Brainjacking E-Book

Brian Clegg

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Brainjacking explores the psychology of storytelling - the ability that makes us human. To discover how science intersects with our desires and decisions, the book pulls together three ways that we use story to modify others' brains: informing, influencing and manipulating. Running through education and politics, advertising and marketing we discover how techniques can range from subtle nudges and subliminal influences to powerful emotional manipulation. With Brian Clegg as your guide, this is a book that will help you unpick the insidious world of brainjacking. Expertly pulling together different strands on disparate topics including AI, Big Data, social media and more, this essential investigation shows how new and old technology and science can be combined to influence human behaviour and beliefs.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-150-3

ebook: 978-183773-152-7

Text copyright © 2024 Brian Clegg

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

For Gillian, Rebecca and Chelsea

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1We’ll tell you what to think

2Once upon a time

3Propaganda or news?

4Misinformation and disinformation

5Deception

6Who will buy?

7Marketing and brands

8Social world

9Knowing me, knowing you

10Artificial intelligence

11Incremental displacement theory

12Subliminal

13Merchants’ world

14It’s the story, stupid

15Further discovery

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks as always to the team at Icon Books, notably Connor Stait, Steve Burdett, Rhiannon Morris and Elle-Jay Christodoulou. This is particularly true in this case in encouraging me to look into a distinctly different topic.

Thanks to the people I interviewed or asked questions of – you will discover them as you make your way through the book – and for those writing the books, papers, articles and podcasts you will see referenced. One recurring theme here is the replication crisis in psychology and how many studies in the field are now considered questionable: this is in no way attempting to reduce the importance of this work, or to suggest that researchers have deliberately set out to mislead.

Most of all, thanks to my late parents and those involved in my education who have encouraged me to look beyond the constraints of a single science to take a wider interest in how science influences and reflects the world around us and how we fit into it.

WE’LL TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK

1

Will you take the red pill?

In case that opening sentence means nothing to you, it references the storyline of the 1999 film The Matrix. In the movie, the hero Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, discovers that his apparent reality – everyday, late-twentieth-century life – is an illusion. Nothing that he experiences is real. For obscure (and totally impossible) reasons, Neo and most of the rest of humanity are comatose in pods, plugged into an immersive virtual-reality environment.*

The concept of experiencing life-like virtual reality was not original to the imaginations of the Wachowskis, the siblings behind the movie. For example, there was a similar concept that was remarkably also called the Matrix in the Doctor Who TV show, first appearing in the story ‘The Deadly Assassin’, broadcast in 1986, while the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson featured a realistic (though consciously occupied) virtual-reality world that gave us the term ‘metaverse’.

Introducing brainjacking

The Matrix film portrayed a visceral, fictional kind of brainjacking, which is the term I’m using to indicate mechanisms that enable our brains to be changed by others, often without conscious awareness that this is happening. This is entirely different from brainwashing, where the experience is all too obvious to and traumatic for the victim. Brainjacking is a more subtle, far more widespread, and more interesting activity. I won’t be covering brainwashing here, but see the Further Discovery section at the back of the book for a recommended title on the subject.

The vivid reality of the Matrix experience, indistinguishable from the real world except when there was a ‘glitch in the Matrix’ certainly won’t become practical any time soon. Early attempts at virtual reality have aptly demonstrated that we have a long way to go. Whether you have experienced Second Life, which has offered a crude virtual world environment since 2003, or have seen the entertainingly basic metaverse implementation that caused Facebook’s parent company to rename itself as Meta in 2021, you won’t confuse what you see with reality. However, if we put aside the aspect of fooling our senses into believing a virtual world is real, there’s another type of brainjacking that goes on in the movie.

At one point Neo, along with Trinity, one of the other main protagonists, is stuck on the roof of a building in the Matrix. Like Neo, the real Trinity is lying on a couch, literally jacked into the system,* but the virtual Neo and Trinity need to escape the building, which handily has a helicopter parked on the rooftop. Neo asks Trinity, ‘Can you fly that thing?’ and she enigmatically replies, ‘Not yet.’ Trinity then calls the real-world ‘operator’ – her minder outside of the Matrix – and says that she needs a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter. The operator taps some keys, the ability to fly the aircraft is pumped into her brain, and seconds later, they are ready to take off.

It might be tempting to think that this kind of thing – inserting information directly into the brain by electronic means – is all that could be described as brainjacking. But in reality, and in far more subtle ways, human beings have been influencing each others’ thoughts for as long as the species has existed. We’ll start to explore this by looking at the apparently simple but core human activity of storytelling.

