For want of a theory, a game, a quip and a cure

. . . neurohumanities is not just a change in how we see paintings or read nineteenth-century novels.  It's a small part of the change in what we think it means to be human.

Allisa Quart 

The sentences above are from Allisa Quart's article, "Adventures in Neurohumanities," published in the May 27, 2013 issue of Nation.  Unfortunately, they end the article; they should have been at the beginning.

For this seems to be the curious state of neuro today, in four generalized narratives: one, the paranoid humanists who rage against determinism, reductionism and their favorite catchall concept, scientism; two, the apparently significant-enough portion of the consuming public who want to believe they can make themselves smarter by playing games online; three, the gossip-conscious and marginally interested public who trade in pop-science news about why we love, hate, yearn, lust, see movie celebrities in our dreams, &c.; and four, just about everyone who is afraid of sliding into the terrible dementia of Alzheimer's.  We're all talking about something rather profound -- what it means to be a human being -- while failing to think of it this way.

It seems we really don't want to think of ourselves in a new way; instead, we prefer being children of God or psychologically actualized or intellectually driven or socially aware or politically affiliated or economically motivated or . . . whatever; but always with some sort of control over ourselves, our capabilities, our destinies.  Anything, that is, but an ape with an evolutionarily and highly developed brain that is subject physiologically to natural and man-made environmental pressures, and lots of luck.

Quart's essay is of the first type, though only somewhat as it seems more like a huge shrug than anything else, as though those pernicious folks who wear lab coats are bound to conquer the humanities.  For one thing, you see, it's about the money.   As Quart puts it, the neurohumanities are "part of an interdisciplinary push into what is broadly termed the digital humanities, and it can be seen as offering an end run around intensifying funding challenges in the humanities."  But if only money were the sole reason; Quart:

Neuroscience appears to be filling a vacuum where a single dominant mode of thought and criticism once existed.  That plinth has been held in the American academy by critical theory, neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis.  Alva Noe, a University of California, Berkeley, philosopher who might be called a "neuro doubter," sees neurohumanism as a reaction to the previous postmodern moment. . . .  Noe argues that neurohumanism is the ultimate response to -- and rejection of -- critical theory, a mixture of literary theory, linguistics and anthropology that dominated the American humanities through the 1990s.

I am neither scholar nor expert and prefer to remain detached when reading such plaints, but I remember years ago picking up great tomes by postmodernist literary scholars heaped in piles at used book sales and wondering how the study of novels had morphed into dense sociopolitical tracts explaining why modern society was both screwed up and meaningless.  It was worse than what Quart calls "the supposedly loosey-goosey art and lit crowds" making up things that sounded cool; more like a lost goose flying north in autumn.  Quart, in a sober mood, writes:

Critical theory offered us the fantasy that we have no control, making a fetish of haze and ambiguity and exhibiting what Noe terms "an allergy to anything essentialist."  In neurohumanities, by contrast, we do have mastery and concrete, empirical ends, which has proved more appealing, even as (or perhaps because) it is highly reductive. . . . Neuroscience is now the favored method for explaining almost every element of human behavior.

Which is why, I think, a lot of people believe their behavior will become better, and they'll be smarter to boot, if only they can improve their brains.

On the science and art of warping reality, Part 2

Let me review quickly where we are (as I understand it now, from Part 1).  First, we know that vision is the most important of our senses and our brain uses lots of neuronal resources to make sure we see the world (objective reality) rapidly and accurately enough (though not with 100 percent precision) for the physical survival of our species.  Second, it appears the brain creates semantic space across its entire cortical surface to classify visual information (processed from the retinas to the occipital lobe) in semantic terms so we can make sense, in an ordinary sense, of what we see.  Third, the brain tunes itself across specific areas of this general semantic space when it needs to pay attention to one or two specific concepts of visual information -- attentional warping, as the researchers call it -- even if the visual information being sought is never found.  I infer from this last point that the same warping possibly occurs in the brain if the target information is only conceived in the mind and not perceived in the external world, because "the brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life," as Annie Murphy Paul, a science writer, wrote in a New York Times article last year.

Now, with my sombrero seated firmly on my head, I return to the relationship of reality and the arts. Once again, Wallace Stevens is a reliable guide; this time from his poem "Description Without Place":

Description is revelation.  It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.

It is an artificial thing that exists,
In its own seeming, plainly visible,

Yet not too closely the double of our lives,
Intenser than any actual life could be,

A text we should be born that we might read,
More explicit than the experience of the sun

And moon. . . .

