The Brain in Pain



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Tattoo Your Ears

“The most merciful thing in the world,” said H.P. Lovecraft, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Nowadays we can’t correlate all the contents of our hard-drives either. But occasionally bits come together. I’ve had two MP3s sitting on my hard-drive for months: “Drink or Die” by Erotic Support and “Hunter Gatherer” by Swords of Mars. I liked them both a lot, but until recently I didn’t realize that they were by two incarnations of the same Finnish band.

Cover of "Die by the..." Swords of Mars
They don’t sound very much alike, after all. But now that I’ve correlated them, they’ve inspired some thoughts on music and mutilation. “Drink or Die” is a dense, fuzzy, leather-lunged rumble-rocker that, like a good Mötley Crüe song, your ears can snort like cocaine. But, unlike Mötley Crüe, the auditory rush lasts the whole song, not just the first half. “Hunter Gatherer” is much more sombre. Erotic Support were “Helsinki beercore”; Swords of Mars are darker, doomier and dirgier. They’ve also got a better name – “Erotic Support” seems to have lost something in translation. Finnish is a long way from English: it’s in a different and unrelated language family, the Finno-Ugric, not the Indo-European. So it lines up with Hungarian and Estonian, not English, German and French. But Erotic Support’s lyrics are good English and “Drink or Die” is a clever title. They’d have been a more interesting band if they’d sung entirely in Finnish, but also less successful, because less accessible to the rest of the world.

Es war einmal eine Königstochter, die ging hinaus in den Wald und setzte sich an einen kühlen Brunnen. Sie hatte eine goldene Kugel, die war ihr liebstes Spielwerk, die warf sie in die Höhe und fing sie wieder in der Luft und hatte ihre Lust daran. Einmal war die Kugel gar hoch geflogen, sie hatte die Hand schon ausgestreckt und die Finger gekrümmt, um sie wieder zufangen, da schlug sie neben vorbei auf die Erde, rollte und rollte und geradezu in das Wasser hinein.

Some Indo-European

Mieleni minun tekevi, aivoni ajattelevi
lähteäni laulamahan, saa’ani sanelemahan,
sukuvirttä suoltamahan, lajivirttä laulamahan.
Sanat suussani sulavat, puhe’et putoelevat,
kielelleni kerkiävät, hampahilleni hajoovat.

Veli kulta, veikkoseni, kaunis kasvinkumppalini!
Lähe nyt kanssa laulamahan, saa kera sanelemahan
yhtehen yhyttyämme, kahta’alta käytyämme!
Harvoin yhtehen yhymme, saamme toinen toisihimme
näillä raukoilla rajoilla, poloisilla Pohjan mailla.

Some Finno-Ugric

All the same, being inaccessible sometimes helps a band’s appeal to the rest of the world: the mystique of black metal is much stronger in bands that use only Norwegian or one of the other Scandinavian languages. Erotic Support haven’t joined that rebellion against Coca-Colonization and tried to create an indigenous genre. They’re happy to reproduce more or less American music using the more or less American invention known as the electric guitar. But amplified music would have appeared in Europe even if North America had been colonized by the Chinese, so I wonder what rock would sound like if it had evolved in Europe instead. It wouldn’t be called rock, of course, but what other differences would it have? Would it be more sophisticated, for example? I think it would. The success of American exports depends in part on their strong and simple flavours. “Drink or Die” has those flavours: it’s about volume, rhythm and power. It’s full of a certain “drug-addled, crab-infested, tinnitus-nagged spirit” — the “urge to submerge in the raw bedrock viscerality of rock”, as some metaphor-mixing, über-emphasizing idiot once put it (I think it was me).

