How do we think together? [Tyler Cowen]

Tyler Cowen has a very interesting post today (April 9, 2025): Why not inquire together more? He sets things up by quoting Robin Hanson. Here's Cowen's complete response to that passage:

I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.

For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we use that method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.

I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke. As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person — somewhat separately — refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke. The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.

When people do wish to “talk through a question with me,” I find I am personally most useful offering reading references (I do have a lot of those), rather than ideas or analysis per se. The reading reference is a short computational strand, and it does not require joint, coordinated maneuvering at the end of very long computational strands.

Sometimes Alex and I make progress working through problems together, most of all if it concerns one of our concrete projects. But keep in mind a) we have been working together pretty closely for 35 years, b) often we are working together on the same concrete problem and with common incentives, c) we are pretty close to immune when it comes to offending each other, and d) our conversations themselves do not necessarily go all that well. So I view this data as both exceptional (in a very good way), and also broadly supportive of my thesis here.

For related reasons, I am most optimistic about “inquiring together more” in the context of concrete business decisions. Perhaps John and Patrick Collison are pretty good at this?

Or so it seems to me. Maybe I should go ask someone else.

After quoting the paragraph where Cowen talks of joking, which I liked, I say this:

David Hays and I worked together quite closely for two decades, from the mid-1970s (when I became his student) through to the mid-1990s (when he died). He had been a first-generation researcher in machine translation and thus one of the founders of computational linguistics (a term he coined). By the time I began working with him he was interested in semantics and how cognition was grounded in sensorimotor perception and action (perceiving and moving).

Our interests and skills were complementary. He'd been trained in the social sciences at Harvard and had that methodology down. He was mathematically sophisticated and had technical skills that I lacked. But I had sophisticated mathematical intuition and was a killed analyst of literary texts. We both liked to draw diagrams and worked together on models of mind best expressed in diagrams. My 1978 dissertation, "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory" was Both a quasi-technical exercise in cognitive science and examination of two literary phenomena, 1) the long-term cultural evolution of narrative form, 2) a detailed semantic analysis of Shakespeare's sonnet 129, "The Expense of Spirit." Once I'd completed my degree we continued to work closely together on our common intellectual project. My point is simple: we were deeply familiar with one another's thoughts and had complimentry skills.

Periodically I would visit him in Manhattan for two or three days and we'd work. Sometimes we'd stay in his apartment and think. And sometimes we'd walk in nearby Fort Tryon Park. Inevitably we'd get to a point where we were stuck. Here's a passage from my eulogy:

This ritual began when both of us were exhausted from the intellectual work, and frustrated because we weren’t making progress. Each of us would lie back and drop into fitful reverie. Every so often one of us would make a comment or ask a question. The other would reply, to no mutual satisfaction, and the fitful reverie would continue. Eventually we would work through it, begin talking and talking, and Dave would sit down to the computer and write up some notes on what we had accomplished.

Looking back I surmise that the point of all the talk was to get us to the point where we could no longer talk. The deep work happened during those (mutual) reveries.

To which I appended this:

Perhaps our single deepest paper is "Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence." I forget just how we decided to pool our knowledge and write something about the brain, a mutual interest we'd been pursuing independently for awhile. The actual work began when we met at my parents house in Allentown, PA. We sat at the kitchen table, pen and paper in front of us, and began listing the various ideas, observations, models, etc. we thought should be included. When the list had reached, say, fifty or so items, I suggested that we start grouping them into piles that seemed to go together. That gave us five piles. Hays then suggested that we come up with a principle for each pile. I forget whether or not we named any of the principles in that session. But however that actually happened, we did end up with five: 1) mode, 2) diagonalization, 3) decision, 4) finitization, and 5) indexing. In the paper we identified brain structures having primary responsibility for implementing each principle and associated each principle with characteristic behaviors. FWIW the final paper had 15 diagrams or illustrations. I take that as an indication of how much our thinking depended on visualization.

As a final comment, I note that my book about music, Beethoven's Anvil, was pretty much about how individual minds collaborate, albeit in making music rather than discursive thinking. "How do we THINK together may be as deep a question as one can ask about homo sapiens sapiens."

Empaths & Gangstas: On the psycho-sociology of race in America [Media notes, Star Trek S3 E12]

An old post about an episode from the original Star Trek–"The Empath" (S 3, E 12) –and what it tells us about the cultural psychodynamics of racism. I'm bumping this to the top of the cue on grounds of continuing contemporary relevance.

Back in 1988 Jesse Jackson decided it was time for a name change. Not his name. The name of, well, black people taken collectively in American society. Here’s a New York Times editorial speaking to the issue:

There's healthy archeology in the Rev. Jesse Jackson's belief that blacks now want to be called African-Americans. The term has ''cultural integrity,'' Mr. Jackson said after a meeting with other prominent African-Americans in Chicago on Monday. ''Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.''

The archeology is dramatically plain to older adults who, in one lifetime, have already heard preferred usage shift from colored to Negro to black. The four lingual layers provide an abbreviated history of civil rights in this century.

If the new name catches on, it will challenge headline writers and disconcert citizens only recently accustomed to black. But people ought to be able to call themselves whatever they wish. The desire to choose one's label is as American as apple pie, and as political as other recent progressions.

What interests me here is the way in which nationwide attitudes toward race got focused through this one issue -- the name to be used for Americans of African descent -- by this one man.

