Evolution And Metaphorical Language: Robert Sapolsky On Our Ability To Think In Symbols

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

“War, murder, music, art. We wouldn't have anything without metaphors"

People are used to being unique in many ways. We are the only species that came up with different tools, killed each other, created culture. But each of these supposed distinctive features is now found in other species. We're not that special. However, there are other ways of manifesting that make us unique. One of them is extremely important: the human ability to think in symbols. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech - they all have tremendous power over us. We kill for symbols, we die for them. And yet, symbols have created one of the most magnificent inventions of humanity: art.

In recent years, scientists have made amazing advances in understanding the neurobiology of symbols. The main conclusion to which they came: the brain is not very strong in distinguishing between metaphorical and literal. Indeed, research has shown that symbols and metaphors, and the morality they generate, are the product of clumsy processes in our brains.

Symbols serve as simplified substitutes for something complex [eg, a rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and its values]. And this is very helpful. To understand why, start by looking at the "basic" language - communication without symbolic content.

Suppose that something terrible is threatening you right now, and therefore you scream with all your might. Someone hearing this does not know what that frightening "Ahhhh!" - approaching comet, death squad or giant monitor lizard? Your exclamation only means that something is wrong - a general cry, the meaning of which is unclear [no additional message]. It is a momentary expression that serves as a means of communication in animals.

Symbolic language has brought tremendous evolutionary benefits. This can be seen in the process of children's development of symbolism - even among other types. When, for example, monkeys find a predator, they do more than just make a general cry. They use different vocalizations, different "proto-words", where one means "Aaaa, predator on the ground, climb trees", and other means mean "Aaa, predator in the air, come down from trees." It took evolution to develop the cognitive skills to help make this distinction. Who would like to make a mistake and start climbing up to the top, when the predator flies there at full speed?

Language separates the message from its meaning, and continues to derive the best from that separation - something that has great individual and social benefits. We have become able to imagine emotions from our past and anticipate emotions that will appear in the future, as well as things that have nothing to do with emotions. We evolved until we had theatrical means of separating message from meaning and purpose: lies. And we came up with aesthetic symbolism.

Our early use of symbols helped shape powerful connections and rules of interaction, and human communities became increasingly complex and competitive. A recent study of 186 aboriginal societies showed that the larger a typical social group was, the more likely it was that their culture had created a god controlling and evaluating human morality - that ultimate symbol of the pressure of rules.

How did our brains evolve to mediate this difficult endeavor? In a very awkward way. While the squid cannot swim as fast as most fish, it swims quite fast for a creature descended from molluscs. It is the same with the human brain: while it processes symbols and metaphors in a rather clumsy manner, it does a pretty good job for an organ that is derived from a brain that can only process literal information. The easiest way to shed light on this cumbersome process is to use metaphors for the two senses critical to survival: pain and disgust.

Consider the following example: you pinch your toe. Pain receptors send messages to the spine and - higher - to the brain, where different areas are triggered. Several of these areas tell you about the location, intensity, and nature of the pain. Is your right finger or left ear injured? Was your finger bruised or crushed by a tractor? It is a vital pain processing process that we can find in every mammal.

But there are more knowledgeable, much later developed parts of the brain in the frontal lobe of the cortex that appreciate the significance of pain. Is this good or bad news? Is your injury signaling the onset of an unpleasant illness, or are you just going to get certified as a person able to walk on coals, and is this the pain associated with this?

Many of these assessments occur in an area of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex called the anterior cingulate cortex. This framework actively participates in "error detection", noting the discrepancies between what is expected and what is happening. And pain out of nowhere is definitely a mismatch between a painless attitude [what you expect] and a painful reality.

We kill for symbols, we die for them

Imagine that you are lying in a brain scanner and playing virtual ball: you and two in another room are throwing a cyberball through a computer screen [There are not really two other people - just a computer program]. In the test conditions, you are informed in the middle of the game that a computer malfunction has occurred and you will be temporarily disconnected. You watch as the virtual ball is thrown between the remaining two people. That is, at this very moment, in the conditions of the experiment, you play with two others, and suddenly they begin to ignore you and throw the ball only between themselves. Hey, why don't they want to play with me anymore? High school troubles come back to you. And a brain scanner shows that at this point, neurons in your anterior cingulate cortex are activated.

In other words, rejection hurts you. “Well, yes,” you say. "But that's not the same as pinching your toe." But it's all about the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain: abstract social and real pain activate the same neurons in the brain.

In another experiment, while the subject was in a brain scanner, mild shock therapy was given through electrodes on his fingers. All the normal parts of the brain were activated, including the anterior cingulate cortex. After that, the experiment was repeated, but on the condition that the subjects looked at their lovers, who received the same mild shock therapy under the same conditions. The areas of the brain that in such conditions ask "Are my fingers hurting?" Were silent, because this is not their problem. But the anterior cingulate gyrus of the subjects became more active, and they began to "feel someone's pain" - and this is by no means a figure of speech. They began to feel that they, too, felt pain. Evolution in its development has done something special with humans: the anterior cingulate cortex has become a platform for creating the context of pain as a basis for empathy.

But we are not the only species capable of empathy. Chimpanzees show empathy when, for example, the need arises to groom someone who has been harmed by another chimpanzee's aggressive attack. We are also not the only species to have an anterior cingulate cortex. However, research shows that the anterior cingulate cortex of the human brain is more complex than other species, more associated with abstract and associative regions of the brain - areas that can draw our attention to the world's suffering rather than pain in the toes.

