The Social Animal

CHAPTER 15 MÉTIS

ERICA SPENT HER DAYS BEING APPALLED BY TAGGERT AND his minions. At night, sometimes late at night, she’d come home and vent to Harold. Harold couldn’t really help her with concrete business advice. He’d drifted away from the corporate world over the years. But he did try to give her some help on how to think about her problems.

Harold was now deeply ensconced at the Historical Society. He’d begun writing catalogue copy for the exhibitions, but he’d been promoted and now was a curator and helped organize exhibitions. The Historical Society was a sleepy old institution, started in the nineteenth century, with countless artifacts in its storerooms. Harold would spend spare hours down in the basement, poking through old boxes and files. Sometimes he’d go into the vault, where the Society’s most precious treasures were stored.

Foremost among these was a dress an actress had worn at Ford’s Theatre the day Lincoln was shot. Just after the assassination, she had rushed up to the presidential box and had nestled Lincoln’s head in her lap as people tried to treat his wound. The dress had a loud floral print, and Lincoln’s bloodstains splattered all over it.

One day, early in his tenure, Harold had gone down to the basement alone, put on white gloves, and slowly pulled the dress from its box. He laid it gently across his lap. It is hard to describe the feelings of reverence that swept through him at that moment. The historian Johan Huizinga came closest: “A feeling of immediate contact with the past is a sensation as deep as the purest enjoyment of art; it is an almost ecstatic sensation of no longer being myself, of overflowing into the world around me, of touching the essence of things, of through history experiencing the truth.”

When he was lost in his artifacts, Harold felt he had reached through time and entered another age. The longer he worked at the Society, the more he immersed himself in the past. He’d organize an exhibition on a certain period—the Victorian age, the American Revolution, or some time long before—and he’d go on eBay and purchase little prints, newspapers and knickknacks from the period. He’d hold them in his hands and imagine the hands that had held them. He’d stare at them through a magnifying glass and try to cross the centuries.

Going into his office was like going into a lost age. Save for his laptop and his books, there was nothing at all made in Harold’s lifetime—the furniture, the pens, the prints, the busts, and the carpets. Harold wouldn’t have wanted to actually live in an age of warriors or an age of aristocrats, but he was stirred by old ideals—classical Greek honor, Medieval chivalry, the Victorian code of the gentleman.

After one exhibit, a publisher noticed Harold’s catalogue copy and asked him to write a book about Samuel F. B. Morse. After that, Harold churned out mid-list history books and biographies at the rate of about one every two years. He never became a David McCullough. For some reason he never took on the really big figures—Napoleon, Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt. But he focused on admirable, accomplished men and women, and in a quieter way gave his readers models of how to live.

At the time Erica was struggling with Taggert, Harold was working on a book about the British Enlightenment. He was doing a group portrait of David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and some of the thinkers, politicians, economists, and conversationalists who had dominated eighteenth-century British thought. One evening he told Erica about the difference between the French and British Enlightenments, because he thought it might be useful to her at work.

The French Enlightenment was led by thinkers like Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet. These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth. Taggert and his team were the dumbed-down children of the French Enlightenment.

But, Harold told her, there was a different Enlightenment going on at roughly the same time. Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. They were not irrationalists. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” David Hume wrote. “We are generally men of untaught feelings,” Edmund Burke asserted. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small.”

Whereas the leaders of the French Enlightenment spoke the language of logic, science, and universal rules, the leaders of the British Enlightenment emphasized the power of the sentiments and the affections. In effect, members of the British Enlightenment based their view of human nature on the idea that behavior is largely shaped by the unconscious, Level 1 cognition. Early in his career, Edmund Burke wrote a book on aesthetics called A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He had noticed that there is a great deal of commonality in what people find beautiful. Human beings are not blank slates to be filled in by education. They are born and raised with certain preferences, affections, and aversions. The “senses and imagination captivate the soul before understanding is ready either to join with them or to oppose them,” he wrote.

Whereas the members of the French Enlightenment imagined a state of nature in which autonomous individuals formed social contracts for their mutual benefit, members of the British Enlightenment stressed that people are born with a social sense, which plays out beneath the level of awareness. People are born with a sense of “fellow feeling,” a natural sympathy for other people’s pain and pleasure. They are guided by a desire to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. Morality, these writers argued, flows from these semiconscious sentiments, not from logical deductions derived from abstract laws.

