Dash Shaw's most recent graphic novel is a meditation on how we see: each other, the world, ourselves, and how the decisions we make, make us in return. Interconnected stories of a group of characters—a man choosing what shirt to wear to a wedding, a teacher considering quitting, a figure-drawing model, a man driving into a fog bank, a woman with new glasses—are drawn together and apart in ways that test how everyday choices can make a life stretch or shrink, an expanding or contracting aperture of possibility. 

 is a testament to the talents of one of our greatest contemporary cartoonists.

Shaw will be joined by Pioneer Works for a screening of his film 

 (2021) and to celebrate the publication of 

 (2024) on Sunday, August 11, 2024, at Roxy Cinema. We hope to see you there. ♦

Join us at the Roxy Cinema for a screening of

(2024), Shaw’s new book for New York Review Comics, an imprint of the New York Review of Books.

Stories of mythical beasts are part of the earliest cultural narratives, attests Jorge Luis Borges’s 

 (or the “handbook of fantastic zoology”). 

imagines an institution to protect cryptids—imaginary animals, often human-animal hybrids, that are by their nature hidden from view to most people. The concept of a theoretical, unknown animal activates a primal fear of monsters hidden or unknown. In 

, the cryptids are derived from mythologies around the world, so even while they are imaginary, the creatures are part of folkloric psyches.

When our own Joey Frank first saw this film, he thought immediately about Pioneer Works as a kind of cryptozoo for artists, a place to support their work and imaginative thinking and to protect them from the outside world’s harsh requirements and norms. Shaw’s film has an almost painted paper-doll aesthetic, scanned from hand-printed surfaces, appropriate for visualizing a world beyond what meets the average eye. A similar spirit suffuses 

, Shaw’s new graphic novel. It tells the interconnected stories of a group of characters—a teacher, a figure-drawing model, a woman with new glasses—whose lives are drawn together and apart in ways that stretch how we see and understand focus, perspective, and visual resolution.

Discussion and book signing to follow the screening of the film.

 is the author of several graphic novels, including 

, published by New York Review Comics in 2021 and named one of the best graphic novels of that year by 

. He has written and directed two animated feature films, the most recent of which, 

, won the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT Innovator Prize and was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

 is part of the founding team of Pioneer Works, and an artist whose large solo exhibition “The Seeker an’ the Trick” was in the Main Hall during Hurricane Sandy of 2012. He was the editor of four thick physical editions of 

, and wrote forwards for both of Adam Green’s graphic novels published by PW Press.

A Film Screening and Book Launch with Dash Shaw

From Cryptozoo to Blurry

Dash Shaw is the author of several graphic novels, including 

, published by New York Review Comics in 2021. He is also the writer and director of 

, which we'll be screening at Roxy Cinemas on August 11th. 

, Dash Shaw, New York Review Comics, 2024.

Advance Copy features exclusive excerpts from forthcoming books by leading novelists, essayists, poets, artists, and scientists.

When I received my first hardbound copy of 

, fresh off the press, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, was still about a decade away from powering up. Back then, of course, no one had any inkling that a mere nine days after the collider finally turned on, in September of 2008, it would abruptly shut down. A tiny loose joint led to an electrical overload that cascaded into some of the superconducting magnets warming and a section of equipment buckling. The damage shut the machine down for about a year, but in late 2009 the Large Hadron Collider came roaring back, propelling protons at nearly light-speed in opposite directions around its 27-kilometer tunnel—among the emptiest and coldest stretches in the solar system—and guiding them into collisions at energies far beyond any previously achieved in the laboratory.

To coincide with the commissioning of the collider, I wrote a 

 op-ed summarizing the major reasons for building it: find the Higgs particle, confirm supersymmetry, provide evidence for extra dimensions of space, encounter something completely unexpected. I was careful not to give equal likelihood to each of the goals that had coaxed the world to spend billions of dollars on the collider (they are listed above in descending order of anticipated likelihood), and I also included another potential outcome: that we find nothing at all. I noted that finding nothing would rank among the most radical outcomes, as it would require some long-cherished and deeply convincing ideas to be jettisoned. But it would also be the most challenging outcome to report: an exclamation point in the headline "Collider Finds Nothing!" would coax a hurried click from physicists but surely from no one else.

As the world knows, the collider was kind to physicists and journalists alike. On July 4, 2012, at a stirring press conference at the Geneva facility, spokespersons Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela were surrounded by hundreds of researchers, including an eighty-three-year-old Peter Higgs, as they officially announced the discovery of the elusive particle bearing his name. The camera covering the event caught an emotional Higgs (the person), a tear welling in his eye. Higgs wasn't the only researcher responsible for the prediction of the Higgs particle—scientists who deserve credit include François Englert (who subsequently shared the Nobel Prize with Higgs), Robert Brout, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, Tom Kibble, and no doubt others too. But Higgs's journey represents the yellowest of brick roads that theorists dream of following.

In the 1960s, Higgs and others were struggling to understand how various particles that were central to the emerging standard model of particle physics would acquire mass. The conundrum was that symmetry principles underlying the theoretical equations seemed to require the particles to be massless, much like the photon, but the data showed clearly that the particles were massive. Faced with mounting tension between theory and experiment, Higgs found common ground: if space were filled with a field, much as a sauna is filled with steam, the equations could preserve their massless symmetry while particles would pick up mass from an environmental influence—a kind of exotic friction as the particles plowed through the Higgs mist.

However beautiful our equations, however seductive our ideas, they are relevant to describing reality only when experiment establishes that they are.

Higgs realized that if his proposal were correct, this invisible space-filling field would have a visible signature: a tiny but dense "nugget" of the field would show up as a particle—the Higgs particle. And how to knock that nugget loose (more precisely, convert energy into a particle excitation of the Higgs field)? One way would be to slam protons together in energetic collisions that would thwack the Higgs field much as a belly flop thwacks water, creating a spray of particles that, according to the calculations, should contain the Higgs. Nearly a half century after Peter Higgs wrote his paper, this is indeed how the Large Hadron Collider succeeded in producing Higgs particles.

The odyssey from a puzzle pitting theory against experiment to a mathematical proposal for reconciliation and then, most importantly, to experimental data confirming the mathematics is the very odyssey theorists hold in the highest regard. However beautiful our equations, however seductive our ideas, they are relevant to describing reality only when experiment establishes that they are. The confirmation of the Higgs particle ranks among the most important modern examples of mathematics illuminating the road to reality, and it led many scientists to anticipate that the discovery of yet more particles predicted by mathematical studies, would not be far behind.

The "super" in superstring theory refers to a deep mathematical symmetry called supersymmetry. It is only the supersymmetric version of string theory that has a chance of describing our world. Supersymmetry requires a host of particles well beyond those that scientists have so far discovered. Indeed, for every particle so far revealed, supersymmetry requires a partner particle: for the electron, the predicted partner is the selectron, for the neutrino there should be the neutrino, for quarks there should be squarks. These "sparticles" are the "superpartners" of the known particles.

Although supersymmetry was developed in the framework of string theory, physicists subsequently developed a version that applies to quantum field theory, and more particularly to the phenomenally successful quantum field theory of the known particles, the standard model. The supersymmetric version of the standard model makes the same prediction of superpartner particles, which is why even non-string theorists ranked finding them as a major goal of the Large Hadron Collider. But, you might ask, without the motivation of string theory, why would physicists be at all interested in modifying the triumphant standard model to include supersymmetry?

