Literature – psychological, forensic, imaginative – is full of evidence of the weakness of most humans’ recollections. Perhaps the most effective way of summoning up a sense of how badly memory works is to look at one of Salvador Dalí’s most famous paintings – a bleak landscape scattered with disturbing, misshapen objects. He called the painting The Persistence of Memory but that is one of the artist’s characteristic ironies: the real subject is how memory fades and warps. In the background is a westering sky, where the light is in retreat, over an indistinct sea, in which every feature seems to dissolve. Then comes a crumbling cliff, as if eroded, like memory, by the passage of time, and a blank slate, from which every impression has been erased. A dead, truncated tree, from which all life has withered, juts into the middle ground, over an almost traceless shore. Huge chronometers, stopped at different moments, sag and wilt, as if to proclaim the mutability time inflicts, the contradictions it unwinds. Bugs seem to eat away at the casing of another watch in the foreground, while in the centre of the composition a monstrous, menacing shape seems to have been transferred from some evil fantasy by Hieronymus Bosch. Memories do turn into monsters. Time does subvert recall. Recollections decay.
The inefficiencies of human memory bridge the difference between memory and imagination. The difference is not, in any case, very great. Memory, like imagination, is a faculty of seeing something that is not present to our senses. If imagination is, as defined above, the power to see what is not really there, memory enables us to see what is there no longer: it is, in a sense, a specialized form of imagination. Memory works by forming representations of facts and events – which is also what imagination does.
Mnemotechnics, the ancient ‘art of memory’ that Cicero used to deliver speeches in the Roman courts and senate, assigns a vivid image – which may not be a naturally suggestive symbol – to each point the speaker wants to make. A bloody hand might stand for a humdrum point of procedure, a lovely rose or a luscious fruit for the deplorable vices of the speaker’s opponent.32 Observations of how the brain works confirm the contiguity of memory and imagination: as far as we can tell, both ‘happen’ in overlapping areas. Almost identical electrical and chemical activity goes on in the brain when imagination and memory are at work.
Memory and imagination overlap. But some philosophers are reluctant to acknowledge that fact.33 I blame Aristotle. He insisted, with his usual common sense, that memories must refer to the past – and the past, he pointed out, was fundamentally unlike imaginary events because it really happened. Sometimes, however, life traduces common sense. In practice, memories and imaginings fuse.
But memories are closest to imaginings when they are false. Their creative power consists in distorting recollections. Misremembering recasts reality as fantasy, experience as speculation. Every time we misremember something old, we are imagining something new. We mingle and mangle the past with features it never really had. Life would be unbearable otherwise. Daniel Schacter, the Harvard cognitive scientist who monitors what happens in the brain when memories are registered and retrieved, points out that evolution has given us bad memories to spare us from the burden of cluttering our minds. We have to make space in the lumber room, discarding relatively unimportant data to focus on what we really need.34
Women who remember faithfully the real pain of childbirth will be reluctant to repeat it. Socialites and networkers have to filter the names and faces of people they do not need. Soldiers would never return to the trenches, unless they suppressed or romanticized the horrors of war. Old men remember their feats – according to Shakespeare – ‘with advantages’. To these self-interested modifications of memory, we add outright errors. We mistake our imaginatively transformed recollections for literal copies of the events we recall. The memories we think we ‘recover’ in hypnosis or psychotherapy can really be fantasies or distortions, but they have life-changing power for good and ill.
We can live with the quicksilver slips and slidings of our individual memories; but when we share and record them in enduring forms, the outcome is social memory: a received version of the past, which can reach back to times no individual can claim to remember. The same vices raddle it: self-interest, rose-tinting, and sins of transmission. Propaganda engraves falsehood on pedestals, copies it into textbooks, slaps it onto billboards, and insinuates it into ritual. In consequence, social memory is often unresponsive to facts or intractable to historical revision. If psychologists can detect false memory syndrome in individuals, historians can disclose it in entire societies.
Workers in jurisprudence may want to demur. The similarity of memory and imagination subverts the value of legal testimony. For law courts, it would be convenient to divide fanciful versions from real accounts. We know, however, that witness statements rarely tally in practice. The most widely cited text is fictional but true to life: In a Grove, a short story from 1922 by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, inspired one of the great works of cinema, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Witnesses to a murder give mutually contradictory evidence; a shaman releases the testimony of the victim’s ghost. But the reader – or the audience of the movie version – remains unconvinced. Every trial, every comparison of testimony, confirms the unreliability of memory. ‘You were all in gold’, sings a reminiscent, ageing lover in the stage-musical version of Gigi. The lady corrects him: ‘I was dressed in blue.’ ‘Oh yes’, is his rejoinder. ‘I remember it well.’ In our various ways, we all remember equally badly.
Poorly functioning memory helps to make humans outstandingly imaginative. Every false memory is a glimpse of a possible new future that, if we so choose, we can try to fashion for ourselves.
