Rather than allow our minds to roam around the mental landscapes of past and present, or gardens of joy or anguish, we are urged to remain within our own skins, moving a spotlight of attention from one part of the body to another, or intently examining the sensations of breathing. I have no doubt that such techniques can restore a mental calm, although one may well wonder whether mindfulness, any more than mind-wandering, actually helps us get focused on the things we must do.
In any event, the news about mind-wandering is not all bad. Italian researchers found that excessive mind-wandering, even when shorn of what they call ‘perseverative cognition’—rumination and worry—may have negative effects on health in the short term, but no detectable effects a year later. It seems we are programmed to alternate between mind-wandering and paying attention, and our minds are designed to wander whether we like it or not. In adapting to a complex world, we need to escape the here and now, and consider possible futures, mull over past mistakes, understand how other people’s minds work. Above all, mind-wandering is the source of creativity, the spark of innovation that leads in the longer run to an increase rather than a decrease in well-being. It is even suggested that we have entered a new era of education that recognises creativity and problem-solving, rather than simply ‘drilling the rote memorisation of facts and figures’. Maybe we should stop feeling guilty about mind-wandering and learn to revel in our Mitty-ish escapades.
In the following chapters, I discuss some of the components of mind-wandering, often with an eye to its likely adaptiveness and evolutionary origins. I will suggest that even rats may indulge in mental perambulations. But I begin with the faculty that must lie at the heart of our wandering minds. It’s called memory.
2.
MEMORY
…
To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga. But in other cases there is no dearth of data. I see myself, for instance, clambering over wet black rocks at the seaside while Miss Norcott, a languid and melancholy governess, who thinks I am following her, strolls away along the curved beach with Sergey, my younger brother. I am wearing a toy bracelet. As I crawl over those rocks, I keep repeating, in a kind of zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the English word ‘childhood’, which sounds mysterious and new, and becomes stranger and stranger as it gets mixed up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunchbacked fairies. There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid seawater, and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire pools.
The place is of course Abbazia, on the Adriatic. The thing around my wrist, looking like a fancy napkin ring, made of semitranslucent, pale-green and pink, celluloidish stuff, is the fruit of a Christmas tree, which Onya, a pretty cousin, my coeval, gave me in St. Petersburg a few months before. I sentimentally treasured it until it developed dark streaks inside which I decided as in a dream were my hair cuttings which somehow had got into the shiny substance together with my tears during a dreadful visit to a hated hairdresser in nearby Fiume.
—Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory
In one way or another, all of our mind-wanderings depend on memory. Without memory, we would have nowhere for our minds to wander to. It provides the material that feeds the imagination, allowing us to visit the past, and construct futures and fantasies. Even the chaotic things that happen in dreams depend on people, places, events, triumphs and tragedies recorded from the past, often combined and blended in random or bizarre ways. To begin our foray into mind-wandering, then, we need to consider how memory itself works.
Memory is not simple, and consists of at least three layers. At the most basic level, are the skills that we learn. We learn to walk, talk, write, ride a bike, play the piano, play tennis, tap out messages on our smartphones. In varying degrees, we are genetically disposed to do these things. Given normal physical endowment, the ability to walk unfolds in childhood largely automatically, but the infant nevertheless spends time practising and perfecting her new-found capacity for getting around. The ability to talk, too, is an innately human capacity, but the actual languages we acquire, and even the particular sounds we make as we speak, depend on experience. Some 7000 languages exist in the world, made up of rather different sound patterns, and we are all locked in to just one or two of these linguistic stockades. Even languages that seem alike tend to drift apart;1 and parents find their children increasingly difficult to understand as they venture into adolescence.
Once learned, skills tend to stay with us. It’s said that you never forget how to ride a bike, although old age and arthritis eventually take their toll. Yet some skills, especially those learned late, can be lost. I once accompanied my four-year-old son to recorder lessons and learned to play rather badly, but I now find I can’t remember a single configuration. Even language tends to fray, and words become more elusive as we dip into old age. Other skills become unlearnable. In early childhood, we learn any language with ease, but as adults we struggle to acquire any foreign language, especially if its sound patterns are distant from our own. I watch teenagers texting on their smartphones, thumbs flitting across the tiny keyboards, and know that I will never acquire that degree of skill.
We take our skills into our mind-wandering, sometimes with a degree of expertise now lost. I occasionally dream of playing squash or field hockey with the (modest) proficiency of old, but physically they’d now leave me for dead—perhaps literally. Watching a rugby game, I can imagine myself edging through a gap to score, or placing a strategic kick, but these are now just fantasies. One of the delights of mind-wandering is that it allows us to recover former skills. But perhaps it’s also a source of the unhappiness, mentioned in the previous chapter, that is recorded when we are abruptly forced back into the present, and the dream is snatched away.
