Brains! Part 1

*these ideas are not my own, except the part about the zombies

Every idea I've ever had belonged to someone else first.
                                                    -James T. Hellcat

In his book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker wrote, "...the mind is a naturally selected computer." I like this metaphor. For one, I'm a Darwinist/Dawkinsist, so the idea that the brain has evolved to be the crazy thinking machine it is is not so surprising/terrifying, & for another, the brain as data processor seems to me completely plausible given its nature.

What do I mean by its nature? Well, the brain has several data processing functions. It is a counting machine, a language processor, it has an expandable memory, and it is capable of crashing, to name a few. For more on the brain: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html

But it's the misfirings of the brain that I really want to talk about. The other day I experienced a classic blunder (in Statistics, a Type 1 error/false positive). I was sitting on my couch enjoying a visit with a friend, when I looked to my left & noticed my cat hunkered down beside the couch, no doubt stalking a fly or spider or a bit of fluff. I then looked up & saw that the cat was sprawled out on the dining table. A quick double-take back to 'the cat' next to the couch & I realized that it was actually a black bag I had earlier set on the floor. Duh!

Called pareidolia or simulacra, this 'uncanny' phenomenon occurs when the brain fills in false information & recognizes a vague image as a specific one. Sort of like the mind's auto-complete, if you will. Human self-delusion is fascinating, don't you think?! Pareidolia (not aliens, God, ghosts, etc.) is also to blame when we insist that we 'recognize' a familiar face, only to realize upon looking closer that it is not at all the person we had thought, & it is what causes us to see faces on random objects such as the moon or a slice of toast. It also makes us susceptible to the power of illusion/magic.

Traditionally (& still today?!), these misperceptions have most often been attributed to supernatural beings/occurrences. But it's just your mind playing tricks on you ... literally! So why do we insist on perpetuating these supernatural myths? Evolution, baby. Our minds have evolved to take on some pretty herculean tasks, so it makes sense that the brain would try to make things easier on itself, say perhaps by switching off/turning down consciousness when it is not directly necessary in order to accomplish the task at hand. ie. making sense of the black lump protruding from behind the couch. That black lump could have been almost anything, so in order to save time & costly cell activity, my brain made a guess based on a number of things (previous experience/memory, what I imagine it to be, & what I hope it is). So why DID I see my cat & not a dog, or a sweater, or a panther, or a black hole, or the black bag that it really was? 

I'll quote Mr. Pinker again, if only because he says things so much more learnedly & eloquently than I (he's the Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, Linguist, & I'm the English major): "...the mind is a system of organs of computation that enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce in the physical and social worlds in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history" (Pinker 2005).

1. Our brains are still evolving & are, therefore, not without imperfections.
2. Our social & physical worlds have evolved much faster than our brain's have.

While the costs of making a mistake in perception may be different (but not less) in the contemporary social & physical worlds, our brains are still hardwired to be on the lookout for both the things we know that are safe & the things we don't that are potential dangers. It may be nothing more than a perceptual error when we misinterpret vague images, but it pays in the long run. The brain's auto-complete function enables us to quickly locate our mates/family in a jungle of faces, locate food & shelter sources & avoid danger. Only sometimes, the brain gets it wrong (like Google?!). I am familiar with the sight of my cat (I've had her for about 6 months now), I do not own a dog, the particular shape & colour of the bag was consistent with that of my cat's (rather large) posterior, I completely forgot that I had set the bag there myself a few hours earlier, & there are no panthers or black holes (that I know of) in my home, so it makes sense that I would infer that the shape I saw was my cat, Vampira. Human perception is a subjective approximation/guesstimation rather than a fundamental, objective truth.  

Everything is a lie.

...

The other day I wrote about my brain. Specifically, how superior I think it is. You may dismiss me as an egomaniac, and to a certain extent, you'd be right. I am genetically hardwired to be selfish (or rather, my genes are). But that does not make me a selfish (and therefore, according to some, bad) human being. As intelligent as I am, as you are, as anyone can ever be (and trust me that person would be a gazillion billion times smarter than me & you put together), there is so much that we don't know, it makes what we do know seem infinitesimal. I may be gifted according to some subjective standardized test, but I am far from being a know-it-all. I am no better (or worse) than the lot of humankind.

