Sacred streets

My dad got me an mp3 player for my birthday, and after a few initial troubles, I've been enjoying it very much.

I listen to quite a lot of Renaissance choral music - Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis et al. - which means it's all settings of sacred words, Glorias and Credos and the like. Because such music was intended to be heard in churches, physical 'sacred spaces', I often feel like I'm in an 'auditory sacred space' when I'm listening to it.

But the weird experience that I've been having is that this technology allows me to take this music out into the world, into the streets of London, into a context for which it was never intended.

Where I'm expecting the fragrance of incence and candles - I get car fumes and cigarette smoke.

Where I'm expecting the order and beauty, altar, candles, icons - I get a jumble of advertising, shoes, streets, food, faces, window displays, gadgets, buses, posters, rubbish.

Where I'm expecting to 'pass the peace' with the people around me - I'm in their way and have to elbow my way through the crowd.

But then I heard: "descendit de coelis...et homo factus est" - He descended from heaven...and was made human - and I realised that this was what the words meant - he descended from heaven and lived in amongst all this - he walked down the street on a Monday afternoon and experienced car fumes and advertising and crowds. I wonder if in some ways the streets of London are actually a better context for these words and this music than a church?

Consciousness, neuroscience, and mystery

I was sitting in the library today skimming through a book called 'Human Brain Function' (I'm studying neuroscience) which is about recent research into brain function using structural and functional brain imaging. It was all much as I expected - careful, scientific, well-written, but quite heavy going.

Then as I was flicking through the chapters, I came to the postscript - subtitled 'An Ethnographic Coda'. It's an intriguing exploration of the culture of 'brain mappers', the truth and value of brain imaging experiments, and attitudes about and problems with neuroscientific explanations of consciousness.

The bit that really struck me, though, was an observation that the traditional distinction between subjective (first person) and objective (third person) accounts leaves out a critical perspective: the interacting account (second person). The second person perspective is essential, because it's the only way we can actually do these kinds of experiments at all (by instructing participants about what they are to do in the scanner). He goes on to speculate that perhaps this criticism should itself become the subject of experimental questions: "Perhaps we should now conceive of - and study - [consciousness] as an inherent property of interacting persons rather than as an intangible characteristic of an abstract, isolated brain."

This resonates so much with bits of theology (Zizoulas, Being as Communion) and social psychology (social identity emerging as a result of intergroup interaction) that I've come across that I momentarily thought I might have found a fantastic interdisciplinary PhD topic! Alas, it is not to be - I am not a theologian, nor a social psychologist, and neuroscience is more than enough of a challenge for me. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating idea, and coming across it unexpectedly like that felt like a real gift. As a scientist, I am very aware of the importance of staying humble in the face of the incredible mysteries of the world around us and the world within us...