The Significance Delusion E-Book

Gillian Bridge

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

We have never had it better so why aren't we happy?;The Significance Delusion explains why humans are so peculiarly vulnerable to mental disorders and social problems, and how understanding the backstory can help you learn the real value of life Today we have everything that previous generations could ever have dreamed of. So why is it that so many people continue to go through life unhappy and unfulfilled, with millions more young people now facing mental health issues? Does it have something to do with the way our brains have developed? Could it be that humans are just essentially delusional ;Now a compelling and insightful new book, The Significance Delusion, draws upon scientific research, ideas, facts and real-life anecdotes to explore the human obsession with meaning. It takes readers on a journey through time, history and the mysterious labyrinth that is the brain, to explore what it really takes for us (and our children) to thrive and survive as individuals and as a society, and even learn the meaning of life.;The author, Gillian Bridge, is a psycholinguistic consultant and expert in empowering people to get the most from their brain, whatever the challenge. The common link in her previous work as a teacher, a lecturer, an addiction therapist, an executive coach and a resilience consultant has been the way brain development and the use of language affect any individual's behaviour and communication. By understanding brain function and how it makes us behave the way we do, Gillian's work enables all people, whether they clearly need help or not, to gain better control of their lives;There are three interweaving strands throughout The Significance Delusion: brain matters, child-rearing matters and self-versus-community matters. By exploring these matters in a challenging, quirky and often humorous way, the book will not only help you answer some age-old questions about yourself (Who am I? What am I? How am I?), but also understand how to better promote the future mental and physical well-being of our children, for the benefit of them individually and society as a whole.;The Significance Delusion provides practical behavioural strategies to improve quality of life, making it a fascinating and invaluable book for parents, teachers, people working in social care, policy makers and anybody else who simply wants to understand themselves, or their relationships better.

Leseprobe

Gillian Bridge

The  Significance Delusion

Unlocking Our Thinking for Our Children’s Future

Dedicated to the shades of William

Acknowledgements

My wonderful children, whose unfailing support and practical help could only be equalled by my gratitude and love.

Ro, for her patient reading and re-reading and endless encouragement and belief in me.

My case studies and other clients and patients whose rich but complex lives brought life to this work.

Peter Young and Emma Tuck, my editors, for taking this book (and me) on, for taking on more than they had to, for making it a better work, and for demonstrating more cool and grace under pressure than this author sometimes did.

To you all – thank you.

And, finally, my five grandchildren, Dylan, Charlie, Edie, Izzy and Frannie – the future that this work is all about.

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgements  Introduction  1. Is Life Enough?2. Bounded in a Nutshell3. Who Loves Ya, Baby?4. Kaleidoscope People5. The ‘I’ of the Storm – Fifty Shades of Me6. The Lost Girl and the Bamboo ManCoda: Our dotty unjoined-up world7. Sharing the Delusion8. New Values and New Shibboleths9. Significant Other10. Do As You Would Be Done ByCoda: Who is the real prisoner?11. Principles in Practice12. The Practice13. Mental Health14. Belonging to a Wider Whole15. Life ItselfConclusion  Appendix A: AddictionAppendix B: The Autistic SpectrumBibliography and Further ReadingIndexCopyright

Introduction

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Mark Twain

The Significance Delusion is a synthesis of research, ideas, facts and fascinating real-life anecdotes exploring our human obsession with meaning: ‘What does it all mean for me? What do I mean to others?’

Although my early trajectory destined me for a career studying and teaching arts subjects, life, as is its way, pushed me in rather a different direction. But it could only have done that if I were complicit in some way. Although I had nothing more than personal experience, curiosity and naive scepticism to go on, I found myself unhappy with conventional explanations of the strange human behaviour and life happenings that I came across. For many, including the ‘experts’, odd things – loving people suddenly turning violent; good parents rearing troubled kids; clever, busy, talented people becoming addicts – could be explained away by stories about repressed desires, inherent badness, ‘King Babies’ and the like. I wasn’t buying into any of that. I wanted to hear about deeper causes and probe into the fundamentals of behaviour. Finding few resources available, I did my own research into the scientific underpinnings of these problems. I had to learn how brains do what they do and how this manifests in observable behaviour.

