Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Limericking the Muse

  I didn't publish anything in this blog during most of August.  New ideas simply weren't coming to mind.  You must know the feeling: you think until your head aches, and come up empty—the Muse has disappeared.  Despite being a rationalist, I cannot help believing in her existence; haven't I indeed dedicated my blog to her in its subtitle, Musings?  I wait impatiently to feel her presence, and panic when I don't.

  That rationalist in me keeps on saying, "Nonsense! Don't be so romantic," insisting that my "Muse" is just a small fold of brain tissue, the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), which I wrote about in May.  It functions subconsciously, apparently by obsessively searching for important but hidden relationships among the myriad fragments of data stored in the brain.  Images from fMRI machines show that it becomes especially active (finding a relationship?) a few seconds before a conscious insight, an Aha! moment.  It seems to be most active when one is relaxed, possibly daydreaming, as was Archimedes in his bathtub. 

  I do in fact find my musing most lively during that daydreaming half-hour or so before I am fully awake in the morning.  That is when my brain has started to return control to my pre-frontal cortex, the center of analytical thinking, which acts as a sanity check, an inhibitor of our most outrageous thoughts, a site of our conscience—a Jiminy Cricket who goes to sleep when we do, allowing the rest of our brain to run amok with phantasmagoria.  The half-awake arousal period is when Jiminy is drowsy too, so our thoughts flit back and forth with no apparent sense of order, yet not at the level of phantasms.  Inspiration is then in attendance, apparently guided by the aSTG.  "Sleeping on a problem" has yielded fruit.

  These are fascinating scientific perceptions, but insufficient to capture the sheer marvel of inspiration.  The romantic in me responds derisively to the rationalist: "You would expound on the diffraction of red light around the earth's limb to explain the awe I feel on viewing a gorgeous sunset!"  I throw my lot in with my romantic self and with the ancients, who saw the Muse's presence as a link to the wisdom of the gods, and who thanked Helios for sunsets.  Communing with the goddess is what musing is truly about, not the random firings of neurons.  As Hesiod said almost three millennia ago, "Happy is the man whom the Muses love: sweet speech flows from his mouth."

  Still, trysting with a goddess can be a love-hate relationship.  A goddess, yes, but also an unfaithful tormentress.  Here's what others have said:

“But the fact is, she won't be summoned. She alights when it damn well pleases her.  She falls in love with one artist, then deserts him for another. She's a real bitch!”  Erica Jong

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."  John Updike

I too have harbored such resentment.  When she vanished last August, I angrily wrote to her—she who traditionally listens more to poets than to writers of prose—in the only sort of rhyme I can handle, especially in her absence:

Oh! Muse, why didst thou desert me?
I so need thee to alert me
            In my waking dreams
            To splendid new themes.
How wouldst thou feel if thou wert me?

Art thou Erato or Clio?
I know not.  O Sole Mio!
            Whichever thou art
            Please mend my sore heart,
And revitalize my brio!

Wait! I have to end with a threat.
Know thou, if my plea is not met,
            Thine ears I'll assail
            With more doggerel
Than thou, my Divine, hast heard yet.

An offer thou canst not refuse!
Be quite sure, Olympian Muse:
            I can deftly kick
            Out more limerick
Should I decide thee to abuse!

  Fearing, I suppose, my spewing out more such claptrap, the Muse returned.  Just the same, I realized I'd offended her, and became more anxious than before.  I'm increasingly at her mercy, more tormented by her infidelities.  She drives me so crazy that today, when she has distanced herself again, I am trumpeting my anger to the world at large. 

  Whatever am I doing?  Publicly offending a mortal woman is more than any man should dare, but a goddess?  Maybe I've really done it this time!

  No!  Spurned lover that I am, I'll stand my ground.  I only wish I'd had the courage to make my limerick bawdy, as this anonymous one advises:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical.
            But the good ones I've seen
            So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

I guess I'm insane enough to insult the Muse, not so insane as to insult her obscenely.

  Last August, I conjectured that the Muse was merely on summer holiday.  That seemed to be the case, for she returned in September.  Maybe she is on winter holiday this time, and will return in January despite my impudence.  Zeus! if ever a father has influenced a daughter, intercede for me with yours!

