Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

He really is that stupid.

No Justins, No Peace

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Battle won, war still ongoing.

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

You are here: Home / Open Threads / A 21st Century Mother-and-Child

A 21st Century Mother-and-Child

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Thought I’d try one post this year without politics or snark, and this is it.

A couple of weeks ago I put this up at The Boston Globe‘s site — and it is, I believe, behind a pay wall.  The Globe is kind enough to release the material back to me to post after a bit, as long as I credit and link back to the original posting (see what I did there) — so here it is.  If the image has any resonance this time of year for you….good.  And if what its maker has to say about the multiplication of possibilities it embodies adds a little joy to the picture?  So much the better.

_________________________

A mother cradling her infant child.

If the better angels of human nature were to prevail, this picture could become one of those pictures — a single frame that captures an essential piece of the 21st century.

Two human beings, stripped way past bare: two brains, connected in a universal human pose, a mother cradling her infant child.

SaxeTakahashi_MRI_April2015

Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist (and my colleague) at MIT, is a maestro of the camera that can make such images, the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI. To create an fMRI portrait, a subject must lie still inside a narrow cylinder, the inside of a giant electromagnet. The artful manipulation of electromagnetic fields catches the brain in the act — not quite the act of thinking, but of working, nerve cells grabbing oxygen to power the action that ultimately adds up to an idea, a gesture, a feeling.

Making a functional magnetic resonance image demands a lot of its subjects. In a return to the earliest days of photography, you have to lie still for minutes to allow the fMRI machine to complete its tour of your skull. “Moving just a millimeter leaves a blur on the screen,” as Saxe writes at Smithsonian.com. “The mother and baby must hold their pose, as if for a daguerreotype.”

Saxe’s work centers on a fundamental question: How people grapple with the realization that other people have thoughts inside their heads — an area of research called “theory of mind.”

Becoming aware of the fact that people around you are thinking and learning to analyze what those thoughts might be, is a capacity that human beings develop over time — which has led Saxe to attempt to make fMRI images of ever younger children. That allows her to track how growing brains, growing people, form the ability to imagine the reality of other’s minds.

There’s no science in Saxe’s picture of herself with her son — or rather, there’s no data to be used in any formal extension of her theory of mind research. Instead, one reading of the image is simply as a marker, a measure of the current state of a scientific project. Saxe writes that the juxtaposition of her mature brain with the just-getting-started one of her son is the “depiction of one of the hardest problems in neuroscience: How will changes in that specific little organ accomplish the unfolding of a whole human mind?”

 

That is: This picture captures a key step in the process of discovery — the moment when a human invention extends the reach of human senses into realms that were until then not just unexplored but unreachable. New instruments don’t just reveal more of something, more detail, better precision, or what have you. Often, as here, they open windows onto whole new vistas. We’re a very long way yet from answering Saxe’s question, but in the sight of her and her son’s brains we can recognize that an answer is possible.

That’s reason enough to borrow an afternoon of scanner time — but that’s not the whole story behind this picture. Saxe says she and her colleagues made this particular fMRI image “because we wanted to see it.” She reads in it a specific story, an argument. Mother and Child is an old, old trope, in art and in human experience, and as Saxe writes, there is a reflex to elevate “the maternal values, and the women who embody them” to the exclusion of the possibility (or propriety) of those same women exercising their smarts in any out-of-the-home role.

Mary_Cassat_-_Mothers_Kiss_-_NGC_29879

Saxe with her son, depicted and depicting — as she writes, neuroscientist and mother — collude in the same single frame. That was the goal, to create “an old image made new.” And there it is, in the traditional gesture of a mother kissing her child, and the utterly new view of that caress from the inside out.

To me, for all that Saxe’s gloss is so clearly readable in her picture, there’s a yet broader idea expressed. There’s a lot of loose talk around the so-called two cultures of the humanities and sciences, often presented as two sharply distinct ways of making sense of the world. Saxe’s picture gives the lie to that simplistic framing. Art does many things, but certainly one of them is to give us images that confront us with shards of the strange experience of being human. Science, an artful craft, can do the same — as it does here.

_______________________

Back to regularly scheduled rage, weariness, snark, schadenfreude, celebrations of the discomfiture of our adversaries and random brain bubbles after this.  Happy Saturnalia, all.  This thread…it is open.

Image:  Mary Cassatt, Mother’s Kiss, between 1890 and 1891.

Reader Interactions

81Comments

  2. 2.

    Debbie

    Beautiful. To misquote Hesse’s “Narcissus and Goldmund,” (another argument about science vs. art) “Without a mother one cannot live!”

  5. 5.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Good thing that she didn’t use some “conservative” as a subject for this…no thoughts to capture.

  6. 6.

    stinger

    Along with all the recorded music and human speech and other data that we are broadcasting out into the universe, just in case there is Other Life out there, this fMRI image should be included. And the Cassatt image as well.

