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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ 0:00
The world that we experience is in no way obvious or rote or matter of fact. The world that we experience is a world that we create. Our minds create the world that we live in, and our mind creates the world that we live in by perceiving and understanding relationships.
PJ 0:25
Hello, and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. David Gilden, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Austin, Texas, University of Texas, Austin, excuse me, and we're talking about his book, The Psychology of Human Temporality. Dr. Gilden. Wonderful to have you on today.
David Gilden 0:43
Thank you. Wonderful to be here.
PJ 0:45
So glad to have you. And so tell me, Dr. Gilden, why this book?
David Gilden 0:52
I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you long answers, because long answers are indicated. I've been, I've been doing experimental psychology for about 35 years, and I have always regarded books written by experimental psychologists to be largely a waste of time. They have, you know, they have a lifetime of about 15 minutes for people who've written books that nobody have read, and it's kind of pointless. Our primary communication is through peer-reviewed articles in various psychological publications, and that's what I've been doing my whole life, or live for the last 35 years, and somewhere around 2006 2007 I was started teaching a course in the psychology of music and developing a lot of ideas about gestalt psychology, which we're going to talk more about, and I had a grad student who was encouraging me to write a book, this was, you know, like what, 20 years ago, and I explained to her that books are a waste of time in psychology, nobody reads them, and they, you know, they're just they're idiosyncratic and weird. There is one book in my field which is really great, and it's called The Ecological Approach to Perception by James Gibson, and this single book, it may be most important book ever written in psychology, and I, you know, I recommend it to all my students. I have multiple copies. It's influenced my thinking, as well as the thinking of a whole generation of psychologists. Outside of that book, I don't see a whole lot happening. So I was not predisposed to writing a book, and so I explained to Tanya, books were waste of time, so over the over the over the 20 year period since she mentioned this, and I've been teaching this course in psychology of music, I I published a number of articles in Psychological Review and in other journals, Journal Experimental Psychology, and they're really difficult articles, especially the article in Psychological Review, and I really, at some point, I began to think that I wanted a wider readership for the work that I was doing than I was going to get in this extremely, it's a very prestigious journal, but it's, it's, it's the article was, was difficult, really difficult. I gave it to my lab, I gave part of it to my lab assistant, my lab manager to read, and she just looked at me and said, David, this is so dense, I can't read it, and you know, but that, that's, that's academic ease, we write, we write dents, and then you know, so that was something that was gnawing at me, was that my ideas and my work was not going to get a wide readership because of where it was published in the nature of my writing, and then I got contacted by University of Cambridge University Press. I thought it was a joke at first, but then I realized this guy was actually legit. He actually is an editor there, and he wanted me to write a book on music, and I countered with the idea that I'll write a book that has a lot of music in it, but I'm going to write a book that has more to do with the human response to passage of time, and I say human response to the passage of time, as opposed to people's understanding of time, because I'm not interested in people's understanding of time. What they understand about it has to do mostly with regret, remorse, and dread. What I'm interested in is the human response to living in time, and that's why I use the word temporality, as opposed to time cognition or time perception, and the editor was agreeable to it. So I embarked on what may be a really fruitless and stupid journey of writing a, an act, you know, a book that expanded on my articles. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure I'm gonna even sell 10 copies, maybe I will, because you're, you know, when we were talking about this before we started taping, you made it clear that this is a difficult book, and it is a difficult book, and I'm wondering if I'm, if, if it's too difficult, that it will test anybody's patience, not realizing that there may be a reward in getting through it, but it is a difficult book.
David Gilden 5:27
So I wrote a book in order to expand on the ideas and my articles to provide what I want. I want to provide a coherent and connected narrative, so that the whole gist of it was laid out in a more or less linear fashion, so you can see how one idea leads to another, because where we start and where we end are so remote and so different. I start off with how do psychologists think about the passage of time, and I end up in a study of biology and what's called allometry, which is how the dimensions of animal bodies impacts their cognition. So I start off with a really abstract thing of how do people experience time, and I get to how does the body structure time, and we made a series of discoveries in our experimental work that made that question and that endpoint meaningful. The journey, the journey I wanted to lay out in a more or less continuous and coherent fashion. So I wrote this book, and I, as I was writing it, I told the editor on several occasions, this is a difficult book, and I'm not sure who's going to read it, because it's not like Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell writes pretty interesting books, but he really writes, he's more accessible. There's a single person that can't read Blink or something with strangers. I mean, he, he, it's not that he dumbs it down, but he's got a convivial style. And another author, Steven Pinker, is a great example of a really good science writer. I'm not sure that I'm a science writer, I'm a researcher that wrote a book,
PJ 7:21
yeah,
PJ 7:22
and that's that's a distinction,
PJ 7:25
yeah.
David Gilden 7:25
The reason I wrote the book was I wanted to put my ideas into a narrative form that wasn't academic and wasn't published in the Journal Psychological Review, that hopefully be more accessible. I'm not sure I succeeded, because even though it's not as dense, the book is not as dense as my academic articles, it's still difficult. So that's why I wrote the foreword that I did, where I made it clear that we start off with existential philosophy and move into gestalt psychology, in which there's a lot of experimental work, and that's one of the things that really distinguishes my book is that I really get into the weeds of how experiments are done and what we learn from the experiments that are relevant to the ideas that I'm trying to promote and explain, and then I really do get into physics, and so when I was explaining to my brother, I've written a book I'm not sure anybody's going to read, because it actually contains three differential equations. I don't write them in, I don't write them in calculus form, but they really are called rate equations, and there are three rate equations that have to do with my ideas about how forgetting occurs, and this physical underpinning is present in really all of psychological theory, and it's even present in introductory psychology courses, but nobody mentions it because it's just way too scary. So, when people have a an intro to memory, for example, they'll talk about the power law of forgetting, and this is a really famous thing that was discovered back in 1890 when the very first memory experiments were done, and there is a specific rate at which forgetting occurs, and rates come from rate equations. It's just that nobody in psychology talks about rate equations well, because they regret, because they're psychologists, they don't, they don't, they don't, they don't speak equations, equations aren't in their, in their, in their lexicon, and so the, the underpinnings, which are in my book, and I'm really, I'm interested in,
PJ 9:34
yeah,
David Gilden 9:34
How do we end up with a law of forgetting? Well, we're going to end up with a law of forgetting when we look at what creates those laws, but that is, that's me as a physicist writing a psychology book, and that's that's another thing that that makes my book difficult, is that my education is not a psychology, my education is in theoretical physics and theoretical astrophysics in particular. It, and so I was a practicing astrophysicist for a decade before I ever even thought about going into psychology, and that's just a personal journey thing that it really isn't relevant to this podcast, but I had a crisis in my life in which I wanted to do something else besides, besides do astronomical theory, and I wanted to have a larger life, and I wanted to teach a more diverse and broad base of students than I was than you get in physics courses, and so I became a psychologist. Literally, the National Institutes of Health gave me a four-year grant to transform my career, and I went from being an astrophysicist to being an experimental psychologist, and then I got jobs in the field of psychology, and I was never a professor in astronomy, but I did several postdocs, and when I write this book, when I wrote the book, I'm writing it out of my head, right, and so my head is full of physics and full of numbers, because that's my happy place, that's where I start off, and so you know the book. I don't think it's possible for me to write a book that doesn't have equations in it, and people's response to that is going to be varied. My brother-in-law, who's a professor at Georgetown in the English department, bless his heart. He got the, he bought the book out of his own money, and he put it down when he hit the first equation. And then he told my sister, I need to go back and learn calculus. He's 85 years old, which is not true. You don't need a book in calculus to read my book, but that was his Rorschach response to the inkblot that I presented him. I had an equation in chapter one, and his response was, I'm not educated enough to read this book, I need to go back to school.
