AWF18: Brain Waves – David Eagleman

AWF18: Brain Waves: David Eagleman

The Aotea Centre had opened up all three levels of the ASB Theatre to accommodate the crowd who gathered to hear Toby Manhire interview neuroscientist, writer, and Harvard professor David Eagleman about brains.

Manhire started with the big question: yanny or laurel? Eagleman explained that we hear different things because that audio file is low quality, which allows your brain to bring its own interpretation to the sound. ‘The brain is locked in silence and darkness inside the skull’ yet we can have a full, rich visual experience with our eyes closed (for example, when we’re dreaming). ‘Your seeing of us now is happening inside your head.’ Already my own head was starting to whirl a bit, but we were only just getting started.

photo courtesy Auckland Writers Festival

Eagleman has been working on sensory substitution, whereby you feed data into your brain via an unusual sense. For example, deaf people can hear by feeling the sound on their skin. Just when I was trying to figure that one out, we moved on again to the Mr Potato Head model of evolution. I didn’t fully understand it if I’m honest, but it’s got something to do with plugging devices into the brain. For example, could we ‘feel’ the economic movements of the world? Manhire asked whether there was a risk these devices could be hacked. Eagleman said not, but I’m not convinced. That whole thing sounded spooky.

Eagleman compared the brain to an inner cosmos: ‘the densest representation of who you are’. We tend to feel like we know who we are, but the deeper we go into neuroscience, the more uncertain we become. Our brains have a hundred billion neurons with a thousand trillion connections. ‘It’s the kind of thing that totally bankrupts our language.’ No kidding.

Manhire ran through a few brain FAQs. It’s not true that we only use 10% of our brains, actually we’re always using all of it. Consciousness – that tiny part that flickers to life when you wake up – is just a tiny speck of the brain. It’s true that brain cells are not replenished over our lifetime, but false that bigger-brained people are more intelligent.

There was an interesting discussion about how neuroscience can contribute to the criminal justice system. Eagleman told the story of Charles Whitman, who committed the first mass shooting in the US in 1966. Afterwards, he was found to have a brain tumour pressing on his amygdala. So does that mean it wasn’t his fault? ‘It strains our notions about justice. A lot of neuroscientists think we don’t have free will.’

Discussion moved on to the nature of memory. Long story short, it’s nowhere near as reliable as we think. ‘Memory is a myth-making machine. We’re constantly reinventing our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are.’ It doesn’t bode well for this review, that’s for sure. I started to worry that I was taking the wrong notes. I’m including lots of quotes here: what if I’ve misremembered them? Memory is physical change in structure of brain. ‘It’s a live electrical fabric that’s constantly reconfiguring itself.’ We feel we’re the same person we were in the past but in fact we’re completely different. Yikes!

So I’m now a different person from who I was when I became annoyed at a particularly daft audience question – one of those that has led Madeleine Chapman to call for an end to all festival audience questions ever. A person asked, essentially, how can we make wrong people be right? We can’t, nor should we, was Eagleman’s response – if memory serves.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage 

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Canongate Books
ISBN 9780857862075

The Brain: The Story of You
by David Eagleman
Canongate Books
ISBN 9781782116615

We also reviewed David Eagleman’s session on The Creative Brain.

WORD: How to be a Writer, with Steve Hely

Steve Hely is a comedic writer from the USA. He has written for many great TV shows, and his TV writing and how he got into this was the focus of the first part of this talk. First up, Hely apologises to all those in the audience who thought this was about how to be a writer, and takes the blame for the odd title (it was meant to be named after his novel How I Became a Famous Novelist.’

I’ll admit I was struggling by this point of the day. I really ought to have had a coffee before going into this session, but due to a quick turn-around, that was too hard. My miasma of tiredness wasn’t helped by the in-crowd angle Toby Manhire took during part of this interview. I have been enjoying each of the USA writers’ views on Trump and American politics however, and I’d recommend going along to The State Of America at 12.30pm here at The Piano.

