Lunar cycles

Five years or more ago, I came across an article – reference 4 – by an astronomer about how the moon did not intervene very much in human affairs – say not in the patters of hospital admissions and not in the pattern of births. Passing notice at references 5 and 6. The fact that the moon was the cause of tides notwithstanding. The fact that the moon has figured large in man’s imagination – one result being lots of moon goddesses – notwithstanding.

Much more recently, I revisited an article about p-values, as noticed at reference 2.

Then a few days ago I came across an article – reference 1 – about the effect on the moon on sleep in Uppsala, in Sweden, a place which is at about the same latitude as Lerwick in the Shetlands. So a place with long winter nights and long summer days. And the abstract was littered with p-values. So it seemed right and proper to take a look.

Very roughly speaking, on the basis of a sample of about 800 sleeps, people seemed to sleep better when the moon was waning than when it was waxing and the effect was more pronounced with men than with women. That said, the effects did not seem to be very large. From where I associate to the tricky business of trying to make significant statements when confronted with a great heap of rather messy data from brain scanners.

I was introduced to the world of sleep science, so plenty of new terms to learn about. There does seem to be a lot of it about, with plenty of sleep institutes, plenty of sleep scientists – and a sleep institute figures in at least one episode of ‘Lewis’ on ITV3. And reference 7 reports lots of problems with sleep. Certainly, speaking for myself, sleeping is not so good as I get older, so maybe sleep is a big deal for older people, and trying to do something about it is a big deal. Whisky is not the best way forward!

The sleeps used here were taken between 2001 and 2018, in three very roughly equal chunks. The first chunk was data recycled from a previous study. I didn’t find out where the other two chunks came from. So I have no idea how good the sample was for the purpose.

 

All the sleeps were monitored by something called polysomnography, which appears to mean that the subject is wired up. Which all sounds rather intrusive, and not conducive to sleep, but lots of it goes on and it can be done at home. Read all about some suitable equipment at references 8 and 9. With reference 9 containing lots of fierce looking health warning about its use – as well as the helpful diagram included above. While I thought the picture at the top of the flier was just so much eye-candy. Nothing much to do with people with problems being wired up at all.

It seemed odd that sleep should be affected by the direction of travel of the moon, whether it was waxing or waning. I would have thought that the amount of moon – say no moon, thin moon, fat moon, full moon – would have been a more natural place to start, but I did not find anything about that.

Nor did I did any reference to the lengths of either days or nights, which one might have thought would have an effect on sleep patterns in the far north. And given that the authors knew about the state of the moon for each sleep, they could have known about the state of the sun, that is to say the length of the day.

Or to the amount of ambient light – solar, lunar or otherwise – during the sleep sessions, probably not known as the sleeps were recycled from previous studies. With one advantage of sleep laboratories with sleep cubicles being that all this sort of thing is under control and easily logged.

All that said, the idea here was to test the relation between quality of sleep (say statistic Q) and the dichotomy between waxing and waning. So we will be interested in whether the mean value of Q for when the moon waxing is significantly different from that when it is waning. On the usual assumptions about the distribution of the statistic Q, I would have thought that getting p-values and making proper use of them ought to be a relatively straightforward application of something like the Student’s t test. A test which I now know is available in Microsoft’s Excel.

It comes to mind that a long time ago, when I was trying to learn something about statistics, one had books of statistical tables, rather like books of logarithms, and you could look p-values up in them. But Microsoft notwithstanding, it might take me a little time now to work out what to do in their absence.

Instead, I had a poke around using Bing and lighted upon the helpful freebie about statistical inference at reference 10, described as course notes, but actually rather a lot better than the course notes I remember. And pitched at about the right level for me. Maybe it will drag me to a point where I can make more progress with the use and abuse of p-values.

Further consideration of the effect on the moon put aside for the time being. Maybe it will resurface in the weeks to come. 

PS: reference 12 suggests that any connection between the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle remains a lively subject of debate. They might be near enough the same in length, but synchronisation of the onset of the menstrual cycle with any particular phase of the moon is another matter.

References

Reference 1: Sex-specific association of the lunar cycle with sleep - Christian Benedict and others – 2022.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-p-value-battle-continues.html. 

Reference 3: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/stop-blaming-the-moon-says-ucla-scientist.  

Reference 4: No Evidence of Purported Lunar Effect on Hospital Admission Rates or Birth Rates - Jean-Luc Margot – 2015. 

