About the brain and us

In 350BC, Aristotle noted that “our senses can be trusted but they can be easily fooled”.

Let me start this with a story that I have told many times. Many years ago my wife and I lived on the edge of the city of Ipswich. You may wonder why we lived there since the house looked out onto one of the sink estates of Ipswich, to our left we had a scrap car yard, and to the right a rubbish dump plus the house had no mains drainage or water – but all that’s another story. The house came with a resident female cat, Jemima, and we adopted each other. After some time the cat became pregnant and gave birth, in my shed, to a delightful litter of kittens. Soon after their birth they were all killed!

A few years later we were revisiting the tragedy and found that we had quite different recollections: in my version our dog, Droopy, had killed the kittens, Margaret recalled that a local tom cat had done the deed. Fortunately I kept quite a detailed diary in those days and was able to refer to my notes. Shock, horror, Margaret was right. My memories of the event, though clear, were false.

We all have false memories some of them pure invention, some distortions. Most people do not believe this, but it is true – and scary. In what can we trust?

Another story. Fairly recently a group of us were shown a video of football game: we were told to watch the player in the black shirt and count how many times he kicked the ball. At the end of the short display we were asked for our answers which were quite varied, but similar. We were then asked, “Did you see superman?” Puzzled, we all said no and the video was replayed and there he was threading his way through the players as large as life! A trick – yes, of the brain. Actually I have changed the players and the intruder in this tale so that this will not be a spoiler if you if you sometime see the original, but hey the brain’s flexible so that’s OK.

In a somewhat related phenomenon your brain filters out the mundane. Its overriding duty is to keep it, and therefore you, safe, and it’s the new, the unknown, and the surprising, that are likely to be dangerous. Hence: a liking for sleeping in one’s own bed, home being where the heart is, blood seemingly thicker than water and so on. However, to the contrary, new environments or challenges steps up the brain’s awareness, hence the stimulation of travel (which ‘broadens the mind’ apparently).

We often need to ‘see for ourselves’ or maintain that we only trust ‘the evidence of our own eyes’. But should we trust that evidence. There are numerous illusions which dramatically prove that our brain messes with reality.  A simple matrix of blobs appears to be moving yet we know that they cannot be, spinning dancers uncannily rotate clockwise or anticlockwise depending on which you set your eyes upon first. And so on and on as more illusions, old and new, are discovered and broadcast over the Web.

Science, one might think, can slice its way through this nonsense to reveal reality. But can it? Much of what is ‘observed’ in modern science is detected by a sensor and relayed to us through a computer which processes the data. We can never see the ‘new’ particles which constitute the things that we actually see, though there was a time when we could observe the tracks of some of the particles in a cloud chamber. Nowadays sophisticated detection and heavy processing sits between the collisions which occur in the Hadron Collider and the graphs that allow physicists to buttonhole the Higgs boson.

There are more and more examples which shake the very foundations of our natural belief in our powers of observation, and yet more can be supplied by philosophers in relation to our powers of reason, meanwhile life goes on. After all, too much doubt in ourselves might cause a collapse of confidence and a resort to instinctual behaviour or a cynical retirement from life itself.

I have a thoughtful friend called Bjorn in Sweden who seems to have found refuge in not knowing and has even found a term to describe his philosophic position which dates back to the Greeks – aporia. Whether aporia  leads to greater clarity or simply defines doubt and confusion, I do not know.  But one thing’s for sure Aristotle was right to say that our senses can be easily fooled – and therefore so can we. I suppose the one thing that we can know for sure is that we don’t know, for sure. However, I’m pretty sure that I am off on my travels in a few days time: Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal.

Bookend Blues

Haven’t written a blog for ages. Been busy: hopefully honing my writing skills.

One of my regular delights is a negative one: it’s not having to get up in the mornings. I do get up eventually of course, but not at those ghastly hours when I had to catch a train to London or motor up to some outlandish place in the north to attend a meeting or deliver a course. Nowadays, my radio belches out the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 at about 7.30 a.m. and then I just lie about cursing at the aggressive bias of the interviewers until I feel ready to take a run or cycle to the gym.