Anticipating Accurately
The distortions of memory enlarge imagination but do not wholly account for it. We also need what the biomedical researcher Robert Arp calls ‘scenario visualization’: a fancy name for what one might more simply call practical imagination. Arp links it with a psychological adaptation that might have arisen – uniquely, he thinks – among our hominin ancestors in the course of making complicated tools, such as spear-throwing devices for hunting.35 Among surviving species, no other creature has a mind’s eye powerful enough to transform a stick into a javelin, and then, by a further imaginative leap, to add a throwing spear.
The test, expressed in these terms, may be unfair: other animals do re-envision sticks: chimpanzees, for instance, are capable of seeing them as means of fishing for termites or guiding floating objects towards a riverbank or smiting nuts or for wielding, for enhanced effect, in an aggression display. If they do not see them as potential spears, that may be because no other animal is as good at throwing as humans typically are.36 Non-human apes, who do relatively little throwing to relatively little effect, find practical uses for sticks, all of which involve some ‘scenario visualization’ or capacity for imaginatively foreseeing a solution. Many animals, especially species with evolutionary pasts as predators or prey, deploy imagination in problem-solving. When a rat finds a way through a maze, it is reasonable to assume that the creature knows where he or she is going. When, by trial and error over a period of weeks, my dog in his youth developed his ingenious (though ultimately unavailing) strategy for catching squirrels (see here), he displayed, in a small way, imaginative foresight.
Dogs also dream. So do cats. You can see them twitching in their sleep, scrabbling with their paws, and making noises consistent with wakeful states of excitement or anxiety. Their eyes revolve in sleep, matching the rapid eye-movement of dreaming humans.37 In dreams pets may be rehearsing or relishing playfulness or reliving or anticipating adventures with prey or other food. This does not mean that when awake they can imagine unreality with the same freedom as human minds exhibit: sleep is a special, untypical form of consciousness that bestows exceptional licence. But in dreaming non-humans do share a visionary property of human minds.
They also help us envisage the circumstances in which our ancestors acquired the power of imagination. Like Arp’s tool-makers, my dog
hunts: indeed, dogs and humans have a long history of hunting together. A canine evolutionary psychologist, if there were such a thing, would identify a lot of behaviour, even in the most placid lapdog, as a product of predation: eviscerating a fluffy toy, mock-fighting in play, scratching at a scent in a rug as if trying to dig out a rabbit warren or foxhole. I do not want to invoke the concept of ‘Man the Hunter’, which feminist critique has impugned (although ‘man’, to me, is a word of common gender, unconfined to either sex). Because hunting is a form of foraging, ‘The Human Forager’ may be a better term in any case. Still, in species that prey and are preyed on, hunting genuinely stimulates the development of imagination in the long run. It does so, I suggest, because hunting and hunted creatures need to evolve an intermediate faculty, which I call anticipation.
If imagination is the power to see what is not there, and memory is the power to see what is there no longer, anticipation is of a similar sort: the property of being able to see what is not there yet, envisaging dangers or opportunities beyond the next rise or behind the next tree trunk, foreseeing where food might be found or peril might lurk. Like memory, therefore, anticipation is a faculty at the threshold of imagination – poised to cross, like an intrusive salesman or an importunate caller. Like memory, again, anticipation jostles with imagination in overlapping regions of the brain. All three faculties conjure absent scenes. Blend bad memory and good anticipation together: imagination results.
Anticipation is probably a product of evolution, a faculty selected for survival and encoded in heritable genes. The discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ – particles in the brains of some species, including our own, that respond similarly when we observe an action or perform it ourselves – excited expectations, about a quarter of a century ago, that they would disclose the roots of empathy and imitation; more remarkably, however, measurements of activity of these ‘suculs’ in macaques demonstrated powers of anticipation: in experiments in 2005, some monkeys only saw people move as if to grasp food; others witnessed the completed action. Both groups responded identically.38
Culture can encourage anticipation, but only if evolution supplies the material to work with. Predator and prey both need it, because each needs to anticipate the movements of the other.
Humans have a lot of it because we need a lot of it. We need more of it than our competitor-species, because we have so little of almost everything else that matters. We are slow in eluding predators, catching prey, and outrunning rivals in the race for food. Because we are clumsy in climbing, a lot of foods are effectively beyond our reach and a lot of refuge is denied us. We are not as sharp-eyed as most rival animals. Our skill in scenting prey or danger, or hearing from afar, has probably declined since hominid times, but is never likely to have matched canids, say, or felines. We have pitiably feeble fangs and claws. Our ancestors had to commit themselves to the hunt despite the way other species with superior equipment dominated the niche: hominin digestive equipment, from jaws to guts, was inadequate to deal with most plants; so carnivorism became compulsory, perhaps as much as three or four million years ago. First as scavengers and gradually, increasingly as hunters, in the line of evolution that produced us, hominins had to find ways of acquiring meat for food.
