arms and chest. But the purpose of the niacin is that it prepares you to deal with all the allergies that you have.

Vitamin B12 I had to take by injection every three days which is pretty icky, but that’s what I had to do. I had stopped eating red meat (beef, pork, lamb) and one runs out of B 12 from these sources in 3 to 5 years (you vegetarians need B 12, too). The purpose of B12 is to reduce mental confusion and inability to think. This was vital to me because the simplest decision becomes impossible to make, let alone trying to earn a living.

How bad do you get? If you suffer CFS you will know, but here is an example from my life: when I tried to get writing contracts, I would have to go to an interview. I found the stress of having to deal with this situation was so bad, that if it was on Thursday afternoon, say, I was wiped out and in bed from Monday all the way through to Thursday at noon when I had to drag myself from bed. Then after the half hour, I had to spend the next four days in bed. That’s how bad.

At my worst, I remember driving five minutes to the marina where I had a boat. I got on the boat, smelled the gasoline and had to leave. I spent the rest of the week sick in bed with my allergy to gasoline. Absolutely, completely wiped out. I didn’t think that I could drive home. When the light changed from red to green, I didn’t know what that meant. That’s how bad you can be. That’s why finding a doctor is the first step. But if you can’t find a doctor, the list below will help you deal with the disease.

2. Sleep

Sleeping is next to impossible when you have chronic fatigue syndrome. That is why it is called chronic ‘fatigue’. And you must get this one under control or you may get so bad you die. A human being cannot be awake for 13 days without dying. This disease can last two decades. You must deal with the issue of being able to sleep.

Here’s what you do: you must provide yourself a full night of rest. Many sufferers try to ‘nap’ in the day. I put the word nap in soft quotes because I have never, in more than 15 years of having CFS been able to sleep when I lay down in the day. I did and do lie there vibrating. I would never get to sleep. The only good the ‘nap’ does is to use less energy than required if sitting in a chair.

And there is a negative outcome to napping in the day: you cannot sleep at night. But I can tell you that the most important thing you can possibly do for yourself, though you must do many other things, too, is to provide that sleep. If you have to take pills, take them. Do not rest in the day if you cannot sleep at night. I take Zopiclone and its derivatives. I have also been prescribed Novo-temazepam, but found that it left me woozy for half of the next day. There are a long list of ‘pam’ drugs, for example, lorazepam, and the related, Alprazolam, commonly known as Atavan, for anxiety which you will have big time if you are trying to earn your living while having CFS.

Now, all drugs have their side effects. I take Zopiclone, and have done so for 15 years. It is a progressive hypnotic, meaning that it is addictive and that it is technically not a sleeping pill. I dealt with the addictive part by not allowing myself to take more than 1.5 of the 7.5 blue pills.

I take one whole Zopiclone at bedtime, leaving a half of one to take in the middle of the night. I also take probably the oldest antidepressant, Amitriptyline. It has two effects for me: it is a sedative (from the era of valium), so it puts me to sleep; and, it is an antidepressant in amounts from 75- to 250-mg. I take three 25 mg yellow tabs along with the zopiclone before bed and take one 25 mg pill with the other half of zopiclone in the middle of the night. This arrangement allows me to sleep about 9 hours. Please note that the effect of taking the pills in the middle of the night might just be psychological, but who cares. It is the issue of being stressed out just considering that you may not be able to sleep that wipes you out. Do what it takes to take this problem off your mind.

You need to figure out a routine of pills to achieve a full night of sleep. Do not turn down antidepressants, but tell the doctor you want one that will help put you to sleep. Not sleeping is, among other things, depressing.

I only vary my pills in the event that I have to be up early and therefore simply must get to sleep at a specified time. I add a half to one zopliclone, but I only do in for one night – remember its addictive properties. And when the depressive thoughts flood my mind, I add a fifth, and some times, sixth amitriptyline. Do note that I add the extra antidepressants for as many nights as it takes to feel better.  Some antidepressants, for example, paxyl, take as much as a month to start working. So taking one one night and not the next will not solve being depressed. I keep taking the extra until my mood has risen and stabilized. I have to add that I have been assessing my mood for a long time and am much more healthy than I was. When you are really sick with CFS, you may be unable to assess your mood.

You simply must get your sleep pattern under control or all the rest of what you should do will not help you.

3. Allergies

The most important issue to get under control, and as important as getting sleep, is the allergies, intolerances and sensitivities that you will have to everything around you.

I had had mild hives and itchiness  with ice cream and strawberries for a few years before I found that I was sick. In that same time, my marriage was falling apart, and the stress from that was so high it was two years until after my divorce that I realized how sick I was.

My first killer of an allergy was to roast beef. I was going to the rights of passage place for Canadian writers: The Banff Centre, and had a huge fill of beef before leaving. When I arrived in Banff I was so sick, I had to stay in bed for a week, instead of work and etc. I could not eat the food there and was taking three extra-strength Tylenol every three hours with little relief from migraines. I had foolishly, prior to this, slowly worked up to taking a dozen extra strength Tylenol everyday for ten years – something that 20 years later, has given me liver and kidney problems, but at the time, it was before all the contraindications we get today.

When I got home, I went to an allergy doctor which was a waste of time because they do that prick thing for 100 things to which you are not allergic to. For example, pine turps and so on. The only things that were positive were dust mites, dust and cat dander. But I was allergic to the entire world and you will be too. All the tens of thousands of chemicals that have been invented in the 20th century are in our environment making us sick. (The most significant to the human race is: bis-phenol A. It is from the type 7 recyclable plastic and mimics estrogen, making males into non-, hermaphro- female, and non-reproductive males, calling into question the survival of entire species. Frogs first, humans next. And you thought Global Warming was bad).

The hard part was figuring out what made me sick. The problem is this: how do you figure out each particular allergy when you are allergic to more than 90% of the foods out there. It took me more than two years of trial and error. And many of the items I would not have expected. One of the hard ones was carrots. How could one be sick of a basic vegetable? That is how hard it is, even if the food is clean. By this I mean sulphite and nitrites and nitrates. The former is put on lettuce and etc. the latter in every smoked meat, like hot dogs, and barbecue sauce, even soy burgers.

Here’s a short list of the foods I could not eat: tomatoes, nuts (and that included even touching a nut, any kind, from peanuts to cashews, and any product that had a nut oil in it), milk, eggs, white rice for Pete’s sake, all dairy products including yogurt, cream, ice-cream, butter, all cheeses, and my favourite: pizza, because of the cheese (and lactose intolerance and irritable bowel syndrome), salmon and every other kind of fish, lobster, crab, shrimp and every other crustacean, pork, beef, lamb and every other red meat (for example, elk, deer, ostrich, etc.), all oils whether made from palm kernels, canola, soy or anything else, mayonaise, all preservatives, like the kind they put in every canned and bottled product including all cereals, chocolate (can life be so unkind), Coca Cola, my favourite sin, and every other cola soda pop, root beer and all other soda pops featuring anything other than carbonated water, Hawkin’s Cheezies (could hardly go on without these) and every other kind of chip whether ripple chips or tostidoes, pita bread, pastries, date and nut loaf, banana bread, bread, no gluten problem for me though, but every kind of baked bready food, avocados, garlic, white onions and every other kind of onion, ketchup, relish, mustard, horseradish sauce and every other kind of condiment in a container because of the ingredients and preservatives, soy milk, soy this, soy that, everything soy, every thing that came from a bottle, or a can, or plastic container, bananas took me five years to figure out and then every other kind of fruit (save apples) including pineapple, lemons, limes, oranges, pomegranites, beans, rasishes, peas, chick peas and all other vegetables other than raw corn, all kinds of dried fruits, particularly those that come from places like Chile where they still use DDT, and places like Turkey where they use sulphur or sulphites on things like apricots, raisins because they have wax to make them shiny and so little sulphur you can hardly smell, but I can tell you that your sense of smell goes way up. I can smell sulphur on vegetables just going into the vegetable part of the store. If I make a mistake, by the time I smell it on my fingers, I am already dead.

