The Last Word On Nothing

A place is set at a lavishly decorated table. The drape of the tablecloth is just so. Light twinkles off fine crystal goblets. Two nicely-dressed people take their seats. One of them pours wine into his companion’s goblet and passes it to her. She takes the cup, takes a sip, and smiles.

Cut. The elaborate lighting and multiple cameras power down. The actors get up and change out of their costumes. The set is disassembled. This wasn’t the opening scene of a 2 hour rom-com. This was the movie.

That’s because this film wasn’t intended for human consumption. It was more like a puppet show for AI.

AI has learned a lot – enough to make six-fingered-but-otherwise-realistic photos and give you plausible answers in the medium of text (which should always be fact checked!). But it has no idea what any of this stuff means, as you probably know from reading the reams of AI coverage that has proliferated in the past year. It hasn’t got a clue about the semantic meaning of images of cats or ladies or cat ladies or a treatise on Boulangerism in 19th century France or “what is a Christie Aschwanden“. That’s no obstacle to spitting out confident content, though, and because it has been trained on such a colossal amount of data, it intuits which word to put in front of another word mostly correctly, the way you might put one foot in front of the other to shuffle around a pitch black room. Occasionally it steps on a rake.

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Sometimes a photo from the past calls out, demanding a story. In this case, no one is left to tell it. My mom (right) died in February 2006, tragically of a brain tumor at 67 years old, and her older sister (left) followed in 2010, her heart failing her (plus, dementia). Here they are, the sisters, Roberta and Judith, a moment of youth captured. I have so many questions. Did they really both get root canals at the same time? Did they have a spat that included punches or slaps? (I doubt it.) Is one making fun of the other’s dental-related misery? If so, I’d guess my mom is the jokester, the actress, knowing their personalities. But oh, those faces, both so serious. So moody in black and white. Maybe the root canal story is the right one.

Which of my grandparents took the photo? I’m assuming it was one of them. Were they smiling at the potential silliness of it, or feeling someone’s actual pain? Was it the girls’ idea to pose in this way?

The perfectly curled hair—I can picture those little pink bristled rollers getting too hot in that steamy plastic dome that sat on every girl’s bathroom counter in the ‘50s. And the neat brows, smoothed just so with a tiny brush. My mom’s shirt buttoned all the way up against her long, white neck. Earlobes soft and clean, no jewels. One ring apiece. And those pleated fabric ice packs with the screw-off top, cubes inside crunching against one another as the user shifted it around in search of a colder arrangement.

I’m a thrift store junkie and often there’s a box at the register filled with old family photos, dumped by the generation who can’t name the subjects anymore. Usually they are the really formal portraits, everyone coiffed and serious as they held steady for the countdown, and you can’t help but feel a little sad at where they ended up. I wonder about those images, with so many tales behind them. I’ve heard of people hanging them in their homes as “adopted families,” naming each person, renewing them with made-up histories. This is Uncle Fred, in sales, a bit of a drinker but good-hearted, and Aunt Martha, who loved to tell an obvious fib or two at the holiday table to make the kids laugh. That’s kind of sweet.

I’ve never been tempted to take those images home. But I think if I saw this one in one of those boxes, I’d snap it up. The dramatic sisters, in the bathroom, posing, their lives ahead of them, a story between them.

Whenever someone ‘swears by’ an obscure vegetable or exercise practice for longevity or [shudder] ‘wellness’, I assume it occupies a ritualistic place in their lives. Magical thinking is a powerful phenomenon, and just as placebo effects are stronger when the ‘treatment’ involves something invasive like a sham surgery (as opposed to a sugar pill), health trends that involve bizarre behavior (rather than, say, walking more), attract fanaticism. That skepticism has largely immunized me against kooky health trends.

That is, until I started flashing obnoxious lights into my own eyes.

Alzheimer’s runs through my family, and while there are various risk factors you can work on, our most recent dementia sufferer has none of them (save for the genetic component). The idea that those pathologies would already be amassing in my brain by now unsettles me. Though drug treatments are finally gaining a tiny bit of traction after decades of failure, prevention is far more appealing.

That’s where the work of MIT’s Li-Heui Tsai found me. Her research is based on the observation that gamma brain waves in Alzheimer’s patients (particularly those around a 40Hz frequency) are much less powerful than in healthy people. The neurons don’t fire as much in synchrony. So it would stand to reason that whatever gamma waves are for would be impaired.

Of course, in these degenerative diseases basically everything falls apart eventually, but the gamma waves are compromised very early.

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For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of was to try to soak up some other people’s bravery. So a couple of months ago, I asked our Ann for her recommendations of favorite essayists.

She recommended Montaigne: “I haven’t read him in a while but I loved him,” she wrote. “He was so smart and funny and open.” I trundled off to a used bookstore and picked up a copy of The Essays: A Selection, translated by M.A. Screech. I’m only about three quarters of the way through the book, but I’ve been taking notes and sending them to Ann as I go. She suggested they might make a decent post, strung together. So, in the provisional spirit of Montaigne, I share them with you, dear LWON readers.

