Cultivating uncertainty

In Haruki Murakami's haunting and surreal short story "Kino" (from his collection Men Without Women), Kino is a quiet and unassuming bar owner whose preferred way of spending his evenings -- splitting his time between serving his few customers and deciding which jazz record to play next -- is upended when a man named Kamita starts showing up.

It isn't every night, but when he's there it's always the same.  He orders a whiskey with water and ice, sits reading his book, then pays up and leaves.  Kamita, Kino tells us, "looks like he could be yakuza," but there isn't really anything concrete he bases this assessment on.  Although there is that one night, when two thugs seem to be intent on beating Kino up, and Kamita tells them to meet him outside instead -- then twenty minutes later Kamita comes back in, unruffled and unperturbed, and calmly tells Kino that the two "won't bother him again."

Other than that, Kamita seems to be a perfectly ordinary thirty-something, enjoying his quiet drink and his book.  But still, there's something off kilter about the whole situation, as if what we're seeing isn't quite real.  That sense magnifies as the story progresses.  Kino's cat mysteriously disappears.  Then he starts seeing snakes everywhere he goes.  He asks his aunt -- who had once owned the building housing his bar -- if she'd seen snakes around the place, and she says she hasn't.  But then she cryptically adds, "[Snakes] often help guide people.  But when a snake leads you, you don't know if it's in a good direction or a bad one...  [A snake] hides its heart somewhere outside its body, so it doesn't get killed.  If you want to kill a snake, you need to go to its hideout when it's not there, find its beating heart, and cut it in two."

All through this, we become increasingly unsure if what we're experiencing through Kino is real.  Murakami is the master at creating a believable Unreliable Narrator -- where we're never certain how much to trust.  Especially when the mysterious Kamita tells Kino one evening that it's absolutely imperative he close the bar "before the rain comes," and leave town.  Kino is instructed not to stay in one place for more than a day or two, and send postcards to his aunt -- no message, don't write his name, just his aunt's address and a stamp -- so Kamita will know he's okay.  "She asked me to keep an eye on you," Kamita tells Kino, "to make sure nothing bad happened...  When it's all right for you to return, I'll get in touch with you."

Amazingly, Kino accepts all this with few questions.  Closes his bar, and leaves... just as the rain starts to fall.  But a few days into his trip he ignores one of the directives, and puts his name and a short message on a postcard to his aunt.  That evening, there's a knock on his hotel room door, quiet but insistent.  It goes on for hours:

Kino pulled the covers up, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands.  I'm not going to look, I'm not going to listen, he told himself.  But he couldn't drown out the sound.  Even if he ran to the far corners of the Earth and stuffed his ears full of clay, as long as he was still alive those knocks would relentlessly track him down.  It wasn't a knocking on a door in a business hotel.  It was a knocking on the door to his heart.  A person couldn't escape that sound.

And that's where we leave him.  We never find out who's behind the door, or even if there was someone at the door.  We never find out who Kamita is, why he did what he did, or how he had a connection to Kino's aunt.  We never learn for certain the significance of the snakes and the disappearance of his cat.  It is weird, surreal, evocative, tantalizing -- and ultimately, we're left to figure out the answers for ourselves.

This kind of ending drives some people crazy.  Me, I love it.  It's the kind of story that stays with you, rather than just handing you the whole thing tied up in a neat package with a ribbon on top.  It keeps you working at it, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.  All the clues are there, it seems to say to the reader.  You're smart enough to figure this out.

It's why one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes in recent years is the haunting "73 Yards."  The Doctor's companion Ruby is being followed by an old woman who always stays exactly 73 yards away from her, making enigmatic hand gestures.  Ruby, of course, can't get close to her, but anyone else who approaches the old woman and speaks to her ends up terrified, running away in fear -- and then turns against Ruby, refusing to have anything more to do with her.  (In two horrifying scenes, this includes the stalwart Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and Ruby's own mother.)  We get hints at the end of who the old woman is and what's going on, but it's never really resolved completely; certainly, we never see the whole picture.

It's creepy, unsettling... but also brilliantly plotted and deeply intriguing.

One of the most critical things for developing an understanding of how things work is a tolerance for uncertainty.  The rush to find an answer -- any answer -- is completely antithetical to true knowledge.  On one level, I get it; it'd be nice if things were simple.  It'd all be so much less trouble.  But the basis of curiosity is in the suspension of that tendency, of allowing yourself not to know for a while, but to think, "Okay, I can do this.  Let's see how this all works."

The drive to fill in the answer blank and be done with thinking is a large part of what's gotten us into the political situation we now have in the United States.  It's the "All we have to do is..." mentality.  All we have to do is... put tariffs on other countries, and industry will come roaring back to our own.  Get rid of all the illegal immigrants, and our streets will be safer.  Cut the size of government, and waste and fraud will magically disappear.  Believe what Donald Trump says, world without end, amen.