PJ 11:54
Right. Well, yes, and I appreciate you sharing that. I want to encourage you that I think, however, I believe that this this book can find its readership. I hope that I can be a part of that. I think maybe one way to approach this, and I would love to hear, what are the three equations that kind of form the spine of this narrative journey? Is that, is that, am I tracking with you there?
PJ 12:19
Well, the equations appear at a specific juncture.
PJ 12:25
Yeah,
David Gilden 12:25
so let me just sort of lay out how we get to equations and why equations might even be remotely relevant, because that's not obvious, since the failed psychology does very well without equations. So, in chapter two, which is really where the book begins. Chapter one is more or less a deconstruction of the field of a field of temporal temporality in the field of timing research, and I'm arguing why we need different approach, and the approach that's laid out in chapter two is that the world that we experience is in no way obvious or rote or matter of fact, the world that we experience is a world that we create. Our minds create the world that we live in, and our mind creates the world that we live in by perceiving and understanding relationships, and relationships. This is I is, I don't know, makes this too complicated with you. Let me just, let me just give you an example from my user course. So, sure, here is a, here's a clap, and here's a clap, and here's a clap, and we're experiencing these things as just one clap after another, and I deliberately created that, so that you hear them as just being one thing happening after another, but listen to this, now you perceive some rhythm, and that's what it means to experience the collapse in relationship to each other, you begin to create what psychologists call an emergent property, and that emergent property that comes out of the collapse is a feeling. The feeling emerges in your body that is created by the collapse. So now we got in the world more than just what's in the world. What's in the world is the sound pressure and the waves that are created by claps. And then, in mind, we've got rhythm, and the rhythm is not in the world. The claps are in the world, the rhythm is in the mind. And so that's where the book begins by pointing out that the world that we experience is a world that is full of immersion properties. The world is not given in a rote or matter-of-fact way. Animals come into the world and they start perceiving things in relationship to each other. So, here's another example. I'm a musician, so most of my examples come from music.
PJ 15:01
What do you play?
David Gilden 15:02
I play trumpet. I've been playing.
PJ 15:04
Sorry, that's yeah, good.
David Gilden 15:09
So, here's a note. Here's a note. Here's a note, and you hear those as one note after another, but now we're going to make melody. Now we took those notes, and we hear them in relationship to each other. We hear minor - it's not a major sound. Major would be minor. You hear minor sound, you hear notes rising, they're not just happening one after another, they're making a contour, and we hear this thing called melody. The melody is not in the world, the notes are the notes, and its vibrations are in the world. The melody is in the head, and melody is really subtle, because that melody can be transposed, it doesn't have to even have those notes. We can, if I want to say, if you know, if you want to sing St. James Infirmary,
Speaker 1 16:09
the
David Gilden 16:13
same song, the same song, different notes. What's in the world of the notes. What's in the mind is the melody. The mind is creating relationships. That's chapter two.
PJ 16:28
Can I ask a question? Here is this. It feels like this also is complicated, and you're.. I understand you're just doing the examples. I want to make sure that I'm on the same track with you. This gets complicated by the concept, and the only name I know it by, is I think it's the Japanese term "ma" the idea of silence. So, for instance, I need to make sure I do it's like, if you do, if you're doing octaves and you're doing the scales, and you know it's a kind of classic joke to do to musicians to play the first seven notes and then not play the eighth because you know they'll need to finish it and so the silence of the eighth note that should be there becomes part of the experience of the of time as well so that silence this isn't just about it's not just about the notes that are being played, and whether they're continuous, it's also the silence, and the.. and we create time around, and the in the melody, and in music, and in life, and this pattern recognition around silence as well, and absence. Is that.. is that another complicating factor?
David Gilden 17:39
No, no, what you're saying is spot on. I'm rephrase it a little bit. So,
PJ 17:44
yeah,
David Gilden 17:47
we take, we take the St. James Infirmary,
PJ 17:51
yeah,
David Gilden 18:00
and the notes are connecting to each other,
PJ 18:03
yeah,
David Gilden 18:04
and they're making minor sounds, and they're making contours that go up, and then the contour goes down, and all of this is the notes coming in the relationship with each other. Now we're going to get to chapter three. What happens when you start spacing the notes out, you were talking about spacing out that last member of the scale. What happens when you start spacing things out? I'm going to play a different tune, so that you don't try and rehearse it in your head,
Speaker 1 18:41
ah.