Tell me a story

Though storytelling was first limited to direct person-to-person communication, it has been expanded by technology ever since the introduction of cave paintings, and even more so by writing, film and video. Everything we read or see influences our thought processes to some degree, potentially in a profound manner. But this is not the limit of real-world brainjacking. When we consciously attempt to get into another person’s brain and influence its workings – when we go from simple argument to something more sophisticated – it can become far more of a dark art.

From the basic brainjacking that has developed from storytelling, we will see the rise of advertising and propaganda. As information technology has improved, particularly with the rise of the internet and AI, we will see the rapid growth of mental influence and manipulation. The more we find out about the brain and psychology, the more we can see opportunities arising to influence human behaviour and beliefs. We will also take time to explore the places that psychology has attempted to expand the potential of simple storytelling, from nudges to subliminal influences and priming.

I started this introduction in the world of science fiction. This is rarely a good predictor of the future. It’s not what it’s for. But in the field of dark brainjacking, fiction can sometimes offer real and valid warnings. The movie Minority Report, for example, showed advertising specifically targeted at an individual as his retinas were scanned and identified. In the classic novel The Space Merchants, even more science-based marketing techniques were featured, ranging from subtle influencing to deliberate addiction to a product. We will visit these possibilities later in the book.

Brainjacking also takes us on a journey through advertising and marketing’s attempts to understand and influence our thoughts and desires, reaching more subtle and even subliminal influences. In discovering how science intersects with our desires and decisions, we will see both how these techniques can have a genuine impact on our lives, and also how they can be, and often have been, overhyped.

This is going to be a different kind of science book to many that deal with the mind and the brain. I read a lot of popular science and must confess that my eyes rapidly glaze over when I’m faced with a whole list of different parts of the brain being identified as having a responsibility (or not) for various aspects of our cognition. The reality is almost always ‘but it’s really more complicated than this’. To some, I’m sure, this labelling of brain bits is fascinating and fun, but I’m more inclined to the Richard Feynman viewpoint.

Feynman, one of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, found his postgraduate physics course a little limiting: to broaden his experience he attended biology lectures at the same time. A story he tells of his experience in his classic collection of anecdotes, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!, describes how in one of the biology class exercises he had to comment on a paper in which the electrical impulses in the nerves of a cat had been measured. Feynman wanted to put the interior parts of the cat mentioned into context, so went to the library and asked for a map of a cat, much to the librarian’s amusement.

When Feynman later reported on the paper to the class, he began by explaining just what went on inside the cat. His fellow students pointed out they had already memorised the names of the cat’s muscles and so on, so knew what went where. ‘Oh,’ said Feynman, ‘you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.’

In a similar way, I don’t think there’s much to be gained by giving you a map of the brain and pointing out the various parts that get activated by mental influences, unless there is a very specific reason for doing so. To paraphrase something else that Feynman said, a lesson he learned at an early age from his father was that science isn’t about knowing the labels for things, it’s about understanding what’s going on.

Informing, influencing, manipulating

Instead of taking a clinical, solely objective approach, Brainjacking will be a more personal take on the subject than I would ever use in a book on, say, quantum physics. We all have minds – and we have all had those minds influenced throughout our lives. It would seem silly and wasteful to ignore personal experience, and so I will crop up as an individual in the story of brainjacking significantly more than I would usually expect to. After all, influencing minds is what my job is all about.

In the previous sentence I used ‘influence’ in a vague fashion. We will discover that brainjacking can be used at three levels: to inform, to influence and to manipulate. Information is typically about facts that have no consequential impact on our behaviour. A hydrogen atom has one proton in its nucleus. If you didn’t already know this, you are now so informed. If it sticks in your mind, then I have changed your brain in a small way, but it’s unlikely to make any difference to what you do in future.

Influencing and manipulation, by contrast, both have the potential to change beliefs and future actions. Although we tend to think of manipulation as being worse than influence, either of these processes can be undertaken for good or evil (depending on your definition). Manipulation is a more difficult concept, because the word now has negative connotations. The initial meaning was changing something by hand (manus is Latin for hand), but it came to mean more general handling and dexterity. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that a suggestion of deviousness crept in.

If we take influence and manipulation to mean a conscious attempt to make a change, then there is no doubt that plenty of this does occur in storytelling – and some of it does delight in deceit. In the way I’ll be using the terms in this book, the difference between the two isn’t about whether or not the content is factual. It’s possible to influence with a lie and manipulate someone to do something good. But manipulation encourages a decision from the heart rather than the head. Influence is more about winning someone over using intellectual argument.

All informing, influencing and manipulating sit on a continuous spectrum – the types of brainjacking subtly shade into each other. But we can often see attributes of each in different ways of talking or writing about the same thing. Take these three statements:

The famine in Romanda is now severe. Each week at least 100 children are dying of starvation. Without aid things will get worse.

