Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

1

One could argue that the spelling klooge (rhymes with stooge) would even better capture the pronunciation, but I’m not about to foist a third spelling upon the world.

2

The term Bayesian comes from a particular mathematical theorem stemming from the work of the Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), although he himself did not propose it as a model for human reasoning. In rough terms, the theorem states that the probability of some event is proportional to the product of the likelihood of that event and its prior probability. For a clear (though somewhat technical) introduction, point your browser to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics.

3

Except, tellingly, those of their sisters.

4

Emphasis on “tends to.” Strictly speaking, the steps taken by evolution may be of any size, but dramatic mutations rarely survive, whereas small modifications often keep enough core systems in place to have a fighting chance. As a statistical matter, small changes thus appear to have a disproportionately large influence on evolution.

5

The word you’re trying to remember is abacus.

6

Which is not to say that no human being could do better. A number of people, far more dedicated to the cause than I ever was, have managed to learn thousands, even tens of thousands, of digits. But it takes years. I’d rather go hiking. Still, if you are into that sort of thing, refer to http://www.ludism.org/mentat/PiMemorisation for some basic tips.

7

Google for “change blindness” if you’ve never seen a demonstration; if you haven’t seen Derren Brown’s “person swap” video on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFaY3YcMgiT), you’re missing something special.

8

I’m speaking, of course, of Steven Spielberg.

9

The trick — the same goes for using search engines — is to employ as many distinctive cues as possible, thereby eliciting fewer and fewer extraneous memories. The more specific your cues are (“where I left my car last night when the street was full” rather than “where I left my car”), the greater the chance that you’ll zero in on the fact you need.

10

Similarly, if you study while stoned, you might as well take the test while stoned. Or so I have been told.

11

Several other studies have pointed to the same conclusion — we all tend to be historical revisionists, with a surprisingly dodgy memory of our own prior attitudes. My own personal favorite is an article called “From Chump to Champ” — it describes the one instance in which we all are happy to endure ostensibly negative memories about our own past: when it helps paint us, Rocky-style, as triumphing over adversity.

12

The principals involved were Tonya Harding, Jeff Gillooly (her ex-husband), and Nancy Kerrigan; Gillooly’s hired goon went after Kerrigan’s knee on January 6,1994. Bonus question: When did the Rwandan genocide begin? Answer: April of that same year, three months after the onset of Tonyagate, which was still a big enough story to obscure the news from Rwanda. In the words of the UN commander on the scene, Roméo Dallaire, “During the 100 days of the Rwanda genocide, there was more coverage of Tonya Harding by ABC, CBS, and NBC than of the genocide itself.”

13

Animals often behave as if they too have beliefs, but scientific and philosophical opinion remains divided as to whether they really do. My interest here is the sort of belief that we humans can articulate, such as “On rainy days, it is good to carry an umbrella” or “Haste makes waste.” Such nuggets of conventional wisdom aren’t necessarily true (if you accept “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” then what about “Out of sight, out of mind”?), but they differ from the more implicit “beliefs” of our sensorimotor system, which we cannot articulate. For example, our sensorimotor system behaves as if it believes that a certain amount of force is sufficient to lift our legs over a curb, but nonphysicists would be hard pressed to say how much force is actually required.) I strongly suspect that many animals have this sort of implicit beliefs, but my working assumption is that beliefs of the kind that we can articulate, judge, and reflect upon are restricted to humans and, at most, a handful of other species.

14

Due to the effects of memory priming, adventuresome is the answer most people give.

15

Nobody’s ever been able to tell me whether the original question was meant to ask how many of the countries in Africa were in the UN, or how many of the countries in the UN were in Africa. But in a way, it doesn’t matter: anchoring is strong enough to apply even when we don’t know precisely what the question is.

16

When did Attila actually get routed? A.D. 451, if you’re aware of the process of anchoring and adjustment, you can see that why it is that during a financial negotation it’s generally better to make the opening bid than to respond to it. This phenomenon also explains why, as one recent study showed, supermarkets can sell more cans of soup with signs that say LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER rather than LIMIT 4 PER CUSTOMER.

