Eric Kandel - Think Again Podcast - The Eye of the Beholder

Hi there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast. Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas in little doses from some of the most creative thinkers around. On the Think Again podcast, we take ourselves out of our comfort zone, surprising my guests and me, your host, with unexpected interview clips from Big Think's archives. Ideas that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

Today, I'm so happy to be joined by Professor Eric Kendell of Columbia University. In the year 2000, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering work on understanding how memory is stored in the brain by studying a particular type of sea snail with a relatively simple nervous system. In his recent books, he's been pioneering in a very different way, trying to bridge the gap between the quote-unquote two cultures of the sciences and the humanities. His current book, "Reductionism in Art and Brain Science", continues this work, looking at the ways both modern art and science reduce complex phenomena down to their component parts to achieve new insights and effects.

Welcome to Think Again, Professor Kendell.

Thank you very much. I guess maybe we should start with the cultural divide between the humanities and the sciences. I mean, this is a very big topic, but maybe you want to start with a bit of an overview of how that happened.

Yes, I mean this was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. C.P. Snow wrote a series of lectures and essays on the divide between the humanities and the sciences. He thought that this was an unbridgeable divide because humanists and scientists not only had different aspirations, different goals, but used different methodologies. The point that I try to make in this book, the overriding theme, is that humanistic aspirations are not unique to people who are called humanists, but scientists can also have humanistic aspirations. And all in modesty, I can say that the study of learning and memory is a humanistic ideal. We all want to understand who we are, because who we are is a large part dependent on what we remember about ourselves, and that has a biological base. The biological base is memory.

In addition, not only do scientists have humanistic goals, but artists use empirical scientific experimental methods, and my book shows several examples of this. Jackson Pollock taking the canvas off the wall and putting it on the floor and dripping on it – this is a completely new approach to painting.

Right, if you could give a little brief overview of what you mean by reductionism, because the term has many meanings, some of them pejorative, but you're not using it in that way here. Maybe you could talk about what reductionism is and how it, you know, broadly, it's common to art and science.

Right, reductionism is taking a complex problem that interests you and taking one component of that problem and going into it at great depth. So for example, on the cover of my book, I have an image by Rothko, who's a color field painter, and he has decided that he can convey emotions most effectively by using color. He uses stripes of color in many of his paintings to convey a feeling that is almost spiritual. And as he aged and also became more depressed, the colors changed, became darker. In the Rothko Chapel, there are dark browns and blacks, and still it conveys a powerful mood in this way.

So this clearly is a reductionist approach. He had a chance of doing many things besides color; he used figuration in addition to color, but he drops out figuration, focusing only on color and simplifies the color pattern. And yet we get a powerful response to it.

And this is, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I'm thinking about it, the goal of reductionism in science, at least as you describe it in the book specifically using the example of your work with sea snails, you know, you're trying to understand the complex phenomenon of memory by looking at a relatively simple nervous system. But your goal is to understand that phenomenon, whereas the artists that you describe, what they're trying to do seems to be less about understanding maybe than about getting at some more immediate experience or provoking some kind of response in themselves or in the viewer. Could you speak to that a bit?

Yes, I mean you described it perfectly. Reductionism need not simply solve a scientific problem, although in a sense every artist solves scientific problems along the way. But it may be that of the range of emotional experiences, the artist will only focus on some rather than others in order to go into it in some depth.

So for example, I mean the history of art from, say, 1850 to Claude Monet was figuration. The whole idea of art was to deceive the viewer into thinking that when they were looking at a flat surface they were, in fact, seeing a three-dimensional world. And the whole artistic capability critically involved trying to develop perspectives, etc., that gives you the sense of three-dimensionality. Modern art has reduced that; why not accept the fact that we work on a flat surface and let's do the most we can with the flat surface and bring out new stuff?

And what they're driving at, though, as you describe it in the book and you quote a number of these artists, what they seem to be driving at, most of them, is trying to get a more immediate experience of the sublime, but not to demystify it in any way. And that I wonder whether that's sort of the heart of this cultural divide sometimes between the arts, the humanities, and the sciences – that, you know, science seeks to demystify, whereas the arts at least – I don't know that they do. I don't know that they're using reductionism.