But this is a short list. There are hundreds of other foods that had to be cut out. And this is the big problem that you face, with no doctor to help you, unless you find a copacetic naturopath/homeopath and many years of being sick to figure out what you leave out. But slowly after many years you will start getting to the point where you are not wiped out by foods, because you have very little choice left. And the niacin will help in this regard.

What is left to eat? Virtually nothing.  It will take you years to figure out your problems. I existed for ten years on: one specific kind of raisin scones, apples (skin off because of the carnuba wax they put on them to make them shiny), boneless skinless chicken breast with no sauces or flavourings whatsoever, apple juice, only tea until noon, potatoes in the skin, and raw corn. A whole decade.

And that is only the beginning. I am allergic to virtually every kind of chemical in our environment. You will be, too, and you need to figure them out. Once you do, you will look at your household cleaner cupboard as simply full of poison. I threw all of it out, and cleaned things, when I was able to, with hot water on rags. That’s it. Vacuuming made me so sick, because it lifted the dust into the air, I had to put up without vacuuming for many many years. My house was killing me. But I had no alternative to living with a slow case of sickness because cleaning made me so so sick. Try to eliminate carpets and underlay. Get down to wood or linoleum and have someone else clean it, if you can  find anyone. You will not on your own be able to afford a domestic goddess.

The chemicals in your cleaning cupboard include pinesol, toilet cleaners like Vim, those blue duck things, Drano, most particularly air fresheners like Febreeze – you will come to think of these things as poison directly from an oil well that you spray into your only air to make you so sick you can’t get out of bed for days. This includes all paints, whether latex or oil based, and does not matter whether it is acryamide, enamel or whatever.

As for the chemicals in the environment, meaning the ones you know you come in contact with – you can’t take action against chemicals that you can’t smell, like PCBs or Bisphenol A and so on. But in the aerosol department, gasoline is a killer for me, get a few drops on my hand when filling the car and I am sick in bed in less than an hour. Even the smell of gas, any kind of grease or oil-based product that is in the air. Every time I fix something like my car, or boat, lawnmower, and the exhaust from all of these, once I get grease on my hands I am wiped out for the rest of the day. Wear disposable gloves. If you are allergic to latex, or to baby powder, try the blue nitrile ones. When I paint, I use an industrial gas mask with the replaceable chemical filtres so that no scent comes my way. And, even then, if I get paint on my my hands or clothes, then I get sick, too. This includes paint thinner, any chemical like dormant oil spray for plants, citronella for insects, smell of propane, glues, Goop, diesel, WD-40, Loctite, all dry-cleaning products including, Scotch Guard, per-cloroethane, Brillo Pads. More than 75,000 chemicals have been developed in the past 50 years, and only now are we staring to realize that they are killing us. Asthma being a leading generalized disease group results largely from chemicals we breathe, particularly living close to a major road syste.

And the long long list of personal products that people use. Shampoo, conditioner, those absolute killers, static cling sheets for the dryer, even the ones the neighbours use because their vents come into the air you breathe outside, deodorant, skin creme, hand cream, dermatologic products, perfume, cologne, candles, candles wax, bees wax, the scents from candles, burning candles, women’s makeup, particularly the base or foundation put on the skin before putting on makeup – a real killer for me. I have to walk away from such smells within the first few lungfuls of them or I can be wiped out for several days. Lipstick, mascara, the clothes people use to clean their glasses, anti-fungal creams or aerosols, soap, dishwashing soap, clothes washing soap, walking in the soap and chemical aisles of food stores. Simply the smell can leave you in bed sick as a dog. House mold and mildew, static air from not exchanging air in the winter, not changing furnace filtres often enough, needing HEPA filtres. The first one I bought actually made me sick because the charcoal in it, in early use was putting the smell of charcoal in the air. Everything in the air can make you sick. Alcohol, yeast, beer (a true tragedy!), buildings with mold in them, like archives and museums. It’s a mine field out there for allergy sufferers. So no going out to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, churches, recreation centres, city halls, shopping malls, stores, any building where people gather will be filled with dozens of chemicals that will make you sick.

The only thing good about all this is that your nasal abilities will increase to an astronomic level. I can smell scented products in the air from 30 feet away. I can to into a room of several hundred people and walk right up to the one person with perfume on and point them out – this is assuming no other personal product or its residue on clothes, has been worn by any of the hundreds of other people in the room. At my worst, I had to hold my breath and dash out into the air so that I wouldn’t get as sick, but, even one lungful of a scented product put me in bed for days. Develop your nose. It will save you many times. You will come to realize that we are saturated in chemicals that are killing us, only the effects in others is not as strong – yet.

You will get to the point where your would like to explain how sick you get by putting your hand on the head of someone with a scented product on who just doesn’t get the point and saying: “I take from you your health, and give to you my sickness.”

4. Floundering

You may feel very badly about yourself because you just can’t seem able to get it together to get it together. Don’t feel bad about not achieving things, even though this world is about achieving things, if you are an adult. CFS wipes out your ability to do anything. Try not to beat yourself up about your inability to keep to even the most rudimentary plan.

I floundered for more than 10 years with my family and others telling me constantly what to do, and how could I live if I didn’t have a job, and why couldn’t I eat white rice or whatever, which is simply negative stuff aimed your way. You will not be able to do anything about it. You will simply flounder without hope year on year and life will seem to grow away from you, even though you are so sick you just cannot do things: keep a job, take kids to lessons, plan meal schedules, do washing.

I have been improving slowly, but now have realized I will have chronic fatigue for he rest of my life. I have to tell myself constantly that I cannot achieve things because I am sick. It is something that I struggle with even now, when I have been telling myself for the better part of two decades not to feel bad about not achieving anything, that I am sick. You just have to keep at it.

It’s true, too, that even now, I could not go to a regular job, which I have not done for more than 22 years. The stress of not being able to control my situation would leave me totally wiped out by coffee break at 10 in the morning. Keep telling yourself you are okay when the negative thoughts enter your head. Most of the time you will be too sick to even have negative thoughts.

Not long ago, I was asked to talk with someone else who had CFS and was much earlier in her sickness than I. When I asked her how she was feeling, she was unable to tell me. She was so incapacitated with feeling small that she could not put into words how she felt. So I started telling her about me, for example, what I had had to do about sleeping. Only then did she tell me that she napped in the afternoon but couldn’t sleep all night long. I told her what I said above.

I should add that she was unable to do her job, but had a husband who was working. Needless to say, her sickness was affecting her releationship. But she didn’t have the confidence to tell me this. I had to lead the conversation saying that I could not have someone in the same room as me if I was ever to go to sleep. And that prompted her to say that she a some problem.

The conversation ground on for three hours, her unable to even talk about having CFS, and I trying to lead her by telling her my story. She couldn’t even have a conversation. That’s how bad she was.  I had to tell her parents when they said they were at wits end, about how they had to intervene with doctors for her, harp on her to do certain basic things, to follow through on seeking a herbal this or a vitamin that. She just couldn’t do anything. She was floundering and had floundered for almost a decade and still couldn’t even verbalize her problem.

Her parents said what if I’m in my sixties still doing things for my child. Will she never grow up? Who will do things for her after I am gone? And so on. I said that your child is floundering, she isn’t doing it on purpose and you have to continue to support her for as long as it takes and just accept that. She will come out of floundering when she is able to do so. There is no time limit, no score card.

