The
LEFT BRAIN
SPEAKS
The
RIGHT BRAIN
LAUGHS
The
LEFT BRAIN
SPEAKS
The
RIGHT BRAIN
LAUGHS
A Look at the Neuroscience of Innovation & Creativity in Art, Science, & Life
Ransom Stephens, PhD
Copyright © 2016 by Ransom Stephens.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink
Cover photograph: iStock
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
Illustrations: Ransom Stephens
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-63228-046-6
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63228-047-3
“There’s more to it than that.”
—MILES DYLAN,*
FROM HIS BOOK EVERYTHING
*Miles Dylan is a fictitious philosopher invented by college roommates Michael (Miles) Vinson and Chris (Dylan) Young. Miles Dylan’s lack of actual existence (and consequential lack of actual publication) renders tremendous freedom in attributing tidbits of wisdom that, unattributed, might be taken less seriously. For a complete reference, see The Toilet Papers by Miles Dylan.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. YOU & ME
1.1 Peeling the ignorance onion
1.2 Left & right
1.2.1 A new and improved left-right oversimplification
1.2.2 Sorting out the left-right dichotomy
1.3 The picture within a picture
1.4 What are we doing here?
2. ANIMALS & PEOPLE
2.1 Different perspectives on reality
2.2 Evolution
2.2.1 The power of long times and large numbers
2.2.2 Evolution predicts what already happened
2.3 A frog, a puppy, and Richard Feynman walk into your cranium
2.3.1 First dose of jargon: neurons, axons, dendrites, and synapses
2.3.2 Your inner puppy and inner Feynman
2.4 How to greet a saber-toothed tiger … or chess player
2.4.1 Reaction timescales
2.4.2 Positive and negative feedback
2.5 The reality interface
2.5.1 The inescapably subjective nature of our realities
2.5.2 The realities of whales, dogs, and trees (and naked people)
2.6 The power of perspective
3. LIFE & DEATH
3.1 Emergence
3.2 Being alive and awake
3.2.1 Your stupid, bottom-up, parallel, unconscious processors
3.2.2 Your brilliant, top-down, serial, conscious thinkers
3.3 We are pattern-recognizers and model-builders
3.3.1 First impressions
3.3.2 Prejudice
3.4 How come novels work?
3.4.1 Theory of mind
3.5 Sentience and consciousness
3.5.1 Consciousness threshold
3.5.2 Consciousness spectrum
3.6 Free will
3.7 The essential weirdness of death
3.8 Good, fast, or cheap: pick two
4. TALENT & SKILL
4.1 Talent
4.1.1 Whence talent?
4.1.2 Skill
4.2 Like ringin’ a bell
4.2.1 The wetware
4.2.2 The signal
4.2.3 The transition from playing notes to playing music
4.3 Talent or skill?
4.3.1 Neural pruning and synesthesia
4.3.2 Brain size
4.3.3 Perfect pitch: talent or skill?
4.4 Nature & nurture
4.5 Prodigies
4.5.1 Child prodigies
4.5.2 Adult prodigies
4.6 Skalent fuel
5. INTELLIGENCE & INTUITION
5.1 We can’t separate intellect and emotion
5.2 Learning
5.2.1 Recipes and algorithms
5.2.2 Plasticity
5.2.3 Education
5.2.4 Memory
5.2.5 Answer resolution
5.3 Thinking with your guts
5.3.1 The feeling of knowing
5.3.2 Priming
5.4 Priming your guts
6. ANALYSIS & CREATIVITY
6.1 The canyon floor and the mountain peak
6.2 Tools for thought
6.2.1 The binding problem
6.2.2 Reduction of the inconceivable
6.2.3 Words
6.2.4 Mental tools—the power of scratch paper
6.3 Lateral thought
6.3.1 Synesthesia
6.3.2 Neural resonance, coherence, and flow
6.3.3 Language as spatial resonance
6.3.4 Releasing your inner savant
6.4 Creativity
6.4.1 People use tools to analyze and create
7. ALONE & TOGETHER
7.1 I was a loner until I wrote this chapter
7.2 Are we a hive?
7.2.1 The death of my inner rugged individualist
7.2.2 Extending the consciousness feedback loop to others
7.2.3 Imitation and simulation
7.2.4 Well, are we?
7.3 Value
7.3.1 The creator and the beholder
7.3.2 Engagement and novelty
7.3.3 Our subjectivity has a lot in common
7.3.4 Right people, right place, and right time
7.3.5 Common sense is neither
7.4 Does friendship define us?
7.5 Significance
8. ART & SCIENCE
8.1 The good, the bad, and the valuable
8.2 In it for the buzz
8.2.1 The glorious hopelessness of art and science
8.3 Neuroaesthetics in art and science: Ramachandran’s rules
8.3.1 Ramachandran’s rule of grouping—dissonance to consonance
8.3.2 Ramachandran’s rule of peak shift—exaggeration
8.3.3 Ramachandran’s rule of contrast—boundaries
8.3.4 Ramachandran’s rule of isolation—heuristics and approximation
8.3.5 Ramachandran’s rule of peekaboo—bait
8.3.6 Ramachandran’s rule of abhorrence of coincidence—bullshit meter
8.3.7 Ramachandran’s rules of orderliness and symmetry
8.3.8 Ramachandran’s rule of metaphor
8.3.9 Ambiguity
8.4 Veronica
8.4.1 How music works
8.4.2 Elvis Costello’s “Veronica”
8.4.3 Musical resonance
8.5 Art & science
8.5.1 Good work if you can get it
8.6 We have a lot of subjectivity in common
9. INNOVATION & DISCOVERY
9.1 Facing challenges