Then I started working with clients and added genuine experience to the pot of knowledge I had acquired. And now I mostly work with people who are not average, whose brains seem to function in a different way from most others. All of which is enormously helpful for defining how more regular brains work. This, as I have discovered, is not actually normal at all, at least in species terms.

What I have found is that humans are essentially delusional. And that in order to thrive, they need to share a common delusion. This finding, the underlying explanations of how it all came to be and where it has taken us, is what this book is about. The key features are:

Research into two key mutations which allowed our brains to develop long-distance connectivity and thus symbolic thinking, but also vulnerability to mental health problems.

The search for Significance.

The science behind the ‘mutant human’.

Optimum child care.

The central place of language (and individual language use) in wellbeing.

Survival skills for human growth.

The current obsession with individualism that is compromising our ability to thrive.

There are three interweaving strands throughout the book: brain matters, child-rearing matters and self-versus-community matters. The overall ambition of the book is one I have chosen, in places, to call ‘surthrival’ – a portmanteau term that suggests not just surviving but thriving in the best possible interests of the individual and of the species.

Our brains are us, but it seems we are not quite all we might like to be. Despite having advantages previous generations could only dream about, we are still not as happy or fulfilled as we think we should be. By understanding brain function, by seeing how it ‘makes’ us behave in the way we do, by looking at the implications of the nature/nurture debate and by considering how society works on both an individual and a group level, we can get a better grip on it all and improve our own lives, plus those of generations to come.

We are the blueprint for that future, so it is vital to question, in particular, the ramifications of some aspects of contemporary ideologies on the mental health of both present and future generations. I challenge givens such as: the importance of happiness and self-esteem; the value of subjective experience and individual ‘rights’ over social cohesion. And I certainly hope my take will prove controversial.

I also hope it will prove compelling because there is a hunger for understanding. My audiences and clients frequently express the need to understand themselves, and they want to understand why so much seems to be going wrong with us humans, despite having more of just about everything we ever thought we wanted. The old explanations don’t work; the ‘truths’ coming from experts are problematic because they have not had the direct experience. The worlds of research and of professional caretaking of society have been secret, special and siloed for too long. I believe most people, given the appropriate information, would prefer to think of themselves as responsible enough to make their own judgements.

Who am I? What am I? How am I? You will find the answers here. By the end of the book, with the help of my occasionally challenging, often quirky and usually humorous observations, you should be a whole lot closer to understanding yourself – which is good. And if you have or care for children, either personally or professionally, you will also be a lot closer to knowing how to promote their future wellbeing in the best way possible – which is better still.

This book takes you on a journey through time, history and the mysterious labyrinth that is the brain, visiting a number of strange cases and everyday conflicts on the way. Some are eternal dilemmas such as, how do we feel we’re individual but remain part of society? Others are utterly modern – for example, what can we do about clever kids addicted to online living? How do we make them less sensitive and susceptible to the knock-backs of failure? By the end, having read this compendium of all the lifestyle advice that a well-adjusted human will ever need, you will know what it takes to thrive and survive as the bizarre creature with danger written into its DNA – the human being.

Chapter 1

Is Life Enough?

Do you leap blithely out of bed and celebrate the dawning of the new day? Do you turn on the news and find yourself humming ‘What a Wonderful World’? Does satisfaction, like an Andrex puppy, run riot through your workplace?

I ask, because I’d love to meet someone who felt able to say ‘yes’ to all of those questions. That would be something of a first for me, and as a cynical old thing I could do with the morale boost. I sometimes feel that if I were an alien anthropologist, just landed here to take soundings on the earth’s viability as a place to colonise, I’d be advising my leader to think twice before committing to the project:

Well, yes, it’s got all we need to support life, for survival …

Al, I can hear a ‘but’ coming. What’s your problem?

Well … but, the humans seem to be in a bit of a mess. Plenty of them and all that, but somehow not quite, how can I put it? Thriving. Even in the places where there’s enough of everything to go around, like food, shelter, clothing, education; it just seems that it’s never enough.

