The Social Animal (53 page)

But now she was beginning her second education. This education was an emotional one, about how and what to feel. This second education did not work like the first one. In the first education, the information to be mastered walked through the front door and announced itself by light of day. It was direct. There were teachers to describe the material to be covered, and then everybody worked through it.

In the second education, there was no set curriculum or set of skills to be covered. Erica just wandered around looking for things she enjoyed. Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure. The information came to her indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards, and through the vents of her mind.

Erica read
Sense and Sensibility, The Good Soldier
, or
Anna Karenina
and she would find herself moving with the characters, imitating their states of mind, and discovering new emotional flavors. The novels, poems, paintings, and symphonies she consumed never applied directly to her life. Nobody was writing poems about retired CEOs. But what mattered most were the emotional sensations portrayed in them.

In his book
Culture Counts
, the philosopher Roger Scruton writes that “the reader of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ learns how to animate the natural world with pure hopes of his own; the spectator of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ learns of the pride of corporations, and the benign sadness of civic life; the listener to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”

Even at her age, Erica was learning to perceive in new ways. Just as living in New York or China or Africa gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so, too, spending time in the world of a novelist inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

Through trial and error, Erica discovered her tastes. She thought she loved the Impressionists, but now they left her strangely unmoved. Maybe their stuff was too familiar. On the other hand, she became enraptured by the color schemes of the Florentine Renaissance and Rembrandt’s homely, knowing faces. Each of them tuned her mind, the instrument with a million strings. She had some moments of pure pleasure, when she could feel her heart beating faster and a quiver in her stomach—standing in front of a painting, or discovering a new installation or poem. There was a time, reading Anthony Trollope of all people, when she could feel the emotions of the story in her own body, and was alive to the sensations produced there. “Mine is no callous shell,” Walt Whitman wrote about his body, and Erica was beginning to appreciate what he meant.

Erica’s experience with art is a microcosm of all the different kinds of perception we have seen in this story. Seeing and hearing were thick, creative processes, not just a passive taking in.

When you listen to a piece of music, for example, sound waves travel through the air at 1,100 feet per second and collide with your eardrums, setting off a chain of vibrations through the tiny bones of the ear, against the membrane of the cochlea; producing tiny electrical charges that reverberate all across the brain. Maybe you don’t know anything about music in the formal sense, but all your life—from the time when you were nursing in rhythm with your mother—you have been unconsciously constructing working models of how music works. You have been learning how to detect timed patterns and anticipate what will come next.

Listening to music involves making a series of sophisticated calculations about the future. If the last few notes have had pattern Y, then the next few notes will probably have pattern Z. As Jonah Lehrer writes in his book
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
, “While human nature largely determines how we hear the
notes
, it is nurture that lets us hear the
music
. From the three-minute pop song to the five-hour Wagner opera, the creations of our culture teach us to expect certain musical patterns, which over time are wired into our brain.”

When the music conforms to our anticipations, we feel a soothing drip of pleasure. Some scientists believe that the more fluently a person can process a piece of information, the more pleasure it produces. When a song or a story or an argument achieves limerence with the internal models of the brain, then that synchronicity produces a warm swelling of happiness.

But the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them. As Daniel Levitin observes in
This Is Your Brain on Music
, the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” arrest our attention with the jarring octave-gap between them, then the rest of the song eases us into a more conventional, soothing groove. In his book
Emotion and Meaning in Music
, Leonard Meyer showed how Beethoven would establish a clear rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then manipulate it, never quite repeating it. Life is change, and the happy life is a series of gentle, stimulating, melodic changes.

Perceiving a painting follows a similar process. First the mind creates the painting. That is to say, each eye makes a series of fast, complex saccades across the surface of the picture, which then get blended and re-created inside the cortex, producing a single image. There are parts of each view the mind cannot see, because of the blindspot in the middle of each eye where the optic nerve connects to the retina. The brain fills in the holes based on its own predictions. Simultaneously, the mind imposes its concepts upon the painting. For example, it imposes color. Depending on lighting and other factors, there are huge fluctuations in the wavelength energy of light bouncing off a painting, and yet the mind uses internal models to give the impression that the color on the surface is remaining constant. If the mind couldn’t assign constant color to things, the world would be in chaotic flux and it would be hard to deduce any useful information from the environment.

How it creates this illusion of constant color is not well understood, but it seems to involve ratios. Imagine a green surface surrounded by yellows and blues and purples. The brain understands there is a constant ratio between the wavelengths bouncing off green and the wavelengths bouncing off yellow. It can assign constant qualities to each even amidst changing conditions. As Chris Frith of the University College, London, has written, “Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.”

As it is creating the painting, the mind is also evaluating it. A wide body of research has found that there are certain tastes that most people share. As Denis Dutton argues in
The Art Instinct
, people everywhere gravitate to a similar sort of painting—landscapes with open spaces, water, roads, animals, and a few people. A cottage industry has grown up to investigate this preference. Evolutionary psychologists argue that people everywhere prefer paintings of landscapes that correspond to the African savanna, where humanity emerged. People generally don’t like looking at dense vegetation, which is forbidding, or spare desert, which has no food. They like lush open grasses, with thickets of trees and bushes, a water source, diversity of vegetation including flowering and fruiting plants and an unimpeded view of the horizon in at least one direction. Some critics have noted that Kenyans prefer pictures of the Hudson River School to pictures of their own native landscape. That’s because, the critics argue, the landscape near the Hudson River in New York state more closely resembles the African savanna back in the Pleistocene era than does the present, and much drier, Kenya.

