Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  Can you imagine trying to read a computer screen with only a few pixels lighted up at a time? The only way you could do it is by moving the lighted area around the screen pixel by pixel, picking up little pieces of information one by one and putting them together into some semblance of a whole. This is the plight of consciousness.

  It should be no surprise, then, that accident rates shot up when drivers began sending texts from their cars. Even race drivers have trouble with digital distractions. Their cars now have up to 26 electronic buttons to divert their eyes from the road. Said race driver Vitaly Petrov, “Playing with all the steering-wheel dials at 300 kilometers per hour will be, I guess, like answering three Blackberry messages while making fried eggs and doing your shoelaces at the same time. We’ll see how it goes.” In the US Air Force, test pilots have a warning about this: “Wheels up, IQ down.”

  According to psychologists, we can only hold a maximum of four “items”—thoughts or sensations—in our conscious mind at the same time. If you’re like me, and your wife complains that you don’t always listen, you now have a good excuse: To fully understand what another person is saying, you have to process forty bits of information per second, and nature has given us a normal speed of sixteen.

  Luckily, we have a powerful mechanism to turn this severely constrained bandwidth to our advantage. It’s called attention. By tuning out most of the information we receive, we can focus on what’s immediately useful. This is particularly important for anyone learning a skill or practicing a craft. Csikszentmihalyi uses the example of a musician who structures her attention so as to focus on nuances of sound that other people may not hear, or a stock speculator who can sense tiny changes in the market. A good clinical diagnostician has an uncanny eye for symptoms, because he has trained his attention to process information others would miss.

  Csikszentmihalyi says that paying attention can involve extra processing work beyond the usual baseline effort, but focusing attention is relatively easy for people who have learned to control their consciousness. They simply shut off all mental processes except for the relevant ones. “Attention shapes the self,” he says, “and in turn is shaped by it.” Thanks to the limitations of consciousness, we are what we attend to.

  But what exactly is consciousness? Although we can understand its functional properties, including perception, information processing, attention focusing, and so forth, it’s more difficult to understand its qualitative properties, or qualia, such as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. This is known as the “hard problem of consciousness,” a phrase introduced by Australian philosopher David Chalmers. How can mere physical matter, such as three pounds of flesh inside a human skull, give rise to nonphysical qualia? Is it possible to understand consciousness when our only lens is consciousness itself? Is it like standing between two mirrors that reflect infinite copies of “me” while revealing no new information? And if even if we can understand it, what’s the evolutionary purpose of consciousness?

  These are questions that Nicholas Humphrey handles nicely in his book Soul Dust. His answers run parallel to those of Nørretranders and Csikszentmihalyi, and if all three are right, the consequences for creativity are enormous.

  Humphrey is persuaded that there’s nothing that conscious experience actually is, apart from what we think it is. In other words, our mental representation of reality is our consciousness, and our consciousness is merely a mental representation. The objects we perceive “out there” are based on real things, but our experience of them is an illusion we create in our minds so we can make sense of them. This is not unlike Plato’s cave, a parable in which a group of prisoners must construct reality from the shadows on the wall, since they’re restrained from turning around to see the source of the shadows.

  René Descartes proposed a similar model of consciousness many centuries after Plato, known as the Cartesian Theatre. He believed the brain replicates the outside world as a kind of picture, which is displayed for the edification of the mind.

  Humphrey believes Descartes got it slightly wrong. Replication, he says, is not what theaters are about. Theaters are places where events are staged to comment on the world, not replicate it. They exist to educate, persuade, and entertain. Our consciousness, then, is a self-created entertainment for the mind, a magic show that dramatically changes our outlook on life.

  This ability, he says, has conferred an evolutionary advantage on the human race. It spells the difference between truly wanting to exist and merely having some sort of life instinct. “When you want something,” he says, “you tend to engage in rational actions—flexible, intelligent behavior—to achieve it.” Our ancestors might have engaged in activities that weren’t rewarding in themselves, but were calculated to deliver this goal. The added joie de vivre, the enchantment in living, would have given them an extra boost in terms of natural selection. It would have increased the investment they were willing to make in their survival.

  And how far back did this ability go? Humphrey makes a guess that this enhanced level of consciousness evolved during the Upper Paleolithic revolution—the same period in which we began painting in caves. While anthropologists view the paintings, carvings, tools, and weapons of early humans as functional, it’s now clear that part of their function was to delight the senses.

  Forever afterwards we’ve longed to share our conscious experiences—our personal versions of the magic show—with our fellow human beings. Yet conscious experiences are by nature private. No one else can really feel what we feel or see what we see. We can’t simply unveil our experiences or hand them over to be experienced in the same way.

  All we can do is master various forms of art that approximate our experiences, or else place other people in similar situations—smelling the same rose or looking up at the same night sky—and hope that somehow their experience of transcendence will be similar to ours.

