This is the sixth in a series of six articles.
Preview. 1. A New Science. 2. A Brain Lesson. 3. Hypothesis. 4. Some Explaining to Do. 5. A Lifetime of Art.

Beyond just explaining observed art phenomena, I imagine that this hypothesis could be used to make the creation and criticism of art more efficient.

The creation of art is a feedback loop between Android Brain and Animal Brain. Android Brain works through the steps of creating a work of art. The steps involve speaking in the language that Animal Brain understands: novelty, patterns, emotions, satisfactions and alarms. Animal Brain gives the artist feedback about the quality of the artwork, about whether new nondeclarative memories are being formed by it. Based on that feedback, the artist, in Android Brain mode, then alters the work.

Many artists just trust their own Animal Brain feedback and follow that. For those who are successful doing that, good for them. Don’t change a thing. But I think many artists would probably see the quality of their work improve if they had some good guidelines for Android Brain to follow.

Good rules can help artists be more aware of the choices they have and tradeoffs they make. Android Brain is built for step-by-step instructions. It’s methodical. There are already many good instruction books for artists to follow, but I think we can use the language of memory formation to make our explanations more precise.

Such explanations would not only be useful for pure artists, but also for advertisers and producers of goods whose measures of success are not counting new memories, but counting sales. As Virginia Postrel points out in her book The Substance of Style, aesthetic quality is becoming an important part of our economy.

A similar feedback loop pertains to art critics, too. Animal Brain is the source of our reactions. Android Brain has facts and rules about how art should work. It’s the source of our explanations. A good critic will move back and forth between Animal Brain and Android Brain, testing what their rules tell them against what their actual reactions are. If their reactions differ from their rules, they’ll adjust their rules. The goal of art criticism is to explain to Android Brain what’s going on in Animal Brain.

Some bad critics favor one system or the other. A bad Animal Brain critic will have a reaction and try to explain it without using any logic at all: I opine, therefore I’m right. That’s not helping Android Brain, which wants logic. A bad Android Brain critic will have rules about what art “should” be, and analyze according to those rules. But if you’re not testing the rules for accuracy against Animal Brain, you’re likely to have ineffective rules.

I can imagine people reacting negatively to thinking of art as a form of engineering. Even to me, it feels like the magic of it might be diminished. But because of that inaccessible data inside of our Animal Brain, I think art will always retain a certain mystery. The conversation between Animal Brain and Android Brain need never end.

To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes–
being carried along is not enough.

Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.

  –Rainer Maria Rilke

   from Just as the Winged Energy of Delight
   translated by Robert Bly
   in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

And finally: A summary in haiku form

This is the fifth in a series of six articles.
Preview. 1. A New Science. 2. A Brain Lesson. 3. Hypothesis. 4. Some Explaining to Do.

In my last article, I used my hypothesis to explain some commonly seen phenomena about art. In this article, I want to explore how our tastes change over the course of our lifetimes.

Babies

When my daughter was three months old, she laughed for the first time.

I bent over, so that my daughter could only see my hair. Then I suddenly lifted my head up, so my daughter could see my face again. My daughter burst out into a fit of giggling laughter.

The scientific term for this behavioral phenomenon is “peekaboo”.

Peekaboo is an art form. If you reveal your head too slowly–no laughs. If you lift your head up and down too quickly–no laughs. To achieve maximum laughs, must hide your face, and then reveal it, with a certain optimal delay.

My three-month-old daughter, who could not talk, who could not eat solid food, whose only major accomplishment of human behavior was to hold her own head up without it flopping over, was suddenly demonstrating a sense of aesthetic quality.

Child psychologists say that peekaboo tests the concept of “object permanence”. Object permanence is the concept that an object still exists even though you cannot see it. Before object permanence, when the face is gone, it’s gone. When it’s there, it’s there.

Object permanence turns peekaboo into a paradox: the face is not there (I can’t see it), but it is there (objects continue to exist even while not visible). It’s not there, but it is there! Two separate, and indeed contradictory, memories get associated with each other, and the result is a new memory.

Peekaboo’s effectiveness lasts for several months. At first, it seems you can play it endlessly and get a laugh every time. Slowly, though, the game gets more sophisticated. Your timing needs to be more precise to elicit laughter. You can’t emerge from the same place each time: you have to suddenly emerge from unexpected directions to get a laugh. Eventually, sometime after the child’s first birthday, peekaboo stops working altogether.

Peekaboo becomes a cliché. The child has become completely habituated to the idea of object permanence.

Preschool age

Why do kids like cartoons? Do you know of any young child who prefers a live action film to an animated one? I don’t.

As you saw with object permanence, one new memory can become half the building block for another. It’s a long process, though. Children take much longer to become habituated to new things than adults. Ask any parent who’s had to tell the same story over and over and over. And over. And over. And over.

