The Neuromantics

Reading is an advanced form of looking – and of looking at faces, in particular. That’s the fascinating story behind Evolution of Reading and Face Circuits during the First Three Years of Reading Acquisition, a paper published in NeuroImage in 2022 by Xiaoxia Fenge et al in which some interesting distinctions are made. The part of the brain dedicated to facial recognition (the fusiform gyrus) is co-opted when we learn to read. But after that ability has been acquired it can’t be lost, or only when it degrades because of brain damage (or dementia). Face-processing, on the other hand – the Ur-form of reading – continues to develop, perhaps because it is such a necessary form of discrimination. We are one of very few animals able to tell other animals apart. Crows (corvids) can also do this. They know the un-Crowiness of the rest of the world. They are also masters of shared attention. From their ability to remember faces comes the ability to know me from you; to hide things, and to give them.
None of this would be news to Ted Hughes, whose great poem sequence Crow (1970) drew on the tradition of bird poetry in English and the exaltation of the winged messenger in ancient myth to fashion a symbolic verse narrative for the post-war era. His titular character is a reader of change and destruction – a ragged Shamanic figure flying between different spiritual traditions who sees the whole of life as a battle for survival and meaning. The sequence is a violent creation myth, and such “making” myths are all about telling one thing from another.
Creation myths also tend to acknowledge disaster in the background: the urge to make is the urge to rescue something from meaninglessness, or save it from loss. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Sandpiper” (1962), the bird is “looking for something, something, something.” And in Sylvia Plath’s “The Zoo-Keeper’s Wife” (1961), an insomniac spouse sees her marriage as an encounter with animals in an airless ark. It’s not all bad news, though, because Plath’s wide-awake suffering is our gain as readers, and a way of looking sadness in the face.

Some people hear voices in their heads but are not suffering from a psychiatric disorder. The voices are “non clinical”, and the people who experience them “non-clinical voice hearers”. One question that arises is: do NCVHs also hear external speech in a different way; more distinctly, perhaps? According to experiments conducted by Ben Alderson-Day et al (“Distinct Processing of Ambiguous Speech in People with Non-clinical Auditory Verbal Hallucinations”, 2017), the answer is yes, though it’s a complex picture. When played excerpts of degraded but potentially intelligible speech, NCVH participants are better than their controls at recognising it. Enhanced perceptual processing seems to be at work. At the same time, an element of mystery clings to the inner voice these people hear: if it doesn’t coincide with external reality and it isn’t “imagined”, then what is it?
You could say that this paper is about removing layers – trying to get at the mechanistic processes underlying individual experiences. Majorie-Ann Watts’s witty short story “Mrs Calder and the Hyena” (from the collection Are They Funny, Are They Dead?, 2010) approaches the same problem from a different direction, casting doubt on experiences that are too general to be authentic. Mrs Calder is elderly and ill. She may be on the cusp of dementia. She certainly annoys her daughter by living in disorder, taking up with vagrants, hanging around churchyards and giving free rein to her imagination (she sees people naked on the tube and floating through the clouds towards Heathrow). The hindrances to right perception, in this case, are not Mrs Calder’s hallucinations but the routines of daily life, the insensitivity of her carers, and the received wisdom of impatient medics.
Nostra culpa: we’re sorry for the delay to this episode of The Neuromantics, the podcast that brings science and literature together, but we’re back in the saddle now. Listen, like and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, if you care to. And spread the word!

Have you ever tried to finish a tricky but familiar task – unlocking something, let us say – and discovered that, even though the key won’t turn in the lock, and there are other keys to be tried, you’re oddly compelled to carry on jiggling the one that doesn’t fit? If you have, then you have been demonstrating what psychologists call the Einstellung or set effect, which finds that a general tendency exists, in humans, to favour first ideas in problem solving at the expense of alternatives, even when the alternatives are simpler and even when we think we’re looking for them.
The Mechanism of the Einstellung Effect: A pervasive source of cognitive bias (2010), by Merim Bilalic, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet, considers this phenomenon as it applies to expert chess players attempting to reach “smothering mate”, but it has a wider resonance (for The Neuromantics, and not just for us) in politics, religion, philosophy and daily life – anywhere, in fact, where a predisposition to think one thing gets in the way of new evidence, and so stops us reappraising the situation. The application to literature is equally revealing, and the beautiful work of the American poet D. Nurkse (in his 2013 collection A Night in Brooklyn) shows how riddles and dream narratives make use of cognitive bias to surprise – and delight – the reader.

