My partner Chi said she will not read this article. She walked away from her editorial function! She said:

“Just go ahead and publish it!”

Why? Because it is mostly about science. Science bores her.

So naturally I set out to write about a scientific concept in a way that is not boring. I hope it works.

If you are not interested in science, please stick with me — the sexy bit is at the end. If you are a scientist, go easy on me, I’m doing my best. I am an artist trying to paint a picture of your subject without representing any of your objects.

Seeing is believing … but

We tend to treat what we see as simply reality — and rarely question the lens we look through. But what are we missing?

Language is a powerful lens. The words we use and the meanings we attach to them can change how we ‘see’ or understand our reality. Words change how we define what is real — personally, socially and politically.

This also applies to science.

We live in a scientific age. Yet most of us don’t understand science, especially not something like quantum physics. As outsiders, our ability to grasp scientific concepts depends entirely on the words used by scientists to communicate their ideas.

Physicist Matt Strassler declared that his peers are actually terrible at using language to describe what they do. They use mathematics to talk to each other. When they talk to non-scientists, they seem to pull whatever words they find handy to approximate their ideas. Then we completely misunderstand them. Strassler wrote a book about this, just to bridge the communication canyon — Waves in an Impossible Sea

In my last article, I talked about the difficulties my work colleagues had in their attempts to create ‘object detection’ algorithms. I had tried to help them by declaring that there is no such thing as objects. But I only confused them more.

Still, it is an interesting idea. What does science have to say about this?

In a comment on his blog, Strassler sums it up pretty succinctly with this:

“You and everything around you are made of vibrations”

Another physicist, Art Hobson, defines those vibrations as “spatially extended bundles of field energy.”

These ‘vibrations’ occur in various fields that permeate the entire universe. Vibrations in cosmic fields. That is an interesting take on what reality is.

But even though modern physicists view the universe as vibrations within cosmic fields, the language they use still sounds like they are talking about classical objects. For example, the word ‘particle’ is a commonly used term. Particle physicists use particle accelerators to make particles collide. It’s hard not to think of bouncing billiard balls when they talk like that.

But that kind of language takes us away from important insights. For scientists these words are code for mathematical concepts. But for us as non-scientists, they just send the wrong messages, and we don’t even realize it.

In an attempt to correct some of this terminology problem, Strassler advocates for use of the term ‘wavicles’ to describe those vibrations-in-universe-filling-fields. As an unfamiliar term, he says, it is less likely to give people the wrong impression. (Although I do tend to think of tasty frozen summer treats when I hear it.)

As Strassler puts it, a wavicle “is not a dot” and “is always spread out”. That means the vibrations have a point of focus where they are most likely to occur in space. But there is no hard boundary — the odds of finding the vibrations taper off in all directions, never quite reaching zero but becoming negligible very quickly.

I’ll put that into Core-Radiance terms: each wavicle is a radiant core of vibrations. Energy at the fundamental level takes on a Core-Radiance pattern.

Taking a cosmic field trip

This Core-Radiant ‘shape’ of energy at the lowest level is true of photons, electrons, and any other type of wavicle in elemental fields. Where it gets interesting is at the point of transition from one field to another. That’s what happens when light hits the retina in your eye.

For reasons unknown to me, but nevertheless astounding, nature built fields with the ability for vibrations (energy) to move from one field to another through a process known as ‘resonant coupling’. I admit it took me a very long time to get this through my head, largely because the words I read in the various ‘explanations’ just didn’t make sense to me. So now I want to put this into my words, and I hope it will make sense more quickly for you.

When a photon hits a photoreceptor in your retina, it encounters a special molecular structure that basically amounts to a sort of ‘net of electrons’. This net comes from a group of atoms that join together in a way that makes a photon more likely to get caught. When it does, one of the electrons absorbs the energy and effectively sets off an action that could be seen as the turning of a key in a lock. When that lock is turned, it triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that sends signals to the neurological system.

The critical piece here is how the electron absorbs the energy of the photon. Without that we don’t see anything. But the way this happens is deep quantum physics — it took me a lot of probing to find a way to make sense of it. Eventually a couple of analogies came to mind that made it clear for me.

Photons vibrate in the photon field, AKA the electromagnetic field. You’ll be familiar with many of these types of vibrations. The most widely known is visible light. But other types include x-rays, radio waves and infrared heat. The difference between all these is the frequency of the vibration — which you’ll know if you’ve ever used a radio tuner.

Electrons, also, are vibrations in a cosmic field — the electron field. They, too, have frequencies and intensity levels. But their behaviour is totally different from light. If photons are the inter-galactic energy couriers, then electrons are more like the local atomic work-trucks, carrying energy through molecular structures, forming bonds, doing useful things to make up matter and power your iPhone.

For your retina to take the energy of light and give it to an electron is quite a trick. A physicist might describe this as: the photon collides with an electron, the electron absorbs the photon’s energy, putting it into a higher level of excitation which then gives it the power to twist the molecule around to trigger the neurological signal process.

Sex and the single photon

But it’s way more interesting than that. It’s not a matter of welding things together or blowing things apart. The critical part of this is that the electron and the photon are both vibrations in their respective fields. If those vibrations are compatible then the photon ‘jumps over’ from the electromagnetic field to the electron field. So what makes the vibrations compatible?

This transition is not instantaneous. It takes a finite amount of time because that’s what vibrations are — changes over time, even though everything is happening at light speed.

It may be a bit easier to understand if you think about the case of a photon emitted by a sodium lamp. It has a wave train of around five meters. That’s a measurement we can relate to — meters, not nanometers, and certainly not femtometers. So that photon stretches out a long distance. And it has within it a vibrational frequency. The higher the frequency, the more energy the photon is carrying.

When I first read about this, it reminded me of videotape.

Videotape has vibrational signals recorded onto it. The video player has a pair of playback heads mounted on a cylindrical drum. It spins around at 30 times per second (for NTSC). The signal, encoded in diagonal stripes on the videotape, uses exactly the same frequency. The tape is wrapped around the cylinder so the spinning head can scan those diagonal stripes and build up the information it needs to make a frame of the video.

If we think of the photon as the videotape and the electron as the video head, each with their own frequencies, we can see how the compatibility between them depends on an exact match between their frequencies. Any deviation and there’s no picture. And any incompatibility in vibrational frequency between the photon and electron leads to — nothing. The photon just moves along.

That, hopefully, explains how the frequencies are aligned over a short burst of time. But in the case of photons and electrons, there is no tape and no spinning tape heads. So what is actually going on there?

The electron, as small as it is, is governed by certain rules dictated by the nucleus of the atom it is bound to. Those rules restrict how the electron can interact with other particles, including photons. The rule for interacting with photons basically says ‘if you and the photon can get your amplitude up to a certain level then you can stay together’. Wow, that’s strict parenting!

So it takes a bit of time for the electron and photon to build this amplitude together. If they are compatible, their vibrations rise and fall with the same rhythm, building up the amplitude, steadily over time. We’re moving at the speed of light here so it’s not a long date — but it is potentially a meaningful time together. The amplitude builds and builds and then ... release! They join together as one!

But if they are not compatible, it’s a dating disaster. The rhythm doesn’t work out, they can’t get any build up going and eventually the photon gives up and moves on, leaving the electron in its original (lonely) state.

So looking at it this way, light hitting your retina works through endless subatomic energetic orgasms. Metaphorically speaking of course.

As surprising as the metaphor may be, it’s still fascinating to see how human lovemaking uses the same rhythmic pattern that we find in quantum transformations. And the phrase ‘resonant coupling’ applies equally to both.

Sit with that for a moment.

Interaction between subatomic particles is way more like a one-night stand than a game of pool, as most physics texts would have us believe.

From objects to the subject at hand

A lot of the language around ‘particle physics’ is hampered by the very idea that we’re dealing with particles, rather than just energy.