Adults are habituated to so many more things than young children are. Children experience much more unrecognition with any given artwork than an adult does, and far less cliché.

Cartoons are simpler in every way than live action film. With live action, there is so much else going on: the colors, the lighting, the backgrounds, the body movements, the facial expressions–they are all more complex than a cartoon. There is so much more the brain needs to filter, and so the young brain becomes much less likely to recognize patterns in live action film.

In cartoons, however, there is much less information to sort through. The child can more easily recognize the patterns, the plots, the characters and their emotions–and trigger all those pairs of neurons, and create new memories.

School Age

When my daughter turned five, she was given a (fake) coonskin cap from a relative who had visited the Alamo. She loved it. When she started kindergarten, she wore it on her first day of school. She’s in first grade now, and she still sometimes wears it to school.

That won’t last. Nobody else in her school wears a coonskin cap.

Somewhere between second and fourth grades, ages 8-10, what other people think about art suddenly becomes hugely important to us. The clothes that looked fine before suddenly are rejected because that’s not what everyone else is wearing. Kids will suddenly develop passions for sports or pop music, because that’s what their peers are doing.

In other words, art becomes a social act. Before this, a child’s reaction to a work of art is almost purely its own. After this point, what other people do enters the database of patterns we build up in our brain, and becomes a factor in our judgments.

The child is building more and more sophisticated patterns every day. More and more adult-level patterns move from unrecognition into recognition, as the child-level patterns move into cliché.

Young adults

Mature adults often hate popular artworks aimed at a teenage audience. Adults see them as cliché, but the teenagers don’t. As the teenagers mature into young adults, and experience those patterns over and over again, that begins to shift.

Why don’t college radio stations play bubble-gum pop music? Because college-age students are finally at the age where they can easily recognize the clichés of popular culture. At an age where young adults are establishing their own independence, there’s a natural rebellion against the standards of popular culture from the previous generation.

The passing of generations is probably a vital creative force. In the effort to reject the old generation, a new generation puts a lot of effort into finding new kinds of patterns that they can identify as their own.

Mature Adult

So why don’t we just hate everything by the time we’re say, 50 years old? By then, we’ve probably seen so many patterns we become nearly impossible to please.

This is where I think my focus on habituation breaks down a bit. I focus on it because I think it plays such a huge role in how we perceive art. But all the other forms of conditioning can also affect how we form nondeclarative memories in our Animal Brain.

Nostalgia is the result of a kind of associative conditioning, similar to Pavlov’s dog. When you first enjoy a work of art, you get a positive emotion associated with it as a sort of byproduct. Those positive emotions will remain with that artwork, and any similar artworks that remind you of it. You become conditioned to enjoy that kind of art, the way the dog became conditioned to expect food after hearing a bell.

I still listen to a lot of the same music I listened to in college. Yes, I can recognize the clichés in the old stuff, but I still like it anyway. A lot of the new stuff is either too clichéd or unrecognizable to me.

I’m just an old fuddyduddy now, I guess.

Next: A better mousetrap.

This is the fourth in a series of six articles.
Preview. 1. A New Science. 2. A Brain Lesson. 3. Hypothesis.

We have a hypothesis, so let’s use it. We’ll begin by trying to explain some phenomena we frequently observe about art.

• What all art forms share

  Part of the problem with trying to decipher art as a whole is that art forms seem so different on the surface. What does painting have to do with music? What does dancing have in common with architecture?

  But if you look at the elements of each genre as a building block to a memory, you can begin to see the commonality. Since it takes two pieces of data to form a new memory, we can look at each art form for ways in which it creates associations between unrelated items.

  Some examples:
  In drama, you’re often given a conflict. One character wants something, and another character wants it, too, but for a different reason. The motivations are different, but there’s a common desire. Your brain creates an association between the different motivations, and a new memory is formed.

  Music composers often pair a major chord with its relative minor. Major chords are often described as sounding “happy”, and minor chords as sounding “sad”. But the difference between a C major chord (notes C-E-G) and an A minor chord (notes A-C-E) is only one note. By juxtaposing the C major chord with an A minor chord, the composer is creating an association: they’re dissimilar because of the major/minor difference, but they’re also similar because two of the three notes are the same.

  That’s what we’re looking for in each art form: juxtapositions of opposites, differences between similar elements, paradoxes, repeated sequences of different elements, associations between items: unrelated pairs which are combined to create a new Animal Brain memory. For want of a better word, let’s just call all these things patterns.

• The role of emotions in art

  Emotions do two things for us. They trigger automatic, physical reactions which keep us alive and breeding. They also serve to enhance memory formation. We’re more likely to remember things that are associated with emotions. Those emotionally enhanced memories keep us from repeating dangerous actions, and give us incentives to repeat beneficial behaviors.

