Thinky links

Around the holiday season there’s not quite as much science-themed entertainment, but what a lot of thought-provoking articles on art, science, storytelling, and the self have come out lately.

Well, there is one bit of holiday time science fun–NPR’s Science Friday broadcasts an edited recording of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony on the Friday before Thanksgiving. Makes a nice family tradition for us! And perhaps it will for you, too. Have a listen. They always do a great job.

And more …

Slate’s Willa Paskin looks at how psychology and technology combine to create the fad of “being obsessed with cultural product ‘X.’” My recent obsession was, and still is, the “Song of Fire and Ice” novels. (I finished all five of them two weeks ago, and although I have read other things, I have not wanted to read other things). She tends to attribute what gets obsessed over, and what doesn’t, to hipsterism, basically: You want to show how cool you are by discovering something, sharing it with cool friends, and moving on when the hoi polloi discover it. This may be the case with, say, cronuts, but it seems to me that cultural products that garner geeky obsession, as opposed to being merely a pop fad, are those that reward nitpicky analysis. Usually this happens because the product is complex and open to multiple lines of inquiry–like the “Game of Thrones” books–although it can also happen when the product is so utterly vapid that it provides a fertile field for improv disguised as critique, like those Amazon reviews for Bic pens “For Her.”

More on psychology and media–Americans have always felt guilty about watching TV, although the reasons have changed over time. Is science the solution?

In the late 1980s, research began to indicate the existence of consumer guilt and its useful role in capitalism (terms like “guilt market” were coined). Networks recognized their stake in easing their viewers’s collective guilt and adapted accordingly. According to Brooks, viewers tend to feel better about watching TV if they can feel there’s a mentally stimulating component—hence the eventual meteoric rise of franchises like Law & Order and CSI, with their seemingly infinite capacity to generate spinoffs.

“The police procedural mixes science with crime-solving, so you get the police lab and how they figure out the hairs and DNA or the little clues—and all of that gives it a patina of science,” Brooks said. “And so the viewer thinks, ‘Maybe this isn’t a waste of time; I’m learning something from this.’”

Speaking of what we “should” and “shouldn’t” watch, Pacific Standard–a really excellent magazine–has a great piece about when high culture and low culture have been at odds in American culture, and when they’ve converged. Here’s how Shakespeare fits in:

[I]n 19th-century America, high culture was everywhere. Shakespeare was The Avengers of the 19th century. To say that Shakespeare was The Avengers, though, is to say, in part, that Shakespeare was not high culture at all. Instead, Shakespeare was popular culture—and treated as such. Shakespearean plays, Levine writes, were advertised the way big-budget movies are advertised today—as spectacular draws filled with gore, melodrama, and special effects. Acting styles of the 1800s were broad and explosive; Whitman said that Edmund Kean’s performance “blinded and stunned the beholders, appalled the imagination, and chilled the blood.”

Shakespeare’s plays were treated as popular culture—they appeared on the same bill with farces, acrobatics, and minstrel shows. Just as studios feel comfortable reworking stories about Spider-Man or Batman ad infinitum, so did the theater producers of the time feel comfortable rejiggering Shakespeare, adding a happy ending to Lear, moving characters from play to play, shifting soliloquies or incorporating them into minstrel pastiches.

Yeah, yeah, I know worrying about authorial intent is a critical faux pas nowadays, but I have to say, Shakespeare would have loved that.

One of the most interesting psychological insights/theories of the past 20 years or so is “embodied cognition,” or the idea that our physical world structures, through metaphors, the way we think. Slate has a good piece on this, and my friend Michael Chorost introduces the concept and some of its current controversies in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Kat McGowan writes in Aeon about the human instinct for imitation:

Other animals sometimes copy and can learn from one another. But only humans imitate indiscriminately, persistently, and at very high accuracy. We’re compulsive about it. Even before babies can walk, they start imitating adults. In the 1930s, a pair of psychologists raised an infant chimp alongside their own baby in an attempt to understand both species better. The chimp raised in this family (and others in other such experiments later in the century) never behaved much like a human. The human child, on the other hand, soon began knuckle-walking, biting, grunting and hooting – just like his new sibling.

The article goes on to argue that progress–however defined, really–is the result not so much of innovation as imitation: “It turns out that creating something new is the easy part. What’s difficult – and what’s really important – is maintaining what we already know through copying.”

Finally, another Science Friday piece (with transcript, if you’d rather read than listen) about the collaboration of Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver and his dedication to bringing science and the visual arts together:

Klüver came along just when Tinguely had begun thinking about this work, which was to become his most famous act of destruction. Homage to New York was an extraordinary contraption, a weird assemblage of small machines that would self-destruct one by one at preset times, sparking and smoking to an accompanying musical sound track while it rolled around haphazardly until it completely blew up in, as Klüver put it, “one glorious act of mechanical suicide.”