The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

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  You are a talented reader because you have all the wetware in the right place to assemble the neural circuits necessary for reading. We don’t think of this as a talent, of course, because almost everyone can do it.

  Most of us also have the necessary wetware to play music. But someone like Johnny, Jimi, Joan, Nancy, Eddie, Eric, Joni, Gretchen, Jimmy, Joe, Bonnie, or Kaki—they have something extra. Is that extra a physical thing? Most of them have long fingers capable of reaching across four frets to play difficult chords—the same sort of talent Manute had—but some of them make their little fingers go a long way.

  Great musicians, people we think of as talented, have the ability to distinguish and identify tones that most of us don’t have. Is that a talent or a skill?

  4.3.1 Neural pruning and synesthesia

  Once Johnny’s ability to play guitar becomes as easy as ringing a bell, something weird happens: Synapses start disappearing. By making large numbers of random connections, the probability of making the right connection is quite high. If you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it is bound to stick, right? But the probability of making the wrong connections is higher, so it leaves a mess.

  Once people start coming from miles around to hear Johnny play, the neurons that don’t make music stop firing. Synapses that don’t fire fade away.

  This idea of “neural pruning” or “neural Darwinism” gets really weird.

  We seem to be born with acute synesthesia. Infants have two to three times more synapse connections than three-year-olds or adults, a huge mess of connections between the senses in a state of massive confusion. With no other experience to weigh against it, the confusion doesn’t freak out our infant selves. Instead, we set about investigating the world and differentiating sensory inputs, and, just as Johnny’s brain trims away the connections that didn’t help him play, our brains prune away the axons and synapses that experience inter-sense crosstalk. Maybe the day you were born, you saw sounds, heard tastes, felt scents, and so on. Maybe the simple experience of being in the world cuts those lying connections, leaving your senses with axons finely tuned to reconstruct reality.

  Learning things makes the brain a bit larger, but most of that size is pruned away as expertise is achieved. Biological systems abhor waste, and cutting out unused wetware leaves a leaner, more efficient machine.

  4.3.2 Brain size

  Manute Bol had long legs and arms; Eric Clapton has long fingers; Albert Einstein had a large brain. We can probably agree that Einstein had talent, but did the size of his brain have anything to do with it?

  Birds have really small, lightweight heads that carry around some of the smartest brains in the animal kingdom. Ravens perform simple arithmetic and show greater evidence of self-awareness than dogs.

  No study has produced a correlation between genius and brain size. While Einstein had an extra large brain with some peculiar abnormalities, there have been plenty of pinheaded geniuses too.

  In Einstein’s parietal cortex, along the sides of his brain just behind his ears, two creases merged into abnormally large patches where most people have folds. We use this region to comprehend positions in space and the timing of events; it also plays a role when we do mathematics. Did the decades Einstein spent concentrating on the relationship between space and time cause this difference? Or was he born with a brain uniquely suited for conceiving relativity?

  On the one hand, I’m tempted to argue that this region of his brain shouldn’t be extra large, because once he formulated special and general relativity, the extra wetware should have been pruned away. On the other hand, maybe it reflects how he struggled for thirty years trying to unite gravity and quantum theory.

  By pruning the unnecessary connections to improve efficiency, I wonder if Mister Know-It-All, you know, that guy who knows everything, has the smallest brain of any human. After he’s acquired all knowledge and the ability to perform every possible task, all superfluous connections would be clipped away, leaving a tiny but perfect brain. You and I, on the other hand, have big brains because we’re still sorting things out.

  4.3.3 Perfect pitch: talent or skill?

  Johnny’s perfect pitch enables him to play beautiful music. His ability to distinguish differences between notes that sound the same to most people allows him to compose and play the special melodies that draw people from miles around.

  Is perfect pitch a talent or a skill?

  The answer is a resounding maybe.

  As Johnny practiced, canoodling with the tuning knobs, bearing down and concentrating to tune that E string just so, he deciphered ever-smaller variations between notes. After repeating the process thousands of times, he got better at it.

  We decipher pitch with snail-like pieces of wetware called cochlea in our inner ears. If we unroll a cochlea, it looks like a pair of parallel tubes about 1.4 inches (3.5 cm) long. The tubes are filled with sound-conducting fluid, and the cochlea is lined with tiny cilia hairs that wiggle when sound comes in.

  Just as different colors of light excite cones according to the mix of red, green, and blue, we distinguish different sound frequencies, from bass to treble, about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, by which cilia wiggle. The cilia are the far ends of axons, sound transducers that convert vibrations into action potentials. As sound travels up the cochlea, lower frequencies continue up the tubes and higher frequencies die out. When cilia way up your cochlea wiggle, you hear a low note; if only the cilia at the opening wiggle, you hear a high note.

  Figure 12: (a) A cochlea, your bass-treble detector, (b) a perfect unrolled cochlea, (c) an imperfect unrolled cochlea.

  By spending hours trying to distinguish different notes, Johnny directs attention to the sound processors that acquire data from the cilia. That conscious attention causes more synapses to form, and he improves, that is, he improves his note-identifying skill.

