The Science of Creativity and Love

Wow, it's been months. Oops!

But I saw this in my inbox this afternoon, and I couldn't resist.

Scientific American posted an article called "Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?", and the short answer is yes. The reasoning behind it is that thinking about love (as opposed to just sex or nothing at all) triggers global processing. We tend to think farther ahead when we think about love - lifetime commitments, companionship, til death do us part. Whereas, sex triggers local processing (where is the nearest bed, and how fast can I get to it?)

Global processing allows a broader overview, which promotes creativity and hinders analytical thinking. Local processing does just the opposite - it focuses on logic and the concrete.

They did some really cool experiments with GRE tests and questions that I'll let you read about, if you want. But I loved both the sentences below.

"One of the most noteworthy implications of these experiments is that love and sex don’t simply influence the way we think about the people we love or desire. Instead, they influence the way we think about everything.

The takeaway lesson is that thinking about love, or anything that promotes a distal perspective or global processing, can make us more creative. Perhaps love is an especially potent way to induce in us a sense of transcendence – being in the here and now yet also contemplating the distant future and maybe even eternity."

Here's to love! And creativity! Who wants to paint another Mona Lisa?

Quantum Cello

How did it get to be the 20th? I don't understand.

So, I was going through my Radio Lab podcasts this weekend (for any of you haven't heard of Radiolab, download it through iTunes. Now. I'll wait.) and realized how amazing this show is. Their little blurb reads, "Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility."

My little blurb reads, "Radiolab takes extraordinary, fundamental ideas and assumptions and rotates everything 180 degrees. Why talk about city planning with architects when you can talk about it with ant specialists and musicians? Why not delve full-tilt into a story about letters found on the side of the road to try and understand forensics and genetics? Art, science, religion, philosophy, mathematics, life. It's all here, waiting to be discovered."

But I especially want to talk about a podcast I listened to this weekend. It's not new - in fact, it came out almost a year ago. But it's beautiful. A cellist named Zoe Keating uses computers to record herself and loops them back through so that she can literally make up an entire cello section with just one instrument. She hits and plucks and bangs the cello to create rhythm, new sounds and extraordinary music. Here is the podcast online. If you just want to listen to the music, that starts at 5:45.

I can't stop listening to these songs. Which is another topic that Radiolab delves into. You should listen to that podcast too. But Zoe Keating first. You'll never hear a cello the same way again.

Musical Minds with Oliver Sacks (whom I love!)

Hey all! A quick little posting about Oliver Sacks. He is a neurologist who is fascinated by the weird and (not-so) wonderful wirings in our brains. My new art company, Thesia Arts, was named as a derivative of Synesthesia - a condition in where your senses are mis-wired in the brain, causing you to hear colors and smell music. People like Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, Tori Amos, Richard Feynman and Stevie Wonder are reported to have some variation of this disease. (I don't have time to verify if these are true or not, so if you want to do my investigating for me, start here.)

And you know who turned me on to this really creative mind disorder? Oliver Sacks. His books are like poetry to me - they're so amazing.

So, Dr. Sacks wrote this book. Musicophilia. (It's a great book. Get it.) While working with his patients, he realized that a large number of them gravitated toward music in some way. And then he became obsessed by it and how music works inside our brain. So he wrote this book. And then PBS did a special on it through NOVA. And I heard about it through a New York Times article.

So there is the progression of Musicophilia. Book. Article. TV Program. I have nothing more to say, other than: click on one of those links. Oliver Sacks has a beautiful, heartbreaking and very artistic outlook on the science of the brain.

Painting the Moon

Before I go any further - Happy 4th of July!  I'm sitting in a beautiful little cottage by Lake Ontario, far and away from the rigors of New York City.  Which couldn't be better, unless I could take off this stupid leg cast that somehow attached itself to my left leg.  Well, technically I put it there.  And will continue to put it there for three weeks until my torn ligaments in my foot heal.  But that's my latest excuse for not writing for almost two weeks.  I hope you enjoyed it!  ;)

I found this wonderful little article in the New York Times a few weeks back, and thought today would be a perfect time to bring it out.  NASA is, in my mind, one of the greatest feats in the American government and what better day to celebrate it?  Also, I love it when scientists turn artist.

