Just Wrought

Stark Choices from New Knowledge

Ms. Jolie’s piece in The New York Times echoed for me with a play I wrote a few years ago about the race to decode the human genome, thus gaining access to all sorts of new information which we now have to face with sober eyes.

 

KELLIE:  . . .   You discovered the Breast Cancer Gene. 

FRANCIS:  The BRCA 1 sequence.  Helped to discover.  Yes.

KELLIE:  My mom died of breast cancer.

FRANCIS:  I’m sorry to hear that.

KELLIE:  Ashkenazi Jew.

FRANCIS:  Then you must know Ashkenazi Jew’s are several times more likely to develop the mutation

KELLIE:  Yup.  And if they have it they face an 80% to 90% chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes, particularly at a young age.  And you must know that some women who test positive—and I can’t say as I blame ‘em—elect to under go prophylactic mastectomy.

FRANCIS:  Yes I do know that.  May I ask: have you tested for the sequence?

KELLIE:  No.

FRANCIS:  You should.

KELLIE:  I know.

FRANCIS:  You shouldn’t wait too long.

KELLIE:  I’m not in a rush to chop my tits off.

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Angelina Jolie's Double Mastectomy Choice Increasingly Common, Still Medically Murky

Why Curt Dempster Commissioned Me to Write THE SEQUENCE

My Dec. 29, 2007 journal speculation on why Curt Dempster, now deceased Founding Artistic Director of Ensemble Studio Theatre, commissioned me to write The Sequence, which dramatizes the race to decode the human genome: a race accelerated and sharpened by bio-tech entrepreneur J. Craig Venter.

“Curt wanted me to tell this story ‘cuz he recognized in Craig a kindred spirit: a kinless prickly genius who gets things done.”

While Simultaneously Reading Stephen Jay Gould and Larry McMurtry

For reasons I would rather not get into I have taken to re-reading all my journals since I started handwriting them into marble comp books back in 1997. (I was typing for a living at the time and wanted to spare my wrists keyboarding my personal thoughts. I never went back to a digital.) The review is a pretty tedious endeavor. I wish I had described a lot less of my career woes and a lot more of my physical delights, but youth is ever wasted on the baselessly self-fascinated. Every so often as I read, however, I run across a little snippet, or string of them, that pleases me such that it prompts a desire to share.

9/26/07

. . . . Surprisingly, I find a deep correspondence between the Gould and the McMurtry. Both maintain—one overtly, the other subtly and subversively and ultimately more convincingly—that life has no plan, no forward progress, not even dominant echoes or themes; just the faintest hints of them. Contingency is all and contingency is one brutal motherfucker.

People, especially "White" people get all bent out of shape when I refuse to identify as "White"; but genomics genius and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter put it best: "Race is a social concept, not a scientific one." I'd rather stick with science, if it's all the same to you.

Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”

Artists love to talk about being “experimental”, and it rightfully drives scientists nuts.  We artists obnoxiously brandish that word whenever what we really mean is “avant garde” or “edgy”or “provocative” or “abstruse”.  Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable.  In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.  However, all too often in the arts, especially theatre, work gets described as “experimental” that is, in fact, incapable of being “falsified”, because it never had a truthful purpose in the first place. Consequently, the worst kind of “experimental artist” will blame the audience for every failure of meaning or impact.

I promise I will not be doing that this coming Monday evening at the Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake. Instead, with the help of my truly gifted colleagues Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith I will be performing a bona fide artistic experiment by reading aloud my very latest play Philosophical Zombie Killers.  I attempt things in this script I have never seen tried before in the theatre, and thus the ominous likelihood looms that some of these things I am trying can, and most likely will, fail. 

I am not asking you to come see my greatest latest triumph, which I happen to have dubbed “experimental” cuz it sounds cool.  I am asking you to come see my latest experiment, and help me make it better, by watching where it fails, and letting me know.

Here are the details:

The graduate level seminar is about human conscious-ness. Or at least that’s what you thought when you signed up for it. Now someone’s telling you that you’re 45 years old and you’re dying. You certainly didn’t sign up for that. Now this alcoholic professor is asking you to explain consciousness to him. And this depressed ex-cop from Missouri is telling you about the epidemic of decapitations in Seattle. And this weird lady from Omnisoft just wants you to admit that there’s no such thing as consciousness and no such thing as you for that matter. Could she possibly be right? Might make dying easier. Who said you were dying?