And it's fed by the talking heads on the news, too, who give us little bite-sized pieces, nice and manageable -- and due to our tendency to gravitate toward the media we already believed, nothing that'll challenge our preconceived notions.  Nothing that forces us to question.  

Nothing that says, "Here are the actual facts.  Now, put them together.  You don't need me to tell you what to believe, you're smart enough to find the answer yourself."

Psychologist Todd Kashdan said, "If we are interested in producing a population of critical thinkers armed with courage, resilience, and a love of learning and discovery, then we must recognize, harness, and cultivate curiosity."  But the flipside of that is if you want to produce a population of people who will blindly follow an amoral autocrat, who will swallow every last bit of party-line propaganda from his mouthpieces, then make them incurious, unquestioning, and the unable to sustain uncertainty.

The frightening truth is that the last thing our current elected leaders want is a populace who asks uncomfortable questions, who probe deeper, who tolerate ambiguity, who examine their own biases and those of the people they meet.  No, they want followers who'll wear a gold pin with Donald Trump's face on it.  It's easy to get scared people to fall for hero worship -- and scared people are far more susceptible to bullying by the greedy and power-hungry.  

I get that we live in uncertain times, and as someone who has had a lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression, no one knows better than me how uncertainty can provoke fear.  But I'm asking you to hold that fear in your hands for a while.  Examine it and be curious about it.  Ask it questions.  Find out about your biases -- we've all got them, but they're not dangerous as long as you keep them where you can see them.  This approach may not be as instantly gratifying as having Fox News tell you, "Here's what to think," but in the end, it'll be worth it.

Believe me about this much, at least; in the final tally, a deep understanding is worth the anguish of being in the dark for a while.

Be brave.  I trust you to figure the answers out.

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Thin ice

In her phenomenal TED talk "On Being Wrong," journalist Kathryn Schulz says, "[W]e all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything...  [and] I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make."

I've often thought that that the willingness to entertain the possibility that your knowledge is incomplete -- that you may not have all the answers, and (more critically) that some of the answers you've arrived at might be false -- is the cornerstone of developing a real understanding of how things actually are.  Put a different way, certainty can be a blindfold.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dale Schoonover, Kim Schoonover, Blindfold hat, CC BY 3.0]

I'm not saying I like finding out I'm wrong about something.  As Schulz points out, finding out you've made a mistake can be revelatory, enlightening, or hilarious -- but it can also be humiliating, frustrating, or devastating.  I'm reminded of one of the funniest scenes from The Big Bang Theory -- when Sheldon meets Stephen Hawking:

While most of us have never had the experience of embarrassing the hell out of ourselves in front of one of the smartest people in the world, I think we can all relate.  And part of what makes it funny -- and relatable -- is until it's pointed out, Sheldon can't fathom that he actually made a mistake.  Maybe there are few people as colossally arrogant as he is, but the truth is we are more like him than we want to admit.  We cling to the things we believe and what we think we understand with a fervor that would do the Spanish Inquisition proud.

The reason all this comes up is a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jeroen van Baar and Oriel Feldman-Hall (of Brown University) and David Halpern (of the University of Pennsylvania) called, "Intolerance of Uncertainty Modulates Brain-to-Brain Synchrony During Politically Polarized Perception."  In this study, the researchers gave a group of test subjects videos to watch -- strongly liberal, strongly conservative, and politically neutral -- and looked at the brain's response to the content.  What they found was that (unsurprisingly) some test subjects had strongly aversive reactions to the videos, but the strongest correlation to the strength of the response wasn't whether the watcher was him/herself conservative or liberal (putting to rest the idea that one side is intolerant and the other isn't), nor was it the perceived distance between the content of the video and the test subject's own belief; it was how intolerant the person was of uncertainty.

In other words, how angry you get over hearing political commentary you don't agree with depends largely on how unwilling you are to admit that your own understanding might be flawed.

It's kind of a devastating result, isn't it?  The polarization we're currently experiencing here in the United States (and undoubtedly elsewhere) is being driven by the fact that a great many people on both sides are absolutely and completely convinced they're right.  About everything.  Again to quote Kathryn Schulz, "This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly.  But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human.  It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds.  And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing."

A lot of it, I think, boils down to fear.  To admit that we might be wrong -- fundamentally, deeply wrong, perhaps about something we've believed our entire lives -- is profoundly destabilizing.  What we thought was solid and everlasting turns out to be thin ice, but instead of taking steps to rectify our misjudgment and skate to safety, we just close our eyes and keep going.  There's a part of us that can't quite believe we might not have everything figured out.

Like I said, it's not that I enjoy being wrong myself; I find it just as mortifying as everyone else does.  So part of me hopes that I do have the big things figured out, that my most dearly-held assumptions about how the world works won't turn out to be completely in error.  But it behooves us all to keep in the back of our minds that human minds are fallible -- not just in the theoretical, "yeah, people make mistakes" sense, but that some of the things we're surest about may be incorrect.

