Lethe

Yesterday I walked into the kitchen pantry while my mind wandered as it often does. I suddenly realized I had forgotten for what I had gone in there. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a senior moment (something one always questions after a certain point) since I commonly did this very thing as a teenager – in fact more frequently then. In those days my mom (overestimating my academic achievement) called me the “absent minded professor.” Then, as now, my mind tended to wander onto events of the day, future plans, recent conversations, and various other matters so that I would forget the task at hand. I remembered what I was after yesterday immediately after exiting the pantry by the way: it was toothpaste, which in fairness is not something one usually retrieves from a pantry. Earlier in the morning I had noticed the tube in the bathroom was empty.
 
This sort of forgetfulness has been understood in broad outline for decades. Short-term and long-term memory storage are separate mechanisms. The former, mediated by the hippocampus, normally is good for up to 30 seconds – short enough to forget why one walked into a pantry. In order to kick a memory into long-term storage in the cortex you either have to deliberately concentrate on it or by happenstance associate it with some stimulus such as pain, fright, pleasure, intrigue, and so on. This is why soon after an hour’s commute we can’t remember most of it – only the parts where we had to concentrate because of some stressful road conditions. By the next day we might forget even these. In essence, the default setting of the brain is to forget; to remember requires effort, whether evoked spontaneously or by intent.
 

forget-me-nots
(Myosotis sylvatica)

Storing something into long-term memory changes the wiring and chemistry of neurons in the cortex so that some connections carry charges easier. These engrams are our memories, but even these frequently fade. (They are also subject to manipulation, which is why “recovered memories” in particular are notoriously unreliable.) A memory can be made not just long-term but permanent either by repeatedly calling up the memory (thereby reinforcing the wiring changes) or by associating it with some major stimulus. Traumatic stimuli are especially effective at locking in a memory, but more pleasant stimuli work, too. A very imperfect but useful analogy is a flexible green tree branch. If you flex it a little and quickly let it go, it will snap back to its original shape. It will, in essence forget the flex: an analog of forgetting a short-term memory. If you flex it repeatedly, however, or give it a sharp extreme bend, it will not snap back all the way, but will retain a partial “memory” of the flex.
 
Recent studies indicate that forgetting is an essential part of the process of making new memories long-term. Encoding all the details of an experience would clutter our minds and overload our capacity to speedily get any meaningful use from the memory. It’s important to remember at what corner to make a turn to get to a destination; it is not important to remember the rust patterns on every storm drain we pass on the way to the corner, so we don’t. It’s important to remember that a dog growled before it bit, not that there was a grass stain on its back left leg. Our brains tend to filter out the unimportant data (though odd details sometimes stick), so we are very good at remembering the gist of an event (the Darwinian advantages of which are obvious) but not the surrounding fluff. This is why eyewitness testimony is so often poor. Was the getaway car green or black? Were there two shots or three? Eyewitnesses often (in fact, usually) conflict with each other about the details and they are very open to influence; for example, if told a car was green they are likely to remember it as green whether it was or not.
 
Recalling just the gist aids survival because it helps us generalize in useful ways. In the dog example above, it’s good to generalize that a growling dog might bite, not that a growling dog with a grass stain on its back left leg might bite. That is too much detail; we could underestimate the risk of a stain-free growling dog. This is a commonplace issue in artificial intelligence as well. The problem is called “overfit,” which is when a self-learning AI attaches too much significance to random coincidences, thereby diminishing its ability to generalize and make useful predictions. An effective AI needs to be able to “forget” the unimportant stuff.
 
There are people with extraordinary long-term memories. The condition is called hyperthymesia, but it is a relative thing. People with hyperthymesia forget, too; they just forget less than the rest of us. This sounds like a great advantage, and in some ways it can be. The actress Marilu Henner famously has this type of memory; it doesn’t seem to cause her any trouble and it certainly has helped her remember her lines. Overall though, people with hyperthymesia do not do any better in life than other people; on the contrary they are at higher risk of PTSD and other obsessive disorders.
 
Experiments with rats have demonstrated various ways that neurotransmitters (dopamine in particular) affect memory retention. Understanding the process better might help with the treatment of PTSD (not enough forgetting) on one end and Alzheimer’s (too much forgetting) on the other. The scifi trope of excising or implanting specific memories does not appear to be in the cards for the foreseeable future, however, which is probably just as well.
 
