They've Blinded Us With Science

                  Like many before me, I attended both a college and a graduate school which bore, and still bear, the title schools “of Arts and Sciences.”  Those two terms have carried many meanings over the years.  Scientists, after all;, did not call themselves scientists until less than 200 years ago.  (They were commonly known as “natural philosophers” back then.)  But with modifiers like “fine and applied” for arts, and “natural and social” for sciences, it was pretty clear, for example, that the English and music majors, the painters and sculptors, were in a different phylum from the physics, biology, and chemistry majors, however ambiguously the psychologists, sociologists, and economists might see themselves.

                  Today, however, it seems that even the most unscientific of the arts are being probed by the scientists’ instruments, and in the process are providing explanations that appear to fall into two pots of fool’s gold: the “it took a study to show that?” pot and the “Oh come now” pot, both of which should be put out with the trash.

                  In the “it took a study” bucket, we have science telling artists and their devotees things we might have thought were already pretty well known.  Take this headline from the Wall Street Journal, “Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker: Why does Adele's ‘Someone Like You’ make everyone cry? Science has found the formula.”

Actually, there are two formulas, one musico-psychological and the other neuroscientific.  First, the Journal informs us:

“Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an ‘appoggiatura.’

“An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. ‘This generates tension in the listener,’ said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. “‘When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.’”

The clue to the waste of experimenter’s time and salary comes in a single word, “appoggiatura.”  The scientists didn’t invent the term, or the device.  It’s linguistically over 250 years old, and in practice is much older than that.  In fact, the ancient Greeks had already figured out the emotional valence of different types of music, as is evident from Plato’s Republic, where Socrates asks which musical modes are unsuitable for a rational society’s guardians and warriors:

 “What, then, are the dirge-like modes of music?  Tell me, for you are a musician.”
 “The mixed Lydian, he said, and the tense or higher Lydian, and similar modes.
 “These, then, said I, we must do away with.  But again, drunkenness is a thing most unbefitting guardians, and so is softness and sloth.
 “Yes.
 “What, then, are the soft and convivial modes?
 There are certain Ionian and also Lydian modes that are called lax.
 “Will you make any use of them for warriors?
 “None at all.”

               

   Part Two comes when we stop asking people questions and peer into their crania to tell them what’s “really” going on.  Again, according to the Journal:

                  “If "Someone Like You" produces such intense sadness in listeners, why is it so popular? Last year, Robert Zatorre and his team of neuroscientists at McGill University reported that emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs. This makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behavior.

                  “Measuring listeners' responses, Dr. Zatorre's team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song.

                  With "Someone Like You," Adele and Mr. Wilson not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success: Unleash the tears and chills with small surprises, a smoky voice and soulful lyrics, and then sit back and let the dopamine keep us coming back for more.”

                  Now certainly it’s true that we release dopamine in the brain in many situations.  But, as the article previously noted of this dopamined state, “Depending on the context, we interpret this state of arousal as positive or negative, happy or sad.”  So we have two bits of data: appoggiaturas give us goose bumps, and goose bumps are a sign of dopamine release.  All that’s left out is that annoying matter of “depending on the context.”  That’s where the complete human being comes in: interpreting the lyrics (remember them?), seeing or visualizing the singer, connecting what’s happening to past musical, and even more important, life experiences, all contribute to our emotional response.  Compare this to the rat who learns to tap a button to get a shot of dopamine and gives up everything else to keep the highs coming.   

At the other end of the rainbow of scientific over-analysis is the “how could anyone think that one up?” pot of fool’s gold.  My favorite example of this comes from noted neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran.  His theory: much art, especially modern cubism and other forms of art, can be neurobiologically explained.  He has set out to answer the question, “Why does art work?”  and has come up with an approach that aims to reduce art to a science.  In the words of Psychology Today, “All the adjectives we use to describe art—vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”—should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing inherently mysterious about art. Its visual tricks can be decoded. Neuroaestheticians hope to reveal ‘the universal laws’ of painting and sculpture, to find the underlying principles shared by every great work of visual art.” 

I’m reminded of the snippet LP collections of my youth that offered “Great Moments in Music.”  The idea was that certain fragments of every great piece of music were really what the listener wanted, so you could get the best of everyone from Bach to Tchaikovsky in just a few grooves by cutting them to a few bars apiece.  That was followed by a parody, “Great Square Inches in Art,” which proposed to offer God’s finger from the Sistine Chapel, a Dali melting clock, and all the other essential bits of  art throughout the ages.

