In a country where psychic hotlines dominate public airways at nighttime, university psychologists have begun to prove the ability to read auras is simply an added biological trait.

Emilio Gomez is the supervisor for Oscar Iborra’s doctoral thesis, regarding special infrequent types of “synesthesia,” which in ancient Greek is “together” and “sensation.” Essentially, it is how one sensory or cognitive pathway involuntarily affects another pathway.

“We have explored overall person-color synesthesia, in different populations, artists overall. Then we thought that it was similar to the esoteric aura and then decided to explore the relationships,” Gomez says. Artists, persons of religion, and mind readers and the like each have been historically-perceived as depicting the auras of others, which can be a a colored radiation of light surrounding their patients and customers. “The phantom experience is not always a color, it can be also a temperature or a number,” Gomez clarifies. The colors are often then interpreted, ending in the giving of medical, emotional and spiritual advice or even alleged healing.

“About the extra-sensory psychic powers like reading auras, we think that (emotional) synesthesia can explain the origin of the beliefs in auras–person-color synesthesia–and (healing by) hand, mirror-touch synesthesia,” Gomez says. Essentially, the University’s research attempts to prove that there may be some reality to what healers and readers are perceiving, but that there is a logical neurological basis behind it, not some sort of higher power.

Gomez admits that this is just a theory, and they still have a lot of work to do. “Our main idea is that person-color synesthesia is very heterogeneous and related to very different parts of the brain. Sometimes the connection is between color zone and emotional brain, but others between motor brain and color zone, or between memory areas and color zone,” he says.

“I do not know about other countries, but in the south of Spain a lot of people believe in an esoteric world, reading hands, (healing) by hands, bad eye, different (visions) and so on. It is not difficult to find in small villages people with these ‘powers’,” Gomez says with air-quotes.

Gomez teaches at the University of Granada, near one one of Spain’s most famous holy figures “Santo” Esteban de Baza. In 1983, Esteban claims–after falling from a cliff and losing consciousness–to have seen the Virgin Mary, who then bestowed him with healing powers, at the age of 11. Since then, about 40 people a day come to him for healing of all sorts, especially eye ailments. Esteban is one of many fortune tellers and healers alleged to be in the areas of Baza and Gaudix, which economically benefit from incoming tourists and worshipers.

Apparently, certain jobs, like priests and painters, are more likely to have the neuropsychological phenomenon of synesthesia. The research saw a higher likelihood of synesthesia in artists and persons of religious, but Gomez says it is not a sufficient condition unto itself.

“You need also other personality traits. To be a religious person of this kind, a holy man, your frame of beliefs must be related to schizotypal (personality) or similar,” which is a type of social anxiety disorder. “About the artists, if your brain is more interconnected and it offers to you more emotional intelligence or different points of view, more cognitive flexibility and so on, then this type of mind is congruent with the artistic way of life.”

Gomez explains that he doesn’t believe this extra neuropsychological trait is necessary in order to be a successful artist or person of religion, but that it helps. “You can be a good non-synesthete artist and vice versa. We do not know if to be a synesthete makes you a good or a bad artist. In the same sense, I think that to be synesthete make you a better (holy man) or religious person. I mean, your powers can be not real, but you are more emotional and convincing,” Gomez says. “Not all people of religion have it. Only the frequency is higher than in general population, but probably” even higher in artists, he further explains.

If you don’t have this natural trait, you can still acquire it. “Yes, there is always the option of associative learning, but the learned synesthesia is poorer, less emotional, different,” Gomez says.

He doesn’t think their research is finished, as the brain contains infinite mysteries that he and his students will continue to try to unlock. He assures that his goal is scientific, not to disprove anyone, but to prove science.

“I mean for me it is not a question of all or nothing,” Gomez says, assuring that he isn’t aiming to disprove all healers as crock. “In the same sense that probably there are not super heroes like Superman, but you can find real heroes.”

To read the actual paper, go to Gomez’s student’s thesis. This research is based on Chapter 9, starting on page 157.

By Jennifer Riggins

WHY are we thinking so much about thinking these days? Near the top of best-seller lists around the country, you’ll find Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” followed by Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” and somewhere in the middle, where it’s held its ground for several months, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Recently arrived is “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior,” by Leonard Mlodinow.

It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books.

Unlike most pop self-help books, these are about life as we know it — the one you can change, but only a little, and with a ton of work. Professor Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic science a decade ago, has synthesized a lifetime’s research in neurobiology, economics and psychology. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” goes to the heart of the matter: How aware are we of the invisible forces of brain chemistry, social cues and temperament that determine how we think and act? Has the concept of free will gone out the window?

These books possess a unifying theme: The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.

Professor Kahneman breaks down the way we process information into two modes of thinking: System 1 is intuitive, System 2 is logical. System 1 “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” We react to faces that we perceive as angry faster than to “happy” faces because they contain a greater possibility of danger. System 2 “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.” It makes decisions — or thinks it does. We don’t notice when a person dressed in a gorilla suit appears in a film of two teams passing basketballs if we’ve been assigned the job of counting how many times one team passes the ball. We “normalize” irrational data either by organizing it to fit a made-up narrative or by ignoring it altogether.

The effect of these “cognitive biases” can be unsettling: A study of judges in Israel revealed that 65 percent of requests for parole were granted after meals, dropping steadily to zero until the judges’ “next feeding.” “Thinking, Fast and Slow” isn’t prescriptive. Professor Kahneman shows us how our minds work, not how to fiddle with what Gilbert Ryle called the ghost in the machine.

“The Power of Habit” is more proactive. Mr. Duhigg’s thesis is that we can’t change our habits, we can only acquire new ones. Alcoholics can’t stop drinking through willpower alone: they need to alter behavior — going to A.A. meetings instead of bars, for instance — that triggers the impulse to drink. “You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.”

“The Power of Habit” and “Imagine” belong to a genre that has become increasingly conspicuous over the last few years: the hortatory book, armed with highly sophisticated science, that demonstrates how we can achieve our ambitions despite our sensory cluelessness.

Like Timothy D. Wilson’s recent how-not-to book, “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change,” a primer for well-intentioned parents, bosses, coaches, teachers, psychologists and others in the life-improvement professions, they’re full of stories about people who accomplished amazing things in life by, in effect, rewiring themselves.

Mr. Duhigg recounts the now legendary story of the football coach Tony Dungy’s system for reviving the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a loser team: teach them not to think. By instilling in his players an “automatic” response to situations encountered on the field, Mr. Dungy “removed the need for decision making.” Glance at the outside foot of the lineman to see if he’s getting ready to step back… Check the direction of the quarterback’s face to see where he’s going to throw. Don’t react: act. Guess what? The Bucs started to win. (That game, anyway. Then they went back to losing, and he was fired.)

Mr. Lehrer calls this ability to identify and re-program what goes on inside our heads “the science of insight.” Our minds are more susceptible to epiphanies when we’re taking warm showers, watching Robin Williams do stand-up or walking on the beach. The color blue puts us in a more creative mood than the color red: it stimulates our alpha waves by triggering associations with clear skies and oceans.

Why now? To pose the question that psychiatrists ask their patients, why are we preoccupied all at once with the how instead of the why of things?

“It’s a convergence of ideas, really,” says Professor Kahneman. “It used to be that the main explanation focused on emotional or social distortions of thought.” What he and his colleagues on the best-seller list are doing now is to “scientize” brain research, using the tools of our technological age — neurobiology, brain scans, retinal research — to prove that reflection plays a more minor role in our lives than we ever realized.

The 18th-century philosopher David Hume (much quoted by Mr. Lehrer) didn’t have an M.R.I. scanner at his disposal, but he framed the question in much the same way. His major work, “A Treatise of Human Nature,” explored the ways in which habit, or “custom,” rules our lives. Hume’s experiments with perception — how we respond to colors, distance, numerical sets — prefigure the rigorous science of Professor Kahneman. His intent was to show us “the natural infirmity and unsteadiness both of our imagination and senses.” Consciousness, like philosophy itself, stands on a “weak foundation.”

If Hume seems modern, William James reads like a contemporary. Writing toward the end of the 19th century, James addressed the same question that had concerned Hume — how the unconscious operates as a physical process, not just, as Freud would have it, a mental one. In his now-classic essay, “Habit,” he argued that even our most complex acts are reflexive — “concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres.” The hunter spots the bird and shoots. The fencer knows when to parry and return. They perform these acts unthinkingly — they act before they think. But what about people who involuntarily perform acts that are against their own interests, like biting their nails, “snuffling” or speaking with “nasality”? The answer is that we can train ourselves to change if we work at it hard enough. Self-awareness sets us free. “The great thing, then, in all education,” writes James, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

Are we there yet? The linguistic philosopher John Searle, who has been writing on this subject for over half a century, is convinced we’re on the right track, but have a long way to go. “I’ve become more and more dissatisfied with the philosophical tradition,” he said last week, speaking from his office in Berkeley. “People have always been interested in how the brain works, but we’ve got to see it as a more natural process, like digestion and photosynthesis.” The brain is an organ, too.

Does this mean we have no “agency,” no capacity to act on our own? Or can autonomy thrive within the prison of self-ignorance? “We have to believe it does,” says Steven Lukes, a professor of sociology at New York University highly admired for his work in moral philosophy. “If we seriously thought that our intentions made no difference to how we behave, we couldn’t go on using the language of ethics. How would we go on living the lives we live?” Or doing what we think is right? “People have free will when they ‘feel’ they have free will,” says Professor Kahneman. “If we didn’t believe in it, we would have no responsibility.”

But of course what one “feels,” as we’ve learned from all these books, could well be — indeed, probably is — an illusion. As Timothy Wilson puts it with haunting simplicity: “We are strangers to ourselves.”

Strangers who can learn how to be friends.

Pando, the Trembling Giant

Compared with a mite or a virus, we humans are enormous. But we share this planet with other organisms that, in turn, dwarf us. At 100 feet, a blue whale is about 18 times longer than the average person; a giant sequoia, three times that. There are even larger giants on Earth, and you don’t have to travel to some far-flung corner of the world to see them. In 1992 two Michigan biologists startled the public by announcing their discovery of a fungus covering an area of 40 acres. Their announcement was soon followed by one from another group of researchers who claimed to have found a 1,500-acre fungus in Washington.

When I and two of my colleagues at the University of Colorado, Jeffry Mitton and Yan Linhart, first read about the fungi, we decided that the record had to be set straight. While the Washington fungus may in fact be the world’s largest organism in area, it is not the largest in mass. Its discoverers have yet to calculate its weight, but they do know that it probably weighs under 825,000 pounds–about double the weight of a blue whale but nowhere near that of a giant sequoia, which can tip the scales at 4.5 million pounds. Yet even the majestic giant sequoia is not the record holder. That honor goes to a tree that my co-workers and I have studied for years: the quaking aspen, a common tree that dapples many mountains of North America. Unlike giant sequoias, each of which is a genetically separate individual, a group of thousands of aspens can actually be a single organism, sharing a root system and a unique set of genes. We therefore recently nominated one particular aspen individual growing just south of the Wasatch Mountains of Utah as the most massive living organism in the world. We nicknamed it Pando, a Latin word meaning I spread. Made up of 47,000 tree trunks, each with an ordinary tree’s usual complement of leaves and branches, Pando covers 106 acres and, conservatively, weighs in excess of 13 million pounds, making it 15 times heavier than the Washington fungus and nearly 3 times heavier than the largest giant sequoia.

Pando reached such vast dimensions by a kind of growth, common to plants, known as vegetative reproduction. A plant sends out horizontal stems or roots, either above ground or below depending on the species, that travel some distance before taking root themselves and growing into new, connected plants. For us humans, who tend to view sexual reproduction as the only means of generating offspring, the method may seem a bit strange. Yet vegetative reproduction happens all around us. Every gardener witnesses it in one form or another. Strawberry plants, for example, send out stringy aboveground stems that can take root and form additional leafy clusters. Vegetative reproduction allows grass to produce lovely lawns (as well as foul language when it spreads into the garden plot). People who raise houseplants routinely take advantage of vegetative reproduction when they make cuttings of their favorite ivy or spider plant and root those pieces in new pots.

In the wild, vegetative reproduction commonly happens on a much grander scale. If you fly across the Southwest, you may see striking geometric patterns of desert shrubs, such as the creosote bush, which usually grows in circles. These circles don’t provide evidence of geometrically savvy visitors from outer space. They’re evidence of new creosote bushes forming at the periphery of a spreading individual while older stems in the center are dying.

Most trees stick to sexual reproduction. In some species, male trees produce pollen in their flowers, which is then used to fertilize the female flowers and produce seeds. In others, a single tree will have the equipment of both sexes. Aspens do indeed have flowers and sexes (Pando is male), but they almost always reproduce vegetatively. They send out roots horizontally underground, from which new shoots called stems (or, more formally, ramets) grow vertically. The new shoots eventually develop into new tree trunks as tall as 100 feet, with branches, leaves, bark–in short, everything you’d associate with an individual tree. Because a root may travel 100 feet underground before sprouting up, and each new trunk can send out its own army of underground roots to form still more new shoots, an aspen individual can attain quite impressive dimensions.

The sum of all the stems, roots, and leaves of one such individual is called a clone. Quaking aspen clones may spread far across a landscape as they continue to reproduce vegetatively. How far one clone can migrate depends on how long it can live.

And how long might that be? The short answer is that we don’t know. It might seem as if all one has to do is count the annual growth rings in the individual stems. Aspen stems that I’ve studied in the Colorado Front Range rarely exceed 75 years. Elsewhere individual stems occasionally reach 200 years. But the age of individual stems tells us almost nothing about the age of the clone they belong to, since its living stems may only be the latest to sprout. The oldest clone with a firm age is an 11,700-year-old creosote bush (researchers were able to date it by measuring the rate at which its circle expands). But aspens may actually be far older. Based on evidence such as the resemblance of some aspen clone leaves to fossilized ones, Burton Barnes of the University of Michigan has suggested that aspen clones in the western United States may reach the age of a million years or more. In principle, clones may even be essentially immortal, dying only from disease or the deterioration of the environment rather than from some internal clock.

As a true organism, a clone is made up of genetically uniform parts. Barring rare mutations, the aspen trunk on the north edge of a particular clone will be genetically identical to the aspen trunk on the south edge and to all in between. We biologists can use molecular techniques to compare the genetic makeup, but an observant hiker can also recognize clones and even distinguish among them. The angle between individual branches and the main trunk tends to be a genetically determined trait that is different from clone to clone. Thus branches on the trunks of one clone may angle off at about 45 degrees, while another clone’s stems show angles nearer 80 degrees.

The time at which clones come out of their winter dormancy also has a strong genetic basis. In spring you can commonly observe that one stand of aspen trees will be bare of leaves while a nearby stand will be fully leafed out. But the most spectacular (though not infallible) indicator of clone identity unfolds with the onset of fall. Some clones turn a brilliant, shining yellow that almost seems to generate sunlight. Others manifest a deep, rich gold, vibrating with many overtones. The leaves of still other aspens turn red; some show a barely perceptible tinge, others a rich scarlet. With experience, one can use these colors as clues to deduce the boundaries of clones. A warning: they can also mislead. Just as a single red maple tree may have dramatic differences in fall coloration between its sunny side and its shady side, aspen clones can vary, too, but the differences may be spread across thousands of different trunks.

Even biologists can be fooled by aspen stands. One group of researchers, examining the strings of flowers (known as catkins) that quaking aspens produce before leafing out, concluded that the flowers produced one year were of a different sex from those produced the previous year by the same small stand of trees. Knowing that other vegetative reproducers, such as some desert junipers, can be male one year and female the next, the researchers speculated that perhaps aspens could switch sex also.