  Although emotions are not essential to memory creation, they are a powerful enhancer. If the goal of art is to create new nondeclarative memories, the triggering of emotions is a very important tool in the process.

  I don’t think our physical reactions to art (clapping, cheering, booing, crying, toe tapping, etc.) are a factor in our judgment of the quality of art. I’d guess that quality judgments and physical reactions are two separate effects from the same cause.

• Why art is so hard to explain.

  You make a judgment about a work of art, and then you want to explain why you feel the way you do. The problem is this: the data you used to make the decision are not available to your conscious mind. The data that informed the decision are nondeclarative memories. They’re locked up in your Animal Brain, and you can’t query them.

  Instead, you go scouring for reasons in your Android Brain’s declarative memories, but that’s not where the answer is. Your Android Brain may contain facts about the patterns in the artwork, but it doesn’t have the actual patterns themselves.

  You cannot know for sure if the facts in your Android Brain match the patterns in your Animal Brain. It’s a bit like Schrödinger’s Cat. There’s no easy way to peek inside the box.

• Clichés and “I don’t get it”

  A cliché is simply a habituated memory. It’s something we’ve been exposed to so often, that we have learned to ignore it as insignificant, just as the zebra ignores the wind-blown grass.

  The “I don’t get it” experience happens when an artist intends for you to recognize a pattern, to make some association between two items and create a new memory, and you don’t recognize the pattern or association. I call this unrecognition.

  An artist has to walk a delicate balance between cliché and unrecognition.

  My baseball limericks suffer from both these problems. The limerick form is quite clichéd. Most people know the meter and rhyme pattern, so it’s hard to create a novel experience. And if you’re not a baseball fan, you’re unlikely to recognize the associations I’m creating by juxtaposing the attributes of various baseball players. The size of my audience is therefore quite limited. I’m doomed to mediocrity, at best. Oh, well. But speaking of mediocrity…

• Great vs. Mediocre vs. Bad

  The great works of art resist habituation. The patterns within them are so layered and interconnected that you can keep finding relationships between the details of the work, even if you experience the artwork many times.

  Mediocre works of art, on the other hand, may work to stimulate us once or twice. But sooner or later, habituation sets in.

  Bad works of art don’t even work the first time. They’re riddled with cliché and/or unrecognition from the start.

• Different opinions about the same work of art

  We’re measuring the creation of nondeclarative memories in our Animal Brain. To create a new memory, you need two bits of data. The bits can come from two sources: the artwork, or previous memories stored in the brain.

  The artist controls only one of those sources. Some brains won’t recognize patterns in the artwork, others will. Some brains will see clichés in the artwork, others will find the same pattern novel. Our own brain participates in the measuring of the artwork.

  For example, there are two songs about dying on Peter Gabriel’s album “Up” which I find particularly moving: “No Way Out”, and “I Grieve”. The reason I find them so moving is because they trigger emotional memories of my own father’s death. If my father were still alive, I doubt I would have had nearly as strong a reaction to the songs. Half the source of my emotional reaction is from the music, but half is from my own brain. The association between the two sources forms the new memory.

  For this reason, it really doesn’t make much sense to say a work of art is simply “great”. You really need to say the work of art is great to somebody. Any general measure of greatness needs to include some kind of demographics and probabilities. Hamlet is unlikely to seem great to preschoolers. It is more likely to seem great to adults.

• Rise and Fall of Genres

  Each genre of art has its natural building blocks, its common types of patterns, for creating new memories. As artists explore these genres, the building blocks get used over and over again. So as a genre ages, it becomes more and more difficult for the artist to avoid cliché.

  Eventually, the artists feel the need to break the boundaries of the genre. When this happens, though, the result is often unrecognition for the masses. The patterns become so complex that it begins to take a trained eye to recognize the associations the artist is making. At this point, the popularity of the genre begins to fade.

  You can probably recognize this phenomenon in the histories of painting and poetry. The patterns of abstract paintings and free verse are much more difficult for an untrained audience to recognize than those of representational paintings or rhymed verse, whose patterns are more obvious.

• Difficulty predicting future analysis of current works

  I remember the first time I heard the music of Prince. It sounded so strange to me! Unusual rhythms, weird chords: I just didn’t get it: unrecognition. Twenty years later, what seems strange that I thought Prince’s music was so hard to comprehend. Those rhythms and chords are everywhere now: cliché.

  The old artwork has not changed. Our brains have changed. And because our brains change, the things artists do to create associations will adjust to those changes. In turn, those adjustments change what kinds of patterns we recognize.

  It’s a cycle that is hard to predict very far in advance. Art history can turn unrecognition into attention, and attention into cliché, or vice versa.

• Critics who hate everything

  Some of us are more susceptible to habituation than others. I suspect that those members of the population at either extreme don’t make particularly good critics.