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Getting from A to Z

  Some of us, very methodical in solving problems, get from A to Z in 25 diligently organized steps.  Others get there in intuitive leaps, from A to K, then to Q, then to Z, perhaps backtracking a bit along the way when confused.  Neither process is definitively better, for methodical and intuitive people can be equally creative and successful in working things through.

  I am reminded of the two sons of good friends of mine—call the older S1 and the younger S2.  S1 is  systematic in the way he tackles tasks, S2 is instinctive.  Many years ago, when S1 was about 10 or 11, he got a new computer for Christmas.  As he unpacked it, he immediately went to the instruction manual, not only to check whether all the components were there, but to prepare to assemble them.  S2, three years younger, simply started to plug the parts together and had the computer operational before S1 was even a few pages into the manual.  The two are equally smart.  I used to fault S1 when he wrote an essay because he would assemble more information than he needed to sustain his theme.  I used to fault S2 because he left out convincing arguments that were obvious to him, although maybe not to his audience.

  I am one of those who likes eventually to visit every letter in the alphabet.  If I make an intuitive leap over some of them to enhance my understanding and project my path to Z, I then force myself to go back and systematically fill in the gaps to verify that my intuition hasn't led me astray.  That used to drive my late wife Helen crazy.  If I'd gotten an answer intuitively, she would wonder, why did I waste time shoring up the result analytically?  For her, intuitive leaps sufficed.

  I most assuredly endorse intuition as a method of attacking a problem, especially if it is preliminary to deeper investigation.  One of my postings in March, Intuition and Expertise, was indeed an essay in praise of it.  However, as I said then, I believe that intuition must be informed by expertise, and expertise comes only through arduous practice.  A chessmaster can in a flash intuit the course of a game many moves in advance by just glancing at the board, yet only because of years of hard effort.  An amateur's intuitive move is likely a mere stab in the dark.  Even my friends' son S2 assembled that computer so quickly because he had spent years of his earlier youth plugging electrical circuits together just for the fun of it, so he knew what made sense.

  Helen would also complain when I carefully plotted a route through a strange country, usually planning a fast, minimum-distance drive along autoroutes: A to Z in a trice!  "Why not wander along byways and get lost?" she would say.  "Maybe we'll see some lovely, unexpected sights. We are, after all, tourists!"  Impatient as I habitually was to get to Z, I still had to admit that she had a point, at least for tourism.  When she prevailed over my sense of efficiency, we often did come across beautiful vistas, towns, churches and the like.  It's what I call discovery by meandering.

  Transposed to problem solving, discovery by meandering—in a usually vain hope for serendipity—is an ineffective heuristic.  I liken it to jumping through the alphabet at random, guided neither by method nor intuition, placing one's faith in a stroke of luck.  Even then, one must have a well-honed ability to recognize luck when stumbling upon it, an ability that is itself part of intuition.  Without it, an amateur chess player may miss a lucky opportunity in front of his eyes.  Being truly lucky is largely a matter of preparing one's intuition to take advantage of Fortune when she smiles, not of simply praying that she does.

  In my earlier posting on intuition, I described a grand old professor of mine at MIT, Professor Ernst Guillemin, a master of the intuitive method of teaching and learning.  I remember his presenting a paper at a symposium at a time when younger members of his field had turned toward proving results through methodical sequences of theorems.  He said, "I'm not going to try to present a series of theorems and lemmas to get to my results—I wouldn't know how.  But I'm pretty sure that I will be able to convince you of my results by showing you how intuitively reasonable they are."  And he did.  Because he was a grandmaster with decades of experience, he likely knew that his results were correct because his brain had flashed through all the intermediate steps subconsciously.  And even if he stumbled on a result by sheer luck, he immediately intuitively recognized its worth.

  Few of us are purely methodical or purely intuitive; most are a combination of the two.  Although some at the intuitive extreme, like Professor Guillemin, will be inclined to leave it to others to fill in the gaps to their satisfaction, most will themselves backfill with careful analysis.  Those toward the methodical extreme will usually be unsatisfied with a result unless it also appeals to their intuition.  I like to think that I fall about halfway along the spectrum, mixing intuition and method in equal measures. 

