At Home This Week

Weekend Google Doodle

I loved learning about the history of kayaks on a trip to Greenland, so this Google Doodle celebrating the kayak was pleasing to see. The reason for this Doodle: 

“In honor of Native American Heritage Month, today's Doodle celebrates the kayak, a narrow watercraft originally created by Arctic tribes 5,000 years ago.” 

About the artist: 

“This Doodle was illustrated by Inuit Nunangat guest artist, Natashia Allakariallak.”   

We have enjoyed our own inflatable kayak as well as opportunities to go kayaking in several places. Kayaks of the more stable and recreational variety are offered on many of the National Geographic trips we have done, so we’ve seen lots of beautiful sights from a kayak. For the last few years, we have also owned an inflatable kayak, which gets us out on the very tame local lakes and rivers — nothing to compare to the incredibly dangerous conditions in which the Inuit kayakers hunted for large marine mammals in unbelievably cold Arctic seas!

On our trip to Alaska in 2013, we watched a bear fishing while we were in a kayak.

Watching a kayak demo in Greenland in 2022. The Inuit of Greenland contributed much to the development of kayaking.

A “Psychological Thriller”

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell portrays a pathological woman who deceives everyone. Her victims may become suspicious, but she manipulates them to an uncanny extent, and the reader also doesn’t know where her fabrications begin and where the truth ends. A friend of mine recommended this book as a “psychological thriller.” The book definitely embodies a lot of tension, suspicion of coming bad things, cruelty, and growing horror at the layered revelations.

Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything like this book, and it’s not my usual type of reading. While I wouldn’t call it a supreme work of literary genius (it’s not), I think it’s unusual and very suspenseful.

Question: What is Consciousness?

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith explores two main topics: the working of our human minds and of the minds of the octopus and closely related species (the cephalopods). The author reviews the evolution that created both humans and cephalopods. He says:

“Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p. 9)

In attempting to compare the minds of these divers creatures, he probes the question of consciousness, a question that’s often asked and never really answered. He describes the early steps taken by these animals:

“Later … an integrated perspective on the world arises and a more definite sense of self. We then reach something closer to consciousness. I don’t see that as a single definite step. Instead, I see “consciousness” as a mixed-up and overused but useful term for forms of subjective experience that are unified and coherent in various ways. Here, too, it is likely that experience of this kind arose several times on different evolutionary paths: from white noise, through old and simple forms of experience, to consciousness.” (p. 97)

I reviewed this book in some detail in 2018 in a post titled Invertebrate Intelligence and decided to reread it during the past week. 

Stories for Our Time

A purely evil political leader appeals to the masses through his dramatic speeches. The large crowds of his followers go wild, howling with adoration and loyalty. He convinces them that they are superior beings, and that they should show no tolerance for those who differ from them. He promises that once empowered, he will expel or even exterminate their inferiors. His overwhelming appeal almost enables him to become the supreme ruler of the Wizard World. Luckily, a few brave opponents, especially Newt Scamander and Albus Dumbledore, prevent the deceptive and charismatic Grindlewald from achieving his evil plan. 

As we binge-watched the three recent Fantastic Beasts films (prequel to the Harry Potter story) I was overcome with dread because of the parallel to recent real life. Unfortunately, no one stopped the onslaught of our new dictator, and as he rapidly announces his coming regime, I fear that no one will stand up to his evil plan.

Not only are we without a magical hero to save us, we don’t even have adorable magical pets to cheer us up. However, these films are a good escape if you don’t take their political situation too seriously. Here are Newt Scamander’s two adorable pets:

A Niffler

A Bowtruckle

Blog post and original photos © 2013, 2022, 2024 mae sander. 

Movie images from Warner Brothers

Georges Perec

Who was Georges Perec? He was a very talented and accomplished French writer, born in 1936. He published many books between 1965 and his death in 1982. As a member of Oulipo. a French literary society, he  was involved with a variety of formal and unusual writing techniques. In particular, he wrote an entire novel without the letter e and then wrote a short story with no vowels other than the letter e.

Perec was very fond of word play and complicated plots and twists in his works of fiction. He was concerned with what he called the “infra-ordinary” side of daily life, and his many books explored it in a number of forms, including prose, poetry, and even the composition of crossword puzzles. He liked jokes too; he wrote erudite spoofs, poems full of tricks and more, and his work is extraordinarily full of allusions to other works of literature.

The biography of Perec reveals a very complicated person. He was orphaned during World War II, when his father died in battle and his mother died in Auschwitz. Once the war ended, he lived with his aunt and uncle, received an entirely French education, worked at a job in a research lab, and published highly acclaimed fiction and other writing. In the course of his life, he associated with many of the most famous thinkers and writers of his era. Perec’s life, in my view, mirrors much about the life of intellectuals in Paris in his time.

Reading a Biography of Georges Perec

Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos begins with a history of the author's name: Perec. While it seems to be a Breton name, it's actually a phonetic transcription of Peretz, the original name of Perec's father, who was a Jewish immigrant with a traditional Jewish name. Bellos gives a detailed history of the origins of the Peretz-Perec family's immigration from Eastern European shtetls to Paris France in the decades before Georges' birth in 1936.

Bellos's biography is highly detailed in every way, beginning with the family’s assimilation to life in Paris, the business dealings of several family members, and eventually the way they survived (or didn't survive) during the Nazi occupation and the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps. The survivors spent the war in the Grenoble area; when the war was over they moved back to Paris and more or less resumed their pre-war life. It’s a painful story, especially the death of. Perec’s parents and his time being hidden when he was a small child.

The years just after the allied victory in France brought the family another type of nightmare, one that's not covered in many histories. For the surviving Jews there was an agonizing wait to know what had happened to their deported relatives: a brief period that is rarely covered by history books. After the 1944 Allied victory in France, the government was unable to provide information about these victims. Finally, in June 1945, a huge exhibition at the Grand-Palais was entitled “Hitler’s Crimes." It revealed, for the first time, the fate of the French Jews. It's unimaginable to think of the way this news must have affected the surviving Jewish people of France, including Perec's family. 

