118 - Human Nature, Synesthesia and Art

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Dr. V.S. Ramachandran

[NOTE: All quotes are by V.S. Ramachandran.]

“Let’s think about what the standard explanations were [before the late 1990s] for synesthesia. The most common explanation, which we used to hear until about five or ten years ago was, ‘Oh they’re just crazy, they’re nuts,’ because it doesn’t make any sense. And this is a common reaction in science. If it doesn’t make any sense you brush it under the carpet.”

“It turns out that synesthesia is more common among acid users, but that to me makes it more interesting, not less interesting.”

“You cannot solve one mystery in science by using another mystery.”

“Synesthesia my even hold the key for understanding the emergence of language and abstract thought.”

“It turns out that it [synesthesia] is much more common among artists, poets, and novelists.”

“One of the things you know as a physician is that when you think something is crazy it usually means you’re not smart enough to figure it out.”

“Art is not about copying. It’s about distortion and exaggeration, but you cannot randomly distort an image and call it art.”

“There is only one pattern of neural activity that can exist at one time, and it will destroy any other competing patterns of neural activity. This means there is a bottleneck of attention. You can only pay attention to one thing at a time.”

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117 - The Importance of Psychedelics

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119 - A Crisis of Consciousness

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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Well, I hope you’re ready for a wild ride today,

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at least wild in the sense of something a little different from what we’ve been hearing in the past few weeks.

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Not that I mean to detract in any way from the great talks that we’ve been hearing from Terrence McKenna.

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However, I think it’s time for a little change of pace.

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Kenna. However, I think it’s time for a little change of pace. But before I introduce today’s program, I want to thank Victoria T for her second donation to the salon, which will help keep these

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podcasts on the air, so to speak. Although since most of the internet’s backbone traffic these

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days is carried over fiber optic cables, I like to think that our donors are keeping this program on the light.

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Not that air is inferior, of course.

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We need air, too.

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I just like to think of these podcasts as winging their way to you on the light.

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So, thank you, Victoria.

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Also, before I forget to say this,

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to those of you who have sent emails lately and who haven’t received a

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reply yet, well, my intentions are good, but I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to answer all of

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you. I’m usually pretty good at responding to the short one or two sentence or paragraph emails,

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but lately some of them have gone on for thousands of words, and if i actually took the time to read them let alone

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to respond to all of the points they raise well i’d never get another podcast out so once again

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i’d like to encourage you to post your comments on the psychedelicsalon.org blog or on our forum

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over at thegrowreport.com instead of sending emails and that way some of our fellow salonners can help me out by answering questions

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that they are actually better qualified to answer than I am.

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Now, to get right into today’s program,

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my thanks go out once again to John Hanna and J.T. for the terrific program we have today.

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It’s a talk given by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran

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that he gave at the MindStates

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conference held in Berkeley, California at the end of May in 2003. I can still remember

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sitting in the audience that day and being completely taken by this brilliant talk. And

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thanks to the kindness of John and J.T., we all can hear it again today. For an introduction to Dr. Ramachandran, I’m going to defer to Susan Blackmore,

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who was the emcee for that year’s conference, and begin with her introduction of Rama.

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But I would also like to point you to the Wikipedia article about him,

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which you can find by going to Wikipedia.com and searching on V.S. Ramachandran.

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That’s R-A-M-A-C-H-A-N-D-R-A-N. And at the

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bottom of that article, you’ll also find a link to Dr. Ramachandran’s personal website.

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So now let’s begin with the ever-enthusiastic Susan Blackmore as she introduces today’s

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speaker.

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more as she introduces today’s speaker.

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Well, it’s my great pleasure this morning to introduce V.S. Ramachandran.

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Rama, as his friends know him, is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and a professor of psychology at UC San Diego and also a professor at the Salk Institute.

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He used to work mainly on visual perception, but he’s one of those amazing neuroscientists who seem to work on everything,

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not just art and synesthesia, but phantom limbs.

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Maybe some of you know his book, Phantoms in the Brain.

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In fact, he’s made a claim to be the only person in the world ever to amputate a phantom limb.

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I don’t think we’re going to hear about that, but you can read about that wonderful event in his book.

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So today he’s going to be talking about synesthesia and the meaning of art.

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And where are you, Rama? Are you hiding?

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I’m here.

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Come up.

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Thank you very much.

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Thank you very much.

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I tell you what I forgot to say.

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This is much more meaningful to British people than you foreigners.

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But in England, our premier radio station for serious stuff is Radio 4.

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And one of the most honorable things that you can do is to be the annual Reith lecturer.

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Reith founded the BBC.

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The whole principles of public broadcasting started with him in the 1920s.

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And every year there are these lecturers.

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And this year’s Reith lecturer was Rama.

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And you can listen to those lectures online.

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You can get them through his website or through the BBC website.

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So I thoroughly recommend them.

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I enjoyed them myself very much.

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Rama.

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Thank you.

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Well, first of all, thank you very much

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to John Hanna

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and the organisers for inviting me to

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be here and for Sue for

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that wonderful introduction.

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It’s very hot here, is it?

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Or is it just me?

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There you go. Maybe I’m just overdressed. Okay, so what I’d like to do is tell you a little bit about the work we’ve been doing in neurology, behavioral neurology, or what these days we call cognitive neuroscience. That is when there is a small change in some part of the brain, or damage to a small part of the brain, what you often see is a specific change in your mind or your

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behavior, rather than an across-the-board reduction in all your mental abilities. You

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don’t see a general blunting of all your abilities. What you see is a highly selective loss of

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one function. So what we do is we systematically study these patients or these people who have

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changes in behavior, trying to find out what’s gone wrong in the brain, what’s changed in

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the brain. And what can these changes and their changes in behavior tell us about normal

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human behavior, about human nature, and about human consciousness. So that’ll be the main

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theme of this lecture. In fact, that’s what I do for a living.

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Now, to get you started, let me just tell you, you all know about the brain.

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It’s made up of 100 billion nerve cells, and it’s got the frontal lobes, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, and temporal lobe.

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What I’d like to do today is start off with a syndrome, a very rare neurological syndrome.

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Tell you about that briefly, just to give you an idea about the sort of thing we do. to do today is start off with a syndrome, a very rare neurological syndrome, tell you

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about that briefly, just to give you an idea about the sort of thing we do, then talk about

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another fascinating phenomenon called synesthesia, which was discovered in the 19th century,

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but has not been studied intensively until recently. And the second half of the talk,

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or the third, third, third of the talk will be about art, and how the brain responds to

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art. So the first half is really about science, the second half about art, okay? And I think that’s very appropriate

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given this audience. Now, let me tell you about a patient we saw not long ago who had

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a disorder called Capgras syndrome, or Capgras delusion. This was discovered around the turn

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of the century by a French neurologist, And typically the patient, I’ll tell you about the patient I saw, he’d been in a car accident and had a head injury and was in a coma for about two weeks.

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Then he came out of the coma and he seemed quite normal.

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Mentally quite lucid, articulate, fluent in conversation.

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Seemed quite a little bit slowed down given that he’d just come out of a coma.

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But other than that, he seemed quite lucid and intelligent.

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Except that he had one profound delusion.

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He would look at his mother and say,

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Doctor, this woman looks just like my mother, but she’s an imposter.

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She’s some other woman pretending to be my mother.

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And what is amazing is the selective nature of the delusion.

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That’s the only problem he has.

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Now, why does this happen?

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The standard explanation

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for this, oddly enough, is a Freudian one.

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And that is this chap, when he

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was a little baby,

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and this applies to all of you here, when you’re little

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babies, and I’m talking about the men here,

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but same argument applies for women.

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So when you’re little babies,

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you have this strong sexual attraction to your

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mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud.

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I’m not saying I believe this, but this is the sort of standard view, Freudian view.

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Now as the child grows up, these latent sexual urges get repressed by the cortex, which develops.

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So the cortical influences repress these latent sexual urges.

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And then along comes a blow to the head, damaging the cortex.

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And these latent sexual urges come And then along comes a blow to the head, damaging the cortex. And these latent sexual urges come flaming to the surface. And suddenly and inexplicably,

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this chap finds himself sexually aroused by his mother. And he says, my God, this is my mom.

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How come I’m sexually aroused? Something wrong here. This must be some other woman

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pretending to be my mom. Okay, so this is the standard view. Now, it doesn’t work

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because I’ve seen patients with the Kamp-KGross syndrome who have the same kind of delusion, not about their mother, but about their pet poodle,

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about their dog. They’ll say, doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi.

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Now, you think about it, how would the Freudian account explain this? You would have to invoke

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the latent bestiality in all humans or something like that.

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So we came up with a much simpler explanation in terms of the circuitry in the brain.

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Visual messages go to the visual area in the occipital lobe,

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and they’re analyzed in 30 different visual areas for color, shape, movement, depth,

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all the different visual attributes, which all of you artists know about.

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After the analysis is carried out, the message goes to a structure here in the temporal lobes called the fusiform gyrus.

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And in the fusiform gyrus, you recognize what it is.

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Is it a face? Is it my boss? Is it my mother? Is it a pig? Is it a chair?

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Something completely unimportant? Okay. What is it?

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And then the message goes to the limbic system, the emotional core of your brain,

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where the appropriate emotions are revoked towards what you’re looking at.

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So you say, wow, that’s a mate.

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Wow, that’s a predator.

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Okay? Let me get out of here.

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Or you say, well, it’s just a table or a chair.

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Let me ignore it.

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Okay?

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And then, so that’s done by the limbic system and the amygdala,

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which is the gateway to the limbic system.

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The messages then cascade down the

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hypothalamic nucleus on the autonomic nervous system

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and your body starts sweating,

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your skin starts sweating, your heart starts beating

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faster, and you pump more blood,

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preparing your body for action,

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for feeding, fighting, and sexual behavior.

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The three F’s.

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Okay?

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Now, For feeding, fighting, and sexual behavior. The three F’s. Okay? Now.

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Okay, so now, what I think has happened in this patient is,

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the fusiform gyrus is intact.

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It’s not affected by the damage.

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That’s why he looks at his mother and says,

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hey, it looks just like my mother.

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But the message, the wire that goes from the fusiform gyrus

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to the limbic system, to the emotional centers,

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to the amygdala,

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that wire is cut by the accident.

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Therefore, there is no emotional arousal

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when he looks at something.

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There’s been a disconnection between vision and emotion.

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So he looks at his mother and he says,

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hey, this looks like my mother,

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but my God, if it’s my mother,

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why am I not experiencing a warm glow or terror, as the case may be?

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So there’s something not quite right here.

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This can’t be my mother.

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So we then did experiments to test this idea by measuring the amount of skin conductance change, sweating, when this chap looks at tables, chairs, lions, and mothers.

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All of you here, you don’t sweat for a table, or a chair, or a shoe, unless you have a shoe fetish, that’s a different

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matter, but normally you don’t, but if I show you a picture of your mother, believe it or not, all of

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you here, anytime you see a picture of a stranger, you don’t sweat, but if I show you a picture of

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your mother, instantly you start sweating, you don’t even have to be Jewish. Okay? Anybody.

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And I can measure this by looking at the galvanic skin response and show that this happens.

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Now, what happened in David, this patient is,

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we showed him tables and chairs, nothing happens.

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We showed him his mother, no change in skin resistance.

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Showing that there’s been this disconnection between vision and emotion.

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And I’m going to return to this later in the second half of my talk,

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because it’s these same connections between vision and emotion

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that the artist is tapping into in visual aesthetics,

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painting, sculpture, and art.

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But suffice it to say, some of these patients

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lose the ability to enjoy visual images.

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One of them said, landscapes are no longer pleasing to the eye.

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Flowers, which used to bring me so much joy when I look at them, they look like plastic flowers.

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Again, showing this disconnection between vision and emotion.

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Okay, so I took so much time to explain this disorder to illustrate

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the power of this approach to understanding the functions of the brain, what we call

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cognitive neuroscience or behavioral neurology.

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By the way, if you take this chap, if this chap, David, if his mother walks in,

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he says, who are you? You look just like my mother.

