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

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СКАЧАТЬ developments in the mental abilities of human beings, over the other species (even the primates), was stimulated by just this need to be a skilled player of social games; and that, as each ‘move’ could potentially be met with a counter-move – as in the first example, where chimp B pretended to be fooled by chimp A’s attempt to put him off the scent of the bananas – so society became involved in an accelerating ‘arms race’ of social sophistication. ‘The formative years for human intellect were the years when man lived as a social savage on the plains of Africa’ says Humphrey.⁴⁰ And:

      It was…the circumstances of primitive man’s social life—his membership of a complexly interacting human community, his need to do well himself while at the same time sustaining others – which did more than anything to make man, as a species, the subtle and insightful creature we know today…If men were to negotiate the maze of social interaction, it was essential that they should become…capable of looking ahead to as yet unrealised possibilities, of plotting, counter-plotting and pitting their wits against group companions no less subtle than themselves.⁴¹

      Even before the appearance of verbal language, the business of reading other people’s intentions – and broadcasting or concealing your own – via subtle variations in posture, behaviour and the direction of gaze was well developed. Indeed, many of these signals, and their responses, developed long enough ago to have become embodied in the genetic code.⁴² But genetics cannot prepare you for all the idiosyncrasies of the other members of your primate colony: for this learning is required, and preferably not just occasional observations and encounters, but sustained, close-quarters ‘getting to know you’ sessions. What better medium for these prolonged ‘conversations’ than mutual grooming? Chimpanzees and baboons, who live in groups of 50 or so, spend up to 20 per cent of their day in this activity, not only establishing ‘goodwill’ between each other, but inevitably, through spending so much time at close quarters, building up quite a detailed minitheory of each other’s preferences and dispositions. In groups of this size, and with a primate lifestyle, this amount of time can be devoted to fostering relationships without encroaching on other necessary activities.

      However, as social groups get larger, and society even more intricate, so the amount of time required for physical grooming becomes a luxury that can no longer be afforded. Robin Dunbar of the University of London has suggested, on the basis of contemporary hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural societies, as well as archaeological evidence, that early human societies settled into groups of 120–150 people: considerably larger than the primate groups.⁴³ To give the same amount of time to one-to-one grooming, in such a group, would require not 20 per cent but nearer 40 per cent of daily activity, a proportion that would jeopardize food-gathering and all the other jobs needed to service the community. Grooming becomes inefficient as a social adhesive because it is necessarily an activity between only two (or occasionally three or four) animals at a time, and you cannot get on with much else simultaneously. What is more, a three-fold increase in group size greatly increases the amount of social learning there is to do.

      So Dunbar argues that there would have been an evolutionary pressure to devise an alternative form of communication that would enable individuals to get detailed information about each other rapidly, while preferably leaving your hands and feet free to get on with other tasks. Enter, finally, the spoken word, as the ideal solution to the ‘grooming’ problem.

      It would of course make social learning very much quicker if people were able to tell each other, not just how they were feeling at the time – which their observers then had to distil inductively into tentative images of ‘character’ – but what kind of person they were. If people were able to gossip, as it were, about themselves, social cement would accumulate much faster. And if they were able to communicate generalized information about ‘third parties’, then individuals would be prepared (not always accurately or adequately, of course) to get along with characters whom they had not met before.

      It is a commonplace that when a more sophisticated, but more recent (developmentally or evoiutionarily) strategy is proving inadequate, an animal or a person frequently reverts to an earlier or more primitive way of operating – even when that too may patently fail to meet the needs of the situation. As the evolutionary precursor of gossip was grooming, it would not be surprising to note this ‘need’ for physical contact reasserting itself, either in the face of loneliness or confusion, or in those special cases where words can never be enough. As Dunbar notes: ‘when it comes to really intense relationships that are especially important to us, we invariably abandon language and revert to that old-fashioned form of primate interaction – ‘mutual mauling’. But what form, in the modern world, with our smooth bodies, should this ‘mauling’ take? Should we be busy shampooing each other’s hair, or gently cleaning out the wax from our loved ones’ ears? Perhaps the closest analogue is to be found in massage, cuddling and non-erotic stroking. Perhaps the contemporary fascination with sex represents a mishearing, a perversion of this faint, evolutionary, call to arms – to embrace and be embraced.

      Modem Times

      If Dunbar’s speculations are anywhere near the mark, it would mean that our genes are still equipping us to master living in communities of 150 people. Yet in our industrialized, urbanized, televised society we rarely operate in groups of such a size. On the one hand, the nuclear family (with all its current variations), plus an individual’s active friendships, may number only a dozen or less. From this point of view, once we have developed our intimate relationships and observed each other about as much as we can, we are left with unfulfilled gossiping-inclinations, and unused gossiping-capacity. What do we do? We read the tabloids and become addicted to TV soaps. They will provide us with instant ‘Neighbours’ to get to know, and to have feelings and opinions about. Even though we will probably never meet Princess Diana or Michael Jackson, we add them to our list of ‘virtual acquaintances’, and prepare ourselves rigorously for encounters that are never going to take place. The spare capacity of the social brain gladly seizes on the next salacious revelation of ‘what Prince Charles is really like’.

      On the other hand, the social institutions of which we are part – the schools and corporations in which we study or work – frequently contain a thousand or more people. And the media daily introduce us to dozens more. The modern teenager flails about in a maelstrom of faces – different classmates and teachers, ‘real’ heroines and ‘fictional’ characters whose reality status is hardly distinguishable – and almost always escapes into a restricted world of ‘brightness’, ‘naughtiness’ or fanatical devotion to some sports team or rock star.

      While the smaller groups leave us with spare capacity, the larger groups are too hard to handle; our brains, big though they are, cannot enable us to develop a relationship with every shop assistant or taxi driver we meet. (The central humour of the Crocodile Dundee character, you may remember, lay in his attempts to apply his ‘small group’ social habits to New York, by, for example, endeavouring to pass the time of day with every cab driver and policeman he ran into.) The global village has grown far too big, while the local community is far too small; so we top ourselves up with celebrities.

      These are truly the days of the ‘fragmented mind’, and the problems that such a culture poses for the brain-mind are formidable. How are the separate files to be kept apart, so that you instinctively know how to be with different people; and yet integrated in such a way that your developing array of social skills distils out into a general purpose savoir faire? This is the problem to which we return, after the brief excursion of this chapter, in Chapter 7.

      Just before we do so, however, we should pause to note one vital conclusion. Humankind is indelibly sociable. Just as it is etched into our bones that we are biological systems, both greater than the СКАЧАТЬ