I just returned from the world premiere of an opera based on Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. With music by Ned Rorem and a libretto by J.D. McClatchy, this opera is lovely, emotionally moving, and I thought very true to the spirit of the play. I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between different art forms: how they are similar, where they differ, and how they are related to each other. I was impressed and intrigued by the way the libretto distilled the essence of the play; even though some scenes and characters were cut, the elements that gave such meaning to the story were all there. The music was gorgeous; in the last act in particular, I thought that the way the dead sang was somehow what they really would sound like, if they could sing and we could hear them. The whole experience captured very well the core emotions and experiences of the play, which to my mind is an excellent expression of what it means to be thinking meat. It was very satisfying to see the play transmuted so well into another art form. Afterward someone, I think McClatchy, said something to the effect that at the heart of the play was the emotions in Emily’s heart, and if the creators and cast and crew had transmitted those emotions to us so that we experienced them too, then they had done their jobs. That struck me as a pretty good description of one of the roles of art.

This afternoon I heard Ronald Green, an ethicist from Dartmouth, give the 2006 Sims Lecture for the Poynter Center on the IU Bloomington campus. His topic was “Babies by Design? The Ethics of Gene Enhancement.” It was a good lecture, hitting most of the interesting questions regarding the possibility that at some point in the future, humans are going to be able to tinker with their own genetic makeup or even their own evolution. The most interesting area of discussion, and what I’m mostly focusing on below, is the area of germline changes (i.e., changes that affect not just the person receiving the treatment but his or her offspring), and in particular those that are aimed more at enhancing life rather than removing disease.

One of the questions afterward had to do with evolution, and what it would mean to take the “natural” out of natural selection. Green responded with a couple of points; for starters, we evolved for a different landscape from the one we’re in so perhaps it makes sense to adjust our genome to better suit our current environment. For example, we have in some sense adapted to food scarcity, so that abundance can be hard to live with and many people become obese. What if we could re-engineer our genome to remove the tendency toward obesity? This might be important especially because obesity doesn’t necessarily kill people before they reproduce, so I suspect the selection pressure against it is relatively small. What gives me pause is the possible unintended consequences, about which more below.

His other point stuck in my mind because it had just come up in a conversation with a friend. Evolution is about surviving long enough to reproduce, and so some of the things that matter to us don’t matter to evolution. Green added that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to help evolution along and provide some of the things for ourselves that evolution doesn’t care about, like a healthier post-reproductive lifespan. He mentioned a cryptoreligious thread in discussions of evolution, the idea that our nature and our genome are given to us by God, and therefore sacred, something we should not tinker with. However, I don’t think you have to be religious or believe in God to feel deep reservations about the wisdom of changing our genome. What worries me is whether we have adequate knowledge and humility and foresight to do better than nature at creating ourselves–not because nature is sacred, but because of the complexity of the systems involved.

Obviously we intervene in nature all the time; I live in a climate-controlled building and wear glasses and take a calcium-channel blocker for hypertension, for example. But it’s obvious that in improving human life and rearranging nature more to our liking, we’ve damaged the natural systems we rely on for clean air, drinkable water, and livable weather, not to mention the toll we have taken on other species. We haven’t found a balance between improving our lives and living sensibly and sustainably within the bounds of the planet on which we depend. Given our cavalier and reckless treatment of the biosphere, why assume we would be any less short-sighted or selfish or ignorant when dealing with our genome?

Furthermore, even though the human body is far from perfect, the limitations we’d face in improving it are not that different from those faced by the evolutionary forces that created it in the first place over generations of compromises and contingencies, and we don’t yet understand very well the trade-offs and interactions that went into making us who we are. We’re not intelligently designed; we’re cobbled together out of whatever worked in previous generations, plus whatever was suboptimal but not bad enough to outright kill previous generations, plus a lot of things that don’t matter one way or another to evolution but arose as byproducts of something else. I sometimes think the human body is like a generations-long software project that has accreted all kinds of mysterious bits of code for which the purpose is not obvious. Things are connected in ways that are not clear; old structures or processes are pressed into performing new functions. The human body is in some ways an amazingly complicated Rube Goldberg contraption, and I don’t think we understand it nearly well enough to improve our genome significantly.