My colleagues and I were so intrigued by this suggestion that we decided to follow it up more thoroughly. First we identified a number of clones by isolating their unique patterns of enzymes in the lab and then marking the shoots in the field. For several years we then followed their flowering pattern each spring. We found no switching of sexual identity; instead, we discovered that even a small stand of aspen trees may contain more than one clone. We mapped and marked some 160 stems in one such stand. It turned out that there were two clones intertwined in the stand, one male, one female. The previous researchers, we realized, had been tricked into seeing sex switching when in fact they had seen a female clone in their stand flower one year, and a male clone in the same stand flower the next.

Aspen stands are just as complex below ground as above. Their intricate network of roots can ferry nutrients from one part of the clone to another. Roots near an abundant water supply, for example, may provide water to other roots and shoots in a much drier area. These parts of the clone can return the favor if their roots have access to crucial nutrients missing from the wet area. By distributing its water and nutrients over its entire expanse, a quaking aspen clone can survive in a patchy environment where other trees might die off.

It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that the quaking aspen is the most widespread tree in North America, forming an almost continuous band between Newfoundland and Maryland in the East and another between Alaska and Washington in the West. Aspens also follow the Appalachian Mountains south to Georgia, and the Rocky Mountains all the way into northern Mexico. In total, this species covers tens of millions of acres in North America.

Wherever they grow, quaking aspens like unstable habitats. In mountainous areas avalanches and mud slides leave barren paths that soon support extensive stands. In fact, it’s possible to date mud slides and avalanches by measuring the age of aspen stems that shoot up immediately following a slide in the scoured area. The distinctive light green of aspen leaves in summer, set off from the deep greens of conifers such as lodgepole pines, frequently marks the zones where winter snow is unstable and tends to avalanche.

Even more than slides of mud or snow, however, it is man’s old friend and nemesis, fire, that ensures aspen survival. At first this might not seem logical, because an aspen stem is particularly vulnerable to fires. Most trees are covered in a bark of dead cells, but the smooth, cream-colored bark of quaking aspens usually remains a living, functioning tissue; it even carries out photosynthesis. The bark succumbs quickly to forest fires, and the entire stem in turn dies.

When a single stem dies, however, the entire clone feels the effect. Normally each stem sends hormones into the root system that suppress the formation of new ramets. But when a stem dies, its hormone signal dies as well. If a large number of the shoots in a stand are wiped out, the hormonal imbalance triggers a huge increase in new, rapidly growing stems. The regeneration of stems can dwarf the original destruction: researchers have counted densities of up to 400,000 aspen stems per acre (Pando has a rather low figure of just over 400 stems per acre).

If an aspen grove does not regularly experience fire or some other disturbance, its days are numbered. Conifers will invade its borders and begin to shade out the stems. Aspens can’t tolerate low levels of light, and they will eventually start to die as the conifers dominate the grove. One consequence of fire suppression by humans in North America has been a drastic reduction in the extent of aspen forests. Pando probably reached such a huge size because until recently he experienced a regular sequence of fires that let him regenerate, spread, and maintain himself. The fires didn’t happen so quickly that they eradicated him, nor were they so infrequent that conifers had time to replace him.

The quaking aspen gained its name because of the way the tree’s leaves tremble in even the slightest breeze. French Canadian woodsmen in the 1600s believed that the trees quaked in fear because the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made of aspen. Now giant aspen clones like Pando have a new reason to tremble: human incursions. Several private homes have recently been built within one section of Pando, and another section has been turned into a campground, complete with parking spaces, picnic tables, and toilets. Paved roads, driveways, and power and water lines built to serve these developments dissect this spectacularly beautiful aspen stand. The presence of people has led the U.S. Forest Service to suppress wildfires, and yet Pando’s remarkable size and longevity are largely a consequence of the cleansing, rejuvenating power of wildfires. Ironically, ending wildfires could well mean the end of Pando.

Realizing that it was affecting Pando’s vitality, the Forest Service recently decided to try to boost its growth by clear-cutting part of the stand. It chain-sawed three clear cuts, totaling about 15 acres, right out of the middle of this magnificent old clone and offered the timber for free to any who wanted firewood. The results have been mixed: because of heavy deer browsing, the first two clear cuts showed minimal regeneration; the third was fenced to keep out the deer. New shoot growth, now one foot tall in the fenced area, appears abundant and healthy. And yet the clear cuts carved from the heart of this individual, clashing as they do with Pando’s surrounding pristine parts, come as a dispiriting shock to me.

Since my colleagues and I nominated Pando as the world’s largest organism, he has captured the attention of dozens of newspapers and radio stations across North America, and some of the reactions have been quite funny. Some see Pando as a threat: I received a call from someone asking, Does this giant clone, spreading vegetatively, pose a threat to the people living in southern Utah? Another person wondered if this recognition of the interconnectedness of nature was the real beginning of New Age philosophy. For us, the real significance of Pando lies in the interest about things botanical he has stimulated. The more we examine the special properties of the quaking aspen, the greater our fascination with the beauty, complexity, and continuing mystery of this tree. If others agree, perhaps we can save clones like Pando from a destiny as firewood.

By Michael C. Grant

Speaking a second language can change everything from problem-solving skills to personality – almost as if you are two people

Cognitive enhancement is just the start. According to some studies, my memories, values, even my personality, may change depending on which language I happen to be speaking. It is almost as if the bilingual brain houses two separate minds. All of which highlights the fundamental role of language in human thought. “Bilingualism is quite an extraordinary microscope into the human brain,” says neuroscientist Laura Ann Petitto of Gallaudet University in Washington DC.

The view of bilingualism has not always been this rosy. For many parents like mine, the decision to raise children speaking two languages was controversial. Since at least the 19th century, educators warned that it would confuse the child, making them unable to learn either language properly. At best, they thought the child would become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. At worst, they suspected it might hinder other aspects of development, resulting in a lower IQ.

These days, such fears seem unjustified. True, bilingual people tend to have slightly smaller vocabularies in each language than their monolingual peers, and they are sometimes slower to reach for the right word when naming objects. But a key study in the 1960s by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, found that the ability to speak two languages does not stunt overall development. On the contrary, when controlling for other factors which might also affect performance, such as socioeconomic status and education, they found that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in 15 verbal and non-verbal tests (Psychological Monographs, vol 76, no 27, p 1).

Unfortunately, their findings were largely overlooked. Although a trickle of research into the benefits of bilingualism followed their study, most researchers and educators continued to cling to the old ideas. It is only within the last few years that bilingualism has received the attention it deserves. “For 30 years I’ve been sitting in my little dark room doing my thing and suddenly in the last five years it’s like the doors have swung open,” says Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, Canada.

In part, the renewed interest comes from recent technological developments in neuroscience, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) – a form of brain imaging that acts as a silent and portable monitor, peering inside the brains of babies as they sit on their parents’ laps. For the first time, researchers can watch young babies’ brains in their initial encounters with language.

Using this technique, Petitto and her colleagues discovered a profound difference between babies brought up speaking either one or two languages. According to popular theory, babies are born “citizens of the world”, capable of discriminating between the sounds of any language. By the time they are a year old, however, they are thought to have lost this ability, homing in exclusively on the sounds of their mother tongue. That seemed to be the case with monolinguals, but Petitto’s study found that bilingual children still showed increased neural activity in response to completely unfamiliar languages at the end of their first year (Brain and Language, vol 121, p 130).

She reckons the bilingual experience “wedges open” the window for learning language. Importantly, the children still reached the same linguistic milestones, such as their first word, at roughly the same time as monolingual babies, supporting the idea that bilingualism can invigorate rather than hinder a child’s development. This seems to help people like me acquire new languages throughout our lives. “It’s almost like the monolingual brain is on a diet, but the bilingual brain shows us the full, plump borders of the language tissue that are available,” says Petitto.

Indeed, the closer the researchers looked, the more benefits they discovered, some of which span a broad range of skills. Bialystok first stumbled upon one of these advantages while asking children to spot whether various sentences were grammatically correct. Both monolinguals and bilinguals could see the mistake in phrases such as “apples growed on trees”, but differences arose when they considered nonsensical sentences such as “apples grow on noses”. The monolinguals, flummoxed by the silliness of the phrase, incorrectly reported an error, whereas the bilinguals gave the right answer (Developmental Psychology, vol 24, p 560).

Bialystok suspected that rather than reflecting expertise in grammar, their performance demonstrated improvement in what is called the brain’s “executive system”, a broad suite of mental skills that centre on the ability to block out irrelevant information and concentrate on a task at hand. In this case, they were better able to focus on the grammar while ignoring the meaning of words. Sure enough, bilingual kids in subsequent studies aced a range of problems that directly tested the trait. Another executive skill involves the ability to switch between different tasks without becoming confused, and bilinguals are better at these kinds of challenges too. When categorising objects, for instance, they can jump from considering the shape to the colour without making errors (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol 13, p 253).

A second viewpoint

These traits are critical to almost everything we do, from reading and mathematics to driving. Improvements therefore result in greater mental flexibility, which may explain why the bilingual people performed so well in Peal and Lambert’s tests, says Bialystok.

Its virtues may even extend to our social skills. Paula Rubio-Fernández and Sam Glucksberg, both psychologists at Princeton University, have found that bilinguals are better at putting themselves in other people’s shoes to understand their side of a situation. This is because they can more easily block out what they already know and focus on the other viewpoint (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, vol 38, p 211).

So what is it about speaking two languages that makes the bilingual brain so flexible and focused? An answer comes from the work of Viorica Marian at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues, who used eye-tracking devices to follow the gaze of volunteers engaged in various activities. In one set-up, Marian placed an array of objects in front of Russian-English bilinguals and asked them to “pick up the marker”, for example. The twist is that the names of some of the objects in the two languages sound the same but have different meanings. The Russian word for stamp sounds like “marker”, for instance, which in English can mean pen. Although the volunteers never misunderstood the question, the eye-tracker showed that they would quickly glance at the alternative object before choosing the correct one (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol 6, p 97).

This almost-imperceptible gesture gives away an important detail about the workings of the bilingual brain, revealing that the two languages are constantly competing for attention in the back of our minds. As a result, whenever we bilinguals speak, write, or listen to the radio, our brain is busy choosing the right word while inhibiting the same term from the other language. It is a considerable test of executive control – just the kind of cognitive workout, in fact, that is common in many commercial “brain-training” programs, which often require you to ignore distracting information while tackling a task.

It did not take long for scientists to wonder whether these mental gymnastics might help the brain resist the ravages of ageing. After all, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that other forms of brain exercise can create “cognitive reserve”, a kind of mental padding that cushions the mind against age-related decline. To find out, Bialystok and her colleagues collected data from 184 people diagnosed with dementia, half of whom were bilingual. The results, published in 2007, were startling – symptoms started to appear in the bilingual people four years later than in their monolingual peers (Neuropsychologia, vol 45, p 459). Three years later, they repeated the study with a further 200 people showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Again, there was around a five-year delay in the onset of symptoms in bilingual patients (Neurology, vol 75, p 1726). The results held true even after factors such as occupation and education were taken into account. “I was as surprised as anyone that we found such large effects,” Bialystok says.

Besides giving us bilinguals a brain boost, speaking a second language may have a profound effect on behaviour. Neuroscientists and psychologists are coming to accept that language is deeply entwined with thought and reasoning, leading some to wonder whether bilingual people act differently depending on which language they are speaking. That would certainly tally with my experience.

Such effects are hard to characterise, of course, since it is not easy to pull apart the different strands of yourself. Susan Ervin-Tripp, now at the University of California, Berkeley, found an objective way to study the question in the 1960s, when she asked Japanese-English bilinguals to complete a set of unfinished sentences in two separate sessions – first in one language, then the other. She found that her volunteers consistently used very different endings depending on the language. For example, given the sentence “Real friends should…” a person using Japanese replied “…help each other out,” yet in English opted for “…be very frank”. Overall, the responses seemed to reflect how monolinguals of either language tended to complete the task. The findings led Ervin-Tripp to suggest that bilinguals use two mental channels, one for each language, like two different minds.

Her theory would seem to find support in a number of recent studies. David Luna from Baruch College in New York City and colleagues, for example, recently asked bilingual English-Spanish volunteers to watch TV adverts featuring women – first in one language and then six months later in the other – and then rate the personalities of the characters involved. When the volunteers viewed the ads in Spanish, they tended to rate the women as independent and extrovert, but when they saw the advert in English they described the same characters as hopeless and dependent (Journal of Consumer Research, vol 35, p 279). Another study found that Greek-English bilinguals reported very different emotional reactions to the same story depending on the language – finding themselves “indifferent” to the character in one version, but feeling “concerned” for his progress in the other, for example (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol 25, p 124).

One explanation is that each language brings to mind the values of the culture we experienced while learning it, says Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. She recently asked bilingual Mexicans to rate their personality in English and Spanish questionnaires. Modesty is valued more highly in Mexico than it is in the US, where assertiveness gains respect, and the language of the questions seemed to trigger these differences. When questioned in Spanish, each volunteer was more humble than when the survey was presented in English.

Some of the behavioural switches may be intimately linked to the role of language as a kind of scaffold that supports and structures our memories. Many studies have found that we are more likely to remember an object if we know its name, which may explain why we have so few memories of early childhood. There is even some evidence that the grammar of a language can shape your memory. Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University in California recently found that Spanish speakers are worse at remembering who caused an accident than English speakers, perhaps because they tend to use impersonal phrases like “Se rompióel florero” (“the vase broke itself”) that do not state the person behind the event (Psychonomic Bulletin Review, vol 18, p 150).

The result seems to be that a bilingual person’s recollections will change depending on the language they are speaking. In a clever but simple experiment, Marian and Margarita Kaushanskaya, then at Northwestern University, asked Mandarin-English bilinguals a general knowledge question, first in one language then the other. For instance, they were asked to “name a statue of someone standing with a raised arm while looking into the distance”. They found people were more likely to recall the Statue of Liberty when asked in English, and a statue of Mao when asked in Mandarin (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, p 14, vol 925). The same seems to occur when bilinguals recall personal, autobiographical memories. “So childhood memories will come up faster and more often when you are reinstating that language,” Marian says.

Despite the recent progress, the researchers may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact of bilingualism, and many questions remain. Chief among them will be the question of whether any monolingual person could cash in on the benefits. If so, what better incentive to bolster language education in schools, which is flagging in both the UK and US.

Much has been made of the difficulties of learning a new language later in life, but the evidence so far suggests the effort should pay off. “You can learn another language at any age, you can learn it fluently, and you can see benefits to your cognitive system,” says Marian. Bialystok agrees that late language-learners gain an advantage, even if the performance boost is usually less pronounced than in bilingual speakers. “Learn a language at any age, not to become bilingual, but just to remain mentally stimulated,” she says. “That’s the source of cognitive reserve.”

By Catherine de Lange

In this lecture for Westmont College’s series titled “Beyond Two Cultures: The Sciences as Liberal Arts,” string theorist Jim Gates offers his thoughts on the complementary natures of science and the liberal arts — and how the human mind formulates “systems of belief” in both disiplines.

This is the first time, in a formal structured way, I’ve been asked to speak before a group of academicians on this set of issues. It is a great honor to be invited to speak on behalf of one of the two “cultures” mentioned in the commentary by C.P. Snow (1905-1980) in New Statesman. It is also a great challenge to be so called upon to speak for an entire “culture.” Of necessity, my comments were created from the vantage point of thirty or so years of working embedded within the academic/scientific culture, and specifically within the field of physics. My views have been molded by this experience.

