How Does "My Sharona" Affect the Brain?

Is it because neuroscience is such a young field, so rapidly growing, that so many half-baked arguments are bandied around in the field?

In today's New York Times, Clive Thompson sketches ("Music of the Hemispheres") an argument from Daniel Levitin that listening to Mozart cannot enhance one's intelligence.

Levitin argued that this could not be true, based on his study of people with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that leaves people with low intelligence. Their peak mental capacities are typically those of a young child, with no ability to calculate quantities . . . . Yet people with Williams possess unusually high levels of musical ability . . . . Music cannot be indispensibly correlated with math, Dr. Levitin noted, if people with Williams can play music.

Well, no, but that says nothing about whether listening to Mozart can enhance one's analytic abilities. It is quite possible that parts of the neurological pathways used for mathematical computations and analysis are shared with the pathways used in interpreting music. If the non-music parts of these pathways are weak in Williams people, no amount of listening to music will help them. However, if the music parts of these pathways are weak in non-Williams people, but not the rest, then listening to Mozart could have a dramatic effect for them. (It would be a surprise to me, however, if it were ever proved true that something as passive as listening to music has a lasting effect on the brain.)

It's possible, of course, that Thompson has overstated Levitin's position. But there are weak and bizarre arguments aplenty in the field. Nicholas Humphrey's assertion that sensation and perception are two independent things that happen in parallel is an odd one (see John Searle's discussion in the New York Review of Books, Volume LIII, Number 17). Daniel Dennett's feeling that denying that subjective experience exists is sufficient to dispense with it is a weak, if surprisingly popular, position.

Incidentally, CNN reports that President Bush listens to baby-boomer tunes.

A Stupid Ending

I began the story I'm working on with the thought that I would try something stupid and make it work, but that I would avoid or subvert any traditional genres, including naturalism. Now that I'm halfway through it, I find that the plot stubbornly conforms to the most traditional formulas in the book. I should be writing for Disney.

Now I find myself believing in some kind of Platonic world of ideas — one that includes the perfect resolution for this story. It opens with the traditional inciting event, and it is propelled by a ticking clock. But the resolution is neither triumphant nor tragic. Perhaps the entire story is reframed in some epiphany (not "and then I woke up"), or perhaps the antagonist becomes the protagonist.

But this is exactly where writer's block comes from: The belief that there is a perfect story. I'll come up with a stupid ending and make it work.

The Gross Clinic Grosses Big

In a scene at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the young Indiana says of a jewel-encrusted cross: "That cross is an important artifact; it belongs in a museum." This is how, improbably, the scholar becomes an adventurer and man of action. And this is how the arcane pursuits of dedicated men find a footing in civic life.

By Indiana's thinking, the buying power of today's wealthy art collectors, which often outstrips the buying power of museums, is a cause for concern. When Alice Walton slapped down $68 m for Eakins's The Gross Clinic, there didn't seem to be much hope that the Philadelphia Art Museum would be able to match the bid. (To be fair, Walton was not buying the painting for private display; it would have been displayed at the National Gallery.)

Writing in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Edward J. Sozanski touches on this in a discussion of The Gross Clinic and the role of art in civic life. "Walton waved a check for $68 million in front of the painting, instantly transforming it from a treasured work of art into a fungible asset." This is true insofar as treasured works of art and fungible assets are mutually exclusive things — which is to say insofar as those who really care about art are too strapped for cash to hold on to a painting worth $68 m.

But Sozanski muddies the issue when he says, "museums are refuges of last resort." He is correct to say that works of art in museums have lost their context, if by context we mean the artist's studio. Even if most works of art have been created for wealthy buyers, museums put works of art in the most meaningful possible context: the assembled works by artists great and obscure from the ages. In the Philadelphia Art Museum, you can view a painting of the crucifixion by Van der Weyden, and stroll over to another room and see Duchamp's The Large Glass. The Museum has arranged these works in roughly chronological and geographical order, but you are free to associate them in any way you please. It would be easy to draw parallels between the Van der Weyden and Reubens's Prometheus Bound (also at the Museum), which both use simple, dramatic compositions.

From this perspective, it would seem to make little difference whether The Gross Clinic goes to the National Gallery or to Philadelphia Art Museum. However, Sozanski and I are agreed that art is a vital part of public life (though, this point too seems to get lost in his lamenting how little the public notices art — I, for one, notice it). If the National Gallery had successfully purchased The Gross Clinic, Philadelphia would have been the poorer for it, and it is well for us Philadelphians that the Philadelphia Art Museum raised the capital to buy this highly treasured asset.