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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Monthly Archives: May 2013

How to Communicate

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

books, communication, literature, Sebastian Junger, Writing, Writing with Power Clarity and Style

Sebastian Junger

“When you write a book, when you write for people, what you’re saying is, ‘Okay, please step out of life, and into this weird mental place where you’re just alone with me… for hours, days.’ That’s a big request, and if [your readers] honor you by accepting, you have to really work hard to make it worth their while.

There’s a relationship there. They’re not there to admire you — they may end up admiring you — but that’s not what they’re there for. You are writing to give them an experience, on some level, an entertaining and fulfilling experience. And it’s really not about you…

The sort of world of writing for me is divided into two things: there’s content and then there’s style. There’s what you’re writing about, and there’s the way you write about it. Style is what gets people to keep reading, but ultimately it doesn’t have any inherent value. God forbid we write a book where the writing is the point.

That’s just too self-referential, and it betrays a kind of lack of respect for the world. You’re not more interesting than the world is. Your writing is not more beautiful than the world is. You don’t want the facts of the world to serve as a platform for your skill as a writer. It’s the other way around. The relationship goes the other way. Your skill as a writer serves the world.

You’re not supposed to tell people what to think; you’re supposed to tell them what to think about. You want to address the readers directly. I mean, you want to kind of look them in the eye. It’s like a conversation. It’s a conversation where you have respect for their intellect. You’re not talking down to them. You’re kind of amazed by the world. I mean, the world’s an amazing place, but it’s easy to forget that. If you open yourself to how amazing the world is, your writing will communicate something really valuable to other people.”

__________

From Sebastian Junger on Writing with Power, Clarity, and Style.

I think these ideas generalize to nearly any form of communication. You can replace “writer/writing” above with “artist/painting,” “teacher/teaching,” or “speaker/speechmaking,” and it make exactly as much sense.

Junger upheld this outward-looking philosophy so doggedly that he lived for many years without a mirror in his New York apartment. “So I wouldn’t be thinking about myself,” was Junger’s justification. “When he has to shave or brush his teeth,” his ex-girlfriend once explained, “he uses the back of a CD.”

Sebastian Junger

____

Check out some of Junger’s work below:

Restrepo: Junger and HetheringtonWar, Combat

Sebastian JungerThe Insane Amount of Firepower

Sebastian JungerSomething Noble about Human Beings

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“Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, Religion

≈ Comments Off on “Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas

Tags

belief, church, doubt, God, Nuclear, prayer, preaching, R. S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

__________

“Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas, which you can read in Collected Poems: R. S. Thomas.

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The Paradox of Tolerance

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Freedom, intolerance, John Rawls, Karl Popper, Plato, The Open Society and Its Enemies, the paradox of freedom, the paradox of tolerance, tolerance

NPG P370; Sir Karl Raimund Popper by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

__________

From Chapter 7 of Karl Popper’s notes to The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Several years after the publication of The Open Society, John Rawls took up the so-called “Paradox of Tolerance” but prescribed a different sort of state response to intolerant factions. For Rawls, the paradox certainly exists, yet it does not dictate we should practice intolerance towards those who are themselves intolerant.

While Popper looked to preempt intolerant groups from acting criminally — by advocating a sort of prior restraint approach — Rawls believed that action against intolerant sects is justified only when they pose a direct threat to the security of other members of a society. This approach aligns with the principle of stability of a tolerant society, which states that the members of an intolerant faction will gradually acquire the tolerance of society at large, and soon find themselves integrated within it.

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“The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke

26 Sunday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, War

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

combat, England, Poem, poetry, Rupert Brooke., The Soldier, War, Wilfred Owen

Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

__________

“The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke, which you’ll see in The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

It is an irony both tragic and prophetic that Rupert Brooke did in fact die (at 27 years old) while enlisted in the British army. He was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy’s Antwerp expedition. His friend and fellow soldier William Denis Browne wrote this of Brooke’s final moments —

“…I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4:46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.”

— and also found the plot of ground, in a shaded olive grove in Skyros, Greece, that would be Brooke’s final resting place. You can still visit his grave there today.

