- A great deal of focus is paid to achieving self-actualization, the long-espoused pinnacle of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
- Maslow, however, didn't believe this was the real pinnacle of human development: he averred that self-transcendence was.
- Maslow became ill and soon died after conceiving of this new pinnacle, which is why we hear little about it today.
"A peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need," wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow, "is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, … life itself tends to be defined in terms of eating."
This serves as a good example of his model of human development, the now well-known "hierarchy of needs." At the bottom of this hierarchy are the physiological needs — without a reliable source of food, human beings define their lives "in terms of eating." But as those baser needs become satisfied, we find ourselves needing more and more sophisticated things: shelter, love, esteem, and then, at the pinnacle of the pyramid, self-actualization. This refers to our need to realize all our potential, to become everything that we can be.
But toward the end of his life, Maslow began to have some doubts about this model. In his personal journal, published only after his death in 1970, Maslow wrote:
"All sorts of insights. One big one about [self-actualization] stuff, brought on, I think, mostly by my deep uneasiness over articles. . . . I realized I'd rather leave it behind me. Just too sloppy & too easily criticizable. Going thru my notes brought this unease to consciousness. It's been with me for years. Meant to write & publish a self-actualization critique, but somehow never did. Now I think I know why."
What was this developing crisis about? Why did Maslow want to revise the hierarchy that he would ultimately become famous for? The answer is that he had realized the hierarchy was incomplete. Self-actualization wasn't the pinnacle of his pyramid — self-transcendence was.
What's wrong with self-actualization?
Maslow's original hierarchy of needs without the addition of self-transcendence.
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Part of these criticisms that Maslow and others had with the idea of self-actualization was that it was directed entirely on the individual. Self-actualized people become what they are individually capable of being, but scholars have argued that this excludes a concern for others. A self-actualized person under this definition might care for others, but it is by way of satisfying their own need to be an individual that cares for others.
"In one individual," wrote Maslow "[self-actualization] may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions." The "ideal mother" may have a genuine concern for their child, but they are not self-actualized because of that concern; they're self-actualized because they were motivated to become as talented a mother as they could be.
What's new about self-transcendence?
When he initially developed the hierarchy of needs model, Maslow described several characteristics of self-actualized people, only to later realize that he had bundled the characteristics of self-transcendent people with those of self-actualized people. Specifically, Maslow thought that self-transcendence was more defined by peak experiences than self-actualization.
Maslow defined peak experiences as "feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences."
While self-actualizers experience this, he believed that peak experiences were a means of becoming more than just the self:
"As [self-actualized individual] gets to be more purely and singly himself he is more able to fuse with the world, with what was formerly not-self, for example, the lovers come closer to forming a unit rather than two people, the I-Thou monism becomes more possible, the creator becomes one with his work being created, the mother feels one with her child."
This accounts for a gap in Maslow's humanist psychology tradition. Transcendent experiences are the focus of such a wide variety of world cultures — notably Eastern cultures and shamanistic traditions — that it would be an omission to ignore such a pursuit from any model of human development, like the hierarchy of needs. In his later thinking, Maslow realized how to reconcile the Western, individual-centric idea of self-actualization:
"The goal of identity [self-actualization] seems to be simultaneously an end-goal in itself, and also a transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. … If our goal is the Eastern one of ego-transcendence and obliteration, of leaving behind self-consciousness and self-observation, … then it looks as if the best path to this goal for most people is via achieving identity, a strong real self, and via basic-need-gratification."
Thus, human beings may feel a strong need to become all that they can be, but once this need is met, some continue to feel needs beyond the self, to pursue goals that may in fact have little to do with the self at all.
How self-transcendence became forgotten
Why is it that this revision to the hierarchy of needs, made by the creator of the concept himself, is not better known? There are a few reasons.
The first is simply bad timing. Maslow first began to conceptualize this additional level in 1967. Later that year, he had a major heart attack and was seriously weakened. He was busy with his convalescence, his other duties as the president of the American Psychological Association, and with lecturing at various colleges until a second, ultimately fatal heart attack struck him in 1970 while he was jogging.
Second, he only published his findings in a little-known journal at the time, and his personal journals were not published for some time after his death.
