Every Sunday Morning, a place where various things get thrown out, shot at, cut open, and dissected. Topics of interest: psychological, and medical anthropology, privatization, globalization, excess, language, humor, hip-hop culture, jazz, brain and mind, memory, urban space development, Los Angeles, the Chicago Bulls, UCLA Bruins, FC Barcelona, and mankind.
I started a new blog about Los Angeles and open spaces in it. The inspiration for the name comes from an organization that organizes public lectures in LA, Zocalo. Their tag line is "to provide a welcoming, inclusive space in a city with too few welcoming spaces." Mish mash that with the existence of Skid Row just a few blocks from a revivalist downtown and Mike Davis' city of Quartz and voila, Los Angeles Public Space at http://losangelespublicspace.blogspot.com.
I've been talking about the walkability of things, free events, and Watts. I talk about everything possible in the public realm but only from a perspective I'm comfortable with. I know some of what's going on, but I won't pretend to be an expert with years of experience. For now, I'm just the man on the sidewalk.
That said, the introduction of the blog, and the ease with which I write on, kinda helped me realize my professional and career interests.
This will be my professional shpiel, and I am now practicing it.
I've decided mentally officially that I want to be a Cognitive Anthropologist with a focus on urban settings. It's my way of bridging my interest in urban planning and psychological anthropology and the possible subfield of "neuroanthropology."
Specifically, I am interested in memory as expressed in the public and social realm. I'm curious about what people remember about events, and how they use that recall to formulate...something I developed from years of Chicago Bulls basketball message board reading.
I have had the luxury of having a well-developed and active message board community. Sure there are fans from other teams, but this is a community of namely Bulls fans, and virtually all of the fighting and conflict stems from within the Bulls fan commmunity.
The conflict stems from certain decisions made by management. There are factions that support management decisions, others that don't. There are factions of fans that support players over others, there are factions that dislike certain players ON THE TEAM.
There may not always be news regarding the team, but there is definitely a community that stays active even when there is no action. It can be seen in the number of Off-topic (OT) threads that are started, specifically during the offseason.
I think these factions represent a community and the individuals/actors within them reflect real world politics and beliefs. Those beliefs are all but embedded in the language they use. Sometimes they reflect hidden racist attitudes, or liberalist viewpoints. Having spent years on these message boards with the same characters, I could sort of anticipate whose going to comment on what, and how they're going to respond to a certain situation.
One thing I've been struck by on these message boards in relation to memory is that fans don't usually remember a lot of facts or details when they argue about the value of players. No one can recall the details to every game ever played, not even self-professed fanatics. Recalling those details turns out not to be important in that most people never seem to reference them again. The reality of the message board is not so much to make published, lasting statements, but for fluid human-like conversation. Most people operate on a type of working memory that does not lead them to progress in their understanding of the different players and team.
Instead, the fans who rely on that working memory and fluid-conversation seem to be stuck and glued to their modes of thought. As the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis postulates, language creates thought. I think those who use working memory more often are likely not to take in and fully register the new language/discourse expressed upon understanding players. Without taking in that language, they aren't likely to make new distinctions or give meaning to new distinctions and nuances. They aren't likely to be detailed, but not taking in the discourse allows them to reproduce their statements and in turn inflate more meaning into their repeated discourse.
I think this kind of interest has implications for understanding the political mind, how people make decisions, and other such fields as marketing, psychology, etc.
On a more personal note, I don't want to do this just because it's my interest, but also because I want to show that Filipinos, minorities, people of color can be influential and do other things, specifically in academia and where the knowledges are created. I want to show that my race and ethnicity, the hip-hop I rock, the language we use is not stupid, we won't be fooled, and we can make things happen.
A man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with scuh furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it...It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless fact elbowing out the useful ones.
Except John Paxson didn't crowd the Bulls with knowledge. He crowded them with overrated and overpaid players.
Kirk Hinrich, an unimpressive point guard, got an average of 9.5 million over 6 years to overdribble, complain on defense, choke in the clutch, and back-up Derrick Rose.
Ben Wallace got 14 million per year to deteriorate and watch other centers and power forwards grab rebounds. Ben Wallace's deterioration begat the 13 million dollar albatross that is Larry Hughes, whose seen better days, particularly those days when there wasn't a website dedicated to him telling him not to shoot so much.
Luol Deng is the latest to benefit from Paxson's fool strategy. He got 12 million per year, to stay injured and to perform his disappearing act when it matters.