About the exhibition:

"It presented a chronology of the internment of Jews in the French camps of Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, and Drancy, in the occupied zone, and at Gurs, near Navarrenx, in southwestern France, under the rule of Vichy. It also gave a tally of deportations from Drancy to Germany: 62,608. ... The exhibition itself was dominated by two wall-size enlargements of photographs of Belsen-Bergen, on loan from the British embassy; there were other images as well of Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Mittelgladbach, and Maidanek. Though there were no pictures yet available of Auschwitz, it must have been obvious what fate had befallen the French Jews deported there from Drancy."

Perec was a small child at this time. From age 5 to 9 he had been required to keep his identity and Jewishness a secret, and forget everything including his lost mother. When his Aunt and Uncle took him into their family, they were required to do excruciatingly painful paper work to prove Perec’s mother Cécile’s “disappearance.” After she had been taken to Auschwitz there was no proof of her fate. They obtained only “a missing person’s certificate for Cécile. It was not a death certificate. It was called an acte de disparition.” Perec thus grew up without clear knowledge of his mother’s end -- but in fact he had too much knowledge.

The future writer had a fairly conventional school career. He recieved a typical French Lycee education until the bacchalaureate, and then spent some time preparing for admission to further education. Having attended prep classes for the Grandes Ecoles examinations, Perec decided (unlike almost all French intellectuals) to drop out, and simply try to be a writer. In fact, he had decided on this ambition at the end of Lycee. For the rest of his life, his principal identification of himself was as a writer. 

Once he abandoned the standard educational path, Perec struggled to establish a life in Paris, and he had various part-time jobs while enjoying life with friends and pursuing intellectual interests. During his early 20s he was required to do a term of military service. After training as a paratrooper, his military service included a term as an office worker in Paris, where he returned to life with his friends. His Paris life:

“The moment his duties were done each day, he could step out of the ministry building, dressed in his embarrassing uniform and red beret, walk down Rue Saint-Dominique, go over the Solférino Bridge into the Tuileries gardens and saunter past the statue of Eblé, the least famous of Napoleon’s generals, or alternatively, using the Point-Royal, pass through the Place du Carrousel, then cross Rue de Rivoli, and reach his perch in ten minutes at the most. He would reemerge metamorphosed, wearing (perhaps) a broad-striped red and green pullover, tight trousers, and shoes as unlike military boots as could be managed; and in such or similar informal evening attire, he would head for one or another of his regular haunts to drink with his friends and discuss the major issues of the day, from food to philosophy to film.”

To me, this describes the ideal life of a young person in Paris in the late 1950s! Perec was also trying to write and publish his first novel. His early efforts were not particularly successful, and he drifted around for a while, acquiring an apartment (with money from German reparations) and a wife. He lived briefly in Tunisia, where his wife had a temporary teaching position. 

After a long time living on the margins, Perec took a salaried (though low-paying) and stable job as an archivist at a neuroscience laboratory. He was given the job because he had experience creating a file-card system for information retrieval. Though not mathematical, he worked out a way to apply mathematical graph theory to the task of finding articles on neuroscience for the researchers in the lab, and his invention was a remarkable success, while his job left him time to keep on writing. As it happened, a mathematician whom he consulted on graph theory for his job was also a member of the literary group Oulipo, to which he introduced Perec. 

In 1965, after ten years of reworking his first novel, Perec published Les Choses — Things. It achieved a slow success, as each small edition sold out with more and more of the young people around Perec’s age, mid-twenties, talked about the way this unusual and very short novel captured the spirit of the 1960s. And: “On 21 November 1965, the Renaudot Prize put Things in the limelight and made Georges Perec a national celebrity if not quite a household name.”

Perec wrote many books in the following years.
These are the ones I found in my attic from my past Perec reading projects.
He also worked in film, radio productions, opera, magazines, and other media.

Perec and Oulipo

Oulipo was a formal group of literary and mathematical creators, who had regular meetings (dinner meetings at restaurants) and discussed a variety of literary forms. One such form was the lipogram, which is a text that is missing one of the letters of the alphabet. Many others, based on mathematical ideas, were also discussed, and some of the members wrote poetry or short works that followed the invented constraints.

Perec took the inventions of Oulipo more seriously than the others -- in 1969 he published a full-length novel called La Disparition, which is a lipogram in e -- that is, it is written entirely without the most common letter in the French language. The plot of the novel centers around disappearance and loss: the characters know something is missing but they can't quite grasp what it is. Remember the "acte de disparition" that proved that the French government did not know what had happened to Perec's mother at Auschwitz? Perec connected the disappearance of the letter to the disappearance of the mother. 

Throughout his life, Perec was often treated by psychoanalysts and other analysts, and he was enormously introspective. This seems to have contributed to his genius as an author of unusual and very original writings.

Perec's Writing and Publishing Continues

In the 1970s, Perec continued writing and publishing a variety of things, both directly influenced by Oulipo and not-so-directly. He traveled, including visits to the US and Germany. His personal life was complicated by separation from his wife, and relationships with several other women. In Georges Perec: A Life in Words, Bellos details all of his writing and personal life in great detail, but my summary is already much too long!

An important publication, W or The Memory of Childhood was an autobiographical novel that Perec worked on for years, but completed only in 1974. Alternating with a fictitious story, he tells how his memory of his parents, their disappearance, and his time hiding from the Nazis were unretrievable no matter how hard he tried to remember. 

Saul Steinberg: "The Art of Living." 1949.
One of Perec's inspirations for Life: A User's Manual.

Perec began working on a long and elaborate book called La Vie: Mode d'Employ or Life: A User's Manual in around 1972, intensely in 1974. Like the Steinberg cartoon, which he cited as an inspiration, he pictured the rooms of an apartment building, the people living in them, and what they were doing. The various chapters of the book, as he presented it to Oulipo, fit together in a way that Perec imagined was like chess puzzle called a knight's tour. He also described it as "a jigsaw-novel that describes a block of flats in Paris with its façade removed." The book was eventually completed and published in 1978. Essentially, the book defies any simple description of its style. "Perec’s masterpiece is an Oulipian work, but one that is based on the “bending” of all of its constraints."