                                                     bookends | notonthehighstreet.com

It was on such a morning that I heard the announcements concerning this year’s UK exam results for sixteen-year-olds – the GCSEs. Hardly jump out of bed stuff, but it did send me spinning back to my own teens. In my day you received the dreaded results by paper mail. I can remember looking at mine with some disbelief. 

Funnily enough I can remember the exact street in Cheltenham where I studied them. The bearer of this momentous piece of information was devastatingly disappointing: a flimsy slip of paper simply listing subjects and grades, little more than a single shred from today’s shredders. In those days grades were not that important. In ‘O’ levels, as they were called, failure was not encouraged, but it was allowed: it was the number of subjects that you passed that mattered. I did OK - I seem to remember that I got a grade 1 in something; grade 8 was a pass.

Dozing can lead to considerable confusion and listening to the radio I was – confused. Everything seemed upside down as they reported on the year’s results. In previous years they had used letters to represent grades, but this year they had reverted to numbers again. However, grade 9 was the top and grade 1 was the bottom. Seemed odd, and to quote from David Richard Getling who knows more about this stuff and is a little more outspoken than I am : ‘Of course, only someone as intensely stupid as the British government would have invented such a grading system. Top grades have always been 1 or A. We talk of something being first class, or A grade, if it's the best: and this is common throughout the world. So it takes a complete and utter moron to do the opposite.’

Those recent announcements reminded me of how hard I worked in revising for my exams. I can remember the hunted look on the faces of my teachers as exams loomed and I approached them with my incredibly long list of questions in which I tried to understand all the things I should have understood from their lessons. More topically I can recall the longing for the revision and the exams to come to end so that I could be free. Yes free. Free to do what?  Instead of freedom I actually experienced what is best described as bathos, or anticlimax, or post natal depression without the baby.

Finishing reading a good book is a bit like that. Finishing writing a book is exactly like that: hence the title of this blog. Actually I haven’t quite finished, one never does. But the first draft is done, the bathos then has two sources. First, during the very creative part of researching and writing there aren’t enough hours in the day: in other words there is always something to do – and a deadline to meet. And second, now that the baby is born, one becomes protective, yet critical. Is it any good? Wouldn’t it have been much better structured in a different way? Does the title do it justice? If I start fiddling with it, will the panoply collapse and all the cross references go astray?

Though I often self-publish, this one goes off to the publishers. More worries. Is it ready? Will they like it? Is it what they thought it would be? Will their editors tear it apart and bastardise it.

Hey, ho. The journey’s been good though. There should be a song The Bookend Blues. I’ll make a start on the lyrics right now, but then would I be happy with them?

Rob and Rob in Oxford

Conducted my first Hen Party around Oxford on Saturday– has it come to this? Actually they were quite sweet – laughed at some of my quips, with a little prompting. Hope Becca enjoyed it.

Then, the very next day, it was my birthday – again. Can it really be a year since we celebrated IvyFest on the 3^rd June 2017: my 70^th and our 50^th?

I like to spend my birthday in Oxford with my wife. No party. Drinking taking primacy over eating. Lot’s of stuff. One of my most memorable was when I clocked up six physics lectures, then off to the pub. This one was a little more refined.

First we wandered into the centre where there was music at the Wheatsheaf all afternoon. It is still odd to go into the old place: to look around and wonder ‘What if?’ – it’s at least twelve years ago that I tried, and failed, to buy the place. The music was OK and the beer was OK (Doombar). In fact the best of the three acts was Tony Batey, the blues man who has been playing Oxford for all the years that I’ve been here and many more. I thought that I’d been over-exposed to his music, but it was good, very good – and his guitar playing is superlative.

Then off to the refinement: Somerville College chapel for a talk plus performances by the choir. The latter was wonderful, the girls could ‘lift the roof’ and I thrill to that. The talk was, well, boring really. Still, one must sup for your singing I suppose. Next a quick pint (Doombar again, drat it) in the Royal Oak, which is almost opposite the college, while we waited for the #6 bus to Wolvercote and nearly missed it.

