The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (15 page)

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Authors: Shimon Edelman

BOOK: The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life
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In no other case has co-evolution of memes and their hosts led to a more world-shattering outcome than in human language. In this one species of perpetually hungry, highly social, and highly competitive information processors, which threw in its fate with an initially small band of information packets that proved highly infectious, selection pressure set off a runaway cascade of transgenerational cultural learning. The still somewhat bewildered beneficiaries of the resulting relentless series of cognitive system upgrades—some genetic, but many more others cultural—now find themselves collectively capable of working miracles, such as killing millions of their conspecifics at the press of a button, saving millions by inventing antibiotics, wrecking their home planet, and landing fancy hardware on other planets.
6
We come to share in the cognitive kickbacks of language because learning it, in all its fantastic complexity, is for us mere child’s play. Indeed, language itself is a kind of game that all of us play—a structured activity in which we engage for fun or profit, together or alone .
7
It is, however, a peculiar game. Participation is not a matter of choice: normally developing children get sucked into the language game simply by being their regular social selves around their peers and other people, who already are in the play. Quitting the game once you’re in is not an option either: you can stop speaking to other people and you can stop your ears, but you cannot stop interpretations of what you hear if you do listen (or, in sign language, interpretations of what you see if you do look) from arising in your mind.
Taking the memes’ perspective, we see that language is also a game that plays people. The memes that comprise it are not, after all, passive packets of information. The thoughts and expressions that act as pieces in the language game have a mind of their own, in which they resemble the hedgehogs that served as balls in the Queen of Hearts’ croquet game in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and that had a predilection for moving around without waiting for Alice to strike them with her flamingo. Meme-instigated thoughts hover in the background, intervening whenever possible in actual overt behavior, constantly on the watch for opportunities to express themselves so as to be seen or heard by other potential hosts. A day on which a meme gets its human host to air it is a happy day for it and for the memories of the words and gestures it recruited along the way, all of which receive a nice representational health boost from the exercise.
The word croquet game is by orders of magnitude more complex than any of our other ritualized activities that do not rely on language. The troupe of memes that collectively turn a human into a language player grows well into tens of thousands of active memory traces of all stripes and sizes. Together they impart a ritualized—statistically regular, hence meaningfully learnable and sharable—form to the thoughts that well up and make themselves available for sharing. With a bit of experience and mental agility on the part of the team (the troupe and its host), the outcome of this process can be breathtaking, as the following dialogue amply illustrates:
ROMEO,
TO
JULIET
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
 
JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
 
ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
 
JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
 
ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
 
JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
 
ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
ROMEO
kisses
JULIET
 
JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
 
ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
ROMEO
kisses
JULIET
again
 
JULIET
You kiss by the book.
8
 
 
The Digital Revolution
 
Like a soccer match overrun by spectators who spill over onto the field, chase away the referee and the teams, and tear up the turf, a language game without order and structure would quickly devolve into verbal chaos. There being no pattern in mayhem for a novice participant or an outside observer to discern, a game that is prone to disorder is unlikely to survive as a meme: such games become extinct just as soon as they coalesce out of the background noise of their hosts’ behavior.
Whereas in a disorderly game each melee is chaotic in its own inimitable (and therefore unlearnable) way, in a well-structured game all rounds resemble each other. All instances of the game of Go are played out with pieces that differ only in their color; all soccer matches involve one ball each; all wedding ceremonies decrease the number of unmarried people by no more than two at a time. In language use too, there are certain structural traits that hold for all conversations and for the language game in general.
The most obvious such trait is the serial order in which language is generated and perceived. In spoken language, it reveals itself in the sequential structure of speech: sounds follow one another in an order that matters, often accompanied by a series of gestures and facial expressions that are likewise ordered and timed. Meddling with the order of the sounds is generally a recipe for total communication breakdown. Meaning may merely mutate, as when “kiss” pronounced backwards becomes “sick,” or as “you kiss by the book” may be turned into “you book by the kiss” by a spoonerism-prone novice Juliet, gripped by stage anxiety. Meaning is far more likely, however, to vanish altogether: an overwhelming majority of conceivable sound combinations are not just meaningless but unpronounceable.
Although the ordering of words is what first comes to mind when one thinks about its sequential nature, language is serial on more than one level. Sequences of basic sounds or “phones” form words, which in turn can be strung one after another to form phrases and sentences. As phones are produced and perceived by the members of a linguistic community who share a dialect, they are channeled into a small number (no more than a few dozen) of distinct categories—the phonemes. All human languages, as they are spoken (or signed), are in this sense digital: they are constructed from discrete building blocks in the same way that the file into which I am writing these words exists in my computer’s memory as a sequence of physical symbols for 0 and 1.
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Getting the phonemes right may be quite a tough job for a non-native speaker. Having been brought up speaking Russian, I, for one, will always be challenged by some of the phonetic distinctions that English mandates. (The need to avoid making tricky distinctions explains my otherwise puzzling tendency while speaking English to substitute whenever possible “page” for “sheet” and to refer to the German philosopher Kant, with whom I never actually drank bruderschaft, as “old Immanuel.”) At the same time, I am told that in Hebrew, which I speak as fluently as any native, I sound like an American.
In contrast to inept foreigners and their queer phonemes, both the native speakers and the language memes they bandy about benefit greatly from the categorical limits on phonemic variation. For the speakers, a digital medium affords error-free communication; for the memes, it promotes faithful replication. It was by going digital that the language memes adapted to their human hosts’ predisposition for perceptual categorization, while offering them a handsome kickback in the form of a reliable medium for communication. This co-evolutionary development set both sides in the language game on a path to their unprecedented collective success.
10
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
 
