Some pairs of colors go nicely together. Color-value pairs, like yellow and purple, red and green, orange and blue, and silver and black convey day and night, apple and tree, flowers and sky, and just win, baby! They accentuate each other. Such colors capitalize on the origin of our color-detector wetware. Natural selection made red and green go nicely together so food would look good, not for Christmas decorations.
In music, chords are combinations of separate notes that go nicely together. Sets of three to six different notes combine in pleasing ways, similar to the way colors pair up. Combinations of different notes cause different audible experiences. Two close-together notes create beats at a frequency given by the difference of the frequencies of the neighboring notes. Most cultures find anharmonic beats annoying. If the notes composing a chord have frequencies that are far-enough apart that our frequency-detecting cochlea can’t detect the beat frequencies, then those combinations tend to come together nicely in a consonant sum. Musicians manipulate their audiences by grouping pleasant and unpleasant sounds to evoke certain responses.
When the rule of grouping means grouping in a broad (and not necessarily neighboring) sense, contrast emphasizes two neighboring characteristics. Artists of every type learn how to use contrast to focus your attention where they want it.
In science, contrast leads to discovery. Signals tend to be buried in noise. Of course, one boy’s noise is another girl’s signal, but the trick to finding something new is looking at a set of data in a way that gives maximum contrast. Scientists and engineers design equipment to provide the greatest contrast possible between what they want to see, things they don’t yet understand, and what they don’t care about. Biologists use dyes to distinguish cellular structures. We switched from analog signaling to digital for many reasons, but the biggest reason was contrast. Digital signals impose a step above the noise.
8.3.4 Ramachandran’s rule of isolation—heuristics and approximation
A simple sketch, a bare outline, a single brushstroke, one tell-tale note, and a single character overcome by a single emotion all demand attention and make powerful, long-lasting impressions.
To get your attention, an artist has to give your brain something that’s either unexpected, so it boils up from your parallel processors, or strikes a note so clear that you can understand the whole without assembling it from its parts. Isolating features of a work draws the beholder’s attention and simplifies the point.
Simple, isolated objects resonate because they’re easily matched to our stash of recognizable patterns and, because they’re so easy to latch onto, they feel louder, brighter, and more archetypical without actually being louder, brighter, or more archetypical.
While Ramachandran’s rule of peak shift relies on exaggeration, isolation relies on simplicity.
Understanding the universe is difficult because there’s so damn much going on. Reductionism is a form of isolation. By isolating components of a system, we have a fighting chance to understand complicated systems. What’s more, when we really understand something, that is, when we have a complete mathematical description that unfailingly predicts everything that a system does, we still need a way to really understand it conceptually. I know how stupid that sounds, but whatever truth there is to a physical theory is in the mathematical prediction, and sometimes the translation to language, to a concept, leaves crucial details behind.
Isolation provides the powerful tools of hand-waved descriptions, back-of-the envelope calculations, and rules of thumb, heuristic descriptions that help us internalize a complex theory into a satisfying concept. Once we have the concept, we can develop intuition for how things work. Without isolation, a mathematical theory doesn’t provide the satisfaction of understanding, the feeling of knowing that is, after all, why scientists play in their respective sandboxes in the first place.
8.3.5 Ramachandran’s rule of peekaboo—bait
Peekaboo is another way to get someone’s attention, this time by understatement. It’s such a powerful concept that you’ll grasp it in one word: striptease.
The world’s great theatres have no microphones, amplifiers, or speakers; instead, they have wonderful acoustics. Good acoustics don’t make the sound louder; they make the sound clearer. Storytellers and stage directors understand the value of soft, low-volume speech that forces the audience to pay extra close attention. When a simple, subtle puzzle is embedded in art, a fragment of a guitar riff hidden in a rhythm, a swirl of yellow in a tree trunk or pond, a quirky minor character or clue in a novel, the beholder is sucked right in.
Novelists create suspense by suspending the story and withholding information to draw your attention, sometimes without your even knowing it. As the saying goes: Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, but make ’em wait.
When baited, we look closer, and that means we’re aroused.
Unlike isolation or contrast, the peekaboo rule acquires your attention by hiding the goods and engaging your participation in the song, story, painting, or structure. The extra attention requires some work on your part, an investment, and when you invest in something, you feel like you need to own it.
Isolation draws your attention, but peekaboo entices you with hints to look closer. Isolation gives immediate top-down gratification when you “get it.” Peekaboo engages your bottom-up parallel processors by hinting at something, creating just enough dissonance to draw you in, but not so much that you’re confused. Isolation fails if you don’t get it, but peekaboo is even more effective. Brain scans have shown that anxiety is greater when we’re not conscious of its cause. The lingering anxious doubt plays right into artists’ hands.
Scientists take pride in their ability to figure stuff out with ever-greater subtlety and finesse. The three-volume set of lectures that Richard Feynman gave to his freshman physics class at CalTech in 1962 are the bestselling, most loved physics texts in history. He explained things in clear and simple ways but without spoon-feeding the reader the details; Feynman left plenty for the reader to figure out on her own.
