Title of the week!

"'Doctor' or 'darling'? Decoding the communication partner from ECoG* of the anterior temporal lobe during non-experimental, real-life social interaction" appears in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

________
*"ECoG" (pronounced "ee-cog" = Electrocorticography or intracranial EEG)

Some good advice from Karen Amstrong.

"There are times when you have to speak out against injustice or cruelty. But if you speak — and this is what Gandhi said — in order to punish or wound, you will do more harm than good. The Dalai Lama said that to condemn injustice with hatred in your voice will make the injustice worse. ... So it does no good to attack viciously. The thing to do is not to rise to the bait."

-from an interview with Karen Armstrong in the June issue of the Believer magazine.

Привет, Россия!

Many NeuroCooking pageviews are coming from Russia, and we would be delighted to hear from our Russian readers.

Please, consider saying hello using the blog comments, or via twitter at @thaler or @jimpekar.

The sun & the moon (heard on my morning commute...)

This morning on the Writer's Almanac I heard Garrison Keillor read from Alexander Pope's 1734 "An Essay on Man:"

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees..."

And then a few minutes later I heard Mr. John Darnielle sing the first lines of the opening and title track of the Mountain Goats 2002 album "Tallahassee:"

"Window facing an ill-kept front yard
Plums on the tree heavy with nectar
Prayers to summon the destroying angel
Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector..."

Were you wondering, about Pope's trees, about just what kind of trees were they?

Turns out, they're plum trees...

"h" vs. "H" (and the Mountain Goats, Down Under)

The Mountain Goats rocking Melbourne's Toff, 9 May 2012 (iPhone photo).

Last week I was in Melbourne, Australia, for the 20th annual meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Melbourne is a great place for live music, and, as it happened, I found out in advance that the Mountain Goats would be in town! So, when I travelled Down Under I did so with a ticket for what was to be a sold-out show at Melbourne's The Toff in Town.

How eager was I to see the Mountain Goats (whose songs I've loved for years, but whom I'd never seen live)? Let's just say I went to the Toff a whole day early, to check out the venue, which is how I came to see Max Savage and the False Idols play soul-tinged country-western Rock-n-Roll:

Max Savage and the False Idols at the Toff, 8 May 2012 (camera: Ricoh GX-100).

However, dear NeuroCooking friends, my topic today may not be singer-songwriters, or rock-n-roll, or intimate venues for live music, or fantastic audiences who shout out the choruses to early Mountain Goats songs, allowing Mr. John Darnielle to sing just the verses, or even the persistent paradox of how listening to songs about self-destructive persons engaged in abusive relationships can be uplifting. No, my topic today may be beer.

I like hoppy beers, like India Pale Ales. When I visit someplace with unfamiliar offerings on tap, especially overseas, I will ask the bartender to recommend a beer. So, that Tuesday night at the Toff, I asked the bartender:

"What's hoppy? Like an IPA?"

And he replied:

"Yes. Would you like a taste?"

I did a double-take, and looked at the taps, and yes, they had a beer on tap called "Hoppy."

And yes, it was.

This "hoppy" vs. "Hoppy" reminded me, instantly, of the old "Who's on first" routine:

It's too late to see Abbott and Costello live, but, thankfully, it's not too late to see the Mountain Goats, which I recommend that you do, wherever and whenever you can!

"We love you, John!" The Mountain Goats at the Toff, 9 May 2012 (iPhone photo).

Board of Education member: Rock Creek Hills Park not "adequate size," so Montgomery Hills site would be needed, too.

Françoise Carrier, Chair of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Planning Board, attended the April 17th meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Education. There, Board of Education member Laura Berthiaume told Ms. Carrier that, due to the small size of Rock Creek Hills Park, if Montgomery County Public Schools were to take the park to build Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) middle school #2, then it would soon become necessary to build a third B-CC middle school, on the site of the former Montgomery Hills Junior High (currently the Yeshiva and Torah School of Greater Washington).

You can read their exchange on Kensington Patch.

To help spread the word, after you click through to the blog post on Patch, click on the Facebook "recommend" button on that page!

A Racy Taint.

Just the final sentence of the article "Off-Color Communiques Taint FBI Sting in Court: Racy text messages between informant and agents turn off jurors" by Del Quentin Wilber, which appears on the front page of today's Washington Post:

“U [expletive] [expletive],” the agent texted back.

Jung Slices His Brain.

