Mike Oaksford and Simon Hall, ‘On the Source of Human Irrationality’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 336-44.

OK, I’m back. September: do your worst!

One of my favourite things at the evolutionary end of Psychology is when the researchers look at some component of our mental lives, deem it inadequate or inefficient, and then work out a reason why evolution made it so, and why in the end it’s served us well.
Oaksford and Hall explore the ‘error-prone’ nature of reasoning and decision-making. They seek to overturn the idea that what’s known as ‘System 1’ thinking (fast, ‘phylogenetically old’, instinctive, unconscious) is responsible for error whereas ‘System 2’ thinking (slow, ‘later evolved’, involving language and working memory) moderates and corrects errors. Instead, they think System 1 is basically rational, and many of our shortcomings arise from System 2, but, very importantly, ‘language also sows the seeds of error correction by moving reasoning into the social domain’.
      The big problem, they argue, is that ‘people have only imperfect access to System 1. Errors arise from inadequate interrogation of System 1, working memory limitations, and mis-description of our records of these interrogations’. Social life offers mitigation and perhaps more: ‘reasoning in groups is perhaps better than individual reasoning because it provides the opportunity to transcend our individual laziness in interrogating our underlying, rational, System 1 models’.
      And then the twist that I think is most interesting: ‘The corrective role of communication and argumentation in social groups may also have removed any selective pressure to further improve language to better communicate the results of interrogating our continuous probabilistic models of the world’.

*

There’s a lot underlying the rather broad points I am drawing out, much of which has been, could be, and will be, debated, so (as usual, but maybe more) I urge you towards the original piece. It made me think that (curiously, perversely, brilliantly) evolution has left the individual in need of the group to a remarkable extent. Social interaction is so advantageous that error-prone inadequacy may have been a fitter strategy than individual competence. No one’s an island, etc.
      I’ve been thinking about the ‘we’ recently (as another post describes). There are literary cases where individuals merge into groups, and achieve more as a result. In some cases this could be a pertinent comparison for what’s at stake in this essay. Instead, I am thinking about Beckett – and I’ve said before that Beckett is frequently on my mind when I am writing for this blog. As usual the reason is because Beckett shows an uncanny, off-kilter versions of human cognition in uncanny, off-kilter social contexts. In Waiting for Godot or Happy Days individuals who struggle to dredge up any coherent sense of things are subjected to a social world with no corrective capacity. The results are, as you’d expect, tragicomic.

Earlier in the summer I went to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ International Congress in London. My Cambridge colleague Neil Hunt, and his usual collaborators Trevor Turner and Mark Salter, were holding what has become a tradition at the conference: a Shakespeare debate. I went to similar sessions at meetings in 2014 (described here) and 2015 (described here). This year the question was whether the actions and especially the suicides of Romeo and Juliet should be attributed to (i) personality disorders or (ii) the problems of Veronese society. It was a landslide win for (ii). A morbid obsession with death, risk-taking behaviour, and impulsive violence, were cited on one side; signs of thoughtfulness, awareness of the thoughts of others, and violence in the wider family and the wider society, were cited on the other.
      Nobody involved thinks that Romeo and Juliet are very much like real people, and the use of technical psychiatric vocabulary is usually met with wry laughter. However, I participate (introducing the play’s plot and context, saying a few things about why some tests of character — a sense of proportion, for example — might not work in the same way in tragic heroes) with some seriousness. It’s interesting to see how these professionals think through stories and narratives, which bits of evidence they weigh, and then the special attitude to outcomes. One argument in favour of the social explanation was to put it to the audience that if Juliet survived, they’d advise family therapy first before considering any drastic intervention aimed at her alone, wouldn’t they? That’s obviously not something literary critics consider, but there is a role for ‘what if?’ questions somewhere in the process of understanding a play.
      What I am really after, and what I have not yet found, is whether there is some specific and not necessarily expected thing about Shakespeare’s characters that strikes psychiatrists as particularly effective in representing mental disorder, or igniting the curiosity of those who have to treat it. It may well be that there isn’t that much to it: Shakespeare is notably good at story and character and has a reputation that causes all kinds of people to value their engagement with his work. I do hold out some hope, though, that it’s a matter of language too: that the particular sort of dramatic poetry we get in his plays may contribute to the persuasiveness of the portraits of psychology we get there.

*

This is also my summer sign-off. I am unlikely to post before the beginning of September. Best wishes to all!

States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness — An Anthology, ed. Anna Faherty (Wellcome / Profile, 2016)

I mentioned the Wellcome Collection’s ‘States of Mind’ exhibition once before (here). Now I’ve been to see its eclectic arrangements of arts and sciences exploring the edges of consciousness. The exhibition is smaller than I expected (smaller than the handsome café downstairs, but that’s modern museums for you) but consistently thought-provoking. I’ve been thinking about two things since:

* Louis Darget’s ‘Thought Photographs’ from the 1890s, produced by pressing unexposed photographic plates on people’s foreheads, and asking them to project images from their minds. He was able to explain some of the shapes that arose in relation to the particular thoughts his sitters were working on. I was most struck by the tenacious intuitive power of the idea that the mind works with visual representations, to the extent in this case that the difference between thought and light waves (or rays, or whatever model Darget was working with) were interchangeable.