I think you're absolutely right. I don't think the artist tries to demystify. That is not the purpose of reduction. The purpose of reduction is to increase the mystery. I mean one of the wonderful things about abstract painting, if we look at a de Kooning or if we look at a Jackson Pollock, is because the information is often ambiguous; it forces us to fill in the detail.

And I describe this in a book in terms of top-down processing. We rely on our free association, our memory, our previous experience to fill in the detail of ambiguity. And that means that you recruit the beholder, the participant in the creative act. This actually goes back to Al Regal and to Gumbridge and to Ernst Chris, who pointed out that when you and I look at the same painting, we see it somehow differently. What does that mean? That each of us is recreating in our own brain the image that we're looking at. That is, the beholder undergoes, in a very modest way, a creative experience that parallels, in a very modest way, the creativity of the artist.

And why is that interesting? I don't know whether you've had that experience, but certainly, I find when I have the most modest creative idea, it gives me a great deal of pleasure, and I think one of the things that is so pleasurable about abstract thought, for those people who respond to it, is that it gives you lots of room for your own creativity.

So now what's interesting, though, with these abstract painters, and not all the painters you describe in the book are abstract. I mean, Chuck Close uses abstraction to build up, you know, portraits. But is that, in a way, they seem to be ceding some of the control of the artist over to the beholder's share? Like increasingly by saying…

You're absolutely right. The beholder's share has a more prominent feature in abstract art than it has in figurative art, and this is one reason why some people don't like abstract art – right, too much work for them. But other people who enjoy this get a lot of satisfaction out of it.

I guess where I was going with that is that it seems an unusual move for an artist. Like our stereotype of artists is that they can be somewhat of control freaks, you know, wanting total control over the process and over how the thing is perceived.

I think that's definitely true of writers to some extent, but for them to make this move of, you know, giving more and more over to the viewer is an interesting move.

I get your point and you're 100% right. It is only one dimension of it. I think they are control freaks. I think that Pollock and de Kooning are perfectionists. And you know that I discussed this one painting that Rosenberg, who, um, was a teacher, I guess, Professor Shapiro at Columbia, came to visit him and saw this and said, you know, this is a wonderful painting. And de Kooning didn't want to release the painting, didn't think he was ready to go because he still felt he could improve it, and he told him, "This is a masterpiece! Get it out right now!"

So, I mean, they are very much control freaks, but they're control freaks in the way they control ambiguity.

Yeah, and they're controlling, I guess, their own sort of experience, their own...

Right, right, right, right. Then it's up to the viewer. That's interesting.

Okay, um, well I think that might be a good moment for us to transition into the second part of this.

Yes, this is, uh, this first one is Jan 11, who's an astrophysicist, and the video is called "Three Visionary Scientists Who Embraced Limitations to Have Creative Outbursts".

I became interested in this phenomenon of constraints inspiring creative outbursts, and if you look at the last century, there were three really profound examples of that. I would say the earliest that I found incredibly interesting was the limit of the speed of light leading Einstein to the theory of relativity, where a lot of other scientists wanted to remove the limit. They wanted to say there is no limit to the speed of light; that doesn't make any sense; that's impossible. Einstein actually, despite the word relativity, adhered to a very strict absolute, and that absolute was the speed of light. He took that to be his guiding constraint, and by sticking to it rigidly, he said, "I'll give up anything else but the speed of light."

And by doing so, he gave up on the absolute nature of space and time. So I mean, that's just much harder to let go of intuitively.

But it was right. So she's talking about embracing limitation, like how limitation can actually push science forward. Have you found that to be true in your own work?

Well, I mean, in a sense it isn't quite a reductionist approach, but it's focusing on one thing to the exclusion of others in a sense. And certainly, um, if you look at the history of... go beyond memory storage, take a larger problem. If you look at the explosion in understanding the biology of life that came with the discovery of genes by Mendel and then later on by Thomas and Morgan realizing the genes are in chromosomes, and then the discovery the genes are made out of DNA, then the fabulous Watson-Crick discovery about the structure of DNA of the gene. I mean, these are all focusing on the gene to the exclusion of carbohydrate metabolism, lipid metabolism, everything else. Those are secondary processes that derive from genetic control of cellular processes.

