Growth Above All

Yesterday, I invoked a phrase borrowed from Jason Epstein in writing about the "unbreakable addiction" of the World Economic Forum to economic growth. Where substances are concerned, one is addicted when the need to get a "fix" of that substance excludes any other need, even those necessary for sustaining life. My metaphorical use of the term "addiction" extrapolates from substances to concepts. The World Economic Forum is basically a pulpit from which those who have been properly ordained (usually based on a metric such as personal net worth) may preach that economic growth will solve all of the world's problems. This may seem a bit anachronistic in the face of data that support the premise that economic growth can be linked to many of the conditions of the climate crisis, but those who are sustained by their wealth and power need not worry about being logically out of step with the rest of the world.

Fortunately, every now and then "the rest of the world" manages to get its hands on a reality check. After reading Al Jazeera's account of our Congressional investigation of Toyota, I realized that all of those defective automobiles may have provided such a reality check. Consider the written statement released by Akio Toyoda prior to facing our Congress. Beyond the usual gestures of contrition were some remarks that are likely to be taken as heretical among the World Economic Forum congregation:

We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organisation, and we should sincerely be mindful of that.

Quite frankly, I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick.

That heresy was reinforced by the testimony given yesterday by Jim Lentz, who is in charge of Toyota's United States operations:

I think we outgrew our engineering resource. And the most important thing is that we lost sight of the customer.

I suspect that this was the comfort level he found for declaring that the priorities of shareholders, who never wanted anything other than a return on investment, were allowed to exceed those of not only the customers but also all those involved in the production chain of what the customers were buying; and that premise is also the basis for Toyoda's statement.

We might do well to think of the shareholders as the belly of a corporate body, rather along the lines of the parable related by Menenius Agrippa in the first act of William Shakespeare's Coriolanus. While it is true that the belly consumes all (and often seems to have no priority other than to demand more), without its consumption none of the other members of the body would be able to function. The punch line of Shakespeare's parable is that, when the belly completes its digestive duties, all that remains for it is what is ultimately ejected from the large intestine. Shareholders would argue that what is left for them is the increased value of their shares; but that value is nothing more than a necessary fiction of convenience (from Niall Ferguson's optimistic point of view) or a manifestation of "naive extrapolation and collective magical thinking" (in John Kay's pessimistic one). From Shakespeare's point of view, there is more substance in our excreta than in those shares!

Nevertheless, the corporate body of Toyota needs its shareholders as much as the human body of Shakespeare's parable needs its belly. However, in the healthy human body the activities of the belly are regulated by those of the brain. By analogy, that addiction to growth upon which the World Economic Forum sustains itself, is addling the corporate brain in much the same way that substance addiction damages the human brain. Back when our economic crisis was at its worst, a few isolated voices kept trying to ask whether or not the "real economy" would be part of any of the recovery strategies being proposed. When we look at Main Street, rather than Wall Street, we see that such a "real economy" is still being neglected if not entirely ignored. That is because the "growth pushers" are still peddling their stuff on Wall Street; and, until we drive those pushers off the street, the addiction they promote will flourish. The rest of us will be stuck with a belly no longer capable of nourishing the rest of the body while going about its business of consumption and excretion.

Your Brain on Music is a Highly Distributed Processor

BBC Science Reporter Victoria Gill in currently in San Diego covering the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After yesterday's proceedings she filed a story that almost immediately grabbed my attention. Here is the opening summary:

Teaching stroke patients to sing "rewires" their brains, helping them recover their speech, say scientists.

By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech.

If a person's "speech centre" is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their "singing centre" instead.

The paper was delivered by Gottfried Schlaug, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, practicing at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The research has been based on a therapeutic technique for stroke patients that has been used for some time. It is based on the premise that the brain has separate areas for processing speech and music. The conclusion of the above excerpt reasons that, if the patient cannot use language through speaking, linguistic performance may still be exercised through singing.

