When I was a boy, I couldn’t pronounce her name, but she didn’t care about that. Now I’m not even sure if she remembers it. And that’s a shame because it rolls off your tongue like water in a stream.
Watching her in that sunny room, you see the nurses go by. Now and then they stop and leave some food or steal some clothes or jewelry that she’ll never miss. She doesn’t move, just sits in her own darkness.
Do you think she’s hiding? Do you think she laughs when the nurses come and go?
She used to laugh so often, a merry laugh that would light up your heart if you could hear it now. She taught me to laugh in the face of crises and smile in the face of tragedy. And she always had an illuminating quip at hand, something she managed to balance on warmth, insight, and irony.
Does she relive the decades? Is that what she does in her place in the dark?
You know how time slips away. Does she cling to the years, the lovers, the children, the cousins, and does she remember me?
I remember a picture over the mantel in her warm, frilly house, a picture of her with the ghost she loved but barely knew.
Sixty-five years ago, she lived on Kings Road. She helped the wounded and she cleared the rubble while her young man sailed across the Channel with her picture next to his heart.
She woke up this morning and said his name. In that instant, the clouds cleared and she remembered that he never came back across that channel. Now she sits without a sound, without motion, and no one knows what happens in her mind. No one knows if anything goes on in there at all. She has so much in her life to relive, to wonder about— the way children look into the future and wonder where they’ll land; does she wonder where she flew?
She closes her eyes again and I wonder if she’s gone to hide.
A nurse comes in with ice cream because it’s cold and sweet and easy to eat and says, “Here you go, Valerie.” She says it with care, but it’s different from the name she used yesterday, Victoria, I think it was, and Verona or Virginia the day before and Violet last week.
Her eyes flutter at the name, and it comes back to me.
I remember the boy I was, going to her door and mispronouncing her name. I remember the look on her face. That sparkle in her eye when she took my hand and said, “You can call me anything you like, but my name is Veronica.”
8.1 THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE VALUABLE
So far, at this point in each chapter, I’ve conveyed to you how the opening story indicates where the chapter is headed. I’m not doing that this time, other than to tell you that the story of Veronica is mostly fiction. What’s not fiction is about someone else’s grandmother, not mine. You’ll see whose in a few minutes, and you’ll be psyched.
This is my favorite chapter because we’re finally going to start pulling concepts together into tools that we can actually put to use.
8.2 IN IT FOR THE BUZZ
We tend to think of science and art as widely separate fields. Some people might even think of them as opposites—though I suspect those folks have little experience doing either. To understand how science and art feed each other, we need to look at what brings value to the fields, how they’re performed, and what their goals are, but first, let’s consider the people.
Artists and scientists have a lot in common. As highly educated people, scientists tend to appreciate the classics in art, literature, and music. Artists, working with color and sound and materials, employ scientific analysis in the daily process of making art.
There’s no question that science is better funded than art, but the tiny fraction of well-paid artists brings home far greater riches than the highest-paid scientists—after all, the highest-paid university faculty are football coaches. On the other hand, if you pick a random scientist and a random artist, odds are the scientist makes a six-figure salary and the artist a five-figure salary. A scientist grinding away in a lab, digging through data, searching for a discovery, or struggling with equations to assemble a theory can double her salary in a month by bailing out of research and signing on with industry.
A struggling artist, whether cranking out novels, paintings, sculpture, or playing gigs at bars and coffee shops, can easily make more money by getting a “real” job. Indeed, few of the people who think of themselves as artists actually file their taxes as artists.
Artists and scientists do what they do for the buzz.
When you stumble onto something that no one else has seen before, you get a jolt of excitement, joy, satisfaction, elation, and even fear. After all, if you make a mistake, your so-called discovery will reveal it to everyone you respect. Creating a work that you know to the depths of your being will alter people’s perspectives or move them to laughter and tears, outrage and contentment, brings the same buzz of joy, satisfaction, elation, and, yes, fear—because no one experiences self-doubt like artists experience self-doubt.
8.2.1 The glorious hopelessness of art and science
Here’s my favorite definition of art: the distillation of pure experience. What do you think pure experience even means? It sounds to me like the rush of being alive in the moment, truly experiencing existence, a feeling that you might never achieve but can always get close to. When an artist creates a masterpiece, he imposes his own experience of the world in all its meaning and feeling, culture and politics, oppression and exultation, glory and despair on us, the beholders. Artists insert us into different subjective realities, in one way or another, to help us understand what it’s like, whatever “it” may be. Sharing one person’s raw subjectivity with another is, of course, impossible. That artists pursue the impossible is in itself beautifully artistic.
On the other hand, scientists pursue objective descriptions of impersonal reality that should make sense to any sufficiently capable and curious being—human, alien, or beast. Scientists insist that their descriptions and predictions of nature’s phenomena be independent of their personal viewpoints. Galileo’s formulation of relativity, identical to Newton’s, provided equations for assuring that we could switch reference frames without altering the theory. Einstein’s relativity does the same thing, but with the caveat that the speed of light in a vacuum must have the same value, regardless of the point of view of the observer.