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But if she goes to the next room an hour later, phones him, he picks up the phone.

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He says, mom, how are you? And his mother talks to him, there’s no delusion.

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How come? Okay, if he’s crazy, how

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come he’s delusional when he looks at her, but not on the phone? Okay, well, the answer is, it turns

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out there’s a separate pathway going from the auditory hearing center to the amygdala limbic

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system. And that’s not being caught by the accident. So when he listens to her voice, emotions come

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flooding back, and he says, this is my mom. But if he looks at her, when she walks in, he says, who are you?

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You look just like my mother, but you’re an imposter.

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So you can get to this level of precise detail in accounting for,

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that’s very good, thank you, Sue, in accounting for this patient’s bizarre behavior.

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It’s a lovely example of how you can take a bizarre, completely incomprehensible

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neuropsychiatric syndrome,

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where it looks like somebody is just nuts,

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saying his mother is an imposter,

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but not on the phone, right?

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And then showing that you can explain it

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in terms of the known neural circuitry

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in the temporal lobes.

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And then you can test this idea

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using a simple experiment.

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Now, I’d like to switch gears.

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So this is the recurring theme in our research.

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We take neurological oddities or anomalies, which have been known for a long time,

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but brushed under the carpet by the establishment, regarded as a curiosity,

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but brought it back into mainstream neuroscience, done some systematic experiments,

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and ask, why does the patient do this? What has changed in his brain?

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And what is the deeper message for all of us who are interested in how the brain works and interested in the human mind.

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I was going to tell you about phantom limbs, I’m going to skip that.

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The second phenomenon I’m going to tell you about is synesthesia, which is a really fascinating

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phenomenon which many of you would know about being artists, but if you go back to the 19th

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century, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was the first person to study this

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systematically and he published a little paper in the British scientific journal Nature.

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He pointed out that certain people in the general population,

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who are otherwise quite normal, a tiny proportion of the normal population,

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they have the following peculiarity.

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That is, every time they hear a particular tone, like C sharp is always red,

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F sharp is always blue, different different notes musical notes are colored differently they say they experience the colors

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or sometimes they’ll say numbers like five is red six is blue seven is yellow eight is chartreuse

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nine is indigo okay and galton first drew attention to this he also pointed out that it runs in

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families and there may be a genetic basis to this. And I think it’s fair to say that since

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Galton’s time, there have been dozens of case reports of synesthesia,

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but it’s never made it into mainstream neuroscience. It’s always regarded

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as a Kuhnian anomaly. You know, it doesn’t make any sense when somebody says

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C-sharp is red or 5 is indigo. What the hell does that mean?

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So it was brushed under the carpet

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by the mainstream scientific establishment.

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And in fact, that’s three standard

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explanations for…

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Let’s think about what the standard explanations were

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for synesthesia.

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The most common explanation, which we used to hear

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until about 5 or 10 years ago,

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oh, they’re just crazy.

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They’re nuts.

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Because, you know, it doesn’t make any sense.

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And this is a common reaction in science.

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If something doesn’t make any sense, you brush it under the carpet.

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Second explanation is,

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oh, no, they’re just acid junkies or potheads.

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They’re on drugs.

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Okay?

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So they’re experiencing weird things.

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Now, there may be some truth to this,

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because it turns out synesthesia is more common among acid users.

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But that, to me, makes it more interesting, not less interesting.

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Why do some

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drugs, how do they change

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the pharmacology in the brain to create

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these synesthetic experiences? It’s a legitimate

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scientific question. The third

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explanation is, oh, they’re just

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childhood memories. Every time they

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saw five as a child,

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a refrigerator magnet, they’re playing with these magnetic numbers.

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Five was red, six was blue, seven was green, and they stuck with

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these memories from childhood. Well, this never made much sense to me because

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how come it runs in families then, the synesthesia? You’d have to say the same

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magnets were being passed down or something like that. This doesn’t make much sense.

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So he said, well, put something to bear in mind as a possibility.

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Fourth idea is much more ingenious and more subtle.

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And that is, they’re just being metaphorical.

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Just like people say, what is a metaphor?

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Linking two seemingly unrelated things.

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Like when people say, cheese is sharp.

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Cheddar cheese.

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Well, cheese isn’t sharp.

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You take it and rub it on your skin.

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It’s soft.

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So why do you say it’s sharp?

00:17:49 ► §

You say, well, it’s sharp, meaning the taste is sharp.

00:17:52 ► §

But that’s circular.

00:17:54 ► §

Why are you using a tactile adjective to describe a taste sensation?

00:17:58 ► §

Or you can think of many other examples.

00:18:00 ► §

A loud tie.

00:18:01 ► §

It’s not making any noise.

00:18:02 ► §

Why do you call it loud?

00:18:04 ► §

Or hot babe. You know, if you touch her, she’s not hot. Why do you call it loud? Or hot babe.

00:18:06 ► §

You know, if you touch her, she’s not

00:18:07 ► §

hot. Why do you say hot babe?

00:18:09 ► §

So, all of these synesthetic

00:18:11 ► §

metaphors, so maybe synesthetes

00:18:14 ► §

are especially gifted in this regard.

00:18:16 ► §

This is C sharp is red, F sharp is

00:18:18 ► §

blue. Now the problem

00:18:19 ► §

with this is not that it’s wrong,

00:18:22 ► §

and I’ll return to this

00:18:23 ► §

later in my talk. the problem with it is,

00:18:26 ► §

you cannot solve one mystery in science by using another mystery. You can’t say synesthesia is

00:18:32 ► §

just metaphor that explains it, because we don’t know what the hell a metaphor is. We don’t know

00:18:37 ► §

how it’s represented in the brain, what’s going on in the brain, we don’t know what a metaphor is,

00:18:40 ► §

okay? How the brain represents metaphors. So saying synesthesia is just metaphor doesn’t explain a damn thing.

00:18:46 ► §

And in fact, as we go along, what I’m

00:18:48 ► §

going to do is turn it completely upside down

00:18:49 ► §

and argue the opposite. I’m going to argue

00:18:51 ► §

synesthesia is a concrete sensory phenomenon

00:18:54 ► §

you see in people.

00:18:55 ► §

We can study its neural basis,

00:18:58 ► §

find out what’s going on in the brain, and that in turn

00:19:00 ► §

is going to give you an experimental foothold,

00:19:02 ► §

a lever for understanding

00:19:03 ► §

more enigmatic mental attributes

00:19:06 ► §

like what is a metaphor.

00:19:08 ► §

And indeed, as we go along, we’ll see

00:19:09 ► §

synesthesia may even hold the key for understanding the emergence

00:19:12 ► §

of language and abstract thought.

00:19:14 ► §

Okay? How? Okay.

00:19:16 ► §

First thing we need to do is

00:19:17 ► §

I want to do three things with synesthesia, and I’m going to go

00:19:20 ► §

through very quickly, giving me half an hour to cover

00:19:21 ► §

synesthesia and then half an hour for art.

00:19:24 ► §

What I’m going to do is

00:19:25 ► §

first give you evidence this is a real

00:19:28 ► §

phenomenon. It’s not bogus. These people are not

00:19:29 ► §

making it up. They’re not crazy.

00:19:31 ► §

So we have to show clearly and unambiguously

00:19:33 ► §

that it’s real.

00:19:35 ► §

That’s what you need to convince scientists, first thing.

00:19:38 ► §

Second thing you need to do is, so,

00:19:39 ► §

why do they have it? What’s going on in the brain?

00:19:42 ► §

Okay? And third thing, you need a

00:19:43 ► §

mechanism. Third thing you need to show is what’s the big deal? Who cares? Here’s some people with some on in the brain? Okay? And third thing, you need a mechanism. Third thing you need to show us

00:19:46 ► §

what’s the big deal? Who cares? Here’s some

00:19:48 ► §

people with some change in the brain. They have some

00:19:49 ► §

weird experiences. Who cares? So what

00:19:52 ► §

I’m going to show is that it has vast implications

00:19:54 ► §

for understanding all aspects of the mind,

00:19:56 ► §

including artistic creativity.

00:19:57 ► §

Okay. So let’s go one step at a time.

00:20:00 ► §

First, how do you show it’s real? So we got all

00:20:02 ► §

the people in whom

00:20:03 ► §

numbers were colored.

00:20:05 ► §

Two was red and five was green.

00:20:07 ► §

Or two was green and five was red.

00:20:10 ► §

First of all, we found it’s much more common than people realize.

00:20:12 ► §

One out of 200 people is a synesthete.

00:20:15 ► §

And it turns out that it’s much more common among artists, poets, and novelists.

00:20:19 ► §

This has been shown 20 years ago in a survey.

00:20:22 ► §

It’s eight times more common among artists, poets, and novelists.

00:20:26 ► §

And I’ll return to that later.

00:20:29 ► §

Runs and families,

00:20:30 ► §

these are all questions about

00:20:32 ► §

synesthesia.

00:20:34 ► §

Is it real? Is it a real sensory

00:20:36 ► §

phenomenon? What are the precise

00:20:38 ► §

mechanisms? What are its broader

00:20:40 ► §

implications? In other words, what’s the big deal?

00:20:43 ► §

So what we did was

00:20:44 ► §

we created a display like that,

00:20:46 ► §

made up of twos,

00:20:48 ► §

or sorry, made up of fives,

00:20:49 ► §

embedded among them are a bunch of twos.

00:20:51 ► §

It’s hard to find them.

00:20:52 ► §

There’s one there, right? One there.

00:20:56 ► §

Okay, one there.

00:20:57 ► §

It’s kind of hard to pick them out because they have the same features.

00:21:00 ► §

A normal person takes 10, 15, 20 seconds,

00:21:03 ► §

even 30 seconds,

00:21:04 ► §

to discover the hidden shape made up of twos.

00:21:06 ► §

How many of you start seeing it?

00:21:08 ► §

It takes a while.

00:21:09 ► §

Okay, but now, oops.

00:21:12 ► §

If you show it to a synesthete, he says, oh, I see a red triangle.

00:21:16 ► §

Okay, and he sees it instantly.

00:21:18 ► §

So if he’s crazy, how come he’s better at it than us?

00:21:21 ► §

Okay.

00:21:22 ► §

He’s actually quicker.

00:21:23 ► §

And we’ve done a whole bunch of experiments like this showing they can

00:21:25 ► §

discover that hidden shape much more rapidly

00:21:27 ► §

than normal people. It’s like

00:21:29 ► §

you know that Ishihara test for color blindness

00:21:32 ► §

you see in traffic school. Okay?

00:21:33 ► §

It’s very similar to that. So what we have devised here is a

00:21:35 ► §

clinical test to discover closet synesthetes.

00:21:38 ► §

Okay?

00:21:43 ► §

Now, next question,

00:21:44 ► §

where is it happening?

00:21:45 ► §

What’s going on in the brain?

00:21:51 ► §

Well, we were struck by the fact that if you go into the fusiform gyrus I was telling you about in the temporal lobes,

00:21:52 ► §

where the visual signals come,

00:21:57 ► §

that’s one of the earlier stages in the brain where you recognize things.

00:22:01 ► §

And that’s where the visual number area is, that green stuff.

00:22:05 ► §

That’s where visual appearance of numbers is encoded.

00:22:07 ► §

And Zeki’s color area V4, where colors

00:22:09 ► §

are processed in the brain,

00:22:12 ► §

one of the earlier stages where colors are processed,

00:22:14 ► §

is right next to it, it’s almost touching it.

00:22:16 ► §

So the number area and color area are touching

00:22:17 ► §

each other. And I said this can be a coincidence,

00:22:19 ► §

that the most common type of synesthesia is number

00:22:21 ► §

to color, and the number and

00:22:23 ► §

color area in the brain are almost touching each other.

00:22:25 ► §

Maybe these people have some cross-wiring, some accidental cross-wiring.

00:22:29 ► §

Remember I said it runs in families.

00:22:31 ► §

Maybe there’s a genetic basis.

00:22:34 ► §

Maybe, and remember, the infant brain, the fetal brain, has an excess of connections.

