The Four Corners of Our Brain

Abstract

Throughout religious, scientific, and humanist literature on ideas one finds categorical subdivisions that are four in number: the four corners of the Earth, the four cardinal directions, the four proteins constituting DNA, Maxwell's four equations, Toynbee's four societies, Pythagoras’ four elements of arithmetic, Pythagoras’ four elements, Hayden White's four aspects of imagination. The list is endless. From where does the “four” come? Why not five, or six, eight, or nine? Andersen tracks back to the beginnings of arithmetic utilized in the architecture of conceptual thinking. He finds the answer not only in the quadration of the human body as having four sides and giving a stabilizing structure to the brain but equally in the architecture of memory. Using the slot-theory of short-term memory processing, he demonstrates how easily the four-count comes to mind and how the brain resists moving on to five.

Notes

Notes

1. As reported in “Science,” The New York Times, November 11, 2003.

2. Vitruvius, On Architecture, Bk. V, pref. 4.

3. Cf. Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 162.

4. James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representations in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 19.

5. Ibid.

6. May 21–August 26, 1996. The text for this exhibition took the form of a book written by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Bois's essay title in this book, “The Use Value of Formless,” is adapted from Georges Bataille's “The Use-Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” which reveals intellectual pornographer Bataille's identification with the Marquis de Sade, and in turn the identification of Krauss and Bois's formulation of the formless with Bataille's thoughts on the matter.

7. Rosalind E. Kraus, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 282–83.

8. The example I have in mind appears as a diagram in Jacques Lacan, “Léonardo-en-mirroir,” in Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre IV: “La relation de l’objet,” ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Èditions du Seuil, 1994).

9. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1984).

10. William Rowan Hamilton, Treatise on Quaternions (Dublin, 1853).

11. The subject of my youthful paper, “Reflections on a Polished Sphere,” delivered at the American Society for Aesthetics Conference at Sacramento State College, February 1958.

12. See Lawrence D. Stifle, “Dimension and Development in the Passage from the Virgin to the Bride,” in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (New York: De Capo Press, 1975), 103 n. 32.

13. Ibid., 91.

14. Cf. Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 7.

15. For this and other examples, see Ibid., 7–10.

16. While I had this worked out in greater detail when teaching my seminar on non-directional thinking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, I found it confirmed in O. Neugebauer's excellent study, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 2nd edition (New Haven, CT: Brown University Press, 1957).

17. See The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, comp. and ed. Jean Paul Richter (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), vol. 2, section 14: “Anatomy, Zoology, and Physiology,” para. 840.

18. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 9–11.

19. George L. Henderson, “What (Else) We Talk About When We Talk About Landscape,” in Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson, ed. Chris Wilson and Paul Groth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 182.