In preparing for this conversation, I have given much thought to how I, as a scientist, could make a valuable contribution to this tradition established at Westmont College. I believe this is best accomplished by spending most of my presentation describing the attributes of the culture of science as I have experienced them and reflected upon this experience. I claim no special abilities or qualifications to be making this presentation. I am most certainly and woefully uninformed on what I am sure must be a vast liberal arts literature on science and culture. I am, however, a theoretical physicist who has made an effort to think on such matters.

Like most of my academic/scientific colleagues, I am only dimly aware of the other culture (the liberal arts) that nonetheless is present in the university world where I have worked for several decades. I may be a little less like my physicist colleagues as my career includes unusually large numbers of lectures and such to non-physicists and non-academicians both on and off campus. Some of these experiences include presentations on my home campus to philosophy classes and honors courses for non-science majors. Of the latter, I owe a special debt to a course entitled “Knowledge and its Human Implications” (supervised by Dr. Kathleen Staudt) that has provided me with an invaluable forum in which to formulate, discuss, and exchange ideas with non-scientific academic colleagues on topics relevant to this conversation.

The “Beyond the Two Cultures” theme of this conversation is very timely from several different perspectives.

It is occurring in the Einstein World Year of Physics (WYP) celebrating the great “annus mirabilis” of 1905 when Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wrote papers that set the course for physics and much of science to this day. The WYP is being recognized around the world as a time for physicists to reflect on past accomplishments of the field and prospectively look at the future. Due to this timing, I will in the following (perhaps more than I might otherwise) refer to statements he made when they seem to be relevant to this presentation.

We are also living at a time when science, through its application in technology, has been remaking the rules by which the wealth of nations will be determined in the future. The principal agencies of this are the Internet and World Wide Web. The implications of this presently seem hardly recognized in our general society. Resulting from new developments in science such as “nano-technology” and “genomic-based science,” we appear to be living at the dawning of an age where technological application of science will potentially have the ability to remake the meaning of the word human. There is both great promise and peril in this.

Finally, there are increasing signs the general society in the United States is turning away from one of the greatest triumphs of Western civilization, the view that objective reality is governed by rational and comprehensible rules independent of human desires and emotions.

All I have to say assumes this fundamental article of faith, a fundamental proposition that allows for science as we know it to exist. Scientific culture promotes a rationalist reality — based view of the objective universe. This view of our universe, our working hypothesis, has been the chief enabler of scientific and technological progress over the last few centuries.

In a sense, the commentary of C.P. Snow can be seen as a premonition of the divergence of the culture of science from not just the “intellectual life of the whole of Western society,” but perhaps also in the U.S. from the general culture of the nation. Many present day manifestations in U.S. society seem to follow as the natural evolution of Snow’s observations.

One thing I find most interesting about these kinds of conversations and deliberations is my part of science, physics, evolved from a subject known as natural philosophy. So in a very real way, physics is a part of the liberal arts tradition. It is not entirely something separate. This is very different from other subjects known collectively as the sciences.

My field has been influenced positively from one perspective (perhaps negatively from another) by having intellects like René Descartes (1596-1650) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) participate in its intellectual birth. The latter “pushed,” with his studies of motion, a particular way to view the world by using a very specialized language. I believe Snow understated the importance of this fact. In discussing the difficulty of communicating between the two cultures, he writes it is as “though the scientists spoke nothing but Tibetan.” Actually, the language largely in use is mathematics. I believe language can influence culture. The language of mathematics has shaped scientific culture.

Of course, mathematics had been used well prior to Galileo in descriptions of the physical world. However, from what I understand of history, the subject of motion, trajectories, and rates of change leads to a fundamental increase in the mathematical basis of the physical sciences. Following Galileo, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) solved the problem of motion with the invention of “the Calculus.” This proved a fundamental breakthrough in the development of physics and all of the physical sciences. It is also interesting to note that the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) at about the same time made this same leap. Even more interesting is recent evidence calculus may have been created by Archimedes (287BC-212BC) but lost to humanity until the work of Leibniz and Newton.

Humanists may be surprised to think of mathematics as a language, but this is a part of life for physicists. Mathematics is, in fact, a very interesting and strange language with many properties in common with other languages. I tell nonscientists to think about mathematics as a language because this is the way scientists use it. It is a language tool. As my fellow conversationalist at the meeting, Dame Gillian Beer, reminds us, Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) declared that the problem with the use of words for a discussion of scientific concepts is there are not enough tenses.

I also have described mathematics as an organ of perception. By this I mean theoretical physicists are working to gain insight into structures that make up levels of existence to which we have no direct access. We achieve this by the means of mathematics. We “see” these levels first with mathematics.

An illustration of this process can be seen in the ability to detect atoms. Using present day technology in the form of “atomic force microscopes,” individual atoms can be directly imaged. This has only become possible within the last decade. Yet in a very real way, physicists have been “seeing” atoms for about one hundred years. We can trace this especially back to one of the great works of Einstein in 1905. On July 18 of that year he wrote “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat.”

The work of Einstein firmly established the existence of atoms and their size. Thus, we physicists have “seen” atoms by way of their mathematical description in theories that explain observable behavior in our world. For us, mathematics really is another means for viewing the universe. I often tell young people mathematics is an extra sensory perception organ. Of course, I am not the first person to notice this very strange property of mathematics. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) said, “Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.” So I would argue it is this strange tool that is responsible for how physics especially diverges from the rest of the liberal arts.

Even for those of us who make use of the tool of mathematics in physics or science in general, this tool has a lot of surprising properties. One of these properties I refer to as telepathy. All languages have the power to convey ideas from one mind to another. To this extent, the telepathic power of languages is ubiquitous. However, the precision of the transmittal of concepts using mathematics is striking when compared to other forms of human communication.

As my career has progressed, I am drawn into discussions with many people who are not scientists, nor even academicians. One ongoing discussion has been with someone involved in film production. Recently he posed the following question: let us imagine true extra sensory perception exists. Could individuals possessing this gift be used to advance the study of the submicroscopic world? I ask the reader to indulge me a bit as there is a serious point to be made.

For the purpose of this discussion, let us grant this possibility. In this case, imagine the purported “remote viewer” actually perceived an idea about an object in the sub-microscopic world that had never been considered previously in physics. Having found this, how does he or she communicate it to others? The viewer will have to struggle with the use of simile and metaphor (ruling out science fiction-type telepathy) to communicate the genuinely new idea.

One of the properties of the mathematical language is if an object or idea has a mathematical description, there is automatically a way to communicate it in a precise and detailed way to others’ minds. This is true even though those other minds have no previous experience with the new discovery. The mathematically precise understanding of the discovery is accessible to anyone with a sufficiency of mathematical “numeracy” (the analog of literacy). Mathematics has this peculiar telepathic nature to it because of the precision it enforces in its users. In a very real way we can know with much more precision, than with other forms of human communication, what another person is thinking. This precision does not exist in the media of aural or written, nor in graphical representations (outside of mathematics), nor visual representations. We share a common platform for the exchange of concepts.

The physicist Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) once wrote an essay entitled, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” In this he noted the puzzling scope of success the physical sciences have achieved in the last few centuries based on the use of the language of mathematics. I’d like here to give one such example.

In the late 1920s, the physicist P.A.M. Dirac (1902-1984) found equations that provide a description of the electron and are consistent with both the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Theory (the laws of the very tiniest structures in our universe). When he investigated the equations completely, he found indeed one solution that accomplished the goal of describing the electron. Unexpectedly, a second consistent solution was also found. This second solution had not played any part in his thinking about the properties a mathematical description of electrons ought to possess. Yet it was there, and by studying its properties, one learns that this second mathematical solution describes an object with the same mass as an electron but also the opposite electric charge. Even more startling, if this second solution is superimposed at the same location as the electron, it causes both to disappear and be replaced by an amount of equivalent energy given by Einstein’s famous equation, “E = mc².”

A few years later in a laboratory experiment, C.D. Anderson (1905-1991) discovered a particle possessing these properties. It is the anti-particle to the electron (called the “positron”) and was the first known form of what we now call anti-matter. Dirac did not set out to discover anti-matter. Nonetheless, the mathematics he used forced this. The point of this story is to ask the question: Why?

The history of physics is filled with such stories. “Why does the mathematical understanding of how gravity works at the surface of the earth explain how it works for planets?” “Why does the mathematical understanding of how electricity and magnetic work in the laboratory explain how fast a light beam travels?” In all of science this same phenomenon occurs.

With the emergence of physics from the classical liberal arts conversation, using a highly specialized language, this “queen of the sciences” pulls all of the sciences in this direction. It pulls the language of all of the other sciences in a direction that is mathematically based and represents a particular kind of human reasoning and perception. In A Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) phrased this concept as follows: “No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.”

To this day physics continues to “pull” other physical (and even non-physical) science disciplines toward using a mathematically-based paradigmatic philosophy. Within the last decade, there has been a noticeable divergence in some fields of biology, so they increasingly are coming to more resemble physics. Indeed, the physics community itself is responsible for some of this. Numbers of its members have turned their approaches, techniques, and philosophies of physics toward issues of biological systems.

However, due to the field’s use of this language, physicists often find enormous difficulty communicating with others outside of their field and language. When speaking among ourselves, we presume there exists this common language, and thus when, for example, confronted with speaking to the public or to funding agencies or entities, we are thrown back into the issue of communicating the goals and achievements of the field. We are forced to use other forms of communication, and our effectiveness is important to gain support for the continuation of research activities.

Before we leave the consideration of the power of mathematics as it shapes the culture science, there is one other development that is now apparent and could have likely more important implications for the future culture of science. It need hardly be remarked upon how enormous is the impact of computers and computer technology on society today.

Throughout most of the history of the development of science, there has essentially been a single medium through which mathematics has been accessible. Practitioners had to master symbolic systems of representations in order to master mathematical concepts. This point is easy to overlook, and it might be thought the two are inseparable. However, with the creation of the modern computer, a potentially new medium with which humans might research mathematics has appeared.

In order to explore this more fully, let us focus upon another area where human creativity and a powerful symbolic representation technology co-exist. There is one obvious such example: music. A score to an intricate piece of music is at least as complicated as pages of mathematical calculations.

While pieces of music exist as scores, they can also be played on musical instruments. Any person possessing the ability to hear has a direct access to the concepts in music that have their symbolic representation in the scores being performed. Until the advent of the computer, there were no analogous instruments or medium for mathematics. It is possible to use a fantasy to better stress this point.

Imagine a planet on which there existed no sound at all but with beings who were our equal in intelligence. Could music exist on such a world? I would argue the answer to this question is “Yes.” If by some means one of these beings happened upon the idea of a musical score, then he or she would have access to music. Of course, only those who mastered the technique of scoring would have such access, but they might be inspired to marvel at the beauty, elegance, and power in this world of symbolic representation. They would also encounter enormous difficulties communicating with their fellow beings.

The introduction of sound and musical instruments changes this immediately. One goes from a world in which only those who master the symbolic representation of musical concepts can develop an appreciation of music to a world where there can be almost universal appreciation. In our world, we know of musical geniuses who never learned to read scores! Musically, creativity is not limited solely to those who master the symbols. I have a suspicion that with a sufficiently long interaction between humans and their computers, something like this might happen with mathematics. This would herald an enormous cultural shift. We can see some of this starting to happen in computational science, cellular automata, algorithm, and computer science. Science serves as a foundation of technology. Although it is true physicists “find the codes of reality,” this is only done in the context of several centuries of experience, which have shown that by allowing some members of society to engage in this activity (of low immediate value), the knowledge uncovered has demonstrated lasting (high) value over the long term. This is very apparent when we note whereas physics finds the rules for what can be, it is the effort of talented engineers and technologists who use these rules to create what has never existed previously… advanced technology. So physics and all of the science are serving the purpose of creating a storehouse of knowledge. The role of the sciences is to uncover the codes.

When speaking to young people, I often like to use a scene from the popular movie “The Matrix” to drive home this point. There is a scene when the lead character, Neo, first realizes who he is, and when this occurs, the scene around him fades to be replaced by strings of green characters running across a screen. These characters represent the underlying computer codes running the matrix. Likewise, science is the activity that uncovers the codes that run physical reality. In speaking to students, I have found many believe that science is a collection of facts found in books and that being a good science student consists of regurgitation of these facts. My response is it is necessary to change this definition of science. If that is the view one has of science, it is like walking into the studio of a great sculptor, looking down at the rubble on the floor, and concluding that sculptors are people who make little piles of pebbles from large rocks. This misses the main point of the activity. The facts that end up in books are the results of science.

Science is the human process by which our species gains its most precise understanding of the place in which we live, the universe (or physical reality — the part of reality not dependent on our emotional state as far as we can measure). It is a process, a conversation among a group of humans, and in a sense, a conversation between a group of humans and the universe. This conversation has taught us to be cautious in our attitude toward what it is that we believe.

Often non-scientists appear subject to an illusion that science uncovers “scientific truths” for our species. This is not the work of science. Science reveals “theories” about the structure of the universe. In Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein said,

It is difficult to attach a precise meaning to the term “scientific truth.” Thus the meaning of the word “truth” varies according to whether we deal with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition, or a scientific theory.

The use of the word theory recognizes any paradigmatic explanation of facts (i.e., scientific observation) is a proposition that can be proven false. Any claim made to being a part of science must surrender ab initio to this property, and it must in principle allow (by the action and reasoning of scientists) for the claim to be proven false.

Scientists are aware ours is a clever species, having inhabited earth for at least hundreds of millennia before obtaining our present status as the planet’s dominant life form. Our mental processes have allowed us first to survive and later thrive and thereby reach this point. Due to our cleverness, science must take into account we are also clever enough to fool ourselves. Accordingly, built into the structure of science there must be mechanisms for error correction. This is the role of what has been called the scientific method and the means by which we discern arguments, observations, and experiments that provide a basis for our system of beliefs. A corollary to such a system is scientists must be willing, when presented with a preponderance of evidence, to abandon beliefs held as correct. In science, there can be no final certainty about one’s scientific beliefs. Part of the charge to each new generation of scientists is to check and re-check the “canon” that is its inheritance from previous generations.

Among systems of belief, science is almost unique in this embrace of fallibility and limitations on human ability and perception. Instead of a weakness, this is the source of the strength of science. It can be argued that this unremitting dedication to the refinement of our understanding of the universe gives science, through its application in technology, more power to alter the quality of human life than perhaps any other system of belief. Certainly human history over the course of the last several centuries supports this.

Science lies at the intersection of several different and not completely overlapping regions. One of these is the human imagination, and mathematics is part of it. A second consists of physical reality, and the final is a subset of this corresponding to the technical competence of our species. Science, as we know it, can only exist in the region where these three completely overlap. Not all are static. It is clear that what we call technological progress means that the technical competence of our species is expanding. The part of the circle of physical reality that lies outside of our technical competence and mathematical imaginations constitutes the realm of profoundly unknown parts of physical reality.

It is possible to observe phenomena without possessing the requisite mathematical ideas to explain and give complete context to the observations. A present day example is the phenomenon of “high temperature” superconductivity where there exits no accepted scientific theory. Perhaps the opposite example to this is the part of physics known as “superstring/Mtheory.” Here we have lots of mathematical imagination, but no observational basis of this set of ideas. It remains a piece of “pre-physics,” “proto-physics,” or “putative physics.” (Some of its detractors even say that it is “meta-physics,” i.e., not physics.)

