Intrinsic Morality and Non-Morality

Richard Cocks over at the Orthospehere summarises some recent research from the Infant Cognition Center at Yale, run by Dr. Karen Wynn and her husband Paul Bloom.  Five month olds somehow prefer the little yellow-colored shape that tries to help another (red) shape over the antagonistic, actively interfering blue shape. Yay! Even babies prefer cooperation! However, they also prefer shapes or puppets that make similar cereal choices to their own, and want the puppets making other choices to be punished. This seems more likely to lead to adult conflicts in ways that we recognise all too well.

A fun read.

Recording of CS Lewis

These addresses became "Mere Christianity."

Get Depressed About Taiwan

Paul Huang, interviewed over at Steve Hsu's Manifold (sidebar, but transcript here) believes that the Taiwanese at all levels - the politicians, the academics, the military, and the general populace - are completely unrealistic about what their true situation is vis. China. They believe their chip capability, a legitimate but single card to play, insulates them from all danger. They draw inspiration from Ukraine fending off Russia but are do not discuss that A) Russia is not China and Ukraine is not Taiwan; B) Whatever results from the current war, Ukraine has had an enormous exodus of people, has had much of its economy destroyed, and has had large areas simply destroyed. The Taiwanese are not aware of this at any level. They believe they can hold off China militarily (they can't, not close) for long enough that the US will rescue it (not likely, and likely not even possible, as evidenced by the rapid depletion of help for Ukraine). Politicians buy overpriced American military equipment in order to be re-elected, but it does not meet their needs. Everyone talks about how difficult it will be for China to actually take over Taiwan because of the superiority of Taiwanese character and the general determination to resist.

Paul Huang: Yes. If you look at the history, no, no country, no nation ever actually fought till the last man or woman. It just never happened. Usually you surrender, you capitulate at a threshold of say, something like 20 to 30%. After you lose 20 to 30% of your population, you're going to surrender.

This is just what's going to happen, right? There's like, no matter how brave, how, how ferociously you, you, you, you think you are, that's, you're just going to, your country, your nation, your, your tribe, it's not going to fight till the very last person, right? And you look at the history, like, it's like Imperial Japan in World War II, right?

All their major cities were burned to the ground. Millions of civilians died in the firebombing and the atomic bombing. And they surrendered. That's Japan. That's, that's like, we're talking about a militarist society at that point. They surrendered. As well as any other cases in history, but this is not something that Taiwan in Taiwan's defense that people talk about.

"What happens after the first day of a war?" Is not discussed, and to even bring it up brands you as a Chinese propagandist. The Lesson of Cowslip's Warren is forgotten. The only things that need to be said are the only things that are not being said. 

China does not need a strategy except to wait until the moment is right. They keep improving and upgrading their military at all levels, Taiwan does not, and so the gap increases every year.  There is no bright line that Taiwan could cross to provoke them.  They can ignore it all until their moment is right. There is no need to hurry. The US, perhaps, could cross a bright line.

It is true that once a nation has a capability they find it hard to resist using it, and so China might be impatient and unwise. But that will not change things much. 

At the end they discuss US interference in elections, and compare to Ukraine 2014. Both noted that the US did put effort into influencing the outcome, but such things always have to start from a baseline of balance and uncertain outcome. Nations and factions within them have an inertia, and even massive intervention can only move the dial a little. As for the upcoming elections...

Paul Huang: course. Yeah, of course. They, they, they, like, you know, within Taiwan, like, people always, like, speculate, you know, the United States favors Lai Ching-te, you know, the United States favors who. Nah, this is just not going to be the case, okay? The Biden administration's policy toward Taiwan is so passive, so reactive, so, like, I don't think they even care.

Right.

Steve Hsu: Okay. So, there's no CIA, not going to be any CIA intervention in the election in favor of one candidate over the other.

Paul Huang: Oh, I know that. I know the kind of guy that they send to Taiwan, right? They're not going to, they don't even speak Chinese. How can they influence elections there? I'm

Steve Hsu: Well, okay. Let me ask you a related question. Do you think the color revolution in Hong Kong was at all, even in part, stimulated by U.S. intelligence services?

