understand how people use both their conscious and unconscious mental processes to respond to a work of art. we can outline a scheme of the various steps that are involved in looking at a great painting and having a perceptual response, an emotional response, an empathic response to it. and we can outline in principle how this occurs, that a lot of details that have to be filled out but this is an initial attempt to try to bridge art and brain science. >> rose: and from harvard the theoretical physicist lisa randell. >> what is really wonderful about physics and i think is important it is symptomatic the regime where we understand things and where we need to go beyond it. so we have there core of knowledge that works and it can could turn out that when you have shorter distances and higher energies you get to do mains you haven't explored; that you find out that fundamentally the rules are very different but we still have this base of

knowledge that works, that makes predictions. i think that we have never reached a point where we have all of the answers. >> rose: we conclude with jonah lehrer who writes about creativity. >> we assume creativity is a singular thing, there is one way we should be thinking when we need a new idea. it is a overall catch-all idea you need a moment of insight and sometimes you need the focus and grind it outside grind it out and go draft after draft. >> sometimes it helps the wall and be horribly stumped because what your brain is telling you need a moment of insight now, you need a big breakthrough, you need an epiphany. >> rose: some of the scientists and people who write about scientist at our table to talk about the work and the frontier. funding for charlie rose was provided by the following.

>> rose: additional funding provided by these funders: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia and news information services worldwide. from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. captioning sponsored by rose communications

>> rose: e o. wilson is one of the most distinguished scientists in the world and one of my favorite people. some call him the father of biodiversity. "the social conquest of earth" considers the most fundamental questions: where do we come from? where are we going? i am always glad to have e o. wilson back at this table. >> thank you so much. >> the booked is called the social conquest of earth, which means what? >> well, it means that those creatures on earth who reach a very high level of social organization... >> rose: that would be us? >> that's us, right, among the big animals, and the social insects and a lot of other small creatures that reach very high levels of social organization. >> rose: that would be ants. >> ants, termites and a few others, that became highly social.

have pretty well have taken over the earth. >> rose: by highly social means simply to live together in groups? >> it means living together in groups. we use a special term, "eu-social," eu, which means, good or solid or secure. and we say that word for the societies in which there is a lot of cooperation, and some division of labor so that a few individuals live longer, and reproduce more than the others as part of the social organization. and that is what the ants and bees, wasps and humans and a couple of other mammals do. and that is very interesting phenomenon. because it raises a question-- if high social organization, which we manifest more than

anything else, is so successful, why isn't it more common? it raises the question, in that formula, i said why did it take so long to evolve? it took humans, most of the history of life, which is over, you know, billions of years before we appeared. and the ants, the bees and the wasps dominate, i mean they make up most of the insect biomass, the sheer weight of insects. they doesn't it appear until, you know, the early age of dinosaurs. it took forever. so the question is, what took so long? and that has led me, then, to a whole new layer of investigation in which i set out to find out how did it happen? this thing that took so long. >> rose: and.... >> and. >> rose: how did it happen? >> well, it turns out that we

just haven't been looking in all of our arguments about what is the main force? what is the main circumstance that preoccupies anthropologists about humans and the like. we should have been looking more carefully, first of all, at all of the social organisms in the world to see if there is a general law just the way we look at gut bacteria. >> rose: right. >> to find out the basic of molecular genetics, as we look at these little roundworms to figure out how nerve cells are put together in a brain. we should be looking at all of the different species of animals that have made the huge link up in evolution to find out what they held in common, and in a nutshell, it is this, and it explains the rarity and why it took so long. they have to go through a series of steps leading up to the threshold before they go from solitary to advanced social behavior. these steps include one common

feature for all of them, and that is the final step is a solitary species, one, where individuals are solitary and live together, forms or creates an expensive and valuable nest from which it forages out and gets prey and other food and brings it back, feeds the young until they mature. everyone, without exception, of these species that made the jump over, including human beings, had to go through that process and that takes a long time. >> and so how do you determine who does and doesn't do it? >> basically, the accidents of evolutionary history. we should look at evolution sort of like a maze. it starts at solitary and you evolve, you are a species and

you evolve, and at some point, the environment is changing or opportunities arise and you take a turn, you move in a certain direction in evolution. and that might bring you to a dead end, so far as going on to something like advanced social behavior. or you may, as going through a maze, take a right turn but only a few make that right turn, and then the wrong... most take the wrong turn. then the correct turn comes up later and that is still smaller, so by the time we find that the species are arriving at the point where they can go over and become... get to the human level or the ant level, to the bee level-- only a tiny percent of all of the species that have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years have reached that point where they can cross over. >> rose: when you talk about "altruism," what do you mean by it in context of... take the ants? >> well in biology we use a very special way, and that means that you give up some of what we call

