Profane Brain

(Note: this is an experimental essay that began as a collage of quotes by influential writers on media and the arts. I then glued together and framed those thoughts with my own words. Constructed in this way, I hoped to preserve the experience of a resonance of message that I felt as a reader of the works cited. In the course of that reading, a unified message cohered in my mind that felt like a thesis worth sharing, with its roots in the words of greater minds maximally preserved. A longer work may come of this some day.)

Have you ever wondered why audio feedback sounds the same no matter who's at the mic? That's because it isn't the person's voice you're hearing. That tone emerges from the placement and acoustic properties of the equipment and the venue. They are resonating and ringing like a bell. It's their voice you hear. The medium itself can speak. A more complex medium like the Internet can do more than wreck open mics. It can distort reality like a lens. It can introduce a "change of scale or pace or pattern" [1] into human affairs, even impose "its own assumption on the unwary" [1]. "Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images" [2] onto home TV screens "and you make a cultural revolution" [2]. Now with social media, "you are the screen and [the medium] watches you" [3]. Each new technology, alters our perception, distorts our messages, constrains what it is possible to express, and thereby "creates a totally new human environment" [1] in which new unwritten rules are at play. The web created a new place. What are its rules? What tone resonates there? How does it change the scale, pace, and pattern of our lives as we move online? Well, the web is "abolishing ... space and time" [1]. Through a "global embrace" [1] of "speed-of-light transmission" [2], the online world is "instantly interrelating every human experience" [1], "bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion" [1] so that "the globe is no more than a village" [1]. Everything is Here and Now. This proximity has helpfully made us "informed as never before...but also involved in the total social process as never before" [1]. "Action and ... reaction occur almost at the same time" [1]. There's no time for nuance because there is no time online. Worse, "history and memory are right now being erased." [4] Cell phone cameras capture each passing moment at higher and higher fidelity and frequency so that the hyper-detailed Now eclipses the low-res then. "We are being rendered unfit to remember" [2]. We "know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years" [5]. The enormity of Now demands our full attention, fuels anxiety, buries our past. We panic. We forget. We become "agitated amnesiacs" [5] living in "a continuous, incoherent present" [2]. This is how the shriek of feedback rattles the online world. This is the message in the medium. So, what do we do? Where do we find hope? It's easy to get discouraged, to think we've regressed. But that's not quite right. Past progress woke us up from old illusions. With new media come new illusions, and we start off asleep to them. Society has reincarnated someplace new. And like newborns, we need to reorient ourselves, relearn how to see, to reason, to act justly. So how? How do we remember who we are and what we value. We do this with a special power called Art. As new doors are invented and opened onto "a whole series of new environments" [1] we turn to the arts to "provide us with the means of perceiving the environment itself" [1]. Because perception is the artist's tool. They use our senses to invoke experience. The artist is able to "encounter technology with impunity ... because [they are] an expert aware of the changes in sense perception" [1] that we unconsciously adopt along with new tech, the distortions of society's sense of proportion, pace, or pattern. Art opens our eyes, "awakens and enlarges the mind itself" [6], challenges assumptions, pierces the veil. It's "a means of training perception and judgment" [1] and coping with "the psychic and social consequences of technology" [1]. And that's not all. Art reminds us of our history. It retells old tales in modern terms. Reinforces values. Reconstructs cultural identity and can renew the relevance of institutions or completely redefine them. "If remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires ... a theory, a vision, a metaphor." [2] Art supplies these. Now, I don't claim that all art must serve this purpose. Art is many things. But some art must be this. A reminder. A memory of culture's past lives. A way for us to wake up dazed in a wilderness, collect ourselves, and rebuild out of the stuff of new worlds.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman, 1985

Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard, 1981

My Dinner With Andre, Wallace Shawn & Andre Gregory, 1981

Moyers on Democracy, Bill Moyers, 1987

“The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.”

We’re misusing averages to our peril, says Todd Rose in his book The End of Average. Our society has developed "norms” in education and business that ignore human diversity. These standards are mirages thrown up by the misuse of a seemingly innocent mathematical operation, the average.

A new science of the individual, championed here by Rose, seeks richer models of humanity that acknowledge our complexity instead of hiding it behind one-dimensional metrics. The author, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, shares the history and science of social averaging, as well as his own battles against unfavorable comparison to the mythical average person.

“It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place... But the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee—the moment you need to make a decision about any individual—the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.”

Averages have a place in astronomy. When one astronomer measures the movement of a heavenly body, the measurement contains some error. However, if many astronomers take measurements that are then averaged, they converged toward an accurate answer. Rose tells us how the magic of this “method of averages” inspired Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet to create the concept of the “average man”.

“Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago.”

During the Belgian Revolution, Quetelet’s Brussels observatory fell under the occupation of rebel troops. His work thrown into chaos by social revolt, Quetelet wondered whether the methods of physics, capable of accurately modeling the heavens, could be used to model, predict, and even manage society. In a practice he dubbed “social physics” (a term he appropriated from Auguste Comte leading Comte to rename his combination of psychology and economics “sociology”), he studied statistics of crime, marriage, and suicide. Compiling average body measurements of thousands of individuals, he created what he called the “Average Man”, a model of the human physique he believed to be ideal. In fact, Quetelet believed that a person’s deviations from this form were a kind of disfigurement or disease. His studies of the body gave us the Quetelet Index, or Body Mass Index, still in use today.

