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CHAPTER 3

BENDING

In the early 1890s, the French artist Claude Monet rented a room across from Rouen Cathedral. Over the course of two years, he painted more than thirty views of the cathedral’s front entrance. Monet’s visual perspective never changed: he painted the facade over and over from the same angle. Yet in spite of this fixed scene, no two paintings were alike. Instead, Monet showed the cathedral in different lights. In one, the noon sun gave its facade a bleached pallor; in another, dusk illuminated it with red and orange hues. In representing a prototype in constantly new ways, Monet was making use of the first creative tool: bending.

Like Monet, Katsushika Hokusai took a visual icon – Japan’s Mount Fuji – and created thirty-six woodblock prints, depicting it in different seasons, from different distances, and in different visual styles.

Throughout history, cultures have been bending the human form in different ways.

Mayan

Japanese

Ghanaian sculptures

And they’ve equally manipulated the forms of animals.

Chinese

Cypriot

Greek horses

Bending happens not only in the open, but also out of sight. Consider cardiology. Hearts are prone to fail, so researchers have long harbored a dream: in the same way that they build artificial bones and limbs, could they build an artificial heart? The answer, as first proven in 1982, was yes. William DeVries installed an artificial heart in retired dentist Barney Clark, who lived for another four months and died with the heart still pumping. It was a resounding success for bionics.

But there was a problem. Pumps require an enormous amount of energy, and their moving parts are quickly subject to wear and tear. Fitting the machinery inside the chest of a person was a challenge. In 2004, doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier came up with a novel solution. Although Mother Nature only has the tools to pump blood around the body, there’s nothing to say that has to be the single solution. Cohn and Frazier wondered: what if one could use a continuous flow? Like water circulating in a fountain, could blood get oxygenated as it passed through a chamber, and flow right back out?

In 2010, United States Vice President Dick Cheney was outfitted with a continuous flow heart, and he has been alive but pulseless ever since. A pulse is simply the byproduct of the heart’s pumping, but it’s not a necessity. Cohn and Frazier invented a new type of heart by taking nature’s prototype and putting it on the workbench.

Bending can remodel a source in many ways. Take size. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks on the front lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art are inflated to the size of teepees.

For the 2016 summer Olympics, the artist JR installed a giant sculpture of high jumper Ali Mohd Younes Idriss atop a building in Rio de Janeiro.

What can expand can also contract. Confined to a hotel room as a refugee during the Second World War, sculptor Alberto Giacometti went small, creating a series of tiny human figurines.

Alberto Giacometti’s Piazza

French artist Anastassia Elias creates miniature art that fits inside toilet-paper rolls.

Anastassia Elias’ Pyramide

Using a focused ion beam, artist Vik Muniz etches nanoscale artwork on grains of sand.

Vik Muniz’s Sand Castle #3

What might these art pieces have to do with, say, making nighttime driving safer? At first glance, not much. But the same cognitive processes were at work when a baffling problem about windshields was solved. Early in the automobile age, riding around after dark was dangerous because of the blinding glare caused by approaching headlights. American inventor Edwin Land was determined to create glare-resistant windshields. To increase visibility, he turned to the idea of polarization. It wasn’t a new concept: during the reign of Napoleon, a French engineer had noticed that the sunny reflections of palace windows were less brilliant if he looked at them through a calcite crystal. But there was a problem. Several generations of inventors had struggled to put large crystals to practical use. Imagine a windshield made up of six-inch-thick crystals: you wouldn’t be able to see through it.

Like everyone before him, Land tried working with large crystals but got nowhere. Then one day he had his A-ha moment: shrink the crystals. What Land later described as his “orthogonal thinking”¹ involved the same mental process as the diminutive artwork of Giacometti, Elias, and Muniz. Turning the crystals from something you held in your hand to something you couldn’t see, he soon succeeded in making sheets of glass with thousands of tiny crystals embedded inside them. Because the crystals were so microscopically small, the glass was both transparent and cut down on the glare. The driver got a better view of the road – and the creativity that produced it remained invisible.

