read this e-journal

Part of day job is putting together a monthly journal for Julie Meyer's company, Ariadne Capital. If you're interested in early-stage companies in the broad media, tech and telecom space then it's not a bad read and occasionally a very good one. Through the Maze comes out the third week of every month and is free to subscribe to. I'm always looking for interesting stories and writers too, so if you fall into that category, contact me.

Is Google making us stupid?

This was the title of Nicholas Carr’s article published in Atlantic Monthly that sparked what has become a firey debate between the guardians of old culture and the nouveau tech. It’s a debate that interests me profoundly, not just because I don’t just sit but live on the fence between the two, but also because of the more scientific research that has begun to show neurological changes in a whole generation intellectually engaged with Playstation, Facebook and MSN.

John Walsh in this Sunday’s Independent, iterated the case that there are increasing numbers of people now unable to tackle what might be called ‘difficult’ literature: Joyce, Beckett, Homer, Milton. Actually that should read difficult and long. Because the argument goes that given the way we engage with information on the web, ‘power browsing’, we are increasingly unable to apply the necessary intellectual concentration needed to sustain meaning over the long distances of big novels or other works. This inability is mirrored in structural changes to the fore-brain, or the parts of the brain that are involved with language and abstract logic.

I’ve just finished reading Susan Greenfield’s ‘The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century’ (no, not that long). Professor Greenfield is the eminent Oxford neuroscientist whose work has been popularised in various forms over the past decade. She writes, “At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.” So the brain is plastic and malleable, like a muscle. Use it or lose it. She quotes a fascinating research study undertaken by the Harvard Medical School. Three groups of adult volunteers with no prior ability to play the piano are given a week in an identical room with an identical piano. Group 1 is given intensive piano practice for five days; group 2 has nothing to do with the piano and Group 3 is told to imagine that they were spending five days intensively practising the piano. Comparative brain scans showed Group 2 had no change; Group 1 had significant structural changes to the parts of the brain associated with fine motor control and – big surprise – Group 3 showed almost as much change to the same parts of the brain as Group1. In other words, the impact of the imagination, or higher thought process, is not just real but physical.

My late father studied Classics at Cambridge and then went on to carve out a very classical career as a mandarin civil servant. He always maintained his education had taught him how to think, had trained his mind. I, of course, poo poo-ed such Byzantine thinking until, in the immortal words of the Fonz, I realised he was right just at the point when I have a son who thinks I’m wrong. (And aged four, wants nothing more than to master Playstation).

I don’t really think the Sony Reader with its galactic memory (160 books-worth) and leviathan battery life or Google Book Search (with its millions of scanned books out there free on the web) are a threat to the world’s creative imagination. To me physical access to ideas is always good if it’s expanding: I think people will always choose to lose themselves in a good book, with paper and ink and easy pages to turn at some time. What does concern me, though, is if somehow the democracy and vastness of the internet, with its multiplicity of views and sources, turns us away from the deeply-researched, long argument posited by a single, deeply-thinking person, and worse, makes us unable to follow him or her on a deep intellectual journey.

Beanz meanz Heinz...or Branstons?

OK now we know the credit crunch is real. Sales of baked beans are up 12% on last year and Branstons beans are up 22%. I'm a Heinz girl myself - and the full sugar version too. They can't do them in France where the name says it all - haricots blancs à la sauce tomate - so I wonder what hard-pressed French families are eating more of? Let them eat cake.

In a world where...

Don laFontaine has died aged 68. Until his death no-one outside his niche knew his face – even his name. But his voice sold over 5,000 of Hollywood's most blockbusting flicks from Dr Strangelove to The Terminator. He'd started as a radio engineer and then progessed to a few radio ads before finding his real talent. Overweight and unglamorous, he is probably one of Hollywood's most hired actors. In his 33 year career he single-handedly created an industry of voicing movie trailers with his signature sound of an insomniac's throaty base rolling like thick black coffee over gravel. He had a pregnant voice; a voice that held your attention and promised and suggested. How can one man's voice be so iconic? So unrepeatable? So resonant for so many people across all the world. Earlier today I was doing some early work putting together Ariadne Capital's next journal to Maria Callas belting out arias at high decibels across the Somerset countryside. It got me thinking about other voices I love: the unfashionable 50s tenor, Beniamino Gigli and the rasping bark of Sid Vicious (strangely also admired by the great interpreter of German lieder, Ian Bostridge) and Tom Waits and Dylan and Louis Armstrong. They've all got highly individual voices that are drenched in experience: unmistakable. So now we can look forward to many laFontaine immitators and how dull they'll be.