Category: science

Posted on

Musings

Memory plays funny tricks. I’ve been transferring some of my old cassettes onto the PC, via a USB cassette player, bought for me by ex-hubby as a Christmas present, but which has spent most of the last decade stored away in its box. I haven’t been doing it the last few days – since the weekend in fact – because I realised the rooms on either side of my study were probably used as bedrooms and I didn’t want to disturb my neighbours too early in the morning.

But when I sat down this morning I had Joe Jackson’s ‘Breaking Us In Two’ in my head and thought: I don’t want to copy anything this morning, just do what I normally do, which is to shuffle the list and let Windows media player go randomly through my music. But when I opened it, the song which started up was ‘Breaking Us In Two’, so presumably it was the last track played and had stuck at the back of my mind from four or five days ago, or whenever the last time was that I sat here with music playing.

I started writing yesterday but everything I was thinking was so dark that I didn’t really want to go on. Feeling much the same again today. I think I am coming towards the time when this all seems so overwhelmingly futile that I give up altogether. ‘If you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything’. It’s been quite a good run: four months, roughly 120 days (barring those I missed), 60k words.

‘I’m reading a book which puts forward evidence from research in neuroscience to show that what we call the ‘self’ is not single and fixed for any individual but rather plural and malleable, and hence, in a sense, illusory. I don’t find this contentious, in fact I’m rather surprised that anybody would. It’s rather like saying ‘there’s no such thing as society’ – there may be no specific institution or body which bears that name, but the influence of the web of interactions, rules, structures, relationships etc on the actions of people and organisations leads to impacts in the physical world.’

That’s how I started yesterday, which I suppose isn’t too grim, but the rest of what I was thinking was. I read some more of the book after that, and found that the author was saying that the ‘self’ is created by contrast with everything which is outside the self. Which surprised me, because there I was thinking the other way round, that it is embedded in a network of influences (nature and nurture) and is the product of those. I’m not a psychologist, and maybe I’m not understanding the terms properly – what’s the difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘personality’, for example?

He went on to say that the left brain operates by looking for patterns and telling stories. Which sounds very like me.

Maybe I will keep writing – at least, when I’ve read some more.

Posted on

Happy Solstice

The northern hemisphere summer solstice, as you probably know, is usually on the 21st June, but fluctuates because the convention that Earth’s orbit around the sun takes 365 times as long as each rotation is an approximation – the real figure is closer to 365.24, but with the addition of an extra day every four years, it’s a pretty good approximation to keep things consistent within the average human lifetime – though it does go adrift over the centuries, hence the introduction in the Gregorian calendar of another fix to remove a day from three centuries in four – an improvement adopted by the English less than three centuries ago, years after the rest of Europe, and then only with much grumbling, propagation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and rioting in the streets. Plus ҫa change.

There I go again. Nobody likes a smart-arse. But the point is… when I’m doing the Cassandra smart-arse thing, it’s not that I’m trying to show off – well, maybe it is, but only because in the normal run of things, I feel there is so little I can show off about. In the normal run of life I am so chaotic, clumsy, awkward, forgetful, messy, slow, disorganised… dyspraxic. That’s who I am, it’s who I’ve been all my life, and (though I’m not a big fan of putting labels on people) it’s a relief to have a word for it.

When I started seeing my therapist, I told her all this and she began by trying to find a more positive word than ‘chaotic’ (though the one she came up with: ‘ditsy’ – didn’t strike me as an improvement). Like most people I’ve tried to speak to about this, she was making the assumption that it was just a story I was told as a child, and that I’ve been repeating to myself ever since, it’s not who I really am.

One day, after I’d been seeing her for a couple of months, she suddenly said: ‘What you’re saying reminds me of another client I used to see – I think you might be dyspraxic.’ So I looked it up and read the characteristics associated with dyspraxia – and saw myself laid out, even down to strange apparently random things like: not being able to read my own handwriting; lacking confidence in my appearance because I can’t do hair, make-up and have no dress-sense; took years to learn how to ride a bike…

I find it difficult to explain this to people. It sounds like excuses, doesn’t it? I think that’s probably been the problem all my life – I am so conscious of my shortcomings because surely, with a little more effort, I could find ways round them? So I try and fail and get frustrated and hate myself.

Maybe I should come back to this another day. Because what I started to write about was the Cassandra thing, because sometimes it feels as though a head full of useless knowledge is about the only thing that I’m good for.  

