Navigators from the Planet Hippocampus

Hackney cab sign, London

If you’re a regular user of London taxis, you may have come across something called The Knowledge. A significant part of the world’s most exacting taxi qualification examinations, it tests drivers’ navigational knowledge of London’s streets and points of interest.

Not easy. London’s a labyrinth, 6 square miles of navigational hell. The Blue Book, or Guide to the Knowledge of London, contains all of London’s 25,000 streets, plus ‘points of interest’. It takes three years – an average of 12 attempts – to master the Blue Book. The dropout rate is enormous. It’s like learning the bible. Properly knowing it is a serious feat of memory, so serious, in fact, that it involves physically growing parts of the brain. No joke.

Our understanding of the function of memory is today in a good place. Old one-stop-memory shop models are out. Studies of damaged brains, aided by the rise and rise of magnetic resonance imaging technology, show how different parts of the human brain have evolved systems specific to types of memory. Many of these studies took place on one brain. It belonged to Henry Gustav Molaison. Molaison was an American epileptic whose correctional surgery – he was operated on in 1957 – included the removal of nearly all the hippocampus, an area located above both temples. The operation resulted in anterograde amnesia: Molaison was unable to commit new events and meaning to long term memory. He died in 2008.

Molaison’s case is useful to our understanding of the brains of London cabbies. The Blue Book works the hippocampus hard. This area of the brain – as Molaison’s surgery indicated – is largely responsible for what in the business is known as the declarative memory system. An example of a declarative memory is remembering that you went for a drive today (where you went, how long it took etc) – as opposed to knowing how to drive, which is a procedural memory function. Given, therefore, that a significant part of the training for The Knowledge consists of (motor)biking around London, committing tens of thousands of (brain manufactured)experiences to memory, it will come as no surprise (perhaps) to learn that a study in 1999 found that Blue Book brains have larger posterior hippocampi than the rest of us.

The posterior? Yes. It seems that this part of the hippocampus is responsible for storing a specific subset of the declarative memory system, one that is ‘a spatial representation of the environment.’ It maps space.  It’s our GPS. Logical, then, that people who rely heavily on navigational skills have bigger ones.

MRI showing growth (left to right) of the hippocampus in taxi drivers - image courtesy of Elenour Maguire, Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, University College London

And that’s less than half the story. The study also showed that Blue Book brains have correspondingly smaller anterior hippocampi than the rest of us. Subsequent experiments – conducted by Hugo Spiers – suggest that this area keeps an eye on the straight line distance between you and your destination. In the same way that your Sat Nav goes bonkers once you go wrong – and especially if you go wrong several times – so ‘the activity in the front end of the hippocampus ramps up and up’ the further you get from your destination. That’s the rest of us. We get lost. Travel twice the distance. Blue Book brains – unless there’s traffic, or someone’s pulling a fast one – take the most direct route. Ergo, the Blue Book anterior hippocampus is smaller.

More. In the same way that neuroscientists discovered that aspects of Henry Molaison’s spatial memory remained intact post-surgery (he could draw a detailed floor plan of his house), and fairly surmised therefore that spatial representation is not solely the remit of the hippocampus, so the London taxi driver’s navigational brain operates from different localities. For example, a study using a bastardised version of Sony’s The Getaway – a simulated experience of Blue Book brain driving through London – shows that, once planned, the journey hardly uses the hippocampus. It goes into cruise control. Unexpected events are handled by the right prefrontal cortex; the expected – landmarks etc. – by the retrospenial cortex. The hippocampus only kicks into gear once there is a change in destination.

All of which means that next time you get into a London cab, know – please – that you are dealing with a superior life force. A brain grower. You are.

MRI scan of brain

Follow the Yellow

Jia Chai - Phuket, Thailand - image courtesy APF

If Wassily Kandinsky’s feel for yellow rings wrong, then get thee to Phuket, Thailand, to the Vegetarian Festival, where yellow is warm, calm and very violent.

Held in the first nine days of the ninth lunar month, in honour of the Jade Emperor and the Nine Emperor Gods, the Festival of Jia Chai is known for the practice among devotees of ritualised self-mutilation.