One reason is that with supersymmetry the strengths of the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces converge to very nearly the same value on short distance scales, an important clue toward unification. But a more basic motivation for supersymmetry is entwined with the Higgs saga. Long before the Higgs particle was detected experimentally, physicists completed calculations showing that the Higgs mass would be particularly sensitive to the quantum influences of the many other particles with which it interacted. Indeed, the quantum influences would drive the Higgs mass billions and billions of times larger than the value subsequently revealed by the Large Hadron Collider (the measured mass of the Higgs particle is about 125 times the mass of the proton). Supersymmetry offered a solution to the mismatch: the superpartner particles would influence the Higgs mass too, but according to the calculations, these new contributions would cancel those coming from ordinary particles, thwarting the push toward a far larger Higgs mass.

Over the years, many physicists deemed this role for supersymmetry deeply compelling. Many, too, were charmed by supersymmetry's mathematical structure, which naturally culminates a long history of incorporating symmetry principles into physics. I remember well the pervasive feeling back in the 1980s during my graduate school days that supersymmetry was among those ideas that were simply too beautiful to be wrong. And so it seemed just a matter of time before the superpartner particles would be produced, the problem with the Higgs mass resolved, and an intrinsic quality of string theory confirmed. Champagne bottles in physics departments the world over were poised to pop.

So, all these years later, where do we stand?

Well, more than a decade since the Large Hadron Collider successfully found the Higgs, the headline summarizing subsequent progress would indeed read "Collider Finds Nothing!" The hunt continues, as an exhaustive search for the superpartners is a long and arduous task. But what are the implications if the trend continues and the superpartner particles fail to turn up?

Most concretely, physicists will once again face the puzzle of the Higgs mass: without the cancelations provided by superpartner particles, some other mechanism must be identified to keep the Higgs mass from exploding. But of most concern to our focus here, what would the absence of superpartner particles mean for string theory?

Well, if we could conclude that string theory was ruled out, I'd be thrilled. Not thrilled that string theory was wrong, but thrilled to have definitively settled the question of string theory's relevance to describing reality. I stress this point because a scientist's close association with a theory can easily be misconstrued as a commitment to supporting the theory even in the face of damning evidence. Let me be explicit: My commitment is not to string theory, or to any other proposal for nature's deep workings. My commitment is to advancing science toward truth. If data, or in this case the absence of data, could rule out string theory, that would be a resolute truth-directed step, and that is a step I would enthusiastically take. Don't get me wrong, I would be disappointed that string theory's mathematics did not realize the theory's promise of providing a unified, predictive, and confirmed description of reality. But that sentiment would pale in comparison to the profound appreciation for learning now—not a year from now or ten years from now or twenty-five years from now—that the string theory community's time and energy needed to pivot.

Perhaps one day we will have such evidence ruling out string theory, but the failure to find supersymmetry will not be the source. The reason is one of scale. To probe smaller and smaller distances we need larger and larger energies. In string theory, the central scale is the Planck scale, which in terms of length is about a billionth of a billionth the size of an atomic nucleus, and in terms of energy is about a hundred billion billion times the mass of a proton. By contrast, at the Large Hadron Collider's highest setting, it can probe lengths only as small as a thousandth the size of an atomic nucleus, with an energy that's only as large as ten thousand times the mass of a proton. And so, to probe the Planck scale we'd need an accelerator about a million billion times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider.

If we had such a Planckian-scale collider, and if string theory is a correct theory of nature, supersymmetry would manifest in the data. But with today's coarse technology (coarse compared to the Planck scale) the supersymmetric quality of string theory can easily be obscured, much as the quantum qualities of the atomic world are obscured on the comparatively coarse scales of everyday life. Concretely, it might be that the superpartner particles exist but their masses lie well beyond the collider's reach, explaining why we've not detected them.

This is not a new realization. Since the earliest research on supersymmetry, theorists recognized that the fundamental equations did not specify the mass of the superpartner particles, and so there was always a chance that the Large Hadron Collider would lack the power to produce them.

Although I and many colleagues considered that chance to be small, there were theorists at that time who emphasized that string theory seems to favor superheavy superpartners, far too massive for the Large Hadron Collider or even any remotely realistic next-generation colliders to produce. It is worth spending a moment to appreciate their reasoning, especially now that the data are tipping things in their favor.

—Calabi-Yau shapes—share the property that they keep focus on supersymmetry, preventing it from being obscured as we examine the theory's implications at energies well below the Planck scale. In fact, in the original research paper that introduced Calabi-Yau shapes into string theory, the authors required that the extra dimensions protect supersymmetry, ensuring that their tiny geometry thins the quantum fog that would otherwise shroud the superpartners, and with that stipulation the mathematics led them to Calabi-Yau shapes.

But there are a great many other possibilities beyond Calabi-Yau shapes that string theory can happily use (that is, shapes that solve the equations of string theory) and such shapes do not protect the supersymmetric quality from being obscured. For these choices of the extra dimensions, string theory does not predict that superpartner particles will be within reach of the Large Hadron Collider, or for that matter any collider we could build in the foreseeable future. What's more, there are a great many more shapes that obscure supersymmetry than there are those that protect it. In the past, researchers (like me) who were deeply impressed by the mathematical beauty of supersymmetry, its capacity to address the puzzle with the Higgs mass, its natural unification of force strengths, its ability to simplify horrendously difficult calculations through justifiable approximations, and even its compelling proposals for dark matter were reluctant to study anything but the case of unobscured supersymmetry. But with no evidence for superpartners forthcoming from the Large Hadron Collider, this attitude is changing and researchers have been broadening their studies to include the much larger class of shapes that do not preserve supersymmetry. So, rather than ruling string theory out, the failure to find superpartners is instead shifting various research agendas within string theory itself.

Pulling back from the details, the challenge these developments underscore is that string theory does not make specific, unambiguous predictions that can be tested with current technology. Many of us had hoped that finding the superpartner particles would be the first in a series of breakthroughs that would, discovery by discovery, walk beyond the physics of the standard model and inch closer to string theory. But the goal of finding the superpartners was always a well-motivated hope and not a sharp prediction. Without equations that yield definitive values for the masses of the superpartners, there's ample opportunity for them to be too hefty for the reach of today's colliders and, more than likely, those of tomorrow.

To be sure, if colliders could reach nearly Planck-scale energies, we'd be in a very different situation, as direct probes of string physics would be possible. We would still need to understand the theory with greater depth to make detailed comparisons between calculations and data, but in that imagined setting experiment would guide theorizing much as it has across a significant stretch of the history of physics. Coming back to the reality of today's technology, at a remove of fifteen orders of magnitude from the Planck scale, such direct experimental contact is unlikely.

 Let me be explicit: My commitment is not to string theory, or to any other proposal for nature’s deep workings. My commitment is to advancing science toward truth.

Does the lack of testable particle-physics predictions mean that string theory belongs to the realm of metaphysics? Detractors of string theory have argued, some with an oddly overheated zealotry, that the answer is yes. I find such assessments of little value. Any approach to quantum gravity, string theory or otherwise, will have core physics that is directly relevant to the Planck scale, and because this scale is so far beyond our technological reach, developing experimental tests will be extremely challenging. Such is the nature of the most ambitious theoretical research that walks along the very edge of knowledge. It surely does not mean the research fails to qualify as physics and should be abandoned.

But without experimental contact, how should we judge string theory?

We should use the very approach followed by those with the most on the line: young scientists deciding on their research careers as well as mature investigators striving to advance knowledge. As a matter of course, even without a formal assessment, these researchers are constantly evaluating the field's progress and achievements. And over the years, such evaluations have convinced some scientists that the advance toward experiment was too slow for their research expectations, and so they have left the field.

But others, indeed so many others that string theory has been berated for attracting too many of the highest-caliber scientists, have found that the pace of new theoretical discoveries and novel physical insights is so rapid and thrilling that they are propelled onward with vigor and excitement.

