Читать книгу Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 9

Parents like to think that they give their children clear, unambiguous instructions. They are puzzled as to why their children seem not to understand them. ‘Be home by 10 p.m.’ does not have a suffix of ‘or whenever it suits you’. It comes as a surprise to many parents to discover that children, like adults, do not hear what is said to them. What their brain registers is not what the parent says but what the brain interprets of what the parent says. This is the disability under which we all labour. All we can know is our interpretation of a communication, not the communication itself.

Different generations live in different worlds. Each generation’s world contains a past, present and future that are different from the pasts, presents and futures of other generations’ worlds. Teenagers, and those of us who can remember what it felt like to be a teenager, know how, when in conversation with our parents, we suddenly see the gulf that separates our world from our parents’ world. In that moment, we experience the loneliness of living in our own individual world.

This kind of loneliness is often called the loneliness of being. It is a very valuable loneliness because it allows us to think deeply, to become absorbed in meditation, or in the contemplation of nature, or the arts, or in some form of creativity. But, when we feel that intense loneliness of being unloved by those we want to love us, or of being with people who are so absorbed in themselves that they ignore us except when they want to use us, to be told that the loneliness of being is inescapable can mean that the loneliness we feel is unendurable.

Even when we are with people who love us and are interested in us, we find that our conversations always involve misunderstandings. This too is inescapable in our own individual worlds.

Here is a list illustrating the kinds of complaints people make about a conversation in which they are or have been engaged.

‘You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean.’

‘He can’t get it into his head that he has to do what he’s told.’

‘She just pours out all her feelings.’

‘He gave us his thoughts about this proposal but they proved to be rubbish.’

‘I can’t grasp his meaning.’

‘I gave him a piece of my mind but he just closed his ears to what I was saying.’

‘He never takes my advice.’

In each of these sentences something is being said about a thing. To speak about a thing we use a noun or a noun clause. The things talked about in these sentences are ‘idea’, ‘what he’s told’, ‘feelings’, ‘thoughts’, ‘rubbish’, ‘meaning’, ‘what I was saying’, ‘advice’. Each of these sentences contains the metaphor of something being passed from one person to another. The linguist Michael Reddy called this the ‘conduit metaphor’.¹ We think of conversing with one another, be it in actual conversation, or writing to someone, or reading a book, or watching television, as a process of passing something from one person to another. The means of passing something from one person to another is along some kind of conduit. The thing launched does not always reach its objective, as in ‘His words fell on deaf ears’, or ‘That idea has been floating around for a long time.’ The conduit metaphor assumes that the communication one person sends along the conduit reaches its target complete and intact. What you receive is what I send.

The conduit metaphor lies behind Richard Dawkins’ idea of the meme, which he defined as any kind of information which is copied from one person to another. The meme I send you is the one you get. Memes, Dawkins argues, replicate like genes. To explain why one person misinterprets the ideas another person gives him, Dawkins says that, like genes, memes are not always copied perfectly, and so give rise to new memes. He likens the memes he disapproves of, such as religious beliefs, to viruses, and thus they can be dangerous. His colleague the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote, ‘Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable.’² Richard Dawkins used to occupy the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. It is somewhat ironic that the person whose task it is to assist the public in understanding science does not understand himself how human beings communicate with one another.

Dictionaries define the words we use. If I do not know the meaning of a word you use, I can look it up in a dictionary. However, a dictionary cannot tell me the connotations you have given to that word. Connotations are the meanings we attach to words and phrases. Your connotations for a word are unlikely to be the same as my connotations for that word because your connotations are drawn from your past experience and my connotations from my past experience. Dawkins’ and Dennett’s connotations for the word ‘meme’ would be along the lines of ‘good’, ‘intelligent’, ‘indubitably right’, while my connotations for ‘meme’ are along the lines of ‘what rubbish’.

Everything we say has unstated implications. The person listening to what we say tries to guess the implications for the speaker of what they hear. The invented implications are rarely the same as those of the speaker, unless the listener knows the speaker extremely well. For instance, you might say to me, ‘My computer’s out of action again’, and I immediately assume that the implication of your statement is that you are frustrated as I would be when my computer fails to function properly. I do not know that you are secretly delighted to have such a good excuse for not answering your emails. We read into a communication much more than the words alone convey. Listening to one speaker we might be most perspicacious but with another we can be quite wrong.

