Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 35

Some of the most general features of human psychology arise simply from the nature of the brain-mind system – without our having to add any other assumptions. It is obvious, for example, that such brains are built to generalize and categorize in the same way that humans do. Experience wears metaphorical ‘grooves’ in the brain, as a river gradually wears a V-shaped valley through the landscape. And just as rain falling on the sides of the valley tends to run down into the river, so experiences that share most, but not all, of the features of a very common category will tend to be treated as if they were typical members of the category.²⁸ If it has got soft fur, likes fish, mews and rubs itself along my legs at supper time – well, that’s good enough for me: it’s a cat. It may only have three legs, be at least six inches longer than any other cat I’ve ever seen, and have fur the colour of the sky…OK, it’s a lame, gross, exotic cat – but still, basically, a cat.

Psychological research since the turn of the century has been full of demonstrations – if we needed them – that we see what we know; we look at the world through the categories and concepts of our minds. In one of the most famous demonstrations, people were flashed very brief exposures of playing cards which they were asked to try and identify. Unbeknownst to them, some of the cards were tricky ones: they crossed the colour with the suit, so every-so-often there would be a red six of clubs, or a black ten of hearts. People found it impossible to see what was there, insisting, until the cards were actually put into their hands, that they were regular cards – 'but a bit fancy' – would be about as far as they were prepared to go.²⁹ We have noted before that it is effectively part of the design characteristics of a tuneable brain that it should lead you to see what is familiar, and consequently have trouble, especially if time or attention is short, with the unprecedented.

The basic features of memory, too, are already laid down in the octopus model. If you take a familiar concept, memory or scenario – a gang of octopuses – then the more details of this group you subsequently activate, the more likely it is that the rest of the gang will also wake up. Memory works by part of a group recruiting the rest. That is why, if you have got a word on the tip of your tongue that will not come to you, the best strategy is not to keep straining for the word, but to let yourself free associate to it. In this way you can aim to build up sufficient ‘active’ ingredients of the memory trace for the whole thing to fire off, and the word or name pop into your head. And this is also why, if I asked you to think of the names of the other children in your class when you were seven, few if any would pop up. But if I took you back to your old classroom, or even sat you down and asked you to recreate in your mind a vivid picture of the room, then lots of previously hidden details would ‘miraculously’ start to come back to you.

In this chapter I have developed, with the help of the octopus model, the view of the brain-mind, and its basic modus operandi, which is emerging from the sophisticated labours of cognitive science. It is a brain without a control centre; a brain composed of thousands of simple constituents linked together in such a way that, collectively, they can perform complicated life-saving and life-enhancing computations. And they can, by altering the way different units are primed, make decisions either as quick as lightning, or in a slower, more reflective manner. So far, so good. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, even such a brain becomes clumsy as it gets bigger, and the next twist in the evolutionary tale has to occur.