Several years ago my son was watching a nature program on TV while I was doing housework. As I moved in and out of the living room, all I caught was an occasional sentence or two from the show, totally out of context; one of these, intoned in a portentous nature-show voice, was “But mating is a risky business.” Although I’m sure the show was not about humans, I had to agree. But if you think humans sometimes have it tough, consider the Australian cuttlefish.

The male/female ratio is drastically skewed, with as many as 10 males for every female. The big strong males can fight off competitors if they can persuade a female to mate with them, but the smaller guys try a smart trick instead. Cuttlefish are able to make astonishing changes in their appearance to disguise themselves from predators; on TV once I saw what looked like a video of some kind of plant sitting on the sea floor, until part of it seemed to turn into a cuttlefish and swim off. Even after the video sequence was replayed, I couldn’t believe my eyes. So a small male cuttlefish transforms himself into what looks like a female, so he can sneak past a larger male and get close to the female that the bigger fish is guarding. The big fish doesn’t chase him off, because presumably he appreciates having another female, but the smaller male then has a chance to mate with the real female.

The really surprising thing is that the females prefer these guys, being more likely to mate with them and, more to the point, let their eggs be fertilized by them. I’ve wondered about the brains of cuttlefish; I saw the video of that magical transformation on a show about looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, and the point was that there are plenty of complex brains down here that would never be apparent to anyone on another planet; some of them are barely known to those of us who live on this one. The cuttlefish have some huge number of chromatophores that change color and size to allow them to make dramatic changes in appearance, and their brains, the processors that control all of the chromatophores, have to be fairly large and sophisticated. I don’t want to anthropomorphize these female cuttlefish and cheer them on for choosing wit over brute force, but it is a cool story anyway. (And as I recall, the reason the cuttlefish have this elaborate system of mimicry in the first place is that they have few other defenses; their success against predators lies in craft rather than force. That’s one reason I find them so interesting.) The only down side for the small males is that sometimes they look so convincingly female that a larger male will try to mate with them. Nobody said it would be easy. After all, mating is a risky business.

You can learn more about cuttlefish and other cephalopods at the Cephalopod Page.

Sometimes I have a terrible time making a decision. I remember when I was younger being advised to make lists of the pros and cons for each side and then somehow weigh them up and come to a conclusion, but the act of weighing them up is mysterious in the extreme, because when you’re making a difficult decision, you’re often having to consider trade-offs among things that are close to being equally desirable. Here’s some recent research that suggests that for the big decisions, the kind you tend to sweat, it can be better not to spend too much time on the conscious analysis, but to let your subconscious come to its own conclusions. Test subjects were given information about products and told they had to decide which one to purchase; spending time weighing the options led to better decisions for relatively trivial purchases like shampoo, but when people had to make big decisions, they were better off for spending some time with their conscious minds distracted while their subconscious evidently pondered all the data and made a decision. (They made better decisions in the sense that they were happier with them later.) The people needed to be aware that they were going to have to come up wth a decision in order for this to work.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know if there’s similar processing going on or not, but I’ve found that when I work for awhile on a piece of writing, if I give my mind some material to chew over and then go do something else, like take a walk or scrub the floors, I will find fresh ideas for the writing starting to come to me. Maybe this is also why names that you forget come back to you later after you stop trying to remember them. Or why I so often get NPR’s Sunday word puzzle when I’m in the shower.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn8732.html

You know how time can shrink and expand in your brain; there are times at work when I look at my watch and it’s 2:30, and then I look again what seems like hours later and it’s 2:45. (Those are usually Fridays.) But on days when I’m busy, it will be 2:00 before I’ve even had time to think about lunch. Evidently distance is also a flexible concept in the brain, with variables like familiarity with a route and its intrinsic interest playing a role in our perception of how long a distance is. This news story from Nature describes some research into the way people estimate distances and how that’s influenced by their familiarity with a route. It’s interesting that according to this, people generally find an unfamiliar route shorter, but when I’m driving someplace for the first time it usually seems longer going out than coming back (i.e., the route feels longer when it’s less familiar). I have thought that maybe this had to do with not knowing how to judge where I was along the way, so I can’t break the trip up into stages in my mind or watch for milestones, and it winds up seeming longer. But of course I’m just one data point.

