The Taxonomy of the Nerd

by BENJAMIN HALE

I have been using this to entertain people at parties for years, and I’ve finally decided to write it down.  I have to credit my good friend Sam Cooper as the co-creator of this graph. (Check out his band, Horse Feathers.) The very first Nerd Graph was rendered on a napkin at Abo’s Pizza in Boulder, Colorado sometime around the turn of the millennium.

As a nerd, I have always been interested in nerd anthropology. Non-nerds often fail to understand that not all nerds are created equal. In my years of careful observation I have identified four distinct subspecies of nerd. I believe that all nerds can be generally grouped as follows: geek, dork, creep and loser.

They are identifiable along a Cartesian spectrum:

Keep in mind that these are not static categories; any nerd could be represented as a dot somewhere on this graph. The “perfect nerd” (as dubious and elusive as a cryptozoological creature) would be a dot falling exactly at the intersection of all four categories. I will now detail the distinguishing characteristics of each subspecies of nerd.

Geek

Nerds who are both intelligent and social are geeks. The geek is generally the most well-adjusted and successful nerd. His nerdiness usually does not prevent him from, if necessary, “passing” as a non-nerd when interacting with mixed company, although he feels most comfortable in the company of other geeks. I am a geek. Most of my friends are also geeks. But that doesn’t mean we’re not cool. Geeks may, for instance, do drugs.  This does not make them non-nerds.

Identifying characteristics

Obsessive and/or arcane hobbies: photography, backgammon, etc.

Expansive knowledge about a certain subject: for instance, there are music geeks, movie geeks, etc.

Ability to “pass”

Mating habits

Geeks usually have sex with other geeks.  Female heterosexual geeks may have sex with non-nerds, and sometimes male creeps — very rarely with male dorks. Male heterosexual geeks usually only have sex with female geeks, though there are observed instances of male geeks having sex with female dorks. Male geeks also sometimes have sex with non-nerds, but it is observably rarer than with female geeks. However, a relationship between a geek and a non-geek rarely lasts, for at some point the geek’s mask will slip.

Where to find them

Music stores, book stores, liberal arts colleges, graduate programs, “hip” neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas

Quintessential geek

William Jefferson Clinton

Bill Clinton’s ability to “pass” is uncanny, and as for intelligence and sociability, he maxes out both scales.

(Editor’s note: You’ll have to click the link to read the rest of the definitions for dork, creep and loser. I identify with the geek label, if you’re constantly checking up on this site, you’re probably one too.)

Paul Rand stands without peer at the pinnacle of graphic design’s Olympus, the North Star that guides professional practice even more than eight years after his death. (Indeed the first entry here at Design Observer was on Rand’s personal library.) An important new book, Paul Rand: Modernist Design, edited by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo as part of the University of Maryland’s Issues in Cultural Theory series, adds to the already substantial body of writing on the man and his work. A combination monograph, anthology and festschrift, it also contributes to the unassailable Rand legend.

I did not know Paul Rand. I did not work for him or study under him. My understanding of his importance, then, has been gained in the same way as students and practitioners in years to come will gain theirs: through books like Modernist Design. The book’s more than two dozen contributors are almost uniformly positive, if not downright adulatory (the most notable exception is the reprint of Jessica Helfand’s critical essay from her own book.) So it’s with some trepidation that I wonder if I might lodge a few complaints about Mr. Rand as a model for graphic design practice. But here goes.

A single-minded emphasis on logos. Every organization needs to communicate intelligently, distinctively, consistently and effectively. Not every organization needs a logo. But communicating effectively is a complex challenge that needs to be addressed anew every day; making a logo is a largely formal exercise that can be priced, paid for, done once and locked up forever. It’s no wonder that so many clients and designers collude in the comfort of pretending the second activity is a substitute for doing the first. 

More than anyone else, Rand placed logo design at the heart of our professional activity. His logos form the heart of each of his books and are invoked repeatedly in Modernist Design as the epitome of his practice. Dare we admit that not every Rand logo is perfect? Take his UPS logo, the redesign of which last year was treated in some quarters as an act of cultural desecration on the level of the looting of the antiquities of Baghdad. Designed in the early sixties for a company that positioned itself as a businesslike alternative to the U.S. Post Office in a world where Fed Ex was unimaginable, it looked like a shield partly because the logo it replaced was a shield. The bow (“That’s a present, daddy!”) is a patent anachronism; UPS refuses to handle packages tied with string. Although the Mighty Morphin Power Ranger Photoshop Fantasy that replaced it is truly vile (a friend who studied under Rand calls it “the golden comb over”) that doesn’t mean the original mark wasn’t flawed and overdue for a change.

An interest in the outside and not the inside. For a man who famously said “”Graphic design…is not good design if it does not communicate,” Rand seems to have paid less attention then you’d expect on the actual content of the things he worked on. If you’ve ever seen the inside of a Rand-designed annual report for IBM or Cummins, you’ll see what I mean. Behind the beautiful cover one finds completely uninflected three-column typography (always, to be sure, in an elegant typeface) with photos on a grid that look like they were pulled out of a drawer. There is none of the compelling visual storytelling one associates with less acclaimed designers like Erik Nitsche or Lester Beall. The IBM annuals designed by VSA Partners in the last few years for CEO Lou Gerstner feature the kind of overactive, pluralistic “messy” layouts that I’m guessing Rand would find really irritating; they are also much better feats of communication.

A curious detachment from history. Modernist Design features a timeline that tracks Rand’s life, Rand’s work and world history in a comparative chart. Above, one finds sublime posters and logos. Below, references to war, assassination, struggles in civil rights, and the general tumult that characterized much of the last century. The only place the twain meet is his 1940 cover for the magazine Direction: two strands of barbed wire “wrap” a package riddled with bullet holes. It is one of his best pieces. Rand’s dedication to timelessness drove him repeatedly to the purity of form bereft of specific content: the Direction covers let us see what he might have done had he continued to use his talent as a way to engage with — rather than shield himself from, perhaps? — the changing world around him.

Humorlessness. Rand’s work is so often acclaimed for its playfulness (one of his seminal essays was entitled “Design and the Play Instinct”) that I wonder if it’s some kind of selective blindness that makes the joy that others see so invisible to me. Just because children use cut paper and primary colors doesn’t mean that an adult that does the same is conveying a childlike sense of wonder. The famous IBM rebus poster - an “eye” for vision, a “bee” for industriousness, and…well, an “M” - seems to me to be waiting for its punchline.

I left that one for last, partly because in the face of the formidable Rand legend I simply wonder, indeed, if the problem is with me. I love his work and I miss not having known him. I also wonder whether young designers today are well served by having their forebears presented as infallible. In Modernist Design, Georgia Tech professor Diane Gromala contributes an enlightening essay with a title I would have liked to have used for this piece: “The Trouble with Rand.” Near the end she describes an exchange with Paul Rand that she had as a student: “When I asked him if it was a pain to be just worshiped, if that didn’t cause a certain sense of loneliness, he proffered a knowing smile.”

That smile, as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa’s, is what we’re left with as the living portrait hardens into revered icon. As time goes on, it’s only the cracks in the surface that will reveal the humanity within.

The Chinese government has called for an end to the public shaming of criminal suspects, a time-honored cudgel of Chinese law enforcement but one that has increasingly rattled the public.

According to the state-run media, the Ministry of Public Security has ordered the police to stop parading suspects in public and has called on local departments to enforce laws in a “rational, calm and civilized manner.”

