The Cause of Effect

Edited by Chris Decker

Collected from articles by Malcom Gladwell, Brickard Bilger and Dzifa Benson

{

of ef f ec t

The Cause of Effect is a compendium of process

Copyright Š 2016 by Chris Decker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the creator.

All images are used solely for educational purposes Printed in the United States First Edition This book was designed by Chris Decker under supervision of professor Julio Martinez while enrolled in Intermediate Graphic Design in the San Jose State University Graphic Design program. Designed from February 8 to March 21 2016.

{The Cause of Effect} Edited and Designed

by Chris Decker

01 introduction

6-15

the creation myth Malcom Gladwell

2015

2011

2

Chris Decker

16-43

03 Brickard Bilger 2011

44-75

performance is the thing

76-89

Dzifa Benson

4

the possibilian

2006

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i n

the engineer

t r

the scientist

u

d

c and the artist

i n t o

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r

obert scowled at his son. He couldn’t help it, the young man was about to throw his entire career away, his entire life even. The thought probably crossed Robert’s mind at this point like it must for most fathers who find themselves in this un-envious position, that it was in-fact, his own fault. He was too soft on his son or too harsh or too anything other than the way he had been. He couldn’t understand how a man so accomplished as he was could raise a son who cared only for “shooting, dogs and rat catching,” However, there was ultimately nothing he could do, which probably made Robert even angrier as he yelled,

“you will end up a disgrace to yourself and all your family!”

In the end though, as hard as he tried, his son Charles Robert Darwin simply wasn’t interested in becoming a doctor.

/8

The thing was that Charles didn’t know what he wanted to do, he just knew what he never wanted to do. He had attended the University of Edinburgh for years now and was feeling unfulfilled amongst the lifeless and cold slabs of grey bricks and granite that made up Edinburgh University’s neo-classical arches and domes. He hadn’t enjoyed his time there and was also bored for most of it. What his father had failed to understand was that Charles was in the middle of a process and process, was a messy and unpredictable thing with no clear goal.

C N

C

C N S C

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L A E O S I A L

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Eventually Charles found his footing albeit shaking footing aboard the Beagle.

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The vessel that would carry him to the Galapagos Islands and further into history. Darwin’s contribution and ultimately his ownership of the theory of evolution is significant for it’s emphasis on process without a clear goal. Without a clear beginning or a clear end evolution is the ultimate process.

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t c p d t t s o p

h o e i e h t f r

i m n u l e o

s m l s r

y

o c e

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Where it comes from, what fuels it and how it’s largely ignored by western culture. It is filled with people who like Darwin didn’t exactly know what they wanted to do and perhaps like Darwin, this sense of uncertainty and lack of focus on clear goals opened their minds up to the possibilities of process and allowed them to stay more in the moment than others might have.

We can imagine Darwin sitting on a cold wet rock in the middle of the pacific, analyzing birds and lizards, sketch-book and quill pen in hand.

This period in Darwin’s life might’ve felt it lasted two lifetimes when he looked back later in life if we are to believe the research presented in The Possibilians. Here Dr.Eagleman postulates that when a brain is surrounded by new and differ-

ent stimuli it works overtime to assimilate everything and in turn time seems to stretch and the individual retains more of the event later on. Also like Darwin, Dr.Eagleman’s career path was anything but linear. From a writer to an electrical engineer to the Israeli Army and then to a Poli Sci career, then to literature and naturally screenwriting before finally settling on, of course, neuroscience. Unlike Darwin though, it seems that Dr.Eaglemans parents were supportive and understanding.

s s

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The vessel that would carry him to the Galapagos Islands and further into history.

Darwin’s contribution and ultimately his ownership of the theory of evolution is significant for it’s emphasis on process without a clear goal. Without a clear beginning or a clear end evolution is the ultimate process. . Many people assume that Darwin invented the theory of evolution himself. Instead Darwin discovered overwhelming evidence of this theory. The myth of evolutions origins and Darwin’s’ Origin of Species compared with the reality are common. Western culture is so primarily concerned with the end product that we conveniently forget that the process of creating is unstructured and nonlinear. This concept is explored in our second article The Creation Myth. This explores the actual unorthodox path that a revolutionary piece of technology like the Apple Lisa computer or Xerox’s first Laser Printer takes versus the common conception. Much like these revolutionary ideas, which didn’t have a singular conception point, neither did Darwin’s Origin of Species. In addition to this Darwin’s concepts and theories weren’t well received and on top of that people thought they were rather unremarkable at the time. Only when this concept was given time to breath and live in the world did it become an important link in our understanding of life.

Darwin sat on top of the inky black volcanic rocks that litter the Galapagos Islands, sketching. Loosing himself in the every single uttermost detail of these amazing animals that surrounded him, sketching. Darwin began to wonder how these animals came to live on this island. One theory he proposed was that terrestrial species such as tortoises or lizards would arrive on top of vegetation that would have broken away from the mainland during a storm. While Darwin was piecing together this theory he might have formed a kinship with these animals. Breaking away from their mainland, adrift at sea for months until finally washing up on these tiny islands, free to begin their own evolution. Did that self identity slip away when ventured back to camp at the end of the day and interacted with other people. In Dzifa Benson’s essay Performance is the Thing, she explores the philosophical question of the ever shifting self definition and that the person we perform most for is ourselves.

evolution

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is the ultimate

Evolution is the ultimate process. We know not where it began and not where it will end. The aspect of evolution that we have to value the most is the process. Darwin led a multiple faceted and non linear life like most of the people and devices discussed later in this compendium. This lack of linear experiences opens up their minds to a higher level of creativity and problem solving and when one understands process one can access it to become a more actively creative individual.

process

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the creation Malcom Gladwell

myth

originally appeared in the new Yorker

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May

16

2011

In late 1979, a twenty-four-yearold entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. He was the cofounder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

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X

erox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. A visitor to

why

aren’t

a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of hiwws company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.”

A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and PARC was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at PARC thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One PARC scientist

you doing anything

PARC, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox PARC—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted

with

recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a freshcheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, PARC’s prized personal computer.

An engineer named Larry Tesler conducted the demonstration. He moved the cursor across the screen with the aid of a “mouse.” Directing a conventional computer, in those days, meant typing in a command on the keyboard. Tesler just clicked on one of the icons on the screen.

He opened and closed “windows,” deftly moving from one task to another. He wrote

this?

This

is

19\

on an elegant word-processing program, and exchanged e-mails with other people at PARC, on the world’s first Ethernet network. Jobs had come with one of his software engineers, Bill Atkinson, and Atkinson moved in as close as he could, his nose almost touching the screen. “Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time,” Tesler recalled. “He was very excited.

Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why

the

greatest thing.

This

is

aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’ ” Xerox began selling a successor to the Alto in 1981. It was slow and underpowered—and Xerox ultimately withdrew from personal computers altogether. Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company’s next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse.

The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley.

Revolutionary!

!

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What’s a mouse?

“If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities,” Jobs said, years later, “it could have been as big as I.B.M. plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined—and the largest high-technology company in the world.”

This is the legend of Xerox PARC. Jobs is the Biblical Jacob and Xerox is Esau, squandering his birthright for a pittance. In the past thirty years, the legend has been vindicated by history.

Xerox, once the darling of the American high-technology community, slipped from its former dominance. Apple is now ascendant, and the demonstration in that room in Palo Alto has come to symbolize the vision and ruthlessness that separate true innovators from also-rans. As with all legends, however, the truth is a bit more complicated.

After Jobs returned from PARC, he met with a man named Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. “Jobs went to Xerox

21\

PARC on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I saw him on the Friday afternoon,” Hovey recalled. “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue.

So he explains it, and he says, ‘You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here’s your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans.’ From that meeting, I went to Walgreens, which is still there, at the corner of Grant and El Camino in Mountain View, and I wandered around and bought all the underarm deodorants that I could find, because they had that ball in them.

I bought a butter dish. That was the beginnings of the mouse.”

morning, just for the fun of telling the story of the Apple mouse in the place where it was invented. The room was the size of someone’s bedroom. It looked as if it had last been painted in the Coolidge Administration. Hovey, who is lean and healthy in a Northern California yoga-and-yogurt sort of way, sat uncomfortably at a rickety desk in a corner of the room. “Our first machine shop was literally out on the roof,” he said, pointing out the window to a little narrow strip of rooftop, covered in green outdoor carpeting. “We didn’t tell the planning commission. We went and got that clear corrugated stuff and put it across the top for a roof. We got out through the window.”

I spoke with Hovey in a ramshackle building in downtown Palo Alto, where his firm had started out. He had asked the current tenant if he could borrow his old office for the

I didn’t have a clue.

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He had brought a big plastic bag full of the artifacts of that moment: diagrams scribbled on lined paper, dozens of differently sized plastic mouse shells, a spool of guitar wire, a tiny set of wheels from a toy train set, and the metal lid from a jar of Ralph’s preserves.

He turned the lid over. It was filled with a waxlike substance, the middle of which had a round indentation, in the shape of a small ball. “It’s epoxy casting resin,” he said. “You pour it, and then I put Vaseline on a smooth steel ball, and set it in the resin, and it hardens around it.” He tucked the steel ball underneath the lid and rolled it around the tabletop. “It’s a kind of mouse.”

The hard part was that the roller ball needed to be connected to the housing of the mouse, so that it didn’t fall out, and so that it could transmit information about its movements to the cursor on the screen.

But if the friction created by those connections was greater than the friction between the tabletop and the roller ball, the mouse would skip. And the more the mouse was used the more dust it would pick up off the tabletop, and the more it would skip. The Xerox PARC mouse was an elaborate affair, with an array of ball bearings supporting the roller ball. But there was too much friction on the top of the ball, and it couldn’t deal with dust and grime.

