January 2007 - Posts
Get this: attaining fame in one's life can actually prolong it. Sounds hard to believe doesn't it? Not so, according to the work of Matthew Rablen and Andrew Oswald of Warwick University in England as reported
here. Their research among Nobel prize winners and nominees showed a remarkable fact, that those who had actually won the prestigious award lived on average two years longer than their counterparts who though nominated had not won. These also rans were of course equally worthy of the prize but ended up not receiving the ultimate award of scientific achievement and acclaim. The researchers' analysis specifically focused on the
status of the individual, and not their material wealth which among other factors in the study including country of residence and sex were removed from the experiment. To explain the source of this longevity is still a mystery but it is obvious that the sheer stress of being at the bottom contributes to a reduced lifespan. The point to be taken away from all this, of course, is that we should all strive to make a name for ourselves in our lifetime because it just might very well be - healthy.
I hardly go out to see movies nowadays, but one movie that had been on my radar screen after A.O. Scott of the New York times rated it as the
best film of 2006, was the Clint Eastwood directed
Letters from Iwo Jima. The movie, though about war, is not a war epic. It is based on events in February-March of 1945 with WWII raging in the Pacific and really no side able to claim supreme advantage. The Imperial Japanese army and the United States military were engaged in several simultaneous and bloody battles over control of strategic territory in the vast Pacific ocean. The invasion of the tiny Japanese island of
Iwo Jima, only 8 square kilometres in area and 1200 km south of Tokyo, by the Americans whose aim was to use its airfields to launch non-stop air raids on the Japanese mainland was a pivotal turning point in the war that lead to the eventual invasion of Okinawa and ultimately the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. The context of this particular battle is significant - the Japanese had recently had their entire Naval fleet destroyed and thus had no real reinforcements to send to the island's defense portending its doom from the outset, however this information was witheld by the Japanese war planners from their generals in an effort to not weaken their resolve. Herein lies one of the central themes explored in this movie: in the face of certain defeat, how are soldiers supposed to act? The movie is told from the perspective of the Japanese whose culture is well known to revere honor in death. Yet the key question is honor for whom, one's country or one's self? This idea is explored in different ways through several characters including a few soldiers and General Kuribayashi who was commisioned to lead the defense. All the men describe their ordeals in letters written to family members that serve to also relive their past. The theme is beautifully encapsulated in a letter an Americon mother from Oklahoma has sent to her captured son on the battlefield that says "do what is right, because it is right." The humanizing of the soldier's lives through vis-a-vis their letters only adds to the audience's experience of the traumatic war, but gives us necessary insight into the mindset that pervaded a wartime society, a society in which conscription into the army was an honorable and almost desirable act that forced these young men to display incredible selflessness. I do not want to give away too much of the plot so I won't say more, but I will say that the sheer realism of the re-enactment of this battle is gripping.
Some interesting
research conducted by Dr. Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist, of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University has tried to answer the important question of how music affects our emotion. How does music confer evolutionary survival advantages? What are the neuroscientific underpinnings for remembering popular songs? An enlightening experiment Dr. Levitin performed was to stop people in the street and ask them to sing their favorite song - the results are quite interesting in demonstrating people's accurate rendition: most were able to sing the tempo of the song correct to within 4% and and two thirds sang within the original pitch! How then can music be so forcefully engrained in our minds? The answer lies in the reward center of the brain, the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental, which are triggered to release dopamine upon memory of a particular melody. Another element contributing to the lasting impression that music has on us is timbre - the particular blend of tones in any sound, the reason why a flute sounds so different than a tuba even while playing the same note of the same key. Dr. Levitin also probed the connection between a symphony conductor and his orchestra to see whether the conductor had any noticeable effect on the emotional tenor of the music being created, he claims there is. And finally, he claims controversially that one of the reasons men create music is for reproductive fitness, to explain the groupies that follow rock stars around. Of course.