Al, tell me more. Give me some facts, some evidence.

Okay, take these news reports I’ve been reading:

Desire for happiness that only leads to woe

Unborn child feels a mother’s stress

Face up to it: children are in the grip of National Attention Deficit Disorder

Top head slams hothousing

British parents are too intrusive and ‘baby’ their children, says MP

Babies of obese mothers at risk of heart disease

Britain’s health has fallen further behind other Western nations, says Lancet report

Loneliness in old age ‘deadlier than obesity’

Guilt of the balancing act mothers

Buggy children are unable to walk at three

Children ‘are growing more miserable’

Too soft pupils will get toughened up

Student mental ill health is ‘under treated’

One in ten young ‘can’t cope with life’

I don’t know about you, Leader, but that last one just about scares the coprolite out of me. Ten per cent of the species likely to fail to function? Why risk it?

Al, you’ve got a point. Let’s fire up the rockets.

It’s all getting quite depressing. If we take that last report (which was produced by the Prince’s Trust in 2015) a bit more seriously, we can see that we’re on target for it to get even more depressing, because, based on the UK government’s population projections, by 2020 we will have 1.3 million non-coping unhappy youngsters in our midst.

This is not only about how we parent our young and how badly wrong we seem to be getting it. Heaven knows, parents get it in the neck quite enough already. This is about how we all live our lives; it’s about things that run through the warp and the weft of every single human life lived.

It’s a species thing. It’s about why there really is something funny about our species, something that, if we weren’t quite so successful at surviving, should surely make us non-viable.

This book is about that strange anomaly and explains how that anomaly lies behind so many of our modern problems. It leads, almost inevitably, to consider our contemporary tsunami of discontent – which includes:

STRESS

respect ADDICTION yearning religiosity

OVER-CONSUMPTION

INTERNET FIXATION fear of death obsessions

sentimentality ANXIETY

hypochondria Munchausen syndrome emptiness

despair DEPRESSION

emotional confusion authority issues AUTISM

identity issues texting obsession

POSSESSION ENVY perfectionism over achievement guilt

EATING/WEIGHT ISSUES power/megalomania

NOVELTY/THRILL SEEKING

restlessness RELATIONSHIP ISSUES commitment

issues SEX ISSUES

status envy loss of motivation shame envy

CO-DEPENDENCY control issues

genealogy ‘special and different’ therapy/counselling

fixation emotional desperation UNDEPENDABILITY

ceremony and ritual fixation BOREDOM SELF-DOUBT

procrastination COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES

demotivation

FAME SEEKING Facebook and ‘phoney’ friendships

THOUGHTLESSNESS

These are some of the most common and troubling concerns that people suffer from today, even though not one of them can be said to have any measurable or quantifiable existence in what we call reality. These concerns and troubles have their primary and most powerful and disturbing existence deep within our own heads.

What’s in it for you?

Well, first, you’ll find out a lot about what it means to be human in this book, including the implications of some of the most recent and ground-breaking research into those very heads where so many of our troubles are located. And then you will find explanations for those problems that you might be experiencing, together with a whole raft of solutions for them. At the same time, you will have to hand a masterwork on resilience that will fit you with the skills to help bring up a whole generation of more fully rounded and functional human beings. What’s not to find helpful and fascinating?

Am I, in fact, an alien anthropologist? Not quite. But I’m enough of an outsider to have a useful perspective, and enough of an insider to know what I’m dealing with. Having spent years working with some of the most extreme forms of human behaviour, I have a very useful back catalogue of materials to draw on.

I have worked with geniuses who have been well-regarded and in highly paid work, with geniuses who have ended up in prison and with yet others who have lived in a permanent state of confusion. I have worked with brain-damaged people who have had little apparent physical or cognitive function left and come to me barely able to communicate at all, and those who have only grunted or barked. I have worked with crack addicts who have carried on slicing open already stapled together arms and with prisoners whose scarred heads showed horrific evidence of having been cracked open by ‘colleague’s’ spades. I have treated people so desperate for booze that they’ve sucked the final drops of spilt alcohol from the carpet and gym bunnies so desperate for fitness they’ve pounded the treadmill till they dropped.

