It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind (2 page)

As you go through this book and see the scheme of the argument, I hope you’ll be tempted to apply it to phenomena of interest to you. I venture to say that every phenomenon of interest in cognitive psychology can be explained in terms of the perspective offered here, at least in general terms. Meanwhile, phenomena that are imaginable but have never been observed—kids doing calculus before they can add, people remembering everything that ever happened to them to the point where most experiences are déjà vu, people being unable to attach suffixes to verbs only on Tuesdays—should be precluded by the theory, and I think they are. A fun exercise would be to invent neuropsychological disorders that are extremely unlikely though logically possible and then to articulate why they are so improbable.

A caveat for those who see themselves as visual thinkers: This book doesn’t have many pictures. The few that are here are ones that would take too many words to describe or that could never be fully conveyed with words alone. I chose to keep the number of pictures to a minimum because I believe in the image-making power of words and also because, nowadays, it is so easy to grab images from the Internet. I invite you to look up relevant images as you read this book. Where it’s not obvious how to find the best images for the material at hand, I’ve pointed to search terms, hoping to help you find them.

Though this book reflects my own mental functioning, that mental functioning, like everyone’s, occurred in a social milieu. Like neurons in the brain living in the niches they occupy, I’ve lived in a niche that made it possible for me to develop the ideas in this book. My work on this project has benefited from others, and I want to thank them here.

First, a student who took my cognitive psychology course surprised me with a gift after the course was over (and after grading was complete). The
student, Shengan Chang, presented me with a metal sign modeled on a yield sign, so it was yellow and shaped like a diamond. The words inscribed on the sign were “It’s A Jungle In There.” I’ve kept her gift in my office, both as a reminder of her kindness and as a conversation starter for visitors not familiar with my course. Some useful insights have come out of the resulting discussions.

Several faculty and postdoctoral fellows helped with the book’s intellectual development. Rich Carlson, Nancy Dennis, Paula Droege, Giuli Dussias, Danny Fitousi, Chip Gerfen, Cathy Hunt, Rick Gilmore, Ping Li, Bill Ray, Jonathan Vaughan, Dan Weiss, Michael Wenger, and Brad Wyble all helped in this way. One faculty colleague, who also happens to be my wife, Judith Kroll, deserves the most thanks.

Several graduate students and undergraduate students gave me useful comments. I express my thanks to Katie Chapman, Sangdi Chen, Chase Coelho, Jeff Eder, Lanyun Gong, Joe Santamaria, Amanda Thomas, and Ben Zinszer. Colleagues who kindly replied to my questions via email were Geoffrey Hinton, Daniel Rankin, Craig Speelman, and Anne Treisman.

The staff at Oxford University Press were helpful, not just in their openness to this project but also for their help in the book’s realization. I thank Catharine Carlin and Martin Baum, who long ago, and more recently, conveyed their interest in my writing. I also express my gratitude to Melissa Lewis, Tracy O’Hara, Miles Osgood, and Emily Perry, who shepherded the work through to completion. Joan Bossert, my editor at Oxford University Press, deserves the most thanks for her support and effective prodding.

The reviewers who read the manuscript at the behest of OUP provided very useful comments. For their enlightening goads and encouraging words I thank Sue Barry, Raymond Klein, and Robert Proctor. Any mistakes or other shortcomings in the final work are my fault, not theirs, nor the fault of anyone else mentioned here.

I also want to thank the foundations and grant agencies that have supported my research over the years. My research has focused on just one of the topics covered in this book—motor control or, more broadly, perception and action—but the support I got afforded me the luxury of stepping back to ask how questions and answers arising from my own investigations might reflect larger truths. The sources of support have included the National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation (NSF); the Dutch and German equivalents of NSF; Penn State’s Children, Youth, and Families Consortium; Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Just as my work on this project benefited from others’ input in the past, I hope to continue to benefit from others’ thoughts in the future. Regardless of whether you are a professor, a student, or some other interested party, I invite you to get in touch with me. Please feel free to offer questions you may have, corrections you think I should consider, or challenges you think I should take up. My email address is [email protected].

Authors have a habit of dedicating their books to others. Because the jungle principle arose from my teaching of cognitive psychology, I am happy to dedicate this book to the many students I have had the privilege of teaching and from whom I have learned so much.

Everyone has heard the expression “It’s a jungle out there.” The saying refers to a competitive environment in which you’d better hone your skills if you hope to survive. You’d better talk the talk and walk the walk if you hope to make it in this dog-eat-dog world. And you’d better do what you can to keep a roof over your head, food in your belly, a leaf on your loins, and a mate who’ll help pass on your genes to the next generation of Jungle Jims and Janes.

It turns out that it’s not just a jungle
out
there. It’s also a jungle
in
there. What I mean is that your brain’s a competitive arena. Competition within your brain does as much to shape who you are as does the competition—physical and figurative—you face externally.

It may be disconcerting to read that your brain’s a war zone. How nice it would be if it were otherwise! How gratifying it would be if your mental interior were a haven where you could retreat after a hectic day. But it’s not that way. If your brain purred all day like a contented cat, you wouldn’t be the man, woman, or child you are. You are, for better or worse, the host of an inner battlefield.

