The Entorhinal Cortex & Knowing Where We Are

Science-technology-and-industry has enabled us to be precise (apparently) in describing objects that are extremmely small and near or extremely large and far away. It has failed utterly to provide us with even adequate descriptions of the places and communities we live in - probably because it cannot do so. There are scientists, one must suppose, who know all about atoms or molecules or genes, or galaxies or planets or stars, but who do not know where they are geographically, historically, or ecologically. Our schools are turning out millions of graduates who do not know, in this sense, where they are.

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

My brain feels solid after a day wayfaring on the wheels; finding my way, checking the maps I bring with me, checking landmarks, hill-lines, even listening to the landscape, whether it be roads with cars on them or rivers and streams, or the absence of both.

It may be a little exhausted, this little brain, but it is solid nonetheless, as if you had just done a major workout at the gym, except here the muscle is in your brain, more specifically, in a little area responsible for navigation called the entorhinal cortex.

This cortex is related to memory, in particular spatial memory. In 2005 it was discovered that the EC contains a neural map of the spatial environment in rats. And if you've ever kept a rat, you'll know how explorative they are. In short, it is thought that the EC in humans works in a similar way to other animals. I have always maintained to those who simply dismiss rats as 'rodents' or 'vermin' that they are great navigators, like humans used to be, seafarers, wayfarers, trekkers, et al.

Now however, progress and technology has forced most of us (the dimwitted who accept without questioning) to outsource these natural talents for navigation, our vision, our hearing, our finding our way by ourselves or by using tools that enhance our search and not annihilate it entirely.

The EC, like any 'muscle', requires exercise in order not to atrophy. Yet, faced with gadgets and gizmos which do the work for us, atrophy it has to the point where we no longer know where we are... spiritually, physically, existentially, metaphysically....

And if you don't know where you are, well, problems are never far away. Problems like ecological devastation, economic destitution, and human desolation (loneliness, alienation, confusion, self-loathing... etc.). Indeed, it has been suggested that the onset of Alzheimer's disease and various neurological disorders are a direct result of our lack of presencing and not knowing where we are. Effectively, dementia is a state of mindlessness (de-mented, removed from Mind), resulting from our kowtowing to an economic system that is neither economic nor eco-minded; it is a result of our outsourcing our own locomotive forces to machines, and outsourcing our own mental energies to technologies that do it for us... Kowtowing to convention it would appear is fraught with danger. Of course, the converse is also true: that the harder people try in building cognitive maps of space, the stronger their underlying memory circuits become. As Nicholas Carr writes in The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, this practice can actually 'grow gray matter in the hippocampus - a p[henomenon documented in London cab drivers - in a way that's analogous to the building of muscle mass through physical exertion.

Veronique Bohbot, a research psychiatrist and memory expert at the University of Montreal warns us that today's over-technologized society is the road to entorhinal and hippocampal ruin, and thus the road to our ruin:

Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus. In the next twenty years,  think we're going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.

Carr himself states based on the information gathered by various experts in the field that:

It may well be that the brain's navigational sense - its ancient, intricate way of plotting and recording movement through space - is the evolutionary font of all memory.

One could thus conclude that, in terms of knowing where we are, and re-membering the self in all its intricate complexity, Memory (with a big M) is thus a matter of locomoting-navigating, thinking and moving, under our own steam, and not allowing anyone else to do it for us.

Cycling on top of the World

Made it, Ma! Top of the world! James Cagney, White Heat

From the Slacks at the top of the photo there are a few dirt paths down to the braes and the bottom of the hills. The blue line is one that I have walked but not cycled. Beware! It can get a little muddy if it's been raining. There are mountain-bikers who come up here regularly to try out their new manoevres, and you can usually find them at the weekends in the centre of the map where the X is. Not my sort of thing to be honest, seeing the hills as a means to an end (I prefer to see them as an end in themselves), but at least they're out in the hills and the elements, and not sat indoors in front of a bloody X-box.

The Dangers of Automation

Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

There’s a point near the beginning of Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill where the captain, welcoming fresh new recruits to the arena of operations in Las Vegas, expounds the news behind the operation of RPAs (remotely piloted aircraft) or as we have come to know them, drones.

Ladies and gentleman, the aircraft that you are looking at is not the future of war, it is the here and fucking now. Anytime day or night there are dozens of these things in the sky above our theatres of operations, and most are currently working in the garden of Eden they call Afghanistan where they’re starting to think it’s their new national bird… the United States Airforce is ordering more drones than jets, excuse me Remotely Piloted Aircraft, you can call ‘em whatever you want, drones aren’t going anywhere, in fact they’re going everywhere. But don’t think I believe my own shit either, cause we like to dress it up in fancy language: prosecuting a target, surgical strike, neutralizing a threat. Make no fucking mistake about it, we are killing people. So I’m gonna drill this into your heads every goddamm day: this ain’t fucking Playstation, even though, and the brass don’t like to admit it, our operation was modelled on X-Box, and half of you were recruited in malls precisely because you are a bunch of fucking gamers, and war is now a first person shooter. You pull the trigger here, it’s for fucking real. It ain’t a bunch of pixels that you’re blowing up. It’s flesh… and fucking blood.