While mortification rituals are as old as god itself, those particular to the Jia Chai originate in 1865, when the local Chinese community, tin miners in the main, devastated by ‘fever’, probably malaria, was saved by a travelling opera company’s emergency recourse to a strict vegetarian diet and to a variety of associated acts of purification.

Devotee - image courtesy Reuters / Dario Pignatelli

The festival begins on the first night, at midnight, with the gods descending from heaven by way of a holy pole. The following nine days are filled with ceremony. Processions carrying representative gods in sedan chairs make their way through streets lined with yellow flags. The flags are signs that the food on sale is pure vegetarian. Everyone wears white.

A god called Pak Tai – Supreme Emperor of the Dark Realm – watches over the dead, and over the Ma Song, the devotees, in whom warrior and warrior horse spirits temporarily reside. Possessed, the devotees pass objects – metal rods, knives, swords, umbrellas, exhaust pipes, bicycles, guns – through their cheeks and tongues. They climb bladed ladders. They walk on fire coals. They bathe in hot oil. Yellow headdresses and yellow T-shirts stand out against the smoke.

The reaction to all this is predictable. Visitors are stunned, amazed at the feats of the Ma Song. For local Taoists, it is normal. The so-called ‘entranced horses’ are, for the rest of the year, their brothers, their sisters, their parents and children. During the festival they are gods, devil catchers. They are cleansing themselves. They are making peace with animals. They are living in heaven and in hell. They are making things all good.

Procession - image David Longstreath / EPA

Some Meanings for Yellow

Wassily Kandinsky - Yellow, Red, Blue

Yellow has many meanings. It is the colour of the sun, and of wheat, and candle light. For some, it is the colour of cowards and xenophobes, of disease, of growing old. It has been the colour of terror, of madness and of kings.  In one or two countries, the yellow joke is adult, as are yellow movies. In others, it is divine, holy, the earth and the sun and everything.

In physics, strange to say, yellow is simply the colour of a light with wavelengths of between 570 and 590 nanometres. Light like this excites the medium and long wave cone cells of the retina. Indigo blue – for reasons of the length of its own wave – is yellow’s perfect compliment. Fully fledged tritanopes are blind to both yellow and blue. If this means nearly nothing, then be at peace. Just know that your brain is a very clever thing indeed.

For Vincent van Gogh, yellow was the colour of hope. Van Gogh lived in a yellow house. Yellow is everywhere in his work. There have been number of theories as to why. Digitalis is one. Van Gogh was prescribed digitalis for his mania. Highly toxic, one side effect of digitalis is its propensity for producing yellow tinged hallucinations in users. Suspected glaucoma is another (theory).  More (bio)physics: glaucoma is a disease of the eye; if you get it, your cornea swells and light sources are perceived as being surrounded by halos – a bit like those that sometimes surround the moon.

Vincent van Gogh - Self-portrait

Whatever the truth (and there is no evidence for either), Van Gogh clearly felt yellow more keenly than most. Wassily Kandinsky would have sympathised.’ Kandinsky heard his yellows. Literally.  And Kandinsky wasn’t mad. Or sick. Or addicted to drugs. He understood yellow as the noise of warmth, of fire, even. Yellow, he said, is ‘terrestrial’, violent, a colour both ‘painful and aggressive’, which – like hope sucked of warmth – describes perfectly Van Gogh’s own private yellow hell.

Actually, we’re misrepresenting Kandinsky. He did not think yellow the colour for madness. He called it eccentric, by which he meant off-centre, in the same way that engineers or mathematicians speak about off-centre wheels and circles. He was a synesthete. Yellow, like the sound of a violin, soars, is strident, calms, punches holes in compositions – hence its capacity for warmth and for violence. Like the sun. Like humans.

staging of Wassily Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound

Yellow Truths

Oscar Wilde

When Oscar Wilde appeared in court, on 26^th April 1895, to be charged on several counts of gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, he was carrying a yellow book. Nearly all – friends, enemies, the press – thought it an issue of The Yellow Book, a London based quarterly, illustrated and art edited by Aubrey Beardsley.