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/06/statistics.html. 

Reference 6: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/06/part-2-of-2.html. 

Reference 7: https://www.sleepassociation.org/about-sleep/sleep-statistics. 

Reference 8: https://neuro.natus.com/products-services/natus-embla-ndx-psg-amplifier.

Reference 9: Natus Brain Monitor & Embla Dx Series: User and Service Manual – Natus – 2018. 

Reference 10: Fundamental Theory of Statistical Inference – G. A. Young – 2021. The course notes.

Reference 11: Essentials of Statistical Inference – Young and Smith – 2005. The source book. Available for £30, including postage, from Abebooks, compared with the £10 I paid Ai Printers on our High Street to print the course notes version.

Reference 12: https://www.healthline.com/health/womens-health/menstrual-cycle-and-the-moon. 

Making the law

The piece at reference 1 asserts that government is moving towards government by diktat - which sounds to me like a watered down version of Hitler's infamous Enabling Act, duly passed by the newly elected, Nazi dominated German Parliament, which said, roughly speaking, that Hitler could do whatever he wanted.

And it is certainly true that journalists and others have long been protesting amount the huge amount of stuff which is passed into our law over a Minister's signature, with little if any desire or need for further Parliamentary scrutiny.

By way of example it refers us to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, presently before the House of Lords, which it describes as 'a monstrous jumble of laws that wouldn’t look out of place in Soviet Russia'. I associate to a story that the wheeze in Putin's Russia is to have such a monstrous pile of laws that no-one can understand them all, that they are full of internal contradictions (something that old-style Marxists were always finding in capitalism)  - but which can always be used to make more or less anyone or anything illegal, as the need arises.

Curious, I turn up the law (reference 3), which is pretty impenetrable. I search for offending terms like 'without suspicion' (does away for the need to be suspicious before some preventative actions can be taken) or 'named individuals' (who are not allowed to protest) and either get too many hits or too few.

I then turn to the consolidated list of amendments (reference 4) (only being slightly confused and delayed by the relevant page being updated while I was looking at it). And this sort of thing does turn up there, in useful quantities. Cavendish is on the right track.

One of the people involved in all this is one Baroness Williams of Trafford, who was born in Cork, educated up north at a private Catholic school, trained in applied nutrition, did time on Trafford Council and then more time in the House of Commons, before being elevated to the Lords.

But what caught my eye about her was that she succeeded one Earl Atlee as Conservative whip in the Lords. A Tory earl who is the grandson of that pillar of Labour History, the first earl. A renegade! A chap who was educated in the fancy public school called Stowe, to be found at reference 5. That is to say a stonking great house whose owners ran out of dosh in the aftermath of the first world war and which then became a school.

Gardens passed onto the National Trust for them to look after. Some of the state rooms in the big house now open to the great British Public. And I imagine lots of tasteful new buildings have been erected nearby, but out of sight from the gardens.

Maybe some day we will get to some better way of making the law of the land. Does it really have to be so complicated? But in the meantime, how many people actually understand all this stuff? Do we have to just take it - and the judgement of the minister on the day, who is empowered to more or less make most of it up as he goes along - on trust?

All to be followed up at some point, quality time permitting.

References

Reference 1: The new ‘government by diktat’ bypasses parliament altogether: Ministers should ask themselves what opponents might do with the new powers they are busily creating - Camilla Cavendish, FT - 2021.

Reference 2: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2839/publications. The official starting point for the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

Reference 3: https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/43970/documents/1042. Possibly the current state of the bill - all 304 pages of it.

Reference 4: https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/44037/documents/1091. The running list of amendments. - just 74 pages of this one.

Reference 5: https://www.stowe.co.uk/. But the snap was turned up by Bing.

Winter Wisley

One cold and frosty but bright day a week or so ago, we paid a visit to the gardens at Wisley. And opted to turn left for Battleston Hill on exit from the entry port.

The first item of note was the first sign of extensive electrical works supporting the forthcoming twilight festive fun - or something of that sort. By the end of our visit it was clear that a great deal had been spent on this fun and one only hope that Wisley management have got their sums right and that the festive fun breaks even. That it makes headway against all the other rival festive attractions, for example at Polesden Lacey, Hampton Court Palace and Chessington Garden Centre. While I was pleased to see yesterday that Painshill seems to eschew this sort of thing.