The book won the Médicis Prize for 1978 -- an important accomplishment in France. He also appeared on the insanely influential French TV program Apostrophes, hosted by Bernard Pivot. And thus became famous and acclaimed as a writer.

Perec's creative life continued with a book he wrote while on a visit to Australia, and with many of the other creative endeavors he had pursued in his life. However, when he returned from Australia, he was diagnosed with cancer, and he died in 1983.

Wrapping up this very long blog post

Georges Perec: A Life in Words is a painfully and painstakingly complete biography, based on numerous interviews with Perec's family, friends, and colleagues as well as on published and unpublished materials. The hardcover edition has 832 pages; this blog post is based on my reading of the book.

The Kindle edition of Georges Perec: A Life in Words is very bad. It is missing the photos and illustrations that are called out in the text; it has no page numbers but it gives cross-references by page number; and it has many transcription errors. My quotes here have no page numbers because they are missing from the Kindle edition. 

In conclusion, I'll just ask -- do you think I am totally mad to have patiently read this enormous book? Whatever the answer, I now hope to read and reread some of the actual works by Perec. I'm sharing all of this with the bloggers at Paris in July.

The google doodle for March 7, 2016, which would have been Georges Perec's 80th birthday.
I like the subtle erasing of the e -- referring to the book for which Perec is best known.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

What makes eating so satisfying? (Repost from 2013)

Looking forward to wine and crunchy snacks on the patio,
while the weather is still keeping us waiting for spring!
This post is linked to the weekly celebration of drinks at Elizabeth's blog. 

"With wine, there are actually two layers of flavour in the initial nosing. The first aromas to hit are those such as bubble gum, banana or butterscotch from the most volatile elements that, says Smith, 'have probably arisen from fermentation.' Then, after the glass is agitated to break the surface tension, a second set of volatiles is released. 'That's when you get the fruit aroma – raspberry, pear, melon,' Smith adds." (The Guardian) 

Several years ago, in 2013, I did a reading project about the sense of smell. I continue to find the study of "neurogastronomy," or how the brain processes aromas and tastes, a compelling one (documented here). I often look for new articles about ongoing research on the subject. However, today, I'd like to repeat a post that I wrote back then, beginning with a link to an article in the Guardian -- "What makes eating so satisfying?" This article summarized some of the research on how the brain and sensory organs work together to create flavor and enjoyment in eating and drinking. This fit very well with my reading project of that time. It also fits well with several books and articles I have read this year, in 2022.

The author had several things to say about the complex pleasure of smelling and tasting wine.When you sniff a wine, the article points out, you perceive the most volatile aromas first, followed by those that are stirred up when you swirl the contents of your glass.

From the article: With wine, it is easy to confuse the two separate
entities of taste and smell. Photograph: David Levene

The complexity of the taste receptors on the tongue isn't quite what one learned in the past: the old "map" of taste buds has been superseded by recent research, says the Guardian. "The current consensus is that tastebuds all over the mouth carry receptors for all the basic tastes, it's just that there are higher concentrations of those four tastes in their designated areas."

The following example illustrates the article's point that perceptions of flavors in fact reside in the brain and on memories and learned reactions, citing Professor Barry Smith of London University's Centre for the Study of the Senses:

It is easy to confuse the two separate entities of taste and smell, and the latter holds great sway over how something will taste when it reaches your mouth. For example, westerners associate the aroma vanilla with sweetness (which is a taste – we can't actually smell sweet) so strongly that if vanilla is added to food, we'll think it tastes sweeter than it really is. But connections such as this are, adds Smith, "learned by the brain, not by you". If you are given a drink that has traces of sugar and vanilla that you wouldn't detect if they were on their own, the two together will taste sweet to you. Unless you're from Asia, where vanilla tends to be associated with salty food. 

The role of the brain in creating flavor is the subject of an entire book that I have read more than once: Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters by Gordon Shepherd. The connection made me find this example especially interesting.

Enjoyment of food also depends on visual cues, especially color, and on the sounds one hears while eating, says the Guardian:

In 2008, the Oxford professor Charles Spence won the Ig Nobel prize for proving the importance of noise when eating crunchy snacks. The study showed that people think Pringles "taste" stale when they're less crunchy, even though the taste and smell remain normal. He then put headphones on his munching participants, amplifying the sounds of their own crunching. The louder the crunch, the fresher and crisper the Pringles were reported to be. This is why, says Smith, "they make bags of crisps so noisy, to get the brain to think: fresh fresh fresh." 

Quite a fascinating article!

Blog post © 2013, 2022 by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

“Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist”

“While it is always unwise to ignore biology, it is a simplification to attribute existing social roles to it. Modern knowledge of animal and human behavior indicates a more flexible arsenal of responses than is often assumed.” (p. 290)  

This warning echoes throughout the new book, Different, by primatologist Frans de Waal. Different contains a wonderful presentation of the author’s insights from a long career observing primates, and a long life making personal observations of his fellow humans (whom he never lets you forget are also primates). Simply stated, the essential topic is the old nature-nurture question as applied to human sex and gender, but backed up with the most recent studies of neuroscience; observations of chimps, bonobos, and other primates; and measures of actual human behavior (as opposed to questionnaires, which are subject to self-censorship).

A counter-theme of DeWaal's book is to correct many misconceptions in prior popular science writing. DeWaal constantly presents summaries of theories from earlier authors who claimed the authority of having made observations of male and female primate behavior. DeWaal does a wonderful job of showing the ways that many of these theories were flawed, sometimes because the primates under observation were in abnormal captive situations, and sometimes because the observers were extraordinarily biased by the expectations of male-centric human culture, especially among the early primatologists. Despite many years of improving observations, thanks in no small part to the women who entered the field, the picture has changed. Women scientists were especially influential in figuring out how to observe troops of wild chimpanzees and bonobos. 