Paul Huang: No, there's no evidence of that. The U.S. intelligence community, the CIA, that is just never, it's not capable of organizing anything of that sort. See, they're just not, sorry to say. (Italics mine.)

Read 'em and weep, as they used to say.

Sexual Revolution at UnHerd

Mary Harrington at UnHerd had an essay two years ago The Sexual Revolution Killed Feminism. I was familiar with most of the arguments, but she assembles them clearly, puts in a few things I had not thought of, and makes connections I had at least not fully absorbed, if not overlooked altogether.

...what we think of today as ‘feminism’ is a story of economic transitions.

Specifically, it’s a story of how men and women re-negotiated life in common, in response first to the transition into the industrial era, then into twentieth-century market society. If everyone today seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.

And later

In its nineteenth and early twentieth-century incarnations, the women’s movement sought a positive negotiation of sex roles for prevailing material conditions, in the interests of life in common. But feminism in this sense ended in the 1960s. It was killed by the twin technology shocks of contraception and abortion.

Up to that point, the women’s movement encompassed both women who understood personhood in the context of family life – women as relational beings – and those who argued for women to be treated primarily as individuals, irrespective of the givens of sex or relational obligations. Medical control of fertility constituted a fundamental material change to this debate: it enabled the final victory of the individualist side.

A premise she puts a lot of weight on is that feminism is now so strongly with associated with bio-libertarianism (bodily autonomy) because of the issues of abortion and contraception that the two are often confused, both by feminists themselves, and the cultural conservatives who believe that "feminism" has ruined everything. She shows that they have in fact always been distinct, as the transgender conflicts with feminists are now illustrating. 

It reminds me of GK Chesterton's observation a hundred years ago that the success of women in the world of work (GKC was neither capitalist nor socialist) was not a victory but their final defeat. Throughout history men and women had competed in whether life should be organised around things (and thus individualism) or around people (and thus relationalism). Women in the marketplace was their capitulation: "All right, then, it's things." I think his reading of history is incomplete, oversimplified, and of prehistory only half-right, but the overall point has a great deal to it. And rather obviously, women succeeding in the world of things is even farther along now. Individualism has won decisively.

I do find some fault with the essay. In her solutions and hope-fors she veers into cliches about family attitudes being a liberation for men as well as women.  Not that she is wrong, but something seems wooden about it. Perhaps I am not entering into the spirit of this properly, but are we quite sure this is how it's going to work? And do we think renegotiation is necessarily going to work for everyone? Also, she is pretty rapidly dismissive of 20th C women putting so much stock in declaring their independence from fathers, brothers, and sons. I take her point that it has become downright silly (and hypocritical) in many cases, but it overlooks the fact that a lot of women had very good reason to declare themselves independent, especially of fathers. If the only other landing place was a rather radical individualism, they can hardly be blamed for embracing that.

Post 9300 - Folk Songs

Republished from 2011, inspired by the comments about appropriateness for children under the "Train Songs" post.

I recall when Jonathan, and Ben after were in high school, being a little amused at their private Christian school's repeated stern warnings about the content of rock and other popular music. With me driving them to school, they were listening to folk music, especially Steeleye Span, and exposed constantly to themes of human sacrifice ("Tam Lin"), murder ("Edward," "Long Lankin," and "Lady Diamond"), rape ("Royal Forester"), abandonment (too many to list), infidelity (too many to list), drunkenness (too many to list), smoking ("Think On This"), witchcraft ("Alison Gross," and "King Henry"), grinding poverty, hideous disability, thievery, widowhood, forced labor and transportation, crows eating corpses, insanity, warfare, demons, shipwreck, and infanticide. And some very nice love songs and dance tunes.

Rockers and rappers are complete pikers when it comes to this stuff.

All in all, it may be one of the best parenting moves I ever made. Funny thing.

Asperger's, Autism, Neurodiversity

Update: bsking points out that Scott Alexander has just discussed the general issue of the Social Model of Disability about two weeks ago, and then took highlights from the voluminous comments to discuss the best issues further.  Well do I remember in mental health going to conferences and social work meetings where people deplored the strawman "Medical Model" and invoked the name of St Thomas Szasz (and all the Family Systems folks, or RD Laing - there was actually a Laing-inspired retreat center way up north and out in the woods in NH called Burch House. It did not sustain in that form. Nice people.) Szasz cherry-picked some things that were weak in the diagnostic system vis. social adaptation to declare that all supposed mental illness was only society's inability to adapt to people who were different.