Cover of "II" by Erotic Support

Erotic Support are “beercore”, remember. Beer marks the brain with hangovers, just as tattoos mark the skin with ink. And just as loud music marks the ears with tinnitus. There are various kinds of self-mutilation in rock and that self-mutilation can have unhealthy motives. It can be an expression of boredom, angst, anomie and self-hatred. Unsurprisingly, Finland has the nineteenth highest suicide rate in the world. Beer, tattoos and tinnitus are part of the louder, dirtier and loutier end of rock: unlike Radiohead or Coldplay, Erotic Support sound like a band with tattoos who are used to hangovers. “Drink or Die” is a joke about exactly that. But what if rock had evolved in a wine-drinking culture? Would it be less of a sado-masochistic ritual, more a refined rite? Maybe not: the god of wine is Dionysos and he was Ho Bromios, the Thunderer. His brother Pan induces panic with loud noises. But black metal looks towards northern paganism: it’s music for pine forests, cold seas and beer-drinkers, not olive groves, warm seas and oenopotes.

Erotic Support don’t create soundscapes for Finland the way black metal creates soundscapes for Norway, but they do create beer-drinkers’ music, so they do express Finnishness to that extent. Swords of Mars, being darker, doomier and dirgier, are moving nearer an indigenous Finnish rock, or an indigenous Scandinavian rock, at least. This may be related to the fact that genes express themselves more strongly as an individual ages: for example, the correlation between the intelligence of parents and their children is strongest when the children are adults. Erotic Support create faster, more aggressive music than Swords of Mars, so it isn’t surprising that they’re the younger version of the same band. In biology, the genotype creates the phenotype: DNA codes for bodies and behaviour. Music is part of what Richard Dawkins calls the “extended phenotype”, like the nest of a bird or the termite-fishing-rods of a chimpanzee. A bird’s wings are created directly by its genes; a bird’s nest is created indirectly by its genes, viâ the brain. So a bird’s wings are part of the phenotype and a bird’s nest part of the extended phenotype.

Both are under the influence of the genes and both are expressions of biology. Music (like bird-song) is an expression of biology too, as is the difference between the music of Erotic Support and Swords of Mars. As brains age, the behaviour they create changes. Swords of Mars are older and not attracted to reckless self-mutilation as Erotic Support were: it’s not music to precede hangovers and induce tinnitus any more. Sword of Mars aren’t trying to tattoo your ears but to educate your mind.

The Isle of the Torturer






Front cover of Dr No (Pan paperback)





Front cover of Dr No (Pan paperback)



































Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift


Ave Aves!

Front cover of Collins Bird Guide by Lars SvenssonCollins Bird Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (second edition), text and maps by Lars Svensson, illustrations and captions by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström, with a significant contribution by Peter J. Grant, translated by David Christie and Lars Svensson (HarperCollins, 2009)

A literate musician can read a score and hear a symphony in his head. I wonder whether the mega-minds of the future will be able to do something similar with genomes: read a DNA recipe and see the animal or plant cooked from it. The mega-minds will need to know about the oven, that is, the womb, egg or seed, but then musicians need to know about instruments, not just notes. The code can’t exist in isolation: it needs a world to be realized in and a musician’s mind can mimic that world.

But mega-minds aren’t here yet for genetics, so we have to use books like this to see the product of DNA-recipes. Collins Bird Guide is effectively a genetic cook-book or genomic score, but we don’t see the naked genes, just the dish or symphony cooked or played from them. Lars Svensson describes thousands of birds of all shapes, sizes, colours, diets and habitats, from the huge golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos, which can carry off a lamb, to the tiny goldcrest, Regulus regulus, which isn’t much bigger than a bumblebee. But these two, like all other birds, have a common ancestor: when you see a bird sitting in a tree, it is also, metaphorically speaking, sitting in a genetic tree whose twigs, branches and boughs spring from a single trunk. One DNA-recipe has turned into many under the influence of natural and sexual selection.

Birds, which often come in very distinct male and female forms, offer lots of good examples of sexual selection. One of the most spectacular examples isn’t native to the region covered by the book, but it has been introduced here. And so there are pleasant surprises in store for some European ornithophiles. I once came across a wild-living golden pheasant, Chrysolophus pictus, early one morning in a park in northern England. I thought for a moment that I was hallucinating: the bird has a crest of spun gold, a scarlet breast and belly, and an orange/black “nuchal cape”, or neck-feathers, that “can be raised like a fan when displaying” (“Partridges & Pheasants”, pg. 59). It also has yellow legs, blue wings and a long, attractively patterned tail. “Unmistakable!” notes the book.

