23-year old Bob Dylan plays Chimes of Freedom at the Newport Folk Festival, I think. This is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, and this is probably the best version of the song I have ever heard.
Time and time again, psychologists and philosophers alike ponder the ancient question: What is Happiness? To which I must answer, of course: An awesome movie from 1998 by Todd Solondz ! A few days ago I put the poster for the movie (shown above) in a frame I found in the trashcan of a house down the street, and it really looks nice. The poster is done by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog. Its orange and purple colors, and the beautiful drawings really makes me happy, which is of course profoundly ironic, since the movie is about people who are most certainly not happy. The movie is highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart.
So I finally gave it a shot, and updated Wordpress (the thingy that I run my blog on). It was really inspired by the fact that I needed some kind of spam-fighting plugin added to the blog. I have been getting a butt load of spam lately, for some reason – maybe it is the fact that I mentioned Jennifer Aniston in a post once (oops, I did it again!). Adding this plugin meant fiddling more with the blog than I’ve ever done before, and the success of it inspired me to also update to the next version of Wordpress.
So far I have not noticed any changes for you guys, the readers, but it might benefit you in other ways, because my success has inspired me to install other plugins. The first one allows subscribers to my blog, so that you get an email every time I post something new. You can subscribe under “Pages” or “Meta” at the right side of your screen. I have previously done something similar manually, in fact I have already subscribed all my previous subscribers, which is probably why you are reading this. Anyway, if you want to unsubscribe, it is in the same place as subscribing. In the future I will probably add more fun plugins, so let me know in the comments if there is anything you want, okay? And yes, yes this should hopefully also lead to more activity on the blog in general.
This post should not only be about boring blog-stuff, so let me mention a few records that I think should work fine as a soundtrack to the warmer days ahead of us:
So I just had a chance to see Coraline again, which made it evident to me that it had to find its way onto this blog. I really, really like this movie, and I think it is worth seeing even if you are not usually into watching kids’ movies. The movie is based on a book by Neil Gaiman that I have not read, but I am somewhat familiar with Gaiman’s works, having read most of his Sandman series of graphic novels, and watched the movies Mirrormask (screenplay by Gaiman) and Stardust (based on a Gaiman novel). Now there is no doubt that Gaiman is a talented author, Sandman are stunning graphic novels, I really liked Mirrormask, and Stardust was unorthodox, at least.
In the case of Coraline, however, the greatness of the movie is not merely a reflection of its literary predecessor. The story is a pretty straight-forward Alice in Wonderland-tale, albeit inhabited by several weird and charming characters. Where Coraline really shines, however, is in its images: They are simply stunning, at once trippy and playful, beautiful and scary. Harnessing the power of both stop-motion and computer animation, the film makers manage to make the other world that Coraline discovers a wonderful warped mirror image of her own world. See it in 3D if you can, but 3D or no 3D, you will be transported into a radical alternate universe, and like the main character, you will not believe your eyes. The voice acting is brilliant too, and the music (by musical heroes of mine, They Might Be Giants, among others) is both fitting and beautiful. A final word of warning: If you do take your kids to see this (and you should) keep in mind that this a pretty scary story with a few quite disturbing images, so perhaps the smallest moviegoers should be left at home.
In other news, I now have a website for professional use at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~kohler/. This is where I will publish my demos, links to articles and other items of interest, allowing myself, my friends and my colleagues to keep track of what going on in my scientific career. Feel free to drop by, and please let me know if anything looks or sounds weird.
I just want to give my sincere thanks to every American that came out and voted. Today is, whether you are red or blue, a historic day for America. I am a Danish-American, and my small thanks to all the American citizens is this extremely beautiful song:
So, having returned to the states after a long, wonderful summer vacation, I think it’s time to get this blog up and running again. Much of my time in the lab these days is spent doing manual segmentation, which is basically separating the gray and white matter in our brain scans. This is probably the most boring task the lab has to offer, but the upside is that I am able to listen to music while I do it. So I thought I would start up again by talking a little bit about music, also because it seems to be an easy start.
I recently heard about a movie called “Wild Combination“, describing the life of acclaimed musician Arthur Russell (pictured above). That inspired me to finally really listen to some of his music, and it has completely blown me away. Russell was a classically trained cellist whose music spanned everything from disco to avant garde, and very often a little of both. He put out records from 1979 until his death in 1994, and was known to be very prolific. The framework for his songs is very often the cello, with rhythmical structures being built around it. The centerpiece is Russell’s voice, which I find particularly remarkable; it is at once vulnerable and powerful, otherworldly and personal. The lyrics take the form of little mantras, with several words being repeated over and over again.
I find this music genuinely moving, not only in the sense of the emotional impact, but also in its ability to transport you to another time and place, be it New York in the late seventies, or outer space. I realize that Arthur Russell might not be easy to swallow for people that are not used to “strange” music, but give it a chance – you can even dance to it. If I can get just one person to discover this music, I will be happy. I found this video with the song that gave the movie its title. I don’t know if the images are related to the music at all, but the song is wonderful.
Another musician that I’ve been grooving to a lot lately, is a guy from Mississippi that calls himself Dent May and his Magnificient Ukulele. He plays (you’ve guessed it) the ukulele, and is sort of a one man band. His music can also take you to a different time and place, and in this case its often something like long, warm, youthful summers where you had nothing better to do than to hang around and/or fall in love.
His album comes out in February, and it is going to be the perfect remedy to help you overcome the last part of winter. While Arthur Russell might be a little challenging, I think everyone ought to love this; it should be the next big thing. Here’s the video for “Oh Paris!”, but the songs on his myspace are even better.