Not only is this principle familiar, it has led to any number of jokes. Had Figaro decided to ask Susanna about the price of the ribbons on her new little hat, one might have ended up with an elaborate duet (of a sort that only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart could have composed) debating the equally elaborate fine points of the cost of living in seventeenth-century Seville! More seriously, Schlaug's contribution has escalated the study of the stroke-afflicted brain from a successful therapeutic technique to new results in brain imaging. His claim is that he can show "what is actually going on in the brain" (his words) as patients learn to sing their words rather than speak them.

More interesting for me, however, was a reaction Gill reported from another research community:

Dr Aniruddh Patel from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said the study was an example of the "explosion in research into music and the brain" over the last decade.

"People sometimes ask where in the brain music is processed and the answer is everywhere above the neck," said Dr Patel.

"Music engages huge swathes of the brain - it's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex."

Again, there has been talk about the brain as a distributed processor for some time. This inspired the whole connectionist approach to artificial intelligence that was so popular 25 years ago and probably still has its allotment of die-hard supporters. Connectionism never progressed very far beyond serving as a new approach to applying optimization to pattern classification, which is only a small part of what probably occupies "your brain on music" (to appropriate the turn of phrase by Daniel J. Levitin). The practice of music is a far more complex behavior, and researchers like Patel may be leading us into intricacies of brain function that could be only vaguely hinted in Levitin's exposition.

Needless to say, we are still quite some distance from any understanding of music behavior that accounts for the objective, subjective, and social worlds in any remotely comprehensive way. The good news from Professor Schlaug is the imaging technology keeps getting better; and, each time it improves, researchers come up with new ways to leverage those improvements. As we proceed down this path, there will be less talk about the "musical brain" at cocktail parties and more talk at scientific conferences!

Quiet Desperation in Rhode Island

This week's episode of Brotherhood on Showtime may have acknowledged William Shakespeare in its title ("The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth"); but the "poetic wisdom" of the story line came straight from Henry David Thoreau:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Indeed, had the series been set in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts, rather than Providence, Rhode Island, a more appropriate title for the episode might have been "In Search of Walden Pond." The episode did little to advance the overall narrative of the series; but, using the setting of a Labor Day Weekend, it offered a reflective examination of all the major characters, all but one of whom had retreated to a Walden-like setting. The reflections may not have been as deep as those Walden inspired in Thoreau; but, this being television, we should be thankful for the few crumbs of reflection we get!

The episode was basically structured around three "Walden surrogates." The most important of these (emphasized by its role in framing the entire episode) actually involved a physical body of water in the form of a lake whose shore serves as the border of a country house. This is where Tommy Caffee wants to take his family to retreat from the world of Rhode Island politics, having become fed up with it all in the previous episode. His is the embodiment of a life "frittered away" (again, Thoreau's words); and the key question is whether or not he can recover his life in a pastoral setting so alien to the life he has led since birth. Indeed, the setting is so peaceable that Freddie Cork, a lion (somewhat weakened) of the gang world, is there by the lake playing badminton with Tommy's family, perhaps as in indication that reality will intrude on this ideal retreat sooner than Tommy may have anticipated.

The second Walden is a bed-and-breakfast in some unnamed Rhode Island town on the Atlantic coast. Declan Giggs has come here to try to patch up relations with his estranged wife Cassie. This "kingdom" is far less peaceable when Cassie encounters her boss; and it comes out that she had an affair with him while separated from Declan. Both characters then drown themselves in drink, leaving their "Walden" in greater (and noisier) desperation than when they arrived.

The final Walden is an anonymous motel room where Colin Carr hopes to final consummate his passion for Kath Parry, whose life with Michael Caffee (Colin's boss) has been steadily deteriorating. The setting is anything but pastoral; and the interplay is as awkward as it is dangerous, particularly in the context of Michael's uncontrollable capacity for violence. Both of these characters are mired in quiet desperation out of the necessity of their situation. The progress of this mini-narrative is thwarted every time it inches forward; and, in the context of what we know about the possible consequences, this is probably just as well.

Indeed, in the course of his one-hour episode, Michael is the one character who does not find a Walden to which he can retreat. It may be a holiday weekend, but he remains all business. However, this is probably because his "business" is his only strategy for warding off the symptoms of his damaged brain. Thus, while a Walden is offered to him in the form of a barbeque at the home of the Italian gang leader, he can do little other than aggravate the Irish-Italian division, ultimately getting cast out from the would-be Edenic setting.