8.3.6 Ramachandran’s rule of abhorrence of coincidence—bullshit meter
Your brain combs through the incoming stream for patterns and, when you find one, your bullshit detector is primed for anything suspicious. Our ancestors spent lots of time among forests, hills, and tall grasses looking for food and avoiding predators. Predators want us to feel comfortable, fat, and lazy—off-guard. So when we come upon something that seems too good to be true, like a still, clear pond in the middle of an empty clearing, we get suspicious. After all, those of us who walked right into traps never got laid, so we survivors have well-primed bullshit meters.
A painting or sculpture that offers a unique rather than seemingly common or random viewpoint must somehow rationalize that special orientation by intimating extra context, or it just looks fake and contrived. In Following the Equator, Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction … because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” Remarkable coincidences are acceptable in memoirs but not in novels.
It’s no different in science. When things fit together too nicely, we get suspicious, and we get to work.
Physics is plagued by “naturalness” and “fine-tuning” problems. Einstein’s cosmological constant has exasperated physicists for almost sixty years. It seemed like the cosmological constant was zero with an insane level of precision, a level of precision that bothered physicists. Zero meant that the universe was flat, which was annoying; let it expand in all its glory eternally or give up and collapse eventually, but straddle the teeter-totter in a perpetually flat, static tedium? Yuck. In the late 1990s, the first evidence appeared for “dark energy,” which required that the cosmological constant be a positive number, an expanding universe. No one knows the source of dark energy, and results continue to accumulate that reinforce a positive cosmological constant. We can safely assume that cosmologists will continue in a state of disagreeable moodiness until they solve the puzzle.
Coinci
dence causes dissonance between your delusional left brain and your overbearing right brain. Your left brain is perfectly happy with a coincidence—it doesn’t even have to think! But your judgmental right brain doesn’t trust it. When the two halves of your own brain don’t get along, you can’t relax. Coincidences suck.
8.3.7 Ramachandran’s rules of orderliness and symmetry
Ramachandran distinguishes between orderliness and symmetry as separate rules of aesthetics. I’m not comfortable dicing the tomato into such narrow pieces. The seeds get everywhere. Symmetry seems like a special case of orderliness, so let’s consider them together.
Sensations that fit tidily within our expectations provide rhythm. Rhythm doesn’t wake us up; it relaxes us.
Here’s a silly trick to play on your significant other when you’re asked to tidy up or put your stuff in that mythical place referred to as “where it belongs.” Don’t pick anything up; just rotate it so that it’s parallel or perpendicular to the other stuff in the room. A cluttered table, desk, or hearth, will appear tidy even though it has just as much crap on it as before.
Any piece of art—rich music, a textured novel or poem—requires a background. Those backgrounds provide the setting for grouping common themes, a place to isolate features or to shift peaks, where contrasts can emerge and puzzles can hide. We can’t pay attention to everything, but we require context, and contexts that aren’t orderly require too much attention. Everything that provides the background needs to fall into the background. It’s why we hate jazz. Seriously? Even with brushes instead of drumsticks?
As I was saying, it all boils down to predictability. Since the flow of your reality is predicated on how you predict the future from the past, “good” art interrupts our rhythm with a purpose. The regularity of a melody soothes the soul, cleanliness is ethereal, and a steady backbeat converts jazz into rock.
People associate beauty with symmetry. Ramachandran explains this phenomenon by pointing out that we are symmetric and the animals we eat, as well as those who would eat us, are also symmetric, so we’re naturally selected to take note of things with bilateral symmetry. Plus, broken symmetry can indicate the presence of disease, and disease is not attractive. Maybe nature uses broken symmetries in her self-portrait to draw our attention, to tease us.
In art, symmetry provides a way to bury artifacts and thereby enrich context. Similarly, carefully broken symmetry pulls your attention to where the artist wants it.
The rules of orderliness and symmetry go a bit over the top in science, indicating that the lab-coated might be fastidious.
Physicists demand symmetry at ever-higher levels of abstraction. You’ve heard of superstring theories that might someday lead to a theory of everything. Well, superstring theories are built on an abstract concept of symmetry. The first evidence for superstrings would be the discovery of super-symmetry.
The scientific method is predicated on Newton’s first rule of reason, also called Occam’s razor, a giant pragmatic prejudice: When presented with more than one description of a phenomenon, we assume that the simplest description is closest to the truth. That is, we use the theory built on a foundation of the fewest, most straightforward assumptions until it breaks down. We prefer tidy, elegant theories at the expense of cumbersome, complicated theories.
Science has worked pretty well, but I wonder if our prejudice in favor of simplicity might cause us to gloss over messy phenomena. Here’s a particle physics example: The big money is spent on high-energy experiments capable of making fundamental discoveries that try to organize our understanding of the constituents of matter and energy. In the process, we’ve left behind lots of complicated systems as though we’re not interested.
Grouping the particles formed in nuclear reactions led to the quark model, which led to the discovery of quarks; the up, down, and strange quarks were first. After those three, the hunt was on for more. We plowed ahead and discovered the charm quark in 1974, the bottom quark in 1977, and the top quark in 1994. During that twenty-year span, we didn’t put nearly as much effort into understanding the grimy details of how the first two quarks, up and down, form neutrons and protons and how those bind together in atomic nuclei.