10.29.23

To philosophize is to learn how to die

I read this essay while waiting for a big vegetable lasagna to bake. I was in the middle of Montaigne’s exhaustive list of ways to die (killed by a bump from a pig!) and his instructions to continuously keep death at the forefront of our minds, when the timer beeped.

I went to pull the lasagna out and dumped the whole thing upside down onto the oven door, barely missing my feet. After screaming for help, then scooping the charred noodles back into the dish, I went back to the couch and read the following: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.” The lasagna looked terrible but tasted great.

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I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve learned.

[Ed. note: This was first published 10/29/2012. Helen is a pretty redoubtable learner and has certainly been to more museums on more continents and learned more stuff since. But this will do for now.]

1. Don’t try to see everything.

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These thoughts on sneezing first ran back in October 2015, and I loved the responses. Feel free to share more examples of achoo styles from friends and family! It’s always a good time for a robust sneeze.

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When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah!

Seventeen times. He was very consistent. (He says he’s now down to seven.)

By sneeze number two, tissues were required—and employed, if time permitted, in between explosions.

My husband, meanwhile, sneezes so loudly and with such force that I can’t help but shriek. I beg for a warning but never get one. Even the second and third ones rattle me. They cause our old Jindo dog to drop belly-flat to the floor in fear. John is a big guy, with big lungs, who doesn’t hold back. So he sneezes larger than most.

Sneezes are like fingerprints—we each have our own. But the physiology of a sneeze is the same for all of us. The trigger is usually dust or some other irritant trapped in the mucous lining of the upper respiratory tract. Cranial nerve endings fire off a message to the brain stem telling the lungs to take a deep breath. Your eyes and vocal cords close, then air explodes forth from the mouth and nose at upwards of 90 miles per hour.

There’s no way to look cool while sneezing.

Scientists call sneezing sternutation. Some of us sternutate (no, I’m not sure you can use it as a verb) when we look at the sun—called photic sneezing (I do that). A sneeze may build as we tweeze a hair from the eyebrow or nose (been there). Others achoo during an orgasm, apparently (so far, nope). Those responses—and others—are a bit of a mystery, but faulty wiring in the brain is likely to blame.

Do sneezes match personalities? A lot of loud (may I say obnoxious?) people are, after all, giant sneezers, and we all have that friend who really holds back, letting squeak out just a tiny, high-pitched choo at the very end. My mother did that, at least for sneeze number one. Any follow-up sneezes had force, and the same phonetic as (though less drama than) my brother’s: ah-YESH-ah. They were much like her, a seemingly polite and gentle woman who might without warning start a whipped-cream fight at the dinner table or make a joke about “taking the bull by the balls.” In a church.

From a very unscientific poll (thanks, Facebook) I learned that allergy sneezes tend to be harder to control than other types, many people sneeze in twos, and sneezing politely into the arm is far from universal. (Australians and Indians, according to friends, aren’t germ-phobic like we Americans; they share sneeze product widely. Sometimes right in your face.) A pregnant friend has decided that letting it all out is better for the fetus than holding back. Who knows if that’s true.

My friends seem to like sneezing. Here’s how some of them do it:

Often its loud-knock-the-china-off-the-wall sneezes…and out of the blue. Scares the bejeezus out of the mister.

Mouth sneeze, not through the nose. One sneeze, rarely multiples. All out. [A useful tidbit: Ear doctor taught me to suppress post-surgical sneezing (so as to avoid jostling delicate ossicular chain reconstruction) by snorting forcefully out through my nose, alternating with panting hard out through my mouth. Works pretty well.]

Face in elbow and let ‘er fly. Sleeve stops the splash damage and muffles the sound.

Definitely through the mouth. No hand gyrations or exciting body movements. Volume is excessive.

Once sneezed very delicately and got such an amazed and positive response that I now actually out of habit sneeze that way. It is about the only time I ever get called, “cute”.

My sneeze? Like my mom, I might go minimal at first but then I transition to a fuller more satisfying outburst. Why hold back? There’s obviously something in there that wants out. If needed, though, I can sneeze almost imperceptibly, with no product whatsoever. I’m pretty proud of that.

Meanwhile, the appropriate response to a sneeze depends on where in the world that sneeze happens. According to a fine list on Wikipedia, in most countries, a witness offers up God’s blessings or wishes you good health or long life. (We were a “bless you” family, although the German “gesundheit” was also acceptable.) Mongolians ask God to forgive the sneezer, and the Igbo apologize to or for the person. In China and Japan, it is customary just to ignore the whole thing.

But my favorite reply wonderfully states the obvious. If you speak the Australian language Ritharrngu, you might say after someone’s wet blast, “klas bin gurruwan.” It means: “You have released nose water.”

They don’t say “You have released nose water in my face.”

I guess that would be rude.

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Possible future polls: Tissue or Kleenex? Whose dad still carries a handkerchief—and has he ever found a pocket booger? Does your sneeze match your love life? Stay tuned.

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Photo: Shutterstock