The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

  That’s when Butch sees a disc-shaped rock and wonders if a rolling stone might be of use in transporting his dead hippo. That’s when Johnny grows weary of the G-A-D progression and maybe takes a stab at jazz. That’s when Vanessa looks at the child dressed in Vinnie’s clothes and doubts her own intuition. And when Tony Magee buys a homebrew kit and adds more hops than the recipe dictates—we’ll get to Tony in a minute.

  It’s not just that being in the zone and experiencing flow are not quite comfortable—they can’t be both comfortable and thrilling. If they were, your bottom-up processors wouldn’t launch you into action. To think laterally, you have to stand on a metaphorical mountain and take your old tools to a new valley. I know, the metaphor is sort of collapsing here, but I think I can pump it back up.

  The novelty of Johnny’s jazz creation may or may not have value. Butch’s hippo-transporting wheeled wagon seems like a sure thing, but what if he’s violated a cultural taboo requiring that food never be touched by round things? What if Starla’s rainbow theory offends the Irish or violates a more well-established scientific principle?

  We don’t determine value by ourselves. If nobody likes Tony’s homicidally hoppy ale, no tribe will show up at his brewery.

  7

  ALONE & TOGETHER

  TONY MAGEE IS A STORYTELLER.

  He had a high school teacher who conveyed the possible: Everything you do is easier than it looks once you get to work. Stories are told one sentence at a time; music is played one note at a time; and yeast eats sugar and shits alcohol one molecule at a time.

  Tony thinks we’re all artists, and he has an understanding of how we can find our places in the world: “If you’re a musician, you’re listening to Beethoven, Brahms, Frank Zappa, the finest composers who’ve ever existed on planet Earth. You’re not comparing yourself to anything that’s even realistic, and so your aspirations are limitless.”

  Then you start creating and “you try to put it out there, put it in a way that’s honest, not the way people think you should or the way you think people expect it to happen. And you find your own voice.”

  In the early 1990s, desktop publishing put a dent in his printing-and-design business. As an iconoclastic, workaholic perfectionist, the lull threatened to drive him nuts. Fortunately, his brother gave him a home-brewing kit, and he set to work. “It didn’t seem like a good idea to anyone around me, including my wife, but now she runs the plant, so I think I won her over.”

  His first beer, an early version of Lagunitas Dogtown Pale Ale, tasted like kerosene and broccoli—I know this because it says so on the label of the current Dogtown Pale. Laughing at his less successful brews and drinking and sharing the more successful ones, he found solace and buzz, the satisfactions and camaraderie of creativity.

  “I didn’t realize this at first, but I approached brewing like music. It’s all the same thing; there are themes in the ingredients, how you present them. It spreads across your palette, and you get the next set of themes as it hits different taste buds and you swallow it and you get the hop aromas in your nasal cavities. It’s like a little piece of music. That’s what music is, a story. A story told in a language without words, and that’s the thing that makes music so transcendent.” Tony cites Frank Zappa a lot, and Zappa pointed out the continuity of creativity: Every note and lyric, every hop, malt, yeast, and drop of water, every label and beer mat, every brewer, bottler, distributor, and beer drinker are part of the symphony.

  As with music, Tony has to know his audience. If he’s the creator, then you and I are the beholders. “A tribe gets built around stories, commonly held stories that everybody agrees on. I don’t think we’re in the beer business; we’re in the tribe-building business.” An early label of Lagunitas Dogtown Pale Ale said, “No dogs were harmed in the brewing process.” PETA got a kick out of it and served the Dogtown Pale at their annual fundraiser. Inside jokes, shared interests, and appreciation for the absurd all play their parts in the Lagunitas tribe, and all you have to do to join is pry the cap off.

