Brain Stuff and Heart Stuff

Being cerebral is an academic affliction. Being in touch with emotions, speaking from the heart, is not something that comes easily to academics. This may be because brain-stuff resides in words which can be codified, and used (sometimes as weapons) in articulating and defending ideas. Heart-stuff has to be experienced, and sometimes it hurts. Nobody likes to be hurt, and so we tend to inoculate ourselves against heart-stuff in favour of brain-stuff, which is where the academic affliction begins. Freud would call it "sublimation". Even Freud's label is brain-stuff rather than heart-stuff.  

I'm about to travel to China, and I'm reminded of the last international trip I made to Morocco a couple of months ago. I came back emotionally hurt in a way that hasn't happened for a very long time. I wasn't alone in experiencing pain, which made it worse. I'm naturally apprehensive about this trip, although I'm sure it will be fine, and I like China. I'm returning to Beijing Normal University's Zhuhai campus to deliver a course on "Non-Linear Learning" (it's really about AI), and then to Manchester's academic centre in Hong Kong to deliver a masterclass on AI and Cybernetics. The masterclass is deeply related to my Morocco experience. I need to think of a way of making it "sing" - so I'm taking my Roli Seaboard as a pedagogical tool. 

One thing that I've reflected on in recent weeks is that heart-stuff may be very uncomfortable, but it is extremely important to experience and be reminded of the central importance of our emotions. It is in fact a privilege to experience it and I am "lucky" to feel the pain. It's all a bit like Orpheus's severed head floating down the river Hebrus, refusing to stop singing. It would be far worse to succumb to emotional inoculation and live merely cerebrally - then the singing stops. 

Academics don't sing enough. This is probably why they get into silly battles with each other about concepts that few understand. The "Cyprus experiment" in Brave New World is the classic example - the experiment by a utopian society to gather the most brilliant minds on the island of Cyprus to create an intellectual powerhouse. What happened? Civil war - they all killed each other.