60 years ago Robert Hugh MacMillan, in Automation: Friend or Foe?,  confronted the  the increasing and, at times, worrying role ‘that automatic devices are playing in the peace-time industrial life of all civilized countries’. He goes on to muse that ‘just as earlier machines had replaced man’s muscles’, these new devices looked likely to ‘replace his brains’….

That was 60 years ago.

Nowadays, everyone seems to think that automation is a good thing. 'It's convenient'... is the usual trite and painfully impoverished response. Beyond that, the articulacy as to why it might be a good thing is pitifully limited to a single answer: reduction of workload.

But then, has man succeeded in working less? Was John Maynard Keynes right when he wrote (in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in 1928) that by now we should’ve solved the work problem and learned to work less and develop our selves more?

The paradox of automation is such that in its promising to reduce the amount of work we do, it actually increases it, for it simply frees up time that we fill with more work. The problem here is not automation per se but man’s inability to deal with his own free time, and be free without having to feel the need to work (or recover from work)….

‘All too often automation frees us from that which makes us feel free’ writes Nicholas Carr in The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Talking Us.

‘The trouble with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do.’

The logical conclusion of this scenario will, presumably, be a work-free society populated by 'techno-slaves', and a sybaritic leisure class who do not know even how to wipe their own asses.

The dangers of automation should be clear: anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.

Life is not a first person shooter, and humans are not gamers. Those who use their own steam have no demons.

Here is a lazy ball surrounded by turbulence: Planet Earth as satellites photograph her.

Whole…

We have all become astronauts, completely deterritorialised as in the past a foreigner could be when abroad, but with respect to Earth of all humankind […]

… all humanity is flying like spacewalking astronauts: outside their capsule, but tethered to it by every available network…

Astronaut humanity is floating in space like a foetus in amniotic fluid, tied to the placenta of Mother Earth, by all the nutritive passages.

Michel Serres, The Natural Contract

The Great Vehicle: The Bicycle, The Cycling, The Cyclist

THE GREAT VEHICLE

1. The bicycle:
Mahayana Buddhism's 'Great Vehicle';
Life & Death:
Two spokes in the wheel of existence;
Cycling
an act of understanding,
of living -

2. Like music,
the spontaneous cyclist
penetrates
the deep reality.

Rage Against the Machine

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Zack de la Rocha, Killing in the Name

Dare to leap into the origin.  Asvaghosa, The Awakening of Faith

DESPERATE. It’s the one word that immediately springs to mind about this situation: Telling a 4 year old child and her bewildered father that she cannot cycle to school on the ‘footpath’ but instead has to use the road. Seriously? I mean seriously???? And then, if that wasn't bad enough, being warned (threatened more like by idiots with tasers) that if he (the police officer) looks in his rear-view mirror and sees the child still on her bicycle on the footpath he will turn around, come back, and confiscate the child’s bicycle (complete with stabilisers).

You will forgive me if I profess to the world being mad, to the insanity of the rigidness of rules and regulations (the fear & trembling) that prevent people in positions of authority from using the power of discretion (a noble attribute if ever there was one) and the power of independent and critical thinking based upon context. Context, after all, is everything. If you cannot take the context into account and make your decisions accordingly, then you might as well be a zombie. Alas! this is what the masses have become, browbeaten as they are by conventions and media. They act upon superimposed templates that have been handed down to them from nefarious sources, emphatically not their own. And when you start outsourcing your thinking and, by extension your being, to idiots, then you can only expect things like this to occur. Original thinking and original being (that which originates within and not without) are left by the wayside. What remains is mechanical and automatic. Gone is the sensitive and intelligent response. Intelligence after all, as its etymology suggests [from the Latin inter + legere, to read between], presupposes a context in its reading between (the lines).

I find it more than a little ironic that this occurs on the same day (11.03.2015) that a petition is signed to re-instate Jeremy Clarkson (following his dismissal by the BBC for another strop), as it was, according to a spokesman, in the interests of the ‘motor industry’ to keep Top Gear rolling

And so here we have, (reading between the lines as one must necessarily do in an overly deceptive society), an illuminating situation: the effective industrialization of the human. 

Even the zombies can see this - in the dehumanising activities that people call work, jobs whose sole purpose is to sell people stuff they simply do not need; in the modern addiction to sensationalism and media; in the apparent absence of original thinking and original moving; and in the culminating readiness to sell one's vitality to the maker of machines (the irony being that in this 'selling', one actually pays).

And so it is that society is insane. And that I occasionally rage against it.

The health and holiness of the self (based upon its own originary forces) is cast off in favour of something a little more 'instant', something a little more exciting. Yet, if the idea (nevermind the practice) of life itself no longer stimulates you, then there's definitely something wrong somewhere. The sacred (which is of course the upholding of life itself and its inextricable binding to body-mind-world) is sold off like a two-bit condominium to the point where the world (which is actually the self) becomes a mess of conflicts and crises, and nonsenses. Nonsenses like a four year old being threatened by an adult who has been vested with the ultimate boddhisattvic act of looking out for us; nonsenses like an immature and juvenile manchild preaching the effective godhood of a machine that does nothing but strip us of our own vital energies whilst simultaneously polluting our environment (and our vision of it through screen and speed).