I have watched as sink-estate mums blossomed into Shakespeare-mad lecturers and seen apparently charming young men suddenly turn and throw knives at innocent kids. I have worked with stratospherically successful CEOs and with people who haven’t had a clue how to get themselves out of bed in the mornings.

And here’s the thing: without exception, I have observed that those who were the most damaged (and they were by no means always the least successful) had something very specific in common. They shared a particular trait.

The magic Cinderella key

This trait, the one that helps to pinpoint and identify dysfunctional thinking and/or behaviour, also pointed me in the direction of a factor underpinning all three: the trait, the thinking and the behaviour. This, I realised, had potentially revolutionary implications. So I decided to call this underlying factor my magic Cinderella key because its impact on humans is both mysterious and transformative, and it seems to have been more or less completely overlooked by everyone. Also it unlocks the cells (a rather useful pun here) in our imprisoning brains.

I shall keep you hanging on a bit longer, though, before I tell you what it is. If I said what it was straightaway you might simply see it as a rather familiar figure dressed in rags, and your response to it might go something like this, ‘What, that old thing! Why do you want to make such a fuss about that?’ So let me introduce you to Cinders when I’ve dressed her up a bit more formally in the material of science.

What I can tell you now is that this magic Cinderella factor is bigger than poverty, social breakdown, loss of religion, the internet, commercialism and all of the other suspected causes of unhappiness and failure to thrive. And in its way, it’s much more dangerous.

Danger in our DNA?

It is dangerous because it is deeply implicated in the way that we developed as humans. Although it may have been no more than an accidental occurrence, a mutation even, it came to define the way we thought about experience and reacted to it, and so, in a very real sense, it made our species the special one that it is. But, but, but … the downside of this evolutionary quirk (or hiccup, or whatever) is that it also made us much more vulnerable than other animals to the possibility that quite large numbers of us could fail to develop into fully functioning, thriving members of the species.

To understand why this is, in the next chapter I shall be looking at the way our brains evolved. But that is only one of the reasons; the others are:

Sometimes the stuff that’s inside our head is our own worst enemy. Know your enemy is a very good principle.

Understanding how brains work (at a reasonably user-friendly level) will help to improve anyone’s parenting skills.

Our brains are us and this is both our history and our inheritance.

Chapter 2

Bounded in a Nutshell

Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Hamlet, II. ii

The girl in the canvas sack

There were screams coming down the corridor, followed by anguished cries, ‘I’m living inside my head. I can’t get out. I can’t get out. Help me. Help me.’

The dark-haired young girl who was doing all the screaming and shouting was dragged around a corner and into view, straitjacketed in a makeshift green canvas stretcher which two grim-faced men were failing to hold quite taut enough to keep her above ground level as they hurried her past me on their way to the treatment area.

In the days before gap years, many young people spent the time between A levels and university earning a bit of extra cash doing any available kind of menial work. If you lived in the ‘lunatic fringe’ around Surrey, you ended up working in one of the many vast Gothic mental asylums. The one I worked in was called Belmont, and has long since disappeared in the dubious pursuit of care in the community. My job in that Hammer Horror of a place was cleaning the ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) wards, where the intractable cases were sent, and on those wards I learned more about human heads than a shelf full of books could have taught me.

I stated that the magic Cinderella key was deeply implicated in the way we have developed as a species and suggested that to understand it, and see how it affects what we call our psychological wellbeing, there would first have to be some dressing up of a simple-looking idea in some fancy scientific clothing. This is where I ask you to follow some quite complex connections between developments which are in themselves all about complex connections. It will be worth it (I promise), and you will advance your thinking skills at the same time, because, as we shall see, advanced thinking skills are what you get when you can make complex connections. It’s a win-win exercise.

The fancy scientific clothing

One of the most curious things about our heads is this business of being aware that we exist inside them. If I were to ask you to say where you think the centre of your self is, nine times out of ten you would point to an area just behind or slightly above the bridge of your nose. It is this sense of being located in a physical place, and that this place is inside our heads rather than, say, in our feet (not as daft as it sounds – they move us around) that is both the making of us and the undoing of us. It’s that anomaly that I mentioned earlier: the aspect of human development that makes us so special is also the one that places us at risk. This is what that poor girl found out when she was being dragged, imprisoned inside her head, to the ECT machine that may, hopefully, have helped free her for a while.

