Starry Starry Night with Roberta Olson, Jay Pasachoff, & Heather Berlin

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

And today we’re going to talk about the universe in art.

In art.

Yeah, artists been touching the universe lately, and we’re going to get some insights.

Well, I’ve been doing it for quite some time, actually.

We’ll get some insights on that.

But let me first introduce my co-host, Chuck Nice.

Chuck.

All right.

I’m excited.

Art and the universe.

I feel as though I should be conducting this show with a fine Bordeaux in my hand.

You know?

Yeah.

So, actually, in art openings, they don’t serve, well, they serve Mirolo at art openings.

That’s the Joe.

Oh, how garish.

No.

So that’s the contract.

Joe Sixpack and Martin Mirolo.

See, that’s how that goes.

Yeah.

So actually, you know, I think a lot about this stuff, but I don’t claim any special expertise in it.

And so we’ve got two guests who are all in it.

Let me first introduce a long time friend and colleague and fellow New Yorker.

And I think we even went to the same high school as each other.

I’ve got Jay Pasachoff.

Jay, welcome to StarTalk.

Well, thank you very much.

It’s nice to see another Bronx High School of Science alumnus again.

And you are the field memorial professor of astronomy and you’re director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College.

And I kind of sort of can claim I’m a graduate because I was honored by an honorary degree several years back.

So thank you guys for voting me in.

A well-deserved honor.

In the club, in the club.

I’m sorry, Neil, that would only make you an honorary graduate.

Damn, just, you know, check.

I worked hard for that honor.

I sat by the phone and they called me.

Come on, you got enough degrees.

You know that.

It’s better than being a dishonorary graduate.

Indeed, indeed.

We’ve got with us an actual artist, art historian and co-author of a couple of books with Jay, Roberta Olson.

Roberta, welcome.

It’s thrilling to be here, Neil.

And you’re actually a neighbor of mine on Central Park West.

Well, there you are as curator of drawings.

That’s a cool thing on your card.

I curate all drawings, all attempts of people to represent reality and all that comes out of their head, even if it’s not reality, I guess, in the drawings at the New York Historical Society across the street from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Let me just finish out your CV here.

Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wheaton College.

So, that’s the full sort of IDs for both of you.

That’s great.

Now, the two books, one of them, when I first knew of your collaborations, it was Fire and Ice, A History of Comets in Art, and that’s still on my shelf.

And I loved that book.

And that was only me.

Oh, that was only you.

But it was before that, and it was actually that, that was the reason why Jay and I met.

So that’s the origin story of your publishing relationship.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, okay, so you’ve got, so, okay.

So you’ve already had some astronomy chops is what you’re saying here.

When I was teaching at Wheaton College, I was doing a two week long sort of investigation of Giotto.

And I looked at the Adoration of the Magi one time.

Giotto the artist.

Giotto the artist who painted the Slovenia Chapel in Padua.

And in 1303 to 1306, 1306 and I looked at the Adoration of the Magi and I asked my class, why is there a comet for the Star of Bethlehem?

No one could answer.

Right, cause if you draw the Star of Bethlehem, it’s got like point these, point the spikes coming out of it.

And if you draw a comet, people know what comets look like.

You don’t mistake a comet for a star.

This is what’s absolutely incredible.

So I had to answer my students.

I was a good teacher.

I am a good teacher.

So I went to the New York Public Library and I spent months learning cometology.

Also going through everything that had been published on JATO.

And Ecclesiastes was actually wrong.

No one had ever identified that as a comet.

So I thought, got to do something about this.

Learn cometology.

And I thought, all the art publications, two years hence.

So I sent it to Scientific American, unknown.

And there were no computers in those days.

This is 1979.

I got a letter back in two days and said, we’re going to put it in the next issue.

All right.

There it was.

And then the European Space Agency sent me a telegram and said, we’re flying to Halley’s Comet in 1985, 86.

Can we name the satellite JATO?

Yeah, so Neil, remind me never to get into an argument with Roberta.

Roberta is just like, I’ll see you in two years after I learn everything about it and you, sir, will be proven wrong.

At the time, we’re talking about 1979, there wasn’t that much published.

I mean, it’s very different.

We are filled with wonderful things today but a glut of information.

And in those days, it was much more manageable.

And…

Wait, wait, wait.

You’re leaving out an important piece of information here.

If you do this 75, 76 year orbit of Comet Halley and you go backwards through time, it lands at the time that painting was made.

Isn’t that correct?

So we can say that was probably Halley’s Comet.

Absolutely, you’re correct.

And we know from Giovanni Bellani’s Chronicle, it was described exactly like Giotto painted it.

And he has the wonderful sweeping dust tailing.

