Well, not only have I fallen behind with my Waking Up Challenges, but I’ve fallen behind in writing about them as well.
Day 5’s challenge was to sit it somewhere for five minutes and write down exactly what I saw,—objects, movement, colors, textures, light- then to write about what emotions or expectations might be influencing what I saw, and how. Well, I sat at my desk, the same desk that I’m typing this at. I have slimline venetian blinds, and so the light was being sliced up horizontally. What I could mostly see was mess: printoffs of music, little notes to myself, piles of folders, books I’ve read and haven’t decided what to do with. Around me, more piles of books and an assortment of ukuleles. My feelings about them all? Obligation and “I should”s. The one thing that made me smile was looking at my desk calendar which I had printed off with photographs of my grandchildren. Listening to the reflection that accompanied this challenge, I must be a person who sees through a glass darkly (which is not, I must admit, how I perceive myself). Or perhaps I should just clean up this desk (another should).
I skipped Day 6 but it looks interesting, and I might come back to that one.
Day 7 was called ‘Leveraging Boredom’ and the challenge was not to use my phone FOR A WHOLE DAY. Well, I soon decided that I couldn’t possibly do that, but what I could do was to not go onto social media, no Wordle, no Google, no Solitaire, You Tube or The Guardian website for a day. It was disturbingly difficult but I’ve been hating how much time I waste each day, especially at night when I get tired. So, instead of scrolling, I finished reading a book I’ve been enjoying and felt much better for doing so. Instead of watching TV and playing Solitaire at the same time, I actually watched the Foreign Correspondent episode I was watching.
Day 3 of my Real Attention Challenge. Today I had to do one task about 80% as well as I otherwise would, and let that be good enough. Huh!
This is my bed. I loathe doonas: give me blankets any day. And don’t get me started on the absence of a top sheet in hotels. Layers, people, layers.
Anyway, we make the bed every morning: sheets (bottom and top), two blankets and a doona in a doona cover more for appearance than anything else. I tuck my blankets in, but Steve doesn’t. Worse still, you can see the blankets hanging out of the side of the bed reflected in the mirror because there’s never enough doona on his side. So every morning I spend a little while walking around the bed, making sure that the doona is even on both sides and tucking in any errant blankets on Steve’s side. I smooth out the wrinkles from the doona, and all is right with the world.
Did it matter? You bet it did. Every time I walked into the bedroom, I’d see the blankets hanging out of the side of the bed and it took every bit of self-control not to run round there, tuck them in and straighten up the doona. It put me in a bad mood for the whole day.
Then just to add insult to injury, I listened to the short reflection that went with this activity, where a man with a smooth voice rationalized his failure to wake up on time on a Saturday morning and get his kid out out of bed to go to kick-boxing by saying that it didn’t REALLY matter. Yes it did! You’re the father- show some responsibility! And if that kick-boxing instructor was a volunteer, that’s a million times worse. That’s the deal: you get your kid here on time, and I’ll teach him.
Does it matter? Yes.
Grrr. I don’t think this challenge is very good for me.
So, I’ve been subscribing to the ‘Waking Up’ meditation app for a few years now. This year they launched the Real Attention 14 Day challenge and I thought ‘why not?’ So Day 1 the challenge was ‘try something new’. Uff…something new. I am the ultimate creature of habit and it took me quite a while to think of something that I’d never done before. In the end I came up with two things
Something New Number 1: Go to Coburg Lake Park.
I must have driven past Coburg Lake dozens and dozens of times, but I’ve never actually been to it. It’s on Murray Road, opposite the old Pentridge Gaol which has now been redeveloped into highrise buildings, with shops, cinema etc. all enclosed within the bluestone walls of Pentridge, which can be seen on the other side of the lake in the photo above. I don’t know if I’d really like to live there: it’s just a little bit creepy. The lake is on the other side of the road from the gaol, and is reached by a bluestone bridge. Apparently Coburg had over 40 quarries in the 19th century, and this lake was constructed on the Merri Creek around the time of WW1.
It looked pretty grim when it was first constructed. You can see the Pentridge Wall quite clearly in these photos. Just what you want as a backdrop to a picnic area.
Coburg Lake 1927 SLVDiving Tower 1948 SLV
But by mid-20th century it was all looking very formal
There’s still traces of the formal gardens in the park, especially the Avenue of Honour, which was planted in 1919. Originally there was one tree for each soldier, but now the remaining trees commemorate all Coburg servicemen.
