The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

  Should we think of self-discipline as talent or skill? Your answer might depend on your experience reasoning with three-year-olds.

  5.2.1 Recipes and algorithms

  If you peel off your inner Feynman, that is, your neocortex, you get a thin, gray, wrinkly shell that looks pretty much the same across its surface. It has six layers: a mat of axons at the bottom and tightly packed neurons of different types in the other layers. Layers two, three, and five have mostly pyramid-shaped neurons, layer four has star-shaped neurons, and the outer layer has differently shaped neurons concentrated in different regions, like the slow-reacting neurons behind your forehead. It’s one big network with ample connectivity, kind of a mess.

  Neuroscientists assign names to the cortex’s folds and ridges to identify the regions that are genetically tuned for specific processes. While different processing centers perform different tasks, they aren’t truly independent of each other, and it’s not known how or even if their physical structures differ. It’s possible that the entire neocortex consists of identical, repeating structures. In any case, each processor has to learn how to do its job, whether that learning occurs over the course of natural selection from generation to generation—like our instinctual abilities to see, laugh, and yearn—or whether that learning consists of education or training—like algebra, plumbing, and sculpting.

  To get to the heart of how we learn stuff, think of a recipe: a list of ingredients combined with instructions on how and when to combine and cook them. A recipe is an algorithm for cooking a particular dish. If you flip the pages of a cookbook in a language you can’t read, the recipe for lasagna looks the same as the recipe for cake. If you can read the language, you’ll see that the ingredients differ, but the recipe format and steps are similar, that is, the structure is the same but not the details. If you were born to cook, then you learn that structure early, and as you gain experience, you learn which ingredients and which mixing and cooking techniques work for each dish; you start with an algorithm and tune the parameters.

  We have a talent for recognizing people because we come equipped with algorithms for facial recognition. We come with the recipes but have to learn the ingredients for everyone we recognize.

  Alligators don’t recognize their own children. Seriously, momma alligator drops her kids off at gator daycare in the morning on her way to the swamp. After a long day lounging in the sun, eating squirrels, kittens, and fish, she goes back to pick up her children. Entering the daycare wetland, she can’t tell her kids from anyone else’s; she’s happy to eat any of them.

  How can you instantly distinguish your children in a huge crowd? I mean, it’s one thing to recognize your beer from all the others sitting on the bar, but children all look the same.

  On your way to work, you drop your brilliant four-year-old daughter Bril at Kiddie Care on your way to the cubicle swamp. You spend the day floating between meetings, drinking coffee, spreading rumors, sandbagging your boss, creating and presenting astounding but underappreciated works of sheer genius and then, on your way home, you stop at Kiddie Care to pick up Bril. You walk in and see a horde of children between the ages of two and five. Which one is Bril?

  You scan the horde. Bril’s voice, hair color, face, height, body shape, all the details/parameters/ingredients come together and, despite the constantly moving swarm of children, you pick her out of the crowd with ease because she’s yours.

  Unimpressed? Me too. But consider this: At four, Bril looks nothing like she did two years ago. Since she wears different clothes each day, she barely looks the same today as yesterday. Unlike the alligator mommy, you constantly tune the parameters for identifying your child.

  It gets worse—if you’re a parent of a child over age eleven, you’re already aware of this. Comprehending your child’s character requires massive, dynamic pattern association. Their appearance is a tiny fraction of who they are. Their emotional and intellectual states require far greater processing. The constant proclamations of adolescents that parents don’t understand them arise from the irritating fact that they’re right, and that parents are busy. The patterns of a child’s state of mind in a parent’s brain tend to lag reality. We have a tendency to parent a child who is months or years younger than the actual child, until some crisis forces us to update our wetware. It’s exhausting, yet somehow we recommend it to others.

  Our neural networks perform like algorithmic recipes that recognize and associate patterns in a very general sense. Instinctual actions come with preset parameters, while others require learning. In an ever-growing tree of abstraction, our wetware algorithms recognize patterns and create other algorithms to recognize more patterns.

  In neuroscience jargon, the spectrum from instinctual to learnable, from concrete to abstract, ranges from low to high plasticity.

  5.2.2 Plasticity

  Your inner frog fears snakes. Your inner puppy hates vacuum cleaners. Your inner Feynman is confused by credit default swaps.

  Natural selection develops ever-more sophisticated wetware to handle more sophisticated situations by reusing equipment from previous developments. Frog neurons aren’t so different from Feynman neurons, but once people started talking—to be more specific, once we started complaining—physical evolution was too slow to accommodate our spiraling demands for better entertainment options. Cultural evolution ramped up to speed. Natural selection didn’t provide specific circuits for the advanced calculus that Feynman used to formulate quantum electrodynamics. No, the great mathematicians that preceded him repurposed the symbolic processors in their brains to invent new ways to think, and Feynman learned from them.

  Your ability to coerce your own brain into doing what you want is called plasticity. Bendable plastic can be remolded for different purposes.

  Each layer of sophistication uses earlier layers. Craving sex and craving a solution to quantum gravity don’t use the same wetware, but in the sense that they are both appetites, they’re more similar than they are different.

