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051: Aphasia

I’ve been reading up on aphasia, the mental condition wherein your language centers are fucked. Usually brought on by a stroke or some sort of physical trauma to the head (specifically the left hemisphere), aphasia is a breakdown of the signal between the processing sections of the brain. Those suffering from Global Aphasia are good and truly separated from language. You cannot produce recognizable words and you have no ability to comprehend written or verbal language. On the short end of this stick is Anomic Aphasia where you’ve just got this persistent inability to find the right word to describe what you are thinking.

In between is the land of Broca and Wernicke. Paul Pierre Broca (1824-1880) discovered that if you remove a small area about four square centimeters in size, you can destroy a person’s ability to speak. Maps of the brain label this little square “Broca’s Area” and also lent his name to this manifestation of motor aphasia. Broca tumbled to this area during research with a test patient named “Tan” because, while Tan’s ability to recognize speech was intact, the only sounds he could produce in response to any stimuli were “tan-tan.”

Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) was a German neurologist who had some influence on Freud and whose monograph on aphasia came several years after Broca’s discovery of motor aphasia. The syndrome described by Wernicke is now known as sensory aphasia and is marked by an inability to understand speech. Additionally (or rather, in more extreme cases), this inability also extends to the patient’s ability to speak as their discourse descends into incomprehensible gibberish.

Wernicke also discovered that different areas of the brain were affected in the case of either syndrome. Now, I’m not about to pull out a map of the brain and draw little ‘x’s where things go bad, but the interesting thing to note here is the movement of thought and speech through the brain. Broca’s area is in the frontal lobes just above the lateral fissure, just in front of the cortex. Signals from this area go directly to the motor sections of the brain so as to move the muscles of the jaw and throat in speech. Whereas Wernicke’s area lies further back in the brain (in the left temporal lobe beneath the lateral fissure) and is adjacent to the primary auditory cortex, which is the terminal point of auditory input into the brain.

You whack these areas hard enough or damage the connective tissue between the language areas and you get all sorts of disconnection syndromes. There are a number of fun names for them, but my favorite is “pure-word blindness.” Patients with pure-word blindness can function normally; they just have no comprehension of the written word.

Think about that one. It’s not just being illiterate. There you can at least realize that what you are seeing is some sort of language. No, this is a state where you can’t even understand that you are looking at language. It’s not just weird symbols on the wall which you can’t fathom. You don’t even realize that the impressions on the wall are symbols.

Now, let’s look at the other extreme. Could you be “hyper-word sensitive”? This question skates into a larger question of what is language and how much of it is learned and how much of it is something that is, well, genetically ingrained. Because, when you get right down to it, what happens to you when either Wernicke’s or Broca’s area gets whacked? You don’t forget “language,” rather your ability to make the connections between what you hear and what you mean to say and the language warehouse in your brain are severed. What would it mean to have the language centers of your brain be hyper-aware?

Posted by Teppo at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) June 17, 2003

050: Dee's Enochian Evocation

Book 5, Chapter 2.1: "We instruct and inform you, according to this Doctrine delivered, that which is contained in the 49 Tables. In 49 voices or callings, which are the Natural Keys to open those (not 49 but 48, for One is not to be opened) Gates of understanding. You shall have knowledge to move every Gate, and to call out as many as you please, or shall be thought necessary..."

Book 5, Chapter 3.3: "In these keys which we deliver, are the mysteries and secret beings and effects of all things moving, and moved within the world. In this is the life of MOTION, in whom all tongues of the world are moved, for there is neither speech nor silence that was or shall be to the end of the world."

Book 5, Chapter 4.1: "Thus you see the necessity of this tongue, the excellency of it, and why it is preferred before that which you call Hebrew. For it is written that every lesser consents to its greater. Our wisdom shall prove Rhetoric. In this language, every letter signifies the member of the substance whereof it speaks. Every word signifies the essence of the substance. The letters are separated, and in confusion: and therefore, are by number gathered together, which also signify a number. For as every greater contains his lesser, so are secret and unknown forms of things knit up in their parents. Being known in number, they are easily distinguished, so that herein we teach places to be numbered, letters to be elected from the numbered, and proper words from the letters, which signifiy substantially the thing that is spoken of in the center of the Creator."