That’s true of the ♂, at least. The ♀, whose eyes and brain are responsible for the spectacular appearance of the ♂, is undistinguished and similar to the ♀ of Lady Amherst’s pheasant, Chrysolophus amherstiae, whose ♂ is again “Unmistakable!”, thanks to the sexual selection of its ♀. These closely related species are native to eastern Asia and “occasionally hybridize” in Britain (pg. 59). In other words, their common ancestor was fairly recent and their DNA recipes can still work together. But these hybridizations may also be a function of small populations and restricted habitat in Britain. “Function” is the operative word: birds, like all other forms of life, are mechanisms with inputs, throughputs and outputs. For a pheasant, some of the input is sense-data. The throughput is the processing of sense-data in the brain. The output is behaviour: for example, mating with a less-than-ideal partner under the restricted conditions of Britain.

All this can be modelled mathematically, but in the widest and deepest sense it already is mathematical: the human invention of mathematics, with a small “m”, is a symbolic representation of Mathematics with a big “M”. Mathematical symbols represent entities and operations and are manipulated according to logical rules. This mimics the inter-play of entities in the real world, which are subject to the rules of logic implicit in physics and chemistry. Human mathematics is fallible, albeit self-correcting. The mathematics underlying reality realizes the pipe-dreams of the papacy and is infallible, in the sense that it never disobeys the rules by which it is governed.

But this infallible mathematics can fail the entities for whom it operates: birds can die young and fail to reproduce or have fewer offspring than their competitors. But this is the fuel of a larger mechanism: evolution, which is a mathematical process. Genes mutate and vary in frequency under the influence of natural and sexual selection, inter alia. Birds offer more good examples of the effects, because they have wings, beaks and feet. These are mathematical mechanisms, shaped by and for the physics of a particular environment: wings have input from the air and provide the output of flight. Or the output of swimming: some wings are adapted for movement underwater, as in the cormorants, or Phalacrocoracidae, whose beaks are adapted for seizing fish and feet for paddling.

Sample page from Collins Bird Guide by Lars Svensson

You can look through this book and survey the varying geometry of wings, beaks and feet, from gliding gulls to hovering warblers, from seed-cracking finches to flesh-tearing owls, from tiny-toed swifts to wading egrets. The tool-kit of the common ancestor has become many tool-kits and evolution has been morally neutral as it has worked its multiplicative magic. The feet of the odd and endearing wallcreeper, Tichodroma muraria, are adapted to clinging onto vertical rock; the feet of eagles and owls are adapted to puncturing nerve-filled flesh. And presumably each species enjoys using its adaptation. A distinct psychology will accompany each distinct wing, beak and foot, because no organ can change in isolation: it is evolving within the environment of the body, influencing and influenced by other organs, in particular the brain.

But changes in the brain aren’t easily visible. If they were, some parts of evolution would be much less controversial: racial differences in human intelligence, for example. But races differ in other ways: in their attitudes to animals, for example. One generalization is that northern Europeans like listening to songbirds and southern Europeans like shooting them. So it’s not surprising that this book was originally published in Swedish as Fågelguiden, Europas och Medelhavsområdets fåglar i fält (1999). It would also be interesting to see the statistics of ornithological publishing in Europe. Those statistics will reflect genetic differences in the white European race, and so will readers’ reactions to the book.

My interest is partly aesthetic and mathematical, for example, and I quail at the thought of learning the differences between what bird-watchers call “little brown jobs”: the various kinds of warbler are hard enough to tell apart in pictures, let alone in the wild. But things can get even worse at night: Lars Svensson notes of Savi’s warbler, Locustella luscinioides, that “A possible confusion risk at distance and at night in S and C Europe is the mole-cricket” (“Warblers”, pg. 318). Birdsong and bird-cries are another aspect of ornitho-mathematics, but it’s hard to represent them in print: “kru-kih karra-kru-kih chivi trü chivi chih” (clamorous reed warbler, Acrocephalus stentoreus, pg. 322), “glipp-glipp-glipp” (common crossbill, Loxia curvirostra, pg. 386), “trrsh, trre-trre-trre-rrerrerre” (sand martin, Riparia riparia, pg. 258), “pyük…popopo…” (pygmy owl, Glaucidium passerinum, pg. 226), “brrreep, bip bip bip” (red phalarope, Phalaropus fulicarius, pg. 162), and so on.

