The Evolution of Imagination 9780226225333

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THE E VO L U T I O N OF I M AG I NAT I O N

THE E VO L U T I O N OF I M AG I NAT I O N

S T E P H E N T. A S M A THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by Stephen T. Asma All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17  1 2 3 4 5 IS B N-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­22516-­6 (cloth) IS B N-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­22533-­3 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226225333.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Asma, Stephen T., author. Title: The evolution of imagination / Stephen T. Asma. Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016056665| ISBN 9780226225166 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226225333 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Imagination. Classification: LCC BF408 .A83 2017 | DDC 153.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056665 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI /NI SO Z 39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Julian

: CONTENTS :

INTRODUCTION 

1

ONE : THE SECOND UNIVERSE 

15

Counting Off Some Crucial Ingredients The Captain or the Muse? Metaphysical Imagination A Second Universe Philosophical Missteps You Are an Expert Improviser

T W O : T H E C R E AT I V E B O D Y  

Give the Drummer Some Thinking with Your Body The Simulation System Hot Cognition and Heuristics

15 17 26 28 39 45 47

55 55 56 63 69

I Feel, Therefore I Improvise The Most Playful Ape The Caveman Thespian Emotional Intelligence and Improvisation

73 82 84 86

T H R E E : D R A W I N G , D R E A M I N G , A N D V I S U A L I M P R O V I S AT I O N  

91

The Roots and the Walking Bass Caveman Picassos Images, Dreams, and Proto-­Consciousness Pictorial Mind and Creative Thinking Voluntary Imagination

F O U R : S P I N N I N G T H E YA R N : C R E AT I N G W I T H L A N G U A G E  

Playing the Head How Did Language Evolve? Storytelling Apes Take It to the Bridge! Improvisation as Helpful Deviance Tuning a Theory

F I V E : B L O W I N G A W AY T H E S E L F : C R E AT I V I T Y A N D C O N T R O L  

Solo Time Evolution of the First-­Person Perspective Where Is the Self ?

91 93 103 111 117

131 131 134 147 155 160

177 177 180 187

Zen, Flow, and Brain Systems Finding Your Way Back

S I X : T H E P O L I T I C S O F I M A G I N AT I O N : T R A D I N G F O U R S  

The Cultures of Creating and Copying Ethics and the Moral Imagination Improvisation, Dogmatism, and the Future of Freedom

Acknowledgments 273 Notes 277 Index 307

197 211

229 231 244 261

INTRODUCTION

Consider Miles Davis stepping up to the microphone and sculpting a powerful musical statement—complete with furtive tonal secrets, inside jokes, and blasting climactic summits—all composed in real time over a hard-­swinging rhythm section. Now consider a hip-­hop freestyle rapper performing an unrehearsed verse, and each word takes him dangerously closer to the inevitable closing rhyme—his options for a coherent finish dwindle even while he builds his final sentence. Or consider a comedy improv team—like The Second City—taking a few cues from an audience and collectively riffing it into a coherent story punctuated by belly laughs and irony. Now envision a team of digital engineers doing some “outside the box” brainstorming, as they work to invent a new app. Or slow it down and we find the Darwins and Einsteins of science testing and trying fresh theoretical solutions to the nagging mysteries of nature. The shared element in these diverse activities is the enigmatic engine of human creativity, the improvising imagination. Human culture itself is impossible without the imagination, and yet we know very little about

2 : INTRODUCTION

I.1. Trumpet player Miles Davis (1926–1991) is considered one of the great improvisers of several jazz traditions, including cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.

it. Why does a story evoke a whole world inside us? How are we able to rehearse a skill or an event in our mind’s eye? How does creativity go beyond experience to make something altogether new? And how does the moral imagination help us improvise our way toward a more ethical society? Artists often consider the imagination their unique provenance, but the imagination drives everything from engineering, marketing, cosmology, economics, and ethics. Aristotle described the imagination as a faculty in humans (and most other animals) that produces, stores, and recalls the images used in a variety of cognitive and volitional activities. Even our sleep is energized by the dreams of our involuntary imagination. Immanuel Kant saw the imagination as a synthesizer of sensibility and understanding. Freud saw it as a release system for antisocial desires. And recent neuroimaging reveals that a prefrontal and temporal lobe circuit enables us to pro­ject ourselves into different times and places—the imagination is our inner time-­traveler. We live in a world that is only partly happening. We also live in co-­ present simultaneous worlds made up of “almosts” or “what ifs” and

INTRODUCTION : 3

“maybes.” At the moment that I’m failing at some task, for example, I’m simultaneously running a success scenario of my actions, and this imaginary reality is creating real emotions inside me. Or I see this open grassy field here, but also see (through imagination) my future home that will be built on this empty plot. Imagination is the possibility maker. It is the home of hope and regret. What is the relationship between improvisation and imagination? The issue is fraught with ambiguity. The philosophical and the artistic traditions have considered the imagination as a mental faculty that mediates between the particulars of the senses (e.g., luminous blue colors) and the universals of our conceptual understanding (e.g., the judgment that Marc Chagall’s blue America Windows is beautiful or sunrises are beautiful). Philosophers (from Aristotle through Kant, and beyond) have focused on the

I.2. Hip-­hop artists often “battle” each other with freestyle rap techniques. The artists take turns delivering spoken poetry that has not been rehearsed, and often incorporate spontaneous commentary on the opponent’s appearance and skill level (not to mention the dubious character of their respective mothers).

4 : INTRODUCTION

unique forms of judgment that arise from imagination. But I will argue (respectfully) that this tradition over-­intellectualizes the imagination. The philosophers characterize imagination as a kind of cognition rather than embodied action. This common mistake demotes the imagination to a kind of weak knowledge—making it derivative or secondary to “real knowledge.” From Aristotle to the present, philosophers and scientists have tended to think of real knowledge as a process of seeing through the particular cases to the universal rules or laws that govern them. This search for formal properties ignores sensual particulars in favor of conceptual universals. For example, we see that this man has a snub nose, this other man is bald, this man is young, this one old, this one hungry, this one tall, et cetera, but eventually we see past all this to recognize their shared defining features: they are all rational, featherless bipeds. The common defining features are the real objects of knowledge, according to this long-­standing tradition. Against this universalizing approach, the imagination stays close to particular sensual impressions—the snub nose and the baldness of the men are more relevant (e.g., the hunchback is not subtractable from Quasi­modo of Notre-­Dame). Often the imagination adds many traits rather than subtracting them, as in the case of flying pigs, talking animals, and composite hybrid creatures like mermaids, griffins, and even gods like the Hindu Ganesh. The imagination is interested in the particular. If imagination captures a universal—and it frequently does—it is emotional rather than conceptual, as when a theatrical tragedy (rich with particular detail) captures a universal aspect of grief or love. I will draw upon the philosophers when their ideas about the imagination are relevant, but my interests are closer to the common layperson’s use of “imagination” as a creative power. Creativity must be broadly understood as an intellectual, artistic, and even bodily form of investigation and expression. Improvisation, in my account, will be the main activity, method, or operation of the imaginative faculty. Improvisation, more accurately, is not just what the imagination does, but is the adaptive meeting place between the organism and the environment. The improvising imagination draws on internal resources (i.e., thoughts, feelings, behaviors) and environmental resources (i.e., this tool, this pigment, this rock) in service of various end goals. As we will learn, the rapid activity of real-­time prob-

INTRODUCTION : 5

lem solving is where improvisation shines, but a common cognitive architecture underlies the slower, cool-­headed forms of imaginative planning as well. Improvising a can opener and designing one take place in two different timescales, but both processes draw on similar mind-­body equipment. It is rare for imagination to engage in free-­play synthesis with no purpose whatsoever. We like to think of imaginative improvisation as completely unfettered, but it rarely is. And if it were, it would be more like uninteresting noise. As spontaneous creativity inevitably becomes more bounded by specific goals (e.g., technology, procreation, play, catharsis, prediction), it comes under greater executive control. My team riffs and brainstorms ideas, for example, but those riffs are channeled toward the different goals depending on whether my team is a corporate group, a scientific research team, a TV drama’s writers, or a baseball team. We break improvisation into conventional taxonomies or headings, like humanities or fine arts or sciences, but the “mechanics” or processes of the underlying creativity share many common features. The activity of improvising furnishes us with a fresh model for grasping how the imagination works, and one that does not fall victim to the overly intellectual approach. The intellectual or overly “cognitive” approach to the mind considers thinking as a kind of internal talking. The inner conversation of our thought is bound by language structures and functions—our thinking is a rapid blather of propositions. According to this dominant cognitivist view, imagining and other forms of thinking are ways of bringing together representations (like memories and concepts) into novel combinations, governed by linguistic grammar. But I will argue that the imagination is not information processing. The binary logic of computation, so effective in artificial intelligence (AI), is the wrong starting place for understanding the imagination. It’s not wrong because we should all be “mysterians” about the mind and ascribe to it supernatural miraculous powers. It’s wrong because an algorithmic approach fails to grasp the emotional and bodily basis of imagination. We should think of “imagining”—the verb form, rather than imagination as a mental faculty. In this way we’ll see greater connection between improvisation and imagination. Ultimately, however, these relatively unconscious processes have been hidden from any direct examination and only glimpsed obliquely or inferred from their finished creative products.

6 : INTRODUCTION

Thinking of the imagination as a process is more consistent with brain science as well. There is no imagination organ buried in the neuro­ anatomical structures of the brain. Several candidates for location have come and gone, most popular of which is the idea that the right hemisphere houses imagination. But data suggest no clear localization of creativity, and the most that can be said with confidence is that communication between brain regions is very high in imaginative people. The brain activity during the creative process is widely scattered, and we will learn that imaginative improvisation draws on many systems (e.g., motor, imagery, language, emotions, etc.). Using other philosophical traditions (e.g., phenomenology, pragmatism, biosemantics, etc.) and recent scientific research (e.g., Ap Dijksterhuis’s Unconscious Lab, affective neuroscience, etc.), I will argue that improvisation (spontaneous creation) is the fundamental process that underlies downstream achievements of both scientific and artistic imagination. Moreover, the improvising imagination has more access to knowledge (more epistemic power) than most modern philosophers, scientists, and even artists have been willing to consider. We are always engaged in mental improv, but the stakes seem low because most of us are not doing it onstage in front of an audience. And while high-­risk, onstage improvisation brings unique emotional and cognitive ingredients, we are all in dangerous territory whenever we strike out toward new intellectual and social terrain. The danger is, of course, also the attraction. Playing a jazz solo or a cadenza seems like high-­stakes improvisation, but try parenting, marrying, soldiering, or feeling your way around a new religion. Real life is also high-­stakes improvisation. In this book, I will take care to explore archetypical cases of human improvisation—general intelligence processes that probably came online before the Upper Paleolithic (before 50,000 years ago), but remain with us today in culturally transformed processes, including music, social interaction, storytelling, religion, and technology. These examples will help to clarify the complex relationships between improvisation and imagination, and hopefully give us a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved primate minds.1 The improvising imagination is one of the little-­explored phenomena that uniquely unify the humanities and biology. In it, we find the cre-

INTRODUCTION : 7

ativity that first emerged in our adaptive innovations (e.g., technological and social advancements), our involuntary free-­play compositions of dreaming, our adaptive mythologies, and our highest human artistic achievements. It is common for some evolutionary psychologists to reduce the mind to a set of computations (domain-­specific problem-­solving circuits) and pro­ject them into the Pleistocene era. Our mind, according to this modular approach, is a series of specific circuits or modules that evolved to solve specific problems—for example, avoiding poisonous plants is a mind circuit, detecting people who cheat is a mind circuit, finding a fertile mate is a mind circuit, and so on. However, this view of highly specialized circuits is heavily contested. Our improvising skills and our imaginative powers, for example, almost certainly grow out of general intelligence capabilities, not specific modules. Indeed, our improvising mind is the very opposite of a hardwired module or circuit, because it cannot be dedicated to one or two functions and seems available to all manner of problem-­solving experiments. Improvisation is the anti-­module. I will articulate sensible scenarios of early adaptive imagination, as corroborated in comparative primate studies, anthropology, childhood developmental psychology, and social psychology. But I will also give great weight to the unique semantics of culture and the humanities proper, all the while keeping track of the cognitive, social, and emotional prerequisites that evolved to get us here today. Humanities scholars have long argued that imagination allows us to enter the life and mind of another person or people, giving us the realization of common humanity, moral understanding, and tolerance.2 Our improvisations as a virtual other self require cognitive structures for projecting identity and difference, as well as emotional systems undergirding care and empathy. Philosophy will help articulate these faculties and functions. Moreover, beyond any evolutionary justification, aesthetics (as an autonomous discipline) reveals which kinds of stories work well or badly, which kinds of images and melodies move us or fail, and what makes an improvisation beautiful, ugly, or sublime. My approach will be pluralist, not reductionist. As a philosopher, part of my job is conceptual engineering—informed by the latest evolutionary science. Tracking the evolution of improvisation requires me to reverse-­engineer a contemporary skill into its ancestral parts and capacities. But I will try to validate

8 : INTRODUCTION

these findings with evidence from the life sciences and the humanities, and my claim is that many of these ancestral capacities are still available in our contemporary creative activities. Books about creativity have tended to fall into one of three genres. On the one hand, there have been the breathless and overreaching feel-­good paeans to famous entrepreneurs and successful CEO creatives. This kind of book is crammed with amusing but shallow factoids and over-­interpreted fMRI studies, all wrapped in a vaguely inspirational glaze. Next, we have the how-­to books that give artists a series of exercises to unblock their creative flow. These books are either therapeutic or instructive, or both, and seek to nurture the joy of our inner prodigy. The third genre is the impenetrable academic baffler, chock-­full of erudite and cryptic references to Foucault and the hegemonic phallocentric horizon of being, but otherwise devoid of illumination. This book, by contrast, will be a broadly philosophical exploration of the origins and meanings of human improvisation and creativity. Fans of those other books will hopefully find much of interest here too, but this project is more foundational. So, what is new and possibly groundbreaking in this book? Perhaps the most unique aspect is that I am reversing the traditional order of things, both logically and chronologically. Improvising did not emerge recently as some rarified elite employment of otherwise pedestrian symbols and behaviors. It was, instead, the driving force in our natural history. Our ancestors’ forms of communication were prelinguistic, embodied gestural modes that served social needs. These mimicry forms of communication presumably emerged from affective/emotional adaptations that were long under construction in mammals. Grooming, body language, motherese, gesture, play, and other learned nonlinguistic communication preceded the cognitive revolution that language instigated. But contemporary cognitive science and evolutionary psychology have failed to take the primate social niche, and even the body, seriously.3 I will be arguing that the manipulation (improvisation) of information-­ rich perceptions/memories/image schemas/bodily gestures is born out of our primate social, emotional needs. Our intellect is a product and servant of our social life, and the improvising imagination—our early intellect—gave us the behavioral/mental scaffolding to organize and manage

INTRODUCTION : 9

our experience long before words and concepts. The improvising imagination typifies the flexibility of human mind, but the dates and the proximate triggers of such flexibility remain somewhat obscured in prehistory. Following anthropologist Steven Mithen, I argue that a crucial feature of Homo sapiens’ mind is “cognitive fluidity.”4 This fluidity breaks down the dedicated brain circuitry that ties one action response to one stimulus. Our minds become less machine-­like because we can entertain counterfactual images and enlist alternative responses. Most evolutionary psychologists claim that the cause of this cognitive fluidity was the development of language (in the late Pleistocene), because language provides an obvious syntactical/grammatical system for manipulating representations. This system seemed to be the perfect girder network for expanding the inner head space of flexible cognition. But more recently, Mithen has argued that another system—namely, music—coevolved in parallel with language and gave pre-­sapiens similar ways of projecting possible futures. My argument takes this insight one step further, suggesting that, more than just music per se, a suite of creative abilities—dance, image, music, gesture, et cetera, which are more proximate to the body than language—built an inner space and behavioral space of options that freed Homo from the more deterministic patterns of other hominids. These creative improvisation skills emerged from earlier mammalian habits that manage resource exploitation and social cohesion, and they were emotionally (affectively) driven (i.e., habits like grooming and play fighting). Play, for example, would be selected for because it allows mammals to take threats (and dominance) off-­line and rehearse for them in safe environments. And such proto-­imagination play is done largely through the body, without much cognitive motivation or even understanding. From such lowly origins, a discernible thread can be traced all the way to Einstein’s reputed claim that “play is the highest form of research.”5 Some scholars have pursued the embodied metaphorical structures within language itself, and their work is important evidence that meaning is rooted in the body (not the head).6 But I am more interested in exploring the evolutionary period before explicit language, as well as our contemporary access to that prelinguistic mode of meaning. I’m trying to explore the phase of mind above purely behaviorist stimulus-­and-­response, but below linguistic metaphors and propositional meaning. This histori-

10 : INTRODUCTION

cal moment (probably initiated during the early Pleistocene, circa 2 million years ago) is replicated or recapitulated, I believe, in the processes of our contemporary improvisational activities. The improvising musician, dancer, athlete, or engineer is drawing directly on the prelinguistic reservoir or meaningful communication. A music improviser or even a backpacker traveling in an exotic land without knowing the local language has to tap into that ancient call-­and-­response logic of body language and emotional expression in order to navigate properly. We try this move and watch for a response, try that move and watch. We dodge and parry this incoming gesture, accept that one. Flying by the seat of our pants, in these cases, is not just some analogy to prelinguistic communication—it is the thing itself. This may well be the most controversial aspect of the book—that we might all have regular access to the ancestral mind. My thesis is that we have some direct access, albeit murky, to prelinguistic Homo intelligence, and this subjective experience can be intersected with the scientific methodologies of anthropology and evolutionary psychology. My job will be to expose the reader to some of this fascinating new research in the human sciences and reveal the connections with our own imaginative experiences. Trying to infer whether Neanderthals were cognitively modern from evidence of their ancient funerals is a worthy research program, but I want to augment such approaches with a systematic introspection of our own nonlinguistic consciousness. There is nothing spooky or mystical about this approach. I will be trying to articulate the dynamics of our embodied improvisational activities. My approach is part of a growing research movement that seeks to ground meaning (biosemantics) in the embodied interaction of social primates. As great apes, we humans almost certainly engaged in the kind of subtle, antiphonal, body-­language communication that we see throughout all social primates. Primate psychologists, like Louise Barrett, for example, are starting to track the malleable interaction networks that build up slowly in the course of development, giving primates the proximate lexicon of signifying gestures that will ultimately serve the bigger functions of dominance and submission, mating, alliance, food sharing, provisioning, and so on.7 My argument is that we, too, operate in these embodied gestural systems of meaning much more than we usually acknowledge. The reigning paradigm in both the humanities and the sci-

INTRODUCTION : 11

ences is that meaning is linguistically grounded—propositional, inferential, and largely indicative. My argument is that this level of meaning rides on top of a deeper and older level—bodily, associational, and largely imperative (normative). Art making is a realm that actually demonstrates these deeper lexicons of social communication. Jazz is a great case study of this realm of meaning, but it is just a token of a capacious type of adaptive human mind. Collective art making, especially in real time, manifests call-­and-­ response meaning, but even solitary imaginative improvisation (the painter or writer) internalizes the social interaction within the practitioner.8 In some cases, the improviser is “talking to herself ” (generalizing a social other) as she composes an artwork—and while such work is more linguistic (propositional and representational), many art-­making scenarios entail an inner “conversation” that is much more image based, impressionistic, embodied, and even liminally unconscious. Call-­and-­response is one of the oldest improvisational techniques, as is synchronization of our melodies and our body movements (like in dance). These are ancient procedures for cementing communities, captured in performances that express emotion and draw out emotion. Such techniques allow us to explore open-­ended options at the fringes of social and technological rules. Eventually such socially constrained exploration evolves into more and more off-­line experimentation, growing into forms of thinking with images, with sounds, with gestures. Our primate cousins have impressive abilities (grounded in the cerebellum) for sequencing motor activities—they have a kind of grammar for processing inedible plants into edible food, for example. This is a level of problem solving that seeks order (and “banks” successes and failures) between the body and the ecological potentials. I will argue that this kind of motor sequencing is the first level of improvisational grammar. Following this foundation, another level of image-­schema manipulation— like mental rotation and eventually image narrative—piggybacks upon body grammar. And finally, only much later, did we start thinking with linguistic symbols. Computational theories of mind may resonate with our late Pleistocene linguistic thinking, but not with our earlier image cognition. We encode and manipulate image schema and gestural schema, and thereby form the basis of subsequent metaphorical meaning. I suspect that it is

12 : INTRODUCTION

this thinking with images, sounds, and gestures that kicks off the cognitive fluidity marking our psychological modernity. As Eric Kandel puts it in his Age of Insight, “Perhaps in human evolution the ability to express ourselves in art—in pictorial language—preceded the ability to express ourselves in spoken language. As a corollary, perhaps the processes in the brain that are important for art were once universal but were replaced as the universal capability for language evolved.”9 I submit that the pictorial and gestural languages are still with us, and when we quiet our discursive consciousness long enough—like in improvisational activities—we can still converse in these more ancient tongues. Besides the biophilosophy approach, this book draws upon my learning in both Western and Eastern wisdom traditions, and promises to be a cross-­cultural investigation. I have had the good fortune to live, study, and teach in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and China. I have significant experience in the Western educational paradigm that treasures innovation and imagination, as well as a Chinese paradigm that prizes structure and mastery of time-­worn rules and precedents. These contrasting civilizations are in a contemporary conversation about the value of the improvising imagination for future education. So, in addition to the evolutionary origins, we will also look at the possible future of improvisation as an engine of cultural success. I’ve taught creative young people at a fine and performing arts college for twenty years, and I’ve researched creativity for decades and road-­ tested ideas in my classrooms. But more importantly, I’ve been a professional jazz/blues musician for twenty-­five years, having the privilege of playing all around the country with some of my heroes—including Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, B.B. King, and countless other great musicians. I’ve also worked as a professional illustrator, designing books, magazine articles, and websites. These experiences give me an insider’s perspective on improvisation and help guide my exploration of both the inspiration and craft of creativity. I’ve chosen to weave the entire book with the story of a specific jazz performance. The quintessential American form of improvisation, jazz, is a perfect paradigm—organized, flexible, adaptive, emotional, logical, and occasionally chaotic. The Evolution of Imagination is a jam session in six

INTRODUCTION : 13

chapters. But don’t worry if your jazz or musical vocabulary is not up to speed. I’m more concerned with the dynamics below the surface of any one example of improv. The jazz description will focus more on the social experimentalism of group performance and not music theory per se. Most of what we’ll find at work in a swinging jazz combo can just as easily be found in a pickup basketball game, product development team meeting, political diplomacy session, or tribal hunting party. Each chapter will trade between two dominant melody lines: our real-­ time, in-­the-­moment uses of improvisation, and the origin and evolution of those imaginative powers. It will be an ontogenetic (individual development) and phylogenetic (species development) concert. How do we meaningfully dance today, for example, and how did the practice evolve in the first place? How do we use storytelling today, for example, and how did storytelling itself originate? How do I improvise in my daily life today, and how did improvisational thinking itself evolve in our a­ ncestors?

“I asked, ‘Do you have an electric dermatome?’” she recounted, hoping to use the surgical instrument commonly used in the United States to produce uniformly thin slices of skin for grafting. “They said, ‘Yes,’ and handed me a 12-­inch-­long knife.” D O C TO R S W I T H O U T B O R D E R S S U R G E O N S H E R RY W R E N , I M P R O V I S I N G W H I L E T R E AT I N G A N E M E R G E N C Y PAT I E N T I N C H A D , A F R I C A

What we did . . . you couldn’t ever write down for an orchestra to play. That’s why I didn’t write it all out, not because I didn’t know what I wanted; I knew that what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. The session was about improvisation, and that’s what makes jazz so fabulous. Anytime the weather changes it’s going to change your whole attitude about something, and so a musician will play differently. . . . A musician’s attitude is the music he plays. M I L E S D AV I S

: ONE :

THE SECOND UNIVERSE

COUNTING OFF

The upright bass player asks the pianist for an E. The note rings out amidst the clinking highball glasses and the audience murmurs. He winds his tuning peg slowly to find where the pitch warble unifies into an even tone. The tenor sax player wants to hear a C note, honks briefly, and then adjusts his mouthpiece until the note trues. The drummer downs a shot of whiskey and throws the lever on his snare drum. He feels the weight of the sticks in his hands and considers switching to brushes instead. He decides to wait, wondering what the first tune will be, hoping it’ll be an up-­tempo song and not a ballad. The pianist rolls up his sleeves and cycles through some minor chords, realizing the middle octave F# key is sharp. He winces and resolves to work with it anyway. No choice. Meanwhile the guitar player adjusts his amplifier, tweaking the treble dial and checking it against the idiosyncratic acoustics of the room. The musicians are working through an ancient ritual of collective

16 : CHAPTER ONE

music making, adjusting their specific instruments and getting them in harmony with the others. Also, they are readying their bodies: limbering the right muscles, stretching the tension out of some, and tightening others, cracking knuckles, clearing throats, and tuning their eyes and ears to each other and the room of spectators. In short, the human imagination is slowly assembling its ingredients before improvisational combustion. The piano player waves his hand and everybody leans in. “Let’s play the old Van Heusen tune ‘Imagination.’” Heads nod; the tenor player smiles. “But don’t play it like the Ella ballad. Let’s speed up and swing it—” “Wait,” the bassist interjects. “I don’t think I know the bridge on that one.” “Don’t worry,” the guitar player says. “Just follow me—you’ll get it.” “One, and two, and three, and . . .” : : :

We’re off. Something as simple as a count-­off is deeply complex when we consider the cognitive and even bodily anticipation required to communicate and then create a melody and rhythm. The musician creates a one-­measure virtual reality of what’s coming, and everyone has to feel it together to embark on the real-­world version that audiences can enjoy. The count-­off is an imaginative act that produces the future—it starts actualizing one groove from the myriad potential interpretations of the jazz standard “Imagination.” The ability to “get ready, set, go” is unique to higher animals. It allows us to prepare and create what’s coming next, rather than just responding to stimuli. Predators excel at the metaphorical count-­off because it helps them anticipate and catch what’s coming or going. Long before the count-­ off was a mental preparation, it was a bodily preparation—getting our muscles and limbs ready, our heart racing, our game face on. The earliest form of imagination, in the embodied mind, is anticipation. Now imagine you’re on a Pleistocene hunting foray with your little band of Homo erectus tribesmen. Anticipation is crucial. The ability to throw a projectile and hit a moving target is an astounding piece of adaptive calculation—a crude first step of imaginative prediction. Throwing a projectile requires anatomical evolution (expansion of the waist, and a more twistable humerus) but also new cognitive/perceptual skills. The

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  17

hunter needs to simulate internally what the prey animal might do next. Other non-­human animals make such predictions, but they do not hunt with well-­aimed projectiles. And perhaps most importantly, all this cooperative action and predictive skill requires some kind of apprenticeship. My readiness potential has to be directed and educated. Our ancestors survived because an early imaginative culture helped improvise and transmit cooperative hunting and gathering. Did the hunting party improvise their way to dinner by conceptually modeling the environment and drawing logical inferences about where the wildebeest or buffalo will be next? If so, they would have needed mental concepts and inferential logic to manipulate them. Or did they feel their way to each successive move by some simpler experiential technique—following a bodily rehearsed series of motor sequences? These sorts of questions will become paramount as we track the capacity for improvisation. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We first need to consider some fundamental properties of the improvising imagination.

SOME CRUCIAL INGREDIENTS

Improvisation is found in so many varied activities that it is difficult to isolate the essential or defining characteristics. We often know it, when we see it, but strict definitions rule out some good candidate activities. Too narrow a focus on MacGyver- or Rube Goldberg–­type engineering may rule out certain features of musical improvisation, and vice versa. But if the definition is too broad, then everything becomes improvisation and we don’t gain insight into the crucial elements. At the risk of missing certain contours of the phenomenon, I’ll propose some key features of improvisation—with the Wittgensteinian caveat that such practices have a family resemblance to each other rather than a definite dictionary agreement. Many of these key features are so intimately related to one another, they cannot be entirely teased apart. Spontaneity is a key feature. Improvisers are seemingly artless and natural, generating their work from within themselves. There is a notable freedom of process that produces novel responses to a situation in real time. Planning may be an implicit phase, but not particularly overt. Without spontaneity, the moves become predictable and the activity is rote rather than dynamic. In art, a lack of spontaneity creates artworks that are

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stilted and mannered. Similarly, in social interaction, spontaneity saves us from overly scripted communication and robotic body language. Relaxing our expectations about formal rules of engagement often allows for a more authentic unrehearsed expression of feeling and a more receptive read of others’ expressions. Intuitive. The meaning of intuition is arguable, of course. The history of modern philosophy and theology has tended to contrast intuitive experience or intuitive knowledge as that which does not first enter through the five senses (the gateways of empirical knowledge). For that reason, it is sometimes characterized poetically as a sixth sense, as it delivers a knowledge state inside the subject without the usual perceptual mediation. But this view, favored by mystics of all stripes, can be contrasted with a more mundane (and scientific) approach to intuition. This more naturalistic use of “intuitive” describes the very subtle systems of animal awareness, mostly unconscious, that we all possess, such as body-­position awareness (proprioception), personal space (proxemics), and arousal states that trigger instincts like fight or flight. They are physiological responses to environment, rooted in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Improvisers draw upon this reservoir as they act. Adaptive. Improvisation that has no direction whatsoever will hold some interest for us later, but such aimless riffing (even the free associations of surrealism) eventually seek to fit (adapt) an organism to an environment, a structure to a function, a part to a whole. Even the most wandering free play of thought or gesture can be an exploration of the potential in a given material or scenario. Improvisation is often a research mechanism or method of adapting means to ends. In the 1920s, psychologists demonstrated how chimpanzees could stack boxes together and build poles to reach food.1 Since then we’ve had countless studies revealing the engineering improvisations of primates and other mammals. Of course, humans are masters of repurposing materials to new functions— turning reading glasses into fire starters, dental floss into fishing line, and duct tape into everything else. The improviser’s survival may not be at stake in all these cases of adaptation, but we can appreciate that good improv improves the organism or has that potential. Resource deficiency is often a key feature of improvisation. The perfectly provisioned kitchen or toolshed has an implement for every eventuality. Perusing posh shopping magazines introduces one to devices like the

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  19

Grillbot Automatic Grill Cleaner robot and the Rosle Egg Cracker tool as well as the Parmesan cheese gouger. In this exclusive world, there is a preset tool and solution for every problem, but this is not the domain of the improviser. The improviser does not have the optimal resources needed for a given problem. And this paucity of resources is the very condition of creativity because it forces a kind of lateral thinking. From the survivalist who conquers the jungle with just the contents of his pockets, to the urban entrepreneur who entertains crowds of tourists with a bucket instead of a drum kit, the improvisers are usually short on supplies. Various “junkyard war” competitions help students learn about design and engineering, by posing objectives (e.g., make a floating vessel) and then presenting them with suboptimal construction materials. Such challenges reveal the social aspects of improvisation, but also the paradox of resource deficiency. The worse off the materials appear to be, the more creative the competitors must become. Natural or self-­imposed disciplines. Chuck Jones (1912–2002) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest animators, giving us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Wile E. Coyote, to name just a few. As an imaginative improviser, working with the freest medium, he could make animals float in the air, fly through walls, and walk away from devastating injuries. In addition to great character development, his cartoons are captivating because he carefully constructed world rules or “disciplines” that he and the artists strictly obeyed in the creation of the stories. A few of his disciplines for the Road Runner and Coyote cartoons are listed in his book Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist: “1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going ‘beep beep.’ 2. No outside force can harm the Coyote—only his ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. 3. The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. . . . 6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the Southwest American desert.” And so on.2 The creativity of the practitioner must be bounded by real or imaginary physics or rules that give consistency and predictability even to the most fantastical scenarios. The audience enters into these disciplines consciously or unconsciously and accords their expectations. This aspect— agreed-­upon conventions—crosses many domains and media (e.g., musical genres have indigenous scales for improvisation). Even the most iconoclastic improvisational departures are in a relationship, albeit rebel-

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1.1. It is common for jazz musicians to schedule gigs in front of audiences and then refuse to rehearse ahead of time. This will force them to bring their most skillful and responsive selves to the performance, and challenge the other players to do the same.

lious, with the conventional disciplines or rules. The disciplines keep improvisation from being nonsense. Emergency or high-­stakes conditions. Of course, many improvisations are successful under the low-­pressure, no-­stress conditions of leisure. Many musicians will successfully explore entirely new territory on their instruments when the audience is sparse and undistinguished, and many engineers will improvise their best work when the boss is no longer looking over their shoulder. But most accomplished improvisers recognize that they “up their game” when the stakes are high. Improvisers are not afraid of vulnerability, or at least they overcome their fear and regularly put themselves in vulnerable situations. It is common for jazz musicians, for example, to schedule gigs in front of audiences and then refuse to rehearse ahead of time. This will force them to bring their most skillful and responsive selves to the performance and challenge the other players to do the same. A little desperation and anxiety go a long way to focus the mind and the players in any collective project. And the no-­rehearsal model also ensures that the performance will be a unique one-­of-­a-­kind event, reflecting a cultural apotheosis (and possibly spiritual celebration) of the very moment of improvisation.

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  21

This last point brings us quite naturally to another important feature: improvisation is simultaneously performative and compositional. Whether it’s building a house, a sermon, or a pop song, most projects entail a separate composition and performance phase. But improvisation combines these two phases. This is clear to see in things like jazz and comedy improvisation, where the practitioner is simultaneously expressing some idea or gesture and fitting it into a larger compositional framework (i.e., the solo inside a song, the riff inside the comedy sketch). One performs in a Janus-­ faced mode, looking inward to the next move and outward to the accruing arrangement. And, importantly, the composition is finished at every moment, because the improviser cannot stop to do things over again. Unlike in a recording studio or on an architect’s drafting table, the improviser cannot erase. The phrases we try, as improvisers, cannot be taken back, and they go out into the social world as public gestures. Trying new things in improvisation is not a practice or rehearsal for performance, but the thing itself. Thankfully, there is a high tolerance in improvising communities for “warts” and “wrong turns.” If we switch from a jazz combo example to a hunting party, then we see that tolerance must have its limits too. A member of the hunting party who is always trying new hunting maneuvers can be an ineffective and possibly dangerous teammate. Much is made in anthropology literature about the freeloader problem, which is the challenge of dealing with a self-­interested parasite member who won’t carry his weight in a cooperative venture like hunting. But cooperative ventures need protection from the “overly creative” too. In this context, we can see the vital importance of reliable clichés in improvisation. A good improviser has an arsenal of ready-­made options to introduce into an immediate activity. Hunters have a division of labor, of course, but as individuals and as groups, they also have a series of reliable tricks to flush out, track, and kill prey. The improviser uses his clichés as scaffolding for subsequent deviations and novel moves, but introducing the right clichés at the right time is also an artful part of improvisation. The great musicians have signature riff and phrase preferences. The comedian has her go-­to impersonations and prefabricated jokes. The athlete has her automatic patterns of forehand here and drop shot there. The improviser must both develop meaningful clichés (for storage) and unpack or discharge them meaningfully (i.e., the right clichés at the right time). Some of this reliance on clichés or prefabbed formulae is necessary

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because it’s not possible to create spontaneously all the time. Moreover, improvisation is usually a social interaction, and formulaic moves allow others to make smart predictions about your movements—a crucial aspect of cooperative projects like hunting, music making, and even religious ritual. From all of the above, we can already see that improvisation is functionally promiscuous or unlimited. It’s a skill set that operates in any domain. It’s a way of doing things rather than a specific body of information. As an end in itself, improvisation has all the pleasures and satisfactions of any intrinsic delight. The improvised comedy skit needs no utilitarian grounding to help us enjoy and appreciate it. But improvisation is also a means, and as such it can take up with almost any teleological goal. Improvisation is the engine of trial-­and-­error learning. Like Darwinian evolution itself—comprised of chance mutation and natural selection—improvisation often tries or proposes a “solution,” and then the environment selects for or against it. Improvisation is an unsystematic generate-­and-­test method for getting maximum grip on one’s situation. My strange bait caught the fish, for example, so I learn. My joke got no laugh, so I learn. My improvised blade cannot cut this hide, so I learn. My offering to the gods was rejected, so I learn. Out of these trial-­and-­error experiences, domain-­specific patterns and rules emerge, but improvisation doesn’t deduce its solutions so much as fumbles toward them. And, save for certain problems that require exact precision (e.g., certain mathematical ones), the art of fumbling can solve many mammalian survival challenges. Improvisation is rule governed in many cases, but casually so. It is a flexible practice that sees rules as elastic. Improv is serviceable rather than optimal, imprecise rather than exact, flexible rather than rigid. If I’m playing with a pianist who plays an A-­minor chord, then I can play a solo in a pentatonic scale for a bluesy flavor, and I can throw in a Dorian modal phrase for darker shades and a natural minor or Aeolian mode, but I cannot do much with a C# note unless I’m deliberately flaunting the rules for dissonant purposes (and that might be fine too). The point is that the improvisational maneuvers already exist within a system of received conventions, but the constraint is usually gentle. Flint knapping had conventions that governed its practice for hundreds of thousands of years, and they were tight enough to ensure success but loose enough to admit

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  23

maverick maneuvers and even virtuoso innovations. The Mozart of flint knapping must have broken many rules, but was also presumably recognized as a positive force rather than a mere rule breaker. One common form of improvisation is the mixing, or hybridizing, of frames. Pastiche can be seen as a major player in the improvising imagination. Once the person grasps the relevant rule systems or genre conventions (the “frames”), she can create novel meaning by mixing those usually separate systems. The great cellist Yo-­Yo Ma will regularly drop phrases from a country-­and-­western genre into a classical improvisation, or a Bach convention into a Chinese folk song, and so on. But larger genre mash-­ups have also dominated the pastiche artworks of the postmodern era, wherein crime noir frames (dominant in the 1940s) are blended with science fiction narratives (e.g., Blade Runner, The Matrix), or rock and opera are melded into unprecedented configurations (e.g., Tommy, The Wall, American Idiot). Two or more well-­entrenched frames can be fused to create a fruitful new platform for further experimentation. Architects mix classical and modernist frames together to produce strange new facades and structures like the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, and ballistics innovators mix grenade technology with rifle technology to produce novel weapons like the M203. Within this broader tradition of pastiche, we might recognize a sub-­ branch of humor that often colors improvisation. Putting a blues riff in a polka tune or quoting Shakespeare in a comic strip can be extremely funny, in part because the juxtaposition is so unexpected. In improvisational music, the performer is often creating something for two audiences—the cognoscenti (the other musicians) and the hoi polloi (the general public). Humorous frame bending and mixing often arise as players try to surprise each other, as well as the larger audience. Of course, there is little humor or irony in high-­stakes survival improvisation, but in many other forms of experimentation, we find a self-­reflexive awareness (a knowing wink) of the process itself. In addition to all of the above, the improviser is emotionally or affectively charged. Affect is a more physiologically oriented way of describing emotions, and we need to recognize that improvisation is steeped in moods, passions, and subjectively felt motivations. Common speech sometimes uses “affect” to describe a person’s expression of emotion, but the more accurate scientific meaning is different. An affect is a specific

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bodily change that can give rise to a conscious feeling but need not. My emotion of anger, for example, is a subjective psychological experience that I can report, but it rests upon a specific physiochemical change in the brain and body (i.e., catecholamine neurotransmitters are released and produce a burst of energy, heart rate and breathing increase, blood pressure rises, hormones like adrenaline spike, the amygdala becomes very active, and so on). Affect, then, is a way of describing this somewhat impersonal physical process at the root of our felt emotion. Each primary emotion—like fear, lust, anger, and so on—has a specific brain-­body pathway of chemical change that precedes or simultaneously constitutes our conscious emotion. In many cases we can use the words “emotion” and “affect” interchangeably, but occasionally it will be helpful to recognize the formal difference. The improviser is goaded or energized by an emotion of seeking or wanting, and he is driven by the all too familiar feeling of desire—having an “itch” that he is desperate to “scratch.”3 Desire is motivational, but many negative affects (e.g., performance anxiety, nervousness) also accompany the starting phases of improvisation and must be dealt with by the practitioner. The affective systems that push improvisers at the beginning of their experimentation are joined by other emotional systems later in the process. As I try new moves, I read the effects of those moves, and my assessment of feedback (from the material or social environment) is emotional, bodily, intuitive. Often the speed of improvisation itself makes slower, deliberative, cognitive appraisal of feedback impossible, and the improviser must rely on real-­time gut reactions. In addition to the affectively charged origins and in-­process phases of improv, we would be remiss to ignore the exultations and miseries of the completion phase. Successfully completing an improvisation is a kind of emotional ecstasy that many people will recognize. One doesn’t need to be a performer to feel the sense of triumph that accompanies any successful project of flying by the seat of your pants. Effectively navigating a Beijing grocery store, for example, when you only know a handful of Chinese words can be a true joy. And, of course, creating a powerful musical solo or proposing a winning idea in a business brainstorm session can get a person high for days. Contrariwise, the failures are charged with powerful negative affects as well.

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  25

Lastly, I want to begin an articulation—often returned to in this book—of the prerequisite imaginative faculties behind improvisation. Improvisation requires some basic aspects of the mammal operating system, like perception and emotional or affective circuitry. But we also need short-­term and long-­term memory storage and fast retrieval. We need classical and operant conditioning or associational systems. We need some kind of representational system that can take images, events, and ideas off-­line (decoupled from immediate experience) and manipulate them for novel results. We need social learning abilities that undergird skill acquisition like materials crafting, food processing, language, and even moral norms. Crucially, improvisation is not possible without some sort of human freedom, or way of discriminating and preferring some behavioral options over others. This means we need a specific kind of biopsychological operating system that makes such flexible maneuvers possible. Some animals cannot improvise. As philosopher Daniel Dennett noticed (and many cognitive scientists repeated), the Sphex wasp has very rigid, constrained behavioral options.4 When the wasp returns to its burrow with food for its grubs to feed on, it first leaves the food on the threshold and enters to check the burrow. Devious scientists experimented on Sphex behavior by repeatedly moving the food a few feet from the threshold whenever the wasp went inside the burrow. Each time the wasp exited the burrow, it went through the exact same behavior protocols—dropping the rediscovered food at the threshold again and entering the burrow. The scientists repeatedly moved the food (up to forty repetitions), but the Sphex never learned to simply bring the food into the burrow directly and remained trapped in a seemingly endless action loop. The creature follows its biological script with great fidelity, but it is not a good improviser. By comparison, humans are virtuoso improvisers, and I will try, in this book, to articulate the suite of biocultural powers that make such virtuosity possible. As I mentioned in the introduction, a few philosophers (notably Aristotle and Kant) have long recognized a faculty of imagination, but the parameters of its work and power have been narrowly circumscribed. I will broaden the notion by treating it as a mammalian set of aptitudes (comprised of bodily gestural lexicons, cognitive representational abilities, perceptual knowledge, the memory-­emotion complex, cultural

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mechanisms of informational and emotional management, and, finally, rational decision-­making powers). There will not be a specific “faculty” that houses all these powers, but rather a network of interconnecting systems. In this sense, my use of “faculty” is shorthand for a suite of affective and cognitive capacities that I will spell out as we proceed through the book. Unlike most philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, I’ll be arguing that the heavy lifting in human creativity is borne by the emotional brain (limbic system) rather than the rational brain (neocortex). The imaginative prerequisites that make us Homo sapiens rather than Sphex emerge out of our primate heritage.

T H E C A P TA I N O R T H E M U S E ?

The freedom problem (above) has produced a bogus model of imaginative improvisation—namely that there is a conductor, or captain (sometimes called “homunculus”), rationality inside me, and this captain does the decision making. The captain is an executive controller who winnows down the myriad options and commits us to a line of action. In writing a story, this model might make sense, because the author can slowly consider alternative scenarios for a plot or character and then rationally choose the best. In music improvisation, however, such a captain is presumably weighing all the note choices in the relevant scale and choosing the best note for a phrase. But the sheer speed of musical improvisation alone is enough to make us doubt the accuracy of this captain model, at least in regard to some creative activities. On the other hand, the mysterious loss of self that most improvising practitioners experience has produced a second dubious model—the muse model of supernatural possession. We’ve romanticized creativity so completely that we’ve ended up with an impenetrable mystery inside our heads. Following the Greeks, we still think of our own creativity as a muse that descends upon us—a kind of spirit possession or miraculous madness that flooded through Van Gogh and John Lennon, but only trickles in you and me. We may not literally believe in muse possession anymore, but we haven’t yet replaced this romantic view with a better one. After the great Texas guitar improviser Stevie Ray Vaughan died, Eric Clapton paid tribute by describing him as “an open channel . . . music just flowed

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  27

through him.” And when I worked as a blues musician in Chicago, playing with greats improvisers like Buddy Guy and B.B. King, I saw plenty of this “channeling” firsthand. It didn’t happen all the time or even most of the time, but when it did, it was something special. We recognize that creative activity decenters the ego. This gives us some skepticism about the agency involved in imaginative improvisation. Recently, the new science-­based mysterians (devotees of “the singularity” and other worshippers of transcendental wonder) have sounded almost theological in their claim that the cosmos is channeling through us, when we are in a hypnotic “flow” experience of sublime nature.5 What’s happening during this muse-­like loss of agency, however, is rarely explored. We tend to equate this loss of executive control (i.e., the “captain” jumps ship) with a pseudo-­religious ecstasy and give up any further analytical approach. But throughout this book, I will break with the creativity mystics and try to say something about the unsayable. When we are in this decentered muse state, for example, we are often engaged in a highly associative process—what William James might call the “stream of consciousness.” The imaginative faculty is proficient at image associations, for instance, but also the faculty is extremely adept at mixed-­media associations. When we imagine, we blend pictures and propositions, memories and real-­time experiences, sounds, stories, and feelings. The imagination is a multimedia processor that jumps laterally through connotations, rather than downward through logical inference. Much of this is unconscious, which is why the muse simile is so powerful, but this phase is followed by a reentry phase, where the free associations or stream of consciousness is brought back under executive control and integrated into the more focused projects of the person (i.e., the return of the “captain”). The captain and muse models are fairly unhelpful if taken alone, but we must recognize them as exaggerated aspects of creativity. Taken together, they give us two important phases of the imaginative process. Improvisation is a Janus-­faced phenomenon, and we will have to keep an eye on its two faces. In fact, it is probably a three-­faced deity (like a Buddhist Asura) because the reentry phase is not just a return to quotidian coherence, but a new development (having productively waded in the stream of consciousness).