Consider the notion of a semantic representation, more commonly called a concept, as revealed in the Gallant Lab research (see Part 1 if you haven't read it yet).  It is a one-word description "more explicit than the experience of the sun and moon."  Why should our brains have a physically identifiable general semantic space where descriptions of objects and actions can be located?  Let me put this another way. Given that humans, like all living things, are evolved creatures, there must be an evolutionary reason for our brains to have a physical space across their cortical surfaces with the capability to generate not only concepts, but the concept of a concept.

Is the general semantic space identified by the Gallant Lab an adaptation?  That is, is it necessary for our survival?  Tribes of human beings survive in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea without, I assume, the same concepts as we possess -- not that I want to live as they do, but evolution is not concerned with the quality of an organism's life, only its survival -- but if the Gallant Lab research is correct, members of these tribes should have the same general semantic space as we residents of the developed world.  If not an adaptation, might this space be a trans-adaptation?  That is, did the general semantic space originally evolve for another purpose, only to be converted into an area for a new function (concept creation, for lack of a better term), just as, Werner R. Loewenstein points out in his book, Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain, feathers developed millions of years ago to maintain body temperature but now enable birds to fly?  Loewenstein considers a similar possibility for the frontal cortex in the human brain:

. . . patients with mathematical inabilities . . . showed structural deficits in the left frontal bulge of their brain and in the left parietal-occipital region. . . .  That same capacity . . . may well be the basis for higher mathematics . . . [which] stands to reason because the alternative, a special neuronal circuitry for such mathematics, is unlikely on Darwinian grounds.  What selective advantages could the solving of quadratic equations possibly have, or the formulation of topological theorems or wave equations?

On the science and art of warping reality, Part 1

I've been rereading the great American poet Wallace Stevens lately, not just his poetry but some of his prose, because I think Stevens is probably more relevant in the early 21st century than he ever was in the 20th.  He wrote a lot about reality, which is why I've gone back to him.  For reality, that old conundrum, is on my mind these days.  What, exactly, is it?  Per Stevens: ". . . reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it."  Sounds like something a poet would say, not very scientific but elliptical.  Pure Stevens.  But as he wrote in his poem "Six Significant Landscapes":

Rationalists, wearing square hats,

Think, in square rooms,

Looking at the floor,

Looking at the ceiling.

They confine themselves

To right-angled triangles.

If they tried rhomboids,

Cones, waving lines, ellipses --

As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --

Rationalists would wear sombreros.

I will wear a sombrero for this post, partly because of Stevens; partly because I recently finished reading both Semir Zeki's most recent book, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness, which I hope to discuss with him in the near future, and Werner R. Loewenstein's Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain, which might prompt a separate blog post in the future; and partly because I discovered two rather amazing studies from the Gallant Lab at Berkeley that have to do with how we interpret what we see, the semantic representation of the external world.  The science at issue is profound and wearing a sombrero helps keep it in perspective (pun intended, as you'll see).

(Warning: this post is long -- in two parts -- and a little technical.  If you're a writer or artist unfamiliar with these subjects, I have tried to provide enough links to Wikipedia entries to help, as I have provided links to books and research articles.  On the other hand, if you know your science . . . well, feel free to critique me.  Please.)

Characteristic of a man wearing a sombrero, I want to begin my poking and probing into reality with a novel keyed to a real-life video installation at an art gallery.  24 Hour Psycho, a 1993 installation by the artist Douglas Gordon, is the central object in the opening and closing scenes of Don DeLillo's brief novel, Omega Point.  Douglas appropriated Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Psycho and slowed it down to roughly 2 frames per second instead of the usual 24.  In the opening scene of DeLillo's novel, presumably at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an unnamed man observes the installation:

The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now.  Anthony Perkins is turning his head.  It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins' head.  Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything.  Anthony Perkins' head swiveling over time on his long thin neck.

It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception.  He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required.  The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.  The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded.  He stood and looked.  In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much.  But it was impossible to see too much.  The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.  This was the point.  To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.

Point Omega is a novel that forces the reader to slow down -- and I do mean s - l - o - w -- to pay attention to the details of its characters, its setting, its possibilities presented as past and present, and, in the most eventful development to occur in an otherwise uneventful story, as future -- a catastrophe that no one sees coming.  Space and time are center stage throughout the novel.  I have chosen my words carefully in writing the previous sentences, because in considering reality I am led to think about our sense of vision and the notion that without it, we wouldn't experience space or time -- past, present or future.  Which means we wouldn't have nouns or verbs.