00:22:39 ► §

All the different parts of the brain are connected to each other.

00:22:41 ► §

And the way you create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain

00:22:45 ► §

is to prune away the excess connections.

00:22:47 ► §

Just like Michelangelo creating David

00:22:49 ► §

by removing all the marble

00:22:50 ► §

that didn’t look like David.

00:22:53 ► §

Okay?

00:22:53 ► §

So that’s how you create a brain.

00:22:55 ► §

Now, if there’s a mutation in that gene

00:22:57 ► §

or set of genes,

00:22:57 ► §

you’re going to get defective pruning

00:22:59 ► §

and cross-wiring between adjacent parts of the brain.

00:23:02 ► §

Or cross-activation is a more neutral phrase.

00:23:05 ► §

We don’t know if it’s actual wires

00:23:06 ► §

or transmitter imbalance

00:23:08 ► §

producing disinhibition.

00:23:10 ► §

So every time a guy sees a number,

00:23:13 ► §

it goes and cross-activates a color area,

00:23:15 ► §

he sees a color.

00:23:16 ► §

So we’ve now done brain imaging experiments,

00:23:18 ► §

we meaning Ed Hubbard and I,

00:23:19 ► §

as a graduate student in our lab,

00:23:21 ► §

and we’ve shown that this is what happens.

00:23:22 ► §

In a normal person, only the number area lights up.

00:23:24 ► §

In a number color synesthete, the number area lights up. In a number color

00:23:25 ► §

synesthete, V4 also lights up.

00:23:27 ► §

Showing that you can actually get to the neural basis

00:23:29 ► §

of this. Now,

00:23:32 ► §

it turns out, this is all

00:23:33 ► §

true of the first two or three synesthetes we

00:23:35 ► §

tested. But then,

00:23:38 ► §

things got complicated. What we

00:23:39 ► §

found was, there are two types

00:23:41 ► §

of synesthetes. These

00:23:44 ► §

first type of synesthetes we saw, if you show

00:23:45 ► §

them numbers, they see colors. Five is red, six is

00:23:47 ► §

blue, seven is yellow. But then

00:23:50 ► §

if you show them Roman numbers, V

00:23:51 ► §

or V-I, the

00:23:53 ► §

six, right? V-2-I is the

00:23:55 ► §

seven. If you show them Roman numbers, they don’t see

00:23:58 ► §

any color. They say, oh, I see it’s a number, it’s five, it’s

00:24:00 ► §

six, but I don’t see any color. Now that’s

00:24:02 ► §

very important, because it’s showing

00:24:04 ► §

that it’s the

00:24:06 ► §

actual visual representation

00:24:08 ► §

of the Arabic number.

00:24:10 ► §

Actually, I should say Indian number,

00:24:11 ► §

originally came from India.

00:24:13 ► §

The Indian-Arabic number,

00:24:15 ► §

that appearance is what is colored.

00:24:18 ► §

The numerical concept

00:24:19 ► §

of ordinality,

00:24:21 ► §

that’s not evoking the color.

00:24:24 ► §

That’s why the Roman number is ineffective. But then we stumbled

00:24:28 ► §

on additional synesthetes where this is not true. Where even days of the week,

00:24:32 ► §

months of the year were colored. Monday is blue, Tuesday is

00:24:36 ► §

red, Wednesday is yellow, December is pink,

00:24:40 ► §

January is chartreuse, February

00:24:43 ► §

is indigo.

00:24:46 ► §

Now, what do… No wonder people thought they were crazy.

00:24:48 ► §

What do you mean Monday is blue?

00:24:50 ► §

But think about it.

00:24:52 ► §

One of the things you know as a physician is

00:24:53 ► §

when you think something is crazy,

00:24:55 ► §

it usually means you’re not smart enough to figure it out.

00:24:57 ► §

Okay?

00:24:58 ► §

So listen more carefully.

00:24:59 ► §

Okay.

00:24:59 ► §

So what do days of the week, months of the year,

00:25:02 ► §

and numbers have in common?

00:25:03 ► §

The idea of sequence.

00:25:05 ► §

Abstract notion of sequence or ordinality.

00:25:08 ► §

Okay?

00:25:09 ► §

And I think that’s represented higher up in the brain in the angular gyrus here,

00:25:13 ► §

which is strategically located to represent abstract numerical concepts

00:25:17 ► §

because it’s the crossroads between parietal for touch, visual cortex, parietal cortex,

00:25:23 ► §

occipital lobe, visual cortex,

00:25:25 ► §

and temporal lobe or auditory cortex.

00:25:27 ► §

So it’s at the crossroads getting intermodality sensations

00:25:30 ► §

from vision, touch, and hearing,

00:25:32 ► §

and constructing abstract modality-free representations

00:25:35 ► §

like five pigs, five donkeys, five notes, five touches.

00:25:40 ► §

All they have in common is fiveness.

00:25:42 ► §

And that’s being created there,

00:25:44 ► §

and I bet there’s an actual representation of sequence

00:25:46 ► §

and Zaki’s next color area

00:25:48 ► §

in the sequence is right there touching it

00:25:50 ► §

near it, very close to it

00:25:51 ► §

so I’m arguing in a higher synesthete

00:25:53 ► §

the genes are expressed here, the malfunctioning genes

00:25:56 ► §

producing cross wiring here

00:25:58 ► §

in a lower synesthete it’s a visual appearance

00:26:00 ► §

so it’s in the fusiform gyrus

00:26:02 ► §

so you get these two types of synesthesia

00:26:03 ► §

and we’re now doing imaging experiments to verify that.

00:26:06 ► §

Now finally, what about artist, poets, and novelists?

00:26:09 ► §

See, genes can

00:26:10 ► §

be selectively expressed, even though you have a mutation.

00:26:12 ► §

It can be expressed in

00:26:13 ► §

specific parts of the brain or body

00:26:16 ► §

because of transcription factors.

00:26:18 ► §

So if it’s expressed selectively in the fusiform, you get

00:26:20 ► §

a lower synesthete. If it’s expressed

00:26:21 ► §

selectively in the TPO junction

00:26:23 ► §

angiogyrus, you get a higher synesthete, driven by the concept. What if it’s expressed everywhere in the brain?

00:26:28 ► §

You get complete, lots and lots of cross-activation between brain maps. Remember I said it’s much

00:26:33 ► §

more common among artists, poets, and novelists. Eight times more common. Among all artsy types have in common? Anybody?

00:26:46 ► §

Creativity. Poverty.

00:26:53 ► §

I can’t explain that one.

00:26:54 ► §

Actually, I can, but we won’t go into that.

00:26:58 ► §

Creativity, but also the propensity to metaphor.

00:27:01 ► §

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

00:27:04 ► §

You say, Juliet is an attractive young woman.

00:27:08 ► §

The sun is a celestial body.

00:27:10 ► §

Sorry, no pun intended.

00:27:14 ► §

It’s a big glowing ball of fire.

00:27:16 ► §

Now, you don’t instantly say,

00:27:18 ► §

Juliet is the sun.

00:27:18 ► §

Juliet is the sun.

00:27:20 ► §

You mean she’s a glowing ball of fire?

00:27:22 ► §

You don’t do that.

00:27:23 ► §

Schizophrenics do.

00:27:23 ► §

They take metaphors literally.

00:27:24 ► §

It’s one of the things we’re studying. Normal people

00:27:26 ► §

don’t do that. They say, no, she’s radiant

00:27:28 ► §

like the sun. She’s nurturing

00:27:30 ► §

like the sun. She’s warm

00:27:32 ► §

like the sun.

00:27:33 ► §

She rises in bed

00:27:36 ► §

like the sun rises in the east.

00:27:37 ► §

You can form any link you want. And Shakespeare, of course, was a

00:27:40 ► §

master at this, evoking multiple

00:27:41 ► §

metaphorical nuances in your brain.

00:27:44 ► §

So, if you believe that

00:27:45 ► §

concepts are also represented

00:27:47 ► §

in brain maps, there’s an excess

00:27:49 ► §

cross-wiring throughout the brain, cross-activation,

00:27:52 ► §

this creates a propensity

00:27:53 ► §

toward metaphor.

00:27:56 ► §

Another point I want to make

00:27:57 ► §

about synesthesia is

00:27:59 ► §

lower synesthesia,

00:28:01 ► §

higher synesthesia, artistic types, metaphor,

00:28:04 ► §

Shakespeare, see how you can start with this bizarre phenomenon of synesthesia. higher synesthesia, artistic types, metaphor, Shakespeare.

00:28:08 ► §

See how you can start with this bizarre phenomenon of synesthesia.

00:28:09 ► §

People seeing colors with numbers.

00:28:12 ► §

Get to the nitty-gritty brain anatomy.

00:28:16 ► §

Go all the way to psychophysics, you know, the Popeye experiments, blindside experiments we have done.

00:28:19 ► §

And all the way to Shakespeare and metaphor.

00:28:23 ► §

And next point I want to make is about abstract thinking.

00:28:26 ► §

Now, you may think, well, here’s this strange phenomenon.

00:28:26 ► §

So what?

00:28:28 ► §

Okay, here are some people with synesthesia.

00:28:29 ► §

So what?

00:28:31 ► §

How is it important to me?

00:28:32 ► §

I’m normal.

00:28:32 ► §

Okay?

00:28:35 ► §

Okay, I’ll show you.

00:28:37 ► §

By the way, I just wanted to mention,

00:28:40 ► §

synesthesia is very sensitive to contrast. If you change the contrast of the number,

00:28:42 ► §

if you make the 5 less and less lower the contrast

00:28:46 ► §

at below 10% contrast

00:28:48 ► §

you still see the 5 but there’s no color

00:28:50 ► §

this dependence

00:28:52 ► §

on physical parameters also argues

00:28:54 ► §

that it’s an early front-end visual

00:28:56 ► §

process, not some high-level cognitive process

00:28:58 ► §

okay

00:28:58 ► §

okay

00:29:01 ► §

now I’m going to prove to you something very

00:29:04 ► §

interesting, I want all of you to look at these figures. This is Martian alphabet. Okay? Just like you’ve got A is A, B is B, C is C, different shapes of different names. This is Martian. One of them is Kiki, the other one is Booba. How many of you see this as Kiki, this as Booba? Raise your hands. Okay?

00:29:21 ► §

as Kiki, this is Booba, raise your hands.

00:29:23 ► §

Okay?

00:29:25 ► §

How many of you see this is Booba, this is Kiki, raise your hands? 99%.

00:29:28 ► §

Okay? So there are one or two mutants

00:29:29 ► §

here, but we’re not going to…

00:29:31 ► §

Okay. So, even though

00:29:33 ► §

none of you know Martian, and none of

00:29:36 ► §

you has ever learned Martian, so how

00:29:38 ► §

come you say that’s Booba and that’s Kiki?

00:29:39 ► §

It’s because you’re all closet synesthetes.

00:29:42 ► §

But you’re in denial about it.

00:29:44 ► §

Okay?

00:29:46 ► §

How do I know that?

00:29:46 ► §

Well, look at that.

00:29:48 ► §

What has that got in common with booba?

00:29:50 ► §

And that with kiki?

00:29:52 ► §

What it is is,

00:29:55 ► §

this visual sharp inflection of the contour.

00:29:56 ► §

Okay?

00:29:57 ► §

Mimics,

00:29:59 ► §

synesthetically mimics,

00:30:01 ► §

the auditory representation of phoneme.

00:30:03 ► §

The sharp inflection of the phoneme, kiki.

00:30:06 ► §

And the tongue hitting the palate,

00:30:07 ► §

kiki, versus booba, you know,

00:30:10 ► §

the lip and tongue making this gentle

00:30:12 ► §

undulation, and this gentle undulation

00:30:14 ► §

of the sound in auditory cortex,

00:30:16 ► §

mimicking the visual representation.

00:30:18 ► §

Now, so what’s the big deal?

00:30:20 ► §

One of the things we have found recently is

00:30:21 ► §

that people who are damaged to the angular

00:30:23 ► §

gyrus of the left hemisphere,

00:30:25 ► §

these patients do not get this buba kiki effect.