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M E TA P H Y S I C A L I M A G I N AT I O N

We think of the imagination as powerful, and in chapter 6 we’ll consider its ability to shape the social world. But previous eras also believed that imaginative acts could transform physical matter directly. From the ancient alchemical doctrines of Hermes Trismegistus through the esoteric societies of the Renaissance and early modern period, the imagination was seen as a uniquely powerful tool for manipulating nature. The hermetic and gnostic traditions viewed the world as a series of isomorphic associations, with aspects of the human form (shape, ratios, humors, etc.) as microcosmic mirrors of the macrocosmic world. In the same way that Plato’s demiurge gave shape and form to the physical universe (Timaeus), our imagination acted as a god within—able to create worlds of meaning and even causal changes in the physical world. Paracelsus (1493–1541) called the imagination the “inner star,” aiming not at fantasy but at the Platonic Ideas (eide). A common belief among the pagan alchemists was that the trained imagination could capture the departing soul of a person, transform that soul into a good force (a pseudo-­deity) or bad (demon), and then replant the soul into a statue or icon image (thereby giving the spirit a new body). In this state—as a magical artwork—the icon, if benevolent, could be appealed to for help with health problems, or, if demonic, for help with vengeance against enemies.6 A less magical tradition of imagination still conceived it as having direct causal force in the world. More than just a mirror of experience and inventor of fantasy, the imagination had a mechanical aspect too. More than just a mental faculty, the imagination had intimate causal connection with the whole body. If you weren’t careful with your imagination, you could harm yourself and others. Before the rise of scientific embryology and sophisticated developmental biology, we did not fully understand the causal relationships between a parent’s mind/body and their offspring’s mind/body. Truth be told, we still don’t know a lot, and the recent field of epigenetics suggests that there is much still to learn. Nonetheless, we feel justified in thinking of the imagination as a purely psychological “mixer” of previously received perceptions, and these inner mash-­ups have no physical effects beyond the brain of the imaginer. Through most of history, however, and even in contemporary cultures, people have seen the imagination as

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  29

a metaphysical force. If I imagine disturbing things, for example, will my baby be harmed or even distorted? Such a metaphysical imagination is more reasonable before the clear split between subjective and objective experience, brought about by modern philosophy and science (e.g., Descartes, Galileo, Kant, and so on). Without a clear boundary between subjective and objective experience, a fantastical experience of supernatural creatures could be easily read as a supersensory encounter or discovery of reality, albeit weird and rare (e.g., spiritual intuitions of the divine realm). Our tendency is to read such an experience as strictly subjective and psychological, but that is a recent tendency. If an inner mash-­up of forms and feelings could be an encounter with the real, then it’s a small step for some to believe that such mash-­ups also cause real physical changes in the world (either by some action at a distance or some subtle matter mechanism). And it was not just mystics who entertained this possibility. As recently as Darwin’s day, scientists debated this very question. An 1865 letter to Darwin begins, “I have today come across a very remarkable case of animal monstrosity with the particulars of which you will I think be interested.” George Maw, a Shropshire tile maker and amateur botanist, had sent the letter.7 Maw relates a recent pig birth at the local inn, in which a sow gave birth to ten normal piglets and one deformed creature resembling a little elephant. The monstrous offspring possessed a distinct trunk-­like proboscis and the ears and mouth of an elephant. The creature was born alive but the mother smothered it, and the local pharmacist pickled it in a jar of spirits. Maw’s letter to Darwin asks advice. Does Mr. Darwin think it is interesting enough for scientific analysis? Should Mr. Maw purchase the monstrosity and bring it to the Hunterian collection in the Royal College of Surgeons in London? Maw has investigated the case thoroughly and eagerly shares a tentative theory about the genesis of the elephant pig. A day or two after the sow was impregnated, he explains, a traveling menagerie passed through town and one of the elephants tried to attack the sow. She was terror-­stricken by the experience, and Maw suggests that this trauma distorted the embryonic pig gestating within her. The frightening impression of the aggressive elephant traveled through the imagination of the sow and imprinted a disfiguration upon the forming matter in utero. The theory of monstrous maternal impression was widespread from

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the pre-­Renaissance through the nineteenth century. It was often employed to account for organic distortions in human as well as animal embryology. One is reminded of Joseph Merrick, “the Elephant Man,” who claimed that his own unfortunate condition was the result of his pregnant mother being frightened by a dangerous elephant in 1859. In his autobiographical pamphlet, Merrick says, “I first saw the light on the 5th of August, 1860, I was born in Lee Street, Wharf Street, Leicester. The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the elephant’s feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy.”8 As superstitious and pernicious as this view of disability seems to us now, it was progress compared with the earlier theological view that abnormalities were punishments sent by God for sins of the parents. Russian czar Peter the Great (1672–1725) celebrated all things monstrous and freakish in his early museum collections, and in some of his official proclamations he prohibited the killing of deformed children and requested that local officials send the “marvels” to his St. Petersburg museum. Obsessed with breeding giants and dwarfs, Peter looked more deeply into the science of teratology, the immediate mechanisms of deformation and variation. In one of his proclamations, he states: Ignoramuses think that such monsters are born from the action of the devil, which is, however, impossible for there is only one creator of all creation, and that is God. And the Evil One has no power over any living creatures. For monsters are the result of internal damage, of fear and the thoughts of the mother during her pregnancy, of which fact there are many examples. For example, when the mother is frightened, hurt or injured in any way the child will be influenced.9

A hundred years before Peter’s psychologizing of monster embryology, the French surgeon and scholar Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) also emphasized the role of the mother’s imagination in teratology. Paré started “rescuing” monsters from the melodramatic arena of spiritual and moral meaning, but failed to effect a complete revolution in monsterology and toggled between the highly superstitious and scientific. He certainly

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  31

paved the way for future medical scientists to study birth anomalies. Paré’s book On Monsters and Marvels took a relatively empirical approach to monsters, preferring the collection and dissection of oddities rather than simply hearsay natural history. Paré listed thirteen established causes of monster births, including naturalistic causes like too much or too little seed, but also supernatural causes like “God’s wrath.”10 Number five on his list was the imagination. Paré describes a sad story of a girl whose body was “perfect and well-­ proportioned” save the fact that she had two heads. She lived for over twenty-­five years, “which is not natural for monsters, who ordinarily live scarcely any length of time at all because they grow displeased and melancholy at seeing themselves so repugnant to everyone, so that their life is brief.” This rare moment of recognition—acknowledgment of the inner psychology and subjectivity of the monster—is abandoned quickly and the pariah status is underscored in the rest of Paré’s story. “This girl,” he continues, “went begging from door to door for her livelihood, and people gladly gave to her on account of the novelty of such a strange and such a new spectacle. Nevertheless, she was at last driven out of the Duchy of Bavaria because she could spoil the fruit of the pregnant women by the apprehension and ideas which might remain in their imaginative faculty, over the form of this so monstrous a creature. It is not good that monsters should live among us.” Paré follows his ancient predecessors (i.e., Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Empedocles) in upholding a theory about the role of the mother’s imagination at the moment of conception and in early gestation. If a woman in coitus is exposed to some frightening, disturbing, or just strong imagery (either through the senses or memory), then her offspring may be impressed upon by the offending image. Paré accepts the reality of a physiological process—one that begins as a disturbing sense impression and ends with a distorted fetus. He offers a few cases to illustrate his point, some of which strain his own credulity while others seem quite credible to him. Undermining his own embryonic empiricism, he cites the authorities of old. He tells of Queen Persina of Ethiopia, who together with the black King Hidustes mysteriously produced a white baby “because of the appearance of the beautiful Andromeda that she summoned up in her imagination, for she had a painting of her before her eyes during embraces from which she became pregnant.” Likewise we are told of another

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girl who was born as furry as a bear. Her unfortunate state was a result of her mother “having looked too intensely at the image of Saint John [the Baptist] dressed in skins, along with his [own] body hair and beard, which picture was attached to the foot of her bed while she was conceiving.” A more contemporary example is offered in Paré’s story of a baby born in 1517 France with the face of a frog. When asked what the cause of this monster might be, the father of the child explained that his wife had been ill with a fever and had taken the curative advice of her friend. The friend offered a folk cure, saying that the wife should carry around a frog in her hand until the frog died—at which point she would be cured of the fever. “That night she went to bed with her husband, still having said frog in her hand; her husband and she embraced and she conceived; and by the power of her imagination, this monster had thus been produced.” From these cases, Paré, the medical man, offers some advice. It is important, he says, that women “should not be forced to look at or imagine monstrous things” at the time of conception or during the early formation of the child. But once the formation of the child is complete, no images or imaginings will have a detrimental effect upon the offspring. Paré is drawing upon an ancient tradition that started in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and found full force in the writings of Albertus Magnus (c. 1193–1280).11 This tradition explains conception and development as the impression of male “substantial form” (contained in semen) onto the menstrual blood or matter (contributed by the mother). This is in keeping with Aristotelian and later Scholastic metaphysics of hylomorphism. Forms become instantiated in matter, and this makes one animal different from another (our species definitions are meant to capture these different substantial forms). But the mind itself is, according to Aristotle, the “form of forms.” The mind receives the forms of the natural world, not the matter (there’s no room in my mind for the material world). My mind takes in a form of a tree (and manipulates it as a representation), not the tree itself. The imagination is the receiver and manipulator of these forms, and it must be pliant enough to receive the impression, but durable enough to hold the forms. From Aristotle to Albertus Magnus, it was thought that the imagination of women was more susceptible to unhealthy impression because the female mind was more moist. Excessive moisture made the imaginative faculty easily corrupted with frightening external images and inner ideations. This impressionability put the fetus at risk of malforma-

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  33

tion. Inner humidity “explained” certain kinds of monstrosity, but also the fickleness of females, who get impressed easily but lose focus because the mental substrate cannot hold the information properly. These sorts of causal explanations may seem ridiculous to us, but they represent a naturalistic turn in the sense that they opened up possible research avenues. There may not have been a discoverable physiological mechanism that transmits disturbing sense impressions to the conceptus, but at least Paré didn’t just throw up his hands and say “the devil did it.” Invoking the imagination also indicates some sense of psychological effects; psychology can lead to very concrete manifestations (e.g., a deeply troubled woman can result in a miscarriage). In this respect, Paré seems to foreshadow psychosomatic theories that flourished during Freud’s generation and beyond. French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) continued the exploration into metaphysical imagination, trying to bridge the dualism divide of mind and matter. The bond between mother and unborn child is the strongest that exists for humans: And although their soul be separated from their mother’s, their body is not at all detached from hers, and we should therefore conclude that they have the same sensations and passions, i.e., that exactly the same thoughts are excited in their souls upon the occasion of the motions produced in her body. Thus, children see what their mothers see, hear the same cries, receive the same impressions from objects, and are aroused by the same passions.12

Malebranche illustrates the point with a recent specimen that “all of Paris has been able to see as well as me, since it was preserved for a considerable time in alcohol.” A woman had been looking too intensely at a portrait of St. Pius and gave birth to a baby that resembled perfectly the face of the saint. The baby had the face of an old man, and even his forehead was shrunken due to the foreshortened angle of the portrait. When a mother desires a pear too much, according to Malebranche, the pear shape (object of desire) will actually re-­form in the extremely soft flesh of the embryo—distorting the body. The mother is spared this transformation because her body is no longer as soft and impressionable. Women are more impressionable than men, but less than babies.13 From Aristotle, through Ambroise Paré, to Peter the Great, the imagi-

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nation played an important role in the naturalized tradition of pathological ontogenesis. Things began to change, however, in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. But breaking with such historical inertia was difficult. Mary Shelley’s friend Professor William Lawrence (1783–1867) was an early scientific martyr in the demystification of pathology, especially the metaphysical imagination. Shelley apparently added the moralizing anti-­materialist tone to Frank­ enstein in later editions because she feared the same condemnation that her friend William Lawrence received. He had been suspended from the Royal College of Surgeons because of the radical materialism contained in his controversial book Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1819). Fearing that her own book might be withdrawn, Mary Shelley tempered her original 1818 edition.14 Lawrence, however, paid a great service to embryology and laid to rest many popular misconceptions about monsters. Regarding the theory that a mother’s imagination can corrupt the fetus, he asked: What sort of mechanical process could operate from the mother’s imagination down to the womb, where it would then have to destroy the normally developing head and reconstruct a new monkey head or frog head or whatever? Furthermore, he stated, we have extensive evidence that women can suffer serious disorders (e.g., diseases, amputations, etc.) with no ill effect on the fetus, so frights and imaginings seem far too weak for fetal reconstruction.15 When George Maw wrote his 1865 letter about the elephant-­pig monster, Darwin’s response came quickly—and it provides us with insight into late nineteenth-­century embryology and changing ideas about imagination. Darwin had toured the many monsters of the Hunterian collection in London, but he was convinced, after reading Étienne Geoffroy and Isidore Geoffroy, that monsters were developmental glitches.16 They were not “messages” or signs from the beyond, nor were they preformed in the germ. Instead, they were caused by environment. This environmental developmental view of monsters left open the question: Did the mother’s imagination absorb and translate some shock to the piglet (perhaps via pangenesis), or did common mechanical causes distort the fetus because of environmental flux? The answer is in the rarity or regularity of such occurrences. In his response to George Maw, Darwin doesn’t rule out the imagination thesis entirely, but he refers to Isidore Geoffroy’s

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work. Darwin writes, “The monstrosity of a proboscis-­like prolongation of the snout occurs much more frequently as stated by Isidore Geoffroy than with any other animal; and therefore I presume is not rare.” A pig trunk is, in fact, a common aberration and correlates with developmental patterns of craniofacial formation. Similar developmental glitches can be seen when the forward-­most part of the brain (prosencephalon) fails to properly divide the eye orbits into two cavities and Cyclops anomalies occur. The pig trunk is a common teratology defect. Darwin says that he “must believe that the coincidence of the visit of the elephant and the birth of the monster was a simple accident.” Increasingly, monsters came to be seen as the result of pliable developmental causes, but the pliability was not like the radical folk version of maternal imagination. It wasn’t the lack of an imagination-­sculpting mechanism that doomed the theory of metaphysical imagination. After all, the nineteenth century lacked knowledge of other crucial mechanisms too, such as the mammalian egg and the genetic DNA unit of heredity, but science still held out for both. The metaphysical imagination just slowly died in scientific culture from a lack of significant correlations between mothers’ imaginations and teratology cases. The connection was too anecdotal. Setting scientific culture aside, however, folk belief in “imagination distortion” remains alive and well. When my Chinese wife was pregnant with our son, I was regularly told (by my in-­laws and other Chinese relatives) that I should keep my wife calm and away from disturbing imagery. This advice was offered by highly educated urban professional Chinese, not uneducated rural villagers.17 In southern India, pregnant women are cautioned against looking upon temple decorations of lion figures or disturbing deities. “If she does,” ethnographer Edgar Thurston says, “the tradition is that she will give birth to a monster.” Thurston writes, “Some Hindus in Madras believe that it would be unlucky for a newly-­married couple to visit the museum, as their offspring would be deformed as the result of the mother having gazed on the skeletons and stuffed animals.”18 More recently, the Ethnicity and Disability Fact Book, updated regularly by the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association of New South Wales, reminds us that many people around the world still believe that disabilities can be “caught” like a contagion by encountering other dis-

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abled people or frightening events. “The idea that disabilities can be caught is quite common across the world. This results mostly in actions to protect pregnant women from seeing, hearing or touching people with disability or even their technical aids.” In addition, disabilities are frequently blamed on “perception negligence” of the mother. “In the Philippines,” the Fact Book explains, “a woman gave birth to a baby who was unable to move his limbs. Her explanation of her son’s disability was that she had worked in view of a statue of a national hero during her pregnancy and must have caught the ‘stiffness of the limbs.’ ”19 In Ghana, women must not look at blood or monkeys or disturbing carvings. In Jamaica, mothers are advised against seeing a human or animal corpse. The same is advised by North American Indians, and Nigerian mothers are told to make sure that no ugly people walk behind them. Sami mothers in Lapland are to avoid conversations about deformity and avoid witnessing reindeer calving.20 All this superstition is easy to dismiss, and we’re tempted to write off the maternal impression thesis as retrograde magical thinking. But as usual, these folkways contain deeper truths. We will not, I suspect, find any mechanism that translates bad thoughts or disturbing perceptions into monstrous babies, but we now accept the more general mechanisms by which maternal stress negatively impacts offspring. Stressed mothers release high levels of cortisol and adrenaline into their systems. Ordinarily these hormones are useful for fight-­or-­flight adaptive responses to threats, but if their levels stay too high for too long, they can damage the mother’s body and brain, and compromise the health of the child. Acute stress (like seeing something very disturbing) or chronic stress (like living in an unsafe environment) can bring unhealthy hormone levels into the baby’s system. These changes can alter brain development and corrupt blood flow in the fetus, reducing oxygen levels and negatively impacting organ integrity. Moreover, a stressed mother tends to eat and sleep poorly, and these are not optimal for the baby’s health. Perhaps a little superstition about maternal imagination and monsters helped generations of mothers and babies stay healthier. As we enter a new kind of epigenetic paradigm, we may have even more reason to celebrate the paranoid preventions of prenatal monsterology. “Epigenetic” formerly meant embryological development from simple to complex

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  37

structure (as opposed to preformation), but the term has a new meaning these days. “Epigenetic” has been resurrected by biologists recently to refer to the newly discovered layer of molecular triggers and switches that ride on top of our genetic code. The new epigenetics is rendering the old distinction between nature and nurture obsolete. It is also revealing how the mother’s prenatal uterine environment can “communicate” features of the outside world to the baby’s epigenome (switching system) and set new default traits that may last for multiple generations. For example, recent data from the “Dutch Hunger Winter” show an epigenetic switch for obesity. Nazis in 1944 Holland diverted food from the Netherlands to Germany. Longitudinal studies of the Dutch population have demonstrated that if a fetus was in its second or third trimester during this famine, the fetus “learned” that the environment was extremely poor in nutritional resources, so the brain/body adapted in utero by calibrating its physiology to aggressive conservation of incoming fat, sugar, and nutrition generally. The fetuses that were developing in this hostile uterine environment of the Dutch Hunger Winter automatically reprogrammed to store every bit of incoming calories. The result, many years later, was a high degree of obesity in the adults who were epigenetically changed during their fetal experiences. Lab testing on rodents has isolated the actual epigenetic switch for fat storage that can be turned on or off.21 The point of this, for our purposes, is that maternal experience can have shaping influences (beyond genetics) on the gestating offspring—both short- and long-­term influences. The developing fetus is unrolling a genetic program, but it is also a very plastic and impressionable system—open to real-­time changes in the mother’s experience. None of this is meant to suggest that maternal imagination can distort embryos and fetuses in the traditional metaphysical manner. Science has not confirmed earlier magical thinking, and it probably won’t. But it’s interesting that we’re more culturally sensitive than ever to the importance of “womb safety”—not only avoiding disturbances but also playing Mozart and Bach to the gravid belly. We’re reminded that chemistry emerged slowly out of alchemy, and evolution theory arose out of natural theology. Theories of maternal imagination reveal a complex dialogue between folk psychology, teratology, and medical embryology.22 These days, we’re not metaphysical about the imagination. Or at least

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we lengthen the causal chain between antecedent imaginings and physical changes in the world. We no longer think the imagination sculpts different kinds of bodies, but from Freud through to the present, we do think psychological images have long-­range impact on the well-­being of the imaginer and his community. Culture has always used the imagination as a tool for social cohesion and ethical norm enforcement—take another look, for example, at Christian paintings of hell. But consider that we are now living in a culture where some of the most sadistic torture movies can be downloaded by anyone with an Internet connection. With a very modest cable television package, for example, I recently watched (to my great regret) a handful of Hollywood films involving a zombie pushing a needle into a victim’s eye (slowly), followed by a relentless gang rape scene, topped off with a revenge sequence in which a man is tied to a tree with his eyelids hooked open by fishing tackle as crows pluck out his eyes. Am I psychologically improved by such images or diminished by them? The director of the splatter film Hostel, Eli Roth, has defended his sadistic films on what appear to be Freudian grounds. Interviewed frequently in the media, Roth argued that horror films tend to crop up more when the country is undergoing severe social stresses: the Vietnam era produced the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Last House on the Left, and others, while the post-­9/11 and Iraq War era also corresponds with an influx of violent horror films. Political correlations aside, Roth argues that human fear and anxiety are held in check during our day-­to-­day functioning, but sometimes we need to exorcise these troubling emotions. Horror films allow us the opportunity to scream and release anxiety in a cathartic manner.23 Horror films, according to Roth, have a therapeutic effect. “There are soldiers in Iraq,” Roth explains, “that write me and tell me that Hostel is one of the most popular movies in the military.” They love it. I wrote back and asked, “Why on earth would you watch Hostel after what you see in a day?” And he wrote back and said that he was out during the day with his friends and they saw somebody’s face get blown off, and then they watched the movie that night with about 400 people and they were all screaming. But when they’re on the battlefield, you have to be a machine. You can’t react emotionally. You have to tactically respond to a situation. And these guys are going out every day seeing this horrible stuff, and

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  39

they’re not allowed to be scared. But it all gets stored up, and it’s got to come out. And when they watch Hostel, it’s basically saying, for the next 90 minutes, not only are you allowed to be scared, you’re encouraged to be scared because it’s okay to be terrified.24

Roth does not explicitly intone Freud in his explanation, but that is only because the theory of the repressed and released Id has now attained the paradigm status of common sense. But if torture porn encourages a purging of anxieties, it certainly adds new previously unimaginable images of vulnerability to the audience’s experience. It remains to be seen whether or not the fears and anxieties that torture porn takes out of viewers by catharsis is superseded by the new fears it puts in.25 Some critics of sadistic imagination, including the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon, have claimed that torture porn debases its audience—taking away something from the people who have seen it.26 We’ll come back to the wider social and psychological implications in the last chapter of this book, but for now we need to introduce some of the cognitive architecture that underlies the stories we consume.

A SECOND UNIVERSE

Salvador Dalí met Sigmund Freud only once, in 1938, but the patriarch of the unconscious had already been shaping the artist’s dreams and paintings for decades. Dalí showed Freud his Metamorphosis of Narcissus—a nightmare of twisting and melting human flesh and musical instruments—as a demonstration of his devotion to Freud. Years before, in fact, Dalí—­ inspired by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—experimented by placing his unfinished paintings at the foot of his bed, so that he might take the imagery into the dream world. He would then “work” upon the imagery while asleep and return from reverie with useful souvenirs and solutions. Dalí was so dedicated to exploring the fertile liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness that he frequently took naps while holding a spoon over a metal mixing bowl, so he’d repeatedly startle awake to the clang of his drowsy spoon drop. For many of us, surrealism is a paradigm example of what we mean by imagination. Who shows us better the meaning of imagination than the weirdest, eccentric artists? But we’re actually misled about the na-

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ture of imagination if our paradigm cases are artists. Scientists, too, are highly adept with the mysterious imaginative faculty, employing it in many theoretical breakthroughs. Charles Darwin, for example, could not formulate the precise mechanism of evolution until he chanced to read an unrelated economics essay by Thomas Malthus. Human population growth, according to Malthus, is checked by resource limits—adapting population numbers (by famine and disease) to the changing contours of available food, land, and so on. Chance favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur noticed, and Darwin suddenly imagined Malthus’s economics principle applied to all of Nature herself. In this imaginative leap, the principle of natural selection was born. This appears to be an example of hybridizing frames, which was discussed above in the list of improvisational techniques. Crossing from one domain to another is a crucial feature of imaginative thinking. Einstein claimed that his mind engaged in a kind of “combinatory play” or “associative play” just before his breakthroughs. His logical analysis would follow after this synthesizing creative phase. Many mathematicians and scientists get their “aha moments” after they have relaxed their conscious pursuit of a solution. When the problem sinks down into the unconscious, it continues to have a life, as it were—a private life that consciousness is not privy too. Then, while she’s brushing her teeth or crossing the street, the scientist suddenly sees her solution. Einstein famously said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”27 A hagiography of imaginative artists and scientists will not reveal the most important and ignored aspect of our creative faculty—namely, its centrality to our mundane as well as our magical thinking. Philosophers call this ability to think of something that doesn’t exist “counterfactual” thinking. And the vast majority of our thinking is of this non-­real, counterfactual variety. When you lie in bed playing a revisionist version of the argument you had with your boss—a version where you make some genius and vindicating retort—you’re engaging in counterfactual thinking. When you pro­ject a series of possible outcomes before you go on a date or eat a cake or buy a house, you’re engaging in counterfactual thinking. As Harvard psychiatrist Arnold H. Modell puts it, our minds

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  41

have the ability to create “a second universe”—an internal environment of possibilities that exists concurrently with the stubborn physical world. Do other animals have this second universe? Do some children fail to develop imagination? Did early humans have it? These deep questions put the imagination at the center of the human mystery. But surprisingly there is very little philosophical writing or scientific research on the imagination, and what little that does exist treats imagination as peripheral (a sub-­branch of aesthetics). Contrary to our negligent tradition, the improvising imagination should probably be the paradigm of human thinking. Cognitive science has made great strides in the realm of computational information processing, but that stuff is not thinking. Computer programs simulate thought by channeling input data through logical syntax systems to arrive at outputs. This approach to cognition—artificial intelligence—produces great chess-­playing and Jeopardy!-­winning computers, but it doesn’t help us understand the more image-­based and embodied thinking of human beings. The imagination is more associational than computational—it links together ideas and images instead of deriving or inferring them. And yet the imagination is not a passive spectator of images and memories, for it also actively constructs new knowledge and new behavioral options. The representations in the mind’s eye are not just information data, like neutral photos, but have a fundamental emotional or affective component—at the very least, a representation comes painted with an “approach” or “avoid” feeling (positive or negative affect). We use the representations of the second universe (the virtual world) to rehearse for, predict, and re-­create the first universe (the actual natural world). Archaeologist Steven Mithen argues that our ancestors lacked some of our powers of imagination. The cave paintings and Venus sculptures of the Upper Paleolithic (50,000–10,000 years ago) are often taken as evidence of artistic imagination—a sparking period for the cultural conflagration to come. But Mithen points out that even the simple hand ax— which was flaked repeatedly to a biface symmetrical point—required our earlier ancestors Homo erectus to imagine an ideal form at the end of the knapping process. Some kind of counterfactual image—a remembered ax or a mental ideal, or something, must have guided the real-­time process. But while this early case of an emerging second universe (inside the

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1.2. The Venus of Willendorf is a four-­inch statuette, believed to be carved between 28,000–25,000 bce. Similar Upper Paleolithic statuettes have been discovered all over Europe.

Homo head) is interesting, archaeology suggests that their imaginations were rudimentary. Once fixed upon, hand-­ax industry stayed basically the same for over a million years and did not evolve into other adaptive tools like spear points, arrowheads, and stone knives. Mithen suggests that pre-­ sapiens humans lacked the more sophisticated imagination to innovate these useful new tools.28 The imagination comes online slowly, in fits and starts, over the course of human evolution. In fact, we might be engaging in some unjustified anthropomorphism (or sapiens-­morphism) when we think of Homo erectus flint knapping his way toward some mental ideal (even remembered prototype). Our modern brains might fix an ideal image in our mind’s eye and then chip our stone tool toward that teleological end, but this presupposes a very sophisticated second universe. Our ancestors more likely carried real prototype hand axes with them and knapped new stones to resemble the physical forms in front of their eyes and in their hands. The physical prototypes themselves may have slowly emerged, carried down through generations, after earlier discovery of useful, naturally occurring bi-­face stones. The art of stone tool creation was probably governed more by physical copying or mimicry, rather than by mental representation or ideational design.

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Our own second universe is very good at representing things that we’ve seen before. Homo sapiens remembered experiences and then replayed them and re-­created them with increasing executive cognitive control and purpose. Something dramatic happens when we move beyond a remembered image to an embellished image. The famous fertility carving Venus of Willendorf (25,000–28,000 bce), for example, has an unlikely obese body type for the time of its creation—more a work of the second universe, perhaps, than an accurate memory or perception. Presumably the artist employed imagination to expand the hips and breasts of the endomorphic bodies that he/she encountered in the real world. That kind of extrapolation and embellishment is more miraculous than it at first seems. It’s “miraculous” because it means that our head space can take in copies or representations of the outside world and then manipulate them inside the mind. Obviously, we can fit a representation of a hippo in our head, but not the hippo. We take in shape, color, sound, and so on, through perceptual equipment, but how does this get instantly stitched together into a coherent hippo (in real time), and how does it become a symbol (after the perception) for later cognitive manipulation? The Epicurean philosophers of ancient Greece were so mystified by mental representations, they formulated a charming theory that physical objects are always giving off atomic tissues or films of themselves—like the shedding of ghostly invisible skins—and these atomic films enter into our eyes and travel into the mental space. Happily, we understand perception much better these days, but our understanding of how representations form (bind together sense data), get stored, get re-­accessed, and get played with is not much better than the quaint Epicurean view. Neuroscientist John R. Smythies poses the relevant question, “How do the brain mechanisms actually construct the phenomenal object?”29 Neuroscience will certainly help us, over the next few decades, grasp some of the mechanics of our counterfactual second universe, but we’re just beginning the investigation. In the philosophical tradition, the term “representation” has a broad sense. It is an inner mental entity that has meaning via its correspondence with the external world or via its coherence within a context of other meaningful experiences (i.e., other representations, rules, schema, emotions, and so on). My representation of a “dog” stands in for real flesh-­ and-­blood mammals out in the world. The mental method for acquiring such an inner “dog” is still much-­disputed territory (from naïve realism

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1.3. An imaginary hippo in a tutu. Inspired by the 1940 Disney animation film Fantasia.

that sees the mind as a mirror of nature to social constructivism that sees culture as the creator of our inner conceptual categories, to all points in between). My own views about representations (What are they, and how do we get them?) will emerge naturally from the coming chapters, but it is enough now to acknowledge that our second universe is populated with thoughts, beliefs, concepts, images, and so on that have some level of intentionality. My inner image of a dog intends, refers to, or is “about” some four-­legged creature out in the world. But even my imaginative improvisations—Cerberus the three-­headed dog or Scooby-­Doo—have some intentionality too, in the sense that they refer to mental realities, possibilities, and traditions (housed both in the individual mind and the reservoir of culture). Our inner play of representations is remarkable partly because we have significant control over the process, and our distant ancestors probably didn’t. I can consider a hippo in my mind’s eye by calling up a memory from past experience, but I can also imagine it purple or ten times its natural size, or even dress it in a tutu and dance it through my Disneyesque mind space. That means that I have a lot of agency in the second universe—in fact, I have almost God-­like control there. But before we

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  45

evolved the ability to control the second universe, it probably had a rich life of its own and controlled us every night when we entered dream sleep. We’ll return to dreams in a subsequent chapter, but for now we must acknowledge the central problem of doing “archaeology” of the human mind. The current operating system of our minds is a bias generator, as we try to penetrate the ancestral mind (which had a different operating system). If I try, for example, to imagine what it was like to be a conscious being before language (either a Homo erectus man or a contemporary Homo sapiens baby), I run straight into the fact that my mind is already deeply structured by language. It is difficult to peek around the veil of language to see the prelinguistic operating system at work. Likewise, if I go out and try to flint knap a stone ax, I’ll try to remember images I’ve seen, try to hold them in my mind’s eye (even rotating and manipulating them), and work the stone toward that end. But this requires symbolic token/type thinking, sequential mental grammar, and executive intellectual management that almost certainly preclude our ancestors from flint knapping with the same methodology. Just as animal ethologists must avoid the tendency to pro­ject human rationality onto animals, we must be careful not to pro­ject contemporary forms of creativity (highly intellectual and culturally sophisticated) onto our earlier ancestors. My goal in this section has been to acknowledge the rich second universe of representations that we enjoy and to admit their importance for contemporary imaginative improvisation. It’s a reasonable place to start our investigation because we are more phenomenologically aware of our representations (more aware, anyway, than we are of the mind/ brain mechanisms that produce them). But now we need to bracket out this rich conceptual inner world (for a few chapters at least) and try to dig underneath it to find its evolutionary predecessors. So, we will come at the improvising mind obliquely for a few chapters, before returning to the more recognizable cultural manifestations of human imagination.

PHILOSOPHICAL MISSTEPS

I recognize that philosophers isolated some extremely important aspects of the imagination, but they also turned us in the wrong direction. Aristotle, in his De Anima, suggested that the imagination ( phantasia) is a middle faculty between our sense perceptions (colors, sounds, tastes,

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etc.) and our mind (the realm of concepts and judgments). Like sight, the imagined form has sensual properties and shares in some aspects of our embodiment. The imagination—which Aristotle says is “that in virtue of which an image occurs in us”—provides us pictures that have particular shapes, sizes, colors, and so on.30 But sense impressions are never really false, according to Aristotle. They are like raw data. When the drunk person perceives the walls moving, he truly perceives the walls moving. Imagination, however, joins perceptions to additional mental data and sometimes forms judgments. In this way it is more like mind (nous), which abstracts out particular sensual data and considers the universal defining features of a thing. Mind is a “form of forms”—able to ignore the material aspects of natural things and re­cord and process their formal aspects. Mind can run code versions of experience. Although there are many differences between Aristotle’s and Immanuel Kant’s philosophies, Kant seems to agree that the imagination is an unconscious synthesizing faculty that pulls together sense perceptions and binds them into coherent representations that have universal conceptual dimensions.31 I see this fluffy brown shape moving in the field and quickly judge it to be a rabbit—a creature that fits into a formal conceptual category (of the family Leporidae, inside another category Mammalia, inside the subphylum Vertebrata, etc., or the folk-­taxonomy equivalents). The imagination (an inscrutable black box) plays some role in subsuming particulars (percepts) under universals (concepts). According to philosophers, our image-­making faculty helps package our experience into manageable units that can be plugged into cognitive judgment faculties. These cognitive judgments are propositional, in the sense that they have subject/predicate attribution structure (“the rabbit is brown”) and the judgments are categorial (“this brown creature is a mammal”). But a little reflection will reveal the strangeness of this model. It is extremely rare to see a moving shape in a field and suddenly turn into Linnaeus, cataloging and classifying my experience into a cognitive system. We rarely engage with the world by explicitly categorizing it, using essentialist definitions. In rarefied endeavors, like science, we try to relate our experiences to abstract models and form judgments and predictions accordingly, but most of our imaginative work is well below that erudite level. Philosophers have “jumped the gun” and raced straight from perception to propositional conceptualization, missing the huge middle ground.

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  47

I recognize the rabbit more by automatically associating it with memory images, not subsuming the percepts under a formal abstract concept. I associate this brown creature to a prototype memory—a learned and stored master image of a rabbit—and this helps put the experience into an overall context of meaning. And I manage to judge the experience in many ways that are not like logical inferences. As soon as I recognize the rabbit, for example, I am affectively or emotionally drawn (“Oh, isn’t he cute?” Or in the case of the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “Isn’t he frightening!”). These positive and negative affective judgments are very tightly conjoined with our perceptions and slip into the psychological mix well ahead of the conceptual processing. The missing middle ground, which philosophers have ignored, is the truly interesting territory for us because it is the realm of evolutionary degrees. Before you have a modern eye, you need a simpler optical predecessor, and before that you need a responsive light-­sensitive tissue. Evolution scales up from the ground, so to speak. Evolution built a crude imaginative faculty before it refined it into a sophisticated one. The crude system (dominated by affects and perceptions) is still alive and well in the basement of our psychology. In the two chapters ahead, I will explore some of these underappreciated forms of imaginative and adaptive improvisation, namely: thinking with your body, and thinking with images.

YO U A R E A N E X P E RT I M P ROV I S E R

When I was in my twenties, I had the good fortune to play guitar as an opening act for blues legend B.B. King. This lucky break opened many doors for me, and I soon found myself playing with other legends like Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, and Bo Diddley. Whenever Bo Diddley came through Chicago, I was repeatedly hired to play guitar for him. These were hair-­raising gigs, because we never talked or rehearsed beforehand, and I never knew what was coming until he walked onstage during the actual performance. The first time he hired me, I spent hours the week before the gig rehearsing and reacquainting myself with Bo’s many hits. He arrived to the venue five minutes before showtime. When I first met him, as he walked onstage in front of five hundred shouting fans, I tried to tell him all the songs I had prepared. He just looked at me blankly— through his coke-­bottle glasses—plugged in his guitar, and launched into a loud rhythmic riff on his trademark square guitar. He never bothered

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to tell me what song we were playing, what chord changes were coming, what key we were in, or anything. But, as every blues and jazz musician knows, that’s how it goes. I was getting my improvisational education from some of the masters. But the apprenticeship was stressful. Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, and all the great blues bandleaders never told me what was coming next, because they didn’t know themselves. My job was to fumble and find the chord we were playing, which usually told me the key signature. Sometimes I could assume a certain chord progression and scale, but not always. Then I had to watch the bandleader like a hawk, for subtle cues of musical direction—this tilt of the guitar means I should solo, this slight bend of the knees means bring the dynamic volume down, this sudden jerk of the upper body means break, or stop. Once, while playing with the great but volatile Otis Rush, the band missed the cue and played one beat too many. He stopped, walked slowly over to us, as the audience looked on intensely, and said between clenched teeth, “When I tell you to stop, you muthafuckin’ STOP!” Improvising is simultaneously composing and performing, and doing it onstage in front of a large audience with an exacting and temperamental artist is high-­stakes creativity. There may even be a touch of masochism in it. But it is certainly spontaneous, and the great innovators, like Buddy Guy, have found a way to maximize the jeopardy and exhilaration. I played in the house band of Buddy Guy’s music club Legends throughout the 1990s. Together with a band called Howard and the White Boys, I toured the Midwest with Buddy, as he supported his album Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues. This led to many improvisational moments, as Buddy regularly jumped onstage to surprise us while we played. He enjoyed “cutting heads” (guitar dueling) with me, and we often engaged in spontaneous riff conversations, where he would play a two- or four-­ measure melody and I would try to copy it, augment it, or even best it, if possible. He taught me how to take my time and wait for the music to “come to me” rather than forcing it with too much strident effort. Buddy is such an improvisational musician that he often starts a song and after two verses feels moved to turn in a new direction, singing a completely different song for a couple verses, until the spirit moves him to switch again. This technique is maddening for the purist, because Buddy doesn’t finish what he started, but it’s also exciting and unique because no two performances are ever the same. Playing with such a genius

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  49

is a huge challenge, because songs change, key signatures change, tempos change at the drop of a hat, and everyone is at the immediate behest of the artist’s changing mood. None of this imaginative improvisation works, however, unless the musicians share a language of musical tools and norms. And some of these tools (scales, chords, etc.) and norms (conventions of dynamics, breaks, progressions, etc.) are learned on the job, so to speak. They are acquired in the process of the communication itself. A more open and attentive listener acquires more innovative and nuanced moves, and increases her lexicon of expressive gestures. And of course some pre-­learning and practice are also crucial for a successful and adaptive improvisational encounter. Music aside, the deeply improvisational nature of most verbal conversations reveals the balance and need for shared tools, norms, and processes. We can see some of the hidden tools and norms more clearly when we consider the imperfect rather than perfect case of conversation. Talking with a stranger in a tongue that is not your own, for example, is deeply humbling and imperfect, but also reveals the interplay of prepared tools and real-­time apprentice learning. The process is more associational than algorithmic. I have been learning to speak Mandarin for years, and foreign languages are not one of my natural aptitudes. As any second-­language learner knows, before one can really converse with a native speaker, there are many levels of intermediate proto-­conversation. You learn a language in part by first memorizing some stock phrases, and these become your go-­to clichés. As soon as a real-­world exchange goes off script, which is quickly, the beginner is lost. But the intermediate speaker can try to get things back on track with certain improvisational “bridges” that keep dialogue rolling. Sometimes in China, I would get into a brief conversation, and the topic would tilt toward food. In the midst of my intermediate proto-­ conversations, I would often fail to properly understand a question or comment, or I’d catch the tail end but not the full meaning. If I kept asking the person to repeat themselves, they would quickly give up and stop engaging in the conversation—in part because they could see we weren’t getting anywhere and also because they were embarrassed for me. An alternate move, however, was more adaptive. While still confused by a specific statement, one can reply with a state-

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1.4. Any traveler who gets off the beaten path unwittingly engages his finest improvising skills, even in a gentle haggling session.

ment that is at least vaguely connected to the topic at hand—stating it as if you are answering their question or comment. In most of these cases, the other person nods and keeps going with you. You’ve added something in between an appropriate response and a non sequitur. It’s a kind of pseudo-­sequitur. It is a bridging mechanism that gets you to the next bit of conversation that both parties understand. “Do you like Chinese food?” “Yes, I like it very much.” “Do you enjoy dumplings?” “No, I have not eaten yet today. I am very hungry.” “I see. Do you like tea?” “Yes, I like green tea very much.” In music and everyday conversation we achieve startling speeds of improvisation, and the stakes can be dramatic. But a truly high-­stakes form of improvisation can be found in medicine, where lives are actually hanging in the balance. Medical improv is a new form of training, in which theater improv techniques are used to train doctors, nurses, and first-­

THE SECOND UNIVERSE  :  51

responders to communicate and troubleshoot more effectively. Workshops are cropping up all around the country, and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine is a forerunner in the movement. Professors Katie Watson and Belinda Fu, at Northwestern and University of Washington, respectively, organize training sessions for health care providers and clinicians. “Improvisational theater skills have a surprising and substantial overlap with skills required of clinicians,” according to Watson and Fu. “Improv is a genre of performance art grounded in principles of spontaneity, adaptability, collaboration, and skilled listening.”32 We’re all familiar with the common improv exercise of “ask for”— wherein the improviser asks for a suggested place or character persona or situation from audience members. But many other improv exercises reveal the larger social and cognitive structures of rapid problem solving. For example, an often-­used exercise in improv is sometimes called “Advance and Expand.” In this exercise, a group of improvisers will be spontaneously creating a scene of one sort or another, and the instructor will shout out “advance,” requiring the players to focus their comments and gestures entirely on advancing the storyline of the scene. At another time, the instructor shouts out “expand” and the players must immediately explore the environment to find fresh resources or directions for the scene under construction. These discoveries can then be incorporated into advancing the storyline too. We will see in chapters 5 and 6 that cultural history and the mind itself toggle between these “advance and expand” tendencies. There are highly associational stream-­of-­consciousness states and more consolidated and centralized-­conscious states that work together in the improvisational imagination. But more on that later. A medical team, especially in emergency situations, needs to assess problems quickly, determine curative options, and mine the immediate environment for useful resources. Improv training can be helpful for such dramatic troubleshooting, but it also helps doctors with notorious communication challenges. When medical students in Northwestern’s medical improv course were asked to name some of the common complaints about doctors, they listed: “Doesn’t listen, arrogant, bad communication, makes you feel inferior, objectifying.”33 One of the cardinal rules of improv training, however, is to respond to others with the modus operandi of “yes, and . . .” rather than “No.” When someone proposes an unfamiliar or strange idea, the improviser does not immediately shut it down

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because it is unfamiliar or inconsistent with her assumptions, but rather explores the idea. Practicing this “yes, and . . .” communication style can help health care providers overcome some of the common complaints and also aid in proper diagnosis and treatment. “ ‘Improv’ is not synonymous with ‘comedy,’ ” explain Watson and Fu, “but the fundamental principles of improv (spontaneity and honesty) can naturally lead to humor. That’s what makes medical improv ‘serious play’—the method is fun, but the goals are serious.”34 Like medicine, business schools have recently begun to incorporate improvisational training in their management and executive curriculum. Robert Kulhan has been improvising on stages for many years, and he also teaches improv skills at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, in North Carolina. “Improvisation,” Kulhan explains, “isn’t about comedy, it’s about reacting—being focused and present in the moment at a very high level.”35 Lakshmi Balachandra, at MIT Sloan School of Management, teaches Improvisational Leadership and also lectures for advanced negotiation students at Harvard Business School. Before working in venture capital and finance, Balachandra was an improvisational comic and found those skills to be crucial in her business career. Improvisation, according to Balachandra, helps people think on their feet and react very quickly to unexpected changes that are impossible to plan for. “It applies to leadership and it applies to negotiation, where you never have control over what happens. Negotiation is a dynamic process—you have to be able to think on your feet and adapt,” Balachandra explains. In business training, the improvisational approach helps leaders suspend their judgment, increasing the likelihood and effectiveness of creative brainstorming. This is the same modus operandi of “yes, and . . .” Music, medicine, business, and everyday conversation are just a few of the diverse domains that reveal a common underlying cognitive structure. You, dear reader, should recognize yourself in some of these activities. You may not be a jazz musician or a field surgeon, but you are an expert improviser in some domain—conversation, cooking, parallel parking, parenting, or small business management. In the coming chapters, we will explore the underlying cognitive, emotional, and social structure of your improvisational expertise.

Gospel music was mostly improvisation within a fixed framework and it never occurred to me to analyze it. Gospel was part of church, which was part of life, and you don’t sit around wondering exactly how it is you walk, or breathe, or do any other everyday thing. Even so, gospel taught me about improvisation, how to shape music in response to an audience and then how to shape the mood of the audience in response to my music. When I played I could take a congregation where I wanted—calm them down or lift them up until they became completely in the music and atmosphere. NINA SIMONE

: TWO :

T H E C R E AT I V E B O D Y

GIVE THE DRUMMER SOME

While the melodic players of our jazz combo work out the intricacies of the “head” and expand into solos, the rhythm section holds it all together. After the sax player and pianist have finished their cathartic solos, it’s common to give the drummer a stretch. After the turnaround, everyone hits the first chord of the A section and drops out, letting the drums percolate on their own. Every eight bars or so the guitarist strums a chord, letting everyone in the audience “hear” (imagine) the invisible tune that continues, even though no one is playing. No one except the drummer, that is. But set the drum solo aside for now and think about the main job of the rhythm section. Jazz player Cecil McBee describes the aesthetics of rhythm as a wave, and, as he explains, “you understand that particular pulse, where emphasis is placed on two and four. . . . The moment you pick up the instrument and put it into motion you’re suppose[d] to feel that, and then the other things kind of ride the wave.”1 As ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson points out, this emphasis on the off-­beats has a well-­

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known ability to inspire listeners into rhythmic participation. “An entire room of people clapping on 2 and 4 in a gospel service, for example, has the power to motivate all but the most resistant to clap along.”2 : : :

In this chapter, the rhythmic drums are a metaphor for the human body. The parallel is obvious since rhythm makes the body move automatically, and it requires more body movement to produce it properly. In the same way that music appreciation can overemphasize melody, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology can overemphasize computation and concepts. The reigning theorists of mind, still dazzled by the computer metaphor, tend to reduce mind to procedural or algorithmic calculation. But exploring the imagination—part sensory, emotional, as well as rational—is a great route for getting back to the body. To properly understand the evolution of mind requires us to grapple with the embodied mind. The imagination is not just a head game, but shows how our bodily emotional systems (like fear, rage, care, joy, and so on) are organized and managed. We often think of imagination as a free play of disembodied ideas, but it also helps us train our bodily feelings and behaviors. This chapter will draw on emotional neuroscience and recent embodied cognition theory. We’ll look at the way imagination cycles through the emotional brain (limbic system), the memory system, and the motor system. And all of these systems interact with the rational brain (neocortical deliberation system). Underneath the cognitive realm, humans have a much older simulation system—built up from sensory-­motor mimicry and associational learning. The mind is not a computer, and the drummer is not a drum machine. Artificial intelligence (AI) can impersonate thinking, but improvisation fastens our computation abilities to the value-­laden (and feeling-­laden) goals of the body.

