David Von Drehle is a former deputy opinion editor at The Post.
One summer day in 1981, a cool kid at the summer camp where I was a counselor offered me a turn with his astonishing new gadget — a handheld cassette-tape player with featherweight headphones connected by a wire. The Sony Walkman debuted the previous year and had made its way to me as part of the still-ongoing process of turning human communities into billions of atomized individual appetites.
What blew my mind even more than the device, however, was the music it pumped into my head. Over a propulsive bass line that I would gradually learn to recognize as African in origin, a somehow unsettled, unsettling male voice, perhaps from another planet, sang as though struggling to remain sane amid the madness of modern life:
You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, “Well … how did I get here?”
That was my introduction to David Byrne of the Talking Heads — at the very nanosecond that he and his band were passing from coastal phenomenon to mass sensation. A moment earlier, it had been acceptable not to know who he was; a moment later, such ignorance would have stamped a kid anywhere in America as culturally backward. I shudder to think what might have become of me if I had not slipped into those headphones that afternoon.
The first impression proved enduring, and true: This guy is a genius. Byrne and his design-school collaborators not only created a soundtrack for the dystopian early 1980s; they were pioneers of the music video art form and starred in the extraordinary concert film “Stop Making Sense” in 1984.
By then, they were about a decade into their run, a time span that tests even the most original of musicians. The time comes to find a new vein to mine, to dwindle into a nostalgia act — or to break up and move on. Since Talking Heads disbanded in 1991, Byrne has engaged in a huge range of projects, including Broadway and books, TED talks and bicycle racks. But the omnivorous nature of his curiosity is nowhere more evident than in his latest undertaking, an exploration of how creativity comes to life, how its fruit can be forgotten and how lost ideas can be resurrected.
The flickering lightbulbs of overlooked discoveries are common enough in science that researchers have a name for them: “sleeping beauties.” Byrne borrows the phrase for the title of his new book, “Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up.” The surprisingly breezy volume is a polymath performance of a type well known to British readers, whose culture has long celebrated public intellectuals — Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Michael Palin and so on — who refuse to stay in one lane. Perhaps not coincidentally, Byrne has British bona fides, born in Scotland and maintaining his passport through decades of life as a prototypical New Yorker. In his book bound in covers of gaudy red cloth, he writes with winsome confidence about painting, music, political theory, quantum physics, biochemistry, economics, literature, astronomy, water conservation and medicine.
It is delightful, though perhaps not surprising, that a musician can limn the history of vibrating strings to explain why J.S. Bach was taken for granted as a composer for nearly a century. It’s downright dazzling that the same author can unpack the paradigm-shattering biology of lichens, neglected for generations after its discovery in 1869.
Byrne’s book is a compendium of similar episodes of forgetfulness and neglect. How was it possible that a survey volume titled “Famous European Artists” could appear in 1890 without a single mention of Vermeer? That a huge Caravaggio was yanked off the market in the 1830s because no one wanted to buy it? According to Archimedes, a scientist named Aristarchus of Samos deduced in the third century B.C. that Earth orbits the much-larger sun. Why was that idea still dangerously cutting-edge when Galileo made his case almost 20 centuries later?
Perhaps you’ve read before that “Moby-Dick” sold poorly when published and was out of print when Herman Melville died. But did you know that the New York Public Library — one of the world’s most comprehensive collections — had just two of William Faulkner’s works on its shelves in 1944? “Faulkner is finished,” his editor wrote to a friend. For the first quarter-century of its existence, “The Great Gatsby” was a commercial dud.
Radio astronomy, a discovery that opened the universe to our inspection, languished for more than a decade, pursued only by an eccentric ham radio hobbyist in his backyard in Illinois. Inoculation was practiced for centuries as folk medicine but ignored by authorities while hundreds of millions died of preventable disease. Byrne reports that the scientist-monk Gregor Mendel sent his pioneering work on genetics to Charles Darwin, among other leading experts, though there is no evidence Darwin ever saw it. Thus the Englishman died without learning the Mendelian mechanics behind natural selection.
“When we discover that many things we now love, and many ideas we now believe, were once ignored and dismissed, it raises the question: How will people in the future look at our own current beliefs and the works we now hold in high esteem?” Byrne writes. “Isn’t it reasonable to assume that we might be just as biased as the folks in the past, with their ideas that now seem peculiar and sometimes ridiculous to us?”
Byrne’s book is timely. Accelerating progress in artificial intelligence is feeding an intense bout of millennialism. Whether optimistic, pessimistic or some measure of both, many public thinkers are anticipating an imminent moment when a higher power answers all questions, with utopian or apocalyptic results.
“Sleeping Beauties” reminds us that we are nowhere remotely close to knowing everything. Indeed, we can’t even remember the things we’ve already learned. And what we think we know is often wrong.
Take the previously mentioned Mr. Darwin. His theory of biological change through time ranks among the most consequential insights of scientific history. But he saw through a glass darkly, perceiving nature exclusively as competition. Oversimplified (as most popular ideas tend to be), natural selection was reduced to a Hobbesian war of all against all, with only the “fit” surviving. The idea of biology as meritocracy was embraced with ghastly consequences by Nazis, white supremacists, eugenicists and xenophobes.
Byrne’s excavations reveal alternative facts of biology that suggest evolution owes at least as much to cooperation and symbiosis among organisms; at the molecular level, “make love, not war” is a theme that resonates powerfully. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued in his 1902 book, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution,” that many of the animals he observed living under harsh Siberian conditions cooperated to survive. “The vast majority of species live in societies,” he observed, not in a state of constant conflict. The work was neglected for 70 years.
At any given moment, including our own, Hamlet rings true when he says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Learning is not — has never been — an arrow fired at a distant target, steadily approaching it in a single arc. We learn and we forget. We discover, then misinterpret. We hatch theories prematurely, before we have the means to test them, and we make inventions before we’ve found a use for them. We turn blind eyes to discoveries by the “wrong” people: women, eccentrics, outsiders, amateurs. We overvalue mistaken judgments by people with the “right” credentials. We get wrong answers because we’re asking the wrong questions — which we might fix if only we had more right answers.
“The known is finite, the unknown infinite,” wrote biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, and Byrne wisely quotes him in an epigraph. “Intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.”
AI will be an immensely powerful tool for answering questions — right ones, but also wrong ones. It’s reasonable to hope that this tool will also be useful in shaping better questions to begin with. Byrne suggests strategies, some of them AI-friendly, for speeding up the search for still-slumbering beauties.
But Huxley’s illimitable ocean still yawns in all directions, and everything we know is a small and leaky vessel with which to explore it. Few of us even know ourselves when it comes right down to it. The mark of a true superintelligence — David Byrne, to name one — is clarity on this essential truth.
The post Same as it ever was: David Byrne on why great ideas sometimes fall asleep appeared first on Washington Post.
