Yes, thirty years ago this evening I went to see the Clash playing at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ, with friends Jack Vitha and Matt Oates.  This set list is what I could remember after the show, and I got most of them.

Funny enough, a couple years back at a street vendor’s booth in Utrecht, the Netherlands, I found a CD bootleg recording of this very show.

Here’s some material from a book I’ve been reading called Train Your Mind Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley which reports on some recent neuroscience findings (it’s in fact a summary of findings that were presented to the Buddhist community  including the Dalai Lama in a series of workshops).  Many of the findings are with regard to neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change in response to various stimuli.  But this one stuck out in my mind (page 158):

Attention is also, as it happens, indispensable for neuroplasticity. Nowhere was that shown more dramatically than in one of Mike Merzenich’s experiments with monkeys. The scientists rigged up a device that tapped the animals’ fingers one hundred minutes a day every day for six weeks.  At the same time as this bizarre dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys listened to sounds over headphones. Some of the monkeys were taught, pay attention to what you feel on your fingers, such as when the rhythm changes, we’ll reward you with a sip of juice; don’t pay attention to the sounds. Other monkeys were taught, pay attention to the sound, and if you indicate when it changes, you’ll get juice. At the end of six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys’ brains. Let me underline that every monkey, whether trained to pay attention to what it was hearing or what it was feeling on its fingers, had the exact same physical experience – sounds coming in through headphones plus taps on its fingers. The only thing that made one monkey different from another was what it paid attention to.

Usually, when a particular spot on the skin suddenly begins receiving unusual amounts of stimulation, its representation in the somatosensory cortex expands. That was what Mike Merzenich discovered in his monkeys. But when the monkeys paid attention to what they heard rather than to what they felt, there was no change in the somatosensory cortex – no expension of the region that handles input from the finger feeling the flutter.

It goes on to state that the stimuli that was attended to produced more brain resources going to that stimuli, and not to the one that was ignored.  So in some sense it appears that ‘attention’ can be a part of what shapes our brain, and that since we can direct our attention, there may be ways to consciously direct the development of brain resources.

Now in some ways this finding seems completely obvious.  Clearly when we’re in school, we tend to learn those things which we pay attention to… if you attend a foreign language class and don’t pay attention, you may pick up a few words, but will not learn much.  This just confirms that there’s an actual physical result from the conscious attention.  The interesting questions to me are what techniques can be used to direct attention in the most effective way to achieve one’s goals and desires.

Also it seems to me that as more brain resources are trained on particular tasks, the task moves from one that requires conscious attention to being more of a background, autonomous process, allowing the conscious attention to move to other areas.

From John Mauldin’s last newsletter, in a section titled “So Where’s the Inflation?”:

The actual amount of bank loans is falling each and every quarter, with no signs of a bottom. Consumers are reducing their debt and leverage. Bank loans are being written off at staggering rates. Over 700 banks (I think that is the figure I saw) are officially on watch by the FDIC, with more banks being closed each week.

There is at least $300-400 billion in losses on commercial real estate waiting to be written down. Housing foreclosures are rising and hundreds of billions have yet to be written off. As more families fall into unemployment or underemployment, there will be more writedowns. Is it any wonder that banks are having to shore up their balance sheets and make fewer loans?

With capacity utilization just off all-time lows, why should we expect businesses to borrow to increase capacity? Inventory levels are much lower than two years ago. Businesses no longer need to finance as much inventory. They simply need less.

Dennis Gartman writes:

“Effectively the Fed had become a cash machine rather than a monetary expansion machine. At the end of last year, the multiplier had actually fallen to less than 1.0 and the trend remains downward. If anyone had told us five years ago that the money multiplier would be down to 1.0 we would have laughed. The laugh, however, would have been upon us, for it is there and it is still falling. Hard it shall be to sponsor strong economic growth when no one really wants to take a loan or when few banks want to make a loan. The ‘game’ of banking has been turned upon its head, and the strength of the economy suffers while inflationary pressures (at least for now) remain virtually non-existent.”

Bottom line is that there’s plenty of evidence that we’ve already had a lot of the inflation everyone’s worried about (it was just called a Housing Bubble, or rising tuition, or rising medical costs, not inflation).  Right now money is disappearing (loans being paid off or written off), and I think the Treasury and Fed are trying desperately to keep outright deflation from taking over.

This NYT article “Preparing for the next bubble” also had this interesting bit at the end:

So rather than trying to predict the number and type of bubbles, it may make more sense to look inward when trying to predict the future. Bob Goldman, a financial planner in Sausalito, Calif., said that clients often looked at him blankly when he asked them what it was they imagined for themselves in the future. Sometimes, they need to go home and figure out what sort of life it is that they’re saving for — and how much (or little) it might cost.

“People come in and talk about how we all know that inflation is going to explode next year,” Mr. Goldman said. “Well, we don’t all know that. We don’t know anything. But we can know something about our own lives, and there is a person we can talk to about that. A person in the mirror.”

It does strike me as strange that so many people seem to have such certainty about the economic future, when in fact no one really knows!  But it is indeed fascinating to ponder…

Just wanted to share a few shots I took this afternoon in the neighborhood.

Well, it’s Friday but it’s no longer football season… unless you’re watching old seasons of ‘Friday Night Lights’ which I have to admit has been consuming a fair amount of my time lately.  I just finished watching season 2, which I found to be a little less satisfying than the first season, if only because it felt like some of the episodes were a little too ‘cleverly’ plotted instead of just organic developments of the characters.  Apparently they give the actors quite a lot of latitude to ‘feel’ their way into scenes, not forcing them to read the lines as written, and this gives things a nice freshness (along with the fact that it’s all shot on real locations near Austin, TX, not studios), even though it’s basically a bit of a soap opera.