So I think in a sense, this is not a universal strategy, but a common strategy. Often there are major variables that if you understand them, other things will follow more readily. I guess it was, uh, Karl Popper, I think it was, who spoke about paradigm shifts and how essentially science proceeds by people laboring in specific trenches for long periods of time, and then either you have a visionary who breaks things open, or those limitations of focus end up leading to breakthroughs.

Yeah, I mean, Popper has been very important in my field in the following way. Karl Popper felt you can't prove anything in science; all you can do is disprove. And that turned out to be a very important historical insight.

There was a guy by the name of Jack Eccles who was a major person in my field, a major student of synaptic transmission, and he thought synaptic transmission between the nerve cells was mostly electrical. With time, it became clearer and clearer that this was likely to be wrong. And Eccles became despondent at that time – I think he was in Australia, I forget where he was – but he went to the Faculty Club and he bumped into Popper, and they became friends. He explained to him why he was depressed, and Popper said, "That's ridiculous. You can't ever prove anything; all you can do is disprove it. Go back into the lab and disprove yourself. Show that you were wrong, that it's not electrical; that it must be chemical." And that's exactly what he did.

I guess I would be interested in hearing, kind of as an adjunct to this, what, you know, in your field, in the work that you do on memory and brain science, what are the intractable problems right now that people are finding themselves bumping up against that if they could solve them, it would be a major, you know, move forward? What seem to be the frontiers right now for brain science?

We are trying to see, for example, what is responsible for the reliability of memory in one hand and its extraordinary unreliability in the other. You know, often we have the feeling we remember something when we don't, right? Or we misremember it, and this is why testimony in court is so unreliable. A single observer remembering an event has a finite and not too small chance of being wrong, not by being dishonest but by just misperceiving or misremembering.

Right, so memory is not, you know, stamping something into a book, and you never have to worry about it. It's often modified as a result of subsequent experiences without our being aware of it. So trying to figure out what controls that and how we can get a better idea into the core of the memory process is a very active part of the field.

That's interesting. Do you think that that may have something to do – I mean, from a cognitive standpoint – that that may have something to do with kind of the pragmatics of memory, like what it is that we actually need to remember in order to survive versus what we don't?

I don't think it deals with the pragmatics of memory. I think it deals with the pragmatics of the brain. So, I remember this conversation, for example, we're having right now, and it's possible that I'm sitting down one day listening to a similar conversation, and I may infuse that second conversation at a subsequent time as being part of the first conversation, right?

You re-experience the initial memory, and you often bring to bear on it some of the subsequent experiences associated with the second sitting, not just the first, but possibly because those things are being stored in – I mean, I'm not asking you to speculate on science that hasn't been done yet – but possibly because those memories are stored in similar areas, and we're conserving space or something.

That's right, and they can be activated in different ways. And also, when a memory is recalled, particularly the first few times, it's sensitive to disruption and distortion. So those things can interfere with the long-term fidelity of the memory storage.

How does that disruption or distortion happen? I mean, like, so when I'm recalling the memory the first few times...

The disruption is only in a sense that the memory is fixed, but the structures that fix it become unglued for a second, for a short period of time. So the memory, if perturbed, can be altered.

So if something like... So let me put it to you this way: when you form a memory, it's a short-term memory, and it doesn't persist. But if you train repeatedly, you form a long-term memory, and the long-term memory consists of the growth of new synaptic connections. And those synaptic connections require new protein synthesis during a certain critical period that protein synthesis is sensitive to disruption.

And you can lose the growth of new synaptic connections despite the fact that they've occurred because the synthesis is not ongoing. After a while, that no longer happens, but in the early stages of long-term memory storage, it's susceptible to disruption, and disruption can come from like other memories or ambient things happening around you.

Other experiences, other memories, right?

Interesting, interesting. Okay, well I think, I think on that note, let's, uh, let's move on to the second surprise.

This is Harvard psychologist Susan David on the psychology of defeating fear.

Low self-esteem and hate live in the mind. When we have politicians who are effectively demagogues who are inspiring fear in us, that fear leads to very particular and relatively predictable responses. When we are fearful, there is this idea in psychological research of mortality salience, that when our mortality is threatened – when someone says, "Oh, this group of people is out to get you" and we feel that we are actively being threatened – we are more likely to stereotype. We are more likely to respond to messages that we hear time and time again, even if they are against our values, as somehow making sense to us.

