The evolution of hypnosis

‘Here’s where we get to shamanic healing rituals and the placebo effect. And here I’m relying on a book by James McClenon, Wondrous Healing. In some ways it’s a naive book, in some ways it’s a very interesting book… and what he claims is that everywhere in folk religion, what we find is shamans who are shamanic healers. They have their potions, they have their herbs, they have their concoctions… but they also have their rituals. And the same rituals have evolved again and again in human cultures, even though there’s no reason to suppose there’s been any particular cultural transmission between them… this is reinvention. And the suggestion that McClenon makes is that, in addition to developing the herbs that actually have a direct effect, what shamanic healers have found again and again is the placebo effect. And they have found ways of delivering the placebo effect and making it effective… and it really works.

Now, stop and think. What shamans are are hypnotists. They create a placebo effect. And by creating a placebo effect that actually works, they create a culturally spread selection pressure for hypnotisability. If you are just not as susceptible… if you are just not as hypnotisable (there is by the way wide human variability in susceptibility to hypnosis) (…) If you’re not very hypnotisable… you don’t have any health insurance. There could be an extremely potent selection pressure in human prehistory, because insofar as human ailments were treatable at all, they were treatable in the main by shamans who had techniques and practices which depended on hypnotisability.’

– Daniel Dennett, book talk for ‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon’, Cambridge, 2005

What is consciousness for?

In 1956, Erwin (what a great name) Schrödinger delivered a lecture on ‘Mind and Matter’ at Trinity College Cambridge, and it’s recorded in this amazing book, along with his more famous and influential work, ‘What is Life?’. It’s the best essay on consciousness I’ve read. This is my favourite section:

The gradual fading from consciousness is of outstanding importance to the entire structure of our mental life, which is wholly based on the process of acquiring practice by repetition [...] Now from our own inner experience we know the following. On frequent repetition [a] string of events becomes more and more of a routine, it becomes more and more uninteresting, the responses become ever more reliable according as they fade from consciousness. The boy recites his poem, the girl plays her piano sonata ‘well-nigh in their sleep’. We follow the habitual path to our workshop, cross the road at the customary places, turn into side-streets, etc., whilst our thoughts are occupied with entirely different things. But whenever the situation exhibits a relevant differential – let us say the road is up at the place where we used to cross it, so that we have to make a detour – this differential and our response to it intrude into consciousness, from which, however, they soon fade below the threshold, if the differential becomes a constantly repeated feature.

Before reading that, I thought of consciousness as a mysterious general characteristic of ‘higher’ thought. I know I’m conscious,  and I assume the people around me are conscious because they’re the same as me, but I can’t tell if a chimp is conscious (or how conscious) or if a dog is aware of its own existence… In fact, I haven’t the tiniest clue what it’s like to be a dog, no matter how long I spend staring at one, and I have enough difficulty not anthropomorphising my house plants to know I shouldn’t trust my instincts.

Schrödinger didn’t offer any insight into what consciousness actually is – that’s still far out of our reach. But he did suggest what it might be for. He framed consciousness as something very specific: a tool for dealing with novel situations. Through most of history, animals have only been able to discover new and useful behaviours by the extremely slow process of genetic trial and error – moths will still be flying into light bulbs in thousands of years’ time, if both moths and light bulbs are still around. Higher animals like dogs have the huge advantage of being able to learn new behaviours by trial and error and associative learning. But a very small number of animals, including humans, can face a new problem, apply their general, abstract knowledge about how the world works, and find a solution. Humans are so good at this that we often know our solution will work before we even try it.

Suddenly this video makes a lot more sense to me, and I feel like I can start to imagine (very unscientifically) what it might be like to be a chimp:

Chemical scum

Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life – complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile.

Suddenly we humans, (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.

                      – Paul MacCready

Thick skulls

‘I saw there something astonishing, which I had heard about from the local inhabitants. The bones of the men from both armies who fell in this battle are strewn over the battlefield, with the bones of the Persians lying on one side and those of the Egyptians on the other, in distinct parts of the battlefield, just as they were originally. Now the skulls of the Persians are so brittle that if you just hit one with a pebble you would make a hole in it; however, the Egyptians’ skulls are so strong that you would find it hard to break one by striking it with a rock. The reason they gave me for this – and I found it very plausible – is that from childhood onwards the Egyptians shave their heads and the bone thickens up in the sun. (This also explains why they do not go bald; I mean, there are fewer bald men to be seen in Egypt than anywhere else in the world.) So this is why they have thick skulls, and it also explains why the Persians have thin skulls, because they wear felt tiaras from birth and so shelter their heads from the sun.’