The new regulations are thought to be a response to the public outcry over a recent spate of “shame parades,” in which those suspected of being prostitutes are shackled and forced to walk in public.

Last October, the police in Henan Province took to the Internet, posting photographs of women suspected of being prostitutes. Other cities have been publishing the names and addresses of convicted sex workers and those of their clients. The most widely circulated images, taken this month in the southern city of Dongguan, included young women roped together and paraded barefoot through crowded city streets.

The police later said they were not punishing the women, but only seeking their help in the pursuit of an investigation.

The public response, at least on the Internet, has tended toward outrage, with many postings expressing sympathy for the women. “Why aren’t corrupt officials dragged through the streets?” read one posting. “These women are only trying to feed themselves.”

But much of the anger has been directed at the police, who are a focus of growing public mistrust. Although corruption among the police is rife in China, the disdain has been further heightened by a series of widely publicized episodes involving the torture of detainees, suspects who mysteriously died in custody and innocent people jailed on trumped-up evidence.

One man spent 10 years in prison for murder after the police extracted his confession — only to be freed when his supposed victim turned out to be alive.

Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at People’s University in Beijing, said the new regulations were necessary to rein in the worst impulses of the police.

“There are more modern tools for law enforcement,” he said. “Besides, if these kinds of tactics are allowed, the police will get used to dealing with problems outside of the law.”

The most recent wave of prostitution arrests involving thousands of suspects is part of a seven-month “strike hard” campaign aimed at gambling, drug use and violent crime. As part of the increased law enforcement efforts, judicial authorities have been encouraged to mete out swifter, and harsher, punishment. It is the fourth such campaign since 1983.

Public shaming of the accused and the condemned has been a long tradition in China — one that the Communist Party embraced with zeal during episodes of class struggle and anticrime crusades. Although public executions have been discontinued, provincial cities still hold mass sentencing rallies, during which convicts wearing confessional placards are driven though the streets in open trucks.

The practice has also taken hold in some Chinese neighborhoods of New York, with some supermarket owners threatening to post photographs of shoplifters and call the police unless the suspects hand over cash, sometimes demanding hundreds of dollars. The legality of the practice, however, remains in question.

It is unclear whether the directive against the humiliation of suspects will have the desired effect. Similar rules and regulations have been passed down through the years, beginning in 1988, when the Supreme People’s Court ordered prosecutors and the police to protect the identities of the accused. In 2007, the country’s top judicial and law enforcement bodies issued a similar notice that forbade the parading of convicts.

Even if such directives must be issued repeatedly, Joshua Rosenzweig of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group, said he was somewhat encouraged that the government recognized the need to abolish such practices.

“Repetition can increase pressure and help force change, but ultimately it will take a great deal of political will to implement these kinds of changes,” he said.

By: Paul Graham

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn’t want as the top one in my mind for two long stretches.

I’d noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren’t.

I’d hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I’d forgotten why I hated it so much. When we raised money for Y Combinator, I remembered. Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It’s hard to get money. It’s not the sort of thing that happens by default. It’s not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you’ll make little progress on anything else you’d rather be working on. [2]

(I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors. Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side. It may be time to fix that.)

The reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of the preceding 10 years I’d been able to think about what I wanted. So the contrast when I couldn’t was sharp. But I don’t think this problem is unique to me, because just about every startup I’ve seen grinds to a halt when they start raising money—or talking to acquirers.

You can’t directly control where your thoughts drift. If you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about.

You don’t have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. [3]

Even Newton fell into this trap. After publishing his theory of colors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years, finally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:

I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus’s business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction or leave to come out after me. For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to defend it. [4]

Linus and his students at Liege were among the more tenacious critics. Newton’s biographer Westfall seems to feel he was overreacting:

Recall that at the time he wrote, Newton’s “slavery” consisted of five replies to Liege, totalling fourteen printed pages, over the course of a year.

I’m more sympathetic to Newton. The problem was not the 14 pages, but the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced as the top idea in a mind that wanted so eagerly to think about other things.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head. I’m always delighted to find I’ve forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn’t been thinking about them. My wife thinks I’m more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. I’m often mistaken about it. I tend to think it’s the idea I’d want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

“There’s a regular rhythm to waves that calms us,” says British author Gavin Pretor-Pinney, explaining how he came to be fascinated by the science behind the movement of the ocean. In “The Wave Watcher’s Companion: From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life’s Undulations,” he stares down the physics behind waves of all stripes (Penguin Books, July 2010). For the record:An article in Saturday’s Section A about “The Wave Watcher’s Companion” incorrectly referred to oceanographer Walter Munk as Walter Munch. The quaint book is part hard science, part friendly explanation. Pretor-Pinney talked with the Los Angeles Times about waves of sea and sand; how bees and hippos do “the wave,” and more.

You write, “There’s no such thing as a wave-free sea.” Can you explain?

There’s always movement in the sea, even if there is no wind.

As wind blows over the surface of the water, it causes tiny ripples, less than an inch in height, that roughen the surface, increasing the friction between wind and water, giving it more purchase and helping it lift the surface. In this way, the wind’s energy is transferred to the water.

The stronger the wind, the greater the area over which it blows and the longer its duration, the higher the waves will grow. But when the storm dissipates and the wind dies down, the waves that it caused roll on of their own accord. The train of waves is known as a swell, and can travel over huge distances.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the great oceanographer Walter Munch measured how far ocean waves travel from the storm that created them. He found that waves created in storms off Antarctica could be tracked right up through the Pacific to the coast of Alaska. It took about two weeks for them to make this epic 7,000-mile journey, at the end of which they were far too feeble to be detected by anything but the most sensitive recording equipment.

What are the three forms of waves?

The three kinds of waves are transverse, longitudinal and torsional waves. It kind of worried me that these sound sort of dull. So I described these waves as animals.

A transverse wave is sort of like the serpentine movements of a snake. When you send a wave down the length of your garden hose to unhitch it from the fence post, you are creating a snake wave — sorry, a transverse wave.

A longitudinal wave is more like the way an earthworm moves. The worm grips the earth around it by bunching up its body to make it thicker and sending the muscular contraction down its length to propel it forward through the ground. Here the movements of the worm are not from side to side but forward and backward. Sound waves are examples of longitudinal waves. The sound from a speaker travels towards you on account of the air molecules vibrating forwards and backwards to produce traveling regions of higher and lower air pressure.

Torsional waves move in a twisting motion. You don’t tend to come across torsional waves much — not unless you work in the drilling industry. Nor do you come across many animals that use torsional waves to get around. In fact, I found it impossible to come up with any animal at all.

What are sand waves?

The dunes of the “sand seas” of the Sahara certainly look like waves, and they even travel along gradually in the wind. But I soon found out from an aeolian geomorphologist — a dune expert, to you and me — that they result from fundamentally different physical processes than actual waves.

Talk about your trip to Hawaii.

The main reason for writing the book was to go on vacation — sorry, I mean on a research trip — to Hawaii. The swells there arrive unimpeded from the winter storms tracking across the North Pacific. I was transfixed by the immense power and beauty of the breakers along the North Shore. There, more than anywhere, you get a true understanding of the energy that waves can contain.

When the ocean swells reach the lava reefs, bunching up into peaks and peeling forwards into an explosion of white water, you can feel the energy that originated from the storm as it is finally released. This energy doesn’t disappear — energy can only change from one form to another. Some of it changes into the crashing sound of the waves — and sound is a form of wave, isn’t it? Some of it travels on through the ground as vibrations — which are known as ‘microseisms’ and are like mini seismic waves. And some ends up heating up the water and shore slightly. This heat, too, travels on as waves — infrared waves. It was a huge revelation for me to realize that ocean wave energy just keeps on traveling as other types of waves.

