Starry Starry Night with Roberta Olson, Jay Pasachoff, & Heather Berlin

Can you hear colors? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore science through art in Van Gogh’s Starry Night with art historian Roberta Olson, astronomer Jay Pasachoff, and neuroscientist Heather Berlin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk about the universe in art, in art. Yeah, artists been touching the universe lately, and we're going to get some insights. Well, I've been doing it for quite some time, actually. We'll get some insights on that, but let me first introduce my co-host, Chuck. Nice, Chuck.

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Neil.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, all right.

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  I'm excited. Art and the universe. I feel as though I should be conducting this show with a fine Bordeaux in my head. You know?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, actually, at art openings, they don't serve Bordeaux, they serve Merlot. That's the joke.

• 1:02Chuck Nice?

  How garish.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's the contrast, Joe Sixpack and Martin Merlot. See, that's how that goes.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, actually, you know, I think a lot about this stuff, but I don't claim any special expertise in it. And so, we've got two guests who are all in it. Let me first introduce a longtime friend and colleague and fellow New Yorker, and I think we even went to the same high school as each other. I've got Jay Pasachoff. Jay, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Well, thank you very much. It's nice to see another Bronx High School of Science alumnus again.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And you are the Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy, and you're Director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College. And I kind of sort of can claim I'm a graduate, because I was honored by an honorary degree several years back. So, thank you, guys, for voting me in.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  A well-deserved honor.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the club, in the club.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, Neil, that would only make you an honorary graduate.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, just, you know, Chuck.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I worked hard for that honor. I sat by the phone and they called me.

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  Come on, you got enough degrees, you know that. It's better than being a dishonorary graduate.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've got with us an actual artist, art historian, and co-author of a couple of books with Jay, Roberta Olson. Roberta, welcome.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  It's thrilling to be here, Neil, and you're actually a neighbor of mine on Central Park West.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there you are as curator of drawings. That's a, that's a cool thing on your card. I curate all drawings, all attempts of people to represent reality and all that comes out of their head, even if it's not reality, I guess, in the drawings at the New York Historical Society across the street from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Let me just finish out your, your CV here. Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wheaton College. So that's the full sort of IDs for both of you. That, that's great. Now, the two books, one of them, when I first knew of your collaborations, it was Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art. And that's still on my shelf and I'd love that.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  And that was only me.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that was only you? Oh, my gosh.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  It was before that. And it was actually that, that was the reason why Jay and I met.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that, that's the, that's the origin story of your publishing relationship. Wow, wow. Well, okay, so you've got, so, so, okay, so you've already had some astronomy chops, is what you're saying here.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  When I was teaching at Wheaton College, I was doing a two-week-long sort of investigation of Jato. And I looked at the Adoration of the Magi one time.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jato the artist, yes, okay.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  The artist who painted the Stravany Chapel in Padua. And in 1303 to 1306.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  And I looked at the adoration of the major and I asked my class, "Why is there a comet for the star Bethlehem?" No one could answer.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because if you draw the star Bethlehem, it's got like pointy, uh, spikes coming out of it. And if you draw a comet, people know what comets look like. You don't mistake a comet or a star.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  This is what's absolutely incredible. So I had to answer my students. You know, I was a good teacher. I am a good teacher. So I went to the New York Public Library and I spent months learning cometology. Also going through everything that had been published on Joddo. And Ecclesiastes was actually wrong. No one had ever identified that as a comet. So I thought, "Got to do something about this." Learned cometology and I thought, "All the art publications, two years hence." So I sent it to Scientific American, Unknown. And there were, there were no computers in those days. This is 1979.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  I got a letter back in two days and said, "We're going to put it in the next issue." Alright, there it was. And then the European Space Agency sent me a telegram and said, "We're flying to Halley's Comet in 1985, 86. Can we name the satellite Joddo?"

• 5:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so Neil, remind me never to get into an argument with Roberta. Roberta is just like, "I'll see you in two years after I learn everything about it, and you, sir, will be proven wrong."

• 5:49Speaker 03

  No, but at the time, this is, we're talking about 1979, there wasn't that much published. I mean, it's very different. We are filled with wonderful things today, but a glut of information. And in those days, it was much more manageable. And, uh...