DeWaal still finds the cultural blindness when observers claim to know about the inborn nature of behavior — both of us and our evolutionary relatives:

“Yet in academic discourse, nurture still often is the sole message. I’m at a loss as to why this is so, and I’ve tried to poke holes into this position by describing how males and females behave in our next of kin. Not that the conclusion is crystal clear, but at a minimum, it’s considerably richer than the cliché of the male monkey overlord that was foisted upon us during an era of limited knowledge. Human gender differences have enough commonalities with primate sex differences to clarify that we didn’t escape the forces of evolution.” (p. 314)

A young male chimpanzee, it turns out,
likes to play with toy vehicles and balls,
while girl chimps like dolls, and even use
wood sticks or other objects in the wild to 
imitate mothering behavior.

In part due to DeWaal's own primate studies and publications in the 1980s and 1990s, the contrasting sexual behavior of males and females in bonobo and chimpanzee societies have become iconic because chimps are often violent, including the killing of infants by male members of the troop, while bonobos live a nonviolent life full of relaxed sex acts between just about any combination of partners. The key observation in Different is that both the males and the females of various species have their own social order, in which both sexes cooperate, and that female leaders often exert a great deal of authority and leadership in the troops of animals. The alpha female often has the power to determine which male becomes or remains the alpha male of the troop.

Different offers many insights about numerous issues of sex and gender and what we can learn from our close primate relatives. For example, there's the question of whether differences in male and female behavior are innate or learned. Basically, the answer seems to be both. It's complicated, and I won't try to replicate the details of the discussion.

For another example, the question of male or female brains --

"The only point both sides agree on is that the brains of women and men are more similar than they are different. Animals play a critical role in this debate, as their brains develop independently from the human cultural environment. If their brains vary by sex—and they do—why should ours be gender neutral? A recent study of capuchin monkeys, for example, reported a remarkable divergence between male and female brains, which differ in cortical areas associated with higher-order functioning." (p. 316). 

The complexity of the topic of gender is important, and DeWaal offers a deep study of how our society deals with the differences between the sexes and how the differing roles of the sexes arise:

"Except for purely cultural embellishments—such as pink for girls and blue for boys—these roles integrate both nature and nurture. As a result, they are more resistant to change than you’d expect. In this day and age, some parents opt for a gender-neutral upbringing of their children to throw off what they see as society’s shackles. They refuse to reveal their child’s anatomy, sometimes not even informing the grandparents. They cut the hair of girls or let that of boys grow long, and they allow their children to dress any way they want, also if their son decides to go to school in a tutu. They do so in reaction to society’s gender stereotyping and the associated inequality. Note, however, that only one of the two words in gender inequality refers to a problem, and it’s not gender . No one would propose to fight racism by urging people of different races to try to look more alike. So why would we try to get rid of gender? Ultimately, such attempts fail to address the deeper problem of inequality. It blames the existence of genders for the moral and political shortcomings of society." (pp. 50-51). 

Many other topics of how animal behavior might provide hints about human behavior. In reading all the numerous and enlightening examples in Different, I was fascinated to learn how subtle and complex the communication and intelligence of primates can be, including observations of occasional female chimpanzees who exhibited male characteristics and behavior, but were treated normally by their fellow chimps.  

Other primates besides us humans also plan what they will do. In the author’s sketch, you can see a female with both a baby and a rock on her back. She's on the way to use the rock to crack some nuts that she finds good to eat. 

Even if you have read other popular science books about gender behavior and about aggression in primates and how it applies to human interactions, I strongly suggest that you read this one too. Maybe you'll remain convinced by the earlier authors, but DeWall will offer you some good material to think about in terms of the evolutionary heritage we share with these close relations of humanity:

"Outside science and sometimes within, a common belief seems to be that, while our bodies are a product of evolution, our minds are ours alone. Humans aren’t subject to the same laws of nature as animals, and we feel and think the way we do because we freely chose to. I consider this position a form of neo-creationism: it neither denies nor fully embraces evolution. As if evolution came to a screeching halt when it reached the human (and only the human) neck, thus leaving our lofty heads alone!"  (p. 316). 

My few quotations and descriptions of this book really can't capture how interesting it is!

Review © 2022 mae sander. Images taken from the book 

Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist by Frans DeWaal, published 2022.

 

Invertebrate Intelligence

"Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien."-- Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (p. 9). 

Peter Godfrey-Smith's book about his experiences with octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid (the cephalopods) combines the author's academic profession, philosophy, with his avocation: scuba diving. I don't read much philosophy -- in fact, I avoid it -- but I found this a readable and very informative combination of theory and observation.

It's likely that you've seen a Youtube video of an octopus escaping from the aquarium where it's supposed to live and sneaking into a nearby aquarium to eat the other captive fish. Thanks to stories about efforts to keep them in captivity, the cognitive capabilities of the octopus are almost legendary. The various species of octopus range greatly in size, and inhabit most of the world's oceans; the author's experiences are mainly in Australia and California, with reports from scientists in many other locations.

An octopus has eyes much like ours (lens, retina...) but also visual sensors are found all over their skin. Octopus blood is totally different chemically in the way it supplies cells with oxygen; an octopus can take in oxygen through the skin as well as the gills -- and an octopus has three hearts to circulate the blood. An octopus has a huge number of neurons; in fact, the neurons in octopus arms are almost independent of its brain. An octopus has no bones: it's almost entirely made of soft flesh, which has various consequences. Sometimes the octopus is solitary; sometimes octopus groups seem to live together. The social organization of the octopus isn't yet understood: it's challenging for humans to spend much time with them since scuba diving is pretty time-limited.