At first, Hovey set to work with various arrangements of ball bearings, but nothing

quite worked. “This was the ‘aha’ moment,” Hovey said, placing his fingers loosely around the sides of the ball, so that they barely touched its surface. “So the ball’s sitting here. And it rolls. I attribute that not to the table but to the oldness of the building.

The floor’s not level. So I started playing with it, and that’s when I realized: I want it to roll.

I don’t want it to be supported by all kinds of ball bearings. I want to just barely touch it.”

The trick was to connect the ball to the rest of the mouse at the two points where there was the least friction—right where his fingertips had been, dead center on either side of the ball. “If it’s right at midpoint, there’s no force causing it to rotate. So it rolls.”

Hovey estimated their consulting fee at thirty-five dollars an hour; the whole project cost perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. “I originally pitched Apple on doing this mostly for royalties, as opposed to a consulting job,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m thinking fifty cents apiece,’ because I was thinking that they’d sell fifty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand of them.” He burst out laughing, because of how far off his estimates ended up being. “Steve’s pretty savvy. He said no.

Maybe if I’d asked for a nickel, I would have been fine.”

Here is the first complicating fact about the Jobs visit. In the legend of Xerox PARC, Jobs

23\

stole the personal computer from Xerox. But the striking thing about Jobs’s instructions to Hovey is that he didn’t want to reproduce what he saw at PARC. “You know, there were disputes around the number of buttons—three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse,” Hovey went on. “The mouse at Xerox had three buttons. But we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat in and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important.”

So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.

The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs’s imagination. Xerox

PARC’s innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user’s intention and the computer’s response. Jobs’s software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized “direct manipulation.” If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can—all features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial.

It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that’s

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appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.

innovations of R.M.A. in a manner so devastating that it destroyed nineteen surface-toair batteries and eighty-seven Syrian aircraft while losing only a handful of its own planes.

In a recent study, “The Culture of Military Innovation,” the military scholar Dima Adamsky makes a similar argument about the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs. R.M.A. refers to the way armies have transformed themselves with the tools of the digital age— such as precision-guided missiles, surveillance drones, and real-time command, control, and communications technologies—and Adamsky begins with the simple observation that it is impossible to determine who invented R.M.A. The first people to imagine how digital technology would transform warfare were a cadre of senior military intellectuals in the Soviet Union, during the nineteenseventies. The first country to come up with these high-tech systems was the United States. And the first country to use them was Israel, in its 1982 clash with the Syrian Air Force in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a battle commonly referred to as “the Bekaa Valley turkey shoot.” Israel coördinated all the major

That’s three revolutions, not one, and Adamsky’s point is that each of these strands is necessarily distinct, drawing on separate skills and circumstances. The Soviets had a strong, centralized military bureaucracy, with a long tradition of theoretical analysis. It made sense that they were the first to understand the military implications of new information systems. But they didn’t do anything with it, because centralized military bureaucracies with strong intellectual traditions aren’t very good at connecting word and deed.

The United States, by contrast, has a decentralized, bottom-up entrepreneurial culture, which has historically had a strong orientation toward technological solutions. The military’s

But Heaven not a good to commerci

27\

close ties to the country’ high-tech community made it unsurprising that the U.S. would be the first to invent precision-guidance and next-generation command-and-control communications. But those assets also meant that Soviet-style systemic analysis wasn’t going to be a priority. As for the Israelis, their military culture grew out of a background of resource constraint and constant threat. In response, they became brilliantly improvisational and creative. But, as Adamsky points out, a military built around urgent, short-term “fire extinguishing” is not going to be distinguished by reflective theory. No one stole the revolution. Each party viewed the problem from a different perspective, and carved off a different piece of the puzzle.

In the history of the mouse, Engelbart was the Soviet Union. He was the visionary, who saw the mouse before anyone else did.

But visionaries are limited by their visions.

“Engelbart’s self-defined mission was not to produce a product, or even a prototype; it was an open-ended search for knowledge,” Michael Hiltzikspan writes, in “Dealers of Lightning” (1999), his wonderful history of

is place ialize

Xerox PARC. “Consequently, no project in his lab ever seemed to come to an end.” Xerox PARC was the United States: it was a place where things got made. “Xerox created this perfect environment,” recalled Bob Metcalfe, who worked there through much of the nineteen-seventies, before leaving to found the networking company 3Com. “There wasn’t any hierarchy. We built out our own tools. When we needed to publish papers, we built a printer.

When we needed to edit the papers, we built a computer. When we needed to connect computers, we figured out how to connect them. We had big budgets. Unlike many of our brethren, we didn’t have to teach. We could just research. It was heaven.”

But heaven is not a good place to commercialize a product. “We built a computer and it was a beautiful thing,” Metcalfe went on. “We developed our computer language, our own display, our own language. It was a gold-plated product. But it cost sixteen thousand dollars, and it needed to cost three thousand dollars.”

For an actual product, you need threat and constraint—and the improvisation and creativity necessary to turn a gold-plated three-hundreddollar mouse into something that works on Formica and costs fifteen dollars. Apple was Israel.

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Xerox couldn’t have been I.B.M. and Microsoft combined, in other words. “You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market,” the tech writer Harry McCracken recently wrote. “They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both.” He was talking about the decision by the networking giant Cisco System, this spring, to shut down its Flip camera business, at a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. But he could just as easily have been talking about the Xerox of forty years ago, which was one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology the world has ever known. The fair question is whether Xerox, through its research arm in Palo Alto, found a better way to be Xerox— and the answer is that it did, although that story doesn’t get told nearly as often.

One of the people at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited was an optical engineer named Gary Starkweather. He is a solid and irrepressibly cheerful man, with large, practical hands and the engineer’s gift of pretending that what is impossibly difficult is actually pretty easy, once you shave off a bit here, and remember some of your high-school calculus, and realize that the thing that you thought should go in left to right should actually go in right to left. Once, before the palatial Coyote Hill Road building was constructed, a group that Starkweather had to be connected to was moved to another building, across the Foothill Expressway, half a mile away.

There was no way to run a cable under the highway. So Starkweather fired a

laser through the air between the two buildings, an improvised communications system that meant that, if you were driving down the Foothill Expressway on a foggy night and happened to look up, you might see a mysterious red beam streaking across the sky. When a motorist drove into the median ditch, “we had to turn it down,” Starkweather recalled, with a mischievous smile.

Lasers were Starkweather’s specialty. He started at Xerox’s East Coast research facility in Webster, New York, outside Rochester. Xerox built machines that scanned a printed page of type using a photographic lens, and then printed a duplicate. Starkweather’s idea was to skip the first step—to run a document from a computer directly into a photocopier, by means of a laser, and turn the Xerox machine into a printer. It was a radical idea. The printer, since Gutenberg, had been limited to the function of re-creation: if you wanted to print a specific image or letter, you had to have a physical character or mark corresponding to that image or letter. What Starkweather wanted to do was take the array of bits and bytes, ones and zeros that constitute digital images, and transfer them straight into the guts of a copier. That meant, at least in theory, that he could print anything.

“One morning, I woke up and I thought, Why don’t we just print something out directly?”

Starkweather said. “But when I flew that past my boss he thought it was the most braindead idea he had ever heard. He basically told me to find something else to do.

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why don’t we just print something out direclty.

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The feeling was that lasers were too expen“There was still a tremendous amount of opposive. They didn’t work that well. Nobody sition from the Webster group, who saw no wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful future in computer printing,” he went on. “They enough. And I guess, in my naïveté, I kept said, ‘I.B.M. is doing that. Why do we need to thinking, He’s just not right—there’s somedo that?’ and so forth. Also, there were two thing about this I really like. It got to be a or three competing projects, which I guess I frustrating situation. He and I came to logger- have the luxury of calling ridiculous. One group heads over the thing, about late 1969, early had fifty people and another had twenty. I had 1970. I was running my experiments in the two.” Starkweather picked up a picture of one back room behind a black curtain. I played of his in-house competitors, something called with them when I could. He threatened to lay an “optical carriage printer.” It was the size of off my people if I didn’t stop. I was having to one of those modular Italian kitchen units that make a decision: do I abandon this, or do I you see advertised in fancy design magazines. try and go up the ladder with it?”

“It was an unbelievable device,” he said, with a rueful chuckle. “It had a ten-inch drum, which Then Starkweather heard that Xerox was turned at five thousand r.p.m., like a super opening a research center in Palo Alto, three washing machine. It had characters printed on thousand miles away from its New York its surface. I think they only ever sold ten of headquarters. He went to a senior vice-presthem. The problem was that it was spinning so ident of Xerox, threatening to leave for I.B.M. fast that the drum would blow out and the charif he didn’t get a transfer. In January of 1971, acters would fly off. And there was only this his wish was granted, and, within ten months, one lady in Troy, New York, who knew how to he had a prototype up and running. put the characters on so that they would stay.