  Were Helen alive today, I imagine she would disagree with my self-assessment, instead placing me squarely among those who address life systematically at every step.  Luckily for me, that's probably one of the reasons I was able to catch her in the first place—I guess she intuitively wanted someone she could count on to methodically conduct our affairs.  If so, it was a good trade-off, for I much needed the spontaneity she brought me, which I now sorely miss.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Another Saint of Education

  The best of educators are by their nature dreamers, because they focus not on the here and now but on shaping generations to come.  That engagement with the future might explain why they accept payment for their work that is often inadequate for their own needs in the present.  I recently wrote about Chris Bischof, the founder of Eastside College Preparatory School in East Menlo Park, California, who is a paradigm of this commitment.  I've lately come across another: Anne Crowden, founder of the Crowden School in Berkeley, California, which is for young musicians.

  Last month, I attended a fund-raising reception for the Crowden School and Music Center.  I went mainly because of my fondness for the reception's hosts, not at all  knowing what to expect.  I got a beautiful earful: a string quartet of eighth-graders and recent alums from the school playing a work of a seventeen-year-old who graduated from it three years ago.  I don't know whether it was the acoustics of the hosts' living room, the beauty of the composition, or the sheer virtuosity of those very young players—likely a combination of the three—but I have never before been so immersed in and moved by a chamber-music performance, literally to tears.  I decided that I had to find out more about Crowden.

  I found a gem of education, figuratively sitting at my doorstep; I am sure that I have driven by it a thousand times without noticing it in plain sight.  On my visit, I encountered several dozen fourth- through eighth-grade pupils in their morning music lessons, practicing in ensembles.  Even in practice sessions, those nine- to fourteen-year-olds were playing as young professionals. 


The Crowden School

A sextet practicing with a teacher
  
  On a later visit, I saw the entire student body watching a performance of the San Francisco-based Alexander String Quartet, one of frequent guest visits by professional musicians.  It was exhilarating to watch: those youngsters were leaning forward in their seats, intensely absorbing every bow-stroke and fingering of the Quartet as it played a piece by Schubert.

  The school was Anne Crowden's dream and accomplishment.  A Scotswoman and concert violinist, she first played a stint with the Edinburgh String Quartet before joining the famed Netherlands Chamber Orchestra in Amsterdam.  The separations from her young daughter while she was on tour were too much for her to bear, however, so when a group of friends urged her to move to the Bay Area and offered to sponsor her for permanent residency in the United States, she felt in her bones that some good spirit was telling her something.  On that hunch, she moved to Berkeley in 1965, and was soon playing with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Opera/Ballet Orchestra, and chamber music groups at universities around the Bay Area.  The move sat well with her, and a bonus was that she was able to be at home for her daughter.

  Teaching music was always in Crowden's blood, a yen that was only partly satisfied by having a roster of private students and teaching at summer music schools.  Her dream was really to start a school for young musicians like those she had seen in London.  Such a dream, if it is to come to fruition, is the point at which dreamers must descend from the ether and face the constraints of reality—in this case, no money, no site, no students and no faculty, all wrapped into a giant chicken-egg conundrum.  It was an arduous multiyear task, juggling all those elements until they cohered, but with the help of many local parents and the endorsement of international musical luminaries, Crowden was able to complete it.  In 1983 she started Crowden School in a church basement with 13 students in grades six and seven.
 
  The rest is history.  Crowden School is now in its 30th year, since 1998 occupying its own spacious building, bought from the Berkeley School District and lovingly renovated.  I believe it is unique in the United States: a private middle school spanning five grades, in which pupils spend each morning on instruction in music technique, ensembles and practice, and each afternoon on academic subjects—English, math, science, history, foreign languages, etc., combined with music theory and history, and chorus.  Its  graduates go on to high school fully prepared for academic challenges as well as deeply educated in music.  Many later become professional musicians.

  The school is part of a subsequently formed umbrella organization, the Crowden Music Center, which also provides year-round music instruction and summer music courses for all ages.  Its Outreach program offers music classes at elementary schools in Berkeley and Oakland.  The Center has thus become a substantial multipurpose resource for the community.

