The Wandering Mind

by Michael C Corballis

  But such games are not stories, because they are played in the present. One additional ingredient, then, is the ‘once upon a time’ element that takes the action away from the here and now and into the past or future, or into other places, or into the lives of other people, real or imaginary. A second ingredient is narrative. Stories have a complex, usually sequential, structure—events unfold through time, often in elaborate ways. And the third ingredient is that stories are shared beyond those that feature in them. Personal mental time travels become shared mental time travels, whether in the tales told of travels abroad or of imaginary adventures, or indeed of what one is planning to do on the next trip. Stories are a mixture of actual experience and made-up fantasy, of work and play. It is through stories that experiences of individuals become the experiences of a social group, or even an entire culture.

  The emergence of stories from play is evident in the lives of preschool children, who seem to live in a world of make-believe. Indeed, before they go to real school, many young children are sent to playschool, whose very name speaks of the importance of play in their young lives. They begin to experiment with simple make-believe stories around age two or three, and tell competent stories by age five or six. They seem especially to relish stories with elements of danger, as though playful exposure to fearful events might help them cope with true danger later in life. The world of the three-year-old is one in which fact and fantasy are blended, and there is the fear that the Big Bad Wolf, or some other fearsome creature, is really lurking behind a tree—or worse, under the bed. Children’s nursery rhymes and fairy stories, from ‘Jack and Jill’ to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, tell of frightening events and disasters, usually (but not always) narrowly averted.

  Stories probably originated in our hunter-gatherer past, as our early forebears relayed their foraging experiences. Some sense of this can be gleaned from present-day hunter-gatherers. Among the Aché people of eastern Paraguay, each man is said to report to the others in detail on every game item that he encountered that day, and the outcome of the encounter. This enables the group to become familiar with the terrain, likely locations of game, hunting techniques, successes and failures. Foraging as a way of life, involving exploration over wide terrain, probably goes back to the early Pleistocene, beginning some 2.6 million years ago and extending to around 12,000 years ago. During this era, as foraging gradually expanded to include active hunting, and as the range and diversity of terrain increased, the pressure to communicate effectively would also have increased. Children, too, would be captivated by the tales told by the men, and perhaps repeated by the women, and so would gain knowledge about food sources and hunting techniques before themselves going on the hunt.

  Grandparents can be useful too. In the Jicarilla Apache of northern New Mexico, as in other present-day hunter-gatherer societies, it is the elders in the extended family who tell the stories to the children. This arrangement may well have originated in the Pleistocene, and might help explain why humans have evolved to live well beyond child-bearing years to become the bearers of wisdom and stories for their grandchildren. Michelle Sugiyama also suggests that the telling of stories helps explain the prolonged juvenile phase—kids have a lot to learn before they’re fit for adult life and the rigours of the hunt, or indeed of child-rearing itself.

  Hunting and gathering are risky, and were especially so on the African savannah during the Pleistocene, when dangerous sabretoothed cats roamed the plains. This gave added advantage to sharing knowledge and expertise, not least so that the wisdom of those killed in action would not die with them. But stories go well beyond the communication of knowledge, incorporating the sense of play and fantasy, the invention of imaginary places and imaginary minds, the creation of cultural beliefs. In many ways, then, the ability to tell stories enhanced the survival of the group, even if sometimes at the expense of the individual.

  Storytelling also established social hierarchies. In traditional societies, at least, this seemed to apply particularly to men, in whom the ability to hold forth in public was the avenue to status and influence. For New Zealand Māori, writes Anne Salmond, ‘oratory is the prime qualification for entry into the power game’. Males are the loudmouths, with the deepening of the voice seemingly designed to command attention: Salmond goes on to write that a great Māori orator ‘jumps to his feet with a loud call and immediately dominates the speaking-ground’. The social anthropologist David Turton similarly wrote of the Mursi in south-western Ethiopia that ‘the most frequently mentioned attribute of an influential man is his ability to speak well in public’. The same may be true even in city life. In the inner-city neigh-bourhoods of Philadelphia, according to the anthropologist and folklorist Roger Abrahams, the African-American ‘man of words, the good talker, has an important place in the social structure of the group, not only in adolescence but throughout most of his life’. As I write, one man has succeeded another as the Prime Minister of Australia, and three male aspirants are vying to lead the opposition party in New Zealand to compete with the current Prime Minister, also a male. Vocal eloquence seems to feature prominently in these bids for power. One hopes, of course, that eloquent orators also have something to say.

  But it’s not all male, since until quite recently the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand were both female, and in modern society, at least, women are if anything superior to men in the use of language. The way in which language is used, though, may differ. Men seem more inclined to use language as a form of public display, like peacock feathers, whereas women are more likely to engage in intimate talk, to gossip, to use language to seek companionship rather than power. Women’s talk, perhaps, is more subversive, a way of communicating that carries subtleties undetected by us blustering males. Or so I have been led to believe.

