The Fear of Neuroesthetics IV

 

There are some who fear neuroesthetics because they fear that it may ‘de-mystify’ what they prefer to remain mysterious. Knowledge about brain mechanisms that may be involved in the experience of beauty or of love and desire would deprive them, so they believe, of the full enjoyment of those experiences. I gather that a prominent professor has said that he regards it as ‘unwelcome’ to learn what happens in his brain when he is experiencing beauty. Presumably, if he were sitting on some research council, he would use his influence to suspend research in these areas. So, it is a relief that those who hate neuroesthetics and fear it are not in a position to halt research in the subject, at least not at present. There was a time when they could have and, in some areas of research, came close to doing so. Galileo was investigated by the Inquisition and ordered to stay silent, which he did, sort of, for a while. In the Soviet Union, a law was passed forbidding dissent from Lysenko’s anti-Mendelian views, which resulted in many losing their jobs and even being imprisoned. The law was rescinded in the 1960s.

I have no complaints against those who do not want, through knowledge, to de-mystify things which they hope will remain mysterious. That is their view, and I respect it, sort of. But it has to be noted that these are not people who are avid to learn more. It is not that they are simply dis-interested in certain things but that they are vocal in trying to discourage the rest of us from trying to learn more about important subjects – for I take it that the experience of love, beauty and desire are important and interesting subjects. In this sense, then, their intellect is somewhat limited. Though perfectly entitled to their views, these are not the sort of people whom I would like to have sitting on research councils.

In other ways, their attitude seems strange. Science has been de-mystifying things for millennia but I am not at all sure that the world has been rendered any less marvelous because of it. One could say that landing humans on the moon and bringing them back safely to earth was a step in de-mystifying the heavenly bodies, but it has not rendered the moon any less glorious; one could say that compressing all the secrets of life into two strands of DNA de-mystifies life, but it has made it all the more wondrous to me; one could also say that the role of neurotransmitters in regulating sexual behaviour (and hence determining, at least in the world of rodents, the extent of promiscuity) de-mystifies morality or immorality, at least in the world of rodents, but to me it raises a host of interesting questions about how behaviour is regulated, even when it threatens to invade the world of morality.

Perhaps much the more interesting question is a neurobiological one: why do some people (and there are many of them) prefer mystery to knowledge? What advantage does it bring them and what does it satisfy in them? If one of the functions of the brain is to acquire knowledge, what mechanism is it that suppresses the desire to acquire  knowledge in such interesting spheres, when the knowledge does not harm anyone? What dis-advantage would such knowledge bring to them?

The answers to such questions, too, might de-mystify things and those hostile to learning more might want to discourage research councils from funding research in these areas as well. But they remain, nevertheless, interesting questions and so I hope that those who want to dictate what kind of knowledge should be pursued and what avoided are never given a seat in the councils that make decisions about funding research.

The fear of neuroesthetics III

It is worth examining briefly another terrain – reductionism - on which some display their fear and loathing of neuroesthetics. I say some because I don’t want to tar everyone with the same brush. In my experience, a significant number of those in the humanities I meet are very hospitable to neuroesthetics. This is especially true of artists and composers. They do not seem to fear us. They want to learn more.

As I have argued on this site before, science is reductionist by its nature. It cannot study a complex system as a whole; rather, it isolates its constituents first and tries to build a picture of the whole from studying its parts. This is true of the study of matter by physics and chemistry – to study the particles constituting matter in terms of atoms and electrons and neutrons, and then the sub-atomic parts, and so on. It is true of biology and medicine, which tries to isolate, for example, the constituents of a cell to study their chemistry, or molecular biology, and to learn how these constituent parts interact. Yet this kind of necessary reductionism is, rightly, never criticized. Any perceived reductionism by neuroesthetics is, on the other hand, roundly condemned, at least by those who see it as having the imaginary powers to “flatten our culture”.

But let us forget chemistry, physics, and biology and delve into the humanities, and into the arts, that is to say into the territory from which the vociferous critics of neuroesthetics come. How certain is it that artists and art historians and philosophers of aesthetics do not indulge in the same kind of reductionism that the critics of neuroesthetics find so odious?

When the English art historian, Clive Bell, asks in his book Art what “Sta Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne” have in common because “either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of ‘works of art’ we gibber”, is he not being reductionist?

And when Immanuel Kant writes in The Critique of Judgment of a sensus communis which gives universal validity to the aesthetic judgment of an individual, is he not being reductionist?