Third, the concept of self-transcendence dips its toes into the spiritual or mystical, something that psychologists avoid doing even to this day. Of course, one doesn't have to embrace pseudoscience or the supernatural to study the human being's predilection for the mystical. Human beings have a drive to become more than their individual selves, a desire that should be studied regardless of whether it manifests in religious, spiritual, or mystical settings.
The lack of such a study is arguably one of the reasons why Maslow felt his hierarchy to be incomplete.
Arches of chaos in space manifolds.
Humanity could be making its way through the Solar System much faster thanks to the discovery of a new superhighway network among space manifolds. Don't get your engines roaring along this "celestial autobahn" just yet, but the researchers believe the new pathways can eventually be used by spacecraft to get to the outer reaches of our Solar System with relative haste.
The celestial highway could get comets and asteroids from Jupiter to Neptune in less than a decade. Compare that to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years it might ordinarily take for space objects to traverse the Solar System. In a century of travel along the new routes, a 100 astronomical units could be covered, project the scientists. For reference, an astronomical unit is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun or about 93 million miles.
The international research team included Nataša Todorović, Di Wu, and Aaron Rosengren from the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory in Serbia, the University of Arizona, and UC San Diego. Their new paper proposes a dynamic route, going along connected series of arches within so-called space manifolds. These structures, coming into existence from gravitational effects between the Sun and the planets, stretch from the asteroid belt to past Uranus.
The most pronounced of these structures are linked to Jupiter by its strong gravitational pull, explained UC San Diego's press release. They influence the comets around the gas giant as well as smaller space objects called "centaurs," with are like asteroids in size but exhibit the composition of comets.
This animation shows space manifolds over a hundred years. Each frame of the animation shows how the arches and substructures appear over three-year increments.
Credit: Nataša Todorović, Di Wu and Aaron Rosengren/Science Advances
"Space manifolds act as the boundaries of dynamical channels enabling fast transportation into the inner- and outermost reaches of the Solar System," write the researchers. "Besides being an important element in spacecraft navigation and mission design, these manifolds can also explain the apparent erratic nature of comets and their eventual demise."
A closer image of the manifolds showing colliding and escaping objects.
Credit: Science Advances
The researchers discovered the structures by analyzing collected numerical data on the millions of orbits in the Solar System. The scientists figured out how these orbits were contained within known space manifolds. To detect the presences and structure of the space manifolds, the team employed the fast Lyapunov indicator (FLI), used to detect chaos. The scientists ran simulations to compute how the trajectories of particles approaching different planets like Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune would be affected by possible collisions and the manifolds.
While the results are encouraging, the next step is to figure out how these arches can be used by spacecraft for much speedier travel. It's also not clear how similar manifolds work near Earth. Also unclear is how they impact our planet's run-ins with asteroids and meteorites or any of the man-made objects floating up in space near us.
Check out the new paper "The arches of chaos in the Solar System" in Science Advances.
Robert Erdmann, a senior scientist working for the Rijksmuseum, cannot help but smile when I ask him to explain — in as much detail as possible — how exactly he used artificial intelligence to recreate long-lost portions of Rembrandt van Rijn's most famous painting, The Night Watch (1642). "Most people just want the elevator pitch," he tells me over Zoom.
The Night Watch is a mammoth of a painting, and it used to be even bigger. In 1715, it came into the possession of the bureaucrats in charge of Amsterdam's Town Hall. In order to fit it on their wall, they sliced off all four outer edges of Rembrandt's priceless masterpiece, inadvertently creating the compromised version we know today.
Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," with the missing edges shown in black.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
The missing pieces of "The Night Watch" were never recovered, but we know what they looked like thanks to Gerrit Lundens, a contemporary of Rembrandt who copied the painting when it was complete. These missing sections depict the top of the arch, a balustrade at the bottom, and two soldiers of Frans Banninck Cocq's militia company that stood at the far left.
Though the absence of these elements does not make "The Night Watch" any less impressive, their presence greatly alters the painting's look and feel. The balustrade emphasizes the company's movement forward. Together, the four missing pieces shift the principal figures — Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch — to the right, creating a more compelling composition.
Copy of "The Night Watch" by Gerrit Lundens.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
As part of Operation Night Watch, a multimillion-dollar restoration mission, the Rijksmuseum set out to recreate these missing pieces of the painting to show visitors The Night Watch as Rembrandt had originally constructed it. One easy way to do this would be to upload the smaller Lundens copy into Photoshop, blow it up by a factor of five, print it out, and call it a day.