In essence, when it comes to the human brain, degrees of intelligence are irrelevant. We're all pretty damn smart (in comparison to protozoa, say) or stupid (compared to superhuman robots, which thankfully, don't exist). Think about it. From an evolutionary perspective, we aren't that much more evolved than primitive man/woman (which explains a lot about our current disordered world!). I may be an intelligent being, but most of the time I find myself shambling about like some ravenous, slobbering zombie. 

And like I always say, I am a self-portrait of you.

...

The human brain, with all of its capabilities, its imperfections, & its limitations, truly amazes & confounds me. It is not only the source of, but quite possibly, the best example of the 'uncanny' there is.

Which brings me to zombies. The words 'uncanny' & 'zombie' are practically synonymous in my world.

I really like zombies. They are my favourite monsters, despite my theory that zombies, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein, golem, ghosts, demons, mythological monsters such as Medusa & Hydra, succubi, human monsters--serial killers/cannibalists/necrophiliacs etc.--even the Devil himself, are all incarnations of the same thing: the inherent darkness within the human brain. Zombies aren't real, but they are useful as a metaphor for the things we don't understand/like/are afraid of about ourselves. It is much easier to create an 'other' to bear the weight of our troubles, one who is capable of acting out all of the nastiness we can imagine, than it is to accept that we ourselves ARE monsters. Lest you think I am being incontrovertibly pessimistic about humankind (and truthfully, most of the time I am), I also believe that our brains have advanced far enough for us to accept this & move on. We are not merely devils, we are angels, too.

And, although logically impossible, zombies are, nonetheless, quite frightening to anyone with a brain.

...

Welcome to the Age of the Zombie.

...mmmmm brains!

...

The Computation
John Donne

For my first twenty years, since yesterday,

I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favours past, 

And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown'd one hundred, and sighs blew out two;

A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;

Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life ; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die ? 

...

Sources


Carroll, Robert T. http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html
Chalmers, David. http://consc.net/zombies.html
Dennett, Daniel C. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/unzombie.htm
Pinker, Steven. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/So_How_Does_The_Mind_Work.pdf
___________. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html

Just when you thought it was safe to be dead!

I was 11 when I first watched Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988). My best friend & I sat in her livingroom & ate popcorn & drank pop & watched it over & over & over & laughed & laughed & laughed & cried & cried & cried. We also hung out with the cows in her barn & later checked out the Hustler mags her Stepdad kept between his mattresses, but that's another story (& trust me it's NOT as perverted as you think).

Return of the Living Dead Part II wasn't my first zombie flick, but it was almost as memorable. The first was a little known Z-grade classic called The Children, about a group of kids who become zombified after the school bus they're riding on passes through a mysterious fog. I was 8 & watched it with my Dad. For some reason I thought the children ate the adults when they hugged them (they don't, they burn them) & it was because of this movie that I was terrified to go into the shed. There was a lot of junk in the shed & consequently a lot of hiding places for the children, you know!

But Return of the Living Dead Part II. THAT one made me laugh pretty much from beginning to end. Good-bad acting, cheesy dialogue, blood, guts & brains galore! It was the day my love affair with all things slashy & trashy truly began. I've seen better zombie movies since (much better in fact), but it was crucial to my psychological development. If it weren't for movies like this, I wouldn't be the mentally deranged person I am today! I also wouldn't have this:

That's right. Return of the Living Dead Part II Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on vinyl. Framed. Oh hell yes, baby, can you dig it!

Besides arousing in me a feeling of total nostalgic bliss, this album is important because a) it was released in 1988 around the same time as the movie, b) other than a small hole in the cover itself, it's in near mint condition, and c) due to rights issues or some other damned thing, the soundtrack for the DVD is not the same as the soundtrack for the VHS. This puppy's rare. Ca-ching!

