The Art of Science _ the Science of Art with Neil deGrasse Tyson

0:04 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 have 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. Hey, Neil. Hello. Jock, all right.

0:29 I'm excited. Art and the universe.

0:32 I feel as though I should be conducting this show with a fine Bordeaux in my hand.

0:40 You know? Okay. Yeah. So, actually, at art openings, they don't serve Bordeaux. They serve Merlot. That's the joke. Oh, how garish.

0:53 So....

0:58 Um, so that's the contract, Joe six pack and, and Martin Merlot. See, that's how that goes. Yeah. So, uh, actually, you know, I, 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. Uh, let me first introduce a longtime 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 Passikoff. Jay, welcome to StarTalk.

1:28 Well, thank you very much. It's nice to see another Bronx High School of Science alumnus again.

1:33 Okay. And you're 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 for voting me in.

1:52 A well-deserved honor.

1:54 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. I'm like, you got enough degrees, you know that.

2:13 It's better than being a dishonorary graduate.

2:15 Oh, there you go. 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.

2:30 It's thrilling to be here, Neil, and you're actually a neighbor of mine on Central Park West.

2:36 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. You're also a professor of emeritus.

2:59 And I have actually written books without Jay, but now it would be very difficult because we have forged such a wonderful relationship and process of looking at art and history. representations of astronomical phenomena.

3:18 Yeah, because the universe is quite the fertile subject for art. And 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.

3:42 And I love that book.

3:43 And that was only me.

3:45 Oh, that was only you. Oh, my gosh.

3:47 But it was before that. And it was actually that that was the reason why Jay and I met.

3:56 So that that's the that's the origin story of your publishing relationship.

4:00 Wow.

4:02 Wow. OK, so you've got so. OK, so you've already had some astronomy chops is what you're saying here.

4:10 Well, I mean, I grew up in the Midwest and so I went out to look at the Perseids on top of, you know, trunks of cars. And then 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.

4:31 Giotto the artist. Giotto the artist who.

4:33 Painted the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and in 1303 to 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. So neat.

4:50 Right, because if you draw the Star of Bethlehem, it's got like pointy 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.

5:01 But you know what? This is what's absolutely incredible. So I had to answer my students. You know, 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 Giotto 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.

5:49 All right? Well, there you go.

5:50 There it was. And then the European Space Agency sent me a telegram. Oh, those dinosaur days. And said, we're flying to Halley's Comet in 1985, 86. Can we name the satellite, Giotto? They asked me. I mean, how.

6:10 Humbling is that?

6:12 And I always say, well, ask Giotto.

6:16 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.

6:31 No, but at the time, this is, 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.

6:45 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.

7:07 Absolutely correct. And we know from Giovanni Villani's Chronicle, it was described exactly like Giotto painted it. And he has the wonderful sweeping dust tail, and 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, artists are very intelligent. They layer things. And he put it where the Star of Bethlehem usually is, 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 would look at and say, yes, that's a comet he's describing, not a star.

7:55 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because we all share the same vocabulary, and if you're looking at stuff, it's going to 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?

8:07 Well, the latest collaboration is Cosmos, the Art and Science of the Universe, but it started with Halley's Comet. A mutual colleague, the late Sam Edgerton, a professor of art at Williams, invited Roberta to come 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 Halley's Comet lecture were similar, but of course, her last third was art, and mine was and we were introduced at that point. So basically since Halley's Comet came by in 1985, we've been working together.

8:48 So what can the two of you say or reflect upon when you see artists reach for the universe as their sources of inspiration?

8:57 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 sort of describing what they could see because that was a different universe

9:44 than we have today in the sense of what could be encompassed.

9:47 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?

10:14 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

11:09 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.

11:20 Yes, I did, of course.

11:22 I did, too.

11:22 Who do you think you're talking to? Who do you think you're talking to? Did I see Comet NEOWISE?

11:27 I know. Well, I had to sort of tweak you a little bit.

11:30 On that one. Talk to you.