T H I N K I N G W I T H YO U R B O DY

Philosophers of mind and linguists have noticed that many of our abstract concepts and words are based on bodily experiences.3 Of course, our particular judgments are strongly influenced by sensual experiences of color, texture, and temperature. But, more radically, our everyday metaphors— such as “she’s cold as ice,” or “this really moves me,” or “rough night,” or

T H E C R E AT I V E B O D Y   :   5 7

“do you grasp the idea?” and so on—all use the body as a source of meaning. Cognitive scientist Mark Yates places this in evolutionary context, pointing out that our ancestors’ brains were devoted to processing/translating perceptual information into motor behavior. “So it makes sense that higher cognition, which evolved from these brains, should integrate with the perceptual and motor systems.”4 Most of us assume that thinking happens in the head, but dancers know otherwise. Dancer Gabrielle Roth says, “We dance because it’s the fastest, most direct route to the truth—not some big truth that belongs to everybody, but the get down and personal kind, the what’s-­happening-­ in-­me-­right-­now kind of truth.”5 And another dancer’s online blog summarizes that “dance is good for the human body and soul. Dance gives me an amazing physical workout while I can let my emotions out and clear my head. It’s an escape from the real world. It lets me forget about the people that disappointed me in life and lets me express my emotions about them without causing any drama.”6 These reflections reveal the relationship between ritualized, sequential body movements and emotional (affective) management. Dance is expressive and cathartic for individuals, who are feeling a heightened energetic surplus or tensional state. Dance releases many pent-­up affective situations, in ways that do no social harm. Once catharsis is achieved, the dancer returns more easily to prosocial levels of affective interaction. Negative affect is pushed away by positive affect, and perseverating hostile thoughts are exorcised. However, these personally therapeutic aspects of dance are only part of the story. The anthropology of dance reveals more collective functions for dance. In fact, it would be misleading to export our modern Western concept of dance—a distinct aesthetic activity (with personal therapeutic aspects)—to the realm of early human folk culture. Folk cultures, both then and now, employ sequential body movements for many purposes, but social communication appears to be foundational. As anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler puts it, “Movements are cultural artifacts, which, in their specific combinations and uses, belong to a specific culture or subculture and can be activated for specific purposes.” The movements may be audience-­oriented—intended to be viewed—or they may be participation-­oriented. Such dance may make “political or social statements, they may bring religious ecstasy or trance, they may be performed

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as a social duty. Movements given by the gods and ancestors may be perpetuated as cultural artifacts . . . even if their meanings have been changed or forgotten as reference points for ethnic or cultural identity.”7 From an evolutionary perspective, dance is not just “cultural cheesecake.” Rather, dance probably provides adaptive strategies for problem solving and for social grooming. Like other animals, we use dance to demonstrate our fitness to potential mates. Ritualized body movement is both a show of health in real time and a symbolic promise of health for future genetic investment (offspring) and nurturing. Sexual selection builds anatomical traits and behaviors into males, because females prefer those behaviors when choosing mates (and vice versa). Moving the body in sequential patterns can also communicate rich environmental information to members of your group. Even bees perform a waggle dance that informs other bees where to fly in order to find nectar, pollen, water, and other resources. The body can create a map, and even be a map, for other hive or tribe members that need to navigate space. In addition to these uses of dance, body movement that is synchronized is especially pleasurable. Like other forms of social grooming, the body produces internal opioids (like endorphins) during ritualized rhythmic dance. In fact, dancing is a tour de force of neurochemical pleasures: serotonin, epinephrine, endorphins, and dopamine. Pain is blocked, and euphoria is increased in the dancing group. Unsurprisingly, a team of researchers recently found that group dancing raises endorphins considerably and contributes to social bonding, suggesting that dancing was probably selected for by natural selection.8 Rhythm is infectious for humans. If one person bangs a drum rhythmically, another person can move their feet, bob their head, or bow their trunk in time to the beat. Next, another person or group of people can start to synchronize the same motions to the same beat. Before you know it, you have a whole tribe in a groove together. This seems relatively simple to us because it is so universal in humans and requires little or no training. But other animals, even our closest cousins, fail miserably to get a decent groove going.9 There are rare exceptions—like Snowball the dancing cockatoo—but most animals seem incapable of synchronizing their own bodies to a beat, and coordinating multiple bodies to a pulse is nigh impossible. This ability to sync to a beat and subdivide time inside a beat is called entrainment.

T H E C R E AT I V E B O D Y   :   5 9

2.1. Synchronized dancing (entrainment) is emotionally satisfying but also adaptive, because it both creates and signals group strength and cohesion. Maasai dancers in Kenya and Tanzania continue many of their ancient customs, including group dancing.

Without entrainment, animals cannot synchronize tightly. Dancing is out of the question. Patricia Gray, at the University of North Carolina, has been jamming and improvising with a group of bonobo chimpanzees, including the famous Kanzi (who learned some linguistic skills through lexigrams). Dr. Gray thinks she has some evidence that bonobos can sync, but the data is inconclusive. Gray plays a pattern or a pulse on a keyboard piano, and sometimes the bonobos, using their own keyboard, play along. But “play along” is a rather charitable description of a kind of haphazard meandering, sounding more like a windy breeze on a chime than intentional rhythmic coordination. Edward Large, at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, argues that primates are permanently like human toddlers.10 Toddlers can hear rhythm (process it in the auditory system), but they cannot synchronize with it until around four years old.

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Something seems to come online in the course of development that actualizes entrainment in humans, but it doesn’t come online for most other animals. Is there a “groove” module or a “swing switch” in the human brain’s genetic instructions, or does the long developmental period of the human brain allow socially stimulated rhythms to be wired into the plastic system? The jury is out on this particular debate, but recent findings lean away from the idea of a groove gene and toward a developmental social story. Bodies simulate bodies. Such simulation is a prerequisite for, and early example of, social learning and social experimenting. Many animals, like birds, engage in flocking and swarming synchronization—and maybe this spatial copycat ability gives rise to time-­based simulation. But temporal entrainment is particularly rare. How did we evolve the ability to count off a beat and then stay together as a group, digging deeper into the pulse with repetition? What is happening in the brain during such simulation? Neuroscientists Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons studied the brain while it dances, even designing a specialized dance floor for an fMRI machine.11 They discovered two separate systems: a “high road” that involved auditory areas in the cerebral cortex, and a “low road” involving a subcortical auditory pathway and the cerebellar motor system. Something as complex as dancing requires your whole brain, but there’s a division of labor and certain jobs transpire in the brain’s evolved departments. Matching your toe-­tapping to a beat is a fairly unconscious process, and it takes the “low road” through the brain. The cerebellum, Latin for “little brain,” is at the very back of the brain, tucked under the occipital lobe, and it looks like another little brain under our larger brain structure. This is a headquarters for certain motor abilities, in particular the coordination of movement. The cerebellum integrates inputs from the sensory systems all over the brain, but especially from the spinal cord. Drs. Brown and Parsons discovered that a part of the cerebellum, called the anterior vermis, works like an internal metronome. This metronome is set by incoming auditory-­thalamus signals from the medial geniculate nucleus, and this “low road” pathway gets your body bopping unconsciously to the beat without much involvement from the higher brain areas. Things get complicated fast, however, when we try to sync our bodies with other bodies that are doing sequential steps or gestures. The brain must go beyond feeling the pulse and try to mirror the complex move-

T H E C R E AT I V E B O D Y   :   6 1

ments of another person. This simulation enlists many other parts of the brain. In particular, the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex at the top of the brain integrate together and enlist sensory information from visual and auditory systems. Additionally, memory stores are accessed, limbic emotions charged, and an internal body map, called the precuneus, comes into play. The precuneus is a part of the parietal lobe that houses the body map, or cortical homunculus. It lights up strongly when we dance, because it projects or plots our body movements through space and does this from an egocentric perspective.12 This egocentric perspective helps us synchronize and self-­correct discrepancies of sequence or nuanced motion. It helps fine-­tune the simulation. These brain prerequisites were in play presumably when prehistoric Homo sapiens gathered around a beating drum, clapping their hands, bobbing their heads, and lifting their feet in unison. I suspect dancing was already a tradition for Homo erectus. But why should such a rare ability, synchronized movement, evolve? It’s possible that group simulation, like dance, is an accidental by-­ product of unrelated brain evolution, and it’s possible that we developed it simply because it feels good to our physiological reward system (the endorphin release, I mentioned earlier). But it’s also important to think about imitation dancing as adaptive. Researchers Edward Hagen and Greg Bryant suggest that synchronized dance or ritualized body movement would have sent a very strong signal to competing groups: Don’t mess with us, because we are a unified and formidable group.13 Coordinated dance is, according to Hagen and Bryant, a strong form of coalition signaling. Imagine two competing tribes facing down each other over some resource or territory. If one of them jumps, stamps, spins, and generally grooves together like a giant single organism, it signals to the other group that these guys are going to stick together in a fight. A small but coordinated group of warriors can do much more damage than a large but loose coalition. And the dance signal is high fidelity, because it cannot be faked. Groups can pretend or fake strength with bravado and shouts, but synchronized dance actually demonstrates strength directly. Dance shows, instead of merely says, that the group is highly cooperative and has significant history together. Contemporary Samburu and Maasai of Kenya, along with many other tribal peoples around the world, still per-

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form a synchronized warrior dance that is remarkably coordinated and intimidating for any potential enemy to witness. Indeed, modern militaries around the world still use forms of synchronization as intimidation. Improvisation in this entrainment dance would produce micro and macro innovations. First, the original composers of the dance would have strung together discrete body movements into a sequential whole. This would be complex enough to challenge participants and impress observers, but simple enough that average community members could master it. Once solidified, the dance admits only minor or micro improvisations (usually by the leader) that add spontaneity, but do not jeopardize the unified adaptive signaling. Staging such a dance in front of competitors would have tightened the constraints on improvisation, but staging it in the friendly confines of one’s own tribe (internal rituals, celebrations, etc.) would loosen such constraints and possibly even reward innovative spontaneity. Such spontaneous improvisation should not be understood as a result of cognitive planning, but rather emotional or affective expression. In the same way that the brain’s frontal lobes play an inhibitory role on our affective impulses, social situations (e.g., going into battle) also play inhibitory and regulating roles on our affective impulses. Cultural traditions structure emotions and behaviors. Moreover, even learning a simple synchronized dance is an elaborate switching process between inhibiting some motions and permitting others. In addition to prehistoric warfare dance, we probably engaged in adaptive synchronized motions to ward off predators. Evolutionary ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania argues that our Pleistocene ancestors learned to move together in order to look larger and frighten predators, but also in order to psych themselves up for conflict with a synchronized “battle trance.”14 The battle trance is an altered state of consciousness that prepares groups for violence, by reducing fear and pain. Repeated, ritualized stomping, swinging, drumming, and singing forge a single battle-­ ready organism out of a cluster of individuals. Such a strategy would have been extremely helpful once Homo erectus was eking out an existence in the dangerous, newly open savanna of the Pleistocene era. Many dangerous animal threats (like big cats, hyena, crocodiles, other primates, even hippopotami) could have been effectively managed by battle trance techniques. And these same techniques could then be recruited for skirmishes with other competitor pre-­humans.

T H E C R E AT I V E B O D Y   :   6 3

Finally, dance is a kind of investigation or way of knowing generally. The dancer learns things about herself that she didn’t know before she danced. Some of this discovery is about her physical body and what it can do, but some of it is discovery of her inner psychological organization. And these revelations apply to the other people we are dancing with as well. Previously hidden aspects of them are revealed to us. Philosopher Alva Noë argues that dance “ways of knowing” can be quite deep, even existential, but they are usually discounted because we have a limited view of what qualifies as knowledge.15

T H E S I M U L AT I O N S Y S T E M

Obviously, humans can synchronize their bodies in a socially meaningful dance. But dance is just one form of social imitation, and the same brain/ body mechanisms underlie the mimicry involved in tool learning and language learning. How did our sophisticated simulation system evolve in the first place? When you clap rhythmically and I fall in with you, or when you smile and I return the facial gesture, or when you use a stick to dig a tuber out of the ground and I mimic the technique—when my body replicates your body, it reveals a complex simulation system that enables our imitation virtuosity. Imitation is the key ingredient in social learning. For decades now, researchers have tethered our social learning advances to the expansion of the neocortex (rational brain). This expansion happened between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, for example, famously correlated the size of the human neocortex with the increased size of our social groups.16 During the Pleistocene period, our neocortex expanded significantly and Dunbar argues that this brain growth paralleled the size of our social groups. As groups become larger, it is more cognitively demanding to keep track of the many complex social relationships. The complex social environment becomes a selective pressure for increased mental processing power, and this built our better memory, representational ability, and even language. The neocortical evolution in turn helped make us more domesticated, because our reasoning skills allowed us to create larger and more stable social groups. Other influential theorists, like Ray Kurzweil have followed the simple equation of neocortex growth and human cultural intelligence.17

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This view—that the mind evolved as an efficient social calculator—is not wrong per se but incomplete. Our contemporary minds are such good calculators, such good processors of information, that we forget the fundamental “action” of the mind. Instead, we need to think of mind first and foremost as “internalized movement” not as a spectator or recorder of data bits. Anthropologist Robert Barton’s research focuses on the form, function, and evolution of the cerebellum in particular and its underappreciated link to the cortex.18 Our ability to coordinate our bodies into sophisticated action sequences, like rhythmic entrainment or tool use, stems in large part from the cerebellum motor system of the brain. A dancer on the ancient savanna and a good jazz drummer today are sequencing motor patterns in a sophisticated manner, but the roots of motor-­sequencing evolution can be seen in our primate cousins. We were so focused on studying the expansion of the neocortex that we did not notice, until Barton’s work, that the cerebellum grew even more rapidly in size and complexity. Primate cerebella, especially ours, are not just relatively larger than other mammals, but they are incredibly dense in neural connections. In humans, the cerebellum has around 70 billion neurons, and we have little understanding of their functions. By doing a comparative study of monkeys and apes, Barton discovered that cerebellum evolution happened six times faster in apes than in other primates. So, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans had a rapid cerebellum expansion that might be even more important for explaining our unique mental and cultural advances. As we’ve already seen, the cerebellum is important in modeling, predicting, and organizing behavioral sequences. It is crucial in correcting spatial and temporal relations, like those necessary in dance and tool-­use sequencing. It is also important in fine visual-­motor dexterity—the kind that apes excel at when engaged in foraging and food preparation. Gorillas, for example, perform a complex food processing that turns painful stinging nettles into an important source of nutrition. Stinging nettles are flowering plants that have burning stinger thorns all over their leaves and stems. Gorillas carefully strip the leaves off the stems and then gingerly fold them in a way that keeps the stingers from piercing their mouths as they eat. They also have similar serial steps for processing bamboo. The ability to string together such behavioral steps is facilitated by the cerebellum (not higher cognition), and it makes social learning possible.

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The capability to build up complex sequences from subroutines is called behavioral parsing, and apes are good at this in the domain of foraging and food processing. Presumably early action chains of behavior would have been small, irreducible sequences that had to be performed in exact order for the result to be achieved. For example, peeling the skin from a fruit or engaging in a courting behavior that started very simply—with a male competitor displaying a body motion to attract female interest (and vice versa). As memory and motor coordination became more robust in our ancestors, the behavior sequences could extend out—by replication of subroutines. Decomposing larger routines into parts also creates the possibility of rearranging the sequences, not just repeating parts. Thus a kind of task grammar begins to emerge. All the while, innovations of sequence must be edited by natural selection—if a novel routine fails to produce food, shelter, mates, or protection, then it will fail the innovator, and social mimics are unlikely to replicate the innovation. In foraging, apes are too big and heavy to be jumping around on trees like monkeys, so, Barton suggests, they had to carefully plan and predict their pathways through their physical environments. This meant there was selective pressure on embodied simulation—a cortico-­cerebellar loop (a new and old brain loop) that gave apes better coordination of learned sequences and better predictive power about bodies in space and time. Subtle changes in the ape brain increased sensory-­motor task grammar, or action-­syntax abilities. Barton suggests that this bodily skill probably scaled up, in early humans, to help organize, predict, and model social domains as well. Such motor coordination of steps is prerequisite for tool use, and may be the beginning of a kind of gestural syntax system that could give rise to gestural communication and eventually language in humans. Recent studies of apes reveal that some of the seriatim food-­ processing techniques, like gorilla nettle preparation, are culturally transmitted to members of the same band or troop.19 The Sonso chimpanzee community of Budongo Forest, Uganda, was recently observed engaging in fairly sophisticated social learning. Chimpanzee cultural transmission was observed in the wild by Catherine Hobaiter and colleagues when members of the group modified their water-­ collection tools.20 The members often set water traps to collect sips of drinking water, using leaves plugged into tree holes. This method of leaf-­

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sponging is universally common among chimpanzees. But in the Sonso community, researchers observed a dominant male improvise a “moss sponge” technique, and then the chimps who observed the innovation slowly adopted the new technique over the course of a few days. Apes must acquire such multistep chains of behavior by mimicking the conduct directly—the learner moves his body along with the “teacher’s” body, or internally mimicking or simulating the behavior by watching first and trying later. These methods of simulation are alive and well in our own contemporary arts education techniques. A piano teacher or drum teacher will actually directly position a young student’s hands and body position, or have the child’s hand rest on the teacher’s hand to feel the right way to play the pattern or scale. Our ape cousins rarely “teach” and seem to learn more from imitating (as information flows out of their elders’ activities), but we share the same simulation system that wires together our sensory visual information with our bodily motor action.21 Our imitative capacity is good but not unique among primates. Psychologist Kim Bard studied simulation abilities in chimpanzees just after birth (7–15 days of age). In a series of experiments, researchers made specific facial expressions to the baby chimps, and the apes responded with high degrees of mirroring activity.22 When the researcher opened her mouth wide, for example, the chimp responded with open mouth, and so on. Bard concludes, “Neonatal chimpanzees have an innate capacity for imitation that is comparable to humans.”23 But this capacity of facial simulation atrophies quickly in developing chimps because they do not continue nuanced facial communication, whereas human babies and mothers keep up (indeed ramp up) an elaborate social learning process of face-­to-­face communication. In fact, Bard tracked chimpanzee development over subsequent months and found that chimps raised by their biological mothers (with minimal human interaction) lost “smile” mimicry, while chimps that were nursery-­raised (with significant human interaction) retained their smile mimicry powers. So parental nurturing of the simulation system may be one of the ways humans quickly rocket past their ape cousins when it comes to social learning. A brain/body mechanism that wires together visual perception and sequential motor action is slowly coming into scientific focus. Research is still in its early stages, but psychologists like Cecilia Heyes at Oxford think that “mirror neurons” may be part of a deep associative system that

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correlates visual stimuli with body simulation responses.24 This would be the unconscious body imitation system that helps explain social learning and most other forms of conditioned learning. Just as primatologists suggest a cortico-­cerebellar loop that helps apes expand their somatosensory task grammar, so, too, are psychologists zeroing in on the same loop in baby humans as they learn to imitate their caregivers. The recent discovery of “mirror neurons” suggests that our social brains are so sensitive to the feelings and actions of others that my same neural pain pathways will activate when I see you undergoing some painful experience.25 I literally sense a little taste of your pain, just by witnessing it. The subjective wince that I feel at your suffering is neurologically underwritten by automatic brain processing—both my brain stem and my anterior cingulate (in the front brain) activate when I am poked with a pin, but my anterior cingulate also activates when I witness you getting poked with a pin. Of course, it’s not all pain and empathy. I am also sexually aroused when I see you sexually aroused. And there are whole industries devoted to correlating a performer’s pleasure and an audience member’s pleasure. The point is that there is a “shared manifold” of feelings or even an “emotional atmosphere” that humans share with one another. It’s not mystical or spooky; it’s just an under-­recognized perceptual ability Cecilia Heyes and colleagues argue that this neural simulation system is soft-­wired in the course of early primate experience.26 It is in the course of our early development that our flexible brains create mirror neuron pathways linking our observed world with specific body actions and feelings. The cognitive architecture of imitation connects a sensory representation of an action to a motor representation of the same action. So, I see a hand grasping, and this matches with an inner motor sense or feeling of my own hand grasping—these are “matching vertical associations.” Observational learning requires a conversion of visual patterns to bodily patterns (action and affect), and mirror neurons act as the requisite converters. When a monkey reaches out to grab a grape, a specific neuron fires, and when this same monkey watches another primate grab a grape, the same neuron fires. Holding, squeezing, or throwing the grape will have different vertical associations. These connections are learned in sociocultural interactions. When a human infant sees grabbing, a specific neuron in the visual

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cortex fires, and when she observes a squeezing hand, a different neuron fires. When the baby uses her own hand to grab or squeeze, unique neurons fire in the motor cortex. These different systems have unique neuron signatures for the unique events in their visual or motor domains, but they are not correlated with each other until experience glues them together across the domains. What kinds of experiences glue together the visual and motor domains? Self-­observation is a significant source of relevant experience. A baby lying on its back, for example, watches and feels its own hand squeezing an object, and this simultaneous visual and somatic experience forges a strong connection between what squeezing looks like and what squeezing feels like. The visual neuron fires in correlation now with the motor neuron. Infants spend two-­thirds of their waking life looking at their own hands in action, so the stimulus is plentiful. If these correlations happen with frequency across many kinds of experiences, then, as the old saying goes: what fires together wires together. The result is that the child’s motor neurons will now be mirror neurons, firing when she sees another person engaging in the squeezing behavior. To this very rudimentary self-­observation mode of soft-­wiring, we must add the elaborate social experiences, like when babies and mothers replicate each other’s facial expressions, vocalizations, and body movements. These non-­cognitive interactions are underscored by emotional reward conditioning. Then as the child grows older, this neuroplastic system is fed countless forms of training and habitual repetition. All of this forges strong unconscious links between the child’s perception of other bodies in action and her own body in action. In summary then, my action states (e.g., squeezing hand, grooming motions, tool-­use sequences, even sexual technique, etc.) are heavily correlated with the action states of my social group. This helps me learn, perform, and comprehend those actions. My body comprehends other bodies. The imitation social skills are not conscious calculations, but expansions of mammal brain adaptations for coordinating visual-­motor control. Most kinds of improvisation, especially social group improvisation, employ these unconscious associational communications. Creative practice relies heavily on the body-­mind loops (somatic-­cognitive loops) we’ve been examining. If we’re in a musical improvisation together or

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a collective building project or a hunt, my simulation system reads your body automatically and unconsciously, and helps me see, hear, and feel where you’re going. In real time, my behavior adapts to your behavior and vice versa, and this helps us corner the animal, build the crescendo of a chorus, or whatever. Thinking with the body is intuitive, associational, collective problem solving.27

H OT C O G N I T I O N A N D H E U R I S T I C S

The body is a major resource of thinking.28 People often think through their ideas or their intuitions by modeling them in some way. The body is one way to model an event for an audience and even for oneself. In modern human beings, the automatic simulation system can be governed or managed, through increasing executive control (e.g., I can consciously decide what body movements I want to focus on and learn). The evolution of increasing executive control is “recapitulated” in the developmental psychology of the child, who slowly learns to harness its body simulations into inner representations (memories of actions that can be called up for conscious manipulation). Once the modern mind (linguistically sophisticated) is up and running, then high-­level modeling of experience becomes the norm. But between automatic simulation (bodies reading other bodies) and symbolic modeling, there is an expansive middle ground of adaptive body modeling (somatic modeling). The task grammar discussed earlier breaks down action patterns into serviceable subroutines that might be detached from their origin domain (say, food processing) and moved into multiple domains for adaptive problem solving (say, flint knapping or fire starting, etc.). This expansive middle ground of body modeling is a dominant engine of improvisation and of the mind generally. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests that we should think of the mind as made up of two systems.29 His experimental work on human judgment and decision making reveals the two systems as distinct but frequently intertwined. System 1 is sometimes called “hot cognition,” and it is automatic, fast, stereotypic, emotional, frequent, and subconscious. System 2 is sometimes called “cold cognition,” and it is effortful, slow, calculating, logical, infrequent, and conscious. Kahneman is relatively uncommitted about the brain anatomy and the evolution of these systems, focusing instead on the implications

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for Homo economicus (economic man). But, of course, neuroscientists think that the limbic regions house hot cognition and the prefrontal cortex regions house cold cognition. And evolution suggests that hot cognition is much older (similar with other mammals) and cold cognition is the relatively newer aspect of mind/brain development. We easily recognize the operations of hot and cold cognition. Hot cognition helps me judge an angry threat coming at me with great speed, and it triggers all the emotions and actions that might save me from a predator. Cold cognition helps me carefully weigh all the costs and benefits of pursuing a law degree. Often the two systems are in conflict over a particular judgment. My cold cognition tells me I can’t afford this car, but my hot cognition pushes me toward the stunning aesthetic features. My hot cognition recommends that I sleep with my best friend’s girlfriend, but my cold cognition overrides the temptation. In the language we’ve been using, hot cognition is more “embodied” than cold cognition. It’s more tilted and biased in its judgments by affect, feeling, and emotion. I suspect that hot cognition is just another way of describing the associational soft-­wired systems that we discussed earlier. In the same way that experience quickly wires visual perception to motor responses, it also wires perceptions to emotional reactions—building up a fast (albeit sometimes inaccurate) judgment system. This developmental coding gives perception itself a kind of predictive power. My matching vertical associations will quickly reveal that this is not just a tree, but a climb-­up-­able tree. I don’t have time on the African savanna to coolly calculate and draw inferences from data. I must see the thing and act immediately. In this world, stereotypes are helpful. Some perceptions (e.g., snakes and spiders) seem to come preloaded with predictions (e.g., imminent threat), feelings (e.g., amygdala-­based fear), and action routines (e.g., run now). To some evolutionary psychologists, such fast processing seems hardwired and modular, but I suspect it’s a result of the soft-­wiring developmental process we saw earlier. The hot cognition style of problem solving is heuristic. The word is derived from the Greek word for “find,” and it expresses a style of imprecise judgment that we might call rule of thumb. Heuristic techniques are usually trial-­and-­error procedural approaches, like when a small child tries all the wooden block peg shapes until he finds the one that goes into the round hole. He solves the problem by trial-­and-­error elimination,

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but he has no theory, principle, or rule by which to deduce the correct solution. Or consider a jazz bass player, riding on the tonic note, trying to play a minor third or a major third under a piano chord, listening for dissonance or harmony. Compare this with a bass player who refuses to try a candidate note, but instead studies the chord on the sheet music and deduces that the minor third (not the major) harmonizes with this specific chord properly. Heuristic judgment contrasts strongly with a deductive approach to problem solving. In deduction, I draw logical inferences from provable rules, with optimal information, and the results are usually exact. The process is algorithmic and produces relative certainty. But heuristics are experiential, probable, and approximate. The issue is not that one strategy is absolutely better than another, but rather that one (heuristics) is more helpful when available information is low and action requires speed. When I try to solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle, I see various square colors spread about the cube. I am not smart enough to look at it and generate a theory of seriatim moves that will solve the puzzle. Indeed, there are 43 quintillion possible permutations for the Rubik’s Cube. Even the established successful algorithms for solving parts of the puzzle are composed of many steps and are difficult to memorize and execute. Jessica Fridrich’s solution requires the player to memorize 120 algorithms.30 Solving the puzzle is not impossible, and “speed-­cubers” demonstrate that a science of cubing can be mastered. But most of us attack the frustrating game with fumble-­and-­find moves, alternating vertical and horizontal turns. The heuristic approach usually fails in the case of Rubik’s Cube, but very often succeeds in other domains of human problem solving. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that heuristics are the most ubiquitous forms of human judgment, and that overly deductive, cognitive approaches to human decision making (like those in rational choice economics or traditional evolutionary psychology) miss the true springs of action.31 “Human rationality cannot be understood,” he argues, “by the ideals of omniscience and optimization. In an uncertain world, there is no optimal solution known for most interesting and urgent problems.”32 Like our ancestors before us, we must improvise our way to solutions without the luxuries of time and optimal information. But unlike simpler animals (e.g., remember the Sphex wasp), we are not locked into a deterministic behavior option, nor do we need to try every possible trial in a

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trial-­and-­error scenario. Instead, our embodied cognition contains heuristic rules of thumb (forged in developmental experience) that we can employ across multiple domains. Consider a task that seems almost impossible to solve if we try to calculate it or deduce it from first principles and data points. The task is hitting a moving animal with a throwing spear or a projectile rock. This is not a trivial example, as it must have been a real challenge for our ancestors. Presumably there was a long trial-­and-­error phase for this learning, resulting in many possible meals escaping. Eventually, however, our ancestors must have formulated a subconscious heuristic rule for accurate throws—something that could be easily remembered and practiced. I won’t attempt to articulate the full heuristic technique, but it involves throwing at a point above the animal because gravity will arc the projectile down. It will also involve throwing ahead of the animal if one is anticipating where the moving animal will be in a moment from now, and so on and so forth. The already-­discussed associative body-­brain loops are sufficient to build up the heuristic technique here. Every kid who learns how to throw a successful football pass solves the challenge with trial-­and-­error repetition, not chalkboard math. The alternative deductive model of cold cognition would require a NASA team of physicists to solve the computations needed by our ancestral hunter and our teenage quarterback. How does an athlete catch a high-­flying projectile (e.g., a football, baseball, etc.)? It’s a common problem in sports, but each case is also heavily improvised because the variables are too overwhelming to calculate. AI programmers could try to make a robot solve this problem by sheer computational force, but they would need to input millions of data points, all shifting as the object changes in the wind. Instead, Gigerenzer points out that athletes engage in “gaze heuristics” to track the ball properly. When the football is coming in high, “the heuristic is that you adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze, the angle between the eye and the ball, remains constant.”33 If you succeed in keeping this angle constant, then the football comes down to you. The complex problem of myriad variables is solved heuristically by focusing on only one variable, the angle of gaze. This gaze heuristic is conserved across many other species, and we find that dogs also employ this tracking rule of thumb (or rule of paw) to catch projectiles.

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All of this shows that adaptive improvisation does not come primarily from cold cognition, but from older, hot cognition brain systems. Many of these old systems are intimately connected to the real-­time events in our social ecology. Tuning and retuning your actions in response to another person in a dyadic social relation is not a head game but a body game. As psychologist Kerri Norman and colleagues suggest, human communication is based on embodied gestural maneuvers—more like a dogfight than a chess match.34 Each dog makes a gesture—dominant or submissive—and the other dog counters with a gesture, and back and forth in a dangerous dance. Many of our higher human interactions are just rarefied versions of these gestural dogfights, and then, afterward, we spin a highbrow, cold cognition story to explain our actions and feelings to ourselves. We’ve seen how perception and action get soft-­wired together into adaptive automatic responses and heuristic rules of thumb, all of which draw significant stimulus and training from our social ecology. Now it’s important to examine the affective or emotional ingredients that permeate all these processes.

I FEEL, THEREFORE I IMPROVISE

Perhaps the strongest ingredient in improvisation is emotion. The external environment pre­sents constant challenges to the improviser, like how to ford a river successfully, how to get fruit at the top of a tree, how to appease this angry alpha male, or how to build a shelter. But the inner world is also constantly changing and pushing us with feelings of anger, sadness, joy, fear, and so on. Emotions are not just experiences that we passively endure or observe as spectators. They are motivational forces and have the kind of intimate relationship with our motor responses that we already saw in the case of visual perception. Hot cognition paves fast routes between perception, affective states, and bodily actions. Improvising is responding to the immediate situation, and a large part of our immediate situation is our emotional state (and our group’s emotional state). I have been suggesting that improvisation is a kind of judgment or decision making with prediction and action potential built in. But this decision making is not cold cognition. It flows out of feelings more than logical inferences. We need to understand the adaptive nature

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of emotions and their role in mind generally and improvisation specifically. We owe a debt to our big neocortices (rational brains), but our survival owes much more to the emotional skills that were under construction in mammals long before the Homo sapiens brain boom. We share a rich emotional life with our animal brethren because emotions helped us all survive in a hostile world. Indeed, the more we understand what mammals have in common, the more we have to rethink everything about even our specifically human intelligence. Fear is one emotion that is ubiquitous and palpable on the African savanna, where we evolved. Having spent time on safari in Tanzania and Rwanda, I can report that fear permeates almost every moment on the Serengeti. If you get out of the safari truck, lions will eat you. If you try to cross this little river, the crocodiles will shred you in minutes. Even the comic, bulbous-­bodied hippopotamus is menacing in person. They kill more humans than any other animal in Africa. I watched a hippo fight explode in front of us, and it seemed to shake the ground itself. One thing you gradually understand in this ancestral environment is the inevitability of death. The carnage is so predictable that a good guide can judge the trajectories of prey and predators, and then park the safari truck in a prime spot to wait and watch. This is no trick or staged drama. Crocs have to eat. Wildebeest have to drink. Add those facts together, and bloody spectacle inexorably follows. One morning we broke camp early, climbed into our safari truck, and raced off-­road through the scrub to a rapidly shrinking creek. Our tracker Mohammed had received a walkie-­talkie tip from another guide that a herd of wildebeest was preparing to cross. Mohammed knew that crocs would be sunning themselves nearby and that some ancient drama might ensue. Parked on a riverbank, we watched in silence as wildebeest sniffed at the water’s edge. They moaned and paced anxiously while reptile eyes began to multiply above the water line. Wildebeest, it turns out, are not very smart. Mohammed explained that if zebras start to cross a waterway and lose just one of their numbers, they usually cancel the mission, back up the herd, and look for alternative passage. Wildebeest, by contrast, will continue to throw themselves into the croc-­filled water. Once they’ve committed to crossing, through some tipping point of group emotion, they seem incapable of modify-

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ing or adapting to the new situation. Panic sets in and the wildebeest leap into the fray, snapping their own legs, breaking their backs, drowning each other. As we were watching, a lone wildebeest ventured too far—only a meter off the shallows—and then a crocodile leapt up. The herd started to run; pandemonium ensued. Only when the other animals had crossed over and disappeared into the distance did the crying of the luckless victim go quiet. In preternatural silence, it pulled itself toward the shore, revealing a giant crocodile fastened onto its hindquarters. A back leg was already down the reptile’s throat, the rump locked by razor-­sharp front teeth. “This is now a waiting contest,” Mohammed explained. “The croc will never let go.” The wildebeest was stronger than I expected, but it couldn’t overcome the croc. Other crocodiles were starting to make their way toward it. Then something surprising happened, something that shocked even the seasoned Mohammed. After about five minutes, the predator tried to adjust its jaw grip. In that fraction of a second, the straining wildebeest shot free and found itself—as startled as any of us—­teetering on the shoreline. We all felt an exhilarating rush of triumph for the underdog. A happy ending. Mohammed took the wind out of our sails. “He was a breakfast for crocs this morning, but now he is a walking dinner for hyenas tonight.” True enough, the wildebeest’s leg was now a mangled ribbon hanging loosely off its hindquarters. It was now an easy target. Our city-­slicker buoyancy was premature—nature is not merciful. Time on the Serengeti makes you think a lot about the inner life of animals. While the wildebeest is screaming, is it feeling fear like we do? Is it relieved when it’s suddenly free? Is the croc filled with regret? It might seem self-­evident to the sentimental pet owner that our fellow creatures have emotions, but science has long been loath to admit it. Yet Dr. Jaak Panksepp, professor of veterinary anatomy at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, says this is one area where our anthropomorphic tendencies are probably in the right: animals do have rudimentary emotional lives. Panksepp is one of the founders of the relatively new field of affective neuroscience. What makes his work especially compelling is that he has learned how to turn the major emotional systems on and off in his animal

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subjects. The squeamish won’t like some of his experiments—they include removing brain parts of living rodents—but the data are important. Using electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB), he has demonstrated that mammals have emotional/behavioral responses built into the subcortical and limbic parts of the brain (the older parts of the brain). Panksepp placed an electrode into the medial hypothalamus of a cat, for example. At first, the animal was perfectly peaceful. When Panksepp administered an electrical charge, it leaped viciously at his head, a hissing spitting tangle of fangs and claws. As soon as he turned off the stimulation, the cat relaxed into a peaceful state and could be petted with no sign of danger. Humans who have had electrical stimulation in the corresponding brain locations also reported intense rage, which lends credence to the idea of animal subjectivity. Adjusting the electrode and the stimulus to nearby brain areas resulted in no such response. By this patient method over many years, Panksepp produced a brain map of emotional/ behavior systems. Old-­school behaviorists, resistant to the idea of animal emotions, might describe the cat’s behavior as “sham rage,” but Panksepp and other affective neuroscientists are biting the bullet and calling it what it looks like—rage. And ethologists who study animal behavior increasingly accept the idea that fear keeps animals away from predators, lust draws them toward each other, panic motivates their social solidarity, and care glues their parent-­offspring bonds. Just like us, they have an inner life because it helps them navigate their outer life. Consider the affective and emotional system of lust. While on safari, we came upon a huge male lion in his mating ritual with a female. With stealthy off-­road driving, we crept within a few meters of their love nest— sex nest, actually. They had separated themselves from the larger pride and were engaging in the standard three-­day romp. When the female is in estrus, or in heat, the male will spend the first day mounting her every ten minutes, like clockwork. On the second day, they mate every fifteen minutes, and on the third day, every thirty minutes. In between these quick sex sessions, the two laze about sleeping in the high grass. The male mounts the female from behind and engages in light neck-­biting until he achieves a micro-­roar petite mort. None of this is cute or cuddly or tender. In fact, in many cases, the male lion has put the female in estrus by killing her cubs. Killing the babies of a previous romance will stop the mother’s

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lactation and put her back in estrus, so the interloping male can replace the previous gene line with his own. Lions, Mohammed informed us, do not have sex for pleasure. Other animals do, but lion sex, at least from my perspective in the safari truck, looked perfunctory, utilitarian, and grudgingly purposeful. It is sex at its adaptational no-­frills finest: chemically triggered, involuntarily acted, immediately forgotten. Violence on the Serengeti worked the same deterministic way. Predators would be in rest mode or play mode until a trigger (a smell, a movement) switched them into hunt mode. It was the same with the herd animals: their default settings are set to twitchy nervousness all the time, but they can switch up to contagious group panic at the slightest signal. This is not to say that the actions of the animals are deterministic like a machine. That’s an old prejudice, from Descartes’s bête machine to Pavlov’s dog. No, animals in the wild are definitely not machines, but they are deterministic in the sense that they are relatively unthinking. Many animal behaviors that look like the result of reasoning are not.35 After you spend time with wild animals in the primal ecosystem where our big brains first grew, you have to chuckle a bit at the reigning view of the mind as a computer. Most cognitive scientists, from the logician Alan Turing to the psychologist James Lloyd McClelland, have been narrowly focused on linguistic thought, ignoring the whole embodied organism. They see the mind as a Boolean algebra binary system of 1 or 0, “on” or “off.” This has been methodologically useful and certainly productive for the artificial intelligence we use in our digital technology, but it merely mimics the biological mind. The “wet” biological mind is embodied in the squishy, organic machinery of our emotional systems—where actions are triggered when chemical cascades cross volumetric tipping points. The emotional or affective systems are more analog than digital. Neuroscience has begun to correct the computational model by showing how our rational, linguistic mind depends on the ancient limbic brain, where emotions hold sway and social skills dominate. In fact, the cognitive deductive mind works well only when emotions preferentially tilt our deliberations. This is an important point for understanding improvisation, because good improvisers are letting their moment-­to-­moment feelings influence their moves. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio worked with patients who had

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damage in the communication system between the cognitive and emotional brain. The subjects could compute all the informational aspects of a decision in detail, but they couldn’t actually commit to anything. Without clear limbic-­brain values (that is, feelings), Damasio’s patients couldn’t decide their own social calendars, prioritize jobs at work, or even make decisions in their own best interest. Our rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional embodiment we have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond syntax to semantics, we need feelings. And our ancestral minds were rich in feelings before they were adept in computations. Damasio developed a mechanism called a “somatic marker” to explain the flexible restructuring of the feeling brain.36 A somatic marker is the result of a brain process that codes experiences with emotional tone or coloration, engraving memories with affective associations that automatically and rapidly influence decision making. Rational deliberation is already heavily tilted or weighted in a certain direction by emotional biases. For example, I gravitate toward this person rather than that one at a party, even before I have enough information to make rational discriminations. Or I automatically back away from quick-­moving shapes in darkened rooms. These biases result, in part, from somatic markers that have been stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain. Original codings can be changed or modified pursuant to new experiences. The somatic marker hypothesis is the same sort of associational mechanism that we already saw with matching vertical association, mirror neurons.37 Our neocortex mushroomed to its current size less than 1 million years ago. That’s a very recent development when we remember that the human family broke off from the great apes in Africa 7 million years ago. That future-­looking, tool-­wielding, symbol-­juggling cortex grew on top of the limbic system. Older still is the reptile brain—the storehouse of innate motivational instincts such as pain avoidance, exploration, hunger, lust, aggression, and so on. Walking around (very carefully) on the Serengeti is like visiting the nursery of our own mind. In the days of Australopithecus and early Homo, our ancestors’ lives were probably dominated by the limbic region. It’s the same system that most mammals share: an integrated memory and emotion process, composed of the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior cingulate, and so on. These social brains are somewhat plastic and open to experience, but they’re also

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wired, according to affective research, for parent-­child bonding, panic, rage, anxiety, loneliness, and play. As Panksepp explains in Affective Neuroscience, these limbic systems “allow newborn animals to begin responding coherently to the environments in which they find themselves.”38 The brain that feels precedes the brain that thinks. What’s more, the process by which we attach fear, anger, and desire to the right kinds of creatures in our environments turns out to be quite flexible. Humans are afraid of the dark, but rats—our more distant mammal kin—are afraid of the light. It’s the same emotional system, assigned to different settings thanks to neuroplasticity. This flexibility is changing the game in contemporary theories of mind. Until recently, evolutionary psychologists such as John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Steven Pinker characterized the mind as a series of independent problem-­solving modules, like separate gears in a watch. Each of these modules, they argued, was sculpted by natural selection during the Pleistocene to solve a specific survival challenge; we now inherit them in toto as part of our genetic birthright. Perhaps the most famous such module is Noam Chomsky’s “deep grammar.” Chomsky argued that language is too difficult to pick up from scratch using only our general intelligence, so we must be born with a genetically engraved, brain-­based program that just does one thing— namely, acquire and employ language. The module has to be activated by specific cultural languages, but the deep grammar is innate. Some evolutionary psychologists have tried to apply Chomsky’s module idea to almost every other mental activity. What kind of food we like, what kind of spouse we’re looking for, our phobias of snakes and spiders, our preference for certain kinds of stories, even our ability to detect cheaters in a group: all have been attributed to specialized programs in the brain. This neat, formulaic explanation of human psychology plays well in the popular press, but it seems less convincing as we learn more about brain development and early human ecology. Its chief rival is the school of “general intelligence.” According to this view, the neocortex is a highly flexible, general problem solver. Our environment selected for a mind with reliable pattern recognition and prediction powers, but it didn’t give us specific modules for thought contents or behaviors. As affective neuroscience advances, the general-­purpose mind comes to look more credible, albeit with a surprising twist. It seems that even the emotional springs of the limbic system—our fear, care, rage, and

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so forth—are more pliable and open-­ended than we previously thought. If even instinctive emotions can be trained and rewired, how much more plasticity must the neocortical mind possess? Affective systems are not dedicated to one or two behaviors: they serve as general emotional problem solvers with many adaptive functions. Another death knell for traditional evolutionary psychology might be sounding from the field of hominin-­era climate studies. A vital premise for the modular theory is that our minds evolved in an extremely stable, unchanging environment. If our current minds are a mishmash of Pleistocene adaptations, then the conditions that shaped our brains must have been very consistent, or else natural selection couldn’t sculpt each module to fit our perennial environmental challenges. But it now appears (thanks to the work of paleoanthropologists such as Richard Potts) that the environment was anything but stable during the brain boom.39 In fact, it was precisely the climate chaos of this era that may have created our multipurpose, problem-­solving minds. If the weather, and therefore the context in which we did our foraging and hunting, kept changing radically, hardwired specialized modules weren’t going to do us much good. What we needed was all-­purpose intelligence that could perceive new challenges and apply general logical rules and cultural folkways to solving them. Remains of ancient humans are found in very diverse habitats in highly fluctuating climates. The expansion of the brain corresponds with an increasingly flexible, adaptable, mind. This is exciting because it shows that early mind expansion was related to improvisation in unfamiliar territory. Having a mind that could try new things was crucial when the old ways were no longer enough to ensure survival in fast-­changing environments. When climate fluctuations are dramatic, as they were in the last half million years, our ancestors had three basic moves: go extinct, move or relocate, or become more versatile. Pre-­humans did all of the above, but versatility came to mark the most successful groups. New food sources including faster animals began to be hunted, fishing improved, and new plants were processed with grindstones. Cooking provided versatility in diet and the protein needed to fuel the expanding costly brain. If human conceptual thought was largely generated by the evolution of language, then we can estimate the birth date of our cognitive skills. But it’s a big window—somewhere between 200,000 and 30,000 years

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ago. Sometime after the origin of anatomically modern humans 200 millennia ago, the FOXP2 gene mutated and set the stage for language evolution (recent Neanderthal DNA analysis might push this mutation date back slightly). That means our rich cognitive life didn’t emerge until after the long and successful Homo erectus period. Pre-­sapiens would have been adapting more from a pool of emotional flexibility, rather than higher-­ order intelligence. But it is a rich emotional intelligence, like those of other mammals. Compare those 200,000 years of language-­based cognitive life with approximately 200 million years (the late Triassic) of emotional life. Some 200 million years ago is when mammals first began to emerge, and this is when the rudimentary emotional systems of lust, aggression, seeking, care, panic, and so on began their rise to dominance.40 When a mammal (including us) is with its kin, ordinary empathy (not reason) is all that is needed for members to track how the group is feeling. While watching the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, I witnessed doting mothers nestling, suckling, and carrying their tiny infants. We had to be extra careful to avoid any threatening movements toward the mothers, and our two guides made special cooing vocalizations and gestures of submission to calm the ever-­watchful silverback male. Meanwhile, the juveniles and adolescents roughhoused playfully with each other. It was not sham care or sham play that we witnessed. And when the silverback chased down a belligerent adolescent and put him in a persuasive headlock, it was not sham anger or sham fear. Actually, the fear generated by the alpha power display was shared by that primate in the headlock and this primate. I caught the contagion easily that day. While many believe that the emergence of our rational, deliberative cognition gave us the flexibility to rise above pure instinct, it was probably these earlier developments of emotional intelligence that gave us the real leg up. Early humans evolved longer childhoods and greater dependence on our mothers. Eventually, this led to something new: the capacity to care beyond our narrow biological circles. Chimps have an even longer dependency on their mothers than gorillas. They bond strongly with their mothers for eight years, and their emotional connection is underwritten by the oxytocin system. But they don’t generalize or extrapolate this affection to other chimps, and they even lose their bonds with their mothers after the eight-­year period. Chimp coalitions and friendships are flimsy compared to the relation-

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ships that humans developed. We aren’t sure when early humans became emotionally modern—capable of lifelong kith and kin bonds—but traces of Neanderthal funerals suggests an ability to extend grief (and bonding) over very protracted time spans. Neanderthal graves are usually proffered as suggestive evidence for the intellectual flights of proto-­religion. They might be even better evidence for emotional evolution in our ancestors. Emotional flexibility means that we could spread our feelings around liberally, extending them to our fellow humans in general and sustaining loyalties over greater expanses of time. By comparison, other animals seem strictly concerned with specific threats and benefactors. We might have evolved our emotional plasticity in part because our brains continue developing for so long after our birth, and so the social environment constitutes a huge part of our mental and emotional formation. Our emotional systems had to be fluid, flexible, and general; they couldn’t just fasten on one animal or action pattern. But these stretchable emotions helped our social evolution as much as language and symbol ­manipulation.