Of course, not everybody has experiences as extreme as hers, but the more common issues such as stress, respect, addiction and all the rest of my list are every bit as much the negative consequences of having an internalised self.

So ‘we’ are there, located inside our head casings, for good or bad (for good and bad). And it is in those head casings that we have both our sense of self and most of our conscious experiences. I don’t intend to spend much time on the idea of what consciousness is (there are entire research organisations dedicated to that) but, briefly, and to use a modern analogy, consciousness is a bit like a series of text alerts that keeps us up to speed on what’s happening (internally and externally), focusing attention on any need to prioritise and prompting initiation of any action required by that data.

A sense of self is altogether different. Put very simply, it is the perception that all of the above is happening to an embodied being that is unique and distinct from the external world which surrounds it. This is something that, perhaps surprisingly, we share with flatfish. In fact, it could be argued that flatfish are rather more self-aware than dogs (making a nonsense of the hierarchies of sophistication usually applied to different species). Because flatfish can camouflage themselves very effectively, this implies some primitive sense that they ‘know’ there is a self which, under threat, needs to become less obvious to the outside world. Dogs often try to get the same result by pushing their snouts into a corner while leaving their backsides in full view of the world, which rather suggests that they may be several steps behind the flatfish on the road to self-awareness. After about the age of 2, human beings will at least make an attempt to get the whole of the body into their chosen hiding place.

The flatfish may demonstrate some primitive form of self-awareness, but I’m not about to suggest that they have any overwhelming sense of their own subjectivity or that they painfully internalise all their experiences as that poor girl did. To understand where that comes from, and how a sense that we exist is important in the grand scheme of things, we must go back at least two and a half million years to the time when we Homo sapiens split from our predecessors and began to develop what we call consciousness and, more specifically, self-consciousness. This is the source of our greatness and of our great difficulties. To keep faith with my Cinderella metaphor, I shall call what follows the original blank for the magic Cinderella key.

Believing in what’s not really there – it’s all about connections

When you think about it brains, in general, amaze us with their ability to direct distant bits of body about – like air-traffic controllers directing planes around the planet. But human brains are something else. They are three times the size of chimpanzees’ brains (our next of kin), and with their 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion neural connections are able to add an extra dollop of meaning to anything they come across. It is this extra dollop of meaning which is all important.

About two and a half million years ago our brains began to grow much bigger than those of our more ape-like predecessors. It was also at about this time that we began to do something that only a very few other species can do (and then only in the most rudimentary sense) and that is to make use of tools. We did not, at first, actually make or shape them as such – that capacity developed a bit later – but humans learned to see in naturally occurring things, such as sticks and rocks, the potential to be something other than just sticks and rocks. This development was extremely important; it implied several things about the way our human brains were evolving:

We were starting to connect seemingly unconnected data that the environment or experience was offering up.

Doing this involved stir-frying the data inside our brains because these connections didn’t exist outside in what might be called the real world.

What we then experienced had to feel as real to us as what we experienced in the outside world – otherwise we would not have been prepared to put it to the test. The internal notion that a flake of rock might be useful to prepare a nice steak with (that’s to say, it could be a knife) had to have convincingly sturdy legs.

However, something strange and different must have happened to our brains in the first place to allow them to make those connections between pieces of flaked rock, dead animals and a desire to eat them more conveniently and tastily. Scientific research is now beginning to show us how that something strange and different might have looked.

Jumping genes and a genetic ‘mini-me’

Relatively recent discoveries from research into brain development are jumping genes and what I’m rather frivolously calling a genetic ‘mini-me’. Although both need further investigation, they are already offering up some convincing explanations as to how our brains evolved from being concrete and immediate to becoming imaginative, flexible and rarely satisfied with what was immediately in front of them. Or, to put it another way, evolved from being happy cave-dwellers to become Grand Designs devotees. It may not come as a surprise that jumping genes and mini-me’s are both about connections.