He does it in layers.

He has the condensation around the nucleus and the coma.

I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant layer upon layer.

And it actually is, artists are very intelligent.

They layer things.

And he put it where the Star of Bethlehem usually is, but someone was advising him and he did his Church Fathers.

He read Origen and John of Damascus because they described the Star of Bethlehem in words that you, Neil, you, Chuck, you, Jay, everyone will look at and say, yes, that’s a comet he’s describing, not a star.

Well.

Yeah, because we all share the same vocabulary.

And if you look in at stuff, it’s gonna come out that way.

So this latest collaboration is, let me make sure I get the title of that.

Jay, what’s the title of the book?

Art.

Well, the latest collaboration is Cosmos, the art and science of the universe.

But it started with Halle’s Comet, a mutual colleague, the late Sam Edgerton, a professor of art at Williams, invited Roberta to come up from, up to give a lecture.

And I went to her lecture, and I heard that the first two thirds of her lecture and the first two thirds of my Halle’s Comet lecture were similar.

But of course, her last third was art and mine was science.

And we were introduced at that point.

So basically, since Halle’s Comet came by in 1985, we’ve been working together.

So what can the two of you say or reflect upon when you see artists reach for the universe as their sources of inspiration?

Well, it’s really an exploration again, and again, multi-leveled.

Artists are basically searchers for meaning, just like astronomers.

I mean, it’s a different thing, plus both artists and astronomers are visual.

And it depends on what area you’re talking about.

If you’re talking about Babylonian seal engravers, they were reflecting the cosmology at the time and the belief in astrology.

If you’re talking about the 18th century in England, this was a time when people were really differentiating what was going on in the heavens.

And scientists, astronomers and amateurs and professionals and artists were both involved with describing what they could see because that was a different universe than we have today in the sense of what could be encompassed.

Also…

Right, but it’s one thing to interpret the universe and then create some work of art that emanates from your own perspective.

It’s another thing because I don’t know how to draw and I need you to draw what I see in my telescope.

So you’re kind of a substitute camera for me in that context.

So do you guys explore that distinction?

Before photography, that was the case.

And in fact, if you know Carolyn Herschel, she drew comets in her book of records.

We know that actually Newton, Sir Isaac Newton drew comets in his scribblings too.

And in his notes, astronomers actually and some of the wonderful McClure have fabulous drawings because before photography, you had to be able to draw to remember something, to describe something because art is a visual language.

And so you have that, but then art is also a symbolic image.

And so if we jump to the fact of the universe is riveting, okay, comets are riveting, the stars are riveting, and they also shall we say call forth speculation, where are we going, where have we been, where are we going to, as Gauguin would say, they encourage speculative thought.

Plus, before electricity, they were much more galvanizing.

I don’t know if you tried to see Comet Neowise last year.

Yes, I did, of course.

Who do you think you’re talking to here?

Did I see Comet Neowise?

I had to sort of tweak you a little bit on that one.

So one of the first things that I did with Roberta was when we noticed that in a book called The Nuremberg Chronicle from 1492, there were a number of pictures of comets, but one of them kept getting cited as the first drawing of a comet.

And when we actually looked in the book, and this at that time, and the World Wide Web required my going to the Harvard Library to take the book out and page through, we discovered about a dozen pictures of comets.

But then we realized that there were only four woodcuts, and they turned them every which way, and just put them next to dates.

So that was not really a picture of a comet.

That was an independent drawing.

It was stylized woodcuts.

And so we heard that there were exemplars, which are plans for the books, layouts, which were very rich and had been lost in World War II, and we were able to go to Nuremberg, because the library had found them, and see how they plotted out both the Latin first and then the German editions in 1493.

It was just fabulous.

So just remind me, the Nuremberg Chronicles is a complete compilation of all knowledge up to that day, isn’t that correct?

That’s right, and it’s an early incunabula, it’s very important, and it’s a huge volume, but they tried to give the entire history of the world in terms of rulers and war.

Everything, everything.

It was just, yeah, that was the one stop shopping.

You know, Mel Brooks did the same thing.

Mel Brooks did the same thing, and it was really good, I have to say.

But they reused woodcuts.

Some of the pictures of cities were reused from one city to a different city.

And we then did make this list in an article.

We had a grant from the Travel for Collections from the National Endowment for the Humanities to go see these exemplars.

And they turned out to be really sketchy, just very rough pencil drawing.

So there was clearly no accuracy in the depiction of the comics at all.

So, you know, with respect to that, are there times when, as Roberta mentioned earlier, the speculative nature, where we’re going, what we’re doing, which often leads to interpretation and the artist being able to expand what they’re looking at?