Hely’s writing credits include the David Letterman Show, American Dad, 30 Rock, and Veep. He has also published the title named earlier, plus travel book The Wonder Trail. He wanted to be a TV writer from very young, and deliberately went to Harvard (after some of his favourite writers) so he could work at the Harvard Lampoon magazine. After college, he pitched his writing to Letterman, didn’t hear anything for months, moved to LA in the meantime, then to New York when he got the job.

The writing process for Letterman: “You got there and were told what the pitch was for that day. You’d pick a topic then you’d write jokes for it, then write some skits for the opening set piece.  You were in a box writing on your typewriter.” When he moved to comedy writing though, it became more collaborative – TV writers are aware that 1 + 1 = more than 2.The style of the writing room depends on the personality of the show-runner. “Sometimes they touch everything themselves, sometimes they delegate and let others deal with it.”

Hely was dubious about the idea of a US version of The Office, but by the time he came in as a writer it was through to its 7^th season: there ended up being around 250 episodes of US The Office, compared to about 12 in the UK. In this writing group, writers were often transitioned to become actors, quite deliberately – to give them a sense of what they are doing.

They moved on then to talk about his books. Hely says, “It is helpful as a writer to be able to split your personality into different characters.” One of the reasons he wanted to be a novelist was to be invited to literary festivals. The theme of How I became a famous novelist was how much you could get away with, when pretending to be a writer. “I wanted to explore the line between being genuine and being a poser.” Hely also wanted to explore the difference between mass-market and literary fiction – he is interested in who we give literary awards to, and why.

While on hiatus from TV writing, he took a trip around Central and South America. He had pitched this to publishers before leaving, and when he was part-way through his agent sold the book: so then he had to write it. “I like to break my routine by travelling, and talking to strangers, and working out a new country. New Zealand has a culture of this, but I have encountered a lot of Americans who have never considered travelling. “

Trump

Hely attended the Republican Convention: “It was so tin pot, cheap, dictatorial, fascist and I hated to see it in the United States. Donald Trump is barf – US got so disgusted with the political system that they threw Trump up. Those who weren’t part of the the machine threw this up.” The only funny part of it was when Ted Cruz – “another despicable individual” – refused to endorse Trump. But as soon as Trump started talking he thought “No. We need to shut this down.”

One of the audience members asked whether it was getting harder to write political satire, given Trump is doing this himself? “The fact satire is being outpaced by reality is a problem.” It is, he says, hard to make fun of this guy who changes his mind at every turn. “I don’t subscribe to the idea that comedy’s job is to change people’s minds. The real value of it is making you feel less insane. It’s helpful to make people understand they aren’t alone.”

Reviewed by Sarah Forster

How to be a Writer, with Steve Hely

Steve Hely is also at:

The State of America, Sun 28 Aug, 12.30pm

 

WORD: The Spinoff After Dark: Toby Manhire, Alex Casey and Duncan Greive

I arrived at this session in a bit of daze, having had my head exploded by Hear My Voice, two hours of incendiary poetry and storytelling from a group of WORD Christchurch’s most outspoken writers. One of my favourite things about literary festivals is discovering new writers to love, both from Aotearoa and overseas, and at Hear My Voice I found three: Sophie Rea, Daisy Speaks, and Ivan E. Coyote. As well as being wonderful writers they were also exceptional performers. Catch them if you can.

The Spinoff After Dark was a very relaxed session – and a good thing too, because by this point in the day after Busted, Speaking Out and Hear My Voice, I was in danger of Feelings Overload. Toby Manhire, Alex Casey, and Duncan Greive from The Spinoff sat with some mics in a cafe and nattered to us. They did mini-interviews, which were quite fun, starting with comedy writer Steve Hely: “Everything I know about Max Key, I learned from Alex Casey”. I’m not sure why they were talking about Max Key, or why Casey had been emailing Hely so much information about him: one of the downsides of this session is that it assumed a lot of shared knowledge on the part of the audience (which I didn’t always have), and relied often on in-jokes. But the participants were quick-witted and the mood good-humoured, so it was generally entertaining.