Of course it is easier to draw from object analogies to explain this pretty complex stuff. But there is a price for this — non-physicists like us can easily get the wrong picture about what is going on down there in the subatomic world.

Let’s retell the story of vision from a completely non-object-oriented perspective. Let’s tell it from the point of view of the energy:

Light comes to us as a vibration in the electromagnetic field racing through space towards us. It has a certain pattern to it, based on its frequency, polarization and direction. Within the retina are many other energetic patterns formed in the electron field, some of which are grouped in a way that the light energy can more easily overlap with them in space and time. When they overlap, the light energy and electron-field energy resonate because they have matching frequencies. Within a short time, they transform to become a new vibrational pattern in the electron field. The energy that was the light has crossed into a new field where it will continue to make further transformations — into chemical energy patterns, atomic motion, some dissipating into heat, some continuing as electrochemical waves into the brain.

This is not how scientists are ever going to talk about their work. It is more poetry than useful description. They label things for good reason. Scientists work with many sets of functions and methods to study and understand the real world.

They build and use the physical and conceptual tools of their trade. The tools all have names. Names we non-scientists do not understand. When they do high-level communication amongst themselves, of course they will use these names.

That’s why so many of us have no idea what they are talking about. That’s why it can be so difficult to understand science. That’s why Chi wouldn’t read this article.

The writing about Core-Radiance that we are doing here is an attempt to build a new language to understand the way the world works.

Core-Radiance is a linguistic ‘lens’ based on visual thinking and therefore able to evoke images that people can understand easily. It is not just metaphor — the images are based on observable patterns.

Our challenge is to see how far we can take this. How much Core-Radiance light can be shed on the mysteries of the world and how much can that help people? And today we are using it to open our eyes to seeing the universe in terms of pure energy.

There are no objects in the universe. Everything is energy. Shaped energy.

We might ask “what does this shaping of energy mean?” The short answer is that it is tied to the emergence of meaning itself. That is what I will explore in my next article.

This article is part 6 of a series on Core-Radiance. If you haven’t already seen the others here are the links. Enjoy!

Thanks for reading!

References

Books:

- Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean (Basic Books, 2024)

- Art Hobson, Fields and Their Quanta: Making Sense of Quantum Foundations (Springer, 2024)

Blog:

- Matt Strassler, Matter and Energy — A False Dichotomy — includes the “made of vibrations” quote (comment reply to Henry Becker, July 18, 2024)

Wikipedia:

- Resonance (particle physics)

- Wavicle

- Electromagnetic spectrum

Part One of this story begins in a small cubicle in a bland office environment. Part Two (next week) ends with a discovery that the universe, at the subatomic level, has a lot more in common with human sexuality than we have ever imagined.

Along the way, I want to show you how the Core-Radiance pattern plays a critical role in how we see things and thus in our survival.

A disappointing search for objects

Long before Google existed, I worked for a technology company that did interesting things with automatic searches of video closed caption feeds. Great tech, great team, terrible product idea. The company went bankrupt six months after I joined them.

They were bought out by a company that did video surveillance. Weird tech, mediocre team, saleable product. There is a big demand for products that identify criminals, real or presumed, through the use of video technology.

Bank security managers would say “I want to be alerted when a known felon walks into the lobby.” They were serious, having seen such things often on television shows.

The company I was absorbed into had a huge business opportunity at the time.

The predominant technology for security videos was VHS tapes. Some individual would be paid to wear a uniform and sit in a windowless ‘Security Office’ to watch a bank of small video monitors and occasionally swap in new tapes. They had cabinets full of date-stamped video tapes.

The problem is this: storage is easy but retrieval is really, really hard!

If a case was to be investigated — let’s say an incident in the parking lot — this unseen, uniformed person would have to track down the right recorded footage. They would search for the right camera, on the right tape at the right time.

And for every tape swap there was the clicking and whirring of the machinery as it pulled the tape out of the cassette and wrapped it around the cylindrical head. A process that seemed to take longer as urgency and fatigue mounted.

The company I worked for offered a solution: networked digital video. In that business, the holy grail for the marketing team was automatic Object Detection!

Dominic, a graduate student doing a work term at our company, had based his thesis on Object Detection. He was in a strong career position — if his ideas worked. One day I passed by Dominic at his desk and I noticed a look of despair. ‘What was the matter?’ I inquired.

“It’s not working today. It worked yesterday. Why can it not see the box? It’s right there!”

He was staring at his computer screen, pointing to a video image of a dark blue box. The real box was twenty feet away, on a desk by the wall. The video image had a yellow rectangle painted around the box and also a good chunk of the wall behind it.

Non-technical people might assume that if you hook a video camera to a computer you can enable the computer to ‘see the world’.

But it’s not as simple as that. Not even close.

In the days before AI and LLMs did all the heavy lifting, software engineers had to figure things out for themselves. They had to invent clever ways to solve complicated problems. Computer ‘vision’ is a complicated problem. My colleague was getting annoyed that his solution was not working. His degree, his job, and possibly his career, were on the line.

Sandra, another young colleague, joined us. She looked at the video, looked at the box, and without intending to sound unkind, said “It’s too big. Look there’s the box. Why are you including all this?” She ran her finger across the computer screen where the image of the wall was.

“The ObjectDetector method is not doing so well today. It was working yesterday.” said Dominic.

I couldn’t help myself. I had to say something.

“There’s no such thing as objects.”

They looked up and stared at me in disbelief, as if I had said the Earth is flat. I explained:

“Dominic, your algorithm is not actually an ‘object detector’. It’s a dark pixel detector. It worked yesterday because the sun was shining on the wall behind the box, making those pixels lighter. Today, the wall is all dark pixels — so it got detected.”

Dominic did not look happy. Sandra made a defence of objects.

“Are you crazy? Of course there are objects! Look! The desk — an object! The monitor — an object! Everything you can see here is an object!”

I was surprised she left it at that and didn’t include the drawers in the desk — each of them objects. Or the cables trailing from the back of the monitor — more objects.

Of course what she was saying was common sense. And what I was trying to say was that common sense was lying to us. This was something I had learned in a previous life, when I had attended art school.

Learning to see

I had always considered my art school years to be a complete waste of time. But later in life, moments like this would suggest otherwise — art school had taught me how to see.

The last thing any of our professors would let us get away with was the use of common sense. They repeatedly reminded us to get rid of all preconceived ideas about, well, anything — especially what we see. They taught us to pay attention to what our eyes are actually telling us, not what we think we see!

Anyone with a camera will probably have used it to take a picture of something spectacular — a rainbow, a nice car, a colourful tree in the fall. And only later would they notice that a building or truck or passerby had blocked most of their subject. (It was worse when it took a week to get prints made at the drug store.) We thought we had gotten the shot but all we really got was noise.

Artists are trained to notice things — and to question things. In that way, they are like scientists. Paying attention to what hits the retina is the first step to representing visions about the world on a canvas.

When we do this — when we really look at things carefully — we can break things down. Familiar objects become new lines or shapes or perhaps just interesting textures. Certain details, previously unnoticed, suddenly stand out. Relationships between things are formed and then dismantled and then re-formed in new ways.

There is really no end to the ways you can learn to see things differently.

For sighted people, direct vision is our primary sense for determining what is real. Our eyes tell us the world is made of countless objects. But if we look at things beyond what our eyes can show us, we would see a different reality. This is where scientists are like artists: they invent new ways to see. Astrophysicists peer into the universe with high tech telescopes to see to the beginning of time. Physicists use particle accelerators and even mathematics to look into what makes up matter itself.

Our eyes are on the boundary between two extremes — the infinitely huge universe and the incomprehensibly small world of atomic events. They receive light from outer space and convert it into messages our brains can use to give us awareness. They are not simply cameras. They are intelligent organs, structured in ways that make our very existence possible.

