Dropping science
little lera boroditsky (lowercase, please) turns the Tentacle Sessions into a hip lecture hall – with beer even.

By Summer Burkes

I AM NOT the type of person who regularly attends scientific lectures by certified geniuses. My choice of extracurricular entertainment more often than not necessitates using words like "earplugs," "cops," and "hangover." Nevertheless, an invitation to hear a Stanford cognitive-psych Ph.D. candidate speak on "the science of illusion and the illusion of science," which I would normally meet with apathy and/or trepidation, was made more attractive by the fact that the lecturer's name was "little lera boroditsky, girl scientist" [lower case hers], and it's said she often dresses as a giant banana.

Laughing Squid's "Tentacle Sessions," a living-artist series at North Beach's Blue Bar, started one year ago as sort of a meet-and-greet for local artificers, tricksters, thespians, and thinkers. Since then, on the third Sunday of each month, filmmakers, circus performers, art-car creators, sculptors, and others on the fringe-art scene's best and brightest have performed and lectured for peers and fans alike. little lera boroditsky (girl scientist), whose extensive academic resume makes my head hurt, took the Tentacle Sessions stage this past Sabbath to drop some interesting facts and theories about color, perception, and tropical fruit.

At 6:30 p.m., the basement Blue Bar is already standing-room only. DJ Mermaid spins aberrant outer-space music – perfectly matched to the ultra-modern, ichiban-arrangement-filled feng shui of the joint – as a small disco ball spins overhead. Two expensive "flat" televisions throb with paint-splatter-and-paramecium visuals as the lucky ones of the audience settle into comfy velvet chairs. People in the crowd examine each other, smug and slightly apprehensive about this forthcoming one night stand of intellectualism.

After a fashionable expanse of time, an emcee appears. "Some of you may know her from running around in a banana suit or licking a lollipop in a little girl's dress. Others of you are students of hers." little lera boroditsky (girl scientist), a confident, diminutive, soft-spoken pixie in a smart brown suit, takes the helm, hands firmly planted on an overhead projector pilfered from the Stanford psychology department. A bookish, socially retarded scholastic savant she is not.

"I'm not by any means an artist," boroditsky broaches. "I wanted to let you know that straight up. I'll prove it to you by showing you some of my drawings." She overhead-projects an optical illusion of two stick-figure boxes that, at different angles, appear to be different sizes but aren't. Which demonstrates, she says, that everything humans see is made up by our brains. We don't see what's actually there.

"We as a species have eyes because it prevents us from going around and licking everything all the time," boroditsky says. "We can explore things from a distance. Everything we know about the world comes in through two little holes in our heads." So whereas flies taste with their feet and see with 10,000 eyeballs; whereas spiders have eight eyes and each pair has a different function; whereas snakes have infra-red vision; whereas scallops have oculi that line their ribs for the length of their bodies – we humans (most of us, anyway) only have two inch-round instruments for cognition, anticipation, and interpretation, and they only work if there's light.

boroditsky then projects several other headache-inducing images that prove our eyes and brain filter out what they believe to be extraneous information. When asked to pick out a "real" American penny from a lineup of nine tweaked pennies, hardly anyone guesses correctly. A black dot surrounded by light gray-to-white shade, when stared at long enough, becomes a black dot on white paper – the brain cancels out weakly-colored things it sees as stationary. (Otherwise we'd always see the blood vessels in our eyes.) What seems to be a conclusive explanation of how camera "red-eye" works gets drowned out by some inebriated heckling.

"The thing is, scientists only found this out last year, when magicians have known that people don't really pay attention to anything too closely for hundreds of years," says boroditsky. An assistant then does the magician's scarf-disappearing-in-the-hand trick, revealing that, while he makes grandiose and confusing hand gestures and we watch the scarf, he stuffs it into a prosthetic thumb hidden in his fist. Nobody catches it. Proving that eyes move around constantly and never get a full picture – more like tiny, constantly-roving focal points. So we don't see all we think we do. Scary.

Aside from a few outbursts, strangely enough, the entire crowd of rowdy drunks pay attention as if this were a moldy, fluorescent-lit indoor university amphitheater and not a lounge with an alcohol permit. And the waiters bring cocktails, crab, onion rings, and steak to paying customers. If school were like this, nobody would ever leave it.

The banana ... boroditsky likes bananas. Her banana obsession, ostensibly, led to her building herself a seven-foot banana suit in which to anonymously stalk a crush, as well as a huge banana vehicle in which to ride around at Burning Man, but that's another column. She likes bananas because she believes they're directly responsible for humans seeing in color – evolving monkeys had to be able to spot fruit on trees in order to avoid starving.

Color isn't actually there – it's all light waves and the reflections and frequencies of this light. Though we only have receptors in our eyes that see blue, green, and red, the endless combinations of these colors in light produce the staggering array of colors we know. This discovery led to an art movement called Minimalist Pointilism, and eventually the invention of the television (where, like the eye, every image is made up of red, green, and blue dots.) And the deep thing about this, boroditsky says, is that there are millions of color combinations that activate all three receptors and lead to our seeing white ("metamers"), but we only see white, period. And some people, called "sinesthetics" (like Kandinsky and Scriabin), associate certain colors with musical tones or letters on the page, thereby hearing or reading rainbows. And they can't agree amongst themselves which colors go with which notes or letters.

So, boroditsky concludes at the end of a delightful but brain-draining Session, humans, though we're stuck here together, can't really concur on anything, don't really see much, and nothing is as it seems. What if all this talk makes us think twice about relying on our vision for everything, a freaked-out audience member asks? "Licking always works," she says. "When all else fails, go back to licking."

The next Tentacle Sessions will be with Hal Robins in "Hal 2000," Sunday, Feb. 20, 6:30 p.m. at the Blue Bar. Dilettante appears alternate Wednesdays.

PHOTO: PAUL KING

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