If you follow my other feeds (Twitter, robinsloan.com), you’re going to be sooo sick of this by now—but most of you don’t, so let me point you to some fun Friday reading: a very short story inspired by a pair of pants.

Not to be grandiose (I mean, it is a very short story), but there’s actually a larger idea at work here.

The meta-inspiration was an idea that Geoff at BLDGBLOG threw out a while ago. It went something like this: How about fiction commissioned specifically for a new building? Imagine it: There’s a swank new apartment tower going up, and the developers pay a writer to compose a book of short stories about it. (It would be great arbitrage: a fortune in writer-terms is a pittance in developer-terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-edition copy of that book waiting on your polished-concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the building: characters move in and out of spaces you recognize. They walk down your street, shop at your grocery store. They have the same view out their window that you do!

Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writers need desperately, I think—especially writers of short fiction—is new venues, new contexts. General-interest magazines used to provide one (I guess?); the internet sort of provides one now, but honestly, a short story on the internet can be pretty random. The most vital venue for short fiction today is probably, uh, school. Which is fine if you’re in the 7th grade, but what about the rest of us? How do you ground a story and—here’s the crux of it—give people a reason to read? (And, optionally, how do you support the creation of new fiction? Where does the money come from?)

So, as one of many possible solutions, I really love this idea of hooking a story to something in the real world, whether it’s a new building or (in this case) a pair of pants. Imagine that you took this a step further, and the story actually came with the pants. You open the trademark blue-paisley Bonobos box that just arrived in the mail and there, folded neatly atop your new khakis: a short story to get you started, to fire up your imagination.

What if every product shipped with a story?

Imagine analogues in other media: an album composed with a new car in mind, and when you buy the car, the album is loaded into the stereo, waiting for you. (It’s fine-tuned for the car’s acoustics, natch!) Or a movie set in that swank new apartment tower—filmed after construction is complete but before people move in.

It’s fanciful, but I think it connects to the idea of a data shadow—the idea that every physical object has tons of metadata attached to it, cascading away from it—and expands it. That “metadata” can be more than, like, a stream of usage information. It can be narrative; it can, in fact, be fanciful. Call it a story shadow.

It happens naturally, of course. Think of New York City’s story shadow! It’s huge! It’s like, a fifth of all movies ever made! Most cities already have story shadows; some buildings do; relatively few products do. So really what we’re talking about is priming the pump: producing a starter story-shadow on the front-end. And I think done right—again, this is the whole point—it could give people new reasons to read new fiction.

Probably the best example of story-shadow engineering today is the super-awesome Significant Objects. I feel like you ought to be able to take what they’re doing and move it up the food chain—imagine a future for new objects, as well as a past for old ones.

Does this even make any sense? It’s one of, like, the top ten things I’m interested in these days—but I’m not sure I’ve figured out quite how to articulate it yet.

P.S. Ha ha, now here’s a reason to read. Dave Eisenberg from Bonobos chimes in and offers a discount to short-story readers!

Okay, I’m partial. But Pound’s life, writings, and character were so outsized, so dramatic, it’s amazing we haven’t seen a movie version of his life already. (Tom and Viv must not have grossed well.) Check out Lawrence LaRiviere White’s spare allusions to just a few of the events surrounding the Pisan Cantos:

For example, I’ve always been partial to one part of the story, something not in Sieburth’s intro, something that happens long after all the Pisan stuff: after he gets out of St. Elizabeth’s, and after his great photo op, giving the fascist salute on the boat, throwing out some red meat for the boys in the press, his first stop is Schloss Brunnenburg, home to his long-suffering daughter & her aristo husband. The way Kenner tells the story, it’s a miserable spell, during which Mary for about the first time in her life has a chance to spend some quality time with her dad, but then all these wackos show up, her dad’s friends—poetic sycophants, escaped fascists, fellow former mental patients. It could make a great play, kind of like a realist, big cast version of End Game, & a dark dank broken down medieval castle for a set. All of Pound’s pretensions come home to roost & the nest gets stinky. There’s an arc to that story.

