FIREFLIES AND ROMANCE. Fireflies evoke romance and past summer evenings. The Kevin Kline “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with Rupert Everett as Oberon and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, ended with images of the fairies as fireflies as the lovers go off together. This article tells how each flash of light by a firefly is part of a courtship ritual. The fireflies flashing in the air are all male. Female fireflies stay on the ground and respond to the flashes of one of the males at the precise time interval for that species. Each species has a different pattern of flashes. (There are six different species in the field in eastern Massachusetts where the article is set). A female may respond to as many as ten males in an evening, but at the end of the evening, she mates with only one.
FIREFLIES AND ROMANCE.
Posted by Philip on July 3rd, 2009MEMORIES AND MARSHMALLOWS.
Posted by Philip on July 2nd, 2009MEMORIES AND MARSHMALLOWS. Thinking about choices between present and future is more complicated if pleasure in the present will give rise to happy memories in the future. Experiments with young children avoid these complications because we assume that when children make choices, they will not take into account future memories. Experiments with cookies and marshmallows also avoid these complications because cookies and marshmallows don’t give rise to many memories. On the other hand, Proust found happiness in the memories arising from the taste of a cookie.
STORING UP MEMORIES.
Posted by Philip on July 1st, 2009STORING UP MEMORIES. My brother and a friend were studying late for an exam in graduate school. They paused to discuss how many others in their age group were at that moment having a good time. They agreed that in the terms of Aesop’s fable, it was graduate students like themselves who were grasshoppers, spending their time in study and foregoing happy memories. The young people who were having a good time were the ants, storing up happy memories. The idea that you can invest in memories shows up all the time. Think of CASABLANCA: “We’ll always have Paris.”
“THERE IS NO GREATER PAIN….” (COMMENT).
Posted by Philip on June 30th, 2009“THERE IS NO GREATER PAIN….” (COMMENT). Mary Jane’s reaction to the Madoff post was that Dante had a different perspective on memories of happy times. She referred me to a line by Paola in Canto V in THE INFERNO. (Canto V tells of Paola and Francesca). The quote is: “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.” In Sinclair’s prose translation: “There is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery.”
THE HAPPY MEMORIES OF CRIMINALS (COMMENT).
Posted by Philip on June 30th, 2009THE HAPPY MEMORIES OF CRIMINALS (COMMENT). Dick Weisfelder commented on yesterday’s post on Bernie Madoff that perhaps other criminals, including killers, have happy memories. I am in unhappy agreement. I hesitated on whether to make the Madoff post because I find it painful to think of criminals reminiscing happily. I think people like me tend to think of criminals who specialize in crimes involving money as being in it only for the money. Yet some criminologists believe that armed robbers are motivated by the joy of dominating people, of putting them in fear of their lives. Others enjoy the excitement of being outlaws, defiers of the legal order. All of which makes deterrence difficult.
BERNIE MADOFF’S MEMORIES.
Posted by Philip on June 29th, 2009BERNIE MADOFF’S MEMORIES. What must if be like to be Bernie Madoff? After a life of luxury, he is universally hated and reviled, rejected by his family, and today was sentenced to 150 years in jail. And yet, I wonder. He has his happy memories. Memories of the things that were important to him, memories of the days and years when he was always the most important person in the room, treated with deference wherever he went. Knowing that the respect was not deserved seems not to have mattered to him. I suspect that if Bernie Madoff had the opportunity to live his life over again, he would choose the same path.
THE BOSTON MOLASSES DISASTER.
Posted by Philip on June 28th, 2009THE BOSTON MOLASSES DISASTER. Sam Anderson gives an amusing list of all the things that distracted him in the course of writing his article. One of the items is the Boston Molasses Disaster. Anderson says: “If I were going to excuse you from reading this article for any single distraction, which I am not, it would be to read about the Boston Molasses Disaster.” Here is a link to the wikipedia article on the Boston Molasses Disaster. When I studied American history in high school, I never encountered the Boston Molasses Disaster, but apparently both Annalisa and Nick learned that in 1919, a huge molasses tank in Boston collapsed, killing 21 people. I suppose the significance of the Boston Molasses Disaster for the teaching of history is that students would learn that in 1919–instead of sugar–“molasses was the standard sweetener in the United States.” It’s also a good story.
YOU CAN’T REALLY MULTITASK.
Posted by Philip on June 27th, 2009YOU CAN’T REALLY MULTITASK. Sam Anderson says that despite all the talk about multitasking, with minor exceptions, people can really pay attention to only one thing at a time. The best we can do is to switch rapidly from one thing to another. The phrase for this is apparently: “continuous partial attention.”
ALLOCATING ATTENTION.
Posted by Philip on June 27th, 2009ALLOCATING ATTENTION. Economists think in terms of allocating a limited amount of a resource. Traditionally, they deal with the problem of efficiently allocating a limited income. I posted here about how economists are now thinking about allocating time and that some psychologists are thinking in terms of allocating a willpower budget. Sam Anderson quotes the great economist Herbert Simon as pointing out in 1971 that: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
AGREEING TO MY EXPERIENCE.
Posted by Philip on June 26th, 2009AGREEING TO MY EXPERIENCE. I posted here on Jonah Lehrer’s insights into Virginia Woolf. Lehrer concluded that: “Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention.” Sam Anderson tells how Winifred Gallagher, the author of RAPT, a book about the control of attention, is able to ignore the sound of jackhammers outside her apartment window. “Gallagher stresses that because attention is a limited resource….our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives.” The epigraph to Gallagher’s book is from William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” I think this is an empowering idea.
