psychology

The Secret to Making Good Wine

Basically, charge more for it. That's all it takes, and I roared when I read the account on the Boston Globe site. Take that, ye wannabe wine snobs! In summary, when people have not learned the subtleties of wine flavors, they fall back on the assumption that good wine is more expensive than so-so wine, so when told how much a bottle of wine costs without being told what it is, they overwhelmingly declare that the more expensive wine is the better wine—even when all the wines in the tasting are exactly the same wine.

Heh.

Perceiving the subtleties of wine is like playing the piano, or most any other musical instrument: It takes years of practice, and (though we may mightily deny it) many or even most people have no talent for the skill and cannot learn it. Add that to the fact that human taste perception varies wildly from individual to individual and cannot be quantified, and, well, it cooks down to this: Buy what you can afford and learn to like it, as the odds are that you cannot tell the difference between good and ordinary wine anyway. From the article:

After the researchers finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste the five different wines again, only this time the scientists didn't provide any price information. Although the subjects had just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind, when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations, the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn't fancy, but it tasted the best.

The larger issue, that expectations color what we consider “objective” perception, is worth close study, as it applies to a lot more than just wine. People say that house brands are inferior to name brand only when they're told which is which. Our sense of taste is not as good as we think, nor are our skills of perception. I don't buy brand name Rice Chex anymore, nor real Diet Mountain Dew. (And we buy Joe's Os when we're somewhere that they're sold; they beat Cheerios all hollow.) I save money, and I'm just as happy as I was going with name brands. Objective quality is perceptible (and thus definable) for some things, less so for other things, and not at all for a great many (perhaps most) things. Being able to tell which is which is an important skill. Don't assume that you know more than you do, nor that you can discern more than you can.

A recent phone conversation with Michael Abrash triggered some insights in this area. More on it when I find the time. And thanks to several people who sent me the Boston Globe link; I believe Rich Rostrom was the first.

Fuse Fuse Revolution

Jan 22nd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Yee-hah! The drugs are gone and I got my monsters back! Ok, last night's monster was nothing special, but at least I'm no longer dreaming of repairing Xerox machines for Hilary Clinton. And the monster is probably the least interesting aspect of last night's major dream.

But it was still a monster, and that counts for something. I dreamed that Carol and I were vacationing somewhere in England. In a small hillside village we were browsing in shops and in a sort of street market, and that's where we first saw the monster: It was a big, totally hairy 9-foot tall Sasquatch-ish thingie. It wasn't doing anything special; in fact, it was browsing the market stalls and stepping into shops just like we were. (In the morning it occurred to me that the poor thing was probably vacationing from western Oregon, where so many tinfoil-hat types are searching for it that it must lead a pretty stressful life.) We later saw it again while touring some old castle.

Now, I have a protocol for dealing with dream monsters that has worked well for me these past 55 years:

Don't get too close;
Don't make eye contact;
Don't engage them in conversation.

(I use this same protocol in the real world for beggars, religious fanatics, and women leaning against buildings.) Every time I saw the monster, I quietly started herding Carol in the opposite direction, and once again, it worked.

But toward the end of the dream, I saw something remarkable: A video game vaguely similar to Dance Dance Revolution. It consisted of a typical game console, plus a low square platform with nine cells that you step on. When the game begins, the platform lights up in dull red, and the nine cells display callouts for common nuclei. The object of the game is to put one foot on each of two nuclei that can fuse. For example, if one cell says 7Li and the another 1H (Physics types will know what I'm talking about) you step on both and the game console totes up the energy you've generated, with a display on the console in MeV. Each time you successfully fuse two nuclei, the pressure value goes up and the platform's backlight slides up the spectrum a little from red toward violet. As the pressure goes up, more exotic fusion reactions become possible, and if you know your nuclear physics you can rack up quite a score. The machine we saw was in a pub, and a young business-suited British gentleman was playing with a pint in his hand.

Damn, I remember thinking, he must know his carbon-nitrogen cycle cold.