It wasn’t.  It was an advance copy of Pierre Louys’s Aphrodite – Ancient Manners. But it didn’t matter. People thought it was; and if people thought it was, then The Yellow Book it was – so to speak. Anyway, most of them – the newspapers, crowds, Christians etc. – didn’t like the things Wilde liked. Windows were broken, Beardsley sacked and The Yellow Book, says its publisher, John Lane, was ‘killed.’

So, why think it was? The Yellow Book, we mean. Well, one, it was typically Wildean; two, Beardsley had previously illustrated Wilde’s Salome (best mates); three, it was yellow. Case closed.

Wait. Yellow? Really? Yup, yellow. Yellow was the colour of the hour. It covered libertine French books. The Pre-Raphaelites loved yellow. So had Swinburne.  Ruskin too. And Walter Pater. Sir Richard Burton had yellow breakfasts. William Morris’s sunflowers plastered influential walls. Yellow meant aesthete. It meant decadence. It meant Beardsley, The Yellow Book and – to finish – it meant Oscar Wilde.

True, but also not true. Wilde never did write for The Yellow Book. He didn’t like it, said it was ’not yellow at all’, and he (reportedly) didn’t like Beardsley, or his Salome pictures. Unlikely, therefore, that he would have been caught dead with a copy, let alone on his way to court.

So there you go.

Plate 33 - from The Yellow Book - Aubrey Beardsley

Death of a Bad God

Pyongyang, North Korea - memorial for Kim Jong-il - 1 million estimated mourners - image KCNA - Reuters

Seen it already? Probably. It was all over the TV, YouTube’s full of it and now everybody knows a new thing about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: Kim Jong-il, Supreme Leader (Our Father, Dear Leader, Our General) died at work, on a train, of a heart attack, just before Christmas.

It’s made us – the rest of the world, capitalists, China too – afraid. The Great Successor, Kim Jung-un, is young, inexperienced, an unknown quantity. He takes over an isolated, totalitarian nuclear state. He’s 28. He likes basketball. He suffers from hypertension. He’s surrounded by a bunch of savvy, purge-avoiding, super political generals. It’s serious.

But more than this, it’s made us look at something different: the spectacle of a country in grief, the spectacle of a country that is all about spectacle making. Is it real? What makes millions of people cry uncontrollably, slap the ground, all for one man? Why (sometimes) do it in perfect lines, in such uncrowd-like shapes? We’re curious. Morbidly so.

mourners lining Jong-il's funeral procession - image KCNA - Reuters

Well, one answer is that North Korea is the finest propaganda machine the modern world has ever seen. Supported by the party, the media (there is no news in this place), and by a litany of public holidays, cultural events and special occasions, Jong-il was god. Literally. He made time bend, the land live. He was why we are happy. A god has died. Mourn him. Mourn him big.

Yes, but was he his dad? Well, no, because he wasn’t a war hero; and he was transparently narcissistic (he invented the hamburger, you know); and he didn’t have a big toothy grin (really). Still, he had his dad’s ruthlessness, bags of it, and the army, a secret police force, a self-serving constitution, a policy induced famine and a punishment apparatus to rival anything anywhere.

So, millions of ranked mourners. What’s really going on? Mass choreographed or no? From what we know, and knowing isn’t easy, even dad’s 10 days of mourning was overwhelmingly organised, and mainly in Pyongyang, capital and home to the privileged, the loyal, the believers. So, neat million strong crowds of the genuine, the co-opted, the deeply afraid. We think.

Kim Jong-il

For more on North Korea, see Bradley Martin and Jiro Ishimaru, Kim Dong Cheol and the work of a number of North Korean insiders.

Keeping it Real

Tom the Lion - FreeState window

You’ve seen Madmen, right? Bunch of well dressed ad people endlessly selling lacquered turds to post-war America? Set in the 1950s, it chronicles the moment the world is first persuaded to buy – on a mass produced scale – things it might not need.  Fast forward to 2012 and not much has changed – except the amount of things, and how they’re packaged. Consumption on a digitalised scale.

Yes, but all’s not lost. For every burger bought on the internet (well, you get the point), there’s someone somewhere working on something real. Tom the Lion, for example.

