William L. Benzon, "Beethoven's Anvil", 2001, Oxford University Press, Oxford
「In one way or another the postmoderns are obsessed with the possibilities and difficulties of interpersonal understanding.」（p.19）「the central nervous system (CNS), consisting of the brain and the spinal cord, functions in two domains external to it, the internal milieu and the external world.」（p.32）「the central nervous system operates in two environments, the external world and the internal milieu, and it regulates the relationship between the external world and the interior milieu on behalf of that milieu.」（p.33）「the neural representation of other people」（p.34）「You are your body, but the division of the nervous system directed toward the external world is quite capable of treating your body as an object on a footing with other objects. The neural self (NS) in the CNS is the neural representation of that body.」（p.34）「It is important that the individual's sense of self, represented by the ego node, be consistent with other people's sense of him or her, and that these various other senses be mutually coherent. Much of social interaction is about achieving coherence among the neurally distributed components of a single identity.」（p.62）「A social status is simply one's position in the social system. ... A role, by contrast, is the social "script" you use to enact your status in a praticular situation.」（p.62）→A socialized or generalized persona is a status.「We could in fact think of one's kinship status as a specialized aspect of one's persona, an aspect one shares with all other individuals of the same status.」（p.62）「We might think of a status as a constraint on the persona, but better perhaps to consider it the core of the persona, which determines the basic features of one's interactions with others. One's unique features and capacities are then "attached" to that core. As such, the status exists in the brains of everyone in the culture.」（p.63）→In fact, "a constraint" makes a role easy to enact. It's a stimulus.「In fact, the set of possible statuses exists in the brain of every adult member of the culture. This set of statuses is affirmed and elaborated in the culture's stories and rituals; it forms the core of social life.」（p.63）→In one sense, "the set of possible statuses" is a culture.「the fluctuating patterns of interpersonal conjunction that sustain our cultural life.」（p.66）→The culture has certain patterns of interpersonal conjunction to sustain itself. Or cultures differ from one another as what kinds of patterns it has, and how it has them.「mind is like the weather」（p.72）「a low level of activity is still a means of participating in the evolving mental state.」（p.72）「The overall state (of the brain: Kakuta)is not explicitly controlled, at least not at a high degree of precision. Rather, that overall state reflects activities at various levels within the whole system. ... Yet no component of the brain regulates all of this activity in detail. The overall activity just happens. That overall activity is what I am calling the mind.」（p.73）「self-organizing dynamical systems」（p.74）「self-organizing dynamics」（p.75）「Somewhere in the brain a small fluctuation takes hold and becomes amplified to the point where it takes over global brain dynamics. This is not something you can will to happen --- at least not directly --- but if you put yourself in the right frame of mind and do the right things, then the magic may happen.」（p.75）「the mind as neural weather」（p.79）「The pleasure of sport ---at any rate, the pleasure that derives from the activity itself, rather than from beating aomeone else in competition --- is simply the subjective feeling of smooth fluid physical motion in which one's motive force exactly matches and counters any resistance.」（p.85）「our commonsense view of the self easily accommodates the notion of multiple inner agents, often at odds with one another, acting on our behalf」（p.96）→"the notion of multiple inner agents": The notion needs its name. To have a name or not to matters. Having, or commanding, its name gives you a power to control it.→"multiple inner agents, often at odds with one another"「To be sure, we can choose to supress emotional expression through firm self-control --- but htat is quite different from not generating the expression at all. The latter is not physically possible. When the appropriate subcortical mechanisms organize some emotional state, they will modulate the skeletal muscles with the appropriate essentic form. Whether one's body freely expresses that form depends on the neocortical motor systems: they may allow the expression or try in varying degrees to suppress it.」（p.100）「it is clear that the emergence of strategies for dealing with separation is critical for human psychological development.」（p.113）→It might have something to do with the human development and schizo.「The various bits of brain circuitry do what they must, and some overall brain state emerges.」（p.115）→Having a ceratin virtual " overall brain state" enables us to get prepared to a certain reality. That is: Having a sad virtual " overall brain state" enables us to get prepared to a sad reality. Having a raging virtual " overall brain state" enables us to get prepared to a raging reality. etc.「George Lackoff found that we conceive the self to be a multiplicity of agents.」（p.152）「By and large, everything is connected to everything else, though some linkages are more direct than others. Any but simplest mental function involves a distributed network of neural centers.」（p.158）「No doubt we need more evidence, but beyond that, the mind and brain may operate in ways too subtle to be adequately captured by our current concepts.」（p.159）→We need new concepts to capture what we can't now.「the purpose of speculation is not to hit upon the right explanation, as if by magic, but to guide subsequent research in a fruitful direction.」（p.159）→What a wise saying!