Author Archives: Adrian Hornsby

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How Cognitive Illusions Can Make You A Better Dancer

Posted on 17 Apr 2012 by Adrian Hornsby

The beautiful thing about Daniel Margulies & Chris Sharp’s “Untitled”, which shows a brain listening to the Rite of Spring (see recent post), is the way the movements of Stravinsky’s music, and the floods of purling colours, seem to harmonise in time. It is almost as though they are dancing with each other. A lull in the music comes, and a cool blue suffuses the brain. A strident chord hits — and red chrysanthemums burst open across the cortical surface. And yet the opposite can happen too. Busy red activity can accompany a slower passage — as though the brain is jiggling from foot to foot in anticipation of the next fortissimo. And equally, a furious musical release can provoke a neural stillness, as though the sheer intensity of it flattens the brain out, and compresses it into a single state of pure blue.

The truth is, much of this is likely to be a cognitive illusion — Continue reading →

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Untitled (The effect of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Kant’s 3rd Critique on the human brain: a functional magnetic resonance imaging approach)

Posted on 07 Apr 2012 by Adrian Hornsby

from Daniel Margulies & Chris Sharp

The brain really is a piece of work. You pump in a supply of glucose and oxygen, and the craziest stuff comes streaming out. Amongst these streams are the works of Stravinsky, Kant’s Critiques, and more recently, this piece by Daniel Margulies and Chris Sharp. The film is a continuous fMRI scan of a brain listening to the Rite of Spring and pondering Kant — showing the floods and ebbs of cortical activity as the music rushes through it. Very suggestive, very beautiful.

“Untitled” is currently on show at the Wellcome Trust as part of their exhibition Brains: The Mind as Matter. If you are in London and haven’t been: go! It is a fascinating and delightful show, featuring: a brainbow mouse, a time lapse film of a chick’s brain spinning itself into existence, old medical movies of brain surgery, casts of eminent brains, trepanned skulls, anatomical drawings, phrenological tools, and much much more. Entry is free.

Posted in Reflections from elsewhere | Leave a comment

The Good Analyst

Posted on 08 Mar 2012 by Adrian Hornsby

good analyst noun 1. a person who analyses social or environmental good, 2. a person who is good at doing this, 3. an analyst who is a force for good (cf. good Samaritan, good witch)

The Good Analyst is a new book about how a better understanding of social value can create a new set of relationships between society, money, and people’s access to an ok life. Money can be difficult to move around in society — getting stuck sometimes in the wrong places, or being imagined to be somewhere where it turns out later it’s not (or not any more). In the social sector these difficulties are often compounded by money not really knowing where to go, or how to be effective. But there is a potential lead. As the sector is really about impact — meaning the social or environmental good that comes from somebody doing something — by looking at impact, it is possible to send signals to money as to how to move. And so put more distinctly, the book is about how analysing social impact can inform and guide the flow of capital through the social-purpose universe to the places where it can do most good.

The Good Analyst presents Continue reading →

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Sonnet for Sylvia

Posted on 24 Jan 2012 by Adrian Hornsby

by Martin Lewis

I frame this verse, in somewhat antique style,
For thee, Miranda open-eyed and bright,
The sole lady of thine enchanted isle
Now Prospero hath sailed into the night:

And both to him, and thee, I offer thanks
For that haven of fellowship and art
He conjur’d up on swift Sequana’s banks
By Notre Dame, Lutetia’s very heart.

In thy heart also may there ever dwell
The humane passion that thy father proved,
And strength besides, to live that passion well
And love the calling as he also loved.

Fight, like Sir George, with reason and with rhyme
The dragons of this calibanic time!

Posted in Reflections from elsewhere | 1 Comment

What Zen Is This Koan?

Posted on 15 Sep 2011 by Adrian Hornsby

Reading in a book, I came across the following Zen koan:

Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply raised a finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.

Do you get it? I don’t know if I get it. How does the boy become enlightened? What does the visitor make of it all? What does the master do with the finger?

Zen koans are famous for simultaneously suggesting and resisting meaning. This one however I cracked. Through a process of ‘inductive leapfrog-thinking’ I realised there had been an error in the translation. The translator had consistently rendered “raised a finger” for what in the original Japanese had in fact been “gave the finger”. Thus the true koan reads:

Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply gave people the finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy gave him the finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei gave him the finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.

Makes much better sense. Still, not very Zen.

Posted in Haha | 2 Comments

Khamsin Coming: Arab Spring to London Bloom

Posted on 19 Aug 2011 by Adrian Hornsby

The seriousness of the recent riots across England has inspired a period of serious reflection. The search for the reasons why has looked instinctively to deep-level problems, with heavy-faced politicians and commentators alike theorising over social deprivation, financial exclusion, latent criminality, pervasive greed, moral atrophy, heinous influences, bad grammar, poor parenting, the enervation of authority, the erosion of community, unemployment, recession, and the all-encompassing concept of a broken society. While these represent various political and ideological positions, what is striking is that almost all the explanations on offer are characterised by a brooding introspection (that the problem must be within us), and a focus on long-term issues. The sense is that, be it through poverty or the corrupting touch of welfare, Britain has been grinding darkly year after year toward this dire and profoundly inevitable conclusion. Fittingly this is to be met, as we are beginning to see in the court results coming through, with the handing out of equally grinding and long-term custodial sentences.

The most natural response to something extremely surprising, as the rioting indeed was, is to declare immediately that it was always going to happen and a long time coming. It’s an emotional, if rather irrational way to recapture our balance after taking a destabilising hit. We feel we need to reinstate big causal links, and so start drawing them out from the richness of history. Continue reading →