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, you're leaving out an important piece of information here. If you do the 75, 76 year orbit of comet Halley, and you go backwards through time, it lands... At the time that painting was made, isn't that correct? So we can say that was probably Halley's Comet.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely, you're correct. And we know from Giovanni Bellini's Chronicle, it was described exactly like Jado painted it. And he has the wonderful sweeping dust tail, and he does it in layers. He has the condensation around the nucleus and the coma. I mean, it's absolutely brilliant, layer upon layer. And it actually is... Artists are very intelligent. They layer things. And he put it where the star of Bethlehem usually is. But someone was advising him, and he did his Church Fathers. He read Origin and John of Damascus, because they described the star of Bethlehem in words that you, Neil, you Chalk, you Jay, everyone will look at and say,

• 7:06Speaker 03

  yes, that's a comet he's describing, not a star.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, because, you know, we all share the same vocabulary. And if you're looking at stuff, it's going to come out that way. So this latest collaboration is... Let me make sure I get the title of that. Jay, what's the title of the book? Art...

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Well, the latest collaboration is Cosmos, The Art and Science of the Universe. But it started with Halley's Comet. A mutual colleague, the late Sam Egerton, a professor of art at Williams, invited Roberta to come up from... up to give a lecture. And I went to her lecture. And I heard that the first two thirds of her lecture and the first two thirds of my Halley's Comet lecture were similar. But of course, her last third was art and mine was science. And we were introduced at that point. So basically, since Halley's Comet came by in 1985, we've been working together.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what can the two of you say or reflect upon when you see artists reach for the universe as their sources of inspiration?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Well, it's really an exploration again, and again, multi-leveled. Artists are basically searchers for meaning, just like astronomers. I mean, it's a different thing. Plus, both artists and astronomers are visual. And it depends on what area you're talking about. If you're talking about Babylonian seal engravers, they were reflecting the cosmology at the time and the belief in astrology. If you're talking about the 18th century in England, this was a time when people were really differentiating what was going on in the heavens. And scientists, astronomers, amateurs and professionals,

• 8:54Speaker 03

  and artists were both involved with sort of describing what they could see, because that was a different universe than we have today in the sense of what could be encompassed. Also...

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but it's one thing to interpret the universe and then create some work of art that emanates from your own perspective. It's another thing, because I don't know how to draw, and I need you to draw what I see in my telescope. So you're kind of a substitute camera for me in that context. So, do you guys explore that distinction?

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Before photography, that was the case. And in fact, if you know Carolyn Herschel, she drew comets in her book of records. We know that actually Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, drew comets in his scribblings too, and in his notes. Astronomers, actually, and some of them wonderful, MacClure, have fabulous drawings, because before photography, you had to be able to draw, to remember something, to describe something. Because art is a visual language, and so you have that. But then art is also a symbolic image. And so if we jump to the fact of the universe is riveting, okay?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Comets are riveting, the stars are riveting. And they also, shall we say, call forth speculation. Where are we going? Where have we been? Where are we going to? As Gauguin would say. They encourage speculative thought. Plus, before electricity... They were much more galvanizing. I don't know if you tried to see comet Neowise last year?

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I did, of course. Who you think you're talking to here? Did I see comet Neowise?

• 10:46Speaker 03

  I had to sort of tweak you a little bit on that one.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  So one of the first things that I did with Roberta was when we noticed that in a book called the Nuremberg Chronicle from 1492, there were a number of pictures of comets, but one of them kept getting cited as the first drawing of a comet. And when we actually looked in the book, and this at that time, and free World Wide Web required my going to the Harvard Library to take the book out and page through, we discovered about a dozen pictures of comets. But then we realized that there were only four woodcuts. And they churned them every which way and just put them next to dates.

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So that was not really a picture of...

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't an independent drawing. Oh, my gosh.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  They were stylized woodcuts. And so we heard that there were exemplars, which are plans for the books, you know, layouts, which were very ray-shared and had been lost in World War II. And we were able to go to Nuremberg, because the library had found them, and see how they plotted out both the Latin first and then the German editions in 1493. It was just fabulous.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just remind me, the Nuremberg Chronicles is a complete compilation of all knowledge up to that day, isn't that correct?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  That's right. And it's early in Knoblauch. It's very important. And it's a huge volume. But they tried to give the entire history of the world in terms of, you know, rulers and war.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything, everything. It was just...

• 12:28Chuck Nice?

  You know, Mel Brooks did the same thing.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The same thing and it was really good, I have to say.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  But they reused woodcuts. Some of the pictures of cities were reused from one city to a different city. And we then did make this list in an article. We had a grant from the travel for collections from the National Endowment for Humanities to go see these exemplars. And they turned out to be really sketchy, just very rough pencil drawing. So there was clearly no accuracy in the depiction of the comments at all.

• 13:04Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, with respect to that, are there times when, as Roberta mentioned earlier, the speculative nature, where we're going, what we're doing, which often leads to interpretation and the artist being able to expand what they're looking at?

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, that's what I want an artist to do for me, right?