On octopus behavior Godfrey-Smith writes: "Octopuses, of at least some species, have an opportunistic, exploratory style of interaction with the world. They are curious, embracing novelty, protean in behavior as well as in body." (p. 98) He describes the ways that the octopus and close relative the cuttlefish can display dramatic patterns and camouflage on their skins: "They can be completely invisible to an observer— an observer looking for octopuses— just a few feet away." (p. 123). He provides a great deal of detail on how they use a number of different types of pigment cells and reflective cells in their skin, and speculates on what these displays might mean. This is incredibly fascinating:

"Intermediate between the clear cases of camouflage and of signaling are deimatic displays. These are dramatic patterns often produced while fleeing a predator. It’s hypothesized that they are an attempt to startle or confuse the foe— to suddenly look different, and weird, in a way that might lead the predator to pause or lose their bearings. Here, the display is supposed to be noticed, but it does not send information to a receiver. It is merely supposed to be confusing or disruptive." (p. 125).

Most fascinating of all is the possibility that the displays are not only for communication or for camouflage, but also a side effect of the animal's inner state:

"That is how I interpret the colors of many giant cuttlefish; they are an inadvertent expression of the animal’s inner processes. Such patterns include flares and surges of activity, and also subtler changes. If you look closely at the 'face' of a giant cuttlefish— the area between its eyes and down the first part of its arms— you will often see an ongoing murmur of very small color changes. Perhaps the machinery of color change is in an 'idling' state there." (p. 127).

"A large and friendly giant cuttlefish" --
one of the wonderful photos from Other Minds.

Other Minds describes cephalopod evolution, anatomy, and behavior in systematic terms, and attempts to analyze just what observed behavior tells us about the neuroanatomy and neural organization of these creatures. There's a certain amount of speculation about how the two different evolutionary paths -- ours and those of the cephalopods -- led to some type of cognition and intelligence with very different anatomical structures.

Can we look an octopus in the eye and seem to reach any sort of understanding with it? Well, just maybe. But Godfrey-Smith doesn't encourage over-interpretation of human-octopus encounters. Other Minds is a richly thought-provoking book! The conclusion:

"There are many reasons for us to appreciate and care for the oceans, and I hope this book has added one. When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all." (p. 204). 

A Thought-Provoking Book about Animal Capablities

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal explores the history and successes of a particular scientific endeavor called ethology: "the biological study of animal behavior" (p. 29). The book covers the state of the art of studying animal intelligence, non-human mental capacities, insights into animal minds from neuroscience, cognition and social interactions in various species, and other behaviors. Many of the observations made by de Waal and his colleagues over his long career in the field were in direct conflict with rigid assumptions about non-human characteristics held by earlier behaviorists.

Are We Smart Enough...  is full of descriptions of how the earlier researchers floundered in blind alleys while systematically excluding and mocking those who disagreed with their view of the limited nature of any creatures that were not humans. This is interesting, but what I found much more interesting was de Waal's many stories about the actual behavior of animals including a wide variety of species with numerous adaptations. He discusses the highly developed social life, social learning, and food-gathering methods of various species including chimps, monkeys, and corvids like crows and jackdaws, and even describes the clever hunting techniques of the octopus. We learn of many ways that these creatures make and use tools. We learn about their cognitive capacities, evidence of their consciousness and self-awareness, and several other characteristics once believed unique to humans. The question of consciousness, a problematic concept whether in humans or animals, is especially intriguing: from a conference on the subject de Waal quotes this: "The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness." (p. 234)

There are many fascinating descriptions of apes, small monkeys, and even birds creating tools from available materials like twigs. One type of monkey even employed a sharpened stick to kill a small animal in its hole and pull it out to eat it. Moreover, a number of different animals apparently foresee when they would need the tools, bringing them to a site where food may be available, and then using them to overcome challenging situations where food is hard to get. Here's an example of one of de Waal's very informative original illustrations about wild chimps using tools --

De Waal describes quite a bit about how chimps go about this elaborate activity, especially how young chips patiently watch their mothers breaking the hard nut shells. At first the young chips ineffectively imitate their able mothers in a skill that's not in fact that easy for a human to do; after several years they become adept. An important fact about this observation is that it occurs in wild chimps, not in captive individuals. Here's more:

"The Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa tracked the development of this skill at the 'factory,' an open space where apes bring their nuts to anvil stones and fill the jungle with a steady rhythm of banging noise. Youngsters hang around the hardworking adults, occasionally pilfering kernels from their mothers. This way they learn the taste of nuts as well as the connection with stones. They make hundreds of futile attempts, hitting the nuts with their hands and feet, or aimlessly pushing nuts and stones around. That they still learn the skill is a great testament to the irrelevance of reinforcement, because none of these activities is ever rewarded until, by about three years of age, the juvenile starts to coordinate to the point that a nut is occasionally cracked. It is only by the age of six or seven that their skill reaches adult level." (p. 80).

Exaggerated claims about animal capacities are in a way the other side of the extreme views of animal limitations. For example, de Waal provides much detail about the claim that the famous parrot Alex was really using language just as humans do. De Waal doesn't think Alex's ability was the same as human language. However, he respects the endeavors with Alex and other language-trained non-humans, saying:

"The immense effort to find language outside our own species has, ironically, led to a greater appreciation of how special the language capacity is. It is fed by specific learning mechanisms that allow a toddler to linguistically outpace any trained animal. It is in fact an excellent example of biologically prepared learning in our species. Yet this realization by no means invalidates the revelations we owe animal language research. That would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It has given us Alex, Washoe, Kanzi, and other prodigies who have helped put animal cognition on the map. These animals convinced skeptics and the general public alike that there is much more to their behavior than rote learning. One cannot watch a parrot successfully count up items in his head and still believe that the only thing these birds are good at is parroting." (pp. 112-113)

There's much more here than I can possibly cover in a brief review. A very thought-provoking book!

To quote the review in the New York Times by Jon Mooallem:

"We sometimes fall into what de Waal calls 'neo-creationist' thinking: We accept evolution but assume 'evolution stopped at the human head' — believing our bodies may have evolved from monkeys, but that our brains are their own miraculous and discrete inventions. But cognition must be understood as an evolutionary product, like any other biological phenomenon; it exists on a spectrum, de Waal argues, with familiar forms shading into absolutely alien-looking ones. He introduces what he calls the rule of 'cognitive ripples': We tend to notice intelligence in primates because it’s most conspicuous. It looks the most like our intelligence. But 'after the apes break down the dam between the humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, the floodgates often open to include species after species.'" (NYT Review, April 26, 2016)

"Tasty" by John McQuaid: A very satisfactory book!