Homo sapiens is a visual creature, as our metaphors indicate: we search for meaning, seek the truth and need to see the facts because we'll only believe something when we see it.  (I know because I was born and reared in Missouri, the "Show Me" state!)  Vision is so important that, unlike the other senses, it has its own substantial section of the brain, the occipital lobe at the back of the cerebral cortex, and within this lobe are sub-sections, each of which responds to specific types of visual stimuli, including color, shape, movement, location, orientation, &c.  But making sense of what we see, in terms of a continuous reality of concepts understood semantically (a subjective human reality, I might say), apparently requires practically the entire cortical surface.  I find this astonishing.

Welcome to an exciting adventure for creative minds

From "Charles Fernyhough: Is memory just a leaky construction?" by Charles Fernyhough, published April 26, 2013 at The Guardian:

If tracing behavior and experience to its neural underpinnings really offers a new understanding of humanity, aren't novelists bound to draw on it in revealing how their characters understand themselves?  In one sense, neuro-explanations seem to challenge the mechanisms by which novels work.  Neuroscientists warn us that we may have no free will, no "self" at the helm; their work shows that our memories are leaky reconstructions and that even our visual perception of the world is a system of illusions.  How do these messages change what we do, how we feel, how we decide to live?  Fiction is a perfect medium for exploring these questions.

Fernyhough's column is short, unfortunately, but this owes mainly to the fact that he has such little material to work with -- beyond, of course, space limitations imposed by The Guardian.  He cites very few novels, and these are, unfortunately, characterized either by aberrant behavior or the presence of neuroscientists as characters.  As to the former, Fernyhough notes in his most important comment in the article: "If neuroscientific ideas are really going to prove their worth to novelists, they need to be able to provide satisfactory accounts of ordinary."

This raises two related issues.  First, novelists (and all artists who are interested), need to read the science.  By this I mean scientific studies and serious appraisals of research written by scientists -- and not merely the pop-science articles published in the popular press.  This is why I pay so much attention to scientific studies and quote from them verbatim, technical terms and all, with links to Wikipedia and other explanatory sources.  Yes, it's a little more work than reading the Associated Press version but, as I've written before, if artists expect scientists to appreciate their work on their terms, they should expect the same of themselves when encountering the work of scientists.

More important, though, is this issue of "satisfactory accounts of ordinary."  The revolution currently under way in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences is, at its most basic, about just this: the normal, everyday, prosaic, ordinary functioning of the human brain and behavior of the human being.  Not only is the meaning of normal up for grabs, but the discoveries are coming so quickly and from so many surprising directions that the ordinary is looking quite extraordinary.  The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who is getting a lot of press these days because his latest book has been published, said in a conversation at Edge:

. . . each neuron, far from being a simple logical switch, is a little agent with an agenda, and they are much more autonomous and much more interesting than any switch.  The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances?  This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like some sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously. . . . You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as a base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well.  But still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time.

Whether you agree or disagree with Dennett's metaphor, ordinary is amazing.  For novelists, though, this very situation is an extraordinary challenge.  One reason, I think, is that novelists think in Cartesian and Freudian terms; that is, there's a little homunculus in our brains, a Little Me, who causes us to act according to (mostly outdated) psychological motives.

Now add two more elements -- that science, by its very nature, is really not the place to go if you want once-and-forever certain explanations of the meaning of life (that's what religion is for); and that the biological revolution occurring today is still in its infancy -- and it's no wonder novelists aren't sure how to deal with the subject.  In a sense, poetry is much more conducive.  And, as Fernyhough says, "It's possible that neuroscience is just too new for its ideas to have permeated literary fiction. . . ."

This is why I write BR&L.  If you are an artist of any sort, I hope you're reading and clicking here.  The science I write about and link to is an exciting adventure for creative minds.

(Image: Some fungi that grew on a wet paperback novel by Cornell Fungi)

Rogues in the House

Your letter marks the beginning of an investigative effort, the implications of which are profound.  This is the first step on a path that would destroy the merit-based review process at [the National Science Foundation] and intrudes political pressure into what is widely regarded as the most effective and creative process for awarding research funds in the world.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas 

I prefer to avoid politics in this blog, but the war on science being waged by a handful of right-wing conservatives has reached a new low, and I must highlight it.  Rep. Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has drafted but not yet (as of pixel time) introduced a bill which would required the director of the National Science Foundation to certify publicly, on the Foundation's website, that before any taxpayer-funded grants are provided, the research is:

. . . in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science; is the finest quality, is ground-breaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and is not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.