Kirk Hinrich, Larry Hughes, Luol Deng. They will make 31 million out of the 54 million under this year's salary cap. With the on/off Nocioni, that's 39 million invested in 4 players: a player who should've been traded, a player we traded for because of a bad signing, a bad signing, and Andres Nocioni.
In contrast, the San Antonio Spurs, a real franchise, invested 41 million dollars in 3 years, but in players who are actually the team's main producers: Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili.
In Paxson's mistake-accumulating frenzy, he crowded out one of the team's main producers since 04-05. None other than the leading scorer over the past 3 years, Ben Gordon.
Despite his status as the clearcut #1 option on the offense, he wasn't going to be paid even Kirk Hinrich money, let alone Luol Deng money.
After a long and drawn out negotiating period, Ben Gordon signed the 1-year qualifying offer for 6.4 million dollars. The consensus is now that he is good as gone after that 1 year. After this one year, he becomes an unrestricted free agent, meaning he could sign anywhere and the Bulls would be left with nothng to show for the 3rd pick in the 2004 draft.
Yes, he comes off the bench, and yes he was leading scorer for a losing team.
However, bench scoring is one of the few things going for us, ever, and he was leading scorer for a 41 win team, and a 49 win team as well.
I've followed this team since the first Bush was still in office. I was the jump-rope monitor for my class. I've since advanced to playground monitor.
I didn't even know who Ben Gordon was out of college. I wouldn't care too much about him if he didn't help the Bulls shoot themselves out of the pile of dung they were in.
I simply recognize a good, winning product when I see it. Ben Gordon is exactly that.
Unfortunately, the Bulls wouldn't know. If anyone has inclinations of using any variation of the phrase, "wouldn't know [insert item of curiosity here, in this case for the Chicago Bulls, WINNING PLAYERS/DIFFERENCE MAKERS] if it was biting them in the ass", the Chicago Bulls are a good modern-day point of reference.
He was a huge reason we even had a resurgence in 04-05. We were supposed to be monumentally bad and supposed to continue in that direction. Luol Deng was the first guy I noticed, I thought he was a star, after a Lakers game, but we still lost. I lost all hope in the season after watching us muff a Clippers game.
Then out of nowhere we won a game in Utah.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/recap?gid=2004112426
It was cute. The rookie was doing something we could've had Jamal Crawford done. Nice!
We then won against the Lakers at home.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/recap?gid=2004120104
I thought that this Ben Gordon guy might be worth something after all, but it would be impossible for this team to do anything else.
He solidified his status as 4th quarter magic in 2 games against the Knicks. By the time he was done, he was a league-wide sensation and the Bulls were suddenly out of the worst 6 year funk in pro team sports history. He had 20 games where he had 10 points or more in the 4th quarter. He was a reason that announcers talked about clutch statistics. 6th man of the year as a rookie.
However, that was probably a curse in disguise for the perception of his game.
Scott Skiles pigeonholed him as being effective only as a 6th man.
For the better part of 3 years, Gordon would have to fight for his playing time, let alone starting time in ways most star scorers would never have to. In 06-07, despite being a league top 20 scorer at 21.4 points per game, he averaged the least minutes (33), and scored at the rate of and more than Amare Stoudamire, a guy who operates in the post.
However, instead of giving this leading scorer, this guy who's helped to re-energize your franchise more room to grow even more, Scott Skiles seemed to punish Gordon. Particularly in 05-06, BG was subject to benchings for in-game defensive lapses and turnovers. Skiles jerked him on and off the bench, starting each season with Gordon as a starter, before relegating him, and subsequently reinstating him.
At work in Skiles' mercurial management of Gordon was the principle of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." As in as they kept trying to change BG's role and his minutes around, the more his status to the team, his reputation stayed the same, the perception of his improvement stayed the same.
The league-wide expectation is that if you are a bench player, your ultimate goal is to become a starter.
However, the line fed to us by the Skiles regime was that Gordon was our very special bench player, not the traditional bench player who stunk, but the one who gave us a boost from the bench. Bench scoring, tops in the league, thanks in no small part to Ben Gordon.
But still even with Skiles' explanation, casual fans and media pundits alike completely missed that point this summer when analyzing Gordon's situation.
They missed that point when they were calling him simply a bench player, who was fair value worth no more than 8-9 million dollars a year. They missed that when they de-valued his contribution as the leading scorer.
Bench players in the NBA tend to get conflated into one category. Not good enough to play unless you are Manu Ginobili and Leandro Barbosa, players on the bench on winning teams. If you're not on a winning team, bench players are players of excess. Ben Gordon is a bench player. Ben Gordon is of excess.