See, that’s what I want an artist to do for me.

Right?

Because Jay, I get people write to me and say, oh, I saw this Hubble photo and I made this painting of the Hubble photo.

I’m sorry, I don’t need that.

I got the Hubble photo.

All right?

So at what point did artists start putting their own paw print on the cosmic topic?

Well, in fact, I think one of the reasons that the Hubble photos are so interesting to many people is that they have a public information division that colorizes the photos in weird and wonderful ways and have paid a lot of attention to the artistic versions.

So in fact, I’d be very glad to have an oil painting of one of the Hubble photos on my wall.

If any of the listeners here want to send us some copies, maybe three copies, please.

One to Roberta, one to Neil and one to me.

We have these wonderful false color things and now we’re looking forward to the false color things that will come out of the James Webb Space Telescope when that’s launched in a few months.

And that, in fact, is just going to work in the infrared, as certainly Neil knows very well.

So there won’t actually be the same high quality, fine resolution, visible light photos.

But in false color, it will all look great.

And, Jay, let me just thank you for leaving me off the list as I now sit without any Hubble oil paintings in my home.

Maybe I’ll go to Neil’s and just look at his.

Perhaps he’ll keep it at the museum and I can see it there.

Well, I actually have one page on my wall from the Nuremberg Chronicle that happens to have a comment in it, of course, so I’ll make a copy of that, Chuck, if you send me your address.

That makes up for it completely.

I’ll get you that copy.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And Jay, you own so many antiquarian books.

I’m disappointed you don’t have your own Nuremberg Chronicles.

There was a choice at one point, we got either the Nuremberg Chronicle or getting something that was more straightforward astronomy.

And I got the astronomy one, but I’m so sorry that I let the Nuremberg Chronicle get away.

Yeah, I thought you might have said I could have bought the Nuremberg Chronicle or another house.

Last I checked what these things are going for.

We got to take a break.

We got to take a break.

And when we come back more with Jay and Roberta, Jay Pasachoff, Roberta Olson, we’re talking about the history of astronomy in part on StarTalk.

Hi, I’m Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarTalk.

I got Chuck Nice, my co-host.

We’ve got Roberta Olson and Jay Pasachoff, a fellow astrophysicist, and they’re collaborators on projects that explore the intersection of art and science.

And Roberta, we left off, you were gonna tell us when and where or how artists started making representations of the universe, an expression of how they see the world, rather than trying to duplicate what a photograph might be.

Well, I think it starts, first of all, trying to capture in the Renaissance what people saw.

For example, the Lorenzetti would look at meteor showers and put them in the Garden of Gethsemane when Christ was arrested and Judas betrayed him because it was chaos, it was a symbol, but it was a symbol everyone could understand because they had seen it and they were afraid when there were meteors falling.

So that was a symbol everyone understood.

And then I think by the time you…

But just to be clear, at the time, they had no clue what a meteor was.

So these were just falling stars.

They didn’t know whether they were comets or meteors or whatever, they were not differentiated until the 18th century really.

So they were called things like falling stars, broom stars, hairy stars, and comites by the way is Greek for hairy star, which is why they were always satirized with long tresses.

But then after the Enlightenment set in, when it was sort of everyone had mastered depictions that were realistic, artists and also writers began to be very subjective.

And I mean, you always had comets and meteors and other astronomical things used by Shakespeare, by Spencer, and they had all this incredible symbolic baggage.

Artists began trying to express what they felt about life, the universe, their own view of things like William Blake, who holds the record of showing 18 comets in his illustrations, and their bizarres all get out.

Very personal.

It was sort of a liberation.

That’s how I, that’s what I want.

If I had a house artist, that’s what I’d want them to do.

You know, like the king has a court jester.

If I had an artist at my disposal, I’d want them to always interpret the world for me.

And it’s great.

And it’s endless like the universe.

I mean, it can go on.

I mean, obviously everyone has a finite number of years, but they were very inventive.

I mean, it was something that people had fun with.

They also became vehicles for satirizing in the 18th century when you had coffee houses and they would have caricatures of people.

You could do political caricatures.

You could do anything.

But remember, these were topical events.

Everybody looked up.

There was the sky.

There was no TV.

There were no computers.

And everything that happened in the sky was much brighter.

And people were still afraid.

So the sky was, the sky is antiquities television.

Yeah, basically.

And up until electricity it was.

And then you had people in the Victorian times, they would take transparencies and they would take pins and prick them, put them up to their kerosene lamps to try to duplicate what they had seen in the heavens.

Okay, I just got to say this.

But Roberta took us from ancient Babylon in the beginning.

Up to the Roman Empire and Christ, right?

