Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Michael Tomasello and his team have compared human and chimpanzee development more closely than anyone else. Tomasello stresses that humans have evolved a unique motivation to engage with and understand others of our kind and a unique capacity to do so. Our intense engagement with others begins at birth. Human mothers and infants have evolved so that they can and want to share their gaze while the infants suckle, unlike in any other species. Human eyes have evolved to reveal the direction of their attention, whereas other primate eyes have evolved to conceal eye direction. Human one-year-olds engage in joint attention—following others’ hands or eyes and checking to see that the others follow theirs—and in proto-declarative pointing—indicating objects or events simply for the sake of sharing attention toward them, which apes never do. They expect others to share interest, attention, and response: “This by itself is rewarding for infants— apparently in a way it is not for any other species on the planet.”2

  Why? I said that primatologists originally named the social intelligence hypothesis the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis because they assumed that the competition they observed in chimpanzees was a key driver of intelligence. But flexible cooperation requires even more intelligence than competition. To compete with others in ways apart from the purely physical usually needs little more than concealing your knowledge and intentions. To cooperate in flexible ways, you need to know in detail what the others you wish to cooperate with know and plan. You need to pay close and continuous attention to what others are seeing, feeling, and doing.

  Tomasello stresses that our minds have evolved a unique capacity to understand one another because we have evolved a unique disposition to engage and cooperate with one another: somehow we have crossed a cooperation divide. We want to share attention and intentionality, to direct our minds toward the same things, and to share similar responses—without which art and story would be impossible. In fact, stories can be one of the richest ways of sharing intentionality with authors, with characters, and with others in the audience.

  Our cooperative disposition has made us uniquely capable of social learning. All social animals can learn from others rushing from a threat or toward an opportunity. Highly social animals can cut down on information search time. Honeybees with their waggle dances and ants with their pheromone trails act as superorganisms, each individual almost like a neuron firing in an extended social brain. Bees and ants are eusocial, adapted for hypersociality, even to the point of having specialized breeders and non-breeding workers; biologists have recently begun to characterize humans, uniquely, as ultrasocial. Our cooperative disposition and our desire for joint attention and shared intentionality led to the emergence of language, probably out of gesture and mime, and ultimately to our occupying, uniquely, the cognitive niche.

  As a result we therefore learn all sorts of fine-grained information from one another. We have even evolved a uniquely long childhood to help us learn. “Even in a school-less hunter-gatherer society, individuals learn more than 99 percent of fifty core skills with help from others.”3

  We not only pass on information, we actively seek it out. Why? A vast amount of research has been done in cognitive ethology and in comparative and developmental psychology to understand theory of mind, the capacity to understand other minds. It seems that only humans have evolved to become capable of understanding others not only in terms of desires and intentions, which many animals intuit, but also in terms of beliefs. By the age of five, we can realize that if another person lacks a key piece of information, they may have a wrong belief, which may then affect their desires and intentions. But that understanding of the possibility of false belief also alerts us to the possibility that we may not know enough, that we may be missing key pieces of information, that we need to seek more.

  Chimpanzees are more curious than any other nonhuman animal, but humans take curiosity to a whole new level. Human curiosity, most momentously, allowed us to understand how plant cycles work, how to help them work, how to start agriculture, how to generate food surpluses. From there we could build settlements with some of the features of a beehive or an ant colony, with more scope for information search and sharing. We can send out, as it were, not food seekers laying down food trails but specialized information seekers laying down knowledge trails that then feed back into the colony. In these more complex societies, we learn not just from elders, as in hunter-gatherer societies, but from specialized teachers, from writing, from printed books, from libraries, and now the Internet. There is, I think, in Darwin’s words, “grandeur in this view of life,” in seeing sociality and social learning from their simple origins to the present.

  I started that line of inquiry in answering Nabokov’s dislike for the stress on competition, on the struggle for life, in Darwinian natural selection and in showing recent developments in understanding cooperation. What about the other aspect of Nabokov’s misgivings about natural selection: his sense that play is crucial to understanding “Homo poeticus—without which sapiens could not have been evolved”? Or to put another question, which will lead to the same answers: if information has been so powerful for humans, how is it that we also spend more of our time and energy on misinformation than any other species? Why do our libraries store not only nonfiction but also fiction and the scriptures that are considered fictive at least by most outside any given faith?

  In On the Origin of Stories I build on the findings I have already discussed to try to answer the question, why does a species that derives so many of its advantages from mastering information have a compulsion to spend time engaged in fiction, in telling one another stories that teller and listeners know to be untrue? It’s no biological puzzle at all why we should have evolved to tell true stories. If we can comprehend events, if we have language, and if we are highly social animals, then, without needing to add anything else, we will tell true stories. Chimpanzees monitor each other intensely, and one chimp will bring to the attention of another the fact that this male and that female are copulating behind that tree. Humans, too, have every reason to want to know who’s doing what to whom, and with true narrative we can also point who has done you-know-what to whom or who has had a successful kill and where and so on.