Here is the pdf of draft bill, courtesy of the Huffington Post, that in perfect Orwellian phrasing is titled the "High Quality Research Act."  The House committee too is run by an Orwellian crowd, including Rep. Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, who said:

God's word is true.  I've come to understand that.  All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all this is lies straight from the pit of Hell.  And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.  You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth.  I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old.  I believe it was created in six days as we know them.  That's what the Bible says.

I've been around politics enough in my professional life (though not much, still too much) to know that such a bill won't go anywhere, but this is small consolation.  Even if the bill never becomes the law of the land, the religious conservatives in the House of Representatives who are attacking science can cause a lot of problems -- hearings and investigations are the usual methods of attack and harassment. This possibility is just what Rep. Johnson suspects; her comment was prompted by a letter from Rep. Smith to the acting director at NSF requesting "detailed information on specific research projects awarded NSF grants."  This is all reminiscent of the culture wars of the 1990s when the National Endowment for the Arts Humanities was under attack, but the stakes are much higher this time.

As I have written before, I am an atheist and not shy about it.  I don't like to get into huge discussions on the topic because it's tiresome; I have better things to do with my time; and neither do I want to spend a lot of time writing about these debates at BR&L.  But sometimes I have to say something, and this is one.  If Reps. Smith and Broun want to live in the 1st century instead of the 21st, it's fine by me, but they have no business using the institutions of government to force their religious views on Americans and drag down science in the process.

A quick note on the above image.  It is the cover of the Conan the Barbarian book which contained the seventh story in Robert E. Howard's series, "Rogues in the House."  I think the title applies here, even if there is no parallel to the story.

(Image: Conan by Lonnie's Life)

Culture among wild animals?

The abstract of "Potent Social Learning and Conformity Shape a Wild Primate's Foraging Decisions" by Erica van de Waal, Christele Borgeaud and Andrew Whiten, published April 26, 2013 at Science:

Conformity to local behavior norms reflects the pervading role of culture in human life.  Laboratory experiments have begun to suggest a role for conformity in animal social learning, but evidence from the wild remains circumstantial.  Here, we show experimentally that wild vervet monkeys will abandon personal foraging preferences in favor of group norms new to them.  Groups first learned to avoid the bitter-tasting alternative of two foods.  Presentations of these options untreated months later revealed that all new infants naive to the foods adopted  maternal preferences.  Males who migrated between groups where the alternative food was eaten switched to the new local norm.  Such powerful effects of social learning represent a more potent force than hitherto recognized in shaping group differences among wild animals.

I have neither studied nor read a lot about the elements of behavior necessary to make culture but guess that mimicry is one -- and this applies to culture in general as well as aesthetic culture.  The key phrase here is "powerful effects of social learning," which we tend to think of as being characteristic only of human beings.  This study and another, which examined an enormous data set concerning a specific fish-hunting technique among humpback wales, challenge the Homo sapien species-centric view, though neither is conclusive, according to scientists not associated with either study.

Evolutionary anthropologist Rachel Kendal of Durham University is quoted in a ScienceNews article by Meghan Rosen: "Claims of tradition and culture in wild animals can be very contentious.  I'd love to be able to say that the case is closed, but I think there will always be debate about culture in animals." Then there is Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, who is quoted by Michael Balter in an article at ScienceNow: "Both these papers show that animals pay attention to and are influenced by what other animals are doing."  But, Balter paraphrases Pagel,

neither study demonstrates the kind of sophisticated copying typical of humans and which demarcates humans from other animals. . . .  Without the ability to truly copy others, Pagel adds, animals cannot develop the increasingly sophisticated behaviors that have ratcheted human culture to such a high level.

But the research continues.  Bravo.

(Image: Vervet Monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) by Arno Meintjes Wildlife)

The literary novel as cognitive overhead

Recently I wrote that one reason the literary (or serious) novel is likely becoming cultic, if it isn't already, is that its abstract nature competes with the increasingly abstract world in which we live every day.  The idea is loosely based on James R. Flynn's explanation of his Flynn Effect, which is the apparent increase in human intelligence as measured by IQ tests.  As I wrote, 

We are not getting more intelligent as a species, so what is happening?  His explanation is that IQ tests, to be culturally neutral, are abstract by design and, as global societies -- particularly Western societies -- continue to become increasingly abstract, the human brain has become more adept at dealing with abstraction; indeed, functioning successfully in contemporary society requires our brains to rewrite for it.