Up to the 1700s.

How much, where, how much history is in you?

But wait, no, she went up to the Victorian times.

And then up to Victoria, yes.

Okay, there’s just endless amount of material.

I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of works that we could discuss.

And Roberta notes them all.

So that’s what this new book is basically.

We’ve written a dozen or whatever articles over since Sally’s comic came by in 1985, 86.

And so we just had a chance that we have a dozen chapters each on a different topic, such as meteors, comets, et cetera, in this new book with a few hundred illustrations showing samples from all these different periods of time.

So Chuck, when you said she knows thousands of years, I was going to say we need a bigger boat, bigger format.

So Roberta, I’ve done some of a little bit of my own homework.

I wouldn’t call it scholarly homework, but just sort of casual homework while I’m eating popcorn.

And Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the Starry Night, 1889, I’ve looked hard and I’ve not been able to find another work of art where the title is astronomical, even if there’s astronomical things in the painting.

Not only that, I have not been able to find a work of art where the title is the background.

So he’s got a village, he’s got rolling hills, there’s a cypress tree, none of that is the title of that painting.

It’s called The Starry Night.

So for me, it felt like maybe the universe is becoming front and center and not just the wallpaper or whatever else you’re drawing.

So how much of what I just told you there will land on fertile ground and how much is just bullshit?

And remember, he’s not the least bit biased.

I think that Van Gogh speaks to you and threw you in because what he has shown is an approximation of his emotional interaction with the universe.

Because there are other works of art with titles that have astronomical features such as Millet’s work that’s not Starry Night, but it’s the same thing.

It’s a meteor shower, which Van Gogh may have known.

But I think that Van Gogh was totally obsessed.

I mean, at least four Where the Night Sky is in all that.

With the Night Sky and actually one, an additional one which people haven’t commented on, which is known in about four versions.

So there are five with one of four versions.

And we’re very lucky because he wrote to his brother Theo and told him everything.

And he told him that he wanted to do a painting of the Starry Night.

And nocturnes were very, very popular at this point in Paris and all over in England as well.

But nocturnes, I think of nocturnes, I think of piano nocturnes.

Is that what you mean?

Nocturnes is a term for a night painting.

And something done at night.

And we know that he warmed up to this.

And in fact, he wrote to his friend, the Belgian, Eugene Bloch, that he wanted to paint this cafe terrace where they had been.

That was the first one.

And he painted the sky at the cafe, by the way, is now named Cafe Van Gogh.

It wasn’t at the time, but everyone goes there on the Van Gogh tour to see it.

And the second warm up was the one that is, shall we say, over the Rhone.

It’s the view over the Rhone with the starry sky.

And it’s very near where he was living in Arles at the time.

He was living in the Yellow House.

And that one actually does have astronomical bodies.

You can identify it as part of the Ursa Major, the Big Bear, the part that the English call the Plough and we call the Big Dipper.

But it’s reoriented.

It’s a marriage.

It’s not an actual topographical, shall we say, or skyscape view, because he’s looking towards the southwest.

And you can, by going there, you can figure out where the view was, because it looks very much the same.

And there are pictures of it.

He was actually painting the sky on the other side.

So he married the two.

And this sort of answers many of your questions.

I mean, he lied.

Just to say.

You could say it.

It’s artistic license.

He manipulated things for feelings.

He wanted things.

And he wrote to his brother after Starry Night, he wrote, I’m in dire need of religion.

For him, if you think of Starry Night, you think of the blues.

He appointed colors with certain emotions.

This is post-impressionism.

Blue was infinity.

Blue was eternity.

And he’s speculating, just like you do when you look through a telescope, what’s out there?

What does it mean?

Where are we going?

How does it relate to me?

And people have spilled much ink about what we see in the sky.

The only thing we can say for certain is that there is what he called the morning star, which is Venus, which apparently, according to astronomical calculations, was in its eighth year of the cycle, so it was extremely strong.

But he distorts everything for a kind of wonderful, aureolous glow around the morning star.

And then, you can tell me, Neil, and they certainly can comment, and I’m sure Chuck would too, is that the spiral nebula, or as some people said, oh no, it’s clouds in the sky, it’s blue in the sky, and then down below on the horizon, is that the Milky Way?

And then we have a crescent moon, but we know this painting was done in two days.

It was done in two days, we know that from the letters to Theo, and the moon was gibbous at that point.

It wasn’t a crescent.

So he’s, you could say he’s lying.

He’s manipulating it because he knows the crescent moon is more interesting for most people who are not astronomers.

Okay, yeah, people hardly ever draw a gibbous moon.

It’s just it’s the saddest moon phase.

I know.