  Early on, Lagunitas grew too quickly. They had to buy a new bottler—a conveyer system that guides bottles one by one to a beer faucet that fills them, attaches bottle caps, and places them into boxes. The cost of it left them broke. Tony couldn’t make payroll, so he held an all-hands meeting. Rather than laying down the law, as a conventional CEO might, Tony presented a variety of mixed metaphors so confusing that no one seems to remember what he said beyond “I can’t pay you, so if you don’t come to work tomorrow, I’ll understand.” The next day, about two-thirds of his crew showed up, some of them doing bad Tony Magee imitations and laughing at his unintelligible speech. In that moment, Tony realized that his company was just a community built of camaraderie and affection.

  Tony takes success lightly. “Beer lovers are driving our bus, and we do respect the bus driver!”

  Through most of human history, ale has brought people together and reinforced laughter and joy, courage and anger, bluster and sorrow. It’s part of our story: “Beer speaks, meople pumble.”

  7.1 I WAS A LONER UNTIL I WROTE THIS CHAPTER

  Back in chapter 1, I said that we’re never alone even though we can’t seem to come together. Alone-together is a feedback loop just like life-death, talent-skill, analysis-creativity, and all the rest, but this chapter might make you feel unsettled. You might get pissed off at me. I’m with you. When I wrote this chapter, it kept me up at night because it dismantled some of my more affectionately held opinions.

  When we expand our own minds to include others, it’s kind of like adding more layers of frogs, puppies, and Feynmans. The value of the things we create, beer for example, comes from what other people think. And people affect each other in different ways. There’s the effect of people making choices, but there’s also the echo-chamber effect of people mirroring each other, convincing themselves that they should choose something because their friends like it.

  The value of your creations determines your wealth. By wealth, I mean the whole keg, not just your bank balance but wealth in a higher sense too. Much like how we boosted the concept of prejudice from simple bigotry to laziness of thought, we’re going to bring wealth and value from their materialistic roots to the bigger question of what matters. Being wealthy has little to do with money, except that, without any money, it’s hard to be wealthy.

  The way that we all get together and determine what does and doesn’t have value involves communication. The way we communicate with others kind of dictates how we communicate within ourselves. By ourselves, I mean all the people inside our heads: the child, the professional, the parent, the lover, the sibling, all of ourselves.

  As we investigate how we fit together, we’ll have to make sense of different types of communication, including smiles, laughter, and humor.

  Seriously, it’s going to get weird. But don’t blame me; how we find, define, discover, and create our identities bugs me. I’ve enjoyed being a loner up to this point, but while writing this chapter, I was forced to give it up.

  7.2 ARE WE A HIVE?

  From the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we emerge into the world alone, and we leave it alone. Or do we?

  We emerge with our ancestors’ genomic legacy. We go through our lives with the reflections of other people constantly in our minds, and when the light goes out, well, was that light lit by a lifetime of interactions?

  Are we really individuals, or are we so integrated into our tribes that what we think of as distinguishing characteristics are really fragments that we’ve picked up along the way from our people, our pets, and the wildlife—both human and beast—we encounter along the way?

  Unfortunately for those of us, like me, who cherish the notion that we’re loners in control of our own destinies out here on the metaphorical range herding our figurative cattle, the concept of individualism collapses at the first glance; okay, maybe the second glance.

  7.2.1 The death of my inner rugged individualist

 
Remember solipsism? We talked about it in the context of the theory of mind back in chapter 3. Solipsism is the impossible-to-disprove “it’s all a dream” philosophy.

  What if your brain emerged into being without any contact with the physical universe? No sensory input, just a brain sitting around, existing with a nicely oxygenated blood supply. With no input, your entire reality would have to come from inside, truly a dream world of pure fantasy, except for one huge problem: In this brain, time doesn’t pass.

  Having never experienced interaction with an outside world, you’ve never seen anything, so you don’t know what images are; your ears never heard a sound, so you have no sonic patterns either, and no scents, tastes, or sensations. Nada.

  Consider that: no thoughts. Now try it.