Starkweather is retired now, and lives in “So we finally decided to have what I called a a gated community just north of Orlando, fly-off. There was a full page of text—where Florida. When we spoke, he was sitting at some of them were non-serif characters, Hela picnic table, inside a screened-in porch in vetica, stuff like that—and then a page of graph his back yard. Behind him, golfers whirred by paper with grid lines, and pages with pictures in carts. He was wearing white chinos and and some other complex stuff—and everya shiny black short-sleeved shirt, decorated body had to print all six pages. Well, once with fluorescent images of vintage hot rods. we decided on those six pages, I knew I’d He had brought out two large plastic bins won, because I knew there wasn’t anything filled with the artifacts of his research, and I couldn’t print. Are you kidding? If you can he spread the contents on the table: a metal translate it into bits, I can print it. Some of octagonal disk, sketches on lab paper, a these other machines had to go through hoops black plastic laser housing that served as the just to print a curve. A week after the fly-off, innards for one of his printers. they folded those other projects. I was the only game in town.” The project turned into the Xerox 9700, the first high-speed, cut-paper laser printer in the world.

erox 700

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d e s p i t e

a l l

t h e

h a s s l e s

In one sense, the Starkweather story is of a piece with the Steve Jobs visit. It is an example of the imaginative poverty of Xerox management. Starkweather had to hide his laser behind a curtain. He had to fight for his transfer to PARC. He had to endure the indignity of the fly-off, and even then Xerox management remained skeptical. The founder of PARC, Jack Goldman, had to bring in a team from Rochester for a personal demonstration. After that, Starkweather and Goldman had an idea for getting the laser printer to market quickly: graft a laser onto a Xerox copier called the 7000. The 7000 was an older model, and Xerox had lots of 7000s sitting around that had just come off lease.

Goldman even had a customer ready: the Lawrence Livermore laboratory was prepared to buy a whole slate of the machines. Xerox said no. Then Starkweather wanted to make what he called a photo-typesetter, which produced camera-ready copy right on your desk. Xerox said no. “I wanted to work on higher-performance scanners,” Starkweather continued. “In other words, what if we print something other than documents? For example, I made a high-resolution scanner and you could print on glass plates.” He rummaged in one of the boxes on the picnic table

a n d

r i s k s

t h a t

a p p e a r e d

and came out with a sheet of glass, roughly six inches square, on which a photograph of a child’s face appeared. The same idea, he said, could have been used to make “masks” for the semiconductor industry— the densely patterned screens used to etch the designs on computer chips. “No one would ever follow through, because Xerox said, ‘Now you’re in Intel’s market, what are you doing that for?’ They just could not seem to see that they were in the information business. This”—he lifted up the plate with the little girl’s face on it—“is a copy.

It’s just not a copy of an office document.” i n

g e t t i n g

t h e

l a s t e r

But he got nowhere. “Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn’t on a metric.”

A few days after that afternoon in his back yard, however, Starkweather e-mailed an addendum to his discussion of his experiences at PARC. “Despite all the hassles and risks that happened in getting the laser printer going, in retrospect the journey was that much more exciting,” he wrote. “Often

p r i n t e r

g o i n g ,

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i n

r e t o r o s p e c t

difficulties are just opportunities in disguise.” Perhaps he felt that he had painted too negative a picture of his time at Xerox, or suffered a pang of guilt about what it must have been like to be one of those Xerox executives on the other side of the table. The truth is that Starkweather was a difficult employee. It went hand in hand with what made him such an extraordinary innovator. When his boss told him to quit t h e

j o u r n e y

w a s

t h a t

m u c h

m o r e

e x c i t i n g .

working on lasers, he continued in secret.

He was disruptive and stubborn and independent-minded—and he had a thousand ideas, and sorting out the good ideas from the bad wasn’t always easy. Should Xerox have put out a special order of laser printers for Lawrence Livermore, based on the old 7000 copier? In “Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer” (1988)—a book dedicated to the idea that Xerox was run by the blind—Douglas Smith and

/34

Robert Alexander admit that the proposal was hopelessly impractical: “The scanty Livermore proposal could not justify the investment required to start a laser printing business. . . . How and where would Xerox manufacture the laser printers? Who would sell and service them? Who would buy them and why?” Starkweather, and his compatriots at Xerox PARC, weren’t the source of disciplined strategic insights. They were wild geysers of creative energy.

The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. “Quality,” Simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.”

Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “The more suc-

cesses there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well”—meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult. The making of the classic Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main Street” was an ordeal, Keith Richards writes in his new memoir, because the band had too many ideas. It had to fight from under an avalanche of mediocrity: “Head in the Toilet Blues,” “Leather Jackets,” “Windmill,” “I Was Just a Country Boy,” “Bent Green Needles,” “Labour Pains,” and “Pommes de Terre”—the last of which Richards explains with the apologetic, “Well, we were in France at the time.”

At one point, Richards quotes a friend, Jim Dickinson, remembering the origins of the song “Brown Sugar”: I watched Mick write the lyrics. . . . He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand.

I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing.

Richards goes on to marvel, “It’s unbelievable

35\

how prolific he was.” Then he writes, “Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy.”

Richards clearly saw himself as the creative steward of the Rolling Stones (only in a rockand-roll band, by the way, can someone like Keith Richards perceive himself as the responsible one), and he came to understand that one of the hardest and most crucial parts of his job was to “turn the fucking tap off,” to rein in Mick Jagger’s incredible creative energy.

The more Starkweather talked, the more apparent it became that his entire career had been a version of this problem. Someone was always trying to turn his tap off. But someone had to turn his tap off: the interests of the innovator aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporation. Starkweather saw ideas on their own merits. Xerox was a multinational corporation, with shareholders, a huge sales force, and a vast corporate customer base, and it needed to consider every new idea within the context of what it already had.

Xerox’s managers didn’t always make the right decisions when they said no to Starkweather. But he got to PARC, didn’t he? And Xerox, to its great credit, had a PARC—a place where, a continent away from the top managers, an engineer could sit and dream, and get every purchase order approved, and fire a laser across the Foothill Expressway if he was so inclined.

Yes, he had to pit his laser printer against lesser ideas in the contest. But he won the contest. And, the instant he did, Xerox cancelled the competing projects and gave him the green light.

/36

37\

He wrote it down as fast as he could move hand his

/38

“I flew out there and gave a presentation to them on what I was looking at,” Starkweather said of his first visit to PARC. “They really liked it, because at the time they were building a personal computer, and they were beside themselves figuring out how they were going to get whatever was on the screen onto a sheet of paper. And when I showed them how I was going to put prints on a sheet of paper it was a marriage made in heaven.” The reason Xerox invented the laser printer, in other words, is that it invented the personal computer. Without the big idea, it would never have seen the value of the small idea. If you consider innovation to be efficient and ideas precious, that is a tragedy: you give the crown jewels away to Steve Jobs, and all you’re left with is a printer. But in the real, messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don’t really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.

“When you have a bunch of smart people with a broad enough charter, you will always get something good out of it,” Nathan Myhrvold, formerly a senior executive at Microsoft, argues. “It’s one of the best investments you could possibly make—but only if you chose to value it in terms of successes. If you chose to evaluate it in terms of how many times you failed, or times you could have succeeded and didn’t, then you are bound

to be unhappy. Innovation is an unruly thing.

There will be some ideas that don’t get caught in your cup. But that’s not what the game is about. The game is what you catch, not what you spill.”

In the nineteen-nineties, Myhrvold created a research laboratory at Microsoft modelled in part on what Xerox had done in Palo Alto in the nineteen-seventies, because he considered PARC a triumph, not a failure. “Xerox did research outside their business model, and when you do that you should not be surprised that you have a hard time dealing with it—any more than if some bright guy at Pfizer wrote a word processor. Good luck to Pfizer getting into the word-processing business. Meanwhile, the thing that they invented that was similar to their own business—a really big machine that spit paper out—they made a lot of money on it.”

And so they did. Gary Starkweather’s laser printer made billions for Xerox. It paid for every other single project at Xerox PARC, many times over.

In 1988, Starkweather got a call from the head of one of Xerox’s competitors, trying to lure him away. It was someone whom he had met years ago. “The decision was painful,” he said. “I was a year from being a twenty-five-year veteran of the company. I mean, I’d done enough for Xerox that unless

39\

/40

The game is what you catch

not what you spill

41\

/42

43\

I burned the building down they would never fire me. But that wasn’t the issue. It’s about having ideas that are constantly squashed. So I said, ‘Enough of this,’ and I left.”

He had a good many years at his new company, he said. It was an extraordinarily creative place. He was part of decision-making at the highest level. “Every employee from technician to manager was hot for the new, exciting stuff,” he went on. “So, as far as buzz and daily environment, it was far and away the most fun I’ve ever had.” But it wasn’t perfect. “I remember I called in the head marketing guy and I said, ‘I want you to give me all the information you can come up with on when people buy one of our products—what software do they buy, what business are they in—so I can see the model of how people are using the machines.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I have no idea about that.’ ” Where was the rigor? Then Starkweather had a scheme for hooking up a high-resolution display to one of his new company’s computers. “I got it running and brought it into management and said, ‘Why don’t we show this at the tech expo in San Francisco? You’ll be able to rule the world.’ They said, ‘I don’t know.

We don’t have room for it.’ It was that sort of thing. It was like me saying I’ve discovered a gold mine and you saying we can’t afford a shovel.”

He shrugged a little wearily. It was ever thus. The innovator says go. The company says stop— and maybe the only lesson of the legend of Xerox PARC is that what happened there happens, in one way or another, everywhere. By the way, the company that couldn’t afford a shovel?

Its name was Apple.*span id=”corrected”>By the way, the man who hired Gary Starkweather away to the company that couldn’t afford a shovel? His name was Steve Jobs.

}

/44

the Bruckard Bilger

originally appeared in the New Yorker

possibilian

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April

25

2011

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling

/46

this must be how Alice felt

47\

i

n the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet.

His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward— some shiny nails are scattered across it— as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. Physically, he seems no worse for the fall. He did a belly flop on the bricks, he says, and his nose took most of the impact. “He made a one-point landing,” as his father puts it. The cartilage was so badly smashed that an emergencyroom surgeon had to remove it all, leaving Eagleman with a rubbery proboscis that he could bend in any direction. But it stiffened up eventually, and it’s hard to tell that it was ever injured. Eagleman has puckish, neatly carved features, with a lantern jaw and modish sideburns. In Baylor’s lab-coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a bounce in his step that’s suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure Island.