There’s an arc to Sieburth’s version of the Pisa story, one that doesn’t get played up in the Kenner. Both versions give us the capture in Rapallo by the partisans, with Pound picking up the eucalyptus pip on the way out (& I’m fond of that pip. I too collect fetish objects, if too many. I’ve got this box of rocks. I used to know where each came from). & both gives us good details on his time at the DTC, the weeks in the cage & the weeks in the infirmary. Sieburth emphasizes the racial dimension, something that has a sharp presence in the poems. The Detention Training Center was the only segregated [sic; I think White means desegregated, TC] unit in that theater of operations, and Sieburth believes that the contact with the black voices, their inclusion in the poem, is the crucial element in the Pisan Cantos.

But it’s the time between the two events that fascinates me. Pound isn’t taken directly to Pisa. His first stop is at a military intelligence facility in Genoa, where some sympathetic officers give him the good cop treatment & Pound sings like a bird, for the benefit of J. Edgar Hoover’s files. It’s a glorious manic phase for Ezra, lifting him up to make for a better depressive crash in the cage. Pound is at his delusional best (& whether or not he was insane, he was grandiosely delusional), firing off letters left & right, telling everyone how all he had to do was have a quick chat with Truman (& even Stalin) & he’d get everything fixed, & by everything he didn’t mean his case, he meant the world.

A. David Moody has already banged out a solid biography of the young Pound (1885-1920) and is working on a second volume; I wonder if anyone’s optioned it yet. (Among other American modernists, Gertrude Stein would also make a great movie subject.)

Alan Jacobs:

If you want people to believe that the populace is becoming more literate through digital technology, you need to be sure not to misspell “populace.”

The whole post is quite good.

There are a few ways in which the future of bookstores will resemble the past. Here’s one you might not know about: The money in bookstores has never been in selling books.

Don’t believe me? Read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a printer, a publisher, a newspaperman, a bookseller, and of course an author, scientist, inventor, and über-citizen. Do you know where he made his money? His stationery shop. He sold bookplates, printed invitations, letterhead, and plain writing paper. This was always the high-margin AND high-volume end of his business. Franklin’s newspapers, pamphlets, and books were a labor of love, patriotism, and intellectual overflow, but functionally, they were loss leaders.

And really, this is still the way bookstores work. Yes, we go in to browse, be comforted by, and perhaps even purchase books — but really, the big-ticket items are greeting cards, blank books, calendars, wrapping paper, college sweatshirts, candy, coffee. That, at least, is where the money is. Booksellers are still primarily dealers in 1) paper and 2) social goods — books are merely the low-profit-but-high-prestige emblem of that intersection.

Of course, now big-box retailers are using books as loss leaders in a very different way — selling hot books below WHOLESALE in the hope of getting you in the store to buy a big-screen TV. It’s not just books and media, but also groceries, tube socks, and prescription drugs. The Targets, Wal-Marts, and Best Buys of the world arguably have just taken the stationers’ model to parodic heights. And since there wasn’t exactly an independent tube-sock market before, the people who stand the most to lose from this are booksellers. Booksellers who, again, are already selling books as loss leaders to get people into the store to buy their high-margin items. You can be more charitable and say that the sale of the high-margin items subsidizes the sale of the books, which is what sellers and readers REALLY care about. But functionally, it’s the same model. It’s just that when it comes to high-margin goods, a photo album simply can’t beat a Blu-Ray player — so Wal-Mart can “subsidize” their book sales a lot more than the booksellers can.

This is the economic substrate of the American Booksellers’ Association’s open letter to the Justice Department. Here’s the ideological payload:

For our members-locally owned, independent bookstores-the effect will be devastating. There is simply no way for ABA members to compete. The net result will be the closing of many independent bookstores, and a concentration of power in the book industry in very few hands. Bill Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, an ABA member, was also quoted in the New York Times:

“You have a choke point where millions of writers are trying to reach millions of readers. But if it all has to go through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers deciding what’s going to get published, the business is in trouble.”

We would find these practices questionable were they taking place in the market for widgets. That they are taking place in the market for books is catastrophic. If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.

Okay. So let’s just grant all of that stuff about independent booksellers – or hell, even chains like B&N or Borders, so long as they primarily sell books – being essential to the functioning of a free society. I’ve got my doubts about how or why that might be true, and way too much (bookstores, newspapers, the American auto industry) seems essential to the functioning of a free society these days — but screw it. In the case of bookstores, I want to believe it.

