Thumbs, Toes, and Tears

by Chip Walter

  Why was the bird orange? he was asked. Joe thought for a bit and then said he wasn’t sure, just something he had come across, maybe a Baltimore oriole, he ventured. He literally couldn’t say because he could not articulate the image that had been flashed to the right side of his brain. His reaction was reminiscent of Alice’s remark in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass when she says, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!” But he was trying mightily to say what they were, to come up with a reasonable explanation for the image he had just drawn, an action that to him frankly must have appeared completely crazy.

  Based on experiments like this, Gazzaniga has developed a theory about how our minds work and the role the brain’s speech centers play in it all. Joe taps the verbal side of his brain to explain behaviors set in motion by other nonverbal thinking he does but can’t fully comprehend because the two hemispheres aren’t directly connected by the corpus collosum. But since his behavior reveals that he is clearly having these experiences (the image of a bird flashed to the right hemisphere of his brain), how does he explain them? Basically he wings it.

  “The left brain constructs a story to help explain the actual behaviors that are pouring out of the right brain,” says Gazzaniga. “It ties it [the behavior] into a coherent whole.”23

  Why would Joe fabricate these elaborate stories to explain his behavior? Basically Gazzaniga’s answer is: because he can, and he must, to make sense of his experience. And, says Gazzaniga, this is something all humans do.

  His thinking follows along these lines. We have modules in the brain, clusters of neurons that have evolved over time to serve different purposes. They sense danger, react to fear, help solve problems, send and receive messages. These modules are like the additions built onto an old house—a dormer here, another bedroom, an expanded kitchen. All of these cerebral embellishments serve their purpose, and they all experience the world in their own ways, yet they are all also interconnected. They process information and experience feelings. In a sense they are multiple minds, each with its own peculiar slant on the world—aural, visual, emotional, intellectual, visceral. But they have one shortcoming: They cannot articulate what they are experiencing because they are not verbal—they evolved before language did. However, says Gazzaniga, the more recently evolved, vocal part of our brain can speak for them and their experiences, and for the actions and experiences of others. It may not speak accurately about them, but it can speak, and it does. He calls this part of the brain “the interpreter.”

  And so throughout the day we act and feel based on the experiences of other unconscious parts of our brain, and as a result we may grow elated or depressed or suspicious without any clear reason. The sources of those feelings could be as varied as cloudy skies, a favorite song, an old memory, an unconscious but crippling fear, even the body language of our boss or spouse. These ripple into our conscious mind, and the interpreter makes up stories to explain them to ourselves or to others. It translates them into verbal symbols and rationalizes our behavior. We need those rationalizations to make sense out of the world. Or as Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie The Big Chill put it, “Don’t knock rationalization … I don’t know anyone who can get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations.”

  But just because the interpreter can tell us stories about our experiences doesn’t mean the explanations resemble reality. After all, we don’t know where most of our thoughts, actions, and feelings come from. But when they force themselves into our consciousness, the interpreter is driven to explain them. “The interpreter demands an explanation for felt states and behaviors. It won’t let go,” says Gazzaniga. “It is an absolutely crucial element [of the human animal], and there really isn’t any evidence that any other species does it.”

  Perhaps this is why we appear to be the only self-aware animals: the speaking part of our mind bestows upon us that elusive thing we call our “self.” It may be a grand illusion fabricated by clusters of neurons, but neurons that together constitute the single voice that tells each of us that we are of one mind, even though we are in fact of many. If it weren’t for this voice we would all suffer from a kind of specieswide case of schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder. Or we might experience life as a series of disconnected events with no “self” to experience, symbolize, or reflect on them. And bankrupt of language and speech, and the interpreter that they make possible, you and I would be without that voice in our heads that tells us, “This is you talking.”

  …

  Whatever the case, when this voice arrived, so had the first members of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens some 195,000 years ago, according to theorists.24 The first of our kind looked precisely as we do today. The sloped, ridged brows were gone. So were the snout-shaped jaws and hirsute bodies. Our legs were long and straight and our hips slim. All of the neurons that could be crammed into our skulls had been. If we had added any more, birth would have become impossible. But despite the limits that nature had placed on the size of our brains, our evolution didn’t stop. It simply shifted playing fields and found new ways to store knowledge and information outside of our heads as well as inside. Carl Sagan once called this “extrasomatic memory.” One also could call it human culture.

  Strangely enough, human culture did not arrive at precisely the same moment our species did—at least not based on the fossil evidence we currently have in hand. The first glimmerings, in the forms of early sculpture, painting, and sophisticated tools, doesn’t appear until about 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began to migrate into the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Australia.25

  It is unclear why 145 millennia had to pass before we created our first works of art. Possibly the fossil record is incomplete. Maybe the magnificent cave paintings discovered in France, Spain, and Australia, and the weaponry and artwork that we have so far found are only part of a larger trove of artifacts that have so far eluded our discovery. Or perhaps time has simply obliterated them.