/48

If Eagleman’s body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. He is a man obsessed by time. As the head of a lab at Baylor, Eagleman has spent the past decade tracing the neural and psychological circuitry of the brain’s biological clocks.

He has had the good fortune to arrive in his field at the same time as MRI scanners, which allow neuroscientists to observe the brain at work, in the act of thinking. But his best results have often come through more inventive means: video games, optical illusions, physical challenges. Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness. “There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science,” he told me. “But we live these short life spans. Why not do the thing that’s the coolest thing in the world to do?”

The Eagleman lab, on the ground floor of Baylor’s Ben Taub General Hospital, could be the lair of a precocious but highly distractible teen-ager. The doors are pinned with cartoons, the counters strewn with joysticks and other gizmos. The conference table is flanked by a large red rubber ball, for use as a chair or a Hippity Hop. When Eagleman first moved in, he had the walls painted baby blue, with a shiny finish designed to be erasable. By now,

they’ve been covered from floor to ceiling with equations, graphs, time lines, to-do lists, aphorisms, and sketches of brain waves—a Pollocky palimpsest of red, green, purple, and black scribblings. “The old stuff is really hard to erase,” Eagleman told me. “It’s like memory that way.”

Although Eagleman and his students study timing in the brain, their own sense of time tends to be somewhat unreliable.

Eagleman wears a Russian wristwatch to work every morning, though it’s been broken for months. “The other day, I was in the lab,” he told me, “and I said to Daisy, who sits in the corner, ‘Hey, what time is it?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. My watch is broken.’ It turns out that we’re all wearing broken watches.” Scientists are often drawn to things that bedevil them, he said. “I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they’re all overweight.”

But Eagleman’s ambivalence goes deeper.

Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction, he says. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set

49\

off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker.

If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points.

The difference can be as little as ninemillionths of a second.

Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again.

When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.”

/50

There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead.

Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz o¬scillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What

we’re all wearing broken watches

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/52

h e r e ’ s

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no

t h e

k i c k e r ,

evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead.

Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz o¬scillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out.

The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

y o u

53\

n e v e r

s e e

y o u r

A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is some other mechanism at work? The only way to know for sure was to re-create the situation in a controlled setting.

Eagleman and one of his graduate students, Chess Stetson, who is now at Caltech, began by designing and programming a “perceptual chronometer.”

About the size of a pack of cards, it had an L.E.D. display connected to a circuit board and powered by a nine-volt battery. The unit could be strapped to a subject’s wrist, where it would flash a number at a rate just beyond the threshold of perception.

If time slowed down, Eagleman reasoned, the number would become visible. Now he just needed a good, life-threatening situation.

Late one afternoon in October, Eagleman and I pulled into a gravel parking lot northwest of Dallas.

A dingy cinder-block ticket office stood to one side, with a sign above the door that said “Zero Gravity.”

e y e s

m o v e

Inside, past a low chain-link fence, a collection of giant steel structures rose several stories into the sky. To the left was a rickety-looking platform with a rubber rope dangling from it; to the right, a monstrous orange windmill with seats attached to the tips of its blades. “We had to shut down the Scraper,” one of the park attendants told me, pointing at it. “It’s waitin’ for a part from Germany.”

Zero Gravity was billed as a thrill park, but it looked more like an abandoned construction site—or an arena for death matches in a post-apocalyptic film.

When Eagleman first went there, five years ago, he knew it was the place for him. He had tried to test the chronometer on his grad students, on a field trip to Six Flags AstroWorld, in Houston, but even the largest roller coasters proved insufficiently terrifying. He needed something completely safe yet plausibly deadly. “I really chewed on this for a while,” he told me. “I couldn’t put people in a car accident.” Then he heard about the SCAD.

/54

put on leave for reasons of mental health.

The ride stood in the middle of the lot at “It was just human error,” the attendant in Zero Gravity, like a half-built oil derrick. A Dallas assured us. Nothing like that had steel gondola hung between its four legs happened here. and could be lifted to the top by thick cables.

SCAD was short for suspended catch air Just then, a young couple wandered into device—a phrase more confusing than its the park. They were both in their early acronym. But the idea was simple: when twenties, moonfaced and a little fidgety. the rider reached the top of the tower, he’d April had small round glasses and a long be hooked to a cable and lowered through ponytail; T.J. had a baggy black T-shirt a hole in the floor of the gondola. His back with a purple sword on it, and a modest would be to the ground, his eyes looking mullet combed back on top. They’d met straight up. When the cable was released, at the Walmart in Weatherford, an hour he would plummet a hundred and ten feet, in away, they told us. April had found this pure free fall, until a net caught him near the place online but already seemed to regret bottom. “I’ve been up this thing three times, it: she clutched T.J.’s hand and peered and it’s gotten scarier every time,” Eagleman at the SCAD, her shoulders hunched up said. “The second you drop, every part of around her ears. He followed her gaze. you locks up. Your abs are rock solid, and “I’ve jumped off cliffs into lakes before,” he you can’t breathe. You’re falling backward, said. “But that’s about it.” going fifty miles an hour when you hit the net.”

When Eagleman showed them the We scanned the lot for potential volunteers, perceptual chronometer, they looked a but the park was deserted. There are only little dubious. Eagleman’s excitement two SCADs in the country, both of which, about his research is usually infectious. until recently, had pristine safety records.

He’s a good talker, with a gift for distilThen, in July, a SCAD operator in the lation and off-the-cuff analogy, and he Wisconsin Dells triggered a drop before the tends to gather steam as he goes, leaping net had been lifted fully into place. When the from idea to idea until his voice is hoarse rider—a twelve-year-old girl named Teagan and his mind is catapulting off to distant Marti—landed in the net, her momentum dimensions. (“What if we were to land on stretched it to the ground. The impact fraca planet with aliens who live at a differtured her skull and broke her spine in ten ent time scale from us?” he asked me at places. Afterward, the SCAD operator was

55\

one point. “Would we seem like statues to them the way trees do to us?”) In this setting, though, it was a little hard to take him seriously. The more sober and scientific he tried to sound, the more April and T.J. seemed to take him for some unhinged Trekkie babbling on about his time machine.

Still, they agreed to give it a try. The attendant fitted them with harnesses, latched them into the gondola, and sent them lurching into the Texas sky. I could see April’s ponytail whipping around above her head like a wind sock. “What is it, Tuesday?” Eagleman said.

“How does someone, on a Tuesday, wake up and decide, ‘This is the day that I’m going to scare myself to death’?” Then he pulled a stopwatch from his pocket and waited for the bodies to drop.

Eagleman traces his research back to psychophysicists in Germany in the late eighteen-hundreds, but his true forefather may be the American physiologist Hudson Hoagland. In the early nineteen-thirties, Hoagland proposed one of the first models for how the brain keeps time, based partly on his wife’s behavior when she had the flu. She complained that he’d been away from her bedside too long, he later recalled, when he’d been gone only a short while.

So Hoagland proposed an experiment: she would count off sixty seconds while he timed her with his watch. It’s not hard to imagine her annoyance at this suggestion, or his smugness afterward: when her minute was up, his clock showed thirty-seven seconds.

Hoagland went on to repeat the experiment again and again, presumably over his wife’s delirious objections (her fever rose above a hundred and three). The result was one of the classic graphs of time-perception literature: the higher his wife’s temperature, Hoagland found, the shorter her time estimate. Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got.

Psychologists spent the next few decades trying to identify this mechanism. They worked with mice, rats, fish, turtles, cats, and pigeons, then moved on to monkeys, children, and brain-damaged adults. They shocked their subjects with electrodes, strapped them into heated helmets, dunked them in water baths, and irritated them with insistent clicks, hoping to speed up or slow down their internal clocks. Hoagland believed that timing was a “unitary chemical process” tied to metabolism. But later studies suggested a hodgepodge of systems, each devoted to a different time scale—the cerebral equivalent of a sundial, an hourglass, and an atomic clock. “Mother Nature’s a tinkerer instead of an engineer,” Eagleman says. “She doesn’t just invent something and check it off the list. Everything is layers on layers built on top of each other, and that provides tremendous robustness.” Parkinson’s disease can impair our ability to time intervals of a few seconds, for instance, but leave split-second timing intact.

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sense a

time

of

Just how many clocks we contain still isn’t clear. The most recent neuroscience papers make the brain sound like a Victorian attic, full of odd, vaguely labelled objects ticking away in every corner. The circadian clock, which tracks the cycle of day and night, lurks in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, in the hypothalamus. The cerebellum, which governs muscle movements, may control timing on the order of a few seconds or minutes. The basal ganglia and various parts of the cortex have all been nominated as timekeepers, though there’s some disagreement on the details. The standard model, proposed by the late Columbia psychologist John Gibbon in the nineteen-seventies, holds that the brain has “pacemaker” neurons that release steady pulses of neurotransmitters. More recently, at Duke, the neuroscientist Warren Meck has suggested that timing is governed by groups of neurons that oscillate at different frequencies. At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomano believes that areas throughout the brain function as clocks, their tissue ticking with neural networks that change in predictable patterns.

“Imagine a skyscraper at night,” he told me. “Some people on the top floor work till midnight, while some on the lower floors may go to bed early. If you studied the patterns long enough, you could tell the time just by looking at which lights are on.”

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling.