South Sudan gained its independence from the north in 2011. A matter of months later, the retired human-rights researcher Elizabeth Hodgkin went to teach in a village in the mountains of Eastern Equatoria, close to the Ugandan border. Letters from Isohe (2022) memorably evokes the challenges of life in this beautiful but remote community. Food supplies falter, girls are forced into marriage, teachers’ salaries disappear, people die: but the village schools survive. Hodgkin’s dispatches are responsive and informal; they bring us close, as only letters can, to the moment of witness.
Perhaps that feeling of responsiveness has something to do with handwriting itself. In experiments designed to measure the “cognitive effort” of handwriting and typing, Sirine Bouriga and Thierry Olive (“Is typewriting more resources-demanding than handwriting in undergraduate students?”, 2021) made an interesting discovery: whereas students can stop and restart handwritten assignments with ease, they find it harder to be prised away from keyboards to perform other tasks. Typing seems to demand more effort; handwriting, once learnt, enters the realm of the semi-instinctive. Is that because writing is closer to the body – to gesture and depiction? Or does the “difficulty” of typing simply reflect the relative novelty of the QWERTY (or digital) keyboard, and the time it takes the brain to get used to disruptive technologies?

If you’re funny and you know it, you’re probably not funny. Equally unfunny are the theories of humour (such as: comedy makes us feel superior; or: it’s about “violations” of expectation), which don’t say much about varieties of taste and won’t help you win over a tough crowd.
In “Wriggly, Squiffy, Lummox, and Boobs: What Makes Some Words Funny?”, 2019, Chris Westbury and Geoff Hollis narrow the focus. What if humour turned out to be a semantic property of some words and not others? They look closely at a data set of 5,000 words rated for humorousness and find certain patterns – insults are funny, the “oo” vowel is funny, and so are various other phonemes, particularly a hard “k”. As Mike Nichols once put it, “‘Casey’ is a funny name. Robert Taylor is not.” It‘s persuasive stuff, until you add a lot of other words – sense, that is – and begin to wonder what happens to “funny” sounds in any extended context. Comedians on tour know all about this: “funny” can be shared, but it isn’t universal.
Things don’t have to make one kind of sense, of course, and most comedy doesn’t, because it relies on inversion and doubling up, either for the hell of it, or to make a point. The Nonsense Songs (1872) of Edward Lear turned the world upside down and “The Jumblies”, famously, went to sea in a sieve: it’s delightful nonsense, because sieves can’t be boats, but it’s also a parody of Victorian adventuring, so the innocence has a sharp edge to it. Even sharper are the thrills we get from tales of the macabre, such as Florence Sunnen’s “The Hook” (Nightjar Press, 2018), in which a bored undergraduate eats himself. The narrator watches her brother disappear, with his parents’ approval. Real food is available, but the self-consuming prankster won’t touch it. When a joke goes on too long, or we laugh too hard, we like to say “Stop!”, aware, perhaps, that misrule has a dark side. But no one does say it, here, and before long the chance to intervene has passed.

This month, on the Neuromantics, we’re looking at stories about hormones, brains and sexual behaviour that run counter to expectations. Testosterone has a masculinising effect on the body in utero and in development, but it also has an effect on the brain, and in mammal brains it turns out that it’s only having that effect after it has interacted with an enzyme called aromatase – and become an oestrogen (estradiol). That’s the shifting ground explored in Brain Aromatisation: Classical Roles and New Perspectives by Charles E. Roselli et al. We might then ask: which hormone is actually responsible for masculinisation – the testosterone or the estradiol? And the answer is a complex one, suggesting that complementary processes are at work, and that to masculinise a body part need not imply that it is defeminised.
This has implications for our view of the hormonal control of mammalian sexual behaviour. An interpretative gap seems to open up between sex differences in the brain and sexual behaviour; and (in humans) between partner preferences and the broad spectrum of behaviour, all of it socially modulated, that is exhibited in order to attract those partners. Some of this complexity turns on gender identity – the social construction of sex – and some of it on the category “sexual behaviour”, the kinds of interactions that we consider “sexual” in the first place.
What would 007 think about all this? And more to the point, what would he do? In Ian Fleming’s 1956 novel, Diamonds Are Forever, much of what the hero does has its roots in aggressive male behavioural traits. It’s a surprise, then, to see our hero packing a suitcase, and taking such loving care of his branded luggage, silk pyjama onesie, and sentimental knick-knacks. The closer one looks, the more interesting this fetishisation of things becomes. Everything in Bond has a sexual connotation, but not all of it feels typically masculine, perhaps because, like all heroes, 007 is an outsider who belongs nowhere, a dandy with a professional interest in concealing himself. The homosexual protagonist of James Baldwin’s famous 1957 novel, Giovanni’s Room, practises more naked self-deception, but his creator – a political activist as well as a great artist – ruthlessly exposes him.

