This kinetic sculpture is a vivid example of artistic expression of the function of a specific area of ??the brain. Calder's work artistically anticipates the physiological functions of cells in a brain area called V5. Cells in area V5 respond specifically to motion and direction. From a distance, each part of this dynamic sculpture looks like a static point of different sizes. However, when the sculpture moves, each part of the sculpture can only cause a response to a type of nerve cells in the V5 area, because these nerve cells only respond to This part of the sculpture is sensitive to the direction of movement.

In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was still thinking hard about the structure of matter. Previous physicists believed that the internal structure of an atom should be like a miniature solar system, with the nucleus being the sun and electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets. This is the classical theory of atomic structure.

But by then, Bohr had already begun studying electron radiation, and he believed that only a new model could explain his findings. The electron's behavior seemed incompatible with classical theory. As Bohr said: "When it reaches the level of atoms, it can only be expressed in the language of poetry." Ordinary words can no longer describe his data.

Bohr has always been obsessed with Cubist paintings. Historian Arthur Miller once recalled that Bohr's study was filled with abstract still life paintings, and he was willing to explain his understanding of this art to visitors. For Bohr, the charm of Cubism was that it shattered the certainty of matter, showed people the cracks contained in everything, and turned the substantiality of matter into a kind of surreal ambiguity.

Bohr's extraordinary insight was his belief that the world of invisible electrons was actually Cubist. In 1923, de Broglie had proved that electrons have wave-particle duality. But Bohr insisted that the shape electrons take depends on how humans observe them. In other words, electronics are completely different from the imaginary "mini planets". They are more like a guitar deconstructed by Picasso, a hazy and unknown object outlined by a brush, which can only be given when you stare at it. It makes sense.

It is difficult for ordinary people to imagine that abstract works of art can influence the history of science. Cubist art seems to have nothing to do with modern physics. When we think of the scientific process, certain words come to mind, such as objectivity, experiment, fact, etc. Scientific papers often use the passive voice, which makes us feel that the world described by science is a perfect mirror image of the real world. However, paintings can be very profound, but they often do not depict real things.

The above view regards science as the only yardstick to measure everything. This is actually based on an unstated assumption: art always circulates with fashion trends, while scientific knowledge continues to increase linearly. It is believed that the development of the history of science should follow a simple equation, that is, time + data = mastery of knowledge. We believe that one day science will be able to solve everything.

But the actual process of science is not that simple. The more we know about "reality," the more apparent its paradoxes become. As the novelist Vladimir Nabokov said, "The better one does science, the more mysterious it becomes."

We can look at the history of physics. More than once, physicists thought they had figured out what the universe was like. They always thought that except for some vague details, the basic structure of the universe was already clear. However, the emergence of the theory of relativity shattered this naive illusion in one fell swoop, essentially changing the relationship between time and space in classical theory. Then, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle appeared, and quantum physics unveiled itself in a surreal way. String theorists began to try to reconcile the theoretical schools that had never been so diametrically opposed, and also proposed an 11-dimensional theory. Scientists still don't understand dark matter. Modern physicists have learned so much about the universe, but there's still so much we don't understand. Eventually, some scientists openly expressed self-doubt: Do humans really have the ability to understand the universe?

A place in the frontal lobe of the brain called Brodmann Area 44 specializes in predicting spoken and symbolic language. and chronological events in music. When the prediction is consistent with reality, the neural circuit is rewarded and strengthened; when the prediction is inconsistent with reality, another brain area called the anterior cingulate is activated and takes over processing events that are inconsistent with expectations. The final chapter of Dvo?ák’s Seventh Symphony is a masterpiece of artistic exploration of the exquisite orchestral coordination of neural circuits. The end of this great work cleverly changes the order of the musical fragments that the audience is accustomed to, allowing us to feel both surprised and rewarded by our nervous system. The next time we hear similar music, we retrieve these perceptions from episodic memory.

Let’s take a look at neuroscience again. Just a few decades ago, scientists proposed various hypotheses about the "bridging principle." The "bridging principle" is a neural event that explains how neural activity creates the subjective experience of "consciousness." They proposed different kinds of "bridges," ranging from 40-hertz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These are the biological processes that purportedly brew the "water" of the brain into the "wine" of consciousness.

However, now, no one discusses this so-called "bridging principle" anymore.

While neuroscience continues to make major strides in unraveling the details of our brains, revealing that we are nothing more than strange circuits of chemical activity at a few kinases and synapses, these advances are making one problem increasingly difficult to ignore: We don’t Unable to experience physiological details at the cellular level. The truth is always full of irony: there is only one reality that science can no longer disentangle, and that is the only reality we know.