An excerpt from "The Red Book (Liber Novus)" by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961):


The Cabiri:  "We forged a flashing sword for you, with which you can cut the knot that entangles you."

I:  "I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow."

The Cabiri:  "We also place before you the devilish, skillfully twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will cut through it."

I:  "Let me see, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly, a human brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?"

The Cabiri:  "The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both: entanglement and severing."

 ______
Notes: 
Jung's Red Book was the most influential unpublished book, ever. Almost a century after it was begun, it was published in 2009 in a facsimile edition, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
This passage appears on pp. 166-167.
The Cabiri were ancient deities.

Of mice and men.

Scene: Friday morning in the Bethesda Row (Maryland) Apple Store, seven minutes after the ten o'clock opening. I'm buying a mouse. A young man is handling the transaction; his co-worker, a young woman, is standing close beside him.

HE: Do you need anything else today?

ME: No, some mornings you just wake up, and feel like a mouse.

HE: Really.

ME: And some other mornings, you wake up, and feel like a man.

HE (smiling): Yeah.

ME: But then, I'm married.

SHE (To her co-worker, while elbowing him in the ribs, hard): But you're not!

Brown, Grey, & Green.

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."

- John Berger

Vincent Grey is the recently-elected Mayor of Washington, DC. During the campaign, candidate debates were regularly marked by another candidate, Mr. Sulaimon Brown, proclaiming "Vote Brown, vote Grey, vote any color you want, just don't vote [for incumbent Mayor Adrian] Fenty!"

After Mr. Grey took office, Mr. Brown was given a job in his administration, but was soon fired, when some facts about Mr. Brown's past came out.

Mr. Brown is now alleging that the Grey campaign had promised him a job, and provided him with financial support during the campaign, in return for his continued attacks on Mr. Fenty.

To support these contentions, Mr. Brown has made his cellphone records available to the Washington Post, which has assembled a data graphic summarizing calls between him and Mr. Grey, and between him and Mr. Grey's campaign chair, Ms. Lorraine Green.

We at NeuroCooking today celebrate the key, or graphical legend, to the Washington Post's fine data graphic:

From Japan, via Walnut Creek.

"So," she asked, "that's bike jewelry, right?"

"Yes," I admitted, "and I got them in red, to go with the bar tape."

"But, if you want the best person, ..."

In 1940, Frank Graham, President of the University of North Carolina, asked George Snedecor, a leader in statistics whom he had recently happened to meet on a train, for a favor. Could Snedecore recommend a man to lead the new statistics department in North Carolina? Snedecore responded with a letter that listed ten men, and then stated:

"These are the ten best men I can think of. But, if you want the best person, I would recommend Gertrude Cox."

Cox got the job.

_____

Source: "The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century" by David Salsburg, 2001 (chapter 19).

A metacognitive approach to problem-solving.

"You're a pretty smart fella."

"Not that smart."

"If you're not that smart, how'd you figure it out?"

"I tried to imagine a fellow smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, 'what would he do?' "

- from Heist (2001) by David Mamet

"What is it that most people need, but don't know that they need?"

We were talking about Google's six billion dollar bid for Groupon, and she suggested that I think up an online business idea that would make us rich.

"What is it," she asked, "that most people need, but don't know that they need?"

"That's easy," I said, "What most people need is to be slapped upside the head. The hard part is getting them to pay."

Just two days away!

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"... it is too narrow for that."

In a 1953 letter, Wolfgang Pauli related to Carl Jung a comment that Ernst Mach had made, some decades earlier, regarding Freudian psychoanalysis:

"These people try to use the vagina as if it were a telescope so that they can see the world through it. But that is not its natural function – it is too narrow for that."

____

Source: "137: Jung, Pauli, and the pursuit of a scientific obsession" by Arthur I. Miller.

"My feeling about you is just the opposite."

In 1926, Wolfgang Pauli attended a lecture by Paul Ehrenfest. Afterwards, Pauli made many criticisms, and an exasperated Ehrenfest said:

"I like your publications better than I like you."

Pauli responded:

"Strange. My feeling about you is just the opposite."

____

Source: "137: Jung, Pauli, and the pursuit of a scientific obsession" by Arthur I. Miller.

"Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems."

Just one sentence (another one titles this post) from James Garvey's interview with Peter Hacker:

"There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing."

[emphasis in original]

on the air

"Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 – 1935)