genetic fitness-- that is to say, you give up some of your expected longevity or your... or the number of children you are likely to produce or both, in the service of others in the community. and that is what we call altruism of the eu-social type, that is how these advanced societies get bound together by that type of division of labor based on altruism. >> rose: how did you discover william hamilton's kin selection? >> brought out an article in the "journal theoretical... journal of theoretical biology" in 1964. >> rose: '64. >> yes. i read it, and i was first rejected, it was too simple, and i read it again and i read it

again. and then on a train trip going from boston down to miami, i was in a different -- doing a different kind of field study at that time, i finally said, well, i guess this really is it, so i went over to london at a meeting of the entomological society of london, and found the forlorn bill hamilton turned around, bill hamilton turned around, they turned this thing down for a thesis and he couldn't get his ph.d. and i went in with him at the entomological society and defended him, and subsequently, not just because of that event, but because it was a very good idea. and i will tell you what it is in a moment, it spread very widely and became actually a productive theory for a while before it began to decay a little bit and break down, and obviously we needed something new. it says essentially that if you are altruistic toward relatives,

they share genes with you by common descent, you have identical genes due to common descent, you are kin. then you will enhance your own genetic fitness, that is, the fitness of those genes that you have that by contributing something to the culture, you lose a little bit of your fitness, he or she gains, and the closer he or she is to you, then the more that person gains from your act of altruism to them. that is what we have been saying for 40 years, and i was the one... one of those that pushed the idea the most strongly in the beginning. >> rose: in the academy? >> yes. it is seductively -- you know, it seems that is the key to social behavior. the only problem is that it is not true. >> rose: when did you come to that conclusion? >> well, i began to see the

things, where cracks are appearing in the whole thing, and the people who were working with it and making it a main subject of their research were... didn't seem to be able to get outside of a box. they were working just in a couple of -- on a couple of the same phenomenon over and over again, i won't bore you by telling you what it is. but the theory hadn't expanded except in statements some day this will explain this, this, and that and when i saw that, that it wasn't going anywhere. and furthermore, parts of it just didn't work, plus i saw that there were a lot of other explanations for how altruism originated. and i covered this with a series of papers that went from 2006 until, well, for four years, and they were mostly ignored, pointing out the flaws and suggesting how a new theory might be formed.

and nothing happened until two brilliant mathematicians at harvard spotted the same thing, and came to me and we collaborated, and it turned out that the basic theory was stated in a form, the original theory, in a form that created a very difficult mathematical problem to get down to the bottom of it to find out whether it was logically true. so they took the effort, they made the effort for the first time, all the way to the bottom, all the way in the exploring of it fully mathematically and found it mathematically unsound. at this point, i came in and said, look, also, there is a way of explaining most of the biological phenomena of altruism and helping, and i will tell you what it is, the new theory says essentially it is not so much a new theory but a revival of a new and stronger formula that says natural selection, you know, that is the action of the

environment that allows some genes to succeed more than others, really is acting at two levels. it is acting at the level of the individuals competing with one another within a society, for the most part, and it is acting at the level of group versus group, and we knew, we know now looking at it with clearer eyes that group versus group is an absolutely fundamental and overpowering phenomenon in human behaviors. it wsa enough to drive whatever group selection was driving and what it was driving was altruism and what we call the traits of virtue, that is compassion, willingness to cooperate, i think the evidence is very strong, all the way through this most advanced social

most advanced social organisms including humans. >> rose: right. >> that group selection is a driving force. driving force, it is a driving force, and the only one we know of or can conceive that allows authentic altruistic behavior and what we call virtual, virtuous behavior among members unrelated to one another in societies as we expand the theory of the origin of advanced social behavior and we are putting it on a foundation now that is solidly grounded in biology, all the way from molecular genetics say to archaeology, and now that is what is happening. we can really begin to put things together. now we can approach once again the other two great helms of knowledge and research, the social sciences and the humanities, and invite joint examination of what could be

called border land areas. the characteristics of human social behavior, what we know about the origins and nature of culture and how it is transmitted and our biological traits, which determine substantially the directions that these various other forms of human evolution have taken. >> rose: this is the cover here. it is a gaw began, why gaugin. >> why did you do this. >> i had a marvelous opportunity to showing the coming connection between the creative arts and science advancing into this domain .. and because in charles darwin's masterpiece, this is a tahitian masterpiece the last great piece he did and in the upper left hand corner, this philosophically inclined artist wrote, it is in drench but i will tell you what he said. >> rose: tell me what he said. >> he wrote up there, where do we come from? what are we? where are we going? he boldly asked the questions that philosophers long ago abandoned and which science now is left to try to answer. >> rose: you like the big questions, don't you?