  But that skill is limited by the structure of his cochlea. Since the feedback loop between synapse formation and practice generates the wetware end of his sense of pitch, it’s hard to identify where the skill ends and the talent begins, and vice versa. However, if his cochlea has imperfect geometry, if sections of it are swollen or constricted, then Johnny’s ability to distinguish tones from the cilia near the bad spots would be forever limited, regardless of how much he practiced.

  4.4 NATURE & NURTURE

  Clark Kent writes an investigative blog for The Daily Planet, but now and then he comes upon nefarious individuals who plot against the continued harmony, such as it is, of life on Earth. At such times, Clark steps into a Starbucks, takes out his cell phone and, while talking loud enough to annoy everyone, removes his glasses and transforms into Superman, tights and all.

  But back on his native planet Krypton, he doesn’t have these superpowers. No, Clark’s talents can only be expressed under the light of a yellow sun like ours. Under the red sun of Krypton, Clark has no remarkable talents other than a journalist’s ability to crank out two thousand words a day.

  Did Clark’s super talent result from nature or nurture? Both; nature and nurture don’t compete, they collaborate.

  If a single concept has emerged from our discussion so far, it’s the way that feedback loops feed-forward loops, and feed-sideways loops with multiple inputs and outputs process their inputs in such a way that the outputs, which usually double as inputs, become an insufferably complex knot—much like this sentence.

  If we ask the question: Is the brain more of a blank slate that can be nurtured to do great things and corrupted to do rotten things, or is it a predefined set of abilities, biases, and talents, we’ll miss the point.

  The nature versus nurture question points us in the wrong direction.

  Remember Gregor Mendel, the friar who invented genetics by studying beans? Like the development of every science, his discovery of dominant and recessive genes turned out to be the outer layer of a big ignorance onion, a first-order
observation, more like detecting light from behind closed eyelids than distinguishing colors in the rainbow.

  Characteristics resulting from pure, inflexible genetic hardwiring turn out to be less common than epigenetic characteristics. Environmental factors flip epigenetic switches to activate or shut off genetic traits, potential talents, inadequacies, features, or bugs. Clark Kent’s super talents only work if he lives on a planet with a yellow star; but the interplay of nature and nurture hardly ever has such a simple trigger. Your talents emerge from how your nature is nurtured—where you hang out, whom you hang out with, what you eat/smoke/drink/snort and, of course, whom you choose to have sex with—which for a lot of us is better described as whomever is willing to have sex with you.

  On the other hand, if your parents are twentieth-generation red-haired Celts, you’re not coming out with freckle-free ebony skin no matter how much Guinness your mother drinks while she’s pregnant or how much subsequent sunlight exposure you get. You might turn out to be blonde, brunette, curly- or straight-haired, but you are going to have pale skin. On the other hand, or really on both hands, I could probably learn to play the guitar if I put in some effort.

  The environmental switches that crank up your talents come in every color. People with diseases or those who spend a lot of time injured, sick, or in pain are at an obvious disadvantage to those with more robust constitutions. It might be tempting to blame genetics for these impairments and call it lack of talent, but the complexity of environmental interactions renders such a blame game a waste of time. Clean water and air, nutrition and immunization, parental encouragement and access to quality instruction, and on down the long list of easy-to-identify levers push us toward the nurture side of the ledger, but without the nature side already in place, the switches and levers have no effect.

  You’re born with instincts and the ability to develop algorithmic recipes. It’s tempting to argue that nature provides the instincts and nurture the sophistication, but without nature’s wetware in place, none of the sophistication can develop. Think of instinct as preprogrammed processors and sophistication as the ability to configure new processors. Both are tools embodied by networks of neurons; both require nature.

  You weren’t born talking, but you did come out primed to learn languages. Nature provides us with a set of processors tuned for speaking, listening, and interpreting sounds into words, but it doesn’t provide a single word. Words are like the ingredients of the language recipe, parameters of the language algorithm, the nurture component.

  When nature produces someone without the gray matter pre-tuned to learn language, the process of learning a language is likely to become that person’s single lifelong goal. Without the nature, this guy is screwed, but check you out, a little nature and you’re gossiping by the time you’re three.

  The nature-nurture question is not “Does nature or nurture play a greater role in determining a person’s talents?” The question is “Does the environment in which a person is nurtured make the most of the genetic nature of that person?” Like democracy or a long-lasting marriage, the key to success isn’t which party contributes more, it’s how they interact.

  4.5 PRODIGIES

  The brain’s electrical and chemical equilibrium is maintained by a delicate balance of inhibitory and excitatory action potentials. Someone born without that delicate equilibrium will behave atypically and see the world differently. Difference can provide a competitive edge, diminished capacity, or both. Seeing the world differently is a key to innovation and discovery. Manute Bol was atypical in height. I consider myself atypical, though not in height—I’m exactly the normal height for a male human being on Earth. I’m certain that you too are atypical in many ways—you rascal.

  Studies of savant phenomena are just beginning to peel the outer skin off the onion. The first-order observation was “Wow! These kids can really count/play/memorize.” But as we dig a little deeper, the miracles start to make sense.