The next level of memory is knowledge, our storehouse of facts about the world. Our knowledge acts as a sort of combined encyclopaedia and dictionary, and is a huge storage system. For a start, it contains all the words we know, as well as what they stand for. Readers of this book probably have a vocabulary of at least 50,000, and that’s also a fair count of the number of objects, people, actions, qualities and so forth that we know and talk about. We know places—cities, beaches, ski slopes, favourite cafés. We know facts we learned in school—third-declension Latin nouns, the boiling point of water, how photosynthesis works. People write whole books on what they know, as I am struggling to do now.
We also know lots of things about the people we know, such as what they do, where they live, what their habits are, what kind of tennis game they have, whether they cheat at cards. We even know a bit about ourselves, perhaps embellished and not always consistent with what others know about us. The poet Edward Lear may or may not have been accurate when he wrote of himself:
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,
Who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
And so it goes on, as a mixture, no doubt, of fact and mind- wandering.
Most of our knowledge is long-lasting and stable, although there are lots of facts we forget. Much of our knowledge comes from schooling, but how much of what you learned in high school or university do you remember? Not much, you may think. Some of it trickles back, though, when your children go through schooling and seek your help, and you recover long-unused knowledge, like Newton’s laws of motion or the dates of the French Revolution. But even though much of our early learning seems to have evaporated, our knowledge is vast, and surely a hallmark of being human. The Greek poet Archilochus (c. 680–c. 645 BC) is credited with
the saying ‘The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, but we humans eclipse them both—or at least we think we do.
The third layer is memory for the specific events of our lives, commonly known as episodic memory. It is in this sense that we generally use the term remember, and remembering is itself part of mind-wandering. Unlike knowledge, which is essentially a static system that provides us with information, remembering is a dynamic re-enactment of the past. Given that the things we remember are essentially personal, they may be said to make up much of what we understand as the self. The things we know are for the most part shared with others, but our episodic memories make each of us unique.
Although we do lose some of our skills, and once-held pieces of knowledge occasionally elude us, it is episodic memory that is the most fragile of the three stages. Such is the length and complexity of our conscious lives that we probably retain only a tiny fraction of the things that happened to us. The émigré Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his novel Ignorance, put it as follows:
The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.
Well, he does exaggerate a bit. A hundred-millionth would amount to only about 15 minutes of remembered events, and most of us can do much better than that.
We can, if pressed, produce quite a large number of episodes from the past. In the laboratory run by my colleague Donna Rose Addis, we borrow an idea from the board game Cluedo, in which contestants vie with each other to discover who committed a murder, with what instrument, and where—it might have been the Reverend Green, with a candlestick, in the billiard room. We ask our subjects to recall around 100 episodes from the past, and identify a person, an object and a location involved in each episode. (We then scramble these components and ask the subjects to generate new episodes, but I’ll talk more about that in the next chapter.) Our subjects have little difficulty recalling the required number of events. When we put our minds to it, we can remember lots of events from the past, and even write autobiographies covering the best part of a lifetime. But most of us are unaware of the vast number of events that we have forgotten, precisely because we’ve forgotten them! Thumbing through old photograph albums can reveal scenes that seem to belong to another life.
Amnesia
The fragility of episodic memory is well illustrated by cases of amnesia, where it is memory for past events that is typically most affected, and in some cases completely wiped out. The most extensively studied case was a man long known in the literature as ‘H.M.’, but whose real name was more recently revealed to be Henry Molaison. Henry was probably the most famous case in the history of neurology, and when he died in 2008 at the age of 82, obituaries to him were published in the New York Times and in the respected medical journal The Lancet. At the age of 27 he underwent surgery for intractable epilepsy, and it was the surgery that was mostly to blame for destroying the parts of his brain responsible for recording personal memories. He formed no memories back in time to the operation, and remembered little of his earlier life as well. He remained able to talk normally, and his IQ was above normal. The authors of a report written in 1968 write: ‘His comprehension of language is undisturbed: he can repeat and transform sentences with complex syntax, and he gets the point of jokes, including those turning on semantic ambiguity.’
Over the years since that fateful operation, Suzanne Corkin, first as a graduate student at McGill University and later as a professor at MIT, carried out most of the testing on Henry and came to know him well. He never got to know her, though, and always greeted her anew, recounting the same few stories that he could remember from his childhood. With curious insight, he once described his relationship with Corkin: ‘It’s a funny thing—you just live and learn. I’m living and you’re learning.’ A flavour of his character and condition also comes from the following snippet of conversation with my one-time colleague Jenni Ogden:
Jenni: How old do you think you are now?
