THE AUGMENTED BODY
Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings.
Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee1
We have been gradually expanding our understanding of the body: what it is, and how intelligent it is. And we have been working our way up from the ‘sub-personal’ level of molecules and tiny electrical sparks, through the interwoven systems of the body, to the ‘personal’ level of conscious thoughts and the more prototypical forms of human intelligence – talking, decision-making, problem-solving and creativity. But you’ll remember that, when we were talking about the nature of human beings as ‘complex adaptive dynamic systems’, way back in Chapter 3, we saw that, not only are we composed of Sub-Systems, but we are ourselves Sub-Systems within a whole array of nested Super-Systems. To comprehend ourselves correctly, we have to include the ‘supra-personal’ level as well.
The envelope of our skin (and all the specialised kinds of touch-receptors we have evolved, like eyes and ears) is not a boundary or a barrier but the place where we are joined to the world. To understand an isolated body on its own makes no more sense than trying to understand the heart without looking at its place within the life of the body. A heart in a steel dish is profoundly different from the same heart in situ. We saw that the healthy heart is in constant resonance with all its fellow organs and substances – and we human beings, through our bodies, are in continual resonance with the flux of energy, activity and information that surrounds and batters us.
The fact that much of this interaction occurs unconsciously makes it no less real. But we have acquired the cultural habit of overvaluing those aspects of ourselves that are conscious and explicit, and this makes us neglect this constant reverberation with our surroundings. Some of these interactions are physical, and often pretty obvious. We die if we stop exchanging gases with the world. If we lose the sense of touch, whether the comfort of a caress or the pain of an injury, we are badly dis-abled. But many of these interactions are social, and often more subtle. We react to the expression in someone else’s eyes without knowing it. We are sensitive to people’s smells of which we are not aware. In this chapter we will explore some of this tissue of connections with the environment.
My-space
Being tickled makes most of us squirm – but so can a pretend tickle that makes no contact with the skin. Waggling your fingers in a threatening manner close to a child’s body can elicit the same kind of squirming and giggling as a real tickle does. That is because there is, around your solid body, an invisible bubble which scientists call the ‘peripersonal space’. It is the area in which, without shifting your overall position in space, you could grab, stroke, kick or butt something if it came your way.2 It is the zone of direct interaction with the physical world: the principal arena in which we use our limbs to latch on to things we desire or that interest us, or to fight off or bat away things that are noxious or threatening. As we saw in Chapter 5, objects that enter the peripersonal zone (such as a rattle offered to a baby) are processed by the brain in a different way from those that are outside it. Their graspability, for example, becomes a much more salient trait, and the motor areas in the brain that underwrite grasping are automatically primed for action. The same object, seen outside the peripersonal zone, is processed in terms more of its own characteristic sensory features than of the physical actions needed to grab hold of it.
In 1994, Michael Graziano and Charlie Gross at Princeton were exploring the behaviour of cells in the monkey brain that seemed to respond to both touch and vision. The cells would fire off when, for example, the back of the monkey’s hand was stroked; but, Graziano and Gross discovered, the same cells would fire equally strongly if the monkey saw the experimenter’s hand get close to the back of its hand without actually touching it. It looked as if the visual clue was enough to prime the brain to expect a certain kind of touch sensation. In effect, the monkey’s sense of touch extended out from its body like an ‘aura’. Of course – unlike some parapsychological claims for the reality of auras – the effect only occurs if the monkey can see the approaching stimulus: that is, if it ‘knows’ that something has entered its peripersonal space. It has to be close – in the monkey’s case, around eight inches away – before the effect begins, and the cells’ responses get stronger as the stimulus approaches closer and closer. The effective body extends out beyond the solid pillar of meat that we usually call ‘the body’.3
Graziano and Gross also found that many of these cells are not where the traditional view would have them be: tucked away towards the back of the brain in the parietal cortex, where information from the senses is known to come together and combine into multisensory representations. No, some of these cells were up front, in the premotor cortex. Here we have another clear example of the interwoven, sensorimotor view of the brain we looked at in Chapter 4. The whole point of being able to predict that something is about to brush your hand is to be able to adjust your hand to grasp it, avoid it or just let it arrive (depending on what you are up to, and what you think it is). The brain is designed to let perceptual predictions and action readiness resonate together virtually instantaneously, and it is smart of it to do so.