With this tree noticed for its having been chopped down, perhaps coppiced, the large leaves and that fact that they were dropping green rather than brown. Something called a Paulownnia Kawakamii, from the Far East, where it is on a red list of endangered species. This despite its being widely grown as an ornamental plant in western nurseries. Otherwise known as the sapphire dragon tree.

With rather spectacular flowers in the spring. Maybe we will remember to come back to look at them.

At the top of the hill framed by long herbaceous borders, we had a decapitated horse's head, a slightly smaller and less offensive version of the green one at Marble Arch. BH objected that I did not object to portrait busts, which were also decapitated. But her point falls, because portrait busts are not usually displayed cut uppermost, in decapitation position, rather with the cut is discretely tucked underneath.

On the other side of the hill we had what were the trial beds, soon to be a lake, and some left over pumpkins. By some trick of the light they looked quite black from the top of the hill. Probably quite close to the Wellingtonia noticed at reference 2, although I did not think to try and pick them out.

Too busy admiring the line of them in the other direction, previously captured and scored.

Not to mention the stump art near the top of the slope. I like to think I could make a good job of painting one of them in bright colours. Given the fondness of Wisley management for outdoor art, I wonder how they would respond to a letter volunteering to paint? Perhaps I would be turned down as not being a member of a qualifying artists' collective or trade union. Or they would trot out some H&S story...

Onto the handsome library in the new science block. A bright airy space, with quality bookshelves and reading tables. Open to anyone who happened to be passing, as well as anyone with some more serious interest. But I wondered whether they got the trade to justify what must have been the considerable expense. The blue books, for example, are Sander's list of orchid hybrids. Is there still a place for them in what one might imagine to be the world of computerised botany? Or are there so many plants out there - Bing says getting on for half a million species identified so far - not counting algae, mosses and such like - that there is still a considerable backlog of plant catalogues to be digitised. While reference 3 suggests that this particular list, with updates every couple of months or so, has been digitised at least back to 2000.

From the sample above, one might think that the main point is that orchid fanciers, like plenty of others, like to see their names in print. I suppose there might also be a copyright angle.

Moving on from orchids, I came across a rather entertaining book about coconuts, presumably directed at colonial administrators and others with an interest in growing them, or rather in getting them grown by someone else. I forgot that I could probably have taken it out or I would have done.

From there to the sky terrace, from which there were good views of the garden, plus a modest garden of its own. But I was puzzled as to why this new building had so much complicated asphalt sheet on the roof, the stuff which comes in rolls - and which is being displaced by some fibre glass flavoured as the roofing material of choice for extension roofs in suburbia. In this case, all terribly complicated, as can be seen top right in the snap above, and which one might have thought likely to cause maintenance problems in the future. Given that the library below looked to have been no expense spared, could they not have splashed out on a bit of lead or zinc on the roof?

No expense spared on the festive fun front. Cafeteria visible behind, where we were able to buy very respectable ham and cheese baguettes. As good as one is apt to get anywhere these days, even if both ham and cheese quite possibly came shrink wrapped, if not in a tin. Separate tins that is. 

Last stop the shop, probably occupying as much floor space as the one at Chessington Garden Centre, although, to be fair, the goods are more National Trust than T.K.Maxx. And in both places, the plants outside probably get as much space again. Although I suspect the same wholesalers from the Netherlands do business with both places.

PS: I have been reminded this afternoon of the trashy news served up online by Microsoft, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, although this particular selection does not offer any glamour - on which my understanding is that the business model is that more trash generates more clicks and more clicks generate more advertising revenue. And to think how Mr. Gates and his former wife come over all holy about all the billions they give to charity. Which, to be fair, they do. I also wonder how much Harry owes his apparently strong position in the personal shaving market - on the evidence of a correspondent - to his spend on online advertising.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/08/wisley-art.html. The previous visit, something more than a couple of months ago.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/wellingtonia-47.html.

Reference 3: https://www.rhs.org.uk/about-the-rhs/publications/orchid-hybrid-lists.

Fake 135

At first glance, the sort of old style mirror you would get in an old style brown wood public house, the sort of place with lots of glass, ground, cut and otherwise.

Actually, more or less new and costing a good deal more than I have ever paid for a wall mirror, even allowing for the considerable passage of time since I last bought one. Apparently the product of some speciality glass operation in London.

