Believing

by Michael McGuire

  A reasonable guess is that among our ancestors, attributions worked very much as they do today. But differences are also likely. For example, two hundred thousand years ago, the range and variety of representations of others’ behaviors and natural events were probably limited, compared to forty-five thousand years ago or today.

  COMPUTATIONS AGAIN

  Earlier in the chapter, it was suggested that the refinement of already-requisite systems didn’t necessarily require increased computational capacities or energy expenditure by the brain for successful group living and mastering novel demographic challenges. Challenges include the migration of our ancestors into new environments, which led to the development of new technologies, increased population density, competition among groups, and increased within-group social complexity.32 The refinement of brain reading and attributing capacities is compatible with this possibility. Mirroring may be an exception at least in crowded environments, such as a cocktail party or a political rally, where there is an increased chance of observing a variety of others and their behaviors leading perhaps to “mirroring overload” among observers.

  The possibility of no increase in computational requirements may seem unlikely. But a possible explanation may be found in the gradual refinement and accumulation of beliefs and models that accurately predict outcomes. Crafting stone tools provides an example. Compared to the first attempts, later attempts would benefit from previous mistakes and learned efficiencies. In turn, craftspeople would more often select appropriate stones and apply efficient stone-chipping techniques.

  An analogy can be made with athletic performance over the last fifty years in the sports of track and field. Literally every record has been broken, often significantly. It is improbable that these accomplishments are due to genetic change over a period of fewer than three generations. Rather, if the changes haven’t been due to performance-enhancing drugs, they are probably a consequence of improved training techniques, training intensity, increased competition, expanded rewards for success, and increased numbers of participants. In effect, the requisite capacities were present fifty years ago. The demographics and challenges of the sports changed. The breaking of records followed.

  A second analogy is to today’s computers. A small cohort of talented individuals—every generation has some—was responsible for their invention and development. Once developed, their uses have expanded dramatically, even among individuals who understand very little about their inner workings. Their myriad applications have led to striking changes in the ways people socialize, conduct business, access and transmit information, and entertain themselves. All this has happened in only two generations without any likely change in the overall intelligence or computational capacities of Homo sapiens.

  Of course it is possible to ask: Does it really matter if increased creativity and social complexity were contingent on an increase in intelligence or the refinement of requisite capacities? My answer is yes, it does. The refinement scenario is easier to reconcile with the amazing success of migrating groups to very different parts of the world.

  My research on vervet monkeys began in Saint Kitts. Subsequently, I traveled to West Africa, the likely spot from which centuries earlier the first vervets departed to the Americas on ships carrying slaves. Differences between vervets living in Saint Kitts and their West African counterparts might reveal changes that have taken place over multiple generations of separation. I hired two guides for the search. A canoe was rented and the three of us started upstream. Days one and two of the trip were unproductive. No vervets were sighted. On day three, we arrived at a small village.

  The villagers—some of the children had never seen a “white man”—were friendly but cautious. We disembarked from our canoe and were escorted to an open space in the center of group of huts. The chief of the village—I’ll call him Chief Fred—greeted us. Following several rituals, including drinking a hideous-tasting soup apparently to test if I could be trusted, the chief, I, and one of the guides who was an accomplished linguist talked. (The chief’s statements below have been edited for brevity and clarity.)

  During the conversation I asked him if a missionary lived in the village.

  “Years ago, a missionary came to live with us. He advised us about how to behave and how to respect and worship his God. He promised that if we behaved the way his God wanted, we would be rewarded in this life and after. Our children would flourish, our food supply, which was often uncertain, would improve and stabilize, and we would find an inner peace. We believed his teachings and became Christians. We were baptized.”

  “Have events unfolded as the missionary said?”

  “No. We soon encountered several years of famine. In another year, one-third of the village died because of disease. We sent the missionary out of the village.”

  “What’s happened since?”

  “We have devised our own rules. Children, mothers, and elders are fed first. Parents are responsible for their children. When we need to build a new hut, everyone participates. Those who don’t cooperate are sent away. We are now healthier, we eat better, and there has been very little disease.”

  “What happened to the missionary’s God?”

  “Some of the elders still believe in him—the missionary was here fifteen years.”

  “Do you have another god?”

  “No. Or maybe yes. Our god is our ability to survive and remain healthy. This we have solved for ourselves. The missionary’s God is not for us.”

  Stories are accounts and explanations of personal experiences, events, imaginings, and hopes, like those of Chief Fred and the members of his village. Models identify patterns and explain events. We create stories and models and live in the world they record and explain.

  Early forms of stories date back perhaps two hundred thousand years. This date is selected because stories usually require language, and language has an estimated history of two hundred thousand years.1 Models, however, don’t necessarily require language: a person lacking language could show others how to locate tubers, make stone tools, and catch animals. Models, thus, are likely to have a longer history than stories.