Who:       Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith

What:     Philosophical Zombie Killers by Paul Mullin

Where:   The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake

When:    October 15, 2012, 7pm

How:      Pay what-you-will, including nothing at all. You’re doing us a favor by giving it a listen.

Reserve seats at Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/278468

Creepy Sneak Peek

No.  I don’t think the revision process of my play about human consciousness is taking any toll on my mental health. 

Why do you ask? 

doyle

Imagine a science fiction species that loses weight by breathing and poops bacteria instead of digested food. Can you picture it? If not, my friend doyle has a suggestion: go look in a mirror.

I met doyle on the internet. I feel closer to doyle than some people I have shared a bathroom with for years. I have only met doyle once in person. I want doyle to bury me.

All of that is tangential to the main point, which is that doyle has a blog called Science teacher and I think you should follow it.

Michael Doyle was born in Northern New Jersey, a good-for-nothing Mick like so many no-good-for-nothing Micks born in Northern New Jersey. (By the way, he prefers to refer to himself as “Oirish” as if that were somehow more PC.) He worked briefly as long shoreman. He went to med school. He became a pediatrician and worked in the ER and the projects. Think about that for a second. An emergency room pediatrician in Newark. You may think you know hell, but doyle has a crisper acquaintance with the place.

The reason I call doyle “doyle” and not “Michael Doyle” or “Michael” or “Dr. Doyle” or even “Doyle”, is that “doyle” was all I knew him by for months. We met as contributors to an on-line gathering site for weirdos and writers and weirdo writers called Everything₂, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. I’m not sure the following piece is the first thing I ever read  of doyle’s, but I do remember it arrested me. He  was on pilgrimage to some mid-western city where his sister had recently died in a car crash.

December 9, 2004 (person)

The driver seat is still intact--inside scattered cd's with burgundy stains, her impossibly colored scarf, glass, pens. A bottle of chardonnay meant to be shared with her love survived. The other side of the car is splayed open, a gaping wound letting in rain, letting in sunshine.

I picked up a couple of cd's--Frankie Allison and the Odd Sox....and now my hands with bright red blotches, my sister's blood when she bled for the last time. I absently rubbed my hands on my jeans--the bright red dulled to burgundy again. I took the scarf with me.

Last summer a feral cat mutilated a mourning dove near my garden. I gave it water. It took a little. It hopped a few feet. It died. Its partner would not leave. It looked sad. A tiny puff of feathers still marks where the broken bird fell.

Her ashes are in a cardboard box, decorated with construction paper, stickers, sparkly glue, and (of course) hearts.

I kept going back in the car, not sure what I was looking for, but sure I would not find it.

At least I got something right this week.

Doyle and I hit it off early. He seemed to like my plays about science and my doggerel poems. I liked pretty much everything he wrote.

During my teaching rounds, I will occasionally show pediatric residents wheat berries, and ask them what they think they are. These fine young minds have been charged with teaching nutrition to parents, so quizzing them about the most common source of grain calories in this part of the world should be fair game.

I have yet to have an American born physician get it right.

My other Everythingian buddy “iceowl” grew up with doyle and liked to fascinate me with stories about him. (Keep in mind when you read the following that iceowl has been to Antarctica three times and has written about it better than Hemmingway ever could have.)

[Doyle’s] done much more for humanity than I have.  I'm just a silicon valley idiot…  He is one of those guys who is blessed to do well doing exactly what he wants in the world.  Classic Joseph Campbell example of, "Following your bliss."  He wants very little from the world, and gives a lot.  So, Doyle couldn't possibly do anything he didn't want to do because the worst that happens is he gets nothing for his efforts, and he's perfectly happy sleeping under the highway overpass if it comes to that …..  He just wants to do things none of us could stomach for more than a day - like dodging bullets and the cops both while illegally vaccinating kids in inner city Newark.

Five years ago doyle hung up has white physician’s coat and traded it for the white lab coat of a high school science teacher. He calls his students his "lambs", though I suspect few of them understand how closely he has observed the slaughter in his former life.

In his blog he mixes the same blend of adoration and frustration that I came to love him for at Everything₂. Here he is breathlessly elevating a discourse on respiration to a paean of the universe, because as he sees it— and trust me, doyle sees it as it is— there is no meaningful difference between the two. (I’ll do my best to capture doyle’s rapturously manic formatting.)