I’ll end here since there is something I need to retrieve from the pantry. There was something else I wanted to say, but I forget what it was.
 

Beverly Bremers – Don't Say You Don't Remember

Flogging Blogging

 
I don’t write blogs for money, which is fortunate because like two-thirds of bloggers I don’t make any. OK, that’s not entirely true, but so close to entirely as to make no difference. All the money passed along from Google for all the ads on my site since the first one in January 2009 (a few cents here, a few there) might add up to enough to cover the cost of today’s lunch (a Philly cheesesteak from Marilyn’s) but I doubt it. Nonetheless, this is my 800^th post (a nice round number that inspired this bit of retrospection), which is somewhat more than one post per week over the past 12 years. The number of readers varies one week to the next, but there are a few hundred in an average week, which is not enough to be remunerative but enough to be gratifying.
 
It is possible to make money blogging, and there is plenty of advice on the net and elsewhere telling you how to do that. The key is specializing in a particular niche such as dietary advice, financial advice, relationship advice, or…well…advice on how to make money blogging. And then there is politics, the more dehumanizing of one’s opponents the better. While this always generates a lot of hateful feedback, regardless of what the blog’s ideological content might be, it also generates traffic. (I don’t do this: not because I lack a political viewpoint [I’ve been active in a third party] but because there is more than enough of all that on the net. Besides, political “discussions” tend to drive out all others in a sort of Gresham’s Law of discourse, and there is so much else to write about.) So, even though 90% of bloggers earn nothing or a pittance, 2% earn over six-figures. Many of these successful bloggers are associated with related commercial operations, such as travel blogs on sites that sell travel packages or health blogs on sites that sell dietary supplements. Some of the statistics are puzzling. For example, blogs over 2000 words attract the most readers (2500 is the sweet spot) yet the average reader spends only 37 seconds on the site. According to a Wiki article on Speed Reading, a typical reader reads at a rate of 250 words per minute while “proficient readers are able to read 280–310 wpm without compromising comprehension.” So, I have to assume those 2500-word blogs aren’t getting a very thorough examination. But if the goal of the poster is just ad-clicks, I guess that doesn’t matter.

For those who want to try to make money this way, have at it and best of luck. Most of us have other reasons for doing it. I just kind of like it. I could expand on that: writing about a variety of topics prompts me to look into them more deeply, which is fun in itself and provides fodder for dinner conversations (remember when there were dinner conversations?); it’s a way of keeping one’s writing skills from decaying too rapidly; and it serves as a sort of online scrapbook, a reminder of where one’s head was at 5, 10, or more years ago. All of which means, I just kind of like it. I recommend it to anyone with even a slight literary itch.
 
It is, of course, a self-indulgent thing to do, but it has advantages over the other two similar self-indulgences: autobiography and journals, both of which are unabashedly about oneself. Blogging at least purports to be about things of more general interest. Besides, autobiographies are books of lies: some of commission but especially of omission. Anyone who wouldn’t leave significant things out of an autobiography has led a singularly uninteresting life. Journals (unless intended from the start to be for publication) on the other hand are more truthful by design but for that very reason are unwise in today’s world. Psychologists, educators, and therapists often urge keeping a journal as a mental health measure; it is a place where you can express privately all those things on your mind that you would leave out of an autobiography. There always has been a risk of forgetfully leaving it out where some visitor can sneak a peek at it with unfortunate consequences, but prior to the 1990s the damage was likely to be limited. There also generally was plausible deniability if the sneak-reader repeated anything. Nowadays with cell phone photos and scanners the pages can be uploaded in seconds. Privacy never can be assumed anymore, either for the spoken or written word. It is unwise to commit to writing anywhere anything you would not want publicly exposed for all to see. We write blogs with that in mind from the start, so it is not so much a problem.
 
Off course, discretion is not everyone’s strongest attribute. Most people who post unwisely get away with it most of the time because most of the time nobody cares. But one cannot always count on disinterest and ignoration. A prime example of misplaced confidence is the so-called Bling Ring of teenagers about a dozen years ago who burglarized celebrities’ homes in the LA area while posting on social media. (The surprising thing is that they got away with it for a year; Sofia Coppola’s movie The Bling Ring about the events is worth a look.) But even a minor faux pas sometimes can go viral. So, with appropriate caution, the reader (if not already doing so) might consider joining the 600,000,000 bloggers that already exist worldwide. You could be among the 2% that make a good living at it. At the very least, in about a dozen years it could pay for your lunch.
 