A Deadly Balance, A Delicate Balance

In reading about race in America, I have the impression that, back in the day (roughly the last quarter of the 19th century through the first quarter of the 20th), the frequency of lynching was sensitive to changes in the overall climate of relationships between African Americans and European Americans. I believe we see a similar process at work here. The political behavior is much less violent – a name change versus lynching and burning – and the valence of the behavior is different, African Americans are demanding action rather than being victimized by it, but it seems to me that the overall social mechanisms are the similar.

African America and European America have coevolved and maintain a delicate balance of energy and anxiety between them. Whenever the balance is disturbed, balance must be restored. If something happens to cause anxiety to increase among whites, then something must be done to lower that anxiety.

 

Violence against blacks has been one standard response.

Similarly, when something happens that anxiety goes up among blacks, then something must be done to lower that anxiety. While violence against whites is common enough, it is a response which has been more dangerous for blacks to take than it is for whites. There are more whites and they have more power. Hence blacks cannot get away with violence as easily as whites can.

So, how have blacks dealt with this problem? There is a measure of self-hate. More constructively, I would guess that religion is another mechanism, in particular, passionate (trance inducing religion). This is, of course, a form of sublimation (in the psychoanalytic sense). And so is art -- music and dance. That is, if we take a given community and chart the course of racial tension in that community, we will see an increase in religious and artistic activity in times of increased tension. These are mechanisms though which African America absorbs and, in some sense, dissipates the violence directed at it by European Americans.

How groups of animals make decisions

Elizabeth Preston, Sneezing Dogs, Dancing Bees: How Animals Vote, NYTimes, March 2, 2020:

Any animal living in a group needs to make decisions as a group, too. Even when they don’t agree with their companions, animals rely on one another for protection or help finding food. So they have to find ways to reach consensus about what the group should do next, or where it should live. While they may not conduct continent-spanning electoral contests like this coming Super Tuesday, species ranging from primates all the way to insects have methods for finding agreement that are surprisingly democratic.

Preston discusses meerkats, honeybees, African wild dogs, rock ants, and baboons:

Primates, our closest relatives, have provided lots of material for researchers studying how groups make decisions. Scientists have seen gibbons following female leaders, mountain gorillas grunting when they’re ready to move and capuchins trilling to each other.

Sometimes the process is more subtle. A group may move across the landscape as a unit without any obvious signals from individuals about where they’d like to go next. To figure out how wild olive baboons manage this, the authors of a 2015 paper put GPS collars on 25 members of one troop in Kenya. They monitored the monkeys’ every step for two weeks. Then they studied the movements of each individual baboon in numerous combinations to see who was pulling the group in new directions.

The data showed that any baboon might start moving away from the others as if to draw them on a new course — male or female, dominant or subordinate. When multiple baboons moved in the same direction, others were even more likely to come along. When there was disagreement, with trailblazing baboons moving in totally different directions, others would eventually follow the majority. But if two would-be leaders were tugging in directions less than 90 degrees apart, followers would compromise on a middle path. No matter what, the whole group ended up together.

Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, an animal-behavior researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany who led the baboon study, points out that unlike in humans, no one authority tallies up baboon votes and announces the result. The outcome emerges naturally. But the same kind of subtle consensus-building can be part of our voting process, too.

“For instance, we might influence one another’s decisions on who to vote for in the lead-up to an election, before any ballots are cast,” she said.

The coupled-group as a single unified cultural actor, a brief note

I have written of a group coupled in music-making as a single actor. There are two aspects to this, physical and intentional.

A single physical system

When a group of individuals make music together they become a single physical system in which some signals pass internally within the nervous systems of individual participants while others pass externally between them. The external signals are transmitted as acoustic waves while the internal signals are transmitted as electro-chemical signals. Furthermore the individual’s movements, and hence their neural activity, must be synchronized at the level of 10s of milliseconds in order for the coupling to be effective.

A single intentional agent

That’s one aspect of coupling. There is, of course, another. When individuals enter into such a group, they give up many degrees of neural and neuro-muscular freedom otherwise available to them. We can think of this as an intentional characterization of the phenomenon that the previous paragraph characterizes physically.

* * * * *

My primary account of this coupling is given in chapters 2 and 3 of Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001). Final drafts of those chapters are available online here: https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture.

See also my post, Intention and Story-Telling: A Neural Explication, which I’d originally posted at the now-defunct group blog, The Valve, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/07/intention-and-story-telling-neural.html.

Brain-to-brain synchrony in the classroom

Dikker et al., 2017, Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Tracks Real-World Dynamic Group Interactions in the Classroom, Current Biology 27, 1375–1380May 8, 2017

Highlights

• We report a real-world group EEG study, in a school, during normal class activities
• EEG was recorded from 12 students simultaneously, repeated over 11 sessions
• Students’ brain-to-brain group synchrony predicts classroom engagement
• Students’ brain-to-brain group synchrony predicts classroom social dynamics

