Oxford University Press's Blog, page 480

How fast can you think?

A call comes through to the triage desk of a large hospital in the New York City metropolitan area: a pregnant woman with multiple abdominal gunshot wounds is due to arrive in three minutes. Activating a trauma alert, the head nurse on duty, Denise, requests intubation, scans, anesthesia, surgery, and, due to the special circumstances, sonography and labor and delivery. The emergency medical service team slides the gurney into the hospital, and the trauma center staff starts in with Denise coordinating and overseeing the entire process. How is it possible to think about so much so quickly?

When Denise (not her real name) recounted this story to me, she was enrolled in my philosophy of science course for nursing doctoral students. In this course, amid discussions of Karl Popper’s criterion for demarcating science from nonscience and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, I would hear stories from her and other students about nursing: about newborns in the critical care unit; about patients who would, against all orders, remove their EKG monitors to use the toilet; about the travails of discussing the benefits of blood transfusions with desperately ill Jehovah’s Witnesses. These stories often reminded me of how little urgency exists in philosophy—one doesn’t feel much time pressure to solve the problem of free will when it has been open for the past two thousand years—as well as how little tragedy. The nurses in my classes learned fairly quickly that they should bring tissues for me. The day I heard Denise’s story was not an exception: neither mother nor baby were able to be saved. Their stories also sometimes illustrated how much thought goes into even the quickest decisions.

Let us now step away from the bustle of the emergency department and consider the conscious mind. Did Denise need to think consciously about what she had to do? Did she consciously decide to request the labor and delivery team? Or, after the call came in, were her actions unconscious and automatic? What is the role of consciousness in emergency decision making?

Unconscious, reflex-like decisions are fast. Neural signals that result in action can travel along myelinated nerves at upwards of 120 meters per second. A runner at the starting block, after hearing the pistol, pushes off in less time than it takes to blink an eye. Compare this to the leisurely 0.5 – 2 meters per second pace at which pain signals travel along unmyelinated nerves. But how fast can one follow through a conscious train of reasoning, one that leads, for example, from the weather forecast to a decision about what clothes to wear? When we have time, we weigh the options—if I bring the light jacket, I’ll be somewhat cold outside but won’t need to carry it when I’m inside—and arrive at what, upon consideration, seems to be the best decision. Yet what happens when, as in Denise’s case, there is a starting pistol for our decisions? Do we go on autopilot, grab the galoshes and run?

To probe the speed limits of conscious thought, I conducted an experiment. I had four accomplished chess players—two masters, one national master and one (retired) international master—think aloud, saying what came into their minds, if anything, as they were playing a game of lightning chess, which is a variation of chess that allows a mere one minute per player for an entire game. After I explained the task, my participants all expressed doubts; they think all the time, they said, but thinking aloud while playing would likely slow them down too much. Indeed, the first player I was scheduled to test made such a convincing case for this, I almost skipped over the one-minute game trials and moved on to the five-minute ones. However, the five-minute trials were not necessary. As soon as they were paired with their online opponents, clocks started ticking and they started talking, very rapidly and more or less nonstop, about their reasoning processes as they were playing.

The Strategy by jarmoluk. Public domain via Pixabay.

To be sure, much of what they said was elliptical. For example, at one point during a game I heard: “if I play B6, he plays F3; is that the idea? B6, F3; what about C5, D5—D5? D5? If he plays D5 I get into a Leningrad-y thing; but I don’t want a Leningrad-y thing . . .” Nonetheless, such comments indicate that my chess players were engaged in rapid, conscious deliberations.

How did this affect their games? The results were what would be expected given the pairings: when paired against slightly weaker players, they won; against slightly stronger ones, they lost. And in terms of their own personal evaluations of their games, they all felt that they performed at least as well as they usually do, with one commenting, “I think it actually helped my game.” Another said, “I never think I play well, but I played like I play.”

From an outside perspective, it might seem that a one-minute-per-player match proceeds so rapidly that it intercepts conscious deliberation. Hands fly over the board or move the cursor on what appears to be mere impulse. Could it be that when the chess players in my experiment vocalized what was going on in their minds, it was the vocalization that elevated their thoughts and plans to the level of consciousness?  Or is it that the appearance of automatic and effortless expertise in lightning chess, in nursing, and elsewhere, can be deceptive?

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, distinguishes what he calls “System 1” thinking, which he describes as automatic and intuitive—what you use when you add two and two—from “System 2,” thinking, which he describes as slow and analytical—what you use when you mentally compute seventeen times twenty-four. The calculations of the chess players in my study were System 2, but accelerated. Though perhaps not as fast as the blink of an eye, it seems that our complex, conscious deliberations can, when necessary, be fast. Or as the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, “thought is quick.”

A Marine once told me that endless drills have allowed him to reload his weapons without any thought at all. Reloading a weapon, hitting the chess clock, picking up the call from the emergency service team—yes, all that is fast and automatic. But what about shooting? I wanted to ask the Marine that question, but, perhaps because of the large M4 carbine in his arms, I was too intimidated. If someone suddenly points a gun at you in the midst of battle, one hopes that the impulse to respond gets carried along those myelinated nerves that serve as a super highway. Yet, at the same time, in war, as on the emergency room floor, one wants to be like the chess player: capable of justifying what you have done. Acting automatically precludes this.

There is an old saying, “look before you leap.” But if there really isn’t time to look beforehand, look while you leap and be ready to adjust plans mid-air.

Featured image: Relay Race by ThomasWolter. Public domain via Pixabay.