Much of the park, especially around the creek has been de-formalized. Merri (originally merri-merri in Woiwurrung) means ‘rocky’ and you certainly get a sense of the rockiness of this area before it was quarried out and tamed.
I walked along the park, through the gardens and along the creek – a pleasant little amble- until I realized that I had no idea where I had parked the car. The Challenge for today mentioned ‘getting lost’ and for a while that was exactly what I was until I finally crested the hill and saw my little car waiting there for me. So Mission Accomplished.
Something New Number 2
Now, this isn’t really something new because my friend Steven has been doing this for some time, but it’s new to me. He and his friends in the Sunday Roast Club go to a pub and have a Roast of the Day. Now, I have eaten millions of roast dinners, because my mother cooked a roast on Mondays and Thursdays (sausages on Tuesday, chops on Wednesday) and a very nice roast it was too. So nice, in fact, that I have never actually paid to have a roast dinner in a pub or restaurant. So, Something New Number Two was to go to an RSL and pay to have a roast of the day. And, you know, it was just like Mum used to make – none of that ‘jus’ rubbish, but real, thick gravy and roast potatoes, mint jelly, pumpkin and peas. Delicious. Mission Accomplished at Montmorency RSL.
In many ways the subtitle of this book is a better indicator of its content than its headline title. The neuroscientist and memory researcher Dr Charon Ranganath does explore the connection between the evolution of the brain and human social behaviour, but he does this mainly through an exploration of the physical structure of the brain before widening his analysis to a more sociological and legal perspective.
His book starts with the evolutionary ancient structures of the brain: the hippocampus, amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. He then goes on to look at evolutionarily-later developments like the perirhinal and prefrontal cortex and the Default Mode Network. These structural elements of the brain are bathed by neuromodulators like dopamine and noradrenaline. To be honest, I couldn’t really tell you specifically what he argued in relation to these more scientific aspects of his book (I can’t remember!) but while at times he becomes rather technical, the language and approach is fairly low-key so that you don’t feel as if you are reading a science textbook.
What interested me more was the social and behavioural aspects of memory which he also deals with. Memory has evolved to enable us to forget much of what we experience. Instead of being backward-looking, memory plays an important role in orienting us to the new and unexpected, and episodic memory helps us to predict what can happen in the future. It is episodic memory, with its placement of beginnings and endings and its tethering in a specific place and time, that declines most with age, while semantic (i.e. facts and knowledge) memory, which is transferable across contexts, remains fairly constant.
The parts that interested me most were his discussions of memory-construction. A memory is not a grab from a fixed, if sometimes inaccessible, mental film-reel, but is instead the constant retrieval and updating of a memory, with subtle alterations creeping in with every reiteration. Moreover, the story varies depending on the audience for retelling as well, as when family memories are shaped into a story with which to regale listeners. As a local historian who collects oral histories, this is a rather disconcerting thought. And more than merely disconcerting are the implications of evidence in legal cases, where long interrogations and repetitions, and in particular ‘shaping’ questioning, can embed a memory that is different from the original one. Courtroom questioning, which involves retrieval of the memory for an external audience operating on different parameters, shapes memory with sometimes dreadful consequences. It’s all very destabilizing.
I had a recent example of this. I was talking on community radio about our local historical society, and was invited to select two songs and talk about the reason for selecting them. One of them was ‘5.10 Man’ by the Masters Apprentices, which I remember for being presented as a new song by the Masters when they appeared at our school social in 1969. I decided to check the Facebook page for my school, where I knew that there had been a conversation about that social, only to find that other comments made it 1968, and the ‘new song’ being ‘Turn up Your Radio’ (which couldn’t have been right because it wasn’t released then). I found myself questioning my original memory, although self-centred to the last, I’m sticking to my 1969 5.10 Man memory.
Charan Ranganath is no Oliver Sacks. His book is based far more in the laboratory than Sacks’ work, with example after example of rather odd lab tests, often using university students, that add incrementally to the science of memory. I did find his compulsion to praise everybody that he had ever worked with rather cloying as well. He intersperses his analysis with some personal anecdotes that, while being somewhat more ‘memorable’ for me than the scientific parts, were not particularly earth-shattering in themselves, and they lacked the deep empathy of Oliver Sacks’ work. So, interesting enough in its own right, although for me the implications of his work are more thought-provoking than the actual explanation.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I read a positive review in the New Scientist.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 