Summary

The human brain has evolved for group living [1 ]. Yet we know so little about how it supports dynamic group interactions that the study of real-world social exchanges has been dubbed the “dark matter of social neuroscience” [2 ]. Recently, various studies have begun to approach this question by comparing brain responses of multiple individuals during a variety of (semi-naturalistic) tasks [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 ]. These experiments reveal how stimulus properties [13 ], individual differences [14 ], and contextual factors [15 ] may underpin similarities and differences in neural activity across people. However, most studies to date suffer from various limitations: they often lack direct face-to-face interaction between participants, are typically limited to dyads, do not investigate social dynamics across time, and, crucially, they rarely study social behavior under naturalistic circumstances. Here we extend such experimentation drastically, beyond dyads and beyond laboratory walls, to identify neural markers of group engagement during dynamic real-world group interactions. We used portable electroencephalogram (EEG) to simultaneously record brain activity from a class of 12 high school students over the course of a semester (11 classes) during regular classroom activities (Figures 1A–1C; Supplemental Experimental Procedures, section S1). A novel analysis technique to assess group-based neural coherence demonstrates that the extent to which brain activity is synchronized across students predicts both student class engagement and social dynamics. This suggests that brain-to-brain synchrony is a possible neural marker for dynamic social interactions, likely driven by shared attention mechanisms. This study validates a promising new method to investigate the neuroscience of group interactions in ecologically natural settings.

Once more, kin selection and group selection

Jonathan Birch, Are kin and group selection rivals or friends? Current Biology, Volume 29, ISSUE 11, PR433-R438, June 03, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.01.065.

Abstract:

Kin selection and group selection were once seen as competing explanatory hypotheses but now tend to be seen as equivalent ways of describing the same basic idea. Yet this ‘equivalence thesis’ seems not to have brought proponents of kin selection and group selection any closer together. This may be because the equivalence thesis merely shows the equivalence of two statistical formalisms without saying anything about causality. W.D. Hamilton was the first to derive an equivalence result of this type. Yet Hamilton was aware of its limitations, and saw that, while illuminating, it papered over some biologically important distinctions. Attending to these distinctions leads to the concept of ‘K-G space’, which helps us see where the biological disagreements between proponents of kin selection and group selection really lie.

Definitions:

Concepts from network theory, such as the ‘clustering coefficient’ and the ‘relative density’ [20], can help us quantify, at any particular moment, the ‘groupiness’ of a social network — the extent to which it contains real, non-arbitrary social groups at that time. If we choose an appropriate measure and take a time-average for the whole population over one generation, we have a rough measure of the extent to which groups are ‘clearly in evidence’. We can define a quantity G that takes the value 1 when social groups are fully discrete and isolated from each other for long periods (as in the Haystacks model) and the value 0 when there is no population structure at all, with more realistic cases in between.

Meanwhile, the extent to which genetic correlation is explained by kinship can be quantified by comparing the locus-specific correlation with respect to the gene of interest to the average correlation across the entire genome, since only kinship can generate correlation at every locus. We can define a quantity K that takes the value 1 when all the correlation is whole-genome correlation and 0 when all the correlation is specific to the locus in question.

K-G space:

These variables lead naturally to the representational device of ‘K-G space’. A population’s place in K-G space depends on the extent to which real groups are clearly in evidence and the extent to which genetic correlation is explained by kinship. As Hamilton himself said in other words, selection in high K, low G populations seems aptly described as ‘kin selection’, whereas selection in high G, low K populations seems aptly described as ‘group selection’. In the high K, high G region we have hybrid cases that are aptly described as ‘kin-group selection’, because assortment is kin-based and groups are clearly in evidence. In these cases, there really is no meaningful debate to be had about which process is at work.

A bit further on:

What is the use of K-G space? It is an unorthodox way of thinking about the relation between kin and group selection, so there had better be some payoff for adopting this unorthodox way of thinking. Otherwise it will just lead to confusion.

The payoff, in my view, is that this representational tool helps us see what is really at stake when proponents of kin selection and group selection debate particular cases, such as the origins of eusociality or the evolution of human cooperation. These are not just non-empirical debates about which mathematical formalism we should use to describe the process. But nor are they black-and-white clashes between vastly different alternatives. They tend to be debates about where the population of interest should be located in K-G space.

Four ways of managing a rock and roll band

Ian Leslie, A rocker’s guide to management, The Economist, December/January 2019. An interesting article. In part because:

If rock groups are businesses, businesses are getting more like rock bands. Workplaces are far more informal than they used to be, with less emphasis on protocol, rank and authority. Many firms try to cultivate the creativity that can come from close collaboration. Employers attempt to engineer personal chemistry, hiring coaches to fine-tune team dynamics and sending staff on team-building exercises. Employees are encouraged to share lunch, play table tennis and generally hang out. As the founder of Hubble, a London office-space company, put it, “We hope that our team will become friends first, and colleagues second.” [...]

Successful startups have to make a difficult transition from being a gang of friends working on a cool idea to being managers of a complex enterprise with multiple stakeholders. It’s a problem familiar to rock groups, which can go quickly from being local heroes to global brands, and from being responsible only for themselves to having hundreds of people rely on them for income. In both cases, people who made choices by instinct and on their own terms acquire new, often onerous responsibilities with barely any preparation. Staff who were hired because they were friends or family have their limitations exposed under pressure, and the original gang can have its solidarity tested to destruction. A study from Harvard Business School found that 65% of startups fail because of “co-founder conflict”. For every Coldplay, there are thousands of talented bands now forgotten because they never survived contact with success.

The history of rock groups can be viewed as a vast experimental laboratory for studying the core problems of any business: how to make a group of talented people add up to more than the sum of its parts. And, once you’ve done that, how to keep the band together. Here are four different models.

