Category: Me

I screwed up. My latest column for BBC Future is about why cyclists enrage motorists. My argument is that cyclists offend the ‘moral order’ of the roads, evoking in motorists a feeling of outrage over perceived rule breaking.

Unfortunately, I included some loose words in my article that implied things I don’t believe and wasn’t arguing. Exhibit A:

Then along comes a cyclist, who seems to believe that the rules aren’t made for them, especially the ones that hop onto the pavement, run red lights, or go the wrong way down one-way streets.

This wrongly suggests both that I think the typical cyclists breaks the law (they don’t), and/or that motorists are enraged by cyclists’ law breaking. This is not the case, rather I am arguing that motorists are engaged by cyclists’ perceived rule breaking, where I mean rule in the sense of ‘convention’. Cyclists habitually, legally, and sensibly break conventions of car-driving such as waiting in queued traffic, moving at the speed limit or not under-taking.

Exhibit A has now been changed in the article to the more pleasing:

Then along come cyclists, innocently following what they see are the rules of the road, but doing things that drivers aren’t allowed to: overtaking queues of cars, moving at well below the speed limit or undertaking on the inside.

So, my bad and apologies for this. I should have been a lot clearer than I was. I’m just grateful that a few people understood what I was getting at (if you read the whole article I hope the correct interpretation is supported by the rest of the phrasing I use). The amount and vehemence of feedback has been quite surprising. Lots of people thought I was a frustrated driver who hated cyclists. In fact, the bike is my main form of transport. I’ve ridden nearly every day for over ten years (and been hit by a car once). For this article I was trying not to sound like the self-righteous cycling proto-fascist I feel like sometimes. I obviously succeeded. Perhaps too well.

Other people thought I was claiming that this was the only factor affecting road-user’s attitudes. I don’t think this. Obviously selective memory (for bad cyclists or drivers), in- group/out-group effects and the asymmetry in vulnerability all play a role. I did write a version of the article which laid out the conceptual space a bit clearer, but I decided it was boring to read, and really I wanted to talk about evolutionary game theory and make a novel – and, I thought, interesting – claim.

I sometimes think I should get “Telling the truth, just not the whole truth” translated into Latin so I can use it as the motto for the column. Each one I write someone comes back to me with something I missed out. If I tried to be comprehensive I’d end up with a textbook, instead of a 800 word magazine column. I don’t want to write textbooks, so I’m reasonably happy with leaving things out, but I do worry that there is a line you cross when telling some of the truth amounts to a deception or distortion of the whole truth. I’m trying, each time, not to cross that line. Feedback on how to manage this is welcome.

There were many other comments of all shades. You can ‘enjoy’ some of them on the BBC Future facebook page here. If you did leave a comment on email/facebook/twitter I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to all of them. I hope this post clarifies things a bit.

I don’t predict what is going to happen when I watch a film. It isn’t like I can’t, it just doesn’t occur to me. When the bad guy turns out to be a good guy (or vice versa) my friends will say “Well that was obviously going to happen”. But it wasn’t obvious to me.

If you had described the salient facts to me, given me a plot summary, I would be able to make the correct prediction, I’m sure, but something about the way my brain works stops me making the leap from the level of experience to the level of description. I am stuck just experiencing the events of the film, and not representing them in a way that would allow me to draw obvious conclusions.

Let’s call this ability ‘narrative extraction’.

I’ve got some smarts, sure, but I think I’ve got a deductive kind of smarts. This is the kind of smarts that can take a set of facts, or axioms, and crunch through the consequences until you get to inevitable result. I’m good at maths and most logic puzzles. I think narrative extraction requires a different kind of smarts. It is the ability to pick an appropriate set of facts or an appropriate method of description which will provide you with an answer which serves your purposes.

For the film example you need to do more than just experience the characters, you need to classify them by their types, the film by genre, the plot by template and from all that infer what would be the most likely thing for an exciting film.

Moral reasoning requires the same kind of smarts. There’s a famous test of moral reasoning by Kohberg, where children are presented with vignettes (“Your wife is sick and you cannot afford medicine. Should you break into the pharmacy and steal it?” type things). Kohberg ranked children’s moral reasoning, giving the most credit to moral reasoning which invoked logical deductions from abstract moral frameworks.

Gilligan, in her book “In a different voice” has a powerful critique of Kohlberg’s system, on the grounds that it gave credit to one kind of reasoning – abstract logical deduction or calculus (e.g. “Stealing is wrong, but letting your wife die is worse, so I should therefore steal the medicine”) – and not to another kind of more contextually sensitive reasoning (e.g. “If I break into the pharmacy then I might get caught and then I won’t be able to help my wife, so I should find another way of getting the medicine”). This sensitivity to what is not in the question – what is not explicitly stated – is a part of narrative extraction.

There is another important, perhaps more primary, way in which narrative extraction is required for moral judgement. Kohlberg’s vignettes are not just logic problems, which can be convergently or divergently solved, they are also descriptions of the world. Thus they do one of the major tasks of moral reasoning for you – that of going from the nebulous world of experience to the concrete would of categories and actions.

