Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Are we entering a period in which we are changing? The immature state in which we are born and the exceptionally long period in which we are raised encourages the implanting into our psyche of a host of erroneous thoughts and beliefs. The absence or presence of creativity determines what we believe. Tell me what you imagine, and I will tell you who you are. Let me tell you what to imagine, and I will tell you what, gradually, you will become. Many people approach the world not as logical adults, but as individuals seeking the camaraderie of the group that denigrates other belief systems as wrong, or even evil. It does not occur to them that they are mistaken—that their system is just one of many whose premises were faulty.

  The three Abrahamic religions should be brotherhoods. They worship the same god, and yet they are torn asunder by petty ideological points. In the East, one is free to believe in Shintoism, adhere to the tenets of Buddhism, and practice Taoism. But in the West, one cannot practice being a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim simultaneously without causing confusion or contempt.

  The curse of war between tribes, communities, and states has always been a prominent feature of humankind. Nationalists, fascists, communists, imperialists—it matters not what they are called; the right to go to war is built into the human genome. This constitutes a curse. Animals of the same species rarely kill each other. They may have tremendous dominance fights in which the combatants come away injured, but large-scale war between members of a higher species is extremely rare.*

  * Chimpanzees, genetically the closest to humans, do engage in raids on other chimps.

  Humans are also singular in their failure to have a breeding signal to inform the members of the species that they are overpopulating an area. Rabbits, deer, and all other animals intuitively know that breeding should abate, as the resources available cannot support an increase in population. But we continue to have babies, overpopulating the world. From the middle of the twentieth century, when the population hovered around three billion, we have ballooned to nearly 7.2 billion, despite the horrible wars in which millions expired.

  The crowding of the planet has increased the anxiety of the ego and the superego, which reside on the left side of the brain. The dominance of the left hemisphere over the right ensures a continuance of the survivalist mode.

  Adding these two traits—willingness to go to war and the destruction of nature—to overpopulation will cause the early extinction of the human race. Unless we change. But where will change come from? The appearance of Leonardo in the gene pool gives us hope. He lived in an age when war was accepted. Yet, later in life, he rejected war and concentrated on the search for truth and beauty. He believed he was part of nature and wanted to understand and paint it, not control it.

  As we enter the first half of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in the annealing of technology and life forms, who can possibly anticipate what might come next? We cannot see what is in store for us, just as we could not have foreseen the other amazing developments in our history and prehistory. Perhaps we will develop into an improved version of Homo sapiens as more of us become less interested in power and more interested in matters of the heart. We humans are undergoing a profound metamorphosis as we transition into an entirely novel species. For those who doubt it is happening, remember: For millions of years dogs traveled in packs as harsh predators, their killer instinct close to the surface. Then humans artificially interfered with the canine genome beginning a mere six thousand years ago. No dog could have predicted in prehistoric times that the huge, snarling member, faithful to a pack, would evolve into individual Chihuahuas and lap-sitting poodles.

  Carbon, the basis for all life forms, is one of the most common elements on the planet. Another element found in abundance is silicon. When combined with oxygen, in the form of silicon dioxide, it forms sand and dirt. The silicon atom had always played a minor role in the health of the individual, being one of the trace elements necessary to maintain homeostasis. And then, in the early half of the twentieth century, clever humans discovered that silicon dioxide possessed a property that would allow it to conduct an electrical current. People crowded into theaters to watch early movies that were transmitted by silicon lightbulbs. Then silicon dioxide in the form of glass vacuum tubes began to transmit messages around the world. But it was in the middle of the twentieth century that silicon dioxide became the basis of the modern transistor. Transistors began to appear in increasing numbers in all electrical appliances. Every device—radios, televisions, cell phones—shrunk in size.

  Silicon compounds possess an additional property that makes them simpatico with flesh. They are the only atom that fails to arouse the ever-vigilant immune system. How unusual! On the other hand, perhaps the failure of the immune reaction is really an invitation to join with silicon. Encasing silicon dioxide transistors in a silicone sleeve gave physicians the ability to place sophisticated mini-machines into the human body: Cardiac pacemakers, insulin and morphine pumps, and transistor-based arrays to let the blind see and the deaf hear have become increasingly routine.