>> well, when you only have several years left of your life, ask them now or never. >> rose: social conquest of earth, edward o. wilson, e o. wilson of harvard. one of my favorites. >> rose: i am pleased to have dr. eric kandel back at this table where he comes frequently, welcome. >> nice of you to have me here. >> rose: the age of insight, why call it the age of insight? >> in the 1900 was a very special period, at the end of the 1900s in which our view of human kind was altered. before that, there was a view of human beings as being essentially rational creatures, specially created by god, this is the view of the enlightenment, it would be different from all other animal species, and then darwin came along and documented how we evolved from simple ancestors, and made us realize that there is a continuity in evolution,

and the viennese extended this to pointing out that the human mind is also complicated and not completely rational. there are many irrational components and the idea of an important aspect of the mind being unconscious mental processes, instincts that control our behavior emerged in 1900, and emerged from several different influences that i tried to describe here. >> rose: just a bit of history, because it is vienna and vienna is a place you lived until age nine? >> that's right. what is amazing about this, for me and so then you and your brother left on a boat alone. >> that is right. >> your mother had the foresight -- >> extraordinary. >> rose: to feel the fear. >> that's right. >> rose: and say, early on, work on the visa deal? >> right. >> and what amazes me is that i was a pretty anxious child, and yet she was able to reassure both me and my brother that everything would be fine. imagine at my age crossing the

atlantic. it is amazing, amazing. yeah. >> rose: there is an extraordinary film about this, which is a documentary about your life, i take note of this book is the devoted dedicated to the delightful denise. who deserves it. but what is the role here as you started to say of vienna, this vienna you love because it was the highest, probably the highest representation of intellectual -- >> rose: sigmund freud was there. >> at many levels. medicine was fairly primitive until 1800 and in the aftermath of the french revolution french medicine became the scientific. by 1850, viennese medicine became the dominant force, so it really introduced scientific

medicine into clinical practice, and this was led by a guy called artonski a major driving force in the theme of modernism, in my thinking. he was the one that realized the only way you can make sense out of a clinical examination is to correlate the clinical findings with what you see at autopsy. he said, truth hidden from the surface, you have to go deep below the skin to find it. freud was in vienna school of medicine in the late stages of artonski's career and this is the driving theme of his career, you can't simply accept a patient's expression of their illness, psychological description of the illness as being the only cause of it. you have to go deep into unconscious motivation, and everyone was influenced by the idea that there are things below the surface that you don't see, the painters that i describe in this book who also developed insights into the unconscious mental processes didn't want to just paint pretty pictures they

wanted to see what was charlie rose thinking, what is going on in the great mind behind the face, to go deep into it. and you see this at every point along the way. >> rose: you have said before, it is the central challenge of science in the 21st century, the central challenge of science in the 21st century is to understand the brain in biological terms, and that is the journey you took yourself. >> yes. >> rose: it began -- >> yes, and then we are taking this series. >> rose: a series. and it is also here in a sense connecting the unconscious. >> exactly. exactly. >> rose: with art. >> right. >> rose: and the creative expression. >> right. >> rose: and understanding creativity. >> right. >> rose: -- as something -- >> one thing this actually characteristic of what you do and what we try to do to get together is to treat science as part of the intellectual enterprise. why should science be less interesting than golf, baseball or tennis? it is an extremely interesting intellectual activity and somehow people are frightened away from science because they think it is

difficult but if you take the pains to explain it it can be understood by everyone, and what i try to do is bridge between science and humanities with a specific example that a viennese artist from 1900. >> rose: i mean, going through it all is this sort of interdisciplinary attempt to understand the unconscious too. >> right. and there is another thing -- >> rose: that affects not only the person who creates art but also the person who observes art. >> that is a very good point. what emerged from students who began to try to put this together, alice regal, who we interviewed. >> rose: wonderful. >> wonderful >> rose: a great historians of our time. >> but he pointed out that when you look at a painting, you are involved in the creative act. >> rose: right. >> what makes a work of art great is ambiguity, you and i see somewhat different things and the reason we do it is each of us brings different experiences and a different brain to bear and we reconstruct

the image that we see in our own head. >> rose: what do you want us to understand here about the unconscious? >> that it is a tremendous influence on both the artist and the beholder and we are beginning to understand how people use both their conscious and unconscious mental processes to respond to a work of art. we can outline a scheme of the various steps that are involved in looking at a great painting, and having a perceptual response and an emotional response and empathic response to it and we can outline in principle how this occurred occurs. there are a lot of details that have to be filled out but this is an initial attempt to try to bridge art and brain science. >> ever since i have known you, we have talked about, you know, this, this central question of the relationship between the humanities and science. >> right. >> rose: and you are a scientist who loves the humanities.

