There are, of course, purely secular forms of prayer . . .
The above remarks were suggested by the award today of a Nobel Prize
for Hopfield networks, and by the Hebbian theory I learned
in a 1960-1961 Harvard Freshman Seminar on Prescott Street.
Updates:
"The personalities come and go in kaleidoscopic succession,
many changes often being made in the course of twenty-four hours."
"By a breaking up of the original personality at different moments
along different lines of cleavage, there may be formed several different
secondary personalities which may take turns with one another."
— Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality ,
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906, pages 2 and 3.
Related reading . . .
In 1978, Harvard moved a structure known as the Morton Prince House
from Divinity Avenue to Prescott Street, where it occupies the former Hurlbut
Parking Lot, which was the vista from my 1960-61 freshman room.
From the Log24 post "Very Stable Kool-Aid" —
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A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dear Dr. Szasz: Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun. The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry. I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century. It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty. . . . . |
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Morton Prince, a Boston neurologist, founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906 as an outlet especially for those who took a psychogenic view of neurotic disorders. Through experiments with hypnotism, he added appreciably to knowledge of subconscious and coconscious mental processes; The Dissociation of a Personality (Prince, 1905) still ranks as a classic. He early saw that studying normal people in the depth and detail with which one studied patients could make significant contributions to our whole understanding of human nature. Before his death he established and briefly directed the Harvard Psychological Clinic, devising the research environment out of which presently sprang major contributions to the study of personality.
— "Who Was Morton Prince?," by R. W. White, |
See as well Who Was R. W. White?
"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light"
— Dylan Thomas, quoted in the final episode of "Blacklist"
Related material, in memory of Raymond Reddington and
Harry G. Frankfurt —
See as well this journal on the morning of July 16,
and also "Cartoon Graveyard."
“I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”
— Paul Simon
A screenshot today of a May 31 NY Times review of a book on hacking —
See also Prescott Street in this journal.
Bergman reportedly died today at 93.
Update of Jan. 4, 2022 —
"Nine Perfect Strangers was certainly not helped by premiering
just days after HBO aired the finale of The White Lotus,
the summer’s word-of-mouth TV hit that’s also a stacked
ensemble of strangers gathering at a lush hotel, and a much more
scathing, focused and riveting satire . . . ."
— Adrian Horton in The Guardian , Aug. 25, 2021
From other posts tagged Tetrahedron vs. Square —
"There is such a thing as a 4-set."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.
Illustration (central detail a from the above tetrahedral figure) —
A Harvard Variation
from Timothy Leary —
The topics of Harvard and Leary suggest some other cultural
history, from The Coasters — "Poison Ivy" and "Yakety Yak."
For the Dr. Seuss School of
Neuropsychopharmacology —
From the school itself —
Related material — Pilgrim's Progress in this journal and . . .
an image from Log24 on December 8, 2012 —
See as well "To Think That It Happened on Prescott Street"
and related posts.
For the title, see the previous post as well as Prescott Street
and Psychedelic Club in this journal.
Some related art —
Or: Geometric Logic Continued
Part I: Mystic Twaddle —
Part II: Meanwhile, on that same date —
Part III: Back at Harvard —
A link from the above post, infra —
“Some Harvard-related material — See Leary and 6 Prescott .”
“Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead.”
* See the previous post‘s link to the phrase
“Turn on, tune in, drop dead.”
"In July, 1960, having just received a doctorate from Harvard
and a research and training fellowship from the National Institute
of Mental Health, I drove, together with my wife, Sandylee,
from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cuernavaca, Mexico."
— Michael Maccoby, June 26, 2014,
"Building on Erich Fromm's Scientific Contributions"
This is the Michael Maccoby of . . .
First published, with a less lurid cover, in 1958 by Arlington Books
of Cambridge, Mass.
What appears to be that 1958 edition, with the Maccoby introduction,
is available as a PDF —
http://paragoninspects.com/articles/pdfs/temp/operators_and_things.pdf .
Some Harvard-related material — See Leary and 6 Prescott .
For a member of a 1960-1961 Harvard Freshman Seminar
at 8 Prescott Street —
Dusenbury’s study of color was published on June 9, 2015.
This journal on that date —
Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM post …
Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to …
|
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dear Dr. Szasz: Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun. The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry. I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century. It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty. . . . . |
The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.
Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."
— Tim Doody in The Morning News web 'zine on July 26, 2012**
Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's
"jewel box" post …
A 4-dimensional hypercube H (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces. In its incarnation as a Galois tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of 2,304 affine transformations.
Similar remarks apply to the I Ching In its incarnation as
a Galois hexaract , for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.
* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.
** See also this journal on that date — July 26, 2012.
"Hum a few bars, Steely Dan."
Related material — "For 6 Prescott Street" and "SAT."
_________________________________________________________________
Links' thumbnail previews —
"SAT"
"Freshman Seminar Program Department Administrator Corinna S. Rohse
described the program’s courses, which allow students to study subjects
that vary from Sanskrit to the mathematical basis for chess, as
'jewel-like: small and incredibly well-cut.' "
— The Harvard Crimson , Dec. 10, 2008
For remarks related to Sanskrit, chessboard structure, and "jewel-like"
mathematics, see A Prince of Darkness (Log24, March 28, 2006).
See also Walsh Functions in this journal and …
Lecture notes on dyadic harmonic analysis
(Cuernavaca, 2000)
Compare and contrast these remarks of Pereyra with the following
remarks, apparently by the same Corinna S. Rohse quoted above.
* Location of the Harvard Freshman Seminar program in the 2008
article above. The building at 6 Prescott was moved there from
5 Divinity Avenue in 1978. When the seminar program was started
in the fall of 1959, it was located in a house at 8 Prescott St. (In
1958-1959 this was a freshman dorm, the home of Ted Kaczynski.)
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