The other day I came across an article by David Lieb, cofounder and CEO of Bump, the company which produces the app that allows smartphone users to share data by simply bumping them together.  The article, "Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn't as Simple as You Think," published April 20, 2013 at TechCrunch, is written for software application programmers and offers this advice:

Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market.  Why? Because most people haven't developed the pattern-matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc.) into meaning and purpose.  We, the product builders, take our ability to cut through cognitive overhead for granted; our mental circuits for our products' patterns are well practiced.

This is especially pronounced for mass market mobile products.  Normal people already have to use more of their mental horsepower to cut through cognitive overhead.  Now imagine the added burden of having to do that while on a crowded bus, or in line at Starbucks, or while opening your app for the first time while eating dinner with a friend and texting another.  This isn't 1999 when your users were sitting in their quiet bedrooms checking out your website on a large monitor while waiting for their Napster downloads to finish; they are out in the real world being bombarded with distractions.

Granted, cognitive overhead is not a scientific term for describing a particular state of the brain -- Lieb quotes a web designer for the definition: "how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you're looking at" -- but it more or less characterizes what I think occurs in a reader's brain while reading a difficult literary novel.  The definition, in fact, could be applied easily to what probably happens when you read James Joyce, David Foster Wallace and other serious novelists.  To paraphrase Lieb, imagine trying to read Infinite Jest on a crowded bus or while eating dinner with the TV on in the other room and your cellphone chiming nearby and . . .

I think it's appropriate that I quote the description of the above image by what I might call a mobile app artist, docpop, the man who made it:

Daily App Experiment #129: "Break out the Casio and the drum machine" -- I created the initial image by taking a screen shot in the #GlitchBeam app, then I ran that through #DotCam.  After that I ran the pixilated images through #StripeCam then assembled all the images in #Diptic. 

Please don't tell me we're not creating a very very abstract world.  No wonder avant-garde is a meaningless term in the arts.

(Image: Daily App Experiment #129: "Break out the Casio and the drum machine" by docpop)

A new book challenges evolutionary psychology

A new book, to be published next week by Princeton University Press, takes on (or possibly takes apart) evolutionary psychology and, in a great scientific tradition, names names -- this time some very big names indeed.  The book, by cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman, whose principal research has been into the evolution of language, is The Unpredictable Species: What Makes Humans Unique.  From Chapter 1, "Brainworks," which is available as a pdf at the publisher's site (found on the preceding link):

The archaeological record and genetic evidence suggest the people who had the same cognitive capabilities as you or me probably lived as far back as 250,000 years ago. However, we don't live the way our distant ancestors did 50,000 years ago.  Nor do we live as our ancestors did in the eighteenth century, or five decades ago.  Nor, for that matter, does everyone throughout the world today act in the same manner or share the same values. . . .  We are the unpredictable species. 

The opposite view, popularized by proponents of what has come to be known as "evolutionary psychology," such as Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Marc Hauser, and Steven Pinker, is that we are governed by genes that evolved in prehistoric times and never changed thereafter. . . .  I shall show that no one is religious because a gene is directing her or his thoughts.  Moral conduct doesn't entail having a morality gene.  Language doesn't entail having a language gene. . . .

The historical record that shows how people really act, as well as the evidence that reaches our ears and eyes every day, has been ignored. . . .  Ethical, moral behavior is a product of cultural evolution.  This stew of invented genes [from evolutionary psychology] diverts our attention from real progress in understanding the interplay of culture and biology in shaping human behavior. . . .  The human brain evolved in a way that enhances both cognitive flexibility and imitation, the qualities that shaped our capacity for innovation, other aspects of cognition, art, speech, language, and free will.

The thing that really caught my eye, though -- besides the direct challenge to Dawkins et al. -- is that Lieberman places the basal ganglia at the center of our cognitive evolution.  Lieberman writes that the basal ganglia "evolved eons ago in anurans -- the class of animals that includes present-day frogs. . . . They control motor acts in frogs and continue to do so in human beings, but they also play a central role in human cognition."  Or as the publisher's summary states, Lieberman

builds his case with evidence from neuroscience, genetics, and physical anthropology, showing how our basal ganglia -- structures deep within the brain whose origins predate the dinosaurs -- came to play a key role in human creativity.  He demonstrates how the transfer of information in these structures was enhanced by genetic mutation and evolution, giving rise to supercharged neural circuits linking activity in different parts of the brain.  Human invention, expressed in different epochs and locales in the form of stone tools, digital computers, new art forms, complex civilizations -- even the latest fashions -- stems from these supercharged circuits.

