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essentialsaltesSong (1893)
Above the earth my window is so high,
So high.
I see only the sunset in the sky,
In the sky.
And the sky seems so vacant and so dull,
So vacant and dull…
My poor heart it pities not at all,
Not at all.
Alas, I am dying of desperate grief,
Desperate grief,
I do not know what it is that I seek,
What I seek…
And I do not know from whence this yearning came,
From whence it came,
But my heart longs to be miraculously saved,
Miraculously saved!
Oh, may something great happen, something new come to be,
Come to be:
Something wondrous the pale sky promises me,
Promises me,
But I weep without tears: I don’t trust its word,
Don’t trust its word…
What I long for so deeply is not of this world,
Not of this world.
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California Shorts. Perhaps I should have known when I picked this up remaindered at $2. But I'm a sucker for California. But the overall average quality of the stories wasn't good through the first half dozen. I agree with Florence on GoodReads.
--
Christopher Kemp
Not a great book, but a good book, focusing on what we know and don't know about how the human brain (and a few other brains) navigates. Focusing a bit on what makes some people much better at it, and some people (like the author) very prone to getting lost even on well-known routes. One funny little detail is he asks all of his interview subjects how they rate themselves 1-10 on navigation skill. Most of them are neuroscientists studying the problem, and it's interesting to see how varied the reponses are. Anyway, some neat details about place-neurons and other things we've learned about how the brain navigates. It gets off to a good start, but I think it could have been a bit shorter.
I only took a few notes.
At the start of the study, Rimfeld had assumed that spatial abilities could be separated into their component parts. For instance, someone might be proficient at one aspect of it, like map reading, but struggle with another, such as mental rotation, or spatial reasoning. Not so, she says. All the separate components of navigation seem to cluster together into a single factor, which she calls, predictably enough, spatial ability. “There is no separable navigation factor, or mental rotation factor, or visualization factor,” she says. In other words, if you struggle with one component of spatial ability, you probably struggle with all of them. If your brain can mentally rotate objects, you’re probably proficient at map reading and memorizing a route.
--
As I'd long suspected, relying on GPS apparently atrophies some of your brain's ability to navigate. But one study found something of a workaround, and an interesting way this might be implemented in the future:
A third and final group of subjects received another set of [GPS like] instructions that included some personally relevant modifiers. For instance: Please turn right at the bookstore. Here you can buy your favorite book, Moby-Dick. Before sitting them at the simulator, Gramann had collected personal information from each subject about their favorite hobbies, books, movies, and so on. Subjects who received the modified instructions performed better than those who just followed GPS directions. Suddenly, with just these minor alterations, navigating by GPS didn’t have such a harmful impact on spatial memory. The subjects had become better at recognizing landmarks. This could be our future, says Gramann. “If you have all your social media on the cell phone that you use for Google Maps, you have your Friends list, you have your search history online: the system basically knows what you’re interested in,” he says. Imagine a future in which we give more power to technology, and let our smartphones sift through the data to generate directions that are meaningful to us in a particular and specific way. “Why wouldn’t you pull that kind of information out of the system automatically?” says Gramann. “If you could do that in a secure fashion, you could basically provide information in any environment, arbitrarily picking out buildings and aspects of the environment that could relay information based on personal interest.”
--
But my personal favorite detail is how to put mice in VR. For people you give them a headset and put them on an omnidirectional treadmill. But for mice, instead of a treadmill they use the Jetball - a styrofoam ball that rests on a cushion of air, and the mouse runs on top of it inside a personal little 360 degree projection (rather than a teeny tiny VR headset)..