The bottleneck of modern science is that we cannot unify everything and produce a universal theory. Our unknowns have not diminished much, but in many cases have increased. The most basic science is shrouded in mystery. It’s not that we don’t know the answers, it’s that we don’t know what questions to ask.

Many basic sciences have encountered this problem, such as physics and neuroscience. Physicists study the fundamental constructs of “reality,” those invisible laws and particles that define our physical world. Neuroscientists study our perception of the world. In order to study animals like humans, they dissected the brain layer by layer. These two sciences ask questions about the oldest and grandest mysteries: What is everything? Who are we?

Before we can unravel the mysteries, science must break free from its existing constraints. How to do it? The answer I give is simple: science requires art. We need to give artists a place in our empirical process, and we need to rediscover what Bohr saw in Cubist paintings. The current limitations of science make it clear that the separation between science and art is not just an academic issue that will silence cocktail party chats, but a pragmatic issue that will stop science from progressing. question. If we want to get answers to the ultimate questions, we must build a bridge between science and art. By listening to the wisdom of art, science can gain more inspiration, and this is precisely the source of scientific progress.

I believe that there are many similarities between understanding the world and observing the world. The extent to which the human eye can achieve optical illusions is the most exquisite metaphor for the extent to which the human brain can achieve cognitive illusions. When you first see Escher's "Relativity" painting, you won't think there's anything wrong with it. But when you look closer, you suddenly realize that what you are seeing cannot possibly exist. Each part of this painting is self-consistent, but when put together they form an impossible whole. What Escher's work shows is that our brains are capable of playing tricks on us—the neurological magic show we call reality.

Since its emergence in the early 20th century, neuroscience has successfully become "inseparable" from the brain. Scientists reduce our perception to a series of independent neural circuits. They collected images of the "thinking" cerebral cortex, calculated the shapes of ion channels, and dissected them down to the subatomic level.

Although we have collected so much knowledge about "matter", we know almost nothing about the things created by these "matter". We know synapses, but we don’t know ourselves. In fact, reductionist logic implies that self-awareness is an elaborate illusion, incidental to the firing of electrical neural signals from the frontal cortex. The machine has no soul, only mechanical vibrations. Your brain contains a hundred billion electrically charged cells, but none of them are you and know nothing about you. In fact, you don't exist at all. The brain is just an infinite return of matter, which can be reduced to a bunch of cold physical laws.

The problem with this "reduction" approach is that it refuses to acknowledge the very mystery it is supposed to solve. Neuroscience is very good at dissecting the human mind from the bottom up, but dissecting self-awareness requires a top-down approach. As the novelist Richard Powells (a contemporary American novelist whose creative themes often concern the impact of modern technology) said, “If we only know the world through synapses, how do we know synapses? "The paradox of neuroscience is that its amazing progress has exposed the limitations of its research paradigm, that is, reductionism cannot explain the emergence of consciousness. Many human experiences cannot be explained by current methods of neuroscience.

The world of human experience is the world of art. Novelists, painters, and poets capture moments that cannot be simplified, dissected, or represented by the movement of a scientific acronym. What artists strive to capture is the original appearance of life. As Virginia Woolf said, the novelist's task is to "see the passing of an ordinary thought on an ordinary day? (trace) the pattern beneath the seemingly unrelated and fragmented surface, which is the basis of each picture. A picture or a pattern of traces left by each event on consciousness.” She attempts to describe consciousness in inner language.

Neuroscience has yet to grasp the benefits of this first-person perspective. Its reductionist approach does not place the "I" at the center of observation. It is still thinking hard about the issue of "qualia". Artists like Woolf have been studying the phenomenon of emergence for centuries and have amassed a wealth of knowledge about the mystery of consciousness. They construct beautiful models of human consciousness that distill the details of life into prose and storylines that successfully capture the human experience. That’s why these artists’ work endures – because it feels authentic.

The reason why these works feel real is because they capture a certain aspect of "reality" that reductionism lacks.

To me, this pencil sketch is a wonderful example of how science and art work together. Both science and art strive to represent and express the inner reality of an object in a simple and economical way. The equations and diagrams I create are no more real than the woman Leonardo da Vinci painted. His painting lets us know the realm that a painter can achieve by breaking away from the limitations of the brush. With just a few strokes, this fairy seems to come out of the paper and look directly into your soul. In order to capture the essence of the universe, I must not confuse my equations with reality. The truth of nature will sublimate from my equations, emerge from mathematics and become a life of flesh and blood.