  Anne Crowden's original vision for the school was for it to be tuition-free, so that talent alone would be the criterion for entrance.  Alas! that has not come to pass.  Of the annual budget of $1.4 million, about 19%—the totality of charitable donations received—is applied to tuition assistance for most of its pupils, who otherwise would not be able to attend.  The school currently cannot afford to assist all qualified applicants.  Were charitable donations to increase enough, enrollment could expand from the present 55 to the school's capacity of 75-80.

  At the reception that introduced me to Crowden, the rising American composer Sam Adams, who graduated from the school 12 years ago, gave a stirring appreciation of his five formative years there.  He also played a stereo recording of one of his works—a stunning piece of electronic music.  His comments, the recording he played, and a New York Times review of the recent San Francisco Symphony premiere of his orchestral work Drift and Providence tell a compelling story: that musical education at Crowden, although concentrating on chamber music, is a reflection of its founder's core belief in music's power to transform the soul, opening it to new vistas.

  I am sad that I will never get to meet Anne Crowden; she died in 2004 at the age of 76.  But I look forward to engaging with her legacy.  And I have added her to my personal pantheon of saints of education, where she joins Chris Bischof. 

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Eusociality

  Certain invertebrate species such as ants, in which individuals subordinate their own needs to those of the group, are said to be eusocial.  The term has also been applied more loosely to some vertebrate species, particularly Homo sapiens.  Unlike ants, though, humans act selfishly for their own survival and reproductive benefit as well as altruistically for the benefit of groups to which they belong.

  Eusociality is the thought-provoking subject of my book club's latest selection, The Social Conquest of Earth by E. O. Wilson of Harvard University.  Wilson is one of the world's leading biologists and probably its leading entomologist.  His lifelong study of eusociality in insect colonies led him to study it in humans, in order to explain how we came to dominate the biosphere.  In describing the difference between eusociality in ants and humans, Wilson wryly observed that "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species."

  A warning before I proceed: Wilson is one of the originators and a strong proponent of a controversial sociobiological theory which asserts that eusociality is dependent on evolution of groups as groups, a level of evolution above that of individuals.  As did Darwin with ant and bee colonies, he sees the group as a macro-organism, subject to forces of natural selection.  It is a top-down theory, in which the group selectively chooses as members those who express a set of innate altruistic traits favoring the group's success in competition with other groups.  Wilson is an equally strong opponent of an alternative evolutionary theory called kin selection, a bottom-up theory, which posits that altruistic behavior in groups evolves only because individuals in the groups already share family genes, and accordingly at times act selflessly to assure the perpetuation of their genes in others if not in themselves. 

  The argument literally rages.  Evolutionists Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago and Richard Dawkins of Oxford have unsparingly attacked Wilson [1,2].  In the remainder of this posting, however, I'll summarize some key points of Wilson's book as well as I can—it is not always easy for a layperson to follow.

****

  The development of eusociality is quite rare.  Of the many millions of invertebrate species, only a score or so have independently achieved it, the remaining species competing largely at the level of individuals rather than groups.  (Think flies and ants.)  Among vertebrates, eusociality is even rarer, having occurred in just a handful of species, including Homo sapiens.  Its appearance in ants has led to their dominance over the insect world, in humans to their dominance over the world at large.

  What is amazing, Wilson maintains, is that eusociality has occurred at all, for the evolutionary maze that leads to it is so extensive and full of twists and dead ends, that for any species to wend its way through the maze is something of a miracle.  After all, eusociality must get its rudimentary start in a species where the rule is selfish natural selection at the individual level, and selflessness/altruism the exception.  Still, ants and their precursors negotiated the maze successfully over many millions of years, as did the line of hominins leading to Homo sapiens in a somewhat shorter time.  Wilson describes the process as involving a long sequence of small evolutionary pre-adaptations over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, leading to a tipping point where the random mutation of as little as a single gene in an individual could start the final conversion to full eusociality.