What about stadium waves?

We all love performing The Wave — especially when there is not much going on on the pitch. But I was intrigued to learn that a Hungarian professor had made two studies into the science of stadium waves. He told me that the critical number of people needed to get a wave started is 25. Also, the waves typically travel around the stadiums at 27 mph.

I was amazed to learn that Apis dorsata, the giant Asian honeybee, also performs The Wave. The bees do it not for fun but for defense, for they build their hives out in the open, protecting them with just a wriggling mass of bees. Hippopotamuses have been known to produce a sound version of a crowd wave. This involves the males in one group, or pod, making bellowing calls which then cause those in the next pod along the river to do the same, who then set the next pod calling. Known as chain chorusing, this wave of hippo calls can travel for several miles along the river. It is probably to do with establishing satisfactory distances between the groups.

Let’s talk about traffic.

Professor Yuki Sugiyama [who runs the Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow at Japan’s Nagoya University] demonstrated that traffic jams can be a sort of wave — known as a “stop-and-go-wave.” Like stadium waves, these are not like the usual sort of waves that physicists study. But they do appear like a sort of density wave within the flow of traffic as cars join the jam at the back and others pull away at the front. Sugiyama found that the critical number of cars on the road [for these waves to form] is 40 per mile. When the weight of traffic is more than this, the flow becomes “unstable” and the natural fluctuation in our driving style is enough to cause these waves to start up. No obstruction is needed — it is just a matter of time before a traffic wave will form.

Other fun facts?

Mariners used to dangle rags and sacks filled with fish oil over the sides of their ships when the sea was particularly rough in order to calm the waves. As an extremely thin film of oil spreads over the surface of the water, it reduces the wind’s grip on the surface, and so makes the waves less likely to break onto a ship, bringing hundreds of tons of water down onto the deck.

Waves are essential to the transport systems of your body. For your heart to pump the 4,300 gallons of blood it does in any 24-hour period, it has to beat 100,000 times. Each and every one of those beats takes the form of a coordinated muscular wave.

Different states of relaxation or arousal are associated with different frequencies of brain wave: the slowest frequencies in deep sleep, the highest when concentrating hard on a difficult task. There is even a medical treatment, known as neurofeedback, in which patients are taught to change the speed of their brain waves as they play a computer game.

A few of you wondered what I meant by active listening in the context of a conversation. Maybe you want to be a good listener without being bored out of your frickin’ skull. I’ll tell you how.

The worst kind of listener is the topic hijacker. Let’s say you enjoy snowboarding and you’re listening to a neighbor describe his new gas grille. Don’t do this move:

Neighbor: My wife got me a new grille for my birthday.

You: Really? I got a new snowboard. Let me tell you about it…

That’s just being a jerk. Active listening, as I choose to define it, involves asking questions to steer the conversation in an entertaining direction without being too obvious about it. Using my example, let’s say you have no interest in hearing about the wonders of barbecuing, but you don’t want to be a blatant conversation hijacker. You might steer the conversation thusly.

Neighbor: My wife got me a new grille for my birthday.

You: Does that mean you do most of the cooking now?

Neighbor: Ha ha! Yes, I think it was a trick.

You: If you do the cooking, who does the dishes?

Neighbor: Well, usually the one who doesn’t cook does the dishes.

You: Do you enjoy cooking?

Neighbor: Not really.

You: Your wife does. So you’re getting screwed when she does the cooking and you do the dishes because she enjoys her end of it. 

Okay, maybe in this example the conversation will lead to your neighbor getting a divorce. As a general rule, the more dangerous or inappropriate the conversation, the more interesting it is. You’ll have to use your judgment to know when you’ve crossed the line.

Also as a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull. So steer toward topics that involve human perceptions and feelings, and away from objects and things.

You also want to avoid any topic that falls into the “you had to be there” category. For example, if someone is describing a vacation, avoid asking about the food. Nothing is more boring than a description of food. Ask instead if the person answered email from the beach. That gets to how a person thinks, and how hard it is to release a habit. And it could provide an escape route to move the conversation to yet another place. Sometimes it takes two or three bounces to get someplace of mutual interest.

You’ve heard of the Kevin Bacon game, where every actor is just a few connections away from Kevin Bacon. Likewise, you almost always have something interesting in common with every other person. The trick is to find it. As with the Kevin Bacon game, you’d be surprised at how few questions it takes to get there.

When I was doing a lot of travel for book tours and speaking, I spent many hours with cab and limo drivers. I discovered two questions that would almost always lead to something interesting:

1. Where did you grow up?
2. Have you driven anyone famous?

I heard amazing stories of political exile, rock star antics, and war. It was great stuff. Most people have at least one good story in them. And you can usually find that story by asking where the person lived and what their parents did for a living. 

In his later philosophy, Heidegger liked to indulge in eccentric etymologies because he was certain that there are truths deeply hidden in language. It is one of the more beguilingly magical aspects of his thought and therefore—to my mind—one of the more convincing. Consider, for instance, the wonderful ambiguity one finds in the word invention when one considers its derivation. The Latin invenire means principally “to find,” “to encounter,” or (literally) “to come upon.” Only secondarily does it mean “to create” or “to originate.” Even in English, where the secondary sense has now entirely displaced the primary, the word retained this dual connotation right through the seventeenth century. This pleases me for two reasons. The first is that, as an instinctive Platonist, I naturally believe that every genuine act of human creativity is simultaneously an innovation and a discovery, a marriage of poetic craft and contemplative vision that captures traces of eternity’s radiance in fugitive splendors here below by translating our tacit knowledge of the eternal forms into finite objects of reflection, at once strange and strangely familiar. The second is that the word’s ambiguity helps me to formulate my intuitions regarding the ultimate importance of baseball.

What, after all, will the final tally of America’s contribution to civilization be, once the nation has passed away (as, of course, it must)? Which of our inventions will truly endure? We have made substantial contributions to political philosophy, technology, literature, music, the plastic and performing arts, cuisine, and so on. But how much of these can we claim as our native inventions, rather than merely our peculiar variations on older traditions? And how many will persist in a pure form, rather than being subsumed into future developments? Jazz, perhaps, but will it continue on as a living tradition in its own right or simply be remembered as a particular period or phase in the history of Western music, like the Baroque or Romantic?

My hope, when all is said and done, is that we will be remembered chiefly as the people who invented—who devised and thereby also, for the first time, discovered—the perfect game, the very Platonic ideal of organized sport, the “moving image of eternity” in athleticis. I think that would be a grand posterity.

I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

The coarsest and most common of these sketches—which has gone through numerous variations down the centuries without conspicuous improvement—is what I think of as “the oblong game,” a contest played out on a rectangle between two sides, each attempting to penetrate the other’s territory to deposit some small object in the other’s goal or end zone. All the sports built on this paradigm require considerable athletic prowess, admittedly, and each has its special tactics, of a limited and martial kind; but all of them are no more than crude, faltering lurches toward the archetype; entertaining, perhaps, but appealing more to the beast within us than to the angel.