It seems a bit strange, but somehow I’ve lived all these years without reading or seeing Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town until this afternoon. I had the idea that it was a nostalgic piece about a simpler time, but that’s not it at all. For one thing, the play contains plenty of bitter truths and does not present a sanitized vision of “the good old days”. The lack of props and sets, the stage manager who addresses the audience, the simultaneous presence of past and present and future: these were all revolutionary when the play was first written, and I think Wilder used them to capture some fascinating truths about how consciousness works and what art is for. Wilder wrote, “I regard theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” I’ve thought before that art helps us deal with being thinking meat, and this to me describes one of the ways that art works. I don’t know why it’s so important to share our experiences of what it means to be human, but it is. Maybe it helps teach us how to live well, but I think more likely the most important thing it does is to alleviates the loneliness of being a conscious animal.

Wilder continues, “The supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always now on the stage.” Somewhere (I wish I could remember where) I read that the subconscious doesn’t know time in the same way that the conscious mind does. For the subconscious, everything is now. This is why it can feel so astonishing, even years after the fact, that someone close to us has died and is no longer here. In our subconscious mind, that person is still here, so how can she be gone out there in the world? The shifting nature of time in the play felt connected to that subconscious eternal now. However, Wilder also writes of the “now” of the stage: “The personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being…” I am fascinated by this link between the arts and the study of human consciousness. Bernard J. Baars, in In the Theater of Consciousness, suggests that the scientific study of consciousness is an extension of what humans have been doing for centuries through the arts: “to apply the mind to its own understanding.”

The point of the play is that it’s a great gift to be here, in this moment and at this place, and that even the most mundane of events and objects are worthy of our attention and love. The catch is that except for “poets and saints”, it’s hard to realize this and appreciate the life you’re living while you’re in the middle of living it. These lines from another Wilder play, The Woman of Andros, express that dilemma: “…we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to live every moment…” Some spiritual traditions focus on mindfulness, an awareness of the present moment, which I think is the same thing as keeping our hearts “conscious of our treasure” and a wonderful goal. However, it’s true that it’s very difficult to live that way every moment. I guess all we can do is keep trying.

This article from the New York Times (free registration required) investigates the phenomenon of cuteness. You wouldn’t necessarily think this would be all that interesting, except that the evolutionary roots of a human preference for cuteness are mildly interesting in their own right and have grown some odd branches. The features that make up cuteness appear in very young humans (for example, round face, eyes set relatively low on the face, waddling steps), and they’re probably attractive to many of us because human infants are so helpless, and adults who responded to them with love and protectiveness were more likely to rear their young to adulthood.

The interesting thing is that we are so inclined to respond to those traits that we attribute cuteness to things that possess the traits for entirely different reasons. This article describes the physiology and anatomy behind the distinctive appearance of human babies, and why pandas and penguins look especially adorable to humans. This also describes the ways that marketers push the “cute” button to try to sell us stuff, making even cars (like the Volkswagen Beetle) cuter if they can. We humans are funny beasts, when you stop to think about it. (Of course not everyone responds the same way, and some of us get tired of cuteness after awhile, especially in things other than babies.)

One of the things I’ve always liked about Bloomington is the way you can hear birds singing. No matter what part of town I’ve lived in, it seems like I’ve always been able to hear birds singing somewhere nearby. Maybe it’s like that everywhere; I don’t know. One snowy morning years ago I walked to work and noticed a bunch of birds gathered on a power line, chirping and twittering. I wondered what they were communicating to each other. When I got to work, I saw my co-workers gathered around the coffeepot, chattering to each other about the cold weather. Maybe that’s what the birds had on their minds too.

