Surfaces and Essences

  One day, Y. saw a brand-new ceramic elephant in a friend’s apartment, and they exchanged a few words about the art object. An hour later, Y. was walking down the sidewalk with his wife, and all at once he was stunned to see exactly the same object in a store window. At the moment he spotted it, he was doing many things at once — talking, walking, listening, pondering, avoiding obstacles of all sorts — and wasn’t in the least thinking about the elephant in his friend’s apartment. And the fact is that in the preceding weeks, Y. had walked by this same store window dozens of times and never once had noticed it, and yet the elephant had been in it every single time, as was attested by the thick dust on it, and as the store owner confirmed when Y. went in and asked. In other words, Y. hadn’t seen it even once in the preceding months, although it had been in his visual field dozens of times, and yet on this day, it had jumped right out at him as if it were ten times brighter than anything else in the store window.

  This little episode provides a useful illustration of the constantly ongoing process of filtering. Because certain concepts had just gotten activated, the previously unnoticed elephant became, in this new context, cognitively salient; it thus moved above the threshold of Y.’s attentional filtering system and became visible.

  As this anecdote shows, our perception is profoundly biased, but this is fortunate rather than problematic, for our biases are generally very useful and efficient. If our brains tried to pay equal amounts of attention to all things around us, we would drown in confusion. Thus our categories act as filters, and as such, they are crucial elements of our mental life, allowing us to deal with the flood of stimuli constantly bombarding us. Since our categories are our organs of perception of the world, whatever affects our system of categories affects our perceptual organ. The rather haphazard course of our thoughts as we drift through life deeply colors our way of seeing the world.

  Thus learning a new fact or having a new experience can profoundly alter our perception of our environment. A pregnant woman sees pregnant women everywhere around her, and after giving birth she runs into newborn babies everywhere she goes. Someone who decides to embark on psychotherapy soon finds out that everyone they know has done the same thing. If one starts going down the pathway of divorce, all at once divorce stories start cropping up whoever one talks to. If one indulges oneself in a new car, one is shocked to see exactly the same model turning up on every street corner. If one starts noticing a tiny gesture or microscopic verbal tic in a friend, all of a sudden it becomes the dominant feature of the friend’s face or speech, even though one had never noticed it before. If at a party one makes the acquaintance of the mother of a child who attends the same school as one’s own child does, and who regularly picks up her child there, thereafter one notices her every single day at school despite never having seen her before for years.

  The Power of Obsessions

  Categories that are activated in one’s mind are always on the lookout for instances of themselves in one’s life. The more highly activated they are, the fewer cases they miss, and the more fluid and creative they are in spotting instantiations of themselves in all sorts of guises.

  The preceding examples have shown how this holds for relatively concrete and familiar categories (ceramic elephants, pregnant women, divorce stories, and so forth), but we are often involved in blurrier situations whose boundaries are extremely ill-defined. In such cases, our mind’s unconscious scouring of its surroundings for resonances with its active categories still goes on just as feverishly as in the simpler situations, but the search takes place at a more abstract level of perception. This abstract filtering of the world can give rise to connections that would seem very strange to an observer who didn’t share the obsession, whether fleeting or long-term, of the analogy-spotter.

  What we perceive is the result of a compromise among our environment’s offerings, our repertoire of categories, and our current concerns. If a concern verges over into an obsession, it seizes control and everything in sight winds up being perceived over and over again in terms of this obsession. Thus after the death of a loved one, the themes of death and sadness are bound to pervade a person’s perceptions. Virtually every object and situation is tinged with the loss. A tilted parasol evokes tears, reminding one of a tree about to fall, of an imminent ending, of universal mortality. A stopped watch represents the fact that time has ceased to exist for the deceased one. A cloudy sky is seen as death hovering above, sending down a pall of gloom. A spoiled peach, a withered rose, a chipped cup, a broken toy, a tipped-over garbage can, a closed shutter, a lowered awning, a dented car, a hunk of ham — each of these is death once again. And then on the other hand, merrily laughing strangers, tenderly gazing lovers, a kissing couple, a happy family strolling by — all these symbols of joy in the world suddenly become cruel attacks reminding us of people’s blithe indifference to the sufferings of others, and highlighting the bleak solitude of every suffering soul.

  Obsession thus tries to exploit every cue coming from the environment. Otherwise put, the source of an obsession will give rise to a cornucopia of analogies applying to situations of every possible sort, and at the same time it will tend to drown out all competing analogies. The dark thoughts of the previous paragraph, for instance, all come from analogies to death, and each one is perfectly justifiable. But they clearly are just a few among a myriad possible ways of perceiving the situations described. Although such driven analogies make a certain degree of sense, nonetheless, when one stands back, they sometimes seem quite forced — so much so that they aren’t really convincing. And yet, the boldness and intensity with which an obsession invariably scans the world in search of fresh instances can occasionally give rise to new and insightful thoughts, even if this is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, an avid quest for analogues of a given phenomenon increases one’s chances of coming across important new perspectives that, without the obsession’s driving force, would never see the light of day. If you try the same key in a thousand different locks, perhaps one time it will work.

