Nigel Warburton
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and the Secrets of Consumerism
By Geoffrey Miller (Heinemann, £20)
Why write a book about the evolutionary psychology of consumerism? As the success of John Naish’s Enough (subtitled “breaking free from the world of more”) proved in 2008, the modern publishing environment is hospitable to this particular species. But why write one? To change the world? To make money? No. Geoffrey Miller’s answer to this kind of question is simple: it’s all about showing off. Our evolutionary history has bequeathed us strong tendencies to display signals that indicate our desirability. Being an author, for example, advertises intelligence—something that in turn is supposed to correlate with brain size, physical and mental health, semen quality in men and, ultimately, sexual attractiveness.
And why would anyone buy Miller’s book? Showing off again. Consumerism, in his view, is not about buying things we need, but is almost always about display. We surround ourselves with symbolic indicators of health, wealth and virtue. Successful marketing plays along with this. According to Miller, this explains why some people buy Hummer H1 Alpha sports-utility vehicles for $139,771 even though they are both impractical and slow. The Hummer is the peacock’s tail of the human world—an unwieldy signal of resources and thus of sexual desirability.
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Philip Hunter
You are dreaming that a hippo is charging towards a lake, and you are caught between the two, about to be trampled to death with no avenue of escape. Then all of a sudden you realise this is just a dream, turn around and the hippo stops in its tracks, turning into a gently grazing horse.
This phenomenon is known as lucid dreaming: we are aware that we are in a dream and may have some control over its course. It has been thought to provide a link between reason and emotion, or even spirituality. Indeed it appears that in the perfect lucid dream, there is a harmony between reason and emotion, with conscious awareness in the background keeping a watch over, but not interfering too much, with the unfolding dreamlike action. At least 60 per cent of people have experienced lucid dreams sometime in their lives, but only around 20 per cent do so regularly—once a month or more.
Over recent years more precise scanning of neural electrical activity, combined with greater knowledge of brain structure and biochemistry, have fostered substantial progress in understanding the mechanisms of lucid dreaming. Significantly, it shares similar patterns of neurological activity not only with its two close relatives, near-death experience and out-of-body experience, but also with a range of psychotic conditions. These include schizophrenia, states of paranoia and the not uncommon depersonalisation disorder where sufferers feel they are observing their own actions from outside and often describe their waking life as like a continuous dreamlike state.
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Edward Marriott
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Twenty-eight years ago, a cricket match entered sporting folklore. That year, 1981, was an Ashes year and Australia, like this year, was expected to prevail. England lost the first test, drew the second, and found their talismanic all-rounder Ian Botham crippled by the burden of captaincy. Only after Botham failed with the bat in the second test did England make the bold and, as it turned out, inspired move to recall as captain a man whose batting was less than Bothamesque, but whose leadership was already legendary.
Mike Brearley had passed the role to Botham after a string of successes including taking England to the 1979 Cricket World Cup final. What he achieved upon his return was the more remarkable for being unexpected. The third test, at Headingley, began badly. Australia declared on 401, with England managing only 174 in reply and being made to follow on. The rest is legend. Botham scored a fearless 149 not out, aided by Graham Dilley’s 56; before Bob Willis and Botham tore through Australia, bowling them out for 111, and victory.
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Alexander Linklater
Doctoring the Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail
By Richard Bentall (Allen Lane, £25)
Uniquely difficult among medical disciplines, psychiatry has the task of conceptualising, studying and treating illnesses for which there may never be any objective physical evidence. There is no blood test, no brain scan, no genetic profile that a doctor can use to identify even acute schizophrenia, let alone any of the more minor conditions. The only diagnostic materials psychiatrists have at their disposal are a patient’s history, behaviour and language.
If psychiatric disorders are diseases at all, they are diseases of the mind rather than of the brain. This is what makes psychiatry so fascinating—and so confounding. For, in a profession with such a fragile diagnostic framework, there remains a very real possibility that its principal disease categories have been misconceived. No other orthodox medical discipline is so open to dispute at its very foundations. It’s hard to imagine a meaningful movement of anti-oncologists, say, who deny the very notion of cancer. “Anti-psychiatry,” however, is a serious minority activity.