The Core-Radiance pattern — nature’s secret for making our eyes smart

When you open your eyes, and light flows in, you might feel it jolt your senses — at least, before your first coffee. Most of the light that hits our retina came a long way to be here. And when it arrives it shows us the things we need to know about our environment — where the coffee pot is, the dog on the couch, a lover’s smile ...

When light hits the retina at the back of your eye, it is not the same as the light hitting the phone camera when you take a picture. The only thing that they have in common is that, at some point, the light becomes electrical energy.

The camera is a dumb instrument. It just records a matrix of light information. All the clever stuff — the tricks that make you look 20 years younger or magically swaps your background to put you in Paris — that all comes later with special software. Fundamentally the camera ‘retina’ is pretty passive. Picture a gigantic egg carton but it holds light, not eggs. Every light-holding photoreceptor is identical — there’s nothing special about any of them.

But the retina in a human eye is very special. It is far more intelligently structured and has significant built-in processing. For a start there are two kind of photoreceptors — called ‘rods’ and ‘cones’. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter what we call them. What is important is how they are positioned within the retina. The cones are compacted together in the centre, ready to take in colour and detail. The rods populate the outer area, the periphery, with fuzzier readings but highly sensitive to movement.

This makes sense. The motion sensitive area is the area you’re not looking directly at. If something is coming at you from the side — a car, a football linebacker, a tiger — you want to know about it as soon as possible. Then you turn to look at it and get as much detailed information as possible, so you can figure out what to do next.

Nature took advantage of a Core-Radiance pattern to do this. The retina has an intelligent Core-Radiant structure — a core area for focused, information-dense detail, and a radiant periphery to put everything into context.

There are about 120 million photoreceptors in a human retina. The information they gather collects into the optic nerve — a central ‘pipe’ which takes the data back to the brain. But to get there, that data has to be compressed to fit into the pipe. If all of those receptors went directly to the brain, the optic nerve would be as thick as a garden hose. Physiologically, that’s never going to work out.

So how does that data get compressed?

The retina makes smart decisions about the light information, responding to contrast rather than light levels, sharpening the edges and boundaries of things (boxes, walls, textures, etc).

And nature again uses a Core-Radiant strategy to do this. The cells are arranged with a ‘centre and surround’ pattern — a Tim Hortons donut with the Timbit left in the middle. Comparisons between the radiant outer receptors and those in the central core provide a mechanism to detect contrast.

And this happens not just once, but twice, in nested levels. The end result is a 100:1 compression rate. It’s not just less information — it’s high quality information about changes in the environment that is passed along to the brain. The brain can then focus on what those changes actually mean to the brain owner.

In all cases where we see the Core-Radiant pattern, the radiant information provides a context that allows the core centre to have more meaning.

By using a Core-Radiant pattern, nature has devised a remarkable strategy for optimizing what information gets sent from the eye to the brain. The brain is a busy organ and consumes 20% of the body’s energy. By reducing the extraneous data, this smart compression system makes good use of limited bandwidth in the optic nerve, saving physical space and precious metabolic energy.

To varying degrees, all creatures on the planet have this — insects, fish, frogs, mammals. Nature figured this out a long time ago. If we were to allow ourselves, for a moment, to see our biological inheritance as Nature’s technology, then we can marvel at the complexity and elegance of the human vision system. And that is just a small part of our story.

Dominic’s camera, and the one in your phone, were designed for profit. The eye’s built-in intelligence is structured for survival. A key part of this natural-technology miracle is the Core-Radiance Principle.

Through this series of articles I have shown examples of the Core-Radiance pattern in many contexts. And there are more. Next I will look deeper into the vision system to explore what is going on at the quantum level when light meets the eye.

References

Wikipedia:

- Receptive field

- Retinal ganglion cell

- Fovea centralis

Videos:

- On Center, Off Surround Ganglion Cells — Interactive Biology

- Center–Surround Receptive Field — garlandscience

- Visual Computations and Circuits / Receptive Fields — Bing Wen Brunton

- Center surround receptive fields — Mechanisms and Logic in Human Physiology

- Visual Processing and the Visual Cortex — Professor Dave

When I read Francis Crick’s popular book on neuroscience - The Astonishing Hypothesis - I brought with me a conceptual tool that I had in my ‘back pocket’ since art school. I used it to help me make sense of what Crick revealed about the workings of the brain. Unexpectedly, that tool showed me certain contradictions in Crick’s perspective that turned out to be connected to a massive paradigm shift that was emerging at that time in the field of neuroscience.

I call that tool the Continuity Principle. It is based on a simple conceptual equation:

Meaning = Continuity

Crick presented a strong case for his main hypothesis - that everything you consider to be You, your thoughts, memories, feelings, and even free will, are ‘no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’. But when he wrote this, the field of neuroscience was on the cusp of a massive paradigm shift. The evidence is in that book.

He successfully debunks the common notion that human perception, awareness and consciousness arise from an inner projection screen in the brain watched by some mysterious inner being. He does this by showing how the brain dismantles sensory inputs into countless separate features such as colour, edges, shape, motion, etc.

But he then poses the question of how the brain puts all these diverse features back together into a unified awareness of objects and experience. He never answers that question.

Throughout the book he refers to the search for ‘neural correlates’ - persistent neural patterns that represent the things we encounter in the outside world. For example, Crick uses the term ‘awareness neurons’ and even ‘the neural correlate for consciousness’.

In part one of this article, I talked about some of the problems with that approach. The main problem is that a neural correlate implies a dead end to neural processing. And that contradicts the fact that all neurons have outputs - so the processing must continue, somewhere.

Looking through my Continuity Principle lens, it didn’t make sense to describe the brain as a system of connections and continuities and then rely on a dead-end concept, such as neural correlates, to ‘explain’ awareness. I wanted to know what happens to that flow after the correlate? But there was nothing in Crick’s book that really answered the question. It was like an elaborate joke without a punchline.

I puzzled about that for a decade or two, wishing I knew an actual neuroscientist to ask them “Did I miss something here?”

The Revolution in Neuroscience

Somewhere around 2015, I stumbled across a book by György Buzsáki called ‘Rhythms of the Brain’. Being a dancer, this title felt like an old friend. So I bought the book immediately.

But it was sooo technical. I have zero experience with chemistry, biology, and neuroscience (other than the Crick book). The book sat on my shelf for years. Until Covid.

When we took a holiday to Cuba in early 2020, there was a possibility of getting stranded there if the virus thing got worse. So I decided I should take a book that would keep me occupied (on the beach) for a few weeks. I took ‘Rhythms of the Brain’.

As it happened we returned home just days before the declaration of a worldwide pandemic. Then everything shut down, especially dance clubs. So I still had lots of time for reading. Just no beach.

It took me a year to read that book. When I had almost finished, I felt I had missed some important pieces. I needed a second pass to understand it better. So I started again, from the beginning. Another year later I finished it, finally.

From the outset, Buzsáki puts everything about brain function into a time perspective. He points out that nature is full of examples of cycles of activity occurring over time. He refers to the continuity of life and the fact that meaning can occur only when experienced through time. Well, there’s those two words again in rapid succession. I was sold - and only page 5.

The Problem With The Traditional Approach to Neuroscience, As Demonstrated by Dominos

Buzsáki points out a fundamental flaw in the way neuroscientists have traditionally approached their research. I didn’t really pay much attention to this the first time I read the book, but on the second pass the importance of it stood out. In fact, in 2019 Buzsáki published another book through Oxford University Press called ‘The Brain from Inside Out’ where he amplifies this critique loud and clear.

As that second book title suggests, the common flaw that he identified in neuroscience research strategy was to attempt to understand the brain from the ‘outside’. In contrast, Buzsáki asserts that when you know what’s actually going on inside the brain, you have a better chance of understanding what it really does - including how perception works and even consciousness.