It’s not a full moon and it’s not a crescent.

Like what is that?

I remember astronomy at this time was very popular.

In France, you had Flamarian and you had Guillemin and Flamarian, because he was so peripatetic, we don’t know what Van Gogh saw.

But just be clear, Camille Flamarian, a highly prolific French writer of astronomical, but a pop French writer of astronomical subjects.

And everyone got it.

But he had beautiful illustrations in his book as well.

We know, for example, a contemporary, Gustave Marot, who has all his library preserved in his atelier, which you can visit in Paris, had copies of Flamarian, okay?

So probably he thought, could he have seen drawings of Lord Ross?

And this is what makes art so fascinating.

It’s not a simple answer, and to unravel it, you have to do archaeology of all sorts.

Like Jay and I know we got Getty grants to do our book, Fire in the Sky, Comets and Meteors of Decisive Century in British Art and Science.

You have to go to the place, and you have to find things that have never been published.

And it’s a, shall we say, a voyage of discovery?

I mean, is it a voyage of discovery?

It is.

Is it archaeology?

Yes, but it’s finding things that haven’t been there before so that you understand what the artist was exposed to.

An artist is like a sponge.

They take in all this stuff and they create something that is entirely different, entirely their own.

And you may relate to it in certain ways.

I may relate to it in certain ways.

But Roberto, could you comment on the intensity of Van Gogh’s colors?

It’s been rumored that he might have had some synesthesia, I think it’s called, where you hear, you can hear color, you know, your senses are crosswired so that it may have manifested differently or more intensely within him.

And because people always remark on the intensity of those colors, it’s almost psychedelic.

It is psychedelic.

And in fact, he purposely chose complementary colors, like oranges and yellows with blues and greens.

And then in the night cafe, and by the way, I should say something about gaslight, he does the same thing with gaslight that he does with Venus, the morning star.

He makes it vibrate, and so it’s alive.

Because for him, it’s an emotional thing.

Gaslight was new, and he wanted to juxtapose in the cafe with the terrace, new gaslight with the cosmic light.

Now Jay, I ran some numbers on the starry night with the crescent moon, so according to Roberta, they know when it was painted, and of course we would know the phase of the moon trivially upon getting the date.

However, if we assume, if instead of that, you say, okay, here’s the crescent moon, here’s Venus the morning star, and about that angle to each other, and about that elevation above the horizon, I derived a date for that scene.

And it’s June 21st, 1889.

And so, and the fact that Venus and the moon are at that very low angle to each other betrays the fact that he’s at a very high northern latitude.

So all of that sort of makes sense.

And I’m wondering, maybe it didn’t matter when he painted it, he saw that crescent moon and Venus had some other date, it would have to have been June 21st, and then put it in his painting.

Well, there’s another Olson, and I never get confused between Roberta Olson and Don Olson.

Oh, Don Olson at Texas.

Don Olson at Texas Tech actually uses all those positions of things and goes to the places with the students and figures out exactly when and exactly where people were standing and what direction they’re looking at.

And he’s got a couple of books out about that that are very interesting.

But the work with Roberta is more is more art historical rather than rather than positional positional technical.

Right.

Right.

But we know that he painted this on June 19th and worked on it for two days.

No, but that would be a crescent moon.

If you if that’s the date, it was a crescent.

It wasn’t gibbous.

It was crescent moon.

Send me what program did you use?

And that’s the wonderful thing about computers.

You can program, you can program Eclipse pass.

You can do.

Right.

And I agree that nobody paints, hardly anybody paints gibbous moons.

It’s a sad phase.

But and I learned from a colleague a few years ago that it’s called gibbous because it give us more light.

When you combine high tech with illiteracy, you get very, you get fascinated.

You know that they examined the canvas, though, and they have said it’s two days.

He left holes in the canvas where he put in the astronomical phenomenon.

He painted the foreground first and the cypress tree, which, of course, is a symbol of a cemetery and death as well as being evergreen.

And notice how the cypress tree dominates completely in the sense it unifies heaven and earth.

It is the cosmos because if you think of Humboldt, Van Humboldt and the cosmos, it also takes us down to earth.

Van Humboldt was one of the first people to bring some intellectual harmonization to the fields of study of our place on earth and in the universe.

You know, before that, there was this little thing going on over there, and this is happening over here, and this is happening on earth, and he’s saying maybe it’s all part of one thing that we might call nature.

So yeah, I mean, people like that are not as much talked about because you can’t point to the one thing they discovered that changed things, but he introduced a perspective that surely had deep influence culturally.

Thank you so much for inviting us to be on StarTalk.

Yeah, this has been great.

And so Roberta, thank you, Roberta Olson and Jay Pasachoff.