Whereas the children of the French Enlightenment tended to see society and its institutions as machines, to be taken apart and reengineered, children of the British Enlightenment tended to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships. In their view, it’s often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the connections between the things you are studying. Context is crucial. Abstract universals are to be distrusted. Historical precedents are more useful guides than universal principles.

The members of the British Enlightenment made a distinction between change and reform. Change is an engineering process that replaces the fundamental nature of an institution. Reform is a medicinal process that preserves the essence while repairing wounds and reviving the essence. Harold tried to explain how the methods of the British Enlightenment might help Erica understand Taggert’s failings and think about alternative ways of proceeding.

The Next Question

And in truth, this debate between pure reason on one side and intuition and affection on the other is one of the oldest. Intellectual history has oscillated between rationalist and romantic periods, or as Alfred North Whitehead put it, between eras that are simpleminded and those that are muddleheaded. During simpleminded periods, rationalist thinkers reduced human behavior to austere mathematical models. During muddleheaded eras, intuitive leaders and artists guide the way. Sometimes imagination grows too luxuriant. Sometimes reason grows too austere.

The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years has provided a new burst of insight into these old questions. The new findings strongly indicate that the British Enlightenment view of human nature is more accurate than the French Enlightenment view. Thinkers from the French Enlightenment imagined that we are Rational Animals, distinguished from other animals by our power of logic. Marxists and others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imagined that we are Material Animals, shaped by the physical conditions of our lives. But the thinkers from the British Enlightenment were right to depict us as Social Animals.

But this raises new questions: Level 1 processes are important, but exactly how smart are they? How much should we trust them?

These were not issues in the old days when the passions and sentiments were thought to be brutish, unruly, and primitive—Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde. But now we know they are more subtle and sophisticated than that. What we don’t have is a consensus description of our unconscious strengths and weaknesses.

Some researchers argue that whatever its merits, the unconscious is still best seen as a primitive beast or an immature child. In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, then of the University of Chicago, say that the conscious Level 2 is like Mr. Spock—mature, reflective, and far-seeing. Unconscious Level 1, they say, is like Homer Simpson—an impulsive, immature goofball. When the alarm clock rings at five a.m., the mature Spock knows that it’s in his best interest to get out of bed, but Homer just wants to throw the thing across the room.

And there’s some truth to that goofball view of Level 1. The unconscious is subjective. It treats information like a fluid, not a solid. When information gets stored in the brain, it doesn’t just get filed away. It seems to get moved about. The recall process of a seventy-year-old activates different and more scattered parts of the brain than the recall process of a twenty-six-year-old. Memory doesn’t actually retrieve information. It reweaves it. Things that happen later can transform your memory of something that happened before. For these and many other reasons, your unconscious data-retrieval system is notoriously unreliable.

One day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Ulric Neisser asked a class of 106 students to write down exactly where they were when they heard the news. Two and a half years later, he asked them the same question. In that second interview, 25 percent of the students gave completely different accounts of where they were. Half had significant errors in their answers and less than 10 percent remembered with any real accuracy. Results such as these are part of the reason people make mistakes on the witness stand when they are asked months later to recall a crime. Between 1989 and 2007, 201 prisoners in the United States were exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence. Seventy-seven percent of those prisoners had been convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness accounts.

The unconscious is also extremely sensitive to context—current feelings influence all sorts of mental activities. Research by Taylor Schmitz of the University of Toronto suggests that when people are in a good mood, they have better peripheral vision. In another experiment a group of doctors was given a small bag of candy and another group was given nothing. Then they were all asked to look at a patient’s history and make a diagnosis. The doctors who got the candy were quicker to detect the liver problem than those who didn’t.

Happiness researchers go around asking people if their lives are happy. They’ve noticed that when they ask on sunny days, people are more likely to say their entire lives are happy, whereas if they ask on rainy days the wet weather changes their entire global perspective on the state of their existence. (Though if people are told to consciously reflect on the day’s weather, the effect goes away.)

In one ingenious experiment researchers asked young men to walk across a rickety bridge in British Columbia. Then, while their hearts were still thumping from the frightening bridge, a young woman approached them to fill out a questionnaire. She gave them her phone number, under the pretext of doing further research. Sixty-five percent of the men from the bridge called her later and asked for a date. Only 30 percent of the men she approached while they were sitting on a bench called later. The bridge guys were so energized by the rickety bridge, they attributed their excitement to the woman who met them on the other side.