Tom the Lion? Who’s Tom? Tom is Tom – musician, writer, producer. He’s 24 years old. He’s on our window. He makes all his music. He’s played a few gigs. He has an agent. He’s just released EPs, and an album – The Adventures of Tom the Lion. Heard of him?

Tom the Lion - St Pancreas Old Church - © 2011 Natasha Bidgood.

If no, then that’s probably because you don’t know someone who knows him. Publicity around Tom the Lion has been almost non-existent.  He’s the subject of a handful of blogs. He’s got a website. He’s been on the radio, interviewed, and interested parties – his record company etc. – reference him. That’s about it.

Instead, everything – money, time, effort – has been about creating sounds, spaces and things intrinsic to the quality of the music. Live events, videos and recordings are true to Tom, the person, the musician. Mistakes, difficulties etc. are accepted as part and parcel of starting out, of ‘paying one’s dues’ and attention is paid to real craftsmanship.

Take the EPs and the album. White vinyl, bible paper, foil-blocked gatefold sleeves, screen printed brass clasped wooden box sets, photographs, uncoated CD wallets, the levels of production are enormously high, the packaging undiluted, acutely observed. The album itself must have cost an arm, but that’s exactly – says Tom’s manager, James Scroggs – the point: ‘Not enough time is spent on challenging the craft and user experience of a product. A good product will ultimately market itself.’

So, not – in a world buried in free CDs, cheap apps and digitalised stores – an act of marketing madness? Well, The Adventures of Tom the Lion’s sold out, was Rough Trade’s album of the month and the internet’s jumping with praise for its textural quality, so no, not really. Just down-to-earth, meaningful, caring product making. Real stuff.

album innards - image © 2011 Gavin Lucas - Creative Review

Necessity being the Mother

MOS Technology

Recognise it? If yes, you need, friend, to get out more.  If no, then fear not: you, us and most of the world.

It’s a central processing unit, a microprocessor, a microchip. There’s one (or more) in every computer – laptop, phone, domestic appliance etc. You name it: if it runs, there’s a chip. Nearly.  Anyway, this one’s called the MC6502. It’s not (now) the best chip on earth; nor is it the most numerous; but it’s the reason why there’s an alternative to the PC, and why there’s something out there called Apple Inc.

How so? Well, as you know, Apple was founded by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, erstwhile pals and early members of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club. Both had very little money, and Wozniak, the designer-engineer, couldn’t afford most of what it took to build a computer. At that time (the mid-seventies), the only microchips available were the Intel 8080 and the Motorola 6800, each of which retailed for about $170 – $700 today. Unaffordable. Wozniak was largely limited to pencil and paper designs, his head, his imagination.

Fortunately, all was not well at camp Motorola, and a whole bunch of their creatives bedded down next door, with MOS Technology, where they proceeded (via a copyright hiccup) to design a chip – the MC6502 – that went on to retail for $25. The rest is, as they say, history: Wozniak has his godfather chip, writes an Apple version of BASIC, builds the prototype. Jobs sells his van, sources the parts, finds an outlet and generally meets everyone he needs to meet to make Apple happen. Out comes the Apple Computer (later renamed Apple I). Out comes Apple II, the world’s first mass produced personal computer. It has colour. It has game making software. It has options, no toggles, less chips. It is beautiful, dynamic. The world goes computer literate.

BASIC

And all from having to hang about for a blessed chip? Well, no, not quite, because that’s the cake story, and you’d need to input things like latent genius, and a million other factors (60 more chips, luck, someone called Mike Markulla etc.), but listen to what Wozniak says about the moment he got his hands on a 6502: ‘Now I had to build the hardware. I looked at all the other computers that were around me and they were like the standard old computer—switches and lights and slots to plug boards in and connect them to teletypes. I said, “No, I want the whole thing, because it’s affordable now.”’ Necessity, then.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

Dreaming of Spheres

Cenotaph - architect's etching - Étienne-Louis Boullée

In 1784 Étienne-Louis Boullée designed the Cenotaph, a monument to Newton, a place to gather, a giant and entirely empty sphere. It was never made. Grandiose, enormous, it was at the time considered an architectural impossibility, an idea, a dream of the future.