Let's all work to become a little humbler, a little more uncomfortable with uncertainty -- as Schulz puts it, to be able to "step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, 'Wow, I don't know.  Maybe I'm wrong.'"

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

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

The attraction of the unexpected

I've always been fascinated by why people like particular pieces of music and not others.

It's extremely personal, and also rather mysterious and unpredictable.  This is why I find it funny when someone asks if I like classical music.  That's a little like saying, "Do you like food?"  I love some classical music, and some of it does nothing for me at all.  But what's eternally fascinating to me is that two people who are alike in a great many respects can come to completely opposite opinions about music.  Take my buddy Dave, for example, who is passionately fond of the Romantic composers -- Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky.  I, on the other hand, have never heard a piece of music by Brahms I've liked -- my tastes run more to the very early (Tallis, Susato, Praetorius, Palestrina, Bach) and the much more recent (Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Vaughan Williams, Holst).  If I had to pick one very favorite piece of music it would be Stravinsky's Firebird:

I'm hard-pressed to say why, however.  And what's the connection between that one, and the piece that had me bawling -- at age seventeen, no less -- the first time I heard it, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis?:

One fascinating piece of the puzzle was discovered five years ago, when two researchers at Wesleyan University, Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui, found that people have strong physical reactions when listening to music they love, and if you hook them up to a fMRI or PET scanner, you find that at the climax of the piece of music, the same parts of the brain light up as when they have an orgasm.

No wonder we love music so much.

That whole tension/resolution thing, with its obvious parallels to sexual response, is pretty universal to music of all sorts.  I remember this being demonstrated to me when I was in the college chorus, and the director was telling us about dynamic tension in chord progression and resolution to the tonic, and demonstrated by going to the piano and playing us a line from the Christmas carol "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."  He played, "Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn."

And stopped.

About a dozen people sung out "KING" in tones that clearly communicated, "Don't leave us hanging, bro!"

So tension/resolution is part of it.  But just this week, a paper was published in Current Biology that added another piece to the puzzle.  Apparently, we also tend to like music that surprises us -- that takes us on a path that we didn't expect.

In "Uncertainty and Surprise Jointly Predict Musical Pleasure and Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Auditory Cortex Activity," neuroscientists Vincent K.M. Cheung, Lars Meyer, and Stefan Koelsch (of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences), Peter M.C. Harrison and Marcus T. Pearce (of the Queen Mary University of London), and John-Dylan Haynes (of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin) found that we're grabbed by twists and turns we didn't see coming.

The authors write:

Listening to music often evokes intense emotions.  Recent research suggests that musical pleasure comes from positive reward prediction errors, which arise when what is heard proves to be better than expected.  Central to this view is the engagement of the nucleus accumbens—a brain region that processes reward expectations—to pleasurable music and surprising musical events...  Here, we demonstrate that pleasure varies nonlinearly as a function of the listener’s uncertainty when anticipating a musical event, and the surprise it evokes when it deviates from expectations.

That certainly agrees with my experience.  I love being surprised, and my favorite music (in any genre) often contains unexpected or startling rhythmic patterns.  Take, for example, the brilliant "Ring Out, Solstice Bells," by Jethro Tull:

I've played Balkan music for years -- with mutant time signatures like 11/16, 22/16, and (no lie) 25/16 -- and I'm damned if I can figure out what time signature this song is in.

And I love that.

My passion for music has been with me for a very, very long time.  My mother used to love to tell the story about how I pestered her incessantly (I couldn't have been more than three or four years old) to learn how to use the record player so I wouldn't have to ask her every time I wanted to listen to music (which was basically all the time).  She finally acquiesced -- and she was impressed that I cared enough about the music that I never damaged either the record player or one of the fragile, easily-scratched vinyl LPs that were all we had back then.  And there was one piece of music I played over and over and over and over, and my mom couldn't figure out (and of course, at that point I couldn't articulate) why I loved it so much.  This was the tail-end of the Big Band era, and my parents had several LPs from Lawrence Welk's band.  Most of them were "meh," in my opinion, but there was one that was different.

It's called "Scarlett O'Hara."  Listen for the completely unexpected key change -- not at all characteristic of Big Band music -- from A Major to (of all the weird keys...) B Major that happens a couple of times.  I used to get a visceral thrill from that moment, even at the tender age of four.

My favorite example of surprise, though, comes from classical music.  I distinctly remember the first time I listened to Bach's magnificent Mass in B Minor, and the sweet, sedate aria "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" drew to a close, and without any warning I was launched forward into the breathtaking chorus "Cum Sancto Spiritu:"

Talk about a brain orgasm.

So we're gradually figuring out some possible reasons for that mysterious phenomenon -- musical taste.

Since I'm on a roll and having way too much fun roaming around YouTube listening to music, I think I'll end with two more of my favorites, one rock and one classical.  I don't know if there's anything similar about them -- see if you can figure it out.  For now, I'm just enjoying listening.

The Kongos, "Come With Me Now:"

  

Jean Sibelius, Lemminkainen's Return:

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.