You can help the children of Romanda with a few clicks. A £10 donation will keep a family of four from hunger for a week.

Little Syra in Romanda doesn’t understand why her mummy can’t help her. She wakes up every morning hungry. You can change her life.

Each statement has a different type of influence on your brain – but the way it does so and the impact it has is different dependent on the position on that spectrum. With all that in mind, let’s take the first steps we all need to understand, benefit from and survive the sometimes insidious but always present work of the brainjackers. And it begins with the concept of story.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.*

* In The Matrix, the justification for humanity being stored in pods is that they are being used by the controlling artificial intelligence to generate power for a hellish future Earth. Unfortunately, this makes no sense, as it takes significantly more energy to keep human beings alive than they generate – people do not produce energy from nowhere. The movie’s key concept breaks a fundamental law of nature, the conservation of energy.

* The jack plugs used in the movie are so enormous that they would almost certainly destroy the spinal cord.

* If you aren’t British or were born after the 1970s, ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin’ may seem an odd phrase. It was used as the regular introduction to stories on the BBC radio programme Listen with Mother, which ran between 1950 and 1982.

ONCE UPON A TIME

2

Biologists don’t like admitting to human exceptionalism – the idea that we have a special place in nature, quite distinct from other animals. But I would argue that this attitude is because they are too close to their subject. Admittedly, in one sense they are perfectly right. We are, after all, not unique in being either a mammal or a great ape. Yet looking at our ability to produce technology, to develop sophisticated cultures and to transform the environment (for good and bad alike), it is surely perverse to suggest that Homo sapiens is not in some sense special.

What makes us unique?

There has been plenty of argument about what makes us seemingly unique among the animals. In his book Consciousness, English biologist John Parrington, based at Oxford University, suggests that there are three factors that enable us to stand out. These are our use of language, the way that our deployment of tools and technology has enabled us to radically transform our environment, and the fact that we have a uniquely complex brain structure. For me, these all come together in one clear and distinctive aspect of human behaviour – and it provides the foundations for brainjacking. We are storytellers.

In How Life Works, science writer Philip Ball notes: ‘One of our attributes that most distinguishes us from other animals is our construction of complex cultures, which rely critically on systems and technologies for passing on information and learning – and thus causal influence – between generations through means other than genes.’ Arguably, the most important system here is storytelling.

American lecturer in English Jonathan Gottschall refers to us not as Homosapiens, but Homofictus – ‘the great ape with the storytelling mind’. He points out that children don’t have to be trained in what stories are – they are inherently part of being human. He notes: ‘Children don’t need to be tutored in story. We don’t need to bribe them to make stories like we bribe them to eat broccoli. For children, make-believe is as automatic and insuppressible as dreams.’

Strictly speaking, not all use of story is brainjacking. One of the ways we stand out from other animals is as a result of our internal storytelling. Rather than live our lives primarily in the moment, we are constantly telling ourselves the small stories that are responses to questions such as ‘What if?’ and to the deployment of ‘How?’ or ‘Why?’ or ‘What?’. Questions like:

How should I get my next meal?

What do I need to do to make this happen?

What if there’s a predator behind that bush?

What happens when I die?

This internal ability to ask ourselves questions that each in turn can generate small stories of what might be and how things might be achieved gives us the ability to plan, to consider future risks and opportunities, and to act accordingly. However, the additional leverage that arises from storytelling that has propelled the human race to a new level is when the stories are passed from person to person, changing human brains in the process. It’s in this process that brainjacking began.

You may by now be thinking that I’ve gone totally over the top. Perhaps storytelling brings to mind sitting on the floor as a child while an adult reads a book. Or, dare I say it, those arty storytellers who bang on about keeping the oral tradition alive that you find at folk festivals and eisteddfods. And that is one version of storytelling – the oldest version that involves simply standing in front of people and talking at them, which developed into oratory and political discourse. But combined with technology, storytelling has become far more. It gives us art and music. It gives us education and books, film and TV, and all the wonders of the internet.

In a sense it’s obvious that story in the broad sense has an impact on our minds. I read something and remember it. I see an advertisement and buy a product. I attend a political rally and the speeches encourage me to vote a certain way. But Jonathan Gottschall points out that from the second half of the twentieth century there has been a significant amount of research to back up the common-sense premise that story moulds our minds. As he puts it: ‘Research shows that story is constantly nibbling and kneading us, shaping our minds without our knowledge or consent. The more deeply we are cast under story’s spell, the more potent its influence.’