9.2 Making better use of our brains
9.2.1 The quest
9.2.2 Stress and focus
9.2.3 Defocusing into insight
9.2.4 Meditation and prejudice
9.2.5 Perspective-altering techniques
9.2.6 Insight comes half-baked
9.3 Invention & discovery
9.4 Finding the pony
10. STARIN
G AT A PICTURE WITHIN A PICTURE WITHIN A PICTURE
10.1 Left-right, down-up, front-back
10.2 Obsessive pattern predictors need lots of education
10.3 The neuroscience onion
10.3.1 Neuroscience has issues
10.3.2 Neuroscience’s dark matter problems
10.3.3 Experimental difficulties
10.3.4 Skepticism is warranted
10.4 So here we are
11. BIBLIOGRAPHY
11.1 Recommended related reading
11.2 Other stuff that showed up here
FROM THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE TO YOU
1
YOU & ME
IT STARTS WITH ON/OFF.
As Starla wakes up, the light seeping through her closed eyelids tells her that the room is no longer dark.
Before we can understand anything about visual awareness, we have to understand the difference between light and dark. Let’s call our humble detector of day or night, shadow or illumination, “first-order vision.” By growing higher orders of visual consciousness from this simple starting point, we trace the complex from the simple.
Besides, we have to start somewhere; it might as well be morning.
Now, with the alarm clock playing a wakeful tune like “Enter Sandman,” Starla opens her eyes, stretches, and drags her sleepy ass out of the sack.
She hears rain tapping on the window and puzzles over how such bright light can leak around the curtain on a rainy day.
Pulling aside the curtain, she beholds the magic of coexisting rain and sunshine. A heavy, gray cloud lumbers past. The late morning sun shines from behind her, working its rays under the cloud and lighting the hills across the valley from her window. At first, the colors look wispy, but then she sees a rainbow arcing over the horizon and, having seen it, she can’t unsee it: red at the top followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet at the bottom.
Perhaps the mnemonic device Roy G. Biv comes to mind; or maybe she muses on the magic and wonders if it’s a metaphor come to life: Is she somewhere over the rainbow? Maybe she pictures light entering the spherical raindrops, bending into the component colors as in a prism or on a Pink Floyd album cover, and then reflecting off the other side of the raindrops back to her eyes, or maybe she jumps into her clothes and heads out in search of the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
We’ll see how the story ends, but we know that it begins with a dichotomy: light and dark, a dichotomy that expands into a spectrum of colors when she pulls the curtain open. So it is with the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy. And so it is with every scientific endeavor. We don’t start with the simplest situation because it’s a good idea; we start at this first-order, on/off level of understanding because we’re dumb apes who don’t have a hope of understanding something complicated if we don’t start with something easy. Okay, I’m a dumb ape; you’re a glorious human.
Let’s back up and take a closer look at Starla’s experience. Her first-order visualization was light and dark. Then, with her light detectors wide open, her second-order visualization brought a spectrum of colors; a spectrum that can be divvied into an infinite number of colors between red and violet or, for that matter, between red and orange.
If she’s into it, maybe she starts assigning the colors names like atomic tangerine and razzle-dazzle rose, dividing the colors into categories, subcategories, and sub-subcategories. This sounds boring to me, sort of like stamp collecting. A lot of science is like stamp collecting, but that’s not the kind of science we’re doing in this book.
After zoning out on the rainbow, Starla goes into the kitchen to fire up the coffeemaker. Still thinking about the infinite variations of color within the rainbow, she notices the Metallica black-light poster over the microwave. Rather than question the ridiculousness of her roommate’s interior-decorating choice—having just woken up, after all—she fixates on the artificially bright fluorescent colors of the fire-breathing, dragon-demon, heavy-metal poster; mostly gonzo green and electric lava. She realizes that these colors are not among the infinite number of colors in the rainbow.
“What the hell?” she thinks to herself.
Scooping coffee into a filter, she recalls that human eyes detect only three colors, and that every color we see is a combination of red, green, and blue—she thinks the three colors might have fancier names, maybe like the overpriced ink cartridges in the printer that came “free” with her laptop: magenta, yellow, and cyan. The thought causes her to pour an extra scoop into the filter.