This is not the first time a situation of this character has arisen in physics. The understanding of motion in the realm of atoms was developed in two major conceptual steps by three physicists, Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Erwin Schröedinger (1887-1961), and Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). The basic reason why they were driven in this direction was the need to explain the unique pattern of colors (i.e., a spectrum) that each element emits when, for example, it is burned.

Brilliant propositions were required to explain this observation about nature. The first occurred in 1905 when Bohr suggested the orbit of the electron was quantized; in other words, it could only orbit at a number of fixed distances from the proton. This became formalized in an ad hoc rule (Bohr-Sommerfeld rule) to be added to the already existing understanding of physics.

This was an unsatisfactory situation. It is not a desirable result that willy-nilly new rules are added to the existing theoretical framework. The world’s physicists were simply taking all the theory that had been proposed by Isaac Newton and then adding one more such rule… one that only applied to tiny objects.

Imagine it was possible to build a time machine, travel back to the year 1920 and ask the world’s leading physicists, “What is the deep conceptual basis for quantum behavior?” The answers given would have been confused and chaotic and most likely incorrect. This was best possibility in the time between 1905 and 1925/1926. A true paradigm shift (including Bohr’s suggestion) occurred in 1925/1926 when Schröedinger and Heisenberg introduced Quantum Theory.

This conceptual framework is a genuine paradigm shift that totally changed how physics envisions the universe at the level of the very tiniest scales. Although in some ways today’s situation in String Theory is distinctive (laboratory-based observational input drove the development of Quantum Theory), at best it presently exists in the state of an incomplete paradigm.

Quantum Theory demanded a new view of objective reality. The Classical Newtonian Theory described a reality cast in the form of points, which for simplicity we can envision as tiny billiard balls. The Quantum Theory description requires these to be replaced by mathematical (“wave functions”) entities that can exhibit the behavior of points under some circumstances but behave as waves under others.

This paradigm shift illustrates a number of features about the two cultures we are discussing. Scientific culture is extremely conservative with regard to its basic beliefs or paradigms. Observational facts have the power to cause a true shift. However, once the shift occurs, the culture accommodates it. These shifts are dramatic. For Newton, a “mechanical universe view” based on generalizing the laws of motion from a game of billiards was sufficient. He invented his calculus to be able to describe such motion. For Bohr, Schröedinger, and Heisenberg, a “mathematically-based universe view” was necessary.

The shift from one to the other is dramatic and illustrates vividly Einstein’s dictum: “Imagination is more important than knowledge” (Ideas and Opinions). For many years this comment puzzled me. I could not see how imagination (which is often associated with creativity and even play) could be more important than knowledge, the basis of technology. The Newtonian/Bohr- Schröedinger-Heisenberg shift illustrates the correctness of Einstein’s comment. Quantum Theory is not derivable from Classical Newtonian Theory, it is a daring leap of the imagination in its final form.

In other words, in science the creation of a genuinely new rational paradigm is itself an irrational process.

This perhaps is the most profound distinction between the two cultures. In science, the creation of paradigms is not determined solely from the internal discourse within the culture. I believe that as scientists view the other culture collectively, we are left in a state of confusion as to how this irrational process is governed or if it is at all.

Knowledge (mathematical, scientific, and technological) is finite. It definitely possesses a boundary beyond which we are blind. The only human facility by which it is increased is imagination. We imagine new answers and solutions. We make them up! However, as scientists we are charged with taking this marvelous facility and seeking Nature’s confirmation that we are less incorrect than with our previous theories. Einstein’s comment was that it was the sad fate of most theories to be shown incorrect shortly after their conception. For those not so roughly treated, at most Nature says “Maybe.” Again and again we go to the laboratory to see if the new paradigm gains support. Science is thus always in a state of “tentativity” (if I may introduce such a term), a state mostly static but with punctuating dynamic periods of changes in beliefs about the universe. This culture must accept that its most cherished theories at some point in the future will likely be changed.

I believe living with uncertainty is a very unnatural way for humans to exist. As I think about fellow members of humanity, beliefs, behavior, cultural patterns, and structures that exist, it seems to me a great deal can be understood as an attempt to remove uncertainty from existence. Many would prefer to have certainty about a false belief than to admit uncertainty and strive thereafter for enlightenment. In science it is impossible to maintain the illusion of certainty. This makes doing science difficult. We are enormously happy when we have wrestled a single fact from, in Einstein’s words, the library of the Ancient One. It takes an enormous investment in human creativity and effort to cause this new understanding to come into being. For me, creativity is the ability to form universally recognizable patterns of harmony, symmetry, and order synthesized from ignorance and/or chaos. I do not know how creativity can come to exist in a person without discipline. So in this sense it is fitting that we scientists all work in “disciplines.”

The culture of science, as I have known it, is a reflection of all I have tried to illuminate above, and I hope I’ve not neglected some important point. Most, if not all, of this likely has been said before in other ways, places, and times. Creating new science is a human effort, and it exists at the edges of what we know by harnessing an irrational quality of the mind — human creativity.

What does this have to do with the liberal arts? I believe we can discern the answer from several points I have attempted to make in the previous discussion.

The strongest of these is based on common assumptions about how human minds operate in formulating systems of belief about existence. Both cultures must begin with the assumption that we are smart enough to figure it out. That is, we are capable of bringing patterns of understanding to the totality of human experience. If we throw up our hands as step one and despair that existence is too complicated to yield to rationalist views, then we never get to step two. Both are forced to rely on deliberative and rational processes to carry the conversation forward.

I would posit that the liberal arts are posing questions and exploring concepts about how the human mind works internally and collectively. From my perspective, we physical scientists, roughly speaking, view our existence as being such that it can be split into two parts, objective reality and human consciousness. We in the sciences are asking the question, “How does our house (the universe) operate when we are not there?”

The liberal arts, I believe, are asking the question “How do we and the house operate when we are home?” To explore their respective questions, both cultures use discourse and collective deliberation as the basic tools for seeking answers. Minus our use of mathematics, these techniques are remarkably similar. We are both “discoursive” (again I hope I’m introducing a useful phraseology). In a sense, the scientists have likely picked the easier question to answer. The spectacularly technological progress since the time of Galileo can be interpreted as evidence for this. From my perspective, whereas there is in general, and especially in the U.S., no great interest in doing science, there is an enormous appetite for the increase in the technical competence that results.

Society permits science to exist for this reason. There still generally seems to be a healthy regard for science due to the benefits derived from the activity.

In the process of achievement, there are certainly “spiritual” reasons to support scientific research. The work of Einstein informs us we live in a universe about 14 billion years old that has undergone almost unimaginable transformations through a cosmic evolution of space, time, matter, and energy. This permits the existence of every individual human consciousness. During this enormous gulf of time and effort, the universe produces apparently exactly one copy of a creature called “you.” The 1933 work of W. Baade (1893-1960) and F. Zwicky (1898-1974) gave us the power to comprehend supernovae, nature’s forges for creating heavy elements (the “star stuff” spoken about by Carl Sagan [1934- 1996]) required for planets and life. The work of Darwin informs us how our planet and universe are capable of creating first life and then consciousness. The discovery by F. Crick (1916-2004), J. Watson (1928-), and M. Wilkins (1916-2004) (with an often unacknowledged assist from female crystallographer, R. Franklin) of the DNA molecule is leading to scientific indications of just how closely related are all members of the human family and our relation to all life forms on our planet. In all these instances, the scientific culture produces answers that curiously echo ideas, comments, and propositions that have long occurred in the liberal arts. Should not these be mutually reinforcing for the two cultures?

Above I commented that the nature of scientific systems of belief is they almost invariably are tentative, and this is likely an “unnatural” state of mind for most people. This is one of the types of questions the liberal arts can explore. There are so many other such questions where it seems to me the liberal arts have and will continue to lead us in exploration of the human condition. Why is it we relate to one another as we do? What is it that art, music, and poetry tell us about the human mind?

After the creation of nuclear weapons, Einstein observed that unless we have advances in the understanding of the essential nature of humanity, we are in a position to be overwhelmed by our increasing control over objective reality to the extent that self-extinction is a possibility. At that time, the threat was from the use of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Although we seem to have avoided that dire fate, this new millennium clearly brings us new challenges.

With new advances in understanding the human genome, shall we embark upon “improving” our species? I have on occasion posed questions to general audiences asking, “If you could choose to have a daughter who could hit a tennis ball like Serena Williams, possess the leadership qualities of Margaret Thatcher, and look like a Sports Illustrated swimwear model, how many of you would choose otherwise?” “If it becomes possible through the use of nano-technology to insert microscopic machines into your body to enhance its function and performance, improve vision, assist weight loss, maintain a youthful appearance, and provide a wireless connection within your mind, would you not so decide?”

To survive essentially as humans, we must diligently maintain the discussion that occurs in the liberal arts and broaden it to cover our entire society, including the other culture. We must endeavor to harness the universal source of human creativity to this end.

By S. James Gates

Spooky quantum entanglement just got spookier.

Entanglement is a weird statewhere two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they’ve been measured and may no longer even exist.

Quantum entanglement is a curious physical property of our universe where paired quantum objects, regardless where they are, instantly reflect one another. Albert Einstein called this “Spooky action at a distance.” Photons (light particles) are quantum objects. Physicists have experimentally confirmed this entanglement phenomenon. One way is to split a photon into two lower-energy photons, and the resulting pair becomes entangled. (Here is a good explanation.) Photons have various properties. When a property in the entangled pair is altered, the other’s same property reflects instantaneously. Physicists have demonstrated separating the entangled photons using fiber optics cables. Again, over some distance, the entanglement property holds.

Imagine a quantum entangled particle is placed on the moon and it’s partner is placed on earth. Sending information between the moon and earth would be instantaneous. For many people who followed the 2009 Mars rover, they will likely know it takes a very long time for new control signals to reach it. Quantum entanglement may hold the key to solve that latency issue.

If that sounds baffling, even the researchers agree it’s a bit “radical,” in a paper reporting the experiment published online April 22 in the journal Nature Physics.

Moreover, the high-frequency and high-accuracy acquiring, pointing and tracking (APT) technique developed in our experiment can be directly utilized for future satellite-based quantum communication.

“Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured,” write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna.

Essentially, the scientists showed that future actions may influence past events, at least when it comes to the messy, mind-bending world of quantum physics.

In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart. Now, two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky effect, called entanglement, could also bind particles across time. If their proposal can be tested, it could help process information in quantum computers and test physicists’ basic understanding of the universe.

“You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” said quantum physicist S. Jay Olson of Australia’s University of Queensland, lead author of the new study.

In ordinary entanglement, two particles (usually electrons or photons) are so intimately bound that they share one quantum state — spin, momentum and a host of other variables — between them. One particle always “knows” what the other is doing. Make a measurement on one member of an entangled pair, and the other changes immediately.

Physicists have figured out how to use entanglement to encrypt messages in uncrackable codes and build ultrafast computers. Entanglement can also help transmit encyclopedias’ worth of information from one place to another using only a few atoms, a protocol called quantum teleportation.

In a new paper posted on the physics preprint website arXiv.org, Olson and Queensland colleague Timothy Ralph perform the math to show how these same tricks can send quantum messages not only from place to place, but from the past to the future.

The equations involved defy simple mathematical explanation, but are intuitive: If it’s impossible to describe one particle without including the other, this logically extends to time as well as space.

“If you use our timelike entanglement, you find that [a quantum message] moves in time, while skipping over the intermediate points,” Olson said. “There really is no difference mathematically. Whatever you can do with ordinary entanglement, you should be able to do with timelike entanglement.”

Olson explained them with a Star Trek analogy. In one episode, “beam me up” teleportation expert Scotty is stranded on a distant planet with limited air supply. To survive, Scotty freezes himself in the transporter, awaiting rescue. When the Enterprise arrives decades later, Scotty steps out of the machine without having aged a day.

“It’s not time travel as you would ordinarily think of it, where it’s like, poof! You’re in the future,” Olson said. “But you get to skip the intervening time.”

According to quantum physicist Ivette Fuentes of the University of Nottingham, who saw Olson and Ralph present the work at a conference, it’s “one of the most interesting results” published in the last year.

“It stimulated our imaginations,” said Fuentes. “We know entanglement is a resource and we can do very interesting things with it, like quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography. We might be able to exploit this new entanglement to do interesting things.”

One such interesting thing could involve storing information in black holes, said physicist Jorma Louko, also of the University of Nottingham.

“They show that you can use the vacuum, that no-particle state, to store a lot of information in just a couple of atoms, and recover that info from other atoms later on,” Louko said. “The details of that have not been worked out, but I can foresee that the ideas that these authors use could be adapted to the black hole context.”

Entanglement in time could also be used to investigate as-yet-untested fundamentals of particle physics. In the 1970s, physicist Bill Unruh predicted that, if a spaceship accelerates through the empty space of a vacuum, particles should appear to pop out of the void. Particles carry energy, so they would be, in effect, a warm bath. Wave a thermometer outside, and it would record a positive temperature.

Called the Unruh effect, this is a solid prediction of quantum field theory. It’s never been observed, however, as a spaceship would have to accelerate at as-yet-unrealistic speeds to generate an effect large enough to be testable. But because timelike entanglement also involves particles emerging from vacuums, it could be used to conduct more convenient searches, relying on time rather than space.

Finding the Unruh effect would provide support for quantum field theory. But it might be even more exciting not to see the effect, Olson said.

“It would be more of a shocking result,” Olson said. “If you didn’t see it, something would be very wrong with our understanding.”

In the quantum world, things behave differently than they do in the real, macroscopic worldwe can see and touch around us. In fact, when quantum entanglement was first predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein expressed his distaste for the idea, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”

The researchers, taking entanglement a step further than ever before, started with two sets of light particles, called photons.

The basic setup goes like this:

Both pairs of photons are entangled, so that the two particles in the first set are entangled with each other, and the two particles in the second set are entangled with each other. Then, one photon from each pair is sent to a person named Victor. Of the two particles that are left behind, one goes to Bob, and the other goes to Alice.

But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob’s particles. If he decides to entangle the two photons he has, then Alice and Bob’s photons, each entangled with one of Victor’s, also become entangled with each other. And Victor can choose to take this action at any time, even after Bob and Alice may have measured, changed or destroyed their photons.

“The fantastic new thing is that this decision to entangle two photons can be done at a much later time,” said research co-author Anton Zeilinger, also of the University of Vienna. “They may no longer exist.”

Such an experiment had first been predicted by physicist Asher Peres in 2000, but had not been realized until now.

“The way you entangle them is to send them onto a half-silvered mirror,” Zeilinger told LiveScience. “It reflects half of the photons, and transmits half. If you send two photons, one to the right and one to the left, then each of the two photons have forgotten where they come from. They lose their identities and become entangled.”

Zeilinger said the technique could one day be used to communicate between superfast quantum computers, which rely on entanglement to store information. Such a machine has not yet been created, but experiments like this are a step toward that goal, the researchers say.

“The idea is to create two particle pairs, send one to one computer, the other to another,” Zeilinger said.”Then if these two photons are entangled, the computers could use them to exchange information.”

Remember, once the entangled pair are apart, information exchange between them cannot be intercepted. Information between the pair can be passed regardless of distance and medium. Communications faster than the speed of light?!

 

By Clara Moskowitz & Lisa Grossman

When it comes to stimulating creativity, brainstorming is one of the least efficient methods.

The idea behind Groupthink models is that creativity and achievement requires other people. Lone geniuses are out, and collaboration is in. Society is snuffing out the potential of introverts – roughly a third to a half of the population – by forcing them to work in teams.