A few things I learned from Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat by John McQuaid (published 2015) --

• The history of humans cultivating sugarcane -- "the world's primary source of refined sugar for thousands of years" -- began around 6000 BC in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. Extracting sugar from sugarcane required much cooperation from groups of humans. By 2500 years ago, sugar refining in India was becoming "an industrial art," and several forms of candy and sweetener were popular. I was especially fascinated by a myth about the Buddha being given sugar by a group of passing merchants, "a few weeks after his enlightenment." Enlightenment led to rejection of human cravings, and "thanks to his enlightened state, Siddhartha apparently ate the sweet treat with no trace of these cravings [for food, sex, money, and success], just simple enjoyment." (p. 110-111)

• Perception of hot tastes, especially capsicum chiles, involves a mysterious combination of pain and relief from pain leading to pleasure. The neuroscience of how people react to chilis, especially incredibly hot ones, is described along with the efforts of chili growers to develop the world's hottest chili pepper. The history given here of the century-long scientific effort to understand how tasting chilis work is really amazing, and although I've read about it before, like many chapters in the book it put information together in a most enlightening way. And, we learn: eating chilis might make one live a longer, healthier life. 

• The famous "map" of tastes on the tongue is entirely false. All taste buds have receptors for the five basic tastes -- sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. And maybe for fat and starch as well. The often-invoked theory that different regions of the tongue had receptors for different flavors was an error that unfortunately became widely accepted and repeated. The exact way that taste receptors work and their genetic basis is still being discovered.

• 

  Archaeologists at work at Gesher ben Ya'aquov --
  image from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  The earliest known kitchen dates from roughly 780,000 years ago. At Gesher ben Ya'aqov in the North of Israel archaeologists found that cave dwellers -- either homo sapiens or a pre-human species -- were cooking grains, acorns, other seeds, olives, fish, deer, elephants, and other foods. "Fire was only the most potent of a whole suite of tools used in food preparation: these early humans had a kitchen. One area was devoted to gutting fish. A space used for processing nuts had hammer-stones and pitted anvils that had been used as bases for smashing the shells of acorns before roasting them." (p. 33)

• Coffee combines a variety of bitter flavors, brought out by the exact method of selecting beans, roasting them, and extracting the flavors with high-pressure almost-boiling water from an espresso machine. You can separate a shot of espresso into three parts, which separately taste bad but together taste good, at least to coffee lovers! The chapter about bitter tastes, including coffee, explains how people's reaction to bitter flavors -- in coffee or anything else -- is complicated, involving genes, early experiences with food, cultural norms, and more. 

• Darwin described facial expressions for human reactions (name them) in a way that still has validity. Study of these, especially the "disgust" reaction offers insight into many food-related studies, reinforcing the idea that many human expressions are fairly consistent across ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds.

In reading about the senses of smell and taste, I've become very interested in topics covered by this book, such as neuro-gastronomy and related ways of describing human anatomy, perception, etc. But each book I have read recently has been more or less like the ones before. McQuaid's Tasty is different! I felt that I was learning something new on every page.

Rather than a more usual review, I thought I would just summarize the above interesting things I learned while reading. The book is full of fascinating topics; among them: fermentation and its role in food preparation; global warming and how it will change wine production; ways that the brain perceives tastes, and many more. The organization of the book is in fact very clear and coherent, and this isn't meant to be a summary!

"Flavor" by Bob Holmes

"We are the only species that seasons its food,
deliberately altering it with the highly flavored
plant parts we call herbs and spices." (p. 4)

"The notion that you can somehow “taste the soil” in a wine is completely false. Grape vines take up only water and simple nutrients like nitrogen, potassium, and calcium from the soil. They make all their more complex biomolecules— including the flavor volatiles— in-house. To put it more bluntly, none of the volatile molecules that determine a wine’s flavor come directly from the soil. ... Instead, a vineyard’s soil affects flavor indirectly, by altering how the vine grows and, especially, how quickly the grapes ripen." -- Bob Holmes. Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense (p. 216- 217). 

Flavor and how it's perceived: two fascinating concepts. Recently, neuroscientists and other researchers have been making remarkable progress in understanding our sensory perception of the volatile molecules in food and drink -- the elements that make flavors vary. Tomatoes, ripe strawberries, fake strawberry flavor, wine grapes, bitter vegetables, seared steaks, artificial chicken stock, and other foods are the subjects of Canadian journalist Bob Holmes' reporting.

As illustrated in the quote above, Holmes explores some of the myths about what we taste and how these tastes get into our food. I choose his discussion of wine -- only a small part of his book -- to illustrate how many revealing details he presents. His explanation of the actual role that soil quality plays in creating wine-grape flavor is something I've been hoping to learn for a long time. The same clone of a particular type of grapes does indeed yield wines of varied flavors -- the vines experience different degrees of stress which affect their sugar content and their flavor elements (mainly volatile chemicals).

The way the grapes are handled during and after the harvest is another surprising source of variation. Here's another quote that shows how this works:

"If you pluck a grape off the vine and chew it, you won’t notice much passion fruit flavor, because the thiol molecules haven’t formed yet— only their odorless precursors are present. The thiols themselves form during fermentation, as the yeast attack the precursors and split off thiol molecules. Rough handling of the grapes causes them to accumulate more of the precursors, so machine-harvested grapes yield wines with about ten times as much thiol as handpicked ones. This, incidentally, may be part of the reason that New Zealand sauvignon blanc, which is generally mechanically harvested, tends to have a much more pronounced passion fruit flavor than French sauvignon blanc, which is usually hand harvested. Even trucking the grapes from vineyard to winery leads to more thiols in the finished wine." (pp. 217-218). 

And finally, he writes about fermentation: "different yeasts can yield very different wines from the same juice. Winemakers are very aware of this, and put a great deal of thought into their choice of yeast." (p. 218).