The point is, there is no right or wrong here. It is a matter of personal scientific taste. Those who want to work on projects that have a close and ongoing dialogue with experimental data should pass by string theory and focus their energies on other research fields. Those who want to explore unsolved problems at the interface of our deepest physical theories-quantum mechanics and general relativity-should focus on string theory (or any of the competing approaches). Everyone else should respect these choices. The best and brightest of our researchers deserve free rein in their careful deliberations regarding where to invest their talents.

In making such choices, some young researchers have nevertheless asked me when I expect string theory to confront data in a meaningful way. In the earlier days of string theory, my answer echoed the sentiment I articulate above. Namely, we all root for experimental contact, but as there are no crystal balls, researchers need to decide for themselves whether they can happily go forward even if such contact should fail to materialize during their productive years. My answer has since changed. I still note how important the question of experimental contact is, but I also note that a stunning breakthrough has shifted the character of the question. I will describe the result in more detail shortly, but here's the elevator pitch: We now have powerful evidence that—shockingly—string theory and quantum field theory are actually different languages for expressing one and the same physics. In consequence, the experimental luster of quantum field theory casts a newfound experimental glow on string theory. Make no mistake, to establish string theory experimentally we need to confirm a definitive string theoretic prediction. But the unexpected equivalence between string theory and the most rigorously tested framework in the history of science quantum field theory is strong evidence that by working on string theory we are pursuing physics, not metaphysics. ♦

Brian Greene is world-renowned for his groundbreaking discoveries in the field of superstring theory, including the co-discovery of mirror symmetry and the discovery of spatial topology change. He is the director of Columbia’s Center for Theoretical Physics.

The Elegant Universe

In 1960, Ella Fitzgerald was at the height of her career, widely regarded as among the best jazz singers in the world. An experienced performer by any measure, she would typically perform 45 weeks a year. On Saturday, February 13, 1960, Lady Ella took the stage at Deutschlandhalle in Berlin in front of 12,000 fans. After singing a repertoire of popular songs from memory, including “Misty,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and “Summertime,” she and the band began “Mack the Knife,” first made popular by her collaborator Louis Armstrong five years earlier. Although many might not have seen the show it came from, 

, the audience knew the song well—­it had been a number 1 hit for Bobby Darin just a year before—and they cheered as soon as they heard the first line, “Oh the shark has pearly teeth, dear . . .”

After the third chorus, about a minute and a half in, Ella forgets the words. Without losing a beat, or her composure, she continues to sing perfectly in time: “Ah, what’s the next chorus, to this song now? This is the one now, I don’t know . . .” She continues improvising lyrics, occasionally inserting a remembered word or two from the song. When the next chorus comes around, still stymied, she riffs on the song’s history by referencing Darin’s and Armstrong’s versions, then self-deprecatingly sings that she’s “making a wreck of ‘Mack the Knife.’ ” The band keeps playing and after modulating up a half step, a new chorus starts. Having now made up words to two entire choruses on the spot while never losing the rhyme scheme, she begins to scat while imitating Louis Armstrong. The audience goes wild.

In the history of live performance, this stands as one of the most mesmerizing, thrilling demonstrations of mastery. And what is mastery if not the ability to deal with the unexpected as though it was expected? To take an error and turn it into something better than if there had been no error at all? This level of mastery requires deep memory for the tools of one’s craft, arrived at through thousands of hours of practice, memorization of procedures, facts, and conventions, until one’s art or craft reaches a state of automaticity, what some call the flow state.

We witnessed this type of mastery in a wholly different domain with “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who improvised a safe recovery of US Airways flight 1549 in 2009 after it lost power in both engines over New York. Sullenberger describes what went through his mind, and his words could equally apply to Ella’s extraordinary performance. “Because I had learned my craft so well . . . I knew my profession so intimately, I could set clear priorities, and so I chose the highest priority items. And then I had the discipline to ignore everything I did not have time to do as being only distractions and potential detriments to performance.” Landing the plane required that he not think deliberately so much as act out of training and instinct, on automatic pilot as it were—the flow state. Without memory, there can be no flow. But memory is not an all-or­-nothing entity. It flows in bits and pieces; it stops and starts and sputters and spurts. Our left cerebral hemisphere then stitches the pieces together with what it thinks are plausible inferences to fill in the gaps.

Although there was less at stake in Berlin that day than on the Hudson, Ella exhibited the same kind of presence of mind and mastery as Sully did—she prioritized and didn’t panic. Ella’s highest priority was that the show must go on, and she ignored everything nonessential. Getting the words exactly right was far less important than keeping it swingin’ with the familiar melody and rhythms.

When we listen to that magical recording, we hear that Ella has at her disposal a number of cues to the nature of the song—her memory for “Mack the Knife” has not been completely slashed. Her memory for the melody and rhythm are intact and precise. We hear her playing with the beat, as she’s done throughout the song so far, using the rhythmic technique of swing that propels each phrase into the next in a long­short, long-short rhythm; she creates groove, even when forgetting the lyrics. The next line is supposed to be “There’s a tugboat, down by the river, don’t you know?” Do you notice what Ella did? She remembered the last word of the line: 

. She also remembered, or reconstructed, the internal rhyme of lyricist Marc Blitzstein, with the long o- sound of 

 when she sings “I don’t know.” Ella improvises her way into a self-deprecating last line that ends with the name of the song, just as her previous chorus did. She then skips to her memory of the final chorus, where the lyrics name-check characters from the opera: Jenny Diver, Sukey Tawdry, and Lucy Brown (Louis Armstrong added Lotte Lenya, a nod to one of the original leads in the show in both Germany and the United States, and wife of composer Kurt Weill).

Music—even more so than language—is a highly structured medium, meaning that the structure itself can help to scaffold one’s memories.

Ella’s stunning ad hoc performance earned her a Grammy award and was so admired that when Frank Sinatra sang “Mack the Knife” with the Quincy Jones Big Band in 1984, he incorporated some of Ella’s Berlin lyrics into his version, adding her name to Bobby Darin’s and Louis Armstrong’s in the list of singers who had previously covered the song. (Ella herself reprised pieces of the improvisation during a return to Berlin in 1962.)

As the seldom-sung final stanza of “Mack the Knife” goes,

There are some who are in darkness, and the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness. Those in darkness drop from sight.

Ella was the bright light, and her performance of forgetting stands as one of the great monuments to memory and forgetting in the history of American music. The truth is that memory and forgetting are forever entwined. Ella retained an exquisite memory for the compositional structure, rhyme scheme, melody, the underlying harmony, accent structure, phrasing, and rhythms of the song. She had intact memory for the song’s history, who had sung it before, and the particular timbre of Louis Armstrong’s voice.

Most of us, of course, don’t possess the kind of mind—or voice—that Ella Fitzgerald did. But we all possess neural networks that represent the music we’ve heard, and these form vital windows for neuroscientists into how we build and access memories in general. The musical circuits in the brain contain potent clues as to how and why music can be an effective tool in treating injury, disease, and a range of mental and physical ills ranging from PTSD and depression to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Our memory is largely governed by a brain structure called the hippocampus, which is shaped like a seahorse. It’s found in both halves of the brain, deep down inside, and it arranges the storage of short- and long-­term memory, including the connection of certain sensations and emotions to those memories. I’ve come to believe that memories aren’t actually 

 in the hippocampus the way you might store a book on a shelf. In the library of the brain, the hippocampus is the card catalog that tells you what shelf the memory is on, in which wing of the library.

