Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection, 2016)

I’ve enjoyed Charles’s work for a long time: his book on memory, Pieces of Light, proved very interesting as I thought about my own most recent book (see the boasting here; the paranoia mentioned there is still rampant). I think The Voices Within is a triumph. It ranges from sharp-edged clinical issues (people who hear voices that are distracting, disturbing, or destructive) to adventurous thinking about the role of inner voices in human psychology. Furthermore, Charles is a novelist himself, and his scientific explorations are often thoughtfully informed by his reading and writing of fiction. In one of his guises he is the Principal Investigator on a project about ‘Hearing the Voice’, based at Durham. This is well-worth checking out here.
I’m not going to attempt a full review, but I’ll pick out some key things that have stayed with me.

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When we think about ‘voices in the head’, we might have a negative image and see it as a facet of mental illness, or as a mental illness in itself. However, when these voices are put on a continuum with a whole range of inward conversations (right… what shall I do next? …), then we begin to see how these things are mild or severe distortions of something familiar to most people.

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Certain historical examples (Julian or Norwich, Margery Kempe, Joan of Arc) proved very suggestive. In all these cases God’s voice is treated as a voice in the head, but that is not simply to debunk the historical claims nor to deny their interest and value. It’s not only the idea of the inner God-voice that proved suggestive. The first two at least are great writers, and Fernyhough has a lot to say about writers of fiction and their inner voices. There are many fascinating anecdotal insights into the ways in which characters, for example, are voices in the author’s head, apparently capable of their own volition at times.

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Theory of mind (the ability to construct an idea of what others are thinking) and inner speech appear to be linked. The same brain regions appear to be active in both. In some way or other, other people are voices in our heads; the voices in our heads are other people.

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It seems that inner speech may be faster than normal speech. Fernyhough includes fascinating descriptions from those whose inner voices seems compressed, hyper-efficient in saying what they have to say. Their speeches occupy small amounts of time. I found this fascinating. It corroborates things I thought when writing my book Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition: that a soliloquy, for example, a kind of inner speech, can occupy any amount of time from an instant to a protracted number of hours, but that typically it might be thought of, in relation to the stage action, as compressed. Theatre and inner speech are odd and yet entirely obvious bedfellows.

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One central thing is, I’d say, the big idea of the book, ‘dialogic thinking’, which is verging on a theory of cognition as a whole (more or less). From his discussions of the pervasiveness of inner speech, Fernyhough forms a theory of ‘dialogic’ thinking. This comes from different theoretical directions. He turns often to the early 20th century work of Lev Vygotsky, who saw social interaction as the key to cognitive development. He also turns to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work on literature and culture emphasises dialogue as a fundamental property. Fernyhough sees internal dialogue (self-testing, self-checking, orientation between perspectives) as, quite possibly, central to many of our mental operations: ‘a solitary mind is actually a chorus’.

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This book is rewarding in so many ways, but very much so for the aspirations of this blog. Literature knows things too here.

Polly Morland, Metamorphosis: How and Why We Change (Profile Books, 2016)

This one showed up on the ‘you might also want to buy this NOW! DO IT! DO IT!’ section of the Amazon page as I stocked up my Kindle for summer (a ritual briefly described in an earlier post). Good title: it made me think of a popular psychology version of Ovid’s great epic poem the Metamorphoses. And this is sort of what it is, but it’s light on theory (a bit of plasticity here and there – we are indeed strikingly changeable, and also adaptable) and mostly consists of real stories of real people whose lives took very sharp turns. I almost said that this was all surprising or remarkable, and that’s true up to a point, but there is also something straightforward and frictionless about the changes undergone by some of the people involved. When change happens, we change, some more than others.

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I was left with a question about why true stories were the order of the day. They seemed to me both less plausible and less amenable to explanation than the stories you’d invent to explore the question. And you’d think that plausibility and explicability would be useful attributes, but truth-in-reality does have a claim, of course. It made me wonder why so many people would easily assent to the proposition that literature is the realm of things that are hard to believe.
      But what I really took away was something quite weird. Chapter 11 starts like this:

After the damp chill of January in the north of England, April in Paris is a blessed relief. The turning world has tilted on its axis and winter given way to spring. From the airport train, a collapsed warehouse by the tracks, its graffitied walls crumpled, steel frame like the picked bones of a carcass, now cloisters a little garden of new life.

