Catmachine

Do you remember the pointless lies you told yourself as a child? I do. I remember them quite clearly. They were harmless but very powerful and sometimes I almost managed to convince myself that they were true. As far as I can see they served one major purpose: to make life more interesting and more like a story. They were micro-stories. One that clearly stuck in my mind was almost convincing myself that I'd heard a cuckoo. Of course it was really a wood pigeon, but a cuckoo was more exciting. Cuckoos belonged in fairy tales and clocks, and how much more exciting would it have been to live in a fairy tale? Or indeed in a clock. The important thing was not to question it. Of course there was that tiny nagging rational voice at the back of my mind whispering "Pigeon... pigeon... pigeon..." but who was interested in pigeons? Pigeons were commonplace, part of the mundane, the everyday, the here and now. Hearing a pigeon was not anything to get excited about. Hearing ...

Of course I believe in coincidences. They happen all the time. What I am doubtful about is that they mean anything. For a start if they meant something then they wouldn't be coincidences by definition. Furthermore as discussed in a recent blog the human mind is trained to see patterns in things above everything else so any such interpretation should be taken with a pinch of salt. But sometimes you wonder. At the beginning of 2014 I finished the first draft of my latest novel. Like the previous one it was partly set in and around the music industry, this time in the early nineties. The central character  - who'd been a supporting character in the previous one - was the singer in an indie band, a band described in the book as shoegaze but with more aggressive vocals than was usual. I must admit that when I was first writing I didn't know exactly what the band (Beam - a very nineties name, I could almost see the logo on the t-shirts) sounded like although I knew that I ...

Our memories are a very useful manual on how not to live your life. Never mind the rose tinted spectacles, for a lot of us the events that really spring into sharp relief are those viewed through blush-tinged goggles. We torment ourselves over and over again over how much of a fool we made of ourselves in such-and-such situation, despite the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person that remembers these faux pas is ourselves. There is one exception to this rule. When we get drunk and make a fool of ourselves there is a tendency of some people to never let us forget it. However this behaviour is most often observed in people who often do the same thing themselves and their attempts to get everyone else to remember that time you went swimming in the fountain in the town square at the end of the evening are merely an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they pissed on a policeman's shoes the week before. But most of the time we're the only ones cri...

"That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a wilful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still." Jerome K Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow We are one of the first generations who can precisely replay many elements of our childhood memories on demand. This has never happened before in the history of human beings. Strange as it may seem, in the distant past they didn't even have TV. It was a civilisation changing invention, sitting between the Printing Press and the Internet in the communication triumvirate that holds sway over our hearts and minds. Never mind those senile old fossils the Wheel and Fire, it's talking to each other and telling stories that has made us what we are today. And yet TV i...

When most children play "lets pretend" they imagine a thing that isn't. Whilst I did do that as a kid, I also used to have little games in my head in which I imagined a thing that already was ... The first major incidence of the phenomenon that I can now recall was back in the seventies when we had an German exchange student staying with us, a woman studying architecture. As a favour to my parents - perhaps as a way of saying thank you for letting her stay - she took me off their hands for an afternoon on a trip to visit Welwyn Garden City and Harlow - of some significance to students of architecture and town planning as they were both "New Towns" built in the twentieth century in the commuter belt to ease overcrowding in London. Whilst we were in Harlow I started playing a strange game with myself. To clarify, this was playing a game in the sense of " let's play Star Trek " rather than " let's play Tiddlywinks ". I started ima...

I'm sure this has happened before. Do you think it has happened before? Don't you remember reading a blog entry by me on the subject of déjà vu? However in this case it actually has. I did indeed write about déjà vu back in September 2009 . I'm not intending to go over the same ground here, but recently woke from a dream with some new insights into what might make this bizarre sensation, this mental feedback, tick. In the original blog entry I hypothesised that déjà vu was caused by the short term memory (in other words the current experience, the present, the now ) being misidentified as long term memory. This does make some kind of sense. However doesn't explain one of the stronger sensations that can be experienced during a promnesiac episode. Often my experience of déjà vu is not so much I'm sure this has happened before but rather I am sure that I have dreamed this before . This makes me inclined to think that déjà vu may be the activation of a system ...

There's nothing quite as interesting as one's own dreams but the downside of this is that there's nothing potentially as boring as other people's. However one interesting thing about anyone's dreams is that if they write them up before falling asleep they may find that this captures details which they then completely forget. The next time they awake from consciousness they  won't remember them. At all. This may be to do with the way consciousness divides up time between the long and short term memory. I suspect that the short-term memory consists of "today" or in other words the amount of time since the last sleeping. This is how we distinguish today from yesterday. Today is now , we are conscious and living on our wits; memory of things that happened earlier that day feel very different from the memories of things that happened the day before, even though the difference in time between them is negligible. The important thing is that they happene...

Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand. The custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant, designed especially for your needs. Last time I was attempting to grope my way towards an understanding of the nature of our bodies and brains as machines by considering the eye. It was a useful exercise; and I concluded that whilst an eye might be a squashy camera, vision is not the same as the software we might use to display the images. After all a digital camera attached to computer is nothing without someone looking at it, interpreting it, being aware of it. At the moment a human mind is the only thing that can do this. Until we develop computers that can interpret and be aware of what they're looking at that is. We may not be as far off this as we might think. Whilst it's unlikely that we'll develop replicants capable of expressing wonder at having seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion by November 2019 (or soon...

Thursday 9 June 1994 What I really enjoyed back then about hitching around to see bands was being on my own. Nobody else seemed to understand that, for most people it was a social thing.  I on the other hand always got frustrated when I found someone else doing what I was doing - often before I knew what was happening I'd been pressured into travelling with people I hardly knew and having to hang out with and talk to them. This was unsatisfactory. You could never rely on other people. This was another reason my 1994 Lush expedition felt so special. There was no-one else on the road. Sure the gigs themselves were packed, but the only other people experiencing all the gigs were the band and crew. It had been so deserted walking out of Bath earlier that night I had considered lying down by the side of the road on a grassy verge and catching some shuteye, but I'm glad I didn't. In the end I made my bed by 4am and listened to my Split CD whilst...

Ever since we invented computers we've started to think of our own brains as computers, dubbing the computers themselves "electronic brains". Neither is the other. Whilst I have no doubt that one day we will invent thinking machines, sentient intelligences with no appreciable difference from our own minds, at the moment we're barking up the wrong tree. In fact I would go so far as to say we're barking up a tree in the wrong forest. On a different continent. This is because the way we think about our minds and brains isn't really how they work. Perhaps unsurprising seeing as it's the brains themselves doing this thinking. We imagine we are organic computers and therefore built electronic boxes in our own mental image; how we thought of ourselves at the time. If we'd been able to build computers in an earlier age, say when the heart was imagined to be the seat of consciousness, perhaps our computers would have resembled pumps. To demonstrate the ...

Tuesday 7 June 1994 Once again I found myself standing at the exit of a service station with my thumb out. Compared with the previous day's journey, today's was going to be a piece of piss. I'd got the bus from Manchester City Centre to just beyond the suburbs and made my way down country lanes to Knutsford Services where I'd sneaked in the back way and from where I was hoping to get a lift straight down the M6 to Birmingham. It didn't take that long and I did it in one hit. Once in Birmingham I had ample time to find somewhere to freshen up, get something to eat and make myself feel slightly human again. After that I went in search of the venue. It was called Edwards and I eventually discovered it tucked away in a side street slap bank in the city centre. The entrance was tall and narrow, squeezed in between two other businesses; once inside there were a couple of flights of stairs leading up to a dark nightclub decorated in black, blue and mirrors. I arrived ...

Previously on Dreaming of the Starlight: After the first gig at Sheffield's Leadmill I'd curled up in a corner of the coach station. Now read on... Sunday 5 June 1994 By the time it started getting light and other people started hanging around, I hadn't really slept. Despite the fact that this was only the first leg, I really felt I couldn't face an all day hitch to Glasgow after no sleep. Suppose I missed the gig? To go all that way for nothing would be too much to bear. Luckily having spent the night in the coach station gave me a cunning idea. I could go by coach. And so it came to pass that I ended up rolling into Glasgow on a bright June afternoon. Being able to check the locations of such things quickly and easily on the web was still a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye at this point (and the Google founders were still two years away from their groundbreaking PhD research project) but luckily I had been at the self-same venue selling merchandise for Toya...

If you were to look at what was once my record collection, became my CD collection and now in the digital age is ascending to a higher state of MP3, you'd find that a large proportion of the music has female vocals. Perhaps not as large a proportion as there should be, but I suspect that is merely a reflection of the sexual inequality that is still as rife in the music industry today as anywhere else. However, if you were to look at a list of my favourite bands, the top ten as it were, you would find that they almost all have female vocals. This is no coincidence. To me the sound of a female voice is so much more pleasant than a male one, a woman singing has a cold, clear, and above all coherent beauty that is such a long way from the fake american accented drawl of so many male artists. This is a personal preference of course and there are exceptions to every rule. But on the whole... Yes, I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't that either. When I first started g...

I watched a fascinating documentary on BBC4 last week, part of the series The Brain: A Secret History . It was all about emotions, where they come from, how they work and what they're for.  All interesting stuff, but I was surprised that at no point was the evolutionary root of emotions discussed - it was all behavioural. And yet I've found that simply looking at things from an evolutionary perspective can provide astonishing insight into what makes us human and just why it is that we do all of the things that we do. Evolution says that anything that makes it far more likely for organisms to pass on their genes to future generations will be exaggerated over time, and for sentient beings lusts, urges and instincts are what make us do things we have to (if we didn't "enjoy" food we'd forget to eat and starve to death). The stronger the lust and protective instincts felt towards a chosen partner will result in more sex and therefore more children; the stronge...