Buzsáki points out that the philosophical roots of the outside-in problem stretch back as far as Aristotle where thinkers invented names for imagined concepts and now modern neuroscience fell into a trap of trying to explain these imagined things based on neural events. To make things even more confusing, more recently people started using computer terminology to ‘explain’ what happens in the brain. All of this led to the search for ‘representations’ of outside ‘objects’ in neural mechanisms.

So an outside-in research approach might set out to show correlations between neural events and a thing we (i.e. the experimenters) know about on the outside. If an experiment shows a ‘correlation’ between certain neural firings and the subject seeing a flower they are holding, this may strike the experimenter as an ‘Aha!’ moment. But it doesn’t take into account the endless other possible reasons for any given neuron to fire - such as sending messages to the muscles of the arm to grip the flower.

As Buzsáki puts it, there is no ‘representation’ of any stimuli in the brain ‘until the experimenter interprets the data.’ (Page 15: ‘The Brain From Inside Out’) It’s largely a subjective matter.

This search for neural representations of ideas we have actually invented ties directly into the search for neural correlates. This is a major characteristic of the old paradigm, along with an apparent tendency to look at neural networks from a ‘feedforward’ perspective. Let me illustrate what a feedforward network is, using a grossly simplified explanation that involves dominos.

You’ve seen the trick. The dominos are stood up close together, forming a line, defying probabilities of accidental falls. We wait for that first push, then ... away they go!

The more dominos, the better the trick. It’s a celebration of cause and effect that excites us, perhaps way more than it should.

And it’s a good metaphor for the way neurons behave in a feedforward network. Crudely put, when all the dominos have fallen and the action stops, there is your dead-end neural correlate. Crick in his book seems to talk around this point. He doesn’t clearly answer the question of where signals go after they hit a neural correlate. And, he rarely mentions feedback routes.

The Critical Importance of Feedback Loops

The work of Buzsáki and his colleagues was central to the massive paradigm shift in the mid 1990s. Buzsáki, jointly with two other scientists, won the inaugural Brain Prize in 2011 for his work in this area. The new paradigm places a lot of emphasis on feedback routes.

Many of the brain’s feedback loops do something that was largely ignored in the Outside-In era. They bring in inhibitory signals to modulate the flow of excitatory ‘traffic’. Traffic lights, basically. And what controls the inhibitory signals? Well other excitatory signals - other traffic. It’s a complex interplay between excitation and inhibition - kind of like life itself.

The result of this is that large scale network oscillation activity emerges. The brain starts to sing!

Traditional neuroscience perspectives had tended to avoid seeing oscillations as important because they were regarded as the stuff of physics. The simple oscillations of physics didn’t match up with the rich complexity of brain activity. Crick does have a chapter on Oscillations but it’s highly speculative, reflecting the views of that time.

But in Buzsáki’s Inside-Out perspective, neuronal oscillators, particularly those arising from feedback loops, are central to everything. Oscillators are found everywhere throughout the brain, from individual units (neurons) to massive collections of them (networks).

This remarkable ability of the brain to self-regulate its own information flow gives it the ability to rapidly reprogram itself. Think about that the next time you watch hockey players in action. This real time reprogramming capability is central to what Buzsáki declares is the primary job of the brain - to predict.

So, where neural processes were previously assumed to come to ‘dead ends’ AKA the neural correlates, Buzsáki points out that information never stops flowing. There are no dead ends in the brain.

Getting back to the dominos, this means that they don’t actually fall - they oscillate. They fire and they reset, propagating signals through the networks as they go.

The Power of Brains Built on Music, and Core-Radiance

A large part of Buzsáki’s first book goes into the technical details of how these oscillations occur. An important thing to note is that there are many levels of oscillators, and they each have their own frequency ranges. Buzsáki’s descriptions of this are very complex and technical. So I’m going to give it a try using the birds in my backyard. (Remember the birds at the feeder in my previous article?)

Neurons, like birds, are all about interaction. Like those birds in my backyard, they often work in sync - i.e. they act together at the same time.

The birds are tiny, low power creatures. They act in groups to achieve outcomes like picking seeds off the ground, together, and collectively watching out for danger. This is survival for them. Neurons can do similar group behaviour and the result is also collective power. These neural flocks are called ‘cell assemblies’.

In my backyard bird story, the noise of the neighbour’s bicycle scared the little things away. And if there were more birds grazing in the neighbour’s yard, they certainly would have also flown off into their nearest tree. If there was a construction site nearby and someone blasted a stick of dynamite, all the neighbourhood birds would have taken off.

And all these triggered events happen at different frequencies and power levels.

At the high frequency end we have birds coming and going constantly in small numbers. If enough birds accumulate on the ground, a threshold could be reached and a bunch more might suddenly appear out of the trees to join them. And then some will fly back. That’s how birds work.

At a slightly lower frequency, other trigger events happen - like the noisy neighbour going about their business, clattering their bicycle, slamming a door or whatever. Loud noises introduce a greater power level that sets our birds, and his birds, on edge. It’s a lower frequency event but the effect is bigger because more birds hear it, in multiple backyards. So lots of groups of birds take off to hide in their trees.

And the construction site explosions happen least often (thankfully) but are very high power. They have the biggest impact, upsetting the entire neighbourhood.

This is a pattern of energy impact that happens across different frequencies: the rarer the event, the bigger the impact. This scaled energy relationship is called the 1/f power dynamic. It describes a pattern that is halfway between chaos and order.

But, hold, I’m lying - or at least really over-simplifying this. My birds are only illustrating how power and frequency are inversely related and that’s just half the story. The other half is about feedback - which can make the entire system self-activating. A more accurate picture of true 1/f dynamics in the brain would involve some of the birds collectively acting on the lower frequency drivers - like tossing bicycles around, slamming doors or even setting off the occasional stick of dynamite. That breaks my analogy but hopefully you get the point.

Statistically, the 1/f pattern is how music works. It’s the reason music is pleasing to listen to. It is also the pattern behind the structure of trees.

And it’s central to how the brain works. Buzsáki reveals that the 1/f power distribution is the outcome of the interaction of nested oscillators in the brain. He also suggests that this ‘noise’ is critical to the way brain organizes information across time scales. Furthermore, he says that when the brain is in the 1/f state, it is highly sensitive to ‘weak and unpredictable environmental perturbations’. (Page 131: ‘Rhythms of the Brain’)

And here’s my main point. This is an important instance of the concept of Core-Radiance at work. Low frequency oscillations, with increased power, are very good examples of ‘Core’ energy. And likewise, the dispersed, high frequency, low power oscillations are equally clear examples of Radiant energy. The interfusion of the two produces something that not only matches the pattern of music, but is also critical to brain function, including, presumably, human consciousness.

Meaning Really is Continuity, Isn’t It?

When Buzsáki demonstrated the importance of feedback loops and oscillations in brain function, he also opened the door to seeing the concept of continuity as playing a bigger, possibly critical role.

The traditional view assumes the brain is a relatively passive ‘viewing’ mechanism, utilizing inner representations of the outside world. But Buzsáki points out that this is a fallacy. He asserts the brain’s primary function is to actively predict - and to test its own predictions. Reliable predictions about the outside world help us survive in time and space. This is true for any creatures with a nervous system. But we humans also evolved with increased memory capacity and various other mechanisms to better predict what the heck is going on in the world. Our brains help us figure out what happens next.

The result of predictability is continuity. Meaning.

All of it relates to survival - our most fundamental continuity. How we define ourselves also factors in. We can take on different ways of defining ourselves, different ‘identities’ and we will find things that are meaningful to each of those identities. Whatever we see as meaningful will help an identity persist.

Buzsáki states that ‘computation in the brain always means that information is moved from one place to another.’ (Page 116: ‘Rhythms of the Brain’) Core-Radiance also appears here, taking information from a radiant space into a focused core and projecting again into another radiant space. We can see this in every nerve cell and throughout the networks.