David Gilden 18:52
What's happening there is a notes, because they're separated, they become detached, and you no longer hear them in their, in their connected form,
David Gilden 19:04
because I have no idea what that is. Yeah,
David Gilden 19:06
notes are still in the world, but they're not making a good scale, they're not making good contour. What's happening is they're disconnecting, but they're not, they're not active, they're not like they're not active, they're very active. These notes are very active, and what these notes are doing
Speaker 1 19:26
is
David Gilden 19:29
they are taking the silence around them and creating a note island, so it's not like this thing is naked. That note is not naked, it lives in silence. That silence provides a context for it. The silence are creats around it, and it makes it an island. An island is not just a landmass. An island is a landmass in the ocean, and it is separate, and the ocean separates it, and that's what's happening with silence. Here a crete sounds accretes
Speaker 1 20:07
silence
David Gilden 20:08
or creeds. What's happening here is we got two things going on. One, if we play the notes fast enough or close enough to each other, we get the immersion property of melody and of scale and of key and of contour among a bunch of other things, and when you separate them, you get islands, and islands are kind of like all the same. Here's a beat island, and then the sounds accrete surrounded, and you're not getting rhythm, you're not getting pulse, but you're getting plenty of other stuff, you're getting silence forming islands around these beats. When you speed things up,
Speaker 1 20:55
now
David Gilden 20:58
you begin to hear something Arabic. I'm using an Arabic scale there, and that you would never have heard that if we had not allowed them to come in a relationship with each other. That's why I chose it, so that you couldn't say, "Oh no, I'm hearing it anyway, because you weren't hearing it anyway. It really goes..
PJ 21:13
no, I had no idea
David Gilden 21:14
one thing after another. So that's chapter three. Is that when you separate things by in time instead of getting connections, you get islands surrounded by silence.
PJ 21:30
Can I ask a quick question? Go ahead. Sure. So, is that.. is it possible, and that this may relate to the, the calculations you're talking about, when you talk about the law of forgetting, some people have better memories than others, and some people's perceptions are trained better than others, or they have better capacity. So, that first, like a musician, if you do that, and I had no idea, I, I could not hear it, but are there people that, if, when you do separate it where most people don't hear it, they're able to hear it in anyways to trace the emergent properties,
PJ 22:06
they can rehearse it, and musicians do this kind of stuff all the time. For example, if they were, if you want to play a ballad that's at 50 beats per minute, which is really slow, in order to play in time, and know where the beat is, oftentimes what a musician will do is they'll subdivide the interval, and musicians will play other kinds of games, and so if they want to, if they want to hear an interval, they'll sing it to themselves, but you don't have to sing it out loud, you can sing it in your head.
PJ 22:45
Yes, one and two and three, yes, yeah.
David Gilden 22:51
But I'm gonna make something really clear here, yeah, unless you're doing that kind of stuff, and you know those, I would call those crutches or strategies. Yeah, everybody's the same, pretty much. I'm gonna, I'm gonna elaborate on that, but
PJ 23:05
please, there
David Gilden 23:06
is, I'm gonna argue that this idea of separating things is common, but all people will all lose our connections, and we lose connections in a kind of general and global way that I did not discover this, this is well known ever since people started thinking about Gestalt psychology, and in fact I'm sure that it's been well known in human communities forever, anyway, but psychologists been talking about this stuff for about 50 years and there's there's a, there's one of the only, there's one person in particular whom everybody cites. He's sort of the grandfather of our experience of the human experience of time, and his name is Paul Fraze, as spelled F R A F R A I S S E, and he wrote an article in which he sort of lays out his experience of how things fall apart in time, and so he's, yeah, so he thinks about the word bitter, and he says, when I say bit ter, it sounds like a compound word, but when I say bit ter, I don't hear the word anymore, I just hear two syllables, and he says, Well, how long do I have to wait between bit and tur before I no longer hear the word, and I just hear two syllables, and that's really what my book is about, and it takes about, it takes about two seconds between the bit and the tur before you stop doing the and you start just hearing bit turn that two seconds is not it's not about the word bitter it's a global experience so the best example of the ones that humans know most about is the metronome
David Gilden 24:58
if you
David Gilden 24:59
go online. Nine, and you ask for a metronome, you type in online metronome into a search tab, a metronome will come up, and 90% of the time the metronome that comes up has an ending at 40 beats per minute, and the reading, and if you, if you buy a metronome,
PJ 25:18
yeah,
David Gilden 25:20
like a Seth Thomas metronome, because it's manufactured and thought goes into how do we build metronomes that people will actually use. Those metronomes definitely go down to 40 beats per minute. Well, 40 beats per minute is the societally, the societal cultural understanding of the absolute slowest that you can recommend playing muzhik any slower than that, people are gonna probably be lost, and they're gonna be lost because the beats stop forming relationships and they start forming islands, and the conductor, their hand motions start far, you know, start decon hit the conductor. No longer knows what the beat is, and so there's flailing, or maybe they're subdividing, but if they're not, they're flailing. And the people that are listening to music are listening no longer to connected streams of sound, but they're listening to note islands. And when does that happen? Well, 40 beats per minute. If you're driving down the highway and you see an exit and it says 25 miles per hour, that means don't do it faster than 25 When you see a metronome that's 40 beats per minute, which is a second and a half between each beat, what that metronome is saying is don't try and play music in which the quarter notes are separated by two seconds, because you're not going to be playing music anymore, just gonna be wandering around lost. That two seconds is really important, and that two seconds is a, it's a general, is a general thing. So, for example, if I say to you, or you say to me, do you understand what I'm talking about? Well, I'm going to nod my head at you, and I'm going to tell you that I understand. Here we go. That's that. Just for me, I understand. If we were in India, we'd probably go like that, because they have their own way of doing things. But yeah, this means yes in America. Now, what would happen if I separated those head motions by a second and a half or two seconds? It just looks weird.
PJ 27:34
Yeah, yeah,
David Gilden 27:35
that looks weird. So, gestures, music, bitter, everything is falling apart when you start putting time in between them. Okay? Why? What's happening there? Something is getting lost now. When you're playing the beats, the beats aren't getting lost. We can, you know, a month from now, we can go back and think about what we talked about, and you'll remember that I went like that. What you're the beats don't get forgotten. The beats are now part of long-term memory, and the fact that beats were played are now going to be part of your life for the rest of your life. Those beats are not part of you. What gets lost when you start forming islands and you stop feeling pulse and you lose the thread, is the relationship gets forgotten, the glue in between the beats gets forgotten, the glue in between my head motions that makes a gesture gets forgotten, the glue between notes gets forgotten, there's something that the thing that intermediates that connects things, it gets forgotten. That's where my book really begins. That's where I started making a contribution. I never.. I did not discover Gestalt psychology, and I did not discover that that timing is really important in whether or not you experience relationships, but I'm the first person I think to ask the question, well, what's going on here? What, what underlying.. I don't want to use the word mechanism, but I'm going to.. when you say words like mechanism, it seems like you know what you're talking about. When I don't, there's. there's something, some kind of process that's occurring that it connects the beats to make rhythm or connects the notes to make melody. There's something that that process is stopping the work, it's just stopping, and we're getting islands instead, where we lose the connection, and now we got note islands and beat islands and head movement islands, and everything is just one thing after another at some point.