However, this inbuilt tendency to lock our attention on to objects that are near our hands – and to process them more quickly and more fully – does have a downside. It is harder for us to shift our attention away from such objects to something else. Give people a task where they have to look at a computer screen and switch focus quickly from one blip on the screen to a second one that happens very soon after. If you tell them to put their hands either side of the screen, rather than in their laps, their ability to switch is slower. The researchers suggested that ‘objects that are near the hands are likely candidates for physical manipulation [such as tools or food] … In those circumstances, extended analyses of objects near the hand may facilitate the production of accurate movements’. But it hinders your ability to deal with interruptions.4
A striking demonstration of the different ways the brain treats the peripersonal zone and the space beyond has been reported by Italian neurologist Anna Berti. One of her patients had a brain disorder that made her seem oblivious to the left side of her vision – but only for things that were within reaching distance. When she was asked to point to the middle of a horizontal stick close to her, she pointed way off to the right-hand end. But when the stick was moved further away, and she was asked to indicate the middle using a laser pointer, she got it more or less right.5 In everyday language we mark this shift by talking about ‘this book’ (within grasping distance) as opposed to ‘that book’ (further away). It would sound odd in English to say, ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but could you possibly pass me this book.’
The functional zone around the body isn’t fixed, though: far from it. When it needs to, your brain is able to adjust the size and shape of this My-space depending on what you happen to be wearing, driving or using at the time. When we pay someone an old-fashioned compliment and say ‘That hat becomes you’, we are speaking the literal truth. In the days when it was common for women to wear hats with wide brims and large feathers, their body schemas would quickly adjust so that they could navigate narrow doorways and low beams without mishap, and without thinking. A renowned neurologist of the day, Sir Henry Head, wrote, ‘A woman’s power of localisation may extend to the feather in her hat,’ and more generally, ‘Anything which participates in the conscious movement of our bodies is added to the model of ourselves and becomes part of the [body schema].’ Clowns on stilts do the same thing. Experienced drivers of huge articulated trucks know without thinking where the back wheels are to the nearest centimetre. In fact they will usually talk about ‘my back wheels’, not ‘the back wheels of the lorry I happen to be driving’, as if the truck had indeed become incorporated into their sense of their own body. My-space is also elastic in terms of how much the things in it, or outside it, matter to you. Desirable objects towards the outer limit of the reachable space are seen as nearer than undesirable or unpleasant ones. That is to say, the peripersonal zone is bigger for things you are keen on.6
Tools, as far as the brain is concerned, quickly become incorporated into the body. When I am using a pencil or a tennis racquet, my brain automatically adjusts the peripersonal space to include the tool. A blind person’s stick literally becomes part of their body map. When people have been using a ‘grabber’ to pick up litter, they judge the distance between elbow and fingertips on the hand which had been using the tool as longer than on the other arm. We literally feel as if our own arm has been elongated. Intriguingly, when Anna Berti’s patient was asked to point to the middle of the far-away rod using a long stick rather than the laser pointer, her distorted view of space re-emerged. With the physical pointer, her brain now ‘saw’ the rod as within the peripersonal space – and so the deficit associated with that near space came back.
In a detailed study of the malleability of these body maps, Professor Atsushi Iriki at the RIKEN Brain Institute in Tokyo has trained macaque monkeys to learn how to use a small rake to drag in raisins – a favourite treat – that are beyond their unaided reach. To see how the brain responded to this new skill, Iriki implanted tiny electrodes in the posterior parietal cortex of the rake-wielding monkeys and measured what are called the receptive fields of individual cells while they were using the rake. The receptive field is the range of physical locations that will elicit a response from a particular cell. Without the rake, the cell’s receptive fields covered just one hand, for example, and the small zone of peripersonal space around it. But when the monkey was using the rake, the same cell now included the rake itself, and the whole wider area that could be reached with the rake. Interestingly, when the monkeys were just passively holding the rake, but not actively using it, the receptive fields quite quickly shrank back to their smaller size. For us virtuoso tool-using human beings, the extended body map lasts longer after we have put down the tool: about 15 minutes.7
Avatars provide an interesting tool for exploring just how malleable these body maps are. Back in the 1980s, virtual reality (VR) pioneer Jaron Lanier and his colleagues were playing with the kinds of VR avatars that the brain would accept. An avatar is the way your own body looks to you in the VR environment. When you look down, or look in a virtual mirror, that is what you see. You can go as yourself or in fancy dress. Sensors attached to your limbs relay your muscle activity to the computer, and those signals are used to drive the movements of the avatar image.