11:35 So one of the questions you're asking, Neil, is when did people really draw what they saw? 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 pre-World Wide Web required my going to the Harvard Library to take the book out and page through, we discovered about a dozen comets 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.

12:28 That was an independent drawing. Oh my gosh. It was just a.

12:30 It was stylized woodcuts. And so we heard that there were exemplars, which are plans for the books, you know, layouts, which were very recherche 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.

12:59 So just remind me, the Nuremberg Chronicles is a complete compilation of all knowledge. up to that date, isn't that correct?

13:05 That's right.

13:06 If I remember.

13:07 That's right. And it's early in Cannabial. It's very important. And it's a huge volume. But they tried to give the entire history of the world in terms of, you know, rulers and war.

13:20 Everything. Everything. It was just, yeah, that was the one-stop shopping. Mel Brooks did the same thing. He did. Mel Brooks did the same thing, and it was really good, I have to say.

13:29 But they reused woodcuts. Some of the pictures of cities.

13:34 were.

13:34 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 drawings. So there was clearly no accuracy in the depiction of the comets at all.

13:58 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.

14:14 See, that's what, that's what I want an artist to do for me.

14:17 Right.

14:17 Because Jay, I get, 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, so where, where, At what point did artists start putting their own paw print on the cosmic topic?

14:39 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.

15:10 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'll all look great. And we just have to hope that we get these pictures down.

15:46 And Jay, let me just thank you for leaving me off the list as I now sit without any.

15:51 Hubble oil paintings in my home. But 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.

16:01 Well, I actually have one page on my wall from the Nuremberg Chronicle that happens to have a comet 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.

16:12 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.

16:20 There was a choice at one point between getting 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.

16:33 Yeah, I thought you might have said I could have bought the Nuremberg Chronicle or another house. Last I check what these things are going for. We've got to take a break. We've got to take a break. When we come back, More with Jay and Roberta, Jay Pasikoff, Roberta Olson. We're talking about the history of astronomy and art on StarTalk.

16:57 We're back, StarTalk. I got Chuck Nice, my co-host. Chuck, what's your social media handle? ChuckNiceComic, thank you for asking, Neil. There you go, there you go.

17:08 I'm sorry that you don't know it. But I appreciate you allowing me to call it out.

17:17 It's better in your voice. That's why I did that.

17:20 Did you get Roberta's permission to use the word comet in your handle?

17:25 Oh, apparently Roberta trademarked comet. We've got Roberta Olson, art historian.

17:30 Next publication, for sure. Okay, so we'll talk about that.

17:35 Roberta Olson, art historian, and Jay Pasikoff, a fellow astrophysicist. And they're collaborators on projects that explore the intersection of art and science. And Roberta, we left off. You were going to 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 do.

18:04 ROBERTA GARCIA- Well, I think it 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 go.

18:32 Well, just to be clear, at the time... they had no clue what a meteor was. These were just falling stars.

18:37 Falling stars, but 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 in the 18th century, 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

19:28 about life, the universe, their own, view of things like William Blake, who holds a record of showing 18 comets in his illustrations, and they're bizarre as all get out. Very personal. It was sort of a liberation. And then the same.

19:47 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 it has like a court jester and if i had a artist at my disposal i'd want them to always interpret the world for me.

20:00 Yeah that's and it's great and it's it's uh endless like the universe i mean it can go on i mean obviously everyone has a 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.

20:42 So the sky is antiquities television.

20:47 Yeah, basically.

20:49 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.

21:03 Okay, I just got to say this. I don't know if people are paying attention here, but Roberta took us from ancient Babylon in the beginning, right? Up to the Roman Empire and Christ, right?

21:16 Up to the 1700s. How much... Where, where, how much history is in you? I don't know. But when she went, then she went up to the Victorian. And then up to the Victorian.

21:27 Yes. Okay. There's just endless amount of material. I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of works that we could discuss.

21:36 And Roberta knows them all.