Gottschall notes that it is not just non-fiction that we learn from; we are shaped by fiction, whether or not it reflects reality. As an example, in my spare time I write murder mysteries: police procedurals. These contain a fair amount of detail of what police officers do in their line of work. But I had to admit to a book group asking how I’d researched my books that I’ve only twice been in a police station and have rarely done any research. Almost all my understanding of police procedure is taken from fiction, with a small amount from popular science, where the work overlaps with, say, pathology – and usually I can get away with it.

Gottschall tells us that Tolstoy thought that his job, the job of an artist, was to ‘infect his audience with his own ideas and emotions’ far more than to inform: Tolstoy clearly saw it as influencing and manipulating. Gottschall goes on relate how a study has shown that ‘scary stories leave scars’ – and fiction is more likely to do so than real-world horrors. Like me, you may sympathise with this view. I remember being terrified when young by a book featuring a comic-strip monstrosity called a caltrop. I was convinced that one lived on the dark corner of my grandmother’s staircase, and I would rush past the corner with my eyes closed.

From the storytelling coal face

Let’s get some assistance in pulling apart the concept of storytelling to see how it can have such an effect. Roger Ashton-Griffiths has a doctorate in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He has also been an opera singer and an actor. If you are a Game of Thrones fan, you would recognise him as Mace Tyrell, though he has appeared in everything from Hollywood blockbusters to Doctor Who and Coronation Street.

I met Roger ten years ago when we were both on the Lancaster University team for the TV show Christmas University Challenge – we will be meeting the other team members later in the book. All four of us are professional storytellers, but each in a very different way. Before finding out more about the nature of story from Roger, though, let’s take a step back for a moment and notice the gentle brainjacking that took place over the last few paragraphs.

The mere fact that you are reading this book gives me a small amount of ability to impact the workings of your brain. Even if you never consciously revisit the topics covered here, apparently forgetting everything you read, some remnants of the ideas from the book will remain, insidiously lurking in your brain. When something relevant comes up, those fragments will be there, even if you don’t directly recall them, contributing to the way that your brain deals with the issue. That is just the standard, base level of brainjacking associated with any book, whether it be fiction or non-fiction.

But a couple of paragraphs back, I also indulged in some more targeted work on your brain. By noting that Roger has a relevant doctorate, I potentially gave his opinion a little more weight. Even though we live in an age when experts are not awarded as much importance and respect as they once were, it may have had a small influence. And, as film and TV are very much part of the storytelling family, Roger’s experience of those gives an additional degree of weight. If you happen to be a Game of Thrones fan, we’ve got some extra interest from a familiar character. And this is potentially important because personal interest and emotion are key tools in amplifying the effectiveness of brainjacking.

Even if you have never watched Game of Thrones, there is still the potential to gain a little extra traction from that association, because almost everyone has at least heard of the show. In essence, my brief introduction to who Roger is provides both simple storytelling in its own right, and also an intentional piece of brainjacking to prepare you for his responses.

Storytelling as preparation for life

I started by asking Roger what ‘story’ is. He told me: ‘My unsubstantiated opinion about what the arts in general and storytelling in particular is, is about ways of preparing for life. In the sense that you’re imagining situations that you either have not or are unlikely to encounter, and that you do so by putting yourself in imaginative space to rehearse this.’

He went on: ‘You’re aware, I’m sure, of Booker’s book about story structure:* he defines seven basic plots. It all arises because you have a bit of a problem, and you work out how to solve it, then you solve it, and you get the princess in the castle, and you live happily ever after. I can see stories as a means of rehearsing life’s situations. It’s like when you come into the house and you’ve got to remember the code for your alarm, and you think about it before you go in – you go, “Whoa, the code is that,” and when you go in, you can press it. Storytelling has that kind of function: it prepares us for life’s eventualities. And beyond that, it’s something we like doing, so we carry on doing it.’

At first sight, this may seem to be overburdening a story. Obviously, the whole panoply of brainjacking, taking in education as much as fiction, does in some sense prepare us for life, but if we take the picture literally, as American psychologist Steven Pinker does in his book How the Mind Works, that fiction in particular provides us with tools to cope with life’s eventualities, it’s worrying how much of what we absorb in fiction is about how to get it wrong. Jonathan Gottschall describes it instead as a form of low-tech simulation where ‘our minds are firing and wiring, honing the neural pathways that regulate our responses to real-life experiences’, rather than providing direct guidance.

We tend to think of a story as being primarily about words, or words and visuals if the story comes in the form of a comic strip, TV show, film or play. But I wondered if it was reasonable to consider all of art and music to be a form of storytelling. Roger responded: ‘Yes, absolutely. Are they also preparing us? In a different way. I think it’s preparing an emotional response: stretching, exercising, working out your emotional responses. In evolutionary terms, emotional responses are things that people save, enabling us to behave in appropriate ways.’

