Specializing in Everything

I read biographies too much perhaps. They tend to make me feel a bit inferior, but I always consider that the inspiration from reading about Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain or Joe Louis far outweighs the likelihood that I will not be a founder of the world’s largest democracy or win the heavy weight championship. It is not  unusual to be more admiring of historical heroes, as they are no longer around to let us down. In many ways it also makes me feel privileged to be living in a technological age that  many of these people, the three above included, were not lucky enough to be a part of. It would be difficult to invent aboard a ship crossing through pirate infested waters on the way to France as Franklin did, or write books without spell check like Twain, or box.. well that is pretty much the same as always. Where genius becomes more complicated in the modern world is not in the areas that can be aided by science and technology, but in the fields of science and technology themselves.

I decided to work for a Ph.D when I was 29 years old. I had already worked several different career type jobs, from producing plays, to managing sales and marketing for my parents business. Luckily for me that business was a technological one, where I was exposed to the exciting worlds of chemistry, physics and computer science. Exposure is nice, but when I mentioned to real scientists that I wanted to get a Ph.D. they were encouraging with a caveat. They said that in modern science it was important to be specialized, and I tended to be a rather scattered generalist. This was, and I think still is, the common wisdom, which is easy to understand if you look at academia. Knowledge in each small field has become so great that to know everything about a problem it takes years to learn.

The Noble prize winning neuroscientist Dr. Kandel when asked at a conference about how a young scientist should choose an area of research said that he should pick something that takes a lifetime to solve. This statement seems like a call for focus, and for specialization until I considered Kandel’s career. Kandel is in his seventies, working hard on a problem. It is true that he has been focused but that focus is on something extremely large; understanding memory. Kandel’s approach to this was to use theory, experiment and even Freudian psychoanalysis to get there. In other words he was a specialist of everything it means to be a thinking being.

Just looking at the faculty of Columbia alone I found another very well known example of the same type of contemporary specialization. Brian Greene, who the author of 3 best selling books, is a theoretical physicist who works in the highly specialized field of String Theory. While having lunch with a friend  of mine last month we both made a rather obvious realization about Brian and String Theorists in general. The goal of this science is to find a link between quantum mechanics and gravity. This is often called the theory of everything, as it would be truly fundamental in our understanding of the entire universe. So how specialized can it be to be working on everything?

All of this is to take a perspective on the biographies of my heroes from the past, and those innovators of today. Perhaps the advice to be specialized is both right and wrong. We need to be specialists on the big questions, because we have the time, the technology and the work of those geniuses of the past to help us.

Re-consolidated Theatre

When I was 21 years old, and had just come to New York for a summer of acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I became friends with a young screenwriter, who was already a success by the age of 25. I respected him a great deal, and asked him one day why he wrote for the screen and not for theatre. His answer was that “film lasts longer”. This is certainly true where an individual production comes and goes, while a film is locked, and we can watch it fresh anytime. There was another dimension to his comment which he explained to me later. He felt that while the average movie is terrible, a really great one can change your life, and you remember it forever. It lasts in us, in ways that a good play does not. There have been times when I believed this, and times when I didn’t, but what I liked most about the idea was that it gave me a new way to evaluate good art. How long I kept thinking, and talking about a piece was perhaps a measure of its importance to me. I tried to see if the recollection of a piece succeeds or fails to reanimate emotions in me. I have plays, movies, operas, ballets, jazz concerts, symphonies and paintings that all have done this, so choosing the superior art form is not a valid way to for me to evaluate its worth. Still, I keep this in mind.

This week I went to see the Trisha Brown Dance Company at BAM and one of the “The Norman Conquests” on Broadway. I left the theatre loving both of these, but now two days later I realize that it is the ballet that has the more lasting powerful effect on me. So, I would judge it to be more important. I think that there is something about this power of truly profound art, rather than simpler, but still very good art, which relates to some interesting research in neuro-science regarding a neuro-function called re-consolidation. Though I have no expertise in this, I understand the main point to be, that in creating long term memories, the brain creates a hierarchy of importance, so that the crucial memories remain. This is achieved through the strong neuron to neuron connections called synapses. Long term memories were traditionally thought to be “hard wired”, not being able to be broken, therefore not being able to be forgotten. This makes sense, as we all know older people who have lost short term memory, which can be associated with the lack of ability to create new synapses, while memories from the distant past seem perfectly clear. This is still thought to be true to an extent, however newer research into re-consolidation shows that it is not actually the original memory (or synapse) that we are accessing. Instead, as we recall a consolidated event, (one that is “hard wired”) the connection is broken and replaced by a new connection. It is re-consolidated. This suggests that we are not remembering the event, but instead remembering the last time we remembered the event. So the more we think about something, the more we are potentially moving away from the original event, but the more that memory means to us, as artifacts of the replaced connections still exist. This is being studied now at McGill, and a drug actually in trials, which can neutralize the impact of a memory, by breaking the consolidated connection. This is being proposed, and been shown to work for people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). After taking the drug they remember the traumatic event, but without the terrible emotional effects of the trauma.