And you guys and your latest book, where can we find it?

I guess it’s just Amazon or who’s the publisher?

It’s Reaction in London and it’s on Amazon and it’s in many bookstores.

And the University of Chicago Press is the American distributor.

The American distributor.

So I’ve been delighted to have you guys on and maybe we can do something like this again.

We’ll find some other art topics that would be in desperate need of illumination by you both.

Okay, so we’re going to take a quick break.

And when we come back, we’re going to analyze the neuroscience of art or what’s going on in our brains.

We’re back, StarTalk.

I have a new guest for this segment.

Chuck, it’s old time favorite of StarTalk.

Yes, it’s a new guest, but frequent guest.

Notice I didn’t say new guest, but old guest.

That’s correct, Chuck.

New young guest.

Yeah, Heather in the house.

Heather Berlin, welcome back to StarTalk.

You’re such a friend of our show.

Thanks for doing this every time we call on you.

Of course, always a pleasure.

Yeah, and so just to get your title, you’re a neuroscientist, which is just really just what I want to call you, but you have other titles, clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the ICON.

ICON, no, ICONT.

I knew it was coming.

ICAHN, ICON School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

And so just welcome back, because we’re talking about what’s going on inside the brain when we think about art and when we do art.

And so what’s going on?

What’s happening when an artist is creating in this way in their brain?

Well, you know, there’s this old myth that I just want to get right off the bat, debunk, that, you know, creativity comes from the right side of the brain and sort of science and reasoning and logic on the left side.

So that’s old news.

But when people are being creative, there’s-

What, you’re saying it’s old news that it’s BS or it’s old news that it’s-

What is the old news part of it?

Oh, so there’s certain, what we call lateralization of function, which just means that certain functions are more specialized in one part of the area of the brain than another.

So language tends to be more on the left, but there’s also some language areas on the right.

And so there is some of that specialization of function between hemispheres, but this idea that all creativity comes from the right side of the brain, it’s basically, that’s not how it works.

It’s not how it works.

It’s not how it works.

There’s a network in the brain.

There’s something called the default mode network, which is active when we are sort of focused inward, when we’re daydreaming, when we’re mind wandering, when we’re not thinking about anything specific.

And that’s sort of where the creative juices come from, bubble up from.

Oh, oh.

The default work, the default.

The default mode, oh my God, that actually sounds like a tiny little hole in the back of your neck that you stick a paper clip and it resets you to factory settings.

You’ve been hanging around Macintosh products too long.

I mean, that’s not too far off.

It’s kind of like when you go back to your baseline, to your basic brain state, when you’re not taking in any information from the world that can kind of muddy the waters in the way.

And then you stay there for a bit.

And then there’s something called the salience network, another kind of activation network of the brain that tells you what’s important to pay attention to at any given point in time.

So it’ll either tell you, you can just go back to your default mode and hang out there, or there’s something happening in the environment.

You should switch your focus of attention outward.

And when it tells you to do that, you go into what’s called the central executive network or the executive control network, which is looking out at the environment.

It’s more sort of logic, reason.

But you can switch back and forth between these networks.

So we find that when people are in the creative process, they’re going between this default mode network where ideas are bubbling up, but then you have to do something with them.

You have to enact them.

You have to give them some structure.

So it’s almost like default mode network is like being in a unorganized sort of dream state where anything goes, you can make novel associations between ideas.

That’s where creativity comes.

You can even fly.

Thank you.

But then you have to kick in the sort of more rational, logical parts of the brain that can organize it and structure it.

So the process of creativity is switching between these networks.

And we find in neuroimaging studies that more creative people have more connectivity between these networks.

So they can switch in and out of them quicker.

And that’s one aspect.

Do they suffer anywhere because of the greater connectivity between those two?

Oh, good question.

Yeah, what’s the cost?

What’s the cost of that?

Yes.

Because if you connect to the dream state easily, maybe you’re not fully connected to the real world at times when you might need to be.

Well, at least that’s what I’m hoping.

That’s what you’re trying to account for your own state of existence.

That, Chuck.

Well, I mean, on the plus side, people are creative, tend to have more flexibility, more adaptability.

If you were to always stay in that sort of default mode network and have trouble switching states, you would have problems, right?

That’s people with schizophrenia who can’t get out of that kind of a state.

But in terms of the relationship between sort of, let’s say mental health issues and creativity, again, that’s another myth that’s been debunked.

There’s not, it’s not any more significant, there’s not any more prevalence of mental health disorders and creative people compared to the rest of the population.

So we’d like to point to these particular cases that stand out, but that’s very anecdotal.

