Pssst! Hey, You. Yes — You. The One with the Brain.

[Video: “7 Myths About The Brain You Thought Were True”]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then
its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant
by sights that ought to strike the sane
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute
with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,
they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret
preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

(Franz Wright [source])

…and:

Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you.

I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.

All of the scientists I’ve known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.

This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80’s, why a visitor to Einstein’s apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant with one hand while doing mathematical calculations with the other. This mixed blessing and burden must have been the “sweet hell” that Walt Whitman referred to when he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet. “Never more,” he wrote, “shall I escape.”

(Alan Lightman [source])

Not from whiskey river:

We have so many [sub-atomic particles] particles that Oppenheimer once said you could give a Nobel Prize to the physicist that did not discover a particle that year. We were drowning in sub-atomic particles.

Now we realize that this whole zoo of sub-atomic particles, thousands of them coming out of our accelerators, can be explained by little vibrating strings. They’re like a violin string.

The Pythagoreans, the Greeks, believed that violin strings were in some sense a paradigm for the universe. They didn’t quite know how it would fit, but the harmonies of the universe, they thought, would be manifest by the harmonies of a violin string. The Pythagoreans founded a school of Greek philosophy trying to find in nature harmonies and resonances. Well, that’s the analogy today, too. In fact, the quarks, according to Murray Gell-Mann, the inventor of the quark model and winner of the Nobel prize, said that the simplest representation of the quark is that it’s nothing but the vibration of a string, and these strings, in turn, can only vibrate in ten dimensions. If you have an 11-dimensional universe it decays back down to ten. Ten is the magic number that works. The irony is that western reductionism, which believes in smashing things apart in order to find the ultimate constituents of matter… these reductionists have always laughed at holists and the people who believe in Buddhism, Taoism, whatever, and the irony is that by smashing these particles to their smallest constituents, we then find strings that only vibrate in the ten-dimensional universe and all of a sudden we realize that you have to look at the whole universe in order to understand the quantum theory! So, in some sense now were combining the best traditions of holism and reductionism.

(Michio Kaku [source])

…and:

Recently a border collie named Rico was tested by Julia Fischer and other psychologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They found that he could understand over two hundred words, most which corresponded to the names of objects. Like a young human child, Rico would quickly form a rough hypothesis about the meaning of a new word after a single exposure by inferring that the new word is connected to an object he is seeing for the first time. One example of this is learning by an exclusionary principle. Suppose that we put out seven toys and say to Rico “Go get the framis.” Rico has never heard the word “framis” before. However, he goes out to the pile of objects and finds that he knows the name of six of them. He then takes the next step and assumes that the one he doesn’t recognize must be the framis. If we test him later, even weeks later, with a new pile of objects that includes the one that we labeled the framis, he will quickly identify it. This is a complex form of language learning that up to now we thought was possible only in humans and language-learning apes.

(Stanley Coren [source])

…and:

No

The children have brought their wood turtle
into the dining hall
because they want us to feel

the power they have
when they hold a house
in their own hands, want us to feel

alien lacquer and the little thrill
that he might, like God, show his face.
He’s the color of ruined wallpaper,

of cognac, and he’s closed,
pulled in as though he’ll never come out;
nothing shows but the plummy leather

of the legs, his claws resembling clusters
of diminutive raspberries.
They know he makes night

anytime he wants, so perhaps
he feels at the center of everything,
as they do. His age,

greater than that of anyone
around the table, is a room
from which they are excluded,

though they don’t mind,
since they can carry this perfect
building anywhere. They love

that he might poke out
his old, old face, but doesn’t.
I think the children smell unopened,

like unlit candles, as they heft him
around the table, praise his secrecy,
holding to each adult face

his prayer,
the single word of the shell,
which is no.

(Mark Doty [source])