  If you are very difficult to habituate, everything will seem interesting to you. You’re going to like just about everything. That’s not very useful criticism. We need to know the difference between good and bad art.

  If you’re easy to habituate, you’ll quickly build up a considerable library of clichés in your brain. Over time, you will become harder and harder to please. These types of critics should probably switch genres often, so they can work with a balance of novelty and cliché.

Next: A Lifetime of Art

This is the third in a series of six articles.
Preview. 1. A New Science. 2. A Brain Lesson.

A brief recap:
The human brain has two separate decision-making systems.

One system is intuitive, fast, and subconscious. It’s designed to recognize patterns and react automatically to them. It holds your memory of motor skills and habits. We’re calling that system our Animal Brain.

The other is rational, slow, conscious. It’s designed to follow step-by-step instructions. It holds your memories of facts and events. We’re calling that system our Android Brain.

Animal Brain tends to dominate our behavior. It broadcasts all kinds of information to Android Brain. But Android Brain has no easy way to communicate back to Animal Brain.

The Hypothesis:

Now we’re ready for my guess as to how art works. Remember that this is just an attempt at reverse engineering: to make something that behaves the same way the original does. The internal workings of the brain may be quite different from this. If so, that’s OK. I’m really only concerned that the outputs are similar.

I propose that art is simply a way to communicate with our Animal Brain. We do that by taking advantage of Animal Brain’s own nature. Animal Brain is constantly on the lookout for unusual patterns in its environment, so that is what we give it with art.

So here’s my hypothesis, using my terminology:

The purpose of art is to provide a way for Android Brain to communicate with Animal Brain.

The definition of art is anything made with the intention of communicating with our Animal Brain.

The unit of measurement in art is a single new memory in our Animal Brain.

The quality of an artwork is the rate at which the artwork creates Animal Brain memories.

Now for the same thing, using scientific jargon:

The purpose of art is to enable the declarative memory system to communicate to the nondeclarative memory system. Or, to give System 2 a way to talk to System 1.

The definition of art is anything artificially constructed to stimulate the formation of nondeclarative memories.

The unit of measurement in art is the formation or enhancement of a single nondeclarative memory. Or, a chemical signal resulting from it.

The quality of an artwork is the rate at which nondeclarative memories are formed. Or, the cumulative strength of the resulting chemical signals.

If my hypothesis is correct, all we need to measure the quality of art is some kind of nondeclarometer, which can count the appropriate chemical signals from the Animal Brain’s nondeclarative memories as they are created.

New memories send out strong chemical signals. Habituated memories release weaker chemical signals. These chemical signals tell Animal Brain what to pay attention to and what to ignore. I’m hypothesizing that the strength of these chemical signals are what we are measuring when we judge the quality of a work of art.

Drat! I just Googled “nondeclarometer” and got zero hits.

Neural scanners are still pretty crude, but I imagine someday it might be possible to measure memory creation fairly accurately. But for now, measuring art is possible only in theory, not in practice.

The brain is a complex organic machine. I’m sure this simple hypothesis is just that, too simple. But if our goal is usefulness rather than accuracy, simple is probably better, anyway. A hypothesis is a beginning, not an ending. We can test our hypothesis against observable phenomena, and adjust it as we learn more. So let’s go use the hypothesis to explain some common phenomena we observe about art.

Next: Some Explaining To Do.

This (somewhat long) article is the second in a series of six articles.
Preview. 1. A New Science.

When we judge whether we like or dislike a work of art, we’re making a decision. To truly understand how to measure art, we need to understand how the brain makes decisions.

In his book The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand describes an observation Oliver Wendell Holmes made about our legal system. Even though our legal system is set up to make decisions like this:

1. gather facts
2. analyze facts
3. make the decision

it seemed that most of the time, judges actually did this:

1. make the decision
2. gather facts that support the decision
3. present analysis to explain decision

People made their decisions first! How could they make their decisions before they had seen the facts? What, Holmes wondered, did they base their decisions on? Practical experience, Holmes decided.

(Holmes then went on to make some quite illogical decisions based on his own practical experience, including ruling that professional baseball should be exempt from anti-trust laws.)

Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics. His studies have focused on how people make economic choices. Kahneman and others have found that people have two decision-making systems. One system is intuitive, the other is rational. From an interview in Strategy+Business (registration required, emphasis mine):

There are some thoughts that come to mind on their own; most thinking is really like that, most of the time. That’s System 1. It’s not like we’re on automatic pilot, but we respond to the world in ways that we’re not conscious of, that we don’t control. The operations of System 1 are fast, effortless, associative, and often emotionally charged; they’re also governed by habit, so they’re difficult either to modify or to control.

There is another system, System 2, which is the reasoning system. It’s conscious, it’s deliberate; it’s slower, serial, effortful, and deliberately controlled, but it can follow rules. The difference in effort provides the most useful indicator of whether a given mental process should be assigned to System 1 or System 2.

