One curious exception is the Pirahã, a remote tribe of people on the Amazon in Brazil. Daniel Everett went there as a missionary with the intent of studying their language so he could translate the Bible for them. He discovered that their language was impoverished by western standards, with a small vocabulary and only indirect ways of referring to the past or future. According to Everett, they don’t create fiction and have no creation stories or myths. The Pirahã language, though, is related to another language called Mura, which evidently does include rich texts about the past. One possibility, then, is that the Pirahã people separated from the Mura at some stage, and in the process lost a sense of their historical past, and indeed seem to repress the personal past as well. Everett spent several years living among them, and records that they are in no way intellectually impoverished—they were quite happy to discuss cosmology and notions about the origins of the universe with him, in spite of having no material of their own to draw on. Indeed, he seems to have been so impressed with their way of life that he was converted from Christianity to become an atheist, and is now a professor of linguistics in the United States.
Most societies, though, do have stories and creation myths, and in preliterate cultures these are typically expressed in verse or song. Rhyme and metre seem to be strong aids to memory. With the invention of writing, there is no longer the strong need for such devices, although children are still taught rhymes to help them remember lists, such as the alphabet, the elements of the periodic table, or the colours of the rainbow. Then there is the poem that gives the first 21 digits of the mathematical constant pi:
Pie
I wish I could determine pi
Eureka, cried the great inventor
Christmas pudding, Christmas pie
Is the problem’s very centre.
You simply count the number of letters in each word, and put the decimal point after ‘Pie’ (3.14159 26535 89793 23846). However, a downside of using jingles to remember things may be the earworms that I mentioned in Chapter 1—the songs and ditties that take over the mind and won’t go away. If the ‘Pie’ jingle won’t go away, I suggest dumping it on someone who might actually use it. It’s probably not a very useful gift, though; if you really want to memorise pi to lots of decimal places, you’re better off using the method of loci, as illustrated in Chapter 2, or finding it through Google.
Even after the invention of writing, and later the printing press, epic tales persisted for a while in the form of long poems, whose rhyme and metre remained as an aid to memory, helping ensure faithful transmission from one generation to the next. The earliest known story in literature may be the Epic of Gilgamesh, which goes back some 4000 years. Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king, befriends Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to divert Gilgamesh from oppressing his people. Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey to Cedar Mountain to defeat Humbaba, guardian of the mountain. They then defeat the Bull of Heaven, sent by the goddess Ishtar to exact revenge on Gilgamesh for spurning her advances. In revenge, the gods then kill Enkidu. In distress, Gilgamesh goes on a long journey to seek immortality. He dies, but his fame lives on for his great accomplishments, and the story itself has provided the basis for many later works of fiction. Such stories carry a full range of emotions, and establish heroes and villains that act as models for the way people behave in society.
Other examples are the Iliad and Odyssey, two famous Greek poems written by Homer, dating from around the eighth century BC. More recent examples include Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the fourteenth century, John Milton’s Paradise Lost from the seventeenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner from the late eighteenth century, or Lord Byron’s Don Juan from the nineteenth century. Epic poems have been well surpassed by stories told in prose or long-running television soaps, although the form is continued by the Australian author and poet Clive James in his satirical verse epic Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World: A Tragedy in Heroic Couplets which was published in 1974. I’m told he’s working on another.
Brian Boyd points out that religious ideas themselves owe less to doctrine than to stories, and religious stories are typically stories of magical deeds. In the Bible, Psalm 77:14 proclaims: ‘You are the God who performs miracles; you display your power among the peoples.’ The four gospels of the New Testament record 37 miracles performed by Jesus, including healing the sick, turning water into wine, and walking on water, and Jesus himself was held to be the son of God, born of a virgin mother. The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, is itself regarded as a miracle, revealed to the prophet Muhammad from Allah through the archangel Gabriel.
Crime fiction
Once writing was invented, stories became much more varied and widely dispersed. Even so, they still play a big role in establishing heroes, and reinforcing moral values. This can be illustrated from a perhaps unlikely source: crime fiction. Murder and other crimes have always featured in stories, from the Bible to Shakespeare, although in modern crime stories they have taken on new conventions, built largely on the trappings of industrial society. You might think the human obsession with murder would only encourage mayhem rather than peaceful cooperation in society, but crime stories, like the epics of old, are really morality tales, since the perpetrator is always caught and duly punished. Crime stories, as we understand them, are largely a phenomenon of western culture, and are in many respects peculiarly English, but they express universal themes.
What perhaps distinguishes modern crime stories from older tales of murder and brutality is the emergence of the detective as the hero. Detective stories as a popular genre go back only to the mid-nineteenth century, with authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins. The archetypal detective-hero is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who was not only a moral guardian in his pursuit of the dastardly Moriarty, but also a clever geek who used extraordinary powers of observation and deduction to solve crimes. He was even a model for aspiring scientists—catching the criminal is a bit like catching the Higgs boson (although less expensive). Of course, Holmes did not really exist outside of Conan Doyle’s imagination, but he became so popular that he was widely regarded as a real person, if not a demigod. When Conan Doyle killed him off in ‘The Final Problem’, published in 1893, public pressure was such that he brought him back to life in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, set in 1894 but not published until 1903.