As primarily a non-fiction author, I wondered about the position of non-fiction in the storytelling universe. For me, narrative is just as important in non-fiction as it is in fiction – and a purely factual book (like this one) will attempt to make changes in someone else’s brain, though the toolkit is certainly notably different.

Do stories manipulate?

I probed Roger on how non-fiction fitted in, unintentionally using wording that opened up a divide in our thinking. I asked: ‘Non-fiction might do some emotional manipulation, but obviously a lot of that is informational?’

Roger’s response was telling: ‘Let’s take out this idea of emotional manipulation, which is what – I don’t know – sales personnel might do to you. They might make you feel guilty because you don’t shower every day, so buy my shower gel. I don’t think that’s the same thing. In storytelling you are not manipulating emotion so much as facilitating.’

This feels defensive (something we will return to at the end of the book). I don’t think there is any doubt that storytelling involves manipulation, underpinned by emotion – and I don’t see why that is a bad thing. It’s markedly true of that insidious combination of music and visual storytelling that happens when you get a good movie soundtrack. The moments when I take a sharp intake of breath and attempt to hold back the tears when watching a film almost always coincide with an emotionally manipulative piece of music. Even when there aren’t images on the screen, such music can have an effect.

A classic example of cinematic manipulation that gets me every time is the ending of the 1970 Lionel Jeffries film of the E. Nesbit children’s book The Railway Children. As a father of two daughters, the moment when Jenny Agutter’s character Bobbie sees her father on the station platform and says, ‘Daddy, my daddy!’ inevitably starts the waterworks. Genuinely, my eyes are tearing up as I type this. This was underlined some years ago, when listening to a radio programme on how film music amplifies feelings. They played the music that goes with that scene without the dialogue – and because of my existing association, the tears still came. Of course, music doesn’t require images to stimulate emotion – its purpose is always in part an emotional response – but there was something different in the way that this particular scene had become embedded in my brain, tied to the musical cue.

I don’t doubt that Roger is right that storytelling facilitates emotion, but I think it would be naïve to suggest that master storytellers do not write or direct in a way that is, consciously or not, attempting to manipulate the recipient as well. Calling it manipulation does not make it bad (though, of course, it can be – think, for example, of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary film Olympia and the way it portrayed the political setting of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany); it’s just what people do when they tell stories.

Roger went on to consider the universal nature of storytelling: ‘Everyone through all walks of society seems to engage with stories one way and another. It might be people who watch soaps on ITV right up to those who watch Danish dramas on BBC4,* but everyone in every strata of society appears to be engaged in it one way or another. I think it has this universal quality. Take, for example, sci-fi, which is not really about an imagined future, it’s about the people of the imagined future, and without that, it’s rubbish: it’s not something you can engage with. It has to be “once upon a time in the future”, and if it’s not that, it’s no good.’

Finally, I wondered if stage acting, with an audience for the actor to interact with directly, is a different type of storytelling to acting to a camera for film or TV? ‘The experience of telling a story is different, but I don’t think the impact of the story varies. It’s a dissimilar sort of process, but then writing novels rather than non-fiction involves different processes, even though aimed broadly at the same thing. Take the case of poetry: in Kipling’s poem “If”, there’s not really any story, but it engages the imagination. It’s about putting the listener into the mindset of this person who can do this, or who could do that. The emotional engagement is exactly the same, even though there isn’t the same sense of linear storytelling.’

I concluded: ‘It seems to me you’re saying that storytelling is a way of seeing into someone else’s brain?’

Roger answered: ‘It’s precisely that. And this is the reason why there are so many different stories, even though Booker says that there are only seven basic plots. We keep reiterating them because there are uncountable ways of addressing the problems, rehearsing in different ways.’

Why we tell stories

It’s worth taking an excursion into the world of Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. This is an extremely chunky book (certainly not an easily digestible story in itself), running to over 700 pages. The first section looks at those seven plots and their variants,* the second explores the nature of a happy ending, the third looks at where the model doesn’t really work, before finally dealing with the aspect that particularly interests us: why we tell stories (this part also explains why many stories don’t have a happy ending).

Booker says that the universality of plots implies that ‘stories emerge from some place in the human mind which functions autonomously, independent of any storyteller’s conscious control … the real key to understanding stories lies in seeing how they are ultimately rooted in a level of the unconscious which is collective to all humanity; and how the “secret” which “sits in the middle”, giving them their underlying shape and purpose, is always trying to put over the same fundamental point.’

