We may appreciate living in an era that doesn’t require us to travel across the world to know what a particular work of art looks like. At the same time, we may instinctively understand that regarding a work of art in its original form feels different than regarding even the most faithful reproduction. That includes the ten-billion-pixel scan, previously featured here on Open Culture, of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring — which happens to be the very same painting used in a recent scientific study that investigates exactly why it feels so much more interesting to look at art in a museum rather than on a screen or a page.
The study was commissioned by the Mauritshuis, which owns Vermeer’s most famous painting. “Researchers used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to reveal that real artworks, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, elicit a powerful positive response much greater than the response to reproductions,” says the museum’s press release.
“The secret behind the attraction of the ‘Girl’ is also based on a unique neurological phenomenon. Unlike other paintings, she manages to ‘captivate’ the viewer, in a ‘sustained attentional loop.’ ” This process most clearly stimulates a part of the brain called the precuneus, which is “involved in one’s sense of self, self-reflection and episodic memories.”
Girl with a Pearl Earring wasn’t the only painting used in the study, but it produced by far the greatest measurable difference in the viewers’ neurological reaction. The others, which included Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1669) and Van Honthorst’s Violin Player, lack the distinctively prominent human features that encourage additional looking: “As with most faces, visitors look first at the Girl’s eyes and mouth, but then their attention shifts to the pearl, which then guides the focus back to the eyes and mouth, then to the pearl, and so on.” Museumgoers wearing electroencephalogram-reading headsets may not be quite what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he put his mind to defining the “aura” of an original artwork — but they have, these 90 or so years later, lent some scientific support to the idea.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Ask aloud whether reality is real, and you’re liable to be regarded as never truly having left the freshman dorm. But that question has received, and continues to receive, consideration from actual scientists. The Big Think video above assembles seven of them to explain how they think about it, and how they see its relevance to the enterprise of human understanding. For the most part, they seem to agree that, even if we accept that something called “reality” objectively exists, of more immediate relevance is the fact that we can’t perceive that reality directly. Any information we receive about it comes to our brain through our senses, and they have their own ways of interpreting things.
As cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman puts it, our senses are “making up the tastes, odors, and colors that we experience. They’re not properties of an objective reality; they’re actually properties of our senses that they’re fabricating.” What’s physically objective “would continue to exist even if there were no creatures to perceive it.”
Therefore, “colors, odors, tastes, and so on are not real in that sense,” yet they are “real experiences”; the trick of separating what exists in objective reality from what only exists in our minds as a result of that objective reality — “the beginning of the scientific method,” as evolutionary biologist Heather Heying describes it — is an even more complicated endeavor than it sounds.
“Reality, for us, is what we can sense without sensory surfaces, and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain,” says Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain author Lisa Feldman Barrett in the video just above. “Trapped in its own dark, silent box called your skull,” your brain “has no knowledge of what is going on around it in the world, or in the body.” It does receive signals from the senses, “which are the outcome of some changes in the world or in the body, but the brain doesn’t know what the changes are.” With only information about effects, it uses past experience to construct guesses about their causes and contexts. We might also call that function imagination, and no scientists worth their salt can do without a good deal of it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you suspect that your brain isn’t quite suited for modern life, you’re not alone. In fact, that state of mind has probably been closer to the rule than the exception throughout modernity itself. It’s just that the mix of things we have to think about keeps changing: “The school run. Work calls. Inflation. Remember your lines,” says BBC science reporter Melissa Hogenboom in the video above. “Our brain never evolved for any of this, and yet here we are, getting on with it as best we can, and it’s all thanks to our brain’s incredible capacity to adapt, to learn, to grow” — the very subject she investigates in this series, Brain Hacks.
In search of neuroscientifically sound “hacks to help strengthen crucial connections and keep our minds younger in the process,” Hogenboom put herself through a “a six-week brain-altering course.” The first segment of the series finds her entering into a meditation program she describes in this article: “For 30 minutes a day, either as one single session or two 15-minute sessions, I practiced a guided mindfulness meditation by listening to a recording.” In addition, she had a weekly session with University of Surrey professor of clinical psychology Thorsten Barnhofer, who also appears in the video.
Can meditation, and the oft-discussed “mindfulness” it emphasizes, keep our minds from wandering away from what we really need to think about? “Mind-wandering is something that, of course, might be helpful in many ways,” says Barnhofer, “but it’s also something that can go awry. This is where repetitive thinking comes in, where ruminative thinking comes in, where worry comes in. Those are the factors which increase stress,” increasing the presence of hormones like cortisol. And “if levels of cortisol remain high, that can actually become toxic for your brain, for regions of your brain which are very plastic.” Stress, as Hogenboom sums it up, “is a direct inhibitor of neuroplasticity.”