One of the small things that can help, with the depression that occurs with sickness is a seasonal affective disorder lamp, as in, a SAD lamp. These put out high luminosity of light – not full spectrum – and sitting with the light on your face for half an hour a day, makes a person feel better. Try it out. I now leave mine on all day while I work at my computer in the winter – Canada seems all winter sometimes – from late September into late May. Get out in the sun and take Vitamin D.

Just accept that you are floundering, it’s okay to be sick, even though you may be so sick you cannot even comprehend what I am writing here. And for relatives, you must commit to staying the course, and find non-pressuring ways to help your sick relative. Remember that if you do it with any kind of negative tone, that the person will just pick this up and slide away from you, back into sickness.

5. Eating Regimen

With all the allergies and sensitivities that you have, you will have a very restricted list of foods and drinks that you can eat. Going out to a restaurant will be a major challenge, if you even attempt it. The problem is that those without allergies don’t think about the little things, like toast that is put on a grilling surface rather than being put in a toaster. They do not get that the residue of cooked meat, for example, can make you sick. Fortunately these days, there has been a big improvement in the public’s and restaurant understanding that some people do suffer allergies and will leave off things that you ask them to.

First, make a list of those things you can eat, and eat enough of them to give you enough protein, calories, vitamins and minerals. Do note that you need to be specific in what you cannot eat, for example, I could not tolerate apple skins, but could eat skinless apples all day long. Be specific. Go to a dietitian with your list of foods. I found, for instance, that I was eating about a quarter of the protein I needed in my diet. So, I added a protein supplement. These are very expensive and it seems hard to justify their purchase when you are ill and in financial stress. But do what you need to do to get a proper diet – or you will not ever get well. I found that I could tolerate whey protein – though I am lactose intolerant and get irritable bowel syndrome from milk products. You may need gluten free/soy free foods/proteins.

And follow your eating plan. I am now hypoglycemic, something I did not have prior to CFS (meaning I had to first find out that I was hypoglycemic, something that took several years to figure out). I went through peaks and crashes all day long. Finally I realized that I had to eat about every twenty minutes to maintain my sugar level. That means constantly eating something. You may well have to do this too, or have some other regimen type requirement. Make sure you find out as if you don’t eat properly, it will make you far sicker than you already are. And do note that protein in your diet helps to maintain the sugar level in your blood for as much as three hours. Eat it and you have one way of counteracting the peaks and crashes. You will need to carry food and drink with you at all times because if you crash, you will be wiped out for a whole day. So you need to catch the crash at the first symptom, often, a reduced level of thinking and decision making. I never go anywhere without water and without some types of candies high in sugar. Werther’s Original candies have saved my bacon hundreds of times, as do Tic Tacs. One Tic Tak gives me about 30 minutes of leeway. But if you are out without something, get to a store and buy something quick.

If you travel, say by plane, take enough food for several days. If you tell the people at airport carry-on security you are diabetic – much easier to explain than hypoglycemia -  they will understand and let you take on what can otherwise seem like an excessive amount of food items. You can get stuck just about anywhere and you do not want your thinking abilities compromised in a foreign country, particularly one where you may have difficulty finding the quality foods you must have to stay healthy.

My experience is that ringing in the ears – an experience that is so killing I cannot even describe it – is made far worse by lack of food, lack of rest and too much stress, among other things. I have asked other CFS sufferers and many of them say the same thing. Don’t let anyone tell you that tinnitus (the technical name for ringing in the ears) is not serious. It is the worst symptom of CFS. It takes you right off your feet for weeks at a time, and you need to eat properly so that it contributes to reducing the ringing.

6. Getting Control of Your Schedule

When you have CFS you lose the ability to work because it wipes you out. For those of you who still retain some of this ability, I am happy for you. In any case, getting control of your schedule will help you be less stressed and less wiped out. If you have control of what will happen in your day and life, you don’t have to worry about what will happen because you will already know. This seems self evident, but let me give you an example: for years, and I didn’t know this was happening, I was completely wiped out in the evening, any time after about 4 in the afternoon.

After years of this languishing so stressed that all my muscles contracted for hours at a time, it finally came into my conscious thought that one of the big worries of mine was that I never knew when the telephone would ring. As I had no ability to stand the stress of this possibility I was wiped out by the possibility, even though it seldom happened that the phone would actually ring. I decided not to take telephone calls after 6 pm, to turn the ringer off and machine noise off and leave the phone base in a different room from where I was. This small change in taking control of my schedule took a great deal of stress off me, so that evening was not a time of silent, lonely dread.

Over the years, I moved the close off time to 5 and then 4 pm. Some time later I decided never to take a call when it came in. My family and others, work things, for instance, were not very happy, but I told them it was my health and schedule that was important. I now seldom phone anyone back in less than two days. People who know me send me emails, as I have less stress with those and they are a kind of cool thing afterall. So take control of your schedule.

If you are putting exercise in your day, and you should, as below, try and put it in at a specific time and make a rigid unbending rule about everyone and thing in your life. The purpose again is to reduce your stress, and with CFS the possibility of stress is almost as important to eliminate as it is to ensure you sleep properly. I do it first thing in the morning, have a shower and clean up so the day does not begin with the detritus of yesterday hanging all over you and your night clothes. It is very easy to slip into complete slothfulness as it is too hard to climb out of it. And nights become days and days become night and the inside of your head drifts down and away.

Part of getting control of your schedule is finding a way, if you can, to fit some income working time into your life. I will deal with the income part next, but here, the point is to figure out what you can do. For me it was to become a freelancer of non-fiction. As a literary writer, non-fiction comes as easily as breathing to me. For you, your strength might be gardening – so put a flower stand in front of your house, and make money that way, or eggs (many cities allow people to keep chickens), or stuffing envelopes, or knitting for charity, or developing a product of some kind and starting a blog to sell it. I know someone who was able to begin drawing (but not use paint because of allergies). She was able to over time develop into making drawings from photographs of babies, houses or whatever else she could do. And then, if you do so, sell it at market rates. Your confidence will be low and you will never price what you do at its correct value. But I say: if the market price is, say, $50 per hour, then use that as your price. Where you make allowances is not with your confidence up front, but later, after the doing, for example, if an accomplished artist would do the drawing in 10 hours, you charge $500. It doesn’t matter that it will take you, let’s say, 25 hours. First you price yourself in the market, and slowly, over time, your speed will increase.

By having control over your ‘work’ schedule that eliminates stress and gets somethings done. For me, at my worst, I might have gotten 15 minutes a day before I was wiped out. I made myself accept that inability and told myself it didn’t make me a bad person. For about five years I was only able to work one hour a day. So I sat at my computer and wrote as fast as I possibly could for my hour, and then went back to bed for the next 23 hours. Awful, but it was a plan, and slowly I worked toward being able to pay some of my bills. Don’t beat yourself up for your inabilities, just work with what you can do. Keep the faith that one day you will do better.

7. Making an income

Making an income while you have chronic fatigue is an oxymoron.You just can’t do it. The problem with this is that we all have to pay our bills and that is a huge problem. Chronic fatigue is so hard on a person that losing your job means you have to have some other support or you will slowly become so financially low that you become homeless. Then you will die because it is not possible to have chronic fatigue while you live on the street and sleep on cardboard. That is simply the truth. A sad one, but the truth. A truth for a person without any other support, as in some family who will help you out.

I have made some suggestions above for when you are well enough to do something. Unfortunately, there are many years before that time will arrive and you will flounder looking pretty useless to anyone outside of yourself. As mentioned, don’t think badly about yourself. You are sick and that’s that. The most important thing to have in order to pay bills is family, particularly a spouse or parents where you can live while going through the worst of the disease. This means that if you can help maintain it, the most important thing you can do is try to maintain a good relationship with your partner or family during the trying years. A partner may want to move on and leave you because they didn’t sign up for supporting someone for a period of time that seems endless. And you may lose that partner, another strong pain to bear. The bright side of this is that you will be so sick that you cannot feel much about losing the relationship.