>> yes. and i love trying to discuss science with nonscientists, and so one of the driving forces to me is to try to get people interested in seeing the bridge between science and the humanities, to realize that knowing a little bit about how facial perception works and how empathy works enriches your understanding of how you respond to art. i think that in the long run, as we know more and more about the biological process involved and how people respond to art, it is not only going to help you enjoy works of art more but it may even help the artist. look, leonardo da vinci dissected human bodies so he could see how the muscles exactly -- so as you learn about the body he could do a more realistic picture. >> rose: right. >> as we understand the mind in

biological terms artist make insights that really alter the way they depict the psychological sensibility of people. >> rose: so what is the question we most want to answer in the pursuit of this bridge? >> we want to understand in detail how do different neural circuits get involved in responding to a work of art? >> right. >> there is an enormous re-creation that is involved in your brain when you look at a work of art. if we understand that, we will understand an enormous amount about perception. let me give you an example. you look at a painting, it is two-dimensional. and yet if the artist is successful you get a tremendous sense of depth, the perspective sees the face, you see it is sculpted but the brain knows, even though it is recreating this that it is a flat surface in a painting and i will give you a good example. if you have a painting of a

person that is made with the artist looking at the subject's eyes, and it is hanging on this wall and you walk around that painting, the eyes follow you, you must have had that experience many times. >> rose: yes. >> okay. if you put a sculpture there and walk around it the eyes don't follow you. because the brain knows this is a sculpture, the eyes don't follow you, but it realizes the painting is a fiction, it is a two dimension, so this is wonderful to realize, how much the brain really unconsciously knows about what is going on, compensates for it and gives you the sense, but, boy, this is really a structure, knowing on one level it is two-dimensional. >> rose: the age of insight the quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind and brain, from 1900 to present, from eric kandel, my friend, thank you. >> thank you, charlie. >> i am pleased to have lisa

randall back at this table, welcome. why does physics appeal to you? >> that is an interesting question. i always liked math and math because it seemed to be definite and predictable and have answers but the idea of doing just abstract math is not interesting that you can explain the universe and actually test some of the ideas you have, of course mathematical theorem can be true whether or not it is realized in the world but the idea of using formulas and math to actually explain and project and be rational about what is going on in the universe and the fact that you can explain and predict things, it is a wonderful thing and so it is really nice to put puzzles together to have disspar disparate elements you realize ultimately are connected and to be able to see how things works. >> knocking on heaven's door, why did you choose that as the title? >> well, anyone who read my first -- >> rose: passages and bob dylan's lyrics and all of that. >> the lyrics, like just

beginning each chapter this one have the song as the title and it is really because i want to express the idea in sort of a fun way of what science does, that you have some base of knowledge that you know, but what scientists do is exploring the edges, it is exploring the things you don't yet know. so you are trying to go beyond that sort of comfort zone to go someplace else and of course the lyrics of the songs were not referring to that, but i like the idea that as you sort of are trying to get to something bigger than yourself and try to get to something out there that you believe is there and how do you cross that boundary and cross that threshold to get to some bigger knowledge. >> rose: physics itself, we are all aware of where molecular biology has gone. it has shown us the structure of the dna, we have mapped the human genome and done all of these things that have to do with biology. have we made the same kind of strides and are we asking what questions in the world of physics? >> it is funny because in some ways i would say that we are in the reverse situation.

it is true that we have mapped the dna but we still have a lot to learn about what that means for animals, for people, what are the implications? >> rose: they say the same thing, the journey has just begun. >> right. in physics we have actually -- we at least know what the rules are down to a certain extent and what is really wonderful about physics and this is a point i think is really important, is that it is sort of systemithe that it is sort of systematic regime where we understand things and where we need to go beyond it so we have this core of knowledge that works, and it could turn out that when you explore shorter distances, higher energies you get to domains that you haven't yet explored, that you find out that fundamentally the rules are very different, but we still have this base of knowledge that works, that makes predictions, and i think we have never reached a point where we have all of the answers, i mean, it would be extraordinary for we, to be the people over the course of history just happened to live in a time where we got a theory that works. but i think the other important

point is even if you have a theory of everything in the sense of you have some fundamental equations that describe some fundamental objects, to get from there to the kind of phenom that we see in the universe is not a simple problem, to solve those equations to the extent you can predict all of the phenomena and what you find is that you can't even do it fundamentally in terms of the fundamental -- a lot of the time you will need to go into new categories, sort of the way with -- in the analogy that we had before with throwing a ball versus quantum mechanics in one case you are looking at the ball as a fundamental object and in the other case you are looking at the atomic structure and if you try to predict a ball using the atomic structure it would take you a very long time so it is very more convenient to use the ball so even if you a theory of everything that has the most fundamental structure, how that turns into all of the phenomenon in this world would be very difficult. >> rose: i take this glass, it has weight, do we really understand weight?