It goes on, warming to its theme: Paris in the spring is nice. By this time, though, something had begun to prey on my mind: whose ‘relief’ is this? Yes, Chapter 10 is about a wintry encounter, and Chapter 11 (the beginning of a new section in the book) has a more pleasant setting. But who feels that this ‘is [the present tense is important] a relief’. The journalistic voice can’t really claim it, because it is not presented as having moved directly from one to the other. The readerly perspective has a pretty nebulous stake in it, but I suppose there is a degree of participation in a book’s atmosphere that could result in something like relief – but this seems a stretch, or at least an effort of will.
      What we’re left with is a sort of writerly perspective, but a surreptitious one: the journey of the book, the movement of its narrating intelligence, creates an artificial juxtaposition that opens up an emotional gradient. To be honest, this may just be a bit of opportunistic, loose writing. But it may also indicate that our ability to read something like the experience of another mind can reach into some strange perspectives, ways of seeing things that can only happen when events and storytellers end up askance. In this sense, inferred by the reader, books can acquire minds of their own.

Constantine Sedikides, and Tim Wildschut, ‘Past Forward: Nostalgia as a Motivational Force’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 319-21.

Not the ancient city, home to Orestes and Clytemnestra; not the British retailer, where goods of many kinds are fetched from behind the screen; this is about Odysseus’s dog.

Sedikides and Wildschut want to rehabilitate the reputation of nostalgia. It’s not ‘an unhealthy preoccupation with one’s past’, it’s really something with ‘remarkable implications for one’s future… It strengthens approach orientation [i.e. motivation], raises optimism, evokes inspiration, boosts creativity, and kindles pro-sociality’. Their findings are that if feelings like nostalgia are created in experiments, then it appears that subjects look forward more positively; and those who have a disposition prone to nostalgia also show these traits. This makes sense intuitively: someone who has experienced things worth missing might be able to compose hopes for alternatives, if not a return.
      The authors prevented me spending time saying ‘er yeah? Odyssey? Homer? Odyssey?’ by tackling it head on: ‘Nostalgia, then, is a deposit in the bank of memory to be retrieved for future use. This was indeed Homer’s original view of nostalgia in his portrayal of history’s most famous itinerant’. Well, yes, and also maybe. There were other epics (now lost) about the homecomings of the heroes of the Trojan War: the Nostoi. Some of these stories were retold in the form of tragedies, like that of the homecoming of Agamemnon. Nostalgia, or a more general desire to return home (because nostalgia has to come with pain), was a powerful animating force for the epic tradition.
      Within the Odyssey, though, the hero’s wish to return home is tested and qualified in different episodes. It’s true that he is strongly impelled, but then again, why does he insist on listening to the siren’s song? (Perhaps that’s ‘approach orientation’ right there; a once-in-a-lifetime chance not missed.) Two moments came to my mind: one was the encounter with the shade of Ajax, his former, humiliated rival. Ajax won’t speak to him: you can never go back. The other comes just as Odysseus gets back to Ithaca, finally in a position to kill his wife’s suitors and retake his place.

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And that’s where Argos comes in. Master and dog recognise one another as Odysseus enters the palace, passing the dunghill where the poor animal now resides. There’s no acknowledgement: one is incognito, the other too weak. I like Stephen Mitchell’s translation, printed in the New Yorker in 2013 (here). Here’s a key moment:

Odysseus wiped a tear away, turning aside
to keep the swineherd from seeing it, and he said,
‘Eumaeus, it is surprising that such a dog,
of such quality, should be lying here on a dunghill.
He is a beauty, but I can’t tell if his looks
were matched by his speed or if he was one of those pampered
table dogs, which are kept around just for show’.

It’s as if he is saying Good Dog, as strongly as he can without giving himself away, and he invites his companion to tell him further whether this is a Good Dog, and Eumaeus goes on to say that this was, in his prime, a really really Good Dog. Perhaps this message gets across and satisfies the dog’s forlorn waiting: ‘And just then death came and darkened the eyes of Argos, / who had seen Odysseus again after twenty years’. I think this tends to validate Sedikides and Wildschut in their argument: this is sad mistiming, something wished for that doesn’t quite happen, but what passes just about between the two of them is valuable, inspiring, and pushes things forward.