Through most of the book, Holmes explains how human sensory apparatus enables people's widely varying response to foods. He shows not only the role of our taste buds and our olfactory system, but also other perceptions of food like how we hear it crunch and how it appears on a plate, and how the stinging and burning of chilies is perceived with our heat-and-touch sensors. He reports on a variety of studies that highlight the role of the context where we eat in how we respond to tastes -- even ambient lighting and noise.

The role of genes that control perception of volatile chemicals (the natural or artificial substances that account for varied flavors) seems to be a critical part of how human variation occurs. Genetics of taste is a study that's in its early stages and in some ways offers more confusion than clarity about how individual responses differ, according to Holmes' account of current research. "Clearly," writes Holmes, "the link among genes, taste perceptions, and actual food choices is not a simple one." (p. 41).

The difficulty neuroscientists encounter in analyzing the genetic component of taste arises for at least two reasons. One is that each person's experience with foods, especially in childhood, creates individual reactions to the various chemicals, so two individuals, despite having the same genes, can react differently anyway. Even so-called super-tasters don't all have the same response to the tastes they perceive. Further, the working of the taste buds and olfactory receptors differ for various taste elements in foods. For example, receptors for the so-called fifth taste, umami, are different from those for salt or bitter taste: "Our umami receptors max out at low intensity, so we’re physically unable to experience very umami in the same way we can taste very salty or very bitter simply by piling on the salt or brewing a cup of extra-strong espresso." (p. 25).

Holmes interviewed a very wide variety of experts including neuroscientists, agronomists, flavor scientists in commercial labs, and wine growers, among others. I have read several other books on the general topic of how humans perceive flavor and taste, including several books that were written by his interview subjects, or books that interviewed the same sources. As a result, I found some of the chapters a bit boring as I had read the same material before, often in much the same form. But on the whole it's a really great book, and its updates on the current state of science and technology of food, challenges to chefs who want to apply this science, and overall understanding of flavor and taste are wonderful!

Everything you didn't want to know about food

I've occasionally written briefly about issues of ethical food, safe food, healthy food, and quality in food. Grub Street/New York Magazine writers Nick Tabor and James D. Walsh have now put together every possible objection to a just about every food I can think of: "The Neurotic Eater's Grocery List." Don't read it if you are squeamish about animal welfare, environmental destruction, or dangerous microorganisms in your food. The authors also include a few remarks about politics reflected in the grocery aisles.

Here are a few notable quotes from the article:

• Eggs farms are true hell.
• Salmon are drug addicts.
• Scallops try to escape. Clams cower in fear. Oysters don’t want to die.
• Octopuses are geniuses.
• Slaves harvested your shrimp.
• However bad you imagine beef is — it’s worse.
• Your banana habit might be supporting terrorism.
• Cabbage can hear you eating it.
• Potatoes are Republican.
• Chocolate is made by child slaves.

The authors don't even mention pesticides on produce until the end of the section about fruit and vegetables, when they say:

"But really, pesticides bathe just about everything. About 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides are dumped on crops in the U.S. annually, and the farmers exposed to them have higher rates of cancer of all kinds: leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and soft-tissue sarcoma as well as cancers of the skin, lip, stomach, brain, and prostate."

Is that paranoid enough for you? Read it and weep, or maybe read it and gag.

The Senses

Grenouille, the central character in Patrick Süskind's bestseller Perfume, is missing something: something needed to make him fully or even minimally human. As a baby, born to an unmarried fishwife in mid-18th century Paris, he's rejected by his wet nurse. She perceives that physically what he's missing is any odor. "He's possessed by the devil," she says.

The priest who is responsible for the baby responds: "Impossible! It is absolutely impossible for an infant to be possessed by the devil.... Does some evil stench come from him?"

The nurse replies, "He doesn't smell at all." The priest demands details. She explains that the baby Grenouille doesn't smell "like human children ought to smell," which after quite a bit of questioning on the part of the priest she explains thus:

"They smell good all over. ... Their feet, for instance, they smell like a smooth, warm stone -- or no, more like curds... or like butter, like fresh butter.... And their bodies smell like ... like a griddle cake that's been soaked in milk. And their heads... smell best of all. [The crown of a baby's head] smells like caramel, it smells so sweet, so wonderful.... And that's how little children have to smell -- and no other way." (p. 12-14)

Odors, aromas, smells, stinks, miasmas, and above all perfumes dominate the intensely vivid descriptions of the book. It begins with all the stinks of the streets, markets, tanneries, stables, and waterways of Paris in that era, as the odorless baby and then child develops into a strange, unlikeable, and self-absorbed person. Having no smell himself, Grenouille nevertheless has a heightened sense of smell, a phenomenal memory for aromas and odors, and a vaguely inhuman way of reacting to them.

But Grenouille isn't just a man without his own natural smell, he's a man without humanity. In an effort to compensate for his missing human odor, he desperately apprentices himself to a perfumer, where he demonstrates remarkable abilities to create pomades, perfumes, elixirs, and other cosmetic preparations. He learns to capture aromas from both the inanimate (like a metal door knob) and the living (like a puppy). However, with a cold-blooded lack of compassion or any feeling at all, he grasps that it's necessary to kill in order to capture the aroma he finds most compelling -- that of a beautiful girl on the threshold of womanhood. The last part of the book turns into a horror story as he becomes an increasingly inhuman serial killer, and ends with a surprising and dreadful conclusion.

So many editions of Perfume in this screen shot from google images suggest how very popular it's been since publication in 1985.

Recent books I've read about the neuroscience of the senses of smell and taste and how the brain processes them often mention Süskind's book, which was published in 1985, at about the same time as the earliest modern studies of the subject. Süskind's descriptions of the mechanisms of smell are very interesting in this context. Grenouille can recall every smell he ever sensed. He can distinguish individual aromas in blended perfumes or streets full of multiple smells. These abilities seem to go far beyond what scientific tests show actual humans are capable of. 