From a study that measured the productivity of computer programmers, what distinguished the best programmers was not experience or salary, but privacy: personal workspace and freedom from interruption. In fact, “sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.”

Social scientists have known this for years. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1950s, researchers found that “individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases.” Studies have replicated similar findings, and they all highlight the same problem: “People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.”

The lesson? Picasso was right. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” So was Steve Wosniak, who in his memoir explained that, “most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists… And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Jonah Lehrer’s latest book Imagine, illustrate the important role other people play in the idea generation process. The first is a study conducted by Adam Jaffe, an economist at Brandeis University. After analyzing a paper trail of patent citations, Jaffe found that “innovation was largely a local process; citations were nearly ten times as likely to come from the same metropolitan area as a control patent.” Jaffe’s finding suggests that inventors are greatly inspired by their fellow inventors, and that the closer they live to each other the better they are at generating ideas. This helps explain why geniuses tend to arise in clusters – think Silicon valley or ancient Athens – and why these clusters are almost always located in metropolitan areas.

The second example comes from a 2010 study by Harvard Medical School researcher Isaac Kohane. Kohane wanted to know how physical proximity affected the quality of scientific research, so he gathered more than thirty-five thousand peer-reviewed papers and mapped the location of the authors. An obvious correlation appeared: “When coauthors were located closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality, as measured by the number of subsequent citations.”

These examples reinforce a point the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser makes in his New York Times bestselling book Triumph of the City: “Cities speed innovation by connecting their smart inhabitants to each other… proximity makes it easier to exchanges ideas or goods.”

Exchanging ideas and collaborating is, however, worthless without honest criticism and good feedback. A great study conducted by Charlan Nemeth, Bernard Personnaz, Maris Personnaz and Jack A. Goncalo demonstrates this by “testing the potential value of permitting criticism and dissent.” The researchers created three groups of people – minimal, brainstorming and debate – and had them discuss a topic. They found that, “groups encouraged to debate—even criticize (Debate condition) did not retard idea generation, as many would have predicted. In fact, such permission to criticize led to significantly more (rather than less) ideas than did the Minimal condition, both in the group and in total production of ideas.” Exchanging ideas with your peers is good, then, as long as it doesn’t turn into a wishy-washy brainstorming session.

A similar line of reasoning applies to the office floor plans of which Susan Cain is critical – some isolation is good, but too much is bad. At Pixar, for example, Steve Jobs insisted that the architect position the bathrooms at the center of the building so that an animator could easily strike up a conversation with a designer who could bounce ideas off of the COO. This model is the 21^st century coffeehouse, and it can be found in the offices of some of the most innovative companies.

What all this means is that generating an idea is a balancing act. When it comes to getting work done and being creative, hell is other people, as Sartre said. But let’s not forget that no man is an island; other people are indispensable when they provide us with inspiration and thoughtful criticism. Steve Wosniak was, after all, one half of one of the greatest collaborations in the 20^th century — despite his introverted nature.

By Sam McNerney

The recent epic failure in rationing superlatives reminds us that hyperbole should be saved for the best of the best

I just came back from a jazz festival at Katy High School in Texas that show-cased student stage bands from ten schools mostly near Houston, but some as far away as Beaumont and Brownsville (the latter band stole the show).

The festival was also a teaching event, with each band or ensemble performing for 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of critique from six professional jazz musicians (two of whom were music professors at universities). The critiques were shared with the small audience consisting almost exclusively of family and friends, even though this festival was advertised for the general public. Performances were staggered so that if you didn’t want to hear a critique you could go hear a student combo and vice versa. The facilities were magnificent, highlighted by the presence of a natatorium, impressive athletic fields and stadium, and a Performing Arts Center where the festival took place. If Texas schools are hurting for funds, it certainly wasn’t evident at Katy High School.

I was astonished at how accomplished these students were. I asked myself: How did those kids learn such complex music? The music played was mostly the big-band music of Goodman, Basie, Kenton, Ellington, and others from the eras of swing and “progressive-modern jazz of the ’50s and ’60s.

Jazz is sophisticated stuff. Yet these bands, of 16 to 24 kids each, could do what a lot of adult musicians cannot do. One band was a middle-school band, and the professional musicians who critiqued each band’s performance were amazed that these 7^th and 8^th graders “played like adults!”

Jazz fans everywhere lament that jazz seems like a dying art form overwhelmed by the simpler music of country, rap, hip-hop, and whatever it is that most kids listen to these days. But the professional “coaches” at the festival reassured the audience that “jazz is in good hands.” Fortunately, many school and university music programs teach jazz.

Learning to playing any musical instrument is hard, but playing jazz is the ultimate challenge. In jazz you not only have to know the tunes, you have to use the chord structure and complex rhythms to compose on the fly. A jazz professor from the University of North Texas counseled in one of his critiques, “I know you have sheet music you have to follow, but when you hear something in your head, play it. That’s what we (jazz musicians) do – improvise!”

Another jazz professor, during a critique session had two bands re-play a number from their performance. About one-third of the way through, he silently and casually walked through the rhythm section (piano, guitar, bass, and drums) and picked up the sheet music. The kids went right on playing without skipping a beat, because they had already memorized the sheet music. His point was they were using the sheet music as a crutch and not engaging with each other. Musicians talk to each other with their instruments, and listening is a big part of jazz improvisation. Students needed to be engaged with what each member of the rhythm section was doing, and, moreover, the rhythm section needed to interact with the saxes, trombones, and trumpets.

Hearing such wonderful music from children raised a nagging question. Why can’t kids master complicated science, math, language arts, or social studies? Why does everybody struggle so mightily to get kids to pass simple-minded government-mandated tests in academic subjects?

And then it hit me. Jazz-band teachers do the right things in teaching that other teachers need to learn how to do.

Two things are essential in teaching, the professionalism of the teacher and the motivation of the students. Most school jazz programs provide both. Sad to say, this is not so true of traditional curriculum.

Consider professionalism. It was clear that these band directors really knew what they were doing. Some had professional playing experience. Most, I am certain, were music majors in college. Think about what they have to do: They take young kids who know little about music beyond humming a tune and teach them music theory, teach them to read music, and teach them to play the different instruments in a band. And then they have to teach students how to compose on the fly. You can’t do that without being a real professional.

As for motivation, teaching and learning jazz involves clearly identifiable motivating features. Jazz-band teachers can’t take credit for some of these features, but creative teachers in other subject areas can think of similar motivating things they could be doing, based on what is involved in jazz.

First, there is passion. Jazz stirs the emotions, from blues to ballads to hot swing. If Benny Goodman’s music doesn’t make you want to jump up and dance, you better check your pulse to see if you are still alive. That brings up this point: Jazz is fun! Learning chemistry, for example, is almost never considered by students to be fun, but teachers should be thinking of ways to make it fun.

Some academic subjects do have intrinsic emotional impact. If, for example, the emotions of history students are not stirred by the Federalist Papers, or the turmoil of the Civil War and the country’s other wars, then history is not being competently taught. If the beauty of the laws of physics and chemistry or the biology of life are not evident in the teaching of science, it is the teacher’s fault.

Second is that jazz is personal. A jazz student intellectually owns his instrument. He or she owns the assigned space on the bandstand. One critiquing musician at the festival reminded students they own that space and if the sheet music stand or the audio at their station was not left just right from the previous band, they must fix it. It is now their space.

How well a student has learned jazz is public knowledge. They can’t hide. What you know and can do is on public display, all the time in practice sessions with fellow band members and, of course, in public performances. In marked contrast, it is against the law for teachers in other subject areas to reveal grades on individual performance, even within the more private area of the classroom. The belief system in education these days is that you should not allow an unprepared and under-performing student to be embarrassed. What dingbat policy maker came up with that? I know; it comes from the perverse politically correct movement that ignores the reality that self-esteem needs to be earned.

Third is that jazz is ultimate constructivism. All teachers know about constructivism, which is the idea that students have to do something to show they have mastered the learning task. Student jazz bands and combos demonstrate personal accomplishment all the time in rehearsals and stage performances. But in many traditional courses, the main constructive thing students do is fill in circles on a Scantron test answer sheet. “Science fairs” encourage constructivism, but these are usually one-time events. Students need to be doing something every day to demonstrate their learning. In English, how often to students write and re-write an essay, poem, or short story? Does anybody write book reports anymore? Do students spend hours of writing and editing comparable to what a jazz student spends in practice? In social studies, how many students are required to explain and debate capitalism, socialism, fascism, democracy, and republican government?

Fourth, jazz is social. Jazz students perform as a group, either in a big band or combo. Recall the earlier example from the festival where the professionals had to emphasize this point by taking away the sheet music. Students had to learn to talk and listen to each other through their instruments. In traditional education, there is a movement called collaborative learning, the idea of learning teams, but many teachers don’t use this approach or do it without regard to the proven formalisms needed for success. Regardless of academic subject, students benefit when they learn how to help each other learn.

Part of the social aspect of jazz is competition. In many schools, students don’t have to compete to get into a music class. But once in, they have to display learning to advance into more prestigious classes (think the “One O’Clock Lab Band” band at the University of North Texas). In whatever music lab they are in, they have to compete for “first chair” in their instrument section. It is like competing to make the varsity and then the first team in sports. Where is the equivalent in science, social studies, or language arts?

Unlike traditional education, where the goal is to meet minimum standards on state-mandated tests, jazz band directors make very clear their high expectations that everybody in each band class should become as proficient as they can. The whole point of their teaching is mastery and excellence. They expect excellence and they get it, as witnessed by festival performances such as I saw. Thanks to the unenlightened thinking of No Child Left Behind law, our public education has degenerated into “No Child Pushed Forward.”

And finally we consider the matter of reward. Somewhere in the college courses of teachers they learned about “positive reinforcement,” and most teachers try to use these ideas to shape the learning achievements of their students. But jazz performance provides public reward, in the form of public applause. Is there anything comparable in the teaching of science, social studies, or language arts? Is publishing (inflated) Honor Roll lists in the newspaper the best we can do?

So in a nutshell, the reason jazz students do so well is because their learning environment is built around:

• Passion
• Personal ownership and accountability
• Constructivism
• Social interaction
• High Expectations
• Reward

What I took home from this experience is a renewed feeling that outside of jazz music programs our schools are letting our children down. These young musicians prove that when motivated and challenged, they can do astonishing things. The printed program for the festival concluded with the comment, “The future belongs to those who are able to capture their creative intelligence. Jazz music education and performance develop the ability to create and produce the ideas that are individually unique.”

Why doesn’t the rest of education do that?

This festival experience leads me to suggest:

Ten Commandments for Better Teaching

1. Love your students as yourself.
2. Be professional. Know the stuff you teach.
3. Instill passion for the content – especially, make knowledge fun.
4. Make learning personal. Show students how to own their learning.
5. Take away the hiding places of unprepared and under-performing students. Let them embarass themselves.
6. Show students they have to earn self-esteem. You can’t give it to them. Praise success and do so publicly when it is earned.
7. Require students to do things that show they have mastered what you are trying to teach them.
8. Give students opportunities to “strut their stuff” in public, in and out of the class.
9. Help students learn how to work with others as a team.
10. Expect excellence. Do not teach to the lowest common denominator.

By William Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D.

14 Lessons From Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was a man of action. Over his lifetime, his curiosity and passion fueled a diverse range of interests. He was a writer (often using a pseudonym), publisher, diplomat, inventor and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

These days, spotting the future requires a different set of tools. There’s an infinite amount of ink and pixels spilled on most any topic. So how do we spot the future—and how might you?

The seven rules that follow are not a bad place to start pinpointing the inventions and trends that will define the future. They are the principles that underlie many of our contemporary innovations. Odds are that any story in our pages, any idea we deem potentially transformative, any trend we think has legs, draws on one or more of these core principles. They have played a major part in creating the world we see today. And they’ll be the forces behind the world we’ll be living in tomorrow.

1. Look for cross-pollinators.
It’s no secret that the best ideas—the ones with the most impact and longevity—are transferable; an innovation in one industry can be exported to transform another. But even more resonant are those ideas that are cross-disciplinary not just in their application but in their origin.

This notion goes way back. When the mathematician John von Neumann applied mathematics to human strategy, he created game theory—and when he crossed physics and engineering, he helped hatch both the Manhattan Project and computer science. His contemporary Buckminster Fuller drew freely from engineering, economics, and biology to tackle problems in transportation, architecture, and urban design.

Sometimes the cross-pollination is potent enough to create entirely new disciplines. This is what happened when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started to fuse psychology and economics in the 1970s. They were trying to understand why people didn’t behave rationally, despite the assumption by economists that they would do so. It was a question that economists had failed to answer for decades, but by cross-breeding economics with their own training as psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky were able to shed light on what motivates people. The field they created—behavioral economics—is still growing today, informing everything from US economic policy to the produce displays at Whole Foods.

More recently, the commonalities between biology and digital technology—code is code, after all—have inspired a new generation to reach across specialties and create a range of new cross-bred disciplines: bioinformatics, computational genomics, synthetic biology, systems biology. All these fields view biology as a technology that can be manipulated and industrialized. As Rob Carlson, founder of Biodesic and a pioneer in this arena, puts it, “The technology we use to manipulate biological systems is now experiencing the same rapid improvement that has produced today’s computers, cars, and airplanes.” These similarities and common toolsets can accelerate the pace of innovation.

The same goes for old industries, as well. The vitality we see in today’s car industry resulted from the recognition that auto manufacturing isn’t a singular industry siloed in Detroit. In the past decade, car companies have gone from occasionally dispatching ambassadors to Silicon Valley to opening lab space there—and eagerly incorporating ideas from information technology and robotics into their products. When Ford CEO Alan Mulally talks about cars as the “all-time mobile application,” he’s not speaking figuratively—he’s trying to reframe the identity of his company and the industry. That’s testimony to a wave of cross-pollination that will blur the line between personal electronics and automobiles.

The point here is that by drawing on threads from several areas, interdisciplinary pioneers can weave together a stronger, more robust notion that exceeds the bounds of any one field. (One caveat: Real cross-pollination is literal, not metaphorical. Be wary of flimflam futurists who spin analogies and draw equivalences without actually identifying common structures and complementary systems).

2. Surf the exponentials.
Some trends are so constant, they verge on cliché. Just mentioning Moore’s law can cause eyes to roll, but that overfamiliarity doesn’t make Gordon Moore’s 1965 insight—that chips will steadily, exponentially get smaller, cheaper, faster—any less remarkable. Not only has it been the engine of the information age, it has also given us good reason to believe in our capacity to invent our future, not just submit to it. After all, Moore’s law doesn’t know which silicon innovation will take us to the next level. It just says that if the previous 50 years are any indication, something will come along. And so far, it always has.

Moore’s law has been joined by—and has itself propelled—exponential progress in other technologies: in networks, sensors, and data storage (the first iPod, in 2001, offered 5 gigabytes for $399, while today’s “classic” model offers 160 gigs for $249, a 51-fold improvement). Each of these cyclically improving technologies creates the opportunity to “surf exponentials,” in the words of synthetic biologist Drew Endy—to catch the wave of smaller, cheaper, and faster and to channel that steady improvement into business plans and research agendas.

This was the great insight that inspired YouTube, when cofounder Jawed Karim realized that broadband was becoming so cheap and ubiquitous that it was on the verge of disrupting how people watched videos. And it’s what Dropbox did with digital storage. As the cost of disc space was dropping at an exponential rate, Dropbox provided a service capitalizing on that phenomenon, offering to store people’s data in the cloud, gratis. In 2007 the two free gigabytes the company offered were really worth something. These days 2 gigs is a pittance, but it remains enough of a lure that people are still signing up in droves—some fraction of whom then upgrade to the paid service and more storage.

