Speaking beauty

My novel In the Midst of Lions, the first of a trilogy, has a character named Anderson Quaice, who is a linguistics professor.  He also has a strong pessimistic streak, something that proves justified in the course of the story.  He develops a conlang called Kalila not only as an entertaining intellectual exercise, but because he fears that civilization is heading toward collapse, and he wants a way to communicate with his friends that will not be understood by (possibly hostile) outsiders.

Kalila provides a framework for the entire trilogy, which spans over fourteen centuries.  I wanted the conlang to follow a similar trajectory as Latin did; by the second book, The Scattering Winds, Kalila has become the "Sacred Language," used in rituals and religion; by the third, The Chains of Orion, it has been relegated to a small role as a historical curiosity, something learned (and mourned!) only by academics, and which few speak fluently. 

But of course, in order to incorporate it into the narrative, I had to invent the conlang.  While I'm not a professor like Quaice, my master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I have a fairly solid background for comprehending (and thus creating) a language structure.  I've mostly studied inflected languages, like Old Norse, Old English, Latin, and Greek -- ones where nouns, verbs, and adjectives change form depending on how they're being used in sentences -- so I decided to make Kalila inflected.  (Interestingly, along the way English lost most of its noun inflections; in the sentences The dog bit the cat and The cat bit the dog you know who bit whom by word order, not because the words dog and cat change form, as they would in most inflected languages.  English does retain a few inflections, holdovers from its Old English roots -- he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs, and who/whom are examples of inflections we've hung onto.)

One of the interesting choices I had to make centers on phonetics.  What repertoire of sounds did I want Kalila to have?  I decided I was aiming for something vaguely Slavic-sounding, with a few sound combinations and placements you don't find in English (for example, the initial /zl/ combination in the word for "quick," zlavo.)  I included only one sound that isn't found in English -- the unvoiced velar fricative (the final sound in the name Bach), which in accordance with the International Phonetic Alphabet I spelled with a letter "x" in the written form; lexa, pronounced /lekha/, means "hand."

Of course, in the end I used about one percent of all the syntax and morphology and lexicon and whatnot I'd invented in the actual story.  But it was still a lot of fun to create.

The topic comes up because of a really cool study that recently came out in the journal Language and Speech, by a team led by linguist Christine Mooshammer of Humboldt University in Berlin.  The researchers wanted to find out why some languages are perceived as sounding more pleasant-sounding than others -- but to avoid the bias that would come with actual spoken languages, they confined their analysis to conlangs such as Quenya, Sindarin, Dothraki, Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, and Orkish.

The first stanza of a poem in Quenya, written in the lovely Tengwar script Tolkien invented [Image is in the Public Domain]

The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, rated Quenya and Sindarin (the two main Elvish languages in Tolkien's world) as the most pleasant, and Dothraki (from Game of Thrones) and Klingon to sound the most unpleasant.  Interestingly, Orkish -- at least when not being snarled by characters like Azog the Defiler -- was ranked somewhere in the middle.

Some of their conclusions:

• Languages with lower consonantal clustering were rated as more pleasant.  (On the extreme low end of this scale are Hawaiian and Japanese, which have almost no consonant clusters at all.)
• A higher frequency of front vowels (such as /i/ and /e/) as opposed to back vowels (such as /o/ and /u/) correlates with higher pleasantness ratings.
• Languages with a higher frequency of continuants (such as /l/, /r/, and /m/) as opposed to stops and plosives (like /t/ and /p/) were ranked as more pleasant-sounding.
• Higher numbers of unvoiced sibilants (such as /s/) and velars (such as the /x/ I used in Kalila) correlated with a lower ranking for pleasantness.
• The more similar the phonemic inventory of the conlang was to the test subject's native language, the more pleasant the subject thought it sounded; familiarity, apparently, is important.

This last one introduces the bias I mentioned earlier, something that Mooshammer admits is a limitation of the study.  "One of our main findings was that Orkish doesn’t sound evil without the special effects, seeing the speakers and hearing the growls and hissing sounds in the movies," she said, in an interview with PsyPost.  "Therefore, the average person should be aware of the effect of stereotypes that do influence the perception of a language.  Do languages such as German sound orderly and unpleasant and Italian beautiful and erotic because of their sounds, or just based on one’s own attitude toward their speakers?"

I wonder how the test subjects would have ranked spoken Kalila?  If the researchers want a sample, I'd be happy to provide it.

It's a fun study, which I encourage you to read in its entirety.  It brings up the bigger question, though, of why we find anything aesthetically pleasing.  I'm fascinated by why certain pieces of music are absolutely electrifying to me (one example is Stravinsky's Firebird) while others that are considered by many to be masterpieces do nothing for me at all (I've yet to hear a piece of music by Brahms that elicits more than "meh" from me).  There's an emotional resonance there with some things and not others, but I'm at a loss to explain it.