At the very least, let’s grant that bookstores are awesome, and add a lot of value to their communities. Let’s also grant that even if the DoJ tries to keep big-boxers from selling below wholesale, they’re still going to exert a lot of price pressure on bookstores so long as they’re selling books cheaply. We can also assume that online bookstores, too, are going to continue to chip away at brick-and-mortars by offering greater selection at a lower price. And let’s assume – or pray – that the ABA’s request that “the loss-leader pricing of digital content also bears scrutiny” by the DoJ doesn’t lead to crushingly high price-fixing on that end. Then we need to figure out a new business model that can keep local brick-and-mortar booksellers alive.

Clay Shirky proposes going co-op (or at least, offering some kind of NPR-style patronage):

Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers.

The core idea is to appeal to that small subset of customers who think of bookstores as their “third place”, alongside home and work. These people care about the store’s existence in physical (and therefore social) space; the goal would be to generate enough revenue from them to make the difference between red and black ink, and to make the new bargain not just acceptable but desirable for all parties. A small collection of patron saints who helped keep a local bookstore open could be cheaply smothered in appreciation by the culture they help support.

There are already existing models for this, like the mighty Seminary Co-Op bookstore in Chicago. Barnes & Noble offers paid memberships that translate into free shipping and discounted books, well worth it for high-volume purchasers. It seems to keep the Sem Co-Op running, and probably nets a significant profit for B&N, so there are good reasons to think that this program has got a shot — especially if bookstores are inventive in how they come up with member benefits. For instance, it would be fascinating to see a bookstore run as a real co-op, with members actively driving the direction of the store. The Sem Co-Op certainly gets a lot of feedback and advice from its members (especially the U of C profs), but it’s pretty far from direct democracy.

Cory Doctorow offers a different way for customers to contribute to the stores’ future — and it’s not unlike what Franklin offered in his stationers’ shop:

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it’s one of the most exciting bookstore sections I’ve browsed in years. And even so, there’s lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there’s plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions — say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions’ illustrations and selling them through the store’s printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Of course, most of the mass-produced catalog will probably end up in the print-on-demand catalog some day, and stores will be able to fill those orders, too. But if you already know what book you want, why bother going to a store? (Unless you’re in too much of a hurry to wait for the mail).

On the other hand, there’s plenty of ways that a physical store could offer added value on mass-market titles: localized covers, signed books, high production-value gift editions, a point-of-sale “donate to our neighborhood schools” kiosk that lets you print a book on the spot for a classroom that’s requested it…

The key point seems to be that bookstore patrons today are kind of like the Republican Party — almost everyone who hasn’t given up on the project altogether is a zealot. To stay alive, bookstores need to foster their communities and harness that zealotry, making sure that they don’t lose a generation of future zealots simply because they didn’t show up.

I like Doctorow’s formulation: “In that world, booksellers become a lot more like bloggers who specialize in all things bookish — wunderkammerers who stock exactly the right book for the right people in the right neighborhood.”

Now this actually loses bookstores the pure democracy argument. It will no longer be the case that bookstores are the only places offering salvatio — er, I mean, books. Bookstores might not be our Catholic churches, where everyone is welcome — but they could be our hard, thrifty Puritan churches, whose members go out into the world and demonstrate their salvation through their worldly works.

Counterintuitive hypothesis: The most significant thing that Amazon and now Barnes & Noble have done for e-books hasn’t been the creation and updating of their dedicated reading machines. It’s the creation of a genuine marketplace for e-books, where consumers can pick up titles easily, publishers can offer them and make at least a little money, and [in Amazon’s case] even little guys can get their stuff out there. You might have needed the reading machines to push the marketplace, but the marketplace will continue to be relevant even if everyone decides tomorrow that they don’t actually want a Kindle anymore. You can already read e-books on computers, smartphones, and pretty soon video game consoles. Amazon sold the razors, sure, but they can sell you the blades even if you don’t buy a razor at all. That’s big.

But creating a marketplace isn’t just about syncing to a device and matching readers’ eyeballs to content. You also have to establish, respond to, and eventually stabilize readers’ and publishers’ expectations about sales, especially about price.

This is harder than it sounds. How much should an e-book cost? How much should publishers have to share with the retailer? Just what are you buying? For hardcovers and paperbacks, these expectations have built up over a long time. This tweaked a bit when online sellers and big-box retailers started offering moderate-to-steep discounts over cover. None of this makes establishing norms for digital sales any easier.