    Remarkable.

  12. 12.

    boatboy_srq

    There’s a lot of loose talk around the so-called two cultures of the humanities and sciences, often presented as two sharply distinct ways of making sense of the world. Saxe’s picture gives the lie to that simplistic framing.

    Explains why so many Conservatists are engineers….

  17. 17.

    Hildebrand

    A little bit of empathy goes a long way to making our world a better place. Thanks, Tom, great post.

  18. 18.

    Anoniminious

    This is a sagittal slice of the right hemisphere of the adult brain and left hemisphere of an infant brain, medial of the cortex and at the same time evocative of Mother and Child iconography going back (at least) to the Neolithic. Whether the “Science” or the “Art” or both or neither are, in some sense, valid depends on the viewer; the viewer gets out what the viewer brings to the image.

  19. 19.

    RSA

    Very nice article, Tom!

    in the sight of her and her son’s brains we can recognize that an answer is possible.

    Actually, I don’t think we do. I’m sure Saxe knows this area much, much better than I do, but I don’t understand how better measurements of brain activity show us that we’re closer to resolving the mind-body problem than we were before.

  21. 21.

    Bobby D

    Can we drop the “hater” label for people who disapprove of Wasserman-Shultz? To me, when someone breaks out the “hater” label it basically means they have no argument to make and can’t support any particular point. It’s lazy, it’s childish, it reflects extremely poorly on the person who uses it. Use that on me and I just label you as a clown unworthy of serious engagement and ignore you.

    I dislike DWS because I find her to be a terrible spokesperson for the Democratic party. If I can’t stand to listen to her, and I support her points/policies…how in the world will an independent view her? And that’s without getting into her blatant, ridiculous thumb on the scale for Hillary (and I say that as someone who will 100% be voting for Hillary).

  22. 22.

    Redshift

    @RSA:

    I’m sure Saxe knows this area much, much better than I do, but I don’t understand how better measurements of brain activity show us that we’re closer to resolving the mind-body problem than we were before.

    Studies like this show the beginnings of what we might find out. The more precisely we can localize details of brain activity (rather than just measuring overall activity), the better we’ll be able to understand how specific brain activity relates to thought patterns.

    Which can be kind of scary, I’ll admit. It feels much safer to believe that thoughts are something independent that will never be possible to detect or influence except through language and the senses.

  27. 27.

    Keith G

    Viewing this, I am struck with a reality of which I have previously not been aware. That is the vast difference in how much available capacity of each of the skulls is taken up by the brain.

    60% compared to 80%?

    The young and developing human brain is such a dominant part of a youngster’s physical being.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

    Strictly speaking personally, find the image highly unsettling, approaching creepy.

  32. 32.

    Keith G

    @NotMax:Unsettling? I find it clarifying. As a society we seem to spend so much time finding ways to avoid committing the proper resources necessary to adequately serve the needs of of our little ones.

    Those little, but relatively massive, brains need to much nutrition, attention and enrichment.

  35. 35.

    WereBear

    It’s just infrastructure. Thoughts remain mysterious.

    I’m reminded of the studies that showed right wingers to be ruled by fear, to the point that their brain structure was physically different.

    PTSD which was never addressed.

  38. 38.

    Germy

    @WereBear: Something I read is that brain structure changes with everything we learn. For example, if I were to take piano lessons and learn how to play fur elise, a scan would show a physical change in my brain.

    Starting my early adulthood just as Reagan began his ascendancy, and then settling into middle age as Bush took power must have certainly shaped my gray matter, and not for the better.

  44. 44.

    Satby

    I was a bit jarred by the image at first, but I agree it’s got its own beauty and it reminded me of Cassatt’s work even before I scrolled to the next image.

  46. 46.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Germy:

    Starting my early adulthood just as Reagan began his ascendancy, and then settling into middle age as Bush took power must have certainly shaped my gray matter, and not for the better.

    It just gave me gray hair, but like Hillary, I’ve dyed my hair for years(currently black).

  47. 47.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Satby: Ahem. 60 is the new 40, thank you very much. Soaps to be opened in about 4 hours…

    Also, too, I want an fMRI. I’m quietly begging the director of imaging of the university mood disorders center to use me as a test one of these days. I expect he will, if only to shut me the fuck up about it already.

  49. 49.

    divF

    Another great posting. Thank you.

    Seeing this, I immediately thought of Steichen’s “Family of Man” collection.

  51. 51.

    RSA

    @Redshift:

    The more precisely we can localize details of brain activity (rather than just measuring overall activity), the better we’ll be able to understand how specific brain activity relates to thought patterns.

    Thanks for the link. I was thinking about consciousness as well, for which we don’t yet have great explanations. Subjectivity doesn’t seem to have any obvious purpose in mechanistic explanations of brain and mind. I don’t doubt that eventually it will all come down to physics, but the how/why is still a mystery.