17

In March 2006, in Sierra Vista, Arizona, Bob Kasun, dead for nine days, won by a margin of nearly three to one.

18

Some (thankfully not all) of those who believe in creationism rather than evolution appear eager to take just about any evidence as further confirmation of their views. One religious news site, for example, took the recent discovery that human DNA is more variable than once thought to “debunk evolution.” The argument ran thusly (and I quote verbatim):

Given that humans are ten times [more] different than one another [than expected], it would seem that a four percentage point difference between the chimpanzee and the human genome could mean hundreds of times differences between each individual human and each individual chimpanzee. And this difference would demolish any reasonable defense of evolution… the more scientists find, the more the Bible is proven.

If there had been less genetic variation, the argument might well have run, “We are all made in God’s image; therefore it’s no surprise that our DNA is all the same,” but in the quoted passage there seems to be no discernible logic relating the premise (that there is an unexpectedly large amount of genetic variation) to its rather antiscientific conclusion.

19

Why didn’t von Rundstedt listen? He was too attached to his own strategy, an elaborate but ultimately pointless plan for defending Calais. Hitler, for his part, trusted von Rundstedt so much that he spent the morning of D-Day asleep, evidently untroubled by Rommel’s fear that Normandy might be invaded.

20

The converse wasn’t true: interrupting people’s consideration of true propositions didn’t lead to increased disbelief precisely because people initially accept that what they hear is true, whether or not they ultimately get a chance to properly evaluate it.

21

How do you get people to lust after money? Let them imagine they’ll win a significant amount of money in the lottery, then ask them to think about how they would spend it. The more money they are asked to envision, the more lust is engendered. In the particular experiment I describe, people in the “high desire for money” condition spent a few minutes thinking about how they’d spend a £25,000 prize, while people in the “low desire for money” condition spent a few minutes contemplating how they’d spend a £25 prize. A remarkable indicator of the influence of induced money lust came from a follow-up question: people were asked to estimate the size of coins. The bigger the lust, the larger their estimate.

22

As a final illustration, borrowed from maverick economist Richard Thaler, imagine buying an expensive pair of shoes. You like them in the store, wear them a couple of times, and then, sadly, discover that they don’t actually fit properly. What happens next? Based on his data, Thaler predicts the following: (1) The more you paid for the shoes, the more times you will try to wear them. (2) Eventually you stop wearing the shoes, but you do not throw them away. The more you paid for the shoes, the longer they will sit in the back of your closet before you dispose of them. (3) At some point, you throw the shoes away, regardless of what they cost, the payment having been fully “depreciated.” As Thaler notes, wearing the shoes a few more times might be rational, but holding on to them makes little sense. (My wife, however, notes that your feet could shrink. Or, she adds brightly, “You never know, you might get some sort of foot surgery.” Never give up on a nice pair of shoes!)

This is not to say that prices need to be fixed, as they are on The Price Is Right. On this long-running show, the eternally young Bob Barker would, at the end of every segment (until he finally retired in June 2007), intone that “the actual retail value” of some product was such and such: $242 for this watch, $32,733 for this car. But in real life prices don’t work that way. Some prices really are fixed, but most vary to some degree or other. Even as a child I found the whole concept puzzling. How could Barker tell us that a Hershey bar cost 30C — didn’t it matter which store he got the candy from? After all, as I well knew, the neighborhood convenience store charged more than the supermarket. (No economist would object to this particular discrepancy; if you need milk at 2 A.M. , and the convenience store is the only place open, it makes sense to pay a premium, and in this regard humans are perfectly rational.)

23

I’m neither a dog owner nor a “dog person,” but if my wife’s experience is at all typical, a fluffy golden may be among the best things money can buy. She’s had hers for a dozen years, and he still brings her pleasure every day, far more than I can say for any of the myriad electronic gadgets I’ve ever acquired.

24

The future of advertising on the Internet is no doubt going to revolve around personalized framing. For example, some people tend to focus on achieving ideals (what is known in the literature as having a “promotion focus”) while others tend toward a “prevention focus,” aimed at avoiding failure. People with promotion focus may be more responsive to appeals pitched in terms of a given product’s advantages, while people with a prevention focus may be more responsive to pitches emphasizing the cost of making do without the product.