How do these differ, in terms of reductionism, from the quest of neurobiologists to learn what kind of brain activity is common to the experience of all beauty in all humans, regardless of the source of the beauty (i.e. whether it is a portrait painting, or a landscape or a musical excerpt) and regardless of the cultural, educational and ethnic backgrounds of those experiencing beauty?

And when Piet Mondrian, in his artistic exploration of form, asks what is the essential constituent of all forms and settles on the vertical and horizontal straight lines, is he not being reductionist?

And how does this differ in terms of reductionism from the quest of neurobiologists to learn whether orientation selective cells in the visual brain (cells which respond specifically to straight lines) are the physiological building blocks of form in the brain?

Is the neurobiologist more reductionist than the artist in this instance?

And when kinetic artists emphasize motion and de-emphasize colour and form, are they not being reductionist?

And when Paul Cézanne considers all the variety of the natural world in terms of the cone, the cylinder and the sphere, is he not being reductionist?

Is abstract art not reductionist?

And this is only a brief list. There are many more examples of reductionism in the humanities.

In light of the above, it is interesting to ask why some single out neuroesthetics to stigmatize it with their hate word “reductionist”?

What exactly are they so afraid of?

the fear of neuroesthetics II

The highly emotional language used by some to describe neuroesthetics, of which I gave a selection in my previous post, suggests a fear – and an irrational one at that – of neuroesthetics. Fear is an interesting state, to which I will return in a future post. But here I want to examine one of the arguments used to trash neuroesthetics by those who fear it so much – “trash” being their word to describe neuroesthetics.

The charge is that even a very detailed study by neuroscientists of the brain’s reaction to an artistic work – or a very detailed study of its creator – will not “explain” the work. The columnist in The Scotsman article gave the example of Finnegan’s Wake. A friend of mine told me of the complaint of a philosopher about neuroesthetics, that no amount of studying the brain response to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde will “explain” it. I wrote in my previous post that it is not the aim or mission of neuroesthetics to explain works of art. On the contrary, neuroesthetics is inspired by works of art and debates in the humanities to learn something about the brain. Let me emphasize that we do not try to “explain” the brain either, but just to gain some insights into its functioning.

However, since one of the chosen terrains by those who wish to “trash” neuroesthetics is that of explanation, it is worth reflecting briefly on who are they who have been trying throughout the ages to “explain” works of art and music and literature.

There are hundreds, probably thousands, of books and articles written on Hamlet. The number of books and articles on the Tristan chord alone exceeds 2000. Many books and articles have been written to “explain” TS Eliot’s poetry [An interesting point here: Eliot reputedly once told a man who tried to explain some lines of his: “Thank you for explaining it to me. I didn’t understand it before” – or words to that effect]. Untold thousands of articles and books have been written trying to “explain” the works of some painter or another. And the list goes on!

Who has written these books and articles? Not neurobiologists, but art critics, literary critics, etc. If they try to “explain” these works, it must mean that they think that there is something explicable about them. And if so, why should they restrict to themselves, or to humanists in general, the privilege of explaining them? Why should a neurobiologist not have the same privilege, even if in the end his or her explanation turns out to be “trash”? Would it not be worth reading their “explanations” (assuming them to have given any) before dismissing in emotionally charged language that what they write is “trash”?

I may add that I often read the explanations provided by art and literary critics of art works with profit and pleasure. Some may seem far-fetched, others are sober and level-headed, many are interesting and inspiring in terms of new ideas and connections. It would never cross my mind to dismiss their collective efforts as “trash”.

I have here used the word explain in quotes throughout, partly because I am quoting those who dismiss neuroesthetics and partly because I do not understand what is meant by “explaining” a work such as Tristan und Isolde or Hamlet. One may want to explain something about the work – many articles have discussed whether Richard Wagner destroyed tonal music in Tristan – but I am not sure that any article succeeds in explaining so complex a masterpiece as Tristan. Where an attempt is made to explain a whole work in a few lines, the result is often unsatisfactory. I once heard an historian trying to explain the whole of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by saying that it can be summarized thus, “That all power corrupts”. Well, that is not quite the “explanation” that I would read into that work. My explanation, if I had to reduce it to a few words, would be: That good and evil reside in most men, and that they come especially to the fore when men have power, though only momentarily, because men, like the empires they create, are ephemeral and ultimately all are crushed by history and destiny. My explanation, too, is unsatisfactory and does not provide an explanation of the whole of Gibbons’ masterpiece, nor would I claim that it is better than the one given by the political historian. Indeed, I am not sure that there can be a simple explanation for Gibbons’ subtle and brilliant masterpiece.