The hippocampus evolved in humans and other mammals to help us find things: Where’s the water? Where’s the food? Where’s the shelter? (Who let the dogs out?) Memory for 

 things are is extremely important to secure food and shelter. The hippocampus evolved for 

, not for remembering things like your PIN number or the lyrics to a song, but we use it for those tasks anyway. In just the last five years or so we’ve learned that the best way to improve your general memory is to exercise your geonavigation skills because they make the hippo­campus function better, regardless of what type of information you are wanting to store in it. Go for a walk in a place you’ve never been! Especially on an uneven surface, where you have to negotiate obstacles like tree roots or holes. Or drive to a place you haven’t been before. If you’re not in a hurry, turn off the GPS in your car. All of this strengthens the functioning of the hippocampus. As does music.

Memory serves many disparate functions. Although it feels as though it is a single, unified faculty, it is a basket full of separately evolved capabilities. It’s certainly helping us with much more than spatial geonavigation. Memory tells us what foods have poisoned us or others, which people and animals are allies, foes, predators, or prey. Without memory, we could not have language, for we would not remember what words mean or how grammatical structure conveys their meaning.

The different kinds of memory systems humans have are sensory memory, procedural memory, semantic memory, episodic memory, geographic/spatial memory, and autobiographical memory. Sensory memory includes the afterimage you may have beneath your eyelids after seeing something, or the echo in your mind’s ear after you’ve heard something. Procedural memory, what we often call motor memory, keeps track of things like how to tie our shoes, how to use tools, how to drive a car, or brush our teeth.

Memory for specific events, or episodes, is called episodic memory, and memory for facts and general knowledge is called semantic memory. A quick rule of thumb is that if you remember 

 you experienced something, that is episodic. If you only remember the thing itself, it is probably semantic. Our semantic memory system is the storehouse for remembering everyday objects, historical events, and cultural practices—­things like 

. Extending the rule of thumb, if you know something but you 

 have a specific recollection of learning it, it is likely a semantic memory. Of course there are cases in which they blend: I remember learning my times tables by practicing them on my walk to school; I remember when I learned the name of the album 

 because I was over at my friend Glen McClish’s house and his older sister played the title cut on her JCPenney record player. The term “semantic” in this context comes from the Greek word “semantikos,” which means “significant.” The idea behind the term is that semantic memory stores the significant or meaningful information that we have acquired about the world around us, and it is thought to underlie our ability to reason, communicate, and understand language.

Autobiographical memory is the most intimate form of memory; it is necessary for our sense of self. 

I played little league softball and I was the centerfielder. I honeymooned in Hawaii. I know how to drive a manual transmission.

 These combine your personal, episodic history and other general self-knowledge: 

Am I someone who likes vanilla ice cream or chocolate? Am I an early bird or a night owl? What do I like to do in my spare time? Who were the great loves of my life?

 This autobiographical memory is separate from episodic memory. Like episodic memory, it indexes events that you were a part of, but it indexes much more: the memories of the things you did and thought, insights, places you’ve been, your political views, your values and morals—all the things that make you 

These different memory systems (geographic/spatial, sensory, procedural, episodic, semantic, and autobiographical) are subject to loss individually as the result of injury, disease, or trauma. The nature of memory, however, is that the different systems often provide access points to one another, cross-referencing and cross-correlating. Even autobiographical memory, which draws on both episodic and semantic memory, can be separately impaired; that is, dissociated from the other forms of memory. President Reagan, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but probably suffering from it already, famously confounded an episode (a movie he acted in) with his autobiographical memory—he thought that the things that happened to the fictional character happened to the nonfictional him.

Memory is the heart of who we are, and the very private sense of what it is like to be us. Inextricably linked to memory formation are emotion and attention. Not everything we experience makes it into memory. If you are really paying attention to something, it’s much more likely to be encoded. Often the unconscious is deciding: What does this experience mean to me? What might I learn from this? How can I use this later? Say I walk into a house that I’m thinking of buying: I’m going to notice different things than if I’m thinking of robbing it. As a buyer I don’t care about the expensive coin collection in the glass case; I care about the leaky roof. Context profoundly influences what gets stored in memory! Also, we tend to remember those things that carry the biggest emotional wallop. This makes evolutionary sense: an emotional event, such as finding water when you’re lost and thirsty, or seeing a family member eat a plant that poisons them—needs to be encoded for survival.

A popular metaphor holds that memory is like a digital recording of our lives—when we want to recall something, we find the file in our memory banks and hit play. And we can fast forward, rewind, jump ahead, play in slow motion—our memory is scan­nable, and its “playback” is under our control. But this metaphor is not very good, because memories are subject to distortion or change over time, making it difficult to rely on what we pull out of our mental attic.

In reality, memory is more like film that has been edited and doctored, with entirely new scenes inserted, old ones rewritten with new characters, backgrounds, and dialogue, and some distorting lenses applied. Our recollections can be influenced by a range of external factors such as context, mood, and expectations, causing them to become altered. This can result in different people having different memories of the same event (in the book I describe how three Beatles and George Martin all had entirely different—and incompatible recollections—of critical Beatles sessions). Over time, our own memories of an event might change, sometimes drastically, as we recontextualize the experiences—we do this without conscious awareness and can’t help ourselves. These intruding distortions can also affect retrieval as we search our memory banks. If you’re searching your memory for that time you had shrimp scampi with your old high school friend Jim Ferguson, you may not find it because you and Jim never 

 shrimp scampi—you only talked about it—and this detail is somehow lost, merged, or rewritten. The maddening thing about all of this is that we are 

. This often is not true; psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown how easily and readily false memories can form.

Understanding the neuroanatomy of the different kinds of memory is crucial for working out how music therapy and music interventions can and do work. Memories of the emotional and autobiographical features of music—

 is the album she and I listened to in bed

—are prone to distortion like any memory. But the 

 components of music hold a privileged position: they tend to be more accurate than other memories, even for nonmusicians. Memory for the absolute pitches of songs that we know well are preserved in memory with great precision; the same is true for tempo, timbre, melody, harmony, and spatial location (such as, 

the cellos are supposed to be on my right

). Memory for the structure of the lyrics, if not each and every word, is also well preserved. We remember, with astonishing accuracy, the rhythms and notes that lyrics are attached to, the accent structure, the rhyme scheme, the pauses. Even if we only know a song fairly well, it’s likely we’ve encoded enough of this componential information that we can take a good guess at what the missing words are.

Why this privileged position for music? In general, it is easier to remember information when there is some sort of organization scheme inherent in the material. The most successful mnemonic devices are ones that contain a structure predictable enough that we can learn it (ideally, just through passive exposure, as we do with our native language). And music—even more so than language—is a highly structured medium, meaning that the structure itself can help to scaffold one’s memories. Because of this structure, we don’t need to remember every single musical detail in order to reconstruct our musical memory. Any one of the individual component attributes of rhythm, melody, timbre, lyrics, and phrase structure can help us to remember others, allowing us to make plausible inferences about what comes next.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do __________

You may have forgotten what comes next, or you may never have heard the song and so never knew. But the mutually reinforcing constraints of rhythm, accent structure, meter, melody, and rhyme (it probably rhymes with 

) constrain the possible completions. How would you finish this? 

? Those might work in a Weird Al Yankovic song, but here they seem out of place. Really the only thing that fits is what Yip Harburg wrote for that lyric: 

. The lyric is memorable because structure and semantics—logic—reinforce it.

Musical memory is unique in that it combines procedural memory (motor memory) with auditory memory and a special kind of semantic memory, memory for the structural rules that hold everything together. Because there are so many redundancies in musical memories, they are among the most robust in our lives, surviving even advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

But musicianship requires much more precision; a multifactorial network of brain regions must cooperate. Ella was lucky in that she only lost the words. In other cases, the sounds can remain in our brains as auditory memory, but we have difficulty getting them out. I learned about this first-hand, in recent years, from my friend Rosanne Cash.