As I said, none of this has really advanced the underlying narrative. Rather, it used the holiday setting as a pretext for taking stock of the characters. Whether or not the Walden concept was deliberately intended as a setting for this stock-taking, the shoe turned out to fit very well, providing some comforting evidence that, every now and then, television can still satisfy the literary mind.

We Don't ALWAYS Live by Metaphors!

It is probably still hard to find anyone in cognitive science these days who does not worship at the temple that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson built with their Metaphors We Live By book, even if most of the important points in this book had been made at least a decade before its publication by Continental literary theorists, such as Roland Barthes and Paul Ricœur. It was therefore refreshing to read what philosopher Colin McGinn had to say about Steven Pinker's latest burnt offering at this temple in the course of his review of Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought, which appeared in the September 27 issue of The New York Review. McGinn is no slouch when it comes to Continental thinking, which makes his take on metaphor interesting reading:

Our language is transparently shot through with metaphors of one kind or another. But it is far from clear that everything we do with concepts and language can be accounted for in this way; consider how we think and talk about consciousness and the mind, or our moral thinking. The concept of pain, say, is not explicable as a metaphorical variation on some sort of physical concept.

While I appreciate McGinn's effort to deflate blanket generalizations, I am not sure I agree with specific examples. Indeed, because the concept of pain is so subtle, metaphor is often the best, if not the only way, to describe it, particularly when it is necessary to form an effective bridge between our own mundane vocabulary and the far more specialized terminology of the physician we have consulted about the pain. When we get to "consciousness and the mind," our knowledge of what we may call the objective reality is still so impoverished that, as is the case with pain, just about anything we have to say involves invoking one metaphor or another.

No, my beef with the Lakoff-Johnson acolytes and priests is that we engage more than metaphor when we express ourselves through tropes. This is why I feel they committed a great sin of omission in disregarding those Continental literary theorists, because Continental writing tends to example all of the tropes (or, as we were probably taught to call them in school, figures of speech). Indeed, one major spiritual godfather of such Continental thinking, Roman Jakobson, even developed the hypothesis that the decision to invoke metaphor or metonymy may serve as an indicator of a particular cognitive function. (Actually, Jakobson began with the problem of trying to account for cognitive dysfunctions; but this is a case where you can learn from looking through either end of the telescope, if one allows that metaphor!)

Out general ignorance of the breadth of figurative language was brought home to me last night in an amusing way. My wife and I were watching the DVR recording I had made of Akellah and the Bee. One of the words that trips her up was "synecdoche." What tripped me up was the discovery that I had never heard the word pronounced, so I only got it once I heard it defined. I then realized that, for all of the times I had read this word in both books and papers, this was the first time I had ever heard it uttered, even though it is used so frequently in our ordinary speech. Could it be that many of the problems we have in dealing with "real reality" stem from the fact that we are now too vocabulary-impoverished to describe that reality?

The Awful Truth

Last night was the first broadcast of Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, the new HBO documentary produced by James Gandolfini. The timing could not have been better. I suppose the original intention of HBO was to broadcast this on the Sunday night before 9/11. However, by all rights it should have been required viewing for all those directly (or, for that matter, indirectly) involved with General Petraeus’ delivery of his report in the Capitol today. It also coincided with an Associated Press story, now available through Truthdig, which introduced it as follows:

More and more troops are coming home from Iraq with brain damage, the result of repeated exposure to explosions, and doctors are having a difficult time keeping up. For many, the damage causes problems experts have never seen before and aren’t sure how to treat.

Reading a wire dispatch, however, is one thing; but seeing is believing. Two of the ten case studies examined in the HBO documentary involved known physiological brain damage; and one can only wonder about the others, even if treatment thus far has involved other parts of the body. A DVD is already available; but it is clear that HBO is not in this one for the money, since they have also provided a link to a page for watching the entire film on-line. What is most important, however, is that ten members of our military who barely escaped death have been given a voice; and HBO has allowed that voice to be amplified to the strength it deserves. The only question that now remains is: Who in the Congress (not to mention the White House) will take the trouble to listen to these voices seriously?