• 13:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Jay, I get people write to me and say, oh, I saw this Hubble photo and I made this painting of the Hubble photo. I'm sorry, I don't need that. I got the Hubble photo. All right. So, so where, at what point did artists start putting their own paw print on the cosmic topic?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Well, in fact, I think one of the reasons that the Hubble photos are so interesting to many people is that they have a public information division that colorizes the photos in weird and wonderful ways. And I've paid a lot of attention to the artistic versions. So, so in fact, I'd be very glad to have an oil painting of one of the Hubble photos on my wall. If any of the listeners here want to send us some copies, maybe three copies, please. One to Roberta, one to Neil and one to me. We have these wonderful false color things and now we're looking forward to the

• 14:28Speaker 02

  false color things that'll come out of the James Webb Space Telescope when that's launched in a few months. And that, in fact, is just going to work in the infrared, as certainly Neil knows very well. So there won't actually be the same high-quality, fine-resolution, visible light photos, but in false color, it'll all look great.

• 14:50Chuck Nice?

  And Jay, let me just thank you for leaving me off the list, as I now sit without any Hubble oil paintings in my home. But maybe I'll go to Neil's and just look at his. Perhaps he'll keep it at the museum and I can see it there.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Well, I actually have one page on my wall from the Nuremberg Chronicle that happens to have a comet in it, of course. So I'll make a copy of that, Chuck.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  That makes up for it completely. Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jay, you own so many antiquarian books. I'm disappointed you don't have your own Nuremberg Chronicles.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  There was a choice at one point, either Nuremberg Chronicle or getting something that was more straightforward astronomy. And I got the astronomy one, but I'm so sorry that I left the Nuremberg Chronicle.

• 15:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought you might have said, "I could have bought the Nuremberg Chronicle or another house." Last I checked what these things are going for. We're going to take a break. We're going to take a break. When we come back, more with Jay and Roberta. Jay, pass it off. Roberta, also. We're talking about the history of astronomy in art on StarTalk.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. I got Chuck Nice, my co-host. We've got Roberta Olson and Jay Pasachoff, a fellow astrophysicist, and they're collaborators on projects that explore the intersection of art and science. And Roberta, we left off, you were gonna tell us when and where or how artists started making representations of the universe, an expression of how they see the world, rather than trying to duplicate what a photograph might do.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Well, I think it starts, first of all, trying to capture in the Renaissance what people saw. For example, the Lorenzetti would look at meteor showers and put them in the Garden of Gethsemane when Christ was arrested and Judas betrayed him because it was chaos. It was a symbol. But it was a symbol everyone could understand because they had seen it and they were afraid when there were meteors falling. So that was a symbol everyone understood. And then I think by the time you-

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, at the time, they had no clue what a meteor was. So these were just falling stars.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Falling stars, but they didn't know whether they were comets or meteors or whatever. They were not differentiated until the 18th century, really. So they were called things like falling stars, broom stars, hairy stars, and comete, by the way, is Greek for hairy star, which is why they were always satirized with long tresses. But then, after the Enlightenment had set in, when it was sort of, everyone had mastered depictions that were realistic, artists and also writers began to be very subjective. And I mean, you always had comets and meteors and other astronomical things used by Shakespeare, by Spencer, and they

• 18:27Speaker 03

  had all this incredible symbolic baggage. Artists began trying to express what they felt about life, the universe, their own-

• 18:38Speaker 03

  A view of things like William Blake, who holds the record of showing eighteen comets in his illustrations, and they're bizarre as all get out. Very personal. It was sort of a liberation.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how I, that's what I want. If I had a house artist, that's what I'd want them to do. You know, like the king has a, has like a court jester and a court. If I had an artist at my disposal, I'd want them to always interpret the world for me.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  And it's great. And it's, it's endless, like the universe. I mean, it can go on. I mean, obviously, everyone has a, a finite number of years. But they were very inventive. I mean, it was something that people had fun with. They also became vehicles for satirizing in the eighteenth century. When you had coffeehouses and they would have caricatures of people. You could do political caricatures. You could do anything. But remember, these were topical events. Everybody looked up. There was the sky. There was no TV. There were no computers. And this, and everything that happened in the sky was much brighter. And people were still afraid.

• 19:45Chuck Nice?

  So the sky was, the, the sky is antiquity's television?

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, basically.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  And up until electricity, it was. And then you had people in the Victorian times. They would take transparencies and they would take pins and prick them, put them up to their kerosene lamps to try to duplicate what they had seen in the heavens.

• 20:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I, I, I just gotta say this. But Roberta took us from ancient Babylon in the beginning, right? Up to the Roman Empire and Christ, right? Up to the seventeen hundreds. How much, where, where, how much history is in you?