Thanks, Tom D. (Told you no one else would buy it!)

...

And for your viewing pleasure:




 ...

dying is fine)but Death
e.e. cummings

dying is fine)but Death

?o
baby
i

wouldn't like

Death if Death
were
good:for

when(instead of stopping to think)you

begin to feel of it,dying
's miraculous
why?be

cause dying is

perfectly natural;perfectly
putting
it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
& artificial &

evil & legal)

we thank thee
god
almighty for dying
(forgive us,o life!the sin of Death

...

How like a corpse she looks in the dying of the light

There are times when I rage.

I rage against time, money, love, happiness, my child, the cat, the douche who almost ran me over with his monster truck, people who talk to me when I am clearly ON THE TELEPHONE, jujubes & jellybeans (ew!), gum on the bottom of my shoe, puppies & kittens, babies (yeah, I said it), world hunger, illiteracy, semi-literacy, and 'the machine.' I rage against bad grammar, bad manners, bad lovers, bad liars & bad livers. And I rage against the world, my life, my mind, and as Dylan Thomas wrote, 'against the dying of the light."

Sometimes I rage against nothing in particular. The most uncontrollable, irrational rage you can imagine. The kind of rage that makes me want to smash things and bite people's faces off. And laugh. And spit in their earholes. And vomit on them. And kick them in the back. And loose red ants upon them. And pluck out every one of the rotting hairs on their bodies one at a time. And ...

All because they cut me off with their grocery cart or squeezed the toothpaste tube from the top instead of the bottom.

The truth is I rage against everything. And most of the time it is in check. But there are those times my rage is as dark & red & cold & bright as 'the dying of the light.

Today was one of those times.

...


Thankfully, I began writing this just before the sun set.

And what a beautiful sunset it was! It helped lift my spirits tremendously.

Thank goodness it didn't literally take my breath away. Otherwise ...

I think I'll make a pretty corpse

 ...

You may already know this one.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

...

Schadenfreude

I like birthdays.

Someone I love very drearily celebrated his 30th birthday just two days ago! Having passed that milestone myself a few years back, I take great pleasure in his misfortune. Ha ha ha.

Just imagine being THIS guy:

Tagline: It'll be a killer party!

The best thing about birthdays isn't the eating, the drinking, nor is it even being scary (or merry if you prefer that), it's the trivial coincidences. You know, like who else was born (or died) on the same day. Now that's fun!

My lovely friend shares his day of birth, August 6th, with numerous (in)famous folks: Alfred Lord Tennyson (& he died the day before MY birthday!), Edith Roosevelt, Dutch Shultz (American gangster & bootlegger), Andy Warhol, Vinnie Vincent, Elliott Smith, Geri (Ginger Spice) Halliwell, JonBenét Ramsay, a whole slew of sporty folks (particularly cricket players) & Punky Brewster (Soleil Moon Frye)!

And, I'll bet you didn't know, four Pope's died on August 6th, as did Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, Diego Velasquez, Rick James, & John Hughes.

Pretty uncanny, right?

Nope.

Blame it on the Birthday Paradox.

What's that you say? Well, it's got a lot to do with Probability Theory. The Birthday Paradox states that you only need a group of 23 people for there to be a 50% chance that at least one random pair of said people will share the same birthday. I'm a bit lost when it comes to the actual mathematics behind the Birthday Paradox, but I do understand the implications.

We are often surprised to learn that we share our birth day with someone else (particularly when that person is a complete stranger we have just met), yet there is actually a pretty good chance that it can happen. A much better chance than we intuit. By the time you reach about 57 people or so, the chances are 99%! Holy coincidence! For further reading, this guy puts it nicely (and with comic flair & only a smidgen of math): http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birthday-paradox

There is nothing supernatural (uncanny) about sharing your birthday with someone else. It's completely probable & predictable.

...