The show has a big cast of about 10 main characters and probably 10 more people who appear regularly, and actually it’s not really about football (very much).  It does center on a football coach and his family, who live in a football-crazy Texas town called Dillon, where there’s a long track record of success on the field, and high expectations.  It follows a number of the high school kids, parents, coaches, teachers as they make their way through life.

Friday Night Lights had gotten a lot of critical acclaim but not great ratings, and I do wonder if it’s a show that kids could watch with their parents – seems to me that it may feel a little uncomfortable for both parties, as the kids in the show get into the usual troubles of drinking, sex and so forth.  But in any case I think it’s well done and worth watching. The fifth and final season will be starting in April.

Finally saw the Canadian pop band Sloan last night at the Doug Fir Lounge, and they put on a great show.  The core group got together in Halifax in the early nineties, and their years of playing together make for a tight sound.  Somehow I never managed to see them until now, but I hope to catch them again next time around!

The other day I found this lovely old postcard of a Canadian Mountie on a horse in the Rockies, reminding me of Dudley Do-Right.  I sent it off to my friend Phil, who somehow still has in his possession a Snidely Whiplash puppet.  Thus the photo above, which I love.

The author of Natural-Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark, is more philosopher than science fiction writer, though as the cover indicates he does cover some pretty far out technology in this book.  He’s most interested in the notion of the ‘expanded mind’, by that meaning the way we incorporate not only biological but also technological tools to navigate in the world.  By this he means not just the cinematic cyborg concepts like implants into the brain, but also simpler tools like pen and paper, and anything else we use either consciously or unconsciously.  I found this book really interesting for a number of reasons, and I’ll try to cover a few high points.

1.  On language:
“The deepest contributions of speech and language to human thought, however, may be something so large and fundamental that it is sometimes hare to see it at all! For it is our linguistic capacities, I have long suspected, that allow us to think and reason about our own thinking and reasoning. And it is this capacity, in turn, that may have been the crucial foot-in-the-door for the culturally transmitted process of designer-environment construction: the process of deliberately building better worlds to think in.” (p. 78).  What he’s getting at here is language as a tool that gives us the ability to examine concepts and generate ideas that could not have been conceived of without language.

In a somewhat similar fashion he mentions how we use mathematical shortcuts and paper-based tools to, for example, multiply two large numbers, like 147 * 382.  Most of us cannot do that calculation in our heads, but with a piece of paper and a pencil and the mental math tools of breaking the problem down into simple integer multiplication (7 * 2, then 7* 8, etc.) we can solve the problem.  So is the calculation simply in our head, or is it in fact a collaboration of brain and pencil and paper (or these days brain and calculator).  The tools expand our mental universe, give us access to areas that we could not get to without them.

2. On extended mental worlds, Alzheimer’s example:
“These patients were a puzzle because althoushould not have been able to do sogh they still lived alone, successfully, in the city, they really should not have been able to do so. On standard psychological tests they performed rather dismally. They should have been unable to cope with the demands of daily life. What was going on? A sequence of visits to their home environments provided the answer. These home environments, it transpired, were wonderfully calibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains. The homes were stuffed full of cognitive props, tools and aids. Examples included message centers where they stored notes about what to do and when; photos of family and friends complete with indications of names and relationships; lables and pictures on doors; [etc.]” (p. 140).

Here again he is making the point that we put ‘intelligence’ out in our environment, and our brains and bodies work with these tools to make sense of the world.  Note that none of this involves ‘biological implants’ but in principle these too are tools that can feed us more useful information, just the way a cane can provide information to a blind person.

3. The extended mind:
“What we really need to reject, I suggest, is the seductive idea that these various neural and nonneural tools need a kind of privileged user. Instead, it is just tools all the way down. Some of those tools are indeed more closely implicated in our conscious awareness of the world than others. But those elements, taken on their own, would fall embarrassingly short of reconstituting any recognizable version of a human mind or an individual person. Some elements, likewise are more important to our sense of self and identity than others. Some elements play larger roles in control and decision making than others. But this divide, like the ones before it, tends to crosscut the inner and the outer, the biological and the nonbiological.” (p 137).

“Tools-R-Us. But we are prone, it seems, to a particularly dangerous kind of cognitive illusion. Because our best efforts at watching our own minds in action reveal only the conscious flow of ideas and decisions, we mistakenly identify ourselves with the stream of conscious awareness.” (p. 137).

There is plenty more to chew on in this book.  This argument about the extended mind is similar to the points made by Alva Noe in his book Out of Our Heads.

I first saw R.E.M. in summer 1981, opening up for Gang of Four at the Ritz in NYC.  At that point I think they only had their first single out, and Mr. Stipe still had lots of bushy hair flying around.  Chronic Town EP came out the next year, and of course lots more over the years.  I liked their music, saw them a couple more times, but the records in the last 10 years or so have been disappointing mostly – not quite the same magic anymore.

So I was a little skeptical about last years double live CD, R.E.M. Live at the Olympia in Dublin, but saw some good reviews and figured I should check it out.  And it is well worth hearing for any long-time fan of the band.  In fact, I’d have to say that if I could only have one of their recordings, it would be this one.  The band played five nights in Dublin, testing out new songs for what became their Accelerate album, and playing lots of old ones.  They sound energized and tough, putting new life in songs going back all the way to that Chronic Town release – check it out.