  Back in chapter 4, we talked about how babies are born with two to three times more synapse connections than three-year-olds and how their brains prune the connections that don’t help them understand their surroundings. If there’s no world, then it’s likely that the pruning process would just keep going until the only synapses left are those required for the barest existence. You’d prune away everything but part of your inner frog.

  In a brain that never interacts with the world, there are no associations, no perceptions, no ideas; it’s just a hunk of meat, plugged in, but with the lights turned off.

  Lobo is a rugged individual. Raised by wolves, she has never interacted with another person. Unlike a solipsist, Lobo interacts with the world, acquires patterns, and learns what to expect like every other person, except for a few glaring deficiencies.

  Our brains require observation of other people right out of the gate, before they prune away the synapses that associate sounds with language. People who have spent their first decade or so isolated from others—raised by wolves or kept in a cell by a twisted bastard—spend the rest of their lives trying to learn to speak without much success. If she never hangs out with people, Lobo has no access to the conceptual tools she needs to think problems through, to develop a narrative of her life, or to assemble absurd but firmly held opinions.

  A horse can run within hours of birth. A baby can’t even drive until he’s been loitering for the better part of two decades!

  Humans continue developing after leaving the womb for far longer than other animals. The standard reasoning is that, if we waited the whole fourteen to eighteen months instead of just nine, our heads would be too big to get out of the hole. That might be it, but joining the pack early provides a huge extra advantage. Coming out prematurely as a courtesy to our dear mothers qualifies as an adaptation; natural selection killed off the mothers of the kids that lollygagged in the womb, and kids born with dead mothers don’t fare very well.

  Coming out early is also an exaptation.

  Although it’s easy to trace an adaptation to how it helps us deal with reality, exaptations also help us, but in a coincidental, lucky, and less obvious way. Natural selection forced fat-headed humans out early, but it came with another huge benefit: The exaptation allowed infants to finish developing their brains in the company of laughing, whining, and sweet-talking people.

  Sure, we have our secrets. Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson famously delineated the secret lives of excretion, sexual fantasy, secret hopes, terror of death, experience of shame, inner pain and turmoil, and the dreams we never share. Existence can be lonely, but the existence of loneliness points to our interdependence, not to our solitariness. To say that we live solitary lives misses the point, the great big point of how and from where we assemble this concept of self.

  It pains me to admit that we really are in this together.

  7.2.2 Extending the consciousness feedback loop to others

  Sorry, Prometheus, the greatest invention was not fire; too bad, Michelin Man, it wasn’t the wheel; due apologies, Newton, not calculus either. When you’re sitting in a café listening to teenagers flirting and gossiping, it can be hard to believe that language has any value at all.

  Along with “thinking outside the box,” the business cliché I hate most is “don’t reinvent the wheel.” Before the advent of language, pretty much everything had to be learned through direct experience; every wheel had to be reinvented for every wagon.

  When children do stupid things, grandparents, usually in-laws, like to say, “The only way a kid learns not to make stupid decisions is to make stupid decisions.” There’s a ring of truth to it, but for the most part, people can learn from each other.

  While our senses give us a reality interface, language gives us an interface between each other’s brains. Sharing experience alters the timescale of evolution.

  250,000 years ago or so, your 12,500th great-grandmother couldn’t think beyond the next season. Thirty thousand years ago, your 1,500th great-grandfather could conceive of almost a century. As a product of the twenty-first century, your world extends over two thousand years. You’re aware of the Roman Empire and have acquired the knowledge of hundreds of generations of other people. Not only do you travel a distance equivalent to halfway around the Earth every year (12,500 miles (20,000 km)), but you can watch live video feeds from Mars. Consider the body of knowledge learned in twelve years of education. By the time you were seventeen, you had acquired the intellectual tools achieved over three hundred thousand years.

  How long would it take natural selection to produce people who could measure the lifetime of the universe? Probably the lifetime of the universe.