Once you’ve heard those same compositions hundreds of times, each time writing a memory trace into your brain, you have essentially rehearsed the song, as a musician might, without even knowing it.

In 2008, the New York Academy of Sciences invited Rosanne and me to perform music together and talk about what goes into creating music, both from the musician-composer side and from the scientific side. Rosanne had undergone brain surgery that affected her musicianship a year before. Rosanne is a rare jewel among marquee performers. She is more focused on the experience of those around her than on her own experience—she directs her attention to the crew, the sound engineer, the stagehands, the other musicians. She is the anti-diva. Knowing that I’d be flying down from Montreal in the winter—not a good time to bring an instrument on a plane—Rosanne offered to bring me one of her guitars to play. We had a wonderful time. We had played together informally at her house, but this was the first time we had performed in public. It was so completely natural and comfortable, it felt like we’d been doing it for years. The event led to a series of similar engagements during which we talk about music and the brain, play a few songs, talk some more, and play a few more songs. It’s a novel and intimate format; the audiences say that they feel like they’re eavesdropping on a pair of friends having dinner at the next table in a restaurant.

Prior to her surgery, Rosanne had been experiencing headaches for as long as she could remember. As she got older, they became debilitating. “Once, I even dropped to my knees, the pain was so intense,” she recalls. “But a lot of times, singing, playing music myself, I would move out of the headache. It would just dissolve. That’s an interesting thing about music. You know, people say it’s very healing. It is very healing, literally.” After ten years of misdiagnoses, she underwent an MRI that showed she had a “Chiari malformation,” a rare abnormality I had to look up, that caused a bit of cerebellar tissue to slide down into the spinal cavity in the neck, pushing against the brain stem, “the geographical equivalent of starting in Vancouver and wandering down to Houston,” Rosanne said. The only solution was neurosurgery. When Rosanne arrived in pre-op, the nurse asked her what she was there for. “I’m having a decompression craniectomy and laminectomy for Chiari 1 and syringomyelia,” she said. Rosanne knew far more about it than I did.

The cerebellum is responsible for the exquisite orchestration of movement, whether it’s lifting one’s leg up a stair, opening a jar of jam, or playing a musical instrument. Any disturbance there, no matter how slight, can have outsized consequences for movements from large to small to minuscule.

Following the surgery, Rosanne tried to play the piano again. Her cerebellum, unceremoniously poked and prodded, was having none of it. She could move her fingers just fine, but all of those precise movements and sequences that had been so carefully rehearsed over a lifetime were now lost. Undaunted, she set off on a path of cognitive and musical rehabilitation, getting out her second-grade piano books and teaching herself those pieces, one note at a time. At first it was frustrating. But gradually the dormant patterns came back to life. What had taken her decades to learn the first time around, she relearned within six months. It is an extraordinary property of memory that once you’ve learned something, even if you 

 you forgot it, you can retrain yourself and it comes back much more quickly than you think it will, given the fits and starts that characterize the early stages.

The intricate processing of music unfolds component by component, commencing from the very moment we perceive its resonating sounds. The waveform, whether it reaches our ears through live performances, speakers, or earbuds, undergoes a deconstruction process that gives rise to neural representations across three distinct dimensions: frequency, amplitude, and duration. These neural representations then traverse specialized pathways where they are transformed, gradually assuming the more familiar attributes of pitch, loudness, and rhythm. Through further specialized processing circuits, the rich world of music materializes into a mosaic of the nine dimensions that engage and shape our perception: melody, contour, harmony, timbre, meter, tempo, tactus, spatial location, and distance.

Accomplished musicians possess the capacity to construct higher-order representations encompassing chords (clusters of pitches), harmonic rhythm (progressions of chords), and phrase structure (such as the distinction between 8-bar and 12-bar blues). As these higher-order representations crystallize through repeated listenings or deliberate practice, they often coalesce into meaningful “chunks.” Chunking reduces memory load, by transforming a collection of disparate parts into a cohesive entity.

Say you’ve got a favorite song on your playlist, and you’ve heard it hundreds or even thousands of times. Each time you hear it, it lays down a trace in your memory, and repeated hearings strengthen that trace. Some of the features of this song are invariant across multiple listenings—the melody, tempo, and rhythms, for example. Other features are variable, such as how loud it is, where it is coming from in space (near or far, left or right), and whether or not it is tangled up with other noises, such as the sound of your windshield wipers swishing, birds singing in your backyard, or a crowd of people chattering in a café. Each of these listenings forms a distinct trace that registers the unique features, and at the same time reinforces the previous traces that encoded the common features. Contrast this with listening to a live music performance, where the band may play the song differently each time—they may change up the rhythms, the melody, and all sorts of things. From an information processing perspective, these are distortions of the original melody. Song recognition remains accurate in the face of very large distortions, or alterations to the original way we heard it. Indeed, jazz improvisation relies on the idea that part of your brain is keeping the melody and chord changes in your head while the soloists riff on it, sometimes into a completely different melody or tonal space. Each such listening stores whatever that particular performance had in common with your previous listenings, as well as whatever is new.

Every time you experience something, whether it’s going on in the world around you or it’s a thought inside your head, it lays down a trace in your memory. When you experience something many, many times, the traces overlap and the memory becomes exceptionally strong. If each experience is slightly different, the traces still exist in a kind of package, like sticks of dried sage bound into a single stalk of incense. The traces themselves are instantiated in a pattern of synaptic connections. All that synaptic activity is governed by characteristic neurochemical activity, a balancing act across up to 100 different neurotransmitters. That high-fidelity, accurate, and absolute memory we have for the pitches, tempos, and timbres of well-known songs essentially falls out of this model for free: once you’ve heard those same compositions hundreds of times, each time writing a memory trace into your brain, you have essentially rehearsed the song, as a musician might, without even knowing it. This sort of massive rehearsal leads to overlearning, a mastery of something that causes it to become automatic—like Ella singing the melody and rhythm of “Mack the Knife” or Sully landing an Airbus 320 without having to think much about it.

Each experience, thought, or piece of information creates a unique synaptic network. When we hear a particular piece of music, some of the 80 billion or so neurons in our brains become connected in a unique way, specific to that song, and specific to that particular episode. Those neurons become members of a special subset of neurons that represent that song. Brain scans from my laboratory at McGill show that when people imagine listening to music versus actually hearing it, the activation patterns are nearly identical. That is, the act of remembering music causes activation of the same neural circuits that were active when we heard the music in the first place. That special, dedicated subset of neurons that were tied together in listening comes online again when remembering. What are otherwise disparate and isolated neurons spread throughout the brain re-form to once again become 

 of that original experience group; the neurons are 

into their original membership group, into their original formation. Remembering is re-membering.

In this respect, Ella’s memory for music appears to be not a recording, but a series of recordings, each of a musical feature— like the multitrack recordings producers make that have drums on one track, bass on another, and so on. So here, imagine that one track got erased by mistake and you still have the others to work with. It is fairly easy to fake your way through. Or imagine that you’re used to playing with a five-piece jazz combo and the piano player doesn’t show up one night. Each musician modifies what they play to some extent, to account for the change of information the audience will hear. On-the­-fly adaptations like this are possible because music contains such rich, mutually reinforcing and redundant structure. And a similar dynamic colors how we access memories—all of which are cross-indexed in our brains, with multiple, almost limitless entry points.

