The Thinking Meat Project

New insight into how art works

I’m currently at work on a novel, so I’m more alert now to the ways that fiction writers create compelling imaginary worlds and characters that seem real. I’ve been an avid reader since I was little, but I’ve usually been content to let writers work their magic and to think about the themes they explore without getting too deeply into the techniques they use. It’s interesting to look at fiction from the inside and try to understand those techniques. Applying them myself seems to be a fascinating blend of conscious effort and subconscious serendipity that I notice only after it’s done.

A recent news story reported on a study of how Rembrandt made his portraits so compelling. It’s not clear whether he was applying a set of methods consciously or instinctively, but researchers at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia have helped clarify how he did it. They created portraits that reproduced Rembrandt’s techniques and used them to identify specific features that attract and guide the eye.

They created modern analogs to four of Rembrandt’s late portraits, matching them as closely as possible to the originals in terms of pose and lighting, as well as the use of colors, brush detail, and various other stylistic attributes. Then they manipulated the level of detail in four different areas of each image and recruited viewers to take a look. They monitored the viewers’ eye movements as they examined the images and also asked about their subjective preferences. Areas of finer detail held the viewers’ gaze longer, calming and guiding the eye; when this happened, viewers rated an image as more artistically pleasing. So one trick of the painter’s trade appears to be selective and subtle use of detail to control the way the painting is experienced.

This article from Science Daily gives an overview of the work, and you can read more, see some of the images, and download a preprint of the paper at the web site of the iVizLab at SFU.

I have never learned to paint, so I don’t know if this use of textural variety is taught explicitly or if painters apply it consciously. Are there any painters out there who can tell me about their experiences?

          

Ardi’s environment

One of the more interesting claims in last year’s announcement of the species Ardipithecus ramidus is that Ardi appears to have been bipedal and that the species lived in a forested environment. This casts doubt upon the hypothesis that bipedalism arose when the environment of our pre-human ancestors shifted from forest to savanna, because walking on two legs made gathering food less energy-intensive than going about on all fours in a more open savanna environment.

However, a team of eight scientists (anthropologists and geologists) have examined the evidence given in the original report on Ardipithecus and conclude that it supports the savanna hypothesis after all, suggesting that Ardi lived in a. This press release from EurekAlert has some of the details. It’s a fascinating story in which different lines of evidence—carbon isotopes levels in the teeth of grazing animals, silica phytoliths (microscopic grains in plant tissue)—are brought to bear on the big question of when and why bipedalism emerged. (For some of the debate about whether or not Ardi was bipedal, see this article from Scientific American from last fall.)

          

The birth of science

On May 28, 585 BC, a total eclipse of the sun was visible from the Ionian island of Miletus. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that Thales of Miletus predicted the event. Thales was the first thinker that we know of to propose that every observable event has a physical cause. He rejected supernatural causation and the role of the gods. It’s not clear exactly how he knew the eclipse would occur, but he explained it as a natural event, evidently on the basis of knowledge of the cycles of solar and lunar motion and eclipses. He apparently understood that the sun was darkened because the moon passed in front of it, not because the gods were upset or were trying to tell us something. This belief in natural causes and in our ability to discover them was the hallmark of his legacy. To quote from the article about Thales in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Because he gave no role to mythical beings, Thales’s theories could be refuted. Arguments could be put forward in attempts to discredit them. Thales’s hypotheses were rational and scientific. Aristotle acknowledged Thales as the first philosopher, and criticized his hypotheses in a scientific manner.”

In short, Thales was the first to articulate what we would describe today as the scientific approach to knowledge. In last week’s What’s New, Robert Parks said that the eclipse marks the birth of science, and that seems as good a way to see it as any.

For me, the birth of science marks the beginning of a tremendous coming of age for our species. When you stop to think about it, it really is astonishing that we bipedal apes, with our inherent cognitive biases, limited life spans, and severely limited physical survival zone, have managed to learn so much about not only the things we see around us every day, but the distant past of our planet, the microscopic and quantum underpinnings of our world, and the far reaches of the universe.

This is why I’ve never really understood a recurring lament in the western world. The story goes that life was pretty good for us when we had a story of a god who created the world, damned us, and then redeemed us, a story that put us at the center of the narrative of all of history. We thought we had a purpose, because this god had given us one. We thought that if we did the will of this god here on earth, he would give us eternal life with all of our loved ones hereafter. We thought that however capricious he might seem to be, he loved us and was looking out for us, despite some severe testing from time to time (or, for many people, more or less constantly).

