The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

  Genuine hives become more intelligent than their parts. How much did your inner frog improve by adding an inner puppy? And how much did your inner puppy benefit from a layer of Feynman? By adding language, we get a pathway to another entire brain of processing power, albeit a pathway that’s slower and less efficient than direct axon-synapse-dendrite connections.

  Imagine being a soldier on D-Day, one bee in a hive of 160,000 working in concert to a common end with absolute dedication. Maybe when you got drafted or signed up, your dedication wasn’t so absolute, but once you hit the beach, it was move forward or die.

  Command chains from prime ministers and presidents to generals, captains, sergeants, and corporals coordinated each other and all of the worker bees. No element functioned perfectly— 2,500 men died that day—but the swarm carried on.

  Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had an impressive title, but he also faced one of history’s great challenges: navigating the egos of politicians and military officers. Word has it that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a rather large measure of self-confidence and an equally generous capacity for self-righteousness, yet Eisenhower convinced Churchill to give him complete authority over the Royal Air Force—a heroic accomplishment. After all, the outnumbered, under-armed RAF had won the Battle of Britain three years before. Why would Churchill give that level of control to a latecomer to the theatre? Because he understood the necessity of a coherent soldier hive.

  Now, with you and me, that woman over there, and that guy in the hoodie, the feedback loop expands. But I’ve left out a crucial piece. We agreed to use the frog-puppy-Feynman model of the brain only if we remembered that it has to be re-optimized at each step of development. In Figure 18, I combined the already oversimplified model into a larger feedback system because I don’t know how to draw the re-optimized connections between each person on the team, connections that include not just language but every other type of communication.

  Figure 18: Communication flow among a team.

  While natural selection re-optimizes the connections in each draft of the brain, as members of a team, we’re responsible for re-optimizing our interconnections. Having participated on teams, we know that the connections need a lot of optimizing. Sometimes, the band comes together and plays as a single, perfect unit. Sometimes, we see the lightbulbs go on in the windows of each other’s eyes, and we’re able to convey the crucial next step, the key line of code, the ideal integrated circuit, the right blend of hops and malt without exchanging a word.

  Teams mesh; people come together, but not the way bees do. When people behave like cogs in a machine following simple, specific rules, the way that individual neurons and bees behave, their talents are lost. Accomplishment, heroism, and magnificence materialize from people working together, recognizing the purpose of the whole while integrating their personal intents into roles dedicated to pursuit of that greater good.

  So, is a corporation a hive? Is it somehow conscious? Could a group of people collaborating on an endeavor become so networked (dare I say Internetworked?) that genuine consciousness emerges?

  Consider what that would feel like. You’re in your cubicle doing your thing, a cog in the machine contributing to a mission along with a bunch of other cogs and, whoa, up boils an overall awareness. Each cog participates in that awareness, but would they be aware of that meta-awareness? It’s a stretch to imagine that each of your neurons is “aware” of you. Is it a stretch to think that an individual bee is aware of the hive’s awareness, assuming that awareness exists?

  Neurons can combine into a conscious being, but can transistors?

  At the risk of jumping off the science bandwagon into the deep end of the philosophical pool and suffocating in a sea of mixed metaphors, let me answer with a firm maybe.

  Crowd-sourcing is remarkably effective. If you put a gazillion candies in a giant jar and then ask one hundred people how many candies are in there, the average of those one hundred guesses will be spot-on; that is, the distribution of guesses will be centered around the actual value, though any single guess is likely to be way off. Is this a step toward hive intelligence? Probably not. If instead of asking individuals, we assemble those one hundred people into a committee and assign them the task of estimating the number of candies, the committee’s estimate will be almost as inaccurate as any single guess. As long as people guess independently, their average guesses will be pretty good, far more accurate than a correlated estimate.

  Many studies show that people work best alone, but combining their efforts yields the best results. Brainstorming is most effective when everyone writes down their ideas without talking to each other. The best software is written by individuals composing their own components; the success of the Manhattan Project may have emerged from the component-wise secrecy of development.

  Maybe we have hive-like properties. Maybe we interact in a way that groups people together in conditions just right for cultural revolutions. Maybe the individuals themselves don’t matter at all, just the confluence, the critical thought mass.

  But are we really a hive? Why are you asking me? We should ask a thousand people, not let them talk to each other, and average their answers.

  7.3 VALUE

  When you go shopping, the objects for sale come with price tags.

  Prices are set by a cultural expression of value, the giant feedback loop that is an economy. The value of something is the combination of the supply of that thing, the demand for it, the supply of the stuff that the thing is made of, and the demand for that stuff, and so on down the spiral.

  The word “demand” might be a capsule for never-ending neuroses. For example, people have decided that gold has intrinsic value. Gold has some useful features: It’s a great conductor of both heat and electricity, and it doesn’t tarnish. These properties make it terrific for use in technology. Gold cables, contacts, and circuits are all superior to copper or aluminum. But we’ve also decided that gold has value because it’s shiny, yellow, and rare!

  Shiny and yellow and rare!