I lost my marriage (thankfully in my case), my health (previously something I thought in inexhaustible supply), had no money, had no job, couldn’t work and lost my children – the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, and it goes on at 15 years for me (no contact at birthdays, no contact at Christmas, etc. – this is just life). Very painful. Perhaps it will change.

Regardless, you will have to pay your bills. The best thing for you to do is: do something that you are good at. This is usually your favourite hobby, and so it is something that is nourishing and positive for you to do in your diminished capacity. It’s positive, even if you don’t earn much. Then you find someway to make $$ out of it. Remember the person who loved watching soap operas. She parlayed that interest – didn’t have CFS – into Soap Opera Digest a multi million dollar outcome. You will not be able to handle the stress of such an outcome, but it is unlikely that you will ever get to such a stage.

The reason for doing something you are good at is that you don’t have to any studying, or course work or anything else. You are already starting as something of an expert. Don’t ever start out to do anything where you have to do anything other than what you know – research never pays off, except when it contributes to a longterm goal. It takes too much time. Then find a way of expressing what you already know in a way that brings you money. I have made many examples above in item 6. Your hobby may be: horses, drinking wine, collecting stamps, collecting Star Trek memorabilia (Elvis?), playing bridge, singing in a choir…

My hobby was fishing. I didn’t think I knew that much and there were plenty of people out there who I thought knew way more than I did. But you don’t have to be an expert when you start out, just have something to say. You will become an expert over time. It just slowly snowballs. I made my first trip to BCs Queen Charlotte Islands to fish Langara – paid by the resort on the understanding that I would do an article – when I was very sick. This was when they didn’t have any sympathy for those with allergies. It was tough (and the guy who went with me almost ended my budding career on my first trip, the turkey). I just took pills and got through it. I knew that when I got home, I could go back to the one hour a day writing and spin the one story into a dozen in the next few years.

After 15 years of being sick, I have developed so that writing about fishing is an important contributor to my overall income. I have written more than 1500 articles in that time. I have been a weekly columnist at the local newspaper, the Times Colonist, for more than 7 years. My fourth book on fly fishing came out in 2008. I have one more written and making the rounds and in the process of selling another about fishing the remote coast of British Columbia – I have traveled the entire coast asked by remote resorts to come in. I have become something of an expert – to some more and to some less – fly fishermen can be picky – just because I have made my hobby work for me in my down time. I slowly learned a whole lot over the years. And my next book that I am shopping around is about how to bring salmon runs back. It is intended to be one of my major books in my career, so a very serious pursuit for me. Fortunately for me, my first degree is in biochemistry, so I can understand scientific research. And so it goes.

Develop your own interest/hobby into earning money. It will take a long time, but you do have time. And, once again, try to maintain your personal relationship with family and partner as you will need their help to get you through. Tell them you are sick and need help. It’s a tough sell but it is what you need to do. I hope that they will be able to see that you are not just unable to get it together to get it together.

8. Exercise

Probably the most underrated but highly important thing that you can do for yourself when sick or not sick is: exercise. When you have CFS you are at your most unwilling to add exercise to your life because you are chronically without energy. But, take it from me, it is as important as getting your allergies under control.

Exercise that has a cardio component, meaning it gets your lungs going and your heart beating, such as bicycle riding, running and swimming is good for anyone because it makes you happy, is good for your body and can be a solid social activity when you are least able or inclined to be social. I am a runner and do so, for the past 15 years, at a gym. It takes your mind off how badly you feel, and it keeps you in the company of other people who are not sick so that it gives you perspective from the very depressing life that you lead.

The most important point, beyond what I have said, is stretching your body out. Both yoga and tai chi are useful, low energy requiring alternatives if you would prefer those. The reason that stretching, and I mean your arms, shoulders, trunk, stomach, bum, quads, glutes, hamstrings, knees, calves, ankles and toes, is so important, is because in chronic fatigue your muscles tend to tighten up into spasm, and regular stretching will keep them from putting you in great pain. This is also important because many, including me, get fibromyalgia in the upper body and shoulders. Stretching out your muscles reduces this pain. I stretch twice a day, first thing in the morning, before exercise, and last thing before bed while lying brain dead in front of the TV. Before I started stretching, I could feel my body tighten up all day, and slowly all my muscles would be contracting so that my body slowly went into a fetal position. Very painful.

Exercise gives you a break from how awful you feel. It gets your mind off it, and you can use it for having a goal in a time when you cannot achieve much else. As mentioned, as adults, we live a life where we are expected to achieve things, and feel poorly when not. If you are trying to get to 25 lengths in a swimming pool, or to run a 10 km run in the spring, there are goals along the way to getting to where you want to get to. This part of your life can help you, then, with other aspects of your life, and the endorphins of it all are good for you. The spindle cells that comprise your dopamine circuits for immediate satisfaction are also turned on by exercise. This is a good thing as this system is the one that underlies our experientially derived sense of satisfaction.

Exercise will also help you with how cold you feel with CFS. Feeling cold is very debilitating. This results because blood vessels get constricted, because you are using less energy from lying still, and thus your body’s temperature is lower. No doubt your metaboloic rate is lower in CFS because folic acid, which helps with thermoregulation, is one of the supplements that you take with this disease. I can tell you that I spent years on the couch frozen, in a down sleeping bag, having to go to bed fully clothed. A very depressing way to live. Exercise which involves breaking sugar down to move muscles, gives off heat because muscles breaking sugar into two carbon fragments cannot harness all the energy released during the process. This energy is given off as heat and it warms you up.

9. Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is characterized as pain in the upper chest and arms. It can be very debilitating in itself, as pain wears you down completely over time. Seeing a doctor can produce a ho-hum response because such pain has been conjoined in the literature with most of the symptoms of CFS, for example, anxiety, inability to sleep, mental disturbances, mental incapacitation and so on. This makes it a syndrome, not a disease, and one that overlaps so much with CFS that some don’t take it seriously – not to mention that they don’t take CFS seriously.

But you must do something about the pain. The problem is that every common pain medicine causes its own problems in the body over time; Tylenol is not good for your liver; ibuprofen is not good for your kidneys, and so on. My pain got worse as the day went on, and it was conjoined with being exceptionally cold, as mentioned above. Search the web for all such things. I wouldn’t take Codeine on a long-term basis as it is a narcotic, and there is the constipation thing. Inderol is also a beta-blocker, but is what I took for two months to wean me off acetaminophen (Tylenol); it reached the point that the 12 extra strength acetaminophen pills I took everyday, simply resulted in rebound headaches, and when I had to hit higher amounts, it finally had no effect at all.

So talk with your sympathetic doctor, after you have done your web search – a recurring theme, here. And make a point of turning up your heat in the evening. Pick up a space heater for the room where you lie in state having to watch tv for the time before you take sleeping and anti-depressant pills to put you to sleep. Leave that high intensity SAD light on all day long and sit in the room with it. I have to hit 75 before my cooled body starts to warm up.

10. Be Around Well People

I have been so sick that for more than 15 years, it has been impossible for me to stand to be in the company of other human beings. I was so sick that just the stress of thinking about being with someone, even a week away, would reduce me to a wreck. This is inability to take stress. It also made me impossible to be normal around others, and so many many of my relationships, friendships, ‘work related’ acquaintances, significant others failed or never got off the ground. I mentioned to someone not long ago, who I had not seen for about 15 years, that I had CFS. She was visibly shaken because she and a whole lot of other people thought I was constantly over the edge and pretty well impossible to deal with because my mood swung so badly. At the time, I was unaware of the problem. Only now as I slowly improve, though I will never get well, am I able to think about such a subject; it was beyond me for a long long time.