00:30:28 ► §

They’re at random.

00:30:30 ► §

Which means you need that structure to do this cross-modal synesthesia that we are all capable of.

00:30:37 ► §

Okay?

00:30:37 ► §

Now the reason this is important is think of what this entails.

00:30:41 ► §

One of the things that human beings are very good at is abstraction.

00:30:46 ► §

Okay? Taking the common denominator between seemingly unrelated things.

00:30:49 ► §

Five pigs, five bananas, five chairs, five notes, fiveness.

00:30:54 ► §

That’s what’s in common.

00:30:55 ► §

And humans excel at this.

00:30:59 ► §

Think of what’s involved here.

00:31:00 ► §

A bunch of photons hitting your eye in parallel.

00:31:04 ► §

In the hearing mode, it’s a number

00:31:06 ► §

of hair cells being activated sequentially in the ear. They have nothing in common. The

00:31:12 ► §

hair cells in the ear and the visual contour have absolutely nothing in common except the

00:31:19 ► §

abstract property of jaggedness. And that’s what the brain is picking up. So this ability to extract

00:31:26 ► §

common denominator between dissimilar

00:31:28 ► §

things, namely abstraction, is done by

00:31:30 ► §

the angiogenesis, which is much bigger in

00:31:32 ► §

primates, by the way, than in lower mammals,

00:31:33 ► §

and much bigger in humans than in lower primates.

00:31:36 ► §

So this, I claim,

00:31:38 ► §

led to what we call abstraction

00:31:40 ► §

in humans. Now I’m going to switch gears, go on

00:31:42 ► §

to art. What are we doing for time, by

00:31:44 ► §

the way?

00:31:48 ► §

Oh, good, good. Oh, I thought you meant I only had five minutes.

00:31:51 ► §

Okay. All right, okay. All right, then I can go back.

00:31:56 ► §

So I wanted to tell you a little bit about the emergence of, I’ve told you about the emergence of abstract thought in humans. Now you could say, why did we develop this ability

00:32:00 ► §

in the angular gyrus, this ability to engage in abstraction?

00:32:04 ► §

What does it buy you? Well, think about it. You’re a primate scurrying up in the angular gyrus, this ability to engage in abstraction. What does it buy you?

00:32:06 ► §

Well, think about it. You’re a primate scurrying up

00:32:08 ► §

in the treetops, and you see a horizontal

00:32:09 ► §

tree branch. Horizontal

00:32:12 ► §

photons hitting your retina.

00:32:14 ► §

You need to take your hand and grasp it

00:32:16 ► §

horizontally. Okay?

00:32:17 ► §

This is all muscle and joint sense. That

00:32:19 ► §

has to be synesthetically mapped on

00:32:21 ► §

to the horizontality of vision.

00:32:24 ► §

So that’s why you’ve all the ability to

00:32:25 ► §

abstract, using the

00:32:27 ► §

angular gyrus for cross-modal synthesis.

00:32:30 ► §

But once it was in place,

00:32:32 ► §

it became an exaptation

00:32:34 ► §

for other more complex

00:32:35 ► §

types of abstraction that we humans

00:32:37 ► §

excel in. So it’s a great

00:32:39 ► §

irony that our little ancestors

00:32:41 ► §

scurrying up on the treetops, grasping branches,

00:32:44 ► §

that’s what culminated in a Shakespeare metaphor, Einstein, all of that stuff.

00:32:51 ► §

Now, let me go on to talk about art.

00:32:53 ► §

And let me just say, the quest here, this is part two of my talk,

00:32:58 ► §

is going to be speculative, unlike part one.

00:33:00 ► §

And I’m just going to kind of let my hair down down because you’re all artists. You can handle it.

00:33:06 ► §

It’s meant to be fun.

00:33:08 ► §

Part 2 is meant to be a talk on art,

00:33:10 ► §

not a talk on science.

00:33:12 ► §

But what I’m going to try to do

00:33:13 ► §

is bridge science and art,

00:33:15 ► §

bridge neurology and art.

00:33:16 ► §

The question is,

00:33:17 ► §

are there artistic universals?

00:33:18 ► §

In other words,

00:33:19 ► §

there’s a staggering diversity

00:33:21 ► §

of artistic styles across the planet

00:33:23 ► §

and across historical periods.

00:33:26 ► §

You’ve got classical Greek art, Renaissance art, Tibetan art, the Dada movement, which is not even art,

00:33:35 ► §

Cubism, Expressionism, Impressionism, you name it, hundreds of kinds of artistic styles.

00:33:40 ► §

Okay?

00:33:43 ► §

You name it.

00:33:44 ► §

Hundreds of kinds of artistic styles.

00:33:50 ► §

But in spite of this diversity, are there some common principles that cut across these cultural boundaries?

00:33:52 ► §

And I’m going to argue, yes, there are.

00:33:54 ► §

And I’m going to show you the evidence.

00:33:57 ► §

And if so, what is the neural brain mechanisms involved?

00:34:04 ► §

How are these universals instantiated in the neural architecture of the brain?

00:34:08 ► §

Now, just to give you a little bit of historical background,

00:34:11 ► §

until about seven or eight years ago, I had absolutely no interest in art.

00:34:14 ► §

Except if I’d go to an art gallery somewhere in a city,

00:34:17 ► §

if I’d go to a meeting in a city, I’d go to the local art gallery,

00:34:20 ► §

just to show that I was very cultured, that type of thing.

00:34:22 ► §

But I had no real passion for it.

00:34:26 ► §

And everything changed that one month when I went to India on sabbatical for three months,

00:34:28 ► §

and there were not that many patients

00:34:29 ► §

in the neurology clinic where I worked there.

00:34:32 ► §

So then I started walking around the temples,

00:34:35 ► §

and I saw these sculptures of Indian gods and goddesses.

00:34:38 ► §

Initially, I was not moved by them

00:34:40 ► §

because, like many Westerners,

00:34:42 ► §

I was educated in the West,

00:34:44 ► §

and I regarded

00:34:45 ► §

them not as art but as mythology religious iconography okay then suddenly

00:34:51 ► §

something started happening I had an epiphany and these images start haunting

00:34:55 ► §

me and suddenly I started realizing that they were great works of art not

00:34:59 ► §

mythology not religion but works of art okay and then began this quest, and I asked myself,

00:35:05 ► §

why are these sculptures and these images so evocative?

00:35:09 ► §

How does the sculpture or a painting affect the brain?

00:35:13 ► §

What parts of the brain are involved?

00:35:15 ► §

And then I looked at the history of ideas about Indian art.

00:35:18 ► §

I’m going to mainly talk about Indian art because that’s what I’m most familiar with,

00:35:21 ► §

but the same argument applies to other types of art, as you will see.

00:35:26 ► §

So, when I looked at the history,

00:35:28 ► §

it makes fascinating reading.

00:35:29 ► §

In fact, one could give a whole lecture on this,

00:35:31 ► §

about the English who came to India

00:35:34 ► §

and started looking at the art there,

00:35:36 ► §

studying it, quote-unquote, objectively,

00:35:39 ► §

so to speak, as an art historian might,

00:35:41 ► §

and they looked at these sculptures

00:35:43 ► §

and they were absolutely appalled by it.

00:35:45 ► §

For example, that is a bronze sculpture of the goddess Parvati

00:35:48 ► §

from the Chola dynasty in the 11th or 12th century from southern India.

00:35:53 ► §

And it is supposed to depict, the wife of Shiva,

00:35:56 ► §

it is supposed to depict Parvati,

00:35:58 ► §

who is the very epitome of feminine sexuality, sensual grace poise dignity all of that elegance all of that

00:36:10 ► §

everything that’s feminine in one statue okay because she’s a goddess she’s not an ordinary

00:36:14 ► §

woman but the victorians looked at this and they said it looks hideous because it doesn’t look like

00:36:20 ► §

a real woman look at the breasts are too big likes. The waist is too narrow and the hips too broad.

00:36:26 ► §

She’s standing, you know, in a strange

00:36:27 ► §

manner. And this is not realistic.

00:36:30 ► §

And they said the same thing about Mughal

00:36:31 ► §

miniature paintings. Looking at the miniature paintings,

00:36:33 ► §

it lacks perspective. So it’s not realistic.

00:36:36 ► §

Now, of course, in making this criticism,

00:36:39 ► §

it’s a logical

00:36:39 ► §

fallacy, as you all have seen

00:36:41 ► §

immediately, would have seen immediately,

00:36:43 ► §

because what

00:36:45 ► §

they’re doing is unconsciously comparing Indian art with the standards of Western art,

00:36:49 ► §

representational art, especially classical Greek art and Renaissance art, okay, where

00:36:54 ► §

realism is strongly emphasized. But everybody here, I’m sure, knows, looking at the pictures

00:36:59 ► §

around you, art has nothing to do with realism, okay? I can take a $5 camera here and then

00:37:04 ► §

take a picture of my friend David here,

00:37:06 ► §

and you wouldn’t give me a dollar for it.

00:37:08 ► §

It’s very realistic.

00:37:10 ► §

You wouldn’t pay me a dime for it.

00:37:12 ► §

Unless he takes his clothes off, that’s different.

00:37:16 ► §

But if you’re an artist, what you’re doing is quite the opposite.

00:37:21 ► §

It involves deliberate exaggeration, hyperbole,

00:37:25 ► §

distortion even,

00:37:27 ► §

to evoke certain pleasing reactions in your brain.

00:37:30 ► §

It’s not about copying the image.

00:37:31 ► §

Art has nothing to do with replicating

00:37:33 ► §

what’s out there.

00:37:35 ► §

So the question then becomes,

00:37:39 ► §

what types of hyperbole and distortion?

00:37:43 ► §

Is it lawful or is it random?

00:37:45 ► §

And I’ll get to that.

00:37:46 ► §

But first, a little bit more of history.

00:37:49 ► §

That’s another example of a nymph from Kajirao,

00:37:52 ► §

the very embodiment of feminine fecundity, fertility, sensuality, and all of that.

00:38:00 ► §

Now, the irony is, you come back to the Western art critics

00:38:04 ► §

who are saying that this Parvati is all distorted and she doesn’t look like a real woman.

00:38:10 ► §

Now you come to the 20th century and Picasso comes along and he’s got this completely distorted woman with a hunchback and two eyes on one side of her face like a flounder.

00:38:22 ► §

two eyes on one side of his face like a flounder.

00:38:25 ► §

And they look at it and they say,

00:38:27 ► §

my God, what a work of genius!

00:38:31 ► §

Because he has liberated us from the tyranny of realism.

00:38:35 ► §

Well, guess what the Hindu artist portraying Parvati was doing?

00:38:36 ► §

He was doing the same thing.

00:38:40 ► §

Now, funnily enough, I was giving this lecture at the Getty not long ago, and this English art historian gets up and he says,

00:38:43 ► §

but Professor Ramachandran, surely, you see,

00:38:47 ► §

Picasso did it deliberately. How do you know the Chola

00:38:51 ► §

artist was deliberately introducing these enhancements

00:38:56 ► §

in his bronzes? You know, maybe he just got it wrong.

00:38:59 ► §

And I said, well, look, my dear chap, first of all, the Chola

00:39:03 ► §

artist knows perfectly well what a real woman looks like.

00:39:07 ► §

Secondly, if you go to India, 2500 BC, and you look at terracotta busts, this is of a male, of a male, obviously, busts,

00:39:21 ► §

look at the realism there. It’s extraordinarily realistic.

00:39:25 ► §

In fact, if you look at it carefully, it even has these bulge in the abdomen that’s what real men look like

00:39:29 ► §

not like those greek statues of david and all of that you know there are no real guys like that

00:39:39 ► §

okay so the indian artists really knew what realism was all about but then they abandoned

00:39:44 ► §

it they said to hell with realism.

00:39:46 ► §

By the time they got to the medieval times and to Gupta times, it is about idealization, abstraction, hyperbole, exaggeration.

00:39:53 ► §

They realized that was the goal of art.

00:39:55 ► §

So in a sense, Picasso was simply reinventing the wheel, not to detract from his genius.