25

Ironically, our ability to moderate temptation increases with age, even as our life expectancy goes down. Children, who are the most likely to live into the future, are the least likely to be patient enough to wait for it.

26

Fans of the history of neuroscience will recognize this as the brain region that was skewered in the brain of one Phineas Gage, injured on September 13, 1848.

27

If to err is human, to write it down is divine. This chapter is written in memory of the late Vicki Fromkin, an early pioneer in linguistics who was the first to systematically collect and study human speech errors. You can read more about her at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/fromkin/fromkin.htm.

28

Forgive me if I leave poetry out of this. Miscommunication can be a source of mirth, and ambiguity may enrich mysticism and literature. But in both cases, it’s likely that we’re making the best of an imperfection, not exploiting traits specifically shaped by their adaptive value.

29

Perhaps even more galling to Franco-purists is that their own fabrique de Nîmes became known in English as “denim” — only to return to France as simply les blue jeans in the mother tongue. There are barbarians at the gate, and those barbarians are us.

30

According to a recent article in The New Yorker, were it not for the Heimlich maneuver, all of the following people might have choked: Cher (vitamin pill), Carrie Fisher (Brussels sprout), Dick Vitale (melon), Ellen Barkin (shrimp), and Homer Simpson (doughnut). The article continued with a list of “heroes,” celebrities who saved others from certain death: “Tom Brokaw (John Chancellor, Gouda cheese), Verne Lundquist (Pat Haden, broccoli), Pierce Brosnan (Halle Berry, fruit), Justin Timberlake (a friend, nuts), Billy Bob Thornton (his potbellied pig Albert, chicken Marsala).” Especially eerie was the tale of actor Mandy Patinkin, saved from a caesar salad just three weeks after wrapping a film called — I kid you not — The Choking Man.

31

Co-articulation did not evolve exclusively for use in speech; we see the same principle at work in skilled pianists (who prepare for thumb-played notes about two notes before they play them), skilled typists, and major league baseball pitchers (who prepare the release of the ball well before it occurs).

Or Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” for “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” If you, like me, get a kick out of these examples, Google for the term Mondegreen and find oodles more.

32

Is that good or bad? That depends on your point of view. The logic of partial matches is what makes languages sloppy, and, for better or worse, keeps poets, stand-up comedians, and linguistic curmudgeons gainfully employed. (“Didja ever notice that a near-miss isn’t a miss at all?”)

33

Although I have long been a huge fan of Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics, I have serious reservations about this particular line of work. I’m not sure that elegance really works in physics (see Lee Smolin’s recent book The Trouble with Physics), and in any case, what works for physics may well not work for linguistics. Linguistics, after all, is a property of biology — the biology of the human brain — and as the late Francis Crick once put it, “In physics, they have laws; in biology, we have gadgets.” So far as we know, the laws of physics have never changed, from the moment of the big bang onward, whereas the details of biology are constantly in flux, evolving as climates, predators, and resources, change. As we have seen so many times, evolution is often more about alighting on something that happens to work than what might in principle work best or most elegantly; it would be surprising if language, among evolution’s most recent innovations, was any different.

34

In a hypothetical recursion-free language, you might, for example, be able to say “Give me the fruit” and “The fruit is on the tree,” but not the more complex expression “Give me the fruit that is hanging on the tree that is missing a branch.” The words “that is hanging on the tree that is missing a branch” represent an embedded clause itself containing an embedded clause.

35

Recursion can actually be divided into two forms, one that requires a stack and one that doesn’t. The one that doesn’t is easy. For example, we have no trouble with sentences like This is the cat that bit the rat that chased the mouse, which are complex but (for technical reasons) can be parsed without a stack.

36

Perhaps the most extreme version of remembering only the gist was Woody Allen’s five-word summary of War and Peace: “It was about some Russians.”

