by Chip Walter
22. From
www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2001/ling001/origins.html.
23. See Arbib’s work cited above, but also Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 48.
Chapter 6: I Am Me: The Rise of Consciousness
1. More than any other species, we are careworn. We worry. And worrying, in its own way, is extraordinary. We imagine events that have not happened, we dream up in fine detail all of the things that could go wrong. We wonder, we plan, we think the worst, and then try to imagine how we will deal with it. When we worry we are basically trying to predict the future, or even multiple futures. Other animals do not worry. They may feel fear or even anxiety, but they do not worry because they don’t have the cerebral capability.
The daughter of worry is planning. And planning is brought to you by the special architecture and chemistry of your frontal lobes, which are by far the largest on the planet, and the most complexly wired. This is the same part of the brain that enables us to plan, imagine, invent, plot, deceive, dissemble, and mourn. None of us could get out of bed, go about our business, or manage the many relationships that require our constant attention without our prefrontal cortex.
Our ability to worry is strangely connected to a phenomenon that psychobiologist Henry Plotkin calls the “uncertain futures problem.” Plotkin credits biologist C. H. Waddington with having noticed that humans live lives that exemplify the uncertain futures problem. But he takes it to new and interesting levels.
To consider that you have an uncertain future, you first have to be able to imagine one. You also have to be freed from the exclusive commands of your genes. The more advanced a brain is (even though it is itself initially a product of your DNA), the more adaptable it is after you are born. The big breakthrough with the human prefrontal cortex is that it is so much more capable of adapting to change than any other brain on Earth, and therefore liberates us from our DNA. This is why we can operate cell phones even though they weren’t invented before we were born, or learn to speak English even though we might be Finnish, Indonesian, or Inuit.
2. K. Fleming, T. E. Goldberg, and J. M. Gold, “Applying Working Memory Constructs to Schizophrenic Cognitive Impairment,” in A. S. David and J. C. Cutting, eds., The Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1994).
3. Steven W. Anderson, Antonio Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Impairment of Social and Moral Behavior Related to Early Damage in Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Nature Neuroscience 2, no. 11 (November 1999): 1032–37.
4. For more on Phineas Gage see
http://www.uakron.edu/gage/.
5. The total number of synapses in the cerebral cortex is sixty trillion; from G. M. Shepherd, The Synaptic Organization of the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 6. However, C. Koch lists the total synapses in the cerebral cortex at 240 trillion; Biophysics of Computation. Information Processing in Single Neurons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 87. For many of the facts and figures in this sidebar also see
faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html#brain.
6. Christopher Wills, The Runaway Brain (New York: Harper-Collins, 1993), p. 262.
7. Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994), p. 368.
8. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998).
9. From Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: Harper-Collins, 1984). In some cases patients lose all control of one side of their body, which sometimes seems to take on a mind of its own. In one case a man sometimes found that one of his arms would decide on its own to suddenly start to take his clothes off.
10. G. G. Gallup, “Self-Awareness and the Emergence of Mind in Primates.” American Journal of Primatology 2 (1982): 237–48.
11. On another level, the immune system also has evolved a way to distinguish between what is self and what isn’t. Your immune system has a molecular “understanding” of what is you and what isn’t. Anything that isn’t recognized as you and enters your body is attacked as an invader. This is why organ transplantation is so difficult, because the donor organ is usually perceived as something that is not “you” and is therefore assaulted. Autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, AIDS, or lupus are examples of occasions when the immune system “misdiagnoses” parts of the body as an outsider and attempts to destroy them, sometimes with lethal results.
12. Most of this information, such as the ongoing activities of our stomachs and livers, or the capillaries in our lower intestines, isn’t passed along to the cerebral cortex.
13. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 49, and Gerald M. Edelman, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
14. Edelman also pioneered the now-accepted concept of Darwinian synaptic selection as the driving force in brain development in children and adolescents.
Chapter 7: Words, Grooming, and the Opposite Sex
1. E. B. Keverne, N. D. Martinez, and B. Tuite, “Beta-endorphine Concentrations in Cerebrospinal Fluid of Monkeys Are Influenced by Grooming Relationships,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 14 (1989): 155–61.
2. Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney, “Meaning and Mind in Monkeys,” Scientific American (December 1992). Nonhuman primates, such as vervet monkeys, seem to communicate in ways that resemble aspects of human speech. But they do not apparently recognize mental states in others. See
cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Seyfarth.html.Also see Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 68.
3. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
4. Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, ed. Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten, both at the Psychological Laboratory, University of St. Andrews.
5. R. Byrne and A. Whiten, “The Thinking Primate’s Guide to Deception,” New Scientist 116, no. 1589 (1987): 54–57.
6. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, p. 63.