  5.2.3 Education

  I’ve drawn a cartoon of the top-down process of education. The teacher presents patterns to students. The students consciously ponder the patterns. I mean patterns in the broadest sense of things that we recognize: facts, processes, ideas, every type of concept. The new concepts go to the tip of the students’ hierarchical thinking structures.

  Figure 13: Ransom’s model of education.

  The teacher coerces the student to integrate the new pattern into her store of pattern forms through readings, drilling exercises, essays, laboratory activities—all of which fit under the heading of practice and experience. As the teacher packs those patterns ever deeper into the student’s thinking structure, the student begins to associate patterns with other patterns, new and old, without having to deliberate over every detail. From up here at a high level, the process resembles what Johnny does down by the railroad tracks. Just as Johnny made the transition from playing notes to playing music, at some point, the student starts to get it. Having mastered a lesson, the student can then apply that skill to the next lesson.

  Bill is studying neuroscience. He’s lived among humans all his life and has picked up some psychology, philosophy, and history—a stash of established patterns—along the way. When a new topic comes up, his bottom-up processors try to match it to a pattern they already recognize. If they find a good fit, he moves on. But if he doesn’t get it, then his mostly right-brain internal bullshit detector generates a feeling of confusion. As he puzzles over the confusing concept, he pulls up established patterns and uses his conscious top-down processors to modify them, adapting them until he thinks he has a new pattern that solves the puzzle.

  He evaluates the new pattern by feeding it back to his bullshit-detecting watchdog. His bottom-up processors compare it far and wide to even more preexisting patterns for similarities, the toeholds of understanding. Having evolved to favor speed and efficiency over accuracy, Bill constantly predicts the final outcome, always reaching for the �
��I get it” blast of satisfaction. Good students keep concentrating, keep delaying that gratification.

  When he finally comes up with a pattern that doesn’t contradict the parameters of the puzzle, he proclaims, “I get it,” and triumphantly heads off to a frat party to celebrate.

  5.2.4 Memory

  We build our models of reality on a foundation of memory. Without a continuously developing log of experience to provide us with context, we have nothing.

  Since the ability to remember is common to all mammals, it figures that our inner puppies would handle memory formation. Two organlike processors, the hippocampus and the amygdala, are involved; the hippocampus files away explicit memories, stuff like people, places, objects, and equations, while the amygdala arranges unconscious motor skills and immediate perceptions. The two play some handball when it comes to memories with heavy emotional content. Remember, the amygdala houses your fight, flight, freeze, or mate wetware, so it needs quick access to information for immediate life-saving decisions. The hippocampus and amygdala also judge what’s worth storing and what’s not. Your hippocampus can take up to three years to record a permanent memory.

  Memories aren’t stashed away like books in a case or files on a disk. Evidence is piling up that they’re recorded as engrams—associations distributed across many parts of the brain. Engrams are usually described as holographic. Holograms are like photographs except that, instead of recording the color and brightness of light reflected from an object, they record the diffraction patterns of the light reflected from the object. Don’t you hate descriptions of concepts in terms of more complex concepts? Let’s work through it.

  When Johnny learns a G chord, he associates a host of separate patterns. He associates the chord with his visual cortex, so he knows which strings are involved; his motor cortex, so he knows how to put his fingers on those strings; his sound processors, so he knows how it sounds; and his symbol processors, so he knows how it looks on sheet music. The association of all those processors forms a web of axon-dendrite connections spanning across his brain ready to be fired up at any instant. Or, if you think of your brain as a map, then a memory is like directions to your favorite pub. The map exists all the time, but the specific path from where you are now to your local bar only lights up when you’re ready for a pint.

  Whether it’s playing guitar, learning to read, or less book-learning stuff like how to swagger on Mean Street, strut on Telegraph Avenue, or stride through an airport, when patterns are tamped down to lower and lower processors in our thinking hierarchy, they become automatic. Instead of carefully placing each finger here and there, sounding out letters, or watching your step, you can play awesome heavy metal, read great literature, and strut through neighborhoods on a whim.

  One could say that developing understanding to this low, automatic level is equivalent to training intuition. One could say that, and we will, but not until later in this chapter.

  5.2.5 Answer resolution

  Say you’re sitting on a power line over a wide-open prairie. Looking down, you see something in the grass move. Since it’s so far away, you know something is moving, but you can’t see what. You turn to the eagle perched next to you and ask, “What’s going on down there?”

  The eagle says, “There are seven baby mice in the process of being weaned. I’m waiting for their mother to come back, and then I’m going to eat her. Would you like me to score you one of the babies?”

  You look back down. All you can see is a shadow in the grass and some irregular movement. “Seven baby mice?” you ask.

  “Right, seven,” the eagle says. “See how big my pupils are?”

  You look into the eagle’s eyes, and you notice that they’re all pupil.

  The eagle says, “With those puny pupils of yours, it’s amazing you can resolve two houses on a block. But with my eagle eyes, I can resolve objects separated by the width of a blade of grass from one hundred feet, or would thirty meters make more sense to you?”