How do we protect ourselves against this? Daniel Kahneman describes system one thinking and system two thinking. System one thinking is the intuitive response that can sometimes arise out of fear. System two is the deliberate, thoughtful examination of "What is this person saying? Is it aligned with how I really want to be?" When we are able to step back from our fear, we are able to come to a place where we are ultimately protected from the demagogic message.

Okay, so we're talking about demagoguery and fear, and, uh, I guess an immediate point of reference in America in 2016 leaps to all of our minds immediately.

Yes, uh, I have earlier experiences like this.

Oh, I would like to hear about that.

Yes, I'm Jewish and I was born in Vienna, Austria. When I was 9 years old, right as Hitler marched into Austria, he was received by the Viennese in Vienna, where I was living, with open arms. And immediately, people who had been our friends turned away from us and essentially became our enemies. And that's because Hitler had fantastic anti-Semitic propaganda, and he got this propaganda in part from an earlier Viennese. Hitler was in Vienna in 1906-1910, and the mayor of Vienna at that time was a guy called Carl Lueger, and Lueger was a terrific orator, a tremendous campaigner. He wasn't even all that anti-Semitic; he had Jewish friends.

He would say, "I determine who's a Jew," but he had a fantastic way of saying the reason you don't have any money is because the Jews are taking it away from you.

So it scared the hell out of people, particularly those that didn't have jobs, convincing them that the Jews, by charging high prices, by creating works of art that are expensive, et cetera, had, God knows how many reasons, been destroying the quality of their life. So he created this environment of fear to which people responded, and Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf," "I learned more from Lueger how to run a campaign than anybody else."

And fear is, of course, a traditional way in which people build up opposition to one force in order to get support for another.

And I found it very hard for the longest time to understand how people can listen to Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven one day and beat up the Jews the next.

I wonder what that did for you in terms of your thinking about humans at that early age – to see that transition happen almost overnight. Do you have conscious memories of that?

Of course, yeah, absolutely. My brother had built a shortwave radio set, and we were listening to it as Hitler marched into Vienna, and in Heldenplatz, 200,000 people came out and cheered him like mad.

No, it dominated the scene. I walked the streets two days later, and a classmate of mine came up to me and said, "Kendall, I'm never to speak to you again."

That was horrible.

And you ask yourself the question, "What is it that separates the good guys from the bad guys?" And you come to the conclusion – I think the current campaign in the United States illustrates that – that every one of us is capable of good and of evil. Reinhold Niebuhr once said, "The capability of people for good makes democracy desirable; the capability for evil makes democracy necessary."

That's well said. I recently read a book called "Machete Season," and it was about what happened in Rwanda. It was primarily based on interviews with these people who had been just, you know, ordinary people living in Rwanda who then became the kind of soldiers of this campaign, this massacre against their tribal enemies.

And just the sort of mundanity of the way in which they described going out every day to hunt other people was extraordinary.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Arendt called this "the banality of evil."

Well, it's a little bit... I mean, I was very irritated with her use of that. This was about Eichmann in Jerusalem. Evil is not banal. And many of the people, particularly in Eichmann's case, he was a major force; he was not a follower; he was a leader.

But he was able to bring many people along.

No, that's right, that's right. There are those people at the top who are very conscious and calculating and aware of what they're doing. I mean, I can't, you know, I'm not a psychologist, so I can't say whether Donald Trump is, you know, personally aware or conscious enough of what he's doing to be considered truly evil.

But with his followers, you want to look at it and you want to say, "These people are crazy, these people are stupid," but obviously that's not the case for all of them.

Obviously, obviously, our brains are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. I think that this is what the Trump movement has shown. You would never think that a movement like this could succeed in the United States, and it's amazing how far it has gone, although it is clearly fading.

And that is that there are people who are dissatisfied with certain aspects of our lifestyle to whom he appeals. And he does it by phobia of strangers, you know, preventing people from coming into the country, etc., etc., etc.

Do you have any thoughts or insights from your vantage point? I mean, having experienced what you did as a kid and seeing this happening in America now into sort of what would be a better way to engage the people that are following Trump now? Like what is America not doing?

I mean, I know you're not trying to run the country, but I'd be care...

I'm not sure I could. I mean, I'm so startled by the success.

I think the case could be stronger and would be stronger if Hillary ran a campaign a little bit better and if she had run her life a little bit better.