Kahneman tried to train people to make decisions using their rational system in instead of their intuitive system. But the effort was fairly futile:

Our research doesn’t say that decision makers can’t be rational or won’t be rational. It says that even people who are explicitly trained to bring System 2 thinking to problems don’t do so, even when they know they should.

In other words, he found the same thing Holmes did: that people have an extremely strong tendency to judge first, then reason later.

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
—I.G.Y, Donald Fagen

Humans appear designed for inefficiency. Judges make decisions before they consider the evidence. Businessmen ignore logic and opt for less-than-optimal economic choices. Perhaps the song I quoted above is correct. We’d be better off having some kind of android making our decisions for us.

The perplexing thing is that each of us already has an android-like system for making decisions within us: Kahneman’s System 2. Let’s call this system Android Brain.

Android Brain does things methodically, in sequence, and follows rules to arrive at logical conclusions. You can give Android Brain step-by-step instructions, and it will follow those instructions. It’s programmable. It’s available to use. So why do we ignore it? Why do we so strongly prefer the intuitive system that is more error-prone? Are we designed wrong?

Not really. There’s a very good reason we do this.

Quick, tell me exactly what you do with your left big toe when you walk.

Don’t know? Well, actually, you do know. If you didn’t know, you couldn’t walk. So how come you can’t tell me?

Well, just as there are two reasoning systems in the brain, there are two memory systems, too. Scientists call the two types of memory declarative and nondeclarative.

Declarative memory is what we usually think of when we think of memory. It is our conscious memory. It contains facts and events. When it fails, such as in Alzheimer’s Disease, we lose our ability to remember what happened in our lives. Declarative memory is strongly associated with Android Brain, our reasoning system. Its processing center is an area of the brain called the hippocampus.

Sometimes called procedural memory, our nondeclarative memory is often overlooked because these memories are not conscious. They hold things like motor skills and habitual behavior. The reason you can’t tell me what your left toe does when you walk is because this is a nondeclarative memory. Your conscious mind does not have any access to this data. The processing center for nondeclarative memory is an area of the brain called the amygdala (a-MIG-da-la).

The amygdala has a second purpose besides handling your nondeclarative memories. It’s also the central processing center for your emotions. When you’re afraid, angry, excited, or happy, that’s your amygdala talking. The fact that the amygdala handles both your motor skills and your emotions is significant.

Imagine you’re a zebra, grazing on the savannahs of Africa. There’s a light breeze blowing the tall grass around. Suddenly, you notice a strange indentation in the grass. You feel fear, and in fear, you jump up and run away. A good thing you did, too, because that indentation was a lion sneaking up on you.

This is Kahneman’s System 1 in action. Let’s call this system Animal Brain.

Animal Brain has a tight coupling between emotions and motor skills. It’s an effective architecture, because quicker you react to danger, the more likely you’ll stay alive.

Animal Brain did three things to save your life:

1. It recognized an unusual pattern in your environment
2. The recognition caused an emotional reaction
3. The emotional reaction triggered a habitual, physical behavior

Because you were able to recognize this pattern and react to it in an instant, you are still alive.

This is why we have a strong preference for the decisions of Animal Brain over Android Brain. Any ancestor who favored using the slower, rational decision system of a Android Brain was more likely to be eaten by lions. The ones who preferred the quick decisions of Animal Brain stayed alive to pass their genes on to you.

So how did our imagined zebra know the difference between the motion of the grass caused by the wind, and that caused by the lion? Let’s take a slight detour and look at memory.

The process for creating Android Brain’s declarative memories is pretty complex. Animal Brain’s nondeclarative memories are more primitive and easy to explain.

In 1949, a scientist named Donald O. Hebb proposed a theory about how learning works in the brain. All learning, whatever the senses involved, uses the same basic mechanism: pairs of neurons firing together.

Fifty years later, a 1999 study out of Princeton University led by neurobiologist Joe Tsien revealed the genetic mechanism for Hebb’s rule. The gene, called NR2B, creates a protein which acts like a double lock on a door:

It needs two keys — or two signals — before it opens. As such, it is an excellent tool for creating memory, a process that fundamentally consists of associating two events. If two signals arrive at the same time — maybe one results from seeing a lit match and the other results from a sensation of pain — then the receptor is triggered and a memory is formed.

Animal Brain memories are altered by various forms of conditioning: repeated exposure to stimuli in the environment. The most famous example of conditioning is Pavlov’s dog. The dog drooled when he heard a bell, because he had been conditioned to expect food after a bell rang.

One form of conditioning is called habituation. In the book Memory: From Mind to Molecules, authors Larry Squire and Eric Kandel describe it like this:

…habituation is learning to recognize, and ignore as familiar, unimportant stimuli that are monotonously repetitive. Thus city dwellers may scarcely notice the noise of traffic at home but may be awakened by the chirping of crickets in the country.

