brain science

From the Archives • March 31, 2014

Speaking of Music Again: Oliver Sacks

We've been contemplating the mysteries of music over the past few weeks, since our conversations with Gunther Schuller and Richard Powers. Perhaps the essential question here is what neuroscience is contributing to the delicious mystery of music. Will any discovery in the brain circuitry of music trump Proust's reflections on the experience of sound?

We’ve been contemplating the mysteries of music over the past few weeks, since our conversations with Gunther Schuller and Richard Powers. What makes a piece of music “great”? It can’t just be revolutionary rhythms or technical difficulty. From where does that inexplicable effect of music on our emotions come?
proust

The andante had just ended on a phrase filled with a tenderness to which I had entirely surrendered. There followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. A duke, in order to show that he knew what he was talking about, declared: “It’s a difficult thing to play well.” Other more agreeable people chatted for a moment with me. But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing? … I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been — if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened — the means of communication between souls. It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. But this return to the unanalysed was so intoxicating that, on emerging from that paradise, contact with more or less intelligent people seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive, the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation, page 260 in Volume III of the Vintage edition, 1982.

OliversacksMusic uniquely among the arts is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly. It needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him. [Henry Purcell’s opera, from 1689] Everyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.

Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia, p. 300.

I was always doubly tantalyzed by music: first of all by its patterns, its symmetries, its proportions, its mathematical perfection and abstractness; and and second by the excruciating pleasure which it could produce, and the sweet pain which was beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond expression by anything else…

Oliver Sacks, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Cambridge Forum, November 5, 2007

As Paul Elie argued elegantly in his Slate review of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, there seem to be two Oliver Sackses. In our conversation, we welcomed both the observant clinical neurologist and the patient with 70-plus years of soaring, passionate musical memories:

Language of the heart, and language of souls. There’s part of me which sort of rebels against words like the heart and the soul and transcendence, and yet, and yet, one can’t avoid them. Interestingly, Williams James never uses the term ‘soul’ in The Principles of Psychology, but he continually used it in conversation and correspondence and of course he uses it, it’s central, in The Varieties of Religious Experience…

I had a dream the other night. In dreams one escapes from the shackles of one’s own reason and reductionism. And in my dream I dreamt some Fauré; I didn’t know what it was, though when I woke up I realized it was his Requiem. But this in fact went with a vision of star nurseries, the sort of thing which the Hubble reveals and galaxies being formed. I don’t like words like ‘the beyond’ or ‘eternal’ but maybe one can’t avoid them. I may soften up here, but I’m not sure what to say…. Again, my feet are … I’m narrowly, childishly planted in the clinical. I can’t talk about transcendence, and galazies. I think of my patients, you know, who on the whole do not speak in cosmic terms.

Oliver Sacks, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Cambridge Forum, November 5, 2007

Perhaps the essential question here is what neuroscience (still ragingly conflicted about, for starters, the place of music in our evolutionary history) is contributing to the delicious mystery of music. Will any discovery in the brain circuitry of music trump Proust’s reflections on the experience of sound?

From the Archives • March 10, 2014

Steve Pinker’s “Better Angels”: Dodging Our Own Bullet?

Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption.Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of dense, witty prose, distilling and explaining the ever-steeper downward trends in battle-deaths, state executions, murder, rape, wife-beating and child-spanking, among others things.

 

Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption. The short form of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is that we’re on the verge of Liebniz‘s (and Candide‘s) “best of all possible worlds.” Much more than that, Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of dense, witty prose, distilling and explaining the ever-steeper downward trends in battle-deaths, state executions, murder, rape, wife-beating and child-spanking, among others things. “Interesting if true” was my instinctive newspaper-guy response. After a month’s immersion, and this conversation, I’m staggered and stunned, avid for the new Enlightenment.

In William James Hall, high above Harvard Yard, Steve Pinker is setting his own conclusions in the context of intellectual forbears and peers in this field of violence and human progress.

Among them:

” …the survivors of one successful massacre after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our contemporary races spring… Man is once for all a fighting animal; centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out of us.”

William James: Oration at the unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston to the all-black 54th Regiment of the Union Army. May 31, 1897.

“History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed… Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for war’s sake, all the citizen’s being warriors. It is horrible reading — because of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making “history” — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen…

Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity…

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War. 1906

I like to think that William James would appreciate the argument of the book, which is, despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

I call William James the first evolutionary psychologist. He was indebted to Darwin and he made no bones about the fact that we come from ancestors who had to prevail in constant contests of bloodshed, and so we have violent urges. Nonetheless, James was certainly an optimist in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” arguing that it is certainly possible to set up institutions that would minimize war. And I like to think that a hundred years after his death he is being vindicated. Now of course, if he had lived ten years longer, if he had lived 35 years longer, he would have found this hard to believe, because the two world wars are a rude interruption in humanity’s movement towards non-violence. But if he had held on just a little bit longer, he would see that we are living through an era now in which it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that war is going out of style.

