[Humans are evolutionarily drawn to beauty. How do such complex
experiences emerge from a collection of atoms and molecules?]
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HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN IS WIRED FOR ROMANCE  
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Alan Lightman
December 5, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ Humans are evolutionarily drawn to beauty. How do such complex
experiences emerge from a collection of atoms and molecules? _

Couple enjoying a full moon over the Reservoir in Central Park,

 

Recently, I found myself in the office of the neuroscientist Robert
Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at
MIT, discussing what it takes to know that two people are going to
fall in love.

We sat next to a large glass cabinet containing the historical
artifacts and curiosities of brain science: a wooden box bristling
with electrodes and wires used for inducing electrical currents and
shocks to the brain; a brain-wave “synchronizer” with a flashing
vacuum tube; and a frightening metal spike, dating back to the 1940s,
to be hammered into the brain to perform lobotomies.

I asked Desimone if he thought that brain scientists of the future
might be able to predict whether two people would someday fall in
love, given a full readout of their neurons. Desimone replied with a
boyish grin: “I’m a reductionist. So yes,” he told me. He
allowed that, at the moment, our models are only probabilistic. They
would say, “There’s a 70 percent probability you’ll fall in love
with Mary, and a 40 percent chance you’ll fall in love with
Alice.”

But, according to Desimone, the predictive probabilities in the future
will inch up toward 100 percent. I’m a scientist myself, but I find
it a bit unsettling that a brain scientist or computer might
accurately predict whom I’ll fall in love with. At the same time, I
admire the spectacular progress of science in understanding human
beings and where we fit in the grand scheme of things.

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The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science
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ALAN LIGHTMAN, PANTHEON

My question about love was just one of many I posed to scientists,
philosophers, ethicists, and faith leaders as I worked these past few
years on a public-television series titled _Searching: Our Quest for
Meaning in the Age of Science_, which will premiere in early January
2023. I wanted to know: What does it mean to be human in a world of
increasing science and technology? How do complex human experiences
such as falling in love or feeling a connection to nature or
appreciating beauty emerge from the material brain—a collection of
atoms and molecules?

I call myself a _spiritual materialist_. As a scientist, I’m a
materialist. Not in the sense of seeking happiness in cars and nice
clothes, but in the literal sense of the word: the belief that
everything is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing more.
Further, I believe that the material stuff of the universe is governed
by a small number of fundamental laws. Yet I have had transcendent
experiences. I’ve made eye contact with wild animals. Looking up at
the stars one summer night, I lost track of my body and felt that I
was merging with things far larger than myself. I feel connected to
other people and to the world of living things. I appreciate beauty.
I’ve experienced awe. Of course, all of us have had similar feelings
and moments, like the birth of a child or watching a solar eclipse.
Although these experiences vary widely, they have sufficient
similarity that I’ll gather them together under the heading of
“spirituality.” So I’m a spiritual materialist.Many people
associate spirituality with an all-powerful, intentional, and
supernatural God. I respect such beliefs. But my concept of
spirituality does not require them. It is my view that all human
experiences, including spirituality, are compatible with a fully
scientific view of the world, even while some are not reducible to
zeros and ones. I believe not only that these experiences are rooted
in material atoms and molecules but also that they can be explained in
terms of the forces of Darwinian evolution.

As our nation and our world have become more polarized in recent
years, the dialogue between science and spirituality has assumed
greater and greater importance. The two are not mutually exclusive,
and yet too many people act as though they are. We human beings are
capable of inventing antibiotics and smartphones, and we are also
capable of composing symphonies or being awestruck by the melting red
glow of a setting sun. We are experimenters, and we are also
experiencers.

Primary among these “spiritual” experiences is the feeling of
connection—to nature, to other people, and to the cosmos as a whole.
In a previous essay
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I described the evolutionary basis for our feelings of connection to
nature. As we humans have spent more than 99 percent of our
2-million-year history living outdoors, an attentiveness to nature
would have had great survival benefit—for such necessities as
habitat selection, foraging for food, and reading the signs of an
upcoming storm.