Lately I’ve been noticing big flocks of birds wheeling through the sky, making great swooping circles in the air. “I wonder why they do that,” I said to my friend Mark. “They do it because they can,” he replied. Fair enough; we humans do plenty of things because we can (think of the Olympics, or of mountain-climbers). Yesterday as I was walking downtown, I got to see a bird gathering up close: groups of birds overhead, and a couple of trees which were full of birds, maybe a couple of hundred of them silhouetted in the bare branches against the gray sky and chirping energetically. I stood for a moment admiring the dark clouds of airborne birds and the swirling beauty of their motions. I noticed that the trees behind me had fallen silent, and turned just in time to see every bird in them take wing in one concerted movement, joining the birds in the sky and flowing up the street like a river of birds. They passed directly overhead; I had never seen so many birds in one place before, and I was reminded of the huge clouds of passenger pigeons that darkened the sky, in the days before humans wiped them out.

I thought that was my avian encounter for the day, but after I had stopped at the union building in the central part of campus, I stepped outside into another gathering of birds. One group flew overhead and settled briefly in the trees directly ahead of me as I watched, transfixed. We were on the edge of Dunn Woods, a pretty wooded area surrounded by classroom and administrative buildings, and the air and the trees were full of birds. Again the birds in the trees fell silent and, cued by some signal that I couldn’t comprehend, took to the air with a great rushing sound. There were so many that I could hear the beating of their wings as they flew into the woods.

The clock in the tower was striking 2 and I hadn’t had my lunch yet, but I followed them into the woods. I stood for probably 20 minutes watching them. No matter how many birds were perched in the trees, there were always other birds flying over in steady streams or little eddies, a welter of birds landing and taking off. Several of the trees acted as bird magnets; I’d see a small black cloud detach itself from the flow, descend and land briefly and then take to the skies again. The cacophony of their conversation was incredible. A wave of new birds arrived, and then another. There were far more than I’d seen earlier. Another silence fell, and again the noise of a great wind arose as the birds all took flight. They flew a sweeping semi-circle over the treetops and then settled raucously a little further away, further into the woods. I started walking toward downtown again, slowly, pausing often to watch the birds. A minute or two later, they all took off one last time, filling the sky to the south. This time they went so far that I couldn’t hear them any more, and didn’t see the next place they landed. They left me gazing skyward and wondering what that was all about.

I don’t know what kind of birds they are, or why there are so many of them here. It’s possible that they are starlings, which were imported to this country from Europe sometime after the passenger pigeons were gone. From what I can gather, starlings have developed into something of a pest and a threat to native species. Whatever these birds were, though, I was moved to see this great gathering of creatures and their mysterious communication with each other and their equally mysterious patterns of movement. As intriguing as it is to speculate about possible life on other planets, there is plenty to occupy our minds in learning about the other life on this planet.

This press release from Princeton describes some research into what happens in the brain during the act of remembering. Volunteers were shown a series of pictures and then asked to remember them; while they were recalling the images, their brains were scanned and pattern-recognition software applied to the brain scans. Researchers found that the patterns of brain activation during recall tended to move toward the same pattern as when the images were first viewed. Furthermore, the researchers could identify patterns that corresponded to a particular type of object and could watch a participant’s brain moving toward that pattern and thus identify what the participant was about to recall, before the participant actually remembered it.

This seems relevant to the idea that one way to remember something is to put yourself back into the context in which you knew it in the first place, like when you forget what you were going to say and run back over what you were thinking of at the time. And maybe this has something to do with why smells or sounds can be so powerfully evocative of times past; the sensual cues to a particular environment seem to pull a whole train of related memories with them sometimes. It also makes me think about the difference between an experience and the memory of the experience. There are memories that I would give a lot to be able to go back and relive, but no matter how many details you can recall and how much you can place yourself back in the scene, it’s never the same thing as actually being there. Once I dreamed that you could connect some kind of gadget to your head with wires and then view your memories on a TV screen. Rationally it might not make any sense, but it sure was a compelling dream.