Artscience (Part 1): How do we define this weird thing?

Many luminaries of the European Renaissance toed the line between science and art. You're of course thinking about Leonardo Da Vinci right now, because of course. But "artscience" is hardly a thing of the past, and many scientists and artists now are following that same interdisciplinary approach. As a result, many people have been trying to define this weird concept, and in my estimation, many are failing (please see the resoundingly meh first sally in this realm, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation by David Edwards. It was a nice try, but meh). So, I'm now going to try. Artscience: what the hell are you people talking about?

One of the biggest hurdles in defining artscience is that it's so incredibly broad. Are you talking about it as a field of academic research? Are you talking about sciencey art or artsy science? Are you talking about what makes art good? What? I'm going to start my definition by discussing the first question, artscience as a field of academic research. This field can be defined as the examination of the cognitive (and sensory) experience of producing and consuming art. There are a few labs out there researching this concept (like my favorite, the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University), who are most likely busy all the time (if they can get the funding) because of the vast area that this field encompasses. To research artscience is to research: cognitive function, the evolutionary role of art, how different cultures define art, how we produce different types of art, how we consume different types of art, etc. Too many.

Now how about sciencey art and artsy science (and STEAM)? This is, again, super broad. We can talk about my friend who's an art restorer for the Smithsonian, whose tricky work involves sooooo much chemistry and scientific experimentation in order to avoid doing this:

We can talk about wildlife photographers developing robots to go where people can't go, we can talk about scientists developing new neuroimaging techniques, we can talk about Nikon's Small World competition, we can talk about artists like Guhapriya Ranganathan who produce art inspired by neural structures. Hell, we can even talk about Jackson Pollock. Again, it's so damn broad that we can talk about all of this stuff and get nowhere.

Now onto what makes art good, or appealing. Yes, it's subjective, and yes, it's hard to distill, but is it worth talking about? So we know some things from the realms of art history and sensory perception. We like art that falls under the rule of thirds, we like Escher's art because it plays on the quirks of our sensory system, we like art that makes us feel something. There are even those little quizzes with pictures that are supposed to tell you what kind of person you are based on which one you like the best. "Why do we like some art and not others?" is that "reach" question, much like "what is consciousness?" and once we get past answering the first two questions, maybe neuroimaging and behavioral studies are the answer. 

Don't get me wrong - as a cognitive scientist AND dance artist I love this kind of stuff and am willing to discuss it ad nauseum. But like the cognitive scientist I am, I really want us to truly define what we're looking at before we go any further. 

Stay tuned for the next part of this series, Artscience (part 2): Music. 

Pinkifying Science: Where it comes from and why it's ingrained

We've all seen efforts to market products to girls, and they all seem to look like this: paint it pink, give it a girly name, put some relatable pretty girls in the ads, and there you have it.

Case in point.

So it should come as no surprise to see the same approach applied to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math, in case you weren't sure and have just reached a point where it's gone on too long and you feel weird asking) advocacy. Efforts to tie girly things like cheerleading and makeup to STEM may cause me and other females knee-jerk reactions, but is it as ill-advised an approach as we think (and for the reasons we think)?

It seems that STEM education is in such a dire state that all approaches to advocacy involve some sort of "gloss". Sports, cute things, movies, explosions, etc. are being used to get kids (and adults) interested in STEM. If we unpack this approach, it seems like the more effective approaches scream, "hey, this thing you already like? THAT'S STEM!!!" 

So clearly the assumption is that girls like cheerleading and makeup. And while all us female scientists cry foul at that, because OBVIOUSLY you can like STEM and still keep all your female naughty bits without having cheerleaders tell you that you can, we should remember back to the points in our childhood where we wanted "the girl toy" from our McDonald's Happy Meals and wanted to be just like girly girl Jessica Wakefield from Sweet Valley High. All kids go through a period where they are trying to establish their gender identities, which may lead little girls to wear pink and little boys to join Pop Warner leagues. As stereotypical as it sounds, these kids might go for it and lean into these gender identities...because they think they should. Little boys think they SHOULD play football, have GI Joes, and hate the color pink. Little girls think they SHOULD wear frilly dresses, play with dolls, and only go to the pink aisle in the toy store. 

And therein lies the problem. Just go to any toy store and count the pink aisles. One, maybe two. Now count all the other aisles. Please bear with me while I extricate my eyebrows from my hairline. 