For music, Apple pulled this beautifully in the early days of iTunes. At the time, CDs sold between 10 and 18 dollars for a typical album. This was actually really frustrating, because percentage-wise, it’s a huge variation. It was also an uptick from cassettes, which had rarely cost over $10.

Apple just perched on the low end: every track is 99 cents, every album is $9.99. They were competing with the free (P2P or friend copies) and the physical (real discs with better sound quality that you could play in your car), and they found a way out. Round numbers (good retail numbers for any product), close to what we were used to paying (but still offering competitive advantage). And they held it there, even when big media companies huffed and puffed because they wanted to charge more for high-demand (or high-cost) products. Apple’s establishment of trust with the music-buying public won out. And held out. Singles still cost a single. Which makes the digital music marketplace oddly pure.

At Booksquare, Kassia Krozser argues that the same price-stabilization is beginning to happen with e-books:

At Digital Book World, I’m going to do a brief presentation called “The Case for the $75 eBook”, because there is a marketplace for high-priced ebooks. In fact, I think there’s a robust marketplace for higher priced digital books, and I believe I can make a strong case for these price points.

That being said (ha!), I don’t believe the publishing industry can make a valid, solid, logical case for pricing most narrative fiction (and some non-fiction) ebooks above $9.99. Not only is this price point being cemented in the minds of readers by retailers, but, let’s be blunt, publishers have done a lousy job of making the value argument. The near-cynical approach of publishers to producing and selling ebooks has backfired. The process, the pricing, the product has been weighed by consumers and they are not amused. They like the $9.99 and below price point. It makes sense to them.

So, yep, I’m predicting publishers will have no choice but to swallow this one and figure out how to make their business work with ebooks priced below $10. It’s better to initiate this change rather than scramble when the retailers start demanding better terms. You can do it, publishing industry, you can do it!

It’s true! Maybe it’s just because we’re already primed by iTunes albums, or because $10 is the low-end price of a good trade paperback, or that $9.99 is one of those psychologically great retail numbers (Just dollars and cents! Not tens of dollars!), but it’s got real power.

For instance, I priced Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The book lists in hardcover at $27.95. At Amazon, it sells for $18.45 in hardcover and $14.76 for the Kindle. At Barnes and Noble, it’s $20.12 (huh?), or — yes — $9.99 for the e-book.

Now this was easier because I like the B&N app for the Mac and I preordered the Nook. But if B&N sells its e-book for $18, I either buy the hardcover from Amazon or pass altogether. At $9.99, I bought it right away. I did the same thing for China Mieville’s The City and the City: Kindle $13.73, B&N $9.99. On the other hand, I sprung for The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway for almost $18 and still feel like I got hosed.

Now, digital books also offer the possibility that books, like CDs, can be split and sold separately. Maybe I just want to buy a copy of “The Undefeated” and “In Another Country” – a taste of Hemingway, not the whole short-form corpus. Big publishers haven’t really done this yet. But among independents and self-publishers, the other price point that seems to be emerging – the symmetry with iTunes is astonishing – is the 99 cent short story. And again — this feels just about right, especially appealing to folks reading these things on their iPhones, who don’t want to leaf through a whole novel or anthology, right around the same price as a cheap iPhone app or a single song.

But Krozser’s hypothetical $75 e-book suggests that there are still plenty of other price points and formats to be hammered out. Maybe $25-$40 is the perfect price for an e-textbook. Maybe a short, indie nonfiction pamphlet – 2011’s version of New Liberal Arts – could sell well for $3.99. Maybe digital copies of new books will be free for readers who buy the hardcover (factored into the sale price). It’s still wide open. But with competition between sellers and tug-of-war between customers and publishers, we’re bound to figure it out.

A few years back, I Asked MetaFilter: “What do you think is the cheapest, healthiest, tastiest, easiest meal to prepare?”

I got several excellent answers. But having now made this lentil tomato stew numerous times, I realize I’ve found the answer. Every time I make it, I’m shocked at how easy it is, how delicious it is, and how cheap it is. And dagnabit, it’s also super-healthy. Thought I’d share. Back to playing Dragon Age: Origins.

I do not know that this is actually true:

Many types of classic jacket derive from a specific purpose. Trench coats have epaulettes so that dead or wounded soldiers can be dragged to safety.

However, I want it to be true, and will repeat it often, in an attempt to make it as-good-as-true.