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But when she went, then she went up to the Victorian times.

• 20:26Chuck Nice?

  And then up to Victorian, yes.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  There's just endless amount of material. I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of works that we could discuss.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  And Roberta notes them all, so.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  So that's what this new book is, basically. We've written a dozen or whatever articles over since Ali's comet came by in 1985, 86. And so we just had a chance that we have a dozen chapters, each on a different topic. Eclipse's meteors, uh, uh, comets, et cetera. In, in this new book with a lot of, with a few hundred illustrations showing samples from all these different periods of time.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, when, when you said she knows thousands of years, I was gonna say we, we need a bigger boat, bigger format. So Roberta, I, I've done some, a little bit of my own homework. Nothing, I wouldn't call it scholarly homework, but just sort of casual homework while I'm, you know, uh, eating popcorn. And Van Gogh's Starry Night, The Starry Night, 1889. I've looked hard and I've not been able to find another work of art where the title is astronomical, even if there's astronomical things in the painting. Not only that, it's the, I have not been able to find a work of art where the title

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is the background. So he's got, he's got a village, he's got rolling hills, there's a cypress tree. None of that is the title of that painting. It's called The Starry Night. So for me, it was, it felt like maybe the universe is becoming front and center and not just the wallpaper or whatever else you're drawing. So how, how much of what I just told you there will land on fertile ground and how much is just bullshit? And remember, he's not the least bit biased.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  I think that Van Gogh speaks to you and drew you in because what he has shown is an approximation of his emotional, uh, interaction with the universe. There are other works of art with titles that have, um,

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Astronomical features such as Millet's work, that's not Starry Night, but it's the same thing. It's a meteor shower, which Van Gogh may have known. But I think that Van Gogh was totally obsessed.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, at least four where the night sky is.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  With the night sky and actually one, an additional one, which people haven't commented on, which is known in about four versions. So there are five with one of four versions. And we're very lucky because he wrote to his brother Theo and told him everything. And he told him that he wanted to do a painting of the starry night. And nocturnes were very, very popular at this point in Paris and all over in England as well.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But nocturnes, I think of nocturnes, I think of piano nocturnes. Is that what you mean or something else?

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Nocturne is a term for a night painting. And something done at night. And we know that he warmed up to this. And in fact, he wrote to his friend, the Belgian, Eugene Blach, that he wanted to paint this café terrace where they had been, that was the first one. And he painted the sky, and the café, by the way, is now named Café Van Gogh. It wasn't at the time, but everyone goes there on the Van Gogh tour to see it.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  And the second warm up was the one that is, shall we say, over the Rhône. It's the view over the Rhône with the starry sky. And it's very near where he was living in all of the time. He was living in the Yellow House. And that one actually does have astronomical bodies you can identify it as part of the Ursa Major, the Big Bear, the part that the English call the plough and we call the big dipper. And, but it's reoriented. It's a marriage. It's not an actual topographical, shall we say, or skyscape

• 24:43Speaker 03

  view, because he's looking towards the southwest. And you can, by going there, you can figure out where the view was, because it looks very much the same in their pictures of it. He was actually painting the sky on the other side. So he married the two. And this sort of answers many of your questions.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, he lied. Just, just say.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can say it.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  It's artistic license. He manipulated things for feelings. He wanted things. And he wrote to his brother after Starry Night, he wrote, "I'm in dire need of religion." For him, if you think of Starry Night, you think of the blues. He appointed colors with certain emotions. Okay, this is post-impressionism. Blue was infinity. Blue was eternity. And he's speculating, just like you do when you look through a telescope. What's out there? What does it mean? Okay, where are we going? How does it relate to me? And people have spilled much ink about what we see in the sky. The only thing we can say for certain is that there is what he called the morning star,

• 25:50Speaker 03

  which was Venus, which apparently, according to astronomical calculations, was in its eighth year of the cycle, so it was extremely strong. But he distorts everything for a kind of wonderful orient, this glow around the morning star. And then, you can tell me, Neil, and they certainly can comment, and I'm sure Chuck would too, is that the spiral nebula, or as some people said, oh no, it's clouds in the mist cloak? And then down below on the horizon, is that the Milky Way? And then we have a crescent moon, but we know this painting was done in two days. It was done in two days. We know that from the letters to Theo.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  And the moon was gibbous at that point. It wasn't a crescent. So you'd say he's lying. He's manipulating it because you know the crescent moon is more interesting for most people who are not astronomers. Okay?

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, people hardly ever draw a gibbous moon. It's the saddest moon phase of them all. It's not a full moon and it's not a crescent. Like, what is that?