  Whatever the historical details, the main focus of this chapter is not on the earliest moments of stories and models. About those moments, there are very few data. Rather, their possible histories are picked up approximately forty-five thousand years ago. At that time, language was established, and it’s highly likely that both simple and sophisticated models were in use. Modern humans had migrated over much of the globe and had addressed multiple novel challenges. As they did, a reasonable guess is that their brains moved continually toward narrative and explanation—that is, they created stories and models. These would increasingly influence what they experienced, believed, and how they acted.

  Migration to different areas meant that stories and models differed from one location to another. Many would have their origins in the unique demographic challenges that groups encountered. Hunting techniques, food preparation, shelter type, water crossing, social organization, and creation myths, all of which served as in-group markers,2 were their likely topics. Together they would contribute to cultural myths, update the tool kits used for daily living, and stimulate cognitive and emotional explorations of imaginary worlds. By forty-five thousand years ago, it’s likely that the supernatural had its own library of stories and was modeled in multiple ways.

  Both stories and models exist as representations in the physical brain. That said, nothing about either of them suggests that they are products of specific evolved brain systems. Rather, they are products of multiple systems, such as memory, imaginings, brain reading, mirroring, attribution, and intuition. Moreover, the contributing systems are rarely the same for any two stories. This explains in part their variety and hints at their multiple social uses.3 Models also are products of multiple contributing systems. However they differ from stories in that there are mostly innate and mostly learned models.

  Most likely, stories and models
emerged as bread-and-butter guidelines for daily life much as is the case today. Likely also, they both narrowed and widened divides and gave structure to often chaotic experiences and disconnected bits of information, much as they do today. There is nothing surprising here: the brain has a strong tendency to organize and store information as beliefs, stories, and models.

  STORIES

  As with beliefs, stories serve multiple uses. They give structure and meaning to lives and events. Tellers and listeners are provided places in their social, physical, and metaphysical worlds. We relate to others through stories. They are platforms for relationships and reveal the intentions of their authors and their audiences.4 They can serve as a form of knowledge, gossip, and rumor as well as a medium for persuasion.5 They are the history books for illiterate people and the basis for much folk psychology. Their content is limitless and they often become beliefs.

  The reasons for telling stories vary as much as their uses. Personal stories deal with the lives of those who tell them, family, how others believe and behave, and weird happenings. They often entertain listeners and focus attention on the storyteller. When they do, they are satisfying to those who tell them.6 At times, they are told to change the direction of a confusing or an irritating conversation.

  Yet, as important as they are, personal stories have no life of their own unless they are told again and again.7 They are highly vulnerable to extinction. As an example, take the fate of the stories you heard from your grandparents when you were young. As an adult, some may be recalled and told to your children. Very likely, fewer will be heard by your grandchildren. Like languages that become extinct and thereby erode knowledge, so too for stories that are no longer told.8 While this may seem an obvious point, it has troubling implications: when stories become extinct, part of the brain’s library of its owner’s personal history and culture is lost.

  There is a further factor that contributes to extinction. Personal stories are often filled with a teller’s emotions. Memories of emotions tend to fade and lose their valence while cognitive details tend to have a longer life. Often a listener can recall many of the details of another’s story but less of the teller’s or his own emotions when a story was told. There are, of course, partial remedies to this situation. Before printing, there were group storytellers, essentially keepers of important group-relevant stories who often infused emotion into their tales. With printing and historical scholarship, the preservation of past events improved, yet emotions often failed to find a place on the printed page. Moreover, even with printing, preservation of the past is far from complete. For example, how many histories of the United States discuss the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy that ignited intense feeling among the population of New England in 1798?9 Or how many note that during the nineteenth century in both England and the United States, there was a thriving profession of spiritual photography depicting images of dead loved ones who had returned from other worlds?10

  Not unexpectedly, many factors influence how stories are structured and told. Details may be condensed or elaborated. Events may be skewed with the intention of creating a favorable impression among listeners. At times what is told is knowingly crafted to hide a teller’s motive, which has a distinct fMRI neural signature.11 Stories may be inaccurate because of a teller’s self-deception. Or inaccuracy may be due to the effects of aging.12 There are also unintended editing effects when stories travel from brain to brain: there is a parlor game in which people sit in a circle and, as accurately as they can, whisper one to another a story that begins and ends at the head of the circle. After the story has traveled around the circle, it is often unrecognizable from its original version. There are variations, of course. For example, religious stories and myths are partially counterfactual and partially counterintuitive, which, as noted earlier, may make them easier to remember.13

  Telling a personal story involves communicating one’s experiences in ways that others can understand. This requires translating one form of information to another form. This often works successfully. For example, we may flinch on hearing of a terrifying incident, but the point to note is that we are flinching at what is communicated, not at the incident itself. The communication has activated our emotions.