The other argument was against his ability as a #1 option. He was "only" a leading scorer has also been used against him. It's implied that playing offense on a losing team means you're not that good on offense, that you're shooting and chucking because no one else will.
That mode of NBA trend generalization doesn't jibe well with the reality that Gordon's effective FG percentage was well over 50%, meaning he wasn't just randomly shooting and wasn't inefficient.
Despite all the herking and jerking of his playing time, and an everchanging role as defined by an idiotic coach, BG has still been the player whom most fans anticipated to "heat up." "Heat up" as in hit shots. "Hit shots" to actually win the basketball game. No one on this team would have expectation of Hinrich, Luol Deng, or Andres Nocioni to "get hot." There is no Hinrich time, or Luol time. It's Gordon everyone expects to salvage a game.
Gordon heat up in a 19-2 run scoring 16 in the 4th quarter against Indiana.
This was a game in which we were down 19 with 6 minutes to go. If we didn't win this game, we might have not made the playoffs. If we didn't win that game
A few games later, he heat up against the Wizards. He shot 9 for 9 behind the 3-point line. This was the game that sealed our entrance into the playoffs.
Perhaps this 6th man heating up and leading the team in scoring is not such a trivial attribute after all. It might actually be useful, particularly if we were interested at all in winning any championships.
Self-Diagnosed and Induced Dyscalculia: My Math Experience and Its Relation to Working Memory
by B.J. on 9/28/2008 08:00:00 AM
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In my first two years of high school, math was one of my best classes. I did well in Algebra I that I got into Honors Geometry. From Honors Geometry, I did well enough to progress into Honors Algebra II.
Honors Algebra II...where fecal matter made contact with the fan, and my confidence in my math skills evaporated like a fart in the wind.
Mind you, when I took my SATs the following year, I still got the same exact low score on verbal as I did my math, but given my scores in SAT II subject tests, I figured I was just headed for a life without math. Plus, I didn't want to start behind in college, at precalculus, so I just thought I'd avoid it altogether.
Thanks to a vague "quantitative" requirement at UC-Santa Cruz, in which I would be able to use introductory science classes to satisfy the requirement, I was able to slip by my classes without doing much math.
Six years on, two years out of college, staring down options for graduate school, I am still wondering when I am going to take the GRE and/or the CBEST.
At the center of this standardized test hold-up: my fear of my performing poorly in the maths sections. A paralyzing dual fear of 1) forgotten methods and even scarier, 2) miscalculations.
I am now studying all that math that I forgot.
I tried re-doing math when I transferred to LA by re-doing precalculus, but I was practically run over by the speed at which we went through material and it felt like I never had a solid foot on just what the hell was going on. I probably forgot what to do which was one thing, but another thing was simple miscalculation --- getting things wrong in simple division, subtraction, addition, and multiplication, which I shouldn't have!
In just one moment of failure in math, in high school, I atrophied almost a life-time of accumulated skills.
Nowadays, when I look at even just the idea of rational numbers, everything seems very rote. "Rote" as in unbelievably dull, disparate, disconnected, meaningless. I could throw numbers around and not care. Numbers and signs are symbols of an arduous, painful journey upon which I eventually need to take steps.
I might've been keen just continuing what I was doing, but, I've had an education in deconstruction that has taken me in a 270 degree turn almost back to where I was as a math student. Almost.
Numbers in themselves are not 'bad' or 'good.' It is merely a language that communicates trust. Trust across different academic disciplines, communicating trust from government to person, from media or business to consumer. The key is that numbers are merely language. Language is merely a tool for expressing thought. Using math is a tool for expressing thought, but in terms of quantification and precision. It expresses a discreet, definite answer to a societally important question of 'how much.'
In a highly-interconnected society with lots of buildings, roads, people, and objects, but apparently not enough time, space, and/or resources, the question of "how much" is now that much more important.
However, just because its that much more important and perhaps has increased its utility doesn't necessarily mean people want to or actually do learn that language.
I had been wondering why this language of math suddenly became so daunting for me.
One clue from my heightened love for languages and neurosciences:
Dyscalculia arises because a person cannot develop adequate representations of how many things there are.
So the inverse logic is that perhaps I probably have lost an adequate representation of how many things there actually were: I let numbers become too generalized so that they lost their adequate representation. Subsequently, all numbers, notations, and symbols somehow all became similar, particularly when I arrived at answers. I was neglecting negative signs, forgetting to add, subtract, multiply, divide.