Book 5, Chapter 4.2: "Even as the mind of man is moved at an ordered speech, and is easily persuaded in things that are true, so are the creatures of God stirred up in themselves when they hear the words with which they are nursed and brought forth. For nothing moves, that is not persuaded; neither can anything be persuaded that is unknown. Without this language, the Creatures of God understand you not."

Book 1, Chapter 3: "Being as dumb, and not able to speak, Adam [having been cast out of the Garden of Eden] began to learn (through necessity) the language which you call Hebrew but not in the form which is now Hebrew among you. Adam uttered and delivered to his posterity the nearest knowledge that he had of God and His Creatures. From his own self, he divided this speech into three parts: twelve, three, and seven. This division yet remains, but the true forms and pronunciations are lost. Therefore Hebrew is not of that force that it was in the original divinity; much less is it to be compared with this language that we deliver, which Adam verily spoke in innocence and which has never been uttered nor disclosed to man since, until now. In this language, the power of God must work and wisdom in her true kind must be delivered."

[Quoted from Geoffrey James' edition of Dr. John Dee's manuscripts. (Llewellyn Publications, 1994)]

Posted by Teppo at 01:50 AM | Comments (0) June 15, 2003

049: Voices From Beyond

In the late 16th century, Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly composed one of the greatest tracts of occult mythology. Dee, who was a scientist with a certain amount of cachet in the Elizabethan court, became convinced of the existence of angelic spirits. What he sought was the ultimate grimoire, the text which would unlock for him the secrets of the Divine. Like the other prophets -- Solomon, Moses, Abraham -- he believed that God would reveal Himself to the spiritually devout.

And, while Dee was prepared to be the receptor of such divine intelligence, he found that he did not have the sight. The scrying stones -- the objects in which the angelic hosts appeared -- were dark to him. He required the presence of another, someone more properly attuned to the vibrations of the scrying stones, in order to transcribe the tongue of the angels. He required a charlatan. He got Edward Kelly.

Kelly was nearly illiterate, a drifter who wanted nothing more than his palm filled with silver and a hot meal in his stomach. He didn't care for the spiritual possession which came over him when he looked in the magic stones. He didn't understand the full import of his divinely-channeled speech. Or, as some will argue, he understood all too well and his relationship with Dee was strictly that of a con artist working his meal ticket. Kelly is, then, either a fool with an open pathway in his brain or the most brilliant inventor of nonsense history has ever seen.

Your choice. It's all a matter of what you want to believe.

Dee believed him. Dee fervently believed that what Kelly saw and spoke of was the presence and message of an ancient and spiritual host. Dee heard the voice of angels from Kelly's mouth and learned of their desire to resurrect the true art of Magick which had been lost to man. The angels wanted to teach us about the true nature of the universe and how to shape it to our will. They wanted to teach us the barest fraction of the power of God.

These angels have been on earth before. Genesis 6:4. "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown." It is the presence of these giants -- the Nephilim -- and their sorcery which led to God's decision to wipe the slate clean and start over.

In 1582, the silver-tongued angels come back. And this time they're talking to men instead of the ladies. They are impregnating the men with ideas.

Posted by Teppo at 07:05 PM | Comments (0) June 11, 2003

048: Sleep

Sleep is a funny thing. Well, not so much when you're not getting it, but, as a necessary part of our existence, it certainly runs counter to an animal's need to stay alert in order to survive against stronger predators. Maybe it is because we have walls and doors and guns and laws and police to protect us that we can relax enough to talk about "getting enough sleep."

I was doing a bit of reading about dreams and sleep yesterday, just a little googling around, thinking about my current state of partial sleep-deprivation (long weekend doing a network backbone upgrade). I discovered an argument that sleep (or, more specifically, REM sleep) is imperative to the learning process. REM sleep is the time where your brain tries things out, where it tests new ideas, new practices, before putting them into play. REM sleep is where you learn, where things are shifted from short-term to long-term storage and where certain other behaviors and learned patterns are dismantled. REM sleep is the time where your brain optimizes itself, flushes cache, and otherwise reorders itself in order to be focused and receptive to new material.