Another book for my list . . . and which I hope to find the time to read some day.  (I should also apologize for my sporadic blogging these days.  No excuse, really; it's called life.)

(Image: Language of the Birds by quixotic chick)

Rise of the direct-gaze portrait

The abstract of "How portraits turned their eyes upon us: Visual preference and demographic change in cultural evolution" by Olivier Morin, published March 6, 2013 at Evolution & Human Behavior:

It has often been suggested that innate features of the human mind could make some cultural forms more successful than others.  This paper presents a case study consistent with this "cognitive attraction" hypothesis.  Numerous studies show that direct-eye-gaze catches the attention of adults and newborns.  Adults find it more attractive.  We explore one possible cultural consequence of this cognitive appeal.  Among XVIth century European portraits, direct-gaze paintings are more likely to be featured in today's art books.  In Renaissance Europe, the proportion of paintings that stare at the viewer grows gradually, strongly, and remains prevalent for centuries.  A demographic analysis of this shift shows that it was due to the arrival of new generations of painters.  Those artists show a preference for direct-gaze portraits as soon as they start painting, suggesting that they acquired the new style in the years of their apprenticeship.  The preferences of those painters and of contemporary art critics seem consistent with the innate attentional bias that favors direct-gaze faces.  The structure of the "Renaissance gaze shift" bears evidence for the importance of demographic turnover in cultural change.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  I did not pay to read the entire study, and read only one article about the research, "Brain Preferences Shaped Art History" by Gemma Tarlach, published March 11, 2013 at Discover.  She writes that, according to the study, direct-gaze portraits became so popular in the 16th century that they replaced "the profile, three-quarters and averted-gaze poses more common in the 15the century. . . .  Morin theorizes that when gaze direction is not mandated by cultural restrictions, the neurological preference for direct gaze wins out."

More interesting (to me) is that "Morin found a similar evolution of direct-gaze portraits as the preferred pose in Korean paintings, giving weight to the theory that bias for direct-gaze is neurologically based and not specific to European cultures."

I have no doubt that our reaction to direct-gaze portraits is neurological and, further, that it is evolutionary, related to the same areas and functions of the brain that deal with face recognition; the question is why such a powerful neurological effect would begin to occur only as of the 16th century. Why not earlier?  Were prior "mandated . . . cultural restrictions" that powerful?  Or was something else at work?

(Image: William Shakespeare, the Cobbe Portrait by lisby1)

". . . in his own image"

While the rest of the known world was wowing over celebrity news, Washington politics, the Middle East, North Korea and the brain-imaging of dreams, I more or less lost my breath when I read this yesterday . . . the abstract of "Language-Trained Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Name What They Have Seen but Look First at What They Have Not Seen" by Michael J. Beran, J. David Smith and Bonnie M. Perdue, published online March 18, 2013 at Psychological Science:

Metacognition can be defined as knowing what one knows, and the question of whether nonhuman animals are metacognitive has driven an intense debate.  We tested 3 language-trained chimpanzees in an information-seeking task in which the identity of a food item was the critical piece of information needed to obtain the food.  The chimpanzees could either report the identity of the food immediately or first check a container in which the food had been hidden.  In two experiments, the chimpanzees were significantly more likely to visit the container first on trials in which they could not know its contents but were more likely to just name the food item without looking into the container on trials in which they had seen its contents.  Thus, chimpanzees showed efficient information-seeking behavior that suggested they knew what they had or had not already seen when it was time to name a hidden item.

The chimpanzees were trained to identify food by touching on symbols.  The researchers hid food in containers.  Sometimes the chimps saw bananas put into a container, other times they didn't.  When asked to identify the food in the containers, the chimpanzees thought about it first: if they'd seen the bananas hidden in containers they touched the banana symbol; if not, they looked inside the container.

Beran and Perdue are at the Georgia State Language Research Center and Smith is at the University of Buffalo.   Beran is quoted in a Georgia State University news release: "There has been an intense debate in the scientific literature in recent years over whether metacognition is unique to humans." And the entire research team is quoted: "This pattern of behavior reflects a controlled information-seeking capacity that serves to support intelligent responding, and it strongly suggests that our closest living relative has metacognitive abilities closely related to those of humans."

If a chimpanzee can think about thinking about an objective bit of reality, like a banana and its container, might a chimpanzee be able to think about thinking about a subjective bit of reality -- itself?

(Image: In Thought . . . by irishwildcat)