21:37 So, so that's, so that, so that's what this new book is basically. We've written a dozen or whatever articles over the, over since Halley's Comet came by in 1985, 86. And so we just had a chance that we have a dozen chapters each on a different topic, eclipses, meteors, comets, et cetera, in this new book with a few hundred illustrations showing samples from all these different periods of time.

22:08 So Chuck, when you said she knows thousands of years, I was going to say we need a bigger boat, a bigger format. So Roberta, I've done a little bit of my own homework. I wouldn't call it scholarly homework, but just sort of casual homework while I'm, you know, eating popcorn. And Van Gogh's Starry Night, The Starry Night, 1889.

22:31 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 paintings. 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.

23:27 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. There are other works of art with titles that have astronomical features, such as Millet's work that's not starring. I feel 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. He did at least four paintings. That was sort of the crowning one of it. And that he actually wrote.

24:07 At least four where the night sky is.

24:09 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 the 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.

24:36 And he.

24:37 With nocturnes, I think of nocturnes, I think of piano nocturnes. Is that what you mean or something else?

24:42 Nocturne 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 warmup 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

25:39 of the Ursa Major, the big bear, the part that the English call the plow 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.

26:12 I mean, he lied, just to say he lied. You could say....

26:19 Come on. Artistic license.

26:23 Okay.

26:24 Jay likes that. 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.

26:42 Okay.

26:43 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? Okay, 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 aureole, this glow around the morning star. And then, you can tell me, and they certainly can comment, and I'm sure Chuck could too, is that the spiral nebula?

27:35 Or as some people said, oh no, it's clouds in the mist scope. 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 you know the crescent moon is more interesting for most people who are not astronomers, okay?

28:05 People hardly ever draw a gibbous moon. It's the saddest moon phase of them all.

28:10 I know.

28:11 It's not a full moon, and it's not a crescent. Like, what is that?

28:13 I know, and you got it. But remember, astronomy at this time was very popular. In France, you had Flammarion, and you had Guillemin. And Flammarion, because he was so peripatetic, we don't know what Van Gogh saw. But, for instance, Gustave Moreau, who's... But.

28:29 Just to be clear, Camille Flammarion... highly prolific French writer of astronomical, but pop French writer of astronomical subjects.

28:38 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 Flammarion. So probably he thought, could he have seen drawings of Lord Ross, of his spiral nebula that he made at castle.

29:02 They were published. Now, all of this, 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. Jay and I know we got Getty Grants to do our book, Fire in the Sky, Comets and Meteors, the 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.

29:31 Shall we say a voyage of discovery? I mean, to put it in your terms for your. 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.

29:58 I may relate to it in certain ways. And then there are the givens.

30:03 Can you comment on the intensity of Van Gogh's colors? Yes. 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 cross-wired 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.

30:29 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, 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 the new Gaslight with the cosmic light. Wow.

31:06 Before you go any further, Roberta, PBS just called and said, we have enough for the special.

31:15 That's right. You know, I'm thinking, where do we all sign up? We all sign up for the class. That's amazing. It's amazing.

31:25 Can I just read you a quote about the cafe, the night cafe, which is at Yale, which is all complementaries yellow and actually green and red with some yellow in it. And I remember always teaching my students and say, you don't want to stay in there. You go in that cafe where he always ate, it's Cafe de la Gab, you go in the cafe and you run out. But this is what he said. In my picture of the night cafe, I have tried to express the idea that that cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. And then he says about the colors to answer Chuck, all in an atmosphere of like a devil's furnace of pale sulfur. Woo.

32:16 That's amazing. Wow. So he was at a biker bar, basically. That's really bad stuff.

32:23 He wanted to hype everything up.

32:26 Wait, wait, Chuck, I thought you don't see color. I thought that was you. This is true, Neil. I'm not that kind of person. Maybe artistically. Maybe that's the only way I will see it. 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.

33:10 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 at some other date. It would have to have been June 21st. And then put it in his paintings.

33:34 Well, there's another Olson, and I never get confused between Roberta Olson and Don Olson.

33:40 Oh, Don Olson at Texas.

