Some years ago, I began writing ‘serious’ longform essays on a variety of topics. Up until that point, my writing was aimed at a small group of blogger friends, most of whom I knew in real life. I had already begun dabbling with informative essays to supplement my usual output of diary entries, pop cultural ramblings, and surreal nonsense, but a specific incident crystallized a change of attitude. It occurred on January 29, 2011 at a symposium on music and neuroscience. (This was around 7 months before I defended my PhD.)
As it turns out, the very last post on my ‘personal’ blog was about this experience. Here’s a slightly edited version:
I just attended a symposium on music and the brain at Harvard called “Crossing the Corpus Callosum II”. The website subtitle is “Healing our Community through Music”, so naturally I had my reservations. I tend to steer clear of medical neuroscience and therapy-oriented psychology: the touchy-feely sides of my field. But music and neuroscience and a friend’s request for company got me past the snowbanks, the puddles, and the desire to sleep till 1pm and then order buffalo wings. And I’m glad I went. The talks were stimulating and informative — not once did I want to slink off. In addition to the neuroscience of music, for the first time I heard about the role of music in helping people recover from traumatic brain injury and in treating language disorders.
The brain data was more or less familiar to me, but the therapy research was impressive. There are stroke victims who develop aphasia — the loss of speech. They can still comprehend language though, so it’s a frustrating disorder — both for them and for their families and care-givers. A technique called melodic intonation therapy helps them start recovering speech by asking them to sing instead of speak. (If you’ve seen The King’s Speech you’ll know that people with speech disorders can often sing perfectly well. This has to do with fascinating right-brain left-brain asymmetries that I can’t get into here.) There was also a talk by someone outside the world of science and medicine. (He had never used PowerPoint. Ever!) A Juilliard– trained musician who has worked with Def Jam, he started a project call Musicorps, which helps US war veterans deal with their injuries by teaching them to play music. (Here’s a CNN video about them.) Music helps bring these severely traumatized soldiers back from the brink of suicidal despair. Quite inspiring.
Even more moving: the stories and videos of music treatment for autistic children. (Just found a Boston Globe article about some of today’s speakers.) Many autistic children never acquire the ability to speak. One of the conference speakers talked about an experimental therapy method that uses musical tones to get these children to start using words, again by singing them. It’s amazingly effective — in two months a 9 year old autistic kid was able to start saying a few words, like “hello”. Normally, if children do not develop language by this age, they never will. During the question session a woman asked if the treatment was available for non-autistic children with speech disorders. She broke down while asking the question — her four year old daughter has an unrelated brain disorder and cannot speak. She said that she wanted to hear her child say “mommy”. As scientists we often forget that people pin their hopes on new research. The panel had a few words of hope for her, although the therapy in question is still in the testing phase, and not available for the general public. A music therapist in the audience piped in at this point, saying she would get the woman in touch with someone who might be able to help. Applause all round.
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An experience like today’s always increases my respect for the patients and their families, the researchers, the doctors, the therapists, the nurses, the counselors. Their patience and dedication should inspire us in our careers as well as in our relationships. And there’s another take-home lesson, at least for me. We should try to appreciate the abilities we take for granted. There are people who live under a veil of silence. There are people who cannot comprehend even their own emotions, let alone anyone else’s. And there are people from whom these abilities have been stripped away — by war, accident or disease. Those of us who are “whole” are given the opportunity every day to connect with the people around us — to talk, to empathize, to understand. Sometimes that last one seems all but impossible. But we have to keep talking, keep listening, and keep trying.
There was actually more to this experience. While at the symposium, I was overcome by a feeling that I was not helping anyone through my work. My research at the time — modeling the neural basis of timed behavior — was conducted in a spirit of nerd curiosity, with little or no thought for whether it would contribute to individual or social well-being. I felt vaguely guilty: I was not offering anything back to society (which, via taxes, was funding my curiosity). The musical therapy I was learning about seemed so much more rooted in real human concerns than my little network simulations.
I decided to do something. I felt as though it might be a little late to become a clinical researcher or therapist (and in any case I doubted my skill set would fit with that world), so I decided to engage in science communication. I wanted to do more than just report on existing research. I wanted to share my experiences as an explorer of interstices: the gaps between academic fields; the negative spaces surrounding positive knowledge; the elusive patterns of thought that crisscross disciplinary boundaries. My rovings in cognitive hinterlands had been useful to me, and perhaps they would be useful to others.
So during the symposium, I flipped to the back page of my notebook and wrote down a list of topics that I felt I might be able to say something interesting about. Here’s the list:
Over the course of the next several years, I worked my way through most of these topics (and others that cropped up along the way), initially on my own blog, and then as a columnist for the 3 Quarks Daily blog/aggregator. I also did a little neuroscience blogging, and a whole lot of neuroscience question-answering on the site Quora.