In a few, peculiarly favored lands, more refined and inspired adumbrations of the ideal appeared. The Berbers of Libya produced Ta Kurt om el mahag, and the British blessed the world with cricket, but, because the running game in both is played ¬between just two poles, neither can properly mirror the eternal game’s exquisite geometries, flowing grace, and sidereal beauties. And then there is that extended British family of children’s games from which baseball drew its basic morphology (stoolball, tut-ball, and, of course, rounders); but these are only charming finger-paint renderings of the ideal, vague, and glittering dreams that the infant soul brings with it in its descent from the world above before the oblivion of adulthood purges them from memory; they are as inchoately remote from the real thing as a child’s first steps are from ballet. In the end, only America succeeded in plucking the flower from the fields of eternity and making a garden for it here on earth. What greater glory could we possibly crave?

You needn’t smirk. I admit that my rhetoric might seem a bit excessive, but be fair: Something about the game elicits excess. I am hardly the first aficionado of baseball who has felt that somehow it demands a “thick” metaphysical—or even religious—explanation. For one thing, there is the haunting air of necessity that hangs about it, which seems so difficult to reconcile with its relatively recent provenance. It feels as if the game has always been with us. It requires a whole constellation of seemingly bizarre physical and mental skills that, through countless barren millennia, were not only unrealized but also unsuspected potencies of human nature, silently awaiting the formal cause from beyond that would make them actual. So much of what a batter, pitcher, or fielder does is astonishingly improbable, and yet—it turns out—entirely natural. Clearly, baseball was always intended in our very essence; without it, our humanity was incomplete. Willie Mays was an avatar of the divine capacities that lie within our animal frames. Bob Feller’s fastball was Jovian lightning at the command of mortal clay.

And there is something equally fateful, as has been noted so often, in the exact fittingness of the game’s dimensions: the ninety feet between bases, the sixty-and-a-half feet between the pitching rubber and the plate, that precious third of a second in which a batter must decide whether to swing. Everything is so perfectly calibrated that almost every play is a matter of the most unforgiving precision; a ball correctly played in the infield is almost always an out, while the slightest misplay usually results in a man on base. The effective difference in velocity between a fastball and a changeup is infinitesimal in neurological terms, and yet it can utterly disrupt the timing of even the best hitter. There are Pythagorean enigmas here, occult and imponderable: mystic proportions written into the very fabric of nature of which we were once as ignorant as of the existence of other galaxies.

How, moreover, could anyone have imagined (and yet how could we ever have failed to know) that so elementary a strategic problem as serially advancing or prematurely stopping the runner could generate such a riot of intricate tactical possibilities in any given instant of the game? Part of the deeper excitement of the game is following how the strategy is progressively altered, from pitch to pitch, cumulatively and prospectively, in accordance both with the situation of the inning and the balance of the game. There is nothing else like it, for sheer progressive intricacy, in all of sport. Comparing baseball to even the most complex versions of the oblong game is like comparing chess to tiddlywinks.

And surely some account has to be given of the drama of baseball: the way it reaches down into the soul’s abysses with its fluid alternations of prolonged suspense and shocking urgency, its mounting rallies, its thwarted ventures, its intolerable tensions, its suddenly exhilarating or devastating peripeties. Even the natural narrative arc of the game is in three acts—the early, middle, and late innings—each with its own distinct potentials and imperatives. And because, until the final out is recorded, no loss is an absolute fait accompli, the torment of hope never relents. Victory may or may not come in a blaze of glorious elation, but every defeat, when it comes, is sublime. The oblong game is war, but baseball is Attic tragedy.

All of this, it seems to me, points beyond the game’s physical dimensions and toward its immense spiritual horizons. When I consider baseball sub specie aeternitatis, I find it impossible not to conclude that its essential metaphysical structure is thoroughly idealist. After all, the game is so utterly saturated by infinity. All its configurations and movements aspire to the timeless and the boundless. The oblong game is pitilessly finite: Wholly concerned as it is with conquest and shifting lines of force, it is exactly and inviolably demarcated, spatially and temporally; having no inner unfolding narrative of its own, it does not end, but is merely curtailed, externally, by a clock (even overtime is composed only of strictly apportioned, discrete units of time).

Baseball, however, has no clock; rather, terrestrial time is entirely subordinate to its inner intervals and rhythms. And, although the dimensions of the diamond are invariable, there are no fixed measures for the placement of the outfield walls. A ball that would be a soaring home run to dead center in St. Louis falls languidly short in Detroit, like a hawk slain in ¬mid-flight. A blow that would clear the bleachers at Wrigley Field is transformed into a single by the icy irony of Fenway’s left field wall, while a drowsy fly ball earns four bases. Even within a single park—Yankee Stadium, for instance—there is an often capricious disproportion between the two power alleys.

All these variations, all these hints of arbitrariness, are absolutely crucial to the aesthetics and moral metaphysics of the game because they remind us that fair territory is, in fact, conceptually limitless and extends endlessly beyond any outfield walls. Home plate is an open corner on the universe, and the limits we place on the game’s endless vistas are merely the accommodation we strike between infinite possibility and finite actuality. They apprise us, yet again, that life is ungovernable and pluriform, and that omnia mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. They speak both of our mortality (which obeys no set pattern or term) and of the eternity into which the horizons of consciousness are always vanishing (the primordial orientation of all embodied spirit). And something similar is true of the juncture of infield and outfield, where metaphysics’ deepest problem—the dialectical opposition but necessary interrelation of the finite and the infinite—is given unsurpassable symbolic embodiment.

Now, of course, when I speak of baseball’s “idealism,” it is principally Platonism I have in mind: Greek rather than German idealism. But I have to admit that, as I have just described it, much of the game seems to speak not only of the finite’s power to reflect the infinite but also of a kind of fated, heroic human striving against the infinite. There are few spectacles in sport as splendid and pitiable as the batter defiantly poised before all that endless openness. We know that even the most majestic home run is as nothing in its vastness, that even the greatest hitter is a kind of Sisyphus, proudly indifferent to the divine mockery of that infinite horizon; and it is precisely this pathos that lends such moving splendor to those rare Homeric feats that linger on in our collective memory: Babe Ruth in Detroit in 1926, Frank Howard in Philadelphia in 1958, Mickey Mantle in New York in 1963, Frank Robinson in Baltimore in 1966 …

No other game, moreover, is so mercilessly impossible to play well or affords so immense a scope for inevitable failure. We all know that a hitter who succeeds in only one third of his at-bats is considered remarkable, and that one who succeeds only fractionally more often is considered a prodigy of nature. Now here, certainly, is a portrait of the hapless human spirit in all its melancholy grandeur, and of the human will in all its hopeless but incessant aspiration: fleeting glory as the rarely ripening fruit of overwhelming and chronic defeat. It is this pervasive sadness that makes baseball’s moments of bliss so piercing; this encircling gloom that sheds such iridescent beauty on those impossible triumphs over devastating odds so amazing when accomplished by one of the game’s gods (Mays running down that ridiculously long fly at the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series, Ted Williams going deep in his very last appearance at the plate); and so heartbreakingly poignant when accomplished by a journeyman whose entire playing career will be marked by only one such instant of transcendence (Ron Swoboda’s diving catch off Brooks Robinson’s bat in the 1969 Series).

Really, the game has such an oddly desolate beauty to it. Maybe it is the grindingly long, 162-game season, which allows for so many promising and disheartening plotlines to take shape, only to dissolve again along the way, and which sustains even the most improbable hope past any rational span; or maybe it is simply the course of the year’s seasons, from early spring into mid-autumn—nature’s perennial allegory of human life, eloquent of innocent confidence slowly transformed into wise resignation. Whatever it is, there is something of twilight in the game, something sadder and more lyrical than one can quite express. It even ends in the twilight of the year: All its many stories culminate in one last, prolonged struggle in the gathering darkness, from which one team alone emerges briefly victorious, after so long a journey; and then everything lapses into wintry stillness—hope defeated, the will exhausted, O dark, dark, dark, all passion spent, silent as the moon, and so on. And yet, with the first rumor of spring, the idiot will is revived, the conatus essendi stirs out of the darkness, tanha awakens and pulls us back into the illusory world of hope and longing, and the cycle resumes.