T H E M O S T P L AY F U L A P E

Around the same time that our ancestors were becoming successful cooperative hunters, getting better control of fire, enriching their diet, and experiencing an increase in brain volume, something interesting was happening to childhood itself. It was getting safer and longer. All mammals play, as far as we know. Juvenile apes, dolphins, dogs, and even rats enjoy play. It’s the way animals figure out how to work their bodies—their powers and limitations, and it’s how they practice for the adult world of social hierarchy, threat, and competition. Play is adaptive behavior. In the centuries leading up to anatomically modern Homo sapiens, our ancestors developed some cultural technologies that allowed kids to play much more. Biologist Sarah Hrdy argues that our ancestors created a new kind of parenting or child rearing, one that enlisted grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and older siblings (collectively known as alloparents).41 Unlike chimps, who are raised almost exclusively by their mothers, we received much more care and protection from our increasingly stable and prosperous extended kin group. This set the stage for intensive learning— rich childhoods, wherein kids experimented with diverse tools and tech-

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niques. Philosopher Kim Sterelny claims that this period of human evolution is marked by an expansion of “apprentice” childhoods, and he notes that information transmission (e.g., hunting-­and-­gathering skills) would be accompanied by emotional changes toward greater docility, patience, and empathy.42 This kind of safe, experimental childhood was an “enchanted garden” compared to the nasty, brutish, and short lives of australopithecines and early Homo erectus. Contemporary psychology confirms that play decreases as stress increases in animals and humans.43 In the relatively protected space, human children had extended exercise of imaginative play.44 And unlike apes and other mammals, our ancestors did more than tackle each other and wrestle around. Our ancestors imitated other animals, people, and things. Impersonation is actually a huge leap for imagination and for our species. Fantasy is something in which every young child can engage. Two-­year-­olds can imitate dogs and doctors, build skyscrapers from blocks, and imitate tool use. They thrive on fantasy imagination. This innocent play is how humans first developed a rich second universe, and—just like toddlers who imitate before they can speak—our prelinguistic ancestors probably imitated their way into novel technologies and behavioral strategies. Watching and imitating how a big cat stalks its prey, for example, might have led early human hunters to become more successful predators. And a Neanderthal child impersonating the alpha-­male chief in his kin group might one day become him. Immature play is also a great opportunity for the cultural evolution of the whole group. Improvising and trying new things in the high-­stakes adult world can be very costly. But the juvenile world is safe, ideally speaking, and experimentation is not costly. The group is not damaged if a child improvises a new fishing technique or plant-­grinding technique during the course of play. But the child grows up, and the adult might preserve innovative discoveries from play, implementing them successfully later in life when stakes are high. Through imitation, such innovations might also spread to become culturally significant in the whole group. Childhood play is a relatively unrehearsed world. Social norms and customs are being inculcated, but children are encountering the world in an experimental mode. Playing children learn directly about turn taking. They clearly experience how turn taking can be successful, painful, or pleasurable, depending on the many social variables. Just as a playful wrestling match teaches a child how far this arm can bend or that leg

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can kick, et cetera, so, too, do social games frequently teach kids how to care for, intimidate, and assuage other people. Childhood play often imitates adult domestic relations (e.g., playing at husband or wife) as well as domestic tasks. Contemporary Botswana girls play at grinding grain, but as they become proficient, they are slowly phased into the real work of mortar and pestle grinding.45 Play is a low-­stakes arena to develop emotional control as well. Kids who cannot control their emotions and who engage in temper tantrums are given many low-­stakes opportunities to align their emotions with the expectations of their peers and superiors. Emotional management is as much a part of play as physical education (motor training). Imaginative and improvisational play had a significant role in channeling the emotional intelligence of early humans.

T H E C AV E M A N T H E S P I A N

Our pre-­sapiens ancestors, in Africa and Eurasia around 500,000 years ago, probably communicated with one another by gesture and mimicry. They lacked true language, but they were not limited to sniffing each other for information. They needed to work together in order to engage in cooperative group hunting, and the archaeological record suggests increased big-­game hunting during this period. Anthropology of today’s hunter-­gatherers reveals that bands of hunters frequently communicate during the hunt by means of gestures, facial expressions, and mime. Mimicking or acting out a scenario requires a leap in imaginative powers. Our ancestors would need to envision a possible future, based on memory, and improvise a virtual reality version for an audience. The actor, in this sense, uses his body as a readable code for another person to interpret. Re-­creating a chase, a throwing style, or a flushing-­out technique turns a private experience (the sender’s) into a public experience, and then a fresh private experience (in the receivers). And interpretation is another case of imagination because the receiver of the code must connect it to his own experiential memory and set of expectations. For cooperative hunters, gestures and mimicry were “instructive,” not just entertainment. Many evolutionary psychologists have suggested that this Middle Pleistocene era is when theory of mind comes online in our ancestors. Theory of mind is the psychological ability to pro­ject a different mind

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(with different information, beliefs, and desires) into another person’s head. Normal kids develop this ability somewhere around age three or four, but before this, kids do not understand that other people have private minds separate from their own. An older child can deceive their friend because they come to understand that their friend has different head space, different access to information—and such information can be manipulated. It’s currently a great debate whether other mammals have theory of mind or not. Having sophisticated language allows humans to engage in elaborate transmissions (deceptive or honest) between other minds, but before we had true language, we must have used gestures to convey information and to produce emotions and behaviors in our tribe members. This is embodied imaginative work. Gestures require less translation. The hand gesture for “come here” does not just symbolize the request. It actually creates, in the hand motion, a version of a physical object (the hand) approaching (in time and through space) the gesturer. It still needs cultural conventional nuance— for example, Asians gesture “come here” with palm down, while Westerners gesture palm up—but the body sign still shows the meaning more directly than a word. Acting, punctuated with sounds, can be a rich lexicon of communication. In our modern minds, the acting is an expression of a privately accessed second universe in the head of the gesturer. But there must have been a time when the private second universe (head space) was very rudimentary and public gestures flowed more instinctively and more involuntarily. Imitating someone or something is a powerful tool in the development of human mind and culture. More formal rituals and ceremonies are social re-­creations of events, and they probably emerged from body-­ based catharsis and bonding mechanisms (e.g., group dance) to eventually become primordial narratives or myths (proto-­religions). We must remember that even fantasy imagination is still an extension of mammalian play. Our cultural fruits grow from their biological roots. Play would be selected for, by natural selection, because it allows mammals to take threats (and dominance struggles) off-­line and rehearse for them in safe environments. Such early imaginative play was done largely through the body, without much cognitive motivation or even understanding. Play, like discipline and other emotion-­behavior matrices, helped early humans develop their emotional intelligence.

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E M O T I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E A N D I M P R O V I S AT I O N

In 2012 an Arizona news team hired animal scientists Drs. Suzanne Hetts and Dan Estep to investigate a reportedly genius dog named Sheba.46 The dog’s owner, Bob, would pose every manner of question to the dog, and she would respond accurately with yes or no signals (one paw slap for yes and two for no). The signaling system was the only thing that Bob taught to the dog. Sheba seemed to know that the Green Bay Packers had not won the Super Bowl in a given year, and that it was indeed cold in the Arctic, and many other remarkable facts. As one might expect, investigators Hetts and Estep discovered that Sheba was not so smart when Bob himself did not know the answer to some fresh question, and she was stumped altogether when Bob was removed from the room. But this was not because Bob was tricking the investigators. Sheba was a virtuoso at reading subtle body language and unconscious cues from Bob’s face and hands. The moment Sheba arrived at the correct answer to the question, Bob’s demeanor leaked the satisfaction cues. The Sheba case is similar to the early twentieth-­century case of Clever Hans the horse, who marveled audiences with his hoof-­clopping mathematical skills. When Hans’s owner posed an arithmetic problem, say, 2 + 8, the horse would stamp its hoof ten times and stop. A committee was formed by German psychologist Carl Stumpf to study Hans, and they discovered that Hans could also do the math when a stranger (someone besides the owner) posed the questions. Hans was even more clever than Sheba because he had the flexibility of reading cues that were more universal in human body language—not just the idiosyncrasies of the owner. After much testing, Stumpf discovered that the horse was responding to very subtle cues in the questioner, including breath patterns and head tilt. Many questioners unconsciously held their breath while Hans clomped his hooves and then unknowingly released their breath when the correct number of hoof stamps had been reached. Very rudimentary affective states of excitation, quiescence, approach, avoid, and so on are read and mirrored by mammal bodies. Some people are deflated to learn that the horse cannot do math and the dog cannot keep up with Super Bowl results, but of course the truly remarkable lesson is that they can read bodies like we never imagined. Humans can too, but our cold cognition obscures the subtle communi-

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2.2. Clever Hans (c. 1907), the horse who marveled audiences with his hoof-­clopping mathematical skills. When Hans’s owner posed an arithmetic problem—say, 2 + 8—the horse would stamp its hoof ten times and stop.

cation between our respective bodies. When an improvising comedian is riffing in front of a crowded room, she can sense when the room is with her or against her, or slightly uncomfortable. And this largely unconscious communication derives from the same real-­time conditioning system that Sheba and Hans possess. From moment to moment, an improvising comedian, dancer, or musician is taking readings from the social group and responding (i.e., sometimes acquiescing, sometimes challenging, etc.). And this embodied communication is largely emotional, rather than declarative. We are culturally trained in the contemporary world to ignore and resist messages from the body on the grounds that they are biases and prejudices; but while this is sometimes the case, we must also reconnect to the wisdom of the body. Team improvisers, like jazz players and ensemble actors, work hard to shut off some of the cold cognition chatter from regular consciousness, so they can feel the sympathetic rhythms of embodied cognition. This kind of emotional intelligence is strong in good improvisers, but

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we all have it (save exceptions like psychopaths and extreme Asperger’s subjects). In this chapter, I’ve been trying to explain the systems that underlie such emotional improvisation. Previously, behaviorist psychology reduced all this fine-­grained communication (like Clever Hans) to simple stimulus-­and-­response mechanisms, but we (and other mammals) are not simply responding to environmental prompts and cues. We also have deep innate (endogenous) emotional systems inside us that point outward toward the environment and cause behavior by fastening (via experiential learning) to specific targets. Clever Hans, Sheba, and any mimicking human infant are all driven by a prosocial desire for communion with a family or tribe (a system we’ve isolated as care), and this need shapes the behavioral responses. Directing the emotional systems (lust, care, rage, etc.) to flexible targets creates new adaptive strategies. When cold cognition eventually evolves (facilitated by language, among other things), Homo sapiens get more distance and perspective-­taking ability on their own emotional tendencies and targets. That distance creates even more flexible options (shaped by impulse control), and our improvisational skills then pro­gress by many orders of magnitude. When forest habitats of our ancestors Homo erectus were quickly replaced by grassland savanna, it presented them with diverse foraging challenges. They had to find, catch, kill, and process new food supplies or die. Climate fluctuations during this period were some of the most extreme in primate history. These ecological extremes place a premium on behavioral flexibility, on improvisation. The earliest kinds of improvisation were probably alternative uses of action sequences and heuristic patterns. The alternatives were probably few and far between, but some flexibility is better than none. Changes in family structure during this same period probably led to greater emotional flexibility and improvisation too. Human babies are born “prematurely”—in order for their big heads to get down the birth canal. This means that much of our brain development occurs in the social environment. As I mentioned before, human infants were and are more dependent on nurturing (than other primates), and more caregivers (alloparents) held, fed, instructed, and interacted with the babies. Aunts, uncles, brothers, fathers, grandmothers, and so on triggered care mechanisms across an extended family. Since we know from neuroscience that “what fires together wires

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together,” the human brain wired up a flexible open-­ended system of care (and the other emotions). In this way, complex social intelligence and adaptive problem solving emerged—in particular, cooperation could expand significantly without any need for higher-­order cognitive calculations. We recognize all this as emotional intelligence. The Chinese philosopher Mengzi (Mencius) (c. 371–289 bce) argued that these innate prosocial emotions were like the “sprouts” of vegetation. Any person, according to Mengzi, who saw a little child stumbling toward an open well would be filled with alarm and empathy. This innate emotional response is evidence that we all have the “sprouts” of morality inside us. It is up to us as individuals and as a society, Mengzi argued, to tend these emotional moral sprouts into full fruition. This cultivation process works not through the head, but through xin—the heart/mind. Xin, in Chinese philosophy, is the word for heart but also includes powers of decision making, motivation, and commitment. Xin is a physiological and psychological locus of volition. It is another way, a more ancient way, of talking about embodied cognition and emotional intelligence. There is a traceable line from Mengzi’s moral sprouts and xin, to our animal affective systems. The goal in moral life, Mengzi argued, is to be able to perceive the ethical needs of a given situation, feel the appropriate feelings internally, and adapt one’s actions to the benevolent ends. The good moral improviser is not simply applying a rule to a new scenario (like a math problem), but rather she has trained her character such that she will respond to the unique complexities quickly and compassionately as an extension of her nature. For Mengzi and other philosophers like David Hume, morality is a kind of emotional intelligence built upon our animal capacities. For our purposes, we can think about Mengzi’s xin as an improvisation between the internal affective systems and the norms of complex social life. A highly responsive moral virtuoso is a master improviser. He has embodied tendencies to action, subtle perception, strong memory of successful precedents and failures, generosity beyond mere reciprocity, and so on. The moral sage is not just following a rule book or stone tablet. He is improvising in the best sense of that tradition. I will have more to say on moral norms and improvisation later in the book, but for now it is enough to note that embodied cognition grounds everything from dance to ethics.

The unexpected turn, something which the artist himself does not definitely foresee, is a felicitous quality of a work of art; it saves it from being mechanical. JOHN DEWEY

Now that I begin to see where I’m going with it, I’ll take a new canvas and start again. P I C A S S O , A F T E R F I V E H O U R S O F I M P R O V I S AT I O N A L PA I N T I N G ( I N H E N R I - ­G E O R G E S C L O U Z O T ’ S L E M Y S T È R E P I C A S S O )

: THREE :

D R AW I N G, D R E A M I N G, A N D V I S U A L I M P R O V I S AT I O N

T H E RO OT S A N D T H E WA L K I N G B A S S

Our jazz combo swings a rhythmic pulse that everyone grooves along to, but the bass player provides some of the unnoticed elemental scaffolding for the other players. The most significant chord, the key center, in our jazz tune “Imagination” is E♭, and the bass player is crucial for returning the whole band and the tune to this central axis and resolution. But every chord change the pianist makes also needs its relevant root, or tonic note, and the bass player is there to provide it. Creating a platform for each step in the song progression, the bass player makes the harmonic and melodic experiments of the pianist and saxophonist possible. After the melody or “head” is played, the bass player starts to “walk” his note patterns underneath the soloists. The effect is dramatic. The E♭maj7 chord is deconstructed into a serial set of steps: root, major 3rd, 5th, major 7, and back down again—all in quick succession with each beat of the 4/4 time pulse. This musical scaffolding is improvised in its order and dynamics, but it’s also stable and reliable for other members to build upon.

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: : :

In our natural history of improvisation, we are first exploring the elemental ingredients. In a jazz performance, some of the fundamental elements (like the walking bass) are hidden from our initial perception, and we have to peel back the top layers to find them. The creative mind is similar, in that many elements of improv and imagination are below the surface spectacle. Our creative mind is composing and innovating with common elements, and we saw in the previous chapter that the earliest common source was the body itself. Nothing is more ready to hand in a problem-­ solving situation than the body itself. Now in this chapter, I want to explore the role of images. The formation and use of images starts in mammal perceptual powers but evolves into something uniquely human. Images are building blocks of thought itself and form a prelinguistic language of the mind. Following our jazz band allegory, the drummer had symbolized the improvising human body (in the last chapter), and now the bass patterns can symbolize the fundamental ingredient of images. Imagination needs images, generally speaking, and a large part of improvising is employing those images for adaptive purposes (and eventually for non-­utilitarian free play too). But music and imagery are intimately connected through the primate body itself—as we navigate spatial and temporal experience. As music theorist Bob Snyder points out, the same image schemas that make language reflect spatial metaphors (e.g., up is good, down is bad, knowledge is a voyage, etc.) also govern musical universals: musical pitch is usually understood as “high” or “low” even though there is no literal up or down in music.1 Snyder suggests that these musical- and image-­based metaphors are products of how we experience gravity, and this experience of folk physics creates elemental categories for organizing our experience. There are three cross-­cultural melodic strategies that follow spatial schemas. First, the axial schema (a melody weaves above and below a central pitch) is very old and characterizes our bass player “walking” above and below the root note of the jazz chord. This axial schema is also very prevalent in ancient chant music. Second, consider the arch schema, wherein the melody does not dip below the foundation pitch, but rises in steps to a climax and then falls in steps. Finally, there is a gap-­

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fill schema, which leaps from a low note to a high note and then fills the gap in a downward stepwise sequence to the original pitch. These melodic schemas, like images, share spatial orientation aspects that develop from our biology. But in this chapter, we will focus on imagery and image making per se. Thinking with images—just like thinking with music—draws on our perceptual equipment and the folk physics world we experience. The mysteries of imagery need significant exploration. How, for example, does embodied mind (a) form images (perception), (b) retain images (memory), (c) recall images, (d) use or manipulate images (e.g., combining, decomposing, sequencing), (e) communicate with images (info and emotion), and (f ) formalize pictorial conventions (e.g., cave-­ painting styles)? Improvisation plays a large role in (d) and (e) above, but we must enter into all these questions if we are to understand the development of visual thinking.

C AV E M A N P I C A S S O S

The French filmmaker Henri-­Georges Clouzot documented a full day of Picasso painting on a glass canvas, releasing it in 1956 as Le mystère Picasso. We see the painter improvising a female form, which then morphs into a bull, and then a landscape, and then flowers and so on. Each subject is slowly obliterated by the subsequent image, yet a palimpsest of evolving forms build up in the memory and the pictorial space. After five hours, Picasso announces that the canvas is a failure and must be thrown out, but the improvisation itself has taught him how to proceed when he starts the next day’s work. The visual improvisation has been an artwork, an art process, and a kind of research or investigation. It is easy to forget that image making is a kind of active investigation. We are accustomed to thinking of images as either expressions of inner emotional states or as record-­keeping copies of real objects. In Plato’s Republic, for example, he argues that imagery is suspicious and lowbrow because it does not qualify as knowledge (book VII). The imagination generally, according to Plato, is the very lowest level of cognition—because it merely copies (often imperfectly) the impermanent fluctuations of perception. For Plato, whose paradigm of knowledge is math, artists are merely playing around with the surfaces of things, not the things them-

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selves, and certainly not the essences (Forms) of things. This prejudice against images—born out of Plato’s Pythagorean distrust of the senses and the body—has long influenced Western dismissal of the imagination. The distrust is twofold because images or pictures only capture the outer aspect of things (whereas science and philosophy seek to penetrate beyond the phenomenal veil); and, second, pictures are emotionally stimulating and therefore misleading (i.e., images have strong rhetorical power and can manipulate viewers). Of course, anyone who regularly draws recognizes this Platonic view as slightly silly. Drawing is visual thinking. Image making obviously enlists the perceptual brain systems, but also many of the deliberative cognitive systems that rational thinking engages. Psychologist Robert L. Solso ran fMRI scans on an experienced artist and a novice while each sketched a portrait and found that the experienced artist used more executive brain regions (right frontal), while the novice remained stuck in the perceptual FFA (fusiform face area) at the back of the brain.2 The FFA is a specialized system for recognizing faces, and it’s a crucial feature of our visual system, but it’s more like an automatic processor than a cognitive decision maker or analyzer. Solso interprets his data to mean that the experienced artist is “thinking” the face he’s drawing, while the novice is stuck in trying merely to “perceive” the face more intensely. The artist’s passive perception of the subject needs to be sensitive, subtle, and capable of granular investigation, but the drawing itself is a constructive active process that requires many problem-­solving skills and decisions. Repeated drawing shortcuts some solutions for the experienced artist, but each new drawing is a fresh improvisation of possible pencil strokes, checked and rechecked against the subject by error-­detection skills. There is tight sensory-­motor feedback in the hand-­eye coordination of drawing, and it can be considered an extended “dance” improvisation toward a goal of embodying its subject matter. Improvising with images is a two-­step process of mind. It is a process that evolved in a two-­step sequence over hundreds of thousands of years, and while the two steps are now fully integrated in the modern mind, they also remain accessible to us in unique states of consciousness (e.g., dreaming). The first step of visual improvisation can be called storing and refers to the perceptual aspects of drawing, while the second step can be called shaping and refers to the conceptual and manipulative aspects of

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drawing. As part of shaping, I include the monitoring or repairing phase of drawing because it is part of executive control, but some may wish to see repairing as a third step. The point is that visual improvisation is part of a larger story about increased executive control in the evolution of mind. I will try to unpack the logical and genealogical relation between percept and concept, between dreaming and waking, recognizing and representing, stream of consciousness and creativity, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. The oldest cave painting we know is around 40,000 years old—a “red disk” in northern Spain. And the most prolific area, containing over 150 caves of art (including the famous Lascaux and Chauvet), is in southwestern France. Also, hand stencil and animal images in limestone caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia, have been recently dated to the same time period. The hand stencils are made by blowing pigment around a hand placed on the rock wall. If the Indonesian images are as old as the European, then it throws some doubt on the long-­held view that cave painting originated in Europe. Professor Nicholas J. Conard of Tübingen University argues that image making and other cultural innovations may be distributed throughout the early human diaspora, without a single point of origin. He suggests that we think about the late Pleistocene in terms of “polycentric mosaic modernity”—where common skills emerge in different geographic regions. Others, like Professor Eric Delson at CUNY, suggest that the image-­making cultures of the early diaspora (Europe and Asia) are fruitions of the earlier decorative technologies of Homo sapiens in Africa (before the migration of 60,000 years ago).3 It’s clear, however, that figurative art does not really emerge until humans are out of Africa, and the decorative precursors are more like design elements—body adornment with shells, ostrich egg beads, and so on. Image making is a novel craft and seems particularly indicative of symbolic mind, but it also has great continuity with earlier skill sets and accumulated cultural wisdom. The embodied cognitive ingredients for cave painting are discernible in earlier utilitarian cultural traditions. An early visual improviser needs to find pigment sticks or chunks in her environment, or process them herself by grinding minerals: hematite for red ocher, limonite for yellow ocher, wood charcoal for black, and so on (employing cave water as a binder). The first improvisers of paintings may

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have been extending activities from source domains of food processing, tool flint knapping, and body adornment to a new target domain of wall adornment. This is a common aspect of improvisation—repurposing one skill or idea for a new domain. The word “adornment” must be reconsidered, however, because wall art almost certainly had more down-­to-­earth functions than our modern ars artis gratia. We are not sure why our ancestors painted on walls. They rendered rhinoceroses, lions, mammoths, and bears in the earliest works, and horses, bison, and deer in the later caves. But comparative anthropology of historical hunter-­gatherer societies reveals that such image making is a way to enhance hunting success, persuade nature’s fertility, illustrate proto-­religious commitments, or mark territorial boundaries for competing groups. According to Richard Klein, the spiritual-­ cultural aspect of the images may be evidenced by the fact that many of the images are in difficult-­to-­reach, non-­habitable areas of the caves, where light sources (torches and animal fat lanterns) were employed for the work. Such locations, away from the quotidian hearths, may indicate shamanistic aspects of the images.4 The visual art tradition exploded in a short period and quite recently. Even if we include many forms of pre-­figurative decorative design, the visual arts only reach back to 140,000 years ago.5 This contrasts strongly with the gradualism of tool making and tool innovation. Oldowan stone industry built simple choppers and pounders, with little innovation, for almost a million years (2.6–1.8 mya). Subsequent tool-­making industries—like Acheulean (1.7–0.1 mya) and Mousterian (30,000–40,000 years ago)—were more innovative and diverse, but still relatively gradual and conservative compared with the appearance and spread of visual technologies. Why is this? It’s possible that visual imagery and other aspects of Upper Paleolithic culture exploded because language finally emerged at that time. Language may have helped artists organize the technology of art and helped with the transmission (horizontally in the tribe and vertically over generations) of representational techniques. This is not an unreasonable inference, but it remains speculative and contentious. For example, anthropologist Jeremy Coote’s research shows that contemporary Nilotic Sudanese tribes have no art but rich language, and this suggests that any facile inference between a lack of cave art and a lack of language

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is questionable.6 My own hunch is that language follows rather than leads image-­based communication, and we have evidence (from developmental psychology) of proficient image making without linguistic ability— but more on that later. Another extremely important tradition appears in this same time frame, namely, three-­dimensional figurine sculpting. The Venus figurines appear all over Europe, from Portugal to Russia, and have a remarkably similar style. The dates of the figurines run from 28,000 to 21,000 years ago. The exaggerated breasts of the Venuses suggest that they were fertility symbols or mother goddesses. Of course, early pornography cannot be ruled out as a function for these artworks, especially since vulvas are very commonly, even obsessively, represented during this time. But despite our uncertainty of the function of the sculptures and images, paleoanthropologists like Klein think that the complexity of the technique indicates teaching and therefore the presence of rich languages. One wonders, however, whether the biocultural advent of extended and safer childhoods, mentioned in chapter 2 (together with increased associational learning), might be enough to explain the transmission of art techniques in Upper Paleolithic humans. Less sophisticated associational learning systems (of hot cognition) may be enough to account for the acquisition of art skills. I’ll be making a case for hot cognition, rather than propositional cold cognition, as the fount of early image making. For Klein and many others, however, the art of this period offers compelling evidence that these humans possessed cognitive and communication abilities like our own.7 For Klein, the cave painters and Venus sculptors had modern minds, with rich language and cognition. The interesting thing is to try to reconstruct the subtle steps that led up to the modern mind, in particular a mind that can imagine and render two- and three-­dimensional representations. Whatever the mind was capable of before, it seems that by 30,000 years ago human minds could convert a three-­dimensional animal (e.g., a bison or bear) into a two-­ dimensional line representation. This conversion would seem to be a conceptual move, in the sense that bison and bears are not made up of lines and must be reconstructed as if they were. In this way, the two-­dimensional rectangle, for example, can symbolize the three-­dimensional volume of the bison’s box-­like body and thereby become a representational trope, motif, or element for rendering many kinds of animal bodies. How much

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of this is conceptual versus perceptual is hard to say. The idea that the Upper Paleolithic mind can detach impressions from experience, abstract them into elemental parts, and reemploy those parts in creating new impressions that symbolize remembered animals all seems very conceptual, as stated. On the other hand, large amounts of our daily visual field can be said to be like two-­dimensional spatial experience, especially as animals are observed in profile (without foreshortening) against a horizon. It is not that much of a leap to remember and re-­create such perceptions by outlines, without any conceptual translation or folk theory of illustration. Moreover, drawing is often a fumble-­and-­find process, where the line is a sensorimotor experiment first, and then representational referents begin to be suggested or recognized. Doodling slowly reveals objects that our pattern-­recognition systems detect and then refine—not unlike clouds suggesting familiar objects to perceivers, but in this case the artist can start to correct and shape the accidental depiction by remembering or perceiving a prototype image. The artist Paul Klee referred to sketching as “taking a line out for a walk.”8 And the illustrator Shaun Tan says, “Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking.”9 A phenomenology of my own artistic doodling, along with informal interviews with other compulsive sketchers, reveals a complex interplay of embodied processes. Many of us doodle in meetings, lectures, coffee shops, waiting rooms, and similar environments. In the downtime when most people reach for their smartphones, doodlers reach for their sketchbooks. The figures, characters, scenes, and things we draw are often linked directly or indirectly to (a) real-­time triggers in the room environment or local conversations (e.g., sketching the back of the person ahead of us, or creating a cartoon fish inspired by the fishing story of a guy in the waiting room, etc.). The sketches also (b) incorporate memory associations (e.g., this cartoon rhino draws on my semantic memories of Disney characters and a beloved Albrecht Dürer etching, as well as episodic visits to the zoo, etc.). Such sketching is also heavily immersed in (c) purely formal graphic elements (e.g., exploring a pointillism or cross-­hatching technique, or seeing what my fish or rhino will look like if I make him out of grass or long hair, etc.). And finally, (d) the affective states or emotions in the room and in myself are shaping the drawings (e.g., this character or even inanimate object can express frustration, mirth, anger, etc.). Perus-

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ing someone’s sketchbook is an intimate encounter with their conscious and unconscious emotional life. Moreover, we need to acknowledge that drawing itself is an emotional feedback loop. Doodling an angry scene actually tenses the body and brings a grimace to the face, and positively speaking the process can calm and relax the drawer, thereby changing the subject and style of the drawing itself. Improvisational drawing orchestrates all of these processes with spontaneous hot cognition, rather than cold cognition. And this mode of thinking is ancient. Of course, subsequent rendering of improvised drawings may be more deliberative and cold cognition based. Was language suddenly in play in the Upper Paleolithic, and did it form a template for decoupling signs from perceptions, so that image decoupling could follow? Or was it the other way around? Did image production and reproduction create the template for linguistic sign formation and manipulation? The relationship between three-­dimensional sculptures and two-­ dimensional paintings is provocative. If we think that symbols and signs are attenuated versions of perceptions of three-­dimensional things, then it might make sense that our depiction skill moved from the hand-­eye manipulation of objects (e.g., in flint knapping tools) to the hand-­eye manipulation of objects like Venus figurines. Then, from figurines, a further attenuation or abstraction can arise as a two-­dimensional line drawing. This sequence seems like the right order and number of steps in the formation of modern mind. Flint knapping requires the craftsman to chip a smaller form (e.g., a spearhead) out of a larger form (a rock). One might reasonably think of figurines as intermediate between flint knapping and image making. After all, sculpture, like knapping, requires similar skills of extracting and refining a smaller physical shape out of a larger one. And yet the archaeological data doesn’t seem to support the idea of sculpture as intermediate creative step between tools and painting. The dates are wrong. The figurines are more recent than the paintings, and so the order of primitive versus derived skills seems almost counterintuitive. One way to resolve the paradox here is to consider that figurine sculpture may have developed over long periods in perishable substrates, like wood, and only then transitioned to stone around 30,000 years ago. But it is also important to consider how the art of sculpture can be quite

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different from flint knapping and more like two-­dimensional drawing. Maybe the paradoxical time sequence is correct. There is a lot of evidence that stronger drawing skills make for better sculptors. Drawing ability translates well into sculpting accuracy and nuance (consider Michelangelo, after all). Of course, the main challenge in drawing and sculpture is to render form. Sculpture requires a more holistic perspective-­taking ability because it needs to represent a body or object from all sides— something that drawing and interestingly vision itself cannot do. But the act of sculpting a Venus figurine may be more like serial drawing than flint knapping. This is because the stone used for figurines was very soft (e.g., steatite, calcite, or limestone) and quite different than the chert rock used in knapping tools. Chert and other types, like obsidian and quartzite, flake when struck with force, so they make good raw materials for lithic-­ reduction techniques. The crystalline composition makes the stone hard and useful as a tool, but it also makes shaping it difficult and indirect. You don’t sculpt a hand ax or scraper. You chip it out. No doubt a figurine needs to be wrought at first from a core shape that resembles a humanoid body plan, but then the carving is different from chipping. Soft stone carving, like the Venuses, requires one to draw into the substrate with ever-­increasing depth until a three-­dimensional form emerges. It is possible then that cave-­drawing skill, with its sophisticated line work, needed to be added to lithic-­reduction skill as the necessary ingredient for figurine sculpture to emerge. That would also make sense of the archaeological timeline. The relation between two- and three-­dimensional representation also raises important questions about the domain crossing of perceptual abilities and, most importantly, the evolution of representation generally. As we saw in the last chapter, neural pathways strengthen between visual perceptions and motor actions, such as when the developing baby simultaneously sees and feels its hand gripping an object. Artists must also correlate a motor hand movement with a perceptual content, such that the visual content is successfully replicated. I look at the horns of a bison, and I move my paint-­soaked finger in an arc that reproduces the shape. In some caves there is evidence of an initial sketch and then a superimposed corrected version, proof perhaps of what philosopher Peter Lamarque calls “an internal critical tradition.”10 Such a critical tradition would try to optimize the realism and/or emotional impact of the image. Even before learning these artistic simulation techniques, however, all

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humans (artists or not) have learned to associate perceptual data from diverse domains. Tactile touch of a round object, for example, is correlated over and over (via matching vertical associations) with visual patterns of shadow and light. The touch information of a round ball is correlated with a visual pattern that, depending on the light source, has one side of the circular shape very dark and the opposing side very light. These are automatic correlations across perceptual domains, and all humans have such experiences as part of their uncritical holistic involvement with the world. Artists either notice this correlation information better than non-­ artists, building up rule-­of-­thumb techniques around it, or they fumble and find the lines and values but then have more vigilant editorial awareness for error correction. In the cave paintings, we are struck not just by the line accuracy of form but also by the simulation of bulk and three-­dimensional mass. This is achieved by darkening the pigment near the outline edge of the animal, reminding the perceiver’s brain of the matching vertical association of tactile girth. This sophistication is one of the reasons why Picasso, upon seeing the walls of Lascaux, claimed that we have learned nothing new about painting in the eons since. Finally, it is important to distinguish two kinds of improvisation in drawing. For lack of better terminology, I’ll call this tethered and untethered improvisation. Representational improvisation is obviously tethered to the thing being represented, but of course great diversity in line making and color coding is entirely up for grabs. The cave painters of Lascaux were improvising the lines and colors of the running deer or bull, but their improvisation was constrained by the known features of the deer and bull. The prototype deer, presumably retained in memory from direct observation (since the cave “canvas” is not alfresco) acts as a strong constraint on the line work. This kind of tethered improvisation proceeds by small degree. Improvisation is always experimental, but in the presence of strong constraints, it settles into regular embellishments and is tantamount to style. The untethered improvisation is non-­representational exploration of the purely formal elements: line, color, texture, shape. Unlike the twentieth-­century story of art, which went from figurative to non-­ representational formalism, the evolution of visual art itself went in the opposite direction. Design work in the Pleistocene is a hodgepodge of decorative tech-

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niques with no geographic migration pattern. Stones with crosshatched patterns appear in Africa around 70,000 years ago. Cupules are human-­ made, hemispherical indentations that have no detectable utilitarian value and appear to be symbols of some kind, dating all the way back to the Lower Paleolithic (before Homo sapiens). Additionally, zigzag designs etched into mussel shells have recently surfaced in Java, Indonesia, dating way back to Homo erectus—some 300,000 years before the earliest South African engravings by Homo sapiens.11 The point is that our ancestors were doing lots of untethered visual improvisation long before the figurative work. In these cases, the line work is only constrained by the line next to it: echoing it, crisscrossing it, responding to it. This kind of formalism precedes figure depiction and cannot be “wrong”—cannot fail to correspond to its referent. It is also a wonderful puzzle to contemplate the motivations of purely decorative art. We certainly seem closer, in these design experiments, to the realm of a free-­playing imagination. Non-­human primates also show a playful satisfaction in creative design activity. Chimpanzees in captivity show a real joy for “painting” or putting color on a surface. As far back as the 1950s, a chimp at the London zoo named Congo demonstrated an immersive involvement and seeming joy in composing visual improvisations using color pots and brushes.12 Picasso and Miró each acquired paintings by Congo. Congo never made representational art per se, but he did make repeated fan-­shaped designs of multiple colors radiating out from a fixed point. And Congo also learned to paint a circle. The anthropologist Desmond Morris encouraged Congo’s painting and noted that the painting sessions were deeply satisfying for the chimp, who would protest dramatically if he was denied his “painting time” or if his painting was interrupted before he deemed it complete. Decorative design certainly becomes an adaptation that serves social evolution. Tattoos and body adornment are important symbols of group membership, and non-­utilitarian decoration becomes a sign of social status and prestige. But one of the earliest motivations in creating visual design might have been the pleasurable activation of the ancient simulation system (discussed earlier with dancing coordination). Our ancient simulation system helps us to mirror other humans, but also to replicate the patterns of nature (e.g., waves, grass, symmetries of anatomy, and so

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on). Such simulation is magical—even godlike for the artist—because it replicates and creates order from the artist’s privileged point of view.

I M A G E S , D R E A M S , A N D P R O T O - ­C O N S C I O U S N E S S

Like every other natural organ, the mind evolved by degrees and not by sudden fiat. The mind’s ability to improvise stories was preceded by its ability to improvise gestures, tools, and images. Is there any evidence that images can be a rich communicative system independent of language? The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words may be enough, since everyone knows a photograph or painting that moved them to tears and gave them deep insight. A rare case from the medical literature gives us suggestive evidence that pictorial thinking has its own power independent of language. Moreover, picture-­making behavior may have preceded the evolution of language. The cave paintings of Chauvet, Lascaux, and so on are taken to be evidence that the people of that time had modern minds—minds sculpted by propositional cognition. But psychologist Nicholas Humphrey revealed the striking similarities between cave-­painting styles at Chauvet and the drawings of a twentieth-­century autistic girl named Nadia.13 Nadia was born in Nottingham, England, in 1967 and suffered from severe developmental disability. At age six she still could not speak, had physical impairments, and many social incapacities. But even with these substantial deficits, Nadia could draw pictures with great accuracy and expression as early as age three. Professor Humphrey placed Nadia’s toddler drawings next to the images from Chauvet and noticed striking similarities in the rendering of animals, like horses and elephants. The contour lines of the creatures are remarkably similar, as are their dynamic poses, but also the way in which the figures are reiterated and overlaid on top of each other. We cannot place too much emphasis upon such anecdotal data, but Humphrey and more recently Eric Kandel suggest that the Nadia case should throw some skepticism on the assumption that Upper Paleolithic peoples had modern minds.14 If Nadia was so good with pictorial representation while lacking the foundation of linguistic symbolism, then perhaps the Homo sapiens of 30,000 years ago were graphically literate before they were verbally literate. Nadia made meaning very effectively without

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3.1. The paintings in Chauvet Cave, in the Gorges de l’Ardèche, France, were discovered in 1994. They were painted between 26,000–30,000 bce and show remarkable skill and nuanced rendering.

propositional tools. Our recent ancestors may have had impressive nonlinguistic minds—very unlike our own. Image making and image “reading” could have had a complementary evolutionary pathway, alongside language, or could have evolved earlier from natural selection upon tool-­ making capacities and adornment techniques. The weak version of the theory is that Nadia reveals the possibility of pictorial sophistication without language, but the strong version is that Nadia was pictorially sophisticated because she had little to no conceptual/linguistic distraction in her mind. Without the alienating aspects of linguistic symbols, Nadia may have been more perceptually sensitive—­ leading to greater accuracy and expression in her drawing.15 Both the weak and the strong version can be applied to Upper Paleolithic peoples in a way that is at least as consistent with the evidence as the standard claim16 that paintings imply language.

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This is exciting for us because it suggests that visual improvisation and communication—usually denigrated as distracting, derivative, and bereft of knowledge content—were actually foundational for the human mind. The rationalist cultures, from Plato to the Enlightenment and beyond, vilified imagery as merely rhetorically persuasive because of its emotional power. In this way, a haughty division was drawn between knowledge (which dispassionately grasped concepts, universals, and laws) and art (which lacked knowledge content and played in the inferior sensual realm). But, as I mentioned in the introduction, our embodied communication systems—like bodily gestures and image making—contain much more meaning than is usually acknowledged by the rational cognitivists. The reigning paradigm in both the humanities and the sciences is that meaning is linguistically grounded—propositional, inferential, and largely indicative. For example, we understand the meaning of the sentence “It looks like it will rain today” because grammar structures independent nouns and verbs into a coherent inference or prediction, and does so in the indicative voice of reportage. But in the case of image thinking, we see the possibility of the opposite. The level of linguistic meaning rides on top a deeper and older system—bodily, associational, and largely imperative (normative) rather than indicative. Images are especially good at imperative meaning, because they often have emotional and motivational qualities. Images frighten and inspire, in addition to reporting facts. Mind has two mental pathways—dorsal and ventral, cold and hot, indicative and imperative. In order to appreciate the interwoven pathways of mind, consider briefly an experience like fear of a predator—part cognitive and part affective. The emotion/cognition complex in predator fear is a Janus-­faced experience, partly imperative (e.g., I should run away) and partly indicative (e.g., that creature is a snake). According to some philosophers of mind, like Ruth Millikan, this Janus-­faced representation is strongly coupled together in lower animals—mice, for example, simultaneously recognize cats as a kind of thing (in a category) and as dangerous (fear affect).17 A gazelle sees a cheetah as a specific kind of thing (i.e., not a crocodile and not a giraffe, etc.) but also as a fast-­approaching threat (imperative). Humans, on the other hand, can decouple these two pathways (indicative and imperative), and fear can be reattached to alternative kinds of creatures or perceptions.18 In our ancestors, the role of smell was reduced and replaced by sight.19

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Unlike dogs and most other mammals, proto-­humans navigated the physical and social environment with visual orientation more than olfactory. We just do not smell the world as efficiently and adaptively as other mammals (a trained dog can smell the carbon dioxide given off by only one bedbug in a house). This means that vision needs to be a very meaningful alternative for us. Visual images need to be information rich, and we need to extract adaptive responses to them quickly and efficiently. The fear-­based taxonomies that early humans made of threatening predators were flexible enough to be trained and conditioned, as hominids migrated to different environments (i.e., predators in northern Europe were different than in Africa). So, too, lust-­based taxonomies of attractive bodies were innately constrained enough to keep sex generally in the same species, but flexible enough to explain Neanderthal and sapiens mixing. The visual image of a predator or sex object reveals the easy mix of adaptive emotion (fear or desire) and image, but there are myriad ways of subtle mixing and learning. Beyond the adaptive importance of sex and escape, for example, we recognize that our ancestors could navigate migration routes with a combination of landmark recognition and emotional association (i.e., this way is good; that way is bad). Gestalt patterns in the environment or landmarks could be emotionally coded with positive or negative feelings, and could (when combined with memories) make sophisticated navigation possible without much need for inferential cognition. Most of the mixing and learning of adaptive feeling and image is done automatically and unconsciously (through classical and operant conditioning), but a form of mixing and learning occurs in dreams, too, and serves as a possible access point to human proto-­consciousness.20 Dreaming is involuntary imagination. The inner life of our hominid ancestors was probably more like our dreaming consciousness than like our waking consciousness. Brain imaging and neurochemistry have revealed some fascinating changes in the dreaming brain. We’re not surprised to know that our brains “stay on” and continue to operate long after we’re “turned off ” and unconscious. But the surprising thing is that a kind of brain reversal seems to occur. During REM sleep, storms of intense neuronal firing sweep through the brain, but the neural systems most active during waking life cease firing completely. Dominant waking-­life neurotransmitters, like

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norepinephrine and serotonin, reduce significantly during REM sleep. This is interesting because low serotonin also correlates strongly with the hallucinogenic state (like LSD-­induced brain chemistry, as well as the hallucinogenic schizophrenic brain). Serotonin seems to keep the so-­called “doors of perception” closed, to use Huxley’s famous phrase. It keeps our cognitive life relatively coherent and predictable, and when neurologists block serotonin (in clinical tests), our experience gets more trippy and dreamlike. Some neuroscientists have speculated that highly creative people (who sometimes walk the line between genius and madness) may turn out to have low serotonin levels.21 Freud thought artistic creativity was the result of a neurosis, but we’re slowly getting a more fine-­grained picture of creativity. Too little serotonin makes one depressed, not an artistic genius. The mood signature of serotonin is calm and relaxed, and when it is paired with a high dopamine flow (which energizes the organism), we get a mind that is well balanced for creative activity: energetic, but not anxious. However, getting the mood right for creative work is only one ingredient; one also needs the interesting, even fantastical ideations that give rise to art. A recent study by D. Brang and V. S. Ramachandran suggests that lowered serotonin plays a role in synesthesia (music and even numbers are perceived with color associations). In some synesthetes, Prozac (which increases serotonin) reduces the synesthesia, and in some normal subjects, LSD (which fits imperfectly into serotonin receptors) creates temporary synesthesia.22 It might be that serotonin has the unfortunate dual power of raising mood and lowering imagination. It’s too early to say with any certainty. One of the most interesting aspects of the dreaming brain is that our emotional brain “wakes up” after the rational prefrontal brain goes to sleep. There is intense arousal in the limbic system, especially the amygdala, during REM sleep. This rings true for many of us. Our dreams are frequently more emotional than intellectual. We often live through tumultuous events and intense emotional scenarios, while lying paralyzed in our beds. One of the brain systems that stays “on” through both waking life and REM sleep is the theta wave system and the hippocampus (which modulates theta waves). This system is strong in waking life, when animals are exploring their environments (seeking), and most neuroscientists consider it a good indicator that “information processing” and behavior

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modification is happening in the foraging animal. The hippocampus acts as a coordinator of short- and long-­term memories. And paradoxically, our primary motor areas are also running hot in REM—in our brains we are escaping from a nightmare monster, but our legs have been switched off by REM atonia. Now, what could these useful waking systems be doing for us—when we don’t seem to need them in our sleep? Dr. Jaak Panksepp suggests that the dreaming brain may still be “information processing”—but not the usual real-­time survival challenges of the external environment. Instead, our dream activity may be a way for the brain to organize, structure, and generally sort out our internal environment—our image-­based emotional life. The theta activity during REM may reflect “information processing that is allowing transient memory stores to become integrated into subconscious behavior habits.”23 In other words, dream life may be part of a larger animal project—­something like imaginative emotional/behavioral management. This accords well with the Darwinian idea (discussed in our previous chapter) that emotions are precognitive survival strategies for mammals—fast-­acting engines of behavior. Dream life is the playground of the “involuntary imagination,” but as we’ve already noted, this free play is not all fun and games. It is frequently a kind of rehearsal—a virtual training—for life’s trials and tribulations. It allows the subconscious to encounter monstrous threats (e.g., embellished Pleistocene predators) and engage with them through virtual behaviors. Dreams may even be creating a kind of data bank of emotional/ behavioral responses, as a way of integrating previous waking experiences and anticipating future waking experiences. How do dreams sculpt adaptive strategies for waking life? We don’t really know. We understand from simple introspection that if I start a new job and meet a new group of people that I need to organize into a coherent social hierarchy (e.g., person X is above me, person Y is below me, person Z may not be trustworthy, person N is a potential friend, etc.), then dreaming about them helps strengthen and even forge useful associations. These quick associations will serve me better than explicit inferential thinking in the rapid context of the job. Beyond introspection, we suspect there are brain mechanisms that strengthen some synapse connections, even in the sleeping brain.24 In dreams we are extracting important aspects of an event or memory,

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integrating these with other memories, and even projecting these into an imagined future or alternate scenario. One night, for example, I dreamed that I had to perform Schumann’s “Träumerei” on piano, and the audience I had invited was already filing into the auditorium. This was a nightmare of sorts since I don’t play piano. I woke in a sweat, with a broad philosophical sense that I shouldn’t bite off more than I can chew, and a specific imperative sense that I should rehearse more for my real upcoming gig on guitar. We obviously do some of this management in our conscious waking lives—using our neocortical cognitive brains—but we’re also doing this same management (subconsciously) in the emotional brain during the course of REM sleep. It’s possible that our emotionally robust dreaming life is similar to how other mammals (with less executive neocortical administration) process their waking life. And if we continue to an evolutionary comparison, then perhaps the waking life of Homo erectus was like the associative and imagistic emotional life of our contemporary dreaming lives. Early humans lived more in the secret and silent kingdom of the animals. Dreams are more intuitive and image-­based forms of thinking and feeling. They are not like our logical, sequential, and linear waking life. Moreover, dreams do not signal to the subject whether the experience is real or a figment—the senses can frequently be tricked (as Descartes famously pointed out), but the emotions are extremely susceptible to judgment error. Emotions can’t discriminate well between imagined and real threats. Their delusion is so complete because emotions are not representational. They’re not proxies for something else. Unlike the word or concept “cat,” emotions don’t take their validity from their correspondence with objects or propositions. An emotion of fear is a subjective feeling with a physiochemical substrate, and it can overtake you whenever a threat is perceived—regardless of whether that threat is real, imagined, or dreamt. A mere dream about the death of a loved one, for example, can leave us emotionally exhausted. And many post-­traumatic stress disorder sufferers are afraid to go to the second universe of sleep, for the same reason. Some development in human evolution helped us gain greater executive control over the fast internal rivers of memory and emotion that washed through our ancestors. Involuntary imagination was probably reined in by brain developments (e.g., stronger prefrontal cortex control

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over the limbic system) but also cultural shifts that steered our wild dancing second universes toward greater order, discipline, and stability. The ability to inhibit behaviors, suppress responses, and redirect feelings contributed to our mental and cultural sophistication. Counterfactual virtual realities—which previously haunted us—were turned into tools for cooperative projects. Interestingly, even our modern imaginations retain one foot in this unconscious river. And this is why artists like Salvador Dalí and scientists like Einstein suggest that we stir up the waters of creativity but also get out of the way and let them run their courses too, collecting the novel formations when they resurface to consciousness. The old flow of associations is sometimes very productive, if it can be harnessed downstream. Dreams are improvisations in the sense that they are autonomous, uncontrolled narratives with loose cause-­and-­effect sequencing. In fact, some dreams may only be brain “noise”—the hum and flicker of a big wet machine in rest phase. But much of dreaming life is pregnant with meaning. Tonight’s dream will often have some direct reference to today’s events or recent events. This gives credence to the theory that dreams are organizing and reorganizing relevant impressions and desires, but of course the dream sometimes throws up an ancient memory and gives us a glimpse of various stages of the primeval self. In general, dreaming consciousness is more random—it does not even reliably follow the libidinal logic that Freud ascribed to it. Freud thought many dreams were secretly about sex, but dreams are even too improvisational to be secretly about sex in any regular way. However, the psychoanalytic approach and the contemporary neuroscience approach share an understanding of the dream as teleological, as having some purpose, albeit sometimes very mysterious. Dream consciousness is adaptive in part because it codes and strength­ ens emotional memory associations, but it is also intentional or purposive (teleological). As Arnold H. Modell puts it, “If the dream is an expression of intentionality, there is an implicit reference to the future, which may take the form of reference to actions to be taken on the following day or in the more distant future.”25 Dreams are not just memory plays, but also future possibilities. Dreams often have goals. But the teleology of the dream is often misshapen and obscure, as if it can only imperfectly sustain a representational goal. I dream, for example, that my brother comes to

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visit for dinner, but then he transforms mid-­dream into a neighbor and the dinner morphs into a car repair task. The play of ill-­formed representations and narratives tends toward something, but inefficiently and indistinctly. Still, such intentionality is enough. It is faulty but serviceable, getting the waking animal turned toward some adaptive goal (food, shelter, sex, friendship, etc.), even if the trajectory is only subliminally conscious. In the evolution of modern teleological mind, we would expect to find halfway or transitional modes of intentionality. Dream consciousness fits that bill. It is not hard to imagine how the dream mind or proto-­consciousness could be enough to save the life of the creature (even if such a premodern mind is a relatively random and tiny “second universe”). Moreover, such an associational premodern mind could be ever more beneficial and adaptive as greater executive ordering and control came into the free-­playing head space. In the same way that lucid dreaming brings greater agency to normal free-­play dreaming, so, too, a species-­wide evolution of self may have brought the disorder of waking proto-­consciousness under an umbrella of volition. We’ll have more to say about the evolution of self in chapter 5.