My best advice to try and keep yourself a little bit level is to be around people, easy, normal people. Odd advice perhaps given my inability to do this when I was sick. But people need people. We are social animals. We die without such contact. And CFS kills such contact. Try and be around easy people, ones who do not make you anxious, nervous or whatever. Don’t put yourself in difficult personal situations. Even it this is as simple as watching people walk by on the street, or in a recreation centre, church or whatever. People do not understand long term sickness, how bad you feel and how weird you may act. And you can’t blame them for that. But find some people to talk to about everyday things, even if it is the weather, or saying ‘Have a good day.’ to someone. I finally, after 50 years of my life, understood that such a saying was not superficial. I mean it when I say it. And accept such a saying as a kindness to you, too. Be compassionate with yourself. Allow others, who may be able to hold you, do that. Speak and listen.

When my divorce ended, it took two years for me to realize how sick I had been in the marriage. The marriage was so turbulent, I had no idea how I felt. Grieve for what you lose. Watch a show like Intervention if it makes you weep. You need to pass through the illness, pass out the pain and emotion and reintegrate with life in due course. I lost my children. And it took me 15 years to come to terms with that. We all need the simple conversation that is people going about their lives. Please talk to them. Please try.

11. Take Action – Be in Research

If you can tolerate such a thing as being in a research study, below are some current ones. I read through the abstracts for most of these and found that most of them would not include me as a relevant subject. This sounds to me like more of the same old same old: well-meaning researchers not quite getting the point of the disease. For most of these studies I am too old – over 45 – and don’t have the specific things they are looking for. But, do a search at some of the websites, and you may find a subject in which you fit. It is a positive thing to do, and helps others. And these research studies are mostly done in connection with universities. But, do satisfy yourself they are right for you.

Here they are – there are many more than these:

Studies currently recruiting patients with CFS or related conditions

• Center for Hypotension (added 1/26/2010)
• Weill Medical College of Cornell University (added 12/10/09)
• Whittemore Peterson Institute (added 12/10/09)
• Huntsman Cancer Institute (updated 8/09)
• Center for Pediatric Hypotension (updated 8/09)
• Hunter-Hopkins Center (added 9/26/07)
• The Center of Community Research at DePaul University (added 11/09/06)
• New York Medical College Seeks Adolescents with CFS (updated 8/09)

The CFIDS Association of America regularly issues funding announcements as part of its research grants program. Its most recent Request for Applications was issued on March 3, 2008. For more information about this funding opportunity, please visit http://www.cfids.org/profresources/grant-policies.asp.

Please note that cfids is worth looking at as it is a website that has as its mission: working to make CFS widely understood, diagnosable, curable and preventable. I looked at their list of symptoms and while they are short compared with what I have had, they do have most of the most important symptoms.

]]> http://www.dcreid.ca/?feed=rss2&p=205 0 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=123 http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=123#comments Sun, 13 Jan 2008 03:30:42 +0000 D. C. Reid http://www.dcreid.ca/?p=123 So you want a little closer look at the books on the brain bibliography. You got them:

1. A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness- VS Ramachandran

When I began my inquiry into the relationship between current brain science and art, this is the first book I read. While I had been reading in the area for a decade, I decided to write a book on the Brains of Poets (two extensive bibliographies on dcreid.ca) and zeroed in on books like this to pick up and read.

This book does not go where the title suggests. It is not a brief tour of human consciousness, but, instead is a fascinating look at how lesions (small cuts) cause disabilities in human thinking, and how, using lie detectors (galvanic skin response) to understand problems that develop in human brains, scientists can understand how ‘normal’ human thinking works.

Issues such as blind sight (a blind person ducking a ball thrown at them, though they cannot see it), synaesthesia (mixing two types of perceptual information, for example, seeing the number five as a red five), how language works (using Chomsky’s well known expression: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously), kinds of amnesia (prosopognosia, more commonly known as face blindness, inability to recognize faces), phantom limbs (being able to feel limbs that a person has lost), allow Ramachandran to enter and describe crisply, quickly, and without too much science-talk, various aspects of the human mind. A definitely readable book that is well worth the purchase by a general reader who is interested in knowing more about the brain.

But there are two important criticisms of this book for the more widely read reader: Ramachandran, without telling you this, presents perception as a passive reception of what we see out there, rather than active searching for things out there, a view that is not very successful as a basis for understanding human consciousness; and, his ‘universal laws of art’. He says artists manipulate them to make a viewer see the beauty of art, and thus that art is about the pleasure centre of the brain. Tsk Tsk. As a poet for more than the past 30 years (and one of my degrees in biochemistry), I can tell you that I have never written anything to make it beautiful, though many poems are beautiful. Ramachandran’s mistake about art is simply being a bright, bold, award-winning neurobiologist, thinking he can make deep statements about fields he doesn’t know anything about. You can follow the subsequent ‘spirited debate’ amongst academics in many journals about human consciousness, and, of course, in dozens of books on Amazon.ca.

2. Proust was a Neuroscientist – Jonah Lehrer, 2008

This excellent book does two things exceptionally well. It presents 2008 brain science, and marries it seamlessly with art. It has a chapter on Proust – the memory one – about his tome: In Search of Lost Time, coming to the startling conclusion that the more we remember something, the less the memory is real. The book is not a book about Proust, per se, but, has chapters on different artists, for example: Walt Whitman – I Sing the Body Electric – literally; George Eliot, and the biology of chaos theory, and how this presents the ability for us to will our way to new brain cells; Cezanne and his understanding that brains take visual perceptions and impose upon them the need to recognize form, and this results in another unsettling truth: we see what we want to see; and, Auguste Escoffier, the French chef who discovered that glutamate – yes, really, MSG – from rendered animals and plants, is the key to all of smell.

Other chapters include Igor Stravinsky who introduced the 20th century of music dissonance and atonality by trying to change all the old rules about how classical music should sound and progress, harmonically, that the mind rebels at newness but soon it becomes, familiar, trusted and wished for; Gertrude Stein and her unending battle to write language without its form, essentially random gibberish, but had to concede that no matter how much she tried, underneath it all there was the structure of grammar – Chomsky’s universal grammar; and, Virginia Woolf and how her stream of consciousness novels reveal our emerging selves, in that the odd notion that we exist only in so far as our attention is focused on perception is true, and thus the self exists only in these moments, though we experience it as an ongoing river through time; the self exists for 10 second lengths before short term memory collapses and attention makes the next splinter seem joined as though seamlessly.

This ‘lad’ has managed to put in his brain more science and art than most people manage in a lifetime. And he expresses it so clearly that when you hit hard, dry, stuff like quantum mechanics, you go, oh, so that is what that means. The book is endlessly brainy, inventive, charmingly erudite, and at the same time cracklingly readable. I say this as a person with one of my degrees in biochemistry and who has been a poet for more than 30 years. I am in the process of writing a book on the brains of poets, (see dcreid.ca), and have read tons on these subjects. This is wonderfully well wrought stuff about difficult things to understand.

3. The Stuff of Thought – Steven Pinker, 2007

The Stuff of Thought ought to be titled The Stuff of Language – a tale told by a linguist full of sound and parsing signifying a fair bit of neat info about language but not a lot spot about the brain. This is because the book leans heavily on linguistics rather than the biological sciences and talks of how language has been taken apart by linguists and what this suggests about how our linguistic minds work. And if that is what you want in a book of this title, written by a well-known, clever, disciple of Chomsky, this is it. Pinker is an engaging, magpie intellectual in that he has an almost endless, tantalizing list of interesting facts, jokes and permutations at his fingertips while ripping through such subjects as: the social purpose of language, the mind as metaphor machine, the relation between language and the ‘reality’ we share, the relation between words and thinking and emotions, the etymology of words, for example, names, and naming, the symbolism in language, how we say one thing while meaning something quite different, how we use language as a medium of mental exchange, and so on.