The Big Smoke Brew company operates out of Esher, and Bing rapidly turns up reference 3 where I learn all about them. A beer operation which is moving into public houses, some or all of them in partnership with Punch Taverns, who may have bought them from Youngs when they got out of tenanted houses. One of them being the Rising Sun in Epsom. I was quite impressed by the service offered at reference 3 and the amount of useful information, intelligible to the layman, offered by the latest annual report. Perhaps you need to be a much bigger company, with lots of accountants and lawyers in tow, if you want lots of smoke and mirrors to cover your tracks.

I learned, for example, that during the hospitality lock-down they made quite a good fist of direct selling of various unusual varieties of canned beer.

I also noticed that while reference 3 is a government website with a gov.uk suffix, when you go to an actual company document you find yourself deep in Amazon Web Services, with the URLs not being disguised at all: 'https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/...'. So its not just the secrets of the Deep State - noticed at reference 6 - which are being hoovered up by Amazon. Perhaps they did Companies House as a loss leader to sweeten us up. And to think that our fat leader and his friends are obsessed by sovereignty - or at least they like to talk about it a lot - a matter that I had another occasion to mention only the day before yesterday, at reference 7.

PS 1: maybe Photoshop could make a reasonable fist of removing me from the snap above. Can't think how one might avoid getting the camera in view otherwise, other than by taking the snap from the side, not convenient on this occasion.

PS 2: as well as offering a rather good Mount Gay rum, this establishment carried several other interesting looking rums, including one from the Philippines which smelt strongly of vanilla. Possibly one of the Don Papa brands turned up at references 4 then 5.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/fake-134.html.

Reference 2: https://www.bigsmokebrew.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08936754.

Reference 4: http://ultimaterumguide.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.donpaparum.com/. Some entertainment to be had at the art tab.

Reference 6: Amazon strikes deal with UK spy agencies to host top-secret material: Cloud contract for GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 with US tech group aims to speed analysis but likely to ignite sovereignty fears - Helen Warrell, Nic Fildes, FT - 2021.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/theres-hope-yet.html.

The broken house

A short, easy-read memoir (reference 1) of growing up in Germany under Hitler, picked up as a result of a rare encounter with the TLS – only bought these days when I happen to be in Waitrose and have not bought one for a bit. With the review in question being reference 2.

A memoir which is not organised on the usual narrative lines. Rather we have a life compressed into six topical chapters, plus a short afterword, written some time after first publication. Some notes on these chapters follow.

An author who grew up in a Berlin suburb in the 1930’s, served in the army during the Second World War, surrendering to the Americans in 1945. Subsequently became a free-lance writer.

A place like Eichkamp

Southwest of Charlottenburg, just to the east of the Grunewald Forest of reference 4. Just to the south of the railway station which is now called ‘Berlin Messe Süd’. An oblong grid of a dozen streets, running southwest to northeast, perhaps as much as a kilometre by half a kilometre. In part at least, a dormitory estate for the office workers of Berlin.

A garden city built in the 1920s for people in what might be called the lower middle class, according to plans of one Max Taut, of reference 6. Sports fields to the left, railways top and right, this last now supplemented by a motorway. I have not been able to come up with a comparable estate in London, although the sea of inter-war suburban houses of south London, say between Epsom and Wimbledon, comes to mind. I also associated to the White City housing estate in Belfast, noticed at reference 5.

The only fly in the ointment was a workers’ estate just up the road. Probably all Reds, rabble-rousers and rioters. Probably drunks.

In the book, a lot of the houses in Eichkamp and a lot of the street names appear to have survived the carnage that was the end of the Second World War and the reconstruction which followed. At the time of writing, the author’s childhood home was an empty bomb site, of a sort which I can still remember from the central London of around 1960.

Looking at the area now, in Street View, say gmaps 52.4944762,13.2631116, there are a lot of leafy streets, some very narrow. The housing is modest and a lot of it looks to be post-war rather than pre-war. Quite a lot of people have asked for their houses to be greyed out, certainly by the standards of us here at Epsom.

We are told of a rather dreary childhood in a rather dreary – but decent – home. His father, after all, was a civil servant, a reward for service in the first war. Neither parent knew anything of politics, indeed of little beyond their own little world, but Hitler’s festivities and flags provided a bit of colour for their dreary lives. At least, that seems to be how it was seen in Eichkamp at the time. All rather nicely evoked here.

With the point being, I suppose, that there were plenty of other places in the Germany of the time, just like this one.