This article chronicles astronaut Alan L. Bean from his days walking on the moon to his current profession as painter.  It has been almost 30 years since Bean was part of NASA, but his experiences there are what drives him to paint the moon, lunar missions, and self-portraits with the Earth in the background.  

He says, “When I left NASA, I made up my mind I was not going to be an astronaut who painted, but an artist who used to be an astronaut.”  It was a slow transition for him; he used to paint just the monochromatic colors of the moon, before slowing realizing that, “People talk about nature being beautiful, and it is, but it’s not harmonized like a painting.  If Monet painted what he saw, we wouldn’t celebrate him today. He painted a little of what he saw but then he painted mostly the way he felt about it.”  Colors are now allowed on the moon.  Beautiful blues and greens that are never actually seen there.

He still uses his scientific background, though, something I admire greatly.  According to the article, "He builds a scale model of every scene he paints, and uses a klieg light to simulate the sun and to get the shadows right. He works out the angle of the light and the positions of the people with mathematical precision. He wants the details to be historically correct."  There's a huge difference between artistic license and sloppiness, and we've allowed scientifically incorrect sloppiness in our art for too long.  How wonderful is it to know that the painting above could be re-created on the moon, should we ever be able to make it there again?

Bean's paintings can be seen at the Smithsonian in July, if you're in DC and want to check it out.  You can also see more of his work at www.alanbeangallery.com.  It's really beautiful work!

The painting above is of Gene Cernan, painted by Alan Bean.  

Move Speak Spin!

Ack, it's been more than a week since I've posted.  I will blame this on the fact that I lost my science notebook.  Yes, folks, you can cry a little - my notebook has been lost to the annals of the New York City streets.  It had all my notes in it about the World Science Festival, so I cried a little too.  And then procrastinated writing about the other lectures I saw, because I wanted my notes!

While I get over that, I will regale you with a few really cool exhibits from the Science Fair on the 14th.  One was Move Speak Spin, and you can see a little clip of their work on YouTube - Move Speak Spin.  They're a dance group that uses math to tell stories and make art.  This clip is a tiny section in which they danced with triangles.  Their World Science Festival blurb reads, "From tap dance to the permutations of a single sheet of paper, from flying machines to the ancient Chinese puzzle tangrams, this dance company displays the magic and mystery that is both dance and mathematics."

It's really fun!

The World Science Festival! - Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness

The 2nd annual World Science Festival was this weekend, and quite frankly, it was amazing.  On Thursday, I got to sit in on the lecture about Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness.

And what does the moderator lead with?  John Cage's 4:33 of Silence.  It was brilliant and freaked a few people out.  What I didn't know - and thought was really cool - was that 4 minutes and 33 seconds is actually 273 seconds.  At -273 degrees Celsius, all molecular motion stops.  Ahh John Cage.  Crazy, but rather brilliant.

The moderator, John Hockenberry, then led with "Much Ado About Nothing", which made my little heart pitter-patter.  He started discussing the concept of "creation out of nothing" and how this underlying concept is extremely hard to grasp.  The concept of zero took much longer to dream up than the concept of 1.  One can be seen.  Zero takes imagination.

The lecture took a swift turn into science-mode, and I'll be honest, I couldn't follow all of it.  And I definitely couldn't write it all down.  But the participants did speak about two concepts that really hit me.  

John Hockenberry brought up the question of why there is something in the universe rather than nothing.  Why would something even be created?  And one of the panelists (I wish I could remember who) simply said, "Well, there are infinite ways to have something.  There is only one way to have nothing."  I love it when statistics can put everything into perspective.

The second striking point piggy-backed off this idea.  Frank Wilczek (hah!  I remember him!) explained that nothingness is inherently unstable.  Although I will butcher his explanation right now, just take a second to think about it.  The only place actual nothingness exists in our world is in a vacuum.  And how quickly does that vacuum disappear once the seal has been destroyed or something shifts?  Once entropy takes over?  We're talking milliseconds here.