00:40:00 ► §

But what I’m saying is the criticism that Indian art is realistic is ludicrous.

00:40:03 ► §

But what I’m saying is the criticism that Indian art is realistic is ludicrous.

00:40:07 ► §

And by the way, an even greater ironic twist,

00:40:11 ► §

the same Victorian Englishmen who were criticizing Indian art,

00:40:14 ► §

who were criticizing that Parvati saying the bust is too big,

00:40:16 ► §

hip is too big, and the waist is too narrow,

00:40:17 ► §

go look at his wife.

00:40:22 ► §

This is about the time when the corsets were introduced in Victorian England.

00:40:25 ► §

And they removed the ribs.

00:40:27 ► §

I’ve seen these skeletons of these women at the Hunterian Museum,

00:40:29 ► §

at the Royal College of Surgeons.

00:40:30 ► §

They removed the ribs here

00:40:31 ► §

to attenuate the waist.

00:40:33 ► §

Okay?

00:40:34 ► §

And then they were calling Indian art,

00:40:35 ► §

the Indian poverty, primitive

00:40:36 ► §

because the waist was narrow.

00:40:38 ► §

Okay?

00:40:39 ► §

You can draw your own conclusions from that.

00:40:42 ► §

Now, okay, so clearly,

00:40:43 ► §

art is not about copying.

00:40:45 ► §

It’s about distortion and exaggeration. But you

00:40:47 ► §

cannot randomly distort

00:40:49 ► §

an image and call it art.

00:40:51 ► §

Although where I come from in La Jolla, they do that.

00:40:55 ► §

So

00:40:55 ► §

certain types of distortion are effective

00:40:57 ► §

and then that question becomes, what types of distortion?

00:41:00 ► §

Is it lawful? What are the laws of art?

00:41:02 ► §

So I sat down next to the temple

00:41:04 ► §

and jotted down what I call the eight laws of art, universal laws of art.

00:41:08 ► §

Since then it’s grown to about ten, eight, ten, it doesn’t matter.

00:41:11 ► §

The number is arbitrary, but the point is that it’s a finite set of laws,

00:41:15 ► §

which I think are universal and deployed by artists all over the world.

00:41:19 ► §

Now, what are these laws?

00:41:21 ► §

Well, first of all, going back to Indian art manuals in the 3rd century BC,

00:41:28 ► §

in Sanskrit, there is a word that repeatedly appears in art manuals called rasa, R-A-S-A,

00:41:34 ► §

which is very hard to translate.

00:41:36 ► §

But roughly it means capturing the very spirit of something,

00:41:39 ► §

the very soul of something, the very essence of something,

00:41:43 ► §

in order to evoke a specific mood, sentiment, or emotion in the viewer’s brain.

00:41:48 ► §

That whole paragraph is encapsulated in that word rasa.

00:41:52 ► §

So I realize if you understand rasa, you understand art, you understand how the brain responds to art.

00:41:56 ► §

I can give you dozens of examples of rasa.

00:41:58 ► §

For example, here is the rasa of amorous ecstasy, of sexual intimacy.

00:42:03 ► §

is the rasa of amorous ecstasy,

00:42:04 ► §

of sexual intimacy.

00:42:07 ► §

These two celestial lovers in Kajuraho,

00:42:08 ► §

around 10th century,

00:42:10 ► §

gazing into each other’s eyes,

00:42:12 ► §

eyes locked intimately,

00:42:16 ► §

him with his left hand holding her chin,

00:42:18 ► §

raising it towards his lips,

00:42:21 ► §

anticipating a long-awaited kiss,

00:42:26 ► §

her right arm holding tight to his right arm.

00:42:27 ► §

Okay?

00:42:32 ► §

And you can almost feel the palpable erotic tension building up in the image.

00:42:33 ► §

Okay?

00:42:34 ► §

Before the kiss.

00:42:35 ► §

And all of this is quite deliberate.

00:42:39 ► §

He’s trying to evoke the mood of sexual ardor, sexual intimacy.

00:42:42 ► §

You don’t go around saying, well, the earlobe is too long.

00:42:44 ► §

You know, anatomically it’s incorrect.

00:42:47 ► §

This finger is too curved. You don’t do that with a Picasso. Why do you do it with this?

00:42:52 ► §

Okay? The point is to try and evoke a certain mood or emotion. And the artist does that brilliantly in the sculpture, the mood of erotic intimacy. Okay. What are my ten laws

00:42:58 ► §

of art? Given our time limits, I’m only going to tell you about three laws. The first law

00:43:02 ► §

is called the law of peak shift. What I’m trying to do is take evidence from many sources,

00:43:06 ► §

from ethology, neurophysiology, clinical neurology, evolutionary biology,

00:43:13 ► §

and put it all together to try and account for human artistic experience.

00:43:18 ► §

This is peak shift.

00:43:18 ► §

If you take a rat and you show it a square and a rectangle,

00:43:22 ► §

and every time it sees a rectangle, you give it a piece of cheese.

00:43:25 ► §

So what happens?

00:43:25 ► §

The rat keeps going there, learns that the rectangle means cheese.

00:43:29 ► §

In other words, it likes the rectangle,

00:43:31 ► §

although you’re not supposed to say that if you’re a behaviorist.

00:43:33 ► §

It goes towards the rectangle.

00:43:35 ► §

Now, the funny thing is,

00:43:37 ► §

if you now give it a longer, skinnier rectangle,

00:43:39 ► §

which it’s never seen before,

00:43:41 ► §

the rat goes crazy.

00:43:42 ► §

It prefers this to the original rectangle.

00:43:46 ► §

You say, well, that’s kind of stupid.

00:43:47 ► §

Why does the rat like the longer, skinnier rectangle to the original? Well, it’s not stupid

00:43:50 ► §

at all, because what the rat has learned is a rule.

00:43:53 ► §

Rectangularity.

00:43:54 ► §

The more rectangular, the better.

00:43:56 ► §

The greater the aspect ratio.

00:43:57 ► §

It says, wow, what a rectangle.

00:44:00 ► §

And it goes to that instead

00:44:01 ► §

of that.

00:44:03 ► §

And you say, what’s that got to do with art?

00:44:05 ► §

Well, think about caricature.

00:44:07 ► §

What do you do in a caricature?

00:44:08 ► §

Suppose you want a caricature of Nixon.

00:44:12 ► §

That big nose, that eyebrows.

00:44:14 ► §

You need to see what’s special about him.

00:44:16 ► §

And then you need to amplify it.

00:44:17 ► §

So what you do is mathematically you take the average of all male faces,

00:44:21 ► §

subtract it from Nixon’s face,

00:44:23 ► §

and that gives you this big nose and the shaggy eyebrows. What’s special

00:44:26 ► §

about him? And then you amplify it.

00:44:28 ► §

And then you get a caricature

00:44:30 ► §

of Nixon which looks even more like Nixon than

00:44:32 ► §

Nixon himself. Okay?

00:44:33 ► §

The rasa of Nixon, the Republican rasa

00:44:36 ► §

is captured in that picture.

00:44:38 ► §

Okay?

00:44:41 ► §

Now you say, well, that’s

00:44:42 ► §

fine about portraiture. That’s the same as

00:44:43 ► §

Rembrandt portraiture, by the way. If you overdo itdo it you get a cartoon if you do it just right you get great portraiture but you

00:44:49 ► §

say well what about the rest of art well let’s look at the chola bronze a part of it what is

00:44:52 ► §

he doing how do you capture the very essence of feminine grace and poison sexuality you take the

00:44:57 ► §

average female figure subtract the male you’re gonna get big breasts narrow waist big hips and

00:45:02 ► §

you amplify it okay even though it’s amplified absurdly, it’s gorgeous.

00:45:07 ► §

You say, wow.

00:45:08 ► §

You don’t say, it looks ugly.

00:45:11 ► §

Secondly, but look, that’s not enough.

00:45:12 ► §

It’s not enough to just give big breasts.

00:45:14 ► §

She’s not just a hot babe.

00:45:15 ► §

She’s a goddess.

00:45:17 ► §

So how do you give her poise, elegance, grace, dignity?

00:45:21 ► §

How do you give all that?

00:45:22 ► §

Well, there are certain postures that a guy just cannot adopt, even if he tries.

00:45:26 ► §

This has to do between the angle between the shaft and the neck of the femur

00:45:29 ► §

and the curvature of the lumbar spine.

00:45:32 ► §

So I can’t stand like that. But a woman can do so effortlessly.

00:45:35 ► §

This is a gentle triple flexion, a tribanga.

00:45:38 ► §

So what the artist does is goes into posture space,

00:45:41 ► §

subtract male from female, and amplify the female posture

00:45:44 ► §

so you get this triple

00:45:45 ► §

flexion. And she’s also holding a phantom lotus flower, as you can see. Okay? And that’s what

00:45:51 ► §

gives it dignity and poise. And we can talk about that for the next two hours, but we don’t have

00:45:56 ► §

time. Okay? Now, there’s another example of a celestial nymph dancing. Now, you say, well,

00:46:02 ► §

that’s fine about the human body, but what about abstract art and

00:46:05 ► §

semi-abstract art? What about Impressionism? What about Van Gogh? What about Monet? What about Klimt?

00:46:10 ► §

What about Rodin? What about Henry Moore? Doesn’t look like anybody, the Henry Moore statue, okay?

00:46:16 ► §

Well, I’ll answer that. If you go back about 50 years to Oxford, to Timbergan, Timbergan looked

00:46:22 ► §

at seagulls, which have a beak with a red spot, mother seagull.

00:46:26 ► §

The chick hatches. As soon as it

00:46:28 ► §

hatches, it goes and pecks at that red spot on the yellow

00:46:30 ► §

beak. The mother then regurgitates

00:46:32 ► §

half-digested food into the chick’s gaping

00:46:34 ► §

mouth. Chick swallows it and it’s happy.

00:46:36 ► §

Timbergan’s question, how does the chick

00:46:38 ► §

know who’s the mother big mom

00:46:39 ► §

seagull? Okay? Why doesn’t

00:46:42 ► §

it beg for food from a pig that’s passing by?

00:46:44 ► §

Sounds like a silly question, but that’s how science often begins. Okay? Why doesn’t it beg for food from a pig that’s passing by? Sounds like a silly question, but that’s how science often begins. Okay?

00:46:48 ► §

Okay. What he found was you don’t need a mother. You pluck the beak off

00:46:52 ► §

and then, you know, shake it in front of the chick. Chick will

00:46:55 ► §

beg from this disembodied beak.

00:46:59 ► §

Thinking it’s a mother. You say, well, that’s kind of stupid. Why does it think that’s the mother?

00:47:03 ► §

It’s not stupid at all because the goal of vision is to simplify processing.

00:47:06 ► §

Do as little computation as you need to do for the job on hand.

00:47:10 ► §

Here, through millions of years of evolution, the chick’s brain knows

00:47:13 ► §

the only time it’ll see that thing with a red spot is when mom is around.

00:47:17 ► §

It’s not going to see a malicious scientist waving a beak or a mutant pig with a beak.

00:47:22 ► §

So it pecks for food there. Now, even more amazingly, timber can find you don’t pig with a beak. Okay? So it packs for food there.

00:47:25 ► §

Okay?

00:47:26 ► §

Now, even more amazingly, timber confines, you don’t even need a beak.

00:47:29 ► §

You can take a long stick, yellow stick with three red stripes.

00:47:33 ► §

The chick goes crazy.

00:47:35 ► §

It gets mesmerized.

00:47:36 ► §

It ignores the real mother and the beak and goes for this long thing with the three red stripes,

00:47:41 ► §

even though it doesn’t resemble a beak.

00:47:43 ► §

And that’s the key point.

00:47:44 ► §

Okay?

00:47:48 ► §

And all the chicks are mesmerized, attracted to this thing like a magnet.

00:47:51 ► §

They start fetishizing it, ignoring the real beak.

00:47:53 ► §

Okay, now, what’s this got to do with art?