                      – Herodotus (thanks, Laura…)

Is everyone born a scientist?

I read this article, How Babies Think, in Scientific American a few months ago and wanted to write something about it. But then I lost the magazine somewhere in my immaculate flat and only unearthed it again a few days ago.

The author, Alison Gopnik, is interested in what the mechanisms of early learning can teach us about the mind, and is famous for her ‘theory theory’ – the idea that babies learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do, ‘by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories to account for their observations’.

In the article, she describes experiments to test how much babies and young children understand about physics, statistics and psychology, finding that they often seem to know a surprising amount:

‘Babies can [...] understand the relation between a statistical sample and a population. In a 2008 study my [...] colleague Fei Xu showed eight-month-old babies a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: for instance, 80 percent white and 20 percent red. The experimenter would then take out five balls, seemingly at random. The babies were more surprised (that is, they looked longer and more intently at the scene) when the experimenter pulled four red balls and one white one out of the box—an improbable outcome—than when she pulled out four white balls and one red one.’

She also describes experiments that test children’s innate understanding of cause and effect – something they are often thought to lack.

‘[A] study by Schulz used a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group of preschoolers was shown that the duck appeared when you pressed one lever and that the puppet popped up when you pressed the other one. The second group saw that when you pressed both levers at once, both toys popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately. Then the experimenter had the children play with the toy. Children from the first group played with the toy much less than those from the second group. They already knew how it worked and were less interested in exploring it. The second group faced a mystery, and they spontaneously played with the toy, soon uncovering which lever did what.’

Many of the studies suggest that children play in a more focused way than was previously thought and will naturally search for the laws that govern how something works if left to their own devices.

‘Four-year-olds were amazingly good at ascertaining how [a] toy worked based on the pattern of evidence that we presented to them. Moreover, when other children were just left alone with the machine, they played with the gears in ways that helped them learn how it worked—as if they were experimenting.’

The ‘theory theory’ is interesting for what it tells us about learning and development, but also for what it tells us about our natural relationship with science. It suggests that the often cold and unfeeling processes of science are in fact rooted in a very natural inclination to understand our world in terms of rules and statistics, and to test and refine those rules through experiment and observation.

Gopnik does not discuss the differences between childhood learning and scientific enquiry, but these are as interesting as the similarities. Language has allowed our natural process of research and discovery to continue far beyond what is possible in one human lifetime, and one of the things we have learnt over the centuries is that our intuition is flawed. We are inclined to spot patterns in data where there are none, match cause and effect where it is not justified, or fill the gaps in our world views with false explanations when we can’t find real ones: gamblers see winning streaks in what is really the play of blind chance; people clamour for someone to blame in a tragedy; children believe they are responsible for their parents’ divorce… Most people don’t acquire knowledge by science, but by induction and reduction without fair testing, which is bad science, but often a more efficient way of storing information. (Who cares if you don’t know why these berries are good to eat and those are bad, if you have a simple rule or belief to remind you which is which?)

Babies are not so much natural scientists in the modern sense as natural philosophers in the classical sense: keen reductionists, always looking for new rules and theories, but not yet good at thorough testing or objectivity. Part of the challenge of being a good scientist is in finding a balance between using this natural creative approach to generate new theories, and taking a step back to consider whether they are useful, testable and falsifiable.

I love Alison Gopnik’s theory because it frames science as a natural product of our innate curiosity, and a natural extension of our ways of interacting with and learning about the world. I should step back though and remind myself that these studies are open to misinterpretation, and that we are still no closer to understanding how childhood learning actually works. But as inspiration for a fresh look at human nature, it’s an appealing alternative to the common perception of children as stupid sponges and scientists as dull and unfeeling. The processes of modern science can seem mechanical to the outside world, but new theories take human creativity, and the rush of new insight is the same in science as in any other part of life. We’re born to learn, and what could be more human than to keep chasing the rewards of new discovery into adulthood? Archimedes’ excitement as he leapt out of the bath was perhaps not too far off what a toddler feels when she realises – consciously or unconsciously – that the yellow lever makes the duck pop up…

Life: small but significant

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun…

This is how Douglas Adams opens The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – introducing Earth as ‘an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea’. Douglas Adams’s Universe is full of intelligent life, and civilisations far more advanced than ours. Among these, Earth has little significance, and as the story opens, it is being prepared for demolition to make way for a new bypass.

