(MORE RETIREMENTS)
1) That there can be no science of art.
2) Addiction.
THERE CAN BE NO SCIENCE OF ART
Jonathan Gottschall.
JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
US academic and author who specialises in literature and evolution and teaches at Washington & Jefferson College, Pennsylvania
Fifteen thousand years ago in France, a sculptor swam and slithered almost a kilometre down into a mountain cave. Using clay, the artist shaped a big bull rearing up to mount a cow, and then left his creation in the bowels of the earth. The two bison of the Tuc D’Audoubert caves sat undisturbed for many thousands of years until they were rediscovered by spelunking boys [cavers] in 1912. The discovery of the clay bison was one of many shocking 20th-century discoveries of sophisticated cave art stretching back tens of thousands of years. The discoveries overturned our sense of what our caveman ancestors were like. They were not furry, grunting troglodytes. They had artistic souls. They showed us that humans are – by nature, not just by culture – art-making, art-consuming, art-addicted apes.
But why? Why did the sculptor burrow into the earth, make art, and leave it there in the dark? And why does art exist in the first place? Scholars have spun a lot of stories in answer to such questions, but the truth is that we really don’t know. And here’s one reason why: science is lying down on the job.
A long time ago someone proclaimed that art could not be studied scientifically, and for some reason almost everyone believed it. The humanities and sciences constituted, as Stephen Jay Gould might have proclaimed, separate, non-overlapping magisteria – that the tools of the one are radically unsuited to the other.
The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France
The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France: ‘Our caveman ancestors had artistic souls.’
Science has mostly bought into this. How else can we explain its neglect of the arts? People live in art. We read stories, and watch them on TV, and listen to them in song. We make paintings and gaze at them on walls. We beautify our homes like bowerbirds adorning nests. We demand beauty in the products we buy, which explains the gleam of our automobiles and the sleek modernist aesthetic of our iPhones. We make art out of our own bodies: sculpting them through diet and exercise; festooning them with jewellery and colourful garments; using our skins as living canvas for the display of tattoos. And so it is the world over. As the late Denis Dutton argued in The Art Instinct, underneath the cultural variations, “all human beings have essentially the same art”.
Our curious love affair with art sets our species apart as much as our sapience or our language or our use of tools. And yet we understand so little about art. We don’t know why art exists in the first place. We don’t know why we crave beauty. We don’t know how art produces its effects in our brains – why one arrangement of sound or colour pleases while another cloys. We don’t know very much about the precursors of art in other species, and we don’t know when humans became creatures of art. (According to one influential theory, art arrived 50,000 years ago with a kind of creative big bang. If that’s true, how did that happen?) We don’t even have a good definition, in truth, of what art is. In short, there is nothing so central to human life that is so incompletely understood.
Recent years have seen more use of scientific tools and methods in humanities subjects. Neuroscientists can show us what’s happening in the brain when we enjoy a song or study a painting. Psychologists are studying the ways novels and TV shows shape our politics and our morality. Evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars are teaming up to explore narrative’s Darwinian origins. And other literary scholars are developing a “digital humanities” using algorithms to extract big data from digitised literature. But scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It does not constitute a research programme.
If we want better answers to fundamental questions about art, science must jump in the game with both feet. Going it alone, humanities scholars can tell intriguing stories about the origins and significance of art, but they don’t have the tools to patiently winnow the field of competing ideas. That’s what the scientific method is for: separating the stories that are more accurate, from the stories that are less accurate. But make no mistake, a strong science of art will require both the thick, granular expertise of humanities scholars and the clever hypothesis testing of scientists. I’m not calling for a scientific takeover of the arts. I’m calling for a partnership.
This partnership faces great obstacles. There’s the unexamined assumption that something in art makes it science-proof. There’s a widespread, if usually unspoken, belief that art is just a frill in human life – relatively unimportant compared with the weighty stuff of science. And there’s the weird idea that science necessarily destroys the beauty it seeks to explain (as though a learned astronomer really could dull the star shine). But the Delphic admonition “know thyself” still rings out as the great prime directive of intellectual inquiry, and there will always be a gaping hole in human self-knowledge until we develop a science of art.