Why did numbers become so "generalized?"
Perhaps because I started putting concepts in my own terms.
I had learned in my high school psychology class the next year about alternative memory methods. By this time I figured I was heading into the social sciences and humanities, so I focused on just remembering everything in psychology or history. To remember all of what I was learning, I was trying to make the subject material more relevant to me. I was putting concepts in my own terms, making ideas teachers presented to me, relevant to my own experiences.
I was trying to metaphor-ize social science and history subjects to things in my daily life.
Metaphors are imperfect tools of language which seeks to underline and understand similarity. It seeks to understand relationships. The similarities are almost always arbitrary, but it makes it easy to remember because I see their connection to things that I've experienced. The new concept simply adds to that experience. Metaphors are about understanding relationships between things.
When doing my social science thing, I don't necessarily accept terms used to describe things as they appear to be. In fact, I fight a lot of them, because I don't think people like being reduced. I don't think I'd ever call anyone an "illegal immigrant" lest we call everyone in the United States.
Why do we label in the first place? We do it to make fast manipulations when making fast decisions --- a survival mechanism. It's a tool to help us model just what the hell is immediately happening around us.
Conversely, math is about manipulating or changing relationships, and it depends heavily on acknowledging labels in the first place. Labels, symbols, notations. -4 + 5 is different from 4 + 5. You have to acknowledge that '-' before the 4, which is exactly the kind of thing I was forgetting in my GRE test exams.
How to manipulate and change relationships and acknowledge those relationships?
Ostensibly, it seems to depend on developing visuo-spatial ability. Rubik's cube people, chess players are said to have a visuo-spatial abilities, which they can co-opt to their advantage. Einstein's brain was said to be 15% larger in the part of the brain that deals with these abilities. He was said to "think in pictures."
That Causes Some People To Be Lousy In Math. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 20, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2006/03/060320221545.htm
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way
Essentially, nature is what it is, reality is what it is, but we create thought about nature and/or reality based on how we label it. We label things the way we do because we've learned it from some type of institution, be it family, school, church, or tribe.
I learned that it's usually best to be as specific as possible when in the process of organizing things and labeling.
However, why exactly I needed to be specific when labeling something wasn't clear until recently. It hit me when I was filing hard copy foundation information away for my old job...
I had two choices to make when filing away this information. Either
a) make a hard copy labeled manila folder specifically for the foundation b) dump it in a general hard copy folder
If I did "option a" and made a hard copy labeled manila folder specifically for a foundation, there would be room for it to accumulate information. I could add all the stuff related to that foundation including its annual reports, its 990s, its Foundation Center search page. With that information all tucked away into one folder, we'd have a very good snapshot of this foundation. We could learn about the foundation's giving patterns, giving amounts, etc.
Conversely, if I didn't make a labeled folder, all this information would accumulate in the general folder, "option b". Dumping things in the general manila folder would save me time and resources. I usually did this for foundations that did not provide much information. One more manila folder saved, one part of a tree saved!
However, using this method, distinguishing pertinent things between foundations could be somewhat more difficult, especially if I just started dumping all the information available in the general manila folder.
As the swath of information grows, I'll be less likely to peer through any specific foundation information unless I really have to. So it essentially becomes this big pile of crap that I don't want to deal with. The annual reports, the 990s, the Foundation Center search pages might get scrambled with another foundation's information. Things would be worse if some of the information was unlabeled and could not be attributed to one foundation.
Essentially, if I created the new manila folder, I allowed a foundation's folder to accumulate information. I could put as much stuff in there without it getting mixed up with another foundation. Up to a point where it doesn't seem like a mass of information, I can potentially keep adding and growing information. I could add more and more, that is until it becomes difficult to actually use the folder in carrying those papers. Best of all, I can recall the information simply by pulling up its folder and getting what I want out of it.
If I overuse the general folder to the point where I can't even lift the folder with the papers, the items in the folder become one big mass of information. If I overused, even though I knew the information was in there, I'd still take time to dig through the information.
So from that point, I decided to be as specific as possible and consume more manila folders on behalf of the organization.
By doing this, I could help the organization do two things: 1) grow the specific information it had on foundations 2) expedite the process of information retrieval.
Growing specific information.
Expediting information retrieval.
Two big concepts that existed if I built a new labeled folder. Broken down, a new labeled folder is just a depot for me to get whatever I think is "specific" information, and get it quickly.