If we could see the information flowing through any of the billions of complex pathways, we would see it compressing and releasing, continuously. Almost like breathing.

Various forms of continuity occur in the brain either structurally or through its processing behaviour. As I see it, continuity, in one form or another, is the basis for all meaning. Applying the Continuity Principle to this, the brain is not only producing predictions, it produces all meaning - to help us survive.

This view of the brain is entirely different than that of the ‘passive viewer’ of an external fixed reality. The brain does not simply represent an external reality, it constructs all that we assume to be real.

This is not to paint a picture of a Matrix-style dual universe. There is a real Universe out there. But our ability to understand it and survive within it requires that our brains build ways that can reliably predict what comes next.

The insights coming from modern neuroscience can help us see the world in a different way. Objects are less like permanent fixtures and more like flocks of birds than we might have imagined. What is apparent though is that the pattern of Core-Radiance - halfway between order and chaos - is a key part of how our brains work.

And the Principle of Continuity also plays a big role here. Everything I’ve learned about the way the brain works reinforces the idea that where there is continuity, there is meaning. Meaning is not absolute, it is created when the brain finds continuities, through predictions. And a key aspect of how the brain does that is by moving information around between Core and Radiant spaces.

That is speculation on my part and a single article like this isn’t big enough to fully flesh out the argument. I’ve barely scratched the surface! I’ll return to this in future articles. But even this quick summary of recent discoveries and insights in neuroscience opens the door to a perspective that sees the universe as the interplay, and interfusion, of Core and Radiant energy forms. I want to know more about that from a physics perspective. So that’s going to be the topic of my next article.

This article is part 4 of a series on Core-Radiance. If you haven’t already seen the previous three here are the links. Enjoy!

Thanks for reading!

References

- Francis Crick, *The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul* (Scribner, 1994)

- György Buzsáki, *Rhythms of the Brain* (Oxford University Press, 2006)

- György Buzsáki, *The Brain from Inside Out* (Oxford University Press, 2019)

- Voss, R.F. & Clarke, J. (1978). “’1/f noise’ in music: Music from 1/f noise.” *Journal of the Acoustical Society of America*, 63(1), 258-263.

Close Encounter With an Identified Flying Object

My friend and I were on a road trip, driving on the freeway through farm country. Suddenly a huge flock of birds rose out of the field ahead of us and flew directly across our path.

“What the hell is that?” he yelled.

I thought for a moment and said

“It’s a Martian!”

My friend laughed. Of course it was a joke. But it got me thinking: if Martians ever visited us, would we really know what they are? Why should we expect them to look like those angry little green bulbous-headed men that we see in low-budget 1950’s movies?

Why not a flock of birds?

Have you ever wondered about what a flock of birds actually is? I mean, just on the level of physical objects. If we see a bunch of birds flying by us we can pretty easily say, “Yup, that’s a flock of birds”. But what happens when a bunch of them head off in another direction? Where is the flock now?

Years later, the same question arose again while I was relaxing with a book on my back deck one sunny afternoon.

The bird feeder was empty. Below it, the tossed seeds had all been plucked off the ground. A lone sparrow came by to inspect the feeder, just in case. Nothing there. He tried the ground below, just in case. At the moment he touched earth three more sparrows joined him.

And then the tree released a flood of hungry birds within an instant. The ground was rippling with a mass of sparrows, searching for grains that might have been forgotten from previous visits.

One bird got nervous (as small birds seem to do). He flew back to the tree, pulling along two others as if joined by elastic. But there was no mass exodus - because another sparrow countered the retreat by joining the crowd. But that didn’t last long. Another bird gave up the search and took flight. Two or three others exited as well, just in case. The process of exits and arrivals continued for a minute or so.

I had an itch on my head but I dared not move. Just in case.

Birds arrived singly and left in small groups. It was a liquid exchange which dripped down and up, all at once. A bicycle chain clicked in the next yard. The tree instantly sucked the tiny adventurers back into its leaves. Finally I could scratch my head. The tree shouted with a hundred voices “Are you still there? Yes I’m still here!”

You can’t see birds in a tree on a summer day because of the leaves. If the tree were made of glass, you might see the birds hovering in space, like a galaxy. Part order, part chaos.

But beyond the physical closeness, the birds behave like a single unit. The flock. The group. The galaxy in the tree. They have evolved to survive as a group. Their brains play a key role to unite them as a ‘social being’. They constantly talk to stay together. They hear each other. They observe each other. They follow each other. They are not unlike us.

Socially, our brains have the ability to act together to make groups of individuals become part of a social being. The crowd at a sport stadium. The fans at a concert. The protestors on the street. Society in general.

What is perhaps more interesting is that our brains also do the same thing internally. Billions of neurons act together to form coherent patterns and achieve specific results.

The Scientific Search for the Soul

When I was sitting on the deck watching the birds that day, the book I was reading was ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul’. It is written by Sir Francis Crick who won the Nobel prize for his role in discovering the structure of DNA molecules. The latter phase of his career was focused on theoretical neurobiology. This apparently spawned a keen interest in the science behind human consciousness.

Crick’s book was my first ‘deep dive’ into neuroscience. I had glanced at it in art school when a friend showed me some books he’d unearthed in the psychology library. It introduced the idea of neurons being responsible for perception - which intrigued me as an art student who was tasked with learning how to see things in new ways.

There was one other slightly odd thing that happened in my last year of art school that prepared me for reading Crick’s book decades later. Somewhere, in one of the many art books I’d been obliged to read through, I came across an intriguing statement by an artist. He said ‘we can never define meaning’.

My final year of art school was, if I’m really honest, a disaster. I didn’t fit into any of the official disciplines. I was an academically displaced person. And a bit of a fighter. So I took that artist’s declaration as a personal challenge. I spent a long time thinking about it. Weeks? Months? I came up with this:

I could go on a lot about this but for now I’ll just say that it mostly has to do with identity. Whenever we identify ourselves in a certain way, specific choices, experiences and insights become ‘meaningful’. These meanings go directly to help the identity persist, to continue. (Think about this: we often define the meaning of life in the context of an afterlife - more continuity. It is almost impossible for many of us to conceive of complete discontinuity - a real dead end.)

So I brought my definition of meaning along for my journey into the scientific search for the soul, led by Sir Francis Crick.

Crick comes out strong on page one. He leads with a quote from the Roman Catholic catechism “the soul is a living being” and then in his first paragraph, presents his hypothesis. It is that you, and everything you identify as yourself including your joys, sorrows and free will, are ‘no more than’ the behaviour of a huge collection of neurons (nerve cells) and their related molecules.

I’m not religious, so I don’t get upset by scientists when they make claims like this. I have no investment in beliefs about the soul and no religious dogma to uphold. But to be honest, I’d like to think there is more to it than just that. That is a big reason for my writing here - to explore this question.

This article is the third in a series that introduces the concept of Core-Radiance. You can find the other two articles here:

The Big Bang Theory of Trees

My Best Two Words That Describe All Human Relationships

Entering the Brainforest

What I like about scientists is that they, like dancers, can’t fake what they do. The work of scientists is evaluated by peers with the high benchmark of providing evidence, logic and proof. They can’t bullshit their way into credibility. Dancers can’t either. If they can’t move in a way that honestly connects with the music and the environment, they will not be regarded as ‘real’.

So I can relate to that. And Crick’s hypothesis aroused my interest. But as an artist, I wouldn’t just rely on ‘logic’ and ‘proofs’. Between all that I believe and all that I can prove is all that I feel. Intuition matters. I start with intuition and find proofs later.

It’s no coincidence that I made those careful observations about birds in my back yard as I was reading a book about neuroscience. My intuition sensed a connection. Here’s what it led me to understand: the brain is like a combination of the trees and the birds, acting together, all at once. Somehow.

I’m not saying this just to be cute. I’m using the technique of metaphor to build an understanding of something that is pretty complex.