Steven Pinker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 2, 2011

“… the ultimate symbols of the [20th] Century are not space probes and computers but gas chambers and Hiroshima. The slaughter in the two world wars, the pogroms, the various holocausts starting with the Armenian and Jewish ones and ending with the Cambodian and the Rwandan, the Stalinist terror, the carpet bombings and the fire bombings in various wars — they all constitute a rather impressive performance. Twentieth-century science may have produced many wonderful discoveries and miracles, but the gas chambers and the mushroom clouds remain its most resilient symbols.”

“… change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.”

Ashis Nandy, “Violence and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Time Warps, 2002.

Among my questions here: How are we to categorize the violence of poverty in a half-hungry world? How do we calculate the risk of a single nuclear attack that could smash the conceit of better living through science? In American popular culture, what does Steve Pinker make of the rise of Mixed Martial Arts and the decline of boxing? In George Carlin’s sainted name, what about the rise of TV football and the decline of daylight baseball — where the object of the game is to “be safe, at home!”?

Has Steve Pinker been watching the Republican presidential debates — the whooping and hollering for the death penalty, Texas-style, and the Get Your War On rhetoric pointed at Iran, the Arab world, even Hugo Chavez and Venezuela? Of course he’s been watching — “I share the revulsion” — because he watches everything. “The crazies have all crashed and burned and probably the survivor, Mitt Romney, hell, he was our governor in Massachusetts. A lot of the sound and the fury coming out of the right, I think, is in part a reaction to the fact that they keep losing. Go back to the sixties; what the liberals were in favor of then, the conservatives take for granted now: racial integration, women in the workforce, women in the military, no spanking of children, toleration of gay people.”

Does robot warfare by predator drones fit a pattern of progress? “It’s a great advance. I can’t say I’m a fan exactly, but compared to carpet bombing, it’s a fraction of the deaths, a great advance.”

How, on this steep downward slope of human violence, do we explain that the United States — in one of those imperial fits of absent-mindedness — slipped into an immeasurably destructive $5-trillion war in Iraq, then Afghanistan and — who knows? — maybe tomorrow Pakistan?

By a lot of these measures, the United States is not at the vanguard of enlightenment. The United States is a bit of a laggard, and of course the Iraq war was famously opposed by France and Germany, some of our closest allies, and there was some considerable opposition in this country. It’s a little misleading to concentrate on the United States, because the United States is a bit in the rearguard of this.

Even then, the actual Iraq war itself, was by historical standards a far less destructive war than earlier wars — like Vietnam, Korea, Iran/Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan — in terms of the number of people that it killed. Interestingly, it’s now been eight-and-a-half years, and it might be the last of the old-fashioned wars, where two national armies fight each other on the battlefield. There’s a sense in which it didn’t lead to permanent war; this may have been the last gasp.

Steven Pinker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 2, 2011

It’s a main premise of Steve Pinker’s science that, as he says, “You have to have a quantitative mindset to understand history.” My last question: what if not all our critical measures are quantitative?

Podcast • February 24, 2009

Jonah Lehrer: Brain Science for the Rest of Us

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jonah Lehrer. (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3) Jonah Lehrer The joy of reading Jonah Lehrer is that he’s scientist enough to navigate oceans of brain-science lab reports. He ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jonah Lehrer. (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3)

Jonah Lehrer

The joy of reading Jonah Lehrer is that he’s scientist enough to navigate oceans of brain-science lab reports. He knows the neural pathways where Blink meets Nudge. But he’s literature bug and humanist enough to remember that the proper study of man, as Alexander Pope had it, is you and me, the whole of Us.

Lehrer’s first triumph, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, made the case for art in an age of science. On the mystery of consciousness, he wrote: “It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.”

His new book How We Decide, which reads like a sequel, is a set of cautionary tales about the limits of the rational brain, that peculiarly human pre-frontal cortex, and by implication the limits of rational science. It is not reason — certainly not reason alone — that tells quarterback Tom Brady which receiver should get the pass, or that tells the pilot of a disabled plane how to land it. It’s not even reason that brings the best of our human gifts into balance. Lehrer quotes G. K. Chesterton: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Jonah Lehrer identifies himself with the modern doctor who tells you not to choose the MRI for your lower back pain but to study patience, or perhaps Yoga, instead. Not only have MRIs not solved the problem of back pain. “In fact, the new technology has probably made the problem worse. The machine simply sees too much. Doctors are overwhelmed with information and struggle to distinguish the significant from the irrelevant… This is the danger of too much information: it can actually interfere with understanding.”

