did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?

i'm completely operational and all my circuits are functioning normally

• Humans are unpredictable, so they say. I'll miss you, mon petit robot. The existential concerns raised upon termination of human-robot relationships.


• Perhaps those scenarios in which one makes out with oneself will not be entirely limited to REM content. And lest we forget Billy Idol's oh-so-human anthem, this robotic torso ostensibly allows one to hug oneself.


• Alone in a nursing home with no one but a robotic dog to snuggle. Sucks for you in regard to oxytocin, but at least you'll probably experience a decrease in cortisol.


• If cremation isn't creepy, why is a corpse-eating robot? It should be noted that said robots were designed to refuel on any biomass, but perhaps there's a gruesome spin afoot.


• Of course I'm going to include here the Radiolab episode Talking to Machines. Unwittingly falling for a chatbot, robot shrinks, and more!


• Tintypes for every taste. Edward Bateman's Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny.

you dig up my liver, addendum

20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World.  I am particularly fond of l'appel du vide, which describes the instinctive urge to jump from high places. Maybe I'm up in the night, but who hasn't experienced that? Sometimes English is starkly inadequate.

you dig up my liver

• People everywhere tend to describe powerful emotions metaphorically in terms of a part of the body. But in which part of the body and with what sensations people's emotions manifest themselves rather depends upon which language they speak.


• Botox causes impairment in the grokking of negative emotions? The source article is yet to be published in Psychological Science, but here's a masses-friendly scoop in (urp) Psychology Today.


• Having experienced the usefulness of temporary Stoicism, while acknowledging that it has been a tool rather than a preferred state of affairs, I am nonetheless surprised at some of my own internal railing at Nussbaum's arguments. Nussbaum here counters an age-old view espoused by Stoics, Christians and Kantians alike: emotions are disruptive and subversive to reason, they arise from parochial needs and interests and therefore the life well lived is the life in which the things of this world are left behind for a higher sphere beyond accident, pain and desire. On the contrary, Nussbaum writes, human beings enter the world dependent on objects beyond their control, most notably their mothers, and emotional development is a response to this fact....In her ''neo-Stoicism,'' the pain and partiality of emotion are a value-laden mode of thinking that must be accepted if we are to create a just and compassionate world.


• Babies: Cute little blobs of potential, or active participants in relationship?

thanks, b.u.

To live at all is miracle enough

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Richard Dawkins

thanks, a.p.

attachment theory, happiness, and larry david?

"Happiness" seems to be the topic du jour, and soon one will be able to watch Alanis Morissette, Larry David, and others discussing the finer points. PBS will premiere This Emotional Life, a three-part series, on the 4th of January. I am pleased to note that the first episode looks to be heavy on attachment theory. Also pleased that the so-called "negative" emotions will not be ignored. Pleased, simply, that an entire series (albeit a brief one) will be devoted to emotion. I concede that including celeb banter will, no doubt, make this complex topic friendlier to the masses. Finally, both pleased and apprehensive about the series' treatment of pop psych & self-help. I won't deny having high hopes & suppose I'll be weighing in as the episodes are aired.

j'aime le parfum d'odeur, j'aime l'odeur de parfum

• Air, effluvium, efflux, essence, flavor, graveolent, musk, noctuolent, osmagogue, perfume, redolence, scenting, scenty, snuff, stink, tincture...


• Space smells funny. Astronauts have struggled to describe the smell of space: "burnt gunpowder or the ozone smell of electrical equipment." This I find far from satisfying. So I'm trying to imagine what it might smell like based on, well, what it's made of. Which brings happy strings of thought and consequent anticipation of proper, lovely fluffy blanketed & pajama'd sleep.


• No one else smells like you.


• I love a good underarm as much as the next gal, but perhaps not piped through a monstrous dental apparatus. An exhibit I'd travel to see, nonetheless.


• Schizophrenic sense of smell. There did seem to be a smells-are-weird theme among the late night schizophrenic hotline callers. Unrelated or not, people with certain flavors of schizophrenia may have deficits in smell identification.