If the Universe does turn out to be teeming with intelligent life, it will be hard to escape our cosmic insignificance, particularly if we meet aliens whose intelligence outshines our own. But what if intelligence is rare? Could we even be a one-off? This book, Rare Earth, makes a good case for this possibility. If we are a one-off, does that make us any more important?

To most people, these questions are irrelevant. Faced with a godless world, a galaxy of a hundred billion stars, and the billions of other galaxies in the known Universe, it is easy to be overwhelmed by our vanishingly small physical presence in the cosmos. Stephen Hawking famously described the human race as ‘just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies’.

But not everyone shares his point of view. My favourite take on Man’s place in the cosmos comes from David Deutsch – physicist at Oxford University, and author of The Fabric of Reality. In this book, he argues that life and ‘knowledge’ (such as the information encoded in genes) are real, significant phenomena that deserve to be included in our descriptions of the Universe – they belong, in a way, to ‘physics’.

Put a pebble at the top of a slope and let it go. Ask a physicist to explain why it rolls down the slope, and he can do so in terms of basic forces. But ask him to explain why the pebble moved to the top of the slope in the first place, and he can’t do it without invoking concepts outside what he would usually regard as the ‘laws of physics’ – concepts like thought and intention that cannot be reduced to blind forces and the movements of atoms.

‘If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.’

– Douglas Adams

Complex phenomena, like living organisms and conscious minds, will never be completely explained in reductionist terms, so no description of reality is complete without them. That makes them interesting, but how does it make them significant?

David Deutsch argues that, far from being an accidental side-effect of the laws of physics, the fact that we exist says something important about the structure of reality. The laws of physics could have produced nothing more complex than a star, but instead they produced self-replicating molecules (DNA), organisms, minds… and by producing minds they came full circle and produced representations of themselves – the laws of physics produced blobs of matter that carry knowledge about the laws of physics. David Deutsch believes that these sorts of ‘self-similarities’ – worlds within worlds – are not just curiosities, but a central aspect of the character of reality.

To put it another way, as a conscious human being, you represent a piece of the Universe that is conscious of itself – a strange loop in the fabric of space. Imagine for a moment that the human mind is the only object in the Universe that is fully aware of its own existence. Then killing off the human race would not just kill off a species – it would kill off the self-awareness of the Universe itself. In this picture, physical size is surely irrelevant. The complexity of the cosmos – its conceptual size – would shrink dramatically if humans were to disappear, and that’s what makes us significant.

The astrophysicist Adam Frank described his take on the question of ‘cosmic insignificance’ last week on Cosmos and Culture. This was his response to seeing a new and striking image of a nebula surrounded by stars:

My eyes came to rest on a random spark of light in the image’s upper left hand corner.

“That one,” I thought to myself, “what is going on there right now?”  Then my eye would drift to some other bright dot “What about there?” I thought, “That’s a place too.  What’s happening there?”  Every star was a fire, lighting up some family of worlds perhaps.  Inhabited or not, it did not matter. They all had a “here” and a “now.”  So many stars, so many places.

I find his perspective strange, particularly the attention he gives to every star, whether it is inhabited or not. So many places, yes, but isn’t one uninhabited star much the same as any other? We could visit countless planets in other star systems, and perhaps we’d find new and interesting geologies, but if we never found life, we could go on and on and never find any fundamental new ideas – new ‘physics’. Everything would be explainable within the laws and models we already have. So many stars, so many balls of gas. Compared to every one of those uninhabited star systems, ours would be vastly richer, as the home of DNA, computers, Bach, Shakespeare, interest rates, digital watches…

You could argue that this is a very human-centred view – how could music or literature be at all interesting to the outside universe? But they do represent some of the highest levels of complexity that our known universe has climbed to, and that’s what’s important. A novel is a physical encryption of an imaginary world… it’s a universe within the Universe. It doesn’t matter that you need a human to read it, the information is still there. Nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphs before the Rosetta stone was discovered, but their meaning was still there – a code waiting to be cracked. The symbols still encoded another world, even with nobody around to read them. Music is even more cryptic, but notes on a score encode an emotional world, representations of events and places, mathematical relationships, knowledge about wave harmonics…

So no matter how little space you fill, you have no more reason to feel small when staring into space than when looking at the world around you. Most of what’s interesting about the cosmos is here on Earth. While it’s still possible that we’re alone in the Universe, every spark of awareness down here has more cosmic significance than any star ever will.

Not the Nine O’Clock News

When I was about 16, my school held a competition to choose a slogan for each of its departments. I don’t remember what the point of it was, but I remember the winning slogan for the history department: Why We Are Who We Are.