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Philip Hunter
It is difficult to believe that a mix of Big Bird and Black Sabbath could bring a person to their knees. But, as officers in the US army’s psychological operations (PSYOP) know, few combinations are more effective at breaking a prisoner’s will. In Iraq, Sesame Street and heavy metal were combined to keep prisoners awake for long periods. “They can’t take it,” an officer was quoted as saying in 2003. “If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide…your will is broken.”
Sleep is one of the enduring mysteries of human consciousness. We need it for our cognitive and physical wellbeing, and, indeed, for our very survival. Yet, despite decades of research, the scientific explanation for why we need sleep, what it does, and how it evolved, remains elusive. It is not for want of theories; in fact, the problem is that there are too many seemingly contradictory ones.
Many non-scientific theories have filled the gap —most of them worrying that we aren’t getting our full eight hours. It is often claimed that the harried 21st-century man sleeps, on average, at least an hour a night less than in the 19th century. Popular sleep-depriving villains range from too much television and internet to overwork. The think tank Demos even ran a project in 2004 calling for a “well-slept society,” an idea so revolutionary that the Observer heralded it as one of the “ideas of the year.”
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Paul Broks
Sunday lunch. it’s a family reunion. Across the table, Ebby shoots me a smile and jams a finger into her right nostril. Would I like to see her bogeys? No thanks, I say, but too late. The finger reappears capped in a glob of snot. Such a charmer, my wife says on the drive home. Charming? Nose-picking at the dinner table? Disgusting, surely. Picture Ebby as a dribbling great aunt and there’s no question. But she’s a pretty two year old, and purity trumps repugnance.
Two year olds are full of emotions like joy, fear and surprise, but have no sense of disgust, which usually emerges around age four or five. Disgust is a late developer in evolutionary terms, too, and may be uniquely human. Infants and animals reject bad tastes, but taste aversion and disgust are not the same. Disgust has more to do with offensiveness. Chocolate tastes good, but shape and texture it like dogshit and most adults are put off. Not so two year olds. That was an experiment devised by pioneer disgust researcher, Paul Rozin. He and a young philosopher called Jonathan Haidt went on to explore disgust and morality. In his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt describes the evolutionary gear shift from “core disgust,” which is triggered by the physically repugnant, to “elaborated disgust,” which is provoked by the morally outrageous.
Consider the following scenario: bloke goes to the supermarket and buys an oven-ready chicken. He gets it home, slips on a condom, and has sex with it. Then he cooks it thoroughly and serves it to his friends for dinner. What’s wrong with that? No one is any the wiser. The meat is uncontaminated and well cooked. Scenario two: one day (after a nice chicken dinner) our friend and his sister decide they would like to have sex together, just the once. So they do, enjoyably, using contraception, and agreeing to keep it a secret. The one-off experience enhances their relationship. Is that wrong? No one got hurt. Well, we can all agree such behaviour is distasteful and degrading, but can we give convincing reasons why we feel this way? Most people can’t. They flounder in a state of moral dumbfounding—knowing intuitively that something is wrong but being stuck for a rational justification. According to Haidt, this is because the brain has two separate moral evaluation systems, one driven by primitive, automatic reactions, the other by conscious reasoning. The ancient, intuitive system takes the lead. We think we use reason to make moral judgements, but in fact the conclusions we reach are already preset at gut level.
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Dan Jones
Long thought to be a topic of enquiry within the humanities, the nature of human morality is increasingly being scrutinised by the natural sciences. This shift is now beginning to provide impressive intellectual returns on investment. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, primatologists and anthropologists, all borrowing liberally from each others’ insights, are putting together a novel picture of morality—a trend that University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt has described as the “new synthesis in moral psychology.” The picture emerging shows the moral sense to be the product of biologically evolved and culturally sensitive brain systems that together make up the human “moral faculty.”
Hot morality
A pillar of the new synthesis is a renewed appreciation of the powerful role played by intuitions in producing our ethical judgements. Our moral intuitions, argue Haidt and other psychologists, derive not from our powers of reasoning, but from an evolved and innate suite of “affective” systems that generate “hot” flashes of feelings when we are confronted with a putative moral violation.