(Unless, of course, you have synesthesia— another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

everything

The real mystery is how all this is coördinated. When you watch a ballgame or bite into a hot dog, your senses are in perfect synch: they see and hear, touch and taste the same thing at the same moment. Yet they operate at fundamentally different speeds, with different inputs. Sound travels more slowly than light, and aromas and tastes more slowly still. Even if the signals reached your brain at the same time, they would get processed at different rates. The reason that a hundred-metre dash starts with a pistol shot rather than a burst of light, Eagleman pointed out, is that the body reacts much more quickly to sound. Our ears and auditory cortex can process a signal forty milliseconds faster than our eyes and visual cortex—more than making up for the speed of light. It’s another vestige, perhaps, of our days in the jungle, when we’d hear the tiger long before we’d see it.

hrough

threade

is

57\

/58

In Eagleman’s essay “Brain Time,” published in the 2009 collection “What’s Next?

Dispatches on the Future of Science,” he borrows a conceit from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, “encased in darkness and silence,” at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present— processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?

The mind-body problem has been vexing Eagleman longer than most. Even as a boy, his mother told me, he had a tendency to “dissociate himself”—to assess his own inner workings from a cool, analytical distance.

“My brain can do this,” he’d say. His mother was a biology teacher, his father a psychiatrist often called upon to evaluate insanity pleas, but their son was a creature outside their usual experience. “There were things about Dave that were a little bit funny,” his

mother says. He wrote his first words at the age of two, on an Underwood typewriter. At twelve, he was explaining relativity to them.

One of his favorite tricks was to ask for a list of random objects, then repeat it back from memory—in reverse order, if people wished.

His record was four hundred items.

As an undergraduate at Rice, Eagleman wanted to be a writer, but his parents persuaded him to major in electrical engineering instead. “It was like chewing on autumn leaves,” he says. An extended sabbatical ensued. After his sophomore year, Eagleman joined the Israeli Army as a volunteer, then spent a semester at Oxford studying political science and literature, and finally moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter and a standup comic. Nothing took. “I knew I had some intellectual horsepower,” he says. “But I didn’t know where my tires would catch purchase.” Back at Rice, he began to read books about the brain in his spare time and decided to take a course in neurolinguistics. “I was immediately enchanted just by the idea of it,” Eagleman says. “Here was this three-pound organ that was the seat of everything we are—our hopes and desires and our loves. They had me at page one.”

59\

Mathematicians, like rock musicians, tend to do their best work in their twenties and thirties. Not so neuroscientists. The Nobel Prizes in the field are usually earned in midcareer, after a few false starts and fruitless sidetracks. “Biology is special that way,” Eagleman says. “It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works. Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math.

They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.”

Eagleman was speaking from experience. As a grad student at Baylor, he leaned especially hard on his math skills at first, having had so little training in biology. (“I would ask the professors what they were doing, and they would say, ‘Yes, yes . . . Greek, Greek, Latin, Latin,” he says of his admissions interview.) For his doctoral work, he programmed a piece of virtual neural tissue so complex that it tied up the Texas Medical Center’s new supercomputer for days, prompting complaints from all over the university. “I remember, when he was writing it, he had a sack of raw potatoes under his desk,” his dissertation adviser, Read Montague, told me. “He would cook a potato in the microwave, put it in a cup, and lean over and bite it while he was typing. It kind of set the tone for my lab for the succeeding decade. It chased away the faint of heart.”

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Eagleman’s program was a theoretical as well as a technical feat: it showed that brain cells can exchange information not just through neurotransmitters but through the ebb and flow of calcium atoms. He went on to earn a postdoc at the prestigious Salk Institute, near San Diego. Once there, t h i s

i s

a

s c i e n t i f i c

though, he fell under the spell of Francis Crick, a biologist interested in more than clever simulations. Crick was eighty-three when Eagleman met him, in 1999. He had won the Nobel Prize with James Watson almost forty years earlier, for deciphering the structure of DNA, but his research had taken a hard left turn since then, from genetics to the study of consciousness. “We’d have these seminars and he’d sit there and his head would nod, and I’d think, Oh, poor guy, the tolls of senescence,” Eagleman recalls.

“Then he’d get this smile on his face and raise his hand—and just disembowel the speaker.

I’d never seen anything like that.”

For decades, brain researchers had taken their lead from behaviorists like B. F. Skinner.

They treated their subject as a machine like any other, with inputs, outputs, and a shadowy mechanism in between. But Crick and a handful of other researchers believed that it was time to pry open Skinner’s black box—to at least begin to identify the mechanics of individual awareness. “When I started out, you basically weren’t allowed to talk about it,” Eagleman says. “Why does it feel like something to be alive? Why, when you put together millions of parts, does something suddenly have a sense of itself? All of this went out the window after B. F. Skinner.

And it took a guy with Crick’s gravitas to

p r o b l e m

come in and say, ‘You know what? This is a scientific problem—the most exciting of our time.’ ” Crick called it the scientific search for the soul.

Eagleman had to wait a few weeks to be granted an audience with Crick. (“I kind of became pals with his secretary,” he told me.) But they quickly hit it off and met regularly after that. Like Crick, Eagleman was fascinated by consciousness. He thought of time not just as a neuronal computation—a matter for biological clocks—but as a window on the movements of the mind. In a paper published in Science in 2000, for instance, Eagleman looked at an optical illusion known as the flash-lag effect. The illusion could take many forms, but in Eagleman’s version it consisted of a white dot flashing on a screen as a green circle passed over it. To determine where the dot hit the circle, Eagleman found, his subjects’ minds had to travel back and forth in time. They saw the dot flash, then watched the circle move and calculated its trajectory, then went back and placed the dot on the circle. It wasn’t a matter of prediction, he wrote, but of postdiction.

Something similar happens in language all the time, Dean Buonomano told me. If someone says, “The mouse on the desk is broken,” your mind calls forth a different image than if you hear, “The mouse on the desk is eating cheese.” Your brain registers the word “mouse,” waits for its context, and only then goes back to visualize it.

But language leaves time for second thoughts.

The flash-lag effect seems instantaneous. It’s as if the word “mouse” were changed to “track pad” before you even heard it.

t h e

m o s t

e x c i t i n g

o f

o u r

t i m e

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The explanation for this is both simple and profoundly strange. Eagleman first described it to me on the way from Houston to the Zero Gravity thrill park in Dallas. “Imagine that there’s an accident on the highway up ahead,” he began. “One of these cars runs into that bridge.” If the crash were to occur a hundred yards away, we’d see the car hit the bridge in silence. The sound, like a peal of thunder, would take a moment to reach us. The closer the impact, the shorter the delay, but only up to a point: at a hundred and ten feet, sight and sound would suddenly lock together. Under that threshold, Eagleman explained, the signals reach the brain within a hundred milliseconds of one another, and any differences in processing are erased. In the early days of television, Eagleman told me, broadcasters noticed a similar phenomenon.

Their engineers went to a great deal of trouble to synchronize sound and image, but it soon became clear that perfectionism was pointless. As long as the delay was less than a hundred milliseconds, no one noticed it.

The margin of error is surprisingly wide. If the brain can distinguish sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, why don’t we notice a delay twenty times longer? A possible answer began to emerge in the late nineteen-fifties, in the work of Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Libet worked with patients at a local hospital who had been admitted for neurosurgery and had had a hole drilled into their skull to expose the cortex. In one experiment, he used an electrode to shock the brain tissue with electrical pulses. The cortex is wired straight to the skin and various body parts, so the subjects would feel a tingle in the corresponding area. But not right away: the shock didn’t register for up to half a second—an eternity in brain time. “The implications are quite astounding,” Libet later wrote. “We are not conscious of the actual moment of the present. We are always a little late.”

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worth gleman

he said. living

in

the

past

may

n’t ng when ded?”

Libet’s findings have been hard to replicate (zapping a patient’s exposed brain is frowned upon these days), and they remain controversial. But to Eagleman they make a good deal of sense. Like Kublai Khan, he says, the brain needs time to get its story straight. It gathers up all the evidence of our senses, and only then reveals it to us. It’s a deeply counterintuitive idea in some ways. Touch your finger to an ember or prick it on a needle and the pain is immediate. You feel it now—not in half a second. But perception and reality are often a little out of register, as the saccade experiment showed. If all our senses are slightly delayed, we have no context by which to measure a given lag. Reality is a tapedelayed broadcast, carefully censored before it reaches us.

s e e m l i k e a d i s a d v a n t a g e

“Living in the past may seem like a disadvantage, but it’s a cost that the brain is willing to pay,” Eagleman said. “It’s trying to put together the best possible story about what’s going on in the world, and that takes time.”

Touch is the slowest of the senses, since the signal has to travel up the spinal cord from as far away as the big toe. That could mean that the over-all delay is a function of body size: elephants may live a little farther in the past than hummingbirds, with humans somewhere in between. The smaller you are, the more you live in the moment. (Eagleman suspects that the speed of an animal’s mating call—from the piping of a chickadee to the plainchant of a humpback—is a proxy for its sense of time.) “I once mentioned this in an NPR interview and I got flooded by e-mails from short people,” Eagleman said.

“They were so pleased. For about a day, I was the hero of the short people.”

hurt.”

A lot can happen in half a second. At fifty miles an hour, for instance, a body can fall almost forty feet. April, the young woman from Weatherford, Texas, seemed well aware of this when she rode the SCAD later that afternoon. I could hear her strangled “Ayiiiiiiiiii!” as she plummeted from the top of the tower. Eagleman watched her streak past, then punched his stopwatch. “That’s funny,” he said. “They never scream.” April took a moment to extricate herself from the safety net and walked unsteadily to a nearby bench. When we joined her, she was blinking and glancing vaguely around—she’d taken off her glasses before the ride—her eyes wide with shock.

63\

“Was it worth it?” Eagleman asked.

“No,” she said.

but

it’s

a

cost

that

the

brain is willing to pay

“It wasn’t thrilling when you landed?”

“No. It hurt.”

/64

A few minutes later, her boyfriend, T.J., joined her on the bench. He’d jammed a Budweiser cap backward on his head, and his features had a shiny, blown-back look.

