For science to go forward, you need experiments capable of testing theories and theories that make testable predictions. Technology drives experimental progress by enabling ever-more precise measure ments, and theory drives technology by providing the understanding necessary to devise new equipment, like a game of leapfrog.
Could it have been a coincidence that the quantum/relativity revolution in physics began in 1900, half a century into the industrial revolution?
You’ve heard of most of these people: Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Lord Ernest Rutherford, Emmy Noether, Werner Heisenberg, Neils Bohr, Richard Feynman—okay, maybe you haven’t heard of Emmy Noether, but you should have, and you will hear more in a few pages. Were they truly geniuses? Or were they lucky to be in the right place at the right time? More scientific progress occurred in the next five decades than had occurred in the previous fifty thousand years.
Allan Ginsberg wrote a poem titled “Howl” in 1955. At the time, he and a bunch of people he hung out with called themselves Beat Poets and did readings at an art gallery in San Francisco. Like quantum physics and relativity, “Howl” didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Ginsberg was well-read and wrote in the long-line style of Walt Whitman, so his poem had literary credibility. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco bookseller, published it. The mainstream media thought that “Howl” was obscene and generated such a fuss that the poem was banned and Ferlinghetti was arrested for selling it.
A year after the publication of “Howl,” a book written by a friend of Ginsberg, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, came out. It so happened that the New York Times book reviewer was on vacation. The fill-in reviewer loved On the Road, and said that it was “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’” and it sold like crazy. The Beat Poets’ notoriety grew into a counterculture movement, and thousands of beatniks took their parents’ cars on the road to drive to California via Route 66.
Did destiny look down on the circuits of Silicon Valley in 1975, the music of Liverpool in 1960, the poetry and prose of Greenwich Village in 1950, San Francisco’s North Beach in 1955, cars in Detroit in 1903, physics, psychology, and art in Vienna in 1900, paintings in Paris in 1873, and religion in Jerusalem in 33 and decree that they were special? Did fate assemble extraordinary talent in these locations, or did a critical mass of passion at the right time and place fuel the talent-skill feedback loops into revolutions?
Was Allan Ginsberg a visionary? Of course he was. But would he have been a visionary in Kansas City? The odds are that no one there would have helped him publish Howl, so probably not. Was Freud or Klimt or Max Planck special? Damn right, but would they have been as special in 1900 Bogota as they were in a Vienna brimming with brilliance, creativity, and free speech? Were the apostles and Jesus special? Apparently they were, but could we distinguish John the Baptist from Jesus of Nazareth without the help of Judas, Mary Magdalene, John, Paul, George, and Luke? Maybe so, maybe not— and I’m not disparaging religion here, other than the George wisecrack, and I’d like credit for deleting the Ringo joke—I’m merely pointing out that something special occurred that distinguished Jesus from the other itinerant rabbis of his time; whether or not that special thing was directed from on high or not is above my pay scale.
So were these folks natural-born geniuses? Or were they in the right place at the right time with the right friends?
Lots of ingredients go into the witch’s brew that generates cultural disruption. The specific people are rarely as unique as they seem. Without the right timing and place, the cauldron doesn’t make the same soup.
7.3.5 Common sense is neither
Common sense is something that a group of people believes. When something makes sense, we get a satisfying feeling of certainty, but it doesn’t mean that we’re right, nor does sharing a conviction with others mean that it’s true.
What passes for common sense in one culture might not be the same in another. We get most of our beliefs by interacting with people in our own tribes. When we examine a human trait, if we want to understand whether it’s true for everyone or just for the people in a specific group, we have to make comparisons. Science demands that those comparisons stand up to the as-close-to-objective-as-we-can-get examination of statistical significance. Statisticians always sound like they’re talking in reverse, so I apologize in advance for the next sentence. Statistical significance measures the degree to which an observation is inconsistent with random processes. If an observation can be produced by a random confluence of events, then that observation merits no more attention than a roll of dice. Statisticians have analyzed random processes for centuries. We have the tools to subject claims to objective tests so that we can say something like “the chances of a culture preferring long necks to broad foreheads is consistent with a random fluctuation occurring in 5 percent of similar samples.”
Paul Ekman is a psychologist who has performed many cross-cultural studies of facial responses to emotions. Consider pleasure: Something tickles your fancy—literally or figuratively, battery-powered or cerebral—and certain facial muscles react much faster than conscious processes allow. He has accumulated evidence that certain responses are common to every culture; everyone smiles, everyone cries, everyone laughs—he’s got a long list of others.
Linguistics has a similar commonality. When describing an injury caused by a sharp object or an injury resulting in a bruise, regardless of which language you speak, you would be able to tell which word, “cut” or “pummel,” caused which injury.
But now the trouble begins. Although it takes a quarter of a second to hit the brakes, our facial responses to surprise, disgust, sadness, and anger happen almost ten times faster. We might think that reaction speed measures the amount of wetware processing required and that the less wetware involved, the more universal the response. No such luck. Reaction time is insufficient; we are too plastic!
