DD82 – Gods and Robots

It is hard not to be fascinated by robots, machines that are capable of carrying out complex actions automatically, not under the immediate control of a human.  Although some robots are constructed to resemble people, most are task-performing machines designed with an emphasis on functionality, with little regard for aesthetics.  Going back to ancient civilisations, there have been accounts of user-configurable automated devices resembling humans and other animals, many in the form of animatronics, primarily developed as a form of entertainment. In more recent times it was electronics that enabled the development of robots, right back to those three-wheeled tortoise robots created by William Grey in 1948.

Today robots are familiar, especially after visits to manufacturing facilities.  They have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks, often those that people prefer not to do or avoid because of the limitations of size.  It is also the case that  recent years have seen increasing concerns over the use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment, and their use in various forms military combat have raised ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction and may be a realistic concern in the future.

It is easy to assume that robots are a Twentieth Century development.  However, many ancient mythologies referred to artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan in Roman times), the clay golems of Jewish legends, let alone the story of Galatea, the  mythical statue of Pygmalion.  In the 4th century BC, a Greek mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum suggested a mechanical steam-operated bird he called ‘The Pigeon’, later followed by such writers as Philo of Byzantium, who made a washstand automaton, and Hero of Alexandria, an inventor who created several user-configurable automated devices, and went on to describe machines powered by air pressure, steam and water, including a ‘speaking’ automaton.  Not just the Greeks.  In ancient China, the 3rd-century text of the Lie Zi describes an account of humanoid automata developed by Yan Shi for the Chinese emperor King Mu of Zhou.  To my surprise, I read the 5th century BC philosopher Mozi contributed to invention of artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could fly.

All this is the background to Adrienne Mayor’s 2018 book, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (published by Princeton University Press).  She reveals that first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine wasn’t created in MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. As she points out “More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, ‘life through craft’.”  In her nicely illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the surprising story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements, and how these visions reflect the invention of real animated machines.

To quote from her preface: “As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for making automata. Mythic animations appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human technicians used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices weren’t just imagined but actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, [perhaps] the original Silicon Valley.”

The word “robot” will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary, as it was coined in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Čapek. But our enduring interest with self-moving devices, or automata, is far older. In her book classicist and science historian Adrienne Mayor surveys the many living statues, robotic warriors, and artificial devices that populated Greek mythology to show the deep roots of our fascination with beings “made, not born”.  However, I should make it clear that Mayor, who is a researcher in the history of science, is not offering a broad historical overview of ancient automata, as her book is largely about Greek mythology, with only some material from ancient India and China.  If you are interested in mediaeval automata, this isn’t the book for you:  she doesn’t even mention Leonardo da Vinci.

Indeed, in the spirit of further clarification, I should explain that the focus of  Gods and Robots is on myths and the dreams of the subtitle, rather than on the machines. As Mayor explains, the ancient Greeks imagined their gods capable of crafting robots without necessarily explaining how these were supposed to work (obviously the gods’ expertise is beyond scrutiny!).  However, this is a serious and scholarly account, coming from Princeton University Press, and it provides us with interesting look into the minds and thoughts of some fascinating ancient Greeks.  Mayor opens with the bronze giant Talos who was said to patrol the borders of Crete. Despite his origins, he turns out to be susceptible to all-too-human ruses and is destroyed by removing a bolt in his ankle, suggesting similarities to the story of Achilles. This causes him to “bleed out” his ichor, a vital substance akin to blood.

An important figure is Daedalus, a prolific tinkerer.  Mayor reminds us that, as with much about the ancient world, the surviving literature and other evidence is incredibly fragmentary, so opinions are divided on whether Daedalus was a real person, a mythical character, or even a group of inventors.  It is an excellent example of her cautious approach.  Indeed, some of the content also makes you wonder whether her book should have a content warning.  She advises us that “the adulterous King Minos, who ruled over the same Crete patrolled by the above Talos, was cursed by his wife Pasiphae. Any attempt at extra-marital sex would result in him ejaculating scorpions, millipedes, and snakes. Pasiphae, in turn, was punished by Zeus to lust after a bull in Minos’s herd. To satisfy her cravings she turns to Daedalus to make her a hollow replica of a cow that she can crawl into and that the bull can then mount.”  Those who working in the livestock industry and who use similar devices to collect bulls semen for artificial insemination might want to ponder some claims about the roots of their profession.

Only some authors have an (often much needed) sense of humour.  That this is true in this case is evident when you read some of Mayor’s commentaries in her book .  For example, she notes Daedalus was so good at making his statues life-like that the theme of statues escaping their plinths became, well, a recurring element in period dramas. But it also led to Socrates questioning whether such automata should be tethered to prevent them from escaping like runaway slaves. Mayor sees many parallels to current conundrums. Are we comfortable considering robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as property, or even as slaves? And who, then, is responsible for their actions? Early accidents with self-driving cars have already shown that this is no mere academic question.

In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation.  Though many of Mayor’s subjects—such as Talos, mentioned before, the bronze automaton that defended Crete from outsiders—were made through divine processes apparently unknown to humans, Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. As Mayor writes, “Ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible. The myths reinforce the notion that imagination is the spirit that unites myth and science”. Yet such an interpretation of these ancient stories raises the question of whether it is not precisely the inscrutable nature of so many technologies that encourages us to, like the Titan Epimetheus, accept them into our lives and societies with little forethought.

Of course, the ancient Greeks could not have predicted the rise of the godlike techno-capitalists of the early twenty-first century, not to mention our relatively unbridled embrace of their freely-given technological wonders. Nonetheless, the idea that we might not so eagerly trust those more powerful than us is central to the character of technological myths through the ages. In Gods and Robots, Mayor offers a new interpretation of many texts and artifacts from ancient mythologies and cultures.  She opens up new ways of thinking about some very old cultural considerations of the relationship between technology and culture. As Mayor argues in the epilogue, technological wonder “might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress in the age of technology” but an ambivalent fascination with technology “surfaced thousands of years ago in the ancient Greek world”.

In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. The aforementioned myth of Talos represents an early expression of the idea that a sort of independent, if limited, form of life might be replicated through technology. Likewise, Medea luring Pelias into a “cauldron of rejuvenation” represents a forebearer of the “hope and horror [that] still coexist in modern Western reactions to ‘playing god’ with science” (page 42). Mayor also finds evidence for earlier technologies in Celtic and Norse mythology, calling the goddess Freyja an “organic cyborg” (page 68). Ancient “techne-pornography” can be traced back at least as far as the myth of Pasiphae, in which Daedalus—he of the wax wings and Minotaur—built what Mayor calls a “realistic, life-size sex toy” (page 71). Early philosophical writings on the nature of automata, Mayor argues, presaged the complex work of more contemporary philosophers and ethicists on artificial intelligence. Ancient anxieties about how artificial images and beings could seem eerily lifelike find their contemporary analogy, here, in the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Mayor finds some unnerving references to these myths in the contemporary world, such as TALOS, a “computerized exoskeleton” being developed by the U.S. military (page 138). Each of the chapters is illustrated with reproductions of ancient art representing the myths under discussion.

But as Mayor’s overarching interpretation of the relationship between myth and technology suggests, Gods and Robots is more about ancient Greek imaginings of technology—or how “mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos . . awe, wonder, and astonishment” (page 102)—than it is about how technology has been wielded as a form of power, both in these stories and in the cultures in which these stories circulated. However, technology and myth do not act as mere vessels for the imagination. For instance, Pygmalion sculpted a sort of semi-living statue that pleased him in a way that “vulgar real women” could not (107). What does this story say about the ancient Greek world’s understanding of who could claim technological power and how that power had been or ought to be wielded?

Among her many fascinating exegeses of ancient myths, Mayor acknowledges these are often focussed on power and technology, noting, for example, that “one of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic” (page 152). It’s a pity that, building on this text, she didn’t explore this motivation further, as she covers mythic and factual material in the context of these narratives.  Despite this, Gods and Robots is a revealing account of how technology has functioned in both ways from the beginning of recorded history.

It is easy to get swept up by the stories Mayor uses to illustrate her study of technology and ‘magical transformations’.  However, to do so is to miss the point.  As in so many other ways, her book reveals an important truth, which is that so much of what we think of as modern thinking finds echoes in ideas form 2,500 years ago.  What is old becomes new each time we re-discover themes.  Major does go outside classical Greece, and in one case study looks at Qin Shi Huang , an early emperor in China.  Back in 219 BC, he sent people (‘three thousand young people’) to discover the elixir for immortality.  He failed, and it seems such searches end up in failure, as immortality of the body (and mind) seems impossible.  Indeed, it appears the dream of eternal and ageless life never goes away – it‘s still with us in 2025, with some of the new ‘super-heroes’ of the virtual computer technologies seeking ways to live for ever.

In one section she touches on another dream , that of enhancing ourselves, finding ways, through technology to be like other members of the animal kingdom.  In Roman times one example was the story of Daedalus who focussed this energies on creating wings for humans, his way to save Icarus.   His attempt failed because the wax he used to fix the feathers to his artificial wings melted as Icarus strayed too close to the sun.  It was an improbable story, but it has left us with that image of many dangers in ‘flying too close to the sun’.

If we stand back from the various stories and myths she relates, Mayor’s book is a thoughtful piece about the ongoing desire humans possess to step beyond their limitations.  We can go down deep in oceans, fly, and even travel away from the earth.  However, this is only because we sit inside inventions that are designed to protect us.  We remain weak, easily crushed., killed and readily eaten, our only hope to build artificial carapaces to protect us.  It’s not surprising, those ancient Greek and Roman dreams of changing our bodies live on.

Mayor writes of the “tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality”, an issue that somewhat mirrors William Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, which ends with Leontes, the King of Sicily encountering a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had had unjustly executed years before for an infidelity of which she was innocent. Standing before the sculpture of Hermione, Leontes mournfully intones “Still, methinks, /There is an air comes from her! What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?”  Suddenly, Helios arrives on his chariot and the statue of Hermione comes to life and embraces her husband.?

After reading Mayor, perhaps we should think of Hermione in a third way, as an Artificial Intelligence programmed with the consciousness of Hermione, encased in the body of a robot shaped like a woman. Such robots (and their ancestors) have always existed in that uncanny valley between the inert and the living, the artificial and the natural, the human and the divine. They encourage a sense of wonder, with a god from the machine emerging above an Athenian stage, or a statue coming to life in a Sicilian workshop, or in any of the innumerable dreams and myths which animated both classical and the contemporary minds.  The idea won’t go away.

DD60 – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test

Sometimes I read something that comes to me from ‘out of left field’.  It’s an odd phrase, and, resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt the term was first used in the idiomatic sense of ‘from out of nowhere’ to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market.  Back in  1998, an American English professor reported that the phrase ‘out of left field’ was in use by 1953.  However, he added that it was clearly related to baseball, and according to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase refers to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by a ‘left-fielder’ to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.

Things come out of left field when we least expect them, and the challenge we face is that our expectations can widely differ from those of others.  I might consider a lightning or meteor strike as truly amazing, something so rare as to be almost impossible.  An astronomer or climatologists might have a very different appreciation of their likelihood, and some other people might regard such activities as only to be expected when we live in troubled times, especially if they are fond of finding evidence of extra-terrestrials intervening in our world.

Marlene Zuk came to me from out of left field.  She’s an American academic, a biologist and a behavioural ecologist. I wouldn’t have known about her if I hadn’t picked up a book in the Public Library, titled Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test.  Who wouldn’t be tempted by a book with a title like that!  Once I borrowed it, I discovered from the inside cover she has had a distinctive focus on the unusual.  Given her interest in insects from a young age, when she went to university, and after majoring in English, she decided to switch to Biology.  Now an academic, she is based at the University of Minnesota.

Her approach is refreshing.  She works in a lab focused on emerging questions in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology:

“We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behaviour and secondary sexual characters in natural populations.  I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behaviour, life history, and morphology of animals.  Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly.  The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favours reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.

What can a cricket do?  In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction.  The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution.  How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly?  This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behaviour in the establishment of novel traits.”

Interesting?  She goes on to comment that “In addition, like others who study sexual behaviour in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behaviour.  I am often contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, ‘Is monogamy natural?’ or ‘Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?’   Clearly, she enjoys both interacting with other scientists as well as with the public on a broad range of topics.  She has written several books for a general audience about animal behaviour and evolution.

That’s not all this busy academic does.  In addition, she spends time in promoting women in science, on which she has made some very pertinent comments. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘There’s nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences’.  The article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities.  By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing studies based on essential scientific integrity, she argues that “until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.”

Once I had read Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, I was hooked.  Helpfully, it has an overview which explains her interests in relation to five key ideas.  In these blogs I usually avoid quoting another writer at length, but I can’t put her arguments better than she does:

1. The nature-nurture controversy is a zombie idea.

“When people think about behaviour in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behaviour is genetic or whether it’s learned. That’s especially true when headlines are full of declarations like “Our politics are in our DNA.”

“This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all.  The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because it’s in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, it’s the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment that’s important.”  …

2. Having a small brain doesn’t mean you are dumb.

“Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behaviour. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?”

“To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 – 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.”

3. Dogs are not exceptional.

“Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, “In what sense are dogs special?” The conclusion was that they aren’t.  The reception to their work was not appreciative. “Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says,” smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, “Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects.” No one seemed placated.  “All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories.”  The study didn’t show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect.”

