Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter

  A non-lexicalized category is born when a striking episode is encoded and committed to memory (such as Danny at the Grand Canyon). Then, as we have seen, this buried episode will automatically drift up to the surface if and when one encounters another situation whose freshly-minted encoding overlaps sufficiently with the long-ago encoding of the first episode. Although such idiosyncratic categories are deprived of lexical labels and are grounded in unique, private experiences, they are no less solidly anchored in our memory than the thousands of public, lexicalized categories are. For each of us, they constitute our personal secret garden of categories.

  Remindings Can Give Rise to New Categories

  As a rule, our personal categories grow slowly and steadily on their own — unobtrusively, imperceptibly. Thus we are usually unaware of a new category when it is just born. Think, for instance, of Peter’s casual remark to Carol, “That happens to me every January.” Was he thinking to himself, “Wow, I’m building a new personal category to be exploited in the future!” That seems rather unlikely. And when Doug’s mind first noticed the Dick–Danny similarity (as Dick leaned down to pick up a bottlecap at Karnak), he wasn’t aware of having created a new category either. All he felt happening inside his head was a linking-up of two situations that were different but that had an essence in common — something that happens all the time. Only when he consciously tried to analyze this case of reminding did the new category come into focus as such, and at that point its essence started to become clear.

  Such unlabeled and personal categories have much in common with lexicalized categories — those labeled by words, expressions, proverbs, fables, and so on — to which we devoted our first two chapters. They are different, however, in the way they are constructed. One distinction is that they are built on events experienced in private, as opposed to events picked up from exposure to one’s culture. Another is that they are idiosyncratic, in the sense that they might wind up never being shared with anyone else. Nonetheless, their usefulness in helping us to spot the essence of certain situations in a pithy, catchy fashion means that if need be, they can be described and transmitted in words to other people — and when this is done, many listeners will find analogous episodes in their lives springing to mind, unbidden. To illustrate these ideas, we’ll describe a couple of categories that grew in a couple of people’s secret gardens.

  The Secret Agent Dashing through the Tunnel

  The source of this category in Patrick’s memory was a comic book he read when he was a youngster. In it, an aspiring secret agent was required to undergo a series of grueling tests, and at some point he found himself in a very long corridor, not knowing what to do. All of a sudden, the roof started descending and he realized he would have to sprint all the way to the far end in order not to be crushed. He ran like the wind, and as he approached the opening at the end, he said to himself, “These evil monsters required a world-record time, but I’ll show them! I’ll make it out.” However, the final few yards of the tunnel were covered in a thick tarry muck, which slowed him down drastically. In the last fraction of a second, instead of reaching the opening and emerging into freedom, he was mercilessly crushed into a lifeless pancake.

  Every time Patrick is hoping to finish some project by making a crash effort and some last-minute complication crops up to threaten his success, this gripping image flashes before Patrick’s mind’s eye. It could be a sudden loss of access to the Web just as the deadline to submit a grant proposal is approaching. Or it could be the sudden cold-sweat realization, just as his taxi pulls up to the international terminal, that in his frantic rush to pack his bag, he forgot to put his passport into his pocket.

  When Patrick told Nadine about this personal category of his, she was immediately reminded of her first date ever. She’d spent a long time getting ready for it and walked out the door at the last minute, already knowing that she would be a bit late. However, her cat slipped out the door as well, and she had to spend a quarter of an hour coaxing it back into the house, and as a result she was disastrously late. Then another occasion came to mind — the day of a friend’s wedding. She searched in many stores before finding an appropriate gown to wear, and then, back home, dressing in a great hurry, she tore the brand-new gown and it took her a half hour to mend it before she could leave for the wedding. Once again, she was disastrously late. A third case came to her mind as well, which involved a theater outing. She’d left her house late, had run like mad to catch the subway, and arrived on the platform just as the train’s doors closed, so she wasn’t allowed into the theater until the first intermission.

  The ease with which Nadine was able to retrieve episodes from her memory that shared the conceptual skeleton of Patrick’s personal category, while at the same time differing from it in scads of surface-level details, showed that over the course of her life, she, too, had constructed a similar unlabeled category, despite never having read that comic book. The reason she was able to find, among her innumerable memories, a few scenarios roughly describable by the phrase “an unpredictable last-minute glitch drastically reduces one’s chances of achieving an already very urgent goal” is that when she encoded and memorized these episodes of her life, some quite abstract aspects were unconsciously taken into account. How else could one hope to explain the much later spontaneous bubblings-up of those old memories?

  “God is a Sniper”

  The word “sniper” acquired world renown during the war in which the former country of Yugoslavia was splintered into many fragments. Indeed, the main avenue of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo was nicknamed “Sniper Alley” for some years, since people walking along it would frequently shout out, “Watch out for snipers!”