After a while, Lanier’s colleague Ann Lasko got bored with programming avatars with two legs and two arms sticking out of a human-like torso, so she added six large lobster legs to the chest of Lanier’s avatar to see how he would cope. Would his brain be able to learn how to control the legs? In fact, she had programmed in some very tricky rules that related what Lanier could do with his real body and how the virtual lobster legs would behave. A subtle combination of the angles of his left wrist, right knee and right shoulder, for example, would make the bottom left lobster leg flex in a particular way. As Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee say, in describing this experiment, these patterns were ‘much too complex and subtle for his rational mind to grasp’.8 Yet, after some time in the VR environment (as Lobster Man), and without understanding what he was doing, Lanier became able to control the imaginary legs to a remarkable degree. ‘After a bit of practice I was able to move around and make the extra “arms” wag individually and make patterns of motion,’ said Lanier. ‘I was actually controlling them. It was a really interesting feeling.’ I bet it was!
Lanier and his team went on to design an avatar that had a tentacle sticking out of its belly button, which people could learn to wiggle around in the same way as the lobster arms and legs. But this time they combined that trick with another one. If you get people to wear special gloves that vibrate in a certain way, you can create the feeling of a physical sensation out in mid-air, in between their two hands. This in itself, Lanier says, is a truly strange experience. But now, if you rig things right, you can get that phantom feeling to coincide, in space, with the tip of the imaginary tentacle – and it feels just like a throbbing in a real part of your own body!
You can even co-opt parts of other people’s bodies into your own. Imagine you are sitting at a table with your left arm stretched out in front of you, but hidden from your view by a cover. Nearby, and visible to you, is someone else’s arm stretched out. A third person uses one of his hands to stroke and tap your arm – the one you can’t see – in a distinctive pattern and rhythm, and at the same time uses his other hand to create the identical pattern on the other person’s arm, the one you can see. Weirdly, you feel that the second person’s arm belongs to your body. Your creative brain, seeking to make a coherent story out of the different sensations it is receiving, assumes that the stimulus you feel and the stimulus you see must ‘go together’. They must belong to the same arm. As vision is more persuasive than touch, the arm you can see becomes the one that you ‘own’. Because this requires a radical suspension of disbelief on the part of your conscious self, the illusion is brittle, and can be broken if there is additional evidence that the brain’s neat hypothesis can’t be true. If the owner of the visible arm suddenly moves his fingers in an unpredictable way – without any corollary stimulation or motor commands occurring in your own body – the visible arm stops feeling like yours.9
If people’s body shape or appearance changes, it’s not just the ‘body maps’ that adapt; their apparent personality can change too, and they even think differently. When people have cosmetic surgery, or even just a makeover, their confidence often changes, and along with that their whole social demeanour. They may become more outgoing, more funny, more willing to take a risk. Just a change of clothing – those ubiquitous tools for broadcasting our values and social affiliations – can do it. Studies have shown that people wearing black clothes behave more aggressively than they do when they are wearing white. People dressed in nurses’ uniforms will refuse to deliver electric shocks to other people when instructed to do so by an experimenter. The same people dressed up as policemen are more likely to agree to do what they are told. Even in virtual reality situations, monkeying about with the appearance of someone’s avatar can influence how they think and behave. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford have shown that people whose VR avatars are shorter than they are in real life behave less assertively in negotiating situations, and settle for much worse outcomes, than those whose avatars are heightened. People assigned more attractive avatars become more sociable and extroverted.10
Distributed cognition
The backbone of the story of human evolution has been the story of perfecting our knack for incorporating an increasingly sophisticated assortment of physical tools into our increasingly flexible body schemas.
Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee11
We are designed by evolution to augment our on-board, physiological intelligence with all kinds of artefacts. We humans come into the world bundled with a set of capabilities – reflexes, simple skills and perceptual sensibilities. These all have their limits: I can only lift certain weights, only run at a certain speed, only hear over certain distances. So it is in our interest not just to protect these abilities but, where possible, to enhance them. Some I can develop through practice. We all learn that it is much more efficient to get about by walking and running than by crawling on all fours. Dancers and footballers develop mobility to an extraordinary degree. Masters of wine have developed their ability to distinguish subtle differences in taste. But we also have another way of augmenting our capabilities: through the use of tools. The macaque augmented his ability to reach by using the rake. I use a hammer to augment my ability to hit, and scissors to improve my ability to tear. I have spectacles that redress the decline in my on-board visual apparatus, and a mobile phone that vastly increases my ability to make myself heard over long distances. My car is a magical device that enables me to parlay my ability to fill a tank with fluid into a massive amplification of my ability to go places.
