8.3.9 Ambiguity
Ambiguity is not one of Ramachandran’s rules of neuroaesthetics; we don’t require that something be vague to be appealing, though it does play a role in art. Science, on the other hand, can be described as the elimination of ambiguity.
Ramachandran’s rules of peak shift, isolation, and peekaboo each recognize the value of balancing contrast and ambiguity in different ways to fire up the beholder’s internal simulators. Demanding that the beholder solve the details forces her to complete the work within her own context and life, where she can find meaning.
These two images demand that you make a choice.
Figure 26: (a) We can’t really see both the old woman and the young woman simultaneously, but we can switch back and forth; (b) once you see the Dalmatian, you can’t unsee it.
In the first case, you can see either an elderly woman or a young woman, you can switch back and forth, but you can’t see both simultaneously. In the second, you have to decode the Dalmatian from the dots. Once you see the Dalmatian, you can’t unsee it. But once you’ve solved these images, the ambiguity evaporates, and so does their potential to engage you.
Great art continues to demand your participation, to evoke feeling, to encourage you to keep searching.
8.4 VERONICA
The tension and release, the awe and joy, the power of music provides a perfect example of the melodic interplay of prediction and surprise that gives art the power to move us, literally move us, to dance, to head-bang, to sing, to take up the air guitar and thrash.
Elvis Costello’s song “Veronica” has all the necessary components. Not to impose my taste on you; although “Veronica” is on my top-twwenty list of favorite songs, I picked it because the components are easy to decipher, and it’s probably not a song you have on heavy rotation. So you’re probably not sick of it. Besides, if I pretended to be qualified as a music critic, neither of us could keep a straight face.
As an art form, music precedes all others. We had music before we had speech. Birds and the other mammals appreciate music but not paintings or stories, though birds do have some affection for sculpture.
Here’s how it works, then we’ll listen to “Veronica.”
8.4.1 How music works
Music doesn’t have to grab your attention; it soothes your inner beasts whether it boils up to consciousness or not. Take that, all you music producers who demand that songwriters open with a strong hook. Soothing is one thing; it’ll put you to sleep, but “Veronica” is the kind of song that moves you to howl at the moon and cry out into the nothingness and everythingness and to both embrace and deplore the sheer finiteness of existence within the infinitude of possibility.
Music is sound, compression of air at frequencies from 20 to 20,000 Hertz—remember that 1 Hz is 1 oscillation per second. The top string on a guitar, that is, the low E string, vibrates at 82 Hz. Translating that raw data into tears requires a lot of processing. The components—volume, pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyrics—are processed in different brain regions simultaneously and reassembled in a continuous multidimensional train. Your inner puppy understands the emotional tone; it gets happy, sad, bittersweet, or euphoric independent of the lyrics.
Like life itself, a rich melody sets up expectations. You have an idea of what comes next, the chorus, the riff, the bass line. Sequences of small surprises, diversions from the melody, make you soar or blue, and then, like an unfolding triumph or crisis, an abrupt departure grabs your attention. As in life, the triumph gives you a dose of oxytocin and you soar; the crisis sucks the oxytocin up, and melancholy washes over you. Eventually, the melody returns and you settle into a slightly different rhythm; parallel but separated from the original melody by experience.
The melodic sequences and shifts of harmony set up expectations for a particular resolution and then delay or subvert it: relaxation-arousal-tension-relief-relaxation-arousal. It’s copacetic, just telepathy from musician to dancer, shredder to headbanger, punk to punk, heartbroken artist to heartbroken beholder. Our brains mirror the artist’s intent. At live shows, you can feel the feedback from stage to audience and back and forth. From the air guitarists to the mosh pit, a positive feedback loop builds up and levels off. Performers like Bruce Springsteen are masters at making that connection.
Have you ever noticed how you appreciate a song more after you’ve heard it a few times? When you know the song, the carefully grouped, orderly, symmetric melody can fill up the background, and its contrast, isolation, and peak shift can direct your attention. Great music draws your instincts, your inner frog, back to the wild, simulating sounds from your prehistoric glory.
