Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  A thought experiment will help. If I try to envisage the most objective standpoint accessible to my mind, I come up with a sort of cosmic crow’s nest, where a lookout with godlike powers of vision can see the entire planet, and the whole history of every species on it, in a single glance, from an immense distance of time and space, like the onlooker who, in The Aleph, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, perceived all the events of every creature’s past simultaneously. How would such a privileged observer assess the difference between us and other animals? The cosmic lookout, I suspect, would say, ‘Basically you’re all the same – inefficient, short-lived arrangements of cells. But I notice some odd things about you humans. You do most of what all the other species do, but you do a lot more of it. As far as I can tell, you have more thoughts, tackle more tasks, penetrate more places, adopt more foods, and elaborate more political and social forms, with more stratification, more specialization, and more economic activities. You develop more lifeways, more rites, more technologies, more buildings, more aesthetic fancies, more modifications of the environment, more consumption and production, more arts and crafts, more means of communication; you devise more culture, and – in short – turn over more ideas with more speed and variety than any other creature I can see. As far as I can tell, you put more time and effort than other animals into self-contemplation, the identification of values, the attempt to generalize or analyse; you devote vast mental resources to telling stories previously untold, composing images of what no one ever saw, and making music no ear ever heard before. By comparison with most of your competitor-species you are torpid, weak, tailless, deficient in prowess, and poorly fitted with fangs and claws (though you are, luckily, good at throwing missiles and have agile hands). Yet, despite your ill-endowed, ill-shaped bodies, your capacity for responding to problems, exceeding minimal solutions, and rethinking your futures has given you a surprising degree of mastery on your planet.’

  These observations might not make the lookout admire us. He or she would notice the uniqueness of every species and might not think ours was of an order superior to all the others’. But though we may not be unique in being innovative and creative (that would be another self-congratulatory claim, belied by evidence), our power to innovate and create seems unique in range and depth and abundance. In these respects, the differences between humans and non-humans carry us beyond culture, of which, as we shall see, many species are capable, to the uniquely human practice we call civilization, in which we reshape the world to suit ourselves.18

  ‌Becoming Imaginative

  How could our brains have helped us to this improbable, unparalleled destination? The brain, like every evolved organ, is the way it is because conditions in the environment have favoured the survival and transmission of some genetic mutations over others. Its function is to respond to the world outside it – to solve the practical problems the world poses, to meet the exigencies it demands, to cope with the traps it lays and the constraints it tangles. The repertoire of thoughts that belongs in this book is of another kind, a different order. They constitute the sort of creativity enchantingly called ‘fantasia’ in Italian, with resonances of fantasy that exceed what is real. They create worlds other than the ones we inhabit: worlds unverifiable outside our minds and unrealized in existing experience (such as refashioned futures and virtual pasts), or unrealizable (such as eternity or heaven or hell) with resources that we know, from experience or observation, that we command. V. S. Ramachandran, a neurologist who has hunted valiantly for differences between humans and other apes, puts it like this: ‘How can a three-pound mass of jelly … imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos?’19

  There are two traditional answers: one popular in scientific tradition, the other in metaphysics. The strictly scientific answer is that quantity becomes quality when a critical threshold is crossed: humans’ brains, according to this line of thinking, are so much bigger than those of other apes that they become different in kind. It is not necessary for the brain to have a specialized function for creativity or for the generation of ideas: those events ensue from the sheer abundance of thinking of more mundane kinds that emanates from big brains.

  On the other hand, the metaphysical answer is to say that creativity is a function of an immaterial faculty, commonly called a mind or a rational soul, which is unique to humans, or of which humans possess a unique kind.

  Either answer, though not both, may be true. But neither seems plausible to everyone. To accept the first, we need to be able to identify the threshold beyond which brains leap from responsiveness to creativity. To accept the second, we have to be metaphysically inclined. Mind, according to sceptics, is just a fancy word for functions of the brain that neurology cannot quite pin down in the present state of knowledge.

  So how can we improve on the traditional answers? I propose reformulating the question to make it less vague, specifying the exact thought-generating function we want to explain. The term that best denotes what is special about human thinking is probably ‘imagination’ – which covers fantasia, innovation, creativity, re-crafting old thoughts, having new ones, and all the fruits of inspiration and ecstasy. Imagination is a big, daunting word, but it corresponds to an easily grasped reality: the power of seeing what is not there.

  Historians, like me, for instance, have to reconfigure in imagination a vanished past. Visionaries who found religions must bring to mind unseen worlds. Storytellers must exceed experience to recount what never really happened. Painters and sculptors must, as Shakespeare said, ‘surpass the life’ and even photographers must capture unglimpsed perspectives or rearrange reality if they are going to produce art rather than record. Analysts must abstract conclusions otherwise invisible in the data. Inventors and entrepreneurs must think ahead beyond the world they inhabit to one they can remake. Statesmen and reformers must rethink possible futures and devise ways to realize better ones and forestall worse. At the heart of every idea worth the name is an act of imagination – experience excelled or transcended, reality reprocessed to generate something more than a snapshot or echo.