While the responses can be universal, the causes needn’t be. Our motor responses are programmed down to the lowest levels, and culture is one of the most effective programmers around.
We’re all likely to be freaked out by a slithering, hissing, fanged object. But when that object is fricasseed, some of us will tighten our lips in disgust and others will salivate.
Here’s an example of how comprehension can depend on whom we grew up with. Neurologist and author Robert Burton loves to show these two diagrams; which looks longer?
Figure 20: Dr. Burton’s favorite piece of art (since I knew that you’d know that both graphics were the same length—I mean, why would anyone ask if they weren’t? —I drew the bottom one a bit longer).
The bottom one looks longer, though you know me well enough by now to realize that I wouldn’t ask unless they were the same length, right? Well, to folks from Europe and North America, the bottom one looks almost 20 percent longer than the top one, but to the San foragers of the Kalahari Desert, the two appear to be the same length.
To illustrate the fragility of conclusions drawn from tests performed on samples of people from undergraduate programs mostly in the U.S. and Europe, let me present an alternative conclusion to why one graphic appears longer than the other. Since our eyes are so close together, we don’t see objects in their full three-dimensional glory unless they’re within a few meters. To discern the distance (i.e., the third dimension) of objects far away, we rely on perspective. This figure shows how perspective conveys the illusion of different lengths.
The perspective argument provides a common-sense description for the optical illusion. It gives a cozy chin-stroking feeling of pleasure in our highfalutin, pseudo-intellectual brainpans, doesn’t it? But it collapses under the weight of a single contradiction from a rare culture. See, that’s all it takes. For a scientific conclusion to be deemed correct, it has to apply in every case. One failure and it’s done. After all, the San foragers see in just as many dimensions as everyone else does.
Before wrapping up an idea, calling it done, and congratulating ourselves, scientists have to submit any test performed on humans to a huge cross-cultural population to find out if the effect is universal or culturally derived. It’s not the place of science to judge the relative merits of separate cultures—that’s best left to Raiders fans. And second, as Miles Dylan says, regardless of subject, “There’s more to it than that.”
7.4 DOES FRIENDSHIP DEFINE US?
Friendship might be our greatest achievement. How many successful friendships have you had? How many successful love affairs? Compared to romance, friendship is easy.
Our mind-reading ability, resulting from a combination of theory of (other people’s) mind(s) and our immediate mirrored responses to the experiences of others, does more than give us empathy; it makes us friendly. We get each other’s jokes, sometimes before we even say them out loud. How often do you have an experience that you can’t wait to share? “Can’t wait” means that you feel an appetite. We are drawn to each other. When we interact with our people, the tribal wells from which we draw our friends, we get a pleasant dose of oxytocin. Humans feel good about hanging with their people, but we don’t get that pleasant dose when we interact with other tribes, people whom we think of as separate and different. Trouble has ensued from this trait.
Friendship does more than bring us closer together to fend off the elements; it gives us a mirror in which we see ourselves. It goes like this: Your mirroring system reproduces the experiences of other people in your mind. From those experiences, you construct models of the identities of other people. You then use those models to see yourself as others see you. Now reproduce that feedback loop for everyone you’ve ever interacted with, and your self-image appears.
Let me rephrase that last bit. You’re standing between two mirrors. When you look in one, you see reflections of your reflections of your reflections ad infinitum. Now think of each of those images as your understanding of how another person sees you. Your first reflection is how you think you look to your partner or your best friend. Six or seven reflections further in, you’ll find what you look like to colleagues and acquaintances. The really dim reflections far in the distance are how you’re seen by people you barely know.
Our unique characters quite likely emerge not from quirky independence, but from our perceptions of what other people think of us.
And the wind carries away the final ashes of my rugged individualism.
Right behind the geometric center of your forehead there’s a spot in your brain that lights up when you think of yourself, look in a mirror, or hear your name. It lights up when you think of other people thinking of you, when you decide how to interact with someone else, how you fit into a specific context, and when you suppress your emotions, that is, when you suppress who you “really” are.
If nature put the processors that we use to figure out who we are right behind the geometric centers of our foreheads, then neuroscience has found evidence that we figure out who we are and what we care about, not as rugged individuals controlling our own destinies, but from a feedback loop of our interactions with other people (and presumably animals). The feedback loop goes like this: We conceive our self-images by adding up our perceptions of what other people think. Some people matter more than others, but everyone you interact with has an effect.
If this sounds a bit sketchy, a bit speculative, it should, because it is.
In any case, there’s no denying that our identities form to some extent or another from a self-perception that is deeply influenced by our perception of other people’s perceptions of us.
7.5 SIGNIFICANCE
Our worlds are fragile.
I’ve had to surrender my self-image as a rugged individualist. While I still insist that I’m neither a follower nor a leader, I have this impending feeling that, no matter what I do, I’m a cog in some sort of machine, a bee in some sort of hive.