  As the amount of silicon increases in relation to the amount of carbon in a person’s body, it is possible that Darwin’s theory of natural selection will have to be revised once again as humans morph into what could be called “cyborgs” (cybernetics+organic). Partially inorganic and partially organic, humans already have begun to constitute an entirely new life form.

  The efficiency and ubiquity of computers also improved as a result of silicon dioxide. The speed with which new advances are occurring is breathtaking. Increasingly, humans are living more productive lives because of cell phones, computers, and the Internet.

  The interrelationship of silicon and carbon has revised Darwin’s theory to include a life form that incorporates both carbon and silicon. The computer and the Internet have begun a transformation that is not yet finished.

  The brain is the body’s most energy-consuming component. It demands reinforcements, requiring molecules to come and go. The brain’s constituency is always in a state of flux. American physicist Richard Feynman put it thus:

  The atoms that are in the brain are being replaced; the ones that were there before have gone away. So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms associated with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago.

  These atoms enable us to make the devices that probe the universe and the satellites that communicate, measure, and survey. We are made of carbon, but the “machines” depend on silicon. One of the intriguing side effects of combining silicon with carbon has been the de-emphasis of the left brain and the rise of the right brain.

  For a very long time humans experienced speaking and listening as the only means of communication. Both sides of their brain were active and involved. The introduction of reading and writing around five thousand years ago completely reoriented the brain’s hemispheres, providing the left side with a dominance it did not have in the speaking and listening mode. Speaking and listening required both cerebral lobes. The expressiveness of body language and the inflection in the speaker’s voice became less prominent. In its place was the isolated written word. Marshall McLuhan commented on the collision:

  Of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion that can occur in any social structure.

  The objectification of the world and other people massively amplified as reading, writing, and the number of books dramatically increased. The emphasis on learning to do these things has taken over the schoolroom.

  Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, observed:

  Since education is effective only insofar as it affects the working of the brain, we can see that an elementary school program narrowly restricted to reading, writing, and arithmetic will educate mainly one hemisphere, leavi
ng half of an individual’s high-level potential unschooled. Has our society tended to overemphasize the values of an analytical attitude, or even of logical reasoning?

  With the addition of silicon, a shift away from this trend has finally occurred. At the turn of the twentieth century, if we wanted to see a motion picture, we had to squeeze ourselves into a dark theater. By the middle of the twentieth century, vacuum tubes made out of glass powered the television. Television has introduced many stark visualizations; it speaks to both sides of the brain. The televised Vietnam War produced an outrage that would have been much slower had it been described only in print.

  Now, as the silicon revolution advances, we carry our phones and computers in our pockets and purses. When President Obama gives a speech to the public, the number of handheld cameras recording his words resembles a waving field, each camera trying to achieve the proper height, distance, and angle.

  The publishing business is in decline. Newspaper subscriptions have fallen off a cliff. But the enrollment in classes that emphasize graphic design and filmmaking are burgeoning. The Internet and its various platforms have markedly increased the volume of graphics. Images are replacing text.

  Organized religion is in decline as more people become aware that the multiplicity of beliefs tends to challenge the belief in any one of them. The number of agnostic and atheist voices has increased. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins assume an exalted position unheard of in earlier days.

  Silicon has increased the importance of the right lobe. As more people access the holistic mode—abandoning the “I” versus “them” way of thinking—a desire to honor the planet, rather than conquer it, has spread. As we shift back to the right hemisphere based on image information, we are entering what I call the Iconic Revolution. More people on the planet are being interconnected using the iconic mode.

  In The Last Supper, one would expect Leonardo to have chosen the center of Jesus’s forehead as the point that perspective begins. But he chose to center the perspective of his painting at a point over Jesus’s right brain. Was he trying to tell us something, or was it just an accident? For a painting that does not contain any “accidents,” what was this extraordinary genius, this exceptional Homo sapiens, trying to tell us?

  Leonardo intuited that image gestalts processed by the right brain were superior to the written word. “Your tongue will be paralyzed . . . before you depict with words what the painter shows in a moment,” he wrote. As with so many other things, he was prescient with this statement, as well. Images are ascendant in this new age, and they reveal in a moment what a wordy description can only attempt to do.

  He would be very gleeful today to know that the rest of the world is finally catching up with his vision.

  Acknowledgments

  Our father would normally write a detailed, poetic, and loving list of all the people who had helped him on the journey to complete a book. However, he never had the time to do this—so we are hoping if you are reading this, and you helped him in any way, that you know your name would be here.