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Remember, astronomy at this time was very popular. In France, you had Flemarien, and you had Guillaume Maure. And Flemarien... Because he was so parapetetic, we don't know what Van Gogh saw.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, Camille Flammarie, a highly prolific French writer of astronomical, but pop French writer of astronomical subjects.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  And everyone got it. But he had beautiful illustrations in his book as well. We know, for example, a contemporary, Gustave Marat, who has all his library preserved in his italie, which you can visit in Paris, had copies of Flammarie. Okay, so probably he thought, could he have seen drawings of of Lor Ross? And this is what makes art so fascinating. It's not a simple answer. And to unravel it, you have to do archaeology of all sorts. Jay and I know, we got Getty grants to do our book, Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Century in British Art and Science. You have to go to the place and you have to find things that have never been published.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  And it's a, shall we say, a voyage of discovery. I mean, is it a voyage of discovery? It is. Is it archaeology? Yes, but it's finding things that haven't been there before so that you understand what the artist was exposed to. An artist is like a sponge. They take in all this stuff and they create something that is entirely different, entirely their own. And you may relate to it in certain ways. I may relate to it in certain ways.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Robert, could you comment on the intensity of Van Gogh's colors? It's been rumored that he might have had some synesthesia, I think it's called, where you hear, you can hear color. You know, your senses are crosswired so that it may have manifested differently or more intensely within him. And because people always remark on the on the intensity of those colors. It's almost psychedelic.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  It is psychedelic. And in fact, he purposely chose complementary colors, like oranges and yellows with blues and greens. And then in The Night Cafe, and by the way, I should say something about gaslight. He does the same thing with gaslight that he does with Venus, the morning star. He makes it vibrate, so it's alive. Because for him, it's an emotional thing. Gaslight was new. And he wanted to juxtapose, in the café with the terrace, new gaslight.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  With the cosmic light.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, now Jay, I ran some numbers on the starry night with the crescent moon. So according to Roberta, they know when it was painted. And of course, we would know the phase of the moon trivially upon getting the date. However, if we assume, if instead of that, you say, okay, here's the crescent moon. Here's Venus, the morning star, and about that angle to each other, and about that elevation above the horizon, I derived a date for that scene, and it's June 21st, 1889. And so, and the fact that Venus and the moon are at that very low angle to each other betrays the fact that he's at a very high northern latitude. So all of that sort of makes sense.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm, I'm wondering, maybe it didn't matter when he painted it. He saw that crescent moon and Venus had some other date. It would have to have been June 21st, and then put it in his painting.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Well, there's, there's another Olsen, and I never get confused between Roberta Olson and Don Olsen.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Don Olsen at, at Texas.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Don Olsen at Texas Tech actually uses all those positions of things and, and goes to the places with the students and figures out exactly when and exactly where people were standing and what direction they're looking at. And he's got a couple of books out about that that are very interesting.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  But the work with Roberta is more, is more art historical rather than, rather than positional.

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Positional, technical, right, right, right.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  But we know that he painted this on June 19th and worked on it for two days.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but that would be a crescent moon. Wait, wait, if you, if that's the date, it was a crescent, it wasn't gibbous, it was crescent moon.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Then, the literature is bomb, Neil. Send me, what program did you use? And that's the wonderful thing about computers. You can program, you can program eclipse paths, you can do.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And, and I agree that nobody paints, hardly anybody paints gibbous moons. It's a sad phase, but.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  And I, and I learned from a colleague a few years ago that it's called gibbous because it give us more light.

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you combine high-tech with illiteracy, you get fascinating.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  You know that they examined the canvas, though, and they had said it's two days. He left holes in the canvas where he put in the astronomical phenomenon. He painted the foreground first and the cypress tree, which of course is a symbol of a cemetery and death as well as being evergreen. And notice how the cypress tree dominates.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  In a sense, it unifies heaven and earth. It is the cosmos. Because if you think of Humboldt, Unhumboldt and the cosmos, it also takes us down to earth.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Van Humboldt was one of the first people to bring some intellectual harmonization to the fields of study of our place on earth and in the universe. You know, before that, there was this little thing going on over there, and this is happening over here, and this is happening on earth. And he's saying, maybe it's all part of one thing that we might call nature. So, yeah, I mean, people like that are not as much talked about because you can't point to the one thing they discovered that changed things. But he introduced a perspective that surely had deep influence culturally.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for inviting us to be on Startalk.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, this has been great. And so, Roberta, thank you, Roberta Olson and Jay Pasachoff. And you guys and your latest book, where can we find it? I guess just Amazon or who's the publisher?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  His reaction in London, and it's on Amazon, and it's in many bookstores.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  And the University of Chicago Press is the American distributor.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The American distributor, okay. So, I've been delighted to have you guys on, and maybe we can do something like this again. We'll find some other art topics that would be in desperate need of illumination by you both. Okay, so we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to analyze the neuroscience of art or what's going on in our brains when we do art and when we think about it. When Startalk continues.