The problem with trees is much the same as the problem with keeping tracking of our goals. You may recall, from the chapter on memory, the example of what sometimes happens when we plan to stop at the grocery store after work (and instead “autopilot” our way home, sans groceries). In a computer, both types of problems — tracking goals and tracking trees — are typically solved by using a “stack,” in which recent elements temporarily take priority over stored ones; but when it comes to humans, our lack of postal-code memory leads to problems in both cases.

As it happens, there are actually two separate types of recursion, one that requires stacks and one that doesn’t. It is precisely the ones that do require stacks that tie us in knots.

37

According to legend, the first machine translation program was given the sentence “The flesh is weak, but the spirit is willing.” The translation (into Russian) was then translated back into English, yielding, “The meat is spoiled, but the vodka is good.”

38

Ambiguity comes in two forms, lexical and syntactic. Lexical ambiguity is about the meanings of individual words; I tell you to go have a ball, and you don’t know whether I mean a good time, an elaborate party, or an object for playing tennis. Syntactic (or grammatical) ambiguity, in contrast, is about sentences like Put the block on the box in the table, that have structures which could be interpreted in more than one way. Classic sentences like Time flies like an arrow are ambiguous in both ways; without further context, flies could be a noun or a verb, like a verb or a comparative, and so forth.

In a perfect language, in an organism with properly implemented trees, this sort of inadvertent ambiguity wouldn’t be a problem; instead we’d have the option of using what mathematicians use: parentheses, which are basically symbols that tell us how to group things. (2 × 3) + 2 = 8, while 2 × (3 + 2) = 10. We’d be able to easily articulate the difference between (Angela shot the man) with the gun and Angela shot (the man with the gun). As handy as parentheses would be, they, too, are missing in action because the species-wide lack of postal code memory.

39

People hear the words animals and ark, and fail to notice that the question is about Moses rather than Noah.

40

That said, when it comes to reasons for having sex, pleasure and reproduction are, at least for humans, just two motivations among many. The most comprehensive survey ever conducted, reported recently in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, listed a grand total of 237. Seeking pleasure and making babies were definitely on the list, but so were “it seemed like good exercise,” “I wanted to be popular,” “I was bored,” “I wanted to say thank you,” and “I wanted to feel closer to God.” One way or another, 96 percent of American adults have at least once found some reason for having sex.

41

My friend Brad, who hates to see me suffer abstemiously in the service of some abstract long-term good, likes to bring me to a restaurant called Blue Ribbon Sushi, where he invariably orders the green tea crème brûlée. Usually, despite my best intentions, we wind up ordering two.

42

The trouble is there’s no evidence that all that good uncleing (for relatives that are only one-eighth genetically related) offsets the direct cost of failing to reproduce. Other popular adaptationist accounts of homosexuality include the Sneaky Male theory (favored by Richard Dawkins) and the Spare Uncle theory, by which an uncle who stays home from the hunt can fill in for a dad who doesn’t make it home.

If homosexuality is a sort of evolutionary byproduct, rather than a direct product of natural selection, does that make it wrong to be gay? Not at all; the morality of sexuality should depend on consent, not evolutionary origin. Race is biological, religion is not, but we protect both. By the same token, I see pedophilia as immoral — not because it is not procreative but simply because one party in the equation is not mature enough to genuinely give consent; likewise, of course, for bestiality.

43

All this is with respect to humans. The bird world is a different story; there, males do most of the singing, and the connection to courtship is more direct.

44

Music that is either purely predictable or completely unpredictable is generally considered unpleasant — tedious when it’s too predictable, discordant when it’s too unpredictable. Composers like John Cage have, of course played, with that balance, but few people derive the same pleasure from Cage’s quasi-random (“aleatoric”) compositions that they do from music with a more traditional balance between the predictable and the surprising — a fact that holds true in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock. (The art of improvisation is to invent what in hindsight seems surprising yet inevitable.)