Scientific studies usually focus on the interaction of smell and taste, what one author calls "how the brain creates flavors."  Süskind's character seems to find the taste of food unrelated to the complex and well-developed sense of smell that distinguishes him from other humans. In one long section, Grenouille lives as a recluse in a mountain cave, during which time he eats lizards and other vermin with no sense of disgust. Maybe his name -- meaning frog in French -- is relevant to this part of the tale. Other than his having been a very greedy baby (another fault found by the wet nurse) and despite his constant obsession with aromas, there's little about food, flavors, or cooking in the book at all -- only smells.

"The Emperors of Chocolate"

Yesterday night: culinary book group again. Book selection: The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret world of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner.

Agreed by the six participants who had read it: the book was great!


Also agreed: the Reese's PB Cups (brought by one of us) were a great way to kick off the discussion.


Reese's Cups and Reese's pieces, Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Hershey Bars, M&Ms, Milky Ways, and many of the other candy bars from these corporations are their best-known products, but we were also surprised to learn that Mars makes pet food and Hershey is a major producer of pasta.

From Time

Any mention of candy bars anywhere is a big deal: in Time magazine this week, there's an article on "The 13 Most Influential Candy Bars of All Time." The Hershey bar, Milky Way, and Snickers, as featured in our book, are all on the list, along with more obscure bars like "Chicken Dinner" which was available from the 1920s to 1960s, with vintage pictures of some of their original labels. This perpetual relevance made Brenner's work all the more fun to read.

This book is a work of profoundly important research, as the author was allowed to interview people and read documents that are now off-limits to journalists or researchers. The author describes culinary history, social history, economic history, food manufacturing history, and more -- and makes them all very appealing to read about. The Emperors of Chocolate is around 15 years old, and we all would have liked to know more about the recent past (some of us googled it) and about the larger chocolate industry. No doubt, this is a classic book.

A few of the things we liked about the book:

• The historical coverage of the founding of each of the two biggest players in the history and present of candy bars -- Mars and Hershey's. We read how candy making went from small-batch, local production to mass production and mass consumption. Detailed descriptions of the experiments that went into chocolate processing and creating the flavors and colors of the candy were fascinating. Attitudes of European chocolate makers and cognoscenti towards American chocolate are also interesting: mainly, they are contemptuous of the sour flavor of Hershey's milk chocolate. But the book stays pretty much on the topic of the two American dynasties.
• The personalities and family dynamics of Mars, still a privately held corporation and Hershey, long dominated by Milton Hershey. We were intrigued by the horrible relationship between Forrest Mars, Sr. and his sons and daughter who inherited the company. Also by the relationship of Milton Hershey with his parents and his immediate employees, and his legacy. Though public, much of the Hershey corporate stock is owned by a foundation that he created, which runs a school for orphans or children with difficult family situations.
• Rivalry of the two companies over time. This story of business and adverising is also compelling. They vied with each other to supply chocolate for the troops in World War II; they cooperated in the creation of M&Ms (the first M is for Mars but the second is for Murrie, a Hershey executive's son -- hired then driven out of Mars when the family wanted to compete rather than take advantage of Hershey), and then they rivaled each other for popularity and for shelf space in supermarkets and anywhere candy is sold. Still do!
• The blindness of the Mars family to modern business practice because the owners are secretive and neurotic, and some of the slips at Hershey's because they weren't aware of the need to promote their product. Above all, we liked the story of the Mars family's refusal to let M&Ms be used in the film "ET" -- instead as everyone knows, ET ate Reese's Pieces, a Hershey's product, which were just becoming popular and received a huge sales boost from the film.

Next time we are reading Wine and War, which describes the events of World War II in France through the eyes of wine growers, wine merchants, and other French men and women in the wine trade, beginning in about 1939 and proceeding historically as the Nazis conquered France. I've read it before and wrote about here: Wine and War. As always I'm looking forward to another lively discussion.

How we smell and taste

A recent article in the Guardian -- "What makes eating so satisfying?" -- summarized some of the research on how the brain and sensory organs work together to create flavor and enjoyment in eating and drinking. This fit very well with my recent project to learn more about human responses to aromas and smells as I have been writing here.

The author had several things to say about the complex pleasure of smelling and tasting wine.When you sniff a wine, the article points out, you perceive the most volatile aromas first, followed by those that are stirred up when you swirl the contents of your glass.

From the article: With wine, it is easy to confuse the two separate
entities of taste and smell. Photograph: David Levene 

The complexity of the taste receptors on the tongue isn't quite what one learned in the past: the old "map" of taste buds has been superseded by recent research, says the Guardian. "The current consensus is that tastebuds all over the mouth carry receptors for all the basic tastes, it's just that there are higher concentrations of those four tastes in their designated areas."

The following example illustrates the article's point that perceptions of flavors in fact reside in the brain and on memories and learned reactions, citing Professor Barry Smith of London University's Centre for the Study of the Senses:

It is easy to confuse the two separate entities of taste and smell, and the latter holds great sway over how something will taste when it reaches your mouth. For example, westerners associate the aroma vanilla with sweetness (which is a taste – we can't actually smell sweet) so strongly that if vanilla is added to food, we'll think it tastes sweeter than it really is. But connections such as this are, adds Smith, "learned by the brain, not by you". If you are given a drink that has traces of sugar and vanilla that you wouldn't detect if they were on their own, the two together will taste sweet to you. Unless you're from Asia, where vanilla tends to be associated with salty food. 

The role of the brain in creating flavor is the subject of an entire book that I read in the course of my project: Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters by Gordon Shepherd. The connection made me find this example especially interesting.

Enjoyment of food also depends on visual cues, especially color, and on the sounds one hears while eating, says the Guardian:

In 2008, the Oxford professor Charles Spence won the Ig Nobel prize for proving the importance of noise when eating crunchy snacks. The study showed that people think Pringles "taste" stale when they're less crunchy, even though the taste and smell remain normal. He then put headphones on his munching participants, amplifying the sounds of their own crunching. The louder the crunch, the fresher and crisper the Pringles were reported to be. This is why, says Smith, "they make bags of crisps so noisy, to get the brain to think: fresh fresh fresh." 

Quite a fascinating article!