* Aya Ben Ron’s video ‘Still Under Treatment’ (2005), an intense five minutes of film depicting the moments at which patients lose consciousness under general anaesthesia. The moment of transition wasn’t always obvious to the untrained eye, I felt; at least there wasn’t a single definitive sign shared by all the individuals. What was obvious was the change in behaviour of the medical professionals, who knew – but checked – when they could start handling the bodies with a more abrupt, business-like approach. That’s what struck everyone I saw watching.

Wellcome have published a book to complement the exhibition, which traces similar themes relating to consciousness through a range of written sources. Those who played close attention to my first post about the Helsinki conference (here) may spot what caught my eye in this sentence from Mark Haddon’s introduction:

If nothing else, the passages printed here should convince you that novelists, poets and artists have intuitively understood many of the mind’s oddities since long before doctors and scientists began taking an interest. (p. xiii)

Yes, it’s intuition again. It’s harmless. It’s mostly harmless. Literature and art more generally are characterised as intuitive, and sometimes only intuitive, in the way they may understand (apprehend… process… study… experiment with… know about) the mind. Doctors and scientists starts with ‘interest’ but you know they’ll end up further in. Maybe I am taking intuition too negatively; maybe this is testimony to a very special and privileged level of insight. And Haddon’s introduction is a good piece so I shouldn’t focus on just one moment for too long.

*

My single favourite quotation in the book is from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It describes the heroine Fanny Price enjoying a walk through a garden, and thinking about how it has changed:

‘Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of as anything; and now it is converted into a walk, and it would be difficult to say whether most valuable as a convenience or an ornament; and perhaps, in another three years, we may be forgetting – almost forgetting what it was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!’ And following the latter train of thought, she soon afterwards added: ‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient – at others, so bewildered and so weak – and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! – We are, to be sure, a miracle every way – but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.’ (p. 154)

There is so much in this passage it’s hard to know where to start. I like the matter-of-fact witty way Fanny wonders whether this ‘walk’ (a fancy path) is a convenience or an ornament; she is able to see the contradictions of garden design. I particularly treasure the representation of a thought process about memory that leads her to marvel at the its complexity. The ‘train of thought’ is evoked quite specifically and it’s not an obvious one. It goes ‘forgetting… almost forgetting… changes of the human mind… memory’. That is, the capacity or characteristic (ironically) that makes her exclaim about memory is, I think, ‘almost forgetting’; that’s a nice energetic hypothesis about the nature of our memories. Let’s not think about them as coherent or complete and somehow compromised at times, but rather as things which persist in spite of the prevailing trend. To remember is really to (only) almost forget.
      What does Jane Austen know? What does Fanny Price know? Perhaps they only have intuitions; maybe these turn into hypotheses. Perhaps the knowledge, if that’s what it is, seems esoteric. It’s a neat touch that the next sentence in the novel is ‘Miss Crawford, untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say’. Fanny’s insights don’t mean a lot to other people.
      When I think about what Jane Austen knows, I remember a quotation from Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow, where Gloria says she gave up Sense and Sensibility on page 7: ‘She makes me feel like a child. All that truth. It frightens me. What she knows’. Now Amis’s novel and this particular character have particular and unusual knowledge in mind, I think, but still: you can see why, with my worries about how to talk about what literature knows, I remember that bit.

John Sutton and Evelyn B. Tribble, ‘The Creation of Space: Narrative Strategies, Group Agency, and Skill in Lloyd Jones’s The Book of Fame’, in Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Sciences of Mind, ed. Chris Danta and Helen Groth (Bloomsbury / Continuum, 2014), 141-160.

Right back at the beginning of the blog I noticed an article about the ‘we-mode’. I posted about it then. Recently I’ve been talking to the authors of that article, and others, about further ways in which the idea of joint action and/or joint experience in literature might connect to ways of thinking about these things in philosophy and cognitive science. The key thing about the we-mode, if I am understanding it correctly, is that it’s about how collective experience adds something to individual experience. Often the assumption seems to be that being part of a group entails a loss for the individual. It may also be the case that being part of a first-person-plural gives us new ways – other people’s ways to add to our own – of perceiving and understanding the world.