The British engineer Francis Evans has suggested that our technological disposition developed out of two evolutionary shifts. The first was an inquisitive inclination to mess about with the material we find, and get it to reveal additional affordances. If you fiddle with a stick you might reveal its ability to become a fishing rod. If you try smashing stones of a certain kind together, you might splinter off shards that can be found useful for cutting. And the second big contributor to our technological bent was, of course, learning how to get up on our hind legs and free our hands for manipulation and investigation.
Free hands vastly amplify our ability, first, to be opportunistic thing-users, and, second, to develop the skills to become thing-crafters. Increasingly adept and ingenious manipulators of material, we began to be able to craft – to an extent unmatched even by the great apes – our own worlds, and to populate them with labour-saving, intelligence-expanding devices of a thousand kinds. Find a fallen branch and it can help you climb a steep hill. Find a straighter one, with a V-shaped notch at one end, trim it a bit, and you have a much better walking stick. Find a longer, whippier one and you can learn how to vault streams with it. Invent fibreglass, learn how to mould it into a strong, light, hollow pole, and you can use it to vault over a six-metre-high bar and win the Olympics. Evans argues that we are built to be cunning exploiters of material, and thus to be able to bootstrap our own natural capabilities, physical and mental, manyfold. Prototypically, Evans recalls:
The other day I was standing in a muddy ditch at Wortley Top Forge, and I wanted to clean earth off a stone. I glanced around and found a root – straight and strong enough to scrape with. My mind had abstracted [needed] qualities – straightness and hardness – which were unrelated to ‘root’, the part of a tree that sits under the ground. This mental act took place without words – readers will know what it feels like to look round the garden shed for a piece of scrap material that will ‘do the job’.12
This is, if you will, another manifestation of our somatic nature – the deep disposition for us humans to weave together our sense of what we want to do, what we are capable of doing, and what the circumstances allow us to do. As we look around the shed in a way that is simultaneously purposeful, open-minded and wordless, our perception is saturated with those active senses of Want To and Can Do. Intelligence manifests in sophisticated seeing and ingenious doing.
Person plus13
We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
John Culkin
It’s not simply that we use tools intelligently to augment our intelligence. It is more accurate to say: intelligence is an accomplishment that relies on the astute orchestration of internal loops (like the loop from the gut to the anterior insula) and loops and processes that connect outwards into the material world. Put simply: ‘I’ am only as smart as ‘I’ am because I am enmeshed in a vast web of smart materials: books, spectacles, notes, printers, weblinks, diaries, calendars, maps, satellite navigation screens, computer programs, filing systems, Skype links, mobile telephones … all of which I know, more or less, how to capitalise on. We humans are heirs to a massive cultural repository of these smart objects and instruments, and much of our learning as we grow up, both in school and out, is mastering when and how to make the most of them.
In having access to this vast backlist of useful cultural tools, we are very different from animals. But we are not completely different. All creatures are best viewed ecologically, as finding and creating eco-niches that then influence their capabilities. Here are some examples of extended systems, in which the intelligence of the whole system includes the environment as well as the animal.
A hermit crab finds a shell and inhabits it till it outgrows it, whereupon it moves, for a moment shell-less and vulnerable, into a bigger one. There is no real difference in kind between crab+shell, where the shell is found and appropriated, and turtle+shell, where the shell is home-grown – is there?
A spider spins its web, and then spider+web acts as the smart apparatus for feeding the spider. The web actually consists of the spider’s own secretions – it is made out of spider-body – and spider and web work seamlessly together. So are there two systems at work here, or just the one?