Posted on

Spitting into the Wind

Yesterday there was something in my head that I wanted to say, but I ended up saying something completely different, and thought I would save it for today. Then this morning I couldn’t remember what it was and started thinking on different lines. Then I got an inkling of that thing from yesterday, but not sure now if I want to say either of them.

In fact, I’ve just made the classic mistake of looking something up before continuing, and having wandered into and down the rabbit hole of Google and Wikipedia, I am even more confused. But I have discovered that although for years and years I have believed that Newton’s three laws were the same as the three laws of thermodynamics – they’re not. Bugger. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially if you only know the names and not what they actually mean.

However, on the subject of universal laws…

All living things must die, and everything must change (that’s where the three laws come in, but unfortunately not Newton, so I can’t use the quote: ‘God said let Newton be! And all was light’ which is by Alexander Pope, and the reason I was poking around the rabbit hole in the first place, because I couldn’t remember who said it).  

All living things must die. Everything must change. A flame only burns until it runs out of fuel (that’s what set me thinking about the three laws). And – spoiler alert – anyone who is listening to the current Quandary Phase of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 extra should look away now – the Great God’s message to his creation is: ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’.

Any universal truth is fundamentally banal. (Who said that? Me. I don’t claim it to be original, but if I’ve stolen it I don’t know where from.)

It may be argued that true happiness means accepting the impermanence of all things and deciding that life is still worth living. On the other hand, maybe the route to true happiness is to stop thinking about all that bollox, be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Perhaps this is a fundamental difference between two types of people (the Cassandras and the Melindas) – or maybe (more likely, I’d say), there is a spectrum between the two, and we all find our own place.

Which has brought me back to the thing I was thinking about yesterday – or the bit I can remember – that for me, euphoria (Melinda) can’t be separated from existential despair (Cassandra). It’s over thirty years since I first sought professional help to ‘fix’ my psycho-emotional shortcomings, and the paradox is that any attempts to convince me that I’m ‘fine as I am’ miss the point that if I really was ‘fine’, I wouldn’t need to be convinced, I’d already know it. And if I’m not, any amount of wishing away that sense of ‘unfineness’ without accepting it as fundamental part of myself, is spitting into the wind.

Posted on

Unknown unknowns – or are they?

I had an idea for the start of a poem in the shower, but as I mentioned the other day, poems don’t tend to come when I’m already writing, so not sure what to do about it. Not sure I even remember it now.

Something about balance, and equilibrium, and the middle way. No, even the first couple of lines don’t seem to be coming back. Bugger.

Maybe it was: ‘We live on a knife edge’ – no – ‘Life is in the balance…’ No, because I thought it could be the start of a haiku, and that’s too many syllables (whereas ‘Life is balanced’ is too few). ‘The balance of life…’? That’s about right. Then I followed it with a few comparisons: ‘Freedom and security/Joy and despair…’ That sort of thing.

Pretty trite stuff anyway.

Might have to leave it and see if anything else comes to me.

A friend keeps asking in emails if I’ve seen the Bill Gates (I think it was Bill Gates, somebody like that anyway) TED talk from 2015. I haven’t – not recently at least – but I think from the context I can guess what it’s about.

Something to do with the fact that scientists have been predicting a global pandemic for years, and how devastating it could be? It could have been SARS, it could have been swine flu (or was it bird flu?), it wasn’t, but it was inevitable, it was overdue, and it would come suddenly without anybody taking notice of the warnings?

I’m being completely honest here and the video might be about something totally different, but I have been aware of the science. It’s not that obscure, it’s one of those things that comes up on the news every couple of years, then everybody goes back to whatever the current worry is, and forgets about it – except the scientists directly concerned, and people like me (who as it happens made a detailed study of individual and societal reactions to this kind of high-cost –low-probability risk in the 1990s, and was awarded a PhD on the strength of it).

It’s the same psychology that brought us the 2008 banking crisis and is bringing us climate change and Brexit (don’t forget they’re still lurking in the background).

Twas ever thus.

If I have to sum up my PhD thesis in a single sentence I tend to compare it to Murphy’s Law, with a corollary: ‘Shit happens, but nobody does anything to stop it until it hits the fan’. No amount of forewarning, scientific investigation or crisis planning is ever quite enough to forestall disaster when it comes. This is where my alternative person, ‘Cassandra’, comes from. However we think we can manage and prioritise our lives, there’s always something that creeps up on us that we’ve avoided addressing. Emergencies emerge, that’s what they do. Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for warning about the ‘unknown unknowns – but even when they’re ‘known’, reactions depend on who they’re known by – and who chooses how to respond.