In other studies people have been led to believe that they had once gotten lost in a shopping mall, been rescued by a lifeguard, survived a vicious animal attack, and been uncomfortably licked on the ear by Pluto.34 They have been made to believe that they once had a finger caught in a mousetrap,35 spilled a punch bowl at a wedding reception,36 and were hospitalized overnight for a high fever.37 But even when memories are entirely fabricated, they are usually based on something true. Kids might be induced into believing they took a ride on a hot air balloon—but the details the child fills in to explain the bogus balloon ride photo percolate from the child’s unconscious, from a body of stored sensory and psychological experiences and the expectations and beliefs that stem from those experiences.
THINK BACK ON your life. What do you remember? When I do that, I find that it is not enough. Of my father, for example, who died more than twenty years ago, my memory holds but meager scraps. Walking with him after his stroke, as he leans for the first time on a cane. Or his glittering eyes and warm smile at one of my then-infrequent visits home. Of my earlier years I recall even less. I remember his younger self beaming with joy at a new Chevrolet and erupting with anger when I threw away his cigarettes. And if I go back still further, trying to remember the earliest days of childhood, I have yet fewer, ever more out-of-focus snapshots: of my father hugging me sometimes, or my mother singing to me while she held me and stroked my hair.
I know, when I shower my children with my usual excess of hugs and kisses, that most of those scenes will not stay with them. They will forget, and for good reason. I would not wish upon them the unforgetting life of a Shereshevsky. But my hugs and kisses do not vanish without a trace. They remain, at least in aggregate, as fond feelings and emotional bonds. I know that my memory of my parents would overflow any tiny vessel formed from merely the concrete episodes that my consciousness recalls, and I hope that the same will be true of my children. Moments in time may be forever forgotten, or viewed through a hazy or distorting lens, yet something of them nonetheless survives within us, permeating our unconscious. From there, they impart to us a rich array of feelings that bubble up when we think about those who were dearest to our hearts—or when we think of others whom we’ve only met, or the exotic and ordinary places we’ve lived in and visited, or the events that shaped us. Though imperfectly, our brains still manage to communicate a coherent picture of our life experience.
In the last chapter we saw how our unconscious takes the incomplete data provided by our senses, fills in what’s missing, and passes the perception to our conscious minds. When we look at a scene we think we are seeing a sharp, well-defined picture, like a photograph, but we really see only a small part of the picture clearly, and our subliminal brains paint in the rest. Our brains use the same trick in memory. If you were designing the system for human memory, you probably would not choose a process that tosses out data wholesale and then, when asked to retrieve it, makes things up. But for the vast majority of us, the method works well, most of the time. Our species would not have survived if that weren’t so. Through evolution, perfection may be abandoned, but sufficiency must be achieved. The lesson that teaches me is to be both humble and grateful. Humble, because any great confidence I feel in any particular memory could well be misplaced; but grateful, both for the memories I retain and the ability to not retain all of them. Conscious memory and perception accomplish their miracles with a heavy reliance on the unconscious. In the chapter that follows, we’ll see that this same two-tier system affects what is most important to us: the way we function in our complex human societies.
CHAPTER 4
The Importance of Being Social
The fundamental role of human social character … why Tylenol can mend a broken heart
Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.
I CAME HOME FROM work late one evening, hungry and frustrated, and popped into my mother’s house, which was next door to mine. She was eating a frozen dinner and sipping from a mug of hot water. CNN blared on the TV in the background. She asked how my day had been. I said, “Oh, it was good.” She looked up from her black plastic food tray and, after a moment, said, “No, it wasn’t. What happened? Have some pot roast.” My mother was eighty-eight, hard of hearing, and half blind in her right eye—which was her good eye. But when it came to perceiving her son’s emotions, my mother’s X-ray vision was unimpaired.
As she read my mood with such fluency, I thought about the man who had been my coworker and partner in frustration that day—the physicist Stephen Hawking, who could hardly move a muscle, thanks to a forty-five-year struggle with motor neuron disease. By this stage in the progression of his illness, he could communicate only by painstakingly twitching the cheek muscle under his right eye. That twitch was detected by a sensor on his glasses and communicated to a computer in his wheelchair. In this manner, with the help of some special software, he managed to select letters and words from a screen, and eventually to type out what he wanted to express. On his “good” days, it was as if he were playing a video game where the prize was the ability to communicate a thought. On his “bad” days, it was as if he were blinking in Morse code but had to look up the dot and dash sequence between each letter. On the bad days—and this had been one of them—our work was frustrating for both of us. And yet, even when he could not form words to express his ideas about the wave function of the universe, I had little trouble detecting when his attention shifted from the cosmos to thoughts of calling it quits and moving on to a nice curry dinner. I always knew when he was content, tired, excited, or displeased, just from a glance at his eyes. His personal assistant had this same ability. When I asked her about it, she described a catalog of expressions she’d learned to recognize over the years. My favorite was “the steely-faced glint of glee” he displayed when composing a potent rejoinder to someone with whom he strongly disagreed. Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words, and are communicated—and understood—without conscious thought.
The experience of feeling connected to others seems to start very early in life. Studies on infants show that even six-month-olds make judgments about what they observe of social behavior.1 In one such study infants watched as a “climber,” which was nothing more than a disk of wood with large eyes glued onto its circular “face,” started at the bottom of a hill and repeatedly tried but failed to make its way to the top. After a while, a “helper,” a triangle with similar eyes glued on, would sometimes approach from farther downhill and help the climber with an upward push. On other attempts, a square “hinderer” would approach from uphill and shove the circular disk back down.