Just as evolutionary forces probably shaped our feelings of a deep
connection to nature, they also probably shaped our need for
connection to other human beings, which, in turn, is related to our
feelings of being part of something larger than ourselves. In early
hunter-gatherer groups, which occupied most of human history, members
of the group would have been highly dependent on one another for
survival. Danger was always nearby. The hunters went out for food,
while other adults protected the children, kept the fire going, and
fortified the cave in communal settings. Being shunned or separated
from the group probably would have brought a quick death. The social
psychologist Cindy Frantz of Oberlin College says that there are
definite psychological similarities between the kinds of relationships
we have with nature and those we have with people. “One of the
adaptive strategies that humans have,” she told me, “is that we
live in these cooperative social groups. For our ancestors, to not be
a member of the group would have meant a dramatically higher chance of
dying and not passing on their genes … We evolved these core social
motives because they helped keep people alive. The most powerful of
those is the need to belong.”

One of the more thought-provoking conversations I recently had was at
the La Ferrassie rock shelter in Southern France. Bruno Maureille, a
local anthropologist, told me that skeletons found there showed that
early humans, as long ago as 40,000 years, buried members of their
group with ritual care. Much of nature we consider beautiful because
we are part of nature. Coppery clouds. The winding swirl of a
seashell. The splaying of hues in a rainbow. The reflection of stars
on the surface of a still pond at night. We grew up in nature,
evolutionarily speaking. Of course, there’s also a cultural
component to the notion of beauty, especially when it comes to the
physical beauty of people: Elongated earlobes are considered beautiful
by the Masai in Kenya. For centuries, the Chinese bound the feet of
girls, believing that small feet were beautiful, feminine, and a sign
of refinement. But some concepts of beauty seem universal.

It is not hard to argue that an appreciation of color and form and
other aspects of beauty had survival benefit in their relation to
sexual attraction. The primal and evolutionary force behind sexual
attraction, of course, is procreation, and procreation is most
successful when both partners are healthy and vigorous. Health and
vigor, in turn, are associated with well-formed body shape, smooth
skin, good color, striking facial features, and other elements of
bodily “beauty.” In fact, the neurological reactions to beauty
trigger some of the same pleasure centers in the brain as eating, sex,
and drugs. Both Darwin and Freud opined on the connection between an
appreciation for beauty and sexual drive.

Of course, most experiences of beauty do not involve sexual
attraction. But the more general appreciation of beauty could well be
a by-product of a trait, like sexual attraction, that did (and does)
have survival benefit. Evolutionary biologists call such by-products
“spandrels.” The botanist and geneticist Hugo Iltis wrote that
“man’s love for natural colors, patterns, and harmonies … must
be the result of natural selection through eons of mammalian and
anthropoid evolution.”

Our sensitivity to beauty, combined with our kinship with the natural
world, has some surprising aesthetic manifestations and
interconnections. Take the “golden ratio.” Biologists, architects,
psychologists, and anthropologists have long noted that we find
especially pleasing those rectangles whose ratio of long side to short
side is approximately 3 to 2. That ratio is close to what is called
the “golden ratio,” sometimes called the “golden mean.” Two
numbers are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the larger number to
the smaller is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger
number. From this seemingly simple definition, we can determine that
the golden ratio is 1.61803… .

Now we enter the kingdom of magic. The 12th-century Italian
mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci discovered an interesting sequence of
numbers, called the “Fibonacci sequence”:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, …

Each number of the sequence, after the zero, is the sum of the
previous two numbers. As you can test for yourself, the ratio of a
number in the sequence to the one before it approaches the golden
ratio as we go to bigger and bigger numbers. For example, 21/13 =
1.615, 34/21 = 1.619, 55/34 = 1.6176. So this special series of
numbers is closely related to the golden ratio. Even at this point,
anyone with an appreciation for mathematics can see much beauty in the
golden ratio and its relation to the Fibonacci series of numbers.

