Archived stories, reports, news snapshots

 

 

 

 

Original plan of the website makes use of an imaginary community as the sponsor of the content of mindsinplay.com

A brief history of the New Bretten community 

 

While much of the material below is fiction the events and people who are part of the New Bretten community represent real people who lived in the area of Bretten Germany before the onset of World War II and escaped before facing annilation.

My name is Lothar A. Kopell.  I use my initials LAK on the website Mindsinplay.com.  My role is that of website manager. The content of site is compiled and reviewed by the New Bretten mind-brain science work group which formed in 1994 and is the sponsor of Mindsinplay.com. While the website contains mind-brain science news and stories it also provides sketches of the lives and people that make up the New Bretten community. Over time you will get to know who we are individually and as community (see New Bretten log). The aim of our workgroup is to learn about mind-brain science, share what we have learned, and harness our knowledge so that it can be put to use to improve the way we live our lives. It is important to also note that we could not survive without the generous support from individuals and organizations throughout the world.

 

In reflecting on the history of our island community I thought we should start in the middle and move backwards and then forwards till we get to now.  April 30, 1993 was a double dark day in New Bretten.  Günter Barth died and he was the last of our art colony mentors (musicians writers, actors, dancers), that attracted students and the curious to our isolated but revered training program in the arts. This program also happened to be an essential element in the foundation of our economy. His death had a profound effect on all of us. It was also what propelled us to act collectively, to build on our love of the arts as a bridge to the world of science in general and mind-brain science in particular.

Gunther was the last and oldest surviving refugee that was shipped to this island from Shanghai by the Japanese in April 1942. Günter was one of many thousands of mostly German speaking Jews who had escaped east to China just before and at the outbreak of WWII. Many of them ended up in Shanghai China. In April of 1942 the Japanese ‘resettled’ 11,257 of these refugees on a cluster of three deserted islands in the middle of the south Pacific. The Japanese military had planned to use their backs and talents for building an airfield from which they planned to attack Australia. The airfield was partially completed at the time of the defeat of the Empire of Japan. By 1947 most of the refugees left the island, seeking their relatives and renewing their lives in places all over the world. Günter was one of those 900 odd souls that stayed behind and became one of the leaders of our community. As a young man he was considered one of the finest violinists in the world but also had a talent as a teacher of other violinists. Before leaving Germany he had also started his career as a composer and in that role joined the Bauhaus shortly before it ‘disappeared’ under the heel of the jackboot.

Günter did not look like someone who could play the role of leader in a Hollywood film. He was quiet, spoke slowly, and had a trace of a lisp. He was short, barely 5 foot 5 inches tall and when he died not much over 5 feet. He also happened to have a huge amount of energy and optimism and his smile and gentle nature were infectious especially during the trying times that all of us experienced from 1940 till the end of the war. He had a youthful look even as he was dying. His face featured no wrinkles but he did grow dark shadows under his eyes. In time you will become better acquainted with Günter and many others in our unusual community.  We will all miss him and so will you.

We named our island New Bretten in memory of ‘old’ Bretten a small city located in the middle of Baden and Wurttemberg, (southwest Germany) which was the home of many of our parents and some old survivors of the Germany of the 1930’s.  (See the posting entitled ‘Flehingen’ for details about one of the communities that is now building a museum for some of the pre-World War II former inhabitants of the Bretten region of Germany.)We considered naming our island after other towns in that region such as Bruchsal, Sinsheim, Mosbach, Wiesloch, Zaberfeld, Sulzfeld as well as towns along the French border including the city of Strasbourg France. Some think we chose the name Bretten because it sounds a lot like Britain. Not so. It could just as easily been named after any of the towns in Baden or Wuttenberg.

New Bretten is tiny and made up of 3 islands the largest covers 26 square miles of low granite hills, some reasonable stretches of soil inland and on the windward cost which provided the necessary farmland that could sustain us. Of course we also had lots of beaches, palm trees, scrub, saltwater marshes and forests in the highlands of the island.

We struggled through a variety of crisis to build our community. We each had our individual challenge of escaping from Nazi Germany. We then had to deal with internment in Shanghai by the Japanese followed by our deportation to this isolated island where we were put to work.  Our commitment to our community saved us then as now.