 

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 
of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 
broken down by a few brain cells that would
rather do anything but this school thing.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

 

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂ =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

 

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

 

Without an iota of the effort I put into it, Doyle writes the way I yearn to, with a high-wire walker’s combination of improvisation and precision. Because he flat-out knows so much, thanks to an enormous education and equally enormous experience, he can produce an uncannily free of flow of ideas without the so-much-smoke-blowing of so many formally educated, professionally self-identified “writers”. After I’ve been steeping myself in his prose for a while, I start to feel my own prose improving, taking flight. It could just be my imagination; but given how much both doyle and I believe in imagination, I’ll take it.

Neil Gaiman first introduced me to the Talmudic legend of the 36 Tzaddikim in his Sandman series. "They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world." I’m not going to come out and say Doyle is a Tzaddik. Such a pronouncement would be absurd, given the the legend’s clear and emphatic stipulation that no one can know who the 36 are. 

I just have my suspicions is all.

 

Photo by Susan LaRusse Eckert, used with permission of the subject, who only asked that I note: "She's a little pissed off at me now--I tend to do that. I'd be much obliged if you mentioned that I'm truly sorry for my, um, knuckleheadedness."

 

Cutting-Edge Virtual Brain Palpation (a.k.a. "Theatre")

My five year-old son was climbing a tree and got to about seven feet off the ground when he told me he wanted to jump off.  I balked.  “It looks far,” I said.

“I can do it,” he said. 

“Won’t it hurt?” 

“No,” he assured me.  He jumped.  His feet slapped the hard dirt, and my own soles dimly rang with the sting of the impact.  Turns out, however, that I’m not preternaturally empathic; nor even merely an overly imaginative drama geek dad.  Turns out, according to some of the latest research into what have been dubbed “Mirror Neurons”, I am a human being.

As reports Christian Keysers, Scientific Director of the Neuroimaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen, the same neuron fires in a monkey’s brain when it grabs a peanut as when someone else grabs the peanut.  Says Keyser:

This phenomenon is not restricted to physical movement.  When someone taps my shoulder, say, my somatosensory cortex makes me feel the sensation.  But simply seeing someone else being tapped activates the same area of my brain.  If I cut my finger, my cingulate cortex and anterior insula will register the pain—and these areas also become active if I see you cut your finger.  The vicarious representations are not quite as strong as those produced when we experience our own sensations, but we nevertheless feel a milder version of what the other person feels.

None of this is all that surprising to my fellow stage artists.  We’ve known for millennia that we can get folks in the audience to reassuringly rub their hands just by chopping off some fake hands on stage.  In such moments, everybody knows that nobody’s fooling anybody, and yet our bodies do get fooled despite our brains’ reassurances. 

These brain circuits can keep us from seeing other individuals as something “out there.”  Indeed, we are able to feel their actions, sensations, and emotions inside us, as if we were in their shoes.  Others have become us. [emphasis Paul’s]…. These brain circuits thus blur the bright line between your experiences and mine.  Our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge that we call culture.

Dear Professor Keysers, my colleagues and I happily wish to inform you that we have been investigating these phenomena for some time.  We call it theatre.  Welcome to the ongoing experiment.

By the Whites of Our Eyes

While reading Brian Christian’s evocative new book The Most Human Human, which manages to explore an impressively wide and variegated territory while covering the secondary contest at an annual Turing Test competition to determine which human entrant seems most human, I ran across this random fun fact:

.... Humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species....  There must be some reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs.  In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clear, and from a distance, which directions other humans are looking....  Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s heads, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s eyes.

All evolved traits have costs associated with them.  A peacock develops his tail to attract a peahen at great nutritive cost.  In fact, he does so as a way of signaling, “I must be really special because I can squander resources on this utterly useless and even detrimental fancy fanny fan.”  So likewise, there must have been costs to developing these large and prominent sclera of ours.  The most obvious leaping to my mind is the fact that when I can easily see what other people are looking at, they can just as easily do the same with me.  This is mutual mind-reading, plain and simple.  And we have to assume that being able to read each others’ minds was ultimately more advantageous to our forbears than permanent obfuscation.  We were stronger when we understood each other well.   We still are.