Making metaphors to my own human memory, if I could simply take that concept of building new "labeled folders", I too, could also grow information into my head and expedite information retrieval. But how the heck do I build "new labeled folders?" in my own mind?
When I first starting using delicious to save important and interesting web pages accessible anywhere I went provided I had internet connection, I learned pretty quickly that I was interested in the "brain."
I saved a lot of things under the self-created category "brain."
But now that I look back at my delicious page, and currently the category "brain" has 538 items under it. I bookmarked 538 items under the category brain, which is kind of intimidating. It's a whole mass of shit to deal with! Interesting information, but I'll need a whole lot of energy to go through it again. Unless I was paid to navigate my own shit trail, I would never be able to navigate this endlessly broad category again.
To chomp on that information, however, I developed a plan. The same plan I had when I was making new labeled Manila folders. The "brain" had obviously become that overstacked "general" folder. All I needed to do was "create more folders." Creating folders within a delicious bookmarking context means creating more "tags" or categories. Instead of just "brain" accumulating everything, all I had to do was be more specific about what part of brain it had to do with...whether it's been "brainimaging", "memory", "perception."
Why did I not just label things specifically from the start?
It's simply because when I started delicious account, I only had a general interest in the brain. There wasn't too much distinction for me to make between an interesting study on alzheimer's disease and an interesting study on autism. It was just all "brain" to me.
But now that I have more distinctions to make between items pertaining to the brain, I now have the necessary room to grow...grow into that scholar of memory who knows the categories, the labels, the symbols and can retrieve that information quick enough to be in the conversation.
by B.J. on 7/16/2008 11:46:00 PM
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I have no idea why I saved this blog here a month ago. For some reason, my memory recall of ideas has been hazy. I feel like I've been "tip of tongue" most of the time in which I know I had an idea, but it feels like I can't quite capture exactly what it is. I'm hitting everything, except the exact strand of thought that clarifies everything.
The Depression of 2009 and the Economic Geographies of 1929.
At the time I del.icio.us'ed it to my "blog" tag, I was thinking of a possible master's thesis, the geography of opportunity, for my Master's application, I made a trip to the Center for Land Use Interpretation bought a book and set of maps called Radical Cartography and another book called Slow Space.
Quotes of interest:
-"In discussions of the current financial crisis, the importance of housing and mortgages, and of foreign account imbalances, notably with East Asian manufacturing economies, suggests a failure in spatial fixes on which capitalism has been said to depend."
Spatial fixes I've learned from this blog, and this paper are simply "geographic expressions of an economic system."
-"It is a matter of material sites of social reproduction, such as the home."
So what was of interest to me? What was the question or questions I was interested in?
Some possibilities...
1) What were the economic cycles were people enmeshed in at the time? What was the physical infrastructure, layout that made this possible in the first place? Upon what did people depend on to obtain commodities to sustain their lifestyles? What was the geography that enabled them to depend on such things in the economy? I think this is likely what I was most wondering about.
2) What did the maps of 1929 look like? Was there spontaneous consumership and what did that look like?
3) Could it have to do with immigrants and following the flow of goods and commodities?
4) What were the social networks available? Upon what networks of relatives, co-workers, friends did people rely on during the depression?
5) What were the opportunities they saw and what did they seize upon?
I can't quite figure out what was interesting, so it's just here and maybe something else will remind me.
Spent most of undergrad criticizing the sciences in a minor that I thought would be devoted to just that.
But here I am, 2 years later, needing to learn it...
I bought the book In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel because:
a) I had been given a 2nd Barnes & Noble Giftcard thanks to my friend Nancy b) I figured I would probably take a class in auto repair...(or just rent a book from the 'brary) c) I wanted something that would encourage my interest in memory studies d) I didn't want something that I felt comfortable with and could read in an entire day
Yes, I've figured out something specific...I like the brain...and specifically I like memory.
Memory, because of its multifacetedness.
Short-term working memory has implications for intelligence, which is what I've always been interested in. Long-term memory shows what really lies deep within ourselves. Memory is a reflection of what we give meaning to, what we place importance on. Highly emotional, highly subjective states are what we remember most, because they are packed with meaning, and ultimately that's what we go on.
Overall, I didn't understand a lot of the biological language, but certainly, I became more interested in learning about them. I was interested in the insights he had into the science profession, the mind. Generally speaking, it's stuff you've heard before in the public discourse...our brains are plastic, you can learn a lot no matter what age you are, just in more detail.