7. Other studies by Dunbar and his group have shown that we can hold conversations with up to three other people (a total of four). More than that, and they break down. So if three people are talking at a party and two others join in, someone will be left out, or the group will split into two separate conversations.
8. See:
cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Seyfarth.html
for details and references.
9. Chimps spend about 20 percent of their time socially grooming; we spend about 40 percent of our time in social situations, so Dunbar splits the difference and estimates that when we reached a point where we had to devote 30 percent of our time to social interaction, apelike grooming simply wouldn’t have worked effectively any longer.
10. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, pp. 111–14. Dunbar also speculates that the very last of Homo erectus may have developed the rudiments of this kind of language, but only as an afterthought.
11. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994), p. 314.
12. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, p. 123.
13. Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
14. Pinker; The Language Instinct, p. 369.
15. This is why it is more interesting to read a novel than the phone book or a list of mathematical equations. Stories are about human relationships, and that is what fascinates us. After all, excelling at them is crucial to our happiness and an essential part of everyday life.
16. L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange.” In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 162–228.
17. Try this test. I deal you four cards, two marked with the numbers 8 and 3 and two marked with the letters E and Z
. They are all dealt with the numbers and letters showing. Now I tell you that on the other side of the cards you will find different numbers and letters. In fact, the rule is that a card with a vowel on one side will always have an even number on the other side. To prove the rule, which card or cards should you flip over?
Figuring this out isn’t trivial for most people. In fact, about 75 percent of those who take the test get it wrong. Most people either chose the E card or the E card and the 8, even though the rule has nothing to do with what is on the other side of an even-numbered card. The solution is to flip over the cards with E and 3 on them. They reveal all of the possibilities.
When the problem is presented this way, people are confused because our minds handle social situations better than purely abstract problems. To prove the point, a scientist named Lida Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reworked the problem. Instead of dealing cards, she told an experimental group that there are four people sitting at a table. One is sixteen years old and one is twenty; and one is drinking a soft drink and one is drinking a beer. If the legal drinking age is eighteen, with which one of them do you have to check with to see if the law is being broken? The answer was obvious to almost everyone who took the test. Check the sixteen-year-old and the beer drinker. If the sixteen-year-old is drinking beer or the beer drinker is under eighteen, the law has been violated. From Cosmides and Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptations.”
18. Theory of Mind is double-edged. It may help us correctly guess what others are thinking, but is also often a source of many of life’s misunderstandings because we don’t always guess correctly. Othello, for example, (with Iago’s help) imagined that Desdemona was cheating on him, and he murdered her for it. But it was all in his imagination. In fact she was devoted and never considered cheating. Xenophobia, racism, terrorism, and war have their roots in the same sorts of misunderstandings.
19. The left hemisphere controls language in 97 percent of right-handers. The right hemisphere controls it in only 19 percent of left-handers. The rest control language from the left side of the brain, or equally in both sides. Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 306.
20. Ibid.
21. See Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, p. 138, for references.
22. Sometimes the left hemisphere’s superior ability to handle verbal duties go beyond handling language. Most split-brain patients show word recognition only in the left hemisphere. But a few can use either hemisphere for this task. Even in these cases, the right brain deals with words far less adeptly than the left brain.
For instance, among those who can process language in either hemisphere, each isolated hemisphere can recognize a specific letter in genuine words more easily than in nonsense words or in random letter strings. But the right hemisphere takes longer than the left to perform this task and requires considerably more time to “make up its mind” as words get longer.
The right hemispheres of split-brain patients also consistently make grammatical mistakes. They struggle with changing verb tenses, constructing plurals, and indicating possessives. Findings such as these support the idea that the left brain harbors an evolved mechanism for understanding grammatical principles common to all spoken languages, according to Gazzaniga.
Some split-brain patients can also verbally identify many items presented to their right hemispheres, which illustrates an extraordinary ability of the split brain to reorganize itself, sometimes resulting in the emergence of limited right-brain speech ten years or more after surgery.
23. Gazzaniga has outlined the evolution of his theories in several fascinating books, including The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Mind Matters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, in association with MIT Press and Bradford Books, 1998); and The Mind’s Past (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000).
24. See www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223122209.htm; “The Oldest Homo Sapiens: Fossils Push Human Emergence Back to 195,000 Years Ago,” Science Daily (February 28, 2005). Also see
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223142230.htm.