This cozy nursery story of a personal god and his plan for us was challenged by Copernicus’s suggestion that the sun did not go around the earth, and that in fact it was the other way around. Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of several planets circling the sun. Worse was to come: The sun wasn’t the center of the universe, but merely one of many stars in the galaxy, and not even a particularly prominent one at the center—not Rome or London or New York, but some dusty backwater in the provinces. The galaxy was one of many galaxies in the cosmos, none of them particularly favored with a central location. Furthermore, the earth was vastly older than the Biblical story taught. For many, the most serious blow is that all the evidence suggests that we, and all the other living beings on this planet, were not created ex nihilo by a deity, but were the result of a long, entirely natural process, what Carl Sagan described poetically as a matter of time and death.

The basic story line is that science has slowly ejected us from our place at the pinnacle of earthly creation, below only the angels and god, that it took away our belief in ourselves as having a special role and a unique meaning. However, I think this is totally backward. When Thales predicted that eclipse, we were still in our infancy in terms of coming to terms in a rational way with the physical reality in which we live. We were at the mercy of superstition and ignorance. Since then we’ve been like children leaving the illusory safety (and real bullies) of the playroom and becoming increasingly better acquainted with reality. The millennia since Thales have been a remarkable, if sometimes slow, journey. All those ejections from the center of the universe have actually been a series of amazing gains in our knowledge and abilities. We’re not being demoted; we’re growing up! It’s not been a continual story of loss and exile; we’re coming home! We’re learning the true nature of our surroundings and our true place in the big picture. Weeping over what we supposedly lost is like mourning over losing the helplessness and ignorance of childhood.

The world is not lonely and empty without the supernatural. It’s still filled with all of our fellow humans (some of the ones who are not here any more have even left their thoughts behind for us to share), not to mention our rich connections with the natural world. The world is not devoid of meaning; we can decide what it means. Many are choosing systems of meaning that are free from concepts of sin, divine retribution, and inherent guilt; once you realize that we are, to some extent, creating our own viewpoint, why not create a positive one? The emotional connections we form with family and friends can be strong and enduring even in the total absence of the supernatural; I think they offer all the comfort possible or needed in an imperfect world. There is not a shred of evidence for life after death, save the brief immortality of living on in the hearts and minds of those with whom we have shared ourselves. That’s enough, in my opinion.

If you yearn for connection to something bigger and more permanent than yourself, at least two compelling possibilities are available. First, human exploration and the expansion of knowledge are an enduring intergenerational saga that rivals any other story ever told for drama, satisfaction, heroism, struggle, adversity, and triumph. Second, the natural world was here long before we appeared and something of it will go on long after the last of us is not even a memory. Like it or not, we’re a part of it, and we can turn the story of our planet’s ecosystems toward tragedy or toward fulfillment. Either or both of these grand narratives offer enough meaning to fill many lifetimes.

Furthermore, the story of our species, our planet, our universe, is fascinating. It’s not always comforting or comfortable, but it’s the bedrock physical reality on which we live. We need to know how it works in order to know how to live well within its limits and understand all of its possibilities. Not only that, though: it’s beautiful! From fragments of ancient bone, we can slowly trace our lineage. From photons shed long ago by distant stars and galaxies, we can puzzle out the story of the universe. We can sit on a mountain at 7000 feet and see the fossils of marine animals, or walk along an Indiana creek and see the fossilized crinoids, and understand a former world very different from the one we know. We can examine DNA and begin to understand the deepest biochemical roots of our nature and the evolutionary links in the tree of life. Scientific knowledge is not just a source of power; it’s a source of wonder.

So, happy birthday, Science! I offer best wishes and great respect to all who have used careful observation, dispassionate analysis, and reasoned argument to advance our knowledge.

          

Talk on exercise and the brain at Indiana University

On Thursday, May 13, Dr. John Ratey will be discussing physical activity and the brain at Indiana University in Bloomington. His talk is from 5:30-6:30 in the Frangipani Room of the Indiana Memorial Union. It’s part of a Big 10 Recreational Sports conference, but it’s free and open to the public. Ratey has written a book about exercise and the brain, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, which examines the scientific evidence for how fitness influences your ability to learn, to cope with stress, anxiety, and depression, and to stay mentally sharp as you age. For more information, see the press release about his visit.