P I C T O R I A L M I N D A N D C R E AT I V E T H I N K I N G

Whether it’s dreaming or waking reflection, the kind of thinking we are focused on presently takes its start from visual perception. It may be stored in memory and then retrieved voluntarily (in waking) or involuntarily (in dreams or unguided mind wandering). But how does this perceptual motor-­based simulation become thought, as we know it? The embodied cognition paradigm that I’m endorsing requires us to get from bodily states to mental states, and the most difficult bridge is from body state (in this case visual perception) to abstract concept. Can internal images represent tokens and types (e.g., Steve and Homo sapiens)? Can an inner image act as a concept? Can I draw inferences from an image? And can I productively combine images in head space to produce knowledge advantages? Many cognitive scientists think not. The field of cognitive science is populated by chess wizard programmers, like Demis Hassabis, who thinks of the mind as a computer. Hassabis, who sold his programming company

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to Google for over $500 million in 2014, boldly claims, “With the brain, there isn’t anything non-­computable.”26 Artificial intelligence programmers have assumed that the brain must be converting the sensory perceptions from the body into some kind of code, and these codes will be stored in the memory areas and retrieved for algorithmic manipulation and then on to behavior or cognitive output. The model is as follows: input, transducers, code, transducers, output. Intelligence, on this model, is the application of a code rule to a specific variable, with a suitable outcome. The more rapidly a system can apply rules to variables and gather outcomes from antecedent conditions, the more intelligent the system is considered. This is exactly the model of mind that a chess enthusiast would like. The application of universal rules to particulars is certainly one of the amazing features of mind that any theory needs to explain. If I say, “All men are mortal. And Socrates is a man,” then you will have no trouble drawing the proper inference from the syllogism. You can conceive of type concepts, like “man,” category concepts, like “mortal,” and tokens, like “Socrates.” These are easily transduced into codes of variables and functors, which is how our daily Google searches winnow down the pools of information. For the code-­believers, the mind is either a probability calculator (i.e., Bayesian models of intelligence) or a connection algebra of binary variables.27 However, despite the dominance of the code-­believers, recent research is starting to complicate the story in the best possible way. Psychologist Lawrence Barsalou, for example, has been leading a quiet revolution by reminding us that images are forms of thinking too.28 Cognitive activity, according to Barsalou, is a kind of simulation of external reality, via perceptual rather than code systems of representation. When we have a visual experience of a bird, for example, the brain extracts an image symbol from the perceptual experience. The specific details of a blue jay are abstracted out of the image symbol—and we get a morphological or shape simulation of the blue jay, without the specific color and head plumage and so on (powers of selective attention are enough to create attenuated symbols from the data). This more generic symbol of bird is not a transduction of the image properties into code properties. Rather, the structure of the perception is simulated in the symbol that is stored in the brain. These image symbols, derived from the visual system, are then stored in long-­term memory to function as concepts.

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The generic symbol of bird now acts as a prototype concept that helps us to organize other experiences. For example, comparing a new creature we’ve encountered to the extracted and symbolic bird prototype leads us to identify it as a member of a generic (type) category. Moreover, a symbol prototype of bird gives us inferential abilities regarding features of a creature that may or may not be visible in the moment. For example, I can’t see the lower half of this creature before me, but since it matches the bird prototype, I can infer some sense of its leg structure and function. This is all unconscious processing, for the most part, and we are not aware that our mind is forming these image concepts. Consciousness rarely reveals the machinery of knowledge itself, and we’re forced to catch it obliquely. The specificity of mental images is an old debate in philosophy. Without the advantage of contemporary experimental work, philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) made up his mind about mental images. Berkeley had seen a theory similar to Barsalou’s in John Locke’s philosophy, but he strenuously objected. Whether others have this wonderful Faculty of Abstracting their Ideas, they best can tell: For myself I find indeed I have a Faculty of imagining, or representing to myself the Ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a Man with Two Heads or the upper parts of a Man joined to the Body of a Horse. I can consider the Hand, the Eye, the Nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the Body. But then whatever Hand or Eye I imagine, it must have some particular Shape and Color. Likewise the Idea of Man that I frame to myself, must be either of a White, or a Black, or a Tawny, a Straight, or a Crooked, a Tall, or a Low, or a Middle-­sized Man.29

In short, Berkeley introspects his own consciousness and finds that he cannot picture abstract images, only specific ones. He can compose novel hybrids, but their parts are also highly specific. Therefore, he concludes, human beings cannot imagine general man or a general circle or a general prototype bird. Two responses to Berkeley’s skepticism seem trenchant, however. For one thing, having an abstracted general image in one’s mind is an empirical issue—Berkeley cannot picture an image generally, but I think I can. And a great many other people think they have such images available to

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them as well. Not much follows about the human mind from Berkeley’s inability. Second, and more interestingly, there may be good evolutionary reasons why humans can form generic mental images. In a constantly changing environment (like the one our ancestors evolved in), it does no good to store very precise visual memories that fail (by their specificity) to map onto the diverse problems of life. Generating an abstract prototype out of specific perceptions would be more adaptive because it would be more capacious for a mind’s classifying work and more fruitful for the predictive work of a mind trying to limn nature. Back to the present, psychologists Stephen Kosslyn and colleagues found empirical evidence for where and how mental imagery is managed in the brain, and he also showed that mental rotation of an object takes time because our mind actually needs to inspect our internal mental imagery. This productive re-­inspection of mental imagery seems to confirm that the medium of the image is not digital code or algorithmic encryption, but something pictorial—albeit in some neural substrate ­format.30 The point is that images are making a comeback of sorts. Philosophers like Aristotle considered thinking to have a significant image component, but twentieth-­century positivism and computationalism replaced image thinking with a paradigm of thinking as code—in part because meaning was reduced to linguistic representation. I want to bring back the pre-­ computational paradigm of embodied mind, because we now have tools and data that can fill in many of the earlier gaps. For example, we had no real model of coherent thought structure except syntactic language, which led us to treat thinking as intrinsically propositional. But the recent research into embodied brain loops, like Robert Barton’s cerebellar-­ cortical system (see chapter 2), reveal how a task grammar of behaviors can organize subroutines into complex sequences. This could be the kind of prelinguistic syntax system that governs images too. As Barsalou explains, “Many have assumed that native mechanisms interpret and organize images (e.g., Kant, Reid). All [pre-­computationalists] have assumed that images can be dynamic, not just static, representing events as well as snapshots of time.”31 This is a crucial point because while I am stressing the logic of images in this chapter, properly speaking an image is already an abstraction from the flow of visual experience. Most daydreaming imagination, for example, replicates the dynamic visual world, not static images. When kids

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sit in church or school, or take long rides in cars (think Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes), they frequently gaze out to the environment and mentally place action scenarios of superhero battles, giant monsters, rocket trajectories, and so on against the real backdrop. The images are narrative, even filmic. The great animation artist Hayao Miyazaki describes, in a documentary film, how his mind projects dynamic adventures on top of mundane situations.32 Looking out a midrise window at the buildings below, he says, “See that house with all the ivy on it? What if you leapt onto the next rooftop, dashed over to that blue and green wall, jumped up and climbed the pipe, ran across the roof, and jumped to the next? You can in animation. Suddenly there in your humdrum town is a magical movie. Isn’t it fun to see things that way? Seems like you could go somewhere far beyond. Maybe you can.” Projecting counterfactual visual scenarios into our immediate environment is a pleasurable but also adaptive habit, since it might help one prepare and predict dangerous or beneficial features of the habitat. So we should remember that the subjective felt sense of visual imagination is usually quite lively—filled with motion, spatial, and temporal activity. Embodied cognition research is starting to show how such organization of dynamic imagery developed out of the sensory-­motor systems long before language syntax emerged—and indeed, the latter is probably the outgrowth of the former. In addition to organizing reality (into types and tokens), mind possesses the ability of recursivity. Recursion is meaningful self-­replication, or repeatedly applying a structure or function. Language has this ability, because—like the number series—it can keep adding more terms according to its syntactical rules, and thereby keep adding more and more detailed representations of the external or internal worlds. I can say, “There was an old lady who swallowed a goat to catch the dog, to catch the cat, to catch the bird, to catch the spider, to catch the fly,” and you know, despite the strangeness, what I mean. We’ll discuss this kind of language recursion more in chapter 4. However, the deeper grammar that seems to generate several syntax systems, not just language, is the breakdown of the world into (a) entities, (b) properties, and (c) processes. Yes, language corresponds to this deep taxonomy, with nouns, adjectives, and verbs, respectively, but gestural motor subroutines can also be characterized in a similar logic. Remember, for example, the gorilla food-­processing case in chapter 2. The task

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grammar of subroutines that gorillas use for folding stinging nettles into an edible meal is also structured in a dynamic process (folding and eating) of an entity (nettle) with the property (stinging). The animal does not conceptualize this in a propositional way, but it sequences its perceptions and motor skills into a helpful routine that is not merely stimulus-­response association. Images, too, have a grammar. Some image grammar is socially and culturally constructed and does not travel well across geographic and historical distances. But worldwide wonder and cross-­cultural fascination with the Paleolithic cave paintings suggest that a deeper universal grammar of images may exist. Pictorial images, stored as amalgams of perceptual symbols, reveal relations (like predicate/substrate) and allow us to grasp quickly which part of an animal produces locomotion (legs, wings, etc.), which part is non-­essential and accidental (color, length of hair, etc.), which part is likely the front or the back, and so on. These are successful kinds of reasoning, albeit pictorial. The universality of image grammar is likely if internal representations of percepts are structurally similar to the referents they symbolize—something true for all human seers, but not true for the highly arbitrary and conventional designations of human languages. In other words, an image of a dog also has four legs, but the word “dog” has no legs at all. The grammar of images includes the manipulations or operations performed on those images. Images are spatial and convey relative distances between component parts, but they can also easily express ideas of containment—and being inside or outside something is fundamental in categorizing our experience. Recall my earlier syllogism, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” As we noted, this categorization and inference-­drawing cognition about Socrates submits easily to a propositional logic, but importantly it is also thinkable in visual logic. Imagine two interesting Venn diagram circles, for example, one set contains (a) all men, and the other set contains (b) all mortals. The meaning of the first premise of the classic syllogism is that we visually erase or shade away any portion of the (a) set that does not reside inside the (b) set. Now (b) contains (a) within it, and when we place Socrates (x) inside the set of men (a), he is simultaneously placed inside the set (b), ergo the conclusion. But this logical derivation is a result of sequential image manipulation, and the relation of tokens and types is established pictorially.

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The upshot of all this is that mental images and artistic images are not simply recordings, like camera snaps. They are modes of human appraisal. They are early forms of judgment. The model of knowledge I’m articulating in this book then is somewhat controversial. Many contemporary philosophers claim that knowledge is linguistic, because propositions enable the thinker to subsume individuals (Steve) under universals (Homo sapiens), attribute properties (is hungry), and draw inferences (is now seeking food). On this model, knowledge is declarative. But another way of thinking about knowledge reveals its imaginative and improvisational heart. I am suggesting that a person who simulates a thing to a high degree of detail (either with body gesture, drawing, or mimicry) can be said to understand that thing. They have substantial knowledge of it.

V O L U N TA R Y I M A G I N AT I O N

The proto-­conscious world of dreams and animals has a flow to it. Following Freud, the surrealists celebrated this unguided stream of associations, calling it “automatism.” In his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” André Breton defines surrealism as “pure psychic automatism by means of which one intends to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, free of any aesthetic or moral concern.” Interestingly, the depiction or rendering of objects and characters is quite realistic in surrealist painting and writing, but the arrangement of these characters is broken out of their predictable sequences and given over to unnatural and unpredictable recomposition. The process of juxtaposition itself became a lever for prying open a hidden realm of unconscious meaning. Surrealists like Breton characterized the movement as revolutionary, designed in part to break conventional society of its complacent assumptions and false realities. A large part of improvisational imagination is fresh juxtaposition. Today the psychoanalytic science that grounded surrealism has been rejected as dangerous over-­interpretation. Freud argued, for example, that dreaming of melting candles meant a latent fear of sexual impotence, and Dalí dutifully included the image in his paintings. These days we’re more likely to call a cigar a cigar, but the overall idea that dreams

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3.2. The dreaming mind is an automatic or involuntary form of imagination, and Freud (1856–1939) encouraged us to understand how it does its secret work. Many of the specific “latent meanings” of psychoanalysis have been rejected, but the broader meaning of dreams is still a living puzzle for researchers.

reveal, albeit imperfectly, desires, emotions, anxieties, life plans, and so on is still alive and well. Unlike the psychoanalytic tradition, current dream psychology no longer assumes that the dreaming mind is entirely cagey about its desires. The line between latent and manifest meaning of dreams is permeable and porous. The dreaming mind is an automatic or involuntary form of imagination, and as such beckons us to understand how it does its secret work of association and why it does such work. The Freudian view asked the “why question” in the context of the individual’s development (i.e., the ontogenetic level). And the function of involuntary imagination, in this paradigm, was the individual’s catharsis or purging of neurotic or pathological tendencies (in part brought on by the inevitable psychic violence of repressive socialization). In contrast to the Freudian view, I have been suggesting that the “why

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question” regarding involuntary imagination would be better researched in the domain of human evolution (i.e., the phylogenetic level). Humans, having a scarcity of instincts, do not possess many reliable preset responses to the world. And the world does not come carved up into obvious meaningful entities, so we must learn (through conditioning and social learning) which creatures and which people to avoid and to pursue. Dreams are part of the process of tagging the world with significance or value. That value is provided by the emotional/affective feelings that attach (as associations) to experiences and memories. For example, fearful dreams of the new guy in my tribe will give me useful trepidation in waking life interactions. Such an imperfect emotional processing system makes occasional mistakes tagging our social group, but evolution only needs to make the system serviceable rather than perfectly optimized. The subsequent evolution of a cold cognition system helps humans further refine the tagging of our natural and social environment, by making judgments and deliberations more explicit and voluntary. The old tagging system, however, still churns and toils in the “basement” of the human mind. Recall that the philosophical tradition has approached the imagination in two very different ways. On the one hand, the imagination is a deep well of free-­playing creativity that stands in contrast to the orderly rational mind. This view dominates the popular sense of the imagination, and the average person on the street will recognize this as the familiar meaning. There are Romantic philosophers who celebrate this sense of imagination as fantasy, but most philosophers have focused on the other way of thinking about imagination—namely, imagination as cognitive architecture, the integration of percepts and concepts. As I mentioned in the introduction, this philosophical view of imagination as “integrator” can be seen in Aristotle’s claim that imagination is a faculty in humans (and most other animals) that produces, stores, and recalls the images used in a variety of cognitive and volitional activities. Even our sleep, he recognized, is energized by the dreams of our involuntary imagination. Immanuel Kant also saw the imagination as a synthesizer of sensibility and understanding, focusing on imagination as a form of judgment rather than fantasy or creativity. In many ways, embodied cognition is finally delivering a more scientific and granular model for how percepts and concepts are integrated in the mind. In particular, we’ve looked at how images or pictures can become conceptual, allowing for categorization of experience and infer-

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ential judgments. This is the same kind of synthesis that Kant attributed to the imagination, but the conceptual categories of embodied cognition are not inborn structures of mind. Instead, contemporary science asserts that conceptual categories are derived from native brain abilities sculpted and pruned by perceptual experiences. This integrator view of imagination, from Aristotle to embodied cognition, investigates the “how question” mentioned earlier—how are image associations coherently, but unconsciously, structured in the mind (in dreams and waking life)? The contemporary “why question,” on the other hand, has two major directions, with many side paths along the way. One direction is functional and utilitarian—evolutionary adaptation, for example. The integrator view of imagination always tilts toward the utilitarian usefulness of the simulation systems (whether pictorial or bodily). The transformation of percepts into concepts, via prototypes, helps humans understand their environment and survive. The other direction of interest in why is quite different. It is aesthetic. Why do we have and use the imagination? Because it provides some of the highest human pleasure and joy. The fantasy view of imagination tilts in this direction (though fantasy can also be recruited for adaptive survival ends). Focusing on improvisation allows us to bring together these imagination traditions. When a visual artist improvises a novel image—say, Joan Miró’s Harlequin’s Carnival, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, or H. R. Giger’s “Alien” for the film Alien—he or she creates the stunning fantasy that surprises and awes the viewer. The artist typifies the magical and fantastical imagination. And aesthetic joy (and fear, etc.) emerges as the intrinsic value of the work, for both artist and audience. Many aesthetic emotions and judgments accompany the art—beauty, sublimity, amusement, inspiration. But closer examination of the fantasy process brings us inevitably to the integrator mechanics of imagination—the unconscious and proto-­conscious play of percepts and concepts. The integrator imagination is a necessary prerequisite for the fantasy imagination. The artist can bring this process under greater voluntary control (than nightly dreamers and non-­artists), but of course no one wants it fully under ­control. How is creative control achieved? From the Great Sphinx of Giza (c. 2558–2532 bc) to the walking spoons and plates of Disney, artists have

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3.3. Plato, in Republic (book IX), concocts a wonderful three-­animal hybrid of the human soul, consisting of multi-­ headed writhing beasts (desire), mixed with a lion (emotion), mixed with a homunculus (reason). The well-­ordered soul consists of reason forming an alliance with emotion (thumos) to rule over the chaotic appetites.

mashed together parts and categories that do not overlap in nature. It is possible that surreal dreams—a human head on a lion body—first gave rise to waking artworks like sphinxes or satyrs. But we cannot know for sure. What matters is that waking and dreaming creativity both engage in a visual-­conceptual dissection of two creatures and subsequent recombination of limbs and powers. This cognitive blending is called “category jamming.”33 The ancient chimeras are evidence of this routine technique of improvisation. Consider the Greek and Roman centaurs, griffins, harpies, mermaids, cynocephali, et cetera, and the Indian Ganesh, Hanuman, and Garuda, as well as the Chinese Qilin, Shi (Foo Dogs), or long (dragons), and so on. Plato, in Republic (book IX), concocts a wonderful three-­ animal hybrid of the human soul, consisting of multi-­headed writhing beasts (desire), mixed with a lion (emotion), mixed with a homunculus (reason).

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Mixing two beasts is a common cliché of imaginative improvisation, as is the alternative fantasy technique of multiplying natural limbs and powers until the resulting creature is quite unnatural. The Greek “hellhound” Cerberus is depicted on sixth-­century bc vases with two and three heads, but in Hesiod’s Theogony he is described with fifty heads (which reveals the ease, and perhaps therein the advantage, of linguistic improvisation compared to pictorial). But many others follow the multiplication cliché: Hydra, Scylla, Janus, and in Indian imagery Shesa, Brahman, Shiva, Avalokiteśvara, and so on. There are limits to imaginative fusions, however, suggesting that the native productive mechanisms of the mind can construct virtual realities up to a point. There are constraints, even on the most creative minds. Breakdowns occur when you try to imagine, for example, a running tree.34 But perhaps the constraint is easily overcome by simply adding legs of some kind—in fact, adding legs to anything I conceive (clocks, snakes, planets, trees, etc.) will get it up and running in my internal second universe. But even here there are still constraints. I need to draw upon an absurd but still coherent image logic to make a snake fly in my imagination. For example, I need to add wings, but it will not do to add legs in this case. This is because the parts of creatures (e.g., wings) have powers (flight) or potentials (affordances) already associated with them in our image database, and when I mix and match, I bring along some essential associations with the anatomical structures. Anatomical category jamming is a large part of visual imagination, but other productive clichés derive from reframing characters and objects. One of the most imaginative visual artists of recent years is the Australian illustrator Shaun Tan, author of award-­winning books like The Arrival (2006) and films like The Lost Thing (2010). Tan is a master of changing the natural frames of space and time in his drawings. By changing the scale of a character or object, he creates a new imaginative world where rabbits are larger than houses, and people fit inside matchboxes. A 2004 pencil sketch called Tea Ceremony depicts a parade of odd characters (category-­ jamming chimera) marching through a fairground. But the fairground is actually a dinner setting, with a gigantic teacup and spoon dwarfing the tiny characters. As the characters pass, they pour water from a tiny teapot and, where the water hits the tablecloth, flowers immediately sprout up, forming part of the parade itself. We are cognitively and sensually

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3.4. Real and imaginary birds. Here we find two cases of category jamming. On the right, we have a buzzard’s head fused to a penguin’s body. And also a toucan head is mounted on a human body. Cartoonists everywhere have sketchbooks filled with such absurdities.

delighted and aroused by the image. The spatial scale of everything is all wrong, and time has been twisted—flowers grow slowly, after all, not instantaneously. Such reframing is amusing and exciting, but such imaginative flights also create fresh emotional associations and, as we’ll see later in the book, have deeper cultural significance, including religious and moral shaping. One more productive cliché of imagination is readily observable in Shaun Tan’s work, but also in that of M. C. Escher, Frida Kahlo, and Joseph Cornell, not to mention contemporaries like Damien Hirst and Mark Dion. It is the mixing or category jamming of the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic. In this fusion we have birds with robot heads, lightbulbs with tentacles, people made of clock wheels, and all manner of steam-­punk amalgamation. How are all these category mash-­ups possible? They rest upon some

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ancient integrator mechanisms of early mind. I would not want to suggest that creativity can be reduced to simple cognitive machinery, but it is also too Romantic to deny some prerequisite creativity mechanisms. If you draw an on/off switch on an animal, for example, or put a tentacle on a machine, you have already done the lion’s share of the imaginative work. There is a “conceptual blending” process that helps us create novel and meaningful improvisations.35 The human mind has a subconscious skill that gathers elements from diverse domains and blends them into a new concept. For example, if a conservative American in the early 1990s fantasized that Margaret Thatcher would make a great U.S. president, he would be enacting the conceptual blending process.36 First, a conceptual general space is needed, in this case a generic concept of “world leader” is already available to the person—this general category is capacious and can contain prime ministers, presidents, kings, and so on. Next, the mind draws different elements from two separate domains, called input spaces: U.S. and British political life (e.g., British politician, Thatcher’s personality, union organization, American presidency, U.S. voting policy, and so on). Finally, the information from the general and input spaces is all blended into a new concept, “President Thatcher.” We all do this kind of imaginative thinking every day. We unconsciously and consciously harvest elements from source concepts and map them or blend them into new target concepts. My idea of love is a blended space, comprised of other domains, like war, mountain climbing, and drowning. Maybe you have a different blend. Recently, scientists have started investigating how this kind of conceptual blending might be happening in specific brain regions. Neural patterns that store the representation “shirt,” for example, could be overlapping with neural patterns for “red,” such that a combined “red shirt” thought is produced.37 A neural map of “red shirt” would extend out to include portions of the source patterns, “red” and “shirt” (and attendant associations). We’re a long way from identifying exact neural correlates for specific thoughts, but this model is compelling because it admits of many kinds of input sources and blended novelties, including emotions and perceptions, as well as traditional conceptual representations. With regard to visual imagination, all this makes good sense. When creative genius Hayao Miyazaki puts legs on a house (Howl’s Moving Castle) or turns a cat into an autobus (My Neighbor Totoro), we see how the creative mechanism of blending produces an unanticipated innovation with

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unique emergent properties. And once a new target image (e.g. a “catbus”) is created, it can become a source concept for building ever more complex layers of meaning. Now the catbus can be blended with a bird, and we can imagine a flying catbus, and so on. This is the recursive operation (recursion) that allows us to improvise with images. Notice that improvising with images does not, per se, prove that the process is occurring in mental space first and physical space after. Yes, Miyazaki and other modern minds can run experimental creatures, like walking houses, in the mental space of their second universe, but Upper Paleolithic humans may have been image blending in the physical space first. Just as involuntary dreams can paste together fresh chimeras, so, too, fumble-­and-­find drawing techniques can accidentally cobble together imaginative composites. Our ancestors may have accidentally created startling and provocative image combinations through doodling behaviors. Just as we speak of mind-­wandering imagination, we can speak accurately of pencil-­wandering (or Paleolithic pigment stick-­wandering). That caveat in place, it’s clear that once we started to improvise with images, we never slowed the pace. As cultural communication and transmission became more sophisticated, humans could build image concepts and pass them down over generations. We pass pictorial Internet memes all around our social networking sites, but early humans may have done something similar, albeit slower and with more gravitas (a guild of illustrators). Is this why cave painting and figurine representational styles have similarities across a geographical and temporal spread? Some features of image making appear universal in our species, and this provokes the usual question about native innate ability versus culturally created customs. The cognitive science of image making that we’ve been exploring here suggests some universal perceptual-­ conceptual mechanisms. Moreover, the case of Nadia, mentioned earlier, can be interpreted as evidence that drawing ability has a genetic and neurological component that connects a six-­year-­old British girl (and all of us) with Upper Paleolithic cave artists. Still, this is not much evidence for a nativist view of image making, and there are many cases of cultural diversity in how images are created and even read or interpreted. Several decades of research have asked Western and Eastern people to look at the same image with three objects: a cow, a chicken, and a patch of grass.38 When asked to group things together, Western people gener-

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ally group the cow and chicken together, while Asians tend to group the cow and grass together. This different taxonomic preference appears to reflect a deep cultural difference in how we carve up the world. Westerners group the things together, the animals. But Easterners group the cow with its grass environment (its food or ecology), which suggests to some that they are organizing the world more in terms of process, than objects per se. For our purposes, it is interesting to note the deep diversity of reading images, and this may give us pause when making a facile leap to a universal image grammar. Still, just as the supposed deep grammar of language is supposed to underlie individual languages, from English to Chinese, a similar case may apply to the image grammar we’ve been exploring. It seems reasonable to suggest that the creative mechanisms (e.g., perceptual symbols, conceptual blending, etc.) lie beneath the culturally specific ways of organizing images. An important place to continue the investigation is childhood development. We now know, for example, that children’s drawings have identifiable universal stages. Contemporary developmental psychology continues to endorse modified versions of the stages first articulated by Viktor Lowenfeld, Jean Piaget, and Bärbel Inhelder.39 From 15 months to 2.5 years old, children engage in “random scribbling.” They mark surfaces with broad strokes, governed mostly by shoulder movements, and take joy in the process. From 2 to 3 years old, children engage in “controlled scribbling,” activated by more fine hand and finger muscle coordination. They usually make heavily repeated markings: diagonals, circles, horizontal lines, and so on. The grip on the drawing tool changes to the thumb and pointer finger. From 2.5 to 3.5 years old, children mostly draw “lines and patterns,” many of which hint at recognizable objects and parts of letters. They seem more explicitly interested in simulating or imitating something external to the drawing. Then, between ages 3 and 5, children start drawing “objects and/or people.” This stage requires more planning as well as more sophisticated simulation abilities. And more details begin to appear in the previously crude objects. Children begin to actively shape the symbol system of drawing. Notice that the developmental stages of the average kid look a lot like the sequential archaeological record of Homo artistic stages. First we had decorative patterning, earlier in the Pleistocene, and later the figurative people and animals of the Upper Paleolithic.

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Is scribbling just a kinesthetic exercise for the child—enjoyable motor coordination practice? Or are scribbles proto-­representations, sometimes thought to be “action representations”—visual-­motor representations of movements?40 Evidence that the scribbles mean something beyond exercise is revealed by the fact that two-­year-­olds will immediately cease the motor activities if given pencils without lead. Kids will also draw “bunnies” with a hopping motion of the crayon, or “airplanes” with rapid scribble lines of a propulsive quality. When asked what an indecipherable scribble is, two- and three-­year-­old children offer consistent verbal accounts of the thing/process represented. In other words, your kid identifies an indecipherable scribble as the family pet dog, and months later identifies the same scribble as the family pet dog. Realism in drawing, however, is not a straightforward development. The deep entanglement of percepts and concepts can be seen in the transition from intellectual realism in drawing to visual realism.41 A series of experiments asked children to draw a cup placed in front of them. The handle of the cup was positioned away from the child and could not be seen directly. Children under eight years old usually draw the cup with a handle, whereas children older than eight will actually draw what they see, a cup with no visible handle. These sorts of tests suggest an important distinction. At a certain age, perhaps from four to eight, the child engages in intellectual realism—drawing what she conceptually knows is there (cups are familiar objects and children have stereotypical mental ideas about them). After eight, however, some children are more likely to draw with visual realism—drawing what is really given in the visual field, rather than supplied by cognition. Interestingly, some autistic children have remarkable abilities of visual realism. They can be savants of realistic drawing at a much younger age than other excellent drawers. One explanation for this might be that they lack the cognitive dominance that normal four- to eight-­year-­old children have, and therefore their sensitive drawing technique is unpolluted by conceptual contamination. Remember that this was one way to read the drawing virtuosity of our earlier Nadia case. This idea of unpolluted visual realism accords well with a theory of autism called “weak central coherence,” which suggests that autistic minds are hyper-­focused on small parts of experiences, but fail to process the contextual and conceptual frames.42 Put another way, they cannot see the forest for the trees. For our purposes, these studies may give credence to the idea that

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visual realism is a default orientation for children, but the rise of linguistic cognition “railroads” the mind into more intellectualized interpretations of visual information. This may explain why and when intellectual realism dominates the drawings of normal four- to eight-­year-­olds. If they are to go on to become proficient drawers after eight, they must actively overcome the interference of their own knowledge. The difficulty of down-­tuning such interference may be a large part of why good drawers are so rare in the overall population. Consistent with this is the idea that certain children on the autistic spectrum may continue refining and enriching the default orientation of visual realism, getting only minimal interference from the linguistic phase of cognitive development. Psychologists Florence Goodenough and Dale B. Harris devised an image-­based intelligence test called the Draw-­a-­Man test. They asked children at various stages of development to “draw a man” and graded the result on three criteria: the presence or absence of body parts, the correct proportion of the body parts, and the quality of the brush strokes. Nowadays, we recognize the many problems with such a test—the assumptions are rife and there are many ways (cultural and personal) that drawing skills might be poor, but intelligence and other cognitive skills very high. But the motivation behind the experiment is impressive. It assumes that image making is a kind of thinking and that such prelinguistic thinking is somewhat accessible.43 The jury is still out about the universality of a deep image grammar, but the childhood development data nags us to think about the role of volition in imagination. I have been suggesting a parallel between dreaming consciousness and the proto-­consciousness of pre-­humans. But image manipulation becomes increasingly volitional in both the archaeological record and the observable stages of childhood development. Voluntary imagination does not need to wait for novel mixtures and blends to pre­ sent themselves, nor does it need to fumble into representational clichés. Our second universe becomes increasingly managed from the top down. A conscious agency emerges out of the involuntary chaos of perceptions, memories, and random image blends and takes the reins. I will have more to say on this in coming chapters, but it’s worth noting now that some level of executive function comes online and gives coherence to our free-­ playing automatic imagination. Image schemas in the mind are built up though some of the asso-

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ciational and creative mechanisms that we’ve seen in this chapter. Early man may have found the kind of image schemas and memory he needed while migrating through an environment, because the trees, rivers, and landmarks automatically triggered the needful associations for navigating a path. This is a kind of ecological psychology that offloads some of mental problem solving into the environmental cues. Sometimes, for example, I find a friend’s house by getting close to the address, and then letting my triggered memories and real-­time perceptions finish the navigation for me. No doubt a large part of our current improvisation and early human improvising is guided by subconscious reading of our context. But at some point, it also became possible to close one’s eyes and volitionally order and sequence image memories and symbols (in order to guide one’s behavior, technology, navigation, social manipulation, etc.). We have central cognitive control abilities over many perceptual symbols, like motor sequences in dance or image schemas in drawing. Agency means that I can have some supervisory attentional focus on internal schemas and sequences, and I can preferentially plan one option rather than another. I can run two movies in my head about how to get downstairs—the stairwell or the elevator—and then choose between them. And finally, I can execute the imagined sequences in behavior. The frontal lobes are necessary for such executive function, and we find extensive communication between image and motor processors of the brain and these more volitional prefrontal areas. Perhaps the slow developmental sequence, from childish scribbling to visual realism, is but one version of this executive emergence. The child’s passive perceptual processing is followed by crude hand-­eye simulations of motions and lines. Then these image elements are brought together into object representations.44 Now, the dog image looks like a dog. The agency control is in full effect, bringing involuntary images under increased voluntary control. Finally, the goals (of intellectual or visual realism) can be employed by another level of creativity—in composing the innovative and the fantastical. The results of all this synthesizing—even the Rube Goldberg–­styled fantasies—may turn out to be as adaptive and useful as they are enjoyable and playful.

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries. C H A R L E S DA RW I N

What you can imagine depends on what you know. DANIEL DENNETT

: FOUR :

S P I N N I N G T H E YA R N

Creating with Language

P L AY I N G T H E H E A D

With the drummer and bassist pulsing the steady rhythmic foundation, the tenor saxophone player tells the main story over the top. The piano player joins in to reinforce the melody, while the guitarist complements gently with subtle harmonic coloration. All jazz musicians refer to a song’s melody as “the head.” It’s the part of the tune you end up humming or whistling later on. A well-­composed “head” sticks in your memory. It also gives us the story of the song, the narrative structure. Johnny Burke’s lyric for “Imagination” unfolds on Van Heusen’s deceptively simple melody: “Imagination is funny. It makes a cloudy day sunny . . .” The jazz player re-­creates the composed head, but also interprets it, giving it emotional nuance and unique personality. All the other musicians are supporting the tenor player, in this case, as he builds the song’s central story. A well-­composed melody has a purposeful beginning, middle, and end—with a climax and resolution, and an engaging blend of predictability and surprise.1

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: : :

This chapter is about the evolution of storytelling. The jazz melody, or any melody, is a key for understanding the dual functions of imaginative communication: social bonding (through emotional manipulation) and information transmission (facts and skills for exploiting resources). Each function is equally important, but there is some mystery about which function came first. I will argue in this chapter that social bonding preceded the didactic functions of language. The melody of a tune is its most declarative feature, so many listeners will inevitably zero in on it. By analogy, the linguistic story or proposition is the most declarative feature of the human mind, and many theorists zero in on it as the crucial aspect of meaning. Underneath the head, however, we find the pulse, the groove, the harmony, the body—and improvisation happens in all parts of the musical and biological organism. Independent notes are necessary for the construction of melody, but like individual words the richer meanings only emerge from the composition of parts into tunes and propositions. One way that a jazz musician learns a complex tune is by sight-­reading the notes on paper and committing it to memory. But long before that sign system was adopted in musical education, musicians learned complex melodies “by ear.” Players listened intently and through trial-­and-­error learning hunted and pecked for the correct note sequence. Then rigorous repetition fixed the melody sequence into the apprentice musician’s head. The melody became a musical “chunk” of muscle memory and cognitive circuitry. But a melody is also an emotional or affective chunk, gestalt, or Umwelt that can trigger unique feeling types in the player and simultaneously in the listener. Learning and committing melodies and verbal phrases to memory requires increased memory power. According to linguist James R. Hurford, “During the roughly 1 million years in which African erectus was around, it is likely that there was an increase (perhaps steady, perhaps punctuated) in short-­term memory and powers for processing sequences, already paving the way for easy management of the highly productive systems we see in modern languages.”2 Simulating a melody or a body gesture, storing it, and reproducing it in a needful context are not different in kind from simulating and producing a speech act. Investigating the origins of imagination required us to isolate cer-

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tain ancestral ingredients. In particular, we’ve been exploring embodied forms of behavioral sequencing and simulation. Improvisation is a kind of constructive deviation and fresh manipulation of action patterns, but that means that our primate ancestors needed pattern recognition and pattern storage “software.” In chapters 2 and 3, we investigated the evolution of a mammal simulation system that allows animals to learn from others in their group. My body can “read” your body. This associational system is the same (homologous) across the mammal family, but humans have efficiently exploited it into elaborate forms of social and cultural learning—everything from babies mimicking mothers’ smiles to novice tribe members learning ritual dance moves, to apprentice craftsmen learning Acheulean hand-­tool industry. Simple simulation or mimicry is not enough, however, and we need other ingredients, like the ability to order and sequence subroutines into larger meaningful patterns. Such adaptive sequencing is likely rooted in the primate task grammar that we detected in ape food preparation, for example, and that we see in any multiple-­step seriatim behavior. Simulation and sequencing powers are brain-­based novelties that natural selection favored over hundreds of thousands of years, but these native powers are immersed in brain-­body feedback loops as well as increasingly complex cultural folkways. Improvisational behavior augments and deviates from established or entrenched patterns (e.g., new melodies or rhythms build off old ones), or improvisation transposes patterns to novel domains (e.g., throwing projectiles for play and for hunting). My argument, all along, has been that Homo sapiens did not have to wait for the evolution of language to acquire the behavioral and cognitive skills of culture. Simulation and sequencing (action syntax) are enough to learn and transmit rote habitual techniques like fire and tool making. But what about the innovative experiments—the improvisations—that deviate from social copying or even generate the first moves in a potentially replicating activity? There was probably no conscious “innovation faculty” in the mind of our pre-­sapiens ancestors. That comes later, with the co-­evolution of greater cognitive executive control and cultural selection for innovative thinking. At this early stage, innovations in communication and tool making would probably be generated unconsciously, and then social learning would pick up the new behavior or speech sound and spread it

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through the population. Such invention probably first derived unconsciously from play or accidental domain crossing. Lots of language innovation still happens this way. For example, the use of “like” in informal English has become an extremely popular filler word: “I was like, damn!” or “It’s like gigantic” or “we were like, ‘what?’” and so on. No one knows the origin of this variation, and it was probably an unconscious glitch, but it has spread substantially throughout the Anglophone world. The third major ingredient that needs to be added now to our story is the sign. Improvising moves beyond behavioral changes in real time, because the sign allows the actions and events to decouple from the here and now. The sign is the fundamental furniture of the expanding “second universe.” My argument in the previous chapters is that signs were internalized gestures and images before they were words, so the second universe was already quite large with body-­based representations (e.g., memories, perceptual symbols, etc.) before spoken language brought a new level of complexity. Researchers like Doreen Kimura point to similar neural structures underlying both gestural sign language and verbal language.3 The cortical regions for mouth movement and hand movement are contiguous in the brain. And comparative work on spontaneous primate gestures (e.g., chest beating, begging) also suggests that a language of gestures preceded a language of words.4 Verbal language, however, amplifies the old system and launches a new one—making human beings the storytelling animals. The evolution of human imagination is bound up with the development of storytelling. But storytelling did not have to wait for propositional language to arrive on the scene. Storytelling (representation) arose in multiple media: body mimicry, cave painting, ornamentation, and early music (on bone flutes and drums). The earliest expressions of imaginative storytelling probably re-­created or predicted the hunt, or celebrated some battle or dramatic event in the collective life of Homo erectus. Now in this chapter, however, we will explore the improvisational galaxy that linguistic storytelling opens up in our expanding head space.

H O W D I D L A N G U A G E E V O LV E ?