On average, artists aren’t necessarily more dysfunctional than your average Wall Street guy.

Well, I’m gonna have to look for another excuse now.

Another excuse, yeah.

Well, wait, so Heather, are these literal electrochemical networks in the brain or is this an organizing sort of heuristic accounting of what we see going on?

I think it’s a little of both, but it’s certainly, there are these networks that we all have in our brains that are gonna be either activated or deactivated depending on what we’re doing.

Yeah, but imagine the future where you know where that network is, you go in with some needle and inject it with extra electrochemical nodes, and then all of a sudden a person gets more creative.

If you can actually know and identify and isolate such networks in the brain.

But I was just gonna say this, as a person who dabbles in creativity, you can actually do that kinda to yourself right now.

There are times when you can, I can’t say make yourself more creative, but there are times that you can deepen the creative mode.

There are times when you can actually do activities to place your mind to receive creativity.

No, Chuck, I want Heather to inject a joke in your head.

Okay, that’s what I want Heather to do.

You know she’s working on that.

Wait a minute.

Let me just say this, Neil.

I want Heather to inject a joke into my head.

You see behind that screen behind her there?

So Heather, very, very serious question.

Let’s look at, you know, Van Gogh, of course, was an impressionist artist.

But let’s back up a little and let’s go to Leonardo.

So Leonardo is illustrating perfectly human physiology in his artwork.

Where is the creativity in that if he is only drawing what he sees?

Hmm.

That was a good one, wasn’t it?

Wow.

So in a way, I wouldn’t call that part of his output the most creative part.

The creativity was in his drawings of like flying machines and…

He’s thinking the way no one has thought before.

Right.

Doing detailed anatomy is a talent for sure.

But I wouldn’t say that is the most creative aspects of Leonardo.

Okay.

What we see is that when people are in these really highly creative states, we’re seeing these differences in network activation, but then we can also pinpoint certain just like nodes within that network that if we kind of focus in on those, that maybe we could stimulate creativity or decrease creativity.

But one of them is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which we find when it’s turned down, people tend to be more creative and in these flow states and when it’s turned up, they tend to be more self-aware, self-conscious, and less creative.

So by creativity, you mean a new idea.

A new idea, a new novel.

So we all have access to the same information.

I like to use Darwin as an example.

We all, all the scientists at the time had access to that basic data, but he kind of put that data together in a novel way, which when they come up with it, it seems, of course, obvious.

It’s just that nobody else had thought about before.

And so it’s novel thinking, it’s divergent thinking, newest associations between ideas when everybody had access to the same information.

So it’s so funny you say that.

When comedians watch each other work, the thing that they’ll do is they’ll sit there and they’ll go, oh, that was funny.

Oh, that’s funny.

They never laugh.

And the reason is because they’re watching that person make associations that they themself did not make.

And so they’re thinking like, oh, wow, I didn’t even look at it that way.

So if that’s the case, if it’s creativity has a great deal to do with associations, like Darwin, same information, making new associations, will AI be able to be more creative than human beings?

Because AI is able to make millions of associations at once.

Well, first of all, there’s been some studies with comedians which look at amateur versus professional when they have to look at a cartoon and then the task was just come up with a novel-like creative punchline to this cartoon, like a New Yorker cartoon.

And it takes less work for the professional comedians to activate, to come up with something.

And we find that the association areas were quickly activated.

So you’re quicker to make these associations.

Now, with AI, I just recently came across this video.

It was the first comedy set that was created by an AI.

I encourage you to watch it.

It is simultaneously awkward yet strangely funny in a weird, awkward way.

Are you sure somebody didn’t just tape my set?

That sounds a lot like weirdly, awkwardly funny, Chuck.

Weirdly, awkwardly funny, but go ahead.

In a comfortable, uneasy way.

You know that they say that uncanny valley, when you are trying to create the AI, I think it’s just something slightly off.

That’s what it’s like with the comedy.

However, I do think that after they perfect it and after they keep feeding in this algorithm over and over again with self-learning processes, that they will be able to come up with these novel jokes and to rival the greatest comedians.

Heather, there’s been rumors that Van Gogh may have had a, I don’t want to say suffered from because that places value judgment on it, but had a condition of synesthesia or chromesthesia.

There’s been rumors about that.

I guess where you hear color or you smell color, where there’s a cross-wiring of your senses.

Right.

So what can you tell us about those two conditions within the human mind?

Well, chromesthesia is like a subset of synesthesia, which is sort of crossing over of the senses.

So sometimes people will see letters as different colors or numbers as different colors, and they will cross over chromesthesia, specifically sound relating to colors.

So colors will sound like something.