Some entry points to memories are universal (“name a song normally sung at a birthday party”), some are well known within a culture (“name a popular Beyoncé song”), some are very specific to you or your cohort of friends (“name the song we danced to over and over again that night on the beach”). In cognitive psychology, we call these entry points 

. The cues can be almost anything: sensory, emotional, autobiographical, factual, geographic, associational, a lyric, a piece of melody . . . the list goes on.

Think of a song that makes you sad. Think of one that always makes you feel happy. Think of a song that is about driving; a song that reminds you of your first kiss; one that you like to sing out loud; a song with the name “Jane” in the title. Each of these serves as an entry point to memory, a cue. But the meaning of a song can’t be summed up by an appeal to the notes that constitute it. If an especially emotional memory becomes associated with a song at any point, you will probably never hear it the same way again: memories are not static or passive, but rather dynamic and evolving. That song you loved when you were dating so-and-so might be difficult to listen to after an acrimonious breakup. Hearing it and experiencing those negative feelings will cause these new negative feelings to become attached to the memory and then stored along with it. As the most recent feelings stored, they may dominate the older ones so that it will be hard to recall a time when you 

The fascinating phenomenon of state-dependent memory retrieval emerges as a consequential companion to these observations. When our spirits are high, we retrieve joyful memories effortlessly. Conversely, when we find ourselves submerged in sorrow, the retrieval of any gleeful recollections can prove arduous, leading us to conclude that our existence has perpetually been tinged with melancholy. This sets in motion a discouraging cycle of escalating despair, rendering it increasingly challenging to emancipate ourselves from the clutches of despondency. Trauma operates on a similar principle—whenever we recollect a traumatic encounter, entwined with all the adverse sentiments it entails, liberating ourselves from this perpetual cycle becomes a daunting endeavor: each triggering stimulus evokes a sense of panic, imprinting itself as an additional memory trace atop the accumulated others. Even music associated with a distressing period of one’s life can summon forth fresh negative memories in individuals afflicted by depression, exacerbating their condition.

The multifeatured, multifaceted aspect of music, and the different ways it can be accessed, are what allows it to be so powerful with Alzheimer’s, depression, PTSD. When nothing else gets through, a little snippet can shoehorn its way into consciousness, mood, and memory itself.

Neuroscientist Amy Belfi found that music-evoked autobiographical memories are more vivid than autobiographical memories evoked by other familiar cues, such as photographs. In all our musical adventures, from childhood on, our brains are seeking similarity and patterns. Our brains are giant prediction machines, trying to figure out what will come next to us in the world. To do that, we need to extract patterns, commonalities, and create groupings of objects that are similar. We make sense of orchestras because we don’t hear the 100 or so instruments as separate—­our ears naturally group similar sounds together. All the violins automatically get merged in our head into a section (or two or three when they are playing different parts). Similarity can also apply to melodies as they are handed off from one instrument to another. Our brains apply certain rules that are inborn, to define similarity in several ways. An example is that notes that are close to one another in pitch space tend to get grouped together, and they separate—pop out—from other note clusters that are far apart from them. This is what allows us to hear a bass line as distinct from a guitar or clarinet line. There are over a half dozen rules for detecting similarity, most of them worked out by the Gestalt psychologists back in the late 1800s; these “configurationists” rejected the dominant notion that one could understand a complex phenomenon by studying the parts one at a time.

This penchant for similarity draws us toward music that has something in common with music we’ve heard before, the strongest example being different versions of the same song, followed by songs that are based on the same structure (from 12-bar blues up to sonatas and symphonies). When we’ve learned some of these fundamental laws that govern the music we listen to—that is, when we’ve built up dedicated brain circuits to do the work—our brains take over and handle the ongoing tracking of melody, rhythm, and other musical features without our conscious control. Our brains notice small and large deviations from what they expect, and those get encoded as separate memory traces, allowing us to build up a larger vocabulary of patterns, enriching our experience of music.

All of these musical elements are being stored along with extramusical and contextual memories—smells, tastes, feelings you’re experiencing, the place you are, the people you’re with. Each of these independently serves as a retrieval cue. This is why a smell can trigger a memory, and particularly if it is an odor that you don’t experience all the time, and so is uniquely associated to a very specific memory. That is the key, really—the more specific a memory cue, the easier it is to retrieve what you’re looking for. If I ask you, “Do you remember that shower you took three Wednesdays ago?” you’re unlikely to have a specific memory for it—it’s blended in with all the other showers you’ve taken recently. But if I ask, “Do you remember that shower you took recently when the water suddenly turned ice cold?” that, presumably, only happened once in the last few weeks, and so the uniqueness triggers the memory.

All these processes can be tied together: unique memory cues, multiple trace memories, similarity, and memory for individual features of music. When I simply 

 a song without hearing it, that hippocampal index tells me, 

These are the circuits that were involved, the neurons that fired, the firing rates of those different neurons

—all of that info in the neural library card catalog I described. But I don’t get it back perfectly, which is how I know it’s a recollection and not the actual thing—unless I’m hallucinating to the point where I can’t tell the difference between reality and imagination. This is another point about memory—neurochemical tags tell us when something we are thinking about is a memory, versus something that we dreamt or hallucinated. That’s a good idea, evolutionarily. You don’t want to pick a fight with Caveman Og just because you 

 that he stole your food. But this system of neurochemical tags sometimes goes awry. When that happens we can have experiences such as déjà vu, the feeling that we’ve been somewhere or done something before when we really haven’t; as you are actively encoding the experience and putting it 

 memory, something goes wrong and it gets spit back out as though it is coming 

 memory, rather like a kitchen sink backing up. Jamais vu occurs when you’re doing something you’ve done many times, but it feels like the first—as though you’ve never (

) done it. Jamais vu is a state that every musician and actor seeks to attain when they are performing. The late Burt Bacharach probably sang “Alfie” more than a thousand times. But as pianist and producer Shelly Berg said, “Every time he sings it, it sounds—and feels—like he is singing it for the first time ever. And that’s what audiences connect with.” Psychotherapy can often trigger déjà vu and jamais vu because it aims to recontextualize memories.

We also connect anything we’re hearing with what we’ve heard before, and that deeply enriches the listening experience. Our musical memories begin before birth and evolve as we grow. As long as we are listening, we keep adding to those memories, reinterpreting the new in light of the old, and in the process, recontextualizing the old. Your brain is changing all the time, and so are your emotional states, and so the “music medicine” you receive is essentially a brand-new medicine each time. The brain that hears that favorite song today is different from the brain that heard it last month. The journey through music is a never-ending one, guiding us through moments of joy and sorrow, discovery and nostalgia, a faithful friend that is always there to lift us up or help us through rough times. As long as we keep listening, we move forward, one note at a time. ♦

Daniel J. Levitin is a neuroscientist, musician and author. This piece is adapted from his new book, 

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine

 which was just published by W.W. Norton.

Music is Memory

Our human lives have a fair degree of definiteness to their boundaries. Where each of our bodies begins and ends in space is pretty clear (give or take the bacterial colonies inside our guts—those might be in some ways part of us, and in other ways distinct). The same is true of our beginnings and endings in time. Each of us begins from a fertilized egg. The new individual grows up and develops, while keeping a fairly constant form, before growing older and dying.

Other organisms are much less definite in their beginnings and ends. When a bacterial cell divides, is the result two daughters and the death of the parent, or does the parent live on in one of them? If so, which one? A tree might send out a root that initiates a new stem, and if the root breaks, the two trees are entirely separate. Is that something like a birth? And where are the spatial boundaries of “the” tree while the two stems are still attached?

