The Secret Life of the Mind

by Mariano Sigman

  The first actual materialization of Molyneux’s mental experiment was done by the Italian ophthalmologist Alberto Valvo. John Locke’s prophecy was correct; for a congenitally blind person, gaining sight was nothing like the dream they had longed for. This was what one of the patients said after the surgery that allowed him to see:

  I had the feeling that I had started a new life, but there were moments when I felt depressed and disheartened, when I realized how difficult it was to understand the visual world. […] In fact, I see groups of lights and shadows around me […] like a mosaic of shifting sensations whose meaning I don’t understand. […] At night, I like the darkness. I had to die as a blind person in order to be reborn as a seeing person.

  This patient felt so challenged by suddenly gaining sight because while his eyes had been ‘opened’ by the surgery, he still had to learn to see. It was a big and tiresome effort to put together the new visual experience with the conceptual world he had built through his senses of hearing and touch. Meltzoff proved that the human brain has the ability to establish spontaneous correspondences between sensory modalities. And Valvo showed that this ability atrophies when in disuse over the course of a blind life.

  On the contrary, when we experience different sensory modalities, some correspondences between them consolidate spontaneously over time. To prove this, my friend and colleague Edward Hubbard, along with Vaidyanathan Ramachandran, created the two shapes that we see here. One is Kiki and the other is Bouba. The question is: which is which?

  Almost everyone answers that the one on the left is Bouba and the one on the right is Kiki. It seems obvious, as if it couldn’t be any other way. Yet there is something strange in that correspondence; it’s like saying someone looks like a Carlos. The explanation for this is that when we pronounce the vowels /o/y/u/, our lips form a wide circle, which corresponds to the roundness of Bouba. And when saying the /k/, or /i/, the back part of the tongue rises and touches the palate in a very angular configuration. So the pointy shape naturally corresponds with the name Kiki.

  These bridges often have a cultural basis, forged by language. For example, most of the world thinks that the past is behind us and the future is forward. But that is arbitrary. For example, the Aymara, a people from the Andean region of South America, conceive of the association between time and space differently. In Aymara, the word ‘nayra’ means past but also means in front, in view. And the word ‘quipa’, which means future, also indicates behind. Which is to say that in the Aymaran language the past is ahead and the future behind. We know that this reflects their way of thinking, because they also express that relationship with their bodies. The Aymara extend their arms backwards to refer to the future and forwards to allude to the past. While on the face of it this may seem strange, when they explain it, it seems so reasonable that we feel tempted to change our own way of envisioning it; they say that the past is the only thing we know–what our eyes see–and therefore it is in front of us. The future is the unknown–what our eyes do not know–and thus it is at our backs. The Aymara walk backwards through their timeline. Thus, the uncertain, unknown future is behind and gradually comes into view as it becomes the past.

  We designed an atypical experiment, with the linguist Marco Trevisan and the musician Bruno Mesz, in order to find out whether there is a natural correspondence between music and taste. The experiment brought together musicians, chefs and neuroscientists. The musicians were asked to improvise on the piano, based on the four canonical flavours: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Of course, coming from different musical schools and styles (jazz, rock, classical, etc.) each one of them had their own distinctive interpretation. But within that wide variety we found that each taste inspired consistent patterns: the bitter corresponded with deep, continuous tones; the salty with notes that were far apart (staccato); the sour with very high-pitched, dissonant melodies; and the sweet with consonant, slow and gentle music. In this way we were able to salt ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ by Stevie Wonder and to make a sour version of The White Album by the Beatles.

  The mirror between perception and action

  Our representation of time is random and fickle. The phrase ‘Christmas is fast approaching’ is strange. Approaching from where? Does it come from the south, the north, the west? Actually, Christmas isn’t located anywhere. It is in time. This phrase, or the analogous one, ‘we’re getting close to the end of the year’, reveals something of how our minds organize our thoughts. We do it in our bodies. Which is why we talk of the head of government, of someone’s right-hand man, the armpit of the world and many other metaphors* that reflect how we organize thought in a template defined by our own bodies. And because of that, when we think of others’ actions, we do so by acting them out ourselves, speaking others’ words in our own voice, yawning someone else’s yawn and laughing someone else’s laugh. You can do a simple experiment at home to test out this mechanism. During a conversation, cross your arms. It’s very likely that the person you are speaking to will do the same. You can take it further with bolder gestures, like touching your head, or scratching yourself, or stretching. The probability that the other person will imitate you is high.

  This mechanism depends on a cerebral system made up of mirror neurons. Each one of these neurons codifies specific gestures, like moving an arm or opening up a hand, but it does so whether or not the action is our own or someone else’s. Just as the brain has a mechanism that spontaneously amalgamates information from different sensory modes, the mirror system allows–also spontaneously–our actions and others’ actions to be brought together. Lifting your arm and watching someone else do it are very different processes, since one is done by you and the other is not. As such, one is visual and the other is motor. However, from a conceptual standpoint, they are quite similar. They both correspond to the same gesture in the abstract world.