When Eagleman asked him how the ride went, he held his forearms out in front of him: his fingers were shaking uncontrollably.

Eagleman and Chess Stetson, his grad student, ran the first round of SCAD experiments in 2007, with twenty subjects. They programmed the perceptual chronometer to flash its numbers just a little too fast to be legible. Then they stationed one observer at the top of the tower, to make sure the riders looked at the chronometer as they fell, and another on the ground. Afterward, the riders would report their chronometer readings, then take a stopwatch and go back over the experience in their minds, timing it from start to finish. Eagleman knew how long the fall had taken in real time; now he wanted to know how long it felt. April was too jittery to manage this at first, but then she took a deep breath and tried again. When she opened her eyes, the stopwatch showed just over three and a half seconds—about thirty per cent longer than the actual drop.

April’s timing was typical: on average, Eagleman’s subjects overestimate the length of their fall by thirty-six per cent. To his surprise, though, the speed of their perception doesn’t change as they drop: no matter how hard they stare at the chronometer, they can’t read the numbers. “In some sense, that’s more interesting than what we thought was going on,” Eagleman told me. “It suggests that time and memory are so tightly intertwined that they may be impossible to tease apart.”

One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last.

“This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

rubbery

thing.

Time is a

65\

this explains

Like Eagleman’s comments about short people, the SCAD study triggered a flood of correspondence when it was published, by the Public Library of Science, four years ago. “It was like a propagating shock wave,” he told me. “I got e-mails from paratroopers and cops and race-car drivers, people in motorcycle accidents and car accidents.” One letter was from a former curator at a museum who had accidentally knocked over a Ming vase. “He said the thing took fucking forever to fall,” Eagleman said. During the next few years, he plans to study the stories—some two hundred so far—by going back to the authors with a questionnaire. In the meantime, it’s easy to pick out the common threads— not just the sense of time slowing down but the strange calm and the touch of the surreal that he remembers from his own childhood fall. In one story, a man is thrown off his motorcycle after colliding with a car. As he’s sliding across the road, perhaps to his death, he hears his helmet bouncing against the asphalt. The sound has a catchy rhythm, he thinks, and he finds himself composing a little ditty to it in his head.

Time is a why time

Time is a

thing.

when we get older

rubbery

speeds up

“Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.” The best example of this is the so-called oddball effect—an optical illusion that Eagleman had shown me in his lab. It consisted of a series of simple images flashing on a computer screen.

Most of the time, the same picture was repeated again and again: a plain brown shoe. But every so often a flower would appear instead. To my mind, the change was a matter of timing as well as of content: the flower would stay onscreen much longer than the shoe. But Eagleman insisted that all the pictures appeared for the same length of time. The only difference was the degree of attention that I paid to them. The shoe, by its third or fourth appearance, barely made an impression.

The flower, more rare, lingered and blossomed, like those childhood summers.

/66

Before Francis Crick died, in 2004, he gave Eagleman some advice. “Look,” he said. “The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.”

Eagleman may have taken the words a little too much to heart. When I was in Houston, he had more than a dozen studies running simultaneously, and spent his time racing from laboratory to lecture hall to MRI machine to brain-surgery ward and back. “We’re using the full armamentarium of modern neuroscience,” he told me. One of his nine lab members was studying the neurological roots of empathy; another was looking at free will. Two were studying timing disorders in schizophrenics; one had helped create the world’s foremost database of synesthetes.

Eagleman had projects on epilepsy, counterfeiting, decision-making in courts, and timing deficits among brain-damaged veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as four books at various stages of completion.

In early April, Eagleman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on synesthesia. In May, Pantheon will publish “Incognito,” his popular account of the unconscious.

“Did I mention my paper on the asp caterpillar?” he asked me one day. He pulled up a picture on his computer of what looked like a grub in a fancy fur coat. It was a highly venomous insect, he assured me. He knew this because one of them had crawled up his leg seven years earlier. “It felt like someone had just poured a glass of acid on my shin,” he said.

In the hospital that night, an emergency-room doctor

67\

called him a wimp. “Haven’t you been bitten by a bug before?” he said. So Eagleman, by way of reply, spent the next few years rounding up every known case report of asp-caterpillar envenomation. He created the first map of the caterpillar’s distribution in North America, as well as graphs of a hundred and eightyeight attacks, broken down by month and symptom.

Then he published his report, extensively footnoted, in the journal Clinical Toxicology. “It turns out that I’m the world’s expert on this thing,” he told me, grinning.

Eagleman’s colleagues occasionally grumble that he’s overreaching, or seeking publicity. But he has an impressive record of peer-reviewed publications, and even his wackiest projects tend to bear up under scrutiny. “The data are solid,” Dean Buonomano told me. “The interpretations can sometimes be a bit dreamy.” Eagleman’s bigger problem is time, in a practical as well as a theoretical sense. He gets seven hours of sleep a night, he says, but only by working seven days a week, mostly without pause. (His last vacation was three years ago, a weekend wedding in Hawaii.) For years, Eagleman was a confirmed bachelor and “serial dater,” as one of his friends put it, with a tidy bungalow that he liked to call the Eagle’s Nest. Then, last October, he surprised everyone by marrying Sarah Alwin, a twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate who studies the electrophysiology of vision at the University of Texas in Houston. “We’re a terrific match,” he told me. “She’s as much of a workaholic as I am.” They hope to have children soon, before the DNA in his sperm deteriorates too much with age. “I used to be such a cynic about marriage,” he said.

“Now I even want to spawn!”

Eagleman has never lost his childhood tendency to

observe himself from a distance, treating his own brain as a research subject. When we were winding our way through Baylor’s labyrinthine corridors, he credited his sense of direction to a fine hippocampus. And when we sat down to a meal at a restaurant he complained that he’d much rather ingest a “compressed bar of nutrients.” As for his wildly varied research: it’s just another version of the oddball effect, he told me. By leaping from topic to topic, he forces his brain to give each problem far more attention than familiarity would allow. “Emerson did the same thing,” he said. “He had a lazy Susan with multiple projects on it. When he’d get bored, he would just spin it and start on something else.”

Early this winter, I joined Eagleman in London for his most recent project: a study of time perception in drummers. Timing studies tend to be performed on groups of random subjects or on patients with brain injuries or disorders. They’ve given us a good sense of average human abilities, but not the extremes: just how precise can a person’s timing be? “In neuroscience, you usually look for animals that are best at something,” Eagleman told me, over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill. “If it’s memory, you study songbirds; if it’s olfaction, you look at rats and dogs. If I were studying athletes, I’d want to find the guy who can run a four-minute mile. I wouldn’t want a bunch of chubby high-school kids.”

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The idea of studying drummers had come from Brian Eno, the composer, record producer, and former member of the band Roxy Music. Over the years, Eno had worked with U2, David Byrne, David Bowie, and some of the world’s most rhythmically gifted musicians. He owned a studio a few blocks away, in a converted stable on a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, and had sent an e-mail inviting a number of players to participate in Eagleman’s study. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno said. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.”

Eno first met Eagleman two years ago, after a publisher he knew sent him a book of Eagleman’s short stories, called “Sum.” Modelled on the cerebral fiction of Borges and Calvino, “Sum” is a natural outgrowth of Eagleman’s scientific concerns—another spin of the lazy Susan that has circled back to the subject of time. Each of its forty chapters is a kind of thought experiment, describing a different version of the afterlife. Eagleman establishes a set of initial conditions, then lets the implications unfold logically. In one chapter, the dead are doomed to spend eternity playing bit parts in the dreams of the living. In another, they share the hereafter with all possible versions of themselves—from the depressing failures to the irritating successes. “I’m a minimalist at heart. I like short, big ideas,” Eno said. “I asked my friend when he was publishing it, and he said, ‘Next February.’ We had a big argument. I said, ‘Just get the bloody thing out!’ ”

“Sum” had taken years to find a publisher— Eagleman began writing it while still in graduate school—but it quickly found an audience. In England, it was praised by publications as disparate as Nature (“rigorous and imaginative”) and the Observer, where the author Geoff Dyer called it “stunningly original” and saw in it “the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius.” Eagleman had considered writing under a pseudonym, thinking that he’d be vilified by scientists and religious readers alike. Instead, both groups claimed the book for their own. Atheists like Philip Pullman wrote enthusiastic blurbs, while the editors of an interfaith Web site named it one of the best spiritual books of 2009. At a Unitarian church in Massachusetts, members of the congregation took turns reading chapters from the pulpit.

Eno and Eagleman had struck up an e-mail correspondence by then, and Eno had suggested that they collaborate on a staged reading of the book. The production premièred at the Sydney Opera House in June, 2009, with an ambient score by Eno. (A full-fledged operatic version, with music by Max Richter, is scheduled to be produced by the Royal Opera House, in London, in 2012.) It was while they were there that Eno told Eagleman the story that inspired the drumming study.

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“I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums,” Eno told me. “ ‘All That You Don’t Leave Behind,’ or whatever it’s called.” Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track—a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. “I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ” Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”

Eagleman arrived at Eno’s studio late the next morning, carrying a pair of laptops and a wireless EEG monitor. “This thing is so cool!” he said, pulling the latter from its foam-cushioned case. “They did the full T.S.A. search on me at the airport.” He clamped the EEG on his head—it looked like a giant tarantula perched there—then watched as sixteen wavering lines appeared onscreen, in candy-stripe colors. Each line represented the electrical activity at a different point in his brain. The drummers would wear this while taking a set of four tests, Eagleman explained. The tests were like simple video games, designed by his lab to measure different forms of timing: keeping a steady beat, comparing the lengths of two tones, synchronizing a beat to an image, and comparing visual or audible rhythms to one another. “The EEG can pick up twenty-thousandths of a second,” he said. “Brain activity doesn’t even go that fast, so we’re oversampling by a lot. But why not?”