• 36:16Heather Berlin?

  Which is active when we are sort of focused inward, when we're daydreaming, when we're mind wandering, when we're not thinking about anything specific. And that's sort of where the creative juices come from, bubble up from.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  The default work, the default.

• 36:32Heather Berlin?

  Default mode.

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  Default mode. Oh, my God. That actually sounds like a tiny little hole in the back of your neck that you stick a paper clip and it resets you to factory settings.

• 36:46Heather Berlin?

  On a way.

• 36:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been hanging around Macintosh products too long.

• 36:52Heather Berlin?

  I mean, that's not too far off. It's kind of like when you go back to your baseline, to your basic brain state, when you're not taking in any information from the world that can kind of muddy the waters in a way. And then you stay there for a bit, and then there's something called the salience network, another kind of activation network in the brain that tells you what's important to pay attention to at any given point in time. So it'll either tell you, you can just go back to your default mode and hang out there, or there's something happening in the environment, you should switch your focus of attention outward. And when it tells you to do that, you go into what's called the central executive network, or the executive control network, which is looking out at the environment. It's more sort of logic, reason.

• 37:36Heather Berlin?

  But you can switch back and forth between these networks. So we find that when people are in the creative process, they're going between this default mode network where ideas are bubbling up, but then you have to do something with them. You have to enact them. You have to give them some structure. So it's almost like default mode network is like being in an unorganized sort of dream state where anything goes, you can make novel associations between ideas, that's what creativity is.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you fly? Can I even fly?

• 38:00Heather Berlin?

  You could even fly.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 38:02Heather Berlin?

  But then you have to kick in the sort of more rational, logical parts of the brain that can organize it and structure it. So the process of creativity is switching between these networks. And we find in neuroimaging studies that more creative people have more connectivity between these networks, so they can switch in and out of them quicker.

• 38:21Chuck Nice?

  Do they, do they, do they suffer anywhere because of the greater connectivity between those two?

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what, what's the cost, what's the cost of that?

• 38:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's because, because if you connect to the dream state easily, maybe you're not fully connected to the real world at times when you might need to be.

• 38:40Chuck Nice?

  Well, at least that's what I'm hoping.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trying to account for your own state of existence.

• 38:48Heather Berlin?

  Well, I mean, on the on the plus side, people who are creative tend to have more flexibility, more adaptability. If you were to always stay in that sort of default mode network and have trouble switching states, you would have problems, right? That's people with schizophrenia who can't get out of that kind of a state. But in terms of the relationship between sort of, let's say, mental health issues and creativity, again, that's another myth that's been debunked. There's not, it's not any more significant, there's not any more prevalence of mental health disorders in creative people compared to the rest of the population. So we like to point to these particular cases that stand out, but that's very anecdotal.

• 39:28Heather Berlin?

  On average, artists aren't necessarily more dysfunctional than your average, you know, Wall Street guy.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna have to look for another excuse.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so Heather, are these literal electrochemical networks in the brain? Or is this an organizing, is this an organizing sort of heuristic accounting of what we see going on?

• 39:57Heather Berlin?

  I think it's a little of both, but it's certainly, there are these networks that we all have in our brains that are going to be either active, activated or deactivated, depending on what we're doing.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but imagine the future where you find, you know where that network is. You go with some needle and inject it with extra electrochemical nodes. And then all of a sudden, a person gets more creative. If you can actually know and identify and isolate such networks in the brain.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  But I was just gonna say this. As a person who dabbles in creativity, you can actually do that kind of to yourself right now. You know, there are times when you can, I can't say make yourself more creative, but there are times that you can deepen the creative mode. There are times when you can actually do activities to place your mind to receive creativity.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Chuck, I want Heather to inject a joke into my head. Okay, that's what I want Heather. Heather, you know she's working on that.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, let me just say this, Neil. I want Heather to inject a joke into my head.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see behind that screen, behind her there, see that's behind that screen?

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Heather, a very, very serious question. Let's look at, you know, Van Gogh, of course, was an impressionist artist, but let's, let's back up a little and let's go to Leonardo. So Leonardo is illustrating perfectly human physiology in his artwork. Where is the creativity in that if he is only drawing what he sees?

• 41:35Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, that was a good one, wasn't it?

