Cracking the Maya Code

Because December 21, 2012 is drawing closer, I decided to watch the 2008 NOVA documentary about ancient Mayan heiroglyphs, Cracking the Maya Code.

The film follows the discovery of ancient Mayan writing and how scientists have gradually managed to decipher the hieroplyphs more and more. Mayans used to be spread out all over South and Central America with their own unique and complex culture, mythology, and writing system, but the Spanish invaded their cities and destroyed all except 5 of their book, converted them to Catholicism, made them speak Spanish, etc. The Maya abandoned their cities and all but died out. Then in 1774, Jose Calderon found their temples and the writing that was in them. Soon, scientists and archaeologists began coming to the lost cities to learn about Mayan Culture and decipher the heiroglyphs. In 1810, a man named Constantine Rafinesque found copies of an ancient Mayan text and was able to figure out their number system. Scientists made a little progress in dating some Mayan monuments, but not much. An archaeologist named J. Eric Thompson then was able to chart all the Mayan Glyphs and tried to figure out what kind of language system it was. He deciphered a few signs, but eventually determined that most Mayan symbols were just pictures and had little meaning. Several scientists since then have been able to disprove that, discovering that the pictures could tell stories, could represent whole words, names, or just syllables. Being able to read the glyphs had a huge impact on modern Mayan culture, and Mayans are now able to learn firsthand the ways of their people that have been lost for centuries. It included several interviews with prominent scientists including David Stuart, Michael Coe, and Linda Schele.

This documentary did a very good job of clearly getting its message across with good use of point of view and characters, as well as sticking to the well-defined goal.

There were a few reenactments, all of which had realistic props, costumes, and actors.

The cinematography was very good. The different shots were well put together and relatively simple and easy to understand. There were several real pictures from the time period, all of which were helpful. When complex or somewhat illegible glyphs were shown, they would be outlined or highlighted in a way that made them clearer using special effects. This made it even easier to understand what was being said.

I really enjoyed this documentary. Although it isn't as well-known or life-changing as some documentaries,  it was very informative and really fascinating. It was really cool to follow the development of scientists's understanding of an entirely new language and culture. It's so interesting to think that this complex culture would be lost forever had scientists been unable to crack their code.  It was also cool to see how happy it made the Mayans of today to know that they could read, speak, and follow many of the same customs as their ancestors. 

If you'd like to watch it, which I highly recommend, it is available on the NOVA website, on Netflix, and, of course, here:

Cracking the Maya Code (52 mins) is not rated.

Synesthesia--part two

Okay, here is the probabbly-not-very-anticipated-but-still-here-so-you'll-have-to-deal-with-it part two of my explanation of synesthesia!

To see the first part, click here.

I just wanted to talk briefly about a few notable synesthetes.There are a lot, especially in the art and music world, because synesthesia usually has to do with color and/or sound. Some synesthetes will go their whole lives without knowing that they're different, believing that everyone can experience their unique perspectives.

• One of the most well known synesthetes is the famous composer, conductor, author, pianist, and lecturer Leonard Bernstein . He had timbre-color synesthesia, which means that the timbre of different notes triggered different colors for him. He was conductor of the New York Philharmonic orchestra as well as composing several pieces of music, including the songs for West Side Story. He wrote about his synesthesia and how it had influenced him as a musician in Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein also recieved the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Yeah, he was pretty cool. 
• Another fairly well-known synesthete is composer, big-band leader, and pianist Duke Ellington. Perhaps you've heard of him. He was an extremely influential figure in the history of jazz, but didn't limit himself to one genre of music. Because of his work, he was (posthumously) awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1999. He had sound-color and -texture synesthesia, so different notes (sometimes even the same note played by different people) had a unique color and texture for him. This exceptional perspective helped him to create the distinctive sounds he was so well-known for. 
• You may not have heard of this person, but you've probably heard of his work: the cartoonist Michel Gagné . He was the animator who created such films as Ratatouille, Osmosis Jones, The Land Before Time, and a lot more. He has music-color and movement synesthesia, which could explain his animation prowess. That synesthesia reminds me of this scene from Ratatouille where Remy has a synesthetic eating experience:  
• Abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky . Kandinsky was an art theorist as well as a painter, exploring the possibilities of the connections between the color scale, shapes, and sounds. He also is credited with being a pioneer in the field of pure abstract art. He was influenced by french impressionists, as well as his own sound-color ynesthesia. He wanted to combine his perception of sounds with the colors in order to create a fantastic visual experience. You can look at some of his works here. 

If you look around, you'll be surprised by how many famous artists are synesthetic. Synesthesia is not horribly uncommon, and synesthetes are very likely to go into some field of art. There are several famous artists who are confirmed synesthetes, including a few who are still being processed and some false alarms. Overall, synesthesia is an absolutely fascinating condition and one which we probably will never fully understand.

Sevivons to Play With and Latkes to Eat

Today is the first night of Hannukah.

I was going to write another post about Synesthesia, but then today we went shopping and there were Christmas decorations EVERYWHERE. It looked like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was flying too fast after accidentally eating some little Christmas elves and half of Santa's bag of presents and puked green-and-red Christmas festiveness all over the entire store. 

On behalf of my religion, Feh! Oy gevalt. Christmas is such a nudge. We Jews have been around for thousands of years and we get what? Bupkes! And don't even get me started about other religions!

Pardon my kvetching, but I felt extremely underrepresented. So today, I wanted to tell the somewhat little-known story of Hannukah.

Here we go:

A long time ago, around 168 BCE, some Greeks took over a Jewish temple and made it into a temple for Zeus. The Greek king, Antiochus, forbade them from practicing judaism and forced them to worship Greek gods instead.

