Jonah Lehrer: The Fourth Culture

Jonah Lehrer In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented a chasm between what he called the Two Cultures: artsy types on one side and stuffy science folks on the other. Well, Jonah Lehrer has been trying to bring them back together. His book Proust was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) makes large strides toward their collusion by showing how the insights of several artists, musicians, writers, and one chef were a step ahead of the science of their time. In spite of Sir Karl Popper’s insistence that “real” science be falsifiable (though even he respected the authority of the artist), art often tells us more about ourselves.

Noam Chomsky once said, “It is possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Examples of the overlap between art and science are not difficult to unearth. World-renowned physicist Richard Feynman was known to draw, Philip K. Dick‘s A Scanner Darkly (for one example from Dick’s vast canon) explores possible effects of a corpus callosotomy, and Lehrer himself reveals many more in his article “The Future of Science is Art” from Seed Magazine, where he is Editor at Large.

Up against Lehrer, with his post at Seed, his oft-updated blog (The Frontal Cortex), and his well-written, well intriguing book, the rift between the two cultures doesn’t stand a chance.

Roy Christopher: How did the people in Proust was a Neuroscientist come together? Was James Joyce too easy an example? How about Philip K. Dick?

Buy This Book from Powell'sJonah Lehrer: I’m always a little embarrassed to admit just how idiosyncratic my selection process was for the eight artists in the book. Once I had this idea about artists anticipating the discoveries of modern neuroscience –- and I got that idea when I started reading Proust in a lab — I began to see connections everywhere. I’d mutter about the visual cortex while looking at a Cezanne painting, or think about the somatosensory areas while reading Whitman on the “body electric.” Needless to say, my labmates mocked me mercilessly. But, in general, my selection process could be boiled down to this: I began with my favorite artists and tried to see what they had to say about the mind. The first thing that surprised me was just how much they had to say. Virginia Woolf, for instance, is always going on and on about her brain. “Nerves” has to be one of her favorite words.

Joyce makes a few appearances in the book, but so much ink has already been spilt on Joyce and “consciousness” that I wanted to find something a little more surprising. And Philip K. Dick will definitely appear in the sequel, when I get around to writing it.

RC: In light of all of the parallels between the Two Cultures that you’ve documented, do you think that C. P. Snow’s insight was a fallacy?

SEED Magazine: The Future of Science is ArtJL: Of course, there are real differences between our Two Cultures. Artists speak with metaphors, brushstrokes and plot, while scientists rely on acronyms, experiments and control variables. Sometimes, the languages of art and science can be so different that it’s hard to imagine a consilience ever taking place. But I think that cheap and easy binary distinction is also a little misleading. For starters, artists often rely on experimentation while making art -– they’ll try out different approaches and see what “works” –- while scientists often depend on their imagination.

Finally, I’d add that you don’t have to go very back in time before this cultural distinction disappears. George Eliot, for instance, famously described her novels as a “a set of experiments in life.” Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the “psychology should be done very realistically.” Or look at Coleridge. When the poet was asked why he attended so many lectures on chemistry, he gave a great answer: “To improve my stock of metaphors.” In other words, the poet didn’t believe that art and science needed to be separated.

RC: Snow’s Third Culture has given way to John Brockman’s Third Culture. Do you think the latter will inspire a proper version of the former?

JL: They’re fundamentally different enterprises. I believe that a third culture should ultimately be about re-creating a dialogue between our two cultures, which is what C. P. Snow was referring to. John Brockman, on the other hand, believes that the job of a third culture is to translate science for the masses. (As he puts it, “Science is the only news”.) That’s certainly a worthy endeavor — educating the public about science is really, really important — but it’s not a Third Culture.

RC: Is there a cultural divide between East and West? I ask because it seems to me that Eastern cultures — specifically Japan — are more open to what we would consider noise. Your chapter on Stravinsky got me thinking about this.

JL: That’s an interesting idea. I’m not aware of any research on that subject, but it’s certainly a testable hypothesis. I’d only add that I think neuroscience is really beginning to discover the importance of culture. We’re slowly beginning to learn all of the different ways the inputs of the arts — from “American Idol” to Wagner — can literally shape the brain. In other words, ideas are powerful things.

RC: What are you working on next?