All that said, though, one should not mistake the passing moods that the game evokes for the deeper metaphysical truths it discloses; one must not confuse the tone color with the guiding theme. Ultimately, baseball’s philosophical grammar truly is Platonist, with all the transcendental elations that that implies. This is most obvious in the sheer purity of the game’s central action. In form, it is not a conflict between two teams over contested ground; in fact, the two sides never directly confront one another on the field, and there is no territory to be captured. Rather, in shape it is that most perfect of metaphysical figures: the closed circle. It repeats the great story told by every idealist metaphysics, European and Indian alike: the purifying odyssey of exitus and reditus, diastole and systole, departure from and ultimate return to an abiding principle.

What could be more obvious? The game is plainly an attempt to figure forth the “heavenly dance” within the realm of mutability. When play is in its full flow, the diamond becomes a place where the dark, sullen surface of matter is temporarily transformed into a gently luminous mirror of the “supercelestial mysteries.” Baseball is an instance of what the later Neoplatonists called “theurgy”: a mimetic or prophetic rite that summons (or invites) the divine graciously to descend from eternity and grant a glimpse of itself within time.

No—seriously.

I am not nearly as certain, however, that baseball can be said to have any discernible religious meaning. Or, rather, I am not sure whether it reflects exclusively one kind of creed (it is certainly religious, through and through). Its metaphysics is equally compatible and equally incompatible with the sensibilities of any number of faiths, and of any number of schools within individual faiths; but, if it has anything resembling a theology, it is of the mystical, rather than the dogmatic, kind, and so its doctrinal content is nebulous. At its lowest, most cultic level, baseball is hospitable to such a variety of little superstitions and local pieties that it almost qualifies as a kind of primitive animism or paganism. At its highest, more speculative level, it tends toward the monist, as a consistent idealism must.

In between these two levels, however, the possibilities of religious interpretation are numberless, and it may require the eyes of many kinds of faith to see all of them. My friend R.R. Reno sees a bunt down the first-base line, in which the infield rotates clockwise while the runner begins his counterclockwise motion, as a clear evocation of Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot’s living wheels, and so an invitation to Merkabah mysticism. A Buddhist acquaintance from Japan, however, sees every home run as a metaphor for the arahant who has successfully crossed the sea of becoming on the raft of dharma.

Of course, the mental and physical disciplines of the game are clearly contemplative in nature. No one could, for instance, no matter how fine his eyesight or physical coordination, hit a major-league pitch with a cylindrical bat if there were not some prior attunement on his part to the subtle spiritual force that flows through all things, a sort of Zen cultivation of the mindless mind, in which the impossible is accomplished because it somehow simply accomplishes itself in us. Japan’s greatest hitter, Sadaharu Oh—whose hitting coach, Hiroshi Arakawa, was a disciple of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido—even wrote a book on his discovery of the Zen way of baseball. But there are contemplatives and adepts in all major religious traditions.

One could, I suppose, conclude that baseball is primarily Western in its religious orientation, on the shaky grounds that the game as we know it has a somewhat eschatological logic: Within the miniature cosmos of the park, the game must be played down to its final verdict and cannot end before judgment is passed. No one, I think, doubts that Yogi’s most oracular formula, it ain’t over till it’s over, is a perfectly condensed statement of what for us are the game’s highest spiritual and dramatic stakes. And yet the Japanese will play to a draw with equanimity, content at the last simply to let go, so that all forces can reach equilibrium, and I do not believe their version of the game is necessarily any less elegant or profound than ours.

There are, however, at least two respects in which I suppose baseball could be said to speak to, and speak out of, an essentially biblical vision of reality. First, there is simply its undeniable element of Edenic nostalgia: that longing for innocence, guileless play, the terrestrial paradise—a longing it both evokes and soothes. Bart Giamatti, though, wrote so famously and so well on this topic that I have little to add. I only observe that the ballpark is a paradise into which evil does occasionally come, whenever the Yankees are in town, and this occasionally lends the game a cosmic significance that it would not be improper to call “apocalyptic.” This, in fact, is why that dastardly franchise is a spiritually necessary part of the game in this country; even Yankees fans have their necessary role to play, and—although we may occasionally think of them as “vessels of wrath”—we have to remember that they, too, are enfolded in the mercy of providence.

And, second, the game is, for many of us, a hard tutelage in the biblical virtues of faith, hope, and love. Here, admittedly, I am drawing on personal spiritual experience, but I can do so out of a vast reservoir of purgative suffering. My team, you see, is the Baltimore Orioles. In my youth I was full of wicked pride. The Orioles, for nearly the first two decades of my life, were the envy of the baseball world: winning more games than any other franchise, the only team with a winning record against the Yankees, awash in Gold Gloves and Cy Young Awards, a team that was often said to be “magic.” In those days—the days of Frank and Brooks, Powell and Palmer, Blair and Buford, Eddie and the rest—it was almost unimaginable that a season would pass without a pennant race, or that New York would not tremble before us.

And now?

These—and I shall close on this thought—are the great moral lessons that only a game with baseball’s long season and long history and dramatic intensity can impress on the soul: humility, long-suffering, dauntless love, and inexhaustible faith in the face of invincible misfortune. I could no more abandon my Orioles than I could repudiate my family, or my native heath, or my own childhood—even though I know it is a devotion that can now bring only grief. I know, I know: Orioles fans have not yet suffered what Boston fans suffered for more than twice the term of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, or what Cubs fans have suffered for more than a century; but we have every reason to expect that we will. And yet we go on. The time of tribulation is upon us, and we now must make our way through its darkness, guided only by the waning lights of memory and the flickering flame of hope, not knowing when the night will end but sustained by the sacred assurance that whosoever perseveres to the end shall be saved.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.

At as early as six months, the babies showed a preference for the helper over the hinderer. In some plays, there is a second act. The hindering figure is either punished or rewarded. In this case, 8-month-olds preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.

This illustrates, Bloom says, that people have a rudimentary sense of justice from a very early age. This doesn’t make people naturally good. If you give a 3-year-old two pieces of candy and ask him if he wants to share one of them, he will almost certainly say no. It’s not until age 7 or 8 that even half the children are willing to share. But it does mean that social norms fall upon prepared ground. We come equipped to learn fairness and other virtues.

These moral faculties structure the way we perceive and respond to the world. If you ask for donations with the photo and name of one sick child, you are likely to get twice as much money than if you had asked for donations with a photo and the names of eight children. Our minds respond more powerfully to the plight of an individual than the plight of a group.

These moral faculties rely upon emotional, intuitive processes, for good and ill. If you are in a bad mood you will make harsher moral judgments than if you’re in a good mood or have just seen a comedy. As Elizabeth Phelps of New York University points out, feelings of disgust will evoke a desire to expel things, even those things unrelated to your original mood. General fear makes people risk-averse. Anger makes them risk-seeking.

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view. Hauser reported on research showing that bullies are surprisingly sophisticated at reading other people’s intentions, but they’re not good at anticipating and feeling other people’s pain.