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A technophile embraces oral history in the digital age

Today we return to our regularly schedule programming, coming back to our ongoing series or oral historyorigin stories. We hear how Steven Sielaff found his way to the crazy mixed up world of oral history, and how his technophilia feeds into his love of oral history.  To share your own story, contact our social media coordinator, Andrew Shaffer, at ohreview[at]gmail[dot]com.

Since this is an oral historian origin story, I feel I need to begin this post with a bit of a confession. Even though I earned a bachelor’s degree in History from Baylor University, it was not until the summer of 2011, the term before I was to begin my graduate work at Baylor in the Museum Studies program, that I was introduced to oral history in general, and the stellar work and reputation of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH) in particular. Some years had passed since I was in the classroom, and I was looking for a way to get back into the flow when the history department chair suggested I look into BUIOH Director Stephen Sloan’s Seminar in Oral History course. Thankfully Stephen was in his office across the street, and after a brief discussion, I decided to sign up for the seminar.

There were only three of us in this summer session: myself and two young ladies wrapping up their master’s in secondary education. Almost from the start of the course I saw in the oral history profession many of the same characteristics that drew me to museum studies, namely a multidisciplinary nature that encourages eager young historians to “do” and “create” rather than simply read and research. The recent emphasis on oral history’s entry into the digital age also caught my eye, as I am quite the technophile (I always seemed to find myself as the token humanities lover among my circle of programmer/coder friends).

About a month into the seminar Stephen offered me an assistantship at the Institute working on various grant-funded projects, a position I would keep throughout my entire tenure in the Museum Studies program. It was pretty exciting to combine what I was learning in class with both my work at the Institute and my interest in museums. For my seminar project I conducted several interviews on the origin of the Dr Pepper Museum here in town (yes, we have a Dr Pepper museum, and yes, you should totally visit next time you are in Waco!). Meanwhile, as part of my job I created a web portal for a project funded by a local foundation entitled “For the Greater Good: Philanthropy in Waco.”

I will say here it is interesting to see just how much things have changed for us here at the Institute when it comes to online access and curation in the short five years I’ve been involved in oral history. As I pulled the “Philanthropy in Waco” pages into our brand new institutional website last month, I reflected on how many digital tools are available now for oral historians looking to share their work, and how differently I would build this website if I was to create it today. It was one of these tools that also helped sell me on oral history when, still as a graduate student, I was able to beta test the University of Kentucky Louis B. Nunn Center’s Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). Working on adapting our transcripts to work within the OHMS system was exciting work and also translated into a panel presentation at my first OHA conference in 2013. It was at this conference I also served as editorial/social media assistant for the Oral History Review (OHR), thus beginning a relationship with the good folks at OHR that has already led to several reviews and blog posts.

As I wrapped up my master’s degree with a joint BUIOH-Museum Studies oral history project on the genesis of our university museum complex, I knew that I was leaning more toward a life in oral history than museums. Thankfully only a month after my graduation a temporary position became available at the Institute, and I began a new role in researching university history. During this time, however, I also immersed myself in the entire digital lifespan of oral history and learned all I could about the Institute’s accession and processing procedures, particularly our budding new digitization initiatives. When my mentor Elinor Maze announced in the fall of 2013 she would be retiring soon, I knew immediately that this opening, now appropriately weighted more toward the collections management aspect of the job, was perfect for me. Fortunately, Baylor agreed, and I began my current position as Senior Editor and Collection Manager of the BUIOH in the spring of 2014.

Honestly, I cannot imagine a more exciting time to be an oral historian when you consider the wealth of information that the digital age enables us to both discover and, in the case of digitization, rediscover. I feel tremendously blessed to be able to apply my talents at BUIOH to help open our collection to world, and I look forward to the tidal wave of information and innovation that is sure to come from our profession in the years ahead.

Miss the excitement of the #OHMATakeover? Follow our friends at the Oral History Masters program at Columbia University online at oralhistory.columbia.edu or visit their blog here. Add your voice the conversation by chiming into the discussion in the comments below, or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Image credit: “Technology, keyboard, computing” by Pixies, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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How much of an Olympics fan are you? [quiz]

On 5 August 2016, Rio de Janeiro will welcome the Summer Olympics, becoming the first South American city to ever host the Games. Featuring a total of 28 sports in 41 disciplines, Rio 2016 promises to be the most widely broadcast event of the summer. There are new sports added to the list too, with Rugby Sevens and Golf making their respective debuts. Before you attend that Olympics viewing party, why not brush up on your trivia game with our quiz below? Find out if you are the next star of ‘mental athletics’ or if you need to go back to training.

Featured image credit: London Olympics 2012 by Steve Fair. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Quiz background image credit: Rio 2016 logo. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Rio 2016: evidence of greatness or a bid for recognition?

The eve of the opening ceremonies of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics is a good time to reflect not only on Brazil’s role as the organizer of the games, but whether the experience of the host country can tell us anything about the status of the BRICS — one of the most important economic groupings in the world, and one which you may never have heard of.

As nations much showcased since 2001 (when Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs first clustered them together) as big, dynamic, rising countries, much of their global projection has focused as much on spectacle as on substantive achievements.

In the world of diplomacy the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) reproduced many of the same features embedded in the activities of the G7 forum made up of the old Western dominated establishment. Coming together initially as a foreign ministers meeting before being elevated to a full-blown summit of leaders in 2009, the BRICS aimed to show that they were constitutive of a new geography of power. The purpose of such collective action was to a considerable extent symbolic, with a focus on status enhancement whereby the BRICS countries pushed for recognition as influential actors in the international system.