  Whatever the case, even though we looked human 195,000 years ago, it appears it took some time before we began to act human. That could be because we hadn’t yet mastered the spoken word. In fact, it’s unlikely that without modern articulate language we could never have tethered our minds together to construct the colonies of ideas needed to develop the foundations of economies, trade, agriculture, art, religion, and science.

  Derek Bickerton and Noam Chomsky, two giants in the field of linguistics, have subscribed to the “big bang” theory of language as a possible explanation.26 It could be that 50,000 years ago the prefrontal cortex completed the neural pathways needed to gather all of the brain’s different modules into a unified whole rather than a confederacy of clustered neurons that could only murmur chemically and unintentionally to one another. Maybe as these final links connected, they flicked a neural switch, reached a kind of interconnected critical mass, and the first truly human mind, complete with all its linguistic and artistic capabilities, turned on.

  Or perhaps our pharynx was ready to operate and our brain was perfectly capable of conjuring and expressing symbols much earlier, but it took tens of thousands of years before we learned to control the hundred muscles in our throats, lungs, and mouths needed to utter the things we call words.

  Possibly we simply needed time to build the language structures that could harness enough minds together for human cultures to begin to grow. The speech of children, immigrants, pidgin speakers, and inexperienced tourists prove every day that we can manage to communicate marginally even when we don’t have total command of a language. Perhaps we verbally limped along, improving in bits and pieces just as a child does, until finally we mastered the process and accelerated the business of building cultures.

  Merlin Donald has wondered if between 195,000 B.C. and 50,000 B.C., with our brains now full-size, we were still working out the kinks of human creativity and communication. He suspects that social interactions were central to the evolution
of language, and wonders if the shift into a higher gear might have been driven by our underlying need to explain the workings of the world around us now that we were more aware of them. He calls this “mythic culture” and points to the “stone age societies” whose technologies have hardly changed in 35,000 years. They were discovered over the past century and a half: the natives of Tasmania, the Tasaday of the Philippines, the Bushmen of South Africa, and Pygmies of central Africa, each a culture that developed elaborate tribal rules, myths, rituals, and language. He points out that even though there has not been much technological progress, there has been very elaborate social progress. They had the minds to model and imagine mythic explanations of how the world works.

  Donald calls all myth “the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool.” On close inspection Donald’s integrative mind tool bears a striking resemblance to Michael Gazzaniga’s “interpreter.” The interpreter’s stories not only get us through the day, but are also the stuff out of which we have erected the buttresses that support human culture. Our overwhelming need to explain our own behavior and to make sense of the mysterious events all around us is the source of our earliest myths, which are also rationalizations, except they are elaborate and culturewide, accepted by many. They are woven to explain how the world came to be, why we are here, where we go when we die, why the sun rises each day and the moon changes its shape as the weeks pass. Religion, literature, philosophy, and every branch of science owe their existence, one way or another, to the interpretive part of our brain that is obsessed with answering the question: Why?27

  The importance of myth and interpretation, which are the direct results of our mind’s ability to verbally explain our experience, also reveal that we are not purely intellectual creatures. Our fears, joys, and passions drive the stories we tell ourselves about the way we and our world work. We are human beings because we are also emotional beings.

  The traditional view of human evolution has been that as we grew more intelligent, we increasingly left our primal drives in the ancestral dust, shaking off the shackles of emotion and rising to a better self. In fact, that notion is backward. Our increased intellect hasn’t placed more distance between us and our old drives, it has amplified, reshaped, and enhanced them. Our emotional life is more complicated and enriched because of our intelligence, not because our intelligence has obliterated our less intellectual side. In fact, our big brains have created the immense emotional life we all enjoy. Primal drives that in a simpler being once largely focused on fight or flight, fear, hunger, satisfaction, and procreation have been transformed in us into complex emotions: love, hate, affection, friendship, jealousy, and every other possible combination of sin and virtue.

  So evolution hasn’t discarded the drives and behaviors that enabled our ancestors to survive and us to emerge. Instead it has preserved and built upon them. This is why we even have to rationalize the behavior we see, or fabricate myths that explain the world and our own behaviors. Those primal, nonverbal fears and feelings are what beg for explanation.

  Yet there are parts of us that language, powerful as it is, can never fully touch or express. Having evolved before conscious expression, they elude words. And so we have also developed other, newer ways of communicating even after language evolved. These reach back through time to the primal parts of our nature, but link to the newest parts of our brain to send the most intensely human information we can share. Over time they have developed into three extraordinary traits—laughing, kissing, and crying. Each is a mysterious, and wordless, form of communication. Each belongs to us and us alone. And each is a testament to our profoundly human need to hold on to one another.

