by Ian Leslie
Chapter Six: I Me Lie
My account of how the brain creates its version of reality owes a very significant debt to Chris Frith’s excellent, accessible overview of the subject, Making Up The Mind, and to a conversation I had with him after reading it. I found the phrase that I borrow from David Eagleman in the transcript of a conversation he had with Robert Krulwich for NPR, available online. Reed Albergotti wrote about the mystery of Larry Fitzgerald’s ‘blind’ catching for the Wall Street Journal. The experiment involving love on a precarious bridge, and the patient who suffered from a lack of proprioception, are both described in Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful argument for the importance of unconscious processes to our behaviour and moods. Petter Johansson was kind enough to spend time with me discussing his research (as well as explaining exactly how that sleight-of-hand worked). Michael Gazzaniga writes compellingly about his work with split-brain patients in his book The Social Brain, among other places, and Daniel Dennett has been the primary exponent of the implications of Gazzaniga’s work for our ideas about consciousness. I first came across Arthur Schopenhauer’s description of the novelistic mind in John Gray’s book Straw Dogs. In Opening Skinner’s Box Lauren Slater offers fresh insight into the significance of Leon Festinger’s fieldwork with the Lake City cultists. I’ve been fascinated by the story of Sabbatai Zevi ever since reading about it in Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews. The definitive book on the Zevi phenomenon is by the historian Gershom Scholem. I also found Matt Goldish’s account of the Sabbatean movement helpful.
Chapter Seven: I Am Nice and In Control
Shelley Taylor is the most lucid exponent of her own research, and I have based my account of her work on her book Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind. I first heard about Caroline Starek’s research on self-deception and championship swimming while listening to an episode of the NPR programme ‘RadioLab’, an early influence on my thinking; I’m grateful to the RadioLab team for this and for generally being such an splendidly fertile source of stimulation and inspiration – anyone who hasn’t checked out their podcasts should do so at the earliest opportunity. Virginia Postrel’s short but incisive article ‘In Praise of Irrational Exuberance’ (available online) pointed me to the passage I quote from Adam Smith, and to Colin Campbell’s take on consumerism. My version of Pizarro’s rout of Atahualpa’s army is based on the first-hand accounts quoted in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and I borrowed the idea of juxtaposing that episode to Custer’s Last Stand from Dominic Johnson – indeed, much of this chapter was inspired by Johnson’s eye-opening exploration of the role of over-confidence in warfare, in his book Overconfidence and War. My conversation with Kevin Woods about his work on the Iraq Perspectives Project was one of the most fascinating I had in the course of researching this book, and his report is essential reading if you’re interested in the background to the war (as is the Duelfer Report).
Chapter Eight: Lies We Live By: Part One
The literature on placebo effects is wide. Dylan Evans’s book Placebo is a good place to start. I found Michael Brooks’s cogent and perceptive overview of the topic in Thirteen Things That Don’t Make Sense to be very helpful. Anne Harrington’s books offer rich historical context. Daniel Moerman’s Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’ contains the most penetrating arguments about this phenomenon, placing it in a wider context of culture and meaning, and questioning the capacity of medical science as currently constituted to fully explain it. My account of Henry Beecher’s discovery is drawn from a combination of these sources and Beecher’s own published papers. Robert Darnton’s Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France offers a lively account of Mesmer’s rise and fall. Other places to read about this extraordinary episode include Claude-Anne Lopez’s lively essay and Stacey Schiff’s masterly account of Franklin’s years in Paris.
Chapter Nine: Lies We Live By: Part Two
My interest in this subject was sparked by Steve Silberman’s excellent report for Wired, available online. I heard about the Diamond Shreddies case study when watching the video of Rory Sutherland’s talk at TED Global 2009, and the campaign’s originator Hunter Somerville was kind enough to tell me the story from his side. I was inspired to explore the research into wine tasting after reading Jonah Lehrer’s discussion of it in his book The Decisive Moment. I came across Mark Zborowski’s anthropological investigation of the nature of pain in Daniel Moerman’s book, and read about Zborowski’s extraordinary life in Steven Zipperstein’s essay for the Jewish Review of Books.
Chapter Ten: The Murderer at the Door
I relied on multiple sources for my brief history of the Christian church’s relationship with lying, including and especially Johann Somerville’s essay ‘The New Art of Lying’, in Leites’s Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, and Perez Zagorin’s overview of lying and religion in the early modern period, Ways of Lying. Christopher Devlin’s biography of Robert Southwell covers his dangerous expedition to England, and Antonia Fraser’s history of the Gunpowder Plot has more on the capture and trial of Henry Garnet. Anyone wanting to explore the life and thoughts of Benjamin Constant should pick up The Cambridge Companion to Constant, which includes an essay by Stephen Holmes, who was kind enough to share his knowledge of the debate between Constant and Kant with me in conversation, and who, in so doing, helped me join some of the dots in my thinking. I found the example of the Manam islanders, and summaries of Frederick Bailey and Janet Suskind’s findings, in J.A. Barnes’s A Pack of Lies.
Afterword: How to Be Honest
The story of Quesalid, although first published by Franz Boas, became better known when it was retold in an essay by Claude Levi-Strauss called ‘The Sorcerer And His Magic’. Erving Goffman’s thoughts on the theatrical nature of real life can be found in his classic work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The Wallace Stevens quote is from Adagia, the poet’s collection of aphorisms. The full quote is as follows: ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.’
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