The moral naturalists differ over what role reason plays in moral judgments. Some, like Haidt, believe that we make moral judgments intuitively and then construct justifications after the fact. Others, like Joshua Greene of Harvard, liken moral thinking to a camera. Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method. We certainly tell stories and have conversations to spread and refine moral beliefs.

For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies.

They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society.

Their implied description of the moral life is gentle, fair and grounded. But it is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great.

There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman.

That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all—with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean.

Welcome to the world of “possibilian” neuroscientist-writer David Eagleman, to life in the space between what-is and what-if, between the facts we think we know and the fictions that illuminate what we don’t know.

Eagleman-the-scientist would love to rev up his high-tech neuroimaging machines to answer the enduring questions about the brain and the mind, the body and the soul. But Eagleman-the-writer knows that those machines aren’t going to answer those questions.

Eagleman rejects not only conventional religion but also the labels of agnostic and atheist. In their place, he has coined the term possibilian: a word to describe those who “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.”

Taking seriously the old saying “the absence of proof isn’t the proof of absence,” Eagleman recognizes that people who don’t believe in God (at least not in God defined as a supernatural force or entity) can never say with certainty what doesn’t exist. So, the difference between agnostic and atheist is typically a matter of attitude, and such is the case with adding possibilian to the mix. Eagleman is not trying to support or rule out any particular claim but simply suggesting that it’s healthy to imagine possibilities.

While he reports on what-is in scientific journals, Eagleman’s brain and mind run free pondering the what-ifs. In his 2009 book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, Eagleman imagines life beyond death, in a playful series of short philosophical musings: What if there were an afterlife in which we relive all our experiences but shuffled into a new order? What if in an afterlife we confront all the possible versions of ourselves that could have been? What if we experience death in stages: when the body stops functioning, when we’re buried, and the moment when your name is spoken by another for the last time? Sum offers 40 such what-ifs. The stories aren’t meant as serious proposals about what an afterlife may be. They are vehicles for Eagleman’s ruminations on the vexing philosophical questions of human life.

Sum has been a success in the United States and abroad. The Syndey Opera House in Australia staged a theatrical adaptation of the stories, with an original score written and performed by musician-producer Brian Eno. Eagleman hopes he’ll get a shot someday at a larger stage, where he can fulfill his dream of becoming the Carl Sagan of the brain, explaining the billions and billions of neurons in our head to a curious public. And that seems to be possible: Sum’s speculative musings have captured the imagination of a small but lively group of people who claim the possibilian label, leading Eagleman to begin writing Why I’m a Possibilian to flesh out the ideas.

Though Eagleman’s scientific and literary lives seem radically different on the surface, they are part of the same creative endeavor: to deepen our understanding of a complex world we can never fully grasp. Since scientists mostly talk about what they know, Eagleman’s emphasis on our ignorance may seem out of character. Eagleman offers an analogy: The work of science is like building a pier out into the ocean. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, “Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier, but there’s a lot more out there.” The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know, he says. “During our lifetimes, we will get further on that pier. We’ll understand more at the end of our lives than we do now, but it ain’t going to cover the ocean.”

*

Settling in at his office at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Eagleman swivels 180 degrees in his chair, his foot pushing off the various pieces of office furniture to propel him around like a kind of wind-up machine. His verbal velocity fluctuates between fast and faster, depending on his fascination with a particular idea. His thoughts can range from the reflections on the latest experiments he’s running in the five fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machines down the hall, to philosophical questions about free will and its implications for the legal system, to speculations about an afterlife.

Eagleman is working on the last chapter of his forthcoming book Dethronement: The Secret Life of the Unconscious Brain. His central project in that book, as in all of his scientific work, is to understand how the human brain constructs reality. One of Eagleman’s most basic concerns the mind: Is our consciousness the product of anything beyond the material realm? Is there anything beyond the physical brain? If there is something beyond, is that what we should call the mind? What does all this mean for the concept of the soul?

Eagleman wants to know how the brain works. “Understanding the machinery is not a bad pursuit at all,” he says. “It doesn’t rob the myste…, doesn’t rob the awe from everything.”

Why does he stop himself from saying “mystery”? Why replace it with “awe”?

Eagleman explains that Frances Crick, the Nobel laureate biologist whom he got to know at the Salk Institute, once told him, “What we lose in mystery we gain in awe,” and the phrase stuck with him. “Our goal in some sense is to reduce the mystery, but that doesn’t reduce the awe,” Eagleman says. If scientists could produce a neural map that explains why chocolate ice cream tastes good, it would still taste just as good. The mystery would be gone, but the experience wouldn’t be diminished. Eagleman makes clear that he is a possibilian, not a mysterian (one who believes that there are things humans can’t understand, problems we can’t solve). Eagleman acknowledges that in his lifetime we won’t come up with the theories to explain everything and that some of science’s stories may turn out to be wrong, but they usually are better than any alternative stories.

Eagleman rejects fundamentalism in religion, politics, and economics. But he sometimes sounds like a technological fundamentalist—someone who believes that humans, using science, will always find high-energy/high-technology solutions to problems, including the problems created by previous high-energy/high-technology processes and gadgets. For example, Eagleman is optimistic about the possibility of finding significant ways to replace current sources of energy. He believes that the more dire the problem, the more creative humans are: As we get closer to running out of oil, the incentive to solve the problem will pull us through.

Besides contributing to scientific and philosophical inquiry, current research on how the brain constructs reality raises questions for criminal law. Eagleman’s work on the brain and the law, in the new interdisciplinary field called neurolaw, explores the implications of brain science for culpability, sentencing, and rehabilitation. Imagine, for example, that Charles Whitman had not been shot dead in 1966 after he killed 14 people and wounded dozens with a rifle from the top of the Main Building at the University of Texas at Austin. What if the brain tumor found by an autopsy had instead been revealed by neuroimaging, and it had been demonstrated that the tumor caused his murderous rampage? If he had lived and gone to trial, should that have affected a legal determination of guilt? The type of sentence? The evaluation of when he might be paroled?

Eagleman acknowledges that in labs such as his, neuroscientists work under the assumption that “you are nothing but your brain,” and many scientists and philosophers suggest that this is not merely an assumption but a proven fact. Eagleman refers to this as the “hardcore” reductionist/materialist view—reducing the mental to the material, reducing the mind to the physical brain. That could be the case, he says, but it makes him nervous. We shouldn’t presume, he says, that we know about all the pieces that make us up or all the forces that structure the world in which we operate. Enter the possibilian. “Almost certainly, we’re missing giant pieces,” Eagleman says, just as previous generations were missing a big piece of the puzzle when they attempted to understand the world without the concept of gravity. “We’re in that situation now, and the reason we know we’re in that situation is because for the most fundamental questions we have, like consciousness, we not only don’t know the answer but we don’t even know what the answer could look like.”

What does Eagleman mean by the question of consciousness? “How do you put together a bunch of physical pieces and parts, and get private subjective experience out of that? How do you get the taste of feta cheese or the redness of red or the feeling of pain?”

Neuroscience labs are busy mapping neural circuits—the signals within the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the body. But “that’s just mechanical stuff, Eagleman says, “and every single discovery in every neuroscience lab is just mechanical stuff.”

“We’re stuck with this very deep problem, this 800-pound gorilla: If it’s all just mechanical stuff everywhere we look, and if every part of the brain is connected to, and driven by, other parts of the brain, then where’s consciousness?” For most folks, the answer might be, “Well, it’s in my mind.” But that begs the question of what we mean by the mind, beyond the physical brain. What is a mind? (Your brain weighs about three pounds. How much does your mind weigh?) Eagleman has no clear way to frame the question of consciousness, much less a way to describe subjective experience: “There’s no equation that can give us the taste of feta cheese.”