So maybe I should end with a song by Enya, which is not only beautiful musically, but is sung in the conlang she invented, Loxian.  Give this a listen and see where you'd rank it.

I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty sweet-sounding.

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The most beautiful brain network

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece here at Skeptophilia about some fascinating new research suggesting that there are links between our perceptions of artistic, musical, and mathematical beauty, and expressed some puzzlement about how those could possibly connect.  In one of those lovely near-synchronicities that happen sometimes, today I happened upon some new(er) research showing what the underlying connection might be -- in one single region of the brain.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team made up of Edward A. Vessel and Ayse Ilkay Isik (of the Max Planck Institute), Amy M. Belfi (of the Missouri University of Science and Technology), Jonathan L. Stahl (of Ohio State University), and G. Gabrielle Starr (of Pomona College) showed that with different sorts of visual stimuli, our sense of aesthetic pleasure comes from activation of a part of the brain called the default-mode network.  The authors write:

Despite being highly subjective, aesthetic experiences are powerful moments of interaction with one’s surroundings, shaping behavior, mood, beliefs, and even a sense of self.  The default-mode network (DMN), which sits atop the cortical hierarchy and has been implicated in self-referential processing, is typically suppressed when a person engages with the external environment.  Yet not only is the DMN surprisingly engaged when one finds a visual artwork aesthetically moving, here we present evidence that the DMN also represents aesthetic appeal in a manner that generalizes across visual aesthetic domains, such as artworks, landscapes, or architecture.  This stands in contrast to ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT), which represents the content of what we see, but does not contain domain-general information about aesthetic appeal.

Using fMRI studies, the researchers compared the responses of the brains of volunteers to three types of visual stimuli; art, architecture, and photographs of natural landscapes.  The responses of the visual cortices of the test subjects showed great variation between these three different types -- evidently the brain's effort to categorize and interpret what it's seeing, so it's no great surprise that you'd respond differently while seeing the Mona Lisa than you would looking at Chartres Cathedral.

What was surprising, though, is that while viewing visual stimuli the test subjects found aesthetically pleasing, all of them had a high response in the default-mode network, which is usually associated with contemplation, imagination, self-reflection, and inward thought.  It's uncertain if the DMN actually encodes the basics of aesthetic response, but this certainly suggests a critical role.  "We don't know yet if DMN actually computes this representation," said Edward Vessel, lead author of the paper, in an interview in EurekAlert.  "But it clearly has access to abstract information about whether we find an experience aesthetically appealing or not."

This suggests to me a couple of interesting directions this research could go.  Obviously, it'd be intriguing to find out of the DMN is also active with other types of aesthetic appreciation (such as musical and mathematical aesthetics, the subject of the previous research).  What I'd find even more fascinating, though, is to see if there's a difference in the activity of the DMN depending upon how strongly the individual is aesthetically moved.  Those responses are so highly individual that finding a biological underpinning would be amazingly cool.  Why, for example, was my wife moved to tears while looking at paintings in a Van Gogh exhibition we attended a couple of years ago in New York City?  Why do I find Édouard Manet's 1882 masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère so emotionally evocative, while a lot of other art from the same period doesn't really grab me one way or the other?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So this could be a window into finding out -- at least from a neurological standpoint -- how our brain modulates our aesthetic response.  The "why," of course, is more inscrutable -- demonstrating in an fMRI that I go into rapture hearing Stravinsky's Firebird isn't telling me anything I didn't already know, after all, and doesn't answer why I don't have the same response hearing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2.

But at least finding a neurological basis for such judgments would be a step forward.  The Vessel et al. research is a fascinating first step into understanding the sweetest of human behaviors -- our perception of beauty in the world around us.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Is there in truth no beauty?

Today's post is about an odd little piece of research that appeared in the journal Cognition this week, tying together a number of disparate realms -- mathematics, music, art, and the neuroscience of perception.

The study, by Samuel Johnson and Stefan Steinerberger (of the University of Bath and Yale University, respectively), looks at the fascinating question of how our perception of beauty carries across different expressions of the human creative impulse.  I've been interested in this topic for some time, especially with respect to music.  (Artistically, I have the aesthetic sensibilities that God gave gravel, and when my wife and our cultured friends talk art, I usually just keep my mouth shut and nod sagely.)

But the perception of beauty in music has intrigued me ever since my first realization that some pieces of music that thrilled me to the core left other people completely cold, and vice versa.  I have a good friend who, while we agree on many things, has about as opposite tastes to me in classical music as one could possibly have.  He adores Brahms, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff, whereas I don't really care for any of them, and in fact could live happily forever without hearing a piece of Brahms's music again.  My tastes run more to Bach and Scarlatti... and Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.  (What the link is between those two groups of composers, I have no idea.)