33:42 Don Olson at Texas Tech actually uses all those positions of things and goes to the places with his students and figures out exactly when and exactly where people were standing and what direction they're looking at.

33:59 And he's got a couple of books out about that that are very interesting.

34:02 But the work with Roberta is more art historical rather than positional.

34:10 Positional, technical, right.

34:13 But we know that he painted this on June 19th and worked on it for two days. And interestingly, it's at the Museum of Modern Art.

34:20 No, but that would be at Crescent Moon. If that's the date, it wasn't Gibbous, it was Crescent Moon. I promise. I promise you.

34:26 Then the literature is wrong. Send me, what program did you use? And that's the wonderful thing about computers. You can program, you can program Eclipse paths.

34:36 Right, right. And I agree that nobody paints, hardly anybody paints gibbous moons. It's a sad phase.

34:43 And I learned from a colleague a few years ago that it's called gibbous because it'd give us more light.

34:48 Yeah. When you combine high tech with illiteracy, you get very, you get fascinated.

34:58 You know that they examined the canvas, though, and they said it's two days. He left holes in the canvas where he put in the astronomical phenomena. 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 nature.

35:23 Dominates completely.

35:25 Completely. And in a sense, it unifies heaven and earth. It is the cosmos. Because if you think of Humboldt, von Humboldt and the cosmos, it also takes us down to earth. It's the entire whole working universe.

35:43 So for those who didn't know, I mean, von 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. 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, people like that are not as much talked about, because you can't point to the one thing they discover that changed things. But he introduced a perspective that surely had deep influence culturally.

36:21 And I keep running into his name all over. Anyway, thank you so much for inviting us to be on StarTalk today.

36:29 Yeah, this has been great. So Chuck, you're right, PBS did call. I got the text from them. They wanted to do the three-part special streaming. And Roberta, you're going to do a master class on this, and we're all going to sign up for it, for sure.

36:44 Well, it's been a delight to be with you.

36:48 Yeah, and so Roberta, thank you, Roberta Olson and Jay Passikoff. And you guys, and your latest book, where can we find it? I guess just Amazon, or who's the publisher?

36:59 It's Reaction in London, and it's on Amazon, and it's in many bookstores.

37:04 And the University of Chicago Press is the American distributor.

37:08 The American distributor, okay.

37:09 Either side will give you lots of quotes from people and also a sample of the text.

37:14 Yeah, and my website at solarcorona.com has a link to it.

37:20 I see what you did there, because what I didn't say in this program is Jay Pasikoff, he's got to be up there among people who have spent the most time in an eclipse shadow. You've got to be top ten of all time, Jay. Are you monitoring this?

37:38 I monitor the numbers. Other people monitor the time. It's a lot of fun. We're looking forward.

37:43 How many eclipses have you seen? 73. That's crazy. Crazy. And how many of those have you looked at like Donald Trump? You know, where you just stare directly into it. We spend a.

37:58 Lot of time trying to educate people about how.

38:01 To observe eclipses safely. Fantastic. 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. Sounds like fun. Okay, so we've got 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 when we do art and when we think about art, when StarTalk continues. We're back. StarTalk. I have a new guest for this segment. Chuck, it's old time favorite of StarTalk.

38:40 Yes, it's a new guest, but frequent guest. Notice I didn't say new guest, but old guest.

38:46 That's correct.

38:49 See?

38:49 New, young guest. Yes. 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.

38:58 Of course, always a pleasure.

39:01 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 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 it.

39:30 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?

39:40 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.

39:53 So that's old news. Um, but when people are being creative, there's.

39:57 But 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?

40:03 Oh, so there's certain, what we call lateralization of function, which just means that certain functions.

40:10 Are more specialized in one part of the area of the brain than another.

40:13 So language tends to be more on the left, but there's also some language areas on the right.

40:18 Um, okay.

40:19 And so there is some of that specialization of function between hemispheres. But this idea that all of creativity comes from the right side of the brain, it's basically that's not how it works.