These connotations and implications are part of the process of what we call, wrongly, receiving a communication. When someone speaks to us, what we hear is not what the speaker intended but our interpretation of what was said. If there were eighty people listening to my lecture, eighty-one lectures were heard in that room that night – one for each member of the audience and the one I heard in my head as I spoke. If we actually received a communication as it was given, there would be no need for literary critics to explain what a play or novel might mean; no need for political commentators to analyse what political leaders say or do; and in our personal lives we would never be mistaken in what someone communicating with us actually meant.

We make mistakes when we listen to other people, but surely when we listen to ourselves we hear exactly what we mean. We tell ourselves the truth. Isn’t that what intuition is?

Even if we leave aside for the moment the popular activities of wishful thinking and lying to ourselves, the question of whether, when we listen to our internal monologue, we hear exactly what is said is not simple to answer. That kind of awareness we call consciousness is actually quite a small part of what is going on in our brain. It is difficult to decide what to call the part of the brain of which we are not aware. The words ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious’ are now so loaded with the often lurid connotations of psychoanalysis that they are virtually impossible to use in a discussion about the brain’s functions, while ‘non-conscious’ seems to refer to someone in a coma. Psychologists have devised three pairs of terms to refer to aspects of the unconscious, namely, explicit / implicit, declaratory / procedural, controlled / automatic. For instance, if you say, ‘I am walking down a path’ while carrying out this action, the part of your brain which is operating is that which is conscious, explicit, declaratory, and controlled. If you are discussing the finer points of last night’s game while walking down a path, the part of your brain which is enabling you to put one foot in front of the other without falling over is unconscious, implicit, procedural and automatic.

We need a new word for the unconscious because it has very important functions, monitoring and memory. I could create a name based on these two functions, but it has many other functions, the details of which neuroscientists have yet to uncover. So I shall use ‘unconscious’, but ask you to remember that I am not using this word in the ways that Freud and Jung did.

It seems that our unconscious brain constantly monitors our environment. It is interpreting the environment, and these interpretations are meanings. For instance, you might be so engrossed in watching a film that you do not consciously notice that your legs are becoming cramped. However, your unconscious notices, and creates the meaning, ‘Change your position’, and you do so quite unconsciously. If you do not change your position, your unconscious will, metaphorically, raise its voice until it breaks through into consciousness and you move – unless, of course, your loved one is snuggled close to you and you do not want to risk destroying such bliss. You ignore the conscious warning and ensure your future pain when the film comes to an end.

The unconscious warning function is closely allied to the memory function. Your unconscious memory is like an attic where everything you have ever encountered is stored. However, the contents of this attic are in constant movement, changing their relationship to everything else in the attic. Your consciousness is not very efficient at finding things in the attic. The more it tries to find something such as a person’s name the more impossible the task becomes. If your consciousness stops looking and involves itself in another task (you say ‘Jim Whatshisname’ and go on with the story you were telling), a few minutes later Jim’s surname will pop into your head, thrown there by your unconscious like a mother who always knows where your stuff is. In the same way, when we go into an exam for which we have pre pared, if we make a conscious effort to retrieve what we have learnt, all we encounter is a blank wall, but, if we sit quietly and wait for our unconscious to think about the first question on the paper, the stream of our memory will begin to flow.

Many people are very proud of their intuition. They like to think that their intuition is always right. To believe that this is true they try to forget all those times when their intuition was wrong. It is said that a group of people interviewing candidates for a job make up their minds within the first few minutes of meeting each candidate. This is simply an example of what happens to most of us most of the times when we first meet someone. It seems that on encountering a new face our unconscious scurries around in the whirling chaos of our memory, pulls something out and presents it to us. What is presented might be quite banal, such as, ‘He looks like my cousin Harry.’ This might be true. We might follow this observation with, ‘Harry was a liar’, and that might be true. But then we can make an entirely false deduction, namely, ‘Therefore this chap is a liar.’

