Month: August 2014

Annie Sneed highlights the work of neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn that might explain why we can’t remember being babies – “the rapid birth of many new neurons in a young brain blocks access to old memories”:

In a new experiment, the scientists manipulated the rate at which hippocampal neurons grew in young and adult mice. The hippocampus is the region in the brain that records autobiographical events. The young mice with slowed neuron growth had better long-term memory. Conversely, the older mice with increased rates of neuron formation had memory loss.

Based on these results, published in May in the journal Science, Frankland and Josselyn think that rapid neuron growth during early childhood disrupts the brain circuitry that stores old memories, making them inaccessible. Young children also have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, another region of the brain that encodes memories, so infantile amnesia may be a combination of these two factors.

Covering similar ground, Kristin Ohlsen explains why, to form long-term memories, “an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment”:

The raw material of memory – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences – arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, a brain structure named for its supposed resemblance to a sea horse, located under the cerebral cortex. The hippocampus not only bundles multiple input from our senses together into a single new memory, it also links these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations to similar ones already stored in the brain. But some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.

‘So much has to happen biologically to store a memory,’ the psychologist Patricia Bauer of Emory University told me. There’s ‘a race to get it stabilised and consolidated before you forget it. It’s like making Jell-O: you mix the stuff up, you put it in a mould, and you put it in the refrigerator to set, but your mould has a tiny hole in it. You just hope your Jell-O – your memory – gets set before it leaks out through that tiny hole.’

Noting that “an astounding 85 per cent of non-Hispanic blacks [identify] as Christian (Pew Report, 2007),” Dale DeBakcsy talks to Mandisa Lateefah Thomas, who founded Black Nonbelievers, Inc. in Atlanta in 2011:

As Thomas explains it, “Because of the historical role that religion and the church played in the black community, many tie in belief as being inherently part of black identity. Therefore, to be someone that doesn’t believe in God is to be considered a traitor. Most of our community – from the people to the leaders – incorporates belief in almost every aspect of their lives, and it is assumed (and sometimes expected) that we all do. So it can be extremely intimidating and stigmatising to openly admit to being a nonbeliever.”

But why does Christianity still have this allure after having been forcefully foisted so many centuries ago? “The historical aspect of Christianity’s influence in the community plays a huge role in why many blacks still believe. While it was used to justify slavery and was imposed on people of color, the church also served as a system for support at a time when legislation discriminated against blacks. So there is a strong loyalty, although the doctrine is very detrimental to growth and development.”

DeBakcsy, a humanist, believes programs like Black Nonbelievers, Inc. will help spread a secular message:

“We are in the process,” Thomas reveals, “of creating a program that will assist ex-convicts and at-risk youth develop professional skills which will help them find jobs and start their own businesses. We also want to intermittently help nonbelievers who need assistance if they lose jobs, or face financial challenges as a result of losing business or a loved one due to being a nonbeliever.” This is critically important work, not only for the cause of humanism, but for that of humanity. If they are successful in creating their support group for ex-cons and youths, it could go far to rewriting how the South interprets its sense of self. This is new ground for a secular group to tread there, and few areas of the nation need it more.

Listen to a recent interview with Thomas here. The long-running Dish thread, “Where Are All The Black Atheists?”, can be read here.

Reviewing David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, David Womersley raises the vexed question – familiar to any student of the British statesman – of his consistency:

A frequent emphasis in the radical ripostes published in the early 1790s to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, such as those written by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine, is that Burke had no consistency as a political thinker. In the 1790s with his attacks on revolutionary France he had emerged as a defender of monarchy and the hereditary principle; but previously (as in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents) he had been acutely critical of the growing influence of the British Crown under Bute and George III. In the 1770s and 1780s Burke had been the advocate of the American colonists and had urged Britain towards policies of peace and conciliation, but in the 1790s he had become the unappeasable enemy of the French revolutionaries and the unflinching spokesman for a regicide war to be pursued à l’outrance. The passage of less than a decade had transformed (so it seemed to the radicals) the indignant champion of the Indians suffering under the despotic administration of the East India Company into an apologist for Europe’s ancien régime who had nothing but indifference for the hardships imposed on the French people by an absolute monarchy.

How Bromwich answers those charges:

Bromwich identifies two areas of important recurrent concern. The first is a nuanced formulation of the proper role of the people in the political life of a nation. As one might expect, it is a position tensed between two simpler, but more damaging, poles:

The people, says Burke, should not be trusted as advisers on policy or even necessarily as true reckoners of their interests in the short run, but they are always the best judges of their own oppression — so much so that we ought to fear any power on earth that sets itself above them.

The second is Burke’s undeviating commitment to justice. And it is in relation to the theme of justice that we encounter moments when Bromwich — himself a respected commentator on contemporary American politics — allows his exposition of the 18th-century British scene to resonate with our present discontents. Sometimes these connections with the present are introduced gently by way of an explanatory analogy, as in this helpful guidance about how to grasp Burke’s insistence that, in politics, the means must justify themselves, and that consequently means “always alter the character of the actor”:

Thus, if you justify the torture of suspects in order to assist a war against a wicked enemy, you will find that in doing so you have incorporated torture in your idea of justice.  You have come to an understanding with yourself, and the utmost savagery will be compatible with your nature thereafter.  You have become one of those who can acquit themselves of any wrong by appealing to a result in a plausible future.

(“Cincinnatus in Retirement” by James Gillray, 1782, a cartoon that caricatured Burke’s support of rights for Catholics, via Wikimedia Commons)

Stephen H. Webb criticizes John Updike’s biographer Adam Begley for not “getting to the heart of what he most cherished in his personal experiences” – especially the novelist’s attachment to Christianity:

The reason why critics as perceptive as Begley marginalize Updike’s religious faith has to do with the content of his theological convictions, not the lack of them. For Updike, writing was a religious act. He thought the best way to be a Christian and a writer was to try to be a very good writer (while, at the same time, avoiding any claim to being a good Christian). He reserved his deepest faith not for America but for the world as he saw it, on the theological assumption that the ordinary and everyday—the most mundane elements of human existence—are a gift from God. This strategy let him keep his most specifically Christian beliefs somewhat private, even as he never shied away from a public theology of praising God’s creation.

Webb – who notes he corresponded with Updike about the religious ideas in his novel Roger’s Version – goes on to unpack how the novelist was influenced by the great 20th century Protestant theologian Karl Barth:

Updike as a believer was saved by his reading of Barth, since he looked to him for “confirmation of the bad news about the human situation vis-à-vis ultimate reassurance.” As a writer, however, I am not so sure that Barth did him much good. There is a way of reading Barth that leads to a radical separation of faith from the world, so that the world, in all of its secularity, can be affirmed just as it is, without trying to impose a thick theological framework on it.

That is how Updike read Barth, but it is not how he read the world, since he was nearly medieval in his belief in the power of material objects to convey the sacred. Updike’s celebration of the everyday was not just rooted in a natural theology of the goodness of creation. It was also entangled in what I would call the metaphysics of a Eucharistic realism. He believed that material objects could be revelatory if given the proper words. Writing for Updike was a profoundly transubstantional act.

Recent Dish on Begley’s Updike biography here, here, and here. Check out a religion-related Updike short story here.