ADDICTION
Helen Fisher.
HELEN FISHER
Biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey and author of Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love
“If an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it,” Einstein reportedly said. I would like to broaden the definition of addiction and retire the scientific idea that all addictions are pathological and harmful. Since the beginning of formal diagnostics more than 50 years ago, the compulsive pursuit of gambling, food, and sex (known as non-substance rewards) have not been regarded as addictions; only abuse of alcohol, opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis, heroin and nicotine have been formally regarded as addictions. This categorisation rests largely on the fact that substances activate basic “reward pathways” in the brain associated with craving and obsession, and produce pathological behaviours. Psychiatrists work within this world of psychopathology – that which is abnormal and makes you ill.
As an anthropologist, they appear limited by this view. Scientists have now shown that food, sex and gambling compulsions employ many of the same brain pathways activated by substance abuse. Indeed, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) has finally acknowledged that at least one form of non-substance abuse can be regarded as an addiction: gambling. The abuse of sex and food were not included. Neither was romantic love. I shall propose that love addiction is just as real as any other addiction, in terms of its behaviour patterns and brain mechanisms. Moreover, it’s often a positive addiction.
Scientists and laymen have long regarded romantic love as part of the supernatural, or as a social invention of the troubadours in 12th-century France. Evidence does not support these notions. Love songs, poems, stories, operas, ballets, novels, myths and legends, love magic, love charms, love suicides and homicides: evidence of romantic love has now been found in more than 200 societies ranging over thousands of years. Around the world men and women pine for love, live for love, kill for love and die for love. Human romantic love, also known as passionate love or “being in love” is regularly regarded as a human universal.
Moreover, love-besotted men and women show all of the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice: the love object. They think obsessively about “him” or “her” (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively call, write, or appear, to stay in touch. Paramount to this experience is intense motivation to win their sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on his/her drug. Impassioned lovers also distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, experience personality changes (affect disturbance), and sometimes do inappropriate or risky things to impress this special other. Many are willing to sacrifice, even die for “him” or “her”. The lover craves emotional and physical union with their beloved too (dependence). And like the addict who suffers when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved (separation anxiety). Adversity and social barriers even heighten this longing (frustration attraction).
In fact, besotted lovers express all four of the basic traits of addiction: craving; tolerance; withdrawal; and relapse. They feel a “rush” of exhilaration when with their beloved (intoxication). As their tolerance builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more (intensification). If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hypersomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to win back the beloved. And lovers relapse the way drug addicts do: long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and renewed craving.
Of the many indications that romantic love is an addiction, however, perhaps none is more convincing than the growing data from neuroscience. Using brain scanning (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), several scientists have now shown that feelings of intense romantic love engage regions of the brain’s “reward system,” specifically dopamine pathways associated with energy, focus, motivation, ecstasy, despair and craving – including primary regions associated with substance (and non-substance) addictions. In fact, our group has found activity in the nucleus accumbens – the core brain factory associated with all addictions – in our rejected lovers. Moreover, some of our newest (unpublished) results suggest correlations between activities of the nucleus accumbens and feelings of romantic passion among lovers who were wildly, happily in love.
Nobel laureate Eric Kandel recently said: “Brain studies will ultimately tell us what it is like to be human.” Knowing what we now know about the brain, my brain-scanning partner, Lucy Brown, has suggested that romantic love is a natural addiction; and I have maintained that this natural addiction evolved from mammalian antecedents some 4.4m years ago among our first hominid ancestors, in conjunction with the evolution of (serial, social) monogamy – a hallmark of humankind. Its purpose: to motivate our forebears to focus their mating time and metabolic energy on a single partner at a time, thus initiating the formation of a pair-bond to rear their young (at least through infancy) together as a team. The sooner we embrace what brain science is telling us – and use this information to upgrade the concept of addiction – the better we will understand ourselves and all the billions of others on this planet who revel in the ecstasy and struggle with the sorrow of this profoundly powerful, natural, often positive addiction: romantic love.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 15:52:00 UTC