Then there is the problem of immediate rewards. The unconscious is impulsive. It wants to have good feelings now. After all, Level 1 evolved to protect us from immediate pain, the kind that might result from being jumped by a lion.

As a result, we may be aware of our long-term desire to lose weight, but we want the donut now. We may know the virtues of objective perspective, but we still love hearing a commentator affirm a position we already share. Fans at a baseball game become utterly convinced that their own player beat the tag at home plate, while the fans of the other team select their perceptions differently and arrive at the pleasing conclusion that he was out. “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know,” Henry David Thoreau observed.

Then there is the problem of stereotypes. The unconscious mind finds patterns. It even finds them where none exist and makes all sorts of vague generalizations. For example most people believe shooters in a basketball game go through hot and cold streaks. They detect the pattern. But a mountain of research has found no evidence of hot and cold streakiness in the NBA. A shooter who has made two consecutive shots is as likely to miss his third attempt as his career shooting percentage would predict.

People are also quick to form stereotypes about one another. Research subjects were asked to guess the weight of a certain man. When they were told he was a truck driver, they guessed more. When told he was a dancer, they guessed less. Most people, no matter how well intentioned, no matter what their race, harbor unconscious racial prejudices. As part of Project Implicit, psychologists at the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and Harvard have administered hundreds of thousands of tests in which they flash white or black faces and ask test takers to make implicit associations. This project’s work indicated that 90 percent of the people showed unconscious bias. The prejudices against the elderly in similar studies were even more profound.

Finally, the unconscious mind is really bad at math. For example, consider this problem: Let’s say you spent $1.10 on a pen and pad of paper. If you spent a dollar more for the pad than the pen, how much did the pen cost? Level 1 wants to tell you that the pen cost 10 cents, because in its dumb, blockheaded way, it wants to break the money into the $1 part and the 10-cent part, even though the real answer is that you spent 5 cents for the pen.

Because of this tendency, people are bad at calculating risks. Level 1 develops an inordinate fear of rare but spectacular threats, but ignores threats that are around every day. People fear planes, even though everybody knows car travel is more dangerous. They fear chain saws, even though nearly ten times more people are injured each year on playground equipment.

Overall, the unconscious mind has some serious shortcomings when it comes to making good decisions. So there is a reason Taggert and his deference committee went to college and B-School, a reason why they mastered methodical ways of analyzing data. But there is another side to this coin. There are things Level 1 sees that Level 2 just doesn’t. There are reasons to think that the unconscious mind is quite smart indeed.

The Hidden Oracle

In the first place, conscious processes are nestled upon the unconscious ones. It is nonsensical to talk about rational thought without unconscious thought because Level 2 receives its input and its goals and its directional signals from Level 1. The two systems have to intertwine if a person is going to thrive. Furthermore, the unconscious is just more powerful than the conscious mind. Level 1 has vast, implicit memory systems it can draw upon, whereas Level 2 relies heavily upon the working memory system, the bits of information that are consciously in mind at any given moment. The unconscious consists of many different modules, each with its own function, whereas the conscious mind is just one module. Level 1 has much higher processing capacity. Measured at its highest potential, the conscious mind still has a processing capacity 200,000 times weaker than the unconscious.

Moreover, many of Level 1’s defects are the flip side of its virtues. The unconscious is very sensitive to context. Well, sometimes it’s really important to be sensitive to context. The unconscious treats information like a fluid, not a solid. Well, sometimes situations are ambiguous and it is useful to be flexible. The unconscious is quick to make generalizations and to project stereotypes. Well, daily life would be impossible if you didn’t rely on generalizations and stereotypes. The unconscious can be fuzzy. Well, most of life is conducted amidst uncertainty, and it’s useful to have mental processes that can handle uncertainty.

If you want to get a sense of the difficult tasks the unconscious performs day to day, start with some of the most basic. The unconscious monitors where your body parts are at any moment through a sixth sense called proprioception. The physician Jonathan Cole documented the case of Ian Waterman, who suffered nerve damage and lost parts of this unconscious sense. Through a process of painstaking work over many years, Waterman was able to use conscious thinking to monitor his body. He laboriously taught himself to walk again, to get dressed, and even to drive a car. The problem came when he was standing in the kitchen one night and there was a power outage. He could not see where his limbs were and hence could not control them. He collapsed to the floor into a tangle of body parts.