Brooke was also one of the first World War One poets whose name is engraved in slate at the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the stone comes from fellow war poet Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

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The Bixby Letter

26 Sunday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Abraham Lincoln, Bixby Letter, Civil War, Memorial Day, Saving Private Ryan, War

Abraham Lincoln

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

__________

Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated Bixby letter, sent to Lydia Bixby of Boston, Massachusetts, a widow who had apparently lost five sons in the course of the Civil War. Put it on your shelf in the form of Abraham Lincoln: Great Speeches.

While there is controversy about the letter’s authorship (some historians believe Lincoln’s secretary John Hay wrote it) as well as it’s recipient (and whether Ms. Bixby’s boys truly died in combat), the Bixby letter is more than just an individual tribute in the hearts and minds of those for whom Memorial Day is more than just a Monday off work.

This letter also inspired the narrative of Robert Rodat’s screenplay for Saving Private Ryan, and is read during the film in the scene below:

Alletta Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa was also robbed five sons, albeit a century later during World War Two, when a Nazi gunboat torpedoed the USS Juneau on which all five of the brothers were serving. This event prompted the United States military to enact the Sole Survivor Policy as well as christen a new destroyer, USS The Sullivans.

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Hangover Reading

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Literature

≈ Comments Off on Hangover Reading

Tags

A.E. Housman, Alcohol, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Powell, C. S. Forester, Dick Francis, drinking, Eric Ambler, Evelyn Waugh, Everyday Drinking, G.K. Chesterton, Gavin Lyall, Geoffrey Household, hangover, Ian Fleming, John Milton, Kingsley Amis, liquor, literature, P.G. Wodehouse, Peter De Vries, poetry, reading, wine

Kingsley Amis

“Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624–6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick somebody less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A. E. Housman and/or R. S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, C. S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white—i.e. not black—comedy: P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.”

__________

Another section from Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking, this one “Hangover Reading”.

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How Not to Get Drunk

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Alcohol, beer, drinking, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Everyday Drinking, hangover, hangovers, Kingsley Amis, liquor, wine

Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard by Francis Goodman

“Staying away altogether is a stratagem sometimes facetiously put forward at the outset of such discussions as these. To move at once to the realm of the practical, eating has much to be said for it. As well as retarding (though not preventing) the absorption of alcohol, food will slow up your drinking rate, not just because most people put their glasses down while actually chewing, but because you are now satisfying your appetite by eating rather than drinking: hunger makes you drink more than you otherwise would. According to some, oily foods are the most effective soakers-up of the drink already in your stomach, but others point to the risk of upsetting a digestion already under alcoholic attack…

Fatigue is an important element in the hangover, too. Alcohol gives you energy, or, what is hard to distinguish from it, the illusion of energy, and under its influence you will stand for hours at a stretch, throw yourself about, do exhausting imitations, perhaps fight a bit, even, God help you, dance. This will burn up a little alcohol, true, but you will pay for it next morning. A researcher is supposed once to have measured out two identical doses of drink, put the first lot down at a full-scale party and the second, some evenings later, at home with a book, smoking the same number of cigarettes on each occasion and going to bed at the same time. Result, big hangover and no hangover respectively. Sitting down whenever possible, then, will help you, and so, a fortiori, will resisting the temptation to dance, should you be subject to such impulses.

An equally unsurprising way of avoiding fatigue is going to bed in reasonable time, easily said, I know, but more easily done, too, if you allow the soporific effects of drink to run their natural course. This means staying away from stimulants, and that means avoiding coffee, both on its own and with liquor poured into it: the latter, by holding you up with one hand while it pastes you at leisure with the other, is the most solidly dependable way I know of ensuring a fearful tomorrow. Hostesses, especially, should take note of this principle, and cut out those steaming midnight mugs which, intended to send the company cheerfully on its way, so often set the tongues wagging and the Scotch circulating again…

I suppose I cannot leave this topic without reciting the old one about drinking a lot of water and taking aspirin and/or stomach powders before you finally retire. It is a pretty useless one as well as an old one because, although the advice is perfectly sound, you will find next morning that you have not followed it. Alternatively, anyone who can summon the will and the energy and the powers of reflection called for has not reached the state in which he really needs the treatment.