A requiem for Ursula

The suicide of his elder sister in 1938, by taking a poison which took three weeks to kill, is used as a lens through which to focus the world in which they lived. One feature of which was the Catholicism of his mother and the indifferent Protestantism of his father – but we are not told why the sister killed herself, although there is the odd cryptic clue. Perhaps no-one ever knew; perhaps it was not the sort of family which talked.

I associated to the mother and father of Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’, where the mother fancies herself as being of a superior social class to both her husband and her neighbours. Takes tea with the local priest, who was perhaps grateful for a bit of civility in a rather tough neighbourhood. As it happens there is an Ursula in that family saga too.

My Friend Wanja

The author was roughly the equivalent of a grammar school boy. Doing lots of Latin and Greek. Most of his fellow pupils came from posher backgrounds, just a few from poorer backgrounds. Even the odd son of a worker – one of whom became his friend. Both the products of  homes without much love.

Their adolescent rebellion took the form of fairly mild, clandestine protest against Hitler and his party, by then the governing party. Then, separated by the war, he wound up in West Germany, his friend in East. Both by then journalists, they meet up again years later, but there is nothing much left.

With one sidelight on life under Hitler being that if you were a known opponent – that is to say a traitor in the language of the time –  by far the safest place to be was in a regular prison with a regular sentence which carried one through to the end of the war. Gestapo thugs could not get at you so easily in there. And nor could the army.

The Arrest

The description of his arrest and subsequent time in prison is not that unlike that offered by Simenon twenty years earlier at reference 7. Drab, dreary, squalid and uncomfortable yes, but a life run on orderly rather than sadistic lines; a far cry from both the concentration camps of Hitler and the Arctic and Siberian punishment camps of Stalin. Well, up to a point. In this account, there is the threat of violence elsewhere on those deemed uncooperative, with this author not being so deemed. In Simenon’s account, the violence is rather nearer to hand. In both accounts, the police are very thorough, digging up all kinds of stuff about people of interest. Digging which might well include intercepting their mail and spying on them.

On this account, Hitler’s regime seemed to be paranoid about resistance, perhaps one result of knowing that they had never got a simple majority in an election, before, that is, they were shuffled up the back stairs into power. The Gestapo would get a whiff of resistance somewhere and then lots of people would be rounded up and, potentially, have confessions of involvement in this resistance beaten out of them. Perhaps on the basis of very sketchy evidence. Unpleasant work which is apt to suck in unpleasant people.

I imagine the regime did not allow public dissent at all; what might be read now as a symptom of insecurity. As far as the public was concerned, the regime was all knowing, successful and invincible, ever marching forward, never taking a wrong step. But discussion must have been allowed in private or it would all have collapsed much faster that it in fact did.

1945. Zero Hour

The author hangs in in the army, apparently having been in it since 1941 or so, until almost the bitter end. But about a month before the end, appalled by  the summary shooting of a tired and wounded comrade for desertion, he sneaks over the Dortmund-Ems canal to the Americans. A little to the east of the Arnhem of bridge too far fame. For him the war is over. Where, as it happens, he is taken in hand by a German interpreter who had fled Germany for the US before the war and who is pleased to talk philosophy with him – something both of them appear to have been missing in their armies. Then off to the cage.

Release! Release from the dead hand of Hitler and his regime which had sat on his youth and young manhood. He might be at the bottom, but at least he could start to live again.

Day of Judgement

This being the second Auschwitz trial, held in Frankfurt am Main, 1963-1965.

Appalled by the spectacle of the defendants in this trial laughing and joking with their friends in the breaks. Mostly on bail for the duration of the trials. To all appearances, normal older Germans, with happy and well-fed lives.

Talk of being a corporal, not fit for front line duties. But he seems to have seen service in France, Italy, Russia and Poland. For me, the book would have benefitted from a short section giving a timeline, possibly a very brief biography, in which to insert the chapters we are given.

But the important point is his recognition that he, like millions of others, did what he was told. Had he been assigned to Auschwitz, he would have gone, probably in ignorance in the first instance. And had he found himself on the sharp end, he might have tried to wangle himself out of it, but who knows?

Most likely, he would have just wanted to live – and done whatever that entailed.

A curious lack of decorum in that the trial took place in the Römer, in Frankfurt am Main, a clutch of medieval buildings largely destroyed in the Second World War but since rebuilt. But as well as serving as town hall, the place is also a popular and famous wedding venue – with the procession of weddings not being interrupted by the nearby trial. 