Easy, but far from adequate. As Erdmann puts it: "There's nothing wrong with using an artist like that. However, the final product would still contain traces of that artist's own style." For Erdmann, the only viable solution was to create a series of neural networks — software that mimics the human brain through the use of artificial neurons — to transform the Lundens copy into an "original" Rembrandt.
Humans, unlike computers, aren't able to make perfect copies. Faithful though Lundens' painting is — especially in its visual detail, for example, the number of buttons on a coat, plumes on a feather, or engravings on a halberd — it still contains a myriad of miniscule differences that prevented Erdmann from simply copy-pasting it onto the original.
Perspective was the first and arguably most important item on Erdmann's list. "The geometric correspondence is pretty good at the bottom of the copy," he says. "At the top, that correspondence starts to fall apart; the composition looks stretched out, supposedly because Lundens was unable to reach the top of the painting to get its precise measurements."
Lundens' copy, adjusted for perspective by the AI.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
After creating a neural network that could identify corresponding elements in both versions of The Night Watch — from faces and hands to clothing and weapons — Erdmann made a second neural network that could stretch, rotate, foreshorten, compress, and decompress the Lundens copy so that its measurements matched the Rembrandt original as closely as possible.
According to Erdman, this step was "a guide to where we should place the figures on the left, because they need to be consistent with the extrapolation from the original Night Watch." Aside from aligning the two paintings, Erdmann's adjustments also transformed the facial structure of figures like Cocq, bringing them closer to Rembrandt's expert rendering.
Detail of the Lundens copy before perspectival adjustments.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
Detail of the Lundens copy after perspectival adjustments.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
Just as a painter must tone their canvas before they can work on composition and color, so too did Erdmann have to get the dimensions right before he could move on to the third and final stage of his coding process. Erdmann's next part of the neural network involved — to paraphrase his elevator pitch — sending the artificial intelligence algorithm to art school.
"Not unlike how you might translate a text from Dutch to English, we wanted to see if we could transform Lundens' painterly style and palette into Rembrandt's," he explains, comparing the learning curve to a quiz. To educate it, the AI was given random tiles from the Lundens copy and asked to render the tiles in the style of Rembrandt.
As with any pedagogical situation, Erdmann evaluated the AI's efforts with a corresponding grade. The closer its output matched the contents of the original Night Watch, the higher the grade it received. When grading, Erdmann considered things like color, texture, and representation (i.e., how well does this frowning face resemble a frowning face, or this sword an actual sword?).
"Once you've defined what makes a good copy, you can train the network on thousands and thousands of these tiles," Erdmann goes on. There are 265 gigabytes of memory of thousands of attempts stored, which demonstrates improvement in quality over a very short time. Within less than a day, the error margin between the AI and the real Rembrandt grew so small it became insignificant; the training was complete.
Lundens copy when adjusted for perspective and Rembrandt's style by AI.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
Along the way, the AI had developed a thorough understanding of what made Rembrandt Rembrandt. When translating Lundens' copy, it used a less saturated color palette and thicker, sketchier brushstrokes. It even adopted the painter's signature use of chiaroscuro — a technique involving sharp contrasts between light and shadow.
Then it was time for the final exam. Using the knowledge gained from copying Rembrandt, Erdmann ordered the AI to transform the four outer edges of the Lundens copy — removed from the original Night Watch — into Rembrandt's signature style. The result, an unprecedented collaboration between man and machine, is now on display in the Eregalerij of the Rijksmuseum.
Detail of the completed "Night Watch." The two figures on the left were added from the adjusted Lundens copy.Credit: Courtesy of Robert Erdmann / Rijksmuseum
The missing pieces, resuscitated by AI, were printed onto canvas and varnished so that they had a similar gloss to the rest of the painting. The pieces were then attached to metal plates, which were placed in front of the original Night Watch at a distance of less than one centimeter, thus creating an optical illusion for visitors without actually touching Rembrandt's work.
While conservation science is evolving rapidly, the achievements of people like Erdmann are still eclipsed by the artistic genius of the painters whose work they try to preserve, which is a shame because Erdmann's software can be just as inventive as Rembrandt's brushwork. At the very least, Erdmann's problem-solving skills would have made the master proud.