In an electronic manual of ornithology, you’d be able to hear the songs, rather than imagine them, but electronic manuals, by offering more, in some ways offer less. Because the book has so many species to cover, it can’t describe any species in detail. So there are occasional fleeting comments like this:

Asian Desert Warbler, Sylvia nana V*** [= rare vagrant in northern Europe]… has the peculiar habit of sometimes “tailing” the Desert Wheatear [Oenanthe deserti] (“Warblers”, pg. 310-1)

The accompanying illustration shows a desert warbler standing under a small bush and peering out at a nearby wheatear. It’s anthropomorphic and anthropocentric to be amused by the behaviour, but ornithology is a human invention and humans don’t have to be purely scientific. I get a boy-racer thrill from another “V***” bird, the white-throated needletail, Hirundapus caudacutus:

Big, with heavy compact body, neckless, stub-tailed (shape somewhere between fat cigar and “flying barrel”). Flight impressively fast, the bird seems to draw easily away from other swifts (though these are still fast flyers!). (“Vagrants”, pg. 415)

That I would like to see. In the meantime, I have this book and the multiplex mutational mathematics it captures in pictures and words.

Neuclid on the Block

How many blows does it take to demolish a wall with a hammer? It depends on the wall and the hammer, of course. If the wall is reality and the hammer is mathematics, you can do it in three blows, like this:

α’. Σημεῖόν ἐστιν, οὗ μέρος οὐθέν.
β’. Γραμμὴ δὲ μῆκος ἀπλατές.
γ’. Γραμμῆς δὲ πέρατα σημεῖα.

1. A point is that of which there is no part.
2. A line is a length without breadth.
3. The extremities of a line are points.

That is the astonishing, world-shattering opening in one of the strangest – and sanest – books ever written. It’s twenty-three centuries old, was written by an Alexandrian mathematician called Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.), and has been pored over by everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Bertrand Russell by way of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Its title is highly appropriate: Στοιχεῖα, or Elements. Physical reality is composed of chemical elements; mathematical reality is composed of logical elements. The second reality is much bigger – infinitely bigger, in fact. In his Elements, Euclid slipped the bonds of time, space and matter by demolishing the walls of reality with a mathematical hammer and escaping into a world of pure abstraction.

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Paradigm Lost

Genius schmenius — genetics is sooooo 1950s:

But Paul Martin, a sociologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, is surprised that geneticists are still pursuing this line of research. “I think most people would say that’s the wrong paradigm, when most educational research suggests that social factors are incredibly important,” he says. “Strategically, this seems like something of a throwback.”

Chinese project probes the genetics of genius

See? Sense and decency. That’s because sociology is a proper science. Nearly as proper as psychoanalysis or astrology, in fact.

Flesh and Binary

It’s odd that probability theory is so counter-intuitive to human beings and so late-flowering in mathematics. Men have been gambling for thousands of years, but didn’t develop a good understanding of what happens when dice are rolled or coins are tossed until a few centuries ago. And an intuitive grasp of probability would have been useful long before gambling was invented. Our genes automatically equip us to speak, to walk and to throw, but they don’t equip us to understand by instinct why five-tails-in-a-row makes heads no more likely on the sixth coin-toss than it was on the first.

