And the brain can also operate at the other extreme. When the demands of the situation are saying: ‘Don’t just stand there, do something’, the brain can usually oblige. It can compute very quickly the tongue-flick required to catch the fly, or the top-spin lob that might win the point. When the front tyre of your bicycle hits a slippery man-hole cover as you are going round a corner, lightning calculation and correction may, if you are lucky, keep you in the saddle – again without the help, or even the presence, of the normal conscious commentary, which may be paralysed with fear while the brain/body is fighting for its life.
We might guess that the more complex and delicate the computations, and the more long-term rather than immediate the goals to which they relate, the more useful, the more frequently appropriate the diffuse, reflective mode would be. Yet we might also ponder on the plight of an animal, awash with goals, projects, interests and desires, in an intricate environment replete with opportunities but also dangers, who has become locked in to the quick-sharp way of operating; who finds itself in a blacked-out cavern, full of tantalizing smells, unfamiliar protuberances and ominous noises, equipped only with a torch that gives a light spot the size of a pea. I shall argue later that people in modern industrialized societies are in precisely that position.
One salient difference between the diffuse/holistic and the focused/analytic modes of processing is in the picture they give of the world. The focused mode shows you objects only one, or maybe only one piece or aspect, at a time. Individual figures stand starkly out from the ground. It is like having to do a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle without having access to the picture on the lid of the box. Small details or objects seem to be self-existent; if they have a life it is a life of their own, and any overall sense of relationship, of the ecology of the situation, has to be painstakingly constructed with the help of memory, rather than, as with the candle, apprehended as a whole. Diffuse processing, on the other hand, gives an ecological view; it leaves out detail, but conveys a sense of the relationship between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’, to use Gestalt psychologists’ terms.
How the Brain Behaves
Some of the most general features of human psychology arise simply from the nature of the brain-mind system – without our having to add any other assumptions. It is obvious, for example, that such brains are built to generalize and categorize in the same way that humans do. Experience wears metaphorical ‘grooves’ in the brain, as a river gradually wears a V-shaped valley through the landscape. And just as rain falling on the sides of the valley tends to run down into the river, so experiences that share most, but not all, of the features of a very common category will tend to be treated as if they were typical members of the category.28 If it has got soft fur, likes fish, mews and rubs itself along my legs at supper time – well, that’s good enough for me: it’s a cat. It may only have three legs, be at least six inches longer than any other cat I’ve ever seen, and have fur the colour of the sky…OK, it’s a lame, gross, exotic cat – but still, basically, a cat.
Psychological research since the turn of the century has been full of demonstrations – if we needed them – that we see what we know; we look at the world through the categories and concepts of our minds. In one of the most famous demonstrations, people were flashed very brief exposures of playing cards which they were asked to try and identify. Unbeknownst to them, some of the cards were tricky ones: they crossed the colour with the suit, so every-so-often there would be a red six of clubs, or a black ten of hearts. People found it impossible to see what was there, insisting, until the cards were actually put into their hands, that they were regular cards – 'but a bit fancy' – would be about as far as they were prepared to go.29 We have noted before that it is effectively part of the design characteristics of a tuneable brain that it should lead you to see what is familiar, and consequently have trouble, especially if time or attention is short, with the unprecedented.
The basic features of memory, too, are already laid down in the octopus model. If you take a familiar concept, memory or scenario – a gang of octopuses – then the more details of this group you subsequently activate, the more likely it is that the rest of the gang will also wake up. Memory works by part of a group recruiting the rest. That is why, if you have got a word on the tip of your tongue that will not come to you, the best strategy is not to keep straining for the word, but to let yourself free associate to it. In this way you can aim to build up sufficient ‘active’ ingredients of the memory trace for the whole thing to fire off, and the word or name pop into your head. And this is also why, if I asked you to think of the names of the other children in your class when you were seven, few if any would pop up. But if I took you back to your old classroom, or even sat you down and asked you to recreate in your mind a vivid picture of the room, then lots of previously hidden details would ‘miraculously’ start to come back to you.
In this chapter I have developed, with the help of the octopus model, the view of the brain-mind, and its basic modus operandi, which is emerging from the sophisticated labours of cognitive science. It is a brain without a control centre; a brain composed of thousands of simple constituents linked together in such a way that, collectively, they can perform complicated life-saving and life-enhancing computations. And they can, by altering the way different units are primed, make decisions either as quick as lightning, or in a slower, more reflective manner. So far, so good. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, even such a brain becomes clumsy as it gets bigger, and the next twist in the evolutionary tale has to occur.
I am large; there is a multitude within.
Walt Whitman
Brain Clumsiness:
The Proliferation of Needs, Part 11
As we look back along the evolutionary trajectory that was, eventually, to lead to homo sapiens, we can see the intricacy of our animal forbears becoming ever greater; and as it did so, the complexity of the operations required of their brains grew enormously. As the range of needs, the repertoire of deeds, and the sophistication of the information they can pick up got bigger and bigger, so the problem of keeping track of all the different operations became more formidable.
The brain began, in evolutionary terms, to adopt the solution that is typical of almost any system of increasing complexity. Just as the body had differentiated itself into subsystems (one of these subsystems being the nervous system itself), so the brain sought a way of managing its increasingly unwieldy complexity by the same strategy. Indeed the noted American cognitive scientist Herb Simon argued in an important essay published in 1962, called ‘the Architecture of Complexity’,30 that it is part of the internal ‘logic’ of complexity that an evolving system has, at some point, to adopt a hierarchical structure, with the whole breaking into intermediate parts (what the writer Arthur Koestler called ‘holons’31), which themselves may also comprise further sub-assemblies.32
Effectiveness is