The problem that plagues STEM advocacy for girls is the same problem that plagues toy stores: reduced access. So while girls are stuck playing with "appropriate" toys, namely dolls, that encourage them to nurture and beautify, boys play with:

• action figures
• Nerf and other toy guns
• Legos and other building toys
• Transformers (anyone who says that they're the same thing as action figures is going to have a punch in the face, courtesy of me)
• Big Wheels and other vehicles
• etc.

But wait, you say, can't girls play with these things too (the same question applies to boys playing with dolls)? Of course, and they do, but chances are they're going to be discouraged by parents, peers, and in time they'll internalize all of that and start discouraging themselves, and go ahead and ask for that pink doll (I'm sorry, I never really had dolls, so I assume that's a thing.) The problem is sociiiiiiiiietyyyyyy, maaaaan. 

The same applies to STEM advocacy. OF COURSE girls and women can like sports, movies, explosions, video games, projectile weaponry (some of my favorite things, actually)...and STEM. STEM advocacy groups just need to increase female access to ALL narratives, to break down these SHOULDS that originate in childhood. Show us a woman who designs video games, builds weapons, crunches numbers for a pro sports team, etc. And at the same time, show us a man who's a nurse or social worker. No part of STEM is off limits to ANY gender. 

Except maybe dildo model. Is that STEM?

De-Extinction: A New Hope for Wonder

It made me laugh, alright?

I recently had the opportunity to attend TEDxDeExtinction in DC, an event that brought together conservation biologists, synthetic biologists, and others to discuss reviving and restoring extinct species. Since the event, the response has been overwhelmingly negative, with most people focusing on the process of de-extinction:
1. Finding or generating the extinct organism's DNA
2. Creating an embryo
3. Finding a suitable surrogate
4. The surrogate gestating the embryo to birth
5. The organism surviving for longer than a few minutes after birth
6. Finding the proper habitat for that organism
7. Repeating the process for several organisms so they're able to reproduce
8. Observing and measuring the effect of their reintroduction on the ecosystem, etc.

Clearly, that's a lot of steps, and clearly, there are many possible points of failure, so picking this process apart is like shooting fish in a barrel, which is what everyone is doing now. But why? I think we must be discussing all of this because it's all we CAN do, because right now? We're pre-step 1.

I posted a while back lamenting the loss of wonder in our society. With the moon landing many many years behind us and all other discoveries and advancements seeming far less glorious in comparison (can we get a little excitement over the Higgs Boson, people being cured of AIDS, and the samples being collected by Curiosity, please?), it's been seeming like we as a society just can't get excited over science anymore. That is, until you walk up to someone and tell them that the work being done by synthetic biologists today might be able to (eventually) bring back the woolly mammoth. Or the dodo. Or the tasmanian tiger. Or the passenger pigeon. I'd be willing to bet that, after they get the requisite Jurassic Park references out of their system, they'd be kind of excited. Maybe even really excited. And the person I was imagining in that scenario is an adult. Try telling that to a kid.

I'm pretty sure that, after you rehinge all your limbs and regain your hearing, you'll find that kid researching their favorite extinct animal, trying to learn as they can process about synthetic biology, and putting together science fair projects about what they've found. They might go and ask their parents for woolly mammoth pajamas, bedsheets, and posters, just like kids in the '60s asked for rockets, astronauts, and robots. And this kid might eventually go to school to become a synthetic biologist.

With all of our talk of the leaky STEM pipeline, I really wonder what there is to gain by squelching the underlying hope of de-extinction. Are we somehow worried that these synthetic biologists FORGOT how to do real science? Y'know, with experimental replication and peer review? Are we worried that this will take funds away from those of us doing "approved" science? Because I gotta tell you, the pot of funding for ALL science is shrinking. Fast. So clearly, efforts to just keep up the status quo and go for applied research the way we have been isn't helping to punt more grants our way.

All I'm asking is for some understanding of how powerful hope and wonder can be in propelling people to do things. Initial skepticism in the absence of data should not be a deterrent; I'm sure there were many people fearing a trip to the moon would yield space invaders or something, and were making arguments like the ones in this article from 1963. But we did it anyways, and look what came of it: technological innovations, increased knowledge, and kids diving headlong into STEM. We need another moon landing, and de-extinction could be it.

"Do you know Lat Pack?"

Charlotte: Why do they switch the r's and the l's here? 
Bob: Uh... for yuks. You know? Just to mix it up. 
Bob: They have to amuse themselves, 'cause we're not making them laugh. 