I was baffled by the idea that history could answer that question. Didn’t it belong to science? Biology? Evolution? Anthropology? I was reading The Selfish Gene at the time, learning about how one tiny repeating process had built the Earth out of a ball of rock… discovering what life was made of and how human behaviour had emerged from it over millions of years… How could a thousand years of history – political history – possibly compete with that?

At 16 I didn’t enjoy many of my science lessons at school, but I did love science, and I thought that if only more people knew the difference, more of them might feel the same way. Science was constantly shaping and reshaping the way I saw the world, and the thrill of making a new connection was something I never got from a history lesson, or from watching the news.

What I failed to grasp was that, although I was interested in my place in the Universe, most people were more interested in their place in the World, and that meant the world of other people. To me it was exciting to find out that time ticked at a different rate on a jet plane at high altitude, or that matter is mostly made of nothing and a spoonful of a black hole would weigh a thousand tonnes, but to most people those were just curiosities.

I’ve been wondering recently why it is that science has such a tiny presence in the papers and such a poor relationship with the public, and I wonder if this is part of the answer: it’s not human enough. I was talking to a freelance science writer a few weeks ago who said that it’s still true that the only science stories the average person will read are “anything about sex, and anything about anything that might cause cancer”. Tell somebody something about themselves (and their relationships with other people) and they might listen; anything else and you’ll be lucky if you even get people chatting at the water cooler.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has had a lot of headline space recently. The machine has been in development for years and its eventual switching on was a very exciting moment for scientists. But its progress is slow, and advanced particle physics is so divorced from everyday life… it seems surprising that the public is interested. That is until you realise that most of its moments in the spotlight have involved things going wrong, huge bills, or embarrassing typos in the press. In the Guardian last month, several scientists and science communicators wrote about a new age of ‘cool’ in science, and Brian Cox cited the LHC as an experiment that has ‘fired the public’s imagination’, but I suspect that without the human drama and the occasional murmur about the end of the world, few people would be listening.

Climate science is another example. Global warming has been in the news on and off for as long as I can remember, so it inevitably takes new angles or surprising new claims to put it back in the headlines. But the biggest story of the past year is not a science story; it is a story about scientists making mistakes – a story about people who aren’t supposed to get things wrong, getting things wrong. The scandal, started by a series of leaked emails from the Climate Research Centre at the University of East Anglia, caused so much controversy it was irritatingly dubbed ‘Climategate’ by the press. (If anything deserves the name Climategate, it’s surely the continued failure of the world’s politicians to do anything about the global warming crisis itself…)

Too often, the stuff that excites scientists takes place over several years. Experiments are designed, carried out, data analysed, conclusions reviewed… this just isn’t a timescale that the average person can relate to. If science always moves forward with caution and careful review at every stage, is it doomed to remain a minority item in the day-to-day news? In an article in Nature earlier this year, Colin Macilwain criticised science journalism for its uncritical representation of science, complaining that as things stand, ‘the public learns nothing about the actual cut and thrust of the scientific process, and as a result is beginning to adopt a weary cynicism that can only rebound on science in the long run’.

‘There is a need for dedicated newspaper sections, radio and TV programmes, more akin to existing sports coverage, that can provide detailed, critical assessment of the scientific enterprise for people who really like science. Reporters and editors could then engage with sets of findings and associated issues of real societal importance in the news pages, asking the hard questions about money, influence and human frailty that much of today’s science journalism sadly ignores.’

Could this work? Would it require a more robust culture of debate among the scientists themselves, so that some of it could spill over into the mainstream media? If more people understood the flawed, human processes of science, perhaps scientists wouldn’t be held to such unrealistic standards, and mistrusted whenever they got things wrong… it’s an appealing idea.

I’m much more interested in history and politics now than I ever was as a teenager. I appreciate that I’m a product of billions of years of evolution, of geology, physics, hard-wired psychology, but also of the world I grew up in. I would love to live in a society in which it was as embarrassing to be ignorant of science as it is to be ignorant of history and apathetic about politics, and perhaps that will happen naturally as technology continues to encroach on our lives. But I don’t believe the public and the media will change their attitude to science without a complete change in the way science is approached in schools. Most of all I’d love to live in a society where children are introduced to the ‘cut and thrust’ of science first, and the grind of the experimental method second. Too many leave school scarred by endless repetitions of dry experiments, with no understanding of what the subject actually is – a thousands-of-years-old endeavour to find out why and how and what we are and how the hell we got here. People care about people, and scientists, science journalists and educators would all do well to pay that more attention. Why We Are Who We Are would be a good motto for a whole school, not just the history department.