Most of the defendants were sentenced to prison terms, some for life. But it seems that the terms actually served were rather shorter.

Confusingly, Wikipedia places these trials in a quite different building, in what appears to be the entirely new build town hall of the Gallus district of Frankfurt, the Sallbau Gallus, some way to the west of the Römer, in what I suppose is the old town centre.

The chapter almost closes with the Goethe house in a nearby street, the place where the famous Goethe was born and raised. Destroyed in 1944 and faithfully rebuilt in 1949. While the Germans of 1964 rushed about their business, not remembering what had been done twenty years previously and not wanting to be reminded. No wonder that some of the children of that generation rebelled in 1968.

Afterword

The book closes with a reflective afterword, written ten years after the book’s first publication.

It does not plug the biographical gaps, but we do learn that moving to Frankfurt, getting to know the prosecutor – who had some trouble bringing these cases to trial at all – and attending the trial were the triggers for the writing of this book. A book which, it seems, allowed the author move on.

Comment

A book I have now read twice. A timely reminder of how ordinary people can get sucked into and go along with, if not actually do bad things. Some atrociously bad things.

References

Reference 1: The broken house: Growing up under Hitler – Horst Krüger – 1966 & 2021.

Reference 2: Puppets of the party: Apolitical lives and the creation of Nazi Germany – Caroline Moorehead, TLS – 2021.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Kr%C3%BCger. A rather short entry for the author.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunewald_(forest). 

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/hearthlands-of-belfast.html. 

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Taut. 

Reference 7: La Neige était Sale - Simenon - 1948.

Reference 8 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Auschwitz_trials. 

Reference 9: https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/auschwitz-trials.html. For an alternative view.

Reference 10: https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/index.asp. A photographic record.

A binding failure

A Jubilee Way run this morning, passing the now near complete HQ for Lidl GB at the north eastern end of the lane. One in the eye for the nearby Aldi, at the top of Ruxley Lane. Where I quite forgot to check for the maker of their trolleys, as announced at reference 1.

The snap above from Street View is reasonably recent, as were those taken from the Kingston Road. But when I first took Street View into Jubilee Way, from where this snap is taken, all we had was an empty building site, which it has not been for some years now. But as I poked around, the empty building site vanished and I got the view above. And I can't get the empty building site back. Presumably some minor bug in the bit of gmaps which connects latitude and longitude to the Street View camera archive.

Otherwise, a cold run, despite the talk of it being a lot warmer than the day before. Probably because there was a cold breeze coming in from the west.

The second curiosity was a feeling that body and soul were a bit more separated than usual. The head was in working order, the legs were in working order, but they did not seem to be connected in the usual way. That wore off as I warmed up.

The third curiosity was the number of times I had the sensation of some memory being very close to consciousness, but not quite making it. Perhaps a dozen or more times. While getting close enough to consciousness to also have the sensation that the brain was assembling bits and pieces from various quite different episodes, episodes from quite different places and/or times. The business which cognitive psychologists call binding was coming unstuck, rather in the way that it does in dreams. Except that, otherwise, I felt very much awake. This one did not wear off as I warmed up, although it did once I got off my bicycle at the end of the run.

Home to polish of the remains of the sausage stew which we had started on the day before. More or less on the lines of that reported just about a month ago at reference 2. Only slightly marred by the potatoes in it having been in it for slightly too long and the mushrooms having been in the refrigerator for slightly too long. The former problem the result of being late putting on the pasta tubes, and that the result of trying to do something else upstairs at the same time. More discipline needed. And if that is what it takes, bring down something from upstairs to read in the kitchen downstairs!

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/trolley-447.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/riesling-with-sausage.html.

On seeing colour: some science fiction

Science fiction in the sense that what follows does start from known facts. Then there is what is intended to be plausible speculation from those facts.

My interest is in the subjective experience of colour, of black and white. Is there any sense in which these experiences can be said to vary, to vary from one person to another? Persons with more or less normal vision that is. This post tries to clear away some preliminaries.

As we move the pointer through the spectrum of visible light, what you get from a prism or a rainbow, say from left to right in the figure above, we experience the gamut of pure colours, that is to say colours produced by packets of light of a single wavelength, or at least confined to a fairly narrow band of wavelength. Black for absence is present, but white, a mixture, is absent. The magentas, mixtures of blue and red are also absent, round the back if we were to join the two ends of the band above together to make a colour circle.