From Maggie's, a balanced Quillette article Neuroaffirmation - A Therapist's Concerns about the blind spots of the radical neurodiversity movement. 

I am wary, however, of the neurodiversity-affirming movement and the zeal of some of its advocates, especially younger therapists. A perusal of their webpages reveals that many describe themselves as neurodivergent, or if that shoe doesn’t fit, as “neurodivergent allies.” Tried and tested therapeutic models are critiqued and repackaged to make them more “neurodiversity affirming,” or they are avoided altogether. In theory, this all sounds fine, but I worry about the unintended consequences of this movement, particularly when their demands are promulgated religiously and without nuance.

Most autism is at least partially disabling. Even people with Asperger's - now High Function Autism - for all the advantages of focus, emotional distance, and logic they can bring to problem-solving and inventiveness, often create difficulties for those around them. They are seldom much aware of this, which makes it even harder for the family members or coworkers dealing with it.  It is a fine thing to have a long attentions span - but it can get out of hand. A focus on actual words spoken or written can encourage precision in thought and expression - but can also result in a literalness that is hard for others to work around. 

A little mania is sometimes a good thing.  A little depression, or OCD, or even paranoia can have its uses, both for the individual or the tribe. But that does not mean we endorse such things as generally harmless. So too with autism, even if mild, and even if accompanied by enhancing other abilities.

David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart was a name unfamiliar to me, and reading about him and listening to him being interviewed by Tyler Cowen I have the impression that I have been asleep at the switch. I was going to describe him, but the podcast's description is much better than anything I could do, so I will give you that, and then make some minor comments of my own, leading to what I hope is a discussion question. I will note that he is an (American) Anglican convert to Eastern Orthodoxy.

David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious scholar, critic, and theologian who has authored over 1,000 essays and 19 books, including a very well-known translation of the New Testament and several volumes of fiction.

In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.

The transcript is here. The video of same is here.   Podcasts come from various providers, but you can get one at the link on my sidebar.

He provides analysis that is opinion, such as his response to Tyler's question whether Orthodoxy might become just another American religion here, that it already has in many ways.  The number of evangelicals and even fundamentalists coming into EO churches in America is already quite large, and they bring with them a set of Western assumptions that are unusual in its 2000 year history, with little understanding of patristic, scholastic, and philosophical schools of thought which are a diversity of approach less-often seen in America. (Pace, RCC.) But the only counterforce he sees here are those churches that have retained and even reasserted an entirely ethnic identity. He tips his hand that he does not like either approach, but does not say what he prefers.

He did have an interesting comment about Christendom Vs Christianity which I quote in full.

COWEN: Is the future of Christianity, as an institution, brighter or darker than it was, say, 20 years ago?

HART: Well, 20, I mean — [laughs]

COWEN: 30 years ago. A generation ago.

HART: 100 years ago. I don’t know. What would be brighter or darker? For me, what would be good? What would be bad? There are people I know, in fact, people near here in Notre Dame, who are all terrifically intent on trying to revive a dying Christendom, because they think that would be the revival of Christianity in the West. They ally themselves to these reactionary figures like Victor Orbán.

Whereas my ideal of what would be a brighter future for Christianity would be the final eclipse of that kind of conflation of Christianity with the interests of a particular civilization or culture or nation. I believe that’s a perfidious corruption. So, bright in what way? I would say that in many ways, the brightest future for Christianity may consist in the death of many of its institutions and of much of its cultural power.

Most of the people I follow in my little corner of the internet would tend strongly to a belief in the near-necessity of Christendom. If the culture that has protected Christianity for 1000 years, or 500, or at least during the North American experience goes down, then Christianity itself might be imperiled, or at least transformed so fully that our Christian great-grandchildren might have a faith that is nearly unrecognisable to us and live in conditions of fear and persecution.  Stated that strongly, many would back off a bit and acknowledge that God has promised the perseverance of the Church until the end of days, and note that yes, the Church has seen worse before and survived. And yet still...their sympathies...