Ok, so it's time for me to address a myth that gets on my multilingual neuroscientist nerves, which is illustrated perfectly in the little section of dialogue above, from Lost In Translation. In our little American melting pot, we are confronted with the accents of non-native English speakers every day. While I'm not really going to address the idea that the near misses of the American pronunciation of English shouldn't be the object of ridicule (cause seriously, you try speaking Spanish/Chinese/Korean/Italian and see how you get made fun of. By the Chinese in particular. We're a judgey group), I feel it's important to give context for these near misses.

All humans are born with the ability to understand and produce any language...well...ever. As an infant, you have a full vocabulary of phonemes, which are the smallest component parts of all speech. Phonemes cover everything from the slight changes in mouth openness between an English "m" and "b" to the massive differences between vowel-heavy languages like Japanese and the consonant-heavy South African click languages. For example, in Chinese, we have different melodic tones for all our words. Mandarin Chinese has 4 different tones, known as yin, yang, sang, and chu, and they all carry a different musical note and emphasis (by the way, Cantonese Chinese has 9. I'm sure we're all great at singing). Each of these melodic tones is a different phoneme. As you grow and hear more and more of the same phonemes around you, you lose the ability to hear others. This is all part of a regular "pruning" process your brain goes through - why keep things around that aren't necessary? The pruning takes place pretty early - infants stop responding to other-language phonemes at about 6 months of age. 

Once your brain specializes in a language, those phonemes get reinforced. Each time you hear a hard English "b", your brain is reminded of what "b" sounds like. Same goes for the rounded English "r" and the lilting English "l". You start to expect those phonemes. So when you hear a lilting Japanese "r", and a rounded Japanese "l", they deviate so much from your understanding of r-ness and l-ness that you think they must be switched. Truth is, they're both just far closer to neutral than you expect. 

*Note: this is not scientific in any way, just a visual representation of my point.

Now, while it looks like they're not that far apart, one of the things this graphic doesn't capture is how reinforced your native phonemes are. Because your understanding of the hard American "r" is so reinforced that you expect a certain type of "r"-ness, the distance between the Japanese "r" and the American "r" becomes far more pronounced. This reinforcement/expectation ends up putting the lilting Japanese "r" closer to the American "l" on the spectrum. So, rather than looking at this graphic as a continuous flat plane, imagine the American "r" and "l" being valleys or vortexes. A native speaker would have to travel a farther distance to get from the American "r" to the Japanese "r" than it takes to get from the Japanese "r" to the American "l". The same thing happens with the rounded Japanese "l", which is understood by you as being closer to the American "r". 

So, basically, it's not them. It's you. 

The failures of math education

Last year, I was invited to participate in a panel on STEM careers, where my fellow panelists and I were posed this question: "I hate math. How do I get through it?" I nearly jumped out of my chair in excitement; I've fielded these questions from some of my closest friends and I was certain my fellow panelists had had the same experiences; I was really excited to hear what they had to say. But I have never been more disappointed than when I heard their replies: "Work harder." "Practice more." "Work harder AND practice more."

Of course, nothing against my fellow panelists, each of whom were accomplished scientists, mathematicians, and technology experts. Their only failing was making a singular assumption that is shared by many math educators--to assume that students don't WANT to do math, NEVER want to do math, and simply need to be encouraged to keep plugging away at the tedious, awful chore that is math so they can get to the fun stuff. Sadly, when you get a student who's run up against the same brick wall of math every year without any improvement, or worse, clarity, that's probably a safe assumption to make. But it really really really doesn't have to be this way.

Being someone who straddles the line between science and art, I'm surrounded by both math lovers and math loathers. Many of the math lovers would say they had a predilection for math from an early age (I'd put myself in this group) and just received the appropriate challenges and encouragement throughout their development. Their favorite areas of math fall all over the board (I'm big on algebra, myself). The math loathers are an interesting bunch, because many seem to all fall into a single category: people who only get geometry (and are often pretty dismissive of algebra). In other words, these are individuals who need math to be concrete.

It seems strange that algebra and geometry, two areas of math that cover the same types of functions, might generate such divisive reactions. But when you see this:

c² = 3² + 4²

Solve for c. 