Spheres are like this. They’re bloody hard to make. Even small ones. Why is this? If you listened at school (you did), then you’ll know that – geometrically speaking – they’re reasonably simple constructs. V = 4/3 π r³. Right? A = 4 π r². Remember?  Sure you do. And they’re everywhere, aren’t they? We’ve grown up with spheres. Push a ball and it will roll. Look for a sphere and there it is – in us, in the games we play, the tools we use. They’re made of almost anything, and technological advances in their production have rendered them near perfect. Big, small; here, there. What’s to think about?

Well, lots actually. Difficult to imagine now, but Boullée, as a first class member of the Académie d’Architecture, would have been one of the few people in France with access to anything resembling a sphere, any sphere, whatever its size. Indeed, when Boullée dreamt up the Cenotaph (which, let’s be clear, was to be 150m tall, and 110m in diameter) the really big sphere – as thing in the world – was still thoughtfully unbelievable, a half-fantasy. Domes had been around for millennia, but they’re not the same. The first reasonably sized freestanding sphere, the Gottorb Globe (3m in diameter), was built in 1664; Daniel Marlot’s Celestial Sphere was installed at Het Loo in 1699; Jean-Pierre Blanchard had just ballooned his way across the Seine. Everything else was the future.

So what? We’re it. The future, we mean. It’s here. We’ve got James Wylde’s 60 ft tall inside-out globe (1851), the Bathysphere (1934), The Mapparium (1935), the New York World’s Fair’s Periscope (1939), NASA’s Echo 1 (1960), the Unisphere (1964). We’ve got the Ericson Globe (1989), haven’t we? That’s huge. It’s sphere time. The world’s a plastic oyster. Boullée’d be clicking his heels.

Inside-out Globe - James Wylde

Yes? No. Because whatever the rate of the last 200 years’ worth of technological advances, a sphere is a sphere is a sphere. We’ve never made a perfect one – not even a perfect little one, and nor has nature, and once you go beyond heat and moulds, the job gets that bit more hellishly difficult, as well every stonemason knows. And if you think making a stone ball is hard, go figure the maths that constitutes the making of something the size of a large hotel. Flushing Meadow’s Unisphere, for example, the world’s largest globe, is 12 storeys high, weighs 408 tons and involved (for the solving of just one of its problems) 670 simultaneous equations. Compare this with the 40 or so required for solving a similar problem in a similarly sized cuboid – no comparison, really.

So, brain frying stuff, which is why the way – from Cenotaph to Sphere Building  - remains littered with plans, designs, the never-mades, the yet-to-be-mades, and why, if Boullée were alive, he’d still be dreaming… just.

Stone ball - FreeState

Speaking Balls

Sphere collection - FreeState

We’ve always been fascinated by spheres. And not just FreeState. You, the world, all humans.

Yes. The sky is full of balls. The Greeks explained the universe by means of celestial balls. Christian and Muslim medieval theologists posited that the planets and stars were moved by ball-conscious angels. Even today – despite the Copernican revolution – we happily think of the galaxy’s objects as pinned to a vast sphere.

Basically, we like spheres. They speak to us. The globe is a sphere, which is why kings liked them, and popes, and lords, and pretty much anyone interested in taking over the world. The apple is a sphere, and it speaks about loss, redemption, fertility, life, love, purity, desire, rebirth and beauty, which is why kings liked them, and popes, and lords, and…  For a long time the sphere spoke the language of absolutism, of religion, its purpose political, its story found in coats of arms, heraldic insignia and in the decorative elements of both renaissance and baroque architecture.

However, while nearly always saying something, spheres were never – to exhaust the metaphor – keynote speakers. The big cheeses – the triangle (cross) , the crescent (sickle, moon) the circle (sun, wreath, crown) – were always considered more meaningful, more potent, more relevant, and the sphere, relegated even in the case of portraiture to cameo roles, was frequently forced to fight its corner against a treasury of rivals, against pearls, sceptares, diamonds etc. This is certainly most true of architecture, whatever the success of the dome.

Chaux cemetry sphere - Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

And even when finally – with the French Revolution, with in particular the visionary designs of the likes of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée – when finally it takes centre stage, and comes to symbolise by itself the people, the nation, the body nationale, the sphere as metaphor is so much less well behaved than its competitors, its vague and varied antiquarian stories easily hijacked. In 1939, for example, at New York’s World Fair, and in the designs of Albert Speer, Germany’s leading architect, it spoke for futurism and fascism – at exactly the same time.