I’m not arguing that physics should abandon pursuit of the keystones of nature; I’m just wondering if our prejudice in favor of puzzles with tidy solutions holds us back as much as our appreciation for tidy grouping draws us forward.
8.3.8 Ramachandran’s rule of metaphor
If this thing starts snowballing, it could really catch fire—some metaphors work better than others.
Descriptions that use adjectives and adverbs portray a scene more accurately than a metaphor, but a well-wrought metaphor does a much better job at conveying mood, tension, and color, along with whatever detail the author’s sharing. Which do you think makes the point better: “my daughter’s hair is a sort of reddish, dark brown” or “if the bark of a two thousand year-old redwood tree could be spun into silk, it would be the color of Heather’s hair.”
Candles make awesome metaphors for life, death, memory, and our association with the past: “a candle burning bright,” “a flame just extinguished,” or “the wax of his candle has nearly run out.”
Modern sculpture and abstraction of form are nothing but metaphors.
In music, the tempo, bass-treble mix, complexity of melody, harmony, and rhythm combine in a complex auditory metaphor to relate feelings, scenes, and experiences from musicians to listeners. The long, intermittent riffs of the blues convey melancholy. Rapid, high-pitched punk melodies translate into raw, euphoric energy. Heavy metal chords put the oomph in a headbanger’s heart. Yet none of these sounds has anything to do with what they convey, or do they?
Ramachandran argues that metaphor generates a synesthetic effect, crosstalk between different senses. Metaphors use one sense to describe another. Painting the town red, cranking up a color, tasting life’s bitterness excite neurons in those senses. When the processing centers for the senses used in the metaphor are physically close to the processing center for the sense or feeling being conveyed, you get effective metaphors. If they’re too far away, you get confusion or puns.
Metaphors are at once lower and higher levels of communication.
In chapter 6, we talked about synesthesia as a literal example of lateral thought. When they work, metaphors relate separate processors, tying tactile, nasal, auditory, visual, and tasty imagery together with emotion in a direct connection that either reduces or eliminates the need for words.
“That ship has sailed” generates an image of opportunity passing over the horizon, into the sunset, and out of reach. What opportunity? Any. For Johnny, playing the guitar is as easy as ringing a bell.
We use metaphors in science to make sense of how stuff works. Ribosomes are the components of cells that synthesize proteins by encoding the genetic recipe of amino acids in the right order. I know this because, over thirty years ago, my biology professor described them as tiny heads on cassette recorders. You might ask, what’s a cassette? And I might answer, analog memory technology based on thin reels of magnetic tape. To which you might reply, “And this archaic technology somehow helped you remember how ribosomes synthesize proteins?” And I’d say, “Yes.”
Metaphors relate a pattern that is well-worn in your brain, an easily retrieved association, to a similar pattern. Ribosomes reproduce sequences, recording and playing proteins the way cassette recorder heads record and play music. My description of my daughter’s hair color stretches analogies by pulling together the textures of tree bark and silk, the grand status of an ancient life form, and the common ground of combing. A candle’s flame replicates the tenuous relationship between a flame on a wick and our few decades of awareness.
Doing science means figuring out how things work, but we can only understand things in terms that make sense. And terms that make sense are patterns that we already know. I used the metaphor of river and canyon formation to convey the pros and cons of tight
ly focused analysis and wide-open creativity in chapter 6.
More than that, in teaching science, we wave our hands around to give heuristic descriptions. We use isolation to pull a concept out of context, make sense of it, and then put it back into context. When the process of making sense involves metaphors, students get it. And we’re all students.
The best example of all, maybe ever, is the Feynman diagram.
Before Richard Feynman understood quantum electrodynamics—which is electricity and magnetism at very small distances—it took weeks, sometimes months of calculations in quantum field theory to predict how electrons interact. Then Feynman drew diagrams of how he pictured the physical processes. Let’s stop here for a second, because there’s an important metaphor in that last sentence: He pictured the physical processes. To literally picture something, it must either radiate or reflect light in the optical spectrum—right? That’s how images get into our eyes, down our optic nerves, and into our heads. Feynman visualized the processes through an extra layer of metaphor and, in the process, performed magic: He provided both a conceptual understanding and a method for speeding up those calculations. He invented Feynman rules.
Here’s the simplest Feynman diagrams for the interaction of two electrons.
In these diagrams, time flows from left to right. The two electrons are indicated by the solid lines approaching each other, one from the bottom going up and the other from the top going down. Then they exchange a photon, a tiny quantum of light indicated by the wiggly line.
Figure 25: First-order Feynman diagrams for the interaction of two electrons.
Check out the caption. Remember Starla and the rainbow? How her first-order understanding of light was light/dark, then her second-order understanding was the rainbow spectrum, and so on? There are Feynman diagrams for the second-, third-, and so on-order interactions of electrons too, and the calculation gets more accurate with each term.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 19