A beaver builds a dam, which then forms a pond, which provides the habitat that is favourable for beaver life. The beaver crafts the environment, and then the environment crafts the beaver. Richard Dawkins in The Extended Phenotype makes a very good case that beaver+dam+pond work together so closely that the dam and the pond actually are parts of the extended body of the beaver.14
A tuna by itself is physically about seven times too weak to perform the aquabatic feats that it routinely does – accelerating like a rocket, turning on a sixpence, and so on. The way it does them is by capitalising on natural eddies and vortices in the water, and by using its tail to create additional currents which it then ingeniously exploits. The tuna uses the natural properties of the water to effectively ‘turbo-charge’ its own motion. Is it the tuna solo that is the ‘intelligent system’ here, or is it tuna+vortices-and-pressure-gradients?15
Now compare these extended eco-beasts with a hypothetical human Alzheimer’s sufferer, already with significant memory loss. Many such people manage to maintain a high level of functioning within the normal community by deploying a range of external props and aids to help them. These may include labelling the objects around them, using a ‘memory book’ with annotated photographs of family and friends, or a diary for routine tasks and events, and adopting simple tactics like leaving things they are likely to need in plain view, so they will be easy to find when the occasion arises. They are cleverly using the environment to offset the increasing limitations and fallibilities of their own biological system. Is looking up an address in your own notebook so different from looking it up in your on-board memory banks? Is patient+mnemonic-devices any different from tuna+currents, in the way they go about being intelligent?
Now a more hi-tech example. Imagine you are strolling down the main street of your home town trying out your new third-generation competitor to Google Glass. Let’s call them Mnemoptics. They are connected wirelessly to a cloud facility that contains face recognition and navigation software, and a personal database of images of your friends and acquaintances, together with biographical information, such as the names of their spouses and children, the occasion on which you last met, their favourite food, and so on – which you have uploaded and keep updated. As you walk, the software scans the faces in the crowd, and when it finds one it recognises, it displays their fact sheet on your ‘Autocue’ lenses. Social embarrassment is a thing of the past, and old acquaintances ought to be hugely impressed by your recall of their love of seafood and the name of their latest grandchild – except that they are wearing Mnemoptics too. The fact that your enhanced memory loops out into the extra-corporeal world, rather than remaining confined to the biological body-brain, seems hardly to matter. It’s not really different from the attempt to improve your memory by using ‘cognitive enhancing’ drugs, say, or by taking daily exercise to keep those little grey cells in good condition – is it? Are we not all ‘intelligent’ these days because we are person+hand-held-device?
Finally, a very lo-tech example. If I want to know the answer to ‘8 × 7’, my brain pops the answer into consciousness without any fuss or delay. I’ve learned it, and the calculation is recorded in my circuitry. But the answer to ‘362 × 89’ is not. I have to work it out, and to help me do it (the old-fashioned way), I use a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen to record and accumulate the results of a number of component calculations to which I do have ready-made answers. Unable to hold all these components in mind as I go along, I use the paper and pen to offload the memory demands. The ‘cognitive process’ seamlessly interweaves internal and external processes; I am thinking, remembering and interacting with the pen and paper all at once. Though philosophers are haggling about the niceties, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to see this orchestration of thought and action, memory and writing, brain and paper as essentially Mind At Work. We routinely sidestep the shortcomings of our own on-board intelligence by intelligently co-opting bits of the world, and intelligently using them to amplify our capabilities. We are constantly on the lookout for the next mindware upgrade (as Andy Clark puts it) to come along.16
Mundane though this last example is, it highlights one of the most important external amplifiers of human intelligence: writing, and the ability to make all kinds of stable records of our mind’s ‘work in progress’. Speech had given our ancestors enhanced abilities to coordinate actions and share information. But the discovery and invention of tools that make marks, whether as sketches on a cave wall or hieroglyphics on papyrus, was momentous for the expansion of our intelligence. It became possible routinely to offload memory demands: to write shopping lists, for instance. It is not only Alzheimer’s patients who benefit from such mnemonic prostheses.
But more importantly, we became able to reflect on our own developing ideas. Tentative formulations could be recorded and returned to with a fresh mind or a new perspective. Making sketches, models and drafts enables us to ‘freeze-frame’ our intelligence-in-action. Writing and drawing let us take time to reflect on our ‘work-in-progress’, in a way that on-line, real-time thinking cannot, and thus come up with better products and solutions. They vastly expand our power of being able to talk to ourselves. And, of course, writing and sketching make evolving ideas available to other people, and thus enable a wide – now worldwide – circle of critics, sounding-boards and collaborators to contribute to the development of those ideas. Learning to create lasting embodiments of fleeting thoughts made available whole new ways of being cumulatively, cooperatively intelligent.17
These examples just point up what we all do all the time. We, like the beaver, construct our worlds to be full of performance enhancers. Some of them interface with the body very directly, like heart pacemakers, cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs. Others are at one remove, like smartphones, kitchen blenders and hockey sticks. Some tools help us do practical things – cook sous-vide steaks, record how far and fast we have run. Some enhance our perception and communication – semaphore, television, loudspeakers; while others help us learn and think. Amongst the latter are sketches on the backs of envelopes, scribbles in the margins, calculators, filing cabinets, libraries, the internet – and the semi-organised piles of notes and articles laid out around my chair on my study floor. If someone can tell me where to draw the line between aided and unaided intelligence – between person-solo and person-plus – I’d be glad to know.