So says Eva to her ultracool, hipster-cousin Willie, as the two of them are driving in a loaned car on a quest to find a little happiness in sunny Florida. In the car with them is Eddie (played by former Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson), who is much nicer to Eva than Willie, possibly because he is a little infatuated. The movie, Stranger Than Paradise, starts with Eva arriving in a New York City airport, coming straight from Budapest. Willie, who is forced to take her into his home, see her as a disturbance, an consequently treats her like dirt. Eva, however, is not about to be pushed around, and gradually the two establish a relationship.
I don’t know why I so rarely sit down to watch a Jim Jarmusch movie, because the ones that I have seen so far, “Taxi – Night on Earth”, “Ghost Dog”, “Broken Flowers”, “Down by Law” and “Coffee and Cigarettes” I have almost uniformly enjoyed. Maybe it’s just because everything about Jarmusch’s persona, his movies and the people that act in them, radiates cool and hipness in a way that almost makes it repelling. However, at the heart of all the Jarmusch movies I’ve seen so far, there is a realness to the characters and events taking place, that makes for pretty compelling movie experience. This seems paradoxal, since the events taking place are ofter ,mrather weird, but the conclusion seems to be: Real life is weird enough, we don’t have to make stuff up. Everyone with half a brain should watch these movies. They are not art house, they are not difficult to understand – they are just wonderful. Furthermore, in Stranger than Paradise every scene is beautifully shot in black and white.
This is fast turning into a blog about movies and skiing, which shouldn’t be the case. But when your life is centered around neuroscience, movies and skiing, and the neuroscience is still unresolved, movies must take up some space. However, I recently had the pleasure of meeting Prof. Christoph Koch [go explore his website here, it has lots of cool stuff] when he visited Dartmouth about a week ago. He sat in on the graduate class I am taking on Consciousness, and it was a pleasure to be able to discuss some of Koch’s own papers on the subject, with the man himself. Koch also gave a talk on his work on single- and multi-unit deep brain recordings in relation to visual representations such as faces and landmarks. I had the chance to read a paper presenting some of these findings, and I must say that the findings, although not necessary surprising, are still extremely cool.
Basically, Koch and his co-authors showed their participants (who had been implanted with depth electrodes to localize the focus of seizure onset) pictures of a number of famous faces, landmark buildings, as well as animals and objects. What they found was that there were units that responded quite selectively to the faces of particular celebrities, such as Jennifer Aniston. What the picture above is showing, is that this particular unit is responding only to pictures of Jennifer Aniston, and not to pictures of Aniston with Brad Pitt, or to other blond actresses, or other famous people, and so on [if you have trouble seeing the picture, try clicking it - the red bars are showing neuronal responses]. Furthermore, Koch and his co-authors found units that also responded to the name of the preferred celebrity presented as a letter string, suggesting that this is related to the concept, more than some simple features of that person. The authors found similar units that responded to specific landmark buildings, animals and objects. Perhaps the most amazing finding of them all, in my opinion, was that neurons that responded, for example, to the Sydney Opera House, also responded when the subjects were in fact not seeing the Sydney Opera House, but another landmark building that the subjects thought was the Sydney Opera House (in this case, the Baha’i Temple in India).
Based on these results, Koch and his colleagues are trying to figure out a model for how this recognition might take place. What they are suggesting is in fact not grandmother cells but a sparse representation where each concept might be represented by a few hundred neurons, and where there might be representational overlap between neurons, so that one neuron might be a part of the representation of several seemingly disparate concepts (they actually did find units that became active both for Jennifer Aniston and the Sydney Opera House). This research is apparently pretty difficult to undertake (it takes a dedicated surgeon, as Koch remarked), but I find it immensely exciting. Just imagine, each of my friends have a specific neural population that will fire when I look up pictures of them on Facebook…
[P.S. The authors did apparently find cells that were responding specifically to Mr. T - pretty bad ass cell!]
EDIT:
Reference: Quiroga, R. Q., L. Reddy, G. Kreiman, C. Koch & I. Fried (2005): Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain. In Nature, vol. 435 (7045) (pp. 1102-1107). More recent articles on the same subject can be found on Pubmed.
I always had a lot of sympathy for Stallone. After all, he seems to have had a lot more creative involvement in his films, than say, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Furthermore, Stallone emerged as a “real” actor in the brilliant Copland, a movie that should have lead to more great roles, but did not. The new Rambo, however, is not a very good movie. It is extremely brutal in its depiction of war, which makes it useless as a “fun” action movie, it is just too unpleasant to watch. The reason for this might be that someone wanted this to be the a “serious” movie about the horrors of war, and thought they could achieve that goal by making the violence gory and realistic. The problem is that this does not make a good movie, and since there is no story worth mentioning, or deeper meaning, the movie ends up just being unpleasant.
Instead, I encourage everyone to rent the first Rambo-movie, First Blood, a movie that, although it is violent, has something to say. It says something about what being in a war does to the human beings that make it out alive, and, more controversially, it makes the point that the homeland might not have been worth fighting for. A major point of the movie is the intolerance of the townspeople that spark the series of violent encounters with the Vietnam veteran – in fact, this is where the title comes from, as spoken by John Rambo “They drew first blood, not me.”
As some of you might know, I’ve started to learn skiing here at Dartmouth. It’s incredibly convenient, because they have a skiway just 20 minutes away from campus. I take classes every Friday, and try to go on Saturday too, because it is free. I am still not an expert, but I am getting better and better for each day. For a long time I thought skiing was “not for me”, and that I would never be able to have fun with it, but I must confess that I enjoy it immensely! You can see a few more pictures here.