This and that

Formulaic description of Hebbian learning.

The other day, I mentioned I have an ancestor named William Hebb.  I was wondering why that name Hebb seemed familiar to me and finally it came to me.  Back when I was getting my advanced degrees in underwater basket weaving or whatever it was, I studied Hebb's postulate, aka cell assembly theory.  It's a neuropsychology rule stating that an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell. Or, in other words, the neurons that fire together wire together and  those that fire out of sync lose their link. It was introduced by Donald Hebb in his  book, The Organization of Behavior. Hebb's work anticipated spike-timing-dependent plasticity, among other things.  I won't bore you with anymore of this shop talk, but, see, I ain't just a pretty face and a curvalicious bod with a swivel in my wiggle and a gasp in my groan when I get the bone.  Heh.  Okay, down girl. Lol.

A favorite book:

 

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood. 

 “What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”

From another favorite book, Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

 “To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”