A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
- - - -
For more information
about this contest,
click here.
- - - -
An Addendum
to the Foregoing:
Cities, Brains,
Orchestras.
By Lawrence Weschler
- - - -
As it happens, the first book I picked up after emerging from Sennett's Flesh and Stone (highlighted in the last entry) proved to be Steven Johnson's Emergence, from a few years back (2001), and you can imagine my amazement at the paired images I encountered on its very first page, a nifty convergence in its own right, to wit:
Frontispiece from Emergence: Brain and City
Now, Johnson, like Sennett, evokes the capacity of millions of undirected cells or individuals acting separately out of their own self-interested—or, at any rate, self-directing—algorithms, as it were, to generate a seemingly unified field of activity, be it a slime mold, or a jellyfish, or an ant colony, or a city, or the Internet. And he, too, cites such theorists as Adam Smith and Friederich Engels and (more recently) Jane Jacobs and Marvin Minsky as being central figures in the ongoing articulation of a natural philosophy of "emergence," as he calls it. By contrast with Sennett, however, Johnson is much more celebratory of such bottom-up modes of organization. Emergence, for Johnson, is a never-endingly hope-riddled marvel. And key to the phenomenon, once again, is that there is no central command ordering all these phenomena, no king or dictator or ...
Well, I found myself wondering the other evening (while attending a completely mindblowing performance of Osvaldo Golijov's latest orchestral splendor, Azul, at the outset of this summer's version of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center): What about orchestras and their conductors—and, for that matter, the scores from which they play and the composers who wrote them?
Note, for starters, the way an orchestra, seen from above, uncannily replicates that earlier view of the brain (and the city). In one sense, of course, an orchestra is an instance of leader-led and -shaped activity, hardly bottom-up at all (the conductor realizing the composer's intention through the players he imperiously directs). That said, one is reminded of the way that earlier phrenologically steeped conceptions of the brain (in which a given capacity, even to the extent of, say, a particular memory, was thought to be located at a particular unique spot in the brain) have recently given way to a far more subtle and complex conception in which any given thought or capacity is distributed all about the brain, as it were, all sorts of neurons all over the place firing simultaneously and without any sort of top-down coordination, with all that pell-mell electrical activity going on to produce this (illusory?) sense of unified consciousness. Thus, for example, from Harvard neuropsychologist Daniel Schacter's Searching for Memory:
One critically important idea is that the brain engages in an act of "construction" during the retrieval process. The idea is well illustrated by neurologist Antonio Damasio's theory of how the brain remembers. Demasio and others have argued that there is no single location or area in the brain that contains the engram of a particular past experience. Posterior regions of the cortex that are concerned with perceptual analysis hold on to fragments of sensory experience—bits and pieces of sights and sounds from everyday episodes. Various other regions of the brain, which Damasio calls convergence zones[!], contain codes that bind sensory fragments to one another and to preexisting knowledge, thereby constituting complex records of past encodings. Damasio suggests that remembering occurs when signals from convergence zones trigger the simultaneous activation of sensory fragments that were once linked together. The retrieved memory is a temporary constellation of activity in several distinct brain regions—a construction with many contributors.
Precisely the way an orchestra produces a single heart-rendingly unified sound from the individual exertions of the dozens of its far-flung members.
Such that I end up wondering to what extent is an orchestra, too, like the brain, and in precisely which way? Does consciousness have a conductor? If not, how does it orchestrate its peregrinations?
In this context, it should be noted that Oliver Sacks is on the verge of coming out with a new book of his own, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
- - - -
OTHER WINNERS.
- - - -
1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
MORE ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT RISES
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.