• 41:37Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:38Heather Berlin?

  Yeah. So in a way, I wouldn't call that part of his, uh, uh, output the most creative part. The creativity was in his drawings of like flying machines and, you know.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, he's thinking way, the way no one has thought before.

• 41:56Heather Berlin?

  Right. Doing detailed anatomy is, is talent for sure, but I wouldn't say that is the most creative aspect of, um, Leonardo. And, and, you know, what we see is that when people are in these really highly creative states, we're seeing these differences in network activation, but then we can also pinpoint certain just like nodes within that network that if we kind of focus in on those, that maybe we could stimulate creativity or, or decrease creativity. But one of them is the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, which we find when it's turned down, people tend to be more creative and in these flow states. And when it's turned up, they tend to be more self-aware, self-conscious and less, um, creative. But-

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So by creativity, you mean a new idea?

• 42:40Heather Berlin?

  A new idea, a new novel. So we all have access to the same information. Um, I like to use Darwin as an example. Like we all, all the scientists at the time had access to that basic data, but he kind of put that data together in a novel way, which when, when they come up with it, it seems of course obvious. It's just that nobody else had thought of that before. And so it's novel thinking, it's divergent thinking, new associations between ideas when everybody had access to the same information.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  So it's so funny you say that, uh, when comedians watch each other work, the thing that they'll do is they'll sit there and they'll go, oh, that was funny. Oh, that's funny. They never laugh. And the reason is because they're watching that person make associations that they themselves did not make. And so they're thinking like, oh, wow, I didn't even look at it that way. So if, if that's the case, if his creativity is a great, has a great deal to do with associations like Darwin, same information, making new associations.

• 43:41Chuck Nice?

  Will AI be able to be more creative than human beings? Because AI is able to make millions of associations at once.

• 43:52Heather Berlin?

  So there, well, first of all, there's been some studies with comedians which look at amateur versus professional. Um, when they have to look at a cartoon and then the task was just come up with a novel, like, uh, you know, creative punchline to this cartoon, like a New Yorker cartoon. And, um, it takes less work for the professional comedians to activate, to come up with something. And we find that the association areas, um, are more quickly activated. So you're, you're quicker to make these associations. Now with AI, um, it's, I just recently came across this video. It was the first comedy set that was created by AI. I, I urge you to watch it. It is simultaneously awkward, yet strangely funny in a weird awkward way.

• 44:37Chuck Nice?

  Are you sure somebody didn't just tape my set?

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  That sounds a lot like weirdly awkwardly funny. Yes, weirdly awkwardly funny.

• 44:49Heather Berlin?

  In an uncomfortable, uneasy way. You know that they say that uncanny valley, right? When you are trying to create the AI thinks there's just something slightly off. That's what it's like with the comedy. But I, however, I do, I do think that after they perfected and after they, you know, keep feeding in this algorithm over and over again with self-learning processes, that they will be able to come up with these novel jokes and to rival, you know, the, the greatest comedians, so.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Heather, let me ask, uh, there's been rumors that Van Gogh may have had a, uh, I don't want to say suffered from, because that places value judgment on it, but had a condition of synesthesia or chromesthesia? Uh, there's been rumors about that. I guess where you hear color. Or you smell color, where there's a cross wiring of your senses. Right, right, right.

• 45:39Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, any, um, what can you tell us about those two conditions within the human mind?

• 45:46Heather Berlin?

  Well, chromesthesia is like a subset of synesthesia, which is sort of crossing over the senses. So sometimes people will see, um, letters as different colors or numbers as different colors. Um, and they will cross over, chromesthesia specifically, sound relating to colors. So colors will sound like something. Um, so if you imagine Van, the Dutch would say Van Hooch, but Van Gogh, uh, for the English speaking people, which I am one. Um, they imagine his painting would sound musical to him. It would be like a symphony made up of colors. Um, there's some, there's some speculation that he had this because of the letters he had written to his brother Theo.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in fact, I have a note here, it says, quoting Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo. So it says here, some artists have a nervous hand at drawing, which gives their technique something of the sound peculiar to a violin.

• 46:41Heather Berlin?

  Hmm.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How could you even write that unless there was some cross wiring in your brain?

• 46:47Heather Berlin?

  Exactly.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm thinking, that's, that's what I'm thinking.

• 46:49Heather Berlin?

  And it's not just in terms of what's happening in the brain, it's not, there's one idea that it's a sort of cross wiring. Um, another is that there is this disinhibition of feedback, so a reduction. Normally we're having lots of information coming out of the brain and parts of it have to inhibit information from crossing over. But when you lift that, um, inhibition, you can get these, you know, um, melding of senses. And you can actually induce synesthesia in people. People who have, um, certain types of strokes or temporal lobe epilepsy, or then with drugs like psychedelics. When you lift the constraints of the brain, which we normally need the constraints to be able to function.