40:30 It's not how it works.

40:31 It's not how it works. There's a network in the brain.

40:34 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.

40:50 Oh.

40:50 The default work, the default.

40:52 Default mode network.

40:55 Oh, my God.

40:55 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.

41:04 Oh, my God.

41:07 You've been hanging around Macintosh products too long.

41:12 That's not too far off.

41:14 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 a way. And then you stay there for a bit. And then there's something called the salience network, another kind of activation network in 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.

41:40 Something happening in the environment. You should switch your focus of attention outward.

41:44 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.

41:52 At the environment.

41:53 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.

42:08 You have to enact them. You have to give them some structure.

42:11 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.

42:18 That's what creates- Can you fly? Can I even fly?

42:21 You can even fly.

42:22 Thank you.

42:22 I believe you can fly. You can fly. But then you have to kick in the.

42:29 Sort of more rational, logical- parts of the brain that can organize it and structure it.

42:34 So the process of creativity is switching between these networks.

42:37 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.

42:46 And that's one aspect.

42:47 Do they suffer anywhere because of the greater connectivity between those two?

42:51 Oh, good question. Yeah, what's the cost of that? 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. Or at least that's what I'm hoping. Trying to account for your own state of existence.

43:12 Well, I mean, on the plus side, people who 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.

43:37 Again, that's another myth that's been debunked.

43:40 There's not any more significant, there's not any more prevalence of mental health disorders in creative people compared to the rest of the population. So we 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, you know, Wall Street guy.

44:00 I'm going to have to look for another excuse now. Excuse, yeah. Wait, wait, so Heather, are these literal electrochemical networks in the brain, or is this an organizing... Is this an organizing sort of heuristic accounting of what we see going on?

44:23 I think it's a little of both, but it's certainly... there are these.

44:27 Networks that we all have in our brains that are going to be either active, activated or deactivated, depending on what we're doing.

44:36 But imagine the future where you find, you know, where that network is and 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.

44:50 I was just going to say this as a person who dabbles in creativity, You can actually do that kind of to yourself right now. You know, 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.

45:19 No, Chuck, I want Heather to inject creativity. a joke in your head or something. Okay, that's what I want Heather. Heather, you know she's working on that. Wait a minute. Let me just say this, Neil.

45:28 I want Heather to inject a joke into my head.

45:32 You see behind that screen behind her there? See that? That's where it all went wrong. Wait, so Heather, a 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?

46:02 That was a good one, wasn't it?

46:05 So in a way, I wouldn't call that part of his output the most creative part. The creativity was in his drawings of flying machines and.

46:19 He's thinking the way no one has thought before.

46:22 Right.

46:22 Doing detailed anatomy is a talent for sure.

46:26 Right.

46:26 But I wouldn't say that is the most creative aspect of Leonardo. And 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.

46:57 And when it's turned up, they tend to be more self-aware, self-conscious and less creative.

47:03 So by creativity, you mean a new idea. A new idea, a new novel.

47:08 So we all have access to the same information. I like to use Darwin as an example. Like 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 of that before. And so it's novel thinking, it's divergent thinking, new associations between ideas when everybody had access to the same information.

47:32 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.

47:43 Oh, that's funny. They never laugh.

47:46 And the reason is because they're watching that person make associations that they themselves 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 creativity has a great deal to do with associations, like Darwin, same information, making new associations.

48:06 Will AI. Be able to be more.

48:11 Creative than human beings because AI is able to make millions of associations at once.

48:18 So there, well, first of all, there's been some studies with comedians, which look at amateur versus professional, um, when they have to look at a cartoon and then the task was just come up with a novel, like, uh, you know, creative punchline to this cartoon, like a New Yorker cartoon. And, um, it takes less work for the professional comedians to activate, to come up with something. And we find that the association areas are more quickly activated.

48:43 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.

48:53 I will send out the link. I encourage you to watch it.

48:56 It is simultaneously awkward, yet strangely funny in a, weird, awkward way.

49:05 I will send you out the link.