If neuroscientists carefully study these artistic creations, they can better understand the overall characteristics of the things they want to analyze. Before you deconstruct something, it's best to know how it fits together. In this sense, art provides science with a rich database from which science can glimpse its blind spots. If neuroscience wants to understand something beyond the terms of the cerebral cortex—to discover the neural connections of consciousness, to discover the origins of the self, or to find the cells in which subjectivity exists—it must develop a deep understanding of these higher mental events. Scientific methods cannot break through this limitation.

Neuroscience needs new methods, ones that are not bottom-up but capable of complex representations of the mind. Sometimes, it is better to understand the whole in a holistic way. William James (American philosopher and psychologist, the father of American psychology) was the first to realize this again. In the first eight chapters of his magnum opus, Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, he describes the psychology of experimental psychologists who conduct research from a third-person perspective. However, in Chapter 9, he changed his mind and used the name "stream of consciousness" as the title, and also "warned" readers: "We now begin to study psychology from the inside of the mind."

Through this sentence In the extreme simplicity of a modernist novel, James sought to transform the subject of psychological research. Be it perceptions or synapses, he rejects any scientific method of breaking down the mind into its basic units. He believed that these scientific methods were reductionist and ignored real reality.

However, modern science has not followed the path led by James. After the publication of "Principles of Psychology", "New Psychology" was born. This strict school did not accept James' vague descriptions and wanted to purge psychology of anything that could not be measured. For example, the study of experience disappeared from the laboratory.

But artists still interpret complex consciousness in their own way. They never shy away from "experience" because it is difficult to express. They plunge headlong into the vast sea of ??consciousness. No one did this better than James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce attempts to grasp the present tense of consciousness. The novel is not written through the author's "God's eye view," but through the characters' "personal" perspective. As Bloom, Stephen, and Molly ponder beauty and death, eggs on the bed, and the number eight, we silently eavesdrop on their inner confessions. In Joyce's words, this is "the soup of ideas", the mind before punctuation, the stream of consciousness written on paper. "Ulysses" can be said to have taken over the mantle of William James.

Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (British poet, literary critic, and one of the founders of British romantic literature) was obsessed with opium. He became famous with "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" ) wrote poems exploring "the mind's self-experience during thinking" long before the advent of brain science. Or take visual art as an example. Neuroscientist Samuel Psyche once wrote: "Artists (painters) are neuroscientists in a sense. They use their own unique way to study the brain." Monet's " The reason why "Haystack" is attractive lies in his unique understanding of color perception. Pollock's drip paintings make us buzz because they activate specific circuits in the visual cortex. These painters manipulated the brain from opposite angles and discovered visual patterns that caught the eye.

While Mondrian was studying "eternal truths about shape," straight lines became his personal label. He believed that straight lines were the basic component of all shapes. Many years later, physiologists discovered "direction-selective cells," cells that responded selectively to straight lines and were considered the cornerstone of shape perception. When the image is farther and farther away from the preferred orientation, the response of the direction-selective cells becomes weaker and weaker; when the image is orthogonal to the preferred orientation, the cell response disappears completely.

Of course, the standard scientific response to the above arguments is: art is too messy and inaccurate for scientific research; aesthetics does not represent truth, Monet is just lucky; novels are fiction and are The opposite of empirical. If art couldn't be plotted as a scatter plot or compressed into variables, it wouldn't be worth mentioning at all. But isn’t chaos the essence of the human spirit? Isn’t our inner experience full of jumps, illogicalities, and unspeakable feelings? From this point of view, the hybridity of novels and the abstraction of paintings are like A mirror that reflects ourselves.

As poetry critic Randall Jerry said, "It is the contradictions in art, rather than logical and methodical induction, that can symbolize us. Our world and ourselves are full of contradictions."

< p>No scientific model of the mind is complete unless it includes what is irreducible in the mind. Science should of course follow a rigorous methodology and rely on experimental data and testability, but science can also benefit from additional "inputs." Artists' artistic hypotheses can inspire important scientific questions. If science fails to study the brain as a whole, scientific theories will become disconnected from how we view ourselves.

Neuroscience naturally assumes that it has no inherent limitations. One day, there will be scientists who can explain the problem of human consciousness; the bridging principle will finally be answered; humans will finally discover that the problem of experience is just another material problem - such scientific optimism may be right, only time can prove it. It should be noted here that not all scientists are so optimistic. Avram Noam Chomsky once said, “It is highly likely that someone would guess that we learn more about human life and personality from fiction than from scientific psychology.” Anyway, Unraveling what David Chalmers has called "the most intractable problem of consciousness" will require a new scientific approach, one that can draw on the wisdom of art. On the one hand, we can create dream "things"; on the other hand, we are just a bunch of "things". If you look at science or art separately, neither can solve the problem of consciousness, because the truth is diverse.