In the end, the very geometry of its form – total, self-referential, anti-gravitational – makes its own meaning, which in many ways is what happened to our own sphere, the Glitterball. Predictably, the initial attraction of suspending an enormous sphere outside the entrance to Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class Wing at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 is heavy with Old World speak: Virgin is a global brand; it flies around the world; ergo, a giant ball signifying planetary reach. No one could have foreseen, however, its effect upon arrival, its own physical power. Brought in, across one of the runways, it appeared in the distance inconsequential, small. We were – initially – nonplussed, unengaged. It looked like a child’s toy, and it was only up close – craned in over the roof, and readied for suspension – that we were able to gauge its actual size, to feel its hugeness. Now a giant, and yet still emanating a kind of unbridled childishness, it made us smile, laugh – all of us, client included. Ever changing, its moiré affect illusory, compelling, fascinating, it felt irreverent, playful, fun. Like a glitter ball, in fact.

construction drawing of the Glitterball for Virgin Atlantic

Making Giants – again

If you’ve read our post on the same subject, you’ll want to know (perhaps) why one of Britain’s best known giants, Andrew Gormley’s Angel of the North, didn’t get a mention. Short answer? We’re not sure. Sorry. Here it is:

Angel of the North – steel – height: 20m – 300 tonnes

Situated in Gateshead, clearly visible from the A1, and designed, built and erected between 1994 and 1998, the Angel of the North is, for more reasons than one, a very modern giant. Funded largely by the National Lottery, made of COR-TEN, a steel alloy, it cost close to £1 million, is located in an area originally earmarked for regeneration, and initially met with stern opposition. It was described variously as a ‘monumental clanger’ (The Sun), ‘a clothes peg and a foot rule’ (The Mail) and ‘vulgar’ (Brian Sewell, for The Evening Standard). Giants, if nothing else, attract a lot of attention.

Dream

Today, the Angel of the North is a landmark work of public art. We love it. As important an icon of the northeast as the Tyne Bridge, it’s served to whet a collective appetite for giant sculptures, an appetite that has resulted in – most notably – Jaume Plensa’s Dream (St Helens), in Thomas Heatherwick’s B of the Bang (Manchester) and in Wolfgang Buttress’s Rise (south Belfast).

Like the Angel of the North, each of these giants involves enormous amounts of time and planning; each employs industrial scale making techniques; and each serves a public space. However, there’s more here than meets the eye. All, even Dream, the recipient of almost universal praise, has faced giant problems: Rise is actually a replacement for an initial commission, a larger work, Trillian, considered too costly; B of the Bang, the largest of the lot, suffered structural problems and was subsequently dismantled; and Gormley, while successful in getting the Angel of the North made, had previously failed to get his Brick Man off the ground.

Truth be told, making giants is not easy business. They’re expensive. They’re big. They’re next door. They make mincemeat of time frames. The competition is super fierce, and for every successful venture, there are x number of projects that never make it beyond the drawing board – the GatewayWales landmark initiative, for example, or Mark Wallinger’s White Horse.

White Horse - artists model - proposed height: 50m

Giant making requires buckets of faith – in groups, politics, local democracy, yes, but also in science and art. Structural engineer Cecil Balmond calls it ‘the crucible of invention.’ Every successful (read made) giant pushes at the envelope: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas (Tate Modern) uses a fabric that is just 1mm thick; Dream is self-cleaning (titanium dioxide); Dune Grasses (Blackpool), our most recent giant, employs the technical excellence of Altelier One to kinetically mimic windblown grass.

And, as if this were not enough (it’s not), the best of giants speak – to us, the land, with other giants. Really? Yup. Imagine – if you will – beetling up the A1 and coming across the poised and sun-blasted brilliance of the Angel of the North. Look at its wings. Big, yes, but look at their angle. Set to embrace, grab or sweep away, they’re saying something, telling a story, yours, ours, anyone’s. Good giants tell good stories. They do. Worth their weight in gol…

Dune Grasses