In the fall of my freshman year of college, I read an essay by Stephen Jay Gould called “The Panda’s Thumb” (drawn, I think, from a book by the same name) for an Introduction to Philosophy class.* The premise was that evolution was best revealed not in examples of perfect adaptation of a species to its environment, but in biological accidents, cobbled-together solutions. The panda’s “thumb,” for example, isn’t a finely tailored opposable digit like the human’s, but a kind of randomly mutated bone spur at the end of the rest, held together by an overstretched tendon where a ligament should be. Evolution doesn’t produce perfect solutions – whenever possible, it uses what’s there, readapting existing features (or exaggerated versions of them) to fit new uses. To use the terminology of the late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, evolution for the most part isn’t an engineer, creating the perfect tools to fit the job, but a bricoleur, a kind of everyday handyman, perfectly willing to use a butterknife in place of a screwdriver if the butterknife is what’s on hand.

The neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, of the Collège de France, has been getting a lot of buzz for his new book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention, which that reading and writing and evolved in much the same way, making use of existing parts of the visual cortex and rewiring them. What’s more, Dehaene claims that reading and writing’s dependence on a part of the brain that originally evolved to serve other purposes has actually helped determine how reading has emerged historically, and even the shapes of letters themselves. Writing, in other words, isn’t entirely arbitrary – it’s limited by how far our brains can bend.

The neuroscience of writing also suggests that it’s primarily a visual phenomenon, and only secondarily a linguistic one (in the sense of language = speech). But the part of the visual cortex that handles reading relays visual recognition of letters to the speech and motor and conceptual centers of the brain so quickly and efficiently that it almost doesn’t matter; reading becomes a total mental act, integrating nearly all of our mental capacities with split-second timing.

Here’s a summary offered by Susan Okie in her review of the book in the Washington Post:

“Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read,” Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. It was Homo sapiens’s luck that in our primate ancestors, a region of the brain’s paired temporal lobes evolved over a period of 10 million years to specialize in the visual identification of objects. Experiments in monkeys show that, within this area, individual nerve cells are dedicated to respond to a specific visual stimulus: a face, a chair, a vertical line. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the “letterbox,” responsible for processing incoming written words. Located in the brain’s left hemisphere near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes, the letterbox performs identical tasks in readers of all languages and scripts. Like a switchboard, it transmits signals to multiple regions concerned with words’ sound and meaning — for example, to areas that respond to noun categories (people, animals, vegetables), to parts of the motor cortex that respond to action verbs (“kiss,” “kick”), even to cells in the brain’s associative cortex that home in on very specific stimuli. (In one epileptic patient, for example, a nerve cell was found that fired only in response to images or the written name of actress Jennifer Aniston!)

This result astonishes me, since I was pretty sure that the one cell = one concept model of the brain — what Douglas Hofstadter calls “the grandmother neuron” theory — had been completely debunked. Apparently, though, there’s a Jennifer Aniston cell? At least for some of us? It might not be the ONLY cell that lights up – but it doesn’t light up for anything else (and appears, at least in this case, to function at either the image OR the written name, suggesting a degree of cognitive interchangability between the two).

These reading cells work differently for words we immediately recognize – like the name of Jennifer Aniston – and those that we don’t (again suggesting that the brain works by macros and shortcuts whenever it can). Jonah Lehrer explains:

One of the most intriguing findings of this new science of reading is that the literate brain actually has two distinct pathways for reading. One pathway is direct and efficient, and accounts for the vast majority of reading comprehension — we see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s meaning. However, there’s also a second pathway, which we use whenever we encounter a rare and obscure word that isn’t in our mental dictionary. As a result, we’re forced to decipher the sound of the word before we can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two of conscious effort.

Lehrer also keys in Dehaene’s conclusions about the evolution of writing systems:

The second major mystery explored by Dehaene is how reading came to exist. It’s a mystery that’s only deepened by the recency of literacy: the first alphabets were invented less than 4,000 years ago, appearing near the Sinai Peninsula. (Egyptian hieroglyphic characters were used to represent a Semitic language.) This means that our brain wasn’t “designed” for reading; we haven’t had time to evolve a purpose-built set of circuits for letters and words. As Deheane eloquently notes, “Our cortex did not specifically evolve for writing. Rather, writing evolved to fit the cortex.”