The fact that our tools ‘become us’ also begins to explain why people grow so fond of and dependent on them. Chefs become attached to their knives, musicians to their instruments, artists to their brushes, carpenters to their chisels and millions of motorists to their cars. Tools become, psychologically as well as neurally, so much a part of us that their loss feels like an amputation. There is, these days, almost no difference in kind between losing your smartphone and having a mini-stroke. If someone were cruel enough to steal a blind person’s white stick, or to deliberately remove all the clever devices that the Alzheimer’s sufferer has painstakingly crafted to help her function, it would not be theft, a crime against property, but violence, a crime against the person.18
Social resonance
If I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good or how wicked anyone is, or what his thoughts are at the moment, I would fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.
Edgar Allan Poe
We have just looked at a loop that couples my mind with a piece of paper and some arithmetical calculations. I think and write down some numbers; and then I read the numbers and they feed back into my calculating … The paper and I are in dialogue; we reciprocate. But that loop looks really slow and clunky compared to the speed and intricacy of the resonance that connects me dynamically with another human being. If we are built to amplify ourselves by turning objects into tools and resources, how much more are we designed to reverberate with other people.
This happens quite automatically at the neurochemical level. Remember, our brains are peppered with ‘canonical’ neurons that automatically fire up actions relevant to a seen object, and ‘mirror’ neurons that fire when we do something, and also when we see someone else do the same thing. So, when I see you pick up a cup, my brain automatically primes me to copy you, and when I see you smile, I am already halfway to smiling back. (Sometimes my brain primes me to perform an action complementary to yours, rather than the exact same one.) Vittorio Gallese, one of the original discoverers of mirror neurons, has argued strongly that we are naturally inclined to look at what people around us are doing, and automatically convert these perceptions into a variety of internal echoes. We are inclined to mimic their gestures and facial expressions, for example (or to reciprocate, as in the childhood game of Peek-a-Boo).
Through this internal resonance, our system also recruits the visceral motives and concerns that we habitually associate with those gestures and perceptions. And we then use these as a basis for understanding what the people around us are up to, and how they are feeling – exactly as Edgar Allan Poe indicated, except that he offers it to us as advice, which we can follow or not, while recent evidence shows that imitation is our ‘default mode’. It is only with the gradual development of inhibitory control by the frontal lobes that we learn to restrain and restrict the mimetic impulse.19 When people lose the capacity for inhibition through damage or disease of the frontal lobes, they become compulsive mimics of other people’s gestures and speech. In a disorder called echolalia, their imitation may even be triggered by their own speech or behaviour, locking them into long, debilitating loops of self-imitation.
So whether we are aware of it or not, our bodies are in a state of continual resonance with those around us – or those we may be remembering or imagining. While you and I think we are discussing the film we’ve just seen, our bodies are dancing with each other’s every gesture and expression. If we are sitting side by side in rocking chairs, and able to see each other, the rocking of our two chairs will synchronise, without our awareness or intention, even if one chair is weighted so that it requires more effort to rock it. In fact, as we were watching the movie, our brains quickly developed a point-by-point synchronisation. We were literally entrained.20
Good communication depends on this bodily coupling. A study by a research group at Princeton put pairs of people in linked MRI neuroimaging machines, and had one of them relate an unrehearsed, real-life story as if speaking to a friend, to the other person. (In one example the narrator was an undergraduate telling an embarrassing story about her high-school prom.) They found that the activity in the listener’s brain mirrored the speaker’s brain activity, usually with a delay of a second or so. In the neuroimagery records you can actually see the listener reconstructing a model of the narrator’s story in his own brain, as they go along. However, the researchers found some areas of the brain where the synchronised activity in the listener’s brain actually preceded the corresponding utterance by the speaker. As we might expect, the higher levels of the listener’s brain, located in the prefrontal cortex, are trying to anticipate what is coming next and, if he gets it more or less right, his provisional, predicted story structure matches what the speaker actually says. These brain areas are the same ones that are involved in inferring other people’s beliefs and motives, and it is these that provide the main scaffolding around which the developing story is constructed. The stronger the match between what goes on in the two brains, the better is the listener’s understanding. If the two brains fail to synchronise, communication breaks down.21