For life to continue, there needs to be a way of preventing metabolic processes from diffusing away into the surrounding chaos. Compartments and borders of some kind are necessary. This is the role of cells. But when many cells are working together, there’s no need for these larger units to be always neatly marked off from each other

 Living things often have vague boundaries, and this is another reason why it’s common to think about ecological systems using biomass rather than counts of individual organisms; in a lot of cases, it’s not at all clear how the count of organisms would go. This applies to plants, corals and many others.

Now let’s turn to the mind. It seems, at least, that our minds also have pretty definite boundaries, tied to those of our bodies. If there is no afterlife, then when I die that will be the end of my mind. Each of our minds is, it seems, “owned” by an individual person, and private to that person in many respects. This relationship might have some exceptions and qualifications.

In rare and fascinating cases, physically conjoined twins seem to have a partial unity, or at least very unusual contact, across their two minds. “Split-brain” patients are another variant.

Here we treat our minds not as barely housed, floating, ghost-like beings, but as parts of the material world as a whole, embedded in evolution and the Earth’s development.

All these phenomena shake up our expectations in a useful way. And they lead to a question about how things might have been, or how they might be elsewhere. Could the mind, as a feature of life on Earth or another planet, have evolved in a massively spread-out and extended way, merging and blurring rather than being tightly associated with distinct individual bodies and forming individual selves? Is it an evolutionary accident that matters are the way they are here? I want to suggest that it’s not much of an accident. The kind of individuality present in animal lives like ours has connections to the evolution of the mind, including felt experience, and the messages here relate to our boundaries in both space and time

A crucial fact about reproduction in animals like us is that we each emerge through a “bottleneck,” a one-cell stage. Our bodies are rebuilt in each generation from scratch. This seems in some ways a waste. If you want to grow up and get big, why start out as small as you possibly could? But the one-cell stage has a lot of importance in individual development and in evolution. The rebuilding from scratch, the fresh start, enables a small mutation in the genes of one cell to ramify through all the cells as they divide to make the new organism. A small change can affect everything in the body

All this gives rise to something close to a discrete start to each life, in animals like us. It also has consequences for aging and decline. For various reasons—competition, external risks and threats—it makes sense to grow up and become able to reproduce earlier rather than later, as long as you’re able to do the job well. It’s also worth taking on costs that come due later in life, in order to do well at earlier stages. For many animals, this means that a natural decline tends to happen after reproduction, on a rough but reliable schedule.

I don’t want to oversimplify. The “immortal jellyfish,” 

, reaches a particular stage in individual development and then turns around and runs backward towards a more juvenile state, and can turn around and run forward again. It has a much simpler body than we do. If the animals of some species could avoid external threats indefinitely, and very old individuals of that species also had an advantage in reproduction that never abated (large trees are a bit like this), then the usual forms of internal breakdown might never appear in those animals. Even when that’s true, the ends of these lives will still be definite when they do occur. They can’t, except in some simple cases, divide in two and continue on, or disintegrate and reform. There’s a pattern here: animals who are capable of felt experience will be behaviorally complex and mobile, hence unitary in organization, reproducing through a one-celled bottleneck, and with a pretty definite beginning and end to life. It’s no accident that felt experience is associated with our kind of body, and also with our kind of path from birth to death.

Might all this change in the future, with new technology? Even if the shape of our lives and deaths make sense in this way, even if it’s all biologically comprehensible, we can still step back and ask what we think of this arrangement. Should we just accept it? Or should we fight it, and try to take a different course?

If human numbers dropped enough, my view of immortality (or dramatically extended life) might indeed shift. I might start to worry about losing the human project, and see a need to stretch each life out as far as possible. When I say this, I assume in this scenario that we have started to do better with our care of the Earth. But whether we imagine a future with a great many humans or fewer of them, I would rather retain a world with turnover, with new lives, not one where the same individuals go on and on and on. In nearly all cases, I would want to give up my place, hand on the baton, myself.

I understand the point of thinking through the more far-fetched scenarios—the endless, disembodied, cost-free mental continuations. I can vaguely imagine a completely different physical basis for my existence, and then I might see the idea of turnover and endings differently. But we can also think about our situation in a more realistic way, with our physical nature on board. Here we treat our minds not as barely housed, floating, ghost-like beings, but as parts of the material world as a whole, embedded in evolution and the Earth’s development. When we see our nature in this way, you 

 still take on an attitude of total resistance to mortality, but you might instead find yourself at home in this coming and going, this coming onto the scene and departing from it. It’s not just that thinking through the biological side of our existence shows that it would have been hard to have things any other way, and this makes acceptance of our lot easier. That’s not what I have in mind. Rather, this coming and going is part of the Earth’s history, with all its creative character. I identify with that process, including the turnover and renewal, the flow of new arrivals who then depart and leave room for more

In my discussion of wild nature, I said that one can feel a sense of kinship, and something like gratitude for being part of [a] whole. This sense can be more strongly expressed as an identification with the processes characteristic of our enlivened Earth. Those processes include, for beings like us, lives that take the form of a journey, being brought into existence by nature’s energies and then dissolving back into them, as others have before. ♦

 Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World 

Peter Godfrey-Smith is the author of the bestselling 

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

, which has been published in more than twenty languages. His latest book, 

Living On Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World

Living on Earth

Blurry 

magazine photographed the science fiction writer Octavia Butler atop an outcropping at Joshua Tree National Park, in southeastern California. Dwarfed by boulders and rocks rounded by weathering, she stands below a small gibbous moon visible in the daytime sky. It is a striking landscape, an apt setting for a writer whose subject is our world made uncanny. The area is home to hundreds of plant species, including desert lavender, silver cholla, beavertail cactus, and the King Clone creosote, which may be more than eleven thousand years old. Humans have inhabited the High Desert region for thousands of years—the Cahuilla, Serrano, Chemehuevi, and Mojave people are indigenous to the area—and their pictographs, petroglyphs, and artifacts endure in canyons, caves, and rock.

Today, it’s a stimulating landscape for an artist who is thinking about humanity’s relationship to natural history on both a grand and an intimate scale. Aidan Koch has lived in the region for five years. She finished “Spiral,” the first story in this collection, from her then-new home in Landers, California, on the outskirts of Joshua Tree.

It was winter and I had almost no furniture in my house yet, except a work table made of two-by-fours and a disintegrating Craigslist couch. The table was set up against one of the large east-facing windows comprising one side of my cabin. These windows looked out onto a few plantings I’d managed to get in the ground: two mesquite, a palo verde, a desert willow and a couple cactuses. My dove, fully indoors at the time, no doubt scattered the pages flying by countless times.

The scene she describes is economical—a minimal interior enlivened by the beating wings of a dove; outside, wispy bipinnate mesquites and palo verde trees and squat, armored cacti. These modest details could easily appear in her comics, which rely visually on truncated views of the physical world to impart a metonymic sense of environment. A full picture, literally and metaphorically, is never provided, but Koch gives enough information to allow the reader a sensory impression of setting, action, and character. In “Spiral,” the blue-dotted pattern of a woman’s socks is set into an ascending sequence in a grid to represent her movement up a staircase. A handful of straight, perpendicular lines represent a building-in-progress, a human-made structure set against brushy green parcels of nature. And a young woman’s face, partially obscured by the reflection in a car window, comes fully into view in the next panel as she discovers a sense of purpose.

“Spiral” is about a friendship strained by distance and difference, a desire for independence and stability, and the search for meaning and direction in life, which, like the shape of a spiral, links the world to the innermost part of ourselves. Into these threads, Koch weaves multiple timescales. Lise’s partner, Yann, takes the story’s nameless young woman to see the Old Man, one of a series of possibly prehistoric menhirs that long preceded his family’s claim on the land, a claim that seems frivolous within the grand scale of human history that the Old Man represents. In alternating chapters, sylphlike rivers make their own journey across time and the land. They splash and play like children, move in tandem and alone, and curl through much-older spans of mountains on the way to the ocean, where they “meet great depths,” Koch writes. Some, diverted by human intervention, come to less eventful ends.