  But in a world of unsparing biological competition—which our world still is, despite the evolution of cooperation—how could a successful species afford an unflagging appetite for stories we know to be untrue? To answer that we have to answer the question why do we expend time and resources, across cultures, epochs, classes, life stages, and intellectual levels, on music, dance, design, and stories.

  I say this because it seems highly likely that the literary arts were the last of the arts to emerge. Analogues of music and dance exist in many species, in birds, in intelligent nonprimates like whales and dolphins, and in primates like gibbons and chimpanzees. Chanting and rhythmic movement and perhaps rhythmic stick or rock banging—in other words forms of proto-song, proto-dance and proto-instrumental music—are likely to stretch back a million years or more. And the earliest signs of the visual arts date back hundreds of thousands of years, with the first over-refinement of Acheulean hand axes for purely aesthetic reasons. (Some of these stone tools were made much larger or much smaller or much more symmetrical than appropriate for use, and these impractical hand axes, unlike the practical ones, show no signs of use.)4 Although the matter is a very long way from being decided, a full modern language adequate for telling stories seems to date back only a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand years. Other proto-arts had probably been developing for hundreds of thousands of years before the first full-scale fictions.

  In On the Origin of Stories I try to offer a comprehensive explanation for the arts, especially the art of fiction. Art, I argue, is a kind of high play. Play exists in many species, and the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of behavior. Flexibility of behavior solves the problem of coping with unpredictable, complex circumstances, so by definition it cannot be entirely genetically progra
mmed. A flexible behavior has to be learned to maximize flexibility. If a behavior is hardwired, there would be no point in exercising it in a way as expensive in energy and risk (injury, predation) as play. But if there is room for flexibility, then individuals who can improve their execution of complicated behaviors and their judgment of situations in which they are needed will fare better. This is especially the case in critical behaviors like flight or fight.

  If in moments of security animals practice the behaviors that make the greatest life-and-death difference, like flight and fight, they can then perform better in moments of high urgency. For that reason play has developed in many species, especially those with the security that parental care provides: in birds and in perhaps all mammals. (And it seems highly significant that the two most common forms of play, chasing and rough-and-tumble fighting, indeed exercise exactly the skills needed for flight and fight.) The motivation to try out these behaviors has been selected for as those more inclined to practice survive more often until species after species loves play, until they have a compulsion to run, chase, twist, roll, or engage in rough-and-tumble. What we experience as the sheer fun of play overcomes the deeply rooted inclination not to expend energy if effort can be avoided.

  Because we have the longest childhood of any species, play is particularly important for us, and because we now can produce food surpluses and live in settlements safe from predation, children have still more scope for play than the young of any other animals. But humans depend not just on physical skills but even more on mental power. Information matters for any species, but for no others is it so decisive as for ours. So for us the problem arises: How can we make more of our information-processing skills?

  For animals to process information quickly, to make rich rapid inferences that can guide action, information needs to form patterns that minds can recognize almost automatically. Information falls into patterns, in most cases, when there are regularities in the world, regularities that make it more possible to predict what is about to happen. All animals seem to prefer patterned information (symmetry, for instance, distinct colors and shapes, clear-pitched sounds) over more chaotic information arrays: we therefore perceive as particularly beautiful phenomena like rainbows and sunsets in the world of physics and flowers and butterflies in the biological world. We especially crave information that falls into the kinds of patterns our minds have found most useful and have learned to process especially efficiently, like information about other plants or animals or fellow humans.

  We crave information. But because we have a much more open-ended curiosity than other animals, we have a special appetite for pattern. We crave the high yield of novel kinds of pattern. So we not only chase and tussle, we not only play physically, but we also play cognitively, with patterns of the kinds of information that matter most to us: sound, sight, and, in our ultrasocial species, social information. We play with the rhythm and pitch and shape of sounds in music and song; with colors and shapes in drawing and painting and mudpies or sandcastles; and with patterns of social information in pretend play and story. In the social world, we see patterns of identity (who are they?), personality (what are they like?), society (whom are they related to? whom do they team up with? how do they rank?). In the world of events, we see patterns of cause and effect. In the world of social events, we see patterns of intention, action, and outcome.

  Art and fiction start here. Because intense repetition and concentrated attention can rewire brains incrementally, the compulsiveness of music, images, and story reshapes human minds. We process aural, visual, and social information more rapidly, accurately, and flexibly through playing in a self-rewarding way with the high-density information, the cognitive play, of art. In this light Nabokov’s hunch that what makes us most human is not competition but “lolling and loafing,” the security of parental care and the play of the imagination within it—stressed so beautifully in the first and last chapters of Speak, Memory—seems not so wide of the mark.