  Eusociality in humans is of course very far from the extreme of the genetically homogeneous, fixed-caste behavior of ants, yet goes much farther than the social behavior of other vertebrates.  A critical competitive advantage of humans vis-à-vis other vertebrates is that they build defensible, multigenerational, task-allocating cooperatives to which members may have no genetic kinship.  Each community, Wilson says, selects for inclusion individuals who express a desirable subset of altruistic behaviors, most of which were already deeply ensconced in the human genome at the time Homo sapiens emigrated from Africa some 60,000 years ago.  The chosen subset reflects the evolved culture of the group.

  The tension in mankind between the opposing forces of individual/selfish natural selection and group/selfless selection is complex.  Genetic evolution in the former arises from competition between members of a group, in the latter from competition between groups. The two types of competition point evolutionarily in opposite directions because one requires selfishness and the other altruism.  Homo sapiens maintains a tenuous balance between the two because of what Wilson calls the "iron rule": selfish individuals beat altruistic ones, yet groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. 

  The relationship between genes and culture in eusocial groups is also a critical element in group evolution, Wilson asserts, and equally complex.  In building a culture, genes make available not just one trait as opposed to another, but patterns of traits that together define the culture.  The expression of multiple traits is plastic, allowing a society to choose an ensemble from many available combinations, the choices differing among societies.  Wilson contends that the degree of plasticity itself is subject to evolution by natural selection.  These concepts add another perspective to the nature/nurture question, very different, e.g., from one presented in a book by psychologist Bruce Hood that I discussed in my posting The Self.

   A final, quintessential point.  For Wilson, the indispensible requirement for the development of human eusociality—without which group selection could not have proceeded—is the primitively evolved instinct to form tribes.  He says that people feel they must belong to tribes for their existential sense of identity, security and well-being.  Eons ago they were small bands that hunted and gathered together, built encampments, and defended each other and their young.  Today, individuals join many interlocking tribes—city, country, religion, even sports teams—each commanding loyalty, communal effort, and competition with other tribes of the same genre.  In  this sense group evolution is bilateral: groups select individuals based on group needs, and individuals choose groups based on their own needs.

  As evidence that the tribal instinct is extremely deeply embedded in the species, Wilson cites a recent experiment showing that, when pictures of out-group people are flashed in front of experimental subjects, their amygdalas—their brains' centers of fear and anger—activate so quickly and subtly that the conscious centers of their brains are unaware of the response.  Other experiments revealed that even when experimenters created groups at random, inter-group prejudice quickly established itself, subjects always ranking the out-group below the in-group.

****

  Many of the ideas in Wilson's book are indeed controversial, and at times I found them alternately too detailed or too sketchy.  Still, it is a feast for thought, which has forced me to reconsider some previous musings in this blog.

  First, the deep-seated need for tribal association undermines my conjecture in a recent posting, where I discussed tribalism/clannishness and what I called their antithesis, "anticlans."  I suggested that tribalism might be ready for obsolescence in our modern, globally hyper-connected society.  I was of course out of my depth, and therefore took to wild speculation.  I asked whether the modern obsessive inclusiveness of social-networking activities could lead to a widespread "we're all in it together" anticlan behavior, which over the long run could evolutionarily trump the exclusionary, "we vs. them" behavior of clans. 

  I think Wilson would answer my question with a definitive "No."  He spends just one paragraph of his 350-page book noting that the increasing interconnection of people worldwide through the internet and globalization weakens the relevance of ethnicity, locality, and nationhood as sources of identification.  Tribes may wax and wane and sources of tribal identification may shift, but Wilson would hold that tribalism itself will survive, overwhelming anticlan behavior just as it has always defeated less-tribal species.  Bummer.

  Second, the almost-impossibility of negotiating the evolutionary labyrinth to yield a species like Homo sapiens sheds further light on my posting on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI).  In a catalog of obstacles to the success of SETI, I listed the rarity of a star having a planet capable of hosting life at all, much less an advanced civilization that was existent at a time when electromagnetic radiation from it might be detected by us now.  If Wilson is correct about the very remote possibility that Homo sapiens could have evolved on Earth, the odds against there being a similar one extraterrestrially are even larger than I thought.  Could we therefore be alone in the Galaxy, dare I say in the universe?  We'll probably never know.  Bummer again.

  I sometimes wish that newly developing scientific theories didn't get in the way of one's fondest hopes.