And it’s what allowed Fitbit to outdo Nike+. As accelerometers dropped in cost and size, Fitbit could use them to measure not just jogging, but any activity where movement matters, from walking to sleep. For all its marketing muscle, Nike didn’t recognize that accelerometers were the dynamo of a personal health revolution. The new FuelBand shows that the company has now caught on, but Fitbit recognized the bigger trend first.

Exponentials, it turns out, are everywhere. Just choose one, look where it leads, and take a ride.

3. Favor the liberators.
Liberation comes in two flavors. First are those who recognize an artificial scarcity and move to eliminate it by creating access to goods. See the MP3 revolutionaries who untethered music from the CD, or the BitTorrent anti-tyrannists who created real video-on-demand.

Sometimes, of course, the revolution takes longer than expected. Back in 1993, George Gilder pointed out in these pages that the cost of bandwidth was plummeting so fast as to be imminently free. Gilder’s vision has been proven correct, paving the way for Netflix and Hulu. And yet telcos are today—still!—trying to throttle bandwidth. But this is just biding time on the scaffold. In the words of investor Fred Wilson, “scarcity is a shitty business model.”

The second flavor of liberation takes a more subtle approach to turning scarcity into plenty. These liberators use the advent of powerful software to put fallow infrastructure to work. Think of how Netflix piggybacked on a national distribution infrastructure by having the US Postal Service carry its red envelopes. Or how the founders of Airbnb recognized our homes as a massive stock of underutilized beds, ready to be put into the lodging market. Or how Uber turns idling drivers into on-call icons on a Google map, blipping their way to you in mere minutes. Reid Hoffman, the philosopher-investor, describes these companies as bringing liquidity to locked-up assets. He means this in the financial sense of “liquidity,” the ability to turn capital into currency, but it also works in a more evocative sense. These companies turn static into flow, bringing motion where there was obstruction.

What’s it like to live in the future? Ask an Uber driver—these guys are electrons pulsing through a real-life network, and they’re delighted by it. So should we all be.

4. Give points for audacity.
When “big hairy audacious goal” entered the lexicon in 1994 (courtesy of Built to Last, the management tome by James Collins and Jerry Porras), it applied to ambitious executives eager to set high targets for annual revenue growth and increased market share. Yawn. But the term—shortened to BHAG—also coincided with the birth of the web, when innovators began to posit a whole new sort of audacity: to make every book, in every language, available in less than a minute; to organize all the world’s information; or to make financial transactions frictionless and transparent.

Audacity is easily written off as naïveté, as overshooting your resources or talents. And that’s a danger. Plenty of would-be Napoleons have called for revolutions that never found an army. But you can’t make the future without imagining what it might look like.

Too much of the technology world is trying to build clever solutions to picayune problems. Better parking apps or restaurant finders might appeal to venture capitalists looking for a niche, but they are not ideas that seed revolutions. Instead, take a lesson from Tesla Motors, which had the pluck to spend $42 million of its precious capital to buy a factory roughly the size of the Pentagon, stock it with state-of-the-art robots, and begin making wholly viable electric cars. Or look to Square, which has pronounced the cash register a counter-cluttering vestige of the 19th century and created an alternative that will not only make buying things easier but will deliver retailers from their sclerotic relationship with credit card companies.

These times especially call for more than mere incrementalism. Let’s demand that our leaders get in over their heads, that they remain a little bit naive about what they’re getting into. As venture capitalist Peter Thiel told wired two years ago, “Am I right and early, or am I just wrong? You always have to wonder.” This kind of willingness to take a chance and be early is what keeps the world moving.

5. Bank on openness.
In 1997 Wired’s founding executive editor, Kevin Kelly, wrote a story called “New Rules for the New Economy” (it was in many ways the inspiration for this very piece). His focus was on networks, the “thickening web” that was forging connections of catalytic power. Many of his radical rules have become commonalities today, but two of them are just coming into their own: Connected individuals with shared interests and goals, he argued, create “virtuous circles” that can produce remarkable returns for any company that serves their needs. And organizations that “let go at the top”—forsaking proprietary claims and avoiding hierarchy—will be agile, flexible, and poised to leap from opportunity to opportunity, sacrificing short-term payoffs for long-term prosperity. Since Kelly wrote his piece, these forces have flourished. Back then open source software was a programming kibbutz, good for creating a hippy-dippy operating system but nothing that could rival the work of Oracle or Microsoft. Today open source is the default choice for corporations from IBM to Google. Even Microsoft is on board, evangelizing Hadoop and Python and opening the Xbox Kinect controller so it can be a platform for artists and roboticists. Supported by coder clubhouses like SourceForge and GitHub, collaborative circles can emerge with stunning spontaneity, responding elastically to any programming need.

More tellingly, in many organizations openness itself has become a philosophical necessity, the catalyst that turns one employee’s lark into a billion-dollar business. Companies from Lego to Twitter have created a product and then called on its users to chart its course, allowing virtuous circles to multiply and flourish. Time after time, the open option has prevailed, as Zipcar has gained on Hertz and users have upvoted Reddit over Digg.

The best example may be nearly invisible, even to a dedicated user of the Internet: blogging platforms. Less than a decade ago there were a multitude of services competing for the emerging legion of bloggers: Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, WordPress. Today, only the last two remain relevant, and of these, the small, scrappy WordPress is the champ. WordPress prevailed for several reasons. For one, it was free and fantastically easy to install, allowing an aspiring blogger (or blogging company) to get off the ground in hours. Users who wanted a more robust design or additional features could turn to a community of fellow users who had created tools to meet their own needs. And that community didn’t just use WordPress—many made money on it by selling their designs and plug-ins. Their investment of time and resources emboldened others, and soon the WordPress community was stronger than any top-down business model forged inside the walls of their competition.

Sure, there are Apples and Facebooks that thrive under the old rules of walled gardens and monocultures. But even they try to tap into openness (albeit on their own terms) by luring developers to the App Store and the Open Graph. And for all the closed-world success of these companies, the world at large is moving the other way: toward transparency, collaboration, and bottom-up innovation. True openness requires trust, and that’s not available as a plug-in. When transparency is just a marketing slogan, people can see right through it.

6. Demand deep design.
Too often in technology, design is applied like a veneer after the hard work is done. That approach ignores how essential design is in our lives. Our lives are beset by clutter, not just of physical goods but of ideas and options and instructions—and design, at its best, lets us prioritize. Think of a supremely honed technology: the book. It elegantly organizes information, delivering it in a compact form, easily scanned asynchronously or in one sitting. The ebook is a worthy attempt to reverse-engineer these qualities—a process that has taken decades and chewed up millions in capital. But still, despite the ingenuity and functionality of the Kindle and the Nook, they don’t entirely capture the charms of the original technology. Good design is hard.

Indeed, good design is much, much harder than it looks. When Target redesigned its prescription pill bottle in 2005, the improvement was instantly recognizable—an easy-to-read label that plainly explains what the pill is and when to take it. It was a why-didn’t-I-think-of-it innovation that begged to be replicated elsewhere. But judging by the profusion of products and labels that continue to baffle consumers, it has been largely ignored. Same with Apple: The company’s design imperative is forever cited as intrinsic to its success, but Apple still stands curiously alone as a company where engineers integrate design into the bones of its products.

Thankfully, we are on the verge of a golden age of design, where the necessary tools and skills—once such limited resources—are becoming automated and available to all of us. This timing is critical. “Too much information” has become the chorus of complaint from all quarters, and the cure is not more design but deeper design, design that filters complexity into accessible units of comprehension and utility. Forget Apple’s overpraised hardware aesthetic; its greatest contribution to industrial design was to recognize that nobody reads user’s manuals. So it pretty much eliminated them. You can build as many stunning features into a product as you like; without a design that makes them easy to use, they may as well be Easter eggs.

No company has managed this better than Facebook, which outstripped MySpace because it offered constraint over chaos and rigor over randomness. Facebook has tweaked its interface half a dozen times over the years, but it has never lost the essential functionality that users expect. Indeed, its redesigns have been consistently purposeful. Each time, the company’s goal has been to nudge users to share a little more information, to connect a little more deeply. And so every change has offered tools for users to better manage their information, making it easier to share, organize, and access the detritus of our lives. Privacy concerns aside, Facebook has helped people bring design into their lives as never before, letting us curate our friends, categorize our family photos, and bring (at least the appearance of) continuity to our personal histories. Services like Pinterest only make this more explicit. They promise to let us organize our interests and inspirations into a clear, elegant form. They turn us into designers and our daily experience into a lifelong project of curation. This is deep design commoditized—the expertise of IDEO without the pricey consulting contract. And done right, it is irresistible.

7. Spend time with time wasters.
The classic business plan imposes efficiency on an inefficient market. Where there is waste, there is opportunity. Dispatch the engineers, route around the problem, and boom—opportunity seized.

That’s a great way to make money, but it’s not necessarily a way to find the future. A better signal, perhaps, is to look at where people—individuals—are being consciously, deliberately, enthusiastically inefficient. In other words, where are they spending their precious time doing something that they don’t have to do? Where are they fiddling with tools, coining new lingo, swapping new techniques? That’s where culture is created. The classic example, of course, is the Homebrew Computer Club—the group of Silicon Valley hobbyists who traded circuits and advice in the 1970s, long before the actual utility of personal computers was evident. Out of this hacker collective grew the first portable PC and, most famously, Apple itself.

This same phenomenon—people playing—has spurred various industries, from videogames (thank you, game modders) to the social web (thank you, oversharers). Today, inspired dissipation is everywhere. The maker movement is merging bits with atoms, combining new tools (3-D printing) with old ones (soldering irons). The DIY bio crowd is using off-the-shelf techniques and bargain-basement lab equipment, along with a dose of PhD know-how, to put biology into garage lab experiments. And the Quantified Self movement is no longer just Bay Area self-tracking geeks. It has exploded into a worldwide phenomenon, as millions of people turn their daily lives into measurable experiments.

The phenomenon of hackathons, meanwhile, converts free time into a development platform. Hackathons harness the natural enthusiasm of code junkies, aim it at a target, and create a partylike competition atmosphere to make innovation fun. (And increasingly hackathons are drawing folks other than coders.) No doubt there will be more such eruptions of excitement, as the tools become easier, cheaper, and more available.

These rules don’t create the future, and they don’t guarantee success for those who use them. But they do give us a glimpse around the corner, a way to recognize that in this idea or that person, there might be something big.

By Thomas Goetz

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.

This modern age has brought with it a new set of worries. As well as watching our weight and worrying about our souls, we now have to worry about our brain fitness too – if you believe the headlines. Is instant messaging eroding the attention centres of our brains? Are Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools preventing you from forming normal human bonds? And don’t forget email – apparently it releases the same addictive neurochemicals as crack cocaine!

Plenty of folk have been quick to capitalise on this neuro-anxiety. Amazon’s virtual shelves groan with brain-training books and games. You can fight the cognitive flab, these games promise, if you work that grey matter like a muscle. But is this true? Are sudoku puzzles the only thing stopping the species turning into a horde of attention-deficient, socially-dysfunctional, email addicts – part human, part smartphone?

Fear not, there is some good news from neuroscience. But first, it is my duty to tell you the bad news. You may want to put down your phone and take note, this is the important bit.

The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain.

 

Brain workout

Worrying about the internet is just the latest in a long line of fears society has had about the changes technologies might bring. People worried about books when they first became popularly available. In Ancient Greece, Socrates worried about the effect of writing, saying it would erode young people’s ability to remember. The same thing happened with television and telephones. These technologies did change us, and the way we live our lives, but nothing like the doom-mongers predicted would stem from them.

But is the internet affecting our brains in a different, more extraordinary way? There is little evidence to suggest harm. Here we are, millions of us, including me and you, right now, using the internet, and we seem okay. Some people worry that, even though we cannot see any ill-effects of the internet on our minds, there might be something hidden going on. I am not so worried about this, and I’ll tell you why

We regularly do things that have a profound effect on our brains – such as reading or competitive sports – with little thought for our brain fitness. When scientists look at people who have spent thousands of hours on an activity they often see changes in the brain. Taxi drivers, famously, have a larger hippocampus, a part of the brain recruited for navigation. Musicians’ brains devote more neural territory to brain regions needed for playing their instruments. So much so, in fact, that if you look at the motor cortex of string players you see bulges on one side (because the fine motor control for playing a violin, for example, is only on one hand), whereas the motor cortex of keyboard players bulges on both sides (because piano playing requires fine control of both hands).

So practice definitely can change our brains. By accepting this notion, though, we replace a vague worry about the internet with a specific worry: if we use the internet regularly, what are we practicing?

Get a life

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information.

Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a compliment to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute.

So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us. You can decide how much time you want to put into finding pictures of funny cats, bantering on Facebook or fitting your thoughts into 140 characters. There will be no sudden damage done to your brain, or great surprises for your brain fitness. You would be a fool to think that the internet will provide all the exercise your brain needs, but you would also be a fool to pass up the opportunities it offers. And those pictures of funny cats.

By Tom Stafford

The “dangerous” realisation that there is no top-down meaning; that our actions aren’t found to be important by anyone (or One) other than ourselves. This idea destroyed and continues to destroy many ideas I embraced (and that I encounter). Based on this, one must ask what follows.

One might become nihilistic, depressed and/or commit suicide; one might also choose to deliberately ignore all the evidence and conjure up bizarre claims about energy and so on, inflating our solipsism to the point where we view our actions as – from a top-down, metaphysical perspective – meaningful.  These are just two, quite extreme, ways people respond to what they realise is a meaningless (from a top-down perspective) existence.

Many of us grew up with the idea that “right” and “wrong” were synonyms for God’s likes and dislikes. Pork and alcohol, premarital sex, praying regularly, clothing in special places, strange rituals, respecting one’s elders: these were the types of ideas that fit the bracket of “morality” for me, when I was young and considered myself Muslim. Looking at that list now, one can see how utterly solipsistic it is. From dietary to fashion, the invocation of God had little to do with what I realise now actually morally matters: the wellbeing and reduction of unnecessary suffering of others. For my younger self – and for many others –we need not worry about the well-being of others because that is God’s domain. What’s the use of interfering, when life is dependent on how much love you’ve earned from God? If something bad happens, it is because you have upset God somehow: you haven’t prayed correctly, bathed correctly, dressed correctly, respected correctly, thought correctly. Of course, “correctly” was a synonym for whatever God wants. Morality therefore became merely about how much or little you thought God loved you, followed by what you planned to do about it.

This apathy is certainly not true for all religious believers. Many are examples of the best people, including, for example, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, especially during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Here we have a man who played an active, powerful role in helping an entire nation, filled with complete strangers, many of whom were and are godless. He certainly did not believe things would “just work out”, if left up to God. Even the Archbishop then was not of the opinion that morality concerns random rules about our relationship to our god.

Dangers and superstitious relations

The point is that one of the main dangers of thinking there is a top-down, moral perspective, who cares about us – aside from believing a lie – is it relinquishes from us responsibility. Thus we can, too easily, dismiss truly difficult problems in the world by simply proclaiming god or someone equivalent will sort it out in the end (karma, reincarnation, Heaven, Judgement Day, etc.); or, similarly, that there is some kind of balance that we ourselves have upset and can, therefore, set right through arbitrary rituals or invocations. “But,” as Barbara Ehrenreich points out

mind does not automatically prevail over matter, and to ignore the role of difficult circumstances – or worse, attribute them to our own thoughts – is to slide toward the kind of depraved smugness Rhonda Byrne (author of The Secret. See previous link) expressed when confronted with the tsunami of 2006. Citing the law of attraction, she stated that disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are on the same frequency as the event.”