Sherlock Holmes established a tradition of fictional detectives with different, often exotic, identities, luring us into their minds, and in so doing expanding the way we see ourselves. John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps and other spy stories, is perhaps the archetype of the values of the English public school, stiff upper-lipped and fearless—or at least conditioned not to show fear. In a similar tradition are Bulldog Drummond from the novels of H. C. McNeile (who wrote under the pen name of ‘Sapper’) and Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who continues to create mayhem in popular movies. But perhaps the reading public grew weary of jingoistic heroes, and fictional detectives have generally taken on more gentle and often eccentric personae. Dorothy Sayers’ novels featured Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey as the archetypal English aristocrat with too many names. Agatha Christie created the fastidious Belgian Hercule Poirot, and when she tired of him introduced the elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple, who seemed able to combine knitting with crucial observation of giveaway clues. G. K. Chesterton’s sleuthing priest Father Brown seems to be enjoying a revival on our television screens. More recent examples are Henning Mankell’s morose Kurt Wallander, Ian Rankin’s dissolute John Rebus, and Sara Paretsky’s tough-minded female V. I. Warshawski.3 Real-life detectives, it has to be said, are a much more prosaic lot, at least if we can judge from their occasional appearances on television, or before real-world suspects gathered in the living room. (Does this actually happen?)
Entering the mind of a fictional detective may also allow us into places or elements of society from which we may n
ormally be barred. In a recent interview, the Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin had this to say:
A detective is the perfect character, the perfect means, of looking at society as a whole. I can’t think of any other character you could use that allows you access to any area of society. . . . [The detective allows] access to the banks, the politicians, the CEOs, the people who run business, but also the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the unemployed, the drug addicts, the prostitutes.4
Crime fiction, then, is truly an exercise in guided mind-wandering, escorting us into different places, different times, different minds.
Another feature of crime stories is that they alert us to dangerous events that might happen (but we hope they won’t), and so provide scenarios that might follow if they do, and make us better prepared to deal with them. Then there’s the dark side. By exposing the mistakes that lead to the criminal being caught, crime stories may help the readers themselves get away with murder. But it can go the other way, with fact pre-empting fiction. The 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson, is based on the true story of two New Zealand schoolgirls who murdered the mother of one of them. They were, of course, caught and imprisoned, and one is now an internationally known author of crime fiction, writing under the name of Anne Perry.5
Beyond murder
Of course, not all fiction is murderous. Many novels depict everyday life, but with an imaginative overlay that enhances understanding or emotional involvement. They create characters that our own minds can wander into, leading us into vicarious adventures and crises. Plays and novels also serve as social commentary. The novels of Charles Dickens not only provide a vivid portrayal of nineteenth-century London, but were also crafted to highlight the conditions of the poor, and bring about social reform. Dickens pioneered the serialisation of novels, so that readers would eagerly await each next instalment—a technique that persisted in serialised radio productions and more recently in television series. He also perfected the art of literary caricature, creating such memorable but exaggerated characters as Fagin, Uriah Heep and Mr Pickwick.
Just like the gods of ancient stories, the characters of modern fiction often extend beyond caricature to characters that transcend normal human capabilities. Children’s stories, in particular, are alive with talking animals, fairies, magicians and other supernatural beings, well illustrated by the extraordinary success of the Harry Potter series. Is the supernatural adaptive? Perhaps the overstretching of the imagination allows us to better understand what might be possible, although it is perhaps more often a product of wish-fulfilment. If we could fly, become immensely strong, control events with our thoughts—we could overcome many of our problems in coping with the world. James Bond and Superman belong to a long tradition of heroes with superhuman qualities.
Fiction, like other forms of play, is sometimes dismissed as mere fantasy, an escape from the realities of life. We should discourage our kids from reading comics or watching TV cartoons, some say, and have them help with the dishes or tidy their rooms for once. Studies show, though, that fiction increases empathy and improves mind-reading, making us better able to understand others. Brain-imaging has shown overlap between areas of the brain activated by reading narrative stories and those involved in theory of mind. One study measured the amount of fiction and non-fiction that people read, and found that empathy was correlated positively with the amount of fiction read, but negatively with the amount of non-fiction. Another recent study carried the headline ‘Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind’. Better a bookworm than a technology nerd if you want to get on in the social world—but then again, as I noted in the previous chapter, we also need people who can fix our washing machines and set up our computers. Donald Hebb, the esteemed Canadian psychologist and neuroscientist, and one of my mentors, used to tell us as graduate students that we could learn more practical psychology by reading novels than from poring over the journals of experimental psychology. More fun, too.