Scientific results must be independent of the moods of the scientists, right?
Well, no, not quite. Science begins and ends with feeling, just as much as art does.
One of the keystone discoveries so far uncovered by neuroscience, a foundational observation that I’m confident will survive with only fine-tuned modifications as the field stabilizes, is that we don’t understand anything without feelings. Before we can realize our own understanding, we have to get the feeling of knowing.
The feeling of knowing drives a scientist on the path to discovery, but it also compels artists to push harder in their search for the perfect metaphor, whether in sound, on canvas, or in stone.
That scientists and artists both pursue impossible goals—pure objectivity on one hand and pure subjectivity on the other—carries a divine justice or a melancholy hopelessness, depending on your mood. As hard as they try to transcend their limits, artists and scientists are just blood-pumping, milk-nurtured, air-breathing, laughing-crying mammals, not so many steps up the ladder from the dogs lying at their feet or the cats scratching their furniture.
Scientists have proven that true objectivity is impossible because the experimentalist can never be removed from the experiment. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle gives a precise, dare I call it objective, measure of the minimum possible level of subjectivity. Isn’t it just like science to be so objective about its subjectivity? Those scientists are so cute.
Art has nothing like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Artists will fly ever closer to the flame, forever distilling meaning into feeling and sharing it in more ways, despite their absolute, primal understanding that they can never make the perfect connection.
Quite appropriate epitaphs for each, don’t you think?
Figure 22: (a) The scientist and (b) the artist.
8.3 NEUROAESTHETICS IN ART AND SCIENCE: RAMACHANDRAN’S RULES
Along with neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neurowrestling, and neurophilandering, neuroaesthetics is an emerging field that claims to be able to cite specific features of art that render it popular or perhaps even good—in the sense of “subjective, sure, but ‘good’ to every subjective human.”
Neuroaesthetics sets out to determine a set of guiding principles to understand how and why, though not what, art pleases people. Trying to figure out what makes a masterpiece or a bestseller or a top-of-the-charts hit is nothing new. One could even call it the siren’s wail of record executives and publishers. Gallery owners seem a bit above the fray.
V. S. Ramachandran, a professor at my alma mater, the University of California, San Diego, and one of my favorite neuroscience authors, has composed a set of criteria accompanied by neuroscience-based explanations for why some metaphors explode with the clarity of the Hope Diamond while others are peanut butter sandwiches that take too much chewing to get to the point.
Don’t concern yourself about artistic beauty being reduced to a set of rules that Madison Avenue can use to “create” masterpieces in sweatshops. Worked out to its logical conclusion, neuroaesthetics applied to marketing would undo itself. The role that novelty plays in value requires scarcity, so any success in mass-producing breakout art would be short-lived. It’s sort of an economic version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: The instant that someone develops a perfect system for predicting what sells, the market self-corrects in a way that ruins the system.
That said, it’s perfectly reasonable to peek under the hood and try to glean common elements of successful art in terms of brain architecture and response—be it paintings, sculpture, music, literature, craft beer, whatever. To this end, let’s work through Ramachandran’s nine laws of aesthetics. Dr. Ramachandran cheerfully agrees that some of his proposed laws seem to contradict each other and are redundant in some ways. Rather than defend these deficiencies, he suggests that we have to start somewhere. I’m down with that.
Instead of calling them laws, let’s call them rules; laws should be reserved for the inviolate laws of nature. Rules, on the other hand, are made to be broken.
Ramachandran started from the Sanskrit word rasa, which means something along the lines of “capturing an essence in order to evoke a specific response.” The secret to deriving an aesthetic buzz by applying Ramachandran’s rules requires balance in the push and pull of very nearly contradictory concepts.
8.3.1 Ramachandran’s rule of grouping—dissonance to consonance
Common themes within a work percolate patterns, clues of what the work is about, without screaming in your face. In paintings, you’ll find the same color repeated here and there; melodies are built on a riff that’s repeated at different scales with different emphasis; themes infuse depth into literature and enforce concepts in popular science. Visually, groupings settle the eye, provide regularity, and build up from behind the scenes into the whole.
Consider the pieces of a really easy puzzle.
Figure 23: Incoherent drawing.
As you look at the pieces, your visual processors check each one independently. Your left brain compares the pieces, searching the edges to determine how they attach to each other. Your right brain is annoyed by the dissonance and automatically backs off to ponder the whole. Signals relay across the left-right divide as though debating the prominence of the pieces versus the whole. Action potentials fire almost at random between your senses and symbol processors until the instant when you recognize the whole. In that instant, they begin firing in a coherent, synchronous resonance, and you see how the pieces come together.
The pleasant sensation when you decipher a puzzle comes from the transition between random and coherent neural activity, that is, from dissonance to consonance.