However the grasp of spectacle has not only been confined to the sphere of high politics. More than any other grouping of countries the BRICS have embraced the value of linking soft power dynamics to major sporting events, with the Olympics at the top of the list.

In its most robust form this approach has embellished the image of an individual member of BRICS as a country deserving of top-tier ranking. Although pollution and a number of human rights controversies threatened the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the games was deemed by most observers to be a successful coming out party for China. Not only were the main physical images of the Olympics – the “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the ‘water Cube” aquatic centre–consistent with the narrative of a big rising China, it influenced the parallel enterprises of the other BRICS countries, most notably the Russian 2014 Sochi Winter games.

Yet if the winning and running of major sporting events held enormous opportunity this approach equally exposed extreme risks. Indeed, rather than reinforcing top-tier reputation at the apex of global society, the experience of hosting the Olympics or other such event could confirm that the BRICS ( as former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castenada put it) are simply not ready for prime time.

In terms of the hosting of major games it must be recognized that the success of the Beijing Olympics was a singular achievement in the context of the BRICS. Although hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup provided a needed upgrade for South Africa’s transport infrastructure, South Africa backed away from bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympics. And despite speculation that India might compete for the 2024 Olympics this scenario also proved false.

Olympics games ladder by ksobolevo. Public domain via Pixabay.

What is fascinating about Brazil’s hosting of the Rio Olympics is how it stretches across the entire range of images about the BRICS. In October 2009 Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stated that he was the proudest president in the world when hours after Rio de Janeiro had won the right to host the 2016 Olympic games. Not only was Lula instrumental in seeing off the efforts of US President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama’s campaign for Chicago, he received congratulatory messages from most heads of state from South American countries, including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

By the opening of the games this sort of optimism is long eroded. Common sentiment agrees with the view of Rio’s mayor; the Rio Olympics marks a “missed opportunity” for Brazil to demonstrate on a big global stage that it is a rising power. Former president Lula is under indictment for his alleged obstruction of the Petrobras scandal. Moreover the tardiness in the completion of Olympic venues, contamination of the waters where the nautical events are to held, and concerns about the Zika virus, all reinforce the problematic caricature of Brazil for inefficiency.

Yet, notwithstanding all the predictions about disaster, it must not be forgotten that the hallmark of the BRICS both individually and collectively is an aspirational quality. Even as the BRICS have endeavoured to move up the global hierarchy, it is their constraints in the context of development as much as their comparative advantages. But there is plenty to be optimistic about in tracing the geo-political trajectory of this grouping. Building on an unanticipated club culture the BRICS, for example, have been able to create a New Development Bank with innovative ambition.

Unfortunately even beyond the core illustration of Brazil the experience of the Rio games threatens to exaggerate the divergent – and often negative – qualities of the individual BRICS countries. China is analyzed as the main competitor with the United States to lead the medal count. Russia’s outlier status is reinforced as it struggles with charges of systematic doping. India’s status as the perpetual underachiever is anticipated as it only won 9 gold medals, and an overall total of 26 medals in 30 Olympics Games. Although South Africa has escaped controversy on sports related issues, this success is overshadowed by the turmoil for the ruling ANC party as it faces serious tests in local elections.

Holding the Olympics in Rio remains a testimony to the aspirational goals of countries outside of the traditional centres of power. But meeting these goals is – and will continue to be – a messy and uneven affair.

Featured image credit: Sport treadmill Tor by RemazteredStudio. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Experiments in Art and Technology – Episode 37 – The Oxford Comment

Founded in 1966 by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was a non-profit group that fostered collaboration between artists and engineers. Active between the 1960s and 1980s, E.A.T. recruited scientists and engineers to work with artists looking to incorporate new technologies into artworks, performances, and installations. The organization also pioneered educational and public service projects that exposed the general public to telecommunications technology and expanded media access in countries across the globe.

This episode of the Oxford Comment is the second in our two-part series in conjunction with the Benezit Dictionary of Artists. We resume our roundtable conversation at the New York office with artist Robert Whitman, Benezit Editor in Chief, Dr. Kathy Battista, and Experiments in Art and Technology Director Julie Martin, to discuss many of E.A.T.’s noteworthy and laudable undertakings. To learn more, our multimedia producer, Sara Levine, also interviews Dr. Julia Robinson, a Grove Dictionary of Art contributor and professor of Art History at New York University, about E.A.T.’s role in the development of the performance art medium in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.

Featured image credit:  Billy Klüver talking about E.A.T. and 9 Evenings to a group of artists and engineers in Toronto. Artists’ requests to the engineers for their 9 Evenings performances are projected on the wall behind him. Photographer Unknown. All rights reserved. Image reproduced with permission from Julie Martin and E.A.T.

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Musical literacy in Shakespeare’s England

It is commonplace to say that, in Renaissance England, music was everywhere. Yet, however true the statement is, it obscures the fact that music existed in many different forms, with very different functions and very different meanings. Someone living in Shakespeare’s London could easily have heard a ballad about “Queen Dido” sung loudly in the street by an enterprising ballad-seller, or “ballad-monger.” The same person might also hear in church the singing of psalms, which were set to tunes not unlike those of street ballads but with notably different texts. A noble or prosperous Londoner might be treated to an indoor, intimate performance on the lute, possibly a piece by the immensely popular composer John Dowland. Some music was not even “heard” at all, but rather studied in the form of academic texts or published treatises on music.

