Episode 9: The novel intersection of science and arts

(Lightly edited for readability)

Speakers

Prabahan Chakraborty, Jahnavi Phalkey, Debojyoti Chakraborty, Subhra Priyadarshini

00:02 Partner announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.

00:26 Subhra Priyadarshini: Welcome to the Nature India podcast. I'm your host, Subhra Priyadarshini. You've probably heard it said that you're either right brain dominant or left brained. You're either visual, intuitive and creative, or led by math and logic. Now, any neuroscientist will tell you that that's a myth. Just as the two hemispheres of our brain communicate with each other for optimal functioning, science and art are both improved when they work together. This episode, we take a look at science-art collaborations where both artists and scientists challenge their ways of thinking, as well as the process of artistic and scientific inquiry. It's a novel intersection that offers limitless possibilities. Now here are just three instances where you'll see that in action.

01:23 Archival clip of the first cyclotron: "....There are two semi circular electrodes in a vacuum chamber of the cyclotron. So to speak, move up and down in potential. Here, we have two plates that move up and down in potential. And we start it..."

01:45 Subhra Priyadarshini: That's an archival clip of Ernest Lawrence, who built the very first cyclotron particle accelerator in 1936, in Berkeley, California. It's from a remarkable science documentary called Cyclotron directed by filmmaker Jahnavi Phalkey.

02:07 Jahnavi Phalkey: It is during my research and interviewing various scientists and technicians and lab assistants that I learned that we have the world's oldest functional particle accelerator or a cyclotron in India. This is something that was not known, even to many physicists in India, of course experimental nuclear physicist knew, but many actually did not.

02:30 Subhra Priyadarshini: Jahnavi's documentary tells the tale of how the world's oldest functional particle accelerator ended up in the Department of Physics in Punjab University Chandigarh where it has been running for nearly 50 years. The film is also a comment on the state of experimental research and higher education in Indian universities.

02:56 Jahnavi Phalkey: Contemporary history in India is difficult to write and so is contemporary history of science in India difficult to write, because we do not have, broadly speaking, a collections policy. We do not have proper archiving policies and we do not even have institutional archives. Many institutions are working out now, say 50-60 years into their existence, to create the archives in order to understand as I said earlier, decisions that they took in the past and how those decisions play out today.

03:27 Subhra Priyadarshini: It's true that while India has made so many significant advances in science, since independence, its science archives and oral history records are patchy. The practice of archiving has long been considered just something historians bother with not scientists, who are perhaps so busy looking towards the future that they might risk disregarding the past. As a historian of science, Jahnavi Phalkey is trying to change that.

04:00 Jahnavi Phalkey: Archives are the evidence on which history gets written, or archives provide the evidence on which history gets written in order to help us understand why what happened, really did and why what happened matters. Systematically archiving documentation is therefore critical, not only for the functioning of the present, but also in order to take better decisions going forward. Increasingly, institutions are realizing the importance of this. And they're beginning to establish institutional archives. There are also efforts to put oral histories in place.

04:36 Subhra Priyadarshini: Now that's great to hear. For her part Jahnavi is working on a very cool crowdsourced project called Recollect where anyone who wants to help build India's scientific archives can interview scientists and record their recollections. Now, we switch tracks to magic that happens when the world of science and music collide. There's a long history of scientists who were also accomplished musicians. Just think of Max Planck or Albert Einstein, or our very own Abdul Kalam. Let's hear now from another scientist Debojyoti Chakraborty.

05:19 Debojyoti Chakraborty: My name is Debojyoti Chakraborty. I work as a scientist at CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi. My broad area of work actually encompasses genome editing, both for therapeutic applications as well as for disease diagnostics. But aside from science, I am also very keenly interested in Indian classical music, I have been trained in the sitar, and have also been performing widely in India and abroad for a long period of time. (Strains of sitar....)

06:11 Subhra Priyadarshini: There he is performing Raag Bhairavi known as the king of morning ragas. As a performing sitarist Debojyoti has found throughout his career that while music and science are different, they're also very similar on some level, and spending time on one skill can actually enhance the other.

06:33 Debojyoti Chakraborty: Music naturally is giving you a sense of creativity. And in science, creativity has to be there because you need to be creative to design experiments. Breaking away from parts, you need to be creative enough to solve things in an analytical manner. And not just by following the specific methods, methodologies and so on. But I would like to point out something more important here, is that for serious musicians, particularly for instrumentalists, I believe it is very important to practice on certain types of, let's say, notations or certain types of compositions in order to get better and better in music. And research has shown that if you keep on in a loop, practice the same thing over and over again, then it actually helps your mental faculties to really have a better grip on our ability to remember, our ability to analytically solve problems and so on. And these are essentially the forte that scientists rely upon in their day to day work.

07:42 Subhra Priyadarshini: Interestingly, Debojyoti found that this science art collaboration had also lent itself to international collaborations with his peers between East and West.

07:56 Debojyoti Chakraborty: So, my actual PhD in Dresden was of course, different my work in molecular biology was more towards understanding the role played by non coding RNAs in the developing cell form, particularly in embryonic stem cells. Of course, at the same time, because of the proximity to the other scientists, I mentioned at the mathematics faculty at the TU Dresden, who are also interested in music and not Indian music, per se, we got a chance chance to do this in parallel and I was actually a guest scientist or guest researcher, who was working on the mathematical modeling of Indian music activity.

