Brian Greene on How Music Helped Him Write His New Book

The J.Rogan experience. Do you ever listen to music when you're pondering an equation or whether you're going over a problem? It's an interesting question. When I was in college, I couldn't have any sound on when I was trying to, say, learn quantum mechanics or relativity. I would find that it would capture my brain too fully and I couldn't focus on the equations that I was trying to understand. But the funny thing is, in writing this book for the very first time, I found that there were passages that I couldn't write if it was quiet. I needed to have music playing because in some sense, by focusing too directly on what I was trying to say, I couldn't say it. I only found that I could make progress in certain kinds of descriptions by allowing my brain to fly off through whatever musical experience I was playing and allowing the freedom of thought to then emerge within that unusual, for me, environment. What kind of music were you listening to? Well, it varied incredibly. A lot of Slayer? No. But so some of it was classical. I remember there's one vital passage when I was writing where it was, do you know Pentatonix? They are a spectacular acapella group who are able to take songs that you have heard and transform them into sort of transcendent performances. So you should check these guys out. But other times, it would just be loud rock, loud Beatles, loud Rolling Stones, the soundtrack from The Greatest Showman, just blaring that thing. And somehow, it just allowed me a certain kind of linguistic freedom that I could not acquire in my normal way of being in the world, which is, everyone's quiet, let me just work out my equations and I need total focus and no distraction. So is this something that you sort of evolved over the course of your career? Absolutely. Absolutely. It was not there early on. And there's this phenomenon. I don't know if this is anything more than a metaphor or an analogy, but whatever. There are certain things in the night sky that you can't see if you look at them directly. But by looking off axis, you're able to invoke other qualities of the eye that are able to sense those features of the night sky. And I kind of feel like it's the same thing. Sometimes by focusing directly on what you want to do, you can't do it. And you've got to look obliquely. You got to look off axis metaphorically. And that's the only way that you can accomplish what you set out to do. And certainly music is one of the ways to take one's attention and shift it in a different direction to get that oblique view of what it is that you're trying to do. And I have found that it allows for progress that otherwise is unattainable. And is that the case also when you were writing this book? It absolutely was the case writing this book. I have a very, a wife is very understanding. So we have a house, we live in Manhattan, I'm at Columbia, but she would let me go up to our house upstate with the dogs and by myself. And I would disappear for weeks on end. And I'd hold myself up in this cabin in the woods. And I would sometimes write deep into the night and there were no neighbors around. So I could turn on the music at whatever volume I found useful and I would do it. And I would find that it freed up a certain kind of creative thought process that to me was striking because I had never approached work in that way before. And it was really deeply interesting. So how did you come to this idea of doing it that way? I was struggling on certain things and I felt as though I am approaching this in a very flat-footed way. I want to write about this, say I want to write about human creativity or I want to write about religious engagement. And I am just doing what I've always done, which is I have this equation and I want to solve it. So I'm going to bring the tools of mathematics to bear to solve it. And I was approaching this writing project in exactly the same mind frame. And as it wasn't working, I said, let me smack my brain around a little bit. And so one way of, you know, it could be psychedelics, I didn't go that direction, but I smacked it around by forcing myself to be subject to a great deal of distraction in the environment around me. And it really made a difference. It's interesting that you did it in a calculated manner. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I can't break free fully from my physicist training, you know. But it's wise. I mean, that way of doing it is why. And it's also a time tested, you know, from Ralph Thoreau to, you know, beginning of the time. And it's never worked for me in the past because the focus, I think when I'm doing mathematics, it does need, at least for me personally, to be that kind of non-distracted total focus on what's going on. As a writer, it's a very romantic notion too. Yeah. To go to the woods in a cabin, that's what's up, right? That's what everybody wants to do. Yeah, right. Right, exactly. You know, if it's missing, it's whiskey. You're supposed to get drunk out there. Did you get drunk out there? Yeah, that I did. And I had the dogs and it's just, like I said, I hardly ever drink, you know. But it was an unusual creative experience, which to me opened up a different way of going about trying to create things in the world.