"...close to music..."

"The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time. One might argue that photography is as close to music as to painting."

- John Berger, from "Understanding a Photograph" (1968).

Bucky, December 2010. (Click image for full-screen.)

Pretty much the last thing I expected to hear about a Wagner opera at Bayreuth.

"... for no clear reasons, singers smear one another with crude oil."

- from "At Bayreuth, Boos and Dropped Jaws" by Anthony Tommasini in today's New York Times.

Title of the Week!

"The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism" by Michelle Nadine Servaas, Harriëtte Riese, Remco Jan Renken, Jan-Bernard Cornelis Marsman, Johan Lambregs, Johan Ormel, and André Aleman, appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Thank you for giving me control of your brain!

Compelling and Devastating.

"The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" by Michael Moss will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

"What if he was the city?"

"Perceptual capillaries filled the entire indoor space, superexfoliating, dully aching, all of them translucent, and all of them [his] own; or had the shopping center shrunk, in all that sick sensation of tininess, until it fit in [his] ear and reduced the thousand sounds to auditory dots, compressing them, in the shell of his cranium, into the pure white rushing of a lifeless ocean?"

-from page 216 of the Picador edition of "The Twenty-Seventh City," the 1988 novel by Jonathan Franzen.

"Disruption is overrated."

"'Disruption is overrated,' [Stone] said. 'If you tell good stories, the platforms are sort of beside the point. We made the most analog thing you can think of, a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, and it worked out as well as anything we have ever done.'"

-Matt Stone, quoted by David Carr today in the NewYork Times.

In what sense is it true that, had the past been in some way different, an aspect of the present would be more substantial?

Counterfactual history is a literary genre, not a mode of scientific argument, so it was a (pleasant) surprise to come upon the following in a thoughtful and provocative article entitled "Default positions: how neuroscience's historical legacy has hampered investigation of the resting mind" by F. Callard, J. Smallwood, and D.S. Margulies, which appears in Frontiers in Psychology:

"... a compelling body of literature – largely unknown or disregarded ... – ... documents various methods to investigate the processes characterizing activities pursued during so-called “idle time” ... what we now refer to as self-generated mental activity including daydreaming, fantasy, mind-wandering, and dissociation. It is not difficult to see that if these research domains had flourished ... rather than been neglected, our vocabulary for describing self-generated thought would have been richer; our methods to investigate such thought more creative; and hence our capacities to interpret the psychological meaning of different forms of spontaneous neural activity in different systems, including the mental life and associated neural systems of the [Default Mode Network], more substantial."

"Back out of all this now too much for us ..."

At a recent conference in Sonoma, California, I met the poet Jill McDonough. 

Most of the conference attendees were architects and designers. I'd flown in from Maryland to show how magnetic resonance imaging can reveal the functional organization of the human brain; she'd flown in from Boston to read poetry at the closing dinner.

Please may I suggest, dear NeuroCooking friends, that you read this poem, then wipe your tears, and buy this book?

___________

[Note regarding post title: The opening of Robert Frost's Directive is repurposed as a line in "Blackwater" from the book "Where You Live."]

This is not a slide.

I had planned to, but I changed my mind, and I did not show this slide at last week's Applied Brilliance Conference:

However, I did show this one:

So, where are all the great novels written by dogs?

"Everything you need for a novel happens at about dog level."

-Garrison Keillor, on A Prairie Home Companion, tonight.

"I feel / I feel like I am falling / and it feels / it feels like it's okay..."

"...we ain't nothing / but we are something..."

- from "Fall Apart with You" by Alejandro Escovedo (who will be appearing at Maxwell's in Hoboken on Monday!)

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.

e.g., "Rule number eight: exploit superstitious thinking"

"Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers" ("... written for reviewers who may not have sufficient statistical expertise to provide an informed critique during the peer-reviewed process, but would like to recommend rejection on the basis of inappropriate or invalid statistical analysis") by Prof. Karl Friston will appear in the journal NeuroImage.

"I take no sentence for granted."

Just one sentence (another titles this post) from the essay "My Life's Sentences" by Jhumpa Lahiri in today's New York Times:

"The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life."

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.

Title of the week!

"Of Toasters and Molecular Ticker Tapes" by Dr. Konrad P. Kording appears in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Life imitates art (at highway speed).

Today, on the way home from work, I avoided traffic congestion by driving on the newly-opened InterCounty Connector. However, because the car's navigation system doesn't know about this brand-new (multi-billion dollar!) highway, its screen showed the car traveling overground, not on a road.

Which reminded me of "Survival Car" by Fountains of Wayne:

"Funny how the ground can find my wheels
I'm going where the road ain't there"

"Funny how the ground can find my wheels
I'm going where the road won't dare"

"I saw my father with his eyes closed, basking in the early sun, sipping a cup of strong black coffee."

"A place is both itself

and what we make of it, as we are ourselves

and what a place makes of us."

- from "Pecans" by Connie Wanek in her book "On Speaking Terms" (2010) from Copper Canyon Press.

Zip Code 10048.

[Photo by Jon Thaler; Nikon 35mm f/2 on D700.]