“To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarily—members of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training. The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odours of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term “physical cognition”—recognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs aren’t particularly good at navigating over long distances”. …

4. 4. Animals can treat their diseases.

“Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?

Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.”

“This kind of behaviour doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behaviour to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider “smart,” as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.” …

5. Animals get mentally ill too.

“Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but don’t get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.”

“I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviours—hand-washing, turning in circles before lying down—too much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we can’t know what dogs are or aren’t obsessing over.”

“A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dog’s risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dog’s genetic makeup won’t tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dog’s genetic profile doesn’t tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder.  This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesn’t cause the disorder unless the environment favours it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviours.”

OK!  Have I convinced you her books are worth reading?  Here are a couple of quotes that help me make a different point:  often her writing is funny as well as informative.  On her theme that most changes are not exclusively ‘nature versus nurture’, but usually some combination ,of both, she quotes Patrick Bateson ”whole organisms survive and reproduce differentially and the winners drag their phenotypes with them”.  Well, if that seems a bit esoteric, how about another observation:  “Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich?  Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear and was in effect lying in wait”. This was from an English study on Lesser Black-backed Gulls.  Oh, and the researcher noted those same gulls knew at what times there would be fresh dumped garbage at waste centres.”

She also has a mischievous side.  :”Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less molluscs you find in your garden.  Often beautifully coloured, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world.  Two species, called sacoglkossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability:  they can decapitate themselves , and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone.  The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires, a scene that should surely be incorporated into a horror film at the earliest opportunity”. Yup, good idea?!   Weird?  No weirder than Mel Pennant’s recent murder mystery, A Murder for Miss Hortense, about a “retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth’ who lives in a quiet Birmingham suburb, and whose black West Indian) dialect is challenging, so say the least.  Zuk is like Pennant:  the subject might be different but the writing is unusually compelling.

Is she coming out of left field?  Certainly Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test presents many observations that are quite different from what I might have expected.  I’m not a biologist or a behavioural ecologist.  However, even if her observations are not quite about what I might have predicted, they aren’t surprising.  The reason why Dancing Cockatoos is such a compelling book is because it is  reassuringly sensible.  By the time I reached the end, I found myself constantly saying “of course”.  If you want to be reassured how alike we are to many members of the animal world, even to gulls seen spying on apparently available French fries, Marlene Zuk is very convincing.

Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary 

I’ve broken my usual rule, and copied this extract from an article with the same name from Nautilus, January 18, 2018.  It’s an interview by Kevin Berger edited to fit my usual blog length.  I find Anthony Damasio one of the most helpful thinkers to challenge the materialist view of human beings.

Source: https://nautil.us/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary-236956/

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by. But since he published Descartes’ Error in 1994, Damasio has been concerned that a central thesis in his books, that brains don’t define us, has been muted by research that states how much they do. To Damasio’s dismay, the view of the human brain as a computer, the command center of the body, has become lodged in popular culture.

In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, mounts his boldest argument yet for the role of the brain. … “When I look back on Descartes’ Error, it was completely timid compared to what I’m saying now,” Damasio says. He knows his new book may rile believers in the brain as emperor of all. “I was entirely open with my ideas.  If people don’t like it, they don’t like it. They can criticize it, of course, which is fair, but I want to tell them, because it’s so interesting, this is why you have feelings.”

One thing I like about The Strange Order of Things is it counters the idea that we are just our brains.

Oh, that idea is absolutely wrong.

Not long ago I was watching a PBS series on the brain, in which host and neurologist David Eagleman, referring to our brain, declares, “What we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs and our hopes, everything we are happens in here.”

That’s not the whole story. Of course, we couldn’t have minds with all of their enormous complexity without nervous systems. That goes without saying. But minds are not the result of nervous systems alone. The statement you quote reminds me of Francis Crick, someone whom I admired immensely and was a great friend. Francis was quite opposed to my views on this issue. We would have huge discussions because he was the one who said that everything you are, your thoughts, your feelings, your mental this and that, are nothing but your neurons. This is a big mistake, in my view, because we are mentally and behaviorally far more than our neurons. We cannot have feelings arising from neurons alone. The nervous systems are in constant interaction and cooperation with the rest of the organism. The reason why nervous systems exist in the first place is to assist the rest of the organism. That fact is constantly missed.

The concept of “homeostasis” is critical in your new book. What is homeostasis?

It’s the fundamental property of life that governs everything that living cells do, whether they’re living cells alone, or living cells as part of a tissue or an organ, or a complex system such as ourselves. Most of the time, when people hear the word homeostasis, they think of balance, they think of equilibrium. That is incorrect because if we ever were in “equilibrium,” we would be dead. Thermodynamically, equilibrium means zero thermal differences and death. Equilibrium is the last thing that nature aims for.

What we must have is efficient functioning of a variety of components of an organism. We procure energy so that the organism can be perpetuated, but then we do something very important and almost always missed, which is hoard energy. We need to maintain positive energy balances, something that goes beyond what we need right now because that’s what ensures the future. What’s so beautiful about homeostasis is that it’s not just about sustaining life at the moment, but about having a sort of guarantee that it will continue into the future. Without those positive energy balances, we court death.

What’s a good example of homeostasis?

If you are at the edge of your energy reserves and you’re sick with the flu, you can easily tip over and die. That’s one of the reasons why there’s fat accumulation in our bodies. We need to maintain the possibility of meeting the extra needs that come from stress, in the broad sense of the term. I poetically describe this as a desire for permanence, but it’s not just poetic. I believe it’s reality.

You write homeostasis is maintained in complex creatures like us through a constant interplay of pleasure and pain. Are you giving a biological basis to Freud’s pleasure principle—life is governed by a drive for pleasure and avoidance of pain?

Yes, to a great extent. What’s so interesting is that for most of the existence of life on earth, all organisms have had this effective, automated machinery that operates for the purpose of maintenance and continuation of life. I like to call the organisms that only have that form of regulation, “living automata.” They can fight. They can cooperate. They can segregate. But there’s no evidence that they know that they’re doing so. There’s no evidence of anything we might call a mind. Obviously we have more than automatic regulation. We can control regulation in part, if we wish to. How did that come about?

Very late in the game of life there’s the appearance of nervous systems. Now you have the possibility of mapping the inside and outside world. When you map the inside world, guess what you get? You get feelings. Of necessity, the machinery of life is either in a state of reasonable efficiency or in a state of inefficiency, which is most often the case. Organisms with nervous systems can image these states. And when you start having imagery, you start having minds. Now you begin to have the possibility of responding in a way that you could call “knowledgeable.” That happens when organisms make images. A bad internal state would have been imaged as the first pains, the first malaises, the first sufferings. Now the organism has the possibility of knowingly avoiding whatever caused the pain or prefer a place or a thing or another animal that causes the opposite of that, which is well-being and pleasure.

Why would feelings have evolved?

Feelings triumphed in evolution because they were so helpful to the organisms that first had them. It’s important to understand that nervous systems serve the organism and not the other way around. We do not have brains controlling the entire operation. Brains adjust controls. They are the servants of a living organism. Brains triumphed because they provided something useful: coordination. Once organisms got to the point of being so complex that they had an endocrine system, immune system, circulation, and central metabolism, they needed a device to coordinate all that activity. They needed to have something that would simultaneously act on point A and point Z, across the entire organism, so that the parts would not be working at cross purposes. That’s what nervous systems first achieve: making things run smoothly.

Now, in the process of doing that, over millions of years, we have developed nervous systems that do plenty of other things that do not necessarily result in coordination of the organism’s interior, but happen to be very good at coordinating the internal world in relation to the outside world. This is what the higher reaches of our nervous system, namely the cerebral cortex, does. It gives us the possibilities of perceiving, of memorizing, of reasoning over the knowledge that we memorize, of manipulating all of that and even translating it into language. That is all very beautiful, and it is also homeostatic, in the sense that all of it is convenient to maintain life. It if were not, it would just have been discarded by evolution.

How does your thesis square with the hard problem of consciousness, how the physical tissue in our heads produces immaterial sensations?

Some philosophers of mind will say, “Well, we face this gigantic problem. How does consciousness emerge out of these nerve cells?” Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone. You have to think in terms of the whole organism. And you have to think in evolutionary terms.

The critical problem of consciousness is subjectivity. You need to have a “subject.” You can call it an I or a self. Not only are you aware right now that you are listening to my words, which are in the panorama of your consciousness, but you are aware of being alive, you realize that you’re there, you’re ticking. We are so distracted by what is going on around us that we forget sometimes that we are, A-R-E in capitals. But actually you are watching what you are, and so you need to have a mechanism in the brain that allows you to fabricate that part of the mind that is the watcher.

You do that with a number of devices that have to do, for example, with mapping the movements of your eyes, the position of your head, and the musculature of your body. This allows you to literally construct images of yourself making images. And you also have a layer of consciousness that is made by your perception of the outside world; and another layer that is made of appreciating the feelings that are being generated inside of you. Once you have this stack of processes, you have a fighting chance of creating consciousness.

Why do you object to comparing the brain to a computer?

In the early days of neuroscience, one of our mentors was Warren McCulloch. He was a gigantic figure of neuroscience, one of the originators of what is today computational neuroscience. When you go back to the ’40s and ’50s, you find this amazing discovery that neurons can be either active or inactive, in a way that can be described mathematically as zeroes and ones. Combine that with Alan Turing and you get this idea that the brain is like a computer and that it produces minds using that same simple method.

That has been a very useful idea. And true enough, it explains a good part of the complex operations, that our brains produce such as language. Those operations require a lot of precision and are being carried out by cerebral cortex, with enormous detail, and probably in a basic computational mode. All the great successes of artificial intelligence used this idea and have been concerned with high-level reasoning. That is why A.I. has been so successful with games such as chess or Go. They use large memories and powerful reasoning. …[It matches] very well with things that are high on the scale of the mental operations and behaviors, such as those we require for our conversation. But they don’t match well with the basic systems that organize life, that regulate, for example, the degree of mental energy and excitation or with how you emote and feel. The reason is that the operations of the nervous system responsible for such regulation relies less on synaptic signaling, the one that can be described in terms of zeroes and ones, and far more on non-synaptic messaging, which lends itself less to a rigid all or none operation.

Perhaps more importantly, computers are machines invented by us, made of durable materials. None of those materials has the vulnerability of the cells in our body, all of which are at risk of defective homeostasis, disease, and death. In fact, computers lack most of the characteristics that are key to a living system. A living system is maintained in operation, against all odds, thanks to a complicated mechanism that can fall apart as a result of minimal amounts of malfunction. We are extremely vulnerable creatures. People often forget that. Which is one of the reasons why our culture, or Western cultures in general, are a bit too calm and complacent about the threats to our lives. I think we are becoming less sensitive to the idea that life is what dictates what we should do or not do with ourselves and with others.

… The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms. It forces you to look back and realize that what people were doing historically, at the outset, at the moment of invention of a cultural instrument or a cultural practice, was an attempt to reduce the amount of suffering and to maximize the amount of wellbeing not only for the inventor, but for the community around them. One person alone can invent a painting or a musical composition, but it is not meant for that person alone. And you do not invent a moral system or a government system alone or for yourself alone. It requires a society, a community.

You write, “The increasing knowledge of biology from molecules to systems reinforces the humanist project.” How so?

This knowledge gives us a broader picture of who we are and where we are in the history of life on earth. We had modest beginnings, and we have incorporated an incredible amount of living wisdom that comes from as far down as bacteria. There are characteristics of our personal and cultural behavior that can be found in single-cell organisms or in social insects. They clearly do not have the kind of highly developed brains that we have. In some cases, they don’t have any brain at all. But by analyzing this strange order of developments we are confronted with the spectacle of life processes that are complex and rich in spite of their apparent modesty, so complex and rich that they can deliver the high level of behaviors that we normally, quite pretentiously, attribute only to our great human smarts. We should be far more humble. That’s one of my main messages. In general, connecting cultures to the life process makes apparent a link that we have ignored for far too long.

The older one becomes, the more we tend to reminisce with friends about past events – both achievements and failures.  Memory is tricky, in the sense that some things from the past stand out more than others.  I have a vivid memory of losing my wife’s purse when travelling on a bus in London, back in 1962.  Actually, what I remember is the lady who got in touch with me after finding the purse.  I went to collect it, and her face is stuck in my memory – almost as clear as the day it happen3ed:  she wasn’t a nice lady, and her appearance was more than a little off-putting.  Added to that, the returned purse was empty – the state it was found it, she assured me!

Memory is fascinating, especially as it seems there are some moments, like the one above, which seem permanently and readily retrieved, while much else is apparently lost.  To that moment when I retrieved a lost purse, some others are always easily recalled.  There was the time at Christmas when, perhaps aged 5 or 56 years old, I woke early and found a parcel on my bed, along with the large sock full of food goodies.  I opened the parcel quietly, as I was supposed to wait until after breakfast, and in the dark I found I have been given a shirt and shorts.  Clothes for Christmas!  I thanked my parents, only to discover, by their slightly odd response, that what I had uncovered in the half-light was actually a soccer shirt and shorts.  Ah well, perhaps that was a forewarning:  sport and I were never close.

I could continue with other examples of the odd moments that seem to be embedded in my memory, but close to hand.  Standing outside the headmaster’s office on my first day at grammar school, wondering how I’d ended up in trouble of my first day.  When the light above the door went green, I entered to discover the problem was my shoes were clean enough!  How about that moment in a tent in the garden when I lay upon the ground next to a girl I’d invited over (my first girlfriend):  I didn’t know what to do, only to be rescued by our being called indoors for afternoon tea.  How about bungling the beginning of a talk to some 300 people (now this was much later in life, probably aged 40 years old).  Or arriving at the airport for one trip overseas to discover I’d left my passport at home.

As I am typing right now, the memories that seem closest to the surface almost always seem to do with mistakes, embarrassment, or confusions.  Do I recall the telegram letting me know about my admissions to university?  No, although I still have the telegram.  I don’t recall my taking a driving rest at the age of seventeen, but I recall back my dad’s car into a tree as I was practising (fortunately making only a tiny dent to the bumper).  I can remember the nice waitress offering me extra glasses of wine to sample at a wine-tasting, but I can’t recall getting back home in my car (at which point I must have been seriously drunk).  It seems that often there has to be some emotional content to ensure that memories are clearly recalled.

Memory becomes even more elusive when you can remember an event clearly, only to be told by someone else that you have it wrongly recalled, sometimes quite badly so.  To say to a friend “I remember when …” is almost like an invitation to disagreement.  They reply “no, that wasn’t what happened.  What you did was …”.  How could I – or my friend – have got things so wrong.  In fact, it seems that every time I try to validate a recollection, someone pops up to contradict me.  Am I bad at recall?

Frederic Bartlett was a British psychologist whose major work, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, was published in 1932.  It was many years later I read it and began to understand that ‘memory isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’!   He suggested  that memories of past events and experiences are actually mental reconstructions that are coloured by cultural attitudes and personal habits, rather than being direct recollections of observations made at the time. Through a series of experiments, he was able to demonstrate that very little of an event is actually perceived at the time of its occurrence but that, in reconstructing the memory, gaps in observation or perception are filled in with the aid of previous experiences.

Central to his work was that people use ‘schema’, mental structures that an individual uses to organize knowledge and guide both their cognition and their   behaviour. People use schemata  to categorize objects and events based on common elements and characteristics and thus interpret and predict the world.   As a result, new information is sorted out according to how it fits into these mental structures.   People retrieve knowledge from various areas to draw conclusions about missing or non-evidential information, and develop schemata which represent and organise the ways in which the characteristics of certain events or objects are recalled, as determined by one’s self-knowledge and cultural-political background.

Bartlett developed the concept of schema Remembering.  He suggested  organized knowledge can be understood as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures that represent a person’s understanding of the world, and he studied the impact of one’s cultural background in rephrasing and memorizing certain events. For example, in one of his best-known studies, he examined whether subjects could recall events that strongly deviate from their own environmental background, and he showed that the more culturally different one’s own background was from that of the presented story, the less likely it was that participants could remember the story. Bartlett concluded that the participants distorted the presented story in favour of their own cultural stereotypes,  and that details that were difficult to interpret were omitted because they did not fit in with the participants’ own schemata

How does this work.  Bartlett’s model suggests schemata allow one to perceive the whole picture of an event or object based on partial information structures. This reference is possible because each schema has a main category, a so-called slot that connects different semantic networks. For example, the main slot “house” stores the information “wall,” “roof,” and “floor,” and, within a framework of ‘whole-part’ relationships, an individual can therefore infer that a house has a wall, a roof, and a floor. Moreover, each schema is developed in a way that helps to simplify drawing conclusions of a represented concept. For example, if one knows that an object is a door, then, according to the definition of a schema “door,” we can assume that it has a lock, a handle, and hinges.

His perspective has been influential.  In 1981, American researchers William Brewer and James Treyens studied the effects of schemata in memory. In their study, 30 subjects were brought into the office of the principal investigator and were told to wait. After 35 seconds, the subjects were asked to leave the room and to list everything that they could recall being in there.  Brewer and Treyens showed that the subjects could recall all those objects that fit into their schema of “office room,” and they had a much faultier memory of those items that were not a part of their schema.  For example, 29 of the 30 subjects recalled that the office had a chair, a desk, and walls, but only eight could recall the anatomic skull or a writing pad.  Interestingly, nine subjects mentioned that they had seen books, but, in fact, there were no books in the office. Being able to recall books when books were not among those objects present shows that memory of the characteristics of certain locations depends on schemata associated with those types of locations.

This approach leads to an interesting further stage.  It is possible to define certain strategies of simplifying schemata, including such organising principles we term ‘stereotypes’ and ‘archetypes’,  and a great deal of research has shown that these drive the decision-making process. Prior knowledge plays a role in cognitive processing, as pre-existing schemata often need to be activated to relate to new information. This is described in the literature as “stimulating recall of prior knowledge.” Teachers, for example, activate student’s prior knowledge through reading the heading and the title before starting a new subject related to it.  Teachers use analogies and comparisons to activate the learner’s existing schema in particular to help learners draw connections among already existing schemata.

Bartlett is persuasive.  On the topic of what we recall, he addresses such key factors as a person’s key interests, their temperament, and even their character.  Of particular interest is his revealing view that “What is beyond dispute is that remembering, in a group, is influenced, as to its manner, directly by the persistent tendencies of that group” (page 267).  That he suggests has three elements.  In loose groups without any dominant interests, so memory tends to be rote and recapitulatory.  When there are strong and persistent social characteristics, so remembering is likely to ‘appear’ direct.  Finally, where people are subjected to some kind of forcible control, recall is more likely to be constructive, inventive and even assertive.  If memories are social reconstructions, so, he proposes, the nature of that reconstruction is, in turn, to be influenced by a person’s broader social context.

Today, Bartlett has been relegated to interesting history.  In large part this is the consequence of an increasing focus on memory as a storage and retrieval of data, where it is understood as an information processing system, with all those concepts taken from the computer world – processors, short-term or working memory, and long term memory. It is as if we are talking about a computer system when it is proposed the brain has a sensory ‘processor’ which  allows information from the outside world to be sensed in the form of chemical and physical stimuli and attended to at various levels of focus and intent.

The next concept is that of working memory.  This is seen to serve as an encoding and retrieval processor. Information in the form of stimuli is encoded in accordance with explicit or implicit functions by the working memory processor. The working memory also retrieves information from previously stored material. Finally, the function of long-term memory is to store through various categorical models or systems.  In this model, ‘explicit memory’ is the conscious storage and recollection of data, either ‘semantic’, memory encoded with specific meaning, or ‘episodic’, information that is encoded along a spatial and temporal plane.  Yes, this is the brain as a computer!

However, current research suggests memory is not a perfect processor (notice the terminology!) and is affected by many factors. The ways by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved can all be corrupted. Pain, for example, has been identified as a physical condition that impairs memory, and has been noted in animal models as well as chronic pain patients.   The amount of attention given new stimuli can diminish the amount of information that becomes encoded for storage.  Further to this information processing model, the storage process can become corrupted by physical damage to areas of the brain that are associated with memory storage, such as the hippocampus.   Finally, the retrieval of information from long-term memory can be disrupted because of decay within long-term memory.   The brain is a squishy electronic processor, characterised by normal functioning, decay over time, and with the added fillip of brain damage

It is conventional today to distinguish forms of memory.  Sensory memory holds information, derived from the senses, less than one second after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item and remember what it looked like with just a split second of observation, or memorization, is an example of sensory memory. It is out of our conscious cognitive control and is an automatic response. This type of memory cannot be prolonged.  Short-term memory allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute without rehearsal. Its capacity, however, is very limited. In 1956 experiments showed that the store of short-term memory was 7±2 items (adopting in this case a reference to that “magical number seven”).  However,  modern perspectives estimate the capacity of short-term memory to be lower, typically on the order of 4–5 items,

The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally has a strictly limited capacity and duration. This means that information is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, while the total capacity of long-term memory has yet to be established, it can store much larger quantities of information. Furthermore, it can store this information for a much longer duration, potentially for a whole life span. For example, given a random seven-digit number, one may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in short-term memory. On the other hand, one can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory.

The transition of a memory from short term to long term is often described as memory consolidation.  Despite ninety years of work since Bartlett wrote his book, it remains the case that little is known about the underlying physical (or physiological)  processes involved.  In a very complicated field, researchers distinguish between recognition and recall. Recognition memory tasks require individuals to indicate whether they have encountered a stimulus (such as a picture or a word) before. Recall memory tasks require participants to retrieve previously learned information.  For example, individuals might be asked to produce a series of actions they have seen before or to say a list of words they have heard before.

All this analysis seems far away from Bartlett and his work on memory.  The use of information theory and the view the brain is a computer has proven fruitful.  We have learnt a great deal about remembering and forgetting, and the importance of distinguishing between the short term memory system, and that for the longer term.  It is, however, very mechanical.  In our lives, memory is fascinating, and at an individual level, a matter of delight, regret and confusion. Talking to a friend about a past event can be a source of real delight, in some sense ‘remembering’ a past event, even if it is clear that the other person doesn’t appear to get it quite right!  At the same time, the friend can recall some aspects of that past situation which you have forgotten:  we often regret not holding on to an image, a conversation, a sight that seemed so important at the time.

However, the real challenge in day-t-day interactions is confusion.  How many times have you found yourself in a conversation when you utter that dangerous phrase “Do you remember when …”. Sometimes we are horrified to discover another person contradicts your account, and even it’s meaning.  Then another friend joins in, and the only parameters of agreement centre around place and date (usually agreed), but little else about what who said about what topic.  Some of the time we are willing to set aside confusion, and somewhat lamely observe we “don’t really remember it that well.”  Other times we retreat, clinging on to our version of events, and veiling our disagreement with another.  Perhaps the last words should go to Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, singing I Remember It Well’.  They disagree on evert remembered item, but end remembering their love for one another

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag is one of those people who is surrounded by dramatically divided opinions.  She died twenty years ago, and from her first novel, written at the age of 30 years old, through to her examination of war photography, forty years later, she was constantly subjected to critical praise by some and simultaneously and often harshly denigrated by others.  She managed to write about photography, and art more generally, she completed a series of novels over her lifetime, and she was a prolific commentator and essayist.  She was an activist, the recipient of awards and prizes, and at the same time bitterly attacked as undeserving.  She was an intellectual, and, like Christopher Hitchens, another whose essays I really enjoy, her writing  ranged across several areas of non-fiction criticism as well as some outstanding fiction.  The older she became, the harder it was to be certain you really understood where she stood on various issues.  In my case, my ability to fully understand her views was challenged from the beginning.

I would like to write about Susan Sontag, but the task is beyond me.  It would take years to delve into and understand her work, her character, what drover her, and why she did what she did.  Complex, fascinating and even ‘difficult’.  If you want to know more, Melinda Harvey’s review of Benjamin Moser’s biography, Sontag: Her Life, is helpful (in the Sydney Review of Books, 1 August 2022), and is further developed in his book.   Harvey wrote, “That she was a woman who did not find empowerment in leaning in to any of the social identities she had to choose from: woman, queer, Jew. She preferred to escape from them. And there was a label that allowed escape from them: ‘writer’. Wrote Susan in her journal in 1959: ‘My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.’ This is not a million miles from Charlotte Brontë in 1849 writing to her publisher, ‘I am neither a man nor a woman but an author’”.

Despite her extraordinary life and range of writing, much of my appreciation of Susan Sontag and her views come from one book.  My copy of Against Interpretation is the UK First Edition, published in 1967.   I bought my copy in 1968.  It was one of those books that I only partly understood, and yet was immediately attracted to:  it was speaking to issues I didn’t fully grasp, but I wanted to understand.  Much of the book was critical essays on such writers as Camus, Sartre and Levi Strauss, playwrights, film directors, and even on happenings and the meaning of camp.  However, it was the opening title essay that first held me, and I have read it, reread it, and every so often go back and read it yet again.  The twelve pages of Against Interpretation ends with section 10:  one line: “In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”  If I didn’t understand that, I did get the last sentence of the preceding section: “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even if that is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

Before I return to that specific essay, I need to explain that the reason I was acquiring Against Interpretation back in 1968 was because, glancing through a copy in Heffer’s Bookshop, I saw there was an essay inside title ‘The anthropologist as hero’, and it was about Claude Lévi-Strauss.  The man of the decade, and the essay was headed with an extract from Tristes Tropiques, the most tantalising of his books, as he considers what it means to study another culture:

“The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but on the other hand the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity.  The alternative is inescapable:  either I am a traveller in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely  unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveller of my own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality.  In either case, I am the loser … for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking place.”

Sold, to the impecunious student!

Sontag’s essay on Lévi-Strauss was extraordinarily perceptive.  If I had paid more attention to it at the time, my own understanding of Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to social anthropology would have been far clearer than it was.  It took me years to see what I had missed, as I was absorbed in reading ethnographic studies of various pre-industrial societies.  As I focussed on analyses of religious rituals, kinship categories and political systems, I was glancing past the obvious.  What he saw was, as Sontag puts it, “The past, with its mysteriously harmonious structures, is broken and crumbling  before our eyes.”.

As it happens, I abandoned pursuing ethnographic fieldwork in such tempting places as the New Guinea Highlands or the upper reaches of the Amazon.  Married, with young children, I was drawn to research in the safer, comfortable world of contemporary British business, wanting to understand the emergence of a new profession, the computer programmer.  The subject matter drew me over towards industrial sociology, as the world of social anthropology slowly disappeared from view.  As Sontag makes clear in commenting on Lévi-Strauss, what I missed in my reading was understanding his insight into ‘anthropological doubt’, the realisation of what we don’t know, and the willingness to admit that ignorance.  He was seeking to convey the importance of ignorance in the face of other people.

Sontag understood that, and she also understood that in the face of such ignorance, what we can study is how other people seek to make sense of their world.  This was the agenda Lévi-Strauss was pursuing, to find the logical structures that underpinned other cultures.  She ends her essay by concluding “The anthropologist is thus not only the mourner of the cold world of the primitives, but its custodian as well.  Lamenting among the shadows, struggling to distinguish the archaic from the pseudo-archaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent and complex modern pessimism”.   This is Susan Sontag the intellectual at work:  probing, clarifying, and at the same time unable to hold back from translating her insights into vivid images and contradictions.  It offers an insight into the person she was becoming, brilliant, controversial, with a consuming desire to say something more than others have, and in so doing establish her reputation.  Smart, spiky, and often close to going too far.

Later in Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag included some of her film reviews.  I suspect that cinema might have been the area in which this very clever observer was at her most perceptive and comfortable.  She makes it clear that she sees ‘form’ as the critical element of great art, rather than focussing on meaning as the central issue for analysis.  In examining Jean Luc Godard’s film Vivre Sa Vie, she explains that the film is a ‘demonstration’, that “something happened, not why it happened”.  The film is episodic, and it has a structure that reflects the Christian story of the twelve stations of the cross.  However, this is a secular story, and while each of the twelve sections of the film have a title, this is not to show us a path to resolution, to offering meaning to each scene, but simply as signposts:  this happened next.  For Sontag, this emphasis on form as opposed to meaning is what makes the film and its director so important in the history of cinema.

Yet another of the essays looks at ‘Happening: an art of radical juxtaposition’.  Happenings back in the 1960s were a rather different kind of experience from the musical happening that are occasionally seen today.  Our 21^st century happenings are ‘flash-mobs’, a group of people that assembles suddenly in a public place, performs for a brief time, then quickly disperses, often with their activities some strange combination of entertainment, satire, and/or artistic expression.  There are some famous examples of this to be seen on YouTube, like the unannounced performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy outside a Spanish bank, or the Sound of Music Do Re Mi performance at Antwerp’s Central Station.  Incidentally, these brief performances actually took weeks of planning and preparation.

Happenings were deliberately presented as if they improvised on the spot, although they, too, had been planned and rehearsed in advance.  These happenings were a form of participatory art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience.  They are like a scene from a play, but only that one scene – often a brief and problematic vignette.  In most cases part of the intention was to break down the wall between performer and spectator.  This might mean the action happens in front of you or around you and might even involve the spectators as performers.  In some happenings, everyone present is included in the making of the art.  An actor relates a brief episode, bursts  into tears, and then seeks consolation from the audience.  Most had no set rules, only vague guidelines that the performers follow with various props.  Unlike other forms of art, happenings often allowed chance to enter into the performance and were ever-changing. When chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no sense of failure:  the performance is just what ‘happened’.

What Sontag realised was that they often have an underlying aggressive component.  Many happenings unfolded in such a way that it was unclear what was going on.  The event might take part in a darkened environment, sightlines might be deliberately blocked, or the performance space deliberately constructed in such a way that as to restrict observation, as when they took place in a long narrow hall.  Indeed, often the audience wasn’t just ‘involved’ but actually subjected to various indignities:  in some cases they were sprayed with water, doused in flour, subjected to extremely loud noises, or even had coins thrown at them.  As she noted: “This abusive involvement of the audience seems to provide, in default of anything else, the dramatic spine of the Happening”.  After all, if the audience are merely traditional spectators as in normal theatre, the event is less compelling, less of a ‘happening’.

These observations take the reader back to the opening essay, and Sontag’s comments on the topic of Against Interpretation.  It is the epitome of her style, both in its brilliance and in what it doesn’t do.  She begins her commentary by going back to Plato, and his view that art is nothing more than representation.  He wasn’t keen on art, and as a result left the appreciation of art with a distinction, between ‘form’, the nature of the representation, and ‘content’, what is being represented.  Perhaps that wasn’t such an issue when most art was mimetic, when portraits and landscapes were like many of the photographs we see today, trying to reproduce what the eye sees as accurately as possible.  However, once artists ceased focussing on direct representation, then the distinction between form and content became central.  We could no longer look at a painting without being expected to ask questions: ‘what is this artist saying to us?’, ‘what does this painting mean?’

This is the core of this essay, and of Sontag’s collection of essays.  As she explains, “The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation.  The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really – or, really means – A?  That Y is really B?  That Z is really C?”.  She explains this further by first offering some examples of how traditional texts, like Biblical stories, are now explained as allegories, this interpretation being justified by explaining its ‘true meaning’.  Her compelling example is the Biblical story of the exodus from Egypt and arrival in the promised land, which has been explained as “really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations and eventual deliverance.”  And there was me thinking it was me thinking it was an account of Moses running away from oppression in Egypt and finding a new location for the Jewish people.  Silly fellow.

Sontag goes further to explain the latent aggressiveness in contemporary modes of interpretation: “The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one.  The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs behind ‘behind’ the text, to find the sub-text which is the true one.”  This is the distinction that Freud was to make between manifest content and latent content, the true meaning of a text.  In interpreting art, often the outcome impoverishes our experience and imagination, by turning the richness of art into prosaic accounts of our world.  Alice in Wonderland is really about puberty, and Turner’s amazing painting of The Fighting Temeraire is really about the decline of Britain’s naval power, the passing of the ‘glorious’ age of sail and the growth of ‘modern’ technology in an increasingly industrialised Britain.

She writes so well.  Now with the bit between her teeth, she’s having fun, and is especially perceptive when it comes to theatre and cinema, as in this commentary of Elia Kazan’s commentary on directing Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire:

“… in order to direct the play , Kazan had to discover Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilisation, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure.  Tennessee Williams forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible:  it was about something, about the decline of Western Civilisation.  Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.”

How did I miss all that, and think it was about the relationship between two complex, fascinating and deeply flawed people?

Susan Sontag is far too clever to stop after making a few perceptive jabs.  She goes on to point out that there is an important task in describing works of art, but asks the reader to consider what form of criticism would comprise an approach that “served the work of art, not usurp its place?”  She makes it clear that she is arguing for a return to focussing on form.  To quote just once more, she explains that “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today.  Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the things in itself, of things being what they are.”  Sontag was mounting an argument that addressed the need to see more in looking at art, to hear more, to feel more, as she puts it.  It is a passionate perspective, and it’s one I embrace.

Recently while I was attending a live concert at the National Gallery of Australia to hear Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, writing about Susan Sontag was on my mind.  However, once the music began, for the next 40 minutes that was all there was.  I was totally absorbed.  I didn’t have to think about explanations, introductions or overviews of the work, why was written, the structure of the movements.  I just experienced it.  Going to art galleries now, I tend to prefer spending time in just 2-3 rooms, my time taken up with focussing on just a few paintings.  When I was younger, I’d read the commentaries on the wall or the gallery guide:  now I just look and let what I see fill my mind and shape my experience.  Sontag was right.

Throwing Light On the Matter

My father was a physics teacher, and I suspect that it was in one of his collection of books that I first read about the ‘double slit’ experiment.  He had a bookcase full of tantalising volumes, some of which were technical, even esoteric, and others which were fascinating, well, at least as far as the titles suggested.  He was interested in light and how light was understood by astronomers, and part of this interest was that he would carry out experiments at home.  They were part of his plan to complete a PhD, a plan that was never fully realised.  I have no idea what he was trying to study, and he certainly made no attempt to explain it to me.  Nor did he ever complete his research.

All I remember is that at some point in his studies his research involved taking photographs of light sources through long tubes, made up, as I remember it, from the carboard cores of toilet rolls!  There were strange moments in our London house when all the lights were out, a toilet core tube extended through the hall, and, on the floor, my dad would take photographs of the light source at the other end of the tube.  And you thought your childhood was strange?

From time to time I would take one of the books from his bookcase and read it.  I’d try to understand what I was reading.  The ones that boggled me were those concerned with relativity, the expanding universe, and similarly wonderful issues.  I seem to remember reading various books on the nature of light, and some, written around the early 1960s, offered an overview of various recent experiments, which were turning out to take physicists a further few key steps forward in the understanding the nature of light.  More to the point, I hadn’t realised that these were merely the most recent stages in a series of experiments that had begun back in the early 1800s.

Perhaps I should have gone back a little future, as in many accounts of the study of light the real starting point was Newton.  In 1666, Newton had shone light through a prism, and observed the spectrum of colours that exited, ranging from red at one extreme, through orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo, to violet at the other (to be remembered by schoolchildren when I was young by ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!).  This led to a series of experiments, including one clever demonstration that the colour spectrum could be brought back together (using a lens), to recreate white light.

However, other work demonstrated a beam of a single colour, when shone on various objects, always remained the same colour.  The light was the colour.  All of which was a little perplexing, as I knew from messing around in art classes that if you mixed all those colour paints together you ended up with a very dark mess, and a ‘colour’ that was certainly not white.

Newton was interested in the properties of light, and concluded it was composed of particles or corpuscles, which were refracted by accelerating into a denser medium (from travelling through the air to travelling through glass), the different colours being diffracted to differing degrees.  In 1675, in his Hypothesis of Light, of 1675, he proposed  the existence of the ether, through which these particles travelled, (this ether being the medium containing air).  In 1704, Newton published Optiks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation “Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, … and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?”  Little did he know where this would end up!

Newton was a dominant figure, but within 100 years, his views were challenged.  Thomas Young came up with an ingenious experiment in 1801.  On the presumption that Newton was correct in his model of particles of light, then when these particles were fired in a straight line through a slit and allowed to strike a screen on the other side, the result should be a pattern corresponding to the size and shape of the slit. However, when this ‘single-slit experiment’ is actually carried out, a diffraction pattern appears on the screen, with bands of light and dark.  This pattern is the result of the interference of light waves from the slit.  At that time it was thought that light consisted of either waves or particles. Young’s experiment showed light was a wave form!

With the beginning of modern physics, about a hundred years later, it was realized that light could, in fact, show bothwave and particle characteristics.  All this became evident once physicists embarked on a series of increasingly complex ‘double path’ experiments, in which a wave is split into two separate waves (the wave is typically made of many photons and better referred to as a wave front, not to be confused with the wave properties of the individual photon) that later combine into a single wave.

In the basic version of this experiment, a carefully structured and controlled light source, such as a laser beam is directed towards a non-transparent plate pierced by two parallel slits.  The light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate.  The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to ‘interfere’, the result being the production of bright and dark bands on the screen – this was a result that would not have been expected if light consisted of classical particles.  If only it were that simple!  Of course, there was yet more experimentation, and this further research discovered the light is always found to be absorbed at the screen at discrete points, as evidence that it is individual particles (not waves) which are striking.  What we see as the interference pattern appears as a result of the varying density of these particle hits on the screen.

By now, there was more and more experimentation and further versions of the experiment that included adding ‘detectors’ at the slits.  As a result, experimenters discovered that each detected photon passes through one slit only (as would a classical particle), and not through both slits (as would a wave).  That seems clear enough (!), which has to be a comment suggesting there had to be a further complication.  And there was!  These same experiments demonstrated something quite weird:  it seems that the particles do not form the interference pattern if one detects which slit they pass through.  The particles knew what the experimental scientist was up to?  I guess there is only one word for that: spooky!  In fact, the ‘spooky’ behaviour of things is a very popular word among some theoretical physicists.

This last finding was one guaranteed to ensure more and more experimentation.  An important version of these experiment involved single particle detection. Sending coherent particles through a double-slit apparatus one at a time results in single particles being detected as white dots on the screen, as expected. Remarkably, however, an interference pattern emerges when these particles are allowed to build up one by one.  Now the particles know how to create an interference pattern!  Even more spooky.

For scientists, these results demonstrated the principle of wave-particle duality, which isn’t as sophisticated as you might imagine.  It is, quite simply that all matter exhibits both wave and particle properties.  Without getting too complicated, the particle is measured as a single pulse at a single position, while the ‘modulus squared of the particle’s wave’ describes the probability of detecting the particle at a specific place on the screen, in other words a function that results in the observed statistical interference pattern.  This wave-particle phenomenon has been shown to occur with more than just photons, as it is also true for electrons, atoms, and even some molecules.  Continuing experiments revealed, for example, that electrons are found to exhibit the same behaviour as photons when fired towards a double slit.

Did you think that was the end of the puzzle.  By no means.  Soon it was found that, in addition to the interference pattern, the the detection of individual separate impacts was observed to be inherently probabilistic, indeterminate for any individual photon or electron, a finding which was – and is – completely inexplicable using classical (Newtonian) mechanics.

The researchers have continued, and it was found the original photon experiments could be carried out with entities much larger than electrons and photons, although, much to the physicists’ interest, the outcome is found to become more difficult to observe as the size of the entity increases.  Despite challenges, the largest entities for which the double-slit experiment has been performed have been molecules made up of some 2,000 atoms.

The double-slit experiment (and its variations) has become a classic, mainly for its clarity in expressing the central puzzles of quantum mechanics.  For the very reason it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of the observer to predict experimental results, one physicist, Richard Feynman, has called it “a phenomenon which is impossible […] to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery (of quantum mechanics).”  This comes from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol 3, Chapter 1, Quantum Behaviour, and, no, I haven’t attempted to read and understand them:  way beyond my ability.

However, I am aware that if you can’t explain something, make the inability to explain an axiom or a theory.  This leads us to Werner Heisenberg and his ‘uncertainty principle’.  Although this is a horrible simplification, the uncertainty principle is that if you make measurements on an object at the atomic level, and you determine its momentum, you cannot, at the same time, know its position accurately.

How does this help us with the double slit experiments?  The implication of Heisenberg’s principle is that one cannot design equipment in any way to determine which of two alternatives is taken by an electron, say, without, at the same time, destroying the pattern of interference.  Ah, but that is true only if you are observing the electron.  Of course, a clever physicist came up with an approach to get round that problem.

We imagine a modification of the experiment in which a screen with two holes consists of a plate mounted on rollers so that it can move freely up and down.  “By watching the motion of the plate carefully we can try to tell which hole an electron goes through. … We would expect that an electron which passes through hole ‘1’ must be deflected downward by the plate to reach the detector. Since the vertical component of the electron momentum is changed, the plate must recoil with an equal momentum in the opposite direction. The plate will get an upward kick. If the electron goes through the lower hole, the plate should feel a downward kick. It is clear that for every position of the detector, the momentum received by the plate will have a different value for a traversal via hole ‘1’ than for a traversal via hole ‘2’. So! Without disturbing the electrons at all, but just by watching the plate, we can tell which path the electron used.”

Like many of the weird issues that pop up in sub-atomic physics, the double-slit experiment is often used to highlight the differences and similarities between the various interpretations of quantum mechanics.  Do we want to go any further?  Well we might just note there are several different interpretations, and, so far, no easy way to determine why one is ‘correct’ and the others are not.

Briefly, the first approach is called the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’.  This is based on the view the idea that quantum mechanics is intrinsically indeterministic, where   objects have certain pairs of complementary properties that cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously.  Moreover, the act of “observing” or “measuring” an object is irreversible, and no truth can be attributed to an object, except according to the results of its measurement:  on this basis a particular experiment can demonstrate particle behavior (passing through a definite slit) or wave behavior (interference), but not both at the same time.  Copenhagen-type interpretations hold that quantum descriptions are objective, in that they are independent of physicists’ personal beliefs and other arbitrary mental factors.

This is quite different from the ‘relational interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which argues that observations such as those in the double-slit experiment result specifically from the interaction between the ‘observer’ ( the measuring device) and the object being observed (physically interacted with), but not any absolute property possessed by the object. In the case of an electron, if it is initially “observed” at a particular slit, then the observer–particle (photon–electron) interaction includes information about the electron’s position. This partially constrains the particle’s eventual location at the screen. If it is “observed” (measured with a photon) not at a particular slit but rather at the screen, then there is no “which path” information as part of the interaction, so the electron’s “observed” position on the screen is determined strictly by its probability function. This makes the resulting pattern on the screen the same as if each individual electron had passed through both slits.

If you think that one is bad enough, there is, of course, worse!  This is the ‘many worlds interpretation’.  Here theunifying theme is that physical reality is identified with a wavefunction, and this wavefunction always evolves unitarily.  This means, Consequently, there are many parallel universes, which only interact with each other only through interference.  At least one physicist has argued that the way to understand the double-slit experiment is that in each universe the particle travels through a specific slit, but its motion is affected by the interference with particles in other universes. This creates the observable fringes.

Confused?  So am I.  Have I thrown any light on the nature of light?  Unlikely.  This is one of those fascinating areas of science that are delightfully unclear.  There is considerable evidence to justify the statement that light comprises discreet particles, usually referred to as photons.  Shining a light on an object it to direct a stream of photons, that then interact with and bounce back from the object being illuminated.  However, the challenge sits within what we call a photon.  It shows the behaviour of both an object and a wave.  We know what waves of water are, but they are waves in one medium, pushing aside another.  Photons are just wave packets, and waves are just waves.  It is confusing, and it is one of the glorious puzzles of our world.

Colour Blind

Having a father who was a senior school physics teacher could have ensured all sorts of benefits.  He could have helped me with my homework.  He could have given me some extra classes in order to ensure I came home with an excellent report each term (in physics, at least).  He could have found some (easy to read) textbooks to help me.  He did none of those things.  We did have a reflecting telescope in the garden for a few years, and I was able to look up at planets and some star constellations, but any details were for me to track down.  There were interesting books on his shelves, but I read them if I chose to do so, and we didn’t talk about them.  Damn!

On the other hand, there was other stuff.  There was a box, containing some 38 cards, each one numbered and each containing as series of coloured dots inside a circle.  Since I was left to my own devices, I borrowed the box, read the covering guide, and decided to test myself.  In case you haven’t guessed already, what I had a copy of the Ishihara test, a way to identify colour discrimination deficiencies.  Shinobu Ishihara was a Japanese university professor, who developed his test in 1917.  His cards embedded numbers and shapes using different colours:  they were easy to identify by those who had normal colour vision, but they were invisible, or difficult to see, by those with a red-green colour vision defect. They were fun!

The plates include six different test procedures:

• A Demonstration plate: (typically including the numeral “12”); designed to be visible by all persons, whether normal or colour vision deficient. This one card was for use in demonstration exercises only;
• Transformation plates:  these were designed so that individuals with colour vision defect should see a different figure from individuals with normal colour vision;
• Vanishing plates: these were designed so that only individuals with normal colour vision could recognize the figure;
• Hidden digit plates: again, these were to identify individuals with colour vision defects, as only they could recognize the figure;
• Diagnostic plates:  intended to determine one of two types of colour vision defect and how severe this was; and,
• Tracing plates: instead of including a number, these had a line running across the plate, and, once again, only visible to those with a colour deficiency.

I am fairly confident that I didn’t really know what I was doing.  I neglected to take account of the warnings given in the handbook about the accuracy of the test, which depended on using the proper level of light intensity to illuminate the plates.  Moreover, proper testing technique allows only three seconds per plate for an answer, and you were not allowed to touch or trace of the numbers.  Naturally, I looked at the plates in poor light, and helped myself by tracing the numbers I could see, especially when they weren’t particularly clear.  The result was that I managed to convince myself I was severely colour blind and would never be able to drive a car because I wouldn’t be able to discriminate between red and green traffic lights.  Now, that was a worry!

I’m not severely colour blind.  When I repeated the test (the cards are randomly ordered each time) in better lighting conditions, it turned out that I was only mildly red-green colour blind.  Most of the time, I am unaware of the slight discrimination lapses this causes.  For me, the most noticeable was during my brief time believing I could learn to play golf.  If I rested my ball on a red tee on the grassy teeing box, and managed to hit the tee as well as the ball, I often couldn’t ‘see’ it, until I did.  Once I saw it, it stood out quite clearly in the green grass.

I suspect that you may not be particularly interested in red-green colour blindness.  All this was by way of introduction to another form of colour blindness, where failing to see the colours is ideal.  Of course, I am referring to skin colour, where we talk about colour blindness as a positive attribute, since ‘not seeing’ the difference between skin colours is a prerequisite for avoiding discrimination.

First up, a confession.  I had to check exactly what being colour blind in relation to other people means.  Off to Wikipedia which informed me “the multicultural psychology field generates four beliefs that constitute the racial colour-blindness approach. The four beliefs are as follows: (1) skin color is superficial and irrelevant to the quality of a person’s character, ability or worthiness, (2) in a merit-based society, skin color is irrelevant to merit judgments and calculation of fairness, (3) as a corollary, in a merit-based society, merit and fairness are flawed if skin color is taken into the calculation, (4) ignoring skin color when interacting with people is the best way to avoid racial discrimination.”  That seemed clear (if potentially repetitive), but there was more: “This is further divided into two dimensions, color evasion and power evasion.  Color evasion is the belief that people should not be treated differently on the basis of their color’ (didn’t we just cover that?), whereas “power evasion posits that systemic advantage based on color should have no influence on what people can accomplish, and accomplishments are instead based solely on one’s own work performance.”  I guess all that comes down to the fact that colour blindness in this sense is concerns prejudice based on a person’s skin colour.

As a statement of appropriate behaviour, there have been many cases addressing colour blindness practice.  Back in 1896, a famous US Supreme Court case, Plessey v. Fergusson was summarised in one of the judges statements:  “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.”  Good, except that back then this wasn’t the conclusion of the majority in the case!  The decision taken was to support discrimination, the predominant view at the end of the 19^th Century, when laws allowing racial segregation were permissible in the US.  Of course, we know better now …

Um, do we?  The Supreme Court never abandons an issue, each decision being merely a way station on a seemingly never-ending path.  In recent times the court has addressed colour blindness in the context of affirmative action (another topic that keeps returning to the bench).  This has led to some interesting remarks.  In 1978 four justices objected to using the notion of colour blindness, observing “we cannot … let color blindness become myopia which masks the reality that many ‘created equal’ have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.”  That made me think for a moment.  They are noting that supporting colour blindness can ‘mask’ a very different reality in practice.  True.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg reminded the court in 2003 that “The Constitution is both color blind and color conscious. To avoid conflict with the equal protection clause, a classification that denies a benefit, causes harm, or imposes a burden must not be based on race. In that sense, the Constitution is color blind. But the Constitution is color conscious to prevent discrimination being perpetuated and to undo the effects of past discrimination.”  Even conservative justice Clarence Thomas, in 2007, wrote “the color-blind Constitution does not bar the government from taking measures to remedy past state-sponsored discrimination – indeed, it requires that such measures be taken in certain circumstances.”  It’s complicated!

As parents, one of the early challenges many of us face is helping our children understand the ideal that skin colour is insignificant.  I’ve often referred to Martin Luther King’s eloquent 1963 speech ‘I Have Dream’.  This includes, among so many memorable lines:  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  Today we want colour blind approaches to include measures to ensure people are treated equally as individuals, a stepping stone that leads to a more equal society, and one in which race privilege is no longer exercised as it  once was.  However, does that get rid of racism and oppression?

Colour blindness does not replace the need for affirmative action.  Nor is affirmative action an easy path, as it, too, confronts various challenges.  This is because narrowly race-based programs disregard a candidate’s socioeconomic background and therefore can fail to focus help on the poorer portion of any community that actually needs assistance.  In the case of US society, it is clearly the case that there are millions of black people living middle- and upper-class lives and millions of white people live in poverty, with the consequence that race alone is far from being an accurate indication of privilege or of need. Some argue that affirmative action recognising someone’s social class is more important than recognising someone’s race.  Justice Clarence Thomas, one of whose views I’ve already quoted, has argued that race-oriented programs create “a cult of victimization” and imply black people require “special treatment in order to succeed”.  It isn’t clear what he sees as a more appropriate approach.

It is almost like a puzzle.  You want to be colour blind and treat each and everyone you meet as a unique individual.  At the same time, you’re painfully aware racial prejudice is alive and thriving, and should be stamped out.  The issue, of course, is in what you ‘see’.  Seeing is cultural, historical, and personal.  It certainly isn’t objective – whatever that might mean.

I learnt an early example during my school years.  I grew up in a London suburb.  In my secondary school class, there were a bunch of boys (it was a single sex school), and for most of my time there I didn’t think much about differences, except in terms of sport (at which I was pathetic) and academic study (how can anyone understand and speak French?  Most of us were Anglo protestants by background, and I can still remember the shock of going to a classmates party and discovering he was Jewish, attended a synagogue, his parents fairly orthodox.  Clearly, I had belatedly discovered we weren’t all ‘the same’.

If my childhood had been relatively sheltered, once I left home and went to university, my world began to change.  Now the difference between individual and context became far more evident.  Students came from various parts of the world, and two Indian men shared the flat above mine.  Shantanu and Kranti were friends.  We would occasionally eat in together in an Indian restaurant.  I didn’t see them as ‘different’ from the other friends I had, and I think our relationships could be described as largely colour blind.  Then Shantanu returned to India.  His parents had arranged his marriage, and when he returned with his wife the person I met was dressed traditionally, her face shielded much of the time, and very shy.  A student of social anthropology, I was seeing and understanding my neighbour in a different light.  He was Hindu; his wife unable to leave their flat by herself.  As I am writing this I realise, to my embarrassment, I can’t remember her name.   They soon moved away, and I lost contact.  I like to think that our relationship had remained colour blind, but it was certainly overlain with cultural difference.  As I recall I also tried, clumsily, to help his wife step outside and take part in the life of the town.  I failed.  It wasn’t my business.

That was many years ago.  I was young, sheltered, brought up in an inclusive white English middle class culture.  At the same I was in love with science, and people were something on the periphery.  Even when I started to get involved with social anthropology, it was very much about ‘other cultures’ as my first textbook was titled.  Today I can say I was prejudiced:  implicitly distinguishing between ‘us and them’.  That was changed by moving to Australia.

In Australia I began, slowly but surely, to come into more and more contact with people from diverse cultures and began to have many friends who were from Asia and South America, together with indigenous Australians.  Even then, and for a long time, that was about friends, just as it had been in my student days.  I think it was only when I starting to visit Asia regularly that I began to start addressing my embedded prejudices.  To be in Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai and realise you are in the minority, to confront literature, art, music, and thinking very different from your own, now no longer distant and largely invisible but all around you and obvious, that really reframes how you look at others.

This wasn’t about exercising colour blindness, that was easy.  This was about confronting very different lived experiences.  It ensured that some of those deeper prejudices about ‘other people’ had to be addressed and dismissed.  I don’t want to imply that I have abandoned and unlearnt all the cultural and social prejudices of my youth.  I fear many are still there.  However, many of the simplistic views reflecting my middle-class white English male background have certainly been set aside.  Today, it is more often the case that I am aware I am an outsider in many contexts.  A while back, I found spending a day in a remote Aboriginal community quite extraordinary.  It took no time at all for me to realise that the people I was meeting were just like me in many ways, but they had access to knowledge and views that were way outside my previous experience.  I was the odd one out.  To offer another example, I remember being told that many Japanese people with whom you meet will be engaged and interesting but are still likely to discuss your odd physical characteristics when they talk about the meeting afterwards.  It’s good to discover you are the object of prejudice, because the experience offers a mirror in which to reflect on your own behaviour.

It is an oddity of the English language that colour blind has both a positive and a negative connotation.  Leaving on one side how limited it is in describing how we see other people; it is a potentially positive way of behaving.  On the other side, being unable to discriminate some colours does have negative implications, a deficiency which also implies some failure in a person’s makeup.

In both its forms, colour blindness is hard to overcome.  Visual colour blindness can’t be solved by a special pair of glasses.  We can only see what our ocular system allows.  Social colour blindness is a way of ‘looking’ at other people that has much to commend it, but it can’t correct our our failure to see what is really there.  While it was a term that helped thinking a while back, I am beginning to think that ‘colour blindness’ could be a concept that has reached its ‘use by’ date.  Visual acuity and sensitivity to colour variations do matter, but we are all ‘colour blind’ to some extent, and the terms imply some kind of deficiency in their usage.  Equally, recognising that the people we meet are ‘like us’ is easy, but it glosses over the real differences in life experiences, social practices and barriers that really matter.  Rather than resting on the comfort of ascribing colour blindness, perhaps we should take time to pay respectful attention to individuals, and do so carefully, to each and every person we meet.

Awakenings

Although the evidence suggests its impact may be abating, we are all well aware of the COVID-19 pandemic, a global disease resulting from infection by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).  First known to have emerged in an outbreak in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, it rapidly spread worldwide in early 2020.  The World Health Organisation has determined it has caused more than 7 million confirmed deaths by early 2024, and it ranks it fifth in the list of the deadliest pandemics and epidemics in history.  The worst of those we know about was the Black Death, an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in the middle of the 14^th Century, the same disease that spread through the world in the middle of the 5^th Century (the Plague of Justinian) which ranks third.  Second on the list is the Spanish Flu, which swept across the globe in 1918-1920, and the fourth was the HIV/Aids epidemic, which probably began in began in 1981, and continues today.  All these events are horribly familiar, three of which occurred in the past one hundred years.

However, there have been some other epidemics in the past century that have received less press.  Among these, one of the most remarkable, and least well understood, was Encephalitis Lethargica, an atypical form of encephalitis.  It was a disease that attacked the brain, leaving  people in a frozen, statue-like condition, often speechless and motionless.  It spread around the world between 1915 and 1926, but attention was soon deflected from EL to the Spanish Flu.  The exact number of people infected is unknown, but estimates suggest that more than one million people contracted the disease, which directly caused more than 500,000 deaths.  Of the survivors, most never recovered to their prior vigour and alertness.  An account of the lives of a number of victims forms the core of an extra-ordinary book, Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks.  However, before I turn to his account, a few more facts about the overall impact.

Encephalitis lethargica is characterised by fever, lethargy, delayed physical and mental responses and catatonia.  In some case victims enters a coma-like state, Parkinsonism, upper body weakness, tremors, rigidity, and even Klazomania (compulsive screaming).  Patients became frozen, their bodies and reactions stuck at the age when they were infected, even though they physically age.  Unsurprisingly, the timing of EL led to the belief it was connected to the Spanish Flu, but most modern research has argued against this.  A recent study, in 2008, concluded:  “the case against influenza [is] less decisive than currently perceived … there is little direct evidence supporting influenza having a role in the aetiology of EL”, and that “[a]lmost 100 years after the EL epidemic, its aetiology remains enigmatic.”  While opinions on the relationship of encephalitis lethargica to influenza still remain divided, the preponderance of the literature appears sceptical.

It was also unusual in another sense.  A German neurologist who examined hundreds of encephalitis lethargica patients in the 1920s, noted that their encephalitis lethargica typically evolved over time. The early symptoms would be dominated by sleepiness or wakefulness.   Then a second stage of symptoms appeared, characteristically identified by weird and unpredictable eye movements. For many the third stage would be recovery.  A 2010 Oxford University Press compendium quoted a researcher, writing in 1930, who stated, “we must confess that aetiology is still obscure, the causative agent still unknown, the pathological riddle still unsolved”, and asked, at the time of publication:  “Does the present volume solve the ‘riddle’ of EL, which … has been referred to as the greatest medical mystery of the 20th century? Unfortunately, no: but inroads are certainly made here pertaining to diagnosis, pathology, and even treatment”. In 2012, Oliver Sacks noted there was evidence a virus was the probable cause of the disease, possibly an enterovirus variant.

This ‘new illness’ was first noted in the winter of 1916–1917 in Vienna and later in some other cities.  It rapidly spread world-wide over the next three years.  The number of people infected during the ten years of the pandemic is unknown (but, as already noted, estimates suggest more than 1 million people contracted the disease, and that more than 500,000 died).  Encephalitis lethargica assumed its most virulent form between October 1918 and January 1919.  The pandemic disappeared in 1927, as abruptly and mysteriously as it first appeared, although it is likely that the Spanish Flu virus accelerated the effects of whatever caused the encephalitis or lowered resistance to it in a catastrophic way.

Finally, and equally extraordinarily, many surviving patients of the 1915–1926 pandemic eventually seemed to make a complete recovery and return to their normal lives. Despite this, the majority of survivors subsequently developed neurological or psychiatric disorders, often appearing after years or decades of seemingly perfect health. Post-encephalitic syndromes varied widely: sometimes they proceeded rapidly, leading to profound disability or death; sometimes very slowly; sometimes they progressed to a certain point and then stayed at this point for years or decades; and sometimes, following their initial onslaught, they remitted and even disappeared completely.  Often thought of as a disease of the past, it is still seen in occasional cases today.

Two flu epidemics, in 1957-8, and 1968-9, had pushed the Spanish Flu into the background by the end of the 1960’s, and encephalitic lethargica had disappeared from popular attention:  it was relegated to treatment wards.  However, it was an English doctor, then working in Mount Carmel Hospital in New York, who decided to see if he could work with some of the 200 patients in the city using a novel form of treatment.  That doctor was Oliver Sacks, then a consultant neurologist, who decided to try administering a new drug, laevo-dihydroxyphenylalanine (L-DOPA), which had proven to be a ‘miracle drug’ for Parkinson’s patients.  The results were bizarre, and Awakenings, his account of what happened, is a compelling read.  As one commentator, Frank Kermode, an English Professor at Cambridge University, described it: “this doctor’s report … is written in a prose of such beauty that you might well look in vain for its equal among living practitioners of belles lettres”.

My 1973 first edition of Awakenings is dedicated to “To the patients whose lives are here depicted”.  The title page quotes “… and now, a preternatural birth in returning to life from this sickness”.  As we discover in reading his book, for some this was a bittersweet recovery.

The patients Sacks was to meet would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite or desire.  These ‘survivors’ had their thoughts and feelings unchangingly fixed at the point at which their long “sleep” had closed in on them during the 1920s, a time that would remain more real to them than any subsequent decade.  While their minds remained clear and unclouded, they were inaccessible.  Unable to work or see to their needs, they had been largely abandoned by their friends and families and had been put away in hospitals and nursing homes, largely forgotten.

Oliver Sacks was employed at Mount Carmel’s Beth Abraham care centre in New York’s Bronx and was given permission to experiment with the administration of L-Dopa to nearly 80 patients living there.  The result was like an explosion, or perhaps like a rollercoaster ride. Some of L-Dopa’s side-effects had a frightening intensity: in one patient’s words: “I can no more control it than I could control a spring tide. I just ride it out and wait for the storm to clear… That L-Dopa, that stuff should be given its proper name – Hell-Dopa!”

While the L-Dopa released amazing reactions, Sacks was carefully taking notes. “I cannot think back on this time without profound emotion,” he wrote later. “It was the most significant and extraordinary moment in my life, no less than in the lives of our patients. All of us at Mount Carmel [Beth Abraham] were caught up with the emotion, the excitement, with something akin to enchantment, even awe.”

In the spring of 1969, he writes: “I moved to an apartment a hundred yards from the hospital and would sometimes spend 12 or 15 hours a day with our patients – observing them, talking with them, getting them to keep notebooks, and keeping voluminous notes myself, thousands of words each day. And if I had a pen in one hand, I had a camera in the other: I was seeing such things as had never, perhaps, been seen before – and which, in all probability, would never be seen again.” It was, said Sacks, his duty and his joy “to record and bear witness”.

To read the stories of the lives of Frances D, Magda B, Rolando P, Lucy K Margaret A, George W and the others is moving, sometimes shocking and occasionally extraordinarily tragic.  As he explains, “Almost half of these patients were immersed in states of pathological ‘sleep’, virtually speechless and motionless, and requiring total nursing care; the remainder were less disabled, less dependent, less isolated, and less depressed, could look after many of their own basic needs, and maintain a modicum of personal and social life.”  The strange, almost unbelievable histories Sacks tells of the patients at Mount Carmel are exemplified in his description of  concluding moments of the life of Magda B, who had “a sudden premonition of death”.  As he describes in Awakenings, Mrs B suffered progressive blindness, a touching tic and vivid dreaming.  In other respects, her physical health was good.  Then she contacted her daughters.  “Come and see me today … there will be no tomorrow. No, I feel quite well … nothing is bothering me, but I know I shall die in my sleep tonight’.”

Sacks records that “her tone was quite sober and factual, wholly unexcited”.  The medical team wondered if they had missed something, and decided to take cardiograms, some blood tests, and other checks.  The results were ‘quite normal’.  In the evening Mrs B went round the ward, with a laughter-silencing dignity, shaking hands and saying ‘Goodbye’ to everyone there.  She went to bed,” Sacks continues, “and she died in the night.”  To reread just this one case reminded me how just what an extraordinary account Sacks provides in Awakenings.  It is full of similar moments of bizarre drama, in which you find you’re reading about strange and often disturbing events, often appearing more like moments from a fantasy novel.  But it isn’t, it is a window into yet another area of mystery concerning the human brain.

There are twenty case studies in Awakenings.  His account of Margaret A is typical, in that it describes amazing behaviour and reactions (to be clear, each case study is different in almost every respect, except for the strange ‘release’ that L-Dopa achieved), but her story proved more extreme than most.  Margaret was a New Yorker, born in 1908, the youngest child of a poor Irish Immigrant family.  In 1925, she fell ill, initially sleeping almost continually for ten weeks (apart from being woken to be fed) and fell into a state of depression.  Then she appeared to have recovered, working as a secretary and having an enjoyable social life.  However, by 1929, she began to show signs of wakefulness, put on 100 lbs in weight, had periods of depression.  She managed to keep working until 1935, and then stayed at home, nursed by her mother, but with frequent hospital visits.  In 1958, she was admitted to Mount Carmel.  From her admission onwards, her behaviour was characterised by sleepiness, depression, and excessive water consumption.  Her gait and posture were very rigid.

The initial administration of L-Dope in May 1968 seemed promising.  She could walk more easily, dress herself, and talk more easily.  Within a fortnight, she had become sociable, wanted to dance with the nurses, explained she felt a ‘star patient’, although she was having trouble sleeping.  Shortly after this, she began to develop tics, was finding it difficult to sleep, and her almost manic behaviour was alternated with ‘frozen’ periods.   By June, she started to come apart, saying of the L-Dopa, “It’s driving me mad, but I’ll die if you stop it.”

From that moment on, Sacks reported that she was almost never in a “well-modulated ‘middle’ state and has almost nothing in-between coma and hyper-vigilance”.  Sacks goes on to report that:  In the presence of excitement and perpetual contradiction, Miss A has split into a dozen Miss A’s – the drinker, the ticker, the stamper, the yeller, the swinger, the gazer, the sleeper, the wisher, the fearer, the lover, the hater, etc. – all struggling with each other to ‘possess’ her behaviour.  Her  real interests and activities have practically vanished, and have been replaced by absurd stereotypies, continually ground smaller in the mill of her being.  She is completely reduced, for most of the time, to a ‘repertoire’ of a few dozen thoughts and impulsions, increasingly fixed in phrase and form, and repeated, compulsively, again and again.  The original Miss A – so engaging and bright – has been dispossessed  by a host of crude, degenerate sub-selves – a schizophrenic fission of her once-unified self”

This case study ends with another quite unsettling section.  We learnt that she has a younger sister, who arrived once a month to take her out.  They would go on excursions, eat out, and have a great time.  In the book the sister explains they had a wonderful day, each time, and adds “She talked and laughed the way she used to in the old days, back in the twenties before she got ill … she goes mad in your madhouse because she is shut off from life.”  What are we to make of this – and all the other cases Sacks describes.

Perhaps it is unfair to focus on this particular case as an example.  Many of the other patients Sacks treated had equally bizarre reactions to L-Dopa, but in several cases the drug was to help them get back to a more viable way of life.  Some were able to go back to work, marry, have children, and lead fairly normal lives.  If Margaret A offers a sad, unresolved and ultimately unsatisfactory account, in almost every case the original Encephalitis Lethargica and the subsequent impact of L-Dopa left the individuals with scars of one kind or another, in some cases physical consequences, and for almost everyone psychological concerns and uncertainties.

However, Awakenings gives us something more.  It was superbly written, a presentiment of the several books Oliver Sacks went on to author.  His reflections on health, recovery and change take up the last 50 pages of Awakenings, in three sections, under the heading of  Perspectives.  The first part reflects on the process of Awakening and how it was experienced by his patients.  The second is on the topic of Tribulation (and many had extraordinary journeys following that “flash-like drug-awakening of the Summer of 1969” ).  Finally Sacks explores the varieties of  Accommodation, and the very different responses from a return to an almost normal life through to some scarcely doing much more than surviving.

Given his mesmerising and occasionally dark account, any final comments have to come from Oliver Sacks.  In 1982, he wrote:  “I have become much more optimistic than I was when I […] wrote Awakenings,for there has been a significant number of patients who, following the vicissitudes of their first years on L-DOPA, came to do – and still do – extremely well. Such patients have undergone an enduring awakening, and enjoy possibilities of life which had been impossible, unthinkable, before the coming of L-DOPA”.

What’s Going on?

Browsing in the library is a dangerous pastime.  I exercise this foolish endeavour in the Dickson Public Library in Canberra.  Like many ‘professional’ browsers, I have my favourite places.  There’s a wall section where some books are left on display to tempt you.  Some in this small selection are for normal loans, while others can be borrowed for one week only.  However, that’s for beginners.  Past those temptations, I go over to the stacks, where there’s short display sections with books that are being recommended.  After glancing at those and checking for anything new by my favourite writers, I browse the shelves.  In Fiction I look for books by an individual author, and then decide if I’ve found a writer to sample.  Non-fiction is harder.  So many categories, it can feel overwhelming.  I’ve learnt to make a note of the Dewey number for books I’ve read and enjoyed, and then see what else has been shelved in and around that section.  I think that’s how I discovered Ed Yong’s book An Immense World, which explores the complex and diverse sensory world of animals.  As the book’s subtitle explains, it is a study of  How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us.

Two examples in the book are moderately well known.  In fact, Yong explains that back in the 1880s, John Lubbock, who was something of a polymath, decided to use a prism to shine light broken up into the colours of the rainbow on to some ants.  Why he decided to do that, I have no idea, but I have to assume it was a typical example of the ‘gentleman doing science’ world that existed back then.  Anyway the ants scurried away from the light, but this included exiting a region just beyond the rainbow’s violet end, which looked dark to Lubbock.  This was a region of ultraviolet (or UV) light, largely invisible to us, but must have been “apparent to the ants as a distinct and separate colour (of which we can form no idea)”,  Lubbock presciently wrote.  He added, “It would appear that the colours of objects and the general aspect of nature must present to them a very different appearance from what it does to us.”

Yong writes that back then many scientists believed that animals were either colourblind or saw the same spectrum that we do.  Lubbock’s experiment seemed to suggest ants were exceptional, but today we now know they aren’t.  Half a century later, researchers had found that bees and minnows could see ultraviolet, too, although they assumed this was a rare ability.  By the 1980s, researchers had shown that many birds, reptiles, fish, and insects have UV-sensitive photoreceptors, but not mammals.  Then in 1991, yet further research showed that mice, rats, and gerbils have cones in their eyes that were ‘tuned’ to UV, so small mammals could have UV vision, too.  There was more!  In the 2010s, researchers found that reindeer, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, ferrets, and many other mammals can detect UV.  They probably see UV as a deep shade of blue rather than as a separate colour, but they can sense it, nonetheless.  Incidentally, there’s evidence that so can some humans.

Perhaps you aren’t surprised to read this.  Nor will you be surprised to read about echolocation by bats.  This was realised some 80 years ago, when scientists discovered bats were emitting high pitch calls, and were using the echoes that bounced back off the objects around them to navigate and hunt in total darkness.  Bats ‘see’ with their ears.  I had always assumed that this was an ability unique to bats.  However, Yong’s book reveals that once the bat’s ability had been identified, so examples of echolocation in other creatures were identified. Dolphins and toothed whales can do it, some other animals, some bird varieties, several small mammals too, and, surprise, a small number of ‘special’ humans as well.

Ed Yong’s point is that the existence of examples like UV vision and echolocation makes clear how human-centric we are in our thinking.  As Yong comments:  “Things like ‘bird’s-eye view’, I suppose. A bird doesn’t see like we do. We just think of it as being from really, really high up.  You’re right, but if a human actually tried to take a real bird’s-eye view, many weird things would happen. We would have close to wrap-around vision. Just watch a duck in a pond, like a simple duck that no one even thinks about. That duck can probably see the entirety of the sky without having to move its head, which seems incredible to me. They can also see a whole range of colours that we can’t perceive. So, yeah, even when we use language like ‘a bird’s-eye view’ to talk about perspective taken by other species, we radically underestimate the differences.”

Of course, a phrase like ‘a bird’s eye view’ implies we observe as a bird does.  The only problem is that we can’t!  That was brought home to me when I first read Thomas Nagel’s wonderful article on What It’s Like To Be a Bat.  When I first read that title, I thought this should be interesting.  Little did I know.  This was a deeply analytical piece, powerful and, for me, convincing – even if there are some who disagree with elements of Nagel’s argument.

As you might have guessed (or know if you have read the paper), Nagel’s analysis was focussed on consciousness.  Central to this perspective is the view that consciousness is and can only ever be a subjective experience.  Only you can ‘know’ consciousness.  You can describe what you know, of course.  You can describe what you see in your visual field.  You can explain what words mean to you.  You can set out the steps you have used in reasoning.  However, all that ‘objective’ description doesn’t take away from the fact that only you can know what it means to be you.  Our subjective experience cannot be explained in material terms.  It is how we experience from our individual point of view.

To make his argument clear, Nagel focussed on the bat.  Why bats?  Well, they are mammals, and it seems likely they have conscious experiences (today, many writers argue consciousness is a property shared by most living things, but that wasn’t the case back in the 1970s).  More to the point, they have that very sophisticated echolocation sensory system, which allows them to fly, at night, and yet identify objects in their flight path.  You could say they navigate and see using a system something like a sophisticated form of sonar.   That analogy is useful, because we can’t observe the sound waves and their reflection as an ‘aural’ picture:  we have to translate it into a visual form, using a sonar image created through a transducer (converting sound waves into visual equivalents).  However, Nagel points out the limits of that analogy: bats use echolocation by “detecting reflections, for the objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high frequency shrieks”.  Their brains “correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enable bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion and texture”, all inflight and at a high speed (from page 170 of Nagel’s 1979 essay, ‘Mortal Questions’).

Since its publication, there’ve been many critiques of Nagel’s essay, but Yong argues his conclusion is hard to challenge:

“we won’t know, because it is fundamentally impossible to really understand the subjective experience of another creature, which is why, firstly, you always need to make an imaginative leap. You always need this little speck of faith, this little willingness to be creative to get to that destination, and you need a bit of humility and understanding, like, ‘I actually won’t ever quite get there but it’s the journey that matters. It’s the effort that matters.’ And so, for me writing this book, like I know I don’t have all the answers, but I can give you everything we know, and I can give you informed speculations about what the animal might be going through. And that’s what I tried to do. I tried to take us to like the very edge of that chasm between our subjective experience and other animals. Like let us peer over the edge, maybe do that thing where I’m like, woah, and then pull you back. And it’s not easy. One thing that made it a little easier was just asking people who work in these fields and who think about these creatures, and to ask them how they think about the creatures that they study. Because all of this I’ve just talked about, like these imaginative leaps, they tend to not be in papers, right? They’re a little antithetical to what we shove into the scientific literature. But I guarantee you that everyone who really works in this field, every sensory biologist, has thought long and hard about what the creatures they study might experience. And if you ask them, you just get some really cool stuff.” (Yong writing in Nature, 1 July 2022)

Each chapter of Yong’s book is concerned with a different form of sensory input.  The more we travel into the unfamiliar, the harder it becomes to imagine what it might be like to have access to a rather different form of experience.  One example that brought this home to me was the ability to ‘feel’ electricity.  I had read about electric eels.  These dubious creatures kill their prey using electric shocks, with zaps up to 860 volts.  Naturally enough, reading about them made me slightly nervous until I discovered they were only to be found in the northeast part of South America – in Guiana, norther Brazil and the lower reaches of the Amazon.  Also, and again contrary to my somewhat worried imagination, they are fish eaters, and don’t wander the rivers waiting for an unwary human to shock into oblivion.

However, electric eels are not quite as interesting as electric fish, fish with a relatively weak electric field that they use to sense their environment.  They do this by creating this electric field around their bodies, and the field get ‘distorted’ by the objects around them, both items that can conduct electricity, like much vegetable matter, or non-conductive material like rocks and riverbanks.  Amazingly, these fish can not only sense the distortions, but appear to use it to ‘map’ the environment around them.

Actually, that’s old news.  Apparently, scientists have been studying electric fish for a long time, and there is good understanding about both how the electric field is generated and how it is ‘sensed’.  However, Ed Yong asked a really great question of  one of the neuroscientists working in the area:  what do the distortions in the electric field feel like to the fish?  His reply?  “[He] imagined that if the fish is swimming past, like a rock, for example, you might imagine like a cool sensation moving down its flank that would indicate an insulating object is in the environment. So, he imagined it as something akin to touch, but operating in a distance several inches away from the fish’s body. And that gives me a little portal to what it might be like for the fish. Is that exactly what it’s like? Absolutely no idea”.

Inevitably, investigations into various animal senses can lead to speculation about human ‘extrasensory perception’ or ESP.  This area received a boost back in the 1930s, when a psychologist, J B Rhine, with his wife, Louisa E Rhine, started research ESP, using the so-called Zener cards, each with one of five symbols (circle, square, wavy lines, cross, and star) on the face.  A typical pack (an ESP pack) has five of each type of card in a pack of 25.

The cards were used in three forms of experiment’. To test for ‘telepathy’, the ‘sender’ looks at a series of cards while the ‘receiver’ guesses the symbols.  In a more complex test, for clairvoyance, the pack of cards is hidden from everyone while the receiver guesses.  Finally, to test for precognition, the order of the cards is determined after the guesses have been made. Rhine’s results were exciting, but, sadly, staff in psychology departments have attempted and failed to repeat them.  At Princeton University W. S. Cox tried, with 132 subjects over no less than 25,064 trials in 1936.  He concluded “There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the ‘average man’ or of the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group. The discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the subjects.”  Despite many claims since, there has been no reliable evidence for ESP.

Most apparent findings turn out to be flawed as a result of methodological problems.  First many ESP studies confront what is known as the ‘stacking effect’.  Studies using a “closed” ESP target sequence (as is the case with Zener cards) violates the condition of independence used for most standard statistical tests. Multiple responses for a single target cannot be evaluated using statistical tests that assume independence of responses.  Such an approach increases the likelihood of card counting and, in turn, increases the chances for the subject to guess correctly . Another common flaw involves cues through sensory leakage, as when the subject receives a visual cue. This could be the reflection of a Zener card in the holder’s glasses, with the result the subject in the study can ‘guess’ the card correctly because they can see it!   On top of all that, poor shuffling can make the order of the cards easier to predict.

All over?  Probably, but I do admire Ed Yong.  As he explains that while much of what he writes has been researched and proven, “I think if you didn’t do any of the imaginative stuff, the book would just be joyless. Whereas if you just went on like flights of fancy all the time, it would feel like almost like a work of science fiction. This is very much a non-fiction book. And I’m trying to show both what we know but also the limits of that knowledge”.

In an interview with Benjamin Thompson he gives one more example, based on research on the larger whales.  Apparently, they make ‘very deep infrasonic calls’, at a level well below what humans hear.  These can travel long distances, even from one end of an ocean to the other.  How has this been discovered?  Well, scientists near Europe using hydrophones picked up the sound of a blue whale ‘singing’, the sounds coming from a whale swimming off the coast of America!  However, he suggests the real question is not whether whales can hear each other across an ocean.  Rather, what can they communicate through sounds across thousands of kilometres?  Harder to imagine, but not impossible.  So, do whales talk when right next to each other, in visual proximity? Can they be separated by miles, even tens or hundreds of miles?  We don’t know.  But Ed Yong likes to stretch our minds.  As he points out, the sound travels, whales are intelligent, they’re social animals, and … and who knows.  It’s a ‘flight of fancy’, but it’s an example to make us think.  Our sensory abilities are limited to the point we may not know what’s going on with whales, or many other creatures.

Yong finishes his speculations with a few thoughts about  magnetoreception – the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic fields – an ability that songbirds, turtles and probably a lot of other animals have too. He suggests magnetoreception remains one of the biggest mysteries in sensory biology. “It is the only sense where we don’t actually know what the sense organ is or what the receptor is – the cell that actually detects magnetic fields. We know that for everything else, right? So, vision, very obviously, is a thing that eyes do. I know exactly which cells inside my retina are responsible for detecting light. I can trace all the pathways from those cells to my brain. But with magnetoreception, we don’t have any of that. We don’t know what the receptor is. We don’t know how they could work.”  Yong wouldn’t say it, but in suggesting that this is the ‘last great unknown sense’, I can’t help wondering if it really is the last sense to be found.  I agree ESP is nonsense, but the ability to communicate with others using a sense we don’t yet understand or even recognise, that’s certainly possible.  My sense is that this is an area with which it’s worth keeping in touch!

 Migration

Living in England, a young and decidedly amateur ornithologist, I didn’t pay much attention to annual bird migration.  Like many other watchers, I noted, for example, when the swallows arrived and left.  I suspect I imagined there was a meeting, a convocation, one day in the late summer, perhaps at the Marble Arch end of Hyde Park, when instructions were issued (I did have to wonder how??) to the flock advising them of the departure arrangements in three days’ time.  The assembled swallows would be reminded they had those  three days to fatten up, young birds were warned the flight was long and dangerous, and then it was a set of simple instructions: ‘go from Hyde Park Corner to the White Cliffs of Dover, turn a little to the right, and then go straight on for Spain and North Africa’!

A little later in life, I migrated, not for the summer but permanently.  To travel from the UK to Australia required permits, visas, and a flight itinerary:  it was complex, in this case, because we decided to take three months and visit various places on the way.  We didn’t fatten up for the trip, but our bags got bulkier with various gifts and mementos as we went along.  By the time we arrived in Adelaide, we weighed a lot more than when we left (the exact opposite of those migrating swallows.

Arriving in Australia saw an end to anything more than casual birdwatching.  The country was full of varieties I had never seen before, and I decided to abandon adding to my life-list of observations.  However, with parrots and blue wrens in the garden, and black swans on the river, for the first year or so it was a birdwatcher’s dream.  Soon enough I became adjusted to cockatoos and galahs (yes, they’re a bird variety as well as a name for people who make stupid mistakes!).  However, it took another move, this time to the USA in 2011, to see my interest in ornithology returning to the fore, largely driven by Ruby Throated Hummingbirds, hovering just outside the patio door.  In a previous blog I explored how these tiny birds flew north in the late Spring form South American, crossing the Gulf of Mexico, and returned in the middle of Autumn.  Even smaller than swallows, that must have been a demanding journey, over water and without any nectar pods available!

Older, less driven by work demands, I have returned to an earlier question.  How did birds manage to migrate, sometimes for days on end, in the daytime and at night, and yet find their way to their other home?  Perhaps you are unaware of the extraordinary migration paths some birds have followed.  I could start with the bar-headed goose.  Not a particularly exciting bird to look at, but every year flocks fly from southern India to Mongolia.  It’s a distance of around 1,000 miles, but to cover it they fly over the Himalayas, five miles up, where winds often blow at 100 miles an hour, temperatures drop down to thirty or forty degrees below zero and oxygen levels are one fifth of that at sea level.  As one writer explains “The air at that altitude, in fact, is so thin that helicopters cannot fly because their rotors can’t get enough lift.”(from Jim Robbins in The Wonder of Birds).  The bar-headed goose flies at 50 miles an hour (or faster with a tail wind) and crosses the Himalayan mountain range in one day!

The distance travelled by a bar-headed goose is only mildly impressive.  As far as we know, the world champion for migration is the Arctic Tern, going from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and, incidentally, seeing more daylight per year than any other species.  One Arctic tern caught and ringed as a youngster in the Farne Islands, off the British east coast, reached Melbourne in just three months from its fledging capture, a sea journey of over 22,000 kms.

Perhaps you’d prefer to hear about the exploits of the Manx Shearwater,   It is a bird that looks a bit like a gull in flight, although it is from a quite different family of birds.  Its wings are straight, black on top and while underneath.  Its wingspan is around 80 cms, and its body length around 35 cms.  Most the bird’s life is spent over the ocean, but they nest in the northern UK and parts of Scandinavia.  However, in the winter, they go south, and end up in South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.  Some even go to the Falkland Islands.  They fly from the northern regions to the south in around two weeks, a journey of some 14,000 kilometres.  As they are long-lived birds, some will have cover enormous distances during their lives; one record-breaking Manx shearwater is calculated to have flown 8 million kilometres during its over-50-year lifespan (according to a report on CNN in April 2002).  These are serious travellers!

I could continue to describe various bird species and their extraordinary migration adventuress.  Many species of birds travel enormous distances, in several cases remaining aloft for the whole journey, although I should mention that the Manx Shearwater does take breaks as it heads south (or north).  However, what intrigues me most about these supreme athletes is how they know where to go.  Many studies have shown that youngsters, birds that have never migrated before, set off from their nesting area and go south for the winter, knowing exactly how to get to their alternative homes.  How do they do it?

Perhaps I should explain one thing.  Today’s understanding of migration paths has been achieved by playing some mean tricks on birds.  They are loaded with equipment, including geolocators and transmitters, they are taken in darkened aviaries to new locations, often many hundreds of miles from their original home location before being released, and, in some amazing studies, even fitted with eyeglasses that distort their vision.  There might be a large number of Manx Shearwaters, at least half-a-million, but some have done it tough!

Well, it might be you don’t find their travels a mystery.  For many years, it wasn’t seen as anything that was that particularly curious.  However, in more recent years, and certainly since the nineteenth century, it has been an enduring puzzle.  They have to use a kind of ‘spatial cognition’, allowing them to traverse forests, deserts and oceans and keep going in the right direction.  In case you might think it is just a matter of landmarks, many bird species can navigate on dark, cloudy and rainy nights when no physical cues are visible.  This also means that the old sailors’ approach, navigation by the stars, won’t work (nor by the moon, let alone by the sun in daylight hours).  We can dispense with maps:  no evidence has been found of mud maps drawn on the ground near a nesting territory!

Actually, this is proving to be an extremely complex field, and blanket statements, like those I have just made, are often wrong.  Those Manx Shearwaters mentioned earlier do find the sun useful in orienting themselves.  Various studies of warblers have shown they used the night sky to set direction for themselves.  Of course, in both these cases, that means the birds had to be conversant with the impact of time:  they seemed to be demonstrating they possess some kind of inbuilt sextant and chronometer system to set direction, just as a sailor might do.

It might be worth changing focus for a moment, and ask how do we find our way to distant places?  I think the answer might be that we use a variety of ways to do this.  If I use myself as an example, usually the first thing I do is study a map.  I look at where I am, plan what roads would be the best to use, and note the cities I’ll go through or bypass.  Then I set off.  However, without thinking about it, I orient myself by the sun, in order to make certain I am going in the right general direction.  Without thinking?  Well, I know when the route I have in  my mind is interrupted, by major roadworks for example, I only place some reliance of various ‘Deviation’ signs, but I also keep in mind the direction I believe is correct, using the sun and a sense of how many shifts have taken place in one direction or another.  I’m aware that this is an imperfect approach, and I can, to my chagrin, recall times when I have found myself going in the wrong direction altogether when sent off the main road, and taking what I thought would be the correctly aligned turnings!  I also use visual information, of course.  If I know a city, a town or even a major hill or volcanic plug is coming up, I look for that.

It’s challenging to remember what it was like the first time you drove in a new part of the world.  Once we’re settled, we ‘know’ where to go, and there must be some kind of map in our heads we use.  However, when I moved to the US several years ago, I was without a mental map and, to my surprise, there were significant parts of trips where there were few built up areas.  As long as I stayed on a freeway, it was easy, but once I was on back roads, it was back to a sense of where I should be heading, using whatever I could to ensure I was going in the ‘right’ direction (not always easy when roads start to wander), and looking for clues (the names of unfamiliar hamlets are little help).  Of course, my partner never had a problem:  “Stop and ask someone”.  She was right, of course, but there were times when I didn’t want to admit defeat.

How does this relate to avian migration.  Well, I think part of the challenge is that different species, and birds at different ages, use a variety of cues.  There is evidence that in species where the birds are long lived, then the older birds lead the way, and the younger birds learn.  This has been shown in the case of White Storks.  Other research has shown that history plays a role.  The Northern Wheatear now travels from many areas in the northern hemisphere, even if they all end up in sub-Saharan Africa, a function of the expansion of their breeding grounds.  Many species do not fly direct, but follow paths that allow them to take breaks, and several species of water birds follow paths that take them over wetlands where they can stop and recuperate, even though this can extend the overall migration by hundreds and even thousands of miles.  Others fatten up, and just keep going, like the Great Snipe, which migrates with non-stop flights of between 4,000–7,000 kms, flying for  60–90 hours, during which time they change their average cruising heights from 2,000 m (above sea level) at night to around 4,000 m during daytime.  I guess they are the marathon runners of the bird world.

However, research in recent years has shown navigation is based on a surprising variety of senses. Many birds have been shown to use a sun compass (perhaps that’s true for Shelducks!). Using the Sun for direction involves the need for making compensation based on the time.  Quite apart from the sun, and the time of day, stars, and visual landmarks, and more, satellite tracking of birds of prey, including ospreys and honey buzzards, has shown that older individuals are better at making corrections for wind drift.  However, the most exciting findings concern the role of ‘electromagnetic tools’.

In the case of some varieties of bird, it seems a young bird on its first migration flies in the correct direction according to the Earth’s magnetic field, but it does not know how far the journey will be.  Research suggests that this is a consequence of chemical reactions in special photo-sensitive pigments in the bird’s eye, which are sensitive to those short wavelengths which are affected by the earth’s magnetic field.  This only works during daylight but it does not use the position of the Sun in any way.  With experience, the bird  learns various landmarks, ‘mapping’ using magnetites in the bird’s trigeminal system, a key cranial nerve.   As birds migrate between northern and southern regions, the magnetic field strengths vary at different latitudes,  and this system appears to let it know when it has reached its destination.  Further, other research shows there is a neural connection between the eye and the part of the forebrain that is active during migrational orientation, suggesting that some birds may actually be able to see the magnetic field of the Earth (reported by Heyers, D.; et al, in PLOS ONE in September 2007).  More on this in a moment.

Mind boggling?  There’s more.  Considerable research has gone to what is known as ‘path integration’ in animals, usingcues from different sensory sources within the body, without relying on visual or other external landmarks, to estimate position relative to a known starting point or return point, doing so continuously and while travelling on a path that may wander considerably from a straight line.  Obviously, path integration is important in animal navigation, and has been studied since Darwin first wrote on animal instincts.  When vision (and hence the use of landmarks) is not available, path integration must rely on clues generated by the animal’s body.    Path integration in mammals has been shown to make use of  their sensory organs.  However, information from other senses such as echolocation and magnetoreception may also be integrated in certain animals. That would be like me going off track, realising that I had strayed from my way home, and automatically compensating.  Wow, now wouldn’t that be useful.  It sounds like some kind of internal Global Positioning System!  However, it seems path integration isn’t so obvious in human beings, or perhaps we just ignore the signals our brain is receiving.

All this modern work suggests that there are many systems used by birds that hadn’t even been imagined fifty years ago.  Several could certainly play a role in getting a bird back to where it had wintered a year before.  That leaves us with the puzzle of getting there the first time.  All this is the subject of a lot of current research.  Geolocator studies of our old friend the Manx Shearwater confirmed what we knew, those birds travel a very long way, and now there is data to suggest they do down south along the coast of Argentina.  However, a real surprise was to find that they don’t fly straight down, but stop off regularly, to rest and refuel – and will stay in some of those rest points for as much as a couple of weeks!  All this is revealed in Tim Birkhead’s wonderful 2022 book, Bird Sense, with the very appropriate subtitle ‘What It’s Like to Be a Bird’.

As for magnetoreception, recent research has identified cryptochrome in special cells devoted to vision in bird eyes. When photons (tiny individual light particles) strike the cryptochrome, it seems its electrons are briefly (that means for one hundredth of a microsecond or less) in a state of quantum entanglement with the earth’s magnetic grid.  The grid lines identified “allow the bird to see and be guided by them” (in Jim Robbins book, The Wonder of Birds, page 209).  Yes, this is mind boggling.  Continuing research shows that some bird species use this identification of grid lines to compensate for relocation:  these findings are based on those ‘friendly’ studies when birds are taken in light-proof boxes to sites hundreds of miles from the nesting site, and released to see if they can migrate successfully

There is still much to be understood in bird migration.  For once, that great line (from the 1800s) ‘there’s more to this than meets the eye’ is both true and untrue!  There’s even evidence that that gravity anomalies could play a role in homing pigeon navigation.  Some bird species complete truly amazing feats of long-distance navigation.  There are many factors that appear to play a role in their ability to find direction, even if blown off course.  Perhaps, like Peter Sheldrake, they use a variety of methods, relying on one some of the time, and another when circumstances change.  One thing is clear, reading studies based on recent research has reawakened my interest in ornithology, but now I mix my observations of the birds around me with armchair studies of migration.