This isn’t a particularly logical deduction. It’s almost like saying ‘as there are only three directions at right angles we can move in, the three dimensions emerge from the collective unconscious’. If there are only a handful of permutations of plot, it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the collective unconsciousness (assuming there is such a thing: it’s not a scientific concept); it can simply be due to a structural limit. There are only so many ways we can re-arrange things.

From this generalisation, Booker moves on to creation stories. Interestingly, he includes some scientific theories in this set of stories, as well as religious creation myths. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that Booker was a journalist with a history degree, the scientific aspect evades his understanding. We are told that in this story initially there was an agglomeration of hydrogen atoms a few millimetres across and of almost infinite mass. This exploded with such force that all the elements we now have, including those that make us up, were formed. Impressively, every single statement in those two sentences is incorrect.

Should we expect Booker to get the basics of a scientific theory right? I think, if you are to assess a theory as a story, then yes, we should. This is especially true for Booker’s subsequent framing of evolution, which totally misses the point, giving the process a teleological aspect. But evolution does not have a goal: that’s the whole point of it. This is the problem if we, as Booker does, only see story from the limited viewpoint of fiction with a ‘hero’ and a plot. He never explains how, despite putting the big bang theory on a par with creation myths, this can be the case. He does not seem to understand the difference between a creation myth – a story that explains why something happened, but that can’t usefully explore how something happened – and a scientific theory – a story that explains how something happened with no interest in or even concept of the why.

In this sense, then, Booker gets things entirely wrong. But he points out one interesting thought. In some religious traditions, as well as having a creation there is also a fall, where humanity is expelled from paradise. He draws a parallel with the difference between humans and other animals in being detached from the instinctive, unquestioning relationship with nature that is the state of all other life. This genuinely does give us a suggestion as to why we tell stories (as opposed to what stories are). It could indeed be an attempt to deal with our conscious ability to make decisions – where both we and others suffer the consequences, good or bad, of those decisions.

Narrative-emotional technology

In another book on the nature of story, Wonderworks, American professor of story science Angus Fletcher gives us a better take on what it’s all about that nonetheless echoes Booker’s point. According to Fletcher, literature was invented as ‘a narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and pain of just being us.’ Fletcher tells us that our ancestors developed a toolbox of techniques that enabled literature to ‘improve daily health and happiness’ – inventions that have since passed out of use and haven’t been taught for many centuries.

Fletcher attributes the mechanism for discovering these techniques to Aristotle, the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher, as a two-stage process of first identifying what literature is doing and then uncovering how it succeeds in doing it (perfectly logical, if easier said than done). Aristotle then goes on to uncover such a technique which is described as ‘lifting the soul’ – admittedly a fuzzy concept, but one that seems to point towards a sense of wonder arising from the experience of consuming the story. The ‘how’, Aristotle puts down to the reader or audience being presented with a sequence of events that have a predictable progression, followed by a sudden and unexpected change of direction. What we’d call a plot twist.

Fletcher extends this mechanism into what he calls ‘the stretch’: making everything more intense than the everyday, which has been associated by some neuroscientists with an enhancement in the sense of wellbeing – Aristotle’s lifting the soul. This might seem a little odd when Aristotle’s reference point was largely Greek tragedies. If you’ve ever sat through one of these, you will realise that they are not what anyone would think of as cheerful. But Aristotle’s idea, much as Roger Ashton-Griffiths came to in his assessment of the nature of story, was that we can achieve catharsis from our own past traumas by the impact on our brains of watching or reading a drama unfolding.

Fletcher tells us that there are studies backing this idea up, as well as research finding that it works even better if we move our eyes from side to side while revisiting the trauma (conveniently matching the action of watching a play or reading a book). I’m not sure about this. The eye-movement effect is backed up by a 1980s psychology study – prime time for bad psychology papers (we will discover more about these as we progress). Fletcher also references ‘recent studies on mice’ – always a worrying thought because, well, mice aren’t people.

I personally find tragedies (Greek or otherwise) depressing and avoid them as much as I can. When I have watched one, I certainly haven’t found any impact on my dealing with the biggest traumas I’ve had in my life. Nothing. Nada. For me, the goals set by John Reith, the formative director-general of the BBC, for the broadcaster’s role as a public service are far closer to what story seems to deliver, and certainly what I want from it: to educate, inform and entertain (not necessarily in that order) – with an added dollop of influence and persuasion. Perhaps this is because I’m not a great fan of literary fiction, which is more likely to have wider pretentions.