Given the different forms that music took, there was wide disagreement over what made someone musically “literate.” At Oxford and Cambridge, music was still being taught as part of the mathematical quadrivium, along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. In this curricular model, which had its origins in Plato’s Republic and had been institutionalized in medieval European universities, a “true” understanding of music meant an understanding of the mathematical basis of musical harmony—of the numerical ratios that determine musical intervals, consonances, and so on. The principal authority for the academic study of music was the 6th-century philosopher Boethius, who in his De institutione musica had drawn a sharp distinction between “speculative music,” the study of music as a science, and “practical music” or performance, which Boethius considered to be the provenance of unthinking, uneducated practitioners.

However, at the end of the sixteenth century, some English musicians started to promote a very different sense of musical literacy. In his treatise, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), the composer Thomas Morley begins with an anecdote about a gentleman who is utterly embarrassed at a dinner party when it is discovered that he can’t sight-sing. Morley then offers a complete, detailed lesson in how to sight-sing, beginning with the notes of the Gamut, or scale: ut, re, mi, fa, so, la. In this way, Morley teaches his reader how to be musically literate in the literal sense—how to “read” a musical score and perform it. Morley’s treatise was immediately popular, and several other instructional books on performing and composing music appeared in Renaissance England over the next few decades.

Still others felt that being truly knowledgeable about music meant knowing the ancient history of music, including material from both classical and biblical sources. When the Oxford graduate John Taverner was appointed music professor at London’s Gresham College in 1610, he was instructed (as all other Gresham professors were) to give lectures that would be of “practical use” to London citizens. Yet, instead of giving instruction on how to perform or compose music, as Morley would have done, Taverner instead treated his listeners to a long discussion on the origins of music—complete with references to Latin writers such as Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. For Taverner, musical literacy for the average Londoner meant the ability to discuss intelligently the value of music with others. This kind of competency would have been especially relevant in light of the frequent attacks on music made by Protestant Reformers in Renaissance England (often in the same contexts as Reformist attacks on the theater). In these instances, the ability to justify and defend one’s attachment to music might very well have seemed more practical than the ability to perform on the lute or to compose an intricate canon.

The Taming of the Shrew by C. R. Leslie. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Shakespeare was well aware of these competing ideas about musical literacy, and he seems to have been keenly interested in the cultural values implied by them. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare places the debate over musical literacy front and center, in the music lesson that Hortensio gives to Bianca in Act 3. Having promised Bianca’s father, Baptista, to give Bianca a music education befitting a gentlewoman, Hortensio attempts to teach her the lute and the notes of the Gamut. However, Shakespeare complicates the situation by having Hortensio compete for Bianca’s attention, literally, with her Latin tutor, Lucentio, who is teaching Bianca a passage from Ovid’s Heroides. In this way, Shakespeare wryly suggests that disagreements over music education amount to a disagreement over what a woman should learn—how to control and refine the movements of her body (as in playing a lute) or how to read and understand the Latin texts normally taught to men.

Of course, the immediate point of Bianca’s dual lesson in The Shrew is more about seduction than about curricula. For Hortensio, as with Lucentio, the lesson is merely a pretense to express his romantic desire, which he cleverly works into the notes of the scale:

Gam-ut—I am, the ground of all accord,

A—re—to plead Hortensio’s passion.

B—mi—Bianca, take him for thy lord,

C—fa, ut—that loves with all affection.

D—sol, re—one clef, two notes have I,

E—la, mi—show pity, or I die.

The figure of the disguised lover is ubiquitous in Renaissance English drama, and it makes for much comic potential in this scene (there are also some especially bawdy musical puns in this scene). Yet even here Shakespeare seems to be making a larger point about musical literacy, and about cultural literacy in general. Whatever Hortensio really thinks about music, his knowledge of a particular musical language gives him direct access to Bianca—quite literally, it “gets him in the door” and allows him to move within the social circle of his choice. Such side effects of musical and cultural literacy are still familiar to us—think of modern discussions over whether a knowledge of Shakespeare is a virtue in itself or whether it is useful primarily because it makes one appear “educated.” As much as Shakespeare likely loved music for itself, he was still aware of the fact that musical literacy, however defined, could always be put to less noble, and more materialistic, uses.

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Japanese elections: constitutional revision and the anxiety of free speech

While the high drama of the Brexit vote and the US presidential election has grabbed international headlines, Japan has also completed an election that may have far-reaching implications. In the elections for the Upper House of the Diet (Japan’s parliament) on 10 July, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partners won 162 seats, which, combined with sympathetic but unaffiliated members, give them a two-thirds majority in the Upper House. It already had a two-thirds majority in the Lower House.

A two-thirds supermajority in both houses is the threshold needed to instigate a revision to Japan’s Constitution, pending approval by a majority of voters in a referendum. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, along with the LDP, has long held the goal of revising the Constitution, which they consider to have been imposed on Japan by the Allied Occupation after World War II. In particular, Article 9, which renounces war as a means of settling international disputes, may be endangered.

The LDP’s intentions of constitutional revision extend well beyond this article, with the potential to have serious implications for free speech. A host of parties, including the UN Special Rappoteur on freedom of expression, had expressed concerns about the autonomy of the press on the passage of the Secrecy Law in December 2013. This law punishes the unauthorized disclosure of a state secret by ten years’ imprisonment for the person entrusted with the secret (e.g., a bureaucrat) and five years’ imprisonment for the person receiving it (e.g., a journalist, academic, citizen’s group). However, as one does not know what is classified as a state secret, the law could have a chilling effect on investigative journalism or whistleblowing.