But there is much more to this natural magic. Consider a spiral
constructed by the quarter circles connecting the opposite corners of
a series of ever-bigger squares whose sides are the numbers in the
Fibonacci series, as shown in the diagram below:

[illustration of the fibonacci ratio spiral on a graph ]

Astonishingly, many biological organisms embody this spiral. For
example, seashells and aloe polyphylla:

[aloe plant with leaves growing in the fibonacci spiral]

Getty

With its ubiquity in nature, the golden ratio is, not surprisingly,
pleasing to the human eye. Architects, ancient and modern, have built
it into their constructions, sometimes unconsciously. For example, the
Great Pyramid of Giza (2560 B.C.) has a slant height of 186.3 meters
and a base length of 115.2 meters with a ratio of 1.6172, almost
exactly equal to the golden ratio.

The mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan at Duke University has offered an
evolutionary explanation, based on the eye and the brain, as to why we
find the golden ratio so appealing. Bejan argues that the eye and
brain would have evolved to maximize the ease of flow from the visual
plane to the brain. If we consider a rectangle, the time for the eye
to scan the area of the rectangle is smallest when the eye can scan
the horizontal length in the same time it takes to scan the vertical.
After doing an analysis of the geometry of the eye, Bejan finds that
the eye scans in the horizontal direction about 1.5 times as fast as
in the vertical direction. Thus, the optimal value of the ratio, which
minimizes the time to scan the entire rectangle, is about 3/2, not far
from the golden ratio.

It is but a short step from Bejan’s analysis to argue that because
many objects in nature exhibit the golden ratio in their construction,
our eyes would naturally have evolved to optimize the flow of
information to the brain for objects with this ratio. And a short step
from there to argue why this ratio is so pleasing to the eye. The
golden ratio is built into us, just as it is built into seashells and
aloe plants. Our aesthetic of beauty is literally an expression of our
oneness with nature.

Understanding these scientific explanations of why I appreciate
beautiful things does not in the slightest diminish my pleasure and
delight in gazing upon coppery clouds or spiraling seashells or the
reflection of stars in the water. In fact, they enhance my pleasure,
emphasizing my connections to the natural world. For me, the elegance
of the mathematics of the Fibonacci series, the presence of that
particular beauty in seashells and plants, and my own biological
affinity for such beauty are all of a piece, a wholeness, a profound
connectedness of all living things.

The bedrock of all human mental experiences, including those I have
grouped under the heading of spirituality, is _consciousness_: the
first-person participation in the world; the awareness of self; the
feeling of “I-ness”; the sense of being a separate entity in the
world; the simultaneous reception and _witnessing_ of visual images,
sound, touch, memory, thought; the ability to conceive of the future
and plan for that future.

Consciousness almost certainly exists on a spectrum, from automatic
responses to the surrounding environment at the low end to
self-awareness, ego, and the ability to plan ahead at the high end.
Amoebas may not be conscious in any meaningful way, while crows and
dolphins and dogs almost certainly are.

The highest level of consciousness, the primal human experience, is so
unique, so hard to describe, so different from experiences with the
world outside our bodies that we may never be able to fully capture
consciousness with brain research. Like Professor Desimone at MIT and
almost all biologists and neuroscientists, I firmly believe that
consciousness and all mental experiences are sensations brought about
by the chemicals and electrical currents in the brain. But we may
never be able to show how this highest level of consciousness emerges
step-by-step from the neurons and synapses of the material brain.

In his famous 1972 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the
American philosopher Thomas Nagel defines consciousness in a way that
underscores the near impossibility of crossing the
subjective/objective divide: “Fundamentally an organism has
conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is
like to _be_ that organism … We may call this the subjective
character of experience.” How can we feel what a bat feels or what a
dog feels or even another human being?

Even though we may not have a full explanation of that mysterious
sensation we call consciousness, a great deal of evidence suggests
that it originates in the material brain: the association between
“awareness” and physical neurons of the brain; the connection of
behavioral manifestations of consciousness to material brain
structures, a connection particularly evident when the brain is
damaged; and the observed manifestations of different levels of
consciousness through the animal world.