So let’s crank up a good song.
8.4.2 Elvis Costello’s “Veronica”
I think that “Veronica” is better listened to alone because it tells a deeply sad and wonderfully melancholy story of the end we all fear and the journey we all cherish.
“Veronica” was written by Elvis Costello in collaboration with Paul McCartney as an ode to Costello’s grandmother. I opened this chapter with my visualization of this song.
I want you to connect to your favorite music site and buy “Veronica” from Elvis Costello’s 1989 album Spike. If you don’t feel like dropping the cash, hie thee to YouTube.com and search for Elvis Costello’s “Veronica.” There’s a music video, but don’t watch it! Let’s just focus on the music here; you can watch whatever you want on your own time. And no, not the “unplugged” version either; we need our watches synchronized. We need the album version with all the pieces, from Costello’s voice to McCartney’s bass to that oboe or bassoon, I don’t know, maybe it’s a keyboard effect.
Listen to the whole song with eyes closed first, and then we’ll pay attention to how it works through the lens of Ramachandran’s rules.
Ready? Press play.
It starts with a strong melody. Our right brains catch the context within seconds, transmitting expectations across our cortexes. The lyrics come on quick and sound light and fresh with nice, regular ups and downs, a pleasant melody with a rock ‘n‘ roll beat. But as we take in the lyrics, a contradiction grows. Grouped within the melody, the first hint that there’s more to it than carefree rock ‘n‘ roll, come the lyrics “. . . what goes on in that place in the dark” and the story takes another turn.
A little oboe (bassoon?) riff peeks over the melody at the end of the first stanza, not quite twenty seconds in: a simple, sad contrast to the essential melody. The next stanza maintains Costello’s new-wave-y style, consistent with our predictions, but now our right brains are on alert. Toward the end of the second stanza, around twenty-five seconds, a glockenspiel chimes in, an understated, isolated swirl that warns of another shift in context.
Then, half a minute into the song, the chorus erupts in a cry to the stars, the universe, everything and nothing. Costello’s high-pitched whining lilt carries the melody to a different place. We can’t understand the lyrics, but we don’t need them. The wailing contrast to the cheerful rock ‘n‘ roll that led us to this point sucks back oxytocin from our synapses, and melancholy invades our souls. As we cry out and feel the shivers along our spines, maybe a teardrop falls, more likely on your tenth listen than your first. Then, the difficulty we experienced trying to understand the chorus lyrics gets our attention. Primed and ready, the next lyric you can decode is the answer: Veronica.
Now, short of fifty seconds into the song, we hear another little overlay, a sort of “di-deet-dee” isolation that makes everything a bit softer, a bit easier to take. But then another peak shift comes: The drums rest and you relax as Costello wails, the glockenspiel spiels, and a snare drum awakens us to the moment of peace before: Bang! The backbeat drops us right back into the melody, the grouping. Like reemerging from heartbreak, knowing we have to go on despite the loss, we settle in and go forward. No coincidence here, just back into the river of time, the inescapable continuity of experience.
The next stanza poses vague images of doubt and wolves
and wondering, and then that bassoon (oboe?) comes back, with just a little bit of peekaboo to tease us into thinking we’re going somewhere. The next stanza, at about 1:10, settles into the narrative, giving images of a woman’s life, of her husband going off to war sixty-five years ago. The damned oboe (bassoon?) paints enough melancholy contrast over the melody to reinforce the nostalgic sensation of the finite time-capsule nature of life, but not so much that we fall into the blues. No, he’s saving that, the bastard.
Now, not even 1:25 in, the melody takes a dramatic shift. Along with Sir Paul, the drummer switches to half-time, kicking us out of that nostalgic coma. The peak shift warns us that this chapter in Veronica’s life does not end well. The next verse, with lyrics that are finally orderly and understandable, confirms it.