As soon as you describe the world you massively constrain the scope for moral reasoning. You can still make the wrong judgement, but you have made moral reasoning possible by the act of description using moral categories.

Milgram demonstrated scientifically the banality of evil, that normal people could do inhuman things. Did those people who thought they were delivering lethal electric shocks make an incorrect moral judgement? Did they weigh “doing what you are told” against “the life of an innocent” and choose the former? My intuition is that they did not, not explicitly. Yes they made the wrong choice (we too would probably have made the wrong choice), but I believe that they were so caught up in the moment, in the emotion of the situation, that they did not move to the necessary level of description. We, reading this in comfort, are given the moral categories and the right choice is so obvious that we have difficulty empathising with their situation. The narrative extraction has been done for us, so right thing seems obvious. But it isn’t.

Last night I had two dreams in which I was being chased (once by a tour-de-france cyclist in Venice, once by a giant snake in a field, since you ask). I was thinking that being-chased dreams are probably my brain rehearsing escape behaviours – a night-time training programme built in by evolution. Thinking more on it, I realised that I have never had a chasing dream, only being-chased dreams. Is this because being-chased is more adaptive to rehearse, or because of something peculiar to my idiosyncratic psychology? Let’s find out, please vote using the poll below:

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Reprint of the text from my article in Prospect magazine, 4th July 2009, Issue 160

If someone tells you something that isn’t true, they may not be lying. At least not in the conventional sense. Confabulation, a rare disorder resulting from severe brain damage, causes its sufferers to relentlessly invent and believe fictions—both mundane and fantastical—about their lives. If asked where she has just been, a patient might say that she was in the laundry room (when she wasn’t) or that she’s been visiting Scotland with her sister (who’s been dead for 20 years), or even that she isn’t in the room where you’re talking to her, but in one exactly like it, further down the corridor. And could you fetch her hand cream please? These stories aren’t maintained for long periods, but are sincerely believed.

While it only affects a tiny minority of those with brain damage, confabulation tells us something important: that spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind. The damage associated with confabulation—usually to the frontal lobes—adds nothing to the brain’s makeup. Instead it releases a capacity for fiction that lies dormant inside all of us. Anyone who has seen children at play knows that the desire to make up stories is deeply embedded in human nature. And it can be cultivated too, most clearly by anarchic improvisers like Paul Merton.

Chris Harvey John taught me “improv” at London’s Spontaneity Shop. He can step on stage in front of 200 people to perform a totally unscripted hour-long show. There’ll be no rehearsal, no discussion of characters or plot. Instead, he and the other actors invent a play from scratch, based entirely on their unplanned reactions to each other. This seemingly effortless, throwaway attitude is the opposite of what we normally assume about the creative process: that it is hard work. Artists are often talked about in reverent, mystical tones. Art does connect with deep and mysterious human forces, but that doesn’t mean it is only available to a select few who, through luck or special training, are allowed to invent things.

Psychological research increasingly shows that inventiveness is fundamental to the normal operation of the mind. Aikaterini Fotopoulou is a research psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, who specialises in confabulation. She regards it as a failure of the psychological mechanisms responsible for memory. “These inventions are really memory constructions,” she says. “When people confabulate they are failing to check the origin of the material that they build into their memories. You or I can usually tell the difference between a memory of something we’ve done and a memory of something we’ve just heard about, and distinguish both from stray thoughts or hopes. Confabulators can’t do this. Material that, for emotional or other reasons, comes to mind can at times be indiscriminately assumed to be a memory of what really happened.”

There’s a clue to confabulation in the responses of other patients with damage to the frontal lobes. These patients, who may have suffered violent head injuries or damage from illnesses such as strokes or Alzheimers, don’t necessarily confabulate but will often have problems with planning and motivation. They can seem heavily dependent on their external environment. Some, for example, indiscriminately respond to the things they see, regardless of whether it is appropriate in the context. The French psychiatrist L’hermitte demonstrated this “environmental dependency” in the 1980s when he laid a syringe on a table in front of a patient with frontal lobe damage and then turned around and took down his trousers. Without hesitation the patient injected him in the buttocks. This was a completely inappropriate action for the patient, but in terms of the possible actions made available by the scene in front of her, it was the obvious thing to do.

In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories—their thoughts and wishes—rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked why she looks about 50, she replies that she was pushed into a ditch by her brothers and landed on her face. Asked about his good mood, another patient called Harry explains that the president visited him at his office yesterday. The president wanted to talk politics, but Harry preferred to talk golf. They had a good chat.

Improvisers tap into these same creative powers, but in a controlled way. They learn to cultivate a “dual mind,” part of which doesn’t plan or discriminate and thus unleashes its inventive powers, while the other part maintains a higher level monitoring of the situation, looking out for opportunities to develop the narrative.

Both improvisation and confabulation show that the mind is inherently sense-making. Just as a confabulator is unfortunately driven to invent possible stories from the fragments of their memories and thoughts, so an improviser looks at the elements of a scene and lets their unconscious mind provide them with possible actions that can make sense of it. On stage, this allows them to create entrancing stories. But this capacity for invention is inside all of us. As audience or performers, we are all constantly inventing.