(I note that one can find something of both extremes from the writers over at JMSmith's The Orthosphere, on my sidebar.) 

I occasionally note what the mission organisations keep telling us, that the center of the Church has long since moved from Europe to North America, and is now moving to Africa, SE Asia, Latin America, etc. But I ask Does Christendom now need to be a kernel of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, so that it does not remain only a single seed?  Is it now the time for it to die and produce many seeds? (John 12:24)

Train Songs

David Foster put up links to Coal Mining songs and Rodeo songs over at Chicago Boyz, so I thought I would have a go at something more central to the Wyman household, train songs. We would sing them in the car frequently, forcing the boys to join in. 

There are just too many in American folklore to give you anything comprehensive, but I thought I'd give you a few to sample.

Waiting For a Train by Jimmie Rodgers

Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten. This version is here not for its "authenticity," but for the two-finger picking style.

This Train  by Sister Rosetta Tharpe

500 Miles  by Roseanne Cash.  I had never heard this version until tonight.

Morning Train by Peter, Paul, and Mary. Different version of the gospel song. Good harmonies, good build.

Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash.  My son used to object when I would sing this to my infant granddaughters.  I can't imagine why.

Midnight Train To Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips 

Hobo's Lullaby  Arlo Guthrie

City of New Orleans, by Steve Goodman, who wrote it.  Died of leukemia at 36. 

Y'know, this might be the best of them all, the farewell to all the other train songs over the years. Had it been written 30 years earlier, it might not be remembered.

Flavor

I am a slow eater, always the last to leave the table. I would stay for the evening eating, talking, and drinking if I could find others willing to do so. My wife eats quickly and leaves because her mind is already on the next thing. She does eat dessert over half the time, which I seldom do, and this brings her back with her tea and cookies for a bit longer to stay with me.

Much of this is talking, which I do a great deal of at meals. Socialising is what meals are for, after all. I also learned somewhere along the line to chew thoroughly, much more than others seem to. I noticed a connection to that tonight that I had not before.  I have long been aware that I simply love flavor. Any bad eating habits come from nibbling frequently rather than having large portions. My wife is interested in only  a few flavors. The extended chewing may come from the savoring.  I do not mix foods. Tonight was beef, corn, and salad, and at no time did I have salad and beef in my mouth at the same time. Each is enjoyed for its own self.

The rest of you puzzle me, frankly. Even a poor man can have the luxury of some flavor if he attends to it.

Counting 'Em Up

It got so difficult looking for a particular quote of mine from 10 years ago that I counted up all the posts that include the word nostalgia. * It's a little more than 1%.  I'm a little worried what other subjects show up that often. 

I have long said "Eventually, people say who they are whether they mean to or not."  I was usually thinking of work, and also of church when I spoke those words so many times. So I am caught in my own net here.

*I found it, and even though it was closely related to it, the word nostalgia was not in the post.

Governor Doug Burgum

Ann Althouse links to a George Will piece on Gov. Burgum, who is running for the Republican nomination for president.  I'm not sure I regard George Will as a source of wisdom anymore, but I admit I do like what I am reading here.

Discussing governance with Burgum is like conversing with a Gatling gun. It involves a rapid-fire fusillade of his achievements (e.g., cutting $1.7 billion from his state’s $6 billion general fund) and aspirations (e.g., ending irrational immigration policies that enable Canada to poach high-skilled immigrants whose U.S. visas have expired).

The 2024 presidential election will, he thinks, be decided in 20 counties in seven swing states. Rural areas are red, metropolitan areas are blue, and the decisive demographic will be college-educated suburban women.

Dare I like anyone? I am weary.

Clamavi de Profundis

Recommended to me by a friend at pub night. They do a lot of original music to JRR Tolkien poetry as well, as in "Lament For Boromir."

Interesting to see Ashley Hutchings name in the credits. He was part of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and The Albion Band.  I imagine he was in a lot of others as well, but those are the ones I know.

Privilege Laundering

Scott Alexander at ACX, talking about acceptance into Harvard and why they don't just let themselves be bribed for all admissions.