The view through an unpolarized windshield and Land’s polarized one

Like size, shape can bend. In classical Western ballet, dancers’ postures create straight lines as much as possible. Starting in the 1920s, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham used innovative poses, movements and fabric to bend the human form.

As dancers can change shape, so can structures. Using computer modeling and new building materials, architect Frank Gehry warps the normally flat planes of building exteriors into rippling and twisting facades.

Three buildings by Frank Gehry: Beekman Tower

The Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health

Dancing House (with Vlado Milunić)

Volute’s conforming fuel tank

How might a similar bend allow the cars of the future to hold more fuel? One of the impediments to converting engines from gasoline to hydrogen is the bulkiness of the tank: standard hydrogen tanks are barrel-shaped and take up too much cargo space. A company called Volute has developed a conforming tank that folds upon itself in layers and can snake into unused space in the car body, finding ways to make the volume work by bending and twisting it.

Human brains bend archetypes with endless variety. For instance, artist Claes Oldenburg (co-creator of the giant shuttlecocks) not only bent big, he bent soft: in place of marble or stone, he fabricated sculptures from flexible materials such as vinyl and fabric. His oversize Icebag incorporates a motor that makes the sculpture expand and contract – something solid marble cannot do.

Like sculptures, robots have traditionally been hard-bodied: from Robot B-9 in Lost in Space to the automated welders on today’s factory floors, robots are steel-clad helpmates. Their glistening frames are durable, but there are drawbacks: metal parts are heavy and take a good deal of energy to move; it is also hard for metal robots to lift and grasp delicate objects without crushing them. Otherlab is a company experimenting with soft robotics. In place of metals, they use lightweight and inexpensive fabric. The company’s inflatable robots are much lighter than conventional models and use less battery power – yet their Ant-roach robot can walk and support more than ten times its weight. Soft robotics has opened up a host of new possibilities: researchers have built squishy robots that can wiggle and crawl like earthworms and caterpillars, enabling them to navigate terrain that would trip up or trap a metal robot; the delicate grasp of other soft robots enables them to handle fresh eggs and living tissue, which would be crushed by a metal grip.

Otherlab’s Ant-roach robot

Brains constantly play variations on a theme, and that includes our experience of time. The Keystone Cops used fast motion to exaggerate their cinematic pratfalls. The movie Bonnie and Clyde used slow motion to make a balletic death scene as the criminals were being mowed down in a hailstorm of police bullets. The film 300 alternates fast and slow motion to violate temporal predictions in the battle sequences: the warriors hurtle at each other in surprising ways.

The same bend of speed can be used in technology. The continuous flow heart didn’t work perfectly at first, for an unexpected reason: just as eddies form in a flowing stream, clots tend to form where blood flow takes a sharp turn, raising the risk of stroke. After experimenting with different solutions, Frazier and Cohn discovered that modulating the flow speed prevented the blood clots from forming. By programming the pulseless heart to subtly speed up and slow down, they fought back against a potentially lethal problem. In 300, modulating the speed exaggerates the violence; used in the heart, the same bend sustains the breath of life.

And there are other ways to bend time. It usually flows forwards, but not in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. The play tells of a love triangle: Robert’s wife Emma is having an affair with his best friend, Jerry. But Pinter reverses the chronology. The play begins after the affair has ended, when Emma and Jerry meet after several years apart. Over the course of the play’s two hours, the narrative rewinds to the night when, years earlier, Jerry first declared his love for Emma. Each step back in time reveals earlier plans, promises, and reassurances that never materialize. By the time we listen to the characters in the final scene, very little they say to each other feels trustworthy. Pinter has inverted an arrow we normally take for granted, laying bare the roots of a marriage’s destruction.

Brains don’t only rewind time in the theater, but also in the lab. During the Second World War, the Swiss physicist Ernst Stueckelberg realized that he could describe the behavior of a positron (a particle of antimatter) as an electron running backward in time. Although it defies our lived experience, the reversal of time unmasked a new way to understand the sub-atomic world.

