Let me preface this by saying that I’m a huge fan of Errol Morris’ documentary films. I went into this essay/coffee table book assuming it would relatLet me preface this by saying that I’m a huge fan of Errol Morris’ documentary films. I went into this essay/coffee table book assuming it would relate more to his filmmaking, or his ideas about media and the search for knowledge. I was mistaken, and that’s the reason I found this so disappointing.
What this book actually is, is a critical précis of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, situated amidst a series of anecdotes offered by Morris during his time at Princeton. Unfortunately, I’ve never read Kuhn, nor am I particularly well-versed in the analytic tradition. As a result, many of the philosophers he references go completely over my head.
Admittedly, this isn’t Morris’ fault - I expected a certain type of book, and I got another. I’ll have to follow up by reading Kuhn, Quine, Frege, Kripke, Ayer, and the later Wittgenstein. Once I do that, maybe I will get more from Morris’ essay the second time around.
If you are unfamiliar with the analytic tradition, including the various thinkers in the philosophy of science, mathematics, linguistics and logic, I would skip this book....more
A wild combination of quackery and brilliance, Sigmund Freud's classic work, The Interpretation of Dreams, posits psychoanalysis as the skeleton key fA wild combination of quackery and brilliance, Sigmund Freud's classic work, The Interpretation of Dreams, posits psychoanalysis as the skeleton key for understanding the deep structures of human psychology. A tremendously influential and endlessly controversial text....more
Out of My Skull is a short introduction to some of the ways that psychology and neuroscience have approached the question of boredom. The argument thaOut of My Skull is a short introduction to some of the ways that psychology and neuroscience have approached the question of boredom. The argument that James Danckert and John D. Eastwood construct is a clean and persuasive one – boredom is not some kind of “enemy” that needs to be shooed away. Instead, boredom is a signal and a call to action. It contains valuable information about our present state of affairs, cognitively speaking, and it tells us that whatever we’re doing at this moment isn’t enough to fully engage and satisfy our desired mental capacities. Just as a grumbling stomach signals hunger, a bored mind signals the desire for rewarding mental engagement and stimulation.
However, according to Danckert and Eastwood, the desire that boredom signals to us is contentless and objectless. It tells us that we desire something, but it doesn’t tell us what we desire, or how to satisfy that desire. It doesn’t necessarily point us in one direction or another, either. Its primary function, then, is to call attention to the present moment and signal that there is a problem. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, boredom is desire desiring desire itself. In other words, boredom can suggest that something is wrong and that change is needed, but it can’t instruct us on what that something is, or what change signifies in that context. The brain gives you a nudge, but after that, you’re on your own. Likewise, your stomach gives you a nudge toward hunger, but your higher executive functioning needs to ascertain where, why and how that desire can be satiated.
But if boredom is more attentive than it is prescriptive, how can we know what to do? Boredom signals that a choice needs to be made, but which path should we take? Here, Danckert and Eastwood draw influence from some of the great existentialist thinkers, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and – of course – Viktor Frankl. Through these philosophers, they build an understanding of human agency to conceptualize how one could potentially forge meaning through the boredom impulse. As a result, I would be willing to situate Danckert and Eastwood's work within the framework of logotherapy, if I had to slap a name on it. There is certainly a strong sense of connection between Out of My Skull and Man’s Search for Meaning. I enjoyed this blend of neuroscience and psychology with continental philosophy, as it highlights where the edges of the disciplines can meet and even support one another.
Now for the weaker points. Danckert and Eastwood cover a lot of ground, but their book is more of a general survey of the scope of the topic, as opposed to an in-depth look at the field of psychological research on boredom. It’s a decent point of departure for further reading, but you shouldn't expect to be blown away. It’s casual and accessible, but like the impulse it addresses, it could leave you desiring something more.