Anyway, I have no idea whether this makes sense as a game, since I don't play games other than some Snood and an occasional round of Mah Jongg. But it was the coolest thing I've seen in a dream in quite some time, certainly since before I had my gums worked on a week ago Monday. Nor am I sure there are enough possible fusion reactions to make such a game interesting, though in the heart of a supernova (once you goose the platform into the purple zone) who knows what's possible and what isn't?

Some part of me is obviously ready to write some SF again. I gotta get busy.

Artificial Stupidity

Jan 21st, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Unambiguously better now. I'm no longer taking narcotic painkillers, and mirabile dictu! I can think again. The big battle now is not against pain so much as the swelling, and anti-inflammatories don't disrupt your higher brain functions. (They can mess bigtime with your stomach lining if you're not careful, though.) My mouth is still a little uncomfortable, especially after I eat something—even innocuous stuff like oatmeal and cottage cheese, which is most of what I've been eating for seven days now—but it's not like it was even two days ago. I've lost five pounds in seven days while getting no exercise at all. Try the Gingivectomy Diet—no, scratch that. Not worth it.

The swelling can and does cause some nagging discomfort, and while I'm not quite my usual ebullient self, I'm in the ballpark again. My experience this past week reminded me of the mystery that has tied our nation up in knots from time to time: Why “drugs” are an issue at all. We as a society spend an immense amount of money chasing people who make an immense amount of money selling chemicals for an immense amount of money to people who seem to think ingesting them is worth an immense amount of money—not to mention the risk of jail time . I've never been able to figure the payoff, however, and I'm gradually coming around to the realization that the mystery is really about me:

I don't get high. I've never gotten high. In truth, I'm not even sure what “high” means.

I smoked marijuana a couple of times in 1973, in part because everybody I knew was doing it, and in part because I was interested in whether drugs could enhance creativity. The answer to that was a resounding no; pot made me depressed and paranoid for days afterward. By that time I had already given up alcohol because there was no payoff apart from confusion and a tendency to talk too much—and when I drank more while looking for that elusive payoff I just threw up and felt wretched for the next several days. (It was ten years before I went back to good wine in small quantities.)

Here and there in the subsequent 35 years I've been given narcotics for pain. I vividly remember my first hernia surgery in 1978: I had eagerly packed a small bag of electronics theory books to study during what I was told would be four days of enforced bed rest. (They did not tell me who or what would enforce the bed rest, heh.) The memory of picking up an RF design text ten minutes after a shot of morphine is peculiar: Damn, I used to know what this stuff meant! After a few minutes of futile riffling, I grabbed the TV remote and happily watched “Green Acres” reruns until I fell asleep. A few years later I had my wisdom teeth pulled, and under the influence of some damned pill or another I felt stupid and took peculiar delight in watching “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

And that's been my pattern ever since, when medical issues arise and I get handed drugs: Instead of euphoria, I get artificial stupidity, memory lapses, and depression. The memory lapses I don't mind much; who wants vivid recall of a root canal or colonoscopy? (My last root canal I remember well because they tried to sedate me with nitrous oxide, and it didn't work. At all. Nada. I had to content myself with watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on a TV embedded in the ceiling while praying that the whole thing would be over soon.) But I dislike the feeling of my intelligence falling away from me as the drug takes hold; to me it's a metaphor of losing my soul and thus all that matters to me. (I drew on this feeling in describing the motivation of the Guardian in my 1980 story of the same name.)

I'm a naturally upbeat person, and perhaps that's the key: I may be immune to euphoria because I'm already there. A woman I knew in college said something once that startled me at the time: “The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you're too damned happy!” Looking back, however, she just may have been right. Having a naturally euphoric state could be like living at the South Pole: No matter which way you go from there it's toward gummy-headed depression.