The rivers also possess power, carving through stone, wetting the ground, and pushing rocks and wood. Their thoughts and feelings could be those of a human—yearnings and struggles, naivete and experience, melancholy and exhilaration. “The water never thought about what would happen,” Koch writes. “How it would transform… How it would lose the shape of its body.” Her watercolors embody this mutability: she applies watercolor over a thin layer of water so that colors pool and bloom within one another. The effect is somewhat unpredictable and allowed the rivers a certain agency in their own formation on the page, prefiguring their play and surprise in the story itself. In the penultimate chapter, the rivers appear in simplified human forms, like petroglyphs, the earliest form of written communication, such as those made by the indigenous Cahuilla people who made their home in the area that is now Joshua Tree.

Koch made the three other stories in this collection later, in her studio, “when walls were built and heating/cooling added,” she told me.

I got another bird, then dogs, more plants went in the ground (half of which were eaten by rabbits and antelope squirrels). Days of red sun and smoke-filled skies came and went and will certainly come again. Extreme temperatures rising and falling, prompting amnesia to seasons past.

Here, she is marking time, recalling smaller, individual moments (new pets, garden invaders) alongside the great spans of the natural world. We look to the cyclicity of the environment for timekeeping—knowing where we are in the course of a day or a year. But in Koch’s recollection, the vastness of those cycles throws into confusion the intimate progression of time delineated by her activities. The ambient qualities of the outside world reveal nothing of the changing seasons; the view is formless, red and smoky, and the climate is a memory-obscuring repetition. The scale of nature can be obliterating, too.

It is a striking landscape, an apt setting for a writer whose subject is our world made uncanny.

A window in Koch’s studio runs horizontally near the top of the wall. Sloping hills with a thin procession of trees fill the bottom third of the view, and the rest is given over to sky. In an email to me, Koch likened the window to one of James Turrell’s Skyspaces, installations of “specifically proportioned” chambers that include an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. Turrell has made more than eighty Skyspaces all over the world. The apertures frame the movement of clouds and celestial bodies, while the chambers are flooded with intense colors to heighten the modulation of light that occurs at dusk and dawn. In 

, published in 2014 to accompany an exhibition of her ceramics, drawings, and paintings, Koch, too, studies the many varieties of light:

Outdoors: natural-morning, natural-midday, natural-cloudy, natural-full sun, natural-evening, natural-dusk, natural moonlight.

Indoors: lamp-light, fluorescent-light, spot-light, overhead light, ambient-light, color-light.

Like Turrell’s environments, Koch’s comics are immersive, meditative spaces where the world outside the window is brought into a space for observation and consideration—made integral, in other words, not just used as a backdrop for human lives.

Can rivers remember? Do insects have souls? Did we once have a closer connection to the natural world—so close that we weren’t just in it but of it? These are some of the questions Koch pursues in this collection, which was created as she turned her attention to making comics with an environmental focus, folding in elements of “eco-criticism, land-based art practices, folk memory, fairy tales, post-humanism, and intersectional environmentalism,” as she has written. The stories take place in a shared world, Koch says, in nonspecific settings that are pregnant with possibility. In “The Forest,” a figure’s enthralled attention to the sky, trees, and water makes the landscape the central protagonist of the story, one whose narrative potential exists beyond the story’s ability to capture and hold it. In “New Year,” a forest is a site of communal memory and, together with the creatures who inhabit it, part of an anima mundi. The story warns, too, about the ways in which human-made environmental degradation threatens not only ecological balance but our own heritage and culture. 

In the spring of 2022, in the midst of my correspondence with Koch about her stories, I saw an exhibition of photographs by Emmet Gowin, whose body of work focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world. The show displayed his aerial photographs of center-pivot irrigation circles in the American West and Midwest, made over a decade, beginning in 1987: images, for instance, of a crop circle deformed by harvesting, the resulting squiggles and twisting lines echoing the undulating tracks of a snail; and of vast tracts of circles incised into acres of farmland, their radii measured by lengths of wheeled sprinklers, like great watch faces telling time across the landscape.

I thought instantly of Koch’s comics—patterns found in the natural world that are abstracted into pure forms. “I like how knowing they’re a documentation of real sites opens a door for intrigue and curiosity about the history without laying it out,” she wrote back. “The repetition, too, does so much.” In the opening sequence in “Man-Made Lake,” Koch adapts nature’s patterns to human bodies, filling silhouettes of people with rivers, sky, earth, forest, and the blush and stippling of a fish’s scales. The boy in the story once lived an aquatic existence, as some other kind of creature, but he can’t remember his time in that other body. He can only convey that he was a part of his environment and that it was a part of him.

in 2022, Koch wrote of having felt conflicted about engaging with environmental concerns through art instead of taking a more activist approach. But comics has proved an ideal form for her for thinking about the complexities of climate and environment. Comics is a time-bound medium and a unique experience among forms of literature that involves both reading and looking—arguably the most fluid form for describing a conflux of change, perspective, and temporal movement. The reader’s participation is essential; she must make connections within panels and among them, drawing tight the threads of images and words. This seems especially true of Koch’s elliptical style, where the reader must also interpret sparingly rendered sequences to make meaning. “Man-Made Lake” contains Koch’s first foray into collage. She cut bits of photographic imagery from vintage wildlife books and set them alongside her drawings: cormorants nesting in bare branches, a fish’s caudal fin amid green-black water, a vertical strip of blue sky. Most often, these collaged pieces convey texture and mood over explicit information. Her comics are a lesson in how revelatory economy can be.

Can rivers remember? Do insects have souls? Did we once have a closer connection to the natural world—so close that we weren’t just in it but of it?

depicts a conch composed on lined paper. At the bottom of the page, she has written, “Sincerely, Aidan,” as though everything that needed to be said is expressed entirely in the drawing of the shell. Language and image are interchangeable. In another entry, she writes, “Driving up the road at night, a pair of hares. One running, then the other.” These sentences read like descriptions of her drawings, offering just enough to envision the scene, or to feel it, but not much more. The reader’s imagination fills in the rest.

Koch’s minimal approach is striking for the way it concentrates the reader’s field of vision. In her essay for 

, she cites Nancy Holt’s 1972 Land Art work 

. Holt inserted a circular pipe through a dune on the Narragansett Beach in Rhode Island, creating a portal through which passersby could glimpse the ocean from the far side of the dune. In the poem “The World Through a Circle,” written some two years earlier, Holt narrates the experience of directing the viewer’s attention to an unexpected subject: “Drawing in a glance / And then a second look / And more. / The world focuses / And spins out again, seen.” Holt’s lines describe Koch’s ability to focus attention and slow time, creating space for the reader to linger—and, in doing so, to make the larger world come thrillingly into view.

The poem also illustrates Koch’s method of zeroing in on the unexpected details—a pair of feet shuffling awkwardly, repeating panels of empty road, an undifferentiated mass of greenery—that make up the primary visual language of her storytelling. From these small scenes emerge worlds of potential. Koch’s inspiration for these stories also came to her like light through a window, a distillation of time and individual moments, as she recalled to me:

Some stories feel distant now, memories integrated into my life like the travels and people that inspired them. Being picked up at the train station and driven to the farm, watching the stars on New Year’s in a remote village in the mountains, touching the river I’d dreamed about since childhood—small ideas taking shape on the page, blurring realities. The recalling of these rearranging my memories into the landscape of my home in the Mojave and the act of drawing. ♦