Stereophonics - Mr. Writer

Imaginary Friends

“Parasocial” is the term for one-sided relationships of the sort we might have with celebrities: we know them (to some extent) but they don’t know us at all. These one-sided relationships existed even in ancient times when the only media were handwritten scrolls, statues, and word-of-mouth rumors about the elite and famous, but they got an enormous boost with the arrival in the 20^th century of movies and recordings that seem to bring us face to face or within earshot. Fans are known to become emotionally attached to these well-known strangers enough to experience genuine grief when they die. The phenomenon was examined back in 1985 by Richard Schickel in Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America, a book that now seems rather quaint in today’s age of virtual interactions on online social media where twitter posts can masquerade as actual conversations. Most of us understand the limitations of parasocial relationships. Those who don’t understand them form the pool from whom stalkers emerge. 

Dawn Wells (1938-2020)
"Mary Ann"

A more curious phenomenon, also regarded as parasociality, is a relationship with fictional characters. This, too, has ancient precedents. Long before Homer’s epics were written down around 700 BCE (prior to which they were an oral tradition) people sat around the hearth fires and listened to bards recite stories of Troy and tales of brave Ulysses. The listeners surely felt they knew the characters as well as they knew their own neighbors. Again, modern media make the illusion all the more convincing. In the 1960s there was a common debate among high school boys of Mary Ann vs. Ginger on the TV show Gilligan’s Island. Being a smart-aleck teenager at the time, I tended to respond dismissively: “Like, you know they’re fictional, right?” But in truth I knew exactly why the debaters debated, and had an unvoiced opinion. Beyond the superficial level of schoolboy crushes, people often become deeply invested in their favorite shows. They care about the characters and what happens to them. On some level viewers regard the characters on Friends as friends. The prevailing opinion among psychologists is that up to a certain point this is perfectly healthy: a normal expression of empathy. Below the most surface level of consciousness our minds aren’t good at distinguishing between fictional characters and real ones – assuming the scriptwriters and actors are halfway competent. Dr. Danielle Forshee on her website says “your brain recognizes the human emotion they are portraying and starts to feel connected to those characters.” Also, the characters can be avatars of ourselves, and so it can be cathartic and helpful to see them work through difficulties we’ve faced ourselves. It can be disturbing to watch them get into avoidable trouble (by marrying the obviously wrong person, for example) just as it is disturbing to watch a real friend do it – or, worse, do it ourselves.

 

This is also why fans get so upset when book series or TV shows don’t end the “right” way. Many shows get canceled abruptly and so have no proper endings at all. (It’s a bit like being ghosted in real life.) This frustrates fans but apparently not as much as deliberately crafted endings that they don’t like. Google something like “beloved TV shows with hated finales” and you’ll get a long list including Game of Thrones, Dexter, Lost, Enterprise, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, and How I Met Your Mother, among many others. Sometimes the finales are truly slapdash and unsatisfying, but even well-crafted ones can annoy fans.

 

I actually like one of the most hated finales of all time: How I Met Your Mother. *Spoilers* follow, so in the unlikely event the reader hasn’t ever seen the show, skip this next part. The majority of fans are upset because 1) there isn’t a “happily ever after” ending and 2) Ted reconnects with Robin after nine seasons of the audience being told that they weren’t right for each other. Well, life doesn’t have “happily ever after” endings. Mark Twain commented that love affairs end either badly or tragically, and the tragic ending in HIMYM is the way things go – earlier in this case than one might hope but frequent enough at that age even so. Secondly, Robin and Ted weren’t right for each other when Ted was looking for “the One” with whom to build a home and family while Robin wanted a childless globetrotting career. Years later, however, Ted is a widower father of grown children and Robin is successful at her job and divorced. Their goals no longer clash but they still have a long shared personal history. They might get on just fine. Times and circumstances have changed. That doesn’t diminish Ted and Tracy; they were right for the kind of life they had at the time they had it. (Besides, the point is often missed that Ted is Tracy’s second pick; in one episode she talks to her deceased partner whom she had regarded as “the One” about moving on.) Maybe my response is a matter of age: I’m looking at things from the perspective of old done-that Ted, not young aspirational Ted, but to me the ending makes perfect sense. 