>> well, we understand sort of functionally what that would mean, we understand what that means in terms of gravitational force of the earth, .. which is really what we are referring to here, but then, again, you can go deeper and you can see, do we know where that math comes from? do we know where gravity is fund meantly and where the math comes from, actually the math that is actually being attracted by gravity has to do with the strong force and strong interacts, something that is in the particle physics but to understand where the math of those elementary particles comes from, that is what we are trying to build a neutron collider. for among other things. >> rose: tell us what we are learning so far from the supercollider. >> it is this enormous underground ring, kilometers in the circumstance. >> between the french and swiss border. and there are beams of protons and the protons are accelerated to

extraordinarily high energy, seven times the energy of -- two if a machine we have in illinois. what we are about to close in emergency, it is the highest energy we have ever achieved at a collider and the idea is to have the elements of those protons collide and when they do turn it into energy, e equals mc squared which means it is turned into energy. >> rose: einstein's famous formula. >> and then that energy can in turn become other particles we haven't seen before. now that in itself is interesting but what we are really trying to find out is, what is the fundamental structure there? are there new forces and new ingredients? could we find this new particle that is associated with understanding how particles acquire their mass? we know that particles don't just have mass from the get-go, there has to be this new mechanism this ingredient known as the hague mechanism, named after peter hicks and has to do in some sense with the fact with the sense there is actually a charge throughout space, but not

ordinary charge, kind of a charge associated with a different force and when that happens, particles by interacting with that essentially acquire mass, but we know that is the way it should work, but is it really the way it works? and so if it is really the way that it works, there should be evidence, there should be experimental evidence, there should be a particle, that particle is a particle knowns as the hicks -- >> rose: knocking on heavens door is also certain ideas about the role of science, what do you want us to understand? >> one of the things that i realized when i was talking, working out passages there are some fundamental scientific concepts that even scientists don't know and it is really helpful to have those in mind when i talked with friends i realize it is useful to have these ways of organizing information, to understand this role of scale, to understand what uncertainty means. >> rose: this is about process? >> it is about process, it is about the ingredients that go into sort of making a logical, rational decision. it is about understanding that

every fact you have comes with uncertainty, and that uncertainty isn't a bad thing, it is part of the statement of the information, and it is actually, you understand something only if you understand the uncertainty in what you are saying, and if you listen to debates that go on today you realize that is an incredibly important thing for people to understand because there sort of is a shame associated with uncertainty but actually that is a part of knowledge and it is part of going toward a more rational discussion of scientific facts but just facts in general. some science. tim:es i know and philosophers know are worried that in this country, at least, they worry i that somehow we have forgotten that and forgotten what science delivers for us, which is fact, that certain things, overwhelmed by the absence of respect for the scientific inquiry. well -- >> rose: and that is the beginning of decline in civilization.

>> that is a grand statement, and it might even be true, but i guess there is a part of me that wants to believe that people have access to the information, that they have access to understanding the method, that they will think in a more rational way, that it won't be the decline of civilization. and part of what i want to do is get across some of these ingredients, you know, how do we think about risk? i mean we have seen nonsensical statements about risk and some interesting statements about risk but certainly we tend to be irrational when we talk about risk and what is going into that? >> rose: you travel around the world a lot, do you find there is more of an emphasis on science and more of an appreciation? how much of scientific inquiry is simple trial and error? >> well -- >> rose: i mean the idea of how do correct scientific ideas ultimately prevail? >> well, how correct ideas prevail is actually interesting,

because, of course, any time you don't know if it is right in the beginning, and, again, it is a really interesting point, this is something that again gets misrepresented about science a lot, because we think of science as, you know, it is all established, and of course eventually things are established. >> rose: basic laws are established. >> basic laws are established and they get established overtime and they get tested and you get where new things might happen, but in the beginning, i mean right now, what the super collider will do is tell us which theory is right and it will tell us which theories are wrong, everyone has ideas about what we might see there you need it is okay for us to be working on a large number of ideas because experiments are difficult and they need to know what to look for, but what is wonderful about having the data is it will tell us who is wasting their time and who should move on. >> rose: what is to the smallest phenomenon in the universe. >> the smallest phenomenon in the universe? you know, what is