To sum up – once it is acknowledged implicitly, through the many articles written about works of literature, art and music, that there is something explicable in them, the terrain of explanation on which those who want to dismiss neuroesthetics plant their dismissal simply vanishes. They should try hard to find better grounds.

The fear of neuroesthetics I

Every now and then, neuroesthetics is denounced in terms so emotional that one might be forgiven to think that, far from being an intellectual, experimental exercise in trying to learn something about the brain, it is some kind of new and devastating military adventure of awesome destructive power. A novelist has apparently described neuroesthetics as “one of the biggest follies of our era” and an “absolute idiocy… a form of absolute certainty that will flatten all the complexity of culture, and the beauty of it as well”. A bit over the top, one might think, given the daily follies in the political, military and economic spheres, which materially affect our lives far more than neuroesthetics ever will. Perhaps, one might also think, that the description of neuroesthetics as “flattening all the complexity of culture” is more appropriate to a description of dropping a nuclear bomb on some unfortunate country. Such descriptions not only endow neuroesthetics with extraordinary powers, which its practitioners never thought they possessed, but also betray a thrombotic loathing and fear of what neuroesthetics might achieve and reveal.

Elsewhere, a philosopher has described neuroesthetics as “neurotrash”, thus licensing himself and others who may believe him from ignoring it completely. Yet it seems odd that a relatively new discipline, which has been inspired by debates in the humanities - about the nature of beauty, and its links to love and desire - to learn something about what happens in the brain when we have such experiences, should arouse such strong reactions in some. If something is indeed trash, why bother with it at all, let alone describe it as “one of the biggest follies of our era”? After all, what could be more harmless than trying to apply questions raised in the humanities to learning something about the brain, especially given the primacy that most philosophers of aesthetics have given to the senses?

Of course, when one categorizes a serious effort as “trash”, one insulates oneself from having to read what its practitioners have to say. An interesting example is to be found in a recent article in The Scotsman, curiously entitled “Art and science don’t mix”, which elicited this apt comment in the columns of the paper ”I would be very interested in what Leonardo might have to say about the statement "Art and Science Don't Mix." What indeed!

At any rate, a correspondent drew my attention recently to this article, which describes neuroesthetics as “unadulterated bunkum”. It is an interesting article to read, for it betrays a complete lack of understanding of the aims of neuroesthetics and ends with a spectacular own goal.

Using a somewhat far-fetched example, the author of The Scotsman article writes that, “If you take a bit of [James] Joyce’s brain and put it under the microscope, it’s not going to explain Finnegans Wake”. But far from trying to “explain” a work of art or a literary masterpiece, neuroesthetics only tries to gain insights from them to try and learn something about the brain. There are many examples one could give. Mondrian’s artistic exploration of what element is the essential constituent of all forms (the straight line) is a question that is almost identical to the neurobiological question of how the brain represents or constructs forms, especially since the discovery of cells in the visual brain which respond selectively to straight lines. To be inspired by Mondrian’s question and by his artistic explorations to frame scientific questions about the brain does not amount to explaining Mondrian’s work. Equally, no neurobiologist interested in the brain mechanisms mediating our experience of love would want to ignore the world literature of love for insights. This does not amount to trying to “explain” (whatever that may mean) Tristan und Isolde or Madame Bovary or Wuthering Heights.

The author continues triumphantly, “Neuroaesthetics may be a very new field, and neurology may be relatively contemporary, but aesthetics has been studied for millennia.” Precisely! And that is why neuroesthetics relies so heavily on the fruits of these studies and is inspired by them. What is so outrageous about that? How does it amount to a “folly” which will “flatten all the complexity of culture”?

With such contempt does the author maneuver himself into a position where he can mock the article without troubling himself to read what we have written. He writes “It is unclear to me who, for example, decided in the UCL experiment that Guido Reni was somehow objectively less ugly than Hieronymus Bosch”. Well, it is actually spelled out quite clearly, and quite early on in our paper, that each subject gave their own rating for how beautiful the paintings they saw or the musical excerpts they listened to were. No one else rated the paintings for them. The author’s confusion nevertheless leads him to deliver a neat little lecture to those like us whom he supposes to be ignorant of art and about art, or at least less knowledgeable about it than himself: “but the claim lays bare a deeper misunderstanding about art: the idea that in the visual arts beauty is the highest aim. It is not just a legacy of Modernism that we have a more sophisticated idea about art’s aims. In the Renaissance, Caravaggio and Grunewald set out to shock, unsettle and challenge; as did Goya and Doré in the 19th century. Paintings by Poussin, David and Magritte invite a cerebral response as well as an emotive one. From revulsion to awe and from laughter to enigma, art is more than a matter of ‘beauty’”.