  And so language itself was born

  In the early stages, perhaps, stories were told as pantomimes, as people acted out their experiences. But pantomime is inefficient and often ambiguous, and needed to be developed into a system of symbols whose meanings were clear, and understood by members of the community. Once, in a hotel in Moscow, I tried to ask at the front desk for a corkscrew, and having no knowledge of Russian pantomimed the act of opening a bottle, pouring imaginary liquid into an imaginary glass, lifting it to my lip, and making glugging noises. This caused consternation behind the desk, until they understood what I wanted. Consternation turned to hilarity and they found me the desired object. It would have been much more efficient if I had been able simply to ask for a corkscrew.

  In the early Pleistocene, then, the complex activities undertaken by our forebears, such as hunting down and killing an animal, may have initially been acted out bodily, but then ‘conventionalised’ to make the meaning clear. Instead of representing the action in a holistic, visual fashion, separate actions might be developed to refer to the animal, a spear, and act of throwing, the location, and perhaps the time (yesterday, this morning). Each act could be reduced to a standard form, and need no longer retain the pictorial element of pantomime. Communities could come to agree on the meanings of individual acts, and pass them on to the children. This process can be seen in gestural form in the development of sign languages invented by deaf communities.

  Once gestures were conventionalised, the element of pantomime disappeared, and vocal gestures largely replaced manual ones. Even so, most of us, and especially Italians, gesture with our hands as we speak, and this often provides pictorial or spatial cues to elaborate what we’re trying to say. Sometimes we resort to pure pantomime. Try asking people to tell you what a spiral is. Words generally fail them, and they resort to pantomime. Sign languages do retain an element of pantomime, but skilled signers do not notice the pantomimic element. Gestures have become symbols, not moving pictures. Whether gestured or spoken, these conventionalised symbols are called words.

  Rules could then be established to convey sequences and relations between story elements. These rules might dictate the order in which the words
should occur. They too can be arbitrary, but once established are necessary to make narrative meaning clear. So it is that grammar was born. Many simple events involve what linguists call an actor, an action and a patient; for instance, the event might have been that a woman (actor) picked (action) an apple (patient). These constituents are represented in word form as subject, verb and object, and the order in which they are produced is entirely a matter of convention. English is an SVO language, but the majority of languages, like Latin, are SOV, placing the verb last. All six possible orders are to be found among the world’s 7000 or so languages. The rarest are OSV languages, of which only four are known (in case you are travelling, they are Warao in Venezuela, Nadëb in Brazil, Wik Ngathana in north-eastern Australia, and Tobati in West Papua, New Guinea).

  Some languages use other devices to mark the differences between subject, verb and object, and indeed between the many other kinds of symbols to specify place, time, quantity, quality, and other details needed to set a scene or an event in words. Some such languages are called scrambling languages, because the order no longer matters. Walpiri, an Australian language, is an example, and Latin can be scrambled quite a bit without altering meaning because the complex system of suffixes makes it clear which is the subject and which the object, as well as specifying tense, number, and the like. But however it is structured, language is the device that allows us to tell stories of a complexity limited only by powers of memory and ability to sustain attention, located at times and places away from the present, and sometimes venturing into the minds of others.

  If language indeed grew from pantomime, as many have conjectured, its earlier origins must have been gestural rather than vocal, and in this respect may go a long way back into our primate heritage. The mechanics of language may derive not from vocal calls, but from the use of the hands for grasping. The vocal calls of monkeys and apes are very largely emotional and instinctive, tied to the immediate situation, and largely useless for storytelling. The hands, in contrast, are used in a flexible, intentional way, and seem almost custom-designed for conveying information about events. Indeed, the notion of grasping still seems embedded, if only metaphorically, in our very speech. The word grasp is itself often used to mean ‘understand’, if you grasp my meaning. Comprehend and apprehend derive from Latin prehendere, ‘to grasp’; intend, contend and pretend derive from Latin tendere, ‘to reach with the hand’; we may press a point, and expression and impression also suggest pressing. We hold conversations, point things out, seize upon ideas, grope for words—if you catch my drift. It works visually, too, as when you see what I mean, as I hope you do.

  The invention of speech must have occurred well after the line leading to humans split from that leading to the great apes. Attempts to teach apes to talk have failed rather dismally, but chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have become quite proficient at learning simplified forms of sign language. The star is the bonobo Kanzi, reared by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh; he communicates by pointing to symbols on a specially designed keyboard, and supplements these gestures with signs that he apparently picked up by watching the sign language used by Koko, a signing gorilla. Apes in the wild make wide use of bodily actions to communicate with one another, often in the context of play. Robin Dunbar has suggested that the origins of language lie in grooming, a gentle activity of picking and cleaning the fur of another animal, and one that is important in cementing social relationships. A related act of communication is the ‘directed scratch’, in which a chimpanzee scratches the part of its body where it wants to be groomed by another.