Fletcher goes on to deliver a whole smorgasbord of literary devices that can influence our brains, 25 in all. I won’t list all of them, but they include concepts like courage (in a protagonist), romance, exciting curiosity and freeing creativity, freeing your mind, warding off heartbreak, deciding wiser (sic), believing in yourself and lessening your lonely (sic). If these seem like extracts from a New Age self-help manual, I ought to say that many of these concepts are linked to studies that claim to support the abilities of this aspect of story.

The second look

To give one example of story influencing the brain that is particularly apt in the context of brainjacking, Fletcher dives into the ‘neuroscience of our gullibility’. He starts with a story of a Japanese emperor in 1913 and the circumstances of a meeting the emperor undertakes. He then asks the reader if they believed the words that he had written, and suggests that ‘the way your brain evolved, you believe every new thing that you read. You’re having a hard time accepting this biological fact about the brain, I know. That’s because I have just made you suspicious.’

Our brains are far more complex than those of our earliest ancestors. Where originally the brain largely dealt with immediate response to stimuli, we are now able to analyse and assess what we take in. This reflects the two-systems approach that Daniel Kahneman made famous in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. (More on this later.) Typically, we take the fast response first and then sift through what has happened when we have the luxury of time. As Fletcher puts it: ‘Rather than deciding what to believe, [the brain] decides what not to believe.’ He suggests that we accept everything as true in the instant, then begin to question it.

This is, arguably, an over-simplistic interpretation. We don’t really accept everything we read as true initially, but rather accept everything that fits with our worldview as true before we can analyse it in more depth. So, for example, if I read a book eloquently putting the case for a flat Earth (is there such a book?), I would not believe it for an instant. But, for example, Fletcher’s Japanese emperor story is a null event in my worldview. I have no existing opinions or knowledge and so, yes, I did initially believe it.

Fletcher points out a distinct danger for brainjacking (he describes it as brainwashing, which as we’ve already discovered is not the best description of what is happening here). Because it takes additional effort to disbelieve, he suggests, then if we are stressed, tired or distracted it makes it easier to go along with an assertion that on proper reflection would not make sense. However, according to Fletcher, literature has a mechanism to slow down the brain, overcoming instant assessment.

He describes this as ‘the second look’ – literary techniques that make us reassess what we have read so far, potentially seeing the information in a different light. It might be a subtle implementation, such as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony repeatedly telling us that Brutus is an ‘honourable man’, where the repetition pushes us into a meta-reading, asking, ‘Why is he saying that so much?’ Or a more full-frontal approach where the author deliberately takes the reader back to something they’ve already read, forcing them to revisit it.

This isn’t, of course, a technique limited to the written word. In film, Fletcher points to the Japanese film Rashomon (which is linked to the Japanese emperor story). For me, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is the ultimate example. Here, a whole string of events are portrayed in a way that misleads the viewer for much of the movie, but are then unpicked to reveal the reality of the situation. (Watching the film for the first time, oddly, the thing that suggested to me that something strange was happening before the reveal was the idea that a well-off American adult and child would use a bus to go anywhere.)

Fletcher suggests that the answer to being overwhelmed by brainjacking is to ‘try clearing your mind with an alienating book’ such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I’m not convinced this is a useful everyday tool. A far more effective approach would surely be to develop a sceptical viewpoint and to apply a more scientific assessment when presented with new information of significance. It’s easy to overdo scepticism and end up with cynicism. But something you will find happens again and again in this book is that we do need to take a second, sceptical look at what we are told, making sure that we aren’t relying too much on the fast-thinking part of the brain.

Stories and religion

When I spoke to Oxford University’s Helen Carasso about advertising and marketing (we’ll find out more about her in Chapter 3), she brought up one area where storytelling has a huge impact: religion. Although I mentioned this briefly above in the context of Booker’s thoughts, it’s important to explore this a little more in Helen’s company. I ought to be clear that this is not an attack on religion. All too often religion and science are portrayed as being in opposition – but that is an optional viewpoint. And saying that storytelling is central to religion does not equate religious teaching with fiction. As we have seen, non-fiction is just as much about story.

All religions have story at their core. The stories may be different, or they may be overlapping (as they are between Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The stories may be found in central texts, or in a verbal tradition. But religions enable us to explore deep truths indirectly through myths. ‘Myth’ is a word that has become loaded with negativity, often now used to label something untrue. But religious myths attempt to give insights into, for example, the creation of the universe through stories that some take literally, but many accept as metaphorical teaching.

We can also see that religion is responsible for a huge amount of brainjacking. Religious stories still shape the way that the majority of humanity sees the world and reacts to events. This doesn’t require a theocracy – in a primarily secular country like the UK, despite humanists’ moans, everything from our legal structures to our approach to charity has been strongly influenced by religious storytelling.