In coming together as teams, we extend our own frog-puppy-Feynman feedback loops to other people. Like everything else we do—sticks and rocks to hammers and chisels to symbols and software—it’s another layer of abstraction. Organizations reflect similar structures as our own brains. Oh, it’s hardly a one-to-one map, and if it were a metaphor, it would be a poor one, but nothing is tidy in biology.
Like your brilliant, top-down, at least somewhat unified consciousness, the supreme commander assembles the other generals and sends commands down the chain to an infantry of parallel processing privates. The actions of those parallel processors percolate up to higher levels, but everything the supreme commander wills depends on the actions of thousands of privates and their results. It’s the rare private who boils up and catches the attention of the top-down commander. The loop is reproduced at every layer of organization.
What gives? Must there be a leader? Are the anarchists wrong about utopia emerging from the natural goodwill of humanity once they’ve annihilated all authority? This brings us back to hives and my mother.
In writing this chapter, my rugged individualism went AWOL and I had to realize that I’m part of a community. My mother once pointed out that community is the root from which the word communism springs.
Pardon me for using such inflammatory rhetoric, but I can’t resist. “Soviets” were meant to be small democratic committees in which each member would have an equal vote in deciding the course of a community, like city councils where everyone in town is a councilperson. If everyone played a part in one or more soviets and the structure repeated across the world, then any remaining central authority would evaporate like my sense of independence. Instead, they got Yuri Andropov.
That’s a butchered version, but it’s good enough for government work. (See how I put a government wisecrack in a description of a government structure? Yeah, it should have been funny. Maybe the Soviet thing killed it.)
There’s no organization chart among bees. The hive emerges from the actions of all of them. The queen is nothing but a well-fed worker. She doesn’t have any authority other than that she’s the only one getting laid.
Now let’s go back to the neocortex, that repeating structure of neural circuits from which consciousness emerges. Sure, different sets of neurons assemble into circuits that perform specific tasks, and you may value one more than another, but anything resembling Eisenhower emerges from all of them acting together. So maybe your brain is a bed-wetting, god-hating Communist, or maybe not. Look, I had to abandon my rugged individuality; give me a break.
The layering of abstraction ferments everything we do together.
Baring your teeth became a welcome gesture that indicated less level of threat. Our inner drug dealers give us a neurotransmitter buzz when we laugh and hang out with our friends so we value friendship and laughter. Emoticons, the little smiley faces you embed in text messages and Facebook’s “like” button are abstractions of smiles. Emoticons like :) started out as the exchange of fanged threats among primates.
We want objective value, but it doesn’t exist. Value only exists when either a bunch of us, or one person who lots of others either respect or fear—damn Machiavelli—declare it. We make things significant. Either some person, place, thing, or idea is invested with significance, or there isn’t any.
That we create significance need not offend your coat of ethics or moral cardigan; it doesn’t imply moral relativism. The alone-together feedback loop presents plenty of common social parameters. Provided that you are extra careful in determining which are common to all cultures and which are unique to yours, you’re welcome to consider them absolute.
Now that we’ve seen how value comes from each other, we can dig back into the gray matter and try to make sense of how neurons transmitting action potential spikes from axons to dendrites result in stuff that most of us like, stuff that’s “good.”
V
alue might be subjective, but it’s not arbitrary.
But first, I give you a sad story that will prime you for my favorite chapter and a really cool section in about two dozen pages. By the way, telling you that I’m priming you primes you even more than if I hadn’t mentioned it, because otherwise you’d be all, “I was told there would be neither math nor tears in this class.”
8
ART & SCIENCE
SHE LIVES IN A MANY-ROOMED HOUSE ON A HILL, a house where people go to tie up loose ends and fade away. Instead of a driveway or garage, this house has a parking lot. Instead of parents and kids, this house has nurses and old people. And instead of a mailbox, there’s a small sign out front that says “rehabilitation,” but no one recovers and walks away from this house.
A couple of years ago, when she first moved in, she liked to joke around with the nurses and doctors, but they were too busy to laugh. From her bed, she used to watch the cars that drive by carrying people who don’t have the time or take the time to listen to the stories of the folks in this house. She doesn’t look out that window so much anymore. The sun shines into her room, but she sits with her hands over her eyes blocking the light.
As a little girl, she played with dolls and trucks. As a young woman she flirted with airmen, soldiers, and then scored herself a sailor. She waited and helped, and one time she even jumped out of an airplane.
I met her the day I was born. She comforted me and took care of me. When me mum went to work, she played with me; she taught me how to kick a ball, and there she was, cheering, when I buried my first goal.
I remember her standing at the head of the table and telling stories. She could make a man wink, a woman cringe, and children bawl with laughter. I remember adults telling stories in hushed tones that I was too young to understand, stories that she stopped with one withering glare.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 17