Of course, language is not just used for sharing stories. We also use it to share knowledge, although I’ve found that the occasional story thrown into a lecture tends to keep the students awake. And knowledge itself is often story-like. Modern physics, for example, is full of eccentric and all-powerful entities, like mesons and baryons and quarks—and of course the God particle itself, the Higgs boson. These are modern equivalents, perhaps, of the demons and gods of ancient mythology.
If there’s anything that defines our species as unique, then, it is the telling of stories, and the invention of language as the means of doing so. As I suggested in the previous chapter, other animals, even rats, may well undertake limited mental travels through limited domains, but stories allow us to expand our mental lives to unlimited horizons. Through the power of stories, we learned the means of constructing vast cities and machines, assemblages as multi-storied as they are multi-storeyed. Language itself expanded from the telling of tales to the invention of mathematics, the vast power of computing, the symbolic resources of the internet, the ubiquitous cellphone. Stories combine narrative and play, allowing us to construct edifices, both real and imaginary. Our mental travels took us to the moon or to a landing on Mars long before we could accomplish these journeys by physical means.
But the creative component comes not just from our memories and our playfulness. It also has sources that are detached from our conscious control. These sources are the topics of the next two chapters.
7.
TIGERS IN THE NIGHT
…
We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
—William Shakespeare, from The Tempest
The dreams that we have when we’re asleep are especially ubiquitous wanderings of the mind. Just as Mitty-like daydreaming does, night-time dreams activate the default-mode network—that widespread mesh of connections in the brain, described in Chapter 1, which lights up when our attention is not focused. Dreams, moreover, are stories, with a narrative structure that unfolds sequentially through time. We live them as though they are real and actually happening, but in this respect they are not like our waking wanderings. Even Walter Mitty would have known, had he himself been real, that he was not actually in a huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, but was driving along a highway beside his rather agitated wife. He was daydreaming, but this is not the same as the dreams that visit us with unfailing regularity when we’re asleep.
Although the great majority of dreams are experienced as though real, we occasionally have what are called ‘lucid dreams’, in which we are aware that we are dreaming. If the dream is unpleasant or frightening, we can then perhaps escape by somehow forcing ourselves to wake up. One technique that seems to work for me is to force my eyes open—a strangely paradoxical strategy since I dream as though my eyes were open anyway. In one recent attempt to do this, though, I somehow propelled myself not into wakefulness, but into another dream that I was awake. Or perhaps I dreamed this whole story. In the words of the American singer Beyoncé, it could even be that ‘life is but a dream’.1 How would we know?
While we sleep, we fluctuate between periods of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM). Dreams are most vivid and sustained during REM sleep, which occurs about every 90 minutes, so we have three to four REM episodes per night. When people are wakened during REM sleep they report that they were dreaming about 80 per cent of the time, but wakening during NREM sleep produces dream reports less than 10 per cent of the time. Curiously, though, people do report that thoughts were going through their minds prior to being awakened from NREM sleep—estimates here range from 23 per cent to nearly 80 per cent. This suggests that thoughts during NREM sleep often have a contemplative rather than a dream-like quality. In the stage of NREM sleep at sleep onset, though, people report brief but vivid hallucinatory experiences, known as ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’, around 80 or 90 per cent of the time. These are unlike dreams during REM sleep in that they are brief an
d often static, and do not include the actual dreamer. In REM dreams we are normally and sometimes painfully present as participants.
Parts of the cortex of the brain normally activated by vision itself are also activated by these hypnagogic experiences. A team of Japanese researchers identified patterns of activity in the visual areas of the brain elicited by objects and scenes in the visual world, and then recorded activity in these areas in three volunteers while they were in the onset phase of sleep. The sleepers were then woken up, and asked to describe any visual experiences they were having prior to being awoken. The researchers were able to predict the visual content from the patterns of activity with some 60 per cent accuracy—not perfect, but much higher than expected by chance. With improved imaging technology, we may one day be able to tell exactly what people are dreaming about without having to ask them. That could be the ultimate invasion of privacy.
Dreams very seldom replay past episodes, but are typically made up of fragments of memory, sometimes combined in bizarre ways. Dreamers readily accept impossible events, such as flying, or the face of one person appearing on the body of another. Scenes can switch without cause or reason—one moment I am back in my school dormitory, then suddenly trying to negotiate a dangerous path on a cliff face. Both are based on past events, somehow seamlessly blended in the dream. Although dreams are built from memories, memory for dreams themselves is poor. In fact, virtually all dreams are forgotten, unless we wake up while having them—and even then it’s probably the rehearsal of the dream rather than the dream itself that is later remembered. Just why they are forgotten is something of a mystery, since dreaming activates the hippocampus, which is the hub of the memory system. One suggestion is that the prefrontal lobe of the brain, which plays an executive role in memory formation, is deactivated during dreaming. Another is that the brain is in a different chemical state due to deactivation of monoaminergic systems, preventing memory formation. Or perhaps the hippocampus is active precisely because it is involved in consolidation, organising the formation of past memories, but not establishing a memory for the dream itself.
The Wandering Mind Page 9