In 2016, several prominent television news commentators who had been critical of policies or asked hard questions left their posts, including Kuniya Hiroko of NHK’s Close Up Gendai, Kishii Shigetada of TBS’s News 23, and Furutachi Ichirō and Koga Shigeaki of TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station. Reporters Without Borders dropped Japan’s ranking in press freedom to 72 out of 180 countries in 2016, down from 11 in 2010.

The LDP’s blueprint for constitutional revision, last published in April 2012, would change nearly all of the articles of the 1947 Constitution. Meiji University law professor Lawrence Repeta warns that some of these revisions could undermine the protection of individual rights and free speech. While the 1947 Constitution emphasizes the universality of human rights, the LDP proposes to delete Article 97, which emphasizes human rights as fundamental, timeless, and inviolable.

The LDP’s proposed Article 19-2 reads, “No person shall improperly acquire, possess or use information concerning individuals.” Not only is “information concerning individuals” so broad as to include names and photographs, as well as identifying data, but as the prohibition is against “improper” use, as opposed to “illegal” use, citizens would be taking a risk as to what a government authority might interpret as “improper.” Bloggers note that the article could make it more difficult for journalists and writers to conduct interviews, further dampening investigative journalism, or for activists to collect signatures for petitions.

The LDP’s blueprint for constitutional revision would change nearly all of the articles of the 1947 Constitution.

Article 12, which guarantees individual freedoms and rights, would be redrafted to say that “duties and obligations accompany freedoms and rights, and [the people] shall never violate the public interest and public order.” “Freedoms and rights” would be subordinate to “public interest and public order.” The LDP’s Q&A pamphlet clarifies that “public order” is the maintenance of “social order” and a “quiet life”; i.e., individuals should not cause a nuisance while asserting their rights. As public protests are loud and occupy public space, they could easily be considered a “nuisance.”

To Article 21, which guarantees freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association, the LDP would prohibit “engaging in activities with the purpose of damaging the public interest or public order, or associating with others for such purposes…” The prohibition is not against actions that actually disturb the public order, but those that simply aim to do so; the authorities would be interpreting that aim.

Finally, the LDP proposal would grant the prime minister the power to declare a national emergency, not only for armed attacks or natural catastrophes, but also “disturbances of the social order due to internal strife, etc.,” making for a potentially broad and vague set of circumstances (Article 98). Under such emergencies, the Cabinet would be able to enact orders with the same effect as laws (Article 99), without the scrutiny of a Diet debate. As Repeta points out, speaking out against government policy during a national emergency would likely conflict with the maintenance of “public interest and public order.”

Abe downplayed constitutional revision during the campaign, framing the election as a referendum on ‘Abenomics’, his program to revive the Japanese economy. Following Abe through a series of campaign speeches on the street (gaitō enzetsu), the Asahi News Network pointedly noted that he did not mention constitutional revision even once, instead criticizing the “irresponsibility” of the opposition parties, and saying that he was only half-way through with Abenomics.

A search on Factiva on Japanese terrestrial television, on which most of the Japanese rely for news, for the campaign period (23 Jun-9 July) yielded 364 spots that mentioned the Upper House election; of these, only 41 mentioned “Constitution” or “constitutional revision.” While most spots emphasized the importance of the two-thirds majority, they did not discuss why a change in the Constitution would be significant; only a handful mentioned which articles were likely to be changed. Furthermore, these spots were sometimes placed at the end of a 30-minute program, where they were less likely to be remembered. Several opposition members questioned the conspicuous absence of any LDP discussion on constitutional revision, particularly the lack of clarification on which articles they planned to revise.

Given this lack of media emphasis, voters prioritized social security, the economy, and social programs for the elderly and child-rearing over constitutional revision. Furthermore, the fractured nature of the opposition made many voters feel they had little choice besides the LDP. Hence, voter turnout was only 54.7%—the fourth-lowest for an Upper House election, according to Kyodo News. After the election, Hōsei University professor Yamaguchi Jirō said on NHK that the lack of discussion had been “deceitful to the people” and “counter to democratic principles.”

The possible constitutional revisions are occurring five years after the nuclear accident, which exposed the underreporting of maintenance irregularities, accidents, and collusion in the nuclear industry and raised questions about media independence. Following the accident, crucial information was reported well after the fact, including the path of radiation flows (which had been predicted by a government agency), the possibility of a meltdown, and radiation leaks into the ocean. Outrage over limited information disclosure was among several factors feeding into antinuclear protests, which themselves went underreported. The potential for a further rollback on press freedoms would be an ironic consequence of the flow of momentous events and eruption of social activism that followed. But then again, the Peace Preservation Law was rammed through the Diet in 1925, silencing dissent following the disastrous Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923.

 

Editor’s note: A longer version of this piece originally appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal on Sunday, July 31st.

 

Featured image credit: Anti-nuke protesters surround Japanese parliament 7.29 by Hajime NAKANO. CC-BY- 2.0 via Flickr.

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How A. K. Ramanujan mirrored Aldous Huxley

Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan left behind a great legacy of prose, poetry, and scholarly works. Guillermo Rodríguez analyses a spectrum of Ramanujan’s published and unpublished sources, including some hitherto unknown pieces, and shows how classic Tamil, medieval bhakti, oral folk aesthetics, and literature influenced the Indian writer. The following extract from The Windows of Perception looks at the “Mescalin Notes” Ramanujan wrote during an experimentation with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline.