The first thing to suggest is that maybe there are no “universal laws.”  That is an idea ripped from physics and some parts of biology in particular, and mis-transferred to fields where it may not fit at all.  For example, is there a universal law of food?  Only if you lump the need for protein, calories, hydration, roughage, and all the vitamins and trace minerals needed for health into a single category.  Just the fact that one culture adores spices or rotted food and another abhors them should make clear that universal law doesn’t always apply.

The thesis appears to be that a form of visual “hyperbole” attracts our attention, and therefore many kinds of art exaggerate features of their subject – Easter Island megaliths, El Grecos, African art, and so forth.  But even realistic art alters reality, since painting at least is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality (except when it isn’t), and so is some sort of brain stimulant.  When it comes to hyperbole, not much can beat Ramachandran’s seagull theory, which goes as follows: gulls have evolved to peck at a red spot on their mother’s beak in order to get food.  Studies show that a gull will peck at a red spot on a stick, and will go into overdrive when offered a stick with three red dots.  The gull just has to do it, since the stimulus evokes the response just as surely as a tap below the knee makes your lower leg jump. This use by the scientists of “deliberate hyperbole” (if that’s what adding extra dots is), Ramachandran offers as the perfect analogy to, indeed the explanation of, art’s appeal.  As he puts it:

"If herring gulls had an art gallery, they would hang a long stick with three red strips on the wall; they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why they are mesmerized by it. That's all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks."

Beware of anyone telling you that A is exactly like B.  It usually isn’t: a lot like A, somewhat like A, like A in this respect, but hardly ever exactly like A.  Even identical twins aren’t exactly alike. (Oddly, this seems to be pretty much an argument by analogy, an approach that has consistently been debunked by science as a rhetorical way of making us understand a point rather than a true demonstration of anything).  How is the art lover unlike the gull?  Well, for one thing, he’s a distinct minority among his fellow humans.  Not everyone is mesmerized by “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Nude Descending a Staircase.”  No art form, or at least no particular manifestation of it, is universally appreciated by all humans.  Art goes in and out of fashion, gradually gains acceptance, sometimes needs to be explained before it can be appreciated, and so forth.  Nor are we incapable of understanding why we are mesmerized by it.  If we were, art criticism and even personal comment would be fruitless. 

Can you imagine, for example, a gull art critic explaining that blue dots were now in, or that pecking at dots was so passé, everyone is pecking at triangles now?  Or a coterie of gulls exalting or excoriating the newest school of stick art?  For better or worse, we humans change our minds frequently about aesthetic appeal, and we learn from others and from our own experience in a way no gull ever has.

Maybe there’s something to be learned from these studies, however.  I propose a new field for exploration: the neurobiological and evolutionary underpinnings that explain the behavior of neurobiologists and other scientists.  Note an essential similarity between the two theories: in each we humans have responses that we don’t understand, based on events happening in our brain, events connected to such basic needs as food and pleasure (which of course are connected  back to such basis needs as survival or reproduction).  Scientists, therefore, happily point our that we are all much simpler than we thought we were.  Except, of course, for the scientist, whose superiority is demonstrated by their insight.

I propose that a study be funded to learn what neurobiological reactions occur in the mind of a scientist (or indeed any researcher or other academic), when he or she comes upon an apparently novel explanation for a familiar phenomenon.  Is there a dopamine rush?  An adrenaline boost?  A cortisol drop?  Are these reactions greater or stronger when the idea is more or less plausible, or is the subject blind to probability in such moments?  Studies should examine whether at such times the subjects have other behaviors that indicate diminished capacity for judgment.  In other words, does this high make them temporarily stupid?  And finally, we should explore a possible evolutionary advantage to the creation of such explanations.  These individuals, after all, inhabit a very peculiar environmental niche.  Like Galapagos birds, or Australian marsupials, they may have evolved distinct survival strategies suited to their ivory towers.  Does the boost of self-confidence make them more attractive to potential mates?  Is this effect enhanced  by publication, giving new meaning to the old mantra “publish or perish”?  Or are the effects mediated by further steps: promotion, higher salary, media appearances, the chance to join a more prestigious pack in a different ivory tower?  Only a truly scientific study can give us the answers.