She figures that those black-light colors must be a combination of the three fundamental colors or she wouldn’t be able to see them. And since the colors in a rainbow come from separating the yellowish-white light of the sun into its spectrum, black-light colors must be some sort of combination of red, green, and blue, but in a way that emphasizes the separate components differently than sunlight does in rainbows.
She hits the power button and hopes the coffee starts dripping soon. It occurs to her that too much thought in the morning could be lethal, a thought that brings to mind the color of coffee. She dubs it heavy-metal patina, which gives her a giggle.
As our heroine fixes her morning java, let’s note that she has worked her way to a third-order understanding of color. Three layers of complexity: light-dark, the rainbow spectrum, and now fluorescent black-light colors.
Finally sipping her coffee, Starla wonders how her roommate convinced her that a Metallica poster was appropriate kitchen art.
With sufficient caffeine rushing through her veins, Starla accelerates into action, transforming from a color-contemplator into a business professional with meetings to attend in faraway lands. When she’s packed tight into a coach window seat staring at the same raincloud, and presumably the same rainbow, she wonders why they’re called bows. Shouldn’t they be called ribbons? From up here, the rainbow doesn’t touch the ground. It’s not even an arc; it’s a closed circle. Pondering the time wasted by leprechauns searching for pots of gold, she realizes two things: First, the reason why Ireland can never seem to maintain economic prosperity, and second, that there’s another rainbow. The secondary rainbow is far dimmer than the primary, and the colors are reversed, with violet on top and red at the bottom. Starla has made a fourth-order discovery.
1.1 PEELING THE IGNORANCE ONION
I opened our book with Starla’s rainbow experience because it shows how science progresses. We peel the onion of ignorance one layer at a time.
Just as there is a lot more to light than bright and dark, there’s a lot more to how brains work than left and right, but that’s where we’re going to start. Then, building on that somewhat false dichotomy, we’ll toy with others.
Yes, it’s all a ruse.
In this book, you and I will investigate how innovation leads to discoveries, how art and science are totally different (yet also damn near the same), why we’re never really alone even though we can’t seem to get together, how analysis and intuition can’t live without each other, why talent can’t be distinguished from skill or vice versa, how life is built from death, and why the death of a friend feels so incomprehensible.
You will notice that each chapter heading combines two concepts that we often think of as separate but turn out to be deeply interrelated. Yes, even life and death; before you throw a yellow flag (or hold up a yellow card) on the seemingly obvious absurdity of that last statement, wait until you see what I mean. Then throw the flag, mark off the fifteen yards (or take a penalty kick), and we can talk.
By the way, I’m going to convert all measurements from American vernacular to metric, including football references.
With the preamble out of the way, let’s get rolling.
Consider that instant of puzzlement when Starla heard rain tapping on the window and wondered how it could be so bright on a rainy day. Without that quandary, she’d never have boarded the train of thought that led to her analysis of rainbows and her discovery
of how color works. That surprise, that instant when awareness of something out of the ordinary boiled up from her senses to her conscious mind, was the key to her whole discovery process. Had it never happened, Starla would probably still have the Metallica poster in her kitchen.
1.2 LEFT & RIGHT
Before the dawn of modern neuroscience, back when the first tentative insights came from people like Freud and Jung as they tried to reverse-engineer the brain, studies of anatomy demonstrated that, along with arms, legs, eyes, ears, nostrils, hands, and feet, people had what appeared to be two copies of their brains: a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. The first-order insight—the dark-light level of understanding—was that the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side. Like the vast majority of information on how the brain works, this insight came from doctors observing patients with injured brains.
Take Graham for instance. We travel to a South African bar during the Boer War, a mere 110 years ago. Seated a few stools down, Graham, a surly English officer, refers to a conscripted Scot as a cheap drunk. The Scot objects to being called cheap and rises in anticipation of a jolly brawl. Graham reaches for a sidearm. Disappointed that there won’t be a tussle, the Scot pulls out his pistol too. The two men stare at each other. At this point, you and I get the hell out of the bar. We hear a gunshot from inside followed by silence. Peeking through the door, we see that the bullet has destroyed the left side of Graham’s brain. We rush in and recommend that pressure be applied to the wound. Recognizing the uncharitable nature of his actions, the Scot stops the bleeding and, after months of care, Graham’s injury heals.
With no left brain hemisphere, Graham can’t see through his right eye or hear in his right ear; he has no control over his right arm or leg, though he can smell through his right nostril but not his left. With half a mind to work with, Graham provides first-order evidence that the two sides of the brain control opposite sides of the body. The gap in that observation, that nostrils don’t share the asymmetry of the other senses and motor functions, indicates higher-order subtleties still to be understood. Among the less subtle distinctions was that Graham also couldn’t speak or understand language.
While the left and right brains look quite similar, they assume distinct roles in sensory and language processing. The obvious generalization is that the left and right lobes play different roles and perform separate tasks. The legend of your left brain as the inner accountant and your right brain as the inner artist emerged in 1960 and turned out to be a gross oversimplification.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 1