In the 1950s and 60s a cross-section of psychologists, writers and artists in America, partly inspired by Aldous Huxley’s essay The Doors of Perception published in 1954, experimented with hallucinogenics like LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, and hashish to venture into new realms of experience, seeking the “hidden” reality of the self and the world and probing into the meaning of art to locate their ‘inner vision‘. They believed that certain substances could create mystical perception, aid artistic inspiration or reprogram the brain. In the poetry scene of India and its American “connections” this trend also had a visible, yet limited, impact. Alan Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky travelled extensively around India in 1962-63, interacted with Bengali poets in Calcutta and also met Nissim Ezekiel and other Indian poets writing in English in Bombay at that time. Ezekiel was an old friend of the noted South Indian scholar, translator, folklorist and poet A.K. Ramanujan who had settled in the USA as early as 1959. Years later, in 1967, the same year he visited Ramanujan in Chicago, Ezekiel is said to have had his first of a series of LSD trips in California. On the other hand, Ramanujan had also met at Berkeley Josephine Miles, the poetess who was a leading inspiration to the Beat poets.

And so given the literary precedents and social context in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was by no means uncommon that reputed intellectuals and artists resorted to psychedelic substances in their search of an inner truth, as a source of inspiration, or simply as an occasional trial. Ramanujan was not unaware of this trend. Considering his interest in psychology, dreams and the invisible links between the physical and the metaphysical, and his propensity to drift into unknown worlds to discover new realities, it is not surprising that, on a Saturday evening in the summer of 1971, alone in a Madison apartment, Ramanujan decided to take a dose of mescaline as an experiment and challenge. He was forty-two when he got acquainted with the effects of this new hallucinogenic, and part of his experience, in an attempt to emulate Aldous Huxley, he jotted down on paper.

A.K. Ramanujan, circa 1966, location unknown. Copyright The Estate of A.K. Ramanujan. Image used with permission.

Ramanujan’s experiment on the night of 28 August 1971, which left deep marks on his ideas about art, poetry and the body, remained unknown as he never mentioned it publicly. The “Mescalin Notes” were tucked away among the scholarly notes in the A.K. Ramanujan Papers stored at the University of Chicago. Some years ago I chanced upon these twenty-four pages of prose scribblings while researching a series of unpublished poetry drafts the author was going to call Soma. The notes not only relate the particularities of the experience and describe the progressive effects of the chemical substance on the poet’s mind (the senses); they also make an unusual aesthetic manifesto of an Indian poet living in America.

Contrary to Huxley, who was accompanied by a scientist doctor and recorded the observations made under the influence of the drug on an audio tape, Ramanujan`s experiment was an informal incident ‘transcribed” pen-in-hand during the experience itself, as far as that was possible. Ramanujan had no particular pretensions to artistic inspiration when taking the mescaline dose, but to sit down and “meditate.” And like Huxley he conceived the act of “recording” the experience as an intellectual exercise and a psychological experiment. He was interested in the dream-world and psychology, in philosophical as well as scientific matters, and at some point felt he was stepping into Huxley’s footsteps with his trial: “The long journey that Huxley started,” noted Ramanujan in his typical ironic mode on the night of 28 August, 1971, “ends, or begins after 20 years in this III floor Apt. and I can’t bear to read Huxley – yet in spite of Heraclitus, he points to a shared dreaming, not just a shared waking – Swinburne’s peyote trances -Huxley used to call it – must read him now.”

Ramanujan`s intentions with the mescaline adventure were complex and ambiguous for he knew that the actual output derived from it would be rather uncontrollable. Within a wider perspective the mescaline experience had philosophical, metaphysical, religious, aesthetic, and poetic implications for him. In the notes he records with detail the alterations of the sensorial faculties, i.e. sight, sound, touch and taste. It all begins by listening to Vivaldi, followed by The Beatles, Indian violin music, Mozart, Bach, and Schumann on the evening of the mescaline trip, as the writer is struck by the intensity of the colours and shapes “cartooning” behind his eyes. This is how the aesthetic tour de force starts:

Aug 28, 1971, Saturday

6 pm

Vivaldi – flowing – expectancy – surveying all the objects in front


Slight weakness & tremor of limbs –


lying down – evening sunlight  fell on my stretched hand with watch, golden-yellow hair –


the sun was really a reflection in a west-facing


window –

Dry chalklike feeling in the throat—shiver in the calves—


My handwriting isn’t clear, getting less coordinated as my forearm muscles


are aquiver—


A coursing of blood all over—


Earlier on, I took account of all fearful objects, tribal spears, the butterfish


over-hanging—but I’m not going to be afraid—I’m going to meditate

From here on the imagery and colours pouring out of his mind turn into an unstoppable process and get increasingly out of control as the poet struggles to hold on to reality and translate into his own words on the page the patterns and designs he perceives. Indeed, Ramanujan’s compelling account of the “behind the eyes world” in the “Mescalin Notes” begins with an evocative image and suitable metaphor for what is to unfold when he opens the ‘windows of perception’: still in the wakeful world, before closing his eyes to meditate, what he sees as the “evening sunlight” (“golden-yellow hair”), that is, “the sun,” is “really a reflection” in a “west-facing window–”. Isn’t at times what we see in (ordinary) life really a reflection, an illusion (maya), as we always look at things through the playful mirror of our mind?

Featured image credit: Handwritten draft of the poem “Fear” (early unpublished version of the poem “The Striders”) by A.K. Ramanujan, 26 Mar 1960, The A.K. Ramanujan Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Copyright The Estate of A.K. Ramanujan. Used with permission.

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The unadulterated truth about the history of the word “clean”

Its congener in Middle High German meant “brave, beautiful.” On that occasion and on several others, I noted that words may change their meaning in a truly incomprehensible, even bizarre way. I also admitted that semantic bridges are easy to construct but should be used with caution, because they tend to collapse in the middle of the river. Yet the bridge from clean to klein is rather safe.