• 47:31Heather Berlin?

  But when you lift the constraints, that's when you can get these hallucinations and these blending of the senses. And there's a paper I read years ago, it was in the American Journal of Psychol- Psychiatry in two thousand and two. That, um, has a theory that Van Gogh actually had temporal lobe epilepsy. He was having epileptic seizures they think were induced by absinthe. Um, and those seizures might have actually been related to the um, chromosgesia. But other people are born with it too. So it could be, it's a genetic, there's a genetic, um, there's some inheritance with this as well.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  So what you are really trying to tell us is that Van Gogh was high and tripping.

• 48:12Heather Berlin?

  You might say, or others might say he just had a secret window into the reality that we all are, you know, being constrained.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, good reply there. He, he has access to doorways that the rest of us don't. So, so is, is the transition from representational art to impressionist art, is that a creative leap? Or is it, or was, is the first artist to do that just lazy?

• 48:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just wondering, I mean, I don't mean, you know, you know, I don't mean disrespect. Yeah, I don't mean any disrespect. But did they just say, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm not gonna paint every leaf on this tree.

• 48:54Chuck Nice?

  Throw some blobs up here.

• 48:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, my, my theory is that they were all nearsighted, so.

• 49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so everything was blurry.

• 49:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, everything was all blurred, right.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the nearsighted painters, painters movement, right.

• 49:09Heather Berlin?

  You know, I dare say, and as someone who does paints and how was trained um, in, in paint, I was a fine arts minor and I painted. I do know that we have to get trained in all of the skill sets first. You have to be, you know, perfect, the actual representational before you can go into the abstract. I do think it was a creative leap because, you know, it was something new. It was something different. It was a new way to perceive the world. And now we're getting into the realm in, you know, current um, art theory where it becomes so abstract that like, you know, there was recently a sculpture that was put out there, an invisible sculpture. It's just a pedestal.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I read about that. We're talking on it.

• 49:48Heather Berlin?

  With nothing on it. And it's an invisible sculpture. And then it was crazy as another guy said, oh, you stole my idea. That was my,

• 49:55Chuck Nice?

  My invisible.

• 49:56Heather Berlin?

  My invisible sculpture came first.

• 50:00Heather Berlin?

  Um, but, but it's become an attraction now where it's not even about the art. And there's still, of course, you know, realist painters out there.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. Did they steal that from John Cage? Who has, he has a piano sonata. Was it, it's just called four eleven or something, which is like the minutes and seconds. I forgot. There's some duration and the pianist just sits there and, and just, and yes, their hands hover over the keys and they don't do anything. And the claim is, if you do this in a theater, then the concert is basically the sound of the audience.

• 50:32Chuck Nice?

  And the sound, right, the, the.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sound of silence is the sound of the audience rustling and, you know, clearing their throat. And so that's the acoustic version of the invisible sculpture.

• 50:42Chuck Nice?

  And let me just say this.

• 50:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Heather, what the hell part of the brain comes up with that?

• 50:45Chuck Nice?

  Right. Well, that's some creativity and that is also, that's the, that's the greedy part. Cause you charging money, you stealing money is what you're doing.

• 50:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So Chuck, the day you can pull off a comedy act, you just stand there and with your mouth open and nothing coming out at the microphone?

• 51:02Chuck Nice?

  Well, the people, that would make people happy, Neil.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we gotta call Heather quick on that.

• 51:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta Heather intervention to figure out how, how that one worked. Guys are running out of time, but this has been great. Heather, thanks for bringing some neuroscientific insights to add to our artistic, our artistic and scientific insights into the mind of Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh, this is Merka, Jack. No, no, Van Gogh. And I'm not, I'm not hawking a Louis here.

• 51:32Chuck Nice?

  And that's why we don't say it like that. It was just like, huh, oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to spit on you. I'm so.

• 51:40Heather Berlin?

  In the time of COVID, you no longer.

• 51:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the time of COVID, right. You got it. Well, Heather, it's a delight always to have you on the show. Thanks for being such a good sport every time we call you. For our emergency neuroscientific inquiries.

• 51:53Heather Berlin?

  I'm on call.

• 51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On call, you're, that's right. And Chuck, always good to have you. So, uh, this has been the, we now just concluded our three-part investigation into impressionist art focusing on Van Gogh. And of course, my favorite of his is The Starry Night, of course. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I do you. Keep looking out.

• 52:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You.