  “Imagine an ocean of islands,” says Humphrey, “each with its own internal world of shared ideas, dreams, and desires, able to communicate to its neighbors only by smoke signals.” This is the predicament of being human, and it’s why we aspire not only to be scientists but artists.

  Leonardo’s assistant

  Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? This was the title of a paper about predictability given by Edward Lorenz in 1972. Ever since that moment the scientific community has buzzed with talk of the “butterfly effect.” The flapping wings are a symbol for how a small change in the initial condition of a system can trigger a chain of events that could never have been predicted. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings in Brazil, the outcome might have been vastly different.

  One such effect that we struggle with today is the bifurcation of art and science. Up until the Renaissance, art and science were two sides of the same coin. The arts were toughened up by the rigor and rationality of science, and science was set free by the intuition and imagination of the arts. Today they work in separate buildings and are mutually impoverished by the separation.

  It’s quite possible that the flapping wings in this situation were a series of unfortunate events that happened in the 16th century. Leonardo da Vinci, the great genius of art and science, was the personification of Renaissance creativity. He was also a homosexual, a vegetarian, and an anticlerical—at a time when the Catholic Church had spread its sinewy tentacles throughout Europe and looked askance at such proclivities.

  No surprise that Leonardo was a bit secretive. He kept his ideas hidden in a series of notebooks, eventually totaling as many as 100,000 drawings and 13,000 pages of mirror writing (all the better to discourage prying eyes). He never shared these with his contemporaries, fearing, among other things, that his livelihood might be compromised. He intended to sort his notebooks into themes and chapters and have them published upon his death. Unfortunately, he died in 1519 before he could accomplish this task.

  Leonardo’s assistant and occasional lover, erstwhile Francesco Melzi, ended up wit
h the bulk of his estate, which included the full set of notebooks. Francesco, then only 27, did little with the materials except keep them safe in his studio, occasionally displaying the drawings as souvenirs from his 12-year apprenticeship.

  Upon Francesco’s death in 1570 his son Orazio (who was by this time sick of hearing about the great man) unceremoniously dumped the notebooks into chests in the attic. Whenever curiosity seekers turned up at the villa, Orazio let them walk out with whatever they wanted. Any materials that were left were eventually scattered across Europe, their significance underestimated and their author forgotten. For more than 200 years the increasingly disparate worlds of science and art were deprived of the unifying example of Leonardo’s notebooks. Eventually, the materials that survived—only about half of the total œuvre—began to see the light of day, made available to scholars through museums, libraries, and private collections.

  One of the best known notebooks is the Codex Leicester. It contains theories and observations about astronomy, geology, and hydraulics. Leonardo explains that the pale glow in the dark part of the crescent moon is due to sunlight reflecting off the earth, presaging Johannes Kepler by a hundred years. He shows why fossils from the seabed can be found high up in mountains, advancing the concept of plate tectonics centuries before it became accepted theory. He tackles the mechanics of water with detailed drawings of how rivers flow around rocks and other obstacles, adding recommendations on how to build bridges and deal with erosion.

  If only Francesco had followed through on Leonardo’s wishes. If only he had published the notebooks as Leonardo intended, and revealed his secrets to the nascent field of scientific inquiry. If only he had, the world of today might be a better place. Instead, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Lombardy caused a fracture between Western art and science, with science going the way of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, and art following the path of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Picasso. In Peter Watson’s 822-page “complete compendium,” called Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, Leonardo’s name does not even appear.

  So now we place science and art in separate categories. We want science to explain the truth of things, and art to express the experience of things. Put another way, science carefully excludes feelings, while art draws them out. In the long, painful divorce between science and art, science came out on top. Art—and the human feeling it expresses—has been persona non grata in the halls of power. The exile of emotion, says Ken Robinson, is apparent in everyday language. “Arguments can be easily dismissed as only ‘value judgments’, or ‘merely subjective’. It’s hard to imagine any argument being dismissed as ‘merely objective.’”

  We seem to have forgotten that truth is only a construct, a provisional model of reality that allows us to build our world. What we call truth is not objective at all, but a subjective measure of how useful a given piece of information will be for a given time.

  Factual knowledge was actually an invention of the 16th-century European legal system, which allowed lawyers to use facts, or shared observations, as concrete evidence. Science then grew out of this system. Scholars began linking one fact with another to create a web of knowledge that other scholars could agree on and contribute to. Yet during the ascendance of Newtonian science after the Renaissance, something more happened. Educated people began believing that science was the only source of truth.

  Leonardo, for all his belief in evidence, did not exclude art from science. Instead, his deep appreciation of nature and beauty became the gateway into science. Sperienza—or experience—was the starting point for Leonardo’s knowledge. In making drawings of the objects and movements of nature, he was able to experience them as heightened reality, to own them in ways that merely looking doesn’t allow.