Another name for awareness is “attention.” In the millions of
visual images, sounds, smells, and other sensory inputs that bombard
the brain every second, what mechanism allows us to pay attention to
some things and disregard others? What happens in the brain that
enables us to ignore a leaking faucet but pay attention to a knock on
the door? In 1990, the neuroscientist Christof Koch and the molecular
biologist Francis Crick proposed that paying attention to a sight or
sound is associated with the _synchronous firing_ of neurons.
Attention is not consciousness. However, it is probably a necessary
condition for consciousness, and its neural mechanics are a step along
the way to understanding the material basis of consciousness.

The attention proposal was supported in 2014 by the neuroscientists
Desimone and Daniel Baldauf. They presented a series of two kinds of
images—faces and houses—to their subjects in rapid succession,
like passing frames of a movie, and asked them to concentrate on the
faces but disregard the houses (or vice versa). The images were
“tagged” by flashing them at two different frequencies—a new
face image every two-thirds of a second and a new house image every
half second. The researchers then put a helmetlike container on the
subject’s head that could detect tiny local magnetic fields inside
the brain and thus localized brain activity. By monitoring the
frequencies of the magnetic and electrical activity of the subject’s
brain, Desimone and Baldauf could determine where in the brain the
house and face images were being directed and processed.

The scientists found that when the subjects were told to concentrate
on the faces but disregard the houses, the neurons in the
face-recognition portion of the brain fired in synchrony, like a group
of people singing in unison, while the neurons in the house location
fired like a group of people singing out of synch, each beginning at a
random part of the song. And when the subjects concentrated on houses
and disregarded the faces, the reverse happened. Evidently, what we
perceive as “paying attention” to something originates, at the
cellular level, in the synchronized firing of a group of neurons,
whose rhythmic electrical activity rises above the background chatter
of the immense neuronal crowd.

Many other manifestations of consciousness are associated with the
material brain. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have
developed questionnaires for patients with brain damage to measure
their degree of self-awareness and functioning ability. The
questionnaires are administered to three groups: the patient, the
patient’s family, and an observing clinician. One such
questionnaire, developed by Mark Sherer at the Baylor College of
Medicine and the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, asks
these questions, among others:

How well can the patient do on tests that measure thinking and memory
skills now as compared to before his/her injury? How good is the
patient at keeping up with the time and date and where he/she is now
as compared to before his/her injury? How good is the patient’s
memory for recent events now as compared to before his/her injury? How
good is the patient at planning things now as compared to before
his/her injury?

Not surprisingly, the results of such studies show low scores _as
measured by the family members and clinicians_ but not particularly
low as measured by the patients themselves. Evidently, when a person
loses self-awareness, this is not so apparent to the person
themselves. Such awareness of one’s own lack of awareness would
require another, “supervisory” part of consciousness unaffected by
the brain injury. It is also possible that people with brain injury
are defensive about their loss of abilities and overrate their mental
capabilities. Self-reporting is always a tricky business. Thus, most
reliable here are the reports of family members and clinicians.

Autobiographical memory is an important feature of self-identity and
self-awareness. Imagine going to a cocktail party with strangers under
the restriction that you were not allowed to say anything about your
history. Numerous studies have shown that autobiographical memory is
diminished by brain damage and dementia. Consider, for example,
Alzheimer’s, which is a disease that destroys memory and thinking
ability. Autopsies of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients reveal
deposits of a protein called amyloid around brain cells, and plaques
of another protein, called tau, that cause “tangles” of brain
cells. Researchers have also found that as brain cells become affected
in Alzheimer’s disease, there is a decrease in the chemical
neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine, that send signals between
neurons. These findings not only show the clear correlation between
memory (as well as associated consciousness) and the physical brain;
they also emphasize the importance of the communication between
neurons as a crucial part of consciousness and higher intelligence in
general.

One way of exploring the emergence of consciousness in the human brain
is to study the behavioral correlates of consciousness in other
animals and map out a gradation of consciousness with increasing brain
capacities. Dolphins, which have almost as many cortical neurons as
humans (long-finned pilot whales actually have more than humans), have
shown clear signs of self-awareness and play. In a famous experiment
demonstrating self-recognition, a mirror is placed in a pool with
dolphins. The dolphins swim up to the mirror, look at it for a few
moments, and swim away. Then marks are placed on the dolphins’
bodies. Now the dolphins spend longer looking at themselves in the
mirror. Evidently, they have noticed that something has changed about
their body. Out in the open ocean, dolphins will stop what they are
doing when a large boat approaches, and ride in its bow wave. Some
years ago, I went sailing in the Aegean Sea. A dolphin not only swam
alongside me but catapulted itself over the stern of the boat. To all
appearances, it was having fun.