The second guest hauled out of the audience was WORD Literary Director Rachael King. Casey was asking everyone who their Fight for Life opponent would be: it had to be someone equivalent in your field. King chose Auckland Writers Festival Director Anne O’Brien: “I lift weights, so she’d be down in the first round.” (Hely had chosen Max Key.)

The third guest was Joe Bennett, but I’m afraid I can’t report on what he said because all it says in my notes is “wow, Joe Bennett is really goddam annoying”. I think he said he would fight Steve Braunias.

Next up was author Paula Morris. She reported on her travels in Latvia, where you have to go everywhere by bus and it’s really hot on the buses, but people get annoyed with you if you take off your coat. “That’s just one of the many interesting things I know and it’s why travel is important.” She would fight Selina Tusitala Marsh, because she’s weak from where Morris pulled Marsh’s neck muscle while brushing her hair.

The fifth interviewee was illustrator Toby Morris (no relation to Paula); the other half (with Manhire) of ‘The Pencilsword‘. They spoke about the trials of being called Toby. Morris said his father-in-law referred to him as Tony in his speech at his (Toby’s) (I mean Morris) (Toby Morris not Paula) (god, sorry) wedding. He would fight Sam Scott from the Phoenix Foundation.

Then RNZ producer Mark Cubey was called to the stage. He said he was amazed there aren’t more Spinoffs: fantastic, fun, crazy, good websites. In fact, he said, “I think there’s room for a spinoff of The Spinoff, you could call it The Spunoff.” Greive looked horrified. “No one do that!”

Manhire then invited celebrated journalist Rebecca Macfie to come up and be mini-interviewed. This was a complete surprise to her and it took Manhire a while to persuade her. “I’m totally unfunny, I’m the wrong person to be doing this,” Macfie warned. Manhire asked her whether Pike River was over. “Shit no. How can it be finished when there’s no accountability, no bodies, no justice.” Hear, hear.

The final guest was blogger Giovanni Tiso. He was asked how come he’s so good at blogging when English is his second language, after Italian. He said “writing is a second language anyway. You are taught rhetoric if you’re taught well at school.” (I think Italian schools must be better than ours because I don’t remember being taught that?). Casey was asking everyone what they snacked on while writing. He said he writes his blogs on Monday nights so there are no snacks (cue much consternation). He would fight Karl du Fresne.

The panel then answered questions people had tweeted in, and from the audience. Greive on sports journalism: “Everyone got into bad habits a hundred years ago and that’s why a lot of things are bad.” Casey on The Bachelor: “When you apply an international franchise here you see the weirdness of New Zealand, and that’s why I like it”. She ghostwrote the text of Jamie Curry’s (heavily illustrated) book in a couple of days.

Eventually the panellists resorted to interviewing each other. Manhire would fight Duncan Garner. Greive would fight Marcus Stickley because The Wireless won best website at the Canon media awards, and “I will probably carry that resentment to my grave”. Casey does not recommend K Bar chocolate.

I wanted to tell Casey how much I admired her outspokenly feminist work at The Spinoff but such earnestness seemed out of place in amongst light-hearted discussion of snacks. I confined myself to live-tweeting and wine. Bring on WORD Sunday!

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage

The Spinoff After Dark
with Toby Manhire, Alex Casey and Duncan Greive

Alex Casey appears today in:
The Great Divide?, Sun 28 Aug, 3.30pm

Toby Manhire appears today in:
Giving Them Hell: Political Cartoons, (Chair) Sun 28 Aug, 2pm

Duncan Greive appears today in:
Reimagining Journalism, Sun 28 Aug, 5pm