Genius

Robert Sapolsky

 

 

 How many geniuses have you come across ?

I mean, people who really change your thinking and seem to have an original and insightful take on things ? People who seem to excel in whatever they do ? People who have a vast range of interests and manage to join the dots ?

In a lifetime of 70 years, I guess I met two. I read about others, most of them already dead.

But serendipity introduced me to Robert Sapolsky of the magnificent and prejudicial beard. Not personally, but on YouTube, where his lectures at Stanford appear. (And by the way, the photo was taken by Linda Cicero of Stanford News Services.)

This guy is the real deal. You don't believe me ? Well, maybe believe the MacArthur Fellowship, who gave him their Genius Award way back in 1987. And he has got better since then.

So why is he a genius ?

He is a neuro-biologist. He is a gifted teacher and a vastly experienced researcher. But he is also funny, entertaining, and wonderfully clear. Above all, he exudes the humanity that we really need to hear about.

Check him out if you have time. You won't feel your life shimmer, but it will have changed.

Helping the needy

Free meals for kids during the school holidays ? No. The government insists that the temporary £1 000 rise in universal credit will cover the cost.

This makes perfect sense from a government whose response to refugees drowning in the Channel is to see the most urgent need to chase down traffickers. Never mind the drowned family. Why did they never learn to swim ?

It would be such a luxury to have a government that I could support. I am pretty sure that won't be any time soon.

But I do have an idea.

Boris, it was reported last week, cannot afford to live on his £150 000 salary, and has taken a huge drop in income after becoming Prime Minister. Surely this is a case for exuberant and enthusiastic crowd-funding if ever there was one.

If we could jointly provide him with a couple of years of buckshee salary on condition that he steps down immediately and never comes back, do you think he might take the bait ? 

It would be a very satisfying use of hard-earned cash. For me, at least.

Prostate Blues

Like a zillion other guys my age, I have a prostate problem.

More than a couple of years ago, I suddenly found that I could not pee, and knew what damnation without relief felt like.

Since then, I have been a patient undergoing tests and reviews. It has been a weird experience.

I lucked out in being assigned to an excellent consultant, Mr P. He is a lot younger than I am, but already a very senior guy. Ferociously knowledgeable, he is also warm, funny, reassuring, and a great conversationalist. His practice is cutting edge, with no uncomfortable pun intended. He is an enthusiast, a proselytising urologist of limitless energy. I have tried to imagine being an enthusiast for urology, but had to stop as I felt a migraine coming on.

I’d like to see him get some kind of wider recognition, and he richly deserves it.

But the lovely NHS has been a bit stretched during my patienthood, and patience has certainly been required, by patients and staff alike. Appointments have been routinely delayed by a couple of months or more. My MRI scan had to be repeated as the delay between having the scan and meeting with the consultant rendered it diagnostically useless as it was so old by the time we met.

Covid has not helped.

I was due to be reviewed in clinic in June, but that appointment was delayed, and I have a phone appointment in the middle of October instead. Mr P’s view was that we should try to meet, Covid permitting, sometime after another MRI scan which he would book for April 2021. He mentioned that the last scan did not make it entirely clear whether there was a tumour there or not. 

Oh. I had not heard that before. I had a brief pang of anxiety, but know that I am much more likely to die WITH prostate cancer than OF prostate cancer.

I am not keen on all the military metaphors that dance clumsily round the Maypole of disease. A ‘long battle’. A struggle ‘bravely fought’. A determined ‘fight to beat the disease’. These make no sense to me, and I prefer instead to think of the disease as very much part of me, part of my body, and a small step in the gradual decay that comes inevitably with age. My history, genetic make-up, and environment have brought me here, and as long as I can, I will continue to carp my particular diem with all the enthusiasm I can muster.

I really admire the example of David Hume, the great philosopher, and hope one day to emulate his quiet unconcern. Within days of his death he wrote to an old friend:

My disorder … has been gradually undermining me these last two years; but within these six months, has been visibly hastening me to my end. I see death approach gradually, without anxiety or regret. I salute you, with great affection and regard, for the last time.

 

 

Thought for the Day

Radio 4 is more or less the soothing soundtrack of my life. Until Thought for the Day comes on, that is. It’s the that there is an overwhelming urge to shove the radio into the washing-up bowl, or maybe into the oven with the heat turned up.

It’s very weird to get this urge in the middle of a programme dedicated to pumping out the latest political horrors, which I can more or less listen to with equanimity.

The trouble with Thought for the Day is that it isn’t. It seems to trot out a succession of simpering nincompoops, with the Christian contingent being the poopiest. They have maybe heard of thinking, but prefer instead to broadcast conventional platitudinous crapola.

To be fair, there are one or two regulars who do challenge you with odd angles and interesting takes. Some leave you thinking for days. But most don’t. 

Bertrand Russell famously advised against trying to discourage thinking on the grounds that you are sure to succeed.

Once again, this morning some monotonous speaker was holing up Julian of Norwich as a sort of model thinker for these Covid times.

Now there are so many problems with this that it is hard to know where to start. Julian of Norwich spent her life as an anchorite, holed up in s small cell in St Julian’s Church, Norwich. She was completely cut off from the world, did not leave her cell, and had two maids who provided for her physical needs.

While I am very much for the idea of individual personal development, and even more for personal choice, this was clearly a woman with enormous issues. She did not so much have baggage as freight. Nowadays she would be identified as having mental health problems, and would, I hope, receive care and support.

But is she a role-model for today ? I don’t think so. Of course, her approach of complete isolation from the world would have worked a treat during the pandemic, but few of us would like to adopt it as a life-style. 

As with other anchorites, when Julian first moved into her cell, the funeral rites would have been said to signify that she was ‘dead to the world’. This does feel very fitting for such an anti-life approach.

We know little of her earlier life, and even that is a generous statement. We do not even know her given name. But it is worth asking what possible events and trauma formed a personality so fearful of the world and determined to withdraw from it so completely.  It is the response to life of someone who has sustained life-changing psychological injuries. 

To hold her up as a model for living today seems perverse, aberrant, slightly twisted. And unthinking.