So if you imagine the Dutch would say Van Gogh, but Van Gogh for the English speaking people, which I am one, they imagine his painting would sound musical to him.

It would be like a symphony made up of colors.

There’s some speculation that he had this because of the letters he had written to his brother Theo.

Yeah.

In fact, I have a note here.

It says, quoting Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo.

So it says here, some artists have a nervous hand drawing, which gives their technique something of the sound peculiar to a violin.

How could you even write that unless there was some cross-wiring in your brain?

Exactly.

That’s what I’m thinking.

That’s what I’m thinking.

It’s not just in terms of what’s happening in the brain.

There’s one idea that it’s a cross-wiring.

Another is that there is this disinhibition of feedback, a reduction.

Normally, we’re having lots of information coming on in the brain and parts of it have to inhibit information from crossing over.

But when you lift that inhibition, you can get these melding of senses, and you can actually induce synesthesia in people, people who have certain types of strokes or temporal lobe epilepsy, or then with drugs like psychedelics.

When you lift the constraints of the brain, which we normally need the constraints to be able to function, but when you lift the constraints, that’s when you can get these hallucinations and these blending of the senses.

And there’s a paper I read years ago, it was the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002, that has a theory that Van Gogh actually had temporal lobe epilepsy.

He was having epileptic seizures they think were induced by absence.

And those seizures might have actually been related to the chromasthesia.

But other people are born with it too.

So it could be, it’s the genetic, there’s a genetic, there’s some inheritance with this as well.

So what you are really trying to tell us is that Van Gogh was high and tripping.

He might say, or others might say he just had a secret window into the reality that we all are, you know, being constrained from.

Very good.

Wow.

Good reply there.

He has access to doorways that the rest of us don’t.

So is the transition from representational art to impressionist art, is that a creative leap or is it or is the first artist to do that just lazy?

I’m just wondering.

I mean, I don’t mean, you know, you know, I mean, disrespect.

Yeah, I don’t mean any disrespect, but did they just say, I’m just going to, you know, I’m not going to paint every leaf on this tree.

Throw some bobs up here.

Yeah, my theory is that they were all nearsighted.

So also everything was blurry.

Everything was all blurry.

Right.

The nearsighted painters movement.

Right.

I dare say, and as someone who does paints and how I was trained in paint, I was a fine arts minor and I painted.

I do know we have to get trained in all of the skill sets first.

You have to be, you know, perfect the actual representational before you can go into the abstract.

I do think it was a creative leap because, you know, it was something new.

It was something different.

It was a new way to perceive the world.

And now we’re getting into the realm in, you know, current art theory where it becomes so abstract that like, you know, there was recently a sculpture that was put out there, an invisible sculpture.

It’s just a pedestal.

I read about that.

With nothing on it.

And it’s an invisible sculpture.

And then it was crazy as another guy said, oh, you stole my idea.

But it’s become an abstraction now where it’s not even about the art.

And there’s still, of course, you know, realist painters out there.

Wait, wait, wait.

Did they steal that from John Cage?

Who has, he has a piano sonata.

Was it, it’s just called 411 or something, which is like the minutes and seconds.

I forgot.

There’s some duration.

And the pianist just sits there and yes, the hands hover over the keys and they don’t do anything.

And the claim is if you do this in a theater, then the concert is basically the sound of the audience.

And the sound, right.

The sound of silence is the sound of the audience rustling and clearing their throat.

And so that’s the acoustic version of the invisible sculpture.

And let me just say this.

And Heather, what the hell part of the brain comes up with that?

Well, that’s some creativity.

And that is also.

The lady part.

That’s the greedy part because you’re charging money.

You’re stealing money is what you’re doing.

Okay, so Chuck, today you can pull off a comedy act.

You just stand there with your mouth open and nothing coming out of the microphone.

That would make people happy, Neil.

No, we got to call Heather quick on that.

We got to Heather intervention to figure out how that would work.

Guys, we’re running out of time, but this has been great.

Heather, thanks for bringing some neuroscientific insights to add to our artistic and scientific insight into the mind of Vincent Van Gogh.

This is America, Jack.

No, Van Gogh.

I’m not hocking a Louie here.

And that’s why we don’t say it like that.

It’s just like, oh, I’m so sorry.

I didn’t mean to spit on you.

In the time of COVID.

You got it.

Well, Heather, it’s a delight always to have you on the show.

Thanks for being such a good sport every time we call you for our emergency neuroscientific inquiries.

On call, that’s right.

And Chuck, always good to have you.

So this has been the conclusion.

We now just concluded our three-part investigation into Impressionist art focusing on Van Gogh.

And of course, my favorite of his is The Starry Night.

Of course.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

As always, I dig you.