The digital revolution in cognition would have not gone far were it not for another key structural trait that is common to all languages: arranging and rearranging the same digital building blocks to construct a potentially unlimited variety of complex messages, by the way of constrained combinatorial composition. By themselves, digital memes are useful (and fecund) because they are easy to trade. Assigning a distinct symbol to each thought, however, would quickly exhaust the cognitive resources of even the brainiest species. Much worse, it would rule out any possibility of communicating a thought for which the originator and the intended recipient do not already share a symbol.
Both these problems can be averted by the same means:
reuse
of partial structures in different contexts, which includes constructing larger novel structures out of smaller existing ones. Under such a recycling scheme, a part’s contribution to the meaning of the whole (that is, to the effect that it has on the listener) depends on its context. Because different combinations of familiar parts can mean different things, novel meanings can be expressed in a form that would not leave the listener too bewildered. The tale of Queen Mab that Mercutio spins for Romeo just before they crash the Capulets’ party no doubt transcends the prior linguistic experience of that self-confessed “lusty gentleman”—
MERCUTIO
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.
[thirty-seven more lines of wild fantasy omitted]
 
 
And yet, Romeo finds Mercutio’s ravings not so much incomprehensible as perhaps just slightly boring.
ROMEO
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.
 
 
Whatever Shakespeare’s characters have to say about their author’s wordplay, his audiences delight in it. (I still remember being electrified by the Queen Mab rant, delivered by John McEnery in Franco Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet
, which I first saw in the early 1970s.) Why is it so?
In his 1765
Preface to Shakespeare
, Samuel Johnson remarked that “the dialogue of this author . . . is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation, and common occurrences.” The delight that we take in Shakespeare’s words (or in those of Homer) is a close relative of our pleasure in language in general, whose roots go to the core of what it is to be human.
11
Our happy symbiosis with language ensures that we use it often, and with relish; the skill of a master of dialogue or narrative serves merely to amplify the features that are present to some extent in any spirited conversation or good story.
As in the rest of cognition, the pleasure in language is derived from a properly maintained mix of familiarity and novelty—something old and something new. On the one hand, familiarity with at least some parts or aspects of the stimulus ensures that the perceiver’s brain circuits will not remain indifferent to it. Novelty, on the other hand, promotes an effort on the part of the brain to make sense of the stimulus. This effort, if not thwarted by too much that is strange, allows the mechanisms that carry it out to justify their upkeep and reap the reward of pleasure.
12
What seems strange to a mind and what does not depends, of course, on how many of the world’s gifts it has sampled. It would be wrong to think of worldly experience as a hoard of information that the mind may consult or ignore at will. Memories of experience—from simple sensory impressions to sophisticated speech acts—become part of the mind and thereby irrevocably transform it. We may smile while reading Jorge Luis Borges’s “Happiness,” which opens with these lines—
Whoever embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve.
Everything happens for the first time.
—yet as the spell cast by the poem passes, we recognize that a person can look at the world with new eyes, either by setting aside the burden of memory or by accepting it, only at the cost of becoming someone else.

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