「In musicking the external world is assimilated to the inner rhythms of a collective dream, a dream being enacted in that public space where we share our inner environment with others.」（p.164）「To survive an organism must maintain its structural integrity in the face of all those physical forces that work to degrade that integrity.」（p.191）→How about mental integrity?「The emergence of culture created a long-term dynamics that is new in the history of life on earth. When I introduced dynamics concepts back in chapters 2 and 3, I focused on relatively short-term interactions, seconds, minutes, and hours. That is the timescale on which musicking happens.」（p.193）「We now need to think in terms of weeks and months and years and centuries. Those are the timescales on which human groups, and groups of groups, come together in ritual and also in conflict, and go their various ways. From week to week and year to year the rituals are pretty much the same, but over the course of centuries they change. That long-term evolution of collective dynamics is a new phenomenon.」（p.194）「It is cultural evolution. Cultural survival depends on the neurodynamics and couplings that carry the culture. These mechanisms work much faster than do biological evolution. Yet they are no more subject to our direct and intentional control than those of biological evolution.」（p.194）「mind control is basic to human culture.」（p.204）「What is important is that possession is undertaken only for serious reasons;」（p.213）→"Possession" might happen during a senior year. Yet it might be possible to get sutdents prepared for the possession before. 「Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", 1967」（p.222）「the Homeric Greeks heard inner voices and acted on what they heard. From the fact that mental words had become common by the time of the Athenian Golden Age, he concludes that human consciousness had finally emerged.」（p.222）「the creation of concepts ... gave rise to consciousness」（p.222）「patterns of neural weather」（p.223）「Such listening and analysis takes practice because we don't hear rhythm, melody, and harmony and then combine them into a musical whole. Rather, we apprehend the whole first and only gradually learn to differentiate that whole into rhysm, melody, and harmony.」（p.229）「While the neocortex has regions that seem specialized for metric and nonmetric rhysms, timbre, intervals, melodic shape, and harmony, one needs special cultural "tuning" to be able explicitly to attend to and control one or more of these aspects of musical sound independently of the others. Only through the long process of cultural evolution has control of rhysm, melody, and harmony become clearly differentiated.」（p.229）「culture molds brains, not biology.」（p.230）「a society evolves from a hunting and gathering band (HG band) to a chiefdom with well-established permanent leadership」（p.235）「interactions with people whose cultural knowledge is different from their own.」（p.236）「The need to interact routinely with strangers requires a major change in the neural mechanisms for social interaction. In the world of HG bands meetings between strangers frequently end in violence. This would be disastrous in a society where meetings between strangers occur rountinely.」（p.236）「If you live in an HG band, your identity is your place in the kinship system. But that identity is not sufficient to negotiate your way in a civilized world. There you need some notion of citizenship or subjecthood.」（p.236）「If you share subjecthood with a stranger, you can safely interact in certain ways.」（p.236）「Similarly the fact that you must interact with individuals having different cultural knowledge means that your different bodies of knowledge must be mutually consistent. You must recognize that not everyone shares your specialized knowledge and make appropriate adjustments in conversation. You must thus differentiate your specialized knowledge from a body of common knowledge that you assume for all subjects living in the same society --- what George Herbert Mead called the generalized other (GO).」（p.236）「In an HG band each individual will have a persona (recall figure 3.1) in the collective neural tissue. Each individual will also have some neural tissue devoted to the system of roles associated with the statuses in the kinship system (recall figure 3.2). Individuals in our chiefdom, however, will have two statuses unlike any in Hg bands, one for the GO and one for chiefhood.」（p.236/237）→「Individuals in our chiefdom, however, will have two statuses unlike any in Hg bands, one for the GO and one for chiefhood.」（p.237）→Individuals in our society will have two statuses, one for the communalism and one for neo-liberalism.→Individuals in our society will have two statuses, one for the nationalism and one for imperialism.→Individuals in our society will have two statuses, one for the communalism and one for marketism.「as the number of personas grows larger and larger, the neural structures begin to fail. The collective neural weather becomes more and more disorderly, anxiety grows, and disputes became a problem. This "pressure" forces a massive reorganization in which each status, including the role scripts associated with it, is factored into two components: one component is unique to each role while the other component is common to all roles, for all statuses. These common components are then organized into the GO status. With this simplification neural weather calms down, acxiety decreases, and peace returns to the community.」（p.237「Of course, it is not quite the same community. It is organized in a different way.」