Deheane goes on to provide a wealth of evidence showing this cultural evolution in action, as written language tweaked itself until it became ubiquitous. In fact, even the shape of letters — their odd graphic design — has been molded by the habits and constraints of our perceptual system. For instance, the neuroscientists Marc Changizi and Shinsuke Shimojo have demonstrated that the vast majority of characters in 115 different writing systems are composed of three distinct strokes, which likely reflect the sensory limitations of cells in the retina. (As Dehaene observes, “The world over, characters appear to have evolved an almost optimal combination that can easily be grasped by a single neuron.”) The moral is that our cultural forms reflect the biological form of the brain; the details of language are largely a biological accident.

“Writing evolved to fit the cortex.” On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that a human invention would be limited by human biology – that the visual forms of writing would be limited by our abilities to recognize patterns in the same way that the sounds of letters are limited by the shape and structure of the human mouth.

On the other, it so often seems that writing is BIGGER than we are, or at least independent – that it stands apart and outside of us, like it really was a gift from an Egyptian god – or that it’s so abstract, so removed in modern script from any kind of mimetic resemblance to the world, that it’s a purely arbitrary system, dictated by the requirements of the hand rather than the eye.

The other cool thing about Dehaene’s research? All that brain imaging and reading research and mapping of connections between different parts of the brain has helped him to figure out a neuroscientific way to begin to 1) define consciousness and 2) explain why consciousness is evolutionarily desirable. (Really.)

What I propose is that “consciousness is global information in the brain” — information which is shared across different brain areas. I am putting it very strongly, as “consciousness is”, because I literally think that’s all there is. What we mean by being conscious of a certain piece of information is that it has reached a level of processing in the brain where it can be shared… The criterion of information sharing relates to the feeling that we have that, whenever a piece of information is conscious, we can do a very broad array of things with it. It is available…

In several experiments, we have contrasted directly what you can do subliminally and what you can only do consciously. Our results suggest that one very important difference is the time duration over which you can hold on to information. If information is subliminal, it enters the system, creates a temporary activation, but quickly dies out. It does so in the space of about one second, a little bit more perhaps depending on the experiments, but it dies out very fast anyway. This finding also provides an answer for people who think that subliminal images can be used in advertising, which is of course a gigantic myth. It’s not that subliminal images don’t have any impact, but their effect, in the very vast majority of experiments, is very short-lived. When you are conscious of information, however, you can hold on to it essentially for as long as you wish,. It is now in your working memory, and is now meta-stable. The claim is that conscious information is reverberating in your brain, and this reverberating state includes a self-stabilizing loop that keeps the information stable over a long duration. Think of repeating a telephone number. If you stop attending to it, you lose it. But as long as you attend to it, you can keep it in mind.

Our model proposes that this is really one of the main functions of consciousness: to provide an internal space where you can perform thought experiments, as it were, in an isolated way, detached from the external world. You can select a stimulus that comes from the outside world, and then lock it into this internal global workspace. You may stop other inputs from getting in, and play with this mental representation in your mind for as long as you wish…

In the course of evolution, sharing information across the brain was probably a major problem, because each area had a specialized goal. I think that a device such as this global workspace was needed in order to circulate information in this flexible manner. It is extremely characteristic of the human mind that whatever result we come up with, in whatever domain, we can use it in other domains. It has a lot to do, of course, with the symbolic ability of the human mind. We can apply our symbols to virtually any domain.

Consciousness, in other words, is like writing for the brain – it fixes information that would otherwise be ephemeral, and allows you to perform more complicated operations with it. (Kind of like how we need a pencil and paper to do complicated arithmetic.)

Play with those analogies for a while. I’m going to start reading Dehaene’s book.

*Digression: This class was taught by a prof my friends and I nicknamed “Skeletor,” an ancient woman who couldn’t project her voice beyond the first few rows of the long rows of 50+ desks that passed for a seminar at Michigan State. On some days, she would wear a wrap-around microphone that inevitably dropped down her neck, becoming completely useless. She was always totally oblivious of this. We used to joke that she should wear a live snake wrapped around her neck instead – it would amplify her speech just as well, but everyone would pay rapt attention. I skipped about half of the classes to this class, netting one of my four 3.5s as an undergrad, all of them in my freshman year. If I hadn’t taken Ethics with the great Herbert Garelick the next semester, I’d probably be a math teacher today.