00:47:58 ► §

Well, this brings me to my punchline about art, and that is, if the seagulls had an art gallery,

00:48:02 ► §

they would hang this long stick with the three red stripes on the wall.

00:48:04 ► §

They would pay millions of dollars.

00:48:06 ► §

They would worship it.

00:48:07 ► §

They would call it a Picasso.

00:48:09 ► §

But they wouldn’t know why.

00:48:10 ► §

They’d say the damn thing doesn’t resemble anything.

00:48:12 ► §

Why am I paying so much money for it?

00:48:13 ► §

Why am I mesmerized?

00:48:17 ► §

That’s what all of you chaps are doing when you’re buying works of abstract art.

00:48:19 ► §

You’re behaving exactly like those gull chicks.

00:48:20 ► §

Okay?

00:48:24 ► §

And you can see examples of this.

00:48:25 ► §

So what I’m arguing is…

00:48:26 ► §

So what I’m arguing is, through trial and error,

00:48:32 ► §

through intuition, through genius,

00:48:34 ► §

human artists like Picasso, Henry Moore,

00:48:36 ► §

are tapping into the figural primitives

00:48:39 ► §

of the architecture of the human visual pathways.

00:48:42 ► §

Discovering for your brain the equivalent of the long stick

00:48:45 ► §

with the three red stripes of the chick’s brain.

00:48:47 ► §

And producing these primitives

00:48:48 ► §

and amplifying them

00:48:49 ► §

to produce these pleasing effects in your brain.

00:48:51 ► §

That’s my definition of art.

00:48:53 ► §

Okay.

00:48:54 ► §

Now, another principle I wanted to tell you about

00:48:56 ► §

is isolation.

00:48:58 ► §

What are we doing for time?

00:48:59 ► §

We got 10 minutes?

00:49:00 ► §

00:49:01 ► §

Good. Okay.

00:49:02 ► §

This is another principle.

00:49:03 ► §

It’s called the principle of isolation.

00:49:05 ► §

This is not a very good example.

00:49:06 ► §

But you’ve seen nudes drawn by Klimt.

00:49:10 ► §

By Rodin.

00:49:11 ► §

Even by Picasso.

00:49:12 ► §

Bulls drawn by Picasso.

00:49:13 ► §

Just three little doodles.

00:49:15 ► §

And the bull leaps out at you.

00:49:16 ► §

Okay?

00:49:17 ► §

It’s the rasa of a bull.

00:49:19 ► §

How do they do it?

00:49:21 ► §

In fact, this seems to contradict what I said earlier.

00:49:22 ► §

I said art is about hyperbole, exaggeration.

00:49:25 ► §

Here is the aphorism, less is more in art.

00:49:29 ► §

Okay?

00:49:29 ► §

Why is an outline’s doodle with just a few lines much more evocative than a three-dimensional full-color photograph?

00:49:38 ► §

The answer is what I call the principle of isolation.

00:49:41 ► §

The principle of understatement.

00:49:44 ► §

Okay?

00:49:44 ► §

So the question is, why does this

00:49:46 ► §

work? Isn’t it contradicting my earlier principle

00:49:48 ► §

of hyperbole? No.

00:49:49 ► §

Because it turns out that our

00:49:52 ► §

brain has limited attentional resources.

00:49:53 ► §

Even though you’ve got 100 billion nerve cells,

00:49:56 ► §

there’s only one pattern of neural activity

00:49:58 ► §

that can exist

00:50:00 ► §

at a given time. And it will

00:50:02 ► §

destroy any other competing patterns of neural

00:50:04 ► §

activity. This means there’s a bottleneck of attention.

00:50:06 ► §

You can only pay attention to one thing at a time.

00:50:08 ► §

That means, if you give a full color three-dimensional photograph,

00:50:12 ► §

all your attentional resources are distracted by all the relevant clutter in that information.

00:50:17 ► §

The critical information in that nude, or the bull for that matter, is in the outline.

00:50:21 ► §

That’s what’s conveying the rasa of the bull.

00:50:24 ► §

Not its color. That nude’s color is the same as anybody sitting here.

00:50:28 ► §

So it’s the outline that’s important. What the artist has done is removed

00:50:31 ► §

all the relevant clutter, isolated what’s important, and then

00:50:35 ► §

introduced peak shifts in that one isolated dimension, thereby

00:50:40 ► §

saving a lot of trouble for the brain. Eliminating all this computational

00:50:44 ► §

labor that the brain…

00:50:45 ► §

In other words, what a skilled artist…

00:50:48 ► §

Okay. Let me give you

00:50:49 ► §

evidence for this. You say, how do I know this is all true?

00:50:52 ► §

Well, that’s the evidence. That comes from neurology.

00:50:54 ► §

That’s a drawing

00:50:55 ► §

by a normal

00:50:57 ► §

nine-year-old child of a

00:51:00 ► §

man on a horse. It looks hideous, pardon me for

00:51:02 ► §

saying so. Okay? Looked like a

00:51:03 ► §

cardboard cutout.

00:51:06 ► §

That is a drawing

00:51:07 ► §

but by a

00:51:09 ► §

seven-year-old retarded, quote-unquote,

00:51:12 ► §

autistic child, Nadia,

00:51:14 ► §

who couldn’t even communicate with people.

00:51:16 ► §

Look at that horse. That’s

00:51:18 ► §

the rasa of a horse. It’s leaping out

00:51:20 ► §

at you from the canvas. It’s animated.

00:51:22 ► §

It’s moving. Okay?

00:51:25 ► §

And even

00:51:26 ► §

more surprising, that’s a horse

00:51:28 ► §

drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.

00:51:30 ► §

I’ve surveyed large audiences and said

00:51:31 ► §

without telling them which is da Vinci, which is

00:51:34 ► §

the retarded child, and said which one

00:51:36 ► §

do you like better, majority picked that.

00:51:38 ► §

So here you have a great paradox.

00:51:40 ► §

How come the drawing

00:51:42 ► §

of a horse of a seven-year-old

00:51:43 ► §

retarded child be better or at least as good as that of a great Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci?

00:51:50 ► §

The answer is the principle of isolation.

00:51:52 ► §

What’s happened in the autistic child is all the other modules in the brain are not functioning well.

00:51:58 ► §

But the right parietal, which is your rasa module of the brain, concerned with sense of artistic proportion,

00:52:05 ► §

survives.

00:52:07 ► §

And what happens is all her attention

00:52:08 ► §

is spontaneously allocated

00:52:09 ► §

to that one module which is surviving.

00:52:11 ► §

So what you and I have to do

00:52:12 ► §

through years of training

00:52:13 ► §

to ignore all the clutter

00:52:14 ► §

and pay attention only to the sense of proportion,

00:52:17 ► §

she does spontaneously.

00:52:18 ► §

And that’s why she’s born

00:52:19 ► §

with the ability to deploy her Rasa module effortlessly.

00:52:25 ► §

Something that you and I need a lot of effort.

00:52:30 ► §

I’ll conclude with the last law in my list.

00:52:35 ► §

I said there are ten laws.

00:52:36 ► §

I’ve told you about three, I think.

00:52:39 ► §

Two. I’ve told you about two.

00:52:40 ► §

I’m going to go straight to the last one.

00:52:42 ► §

You can read about the others on the website.

00:52:45 ► §

And that is the principle of metaphor.

00:52:46 ► §

We started with metaphor.

00:52:48 ► §

We talked about metaphor in the case of synesthesia.

00:52:50 ► §

It is the east and Juliet is the sun,

00:52:52 ► §

linking seemingly unrelated ideas.

00:52:55 ► §

This is something that we humans excel at.

00:52:57 ► §

Now, normally we think of metaphor

00:52:59 ► §

only in the context of poetry and literature,

00:53:02 ► §

but visual art also often uses metaphor,

00:53:06 ► §

both in Western art and in Indian art. So here’s a

00:53:07 ► §

striking example.

00:53:10 ► §

This is the cosmic dance

00:53:11 ► §

of Shiva. Some of you

00:53:14 ► §

may have seen this image.

00:53:16 ► §

And it’s from the 11th century

00:53:17 ► §

Chola dynasty from southern India,

00:53:20 ► §

from Madras where I’m from.

00:53:22 ► §

And this depicts

00:53:24 ► §

the cosmic dance of Shiva,

00:53:26 ► §

the supreme lord of the universe.

00:53:29 ► §

And this dance of Shiva is supposed to symbolize

00:53:32 ► §

the universe itself, the dance of the cosmos itself.

00:53:36 ► §

So that’s what I mean by a metaphor.

00:53:38 ► §

So let’s look at this and ask ourselves,

00:53:41 ► §

what is the artist trying to convey?

00:53:43 ► §

Let me say at the outset, by the way, that I am not a practicing religious person or a Hindu,

00:53:48 ► §

but you need to understand the religious iconography to understand what the artist is trying to convey.

00:53:54 ► §

So I’m not trying to convert anybody here.

00:53:56 ► §

And I don’t want to offend anybody’s religious sensibilities.

00:53:59 ► §

So this is simply an exercise in art, connoisseurship in art.

00:54:03 ► §

So what’s going on here?

00:54:05 ► §

So simply as a work of art, it’s beautiful because what the artist is doing is,

00:54:09 ► §

first of all, look at the locks of hair flying off and the limbs moving in different directions,

00:54:15 ► §

flying off in different directions.

00:54:16 ► §

That’s what conveys the sense of drama, the sense of tremendous frenzy and agitation and movement and dance,

00:54:24 ► §

depicting the chaos of the universe.

00:54:27 ► §

The movement of phenomena in the universe.

00:54:29 ► §

Okay?

00:54:30 ► §

So that represents the dance of the universe.

00:54:32 ► §

And yet, he’s also supremely poised and tranquil.

00:54:36 ► §

Look at his leg.

00:54:37 ► §

He’s balanced.

00:54:38 ► §

And look at his face.

00:54:39 ► §

It’s supremely peaceful and immortal.

00:54:44 ► §

Okay?

00:54:44 ► §

And permanent and unchanging.

00:54:47 ► §

So amidst all this flux of the universe is Shiva and his grace,

00:54:52 ► §

immortal and permanent and unchanging.

00:54:56 ► §

That’s what God is.

00:54:57 ► §

So that’s what the artist is trying to convey.

00:54:59 ► §

I’ll be done.

00:55:01 ► §

Now, but there are many more layers of metaphor here

00:55:06 ► §

and the larger the number of layers

00:55:07 ► §

the more evocative the work of art

00:55:10 ► §

so for example

00:55:11 ► §

there is a ring of fire

00:55:13 ► §

and that represents the cyclical nature of the cosmos

00:55:16 ► §

of creation and destruction

00:55:18 ► §

punctuated by these flames

00:55:21 ► §

which represent the rhythm of time

00:55:23 ► §

the rhythm of motion in the universe.

00:55:25 ► §

And notice also, in his right hand is a drum, a tambour,

00:55:30 ► §

which beats the universe into creation.

00:55:32 ► §

It represents the rhythm of the cosmos, and also the rhythm of his dance, of course,

00:55:38 ► §

and the pulse beat of animate matter,

00:55:41 ► §

all of which is being regulated by Shiva, with his right hand.

00:55:44 ► §

But notice on his left

00:55:46 ► §

hand, exactly balancing it out

00:55:47 ► §

is the flame of destruction.

00:55:50 ► §

So creation on the one hand

00:55:52 ► §

is balancing out destruction on the other

00:55:54 ► §

hand.

00:55:57 ► §

And then,

00:55:58 ► §

let’s go down to the other limbs.

00:56:00 ► §

That leg is what gives it

00:56:01 ► §

so much balance and poise.

00:56:03 ► §

It’s bent slightly at the knee.

00:56:05 ► §

And here below it is this hideous little dwarf, which is the dwarf of ignorance or maya or illusion.

00:56:13 ► §

And what is that illusion?

00:56:14 ► §

It’s the illusion that all of us shallow scientists have,

00:56:18 ► §

that the universe is nothing but the mindless gyrations of atoms and molecules,

00:56:23 ► §

and that there is nothing more. Okay?