Evolution gave us few physical advantages to make up for our defects. Bipedalism freed hands and hoisted heads, but our overall agility remains laggard, and by becoming merely feet, our lowest extremities ceased to be available as useful extra hands. The biggest adjustment evolution made in our favour is that no species can challenge our average skill in throwing and in fashioning objects to throw and tools to throw them with; we can therefore deploy missiles against the prey we cannot catch and the predators who can catch us. To aim at moving objects, however, we need keenly developed anticipation, so as to predict how the target is likely to shift. Anticipation is the evolved skill that minimized our deficiencies and maximized our potential. A lot of the arguments that help to explain human anticipation apply to other primates. Indeed, all primates seem well endowed with the same faculty. Some of them even show potential, at least, for flights of imagination recognizably like those of humans. Some paint pictures (like Congo the chimp, whose canvases command thousands of dollars at auction), while some coin new words, as Washoe, the linguistically adept ape of the Yerkes Institute, did when she referred to a Brazil nut as a ‘rock-berry’ in American sign-language, and became the first ape to construct a term for an item her keepers had not labelled. She also devised ‘water birds’ to designate swans even when they were out of water. Other non-human apes invent technologies, introduce cultural practices, and change the way they look by adorning themselves with what seems to be a protean aesthetic sensibility – though they never take these practices anything like as far as humans.
What then makes us the most imaginative primates? In part, no doubt, the selectively superior memories we observe in chimpanzees and gorillas account for the difference: you need, as we have seen, a bad memory to be maximally imaginative. In part, too, we can point to differing levels of attainment in physical prowess: we need most anticipation, among primates, because we have least strength and agility. Evolutionary psychology – that divisive discipline, which pits disdainers against disciples – can supply the rest of the answer.
Uniquely, among extant primates, we humans have a long hunting history behind us. Our dependence on hunted foods is extreme. Chimpanzees hunt, as, to a lesser extent, do bonobos (who used to be classified as ‘dwarf chimpanzees’). But it means much less to them than it does to us. They are stunningly proficient in tracking prey and positioning themselves for the kill, but no one observed them hunting until the 1960s: that may be a trick of the evidence, but the environmental stresses human encroachments inflicted on them may have forced them to develop new food sources by or at that time. In any case, hunting is a marginal activity for chimpanzees, whereas it was the foundation of the viability of human societies for ninety per cent of the time Homo sapiens has existed. Typically, hunting chimps get up to three per cent of the calorific content of their diet from the hunt; a study, on the other hand, of ten typical hunting peoples in tropical environments, similar to those favoured by chimps, yielded hugely higher figures. On average, the selected communities derived nearly sixty per cent of their intake from hunted meat.39
Overwhelmingly, moreover, chimpanzee carnivores focus on a narrow range of species, including wild pigs and small antelopes, with preference, at least in Gombe where most observations have been recorded, for colobus monkeys. Every human community, by contrast, has a rich variety of prey. Chiefly, perhaps, because hunting is still a relatively infrequent practice among chimpanzees, and the young have only occasional opportunities to learn, it takes up to twenty years to train a chimp to be a top-rated hunter, able to head off the fleeing colobus or block his route to trap him; novices begin, like beaters in humans’ hunting, by springing the trap – scaring the prey into flight. Human youngsters, by contrast, can become proficient after a few expeditions.40 Even in the course of their limited experience as hunters you can literally see chimpanzees cultivating a faculty of anticipation, estimating the likely path of prey and planning and concerting efforts to channel and block it with all the elegance of an American football defence tracking a runner or receiver. Hunting hones anticipation for every creature that practises it. But it is not surprising that Homo sapiens has a more developed faculty of anticipation than other, comparable creatures – even more than our most closely related surviving species.
Highly developed powers of anticipation are likely to precede fertile imaginations. When we anticipate, we imagine prey or predator behind the next obstacle. We guess in advance the way a threat or chance will spring. But imagination is more than anticipation. It is, in part, the consequence of a superabundant faculty of anticipation, because, once one can envisage enemies or victims or problems or outcomes ahead of their appearance, one can, presumably, envisage other, ever less probable objects, ending with what is unexperi
enced or invisible or metaphysical or impossible – such as a new species, a previously unsampled food, unheard music, fantastic stories, a new colour, or a monster, or a sprite, or a number greater than infinity, or God. We can even think of Nothing – perhaps the most defiant leap any imagination has ever made, since the idea of Nothing is, by definition, unexampled in experience and ungraspable in reality. That is how our power of anticipation leads us, through imagination, to ideas.
Imagination reaches beyond the range accessible to anticipation and memory; unlike normal products of evolution, it exceeds the demands of survival and confers no competitive edge. Culture stimulates it, partly by rewarding it and partly by enhancing it: we praise the bard, pay the piper, fear the shaman, obey the priest, revere the artist. We unlock visions with dance and drums and music and alcohol and excitants and narcotics. I hope, however, that readers will agree to see imagination as the outcome of two evolved faculties in combination: our bad memories, which distort experience so wildly that they become creative; and our overdeveloped powers of anticipation, which crowd our minds with images beyond those we need.
Any reader who remains unconvinced that memory and anticipation constitute imagination may like to try a thought experiment: try imagining what life would be like without them. Without recalling effects of memory, or looking ahead to a future bereft of memory, you cannot do it. Your best recourse is to refer – again, deploying memory – to a fictional character deficient in both faculties. To Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd, ‘memories were an encumbrance and anticipation a superfluity’. In consequence, his mental and emotional life was impoverished, without real empathy for others or admirable accomplishments for himself.
Thinking with Tongues
Out of Our Minds Page 4