When we’re first exposed to something new, a new memory is formed. If we are repeatedly exposed to it, though, and it proves harmless, we get conditioned to ignore it.

Thus, a zebra who is repeatedly exposed to the pattern of grass waving in the wind will become conditioned to ignore it. However, a change to that pattern could indeed have alarming consequences: it could be a lion. The zebra won’t ignore that stimulus.

Now, back to the two brain systems. Let’s compare them:

The reasoning skills of our Android Brain seems rather unique to humans, although other mammals do have declarative memories. It should be obvious that all mammals, if not all animals, have a brain system that works more or less like Animal Brain.

Although the human Animal Brain shares many things in common with a zebra’s, they are not identical. Humans have evolved some very important differences.

At the Neuroesthetics conference I went to, Dan Fessler, an anthropology professor from UCLA, gave a presentation about shame and pride, two uniquely human emotions. These emotions depend on the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking. For example, you don’t feel ashamed if you’re alone and you discover your fly is open. You only feel ashamed if you know that someone else knows that your fly is open.

But by far the most important difference between a human’s Animal Brain and a zebra’s is language. Language is a function of our Animal Brain: it is an automatic and subconscious skill. We speak and understand without deliberate effort. It has a sophisticated type of pattern recognition (listening), and an associated motor skill (speaking).

What happens when the two systems need to interoperate? It was pointed out in the Neuroesthetics conference that the conversation is extremely one-sided. Animal Brain broadcasts all kind of information to Android Brain: emotions, sensations, decisions, language. But Animal Brain seems to be completely unaware that Android Brain even exists. Hardly any information at all flows in the other direction.

Remember, Animal Brain is designed to keep you alive and reproducing. From an evolutionary standpoint, nothing is more important than that. And Animal Brain knows it.

Frog and Toad ate one very last cookie.

“We must stop eating!” cried Toad as he ate another.

“Yes,” said Frog, reaching for a cookie, “we need will power.”

“What is will power?” asked Toad.

“Will power is trying hard not to do something that you really want to do,” said Frog.

  –Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad Together

In this delightful children’s book, Frog and Toad have a problem. Their Animal Brains are telling them to eat more cookies. Their Android Brains are telling them not to. They are finding it extremely difficult to ignore their Animal Brains.

Animal Brain is like that guy you meet at a party that you can’t get away from. He talks and talks and never listens to a word you say. If you try to ignore him, he STARTS TALKING LOUDER. If you try to turn away, he pulls you back: THIS IS IMPORTANT! DON’T MISS A WORD! You have no choice but to humor him.

Animal Brain: what a jerk.

Now, if his message is “there’s a lion sneaking up on you,” you’re grateful for his message. But if you’re on a diet, and he keeps telling you “EAT ANOTHER COOKIE”, it would be better to ignore his message. But it’s very hard to do so. He’s so insistent! Animal Brain assumes everything is urgent. Every situation is life or death.

How do you handle a jerk like that?

Well, one way is to use your own strengths. One of Android Brain’s strengths is the ability to follow rules. So we come up with rules that help us manage the behavior of Animal Brain and correct its errors: Ten Commandments, Twelve-Step Programs, Seven Effective Habits, that sort of thing.

Another way is to exploit his weaknesses. And Animal Brain does have weaknesses. That’s where art comes in.

Next: Hypothesis

This is the first in a series of six articles.
Preview.

Art is nebulous. In sports, you can measure success with wins or points scored. In economics, you can measure success with dollars or euros. But the arts are different. We know quality in the arts when we experience it, but we have a hard time describing exactly what it is.

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and value of art. Theories of aesthetics have been around since Plato and Aristotle. None have delivered a useful way to measure art. But a new science is emerging, that gives us some hope of a solution. It’s called neuroesthetics, the study of the relationship between the brain and art.

I wanted to get a sense of the current state of neuroesthetics, so in January, I attended the Third International Conference on Neuroesthetics, which focused on “Emotions in Art and the Brain.” A wide variety of speakers gave their thoughts on how the brain works in relation to art: neurologists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, art historians and some artists themselves. The Washington Post wrote a good summary of the conference (registration required).

I learned a lot, but I did not learn the one thing I most want to know: how do you measure the quality of a work of art? The speakers all either implicitly or explicitly avoided the issue. Neuroesthetics seems to be in a cataloging mode right now: gathering as many facts as possible.

This makes sense. If neuroscience is in its infancy, neuroesthetics is a newborn sibling. Neuroesthetics has a long way to go before it can give mature, scientifically valid answers to any of its questions.

