never seems bothered by wasting its 20 per cent share of our energy budget watching three-minute clips of The Sopranos on YouTube for five hours straight.) The reason the brain doesn’t give us the full picture is not to do with making energy savings, but because it has evolved to privilege motor activity above all else.
We need to act in real time. We need to do things now. We are surrounded by predators and prey, many of whom come equipped with vastly quicker reflexes than our own.
When Homo ergaster is sprinting to grab her toddler, she doesn’t need to know whether the puma is male or female, or in fact a jaguar. For now, Big Cat Prowling will do. Once you have your toddler in your arms, once your shouts and screams have brought stone-throwing elders to your aid, once the big cat is at bay, then and only then is it useful to notice second-order facts: that the puma is arthritic or old, or that is only a much less scary lynx or linsang. But in those split seconds of your initial reaction all you need to know is where and what in the roughest possible sense. Your picture does not at first need to be more detailed than that – in fact, more detail would not help but hinder.
A good illustration of this is the story of why, during the World War II, my Auntie Ada was discharged from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). From 1940–42, Ada Newman, aged 22, worked in the map room of the RAF Group Operations HQ located in a secret bunker beneath the Strand in central London. Her job was to push model tanks and planes across a giant horizontal map with a croupier stick in response to grid references being called out by WAAFs on headphones. The map was enormous, the size of four table-tennis tables stuck together. It was a relief map with models of forests, mountain ranges, and painted streams and roads. When pushing a model tank through the model forest, or landing a model plane on the shore, Aunt Ada used to do engine noises and gunfire sounds.
Superiors gave her verbal warnings but she couldn’t help herself. She said she didn’t know she was doing it. The bending end came when Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding came to the map room with senior figures from the Admiralty on the eve of a joint sea-air attack. While Aunt Ada was moving a line of German infantry, the top brass overheard her saying:
Gott in Himmel! Once again Tommy’s air cover has proved superior to our anti-aircraft fire. But I die … for … ze … fatherla—aannnggh!
Minutes later, while moving an aircraft carrier from the open sea of grid reference A1 to the harbour of E3, it seems Ada Newman found herself doing a ship horn, followed by the sort of nautical rhubarb the Beatles get up to on Yellow Submarine. She was relieved of map room duties and then discharged from service. In her dismissal hearings, she claimed that she’d only been trying to concentrate the minds of top brass by giving them a more vivid picture of reality down on the ground. In response to this, her superior officer read out the transcript of what Auntie Ada had said:
‘Aye, Aye Cap’n. Full Speed Ahead. Steady As She Goes. Hard To Port.’ He then looked up from the transcript, and in a voice that Auntie Ada said was unnecessarily harsh, asked, ‘In what possible way is that concentrating minds?’
Family feeling aside, I suppose the superior officer had a point. The tanks in the wartime map room are not supposed ot be detailed or individuated. Their role is to give us a big picture at a glance so as to enable a rapid response. It’s the same with the brain in an emergency. The brain doesn’t give us the full picture straight away is because it has evolved to serve action in real time, like the fox in Ted Hughes’ poem The Thought Fox:
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now.
Sets neat prints into the snow.
It’s bad enough that we have to endure a fake and made-up economic austerity, without having to accept an equally fabricated natural austerity. What makes this austere explanation of vision so very galling is that it comes in the middle of a hyper-inflationary bonanza of unregulated speculation that the world is in actual fact, silent and monochrome, and reality takes ‘place in the sealed auditorium of the cranium’ and all the rest of it.
‘Practical men’, wrote John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, ‘who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’
I think this great insight is true of those practical men who write neuroscience books full of handy tips, such as ‘the brain is a tool-kit.’
The most influential philosophers today are people who wouldn’t dream of calling themselves philosophers. They write books and make TV series about who we are and where we came from. They claim merely to extrapolate from what the science says. But, to paraphrase Keynes, those who believe themselves to be dispassionately reporting what the science says are usually the slaves of some defunct philosophy.
When we think we are most free from philosophy, we are most under its spell. If we are not aware of where ideas come from, then it’s harder to resist their influence. But by tracing the sources back to the philosophical stowaways, we may better glimpse ways to escape a deadening neuro-mythology.
The ‘Book of Joshua’ (in which God commands the earth to stand still) once stood in the way of understanding planetary motion. Today, the austerity model stops us understanding the first thing about how the brain works. Eagleman is standing in front of the stage filming the gig on his phone, and blocking our view of the brain’s funky moves.
In Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who is listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in the World, speculates on the evolutionary origins of smiling. Smiling, he says, evolved from an aborted snarl. He bases this theory on no evidence. Instead he advances the following fantasy scenario:
When one of your ancestral primates encountered an individual coming towards him—
And right there, by the way, isn’t that a curious and rather telling choice of phrase? Not ‘one of our ancestral primates’, but one of yours. Clearly Ramachandran is cut from superior cloth. We may have come down from the trees, but he descended from the mezzanine on a spiral staircase to proclaim:
When one of your ancestral primates encountered an individual coming towards him, he would have bared his canines in a threatening gesture on the fair assumption that most strangers are potential enemies. Upon recognizing the individual as friend or kin, however, he might abort the threatening grimace halfway, thereby producing a smile, which evolved into a ritualized human greeting.
It is desperately sad that someone could look around the world in which we live, and in every expression of joy, gladness, fellow-feeling and goodwill see only a snarl, like some kind of upside-down, inside-out, back-to-front Louis Armstrong.
I see friends shaking hands,
Saying ‘how do you do?’
They’re really saying,
You stupid bastard look at you in your fucking tassel loafers, you ghgnnrghfcckgg!’
Well, you may not like Ramachandran’s conclusion, Newman. It may upset your happy-clappy, eco-hippy worldview, but it just so happens to be what the science says …
Well, it’s certainly not what comparative anatomy tells us. Because if you want to talk about ancestral primates, it so happens that when chimpanzees laugh top lip covers upper teeth. Baring the canines doesn’t come into it. When chimps laugh they expose only their lower teeth while swinging