Wolvercote has two pubs in very close proximity: Jacob’s Inn which is an eatery where we ate and the White Hart where we dank and sang. The White Hart is now a community pub and a fellow writer is one of the directors. It was Sheila who told me that they sang sea shanties there on Sundays – and I like a good sea shanty. The beer was excellent (Spring), but the pub was a bit quiet. Sheila wondered if they had enough people for the shanty session. But we joined in, and then a group of blokes from the other pub staggered in and soon we were ‘lifting the roof’: there was even a shortage of song books. We sang ‘Leave her Johnny, leave her’ and ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’ and many more shanties that I had never heard of, but thoroughly enjoyed. The beer flowed and songs were sung and then something ridiculously odd bubbled to the surface. During the gaps between songs people chatted and somehow it became clear that the group of blokes were there to celebrate one of their number’s birthday, like me. Then it became clear that his name was Rob, like me. Then, now you are not going to believe this, but it finally emerged that his name was Walters, like me!

Can you imagine the excitement that caused? Buoyed up by beer, lifted by song, then this most weird coincidence was discovered. I’ve never met another Rob Walters before and nor had the other Rob Walters. Two Robert Walters’s in the Wolvercote White Hart on the same night, singing sea shanties and celebrating their birthdays – he fifty – me twenty-one years his senior. I could have been his dad, but we are pretty sure that we are not related. Then, to my delight and surprise, a very good friend turned up with his wife - and his name was – no that would be too much, his name was Peter. Great night. Wild night.

The Irish Question

I do remember something about The Irish Question (which never seemed to have an answer) from my early history lessons: names like Parnell and de Valera, plus various versions of home rule, lurk somewhere in my mind. And then of course there were the troubles – I believe the question was then answered by The Good Friday Agreement, but that answer was wrong apparently because Northern Ireland cannot form a government and so the answer is Direct Rule from London.

Actually, the ‘Irish question’, posed here is simpler. It is whether or not to fly Ryanair! Of course, according to the boss of this much maligned company that choice will not be on offer post Brexit since he plans to take his aeroplanes elsewhere, but nevertheless we have recently had to make a choice. We needed to fly to Dublin in Ireland, then on to Reus in Spain and then back to England.  Fortunately my wife did the bookings since I am suffering from repetitive strain injury following the mammoth task of obtaining flights and visas for our far eastern trip to India, etc earlier in the year.

The question is actually quite, simple though manifold: do you want to be restricted to cabin baggage which roughly equates to a small lunch box and baggage space in the hold for a bag which weighs  less than pair of good walking boots and fits in a receptacle smaller than most suitcases? Are you happy with waving to your travelling companion in seats that are at each end of the aircraft?  Do you mind being shouted at during boarding as if you are a recalcitrant school child? Are you happy that during the flight that there is certainly no free alcohol and probably none at any price? Are you happy walking in the open air to the plane carrying your (admittedly light) luggage during the incessant bouts of rain that descend upon Ireland? If your answer is YES to each of these questions then you are a man for Ryanair my friend.  Put it another way. If you are willing to pay quite a lot more to avoid all of these petty restrictions and irritations then you have the choice of many different airlines. We chose Ryanair again of course.

In fairness the two flights so far have not been that bad. On one of them I managed to sit next to my wife after a serious bout of seat swapping and we were allowed to take our bottle of water on board which was kind. Also we had two interesting experiences. First, a first for us, our air host/ess was a man with hairy arms and shaven legs dressed as a woman – and the service he gave was well up to Ryanair standards, if not higher. Second, we had a deportee aboard. A policeman entered the plane soon after the Spanish landing in search of this deportee and a police van waited to transport him or her to jail. We suspected that it was the old lady with the stick who sat in front of us who seemed unwilling to leave the aircraft. Meanwhile, given freedom of movement, we cannot figure out how or why a person can be deported from one EU country to another. Has Brexit come early?

Back to the big question. Brexit has certainly placed the island of Ireland centre stage with all four parties (Eire, UK, EU and DUP) seemingly demanding the same thing: a soft border. So what’s the problem? The Swiss seem to manage this OK, yet they are a jewel set in the EU’s firmament. But of course they do not have serious issues like the demands for a united Ireland, the right of the Northern Ireland majority to remain part of the UK, the need for the EU to punish the UK for leaving, retention of protectionist trading, and deep underlying social and religious divisions. In my recent visit to Dublin I did not discuss this with anyone – possibly because I spent most of the time alone at the bottom of my son’s long garden building a concrete block shed. Best place perhaps in interesting times.