People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

Hybrid Theory of the Origins of the Indo-European Languages

Anthropology.net passes along a study by the Max Planck Institute on the origins of Proto-Indo-European. This controversy has been a big deal at least as long as I have studied historical linguistics since the early70s, and from what I read, far longer than that. The competing theories have been the Steppe, that is Northern Caucasus origin, and the Anatolian or Southern Caucasus origin.  I have favored the Steppe hypothesis myself, but even though this result calls itself a hybrid between the two, it looks a good deal closer to the Anatolian to me.

The results of this study do not align entirely with either the Steppe or farming hypotheses. Recent ancient DNA data suggests that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but rather from an area near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. This challenges traditional assumptions and suggests that other early branches of Indo-European may have also spread directly from this region, rather than through the Steppe.

Building on the insights derived from both genetics and linguistics, the authors propose a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages. This hypothesis posits an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus with subsequent migration northwards onto the Steppe. It suggests that some branches of Indo-European entered Europe through later expansions associated with the Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures. The combination of ancient DNA and language phylogenetics indicates that the resolution to the Indo-European language enigma lies in this hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses.

 The paper is here.

Memory in General - What Have We Learned? Part I

What does it mean to have a good memory? It can mean that we have a capacious recollection of events, spontaneously recalling incidents and details that others who were there do not, or remember only if they are cued by reminders. It can mean that we are seldom absent-minded, never forgetting appointments or where we left our glasses. Some people who say they have a good memory have acres of learned material so that they know a topic intimately, even if they do not recall the instances when they picked up the material. Some are good at names and faces. We might mean that we can pull events from our deep past better than others. Andrew Jackson could remember read text verbatim, which was useful when discussing a piece of proposed legislation where some previous written versions had been lost in the course of debate. CS Lewis used to impress his new students early by asking them to pull a book frm his library while his back was turned and read a line from it without saying what it was. He would then say where the book was, its title, and where in the text the quote occurred. Impressive enough. But he would then continue the quote as long as amused him, to the end of the book word for word if necessary. Some pitchers can remember every inning and every pitch of their career*, and some fans show a similar recall. "It was a 2-2 count, one out. Javier had already gone 1 for 3 that day with a loud out to centerfield..."

These memory abilities have some association, but little more than all cognitive abilities do with g-factor in general. People can have enormous learning but be absent-minded. Others might keep little record of even their own past experiences and don't necessarily enjoy getting together with cousins or classmates to compare notes, but have prodigious memories for telephone numbers or lists of parts from the catalogs of the companies they order from. 

Memory can even be too good, when we can't get rid of an intrusive thought - the last song we heard (especially if we did not hear it to the end, BTW), a trauma from years ago, an unresolved argument that is now unimportant. 

One of my sons recalled the Thanksgiving that I had made multiple plum pies. I rejected this outright. Peeling plums and putting them in a pie is an event so unusual that I would certainly remember it. I knew I had never done that thing. Yet other family members chimed in, also recalling the year I had made not one, but two plum pies. Ridiculous. That never happened. Not until someone googled plum pies and saw that this nearly always referred to including a layer of plum jam, not plums themselves did it all fit together. "That does sound familiar, actually. One of them included a layer of chocolate..."  

We forget things all the time, and a good thing, too. Very few of us need to remember last Wednesday's weather.  It is good to remember where we usually put the car keys, and the special exception today of putting them somewhere else, but once we have the keys and are moving to the car the information is no longer valuable. Letting it go is efficient. It really is true that one thing pushes out another, as Sherlock Holmes believed - though he took it to an unnecessary extreme, as usual. Absent-mindedness, it turns out, is partly a matter of intentionality, but also an overall drive to simplification in our lives. When we live alone this are misplaced less often, because only one person is touching them. People with four children have more to juggle than those with one. I could keep all the relevant information in my head for a caseload of fifteen people at my peak - their diagnosis, family phone numbers, dates of birth and admission, addresses, community contact, etc. When I hit sixteen I had to start writing them down - and not just the additional ones. The whole list needed to be put in written form now, which took a great deal more time, and everything was less efficient. My maximum decreased in the last few years, partly because more information was needed on each, but I could tell I was also less able. 11-12 was my max at the end. 