  It’s almost impossible to imagine someone coming up with a revolutionary new insight without being steeped in the domain in an obsessive or near-obsessive manner. But since we are encroaching on Chapter 8’s discussion of scientific discovery, suffice it to say for the moment that great physicists, great mathematicians, and great scientists of any stripe are invariably involved with great passion in their discipline. Louis Pasteur once famously observed that “Chance favors the prepared mind”, and obsessed minds are nothing if not prepared! Were their owners not passionately obsessed, they would never be able to spot connections that for a long time had escaped the eyes of all their colleagues. This brings us back to the idea, considered in the previous chapter, that creativity cannot be turned on and off with a simple switch: in order to come up with creative analogies, one has to be possessed by an idea.

  Let us momentarily recall Archimedes’ “Eureka” moment in his bathtub. To understand how this discovery was made, one has to take pressure into account — and here we don’t mean the pressure exerted by the liquid on all objects immersed in it, but the pressure exerted by the monarch on his faithful servant Archimedes. It’s not hard to imagine that in those days, it was not looked upon kindly if a royal request was not met, and thus one can easily imagine poor Archimedes pacing up and down, racking his brains for any possible way to get a handle on the volume of the damned crown. He would start seeing volumes everywhere, volumes where other people see nothing of the sort. Thus starting with the idea that a crown has a volume, he might soon slide to the idea that a door has a volume, then that a chair has a volume, that an animal has a volume, that a person has a volume, that I myself have a volume, that parts of my body have various volumes, that the water that I displace in my tub has a volume… Aha! That’s it!

  Of Hammers and Nails

  Obsessions bring out curious connections that no one would dream of otherwise. This is reminiscent of a maxim originated by the psychologist Abraha
m Maslow: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as a nail.”

  As a high-school student, J. had such a “hammer”, for he was obsessed by pinball machines, playing on them several hours each day. Getting higher and higher scores assumed increasing importance in his life, and suddenly one day he saw every human life as the trajectory of a ball in a pinball machine. His analogy rested on the vision of life unfolding in the same random and unpredictable way as the ball rolls. Birth, mapped onto the ball’s launch, was followed by a tumultuous life full of swerves and traps, corresponding to the ball’s bounces. At all moments there was a risk of perishing, and death was inevitable, whether the playing had been brilliant or mediocre.

  K. was a devoted rider of horses; she lived among them and adored them. Her understanding of the human world was rooted in her understanding of the equine world. Her profound “horse sense” constituted the key allowing her to unlock all the complexity of human relations, even convincing her that her insights into humanity were deeper than those of other people around her.

  L. was a dog-fancier from earliest youth, and he based his social relations, including quite successful business connections, on rapid intuitive links that he made between each person he met and a selected breed of dog. Into each new acquaintance he read character traits that came along with their “breed”, and on that basis he made all his decisions about how to treat friends and colleagues. L. thought of himself as a Saint Bernard, and he had friends and colleagues whom he saw as poodles, bulldogs, German shepherds, fox terriers, and so on.

  M., a physics graduate student, was so deeply plunged into the world of particles that he built his understanding of social relations on how particles interacted. Even very recondite quantum phenomena (such as quasi-particles, superconductivity, virtual exchanges, and renormalization) had their counterparts in human relations.

  N., when a teen-ager, fell in love with golf. In her parents’ yard, she made an eighteen-hole course and spent many hours playing on it each week. Her days and nights were profoundly impregnated by the vocabulary and imagery of golf: irons, woods, putters, balls, greens, par, birdies, eagles, bogeys, sand traps, fairways, and so forth. During this period of her life, wherever she went, N. would see, in every lawn or grassy knoll or meadow that she passed, a potential hole or putting green. When her family moved to Switzerland for a year, every car trip in the surrounding countryside was the occasion for her to fantasize golf courses wherever she went.

  A few years later, N.’s flame for golf was replaced by no less ardent a flame for photography. Barely weaned from her golf mania, she turned into a photo maniac. Every landscape, every scene, every gesture or expression of everyone she met was caught in stop-motion in her mind and framed inside various possible rectangles.

  Pinball machines were for J. what horses were for K., what dogs were for L., and what particles were for M. Each of their domains provided a rich wellspring of analogies, and each individual grounded their personal model of humanity in these analogies. All of these individuals were obsessed, and each one benefited, in some fashion, from their obsession. And just as we can move from one city to another, so we can move from one obsession to another, as the case of N. shows.

  For outsiders who hear about such extensive, systematic, and long-term families of analogies for the first time, they may sound unnatural and somewhat weird. How can human beings, in all their richness, be understood by invoking images of mysterious invisible particles, balls in pinball machines, or horses or dog breeds? It sounds like imagination given free rein and running wild. It even suggests that an analogy can be drawn between virtually anything and anything else, provided that some kind of obsession lurks behind it all, acting as the driving force.