This unconscious ability to converse with the sensations of the body is not trivial. The body delivers messages that are an integral part of thinking, in all sorts of strange ways. If you read people an argument while you ask them to move their arms in a “pushing away” direction, they will be more hostile to the argument than if you read it to them while they are making a “pulling in” movement. A brain could not work if it was just sitting in a jar somewhere, cut off from motor functions.

The unconscious is also capable of performing incredibly complex tasks without any conscious assistance. It takes conscious attention to learn to drive, but once the task is mastered, the knowledge gets sent down to the unconscious, and it becomes possible to drive for miles and miles while listening to the radio and talking to a passenger and sipping coffee without consciously attending to the road. Without even thinking about it, most people treat strangers courteously, avoid needless confrontations, and feel pained by injustice.

The unconscious is responsible for peak performance. When a beginner learns a task, there is a vast sprawl of brain activity. When an expert does it unconsciously, there is just a little pulse. The expert is performing better by thinking less. When she’s at the top of her game, the automatic centers of her brain are controlling her movements. The sportscasters would say she’s “unconscious.” If she were to think more about how to swing her golf club or sing her aria, she would do worse. She would, as Jonah Lehrer observes, be “choking on thought.”

Then there is perception. As it absorbs data the unconscious simultaneously interprets, organizes, and creates a preliminary understanding. It puts every discrete piece of information in context. Blindsight is one of the most dramatic illustrations of unconscious perceptions. People who have suffered damage to the visual areas of the brain, usually as the result of strokes, cannot consciously see. But Beatrice de Gelder of Tilburg University asked a man with this damage to walk down a cluttered hallway. He deftly zigzagged down the hall, navigating around the obstacles to get to the other end. When scientists flash cards with shapes on them to other sufferers of this “blindness,” they guess the shapes on the card with impressive accuracy. The unconscious proceeds when conscious sight is gone.

These perceptual skills can be astonishingly subtle. Many chicken farms employ professional chicken sexers. They look at newly hatched chicks and tell whether the chicks are male or female even though, to the untrained eye, the chicks all look the same. Experienced sexers can look at eight hundred to one thousand chicks an hour and determine their gender with 99 percent accuracy. How do they figure it out? They couldn’t tell you. There is just something different about the males and females, and they know it when they see it.

In a test that has been conducted by many researchers, subjects are told to follow an X as it jumps from one quadrant of a computer screen to another. The movement of the X is governed by a complex formula in which the location of the next X appearance is governed by the previous sequence of appearances. Nonetheless, subjects can guess where the X will appear at a rate better than that of chance, and their guesses improve the longer they play the game. When researchers change the formula in the middle, the subject’s performance deteriorates, though they have no idea why.

Studies of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, meanwhile, suggest that some soldiers are much better than others at scanning a scene and detecting tiny clues—an out-of-place rock, an odd-looking pile of garbage—where there might be a roadside bomb in the area. Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney does not understand how he knew that a certain car contained a bomb and decided to take the evasive action that saved his life. “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling,” he told Benedict Carey of The New York Times.

In a landmark study, Antonio and Hanna Damasio and their colleagues asked their subjects to play a card game. They were given $2,000 and told to choose cards from four decks. If they picked good cards, they would win money. If they picked bad cards, they would lose. The decks were stacked. Two of the decks had slightly disproportionate numbers of very good cards and the other decks had disproportionate numbers of bad ones. By the fiftieth turn, many of the subjects declared that they “liked” certain decks better than others, though they could not tell you why. As soon as their tenth turn, some started sweating slightly as they reached for the risky deck.

The unconscious mind’s next great achievement is the ability to construct implicit beliefs. The Swiss doctor Édouard Claparède conducted a small experiment with one of his patients, who suffered from amnesia. He had to introduce himself each time he came to see her. But during one visit he concealed a pin in his hand. When they shook hands, the pin pricked her hand. The next time he came to see her, she still did not recognize him. He had to introduce himself all over again. She was happy to “meet” him but when he held out his hand for their traditional handshake, she refused to shake it. Unconsciously she had learned to associate his hand with pain.