As you can imagine, the Jews were not so pleased. They tried to rebel, but they were mostly struck down by the Greeks. Some of the rebels went into hiding, where they formed a great big, wonderful, and admittedly rag-tag group known as the Maccabbees. Perhaps you've heard of them.

Anyways, these Maccabees lead a rebellion and, against all odds, won their freedom! Then they went back to their temple, which was completely and totally spiritually desecrated and contaminated and defiled and corrupted by the Greeks and their pig-cooking, idol-worshiping ways. The Jews had to purify their temple with an oil-burning ritual; they had to burn oil in the temple's menorah (a candle contraption to measure the days that has eight candles, one for each day of the week and one to light the other candles) for eight days. They looked around, but they could only find enough oil to burn for one day. The Jews decided to go for it anyways, and, to their surprise, the menorah burned for all eight days!

This is not the hugest miracle in the Torah, as one might presume. I mean, Moses split the red sea apart and turned his staff into a snake. That's way awesomer than long-lasting candles. The story is less about the miracle of the menorah and more about the success of the Jews in standing up for their beliefs and fighting to gain freedom.  

But you would be right in guessing that Hannukah is not the most important Jewish holiday. The Christmas season has seriously overblown the importance of Hannukah as well as super-commercializing it. Hannukah gets maybe an enitre row in most stores, but Passover, which one of the more important Jewish holidays, gets a shelf of tasteless matzoh-related products and nothing else.

Anyway.

In honor of this minor miracle, which is still a miracle, we light one candle each night in our Hanukkiah, which are menorahs that have nine candles for the eight days of Hannukah. We also eat fried foods, to commemorate the oil that lasted for eight days, like Latkes (potato pancakes) and Suvganyot (jelly doughnuts). Yeah, Jews are awesome. And, if course, we play driedel. Dreidel is more or less a gambling game. You have a dreidel, a spinning top that has four sides. On each side is one of four hebrew letters; a nun, gimmel, hey, and shin. They stand for nes gadol hiyah sham, which means "A great miracle happened there." In Israel, instead of a shin, there's a pei, because their driedals mean nes gadol hiyah po, "A great miracle happened here". Basically, you spin the driedel, and depending on what letter it lands on, you take some coins from the center or put some in. Whoever ends up with all of the coins wins.

As much as I hate the main-stream commercialism of certain holidays and conforming to society, I love this time of year. I love pretty much everything about Hannukkah, especially latkes. I love that everyone seems to be a little happier and a little friendlier, what with Christmas on the way. And I love how there is so much excitement and anticipation everywhere, and a general feeling of giddy joy. Most of the time.

So happy Hannukkah, everyone! Or, as my family says, Chappy Chanukkah!

And just because I can, here's that song about Hannukkah by the Maccabeats. Remember this?

Synesthesia--part one

I've talked about synesthesia a little bit before, when I was discussing Daniel Tammet, but synesthesia is such a broad and delightful topic that I thought I would talk about it more. This post will explain more about the basics of synesthesia and its connection to language, and the next post will have a bunch of interesting synesthetic cases.

To recap: synesthesia is a condition in which neurological parts of the brain are connected in such a way that experiencing one sensation triggers the response of another. Scientists aren't entirely sure what causes synesthesia, but somehow, senses are linked. For example, a person with synesthesia might see purple whenever they eat chocolate, or hear a violin sound whenever they touch something fluffy. There are more than 60 reported different types of synesthesia, but scientists have only studied a few.

One of the most common types is color-grapheme synesthesia, which is when a person percieves a color when they read a certain letter or number, like the number three might be purple or the letter s might be red. Another moderately common type is number form, which is when numbers and times have different specific spacial locations.

Synesthesia is thought to run in families, and often is something children are born with; however, strokes, seizures, brain damage, drug use, and other potentially brain-effecting things can sometimes cause synesthesia. For Daniel Tammet, he had a bunch of epileptic seizures when he was four that probably caused his own synesthesia.

Synesthesia also is thought to be a part of the root of lauguage. There was a study in which participants were shown two shapes:

and asked which one was the "bobo" and which was the "kiki". Almost every single time, they said that the shape on the left was the kiki and the shape on the right was the bobo. The study was done before with the words "maluma" and "takete", with the same results. The sharper sounding word goes with the sharper sounding shape, and the rounder word goes with the rounder shape. This association, although not technically synesthetic, is based on the combination of sound and shape, which is a type of synesthesia. In the beginning of language, synesthesia and synesthetic connections could have caused things to be named the way they are because of how they sound. Words that have the short "i" sound tend to be words like "little" or "quick", because the short "i" sound sounds small. Words like "great", "grand", or "God" all have a hard "g" sound, which sounds big and important. If you think about it, of course that makes sense because that's just the way it sounds. "G" sounds large and grand. "I" sounds small. This is evidence of synesthetic roots at the basis of our understanding of words.

In addition, expressions like "loud shirt", "bitter wind",  and "cutting words" could be synesthetic as well-- they combine more than one sense. 

If you're still interested, there's a lot of stuff about it on the internet that's really cool. This is a good summary of it, if you like videos better:

There's an official organization group thing for people with synesthesia, called The Synesthesia Battery.
It's really cool.

Synesthesia is just so fascinating to me for a lot of reasons, but mostly because there's such a huge variety. Some people see sounds when they hear music, or associate different personalities with numbers and letters. There are just so many different types, and scientists haven't even found them all. Synesthesia could also be really important to scientists' current understanding of our perception of the senses and how the brain works. Or maybe this power could be harnessed and used for some purpose. I highly recommend looking it up if you have time.