Last night I was admiring Ice-Bat, Meg’s Ugly Doll, and he (Meg says Ice-Bat is a she, but even though it lacks genitalia, I say it’s a he) reminded me of a NYTimes article I once read about the scientific explanation for “cute.”

The Cute Factor (Nytimes)

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can’t lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

And so, here are a few scientific reasons why Ice-Bat is so darned cute:

Yeah, I know that was a crappy graphic. I’m away from Photoshop at the moment, and I couldn’t stand the crappy graphic any longer, so I put up a scan straight from the sketchbook. The infographic that ran with the article was pretty crappy, too.

Internet detox continues…hence the lack of posts. But I did want to point out this excellent discussion between musician/artist/awesome dude David Byrne and neuroscientist/musician Daniel Levitin. I find neuroscience endlessly fascinating, and if I had any kind of science background at all, I’d go get my PhD on creativity and the brain at UT Austin, where they have a great center for neuroscience. But alas…

One particularly great subject for neuroscience is babies. Here, DT and DB are talking about mirror neurons:

One of the great mysteries in human behavior was that a newborn child can look up at its parent, and the parent smiles, and the newborn will smile. Well, how does it know how to do that? How does it know by looking at an upturned mouth what muscles it needs to move to make its own mouth turn up? How does it know that it’s going to produce the same effect? There’s a whole complicated chain of neuroscientific puzzles attached to this question.

And:

DL: …There’s actually a theory that all infants are synesthetes, and that sensory differentiation takes a few months after birth to occur. And that infants live in this sort of psychedelic world of everything being jumbled together.

DB: Wow.

I love this stuff…

The book I’m working on includes a kind of memory plot: the main character retrieves his lost memories by retracing his steps, moving through the geographical spaces of his past.

This idea is nothing new: pretty much every character who goes through some kind of trauma in literature deals with it by retracing his steps. Telling his story. Beginning with Odysseus, and more recently, Eternal Sunshine, Memento, Time’s Arrow, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. These great stories do exactly what they’re supposed to: not only do they give us a map and take us on a journey, they give us a new way of mapping our own lives. (I remember stumbling out of the theater after watching Memento, barely able to read the street signs.)

So this morning I’m reading the good ol’ Science Times, and I get another shocker: according to a recent article published in the Journal of Cognitive Science, “the speakers of Aymara, an Indian language of the high Andes, think of time differently than just about everyone else in the world. They see the future as behind them and the past ahead of them.”

It seems that humans began conflating time and space long before Einstein ever picked up a piece of chalk. Instead of equations, however, we use what are called conceptual metaphors, in which space sits in for time.

Most of us describe the future as ahead or in front of us, and the past as behind us. Until the view of the Aymara speakers was deconstructed, no significant exceptions to this way of thinking about time had been demonstrated….

…the Aymara call the future qhipa pacha/timpu, meaning back or behind time, and the past nayra pacha/timpu, meaning front time. And they gesture ahead of them when remembering things past, and backward when talking about the future.

…the Aymara speakers see the difference between what is known and not known as paramount, and what is known is what you see in front of you, with your own eyes.

The past is known, so it lies ahead of you. (Nayra, or “past,” literally means eye and sight, as well as front.) The future is unknown, so it lies behind you, where you can’t see.

Well, this really blew my mind, and has obvious implications for the story I’m trying to tell. If the future is behind us, and the past up ahead, do we back away from the past, trying to edge closer to the future, but still blind to it? Or do we try to put the past behind us, and are therefore doomed to bump into it in our quest to make it into the future?

I think it also has something to do with comics, another “conceptual metaphor…in which space sits in for time”:

page from REINVENTING COMICS, quoted by Dylan Horrocks

Of course, Dylan Horrocks and James Kochalka toss this theory on its head: comics don’t just spacially represent time, “comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.”

I’m not sure where my thoughts are headed at this point, but how curious to me that we must map time in order to conceptualize it. That we all seem to be cartographers, trying to map our worlds…

These are caricatures I did last night during a poetry reading. Poetry folks are a different clan. More about that later…

Meg always saves me the Science Times section. I’m obsessed with it. It’s the only part of the newspaper I read regularly.

Today I read about a tribe in Columbia that walked out of the jungle after thousands of years, and declared it wanted to be part of civilization. They asked “whether the planes that fly overhead are moving on some sort of invisible road.” A thousand miles away, a boy is slowly turning into bone. Other people with his disease twist into living statues. He has a mother who protects him, but not all creatures are so lucky.

To my imagination, this stuff is golden. Magic. What is it about reading science that has this effect on me? That makes life seem so spectacular and mysterious?

All other news pales in comparison: the remix page for MLITBOG is finally up, there’s a nice long post about the novel Kurt Vonnegut didn’t write, and George Saunders recalls leaving Ayn Rand for Sam Beckett.

I’m such a dunce when it comes to Science Fiction. But lately I’ve found that reading the NY Times science pages–or books on String Theory or The Singularity–gives me so many more ideas for stories and comics. Why is this?

Then I came across a great Vonnegut essay about science fiction. He says the best way to get labelled a science fiction writer “is to notice technology”:

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad.

He came into science fiction by accident, observing the small-town GE plant he worked in, full of machines. “I supposed that I was writing a novel about life,” he writes, “about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now.”