Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide. Robert Newman

‘In what possible way is that concentrating minds?’

      Family feeling aside, I suppose the superior officer had a point. The tanks in the wartime map room are not supposed ot be detailed or individuated. Their role is to give us a big picture at a glance so as to enable a rapid response. It’s the same with the brain in an emergency. The brain doesn’t give us the full picture straight away is because it has evolved to serve action in real time, like the fox in Ted Hughes’ poem The Thought Fox:

      Two eyes serve a movement, that now

      And again now, and now, and now.

      Sets neat prints into the snow.

      It’s bad enough that we have to endure a fake and made-up economic austerity, without having to accept an equally fabricated natural austerity. What makes this austere explanation of vision so very galling is that it comes in the middle of a hyper-inflationary bonanza of unregulated speculation that the world is in actual fact, silent and monochrome, and reality takes ‘place in the sealed auditorium of the cranium’ and all the rest of it.

      ‘Practical men’, wrote John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, ‘who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’

      I think this great insight is true of those practical men who write neuroscience books full of handy tips, such as ‘the brain is a tool-kit.’

      The most influential philosophers today are people who wouldn’t dream of calling themselves philosophers. They write books and make TV series about who we are and where we came from. They claim merely to extrapolate from what the science says. But, to paraphrase Keynes, those who believe themselves to be dispassionately reporting what the science says are usually the slaves of some defunct philosophy.

      When we think we are most free from philosophy, we are most under its spell. If we are not aware of where ideas come from, then it’s harder to resist their influence. But by tracing the sources back to the philosophical stowaways, we may better glimpse ways to escape a deadening neuro-mythology.

      The ‘Book of Joshua’ (in which God commands the earth to stand still) once stood in the way of understanding planetary motion. Today, the austerity model stops us understanding the first thing about how the brain works. Eagleman is standing in front of the stage filming the gig on his phone, and blocking our view of the brain’s funky moves.

       4. WHEN YOU’RE SNARLING

      In Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who is listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in the World, speculates on the evolutionary origins of smiling. Smiling, he says, evolved from an aborted snarl. He bases this theory on no evidence. Instead he advances the following fantasy scenario:

      When one of your ancestral primates encountered an individual coming towards him—

      And right there, by the way, isn’t that a curious and rather telling choice of phrase? Not ‘one of our ancestral primates’, but one of yours. Clearly Ramachandran is cut from superior cloth. We may have come down from the trees, but he descended from the mezzanine on a spiral staircase to proclaim:

      When one of your ancestral primates encountered an individual coming towards him, he would have bared his canines in a threatening gesture on the fair assumption that most strangers are potential enemies. Upon recognizing the individual as friend or kin, however, he might abort the threatening grimace halfway, thereby producing a smile, which evolved into a ritualized human greeting.

      It is desperately sad that someone could look around the world in which we live, and in every expression of joy, gladness, fellow-feeling and goodwill see only a snarl, like some kind of upside-down, inside-out, back-to-front Louis Armstrong.

      I see friends shaking hands,

      Saying ‘how do you do?’

      They’re really saying,

      You stupid bastard look at you in your fucking tassel loafers, you ghgnnrghfcckgg!’

      Well, you may not like Ramachandran’s conclusion, Newman. It may upset your happy-clappy, eco-hippy worldview, but it just so happens to be what the science says …

      Well, it’s certainly not what comparative anatomy tells us. Because if you want to talk about ancestral primates, it so happens that when chimpanzees laugh top lip covers upper teeth. Baring the canines doesn’t come into it. When chimps laugh they expose only their lower teeth while swinging their jaw form side to side. (How do I know this? Let’s just say I don’t always play my first choice of venue.)

      But don’t take my word for it. Charles Darwin noticed the same thing in the course of his own investigations into the evolutionary origins of smiling. In The Expression of the Emotions In Man and Animals, Darwin comes to a very different conclusion about the evolutionary origins of the human smile:

      Our long habit of uttering loud reiterated sounds from a sense of pleasure [has evolved] into the tendency to contract the orbicular and zygomatic muscles whenever any cause excites in us a feeling which, if stronger, would have led to laughter.

      So where Ramachandran says that a smile is halfway from a snarl, Darwin says that smiling is – to quote a recent review of my standup – halfway to a laugh.

      If Ramachandran’s fantasy about the evolutionary origins of smiling doesn’t come from comparative anatomy, ethology, zoology or evolutionary biology, then where does it come from?

      It has its roots, I believe, in that most tenacious of philosophical stowaways, Romanticism.

      ‘Laughter’, wrote mid-nineteenth-century French Romantic poet Charles Baudelaire, ‘is a man’s way of baring his fangs.’ Baudelaire’s idea of comedy, commented Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘is entirely of a piece with his frigidity, sterility, and complete lack of empathy.’

      Sounds like a description of each and every privately-educated stand up comedian now dominating our cultural landscape, all doing variations on the same theme: ‘Is it me, or is everything shit? Have you noticed? I mean, is it me? Or is everything shit? Is it me? Or is everything shit?’

      It’s both, and there’s a connection.

      Now, I don’t want the fact that I have just quoted Jean-Paul Sartre to be taken as any kind of endorsement of either him or the Existentialists. Not least because Existentialism is partly to blame for such bizarre notions as We Are Our Brains – which entails that our bodies are somehow not really part of us, as if we are not part of nature at all, just isolated entities floating around, too good for this earth, not really belonging here, yet not really belonging anywhere else either. It’s this cluster of fallacies that is going through Jean-Paul Sartre’s head when he talks about – and I love this quote – ‘the nauseating sloppiness of the natural world’. Here is a man, you feel, who when he listens to the dawn chorus says, ‘One at a time!’

      Sartre displays here only his own nauseatingly sloppy thinking about the natural world, which is, of course, full of animals doing finely calibrated, precision engineering and detailed painstaking work.

      Consider Cyclosa tremula, a black and white striped Guyanan spider. Cyclosa builds replica spiders with which she populates her web. Because she makes these replicas out of prey debris, the husks of insects she has devoured, they do not have her vivid black and white stripes but are a dull grey colour, which the local birds soon learn not to bother eating. And so, when Cyclosa sees an orange-bellied sparrow swooping overhead she bounces up and down on her web, blurring her lines, blending black and white to make grey and the sparrow flies away. It seems, then, that Cyclosa is building her replica spiders as a cunning decoy, in much the same way as during the World War II the British Army built thousands of dummy cardboard tanks. Their turret guns were made from the long cardboard tubes inside wallpaper rolls. They were painted in green and brown camouflage colours and dotted around the fields of Kent alongside hundreds of full-size papier-mâche Spitfires. There were even two entire dummy barracks made from crepe paper stretched