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Adam Phillips
There is a famous sentence in Thomas Jefferson’s declaration of independence that formulates something essential about what most modern liberals believe about both government and education: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Some of us might not believe in the creator part, and all of us would assume now that by men Jefferson means men and women, but probably none of us would quibble with the idea that people are born, if not created, equal, and that they have a right to life and liberty. But what does it mean to have an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness? At first sight, it seems to be a pretty good idea; no one, presumably, wants to promote the pursuit of unhappiness. If we are convinced of anything now, it is that we are pleasure-seeking creatures who want to minimise the pain and frustration of our lives. We are creatures who, perhaps unlike any other animal, pursue happiness.
But fortunately, and unfortunately, the other thing we know is that pleasure, like happiness, is not as simple as we would like it to be; that people can be frightened of pleasure, or can hide their real pleasures from themselves; that they can use pleasure as a way of avoiding necessary pain (drinking alcohol or taking drugs, for example, to avoid intimacy or the useful and necessary awkwardness of social life); that they can get pleasure from their own pain and that of others; and that they can have competing pleasures (a child’s pleasure in pleasing parents and teachers can outstrip the desire to avoid schoolwork, so he sacrifices his genuine—if short-term—interests for the love and approval of the grown-ups).
“A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy,” the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote in Utilitarianism. Whether or not this is true—and I think in many ways it is—it raises the question of why happiness should matter to us at all. It has certainly become the focus of much debate. Anthony Seldon has introduced “wellbeing lessons” to the curriculum of Wellington College, where he is headmaster, and some would like to see the innovation rolled out across the country. Discussions of what makes a good life, and whether virtue can be taught, are as old as literate human enquiry. But happiness is now the thing, and so we need to have some idea of what the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of; whether education can make people anything (that is, how open to influence children are, and in what ways); and what the much-cherished phrase “making someone happy” might mean.
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David Flusfeder
I had trouble getting to sleep the other night. I’m usually the most complacent of sleepers. On this night, it started off well enough: I quickly drifted into that episode the scientists call hypnagogic sleep—the borderline between alertness and slumber, where images, shapes, words lift unbidden into the relaxing mind—before it all went wrong. Concerns of the day stamped back into my mind like a gang of thugs jeering their way into a yoga meditation retreat. Sleep became utterly unavailable. I disapprove of sleeping pills, because they reduce dreaming. So at moments such as these, I look for something so dull that I might be bored into sleep. I tried remembering the name of every child in my class in the first year of secondary school. Puzzling over whether it was really Nathan Hunt who sat next to Alfred Jesudasen, I achieved sleep, albeit fitfully. The last name I remember thinking about, one which did not belong to a member of Class 1Q, was that of Michael Corke.
The most poignant part of Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition “Sleeping and Dreaming” is the shadowy corner devoted to the disintegration and death of Michael Corke. Corke was a music teacher from Chicago who carried the rare gene for fatal familial insomnia. He died in 1993 at the age of 42, having not slept for six months. Corke’s horrifying decline is captured in home movie footage of the ancient-before-his-time conductor at the podium, and then in hospital, eyes empty and wandering, entirely unmoored from the world around him.
Even Gilgamesh, the first great epic hero, couldn’t manage to stay awake for six days and seven nights without succumbing to sleep. But when doctors pumped enough sedative into Michael Corke to send him into a coma, his brain activity still showed no signs of sleep. He died from a neurological degeneration of the thalamus, similar to BSE or scrapie.
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John Cornwell
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker
Allen Lane, £25
Steven Pinker begins a key chapter of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, by unpicking the US declaration of independence to reveal the metaphors beneath the abstractions. The very title, “declaration,” he maintains, appeals to the task of clarifying, making clear, dispelling the murk. The colonies, moreover, are said to be connected by “bands” to England, which it was necessary to “dissolve” in order to effect a “separation.” In the final analysis, according to Pinker, the metaphors allude to a single, unstated metaphor: alliances are bonds, which can blossom into multi-layered attachments like family ties, but can also bind like manacles. From here, Pinker launches into a discussion of the underlying mechanisms of metaphor.
For the past 20 years, Pinker has been writing blockbusters, such as The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate, which explore language, thought, memory and human identity in the light of neuroscience, artificial intelligence research and linguistics. This new book finds him for the first time in the realms of the imagination—metaphor-making. How do we fuse disparate images and ideas to create striking analogies, thereby promoting fresh insights?
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