Most of us read too little or too much about the booming brain sciences. If you’re going to sit down and talk with just one enthusiast who’s wise beyond his years, I’d make it Jonah Lehrer:

The body that knows better than the brain

One of the great themes of modern neuroscience is that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; that the brain knows much more than we know; that we’re always taking in all this information which allows us to swing at fastballs and find the open man in three and a half seconds before we’re sacked, and choose which cereal to buy in the supermarket. All of our decisions are shaped by these emotional signals, which is why when we get cut off from these emotional signals people become pathologically indecisive. That said, one of the other great themes of decision-making sciences in the last couple of decades – going back to Kahnemann and Tversky and lots of recent work in neuro-economics – is that as wise as the emotional brain is, as profoundy intuitive as it can be, the fact that it knows more than we know, it can also be incredibly dumb, incredibly idiotic; and it’s all about the situation. You can put the same brain mechanism which can be so wise on the football field and all of a sudden you have it pick stocks, or figure out which mortgage to get, and it could make the worst decision possible. So one of the things I tried to do in this book was construct a model of decision-making that wasn’t all about: We should always blink and trust our gut – or always be rational like homo economicus. But to say: the way you make decisions should depend on the kind of decision you’re making. That you have to begin with the situation, diagnose the situation, be pragmatic about it. And then work backwards from that and try to tailor your thought process, which we’re capable of doing, to the situation at hand.

Jonah Lehrer with Chris Lydon in Boston, February 23, 2009

There are surprising connections here to the Adam Smith you never knew, to 2/28 mortgages, to the war in Afghanistan, to William and Henry James, the folly of credit cards and the novelists Ian McEwen and Richard Powers. Listen to all of it, please, and leave a comment here.

Podcast • June 10, 2008

Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality

Dan Ariely’s genius in Predictably Irrational is for simple social experiments that become giant public parables. Here’s how playing with the taste of beer, for example, takes him to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: in the student ...

Dan Ariely’s genius in Predictably Irrational is for simple social experiments that become giant public parables. Here’s how playing with the taste of beer, for example, takes him to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: in the student pub at MIT, where Ariely taught, drinkers much preferred the “MIT Brew” to straight Budweiser — unless they were told in advance that “MIT brew” was Budweiser doctored with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. If they knew beforehand what they were drinking, a sour expectation overrode the pleasure of the experience. Moral: preconceptions rule. Application: since memory and preconditioning are so irremediably different between Israelis and Palestinians, only a strong and fair third-party can lift them to a resolution.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with

Dan Ariely (37 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

Dan Ariely’s measure of irrationality

What could he learn at Duke University from the prolonged test of wills by which “Final Four” basketball tickets were alloted to rabid student fans? When the lottery was over and the tickets awarded, Professor Ariely tried to make a market with students who’d won and others who’d lost out. But there was no price point to be found. Students without tickets wouldn’t pay more than $175 for what they’d missed. Students who had tickets wouldn’t take anything less than $2400 for what now felt invaluable. Moral: we overprice what we already have. Application: commentators and Congress folk are stuck (hopeless, but still stuck) with an Iraq war in which they signed (irrationally) for what are now “sunk costs.”

Neither does war remorse necessarily restore rationality, as Dan Ariely observes in our conversation. The Iraq war has set a new “anchor” price for foreign adventure, just as Starbucks re-set the price of your morning coffee. At $1-trillion or more, the Iraq war could make a sequel look like a bargain. Beware also what Ariely calls the “decoy effect.” We all shop by comparision, and tend to go for the less-flawed version in a pair. The “decoy effect” is the reason why Dan Ariely suggests that for success at a singles’ event: bring along a friend who looks like you but is slightly less attractive. It’s the decoy effect that’s being used to suggest that a mere air attack on Iran, without a ground invasion, would be a cinch compared to Iraq.

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational reads to me like a catalog of the Bush follies and how a lazy great nation fell for them. In the book and in our conversation there may also be a rough map of the road back to American Pragmatism and the William James test of policies and ideas: how do they work in practice?