Frans De Waal, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? (W.W. Norton, 2016)

I am very, very modern (2007-style), so for me summer reading means a Kindle power-up. I am also rather, rather lazy so I tend to find a seam of books and follow it until I’m loaded. One time, it was ‘Last Man’ fiction. This time, it was crossover-popular psychology-ish books. One of them was this book by Frans De Waal. I have bashed away at the topic of animal minds a few times before, like here and here, so it caught my eye.
      I like the way that De Waal is mostly patient but also at times a bit impatient as he assembles the evidence for animal consciousness and intelligence. He argues for gradual continuity between the species, and not so much of a decisive gap between humans and others. For example, he maintains that various kinds of animals have a proven ability to engage in metacognition (reflecting on their own thinking; it cropped up here as something that might be considered human-only).
      Now, I am aware that there are philosophical thickets awaiting those who try to make claims about consciousness, and I dare say De Waal hasn’t cut through all of those to everyone’s satisfaction. He won me over, though, to a very large extent, perhaps because I am susceptible to good stories. The two which struck me most…

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* In Twofold Bay, Australia, humans and orcas collaborated for decades in hunting humpback whales. The orcas arrived in the bay making distinctive signs, and then guided the humans to the humpbacks; the humans made the kill and left the carcass in the sea, tied to a buoy; the orcas ate the bits they like best (lips and tongue) and left the rest, as they always do; the humans then retrieved the remainder and made use of it. Now that’s not exactly a lovely story of inter-species cooperation, but I found it a pretty amazing one. The key thing is: why not take it that the orcas are actively exercising astuteness regarding the motives and likely actions of others? We know that’s what the humans are doing. More info here. Oh yes, the town where this happened is called ‘Eden’. Ironic.
* Some primates have been trained in sign language and show a remarkable ability to do very human things. Some think that ‘conceptual blending’ is a crucial evolved capacity that enables us to respond to new environments and come up with creative solutions. We take two familiar concepts and blend them to apprehend something new. The key people in this field are Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. It’s a way of thinking that offers a lot to literary criticism, I think, because we can see it happening in metaphors, and I tried to do a bit with it in my book Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (2011; which is really quite a long time ago!). So of course I was struck when De Waal related how a gorilla, on seeing a zebra for the first time, made the signs for ‘white’ and ‘tiger’; and how a chimpanzee, on seeing a swan, made the signs for ‘water’ and ‘bird’. This seems so simple and basic, but really I don’t think it is.

I think quite a lot of people have seen Scott Newstok’s address to the new students at Rhodes College, where he teaches, but if you haven’t, it’s worth a click. You can find out about Scott here and you can read a version of the talk here. It’s partly a searing attack on an educational culture that emphasises testing and thus inhibits the minds it is supposed to be training, and it’s partly a rousing call to think like Shakespeare – to respond as he seems to have to an education based on rhetoric.

At college, Newstok, argues, students can and should work with ‘precision, inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called Shakespearean’:

His mind was shaped by rhetoric, a term that you probably associate with empty promises — things politicians say but don’t really mean. But in the Renaissance, rhetoric was nothing less than the fabric of thought itself. Because thinking and speaking well form the basis of existence in a community, rhetoric prepares you for every occasion that requires words.

This is music to my ears: I suppose you could sum up some of the things I was trying to say in my book Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition along these lines. In Shakespeare, rhetoric (the metaphors and other tropes, the tone and structure) is the fabric of his characters’ thinking. They think their way through the problems they encounter in style.

There’s more music to my ears:

Yet we might do better to revive instead the phrase ‘negative capability’: what the poet John Keats called Shakespeare’s disposition to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’. In the Renaissance, the rhetorical tradition encouraged such ‘play of the mind’ through the practice of disputation. Students had to argue from multiple perspectives rather than dogmatically insist upon one biased position.

Now it is certainly the case that a lot of people in Shakespeare’s time, beneficiaries of its rhetorical education, were seriously dogmatic about many things. But I think Newstok is right to urge us towards flexibility and open-ness to other ways of thinking, and to recognise it as a product of a rich engagement with rhetorical writing and thought.