  We are very grateful for the dedicated team that helped bring this book to life: from Robert Stricker introducing us to our fantastic new agent for this book, Andy Ross, and editor Ann Patty, and to our great editor, Jon Sternfeld at Lyons Press, who cared just as much as we did about bringing this book to life.

  Kimberly, Jordan, and Tiffany

  Fig. 1: Mona Lisa, c.1503–6 (oil on panel), Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Louvre, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 2: Arno Landscape, 5th August, 1473 (pen and ink on paper) Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 3: The Last Supper, 1495–97 (fresco) (post restoration)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Santa Maria della Grazie, Milan, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 4: The Lady with the Ermine (Cecilia Gallerani), 1496 (oil on walnut panel)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  © Czartoryski Museum, Cracow, Poland / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 5: Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) (oil on canvas)

  Manet, Edouard (1832–83)

  Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Facing page: Fig. 6: The muscles of the shoulder, arm and leg, c.1510 (pen & ink with wash over black chalk on paper)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  The Royal Collection © 2014 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 7: The Adoration of the Magi, 1481–82 (oil on panel)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 8: St. Jerome, c.1480–82 (oil & tempera on walnut)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City / De Agostini Picture Library / G. Nimatallah / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 9: Virgin of the Rocks (Madonna of the Rocks), c.1478 (oil on panel transferred to canvas)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Louvre, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 10: Rubin Vase

  Fig. 11: Necker Cube

  Fig. 12: “The Vitruvian Man,” c.1492 (pen & ink on paper)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 13: Madonna with a Flower, or The Benois Madonna, 1478–81 (oil on canvas)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 14: St. John the Baptist, 1513–16 (oil on canvas)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  Louvre, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 15: A map of the Val di Chiana, c.1503–4 (pen & ink with w/c and gouache over chalk)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  The Royal Collection © 2014 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 16: A plan of Imola, 1502 (pen & ink, wash and chalk on paper)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  The Royal Collection © 2014 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Fig. 17: A scheme for a canal to bypass the Arno, c.1503

  (brush & ink over black chalk on paper)

  Vinci, Leonardo da (1452–1519)

  The Royal Collection © 2014 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Notes

  Preface Epigraphs

  x. “Great art . . .”: T. S. Eliot, “Dante” (1929), paraphrased by George Steiner in an interview with Bill Moyers in the PBS series, Bill Moyers Journal, January 1981.

  x. “It seems to me that . . .”: David Bohm and Lee Nichol, eds., On Creativity (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 33.

  x. “The artist is the antennae . . .”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. xi.

  Chapter 1 Epigraphs

  1. “The good painter has to . . .”: Martin Kemp, Leonardo on Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 144.

  1. “The true mark of genius . . .”: Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 402.

  1. “Both science and art form . . .”: Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999), pp. 108–09.

  Chapter 1

  4. “One science only will . . .”: Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Aubrey Williams, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 39.

  5. “human beings, not human doings”: Candace B. Pert, PhD, Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel (New York: Simon & Schuster / Touchstone, 1999), p. 286.

  5. “Beauty is the first test”: G. H. Hardy, A
Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 328.

  6. He left posterity with some fifteen: Laura Allsop, “Are There More Lost Leonardo Paintings Out There?,” CNN Living, November 11, 2011 (http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/11/living/hunting-lost-leonardo-paintings/).

  Chapter 2 Epigraphs

  9. “When besieged by . . .”: Edward McCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of ­Leonardo da Vinci (London, 1904), p. 66.

  9. “Leonardo created a kind of space . . .”: Andre Malraux, La Psychologie de l’Art, Book 2 (Geneva: Skira, 1947), p. 150.

  9. “The real voyage of discovery consists . . .”: Thomas Lewis, MD, Fari Amini, MD, and Richard Lannon, MD, A General Theory of Love (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 165.

  Chapter 2

  10. “From the child of five years”: Paul Biryukov, Leo Tolstoy: His Life and Work (St. Petersburg, 1911), p. 47.

  11. “The man who has intercourse”: Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man, translated by Sian Reynolds (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 41.

  13. “They will say that because”: Ibid.

  14. “trumpets and reciters . . . better a small lie”: Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004), p. 55.

  14. He referred to himself: Ibid., p.54.