Haynes Famous Quotes

Oedipus is famously clever; that’s how he solves the Sphinx’s virtually-impossible riddle, and earns his right to become King of Thebes. But his cleverness is also his tragic flaw: his quick-wittedness shades into quick-temperedness. This is a man who can solve a puzzle that has baffled all who came before him. But that same quickness explains how a man (who had been warned by an oracle that he would kill his father and was trying desperately to avoid his fate) could be reduced to a murderous frenzy at a crossroads by what amounts to a minor road-rage incident.

Benjamin Libet, a scientist in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco, was a pioneering researcher into the nature of human consciousness. In one famous experiment he asked a study group to move their hands at a moment of their choosing while their brain activity was being monitored. Libet was seeking to identify what came first — the brain’s electrical activity to make the hand move or the person’s conscious intention to make their hand move. It had to be the second one, surely? But no. Brain activity to move the hand was triggered a full half a second before any conscious intention to move it…. John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Studies in Leipzig, Germany, led a later study that was able to predict an action ten seconds before people had a conscious intention to do it. What was all the stuff about free will? Frank Tong, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said: “Ten seconds is a lifetime in terms of brain activity.” So where is it coming from if not ‘us,’ the conscious mind?

Things are different when you become famous. More different still when you are taking pills all the time. You become less present; life gets a little blurrier. There were long days on set, but I don’t remember them. I can’t recall many of the high highs or low lows, even though I know they happened. Instead, what feels most vivid is the memory of the constant loneliness.

The Athenian ideal, espoused in Pericles’ funeral oration20 in 431 BCE, was that women should aspire never to be talked about, either in terms of blame or praise. The greatest virtue, in other words, that an Athenian woman could aspire to was not to be registered, almost not to exist. It is a gratifying quirk of Pericles’ character that he could make this speech while living with the most famous (or perhaps notorious) woman in Athens, one mentioned by everyone from comedians to philosophers: Aspasia. Thankfully the hypocrisy of censuring women’s behaviour in general while maintaining an entirely different set of standards for the actual women you know has now died out.

Not for the first time in literature and society, and assuredly not for the last, there is one set of standards to which Penelope must adhere, and a very much looser set for Odysseus. And yet, in some ways, Odysseus does remain faithful to his wife. He shares another woman’s bed, but he doesn’t share her idea of their future. She offers him something of enormous value–immortality, for which all heroes strive, one way or another–and he rejects it. He would rather return to his less beautiful, mortal wife. Homeric heroes make huge sacrifices for even a brush of immortality: Achilles specifically chooses a short, glorious life that will result in fame which outlives him (a kind of immortality) rather than a longer, less famous existence. And here is Odysseus, offered eternal life but rejecting it. And all for the chance to return to a woman he has not seen for twenty years. A divorce lawyer might not call this fidelity, but it is something.