the largest? >> well, there is the observable universe. >> rose: right. >> and we don't know if that is the largest. it is just that we know the universe that we can observe has been around for 13.7 billion years, in the process of about 100 billion light years because it expanded over the time so there is the size of the universe, but that is not even the biggest size. then in terms of the smallest size, there is the malest size we can experimentally smore and then there is the smallest size we think might exist, and the smallest size where experimentally floarg is actually at the large collider, high energy lets us look at short distances and that's why going to higher -- >> rose: can we define those short distances? >> absolutely and the way we do it essentially is if you imagine you have a certain amount of energy it can create a wave with that energy, and higher energy is shorter wave length so

basically to be able to shore short distances you need something that have energy so you need a high energy wave and lets us g go-go the short distae and that's "we go to the high energies because it allows us to look at the short distance structure. that doesn't mean nothing can exist beyond that. there is a difference between what we can think about, what there theories tell us or what theories suggest or what theories might be possible and what we can actually observe. >> what does all that you know and all that you have learned tell me -- how does it inform your instinct as to what is out there that might blow our mind? >> i am going to take the fifth is it a difficult question? >> >> no because actually the most interesting things often are the things none of us thought about in advance. >> rose: ah. >> i think quantum mechanics is mind-blowing to eryone at some level. >> rose: why is it? because -- >> well, it is such a fundamental notion that i should

be able to say something is here and i can tell you exactly where it is going to be there. the idea that fundamentally there should be probability, i think is a very big deal and i think it is always deeply disturbing, it is not that it is wrong but i think everyone who learns about it is amazed and no one, no one would have thought of it unless the data told us that is the only way things work. and i think, in general, even the theory that we came up with about warp geometry and we found out that in principle you could have an infinite extra dimension of space, we didn't set out to say could you have an infinite -- it came out of what we were talking about for entirely independent reasons so sometimes i just think that the most interesting things, i mean, sometimes the fact of science is more interesting than science fiction. >> rose: the argument to be made that the most powerful force in the world is in fact science and not religion. >> oh, that is -- it depends

over what time era or for whom and in what sense. i mean, again, it is really an interesting question, because if you ask how -- what has affected our daily lives more i would say for most of us in some sense it is science, i mean, just everything we do. >> rose: technology which is part of -- >> exactly. and everything -- every aspect of our lives, i mean, technology, you know, we are not living like the amish and our lives are very different. >> rose: tell me what is the most important question you guys are asking today. what would be the top five questions, you think? >> i think there certainly would be questions about quantum gravity. >> aside from the questions we talked about, how to combine together quantum mechanics and gravity and again it is really important to .. realize this is a question that will have implications. gravity is different from anything we can observe. in some sense it is a theoretical question because it

is not clear we can test it but that is definitely one. i think the question of understanding these questions of mass and how mass is acquired is certainly there. >> rose: a big one. >> and we have a chance of answering it which makes it really exciting. the question of what is the missing stuff in the universe? i mean, the terms of -- >> rose: missing stuff. >> rose: that's what i want to know. what is the missing stuff? or what might the missing stuff be is my question. >> we know the energy in the universe, we know only four percent is stuff that we are familiar with, is stuff you and i are made of, the stuff that our universe that we see is made of, but there is this other 96 percent that is called dark stuff, either dark energy or dark matter which are two different things, so i don't know if that counts as two different things we are looking for. >> rose: we talked about that in one of our previous interviews. >> that's right. and dark matter is also very

interesting in the sense there really are experiments being set up to really probe some of the interesting regimes and try to find it and some interesting theoretical ideas but understanding what dark matter is is something we have a chance of doing both theoretically and experimentally. dark energy is a much more mitts dark energy is a much more mysterious thing out there, 70 percent of the energy we don't know what it is so that is another very big question we have. >> rose: and which one interests you the most? >> which one? well, right now, because there are experiments happening, i am excited about these questions about math and about dark matter, mass and dark matter, because the experiments are happening -- >> rose: and how many dimensions are out there and things like that come under which of the questions? >> well that is actually -- i think i have a fifth left. so we can say what is the nature of space and time out there. in terms of not just how many dimensions there are, but, again, this could be a theoretical question, it is theoretical of what is out there beyond our horizon? are there extra universes out there and other places? and so i think