That doesn’t help me much. I’m just an amateur artist, but I want tools right now to help me build better things. By the time the science can provide me with something useful, I may be in a nursing home. A scene pops into my head:

Bones:	You present the appearance of a man with a problem.
Spock:	Your perception is correct, Doctor. In order to return us to the exact moment we left the 23rd century, I have used our journey back through time as a reference, calculating the co-efficient of elapsed time in relation to the acceleration curve.
Bones:	Naturally. So what’s your problem?
Spock:	Accleration is no longer a constant.
Bones:	Well then, you’re just gonna have to take your best shot.
Spock:	Best shot?
Bones:	Yes, Spock, your best guess.
Spock:	Guessing is not in my nature, Doctor.
Bones:	Well….nobody’s perfect.

Guesses can be useful even if they aren’t always accurate. Long before I had found out about neuroesthetics, I felt compelled to make a calculated guesses about how art worked.

I did this by using my training as a computer engineer to approach measuring art as a reverse engineering problem. I knew what the inputs were (works of art), what the outputs were (judgments). The goal has been to design a new machine that takes the inputs and produces outputs similar to the original, and hope that it leads to useful information about art.

I gathered the data I had, and began tinkering around with numerous possibilities for arranging that data. But it wasn’t until I started learning more about the brain that I was able to find an algorithm that satisfied me.

The resulting hypothesis proposes that measuring art is possible, but it requires technology that isn’t currently available. Although we’ll fall short of one goal–being able to keep score in the arts–we will meet another: finding useful tools for creating and analyzing art. Whether I’m programming a computer, writing a limerick, or just watching a TV show, I now find I can approach my artistic endeavors with more purpose and precision than I ever could before.

Next: A Brain Lesson.

Suppose, for a moment, that there were no statistics in baseball. None, not even the score itself. No runs, hits, or errors were tracked. What would the sport be like?

To begin with, everyone would have a different opinion about who won each game. You’d pick a winner based on how the experience of the game felt to you. Which team’s play did you like better?

“The long home run in the sixth inning was impressive. The home team was the winner, in my opinion.”

“No, that diving catch in the fourth inning was awesome. I give it to the visitors.”

Nothing would have any set value. Perhaps you find the arc of a fly ball to be beautiful, and the team that seemed to hit the best fly balls is the one you’d pick as the winner. Who could argue against you? You like what you like, right?

Pity, then, the poor statisticians, who would have no numbers from the game to analyze. They’d have to resort to measuring the opinions of the audience.

How would you rate Sammy Sosa’s performance today on a scale of 1 (bad) to 5 (great)?
5 – 15%
4 – 28%
3 – 33%
2 – 14%
1 – 10%

Average: 3.24

MLB GOA (Game Opinion Average) Leaders:
Derek Jeter: 4.14
Ichiro Suzuki: 4.05
Neifi Perez: 3.95
Eric Byrnes: 3.92
Juan Pierre: 3.88

Intellectuals, of course, would come forward to take on the challenge of deciding who is best. We cannot trust mere public opinion with such a task. It takes experts to truly understand this stuff!

So then we’d be flooded with essays like “Baseball Analytics: A Postmodern Approach”, “The Influence of Global Capitalist Hegemony on Individual Player Evaluation”, “Oedipal Dynamics in Team Construction”, and “The Role of the Female Orgasm in Baseball Management Decisions“.

In other words, there would be an awful lot of humbug.

For baseball, this is a silly imaginary exercise. But for the arts, this is reality. Nothing can be measured, every opinion is valid, and surveys of those opinions produce absurd results.

I have felt for a long time that the arts would make a lot more sense if it had a statistic like “runs scored”. If we knew exactly what we were trying to accomplish with a work of art, we could speak about it with more accuracy and less humbug.

It seems like an impossible goal, but there’s no harm in trying to reach it. So this week, I will present a series of articles where I explore the nature of art, why it’s so hard to explain, and take a guess at how it could be measured.

Next: A New Science

a man had never been to Yankee Stadium

one morning he grabs his bat
exits his home
and starts walking
in a straight line towards the Bronx

he stops at nothing
and anything that stops him
he smashes with the bat

fence…smash
tree…smash
house…smash
office building…smash
mountain…smash

a trail of destruction
in a straight line towards the Bronx

that will not stop
until the fences curve
and the trees begin to move
and the buildings learn to change speed
and the mountains find a better location

It’s the first baseball broadcast of the spring. The veterans play a few innings, then step aside to let the youngsters have a turn.

“James Loney is just 19 years old,” says the TV announcer.

“19 years old!” says my daughter, looking up from her dolls. She had been ignoring the game until now.

My daughter is 3. She is impressed by 19. It still sounds like a kid’s age to her, but it’s older. Older means being-allowed-to-do-things. Older also means bigger, and bigger means being-able-to-do-things. James Loney is able to do things.

“Wow, 19 years old!” she repeats.

