asserting that the victim was poisoned, Holmes adds, “One more thing, Lestrade … Rache is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”
The novella was a classic, but classics are constantly reinvented, and the writers of the BBC’s Sherlock came up with a twist to this tale. In the opening episode (now titled A Study in Pink), a woman’s body is discovered under similar circumstances. The victim has scratched a word into the wooden floorboards: RACHE.
Lestrade gives Holmes a few minutes to study the crime scene, then asks if he has any insights. A policeman standing in the hallway confidently chimes in, “She’s German. Rache. German for revenge.” Holmes replies, “Yes, thank you for your input. Of course she’s not …” and impatiently shuts the door on him. He continues, “She’s from out of town, though, and intended to stay in London for one night before going home to Cardiff. So far, so obvious.”
Lestrade asks, “What about the message?” Holmes announces that the woman was unhappily married, a serial adulteress and was travelling with a pink suitcase, which is missing. He finishes by saying, “She must have had a phone or organizer – let’s find out who Rachel is.”
“She was writing Rachel?” Lestrade asks, skeptically. Holmes responds sarcastically, “No, she was writing an angry note in German. Of course she was writing Rachel.”
It’s one of the many bends in the update of this classic story.
***
Because of the way that brains continuously bend their inputs, language evolves. Human communication has change built into its DNA: as a result, today’s dictionaries look very little like those of five hundred years ago. Language meets the needs for conversation and consciousness not just because it is referential, but also because it is mutable – and that’s what makes it such a powerful vehicle for transmitting new ideas. Thanks to the creative possibilities of language, what we can say keeps pace with what we need to say.7
Consider verlan, a French slang in which syllables are swapped around: bizarre becomes zarbi; cigarette is flipped into garettsi.8 Originally spoken by urban youth and criminals as a way of hiding from the authorities, many verlan words have become so commonplace that they have been absorbed into conversational French.
Dictionary definitions are constantly revised to keep up with our changing uses and knowledge. In Roman times, “addicts” were people who were unable to pay their debts and gave themselves as slaves to their creditors. The word eventually came to be associated with drug dependency: one becomes a slave to one’s addiction. The word “husband” originally referred to being a homeowner; it had nothing to do with being married. But because owning your own property made it more likely you’d find a mate, the word eventually came to mean a male who has been wed. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the British Parliament. He was captured and executed. Loyalists burned his effigy, which they nicknamed the “guy.” Centuries later, the word lost its negative connotation and a musical named Guys and Dolls ran on Broadway.9 In American slang, bad means good, hot means sexy, cool means great, and wicked means excellent. If you could transport yourself one hundred years into the future, you’d find yourself flummoxed by your great-grandchildren’s speech because language itself is an ever-changing reflection of human invention.
***
As we’ve seen, bending is a makeover of an existing prototype, opening up a wellspring of possibilities through alterations in size, shape, material, speed, chronology and more. As a result of our perpetual neural manipulations, human culture incorporates an ever-expanding series of variations on themes passed down from generation to generation.
But suppose you want to take a theme apart, fracture it into its component pieces. For that we turn to a second technique of the brain.
CHAPTER 4
BREAKING
In breaking, something whole – such as a human body – is taken apart, and something new assembled out of the fragments.
Sophie Cave’s Floating Heads
Auguste Rodin’s Shadow Torso
Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Unrecognized
To create his Broken Obelisk, Barnett Newman snapped the obelisk in half and flipped it upside down.
Similarly, artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso broke apart the visual plane into a jigsaw puzzle of angles and perspectives in Cubism. In his massive painting Guernica, Picasso used breaking to illustrate the horrors of war. Bits and pieces of civilians, animals and soldiers – a torso, a leg, a head, all disjointed with no figure complete – create a stark representation of brutality and suffering.
George Braque’s Still Life with Violin and Pitcher
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica
The cognitive strategy of breaking that enabled Newman, Braque, and Picasso to make their art also made airports safer. On July 30, 1971, a Pan Am 747 was redirected to a shorter runway as it prepared to depart from San Francisco airport. The new runway required a steeper angle of ascent but, unfortunately, the pilots failed to make the necessary adjustments: as the plane took off, its climb was too shallow and it struck a lighting tower. Airport towers and fences at the time were heavy and unyielding so they could withstand high-force winds; as a result, the lighting tower acted like a giant sword, slicing into the aircraft. A wing was dented, part of the landing gear was torn off, and a piece of the tower penetrated the main cabin. The smoking plane continued out over the Pacific Ocean, where it flew for nearly two hours to use up fuel before heading back for an emergency landing. As the plane touched down, its tires burst and the plane veered off the runaway. Twenty-seven passengers were injured.
An Ercon frangible mast
Following this event, the Federal Aviation Administration mandated new safeguards. Engineers were tasked with preventing this from happening again, and their neural networks spawned different strategies. Nowadays, as you taxi for takeoff, the landing lights and radio towers outside the plane may look like solid metal – but they aren’t. They’re frangible, ready to break apart into smaller pieces that won’t harm the plane. The engineer’s brain saw a solid tower, and generated a what-if in which the tower disbanded into pieces.
Breaking up a continuous area revolutionized mobile communication. The first mobile phone systems worked just like television and radio broadcasting: in a given area, there was a single tower transmitting widely in
