The Blind Giant (35 page)

We’re not used to thinking that we can change the big things. We habitually accept that governments and leaders will behave badly, that companies will offend and receive risible fines or no punishment at all, that prices will rise and what appear to be deals will come with strings. We accept this last so absolutely that we become suspicious if we can’t identify a catch. And yet these are
contingent truths, truths that are created by our collective actions rather than being inherent in the world. We have come to see ourselves as separate from our environment and the technologies of the mind we have created to reduce the number of impossible decisions we have to make in a day. We have seen and to some extent continue to see our governments and our corporations, even the nations of which we are a part, as something bigger than us: huge, alien, imponderable forces that crush us and which we cannot stop. It isn’t true, and we’re remembering that.

If the
revolutions in the Middle East, or the Velvet Revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, or even the bleak, depressing events in the UK in the summer of 2011 show us anything at all, it is that government takes place by consent, because these things are made up of individual people. We know this: we have come to an understanding that our law is text, and that text can be edited. What we now have to accept is the responsibility that goes with that. It’s not enough to say ‘I want’: that just gets you bills you can’t pay and a raft of purchases you could have done without, whether you’re an individual or a state. We have instead to make the wise choice, which is hard. And that requires a way of understanding the world, a culture of being present for the big decisions – a culture of engaging.

And that is the habit we need to acquire above all others: the habit of paying attention, of making our own decisions and interrogating the choices with which we are presented: ask
why
the
Economist
pricing system includes the redundant print-only option at the same price as the combined print-and-digital package, and you’re on your way to the kind of behaviour that will improve the way we live. Ask the question online, and compare your perceptions with those of others, and you begin to construct a wise crowd. Keep doing it, day after day, and that’s the start of a society that can work as a democracy, rather than one that merely exhibits the trappings but functions as an oligarchy. And as we know, habits are more than just behaviour: they
change the brain. These changes are a part of (and perhaps the actual physical expression and location of) expertise as we develop it. Neuroplastic changes are less than absolute; there are limits to their depth and scope – even constant use of the Internet will not turn you into a machine any more than endless free-diving will turn you into a seal, although both may make you different, and therefore separate you from people who live a more balanced life.

But within that limit, we can collectively and individually become experts in living intelligently and well, if we try. There are skills we can develop – simple ones which we already possess to some extent, not involved ones which require great commitments of time and energy and thought – that will help.
John Gabrieli, an expert in cognition, memory and emotion at MIT, recently found that the brain naturally enters a preparatory state before taking in information, and measured a 30 per cent improvement in memory when the state was observed over when it was not. The preparatory state was surprising: in MRIs taken by Gabrieli and his team, the parahippocampal place area, a region of the brain known to be highly active during learning, seemed to be very placid. Gabrieli speculated that this might be a ‘clearing of the decks’ before taking on a heavy load of information
¹
– presumably cleaning out the working memory, ditching any current cognitive load so as to be able to take on more. If so, it’s all the more important, when you really need to engage with something, that you be able to ditch any other concerns and concentrate on one subject without others interfering.

In other words, your brain takes time out to have tea and a biscuit before starting work. There may well be real value in doing nothing for a moment (ten minutes, or an hour – or more). Perhaps predictably, given the way we live, Gabrieli’s observation has led some to wonder whether it might be possible to trigger the preparatory state artificially, by using electrodes to stimulate a given area of the brain – or with drugs. No doubt
something in this area is achievable, but why bother? If the ability is present in us already, we just need to practise it.

Back to
Monty Roberts: if you don’t train a horse to move in all the available directions on command, the ones you leave out will become its escape route. Some riders don’t like to teach their horses to walk backwards. That’s what they’ll do when they’re unhappy, Roberts replies, because backwards belongs to them, not you. In the digital context, and the wider world, I think the same is true. You have to own your own directions. Addiction counsellors, I understand, will tell you much the same thing, albeit rather more pithily: ‘You have to own your own shit.’ This means doing things to retain a perspective on what is humanly important, and connecting with the simple, human, analogue self, while at the same time taking ownership of the extended self and the digital technologies we use. Digital is not an enemy; it is a powerful tool. The question is not whether the tool is wicked, but whose tool it is, and part of the way to make sure it’s ours is to know that it is just another aspect of life rather than a replacement for everything.

The way we experience life breaks down into a variety of perceptions and understandings. We make assumptions because that’s how we live. We model the world because it’s too vast to know in detail and because we learn, as we get older, to focus our attention on matters that are of immediate relevance and screen out those that are not. It always seems to me that creative people are the ones who are able to see, or indeed cannot avoid seeing, multiple interpretations of the same situation, from the prosaic (a businessman walking home with a newspaper under one arm) to the unlikely (a weary detective bringing his last case home with him) to the positively baroque (the last of the Knights Templar carrying the original pages of the Virgin Mary’s diary).