But then see this: 

I'd be willing to bet you'd see a lot more people who could solve that function after seeing the triangle, because suddenly they can make sense of what that variable c is supposed to stand in for. You've taken a completely abstract concept and paired it with something concrete that students can see and understand the reasoning behind (FYI: high school math teacher Dan Meyer has a wonderful TED talk on this very concept here: Dan Meyer: Math Class Needs a Makeover). 

So my humble request of all you math (and STEM) educators out there is to PLEASE understand that there are very straightforward reasons why your students just don't get math, and forcing a single perspective on them is exclusionary and unfair, as is punishing them by having them do more homework because they aren't getting it. Your math curriculum shouldn't exclude concrete thinkers in favor of abstract thinkers for the same reason that you shouldn't exclude students of any race, color, or creed. 

I mean, duh.

Our lost sense of wonder

Very few people made it past the first four minutes of Pixar's Up without shedding a few tears. The classic story of lifelong love and loss touched more than a few hearts, and while it reached me too, nothing made me cry more than seeing young Carl's face light up at the sight of his hero, the famed explorer.

Why was I crying? At that very moment, I realized that that sense of wonder, awe, hope, and excitement simply doesn't exist anymore for kids growing up in our society. 

Of course, I might be wrong. In fact, I HOPE I'm wrong. I just worry that our new information-based culture doesn't breed that wonder anymore. 

Now you might ask why we need that wonder, why being able to find the answers to all our questions online (or what we think are all the answers) is a bad thing. 

1. Sure we can find all the answers to our questions. But what questions are we asking? 

There is a lot of material out there about how our current culture is building "tribes" of people over the Internet. So while we have access to all the information the world has to offer, we are selectively turning our attention to just a few tribe-minded things. The Fox News tribe won't necessarily interact with the Daily Show tribe, the Christian Science tribe won't foray into the Atheist tribe, and so on. You can probably see the problems that this causes. Interactions between these tribes are getting more and more heated because ideas are bouncing back and forth within them and gaining support, like a positive feedback loop. As a result, we are getting tribes that not only avoid the information and culture of other tribes, they are actively disdainful of them. "How DARE you question my beliefs when my WHOLE TRIBE agrees with me?" With each negative interaction that occurs, our curiosity about things we don't know outside of our tiny little tribes fades. We not only stop asking questions about things we don't know, we stop recognizing they exist. 

2. We don't learn things we don't already know anymore.

Nowadays, we get to pick through the information that we seek out or gets delivered to us. For instance, most of my news feeds involve neuroscience, STEM education, and art in some capacity, usually from sources that I know very well. These are busy feeds, and I usually have more than enough information to process, which leaves little room for anything else. I don't have the energy to seek out other topics like anthropology, archaeology, religion, food, or politics. But when it comes down to it, I SHOULD be seeking out those other topics; I know quite a bit about neuro, STEM, and art...I know next to nothing about those other topics. I can learn a lot from seeking out those other topics. But I don't. So I get to know a lot about a few topics reported from certain sources, and because I'm so full of information by that point, I think I know it all. 

3. We've become arrogant motherf*ckers.

Because when we know everything we think one needs to know, why not be a little proud of it? When all the information that is going to be found forever has been found and just needs to be spread around, the true glory resides solely in reporting. Who cares that the bar for the value of information has been lowered? When you are the one who got to a piece of information that your tribe values first, you WIN. When you make a video of your cat that goes viral, you WIN. When you make up the "Y U NO" meme, you WIN. Having seen many examples of this very thing, the only way we care to contribute to our society is being famous through the least amount of work possible.

4. We have very little to look forward to because we see our world falling apart.

I think that we'd all agree that the political atmosphere of the U.S. is massive disaster; politicians are so far removed from their constituents and so far in the pockets of lobbies and PACs that they often hold conflicting views (even individually) based on whoever is funding their campaigns. The voices of the extremists are becoming more and more audible (thanks, again, to the tribes of the information age), and it seems there's no place for reason or a median voice. As a result, ours is a country that struggles to get anything done when it comes to the ruling body. If the people we put in charge can't get anything done, what's the point of hoping that we can, or holding on to dreams?

All of this factioning, fighting, arrogance, willful ignorance, and exclusivity does nothing but kill wonder. Why wonder about anything if it's going to scare, shock, and maybe even anger me? Why bother to dream when we have all the information about whether that dream is even possible right here in front of us? Why dream of doing anything cool when nobody in MY tribe does anything different than I do, so clearly there's no such thing? What is left to explore that someone I don't know hasn't already explored and become the definitive authority on? Why make the effort to accomplish anything when you could be famous by doing nothing? And why bother, when your hopes get dashed by the ruling body of your country?