Grouping comes from our fine-tuned ability to recognize patterns even when they are hidden; that is, to see through camouflage. Since that ability allows us to find apples in trees, spot hidden saber-toothed tigers looming behind boulders, and recognize talking points from politicians of the opposite stripe, it generates satisfaction. Just as with everything else humans do, we get the same buzz from more abstract grouping: by using metaphors that follow common themes in literature; similar, carefully positioned colors in art, fashion, and design; and melodies that expand the complexity of a riff. Creators draw the beholder to certain features of images, structures, or songs; the more complex the pattern, the greater the satisfaction—as long as we can make the transition from dissonance to consonance.
You can see the risks that artists take by grouping complex patterns in a work. The juice in literature comes from putting the reader into the experience of characters, and that juice gets even sweeter as the author backs off and lets the reader interpret the world presented, solve its problems, and decipher its mysteries—but if the work isn’t clear and the reader has to pause and go back pages to figure it out, they’re likely to set the book aside. Too much complexity, and it collapses like a lead zeppelin; get it just right, and it soars like Led Zeppelin.
Now let’s look at Ramachandran’s law of grouping in the context of science.
Figure 24: Coherent drawing
Science begins with assumptions. Rather than fret over whether an assumption is reasonable, scientists move forward knowing that some of their assumptions will not hold, and they’ll have to deal with it. That’s okay, though; they like to deal with things. Maybe the best scientific example of grouping is the periodic table of the elements. More than a hundred years before quantum theory explained why certain elements have similar behaviors—like carbon and silicon, neon and argon, silver and gold—alchemists and early chemists grouped the elements by their similarities. The patterns within the groups and subgroups aided the development of atomic theory even as atomic theory explained the origin of the common themes.
In the first half of the twentieth century, nuclear physics experiments produced hundreds of particles. Theorists used the mathematics of group theory to provide order to the so-called particle zoo. Making use of these patterns led to the quark model almost a decade before quarks were discovered. I say this with an air of celebration—and how could I pass up using group theory as an example of grouping?—but in the back of my mind, I wonder how our prejudice for things that fit in groups might be directing what we do and don’t discover.
8.3.2 Ramachandran’s rule of peak shift—exaggeration
We like a twist in our martinis. We like pushup bras. We like big muscles. We like tight jeans. We like extra emphasis on the things we like. We season food to get as much taste as we can. We apply perfume. We attach shiny metals and glittering stones to our bodies, sometimes at the cost of cutting our very skin! We like beer, of course, but we also like scotch. We decided that gold, in all its untarnishable shininess, would be our symbol of value, the soft, malleable, rare, and most metallic of metals.
We seem prone to enjoy a bit of excess: excess in all things, but not excess in all details.
Peak shift excites our inner puppies, making it easier for our inner Feynmans to latch onto the features we like. Overemphasizing certain facets of an object fires up our internal models of those objects and gives them motion and reality.
Every color we see is a combination of the three primitive colors our eyes detect. Peak shift emphasizes the primitives, the fundamentals, the magic parts, the aspects of the thing that give it its thingness. When you see the peak, you can figure out the rest. Peaks are primitives.
Abstract art separates the peak from the object itself. Mathematics separates the peak of a natural principle from reality.
Ramachandran’s laws of neuroaesthetics are a picture-in-a-picture example of peak shift. When these nine rules have been reduced to the minimum number of coordinates that explain all of aesthetics—okay, IF these nine rules turn out to be on the right track, and IF we eventu
ally discover aesthetics’ red-, green-, and blue-like primitives—then those coordinates themselves will be the aesthetic peaks of aesthetics.
It’s not just people, either. Nikolas Tinbergen did a bunch of experiments with seagulls in the 1950s. First, he discovered that hungry seagull chicks focus on a little red dot on their mothers’ beaks. When a chick pecks at mom’s dot, she feeds it. So Dr. Tinbergen made a little puppet with a yellow beak and a red dot. The chicks pecked, and he fed them. Then he switched from a beak puppet to a stick with a red dot. The chicks pecked the dot, and he fed them. He made the dot bigger, much bigger than the dot any seagull mother would ever have, and the chicks became very excited, pecking away like it was seagull Thanksgiving. Then he went for the peak. Instead of a dot, he put three red stripes on the stick. Even though it looked nothing like a seagull beak, the chicks went crazy. Dr. Tinbergen found the peak, the seagull broad shoulders, the seagull cleavage, seagull candles and champagne. The seagull chicks got the munchies, and Tinbergen won a Nobel Prize.
Science is built on peak shift. The entire goal of physics is to determine the bottom line, the primordial rules that dictate how the universe works. Newton’s laws are an abstract peak of motion.
8.3.3 Ramachandran’s rule of contrast—boundaries
Our visual processors seek boundaries first.
The brighter the boundary, the faster we can recognize the pattern, and the more easily that pattern boils up into consciousness. When an author switches from a tranquil scene to an action-packed one, he makes an abrupt shift from long, metaphor-heavy sentences close to a character’s point of view to simple, short, sharp sentences that let the action tell the story. Arguments rely on contrasting pros and cons. The universe has matter and antimatter, and the fact that there’s so much more matter than antimatter drives physicists nuts.
Dark orange against a muddy red background looks just as orange as bright orange against a bright red background, but that dark orange would look brighter and better against a blue background.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 18