Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot, by Richard Restak (3.5)

Finished this last night (March 30). (and I actually finished Faulkner’s The Mansion before that on Friday night, March 28; so that’s coming soon.)

First of all, is it just me, and if so what does this say about my brain, but I didn’t find any passage explaining the title in the whole book. Did I miss something? I mean, I get it. Both Mozart and fighter pilots have practiced their skills and so developed their brains to be quite different from each other; the brain is very plastic and has the potential for one or more of a vast array of “intelligences”... That’s what he meant, right? Or did is there a big old paragraph right at the
front that compares the right/left hemispheres of the brain to Mozart/fighter pilots?

Well, anyway.

The book is about understanding how your brain works in order to better facilitate learning and memory. There are many exercises he mentions to improve your memory and help you from being scatter-brained or attention-deprived (so just about all the current generation could sign up, especially me). There are exercises to use one part of the brain and then the other. etc.

The most illuminating thing for me in the whole book was the revelation that, if your brain is “tired” from too much reading, say, and you need a break, then what you need a break from is not just the book/screen but language in general, especially written. It’s a certain part of your brain that’s tired. Switching the tv on and watching a soap opera isn’t going to help. You’re still listening to language (albeit corny melodramatic language). (That would be like, if your eyes got too tired to read anymore so you decided to watch tv. You’re not giving your eyes a break that way.) What you really need to do is to close your eyes and listen to some music (without lyrics), or maybe do a puzzle, or, in short, use another part of your brain and let the language part catch
up with whatever it’s processing.

A break of just five to fifteen minutes doing something else, using a different part of your brain, and you probably can go back to reading and feel fine again. (Unless you were reading something really hairy, in which case, maybe you should take an hour off!)

A related bit of information was that there are two types of tired: one type of tired (mostly just kind of drowsy) should be dealt with different that another (cranky and grouchy). If you are getting cranky, the only thing that is going to help is to sleep (or, at least, lying down with your eyes closed and relaxing in that way for about 20 minutes, just as if you took a nap).

Another important thing I learned (which I already knew but this put it into perspective) is that you need to use all these different parts of your brain, not just once in a while, but all the time. Take time to listen to music, do crossword puzzles, play chess, play a musical instrument, do some exercise that requires balance; without getting technical, learn what different parts of your brain do and then make sure to exercise all the different parts of your brain.

Being “smart” or intelligent is not just about learning geometry or speaking 12 languages. There are all kinds of smart, and, the more you practice each part of your brain, the better your overall brain will function. This is because when you learn something or reinforce something you’ve learned through practice, then your brain is stimulated to create new synaptic pathways and reinforce old pathways, not only in that specific part of the brain, but in the entire brain.

Play on your strengths in life, to be sure. But also try and practice those areas in which you consider yourself to be average at best and weak at worst. Your goal is not to heroically overcome these weaknesses, but to encourage your brain to build more pathways and make things overall easier for you, even those things you’re not so good at. Never good at band? Try to pick up a musical instrument now. Try something different. Planning to go to Hawaii some day? Who knows? The ukulele might be your thing. But it’s just for fun, for a change, for the betterment of your brain.

Which reminds me that I am woefully behind in learning how to paint, how to play chess, how to speak Russian, how to make a birdhouse, how to balance with both feet on the ground much less do yoga or tai chi… But now that I know how all of this could work together to my advantage, I’m going to look at my schedule and see how I can revamp it to my benefit. Hell, I might even get something done.

He (a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and clinical professor of neurology) advises keeping a journal. I’m not great at that, although I have become much better since I started 43things (I’m on LiveJournal). You can sit down and look at an entry from, say, two years ago, and what you’re actually doing is looking at you two years ago and how you were thinking. Just reading the entry will jog your memory about other things that were happening in your life then. Also, it helps you to keep track of your ideas and how they evolve over time.

He also recommends doing a reading journal. _grins Yes, like mine, which I never thought of as a reading journal but that’s a great name for it. I have to say, I hadn’t really thought about it, but writing my thoughts down about what I read and reviewing what I read has lead me to be a more critical and involved reader overall. He recommends wide reading and also reading more slowly the important things, maybe reading them aloud or listening to audio recordings of the books. And I have to say, that listening to the audio lectures I have for the last two years or so has slowed down my reading so that I’m not just skimming through everything.

Ok well I shouldn’t just tell you the whole book; and I haven’t, I assure you. Restak explains the workings of the brain quite simply, with ideas and exercises to help you better develop your brain, and with resources at the end of the book to help you even further. It’s a quick read at 200 pages, and I enjoyed it.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists

The Trial, Franz Kafka. 4.5

I finished this one a while ago, actually. 2nd of March.

This is a hard one to review… it seems so much has already been said about it. In fact, the introduction basically states that nothing more could possibly be added to the conversation revolving around The Trial, because it has been analyzed and discussed for so long among so many people, and because the novella introspectively analyzes itself.

Joseph K, a high-ranking bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find that he’s under arrest. We never learn what the charge is, and neither does Joseph K. Yet he can live out his daily life (going to work, etc) as normal, and the court is very polite about accomodating his schedule as to when he needs to show up for interrogations. This entire court system, which is separate from the normal court system, is such an underfunded sprawling bureaucracy that the lower courts don’t know anything about the higher courts, the court magistrates confuse one defendant for another, and the entire process is carried out in the attics of the poorest tenant housing in the city, where the air itself is unbreathable.

All very symbolic of course.

Joseph K. progresses from completely dismissing the importance of any such trial (seeing the state of the courts), to gradually becoming so obsessed (and mesmerized) with it and the special court system that he willingly, almost mindlessly, accepts the fate they hand out as inevitable and desirable. Perhaps it is because they are so quiet and polite about it, while they are leading him to a barbaric end.

An exploration of the absurdity of the individual’s conformity to culture, and yes of life itself (the major statement), this book examines the main character as ruthlessly as it does the society.

Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes once drew a comic that would sum up Joseph K. Imagine Calvin here as Joseph:

You get the idea.

The bizarre and astonishing description of the trial procedure (what we can ever know of it, told through the character of Joseph K’s lawyer and also a portrait painter of the judges), (which sadly presages terrors in the real world later) is, unbelievable but true, completely outdone by a parable told by the court’s parishioner (since WHEN do courts have their own affiliated parishioners?), which could make one severely question the idea of blind faith in anything.

This is a book that will leave you thinking for a long, long while, and have you rereading it again and again to see if possibly you can get a better grasp on it this time around. You never will; it’s absurdity, and Kafka’s statement on the point of life.

See more progress on: read all the books on my lists