Here they are, the four types:

FRIENDS

“We can work it out”

The Beatles invented the idea of the band as a creative unit in the 1960s. John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s artistic partnership enabled them to vertically integrate the hitherto separate functions of songwriting and performing. The band had no designated frontman; all four Beatles were capable of singing lead. Though Lennon was the de facto leader in the early years, one of the band’s innovations was not to call itself “Johnny and the Beatles”, as was conventional at the time. Partly because promoters and journalists found this new entity hard to grasp, friendship became central to the band’s image. John, Paul, George and Ringo were presented to the world as a gang of inseparable buddies. Their voices blended thrillingly. They cut their hair and dressed in the same style. They talked – oh how they talked – in synchrony. “We’re really all the same person,” said McCartney in 1969. “We’re just four parts of the one.” [...]

AUTOCRACIES

“I won’t back down”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were formed in 1976 by five musicians from Gainesville, Florida, who had moved to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Petty was the group’s lead singer, songwriter and driving force, but the band split its income equally. Petty was talented enough to make it alone, but he loved being in a band: it gave him a sense of belonging after a fraught childhood scarred by violence. The Heartbreakers had an ethos of all for one, and one for all. By 1978 they had released two albums that sold well. Their next, “Damn the Torpedoes”, would go triple platinum and propel them into the big league. But before that happened, the band’s leader faced a tough decision.

The Heartbreakers had a new manager, Elliot Roberts, who, at 35, was already a grizzled veteran of the industry, having managed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. The first thing Roberts did was sit down with Petty and tell him that he needed to be more selfish. “You can’t do this deal where you’re giving every­body in the band an equal cut of money,” Roberts said, “because there’s going to be a big problem at some point. You’re going to feel really bitter and used. I’ve been down this road with bands before. It explodes, and everyone walks away.” Petty listened. The days of equal shares were over. [...]

DEMOCRACIES

“Everybody hurts”

In 1979, Michael Stipe, a college student in Athens, Georgia, was browsing in a downtown record store called Wuxtry when he got talking to the clerk, a college dropout and amateur guitarist called Peter Buck. The two men bonded over a love of underground rock and soon decided to form a band, recruiting two fellow students, Bill Berry and Mike Mills. Thirty-two years later, their band, R.E.M., broke up amicably, ending one of the happiest collaborations in rock history.

Another regular at Wuxtry Records was Bertis Downs, a law student. An early fan of the band, Downs became R.E.M.’s legal adviser and manager. He told me that R.E.M. operated as an Athenian democracy. “They all had equal say. There was no pecking order.” This was not majority rule: “Everyone had a veto, which meant everyone had to buy into every decision, business or art. They hashed things out until they reached a consensus. And they said ‘No’ a lot.” [...]

FRENEMIES

“It’s only rock ’n’ roll”

Charlie Watts’s forceful rebuke to Mick Jagger came at a difficult time for the Rolling Stones. In the 1980s they came as close to splitting as they ever have. Their last album, “Undercover”, had sold disappointingly. Jagger embarked on a solo career and seemed to be seeking an escape from the band, possibly because he was tired of dealing with Richards, who had shaken off a debilitating dependence on heroin only to replace it with one on alcohol. But Jagger’s solo albums flopped, and he returned to his old partner. The two came to an accommodation. By the end of the decade, the Stones were back on the road again, promoting a successful new album. They have been touring – and the money has kept pouring in – ever since.

“In bands that survive a long time, there’s often an agreement to disagree,” says Simon Napier-Bell, a manager of multiple bands, including the Yardbirds and Wham! “People who don’t get on can get on in an interesting way.” It was possible for the Stones to come to such an arrangement precisely because they were never as close as the Beatles. It’s not that Jagger and Richards weren’t friends, but friendship was never as central to their image. When it comes down to it, they are there to work.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Two Tweets of the Day – group differences vs. how people think about them

First there's this:

What group differences look like vs. how people talk and think about them. pic.twitter.com/4ROSCN9f4Y

— Stephen Vaisey (@vaiseys) November 15, 2018

Then Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychologist) asked him to do it with real data. Vaisey replied with this:

Here's the study: https://t.co/BcQuk3uVXP

— Stephen Vaisey (@vaiseys) October 18, 2018

Q.E.D.!!!
H/t Language Log.

Crisis in a High-Tech Start-Up: A Case of Collective Action

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on general principle. It's about a minor crisis in a pre-IPO (remember those?) software startup, though by this time the company had been around for six years or so. That was back in the days when doing an IPO was the favored exit strategy rather than getting acquired by one of the Big Boys (Google, Facebook, etc.). The man who hired me at MapInfo, Sean O'Sullivan, now runs SOSV, which became the world's third most active seed fund in 2017. 

* * * * *

I’m interested in collective creativity, in how creative activity in lodged in groups. I’ve explored this topic in a number of recent posts, perhaps most explicitly in a post that ranges from Shakespeare through the temporary village that made Apocalypse Now. This post is about a high-tech startup I worked for two decades ago. It tells a story of mounting stress and its release.

* * * * *

MapInfo started as a student project in a course on entrepreneurship at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Some students prepared a business plan that was so good the instructor told them they might be able to make a business of this if they so desired. They desired so and availed themselves of the university’s mechanisms for turning student projects into businesses.