What Johnson and Steinerberger did, though, was to link up people's views of the aesthetic merit of art and music with their perception of beauty in mathematics.  Don't laugh, you non-math types; if you do any digging amongst the writings of mathematicians, you'll find plenty of references to theorems or proofs as being "elegant" or "beautiful," and a while back I did a piece on the claim that Euler's Identity, one of the most curious statements of mathematics, was so beautiful that it is a proof of the hand of the divine.  (To see how far mathematicians will engage in such aesthetic commentary on mathematical theorems, Paul Nahin calls Euler's Identity "the gold standard for mathematical beauty," and Keith Devlin of Stanford University states, "Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.")

So it's not far-fetched to claim that some people see the same kind of beauty in mathematics that many of us do in art and music.  And Johnson and Steinerberger wanted to find out if there's a connection between the three.

They took four theorems from mathematics -- the sum of an infinite geometric series, Gauss’s summation trick for positive integers, the pigeonhole principle, and a geometric proof of a Faulhaber formula.  They used four pieces of music -- Schubert’s Moment Musical No. 4, D 780 (Op. 94), Bach’s Fugue from Toccata in E Minor (BWV 914), Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (Op. 120), and Shostakovich’s Prelude in D-flat major (Op.87 No. 15) -- and four landscape paintings, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California and A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt, The Hay Wain by John Constable, and The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church.

Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California by Albert Bierstadt (1864) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Test subjects were then assigned a series of three rather strange tasks -- to match the music to the mathematical theorems based on how similar they were aesthetically; to pair the art and the theorems the same way; and to rate each of the theorems and the pieces of art and music on nine criteria (seriousness, universality, profundity, novelty, clarity, simplicity, elegance, intricacy, and sophistication).

My immediate reaction to reading this was that I can't see any connection between artistic, musical, and mathematical beauty, at least in the sense that you would look at a landscape painting and be immediately struck the same way as you were by Gauss's summation trick.  I understand finding beauty in each realm, but I can't fathom how they could be connected in any sort of one-to-one correspondence.

But strangely, they seem to be.  The correspondences drawn between art and math and between music and math were remarkably similar across test subjects, as were the rankings given to each, especially on the criteria of elegance, profundity, and clarity.  Whatever it is that gave me such a frisson of wonder when I first came across the formula for the sum of an infinite geometric series -- and yes, that did actually happen, because it's freakin' cool -- causes a consistently similar reaction in people not only seeing art or listening to music, but seeing particular pieces of art or hearing particular pieces of music.

"Laypeople not only had similar intuitions about the beauty of math as they did about the beauty of art but also had similar intuitions about beauty as each other," Johnson said.  "In other words, there was consensus about what makes something beautiful, regardless of modality."

"I’d like to see our study done again but with different pieces of music, different proofs, different artwork,” said Steinerberger.  "We demonstrated this phenomenon, but we don’t know the limits of it.  Where does it stop existing?  Does it have to be classical music?  Do the paintings have to be of the natural world, which is highly aesthetic?"

Which are excellent questions.  For myself, I have incredibly eclectic tastes in music (as evidenced by putting my iPod on "shuffle," and inducing musical whiplash by going directly from a Bach partita to Nine Inch Nails).  Is there some correspondence there -- are other aficionados of Stravinsky also more likely to listen to Linkin Park?  Is there a connection between people who love mathematics and particular styles of music?

And what's going on in our brains when these judgments are being made?

As with much good scientific research, the Johnson/Steinerberger study raises as many questions as it answers.  We still don't know where aesthetic perception comes from, nor why it varies so much from person to person.  But as this study shows, there are some remarkable (and unexpected) similarities in how we perceive beauty.

And that is, in and of itself, kind of beautiful.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.  Loewen's work is an indictment not specifically of the educational system, but of our culture's determination to sanitize our own history and present our historical figures as if they were pristine pillars of virtue.

The reality is -- as reality always is -- more complex and more interesting.  The leaders of the past were human, and ran the gamut of praiseworthiness.  Some had their sordid sides.  Some were a strange mix of admirable and reprehensible.  But what is certain is that we're not doing our children, nor ourselves, any favors by rewriting history to make America and Americans look faultless.  We owe our citizens the duty of being honest, even about the parts of history that we'd rather not admit to.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Nice rice

It's important to keep your brain connected when you read articles in popular media that start with the line, "Scientists Have Just Discovered That..."