  IV

  Laughter

  Chapter 8

  Howls, Hoots, and Calls

  Two cannibals are sitting beside a large fire after eating the best meal they have had in ages.

  “Your wife sure makes a good roast,” says the one cannibal.

  “Yeah,” replies the other, “I’m really going to miss her.”

  —Anonymous

  Laughter is one of the great Mysteries of human behavior. It evades understanding and resists analysis, partly because it thoroughly combines the primal and the intellectual parts of us. Yet we barely acknowledge what an unusual behavior laughing is, mostly because it is so woven into the woof and weave of our lives. Like the noses on our faces and the lobes of our ears, it’s familiar to the point of invisibility. Yet if it were suddenly plucked out of our existence, we would be lost because we use it constantly to send strange and mysterious signals to one another.

  The origins of laughter are ancient and wordless, a behavior whose roots run a good deal deeper than the evolutionary wellsprings of language. It is related to play and feeling good, although it isn’t simply about fun. Darwin observed that it can also show up when we are feeling anger, shame, or nervousness, acting to mask, rather than display, emotion. At other times it may communicate appeasement or submission.1 Or as Dante put it, “He is not always at ease who laughs.”2

  The social nature of laughter also makes it contagious. When someone laughs, the rest of us almost always do the same. This is why Charles Douglass, a television technician, invented the laugh track in 1953, and why it is still effectively used today to make some sitcom jokes seem funnier than they actually are.3 It is why, even when we watch total strangers laughing about something we know nothing about, we will involuntarily smile or chuckle.

  Maybe this explains laughter’s universality. Everyone laughs, no matter where he lives, no matter what her race or background, whether he hunts corporate heads among the skyscrapers of Manhattan or real ones in the rain forests of Borneo. It sews us together as a species and as people. Along with big toes and thumbs and our oddly designed throats, it is one of those unique traits that distinguish us from the other animals.

  Despite its familiarity and universality, we are almost entirely clueless about how we have become the laughing creature. There is no obvious, practical reason for laughing. If evolution resolutely favors the emergence of the eminently practical, what possible purpose could laughter serve? It’s loud and calls attention to us—not necessarily a good thing when avoiding carnivores on the savanna, or hunting mammoths on the tundra. And when we laugh we tend to lose control, as though our minds and bodies have been hijacked, also not a recommended survival technique. Nor is laughing at predators really a very good idea, at least not unless it is done well after the hunt, by a campfire, in a cave far, far away.

  In the crucible of evolution, behaviors also tend to become increasingly entwined in the traffic of other complex behaviors, and after a while it becomes maddeningly difficult to unravel one from the other. So we find it hard to know if laughs came before smiles or the other way around. Why one thing sounds funny while another looks funny? Or why laughter always surprises us? Understanding the origins of laughter requires a kind of psychological archaeology that forces us to compare glimpses of our closest primate relatives to the careful observation of ourselves.

  …

  A couple of years ago, a British team of scientists at the University of Hertfordshire headed by psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman decided to find out what, exactly, people around the world found truly funny. They called this undertaking the LaughLab project, and set up a Web site where they invited people to submit their favorite jokes, while at the same time they asked them to rate other jokes that had already been posted. Within days LaughLab.com became one of the top ten Web sites in the world. Some days as many as 3 million people hit its pages. In the end 350,00 people submitted 40,000 jokes and 2 million ratings.

  After an exhaustive and presumably hilarious analysis of all the information, LaughLab revealed to the world the joke that had been rated the funniest of all. Here is the choice:

  “A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and
calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’ The operator, in a calm, soothing voice says, ‘Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’ There is a silence, then a shot. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, ‘Okay, now what?’”

  Why was this joke chosen as the funniest? Because of its broad appeal, said Wiseman. Men and women liked it, young and old, Belgians, Germans, Americans, British, whoever read it. Wiseman theorized that one appeal was that readers felt superior to the less than brilliant hunter who made the phone call. Another was that it provided a release about people’s own fear of death, something we all share.

  As far back as 1905, Freud made a similar observation about jokes. He said they masked or released, in a socially acceptable way, fears and feelings that might be otherwise inappropriate. And a laugh, he speculated, physically revealed the relief felt when something disturbing was expressed. This, he said, was similar to what we do in our dreaming—unconsciously conveying what we are not entirely comfortable with consciously.4 In other words, there was a link between laughter and the subconscious. Maybe jokes and one-liners functioned like dreams because they often originated in the obscene or aggressive tendencies we saw in our mind’s eye as we sleep. Something dark and startling, maybe even angry, lurked behind every joke. But the joke itself made the expression of that darkness acceptable because it disguised it as positive. And the final result was that elusive feeling we call funny.5