I don’t exactly know why I thought of this research in relation to my earlier comments about the power of art, but for me the very, very mild, but extremely vivid emotional effect that art can have, and can continue to have are memories which are not frozen in time, but recreated, and re-consolidated every time I remember the event. The more times I think about Trisha Brown these next few weeks, the more likely I am to remember it when I am old.

So what about “The Norman Conquests”? It was a terrific play, which was a creative new farce. The reason I went was that friends invited my wife and I after reading the reviews, which were the hands down best reviews of anything currently playing in New York. I understand why, as there is nothing bad to say about it. The writing and directing were perfect. The acting was amazing. Still, I already don’t think about it much. The chances that I will remember this play when I am old are unlikely. This made me think about reviews in general, and I had this desire for critics to write a second review of a play 1 year after seeing it. Of course details would be wrong, but the response, I would guess, would also be very different. What sticks with the critic, and the audience, the night they see theatre is very different from the re-consolidation of it later.

Anticipating Music

There are two schools of thought as far as musical appreciation goes, and I am completely conflicted about which I believe. When I was in high school, my choir teacher (and still one of my closest friends, Mrs. Meinecke) was more than just a director of our small, but very dedicated choir. She was an educator in the best sense of the word. She is single handedly responsible for some of the greatest loves of my life; opera, symphonies, ballets, theatre and even history, politics and literature (also Italian wines, and osso bucco). Amazing woman. One of the ways she did this was to expose us to music, in order that we took ownership of our feelings for this art, rather than be intimidated by it. This was especially true where opera was concerned. She took us to see Verdi’s “Aida”, but only after we had studied the libretto, and listened to the score. When we actually went and saw the amazing spectacle, and the live experience, it was something we were partly familiar with, and therefore at home with. History has shown that for complicated art forms this tends to be the case. The first performance of the Ballet Russe production of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, famously premiered in 1913 in Paris, as not only one of the biggest scandals in ballet history, but one which actually caused riots in the theatre. Dancers supposedly could not even hear the orchestra over the boos and screams. Though this could have been written off as a bad work of art that audiences just hated, one year later the same piece was performed at the same theatre, by the same company, but this time to raves and applause. “Rite of Spring” is generally recognized to this day as the most important classical composition of the 20th century. How this came to be viewed so differently in one year is something that neuroscientist, popular writers and musicologists have been trying to understand. Jonah Lehrer has a chapter in his excellent book “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, dedicated to this. The outcome confirms that knowledge brings comfort, and eventually appreciation, just as Mrs. Meinecke would have predicted. So, in general I try to listen to an opera before I go to see it.

All of this said, I am changing my mind about this. In truth, most people you ask would say they would have rather been at that first production of “Rite of Spring” and not the one the following year. To be the first to hear something shocking and revolutionary is a moment that we would all like to be a part of. There is also the moment to moment discovery, which unravels itself like a mystery. Why is it that we don’t want to know how a television show or movie ends, but we are happy to know how an opera ends? Jazz is a great passion of mine, because of its complete unpredictability. For me, the more improvisation in a jazz concert, that better the experience is, as I feel that I experienced something organic and original. In opera I have also had this experience. I saw John Adams “Doctor Atomic” at the Met, and had never heard the score before and was blown away by it. (no pun intended) That can likely be explained away, as I did know the story of the making of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, and how the whole mess turned out.

Tonight Marine and I went to see Mascani’s “Cavaleria Rusticana” at the Met. Though there is a chance I had heard this music before, I had never read the libretto, and never studied the piece, having only heard some history of how the composer won a competition at the age of 25. But, I like this period of Italian Opera, (and it is the Met, which I try to go to whenever possible, with the exception of sitting through another production of Don Giovanni) so we went. I was again more moved by the piece than I could have possible expected, which made me wonder if I would have liked it better had I studied it, or as I saw it.

These questions are looming large for me, as I have a young daughter who I am trying to introduce to music. My feeling is that Mrs. Meinecke was essentially correct. My little girl tends to get even more excited about hearing music she already knows. Still, is there a time and place to throw yourself (or your little girl) into the chaos of the unknown, in the hopes of truly discovering something new.