Mike Marvin, an administrator with an interest in business staked our guys for a year while they developed the software described in their proposal. When, a year later, they had the software described in the plan, Mike quit the university and joined MapInfo as CEO as one of the Founders along with the four students, Sean O’Sullivan, John Haller, Andy Dressel, and Laszlo Bardos. The business became successful and a few years later they decided they needed a full-time technical writer. This would have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

I applied for the job and was granted an interview. I arrived at noon on a Saturday in full business dress, knowing full-well that it would be extraneous. I was met by one of the student founders, the company President, Sean O’Sullivan, in jogging shorts and T-shirt. We clicked and I got the job. I was employee number 66 (or 67, somewhere in the upper 60s). This puts the company at the upper margin of the size of a typical band, the day-to-day living unit among hunter-gatherer peoples.

At that time the company was way behind schedule on a major software release, having already missed a year's worth of ship dates. I had to learn their (software) product and produce a user's manual in less than two months in order to meet their absolute drop-dead ship date. I did my job and the product shipped at that time.

But the software was buggy, the manual was quixotic, and customers were not at all happy. A company that had been under stress for a year took bad hits from its customers. The developers began the difficult job of cleaning up software that never should have shipped in the first place while the salesmen and company executives set out to appease disappointed customers.

This stress continued for several months when another major release came due. At this time I, as tech writer, made a major mistake that ordinarily would have gotten me fired – I'd messed up in getting the manuals printed. However, other things had been going wrong and Mike saw that my error, however costly, was not an isolated problem.

Well, I’m assuming that’s what happened. I didn’t get fired. And company morale WAS in the toilet. But I wasn’t privy to management discussions.

Mike took immediate steps to bring the company around, including among them an all-hands-on-deck company meeting. One of his watchwords was “no more surprises.” I had no trouble with any actions taken but, a week later, I decided that, from where I sat, we were still in trouble.

I was so distressed that I could not even talk to my boss, John Haller, another one of the founders. On a Friday morning I typed up a memo that said something like: “Something is very wrong. I don't know what, I can't talk and I can't think. I'm going home and I'll be back next Tuesday. Assume that I am working off-site.” I printed this out and presented it to John. He read it, nodded, and I walked.

What I did in the interval is not important, nor do I remember it well. What John Haller and Mike Marvin and the other Founders did was very important. But I wasn't there when they did it and I didn't talk with them about after I had returned.

But when I returned, it was a different company. The place was humming and buzzing. People seemed more relaxed, a grin on the chin, a little pep in the step, some glide in the stride. More noise, but it was happy noise.

And you could see the difference in email traffic. The company had an internal email system and people made extensive use of it. I don't remember much about the email traffic before and after except that there was more of it after, and it had a different tone. I particularly remember that emails from the secretary/receptionist had more zing to them.

So, we have a social system locked in stasis and full of anxiety. I mess up, am called on the carpet, and changes begin. Mike Marvin had put the company into a different mode of activity. Instead of operations as normal, it was time to reorganize. Then a week or so later I, in effect, said the reorganizing wasn't going deep enough. At which point, somehow, someone – no doubt several/many someones acting as a team – drove it home. When I returned the company had settled into a new, and more satisfactory, operating mode.

If, in telling the story, I talked only of my immediate boss John Haller, and the CEO, Mike Marvin, that's only because those are the only ones in the company I interacted with in this incident. Oh sure, I certainly had dealings with other folks during this interval. But it was my interactions with these two that were the most important. Just what they did with others and how that all worked, I don't know. But, even if we could examine daily diaries by everyone in the company during this period, we simply could not tell this story directly in terms of those diary entries in and direct way. It would be necessary to talk about various groups within the company and how those groups interacted. We would have to find a way to talk about the company as a social organism.

The company survived that particular crisis and went public a year or two later, though I’d left the company by that time. MapInfo was acquired by Pitney Bowes in 2007.

Why are conversations limited to about four people?

Jaimie Arona Krems, Jason Wilkes, Why are conversations limited to about four people? A theoretical exploration of the conversation size constraint, Evolution and Human Behavior, Available online 10 September 2018, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.09.004.

Abstract: It is genuinely difficult to sustain a casual conversation that includes more than four speakers. Add a fifth speaker, and the conversation often quickly fissions into smaller groups. Termed ‘the dinner party problem,’ this four-person conversation size limit is believed to be caused by evolved cognitive constraints on human mentalizing capacities. In this view, people can mentally manage three other minds at any one time, leading to four-person conversations. But whereas existing work has posited and empirically tested alternative accounts of what drives the conversation size constraint, to our knowledge, no work has explored the question of why this capacity is specifically four? In this theoretical paper, we (a) review research demonstrating this cognitive constraint in sociality, (b) review the relevant working memory literature, which has explored the “why four” question at some length, and (c) we begin to pose possible answers to our specific social “why four” question. Using simple mathematical models of small-scale sociality, which we imbue with evolutionarily-relevant content, we present one novel possible explanation for the four-person conversation size constraint.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Brain-to-Brain Coupling

I originally posted this in December 2013. I'm bumping it to the top of the queue as this topic is much on my mind these days.

* * * 

Mark Liberman has just posted on this topic over at Language Log, so I'm boosting this post to the top of the pile. He also cites the Hasson article.

* * *

Trends Cogn Sci. 2012 Feb;16(2):114-21. Epub 2012 Jan 3.

Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world.