00:56:25 ► §

And there is no deeper reality beyond appearances.

00:56:29 ► §

Now, what Shiva is saying is,

00:56:30 ► §

and then you have this illusion that you’re born,

00:56:32 ► §

you look at the world,

00:56:34 ► §

you engage in this lofty inspection of the cosmos as a self,

00:56:37 ► §

and then you disappear, you’re dead, it’s all gone.

00:56:40 ► §

Show’s over.

00:56:41 ► §

Okay?

00:56:42 ► §

So what Shiva is saying is, that’s the illusion.

00:56:44 ► §

You are not an aloof spectator

00:56:46 ► §

who comes here briefly and watches the universe.

00:56:49 ► §

You are part of this cosmic dance of Shiva,

00:56:52 ► §

of this eternal flux of events in the universe.

00:56:54 ► §

And once you realize that,

00:56:56 ► §

there is no fear of death.

00:56:57 ► §

And you are liberated.

00:56:59 ► §

And you seek solace.

00:57:00 ► §

He’s raising his left foot,

00:57:01 ► §

pointing to it,

00:57:02 ► §

saying,

00:57:02 ► §

seek liberation under my left foot

00:57:04 ► §

by destroying this demon of illusion and ignorance and arrogance. as he’s raising his left foot, pointing to it, saying, seek liberation under my left foot by

00:57:05 ► §

destroying this demon of illusion and ignorance and arrogance. And then he’s raising that hand

00:57:10 ► §

and saying, then fear not, because all will be well, and you will be liberated from the bondage

00:57:17 ► §

of illusion, from the prison of illusion, and achieve enlightenment. So all of that is conveyed

00:57:22 ► §

here. And to me, what’s especially beautiful is how

00:57:25 ► §

the abstract conception of God, there is no better instantiation of the abstract conception of God

00:57:33 ► §

than the Chola Brahms Nataraja of Shiva. Okay, not a personal God, but an impersonal Spinoza-like

00:57:38 ► §

God. And the English didn’t understand this, you see. Lord Birdwood, who came to India and looked

00:57:44 ► §

at this, referred to it. He looked at it, and he didn’t understand any of the see. Lord Birdwood, who came to India and looked at this, referred to it, he looked

00:57:46 ► §

at it, and he didn’t understand any of the metaphor, any of that,

00:57:48 ► §

nor even as a work of art,

00:57:49 ► §

and he called it a multi-armed monstrosity.

00:57:53 ► §

Okay?

00:57:53 ► §

Now, if I were around those days,

00:57:56 ► §

I would have asked him, hey, what about angels in Renaissance

00:57:58 ► §

art? You see, angels are

00:58:00 ► §

little babies that sprout wings.

00:58:02 ► §

Okay? And as a medical man,

00:58:04 ► §

I can tell you, humans

00:58:05 ► §

having multiple arms is anatomically

00:58:08 ► §

possible. It’s a staple of freak shows in the old

00:58:10 ► §

days. But babies sprouting

00:58:12 ► §

wings is not even anatomically possible.

00:58:14 ► §

Okay? So that’s

00:58:16 ► §

what, it’s a monstrosity, not that.

00:58:18 ► §

Okay? Okay.

00:58:20 ► §

So with that, we conclude, and all I wanted to

00:58:22 ► §

say is that

00:58:22 ► §

the,

00:58:24 ► §

in the old days when I got into this,

00:58:28 ► §

when I was in medical school and then I got into research, I was told of questions about the mind,

00:58:32 ► §

like what is consciousness, what is free will, what is art, how did language evolve,

00:58:37 ► §

how did abstract thinking evolve.

00:58:38 ► §

These are questions you should stay away from.

00:58:41 ► §

In other words, things which everybody is interested in, you stay away from.

00:58:43 ► §

Otherwise, you won’t get tenure.

00:58:45 ► §

Now, that’s true.

00:58:49 ► §

That was true once upon a time,

00:58:52 ► §

but it’s not true anymore. With all the

00:58:53 ► §

wonderful new toys we have, imaging techniques,

00:58:56 ► §

and by doing the right kinds of experiments

00:58:58 ► §

and the right kinds of patients

00:58:59 ► §

and people with anomalies,

00:59:02 ► §

perceptual anomalies, and

00:59:03 ► §

by asking the right questions,

00:59:05 ► §

you can really begin to solve these problems that,

00:59:08 ► §

until recently, have belonged to philosophers.

00:59:11 ► §

And you know how much progress they’ve made in three millennia.

00:59:13 ► §

Thank you.

00:59:14 ► §

Thank you.

00:59:22 ► §

I’m done.

00:59:23 ► §

Do you want me to field the questions or do you do it?

00:59:25 ► §

You can do it.

00:59:25 ► §

Okay.

00:59:28 ► §

So we have about, what, 10 minutes of questions?

00:59:31 ► §

Oh, a bit more.

00:59:32 ► §

Oh, good.

00:59:32 ► §

00:59:34 ► §

All right, everybody.

00:59:36 ► §

It’s wonderful you’re clapping so much.

00:59:38 ► §

Thank you.

00:59:39 ► §

Can’t stop them.

00:59:47 ► §

If you want to ask some questions questions you’ll have to stop clapping

00:59:48 ► §

it’s a fantastic applause for a fantastic talk

00:59:52 ► §

you almost sue us English right

00:59:53 ► §

yes I’m sorry about all those awful ancestors of mine

00:59:57 ► §

being so ignorant

00:59:58 ► §

I apologise on behalf of them all

01:00:02 ► §

right I’m sure you have lots of questions I apologize on behalf of them all.

01:00:06 ► §

Right.

01:00:07 ► §

I’m sure you have lots of questions,

01:00:10 ► §

and Tarama is happy to answer them for you.

01:00:12 ► §

So please, hands up.

01:00:13 ► §

Sure.

01:00:15 ► §

The question is, what about the other laws?

01:00:18 ► §

Well, I’m not going to go through all of them,

01:00:19 ► §

because it’ll take another half an hour,

01:00:20 ► §

but I’ll just mention one briefly,

01:00:22 ► §

and that is a very obvious one.

01:00:24 ► §

Some of these laws, by the way, are obvious.

01:00:25 ► §

Everybody knows about them. They’re just not being incorporated into one list. Some of these laws, by the way, are obvious. Everybody knows about them.

01:00:27 ► §

They’re just not being incorporated into one list.

01:00:29 ► §

Some of them, I think, are genuinely new,

01:00:30 ► §

like what I’m calling peak shift,

01:00:32 ► §

at least in the context of art.

01:00:35 ► §

So one example of a well-known principle is grouping.

01:00:37 ► §

What do I mean?

01:00:41 ► §

This is true both for visual aesthetics and for art.

01:00:42 ► §

What I mean by that is,

01:00:44 ► §

you see a Renaissance painting sometimes, you see a renaissance painting sometimes,

01:00:46 ► §

you have a little bit of blue here,

01:00:47 ► §

you have another blue here,

01:00:49 ► §

a person wearing a blue dress there,

01:00:50 ► §

some bit of blue sky here.

01:00:53 ► §

You use the same color everywhere in the picture.

01:00:55 ► §

And this is pleasing to the eye,

01:00:58 ► §

when you have things which are similar being grouped together.

01:00:59 ► §

Why is that?

01:01:01 ► §

Why do the artists use this? This is just, or, take just aesthetics, okay?

01:01:05 ► §

If you’re wearing a blue, a tie with some blue in it, you’re supposed

01:01:07 ► §

to wear a blue shirt. Well, I’m not, but

01:01:09 ► §

if you go to Nordstrom’s

01:01:12 ► §

and you buy a

01:01:14 ► §

blue, a red belt for a

01:01:15 ► §

lady and you buy a red belt, she’ll suggest a

01:01:17 ► §

red scarf, saying it groups.

01:01:20 ► §

Now, why is that? Is it just ad hoc

01:01:21 ► §

marketing hype? What is it,

01:01:24 ► §

right? Or is it telling you something about the brain? I think it’s telling you about the brain.

01:01:27 ► §

Let me explain.

01:01:31 ► §

Our brains evolved in camouflaged environments. Our ancestral primates

01:01:36 ► §

growing up in the treetops. Defeating camouflage

01:01:39 ► §

was what vision was all about. Finding a lion

01:01:43 ► §

up in the treetops

01:01:45 ► §

and avoiding him.

01:01:47 ► §

Hidden by a bunch of foliage,

01:01:49 ► §

what do you see?

01:01:50 ► §

You just see a bunch of

01:01:50 ► §

yellow lion splotches.

01:01:52 ► §

What the brain does is

01:01:53 ► §

it instantly says,

01:01:55 ► §

what is the likelihood

01:01:55 ► §

that these seven or eight splotches

01:01:57 ► §

are the same yellow by chance

01:01:59 ► §

and different objects?

01:02:01 ► §

Zero.

01:02:01 ► §

They all must be one object.

01:02:03 ► §

So let me group them.

01:02:04 ► §

You group them

01:02:04 ► §

and you see the outline. Whoa, it’s a lion. Let me get out of here. And you jump away. So let me group them. You group them and you see the outline.

01:02:05 ► §

Whoa, it’s a lion. Let me get out of here. And you jump away.

01:02:08 ► §

So it draws your attention. So in other words,

01:02:10 ► §

grouping, as soon as you successfully

01:02:11 ► §

group some elements on the basis of

01:02:13 ► §

similarity, sends a signal to your

01:02:15 ► §

limbic areas in the brain, your emotional centers,

01:02:17 ► §

gives you a jolt and say, pay attention.

01:02:20 ► §

And that’s what the artist is tapping into.

01:02:22 ► §

Little does

01:02:23 ► §

Van Gogh realize when he’s playing, painting his sunflowers or whatever, Monet painting his water lilies,

01:02:30 ► §

that he’s tapping into this principle enshrined in the architecture of the visual centers in your brain

01:02:36 ► §

because you are dodging lions up in the treetops.

01:02:38 ► §

That’s why he’s able to evoke those feelings in your brain.

01:02:42 ► §

Okay.

01:02:44 ► §

Did you hear the question, only… I’ll repeat it.

01:02:47 ► §

Despite your

01:02:48 ► §

apparently disparaging remarks

01:02:51 ► §

about philosophy,

01:02:53 ► §

what about Eastern

01:02:55 ► §

philosophy, Eastern

01:02:56 ► §

wisdom,

01:03:00 ► §

Upanishads, Vedas,

01:03:01 ► §

all of that? Well, my

01:03:03 ► §

criticism was mainly about academic philosophy.

01:03:09 ► §

Dare I say Western philosophy.

01:03:11 ► §

Okay.

01:03:11 ► §

I’ll apologize on behalf of all Western philosophers.

01:03:16 ► §

By the way, I once made up a riddle about Western philosophy.

01:03:21 ► §

What is all of Western philosophy?

01:03:24 ► §

I don’t know, Rama. What is all of Western philosophy? I don’t know Rama, what is all of Western philosophy?

01:03:27 ► §

Consists of unlocking, exhuming and recanting

01:03:32 ► §

what’s been said before and you shouldn’t get riled up

01:03:36 ► §

about it. So anyway

01:03:39 ► §

but going back to your question, with regard to some of the Eastern

01:03:43 ► §

traditions, I am very much

01:03:46 ► §

open to that and I

01:03:48 ► §

when I read this stuff

01:03:50 ► §

it makes a lot of sense, I see it more as poetry

01:03:52 ► §

poetic insight into the world

01:03:54 ► §

and into the human condition

01:03:55 ► §

more than anything else, it’s not the kind of

01:03:57 ► §

rigorous but dry academic philosophy

01:04:00 ► §

that you see post Plato

01:04:02 ► §

in western philosophy

01:04:03 ► §

philosophy is a broad

01:04:06 ► §

term. You lump a lot of things in it.

01:04:08 ► §

And I was only, and also there are some of

01:04:10 ► §

Western philosophy which I find extremely compelling

01:04:11 ► §

and interesting. You know, and I think that

01:04:13 ► §

it was just a frivolous remark, nothing more

01:04:16 ► §

than that.