The brain is made of billions of neurons. Loosely speaking, each neuron has the same type of shape as a tree:

Interestingly, the word ‘dendrite’ comes from the Greek ‘dendron’ which means ‘tree’. So scientists are fully aware of the tree-like shape (they call it ‘morphology’) of a neuron. When they say ‘axonal arbor’, they are saying “Hey this neuron looks like a tree - look at the branch-like patterns of the terminals!”

So neurons, being amazing structures that evolution has come up with for building brains, actually focus electrical impulses from one space and redistribute them to another space and along the way they make decisions about when to do it through a kind of centralized ‘voting machine’ (the cell body).

In my first article of this series I described the shape of trees as being somewhere between chaos and order. And this comes from the interfusion of two kinds of ‘energetic forms’ - Core energy (the trunk) and Radiant energy (the branches). I find it fascinating that the building blocks of the brain use the Core-Radiance principle in order to make the brain actually work.

Here’s a schematic diagram:

A tree connects two ‘spaces’, earth and sky, to provide the essential nutrients and solar energy it needs to live. Similarly, neurons connect different spatial contexts as an essential part of their function.

The job of a typical neuron is to take in ‘signals’ from multiple inputs and make a go/no-go decision to fire - i.e. pass a new signal along to a vast number of targets. By doing so, it makes connections across different spaces. The ‘tree-like’ shape makes all the difference - without it, the connections would be just point-to-point and brains would never work.

As a system of billions of structurally connected neurons, a brain establishes patterns of continuity. It turns information into meaning. The meaning helps ensure the survival of the brain owner.

Which body position represents dance?

Reading Crick’s book was a turning point for me. He made a very complex subject relatively understandable. His hypotheses grabbed me from the start and he followed through with insights about the brain that truly fascinated me.

Having made it clear throughout the book that the brain does not work as an internal projection screen with some ‘little person’ inside watching it, Crick explains that the brain breaks things down into countless diverse features such as colour, edges, shape, motion, etc.

Crick then poses the question of how the brain puts it all back together. How does it integrate the various features to arrive at a perception of an ‘object’? He calls this the ‘binding problem’. How are the ‘loose ends’ bound together into a ‘thing’?

When drawing, artists can do that through hatching. We draw a series of equally spaced parallel lines in a given area to, kind of magically, suggest solidity - this is a ‘thing’! The key is the rhythm. If you use non-equal spacing the effect doesn’t work. It’s just more noise. The object falls apart. That’s first year art school stuff.

So, as I read Crick’s book, I started pencilling the words ‘binding rhythms’ in the margins whenever he talked about building objects in the brain.

His chapter on ‘Visual Awareness’ delves further into the problem of relating neurons to ‘objects’ and, at the time of the book’s publication, there were not many solutions. Throughout the book, the problem is defined in terms of mapping outside objects to single neurons or groups of them. The technical term used for this is ‘neural correlate’. This book is about Crick’s search for the neural correlate for consciousness. The scientific search for the soul.

But searching for a neural correlate for anything is like asking which body position represents dance?

In other words, why should there be a single end point of resolution for our experience of things we can recognize or label as ‘objects’? Look at the photo below. How many ‘objects’ do you see?

Look longer. How many more do you see? Why should your ability to perceive objects in this arbitrary scene be tied to neurons that were sitting around doing nothing until now? Or if they were doing something before, then how have they now come to ‘represent’ these arbitrary objects. The idea is basically absurd.

And Crick himself knew that. He repeatedly states there just aren’t enough neurons to make things work this way. But that was the ‘state of the art’ of neuroscience at that time.

But something else didn’t add up. A neural correlate is a neuroscience equivalent to Grand Central Station. It’s a sort of point of arrival. But it’s a dead end.

This contradicts an important feature about the structure of neurons - they always have outputs. There are no dead ends. So how can there be a point of arrival? For years I wondered, where the heck do things go from there?

When I eventually found an answer, it was remarkable.

Coming next week, Finding Paths of Return in the Brainforest

This article is the third in a series that introduces the concept of Core-Radiance. You can find the other two articles here:

The Big Bang Theory of Trees

My Best Two Words That Describe All Human Relationships

References

- Francis Crick, *The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul* (Scribner, 1994)

In my previous article, I talked about how learning to see the energy of trees was a life-changing experience. It turned out my artist’s vision of tree energy was based on solid scientific concepts. But, as clear as my vision was, the words to describe it in human terms eluded me. At least, until I started Salsa dancing.

But here’s a heads up. If you’ve seen my web site name, these words won’t be much of a surprise. It took me 10 years to get that domain name and another ten years to figure out a plan to write about the concept. So here’s my origin story of how I found these two words that describe all human relationships.

Around 1999 I discovered Latin dancing - and instantly fell in love with it. If you have ever been to a Salsa club you know what I mean when I say there is a lot of energy involved.

It’s not just volume. It’s qualitative. Everyone is different.

I learned to see that the people I met in the clubs, and especially the women I danced with, had unique energies. Remembering names and faces was a bit of a challenge for me. But remembering energy was a skill that emerged over time. When visiting new clubs I have often asked a ‘stranger’ to dance and then, once we start, I would remember that somewhere, some place, we have danced before. I just didn’t remember her appearance or her name.

Remembering a smile is much easier. The energy of it is kept in the heart which grows to accommodate it.

Learning to read energy became an important way to understand people - what kind of people they are, who to dance with, who to avoid or, at least, how to adjust to their reality.

I remember seeing a beautiful young woman at the club one night. She breezed past me on her way to join her friends at the table behind me. She was not a dancer - her head tilted forward as she walked. An experienced dancer acquires a level of confidence that will hold the head upright.

Another woman who was a regular seemed perpetually unhappy. Given the high intensity excitement of the club, this puzzled me. At first I wondered why she even bothered coming out to dance. But over time, it occurred to me that if she didn’t come out, life would have been that much worse for her. It’s sad to say, it became apparent that she carried a deep trauma from somewhere in her past.

Likewise, a man who came regularly was a dark soul who chose to lurk in the shadows at the back of the club. He was not unpleasant but his secret war with himself made it difficult to befriend him. He was not a Salsa dancer. His preference seemed to be a form of Merengue. When the Merengue set began he would emerge into the light, steal an unsuspecting woman from her seat and lead her to the back of the dance floor. If she ever smiled, a flash of joy would light up his face and then disappear, as he returned to his private fear.

Some men dance from the head. You can tell because they focus on complex arm movements, creating twists and turns, tying and untying the woman’s limbs. These men barely move below the neck, as if their bodies don’t exist.

Some dancers draw directly from a higher source - the music. They are the music made visible. (More about that in a minute.)

Everyone has a unique energy signature. And it reveals much about who they are and where they are in life. Dancing presents an opportunity to grow beyond old limitations. Some succeed, some don’t.

I was determined to succeed. I don’t know why. I simply had to.

Learning to dance was challenging enough but learning to lead was for me, and probably most men, absolute torture. Because we have to make so many instant decisions! My first dance instructor called me out on this immediately:

“Micha! You have flabby decision-making muscles!”

But it was hard! I had just spent the previous 20 years sitting at my desk, glued to a keyboard, telling a computer to do logical things. And here was this young woman telling me to turn my brain off and use my body to move hers in peculiar ways. All in time to fast music!

I cringed whenever she yelled “Right turn! Left Turn!” I would have been more relaxed on a roller coaster.

Despite my inexplicable desire to succeed at all this, my beginner self took a big ego hit. It was failure after failure. But look at the stuff men have to do in this partner dance thing! Not only do we have to learn how to move our feet in the right way at the right time, and memorize complicated sequences of steps, we also have to make up a choreography on the spot - all to keep our partner happy.

What manner of hell had I gotten myself into?

It took me a year of group lessons, private lessons, practicing in my oversized kitchen and testing stuff out at the clubs to prepare for my first Salsa Congress, where I knew I would be up against the best experienced dancers.

