Overwhelming sync
“Only connect,” says E.M. Forster. But what if there are too many connections to comprehend? Sync tells us that everything connects to everything else, and that there is sync in chaos as well as in tides. It's a tremendously exciting book, and reading it late at night gives you the heady sense that you're just about to understand the universe completely.
But the New York Times reminds us that people collect mountains of paper (and can sometimes be buried by these mountains) in part because they believe they see connections that are crucial:
Pathological hoarding can affect people of all ages, and it seems to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, added Dr. Frost, who has researched the problem for a decade and recently received a grant to develop a model treatment to be tested on about 40 subjects at the Institute of Living in Hartford and at Boston University.
There are three facets to the problem, he said: enormous emotional difficulty throwing things away; compulsive acquisition ¬ó sometimes by buying things, but often by picking them up for free ¬ó and a high level of disorganization and clutter.
Many of the people afflicted seem to be unusually intelligent, he said. “They see more connections between things, which leads them to value those things much more than the rest of us do. ”
But today I'm going to assert that seeing connections is worth the risk, and leads to more than messy living rooms. I was fascinated by Sync's account of Brian Josephson's absorption with parapsychology. (Josephson won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on superconductivity, but hasn't been doing mainstream physics for the last 30 years.)
It has always seemed to me (I'm going out on a limb here) that the brain can communicate, can joggle other brains, without speech or gesture, and that scientists just haven't figured out why. We have a long way to go in understanding what our brains can do; we may just be stewards of memes and coordination networks that are far beyond our little comprehension. Maybe by continuing to see connections, and by believing that there's a heartbeat to the universe, we are coming very slightly closer to understanding our own capacities.
On the other hand, it may be that I just haven't been getting enough sleep, and Josephson is a nutty Nobel who has strayed. Let's check back in 20 years and see.