Today there are over seven thousand living languages, but how did the first language evolve? Components of language exist in many other

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species, but linguists tend to describe animal systems as communication, not true language. Bird songs can be very elaborate and changeable, dog barking can indicate threats, whale songs can signify navigational information, and recent dolphin studies reveal something like rudimentary conversation. But no other animal communication system comes close to the prolific semantic possibilities of human speech. First, it’s important to point out that animal communication is much more complex and adaptable than we previously imagined. Vervet monkeys, for example, have different alarm calls for different kinds of predators.5 Primatologists discovered that these East Africa savanna monkeys create a low-­pitched vocal alarm for eagles and high-­pitched alarms for pythons, and a third type of vocal sound for leopards. This suggests that vervets have a semantic system, albeit small, that ties an arbitrary sound to a specific kind of referent—a type of predator. It’s arbitrary in the sense that the alarm for snake does not sound like “sssssss.” This rudimentary semantic system is much more sophisticated than a generic alarm that simply alerts other animals to increase their attention and trepidation. The group of nearby vervets responds to the eagle alarm by looking skyward, not to the ground. We were also wrong about our initial understanding of bird songs, which seemed like innate instinctual programs, but on closer examination are often learned during developmental stages. The black-­capped chickadee, for example, has a rudimentary grammar of song parts or note sequences, which they arrange and rearrange. And some birds, like crossbills, can modify their individual song later in life when they pair-­bond with a mate, mixing the two songs together as a new badge of identity. Other birds hear, in the re-­formed song, a dialect that indicates the bird’s race, flock, and family. All this demonstrates that many precursors of human language exist piecemeal throughout the animal kingdom. However, human language has a seemingly infinite potential for meaningful constructions because, as Noam Chomsky famously pointed out, clauses can be added indefinitely in linear sequence, and clauses can be embedded inside other clauses.6 I can express highly complex states of affairs like: “I sent a card, which was hand-­painted, to my grandmother, who lives in a suburb west of Chicago, in order that she might come to visit my brother, who is ill.” Animals cannot do that level of grammatically organized, meaningful information transmission. The great apes

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that learned sign language—like Washoe, Nim Chimpsky, and Koko—­ acquired and understood many signs, but they were never competent with grammar. Chomsky’s explanation of human linguistic complexity is that a deep grammar instinct, or universal language, is innate in humans. How else, he argues, can children acquire an infinitely workable system from finite childhood language stimulation? According to this innate theory, even the most language-­rich childhood environment cannot give a child the staggering amount of associations necessary for competent language use, nor the syntactical rules for novel compositions. And yet even children in poor language-­stimulation environments manage to acquire language competence. This “poverty of stimulus argument” leads nativists like Chomsky and Steven Pinker to posit the existence of a genetically endowed brain capacity for shuffling and ordering signs into meaningful composites.7 For nativists, language is a cognitive module that evolved in the shadowy past and suddenly gave us linguistic capacity. This solves certain problems—like the mystery of how merely associational childhood experiences with speech become increasingly grammar-­bound, and how linguistic ability seems to come online suddenly as a developmental benchmark (with a critical period for activation). But it raises other troubles, like how do we empirically test and verify the existence of such an a priori innate module? Is universal grammar a properly scientific theory or an ad hoc way of avoiding an evolutionary puzzle? And anthropological linguists have noted that nativists tend to exaggerate the universal aspects of human languages, when in fact the speech sounds and importantly the grammars of world languages are more diverse than presumed. Moreover, competing empirical theories of how kids acquire language from the bottom up (induction) are coming into greater focus now and may supplant the nativist tradition. Psycholinguists did experiments on babies, revealing a surprising ability for prelinguistic eight-­month-­olds.8 Babies are able to discriminate word patterns from the wash of parental auditory speech noise, by sheer statistical repetition of sounds. The human capacity to have a “theory of mind” about other creatures—sometimes called “mind reading”—may also be a crucial ingredient in language development. A “theory of mind” in this sense means that a child can recognize that another person has beliefs, opinions, and

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information in their mind that is different from the child’s mind. Prior to developing a theory of mind, children tend to think that every agent has the same information they themselves possess. Debate rages now as to whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind, but there is no doubt that normal children develop it around age four.9 One of the major arguments in the evolution and philosophy of language is how humans arrive at the grammar-­recursion and grammar-­ embedding ability. It’s hard to see how even extreme social learning dispositions can give humans this syntactical ability. But instead of postulating a hypothetical “language acquisition device” in the brain (Chomsky’s solution), we should consider the “task grammar” system that I described in chapter 3. Remember the cortico-­cerebellar loop in apes is important in modeling, predicting, and organizing behavioral sequences like preparing food and collecting water. It is crucial in correcting spatial and temporal relations, like those necessary in dance and tool-­use sequencing. Such motor coordination of steps is prerequisite for tool use and may be the kind of gestural syntax system that acted as a platform for signal communication and eventually language in humans. In what way could such a system be a platform for subsequent language evolution? The two key features of language—recursion and embedding of subclauses—could derive from serial motor sequences and from the incorporation of subroutines into larger routines. Music, for example, has these same properties. Did the properties derive from language, or did they precede it? The song our jazz band is playing, Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Imagination,” has (roughly) an AABA structure, which is the classic American song form: eight bars of the same chord pattern (A1), followed by a slightly modified repeat pattern for eight bars (A2), then eight bars of the bridge pattern of chords (B), and finally a return to the original eight bars (A3). Music is built on such repetition, and it’s reasonable to suppose that even Stone Age flute music had “parts” in repeated sequence and parts embedded within other melodic passages (like dropping a B sequence or “clause” in between the recursive A patterning). As Steven Mithen puts it, “Recursion is one of the most critical features of music.”10 As discussed in chapter 2, however, dance is an even more foundational example of simulation and sequencing. The dancing body is another instance of prelinguistic “grammar” because it has infinite recursion

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and “step” embedding. A good dancer can subsume many subroutines inside a larger frame of movement repetitions. The basic tango is a five-­ step pattern (slow, slow, quick, quick, slow), using eight musical counts. I can’t envision cavemen doing the tango, but they may have been doing something equally complicated. The nativists may be correct in thinking there is something special and uniquely human about recursion and embedding, but they’d be wrong to think this is only a feature of language. Now, when did this human language capacity evolve? Some scholars suggest that human language evolved quite recently, dating back to the time of the cave paintings, approximately 40,000 years ago.11 The logic is that language is a function of a mental development—specifically, the ability to represent symbolically. Art, according to this theory, is evidence that this ability came online in our species in the Upper Paleolithic, and language is a crucial aspect of this wider cognitive revolution. I have suggested, in the previous chapter, that we should be wary about chronologically correlating visual thinking (which has archaeological data) and linguistic thinking (which has no direct data and must be inferred indirectly from archaeological data). But whenever we date the origin, we all recognize that language is a game changer because it ramps up the representational powers of the species. Some philosophers have argued that the mind is so shaped by language that a nonlinguistic mind is not really a mind at all. This hard-­line position claims that linguistic words create definitional concepts in the mind (via some kind of abstraction), and the manipulation of these abstract concepts is thinking. Thought is internal language. And our thoughts become knowledge when the internal symbols and propositions match the external entities and relations. This classical objectivist view holds that mind is a mirror of nature.12 The world has a kind of structure (i.e., entities have properties and stand in relation to one another), and our symbols (in this case, words) get their meaning from their correspondence to reality’s structures. In this way, objectivists argue, our words represent or mirror reality. Good thinking, on this model, is when our concepts (linguistically derived and expressed) accurately describe the world. When I say, “The small dog buries his bone,” I reflect an objective reality of an entity (dog) having a property (small) in a process relation (burying) with another entity (a bone). However, biologists have discerned a whole other dimension of lan-

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guage, besides describing the world—namely, the all-­important social dimension. Describing the world is an idiosyncratic parlor game when compared with surviving it, and for social mammals survival depends on grooming the other members of one’s group. Food sharing and picking parasites off each other is serious work in a state of nature. Our primate cousins spend many hours each day grooming each other in order to create and strengthen social bonds. The utilitarian functions of grooming, like hygiene, are matched and possibly outweighed by the positive emotional effects of touch. And just as touch itself is a communication system (e.g., calming, agitating, etc.), speech sounds are also communicating quite a lot, even when the sounds are not symbolically referential. Proto-­ language was certainly a wash of emotional glossolalia. Motherese, cooing, babbling, and singsong vocalizations are quite universal human bonding methods. Babies learn early that some parent vocalizations are positive, some negative. We all spontaneously produce vocalizations that are emotionally loaded, like laughter or crying, but are also conditioned to associate some vocalizations with extrinsic positive and negative accompaniments and consequences, like eating, sympathetic cooing, smiling, shouting, approval, disapproval, and so on. Positively charged affective vocalizations, like motherese, release oxytocin and generally improve the moods of the senders and receivers.13 Early humans survived in part because they had strong social bonds of care and affection, created and sustained via forms of grooming. The physiological “glue” of all this prosocial bonding includes neurotransmitters like oxytocin and internal opiates. And this underlying “glue” does its work when I caress my group member and when I purr, sing, and coo to them. Just as improvised and ritualized human dancing can be a kind of social grooming, as we saw in chapter 2, so, too, was early human proto-­ language probably a pre-­symbolic mechanism of soothing, exciting, reassuring, and bonding—just as it is in the first year of human childhood development and in other mammals. Some psychologists go so far as to say that “conversation” is more important than word acquisition and syntax, because it reveals the intrinsically social nature of language, including turn taking, reciprocity, and perspective taking of the other.14 Anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that human language emerged as a kind of verbal “grooming at a distance.”15 When a social group gets too large for an individual to physically groom all the important mem-

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bers, other remote kinds of grooming are selected for, and language owes its origin to this change. Social reciprocity is based on the fact that I scratch your back and you scratch mine. But if our social group gets into the tens and hundreds, it is too costly and inefficient for me to spend my whole day picking parasites off everyone. Vocal grooming, however, is relatively energy inexpensive for me, and I can service many relationships at once. The earliest kinds of true language storytelling, according to Dunbar, were probably forms of gossip. Gossip not only feels good and bonds people, but also shares important information about possible social opportunities (procreative and affiliative) and liabilities (free-­loaders and defectors). Our pre-­sapiens ancestors picked parasites off each other using their hands, but our sapiens ancestors picked social parasites off the body politic using linguistic gossip. Our own experience corroborates this view. A ladies’ luncheon or a guys’ night poker game are filled with jokes, gossip, storytelling, maybe even some tears and hugs, and if it goes well, then you have a stronger cohort of friends—companions you can turn to when life gets difficult, as it inevitably does. Some gossip campaigns are malicious and destructive, but some of them are helpful in exposing selfish posers in your social circle. There is still a significant chasm to bridge between the proto-­language (thing naming, social grooming, etc.) and storytelling proper. Another support beam may be added to the scaffolding of such a bridge, namely, the ritual dimension of language. As noted in chapters 2 and 3, social dance and image-­based adornment function in part as signals for in-­group membership. Our ancestors signaled their tribal or filial membership to strangers with emblematic cultural tools: shell beads, tattoos, body modifications, body paint, emblems, and collective actions or performances. As philosopher Kim Sterelny puts it, “Human groups are ‘symbolically marked’; they share distinctive norms, customs, rituals, and the like. Symbols are badges or insignia of group membership and identity.”16 Language and vocal culture generally have a significant ritual dimension independent of the more obvious information-­sharing function of language. In the realm of social meaning, but distinct from grooming, we have ritualized vocal patterns, or mantras, that serve as unifying liturgy for a community. Of course, we all recognize the importance of shared origin stories, where oral folk cultures retell an adventure or cosmogony that puts their tribe at the center of the cosmic drama. In-­group mytholo-

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gies are readily seen in Native American creation stories (Lakota Sioux’s wind-­cave story), African Yoruba stories (creator Oduduwa), Hebrew stories (Yahweh of the Pentateuch), Chinese Yao people’s mythology (Pangu), and so on. But now consider a liturgical form of language that is earlier than these mythologies, something so primordial that it has no heroes, gods, or monsters—something that predates story itself. In the remote inland villages of Kerala in India, there exists a ritualistic oral tradition, stretching back before recorded history. Documentarian and historian Michael Wood recorded the elaborate vocal patterns for a film series about Indian culture and history.17 Select Brahmin fathers of the region transmit elaborate Sanskrit mantras to their sons through exhausting repetition of verbal chants, broken into memorizable chunks and paired with subroutine body movements (usually arm movements that appear to set rhythm and trigger changes). Fathers learned the exact vocal sounds and sequences from their fathers before them, who learned from their fathers, and so on. But in addition to these identifiable Sanskrit mantras, the singers chant an ancient unidentifiable hymn that no linguist can decipher. It is a crucial song that accompanies the seasonal twelve-­day fire sacrifice (for Agni), performed for thousands of years of Vedic history. But this mantra is in no known language. This means that the singers, the teachers, the learners, and the listeners are all devoted to a song they cannot understand—a song that has no declarative meaning. It’s possible that it once had a declarative meaning—maybe it referred to the coming harvest or a terrible war—and then it slowly lost its declarative meaning over eons of transmission. But I want to suggest another possibility. It may have always been a ritual social badge that carves the world into two groups—those who recognize it and those who don’t. Linguists have detected rules and patterns in this mysterious Indian ur-­mantra, but no sense. The nearest sequential, patterning logic that linguists can find is in bird songs. The semantic reference of the sounds (the meaning), either to things or actions, is completely missing. Yet the mantra is faithfully replicated every year, every generation. This indecipherable mantra has no referential meaning, but it has voluminous social meaning. We must think of it as a mysterious code, but the value of the code is in the difficulty it takes to master it, not in what the code is “saying.” When human speech originally emerged out of its humble precursors, it immediately became a sign by which competing

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and cooperating tribes could identify each other (it remains so today, as when you hear a familiar language or even accent when you are in a foreign country). A common vocal pattern—like a mantra, a prayer, a song, or any such code—creates an us/them divide with those who know the code and those who don’t.18 Acquiring such a code is very difficult and resource expensive (i.e., brainpower, calories, time spent, etc.), so when I encounter someone who has the code, I know I can trust him (because faking the code is too much work and very unlikely). Accordingly, the earliest formalized vocal clichés probably served as badges of tribal identity and “trust tests” for attaining and maintaining membership in increasingly larger communities. The goal of this kind of early language is to create a stable, invariant liturgy that community members must master with great fidelity.19 The emergence of a symbolic culture of shared signs, like language, always brings the threat of deception and lying. Since the sign, like a word, stands for an event or a thing that is not immediately present and open to community inspection, the hearer needs to trust the speaker. In our hunter-­gatherer group, say, I need to believe you when you advise that there is food (e.g., tubers) a half-­day’s walk to the south. But you can easily take Machiavellian advantage by reporting it deceptively to the east. As the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim argued that it is the collective rituals (like the fire sacrifice and mantra) that help hunter-­gatherer societies establish trust in the group’s culture generally.20 Everything from marriage (pair-­bonding), to division of labor, to food-­surplus storage is part of a tribe’s cultural system, but none of it will work unless the members are faithful to the system and can be trusted. Presumably, the looming threat of language deception, at the very onset of languages, required there to be an utterly reliable foundation of ritualized invariant language. Linguistic culture, according to this view, requires the rise of orthodoxy. Evidence for such a speculation can be seen in the fact that many of the earliest symbolic cultures we know about are religious and metaphysical. A human-­made system of language that exists as a practical but merely consent-­based contract is not as reliable and trustworthy as a system that comes from the gods (i.e., purports to hold cosmic, metaphysical power). The Sanskrit of the Vedas or the Hebrew of the Pentateuch, for example, was not considered by believers to be mere human-­made symbolic systems that mirror reality. The view of language as a subjective, socially

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agreed-­upon model of reality is quite modern and not the view of Axial Age religions, let alone prehistoric societies. Liturgical language is not a model of reality, but the thing itself. We see this clearly in the Vedic tradition of dharma (sacred duty), which requires devotees to conduct ritualized activities (like offerings and ablutions) but also chant highly ritualized mantras that help the universe stay on course. Without the Brahmin, for example, fulfilling the required speech acts and formulae, the cosmos itself slouches toward chaos. It is the liturgical speaker’s job to keep the universe ordered and coherent. This is only possible because the language is a microcosm of macrocosmic reality, and using it correctly (invariantly and often) causes metaphysical reality to stabilize. Hindu mythology claims that Sanskrit and Tamil emerged directly from Shiva’s drumbeat, as he danced the creation of the world. The celebration of the primordial mantra “Om” in the Vedas and the Upanishads nicely illustrates the premodern notion of language. This syllable sound is thought to contain all other sounds hidden within it, so making the sound properly brings form into existence and puts the speaker in direct contact with the divine reality. Language of this kind is supposed to be revelatory, not just descriptive. We see the same notion of metaphysical language in the well-­known first verse from the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word [logos] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The exact origins of language are shrouded, of course, but we can see how a symbol system might have sparked and grown as a kind of social glue long before it became the descriptive technology that we have employed throughout the Holocene period (circa 10,000 bce to the present). Just as certain ritual practices needed to be done invariantly, so, too, does ritual language bring high-­fidelity transmission requirements. This is the start of symbolic cultural norms. In the evolution of our human cognitive niche, our ancestors developed “technological normativity” for hundreds of thousands of years—in the sense that there was a right way to carve a stone ax and a wrong way. Tool industries are normative in the sense that they govern successful and accurate sensory-­motor movements. And social organization (i.e., families, pair-­bonding, etc.) also form normative structures on social behaviors and actions. But language brings a new kind of normativity, namely, standards of symbol usage and eventually

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standards of thought. This issue of normative, orthodox speaking and thinking is crucial for our exploration of improvisation and imagination (which usually deviate from ritual, and rigid procedural replication). More on this shortly, but for now we need a last piece of language scaffolding to get to the rise of imagination. Language is an imagination pump. We saw in earlier chapters that body simulations and images can be stored in the mind, as well as retrieved and reformatted with new associations and emotional markers. We even saw how simulations could be used to draw inferences and make predictions about our environments. But language is an extremely powerful instigator in second-­universe head space. This is because language, according to linguist Daniel Dor, is an “imagination-­instructing system.”21 When I say, “the black cat is on the fence” to my friend, her perceptual processors take in the auditory stimulation, but her mind then decodes the signal, such that she “sees” in her head space a black cat sitting on a fence. In this way, language allows each of us to have a parallel mental reality. My sentence actually instructs the imagination of my friend to call up the relevant images. According to this view of language, “the communicator produces a code, a plan, a skeletal list of the basic co-­ordinates of an experience, which the interlocutor uses as a scaffold for the construction of a parallel experience in his or her mind.”22 This view of language is helpful, if only because it focuses on the neglected “mind-­conducting” aspects of language communication. So many evolutionary psychologists have focused their research on “theory of mind mechanism” or “mind reading” and have not sufficiently explored this step of mind conducting. The imagination, in this view, is a crucial aspect of how language fundamentally works. The phrase “black cat” is just noise until it triggers the memory image of a cat, which has all the emotional or affective associations that chunk together in a prototype concept. Upon reflection, my inner prototype of black cat looks like a cartoony stereotype of the classic Halloween cat. The speech code instructs the hearer’s memories, placing perceptual symbols in motion—­ simulating the complex meaning that the blueprint code has triggered. Without imagination, the code might only stimulate behavioral response but not produce parallel subjective experience in the listener. The imagination is necessary for the symbol to be a symbol rather than just a stimulus. Remember in chapter 3 we learned that the mind has two mental path-

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ways—dorsal and ventral, cold and hot, indicative and imperative. We briefly considered an experience like fear of a predator—part cognitive and part affective. The emotion/cognition complex in predator fear is a dual experience, partly imperative (e.g., I should run away) and partly indicative (e.g., that creature is a snake). This dual-­aspect representation is strongly coupled together in lower animals—mice, for example, simultaneously recognize cats as a kind of thing (in a category) and as dangerous (fear affect). In contrast, humans can decouple these two pathways (indicative and imperative), and fear can be reattached to alternative kinds of creatures/perceptions. Language helps humans do two different kinds of “decoupling.” A word like “cat” is a symbol, and it allows me to decouple and manipulate the concept from the immediate perceptual experience of a flesh-­and-­ blood cat. I can invoke the idea of a cat (let’s say a big-­cat predator) in my Pleistocene friend by giving the verbal signal. But if he’s also had terrible experiences with lions and leopards (and he might well have), then I’ve also just frightened the daylights out of him. This is because the indicative representation of a cat also has imperative baggage (e.g., run away!). But language also has a way of decoupling the emotional imperative content from the indicative content of the representation. My friend does not become so startled and frightened that he runs around the campfire or cave when I say “cat.” Maybe there’s a frisson of fear, but he inhibits any desire to bolt. Recent data from neuroscience and linguistics suggests that meaning occurs when we re-­create a relevant virtual reality, composed out of remembered and constructed perceptions and actions.23 This is not as simple as reaching inward for the abstract symbol or concept that matches our experience. The animal body itself has intentionality, and so the embodied mind is caught up in those projects. Even when mature language does give us a rich symbol system for easy manipulation, those abstract symbols have their semantic roots in bodily activity. When seemingly neutral lexical terms are processed by our brains, we betray the deeper simulation system. When we hear the word “cup,” for example, our neural motor and tactile systems are engaged because we understand language by “simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things that the language describes.”24 When we hear the word “cup,” the motor parts of our brain “pick up” a “cup.” Increased separation of the emotional response (hot cognition) from

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the factual information (cold cognition) was probably fostered or furthered by the increasing abstraction of words. Some words, like onomatopoetics, have close connection with the things they describe, like “plop” or “fizz.” Still other words could be closely tied to their referents through an imitation of the relevant sounds, like when we talk to toddler kids about a “moo-­moo” for cow or a “meow-­meow” for cat. Early natural languages may have started in this more tightly coupled way, where a hissing “sssss” could represent a snake.25 Word sounds clearly move toward arbitrariness. There is nothing about “cat” that intuitively represents cat in the way that “sssss” might do for snake. If language is increasingly untethered from its referent, then humans get a style of thinking that is more and more indicative and less emotionally imperative. As the symbols are neutered, they no longer subject the communicators to the emotional drama that is part of our mammalian inheritance. Language requires some emotional domestication because we need to calm down and inhibit our selfish and aggressive tendencies in order to engage in cooperative communication. But language itself also helped Homo sapiens increase such emotional domestication because we could use arbitrary, agreed-­upon signals that do not have any inherent emotional push or pull. This is an exciting issue for the rise of imagination. As we’ve seen, language is a “mind conductor” or imagination instructor whenever two people are conversing, but once language helps decouple cold from hot cognition, we now have mental headroom to play with concepts, memories, and ideas without triggering life-­and-­death emotional systems that evolved to save our lives. Certain kinds of daydreaming, mind wandering, and more structured imaginings could thrive and develop unchained from the emotional storms that usually accompany involuntary memories and dreams. Additionally, as the linguistic symbols grew more abstract and arbitrary, they need not trigger or interact with stored mental imagery or at least the interaction could be glancing. This may be why humans can easily inhibit emotional responses to spoken communication, namely, the signals (words) have less emotional content. Images, being more directly sensual, have more emotional content than words.26 Alternatively, another mechanism might explain the expansion of a disinterested head space, namely, the increase in brain-­based executive control and self-­awareness. Instead of language lacking the emotional punch

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of hot cognition, it might have as much power as imagery, but the newly evolved top-­down system (via the frontal lobes) may continually frame the mental events as virtual. In other words, our minds seem to have a “staging” function, reminding us that our imaginings are not real. Moreover, we have a hazy sense that even language itself is but a player on that stage. We’ll explore this more in the next chapter.

S TO RY T E L L I N G A P E S

When language emerged, imagination took off in a powerful way. Abstract conventional symbols, words, could act as triggers for experience and complicated narratives could be constructed. Instead of getting on all fours and barking, Homo sapiens could say, “The antelope ran that way” (or the Neolithic equivalent), and his friend could understand him. These friends could also begin to engage in the ancient arts of embellishment. “How big was the lion that chased you?” “It was bigger than an elephant!” And, of course, when written language developed, this added entire constellations of imaginative representation to our second universe. After defeating King Porus, in the Punjab region, Alexander the Great chased the tyrant farther into India. Lost in the deserts of the Indus valley, Alexander and his army found themselves dehydrated and demoralized by a fierce and hostile environment. Alexander relates the frightening events of that campaign in a letter to his old teacher, Aristotle.27 The letter, which may be apocryphal, is a wonderfully imaginative work of embellishment—the kind of exotic traveler’s tale that entertains the listener and lionizes the teller. But the Hollywood-­like qualities are still rooted in the ancient utility of imaginative storytelling. After many days of marching, Alexander and his exhausted and dehydrated soldiers finally came to a “lake of sweet water” and a surrounding thick forest. All the men drank their fill and regained some of their strength. They pitched camp there at sweet water lake, cutting down huge swaths of forest to build hundreds of fires. They organized their legions into defense formations in case something should attack in the night and settled down to rest. “When the moon began to rise,” Alexander reports, “scorpions suddenly arrived to drink at the lake; then there came huge beasts and serpents—the whole earth echoed with their hissing and filled us with considerable fear.”

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After killing some of the serpents in the fires, the soldiers were relieved to see the creatures retreat. Their hopes of finally getting some sleep were dashed when dragons began to slither out of the woods toward them. This time they were larger than the serpents (thicker than columns), having crests on their heads. “They came down from the nearby mountains and likewise made for the water.” They were horrifying, with breasts upright and mouths wide open to spew poisonous breath. After an hour of fighting, the monsters had killed thirty servants and twenty soldiers. Alexander could see that his men were overwhelmed by the strangeness and resilience of the dragons, so he leaped into the fray and told them to follow his monster-­slaying technique. Covering himself with his shield, he used nets to tangle the enemy and then struck at them viciously with his sword. Seeing his bold success, the other soldiers rallied and finally drove back the dragons. But then came the giant crabs and crocodiles, followed by “bats as big as doves with teeth like those of men; they flew right in our face and some of the soldiers were wounded.”28 After this onslaught, the men were astonished to see an enormous beast—larger than an elephant—emerge from the forest. The behemoth, first appearing in the distance, headed for the lake in order to drink but then suddenly saw Alexander’s encampment. It turned quickly, revealing three ominous horns on its forehead, and began charging toward the men. Alexander ordered a squadron of soldiers to meet the earth-­shaking juggernaut head-­on, but they were pummeled immediately. After engaging the monster in difficult battle for some time, they managed finally to kill it. But only after the creature had taken seventy-­six Macedonian warriors to a bloody end. This fantastic story of Alexander’s monster battle may be invented by ancient writers, or it may be partially true with substantial embellishments. The creatures of Alexander’s letter may have been real exotic animals, like cobras and rhinoceroses, which were then multiplied and enlarged by fear-­filled misperceptions. Psychologists have identified a common human tendency to unconsciously exaggerate perceptions. These misperceptions are heavily influenced by our subjective emotional and cognitive states. People who are startled to discover a burglar in their home, for example, usually report the size of the intruder as much larger than the actual perpetrator. Psychologist Dennis R. Proffitt has amassed data that demonstrates our

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tendency to actually “see” a longer distance between ourselves and the ground when we are elevated and afraid of heights. Dr. Proffitt speculates that perceptual exaggeration of spatial distances probably evolved as a safeguard to promote caution and prevent recklessness when our ancestors engaged in climbing activities. “With respect to fear of falling,” Proffitt explains, “the perceptual exaggeration of steep hills and high places increases their apparent threat, and thereby promotes caution and its adaptive advantage.”29 Applying this Darwinian notion to our fantasy stories of monsters (and heroes), it seems useful for humans to “see” a creature as more dangerous than it truly is. Slowly, we get a taste for fantasy in its own right, and the utility of storytelling evolves into an autonomous realm of aesthetics and meaning. French poet Charles Baudelaire writes, “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.”30 We have to remember that the imagination itself started as an adaptation in a hostile world. A good storyteller, painter, or singer can manipulate my second universe by triggering counterfactual images and events in me, but also emotional changes. Fantasy that really moves us—whether it is high or low culture—tends to resonate with our ancient perennial fears and hopes. Neuroscientist Eric Kandel argues, in The Age of Insight, that unconscious thought—located more in the limbic system—acts as a reservoir for imaginative artists.31 Artists like Edgar Allan Poe, Salvador Dalí, Edvard Munch, and H. R. Giger can take controlled voyages to their primitive brain (an uncontrolled voyage is madness) and then bring these unconscious forces into their subsequent images or stories. Sexuality and aggression can be encoded in the distorted images in ways that suggest or trigger those feelings in the audience. For example, Gustav Klimt’s painting Judith and the Head of Holofernes is a masterpiece of what I’ve been calling “mind conducting” because Klimt stirs the viewer to feel complex mixtures of horror and erotic attraction. The Israelite Judith, according to legend, seduced the enemy king Holofernes and cut his head off in the bedroom. Klimt simultaneously elicits horror at Judith’s decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes, but also erotic attraction to the sultry depiction of Judith’s body, and the recognition of sadistic sexual pleasure in Judith’s facial expression.32 Emotional stories abound in every culture, and some of the earliest

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4.1. On his way to Varanasi, the Buddha encounters a frightening yaksha (spirit being) on a dangerous forest path. The yaksha is named “Furry Hug” and vows to eat the bodhisattva, but the Buddha is not frightened.

literature we have is loaded with characters that inspire us as heroes and horrify us as monsters. Some of the earliest Buddhist literature, the Jataka Tales, dates back to the fourth century bce and conveys moral norms and virtues in a highly imaginative and memorable fashion. These stories are alive and well, forming a continuous normative thread from the fourth century bce to the present. When I lived in the Kingdom of Cambodia, I saw many versions (books, films, imagery, etc.) of the Jataka Tales all around Southeast Asia. They are still used as dharma teaching devices for young children. A typical story imagines a previous lifetime of the Buddha, before he is born as the historical Buddha Gautama Siddhārtha (c. 563 bce). Like Aesop’s Fables, each story is designed to reveal a moral, social norm, or psychological virtue. In Pancavudha Jataka, we learn of a previous life of the Buddha in which he was a bodhisattva called “Prince Five Weapons.” On his way to Varanasi, the prince encounters a frightening yaksha (spirit being) on a dangerous forest path. The yaksha is named Furry Hug and vows to eat the bodhisattva in the same way he’s devoured all other travelers on the road. However, the bodhisattva is the incarnation of bravery and perseverance and attacks the yaksha. He tries every weapon on the beast, but each one gets stuck in the monster’s thick impenetrable fur.

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There is no way to damage the monster with traditional weaponry, so the yaksha is unharmed. Realizing this, the prince does not despair but doubles down on his efforts, vowing, “Today I am going to beat you so that you are crushed to powder!” Leaping up with a battle cry, the bodhisattva prince throws a right fist into the beast, but it becomes entangled in the fur. So he follows with a left hook, and it becomes stuck in the fur. Then a right leg kick and eventually a left leg kick. His four limbs are immobilized in the yaksha’s sticky fur, and he cannot move. Finally, he shouts, “I’ll crush you to powder,” and thrusts his head into the beast, only to get that stuck too. So, after dealing five blows against Furry Hug, the prince hangs helplessly suspended from the beast. But his confidence is unfazed, and he continues to threaten the yaksha. Amazed by all this, the monster thinks to himself, “This is a lion of a man, and I have never seen anyone equal to him.” When the yaksha asks him why he is so fearless, the prince says that he is not afraid to die (because everything dies), and since the prince contains a small diamond sword hidden within his belly (a metaphor of wisdom), he knows that it will penetrate the yaksha from the inside out if he should eat the prince. Hearing all of this, the yaksha releases the prince and vows to reform his murderous ways and rebuild his own karma. The charm of these stories is irresistible and the imagery is deliberately memorable, but we must also put them in their original context, where cooperative social norms needed inculcation in the young and needed constant reminders against selfish default behaviors in adults as well. This story teaches people to fight against adversity, never give up, and also to have faith in the ultimate victory of karma justice (written into the very structure of the cosmos). Before the written versions, these kinds of normative stories must have replicated for hundreds, even thousands, of years as oral narratives. In hunter-­gatherer societies and then early agrarian communities, the storytelling function was either distributed among many individuals or consolidated in a multigenerational family (a micro guild), just like music. Both stories and storytelling skills need to be cultivated and transmitted down through the ages. Eventually, such storytelling becomes “professionalized” in the social division of labor. Traveling folk theater, for example, existed in many pre-­industrialized cultures and still exists in the developing world. The Indian epic myths, like the Ramayana and

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earlier layers of the Mahabharata (circa eighth century bce), traveled from town to town as live theater and puppet theater before the written versions were codified. Similarly, the Chinese story Xi You Ji, or Journey to the West, was an elaborate magical story of a monkey king (Sun Wukong) fighting demons and indirectly learning the ethical norms of Buddhism. Such stories have a theatrical structure that transmits well and an emotional power that drives the normative lessons home. Even the contemporary Indian film director Mira Nair says, “The major thing that made me a filmmaker was the traveling folk theater that would come through town.” In the 1960s Nair could see the same basic Mahabharata stories that Indians learned thousands of years ago. “I would go and see these great battles of good and evil [performed] by two people in a school field with no props but with lots of passion, and hashish, as well. Everyone was stoned out of their heads, and it was amazing.”33 The purpose of storytelling has received fresh interest in recent years, as a new field of Darwinian literary studies has emerged. Literary theorists like Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, and Jonathan Gottschall have all argued that the ubiquity of storytelling suggests that it has been selected for over evolutionary time.34 Storytelling must bestow adaptive benefits on human beings, from the Pleistocene era to the present. On this reasonable view, story-­based imagination would be a helpful mechanism for organizing survival skills against predators and enemies. Stories could also transmit useful information about tool use; prepare and warn us about mate selection and the politics of sexual access; and give us similar insight into parenting, kin, tribal bonds, and wider affiliations of friendship and cooperation. In short, stories can encode huge amounts of survival information in ways that are easily memorable and transferable. Most human stories are about trouble. Tragedy, drama, adventure, romance, and even comedy are almost always about characters encountering and (often) overcoming trouble. Some theorists suggest that there might be a universal grammar for stories (like Chomsky’s innate language grammar). The universal structure can be glimpsed in the “complication, crisis and resolution” formula.35 Characters confronting problems and overcoming them fill our novels, folk stories, religions, movies, and songs. So common is this narrative structure that even our dreams are frequently composed according to this story arc (sometimes called Aristotle’s arc). Caution is needed here, however, and it may be that movies,

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television, and storybooks have given our dreams this parallel structure, not some innate narrative grammar. For example, upon waking my young son in the morning, he sometimes complains with sincerity that I have interrupted the closing “credits” of his dream. This suggests a learned and not an innate dream structure. Regardless, there are clearly paradigms or archetypal stories that contain prototype heroes and villains, going through survival challenges of one form or another. And while there are artsy “stories” that violate the drama grammar (e.g., experimental films with no drama, resolution, or characters), they don’t really draw our attention or catch on like traditional stories. They are subculture acquired tastes. The recognizable drama scenarios are imaginative rehearsals or simulations. Consider monster stories, for example. People cannot seem to get enough stories about vampires, shape-­shifters, giants, and zombies, to name a few. The uses of monsters vary widely. In our liberal culture (small l ), we dramatize the monstrous creature’s rage, then scold ourselves and “intolerant society” for alienating the outcast in the first place (e.g., Frankenstein or King Kong). The liberal lesson of monsters is one of tolerance: we must overcome our innate scapegoating and xenophobic tendencies. Of course, this is by no means the only interpretation of monster stories. The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity. After Freud, monster stories were considered cathartic journeys into our unconscious—everybody contains a “Mr. Hyde,” and these stories give us a chance to “walk on the wild side.” But in the denouement of most stories, the monster is killed and the psyche restored to civilized order. We can have our fun with the torture techniques of Leatherface and Freddy Krueger or the erotic vampires of the Twilight Saga, but this “vacation” to “where the wild things are” ultimately helps us return to our lives of quiet repression.36 A crucial and often ignored aspect of monsterology is the role these beasts play in our moral imaginations.37 Recent experimental moral psychology has given us useful tools for looking at the way people actually do their moral thinking and feeling. It is common in recent moral psychology, for example, to ask moral paradox questions of large numbers of test subjects. Would you, for example, throw a switch to move a trol-

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ley car onto a track where it will kill only one innocent bystander, or let the trolley continue on its present track where it will kill five innocent bystanders? Brain imaging together with hypothetical ethical dilemmas about runaway trolley cars might teach us something about our real value systems and actions. But another way to get at this subterranean territory is by looking at our imaginative lives. Monsters can stand as symbols of human vulnerability and crisis, and as such they play imaginative foils for thinking about our own responses to menace. Part of our fascination with serial-­killer monsters is that we (and our loved ones) are potentially vulnerable to sadistic violence—never mind that statistical probability renders such an attack almost laughable. Irrational fears, however, are decidedly unfunny. Monster stories and films only draw us in when we identify with the persons who are being chased, and we tacitly ask ourselves: “Would I board up the windows to keep the zombies out, or seek the open water? Would I go down to the basement after I hear the thump, and if so, would I bring the butcher knife or the fireplace poker? What will I do when I am vulnerable?38 The monster is a virtual sparring partner for our imagination. How will I avoid, assuage, or defeat my enemy? Will I have grace under pressure? Will I help others who are injured? Or will I be that loner guy who selfishly goes it alone and usually meets an especially painful demise? In a significant sense, monsters are a part of our attempts to imagine the good life or at least the secure life. Our ethical convictions do not spring fully grown from our heads, but must be developed in the context of real and virtual challenges. In order to discover our real values, we have to face trials and tribulation, and monsters help us imaginatively rehearse. Imagining how we will face an unstoppable, powerful, and inhuman threat is an illuminating exercise in hypothetical reasoning and hypothetical feeling. You can’t know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien face-­hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chain saw–­wielding psycho. Thankfully, you’re never going to be put to that particular test. But you might face similarly terrifying trials. You might be assaulted, be put on the front lines of some war, or be robbed, raped, or otherwise harassed and assailed. We may be fortunate enough to have had no real acquaintance with such horrors, but we have all nonetheless played them out in our mind’s eye. And though we can’t know for sure how we’ll face an enemy soldier or a rapist, it doesn’t stop us from imaginatively

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formulating responses. We use the imagination in order to establish our own agency in chaotic and uncontrollable situations. Jonathan Gottschall thinks stories are like “flight simulator models”—helping us train for real life. He even details some of the experimental evidence showing that people who consume a lot of fiction perform better on certain psychological tests, social tasks, and empathy tests.39 This lends credence to the hypothesis of a storytelling adaptation. The monster story and the hero story are probably permanent players in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is permanent. The monster is a beneficial foe, helping us to virtually represent the obstacles that real life will surely send our way. As long as there are real enemies in the world, there will be useful dramatic versions of them in our heads.40 TA K E I T T O T H E B R I D G E ! I M P R O V I S AT I O N A S H E L P F U L D E V I A N C E

And now for something completely different. The dynamic of our jazz song starts to veer, with chordal passing tones and extra purrs on the snare drum. The bass player looks to the guitarist’s hands nervously. The “bridge” is where the song turns left. In most jazz songs—actually, in most songs of any genre—the head or melody takes a hard left turn after two verses. This is called the “middle eight” or the “bridge.” Just when your ear has acclimated to the tune and when your brain starts to expect or predict a melodic phrase or chord change, the tune surprises you with a significant deviation—an abnormality, an irregularity. Some jazz players call it “the release.” The bridge is usually a scripted part of the overall melody that extends over a 32-­bar sequence. It’s the B part in the AABA American song-­form structure. Jimmy Van Heusen’s classic “Imagination” is a masterpiece of slight variation because its melody tricks us into following it for four additional bars in the final A section. Sometimes an artist like James Brown will interrupt a long vamp or groove by calling out to the band. “Should we take it to the bridge, fellas?” And the band gets ready to embed a musical left turn in the song they’re performing. The bridge or release is a standardized convention for the melody to become a little unstandardized. It’s the point or fulcrum of variation, the moment of unorthodoxy. Variation is the heart of imagination—the crucial ingredient that

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keeps journeys fresh. It courageously leaves the established path and suspends disbelief. It’s what we sometimes call “brainstorming.” In the realm of embodied mind, there are “hopeful mutations”—innovative ideas or behaviors that helped early humans survive. In the same way a DNA-­ coding glitch can send evolution in a new direction, imagination can provide us with radical transformations and mutations of perspective. And if the innovation fits the changing environment well, we can be off and running. Deviation and improvisation are also powerful engines of cultural nonconformity. I want to suggest that the improvising imagination has an important role in the creative or invention phase of human cultures, but also an important role in the critical renovation and sometimes destruction of cultural commitments. Using Hindu mythology as an analogy, improvisation can be both Brahma (the creator) and Shiva (the destroyer). Besides tool industries like Acheulean (1.7–0.1 mya), one of the earliest cultural systems to evolve was religion. Prehistoric religion, and even Axial Age religion, is not like our contemporary Western anemic version. It was a totalizing cultural nexus of social norms, ritual practices, identity, metaphysical commitments, and economic relations. Religion was not a rational choice of beliefs amidst other competing beliefs in a pluralistic marketplace of options. Rather, religion was part of the lived environment—the cognitive and emotional niche of Homo sapiens. As we saw in our discussion of language, liturgical forms of expression (e.g., mantras, scripture recitations, incantations, prayers, etc.) are usually part of a social ritual wherein members of the community replicate and reiterate order, reassert norms, and pledge their allegiance to one another and those norms. In traditional religion, much of this cultural work is done in the hot cognition system via emotional management and embodied rituals. Contemporary forms of ecstatic Christianity, for example, retain some of these powerful affective traditions today (e.g., Pentecostal and other forms of charismatic Christianity). But even the coolly recited Nicene Creed in an unemotional church service is a badge of identity and a statement of tribal affiliation. Some of the earliest stories were certainly religious in this sense of organizing mythology. The Iron Age Vedas, the Chinese Odes of the Western Zhou period (seventh century bce), the story of Abraham (sixth century bce), and so on continue an earlier Neolithic impulse to cre-

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ate cooperative social contracts between in-­group members and to assert tribal preference against competing out-­groups. But along with these adaptive social functions, religious mythology becomes very imaginative and departs quickly from the mundane experience of everyday life. Asia, for example, is heavily populated with “spirit houses” that are built as tiny homes or shrines (in private yards, businesses, roadsides, etc.) in order to attract and house the local animistic spirits. Animism, in general, is an imaginative system of invisible spirit beings that reside in our world—in a co-­present dimension, but still causally efficacious in our dimension too. My claim that animism is a work of imagination is not an insult or value judgment, but simply recognition that it represents a counterfactual reality independent of mundane sensory experience, and therefore enlists the cognitive architecture that we’ve been calling imagination. In addition to the imaginative flights of animistic folk culture, the official religions of the scriptural traditions are inhabited by the weirdest and wildest leaps of fertile creativity. The Hindu god Shiva is manifested as a giant penis or lingam, and phallic statues can be found all over India and Southeast Asia. In the Brahmanda Purana scripture, two gods are debating their superiority when a giant flaming penis appears on the horizon and approaches while it grows ever larger. Attempting to determine the size of the lingam, the gods fly in opposite directions along the expanding phallus for a thousand years, never finding its top or bottom. Giving up, they bow in reverence to the lingam and recognize it as superior to them, whereupon the phallus reveals itself to be the god Shiva. Consider that a team of Hollywood writers and special-­effects artists could never invent anything as fantastic as the Indian Ramayana (composed between 200 bce and 200 ce). Through kidnapping, Rama (an incarnation of Vishnu) loses his beautiful wife Sita to the evil god Ravana (who has ten heads). What follows is a weird story in which Rama enlists the monkey god, Hanuman, and the king of monkeys, Sugriva, to fight evil Ravana and his monster minions. Hanuman has the ability to jump from one side of the planet to the other, which he uses to great effect— grabbing a whole mountain of the Himalayas, for example, to bring back medicinal herbs. After fourteen years of warfare, Rama wins back Sita by shooting Ravana’s multiple heads with arrows. But Rama’s unfounded suspicions about his wife’s fidelity cause her to be swallowed up by the

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earth (burned up, in some versions), and so Sita and Rama (who truly love each other) are tragically separated forever. As if the Ramayana was not surreal enough, Khmer culture has also mixed the characters together with other Hindu stories from the Puranas, and the resulting mash-­up can be seen all over Southeast Asia. The popular scene has Vishnu transformed into a giant turtle that is helping Hanuman (monkey god) and Ravana use a huge cobra (naga) to churn up an ocean of milk. By twisting the naga through the milky sea (a metaphor of lactation and semen), they create foam that spits forth beautiful dancing maidens called apsaras, and the overall motive for this cosmic churning is to froth up the elixir of life itself. This reminds us that the imaginative religious impulse is fueled in part by hallucinogenic intoxicants. Hindu culture, for example, is built upon the Soma sacrifice, which is a plant-­based hallucinogen, or entheogen. Nothing triggers the imaginative faculty to its confabulatory processes more than intoxication. But lest Orientalism rear its head, it’s important to point out that trippy religion is not just the provenance of Asia. Catholicism, for example, is filled with supernaturalism, vivid and bizarre imagery, incredible narratives, and a thick aesthetic of counterfactual realities. Or consider John of Patmos’s New Testament book of Revelation, which is unrivaled in its hallucinatory vision of monsters, angels, demons, spiritual warfare, and cosmic conclusion. Religious culture seems to swing like a pendulum between the highly creative fantasies of the Vedas, Catholic theology, and Tibetan Buddhism, for example, and the reforming critical phases of the Upanishads, Protestantism, and Zen Buddhism, respectively. Before we had modern “art for art’s sake,” we had the highly associational explorations of fantastical religion and mythology. In this creative phase, we find intense improvisation, where images and story elements are abstracted from their original context and transferred to different domains, as well as hybridized creatures and gods, and magical scenarios untethered from physics and biology. Like pure math, it’s hard to know where the applied payoffs will be in this free-­play modality, so culture indulges its unique unpragmatic spiral. Some philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer have even glorified this beautifully useless free play (in art, math, philosophy—and I would add aspects of religion) because it represents the hard-­won autonomy of realms above the utilitarian, above the adaptive. There is intrinsic wonder

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and delight in the sheer strangeness of this free-­play mode. Of course, if the religious magic is just designed to frighten the devotees into norm or rule acquiescence, then that reveals an adaptive justification beneath the aesthetic. And surely that explains many religious emotional experiences. When the magic gets to be too much, religious cultures tend to clean house. The critical phase sweeps in, editing down the supernaturalism, pruning the incredible aspects. The improvisational features of religion are reined in, and the imagery and ritual is reattached to the prosocial referents. The “referents” here are the appropriate emotions that are managed by the narratives and images. Martin Luther, for example, suggested that the book of Revelation be edited out of the official Bible, because it stirred too many unhealthy, antinomian emotions and beliefs (and the subsequent history of cult-­leader scriptural choices bears out Luther’s worry). It should be noted that confabulation is also potentially healthy when it comes to our personal psychology. In addition to mythology gluing social groups together, some personal mythology or self-­deception may increase our individual flourishing or happiness. People who believe that they are important in the grand scheme of things, or that they are somebody special, tend to be depressed less than overly realistic people. If I imagine that many people will read my books and their lives will be changed for the better, then I’m more likely to do the difficult work of finishing them. The more likely reality, of my books sitting quietly on the shelves of libraries until they are eventually pulped, is not a motivating meditation. Improvisation in religion is like a cultural élan vital, or life force, that spews out new stories and images, but then needs critical realignment with the adaptive survival challenges of the community. When the management phase becomes too severe and unyielding, it results in dogmatism. Now the members of the community are cowed into inflexible repetition of the ceremonies, customs, and rites. Flexibility is taken as heresy and blasphemy. The imagination is locked down, and improvisation is considered dangerous. In this sense, improvisation is the enemy of dogmatism. Because the imagination is so embodied (i.e., enmeshed with the senses and emotions), it might be tempting to think that imagination is irrevocably irrational. The Romantic movement embraced this view, call-

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ing for a reduction of repressive reason in favor of irrational imagination. But that is too simple. As we’ve seen, cold cognition may be a cost-­benefit calculator, but imagination also fuels the kind of deliberative reason in the hot cognition system (e.g., imaginative empathy as moral compass). The philosopher Karl Popper also aligns the imagination on the side of reason, not just the emotions. “Criticism,” he claims, “always demands a certain degree of imagination, whilst dogmatism suppresses it.”41 In his magisterial defense of the open society, Popper points out the important role of imagination in scientific theory and social policy. He correctly identifies the imagination as an impetus to experimental knowledge, democracy, and social progress. The real enemy of the open society, Popper argues, is “oracularism”—an anti-­empirical view of knowledge as authority-­based access to gnostic truth, delivered like an oracle without argument or discussion. This closed kind of knowledge is “inbred” and tilts toward dogmatism immediately, refusing to admit alternatives. Ultimately, Popper and other liberal intellectuals like John Dewey want to claim imagination for the “good guys” in the open society. And there is good reason to agree. But it is also naïve and slightly disingenuous to over-­identify imagination with critical rational thought. Yes, criticizing a stifling orthodoxy requires the imagination to see alternatives, but the imagination has also given us some of the most unverifiable, unfalsifiable, magical aspects of religion as well. Imagination cuts both ways, because it has no intrinsic value orientation. It can dream of world peace, but it can also dream of a more deadly weapon. Imagination builds a cultural matrix like religion (in the creative phase), but can also help destroy it when it becomes overly dogmatic and maladaptive. We’ll take up these issues more systematically in the final chapter.

T U N I N G A T H E O RY

In order to understand the imagination as an “operating system,” we have explored the “hardware” embodiment and the “software” of sensory-­ motor, visual, and linguistic capacities. We’ve been exploring the evolution of these capacities, not just their functions, and this developmental approach probably pulls the plug on the computer metaphor right away. In evolutionary development, one capacity frequently co-­evolves with another (e.g., emotional domestication and symbolic culture) or in some

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cases evolves out of another (e.g., linguistic recursion out of task grammar). Such development is uniquely biological. Now that we’ve articulated the major components of imagination, this is a good time to tune up our definitions and theories. We have been searching for key insights and definitions via an inductive method. It does no good to start with an artificially stipulated definition of improvisation and imagination, and then try to deduce new facts from them. In truth, we only come to a useful definition of the imagination by tracking how and when people are employing the word and the concept. Meaning is as meaning does. Philosophers, psychologists, and laypeople use the terminology of imagination in flexible and diverse ways, but clear contours have emerged. Up to this point I have been giving a prehistory of the imagination, but now I will increasingly fold in the history of imagination and improvisation. The onset of language gives us oral cultures and then written cultures that can be examined directly for insights into improvisation. But calling the era before recorded language “prehistory” and the era afterward “history” is only moderately helpful. The cognitive architecture is evolving underneath that traditional fault line. We are interested in the way humans filter their perceptual experience into a workable inner experience that can be (a) a virtual off-­line investigation of the external world, (b) a repository of adaptive behavioral responses, and (c) a “playground” for generating new responses (i.e., behaviors, symbols, but also new emotional states). In short, this is the simulation system that we have been describing in various modes of human perception, behavior, and cognition. We can now say with some authority, given our story so far, that the imagination just is this simulation system. Aristotle and Kant glimpsed some of this system in the gap between percept and concept, Darwin said it was the faculty that created brilliant and novel results by uniting former images and ideas, and Freud saw it at work in the dark poetics of dreams. But our natural history reveals that the imagination has two distinct modes: a creative mode that is involuntary, instinctive, spontaneous, and unintentional, and a creative mode that is voluntary, deliberate, and intentional. It is this distinction, not prehistory and history, that tells us about the rapid success of Homo sapiens. And it is not just language that ushers in the new era of imaginative, inner head space. The rise of voluntary simu-

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lation or imagination is the result of (a) a new social world, with greater cooperation and emotional regulation, (b) enrichment of the recursion/ embedding systems that we’ve been describing (of which language is but one case), (c) greater brain-­based executive control (more on this in chapter 5), and (d) prestige social status for creative innovators (skillful improvising becomes a trait that can be selected for by natural and sexual selection). It might be tempting to think of the two simulation modes as weak or strong, and that Pleistocene Homo had weak simulation while Upper Paleolithic and Holocene Homo had strong simulation faculties. But this characterization would be misleading, since the strength of Pleistocene simulation must have been very intense. As we’ve seen, Pleistocene simulation probably includes intense social rhythm (biomusical entrainment), mimicry learning, and of course dreams, among other things. These are anything but weak forms of simulation. Indeed, this prehistoric involuntary simulation may have been overwhelming, especially if cognitive decoupling came later and allowed psychological distance as well as increased control over emotional contagion. Modern humans may have a more comfortable detachment from immediate experience, because our intellect and culture help mediate experience. For example, humans can endure some types of pain if they cognitively tell themselves that the pain will end soon. Like animals, Homo erectus may not have had such mechanisms of psychological amelioration. We are better off conceptually, I think, to draw the line of delineation between involuntary and voluntary simulation, rather than strong and weak. Evolution does not produce a new mental faculty and then “fire” or eliminate the old one. Instead, natural selection slowly repurposes forms and functions—modifying, adapting, and exapting what went before, and generally conserving previous forms. This makes the mind, just like the body, a highly redundant kluge of mechanisms built on top of mechanisms. A kluge is an ill-­assorted collection of parts that are assembled together in such a way that they fulfill a function.42 The voluntary mode of imagination does not replace the involuntary mode, but rather subsumes it. When the simulations can be stored, accessed, and manipulated by voluntary control, then the system rises to the author level that we readily recognize as imagination. But the unconscious, involuntary, raw elements are alive and well inside this more deliberate creativity.