Henry: Round about 34. I think of that right off.
Jenni: How old do you think I am?
Henry: Well, I’m thinking of 27 right off.
Jenni: (laughing) Aren’t you kind! I’m really 37.
Henry: 37? So I must be more than that.
Jenni: Why? Do you think you’re older than me?
Henry: Yeah.
Jenni: How old do you think you are?
Henry: Well, I always think too far ahead in a way. Well, nearer, well, 38.
Jenni: Thirty-eight? You act 38! You know, you are really 60. You had your 60th birthday the other day. You had a big cake.
Henry: See, I don’t remember.
Rather surprisingly, Henry could draw an accurate representation of the floor plan of the house he moved into after the operation, although it took many years for this memory to be established. He therefore retained some ability to acquire new knowledge. He was also able to learn new skills, even though unable to remember the learning episodes themselves. One example is mirror-tracing. He was asked to trace a five-pointed star, keeping the pencil inside its boundaries, but could only see the star and his hand in a mirror. This is quite difficult (try it), since the movements you need to make are front–back reversed from what you see in the mirror. Henry improved rapidly over successive days. On the last day, having easily traced the star, he said: ‘Well, this is strange. I thought that it would be difficult, but it seems as though I’ve done it quite well.’
Another striking case is the English musician Clive Wearing, an expert in early music who built up a distinguished career with the BBC. He founded the Europa Singers, an amateur choir that went on to achieve considerable success, and was responsible for the musical content on Radio 3 on the day of the royal wedding of Prince Charles to Diana Spencer. In 1985, at the height of his career, he was struck down by herpesviral encephalitis, caused by a form of Herpes simplex (the cold-sore virus) that very occasionally attacks the central nervous system. It was some time before the condition was diagnosed and he was given drugs to halt the damage, but by this time the areas critical to the formation of new memories, along with some of his already established memories, were eradicated.
At least some of his prior skills and knowledge were retained. He could still talk, play the piano, and conduct a choir. He knew he was married, but could not recall the wedding; he knew he was a musician, but could not recall any concert. Nevertheless, large chunks of his prior knowledge, especially that relatively close to his illness, were gone. He recognised his children but expected them to be much smaller, and wasn’t sure how many he had. He didn’t know the year or the decade, and was surprised to see that The Times no longer had personal columns on the front page. He knew facts about his childhood, where he grew up, where he was evacuated to during the war. He even knew he went to Clare College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. But he was unable to acquire new knowledge, and his storehouse of knowledge was thrust back years in time.
It was his episodic memory, though, that was completely snatched from him. He lives in a window of a few seconds, enough to sustain something of a conversation, although he soon forgets topics he spoke about only moments earlier. The title of a 2005 ITV documentary in England described him as ‘The Man with the 7 Second Memory’. Indeed, his window of memory is so short that he is often surprised at things he has just done. He likes to play patience, and having laid out cards and then shuffled the ones in his hand, h
e would be startled to see the cards that were laid out. ‘And the cards,’ he would say, ‘they’re not laid out by me! I’ve never seen them before! I can’t understand it . . . The world’s gone mad!’
Yet another well-known case, identified in the literature simply as ‘K.C.’, has little difficulty with factual knowledge, but can’t remember particular events from his past. It’s not just that events are one-off happenings that are not rehearsed. K.C. couldn’t remember events that lasted several days, such as being evacuated from home, along with tens of thousands of others, when a derailment nearby released toxic chemicals. Otherwise he scores normally on intelligence tests and knows the basic facts of his life, many of them seldom rehearsed. He knows his date of birth, the address of the home he lived in for the first nine years of his life, the names of schools he went to, the make and colour of the car he once owned, the location of a summer cottage his parents own and its distance from his home in Toronto. He knows lots, but remembers little.
A condition that has much the same effects on memory is Korsakoff syndrome, one of the consequences of chronic alcoholism. In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks writes of a case called Jimmie G., who could remember nothing since the end of World War II, and even in the early 1980s believed it was still 1945. He never gets over the shock of seeing his face in the mirror, since he expects to see a young, fit man in his twenties. One of the few benefits of drinking too much, then, is that you can believe you are much younger than you are, so long as you keep away from mirrors.
In one respect, at least, these cases of amnesia are limited in their ability to mind-wander—they are denied access to the past. They have lost the luxury of nostalgia.
The Wandering Mind Page 2