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‘What

is

seventy-eight beats per minute?,’

he

will

go tap, tap, tap. And he’s dead on.”

71\

While Eagleman set up testing areas in two rooms, Eno bustled around the studio tidying up, talking to his cats, and brewing tea. The stable had been converted into an airy, skylit space with a circular staircase that led to the former hayloft, now filled with computer workstations.

The back corner was flanked by a pair of enormous monochords: single-stringed electric instruments of Eno’s design, made of railroad ties. Eno was clean-shaven and dressed all in black. He had a round, impish face and rectangular glasses with a pixellated pattern punched along the temples.

“Drummers are very hard to control,” he said, stuffing some Christmas cards into their envelopes. “I didn’t hear anything for days. Then suddenly everybody decided to come, and to bring their friends. So we may have a flood of drummers. Or we may have no one at all.” He was a little worried that they’d get hungry or bored. (“They’re probably more likely to come if there’s a sort of ‘scene’ going on,” he’d written Eagleman a few weeks earlier.) So he sent an assistant to buy pastries and mixed nuts, and brought out “various entertainments” for the drummers to play with, including a drum synthesizer.

“The more competitive they feel about this, the better,” Eagleman said. “A big part of it is making sure they pay attention.”

“That will be hard,” Eno replied.

The first subject wandered in at around noon—a scruffy, swivel-hipped young redhead named Daniel Maiden-Wood, who played drums for the singer Anna Calvi. By midafternoon, the place was full. Larry Mullen, Jr., was on tour in Australia, but the makings of a remarkable rhythm section were sprawled on Eno’s sofas and chairs. Among them were jazz musicians, Afro-Cuban percussionists, and the drummer for Razorlight, a British band with a pair of multiplatinum albums. Will Champion, of Coldplay, came in looking like a lumberjack who’d taken

a wrong turn. (When he removed his yarn cap to reveal a large bullet head, Eagleman said it was perfect for the EEG.) Champion had worked with Eno on “Viva la Vida,” the 2008 album that topped both the British and the American charts, solidifying Coldplay’s standing as the world’s best-selling rock group. “He’s like a human metronome,” Eno said. “If you say to him, ‘What is seventy-eight beats per minute?,’ he will go tap, tap, tap. And he’s dead on.”

The friendly rivalry that Eagleman had imagined among players never quite materialized. (He might have had better luck with a roomful of lead singers.) Instead, they told drummer jokes.

How do you know when there’s a drummer at your door? The knocking gets faster and faster. Had we heard about the drummer who tried to commit suicide? He threw himself behind a train. Eno had been recording drum parts most of his life, but he claimed to be rhythmically challenged. “I suffer from what my friend Leo Abrahams calls the honky offset— the tendency of white players to be early on the beat,” he said. “It’s eleven milliseconds. If you delay the recording by that much, it sounds much better.”

Nevertheless, as pairs of drummers shuffled back and forth from the testing stations, a certain wounded professional pride was in evidence. The players had no trouble comparing a tone or keeping a steady beat, but the visual-timing tests were giving them fits. Eagleman had promised that the results would be kept anonymous, but he’d programmed each battery of tests to end with a cheeky evaluation: “You’re a rock star,” for those who scored in the top twenty-five per cent; “Ready for the big time,” for the second quartile; “Ready for openmike night,” for those in the next group; and “Go back to band camp,” for the bottom quarter.

No one wanted to go to band camp.

/72

we’re stuck A drummer’s timing is a physical thing, they agreed, like dancing. Tapping a rhythm on a trackpad robs it of all sense of movement or muscle memory. Yet many of them played to click tracks even onstage, and their sense of tempo had been conditioned and codified by years in the studio. Hip-hop was eighty or ninety beats per minute, they said, Afrobeat around a hundred and ten. Disco stuck so insistently to a hundred and twenty that you could run the songs one after another without missing a beat. “There wasn’t a fraction of deviance,” Eno said. In the heat of a performance, drummers sometimes rushed the beat or hung back a little, to suit the mood.

But as click tracks became more common such deviations had to be re-created artificially. To Champion’s amusement, Coldplay had lately taken to programming elaborate “tempo maps” for its live shows, with click

tracks designed to speed up or slow down during a song. “It re-creates the excitement of a track that’s not so rigid,” Champion said.

When it was his turn to take Eagleman’s test, Champion spent nearly twice as long at the computer as the others—his competitive spirit roused at last. He needn’t have worried.

Eagleman’s results later showed a “huge statistical difference,” as he put it, between the drummers’ timing and that of the random control subjects he’d tested back in Houston.

When asked to keep a steady beat, for instance, the controls wavered by an average of thirty-five milliseconds; the best drummer was off by less than ten. Eno was right: drummers do have different brains from the

in time

73\

rest. “They kicked ass over the controls,” Eagleman said. His next task would be to use the EEG data to locate the most active areas of the drummers’ brains, then target them with bursts of magnetic stimulation to see if he could disrupt their timing. “Now that we know that there is something anatomically different about them,” he said, “we want to see if we can mess it up.”

Whether they’d want to participate again was another matter. Champion, for one, looked a little punch-drunk after his test. “It’s hard not to feel like it’s a sort of personal evaluation,” he said, as he was putting on his coat. “Hopefully, it will be useful for some larger purpose. But you still want to feel like you’re up to snuff.” He shrugged. “Luckily, it told me that I should be a rock star. So it’s nice to know that that wasn’t wasted.”

It was close to midnight when Eagleman and I finally left Eno’s studio, the laptops and the EEG tucked under our arms. The streets felt muffled and close beneath the starless sky; the sidewalks were slick with snow. Walking back to our hotel, I thought of the countless

sensory signals careering around me: the glimmer of street lamps off pub windows, the rumble of tube trains underground, the scent of wood smoke and spilled beer, and the curve of cobblestones beneath my feet.

From billions of such fragments m¬y brain had pieced together this simple story—a winter’s night in Notting Hill—and I was happy to have it.

What would it be like to have a drummer’s timing? I wondered. Would you hear the hidden rhythms of everyday life, the syncopations of the street? When I asked the players at Eno’s studio this, they seemed to find their ability as much an annoyance as a gift. Like perfect pitch, which dooms the possessor to hear every false note and flat car horn, perfect timing may just make a drummer more sensitive to the world’s arrhythmias and repeated patterns, Eagleman said—to the flicker of computer screens and fluorescent lights. Reality, stripped of an extra beat in which the brain orchestrates its signals, isn’t necessarily a livelier place. It’s just filled with badly dubbed television shows.

“We’re stuck in time like fish in water,”

like fish in water

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you know what?

75\

I’m

a

Possibilian

too

Eagleman said, oblivious of its currents until a bubble floats by. It’s usually best that way.

He had spent the past ten years peering at the world through such gaps in our perception, he said. “But sometimes you get so far down deep into reality that you want to pull back. Sometimes, in a great while, I’ll think, What if I find out that this is all an illusion?”

He felt this most keenly with his schizophrenic subjects, who tended to do poorly on timing tests. The voices in their heads, he suspected, were no different from anyone else’s internal monologues; their brains just processed them a little out of sequence, so that the thoughts seemed to belong to someone else. “All it takes is this tiny tweak in the brain, this tiny change in perception,” he said, “and what you see as real isn’t real to anyone else.”

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue— “essentially an alien computational material”— to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said.

“And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? Why not imagine ourselves, as he did in “Sum,” as bits of networked hardware in a cosmic program, or as particles of some celestial organism, or any of a thousand other possibilities, and then test

those ideas against the available evidence?

“Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.

But certainty is an absurd one.”

A garden-variety agnostic might have left it at that. But Eagleman, as usual, took things a step further. Two years ago, in an interview on a radio show, he declared himself the founder of a new movement. Possibilianism had a membership of one, he said, but he hoped to attract more. “I’m not saying here is the answer,” he told me. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.”

The announcement was only half serious, so Eagleman was shocked to find, when he came home from his lab later that night, that his e-mail in-box was filled, once again, with messages from listeners. “You know what?” most of them said. “I’m a Possibilian, too!” The movement has since drawn press from as far away as India and Uganda.

At last count, close to a thousand Facebook members had switched their religious affiliation to Possibilianism.

Francis Crick, the patron saint of intellectual long shots, might have approved.

}

/76

performance is the Dzifa Benson

thing

originally appeard in Philosophy Now

77\

September 2006

“All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts” From As You Like It by William Shakespeare

/78

S

hakespeare’s melancholic hero Jacques is a libertine-turned-philosopher. He has turned to philosophy in his quest for a new identity, and as a philosopher he questions much of what he sees around him, causing him to offer the soliloquy from which the above excerpt is taken.

I have to say I am with Jacques on this one, at least as far as those four lines are concerned.

The world of the stage, of roles and masks, parts and personas to play, has been one of the most enduring and insightful ways of speaking about life and the world that we live in. But the incandescent philosophical question to me is this: if performance is a metaphor for life, then what is the nature of performance? How does Shakespeare’s use of a theatrical metaphor to represent the grand design of life interface with what I do as a performer, in an artificially controlled setting, with an audience primed and receptive to what I want to portray?

The definition of philosophy is pretty much set – love of wisdom, the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics, the application of reason towards a more enlightened way of life. How can we understand performance in equally clear terms? Also, what are the responsibilities of the performer? I am a performer in the given definition of the word, in that I write and perform poetry in theatres, art galleries, libraries, pubs, parties, friends’ gardens. I have performed in conventional and devised theatre (this places less emphasis on text, using images, symbols, improvisation and movement to create drama). My alter ego, Sister Siren, is about to front a band, the Merchants

of Chaos, who are a loose collective of musicians, vocalists and sound artists. How can my performances enrich my life and the lives of my audiences? What is my own personal philosophy of performance?