This sort of implicit learning pervades every aspect of life. For example, there is no computer powerful enough to catch a fly ball. It would have to calculate too many trajectories to get the glove to hit the exact spot where the ball would land. But even a ten-year-old eventually learns the implicit rule that enables you to catch a ball. If a fly ball is hit to you, you look at the ball at a certain angle. You run toward where the ball is hit while keeping the angle of your gaze constant. If the angle drops, then speed up. If the angle rises, slow down. That one implicit rule will guide you to where the ball will land.

This ability to accumulate implicit heuristics applies to things even more important than baseball. The unconscious seems to encode information in two ways. There is what scientists call “verbatim encoding,” which seeks to encode exactly what happened during a certain event. There is also fuzzy-trace theory, which posits that the unconscious also tries to derive a gist, an imprecise rendering of an event that can be pulled out and applied the next time some vaguely similar event happens. If every time you went to a funeral you remembered the exact details of your behavior at all past funerals, you would get bogged down in useless details. But if you remember the gist of how to behave at a funeral—what to wear, how to walk, what tone of voice to adopt—then you will have a general idea of the socially acceptable form of behavior.

Implicit beliefs and stereotypes organize your world, and are absolutely essential to performing the normal activities of life. They tell you what sort of behavior you are likely to find when you attend a party, what sorts of people you are likely to see if you go to a Star Trek convention or a Bible study group or a rock concert. The unconscious understands the world by building generalizations.

By using these flexible tools, the unconscious is quite good at solving complex problems. The general rule is that conscious processes are better at solving problems with a few variables or choices, but unconscious processes are better at solving problems with many possibilities and variables. Conscious processes are better at solving problems when the factors are concretely defined. Unconscious processes are better when everything is ambiguous.

In one experiment Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran F. Nordgren of the University of Amsterdam and colleagues gave a group of subjects a complex string of forty-eight pieces of information about four different apartments. One of the apartments was made more convenient and attractive than the others (it was described in positive ways, while the others were described in mixed or negative ways). Then the subjects were split into three groups. One group was asked to choose the best apartment immediately. Another group was given a few minutes to think about it. A third group was told they would make a choice in a few minutes, but was then distracted during that entire period with another unrelated task.

Fifty-nine percent of the people in the distracted group chose the favored apartment, compared to 47 percent of those in the conscious thinkers group and 36 percent of those in the one for immediate choosers. While they were distracted, their Level 1 processes had been churning away. Because they had relied upon Level 1 with its superior processing capacity, they had made a holistic choice, factoring in the full array of variables. The conscious thinkers tended to pick out just a few characteristics, and couldn’t process the whole. The immediate choosers did worst, illustrating the important point that unconscious thinking is not the same as snap-judgment thinking. Level 1 does better when it has time to think, just as Level 2 does.

Timothy Wilson did an experiment, later replicated by Dijksterhuis, in which he gave students a choice of five different art posters, and then later surveyed to see if they still liked their choice. People who were told to consciously scrutinize their choices were least happy with their posters weeks later. People who looked at the poster briefly and then chose later were happiest. Dijksterhuis and his colleagues then replicated the results in the real world with a study set in IKEA. Furniture selection is one of the most cognitively demanding choices any consumer makes. The people who had made their IKEA selections after less conscious scrutiny were happier than those who made their purchase after a lot of scrutiny. At a nearby store called De Bijenkorf, where the products on sale tend to be simpler, people who relied on conscious scrutiny were happier.

The unconscious is a natural explorer. Whereas conscious thought tends to march step by step and converge on a few core facts or principles, unconscious thought tends to spread out through a process of associations, venturing into what Dijksterhuis calls the “dark and dusty nooks and crannies of the mind.” Level 1 therefore produces more creative links and unlikely parallels. Unconscious thought can take in many more factors. It naturally weighs the importance of various factors as they come into view. It restlessly scurries about—many parallel processes at a time—as the conscious mind is busy with other things, trying to match new situations with old models or trying to rearrange the pieces of a problem until they create a harmonious whole. It chases vibes and metaphors in search of connections, patterns, and similarities. It uses the whole panoply of psychological tools—emotions as well as physical sensations.

We tend to think of Level 1 as the early part of the brain, which we share with the animals, and Level 2 as the evolutionarily recent part of the brain that distinguishes us as human. But back in 1963, Ulric Neisser made the intriguing suggestion that it might be the sophistication of our unconscious processes that make us human:

It is worth noting that, anatomically, the human cerebrum appears to be the sort of diffuse system in which multiple processes would be at home. In this respect it differs from the nervous system of lower animals. Our hypothesis leads us to the radical suggestion that the critical difference between the thinking of humans and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it.