  The entire amount of gold mined on Earth fits into about a twenty-five meter cube. Any dude with that amount of bling is independently wealthy—as long as everyone else agrees that gold has value. So much for independence.

  Figure 19: Scale drawing of the entire volume of gold so far mined.

  I think money serves as the perfect example of the fragility of culture’s foundation. If I suggested that we print small sheets of paper and cast little discs of cheap metal, and then tell people that they’re valuable, do you think people would spend their entire working lives trying to obtain this currency, this cash?

  7.3.1 The creator and the beholder

  To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is to say that value is subjective.

  We have different values, you and me, but if you’re hungry, happy, or sad, I know how you feel. Empathy between the creator and the beholder creates the common ground that leads to value. Instead of calling them mirror neurons, maybe we should call them money neurons.

  Picture the Mona Lisa; when you think of this painting, a network of associations lights up in your brain. Some of the nodes in that web bring to mind how critics, curators, other artists, and appraisers value this small portrait. Since it’s as much an icon as it is a painting, you might find it difficult to separate your personal estimate of its value from your appreciation for artists and critics.

  When you look at the painting, your bottom-up processors acquire information about shapes, colors, textures—all the details—and as pieces of that data boil up, you respond physically. Your inner frog and puppy respond to a woman looking back at you across centuries. She’s smiling, but it’s a wry, knowing smile as though she’s onto you. She alters your heart rate, and you perspire under her gaze. Maybe you feel a bit threatened, maybe you’re blown away by the vision, maybe you see something in her too, perhaps a hint of guilt; maybe you wonder what she’s hiding.

  Brilliant creators have th
e ability to provoke you.

  When you look at the Mona Lisa, you and Leonardo da Vinci share feelings. You catch what he meant. You empathize, or you don’t.

  If an Andromedan shows you a thing and this thing is so foreign, so extraterrestrial, that you have no idea what it means, represents, or does, and if the Andromedan has no way of communicating with you, then the thing has no value. On the other hand, when you pop open a Lagunitas India Pale Ale, pour it into a clear glass, inhale the homicidal hoppiness, and take the golden liquid into your gullet, you’re sharing something with Tony Magee. His beer does his talking, but your reaction determines its value.

  7.3.2 Engagement and novelty

  Engagement is the first step in the creator-beholder feedback loop. For a creator to get the attention of a beholder, she has to balance expectation and novelty. The beholder must recognize, read, or feel the intent of the creator and, whether she likes the work or not, it must at once conform to and violate her expectations. If it only conforms, then the bell won’t go off in the beholder’s head, and she’ll yawn right past it. If it only violates expectations, then the bell will go off, but too loudly, and the beholder will run away.

  For meaning to boil into consciousness, there must be novelty— but not too much of it!

  A pirate walks into a bar with a ship’s steering wheel stuck to the front of his pants. The bartender asks, “Hey, doesn’t that hurt?”

  The pirate growls, “Arrrgh, it’s drivin’ me nuts.”

  Humor balances punch lines on the fulcrum between absurd and tragic.

  Willi the comedian takes the stage and tells a story, a garden variety story that could happen to anyone. You mirror a simulation of the story in your head. Your brain recognizes the story’s pattern and predicts what will happen next. But then something happens that you don’t expect. This surprise raises conscious flags: Pay attention, something’s not quite right! And your bottom-up processors scramble around offering up choices of alternative contexts to integrate the story into your expectations. You stop for an instant, and then one or more of those alternatives boils up to consciousness. If more than one alternative percolates up and at least one of them is absurd, you laugh. The more absurd (which is to say, the less it jibes with your expectations), the harder you laugh. If two or more of the alternatives are either absurd or insignificant, you keep laughing.

  The tenser the buildup, and the greater the deflation of the built-up expectation, the funnier the joke is. A joke can end in tragedy and still be funny if that tragedy is highly unlikely, but if the absurdity remains a gruesome possibility, only the demented will laugh. If just one alternative pops up and you don’t find it absurd or if it closes the story on a sad note, you don’t laugh. If no alternatives pop up, you don’t get it.

  The absurdity of the punch line is the novelty that gives a joke value. Novelty is the difference that makes people take notice. By tying two separate concepts together, value has a fighting chance to erupt, but if the novelty is too much of a stretch, all novelty and no expectation, all shock and no empathy, well, if you have to explain a joke, no one laughs.

  The art of humor is the inconsistency of the punch line. How did the comedian introduce novelty? She starts with a story, observation, or situation, and then reaches around her brain—whether the process is conscious or not—hunting for remote associations, absurd, out-of-left-field alternatives to the mundane expectation. Or maybe she starts with the punch line, some ridiculous statement, and searches for a mundane context in which to place that perfect line.

  That remote association is lateral thought. The story walks along in a conventional direction, but the punch line forces you into a lateral direction, the conventional notion that only fits if you turn it upside down.