  7.2.3 Imitation and simulation

  You’re standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, watching Randi Magoo walk down the street with her earbuds in, tunes cranked, typing text messages to her BFFs. She comes to a busy intersection and steps in front of a flatbed Ford. You suck in your breath, tighten your sphincter, get a blast of norepinephrine, and then, as the truck careens around her, you sigh in relief at her good fortune.

  Since Randi’s oblivious to the near miss, still typing LOL, your experience of the collision was more vivid than hers. As she stepped in front of the truck, you probably reacted. You might have jumped to the side, but not as far or with as much haste as you would have if it had really been you about to take a bumper on the chin.

  Now approaching the opposite curb, Randi’s still oblivious. Cars swerve around her. A Prius rear-ends a Charger. She trips on the curb and falls. Her knee, wrist, and cell phone hit the concrete at the same time. Sure, you feel some schadenfreude when the phone breaks, but you’ve tripped before and know how it feels. There you go mirroring again, now firing up your anterior cingulate cortex, that is, your pain center. You empathize with Randi’s pain, and your heart races, but you don’t feel that pain. The feedback loop between your muscles and your knees (but not your cell phone) notified your motor cortex and your pain center through inhibitory signals that you didn’t actually participate in Randi’s blunder.

  Your emotional response to another person’s trauma comes from your mirrored, simulated experience of that trauma. Mirroring in your motor cortex generates an immediate physical response to another person’s facial expressions. While it takes 0.2 seconds to jump out of the way of a truck, your face reacts to other people’s faces almost ten times faster. When your partner smiles at you, it takes about 0.03 second for your lip muscles to reply—not a full-fledged smile, but an immediate too-fast-to-control response.

  A real smile is very difficult to fake. You can’t just flash the pearly whites and be done with it. Fake smiles use different muscles than real ones. Look at pictures you’ve posed for. Your initial grin might be sincere (after all, posing situations are usually jovial), but the longer you hold that smile, the faker it looks. When you are behind the camera, hit the shutter as soon as you focus, before your subjects settle into a pose.

  The thing is, we don’t just smile with our lips. Real smiles take over your entire face, especially your forehead and eyes.

  But why do we smile at all? The thinking on smiles is outer-layer-of-the-onion science. The idea is that half a million
years ago, if you and I approached each other at a book signing, we’d bare our canines in a default don’t-mess-with-me threat. Then I’d see your copy of my book, and you’d recognize me from the photo on the dust jacket, and our lips would wiggle a bit and the implied threat would transform into an explicit greeting. As eons passed, your mammalian snarl transformed into your winning smile.

  Immediate, involuntary commiseration with each other ties us tighter into our teams, our tribes, our schools, our people.

  We don’t react the same way to rivals. Our responses to people we don’t know, like, and/or trust, aren’t so automatic. Flash a smile at a stranger so that they won’t feel threatened and they’ll probably leave you alone—that’s a fake smile. The behavior geeks call it a social smile.

  Our automatic reactions to allies and friends create positive feedback loops that reinforce our feelings. The more you like someone, the more you respond to them, the more they respond to you, the more you respond to them.. .and the more you like them. Unfortunately, a lack of automatic response to people you don’t know is also a positive loop: The less you respond, the less they respond…, and the less they like you.

  7.2.4 Well, are we?

  A hive, I mean. As groups, bees and termites act like intelligent creatures. With less than a million neurons each, they’re individually stupid, but throw a few thousand together and they hunt and gather food, engineer and build extensive structures, and they even know how to raise royalty.

  What makes kings and queens exceptional is how other people treat them. Prince Georgie will be unique, not because there’s anything special about him, but because the other people in the tribe have decided that he’s special; it’s the same with bees. You take any old working-bee larva, feed it a special diet, treat it with extra respect— bow, curtsy, overlook protruding noses and bad hair—and you get an autocrat, I mean a bee-crat, a queen.