Performance can fundamentally be said to be a transformation of ideas and dreams and all those other little understood human impulses into outward action. In this very basic sense performance happens with every word and gesture. It also presupposes a process of evaluation by a spectator.

Further, it is critical to distinguish between performing as an adult and performing as a child. Young children perform all the time, without a stage or knowledge of what it represents, without fear of ridicule or of making a mistake. They fly a plane, throw a party for their dolls, make you play one game with them over and over again. This is unconscious performance.

I first performed my own words as a fully fledged adult in Newcastle three years ago. My debut performance was part of Tell Tales, a national tour of 10 minute short stories set to music. I had travelled up by train from London in company of five other more experienced writers. I was acutely aware that they all had better performance chops and skills than me. I had never felt so nervous before and have never felt so nervous since. In the evening as performance time closed in, I had to keep dampening down the rising tide of nausea in my belly. Some breathing exercises

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How can my performance

enrich my life

and the lives of my audience

helped but nothing was going to slow my pounding heart. I know from feedback that when I finally got on stage my face looked calm and my voice was rock steady, although I read too fast. And my hands!

They would not stop shaking. All the nervous energy I had managed to remove from the rest of my body had reached the end of the line in my hands, and having nowhere else to go animated them like hyperactive jumping jacks. There’s one very basic thing I learnt that day: never take your writing on stage on a flimsy bit of paper. Always use something hardbacked.

Even if your hands start shaking, it won’t be so noticeable.

I asked myself, why was I so nervous?

What did I think that my audience supposed about me and my work? And how, in turn, did that inform my performance, then and subsequently? How

could I develop a thick skin? How could I wear the association of my work with my ego a bit more loosely? How could I liberate myself from the notion that I could please all of the people all of the time and make peace with the fact that I can’t fool all the people all the time – least of all myself? I determined that I was going to break through whatever it was that made me so anxious to stand up in front of a room full of people, and simply be.

But I also learnt some other more complex philosophical lessons too, which became clearer over time. In fact, whatever philosophy I have developed about performance has stemmed from that moment.

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Performance and

Romantic aestheticians would have it that art, and by extension, performance, is a heightening of the common human activity of expressing emotions to the point where they are experienced and rendered lucid to the performer and audience in a way that is rarely seen in everyday life.

Performance in its ideal expression can even give you creative license to transform what you think is possible.

Here I am brought to mind of Martin Luther King. Anybody can have a radical message, but how did King disseminate his message of non-violence and racial equality in such a way that his achievements represent a powerful paradigm shift in the way any self-respecting society views itself? King was a pastor, an orator, an eloquent public speaker. In essence he was a performer; but as a performer he was a visionary who became the living embodiment of his dream. This is what makes him a great performer. A great performer such as King opens the windows of human desire and ultimately shapes attitudes and insights that change cultures.

If I could attain even a smidgen of Martin Luther King’s power to move people through words and gestures, I think I’d be doing alright. When I am performing, there’s a desire I can taste to bridge the gap in understanding between me and my audience. I want to find new ways, new language, verbal and non-verbal to express universal truths. I want to push the challenge of understanding deeper, for me and my audience. To put it more dramatically, I want to punch through the chest of the obvious to get to the blood-soaked, beating heart of things: to hold the core of truth up still pumping with life for all of my audience to see. The question is, how I can transcend my self to reach the sublime?

can

a

single

performa n c e

Being

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Can a single performance even be a microcosm of life? Well yes, if I gather as many of my faculties (sensitivity, observation, knowledge, experience, memory, imagination etc) together and bring them to bear on my performance so that the truth and my essential nature shine forth, as happened with Martin Luther King. I believe performance represents an effort to translate ideas into actions, beliefs into habits, philosophy into life. But how to do this?

Initially, I might turn to Seneca the Younger, Roman philosopher, statesman and dramatist as a guide. Seneca’s brand of Stoic philosophy emphasized practical steps by which one might confront life’s problems. The Stoics performed a daily search for freedom from dependence even

be

a

microcosm

on anything external to the self. From what I can tell, Seneca endorsed the practice of philosophy as a daily disciplined performance for the attentive gaze of an audience from which one never escapes: one’s self.

Or consider an approach akin to existentialism.

I say ‘I am a writer, poet, performer,’ but this self-definition is in itself a kind of performance.

Essentially, we lay on some kind of performance every day in our interactions with others.

We utilise different facets of our personality, different personas, when we talk to our boss, lover, hairdresser, children. You do not use the same voice that you would use with your wife to interact with your doctor. But the person we perform to most is perhaps our own self. We are always watching and evaluating ourselves.

When we do this we are asking ‘what is the purpose of my life?’ or perhaps ‘what is my relationship to existence?’ – although we may not articulate this to ourselves so profoundly when we are making those little daily adjustments to the way we perceive ourselves vis à vis the way others perceive us. But in a sense we are always on stage, performing for

ourselves and for others, so we’d better learn and practice the best possible way to perform.

A certain kind of performance-to-oneself can tip over into self-delusion, for example. In that we emphasise action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to our existence, we are performing a Nietzchean or existentialist kind of philosophy. Just as on the stage of life, performers on the theatrical stage are evaluated for the life, integrity, interest and accuracy of their interpretations.

For me performing on stage is like looking through a magnifying glass to reveal what is hidden to the naked eye. In a way, what I am trying to do on stage is what Stanislavski of

life?

meant about the difference between seeming and being. I am attempting to (re)produce myself and the events that I belong to in the offstage world by virtue of craft and sensitivity.

One philosophical problem is that performance on the stage of life doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end in the way it does in the theatre. So after a stage performance, when we discard the magnifying glass for the clutter of the quotidian, it’s all too easy to forget to zero in – to forget that we are still and are always performing, and that life is constantly a performance: that we are, in fact, only performing from moment to moment. Perhaps then I should live my life in the immediacy of the shimmering bubble of intellect and emotion that I experience on stage. But in life as it is on the stage, the action which perfectly manifests ‘that which is’ remains elusive.

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Essentinal Each and every performance I give leads me closer to the notion that substance must always triumph over style. Although style is of course an important way to analyse performance and is often employed to illuminate the substance, ultimately I want the substance, the essential meaning of the piece, to not only inform the style but to be the wellspring of that style. Thus I feel I must strip my performance of all extraneous artifice so that I can get at the truth within myself. Only if I can begin to tap that truth can I hope to open up corresponding truths in my audiences.

But to get nearer that truth I must become more attuned to the very process of creativity which brings out this truth, and as I do I become more actively creative. In life and on stage therefore, performance has to be about tuning into the process.

In the Western tradition we are so accustomed to placing more value in the end result of a process – the product – that we often disregard how the product came into being in the first place. But understanding process can add to our understanding of how we can live our lives for the better and, dare I say, the greater good. When we are blind to process, we miss seeing, experiencing and recognising ourselves as the active creators of the products of our lives – ideas, emotions, thoughts, conversations, relationships, careers, lifestyles. But I want to see the fractals, not just the facets of things. Moreover,

learning how to see how things came to be gives me an understanding of how my work came to be, because sometimes I don’t know how a line I have written in a poem wriggles into life. Sometimes it is just a miraculous mystery how a poem breathes itself into life.

I have found that when I am able to see and experience process, new possibilities emerge. Things are no longer what they appear to be at any given moment: they are also what they were and what they can become. Think of actors in a play

the plays not the thing enjoying a long run in London’s West End. They have to reproduce the play to fresh audiences night after night. They themselves are hardly fresh to the play, saying the same words night after night after night ad nauseam. How do they keep it alive for themselves, getting the audience so wired into what they are creating that you could hear a programme drop? By recognising that the play’s not the thing, but the playing out of the play is the thing. It is at this point that you may find an actor taking a risk, ad-libbing or improvising. He is involved in process, not product.

Truths

but playing out the play is the thing.

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Can I be so bold as to state that Socrates/Plato missed a trick in The Republic by espousing the idea that poetry (and by extension, performance) had dire consequences for the proper governance of an ideal state and should therefore be banished from any decent society? Poetry, currently the dominant medium of my own performances, was revered in ancient Greece as the authoritative expression of sacred myth, tradition and wisdom.

Even though poetry today is a relatively marginal topic for philosophy, it was crucial for philosophy’s own initial self-definition. Poetry came from and appealed to the emotional aspects of human nature, but with Plato, philosophy distinguished itself from poetry as a new, superior knowledge which could provide better guidance for life, and even superior pleasure. This is where I part ways with him. He believed that “ideals [Forms] belong in a world that only the wise man can understand” ­– making the philosopher the only type of person fit to govern others. Poetry, art, performance did not conform to the ideal of a perfect republic led by philosophers. To my mind this is placing undue emphasis on the rational (intellectual) over the irrational (emotional). It also supposes the end product, the thing – an ideal, non-democratic state – to be of superior value to the process. Process awareness would encourage a state that is in perpetual evolution; a living breathing state that therefore cannot ever reach an unchanging ideal.

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Performance itself is an activity of transformation and discovery in a continuous creative process. It has allowed me to embrace unexpected risks, break out of well-rehearsed patterns, enhanced my ability to communicate and collaborate, and develop my capacity to listen. It has taught me to be more attentive to the ‘how’ and not just the ‘what’ of my life and work.

Gil Scott Heron sang “the revolution will not be televised; the revolution will be live.” These words accompany me on my journey to my self. I may not get to where I want to go, but I’m having a damn fine adventure exploring the terrain!

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{t he c au se © Chris Decker 2016