As usual, I see implications for theatre.  A while ago I posted here an essay explaining why solo shows are not plays, and therefore not, strictly speaking, theatre.  I conceded, however, that they belong to the even older art of story-telling.  Now, based on some of the newest science available, I am no longer convinced it really is the elder form.

Communication based on gesture, eye movement and even sympathetic neuronal patterning (more on that later when I abstract research on “mirror neurons”) may well have preceded verbal communication, which leans so heavily on semantic content.  Put more simply, our evolutionary ancestors may have been “play-acting” long before they were “story-telling”.

Time is Memory and Might not Exist

I like to book surf.  If something I am enjoying references another intriguing book, I try to hunt it down.  And if that second book mentions a third tempting tome, I go after that too, following the thread as far as it will take me.  In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr cites some research described in What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, a collection of 18 short and eminently readable essays by scientists working at the cutting edge of their respective fields.

In a piece called “Brain Time”, David M. Eagleman recounts his investigations into how the brain reconciles multifarious streams of incoming data into a coherent perception of “now”: a feat much harder than it seems.  Unlike fiber optics, neurons don’t communicate at anything near light-speed.  Indeed, the signal from a pin prick to your toe takes considerably longer to reach your brain than one given simultaneously to your nose.  So how does the brain register them as concurrent?  Or as Eagleman asks: 

Why didn’t you feel the nose-touch when it first arrived?  Did your brain wait to see what else might be coming up the pipeline of the spinal cord until it was sure it had waited long enough for the lower signal from the toe?  Strange as that sounds, it may be correct.  It may be that that unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information.  Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people.

Also, different senses communicate to our brains at different speeds, which, if you think about it, isn’t exactly news.  It’s why we start foot-races with gunshots and not light-flashes.
So how does the brain resolve all these variously arriving inputs into a unity?  Well, the answer Eagleman postulates is as fascinating as it is simple.  We understand the world by involving ourselves in it:

It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times.  And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such a as a clap of hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight and touch are simultaneous.

Eagelman is keen to emphasize that the perception he is investigating here is conscious awareness.  Humans, like all higher animals, are completely capable of making “pre-conscious” decisions with their spinal cords, which is how you can remove your hand from the hot stove before the pain even registers.  This difference between pre-conscious perception and consciousness itself leads Eagleman to stare down the ultimate question: what do we need the latter for anyway?

What is the use of perception, especially since it lags behind reality, is retrospectively attributed, and is generally outstripped by automatic (unconscious) systems?  The most likely answer is that perceptions are representations of information that the cognitive systems can work with later.  Thus it is important for the brain to take sufficient time to settle on its best interpretation of what just happened rather than stick with its initial, rapid interpretation.  Its carefully refined picture of what just happened is all it will have to work with later, so it had better invest the time.

Humans don’t have sharp claws, or big teeth, or wings or echo-location.  We have something ultimately much more powerful: clear, cogent, handily referable memories.  We experience time as a stream because that’s the best, and perhaps only way to accurately record experience with the level of retrievable complexity that we require to be, well, human.  In fact, Eagleman concludes by casting doubt on the notion of time as a scientifically sound first principle.

Most of our current theoretical frameworks include the variable t in a Newtonian, river-flowing sense.  But as we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion as the sense of color is, we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation.  Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.

With this line of thought, Eagleman follows down a trail blazed by Henri Bergson and Kurt Gödel, whose evocative investigations of time have been all too often ignored or poorly understood by serious scientists and philosophers over the last century.

Implications for Theatre:

What’s more, Eagleman may have unwittingly stumbled on an answer to the most persistently nagging question of my chosen art form: why is live theatre so much more excruciating than movies or TV when it’s bad, and so much more powerfully transcendent on those much rarer occasions when it is good?  Well maybe it is because film and TV do most of your brain’s work for you, pre-packaging all the various elements of sight and sound into a perfectly corroborated unified mega-signal.  In the theatre, the data hits our brains like it does in real life—like it did on the savannah a million years ago— as an unreconciled rough draft.  Our brains are working harder in the theatre to piece it all together.  Film and television tell our brains stories; theatre makes our brains do the telling.  (For my own theatrical explorations of time’s mutability, check out my play The Ten Thousand Things.)

David M. Eagleman’s bio says that in addition to serving as the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Laboratory for Perception and Action, he is also the author of a book of fiction called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.  Cowabunga baby!  Surf’s up!