The Social Animal (9 page)

By age two or three, each of Harold’s neurons could have made an average of about 15,000 connections, though the unused ones will get pruned back. Harold could end up with something in the neighborhood of 100 trillion or 500 trillion or even 1,000 trillion synapses. If you want to get a sense of the number of potential connections between the cells in Harold’s brain, contemplate this: A mere 60 neurons are capable of making 10
⁸¹
possible connections with each other. (That’s 1 with 81 zeroes after it.) The number of particles in the known universe is about one-tenth of this number. Jeff Hawkins suggests a different way to think about the brain. Imagine a football stadium filled with spaghetti. Now imagine it shrunk down to skull size and much more complicated.

In their book
The Scientist in the Crib
, Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl have a nice description of the process neurons use to connect with one another: “It’s as if, when you used your cell phone to call your neighbor often enough, a cable spontaneously grew between your houses. At first, cells exuberantly attempt to connect to as many other cells as they can. Like phone solicitors, they call everyone, hoping someone will answer and say yes. When another cell does answer, and answers enough, a more permanent link gets laid down.”

I want to pause here, because this process of synaptogenesis is part of the core of who Harold was. For millennia philosophers have sought a definition of the human self. What is it that makes a person ineffably herself, despite the changes that happen day by day and year by year? What is it that unifies all the different thoughts, actions, and emotions that pass through each of our lives? Where does the true self lie?

A piece of the answer lies in the pattern of synaptic connections. When we come across an apple, our sensory perceptions about that apple (its color, shape, texture, aroma, etc.) get translated into an integrated network of connected neurons that fire together. These firings, or electrochemical impulses, are not concentrated in one section of the brain. There is no apple section. The apple information is spread out in a vastly complicated network. In one experiment, a cat was taught to find food behind a door that was marked with a specific geometric shape. That one geometric form set off learning-related responses in over five million cells distributed throughout the cat’s brain. In another experiment, the ability to distinguish the sound of “P” from the sound of “B” was represented in twenty-two sites scattered across the human brain.

When Harold saw a dog, a network of neurons fired. The more he saw a dog, the denser and more efficient the connections between the appropriate neurons grew. The more you see dogs, the faster and more complex your dog networks become, and the better you are at perceiving the general qualities of dogness and the differences between dogs. With effort, practice, and experience, you can improve the subtlety of your networks. Violinists have dense connections in the area of the brain related to their left hand, because they use it so much while playing their instrument.

You have a distinctive signature, a distinctive smile, and a distinctive way of drying yourself off after a shower because you perform these activities a lot and the corresponding networks of neurons are thus thickly connected in your brain. You can probably recite the alphabet from A to Z, because through repetition you have built that sequence of patterns in your head. You would probably have trouble reciting the alphabet from Z to A, because that sequence has not been reinforced by experience.

In this way, each of us has unique neural networks, which are formed, reinforced, and constantly updated by the eclectic circumstances of our lives. Once circuits are formed, that increases the chances the same circuits will fire in the future. The neural networks embody our experiences and in turn guide future action. They contain the unique way each of us carries himself in the world, the way we walk, talk, and react. They are the grooves down which our behavior flows. A brain is the record of a life. The networks of neural connections are the physical manifestation of your habits, personality, and predilections. You are the spiritual entity that emerges out of the material networks in your head.

As Harold went about his day, the sight of his mother’s smile set off a certain pattern of synaptic firing, as did the sound of a scary truck. As he toddled around exploring his world, he built up his mind. One day when he was about five, he was running around the house and he did something amazing. He screamed, “I’m a tiger!” and he pounced playfully on Julia’s lap.

This may seem like a simple thing, which all children do. After all, when we think of really difficult feats of thinking, we think about, say, calculating the square root of 5,041. (It’s 71.) Saying “I’m a tiger” seems easy.

But that’s an illusion. Any cheap calculator can calculate square roots. No simple machine is able to perform the imaginative construct involved in the sentence “I am a tiger.” No simple machine can blend two complicated constructs such as “I,” a little boy, and “a tiger,” a fierce animal, into a single coherent entity. Yet the human brain is capable of performing this incredibly complicated task so easily, and so far below the level of awareness, we don’t even appreciate how hard it is.

Harold could do this because of that ability to make generalizations, and because of his ability to make associations between generalizations—to overlay the gist of one thing with the gist of another. If you ask a sophisticated computer to find the door in a room, it has to calculate all the angles in the room, then look for certain shapes and ratios that correspond to the shapes and ratios of past doors that have been programmed into its memory banks. Because there are so many different kinds of doors, it has trouble figuring out what “door” means. But for Harold, or any human, this is a piece of cake. We store in our heads vague patterns of what rooms are like, and we know roughly where doors are in rooms, and finding them usually takes no conscious thought at all. We are smart because we are capable of fuzzy thinking.

We look at the variable patterns of the world and we form gists. Once we have created a gist, which is a pattern of firings, we can do a lot of things with it. We can take the gist of the dog, and then call up the gist of Winston Churchill we have stored in our head and we can imagine Winston Churchill’s voice coming out of the dog’s mouth. (It helps if the dog is a bulldog and there’s already some overlap between the neural patterns so we can say, “This is sort of like that.”)

This activity of blending neural patterns is called imagination. It seems easy but it is phenomenally complex. It consists of taking two or more things that do not exist together, blending them together in the mind, and then creating an emergent third thing that never existed at all. As Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner write in
The Way We Think
, “Building an integration network involves setting up mental spaces, matching across spaces, projecting selectively to a blend, locating shared structures, projecting backward to inputs, recruiting new structure to the inputs or the blend, and running various operations in the blend itself.” And that is only the start of it. If you have a taste for incredibly intricate and sometimes impenetrable reasoning, read the work of scientists who are trying to piece together the exact sequence of events that go into imagination, or as they sometimes call it in that winsome way of theirs, double-scope integration.