Back when I was 19, I–
  Oh, geez. I’m twice as old as Loney, aren’t I?
Another new milestone: you know you’re getting old when–

Loney swings. His follow-through reminds me of David Justice. Justice and I are the same age. Justice retired from playing over a year ago.

Sigh. Sometimes, older means not-being-able-to-do-things.

Later, my daughter maneuvers into her booster seat for supper. As she’s settling in, she sings from the D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song:

“Leo Durocher, Leo Durocher,
Starts to wiggle and to twitch.”

She has no idea who or what a Leo Durocher is, other than something that wiggles and twitches. Heck, I don’t really know, either. He was before my time, too.

But her little song makes me smile. Baseball is back, and the generations have resumed their conversations with each other. Suddenly, the world seems like a whole lot less lonely place to live.

And why he left your court, the gods themselves,

Wotting no more than I, are ignorant.

–William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, scene II

Wotting. To wot. Chaucer used the word hundreds of times, Shakespeare used it 31 times. Now the word has vanished from the English language.

“To wot” meant “to know”, but there was once a distinction between the two. Why wot left our tongue, the gods themselves, wotting no more than I, are ignorant.

Swedish has two related words, “veta” and “kunna”, which retain the distinction. “Veta” means “to know that“, while “kunna” means “to know how“. If you’re describing a fact, you use “veta”. If you’re describing a skill, you use “kunna”. Knowing that Josh Beckett is a pitcher and knowing how to pitch are two different kinds of knowledge.

I have spent hours working on an essay trying to describe a particular distinction in the brain. This morning I realized the distinction is perfectly summarized by the difference between “veta” and “kunna”. In English, it’s a struggle to differentiate these two types of knowledge. A Swede will get it right away.

I know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that people are limited in their thinking by the features of their native language, is out of fashion. But from my experience, some ideas just more naturally come to mind in one language than another.

Just for fun, here are some other Swedish language features which lack a direct English counterpart:

• Dörrarna stängs. If you ride the Stockholm subway, you’ll hear this phrase. It means “The doors are being closed.” Somehow in English, there’s a feeling that “…by the driver” is being left out of the sentence. In Swedish, you can use a transitive verb and an object without implying a missing subject.

  I often wonder if this influences our culture, that we so eager to find blame for everything that goes wrong because we can’t use transitive verbs without implying that there’s some act of willpower behind it. A car was totalled, the driver was injured…by whom? Sometimes, humbug just happens, and there is no subject for the verb.

• Jobbigt. This is a great adjective. It means “a lot of hard work.” Did you do your homework? No, it was too jobbigt.
• Tro, tycka, tänka. These verbs all translate as “to think”, but they are three different kinds of thinking.

  “Tro” is a belief about facts, whose truth is independent of your belief. “I think the Marlins won the World Series last year.” Even if I think the Tigers won last year, the fact still remains that the Marlins won.

  “Tycka” is a belief or opinion whose truth depends on your belief. “I think your hat is lovely.” If I don’t think the hat is lovely, the hat is not lovely.

  “Tänka” is a thought process. “I think about baseball every day.”

  In English, the line between fact and opinion feels fuzzy. In Swedish, it’s clear. When I hear English speakers confusing opinion with fact, I end up wishing we had this distinction in English.

• Kissenödig. Another great adjective. It means “in need of peeing”. I’m kissenödig, where’s the bathroom?
• Lagom. This adjective is everything you need to know about Swedish culture. It means “just the right amount”, or “not too much, not too little.” In America, the ideal state of being is the richest person with the biggest house. In Sweden, the ideal is to be lagom. You want to be lagom rich with a lagom home. Even if you are the best, like Björn Borg or Ingemar Stenmark or Peter Forsberg, you still are expected to act as if you’re only lagom successful.

Well, I tycker that this entry is lagom long. It’s getting jobbigt to write more. I’m kissenödig. Dörrarna stängs.

Names! We’ve got names!
And for all the steroid claims,
Let us go and cast our blame!
They’ve been blemishing our game!
They brought baseball so much shame!
Let us burn them down in flame!
Let’s take Sheffield and take Bonds
And go throw them into ponds
To see if they will drown!
Or maybe run them out of town
And then hunt them west and east,
Like a scary, vicious beast
Or an evil undead zombie!
Let us hound this vile Giambi!
Let us villify Velarde
Who would imitate Joe Hardy
To secure a higher level
And sell his soul off to the devil.
Santiago and Benard
Should be made to suffer hard
All feathered and all tarred
Their careers forever marred
For the image that they scarred,
For their blatant disregard
Of baseball’s hallowed yards,
Let us torch their baseball cards
‘Til all that’s left is charred,
Just charcoal, dust and ash.
Throw these people in the trash,
And then–

And then?

We’ll be positively sure
That baseball will be pure.
Forever.

Blissful–
This will
never

occur
again.