Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind. Guy Claxton

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СКАЧАТЬ on the story of how the brain-mind solved the problem of scenario-overload, we need to say something about why it was that social living – and the development of individual ‘character’ – came about.

      Living together in groups is a survival strategy that bodies can adopt, in just the same way as living together in bodies is, as we have seen, a survival strategy that cells can adopt (and living together in cells is a survival strategy that even more primitive little creatures can adopt). Gambling on community is not, at any of these levels, the only way to go. Solitary multicellular animals abound in the modern world, just as there are unicellular organisms and bacteria of many different sorts. But human genes opted for the corporate life, so it is that path that I shall focus on here.

      The basic advantage of community is, of course, that there is safety in numbers. A cooperative group of animals can defend their young, collectively, against the unwanted interest of a predator, more successfully than a single mother can on her own. A pride of lions can hunt together more subtly and reliably than any one of them alone. And if the kill is big enough to feed them all, then the strategy has paid off well. Furthermore, living in herds – of antelope, let us say – increases the likelihood that those of the extended family who are caught by predators will be the older or weaker members. As the herd wheels in confusion, or turns and flees from the approaching lions, and as the mothers do their best to ensure that their offspring are concealed and surrounded in the middle of the herd, it will be the slowest or the most confused, and not necessarily the youngest, that will become exposed, and the most likely target of the lions’ attentions. Thus, even though the creation of a herd may not save you from the periodic loss, it acts as another mechanism for strengthening the gene pool, by increasing the chances that it is indeed the fittest that survive.

      But collaboration demands its price, and poses its problems. When the catch is good, everyone is happy; but when food is scarce, who is it who has to go short? Must there be equal hardship all round, or will some kind of pecking order emerge? When ‘we’ are under threat, where exactly do the fundamental loyalties of any individual lie? When such choices have to be made, the demands on the group to develop some form of social organization, even of hierarchy, becomes stronger. And this in its turn requires the development of more elaborate forms of social intelligence and social communication.

      At its most fundamental, communal living continually poses the dilemma of how selfish, and how self-less, to be. Living in society, there are benefits to be gained from individualism and entrepreneurship but there are also costs, in terms of social cohesiveness, collective trust and goodwill. When a society starts to be dominated by a few conspicuously successful bandits, a wave of imitation may be stimulated that is not only bound to fail, as more and more people try their hand at outwitting each other, but sooner or later undermines the very rationale for social living. Anarchy is a useful call-to-arms in a passive and oppressed culture, but a hopeless game plan for any species that is indelibly, genetically sociable. (The individualistic consumerism of the 1980s, and the short-lived financial beanfeast to which its ‘Greed is Good’ philosophy gave rise, is of course the most recent case in point.)

      In a complementary fashion, altruism is a valid strategy, especially if directed towards kin whose genes are very similar to one’s own, or towards those who can protect you and promote your status or interests. But it can clearly be to an individual’s disadvantage to give away everything, or always to direct any passer-by to your precious store of winter food, if your altruism is not, at some level, reciprocated. It is also possible for a whole society to be too caring or trusting, and to lose a competitive edge when it comes to dealing with a rogue member of the tribe, or a stranger. ‘Third world’ societies, such as Ladakh in Northern India for instance, have proven to be tragically easy prey for silver-tongued purveyors of ‘development’, and have happily abandoned a thousand years of ecological and social wisdom for the promise of a pair of denim jeans, and the reality of urban poverty.³⁶

      ‘Enlightened self-interest’ would be the ideal compromise, but the practical definition of enlightened depends on who your neighbours are, and on a whole host of ever-shifting considerations. In many species, kinship turns out to be the medium through which ‘enlightenment’ is manifest, and unrepentant nepotism is rife. A group who share genes will share more in the way of resources, labour and defence with each other than with other members of society – with the possible exception of the very important category of ‘potential mates’. If the clan’s preference for its own members extended also to each member’s choice of sexual partners, then the gene pool would be at risk, so this is the one area in which it pays to look outside the immediate family circle. In human societies, of course, the clan itself, or its ‘elders’, have often reserved the right to define who is a ‘potential mate’, and not to leave it up to individual caprice.

      The Machiavellian Primate

      Other than in human societies, the tension between cooperation and competition shows up nowhere more clearly than in the primates – not surprisingly, as it is only six million years or so since our common ancestors were on the Earth. There are now many observations, especially on chimpanzees, which demonstrate the dilemma, and show how it is resolved in different ways in different situations. In one lovely example,³⁷ chimpanzee A observes a keeper hang up a bunch of bananas in an inconspicuous place. Chimp B, however, is in the vicinity, and for as long as he remains, A potters about with a nonchalant air, completely ignoring the bananas. After a while, B leaves, apparently ‘taken in’ by A’s performance…but only apparently. He must have sensed that something was up, because he immediately finds a hiding place from which he can observe A without being seen. Sure enough, as soon as A ‘believes’ himself to be unobserved, he runs off and retrieves the bananas – only to be rapidly dispossessed by the larger B, whose patience and perceptiveness are finally rewarded.

      A second example, worth quoting in full, comes from research by Frans de Waal.

      Yeroen hurt his hand during a fight with Nikkie. Although it is not a deep wound, we originally think it is troubling him quite a bit, because he is limping. The next day a student, Dirk Fokkema, reports that in his opinion Yeroen limps only when Nikkie is in the vicinity. I know that Dirk is a keen observer, but this time I find it hard to believe that he is correct. We go to watch and it turns out that he is indeed right: Yeroen walks past the sitting Nikkie from a point in front of him to a point behind him and the whole time Yeroen is in Nikkie’s field of vision he hobbles pitifully; but once he has passed Nikkie his behaviour changes and he walks normally again. For nearly a week Yeroen’s movement is affected in this way whenever he knows that Nikkie can see him.

      Interpretation. Yeroen was playacting. He wanted to make Nikkie believe that he had been badly hurt in their fight. The fact that Yeroen acted in an exaggeratedly pitiful way only when he was in Nikkie’s field of vision suggests that he knew that his signals would only have an effect if they were seen; Yeroen kept an eye on Nikkie to see whether he was being watched. He may have learnt from incidents in the past in which he has been seriously wounded that his rival was less hard on him during the period when he was (of necessity) limping.³⁸

      Such examples, of which there are now many, demonstrate the chimpanzees’ impressive ability to manipulate each other’s feelings, control their actions, and direct their attention – and to do so in ways that depend subtly on who they are dealing with. And the engine for this remarkable skill is their ability to observe each other closely, and to build the resulting brain-mind patterns into accurate working models of each other as individuals.39 When you live in a society where there are fine gradations of social status, and in which individuals whom you meet day after day have quite intricate ‘personalities’ and preferences, it pays you to develop a very sharp eye for behaviour, and to learn the non-verbal language of the culture, so that you too can play the games.

      Nicholas СКАЧАТЬ