But onto his fascinating explanation.  He said that nothingness is unstable, and while that sounds contradictory to the idea of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, it's not.   (Wikipedia's definition states that "the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium."  Meaning, things fall apart.)  So, while it sounds like we should all be moving toward a state of nothingness, in fact we're moving in the opposite direction.  

Yes, it takes energy to create something.  But you get more energy from the attraction of those things, than you do from nothingness.  Quarks and anti-quarks.  Matter and anti-matter.  The building blocks of our universe.  The energy of these attractions are what has created us and why we're still here to discuss it.  

As Prof. Wilczek was describing this (in much better detail), he kept bringing his hands together to illustrate his point and unconsciously drawing a slightly lopsided, heart-shaped circle.  And I was struck by how much this definition of science sounded like love.   

Interesting.

Happy Birthday, Tetris!

I completely missed this on Saturday, unfortunately.  But Tetris had a birthday!  (I'm going to consider this art, because it's pretty to look at and can easily keep me distracted for two hours.  And who hasn't made up stories about evil kingdoms and walls that must come down?)

So, yes, Tetris was born on June 6th, 1984, which makes it 25.  Who knew I shared a birth year with Tetris?  

Fun fact #2: Andrew Lloyd Webber did a dance remix of the song under the name Doctor Spin.  And it made it to #6 on the UK charts.

Fun fact #3: Tetris has a repetitive stress syndrome named after it.  This was taken from wikipedia - "The game can also cause a repetitive stress symptom in that the brain will involuntarily picture tetris combinations even when the player is not playing the game (the Tetris effect)."

Yes, children, Tetris may damage your brain.  Now get out there and throw balls at your sister's head.

Happy Birthday, Tetris!

The Invisibility of Math and Science

I've been rolling this idea around in my head for awhile, and thought this would be a perfect place to air it out.  

The real purpose of this blog is to find connections between science and the arts.  Meaningful connections.  The kind that open up possibilities on both sides of the aisle.  To me, one can only enhance the other, but this is a relatively new concept for me.  I knew I was going to be an actress when I was in the sixth grade.  I didn't even make it through AP Biology because it was interfering with all the shows I was doing.  And for most of my life, I thought that was completely fine.  What one earth would I need biology for?

Now, of course, I think the complete opposite, but I know where these ideologies come from.  Biology (and most of higher level science and math) doesn't seem necessary to a lay person's way of life.  And that's because science and math are invisible.  They're designed to be.

How many of you have an iPhone?  How many of you have a cell phone?  That slim, wireless, no-antenna'd piece of technology stems directly from new breakthroughs in math and science, one of them being fractals.  I bet you had no idea about that.

But I would also bet that you've seen this somewhere:

This is a visualization of fractals, a piece of art derived from math, if you will.  There was a craze a few years back and these images were everywhere.  It was math made visible.  Yet I have no idea how these images can make my cell phone get smaller every time I upgrade.  A perfect opportunity lost.  

Art, by its very nature, is visible.  The reason for art is to gather a community, to share a concept, to explain and to explore together.  This could very easily be the case for science too, but we've pushed it aside and allowed others to explore without us.  It's become invisible.  I don't want to know how a series of 0s and 1s can become the internet.  The internet has been handed to me and I don't have to do the thinking, so why should I?

Ah, yes, well.  Here's why.  In a fortuitous happenstance, while I was searching the Internet for definitions on fractals, I found this.  Benoit Mandelbrot, the man who coined the term fractal (and has the cutest old-man face I have ever seen), also wrote a book called The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Trouble.  He claims that our fundamental financial assumptions are flawed (we are a rhythmic species, so therefore the market should be rhythmic), and backs it up with fractal analysis. (I'll point you toward a wikipedia page on the Elliot Wave Principle to explain this further.)

This isn't exactly art, true, but it does prove my point.  We don't understand the concepts behind our technologies and our complex world, because science and math have succeeded in making themselves autonomous.  Invisible.  But what if we understood the fundamentals?  If we once again gathered a community and discussed the technologies we're using, explored them and explained them?  We might be able to save ourselves some serious global heartache.