  If you’ve ever taken a drawing class, you’ve experienced the powerful feeling of “knowing” a subject well enough to describe it on paper. There’s something special that happens between the hand and the brain in drawing—and between the body and the brain by moving through space—that creates meaning.

  Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks agrees that we’re suffering from this split between science and life—between the apparent poverty of scientific formulation and the richness of phenomenal experience. “The infant immediately starts exploring the world, looking, feeling, touching, smelling,” he says. “Sensation alone is not enough; it must be combined with movement, with emotion, with action. Movement and sensation together become the antecedent of meaning.”

  What captivated Leonardo’s interest was the dynamics of nature—the way water swirls or wind travels, the way sound moves through air, how organic forms unfold and grow. Beneath the mechanics of all his inventions lay a holistic and ecological view of life that we’re only now beginning to appreciate. The equations of Newton and the geometry of Euclid are inadequate to describe the objects and actions that Leonardo explored. For these we’ll need a new kind of qualitative mathematics that can reach beyond quantitative answers. Fritjof Capra, in his book The Science of Leonardo, notes that the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics, also known as complexity theory, may just be that tool.

  Meanwhile, we have a chance to reunite science and art through the discipline of design. Modern science is already forging ahead with synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Design and design thinking can add a human dimension to what might otherwise be little more than an exercise in manufacturing. They can bring beauty back after 500 years of diminishment, giving future generations much reason to be grateful.

  The last of Leonardo’s notebooks to remain in private hands is the Codex Leicester, acquired by Bill Gates from the art collection of industrialist Armand Hammer. It had been named for the Earl of Leicester, who bought it in 1717, then renamed Codex Hammer in 1980. Gates changed the name back when he bought it at auction in 1994. Like several collectors before him, he cut the notebook into separate pages.

  The uses of beauty

  As a rule, wealthy art collectors are a sorry lot. They long to possess beauty so badly that they end up possessing it just that way—badly. They tend to focus on secondary factors such as investment potential, artist celebrity, popularity of style, and pricing trends—everything but the art itself. They’re like church members who make hefty donations so they can feel more spiritual. If you listen to exchanges between art collectors and art dealers, you’re unlikely to hear any conversations about craft, meaning, or purpose. Instead, you’ll hear endless gossip about who knows whom or what someone paid or who’s showing where.

  How do you possess beauty well? Like Leonardo, you possess it fully by earning it. You open your senses, give your whole body and mind to it, and trace the same path as the originator—if not literally, then through your physical understanding of it. In the same way that a sports fan gets more pleasure from watching a sport he or she has played, an appreciator of art gets more pleasure from art forms he or she has spent time creating. Music is more beautiful to a musician, math is more beautiful to a mathematician, and nature is more beautiful to a scientist.

  Beauty certainly hasn’t been the hallmark of the Industrial Age. If we talk about it at all today, it’s mostly in the context of cosmetics, fashion, or female conformation (swimsuit issue, anyone?). There’s very little talk about the beauty of an algorithm, the rapture of an architectural space, or the elegance of a phrase.

  American philosopher William James once offered this thought experiment: “Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion of which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it, as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness.” Yet in James’s time, industrial America was busy creating just that kind of world for factory workers. The ideal employee was one with no emotional response, an automaton who could be satisfied with the soul-deadening repetition of a command-and-control business struc
ture. While the worst abuses of the assembly line are fading into memory—at least in the developed world—we’re still struggling to escape their legacy. Billboards, strip malls, traffic jams, factory farms, landfills, and housing projects are either concepts or consequences of a mass-production mindset.

  If that’s ugliness, what’s beauty? Can beauty be defined? Or is analysis impossible, like cutting a kitten in half to see why it’s cute? Personally, I think we can define it without harming any animals. Let’s try this: Beauty is a quality of wholeness or harmony that generates pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Using this definition, a traffic jam fails the beauty test, and so does a landfill. A landfill may generate meaning, but it doesn’t communicate wholeness or harmony to very many people. At the other end of the spectrum, the movie Casablanca does embody wholeness and harmony, giving pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction to a broad audience.

  While it’s somewhat possible to define beauty, it can’t be reduced to a pat formula for the simple reason that one of the components of beauty is surprise. In everything we experience as beautiful, there is a moment of surprise when we first encounter it. If there’s no surprise, there’s nothing new. Nothing new, no interest. No interest, no beauty.

  While we can certainly encounter an object or have an experience that gives us mild satisfaction—say, a nicely sculpted vase or a well-crafted melody—true beauty has something more going for it: memorability. Memorability is almost always the result of sudden emotion—the jarring pop of disrupted expectations. The pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction that follows this pop can be experienced as a warm glow, a slowly spreading smile, or the hair standing up on our arms. Physiologically, it’s a blast of serotonin to your central nervous system.