Halfway through the song, the melody all but comes to a stop, setting us up for the big contrast that’s heralded by two sharp drumbeats. But it’s the one missing beat that launches us into that soaring, crying chorus with lyrics we still can’t make out. The melancholy washes over us again. It relents a little when we get to her name, Veronica, and then we’re back into that tightly grouped rock ‘n‘ roll melody—except, not so fast. It’s the same melody, but a bit quieter, a bit older and sadder. With no snare, just the low-bass kick drum, the chorus is different this time. It’s like the melody we predicted but isolated enough to pull us out.
Now, at 2:10, we’re in the convalescent home with Veronica at the end of her life. Costello backs off from his trademark new-wave crooning, using contrast to draw us in and isolation to put us on alert, not on guard and not in fear, but in anticipation of the inevitable. He groups the metaphor of his softer, quieter voice, with the lyrics “quiet and still.”
The nurses and caregivers call her by a name, but not her name, not Veronica. Now, so soft that we wonder if the song is over, he sets us up again for another peak shift. In comes the snare drum, and we’re back into bittersweet nostalgia. He contrasts who she is now with who she used to be. We’re taken back and remember her sense of humor, what she was like.
Now, when the glockenspiel peeks in, it sounds cheerful in contrast to the sad ride we’re on that we know is ending soon. The chorus comes in for the third time and we see it coming. The crying out becomes cathartic, orderly, predictable, sad but in the way the blues makes being sad somehow okay.
All in just over three minutes, holy shit.
8.4.3 Musical resonance
When you pluck a string, you excite a note. That note is amplified by either an amplifier or an acoustic guitar’s hollow body (a resonant cavity). The sound comes out and excites the string some more, which then excites the note, and so on—a positive feedback loop that sustains the note. If not for the negative feedback of air resistance and friction, it would sustain forever.
That feeling of being absorbed in a song or carried away in a work of art is the sustain of neural circuits. Your audio processors first associate the notes in a melody and lyrics in a story. A step higher in sophistication, you associate the song with experiences. The more the song affects you and the more associations it produces, the more layers of feeling spread across your brain and the more your heart fills. The sustain primes you. It carries on after the song ends, until the negative feedback of some annoying crap, like bank fees, crushes it.
8.5 ART & SCIENCE
Science and art, like the other this-and-that dichotomies I’ve been using for chapter titles, feed back to each other. Science requires art; art requires science. Advances in one tend to produce advances in the other, usually with some engineering between them. Photography led to abstract art and the discovery of x-rays. Communicators in television’s Star Trek influenced the design of cell phones, and Dr. McCoy’s diagnosing tricorder preceded the creation of smartphones.
Our affection for music demanded recording and amplification technology. Electrical amplification allowed neurologists to detect the tiny electrical signals that make up the marrow of our thoughts and made guitars as loud as trumpets, relieving us of big bands and introducing four-piece rockers. Ideas, opinions, stories, and religion all led to printing and information technology that periodically disrupts culture with inventions like Gutenberg’s press and Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. Kip Thorne, a general relativity theorist at CalTech, helped a computer-generated imagery artist create black holes for the movie Interstellar and, in the process, came up with new ways to think about gravity.
Rather than being woven together in an inextricable knot like talent and skill, the practices of science and art have a lot in common, but they have a lot of differences too.
8.5.1 Good work if you can get it
Like any other job, they can be boring.
Let’s face it, when Michelangelo carved David from a block of marble, he spent most of his time chipping away at stone. The day-to-day grind probably wasn’t all that different from the experience of a bricklayer: lots of dust and grime. Van Gogh may have poisoned himself by ingesting lead paint as he chewed on his brushes like a bored third-grader gnawing on a wooden pencil. Discovering the Higgs boson required decades of running cables, soldering electronics, and debugging software, and months puzzling over enticing hints in the data. Musicians spend years writing songs, fine-tuning licks, and then playing them over and over again in recording studios and in front of audiences.
