Particularly important when traveling. Your new experiences will matter but your attention will matter more—what will you choose to notice?
[In] some experiments by Mike Merzenich.. He took
a group of monkeys
and put them in an apparatus where they
- received a tap on their finger a 100 times a day.
At the same time, they were
- listening to music piped in through headphones.
Half the monkeys were rewarded with a sip of juice when they indicated that the rhythm of the tapping changed.
Merzenich was teaching the monkeys in the first group to pay attention to the tapping,
After six weeks, in the brains of those in the tapping group, the size of the sensory cortex that corresponds to that particular finger was enlarged.
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The other monkeys were rewarded with juice when they indicated that the music changed.
and the second group to pay attention to the music.
In the brains of the music group, that part of the cortex hadn’t changed at all but the part that corresponds to hearing had grown.
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Remember that the monkeys were treated identically;
they all had the music and the tapping going on at the same time.
The only difference was what they were trained to pay attention to.
[Sharon Begley comments in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain:]
”Experience coupled with attention
leads to physical changes
in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system...
moment by moment
- we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work,
- we choose who we will be in the next moment in a very real sense,
- and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves.”
I hunger for nonfiction because I love learning and because I long to expand my life, my experiences, my thought—all of them so sadly limited. One particular obsession of mine lately is to find truly great nonfiction in languages other than English. It’s not that there’s a lack of it in English (quite the opposite) but rather a nagging suspicion of Western (American-European) parochialism, of missing out on great works and different perspectives I can’t even imagine.
The surprising thing, though, is how hard it is to found it. I have no trouble finding truly great, truly unique fiction in many languages but my trawlings for worthwhile nonfiction turn out almost always empty.
Perhaps it’s a matter of nonfiction not being as readily exportable and thus translated to other languages. Perhaps there’s just not a English market for translated nonfiction. Perhaps English just sucks into it most modern nonfiction writers, whatever their native language. Perhaps whoever wants to be widely read these days chooses to write only in English. Perhaps nonfiction in other languages is ”remade” rather than “subtitled” into English. Perhaps I need to be introduced to it by a native speaker. Perhaps nonfiction as we now conceive it is a very modern meta-genre. Perhaps nonfiction is a Western thing. Perhaps nonfiction needs a massive community of hundreds of millions of wealthy, educated speakers to foster the few who will read it, let alone write it. Perhaps I’m so drenched in the Anglosphere that I only get it’s version of who’s relevant. Perhaps just as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arab, or French had their golden nonfiction age, this is English’s. Perhaps.
Lacking an answer,
my guess these days is that English nonfiction is, personally, by far the only worthwhile modern nonfiction in the world.
But I’m still looking. And so, dear Interwebs, please help me out, what examples do you know of truly great nonfiction in languages other than English?
Anything goes, as long as it’s general, nonlocal, non-culturally-specific
(say, no books on Kohdo, the Japanese art of smelling incense, or on the cuisine in the Mexican state of Oaxaca) but to give you a more specific idea of what I’m looking for,
here are some subjects dear to my heart and some outstanding representatives within them (with the few items in languages other than English bolded):
- Economics —think Daniel Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich;
- History —think Peter Watson’s Modern Mind and Ideas, Mitchel Waldrop’s The Dream Machine;
- Philosophy —think Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves;
- Reference —think Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Diccionario Maria Moliner;
- Biology —think Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, cognitive science (think Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs);
- Neuroscience —think Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence;
- The Singularity —think Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, Hans Moravec’s Mind Children;
- Computer science —think David Hillis’s Pattern in the Stone, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter Norville’s Ambient Findability, Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect;
- Philosophy/language/cognitive & computer science —think Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach;
- Aphorisms —think Jorge Wagensberg’s Si la naturaleza es la respuesta…;
- Essays —think Alfred N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Fernando Savater’s A Decir Verdad;
- Information Design —think, of course, of Edward Tufte’s masterful works;
- Comics —think Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, The 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation, Rius’s works;
- Artificial Intelligence —think Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind;
- Interface design —think Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things;
- Design —think Cristopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form;
- Journalism —think John Battelle’s The Search;
- Business —think anything by Peter Drucker;
- Medicine —think Atul Gawande;
- Language —think Claude Piron’s La Bona Lingvo, George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, Giles Fauconnier’s The Way We Think;
- Selfhelp —think Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion Emocional, Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, Harry Browne’s _How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World;
- Finance —think The Essays of Warren Buffet;
- Sociology —think Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Guillermo Oliveto’s El Futuro Ya Llegó;
- Psychology —think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self;
- Biography —think Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Sam Walton’s Made in America;
- Mathematics —think Michael Spivak’s Calculus, Tobias Dantzig’s Number;
- Education —John Holt’s How Children Fail, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry’s La Tragedia Educativa, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine;
- Programming —think The Pragmatic Programmer, The Little Schemer;
- Technology —think Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control;
- Periodicals —think The Economist, The New York Times;
- Video —think TedTalks, Helvetica, David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth;
- Animation —think The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Trusted Computing, The Machine;
- And other wonderful, unclassifiable stuff —think James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, El Retorno del Cangrejo Parte IV, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Evolving Self.
Extra points (not-at-all-necessary but cool parameters):
- the book is less than 200 years old. One extra point if also less than a 100 years old. A further extra point if also less than 50 :).