We were a very mixed bunch of refugees who learn to collectively deal with a cascade of stressors.  Our potpourri of talent allowed us to build and staff schools, grow all sorts of crops, develop new ones, raise chickens, goats, build modest well designed homes and communal buildings and even several pocket parks. We also were able to preserve the culture that we brought with us from the ‘old country’ and transform it into a new and vibrant community.  We were not short of experts including several physicians, 2 dentists, carpenters, a boat builder, chemists, biologists, educators, scholars (professors) of this and that, artists, writers, and even several entertainers. Our community also included the world renowned violinist Gunther Barth, Emil Loeb the conductor of the Karlsruhe symphony orchestra till 1936 when it was discovered that his maternal grandfather was Jewish which ended his career in Germany. The lead ballerina of the Berlin Opera Company was also part of our New Bretten family. I (LAK) had been an assistant archivist in the central library of Pforzheim before I was relieved of my position in the fall of 1935. Since arriving at what is now New Bretten those archivist skills were useful in keeping a record of New Bretten activities such as marriages, births, deaths, and many of our social and commercial activities. My more recent role in managing Mindsinplay.com is a huge challenge one that requires continuous new learning.

We 900 New Bretteners have built a strong social network linking all of our lives (more about that later) and that too has been documented and archived. We have also become an island of accomplished learners. Over the years we have acquired  a good deal of knowledge about mind-science and most recently have taken seriously the task of  trying to apply that knowledge to how people live singly and in groups. Our plan was to develop an expertise in applied mind-brain science and to export what we have learned. I have been charged with managing the flow of knowledge (information) associated with this ambitious initiative one that is designed to capitalize on the mind-brain science research efforts of others around the world.

Our interests in how minds work goes back long before 1993. Our parents passed down a need to understand the complex set of events and histories that might account for the revolution that transformed the Weimar Republic into a society of defined by hate and murder. It is therefore not surprising that we valued an understanding of how minds/brains work and change.

For many of us involvement in the arts was a natural draw to the basis of the creative process which perhaps would be found in understanding how minds work. Others were quickly seduced by the excitement of exploring mind-brain science and we then became a community of learners and partners in trying to fathom how minds work and fail and how that knowledge can be made useful in everyday life. Another important genesis of our ‘project’ dates back almost a  half century earlier when many of our parents struggled to understand what had turned their cultured world into a hate crucible where killers roamed free under the banner of the swastika and where neighbors ignored the pleas of victims. They were the ones who tried to understand, in human terms, the events of the 1930’s Germany. They discussed at length how to deal with fear, humiliation, helplessness and the challenge of finding an exit doors leading to safety. After they escaped would question with us what allowed some of us to survive and others to perish. The answer was often the nature of human bonds that are part of social networks and families. That was the lesson that they felt was the most lesson for all of us. We forged a community out of the experience of being occupied, as captives, marooned on a primitive island in the middle of nowhere. Survival along with the need to nourish our minds was the impetus for establishing our mind-brain working group along with mindsinplay.com.

Some of the contributors to Mindsinplay.com

Martin Bierg,70,-soothsayer, philosopher, gadfly

Berndt Boden, 43 years old, artist, second generation islander

Erna Boettigheimer, 76 years old widow, New Bretten teacher)

Alfred Fahrar, 83 years old, training in psychotherapy, clinician

Maurice Flehinger 53,-mathematician, genetic, proteomics (separated from  Renata Mannheimer)

Werner Flehinger, 37 years old, New Bretten, printer)

Ilse (46) and Moritz Hausmann (51), entertainers

Martin Heidelberger 42,-chairs subgroup that coordinates collaborations and solicited contributions

Willie Herbst, 57 years old, accountant

Gimi Kahn, 81-chair of the New Bretten cognitive neuroscience workgroup

Lothar A. Kopell, listed in mindsinplay by his initials, LAK, manages the website

Lori Manasse, 32 years old, biologist, daughter of Erna Boettigheimer

Ludwig Mannheimer 67, art curator, co-chair artwork subgroup

Renata Mannheimer, 43 years, married, two children, leads several mind-brain science workgroups

Otto Oppenheimer 61,-Coordinator of collaborative projects

Eric M. Schultz 44, entrepreneur, translation and application of mind-brain science

Michael Vangart, 38 years old, writer, poet, graphic designer, entertainer, co-chair- artwork subgroup

Bernhardt Werner, 36-writer-story teller

 

 

1. Recent dramatic and destructive storm disrupted our internet service. There was limited news during a period that lasted for weeks.  Several buildings were destroyed. More details later as part of our ongoing community log.

2. Project for developing equations that would predict the future value of all kinds of life choices. These math models are designed to quantify future discounting. Several groups are working on this problem.