  Resolution is the ability to distinguish between two things that are close together. The idea comes from optics. Lord Rayleigh, the nineteenth-century British physicist who demonstrated why the sky is blue, showed that the ability to resolve two close objects depends on the size of the pupil, or the aperture; the bigger your aperture, the finer your resolution.

  Our thought process of pattern-recognition-categorization-prediction is limited by the number of patterns we have stashed away. The more patterns we’ve acquired, the larger the apertures of our brains, the greater the resolution of our thoughts, the more accurate our predictions, and the less prone we are to suffer from mistakes made by idea prejudice.

  That is, education improves our answer resolution. Education in any subject—the vast piles of books consumed by students of the liberal arts, the never-ending homework problems solved by students of science and technology, and in any form, the raw experience of life on the streets, in the mountains, or at sea—ultimately consists of exposure to different patterns.

  A musician can resolve two tones that might sound the same to you and me. Painters resolve colors, historians resolve epochs, politicians resolve, well, never mind.

  The uber-genius who knows everything has perfect resolution: a unique category for every phenomenon, however abstract. At the opposite end, the unter-dolt piles everything into one or two categories and misses every nuance, every distinguishing characteristic. You and I are somewhere on that spectrum. We have our prejudices, but the more we learn, the greater our exposure to education and experience in their broadest senses, the finer our answer resolution grows and the less our prejudices interfere with our appreciation of the world. Well, we can hope so.

  5.3 THINKING WITH YOUR GUTS

  One of my top-five favorite books (and movies, for that matter) is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Like most of Hornby’s books, it’s about a self-absorbed man-boy in search of love and satisfaction (gee, I wonder why I enjoy his work so much). Toward the end, the man-boy says, “I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.”

  Our guts make a lot of decisions for us, some more obvious than others, some well within their purview, but others, well, sometimes we need to think things through. Listening to your gut while investing in the stock market can destroy your fortune. World leaders who listen to their guts instead of evaluating complex diplomatic situations cause calamities, tragedies, depressions, and recessions, though they still have a knack for getting reelected.

  Brandi loves to surf, and a typhoon hit Baja last week bringing perfect waves today. Carrying her tri-skeg (a surfboard with three little fins on the bottom—bitchin’) down to the beach, she has a feeling of excitement. That excitement comes from associating the size and shape of the waves—smooth cylinders that fold sequentially from north to south—with the exhilarating combination of physical mastery, tenuous control, and unbridled acceleration along with the risk of taking shitless face-grinds in the sand—gnarly.

  Brandi spends all day in the surf and does a melon for lunch (she eats an entire watermelon—brutal).

  As the sun sets into the ocean, she peels off her wetsuit, feels a pleasant tightness in her muscles, and heads home. Walking along Cliff Drive, she sees a Burger Dive and seemingly out of nowhere, she needs french fries. Brandi surfed all day and she sweated a lot. Her watermelon lunch provided energy and fluid, but not salt, and now her inner frog demands it. As the thought boils up, Brandi’s inner puppy refines her inner frog’s request into a desire for french fries. The pleasure Brandi anticipates in potatoes boiled in fat and bathed in salt is easy to relate to. Deer, bears, everybody likes a lick of salt now and then.

  Brandi’s desire for salt followed a one-way path from her gut to her appetite. Salt didn’t even come to mind; the association of salt was sufficient to spur the simplest intuition.

  Those occasions when an answer simply appears out of the blu
e, when we see something and know the answer, even when the question hasn’t been asked, are like Brandi’s craving for salt. Many unconscious processes pass along the intuited answer to an unasked question.

  Two feelings are key to our ability to understand: the dissonance you feel when you don’t get it and the consonance you feel when you do. Dilemmas generate the dissonance of doubt, as in “Where did I put my beer?” Solutions bring the consonance of certainty, like a fine meal devoured when you’re hungry, as in “Gosh Bill, that turkey and stuffing and—oh my God, the bread pudding—sure were consonant!”

  Intuition comes from bottom-up processors boiling up an answer into consciousness without being aware of either the question or the process used to derive the answer. The unconscious thought processes that generate intuition are just a step below consciousness. Our metaphorical pot of water heats up; the water’s really hot, about to boil; and the answer comes up without any accompanying conscious deliberation.

  5.3.1 The feeling of knowing

  How come you enjoy solving complex, abstract problems? What drives you to invent Internet karaoke? Money? Did Monet paint all those lily pads so he could get laid?

  When your supply is depleted, salt brings simple physical satisfaction in the form of a neurotransmitter cocktail that makes you feel satiated. The specific ingredients of these cocktails have not been resolved. Salt satiation probably includes GABA (gamma amino butyric acid), serotonin, and endorphins. Surfing, or whatever launches you down your tube, serves an exhilaration cocktail that includes dopamine, epinephrine, and endorphins, but why paint lily pads? Why invent, discover, or create? What’s the buzz?

  If Butch the caveman won’t get laid unless he thinks of a way to cart the hippopotamus home for dinner, then he’s going to derive some serious satisfaction when he invents the wheel and a wagon to go with it. Accomplishments trigger the production of neurotransmitters and hormones that make you feel good. Understanding does the same thing. Our internal pharmacist delivers the feeling, just as it generates post-coital bliss and satiation.