The truth is that the actual performance of art and science looks pretty much the same as most other jobs, except for the buzz. And it has to be that way, or the buzz wouldn’t give you a buzz. If you feel the buzz everyday, it goes away.
Behaviorists refer to our ability to adjust to damn near any condition as hedonistic adaptation. Lottery winners fly high for about six months before realizing that money really doesn’t buy happiness. Once our wealth surpasses the minimum requirements for food, shelter, and health, happiness is as elusive for billionaires as thousandaires. Prisoners adapt so well to their constraints that some of them never want freedom.
But it’s all worth it when a songwriter, poet, or novelist writes down the perfect metaphor, when Johnny stumbles across the perfect riff, when Brandi catches the perfect wave, or when Butch pulls a dead hippo into camp on his wheeled wagon.
When you add it all up, we’re nothing but dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin junkies, and maybe that’s not so bad.
8.6 WE HAVE A LOT OF SUBJECTIVITY IN COMMON
Lateral thought, novelty, and abstraction all play key roles in creativity, but only when other people appreciate the results. In chapter 7, we concluded that people are significance investors, that value is subjective, and it only comes from the significance that we invest. The ultimate goal of artists is to relate their own, purely subjective experiences to you, their audience. The most successful artists don’t perform market analyses before working on their next masterpieces. Sure, van Gogh studied everyone and tried everything, but if his primary goal was to please other people, he didn’t accomplish it while he was alive.
Within a culture, our similarities outweigh our differences and, when viewed by a Flintstoner from Andromeda, the humans don’t just look alike, they seem almost identical. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when it comes to what we value and why, we have a lot in common.
We also have a lot in common with other animals. Explanations for why people like music include seduction and the tightening of social bonds through song and dance, and that it’s an exaptation. Yelling and screaming started out as warning systems that were easy to refine into singing and joking seduction techniques, so we kept refining them. There are many other descriptions too. Maybe we like music because birds like music. Maybe our music-appreciating wetware came from some ancestor we had in common with birds. Maybe natural selection didn’t prune away our ancient music-loving networks. We’ve still got wetware from our reptilian past, so why not a few algorithms too?
Now that we have an idea of what creativity is and why so many of us can agree that some things are better than others, let’s turn to innovat
ion and discovery, two acts built from optimizing our interactions alone and together, meshing creativity and analysis, fine-tuning intelligence and intuition, and making the most of our talents and skills. Our ability to innovate and discover solutions to the problems we face on every scale—as individuals, members of communities, citizens of countries, and inhabitants of Earth—will dictate how long and how well we can survive. This takes me to Emmy Noether, a woman who faced big problems and flourished despite them. If there ever was a rugged individualist, it was Emmy.
9
INNOVATION & DISCOVERY
IN 1882, AMALIE NOETHER WAS BORN IN THE KAISER’S Germany to a Jewish family. Everyone called her by her middle name Emmy. A friendly, near-sighted girl, Emmy spoke with a slight lisp and loved to dance. She showed little academic promise, but she could solve complex puzzles quickly.
In 1900, after receiving her teaching certificate—an acceptable intellectual achievement for a properly demur young lady—she chose to study mathematics. Of course, she was not permitted to enroll at the university because she was female. The Academic Senate of the University of Erlangen considered her case but concluded that “allowing coeducation would overthrow all academic order.”
But Emmy went to classes anyway. Since her father taught mathematics at the university, the professors knew her, and most of them let her audit their classes. She worked through the course material without the allure of a degree on the horizon. Then, having completed the program, she was granted a boon. Few of us would think of an opportunity to spend four hours a day taking grueling mathematics examinations as a gift, but Emmy did.
The dawn of the twentieth century brought new liberalism to many institutions and so, having passed the exams, Emmy’s application to the graduate program was accepted. In 1907, Emmy Noether was one of the first women in Germany awarded a Ph.D. degree.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 20