The last paragraph of Chapter 1, Words and Worlds, is a quick summary of this book. If you are looking for someone to disaggregate language and show what this reveals about humans, this is a good book to buy. On the other hand, at 439 pages (bef0re chapter notes) of medium-sized print, the book is 100 pages too long. I found myself skipping here and there, rather than my usual slavish attention to the first word, second word and every word until the last word thing.

What I would have been more  interested in a book of this title was to hear an update on books by Damassio and Panskepp about the role of the sub-conscious in our thoughts, particularly as we do not think in our emotions in words, an important distinction, because when we think consciously, much of what we do is in words. So that words have a primacy in our conscious thinking, and thus the world that Pinker is talking about, but have zero, zilch, nada, nothing to say about the mid-brain where emotion is situated and sends its tendrils up into our conscious brain behind the right front eyebrow for us to focus our attention on and then be brought to life.

I would have liked to hear his take on how Wernicke’s (recognition of language) area in our left temporal lobe has a role in recognizing what others are saying to us and our visual understanding of written language (whether in letters or hieroglyphs). I would have liked to hear him address the role of Broca’s area (speech) in our being able to communicate with one another through making our lips, tongue, lungs, mental feedback loops and etc. work.

And I was interested, as a poet, in his take on metaphor, because that is a primary part of poetry. Here, again, in chapter 5, he breaks metaphor down into different types based on this and that distinction on subject matter, time sequence, spatial separation and so on. All of these are important to the student of language in that person’s quest to understand our medium of mental exchange. And how our language is saturated with metaphor to an extent that we don’t even recognize that many things we say are metaphors. If someone offers the symbolic ice-breaker: ‘Hi, how are you?’ And we answer: Feeling up. Feeling down., or, I’m dead. All of those responses are metaphors, as in, to feel good is up, to feel bad is down, and being dead simply conveys how tired we are. All three are metaphors, but trivial ones.

I found it fascinating that our speaking is drenched in metaphor. On the other hand, the distinctions, of different metaphor type as parsed in this book is irrelevant to a poet. A poet is interested in producing more, more apt, more original, non-cliche metaphors out of the endless manic creativity that we have in Wernicke’s area linked to  frontal creativity, influenced by the subterranean currents of the subconscious. But, perhaps this is expecting too much out of this kind of book.

4. How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer, 2009 (This book has been re-released in 2010 as, The Decisive Moment.)

After being blown away by his previous book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, on the relationship between brain science and art, I snapped up Lehrer’s next one. Its purpose is to demonstrate the relationship between brain science and the way we make decisions in our everyday world.

It points out early that the old dichotomy that we all know and our western tradition has believed for the past three millennia is in fact false. That tradition is that the brain is divided between reason and emotion and that from Plato on forward we have been told we have to pay attention to reason because emotion leads us of the rails and has to be cajoled and bullied back into place by reason.

Wrongo. The brain is a prediction machine and conscious and unconscious factors lead people to made decisions, sometimes favouring the speed and experience of intuition and on other occasions mulling over the facts.

In this context, Lehrer uses compelling real life situations to make his points. How Tom Brady passed into the ‘future’ to win the Superbowl; how the radar tech felt a returning jet blip was wrong and ordered it downed, less than a half mile from a battle ship he was not on – it was a missile; how the mind is averse to loss and that we invest money in the stock market for bad reasons; that superstar basketball players do not get on streaks of success; and so on.

Early on, Lehrer points out that a brain injury patient who has the connection between the subconscious and conscious centre (behind the right eyebrow) severed cannot make decisions because without emotional preferences consciousness has no way of determining which action to take. Then he gets into the dopamine system that makes us feel pleasure, but at the same time tells us when something is wrong (the blip being an enemy missile rather than one of us good guys in a fighter jet) by stimulating long slender spindle cells that go all over the brain so we get the jolt simultaneously. Interestingly enough these ‘emotion’ sensors are only found in higher primates, and humans have 40 times more than our closest monkey friends, pretty conclusive proof that our emotions are a highly flexible system for real time predictions with a mistake recognition loop for improving our expectations for the life we move into.

Intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice. That is the conclusion of one of the best chess, backgammon and poker players in the world, Bill Robertie. If you want to improve, review your mistakes.  Lehrer even tells you how to stop spending so much on so many credit cards, based on brain science of  the small ‘insula’ in the brain that recognizes negative feelings – it’s far harder to hand across cash than plastic. Got suckered in the ’sub-prime’ mortgage debacle? There’s a brain region for that, too. And Herman Palmer, a New York debt counselor (part of the every day use of this book) says, ‘…read only the fine print,” on credit card come-ons.

On mulling the facts, in a crisis, Chapter 4: The Uses of Reason has a stellar section in it about two pilots trying to save their DC-10 (no not because of the faulty baggage door that put the company out of business) from crashing, pages 120 – 132. This tells you how the brain works through a problem when terrified, and coming to a counterintuitive conclusion that has never existed before when 500 lives, most importantly your own, is at stake. Afterwards, 57 pilots crashed in a simulated version of this problem, before one landed safely.

Chapter 5: Choking on Thought, is about how when we think over something we know well, that we inhibit our conscious attention and we choke. This is intended to further develop the intuition, subconscious part of decision making. For my tastes, this was a tad repetitive, and perhaps too many scientific studies to make the same point several times. But, interesting stories, nonetheless, for example, it has been conclusively shown that MRI examinations for lower back pain have resulted in more than 50% more ‘invasive’ incorrect outcomes from doctors because our conscious centre in the right prefrontal area can only handle, get this, seven different factors before its ability to make decisions goes down the tube and we make worse decisions.  And you thought the brain worked like a computer. Wrong.

Chapter 6 is about how we make ethical discriminations. Kant, Descartes and lawyers won’t be happy to know it doesn’t take a lot of rational thought to make moral decisions. It turns out that we are hardwired to do so. We get the feeling, and then the rational mind makes up reasons to explain the feeling. This is because mammals need the warm feeling of mothers and others from the first moment to turn out okay. Our minds innately sympathize with others, empathize, then make altruistic decisions based on, actually, not wanting to see others suffer. We have active emotional reactions from our amygdyla, mirror cells that key in on others expressions so we experience the feeling, then our fusiform area recognizes particular people, and unlike psychopaths who do not feel, an amygdyla problem, or autists who cannot recognize the facial features (fusiform face area) that mean certain emotions (superior temporal sulcus, posterior cingulate, and medial frontal gyrus) and we want innately are wired to theorize that others are like us (no existential loneliness for us – despite JP Sartre et al). The three parenthesized regions do the anthropomorphism that poets and those who think pet rocks are happy. We are all imbued with this need. It’s not about rational thought at all; that comes later in the justification stage. Interestingly, if we are deprived of others our abilities to empathize and take actions to help others go way down, so think about various types of child abuse that change people when they most need those various centres to be turned on, nurtured and grown. Fascinating chapter. Oh, and all you parents who have been deprived of your child or lost a child feel intense pain because of simple hormones that also regulate water level in the body – vasopressin and oxytocin. Such a loss wipes most people out for the rest of their lives.

The collected wisdom of How We Decide comes on pages 244 – 250, but the book is much more fascinating than the summary. And The Coda puts neatly the mesh between the experience (emotion) and reasoning (conscious thought) components of our thoughts. Both have their specialties and both are required all day long every day.