Yet some of this "forgotten" material can be retrieved by cue. "I hadn't thought of that dock at Aunt Cynthia's camp in years, but you're right. It was flippin' dangerous! Why did they ever let children go out and play on that thing?" Last Wednesday's weather is probably irrelevant forever, but there is a chance you might need to recall it, to help recall another event. "That was the day the truck broke down. Do you remember which towing company we called first?"

Yet beyond that are things that are truly forgotten, lost beneath the waves forever. A roomful of people supplying helpful reminders availeth naught. That Psych 101 film of the neurosurgeon touching the guy's brain, causing him to "remember" and event and start talking about it, was inaccurate. Researchers at the time made the assumption of videographic memory without realising it. They concluded it was an actual memory, unlocked by the stimulation. "There was a guy coming through the fence..." In reality, it was more likely created on the spot because of the more random associations with that tiny brain-spot. Memory is more like a computer, reassembling the data each time, with danger of slight changes. Even worse, we are not remembering the original event repeatedly. Unless corrected for (with a photograph or a letter, perhaps), we are recalling the last recollection. You don't have everything that ever happened to you stored in your brain in some vast cinematic catalogue. What you have is a remarkable ability to reassemble memories from very few cues.

Trauma and emotion affect recall. Emotional associations, both positive and negative, increase the chances that an event will be recalled at all. This is why it is surprising, even alarming, when people forget things that seem like they should be central. It raises the possibility that they needed to forget it for some reason. It seems a move away from wholeness. Yet I have my own third son as example against this. He suffered terrible neglect and abuse, and recently exclaimed to his brother "We had an aunt?" Even the rest of the family met her on our one joint trip to Romania, and remembered her. And he is mind-bogglingly well-adjusted.

 *In contrast to someone like Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, who would shrug and say "I just go out and throw."

No memory.

 

Memory In General - The Seven Sins of Memory (Part II)

The Seven Sins of Memory 

I cannot fully recommend the book to the regular reader.  I learned a good deal from Schacter's book - some of that is in the paragraphs above and previous posts - but it is something more like a textbook than a summary of ideas for the general intelligent reader. It's not like it will be above their heads, but that it gets tedious. An example:

The book opens with a poignant story by Yasunari Kawabata, "Yumiura,"about an author who meets with a woman from years ago. She remembers much about their meeting when he visited her part of Japan, how they fell in love and he proposed marriage. He remembers none of this and is rather frantic listening to this calm woman pleasantly tell the story in some detail.  He is deeply troubled as he leaves and when he gets home looks over his notes, diaries, and correspondence from the time to try and find some clue that will unlock the memory for him. He discovers that there are none.  He has never been to this part of Japan (as he originally thought) and can see documentation that he was in other cities at the times in question. She has imagined the entire set of incidents.

I was intrigued because I had had several patients, all female with what we called erotomania, the belief that one is married or engaged to a famous (even if only locally) person.  I imagine they have changed the name at this point, as it sounds a bit insulting and is not fully accurate. The male equivalent presents differently, for the record. I pushed forward, looking for what research had been done, both before the original publication twenty years ago and since then, up until the updated edition last year. Nothing. Just the charming story. Checking back, I noticed what I had missed the first time, that it was fiction.

So what good is it, then? It is a poignant introduction to the topic that has no scientific value. What the chapter did contain was brief descriptions of the unbearably tedious and incremental types of research they do on memory.  They gave lists of ten words to college students, or seniors, or people who had had strokes. They asked them to memorise them, but sometimes they interfered with them and sometimes they didn't. They in four minutes, or four days, to list them.  Or they showed them fifteen words that included some previously listed and some new and asked which ones had been on the list. The designed the lists to be associated words or unrelated. A score of variations on "we gave them a list of words and then did this or that." There are other standard memory test designs, equally mind-numbing to follow.

I completely get it that these are the building blocks for memory research. One immerses oneself in such patterns and studies take on richer meaning and give ideas for further studies. Now we can do fMRIs while they are visualising or memorising or recovering from strokes. I don't fault in the least that this is the way a lot of the work simply has to be done, ins small increments.