In any case, Harold was a little demon at it. In the space of five minutes, he could be a tiger, a train, a car, his mom, a storm, a building, or an ant. For seven months when he was about four, he was persuaded that he was a sun creature born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to confess that he was actually an Earth creature born in a hospital, but he would grow quite grave and refuse to concede the point. Julia and Rob actually began to wonder if they’d given birth to some delusional psychotic.

In fact, he was just lost in his blends. When he got a little older, he created H-World, an entire universe established for the glorification of Harold (what researchers call a “paracosm”). In H-World, everybody was named Harold and all worshiped the king of H-World who was Harold himself. In H-World people ate certain foods—mostly marshmallows and M&Ms—and they had certain occupations—mostly of the professional-athlete variety. H-World even had its own history, events from fantasies gone by, which were recorded in the memory banks just like the history in the real world.

Throughout his life, Harold was really good at blending, generalizing, and storytelling. If you were to measure Harold’s raw information-processing abilities, you would find that he was slightly above average, but nothing special. Yet he had an amazing ability to discern essences and play with neural patterns. That meant he was really good at creating models of reality, and models of possible alternate realities.

We sometimes think that imagination is cognitively easy because children can use it better than adults. In fact, imagination is arduous and practical. People who possess imaginative talents can say, “If I were you, I would do this….” Or they can think, “I’m doing it this way now, but if I tried to do it that way, things might go faster.” These double-scope and counterfactual abilities come in quite handy in real life.

Between the ages of four and ten, Harold would be sitting at the dinner table and he’d interject some snippet of TV dialogue or a commercial jingle, and it was always exactly appropriate to the conversation. He’d use difficult words appropriately, though if you asked him later what the word meant he couldn’t consciously define it. He’d blurt out some ancient lyric from a Paul McCartney and Wings song, and it would be perfectly apt in that social situation. People would look at him in amazement and ask, “Is there a little old man in there?”

In reality, there was no hidden adult in Harold’s brain. There was just a little pattern synthesizer. Rob and Julia organized his life. Day after day they had the same routines and the same expectations. These habits laid down certain fundamental structures in his mind. And out of this order, regularity, and discipline, Harold’s mind went off on riotous adventures, in which he combined unlikely things in magical ways.

Rob and Julia would have been delighted with his imaginative abilities, but sometimes he seemed to have trouble with real life. They would see other kids peacefully holding on to the cart as they made their way up and down the aisles in the grocery store. Harold didn’t do that. He was always pulling and struggling this way or that and had to be held or restrained. Other kids followed the teachers’ instructions at his preschool, but Harold couldn’t stay on task; he was always dashing off to do his own thing. Rob and Julia would get exhausted by his fits and tantrums, and tried to impose a little linearity into his life. He was a real problem on airplanes, and an embarrassment in restaurants. At parent-teacher conferences his teachers would remark that controlling Harold took up way too much of their time. He didn’t seem to listen or follow instructions. Julia used to furtively look at the child-rearing guides in the bookstores, with the sinking sensation that she was raising a poster child for
ADHD
medications.

One evening, when Harold was in kindergarten, Rob passed by his room and Harold was splayed out across the floor, surrounded by little plastic figurines. There was a gathering of green army figurines off to his left, a mass of little Lego pirates flanking them, and a traffic jam of Hot Wheels cars challenging in from head on. Harold was in the middle scampering around, moving a Darth Vader figure behind enemy lines and crushing an unsuspecting G.I. Joe. A squad of army men confronted a gathering of Hot Wheels and fell back. Harold’s voice rose and fell with the ebb and flow of battle. He kept up a steady play-by-play narrative, describing events as they unfolded and, occasionally, he’d rise to a sort of whispering “and the crowd goes wild” roar.

Rob stood in the doorway for about ten minutes and watched Harold go about his play. Harold glanced up, but then returned to the war. He gave a furious pep talk to one of his stuffed monkeys. He preached courage to a piece of plastic two inches tall. He soothed the hurt feelings of a car and scolded a stuffed turtle.

In his stories there were generals and privates, mommies and daddies, dentists and firemen. Very early in life, he seemed to have a very clear sense of what patterns of behavior these different social roles entailed. In one game, he’d play a warrior; in another, a doctor; in another, a chef—imagining how people in these roles think, enacting theories about other people’s minds.

Many of Harold’s stories were about his future life, and how he would win honor and fame. Rob, Julia, and their adult friends sometimes fantasized about money and comfort, but Harold and his playmates fantasized about glory.

One Saturday afternoon, Harold had a few buddies over to the house for a playdate. They were up in his room with his toys. Harold would announce they were firemen, and pretty soon they were busy imagining a fire in a house and gathering tools to fight it—a hose, a truck, a mass of axes. Each kid would assign himself a role in the master story. Rob snuck up there and stood in the doorway, watching. To his chagrin, Harold was a little Napoleon, telling his guests who got to drive the truck and who got to carry the hose. They would have elaborate negotiations over what was legitimate to do in the world of pretend, in the shared mental space they had constructed. Even in the free-form world of their imaginations, it was apparently still necessary to have rules, and they spent so much time talking about the rules, Rob got the impression that they were more important than the story itself.

Rob noticed that each boy tried to assert himself, and the games had a certain narrative arc, from calm to crisis to calm. First they played out a happy scene. Then something terrible would happen that would get them all worked up, and they would fight it together. Then, after victory, they would return to their earlier state of emotional tranquility. Every story would end in triumph, a sort of “all better now” moment, with fame and glory for everyone involved.