A perfect image of a semantic bridge.

The Old English for clean was clæne (with a long vowel in the root; æ had the value of a in Modern Engl. man). Dictionaries offer a long array of glosses for clæne: “pure, chaste, innocent; unencumbered, unfettered; hallowed; clear; open; honorable, true; acute, sagacious, intellectual.” All of them have the same nucleus: “clear; free from dirt, filth, or impediment.” The senses have been extracted or abstracted from various contexts, and, obviously, the list could be enriched by many more synonyms. However, one should beware of shrinking it to one or two basic words, and the three glosses given above in bold will prove their value in the analysis of German. The adverb clean, also from clæne, is not very common in today’s English, but you are clean crazy and especially I clean forgot about our appointment sound both permissible and idiomatic. Clean (adverb) means “absolutely,” as though the platter has been licked clean; compare pure nonsense, pure folly. (Russian chistyi means “clean,” while the adverb nachisto, with stress on the first syllable, means “completely”; the path from clean to empty and absolute is common.) Today, clean usually refers to concrete things. For more abstract situations clear and pure are used.

Clean is a West Germanic word with possible cognates outside Germanic. The same can be said about a few other kl-words. The Old Icelandic form both Skeat and Murray had in view can be partly disregarded, for the adjective, still extant in all the Scandinavian languages, was borrowed from German (see below), and the verb klína “to smear,” though related to clæne, needs special discussion. One can see that among the glosses for Old Engl. clæne the adjective “small” did not turn up. Nor did Old High German klein mean either “small” or “little.” There, the story began with “smooth,” hence “shining.” The next attested senses are “pure” (for instance, wine could be called klein) and “neat, dainty, delicate; high; thin (about a person’s figure and voice); slight, frail; careful; witty; clever (that is, able to make small distinctions, discriminating),” and, finally, just “small.” Some of the meanings attested in the history of German could be predicted from the English list above: consider “acute, sagacious, intellectual.” “Witty” is especially characteristic. And in German the noun Kleinod “jewel, gem” combines the old sense “dainty” with the modern sense “small.”

Licking the plate clean.

“Small” for klein does not antedate Early Modern German and could not be the original sense of clean and klein, especially because the related forms in Old Saxon and Old Frisian also meant “dainty.” There is an agreement among philologists that the starting point in the semantic history of clean was “smooth; shining, bright,” recorded in Old High German. The way from “smooth, bright” to “clean” seems to be natural (not predictable, but natural!). If so, the historically original sense of the Germanic adjective is most nearly preserved by English among the modern languages: though not “smooth, bright, shining,” but at least “clear, pure.”

With “bright, shining” in view, historical linguists began to look for the Indo-European root with this meaning. Some words suggested themselves at once: Latin galbus “greenish-yellow,” possibly a borrowing from Celtic, as in Irish glan “clean, pure; radiant,” Classical Greek glênos “bright object; wonder,” and even geláō “I laugh” (with transference of the idea of brightness, radiance to a spiritual state, whence the further change of meaning to “cheerfulness of mind, mirth, laughter”). Such is the wording in the Universal Dictionary of the English Language by Henry Cecil Wyld. The above reconstruction is plausible. The Greek word for “laughter” is usually associated with radiance, though from the historical perspective laughter and mirth need not be connected. (Consult, if you care, my post of 10 December 2014 on a laughing etymologist.) Looking for ancient roots is a dangerous occupation (as admitted in the previous post), and one sometimes wonders where to stop. The great Friedrich Kluge agreed that West Germanic klainiz, the progenitor of clean and klein, meant “smooth” but went a step farther and connected the root gel– with that in Greek gloiós “resin, glue” (his gloss was “fat oil”). He argued that the initial meaning of the Germanic adjective was “bright and shining with grease, oily.”

Friedrich Kluge, a man with a shining mind and a clear vision of word origins.

Grease! The joy of it! Gloiós is, naturally, related to Latin gluten “glue,” from which, by way of Old French, English has glue. Another sticky kl-word! Nothing in this group, outside the onomatopoeic department, seems to be gluten free (GF). One can return to Engl. clay, Russian glei, and the other words familiar to us by this time. Kluge’s idea became dogma almost immediately after it was offered. At present, etymologists are divided on the issue and, in reconstructing the past of clean, set up either the root meaning “to shine” or the one meaning “to stick.” But since “shining” presupposes being covered with a sticky substance, the semantic result turns out to be almost the same.

Old Engl. clæne became Modern Engl. clean by a series of regular phonetic changes (long æ by umlaut from ā, from ai, became open ē, which yielded the modern vowel by the Great Vowel Shift; the spelling ea, as opposed to ee, still reminds us of the open vowel in Middle English). But in the south of the German-speaking world the adjective klīn is widespread. It is a synonym of klein, and its ī causes trouble. Most probably, klīn is not a variant but a synonym of klein.  Now is the time to touch on the Scandinavian words allied to clean. Old Icelandic klénn “fine, luxurious” and the similar adjectives in the continental languages are not native there, but the verb klína “to smear” is. By this time, its cognates outside Scandinavian look familiar: Old Irish glenen “to stick,” Russian glei and glina, and Latin glūs, all of them meaning “clay,” along with others, mentioned above or in the previous essays.