  Laughter is more valuable than gold, at least in the sense that every culture values it. It’s a positive feedback loop: first you smile, then your smile smiles, then your smiling smile smiles, and so on, until you erupt. If smiling evolved as a way for us to convert an implied threat into an explicit greeting, as in “I was going to threaten you, but I see it’s you, so I’m smiling instead,” then laughter is a way to announce that everything is okay. As the joke unfolds and the tension rises, we’re on guard as though we hear a rustling in the weeds behind us. But then, the punch line comes along and we let loose with the uncontrolled cackling, a jovial “tragedy’s not imminent, everything’s okay; it’s just Butch returning with a hippo.”

  7.3.3 Our subjectivity has a lot in common

  How much we value things, people, or animals varies by whim and whether. We’re fickle. Business, art, and science all have examples where failed works later became important.

  In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed an experiment to measure the properties of the æther. The æther was thought to be the atmosphere of outer space, and everyone knew it had to be there.

  Michelson and Morley assembled an experiment capable of measuring spatial variations with an accuracy of about 0.00000002 inches (5 nanometers), an amazing accomplishment with nineteenth-century technology. The idea was pretty simple. Light should travel faster in the direction of the aether’s “luminous wind” than perpendicular to that pseudo-breeze. But their experiments kept coming up negative. Scientists at the time, including Michelson and Morley, believed that they’d failed to find it, and back to the drawing board they went, and failed again. Morley had a nervous breakdown from overwork. Either they were terrible scientists, or the æther didn’t exist—but it had to exist, everyone agreed!

  Unknown to Michelson and Morley, a young man working in a Swiss patent office had been spending a great deal of time puzzling over light, space, and time. Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity didn’t need an æther, and the Michelson-Morley experiment became some of its first supporting evidence. Those experiments are now considered the world’s most important failed experiments.

  About the same time that Michelson and Morley were failing in science, Claude Monet was failing in art. Well, the parallel isn’t that parallel, of course, but the subjective nature of value runs deeper in art than it does in science.

  As photographic technology matured, the need for realistic images changed. Why paint a picture when you can take a photo? In 1863, at the juried Salon de Paris exhibition, the old-school realists—the folks whom Kodak would render all but irrelevant—rejected the emerging impressionists’ work. A decade later, Monet, together with artists like Renoir, Pissarro, and Cézanne, formed a cooperative, the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, and held their own exhibit in a photographer’s gallery. The critics unleashed on the new style, though one critic, in thrashing Monet in particular, coined the term “impressionist” and it stuck.

  Is Top 40 music the best? Are bestsellers the finest literature? How about blockbuster movies?

  Hold on, you say? Should I use popularity to measure quality?

  What other measure is there? We just saw experts in both science and art make huge mistakes.

  Van Gogh sold one painting in his life, and he cranked out over two thousand works. What his family didn’t throw out with the rubbish now sells for tens of millions of dollars, but the critics trashed his first masterpieces.

  Who decides what’s good?

  In science, good means correct, demonstrably verifiable. Einstein and Feynman were great physicists because the theories they developed predicted phenomena that really happened. Michelson and Morley turned out to be great scientists because they shot down a lame theory.

  Art has critics and contests that award the “best artists” to help us decipher what we should value.

  Was Thomas Kinkade a great painter because malls all across America sell his works? No other painter could boast his level of retail success, but critics hated him.

  Why should we pay attention to critics? You and me, babe, we know what we like. We don’t need no stinking critics, right?

  But just as no single scientist can pe
rform every experiment, make every observation, reformulate every theory, that is, just as every scientist has to rely on other scientists, neither you nor I have time to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every band, drink every beer—okay, we can make time for that, but for the other things, maybe we need some help.

  The creator-beholder feedback loop is tied as tight as any. Our positions and values may all be subjective, but our subjectivity has a lot in common. A critic’s job is to find that common subjective value so that we can waste less time on crappy art. Critics serve a worthy purpose, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to loathe them.

  7.3.4 Right people, right place, and right time

  Physics was finished in 1900. The great classical physicists Ludwig Boltzman, Henri Poincare, Henry Poynting, Lord Rayleigh, and the rest all but declared the field complete. With Newton’s gravity having survived the test of time and Maxwell’s recent unification of electricity and magnetism, the theory of the physical world had been reduced to five simple equations. Sure, there were a few wrinkles in need of ironing, but the big questions had been answered. Nice work all around!

  Two of those wrinkles would explode under the iron within the next few years. First, Max Planck came up with an explanation for what was known as the “ultraviolet catastrophe.” The wrinkle came from an old theory’s prediction of the light spectrum radiated by black bodies; think of charcoal briquettes in a barbecue. As they heat up, they first glow red, then yellow, white, and blue. Not only did the old theory fail, it predicted high-intensity ultraviolet radiation from even slightly glowing coals. If it were true, you couldn’t cook ribs without getting melanoma. Planck’s solution predicted that light comes in discrete packets of energy. In calling them “quanta,” he discovered quantum physics.

  At about the same time, the pipe-smoking guy with the crazy hair in the Swiss patent office ironed out the wrinkle that killed the idea of interstellar æther.