In any case, our assumptions are often fairly sound and we can work happily within them, but in some cases they betray us. A perception of the world that is accepted by everyone around us seems the most obvious and likely, until we check it and it turns out to be simply untrue (a topical example might be the sub-prime crisis. Everyone knew the bonds based on sub-prime loans were okay, because the ratings agencies said they were Triple-A. Then people like
Michael Burry looked at the fine print and saw that in fact the situation was not okay at all). In the less dramatic everyday world, we learn to accept external perceptions of time – the digital clock and the chargeable unit – which can come to dominate not only our working hours but our entire lives. The single sense of time that is set by our employers and the people around us, by a general rush and bustle that implies somehow that if one is not too busy one must be slacking, can be offset by engaging with other perceptions of time. So, for example, you could:

Yes, well, I would say that, but it works. My advice would be to get hold of a copy of
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad. It’s short, which makes it feel approachable, but the prose is stacked and demanding. It requires your attention; you won’t be able to read it at all if you aren’t concentrating.
Obscurantism – the deliberate act of making a text more difficult than it needs to be in order to force the reader to pay attention – was a policy of the German critical theorist
Theodor Adorno. Adorno was one of the banes of my life at university, and I cursed him for his ridiculous posture on clarity. Of course, I remember more about his work than most of the other people I had to study, and recently I found out why: obscurantism actually works. To my enduring irritation, it turns out that making something hard
to read – for example by using a nasty typeface – makes you pay more attention to it: ‘You can’t skim material in a hard-to-read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.’
²
(I’m curious as to how this tallies with Nicholas Carr’s concern about deep reading: does it force the state, or jolt you out of it to parse difficult sentences? And if the latter, how does the outcome – greater uptake of information and greater engagement – square with Carr’s position that the absence of deep reading entails a lesser interaction with the material?)

Reading books will also, of course, re-establish the reading skill in your brain, if you’re concerned that you’re becoming too focused on the creative, participatory style of reading we do online, or if you are simply eager for a rest and want someone else to drive the narrative train for a while. Read linearly, in the old-fashioned way, and trust the author to take you where you need to go. It may even be better to read a novel that is plot-centred rather than one that wants you to stop and consider its deeper meaning all the time. Follow the path of the story rather than trying to define it. Let the text be fixed for a few hours – but let yourself be a bit more fluid. Engage with the book, allowing it to change you, or, at least, to transport you. The experience is immersive, to the point where you can miss your stop, so I find it’s often better to read on the sofa, but it’s certainly a good way to rid yourself of a dull commute.

Reading is the definitive activity of the age that created the brain we have. It is also a path to empathy, and therefore to connection; it is central to who we have been and to many of the beliefs we hold to be a core part of us. To whatever extent we are being changed by digital technology, reading is one of the principal ways of retaining a connection to the present way of being human, and the skill of following someone else’s linear narrative, which is as important as being able to construct one’s own. We need to be able to choose which one is more
appropriate in a given setting, just as, in some contexts, a pencil is better than a laptop, or vice versa.

If you really want to push your sense of time in a new direction, though:

Sourdough is not like the fast yeast you can buy at most supermarkets, or even the more traditional live baker’s yeast: you take a couple of weeks to get a sourdough starter up and running, because you let the natural yeast in the air and the flour grow. Then, when you make the dough, it takes longer to rise than ready-bake yeast loaves. Dried yeast tends to be a single fast-growing variety, not terribly flavoursome. Sourdough is a gallery of strange yeast beasties, and you have to give them some time to do their thing. The end product is splendid, though; it’s like the difference between orange squash and freshly squeezed orange juice. Making sourdough is about as far from the efficiency of the chargeable unit as you can get: you’re working to a pre-modern schedule, not an industrial one. The dough is ready when it’s ready, and you have to get used to checking on the starter, then putting it back. If you’re like me, your mouse-finger will twitch: you’ll want to use the ‘Hurry’ button or the fast forward, skip to when you can do the next bit. Sourdough time would delight Einstein; it’s relative. It isn’t precise, professional time or digital clock time. It’s biological time.

In making sourdough, you’re also stimulating your fingers and your nose. You’re acquiring a new skill – good for keeping older brains young. You may find you are applying decision-making and problem-solving, too; both have definitely featured in my bread-making. So now you’re hanging digitally acquired skills – those aspects of your brain are apparently trained by working with digital technology, remember – on an analogue peg. Look:
your life just got integrated. (Cool.) And you’ve joined a community. You are part of a line of bakers which begins so long ago they had no concept of the clock or the calendar and comes all the way to the present. There almost has not been a period in human history in which we did not make bread. At some point, it is likely that almost every generation of your family – unless you are a king or a queen – did this same thing. You are also part of a contemporary community of bread-fiends who will help you out when things go wrong, and who will come to you for advice. The easiest way to find them, of course, is online, which binds a profoundly non-digital experience to your electronic desktop, and vice versa. Distinctions between on- and offline become blurry, because the technology and the social world both want them to.

Having carved out a sense of time as something malleable rather than something rushing past:

Dancing is a string of sensations and created instincts, practised possibilities. Once again, it’s a skill that must be learned, which improves physical coordination and gives you a sense of your physical body. It works with balance, with timing, with touch and hearing – it’s immanent and to some extent irreducible. It is a pursuit you do in the time and place where you are doing it. You really do, in every sense, have to be there. It is an activity which after a certain point can drop you into a profound and almost meditative calm. You can’t do it while texting, while emailing, or even while worrying about work. It is a single-focus activity, which excludes fretting, stressing and multi-tasking. There is only one positive outcome – good dancing – and a negative one is easy to spot. It also counts as play, in that it is a pointless activity with no obvious reward other than itself. The
act of dancing belongs to you and your dance partner alone. More than that, though, some dances – especially one of my favourites, the Argentine tango – teach following and engagement at a high level, and even decision-making. You simply can’t do them unless you are really, significantly paying attention to the dance and the person you are dancing with.