Really Old Pornographic Art

Sigh.  It's been a week since my last posting.  How quickly this gets away from you.

This one is fun, though.  Nicholas J. Conard, a German archaeologist, found the oldest example of figurative art currently known.  It's 35,000 years old and it is, of course, of a "...voluptuous woman...earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals."  Read the NY Times article.  It's fun.  And there are pictures.

But forget the porn and go back to the beginning of that paragraph.  It's currently one of the oldest examples of figurative art known in the world.  There is no head - in fact, in place of a head, there is a ring, which suggests it was worn as a necklace or perhaps hung somewhere.  This is definitely not "stick-figure-show-you-where-buffalo-are" art.  It's a link back to the beginning of our understanding of aesthetics, of design, of art.  Thirty-five thousand years ago, back when the Neanderthals were still around, we felt the need to create for creation's sake.  I find that pretty cool.

NPR's On Science correspondent, Rebecca Davis put it best.  "There's something about the discovery of things aesthetic that is far more exciting and inspiring than a tool.  This is where we start linking...I wouldn't say spiritually exactly...but we do start linking in a different way, our own feelings and our own passions, with our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago."

I would say spiritually.  Any connection to the past holds its own ghosts - ghosts that archaeologists spend their entire lives trying to ferret out.  And to have a connection to people from 35 millennia ago, one that gives us clues to beauty, art, society and culture - that is most definitely spiritual.

The Physics of Star Trek

I hope I didn't scare anyone off with the blog title.  I promise I won't be talking about centrifpetal force.  Although, I will point you toward an amazing xkcd comic.  (Just had to get that in there.)

(xkcd.com  Seriously, check it out.)

No, I will be talking about cool things like warp speed and photon torpedoes.  Or rather, Lawrence Krauss will.  He's written two books about the science behind Star Trek and even wrote an article about The Infinite Appeal of Star Trek. (Great, short read.) 

But on to The Physics of Star Trek. The article takes a look at transporters, photon torpedoes, warp drive, even "new life and new civilizations", and asks, according to the laws of physics, if these things are possible.  My favorite was the question on life forms - Krauss talks about silicon-based life forms, instead of carbon-based.  And it leads me to imagine what those creatures would look like and what they would need to be in order to be "living".  This is, of course, what Star Trek is based on - the imagination to create a world that includes Bynars and Tribbles and a whole mess of other ideas about what the future will look like.  

I was less interested in reading about Enterprise's gravitational shields, because they have no basis in reality.  There's no factual science involved in bending matter away from you - it really can't be done.  What can be done (and in fact, has been done) are things like quantum teleportation.  Granted, it's only been done with a single atom, but hey - no one had even thought of a floppy disk as a means to transport information until Spock showed up with one.   

I am, again, stepping all over the article, which really is a fantastic read, but I do want to focus on transporters for a second.  Krauss is asked about "beaming someone up", and he broke down what he would do to transport something.  "So I would do what I do when I surf the Internet—I'd move the bits. I'd scan you and try to get all the information, the bits, which make you a human being."  And then, he'd break you into little 1s and 0s and he'd move you.   

So soon we could all be living in the internet.  How's that for science?

The Future of Science is Art

Jonah Lehrer is one of my favorite science writers.  (He's cute too!  Always helps.)  He uses a language that can excite anyone who reads it.  So when I stumbled on Seed Magazine's The Future of Science is Art, I wasn't all that surprised he had written it.  The article argues exactly what it states - science cannot overcome its current limitations without art.  

As I read it, I pulled so many quotes from the article, that I finally gave up and just want you to read the whole damn thing. (Can I swear on blogs?)  Here it is again. 

But there a few things that I wanted to share, for those with short attention spans.  

Lehrer uses a few artistic examples to point out how art can explain something before it even needs explaining.  To wit: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enchanted with opium, was writing poetry about the 'the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking' long before there was even a science of the mind...Monet’s haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception."  Art is essential to understanding what we're even looking for.