PJ 29:48
So, is this where we're moving from like a study of duration to the study of memory because of the loss of relationship? Right? Am I tracking with you?
David Gilden 29:57
Yep. Something is something is getting forgotten. We can call it memory. Why not? Why not call it memory?
PJ 30:03
Yeah,
David Gilden 30:03
well, there are good reasons not to call it memory. Okay, I was just going off your chapter out loud, but okay. When you, when people talk about memory, they always think of memory as something in their heads, and they're storing information, so I, you know, I'm going to remember, you know, your, your, you, and your style, and your clothes, and all this stuff, it's all information, and it's all getting encoded, and it's all getting stored in some sense, and that conception of memory is not going to help us or anybody in understanding the kind of forgetting that's involved in losing the thread and melodies falling apart and rhythms falling apart because the connections are not information, it's not, it's not data, it's not information about the world. There's something else that's going on here, and this is where me, as a physicist, really I step into the picture at this point.
PJ 31:12
Okay,
David Gilden 31:12
and one of the things that that everybody in physics knows is that there's lots of forms of memory that do not involve brains, and they do not involve cells, or neurons, or storage, or proteins, or anything that you would want to put in your head, and try and make a memory out of there are memories that don't involve any kind of information, so what I do in the book is I try and enlarge the idea of memory, so I can accommodate not only the way psychologists talk about memory, but the kind of forgetting that occurs when these are separated by two seconds, so what's happening between those two beats, beats is that they're the sense they go together is getting lost, and when I say bit and tur, the way that bit wants to connect to tur, it gets lost, it's looking for looking for a partner, but it loses track.
PJ 32:23
Yeah,
David Gilden 32:24
okay. So, a conception of memory that we're going to need here is a dynamical form of memory, a memory that is part of physics. In physics, you don't have to have cells to talk about memory in physics. Anytime the past influences the present, you could talk about that system as embodying memory. So, anytime the past influences the present, you have predictability. That's what prediction is. It's when you use past information to predict what's going to happen in the future. So, prediction can be the bedrock of memory, instead of cells being the bedrock of memory, so instead of storing information as a paradigm for understanding memory, we're going to say memory exists whenever the past influences the present, or whenever the present influences the future, whenever you have connection over time, and examples of systems that involve memory are everywhere, literally. Is there just not a psychology? In psychology, people talk about memory just in terms of storage and neural assemblies, but like right now, right now, there's an El Nino that's forming,
PJ 34:05
yeah,
PJ 34:05
and it's in the news every day.
PJ 34:07
Yep,
David Gilden 34:08
what people are saying is what's happening over here in South America is going to lead to weather patterns in the United States, and what they're saying is we can predict the weather in the United States in five months or four months from the weather that's occurring right now in South America, and that is because weather systems embody memory. The weather that you're having today is influenced by all the things that happened in the past as well as things that are happening today, and that's the reason you can have weather prediction, is that weather systems carry past episodes into the present, and it may not be a comfortable way to think about memory, but because you could. Protect the weather to a certain extent. The weather embodies memory. It is a memory-laden system. Another example of a system with memory are financial markets. In fact, almost all economic situations involve memory, so when you look at the Dow Jones, the Dow Jones average can be predicted, not matter, not great, but if the Dow Jones closes today at 51,000 which I think is sort of where it is right now, it's not gonna, when it open, when it closes tomorrow, I could guarantee it, it's gonna be pretty close to 51,000 that's a lot of memory, and the reason that I know that is that the stock market opens in the morning, where closed in the evening before it carries that forward in time, so the stock market is guaranteed to have memory by virtue of the way that we play the stock market game, that we.. it's not like on.. it's not like on June 9 we start over and every, every company in the world has an IPO, and we find out what the markets were on that day, we don't, we don't do that. We take all, all these, all these stocks had IPOs at one time, and those IPOs have been carrying forward in time since then, in a way that the closing on day one is the opening on day two, and so the dot, the stock market has a ton of memory, but obviously it's not remembering anything. The stock market doesn't have cells, it doesn't have neurons, but yet it embodies memory, and it has trajectory. Another, another example, which is going to be really uncomfortable, is that when you throw an object, that object embodies memory that object, while it's on a trajectory, is telling you what its initial velocity and initial position were, and it carries the initial conditions forward in time. That's the only reason you can have moon launches and rocket ships and satellites, is that you can predict where they're going to be, because they carry the past into the present and future, that is a memory, and that that is not a comfortable idea, because in a ball there are no cells, and so it's really hard to think of this thing as having memory, it doesn't have memory, it embodies memory, it displays memory. The memory is in the system, it's not in the ball. It's so hard to think about it that way. The memory is in the system of finance, it's not in a stock. The memory is in the weather system, it's not in a raindrop. It's really abstract way about memory, but we're going to need that to understand how the mind loses its thread and creates islands.
PJ 38:05
Yes, there's a couple things, if you don't mind, and I'm just trying to make sure that I'm tracking with you. The first one is, if I'm understanding you correctly, one of the reasons, if I'm understanding, whenever it's applied to social construction, we get lost because we want, maybe because we want to think we're special, but because we participate in the process, we focus on our participation rather than the continuity of the embodied memory.
David Gilden 38:38
Well, I think that it's that there's more than one thing that's true here, and what you said is definitely true, is that we see ourselves as having agency, and so we are, we want to be involved, and we want to have the memory in us.