49:06 Are you sure somebody didn't just tape my set? Sounds a lot like weirdly, awkwardly funny Chuck. Weirdly, awkwardly funny.

49:18 In an uncomfortable, uneasy way.

49:20 You know, they say that uncanny valley, right? When you are trying to create the AI, I think there's just something slightly off. That's what it's like with the comedy. But however, I do, I do think that after they perfect it and after they, you know, 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.

49:42 So Heather, let me ask, 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, right, right.

50:09 So what can you tell us about those two conditions within the human mind?

50:15 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.

50:27 Will cross over.

50:28 Chromesthesia is specifically sound relating to colors. So colors will sound like something. So if you imagine Van, 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.

50:46 It would be like a symphony made up of colors.

50:49 There's some speculation that he had this because of the letters he had written to his brother, Theo.

50:56 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 at 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.

51:17 That's what I'm thinking. That's what I'm thinking.

51:19 And it's not just in terms of what's happening in the brain. It's not, there's one idea that it's a sort of cross wiring. Another is that there is this disinhibition of feedback. So a reduction, normally we're having lots of information coming on in the brain and parts of it have to inhibit the information from crossing over. But when you lift that inhibition, you can get these, you know, 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 in But when you lift the constraints, that's when you can get these hallucinations and

52:04 these blending of the senses. And there's a paper I read years ago, it was in 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.

52:20 And those seizures might have actually been related.

52:23 To the chromesthesia, but other people are born with it too. So it could be, it's a genetic, there's a genetic, there's some inheritance with this as well.

52:32 What you are really trying to tell us is that Van Gogh was high and tripping.

52:42 He might say, or others might say he just had a secret window into the reality that we all are being constrained from.

52:49 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 the first artist to do that just lazy? I'm just wondering. I mean, I don't mean any disrespect. Yeah, I don't mean any disrespect, but did they just say, I'm just gonna, you know. I'm not gonna paint every leaf on this tree. Throw some blobs up here. Yeah, my theory is that they were all nearsighted. Oh, so everything was blurry at the distance they were painting. The nearsighted painters movement, right.

53:38 You know, I dare say, and as someone who does paint and who has trained in painting, I was a fine arts minor and I painted. I do know that 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.

53:55 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.

54:02 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.

54:13 It was just a pedestal. A pedestal.

54:16 I read about that. With nothing on it. With nothing on it.

54:18 And it's an invisible sculpture. And then it was crazy as another guy said, oh, you stole my idea. That was my.

54:24 My invisible sculpture.

54:26 My invisible sculpture came first.

54:30 But it's become an abstraction now where it's not even about the art.

54:34 And there's still, of course, you know, realist painters out there.

54:37 Wait, wait, wait. Did they steal that from John Cage? Who has... He has a piano sonata... 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. Yes, their 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.

55:03 The sound of silence is the sound of the audience rustling and clearing their throats. 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, that's the greedy part. Cause you're charging money. You stealing money is what you're doing. Okay. So Chuck, the day you can pull off a comedy act, you just stand there and, With your mouth open and nothing coming out at the microphone? Well, that would make people happy, Neil. No, we've got to call Heather quick on that. We've got to call Heather Intervention to figure out how that one worked. Guys, we're running out of time, but this has been great. Heather,

55:44 thanks for bringing some neuroscientific insights to add to our artistic and scientific insights into the mind of Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh. This is America, Jack. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh.

55:57 Van Gogh.

55:57 Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh.

56:00 Van Gogh.

56:00 Van Gogh. Van Gogh.

56:01 Van Gogh.

56:01 Van Gogh.

56:02 Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. And Chuck, always good to have you. Chuck, nice comic on Twitter. And Heather, where are you at?

56:33 Heather underscore Berlin.

56:35 And my website is heatherberlin.com.

56:37 Excellent. Excellent. Okay, guys. So this has been the conclusion. We now just concluded our three-part investigation into impressionist art focusing on Rango. And, of course, my favorite of his is The Starry Night, of course. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.