That is, they brought it on themselves. It was not the failure of poor foundations or structural engineering problems – that remained broken due to inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption. No, instead, it was people thinking “negative” thoughts and sending these out into the universe. One can easily see similar kind of “reasoning” when Jerry Falwell proclaimed that 9/11 was (partially) caused by the gays and liberals in the US, for upsetting God.

Notice these are no different to superstitious behaviour. Black cats and broken mirrors are merely denial of our often horrible existence in quirky clothing: instead of attributing the car crash to pure chance, we try recall the last dark feline encounter. Instead of facing up to our failings as a marriage partner, we locate shattered reflective surfaces or astrological signs.

Prayers, rituals, blaming liberals and gays, shattered mirrors and black cats are all methods we invoke to try have some control on a chaotic, top-down meaningless existence that results in deaths and suffering over which we have no control. The danger is twofold: (1) we don’t engage with reality, to actually sort problems out and, similarly, (2) we rebuff responsibility on to arbitrary, non-causal “tokens”, like broken mirrors. Things won’t get fixed, problems won’t really be solved, but we will have a small moment of serenity when we stroke a cross or toss salt over our shoulder.

Hollow responsibility

Hollowing out responsibility primarily empties moral action. If we are not responsible, then there is no reason to act morally. For example, by saying floods are caused by negative thoughts or terrorist incidents are punishments for upsetting God, we don’t need to look at fixing engineering problems or the growing danger of radical Islam.

Thus by not recognising there is no central moral agent, who can make things right because he loves you from that cosmic top-down perspective, we create a fake, essentially superstitious solution. We won’t solve problems. We don’t make the world secure. This is almost no where better represented than the utterly useless act of prayer: it does more to comfort the believer, pacifying him into inaction, but filled with feelings of accomplishment, than provide any solution to the problem being prayed for.

Again, this is not how many would react, but I am pointing out the dangers I saw for myself and what I see for others. Thus, aside from not recognising the reality of a top-down meaningless existence, we create a lie that perpetuates apathy in a world constantly and desperately in need of action.

My reason for writing, my reason for constantly trying to assess the reality of things is to undo what inaction and apathy does and has done to us; to try understand and undermine what believing you have the answers to right and wrong, because of magic books, does to our social policy and law. I recognise no magical being is going to solve the problems of the world and thus I think I need to do what I can to help. Whether you think I’m still wasting my time by writing and educating (though evidence tells me otherwise), I at least can be persuaded through engaging with the real world and not arbitrary, Bronze-aged moral rules.

By Tauriq Moosa

Using Cognitive Science to Unleash Your Hidden Creativity

Everybody has their own pet theory about how to generate ideas and be productive: some chug caffeine, others relax; some work in groups, others work alone; some work at night, others in the morning. This blog draws from recent findings in cognitive science to inform and answer these questions and others like it. It’s for the creative professional, the businessperson or the artist who seeks to create new ideas and work efficiently. It’s about translating findings in psychology and neuroscience so we can be more productive, make better decisions, be more creative, collaborate efficiently and solve problems effectively.

The Monster Engine is one of the best ideas I’ve come across. It’s a book, demonstration, lecture and gallery exhibition created by Dave Devries. The premise is simple: children draw pictures of monsters and Devries paints them realistically. According to the website, the idea was born in 1998 when Devries took an interest in his niece’s doodles. As a comic addict, Devires wondered if he could use color, texture and shading to bring his niece’s drawings to life.

But Devries had a larger goal: he wanted to always see things as a child. Why? In many ways, children flourish where adults fail. Children are more creative and are natural inventors. Their worldview is incomplete and demands discovery. They prosper because they embrace their ignorance instead of ignoring it. And they are willing to explore, investigate and put their ideas to the test because they are willing to fail. Unlike adults, they don’t care how other people perceive or evaluate their ideas, and they’re unconcerned with the impossible or what doesn’t work.

Growing up, to be sure, has its benefits. As we age, our intellect sharpens and willpower strengthens. We come to control our thoughts and desires. We identify goals and hone our skills. But growing up comes at a cost: we lose our naiveté that facilitates creativity and idea generation. A study conducted between 1959 and 1964 involving 350 children found that around 4th grade our tendency to daydream and wonder declines sharply. In other words, Picasso was right: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Age doesn’t necessarily squander our creative juices, but when we make the leap from elementary school to middle school our worldview becomes more realistic and cynical. The question is: what did Jobs and Spielberg do differently? How do we maintain our naiveté?

A study conducted several years ago by Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University gives us a simple remedy. The psychologists divided a large group of undergraduates into two groups. The first group was given the following prompt:

You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?

The second group was given the same prompt minus the first sentence. This means they didn’t imagine themselves as seven years old – they remained in their adult mindset.

Next, the psychologists asked their subjects to take ten minutes to write a response. Afterwards the subjects were given various tests of creativity, such as inventing alternative uses for an old tire, or completing incomplete sketches. (As well as other tasks from the Torrance test of creativity.) Zabelina and Robinson found that, “individuals [in] the mindset condition involving childlike thinking… exhibited higher levels of creative originally than did those in the control condition.” This effect was especially pronounced with subjects who identify themselves as introverts.

What happens to our innate creativity when we age? Zabelina and Robinson discuss a few reasons. The first is that regions of the frontal cortex – a part of the brain responsible for rule-based behavior – are not fully developed until our teenage years. This means that when we are young our thoughts are free-flowing and without inhibitions. Curiosity, not logic and reason, guides our intellectual musings. The second is that current educational practices discourage creativity.

As famed speaker Ken Robinson said: “the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.”

No matter the reasons, the authors stress, adults can still tap into their more imaginative younger selves. And this brings me back to The Monster Engine and Dave Devries.

Devries’ drawings capture the lesson from this enlightening research well. When it comes to being creative and coming up with new and fresh ideas, children are experts. But in order to harness and hone our creative juices the cognitive tool set of an adult is vital. The children’s drawings, after all, couldn’t have come to life without Devries. The important part is that Devries maintained his naïveté by staying true to the original work. He didn’t change the drawing, he enhanced it.

What’s the Significance?

This approach is behind the success of countless intellectuals and inventors thoroughout history, including Picasso. It is the reason Einstein stressed that imagination is more important than knowledge and, striking a very similar cord to Zabelina and Robinson’s research, suggested that “to stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition.”

Again, it’s often beneficial to approach life with an adult mindset – you probably don’t want to get too creative with your taxes – but when it comes to using your imagination, thinking of oneself as a child facilitates more original thinking.

By Sam McNerney

In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died

A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world’s most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue.

But for many, Facts’ most memorable moments came in simple day-to-day realities, from a child’s certainty of its mother’s love to the comforting knowledge that a favorite television show would start promptly at 8 p.m.

Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people’s lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.”

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.

Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.

“It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”

Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. Poovey said that in its youth, Facts was viewed as “universal principles that everybody agrees on” or “shared assumptions.”

But in the late 16th century, English philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon took Facts under his wing and began to develop a new way of thinking.

“There was a shift of the word ‘fact’ to refer to empirical observations,” Poovey said.

Facts became concrete observations based on evidence. It was growing up.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Facts reached adulthood as the world underwent a shift toward proving things true through the principles of physics and mathematical modeling. There was respect for scientists as arbiters of the truth, and Facts itself reached the peak of its power.

But those halcyon days would not last.

People unable to understand how science works began to question Facts. And at the same time there was a rise in political partisanship and a growth in the number of media outlets that would disseminate information, rarely relying on feedback from Facts.

“There was an erosion of any kind of collective sense of what’s true or how you would go about verifying any truth claims,” Poovey said. “Opinion has become the new truth. And many people who already have opinions see in the ‘news’ an affirmation of the opinion they already had, and that confirms their opinion as fact.”

Though weakened, Facts managed to persevere through the last two decades, despite historic setbacks that included President Bill Clinton‘s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the justification forPresidentGeorge W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and the debate over President Barack Obama’s American citizenship.

Facts was wounded repeatedly throughout the recent GOP primary campaign, near fatally when Michele Bachmann claimed a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease causes mental retardation. In December, Facts was briefly hospitalized after MSNBC’s erroneous report that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s campaign was using an expression once used by the Ku Klux Klan.

But friends and relatives of Facts said Rep. West’s claim that dozens of Democratic politicians are communists was simply too much for the aging concept to overcome.

As the world mourned Wednesday, some were unwilling to believe Facts was actually gone.

Gary Alan Fine, the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, said: “Facts aren’t dead. If anything, there are too many of them out there. There has been a population explosion.”

Fine pointed to one of Facts’ greatest battles, the debate over global warming.

“There are all kinds of studies out there,” he said. “There is more than enough information to make any case you want to make. There may be a preponderance of evidence and there are communities that decide something is a fact, but there are enough facts that people who are opposed to that claim have their own facts to rely on.”

To some, Fine’s insistence on Facts’ survival may seem reminiscent of the belief that rock stars like Jim Morrison are still alive. “How do I know if Jim Morrison is dead?” Fine asked. “How do I know he’s dead except that somebody told me that?”

Poovey, however, who knew Facts as well as anyone, said Facts’ demise is undoubtedly factual.

“American society has lost confidence that there’s a single alternative,” she said. “Anybody can express an opinion on a blog or any other outlet and there’s no system of verification or double-checking, you just say whatever you want to and it gets magnified. It’s just kind of a bizarre world in which one person’s opinion counts as much as anybody else’s.”

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.

Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC.

By Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune reporter

Investigating what is right or wrong often leads one into territory demarcated as a No-Man’s Land, to places forbidden, to territory thought too harsh, horrible or “dangerous” to explore. I am not smart enough to be a discoverer of these countries, but more a cartographer, mapping out where our arguments take us if we truly think our arguments worth holding. Robust ideas must withstand the calm waters of everyday life as well as the turbulent rush of extreme scenarios. If these can only withstand the former but not the latter, it probably means they are not worth holding on to. After all, what is the use of holding on to something that only withstands serene environments which are safe, but not rough ones where harm is ever present?

Thus, I decided to pick on the one thought, idea, and/or argument that I find the most “dangerous”. As Daniel Dennett describes Darwin’s idea – that a basic algorithmic process can lead simple entities toward highly complex ones – a dangerous idea is one that seems to have done the most damage to previous assumptions that were held before it. Therefore I want to focus on the one idea that did this for me. I thought initially of my antinatalism: my ethical stance in not having children (whether I adopt is a separate question). But I then thought this actually fits under a broader, more compelling bracket; one which is deceptive in its initial depiction, but devastating once we follow its tributaries into almost all other ideas.

The idea I found to be most devastating is this: We are more than likely not special from a grand, top-down cosmic perspective. No thing cares about us from this perspective and the universe itself is indifferent.

No amount of pleading, yearning or petitioning will make the world or our lives automatically better. If you accept this as reality, as I did and do, you can see the devastation this has on a number of claims: the existence of the theistic god and the reality of religion’s supernatural claims, the specialness or sanctity of life, the idea that our efforts will mean anything despite how much we give, justifications for why good things happen to bad people and bad things to good. The toiling and sweat and blood our species sheds in efforts to better itself seems only a performance we put on so that perhaps, for a brief moment, we can have some joy amidst the yawning void of meaninglessness.

This is confirmed by considering the idea of bad things happening to good people: A worse explanation, it seems, than saying a god or someone equivalent hates you, is that there just is no reason. It simply is.

Susan Neiman in her book Evil in Modern Thought indicates how the problem of evil is perhaps more powerful in contemporary thought than we realise. The underlying view behind trying to manage how horrible existence often is versus how wonderful it could otherwise be, rests in how we are attempting to bridge the gap between appearance and reality. After all, how we want the world to appear is very often not how it actually is: that’s the point behind what I consider the most dangerous idea. Indeed, the nature of this blog is to constantly reinforce what the best scientific and rational arguments indicates about reality, in an attempt to bleed our best moral views onto this harsh canvas. As Neiman indicates: “The worry that fueled debates about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us – but rather the fear that it would.” We recognised that the world could be better, that grand designs were flawed, that if we had more power, we could shape the world into a superior place. Arguments, for Neiman, were all about denying this reality, trying to show that our perceptions about the harshness, stillness, silence and indifference were mistaken; that somewhere, somehow, something could make a grand difference. We were just somehow mistaken. God still loves us. The Universe has a plan. We are special, we mean something.

But inevitable arguments keep showing these ideas to be false: there is no loving deity, there is only silence and indifference. We are not special since there is no top-down entity. We are here by “chance” and what we have is often not the best it could otherwise be, if we had any say in the matter.

However, one should not assume from this discussion that apathetic pessimism and nihilism follows. Indeed, what I want to encourage in my follow up post, which will look at further implications, are some methods to respond in a way that maintains a sense of morality and fulfillment. That is, a way to maintain a ethical view of life that stands up to the face of an unremitting reality, an indifferent universe and a world constantly, it seems, trying to destroy us. I don’t proclaim to give you answers, but only my own response to what I consider the most devastating, dangerous idea I have encountered.

Update: Some people seem to think I’m saying Christians believe god hates them. This might be true (mostly not), but I am focused on “a” god, not particularly the Christian god. I’m asking you to imagine how terrifying it would be to have an all-powerful deity who actively hates you. My point is that the non-existence of deities and indifference from the universe might be worse.

By Tauriq Moosa

The problem isn’t in failing, it’s the mindset. Mindset is changeable, and by changing one mindset, one will be able to ratchet up his success faster than he ever thought possible.

Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford, has spent her life studying the two learning mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that their capabilities are predetermined and unlikely to change—their intelligence and capabilities are dealt at birth, and they are stuck with it. People with a growth mindset believe that, given enough effort and work, they can change. They believe that any skill is learnable, given enough time and effort.

Dweck’s research is very clear—in order to achieve success, in order to achieve your full potential, you have to adopt a growth mindset.

What are some common traits of people who follow a growth mindset? They value effort, not skill. In one famous experiment, Dweck and her team traveled to New York City classrooms, giving puzzles to two sets of fifth graders. The kids tended to do very well on these (easy) puzzles, and were praised afterwards. The two groups were given identical exams, but were praised differently: one group was told “You must be really smart at this” while the other group was told “You must have worked really hard.”

A small change, right? Just a single line of praise.

Shortly after, the same students were asked to do another set of puzzles, and given the option of choosing to take a set of easy puzzles or difficult ones. The difference between the simple line of praise had a huge effect: over 90% of the students that were praised for effort opted to take the more difficult test, while the majority of students praised for intelligence chose to take the easy exams.

That’s right. A simple line of praise for intelligence (rather than effort) made students extremely likely to take the easy way out.

Now, let’s take a look at failure. For some, failure is an all-or-nothing game. When some people set a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym, and miss a couple days, they see it as a failure. This is part of the fixed-mindset mind: either you succeed, or you fail.

Those with the growth mindset, however, see a failure as a chance to succeed. They know that all new habits will have ups and downs–be it a new diet, exercise, flossing, or anything else. The goal is to get back on the horse and try again.

Successful learners understand this, and they build the expectation of failure into their plan.

By Maneesh Sethi

Too much of a good thing … positive feelings can lead to hasty judgments and stagnation

The happier you are, the better, right? Not necessarily. Studies show there is a darker side to feeling good and the pursuit of happiness can sometimes make you … well, less happy. Too much cheerfulness can make you gullible, selfish, less successful – and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Happiness can protect us from stroke and the common cold, make us more resistant to pain and even prolong our lives. Yet it’s important to experience positive moods in moderation, warns June Gruber, a professor of psychology at Yale University.