Helen said: ‘Religion gives us a moral framework, it gives us a story of how we’re here, and why we’re here, and what we’re here for. I think most people, however much faith they do or don’t have, accept there is a narrative that’s built up around whatever you believe is the core truth of what that literature of faith is, and that seems to me to be an extreme example of where, by having a story, you find a way of coming to terms with the big questions, without getting into what actually happened in the big bang, and what is evolution and so on. It seems to me it’s often something that helps you to put order into chaos.’

Famously, the Spanish founder of the Roman Catholic Jesuit order, St Ignatius Loyola, said: ‘Give me a child till he is seven and I will show you the man.’ Leaving aside the inherent sexism in that remark (to be fair to Ignatius, he was writing in the sixteenth century), the implication that getting your brainjacking in early will result in a shaping of our mental attitude to the world is not without foundation. Having said that, many children rebel in their teen years – and there is good evidence that we don’t have a truly adult outlook on life until our twenties.

Education as brainjacking

It is far less likely that the influence on children and young adults referred to in the quote would come from the Catholic Church now than was once the case. But a huge amount of brainjacking of young minds goes on in the process of education. This is a particular form of storytelling – but unfortunately the implementation of education often destroys the point of story. Our insights into the nature of story all stress the way that story helps the recipient to develop a better relationship with the world around them. This requires the recipient to be in charge of the process of what they get from the story. But in education through to tertiary level, just as much as the Jesuits did, we spend far too much time telling students what to think: how they should react to our educational stories.

Before I began writing books, I spent some time giving training in creativity to businesses. My co-presenter, Paul Birch, told a story about his days in primary school. The class teacher had played a piece of music (it was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture). The teacher then asked: ‘What does that make you think of? What picture does it bring to mind?’ Paul lived in a rural area, where fox hunting was still common. He excitedly told the teacher: ‘It makes me think of a fox hunt, with galloping horses and baying hounds and horns.’ The teacher shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that. Anyone else?’

Far too often, schools expect ‘the right answer’ from their students. This is fine if you are doing STEM subjects such as maths or physics. There is a ‘right answer’ to solving an equation* or working out the current that flows when a particular voltage is put across a resistor. But many of the questions that are important to us as humans have a multitude of right answers. All too often, education can shut down creativity. There is a lurking form of brainjacking that says ‘it’s not safe to be creative – follow the path that is set’.

Of course, there are good reasons for avoiding some aspects of childhood creativity. If a small child thinks that glowing coals in a fire look pretty and wants to play with them, although this is a form of creative impulse, it is right to say ‘No, you mustn’t’ and explain why. But there is plenty of childhood creativity that we suppress unnecessarily.

This isn’t always as crudely enacted as Paul’s teacher’s intervention. Our educational establishments from kindergarten right through to universities tend to instil a particular set of values and approaches. There is not an issue if the topic is scientific, or involves discussing moral and political topics where there is a chance to explore the alternatives, but there are two circumstances – when the approach taken is based on bad science, or when moral and political topics are presented as if there is only one right answer – where the negative side of brainjacking does come into play.

Bad science brainjacking seems to come through particularly strongly in fads that are employed in primary schools (the four to eleven age group in the UK). One example that was common when my children were in primary school was Brain Gym. This was a commercial system intended to enhance the children’s thinking abilities. Some basic aspects of the Brain Gym methodology were simple, well-established factors – like it being good to take regular breaks when learning, the benefits of exercise or the value of basic breathing exercises. However, much of the rest of the process has been shown by Dr Ben Goldacre to have no basis in science, despite using pseudo-scientific terms in its literature.*

Specifically, Brain Gym had a strange attitude to water and incorporated odd rituals. The claim was made that it’s important to drink a glass of water before activities, and to hold the water in the mouth to transport oxygen to the brain. Drinking fluids is certainly a good thing – but the Brain Gym approach to this doesn’t make any sense. To begin with, it specifies that only pure water satisfies the body’s needs for hydration, when in fact we take in water from almost all food and drinks we consume. And holding water in the mouth won’t transport oxygen to the brain. According to Goldacre: ‘They’re keen on drinking water, because “processed foods” – I’m quoting from the Brain Gym manual here – “do not contain water.” This is just not true, and it would be irrelevant even if it were.’

There were also special massage-like movements in the Brain Gym routine, which were said, for instance, to stimulate the blood flow in arteries to carry more oxygen to the brain. Again, these made no physiological sense. Most of the influence from the exposure to Brain Gym brainjacking seems to have faded, but I do wonder if it is why a whole generation seems obsessed with carrying water around with them at all times to avoid becoming dehydrated.