FROM CAVEMEN FLUTES TO BACH FUGUES
MY FATHER, WHO PASSED AWAY SEVERAL YEARS AGO, SOMETIMES VISITS me in my dreams in the middle of the night. One day, musing over the memory of such a dream from the previous night, I grabbed a pencil and paper and composed a poem to my father that I later set to music. As I was writing, the words flowed onto the page with an ease I had never previously experienced. My writing is usually hesitant and I tend to make endless corrections and changes to the words. That wasn’t the case here. The tune also came to me very easily, but when the composition was complete and I cradled my guitar in my hands to play it, my eyes welled with tears. I was so overcome with emotion that I simply could not sing the words.
That’s narcissistic, I thought to myself for a moment, getting choked with emotion over your own composition. But I immediately understood that it wasn’t the lyrical quality of the song or the love of my own creation that were bringing on these emotions. Neither were longings for my father ultimately causing them. I was moved mostly by the accurate way the words of the song described my father as I imagined him.
Although the words flowed easily when I wrote them, they still required much intellectual effort to compose. I recall the experience as being similar to what I go through in my daily research, which mainly involves proving mathematical theorems. The exact rhyming of the words and the unusual tempo were part and parcel of the strong rush of emotions. Where did the song come from and develop? Was it in my head or in the depths of my heart?
We tend to think of our emotions and analytical thoughts as arising in two separate internal systems. Under the best conditions, we hope that those two systems will not interfere with each other. In less favorable cases, we fear that they will become locked in an implacable struggle. The truth is apparently very different from this description. There is a thin border between our emotional and analytical/cognitive internal systems. An intense dialogue between the systems takes place mainly in the prefrontal cortex, which is located at the front of the brain, protected by the forehead.
One of the most successful contemporary treatments of clinical depression involves placing magnets near the prefrontal cortex to undo the characteristic vicious cycle of negative thoughts creating ever more depression and anxiety. But there are also positively reinforcing cycles of thought taking place between the emotional and cognitive systems. In fact, every experience with art, whether it involves the creation of new art or its appreciation by an observer, involves such a dialogue. Artistic experiences are clearly related to emotional responses, but those emotional responses are created within a cognitive process in which we seek to arrive at an insight or to identify an aesthetic structure in the work of art.
Nearly every artistic experience is a combination of cognitive analysis and emotional reactions. Without the emotional part we would remain unmoved and indifferent to the artistic creation. It would seem unimportant to us. But without some level of cognitive analysis we would be unable to identify the aesthetic qualities of the creation, and then it would be incapable of arousing an emotional reaction. Artistic creations that aim to elicit visceral emotional reactions (such as extremely violent motifs or heart-rending descriptions of suffering) are usually regarded as shallow and incapable of arousing true artistic experiences.
Johann Sebastian Bach, whom I regard as one of the most emotionally moving composers of all time, was also a very mathematical composer. Bach’s fugues are almost entirely bereft of a main melody, but they create an intricate web of sounds of different tones combining in incredible sophistication into a giant puzzle. The Fugue in C-Minor is constructed entirely out of four voices, each of which moves along an unconventional 1:16 time signature, together with an elongated pedal tone. The fugue is based on the so-called “BACH motif.” It uses the notes that together compose the name of B-A-C-H. (Many music scales go from A to G, but in some cases H is considered a sharp version of B.)
I recommend that you view an online video of people showing off how rapidly they can solve Rubik’s Cube challenges. If you play a Bach fugue as a soundtrack to these videos, you will soon see that they fit perfectly, as if the fugue is guiding the people in the videos toward the desired solution.
But where do artistic experiences come from? What ends, if any, are served by this synthesis of emotion and logic?
Several years ago a twenty-centimeter flute carved out of an eagle’s bones was discovered in a cave in southern Germany. This flute is considered to be the oldest known musical instrument created by humans. Scientific analysis revealed it to be 35,000 years old. The oldest known cave paintings are dated to about the same time period. Artistic creativity apparently predated most of humanity’s cognitive development. It goes back to the beginnings of human evolution. The pleasure we take from art and our need to experience it may be relics of an ancient human survival need for connecting with others.
Neurobiologists have been trying to understand why the brain reacts so emotionally to music, to the point that it can raise goose bumps on the skin. In one study a few years ago subjects were asked to select their favorite musical passages (from purely symphonic works with no accompanying words). Those musical passages were then played for them while fMRI scans of their brains were conducted. The brain region revealing the greatest activity in those scans was the striatum, a subcortical brain region that is responsible for the secretion of dopamine—a hormone that is involved in giving us pleasurable feelings in a wide range of contexts, including sexual activity and the temporary highs brought about by some addictive drugs.
The way that music affects our emotional moods is fascinating. Music can have dramatic effects on our minds. We tend to enjoy hearing musical passages with familiar structures, but the familiarity cannot be too great, because then we get bored. Brief moments in which surprising sounds emerge in contrast with more familiar and expected notes bring the greatest pleasure. In other words, we apparently require the anchor of the familiar to enjoy the unfamiliar.
There is a common denominator tying together the pleasures we get from music on one hand and well-done humor and successful jokes on the other hand. In both cases pleasure comes from the contrast between expectation and surprise. The same holds for gripping passages in books and films.
Taking pleasure from surprises begins very early in infant development. Infants as young as a few months old are easily prompted to hysterical laughter by the sight of a familiar person doing something unexpected, while we, watching from the side, are honestly no less moved by watching this sight. A good example of this can be seen in the following YouTube video, which has attracted more than 45 million views:
The baby in this video gets incredible pleasure from watching a family member rip up pieces of paper. Why? Because the paper ripping is a surprise to her. Why do we take so much pleasure from surprises? Do our emotional reactions to surprises give us any survival advantages? The answer is that we learn to recognize our physical and social environments mainly through surprising experiences. Each surprising experience implants important knowledge in our brains that can be drawn upon in the future for better decision making.
Familiar experiences rapidly disappear into black holes of forgetfulness. That is a good thing, because they provide us with knowledge that we already possess. Surprising experiences can give us new and vital information. The emotional pleasures we get from surprising experiences incentivize us to seek them and to be alert to their existence, thus improving our learning and our chances for survival. There are other mechanisms that boost learning, such as curiosity. But these mechanisms are more cognitive and therefore are slower than the emotional mechanisms prompted by music and humor.
But we need the structure of the familiar to enable us to learn from surprising experiences. A world composed entirely of surprises would be one in which we could never learn anything. It would be unfamiliar and strange. We would not be able to see ourselves as part of such a world, nor would we know what to expect in the future based on past events. This is why music based on tempos and scales that are unfamiliar to our ears sounds cacophonous. A film showing only a procession of surprising scenes will look tiresome and strange. A stranger trying to surprise an infant by covering and then uncovering his or her face can sometimes induce anxiety instead of pleasure in the child, leading to frightened tears in place of rolling laughter.