JL: I’m currently hard at work on a book that should be published next year. (I just knocked on wood, in case you couldn’t tell.) The book is still coming together, but it won’t involve Proust, unfortunately.

Year-End Top Ten List, 2003

My friends and I always used to do year-end top ten lists of our favorite records of the year. Thinking back through 2003, I decided to archive my favorite ideas of the year. Not that I was let down by music this year, on the contrary, I heard plenty of good records in the ’03 (e.g., Aesop Rock, Kinski, Cex, Prefuse 73, Radiohead, Ilya, Interpol, Mogwai, Tomahawk, Deadsy, Why?, The Blood Brothers, The Mars Volta, Atmosphere, The Roots, etc.), but I thought this would be more interesting. We shall see. Continue reading “Year-End Top Ten List, 2003”

Joao Magueijo: Frontier Cosmology

Joao MagueijoMy friend and colleague Brandon Pierce did this interview for our old haunt, frontwheeldrive.com.

“The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.” — Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein is about as iconic as they come. His image conjures unparalleled respect within his discipline, and arguably, within the scientific community as a whole. He is the father of relativity, and many of his most innovative and radical ideas are now established dogma and have been for nearly 100 years. Continue reading “Joao Magueijo: Frontier Cosmology”

N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl

Kate HaylesDigging deep in the texts of both literature and science, N. Katherine Hayles exemplifies the reconciliation of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” better than anyone I know. Her refusal to concentrate on either side of the fence, instead insisting on plowing new ground on both sides, has lead her to some of the most intriguing research currently being done. Looking at texts from all sources and angles, Hayles is always seeing new things that others overlook. Continue reading “N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl”

Investigations by Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman has been probing the “deep structure” of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found “order for free” in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as “Kauffman sets”) which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. Kauffman never was much for neo-Darwinism or natural selection, and here he continues his holistic approach to self-organizing biospheres. Continue reading “Investigations by Stuart Kauffman”

Howard Bloom: Mind at Large

Howard BloomMy friend and colleague Brandon Pierce let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.

When attempting to examine the essence and inquire about the idiosyncrasies of human behavior, where should one turn? The beaten paths of the past have lead us in the direction of archetypal models involving psychological studies and reflection on past human history. We have also ventured into cultural anthropological endeavors, as well as primatology and ethology. Howard Bloom has managed to swivel heads in a new direction. Many are now peering through the lenses of light microscopes, and catching a glimpse of our ancestors in action. Continue reading “Howard Bloom: Mind at Large”

Rudy Rucker [Part Two]: Game Theory

Rudy RuckerMy friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.

When I last spoke with Rudy Rucker, his nonfiction collection Seek! and science-fiction novel Saucer Wisdom were just finding their way into bookstores. Since that time, Rucker has been hacking on a video game programming toolkit called the Pop Framework and keeping a low profile on the science-fiction scene. After bouncing a few emails with him, it was obvious that we needed to do another interview and shed some light on his latest projects. Continue reading “Rudy Rucker [Part Two]: Game Theory”

Rudy Rucker [Part One]: Keeping It Transreal

Rudy RuckerMy friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.

Rudy Rucker has a lot of things on his mind. Although his day job has him teaching computer science and mathematics at San Jose State University, Rucker is a writer. He has written twenty nonfiction and science-fiction books covering such topics as higher dimensions, artificial life, and biotechnology. Called the original cyberpunk author by many, his self-described “transreal” writing style is akin to Kerouac’s On the Road (Viking, 1959) and an issue of Scientific American after a run through the mince cycle on a blender. I recently had the chance to catch up with Rucker and discuss two of his most recent books, Seek! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999) and Saucer Wisdom (Forge Books, 1999). Continue reading “Rudy Rucker [Part One]: Keeping It Transreal”

Kevin Warwick: The Man in the Mind of the Machine

Kevin WarwickDescribed a short time ago as Britain’s leading prophet of the robot age, Professor Kevin Warwick is head of the Cybernetic Department at The University of Reading. He has designed countless machines that learn amazingly complex behaviors on their own. He is currently involved in a computer/human interface experiment that finds him with an active microchip implanted in his arm. The chip sets off sensors, causing them to activate various processes as he walks by. Continue reading “Kevin Warwick: The Man in the Mind of the Machine”