It may be impossible for me to understand why people risk their lives for narcotics, just as it may be impossible to understand how people can enjoy nasty bitter wine like Chardonnay. Life's experience is not the same for all people. I taste bitter things with outrageous intensity, and for the most part I live my life in a state of nonmanic happiness. My brief spates of depression following the loss of Coriolis and several close relatives makes me wonder what life is like for people who are unhappy basically all the time. Perhaps Huxley's soma—or something similar but gentler—really is necessary for some people. (Perhaps we already have it, in the mind-changing antidepressants. See Listening to Prozac.) Mood seems to be inherited, not earned, and if it's inherited, do people have a right to tweak it? (See Stephen Braun's The Science of Happiness.) I don't claim to have the answers, but there's no better time to be haunted by unanswerable questions than when you're sitting still in a comfy chair, dosed to the eyebrows with something that doesn't permit your brain to do anything more than chase its own shadows.

Putting My Dreams on Hold

Jan 19th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Dare I hope that I've turned the corner? We'll see in the morning. At least the black-and-blue hasn't gotten any worse, and I'm taking the pain pills less often.

And I've been thinking about dreams. A lot of people thought that yesterday's entry described a dream made up for the sake of a funny story, but it wasn't—the dream was real and unfolded precisely as described. I had another dream last night with the same odd characteristic in common: No outlandish elements. I dreamed that I was at my godfather's dairy farm near Green Bay, Wisconsin, standing in the open doorway of the farmhouse watching the cows champ grass in the pasture, like I did when I was there in the 50s and 60s. They were ordinary cows eating ordinary grass, and the house was precisely as I remember it, even though the farm was sold and the house razed over thirty years ago.

I think that's the key: My dreams for the last few nights have been composed entirely out of things remembered, not things made up from whole cloth, as they so often are. I've never met Hilary Clinton, but lord knows I see her enough on TV, and she did grow up a scant couple of miles from where I did. And the outlines of the situation were familiar: I used to visit a lot of offices when I was a Xerox tech rep back in 1974-76, and for the most part I was treated well by the office managers and secretaries who were in charge of keeping their cranky copiers running. I was generally offered coffee or sodas, often with doughnuts or chips, occasionally sandwiches, and sometimes odd things like taffy apples. (I went home once with a zucchini in my coat pocket, though I dislike them and eventually had to throw it out.) More surprisingly, these people (almost always women) generally liked me and had the wisdom not to blame me for their malfunctioning machines, many of which were ancient limping electromechanical clunkers that desperately needed scrapping. I tried to be helpful in return: I was sometimes asked to “look at this damned telephone” or see if I could make a balky radio work. My record there was spotty, but I did what I could and they appreciated it.

I think that Hilary Clinton was standing in here for the archetype of the Good Customer, the ones who knew that I did my best to help them. I enjoyed being a tech rep, even though I knew I wouldn't be doing it for long, just as I enjoyed my visits to Uncle Joey's farm in the early 60s. The Xerox job was peculiarly rewarding—I'm still not quite sure why—and I'm guessing that my dream-maker mechanism was reaching for “comfort memories” and gluing them together with the same abandon that it often glues together weird creatures and impossible architecture and machinery.

So where did the weird creatures go? I have a theory that I tested today: I think that the pain pills anaesthetize the machinery in my subconscious mind that creates brand new things. I tried working on two of my numerous “hanging fire” SF projects, and it was startling how completely incapable I was of making progress. I did a little better on Old Catholics, which is a contemporary mainstream novel about people in Chicago, not an adventure set far in the future on peculiar worlds. Still, I had a great deal of trouble being truly creative today, in any way at all—and I think I'm doing as well as I am on this entry right now simply because I'm due for another pill in an hour or so, and my gums are starting to hurt. I think it's telling that I have taken a pain pill (two of them, actually, of two different kinds) right before bed every night since Monday, so that the chemicals have had their greatest effect while I sleep. (Which is the idea—otherwise I wouldn't sleep.)

I'm starting to miss the weirdly creative theater of the mind that I have always experienced, even though it sometimes disturbs me. I have fair confidence that it will return once the pill bottle is empty. I'll let you know.