  So what makes humans super-imaginative? Three faculties, I suggest, are the constituents of imagination. Two are unmistakably products of evolution. On the third, the jury is out.

  First comes memory – one of the mental faculties we call on for inventiveness, starting, whenever we think or make something new, with what we remember of whatever we thought or made before. Most of us want our memories to be good – accurate, faithful to a real past, reliable as foundations for the future. But surprisingly, perhaps, bad memory turns out to be what helps most in the making of imagination.

  ‌Remembering Wrongly

  Unsurprisingly, in most tests of how human thinking compares with that of other animals, humans score highly: after all, we devise the tests. Humans are relatively good at thinking about more than one thing at a time, divining what other creatures might be thinking about, and handling large repertoires of humanly selected symbols.20 Memory, however, is one of the kinds of thinking at which, even by human standards, other animals can rival or outstrip us. Remembering information of relevant kinds is one of the most striking faculties in which non-humans can excel. Beau, my dog, beats me – metaphorically, not in the sense Descartes envisaged – in retaining memories of people and routes. He can reconstruct, unbidden, any walk he has ever been on. After six years without seeing an old friend of mine, he recognized her on her next visit, rushing off to present her with a toy that she had given him on the previous occasion. Beau makes me willing to believe Homer’s story of how only the family dog recognized Odysseus when the hero returned from his wanderings. He retrieves toys or bones unerringly, while I waste my time seeking misfiled notes and errant reading glasses.

  Anyone who has a pet or a non-human work-partner can match stories of their enviable powers of memory. Yet most people still echo Robert Burns’s pitying address to his ‘wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’r
ous’ mouse, whom, he thought, ‘the present only toucheth’, as if the little beast were frozen in time and isolated from past and future.21 But this sort of distinction between brutish and human memory is probably another example of unjustified human self-congratulation. We do not have to rely on anecdotal stories of dogs of suspected shagginess. Controlled studies confirm that in some respects our memories are feeble by other animals’ standards.

  Scrub-jays, for instance, know what food they hide and remember where and when they hide it. Even without food-inducements, rats retrace routes in complex labyrinths, whereas I get muddled in the simplest garden mazes. They recall the order in which they encounter smells. Clearly, therefore, they pass tests of what specialists call episodic memory: the supposedly human prerogative of travelling back, as it were, in time by recalling experiences in sequence.22 Clive Wynne, the apostle of non-human minds, whose fame is founded on the vividness with which he can imagine what it would be like to be a bat, has summarized some relevant experiments. Pigeons, he points out, retain for months, without degradation, memories of hundreds of arbitrary visual patterns associable with food. They home in on their own lofts after long absences. Bees recall the whereabouts of food, and how to find it in a maze. Chimpanzees retrieve from apparently casually selected locations the stones they use as anvils for cracking nuts. In laboratories, challenged to perform for rewards, they remember the correct order in which to press keys on a computer screen or keyboard. And ‘vampire bats can remember who has given them a blood donation in the past and use that information in deciding whether to respond to a petitioner who is begging for a little blood’.23

  Belittlers of non-human memory can insist that many non-human animals’ responses are no better, as evidence of thinking, than the fawning and cowering of Pavlov’s dogs, who, back in the 1890s, started to salivate when they saw their feeder, not – according to the theory that became notorious as ‘behaviourism’ – because they remembered him but because the sight of him triggered psychic associations. The apparent memory feats of rats, bats, pigeons, and apes – any surviving behaviourist might claim – more resemble conditioned reflexes or reactions to stimuli than recollections retrieved from a permanent store. Apart from prejudice, we have no good grounds for making such a distinction. St Augustine, whom I revere as, in most other respects, a model of clear thinking, was a behaviourist avant la lettre. He thought that a horse could retrieve a path when he was following it, as each step triggered the next, but could not recall it back in his stable. Even the saint, however, cannot have been sure about that. No experiment can verify the assumption. Augustine’s only basis for making it was a religious conviction: that God would hardly condescend to give horses minds resembling those of His chosen species. Equally dogmatic successors today make a similar mistake. Most psychologists have stopped believing that human behaviour can be controlled by conditioning: why retain the same discredited belief in trying to understand other animals? For material directly comparable with human experience we can turn to experiments with chimpanzees and gorillas. They resemble us in relevant ways. We can access their own accounts of their behaviour. We can converse with them – within the limited sphere our common interests permit – in humanly devised language. They do not have mouths and throats formed to make the same range of sounds that figure in humans’ spoken languages but non-human apes are remarkably good at learning to use symbolic systems – that is, languages – of other kinds. By following examples and heeding instruction, just as human learners do or should do if they are good students, apes can deploy many of the manual signs and representative letters or images that humans use.