*

Here’s a hypothetical Shakespearean case. I have argued somewhere (maybe in my 2013 article ‘The Shakespearean Grasp’) that the end of Measure for Measure might configure the individual and the group in an unusual way. At the end of most comedies we (we the audience) are in cheerful harmony, near enough, with the happy ending; but sometimes Shakespeare may make it so that I (meaning me the individual) am no longer confident that we are in tune any more. When the Duke proposes to Isabella, I don’t know what we want. Now, in the light of we-mode thinking, I could restate that more positively, as an ending that makes the we into something that opens up new perspectives to me: not a merged group but an enrichingly complex collective. I am not sure about this: it suits Measure for Measure to see this as an uncomfortable experience. But I like the possibilities of this more generous ‘we’.
      This essay by Sutton and Tribble was one of the treasures I came across in reading up for a Workshop I ran with Mattia Gallotti (School of Advanced Study, University of London; his details here). Jones’s novel is about the famous 1905 tour by the New Zealand rugby team, and it traces the development of the groupthroughout the tour. It represents very well, through a range of stylistic techniques, how diverse individuals merge into a collective that is greater than the sum of its parts, while their individual differences remain crucial. Sutton and Tribble draw out the ways in which fiction can represent psychologically convincing accounts of how skilled groups operate.

Katarzyna Pisanski, Valentina Cartei, Carolyn McGettigan, Jordan Raine, and David Reby, ‘Voice Modulation: A Window into the Origins of Human Vocal Control?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 304-18.

* It is the cry of women, my lord. (Macbeth)

The authors are interested in ‘the apparent absence of an intermediate vocal communication system between human speech and the less flexible vocal repertoires of other primates’. They argue that ‘humans’ ability to modulate nonverbal vocal features evolutionarily linked to expression of body size and sex (fundamental and formant frequencies) provides a largely overlooked window into the nature of this intermediate system’. So the idea is that our ability to control and use the tone, pitch, and timbre of our voices (and the way that we learn to speak in defined ways) are a non-verbal sophistication of the more basic vocal functions we see in other primates.
      This ‘living relic of early vocal control abilities that led to articulated human speech’ seems particularly interesting in relation to gender. As Pisanski et al. say, ‘in humans, sexually dimorphic source and filter voice features reliably indicate sex, age, body size, and dominance. By focusing on static rather than dynamic vocal processes, this literature has largely overlooked the human capacity to volitionally modulate F0 [what they call an individual’s ‘fundamental frequency’]’ in response to specific social contexts.
      They ‘encourage colleagues across disciplines to engage in research that directly examines voice modulation as a signal with tremendous social, as well as linguistic, significance’. Well, OK, I’ll try, but I only have time for one thought right now.

*

(Before that, though, this reminds me of a talk at a conference I posted about a long time ago [like, here]. The subject was speech in post-operative transsexual women. Sounding female, merging with other women and not being visible as something at odds with expectations of femininity, said the kind, practical speech-therapists, is not just a matter of speaking with a higher pitch. Their advice – so well-meant and so revealing – was to end sentences as if asking questions, and not to appear as if you think you know what you’re talking about.)

*

But my thought is about Macbeth. At the beginning of the post you’ll see a brief quotation from the end of the play. Macbeth hears a noise, an inscrutable wailing that can only mean one thing, that his wife is dead; its key characteristic may be its modulation.
      This isn’t remarkable but it’s not the beginning or end of the modulation issue in the play. Much earlier on, and famously, Lady Macbeth asks for spirits to ‘unsex’ her so that she can play her part in the murder of the King and the fulfilment of her husband’s ambition. This speech now looks to me like a moment where modulation might well be at issue.

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’. (Act 1 Scene 5)

In this speech she takes on a voice, finds a voice, defeminises herself, and enters into an invocatory mode: modulation in the wild (and strange). What the Pisanski et al. article helps me think about is the way that the actor here has been given a chance to send out some terrifying messages by means of voice modulation. It’s interesting that there are vocalisations at the beginning and end of the speech: the hoarse raven, and then Heaven crying ‘Hold!’. And she has to say ‘thick’ twice, thickly I suppose.

*

A few further disconnected thoughts about this:

* I have always found this, in performance, a difficult moment to watch. I thought it was because I felt that the actors were exposed here, asked to do too much in order to embody these intense lines with proportionate emotion. But now I think that I was responding to a problem relating to modulation, perhaps not one the actors were in control of, but an interesting one nonetheless.
* The most successful performance I ever saw was in a very experimental production by Cambridge’s In Situ theatre. It was a promenade production in the Director Richard Spaul’s home, with different scenes in different rooms, and no single or clear line through the play. I saw one actor, Bella Stewart, performing this speech in a powerfully and unnaturally low voice. This is how I remember it, anyway. I can now see this as a truly brilliant recognition not just that the Lady Macbeth actor could find a low or authoritative voice here, but that the modulation could end up somewhere very strange, to great effect.
* Shakespeare’s theatre, boy actors… I think you can see where I might go here. Breaking voices, performance of femininity via the voice, cross-dressing, going deep.
* On the throne, Queen Elizabeth… I think you can see where I might go here too. Body of a woman / heart and stomach of a man, inspiring the troops and the people in big speeches, what sort of voice for that Queen?
* Also in Pisanski et al. article, interesting stuff on laughter. Ha, ha, ha! (Lear).