On the book's interesting points:
1) Interesting stuff he said about the work of scientists.
First was a comment on scientific research work. He often described those he held in esteem as "creative", as if they were artists, rather than neurological or molecular biologists.
"There are scientists...who are very strong technically but who do not necessarily have the deepest insights into the biological questions they are studying (68)."
Then he mentioned the motviation of scientists; they are no different than any other human beings.
"If pure scientists were motivated by curiosity alone, they should be delighted when someone else sovles the problem they are working on---but that is not the usual reaction. Recognition by their peers and esteem come only to those who have made original contributions to the common stock of knowledge.(68)"
Scientists have a need to prove and validate themselves just like any other human being. However, the specialized, high-level language they use to describe their work, their findings, etc. makes it appear as if they are disconnected from the regular world.
2) On Learning: "Different forms of learning give rise to different forms of memory." (198) I have no clue as to what he's referring to here, but it could be interesting some day.
3) On Synapses and Learning: He mentions the strength of synaptic connections as being the key to learning.
Very important chapter in the book of neuro-bio for unbelievably moronic wankers.
"We found that learning leads to a change in the strength of synapctic connections---and therefore in the effectiveness of communication---between specific cells in the neural circuit that mediates the behavior.(200)
Strength---the long-term effectiveness of synaptic connections---is regulated by experience. This view implies that the potential for many of an organism's behaviors is built into the brain and is to that extent under genetic and developmental control; however, a creature's environment and learning alter the effectiveness of the preexisting pathways, thereby leading to the expression of new patterns of behavior.(202)"
He connects the idea that we have built-in knowledge to Immanuel Kant as opposed to John Locke's tabula rasa.
4) On Synapses: "Synaptic connections between two neurons can be...strengthened or weakened---by different forms of learning. Thus habituation weakens the synapse, whereas sensitization or classical condition strengthens it (204)."
So from this it sounds like habits make you have less synaptic connection because the synapse grows in itself, which means weaker connections between neurons, which means less likely to associate with another thing, which means that your habit becomes more engrained and exaggerated.
In contrast, being sensitized to something means stronger synapctic connections between neurons, which means more likely to associate with another thing, which means that your sensitization and association becomes more engrained and exaggerated.
In conclusion, associative and explicit learning arises from sensitization, while implicit learning arises from habituation.
5) On Neuro-bio: "Long-term memory required the synthesis of a new protein (212)." As opposed to the electrical charges that keep firing from neurons.
6) On Science and Evolution: Evolution does not have any higher purpose than its immediate adaptation for something.
"Evolution does not require new, specialized molecules to produce a new adaptive mechanism" (234).
...The Biochemical actions underlying memory did not arise apecifically to support memory. Rather neurons, simply recruited an efficient signaling system employed for other purposes in other cells and used it to produce the changes in synaptic strength required for memory storage.
7) On Evolution and Neuro-bio: The stuff that makes us what we are...our genes are ALSO subject themselves to the environment in which they live (264).
8) On Memories: A characteristic of age related memory loss is the inability to consolidate long-term memories (266).
9) On Synapses and Memory: The growth and maintenace of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist (276).
10) On Perception: Sensation is an abstraction not a replication, of the real world (Mountcastle via Kandel 302)
11) On the Hippocampus: Hippocampus is concerned with perception of the environment and represents a multisensory experience (308).
12) On Dopamine: Blocking dopamine blocks the stablization of the spatial map in an animal (313). Dopamine seems like the chemical for explicit learning and memory whereas serotonin represents the chemical for implicit learning.
13) On the Amygdala and Hippocampus: "Damage to the amygdala, which is concerned with the memory of fear, disrsupts the ability of an emotionally charged stimulus to elicit an emotional response. In contrast, damage to the hippocampus, which is concerned with conscious memory, interferes with the ability to remember the context in which the stimulus occurred. (342)"
14) Depression compromises the memory (361).
15) What science lacks are rules for explaining how subjective properties (consciousness) arise from the properties of objects (interconnecte nerve cells) (381).
Reflections:
1) On learning: As he was talking about studying analogs of learning, I was thinking about how people in general, learn. I think at the most ideal level, we learn by figuring out meanings. And then once we "learn" that it means something, we commit it to memory.
He mentioned habituation, sensitiation, and classical conditioning as the basis or most primordial form of learning.
2) On Habituation: Then I began thinking about habituation in my own world. The cycles of the world. I began thinking about the habits of people in the housing developments. What were their habits? What are the habits of the people in the middle and high classs? How did they develop them? What was the geography and environment that forced them to exhibit those habits that they did have?