Hasson U, Ghazanfar AA, Galantucci B, Garrod S, Keysers C.

Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, hasson@princeton.edu

Abstract

Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one's mind, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PMID: 22221820 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

PMCID: PMC3269540 [Available on 2013/2/1]

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The key statement is that “that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment.” I made such an argument the conceptual centerpiece of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven's Anvil. I reprised and extended some of those ideas in my essay-review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. See also my post, The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality, my various posts on coupling, and the piece I did with David Ramsey, Musical Coupling: Social and Physical Healing in Three Disabled Patients.

Addendum: Here's an informal write-up of Hasson's work.

Cumulative cultural evolution: Group think

Kat McGowan in Aeon:

We think of innovation this way: a lone genius applies massive computational power to a problem, and a flash of insight brings about a world-changing breakthrough. But that’s a myth. Most innovation is mundane, the product of lots of copying and a little bit of creativity.

The history of technology shows that advances happen largely through tinkering, when somebody recreates a good thing with a minor upgrade that makes it slightly better. These humble improvements accrue over generations, so that the Bronze Age straight pin becomes a toga fastener becomes a safety pin. Money begins as seashells, evolves into metal coins, diversifies as paper, and eventually becomes virtual as bitcoins and abstruse financial derivatives. In this way, technologies arise that no one person could possibly invent on his own. When Isaac Newton talked about standing on the shoulders of giants, he should have said that we are dwarves, standing atop a vast heap of dwarves.

Researchers dub this iterative process ‘cumulative cultural evolution’: just as organisms evolve via repeated small changes in genes that provide a survival advantage, each human generation makes small modifications to the technology and traditions it inherits.

It Takes a Village to be Creative

Late last year I wrote a post about five creative communities: Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe, the Duke Ellington bans, Disney studios (back in the day but, I suppose, now as well), the group that made Apocalypse Now, and the glory years in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. None of them are freestanding communities, of course, nor do we think of them as communities at all. They’re just groups. One of them was assembled for a specific project and then disbanded, others were relatively stable for a period of years. But all of them were very creative.

One thing in particular that interests me, though I didn't discuss it in that post, is group size. There's a sociological literature on that subject which I've looked at a bit. For example, a study done some years ago showed that Congressional committees charged with reporting out legislation tended to have half a dozen members or so. If the end product was just a report, then the committee might be 10 or a dozen. A different literature has grown up around the size of villages. It seems that once a village grows to about 200 or 300 members it tends to fission. Why?

I'm guessing it took a village to make Apocalypse Now and I'm not talking about the Philippine village that seemed to have more or less gotten adopted. But I'm just guessing on the basis of what I've read. I've never been behind the scenes on a movie production. Obviously there are different phases with different requirements and production on AN was unusually strung out, etc. I'd guess there were a bunch of extras who were only around for a day or three or so; they don't count. Neither does the electrician who was called in on a specialty gig for a day. And so forth.

But between ongoing on-camera talent and the various support crews and behind-the-camera talent, there must have been a village's worth of people doing production work in the Philippines. And within that group you had, what? an “Ellington's band” worth of people with their fingers in the creative pie.

Group Dynamics: Jamming Jazz [2498]

About a decade ago I jammed with a bunch of guys – yes, guys – on Manhattan’s upper West Side. None of us were or had been professional musicians, as that term is understood, though some of us had played paying gigs at one time or another. We met in the pianist’s apartment.

These are some notes I made back then which speak to the social nature of the music-making itself, as opposed to the socializing that went on around the music-making.

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There were five of us regulars, and a floating cast of others. We had three in the rhythm section, piano, drums, and bass, and two horns in the front line, tenor saxophone and trumpet. The general purpose of the session was simply to jam on tunes and have fun, hence our procedures were relatively informal.

Small group jazz is basically a soloist's art (like, for example, classical Indian music). The format for a tune is relatively simple. The horns state the "head" (melody) in the first chorus and in the last chorus. In between you have a bunch of solos. There are various ways this format is spiced up just a bit, but they are relatively minor and aren't necessary to the form.

It is quite common to perform jazz in a piano trio, where you have just piano, drums, and bass. This format tends to be a pianist's gig, e.g. Oscar Peterson, though it can also be a pianist's & bassist's gig, e.g. Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro. By this I mean only that the pianist (or pianist & bassist) is the featured soloist.

Rhythm Section and Front Line

However, quartets and quintets are more common than piano trios (except, of course, in cocktail lounges). Here you add one or two horns to the front line. In this configuration the piano/bass/drums combo becomes known as the rhythm section and the horn or horns becomes the front line. Given that this is a soloist’s art, there is no point in even having such a configuration unless the horn(s) are featured soloists.

In this format the rhythm section is responsible for keeping the "groove" and maintaining the chord progression on which solos are based. The horn(s) play the head and then improvise solos. Musicians in the rhythm section may or may not take solos. The pianist may well, in effect, "retreat" into the rhythm section and leave the bulk of the soloing to the front line. Whether or not this happens is a function of the abilities and interests of the musicians. Finally, if there are two or more horns, they have to coordinate their lines on the head at the beginning and end of the tune.

One of the unwritten rules is that all horns must play on the head; you don't have a situation where one horn plays the head and then all of them solo. I cannot recall ever attending a performance where this rule was violated nor can I think of any recording where it was violated. It surely must happen, but it is rare.