PJ 38:52
Yeah,
David Gilden 38:53
but there's another reason, and that different from yours,
PJ 38:58
true,
David Gilden 38:58
but the one that the one that I obsess about is that there's a really strong metaphor in human language and human understanding, and that is the metaphor of containment, and we, when we think about information, we think about information as something which we contain, and if we're going to contain it, then we have to have a container, and that container is called the brain, and or the cerebellum, or whatever part of the brain we're talking about that does the containment, and that's a really comfortable idea for us, that that we let me think about it, even even at a deeper level, philosophically, our primary attitude towards the world is that we share a world with objects, and objects come in a variety of forms. Some of the objects that we deal with are facts. You may not think about a fact as an object, but it is an item. So, when I say two plus two equals four, it is an individuated true thing, and it stands by itself. And it is, it is, it is, it is, it is a thing that that item, to the extent that you know it, is something that can be stored, that is a fact that can be put somewhere, and it's placeable, and two plus two equals four. If it is a thing that can be placed, then it gets placed in memory, and so memory is not a
David Gilden 40:35
fact, it's a relation.
David Gilden 40:37
Well, it's an object.
PJ 40:41
Okay,
PJ 40:41
it's an object.
PJ 40:43
I was guessing
David Gilden 40:44
it's a thing, and when people talk about, I mean, just think about it. The fact that we can talk about having facts, that means we have more than one. When you put that s on the end, that means that you have a collection of them, what kinds of things exist in collections? Objects, objects exist in collections. We have many objects, and they all surround us, and they, they, they're, they're collected, and that's what happens with facts, is they get collected. Well, what makes them collectible? What makes them collectible? And being, and we can put s on the end, the fact is that they are an item, they are a thing, and therefore they can be put into our head, and and when we remember them and think about them, they become retrieved. Well, what is it when you retrieve something, you put your little hand in, and you grab it. It's grabbable.
David Gilden 41:44
It's like a claw machine
David Gilden 41:46
that you can grab. Yeah, and you can nourish it, and you can. You're gonna enjoy it. It's a thing. It's an it. All of that kind of thinking is wonderful, but it's not the kind of thing that physicists talk about when they're talking about the weather having memory, you could point at a raindrop, and but the memory is not in the raindrop, and you can point at a cloud, but the memory is not in the cloud. The memory is in all the relationships that surround the cloud and the rain, and the same thing is true of the stock market. There are, there are forces that cause the stock market to go up and down, and they can make the stock market really unpredictable, but the fact that we can still do some prediction means that there are the through line, and that through line is memory, even though, even though Tesla stock does not have memory, it's, you know, the stock, you know, it's whatever it's worth, it doesn't have neurons. So what I do in this book is I ask what kind of memory might be involved in losing relationships in the mind and the metaphor, and I am speaking metaphorically, is the idea of cooling or decay. That what happens in the mind when you hear a beat or you hear a note is that the brain gets activated in some way, that there's some energy state that it enters into, and then it begins to deactivate, and there's a period of decay. It is, it is metaphorically just like the cooling of coffee. You heat the coffee up, and then you set it out, and while that coffee is sitting on the table and warm, you could drink it, and you could experience the deliciousness of the past heating. It's no, it's not a room temperature, it's hot for a while, and while it's hot, you can say that this coffee has been prepared and been brewed. It's carrying forward the brewing from the past into the present, and what it's doing is following something called Newton's law of cooling. And eventually, what's going to happen is the coffee is going to cool off and enter room temperature when it enters room temperature, it just becomes undifferentiated, you know. It, that whole earlier epoch of heating and brewing is lost. It's now in equilibrium with the world. But there was a period of time, while it was cooling off, that things could happen. One thing that can happen is you can lift up the cup and drink it and enjoy it. That is a potentiality that exists because of something that happened in the past. Okay, so here's this: where
PJ 44:56
the this is where the math comes in, right, because you're able to use the. It go ahead,
David Gilden 45:01
we're finally there. So, here's a note.
PJ 45:06
Yep,
David Gilden 45:09
it's like cooling coffee. We just prepare the note and set it out on the table while it's cooling off. Things can happen that can allow that note to come into relationship with other notes, so you hear that minor interval, that minor interval gets prepared by the energy that gets put into your head when you hear your mind is ready for that second note. If that second note comes in early enough, it can connect to the first one and make that juicy sound.
Speaker 1 45:54
If it
David Gilden 45:57
doesn't come in, you I played a major thing, so it'll sound different. It just,
PJ 46:08
yeah, yeah, it's like
David Gilden 46:13
the put the coffee out, it cools, and now you drink it. It's like this is nothing happening here. The same thing is happening in the mind when you hear something or experience something, you get something, some juice, some energy, and during the cooling off period, there is a period of time where you can make connections, beats if they come in early enough can make rhythms if they don't come in, they cool off. It's hard to think about beats cooling off, but that's the way I think about it. The beats cool off, the notes cool off, my head motion cools off, and no longer makes a dog. Anything, anything that you experience is going to create a pulse of energy, and that energy for that lifetime that it's around is available to create relationships and connections in these immersion properties, is able to do the gestalt thing, is able to create the world literally that we live in, but if it cools off, that opportunity is lost, and then we just hear islands, or we see islands. So, here's the thing that I got interested in.