（p.237）「Musicking organizes the rituals in which, over time, coupled brains create the GO and chiefhood statuses. When people take part in a ritual, they engage in playacting. There are rituals, often associated with specific calendar times, in which men act like women, women act like men, adults act like children, ordinary subjects act like chiefs, and chiefs act like ordinary subjects. This is the kind of activity that is likely to produce the differentiation we need, for it gives each person's nervous system an opportunity to enact different social statuses and roles, thereby providing an opportunity to factor each into shared and unique components, That is one clue about how the collective neuropil does its work.」（p.238）→A certain activity 「gives each person's nervous system an opportunity to enact different social statuses and roles」「ritual creats a cultural space where social innovation takes place. During periods when a society is under no particular stress, ritual serves to confirm and maintain the existing order. But when the society comes under duress, ritual allows new social mechanisms to emerge. As societies grow and their structure differentiates, musicking continues to play the role it had in humankind's beginning: the forge in which new forms of social being emerge.」（p.238）「Now, at last, I am ready to think about where memetic variation comes from. In the first place, memes can come from other groups. ... New memes may also arise spontaneously in the course of musicking. ... Beyond this, I suggest that individual invention ---- whther spontaneous or deliberate --- is another source of new memes. ... Whatever the source, as long as a group has a plentiful supply of memes it has the raw material for cultural evolution.」（p.239）「It provides a mechanism by which the collective neural tissue can restructure its mechanisms for social interaction.」（p.239）「Writing introduces virtual encounters into the web of social transactions. Whenever you read something you encounter not only the author of the text, but every other reader of the text. But these others aren't directly present to you, hence the encounter is a virtual one. This virtual encounter requires you to imagine the writer and address yourself to her without any external support other than the text itself. As strange as that may seem, writing a text is even stranger, for it requires you to generate language without any of the customary cues about how your words are being received. Given a nervous system that is organized for interaction with an external world, that's quite a feat.」（p.240）「In a world where one is almost never exposed to any group other than one's own, styile is invisible. ... But as soon as one must routinely interact with other groups --- different social classes, different occupational guilds, or tribesman from different provinces, and so forth --- style becomes palpable;」（p.241）→In a world where one is almost never exposed to any culture other than one's own, styile is invisible. But as soon as one must routinely interact with other cultures --- different social classes, different occupational guilds, or ethnics from different provinces, and so forth --- style becomes palpable.「In such a world of interacting groups, I suggest, the expressive style of a group's performances becomes part of the equipment through which the group negotiates its place in the social and cultural order.」（p.241）→In such a world of interacting cultures, the expressive style of a culture's performances becomes part of the equipment through which the culture negotiates its place in the social and cultural order.「We must regard this notation as a mnemonic aid, sings to help one remember melodies one has heard and sung. Without that prior experience, the neumes are deeply ambiguous.」（p.246）「Medieval Europe was a congerie of tribes, cities, and states of various cultures. But they were all, in some measure, under the sway of the Roman Catholic Church, and thus of its ritual, including plain-song. Europe was dotted with communities of chanting religious, and congregations would hear chanting at church services.」（p.246）→Today's world is a congerie of tribes, cities, and states of various cultures. But they are all, in some measure, under the sway of maketism. The world is dotted with communities of marketing.「The greatness of an individual musician such as Armstrong is a function, both of his power to forge compelling performances from the "raw" memes and of the existence of that meme pool. While Armstrong may have been ahead of his fellows, he couldn't have been very far ahead of them, otherwise they could not have performed together.」（p.255）「Minstrelsy, brass bands, and the church were three arenas in which African and European musics mingled in nineteenth-century America.」（p.259）「memetic flow from one style (or family) to another --- keeping in mind that a given meme can exist in many pools. It is, of course, possible for contemporary styles to exchange memes with one another.」（p.259）「cultural cross-breeding」（p.262）「the catalytic emergence of styles from heterogeneous meme pools」（p.262）「an individual's response to musical memes is a function of her emotional and motor style. Individuals with similar styles will group together, attending the same clubs, dances, and concerts, and listening to the same broadcasts and recordings.」（p.269）「to commodify the music so taht it can be marketed to the appropriate consumers」（p.272）「In complex cultural pluralities such as the United States, people have to negotiate a new identity for each arena in which they function: home, church, work, social club, political party, whatever. They have many bodies of music to choose from. Musical preference thus becomes a matter of personal choices that imply specific connections to the larger currents of history.」（p.273）「But the abject veneration of genius devalues the musical capacities of the rest of us and encourages us to substitute recordings for our own music. That path leads to cultural stagnation.」（p.281）「If we wish to hear marvelous new music twenty years from now, we must prepare the way by making our own music now. That music isn't the responsibility of geniuses. It is ours.」（p.281）