01:04:18 ► §

Okay. That’s a very good

01:04:20 ► §

question. Does everybody hear that?

01:04:22 ► §

Okay, the question is

01:04:23 ► §

how do I paraphrase it um in the

01:04:28 ► §

eastern tradition they talk about the sense of oneness with the cosmos that you experience a

01:04:32 ► §

disillusion of self realizing that you’re part of the universe all the everything i was just talking

01:04:36 ► §

about the cosmic dance of shiva telling you that you’re not an aloof spectator coming here watching

01:04:41 ► §

the universe briefly that you’re part of the cosmic flux.

01:04:46 ► §

And the Eastern tradition strongly emphasized that.

01:04:48 ► §

And now you’re asking, in neuroscience, people are starting to get interested in that

01:04:51 ► §

and asking when the brain reacts to things, can you show,

01:04:55 ► §

when the person says, myself is now dissolving, I feel one with the cosmos,

01:04:59 ► §

do you see any changes in the brain?

01:05:01 ► §

Now, there are two answers to that.

01:05:02 ► §

One is that people have been

01:05:06 ► §

trying things like that, but the experiments are not usually done very well. Because what I find

01:05:10 ► §

is what I call the parallel worlds phenomenon, parallel universes, right? This applies to

01:05:15 ► §

holistic medicine. It applies to recreational drug use. It applies to Eastern meditation,

01:05:20 ► §

enlightenment versus Western science. And what happens is the people in western science

01:05:26 ► §

because some of it is flaky they debunk everything they say i don’t even look at it

01:05:30 ► §

on the other hand the eastern meditation people the gurus all of them they say we don’t give a

01:05:37 ► §

dilly squat about what the western scientists think it works for me so there is this constant

01:05:42 ► §

tension instead of an attempt to bridge these

01:05:45 ► §

by having a genuine dialogue,

01:05:47 ► §

the sort of thing Dalai Lama is now trying to do

01:05:50 ► §

and a few others, there’s this

01:05:52 ► §

constant tension caused by

01:05:54 ► §

a different language being used

01:05:55 ► §

and a lack of

01:05:57 ► §

intelligibility of one language

01:05:59 ► §

to the other language and a just

01:06:01 ► §

intolerance of one world

01:06:04 ► §

to the other world and all of these barriers need to be dissolved and that and it’s just intolerance of one world to the other world.

01:06:08 ► §

And all of these barriers need to be dissolved, and that’s what’s happening here.

01:06:15 ► §

Shall I repeat that?

01:06:19 ► §

Okay, the man who, when he looked at his mother, said she’s an imposter.

01:06:20 ► §

She’s not my real mother.

01:06:22 ► §

She looks like her.

01:06:25 ► §

But when he picks up the phone and she phones him, he says, oh mom, how are you?

01:06:28 ► §

Now what if she walks in and starts talking to him? Okay?

01:06:30 ► §

Well the answer is, you see the brain

01:06:31 ► §

uses a hierarchy of

01:06:34 ► §

precedence rules. It gives

01:06:36 ► §

more weight to some sources of information

01:06:37 ► §

than other sources of information. We do this

01:06:40 ► §

all the time, we just don’t realize it.

01:06:41 ► §

So here, the mother walks in and she

01:06:43 ► §

doesn’t look, doesn’t evoke

01:06:46 ► §

the sense of familiarity, but it sounds like his mother.

01:06:48 ► §

The vision will be given priority.

01:06:50 ► §

He’ll say, for some bizarre reason

01:06:51 ► §

she sounds like my mother, but I know she’s an imposter.

01:06:54 ► §

Okay?

01:06:56 ► §

Well, it is a striking

01:06:58 ► §

coincidence that

01:06:59 ► §

Shiva’s hand, right hand

01:07:01 ► §

is holding the tambour, and we know

01:07:04 ► §

musical rhythm and beat is a left hemisphere thing, controlling the right hand.

01:07:09 ► §

Okay?

01:07:09 ► §

And also creation, doing things, is a left hemisphere thing,

01:07:14 ► §

as opposed to receiving, you know, experiencing is more of a right hemisphere thing.

01:07:20 ► §

Or destroying is also a right hemisphere thing. So that’s the,

01:07:27 ► §

the artist has intuitively anticipated the ideas of modern neurology and neuroscience.

01:07:32 ► §

But remember, he has a 50% chance of anticipating it correctly.

01:07:38 ► §

Well, on that note, I think,

01:07:40 ► §

on that note, I think we’ll have to leave it.

01:07:44 ► §

There were lots more people who wanted to ask questions.

01:07:46 ► §

Speaking to a lot of you here, I know some of you have been quite pessimistic about scientists and science and the establishment and everything else. as well who is not afraid and not stopped by anybody from asking the really exciting questions

01:08:05 ► §

about consciousness and illusion and what it’s all about and art and strange weird phenomena

01:08:10 ► §

science is exciting and i’m very grateful to rama for making it so today

01:08:14 ► §

again i want to thank john hannah for inviting dr Ramachandran to speak at the 2003 MindStates Conference

01:08:27 ► §

and to JT for recording this wonderful talk for us.

01:08:31 ► §

As Susan Blackmore said at the end, it is rare indeed to find a person who can bridge the worlds of science, art, and philosophy,

01:08:41 ► §

as does Dr. Ramachandran.

01:08:42 ► §

And the audience that weekend certainly recognized this as well, because, at least in my memory,

01:08:49 ► §

Rama stirred that very psychedelic audience like no other speaker did that year.

01:08:54 ► §

And if his remarks just now stirred you as it did us, well, I hope you’ll go to his website,

01:09:00 ► §

which you can find through that link on the Wikipedia article that I mentioned earlier,

01:09:04 ► §

which you can find through that link on the Wikipedia article that I mentioned earlier,

01:09:11 ► §

or on the psychedelicsalon.org blog, where I’ll post a link along with the program notes for this podcast.

01:09:17 ► §

I’d read that URL out for you, but it’s one of those long university addresses that are difficult to memorize.

01:09:22 ► §

Now, regarding synesthesia, you probably already know this, but there are some people who experience synesthesia while under the influence of ayahuasca or other psychedelic compounds.

01:09:30 ► §

Although this has never been my experience, I have been told, though, that it’s not at all uncommon for someone to have the experience when working with the vine.

01:09:39 ► §

And I’m also told that synesthesia can actually be induced by using certain techniques when under the spell of Lady Ayahuasca.

01:09:48 ► §

I’ve not tried them myself because I already have enough to cope with whenever I’m in an Ayahuasca circle.

01:09:55 ► §

And to tell the truth, I’m not sure what I would gain from actually having an experience like that,

01:10:02 ► §

other than to simply know what it’s like to see music

01:10:05 ► §

and to smell colors, as Terrence sometimes spoke about.

01:10:10 ► §

But it was interesting for me to hear Dr. Ramachandran explain the physiological basis

01:10:15 ► §

for this phenomena, and thus confirm that these tales actually do have a basis in physical

01:10:21 ► §

reality.

01:10:23 ► §

But one of the main things I’m taking away from this talk is

01:10:25 ► §

Rama’s comment about thinking people are crazy when he said, one of the things you know as a

01:10:31 ► §

physician is that when you think something is crazy, it usually means you’re not smart enough

01:10:36 ► §

to figure it out. You know, there are probably a lot of people who must be suffering from

01:10:42 ► §

synesthesia and other unusual perturbations in the brain and who think they’re going nuts when the truth is

01:10:49 ► §

that they may have an evolutionary advantage in some mysterious way.

01:10:54 ► §

So perhaps we should be exploring our own craziness to see if maybe there’s a

01:10:58 ► §

poet or an artist lurking deep down inside that is simply trying to express

01:11:04 ► §

herself or himself.

01:11:06 ► §

At least that seems to me to be a better way to approach our uniqueness

01:11:10 ► §

than to give up because we don’t seem to fit the roles others expect us to follow.

01:11:16 ► §

Find your gift. Maybe that should be our motto.

01:11:19 ► §

We all came here with something unique to offer,

01:11:21 ► §

and if you can discover what it is, in other words, find your gift, and then follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell often said, well, my hunch is that not only will you be better off, our entire species will be better off as well.

01:11:44 ► §

to some of the comments that have been posted on our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog.

01:11:49 ► §

One comes from our old friend and fellow salonner, Xochipilli2012,

01:11:56 ► §

who is also very active on the growreport.com forums and in their chat space.

01:12:00 ► §

One of the comments he posted on our site begins,

01:12:05 ► §

Hey Lorenzo, thanks for sharing another wonderful talk from our beloved Terrence.

01:12:09 ► §

Even though I already have most of the talks you have shared of his,

01:12:12 ► §

I enjoy listening to them again and again on the salon,

01:12:17 ► §

celebrating a collective experience in the knowledge that our brothers and sisters are also digesting and reflecting upon the themes therein.

01:12:22 ► §

Also, I always enjoy your comments, both before and after the main event, the best kind of fireside chat I can imagine. Thank you. encouraging your listeners to hear them for themselves, along with your intention to add some reflections of your own in a future Psychedelic Salon podcast.

01:12:49 ► §

I was so grateful to Dope Fiend for being so open about his own process,

01:12:53 ► §

so I very much look forward to your own insight on the subject.

01:12:59 ► §

Well, thank you for that, Zosia Peely 2012,

01:13:01 ► §

and before long you’ll be hearing my own reflections on that important podcast.

01:13:06 ► §

So, if you haven’t already listened to Dopecast number 103, which you can find at dopefiend.co.uk,

01:13:15 ► §

you might want to do so before I bring it up here in the salon.

01:13:19 ► §

Also, on the Grow Report forums, there’s an interesting thread under the Psychonautical Forum

01:13:24 ► §

that discusses Daniel Pinschbeck’s new book about 2012.

01:13:29 ► §

And I’m in agreement with the comments made by Mike Ra, Pound8Pound, LendoxPDX, and London Eye.

01:13:37 ► §

I think you guys are spot on and totally agree that Max Freakout resonates more with me these days

01:13:44 ► §

than does my friend Daniel.

01:13:46 ► §

Maybe we should encourage Max to write a book himself.

01:13:49 ► §

How about that, Max?

01:13:50 ► §

Maybe the time’s come for you to branch into print as well as podcasting.

01:13:55 ► §

At least give it a thought.

01:13:57 ► §

And thanks to Lewis for posting links on the psychedelicsalon.org blog

01:14:02 ► §

to a couple books that I mentioned in podcast number 115.

01:14:06 ► §

I know I promised to do that myself,

01:14:08 ► §

but I never got around to it.

01:14:10 ► §

So thanks for picking up on that, Lewis.

01:14:13 ► §

Also, I want to thank all of you

01:14:15 ► §

who have added the Psychedelic Salon as a friend in my space.

01:14:19 ► §

It’s really fun for me to see new friends pop up

01:14:22 ► §

and to surf over to your pages

01:14:23 ► §

and learn a little bit more about some of

01:14:26 ► §

our fellow salonners and I appreciate

01:14:28 ► §

you taking the time to link

01:14:30 ► §

to myspace.com slash psychedelic

01:14:32 ► §

salon and I

01:14:34 ► §

look forward to learning about even more of you

01:14:36 ► §

in the year ahead

01:14:36 ► §

before I go I want to mention

01:14:40 ► §

that this and all of the podcasts from the

01:14:42 ► §

psychedelic salon are protected under the

01:14:44 ► §

creative commons attribution non-mercial Share Alike 3.0

01:14:47 ► §

License. And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or

01:14:51 ► §

suggestions about these podcasts, please add them as comments

01:14:55 ► §

to the program notes on our blog so that our entire community

01:15:00 ► §

can get involved in these discussions. Or you can also post your

01:15:04 ► §

thoughts on the Psychedelic Salon forum,

01:15:06 ► §

which you can find at thegirlreport.com,

01:15:08 ► §

where I also spend some of my online

01:15:10 ► §

surfing time each week.

01:15:12 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo,

01:15:14 ► §

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:15:16 ► §

Be well, my friends. into the light into the light into the light of the naked truth