but also understanding the extra dimensions, and the nature of space and time. i think another question that i am going to add one more >> rose: oh, please. you can do ten if you like. >> it is related to the quantum gravity question which is what is fundamentally the nature of space and time which is something well beyond anything we can do experimentally, but it certainly is theoretically an interesting question. >> rose: and the one that interests you the most? >> that is a good question. i think it is a really, really interesting question. i think it is very difficult to attack, and i tend to like working on things that i think i have some chance of making progress, so we might get to that and we might get to it peripherally it is in the back of everyone's mind but now the questions are more about how particles acquire mass, why do they have the passes they do? they have the masses they do? >> rose: jo lehrer is here at age 30 and already a best selling author and writes about neuroscience and popular culture in the head case column for the wall street journal, his new

book examines a phenomenon that has fascinated humanity for ages, the mind's power to create, it is called the book imagine, how creativity works. i am pleased to have him at this table for the first time, welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: creativity. what have you learned about it that we didn't know? >> we have had these myths for thousands of years about the creative process, that, creative process, we rely on the muses for and-out source the imagination, it just seems so mister you when we invent and idea,. >> rose: it was related to some kind of genius thing? >> yes, yes, it is a very, rare, rare talent. and this is mirrored in the surveys of school kids where when you ask a second grader are you creative?" 95 percent say yes i love to paint, i love to draw.

by fifth grade, it is down to fifth percent by the time they are high school seniors less than ten percent of kids believe they are creative. >> rose: what happens. >> we are good about killing off creativity in k to 12 education that a very sad fact but they have come to internalize this myth about creativity that it is a rare gift. when the scientists come that creativity is a defining feature of human nature and a universal talent. this doesn't mean it is evenly distributed-- some are more creative than others, but it does mean we can get better at it. >> rose: you say it is our most important mental talent. >> well, we live in a world surrounded by our own inventions just look around in this world, it has come to define the human species. this is stuff we all invented, it didn't always exist and this is the world we live in. >> and where does it come from? >> you know, it comes from these... it comes from in here. it doesn't come from the muses. the other myth i really wanted to expose about the creativity process for a long time is we use creativity of a singular

thing, there is one way we should be thinking when we need a new idea. creativity is a catchall term for a variety of the same thought processes that sometimes you need a moment of insight and sometimes you do need that focus, you need to just grind it out and go through draft after draft. >> rose: and sometimes you need a roadblock? >> absolutely, sometimes it actually helps to hit the wall, to be horribly stumped because what your brain is telling you, you need a moment of insight now, you need a big break, you need an epiphany. and scientists have made progress in understanding where these moments of insight come from. in a sense they are the most mysterious aspect of the creative process. >> rose: what have they learned? >> this required some very interesting way. put students and say think something creative. they need to generate a lot of moments of insight on the fly, and people like john kunos have come up with a set of word problems that generates lots of

moments of insight so these are known as compound of acronym is unfortunate, c.r.a.p. but they involved giving people three words and you have to find the fourth word to form a compound word for these these so the three words might be pine, crab, and sauce, the answer in this case is apple-- pineapple, crab apple, applesauce. and if you find apple, leap into consciousness just out of the blue and as soon as it pops in your head you know this is the right answer. so it feels like a moment of insight people in the lab will often say "aha" and their eyes go all wide. and what they found is that the seconds before you have a moment of insight, a part possess the brain called the anterior superior gyrus, just behind your ear, shows a sharp spike in activity. and this is a brain area that has been previously associated with things like the processing of jokes and it is interpretation of metaphors, so when romeo says to juliet is to the sun we know, we know juliet is not a big floating ball of

gas. it makes sense metaphor by looking past the surface similarities, juliet and the sun have nothing and the underlying themes, mode associations that we realize romeo juliet lights up his world, a similar mental process is required when you have to make pine, crab and soft. those are not words frequently and your brain is able to find this one other word is apple that bind them all together. the similar mental process is required when you need moment of insight because of the connections are on the surface, if they were obvious we probably would have found them already. that's why we hit the wall and are stumpe and that's why we need to realize on this area of the back hemisphere which is good at drawing together distantly related ideas. >> rose: is another word for drawing together distantly related ideas being able to see connections. >> johnson, creativity is just connecting things, that is

really all it is about, it is a new connection to old ideas. and when you need a big new idea, it is going to come from old ideas that are even further apart that no one else can see the connection between them, no one else can bind them together. >> rose: what is the relationship between bob dylan, creativity and "like a rolling stone"? >> i begin the book by telling the story that happened in may of 1965, when bob dylan gave up on singing and song writing. he was on this grueling tour and didn't know how to reinvent himself, he thought he had no songs left to sing he didn't want to be a folksinger and didn't know what to write next so he moved to woodstock and didn't take his guitar he was going to paint and write poetry and done with the music business. and there for a couple of days when all of a sudden he feels this familiar feeling, the itch of words as he put it and like a ghost just gives you what to say. and then he starts scribbling and his hand isn't moving to for the next several hours it is like he is vomiting forth associations, a very visceral verb. >> rose: he would be prone to use. >> and then he takes a look at these 25 pages of notes he scrawled late at night in