Why not? Think of a performance as a self-contained social occasion. During the opening statement of the head we introduce everyone and say hello. During the final statement of the head we pay our compliments to the hostess and say goodbye. What this means, then, is that if a horn player takes a solo without having played on the head, we don't know who they are or what they're doing at our little soiree. Are they friend or foe? We simply don't know. [Note: There is evidence from brain imaging studies that social areas of the brain are active when people listen to music.]

Jam Sessions

There is however a different, and more informal, playing situation where the norms are different. That is the jam session.

Jam sessions have a long tradition in jazz, complete with accounts of legendary sessions. But jam sessions hardly exist anymore, certainly not in the competitive form often known as "cutting" contests. In such a jam session you have a rhythm section and a parade of horn soloists. Each successive soloist tries to outplay the other, though some of the legendary sessions came down to a battle between only two players. In this format it is not necessary for all the players to perform on the head. You might have half-a-dozen or more horn players. You probably couldn’t get them all on the stage at once – the clubs where these seesions happen have small to very small stages – and the playing probably would be raggedy.

Children in Search of the Dance

I first published this two years ago, but it's worth thinking about again.

An Informal Ethnographic Portrait

Last Thursday evening I went to a concert by the Gordys, a local group in Hoboken, New Jersey, that performs an eclectic mixture of folk, rock, and klezmer music. The performance is an annual event and this was, I believe, the 11th or 12th such concert. The concert was held at 7 in the evening in Frank Sinatra Park, which is located on the Hudson River in full view of Manhattan.

I’d been to a Gordy’s concert two years ago (see photos here) and knew how it would go. In particular, I knew that there’d be lots of families with children and that, near the end of the concert, when they went into klezmer mode, there would be dancing. That’s what interested me this time, the dancing; I wanted to see what the kids did.

It turned out that the most interesting kid action occurred before the klezmer, when the adults got up and danced in circles and the kids managed to fit-in however. Of course, I didn’t realize that until after I got home and started looking through my pictures. Fortunately I did manage to snap enough photos to illustrate what captured my interest.

So, first I’ll say just a little more about the Gordys, then I present a run of photos with descriptive comments, and last I’ll do a bit of thinking.

The Gordys

As I’ve indicated, the Gordys perform and, for the most part, live in Hoboken. They are friends in real life and, consequently, the audience for their concerts tends to be friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, plus, I assume, a straggler here and there who’s attracted to the music. Here’s a photo I took two years ago that shows more or less the whole group as it existed then (there’ve been one or two personnel changes since then):

The point, then, is simple: These people know one another outside of the performance situation. They know members of the audience, and members of the audience know one another. These concerts happen in a social circle that exists within the larger community of Hoboken, NJ, and here, there, and beyond. These people are not strangers. They’re friends, a village within the city.

The concert took place in Frank Sinatra Park, which faces the Hudson River. The park is designed as a low amphitheatre with the performance area at the edge of the river. There’s four or five levels of seating in a semi-circle around the performance area and, as structured for this performance, thirty feet or so between the stage area and the first level of seating. This in-between is where the circle dancing takes place in the last third or so of the concert.

Hearing the Text Changes the Experience

Gregory Jusdanis, one of the more astute bloggers at Stanford's Arcade, has an interesting post on the experience of listening to an audiobook of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He had his doubts about the experience – he listened to the audiobook while driving – but it seems to have transformed his sense of what a book, a text, is.

As the waves of the story reverberated through the car, I felt myself pulled into Twain’s world, incapable of maintaining the critical distance permitted by writing. When reading you gain perspective by closing your eyes, even for a second, moving them up or down, daydreaming perhaps, or concentrating on the distinction between your universe and that imagined one.

Ah, critical distance, lost. That's the curse of reading as a professional critic, you're always looking out for the critical opportunity, having thoughts of your own, and so pulling away from the text itself.

Baboons Decide, Beethoven 9

Reading Latour’s recent essay reminds me that he’s done some work on baboons. I haven’t, but a particular bit of baboon behavior has been on my mind for years: collective decision-making. Here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 107-110) where I talk about baboon decision-making and compare it to the opening of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Let’s consider an example of real social interaction, but not among humans. Let us follow Hans Kummer in observing a resting troop of baboons deciding where to go next. As you read this account you might imagine that you are a baboon situated somewhere in the middle of a troop having, say, eighty members. This is what Kummer sees from his vantage point outside the troop:

The troop performs slow on-the-spot movements, changing its shape like an undecided amoeba. Here and there, males move a few yards away from the troop and sit down, facing in a particular direction away from the center. Pseudopods are generally formed by the younger adult males and their groups. For a time, pseudopods protrude and withdraw again, until one of the older males in the center of the troop rises and struts toward one of the pseudopods. At this, the entire troop is alerted and begins to depart in the indicated direction.

There is thus a fair amount of milling about in which the group ponders its options and, after due deliberation, an elder makes a decision. The troop pulls together and heads out. By comparison you might think about the opening of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: distinctly different musical ideas mill about at until one of them, the “Ode to Joy,” takes charge.

Let’s think about the older males at the group’s center. They cannot see the entire troop in a glance nor even by scanning from a fixed point of view. Each is checking out the various pseudopods and one another, glancing about, picking up indications here and there and integrating it all until one of them decides both that he’s the one to signal a direction, and what that direction is. Whatever the exact nature of the neural dynamics that performs these tasks, all this attending, updating, and integrating requires a pretty sophisticated control system to scan the scene and integrate tens or hundreds of indications about the state of the troop.