  Panzee, for example, is an exceptionally dexterous symbol-juggling female chimpanzee at Georgia State University. She communicates with her carers via cards, which she brandishes, and keyboards, which she taps to access particular signs. In a typical experiment, while Panzee watched, researchers hid dozens of succulent fruits, toy snakes, balloons, and paper shapes. Without prompting, except by being shown the symbol for each object in turn, Panzee remembered where the little treasures were and could guide keepers to them. Even after relatively long intervals of up to sixteen hours she recalled the locations of more than ninety per cent. No ‘cheating’ was involved. Panzee had never had to obtain food by pointing to places outside her enclosure before. Her keepers could provide no help, conscious or unconscious, because they were not privy in advance to any information about the hiding-places. Panzee, therefore, did more than show that chimps have an instinct for finding food in the wild: she made it clear that they – or at least she – can remember unique events. As well as displaying what we might call retrospective prowess, she displays a kind of prospective skill, applying her memory to advantage in predicting the future by foreseeing where food will be found.24 In another intriguing experiment, using her keyboard, she guided a carer to the whereabouts of concealed objects – peanuts, for preference, but including non-comestible items in which she had no active interest. The head of her lab, Charles Menzel, says, ‘Animal memory systems have always been underestimated – the upper limits are not really known.’25

  Among Panzee’s rival rememberers is Ayuma, a quick-witted chimpanzee in a research facility in Kyoto. She became famous in 2008 as the star of a TV show, beating human contestants in a computerized memory game. Participants had to memorize numerals that appeared on a screen for a tiny fraction of a second. Ayuma recalled eighty per cent accurately. Her nine human rivals all scored zero.26 With practice humans can ape Ayuma.27 Evidence in chimpanzees’ favour, however, has continued to accumulate. If one discounts uncharacteristic prodigies, typical humans can remember sequences of seven numbers; other apes can remember more and can learn them faster. Ape Memory is a video game for members of our species who want to try to reach simian levels of excellence. King, a gorilla resident of Monkey Jungle, Miami, Florida, inspired a version called Gorilla Memory. King is good at counting. He communicates with humans by waving and pointing to icons printed on cards. When primatologists picked on him for memory tests he was thirty years old – too well stricken with maturity, one might think, to be receptive in learning new tricks. But he knew human peculiarities from long experience. He showed that he could master past events in time, arraying them in order. With a level of performance significantly well above chance, he could recall each of three foods and could reverse, when asked to do so, the order in which he ate them.28 He can connect individuals with foods they have given him, even when his keepers have forgotten who provided which treat, just as my dog can associate, in memory, his toys with the benefactors who bestowed them. Both King and Beau would, on these showings, make far better witnesses than most humans at a criminal identity parade. A team tested King by performing acts that were new to him, including physical jerks and charades – pretending to steal a phone, or playing ‘air guitar’. When they asked King who had done which performance, he got the answer right sixty per cent of the time. The score may seem modest – but try getting humans to emulate it.29

  Chimps can locate memories in time, arrange them in order, and use them to make predictions. The work of Gema Martin-Ordas at Leipzig Zoo stands out among experiments that have challenged claims that such faculties are uniquely human. In 2009, eight chimpanzees and four orang-utans watched her use a long stick to reach a banana. She then hid the stick and another, too short for the job, in different locations for the apes to find. Three years later, with no promptings in the interval, the sticks returned to their former places. A banana was suitably installed, too. Would the apes be able to get at it? All the participants, except for one orang-utan, recalled the location of the right stick without effort. Other apes, who had not taken part in the previous exercise, were unable to do so. To capture memories and store them for future use, therefore, is part of the cognitive equipment humans share with other apes.30

  A more sophisticated experiment designed by psychologist Colin Camerer and primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa tested chimps’ and humans’ ability
to project predictions from remembered events. Subjects from both species played a game in which they observed other individuals’ moves on a touch screen and then had an opportunity to win rewards by predicting what they would choose next. Chimps proved, on average, better at detecting the patterns than their human rivals, apparently because they could remember longer sequences of moves. The game tests for superior memory and strategic capability: how well the players recall opponent’s selections; how well they detect patterns in choice-making; how cleverly they make their own predictions. The results suggest that some chimps, at least, excel some humans in these skills.31

  So Edgar was wrong, in the present connection, to belittle non-human intellects. I do not mean to suggest that human memories are incapable of prodigious feats. Preachers, performers, and examinees can often parade stupendous amounts of data. Vaudeville acts formerly hauled vast chains of facts before audiences, like Mr Memory in Hitchcock’s version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. There are idiot-savants who can reel off the contents of the telephone directory. In some comparable functions, however, where memory is in play, non-human animals outclass us. Most people recoil when you tell them that human memories are not the best on our planet, but it is worth pausing to think about this counterintuitive notion. Humans have almost always assumed that any faculty that might justify us in classifying ourselves apart from other beasts must be a superior faculty. But maybe we should have been looking at what is inferior – at least, inferior in some respects – in us. Memory is not in every respect humans’ most glorious gift, compared with that of other animals. Poverty, unreliability, deficiency, and distortions corrode it. We may not like to acknowledge the fact, because it is always hard to forfeit self-regard. We prize our memories and take pride in them because they seem so precious for our sense of self – something we are only just beginning to concede to other animals.