woodstock all by himself, and what he sees in these notes are the lyrics to "like a rolling stone." the very next week he goes into the cramped space of columbia records, and on the fourth take they record those six punts of raw music that would revolutionize rock 'n' roll. >> and he understood it? after it came out? >> yes, and this is a defining feature of movements of insight that makes them so mysterious as soon as the answer pops in our head, we know this is the answer. >> rose: you recognize it for what it is. >> you don't have to double- check the math or reread the lyrics; you know this is a solution you have been searching for. >> rose: wow. so suppose that, suppose you know... you know that you have hit a roadblock and you have hit a wall. >> yes. > rose: what ought you to do find a creative way around a wall? >> this was quite surprising to me, because i think we live in this day and age that worships attention. >> rose: right. >> all about the focus. >> rose: focus. >> so when you hit a hard problem, you assume what you need to do is the drink a triple espresso and chug red bull, to find some way to increase your

attention, to chain your self to the desk. and that the turns out to be exactly backwards. what scientists found is people who are in a relaxed state of mind are much more likely have a moment of insight. >> i was out running in the morning and driving, commuting in my car. >> in the shower is a popular one. >> rose: hanging out on a sunday morning, that kind of thing. >> yes. and what is it about that? >> well, because when we are not relaxed, when we are chained to our desk, our attention is out here, it is consumed by the noise of the world, so we are thinking about the problem itself. so you go back to those associate problems and talking about pine, crab, and soft, there is probably a wrong answer we can't get past. it is not until we are relaxed in the shower or on a jog or drive in the car that we finally, that we are finally able to turn the spotlight of attention inward and we hear the quiet invoice voice from the back of the head giving us the answer. maybe the voice has been there for hours, days or week and we just haven't taken a moment to

listen. so that's why relax haitian is so important, the larger lesson here, i think it gets back to this wonderful line of einstein that "creativity is the residue of wasted time." when you need a moment of insight, you really have to make time to waste time, and this is, this seems paradoxical but the answer will only arrive after you stop searching for it. >> so there is also milton glazer-- what did we learn from him, a great designer. >> he has this wonderful slogan about the studio door which is "art is work," and it would be wonderful if the advice we can give to everyone is that, you know, the solution to every creative problem is take a long hot shower, to go for a walk on the beach, to, you know, drink a beer. that is, of course, not how it works in the real world. when you talk to creative people, they often begin with their romantic breakthroughs, the epiphanies that when you least expect it. but when you press them, they talk about all the hard work that came after and all of the iterations and drafts all of the frustration and failures. >> rose: and also their curiosity, we really talked to a large number of artists that just go to the gallery or go to the museum and just look. i mean, it is a studying process

for them. >> it is about realizing that creativity is not a straight line, that it really is about just being open-minded, it is about letting yourself be exposed to a lot of ideas, even if you don't know how they will fit in. about seeking diverse output and you see this mirrored again and again in the literature. people who spend time with lots of people who aren't like them, that according to one measure, three times more innovative with predictable social networks, so it is great, it is great to spend time with people who don't think like us. >> what do jazz pianists have? >> this is i think one for me one of the big mysteries i was interested in when i began thinking about this book. you watch videos of john coltrane and this he steps out on to a stage and beauty pours out of him for 45 minutes or 60 minutes.

and he just improvising he has no idea what he is going to play and yet he knows he can invent it, and this is -- >> rose: could he duplicate it the next at that night? >> he could create a whole new kind of beauty in next night and this is totally awe inspiring. and, you know, there is some really interesting new work which has begun to deconstruct the improv process, this spontaneous creativity and what the scientists have discovered at johns hopkins when you put a pianist and ask them to improvise they began by inhibiting their inhibitions they deactivate a part of the part of the brain behind the forehead and closely associated with things like self-control, impulse control that keeps us from eating all of the ice cream in the fridge and allows us to do the first thing that comes to our mind. so it is a pretty important part of the brain, but it can also hold us back because it makes us worried about what we are saying, it is the voice telling us not to do something. and when you need to improvise for an hour on stage, when you heed the let yourself go, you need to get out of your head and you need to turn that voice off so in a variable to just inhibit their inhibitions on command, you know, that itself, that act of deactivation takes years of practice. it looks easy on stage when they do it but that is only because they work so hard.

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