PJ 47:35
Yeah,
David Gilden 47:36
what is the nature of the decay process? If we're going to use the word decay, which sounds really sciency, it sounds like we know we're talking about, then we should be able to talk about what is it, how does the decay trend, how does what happens, what happens during the, during the decay, can we understand that, that you know, given I want to make something really clear here, I do not understand how melody happens in the mind. I do not understand how rhythm happens to the mind. I do not understand how yes happens to the mind. All these emergent properties are way beyond psychology. Nobody understands this stuff, but we can make an observation, which is, if you insert enough time in between beats or between notes, in between head motions, you kill off the relationships. This is not about the experience of melody, it's not about the experience of rhythm. What we're asking is a much simpler, and this important, it's a much more practical question, which is, why are we losing the thread? What's happening now? When the thread is there, and you're hearing melody, I don't know what's going on. I do not understand how music happens to the mind. Nobody does say melody, different, different, different chord structures. Why, why do I hear them as being the same? What am I even hearing? I don't know. It's just weird, but what's not weird and not inexplicable is a really simple observation. I wouldn't want to call it a fact, just call it an observation, which is when you separate things in time, those relationships fall apart. That falling apart, we're going to call decay, and we're going to the story, which it's the metaphor, is that it's like the cooler coffee, you heat something up and then it cools, you hear a beat, your mind gets heated up, and while it's while it's warm it can create connections to other beats, and if it does, you'll experience rhythm. When you hear a note, it creates a pulse of energy, it heats your mind up. If another note comes in soon enough before it cools, you can experience rhythm. Excuse me, melody. You hear, you see, somebody push their head forward. If it's accompanied by another push soon enough, you experience yes. Otherwise, it just looks basic. It doesn't look like anything. So, if we take this metaphor of cooling seriously, then we can do some physics, and that's where that's where the book starts getting a little complicated, so you can ask the question, How do physicists think about decay? How do psychologists think about decay, even though they don't use the word, there are historically two different, different major ways of thinking about loss and decay. Nature generally has its own ideas about decay. Most natural systems, in fact, infinities of them decay using what's called an exponential process. Basically, what that means is that the rate of decay is simply proportional, proportional to the amount of stuff that is there to lose, the rate at which you lose things is basically given by how much you have to lose, so if you're at a casino and you've got $20,000 in your pocket, and you bet large sums of money, because you have large sums of money, you will lose large sums of money quickly, but if you only have $20 and you can't bet large sums of money, you'll still lose, but you'll lose small sums. If you look at a lake, a lake may have a trillion gallons in it. Have no idea the rate at which evaporation occurs off the surface of a lake, you're going to be losing a million gallons a day, maybe. But if you look at a teaspoon of water, you're going to lose, I don't know, a gram a day. The amount that you have, the rate at which you lose stuff in nature is just generally given by how much there is to lose. That's the way nature works. We make sense when you have more to lose, you're gonna lose faster, you're losing larger. Yeah,
PJ 52:47
my apologies. Yeah, so when you're talking about the coffee, the rate of the heat loss decreases as it goes down towards room temperature, right, because it has less heat to lose, and so it looks like a J curve. It's logarithmic, correct? Am I saying that right?
David Gilden 53:08
You're really close, actually. It's a matter of some discussion, Newton. He had a, he had his own ideas, and he created what's called Newton's law of cooling, and Newton's law of cooling is not that it's logarithmic, but it's that it follows this exponential form. It actually, his, his idea was that cooling of coffee follows the same law as the decay of radioactivity in a nuclear reactor or in an Armageddon, but there will be different, so the rate at which you get decay in nuclear reactor, I mean this is the big issue, that's why you don't, the reason we don't have a lot of nuclear reactors, two reasons: one, Three Mile Island, and that's really scared people. And then the second reason that we don't have nuclear reactors is because no one's ever really figured out where to put nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is a problem because the lifetime, the rate at which the decay occurs, is on this time scale of 1000s and 10s of 1000s of years, which means you have to find very stable geologic, stable geological formations that will be around for the entire lifetime while the radioactivity is there. Coffee cools in about 10 minutes, but Newton's idea was, was that it's the same law, they just have different lifetimes. The cooling lifetime is 10 minutes. The lifetime of radioactivity could be anywhere from a nanosecond to a billion years, depending upon the quantum mechanics and the nature of what's decaying, uranium, plutonium, those. Those, those things are going to be long, but there are other, other kinds of nuclear interactions that, that don't take years, but take literally a billionth of a second, and so the details matter, and what we, what I'm arguing is, we, something is going on in the mind,
PJ 55:20
yes, where
PJ 55:20
we have decay.
PJ 55:23
Yes,
David Gilden 55:23
not 10 minutes. If I separate notes by 10 minutes, I mean, you're going to leave the room. If I separate notes by more than a couple seconds, you've already lost the thread. So the mind has a decay time, which is just by observation alone. If we just take this metaphor, it's a couple seconds. Now, I don't know where that comes from. This is not a biological theory.
PJ 55:53
Okay,
David Gilden 55:54
this is a - I would call this a formal theory, where we make a formal observation that things fall apart when separated by a couple seconds, and we're going to think about this as a decay process, which means that we have a decay lifetime, which lasts a couple seconds. So, the energy in the mind lasts for whatever reason, and I speculate on this, but it's just speculation, for whatever reason, we have a decay lifetime that is set by either, well, it's set, I think it's set by our ecology, I don't think the mind has its own properties, I think the mind is always responding to the world in which the mind is living in, and so if we have a two second, if we have a two second lifetime for the decay of this energy thing that's creating connections, it's because of the way we move around the world, and it has something to do with the kind of animals we are. It's not a property of calcium or potassium or the membranes that in which those those ions flow,
PJ 57:03
yeah. Okay,
David Gilden 57:05
I mean, the way that's the way I think, I mean, you know, we have, we have a lot of wet stuff going on in our heads, but almost all of it is in service of something that we're trying to do as animals, and so the question that I always ask is not what is the side of the head, but what is the head inside of. I didn't make that up, it's somebody else's quote.
PJ 57:31
Can you say that one more time?
David Gilden 57:33
Do ask not what is inside of the head, ask what is the head is inside of, and when you ask what the head is inside of then you'll understand what's going on inside of the head. When you want to understand the neural interactions and the neural constants and the neural chemistry and the way things work out in the brain, what you really want to look at is not the brain but the ecology in which the head that contains the brain is situated.
PJ 58:02
This goes back to the James Gibson book that you mentioned earlier,
David Gilden 58:05
Gibson and people that followed him, but Gibson really started this whole thing off.
PJ 58:14
How does, if you don't mind,
PJ 58:16
go on?
PJ 58:18
How does.. how does this tie to.. you said it's not a biological, it's a formal theory, but you end with, and I had to look up the word allometry, and I'm probably gonna say it right.
David Gilden 58:31
Let's get there, we can do, we can get there in about one minute. Here we go. So I asked the question, what kind of, what kind of decay do we have? Well,
PJ 58:40
yeah,
David Gilden 58:41
I'm not a big fan of Occam's Razor, but I happen to think it's still a pretty smart idea, and that is all things people, the simplest thing is probably true, which is why I'm not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracy conspiracies require a lot of moving parts and a lot of cooperation, and so that's probably why conspiracies are generally not true. They could be true if people actually could cooperate with each other, but generally, because we're not that cooperative, we're not going to be able to create the edifices that are required to construct a conspiracy. The reality is that nature generally does operate using the simplest thing possible, and the simplest decay form possible is when the rate of decay is just proportional to the amount of stuff that's there to lose, and that is how nature pretty much operates, and that means that there is going to be exponential decay, and if you have exponential decay, you're going to have what's called a lifetime. Coffee has a lifetime. The decay process in uranium has a lifetime, and this is a word that we're experienced with. So, but now we can ask the question, do.