Dice from ancient Rome

Dice and gambling tokens from ancient Rome

Or to understand why five-boys-in-a-row makes the birth of a girl next time no more likely than it was during the first pregnancy (at least in theory). Boy/girl, like heads/tails, is a binary choice, so binary numbers are useful for understanding the probabilities of birth or coin-tossing. Questions like these are often asked to test knowledge of elementary probability:

1. Suppose a family have two children and the elder is a boy. What is the probability that both are boys?

2. Suppose a family have two children and at least one is a boy. What is the probability that both are boys?

People sometimes assume that the two questions are equivalent, but binary makes it clear that they’re not. If 1 represents a boy, 0 represents a girl and digit-order represents birth-order, the first question covers these possibilities: 10, 11. So the chance of both children being boys is 1/2 or 50%. The second question covers these possibilities: 10, 01, 11. So the chance of both children being boys is 1/3 = 33·3%. But now examine this question:

3. Suppose a family have two children and only one is called John. What is the probability that both children are boys?

That might seem the equivalent of question 2, but it isn’t. The name “John” doesn’t just identify the child as a boy, it identifies him as a unique boy, distinct from any brother he happens to have. Binary isn’t sufficient any more. So, while boy = 1, John = 2. The possibilities are: 20, 21, 02, 12. The chance of both children being boys is then 1/2 = 50%.

The three questions above are very simple, but I don’t think Archimedes or Euclid ever addressed the mathematics behind them. Perhaps they would have made mistakes if they had. I hope I haven’t, more than two millennia later. Perhaps the difficulty of understanding probability relates to the fact that it involves movement and change. The Greeks developed a highly sophisticated mathematics of static geometry, but did not understand projectiles or falling objects. When mathematicians began understood those in Renaissance Italy, they also began to understand the behaviour of dice, coins and cards. Ideas were on the move then and this new mathematics was obviously related to the rise of science: Galileo (1564-1642) is an important figure in both fields. But the maths and science can be linked with apparently distinct phenomena like Protestantism and classical music. All of these things began to develop in a “band of genius” identified by the American researcher Charles Murray. It runs roughly from Italy through France and Germany to Scotland: from Galileo through Beethoven and Descartes to David Hume.

Map of Europe from Mercator's Atlas Cosmographicae (1596)

Map of Europe from Mercator’s Atlas Cosmographicae (1596)

But how far is geography also biology? Having children is a form of gambling: the dice of DNA, shaken in testicle- and ovary-cups, are rolled in a casino run by Mother Nature. Or rather, in a series of casinos where different rules apply: the genetic bets placed in Africa or Europe or Asia haven’t paid off in the same way. In other words, what wins in one place may lose in another. Different environments have favoured different sets of genes with different effects on both bodies and brains. All human beings have many things in common, but saying that we all belong to the same race, the human race, is like saying that we all speak the same language, the human language. It’s a ludicrous and anti-scientific idea, however widely it may be accepted (and enforced) in the modern West.

Languages have fuzzy boundaries. So do races. Languages have dialects and accents, and so, in a sense, do races. The genius that unites Galileo, Beethoven and Hume may have been a particular genetic dialect spoken, as it were, in a particular area of Europe. Or perhaps it’s better to see European genius as a series of overlapping dialects. Testing that idea will involve mathematics and probability theory, and the computers that crunch the data about flesh will run on binary. Apparently disparate things are united by mathematics, but maths unites everything partly because it is everything. Understanding the behaviour of dice in the sixteenth century leads to understanding the behaviour of DNA in the twenty-first.

The next step will be to control the DNA-dice as they roll. China has already begun trying to do that using science first developed in the West. But the West itself is still in the thrall of crypto-religious ideas about equality and environment. These differences have biological causes: the way different races think about genetics, or persuade other races to think about genetics, is related to their genetics. You can’t escape genes any more than you can escape maths. But the latter is a ladder that allows us to see over the old genetic wall and glimpse the possibilities beyond it. The Chinese are trying to climb over the wall using super-computers; the West is still insisting that there’s nothing on the other side. Interesting times are ahead for both flesh and binary.


1. Suppose a family have three children and the eldest is a girl. What is the probability that all three are girls?

2. Suppose a family have three children and at least one is a girl. What is the probability that all three are girls?

3. Suppose a family have three children and only one is called Joan. What is the probability that all three are girls?

The possibilities in the first case are: 000, 001, 010, 011. So the chance of three girls is 1/4 = 25%.

The possibilities in the second case are: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110. So the chance of three girls is 1/7 = 14·28%.

The possibilities in the third case are: 200, 201, 210, 211, 020, 021, 120, 121, 002, 012, 102, 112. So the chance of three girls is 3/12 = 1/4 = 25%.