Does travel broaden the mind?

As a young boy I wondered if foreign countries really existed. Quite why I thought that someone had invented China or France I do not know. I can only suppose that the idea may have stemmed from attempts to convince me that a supernatural being existed, but could not be experienced.

I was not an early traveller, my school did not take groups abroad and if they had then I know my parents would not have been able to finance such a thing. In fact my first foreign visit was to Sweden when as teenagers my friend and I embarked on an unsuccessful quest for free love. However, through work, I did meet men who had been abroad - mostly as soldiers during WW2: men from my father’s generation. One of them was the most narrow minded bigot I ever met (I have mentioned him before – he’s the man who refuted the existence of negative numbers).

Just back from a long trip to the Indian sub-continent, I feel that if travel does broaden the mind then mine should be the breadth of Myanmar’s, mostly unused, twenty lane highways located in its new capital established by the military junta some time ago. Like most people I did not visit the place, leaving that to Boris Johnson on his recent visit to remind Aung San Suu Kyi of the plight of Rohingyas. I went instead to the old capital to visit the home in which Myanmar’s leader grew up and also the one in which she was for so long incarcerated by the junta.

Yangon, formerly Rangoon was a little like taking a long refreshing shower after nearly three weeks travelling through India by train and bus – and that was a complete surprise. I left Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, expecting somewhere much worse – and I was gratefully wrong. I would say that my most harrowing experiences – of filth, poverty, neglect and overcrowding – occurred as we left Delhi by train, as we approached the incredibly beauty of the Taj Mahal through Agra, and finally in the city which many still call Banares (Varansi). It was in the latter that I could so nearly have experienced the worst possible end to my travelling life.  Arriving in darkness from Lucknow, we were informed by a series of tuk-tuk drivers that our hotel was not reachable. They would drop us as near as they could, then we would have to drag our luggage a kilometre or so through narrow, twisting and dangerous streets. Usually I ignore such tales because tuk-tuk drivers will tell lies in order to get a fare or even better to get you into a pal’s hotel – but this time the story was consistent. Added to which my phone would not work so I could not call the Hotel Alca (carefully selected because it served alcohol AND overlooked the River Ganges).

I chose the least villainous of the crowd vying to transport us to an alternative hotel and negotiated a price of 150 rupees (£1.50). It took about half an hour to get there: Banares is a very holy place for Hindus and therefore has a very high density of sacred cows roaming its busy narrow streets where these bovines are endangered by every conceivable means of speeding, roaring and beeping transport imaginable. I immediately rejected the first hotel judged solely on the state of the reception and the proprietor. The next place was much the same, and, as I left that sleazy hotel, I felt genuine despair – perhaps that’s why I crossed the street rather hurriedly, daring the mass of traffic to allow me passage.  And perhaps my rapid progress accounts for the fact that I did not see the slimy puddle of holy cow excrement in the middle of the road and slipped awkwardly on it, arms windmilling. Luckily, I regained my balance and was able to continue through the rush of vehicles; otherwise I would certainly have fallen beneath the madness of traffic and died there in a pool of dung on that grim street in Banares.

On the brighter side Banares is where the Hindus bring their dead to be cremated, a process that supposedly purifies the deceased once the hot ashes and bones are thrown into the sacred Ganges River. This process must take place within 24 hours of death so Margaret would not have had the cost and inconvenience of transporting me home and, since my corpse would have been already embalmed in holy cow dung, my transport to the next life would surely have been guaranteed.

Next day I ventured out of our rather expensive, but gratifyingly excellent, hotel to explore the ghats that line the Ganges. There, I found the main cremation area where they burn up to 250 bodies per day and watched the process with interest (all part of broadening the mind) and was particularly impressed with the occasional pop as an overcooked brain exploded. Pregnant women and children are not cremated in this way. Their corpses are weighted down with stones and thrown directly into the great river since they are already considered pure. Sometime these bodies pop up – which must be shocking for the young men who swim in that heavily polluted water course (and even drink from it).