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Darwin isolates some of these key adaptive components of imagination when he writes, “The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions, on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them.”43 If I’m imagining a way across a crocodile-­filled river, then I need relatively accurate impressions about possible bridge materials, crocodile lunging heights, predator distraction techniques, and so on. In the beginning of the process, I probably have a series of realistic and cartoon-­type scenarios rush into my conscious field—for example, an old dead tree could, with modifications, serve as a bridge. But also I have the maladaptive impression (quite involuntary, given my long history with cartoons) that I might be able run fast enough using the tops of the crocodile’s heads as stepping-­stones. As Darwin explains, the use of imagination is not simply in its creative associational phase, but also in the editorial phase of judgment. I need to reject, for example, my involuntary scheme to ford the river by skipping atop croc craniums. Ruling out this disastrous option may come from my own conditioned experience playing in rivers as a kid, or witnessing and remembering river-­fording disasters of other agents, or just having a gut feeling or affective repulsion to croc hopping. But, as Darwin points out, I attain the highest level of adaptive imagination when I have voluntary control over the uniting of impressions and testing of scenarios—when I can conduct internal simulations of possible outcomes (using impressions, folk physics, and variable conditions). Aside from engineering imagination, the same point holds for artistic storytelling. If I’m going to make a moving or powerful story, then my reservoir of impressions must be deep and detailed, my judgment and taste for accepting or rejecting impression combinations must be insightful, and my ability to actively assemble impressions must be strong and responsive. And here the artist’s job is more about emotional truth than facts per se. So, for example, filmmaker Mira Nair—best known for Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, and Vanity Fair—believes that including very specific detailed impressions creates, paradoxically, more universal resonance. “When you make a thing personal, it somehow speaks to people and the truth of it is felt.”44 In Salaam Bombay!, for example, Nair embedded a seemingly trivial scene of a family listening to All India

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Radio during a heavy rain, and it resonated deeply with many Indian viewers and others who had done the same activity in their youth. Taken together with other such choices, this judicious inclusion of one impression among myriad possible impressions helped bestow an emotional credibility to the whole film. Even the fantastical creations of science fiction artists works through the same adaptive components—subsuming involuntary impressions under voluntary projects. The Ridley Scott film Alien, for example, has gripped audiences for almost thirty years, but it would not do so if the raw impressions inside the larger narrative were boring, unrelated, too idiosyncratic, too contrived, and so on. As Darwin maintains, the impressions must be plentiful, accurate, and clear, but how will this be possible—let alone resonant—when no one has actually encountered aliens? The answer is in the surrounding details. Viewers thrill and chill to the imagery and story of Alien in part because it carefully triggers our uncanny experiences with human and animal reproduction, insect phobias, parasitology, predator anxiety, and then a mountain of realistic detail about technology and subtle social interaction between characters. The creator helps the viewer do an unconscious domain leap, via analogical thinking. Viewers may have a mundane source domain impression of spiders capturing and eating their prey (readily available to any observant kid), and now they are encouraged to pro­ject that experience to the target domain of a space alien encounter. All the emotionally charged impressions, artfully chosen from the realm of possible impressions, converge to make the central incredibility—an attacking alien creature—entirely credible. That is successful imaginative work. It is the artistic equivalent of fording a croc-­filled river. Notice that this description of successful science fiction fits nicely with the theory of language as an “imagination-­instructing system.” Just as language acts as a code or coordinate map for triggering similar subjective experiences in the listener, so, too, does the narrative matrix (especially story and image together) act as a coordinate map that conducts parallel mental and bodily experiences in the audience. So emotionally strong is this manipulation that some people cannot even watch or hear certain disturbing narratives. A symbol-­enriched simulation system, however, means that I can communicate with myself. I do not have to wait for a tribe member to

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“instruct” my memories, emotions, and associations. I can do it myself. Of course, the ability to conduct or instruct myself increases to the extent that I can divide myself (functionally) into a sender and a receiver—what Herbert Mead called a division of “I” and “me.” This is no trivial achievement, but we’ll take it up more carefully in the next chapter. By improvising with a narrative matrix, I can instruct my own inner experience with various mental portrayals (waking dreams) and “test” them in different domains of purpose. First, I can test them against my own inner emotional responses, thereby establishing an emotional lexicon for use in public and private communication. For example, I can imagine the death of a loved one and feel real emotional pain. Next, I can test a model—a virtual scenario—against the external world (as when I try my imagined log bridge against the actual environment). I can also test my mental portrayals of social interaction against my various social grooming projects. Just as I can improvise a new kind of touch on my lover, friend, or enemy and get instant feedback from my trial, I can also improvise new songs, chatter, and eventually stories—getting behavioral feedback very quickly about which proposed patterns are “working.” Eventually the author, musician, or architect builds up a linguistic and graphic vocabulary with reliable “mind-­conducting” power—a toolbox of good clichés. And this becomes a dependable platform for launching newer improvisational investigations. The simulations of prehistory are largely copies of actions and images that are already available in the external world. The prototypes are publicly accessible. For example, a Homo erectus who wants to chip out a stone ax may have an actual physical ax to emulate. Or the early cave painter, for example, has real mammoths to emulate in his art. But as we make the shift to increased symbols, recursion, embedding, and executive cognition (enabled by emotional domestication), the simulations become untethered to the external world, and they reflect the possible actions and images—most of which are not already available in the external world. This is the evolution from proto-­imagination to imagination proper. Language didn’t start this revolution; dreaming did. Dreams reveal some of the same components and processes that Darwin outlined for waking imaginative work: involuntary impressions, preferential weighting of impression combinations, and (sometimes) voluntary combining. Philosopher Evan Thompson recognizes three major

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phases of dreaming: hypnagogic state, dream state, and lucid dream state.45 In the hypnagogic phase (falling asleep), we experience an egoless field of impressions—“strange images make their way before our eyes and we hear sounds or what seem like conversations going on around us or inside us.”46 But this liminal state is decentered and lacks agency. As we move into dreaming proper, the ego as observer emerges, and I become a participant in the dream story. I am a character in the narrative—usually from the first-­person but sometimes third-­person perspective. Finally, I can occasionally transition to lucid dreaming, wherein I acquire the ability to direct my attention in the dream and even direct the dream itself. As Thompson puts it, “The sense of self shifts, for one becomes aware of the self both as dreamer—‘I’m dreaming’—and as dreamed—‘I’m flying in my dream.’ ”47 This sequence of phases moves through increasing levels of self-­agency (self-­control), and in the more voluntary phase, dreamers can slowly change negative affective or emotional memories into neutral or even positive affective experiences (e.g., reducing PTSD triggers). Whether dream agency evolved before waking agency, in tandem with it, or derivatively is not something we can establish at present. But the parallel of conscious structures in dreaming and waking is certainly suggestive of how early human minds worked. And, under certain conditions, still work today. Now, in what way are these “possible realities” (via dreams or waking consciousness) simulations? I have suggested that the imagination (both involuntary and voluntary) is the embodied simulation system. But storytelling, art, and dreams seem, on the face of it, more like innovative inventions rather than imitations. They are creations rather than re-­ creations. Yes, this distinction between creating and re-­creating makes intuitive sense, but on closer examination we find that the vast majority of any imaginative work is re-­creative, replicative, and reproductive, with purely novel content quite minor by comparison. Thomas Edison’s oft-­quoted slogan “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-­nine percent perspiration” is relevant here. Our culture worships the “big idea.” Everyone from artists to business CEOs is on a big idea hunt. But innovative imaginative work is frequently a one-­variable tweak on a huge body of traditionally established elements. Most of the work that makes Leonardo da Vinci or B.B. King “great” is deep simulation of predecessor techniques (acquiring a second nature of proven tools

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that “mind conduct” audiences) and then adding a slight idiosyncratic factor to the equation. Leonardo, Raphael, and all the Renaissance artists are re-­creating hundreds of years of biblical representation: the subjects, poses, allegorical meanings, anatomical conventions, and so on. But fresh ingredients are added into the cultural mix at this time too, namely, proper perspective (e.g., Brunelleschi’s rediscovery of Euclidean perspective), and a general humanist orientation toward this world rather than the next. Arguably, Leonardo’s idiosyncratic contribution was his lifelong meticulous simulation of nature (including secret dissections and painterly mechanisms like sfumato for simulating physical distance, and so on). For his part, B.B. King soaked up generations of Delta and Texas blues music, mastering the styles and clichés of his musical forebears (easily heard in his earliest recordings). But then he found an idiosyncratic way to simulate the sound of a bottleneck slide guitar by bending the strings manually and punctuating the bend with vibrato. That changed guitar playing forever, but that innovation (an unprecedented simulation) only works when you are already a master simulator of the whole tradition. Imagination simulates nature, but it also simulates simulations. Once the mimicry system comes online in the cognitive architecture, an artist can copy another artist just as easily as she can copy a tree or mountain. A musician can copy another musician just as easily as she copies a birdsong, and so on. In fact, whole genres evolve as slight deviations on the imitation of their predecessors. Arguably, rock and roll is just sped-­up blues music, which is just sped-­up field holler, which is just re-­created African griot style, and so on. This is not meant to sound reductionistic, but only to remind us of another famous slogan, this time from Newton, about standing on the shoulders of giants. Just as the dream and the folktale employ “raw material” impressions (like memories and mental images) as ingredients, so, too, do artistic traditions employ inherited raw materials—pentatonic scales are subroutines embedded in songs we call “blues,” and “the virgin birth” is a cliché that Renaissance painting repeats recursively and embeds endlessly. These are the involuntary impressions bequeathed by deep cultural traditions (like a secondary gene pool). This way of dissecting imaginative art may offend the traditional hagiography of mysterious genius, but it does not demote creativity to analyze it. Demystifying creativity gives us the realism necessary to foster it properly.

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Now compare and contrast all this with our imaginative improviser. When the creator or imaginer has the luxury of time, then cold cognition planning can aid the judicious choice of relevant and irrelevant impressions, or take a day to voluntarily compose hybrid impressions, or even change the whole shape of the narrative arc. But the improviser is not so lucky, not so spoiled by the luxuries of time and cool reflection. She must do all the things on Darwin’s list (i.e., access many involuntarily composed impressions, exercise editorial judgment to filter out unsuitable ones and pass the good candidates upstream, and make explicit voluntary use of these raw materials). And she must do all those things much faster—in real time in front of an audience. Any brainstorming activity must have a second editorial phase of throwing out the copious junk. But the performing brainstormer, the improviser, has no such convenience or comfort. This suggests that the imagination has a cold cognition and a hot cognition pathway. Improvisation is hot cognition because it has the lightning-­fast speed and the close emotional impetus of embodied, sensory-­motor communication. But musical improvisation is not born in the hot cognition system. Rather, it must be assembled in part in the cold cognition system (where musical conventions are accessed in cultural reservoirs), and then transplanted, through muscle memory rehearsal, into the hot cognition system. The National Association for Music Education acknowledges, “Improvising in jazz has often been likened to working without a net. There’s always an element of danger lurking close by. For many musicians, just the idea of creating music on the spot elicits feelings ranging from mere apprehension to almost paralyzing fear.”48 Music educator Robert Larson uses a three-­step teaching exercise to get students to overcome their fears. But his three steps also illustrate the analytic and synthetic aspects of many kinds of improvisation. Larson begins by laying down a twelve-­ bar blues progression to form the context for the student’s experiment. Larson doesn’t use any evolutionary language here, but we can add some unique perspective—namely, we can recognize that the twelve-­bar blues comprises the given environment. It is the ecological niche that the player must adapt to, mining the harmonic resources and also providing further melodic niche construction. The student must now use only one note (the tonic) to improvise through the twelve-­bar environment. Trial-­and-­error

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experiments start to give the student awareness of rudimentary adaptive moves. Next, Larson acclimates the student to the idea that the twelve bars are really just three sections of four bars each. These three sections will be considered “phrases” that the student can invent (still using one note); the phrases will be free and spontaneous during the first two bars of the phrase but rhythmically locked into the background environment during the last two bars of each phrase. This renders the infinitely possible series of moves (the musical equivalent of the painter’s blank canvas) into a manageable structure. Finally, Larson gets the students to add two more notes from the pentatonic scale into the experiment, and the improvising is now up and running (well, maybe walking). Habitual practice, and only habitual practice, turns this awkward process into a complex, fast, and responsive hot cognition skill. Two more crucial tuning twists need to be added to our definition of the improvising imagination: wonder and work. A good campfire story, cave painting, dance performance, or song has emotional power. As we explored in chapter 2, our mammalian emotional system is ancient and plays a large role in our subjective experience and our motivational structure. Our embodied imaginative faculty cannot help but stimulate emotions in its involuntary phase—aggregating and associating experiences that have somatic markers (e.g., positive or negative affect). But, importantly, as voluntary imagination evolves, emotions are recruited into the creative work, and the work communicates emotions to the audience. Whole genres of imaginative work are known principally by the emotion they instill—horror, comedy, erotica, and so on. But if we could articulate an essential emotion in imagination and improvisation, it should probably be wonder.49 The emotion of wonder is common to both the creation and reception of imaginative work. The unreality of fantasy fills us with marvel, but even the careful imitation (simulation) of realist painting also stimulates the sensation of wonder. A realistic three-­dimensional perspective painting, like Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican, is truly magical. Imaginative work interrupts the everyday aspects of life and energizes the viewer or listener with emotional enthusiasms that historically belong to the spiritual or religious domain. The counterfactual nature of imaginative work ensures that we will

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attend to it more carefully than the everyday aspects of life. But wonder is not just attention; it is rewarded attention. A good story or image opens up a crack in the ordinary world, and the extraordinary light shines in. The imagination brings images and emotions together that ordinarily do not meet, and this gives the experience a mystical psychology. Improvisation only increases this same experience of wonder, for the performer and the audience. Musicians often explode with laughter and amazement when they complete a particularly hair-­raising solo through a challenging chorus, or jaws drop when an audience hears a deft rapper freestyle a complex verse with wit and rhyme. And audiences howl at a good comedy improv performance in part because the skit is humorous, but in greater part because the skit is utterly spontaneous and has no luxury of planning. That is what makes the skit wonderful. Whether it’s late-­night skit improv or Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas, our awareness of the artist’s skill, effort, intention, and labor is one of the most important triggers of wonder. Imaginative works are works. They do not count as proper imagination if they are completely involuntary. And this is why dreams and hallucinations are only quasi-­imagination, or as I’ve been suggesting proto-­imagination. True imagination is a productive labor, and the raw materials—be they words, sounds, or Minecraft building blocks—need to be crafted, organized, arranged, aimed. We almost have our theory fully tuned now but need a final important refinement. What is the relationship between truth and the imagination? A dream is obviously not true, in the sense that it corresponds to factual states in the world. And a Pixar movie like Finding Nemo is not true for obvious reasons. Fantasy is clearly distinguishable from the realm of true and false, but there are features of the imagination that relate to truth. Remember the imagination is a dual system, in the sense that it has a bodily aspect (comprised of sensory perceptions and affects) but also a judgment aspect (comprised of predicate and existential assertions). When I stand on railroad tracks and look down them toward the horizon, I see that they converge to a point. The sight of them converging is undeniable—that perception is neither true nor false. But the judgment that the tracks converge is an assertion that the perception corresponds to the factual state of the world. That judgment is true or false, and in this case false. Similarly if I take LSD and see the walls breath or feel a terrible existential angst, my sensations are neither true nor false. I really do see

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the walls breathing and feel terrible, so in that sense it may be accurate to think of sensations as always true (but the philosophical tradition tends to bracket them to a non-­veridical realm). In any case, my judgment or allegation that the walls really are breathing (independent of my subjective state) is where I run afoul. That allegation is most likely false. Now, as we’ve repeatedly seen, the imagination has a significant sensory basis (e.g., images, sounds, feelings, etc.) but also predication power that attributes properties to substances and follows implications of initial scenarios (e.g., I imagine undergoing a painful experience; I imagine a dancing tree, greater socioeconomic parity, a weight-­bearing structure for a bridge, etc.). So, the imagination has one foot in the truth domain and one foot out. There are further entanglements with truth. When the imagination drives play, like pretend cops-­and-­robbers games or theater performances, it commits to a provisional truth about reality (which drives the immediate behaviors) but maintains a higher-­level acknowledgment that this world of pretense is not true or real. Finally, if imagination is a simulation system, then some of its work is attempting to mirror reality, at least in regard to some features of the imitated scenario. And therefore the models produced by imagination are attempts in part to capture some real and truthful relations between the modeled states of affairs. For example, consider the quasi-­realism in these cases: animate teacups feeling joy tend to smile; or alien parasites burst through a host’s rib cage like thus and so. More interestingly, however, is the idea that fiction and imaginative art have their own domain of truth that is quite different from the correspondence or mirror model of literal language. Aristotle praised artists in his Poetics for shaping a version of real events such that a higher truth emerged. This shaping was accomplished by carefully edited, simulated representations of events, called mimesis. Using mimesis, the artist creates a story distant enough that the audience is not frightened for their lives during the drama, but familiar enough that the audience feels empathically connected with the trials and tribulations of the characters. Aristotle would have approved of the mimetic balance achieved in television shows like The Sopranos or Mad Men, because the stories and characters were distant enough (in history or cultural position) but yet intimately familiar in terms of emotional nuance, tragic ambition, family politics, and so on. These are the universal aspects (the essential features) that resonate in

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good art. Films like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, or Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo give us the true humanity of history in a way that factual records fail to capture. It is fitting to speak of these as truths of the imagination. Even if the fiction has small factual “lies” in it or falsehoods, it may still reveal deep emotional and existential truths. Of course, this is not a justification of falsehoods but a description of the autonomy of these truth domains. Additionally, imagination goes toward the future in many cases, and artworks like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) envision and help create a seemingly impossible world—a better world, surpassing the factual and legal realities of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” In light of these considerations, it is not unreasonable to consider a knowledge theory (epistemology) of imagination and improvisation. Can the creative and re-­creative processes of imagination produce knowledge? I want to argue that they can. First, it’s important to note that jazz solos, comedic skits, and paintings are often described with terms that isolate their fidelity. We often hear things like “That solo was the real deal,” or “That comedy sketch was so true,” or “Picasso’s Guernica tells the truth about war.” In analytic philosophy, terms like accuracy and sincerity would not be applied to imagination; but on further reflection they are relevant terms, and ordinary language may be wiser than the professionals. An imaginative work is sincere when the emotional and cognitive content is honestly experienced by the sender and honestly communicated, not contrived, affected, pretentious, or obsequious. An imaginative work is accurate when it successfully simulates the relevant elements (e.g., character, environment) and relevant consequences of initial conditions (e.g., moral karma, laws of nature, or laws of invented nature, and so on). If we think of knowledge as the accurate cognitive mirror of reality, then imagination may not qualify. Its objectives, which include motivational things like inspiration as well as play, are different than descriptive mirroring. But philosopher Ernest Sosa suggests that a mirror is the wrong metaphor for knowledge, and we should think of it instead as “a form of action, comparable to an archer’s success when he consciously

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aims to hit a target.”50 An archer’s attempt to “get it right” is assessed in terms of accuracy (closeness to target), adroitness (skill or competence), and aptness (when the target success is the result of the skill and not other factors). On this archer model of knowledge, imagination seems a better candidate because the work of the creative person is almost always purposely directed at a target goal and the work can be assessed by the three criteria above. Now, I want to make the claim that improvisation is a clear candidate for knowledge-­making activity. Improvising in all its domains—from body movement, to drawing, to social grooming, to scientific theory conjecture—has an expressive aspect and an investigative aspect. The investigative aspect is obvious in many of the examples we’ve already discussed. Consider, for example, how the origins of language can be found in improvised babbling, purring, cooing, and clucking. These vocal grooming experiments receive immediate feedback from family that reinforce or reduce the action. Social touch (haptics) is an improvisational research project between juvenile mammals, and the improvisations eventually settle into reliable rituals (via trial and error and social learning conditioning). And every human being has to learn a lover’s body by improvising and attending to successes and failures. These improvisational investigations deliver real usable information and help us make smart predictions about our natural and social world. I want to recruit the hot/cold cognition distinction here, as well. Let’s use the example of language again, but my analysis would also apply to image making and other activities. Language improvisation in the hot cognition system is an emotionally grounded investigation of another body or a friendship or a love relation or an apprentice/teacher relation. It is tonal and has an imperative immediacy. It communicates value and normative information and is hard to fake. Cooing or babbling as grooming is a spontaneous experiment with others—a kind of unconscious research. Like trying different kinds of touch with your friend and getting immediate feedback as to what is working and what isn’t. In oral signaling, like song grooming, we and other mammals learn (via conditioning) what song soothes and what angers, and so on. Now two things can happen. One, the song can be remembered and stored (involuntarily at first through association triggering). Now we can call up the remembered vocalization and employ it in

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socially adaptive ways. But, second, humans (and maybe only humans) can replay it in our heads to no one but ourselves. The positive affect (grooming) can be replicated to myself. This emotionally grounded process of internalizing the positive cliché (externally researched and acquired) is a likely platform for the internalization of indicative speech too—sematic propositions also become repeatable internally—thus conversing with myself (thinking). In other words, I launch my second universe by internalizing self-­calming or self-­agitating motions and sounds, but eventually this internalizing ability becomes increasingly focused on useful information. This brings us to language improvisation in the cold cognition system. This improvisation is aiming at a different target—namely, increasingly better capture of nature’s contours, through indicative naming, taxonomies, descriptive theory, modeling, and predicting. Even Karl Popper’s famous description of scientific activity as “conjecture and refutation” can be understood as a kind of cold cognition improvisation and refutation.51 We’ve tuned the theory as best we can, at this juncture. Some of our instruments are more obscure than others; some intonation is dodgy, some strings missing, and valves broken. But we improvisers can’t be too fussy about perfect clarity. We have to make do. So, I’ll try to condense the tune so far into a concentrated summary. The imagination is an embodied voluntary simulation system that draws on perceptual, affective, and memory elements, for the purpose of creating works that adaptively investigate external and internal resources. Beyond the extrinsic useful values of this system (adaptive investigation), it also possesses significant intrinsic value (e.g., in the joy of play and states of wonder). The mechanisms by which this system does its synthetic work include association, image prototyping, entrainment, cross-­domain projection, recursion, embedding of subsections, and more. Some of these mechanisms are involuntary in their origin, but then available for later intentional manipulation. These mechanisms appear to be available across modes of cognition and communication, and not exclusive modules of imagination. Similarly, as voluntary control increases, imaginative powers become available to many downstream modes of cognition and culture (e.g., technology innovation, storytelling, music, etc.). Improvisation is a hot cognition exercise of the imagination; simulta-

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neously performative and compositional. It is marked by high toleration and exploration of the flexibility intrinsic to the system. Such toleration and exploration are motivated by (a) the affective exhilaration of high-­ stakes jeopardy creation, (b) the epistemic potentials of lateral thinking (brainstorming and embodied equivalents). Additionally, error toleration is a necessity when hot cognition reduces executive control and time constraints produce reduced or partial intentionality (i.e., unintentional, unconscious, and unguided elements abound under the improvisational umbrella). Shit happens. Moreover, these imperfections are not just tolerated but often celebrated as aesthetic (and sometimes epistemic) virtues.

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. SHAKESPEARE

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time . . . D AV I D H U M E

The self is a house on fire. Get out quickly. BUDDHA

: FIVE :

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Creativity and Control

SOLO TIME

After the bridge, the band restates the head, and then it’s time to cut loose and start blowing. Jazz musicians refer to improvisatory solos as “blowing”—derived originally from horn puffing, but now used for all instrument soloing. Our tenor player steps up, and the drummer switches to a gentle wash of ride cymbal while everyone drops volume to get underneath the soloist as he takes flight. When the soloist stretches out to perform his craft, he knows the scales inside and out. When the B section of “Imagination” shifts along the tonic root to the seventh chord and descends by fourths, the tenor player discerns what scales work with these chords. The song itself is an ecological niche, and the solo is a flood of hopeful tonal progeny, vying for a home inside the harmonic environment. Some moves will be adaptive—the notes will fit, and others will fail. The more scales he knows, the more freedom he has to create appropriately. But, as we’ve seen, the good improviser is also a rule breaker, an emotional receiver, and an audience mind conductor.

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: : :

Improvisation in Pleistocene social life becomes much more adaptive as our ancestors begin to imagine and predict the minds of their friends and competitors. Making successful new moves—in a hunt, a sexual conquest, a family feud, or an escape—will work better if we can read minds (via telltale behavioral giveaways) and effectively predict and direct the actions of other agents. Psychologists Michael Tomasello and Malinda Carpenter suggest that “shared intentionality” is a crucial ingredient in human social life, and other animals demonstrate little or no such collaboration.1 Chimpanzees, for example, engage in collective projects like hunting, but experiments reveal a selfish individualistic core strategy. Human children, on the other hand, actively seek out cooperative relations and share psychological states. In separate game experiments with chimps and children, a researcher engages with a group activity for several minutes and then breaks away from the activity. Children immediately try to reintegrate the separated individual back into the activity, but chimps never do. Humans evolved a new degree of shared intentionality out of earlier primate skills like eye-­gaze following (i.e., primates follow the gaze of other primates, triggering shared attention). Tomasello and Carpenter suggest that we share a Machiavellian social orientation with the other great apes (i.e., manipulative and self-­serving interactions), but we also have a separate, uniquely human lineage of development in which goal sharing was selected for (i.e., turn-­taking activity, increased attention to instruction, perspective taking, etc.) Improvising in a jazz band, or medical triage unit, or a soccer team requires shared intentionality of a very high order. We are a call-­and-­ response, turn-­taking species. The tenor horn blows a blues riff, and the piano responds by mimicking the phrase; the dancer leans in with his hip and his partner curls slightly in response. Just like the jazz musician, the early human improviser had to be very sensitive to the volitions of others around him. His own volition, or will, had to be forged in a hostile crucible of dominant conspecifics and threatening predators, but also nurturing caregivers (alloparents) and cooperative equals. And he must have become increasingly capable of free choices as embodied imagination gradually amplified his possibilities.

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The chapter is about the self, and its role in imagination and improvisation. Self is only a self in relation to others, of course, but for our purposes in this chapter we want to stress the way the self (as agent) organizes the inner life of imagination and the outer life of improvisational behavior. Under the concept of self, we will need to examine some interrelated themes: intentionality, volition or will, executive control, and forms of consciousness. We’ve arrived at one of the greatest mysteries of improvisation, namely: Where am I when I do it? What is the relation of the self to imagination and creativity? These are philosophical and psychological questions, but also issues for brain science. Fascinating research is now under way into the role of executive control centers of the brain during improvisation; I’ll try to put this research into the philosophical and psychological framework I’ve been constructing throughout this book. At the heart of creativity is a mysterious paradox. On the one hand, everyone recognizes that we must clear our minds and get “in the zone.” We must find our way to the Zen moment and be fully present in it. Buddhist artists have been doing this for thousands of years, producing amazing poetry, ink paintings, calligraphy, bonsai, ikebana, sculpture, and so on. But even Western creatives have sought the fleeting egoless moment, and we have everyone from absinthe-­drinking Van Gogh to LSD-­eating Jimi Hendrix. The psychologists of creativity, like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, have glorified this condition of creativity as “flow.”2 But the paradox here is rarely acknowledged. The empty egoless present moment is the most unimaginative, uncreative instant of human experience. In order to “be here now,” I must actually shut off all the usual imaginative creation of the future (what could be), and the re-­creation of the past (what was), as well as the imaginative possibilities of an alternative present. The present moment is a singularly unimaginative place. In Chan (Zen) Buddhism, the artist celebrates this empty (no self ) moment, even as she drags ink across rice paper. In contrast, Tibetan Buddhism celebrates a creative visualization tradition that is deeply imaginative and filled with rich narratives and images about past, present, and future beings of various power and influence. This chapter will tackle the paradoxical relationship between the emptiest moment and the fullest—the mysterious way that egoless consciousness can be one of the deepest wellsprings of creative imagination.

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We will also need a foray into free will and freedom. The imagination knows the rules and also how to break them. And improvisation may have been the first expression of human free will, in a world of relatively mechanical animal instincts. Early human beings not only experimented, but also created a culture of experimentation. Making new moves in a hostile ecological space often resulted in disaster, so innovation was probably rare at first. Early flint tool technology, for example, was highly conservative. Lower Paleolithic stone skills (Oldowan and then Acheulean) conserved the same techniques for almost 2 million years, with little or no variation. But a cultural explosion occurred as anatomically modern Homo sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe, around forty-­five thousand years ago. Now the departures, variations, and left turns came much more rapidly. New ecological niches brought out innovative hunting strategies, material technologies, and social systems. Humans were becoming good improvisers because they were evolving a second universe beyond the real world, as well as a power of deliberation above the inflexible forces of instincts. So, what is the self, how did it evolve, and what is its role in creativity?

E V O L U T I O N O F T H E F I R S T- P­ E R S O N P E R S P E C T I V E

I have been trying to assemble the imagination and the skill of improvisation from the bottom up—focusing on their parts and subsystems and showing how these might have evolved. I argued that the proto-­ imagination of Homo erectus was probably more like a stream or flow of conscious and preconscious associations (more like our dreaming state). There would be coherence to this kind of mind, but the coherence would derive more from the stable features of the environment and the regularities of the ancestral lifeways. However, as the mind became “modern” (arguably during the Middle or Upper Paleolithic), the involuntary, decentered flow of experience becomes more centered, owned, internally controlled. For clarity, let’s call the premodern mind, stream consciousness, or stream state. Stream is a good way to describe the unfocused, associational state of mind. And let’s call the integrated modern mind, centralized consciousness, or centralized state. In this chapter we want to explore the emergence of the centralized state, and the switching movement between the two states that produces creativity.

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5.1. A fanciful representation of “stream consciousness.” In stream mode, we engage in unfocused, associational states of mind. These associations frequently constitute the raw elements of later, more organized, imaginative compositions.

Experience can be monotonously familiar or it can be strangely unfamiliar, but invariably it is my experience and not yours. Perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are all consolidated to a point of view (POV), and yours is different from mine. There are fuzzy boundaries, and moments of “collective consciousness”—emotional contagion in groups, or maybe even a manifold of empathy among allies—but modern mind is marked by first-­person perspective. There may be a lot of neural machinery at work when light impinges on my retina, activating rods and cones, then bipolar cells, ganglion cells, on through the optic nerve to the visual area of the thalamus, and continuing to the visual cortex at the back of the brain; but there is also something we feel when we experience blue or blueness. The felt, subjective experience of color, pain, or an image is what many philosophers call phenomenal consciousness (traditionally called qualia). Philosopher Ned Block points out that other animals have phenomenal consciousness, and such awareness does not require cognitive sophistication—just a centralized nervous system. But another form of consciousness is access conscious-

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5.2. A fanciful illustration of top-­down “centralized consciousness,” which constitutes voluntary, executive-­control aspects of imagination. Central consciousness is correlated with frontal brain activity, cold cognition, and self-­consciousness. There is no actual homunculus in our brain machinery, but experience feels centralized and agent directed.

ness, in which one has a phenomenal impression but this impression is now available to cognitive manipulation.3 I can, for example, perceive a loud scream, and then use that perception to investigate the origin, or reason about the cause, or consider the implications, and so on. A third kind of consciousness, however, is the form we are most interested in pursuing; namely, monitoring consciousness or self-­consciousness. Here, I am not just aware of the contents of my experience (blue sky, red dress, sharp pain), but also aware of myself as the first-­person perspective, the center of identity. Self-­consciousness may be very intense at certain times (e.g., teenage years, during existential crises, etc.), or it may repeatedly flit on and off during one familiar activity (e.g., playing chess, having sex, etc.). The self is “gregarious” and can show up in every kind of activity (from dancing to meditating), but there is also a sense of continuity—self-­identity over time. Historically, having an idea or awareness of myself is one major distinction between higher and lower animals. For example, the mirror experiment, devised by Gordon Gallup in the 1970s, showed that some higher primates have a sense of self, while other species do not. Great

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apes and human children over eighteen months old can recognize themselves in a mirror, but most monkeys, many dogs, and birds act as if the mirror image is some other animal. When experimenters painted a dot on the foreheads of sleeping primates and then introduced a mirror upon their waking, chimps saw their reflection and immediately reached up to their own forehead to check the dot. Gorillas, on the other hand, did not identify the reflection as themselves and did not check their own foreheads. This has suggested to some researchers (but not all) that gorillas lack a sense of self. Does the consolidation of sensorimotor, affective, memory, and imaginative functions in brain headquarters (like the prefrontal cortex) give rise to this subjective experience of self-­consciousness? Or are the brain-­based executive control and the felt sense of agency two separate unrelated events? This may seem like an overly academic question, but it is relevant for understanding improvisation and imagination. Having control (agency) over the representations and associations of stream state allows the creator to actively construct imaginative scenarios. On the other hand, as we’ll see, turning off the controlling self-­consciousness (with booze, or meditation, etc.) tends to facilitate improvisational freedom for real-­time creative endeavors. So we will need to investigate if there is a brain change that correlates with this felt change of taking control and losing control. For now, however, we want to consider why consciousness evolved in the first place. The biologist Francis Crick likened consciousness to a “searchlight” that focuses attention on states of mind, body, or environment.4 This assumes that consciousness is itself adaptive or somehow helpful for survival. However, an organism does not need any consciousness to live successfully, since plants, fungi, bacteria, and maybe some insects seem unconscious but nonetheless thrive in the Darwinian survival game. Animals that move through space to secure resources have intentionality or goal-­driven behavior. They move from a state of nutritional deficiency (decreased homeostasis) toward ingesting nutrients (until homeostasis is regained), but could they do this without the motivating force of sentience—without felt hunger? It’s certainly possible, given the way robots can be programmed to plug themselves in when their batteries run low. But biology has solved this challenge with feeling stimulus. The feeling of hunger or pain or pleasure is the subjective aspect of an electrochemi-

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cal gauge change. Being conscious or sentient actually makes the machine work better, if it’s the kind of machine that needs an inner motivation or goad to pursue external resources—in contrast to, say, stationary aquatic filter-­feeders. The goad works because it feels unpleasant to have the deficiency (hunger) and pleasant to sate the deficiency. The feeling is a form of consciousness, but it may be unfocused, imprecise, or dispersed (stream state) until it is referred to a self (centralized-­state consciousness). Adaptive theories of consciousness suggest a variety of helpful benefits. Conscious awareness may help us detect errors in our behavior, perception, and judgment, thereby increasing the flexibility of our thinking. Consciousness creates a space of reflection that allows us to examine our own belief states as if they were impressions. It may be the ingredient that allows higher-­order assessment of our lower-­order folk logic. For example, consciousness may help us correct basic folk errors like “Those people are not tiny; they are just far away.” It also allows us to identify some actions as originating in us, rather than in others—it gives us the feeling of agency. I am an author in my own experience. Moreover, it gives us a representation of ourselves to aid in more complex planning. I am a protagonist in my own experience. And consciousness may help us confabulate more defensible versions of our beliefs and actions. On these accounts, consciousness helped our ancestors organize their operating systems better, and should therefore be correlated with recently evolved front-­brain executive control systems.5 The reasonable assumption is that consciousness is a part of the new-­ brain integration of otherwise independent neural/informational processes. We must tread carefully here, however, because such a view may be true of self-­consciousness, but not phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, some evidence from affective neuroscience suggests that phenomenal consciousness correlates with much older subcortical brain systems. And, as we’ll see, even self-­consciousness may prove to have evolutionary layers. The brain is itself a layer cake of ancient and more recent strata. The triune brain, as Paul MacLean called it, is an overly simplistic theory, but it orients us well in the complex story of brain evolution.6 On this view, the oldest brain is the reptilian complex of the brain stem, thalamus, cerebellum, and basal ganglia, which we share with all vertebrates. Here reside functions like circulation and respiration, motor control, as well as

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motivational or appetitive drive (in the higher regions of the basal ganglia). As we’ve already discussed, the limbic region (amygdala, hippocampus, midbrain, especially the periaqueductal gray [PAG]) includes the emotional and memory aspects of the mammal mind. And the third and final layer of the triune brain—immense in humans—is the neocortex. The cortex, which is deeply grooved in primates (to maximize surface area) contains the various functional lobes: frontal (planning, calculating), parietal (touch, etc.), occipital (vision, etc.), and temporal (auditory, etc.). For most of hominid history, our brain size was approximately the same as other apes—contemporary chimps and Australopithecus average around 450 milliliter skulls. But as Homo erectus emerged, the neocortex began expanding significantly (by 1.8 mya brains were averaging around 600 ml), and presumably increasing its functional tasks and its processing power. During this expansion we can see an increase in Broca’s area, the part of the frontal lobe that is correlated with language, but astronomically complex wiring changes must have been happening inside the expanding tissues, and these cannot be tracked by measuring skull size. The biggest jump, however, occurs between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago—doubling the size of the brain. Dr. Rick Potts at the Smithsonian has built the entire David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins around the forceful theory that the human brain exploded in size and complexity as a response to intense climate change.7 Climate change was extreme between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago—with radical temperature fluctuations and geological transformation. Extreme climate changes mean intense survival pressures. Thinking patterns, behaviors, and even social strategies that work well in the jungle are not necessarily effective in the woodland fringe environments, on the grassland savannah, or on the coasts. Quick adaptability to new environments and resources are crucial. A bigger brain—with better memory, reasoning abilities, and social skills—was probably selected for as a rapid and powerful information processor.8 Radical environmental fluctuations may also have been important in selecting for and strengthening self-­consciousness. Unfamiliar and unstable situations (during the 800,000–200,000 years ago range) may have forced Homo erectus to slow down, attend to, analyze, and strategically plan, in ways that australopithecines did not. I submit that these environ-

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mental pressures were a major factor in the birth of cold cognition (system 2 cognition). When alternative lifeways are needed for survival, then improvisation is necessary. But hotheaded improvisation (habit-­based) will not work very well in new conditions, and slowing down may have created a meta-­perspective that is capable of examining inner options more systematically. Imagination is part of this change, since Homo erectus is moving from stream-­state to centralized-­state consciousness. Granted, we know the cortex expanded significantly, but why do we think that the frontal lobes in particular are so important for modern thinking? The case of American railroad worker Phineas Gage (1823–1860) is well known in neuroscience circles, because his survival of a terrible frontal lobe injury (a steel rod pierced it) revealed the cerebral localization of cognitive abilities. Before his accident, Gage was said to have a mild and intelligent personality, while afterward he became surly and impulsive. There’s some reason to think that these personality changes are exaggerated in the subsequent stories of Gage, but the general point holds.9 The frontal lobes were identified as the locus of cognitive control and prosocial inhibitions. But the Gage case was just the beginning, and cognitive neuroscientist Joaquin Fuster (1930–­) amassed an enormous amount of data correlating specific prefrontal cortex injuries with thinking impairments.10 Together with neuroscientist Patricia Goldman-­Rakic, Fuster argues that the prefrontal cortex is where we represent information to ourselves. It’s our “mental sketch pad,” so to speak. According to Fuster, the prefrontal cortex is where we draw memories from the past, modify and manipulate them, and pro­ject such representations into the future as part of our intentional planning.11 Many other studies have found a strong correlation between representational thinking and the prefrontal cortex. For example, in 2009 a more updated study, of 241 patients, correlated IQ performance areas with brain lesion areas and discovered that the left frontal cortex governed verbal comprehension significantly.12 The role of prefrontal cortex in self-­control of emotions and ethical decision making is also well documented.13 The prefrontal cortex is a general brake system or filter system that allows some trains of thought/ action to pass and blocks others from expression. This executive control ability allows humans to repress their immediate emotional and behavioral responses, creating better management of social interaction and better realization of future goals.

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5.3. The case of American railroad worker Phineas Gage (1823–1860) is well known in neuroscience circles, because his survival of a terrible frontal lobe injury (a steel rod pierced it) revealed the cerebral localization of cognitive abilities.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), psychologists Jean Decety, Kalina Michalska, and Katherine Kinzler have shown that young children process moral empathy experiences more in the limbic amygdala region.14 But as we get older and become adults, our moral experiences shift forward to the executive regions like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). Decety and colleagues claim this as evidence of “frontalization of regulatory capacity, providing more top-­down modulation of activity within more primitive emotion-­processing regions.”15 This is neurological evidence that our individual developmental story is one of increasing rationality (from limbic to cortex), and this development “recapitulates” a similar evolutionary trajectory.

WHERE IS THE SELF?