In the same vein, scientists are pursuing the goal of cloning a Neanderthal by reversing the arrow of time. Neanderthals were our close genetic cousins, differing from us in about one in ten genes. They too used tools, buried their dead and built fires. Although they were bigger and stronger than us, our own ancestors vanquished them: the last Neanderthals were wiped out about 35,000–50,000 years ago. Harvard biologist George Church has proposed reverse engineering a Neanderthal by beginning with a modern human genome and working backwards. Just as Pinter reversed chronology on the stage, biologists would rewind human evolution to create a Neanderthal stem cell, which could then be implanted in the womb of a compatible female host. Church’s idea is still speculative – but it is another example of the brain manipulating the flow of time to create new outcomes.

Some creative bends are intense; others are more minor. In the 1960s, artist Roy Lichtenstein paid homage to Monet’s cathedral paintings. His silk-screened images are grainier and more monochromatic, but the tribute to Monet is readily apparent.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral, Set 5

Similarly, in visual caricatures, signature features are exaggerated for comic effect – but not so much that we cannot tell who it is.

But when the distortions are more extreme, sources can be obscured. It is not easy to tell that the two paintings by Monet (next page) are of the same subject: the Japanese bridge at his home in Giverny.

Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Footbridge

The Japanese Footbridge

And in Francis Bacon’s portraits, faces are blurred and mangled, the jumble of features fully disguising their subjects’ identities.

Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-portrait)

The capacity to bend a source beyond recognition solved a problem at the birth of the television age. As televisions became fixtures of American homes in the 1950s, broadcasters wanted people to pay for watching shows. But this was long before cable television, and there was no way to get the programming directly to a specific home; networks had no choice but to beam their paid programming in all directions in the air. How could companies get viewers to pay for something that could be latched onto by every antenna? The solution: engineers devised ways to scramble the signal, something like what Bacon had done to his face. In one encryption system, the analog lines were shuffled. In another, a randomized delay was added to each line, making them unsynchronized. To watch first-run movies or premium sports matches, subscribers to Paramount’s Telemeter “Pay-to-See” system dropped coins into a box, while clients of the Subscribervision service inserted a punch card.² For the paying customer, a decoder box would unscramble the signal; for everyone else, it was bent into an unwatchable blur. For Bacon, twisting the image gave his portraits psychological depth; for television broadcasters, it protected their bottom line.

THE END OF TIME ILLUSION

Many of us fall prey to the “end of time” illusion, in which we convince ourselves that everything that can be done has already been done. But the history of bending tells a different story: there is always infinitely more to squeeze out. Human culture is forever a work in progress.

Consider knives. The oldest stone blades, with chips or a sharpened edge, date from approximately two million years ago.

Gradually, our ancestors molded the knife into a longer edge and handle, which allowed for greater force to be applied. From those humble beginnings, knives have been bent into countless forms, their family tree thick and endlessly branching. Consider that these diverse knives from nineteenth-century Phillipines are a collection from a single culture and time period.

Likewise, umbrellas and parasols have existed since ancient times. Early Egyptians made theirs out of palm leaves or feathers, the Romans out of leather or skins, the Aztecs out of feathers and gold.³ The Roman umbrella was collapsible, as was that of the ancient Chinese; in contrast, the royal umbrellas of the Indians and Siamese were so heavy that they had to be supported by an attendant as a full-time job.

In 1969, Bradford Phillips patented the design of the modern folding umbrella. Phillips’ model has enjoyed considerable staying power. Still, it is not the end of the line: the United States Patent Office continues to receive so many patent applications for umbrellas that it has four full-time examiners to review them.⁴ For example, the Senz umbrella’s asymmetric shape gives it better wind-resistance; the unBrella inverts the usual design, with the flaps folding upwards and the ribs on the outside; and the Nubrella is worn like a backpack, making it hands-free.

Just as with knives and umbrellas, there’s no endpoint in the arts. Classics are constantly renovated. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been turned into a ballet, an opera, a musical (West Side Story), and adapted more than forty times for film, including the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet, in which the star-crossed lovers are garden gnomes.