08:43 Subhra Priyadarshini: Of course, there are some very big differences between the interpretation of eastern and western classical music, not just the system of notation, but the way that the patterns of ragas actually convey different moods is something very unique about the Indian format of music.

09:02 Debojyoti Chakraborty: The mathematical modeling of ragas is not something very novel in the context of Indian classical music, there have been previous attempts, trying to find a reason, why different triggers are grouped together under certain types of headings, which are mostly what we call as thaat in North Indian classical music or scales. So, when I was back at the mathematical Institute, there are basically the Department of Mathematics from Technical University of Dresden and they decided to pursue this by finding out models or basically trying to develop models by which we could explain why certain types of ragas are grouped together, why they happen to be in the scale in which they are chosen. Can there be any mathematical model to predict that a priori, was what they wanted to do. And in such a case we would have sessions where I would be playing these individual ragas to mathematicians, to modelers, and they would try to be fitting this into specific patterns or specific types of equations to find out if there is a possibility of connectivity.

10:24 Subhra Priyadarshini: Fascinating, isn't it? From the world of science and music, we now travel to Montpellier in France to learn more from another Indian scientist about the interconnection between science and theater.

10:41 Prabahan Chakraborty: My name is Prabahan Chakraborty. I'm presently in Montpellier, France, where I'm currently pursuing postdoctoral research in understanding social behaviors in certain neuropsychiatric conditions in animal models. Another side of my identity, as I think of it is my training in theater. So I have been trained in theater for about 10 years.

11:05 Subhra Priyadarshini: Prabahan shared with us that theater has taught him the importance of storytelling, even in science, and vice versa. Of course, theater can be a tool to help communicate complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. He shared an example from a few years ago, when he produced a short musical about an unfortunate encounter between a tiger and a child. When the show was over, members of the audience came to discuss nuanced ecological terms, such as habitat loss, and human accountability for these ecosystem crises that they had never stated even once in the play.

11:51 Prabahan Chakraborty: Somebody actually told me you know, there's something called man animal conflict, human animal conflict, right? Where, you know, you will see these reports of, you know, elephants coming into farmer's lands. And we hear these things like, you know, these rhinos in Guwahati walking through streets, because we have sort of encroaching on forest land, and we're sort of eating up their spaces. And so what they do is they sort of, you know, beat the elephants, and sometimes they kill them. In Bangalore, the news of leopards coming into schools like, and this person sort of completely sort of, you know, she, she found an immediate similarity to that situation, and she's like, Oh, my God, I never thought about it.

12:25 Subhra Priyadarshini: It's interesting how, in situations where we least expect it, whether at a sitar performance, or at a play, people can learn more about the connections that scientists are making in a lab or out in the field. And scientists themselves become more aware of how the two fields are inextricably linked, for instance, when a neuroscientist experiences stage fright.

12:55 Prabahan Chakraborty: Okay, so imagine this, I am waiting in the wings, the introduction, sort of the music is sort of fading in, there are lights on the stage, the curtains are slowly going up. And then it's at this point where I kind of take my first step onto the stage. Now, while I'm in the wings or rather in the safety of the wings, I'm still myself. But as soon as I step into that space, with these glaring lights, and 500 pairs of eyes looking at me, I'm someone else. I'm not the same person. What we know now is that the glucocorticoids kind of go and shut down the responses of the hypothalamus, which then shuts down, the pituitary, and so on and so forth. And then the homeostatic equilibrium, kind of the balance of the body is kind of re established,

13:46 Subhra Priyadarshini: Prabahan with his experience in theater knows well how to overcome that fight, flight or freeze response we all have felt. Listen to how one time when he had to present his science at a conference and speak about the impact of stress on the hippocampus and amygdala, he found a way to share it with his peers in a very memorable way.

14:10 Prabahan Chakraborty: "The hippocampus is the place where you store your memories and keep them safe. You can remember a place and remember a face and remember everything until you're stressed. Then you forget things things that you knew. Like what to say in an interview. Names, numbers and things, people and address, the hippocampus shrinks, it functions less due to stress." So this is one, I think they loved it. I mean, this part because I was giving a presentation I sort of said, you know, you forget these useful information and then I pause and then I say, like the lyrics a presentation and they started laughing.

15:01 Subhra Priyadarshini: Now that's definitely a memorable way to convey the science. Maybe I should try something like that the next time I present to my peers. As Prabahan and Debojyoti show, scientists who embrace the artistic medium can infuse new ideas into their scientific works. We learned from Jahnavi how the humanities can hold a mirror to science. So do artistic practices inform science? Of course! And does science inform art? Yes, absolutely. We are at our best when we use our left brain and our right brain together! If you liked this episode, check out our archives of the Nature India podcast, in Hindi and English, and share it with friends and colleagues. We’ll be back soon with another insightful episode on science in India, in Hindi and English. I’m Subhra Priyadarshini, and this is the Nature India podcast.

16:09 Partner announcement: Thanks to the DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance for their support in producing this episode.

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