*

Eagleman, a hardcore neuroscientist who loves the data coming out of his lab as much as conventional religious believers love the scriptures in their holy books, isn’t a hardcore materialist. But what could the missing pieces of the consciousness puzzle be?

Eagleman is quick to make it clear he’s not saying there’s a force X; he doesn’t want to be lumped in with the folks peddling New Age flakiness. He just wants to keep an open mind, which is what he thinks science is all about—extend the pier but don’t forget about the vastness of the ocean, expand what we know but remember that what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t know.

Human beings, including scientists, Eagleman says, are storytellers. He believes scientists have some of the best explanations for how the world works. But the way that the “facts” of the science of one era are replaced by new discoveries should remind us that science is always just telling stories. The earth is pushed out of the center of the universe, Newtonian physics gets nudged by quantum mechanics; science marches on, with lots of “facts” left by the side of the road to rust.

Throw a stone into any contemporary university English department and you’ll hit at least one postmodern literary theorist who will talk about science as narrative, but it’s rare to hear it from a scientist who is as committed to the scientific project as Eagleman. Here’s someone running a lab with five high-test fMRI machines, 16 employees, and a half-million dollar-a-year budget. And it’s all just stories?

“I don’t want to say ‘just stories.’ These are the best stories we have on the planet,” Eagleman asserts, the stories that cure disease and make space travel possible. “I’m just saying that they are narratives that can change. Science is a tremendously successful pursuit, but there’s a lot of wiggle room.”

The awareness that there is always potentially a game-changing discovery around the corner is, for Eagleman, the allure of science. “I don’t think people would want to go into science unless they thought there was something big to be discovered. You go in because you think, ‘I want to kick over the whole fucking chessboard.’ That’s what makes a good scientist.”

*

Growing up in Albuquerque, NM, with a psychiatrist father and biologist mother who both loved books, Eagleman was exposed to lots of discussion about what makes good science and good literature. When he went off to college to major in literature at Rice University in Houston, he dabbled in space physics and engineering but avoided biology; his last biology class had been in the 10^th grade, at which time he pronounced the subject “gross.” But late in his undergraduate career he found himself drawn to questions about the brain, and once he started reading he was hooked.

After doctoral work in the neuroscience program at Baylor College of Medicine, he spent five years in San Diego in a fellowship at the Salk Institute before taking a faculty job in the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center. Baylor lured him back three years ago. With funding from the National Institutes of Health and a few smaller grants, he pays for a lab in which student researchers and regular staff members work out of six cubicles. Conversations about work, along with various pieces of hardware used in experiments, spill over to the office’s combined conference table/lunch room. The whiteboard walls (which are actually a light blue) sport a kind of scientific graffiti—ideas for projects, questions about projects, lists of things to be done on projects—that reflects the serious but anarchic spirit of the lab.

Don Vaughn was a high school student in San Diego when he met Eagleman at his school’s Science Day. After graduating from Stanford and working in investment banking for a summer, the mohawk-coiffed Vaughn bugged Eagleman to give him a job. Now he’s collaborating with Eagleman on a new study on empathetic responses in the brain. Greg Bohuslav is a University of Houston undergrad who loves the nimbleness of the lab. When people have ideas, he says Eagleman will let them run a quick experiment to test it, most of which fail. To do that work without big grants, Bohuslav likes to help design devices used in experiments. “We build a stimulator (device that shoots puffs of air to stimulate the skin) for $2,500 that would have cost $35,000 to buy,” he says proudly. “There’s a value placed on ingenuity here.”

*

The confident Eagleman talks fast and then faster, offering elegant summaries of complex scientific theories and constructing analogies to explain the firing of our neurons. He hits roadblocks and thinks through solutions on the fly. Conversation with him is just plain fun.

The more ruminative side of Eagleman appears when he runs up against a truly troubling question, when he’s stopped cold by the limits of human intelligence confronting the overwhelming complexity of the world—both outside and inside us. Instead of tossing off a stock response, he slows down and reveals the struggle inside Eagleman, between the confidence-bordering-on-hubris of a neuroscientist and the humility-that-produces-doubt of a writer who knows he’s chewing on questions that won’t be solved in this or any other age.

In five hours of conversation, Eagleman and I ran into those walls a handful of times, most notably when I asked whether the size of the human brain means we are a tragic species: Might our intellectual capacity to achieve great things contain the seeds of our own destruction? Given the multiple crises and threats, especially to the ability of the ecosystem to sustain life, I ask, “Is the human story a tragic story?”

“That’s interesting. I would say…” he starts before pausing for 20 seconds, an eternity in Eagleman time. He reframes the question: “Do we hit the solution or the disaster first?”

Eagleman offers an upbeat answer: “We’re leveraging human capital more than we’re ever done before. So I feel like that makes it even more likely for solutions to come along. I don’t mean to be a panglossian scientist and say that science progresses, it’s always going to lead to solutions, but yea, I …”

His voice trails off. Eagleman may be a hopeful possibilian, but he remains true to possibilianism. He repeats his confidence that we can meet challenges, but he knows the question can’t be dismissed. Being a serious possibilian is exciting, but it also can be scary. Are there any possibilities that scare Eagleman-the-scientist?

“I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and I sometimes feel like, oh my god, what if I’ve gone just a little too far?,” Eagleman says.“When you reach your arms down into it, sometimes I feel like I’m seeing the matrix in a sense. Oh my god, this is all a construction. So the same question that excites me [how does the brain construct reality?] can also scare the shit out of me a lot of times. Because it’s much more comfortable to imagine that you open your eyes, and the world is full of color and things just exist and time flows like a river. But when you start breaking all that down and seeing that it’s a construction of the brain, it’s kind of awful, I guess, because it makes you feel so alien to everything you’ve ever known and loved.”

Does that mean Eagleman-the-writer wants to believe that he has both a brain and a soul? How does he respond to the question, “Does David Eagleman have a soul?” He pauses again.

“So, I can answer that in two ways. I can tell you from my internal experience, and from my scientific training. Internally, I have felt as I’ve gotten older that I am not the same as my body, despite all of the neuroscience. How do I put this? What’s clear is that I depend entirely on the integrity of my body. As things in my brain change—if I were to develop a tumor, for example—that could completely change who I am, how I think. So I’m somehow yoked to my brain in a very strong way, and the question for all of us is, are we yoked to it 100 percent or is there some other little bit going on? From the inside, I have an intuition that I’m not just equivalent to my body. That said, intuitions always prove to be a very poor judge of reality. So, if you ask me, ‘do I have a soul?’ I would say ‘you know, I kind of feel like there’s something about me that’s a little separate from the biology.’ But I have no evidence for that.”

The struggle between the brain of a scientist and the soul of a writer continues in Eagleman. Maybe the brain allows itself to imagine a soul in order to take the sting out of mortality of the brain. Maybe the soul allows the brain to pretend to be in control, secure in the knowledge that the soul is immortal.

Hard to say, but in the space between the materialist and mystic, anything’s possible.

In 1820, the Hungarian noble Farkas Bolyai wrote an impassioned cautionary letter to his son Janos:

“I know this way to the very end. I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy in my life… It can deprive you of your leisure, your health, your peace of mind, and your entire happiness… I turned back when I saw that no man can reach the bottom of this night. I turned back unconsoled, pitying myself and all mankind. Learn from my example…”

Bolyai wasn’t warning his son off gambling, or poetry, or a poorly chosen love affair. He was trying to keep him away from non-Euclidean geometry.