After all these bans and discouragements I will throw in one crumb, or tot, of comfort. I am nearly (yes, nearly) sure that mixing your drinks neither makes you drunker nor gives you a worse time the following day than if you had taken the equivalent dosage in some single form of alcohol. After three dry martinis and two sherries and two glasses of hock and four of burgundy and one of Sauternes and two of claret and three of port and two brandies and three whiskies-and-soda and a beer, most men will be very drunk and will have a very bad hangover. But might not the quantity be at work here? An evening when you drink a great deal will also be one when you mix them.

Well—if you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be.”

Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard by Francis Goodman

__________

Hopefully this advice hasn’t found you too late into your Friday evening — from the section “How Not to Get Drunk” in the all-purpose manual Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis.

The photographs are of Amis and his wife Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Read the greatest literary description of a hangover (incidentally, written by Amis himself):

Kingsley AmisThe Hangover

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Our Love for London

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Freedom, History, Interview, Politics, Religion, War

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Afghanistan war, bin Ladenism, Christopher Hitchens, Iraq War, Jihadism, London, terror, Terrorism

Lee Rigby“That’s why it’s so appalling to see so many liberals making excuses for bin Ladenism and Jihadism as if it was some kind of fucking liberation theology, which it is not. It’s the most reactionary ideology in the history of the human race. It means business. It means slavery; it means mass murder; it means bigotry. It means the abolition of culture.

And there are people who say we have to understand its deep-seeded nature, which we certainly do, but not by apologizing to or retreating from it…

Say it once, hope not to have to say it again: You do not deal yourself a hand in the conduct or formation of British foreign or defense policy by putting a bomb on a bus in Tavistock Square in London. You do not. Final. Do I have to say it twice? No.

Will I listen to anyone who says that we should? I certainly will not. I certainly will not, and nor should anyone else.

And the Prime Minister will not do so. And what people ought to realize is that there is indeed a connection between this and the wars abroad. The same people did this at King’s Cross and Edgware Road and Aldgate last week who last Friday blew up 34 school children in Baghdad. Yes of course there is a connection: we’re fighting the same people. And they will rule the day. Or we will outlive, and out kill, and out fight them.

They say they prefer death to life, maybe they do.

They want to be martyrs, we’re here to help.

But our love for London will outlive their hatred, and their love of death. Believe me.”

Christopher Hitchens

__________

Christopher Hitchens, speaking at D.G. Wills Bookstore in California, May, 2006. Watch below.

The picture is of Lee Rigby, son, husband, father of a two year old boy, and drummer in the British Royal Regiment — ritually and barbarically murdered on the streets of south London yesterday. His last text message to his mom will break your heart:

Goodnight mum, I hope you had a fantastic day today because you are the most fantastic and one in a million mum that anyone could ever wish for. Thank you for supporting me all these years, you’re not just my mum you’re my best friend. So goodnight and love you loads.

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It All Adds Up to Happiness… Doesn’t It?

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Faith, happiness, heaven, Julian Barnes, materialism, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Ireland“Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another toward the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.

But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.”

__________

From Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

It’s interesting: all of those areas purporting to lead to self-fulfillment, when considered either individually or collectively, are so alluring. Yet — and I say this without having attained anything like fruition in any one of them — I know they can’t lead to sublime, substantial happiness. I somehow am positive of that; in fact, I’m almost equally as sure they only frustrate one even more in the rabid quest to feel fulfilled.

Consider this passage from A Canticle for Leibowitzas a sort of macro-level frame for a human life that seeks ceaselessly to check all of the above boxes:

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

The picture was taken on one of those temporarily fulfilling foreign holidays to Ireland.

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The Defense of Freedom and Peace

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Politics, Speeches, War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Churchill, conflict, democracy, dictatorship, Freedom, Hitler, Nazis, Nazism, The Defense of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out), tyranny, War, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Winston Churchill

“Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed. After many miseries and prolonged confusion, there arose into the broad light of day the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself. Independent Courts of Justice were created to affirm and enforce this hard-won custom. Thus was assured throughout the English-speaking world, and in France by the stern lessons of the Revolution, what Kipling called, ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law.’ Now in this resides all that makes existence precious to man, and all that confers honor and health upon the State.