25. This is called the “out of Africa” theory, and it is based on genetic studies of mtDNA or mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from women and mutates so predictably that it makes an excellent molecular clock scientists can use to mark the progress of modern humans as they migrated around the planet. There is, of course, debate about this, too. In 2000 a team of Australian scientists headed by Dr. Alan Thorne at the Australian National University studied the DNA of “Mungo Man,” whose skeleton was originally found in New South Wales in 1974. Mungo Man lived sixty thousand years ago, and the researchers say his mtDNA does not match the DNA of other humans. He could, they argue, be proof that the “out of Africa” theory is questionable. Perhaps the human race is a potpourri of creatures who evolved in pockets directly from Homo erectus, some in Europe, some in Asia and Australia and Africa before they spread out to meet one another and form the modern human race we know today. See
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1108413.stm.
26. Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (New York: Praeger, 1986).
27. Of course, thinking is not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are many other highly intelligent animals on the planet—whales, dolphins, gorillas, chimps, and orangutans, even squid and crow. All creatures lie along a continuum. Some abstract more clearly than others, some not at all. But none is as cerebrally gifted as we are. The elaborate cultures we have created are the irrefutable evidence.
Chapter 8: Howls, Hoots, and Calls
1. Adams & Kirkevold, “Looking, Smiling, Laughing and Moving in Restaurants: Sex and Age Differences,” Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior 3 (1978): 117–21.
2. Dante Alighieri Paradiso (XXVII, 5).
3. According to legend, Douglass recorded much of the original laughter for the machine he invented (also known as Charlie’s Box or the Laff Box) from The Red Skelton Show. Because Skelton did so many pantomimes, it was easy for Douglass to record nice, clean snippets of laughter and applause uninterrupted by sounds of the performer.
4. The major part of Freud’s work on laughter was published in 1905 under the title Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, translated by Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).
5. Freud felt that if the joke is successful, the source of laughter in the teller and the listener is the same, something he called “the economy of psychic expenditure.” At that point the dangerous, subconsciously repressed idea is expressed, but then the light nature of its expression relives the tension and we laugh out of relief, just as a baby laughs out of relief when it turns out that a dangerous situation isn’t really as dangerous as it first seemed. Two kinds of pleasure result, he believed: the pleasure of the relief and the plain fun in playing with words in novel and surprising ways.
6. Writer and poet Dorothy Parker was a master of whiplash and one of the great wits of the twentieth century. She never lost an opportunity to show what sort of comedic collisions she could create by juxtaposing two surprising and hilariously unexpected ideas in one sentence. There was the time she reviewed Katharine Hepburn’s performance in the 1933 play The Lake and wrote: “She delivered a striking performance. It ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Or her remark when she arrived at a Yale prom and blandly observed, “If all the girls [here] were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” Or her advice to the lovelorn: “Don’t put all your eggs in one bastard.”
7. These findings resulted from the work of Vinod Goel at York University in Toronto and Raymond Dolan of the Institute of Neurology in London. Both men were looking to understand where in the brain the mental shift takes place that creates laughter. To study the problems they used functional MRI to scan fourteen healthy people while they listened to two types of jokes. Half the jokes were “semantic,” like the shark joke, the other half were puns. They also told control jokes which were set-ups w
ith punchless punchlines. To their amazement they found that the different jokes were processed in completely different parts of the brain. Semantic jokes used a network in the temporal lobes, but the puns were processed near parts of the brain that handle speech. See “The Functional Anatomy of Humor,” Nature Neuroscience, vol. 4:3 (March 2001), p 237.
8. The LaughLab computer counted the number of words in every joke that people submitted and found that jokes containing 103 words are the funniest. The winning “hunters” joke is 102 words long.
9. This is the very same part of the of brain that doctors performing prefrontal lobotomies often destroyed to cure a wide variety of mental problems in the 1930s and ’40s. Unfortunately, they eventually learned that though lobotomies didn’t destroy patients’ ability to think or reason, it often robbed them of their personalities and crippled their ability to relate in emotionally subtle ways.
10. Itzhak Fried, Charles L. Wilson, Katherine A. MacDonald, Eric J. Behnke, Division of Neurosurgery and Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA Medical School, “Consciousness and Neurosurgery,” Nature 391 (February 12, 1991).
11. Daniel N. Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
12. Parents of easily tickled babies may engage in more physical play (since they are positively reinforced by their infants’ laughter for doing so). The play that includes tickling then extends to other forms of humorous physical play and eventually to mental play and wordplay, which encourages children to laugh at any kind of humor. A. J. Fridlund and J. M. Loftis, “Between Tickling and Humorous Laughter: Preliminary Support for the Darwinian-Hecker Hypothesis,” Biological Psychology 30 (1990): 141–50.
13. Darwin, writing in 1872, thought a comfortable social context was important: “the mind must be in a pleasurable condition; a young child, if tickled by a strange man, would scream in fear.” Similarly, the writer Arthur Koestler suggested in 1964 that laughter takes place only when the person being tickled views it as a harmless and playful mock attack.