All Things Will Die
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating
Full merrily;
Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die.
Spring will come never more.
O, vanity!
Death waits at the door.
See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking.
We are call’d–we must go.
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie.
The merry glees are still;
The voice of the bird
Shall no more be heard,
Nor the wind on the hill.
O, misery!
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing;
Ice with the warm blood mixing;
The eyeballs fixing.
Nine times goes the passing bell:
Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago.
And the old earth must die.
So let the warm winds range,
And the blue wave beat the shore;
For even and morn
Ye will never see
Thro’ eternity.
All things were born.
Ye will come never more,
For all things must die.

...

Happy Birthday, Devin. You may be OLD, but at least you're not dead!

...

Don't let them bury me, I'm not dead!

Today is Wes Craven's 71st birthday. And what better way to celebrate than with spiders, snakes, psychotropic drugs, Haitian voodoo, premature burial ...

& zombies?!

One of my favourites from the 80's--a sleek, subtle(r), underrated thriller courtesy of the gore-master himself--I can't even count how many times I've seen this movie:

Loosely based on ethnobotanist Wade Davis's non-fiction account of his investigations into Haitian zombification, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) stars Bill Pullman as the ethnobotanist/anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan, and also features Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield & a pre-CSI Paul Guilfoyle (he's so young & cute!).

For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, here is the American trailer:

...

Well shot & decently acted, this movie practically screams das Unheimliche. Pullman is quite believable as the relentless doctor, however, south-afrikaner Zakes Mokae steals the show for me as creepy witch doctor/bokor Dargent Peytraud.

Just look at this face:

...

I first saw The Serpent and the Rainbow around the time it was released & not surprisingly, it still resonates with me today, some 20 odd years later! This is one of those movies that sticks with you.

The dream sequences in this heavily atmospheric & somewhat disjointed--but never too disjointed--film are quite literally nightmarish. The effects are realistic. The setting is haunting & lush. And the subject matter—zombification—well, everyone who knows me knows how I feel about zombies!

Good enough to eat ... you.

Of all the movie monsters out there--and there are so so many--the zombie is perhaps the most frightening. Why? A loaded question, but I think it stems from the fact that zombies are most like us. In fact, they are us. Only an us that is 'un'conscious, dead to the world.

While the zombies of our imagination are typically (thanks mostly to Romero) portrayed as flesh-eaters, real zombies prove to be much less opportunistic & dangerous. The zombie originated in Haitian folklore (something Craven definitely kept in mind). There have been hundreds of (mostly unsubstantiated) accounts of men & women returning from the grave after allegedly being poisoned by some kind of drug that rendered them 'lifeless,' yet years of research has only turned up a few toxic fish-based powders that mimic the effects of anaesthesia. When the powder wears off, these 'zombies' usually return to their homes to 'haunt' their families, or as is suggested in the movie, are dug up by some evil houngan's henchmen & put to work. Like Christophe (played by Conrad Roberts, who coincidentally had a part in an episode of CSI).

*Spoiler alert*

In our film, the powder is blown onto our hero's face and he soon finds himself paralyzed but completely conscious of his surroundings. Here's where things get tricky. While under the influence of this drug, he has all sorts of hallucinations, including visions of being buried alive! And the viewer has the pleasure/pain of experiencing it right alongside him through a series of clever POV shots. In this case, the shots are quite effective. (Another director who successfully uses a similar type of POV shot is Aldo Lado in La Corta Notte Delle Bambole di Vetro aka Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971)).

Forgive me for the seemingly unrelated intrusion, but if you have seen both movies you will know what I mean. And besides, it gives me the opportunity to show you the killer cover: 

Dig?

...

But now, back to the zombies.

Although they aren't dangerous in the same way modern brain-slurping gut-munching talking running thinking zombies are, traditional zombies aren't any less sinister. The ramifications of zombification are obvious: good ol' fashioned mind control. What better way to force someone to bend to your will than to remove all traces of (self)consciousness from his/her mind!

Sidebar: Governments have long used prescription drugs & alcohol to 'legally' exert mind control over their public (but that is a subject for another kind of blog!).

...

(It always comes back to mind control, doesn't it?)

If you like your zombie movies crunchy & bloody & not the least bit serious, don't bother with The Serpent and the Rainbow. Although there are plenty of scares, Craven is restrained here & so are his zombies. Which brings me to the point.