Francis Galton, a scholar who saw Quetelet as “the greatest authority on vital and social statistics”, took the idea of average in a new direction. To him, the average was not ideal, it was mediocre. He ranked individuals against the average, casting them into types. Those who fell below the average were imbeciles; those who rose above it, eminent.

“From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.”

The problem with the “Average Man” is that he doesn’t exist. Neither does the average woman. In 1943, artist Abram Belskie and doctor Robert Latou Dickinson created Norma, a white alabaster composite of the measurements of 15,000 women. The Cleveland Health Museum, having purchased the statue, ran a contest awarding a cash prize to any Ohio woman whose measurements matched Norma’s. Of nearly 4,000 entries, less than 40 came close to Norma, and no one was an exact match.

In 1950 Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels was tasked by the U.S. air force to compile average measurements of their pilots. There had been a rash of plane accidents. It was believed that redesigning the cockpit around the average pilot would put control back in their hands. Daniels grew suspicious that these averages were not representative of the variation in individuals. He decided to see how many individuals came close to the average measurements.

“Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions... There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.”

The air force wisely heeded Daniels, discarded the average, and designed adjustable cockpits. Rose believes we should embrace Daniels’s findings and root out the misuse of averages in all social endeavors.

Why is the average failing us when it served astronomers so well? It all comes down to application. In the earlier example, astronomers were averaging readings of a single object. Applying the average works well in this kind of problem. But when studying a group, Rose says, one can only apply averages under certain conditions found in a branch of mathematics called ergodic theory: 1) every member of the group is identical, and 2) every member of the group will remain identical in the future. Human bodies and aptitudes satisfy neither condition.

“Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn’t reflect your, or your child’s, or your students’, or your employees’ abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.”

Rose tells us how in the early 1900s Frederick Winslow Taylor brought the average to industry. Organizations would achieve the greatest success and stability, Taylor claimed, if they relied not on geniuses driven by inspiration but on mediocre workers operating within well-designed policies. “In the past the man was first…. In the future the system must be first”.

This same philosophy echoes in a publication of John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board. Frederick Gates, Rockefeller’s philanthropy and business advisor, wrote in 1913:

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science.  We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."

To cure the zealous misuse of the average (what has been called “averagarianism”) and the systemic mediocrity of Taylorism, Rose prescribes adherence to three principles.

The Jaggedness Principle states that the statistics of human characteristics are naturally variable; graphs of these characteristics appear jagged with variation. Averaging measurements of individuals hides the inherent jaggedness.

The Context Principle states that people are not static but change depending on their surroundings. A change in their physical environment, their social context, the time of day, their diet, will change them.

The Pathways Principle states that people can arrive at the same outcome by different paths. The sequence of milestones in a child’s physical development or literacy are not the same for all individuals.

“All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.”

The TED conference is known for its big ideas. The biggest (measured in number of views) isn’t Hans Rosling redefining world poverty, Blaise Agüera y Arcas sharing the dreams of artificial intelligence, or Al Gore warning of climate change. It’s Sir Ken Robinson urging us to foster creativity in kids.

“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

In this speech Robinson delivers the core thesis of his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. 

In the book, Robinson recounts the success stories of Paul McCartney, Matt Groening, and other talented individuals who didn’t fit the academic mold. Their greatness came when they found and embraced their Element -- art, music, dance -- often in spite of discouraging rejections and failures in school. Why, in the pursuit of their dreams, did these greats meet such resistance? The answer, the author tells us, lies in history.

Though it created some prosperity and progress, our education system is a relic of the Industrial Age that became overly reliant on and confident in its standardized tests. In some cases assessments are not only overused, they’re misused.

For instance, In the early 1900s, Alfred Binet developed a test for the French government to identify troubled students. He warned of the test’s limitations, saying that it “does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities ... cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” In fact, he railed against the idea that intelligence is a fixed quantity, a thought he called a “brutal pessimism.” That didn’t stop Stanford’s Lewis Terman, advocate of that most brutal pessimism known as eugenics, from revising it into the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, the first IQ test.

Carl Brigham, another eugenicist, invented a military test to identify good soldiers likely to rise in ranks. Five years after its invention, Brigham disowned the test and eugenics. His test became today’s SAT. Forgetting the dark history of testing, our education system hasn’t learned the limitations of its assessments. Instead, it’s doubled down.

Robinson believes our schools are so focused on productivity and answering test questions correctly, they’ve stigmatized mistakes. That’s bad, says Robinson, because:

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original... We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make... The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Robinson wants that to change.

“Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065... Our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future... Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.”

Intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct, Robinson tells us. We must treat all disciplines as equally important and acknowledge that they share commonalities and even blend into one another. And education should be personalized:

“Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals—not in the databases of multiple-choice tests. I doubt there are many children who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading score for their state.”

The author leaves us with encouraging examples of education reform in progress: Richard Gerver’s child-run town of Grangeton, the integration of the arts at A+ schools, and Reggio Emilia schools where teachers act as researchers for the students. The problem is dire, but the outlook still hopeful.

“In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as it was before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

The building with the globes is now Fedora's museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the medusa pond that would have collected the waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city), the fun of sliding down the spiral, twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise).

On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.”