And it’s not just brains that need to synchronise if communication is to succeed; bodies do, too. Swiss researcher Fabian Ramseyer analysed videotapes of a large number of psychotherapy sessions and found that the extent to which client and therapist mirror each other’s body language predicts the client’s satisfaction with the therapist, and the strength of the bond that the two of them have formed. This mirroring included coordinated body movements and gestures, the congruence of their posture, mimicry of each other’s facial expressions and the adoption of similar voice quality.22
When we say (in a parody of the empathetic Californian) ‘I feel your pain’, we often mean we are resonating at the emotional level. But a recent British study shows that, when we are watching someone else in pain, many of us feel comparable sensations in our own bodies. In this study, people were shown either film clips or still photos of other people in pain, and about a third of them reported physical sensations – always in the appropriate part of the body. The intensity with which we react to the sight (and sound) of someone else in pain depends on how emotionally close we are to them. If you watch a nurse stick a needle into your own child, your involuntary reaction is (not surprisingly) much stronger than if it is someone else’s child. We resonate most strongly with those we care most about.23
Most of this social resonance slips by without our being aware of it. If you flash an image of fearful eyes to people so quickly that they are unaware of them, their brains nevertheless respond (see Figure 11).24 If you vary the size of the pupils in a variety of photos of people’s faces, an observer judges the mood and character of the people differently, yet they have no awareness of the influence that the pupil size is having on their reactions. And the observer’s pupils tend to dilate or contract to match the person they are looking at – again without their conscious awareness. If the picture of a woman on the cover of a psychology textbook is altered so that her pupils are enlarged slightly, male undergraduates buy more copies of the doctored version.25
In a more real-life test, Eunhui Lie and Nora Newcombe at Temple University showed nine- and ten-year-olds photos of children who had been at kindergarten with them, mixed up with some similar photos from a different kindergarten. Very few of the older children consciously recognised their former preschool-mates – yet their skin conductance showed a very clear hike when they looked at the faces of their old peers but not when they looked at the others. All the time, it appears, we are sensitive and responsive to those around us in ways that our conscious mind simply does not notice. We are hooked up to each other in the way that cell phones are: we are in touch, silently (and sometimes audibly) vibrating in response to ‘calls’ that we may or may not choose, more consciously, to answer.
Fig. 11 Scared eyes will activate the amygdala, even subliminally.
This instantaneous resonance doesn’t just make us feel close and connected, though it does do that. It enables us to coordinate our actions more successfully with other people, because we are better able to predict what they might be about to do, and therefore how they are likely to react to what we do. I can assist you better if I can get inside your skin and feel your state and your intentions. People who know each other well are notorious for finishing each other’s sentences. And, if our relationship is of a different kind, I can outwit you better. I can use your tendency to want to anticipate me to trip you up by encouraging you to see me one way – and then doing something completely different. Sun Tzu’s legendary sixth-century BC book on The Art of War counsels the military leader to ‘know your enemies, and know yourself … If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected.’26 Scientists such as Nicholas Humphrey have even argued that it was this kind of ‘arms race’ of social intelligence, driving ever subtler attempts at anticipatory cooperation and competition, which accounted for the sudden evolutionary growth-spurt of the human brain.27
The origins of resonance
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
Eric Hoffer
People’s intricate ability to predict and attune with each other has its origins, of course, in the interactions of babies and their mothers. Even before birth, the baby’s body-brain is tuning itself to the rhythms and habits of his mother. After he is born he will prefer songs his mother sang while he was in the womb to other songs. In her arms, he will learn to adjust himself to her smell, breathing, postures and movements. He will soon come to know the rituals of feeding time, and will ready himself in anticipation. It is as if mother and baby are dance partners, learning each other’s moves, so that, if all goes well, they do not tread on each other’s toes. They become familiar with each other’s natural dance steps, and accommodate accordingly.