People who place a high value on their intuition are often those people who prefer their world of fantasies to the real world in which they live. They are likely to hold the belief that ‘When scientists analyse things they destroy them. My intuition and my feelings are too precious to be destroyed in this way.’

Then there are the people who subscribe to the delusion, ‘I am objective in all the decisions I make.’ Recently, a well-known politician had made a surprising decision about his political future. I was discussing this with another member of parliament. I mentioned that some months before I had seen a television interview with the politician’s wife which suggested to me that the wife did not share any of her husband’s political ambitions. Perhaps this had played a part in the man’s decision. My friend scornfully rejected this. He said, ‘This man made his decision on purely political grounds. The state of his marriage had nothing to do with it.’

Few men my friend’s generation and older would disagree with this. When the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who in the late nineteenth century became one of the founders of modern psychiatry, wrote his memoirs (according to David Healy ‘among the most tedious books ever written’) he noted the death of his children as something of an afterthought and failed to name either his wife or his surviving children. ‘From the point of view of science, the personal details of these people were unimportant.’³ A hundred years later, I found that the psychiatrists I was working with considered that not only their feelings but the feelings of their patients had nothing to do with the practice of psychiatry. What these men were doing was to turn their fear of feelings – their own and other people’s – into a precious belief that fed their pride. They would say, ‘I am objective. I am never swayed by feelings.’

Younger generations of men brought up by mothers who were in the vanguard of Women’s Liberation tend not to be frightened of admitting that they have feelings, but they find them frightening. They know that feelings are there, but they would prefer they were never mentioned. When the Guardian decided to send their arts writers to review sport and the sports writers to review the arts, Steve Bierley, their tennis correspondent, was sent to see the exhibition of the work of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois at the Pompidou in Paris. He wrote, ‘Sport is essentially about youth, and about absolutes. Sport makes you feel elated or depressed. The works of Louise Bourgeois, 97 years old this December, make you feel unsettled, repelled… Sports writing demands, though often does not get, degrees of objectivity and balance. But how can you be objective about art? Sport has rarely spooked me. But Bourgeois did, all the time… Watch sport and you think about sport. Observe art and you discover yourself. Spirals, nests, lairs, refuges. Bourgeois leads you to dark places you are not sure you want to revisit.’⁴

No wonder so many men prefer sport to art!

From my observations of succeeding generations of men, it seems that, while younger generations of men live more easily beside women than older generations of men did, men still fear women because the threat is that women always see things differently from men. This is not to say that a woman’s point of view is closer to the truth than is a man’s, but simply that a woman’s point of view is always different from a man’s. The fact that women see things differently from men is a constant reminder to men of what everyone knows but rarely admits they know, namely, that there are as many truths as there are people to hold them, and all these truths are no more than approximations of what actually exists.

Scientists may have only recently unravelled the secrets of our brain’s anatomy to show how difficult it is for us to see what is there, but wise people have always known that we see not things in themselves but our interpretations of things. Writing about Francis Bacon in his book The Threat to Reason, Dan Hind said, ‘Bacon insists that we will only learn the truth about the world if we put away our preconceptions, whether they derive from our experience, or from established sources of authority.’⁵ Yet we cannot look at the world with eyes washed clean of all our past experience. All we can do is, first, to acknowledge that this is how we see, and then set about practising how to create alternative interpretations. An alternative interpretation might prove to be closer to the truth than the first interpretation.

How can we possibly know what is true? We cannot see reality directly but only the constructions our brain devises out of our past experience. Our brain creates a hypothesis about what is going on and builds up evidence that might increase the probability that the hypothesis is correct. Truth can be expressed only as a probability, not as a certainty. Knowledge of the past is of limited use in predicting the future. Our world and our universe are far more complex than we can comprehend. There are no fixed points in our universe. Everything is in constant change. All we have are our interpretations of the communications we receive, not the communication as it was to the sender. Most of what we know lies in our unconscious. Yet, to operate safely in the world we need to know the truth of what is going on. It is as if we are blindfolded and moving through an unknown landscape, not knowing where it is safe to put a foot, but we are impelled to keep moving on. In such a situation, finding what is true would seem to be our absolute top priority.

But it is not. For all of us there is something far more important than finding the truth.