3) On Sensitization: Then he mentioned sensitatization, and I began thinking about that in my own world. "After hearing a gun go off, a person will show an exaggerated response and will jump when he hears a tone or senses a touch on the shoulder (169)." Essentially, the gun going off acts as a sign and/or a symbol for someone to elicit a response.
4) On Brain studies of the past: I was curious about how this idea ever made sense in American Education in the 1950s:
"We were taught that the map of the somatosensory corex discovered by Wade Marshall is FIXED and IMMUTABLE throughout life." When and why did they think that it was fixed and mutable (216)? Was that informed by religion?
5) On Hippocampus and Spatiality: I also wondered about the hippocampus and spatial information that he mentioned(282).
6) On Intelligence: I was wondering how this fuses into Jeff Hawkins theory of brain and mind in his book On Intelligence.
7) On Fear: Fear is the easily most detectable emotion across species (339). It seems as though this is the emotion that what we give most the meaning to, and so we respond accordingly. It's really a disjointed event from anything were used to, so were likely to give a response out of the ordinary.
He brings in a dose of the breakthrough psychologit William James:
"We do not experience fear until after we have run away from the bear. We first act instinctively and then invoke cognition to explain the changes in the body associated with that action." (340)
Essentially, what he says is that emotion happens afterward, after an event. After the event is finished we build meaning off of that emotion via language expression which is then encoded into our memories.
8) On Learning: I began thinking of the social/asocial aspects of learning.
Learning is a very social activity, and that social activity is one way we build meanings. Learning in isolation is the most fruitful, but it's very difficult because we don't have the benefit of other people affirming your correctness in a belief or whatnot. You're forced to come up with your own meanings, definitions, labels for things and events which might be valid, but might not be recognized by anyone else.
Example: I watch a bunch of NBA basketball, but since I don't really have cable, it's often over the internet via international TV where they're speaking some other language other than English. So I don't watch a lot of basketball in English, which is good.
I don't have annoying commentators like Jeff Van Gundy telling me, indoctrinating me, on how unathletic, but intelligent the whiteboy Kirk Hinrich is, I just see what's on the basketball screen and make meaning out of what's happening all by myself. Therefore I learn what's happening in isolation, relatively speaking vs. other fans. I gain my knowledge of the game by my own observations, interpretations, and analysis. I "learn" what's happening basically on my own.
Realizing that I can learn either socially or asocially kind of annoyed me. Institutions seem to have a monopoly on social learning and will charge the hell out of you just for that. If you're not learning via an institution (and paying at least 20 dollars a unit), you feel like you don't know any avenue to learning what you need to learn.
The library is there, but it's limited and you still wouldn't know where to look.
But I digress.
9) On the feelings of disjointedness vs. fluidity: From Leo Tolstoy: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (349).
From this quote, I became concerned with the idea of disjointedness in the unhappy family and explicitness vs. fluidity and implicitness in the happy family. Everything seems to be a disruption for the unhappy family whereas, everything seems to work in harmony for the happy family.
The discourse about the unhappy family, and explicitness triggered personal memories of the kids in the housing developments yet again. What types of disjointedness have they experienced and how have they dealt with them? I would think a quality of disjointedness towards long-term ventures, not because it's innate, but because it's been learned.
10) On Working Memory: "When normal individuals are challenge by a task that requires working memory, metabolic function in their prefrontal areas increases dramatically (354)."
Working memory seems to be a tool of social moderation --- they say "intelligence" is just working memory, and prefrontal areas with which it is associated with are associated with planning and judging.
Doubts and Questions:
1) On Kandel's Observations and Reductionist Methods: I wondered if Kandel just colored in stereotypical sexist interpretations in his interpretation of results for the differences between male and female brains.
"He [Some scientist named O'Keefe] has found clear differences in the way women and men attend to and orient themselves in the space around them. Women use nearby cues and landmarks. Thus when asked for directions, a woman is likely to say, "Turn right at the Walgreen's drugstore, and then drive until you see a white colonial houe on the left with green window shutters. Men rely more on an internalized geometric map. They are likely to say 'Drive five miles north, then turn right and head east for another half mile.' Brain imaging shows activation of different areas in mean and women as they think about space: the left hippocampus in men, and the right parietal and right prefrontal cortex in women. (315-316)"
That's pretty much a hegemonically sexist thing to say: women are the fluffy, artistic, right-side thinkers, while males are the logical, left-side thinkers.