Explaining the huge leap forward that humans made purely in terms of these two genetic factors is speculative, to say the least. There will almost certainly have been other things involved in the extraordinary development of our cognitive abilities, such as fire, diet, absolute brain size (Neanderthals had big brains, too, but do not appear to have developed symbolic and imaginative thinking), upright posture and social group size. Even so, these two relatively recent discoveries do seem to be some of the prime candidates for ‘most significant causes of our brains having become super-connected and ready to roll’.

The back-story

Ever since God was largely written out of the equation by Charles Darwin in 1859, people have been coming up with explanations of how we evolved. Recently there has been a focus on explaining the sophistication of human thinking and behaviour in terms of two major scientific advances: the recognition that particular regions of the brain have specific and specialised functions, the most advanced of which are unique to our species; and the understanding that we all have an individual genetic blueprint, the human genome.

The focus on brain regions and specific functions for example, taught us that we have limbic systems which are flight-or-fight hairy primitives given to strutting their stuff on a Saturday night, and that it is our frontal lobes ( all-important executive regions which orchestrate behaviour) which we can thank for damping down those wilder limbic tendencies. Such straightforward explanations are useful (though overused in leadership coaching) but, as with most things in life, the story turns out to be not quite that simple. When we get to the more exacting specialisms, things are altogether more complex. In fact, many scientists now tell us that brain regions, per se, do not have specific functions; their job is just to process energy into electrical patterns which travel along our nerves.

The fact that certain pathways and brain regions seem to have become specialised in dealing with certain of those inputs over time is the equivalent of riverbeds and lakes having become specialised in carrying around particular inputs of water. Just as they can be bypassed and replaced by new channels, so new neural pathways and brain areas can take over the functions of those lost to damage or disease. This is known as ‘brain plasticity’. Although the concept remains controversial for some (see Chapter 6), it does serve to explain why recovery from brain damage is so idiosyncratic. It’s long been known that babies can have complete halves of their brains removed and still develop perfectly normal functions with what is left, so brain plasticity is an extension (although less comprehensive) of that facility into later life. Brain plasticity suggests that location of function is not, after all, totally critical to the way we process experience.

As well as looking to brain regions to explain the way we function, the other great white hope of science in recent times has been the human genome, the complete set of hereditary information contained in our DNA. Until very recently this was seen as having the potential to provide the conclusive answer to who we are and how we came to be who we are. But, once again, it now seems that was overly optimistic and simplistic.

There is a whole new field of study called epigenetics which shows that genes are not always the fixed things they were once believed to be. It seems they can be switched on and off. Although they remain unchanged in themselves (as it was always assumed), their likely impact on our development depends on whether certain environmental factors have caused their activity to be turned on or off. For example, if a boy has not had quite enough food at a critical time in his development, any sons he then has are less likely than they might otherwise have been to die of heart disease. The health outcome that should have been inherited by them has been subtly switched, in this case in their favour, by their father’s genetic response to external conditions (see Day et al., 2016).

Further evidence that the genetic blueprint is not the only thing influencing how genes build us is that even though identical twins share all their DNA, they can still suffer from different diseases and develop quite separate personalities and skills.

So, it seems that we need to look again at what might have made us who we are.

Joined-up thinking – the connectome

Current thinking tells us that it is connectivity rather than the actual ingredients of our brains that makes us clever. A cake is not a cake until all the ingredients have joined forces. No matter how perfectly formed a particular part of the brain is, it is nothing in terms of overall cleverness if it does not link up with everything around it. Connectedness, in this case, is like society. Every individual element is important, but we need the individual elements to join up in as many relationships as they can, passing on information far and wide and linking closely to other elements with which they can develop deep symbiotic relationships. The more extensive the networks and the richer the relationships, the more sophisticated and flexible that society can potentially be. For ‘society’ read ‘brain’.