Jazz great Bobby Short sang and played piano for thirty-five years at the Café Carlyle in New York City. Yet no matter how many times he played standards such as “I’m in Love Again” or “Too Marvelous for Words,” no two performances were alike. For a jazz artist, there is no definitive performance, no final outcome. Instead, the goal is continual renewal: the same song never the same way twice.⁵

Similarly, Sherlock Holmes has proven to be a popular favorite for reinvention. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella A Study in Scarlet, the police discover a dead body with a message written in blood on the wall: RACHE. Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade enlists Holmes to help him solve the baffling case. Combing over the scene, Lestrade interprets the bloody scrawl:

Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish. You mark my words, when this case comes to be cleared up, you will find that a woman named Rachel has something to do with it. It’s all very well for you to laugh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You may be very smart and clever, but the old hound is the best, when all is said and done.⁶

But Holmes continues to study the crime scene and, in a flourish, announces a dazzling series of deductions:

There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar.

After asserting that the victim was poisoned, Holmes adds, “One more thing, Lestrade … Rache is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”

The novella was a classic, but classics are constantly reinvented, and the writers of the BBC’s Sherlock came up with a twist to this tale. In the opening episode (now titled A Study in Pink), a woman’s body is discovered under similar circumstances. The victim has scratched a word into the wooden floorboards: RACHE.

Lestrade gives Holmes a few minutes to study the crime scene, then asks if he has any insights. A policeman standing in the hallway confidently chimes in, “She’s German. Rache. German for revenge.” Holmes replies, “Yes, thank you for your input. Of course she’s not …” and impatiently shuts the door on him. He continues, “She’s from out of town, though, and intended to stay in London for one night before going home to Cardiff. So far, so obvious.”

Lestrade asks, “What about the message?” Holmes announces that the woman was unhappily married, a serial adulteress and was travelling with a pink suitcase, which is missing. He finishes by saying, “She must have had a phone or organizer – let’s find out who Rachel is.”

“She was writing Rachel?” Lestrade asks, skeptically. Holmes responds sarcastically, “No, she was writing an angry note in German. Of course she was writing Rachel.”

It’s one of the many bends in the update of this classic story.

***

Because of the way that brains continuously bend their inputs, language evolves. Human communication has change built into its DNA: as a result, today’s dictionaries look very little like those of five hundred years ago. Language meets the needs for conversation and consciousness not just because it is referential, but also because it is mutable – and that’s what makes it such a powerful vehicle for transmitting new ideas. Thanks to the creative possibilities of language, what we can say keeps pace with what we need to say.⁷

Consider verlan, a French slang in which syllables are swapped around: bizarre becomes zarbi; cigarette is flipped into garettsi.⁸ Originally spoken by urban youth and criminals as a way of hiding from the authorities, many verlan words have become so commonplace that they have been absorbed into conversational French.

Dictionary definitions are constantly revised to keep up with our changing uses and knowledge. In Roman times, “addicts” were people who were unable to pay their debts and gave themselves as slaves to their creditors. The word eventually came to be associated with drug dependency: one becomes a slave to one’s addiction. The word “husband” originally referred to being a homeowner; it had nothing to do with being married. But because owning your own property made it more likely you’d find a mate, the word eventually came to mean a male who has been wed. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the British Parliament. He was captured and executed. Loyalists burned his effigy, which they nicknamed the “guy.” Centuries later, the word lost its negative connotation and a musical named Guys and Dolls ran on Broadway.⁹ In American slang, bad means good, hot means sexy, cool means great, and wicked means excellent. If you could transport yourself one hundred years into the future, you’d find yourself flummoxed by your great-grandchildren’s speech because language itself is an ever-changing reflection of human invention.

***

As we’ve seen, bending is a makeover of an existing prototype, opening up a wellspring of possibilities through alterations in size, shape, material, speed, chronology and more. As a result of our perpetual neural manipulations, human culture incorporates an ever-expanding series of variations on themes passed down from generation to generation.

But suppose you want to take a theme apart, fracture it into its component pieces. For that we turn to a second technique of the brain.