Lehrer takes my vote as the science writer who has best thought through the science – their papers often written with tentative conclusions, in gibberish text and with the need to pass peer judgment, demonstrate repeatable experiments and with an overladen Latin weight – and translated it into incisive, sparkling, accessible, understandable and compelling reading for the human being who is interested in investigating how things work in their heads. And it passes the short attention spam test: the book ends in less than 250 pages. As previously mentioned, I am working on a book: The Brains of Poets (dcreid.ca), and would always like more science and more art. This book will appeal to a broader audience. It will help you make better decisions every day.

5. Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damsio, 1994

I came to this book after reading 10,000 pages on the issues of art and science – bibliography on dcreid.ca. I decided to go back and read this 1994 book because it underlies a lot of current discussion and dispute on the role of emotions in thinking and decision making. Because of this central influential role, I gave this book a five star rating. It is highly scientific, so not a light read, and will annoy those with a philosophy background; the title makes you pick up the book, though this is not, ultimately, a refutation of Cartesian views: mind and body, reason and emotion.

First published in 1994, Damasio’s classic brain science book put on the map that the emotional and sub-conscious brain is far more important to our thought than the last three millennia of western thought has believed. This is must-read background for those who want to understand how the brain works. The current Penguin paperback has a new – 2005 – Preface where Damasio updates the science of the intervening decade and posits a good summary of what the book covers – you can get the complete argument from it, for those who like to cut to the chase.

The book makes a good case for the use of emotion, feelings, intuitions, and underlying currents of electrical activity from the body (the brain exists in a body after all that bathes it with more than six million nerve impulses a second) in the process of making decisions some of which require much thought and some of which happen instantly without any thought.

For those looking for a quick, decisive account of brain anatomy, Damasio has done a good job on pages 24 – 30. But, of course, a well put together, book length treatment can be found in Rita Carter’s, Mapping the Mind, a good introduction of depth for non-scientists.

Early in the book, the case of Phineas P. Gage, circa 1848, who got a metal bar shot through his brain but survived, is discussed. The poor fellow made poor decisions for the rest of his life and had various personality issues – understandably. These result from the areas of the brain that were severed. Then Damasio moves to the present, discussing clients/patients who had lesions (cuts) in the brain and specific personality problems because of them.

Chapter four gets into the nitty gritty science involved in the parts of the brain responsible for normal processing of emotion, personal feelings and its integration with attention and reasoning. Essentially the central lower part behind your eyes, the bands of brain beside and up from your ears and various centres, particularly on the right side, along with the high emotion centre, the amygdala are the areas involved. I have a science background and the chapter had so much content it left my brain whizzing, fascinating as it was about how cuts that separate different parts of the brain result in specific problems that can be teased apart in experiments. Page 83-85 of the next chapter neatly summarizes the science in non-science speak.

One problem with brain science books, and this includes this title, is that memory is not adequately understood yet. Here we do not store true images, but dispositional representations, yet, at the same time we can all recall the Mona Lisa’s face, our children and waves dropping on a shore. In other words, I don’t think science yet has a convincing argument. Time will tell.

One of Damasio’s central insights occurs on page 111: the body exerts effects on our minds and our emotions constantly. It does this through nerve circuits of ‘modulator neurons’ that are interested in survival and so monitor our conscious mind’s, the relative goodness or badness of circumstance and influence our thinking and acting toward or away from them. The end of the chapter section: Beyond Drives and Instincts, p 123 – 126, is a good summary of the science, genetic, biology, reductionist side of the equation with the effects of humans living in and being affected by a communal society.

Damassio then moves to a central distinction for him: the difference he posits between emotions and feelings. The former are, in his definition, about the body, and the latter about the mind; however they are linked in that a conscious feeling results in effects on the body (more than just a GSR polygraph sense), and those effects also can affect the way we think. He sees feelings of three types: basic universal (like fear), subtle universal (like guilt) and background feelings derived from the body in which the brain sits. The full system is drawn on page 163, but don’t just flip to the diagram; you need to understand it in context. This again is full of science and I suggest you go through with a yellow magic marker and highlight the high points, if you need something to make you pay attention.

Chapter 8 is the meat of the book: the Somatic-Marker Hypothesis. This means the body’s images, or emotions. I think it a bad term, but it was not my choice. The chapter is about how our underlying emotions, our body states help us make decisions, whether good or bad. We can’t make ‘rational’ decisions without the body’s input on how it ‘feels’ about a situation, say avoiding a car accident, how a smile can make your defenses melt, how even the love of rationality is about the love, not the rationality, and so on. This centre which is brought together in time with working memory in the prefrontal cortex, is much about the spindle cell system and its distribution of dopamine as a ‘reward’ for a gut feeling, whether good or bad. This theme is well extended in Jonah Lehrer’s, recent book, How We Decide. Damassio’s pages 196 to 201 are where he brings together the entire subject and how the mind, and body movement work through time, and are a fascinating completion of his thoughts, that you should not read before reading the chapter preceding this last section. Basic emotions manage actions in a rational way.

Chapter 9 relates interesting gambling experiments with normal subjects and with ones who have lesions in their prefrontal cortexes where conscious attention is focused. The results are clear that those without proper wiring to receive the bodies accumulated ‘knowledge’ about past events cannot predict what will happen in the future and thus result in disastrous decision making skills. Normal participants come to learn when to avoid certain decisions because they can read the body’s experientially derived feelings about a possible choice. Note that this type of analysis is about our abilities to predict future events, and is from an entirely different perspective than those scientists who focus on, say, how the eye picks up images and sets the mind in motion.

Chapter 10 has two fascinating explanations of central features of the human mind: consciousness and subjectivity. Consciousness arises in the instant of the mind focusing on a subject, not the other way around. So it is ephemeral and gives way to another and then another consciousness in an endless stream. Subjectivity arises from the mind reviewing the effects of events the mind is engaged in, a triple mind event.

This book does not pass the short attention spam test. At 267 pages, the book is not that long, but the type is small and the text is dense. Tough sledding for those looking for a not-so-deep look.

6. The Brain that Changes Itself – Norman Doidge

This is an excellent book for the general reader of the new concept of neuro-plasticity.  Doidge is a doctor and worked with Paul Bach-y-Rita, the scientist who brought this subject on stream since the 1970s when every other neurobiologist thought he was a nutbar. That was because the view was that once a brain was formed, it could not change. If you had a stroke,  head injury, or eye damage, tough, you were stuck with it for the rest of your life.

Bahc-y-rita found out differently. His own father, a professor, had a large stroke and could not get himself on or off the toilet, could not crawl, could not lift his arm.  But with much ongoing work of doing things like learning how to crawl again, then to stand without falling over, and so on, he ultimately regained his abilities – including speaking and typing – to be a professor for many years, and go mountain climbing, where he died on a holiday – he fell off a mountain. Very ironic.

The concept of brain plasticity means that if you can give stimulation to one sense for another sense, that the brain changes itself to process the new information and also connect with the areas that require responding to the world – like walking or talking – and the damage is ultimately repaired. For example, a woman who was given too much antibiotics in an infection in a hospital lost her sense of balance so badly that she could not stand up, lost her job, lost everything. She was treated by Bachy-Rita in the following way: a hat with gyroscopes and vision devices was put on her head and then the leads were attached to a small paddle that she placed on her tongue. The small electrical discharges to her tongue were taken up into her head to compensate for her ruined vestibular system (our balance centre in our inner ears), made connection with the visual cortex and the parietal body command centres and ultimately she got to the point where she only had to put the hat on for a few minutes every four months. I have grossly simplified this one example of dozens in the book.

In another example – this has been made into a documentary, that I have seen on PBS and CBC – a blind man was given a vision hat and the tongue paddle. In the end he was able to navigate his way around a room, and, ’see’ and pick up a ball from the floor, spot a garbage can across the room and toss it into it. I don’t think I could do this, and I’ve got sight.