The plan worked enough that had a great time.

(But just between you and I, a video of me dancing with a famous instructor from LA showed my arms dropping to my sides like dead cats - a classic newbie flaw! The evidence was presented over and over at our club back home - someone decided it would be fun to play the congress video on the big screen every night. With that scrutiny, I learned to put energy into my arms at all times.)

It was at the Salsa Congress in 2000 that I first saw Albert Torres, the late renowned Puerto Rican-American Salsa genius and promoter. He danced like a Zen Master with a playful attitude I had never seen before.

I remember watching him dancing with a woman at one of the social dance events in the convention centre. The dance floor was the size of an airplane hangar. At the far side, near the main entrance, were several pairs of superstar dancers with crowds circled around them.

Albert was in a corner of the floor, just a few feet away from where I was sitting. A man, seemingly oblivious to everything around him, walked onto the dance floor and stood right in Albert’s space. But rather than getting upset with him, Albert simply incorporated him into the dance, pretending to be tired and on the 8-beat, resting his arm and head on the guy’s shoulder. It worked - both as a dance move and as a way to gently let him know he was in the way. I learned a lot from that.

Albert’s production company slogan was “Creating Unity Through Salsa”.

What did he mean by this? Perhaps it was an example of his anti-war stance I saw him take in the post-911 era. His email announcements would end with another powerful statement: “If everyone danced, there would be no war.” Again, he seemed to be going his own way, away from the crowd.

Over time, I formed some of my own ideas about that ‘Unity’. And now I see these words as the doorway to a very profound truth. But not only that - they also helped me find words to describe the qualities of energy that we can see in the dance. And trees.

Let’s look into this. Starting with a dance lesson.

Instructors will tell beginners:

“The man is the frame. The woman is the picture.”

Yes, the statement is completely sexist but, hang on, we’ll fix that in a moment. For now let’s just go with it because, for the most part, this is what you will find on the dance floor - men leading women.

This is what I learned through my years of dancing as a lead: my job is to provide my partner with not only moves that she knows, but also variations that make it interesting and fun for her to follow.

I have to provide a mixture of predictable moves and surprises.

That also happens to be the scientific ‘recipe’ for music - somewhere between Order and Chaos. It follows a pattern but presents new things that keep us interested.

In my previous article I spoke about a scientist, Richard F. Voss, who identified a way to understand music as a certain distribution of energy across a spectrum of frequencies. This is called the ‘1/f power spectrum’ (that’s ‘one over f’). To humans, these specific patterns of energy ‘feel right’. But ‘1/f power spectrum’ is a term I don’t want to use in polite, human company. Please bear with me, I’m going to fix that too.

The same ‘1/f’ pattern can be found throughout nature. My article focused on the way that pattern is present in the shape of trees, which of course ‘feel right’ to our eye.

Voss pointed out that 1/f is halfway between the hiss from a disconnected TV and a child practicing piano scales. 1/f is at the midpoint between chaos and order. Technically, the meaning can be simplified to:

the lower frequencies contain more power than the higher frequencies.

This is the pattern of energy I found in trees. And it turns out to be present throughout nature, and as I later learned, in human relationships.

I’ll be honest, the term ‘1/f power spectra’ doesn’t really land for most people when talking about how we get along in a dance club or with a life partner. For years I wished I had a better way to describe it.

Becoming a Salsa addict fixed that problem for me. Two words arrived that I think are much more suitable for human consumption:

Core-Radiance

Here’s where they come from:

“The man is the frame. The woman is the picture.”

In a partner dance, the ‘lead’ boils down to this: is a series of low-frequency decisions.

The ‘follow’ is high frequency styling.

The lead shapes the stylistic expression of the follow, giving it a deeper structure.

Roughly speaking, a guy makes a ‘lead decision’ about every 5 to 10 seconds or so (although it can feel a lot less than that). Within those 5 to 10 seconds the follower has time and space for improvisation. The hand styling, hip gyrations, hair flicks, and (hopefully) smiles all contribute to the expressiveness of the dance.

The lead is low frequency power that guides the follower and shapes the choreography. This is Core energy.

The follower makes higher frequency, lower power decisions within the envelope of the lead moves. This is Radiant energy.

Sound simple?

It’s not really that simple.

It doesn’t take much to see that an experienced lead also improvises with styling and does so at a pretty high frequency all through the dance. In fact, if he is very experienced at the dance, he directly channels the feeling of the music into expressive interpretations. He is also Radiant.

And the follower can also define space in powerful ways. It is common to see an experienced female dancer move smooth, strong, graceful - like a leopard. She is confident at her Core. And her expressive power will inspire and drive the lead.

In my experience, a more accurate way to describe the energy of accomplished Salsa dancers is that they each contain a rich balance of Core and Radiant energy. The specific movements and expressions may differ but the depth of character is equally substantial.

And the result? The dancers express the full Core-Radiant power of the music itself - and with it, the passions of human relationships. And in the Salsa club, what music this is! As much as the guys who lead may feel they are in control, if they are doing their job right it is the music that is in control.

That’s the thing about ‘1/f power spectra’ and Core-Radiance - it scales! The balanced power can apply on all levels. From the ancient roots of Afro-Cuban music to the musicians of today, and from the DJs in the clubs to the smiles of the dancers and even those who enjoy watching them, the patterns of Core-Radiant energy unfold in a continuous flow. It has meaning because these forms are universal truths.

In the laboratory, scientists discover the ‘1/f power spectra’ permeating the universe using complex technological processes.

In the dance club, the test is much simpler. When it’s there, it feels good to dance and to watch.

The dance floor is a laboratory for experiments in human interaction. What happens in the club doesn’t have to stay in the club. It can lead to wider applications. I see Salsa dancing as the art of the 3 minute relationship. It is polyamory set to music. Why not bring this love out into the ‘real’ world?

Sounds ideal. Salsa clubs as love-generating power stations, supplying the world with happiness.

We all know that’s not going to happen.

But what could happen is this. We can apply the Core-Radiance principle - the pattern that makes music, trees, and dancing ‘feel good’ - into any relationship context.

When Albert Torres spoke of “Unity through Salsa” he was bang on. ‘Core-Radiance’ as a descriptive term, speaks of the unity that dancers can find as individuals, as partners and as friends. The dance itself, as an example of Core-Radiant expression, offers clues about building meaningful relationships with others and with ourselves.

Looking at the Salsa club through the lens of Core-Radiance reveals a pattern for becoming a fully expressive human being and relating to others in meaningful ways. It shows us that success in a dance belongs to no one and it belongs to everyone. It is a success that comes from following a universal energy pattern that scientists found in music and I first noticed in the shape of trees. And that can certainly be brought outside the club.

So, if Core-Radiance can be seen in music, in dance and in trees, where else could it be found?

References:

- For an interesting read about Albert Torres, see DJ Paco’s tribute.

- Voss, R.F. & Clarke, J. (1978). “’1/f noise’ in music: Music from 1/f noise.” *Journal of the Acoustical Society of America*, 63(1), 258-263.

I was in art school when I first saw trees in a way that changed my life. This moment of vision triggered a chain of discoveries about art, science and human relationships.

In my teenage years, I was a very good painter. I began taking art classes at the grade 12 level, when I was in grade 10, still majoring in Industrial Arts. In the following year, my teachers supported me by creating a grade 13 course so I could continue. They even gave me a private studio, under the auto-shop. It was a great place to work on my paintings, the record player blasting Frank Zappa and Miles Davis. I was inspired.

I was largely self taught - the art teachers offered their feedback but little technical advice. Other teachers commissioned paintings from me. I made a killing at $25 per landscape-in-oils. In the summer before my last year of high school, I attended a university art course in my home town of Manchester, England. This was more of a challenge. The professor running that course, opened my eyes to many things. He taught me how to see more analytically. I am forever grateful for this.