The following is an explanation of how that species-unique connectedness probably happened (for a fuller explanation of gene jumping see Gage and Muotri, 2012). Jumping genes, aka retrotransposons, have been known about in the plant world for a while, it is only more recently that their place in human brain development has been understood. It appears that these particular sequences of DNA have the unusual ability to make copies of themselves, and these copies, being mobile, take themselves off to other parts of the brain. Usually there is no obvious consequence to this globetrotting behaviour, but on occasion they arrive somewhere that really suits them and they then act like cuckoos, muscling in on their host cells and changing the behaviour of the host. If they have landed on cells in areas necessary to brain development, memory or attention, these jumping genes can subtly alter gene activation patterns and lead to the brain developing in slightly different ways from how it might otherwise have done if the genome itself were the only factor involved.

This doesn’t explain why these genes are so jumpy in the first place, nor why jumping, per se, should lead to greater connectivity. No one really knows, but it might work as follows: new environments, novel experiences and exercise appear to result in more gene jumping in the brain. This, in turn, results in subtle changes in brain behaviour, and a plausible outcome is an ongoing virtuous circle of novelty, adaptability and brain development.

It is important to say that quicker and more flexible responses to incoming environmental information are only part of the effect of gene jumping. There are also negative consequences including severe brain disorders. Clearly, jumping genes, like all changes to the status quo, are a mixed blessing. Gage and Muotri suggest that such a risky factor has not simply died out because nature (being utterly pragmatic about these things) may simply be taking a punt on the benefits of enhanced flexibility outweighing any negative consequences. So what we get is greater adaptability – plus greater vulnerability. One of their most significant arguments in favour of the influence of jumping genes on adaptability and connectivity is that the lineage of jumping elements goes back approximately 2.7 million years – to the beginning of the time when our ancestors first started to prepare their steaks using those flakes of rock.

A genetic mini-me?

Perhaps even more important and exciting are findings from the Scripps Research Institute in California. These suggest that a mutation, an accidental copy of a copy of a single gene, which took place approximately 2.4 million years ago, may have turned our brains into the amazing hyperlinking machines that they have become today.

The original function of this serially mutating gene, the SRGAP2 gene, was to prompt brain development (specifically in the neocortex where sophisticated higher order processing takes place) by making neurons generate connections to neighbouring cells (see Reardon, 2012). However, it seems that the second slightly smaller copy attached itself to its granny gene, and like any piggyback rider slowed down its activity.

At first this may seem like a negative or retrogressive change, but the effect has been largely to the advantage of humankind. This is because, rather counter-intuitively, slowing down the functioning of SRGAP2 has given neurons more time both to grow thicker and longer (and so to become more effective at making connections) and to migrate further from their starting point. This has enabled them to connect with more distant parts of the brain (remember the society analogy). Research by Simon Neubauer and Jean-Jacques Hublin (2012), from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, supports the idea that this will have conferred an advantage. They concluded that it was the comparatively accelerated brain growth experienced by Neanderthal man which meant that the environment had less chance of impacting on their levels of brain connectivity, notwithstanding the overall size of their brains.

The overall impact of this accidental copying was that around two and a half million years ago human brains became much more connected up than the brains of other species. This inevitably led to an infinitely greater capacity to link up and process information from a variety of sources, both internally and externally generated. Over time that capacity would lead us to cross-reference and weave together inputs and concepts that in other species would have remained defiantly separate. Put simply, the SRGAP2c (as the copy of the copy is known) was a sort of Heston Blumenthal of brain development, the source of the most unheard of combinations of apparently unconnected elements – the snail-porridge-maker of the brain.

Returning to the girl in the canvas sack

How does this all affect the way that poor girl was experiencing life? We’re getting there, but first let’s look again at tool use – that development of the ability to see more in something than first meets the eye. It now makes sense that this ability is likely to be an outcome of the brain’s new facility for making many more internally generated connections between the data it is processing:

Oh … a sharp splintery thing!

Oh … a piece of wood!

Oh, oh … what if I put one next to the other? What if one moved backwards and forwards? Oh, look, it’s made marks on the other!

I wonder what I can do with that … ?

This is what we call symbolic thinking – one thing standing for another, despite there being no immediate association between them. In this case a broken flint becomes a knife, which is by no means a natural connection for other species’ brains to make but one easily made by a brain that is networking wildly.