I just have no interest in fighting through this stuff myself. My interest does not lie in understanding what is lacking in those who have damaged amygdalas. Give me the big picture about the varieties of people withing normal limits here. People who have experienced trauma and their memory oddities, sure.  Tell me what's happening there. I see those people, I know some. There are lots of those, and there are levels of trauma. But hippocampus damage? Please no.

Sometimes he does. But here I get even more nervous. Sometimes he hits on topics I already know something about, and while I never found him to be wrong, precisely, I did sometimes think "Not so fast. That's not the whole story about recovered memory, or implicit bias, or the various head-injured/stroke/dementia categories. Even here there is a fair bit of good information, it's just that...things are missing. Uncovering such things when an author hits something that I know makes be retroactively suspicious of the other things he has been telling me, about subjects I knew far less about. His last chapter may be a matter of taste. He speculates on larger issues of memory on the basis or recent research.  If you like your science very hard, you will find this frustrating, as a lot of this isn't nailed down. If you like exploring possibilities you may like it better.

Memory In General - Part III

 Odds and Ends

Trauma makes memory more unreliable. This can get painful, because people feel like you aren't believing them, or are dismissive of their suffering if you don't accept their story as told. Time is frequently disrupted in trauma, especially chronology. Bias is a great disrupter, whether to a narrative, they were all against me but I succeeded anyway, or to categories of expectation, women are more likely to start arguments in public. Our memory for attitudes is more malleable, subject to hindsight bias, than actual events. "We had great camaraderie at that job."  "Our relationship was already in trouble by then." Sometimes these contradict actual documents from that time or test information. Also, people who have suffered trauma have a reduced ability to actively suppress all unpleasant memories, not just the traumatic ones.

It does happen that people invent events and believe them, often because they have been convinced by others that "he probably was unsupportive around you having a sick child all spring and even criticised you in front of others." But reinterpretation of actual events past recognition is more common.

How do we know whose version of a story is correct, absent hard evidence? We don't, and should be cautious. However, there are clues. Some people have a record of accuracy. Me, for example. Others have shown a willingness to swallow hard and accept hard things about themselves rather than always reporting how right they always are. Be alert to noticing who routinely destroys information quickly, such as emails or text threads. We would certainly notice in confidentiality situations people who were always trying to control the flow of information. "You aren't allowed to talk to my sister." Some people like clean files or a clen desk and routinely move things on, and this is fine.  But those who go the next step and quickly delete them permanently may not be covering up anything today, but just be in the habit of removing hard evidence. There have been attempts to show that people who talk too much or too little, who give too many details or too few, are more likely to be deceiving. Mostly, these simply reflect the initial bias of the writer (or even the researcher!) They don't like people who talk too much and suspect them of fabricating. But the evidence for such things tends to be very narrow.

Related to Grim's comment under my last Nostalgia Destruction Tour post* : When people, especially those known to be intelligent, are quiet ones, we expect them to be introspective. Isn't that how it is in the movies and books? I learned from recontact with people, and also with contemplating many of the others, that this is emphatically not true. Many intelligent people, even quiet ones, are not at all introspective. I confess this is frankly amazing to me, but "it's nae use sayin' pigs conner fly when ye see 'em sproutin' wings." (Welsh, I believe) This is not to say that they aren't thoughtful - just not introspective, and thus not very aware of their own motivations and with a reduced ability to assess those of others.

There are many strategies for attempting to forget the unpleasant. Some are not only ineffective but can create a rebound effect. I have tried to make the visual outlines of something progressively fuzzier with less distinct colors, and this has some effect. But it doesn't touch the rest of the memory - its description, its impact, its sounds. Exposure therapies, which bring back the memory and then in some way undermine its reconsolidation, has some good effect. Telling others about an unpleasant event is a mixed bag.  The worst plan is to tell no one about it. The second worst plan is to tell everyone. Telling a small connected group such as a family, or even telling only a single individual tends to be optimal.

*I may have to make that a series

Nostalgia That Still Works

My grandmother had this 78rpm record, one of the few left that could be played on her wind-up phonograph.

Tonight You Belong To Me

 Bernadette Peters might be the prettiest girl ever in the movies.