So it all comes down to one gigantic concept. MOTIVATION. We are not motivated to seek out new information outside of our tribes. We keep going to the same sources because there is just so much out there. So all of our already-held notions of what we personally and what we as a society are capable of are basically repeatedly validated for us, and we don't want anything else. We don't try because we think there is no point. When the late Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, none of us knew that was possible. None of us knew that humans could do that. And when we all saw it happen in front of our eyes, we started to dream of everything else we could do, stuff that we hadn't even begun to explore. 

You can blame science all you want - science brought us the Internet, science made us skeptical of extraterrestrial life, and science killed the hope of magic wands and wizardry and vampires. But it also brought us the space shuttle. It brought us Neil Armstrong. It brought us Curiosity. And it'll bring us the next thing that will open our eyes to a world we didn't think existed. We just need to keep our eyes open. 

I mean it. Open them up. 

Seriously. Keep them open. 

And watch some Doctor Who while you're at it. Wonder about Daleks or something.

Why "just do it the other way" is not sufficient

So way back when in my volleyball days, we had a few lefties on our team that ended up playing kind of "weird". Some of them would switch and play right-handed, and some would just do things really strangely. I remember a particular instance where our coach instructed us on how to "approach" before a spike, which is a distinctive runway/windup procedure that started with the left foot and ended with the feet at hip distance with the left foot slightly ahead, and our right arms ready to take a swing. The goal was to get the maximum amount of torque force initiating from the left oblique abs so not all the load force of contacting the ball was directed into the right arm (sorry, former biomechanics research-speak taking over!); this "approach" is essential to decrease the incidence of torn rotator cuffs and dislocated shoulders. The coach even impressed upon us how important it was to not just jump from a static standing position. So when the coach finished his instruction for us righties and said, "and you lefties, just do it the other way"...that didn't really seem sufficient.

The truth is, no matter which is your dominant hand, your "handedness" or "sidedness" is in no way interchangeable or transferable. Many vital functions of your brain "live" in one hemisphere and not the other (e.g., Broca's and Wernicke's areas, which are responsible for speech production and speech processing, respectively, live in the left frontal and temporal lobes). The motor regions of righties light up more on the left side of the brain in brain scans (motor control for each side is "contralateral", meaning that it resides on the opposite side)...but more about that later. And this extends to the rest of your somatic (i.e., bodily) organs as well. Your heart cheats a little left-of-center, with with the right and left chambers responsible for different functions, and many of your other organs (liver, spleen, pancreas, stomach) reside more on one side than the other. So why the expectation that, in physical (and cognitive) activities, you can just switch?

Now, of course, we can't overlook the plasticity of the brain in this matter. Sure, stroke victims can "retrain" their brains so that essential functions in their non-functioning hemispheres can "live" on the other hemisphere, and "split-brain" patients who have had the connective tissue between hemis severed to decrease seizures often have (near-) equivalent functioning brain areas appear on both sides of their brains. Also, presumably because they've been raised in a righty world, the motor regions of lefties light up in brain scans on both the right and left side (had the righties been raised in a lefty world, the reverse would probably be true).

So with all this talk of plasticity and such, why can't you just strike that and reverse it? Context. Your body "learns" things without you even being aware of it and holds onto this knowledge even if you try to forget it. It embeds subtle differences in skin stretch, pressure, force, and any number of things into this memory so it's  in there unless it's untrained through competition, not training/practicing the memory, or letting it fade over time. There's some discussion over whether simple tasks like reaching can transfer between sides (I've read the studies, but these studies are so tricky to design that it's difficult to tell WHAT is transferring), but with things as complicated as the volleyball approach, playing a scale on the cello, or learning a new dance step, I'd say no until someone incontrovertibly proves me wrong (and, believe me, I'd love them to. Then we could learn 1 thing and be set for life.) So when you see something demonstrated, try it, and then attempt to transfer it to the opposite side, you're not likely to be successful. When you practice a musical scale on a cello with a particular fingering all the way up the fingerboard and then that fingering changes after 8 octaves? Nope. When you've only practiced a dance step right, left-right-left, good freaking luck with left, right-left-right.

And again, I'm going to bitch about how brains/bodies are awesome and freaking annoying at the same time. In fact, that could practically be the unofficial title of this blog.