I also took issue with the stark divisions they built between the concepts of “interest”, “curiosity”, and “boredom”. According to Danckert and Eastwood, those three concepts are mutually exclusive: “[a]lthough not strict opposites, they never coexist. If we are feeling interest, we can’t also feel boredom.” In the context of simple situations, in which there is a one-to-one relation between the subject and his/her object, this distinction seems quite reasonable. For instance, it would be pretty hard, if not downright impossible, to maintain a genuine interest in a television show while also feeling bored to death. That makes sense. But the distinction makes far less sense in complex situations, where there are multifaceted elements and long-term goals. Situations that more closely resemble the roughshod character of real-world lived experiences are not so black-and-white.
Academic commitments represent a good challenge to such dichotomous reasoning. For example, in my undergraduate studies, I expressed a keen interest in Canadian history and decided to pursue that area as a major. However, I wasn’t interested in every single minutia of the Canadian past. Admittedly, I found some topics, themes and periods to be incredibly boring. Yet, despite my interest waxing and waning at times, I also understood that it was necessary to learn about those aspects of history. In this sense, I was occasionally bored with certain particulars of my studies, but at the same time, I never lost sight of the fact that momentary boredom is necessary to achieve knowledge about a broader area of interest. And so, when the authors argue that, “[…] as with interest, it is incoherent to say we are both curious about and bored by the same thing”, I think that is demonstrably untrue. In my own anecdotal experience, interest and boredom have overlapped and coexisted, interwoven and entangled together in ways that can’t be easily distinguished conceptually. Though perhaps paradoxical, it certainly isn’t contradictory to simultaneously feel bored and interested in a complex structure - especially one that you value....more
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is a timeless masterpiece that demands to be studied, discussed, and respected. Mandatory reading.Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is a timeless masterpiece that demands to be studied, discussed, and respected. Mandatory reading....more
Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic, Fahrenheit 451, was an amusing novel, but it didn’t blow me away. Bradbury held my interest conceptually, and I founRay Bradbury’s dystopian classic, Fahrenheit 451, was an amusing novel, but it didn’t blow me away. Bradbury held my interest conceptually, and I found his novel quite stimulating at the level of ideas and social criticism. However, he was less successful in the literary execution of those ideas. For me, Fahrenheit 451 lacked emotional depth, largely due to underdeveloped characters. The world that Montag inhabits is indeed harsh and cruel – yet it was difficult to care about his position in that world.
There are moments of brilliance, though. The scene that stands out to me above the rest – the one where Montag witnesses a woman committing suicide for her personal library – is hauntingly beautiful. The tragedy is transformative, offering our protagonist with an epiphany of sorts: “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house”. From that point on, Montag must wrestle with the twin questions of sacrifice and passion. What is worth dying for? If an apparently rational person can choose to end their life in a single act of defiance, might there be something deeply meaningful in books which compels this sort of commitment to an ideal?
Although I prefer Huxley’s vision over Bradbury’s, the cultural influence of Fahrenheit 451 is unquestionably far-reaching. You can see evidence of that influence in a variety of late 20th-century artistic works, from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to the alternative rock lyrics of the Toadies (remember “I Burn”?). We now live in a time when the text has collapsed into the screen, and it makes me wonder what Bradbury would have thought about tablets and e-readers. The text and the screen have merged in ways that Bradbury did not (could not?) imagine. True, screens are more omnipresent and ubiquitous than ever before. And yet, instead of simply destroying the text and replacing it with a television program, the text has proven remarkably adaptive to technological change. The novel is disappearing as a physical media technology, but it has not disappeared as such – it has simply been subsumed into the broader digital world that we inhabit.
What has stayed the same, I argue, is the pervasive fear associated with technological change. We should remember the context in which Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451. The book was originally published in 1953, during the same decade in which the television entered middle-class American homes. Combine the increasing accessibility of television with McCarthy-era censorship and a looming fear of illiteracy, and you can begin to see the crux of Bradbury’s social and political concerns. The paranoia associated with ‘the idiot box’ or ‘the boob tube’ was very real, and it persists in more-or-less equal form today. Consider the current debates surrounding children and screen time – an issue that is getting slipperier as the present becomes increasingly digital.
It seems that each generation looks at its technology and wonders if the tail has begun to wag the dog. Perhaps this is a timeless truth. And yet, as we worry about technology and cling to our old ways, Bradbury also reminds us that: “To everything there is a season.” Touché....more
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