Gruber compares happiness to food: although necessary and beneficial, too much of it can lead to bad outcomes. ”Research indicates that very high levels of positive feelings predict risk-taking behaviours, excess alcohol and drug consumption, binge eating, and may lead us to neglect threats,” she says.

Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory, Kandel demonstrated that reductionist techniques could be applied to the brain, so that even something as mysterious as memory might be studied in sea slugs, as a function of kinase enzymes and synaptic proteins. (The memories in question involved the “habituation” of the slugs to a poke; they basically got bored of being prodded.) Because natural selection is a deeply conservative process – evolution doesn’t mess with success – it turns out that humans rely on almost all of the same neural ingredients as those inveterbrates. Memory has a nearly universal chemistry.

But Kandel is not just one of the most important scientists of our time – he’s also an omnivorous public intellectual, deeply knowledgeable about everything from German art to the history of psychoanalysis. In his marvelous new book, The Age of Insight, Kandel puts this learning on display. He dives into the cultural ferment of 19th century Vienna, seeking to understand why the city was such a fount of new ideas, but he also explores the neuroscience of aesthetics, attempting to explain why some works of art, such as Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” continue to haunt us. In many respects, the book imitates those famous Viennese salons, in which artists, scientists and doctors exchanged ideas and gave birth to a new way of thinking about the mind. (The city was a case-study in consilience.) If you’re interested in the intersection of art and science, the book is a must-read.

LEHRER: The Age of Insight is, in part, a remarkable history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, which strikes me as an astonishingly rich creative period. What do you think led to such a flourishing of science and culture in Vienna at the turn of the century?

KANDEL: Beginning in about 1850, Vienna was changed dramatically. Responding to the liberal pressure, Emperor Franz Josef began to evolve the Empire along more democratic lines. One of the consequences of this democratization was a freeing up of travel, which allowed people to move readily throughout the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Many came to Vienna. In addition, Franz Josef transformed Vienna into one of the most beautiful cities in the world. As a Christmas present to the citizens of Vienna, in 1857, Franz Josef ordered the demolition of the old walls surrounding the city, and replaced these walls with the Ringstrasse – a grand boulevard that would encircle the city. The Ringstrasse now became lined with a wonderful set of public buildings such as the Opera House, the Theater, and the Museum of Fine Arts and Natural History. As a result, the city attracted many people of different ethnic and religious origins from all over the Empire, who were drawn to Vienna, for its beauty, its music, and its emphasis on intellectual and cultural achievement. A number of these people went on to pioneer a distinctive form of Modernism that characterized Vienna and distinguished it from Modernism in France, Italy and Germany.

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before. Whereas the Enlightenment thinking of the 18th Century emphasized that human beings were distinct from all the other animals because they were created by God as rational creatures, the Viennese Modernists, influenced by Darwin, realized that humans evolved from simpler ancestors. Moreover, they were — as the physicians, Freud and Schnitzler, and the artists, Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele would point out – not rational creatures, but people that were importantly driven by unconscious mental drives.

In addition to these five, there were other pioneers in the Modernist movement. There was the Vienna Circle of philosophers, who tried to codify all knowledge into a single standard language of science. There was an important Vienna School of Economics. And – of course – there was the great tradition of Viennese music that began with Hayden and was now continued by Schoenberg.

Particularly important, in Vienna 1900, was a chain of medical scientists stretching from Carl von Rokitansky to Freud, which established a new dynamic view of the human psyche that revolutionized thinking about the human mind. Freud’s theorizing, Schnitzler’s insightful writings, and the paintings of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka, shared a common focus into the nature of human instinctual life. During the period of 1890 to 1980, the insights of these five men into the irrationality of everyday life helped Vienna establish a culture we still live in today. In a sense, there are very few cultures that have matched Vienna, 1900. Perhaps the most comparable example is Florence during the Renaissance.

LEHRER: One of the heroes in The Age of Insight is Carl von Rokitansky, the founder of the Second Vienna School of Medicine. You argue that he inspired, at least in part, the work of modernist artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. How did he exert this influence?

KANDEL: Rokitansky is the founder of what is now considered the second Vienna School of Medicine, which began around 1846. He was the head pathologist of the Vienna General Hospital, called the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, and then became Dean of the Medical School at the University of Vienna. Rokitansky contributed importantly – I would say, seminally – to the development of modern scientific medicine. He realized that when one examines the patient, one essentially relies on two pieces of information: the patient’s history, and an examination of the patient – listening to the heart and the chest with a stethoscope. But in the 1840s, one did not have any deep insight into what the sounds of the heart meant, for example. No one knew what we now know to be the difference between the sound of a normal valve opening and closing, and the sound of a diseased valve opening and closing. So what Rokitansky realized was that one needed to correlate what one sees of the patient at the bedside, with the examination of the patient’s body at autopsy. Fortunately, Vienna was an absolutely ideal place to do this.

The Vienna General Hospital had two rules that were unique in Europe. One is – every patient who died was autopsied, and two – all the autopsies were done by one person: Rokitansky, the head of Pathology. In other hospitals in Europe, the autopsy was done by whichever physician was is in charge of the patient. So Rokitansky had a huge amount of clinical material to work with. He collaborated with an outstanding clinician, Josef Skoda, who took very careful notes both of what the patient told him, and of what he found on physical examination, and he correlated that with Rokitansky’s autopsy. This allowed Skoda and Rokistansky to define what various heart sounds meant in normal physiology and in diseases of the valve. It also led Rokitansky to enunciate a major principle that had a huge influence – not only on medicine – but also on the cultural community at large, because Rokitansky was not simply a pathologist and Dean of the School of Medicine; he was elected to Parliament, became a spokesman of science, and had an enormous influence on popular culture. He said, “The truth is often hidden below the surface. One has to go deep below the skin to find it.” This Rokitanskian principle had an enormous impact on Freud and on Schnitzler, who were students at the Vienna School of Medicine. In fact, Freud was a student in the last several years of Rokitansky’s Deanship. Rokitansky attended the first two scientific talks that Freud gave, and Freud attended Rokitansky’s funeral. He clearly had a significant impact on Freud’s thinking.

How did Rokitansky influence the artists – Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka? Klimt had a strong supporter in the art writer Berta Zuckerkandl. She ran the most important salon in Vienna: the Zuckerkandl salon, and all the intellectuals in the city attended this. As Berta Zuckerkandl, herself, described it: “Vienna comes alive on my diva.”

Berta’s husband, Emil Zuckerkandl, was a right-hand associate of Rokitansky. Klimt befriended Emil at Berta’s salon and Klimt became interested in biology as an end in itself. He began to read Darwin, and he began to study the slides that Zuckerkandl was working on. He went to Zuckerkandl’s lectures; he attended some of his dissections, and he asked Zuckerkandl to give lectures to other artists so that they would become familiar with the biology of the body. As a result, one can begin to see the incorporation of biological ideas in Klimt’s work. So, if you look at Adele Bloch-Bauer – the picture on the cover of The Age of Insight – you will see that Adele’s dress is covered with oval-shaped symbols that symbolize ova. These oval shapes surround her body; in the background, are rectangular shapes which, in Klimt’s work, symbolize sperm showing that not only is she an attractive and seductive woman, but also reproductively capable. In the famous painting, The Kiss, the man’s garment is covered with these rectangular stripes, the woman’s with ovals. Moreover, not only in the decorative element of his work, but also in the way Klimt represented his women – as evident in his drawings – you see that he wanted to go below the surface. He did not follow the rituals of Western art, or Freud’s naïve and incorrect teachings about female sexuality. Rather, he wanted to use his own insights, which were extensive, to give a modern view of women’s sexuality: that they are capable of pleasuring themselves – they do not need the attention of a man, and their sex lives are just as rich as that of men. Moreover, although Freud was always aware of aggression, he didn’t think it was equally important to eros until toward the end of the first world war, when he saw killing all around him. By contrast, Klimt had already incorporated, in the painting Judith and Holofernes, his insight that aggression is as important as eroticism, and that women are also capable of aggression as well as erotic impulses, and the two can be fused. In this remarkable painting, where Judith, having slain Holofernes, fondles his head in a clearly erotic fashion.

Kokoschka picked up a theme that Freud enunciated: that the examination of the unconscious mental processes of others begins with an examination of oneself. Kokoschka, who was a bit of a self-promoter, argued that he had discovered unconscious mental processes independent of Freud, and in his paintings, he reveals a major interest in going deep below the surface to explore his own emotional life and that of his subjects. And, as with Freud, he had a fascination with childhood and adolescent sexuality that he claimed was independent of Freud. Klimt never did any self-portraits. Kokoschka did a number of very honest and soul-searching self-portraits. For example, during his relationship with Alma Mahler, he depicted himself as a helpless creature, completely in her hands. He also was the first painter to depict female adolescent sexuality – nude adolescence – and the sexual striving of children in the famous painting of the Stein children.

Schiele – the third of the trio of Modernist painters – was the master of modern existential anxiety. He was the Kafka of painting. Much of the paintings that he did were of himself, and many self-portraits were in the nude. Using himself as a model, he depicts all aspects of psychological strivings, not just in facial expression, but even more in hand, arm, and body postures. So, one can trace the influence of Rokitansky throughout all of Viennese Modernism.

LEHRER: Your book is filled with fascinating explorations into the nascent science of neuroaesthetics. If I were a working artist, I’d want to know all about this new field. But I’m curious: do you think scientists can learn from artists? If so, what sort of collaborations would you like to see?

KANDEL: Why would we want to encourage a dialogue between art and science, and, in a larger sense, between science and culture, at large? Brain science and art represent two distinct perspectives of mind. Through science, we know that all of our mental life arises from the activity of our brain. Thus, by observing that activity, we can begin to understand the processes that underlie our responses to works of art: how is information, collected by the eye, turned into vision? How are thoughts turned into memories? What is the biological basis of behavior? Art, on the other hand, provides insight into the more fleeting, experiential qualities of mind – what a certain experience feels like. A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

What would the benefits of such an exchange be today, and who would gain from it? The gain for brain science is clear. One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists, themselves. Insights into the processes of visual perception and emotional response may well stimulate new expressions of artistic creativity. Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, and the Impressionist artists learned about color mixing from the study of color by physicists, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to the revelations about how the brain works. Understanding the biology behind artistic insights, inspiration and the beholder’s response to art could be invaluable to artists seeking to heighten their creative power. In the long run, brain science may also provide clues to the nature of creativity, itself.

You, Jonah, yourself, have pointed out in your first book that artists are psychologists. They have insight into the human mind that often precedes the insight that scientists have, because scientists need to design experiments, and then carry them out in order to do it. They cannot do it by intuition, alone, as can writers and painters. So, I would not necessarily say that scientists and artists need to collaborate with one another, but it would be helpful for them to talk to one another to, perhaps, give rise to specific ideas that may or may not be carried out together. For example, we, at Columbia, under the strong support of President Bollinger, are thinking of starting a Ph.D. program in Science and Art, in which psychology and neuroscience students will learn more about the biological response to art, and encourage some students of art to get involved in this, as well. In fact, David Freedberg, who is an art historian interested in these problems, is going to participate in this.

LEHRER: One of the tensions that emerges from early 20th century Vienna is the attempt (by Freud and others) to undermine the assumptions of the Enlightenment – we are rational creatures – using the tools of the Enlightenment. In many respects, this basic theme has continued in recent years, as neuroscientists and psychologists continue to reveal the powers of the unconscious in shaping our beliefs and behavior. (We are not nearly as rational as Descartes believed.) What do you think Freud would make of modern neuroscience?

KANDEL: I think Freud would love modern neuroscience. Freud developed his tripartite structure of the mind, clinical observation, theory of psychoanalysis, in the hope that, someday, this would be translated into brain sciences, he was aware that what he was developing a cognitive psychology – psychoanalysis – and that this was bound to be modified, and, in part, falsified, by biology. He knew that psychoanalysis was not an empirical, experimental science. So, there is no question, he would very much have liked to develop a biological science of psychoanalysis if he could do so. He tried, in his 1895 essay on Psychology for Neurologists, but he saw this was a complete failure. Biology was just too far away from providing the kind of a background he needed. But the situation is clearly different now.

In fact, if you look around, it is amazing how much of our view of the mind follows outlines of Freud’s thinking. We now know that conscious mentation is the tip of the iceberg, very much as Freud argued. We are now clearly aware of the importance of instinctual strivings. We have localized them to the hypothalamus, and to the amygdala. We know that sexual strivings are present in childhood. We realize that when we convert unconscious to conscious mental processes, a sort of broadcasting function goes on. We are aware of superego functions at a biological level, moral values that are built into our brains.

I think while Freud would be quite satisfied with neuroscience he would not be satisfied with the current structure of psychoanalysis. This is because the generations of psychoanalysts that came after did not try to make psychoanalysis more empirical; they continued the tradition that he had begun. It wasn’t until recently that follow-up studies have been carried out to determine under what circumstances psychoanalysis is effective, how it compares to other forms of short-term psychotherapy, and ultimately, they are now beginning to do imaging experiments to see whether or not biological markers – for example, in Area 25 in depression – are relieved by psychoanalysis. So I think the failure of psychoanalysis to progress is due in part to the decline in the scientific ambition of psychoanalysts.

LEHRER: How has this new science of art changed the way you think about art? Do you now think differently about the beauty of Schiele, Klimt and the Viennese modernists?

KANDEL: Yes. I now have a much better idea of why the Modernists’ portraiture affects us so profoundly, because I realize that they have tapped into the enormous face processing capability of the brain. I now understand why their exaggerations are so effective. They regulate the cells in face patches in the inferior-temporal lobe of the brain. We see how arbitrary use of color can have a powerful affect on our emotions.

We now have an outline of the Beholder’s Share. We see how some people – for example, autistic people – have a difficult time responding empathically to paintings of faces. I understand better, the nature of ambiguity in art – how each of us sees a slightly different version of a great work of art, and that this interpretation is subject to the creative capability of the brain. I was not aware, before, what a creativity machine the brain is, and how each of us sees a different view of art because we have different brain responses to it, and how, even for simple perception, there is not only bottom-up processing, determined by Gestaltian rules of grouping things together, but there is a lot of top-down processing, which is based on comparing what we see now to what has been stored in memory.

So, I think understanding the biology of the Beholder’s Share has significantly enriched my understanding of art. It has done so without in any way diminishing my aesthetic response. In fact in general, knowledge only enhances enjoyment, and I think it has enhanced my enjoyment of art. It is a little bit like saying, “To what degree does reading good literary criticism of Shakespeare, say by Harold Bloom and A.C. Bradley, enhance your enjoyment of Hamlet or King Lear?” I feel very much the same way.

By Jonah Lehrer

What our sense connectedness has to do with the osmosis of rationality and intuition

“Some of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic and inventive expressions of our species. How else could the sentence ‘He’s either a madman or a genius’ be understood?

 

It’s okay to be entirely rational, provided everybody else is too. But apparently this state of existence has been achieved only in fiction [where] societal decisions get made with efficiency and dispatch, devoid of pomp, passion, and pretense.

 

To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between — as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings and nonempirical philosophies — you need politics. At its best, politics navigates all the minds-states for the sake of the greater good, alert to the rocky shoals of community, identity, and the economy. At its worst, politics thrives on the incomplete disclosure or misrepresentation of data required by an electorate to make informed decisions, whether arrived at logically or emotionally.”

 

“When I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than most of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, because they’re small, the Universe is big — but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity — that’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on and activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

By Maria Popova