(Does there really have to be a point?)

No. But it's almost always where things start to get weird.

*Another Spoiler alert*

Dr. Alan enters a strange world when he arrives in Haiti. Everything about the place is contrary to what he knows/thinks he knows. He is arrested several times by the police, framed for murder, nearly castrated, beaten, sent home at gunpoint (but not without his prize) only to return to Haiti to be drugged & subsequently buried alive & unearthed/brought back from the dead (if only in his mind). And finally, after defeating the bad guy, our battered hero emerges from the battle triumphant. (Sounds like a story I once read ...)

...

Usually what appears to be uncanny turns out to be less than mysterious, nothing more than our minds playing tricks on us. But there are those rare instances where it turns out to be something more.

We could travel to Haiti in search of zombies, completely confident in the versimiltude of our own realities.

Like Dr. Alan.

We could be researchers looking for a specific kind of drug that creates these zombies. A drug certain companies would be very interested in acquiring.

Like Dr. Alan

We could be tourists simply looking for a tax break.

Like Dr.Alan.

And we could find nothing but civil unrest, corrupt city officials, & some hallucinogenic fish powder & the occasional strange custom.

Like Dr. Alan.

Or, we could find ourselves, like Dr. Alan, unable to wake from some terrific nightmare.

We could find ourselves

zombified.

...

From Towards Break of Day
W.B. Yeats

Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?

Quiet, you'll wake the dead

das Unheimliche. Astounding, bizarre, creepy, devilish, extraordinary, fantastic, ghoulish, horrifying, incredible ... I could go on and on with the abc's of synonyms for this German word, but none really satisfactorily convey its "different shades of meaning." It is strange, familiarly unfamiliar, & frightening. Uncanny is the closest word to it in the English language.

Freud said "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." Waxwork figures, dolls, monsters, the re-animated dead, disembodied limbs, ghosts, dopplegängers, sideshow performers, haunted houses, seemingly non-random repetitions/coincidences (of numbers, dates, etc.), magic tricks, optical illusions, even epilepsy & mental illness, are all examples of things that can induce feelings of the uncanny.

However ambiguous the term may be, one almost always recognizes the uncanny when one sees it (or to be more accurate, feels it). This blog is dedicated to unearthing the uncanny in our contemporary world, where the laws of physics (especially Einstein's theory of relativity), Darwin's theories of evoloution, & probability theories in mathematics, have made it increasingly difficult to identify things that are truly uncanny.

To celebrate my first blog post, a poem. By a master of the uncanny, Edgar Allan Poe (who, uncannily enough, died Oct. 7th, the day I was born). Why? Because I love poetry. And because I love Poe.

Sonnet: To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

1829

According to the young Poe (a budding Romantic if I ever saw one!), science removes the mysteries from the world, particularly for the poet. Science is a "vulture, whose wings are dull realities." I don't share Poe's sentiments about science. In fact, I think in opposite terms; science reveals the true mysteries (and beauty) of the world. What I do share with Poe is a certain kind of Romanticism--a good, old-fashioned gothic love for the macabre. For Poe, or the speaker at least, scientific knowledge occludes "the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree," which seems to me the equivalent of being unable to suspend disbelief during a horror movie. When the makeup is removed, when the sets & special effects are exposed, when the smoke and mirrors vanish, when the dream is revealed to be just that--a dream--we are left, like Poe's speaker, with a near inability to experience anything like the uncanny.

But it is possible.

What better example to begin with than a photo I took of my 'self' recently:

Is this me? A ghost? Or some malicious doppelgänger? What happens when the ghost in the photo turns out to be a simple trick of light or a slip of the hand? The truth is, despite knowing it is the result of an unsteady hand, I find this photo of myself quite frightening. It IS me, or rather a creepy, unpretty, ghostlike version of me. It makes me think of what I might look like dead. Of what it might feel like to be dead. That part of me would like to be dead. That I am already dead.

And that folks, is pretty damn uncanny!