As evidence of this disconcerting fact, think about the trouble you may sometimes have falling asleep. Inner conflicts keep you awake at night. If this happens, it shows that your mind can be a place of upheaval. You may lie there thinking about things you wish you wouldn’t be considering: Should you have turned down that job offer? Is that dog of yours really worth all the trouble he’s been causing lately? Is it true that your supposed friend will be out of town when you decided to throw a party? Ideas like these turn over in your mind even though you tell yourself to stop thinking about them. Memories come and go no matter how hard you urge yourself to settle down. How odd that
you
can’t quiet
your
own mind!

Saying your brain’s a jungle goes deeper than saying your mind’s less tranquil than you’d like. Imagine that you’re not trying to sleep in your own bed
but instead are lying in a sleeping bag in a meadow. You’ve bedded down far from the fray of your daily life, hoping for a peaceful night’s sleep on a summer holiday.

Now that you’re here in this pastoral setting, ready to close your eyes and drift off, you’re jolted by all sorts of sounds—whistles and hoots, fluttering wings, high-pitched buzzes, low-pitched booms. The night seethes with noisy creatures beckoning their mates, issuing their warnings, settling their arguments. You came here to get away from it all, but you’ve come from one sleepless spot to another.

Why are these creatures yelping and yowling? Why can’t they get a good night’s sleep themselves? They, like you and the mental “creatures” in your head, are doing whatever they do that affects their chances of survival. The sounds they’re making are the sounds of living. “Hook up with me,” the throaty-voice frog bellows to froggy fräuleins. “I’m outta here!” shrieks an opossum running from a chasing fox. “Look out for that approaching bat!” shouts a mosquito darting through the air. None of these animals is actually speaking, of course. What they’re doing is engaging in acts that, one way or another, affect the chances they’ll survive and, in the long run, that they will have offspring who will survive.

The noises in your head are much the same. They may not arise from stand-alone creatures in your noggin, but they may be usefully likened to such creatures. Like organisms in the external world, “elves” in your head need to find useful functions if they’re going to live on. Elves for seeing will be kept busy if your eyes get a healthy input of patterned light. Elves for hearing will be employed if your ears get a nice sound-soaking on a regular basis. Elves for touch will be in constant demand if you rub up against fleece or stubble. Likewise for elves with other functions.

It may sound odd to speak of mental elves. Let me be clear that I use the term only as a metaphor. The term “elves” conjures up thoughts of little helpers for Santa Claus, or obsequious attendants to Snow White. When I say your mind’s made of up elves, imps, demons, or whatever else they might be called, this is just for the sake of offering the present theory in the most engaging way possible.

Neural and cognitive scientists agree that the last thing we should do in explaining mental phenomena is to posit little beings in the head who know things. Doing so begs the question to be answered. If you say you know things
because your mind is made up of little beings who know things, then you face an infinite regress, as seen in the following exchange.

Q
: How do you know what you know?

A
: Because I have little creatures in my head who know things.

Q
: And how do those little creatures know what they know?

A
: Because they have little creatures in
their
heads who know things.

Q
: And how do
those
little creatures know what
they
know?

A
: Because they have little creatures in
their
heads who know things.

This dialogue could go on forever. Realizing this, no respectable cognitive or neural scientist would abide such a story. It’s not helpful to say that mental processes are due to little beings in the head who know things.

So if it’s a bad idea to speak of cognizant beings inside larger cognizant beings, why do I speak of mental elves, imps, or demons? (When I speak of demons, I don’t mean personal worries!) Most emphatically, it is
not
to suggest that there are little animals in your brain with their own agendas. Nowhere in the brain do such beings exist, except perhaps for bacteria, which infest every nook and cranny of your brain and the rest of your body. Bacteria aside, the reason I speak fancifully of little creatures in the brain is that relying on this metaphor provides a fun, friendly way to think about thinking itself.
¹

I first discovered the usefulness of this way of contemplating cognition in the mid-1970s, when I was making the transition from graduate school to my first job as a research psychologist. At the time, I read a textbook featuring charming pictures of functional demons (
Figure 1
).
²
These little beings fawned over their favorite inputs. One loved vertical lines. Another obsessed over oblique angles. Another coveted curves. These creatures, or the functional mechanisms to which they referred, were hypothesized to underlie visual pattern recognition. They shouted loudly when inputs conformed to their preferences. They were quieter when inputs did not pertain to their penchants.

According to the model, demons favoring the features of the capital letter A—horizontal lines, right-facing oblique lines, and left-facing oblique lines—yelled when those features were presented. Higher-level demons were subsequently emboldened by news that their favorite configuration had appeared. As a result, a letter was recognized—the capital letter A—and not some other letter or object.

FIGURE 1.
Cartoon of the Pandemonium model of pattern recognition.

From LINDSAY.
Human Information Processing
, 2E. © 1977 South-Western, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission.
www.cengage.com/permissions

The model instantiated by these little fellows was called
Pandemonium
.
³
I found the model and its depiction charming. The model helped me think about cognitive processes more clearly than I had before, and to the extent that I still found science a little scary at that point in my career, I found it reassuring that some scientists believed, as I did then and still do now, that science can be pursued in a way that is fun rather than fearsome.

Pandemonium is, by definition, anarchic. Even so, such a seemingly disorganized system can afford surprisingly coherent, rational decisions. This is a reason why I use the jungle metaphor throughout this book.
⁴
If I thought anarchy afforded nothing in the way of cognitive control, I wouldn’t offer it as a useful model of the brain. On the other hand, seeing that seeming disorganization (or minimal organization) can lead to coherent, rational choices makes this an attractive option for understanding cognition. If intelligence can be explained without invoking intelligent design, that can be very satisfying.