So what happens when you don't sleep? You get dull. Not just in that sense which drives people away from you at cocktail parties, but also in the way in which your brain can't absorb new information and in the way in which your imagination curls up and dies.

I had a sleep study done about a year ago. I suffer from what a goodly number of us "heavyset" lads have to deal with: airway obstruction while sleeping. When you sleep, your body relaxes, a lot of your muscles take some time off -- put their feet up, pop a beer, watch some TV sort of chilling -- and, in the case of round boys, this includes the muscles in your throat. Your air passage closes off and oxygen stops making its way to your brain. Your brain hits the panic button and beer gets spilled, the ottoman gets knocked over, and the muscles hit the fire pole like they're responding to a four-alarm blaze. Oxygen gets in, the brain calms down, and everything relaxes again.

You can see how the cycles works. In my case, my brain was slapping the panic button every minute or so during the night. Which meant I never got to REM state; I never really slept. And, worst of all, I didn't dream.

You can survive without dreaming. But it is such a pale, colorless world compared to the technicolor eruption of full-on REM sleep. I'm a junkie for the good sleep now; it had been so long that I had really forgotten what it was like to have my head burning. I had my "war on sleep" during college and the successive years, trying to shave off minutes from my sleep time in order to get more things done. Sure, I was awake more, but I wasn't really aware as much.

The people at the sleep center and at the medical supply house who gave me the Darth Vader mask I sleep with now talked a lot about "paying back the sleep bank" and how I would sleep more when I was actually sleeping. I did for a few weeks, but certainly not enough to pay back a ten year debt. No, I slept a little more each night because I was having such a good time dreaming. And, like all optimization and reorganization processes, at some point you are done. Your brain has finished processing yesterday and you are ready for tomorrow.

Apparently birds are the only other creature which dream as much as we do. Do they dream of flying?

Posted by Teppo at 04:40 PM | Comments (0) June 04, 2003

047: The Zodiac Ciphers

I was doing some research for a throwaway detail about Jack's backstory over the weekend and ended up at www.zodiackiller.com. The detail -- Jack's uncle was a investigator based out of San Francisco during the time period that Zodiac was playing his games with the press and police -- was intended to color Jack's history enough to give some versimilitude to Jack's arrival at the Institute. What I stumbled upon was this: there are some ciphers from Zodiac's communications which still haven't been solved.

Now, I'm not interested in getting side-tracked in trying to figure out what is going on with the uncracked messages -- folks much brighter and more focused than I have been working on them for more than thirty years -- but what caught my attention is the fact that Zodiac used a substitution based cipher for some of his letters to the press, and one of the still-unsolved ciphers is the answer to the question: "What is my name?"

The longer ciphers were fairly straightforward symbol substitition. Anyone with enough time or processor power can crack these and, in fact, it took a school teacher and his wife just a week to crack the long ciphers. And I'm sure the sequence shown above is only enigmatic because investigators haven't decided which of several thousand possibilities that they've determined are possible is the right one. Even with a one-time pad (which this isn't) has multiple solutions. The trouble is always knowing which answer is the right one.

Why go to all that trouble to give us a clue which we can't ever solve? There are a couple of reasons probably: (1) As long as we can't figure it out, he'll know something we won't and can thereby claim superior intellect -- everyone likes to be the smartest kid in the room; (2) the name is a delicious red herring, ultimately rrelevant and only meant to confuse us; or, (3) names have power. You know someone's true name ("Ged" versus "Sparrowhawk," for example) and you have power over them. And, as Zodiac taunts in more than one letter, if you know his name, you'd know who he was.

Georges has spent thirty years locked in the Institute, putting his head back together. The names of things have become important to him. The patients at the Institute have been reduced to their case numbers and, in Georges' case, that is the only reference they have to him any longer. As Jack investigates the break-out at the Institute, it won't be the only strange thing he finds.

And Georges? I don't think he'll tell Jack his new name. Not yet.

The picture above was lifted rather unceremoniously from http://www.zodiackiller.com in that sort of "see it, copy it, paste it, use it" fashion which makes the Internet go 'round. My apologies to Tom Voigt for disrupting his presentation of the material and, if you have any interest in the history of the Zodiac killings, I would hope that you'd spend a little time at his site.

Posted by Teppo at 11:06 AM | Comments (1)