  Variations from typical behavior, like those that put people on the autistic or dyslexic spectrums, can engender abilities that dazzle us. But if that person’s genius appears in only a tiny corner of the wide space of human behavior, and she’s not so adept at the simpler tasks of life, that is, if she’s adept at one thing and incapable of doing anything else, she’s called an idiot savant. The seemingly contradictory qualities fascinate observers. On the surface, they look like miracles.

  Society confines our behaviors far more rigidly than we notice. Our colleague from Andromeda probably wouldn’t notice the difference between sitting and standing on a chair, but a waitress would.

  If you’re incapable of conforming to society’s expectations except for a few acceptable behaviors, you’re likely to excel at those behaviors. Did the Rain Man count so quickly because he had super wetware or because he couldn’t do anything else without getting into trouble? Careful analyses of savant behaviors like fast calculation and early musical or artistic talent indicate that the answer might be less miraculous and more Carnegie Hall-ish.

  Randy is a problem child. His weak grasp of language doesn’t prevent him from incessant high-volume babbling. He screams and fights at any perceived injustice. His parents’ explanations for why these behaviors aren’t acceptable have no impact. He simply doesn’t have the inhibitory circuitry to discriminate between courteous and discourteous, tidy and messy, interesting and boring, etc.

  Randy doesn’t fit into society, so he spends a lot of time sitting in the corner. Soon, he discovers that it’s safe there, that looking out the window isn’t so bad compared to being hollered at for variations in his behavior that he can’t understand.

  One day he counts the leaves on the tree outside the window. He tells his mother that the tree outside his window has 17,740 leaves on it. She says, “Oh, honey, you can’t count that high, you can barely talk.” Which sends Randy into a frenzy, so back to the corner he goes. When his time is up, he tells her that there are 133 leaves on the ground below the tree. This time, he says it softly, and she starts to wonder if it could be true. She goes out and counts them herself.

  Soon, Randy is a counting prodigy.

  The positive feedback loop looks like this: Get in trouble à sit in the corner à count stuff à announce amazing fact à be rewarded with praise or be left alone, which is reward enough for many people with autism à get in trouble à sit in the corner … continue the loop hundreds of times until it reduces to count stuff à count stuff.

  Is Randy talented, or has he perfected a skill?

  Savant phenomena occur in 10 to 30 percent of people with autism. Savants possess intense focus, enhanced sensory function, prodigious memory, and/or a large capacity for practice. The talents that emerge are concentrated in areas that include musical performance, drawing, painting, sculpting, and mathematics limited to arithmetic and geometry.

  Some children with severe autism demonstrate astounding artistic abilities that defy the practice-skill model. The talent/skill of idiot savants also tends to peak immediately, reach a point of proficiency, and stay there without notable improvement.

  Remember, neurons can inhibit as well as excite. By reducing some inhibitory effects, through injury or deformation of parts of the scrupulous left brain, certain abilities are unleashed. Some people who suffer strokes that damage their language-processing centers discover remarkable talents for sketching and painting. Perhaps they had this talent all along, but it was suppressed by their reliance and focus on language as a means of communication. Just as a blind person develops greater reliance on hearing and touch, maybe when one processing center shuts down, it stops inhibiting others and they open up. Learning Braille, for example, is far more difficult for the sighted than the blind.

  Johnny showed how dynamic the brain is, throwing out new synapses, stretching axons all over the place in pursuit of pitch, harmony, and tunes. The current, tentative interpretation shared by many neuroscientists is that when certain processors are suppressed— by injury or defect�
��the brain goes into overdrive rewiring the suppressed regions of the brain to perform different tasks, even as unsuppressed regions step up their game.

  Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, has a different approach that fits the concept of myriad, mostly independent, bottom-up processors boiling important thoughts up to a monolithic top-down consciousness. Maybe idiot savants have lower boiling temperatures in the areas where they’re talented. Maybe we all have bottom-up calculators, but due to Randy the leaf-counter’s unique brain, his numbers boil up to consciousness and ours don’t.

  Snyder believes that savant talent can be induced by applying mild electromagnetic signals that suppress certain left hemisphere regions. His test subjects exhibit enhanced creativity that he interprets as evidence that shutting down certain pattern detectors allows other brain regions to boil up different ideas, ideas that the suppressed parts of the brain would otherwise inhibit.

  In other words, when we’re presented with a task or problem—drawing a bird, solving a differential equation, inventing a new cock-tail—our brains scan solutions that have worked in similar situations in the past. Along with that scanning, our brains also suppress angles on the problem that, for whatever reason, we’re prejudiced against.

  The mathematician’s brain is all “Get outa here poetry; this thing is chaotic!” The poet is all “Gimme a break; the number of syllables doesn’t matter.” Then, when the more rigid, more prejudiced brain signals are suppressed, the mathematician’s inner poet comes up with a new trick. Maybe that trick works, maybe it doesn’t, but either way, it alters the mathematician’s perspective on the problem. Maybe the poet’s inner mathematician provides a geometric view of the sonnet as a whole—a simplex sonnet—and the poet creates a new super haiku.