• My cat's breath smells like cat food. We demonstrate for the first time that most women, and some men, deliberately smell their partners' clothing when they are apart. [McBurney, M.L., Shoup, S.A. & Streeter, D.H. (2006). Olfactory Comfort and Attachment Within Relationships. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 2954-2963. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00420.x]


• More interesting (and not so patent that one wonders why bother collect data at all), though no one could successfully feign surprise here: The ladies possess superior sniffers. Furthermore (despite suspicion about methodology & interpretation), who could deny the chin-stroking "hmmmm" factor of a positive correlation between emotional sensitivity and sense of smell?


• If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all.

baryshnikov / cage

much less creepy than slim goodbody...

...and i get to see them perform next month.

Wait

by Galway Kinnell


Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

dope!

Sweet, sweet dopamine. It's what makes new love feel so intense, so important, sometimes even plunging new lovers into pseudo-psychosis. It's why cocaine feels good. It's the big cheese in addiction [some would say one could develop an addiction to cheese via the dopamine/reward system]. It's also involved with motor control pathologies such as Parkinson's disease, but that's a topic for some other blog. For your reading pleasure, a selection of dopaminergic gems:

• Dude! It's a freaking visible synaptic vesicle! The report (with images and a cool, techie video), and a lay friendly-ish play-by-play.


• Smartass protazoans and horny, suicidal rats.


• Finally giving attention to a book I purchased five years ago. Patience, please with the long turns: Dopamine is involved in the impact of early social interaction on the brain structures associated with emotion regulation (of course there are other factors, but this post is dopamine-centric).

  
  The author (Schore) suggests that early maternal deprivation shapes the development of actual brain structures. You know, the brains we'll have for the rest of our lives. [Maternal deprivation = Infant stress that goes unregulated by the mother/primary caregiver - which doesn't have to look like an emaciated orphan rocking back and forth in his lonely crib, but any significant lack of attunement and responsiveness to an infant's emotional cues. The implications of some common parenting practices should thus be of concern.]

  Implications for later functioning may include impairments in attention and focus, hyperaggression, and other emotional dysregulation (possibly including depressive and/or manic states, anxiety, substance abuse - which is, after all, exogenous emotional regulation -- "self-medication" if you like).

  Even interpretations of later social interaction can be impaired: 1) failing to perceive the salience of social interactions, or 2) misinterpreting them. I'll explain: 1) Your friend's face bears markers of sadness, but you are unable to perceive them and thus cannot respond to his/her sadness, and are baffled as to why s/he is upset with you. 2) You tell your spouse/girlfriend/lover that you are angry with her. She asks for clarification. She may well want to understand you with the loveliest of intentions (or may simply be clueless and need some assistance), but the warped "lenses" through which you view certain interpersonal interactions leads you to believe she is attacking you, and, if you are dating a shrink, that she must be using her voodoo shrink powers to psychoanalyze you, inaccurately, and without your consent. [Don't get any ideas; this is a hypothetical situation used here for elaborative purposes.]



• A peculiar feeling: Mussels and their dopamine glue?

take the stairs

thanks, r.t.

disorientation tastes like spinach

...and it could make you smarter.

...the same results were evident among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves as they considered how their past actions were often contradictory. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," Proulx explained. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns.

sagan & hawking, a lump in my throat

thanks l.

calming visual representation of relationships among scientific paradigms; irritating failure of the tiny laptop monitor

found

• Rendered in shades most gentle to the eye, including octopi. Volume III: Mollusca-Annelides-Crustacea-Arachnides and Insecta.


• A Ubiquity of Sparrows


• Unremarkable site design (rather lack thereof), but I shan't shoot the messenger. Cold war propaganda (my favorite is the cautionary to Russian musicians), Czech poster art, and newsy unsettling ephemera.

heavy paper, moments reconstructed in memory, bergamot, the pause at the end of an exhale

a life less posted

I Am Sitting in a Room

by Alvin Lucier

thanks B.

Happiness

by Jane Kenyon

There's just no accounting for happiness, 
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never 
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea, 
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.