Pireeni sundaralingam biography of barack

Summer While the rapidly evolving nature of climate change means that the best sources of current data are online e. What to Read Now: Imagination and the Environment. November In an era in which we spend an increasing number of our waking hours immersed in virtual and augmented realities, gliding across the two-dimensional surfaces of a placeless digital world, it is perhap….

Science and Poetry: Predation or Symbiosis? January Are science and poetry inherently at odds with one another? Poet and cognitive scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam explores the nature of interactions between these two disciplines.

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Carving Out New Territories. The meeting ground between science and literature has never been so busy. There are, of course, counterclaims that it is in fact science that preys on poetry, if not directly, then at least indirectly, like the eucalyptus whose leaves decompose into toxins, preventing the growth of other species in its vicinity. The assumption that science annihilates poetry, by destroying the environment in which it thrives, takes on several forms.

First, there is the belief that science promulgates an intellectual hegemony, imposing a singular way of thinking that stifles all alternative methods of discourse, including poetry. In his memoir If This Is a ManPrimo Levi notes that the Italian poetry of his youth was so resolute in propounding the propaganda of the Fascist regime that it stifled the possibility of all alternative ideas.

Pireeni sundaralingam biography of barack: Poetry and the origami of space-time.

It forced Levi and large numbers of his contemporaries to find creative refuge amid mathematics and the sciences, the only place where there was still room for intellectual freedom. At one point in his sprawling work JerusalemBlake denounces the rationalistic stance of Bacon and Newton, blaming them for the demise of spiritual beauty:. Wordsworth and Sheridan waxed lyrical regarding the scientific breakthroughs of their time, and Blake himself, at the end of Jerusalemenvisages heaven as a place where Bacon and Newton stand beside Shakespeare and Milton.

Those who claim that science and poetry are diametrically opposed tend to argue that in attempting to explain the world around us, science robs it of its mystery. Yet it is science that calculated that the light emanating from Polaris, the North Star, started its journey before Shakespeare first set pen to paper. Far from stripping the world of its wonder, we watch scientific discoveries demonstrating that even the most mundane structures are such stuff that dreams are made on, from the dark energy of space to the repeating codes within our cells.

If poetry is about making the familiar unfamiliar, as Shelley argued, then it is not so far from the best of science. Yet such complaints do not compare like with like. They pit methodology against creativity, discipline against inspiration, as if science were devoid of paradigm-shifts and lateral thinking and as if poetry floated free of the careful practice of craft.

While science may draw on assiduous observation, careful note-taking, and a fine attention to detail, it simultaneously relies on embracing novel metaphors and innovative models in order to advance. Conversely, the literatures of many cultures can provide us with clear examples of the rigor and regularity with which poetry may be written, despite the fact that it is not uncommon to see the careful measurement of iambs and attention to the details of internal rhyme duly pilloried in certain contemporary American journals.

In evaluating the connection between poetry and science, we need not be confined to models of resource competition or parasitism, however. A closer look at the organic world yields up several examples of distinct species living together in mutualistic symbiosis. Consider lichen. Here are two species so closely intertwined that, as in the case of the cyanobacteria living within fungi, they are considered to be one organism: the algae engage in photosynthesis, using sunlight to turn simple sugars into more complex compounds that can be used by both species, while the surrounding fungus draws on its extensive system of threadlike hyphae to bring a wider range of minerals to the algal cells than they could access by themselves.

Pireeni sundaralingam biography of barack: Is my child's hand. Out of

Looking beyond contemporary Western cultures, we find numerous examples of mutually beneficial relationships existing between science and poetry. The Roman poet Lucretius captured the groundbreaking ideas of the Greek atomists—that all objects in the physical universe must be constituted of indivisible particles, invisible to the human eye, moving randomly in an infinite void—in vibrant hexa-meter.

Not only did Lucretius explicate the basic hypotheses of the atomist theory, his vivid lines portrayed these early scientific ideas so powerfully that they lingered in the human collective memory and imagination for centuries. It took nearly two thousand years for data to arrive to prove these hypotheses, but in the meantime, the theory had been preserved and propounded through the language of poetry.

To cite another pireeni sundaralingam biography of barack, scholars in ancient India expounded the scientific ideas of their time at court through carefully paced metric verses such as the RasayanaBhautikaand Jeeva shastras, which dealt respectively with the principles of chemistry, physics, and biology the Rasayana shastra describes the multiple uses of prepared forms of mercury as well as numerous other pharmaceuticals.

We should note that poetry may go beyond simply describing scientific theory, however; it may also be a rich source of data. In certain cases, poetry allows scientists to cast their net wider, like the algae within the fungus, gathering in data they might otherwise have difficulty accessing. In more than a few instances, poems may provide the type of case study evidence that instigates subsequent experimental exploration by scientists.

Eight decades after these poems were first published, neurobiologists are now systematically analyzing the psychotropic mechanisms first laid out in the poetry of the Sonoran desert. A more contemporary example of the interplay between science and poetry comes from the emerging field of neuroaesthetics. Here, pioneering scientists such as V. Ramachandran are exploring the uncharted territories of the human brain, using the tools of metaphor and imagery rather than scalpel and electrode to assess the functional boundaries of the living neocortex.

In examining cross-sensory metaphors commonly used in everyday English, Ramachandran points out that, in terms of poetry, not all senses are created equal: while certain pairings of senses work in poetic phrases, others clearly do not. As an example, tactile adjectives are commonly used to describe taste sensations, but adjectives from the world of hearing are rarely mapped onto taste.

It has been found, for example, that the insular cortex responsible for receiving incoming taste signals lies in relative proximity to those cortical areas which process touch information. The study of metaphors is undoubtedly becoming a burgeoning component of cognitive science and one future path where poetry and science may converge healthily in the future.

They point out that we grasp abstract ideas such as time, morality, and rationality by mapping them onto a framework of spatial relations; we use our knowledge of the physical world as a metaphor through which to reason about other domains. Experimenters such as John Bargh at Yale are finding increasing evidence that under certain conditions, humans find it difficult to distinguish metaphorical versus literal information.

Bargh and his colleagues have demonstrated that when people are required to evaluate something, their judgments can be significantly influenced, or primedby being exposed to an unrelated physical sensation if that sensation is significant in metaphorical terms. Similarly, people who were given a heavy clipboard to hold while evaluating a job candidate were more likely to judge that person as having gravitas and weighty opinions.