  And indeed, there are resemblances to be exploited wherever one’s gaze falls. As the logician and philosopher Nelson Goodman observed, any two situations have an arbitrarily large number of properties in common. For instance, a crown and a human body have in common the characteristic of not being located exactly one mile away from the center of the sun, nor at 1.1 miles, nor at 1.2 miles, and so forth. Although this remark undoubtedly has philosophical relevance, its psychological relevance is minimal, since it’s obvious that humans do not look at all possible properties of all things that they look at — just a tiny fraction of them. For example, no one cares about the fact that Queen Elizabeth’s crown is not located at exactly π miles from the center of the sun.

  Nonetheless, the incredible fluidity of the notion of similarity allows people to come up with connections between entities that a priori would seem utterly unrelated, simply because obsession-driven hunts for resemblance always wind up finding results. The fruits of such avid searches, however, are not random or arbitrary. A passion for horses or dogs does not instantly turn these animals into sources for analogies that yield insights into triangle geometry, quilt design, fly-fishing, or who knows what else. On the other hand, a double obsession could surely give rise to such analogies. That is, a simultaneous fanatic for, say, Euclidean geometry and for fly-fishing would doubtless find plenty of phenomena in these two domains on which to found analogies, for in this case the search would be intense on both sides.

  Real-life Homilies Unearthed by a Pac-Maniac

  Whenever someone’s passion for something increases, their personal likelihood of analogy-making (or analogy-finding) goes up. The following story shows how a young man immersed himself to excess in the world of a particular video game. From this intense experience he drew a significant harvest of analogies, showing how far a profound obsession can carry someone.

  T. bet a friend that he would be able to beat him in Pac-Man, the famous video game of the 1980s, in which the player is represented on the screen by a yellow circle with a wide-open mouth. This quaint old icon seduced T. and several of his friends, and as they grew increasingly sucked into the Pac-Man world, they spent ever vaster amounts of their time playing. For hours every day and even more hours every night, T. would sit at his computer and play and play at this game.

  To do well in Pac-Man, one has to avoid getting eaten by four enemies called “ghosts”, and of course the goal is to acquire as many points as possible. There are two types of pill that the player can swallow, and one of them makes ghosts edible for a short time. If possible, one wants to eat all four ghosts, since the second ghost is worth twice as much as the first one, the third one four times as much, and the fourth one ten times as much. Sometimes a fruit icon will appear at random on the screen, and swallowing it will confer special advantages such as extra points, higher speed, a temporary invulnerability, or the doubling of all one’s points until the next stage starts.

  T.’s days and nights were so steeped in Pac-Mania that he came to see all of life through the filter of this game. It may seem odd, but he formulated what amounted to a whole philosophy of life thanks to a long series of analogies he made while playing. Herewith follow fifteen of T.’s Pac-Man–based maxims:

  (1)In Pac-Man, one endeavors to eat one’s prey and to avoid being eaten by predators. T. observed that in real life as well, some people are stronger than you and some are weaker. Thus life is a pecking order in which everyone eats smaller beings and is eaten by larger ones.

  (2)In Pac-Man, one continually jumps back and forth between being a pursuer and a pursuee; indeed, whenever one swallows a certain type of pill, all of one’s pursuers instantly turn into prey. So T.’s second motto was: to beat an enemy, first you have to weaken it.

  (3)Whenever a ghost is a predator, it can pursue you without stopping, but whenever it is edible, it flees the moment you approach it. T. thus learned that people adjust their behavior to the exigencies of the moment and that even big hoodlums dash for cover whenever they meet their match.

  (4)The more skilled and better-trained you are, the less likely you are to get eaten, and the more likely you are to be able to eat others. A novice, however, no matter how lucky, will never get very far. T. learned from Pac
-Man that in order to excel, you have to work hard.

  (5)T. noticed that in some games he never got any fruit, while in others it was abundant. He thus enjoyed happy occasions on which fortune smiled on him and bitter ones on which he constantly had to fend for himself. He philosophized thus: in life, some people have all the luck while others have none.

  (6)The most flagrant type of unfairness in Pac-Man is the fact that eating a cherry doubles all one’s future points. Thus anyone who has eaten a cherry can get a pretty decent score without being a very strong player, whereas without that boost, you have to take big risks and fight very intensely. T. generalized this observation to the world of people: some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, while others have to sweat their whole lives through.

  (7)Taking risks is indispensable, because otherwise one misses all one’s chances to raise one’s score. Playing in a risk-free way assures you of a mediocre outcome. So T. rediscovered for himself the old proverb nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  (8)Risks don’t always pay off. Anyone who obtains a very high score has taken risks, but players who take risks and who are every bit as skilled as their rivals often die. They pay dearly for their boldness. And so T. discovered how merciless the world is, which is to say that bravery and death go hand in hand.