If he had bothered to read further down our article – though admittedly this is some 8 pages into the article - he would have seen the following:

“Notions of art have since changed and many will today
acknowledge that something considered to be a work of art need
not be perceived as beautiful, good examples being some of the
paintings of Francis Bacon, or the nudes of Lucian Freud, which is
not to say that these works do not have considerable artistic merit
both in their painterly style and in projecting truths, including
truths about decay and ugliness. But any work, be it considered art
or not, may be subjectively experienced as being beautiful by an
individual. This leads us to divorce art from beauty in this
discussion and concentrate on beauty alone. “

But the best is left to the end, when the author quotes approvingly Picasso as having said “when we love a woman we don’t start by measuring her limbs.” There are no quotation marks and no reference to source, so it is hard to know whether this is quoted out of context or not. Picasso was an intelligent man and I find it hard to credit him with having said something quite so silly. But assuming that the quote is not taken out of context, it must rank as one of the silliest things anyone – let alone a painter – can say. For, of course, men make very detailed assessments when they meet a woman, and women do the same when they meet men. These assessments are undertaken before they fall in love. They do not use rulers but other subtle measuring systems in the brain. Had the author not decided that all that neuroesthetics has to say is trash, he might even have learned something about the attempts of neuroscience to learn how we assess people.

British Spring: Loss of fear among British politicians (follow-up to my previous post)

In its edition of July 15, 2011 Le Monde published an article under the title of "Murdoch: au Royaume-Uni, la peur a changé de camp", an article in which the events surrounding the demise of the Murdoch empire are described as "the UK, living its after-Murdoch spring". It is the first article that I have seen which draws an explicit parallel between the Arab Spring and events surrounding the Murdoch empire, although there may of course have been others, and concludes that there was a common factor - loss of fear.

The point being made here is that British politicians, fearful of tackling what they have perceived as the power of the Murdoch press, have suddenly lost their fear. The article does not mention another important similarity with the Arab Spring: the emotional trigger. Just as the Arab Spring had one(s), so the emotional trigger in this instance, I think, was the revelation that journalists working for one of the Murdoch papers had hacked into the mobile 'phone of a murdered girl and had deleted messages on her 'phone, thus giving false hopes to her family that she may have been alive when the search for her was on. The public was revolted. The trigger was ignited; there was no turning back, and the amygdala in the brains of politicians was de-activated, with consequences that we now know - the demise of the News of the World, plus other events that are waiting to happen.

Then came the revelation that the mobile 'phones of relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan may also have been hacked. I daresay that should the current reported investigations in the USA prove that the mobile 'phones of the victims of 9/11 had been hacked, the emotional volcano will be too hot to contain. This is an extremely emotive issue, and the consequences will be dire.

Although there have been some remarkable Members of Parliament who have fearlessly attacked the Murdoch press, the report in Le Monde and other reports in the British press have consistenly written that politicians here were dead scared of saying anything that may upset the Murdoch press and cost them their jobs and imperil their future rise. But once the emotional trigger was set alight, that fear was lost, presumably through amygdalar de-activation.

Another similarity with the Arab Spring, is that this was a mass event, in the sense that the revulsion at the revelations was widespread. Hence, an aid in the loss of fear was the emotional support of a wide segment of the public (see my previous post).

Several articles have emphasized the fact that maybe Murdoch did not have as much as power as he was assumed to have, and that he was only perceived to have this power. The point is really largely academic; power is always the power that is perceived, by the brain of course, never the real one which is in any case difficult to calculate.

And the brain may not be far off the mark. After all, when the British Prime Minister is reported as having had no less than 25 meetings with the Murdochs since coming to power, enjoyed a Christmas dinner with them, and when a previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is reported to have had three telephone conversations with Rupert Murdoch before the launch of the Iraq war, what else can the brain conclude?

Add to that the fact the the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was removed from his position as chairman of a committee to decide the total Murdoch take-over of BSkyB, when he declared - long before these events reached boiling point - that he was "at war" with the Murdoch empire, what else can the brain conclude?

Such events, as the Daily Telegraph said in its editorial yesterday, "would have raised eyebrows in Palermo".

The only reality we have is brain reality - and brain reality seems to have been pretty shrewd at making inferences about power.