  Just when hand gestures were replaced by spoken words is a matter of conjecture. Jean Auel’s novel The Clan of the Cave Bear is set in the Ice Age, 27,000 or so years ago, when early humans and Neanderthals co-existed. A five-year-old girl, Ayla, is orphaned after an earthquake kills the rest of her family, and is eventually adopted into a Neanderthal community. The Neanderthals in the story cannot speak, and communicate in sign language. I should not, of course, take a fictional novel to be acceptable scientific evidence, tempting as it is to do so, but Auel is nevertheless something of an expert on early humans and Neanderthals, and the use of sign language by Neanderthals is a theme in her other novels as well. Curiously, though, the Neanderthals in The Clan of the Cave Bear not only could not speak, but they also could not laugh or cry, and when they saw Ayla weeping they thought she had an eye disease. Even chimps can laugh. In Auel’s novels, the Neanderthals were also able to communicate through telepathy.

  The real Neanderthals did interbreed to some degree with our own species. They died out only some 30,000 years ago, and I suspect that, like us, they were capable of articulate speech. The shift from manual to vocal communication probably occurred gradually during the Pleistocene, and is still not complete. We all gesture manually as we speak, and the sign languages used by the deaf and some other communities are as effective and linguistically sophisticated as speech. Why, then, would spoken words have been introduced, and become so dominant? I think there are many answers. Except for our continued disposition to wave our arms about as we speak, speech frees the hands for other things, such as using and making tools, carrying things, and tending to the needs of infants. Speech is itself a form of gesturing, involving movements of the tongue, lips and vocal cords, but is located tidily within the mouth. It is an early example of miniaturisation, and interferes only with intermittent activities like eating and kissing. We tell our children not to speak with their mouths full, and sympathise with the poet John Donne’s agonised cry from his 1633 poem ‘The Canonization’: ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.’

  Speaking is also much less tiring than gesturing manually, since it involves much smaller movements and piggybacks on breathing, which we have to do anyway in order to survive. Speech works at night, or when speaker and audience are not in visual contact—a property exploited by radio and cellphone. I could go on and on.1

  But whether speaking or signing, we humans gained a profound skill unapproached by any other species. Our closest non-human relatives, the great apes, do not tell stories, even when they gesture. At most, they make simple requests, or respond to simple instructions. The capacity to relay narratives to an audience, through the invention of grammatical language, does seem to be a distinctive characteristic of humans. Whether the distinctiveness lies in the internal construction of imagined events, or simply in the telling of them, remains something of a moot point. Either way, one might well agree with the French psychologist and psychotherapist Pierre Janet, who wrote: ‘narration created humanity’.

  The stories we tell

  Through the Pleistocene, then, our forebears evolved the characteristics that we think of as human. It was the Pleistocene that saw the emergence of the genus Homo, of which Homo sapiens is the only remaining species. The brain tripled in size, and the fully upright stance and striding gait enhanced the ability to wander over wide terrain—no doubt contributing to the wandering of the mind as well as of the body. Our forebears established what has been called the ‘cognitive niche’, surviving the dangerous environment of the African savannah through the sharing of knowledge and the telling of stories. Stories bind peoples together, and create culture. Every culture seems to have its tales of heroism and discovery, establishing a sense of common ancestry. In modern times this is largely conveyed through the written word, but in preliterate societies stories were told down the generations through spoken words or gestures. Many of these are perhaps still locked in languages inaccessible to outsiders, but those that are known have many features in common.

  We have no record of stories that predate the arrival of our own species some 200,000 years ago, but stories handed down through the generations of present-day cultures can provide some appreciation of their nature and content. They seem to have as much to do with establishing myths and creation stories as with the sharing of practical knowledge. The indigenous Australians have told stories that may well go back at least 50,000 years to their a
rrival in Australia, and shortly after the exodus from Africa. They tell of the Dreamtime, a sacred era when ancestral spirits created the world. Some of these god-like figures are more powerful than others. In south-eastern Australia, it was Biame, the All-Father, who first created the animals and then used them as models to create humans; in the Northern Territory, it was the sky god Altjira of the Arrernte people, who created the earth. Dreamtime persists in the Dreaming, the continuing set of beliefs and traditions. Dreaming stories were carried by culture heroes, and expressed in songs and dances across Australia, even through different language groups. They cover a great many topics, about people, places, laws and customs. Children exist in the spirit-child before being brought to life through birth to a mother, and persist eternally after life. Christian tradition similarly tells stories of creation, all-powerful gods, and eternal life after death.

  New Zealand Māori have a much more recent history in their adopted country, having arrived in New Zealand only around 750 years ago, but they too have retained intricate stories told by word of mouth. Māori legend goes back to the demigod Māui, who had magical powers and lived in a place called Hawaiki.2 One day, out at sea, he dropped his magic fishhook over the side of the boat, and felt a powerful tug on the line. With the help of his brothers, he pulled up a large fish, which they called Te Ika a Māui (Māui’s fish), and which became the North Island of New Zealand. The South Island of New Zealand was Māui’s boat, called Te Waka a Māui, and Stewart Island, the smaller island at the southern end of the country, was Māui’s anchor, Te Punga a Māui, which held the boat steady while Māui reeled in the giant fish. Although Māui caused these events, it was the great Polynesia navigator Kupe who discovered the new land, Aotearoa—‘Land of the Long White Cloud’, otherwise more prosaically known as New Zealand. Of course, there is also much more to Māori lore, which includes accounts of the creation of the world, stories of battles, songs, poems and prayers—elements again to be found in virtually all religions.