On Leaving Iraq: It turns out that the bigger and more effortful thing that you have done – the more attached you feel to it. Partially it’s regret. If we have invested $400 billion dollars and we will just leave it as it is and we haven’t achieved anything, we will feel like it’s a real waste. So what do we do? We keep on investing more and more in the hope that it will achieve something in the future. We can speculate evolutionarily how much [the attachment process] makes sense. You do want a mechanism that gets us attached to our kids, family, community and ideology, but it turns out it’s a very strong force and even when we adapt a wrong path, we have a very hard time overcoming this. This is the place where you can actually think of what the role of democracy is, reflecting people’s opinions versus people’s best interests. If we have people that are extremely attached to the war in Iraq, and the cord was severed, in two months they would not be attached any more. I don’t think people are able to predict how quickly they would get over this feeling of complete waste of this war. Right now, people think that if we stop [the war], it would have all had been for nothing. And how long would it take them to get used to the fact that it will have all been for nothing? I think it’s much shorter than they would have guessed. It’s a real dilemma about who you’re serving for a politician. The people of the moment who think that they will feel that it’s gone to waste or the people in two months who would be relieved that the war is over.

On Obamania: I’ll tell you another thing that worries me about Obama. We wrote a paper about a year ago on online dating. What we basically found was that when people describe themselves in less precise terms, they are more popular. The reason is that when you are vague, everyone can read into them what they want. You say you like music. It turns out that everyone thinks you like the same music that they like. Vagueness translates into liking. It turns out that the same thing happens with pictures, by the way. You put up pictures that are slightly more fuzzy and people think that you are more attractive. The second thing that we discovered is that people get crushed when they meet for coffee… I think Obama has been relatively vague compared to Hillary. We’ve known her for a very long time and she’s been more clear. People can read into Obama what they want, which is one of his appeals. At the same time, I think that we’ll have coffee with Obama at some point. The only question is when will we have coffee with Obama? The truth is that no human being can stand up to the expectations that the public has for Obama. At some point we will get disappointed. The question is how much and when.

Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational, in conversation with Chris Lydon, June 9, 2008

Podcast • November 20, 2007

Art, Science & Truth: Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer is preposterously young (26) to be standing so confidently at the intersection of art and science. Reviews have tended to credit him as a child prodigy, which is less than a real authority. But there he is -- science journalist and lab assistant, omnivorous reader, sometime line cook at Le Cirque, philosophy student and blogger -- with a marvelous modesty and calm.

Reading Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist is something like watching Jacoby Ellsbury in the Red Sox outfield. Reflexively one stammers what Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman on reading Leaves of Grass in 1855: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career…”

jonah lehrer

Lehrer is preposterously young (26) to be standing so confidently at the intersection of art and science. Reviews have tended to credit him as a child prodigy, which is less than a real authority. But there he is — science journalist and lab assistant, omnivorous reader, sometime line cook at Le Cirque, philosophy student and blogger — with a marvelous modesty and calm. He’s the boy preacher among the contentious elders, setting a terrific example for all of us who’d get our heads in tune with the mysteries of consciousness and art, and the claims of beauty and truth.

Lehrer’s stylish little book is a brief for art in an age of science. He stands with artists, for starters, because as he argues in eight signal lives, they hit the target first, about brain science in particular: poet Walt Whitman’s intuition of “the body electric,” for example; or novelist George Eliot’s confrontation with systems thinking (Herbert Spencer, in person, and the invented Casaubon in Middlemarch) and her elevation of the indeterminacy of real life; or Paul Cezanne’s methodical discovery of our eye’s part (and our imagination’s) in completing the experience of a painting. (“If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it,” as a talk-radio caller once said to me.)

Lehrer tilts toward artists as the great teachers, furthermore, because their stories, songs and images come out of the stuff of our shared experience.

Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, page xii.

In the nearly 50-year-old gap between C. P. Snow’s famous Two Cultures, Jonah Lehrer sees a stale “third culture” crying now for the corrective of a fourth. Giants of the third culture — Lehrer credits Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, Steven Pinker and E. O. Wilson — brought the truths of science to the literate masses, but always with a reductionist method; with the view as Professor Wilson has written that “all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.” Lehrer’s push for a “fourth culture” applies William James’s broad wisdom that there are other ways of describing reality and defining truth.

…the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. That simple idea will be the starting premise of any fourth culture. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science, wrote, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority beyond the reach of criticism.”

Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, page 197.

We had a quick, intense conversation last week, that linked back to my session with, and his own review of Oliver Sacks. I began with a question from Marjorie Garber, the prolific authority on Shakespeare and much else at Harvard: is this a two-way street that links artistic and scientific inspiration? That is, is there a companion volume to be considered (and could it get published?) entitled Watson and Crick were Poets?