And we feel someone else's pain like no other species. We feel this pain at a great distance, which is why we are ready to help a refugee child on another continent. We feel this pain through time, experiencing the horror that gripped the people who remained in Pompeii. We even experience empathic pain when we see certain symbols imprinted in pixels. "Oh no, poor Na'vi!" - we sob when the great tree is destroyed in "Avatar". Because the anterior lumbar cortex has trouble remembering that these are all “just figures of speech,” it functions as if your heart was literally being torn apart.

Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech - they have tremendous power over us. We kill for symbols, we die for them.

Symbols and morals

Let's look at another area in which our weak ability to manipulate symbols adds tremendous strength to a unique human quality: morality.

Imagine that you are in a brain scanner and because of a terribly compelling request from a scientist, you are eating some rotten food. This activates another part of the frontal cortex, the insular lobe [islet], which, among other functions, is responsible for gustatory and olfactory aversion. The islet sends neuronal signals to the muscles in your face, which reflexively contract so that you can spit immediately, and to the muscles in your stomach, which encourage vomiting. All mammals have an islet that is involved in the process of the emergence of gustatory aversion. After all, no animal wants to consume poison.

But we are the only beings for whom this process serves something more abstract. Imagine eating something disgusting. Imagine that your mouth is full of centipedes, how you chew them, try to swallow them, how they fight there, how you wipe the drool from your lips with their legs. At this moment, thunder breaks out over the island, it immediately turns into action and sends signals of disgust. Now think of something terrible that you once did, something undoubtedly shameful and embarrassing. The island is activated. It was these processes that gave rise to the main human invention: moral disgust.

Is it not surprising that the insular lobe of the human brain is involved in the production of moral aversion along with gustatory aversion? Not when human behavior can make us feel stomach cramps and unpleasant taste sensations, smell the stench. When I heard about the Newtown school massacre, I felt a pain in my stomach - and it was not some symbolic figure of speech intended to show how upset I was by the news. I felt nauseous.

The islet not only prompts the stomach to clear itself of toxic food - it asks our stomach to clear reality of this nightmare incident. The distance between symbolic message and meaning shrinks.

As Chen Bo Jun of the University of Toronto and Kathy Lilzhenqvist of Brigham Young University discovered, if you are forced to reflect on your moral crime, then you will most likely go after that to wash your hands … But scientists have demonstrated something even more provocative. They ask you to reflect on your moral flaws; then you are put in a position where you can answer someone's call for help. Floundering in your moral licentiousness, you are likely to come to the rescue. But only not if you had the opportunity to wash after your moral digging. In this case, you manage to "compensate" for your crime - you seem to wash away your sins and get rid of the damn dark spots.

Symbols and political ideologies

Interestingly, the way our brains use symbols to distinguish between disgust [physical] and morality also applies to political ideology. Scientists' work shows that, on average, conservatives have a lower threshold of physiological aversion than liberals. Look at pictures of excrement or open wounds filled with larvae - if your islet starts to rampage, chances are good that you are a conservative, but only on social issues, such as gay marriage [if you are heterosexual]. But if your island can get over the disgust, chances are you are a liberal.

In the study, participants placed in a room with a trash can exuding an eerie stench "showed less warmth towards gay men than heterosexual men." In a stench-free control room, participants rated gay and heterosexual men equally. In a spicy (entertaining), smart, real life example, conservative Tea Party movement candidate Carl Paladino sent out trash-soaked flyers during his 2010 New York governor primary campaign. year from the Republican Party. His campaign read "Something Really Stinks in Albany." In the first round, Paladino won (However, stinking in the general election, he lost by a wide margin to Andrew Cuomo).

Our shaky, symbol-dependent brains are shaped by personal ideology and culture that influence our perceptions, emotions, and beliefs. We use symbols to demonize our enemies and wage war. The Hutu of Rwanda portrayed the enemy of the Tutsi as cockroaches. In Nazi propaganda posters, Jews were rats that carried dangerous diseases. Many cultures graft their members - creating the conditions for them to acquire repulsive symbols that hone and strengthen specific neural pathways - from cortex to islet - that you will never find in other species. Depending on who you are, these paths can be activated at the sight of a swastika or two men kissing. Or perhaps the thought of an abortion or a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs begin to shrink, we at a biological level feel confident that this is wrong, and we succumb to this feeling.

The same brain mechanism works with symbols that help us to empathize, to engage in the situation of another, to hug him. This feature of ours was most powerfully embodied in art. We see the skill of a skilled photojournalist - a photo of a child whose house was destroyed by a natural disaster, and we reach for our wallets. If this is 1937, we look at Picasso's Guernica and see more than just a menagerie of anatomically deformed mammals. Instead, we see the devastation and pain of a defenseless Basque village doomed to slaughter during the Spanish Civil War. We would like to oppose the fascists and Nazis who carried out the air attack. Today, we may feel the need to take care of the fate of animals when we look at a simple artistic symbol - the panda logo owned by WWF.

Our brains, which generate metaphors all the time, are unique in the animal kingdom. But obviously we are dealing with a double-edged sword. We can use a blunt edge, one that demonizes, and a sharp edge, one that encourages us to do good things.