  Do stories of one’s experiences accurately depict events? Probably not. Why? Because personal experiences rarely occur in organized ways. Stories of these experiences involve post hoc reconstructions that give them structure and improve their likelihood of being understood. Said another way, the process of turning an experience into narrative assures that the narrative will differ from experience no matter how serious a storyteller’s efforts to communicate accurately.14 Writers, perhaps because of the relatively slow pace of writing compared to speaking, are particularly sensitive to this point. Emerson, Melville, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, Lawrence, and Borges all struggled to overcome translation obstacles but never did so to their full satisfaction.15 Assessing how an audience might respond to a story is also a factor: certain stories are either highly modified or not told to certain ethnic, religious, professional, or young audiences.

  The other half of storytelling is that a listener must interpret what he has heard. Understanding a storyteller’s intended interpretation is contingent on both the teller and a listener sharing similar views. Telling a friend of my frustration while waiting forty-five minutes to deposit a check at a local bank will be understood provided my friend can put himself in my shoes (Theory of brain) and imagine his own frustration in a similar situation. A listener’s “I don’t get it” signals the absence of a shared view.

  Jokes—they too are stories—provide an informative example of shared views between teller and listener. Certain jokes are effective when the storyline entices the listener to expect one ending but the story provides another. For example:

  A man is driving down a country road and sees a farmer walking with a three-legged pig. He stops his car, approaches the farmer, and asks: “Is that your pig?”

  “Yes,” replies the farmer.

  “He has only three legs,” comments the man.

  “Right,” replies the farmer.

  “How did he lose his leg?” asks the man.

  “Let me tell you about this pig,” the farmer replies. “Last year, when my wife and I were asleep, a lamp tipped over in the house and started a fire. The pig detected the fire, broke through the back door, raced to our bedroom, and woke us up. We’re alive today because of that pig. And just last month I was alone on the farm when the tractor tipped over and pinned me to the ground. The circulation to my legs was cut off. I thought I was a goner. The pig assessed the situation, raced to town, alerted the police, and they came and rescued me. I have my legs and can walk today because of that pig.”

  “That’s amazing. What a pig!” replies the man. “But you haven’t told me how the pig lost its leg.”

  To which the farmer replies: “You wouldn’t want to eat a good pig like that all at once.”

  The joke works because the structure and content of the story suggest another ending, such as that the pig lost its leg in an accident or was born with one leg missing. Nothing in the story hints that the farmer might eat the pig and especially so, given its exceptional qualities or, worse yet, eat only part of the pig from time to time. In effect, the anticipated ending on the part of the listener is mistaken. It’s the recognition of the mistake that is the basis for laughter.16

  Multiple factors influence how stories are created. Soon-to-be-discussed models deal with how the world works, and they serve to organize and structure experience as well as discard irrelevant bits of information. Stories often reflect their organization and structure. Mirroring may serve to initiate a story in response to another’s state: for example, observing a person in pain may remind the observer of a pain-related story. Attributions often provide story content. And stories and models can contribute to attributions and brain reading. Most often they reduce divides, although they can widen or render them indeterminate. On the other ha
nd, intentional divide widening is a favorite pastime of political activists and competitors who are intent on discrediting others.

  Stories are associated with action. People who believe their own stories often view them as causing their behavior. The stories of others may work the same way. Those about gold and fortunes to be had in places like Timbuktu have been associated with action among those who heard and believed them.17 In effect, stories have their own authority, and it’s the brains of both tellers and listeners that create and grant the authority.

  How might the preceding points apply to forty-five thousand years ago? The likely answers are that stories increasingly contributed to the symbolic and technological complexity of the period, furthered social bonding, and intensified both in-group and out-group identification. They would codify much of the expanding range of human experience that accompanied migration, technological and cultural change, and increasingly sophisticated socialization. This suggests that there should be a positive correlation between the age of a culture and the number of stories known to its members—a kind of continually enlarging encyclopedia of the events and experiences of daily life, even though simultaneously some stories were becoming extinct. Many of these stories would contain messages about what to do or not to do or about heroes. Surely our ancestors had the equivalents of current stories such as the little boy who cried wolf, Paul Bunyan, and werewolves. Surely also there were stories about gods and the workings of mysterious forces of the universe.

  MODELS

  In the most general sense, models are anything used to represent something else. They may be likened to explanations, formulas, archetypes, or templates about how the experienced and supernatural worlds work. Unlike many stories, models often are free of emotion.

  There is an extensive catalogue of model types: metaphysical, mathematical, logical, economic, data, and so forth. None of these are topics here. What follows is a discussion of models that we use in daily life—that is, models that people believe or that they use even if they are not believed because they are all that is available. They are key ingredients in the tool kits for daily living, ranging from how to fry an egg to managing a business efficiently. Rarely is a single model adequate to fully explain a phenomenon. Rather, several models are often present dealing with the same evidence or contingencies—for example, models of social behavior are often used to explain economic behavior and vice versa.18 There are models that are mostly innate and those that are mostly learned.