Epistemological Modesty

Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two. The research doesn’t yet provide clear answers about that, but it does point to an attitude—an attitude that acknowledges the weaknesses of the mind while prescribing strategies for action.

When Harold tried to use his research into the British Enlightenment to help Erica think about her problems, he emphasized a concept that was central to British Enlightenment thought: epistemological modesty. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Epistemological modesty is the knowledge of how little we know and can know.

Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life. This attitude is built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery.

Not knowing ourselves, we also have trouble fully understanding others. In Felix Holt, George Eliot asked readers to imagine what a game of chess would be like if all the chessmen had their own passions and thoughts, if you were not only uncertain about your opponent’s pieces but also about your own. You would have no chance if you had to rely upon mathematical stratagems in such a game, she wrote, and yet this imaginary game is far easier than the one we play in real life.

Not fully understanding others, we also cannot really get to the bottom of circumstances. No event can be understood in isolation from its place in the historical flow—the infinity of prior events, minute causes, and circumstances that touch it in visible and invisible ways.

And yet this humble attitude doesn’t necessarily produce passivity. Epistemological modesty is a disposition for action. The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.

The modest disposition begins with the recognition that there is no one method for solving problems. It’s important to rely on the quantitative and rational analysis. But that gives you part of the truth, not the whole.

For example, if you were asked what day in the spring you should plant corn, you could consult a scientist. You could calculate the weather patterns, consult the historical record, and find the optimal temperature range and date at each latitude and altitude. On the other hand, you could ask a farmer. Folk wisdom in North America decrees that corn should be planted when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear. Whatever the weather in any particular year, this rule will guide the farmer to the right date.

This is a different sort of knowledge. It comes from integrating and synthesizing diverse dynamics. It is produced over time, by an intelligence that is associational—observing closely, imagining loosely, comparing like to unlike and like to like to find harmonies and rhythms in the unfolding of events.

The modest person uses both methods, and more besides. The modest person learns not to trust one paradigm. Most of what he knows accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering.

The modest person is patient. His method is illustrated by the behavior of the little gobiid fish. This is a little fish that lives in shallow water. At low tide, its habitat is reduced to little pools and puddles. Yet the gobiid fish jump with great accuracy over rocks and dry ridges from pool to pool. How do they do it? They can’t scope out the dry patches before they jump, or see where the next pool is. If you put a little gobiid fish in an unfamiliar habitat, it won’t jump at all.

What happens is that during high tide the gobiid fish wander around absorbing the landscape and storing maps in their heads. Then when the tide is low, they have a mental map of the landscape, and they unconsciously know what ridges will be dry at low tide and what hollows will be full of water.

Human beings are good at accumulating this sort of wanderer’s knowledge as well. For ninety thousand generations our race has been exploring landscapes, sensing dangers and opportunities. When you explore a new landscape or visit a new country, your attention is open to everything, like a baby’s. One thing catches your eye. Then another.

This receptiveness can happen only when you are physically there. Not when you are reading about a place, but only when you are on the scene, immersed in it. If you don’t actually visit a place, you don’t really know it. If you just study the numbers, you don’t know it. If you don’t get used to the people, you don’t know it. As the Japanese proverb puts it: Don’t study something. Get used to it.

When you are out there on the scene, you are plunged into particulars. A thousand sensations wash over you. In ancient times a human wanderer would see a stream in a new landscape, and the sight would be coated with pleasure. He would see a dense forest or a craggy ravine, and a little marker of fear would lodge with the image in his brain.

The mind wants to make instant judgments about all the sensory details it receives, file new data away with some theory. People hate uncertainty and rush to judgment. Research by Colin Camerer has found that when people play card games in circumstances that don’t allow them to calculate the odds of success, the fear-oriented centers of their brains light up. They try to end the fear by reaching a conclusion, any conclusion, about the pattern of the game, just to end the fear.

But the wanderer endures uncertainty. The wise wanderer holds off and restrains, possessing what John Keats called negative capability, the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, but of his own weakness in the face of it. He knows that his mind will seize on the first bit of data it comes across and build a universal theory around it. This is the fallacy of anchoring. He knows that his mind will take his most recent experience and try to impose the lessons of that case onto this one. This is the fallacy of availability. He knows that he came onto this scene with certain stereotypes of how life works in his mind, and he will try to get what he sees here to conform to them. This is the fallacy of attribution.