Staging an intervention to keep a child out of math trouble comes off as comic to the modern reader. But in the early nineteenth century, as Amir Alexander ably demonstrates in Duel at Dawn, mathematics was viewed as a passion on par with poetry—an occupation that could lift a youth like Janos Bolyai to exalted heights, and just as quickly fling him into death or dissolution.

At the heart of Alexander’s book is the story of Evariste Galois, the French mathematician who died at 20 in the titular duel. In his short life he managed to revolutionize algebra in a series of papers begun in his late teens—with time left over to serve two prison sentences for political insurrection and to court the 16-year-old girl whose honor eventually demanded his presence at the dueling ground. His life was romantic, to be sure—but not as romantic as the usual accounts have it. The story of Galois frantically writing his treatise on equations the night before his death, familiar to all aspiring mathematicians via E. T. Bell’s account in Men of Mathematics, is a fabrication. And the extent of Galois’s rejection by the mathematical grandees of the time was greatly exaggerated, not least by Galois himself. In prison for threatening the King’s life, he wrote:

“I tell no one that I owe anything of value in my work to his advice or encouragement. I do not say so because it would be a lie. If I addressed anything to the important men of science or of the world (and I grant the distinction between the two [is] at times imperceptible) I swear it would not be thanks.”

The quote encapsulates the character of Galois as Alexander presents him: an impetuous, peevish adolescent whose mathematical brilliance is matched only by his ability to make trouble and enemies. But in the posthumous mythology his co-revolutionaries erected around his memory, he was an innocent martyr whose flame burned too bright to last. That trajectory, Alexander argues, is characteristic—almost obligatory—for the genius in the romantic era of Keats and Byron. The genius gazes (ideally with smoldering eyes) into transcendent realms of truth and beauty invisible to lesser beings, and is inevitably destroyed by proximity to absolute truth and/or the jealousy of the dim establishment. Whether this accurately describes the genius’s biography is beside the point; it was the story the romantics wanted to tell each other, and to hear.

As Alexander details, other great mathematicians of the era had their life stories pressed into the same romantic cookie-cutter, despite the wide range of their actual circumstances. In Duel at Dawn we meet the affable algebraist Niels Abel, who died poor and consumptive at 26 after having been turned down for an academic job in Norway; the politically ultraconservative but mathematically avant-garde Augustin-Louis Cauchy, fired from his professorship for refusing to teach what he considered a watered-down calculus course; and Janos Bolyai himself, who successfully got to the bottom of the problem that had bested his father, but retreated into bitter seclusion after the great Gauss failed to acknowledge his victory. All these mathematicians were viewed by their eulogists as martyrs to their own genius, and victims of a world too stupid to appreciate their brilliance.

The history of math is by now a ground well gone-over by popular biography; Alexander is to be praised for venturing beyond the usual “greatest hits” to cover underexposed mathematicians like Cauchy and d’Alembert. While Duel at Dawn is too long, revisiting the same interpretive claims over and over with minor changes, Alexander’s broad range and ear for a pungent quote keeps it readable.

In the book’s strongest sections, the author ties the new vision of the mathematical genius to a foundational shift in mathematical practice. Until around 1800, mathematics was yoked to physics—the mathematician’s role was to solve problems that arose, directly or indirectly, from material experience. Galois, Abel, Cauchy, and Bolyai, despite their disparate politics and biographies, had one thing in common: they represented a new notion of what mathematics was, in which the subject unhooked itself from the physical universe and held itself accountable only to its own logical rules.

In order to make this argument, Alexander needs to go past mathematical biography into mathematics itself. Accordingly, Duel at Dawn features brisk write-ups of the furious battle among the early modern Italians to solve the cubic equation; of the curve described by a hanging chain; of Cauchy’s expulsion of infinitesimals from the calculus; and many more. The reader who is truly unwilling to encounter an equation may have to drape a cloth over these sections, but others will find much to gain from Alexander’s clear and careful exposition. The history of non-Euclidean geometry is handled particularly well, offering many details absent from more casual treatments, and laying the ground for Bolyai’s revolutionary advance.

Before Bolyai’s era, Euclidean geometry was geometry. Euclid’s so-called “parallel postulate”—that every line admits a unique parallel through a given point not on that line—was considered self-evidently true, though no one had been able to derive it logically from Euclid’s other axioms. Bolyai took a different route, asking: what if it’s not true? What if there were a whole spray of lines through the same point, all parallel to the same line? Mathematicians of an earlier era might have found the question incomprehensible; draw a picture on a napkin and you’ll see there just aren’t such lines. But Bolyai was different. He envisioned a geometry having nothing to do with the universe you can sketch on paper. And not only envisioned it—he pinned it to the page, understood its rules and features.

“All I can say now,” he wrote his father in triumph, “is that I have created a new and different world out of nothing.” That’s traditionally the artist’s prerogative; when mathematicians took it on, Alexander writes, they became suitable, even inevitable subjects of the romantic myth. As G. H. Hardy observed, the age of Galois is the age in which mathematicians stopped asking what things were and started asking, instead, what they might be defined to be. 

That might sound like a bad thing. Wouldn’t it lead to a cloistered, inward-looking profession, making products of interest mostly to its own practitioners? The kind of profession, in other words, that contemporary art is routinely accused of being?

No. The irony, of course, is that yesterday’s transcendent realm of pure thought is today’s physics is tomorrow’s basic engineering. After Poincaré and Einstein, we know that the geometry of the actual space we live in is non-Euclideanly weird. And the “group theory” pioneered by Galois, in its time an extravagant spin-out into abstraction, is by now a routine tool for any serious researcher in physics, chemistry, or signal processing. Once the idea of a square root of negative one was a passport into an alien universe; today we teach it in tenth grade.

If the romantic vision of the mathematician persists (see David Foster Wallace’s 2000 essay “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” [pdf] for a good rundown of recent examples in fiction), it is weakening. Recent popular portrayals of math like A Beautiful Mind and Proof feature mathematicians decoupled from ordinary reality, but this separation is presented as a hindrance to their research, not as its highest aim.

Maybe the reason is demographic. The romantic view of the self—”nobody understands me, I’m made of higher stuff than the mundanes I have to live among”—belongs, these days, to teenagers. And mathematics is no longer a teenager’s game. It’s too deep, the path to the frontier of research too long. We will likely never again encounter a figure like Galois, who can redirect an entire field of math while still young and emo enough to write, “I am disenchanted with all, even the love of glory. How can a world that I detest soil me?” The production of romantic mathematical heroes requires mathematicians who believe their own romantic hype, and that’s not easy for a grown-up to do.

Alexander closes Duel at Dawn with a question: what will replace the romantic hero? He suggests that, as mathematics grows more computational, the mathematician of popular imagination will become a hypertechnical computer nerd. Unfortunately, I think a different outcome is likelier: the mathematician as neuroaberrant, like the narrator of Mark Haddon’s blockbuster The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, whose funny-peculiar brain is the cause, not the result, of his mathematical endeavors. We live in a world eager for medical etiology; “slightly elevated on the autism spectrum” goes down easy, while “touched the aether by sheer force of will” sounds antique. The mythology around Galois and Bolyai was a distortion of history and of mathematics, as Alexander amply demonstrates. But we might miss it when it’s gone.