- from a non-Western language (like Japanese!),
- third culture-ish,
- NOT yet translated into English.
As a man, perfume can boost your self-confidence and your way of carrying of yourself so that women, without needing to smell you, will find you more attractive.
Another freaky fact: you’re attracted to smells that hint of a different genetic mix to yours
(and thus more evolutionary advantageous). For yourself, you tend to choose smells that more loudly proclaim your particular genetic mix.
Via
The Economist.
My mental image of cells is of balloons, stacked, drifting or bumping but always discrete. Now it seems it’s a shifting tendril jungle at the bottom. Staggering!
[In] one of the biggest discoveries in biology of recent times.. using video microscopy [!], they watched adjacent cells reach out to each other with antenna-like projections, establish contact and then build the tubular connections. The connections were not just between pairs of cells. Cells can send out several nanotubes, forming an intricate and transient network of linked cells lasting anything from minutes to hours.
Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?
Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Foretelling
MUST be part of any worthwhile understanding.
(We can all come up on demand with plausible histories after the fact
and “description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.”)
Speculation’s to finance, what experimentation’s to science:
THE TEST.
No one salubriously rich can claim to understand finance.
Whoever
REALLY understands it is welcome to big bucks any day.
Heard that Douglas Adams’s creation story?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Same thing may happen with finance:
Any understandable glimmer of it is too good an opportunity not to be instantly complicated away in the efforts to milk it.
This all but an instance of a bigger theory that claims:
your inability to foretell things foretelling abler (smarter) than you.
The future, society, others, and even you, among such things.
Life Results from the Non-Random Survival of Randomly Varying Replicators.
My answer to life, the universe, and everything:
Randomness begets persistence
For among things that vary a lot,
and vary varyingly
(= non-independently = causally),
what varies little remains
(duh!)
For among things that persist,
what copies itself is an outbreak
Replication begets complexity
For among the ways to copy oneself,
the more successful ones are among the more
complex
(for there are many, many more complex ways than simpler ones)
The cover article of this week’s Economist brings the stem-cell cancer hypothesis to the mainstream. This is over 3 years after Eva Vertes talked about it at TED in one of my favorite video pieces ever. And is very, very exciting.
..just occasionally, a finding revolutionises the field and cracks open a whole range of diseases. The discovery in the 19th century that many illnesses are caused by bacteria was one such. The unravelling of Mendelian genetics was another.
It now seems likely that medical science is on the brink of a finding of equal significance. The underlying biology of that scourge of modern humanity, cancer, looks as though it is about to yield its main secret. If it does, it is possible that the headline-writer’s cliché, “a cure for cancer�, will come true over the years, just as the antibiotics that followed from the discovery of bacteria swept away previously lethal infectious diseases.
The discovery—or, rather, the hypothesis that is now being tested—is that cancers grow from stem cells in the way that healthy organs do.
There is this Higgs field that extends through all space
And some particles slow down while other particles race
Straight through like the photon – it has no mass
But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its ass!
Awesome! Not only is it fun and cool, the lyrics are non-nonsensical. Most compelling and elegant explanation of the
LHC I’ve seen.
Each person creates the world he or she lives in by investing attention in certain things, and by doing so according to certain patterns. The world constructed on the blueprints provided by the genes is one in which all of a person’s attention is invested in furthering the agenda of “reproductive fitness.” This is a simple goal: How can I get enough out of the environment to make sure that I reproduce and that my children will also have children? In less complex organisms, like many species of insects, practically the entire life span is dedicated to the project of laying a clutch of eggs; promptly afterward, the parents expire. Like every other organism, the butterfly has evolved to see only those things that will either help or hinder the survival of its offspring. Its world is made up of flowery shapes that provide nectar, and shapes that resemble predators that are best avoided.
Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
The Evolving SelfAM
Flow was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m halfway through its sequel, The Evolving self, and I can already say the same for it. I’m already having trouble remembering meself before I started reading it—it’s one of those books that stretches and rewrites you as you read it. It’s also deeper than Flow, more speculative, darker—the whole first half has been about the (inevitable) obstacles to human freedom.
After reading
Flow I felt confident happiness, joy, flow, would always be at hand, always within me. Yet I also realized that happiness, joy, and flow were not enough.
The Evolving Self is about what’s missing.
I’ve been meaning to learn me some physics since forever and I think I’ve finally found the right textbook in Motion Mountain: a beautiful, massive (1498 pages!), free book on physics.
The brainchild of one Christoph Schiller, after some 17 years it’s in its 21st edition (though still in progress!) and has been enriched by the suggestions and contributions of the web community. Elegantly type-set, full of multimedia (graphs, photos, animations, tables, videos), problems, experiments, and excellent quotations (in the original Latin, Greek, German or French), the book covers pretty much the whole of physics with a passionate, philosophical approach (there’s a whole subchapter on language and many a Wittgenstein quotation!). Forget condescending, dull textbooks, this is one man who thinks (and argues! see subchapter 39) that “exploring physics is more fun than making love” (“Sex is the physics urge sublimated.”).
Truly breathtaking. One of the best web finds in quite some time.
Download the book and flip through it just to marvel at one’s man labor of love.