That I gave this matter any thought at all is a prime example of parasociality. So, anyone at whom I snickered in high school for debating Mary Ann vs. Ginger is fully within his rights to say to me about the characters in HIMYM, “Like, you know they’re fictional, right?” 

Cream – Tales of Brave Ulysses

Classical Nation Building

Among the books recently to occupy my bedtable (they serve as my sleeping pills) was First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas Ricks. Many of the political disputes that exercise passions today have eerie parallels in the early years of the Republic, and there is value in revisiting that history.

Today the Greco-Roman classics for most students are an educational side note, often with scarcely more attention paid to them than an assignment of a (totally out of context) bad translation of Aristophanes’ The Frogs in high school. In the 18th century they were the core of education above the elementary level. All of the Founders were deeply familiar with them – more so than with the literature of their own time. The classical authors strongly influenced their philosophical and political thought both directly from the original sources and indirectly via Locke, Montesquieu et al. Hence there was an oft-voiced disdain for democracy (a dirty word until the 1820s) because Aristotle regarded it as a “perversion” of a constitutional republic just as oligarchy was a perversion of aristocracy and tyranny of monarchy. The favorable description of the Roman Republic (Consulship, Senate, Assembly) by Polybius was commonly referenced in debates over state constitutions as well as the federal one. Also influential was Cicero: “Statuo esse optime constitutam rempublicam quae, ex tribus qeneribus illis regali, optimo, et populari modice confuse” [I maintain that the best constitution for a State is that which, out of the three general types, is a balanced mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy]. 18th century politicians weren’t subtle about it either: they regularly referenced classical authors and ancient precedents in their speeches. Jefferson admired Epicurus, which helps explain the “pursuit of happiness” line. Other authors who figured prominently in the debates were Plutarch, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Sallust, Xenophon, Tacitus, and Livy. Conspicuous for his absence was Plato. Elbridge Gerry, who sufficiently mastered republicanism to devise the gerrymander, voiced the general opinion by stating, "Plato was not a republican." Ricks explores how this pervasively classical way of looking at things (so often overlooked by modern historians) affected the Revolution and the Early Republic.

The book caught my eye in no small part because I wrote about the same thing – far, far less ambitiously at only 14 pages – as long ago as college. Yes, I still have some of those old papers including such page-turners as The Impact of a Vulnerable Grain Supply on the Imperialism of Fifth Century Athens, The Historical Writings of Procopius of Caesarea, and A History of Land Use in the Township of Mendham though I can't imagine who'd ever want to read them.

Ricks has done his research and presents it well. He is not oblivious to the glaring blind spots in the vision of the Founders (the failure to address slavery being the blindest of all), but nonetheless credits them for putting into practice a theory of rights and governance that made their hypocrisy ultimately untenable – an unmatched achievement in the 18^th century. He rightly notes the importance of the 1800 election. There have been other fateful elections (1860 most obviously) but without the precedent of 1800 the others wouldn’t even have taken place. With Jefferson’s victory, for the first time there was a peaceful transition of power to an opposition party that the losing Federalists truly believed was a threat to the nation. The event showed such a transition was possible and that the result, while consequential, needn’t be the end of the world.

The author closes with an epilogue of ten present-day recommendations that he says are informed by lessons from the Founders and, through them, from the Greeks and Romans they chose as their mentors. Some of the points are unexceptionable but others simply don’t follow from his history of founding principles – or at least one could use similar sophistry to argue just the reverse. That is not to say his modern-day views on health care funding and the like are wrong, just that they are not derivable from Constitutional first principles. They are perhaps not incompatible with them (well, a couple actually might be) but then neither are opposite positions (well, a couple actually might be). There is a tendency (also dating to the Early Republic) to try to achieve by Constitutional interpretation what cannot be achieved by legislation; this often requires reading words into the text that simply aren’t there. It’s a political maneuver used by any side that thinks it has a shot of winning a court decision, but it should be recognized as such rather than as a dispassionate analysis of Constitutional principles, classically derived or otherwise.

What Ricks doesn’t mention is another takeaway from classical history, particularly of the Roman Republic, which many of the Founders were so keen to emulate. Extreme factionalism in the Republic, fueled by ambitious politicians exploiting class fears and grievances, led to civil war: not once but repeatedly. An end was put to this only by Augustus Caesar, and then only to be replaced by non-ideological internal wars among generals. (Rome under the Principate never did adequately solve the peaceful succession problem.) Americans emulated such factionalism down the path to civil war once. It would be best not to do so again.