Nostalgia Destruction Tour - Memory

A self-indulgent post about dealing with old friends who were not as remembered. And yet at another level they very much were, insisting that they had changed while I saw surprising continuities. I understand how that can be just a bit better now.

You may find some useful information about memory in all this anyway. Comments on Daniel Schacter's book, The Seven Sins of Memory, are still to come.

I met with my college friend Sam after the reunion and mentioned two stories about him I had told to my children.  He slightly corrected both of them. "That was probably John Mahler, not Don, because I didn't room with Don until sophomore year." And similarly "That was probably sophomore year, because Don had a car that year.  None of us did freshman year." I instantly saw that he simply must be right in both instances.  Much of getting together with old friends years later is like this. I am usually the one who has the telling detail that others nod at, but have many times been the one who needed to adjust. Sometimes a dispute remains, both of us believing that the other has it wrong. Even this is often amusing, with ongoing mutual teasing about it over a decade. 

Sometimes it is darker, with a person remembering, still with accusing resentment, an incident that the other states did not happen that way, or even denies outright. The artificial smoothing over that "maybe they are both right" will not hold. They both may be wrong. They both may be only partly right. But the paired remembering is contradictory. Often it is easy to see why a person might want a particular claim to be erroneous. It may contain accusations of mean of even criminal behavior. It might make them appear stupid. Other times it is merely baffling. Neither has a clear interest in whether the event took place after work in winter or spring, yet both are fighting for their version. Something else is at play, outsiders cannot tell what.

It is much more likely for a person to forget an incident that happened or consolidate two or more incidents that were similar. This seems obvious, because the drive of the brain toward efficiency is at play. Do we need this? No. Can we mash these together? Yes. Yet I have seen some extreme versions of this over the past few years, and it gives one pause. People forget things that seem impossible. She was your roommate freshman year. You missed the whole season because of grades. Or even, they shot at us.  

Then it is possible that the narrative is so foundational, so required, that it destroys all in its path. It feels unnerving to be in the presence of that.

*******

I found that I remember the good things about people, the witty things they said, their accomplishments, sometimes even things I admired but were generally unnoticed at the time. I have said I have a mind like an attic, full of charming and poignant things of uncertain usefulness. Nostalgia for me is opening trunks and saying "Oh, it's Aunty Em! And there's Toto!" Having actual contact with people - or with their websites and google-stalk info - reminds me of negative aspects I had not forgotten, but had not recalled in years.  

I had forgotten that his sarcasm was not only humorous, but actively mean. I don't think I'd like him much now. 

Her competing with her sister even now reminds me that this girlfriend actually didn't treat me all that well. She was rescued and accommodated then and it seems she has done that all her life and still expects it. 

He just walked away from responsibility in high school too.  I passed it off to immaturity. Guess not.  

These are actively painful for me when I reencounter them now, as if part of my childhood has been stolen.

Yet I revert to my rose-colored prism soon enough. I go to the incidents I loved, and find that I am better than most at enjoying them without regard to what went before or what came after. Like Legolas and the elves perhaps, where memory is evergreen.

I have stressed the continuity of people and this does seem to be something of a contradiction.  Perhaps the difference is not that I could have predicted who they would be now (though that is what it feels like to me) but that I have a greater pool to draw from of what things were in them then that I can use for comparison. 

Your genial, fourth generation salt-water wealth, visible even at 17 and now in its silver haired edition could have gone to putting others at ease like Queen Elizabeth did, but you can't seem to stop talking about your career success, still competing even as you retire. 

You were nerdy and hyperfocused and worried that you might not be smartest and most competent. You could have become intolerable, berating coworkers and having to die on every hill in order to have your way, but you became eccentric in a few side-hobbies instead, mixing with all strata of society with ease. 

You had an aspect of your childhood that was painfully hard, which you could have developed into generosity and tolerance for others who faced hardship, but instead you have redefined seemingly everyone you knew then into an opponent who had to be overcome in order that all-conquering you could emerge. 

All of you claimed to have changed since I knew you, but it is more that you could have gone only a limited number of ways. I can trace you back easily because the tracks into the past are familiar to me. Yet it is possible that my predictions in 1973 would have no better than anyone else's.

It might all have been worth it for the few I found.