PJ 1:00:00
What's the lifetime of human attention? What creates the life?
David Gilden 1:00:04
What creates the lifetime exactly? What creates it? It can't. It's not given to us by God. Something created a lifetime. Why do we have it? What? What's what? What? How did this happen to us? So that's why I, you know, I don't know the answer to this, but somewhere when I was somewhere when I was a postdoc, I really got interested in some work that was being done in biology in the 1930s and it had to do with size scaling in plants and animals, and one of the really interesting things that was discovered in the early 20th century was that animals' bodies, in particular their body size, has a huge impact on their physiology and has a big impact on their behavior, how they can move, and it has a big impact on what's called their morphology. So, there's three areas where body size comes into play: morphology, the way the body looks and how it's structured, the physiology, their metabolism, their blood flow, their respiration, their heartbeat, that's all influenced by body size and their behavior. How, how they move through space. And there was this guy named Kleber, who in 1932 published this amazing article in which he showed that all the animals, all the mammals, at least that he looked at, when you plot their resting basal metabolism against their mass, you don't get a scatter gram, what you get is this incredibly linear lawful relationship, and whenever, whenever your data, you hit your plotting body size versus the rate at which the body consumes energy, and you get a line that tells you you've discovered something, something's going on here.
PJ 1:02:20
Yeah,
David Gilden 1:02:21
and this became he didn't know what was going on, but it became known as Cleaver's Law. Okay, and this, this, this was really interesting, because nobody could, nobody really knew what, why this line had had the properties that it had, and for the next, it's still going on today, so 90 years later, people are still trying to figure out what's going on with animal bodies that makes the body size, the size of the body pretty much completely determinative of the rate at which you breathe, the rate at which your blood circulates, the rate at which your heart pumps, and how long you live, those four things are pretty much just guaranteed to be set by your body size. Now they're going to be other factors. So, for example, large dogs do not live longer than small dogs, because large dogs develop generally, because the way we breed them, I don't know what would happen, and we didn't breed dogs, but if we do breed them, and what we end up doing is we create large animals that have hip problems, and so they don't tend to live that long, because mobility is a big issue for dogs, and really everybody, but if you take those kinds of things out of the equation, it is the case that elephants are really big. They live longer than hamsters, and they live longer than elk, and they live longer than bears, and as you get, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, a bunch of things happen, your heart slows down, your respiration rate slows down, your blood circulation time gets longer, it takes longer to circulate blood through your body, and you live longer, all those things go together, and I just think this is something to pay attention to. Okay, I'm just saying it's really interesting, and there are books now, many, many books that sort of that categorize catalog all the things that are going on with animals that are influenced pretty much just by body size, and that field is called the field of a lame tree. So I asked the question, maybe, or pose the idea, maybe these lifetimes. That set, how long we can keep beats alive in our head or notes alive in our head, maybe that is set by our body size. Why not? Everything else is now. There's never, ever, never ever. There's never been a suggestion that body size influences cognition in this way. There is a large field in psychology called embodied cognition, but that is not what they're talking about. They're not talking about gestalt in the formation of relationships. There it's a different field having to do with,
PJ 1:05:38
yeah,
David Gilden 1:05:39
it's not. It's not that it's not interesting, it's when people talk about embodied cognition, they're talking about other stuff. What I'm asking is, maybe it's the case if we looked at it in the right way, with enough precision and with the right instruments, we might be able to find out that large people are embedded in time in a way that's different is small people, that big people are like elephants, and small people are like hamsters. As small people live in a smaller world, in other words, if they, if a small person wants to experience rhythm, you can't separate, they can't use a regular metronome. That second and a half at 40 beats per minute is just too much for them. They're already hearing islands. If a small person is going to experience rhythm, you've got to get everything closer together, because their decay time is shorter. That beat that decays quicker, and that beat that was there is no longer available to hook up with another beat, so they experience they're better attuned to things that are happening faster, and taller people are better at tune, maybe things that are happening slower, or at least a taller person is able to experience melodies that sound like sound islands to a shorter person, and a tall person might be able to experience rhythms that don't feel like rhythms to a short person, simply because they have longer decay times, they resonate longer, because that is the way would work if we were talking about blood flow, or if we were talking about heart rate, so a heartbeat in a tall person may be this far apart, and the heart rate in a small person may be this far apart, and when you collect the data, that's actually true, that tall people do have slower heart rates on average. We actually ended up getting this data, it was hard to find. You would think that because every time you go to the doctor, they measure your pulse and they put you on a scale and measure your weight and they measure your height. I don't know why they measure your height, it's not like it's changing a lot, but they do. And you would think all that data would just be there, but it's not. It's not published. But I did find one article in which they had a bunch of people. It was published, and it's a beautiful relationship. Um, tall people do have slower heart rates than shorter people on average, and maybe it's a conjecture. Maybe, maybe this is also structuring the way we experience reality, the way they were creating the relationships in time, so this is where Taylor comes into play. So we have, we're done with the physics, we got out of the physics what we needed, we got a law, and that law gave us a lifetime, and the lifetime we don't know what to do with it, but we think maybe body size has something to do with it. I'm not saying that there's a direct connection there. This is definitely a what if kind of thing. What if body size has something to do with it? So I had this really talented undergraduate, and I invited her to work in my lab, and I said, "Listen, Taylor, let's see if this is true. Let's see, if let's see if body science experiences people's ability to connect beats together to make rhythms. Let's just start there. And she, she's a person who is just beloved, and when she went to high school and middle school and elementary school, here I think she'll.. there was one school she went to called St. Andrews, and St. Andrews loves her. And when she asked if we could test their children in their ability to create rhythms, they said, 'Fine,
PJ 1:09:31
yeah,
David Gilden 1:09:32
you have total access and freedom to come into our after-school sessions, and you can do drumming experiments with our kids. And then we also did drumming experiments with all the undergraduates that we could get at the University of Texas, so we had short people, we had tall people, and what we would do is we headphones on them, and we would, we would let them listen to a rhythm, so they listened to pop up, and they. They listen to it for a little while, and then we have a really nice drum for them that's electronic, and it makes a really nice sound, and they can hear it in their headphones, and then they start beating the same rhythm, but the metronome is turned off, they kind of do it on their own, so they listen to the metronome, so they know what they're trying to make, and then the question is, Can they make it, and we test them at fast rhythms, and we test them at slow rhythms, and everything in between, and we look at this. Is where things get technical. I go into the book, and this, I'm not sure it's that readable, but this is sort of my jam, is looking at data and try and figuring out what's going on in the mind, so I look at the drumming performances, and that's I'm going to call them performances, even if they're good or they're bad. We look at their performances and we try and figure out whether a performance is exemplifying solid rhythmic feel, or whether it's exemplifying being lost, or whether it's exemplifying sort of like I'm feeling a little rhythm, but I'm almost lost. So, there's really three different areas that we're trying to parse out here, and we do it person by person. Each person gives us a bunch of performances, we look at them all. We don't know what their size is. Obviously, that would be like really, really bad science if you knew what their size was going in. So we look at their data, not knowing who they were or how big they were, and we look at their collection, and we say, okay, at 80 beats per minute, they're looking good, they're looking good at 70, they're looking good at 6050 is looking a little wobbly, 40 they're lost, so somewhere around 50 they're losing their, their threat.