At first glance, the distance between physics and art seems particularly far. Physical theories are distilled from obscure equations and the subatomic remains of the Superconducting Collider. Physical theory insists that our intuitions about reality are actually wrong, figments of our senses. Artists rely on imagination, but modern physics transcends imagination. As Hamlet expresses, there are things under the sun that are unimaginable. Such a strange universe can only be discovered, not imagined.

But the surreal nature of physics is where artists can help. Science has indeed advanced to a point beyond human comprehension. As Richard Feynman said, "Unlike novelists, our imagination has been exhausted. Let alone imagining things that do not exist, it is very difficult to even understand things that exist." This is the inability to understand. String theory in double-digit dimensions, or a stark portrait of human psychology with the possibility of parallel universes. Our minds evolved in a simple world where matter was deterministic, time flowed forward, and the world had only three dimensions. And when we go beyond our innate intuition, metaphor becomes a lifesaver. This is the irony of modern physics: on the one hand the most fundamental form of human search for truth, and on the other hand the inability of humans to understand these fundamental principles apart from their mathematical expressions. The only way we understand the universe is by analogy.

Thus, the history of physics is full of metaphorical leaps. Einstein had an epiphany about the theory of relativity while thinking about a moving train. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell viewed magnetic fields as small whirlpools in space and called them "eddies." The Big Bang is like a firecracker in the universe. And Schr?dinger’s cat, trapped in cosmic “purgatory,” illustrates the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Moreover, it seems difficult to understand string theory without a hose.

These scientific similes may seem simplistic, but their implications are profound. Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman wrote: "Metaphors in science not only have an educational function, but can also inspire scientific discoveries. When doing scientific research, even words and equations do not have extended meaning beyond the literal meaning. It is impossible not to draw physical analogies, not to draw mental pictures, not to imagine bouncing balls and swinging pendulums. “The power of metaphor is that it allows scientists to visualize abstract concepts concretely and understand meaning beyond mathematical equations. . In short, the world we know determines the world of our thoughts.

But there are risks in relying solely on metaphors, because no metaphor is perfect. As Thomas Pynchon (an American writer known for his obscure and complex postmodernist novels, who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times) said, “Metaphor can either push you closer to the truth or closer to a lie, depending on Depends on where you are. "The cosmic string may be like a hose, but it's not. The universe is not a balloon either. When we tie everyday language to theory, the purity of the equation is tarnished. Thinking by analogy is like walking on a tightrope called correctness.

Human eyes have a visual distance deviation in the horizontal direction. The visual system uses this to calculate depth of field. When the eye focuses on an object, its image is in the same position on each retina. A visual field containing many similar objects will leave similar images in both eyes. Sometimes these images can be matched correctly by both eyes, and people will see a flat picture; sometimes the image in one eye is mismatched in the other eye, and people will see pictures with different depths of field. I think the artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist periods figured this out. They claim to be able to draw air by creating false stereoscopic cues, a method of manipulating depth perception. So when you look at Angron's paintings with both eyes instead of just one, they appear to be three-dimensional.

This is why modern physics needs art. Once we accept the importance of metaphors to science, we can think about how to make these metaphors better. Poets are, of course, masters of metaphor, and the power of their art lies in their imagery-laden meter. Vague feelings were turned into appropriate images. Many great physicists of the 20th century, such as Einstein, Feynman, Bohr, etc., are known for their romantic thinking, and this is no coincidence. These famous scientists used their metaphorical skills to understand things that others could not understand, so the railway became a metaphor for the theory of relativity, and the water drop became a metaphor for the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed up the scientific process and help scientists update metaphors. Maybe we can invent a better metaphor than a hose. Perhaps a simile can solve the mystery of dark matter. As string theorist Brian Greene writes, art can “shake our senses into understanding what is real,” forcing the advancement of scientific imagination.

But there’s another way artists can bring a fresh element to the cosmic conversation—they can make scientific metaphors flesh and blood. If an abstract equation could become physical, physicists could explore the meaning of mathematics from a different angle. Take the sculptures of Richard Serra. His metal labyrinths allow us to engage physically with physical theory, allowing us to imagine the graceful curves of space and time in entirely new ways. The broken graphics in Cubism also served the same function, creating a fruitful dialogue with the cutting-edge physics of the time. Although Picasso could not understand the equations of non-Euclidean geometry, he was determined to use his paintings to demonstrate new trends in space and time. A century later, physicists still cite his fragmented still lifes as symbols of modern physics. Abstract art gives us some understanding of those puzzling ideas.

