3:10am: Reentrant Signaling on Talk Radio

Gerald Edelman applied natural selection to the formation of neural nets: neurons that get used hang around, those that have no activity are eliminated. A fairly direct system for pruning branches and a useful one, perhaps another expression of an effect we observed in sensory neurons...the active ones suppress their neighbors...and in writing.

Reentrant signaling is a more elusive concept but talk radio crystallized it for me at 3 a.m. on Friday night.

Jordan Rich (WBZ, 1030 AM, Boston) takes calls and stirs chatter from roughly 11 p.m. until 5 am on Fridays and Saturdays. Elizabeth Day (KDKA, 1020 AM, Pittsburgh) does the same. They linked a week ago: Day boosted the Steelers and gave her early sympathy and Rich acknowledged the underdog standing of the Patriots but praise their team unity. (The Steelers were favorites but lost and Rush Limbaugh, a day later, assigned a new fight song to their special teams: Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Tiny Tim.)

There was some trial and error as the two stations aligned their schedules, advertising breaks, announcements of phone numbers, and delays between receiving a call and broadcasting it. I pictured Challenger coming to synchrony with the space station.

Day praised the Patriots' determination and lamented the Steelers' being off key and losing the game. Rich and Day then opened the lines for Pittsburghers and Bostonians to wish good luck in the Superbowl and, respectively, to say thanks for those wishes.

There was little about football and it took a while for the Pittsburgh lines to warm up. Most of the Boston calls, however, were about former lives in the communities around Pittsburgh, praising its clean up after the mills shut down, and the spectacular beauty of downtown. Whether you arrive by plane or burst from a surrounding tunnel, you erupt from total darkness to night galaxies of office light webs, twin stacked river boats, and hilltop restaurants.

Rich and Day nominally talked about football but quickly moved to a history of radio, the swap in call letters between KYW (Philadelphia) and a Cleveland station, the number of stations in the west that start with W (perhaps 2) and those in the east with a K (3. Two of them in Pittsburgh and 1 in Philadelphia). Rich and Day had both compiled cookbooks and sold them to benefit local children's hospitals. (Day's "Thank Heaven for Grandmothers," pinch and dab recipes, culled from her grandmother, for cooking from scratch, sounded especially interesting.)

The callers ranged from Canada to Maine to Georgia, each caller sharing their similarities, memories of radio, and once in a while, football. The net grew until 5 AM when staff changed and the link ended.

References:
(Neither of these is particularly easy going.)

Edelman, G. (1987) Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. NY: Basic.

----------- & Tononi, G. (2000) A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. NY: Basic.

The Roberts & Sherrat paper decribes a reciprocity gambit tested in computer simulations. "Open small and if matched, the raise the stakes" (RTS) whipped tit for tat and its variations.

Roberts, G. & Sherratt, T. (1998) Development of cooperative relationships through increasing investment. Nature, 394, 175-179.

Copyright, 2002, James Brody, all rights reserved.

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