PJ 1:11:48
Yeah,
David Gilden 1:11:49
well, 50 beats per minute is about 1.2 seconds between each beat, so we would say we put, you know, when we plot the data, we go back and find out how big they were, that's the x axis. The y axis is 1.2 seconds, that's where they lost the beat. And so now we're going to make a plot of where they lose rhythm versus how tall they are, and that's the, that's where the book goes, and we make that plot. Took this years to make that thing, but we eventually make it, and what we find is, yep, tall people can experience slow rhythms that make no sense to short people, and it follows a really lawful relationship. And here's the thing that's really sick, and I don't have an explanation for this, but because we can do these experiments with real fine detail and with real exquisite precision, we know pretty much exactly where they get lost, and obviously with a ruler, we know exactly what their height is.
PJ 1:12:55
Yeah,
David Gilden 1:12:55
we can figure out pretty much exactly how height impacts how they get lost, and we can create that law.
PJ 1:13:05
Yeah,
David Gilden 1:13:06
well, we have all this other data, which tells us how people's heart rates are slowing down as they get - if they're taller compared to if they're shorter. And what we found was that they were the same law.
PJ 1:13:21
Yeah, is it Clyburn's law? Then for the attention's
David Gilden 1:13:24
law, was it was a different law, actually.
PJ 1:13:27
Okay,
David Gilden 1:13:30
nobody knows exactly what Klamer's law is, but some people think. Some people think I say some people, I sound like I sound like a politician. Some people think there is some evidence that Kleber's law is actually really simple. The simplest thing that might explain the rate at which your cells produce energy in basal metabolism, the simplest thing that could be true about that is that your cells are just replenishing the rate at which energy is radiating off your body, because your body is your skin, your skin is, I don't know, 98 degrees,
PJ 1:14:16
yeah,
David Gilden 1:14:17
or below it, your body is at 98 degrees, then there's your skin, and then your skin is the surface between room temperature, and so what's happening is all this energy is radiating off your body, and the reason the simplest explanation would be that taller people radiate more energy just because they have more surface area, and it might just come down the service area that animal bodies come into play simply because they have more skin, that would be the simplest explanation, and that actually does a good job of fitting the data. It was not the explanation that Kleber came up with. The one that Kleber came up with was more interesting, more baroque, and that's why it attracted the attention of the world, really, because people asked the question, well, if it's, if it's not just given by the service area of the body, something interesting and beautiful may be happening here, and really, really smart people came up with really smart ideas. In particular, there was a group at Los Alamos. Los Alamos, I don't know if you know this, but I mean, there's that - it's not just weapons there anymore. They have a bunch of scientists that are just really smart and think about smart stuff, and one of their scientists came up with the idea was that maybe, maybe the reason that our bodies have basal metabolism the way they do has more to do with the fractal nature at which the order splits off into large arteries, and those large artists split off into slightly smaller arteries, and those split off into slightly smaller arteries, and those eventually split off into capillaries, and what you have is a tree system inside of your body, and the nature of that tree is what determines the rate at which you do your bad, your basal metabolism. They came up, so they basically they ended up talking about what are called fractals, and that was really interesting, but while beautiful and interesting, it may be completely irrelevant, it may just be service area, and if it is just service area, that is the law that we came up with, that the rate at which how people experience, how people experience rhythm turns out in our data to be connected to their service area, weird.
PJ 1:16:47
Yeah,
David Gilden 1:16:47
but here's, here's the metaphor,
PJ 1:16:51
yeah,
David Gilden 1:16:52
your mind is shedding this activation energy, and as it sheds it, you lose your ability to connect notes to each other and beats to each other and everything else that shedding is actually mirroring the way that your body sheds heat off the surface of the body and that is what we found was that the body ends up getting reflected in the shedding of activation, the shedding of heat, and the shedding of activation turn out to follow the same law, and the reason that we could talk about laws in an intelligent and focused manner is that we have the experimental data, and the experimental data gives us the purview and the right to talk about the shape of the data, and that that's all I'm talking about, is that our data message, and the shape is, is the, is the rate is the same shape that your heart in a community of people, their hearts determine their back, their service area determines how fast their hearts. That's it. That's the whole book up to the 10th chapter.
PJ 1:18:11
That's Dr. Gildin, you've been very patient, and you have laid out the entirety of it, and it was a fascinating journey, and I, I would not, I mean, the way that you connected all of that. I'm glad you wrote the book. I know that you, I know how you, you may feel about the book. I understand that the math may be difficult, but the narrative thread is there, and I think it's important that you put it out there. So, thank you. Thank you for coming on today. Thank you for sharing
David Gilden 1:18:38
it. I appreciate your, your having me on here, and I enjoyed talking about my book. I think I think it's really interesting to talk about the nature of reality. There's nothing more interesting, and absolutely appreciate the opportunity to give you my phone, my thoughts about it.
PJ 1:18:54
Thank you, Dr. Gilden. Have a wonderful day.
David Gilden 1:18:56
Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:18:56
Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai