I was about sixteen years old and had just read a very short story that told of a couple who loved each other as intensely as two people could. One evening they make glorious love to each other and then he goes to take a shower. She is smoking in bed, as she savours the love lingering in her body. He has an unexpected, tragic fall, tripping and hitting his head against the bathtub. He dies in silence, without anyone, not even her, realizing it has happened. The story is about that second in which they are barely three feet away from each other, while she is infinitely happy because of the love she feels for him and he is dead. I don’t remember who wrote the story, or the title, just the cheap paper and bad printing of the magazine. Then I came across this same idea in the final story of an anthology edited by Borges and Bioy Casares, entitled ‘The World is Wide and Strange’: ‘They say that Dante, in Chapter 40 of La Vita Nuova, says that when travelling through the streets of Florence he was surprised to find pilgrims who knew nothing of his beloved Beatrice.’
This book, and perhaps my whole adventure in science, is a way of answering the questions that hover implicit in those texts. I suspect that, in one way or another, we all share that impulse. That is the raison d’être of words, hugs, loves. As well as of quarrels, disputes, jealousy. Our feelings, our beliefs, our ideas are all expressed through the body’s rudimentary language.
If I were to sum up the idea behind this book in one sentence, it would be the quest to make human thought transparent. From the first page to the last, the search for that transparency is a constant. All of these experiments with babies are designed to better comprehend their desires, needs and virtues, when their lack of language makes them opaque. Understanding how we make decisions, the driving force behind boldness, the reasons for our whims and our beliefs, is a way of removing a layer of opacity from thought itself, which is sometimes hidden beneath the mask of consciousness. And, finally, the pedagogy that is so prominent in the book’s last chapter is, in my view of neuroscience, a human achievement that allows us to come together, to share what we know and what we think. So that the world is less wide and strange.