Language, probably the most symbolic of our skills, is very like tool use insofar as there is no intrinsic association between the items we’re referring to and the sounds and shapes we’re creating with our voices and on paper or screen. The associations are only symbolic ones. That lack of any immediate connection is made even clearer when what we’re referring to are ideas, concepts and emotions which have no physical presence in the first place. It’s now relatively easy for a healthy (and connected) brain to see that these abstractions are created from flurries of brain connectivity that link one set of non-things with another set of non-things, and that they will (and can) only exist inside our heads. However, it will be less easy for people with certain types of mental disorder to understand that what they’re experiencing in all that rampant internal cross-referencing is not actually real.

Which brings us back to self-consciousness, the way we differentiate between what is happening to several centillions of neurons all around the world and what is merely affecting a specific set of 100 billion neurons lying closer to home. Within that lacy web of dreams and pictures, fancies and thrills that is our brain, there also exists a vital system which operates like a corporate 360 degree feedback review: it tells it like it is and puts a bit of a brake on our more eccentric impulses. This system incorporates those bossy frontal lobes, a fascinating area called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (which, at the risk of contradicting any earlier comments, does attention, pain, inhibition, motivation, self-awareness and a lot else besides1), all the motor and sensory areas that tell our bodies what to do and how we feel, together with the hippocampus which covers our memory for what we have previously said, done and felt (autobiographical memory). When all of these work in concert we become aware not only of our own bodies and our own pasts but also of our own inner processes, even as they are happening. It is that system which, operating optimally, gives us insight and self-control – et voilà, self-consciousness.

However, when some parts of that superb human-specific process fail to function (and we’ll come back to the reasons why that may happen later) then a person can suffer all kinds of disturbing and essentially depersonalising symptoms ranging from a sense of fragmentation to becoming detached from their own sensations or totally enmeshed in them.

I can only assume, because I never encountered the girl in the canvas sack again, that in her case the last of those things had happened. Some aspects of that superb process had broken down and her internalising neural loop was acting like a stuck record, drowning out connections that might have told her that she was still living in an external body and having a physical life in an external world, as well as experiencing all those obsessive internal reflections on that life.

In a nutshell

Hopefully, this chapter has explained how evolution has worked to turn us from relatively simple reactors to outside stimuli into sophisticated creatures capable of shape-shifting what we call ‘concrete’ reality into intricate internalised webs of possibilities by means of flurries of brain connectivity. Unlike other species, when we take information into our heads it does not remain unadulterated but becomes amplified and even distorted by all that connectivity, as though it were passing through a series of echo chambers, each of which causes more of that shape-shifting to take place.

Living inside our heads can be wonderful and enriching. We have concepts, emotions, dreams, imagination, ideas, schemes, plans, fantasies, romance and all the things which drive us on to create more and more of the complexity we now appear to crave. However, living inside our heads can also, as the girl in the canvas sack so poignantly showed, be a real drag. As we have lost the option of getting out and living more like the animals, so we may end up as prisoners in a surreal nightmare instead.

I said my magic Cinderella key could unlock the cells in our imprisoning brains, and although talking about brains as if they somehow locked us in may have sounded strange at the time, I hope it now makes more sense. In the next chapter I explore the mysterious and transformative nature of the key itself.

1 Activity in its ‘twin’ region, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), has recently been found to be predictive of recovery from coma states (see Silva et al., 2015). See also page 251 and Appendix B on autism for further references to the PCC and its link to autism. It would appear that the cingulate cortex, as a whole, is critical to consciousness and, probably, to a sense of self.

Chapter 3

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

It was the first day of a new term in the reception class. A small boy arrived by himself, one of few who had no mum alongside to cling on to. From the start he was fidgety and sullen and it wouldn’t have taken a psychologist to see that he was likely to be alienated and troublesome. The reception teacher started the day by going around her little charges one by one, gently coaxing each into saying their name out loud. She arrived in front of the boy and asked him what his name was, but at that he seemed more than sullen – he seemed confused. She smiled kindly at him and tried again, ‘What do they call you at home?’ He thought hard, ‘Shut up, George’, he said at last.