  Our minds are most finely tuned for understanding agents—any creature that can act, animal, human, and even, by extension, unseen agents like spirits. In ancient environments, the agents we evolved to track were other animals as well as people, and even in modern urban environments children have a compulsive desire to learn the names of animals and to play or attend to stories with animals. Our minds want to and easily can track and differentiate agents since other agents, human or not, offer the most complex, volatile, and high-stake information we regularly encounter. We carry that motivation and capacity into pretend play and story. Very young children do not readily think offline, away from the here and now. They do not easily recall their recent past, but they can easily use the present props of toys, whether homemade or manufactured, to conjure up scenarios involving agents that hook their attention. They learn to think in a sustained fashion in ways decoupled from the here and now, first by using physical props as fellow agents, then gradually by raiding the readymade stories and characters of their culture. By building on our sociality, fiction stretches our imaginations, taking us from our immediate present along tracks we can easily follow offline because they are the fresh tracks of agents.

  In On the Origin of Stories I discuss the other functions that derive from stories as cognitive play with patterns of social information. Not only does their compulsiveness improve our social cognition, but stories also stretch our imagination, our capacity to think away from the here and now, our capacity to see from multiple perspectives in time, place, person, and mode. They offer a series of social thought experiments and ways to share values and understandings, ways to amplify our attunement, motivate our assembly, and therefore improve social cohesion. Like the other arts, fiction becomes a kind of high play that also offers a sense of human mastery, a sense we can shape the world on our own terms. Homer, the greatest of early storytellers, unfolds the world as humanly knowable, from the minds of the gods to the minds of humans, from the panorama of the known world down to a detail like the latch on a door. Homer’s stories, classicists have argued, may even have provided the incentive to develop the first alphabet;5 they certainly promptly provided the core of Greek education and, arguably, the confidence in the mind’s capacity to encompass the world that inspired Greek thought.

  In the real world of biological evolution, as opposed to the world of the stories we shape for ourselves, every benefit has a cost. Our capacity to understand other minds so well, which arises especially from our cooperative disposition, allows us to understand false belief: we appreciate clearly that others may not know information relevant to the situation that we happen to know. That also means that we realize we may not know what we need to know, and that realization drives human curiosity. But it also drives our unique human anxiety. There may be things we feel we need to know about that we know we do not know. That shapes stories: dramatic irony, what some of us know about a situation that others do not.

  But it also shapes our real-world anxieties. We want to understand the causes of things, and we want to understand the consequences. Where do we come from? Where do we go to? Uncertainty and indecision are biologically unproductive. Better at least to think we know and make a move than to stay stalled. Because our imaginations naturally play with agents, we have ways to plug the gaps in our knowledge. We have a natural tendency to over-read rather than underread agency: better to suppose that bush a bear than vice versa. We want to do things, and we do: we see agency as the prototype of cause. We are fascinated by powers different than ours: animals stronger or swifter than us, birds that fly by day, owls or bats that fly by night and “see” in the dark.

  Our uncertainty produces anxiety, anxiety that, throughout history, our predisposition to think in terms of agency has allayed. We engage in a kind of social confabulation rather than having to confront our failure to understand.6 We have coped with our anxiety about not knowing enough by inventing stories involving agents who know what we don’t. As research shows, we especially notice and remember crea
tures with powers that are minimally counterintuitive—gods or spirits who can see but be unseen, say, rather than those who exist only on Wednesdays. Such stories pervade all known cultures, and the sense of control they help give human lives means they have been handed down through the generations in compelling stories often reinforced by compelling ritual, music, dance, costume, and architecture. For a long time, much of the power of art has been commandeered by religion. And even someone as little disposed to conventional religion as Nabokov can be prone to overread agency in the unknown and, in his case, to see a cosmic playfulness behind things.

  So the species that thrives most on information also generates the acknowledged fictions of story and the apparent explanations in the stories that have congealed into belief, into religion. Although true information can be invaluable biologically—if I want to kill prey, I need to know where it is— information need not invariably be true to be biologically advantageous. So long as it leads to biologically advantageous behavior it can be favored: a belief, say, in an unseen being who would witness and punish my uncooperative conduct, even if no others in my group could see what I was up to, will benefit the cohesiveness of my group and therefore, on average, our capacity to overcome competing groups.

  Religion offers explanations beyond what we can see. It allays our anxieties about what we recognize we do not know, and it does so via the inclination to understand in terms of agency so natural for our ultrasocial selves. Eventually our awareness that there are things we do not know and should find out leads to science, to explaining things without agency. Science, too, uses our ultrasociality, although in a different way, through the competitive and cooperative advancing and testing of ideas. But whereas agency comes naturally to us, systematically challenging and testing the ideas that seem to have allowed us to survive so far seems comparatively unnatural. Unlike stories with agents, which we have evolved to be predisposed to, the agentless explanations of scientific stories seem draining both emotionally, in that they require us to put our best explanations to the test, and imaginatively, in that they require us to think about mechanisms not at the level of agency.