4. Individuals and social groups come in all sorts of flavors. Nevertheless there are some universal challenges that we all face and this is also the case for the New Bretten community. Couples quarrel, children rebel, we lie, cheat, exaggerate but you can fill in the list with your own choice problems. You have recently read about a couple that has been together for several decades that have decided to go their separate ways, the husband choosing a younger quite talented New Brettener. This is a small community on a small island so the problems associated with the split are amplified. Needless to say we do try and keep personal couple combat from appearing in our story posters. You may have noticed that this time we were not successful in one of our recent postings (one that was about fixing what is wrong in educational practice). Sorry about that. I should have been more careful in monitoring what appears on this site.

5. Some additional notes that were thought to be lost but have been recovered……..Putting our native talents to work (endorsed by all of the mind-brain science workgroup)

Since the fall of 2009 we are systematically exploring the mind-brain science literature. Access to the internet has been most useful. Education hass been one of our early priority projects.  Our mind-brain working-discussion groups has served to be effective as a learning milieu but also served to spawn play groups, dance clubs, and coffee houses.

More about what these New Bretten neuroscience initiatives in upcoming serialized posts.

New Bretten needed to depend on citizens with special skills and quirky personalities. In time you will be introduced to all of them. Egon M. was one of the many that took on a special role in our collective mind-brain applications project. He became the island’s reliable and systematic archivists. He was obsessive enough to be counting on fretting over decisions about what mind-brain science information was worth distribution. He was a weeder and organizer. The only downside to his role as the collector of articles is that he would often go on forever justifying his choices to the rest of us. It didn’t help when we often shouted in unison “cut it out and get to the point”. He knew about his personality disability and therefore didn’t get annoyed at us. In addition he has established an effective partnership with LAK the the islander responsible for managing the website. Both of them, working together, were like hunter gatherers (mostly a gatherers) of what was going on in mind-brain science. That meant that they had to do loads of reading in order to extract bits and pieces that were worth all of our attention.

One of Egon’s first internet searches turned out initially to be a disaster. He found what he thought was a gold mind tool Carrot2 a cluster engine that can point you to everything that might be known on some topic. Lothar, just like the rest of us, was a child at play and not a sophisticated neuroscience information hunter so he started the search engine by looking up cognitive science and found 938,000 entries and then he tried the search term human performance and got 599, 000 hits. He then tried cognitive neuroscience and found 673,000 and if you add human performance to that search you still get 152,000 entries. How was he going to wade through all that material?

His father loved the expressionist painter Emil Nolde. He taught Egon to appreciate Nolde’s art and so he used that knowledge to test the search engine characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. In searching for Nolde he found 82700 entries and many of them led to museums and pictures of his art. He browsed through many of the entries and quickly appreciated the fact that you had to know a good deal to know how to search for anything especially via a cluster engine on the web. He told us all about his search adventures on the web and how we can get killed with information and that if we don’t watch it the pack rats among us will have us drowning in information. His message to us was categorize, organize, and throw out what you don’t need but then added that is easier said than done.

Egon spent several weeks trying to figure out how to proceed in his task of providing us with materials about mind-brain science. He ended up with a set of questions he thought we should think about as a prelude to learning more about how minds work.

Some of the big and complex mind-brain problems and questions.

1. What is the difference between our brains and that of our ancestors 5000 years ago? What we know is different but our brains are the same and how those brains perform operations are just like our own.
2. Memory is not a passive process but rather a reconstruction of the past based on what you know about the to-be-remembered events. There are different forms of memory (and learning) that are based on different neural operations.
3. How does brain activity give rise to our experience of mind, consciousness, sense of self, and our ability to distinguish happenings that occur inside and outside our selves? One of the places to look for answers is in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula.
4. Sequential operations in specific brain structures (networks) give rise to specific cognitive tasks and operations.
5. We interpret what we see based on staged neural data processing operations.
6. How does the brain process language? Classic areas such as the Broca’s and Wernicke areas have provided us with a hundred years of clues and we have built on that knowledge with current neuroscience knowledge
7. Is the brain capable of self repair? To some extent that seems to be possible. Several nerve growth factors are involved but there is much more to the story.
8. Why is it so hard to undo drug abuse? Abused drugs (including alcohol) produce cellular, neurochemical and molecular changes in the part of the brain that is involved in our experience of reward. The activity of dopamine is just one of the neurotransmitters that are involved in the rewiring of the brains of drug abusers.
9. Treating disorders like depression remains a difficult problem. While many drugs are often effective psychotherapy is no less useful which then begs the question, What is the neurobiological response of drug treatment or talking therapy?