  Ilana came up with the phrase “God is a sniper” as a label for a personal category she had made; it was her way of indicating that fate can be as cruelly random as a sniper. The reason for bringing God into the picture, aside from indulging in a bit of irreverence, is that fate was thus anthropomorphized — a very common type of analogy. Every time Ilana hears that someone innocent has been hit out of the blue by an incomprehensible stroke of terrible luck, this troubling phrase comes to her mind.

  Thus, someone recently told Ilana about a relative who had a loving and tightly-knit family, sweet children who were blossoming, and much success in her career — but who, only a few weeks after being diagnosed with cancer, abruptly succumbed, leaving friends and family in profound grief. The phrase “God is a sniper” popped instantly to Ilana’s mind. For her, this category has gradually grown in importance, to the point where now it plays a central role in her personal philosophy of life. The niche that Ilana has carved out in her mind to accommodate the whims of a cruel shooter lurking in the heavens helps her to deal with life’s unexplainable tragedies.

  The Crucial Role of Emotions in the Evocation of Dormant Memories

  So far, we have not stressed the role of emotions, but if one looks back over the various examples that we have given in this chapter, one will see that emotions are present in a nearly universal fashion. They include jealousy, anguish, sadness, irony, and anxiety. Emotions play important roles inside conceptual skeletons, allowing the retrieval of ancient memories by analogy, as the following example shows.

  When Doug was in elementary school, he was fascinated by numbers and the operations that combine them in various ways. One day, his father, a physicist, told him how one could put a number to a power, and taught him the notation of exponents (as in “x1 ”, “y2 ”, etc.). Enchanted, Doug started putting together a table of integers raised to various powers, and with delight he noticed little patterns in it. One morning a few weeks later, while walking by his father’s desk at home, he saw a physics article that he couldn’t make head or tail of, but in which a certain mathematical notation jumped out at him — namely, subscripts (as in “x1”, “y2”, etc.). His curiosity was instantly piqued. What wondrous kind of calculation could a subscript, looking so similar to an exponent, stand for? To his frustration, he had to
wait for his dad to come home in the evening. The moment he walked in, Doug asked him to explain the enticing new mathematical operation. However, his father merely said, “Oh, those are called ‘subscripts’. It’s just a way of making new names for variables, since we only have a small supply of letters of the alphabet. Subscripts don’t stand for any kind of numerical calculation.” Doug’s avid hopes were suddenly dashed. He’d eagerly waited all day long, only to be let down by his dad’s revelation of the mathematical emptiness of this notation so parallel to that for powers, a concept that had fascinated him.

  This story is centered on a reminding (namely, subscripts reminded young Doug of exponents), but not a reminding mediated by emotions. It was a visual reminding. However, many years later this entire episode was echoed in a most unexpected way, and the act of witnessing it sparked a sudden reminding filled with complex emotions.

  One-year-old Monica was playing on the floor of the playroom in her family’s house. That evening she had come across a Dustbuster, and her parents, Carol and Doug, were amusedly watching her push the device’s ON/OFF button over and over again. Each time, the buzzing noise delighted her. She was having a grand time. All at once she spotted a second button at the device’s other end. Her parents could see her putting two and two together, and in a flash she started pushing on button #2 to see what kind of noise it would bring about. She pushed and pushed but no sound came out. She kept on trying, but still nothing happened. Thinking he’d be a helpful dad, Doug went over, gently took the Dustbuster from her, and, flicking the second button, showed her that a little compartment opened up in which there was a bag containing dust and other grime that the mini-vacuum-cleaner had sucked up. As Monica watched this, an expression of disappointment crossed her face. Far from charming her with this revelation, her dad had deprived her of a hoped-for pleasure by showing her that the very promising resemblance between the second button and the first button, that source of exquisite buzzing, was of no interest.

  Here again we have a young child’s reminding mediated by a visual analogy — the similarity of one button on a gadget to another button elsewhere on the same gadget. But that minimal similarity would hardly suggest an intimate link between this story of a toddler who is delighted by loud noises and a story about a different child who is in love with number patterns. Even when you toss in the extra fact that the two Dougs in the two stories are one and the same person, although at a remove of forty years, this additional common element still constitutes only the weakest of links between the stories — hardly the stuff of a deep reminding.

  But the two stories have much more in common. Indeed, when 48-year-old Doug saw the sudden letdown on his daughter’s face as she realized that button #2 had no interest, a sudden feeling of déjà vu swept through him as the long-buried memory of his own letdown at the words spoken by his father surged up out of nowhere. That event, in a pithy encoding, had been lying inert in his brain for four decades, like a book gathering dust on a shelf in a remote corner of an enormous library. It was certainly not served to Doug on a silver platter, as it has been to the readers of this chapter.

