After-Orts #4

Happy Beethoven’s 250th Birthday!
(December 16, 2020)

Nannette Streicher,The Woman Who Built Beethoven’s Pianos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/arts/music/beethoven-piano.html

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   Consumption of a drug changes the number of receptors for the drug in the brain — to such an extent that you can look at a brain after a person has died and determine his addictions by gauging his molecular changes. This is why people become desensitized (or tolerant) to a drug: the brain comes to predict the presence of the drug, and adapts its receptor expression so it can maintain a stable equilibrium when it receives the next hit. In a physical, literal way, the brain comes to expect the drug to be there: the biological details have calibrated themselves accordingly. Because the system now predicts a certain amount to be present, more is needed to achieve the original high.

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   People you love become part of you — not just metaphorically, but physically. You absorb people into your internal model of the world. Your brain refashions itself around the expectation of their presence. After the breakup with a lover, the death of a friend, or the loss of a parent, the sudden absence represents a major departure from homeostasis.

-- both, David Eagleman in Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain
https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/octavia-butler-maira-kalman-david-eagleman?e=026afffa9b
(scroll down)