45

Gilbert has another favorite example: children. Although most people anticipate that having children will increase their net happiness, studies show that people with children are actually less happy on average than those without. Although the highs (“Daddy I wuv you”) may be spectacular, on a moment-by-moment basis, most of the time spent taking care of children is just plain work. “Objective” studies that ask people to rate how happy they are at random moments rank raising children — a task with clear adaptive advantage — somewhere between housework and television, well below sex and movies. Luckily, from the perspective of perpetuating the species, people tend to remember the intermittent high points better than the daily grind of diapers and chauffeur duty.

46

The psychological use of the term is, of course, distinct from the evolutionary use. In psychology, adaptation refers to the process of becoming accustomed to something such that it becomes familiar; in evolution, it refers to a trait that is selected over the space of evolutionary time.

47

The term cognitive dissonance has crossed over into popular culture, but its proper meaning hasn’t. People use it informally to refer to any situation that’s disturbing or unexpected. (“Dude, when he finds out we crashed his mother’s car, he’s going to be feeling some major cognitive dissonance.”) The original use of the term refers to something less obvious, but far more interesting: the tension we feel when we realize (however dimly) that two or more of our beliefs are in conflict.

48

Another study, commissioned by a soap manufacturer, suggests that in the shower “men split their time daydreaming about sex (57 percent) and thinking about work (57 percent).” As Dave Barry put it on his blog, “This tells us two things: (1) Men lie to survey-takers. (2) Survey-takers do not always have a solid understanding of mathematics.”

49

One recent NHTSA study suggests that fully 80 percent of fender-benders can be attributed to inattention. Among fatal car accidents, no firm numbers are available, but we know that about 40 percent are attributable to alcohol; among the remaining 60 percent involving sober drivers, inattention likely plays a major role.

50

In an earlier era, there was “the inability to achieve vaginal orgasm,” “childhood masturbation disorder,” and drapetomania, the inexplicable desire on the part of some slaves to run away, or what I like to think of as freedom sickness.

51

Another strand of evolutionary psychology emphasizes the extent to which current environments differ from those of our ancestors. As Kurt Vonnegut Ir. (who before he became a novelist studied anthropology) put it, “It’s obvious through the human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we do without vitamins or essential minerals.” “Human beings will be happier,” he wrote, “not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie, but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again.” I have great sympathy with this notion, but the stress of modern life is only a part of the story; as far as we can tell, mental disorders have been around for as long as humans have. Like virtually every aspect of mental life, mental illness depends on a mix of factors, some environmental, some biological.

52

Although sociopathy would be unlikely to spread through an entire population, it is not implausible that in a society in which most people were cooperative and trusting, a small number of sociopaths might survive and even thrive. Then again, at least in contemporary society, a fair number of sociopaths ultimately get caught and wind up in prison, with no further chance to reproduce and little opportunity to take care of offspring they might already have.

53

Evolution is also flagrantly unconcerned with the lives of those past child-bearing age; genes that predispose people to Huntington’s chorea or Alzheimer’s disease could bear some hidden benefit, but the disorder could persist even if it didn’t, simply because, as something that happens late in life, the bottom line of reproductive fitness isn’t affected.

54

It is sometimes said, pejoratively, that evolution is “just a theory,” but this statement is true only in the technical sense of the word theory (that is, evolution is an explanation of data), not in the lay sense of being an idea about which there is reasonable doubt.

55

Pop quiz: should we study the dictionary to make ourselves smarter? Maybe, maybe not: lots of websites promising to build vocabulary tell us that “people with bigger vocabularies are more successful,” but is it the vocabulary that makes them successful, or some third factor, like intelligence or dedication, that leads to both success and a large vocabulary?

56

Another study, conducted before the Web existed as such, pointed in the same direction. Educational psychologist David Perkins asked people with a high school or college education to evaluate social and political questions, such as “Does violence on television significantly increase the likelihood of violence in real life?” or “Would restoring the military draft significantly increase America’s ability to influence world events?”; responses were evaluated in terms of their sophistication. How many times did people consider objections to their own arguments? How many different lines of argument did people consider? How well could people justify their main arguments? Most subjects settled for simplistic answers no matter how much the experimenters tried to push them — and the amount of education people had made surprisingly little difference. As Perkins put it, “Present educational practices do little to foster the development of informal reasoning skills.”