http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-audiobooks-and-the-return-ofstorytelling.html?

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Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling

T. M. Luhrmann

STANFORD, Calif. THE ferns under my oak trees evoke moments from The Great Gatsby for me. I read the book many years ago, but I listened to it last summer while planting 50 polypodium californicas and 50 festuca idahoensis in the dappled light beneath my oaks. Now, when I look at them, I think about that last awful accident, the yellow Rolls-Royce screaming past the repair shop, and what F. Scott Fitzgeralds narrator called Gatsbys extraordinary gift for hope. The sale of audiobooks has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2012, total industry sales in the book business fell just under 1 percent over all, but those of downloadable audiobooks rose by more than 20 percent. That year, 13,255 titles came out as audiobooks, compared with 4,602 in 2009. Publishers seem to be paying more attention to their production. When Simon and Schuster published Colm Toibins Testament of Mary last autumn, the narrator was Meryl Streep. We tend to regard reading with our eyes as more serious, more highbrow, than hearing a book read out loud. Listening to a written text harkens back to childhood, when we couldnt read it ourselves, or a time when our parents left off reading the chapter out loud in the middle, a nudge that wed use our school-taught skills to finish it off by ourselves. The great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure thought we treated writing as more important than speaking because writing is visual. Speech is ephemeral you hear a word, and then it is gone. The word written down remains, and so we attach more significance to it. Saussure wrote that when we imagined text as more important than speech, it was as if we thought we would learn more about someone from his photograph than from his face. But so it is. The ability to read has always been invested with more importance than mere speech. When only a small priestly elite could read, books were sacred mysteries. When more people could read, literacy became a means to move forward in the world. These days, the ability to read is a prerequisite for full participation in the social order. But for most of human history literature has been spoken out loud. The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung. We think that the Homeric singers of those tales mastered the prodigious mnemonic task presented by those thousands upon thousands of lines of text through an intricate combination of common phrases rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea and nested plots that could be expanded or shortened as the occasion demanded. Even after narratives were written down, they were more often heard than read. The Roman elites could read, but gatherings at which people recited their poetry

were common. And before the modern era, when printing made books widely available and literacy became widespread, reading was an oral act. People read aloud not only to others but also to themselves, and books, as the historian William Graham puts it in Beyond the Written Word, were meant for the ears as much, or more so, than for the eyes. In the early 17th century the Jesuit missionary to China Matteo Ricci captured the orality of writing in this letter to a Peking publisher: The whole point of writing something down is that your voice will then carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it fades at a hundred paces. Mr. Graham writes that in Europe, silent private reading became widespread only in the second half of the 19th century. What happens when you hear a text rather than read it? The obvious thing is that you can do something else with your eyes. That is why I can listen to books when I garden. My hands and eyes can work. And so listening to a book is a different sensory experience than reading it. The inner imagining of the story becomes commingled with the outer senses my hands on the trowel, the scent of tansy in the breeze. The creation of this sensory richness was in fact an explicit goal of the oral reading of the Bible in the medieval European cloister, so that daily tasks would be infused with Scripture, and Scripture would be remembered through ordinary tasks. I find that when I listen to a story, instead of reading it on a page, my memory of the book does change. I remember more of the action and less of the language, although sometimes when I listen a sentence will drop into my mind and shock me into attention in a way that is less common when I read. (Mind you, it helps to have a good reader.) You dont check back on previous paragraphs or read the last page first when you listen. You move forward, and what you carry with you is person and event. I listen the way I read books as a child, as if I were there watching. The author becomes more transparent, the characters more real. Listening to Bring Up the Bodies, I dont think, what is the author, Hilary Mantel, up to? I feel the threat of death damp on my skin. And when I have listened to a book in a particular place the ferns beneath the oak trees I remember the book when I come back to that place, as if my hands in the soil were digging up the words. T. M. Luhrmann is a contributing opinion writer and a professor of anthropology at Stanford.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121128-animals-that-can-count