People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armory of potent and indestructible knowledge?”

__________

From Winston Churchill’s speech “The Defense of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)”, delivered on October 16th, 1938. You’ll find it in the essential collection of Winston’s best speeches Churchill: The Power of Words.

Winston Churchill

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The Function of Sleep

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2011 Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium, A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, Aliens, Allen Institute, biology, Craig Raine, dreams, Giulio Tononi, In Search of Sleep Function, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, sleep, the brain

Giulio Tononi

“Among the open questions in neuroscience, I believe the function of sleep remains perhaps the most embarrassing. We don’t know why every night our brain needs us – and presumably itself – to sleep for several hours. There is every indication that sleep performs an essential function, if we only knew which one.

The indications are that sleep is, first of all, dangerous. Obviously you are made vulnerable to predators if you fall asleep and don’t respond to stimuli. It is pervasive; we do it from the cradle to the grave. It is universal: every animal that has been carefully studied does so – from fruit flies to ourselves. There is no single exception. It is also irresistible, as we all know. If you do experiments to keep animals awake – or humans awake, for that matter – there is no way that you can overcome the need for sleep. You can even use pain, shocks — at some point the animal will fall asleep. It is also tightly regulated, with a big portion of the brain stem, the hypothalamus, all kind of complicated connectivity being set up to put ourselves to sleep and then wake us. And finally, if you don’t sleep, or sleep too little, it is clear there are serious consequences. In fatal familial insomnia, after a few months of lack of sleep, you die. Rats die after two weeks. But the most obvious consequences are cognitive consequences. There are all kinds of problems. We become extremely bad cognitively. We make mistakes of all sorts, and we become extremely irritable…

The enigma of sleep function has been around for a long time. All kind of ideas have been proposed. The theory I propose is the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, which is an attempt to understand what is the core function of sleep in every animal.

The idea here is, in short, that sleep is the price we pay for plasticity, which of course is a feature that is functional primarily when we’re awake, when we adapt to the external world.

In our brains, neurons either spike or they don’t — that’s how they communicate. Spikes are more expensive than non-spikes in terms of their synaptic consequences, in terms of the energy they use. So spikes should be reserved, and as far as we can tell they largely are, to signal important events — events that convey a lot of information. Now, when you need to adapt to a changing world — which is basically all the time, especially during development — what you need to do is shift strength of synapses or even add synapses to make sure you are firing for important events or important changes in the environment.

And every neuron does that, to make sure it signals important stuff downstream, in this complicated brain where every neuron is immersed in a sea of other neurons. It doesn’t know what it’s getting, or from where; it doesn’t know what it’s signaling, and it doesn’t know where it’s sending it.

So, in all of this uncertainty, for any learning system which is as complicated as a brain, there is a problem in the end, which is that neurons tend to strengthen to make sure they signal. But then that becomes biologically untenable, because stronger synapses consume more energy, occupy more space, require more supplies, and finally they saturate signal to noise.

Basically, then neurons start firing for everything, and that can’t be good. So there is a need for renormalization to make sure that total synaptic strength is constant.

And we think that that renormalization is not only essential, but it better happen offline, when you actually can sample in an unbiased way the environment of a neuron. And every neuron, by itself, does this in the course of a night’s sleep.

That’s what we think sleep is fundamentally for.”

__________

From Dr. Guilio Tononi’s recent talk on The Function of Sleep at the Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium.

I had never before seriously considered this question of the purpose of sleep, or the sheer strangeness of the fact that we don’t yet have a firm understanding of its biological function. It’s nothing less than absurd to ponder what happens to me, to you, to everyone as we spend one third of our lives unconscious.

As Neil deGrass Tyson observed, “Aliens might be surprised to learn that humans must lay semi-comatose on cushions for nearly a third of every Earth rotation.”

Craig Raine, in his poem “A Martian Send A Postcard Home,” mimics the voice of a martian who is noting different facets of human life and reporting them back to his kind. These take the form of riddles, the last one being a coded reference to human sleep and dreaming:

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Watch Tononi’s entire talk below.

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  • "The Tunnel" by Mark Strand
    "The Tunnel" by Mark Strand

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Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

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Categories

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