  Overture

  Doug (age eight) ⇔ Monica (age one)

  Fascinated by math ideas ⇔ Intrigued by droll noises

  Putting a number to a power ⇔ Finding a Dustbuster on the floor

  Infatuation

  Making a table of powers ⇔ Pushing a colorful button

  Thrilled by unexpected number patterns ⇔ Delighted by unexpected buzzing sounds

  All aflush with excitement ⇔ All aflush with excitement

  Discovery

  Random discovery: subscripts ⇔ Random discovery: another button

  Visual analogy: exponents ≈ subscripts ⇔ Visual analogy: button #1 ≈ button #2

  Anticipation of great new math patterns ⇔ Anticipation of a great new kind of buzzing

  Deflation

  Father (Robert), who explains that… ⇔ Father (Doug), who explains that…

  Subscripts have no mathematical interest! ⇔ Button #2 has no sonic interest!

  Doug’s balloon is popped… ⇔ Monica’s balloon is popped…

  The out-of-the-blue resurrection of this memory was stunning to the adult Doug, for in many ways the episodes are wildly different. But they are also deeply similar. At the crux of each is a very simple visual analogy suggesting a new source of delight to a hopeful child. For young Doug, it was the seductive analogy between exponents and subscripts, while for little Monica, it was the seductive analogy between two buttons.

  But above and beyond the fact that both of these stories revolve around misleading visual analogies, what imbues this reminding incident with its depth and interest is the poignant ending that the two stories share: a well-meaning father who, having no inkling of the distress he’s about to cause, disillusions his hopeful child by revealing that the child’s visual analogy, though seemingly a gold nugget, is in fact just a piece of fool’s gold. All in all, there are a large number of elements common to both stories, the most crucial one being a hopeful child’s sudden experience of keen disappointment.

  Much like the case of Danny playing with ants on the ground and Dick picking up bottlecaps from the ground, this case shows that abstract remindings aren’t triggered solely by a close matchup between the most abstract cores of the two events, but that matchups at several levels of abstraction are often needed to bring them about. Obviously many details are irrelevant, such as the colors of the buttons on the Dustbuster, the ages of the children, the houses where the events took place, and so on, but one aspect that is not irrelevant is the fact that in both stories, it was a parent — specifically, the father — who disillusioned a child. Although this is a superficial aspect of both stories (as is the dirt in the Danny and Dick stories), it certainly contributes to their striking parallelism. And there’s no doubt that the analogy is rendered yet more intriguing by the fact that little Doug, the “disillusionee” of the first story, grew up to be the disillusioner in the second story. To anyone who hears both stories and sees their many analogical connections, this role-reversal has to be one of the most central and ironic aspects of the whole thing, and it no doubt strengthens the analogy, even though the younger and older Dougs play opposite roles in their respective stories.

  In sum, several emotions — an initial fascination, the pleasant surprise of a simple visual analogy, the high hopes that ensue from this discovery, and finally a sudden deflation — all play critical roles in this reminding. This illustrates a general tendency — namely, that remindings that take place at a deep level are often dependent on emotional aspects of the two episodes they link together. This is because very often the most central aspects of an event are the strong emotions that it churns up.

  Events are Encoded Not by Rote but by Distillation

  So far, we’ve been using the term “encoding” as if what we meant by it were self-evident. Our physiology restricts our perception to the standard sensorial modalities (vision, hearing, etc.) and to the features afforded by those modalities (colors, movements, and shapes, for example); our perception is also constrained by the resolving power of our senses (the world would appear very different to us if our visual system could directly perceive microbes). Our psychology also limits our perception, allowing us to recognize and memorize events only in terms of certain modalities of encoding. We perceive through our sensory organs, to be sure, but no less through our concepts; in other words, we perceive not just physiologically but also intellectually. There is thus an unbreakable link between perceiving and conceiving. On the one hand, our conceptions depend on our senses, since our concepts would be quite different if our senses were different, but on the other hand, our perceptions depend on our repertoire of concepts, because the latter are the filters through which any stimulus in our environment reaches our consciousness.

  It may not be obvious why we need to encode our experiences at all — that is, why we need to reduce them to a tiny fraction of their e
ntirety. To see why encoding is necessary, imagine trying to memorize an event without any simplification taking place; the result might be called a “total rote recording” or “perception without concepts”. An experience would be captured in its entirety in our neurons, much as a film can be stored on a DVD. In the case of Danny and the Grand Canyon, having such a “total rote recording” would mean that the entire scene had been “filmed” in Doug’s brain while he was experiencing it, and then that, some twenty years later, when he observed Dick stooping to pick up a bottle cap, this specific film had been reactivated in his brain by a mental search algorithm running through all filmed scenes in his memory.

  This idea of “perception without concepts” can be summarily rejected, because no mental process based solely on visual cues would be able to connect one-year-old Danny with the mature adult Dick, or to see the link between ants and a bottlecap, not to mention the link between the enormous geological concavity of the Grand Canyon and the architectural and archeological masterwork of the Temple at Karnak. A search for purely visual resemblances, based on techniques having to do with alignment of images, could not possibly lead to such a reminding. And so far we have only alluded to the physical entities in the scene, while completely leaving out the actions (manipulating small items on the ground), the context (a two-week-long pleasure trip), the relationships (the contrasting sizes of the entities involved in the situations), the emotions (a feeling of irony), and so forth.