How does a profound emotional experience in one generation affect the next? Is it handed down? Both the scientific paper and the short story under scrutiny in this month’s Neuromantics consider the ripple effect of trauma, and its observable consequences not just for survivors, but for those who come after them.
Offspring of all the higher primates have an extended period of infancy in which they are dependent on their mothers. If the mother dies, the infants are less likely to survive. But survival rates are also impacted before the mother dies, according to Maternal Death and Offspring Fitness in Multiple Wild Primates, by Matthew N. Zipple et al. And the children who do make it to adulthood tend to have fewer chlldren themselves. Why is this? Gorillas and humans can re-allocate the maternal role and reconfigure family hierarchies, often successfully, but other primates have fewer safety-nets (and often a shrinking habitat): they seem to have witnessed something irrevocable. They see a parent struggle and they “know” their vulnerability.
Mixed up in the experience of traumatic grief is fear – that people can disappear, that you or someone else can be taken, that your circumstances can change. And if we see that kind of fear at work in our parents, it works in us, too. In “Loose Change”, by Andrea Levy, the narrator – the English child, like Levy, of Jamaican parents – borrows a trifling sum of money from a stranger, a young girl recently arrived in London from Uzbekistan. They have coffee together. The narrator resolves to be kind, to help, but her resolution is tested by a deeper struggle with its roots in racism and handed-down shame. Can she do more than listen? Can she break the cycle?

Something happens when we go to the theatre, visit an art gallery, or hear music in the company of others, and it’s good for us, whatever our background, whatever the socio-economic indicators that mould our perceptions and expectations of art. That’s the contention – and, in part, the conclusion – of Daisy Fancourt and Alan Steptoe in their paper on Cultural Engagement and Mental Heath: does socio-economic status explain the association? (1982). But Fancourt and Steptoe leave important questions unanswered: what is the difference between the social and the personal experience of art, and how do we measure our collective interest in the kind of art – some poetry might be a good example – that has, over time, exchanged social ritual for individual contemplation? How does this less popular “engagement” with the world of art, music or literature affect our relationship with class, our sense of belonging and obligation, all things that can affect our mood and prevent our interests finding expression in the first place?
Maybe all art involves an exchange of self-consciousness (including class consciousness) for imaginative awareness. An actor discovers the intoxications and responsibilities of presence, we speak of being liberated by music. Those autonomous qualities – presence and the feeling of liberation – are what make artistic activity difficult for authoritarian regimes, and necessary for the artists (and audiences) who must try to survive them. They’re also signposts on the way back from personal contemplation to social significance. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021) wrote lyric verse, but its beautiful vigilance is disturbed by the shadow-side of watchfulness, the presence of the censor, and by his own urgent requirement for what he called “non-naive realism”. In the two poems discussed here – “Night is a Cistern” and “Tierra del Fuego”, both wonderfully translated by Clare Cavanaugh – the poet speaks to us directly and we become his ambiguous political witnesses, at once refugees and bystanders; also, perhaps, spies.

An all-purpose definition of “metaphor” might be, as the OED suggests, a name or descriptive term given to an object to which it is not properly applicable – something described in terms of something else. Can such a transfer of meaning be more than a figure of speech? Hernan Pablo Casakin thinks so. In Tel Aviv, a group of first-year architectural students were asked to redevelop an old bus station. All stages of planning benefited from ideas and images from other disciplines, but especially those involving practical difficulties of space and resources. Thinking about the city “as a bazaar of knowledge” helped one student overcome relative inexperience to create a mixed-use neighbourhood with fifteen flats, public buildings and amenities. Casakin records the experiment in Metaphors in Design Problem Solving (2007).

A longer, stranger, and more beautiful experiment, conducted by the writer, musician, artist and “psychonaut” Peter Blegvad, treats metaphor less as a tool or guide and more as a way of meeting the strangeness of the world. Imagine, Observe, Remember (Uniform Books, 2021) is a dazzling picture-essay in which the author paints and repaints objects and places in situ, from memory, and as his inner eye “sees” them. Radiators grow in stature, pianos become icons, a river delta acquires perfect symmetry. This is Transformers for the everyday environment, but with speculations in place of body armour. If the world comes to us through perception, then what is it “really” like, and are our senses just metaphorical descriptions? If they are, how does one shake off their influence? And do we want to?

The good news from neuroscientists in Australia (Jiang, et al, 2020), as published in NeuroImage and reported in Psychology Today (“How Some People Stay Sharp After 95”, May 6, 2020), is that very elderly people (90-100 yr-olds) exhibiting strong connectivity between the right and left frontal parietal lobes tend not to experience cognitive decline. The bad news is that, while it may sound like a great idea for nonagenarians to keep walking and learning new things, scientists find it hard actually to demonstrate the benefits of any specific activity in preserving brain function. It’s also hard, ethically, to defend the notion that staying “sharp” represents a “model of successful ageing”.

In the latest episode of The Neuromantics, we stop to consider some of the prejudices at work behind this view of longevity and cognitive health. To whom are we comparing these elderly groups? Often there’s context missing from the discussion (the socio-economic background of any late learner is as significant as the task s/he undertakes) and an unwillingness to accept that our educational development, at any age, has a dual aspect: we make bad choices as well as good ones. A useful guide to the limited predictive value of the things we do to “stay sharp” is the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). In three witty essays – “On the Length of Life”, “There is a Season for Everything”, and “On Not Pretending to be Ill” – the rationalist lawyer and devout Catholic advises us to enjoy a contemplative old age. In particular he tells us to deepen our thinking; to aim for intellectual consistency – the perfection of habit – rather than novelty. “We can always continue our studies,” he suggests, “but not our schoolwork.”