A society that is weaned on the idea that the car is somehow inherently ‘good’, and that those who don’t have one are somehow lacking, is a society in existential decline and a society that deceives. A sedentary society is an insane society. But we can see this already, surely, in the new environment that has sprung up around us and which we have labelled 'obesogenic' and 'irreligious'.

As I have said before, and I am not the first, human-ness and vitality begins with one’s capacity to think and move for oneself, for the self-energizing agent within all of us, that binds us (religions us) to the soil and to the earth. When we ignore this fundamental life-force, and worse still, outsource it to a machine or a set of inelastic rules which further cement our ‘fatness’ (of mind and of body) then we are not too far from the edge of the precipice that leads to the abyss.

The only solution is to get rid of the car, and conventions, and start making your own way through the world, start devising your own rules based upon your own automotive energy, your own auto-poetic dynamism. The genius is he who uses his own engines! Who re-cognizes the emergency of being.

Do not allow the machine to usurp your origin. Rage against it! It is your duty, and responsibility.

[Both articles can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31811572
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31832698]

The Mastery of Movement

'Those who have steam need no demons.' Miroslav Holub

It seems coincidental, if not a little ironical, that following a cycling accident last Thursday and an operation yesterday at Gartnavel General for a 'nastily fractured left wrist' I should be talking about the mastery of movement. To be sure, I was going too fast, and having had my vision impaired by two large street-side portakabins, did not see the trailer that was being towed bt the SUV that pulled out of a side street in front of me.

It seems more than a little contradictory that I should also be writing a blog entitled The Slow Flow of Glasgow, when slowness was not exactly a part of this equation. Personally, I blame the wind. Glasgow can be a well windy city at times, and at this time of year, one almost feels like one might take off and end up in Oz. Like Glasgow's seagull population, I pride myself on my knowledge of the prevailing winds, and being able to accommodate them and synergize with them. This is all well and good, if like a seagull you have an ocean of space around you to play in, but Charing X where I had my accident (right outside the Q Club) with its car-filled streets and buildings is not exactly the great Atlantic.

And so perhaps the conclusion is that I have not mastered movement.... at least not yet. But I am on my way, that much is sure, and when at last mastery of movement is accomplished, mastery of everything else falls into place. There is a grace to moving thus, an elegance and natural economy which perhaps I overlooked in my moment of eagerness, in my moment of excessive ventilation. But as I said to the kind nurses who looked after me yesterday, 'I am alive' even though a little broken, which is a lot more than can be said for those who outsource their moving (physical and mental) to machines and screens.

Cycling into the Sea: From Kilwinning to Barassie

What makes this little jaunt special is not so much the Kilwinning to Irvine bit which, let's face it, is a little bit tired and industrial, but the sandy stretch from the point at Irvine to the train station at Barassie.

The path follows the sustrans route as marked on the OS Map through the 'lang grey toon' (as the Kilwinning born Klondike poet Robert Service called it) and past the abbey and onwards to Irvine. It's straightforward enough and as usual, this early March mid-week morning, devoid of people. Once we reach Irvine the salt air opens the mind up. There's nothing quite like the great expanses of sky, sea and sand to pacify the mind. The self is launched into space (quite the opposite effect from the city which always reflects it back onto itself). This assimilation of the self into space, into the elements is a wonderful thing, and the two miles or so cycling along the beach (surprisingly easy, the sand is harder than you think) is a nutritional experience for the mind like no other. Granted, today, we were blessed with a slight jump in temperature and a blazing sun, but no matter the weather, it is always an enormous experience. Incidentally, to get to Kilwinning, I took the 11am train from Glasgow Central (the express whose first stop is Kilwinning) which arrived at 11.25am. A return ticket to Barassie, though not the cheapest in the world at eight pounds, is worth every penny. The journey itself, time-wise, took a relaxing two hours with the train from Barassie at 1.19pm, and so is one of the shortest routes on this blog, but by no means any less for it. Naturally, in the lighter months of spring and summer, you could extend the route to Troon or even Ayr, or equally, start the route at Glengarnock with the hills over Dalry to oxygenate. To be honest, I hadn't planned anything, and so this route was entirely spontaneous (some of the most memorable journeys are). I just found myself in the concourse at Central Station gazing up at the big black board with a flurry of destinations to choose from. 

What'll it be today? I thought to myself. The hills, the coast, the moors, the sea? 

And then:

God bless the trains! and all those who tend to them.

Approaching Irvine...

The Sherlock within tells me that the Americans are running this place.... The Harbourside Hotel in Irvine.

The sea... the sky.... a selfie of an altogether more subtle sort.

The brain blazing at the point....

The snowcapped peaks of Arran in the cloudy distance...

Barassie, with its white-washed villas and manicured greens has a slightly holiday-camp feel to it. Nevertheless, there are some lovely seafront villas with views...