I mean, you know, she realized that she's interested in public office, and I think the whole email thing could have been completely finessed. Moreover, this accepting large sums of money from companies for giving lectures when she's going to run for public office, and realize the question is going to rise: Is she going to feel beholden to those people?

You would think so. I mean, you and I, of course, would never be somebody only gave us a half a million dollars, but Hillary Clinton – how do we know?

Yeah, I mean, that's right. I mean, even if she is somehow immune from their influences, it's hard to preserve the illusion of neutrality.

I think it's essential. Yeah, I think she made mistakes. And I think one of the reasons Trump is more successful than it might have been is that Hillary, although I much prefer her and I think she'd probably make a very good president, did not handle herself in her public life in an ideal fashion.

She did not handle herself the way Obama has handled himself, which I think is extraordinary.

Sure, but at the same time, there just seems to be so much anger, so much fear here. And like, it's hard for me to believe that Trump just instilled that in everybody.

I mean, obviously, there were large numbers of people concerned about immigrants taking their jobs and, you know, that have these...

Well, I mean, our country is not perfect. If you look at the number of people who have billions and see what taxes they pay compared to people earning $40,000, $50,000, or $80,000, it's amazing. You know, there are problems in this country. Do I complain? Not too seriously; I think this is, you know, heaven on Earth. I've had a wonderful life here.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'd like it to remain so for coming generations. So hopefully we can avoid Trump getting elected or any repeat thereof because it just doesn't bode well for our future.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the price of democracy is constant vigilance. I mean, I'm repeating clichés, but...

Right, right, right, right.

No, but this is true.

Alright, so let's move on to the third and final video.

Yeah, this is George Musser on the strangeness of physics and telepathy.

The whole progress of physics is to start with our everyday experience and to analyze it and look at it and look for deviations from it. So the very nature of actually really all the natural sciences, but certainly of physics, is to really get away from our experience.

So the things physics comes up with are just kind of weird subatomic particles. We can't see them directly, at least, but we know they're there. We can actually do thought experiments about the things we do see and deduce their existence.

So already, even with just that limited example, we've gone ventured beyond our direct experience. And 100 years ago or so, people doubted the existence of atoms, let alone subatomic particles. Non-locality, spooky action at a distance is very much in that mold. It's taking us yet further away from our experience, and therefore we expect it to be weird. It should be weird; that's why physics is fun.

And as other scientists have said, you expect it – in fact, if the theory isn't weird, you kind of doubt it because you might worry that your own biases are intruding into the theory and causing you to think the world is a certain way when you're not listening to the way the world actually is.

So weirdness is, in a sense, a test of a theory.

I mean, I largely but not completely agree with it. I don't think physics necessarily has to be weird and that weirdness certainly is not a test of the reliability of a theory, but certainly it deals with phenomena that we do not intuitively think about all the time, at least people outside of physics don't think about it.

And it deals with many things that are invisible and have to be inferred. And someday biology will reach that level; at the moment, that's not the case. Biology doesn't at all deal with things that are weird. I mean, some weird things come out of it, but it tries to explain, you know, living processes that may make intuitive sense, and we want to understand them on a more profound level.

Can you say more about what you mean by someday biology may get there? Why would that happen?

Well, I think we probably want to understand things on a deeper level. Right now, if we understand the level of molecules, we think we're making a great deal of progress, but we may want to make it, you know, on an even more profound level, on a level of electron movement or something like that.

We're seeing this all the time. As a matter of fact, take theory, which has such an important role in physics; it didn't have an important role in biology for the longest time. When I came along, there was a fair amount of theory going on, but it was mostly malarkey, right? Because you can make a theory about anything you want to have a theory about memory. I give you five theories about memory. You know, people were coming up with theories, but they were not testing them.

Right, this has changed now. Theories had a major comeback in the last 15 years. This was true for a long time in physics as well, right? I mean, they had all these theories that they weren't able to test without the particle reactors and so on.

So from the standpoint of lay people, it was like, "What on Earth are they talking about?"

That's true, but in brain science, it was a little bit different because they could test it, but they didn't think of doing it. They didn't think it was necessary.

I see.

To test the theory. But the fact is, we can develop a theory for anything, right? Unless you say, "Now this is a prediction; let's run an experiment to test that prediction," which is what's going on right now. Does brain science...