Mason Williams – Classical Gas

Your Days Are Numbered

homemade key ring present

11 days after the solstice is a strange day to start the New Year. The designation of a New Year’s Day in any calendar system is ultimately arbitrary, of course, but calendars had their origins in Neolithic times from the tracking of the phases of the moon and the (apparent) motion of the sun; accordingly, ancient calendars almost universally begin the year (or try to) at either the winter solstice or the spring equinox. Julius Caesar, ever unconventional, saw no reason why it couldn’t start on some other day, however, and it is he whom we have to thank for our calendar doing exactly that.
 
All early calendars ran into trouble by trying to include lunar months in a solar year. The two cycles don’t synch, of course, so some scheme for reconciling them had to be employed; usually this required throwing in an intercalary month every few years. The traditional Roman calendar was a worse hash than most (even the far more ancient Sumerian was better), thereby creating huge problems in everything from shipping schedules to the calculation of interest payments. Wrote Plutarch, “Festivals and days of sacrifice gradually got out of place and finally came to be celebrated at the very opposite seasons to what was originally intended.” Then Caesar went to Egypt during the Roman civil war where he was impressed not only by Cleopatra but by Cleopatra’s astronomer Sosigenes.  Sosigenes had his own proposals for timekeeping, so Caesar put him in charge of revamping the Roman calendar. Sosigenes developed the Julian calendar, which went into effect by Caesar’s order in 46 BCE. It dispensed with lunar phases and intercalary months. “He linked the year to the course of the sun, abolishing the short extra month and adding an entire day every fourth year” (Suetonius Julius Caesar). Caesar chose what the first day to begin the new calendar would be, and he deliberately chose one other than the solstice. The new calendar was a vast improvement for everyday life and it simplified astronomical calculations as well. When Cicero (no fan of Caesar) was told what date the constellation Lyra would rise, he grumbled, “No doubt it has been ordered to do so.”
 
With only one minor tweak, this is the calendar we still use today. Sosigenes knew very well that the solar year is 365.242 days, not 365.25, but the Julian calendar would drift only 3 days every 4 centuries, and in 46 BCE that no doubt seemed too far away to be a concern. Centuries do pass, however. Accumulated excess days were chopped off in 1582 (not until 1752 in Britain and its colonies) when the Gregorian calendar went into effect. It is the same as the Julian except that it eliminates the leap day from any year ending in 00 that is not also evenly divisible by 400. So, 2000 was a leap year but 1900 wasn’t and 2100 won’t be; this makes the calendar accurate to within one day per 3300 years.
 
So why was January 1 not set on the solstice in 46 BCE? Caesar wanted it otherwise, and that is all there is to it. We still live with the consequences of that choice, which, it must be said, are surely less onerous than the consequences of most of our own life choices. It is commonplace for us to try to put our bad choices behind us New Year’s Eve and start fresh on New Year’s Day. That is what we intend anyway.
 
We need not be entirely captive to the whims of Julius Caesar when celebrating a new year. There is nothing stopping each of us from choosing a personal New Year’s Day (or a whole private calendar for that matter): “I consider my new year to start on July 22, because why not?” That is perfectly legitimate, but it means celebrating your New Year’s Eve alone (even sans Covid); this would be the least of the drawbacks to scheduling by one’s own idiosyncratic calendar. So, most of us are content to ring out the old year by the generally accepted calculation on December 31 and ring in the new year on January 1.
 
The New Year’s Blues typically kick in on January 2 by which time we’ve broken at least a few of our new year’s resolutions and are grudgingly acknowledging that our lives and challenges are not really different than they were a few days earlier. Yet, the blues pass, too, since “not really different” at least means things are no worse. Besides, there is always Orthodox New Year to celebrate. This is calculated by the untweaked Julian calendar, which has diverged two weeks from the Gregorian. That leaves plenty of time to recover from last night’s merriments, so be prepared to raise yet another glass or two when January 14^th arrives. Maybe a second stab at keeping new year’s resolutions will work out better, and January 15 will be blues-free – unless we’re referring to music genres in which case it definitely should be blues-full.

 

Kid Rock - Happy New Year