More broadly, people like fractals, patterns that recur at greater levels of magnification. Nature is full of fractals: mountain ranges with peaks that gently echo one another, the leaves and branches on trees, a copse of aspens, rivers with their tributaries. People like the fractals that are gently flowing but not too complicated. Scientists even have a way to measure fractal density. Michael Gazzaniga illustrates the process in this example: Imagine that you were asked to draw a tree on a piece of paper. If you left the paper entirely blank, that would have a
D
(fractal density) of 1. If you drew a tree with so many branches the paper was entirely black, that would have a
D
of 2. Humans generally prefer patterns with a fractal density of 1.3—some complexity, but not too much.

Erica didn’t have to think about fractals as she was looking at Vermeers or van Eycks or Botticellis. That’s the point; her action was unconscious. She just stood there savoring the pleasure.

After a while, Erica decided to create her own art. She tried photography and watercolors, but she found that she was unengaged and untalented. Then one day she found a beautiful piece of wood, and she fashioned it into a small cutting board. Having it around the house and using it every day gave her immense satisfaction, and for the next few years, as long as her hands could perform the tasks, she made simple household items out of wood.

She’d exercise in the pool in the morning and go for a walk, and then in the afternoons she would return to the little workshop she had built. Gene Cohen, founding chief of the Center on Aging at the National Institute of Mental Health has argued that the duration of an activity is more important than the activity itself: “In other words, a book club that meets on a regular basis over a course of months or years contributes a great deal more to a person’s well-being than the same number of one-shot activities, such as movies, lectures or outings.”

As she continued to carve, Erica found that she was building a repertoire of knowledge and skills. She had to observe the wood she had in front of her—not the generic concept of wood, but the specific piece. She had to divine what household item—napkin holder, a bookstand, or even a piece of a table—lay in its grain.

At first she moved forward clumsily. But she’d walk through stores and crafts fairs, observing how craftsmen worked. She didn’t like the whole “authenticity” atmosphere of the crafts movement. But she liked the objects themselves and how they fit together. As she observed and worked, she got better. She developed a set of hunches that guided her along, a repertoire of feels and gestures. She was astonished to find that she had her own style. She didn’t know how she got it. She just fiddled around with things until they seemed right.

Over and over again, Erica tried to do too much. This late in life she still underestimated how long any project was likely to take her. But she found herself enjoyably dissatisfied by her work. She got a glimpse of some ideal thing she would want to create, and then she’d tinker and tinker with it, never quite eliminating the tension between the reality and the perfection she felt inside. But still she chased it. She understood what Marcel Proust might have been feeling when he dictated new passages of a novel from his deathbed. He wanted to change a section in which a character was dying, because now he knew how it really felt.

The muses came and went. After working for a few hours, she felt her brain running dry, as if little carbonated bubbles in her brain had been used up and everything had gone flat. She became clumsy, lazy and stale. Then other times she would awake in the middle of the night, absolutely sure of what she should do to solve a problem. The mathematician Henri Poincaré solved one of the most difficult problems of his life while stepping onto a bus. The answer just came to him. “I went on with the conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty,” he later wrote. Erica sometimes had little revelations like that, too, while she was parking the car or making a cup of tea.

Like all artists and craftsmen, she was a plaything of the muses. Creativity seemed to happen in a hidden world beyond her control. The poet Amy Lowell wrote, “An idea will come into my head for no apparent reason; ‘The Bronze Horses,’ for instance. I register the horses as a good subject for a poem; and, having so registered them, I consciously thought no more about the matter. But what I had really done was to drop my subject into the subconscious, much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head, the poem—to use my private vocabulary—was ‘there.’ ”

Erica learned little tricks to stoke the unreachable furnace. Art, as Wordsworth put it, is emotion recollected in tranquility. Erica had to put herself in a state in which her emotions bubbled to the surface. She had to go see a thrilling play, or climb a mountain, or read a tragedy. Then, her heart a-tingle, she had to be relaxed enough to express the feelings welling up inside.

As she had gotten older, she found she needed long periods of uninterrupted solitude for her conscious mind to slowly relax and surrender itself to the pulses generated inside. One interruption could ruin her mind-set for an entire day.

She found that this creative mind-set was most likely to come late in the morning or early in the evening. She would work with her headphones on, playing soft classical music to loosen her thoughts. She needed to be near windows, with a view of distant horizons. For some reason she worked best in her dining room, which faced south, not in her studio.

She also learned that when you are trying something new, it is best to do it quickly and wrong, and then go back and do it over and over again. And at rare and precious moments, she even got a sense of what athletes and artists must have meant when they talked about being in the flow. The narrative voice in her head went silent. She lost track of time. The tool seemed to guide her. She integrated with her task.