Between the lure of advertiser revenue from clickbait and the simple fact that a lot of laypeople can't tell peer-reviewed science from loony claims, it's easy to get fooled.  I saw a pretty egregious example of that a couple of days ago, in an article that claimed that scientists have shown that "intentionality" changes the spoil rate of cooked rice.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

No, I'm not making this up.  I found the original research -- if I can dignify it by that name -- in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which a little bit of digging suggests a specialty in fringe-y, and sometimes cringe-y, claims.  The paper is entitled "Human Mental Intentionality on the Aesthetics of Cooked Rice and Escherichia coli Growth," by Alan W. L. Lai, Bonny B. H. Yuen, and Richard Burchett, of Beijing Normal University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the United International College of Guangdong Province (China), respectively.

The gist of the experiment was that they had a group of people think happy thoughts at a bowl of cooked rice, a second thought think negative thoughts, and a third group think neutral thoughts, then had people evaluate the bowls of rice for their "aesthetics," and also measured the amount of E. coli growth in each bowl.  Now for myself, the amount of E. coli I want in my bowl of rice is zero, but apparently that's not a likely outcome.  The authors write:

This study examines the “intentionality hypothesis”—i.e. subjects’ ability to mentally infl uence microbial growth in samples of cooked rice.  Over a 30-day period (under triple-blind conditions), subjects focused their positive and negative thoughts (‘mental intentionality’) toward three randomly formed groups of cooked rice samples (positive intentionality, negative intentionality, and a control group).  After 30 days, pictures were taken of the nine rice samples (three groups, each group was conducted in triplicate), which were then judged for visual aesthetic value.  Findings show aesthetic ratings of ‘positive’ rice samples to be significantly higher than those for ‘negative’ and ‘control’ ones (p ≤ 0.05), with no significant difference between negative and control sample ratings (p ≥ 0.05).  A further test entailed a 7-day study measuring an Escherichia coli strain (a type of coliform that is closely associated with food safety, whose presence often indicates food poisoning and spoilage) in vitro under the same conditions of stimuli as the rice samples.  Results show positive intention to be associated with lower E. coli division rate when compared with the “control” and “negative intention” groups, thereby further supporting the hypothesis, as well as suggesting an emerging inference, that intentionality might be associated with microbial growth and visual aesthetic ratings.

We're told that the negative thoughts included reprimands, which brings up the question of how you could effectively reprimand rice.  "No no!  Bad rice!" doesn't seem particularly appropriate, given that it's the sort of thing you say to dogs when they do something they're not supposed to, such as swiping an entire wedge of expensive brie from the kitchen counter, and eating the whole thing including the plastic wrapper.  (Yes, that's the voice of experience, right there.)  But with rice, I'm not sure how this would work.  What exactly did you expect the rice to be doing?  More specifically, what was it doing that deserved a reprimand?  I've observed cooked rice carefully, and mostly what it does is sit there.  Almost anything else it might do would be a significant shock, and the first thing I'd think of doing is yelling "What the fuck?" and jumping up out of my chair, not saying "Bad rice!" in a disapproving tone.

Anyhow, the results seem to me to be pretty nebulous.  The aesthetic score ranges from zero to four, and the positive-thought rice had an average score of 1.5 ± 0.3, the negative-thought rice 1.0 ± 0.2, and the control rice 0.9 ± 0.2.  So not only were the scores pretty broad-brush (0-4 seems like a kind of coarse-grained scale), they were all relatively close, especially the negative and the control groups.  The E. coli measurements are equally suspect; here the positive and negative groups were fairly close together, and the control group significantly lower than either one.  (If you want to see the graphed data, I direct you to the paper I have linked above.)

So it seems to me that if either experiment suggests anything, it's that rice doesn't like people staring at it meaningfully, regardless of what they're thinking.

Another red flag in this paper is their referencing the completely discredited "research" by Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist who made the claim that if you think negative thoughts at water while it's freezing, it forms ugly crystals.  No, I'm not making this up either, and despite the fact that it has never been successfully replicated, it continues to resurface every time someone claims to have discovered the Magical Quantum Frequency of Love.

Like Emoto's Happy Ice experiment, I'm not buying the Nice Rice results until they are replicated, under controlled conditions, by scientists who don't have a dog in the race.  Note that I'm not accusing Lai et al. of falsifying results, I'm just suspicious enough about their methodology -- not to mention the complete lack of a mechanism by which any of this could work -- that until someone can duplicate their results and show a statistically significant difference in a variable that is rigorously quantifiable, I'm in the dubious column.

So if you're mad at your bowl of rice, my feeling is you should not hesitate to berate it mercilessly.  It will not become bacteria-laden and unattractive thereby.  On the other hand, if you are someone who gets angry at your food, you might want to seek out a good counselor who can help you to focus your ire on more deserving targets, such as people who make specious claims, and the irresponsible media outlets that disseminates them.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]