You talked a little bit about your book in your book about how brain science and psychology have somewhat merged.

Oh, they have tremendous impact on one another. And again, again, this is an area in which people outside of psychology, even in the early stages, psychologists thought that these primitive guys from brain science want to, you know, eat us up; they want to swallow the field. And that's not... you cannot do the biology of the mind without being a psychologist.

I mean, psychologists describe many of the obvious central phenomena – classical conditioning, perception, sensation – all of these things were studied in very reliable ways in psychophysical terms. And what we now want to do is add the biology to it and give it a new depth, a new level of understanding.

It's a beautiful case of coming together. In fact, I would go further than this; I would say there had been a sequence of mergers. First, there was a major merger between cognitive psychology and brain biology, sort of a new biology of mind. But at the same time this was occurring, there were Watson and Crick and Gilbert, and all these people coming along developing molecular biology.

And so the approaches of molecular biology – cloning genes, sequencing them, figuring out their function through mutations – became applicable to the brain. So we can now test many of these ideas with powerful molecular approaches: "Knock out this gene; get rid of this particular protein." So this puts brain science in a completely new level.

That's interesting. I mean, going back to the test case of psychology and brain science, though, that is kind of a beautiful model, I suppose, for the reconciliation of the sciences and the humanities in a way because...

Well, psychology, in all fairness, by the time we got around to it, was no longer part of the humanities. Science is part of the humanities. I mean, it is a discipline, but psychology at that time, cognitive psychology, was an empirical laboratory test...

Yeah, right, experimental discipline, right?

Right, right, right, right. No, I guess I'm thinking of like Theory of Personality. And that's something else: the psychodynamics of it, that's still soft. In fact, you know, I was interested in psychoanalysis; I wanted to become an analyst at one point, and I'm glad I didn't go that direction because psychoanalysis is dying.

And one of the reasons it's dying is it has not become empirical.

Right, and yet we do have these big questions, you know, about like about meaning, identity, what it means to live a good and authentic life, some of which are absolutely intractable.

Absolutely, and you can ask them. There was a guy called Aaron Beck who developed cognitive behavior therapy. I don't know whether you know this about him; he was interested in testing one of Freud's ideas. Freud had the idea that people who are depressed are angry. They first express the anger toward others, then they feel guilty about this, then they internalize it, feel angry with themselves, and that causes a depression.

So Aaron Beck thought he would test this, and he tested it by using the royal road to the unconscious, which is dreaming. So he listened to the dream life of depressed patients, and it all sounded as if this was their problem with them.

What they all sounded like is that they had a low image of themselves. Here, this guy was a famous radio interviewer, and he thought of himself as being, you know, so-so, a guy who was very successful in business thought there was a failure at home – the low image. And as he began to address himself to this issue of low image, saying, you know, "Why do you think you're like this, Joe? Look, your family really enjoys you and appreciates you," he began to alter his behavior.

And cognitive behavior therapy developed, so what Aaron did is to write a cookbook so you and I could do the same thing.

I see.

And he asked other people to do this, and they were able to get the same results. And then he did empirical outcome studies with control showing that mild and moderate depression are significantly helped by cognitive behavior therapy, severe not so much, but synergistic with antidepressants, it works very well.

So you can take these concepts and make them scientific; it just hasn't happened by and large in psychoanalysis. We don't know if it works, under what circumstances and how it works, and that's got to come if it's going to survive at all.

Okay, well, Eric Kendell, it has been wonderful talking to you today. Thank you so much for spending your time on this show. This has been a lot of fun, and to our audience, I would strongly recommend Professor Kendell's new book, "Reductionism in Art and Brain Science." It is fascinating, beautifully written, the science is explained incredibly clearly, and it's full of gorgeous reproductions of modern paintings.

Thank you so much for your time, Professor Kendell.

Oh, thank you for inviting me. This is very enjoyable for me.

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And that's it for this week's episode of Think Again. I've been talking lately on this show to a lot of artists and writers, and it's really refreshing to speak to a scientist, especially one who has lived through so many of the major developments in the past century in science and art and has so much to say about them.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did, and we have lots of amazing things lined up this fall. It's going to be a really, really interesting fall. I am going on a brief and much-needed vacation, but the show will be here, and I hope to see you back here next week.

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