  And now after understanding how we adults merge sensory modalities in music, in shapes and sounds and in language, and how we bring together perception and action, we go back to the infant mind, specifically to ask whether the mirror system is learned or whether it is innate. Can newborns understand that their own actions correspond to the observation of another person’s? Meltzoff also tested this out, to put an end to the empirical idea that considers the brain a tabula rasa.

  Meltzoff proposed another experiment, in which he made three different types of face at a baby: sticking out his tongue, opening his mouth, and pursing his lips as if he were about to give the child a kiss. He observed that the baby tended to repeat each of his gestures. The imitation wasn’t exact or synchronized; the mirror is not a perfect one. But, on average, it was much more likely that the baby would replicate the gesture he or she observed than make one of the other two. Which is to say that newborns are capable of associating observed actions with their own, although the imitation is not as precise as it will later become when language is introduced.

  Meltzoff’s two discoveries–the associations between our actions and those of others, and between varying sensory modalities–were published in 1977 and 1979. By 1980, the empirical dogma was almost completely dismantled. In order to deal it a final death blow, there was one last mystery to be solved: Piaget’s mistake.*

  Piaget’s mistake!

  One of the loveliest experiments done by the renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget is the one called A-not-B. The first part goes like this: there are two napkins on a table, one on each side. A ten-month-old baby is shown an object, then it is covered with the first napkin (called ‘A’). The baby finds it without difficulty or hesitation.

  Behind this seemingly simple task is a cognitive feat known as object permanence: in order to find the object there must be a reasoning that goes beyond what is on the surface of the senses. The object did not disappear. It is merely hidden. A baby that is to be able to comprehend this must have a view of the world in which things do not cease to exist when we no longer see them. That, of course, is abstract.*

  The second part of th
e experiment begins in exactly the same way. The same ten-month-old baby is shown an object, which is then covered up by napkin ‘A’. But then, and before the baby does anything, the person running the experiment moves the object to underneath the other napkin (called ‘B’), making sure that the baby sees the switch. And here is where it gets weird: the baby lifts the napkin where it was first hidden, as if not having observed the switch just made in plain sight.

  This error is ubiquitous. It happens in every culture, almost unfailingly, in babies about ten months of age. The experiment is striking and precise, and shows fundamental traits of our way of thinking. But Piaget’s conclusion, that babies of this age still do not fully understand the abstract idea of object permanence, is erroneous.

  When revisiting the experiment, decades later, the more plausible–and much more interesting–interpretation is that babies know the object has moved but cannot use that information. They have, as happens in a state of drunkenness, a very shaky control of their actions. More precisely, ten-month-old babies have not yet developed a system of inhibitory control, which is to say, the ability to prevent themselves doing something they had already planned to do. In fact, this example turns out to be the rule. We will see in the next section how certain aspects of thought that seem sophisticated and elaborated–morality or mathematics, for example–are already sketched from the day we are born. On the other hand, others that seem much more rudimentary, like halting a decision, mature gradually and steadily. To understand how we came to know this, we need to take a closer look at the executive system, or the brain’s ‘control tower’, which is formed by an extensive neural network distributed in the prefrontal cortex that matures slowly during childhood.

  The executive system

  The network in the frontal cortex that organizes the executive system defines us as social beings. Let’s give a small example. When we grab a hot plate, the natural reflex would be to drop it immediately. But an adult, generally, will inhibit that reflex while quickly evaluating if there is a nearby place to set it down and avoid breaking the plate.

  The executive system governs, controls and administers all these processes. It establishes plans, resolves conflicts, manages our attention focus, and inhibits some reflexes and habits. Therefore the ability to govern our actions depends on the reliability of the executive function system.* If it does not work properly, we drop the hot plate, burp at the table, and gamble away all our money at the roulette wheel.

  The frontal cortex is very immature in the early months of life and it develops slowly, much more so than other brain regions. Because of this, babies can only express very rudimentary versions of the executive functions.

  A psychologist and neuroscientist, Adele Diamond, carried out an exhaustive and meticulous study on physiological, neurochemical and executive function development during the first year of life. She found that there is a precise relationship between some aspects of the development of the frontal cortex and babies’ ability to perform Piaget’s A-not-B task.

  What impedes a baby’s ability to solve this apparently simple problem? Is it that babies cannot remember the different positions the object could be hidden in? Is it that they do not understand that the object has changed place? Or is it, as Piaget suggested, that the babies do not even fully understand that the object hasn’t ceased to exist when it is hidden under a napkin? By manipulating all the variables in Piaget’s experiment–the number of times that babies repeat the same action, the length of time they remember the position of the object, and the way they expresses their knowledge–Diamond was able to demonstrate that the key factor impeding the solution of this task is babies’ inability to inhibit the response they have already prepared. And with this, she laid the foundations of a paradigm shift: children don’t always need to learn new concepts; sometimes they just need to learn how to express the ones they already know.