So, the amygdala is finally de-activated among a large number of members of that sheepish organization known as the Mother of Parliaments. Papers here are speaking about Parliament finding a role and purpose again. I rather doubt it. Which brings me back to the point: how long does amygdalar de-activation last? An interesting experimental question which may lead to lasting new views about politicians.

The Arab Spring, Twitter, Facebook and the brain

A great deal has been written about what has come to be known as the “Arab Spring”. Two factors have reportedly been instrumental in enabling it. One of these is hardly credible, at least to me; the other is of profound neurobiological interest.

The first is that this is a social network media revolution, through channels such as Facebook and Twitter. I find it hard to credit this oft-repeated belief. Both Tunisia (where the revolt started) and Egypt are very poor countries, 40% of the population in the latter living below the beltline of $2 per day. I do not suppose that, apart from a tiny percentage, many have the means to acquire computers and mobile ‘phones. Indeed it is hard to believe that Mohammad Bouazizi, the young man who tragically and in despair over his poverty immolated himself, had the means to have access to social media networks at all. Television, commonly available in cafés for communal watching, is likely to have played a more significant role. This is not to say that Twitter and Facebook did not facilitate communication. Of course they did, just as (in a much slower world) the horse facilitated communication during the French Revolution.

The second – loss of fear - is of greater significance and of much neurobiological interest. We have been repeatedly told that the masses who are revolting, commonly against much better equipped security forces, have lost their fear. Fear is associated with certain physiological activity, and especially prominent among brain structures contributing to such activity is a complex nucleus called the amygdala, buried within the temporal lobes of the brain, and consisting of many subdivisions. I would not wish to imply that the amygdala alone is responsible for so complex a state, for the amygdala is connected to many other brain structures which, collectively, are responsible for generating and maintaining the state of fear, as a defensive mechanism to protect the individual. Whatever the role of the different brain structures, the central role played by the amygdala was shown many years ago when scientists described how damage to it results in a loss of fear by animals and humans.

The amygdala has extensive connections within the brain. It is believed that there are two routes to the amygdala, an “immediate” one from the sense organs, which by-passes the cerebral cortex, and a more “leisurely” one that relays signals through the cerebral cortex. The amygdala is also connected to centres, such as those of the sympathetic nervous system, which regulate activity to mobilize the individual for appropriate reaction in response to fearful events or stimuli.

I suppose that the default state is activity – whatever its exact nature - within this system, activity within the amygdala that is relayed to other centres with which it is connected. I also assume, perhaps somewhat simplistically, that de-activation of this system is what leads to the condition that we describe as “loss of fear”.

This raises the interesting question of what triggers the de-activation and what dictates how long-lasting the de-activation and therefore the change from the default state is.

It is obvious that a long set of grievances reaches a point where individuals defy willfully the physiological state and care no longer about the consequences of their action. In the case of the Arab Spring, there was also an emotional trigger – the self immolation by Mohammad Bouazizi. The amygdala is part of the brain’s emotional and social system and the relative influence of the emotional component compared to the more cognitive component in regulating its activity is interesting to determine.

I am of the view that, in Egypt, a trigger, which was far more significant than Twitter and Facebook messages, was the emotional breakdown of Wael Ghoneim on Egyptian TV, an episode that was played and replayed, and presumably seen by masses in the many cafés in Egyptian cities. The episode was actually accompanied by music, hence fortifying the emotional message.

The fear system has been studied largely in animals, but the events of the Arab Spring and other similar events raise important questions about the organization of the fear system in humans, ones which are amenable to study.

One question relates to the time course of the de-activation. Judging by events in the Arab Spring, it can be very long lasting indeed; indeed it may even be permanent. This may yet turn out to be an interesting example of brain-plasticity.

A second question relates to the trigger. There seems little reason to doubt that an emotional trigger was just that, a trigger coming on top of much discontent. This in turn raises the question whether there is a threshold for triggering an amygdalar de-activation, and what the neural mechanisms for maintaining it may be. It also raises the question of how the system returns to its de-fault value, assuming that the change in the brain is not permanent. Finally, it raises the question of how the two routes to the amygdala – the direct one and the cortical one – regulate one another.

A third question is about the potentiating effect on this de-activation caused by group action. There seems little doubt that the involvement of many in the uprising had a facilitating effect but how this works no one knows.

As I said above, the system regulating fear is not confined to the amygdala and an enquiry into the neural mechanisms involved in the loss of fear would no doubt have to extend much beyond it. But the amygdala is a good place to begin.

The Arab Spring is an example of other events where loss of fear is a powerful engine for initiating change. Hence the lessons that it provides for experimentation and the results of such experimentation will have important, general, implications.