Noting in passing that I find the rendering of violet rather unconvincing. Seems far too bright and light in hue to me. But that is another matter.

Visible light is mostly in the range 400 to 800nm (nanometres, a metric unit of length equal to one thousand-millionth of a metre) and, for example, yellow is around 590nm, roughly where the red receptor and the green receptor lines cross in the figure above – where the colour receptors in human eyes are called cones. The much more numerous rods do black and white. 

High (right), medium and short (left), while I prefer to talk of red, green and blue, or RGB for short. 

With the result that the red and green receptors are stimulated roughly equally, so the RGB signal reaching the brain from the eye is something like (100,100,0). However, as can be seen from the figure above, the same aggregate signal could be arrived at by mixing roughly equal amounts of light from a little to the right (red) and a little to the left (green). There is an infinite number of such mixtures which would deliver what is seen, what would be experienced, as the same shade of yellow.

The colour vision system is additive and works on the mixture of the signals delivered by the three sorts of receptor. So a bit of colour might really be yellow, sending out light at around 590nm, or the bit might actually be a judicious mixture of dots of red and green, aggregated by the vision system taken as a whole to yellow. The subjective result would be the same. A fact exploited by colour printing processes.

Let us work with the LWS-R hypothesis (for which see reference 1), according to which, inter alia, vision is delivered by the topically organised firing of neurons across a small patch of cortex. Where by topical we mean that the neurons are organised in a way that relates in a fairly simple way to what you might get in a two dimensional picture of the same scene. That is to say, if you could look at the neurons through a suitable microscope, you would recognise the scene.

Then colour is a property of that firing expressed over very small patches of cortex, over which there is a sustained and stable frequency mix of firing. The neurons in that very small patch are organised into three cohorts, each spread evenly across the patch and one cohort for each receptor. Within each cohort, the aggregate firing rate oscillates, at least approximately, with the frequency appropriate to that receptor.

The allocation of neuron to cohort varies according to circumstances. The LWS-R frame construction process draws on the base population of neurons according to the needs of the moment, according to the colour of the patch in question.

Some combination of time and space is needed to deliver the subjective experience: if there is more time you can get away with less space and vice-versa.

A natural assumption would be that the frequency of oscillation allocated to a receptor varies monotonically with the frequency to which the receptor is most responsive. So higher frequency oscillations of firing for blue receptors, lower frequency firing for red receptors and green in the middle. But, we argue that it might just as well be the other way around. Then, jumping from colour to black and white, the growing brain might do a similar trick with colour to that which Microsoft’s Powerpoint does with its invert black and white feature, with the figure above being an example of its use. No doubt Adobe’s Photoshop offers lots of tricks of this sort.

We have read recently of people who have four sort of colour receptor – cones – rather than the normal three. This could be accommodated in a straightforward way in the model above. Bearing in mind the need for room: from where I associate to the business of allocating radio frequencies bands to the various uses to which radio can be put.

Additional information

Note that there is no question of a population of neurons in a brain delivering oscillations at the frequency of those of visible light, say thousands of billions of hertz, even in aggregate, even though suitably organised aggregates can deliver much faster oscillations than the individuals can manage. The brain has to come up with some other solution.

I have read that if you give a person glasses which turn the world upside down, after a few days, the brain will turn it back up again. I wonder it something of the sort would happen if you had glasses which did the black and while inversion illustrated above?

In the foregoing, it is suggested that the subjective experience of colour is a straightforward matter of frequency, a fairly obvious candidate. But it might be something much more complicated. It might even be a matter of geometry, with the brain firing up lots of little hexagons or lots of little triangles. Perhaps plausible enough, but perhaps also requiring more neurons in the relevant part of the cortex than are actually available – which according to reference 3 might be around 5,000 to the cubic millimetre. But it does depend on where you look, with rather higher estimates being offered at reference 4 – and which also tells us that estimating this particular number is challenging.

Conclusions

We have offered a speculation about the delivery of the subjective experience of colour.

And to the extent that the frequencies chosen can vary, one might think that the subjective experiences might vary. Perhaps these frequencies are a function of some gene or other, a gene which comes in many varieties, like Heinz.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum.

Reference 3: https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/search.aspx. 

Reference 4: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/105/38/14615.full.pdf. Gender differences in human cortical synaptic density - L. Alonso-Nanclares, J. Gonzalez-Soriano, J. R. Rodriguez, J. DeFelipe – 2008.