I consider myself a male and masculine and all that other shit, but I definitely don't give directions like the cold hard-cut logical male. I currently don't have the means to argue against what he says, but I just know that what he says doesn't seem to represent the truth.
2) On Kandel's Memory and Perception of this growing epidemic of "disorders of memory"...disorders of memory are more evident today than they were when I began practicing medicine fifty years ago because people are living longer now (327)"
This brings up other questions related to medical anthropology and health care that cut across time and space.
Perhaps more people are just diagnosing more, prescribing more, just to make more money, which gives off the feeling that "disorders of memory are more evident today."
After all, the guy is in the pharmaceutical biz...
Also, people probably are living longer, but how is he sure that a connection can be made between the fact that there are more memory disorders and a longer life expectancy?
...a physiological state when what you do socially (other than yak up a carpet or break anything) is acknowledged by watchers that there isn't any meaning to what you are doing.
Almost everything is dismissed by the fact that you are drunk/high. We use it in everyday talk to dismiss anything we do that is considered "stupid".
In a society with so much information and by implication so many meanings for everything said and done, getting high or drunk is more of an impetus for people to drop all those meanings as quickly as possible.
One way to act on your instinct, your subconscious without anyone really challenging you. A passive-aggressive response.
This reminds me of an observation in this book I read in intro to Anthro Linguistics called "Constructing Panic." The book is about a woman with agoraphobia, which is a fear of being in a place or situation where it may be difficult to escape or obtain help. The observation was about how this woman would always accept what her husband told her. She would always accept what he said and do what he asked of her.
However, whenever she felt a panic attack coming, she would suddenly become a dominant figure. Her panic attacks would take priority, and she would ask her way out of anything. For instance, a family vacation that she didn't want to take. She was passive and complicit in the trip, until they were on the road, and she experienced a panic attack. She kept emphasizing how she needed to get away. End result, they need to go home, see a doctor, she gets her way. It takes almost a medical "condition" for her to get her way, but in the end, she gets her way.
Getting high, getting drunk, one way to get your way, least in the short-term. You get your way. In this state, no one will be able to challenge you because it's sort of a physiological state, meaning it's kind of "natural" and that no one can do anything about you acting like that.
Memory of the Civil Rights Movement in Real Estate
by B.J. on 4/02/2008 01:15:00 AM
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1 in the morning. Studying for a real estate midterm. Here is what I read in the section on Ethics, Fair Housing, and RESPA in a California Real Estate Book.
This the last part of the section on Civil Rights Act of 1870.
"Both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amenment were largely ineffective inproviding equal rights for almost one hundred years"
This is what immediately follows that section.
"On November 21, 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an order that prohibited discrimination i housing whereever feeral funds were involved...blah...blah...blah...Thus began the modern-day focus by the federal government to put teeth into antidiscrimination laws as they relate to civil rights and fair housing."
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made John Kennedy's 1962 executive order a matter of law and is considered one of the first of the modern civil rights acts. While not as cmprehensive as later acts, it prohibited discrimination in all federally assisted programs."
Reading these passages from our book without knowing US History, you would be lead to assume quite a few things: 1) that Kennedy was really the catalyst for change, and not the years, years of violent, and nonviolent struggle by folks of color that the laws were enacted out of one person's actions, 3) that everything tends to work out nicely and neatly in this nation of laws especially with regards to all types of discrimination
Even though I'm sure the Kennedys aren't the type of people to take full credit of something like the civil rights movement, how it is fixed to be remembered, at least in this book, is that it was the idea of JFKennedy. The book makes it seem as if prejudice was something American people knew all along and something we would've eventually "fixed."
I know that this is real estate class, and perhaps we don't need a complete lesson about Civil Rights, but this type of history completely obliterates any role played by regular people mobilizing and lobbying against stuff like blockbusting, like redlining and like steering. At least give us a case where it came up...some kind of picture as to why we need it. I don't see how it would hurt anyone to know a bit of context behind the abstractions of dates and acts like the "Civil Rights Act of 1968" thrown at us like bricks from a plane.
Those civil rights acts in particular always end up saying the same thing: "prohibits discrimination against race, sex, gender..." The only thing that changes is the year and where it is prohibited, according to this book. And so civil rights just by association becomes a mindless exercise in the obvious.
Perhaps I am being too critical of this one real estate book. Perhaps I underestimate what people know about the civil rights movement.
However, based on the dismissive nature of race-blind discourse, I think not.
Add me to your reading list.
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