It is time for dialogue between science and art to become a standard feature of the scientific method. Our universities could offer classes on "Poetry for Physicists." But in order for us to better understand the extension of theory, it is also necessary to let scientific metaphors transcend the limitations of metaphor. Art galleries should be filled with images that evoke the stupefying string theory and the EPR paradox (the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, a paradox about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics). an important early criticism). All theoretical physics departments should have an artist in residence. To ordinary people, modern physics always seems too ethereal and unrealistic, and its assumptions seem so bizarre as to be meaningless. Art can bring physics back to the world known to our senses.

Artists have long known that color and light and shadow are two different things. Depth of field (three-dimensional) perception, motion perception, and spatial organization are all controlled separately by subsystems in the visual system. These three systems are all "color blind" and can only see black, white and gray. They are relatively primitive parts of the visual system. In the absence of contrast between light and dark, one cannot distinguish depth of field or motion. The reason why people can see the depth of field in Picasso's "Tragedy" is that in addition to the unique use of color, this painting also has just the right light and shade. Neuroscience could also benefit from artist feedback. Novelists are able to model the latest theories about consciousness in their works. If a theory doesn't make the characters come alive, then it doesn't work. Painters can explore the latest theories of the visual cortex. Dancers can help scientists figure out the connection between the body and emotions. By listening to the wisdom of art, a dialogue can occur between science and art, and science can even become a branch of art. On the other hand, through art's interpretation of scientific theories and ideas, science can look at itself from a new perspective.

Novelist Charles Percy Snow, who coined the familiar term "biculture," proposed a simple way to resolve the divide between science and art. He believes that we need a "third culture" that can break down the "communication barrier" between scientists and artists. If writers could learn the second law of thermodynamics and scientists could read Shakespeare, both would benefit.

There is now such a third culture, but it is different from Snow's conception. Snow believed that the third culture should be based on the dialogue between science and art, but in reality the third culture has completely become a speech by scientists to the public. As John Brockman, the founder of the third culture, said, "'Science' in the traditional sense has become 'public culture.'" Of course, scientists who get rid of the media and interpret data directly to the public are worthy of praise. The many scientists who make up the third culture increase public understanding of cutting-edge science. From Darwin to Green, from Stephen Pinker (American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and popular science writer. Author of many best-selling popular science books) to Edward Osborne Wilson, these scientists not only do scientific research Well, you can also write beautiful prose. They gave us a lot of inspiration.

But how does science and art work together? Are we prepared to live forever in this cultural disconnect? If we want to unify human knowledge, we must first create a new movement, which must Transcending the boundaries of science and art, connecting the two. The premise of this movement (possibly the fourth culture) is that science and art cannot exist independently. The goal of this movement is to foster a positive feedback loop where science and art continually reinforce each other.

Science and art should not exclude each other, ignore each other, or selectively pay attention to each other, but should have a real impact on each other. In this way, old world intellectual barriers will disappear; neuroscience will gain new tools to solve the thorny problems of consciousness; and modern physics will be able to optimize its metaphorical system. Art will become a source of scientific inspiration.

This movement can give us a broader understanding of truth. Currently, science is considered the only source of truth. But that which cannot be expressed in abbreviations and equations is looked down upon as mere fiction, the antithesis of scientific fact.

But science cannot alone solve the grand questions it raises. By blending the two, we are able to evaluate our knowledge by its utility rather than its provenance. What does this novel/experiment/poetry tell us about ourselves? How does it help us understand who we are and what the universe is made of? What kind of problem does it deal with, and does it solve it? What if we If your mind is open enough, you will find that both poetry and painting can promote the progress of experiment and theory. Art makes science better.

But before that happens, science and art must correct some bad habits. First, the humanities must collaborate authentically with the sciences. Henry James (the writer, whose brother is the famous psychologist William James) once regarded the writer as an all-embracing person. Artists must heed this advice and not lose sight of science's exciting portrayal of reality.

At the same time, science must realize that the reality it depicts is not unique. No knowledge can be arbitrary. As Karl Popper said: "We must abandon the idea of ??'knowledge has an ultimate source'. We must admit that all knowledge has human characteristics and is mixed with human errors, prejudices, dreams and hopes. We must All we can do is continue to pursue the truth, even if the truth is out of reach. "Humanity's exploration of scientific truth has a long history and is full of thorns, but it will never end. If we want to get answers to the ultimate questions—who we are and what everything is—science and art are both essential and complementary.