Monkeys play. Kittens chase one another and paw at a hanging string.
Sea lions will toss sticks to each other. Among animals with higher
levels of consciousness like us, we can see striking similarities. Yet
we can recognize aspects of human cognition even at the lower end of
the spectrum of consciousness.

Even though we do not understand in detail how consciousness and
complex human experiences emerge from the material brain, there are
many other known phenomena in which the behavior of complex systems is
often not evident or comprehensible in the individual material parts
of those systems.

Such behaviors are called “emergent phenomena.” An example would
be the behavior of certain kinds of fireflies. When a group of these
insects congregate in a field at night, at first they flash randomly,
like the blinking lights of a Christmas tree. But after a few moments,
the fireflies begin flashing in unison. Such behavior could not be
predicted by the study of an individual firefly, but can be seen
readily in groups. Another example is the large and complex mounds
built by termites, called “termite cathedrals.” The cathedrals
sometimes have elaborate galleries and chimneys to control airflow,
temperature, and humidity.

Building such a complex structure would seem to require some kind of
master plan, executed by the hundreds of thousands of termites in the
colony. But individual termites, which are blind, cannot perceive even
the overall shape of a mound, much less direct its design. Somehow,
the complex mound arises from the _collective_ behavior of the full
colony. Researchers believe that termites exchange chemical signals
with one another and also respond to cues from airflow and
temperature, which are affected by the shape of the mound.

Now consider the human brain, with 100 billion firefly-like neurons.
We can understand everything about how individual neurons work—the
way that electrical ions are exchanged across the neuron membranes,
the way that an electrical current is passed along the neuron, the way
that a neuron chemically connects to another neuron—but we still
cannot fill in all the blanks for how the collection of neurons
produces the sensation we call consciousness. Yet neuroscience
suggests to us that the emergence of consciousness in advanced brains
such as the human brain, although enormously more complex than
fireflies or termite cathedrals, is not different in kind. In
particular, consciousness can emerge from the collective interaction
of billions of neurons, following known laws of chemistry, physics,
and biology, without the intervention of some additional ethereal or
“psychic” force.

I will end with a final illustration of spiritual materialism, as I
see it. There is very good scientific evidence that all the atoms in
our bodies, except for hydrogen and helium, the two smallest atoms,
were manufactured at the centers of stars. If you could tag each of
the atoms in your body and follow them backwards in time, through the
air that you breathed during your life, through the food that you ate,
back through the geological history of the Earth, through the ancient
seas and soil, back to the formation of the Earth out of the solar
nebular cloud and then out into interstellar space, you could trace
each of your atoms, those exact atoms, to _particular_ massive stars
in our galaxy’s past. At the end of their lifetimes, those stars
exploded and spewed out their newly forged atoms into space, later to
condense into planets and oceans and plants and your body at this
moment. We have seen such stellar explosions with our telescopes and
know they occur.

If, instead of going backwards in time, I were to go forward in time,
to my death and beyond, the atoms in my body will remain, only they
will be scattered about. Those atoms will not know where they came
from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been
part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once
have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first
apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand. If I could label
each of my atoms at this moment, imprint each with my Social Security
number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they
floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants
and trees, dissolved in the ocean, and then floated again to the air.
And some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular
people. So, we are literally connected to the stars, and we are
literally connected to future generations of people. In this way, even
in a material universe, we are connected to all things future and
past. I don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe in the
miraculous.

_This essay is adapted in part from Alan Lightman’s forthcoming
book, _The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science.

The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science
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ALAN LIGHTMAN, PANTHEON

_Alan Lightman [[link removed]], a
physicist and novelist, teaches at MIT. He is the author of several
books and the host of the public television series Searching: Our
Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science._

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