While in England I had a chance to visit the National Gallery in London where I encountered Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Madonna of the Rocks’. Da Vinci had been my inspiration since I was a young boy. So it was inevitable that after seeing his painting in London, I would attempt to do the same. This is what teenagers do.

I spent my final year of high school working on a huge painting that was to be my ‘Madonna of the Rocks’. I had it all worked out: how to do the mountains, how to do the trees, etc. But I did not know how to solve the problem of the main subject - the scantily clad woman in the foreground. As a 17 year old, I did not have access to half-naked women to pose for me. So that area remained blank.

When I began university art school, I naively brought that enthusiasm for Leonardo with me, along with my unfinished ‘masterpiece’. My fellow students were impressed. My professors were repulsed. Their preference (i.e. their entire focus) was Abstract Expressionism, which, in my view, was another label for bank lobby art.

I had no interest in making corporate artwork. Within a year I had lost my love of painting entirely. My ‘masterpiece’ was never finished. By second year, I had turned my attention back to Industrial Arts - spending most of my time skipping classes to make a perpetual motion machine that plugged into the wall socket.

By third year I was hanging around the Electronic Engineering building and doing literal dumpster dives to retrieve discarded printed circuit boards and various other objects of technological beauty.

By fourth year, I was a complete outcast, being neither a painter, a print maker nor a sculptor. For a time I set up a ‘studio’ in the front lobby of the art building. Then in a hallway outside the campus post office. Eventually I moved to the back of the wood-shop, separated from the dust and the noise by a large, thin sheet of polythene.

In terms of image-making, the only activity that stirred my interest was drawing. I did it entirely on my own time, privately working on the street, far away from the school studio. It allowed me the freedom and time to make in-depth studies of my subjects.

I made detailed drawings of historic buildings in my small campus town. To earn extra money, I sold high quality reproductions at local book stores.

One of the things I learned from the professor in the Manchester art course was that when we draw, we are not just making pretty pictures. We are attempting to gain an understanding of our subject. The pencil marks are like notes. Drawing is an analytical tool.

If the mind is well focused and the eyes are clear, the pencil lines convey critical information about what we are seeing. I analyzed many picturesque streetscapes in that university town. But, over time, I focused more and more on the trees. One might say the trees drew me. The old historic buildings became just an excuse to examine and understand the surrounding trees.

For my small business, I made a series of half a dozen reproductions of my drawings. Of that set, the most popular by far was the old campus concert hall with its signature tall clock tower. It sold out.

I believe it was popular because of the way I had captured the surrounding trees.

I took my time with this one. For three days I had sat with my easel at the edge of the road, mapping what I saw with as much precision as I could manage. Taking note of exactly where the tree branches were distributed in space.

There is little ‘expressiveness’ in this image and zero abstraction. I was not interested in making art for its own sake or romanticizing the scene. I had taken on the task of truly understanding the shape of trees. I suppose I had approached it with the eye of a scientist.

After each session, as I walked home, every tree I saw began to look a little bit different.

First I saw their unique shapes.

Then I saw their energy.

Suddenly my eyes realized that trees are actually seeds exploding into the air. Time seemed irrelevant.

I saw the structure of every tree. I saw the way the trunk thrusts upwards out of the ground. I saw the branches flying out from the centre.

I saw the tell-tale signs of an exploding mass. It was just happening over many decades. For me it was like discovering ‘red shift’ where each tree was its own universe with its own Big Bang.

Seeing trees in this new way was a visceral experience. It was all about energy. It was a gift from the Universe.

As spectacular an experience as it was to see neighbourhood trees exploding, I sensed something else was going on. Intuitively, it felt like there were messages encoded into these forms. And I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

So I mentioned it to my brother. I tried to explain what I was seeing but words failed me. Unlike me, he was skilled in mathematics and found my mumbling somewhat annoying. But before he could abandon the conversation, an idea clicked and he said something that changed my life.

“There’s an article in this month’s Scientific American. It’s about a new branch of geometry that explains the mathematics behind natural forms.”

This was 1978.

Geometry? Maths? I hated maths. I had dropped out of mathematics in high school so I could make more art. But science? Yes I was always interested in science. After all, Leonardo was both an artist and a scientist.

I bought a copy of the April edition of Scientific American. Luckily it was still on the shelves.

The article, now a classic, was by Martin Gardner under his “Mathematical Games” column. It focused on the creation of stochastic (random) music introducing the remarkable work of a physicist named Richard F. Voss who worked at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Centre.

The article, being focused on music, showed how melodies could be generated using a certain type of randomized pattern called ‘1/f noise’ (one over f noise). This pattern was somewhere between ‘white noise’ (completely random, completely incomprehensible) and ‘brown noise’ (very orderly, very boring) Putting it briefly, it described a way to measure the interfusion between order and chaos. Between order and surprise. And, when you think about it, that is exactly what music is.

There were 2 remarkable things about this article:

First, was the extent to which Voss’s work could be applied to both human understanding of ‘art’ and patterns found in nature. The article focused a lot on trying to link the two.

Secondly, the article, almost as an aside, introduced a new mathematical field - fractal geometry. It was developed by another member of the Watson Research Centre, Benoit Mandelbrot. The reference to fractals was really just as supporting material for Voss’s work.

Interestingly, over time, very few have heard of Richard F. Voss but the name Mandelbrot has become a household word in certain circles. And fractal geometry has changed our world in ways far beyond our comprehension.

I made a special-order for Mandelbrot’s book ‘Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension’. When it arrived, weeks later, I pored over the pages, ignoring the extensive mathematical formulas and fixating on the computer-generated imagery. Most striking were the images of mountains similar to those in my unfinished painting, all generated by computer programs.

This marked the point where I put down my paint brushes and turned to the keyboard. In a time when few had heard about ‘personal computers’ I realized that this was my future.

As far as my ‘tree epiphany’ was concerned, a good part of the mystery was solved. Certainly fractal geometry, as an ‘explanation’ for patterns of nature, did shed light on my new way of looking at trees. But something was missing - I still wanted to know more.

When I had obsessed over the precise details of those trees in my drawings, my aim was not to create pretty pictures. I wanted to understand what forces of nature exist to shape them in real life. So, as interesting as fractals were (I spent the next decade learning software development so I could create ‘natural’ looking imagery) I came to realize that they were not answering my deeper question.

It was decades later that I realized the real answer for me was in the work that Voss was doing with 1/f noise.

Voss had boldly claimed that 1/f noise was behind the meaning of music and art. In my case, it went beyond describing the ‘self-similar’ statistical patterns that defined the fractal geometry of trees. It resonated more with me because it stayed close to those underlying forces behind those shapes. 1/f is not just about pretty patterns. It is about measuring the energy across a range of frequencies and identifying a particular pattern that nourishes our souls.

Energy is the point. The shape of energy is the key.

Trees connect Earth and Heaven. They bring life to the planet. They are graphic examples of 1/f power spectra. And that pattern has a meaning critical to life.

Blending intuition and logic has been a source of discovery throughout my personal and professional life. My approach to drawing trees was an important example of this.

Intuitively, I saw the energy of the trees then and I still see it today. But now I also see that energy in many other places and in vastly different circumstances. The exploding trees were just the beginning.

Logically, careful observation and consideration led me to powerful insights which I have since applied in my work and in forming strong relationships with those around me.

But it would be years before I found a name for what I really saw in those trees - and I found it not in a park but on the dance floor.

References:

- Gardner, M. (1978). “White and brown music, fractal curves and one-over-f fluctuations.” *Scientific American*, 238(4), 16-32.

- Mandelbrot, B. (1977). *Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension*. W.H. Freeman.

- Voss, R.F. & Clarke, J. (1978). “’1/f noise’ in music: Music from 1/f noise.” *Journal of the Acoustical Society of America*, 63(1), 258-263.