“Research has found that after only a few months of mindfulness training, certain depression and anxiety symptoms can ease,” Hogenboom writes, and her own experience seems also to point in that direction. A brain scan performed after her meditation course found that “one half of my amygdala – an almond-shaped structure important for emotional processing – had reduced in volume,” possibly because the practice “buffers stress seen in the amygdala.” It also revealed growth in her cingulate cortex, “part of the limbic system that is involved in our behavioral and emotional responses,” which indicates “increased control of that area.” Hogenboom acknowledges that these changes “could also be random,” since “the brain is constantly changing anyway”; the trick, however and whenever possible, is to nudge it toward change for the better.
Bonus: Below, science journalist Daniel Goleman talks about mindfulness and how you can change your brain in 10 minutes with daily meditation.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.
Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”
Mitchell conceives of it as a continuum: “I’m more conscious when I’m awake,” for example, and “certain species are more conscious than other species.” And perhaps it could develop even in non-biological entities: “I don’t think that we have any machines that are conscious in any interesting sense yet,” Mitchell says, but “if we ever do, they’ll be part of that spectrum.”
The question of whether a machine can attain consciousness naturally arises in host Kmele Foster’s conversation with Hoffman, who’s made serious investments in artificial-intelligence research. As impressive as AI chatbots have lately become, few among us would be willing to deem them conscious; nevertheless, attempting to create not just intelligence but consciousness in machines may prove a fruitful way to learn about the workings of the “genuine articles” within us. Penrose’s theory holds that consciousness arises from as-yet-unpredictable quantum processes occurring in the microtubules of the brain. Perhaps, as Koch has suggested, it actually exists to one degree or another in all forms of matter. Or maybe — to quote from a song in heavy rotation on my childhood Walkman — it’s just what you make of yourself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
There was a time in America, not so very long ago, when conventional wisdom discouraged immigrants from speaking the language of the old country at home. In fact, “it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially children. Turns out we couldn’t have been more wrong.” These words are spoken by one of the variety of multilingual narrators of the recent BBC Ideas video above, which explains “why being bilingual is good for your brain” — not just if you pick up a second language in childhood, but also, and differently, if you deliberately study it as an adult.
“Learning a new language is an exercise of the mind,” says Li Wei of the Institute of Education at University College London. “It’s the mental equivalent of going to a gym every day.” In the bilingual brain, “all our languages are active, all at the same time.” (This we hear simultaneously in English and the professor’s native Mandarin.) “The continual effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with the mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain. It improves our concentration, problem-solving, memory, and in turn, our creativity.”
In this century, some of the key discoveries about the benefits of bilingualism owe to the research of York University cognitive scientist Ellen Bialystok and her collaborators. Speaking a foreign language, she explains in this Guardian interview, requires using the brain’s “executive control system, whose job it is to resolve competition and focus attention. If you’re bilingual, you are using this system all the time, and that enhances and fortifies it.” In one study, she and her team found that bilinguals with advanced Alzheimer’s could function at the same cognitive levels with milder degrees of the same condition. “That’s the advantage: they could cope with the disease better.”
Mastering a foreign language is, of course, an aspiration commonly held but seldom realized. Based on personal experience, I can say that nothing does the trick quite like moving to a foreign country. But even if you’d rather not pull up stakes, you can benefit from the fact that the internet now provides the greatest, most accessible abundance of language-learning resources and tools humanity has ever known — an abundance you can start exploring right here at Open Culture. If it feels overwhelming to choose just one foreign language from this world of possibilities, feel free to use my system: study seven of them, one for each day of the week. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s Tuesday, which means I’ve got some français à apprendre.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
That wasn’t the case in the 1940s, when psychologist Cecil A. Stokes used chemistry and polarized light to invent soothing abstract music videos, a sort of cinematic synesthesia experiment such as can be seen above, in his only known surviving Auroratone.
(The name was suggested by Stokes’ acquaintance, geologist, Arctic explorer and Catholic priest, Bernard R. Hubbard, who found the result reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis.)
The trippy visuals may strike you as a bit of an odd fit with Bing Crosby’s cover of the sentimental crowdpleaser “Oh Promise Me,” but traumatized WWII vets felt differently.
Army psychologists Herbert E. Rubin and Elias Katz’s research showed that Auroratone films had a therapeutic effect on their patients, including deep relaxation and emotional release.
The music surely contributed to this positive outcome. Other Auroratone films featured “Moonlight Sonata,” “Clair de Lune,” and an organ solo of “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.”
Drs. Rubin and Katz reported that patients reliably wept during Auroratones set to “The Lost Chord,” “Ave Maria,” and “Home on the Range” — another Crosby number.
In fact, Crosby, always a champion of technology, contributed recordings for a full third of the fifteen known Auroratones free of charge and footed the bill for overseas shipping so the films could be shown to soldiers on active duty and medical leave.
[Stokes’] procedure was to cut a tape recorded melody into short segments and splice the resulting pieces into tape loops. The audio signal from the first loop was sent to a radio transmitter. The radio waves from the radio transmitter were confined to a tube and focused up through a glass slide on which he had placed a chemical mixture. The radio waves would interact with the solution and trigger the formation of the crystals. In this way each slide would develop a shape interpretive of the loop of music it had been exposed to. Each loop, in sequence, would be converted to a slide. Eventually a set of slides would be completed that was the natural interpretation of the complete musical melody.