Each mother–baby pair develops its own dance, but, provided they are sensitive to each other, the precise form of their dance is less important than the fact that they have one. A case study of a sighted baby with two blind parents, for example, found that the form of their social dance was obviously different from usual – they learned to waltz, so to speak, while most babies are learning a version of the quickstep – but the child’s development was not hampered by this difference at all.28 Children of mothers suffering from postnatal depression, on the other hand, often do show a delay in their social, emotional and mental development, and this is because the mother, preoccupied with her own troubles, may be less sensitive to her baby’s signals, and thus the dance – any dance – fails to develop.29 In general, one of the effects of depression, in both children and adults, is to dampen this social resonance so that the sufferer actually feels physically isolated from others (and they from her).30
As we grow up, this innate propensity for social resonance becomes customised: we become attuned to different individuals, and resonate differently in the light of our past experience with them. Through repeated interactions we discern their traits and habits and build these into a neural model, within our body-brains, that enables us to predict how those individuals will behave in a whole variety of circumstances. Just as the abstraction ‘Timmy’ (which we met in Chapter 7) became the web of expectations relating to next-door’s cat, so ‘Mummy’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Nanny’ become models for guiding actions with significant others. As predictions are proved accurate or inaccurate in the light of events, these models become more adaptable and reliable. And as we meet a widening range of others – classmates, their parents and siblings, teachers, as well as heroes and villains in literature and film – so these models become more numerous. In deliberate, conscious mode, we may be aware of asking ourselves, especially in a tricky situation, ‘How would Aunty Helen have dealt with that?’ or even, perhaps, ‘What would Jesus do?’ But long before we are capable of being so explicit, our body-brains have been busy building on our inherent ability to do the same thing implicitly.
Because our concepts interweave perceptions, actions and concerns (or Needs, Deeds and See’ds, as I put it earlier), these models of familiar individuals enable us to predict not just what they will do, on certain occasions, but how they will see things, and how they will feel. So these models can underpin the child’s growing powers of empathy – having an increasingly good idea what it is like to be ‘you’ (and ‘you’ and ‘you’ and ‘you’), and thus to adopt different perspectives on events. I become increasingly able to detach myself from my default, egocentric constellation of habits and concerns, and see the world through other people’s eyes. A child becomes better at hiding as she grows in her ability to adopt the perspective of the ‘hunter’; better at comforting others as she realises that not everyone shares her own portfolio of anxieties and reassurances. This ability to adopt other perspectives expands her social intelligence; if she and I can see the world from different perspectives, we are less likely to be locked into our own, and therefore better able to find common ground on which to meet. And more generally, intelligence is expanded by the ability to think about and imagine situations from different points of view.31 As British neuroscientist Chris Frith puts it, rather more formally:
Of all the representations held in the brain, that which is coded in non-egocentric coordinates will most closely resemble that held in the brain of another. It is these representations that will best enable prediction of the behaviour of another.32
As the sophistication of my mental models grows, I become able to incorporate your model of Me inside my model of You. I can begin to imagine how you see me, and what you think of me. When I inhabit your vantage point, one of the things it enables me to see is myself. I can become an ‘object’ to myself, with traits, temperament and habits as well as a visual appearance. (Mirrors enable me to see a version of the face that you see when you look at me. I have to paint in the expression of excitement and anticipation, tinged with a touch of anxiety, that I always wear when we meet.)
We could, without too much fancy, imagine that these conceptualisations of individuals could give rise to more general images of kinds of others, based on higher-level abstractions: people who give me a hard time and make me feel guilty; people who seem sympathetic and understanding; people who frighten and confuse me; people who will rescue and comfort me; people who can offer wise advice when I have a problem; people who are charming but untrustworthy; and so on. These high-level categories of significant others begin to look rather like Jung’s ‘archetypes’, and several authors have begun to see if these archetypal, mythic characters – the Judge, the Wise Old Soul, the Witch, the Saviour, the Trickster – can be given bodily underpinnings.33
I would like to pick out one of these putative archetypes for special attention as it will be useful to us later. I call it the Benign Generalised Other: the image of a person who knows us deeply and judges us not at all. Sometimes this image derives from a grandparent, or from a counsellor, psychotherapist or priest. Sometimes it is embodied in a religious figure such as Christ or Buddha. Often it is a composite of several sources. Whatever its provenance, it has the benefit, if one can learn the trick of mentally ‘putting oneself in their shoes’, of providing a warm, neutral point of observation for our own and others’ behaviour. This attentive, accepting vantage point lies at the heart of what is fashionably called ‘mindfulness’ practice.
*****
In terms of their substance, our bodies look like disconnected things. But functionally, in terms of our process, we are distributed beyond the contours of our skin. Each moment our bodies are sensitive to influences from outside which are constantly conditioning and nudging what goes on within. Through the body we and the world are intimately and dynamically interconnected. And this affects not just what we do, and how we relate, but the products and performances which we generate. In craftsmanship, as we work material we can feel this connectedness quite intensely. That’s what we’ll look at next.