There is so much more to say about this trip which touched on seven Asian countries, my notes alone approach forty thousand words – and the photos, don’t ask!! But one thing that will stay with me, particularly concerning India, is the poverty. One image that I have in my head and did not capture on camera, is of an emaciated, young mother with a child hanging onto her shoulder, one in her arms and two holding her hand. The birth rate is more than three times the death rate in India – and clearly much higher among the poor than the rising middle classes.

Did the trip broaden my mind? I think that knowledge must achieve that to some degree even though I cannot claim a deep understanding of the countries visited. But, if I could return to my young and cynically doubting self I could now truly say – they are there, those exotic, teeming, hot and sometimes beautiful countries: they really do exist.

Eggs anyway in an amazing Indian hotel

In India medium priced hotels at below say £25 per night are a little chancy for the traveller. Standards are not high, maintenance and redecoration often non-existent. Many of these places started life reasonably well –lasting just long enough for those inviting photos to be taken for the web page – then declined rapidly in a non-virtuous pact between the owners and the local customers. There are exceptions of course, and I am about to describe one.

The Kunjpur Guest House on the northern outskirts of Allahabad seemed too good to be true when I found it on the web: around £20 a night for a de-luxe room (most of the rooms in India are de-luxe), breakfast included, free Wi-Fi and picturesque. “Things that seem too good to be true are usually not true,” I warned myself as we disembarked from the ‘mouse train’ (see last blog). Yet we were picked up as promise. Our driver was Anil, the owner of the place; he had a doctorate in economics and spoke good English.

The journey to the hotel was as depressing as usual. We left the scruffy and slightly threatening surroundings of the railway station and passed through narrow rutted streets to emerge onto a wide road next to the polo ground. “That looks nice, let’s hope our hotel is here somewhere,” I thought to myself.  But it wasn’t. And anyway, India is deceptive: the polo ground has not seen a match for many years and is now owned by the army (No Photographs Allowed) and the houses on the other side of the road may have been superior residences in their time, but later, in the light of day, they looked rather sad.

The roads became narrower and more rutted as we neared our goal and expectations fell accordingly. Then we stopped. Was that really a tall characterful house gleaming whitely beyond the line of tall palms and thick hedge? Surely not. But it was. Anil sounded the horn and the gates were opened so that we could drive forward.

The place was amazing: a large colonial-baroque house with imposing frontage and neat garden.  Surely this was a facade, but no:  the lobby was equally impressive with its large, high-ceilinged reception room, tasteful furniture, paintings and object d’art.  Partially in shock we were shown, through double doors into our palatial room, or should I say suite (it had an extra double bedroom which we would have found more than adequate). Our bedroom room was at least eight by six metres in area excluding the arched extensions alongside the grandly arched recessed doorway leading to the side of the house. It had a very large double bed, large wardrobe and cupboard plus two, yes two ornate settees (3 and 4 seaters). There were also four casual tables and a full sized fridge! Set back from the external doors was a second archway spanning the whole of the room and supported by two fluted ionic pillars.  The bathroom was as long as it was clean and had a huge fan inset into an external door which seem capable of extracting small children. I could not believe it. All this for 2000 rupees a night? Was there a zero missing? Was this like the Hotel California where “You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!"?

There were two menus in the room for breakfast and dinner. The breakfast offering included ‘Eggs anyway’. Great, I needed a change. Next morning, in the elegant dining room with its oval table in the centre of which was a silver bowl of fresh fruit, I ordered scrambled eggs on toast. Margaret ordered an omelette. We both got omelettes. I ate my omelette. Next day I ordered boiled eggs and Margaret, very sensibly, ordered omelette. We both got omelettes. I ate my omelette. On the third day I took my lap top along to breakfast. I ordered poached eggs on toast and so did Margaret. I then played a video entitled ‘How to make a perfect poached egg’ to the bemused waiters who looked on with growing excitement. And we did get poached eggs in toast, which was nice. Next day we ordered omelettes and got them.