Vets suffering from PTSD were not the only ones to embrace these unlikely experimental films.
Patients diagnosed with other mental disorders, youthful offenders, individuals plagued by chronic migraines, and developmentally delayed elementary schoolers also benefited from Auroratones’ soothing effects.
The general public got a taste of the films in department store screenings hyped as “the nearest thing to the Aurora Borealis ever shown”, where the soporific effect of the color patterns were touted as having been created “by MOTHER NATURE HERSELF.”
Auroratones were also shown in church by canny Christian leaders eager to deploy any bells and whistles that might hold a modern flock’s attention.
The Guggenheim Museum’s brass was vastly less impressed by the Auroratone Foundation of America’s attempts to enlist their support for this “new technique using non-objective art and musical compositions as a means of stimulating the human emotions in a manner so as to be of value to neuro-psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as to teachers and students of both objective and non-objective art.”
Co-founder Hilla Rebay, an abstract artist herself, wrote a letter in which she advised Stokes to “learn what is decoration, accident, intellectual confusion, pattern, symmetry… in art there is conceived law only –never an accident.”
A plan for projecting Auroratones in maternity wards to “do away with the pains of child-birth” appears to have been a similar non-starter.
While only one Auroratone is known to have survived — and its discovery by Robert Martens, curator of Grandpa’s Picture Party, is a fascinating tale unto itself — you can try cobbling together a 21st-century DIY approximation by plugging any of the below tunes into your preferred music playing software and turning on the visualizer:
Anyone who’s worked in an operating room knows that many surgeons like to put on music while they do their job, and that their working soundtracks often include surprising artists. It hardly requires a leap of imagination to assume that there are more than a few scalpel-wielding Pink Floyd fans out there — scalpel-wielding Pink Floyd fans who will surely feel their musical taste vindicated by a study that involved playing “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” to patients undergoing epilepsy-related neurosurgery. Afterward, with help from artificial intelligence, the researchers were able to reconstruct the song from those patients’ recorded brainwaves.
That this turns out to be possible offers “a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can’t speak,” writes the New York Times’ Hana Kiros. “Over the past few years, scientists have made major breakthroughs in extracting words from the electrical signals produced by the brains of people with muscle paralysis when they attempt to speak. But a significant amount of the information conveyed through speech comes from what linguists call ‘prosodic’ elements, like tone.”
It is the musical elements of speech, one might say, that have so far eluded reproduction by existing brain-machine interfaces, whose sentences “have a robotic quality akin to how the late Stephen Hawking sounded when he used a speech-generating device,” as Robert Sanders writes in Berkeley News.
You can hear a clip of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” as generated from the researchers’ AI work with brainwave data in the Euronews video above. Indistinct though it may sound, the song will come through recognizably even to the ears of casual Pink Floyd fans (irked though they’ll be by the video’s accompanying it with the cover image from The Dark Side of the Moon). They may also feel the urge to continue listening to the rest of The Wall, especially “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” with its school-choir delivered declaration that we don’t need no mind control. But as for just-dawning technologies that allow us to control things with our minds — well, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
All of us have, at one time or another, been accused of not seeing what’s right in front of us. But as a close examination of our biological visual system reveals, none of us can see what’s right in front of us. “Our eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve blocks part of the retina,” says the narrator of the new animated TED-Ed video above. “When the visual cortex processes light into coherent images, it fills in these blind spots with information from the surrounding area. Occasionally we might notice a glitch, but most of the time, we’re none the wiser.” This absence of genuine information in the very center of our vision has long circulated in the standard set of fascinating facts.
What’s less well known is that these same neurological processes have made the blind see — or rather, they’ve induced in the blind an experience subjectively indistinguishable from seeing. It’s just that the things they “see” don’t exist in reality.
Take the case of an elderly woman named Rosalie, with which the video opens. On one otherwise normal day at the nursing home, “her room suddenly burst to life with twirling fabrics. Through the elaborate drapings, she could make out animals, children, and costumed characters,” even though she’d lost her sight long before. “Rosalie had developed a condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which patients with either impaired vision or total blindness suddenly hallucinate whole scenes in vivid color.”
This leads us to the counterintuitive finding that you don’t need sight to experience visual hallucinations. (You do need to have once had sight, which gives the brain visual memories on which to draw later.) But “even in people with completely unimpaired senses, the brain constructs the world we perceive from incomplete information.” Take that gap in the middle of our visual field, which the brain fills with, in effect, a hallucination, albeit not one of the elaborate, sometimes overwhelming kinds induced by “recreational and therapeutic drugs, conditions like epilepsy and narcolepsy, and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia.” At the end of the lesson, the narrator suggests that interested viewers seek out the work of neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks, which deals extensively with what opens gaps between reality and our perceptions — and which we here at Open Culture are alwayspreparedtorecommend.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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