Animals that can count

Jason G Goldman

"Numbers are fun." So insisted my seventh grade teacher, but my stubborn thirteenyear-old self refused to believe him. Numbers may be fun, but mathematics was hard. I struggled through maths classes when I was in school, painfully working my way through algebra, then geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. Though I eventually got over my contempt for mathematics, there was a time in which I thought that only humans could be so sadistic as to inflict the pain of mathematics on their young. But, while other species may not spend their time fretting over the quadratic equation or the transitive property of equality, mathematical ability is widespread in the animal kingdom. Take the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus), a bird that many think of as having more to do with barbecue sauce than with arithmetic. If a chicken sits in front of two small opaque screens, and one ball disappears behind the first screen, followed by four balls disappearing behind a second screen, the chicken walks towards the screen that hides four balls, since four balls are better than one ball. The feat is made more impressive when you consider that the chicken in question is only three days old. And it can do a lot more than add up. If one ball disappears behind the first screen, and four balls disappear behind the second, just as before, but then two of the four balls behind the second screen are visibly moved over to the first screen, the chicken is now faced with two tasks. It must add two to one, and know that there are now three balls behind the first screen. It must also subtract two from four, and realise that there are only two balls left behind the second screen. The young chicken must overcome its initial impulse to approach the second screen, which initially hid four balls, and instead approach the first screen, now hiding three balls. If this sounds complicated for the three-day-old bird, think again. Infant chickens correctly approached the screen hiding more balls nearly 80% of the time. Chimpanzees perform even better in their maths tests, succeeding in this sort of task 90% of the time. In one experiment, researchers placed a chimpanzee in front of two sets of bowls that contained chocolate pieces. Each set had two bowls, and to receive their treats, the chimps had to select the set that had the largest combined number of chocolate pieces, in other words adding together the number of pieces in each individual bowl. They succeeded even on trials where one of the bowls in the "incorrect" set contained more chocolates than either individual bowl in the "correct" set. Ant stilts In fact, decades of research have provided evidence for the numerical abilities of a number of species, including gorillas, rhesus, capuchin, and squirrel monkeys, lemurs,

dolphins, elephants, birds, salamanders and fish. Recently, researchers from Oakland University in Michigan added black bears to the list of the numerically skilled. But the real maths wizards of the animal kingdom are the ants of the Tunisian desert (Cataglyphis fortis). They count both arithmetic and geometry as parts of their mathematical toolkit. When a desert ant leaves its nest in search of food, it has an important task: find its way back home. In almost any other part of the world, the ant can use one of two tricks for finding its way home, visual landmarks or scent trails. The windswept saltpans of Tunisia make it impossible to leave a scent trail, though. And the relatively featureless landscape doesn't provide much in the way of visual landmarks, other than perhaps the odd rock or weed. So evolution endowed the desert ant with a secret weapon: geometry. Armed with its mathematical know-how, the desert ant is able to path integrate. This means, according to ant navigation researchers Martin Muller and Rudiger Wehner, that it "is able to continuously compute its present location from its past trajectory and, as a consequence, to return to the starting point by choosing the direct route rather than retracing its outbound trajectory." How does this work? These desert ants calculate the distance walked bycounting steps. Researchers discovered this by strapping stilts made of pig hairs onto the legs of the ants. The ants stilts made each individual step longer than it would have otherwise been, making them overestimate the distance home. The ants calculate the direction they walk by calculating the angle of their path relative to the position of the sun, using the same rules of trigonometry that were taught to me in the tenth grade. And whats more, the ants constantly update their calculations to correct for the sun's march across the sky. All that in a nervous system comprised of as few as 250,000 neurons (compared to the approximately 85 billion neurons in the human). The human capacity for language has allowed our species to transcend the core mathematical and numerical skills that are shared with other species both closely and distantly related. Language allows us to give names to numbers (such as one trillion) too large to comprehend without the aid of words. It allows us to articulate explicit mathematical rules. It allows us to torment children with the spectre of mathematical problems and geometric proofs. But underneath the facade provided by words and language, humans are but one of many species armed with a propensity for counting and calculation. Whether numbers are fun, as my seventh grade teacher claimed, or not, is subjective. One certainty, however, is that numbers are everywhere.