The Science of Discworld II

charcoal smear? Jack went to an art gallery, as an innocent in art appreciation, and tried the ‘context’ trick that any novice is always told to try. You’re supposed to sit in front of the picture, and gaze at it, and kind of sink into it and feel how it relates to its surroundings. The result was instructive. When he paid attention to a small part of the canvas, he found that he could match the context that his brain had invented with the one that the artist had actually provided. The charcoal smear was particularly good for this: each part implied something of the pattern of the whole. However, there were intriguing differences from part to part. There were variations on the theme, as in music, superimposed on the brain’s expectations. Jack’s brain enjoyed comparing the picture that it was inventing with the progressively different one that the artist was forcing his brain to construct.
    Art goes back a long, long way; the further back we look, the more controversial the evidence is. The ‘Dame à la Capuche’, a 1.5-inch (3.5-cm) high statuette of a woman, exquisitely carved from mammoth-tusk ivory, is 25,000 years old. Some of the most elegant cave paintings, with simple, sweeping lines that depict horses, bison and the like, are found in the Grotte Chauvet in France, and in 1995 they were dated at 32,000 years old. The oldest art that undoubtedly is art is about 38,000 years old: beads and pendants, found in Russia. And some beads made from ostrich egg shells in Kenya, which may be 40,000 years old.
    Further back, it all gets less certain. Ochre is a common pigment in rock drawings, and ochre ‘crayons’ found in Australia are 60,000 years old. There is a lump of rock from the Golan Heights, whose natural crevices have been worn deeper, presumably by a human hand wielding another lump of rock. It bears a vague resemblance to a woman, and it is about 250,000 years old. But maybe it’s just a lump of rock that a child idly scratched, and the shape is accidental.
    Imagine yourself in the cave as the artist paints bison on the wall. He (or she?) is creating a picture for your brain that differs progressively from the one that your brain expects: ‘Now let’s put a female woolly rhinoceros under him …’ There have been several ‘artists’ on television, doing precisely that trick. Rolf Harris was surprisingly good at drawing animal sketches before your very eyes. And they were iconic animals, too: sly fox and wise owl.
    There it all is, tied up in a bundle. Our perceptions are tied to our expectations, and we do not segregate sensations from each other, or from memories. They are all played off against each other in the seclusion of our minds. We absolutely do not program our brains with direct representations of the real world. From the beginning we’re instructing our brains what to make of what we see, hear, smell and touch. We put spin on everything, and we anticipate, compare and contrast, construct lengths of time from successive instants, construct areas of picture from focused observation. We’ve been doing this, layer upon layer, taking more subtle nuances from conversation, from flirting glances, to ‘Will she come to look like her mother does now?’ assessments of the real world, all the time.
    That’s what our brains do, and what edge people’s brains don’t.
    We suspect that Neanderthals didn’t do that kind of thing much, either, because there’s an alternative, and it’s consistent with their cultural torpor. The alternative is to live in a world that you’ve set up to ensure that nothing is unexpected. All the events follow your expectations from previous events, so habit engenders security. Such a world is very stable, and that means it doesn’t go anywhere much. Why try to leave the Garden of Eden? Gorillas don’t.
    Tribal life could be like that for Homo sapiens , except that reality always intrudes, for instance those barbarians up on the hill. ButNeanderthals, maybe, weren’t afflicted by barbarians. Certainly, nothing seems to have provoked big changes in their lifestyles, even over tens of thousands of years. Art does provoke changes. It makes us look at the world in new ways. The elves like that, it gives new ways for them to terrify people. But Rincewind has seen further than the elves are capable of seeing, and he’s worked out where art takes us. Where?