I called my new blog Axis, Praxis. I explained the meaning of this term in the first post:
I have a habit of juxtaposing words in nonsensical ways, for the “sound-sex” of it, as Stephen Fry invites us to do. For instance, well before I had an inkling of what “dialectical materialism” meant, I twisted the phrase into “analectic immaterialism”. Half the fun is then deciding what such a collision of words might mean. (Analectical immaterialism, if you’re curious, came to suggest a quasi-mystical political philosophy that combines Confucius with postmodernism.) “Axis, Praxis” was another lexical copulation of this sort. (For the full effect, introduce a gentle pause between the words, half way between colon and semicolon, and emphasize “Praxis” with the zeal of a Marxist and/or Evangelical preacher. I’ll explain why in a moment.)
“Axis, Praxis” refers to the relationship between the ways we arrange our information (axis), and the ways we then use this information (praxis). […]
So “Axis, Praxis” is about ordering the world in order to act in the world. The two processes are intertwined, because our actions determine what we know and how we (can) represent it, and our knowledge determines what we (can) do. This is vague enough to sounds a tad ambitious: it just might entail talking about all of human knowledge and behaviour (?!). But my goal is not to explain (or even list) all our axes of knowing and our praxes of change. I want to survey the space, look at illustrative examples, and see if anything interesting emerges from a view that is by necessity wide and fuzzy. In parallel, I want to see if nontechnical discussions have anything to gain from scientific language and metaphor. Can science offer axes around which to orient our day-to-day praxis?
These were the first few Axis, Praxis essays:
- Truth, Validity and Usefulness — on epistemology, logic and problem-solving
- Vision, the Master Metaphor — on how metaphors grounded in seeing capture various aspects of knowledge, emergence, and alignment among theories
- The Great Red Spot (or, When Can a Thing be Said to Exist?) — on why processes may be more important than ‘things’
- Science Fiction – The Shadows cast by Modernity — an essay that was requested by a friend working at Down To Earth magazine, where it was published. I used three visual metaphors to classify themes in science fiction: SF as lens, SF as mirror, and SF as kaleidoscope.
- Metaphor: the Alchemy of Thought — some musings on the centrality of metaphor in human thought, and in particular in scientific thought
In 2013, when the 3 Quarks Daily editors put out a call for a new set of Monday columnists, I submitted the metaphor essay. I was quite excited when I heard that I had been chosen. If I recall correctly, I happened to be at the Society for Neuroscience conference at the time, and I was in the midst of an extreme bout of imposter syndrome. Finding out that my writing was appreciated was a much-needed confidence booster.
So my Axis, Praxis ‘project’ shifted over to 3 Quarks Daily. Having a monthly deadline was a great discipline (thought I did occasionally and guiltily email the editors to say my piece was not ready yet). In retrospect I probably took the assignment — an unpaid one at that — more seriously than absolutely necessary: I did a fair amount of research for each post. I’m very proud of these essays, even though they all have flaws and are perhaps too long.
After a few years I felt as though I had nothing more to say — or perhaps I needed to learn new ways of saying things. Either way, I stopped writing for 3QD, and also cut down on my Quora answering (which was becoming a strange addiction).
The time spent away from consistent blogging was relatively productive. I organized a discussion group that has been very stimulating: it has enabled a little community to persist and even grow (thanks to Zoom). The emergence journal club was, unfortunately, not recorded, but the subsequent three series — (1) on dynamical systems in neuroscience, (2) on Stephen Grossberg’s book Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain, and (3) on AA Cavia’s Logiciel: Six Seminars on Computational Reason — are available on my youtube channel.
I’ve also had many interesting interactions on twitter since the pandemic started. Twitter is widely (and accurately) described as a factor in the increased fragmentation and superficiality of public thinking, but one particular series of debates actually induced my to flesh out my thoughts on neural representations. The representation tweetstorm even landed me an invitation to go to Dublin for a workshop on the topic, where I contributed my two cents and had a great series of conversations.
The ephemeral nature of twitter does make me miss longform writing, of course. Composing aphoristic witticisms is great fun, but eventually one needs to construct some kind of larger edifice of thought. Which brings me back to the Axis, Praxis project. I’ve been meaning to republish my 3QD essays here. This is partly because there are lots of typos that I cannot easily fix on the 3QD site, but also because I’d like to add some notes and signposts so that readers have a better sense of the eclectic potpourri of ideas and references found in each piece. I delayed doing this because it initially seemed too backward-looking. But I now think that revisiting these essays does constitute a new project: I have by no means exhausted the topics I’ve written about, and new links continually suggest themselves. More specifically, I think that the potential relationships between theory and therapy that I partially discerned in 2011 can be explored from fresh angles.
So stay tuned for new old ideas and old new ideas!