He is on guard against his weaknesses. He pays attention to the sensations that come up from below. He makes tentative generalizations and analyses and focuses on sensations anew. He continues to wander and absorb, letting the information marinate deep inside. He is playing, picking up this and that. He sees a section of the landscape and slowly feels his way to another side. He meets people in this new landscape, and he reenacts pieces of their own behavior and thinking in his own mind. He begins to walk the way they walk, and laugh as they laugh. He sees the patterns of their daily existence, which they are no longer even aware of. His mind naturally oscillates between the outer texture of their lives—their jewelry, clothes and mementoes—and what he intuits of their inner hopes and goals.

Meanwhile, Level 1 is churning away, blending data, probing for similarities and rhythms in its own ceaseless way. It is working up a feel for this new landscape: How does the light fall? How do the people greet one another? What is the pace of life? It’s not only the individuals the unconscious is trying to discern, but the patterns between them. How closely do these people work together? What is the common unspoken conception of authority and individuality? The point is not just to describe the fish in the river, but the nature of the water in which they swim.

At some point there is a moment of calm, and disparate observations integrate into a coherent whole. The wanderer can begin to predict how people will finish their sentences. He now possesses maps in his mind. The contours of his brainscape harmonize with the contours of reality in this new place. Sometimes this synchronicity will be achieved gradually. Sometimes there are bursts of inspiration, and the map comes into focus all at once. After these moments, the mind will reinterpret every old piece of data in a radically new way. What seemed immeasurably complex will now seem beautifully simple.

Eventually—not soon, not until after many months or years of arduous observation, with dry spells and frustrating longueurs—the wanderer will achieve what the Greeks called métis. This is a state of wisdom that emerges from the conversation between Level 1 and Level 2.

Métis is very hard to put into words. A person with métis possesses a mental map of her particular reality. She possesses a collection of metaphors that arranges an activity or a situation. She has acquired a set of practical skills that enable her to anticipate change.

She understands the general properties of a situation but also the particulars. A mechanic may understand the general qualities of all cars, but is quick to get a feel for each particular car. A person with métis knows when to apply the standard operating procedure but also when to break the rules. A surgeon with métis has a feel or a knack for a certain sort of procedure, and she senses what can be about to go wrong at what stage. In Asian cooking there are recipes that ask the chef to add ingredients when the oil is about to burn. A chef with métis knows the quality the oil takes on just before something else is about to happen.

During his discussion of Tolstoy in his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” philosopher Isaiah Berlin comes close to describing a conception of métis. It is achieved, he writes, “not by a specific inquiry and discovery, but by an awareness, not necessarily explicit or conscious, of certain characteristics of human life and experience.”

We humans, he continues, live our lives in the midst of a specific flow of events, the medium in which we are. “We do not and cannot observe [this flow] as if from the outside; cannot identify, measure and seek to manipulate; cannot even be wholly aware of it, inasmuch as it enters too intimately into all our experience.” It is “too closely interwoven with all that we are and do to be lifted out of the flow (it is the flow) and observed with scientific detachment, as an object. It—the medium in which we are—determines our most permanent categories, our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, the subjective and the objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present and future….

“Nevertheless, though we cannot analyze the medium without some (impossible) vantage point outside it (for there is no ‘outside’), yet some human beings are better aware—though they cannot describe it—of the texture and direction of these ‘submerged’ portions of their own and everyone else’s lives; better aware of this than others, who either ignore the existence of the all-pervasive medium (the ‘flow of life’) and are rightly called superficial; or else try to apply to it instruments—scientific, metaphysical, etc.—adapted solely to objects above the surface, the relatively conscious, manipulable portion of our experience, and so achieve absurdities in their theories and humiliating failures in practice.”

Wisdom, Berlin concludes, “is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot either be altered or fully described and calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb—the ‘immemorial wisdom’ said to reside in peasants and other ‘simple folk’—where rules of science do not, in principle apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the ‘sense of reality,’ the ‘knowledge’ of how to live.”

Harold actually read this passage from Berlin to Erica one night, even though the passage is abstract and she was tired, and he wasn’t sure how much she really absorbed.