  52. 52.

    gene108

    The baby’s brain looks different than the mommy’s brain. The baby’s brain lacks the sharp contrasts and distinctive sections the mommy’a brain has.

  56. 56.

    Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA

    @Mary G: Happy birthday!

    As someone who barely survived experiences with two mothers (biological and adopted), and having no desire to have kids of my own, I’m sure this image has scientific value — but my knee-jerk reaction is “Mothers? They ain’t all that.”

    I would love to see an MRI of my mom’s brain while she’s around me or my sisters — I could imagine researchers announcing they’ve found the area of the brain that plays “these little bastards ruined my life” on an endless loop.

    Well, that got dark fast. Merry Christmas!

  57. 57.

    Citizen_X

    Reminds me of a bit of (unattributed?) prose that’s been circulating fb, that I love:

    You are a ghost, driving a meat-covered skeleton, made from stardust, riding a rock that is hurtling through space. Fear nothing.

  59. 59.

    Germy

    My PBS station used to play this R.O. Blechman cartoon every year: simple gifts
    they haven’t in a long time; maybe they got tired of it.

    They’d usually team it up with the animated short “The Selfish Giant”

  60. 60.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Germy:

    My memory is that it used to be a little-known side effect of some threads but that it was bricked up in one of the previous upgrades.

  61. 61.

    Schlemazel

    @Mary G:
    Happy Birthday, kid.
    In lieu of a card here is my favorite, true, Christmas birthday story:
    I went to high school with a girl called ‘Noel’. A bunch of us were talking about names and I asked her if she had been a “Christmas present” (yes, I have always been a clever guy). She said, “No, I was born in August.” there was a pause & then she got this odd look, “well, maybe I was . . . “

  62. 62.

    the Conster

    @Mary G:

    You’re my age- enjoy 60!!!

    To the subject at hand, there’s nothing I miss more in this world, right now, than a mother’s loving embrace.

  63. 63.

    redshirt

    I made lampshades of my own brain MRI and I think they’re beautiful.

    We’re bags of water. Skeletons moving a bundle of nerves and a brain, with supporting equipment. Shells.

    I think this picture is beautiful in a way art would find hard to compete with – as it’s a higher truth.

  64. 64.

    the Conster

    @redshirt:

    We’re bags of water. Skeletons moving a bundle of nerves and a brain, with supporting equipment. Shells.

    Where in the machine does a mother’s love come from?

  65. 65.

    redshirt

    @the Conster: Evolution. Love is clearly a function of evolution, which allows those creatures that experience it to have higher rates of offspring that produce offspring, which is the entire point of life.

    There are other methods (mainly, numbers), but love seems to do the trick.

  66. 66.

    Germy

    Terry Bisson wrote a great short story:

    THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

    “They’re made out of meat.”

    “Meat?”

    “Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

    “Meat?”

    “There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

    “That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

    “They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

    “So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

    “They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

    “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

    “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”

    “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

    “Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”

    “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”

    “Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”

    “No brain?”

    “Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

    “So … what does the thinking?”

    “You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

    “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

    “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

    “Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

    “Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”

    “Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”

    “First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”

    “We’re supposed to talk to meat.”

    “That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.’ That sort of thing.”

    “They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”
    “Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”

    “I thought you just told me they used radio.”

    “They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

    “Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”

    “Officially or unofficially?”

    “Both.”

    “Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”

    “I was hoping you would say that.”

    “It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”

    “I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”

    “Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

    “So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”

    “That’s it.”

    “Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”

    “They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”

    “A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”

    “And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”

    “Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”

    “Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”

    “They always come around.”

    “And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone …”

  67. 67.

    Origuy

    Say, Tom. I watched the three part series on the history of Spain your cousin Simon did for BBC. It revealed some family history about his (and I think your) ancestors. They found that some of his ancestors were Spanish conversos and executed by the Inquisition in Mexico. It was a really good program.

  72. 72.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:

    Have I ever recommended that you visit Reddit’s Raised By Narcissists message board? Because I think I’ve talked to your peeps over there. I’m sure that at this point you realize the problem is her, not you, but it can still be eye-opening to read about other people’s experiences with shitty parents.

    (I mostly lurk there because my parents were not shitty, but each of them was raised by at least one shitty parent, which inevitably affected the way they raised me. Plus my Florida nieces’ mother is a textbook narcissist.)

  74. 74.

    Elizabelle

    @Mary G:
    @Zinsky: Happy Birthday to Mary G and ZInsky.

    Mary G: may a wonderful, nonpsychotic little dog be in your (very near) future. Someone in a fur suit needs you.

  81. 81.

    Joey Giraud

    “depiction of one of the hardest problems in neuroscience: How will changes in that specific little organ accomplish the unfolding of a whole human mind?”

    ADHD researchers I’ve read and spoken to assure me they have it all figured out.

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