We seek to quantify in this world; more and more so as we rely on technologies that understand quantities in ways they could never understand qualities.  Google can show you thousands of websites in a split-second, but you may never get to the one that has the article about light-paintings with the video imbedded. (I found that one after a 2-minute search and only because I remembered I had seen it on Science Friday.)  

But just because it's quantifiable, it doesn't mean it's better.  It doesn't mean it can answer the questions.  As Lehrer begins to dissect physics, he states, "...[its] surreal nature is precisely why it needs the help of artists. The science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense."

This is where Escher can explain something that math never can.  "Relativity" reveals how our minds work more quickly and cleanly than many neuro-scientific studies.  This is where poetic metaphor can unlock ideas that would confound most lay people.  (Or even scientists!  Ever heard the one about our universe being a hole in a block of swiss cheese?  It's mind-boggling.)  This is where James Joyce's Ulysses can capture the essence of humanity more completely than any study of neurons.   

I'm beginning to step on Mr. Lehrer's toes (I need to meet him, so I can finally call him Jonah), so I will refer you back to the article.  But I would like to add something to his words.  Lehrer, too, recalls The Two Cultures (see my previous blog if you have no idea what I'm talking about) and says, more eloquently than I ever could, "The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories...By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress...Art can make science better."

But science can make art better too.  Science is making art better.  From a purely technological viewpoint, art is being created that could never have been conceived in earlier eras.  But to broaden this idea a little more, let's incorporate science fiction.  Star Trek has just hit theatres, and I would call that a work of art.  How much more amazing is it to know that warp drive and quantum teleportation can, and in fact, have happened? (This will be in my next posting - stay tuned.)  That there is a basis in reality for these things?  For me, it makes Star Trek so much more engaging, and it brings a different kind of beauty to it.  This could be our world someday.  Science could be art. 

"We Don't Know Why"

I've struggled with what to lead with on this very first blog post of mine.  I have a feeling that, just like my life at the current moment, this blog will take a while to fully coalesce into something.  I don't have any idea with what that something is, and I'm becoming more and more okay with not knowing.  There's a reason that "life is a journey" is such an over-used cliche.  

So, I've decided to start with two sentences.  "We don't know why.  That's what fascinates us."  Last Saturday, I attended my very first science conference.  Most of my artist friends are rolling their eyes right now, at least internally, but it was fascinating.  Fifty years ago, C.P. Show wrote a lecture called The Two Cultures (See my play on words there?  Oh, I'm good.) and he spoke about how science and the humanities are diverging.  The two groups don't interact, don't speak, in fact, many times can't even understand each other.  Fifty years later, this is still true.  Perhaps more true.  The conference was an attempt to bring the two closer together.

In my humble opinion, there was more talk about what was wrong with science and the humanities diverging and less talk about what could actually be done about fixing that.  But I blame that on the guerilla style of art that I'm so accustomed to.  You get out there, you figure out what needs doing, you figure out how to do it, and then you do it.  Those last two were oddly missing from the day.  

However (and here's where I get to my point), a number of compelling turns of phrase were thrown out there, one being, "We don't know why.  That's what fascinates us."  (This can be contributed to E.O. Wilson, that brilliant biologist obsessed with ants)  

We don't know why we are alive.  It comes down to that.  And we are fascinated by this idea of why.  We use religion to explain it.  We use science.  We use art.  We use war.  We use love.  We even use death.  

Now, I've just listed six things that seeks to answer "why".  You could list seventeen more without pausing.  But take a good look at my list.  Every one can be seen as an opposite of another.  Wars have been waged over religion.  Religion and science are locked in an epic battle of wills over evolution.  Artists and scientists want to have nothing to do with each other.  And death is the antithesis to even the question.

And yet, we're all after that same elusive answer.

I'm not going to end these posts with a "let's all get along" message, because I would have no idea how to even begin that process.  But if the question "Why are we alive?" fascinates you (and it should), take a moment and see if it can be answered from another perspective.  Even if you don't agree with it, I bet you can understand how someone else would.

I've found two cultures that resonate with me.  Art and science both makes so much sense to me that I can no longer see the divide.  Enter internet and the idea of reaching both cultures in one place, and voila!  My Two Cultures.