P.S.: I forgot to link to this great Scientific American interview with Dehaene. Here’s a snip:

COOK: In the book, you describe a part of the brain as the “letterbox.” Can you please explain what you mean by that?

DEHAENE: This is the name I have given to a brain region that systematically responds whenever we read words. It is in the left hemisphere, on the inferior face, and belongs to the visual region that helps us recognize our environment. This particular region specializes in written characters and words. What is fascinating is that it is at the same location in all of us – whether we read Chinese, Hebrew or English, whether we’ve learned with whole-language or phonics methods, a single brain region seems to take on the function of recognizing the visual word.

COOK: But reading is a relatively recent invention, so what was the “letterbox” doing before we had written language?

DEHAENE: An excellent question – we don’t really know. The whole region in which this area is inserted is involved in invariant visual recognition – it helps us recognize objects, faces and scenes, regardless of the particular viewpoint, lighting, and other superficial variations.

We are starting to do brain-imaging experiments in illiterates, and we find that this region, before it responds to words, has a preference for pictures of objects and faces. We are also finding that this region is especially attuned to small features present in the contours of natural shapes, such as the “Y” shape in the branches of trees. My hypothesis is our letters emerged from a recycling of those shapes at the cultural level. The brain didn’t have enough time to evolve “for” reading – so writing systems evolved “for” the brain!

You say “artificial ecologies,” and it sounds like you’re talking about zoos or aquariums or biodomes or terraforming or something. But actually, every legal border on a map creates an artificial ecology. Nicola at Edible Geography (following a post from FP Passport) explains:

For example, the antlion surplus in Israel can be traced back to the fact that the Dorcas gazelle is a protected species there, while across the border in Jordan, it can legally be hunted. Jordanian antlions are thus disadvantaged, with fewer gazelles available to serve “as ‘environmental engineers’ of a sort” and to “break the earth’s dry surface,” enabling antlions to dig their funnels.

Meanwhile, the more industrial form of agriculture practised on the Israeli side has encouraged the growth of a red fox population, which makes local gerbils nervous; across the border, Jordan’s nomadic shepherding and traditional farming techniques mean that the red fox is far less common, “so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.”

I’m fascinated by the fact that differing land-use practices, environmental legislation, and agricultural technology on either side of the political border have shaped two distinct and separate ecosystems of out what would otherwise be a shared desert environment.

(Note: sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’m still in hospital – with hopes of a Monday release! – and among its many other sins, the internet here blocks Google. Can’t even tell you the ridiculous workarounds I’ve had to do just to get the links for this post together. Suffice it to say, Yahoo sucks. As does having nearly all of your internet life hosted by a single company whose pages can get firewalled for no good reason.)

I bought my brother a copy of ESPN sportswriter Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball for his birthday, and he talked it up so much that I wound up buying a copy of it for myself. I’ve been reading it over the past week, and it is a delight. If you like basketball, and/or the history of basketball, or smart, snarky sportswriting, any of them, the least little bit, then you’ve got to nab a copy. In thr introduction, Malcolm Gladwell compares the book to the basketball equivalent of the original Bill James Baseball Abstract, and he’s right — it’s that nerdy (nerdier), that funny (funnier), and that good.

One of Simmons’s charms is that he will do things like define criteria for the NBA’s MVP award, justify those criteria, and then go through every year in NBA history to figure out if the right guy won. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter that gives you some of the flavor of the book:

Question no. 2 [for determing the MVP]: In a giant pickup game with every NBA player available and two knowledgable fans forced to pick five-man teams, with their lives depending on the game’s outcome, who would be the first player picked based on how everyone played that season? Translation: who’s the alpha dog that season? The Finals answer this question many times… but not every time. We thought Kobe was the alpha dog in 2008, but after watching him wilt against Boston in the finals — compared to the way LeBron carried a crappy Cavs team to seven games against Boston and nearly stole Game 7 — it’s unclear. This question reduces everything to the simplest of terms: we’re playing to 11, I need to win, I can’t screw around with this choice, and if I don’t pick this guy, he’s gonna get pissed and kick our asses as the second pick. I mean, imagine the look on ’97 MJ’s face if someone picked ’97 Karl Malone before him in a pickup game. It would have been like Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II when Kay informed him about her abortion.

That’s the other Simmons signature — LOTS of pop culture references. The only thing this guy seems to do besides watch basketball is watch movies, over and over again, which endears him to me in ways I can’t quite express.