Come Together, Right NOW! Music on the March

Yeah, Dylan was cool. But today we have marchin’ music that would burn his protestin’ butt.

Last Saturday Salon published an article by Stephen Deusner on protest music: Will a new Dylan emerge from Occupy Wall Street? For better or worse it struck me as a bit of a lament for the Good Old Days when they had Good Old/New Protest songs, but, alas, kids today don’t write ‘em like they used to:

As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral.

Things get moderated toward the end:

The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. ...

On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away.

Well, maybe.

People’s Music

But I have a somewhat different take on the whole business. Back in the day the most important music was the music sung in black churches, mostly traditional hymns and gospel. That’s the music that summoned, organized and energized the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement was a different group of people and, of course, a different issue, but it emerged in a public arena that had been activated by the civil rights movement.

Time and Again, the Curse of the Linearizing Amulets

A few days ago I did a post on clave playing, Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 1, Loosen Up. At the end I promised a follow-up, How to Construct a Spirit. I’m still working on it and this post is part of that effort. Just when I’ll get there, I cannot predict.

Note: I've edited this post at 6:30 PM 1 October 2011. 

One of the few things I still remember from having read Marshall McLuhan years ago is a remark on time, something about living in a culture—I forget which—where time is marked by burning sticks of incense. How different that must be from our culture.

And how strange we are, wearing, as most of us do, electromechanical amulets that mark the passage of time down to the second, if not less. The time we so mark is, in some contexts, known as clock time. Certainly, in this context that is how we call it.

These amulets are conceptually linked to a scheme that conceives of time as linear, and the line extends back into the past to the beginning of the universe and forward until . . . . whenever. Time is a line, moment after moment after moment, etc.

At the same time, there are these myths and stories of time as circular, not to mention Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return. But what if time really were circular? Or, at least, not linear? How could that be? Could the presence of those linearizing amulets make us insensitive to temporal circularity.

Brain States

That question became very real to me when I was working on Beethoven’s Anvil. There I had to think about the brain and its states. And THAT’s very tricky.

I had decided to follow Walter Freeman’s approach to neurodynamics. Freeman thinks about brain states like a physicist thinks about the state of, say, a volume of gas. In this way of thinking the state of a physical system is a function of the state of each component of that system. So, the state of some volume of gas can be specified by noting the position and velocity of each molecule. If there are 100 trillion molecules in some volume, then you need the position and velocity for each of those molecules. Well, actually you don’t; as a practical matter you can’t get that information. But the underlying math is about that kind of object, position and velocity for each particle.

Now, let’s do that for a brain. What will serve as our molecular component? The individual neuron usually plays this role, but one might choose, instead, the synapse. For our purposes it makes no difference. Either way, there are lots of them. The Wikipedia puts the number at 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. That’s a lot.

To specify the brain’s state at a given moment in clock time we need to know the state of each molecular component, say of each neuron. One convenient way to do this is to say that a neuron is either firing or it is not. So it can have two states. But neurons are complicated things; each is a living cell with the full complement of machinery that that requires. There’s a lot more to a neuron that whether or not it’s firing.

Reading Latour 11.1: The Cartesian Individual

And Why it Must Be Rejected

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.

This is an appendix to my previous installment of Reading Latour. I want to say a bit more about the Cartesian individual, whom I jettisoned when I began to think about music. For it is this individual that has been, I believe, the default starting for most thinking in les sciences de l’homme, including most thinking about music.

By Cartesian individual I mean, of course, the individual that Descartes put at the center of his philosophical meditations. This individual mostly sits in his vat, unable to move, and ponders two questions: Is there a world out there? If so, is there anyone else in it? For such an individual society is deeply problematic—‘hell is other people’, remember that? When examined in the Cartesian shadow, society is conceived as atomic individuals held together by social stuff, that metaphysical substance Latour inveighs against.

When I began to read the literature in preparation for writing Beethoven’s Anvil, I found that it was dominated by this Cartesian individual, though it took me awhile to realize this. Music had been conceived and studied as something heard by a Cartesian individual not as something made by people interacting with one another through sound. Such a conception comes naturally in a society where most people experience many more hours of recorded music than live music and where the making of music is properly done only by children and a few particularly ‘gifted’ individuals. For the most part music is stuff heard by Cartesian individuals floating in their vats.

Now, we’ve got to be careful. The mere fact that psychologists have spent a great deal of time studying how individuals hear music need not imply that they are revolving in the Cartesian orbit. After all, we DO need to understand how the ear and the auditory system work. The only way to investigate them is to observe individuals listening to musical stimuli. It can’t be avoided.

That alone does not betoken Descartes’ shadow. But when I considered the whole array of work, yes, the Cartesian assumption was evident. In the literature that existed over a decade ago, relatively little attention had been given to rhythm and time. Yet without rhythm, no music, which unfolds in time.

When I looked for research on rhythm and on our sense of time, much of the best work was in the literature on motor control and on way-finding (navigation), not music. The psychologists and philosophers, not to mention the musicologists, who were interested in music, were much more interested in harmony and melody than in rhythm and time. Nor were they interested in how musicians coordinated their activities. I suppose that might be attributed to the difficulty of investigating such coordination but, in the overall intellectual context, that just didn’t wash.