Plasticity, like the left brain right brain concept, is currently being dumbed down into psycho babble on many tv shows. This book gives you a much better introduction to the concept and is definitely worth looking at for anyone who wants to understand how the brain can be trained to use another area to provide a function. Many products have been made using these concepts. Space suits are so thick that people can’t feel nuts and bolts in their fingers. Gloves with sensors on the outside connected to the inside make this possible. Men who have lost the ability to ejaculate have been provided with a sensory condom that takes the friction information to another area of skin that then gets taken to the brain and processed so that sexual pleasure is enjoyed and ejaculation happens once again. Tests have shown promise for dealing with the tremor of Parkinsons… it’s a very useful concept of wide application. If you have a brain ‘misfunction’, you should read this book. The problem is not your brain, the problem is that no one has devised a rehabilitation program that you can follow to get the functions back.

And for a Brave New World concept, read page 84 for descriptions of how, in future, we will be able to turn our ‘learn easy’ centre (nucleus basalis) on with yet to be developed drugs and learn anything with the ease we did in childhood. It will be for us the Matrix response to the question: Can you fly this thing? Answer: Not yet. And then you get loaded.

Do focus on chapter 4 that is about love, sex, parenting changing our attractions, losing a love, grieving and learning to love another. All are plasticity events whereby certain brain chemicals (for ex, oxytocin and vasopressin) allow us to unlearn old loves and form new attractions, but at the same time change sexual attraction into love. It also has an excellent section on sexual fantasies, how they arise, stimulate us, and when knowing their origin, change can begin. You will be able to look at your own mind with new light, a common association is sex and violence, and this chapter will give you some insight into yourself. I lost my children through divorce 15 years ago, and this chapter has a good explanation of how one begins to feel less pain by making small steps away over the years, or how, for instance, a new love can shield you from the necessary grieving over the loss of children. It’s still there, waiting to be faced and let go.

Chapter 7 has a fascinating section on pain in phantom limbs (Ramachandran, as above). Using a mirror box that projected a limb for an amputated limb, Ramachandran, was able to have patients lose pain from the limb they didn’t have and to unfreeze limbs that had been in slings or casts before amputation. This means that pain is in the brain, not the body, and that the entire body is really just a phantom the brain has constructed for its own use. This means that with the correct mind stimulus that a person could become anything they wanted to be, including a rocket scientist, or a better rocket scientist.

Chapter 9 focuses on psychoanalysis/psychotherapy and how the mind through its ability to change, does so, and at the same time, can become completely rigid, too. Anyone who has done the shrink thing must read this chapter as it is fascinating and deep stuff. I have done so, and believe me it was painful, but, in my case, allowed me to find my life, something I could never have done on my own. I changed beliefs I didn’t know I had and beliefs that were what I considered my most important good points, and so very hard to give up. Very difficult, very painful, but all plastic. You will also see Freud in a new light – he has had the bad rap of being all about sex for too many decades. And it has much about the left and right hemispheres of our cortex – the left is about explicit memory, the right about implicit. This is a good description of a topic that became dumbed down in the 1970s to serve a pop psychology industry. You will learn much about memory and the hippocampus that mediates learning and long term memory, much during sleep.

7. The Element : How Finding your Passion Changes Everything – Ken Robinson – 2009

This is a well-known book on creativity. Not particularly scientific, so it is to the side of what I am doing, but the gist is that you have an aptitude for something that you are passionate about and you should pursue it because that is the best thing for you to do. He has much to say about how the education system is narrowly focused on reading/riting/rithmetic, but that the world is in a period where change is happening at a far greater speed than in the past and as it is about technology not yet invented our children will be in a world with jobs not yet conceived. We are educating for the wrong thing: the past, the Industrial Revolution when basic math and reading was required and passed to a greater percentage of the human race in the western world in the 17th and 18th century. See TED.com for videos of Sir Ken doing a lecture.

The first chapter explains what Sir Ken means by the Element. Pages 21 – 26 sum the situation up: I get it: I love it: I want it: Where is it? The next chapter has a good take on western thought that our interest in reason against emotion is deep-seated and not a good measure of intelligence. The IQ section is very interesting. The inventor, Alfred Binet, did it as a contract for the French government, thought of it as the opposite of an intelligence test, but for the use that children could get their special needs met in schooling and that intelligence was something that was not innate but could be made greater and greater.

The second part is the addition of Lewis Terman in 1916. He felt the exact opposite: eugenics. He thought it shows how inferior races were not intelligent, and this was innate and unchangeable, and thus they should only be given education to the point where they could labour. He identified: Indians, Mexicans and Negroes as races that should be given rudimentary practical training only. Today, of course, we call this discrimination – a word that, incidentally, has changed its meaning over the decades from good to bad or both. And then there is that old notion about ‘breeding’. IQ tests was used by 30 states who passed laws allowing them to neuter people below a certain number because they reproduced too fast and had to be stopped. Pretty bizarre. The rest of the chapter argues the notion that there are many types of intelligence, for example, as Howard Gardner argued: linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, kinaesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. So ask not how intelligent you are but, how are you intelligent.

Shimano Communiaction Award, Maximum Salmon, 2008
Best Photograph, Canadian Aviation Magazine, 2007
Shimano Communication Award, Outdoor Writers of Canada, Fishing for Dreams, silver, 2006
Shortlist, Dorothy Livesay Award, 2005, The Hunger
Shortlist, Dorothy Livesay Award, 2000, Love And Other Things That Hurt
People’s Poetry Award, 1998
Silver Medal, Bliss Carman Award, 1998
National Magazine Award nomination, 1999
Silver Medal, Bliss Carman Award, 1976

Affiliations

President, League of Canadian Poets, 2009 – 2010
President, Victoria Book Prize Society, 2005
President, Federation of BC Writers, 1996

Education

B.SC., Zoology, Biochemistry, U of Calgary, 1974
B.A., with Honours, English, Philosophy, U of Liverpool, 1976
Masters of Public Administration, U of Victoria, 1980

Life

D.C. Reid walked out onto the Alberta prairie west of Calgary when he was three years old (1955) and never came back. When he was five he reached his hand into a stream and pulled out a trout. His life has been about water since that day. He was published in MacLeans when he was ten and thought the writing life would be easy. What an innocent.

Since that time he has been published in more than 50 literary magazines in Canada, the United States, the U.K., India and Mexico, with his work having been translated into Spanish and Hindi. On the literary side of his writing life, he has published four books of poetry and one novel.

Along the way, and much to his surprise, he took a B.Sc. in biochemistry and zoology, then started over again, instead of going on to a PHD in cancer research; going to England and taking a B.A. in English and Philosophy – both honours degrees. Arriving back in Canada in 1976 unable to find a job, Dennis was told by Eli Mandel at the then Banff School of Fine Arts he could write poetry, something he would never have guessed, nor ever do on his own.

Reid went on to do an M.P.A. to get a job to feed his new family. After going crazy with that and then spending the best decade of his life bringing his daughters up at home, he lost them through divorce, a sadness that continues.

In 1996, Patrick Lane told him at the now Banff Centre that his instincts were good and so was his work. He then jumped off the cliff and has lived in the fire of poetry since then. Now, he calls it: a necessary love. His fifth and sixth books of poetry will come soon: What It Means To Be Human, and You Shall Have No Other. His book to follow those is: Elegies, and there is work from all three books on this site (and another six books).

On another side of his life, Reid has gone on to write for more than 50 magazines/newspapers/websites across North America on fishing – gear, fly and Spey – in salt- and fresh-water. His fourth fishing book will be released in 2008. When not at his computer, he will just as frequently be found in his Vancouver Island wilderness with the fish he likes to check on from time to time just to make sure they are okay. Once secure in that knowledge, he lets them go, sometimes seeing in his rounds as many as 500 in a y