  The secret in their eyes

  So we know that ten-month-old babies cannot resist the temptation to extend their arms where they were planning to, even when they understand that the object they wish to reach has changed location. We also know that this has to do with a quite specific immaturity of the frontal cortex in the circuits and molecules that govern inhibitory control. But how do we know if babies indeed understand that the object is hidden in a new place?

  The key is in their gaze. While babies extend their arms towards the wrong place, they stare at the right place. Their gazes and their hands point to different locations. Their gaze shows that they know where it is; their hand movement shows that they cannot inhibit the mistaken reflex. They are–we are–two-headed monsters. In this case, as in so many others, the difference between children and adults is not what they know but rather how they are able to act on the basis of that knowledge.

  In fact, the most effective way of figuring out what children are thinking is usually by observing their gaze.* Going with the premise that babies look more at something that surprises them, a series of games can be set up in order to discover what they can distinguish and what they cannot, and this can give answers as to their mental representations. For example, that was how it was discovered that babies, a day after being born, already have a notion of numerosity, something that previously seemed impossible to determine.

  The experiment works like this. A baby is shown a series of images. Three ducks, three red squares, three blue circles, three triangles, three sticks… The only regularity in this sequence is an abstract, sophisticated element: they are all sets of three. Later the baby is shown two images. One has three flowers and the other four. Which do the newborns look at more? The gaze is variable, of course, but they consistently look longer at the one with four flowers. And it is not that they are looking at the image because it has more things in it. If they were shown a sequence of groups of four objects, they would later look longer at one that had a group of three. It seems they grow bored of always seeing the same number of objects and are surprised to discover an image that breaks the rule.

  Liz Spelke and Véronique Izard proved that the notion of numerosity persists even when the quantities are expressed in different sensory modalities. Newborns that hear a series of three beeps expect there then to be three objects and are surprised when that is not the case. Which is to say, babies assume a correspondence of amounts between the auditory experience and the visual one, and if that abstract rule is not followed through, their gaze is more persistent. These newborns have only been out of the womb for a matter of hours yet already have the foundations of mathematics in their mental apparatus.

  Development of attention

  Cognitive faculties do not develop homogeneously. Some, like the ability to form concepts, are innate. Others, like the executive functions, are barely sketched in the first months of life. The most clear and concise example of this is the development of the attentional network. Attention, in cognitive neuroscience, refers to a mechanism that allows us to selectively focus on one particular aspect of information and ignore other concurrent elements.

  We all sometimes–or often–struggle with attention. For example, when we are talking to someone and there is another interesting conversation going on nearby.* Out of courtesy, we want to remain focused on our interlocutor, but our hearing, gaze and thoughts generally direct themselves the other way. Here we recognize two ingredients that lead and orient attention: one endogenous, which happens from inside, through our own desire to concentrate on something, and the other exogenous, which happens due to an external stimulus. Driving a car, for example, is another situation of tension between those systems, since we want to be focused on the road but alongside it there are tempting advertisements, bright lights, beautiful landscapes–all elements that, as admen know well, set off the mechanisms of exogenous attention.

  Michael Posner, one of the founding fathers of cognitive neuroscience, separated the mechanisms of attention* and found that they were made up of four elements:

  (1) Endogenous orientation.

 
; (2) Exogenous orientation.

  (3) The ability to maintain attention.

  (4) The ability to disengage it.

  He also discovered that each of these processes involves different cerebral systems, which extend throughout the frontal, parietal and anterior cingulate cortices. In addition, he found that each one of these pieces of the attentional machinery develops at its own pace and not in unison.

  For example, the system that allows us to orient our attention towards a new element matures much earlier than the system that allows us to disengage our attention. Therefore, voluntarily shifting our attention away from something is much more difficult than we imagine. Knowing this can be of enormous help when dealing with a child; a clear example is found in how to stop a small child’s inconsolable crying. A trick that some parents hit upon spontaneously, and emerges naturally when one understands attention development, is not asking their offspring to just cut it out, but rather to offer another option that attracts their attention. Then, almost by magic, the inconsolable crying stops ipso facto. In most cases, the baby wasn’t sad or in pain, but the crying was, actually, pure inertia. That this happens the same way for all children around the world is not magic or a coincidence. It reflects how we are–how we were–in that developmental period: able to draw our attention towards something when faced with an exogenous stimulus, and unable to voluntarily disengage.

  Separating out the elements that comprise thought allows for a much more fluid relationship between people. No parent would ask a six-month-old to run, and they certainly wouldn’t be frustrated when it didn’t happen. In much the same way, familiarity with attentional development can avoid a parent asking a small child to do the impossible; for example, to just quit crying.