Signs And Signals

A little while back, I mentioned that the topic of how the mind and consciousness comes about fascinates me. I’ve just read three books on this in quick succession, and I highly recommend all of them. 

First up is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. As I said then, it’s an absolute joy of a book. He examines, with a not inconsiderable wit, how people react to their lives. The opening sentence reads: "Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet and split infinitives". He goes on to explain the little-known fact that psychologists (he is one) also take a vow, and that is to publish, at some point in their professional lives, a book that contains the sentence: "The human being is the only animal that…".

Stumbling On Happiness is Gilbert’s stab at completing the psychologists’ sentence, and he does it with: "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future". As he says:

"Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer holiday, or turns down a toffee apple because it already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

He goes on to illustrate the evidence for his thesis with both experimental data and illuminating vignettes on how we perceive, and attempt to create, the state of happiness.

Next up is Richard Wiseman’s Quirkology, subtitled "the curious science of everyday lives". Again, lots of entertaining references to actual research that has thrown up surprising facts about the ways in which people behave. He closes the book with a neat piece of metaresearch: he asked people to rate factoids derived from the studies described in the book to identify those factoids that were most likely to provoke good conversation at dinner parties. He lists the resulting "top ten". My two favourites are:

• Women van drivers are more likely than others to take more than ten items through the express lane in a supermarket, break speed limits, and park in restricted areas.
• People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog faeces and not washed, than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer.

As you see, the book lives up to its title, but in with all the bizarre research are some fascinating findings about the way we behave. One negative – there is no index, which means that you will be frustrated trying to track down that precise reference to the Thirteen Club. You’ll have to trawl through the footnotes instead.

Lastly, Chris Frith’s Making Up The Mind, subtitled "how the brain creates our mental world". Frith is a professor in neuropsychology. Like Gilbert and Wisemen, he is an entertaining writer, with the knack of explaining things well. He uses the device of having an imaginary professor of English comment on what he states, and the resulting dialogue is often wry and ironic. He makes the point that his book is not actually a theory of consciousness, instead:

…rather than writing about consciousness, I have emphasized how much my brain knows and does without my being aware of it. My brain makes me afraid of things that I am not aware of seeing and can control complex limb movements without my knowing what I am doing. There seems very little left for consciousness to do. So, rather than asking how subjective experience can arise for activity in neurons, I ask the question, "What is consciousness for?" Or more particularly, "Why does my brain make me experience myself as a free agent?" My assumption is that we get some advantage from experiencing ourselves as free agents. So the question is: "What is this advantage?" My answer is, for the moment, pure speculation.

As I say,  all three books are well worth reading. Sometimes you come across the same data being analysed by more than one of the authors, and that either illuminates a slightly different facet, or reinforces the same conclusions that can be drawn. All three books have extensive footnotes and references to the original research material.

As a bonus, Gilbert’s book comes with a P.S. section which has further entertainment value in a Q & A with Professor Gilbert, a short biography, "why I write", and his top ten favourite electric guitarists. The Q&A is a particular joy. My favourites:

Would you like to live in the eternal now? No. I enjoy remembering the past and imagining the future. My ability to do these things is among nature’s greatest gifts to me, so why would I want to get rid of it? Anyone who wants to live in the moment should have been born a mosquito.

Do you think that we have lost some primal ignorance that would have kept us happy? No, no, no. Did I mention no? Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past.Dead wrong. Things are better today than at any time in human history. Our primal ignorance is what keeps us whacking each other over the head with sticks, and not what allows us to paint a Mona Lisa or to design a space shuttle. The ‘primal ignorance that keeps us happy’ gives rise to obesity and global warming, not antibiotics or the Magna Carta. If human kind flourishes rather than flounders over the next thousand years, it will be because we fully embraced learning and reason, and not because we surrendered to some fantasy about returning to a world that never really was.