Quibbling aside, we can state with some confidence that clean is a West Germanic adjective with gl-congeners outside Germanic. Of course, this confidence will last only until a better suggestion displaces it. The grade ī is represented by a regional German adjective and an Icelandic verb. Why German has klein und klīn remains unknown, but words for “small” tend to be “sound symbolic” and are often pronounced on a high note, especially in addressing children. Besides, the vowel i typically crops up in adjectives referring to small size. It is anybody’s guess whether any of those facts has anything to do with the second German adjective.  Be that as it may, our English withers are un-wrung.

Image credits: (1) “Broken bridge” by fialex, Public Domain via Pixabay. (2) Chattanooga – “Lookout Mountain – Rock City – Fairyland Caverns – Mother Goose Village – Jack Sprat” by Jared, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. (3) Friedrich Kluge by unknown, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image: “Sailor Navy” by skeeze, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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What does being a doctor mean to you?

Are you looking to pursue a career in medicine? Following on from this year’s Clinical Placement Competition, asking medical students “What does being a doctor mean to you?” – we are hoping to broaden our understanding of the medical profession, and appreciate exactly what being a doctor means in practice. What stories of highlights, difficulties, and uncensored advice can current doctors pass on, and how can we help those starting out? With this in mind, we caught up with Lara Coppel, author of OSCE Questions for the Primary FRCA, and Anaesthetic Registrar at the Imperial School of Anaesthesia, London, to discover the highs and lows of daily life as a doctor.

A little bit of background…

I have been a doctor for more than 13 years now and my training has taken me to the far-flung corners of the country and beyond. I have worked all over England, as well as in Johannesburg, South Africa. My family often joke that I travel the world via its hospitals! Their other favourite joke relates to the amount of time I have spent doing exams – which every junior doctor in the United Kingdom knows is not really a laughing matter. Although I got there in the end, I spent what felt like many grueling years doing my two main professional qualifications. I had intended on completing the hat-trick with a third, but narrowly escaped, much to the relief of my other half!

Tell us about your personal highlights?

Over the course of my career, there have definitely been more highs than lows.

Image Credit: “West, Bokeh, Clock” by trinhkien. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

I have always enjoyed working with other people and I have really appreciated the camaraderie that exists in medicine. Being part of a medical firm or a team on nights is reassuring and confidence building; knowing that you will get through whatever is thrown at you together. The jokes and banter we had working fifteen hour days, and helping each other out when our own personal workloads got too much, kept me going. Whilst anaesthetics has a reputation for being a solitary speciality, I have not found this to be the case. I have made close friends, and have found some of the most supportive colleagues – those who make you laugh when you feel like crying, offer support during more challenging days, and who are there at 3am when your decision making might not be at its finest…

Many highlights of course relate to my patients. I appreciate and have felt rewarded by the opportunity of being part of pivotal moments in people’s lives, hearing their stories, and contributing to their care. I have many uplifting memories but a few include giving a spinal anaesthetic to a lady who was giving birth to twins after having tried to have children for ten years with fourteen miscarriages along the way, providing lifesaving treatment for a young woman who developed severe sepsis and who recovered completely because of our rapid interventions, and when a young man I had looked after as an inpatient for more three months with severe Crohn’s disease and its complications – was finally able to go home.

And the challenges?

Being a hospital doctor can be hard. There are often long hours, high expectations, and patient outcomes are not always good or expected. This can be challenging to deal with, day in day out, year after year, especially if you are trying to accommodate a life beyond your job. I generally find my job pleasurable, but there have been occasions when I have made the wrong decision in retrospect, when there was simply too much work to do, or interventions didn’t go as expected. These situations can often be difficult, stressful and heart-breaking to deal with. To give just a few examples of the tougher cases, a young man with a complication of AIDS who initially responded to treatment and looked set to be going home, until he began to deteriorate and despite time, effort and lots of medical interventions, he died; another young man who I looked after for months with alcoholic hepatitis who was discharged home “never to drink again”, was readmitted three weeks later with problems which proved to be fatal; and a young lady who, two weeks after giving birth to her first child, had what turned out to be an ultimately fatal dissection of her internal carotid artery as a result of an undiagnosed connective tissue disorder.

Image Credit: “Doctor, Hospital Bed” by Parentingupstream. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

There have also been non clinical challenges along the way — the pressures of exams for one. I did not pass all my exams first time, and having to pick myself up, dust myself off, face my colleagues at work, and then begin the cycle of working and revising again was at times demoralising and testing. I was fortunate enough to get through these periods and pass my exams however. I also changed specialities from general medicine to anaesthetics after five years of medical training. This should have been quite a challenge, having to go back to basics, committing myself to more exams, being out of sync with my peers – but never one I regretted or found difficult to deal with.

And finally, what does being a doctor mean to you?

Although I have never been asked this question before, I have been asked a variation on it many times at interviews for medical school and jobs.

For me, I still get excited to learn about the human body, how drugs can interact with the body and watching their effect, and seeing how mechanical equipment can be used to monitor patients or treat them. I still feel a sense of responsibility, pride, and honour that I am trusted to give advice and treat people, and I still feel grateful that I can help people or at least listen to them, and always have an opportunity to try and make a situation better. I feel privileged to be with my patients and share with them what can often be defining moments in their lives, and feel incredibly lucky to work as part of a team who each have their own areas of expertise, and colleagues who continually educate me.

The view is not completely rosy though; there are many frustrations associated with clinical life too – the endless paperwork, the different computer systems, the constant moving and rotating of jobs, and the constant pressure of feeling that you should be doing more or you could have done a better job if you had just more time or more colleagues around to help.

Having said this, throughout the highs and the lows – being a doctor has been an amazing adventure, and I cannot imagine doing anything else!

Featured image credit: ‘Open Health: Stethoscope’ by opensource.com. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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