All the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex make it an obvious candidate to house human agency, but is this correct? In a case like the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, it’s hard to know where the self

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is or what the self is. In this experiment, a marshmallow is placed before a child (4–6 years old), but she is told that if she can delay eating the treat, she will get a much greater reward (many treats) when the experimenter returns to the room in fifteen minutes. Delayed gratification is one of the important features of executive control, and the kids who disciplined themselves well did better on later measures of adult success (e.g., SAT scores, educational attainment, etc.). The test was originally done in the 1960s, and forty years later a team of psychologists submitted fifty-­nine of the original test subjects to fMRI tests.16 The brain scans on the subjects, now in their forties, revealed that strong disciplined people had more active prefrontal cortex areas (i.e., executive control areas), whereas the weak-­willed subjects had more active limbic regions (e.g., the ventral striatum). This is fascinating research and confirms the idea that our inhibitory brake is frontal, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us that the self is frontal. When a test subject is divided against herself, wrestling with her desire for the marshmallow and her restraining disciplinary mind, which of these battling forces is the self ? I am my desire, or I am my discipline? Or I am both? Plato, in the Republic, uses a similar example, albeit more gruesome, to show that the psyche has parts or separate functions—sometimes working in confederation and sometimes at odds. “There is a story,” Socrates explains, “which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”17 His point is that the desiring self is sometimes chastised by the moral or indignant self. Presaging Freud by a couple millennia, Plato recognized that the psyche can be divided against itself. The classical tradition has tended to treat the emotions as part of the not-­self, as alien parts of the mind intruding from the body. In Plato’s Phaedrus, lust (eros) is treated as a kind of madness, and he likens the psyche of the lover to a chariot and two horses. The horses are out of control and require tough discipline from the charioteer (reason), otherwise they will drag the psyche to and fro. Agency, on this account, comes from

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rational top-­down control applied to one’s emotional drives.18 Similarly, Stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius argued that rational control over disruptive emotions was the source of agency and power. Stoics believed that even the most blinding rage or forceful lust could be risen above and mastered, but such control comes from imaginative reframing of the disruptive events. For example, Seneca recommended laughter as the best response to abusive and insulting people; and for more worrisome troubles, Marcus Aurelius recommended that we meditate on human history. When feeling depressed, Marcus reminds his fellow Romans to imagine the human dramas of the distant past. Hundreds of years ago, people were working, marrying, falling in and out of love, getting sick, raising children, and fighting. But, Marcus says, “of all that life, not a trace survives today.” Stoics used what might now be called “creative visualization” in order to imagine consoling narratives. Ironically, the consolation comes from imagining how much worse your situation could be, and then taking solace in the differential. The imagination plays an important role in recasting a troublesome event in a new context that defuses the negative emotions. When your enemy is screaming at you, the Stoics suggest that you reimagine them as a barking dog. Since dog barking is not a personal insult or injury, just something dogs do, you cannot be offended when a dog barks at you. If you can imagine your enemy’s abuse as merely the reflex of a poorly trained character, then you lose all feeling of injury. In this way, the imagination has therapeutic power and loosens the hold of negative emotions, freeing the self for vital activity.19 Anthropologists, like Greg Urban, have started studying the way that humans bring involuntary reflex gestures under voluntary executive control.20 For example, grieving for a dead loved one produces spontaneous expressions of sadness (e.g., sobbing, swooning, etc.), but in our social community we may accentuate the sounds into a kind of unnatural wailing—indicating or signaling as a social gesture the depth of the grief. This kind of controlled signaling is possible when we bring automatic affective expressions (limbic system) under neocortical control. One of the things neocortical control does is amplify or decrease the involuntary emotions or actions of the hot cognition system. Further decoupling of the signal from the original source can be seen in things like the signal cough. This is when we use a cough or sniff (ordinarily spontaneous) as a signal

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to inform someone on the train or bus that we need to pass through. The signaling cough is a repurposing of a physiological cough and indicates a transition to greater executive control. Rational discipline over feelings and attention are paradigm examples of executive control, but the imagination has an unclear relationship with top-­down cognitive architecture. Moreover, we’re still hoping that a unified self somehow emerges from a confederation of faculties to give imagination direction, but we don’t know how. We need better clarity on the self if we are to understand imagination and improvisation. One of the titans of the Romantic movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), theorized the imagination into two basic types. All the Romantics glorified the imagination as intuition and treated imagination (especially poetry) as the preferred language of the authentic self. As Isaiah Berlin describes the Romantic view, “The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue; these goals represent the self-­expression of the artist’s own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of some ‘external’ voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative.”21 Coleridge, however, was philosophically nuanced in his analysis.22 Like our distinction between involuntary pre-­imagination and voluntary imagination proper, Coleridge argues that true imagination has two steps: primary and secondary. Secondary imagination (the highest form) is when the artist is willfully and consciously organizing her images or words into an intentional artwork. Secondary imagination creates an ideal world for the viewer or listener and invites them in for insight and edification. The goal of imagination is not understanding of nature, although understanding may be a welcome by-­product. Understanding—even science—is pedestrian when compared with the ideal expressive world of imagination. According to the Romantics, the artist has more innate sensitivity to being moved by the counterfactual second universe and can therefore summon it better for others. William Wordsworth says the poet has the “disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present, an ability of conjuring up in himself passions.”23 Prior to such sophisticated world making, like in Coleridge’s poem

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“Kubla Khan,” the image parts, associations, and component impressions must be available to the artist—originally input through the senses, mixed unconsciously, and stored in memory. This mechanical processing is not primary imagination, as we might expect. Instead, Coleridge scolds people (including William Wordsworth) for thinking of such mere aggregation as imagination. He proposes that we call this more mechanical processing “fancy”—admitting the irony of the word choice. Fancy, for Coleridge is a prerequisite for imagination, but it is only a crude process that captures Aristotle’s five ways of associational experience. Aristotle long ago noticed that the mind associates two or more things together via (1) connection in time (e.g., two events occurring simultaneously, or preceding and succeeding each other), (2) connection in space (e.g., two things in proximity), (3) dependence or cause-­and-­effect connection (e.g., acorns and oak trees), (4) connection of likeness (e.g., this apple and that apple), and (5) connection via contrast (e.g., night and day, up and down). This matrix of largely unconscious associational processing delivers up the raw material for artists (and non-­artists) to use in projects of creativity (and understanding). So, why does Coleridge need another category of primary imagination—above the mechanical fancy, but below the full voluntary secondary imagination? He cryptically says, “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”24 It is difficult to decode this, but it appears that Coleridge is trying to isolate a layer of mental functioning where subjectivity first transforms passive mechanical processing into active intentional projects. The merely mechanical “fancy” (associations and memory) supplies all the cognitive faculties with their objects, but primary imagination brings these objects into a vital concern, a purpose—which is only possible when the self or subject gives agency to the otherwise blind processing. Added to this is Coleridge’s typically Romantic speculation (rife in pre-­Christian and Hindu metaphysics) that the little self of private consciousness may also be the spark of divinity—temporarily alienated from the Godhead conflagration. Bracketing out this metaphysical speculation, Coleridge has helped us see an important and daunting issue: Where am I when I am willfully performing the operations of creativity? Agency seems to suggest three different modalities: First, attention to

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one’s activities from the first-­person point of view. In other words, I am aware that I am an actor composing new images. I am aware that I am composing new narratives. My attention is on that process. I have a first-­ person awareness of my activities, such that the contents of phenomenal and access consciousness are funneled to an egocentric point of view. Second, in addition to the self as point of view, I can actually think about myself as an actor engaged in creative work. In this way I have an objectified representation of myself, and it may play a part in the creative process. The self becomes a symbol or representation and therefore a new content of phenomenal consciousness, ready for examination by the egocentric point of subjectivity. For example, I imagine myself playing guitar or dancing, but do so in a perspective shift from first person to third person. I “see” myself onstage, from the audience seats. Third, we need to recognize that agency entails volition, and volition is an affective or emotional orientation of desire or feeling states in pursuit of goals. Volition is not just composing new images or combining associations, but must also entail the wanting of such compositions and such associations. The creation is not accidental. Wanting to create a sympathetic character that people will identify with and feel compassion for has driven me to engage in the compositional activities that otherwise occur unconsciously in stream state. Wanting to communicate an emotion of fear, for example, drives the painter to emphasize some brushstrokes and deemphasize others, as the image grows closer to the desired outcome. In some cases this process has weak agency, in the sense that the artist is following the process itself with little interference (with limited attempts to impose an ideal goal state), but volitional will is still driving the exploratory process. Coleridge states that self-­consciousness always requires the will, because it is not a state so much as a process—an activity in which the subject becomes its own object. He says, “Intelligence or self-­consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The self-­conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground . . . and can never be deduced from it.”25 Let us briefly consider some of the ways philosophy has tried to capture the mysterious self. Descartes famously doubted his senses, his own body, and even math, but he could not doubt that he existed. Every time I think, even if I’m being deceived in those thoughts, I prove the existence of my own consciousness. I think, therefore I am. Descartes found the

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self in the act of thinking and inferred that we are essentially “thinking things” (res cogitans). This thinking thing is trapped in a material body, according to Descartes, but may transcend it after death. The self is equated to varying degrees with the soul for both Western (e.g., the Christian soul) and Hindu (e.g., Atman) traditions. According to David Hume, however, Descartes had no right to think of the “I” as a metaphysical substance. The cogito ergo sum does not establish the existence of metaphysical substance—it only proves the existence of momentary self in each act of thinking. But now Hume found himself in a new dilemma. If all ideas—all knowledge—originates in sense impressions (a basic empiricist commitment), then what should we make of the self ? My self cannot be found as a discrete content of consciousness—it is always the knower and never the known.26 Hume concluded counter-­ intuitively that I am really just a bundle of experiences (memories, emotions, cognitions, etc.) and the self is a kind of fiction. The fictional self is also an important feature of Buddhist philosophy, and this is worth exploring because improvisers have long allied with the self-­annihilating traditions of Buddhism.27 In Buddhism, there are levels of reality. The top level is the phenomenal world we see around us—our day-­to-­day experiential world is made up of individual beings who seem separate or individuated from each other. There is a man named Barack Obama, and there’s a man named Christopher Columbus, and a woman named Rosa Parks, and a dog barking outside my window, and so forth. And these beings are relatively the same with themselves (over time), but different from each other. However, if you go down beneath this conventional layer of reality, you find a deeper layer in which each being is only a momentary confluence of five streams or aggregates (khandas), namely: body, perception, feeling, volition, and consciousness. This idea of compositional levels is not much different from what we already accept from the physical sciences, just not as reductionist. We are accustomed, for example, to seeing that biological organisms are composed of smaller and less visible chemical interactions, while those chemical interactions are themselves composed of atomic and subatomic physics interactions.28 This idea of levels is important for understanding all the aspects of Buddhism—both the philosophy and the culture of Buddhism. At the top layer of reality, for example, human beings tend to see things as “good” or “bad”; we are attracted to some things and repelled by others. But when

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we see things from a deeper perspective, we find that these properties of “good” or “pleasurable” or “bad” are imposed on to things by us, but the things themselves are neither good nor bad. Values are subjectively placed upon an otherwise value-­neutral reality. An illustration of this is helpful. The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh points out that even love and hate are human misunderstandings of a deeper unified reality. Humans, he explains, are naturally attracted to flowers but repulsed by garbage. And yet, from the level of deeper reality, the flower is on its way to becoming garbage and the garbage is on its way to becoming a flower. Criticizing the idea of independently existing entities, the Buddha argued that all things are interconnected and dependent on other things. Nothing is self-­subsistent; nothing has a fixed essence ( paticca samuppada). Everything is what it is in relation to other things. Humans, for example, who think they are independent essential souls, have made the essentialist error in thinking. Gautama analyzed humans and other living beings down to their compositional parts/powers, the five khandas—and he eliminated the soul in the process. Like Hume, Gautama argued that the self, too, is only a changing moment of consciousness, not a thing, and not even a reliably persistent function.29 Returning to the modern debate, Immanuel Kant appreciated Hume’s skepticism about the self, but suggested a more functional approach to the self, rather than a naïve metaphysical view. The self is the point of unity or focus of subjective perception, feeling, cognition—but the self must be presupposed or inferred in order to make sense of experience. The self is not a fiction, but it is also neither directly experienced (through the categories of understanding) nor directly encountered through intellectual intuition. Many contemporary philosophers have continued this tradition. The self accompanies the content of experience with something like an “awareness tone”—and this moment of self-­awareness adds little or no content but only a peculiar attentionality to experience. This very rarefied high-­level self flits about and colors whatever experience is currently under way. This self is a movable awareness that emerges in different functional modes but has no personality per se. Where is my real self, for example, when I’m struggling with an algebra problem? In this case the self seems to “reside” in the higher neocortical activities of mathematical thinking, but if you suddenly poke me with a stick, then my self will

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quickly shift to the material body domain. Each new activity—indeed each new moment—brings a new self. If there is such a diaphanous self, then not much can be said about it at this point. Below this arid domain of the philosopher’s diaphanous self, however, lies the realm of self that most laypeople contemplate. Here is the self of common sense. A self that has personality—built up over time with beliefs, memories, and life history. William James and pragmatists like George Herbert Mead remind philosophers that subjectivity is not utterly pure, but mixed and integrated with social life.30 Who you are is in part a series of relations with others. Philosopher Daniel Dennett describes this more content-­rich self as our “center of narrative gravity.”31 Antonio Damasio calls this our “autobiographical self.”32 And as these names suggest, this self is largely composed in the highly discursive process of neocortical reflection. Language, together with frontal-­lobe powers, allows us many ways to represent the world and represent ourselves (in directed centralized-­state consciousness). We make ourselves, at this level, through the stories we tell ourselves. Many of those representational processes (that govern our self-­identity) will be constrained by the mechanisms of stream-­state consciousness and Coleridge’s “fancy.” But as cultural identity increasingly replaces biological identity, the sky is the limit on the kind of self we want to create. If the self is an actively composed story in which we edit our memories, revise our histories, and curate our persona, then it puts imagination at the very heart of who we are. The standard or received view is that we are one person, but imagination allows us to seem as different persons. Yet if this theory of the autobiographical self is correct, then imagination is already at work (subconsciously in stream state, and consciously in centralized state) inventing the real you from the get-­go. I want to endorse this idea of an autobiographical self when it comes to the high-­level human personality. It makes more sense than the metaphysical versions of religion or Descartes, or at the very least it’s a more parsimonious theory. But there is a deeper form of self that we must now excavate if we are to better understand improvisation. In contrast to the neocortical, highly linguistic aspects of mind, affective neuroscience has recently gone down to the basement foundations of mammal agency. Neuroscientists like Jaak Panksepp and Antonio

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Damasio have discovered an ancestral self deep in the old brain, developing a more capacious concept of consciousness—one that includes primitive emotions and a sensory-­motor self below the representational and propositional versions that dominate both cognitive science and traditional philosophy. Affective neuroscience reminds us of the body and its nonlinguistic forms of meaning. Dr. Panksepp revises Descartes’s cogito, claiming instead “I feel, therefore I am.”33 But even deeper than this limbic consciousness of emotion, he pursues the primitive SELF—an acronym that means Simple Ego-­type Life Form in the prelinguistic motor, emotional-­action mapping system of the ancient midbrain. Most cognitive scientists and philosophers are too focused on the propositional level of thinking, but embodied cognition reminds us of our evolutionary similarities with other mammals. From this perspective, our biological identity should be found near the core of the brain—not the more recent neocortex. This archaic SELF would be a basic motor-­ mapping system—a template for action tendencies. Despite the inclination of philosophers to think about consciousness and subjectivity in terms of perceptions (like sense data qualia), affective neuroscience reminds us that “a level of motor coherence had to exist before there would be utility for sensory guidance.”34 This archaic SELF would have to coordinate or integrate emotions from the periaqueductal gray (PAG) region of the brain and the perceptual somatosensory system. The centromedial zones of the brain (especially the deep layers of the colliculi and the PAG) answer to this requirement. Moreover, Panksepp’s experimental work with mammals suggests that this area is much more relevant to biological identity than higher neocortical areas.35 The organism is establishing pleasure and pain values at the subcortical level, and so the organism’s most rudimentary self-­awareness, of a spatiotemporally located body in an environment, will already be coded with positive and negative feelings. All this means that the self is not superadded after a certain level of cognitive sophistication is achieved (a view commonly held by philosophers). Rather, the self first emerges in the precognitive ability of most organisms to operate from an egocentric point of view. Way below the level of propositional beliefs, animals must solve basic motor challenges (e.g., Where am I in relation to that advancing sharp claw? Am I moving

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now, or is the environment moving? Am I eating my own leg?).36 This archaic self resides first in the biological realm of action. It is not the disembodied Cartesian spectator. The point of all this is that there are levels of self-­consciousness. It is not an on/off light switch that gets switched on during the expansion of the prefrontal cortex or during the evolution of language. These brain and cultural changes certainly intensify and expand the self, but it might be preferable, contra Ned Block and others, to start thinking of self-­consciousness as a family of biopsychological processes, not just one thing. The autobiographical self prospers when language comes along to craft inner narratives of identity, but an older form of self is implicit in the motor systems of animals. Moreover, it will be interesting for future research to investigate whether nonlinguistic animals have a visual (or olfactory) autobiographical self, composed of remembered sensory experiences and behavioral tendencies—mapped onto a coherent psychological identity. The reason why this is important for us is because we are now going to look more deeply into the creative tradition that tries to destroy the self, or at least incapacitate it.

Z E N , F L O W, A N D B R A I N S Y S T E M S

We may now have a better sense of what the self is, but artists and mystics have long sought to get rid of it. Part of being an imaginative improviser is losing your self. The creative person often seeks to destabilize centralized-­state consciousness and return to stream state. “Picture yourself on a boat by a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.”37 That well-­known line from the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” seems like an obvious product of stream-­state consciousness. Whether drugs inspired it, or free association wordplay, or visionary reflection on a child’s drawing—the poetic, connotative domain of many John Lennon lyrics is far from analytical territory. Intoxicants have a long history with artistic personalities and processes. The obvious parallel and even older lineage is between intoxicants and the mystical religious mind. As the soma-­drinking Vedic authors of Hindu cosmogony understood, removing our centralized state with intoxicants not only frees the stream state to form fantastical associations

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and simulations but also removes the little ego itself—making way for transcendent experiences of divine union (what Freud called “Oceanic experiences”). My suspicion is that the oceanic aspect of this experience comes not from a real metaphysical immersion with God, but from a feeling change—a psychological movement from centralized-­state to decentered stream-­state consciousness (and possibly an unbounded background awareness behind stream-­state representations).38 The religious mystic and the artist have always shared a longing for the open water of consciousness and the vast submerged territories below. The list of artists who notoriously used drugs and alcohol includes Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Charles Dickens, John Cheever, Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Vincent van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Snoop Dogg, and Brian Wilson, to name just a few. Of these cases, we are not interested in the use of alcohol as self-­medication for depression or drugs employed for purposes of stamina and energy in flagging performance situations. Rather, we are interested in the intentional pursuit of altered states of perception and cognition, for (a) knowledge (broadly understood) and (b) enhancement of creative flow. “Acid really opened me up,” said Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash in his autobiography Wild Tales. “It reinforced my feeling that I was just a speck, a grain of dust, and if you looked at the universe from that perspective everything in the world was fucking meaningless yet incredibly meaningful.”39 According to Nash, LSD transformed his songwriting from three-­minute pop love songs to epic-­length explorations of cosmic and social justice themes. “We were maniacs,” Nash writes. “We smoked a joint and snorted a line before every session—a CSN ritual. It put us in a rapturous mood.”40 It goes without saying, of course, that intoxicants are a Faustian bargain for artists who frequently lose mind and life in the process of drug experimentation. Nash himself seems to have been much luckier than many of his friends in escaping the era with his life. But scientists and even the Silicon Valley innovators also acknowledge the liberating importance of the altered state. Steve Jobs said taking LSD was one of the most important things he did in his life, and he attributed Bill Gates’s more pedestrian mind (from Jobs’s perspective) to Gates’s lack of drug experimentation.41 Or consider Francis Crick, one of the Nobel

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Prize–­winning scientists who helped discover the double helix structure of DNA. According to some of his close friends, he was experimenting with LSD as a “thinking tool” around the time that he and James Watson were solving the mystery of the base-­pair structure. Intoxicants are only one way in which creative people pursue a special conscious state. There are many other techniques, but we are more interested in the psychological state itself—interested in its phenomenology, its biology, and its cultural significance. Starting in the 1990s, positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized a euphoric state of selfless immersion called “flow.”42 Since then the term and the idea have become ubiquitous in domains as diverse as sports and religion. Csikszentmihalyi’s interest in the phenomenon is largely in describing and fostering such experiences as a healthy and fulfilling path to happiness. According to Csikszentmihalyi, in flow experience there is a balance between challenges and skills, where action and awareness are merged, self-­consciousness disappears, time becomes distorted, and the activity becomes an end in itself (inherently rewarding). Of course, the idea of productively losing oneself in some absorbing activity is very old and pervades Eastern thought. There are several traditions in Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism that pursue effortless effort, what the Chinese call wu-­wei.43 For our purposes, it will be best if we invoke some Buddhist traditions, as we delve into the no-­self aspect of improvisation. Many musicians, painters, poets, and creative people have found philosophical kinship with Zen, and it’s no accident. In that classic American Beat novel Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac describes the after-­party of the famous poetry slam at Gallery Six—the night Allen Ginsberg read his poem “Howl.” All the Beats ended up at a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant—fumbling chopsticks, laughing, and “yelling conversation in the middle of the night.” Kerouac stumbled over to an old Chinese cook and asked him, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” (The question refers to the legendary Bodhidharma, who came to China from India in the fifth century ce—­bringing Chan or Zen Buddhism with him). “‘I don’t care,’ said the old cook, with lidded eyes,” and when Kerouac related this response to his friend Japhy Ryder (a fictionalized Gary Snyder), Snyder said, “Perfect answer, absolutely perfect. Now you know what I mean by Zen.”44

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Of course, some of the typical Zen patter is not going to make sense. It’s not supposed to. But part of the reason why “I don’t care” is a perfect Zen answer is because Zen evolved as a reform movement in Buddhism. And as such, it sought to break entirely with the old scriptures (i.e. the Pali Tripitika and Sanskrit Prajnaparamita, etc.) and old traditions (i.e., Theravada, early Mahayana, Vajrayana, etc.). Zen emerges almost one thousand years after the historical Buddha lived in northern India, and it sought to peel away all the dogmatic accretions that had formed on the dharma (Buddha’s teachings). It did this purifying by deliberately focusing on meditation only (chan or Zen just means meditation, derived from dhyana). Everything else in Buddhism—the ethics, metaphysics, and devotional traditions—were all jettisoned. Zen says “I don’t care” about tradition, about history, about theory. A small mountain of books has been written about the Zen of archery, gardening, motorcycle maintenance, drawing, and so on. True meditative awareness is focused, in its purest form, on the present moment. Because thinking about the past is a subjective imagining (construction) of events that are already gone, and thinking about the future is also a subjective imagining of nonexistent events. This is a remarkable insight for us because we have been trying to establish the centrality of imagination in the human mind, and here is yet another crucial piece of that argument. Time, or our experience of it, is a product of the imagination. All of us are naturally composing our past (via selective memory, attention, emotional states, and so on) and projecting our futures (via narrative planning with an objectified third-­person self ). We are usually spinning reality in both directions as we blithely neglect the present moment entirely. According to Buddhism, pure meditation on the present moment can be done in a quiet cave someplace, but more importantly it can be done actively—in the normal activities of our daily life. Making tea, shoveling snow, cooking dinner, and so on can all become quite transcendent if we rigorously attend to the activity and refrain from thinking about the past and future. Early Buddhism called this state of flow “mindfulness” (sati). Mindfulness is a state of egoless awareness. For some, like the practitioners of Zazen (sitting meditation), mindfulness will be a quiet affair, but for some (e.g., Chögyam Trungpa’s “crazy wisdom” tradition), it will be Dionysian in nature. It’s decentered ecstasy either way. The West has

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had a fraught relationship with mindfulness, and currently we are seeing a secular version of it, transformed (like Yoga before it) into a relaxation exercise for stress reduction, rather than a spiritual discipline for wisdom. The original purpose of mindfulness training was to decrease suffering (dukkha) and increase compassion (metta and karuna). First, it is the freedom from unhealthy attachments to anxieties; simply put, peace of mind. But also, in mindfulness, one begins to realize that the ego (the self ) is a habitual fiction—it doesn’t really exist, so then we stop acting in a “self-­ ish” manner. Contrary to your everyday consciousness, you are not really a stable being that exists through the past, present, and future moments; you are just a temporary aspect of the flow of becoming. Belief in a self (an essential soul, in its extreme form) is what causes us to strive to profit our selves and injure others—causes us to treat others as a mere means rather than as ends in themselves. For our investigation, we will need to bracket most of this from our consideration and focus on the psychology of mindfulness.45 Our interest is the parallel between selfless meditation states and selfless creative states. Anyone who’s ever tried to “be here now” knows how odd and fresh an old familiar activity becomes. Suddenly, you make a Zen shift and your basketball skills go into “the zone,” or your garlic chopping gets strangely religious, or you lose yourself in playing a piano piece or doing a painting. Such moments are hard to attain, of course, but Zen suggests that mystical experiences don’t need to be drug-­sparked, psychedelic blackouts of epic proportion. The present moment itself is a mystical wonder under our noses all the time. A transcendent experience is one in which we go beyond, transcend, our usual self. But that doesn’t mean we’re having a metaphysical journey from this world to an eternal one, it just means we are having a meaningful state of extraordinary consciousness. Zen struck many Beats and subsequent artists as a wonderful alternative to the religious and metaphysical views about mystical experience. Many Westerners have come to Buddhism through the arts, because crafts, arts, and even meticulous chores can be expressions of spirituality. The secular and the sacred are together in Zen. In loosely connecting meditation, flow, intoxication, and creativity, I have followed the bohemian path laid down by the Beats, hippies, and lama-­loving neuroscientists of the last few decades. But are these connec-

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tions too facile? More careful analysis reveals some important differences in these forms of altered consciousness—differences that help us better understand imagination and improvisation. Since the development of EEG technology, in the 1920s, we’ve seen evidence that the brain has a default mode network, or DMN.46 This is the brain phase that we slip into once we stop attending to specific things or tasks in the external world. It consists of medial or middle brain regions, like the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), the hippocampus (in the medial temporal lobe), and the amygdala (in the medial temporal lobe). This brain system is active when we are in wakeful rest, like mind wandering or daydreaming, mild introspection, and other non-­directional or low attention states of mind. As a default system, it characterizes our goal-­irrelevant frame of mind. And it contrasts strongly with the task positive network or TPN, which consists of more peripheral brain regions: lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the insula, and the somatosensory cortex. The TPN underscores our focused attention and goal-­directed activities—everything from concentrating on a chess game, or analyzing a mechanical problem, to baiting a fish hook or solving a math problem. The long-­standing correlation of meditation states, flow, and creativity would seem to align such forms of consciousness with the DMN, since that network is detached from the usual goals of waking task orientation. Dr. Heather Berlin, for example, suggests that the flow state of free associations is indicative of the DMN, and we find such experience in dreams, daydreaming, and meditation.47 But further analysis reveals the opposite about Buddhist meditation and certainly throws some doubt on the prominence of DMN for creativity. Yale psychiatric professor Judson Brewer and colleagues have studied the practitioners of several different meditation traditions and found that their DMN becomes deactivated or down-­tuned both in meditation (and even at baseline rest).48 In fact, contrary to long-­standing assumptions, meditators show the opposite of “self reduction”—revealing, instead, increased self-­monitoring and cognitive control. Meditation is not a vacation to the mind-­wandering state of the default mode network (DMN), but a strenuous, top-­down, vigilance of thinking. At first this seems paradoxical because we think of the mediator as free from self-­consciousness, but it actually takes a fair share of one’s execu-

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tive control to keep the mind from tilting toward the past or the future. Meditators are becoming more in control of their inner lives, not less so. When people asked the Buddha why his followers were so joyful and vital, when they lived so simply, he replied, “They do not repent the past, nor do they brood over the future. They live in the present. By brooding over the future and repenting the past, fools dry up like green reeds cut down in the sun” (Samyutta Nikaya 1:10). There is nothing “default” about living in the present moment. It is extremely hard to do and requires training. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha used his meditation skills to enter into deeper and deeper trance states ( jhanas). He had learned these techniques from Hindu ascetics during his days of wandering. He was a master of jhana meditation (samadhi) and found that he could move through different trance states with relative ease.49 But under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha switched from jhana meditation (samadhi) to his unique technique of mindfulness (sati). Mindfulness is a meditation on the impermanence of all things (anicca), but it is a systematic method. It proceeds sequentially through four domains: mindfulness of body (kayanupassana), mindfulness of feeling and sensation (vedanupassana), mindfulness of our conscious thinking patterns (cittanupassana), and mindfulness of our “mind objects” (i.e., our beliefs and ideas) (dhammanupasanna). Each domain of mindfulness must be meditated in two modes, internal and external. For example, my body must be contemplated from the inside—I must become more aware of it in the present moment (its weight, shape, movement, and my own ability to calm or agitate the whole body). I must become mindful of the body’s ever-­changing aspect. But then, I must contemplate bodies generally (the external modality) by reflecting on their common nature. And what I find is that all bodies, my own and everyone else’s, are slowly decomposing sacks of flesh, tissues, organs, and so on. The Buddha frequently describes the body as a repulsive “bag, with openings at both ends, filled with impurities.” This is not because he hates the body per se, but rather because he wants to detach the normal clinging attitude that we usually have toward our bodies. The Buddha understood that the human ego is tightly bound up and concerned with the body. Mindful meditation is designed to detach our ego from the body and to see it for what it is—an impermanent composite thing that cannot avoid eventual breakdown.50

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5.4. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha used his meditation skills to enter into deeper and deeper trance states ( jhanas), but eventually abandoned these in favor of his own mental cultivation technique. We translate his unique form of meditation (sati) as “mindfulness.” A common mistake is to associate mindfulness with the default mode network, but in fact it is more accurately correlated with the task positive network.

All this leads us to consider two very different forms of Eastern meditation (and a third form—Tibetan visualization—will be discussed in the final section of this chapter). First, we have the attempt to clear the mind of all content. This approach, which we’ll designate samadhi (i.e., jhana meditation), attempts to empty the mind of linguistic, visual, and even body representations, leaving nothing but bare awareness. This form of meditation is pre-­Buddhist (emerging in Vedantic philosophy), but it returns again in later Mahayana Buddhism (like Yogacara, Weishi, and Zen). Equally difficult, but very different, is mindfulness (sati), which seeks to focus the mind intensely on the impermanent aspects of our representations and emotions. This is the meditation style of classical Buddhism (Theravada).51 Here the goal is not mental emptiness, but a grasp of the

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impermanence of our inner life and the phenomenal objects of our experience. Both types of meditation are Buddhist, but neither should be easily conflated with creative flow state. Meditational detachment is partly a refusal to judge a thought or experience, and in that sense it is like the intention-­less or goal-­irrelevant world of DMN consciousness. But such Buddhist detachment does not come from an immersion into free-­association stream-­state mind. Instead, it comes from carefully divorcing my ego-­based interests from my experience (e.g., sex, chocolate cake, fame, sadness, etc.) and accepting the intrinsic impermanence of every experience. The common features with creativity might be reduced self-­censorship and reduced repression, but the commonalities end there. All this should give us pause when people try to correlate the meditator and the intoxicated artist. There is an ecstasy of consciousness for both, but it might be helpful to consider the differences between Apollonian and Dionysian ecstasy. They share a reduction in future planning and obsessive rumination, but not because they both sink into the free-­ association stream-­state mind. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) made the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction famous in his Birth of Tragedy (1872), but the contrast was prevalent and useful long before. And it continues to shed light on aspects of the creative mind. Both sons of Zeus, Apollo and Dionysius were radically different characters, and those characters gave rise to independent devotional cults. Apollo was the god of light and reason, while Dionysius was the god of wine, irrationality, and chaos. If a person was devoted to Apollo, she attained ecstasy and spiritual communion via rational contemplative activities, like mathematics (e.g., Plato, the Pythagoreans, etc.), but if she was devoted to Dionysius, then communion was achieved through drunken orgies and dance.52 The Apollonian retains significant executive or centralized-­state functionality, while the Dionysian state is a comparative free-­for-­all. Perhaps the common feature of these ecstatic experiences is that the represented self disappears in both. But the functional self (executive control) is maintained in Apollonian endeavors and abandoned in Dionysian ones. In other words, I don’t appear in my experience as a character, but in Apollonian mode, I am still engaged in intentional thinking. Meditation draws more on this Apollonian mode, rather than the free-­for-­all, unfiltered mind-­wandering mode.

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Our interest here is in imaginative and improvisational creativity, so the nature of meditation only concerns us as a window into those mental states. The imagination is often associated with daydreaming, and so it’s reasonable to assume that most imaginative work happens in the default mode network, DMN, rather than the task positive network, TPN. The introspection of memories and second-­universe representations dominate the DMN. Indeed, some excessive DMN activity underlies certain ruminating forms of depression. Now, is imaginative activity more Apollonian and executive, or Dionysian and default? Some new fMRI evidence shows that the DMN becomes more active during musical composition, suggesting that it is an important system in creativity.53 The DMN is in strong communication with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) during composition. The ACC (usually more active in the task positive network) acts as an interface between the more rational deliberator functions of the frontal brain and the emotional aspects of the limbic brain. The strong communication between these two areas during creative composition leads some researchers to speculate that the ACC might be providing the otherwise goal-­less DMN with some measure of focused intentionality. This may be the brain communication underlying the artist’s active manipulation of daydreaming imagery and impressions, rather than just passive mind wandering. Using a rich flow of potential images, sounds, impressions, memories (dominant in DMN), the creator harnesses them into organized narratives or compositions by attending to some rather than others, by discerning implications, framing context, and embedding subsections (i.e., activities more dominant in the TPN). On this view, imaginative activity is a toggle between decentered associational mind (i.e., stream state and DMN) and goal-­directed intentionality (i.e., centralized state and TPN). Even this complicated story is still too simple to capture what is happening in the brain. We need to be cautious in correlating the DMN with imagination and remind ourselves that the spontaneous combinations of the default mode are just the prerequisite representations for imagination.54 Fascinating recent research on the improvising brain reveals some of the neural architecture that underlies the toggle. Cognitive ethnomusicologist Aaron Berkowitz found that improvising musicians in an fMRI machine enlist the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to a significant extent.55 The ACC is one of the filters or switching stations where competing cognitive options and affective values become preferred or chosen.

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But Berkowitz worked primarily with classical musicians who branched out slightly from established compositions, in improvisational cadenzas. A complementary study by Charles Limb and Allen Braun opened up the experiment to include different kinds of improvisers, notably jazz musicians and freestyle hip-­hop rappers.56 Limb and others, like G. F. Donnay et al., have continued these experiments and begun a new wave of research into spontaneous creativity.57 The studies reveal that the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) deactivates during improvisation, while the medial prefrontal activity increases. What does this mean? It suggests that improvisation succeeds when we shut off our higher-­ order consciousness, particularly self-­monitoring awareness, and we let the default mode network (DMN) do its thing. The lPFC is one of the “brakes” or censors in the brain, and the adept improviser is able to disengage the brake so to speak, allowing the usually filtered associations and behaviors to flow more freely. This state of decreased control is sometimes called “transient hypofrontality”—meaning, temporarily reduced frontality. Removing the brake is the last step in the improviser’s series of preparatory behaviors and habits that help her access the note patterns, rhymes, or free associations that characterize spontaneous creativity. Neuroscientist Heather Berlin describes the freestyle rapper’s brain as unfiltered. “The medial prefrontal cortex has increased activation when they’re improvising compared to doing a memorized rap, which has to do with the internal generation of new ideas. There’s decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has to do with your sense of self. When that part turns down, you lose the filter that makes sure you conform to social norms, which allows for the free flow of information. That can be a really good thing, because on stage consciousness can get in the way.”58 This recent neuroscience confirms the older theory that transient hypofrontality is a crucial ingredient in altered states of consciousness. Arne Dietrich, for example, argued that transient hypofrontality is the common state of dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, drug-­induced states, and hypnosis.59 He probably lumped too many diverse mental states under the same brain deactivation (even our brief foray into meditation, for example, reveals its incompatibility with hypofrontality), but Dietrich seems vindicated in cases of improvisation at least. Finding ways to disengage the inhibitory brake has had a long history

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with creative people, long before we knew any neuroscience. The aforementioned intoxicants may be the obvious example of self-­engineered transient hypofrontality, but exercise also reduces frontality, and even taking a hot shower can relax the ever-­vigilant centralized-­state consciousness—allowing fresh insights and perspectives to emerge. Woody Allen explained in an Esquire interview that the shower is part of his creative process. “In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you’ve left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. . . . It’s the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that’s crippling you when you’re trying to write.”60 Beyond the data about relaxing the frontal brake, the recent neural studies of improvisation61 also reveal that musical interaction between two players enlists parts of the brain that ordinarily control communication. When two musicians engage in “call-­and-­response” improvisation, or “trading fours,” the language areas of the brain light up.62 As Donnay et al. puts it, “These findings support the hypothesis that musical discourse engages language areas of the brain specialized for processing of syntax but in a manner that is not contingent upon semantic processing.” Therefore, they argue, “neural regions for syntactic processing are not domain-­specific for language but instead may be domain-­general for communication.”63 This is an exciting and suggestive finding that strengthens my earlier claim that a social simulation system (including task grammar, gesture, and image thinking) probably preceded language. It bodes well for the idea that music, and probably dance and imagery, are communication systems that preceded or paralleled propositional mind. If the associations, representations, and other raw elements of stream state need to get drawn up from the sea of combinatory possibilities and pushed forward into coherent phrases, then a domain-­general syntax might be the needed cognitive scaffolding. Add to this relatively internal cascade of causes the way that social and cultural forces structure emotions and behaviors, and we see a large part of the causal matrix that demystifies improvisational creativity. Notice, however, that taking off the brake is just one part, albeit a large part, of real-­time improvisation. Every good improviser is constantly checking whether his output is being well received. The musician is generating phrases, but also monitoring the effects of her output

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on audience and other musicians (i.e., emotional, musical, social effects). The rapper or the interlocutor in a conversation is also toggling between spontaneous creation and scrutiny. So, too, the surgeon, who is improvising in the developing world with few or none of the expensive medical instruments, constantly checks on the effects of her incisions, grafts, stitches, and so on. They are in a feedback loop, but brainstorming is one thing and monitoring success is another. The subjective feeling (phenomenology) of improvisation reveals the same toggle. Social creativity has a strong monitoring component. Musicians, comedians, and performers are constantly looking at each other, stealing glances at other practitioners, audience members. And even in mundane conversations—which are paradigm cases of improvisation— we are reading each other’s body movements, eye and mouth changes, tone of voice; all in response to our own output. These are the Apollonian moments of mental life. They may not always be fully conscious, but they are intentional—in search of specific goals. The toggle between the Apollonian (executive) and Dionysian (DMN) is astoundingly fast in the good improviser. And neuroscience has started to isolate the brain systems (e.g., ACC, lPFC, etc.) that underlie this rapid-­fire switching of creativity. The importance of this switching process can be seen when the switching is faulty or unsuccessful. The trivial case is just a bad improviser, but since these are defining brain systems for mind generally, the worst-­ case scenario might be schizophrenia. Some researchers have noted that schizophrenics have abnormal activation of their DMN (as well as hypofrontality), and this may underlie a failure of the DMN to switch off or deactivate when the person engages in daily cognitive tasks and normal waking mind activity. In other words, their creative daydreaming fails to shut off and penetrates up into the active modes of TPN consciousness.64 Perhaps this research will eventually give us greater insight into the folk belief that madness and genius are linked. One more source of recent data about decentered mind needs consideration. My claim all along has been that imagination has real consequences for knowledge (epistemic power). The dominant tradition has relegated imagination to fantasy play and neglected it as a source of knowledge. Some recent research on mind wandering and unconscious thinking, however, seems to cut in favor of my argument. Some psychologists have started empirical research into unconscious

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thought. If the mind has levels of consciousness and self-­awareness, then many cognitive states may be below the surface of declarative first-­person report. I am thinking, quite often, without really being aware that I’m thinking. Some philosophers find this an incoherent idea, but it is as old as Freud, who famously thought of the unconscious as a “decision-­making” font, albeit largely opaque to introspection. More recent research shows that when our cold cognition system is off or distracted, then unconscious problem solving reveals itself. Social psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis published research in 2004 suggesting that a kind of “smart unconscious” is very effective at reading the environment and making adaptive choices.65 Dijksterhuis gave a knowledge challenge to different groups of subjects, involving the choice of a good apartment. People could choose between four different apartments, one of which was objectively superior to the other three choices. But the choices were obscured by overwhelming amounts of additional details about the apartments. After exposure, one group of subjects were allowed to consciously consider the apartment data before they made a decision, while the other group was given a distracting cognitive puzzle that derailed their conscious ability to consider the apartments. The second group was required to choose the apartment without conscious deliberation. Surprisingly, the non-­deliberating group did much better on average at choosing the best apartment (60% of unconscious thinkers succeeded as opposed to 37% of deliberators).66 Explicit conscious reflection tried to juggle too many distracting minute facts about the apartment and ended up confused about the overall value. There is a kind of accurate deliberation without attention or explicit awareness. This suggests that an adaptive intelligence exists below the centralized-­state level of consciousness. This work is relevant for our investigation into imagination. The internal associational system of stream state can do productive work while “nobody’s home” in the controller position (executive function). But the same embodied simulation system is certainly in intimate communication with the external world too (via the sensory-­motor-­affective pathways). We only grasp this embodied cognition when the loud and incessant declarative intellect is quieted down or distracted, but it is constantly acquiring knowledge via simulation and also deliberating without introspection. The empirical research gives us a glimpse into how effective hot cognition can be, and I have been suggesting that the imagination and im-

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provisation are paradigm expressions of that hot cognition. The aesthetic virtues and values of the imagination are well acknowledged, but we now begin to appreciate the epistemic virtues and values as well. As Alexander Graham Bell put it, “I am a believer in unconscious cerebration. The brain is working all the time, though we do not know it.” Bell thought that retiring the executive controller every evening at bedtime had a propitious effect on creativity. “At night, [unconscious cerebration] follows up what we think in the daytime. When I have worked a long time on one thing, I make it a point to bring all the facts regarding it together before I retire; and I have often been surprised at the results. Have you not noticed that, often, what was dark and perplexing to you the night before, is found to be perfectly solved the next morning? We are thinking all the time; it is impossible not to think.”67

F I N D I N G Y O U R W AY B A C K

There are many costs to mind wandering. As kids, we are all dissuaded from engaging in undisciplined thinking. We are not culturally rewarded for developing our imaginations, at least not in primary school. Alas, some of the costs of imagination are indisputable. Our reading comprehension plummets, and aptitude tests reveal major deficits for those who cannot sustain attention over time. However, there is more data emerging about the benefits of mind wandering too. In particular, there appear to be at least two areas where imaginative daydreaming is chiefly beneficial: thinking about the future, and creative problem solving. Creative problem solving seems like an obvious one, but recent empirical data confirms it. Subjects who prefaced a problem-­solving challenge with mind wandering did much better on the challenge—presumably because the mind-­wandering acts as an incubator period for subsequent problem solving.68 Test subjects were given an everyday object and asked to come up with as many new uses for it as possible in a short time. This is the Unusual Uses Task, and it’s been utilized for decades to test for creative thinking. If the subject is given a brick, they might say: doorstop, paperweight, mouse hole blocker, weapon, Spartan bed for tiny monk, and so on. Those test subjects who prefaced the task by mind wandering (about something besides the task) did better at formulating creative new uses.

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But how does imaginative wandering improve my future thinking? Some psychologists have argued that a major function of mind wandering is “the anticipation and planning of personally relevant future goals, otherwise known as autobiographical planning.”69 We frequently do not choose when to mind wander, but research shows that we are prone to do it when no other pressing performance challenge is upon us—when working memory requirements are low. And according to research, very high amounts of daydreaming activities are future oriented and involve possible scenarios of the self. Reintegrating imaginative flights with the possibilities of the future self transforms the costs into adaptive benefits. It’s important to remember a crucial aspect of imaginative life here, the aspect that contributes to its adaptive power—namely, emotion or affect. Autobiographical planning can easily degenerate into maladaptive worry, so we should not assume positive affect as intrinsic to imaginative activity. We should not romanticize mind wandering. If a person’s active second universe is colored with negative affect, then the imagination may be a great source of misery. There are many developmental psychological reasons why a person may imagine depressing or anxiety-­producing scenarios, but generally speaking deficits in the neurotransmitter dopamine (important in seeking motivation and pleasure rewards) bring negative affect to the subject’s imagining. When our imagining activity is accompanied by higher degrees of dopamine, we are more productive creators. And no amount of hypofrontality itself will ensure that the necessary positive affect will accompany it. The down-­tuned executive control alone is not the key to productive imagining, but seems to need the additional ingredient of increased or at least sufficient dopamine. And it is no accident then that many of the traditional hypofrontality techniques (e.g., showering, intoxicants, exercise, etc.) also promote the neurochemistry of positive affect. In this last section of the chapter, then, let’s assume that the decentering phase was successful and the emotional environment conducive. Now what? The final stage of imaginative work is a reentry phase, where the stream-­state incubation results are reintroduced to centralized-­state consciousness. We’ve already described the ongoing toggle between uncensored and monitored improvisation, but we also need to recognize the more enduring reintegration of novel creations into waking, self-­ organized life. Productive Dionysian activity must be reintegrated into

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Apollonian life. That is the process that turns vision and insight into culture. Let’s examine three ways that reentry into centralized-­state consciousness constitutes adaptive imagination. Here our discussion naturally correlates the individual and the species advantages of imaginative thinking. Biology, psychology, and culture converge, and feedback loops make individual imaginative creations available to cultural reservoirs, while individuals are born into cultural niches that have been heavily shaped by individual imaginative adaptations. Three areas to consider are (a) insight flashes, (b) smarter habits, and (c) non-­cliché thinking. Imagination is a powerful engine of insight. We often characterize it with lightbulb metaphors, lightning flashes, sparks, and other combustion symbols. Let’s consider some of the profound ways that imagination has created deep cultural systems like religion and mythology. As I mentioned before, early religion was not a rational choice of beliefs, amidst other competing beliefs in a pluralistic marketplace of options. Rather, religion was part of the lived environment—the cognitive, social, and emotional niche of Homo sapiens. Claiming that religion is a work of imagination is not a value judgment or criticism, but simply recognition of its counterfactual independence from most everyday experience. Religion and mythology depend heavily on the cognitive architecture that we’ve been calling imagination. Our interest now is in the existential insights that might be attained during stream-­state submersion and that might beneficially reenter into ordered consciousness and culture. Anthropologists and psychoanalysts have long suggested archetypical structures of mind, dimly glimpsed in hypnogogic and religious states. Much of this work lacked scientific grounding and tended to overgeneralize idiosyncratic habits of thought. I make no effort here to save notions of the “collective unconscious” from the scientific disrepute into which they fell. The question of innate versus learned mythic structures does not particularly interest us here. But the way such myths organize existential insights through imagery and story does interest us. Certain existential universals are condensed (mimesis) by the general mental alchemies we’ve been calling imagination (e.g., image blending, domain crossing, etc.). The biological and cultural landscapes of all human beings contain common landmarks; we all have certain cognitive structures (e.g., language

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capacity, theory of mind, etc.), certain affective or emotional systems (e.g., psychobiological systems of fear, rage, care, etc.), and social structures (e.g., procreation, affiliation, dominance, cooperation, etc.).70 Importantly, for our embodied approach to mind, we also include the common issues of ecological niche (i.e., we all need to secure resources from the immediate environment, and avoid competitors as well as natural dangers, etc.). As all human groups “travel” this “landscape,” they tend to solve the common challenges with common solutions. Diversity abounds, of course, but between the level of biology and cultural idiosyncrasy, there lies a realm of converging imaginative archetypes. Animism, for example, has familiar structures wherever one finds it. Animists have an imaginative framework for invisible “persons” or agents who exist all around us. These beings influence and can be influenced by the human world, but have few of the spatiotemporal restrictions of flesh-­and-­blood creatures. Nonetheless, the spirits often engage in animal-­like behavior, including eating, drinking, copulating, causing mischief, and so on. They can be placated with booze, prayers, and other sacrifices. And their imagined form or morphology is usually a quasi-­zoological hybrid, or ghost, or some such magical twist on everyday perceptions and memories. Stream-­ state imagery of dreams and imaginative composition are put to good use as rural humans navigate the challenging landscape of subsistence. As Freud, Durkheim, and almost every other scholar of religion has noted, human beings commonly imagine themselves as part of something more, and frequently this involves some kind of “higher being.” Freud famously argued that monotheism is an imaginative delusion that generalizes the love and fear of the human father into an invisible spirit being (God) who adjudicates all human behavior. This is an adaptive move, according to Freud, because “big God” beliefs are helpful to the management of complex social realities (i.e., managing repression guilt, fostering cooperation, dissuading defectors, etc.). Most Westerners readily recognize that God has been imagined along the lines of the family patriarch, and even a cursory look at Christianity, Judaism, and Islam reveals a “father” deity. But if this pains our egalitarian sensibility and we open up the issue to include the alleged matriarchal religions of prehistory, our central point is still preserved: humans tend (consciously or unconsciously) to imagine God as a much more powerful version of their parents. This is probably a natural outgrowth of the child’s earliest navigation

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with power and love in the family, rather than some innate idea. I submit that we have here—in the parent-­god surrogate—another example of those convergent archetypes that may not be universal but common enough. The role of the imagination in creating and sustaining a father god is substantial. And after arguing repeatedly for the knowledge powers of imagination, I hasten to add my own agnosticism as to whether such an imagined God is delusional or real. My point is that the existence and the properties of a father god are shaped by the associations, memories, and images of stream-­state consciousness (including dreams and involuntary imaginings), then made coherent by reentry into centralized-­state consciousness, and finally codified by cultural traditions (e.g., rituals and images that feed back into the individual’s imaginary lexicon).71 Anthropological psychologist Natalie Emmons did a cross-­cultural analysis of religious and non-­religious children, and found a surprisingly common belief in immortality. Unlike religious ideologies, however, this belief—or bias really—in eternality is not based on a coherent theory about the soul or heaven or samsara, but rather on an intuitive sense that one’s core desires or emotions exist with or without the body.72 Children between ages five and twelve were shown a sequence of pictures of their mothers—first from a recent time (when the subject was already born), then from a time when the mother was pregnant with the subject, and finally from before conception/pregnancy. Children from very different backgrounds all reported that they could feel or want things during the preexistent time frame, before their own conception. This finding is surprising in cultures that do not have reincarnation theories as part of their background cultural radiation. According to Emmons, “Children struggle to imagine a time when they did not feel or desire.” It’s hard to know if these results reveal an innate immortality instinct or just a strange result of weird psychology testing on children who are eager to play along. But for our purposes, it raises the possibility of an imagination that is already born dedicated to some general cognitive biases or tendencies. I am not suggesting we resuscitate any of the innate idea doctrines of the philosophers, nor a deterministic modular view of innate ideas that are genetically engraved in the mind. Instead, I suggest that we all have cognitive tendencies that are unlearned, but emerge out of the embodied mental operating system as it travels the common adap-

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tive landscape. This is a naturalized Darwinian notion of “innateness” that accepts the importance of developmental experience. In his private Notebook M, Darwin reveals a funny conversation between him and his brother Erasmus about Plato’s dialogue Phaedo. The notebook entry, from 1838, reads: “Plato (Erasmus) says in Phaedo that our ‘necessary ideas’ arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience.—read ‘monkeys’ for preexistence.”73 In this iconoclastic note, he paves the way for thinking about a priori knowledge in a genealogical or evolutionary way. And with twenty-­first-­century brain science perspective, we can add the plasticity factor to such evolutionary psychology. The imagination may be the most flexible and free aspect of cognition, but it, too, is constrained. It, too, must work within the adaptive biocultural landscape. Such constraints might well produce a psychology of father gods and immortal souls, as well as mundane biases having to do with folk taxonomies, folk physics, causation, and so on. If I try to imagine life before I was born or after I die—like the kids in Emmons’s experiments—then I can’t help placing some version of my subjective first-­ person perspective into that time frame. That incoherent maneuver seems to be an unavoidable exercise of the imagination. Are there other existential universals of the imagination? Setting aside these relatively intuitive examples of common imaginative archetypes (e.g., patriarchal deity, disembodied subjectivity), let’s briefly consider the ayahuasca research of psychologist Frank Echenhofer. Ayahuasca is an Amazonian plant that contains the psychedelic compound DMT and is ingested by indigenous peoples for the attainment of spiritual insight. Professor Echenhofer argues that the intoxicant produces very common “spontaneous imagery narratives” in people who ingest it.74 Several decades of research on ayahuasca reveal similar “waking dreams” in the practitioners, and Echenhofer categorizes a three-­part sequence: form dismantling, form creation, and form expression. Some of Echenhofer’s specific analysis is highly speculative and difficult to corroborate, but his work raises afresh the question not just of a rudimentary image grammar but a way of accessing it in dreams, hallucinogenic experiences, art, and so on. Most of this kind of speculation descends from psychoanalytic approaches to mythology symbolism (e.g., Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory), but hopefully a new generation of researchers will find a more scientific way forward.

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The person undergoing the waking dream of ayahuasca appears to have a similar therapeutic consolidation of memories and emotions— comparable to the therapeutic aspect of dreams. Just as dreams can sculpt and manage affective meaning by soft-­wiring the hot cognition system into useful biases, so, too, the ayahuasca adventure takes the subject on a mental adventure (now semi-­conscious, or at least more lucid than normal dreaming). The process is a meaning-­making adventure, in which the subject reorganizes painful or positive past experiences into a fresh context (often reliving the past with a helpful buffer of present detachment). In this state, the subject undergoes a powerful cathartic stage of vomiting and sobbing and a correlated psychological dismantling. According to Echenhofer, most subjects report an initial stage of destroying their old self, comprised of a gradual increase of conflicting energy, with disturbing images and memories, then an ability to tolerate the overwhelming experiences, followed by images of dying or being broken apart. This can be a frightening journey for the subject. The specific journey is dominated by the almost infinitely diverse experiences and memories of each subject, but the sequence still has an underlying grammar. The underlying grammar of the journey may be provided by common Homo sapiens’ embodied schema (i.e., natural categories or filters of experience, laid down, as Darwin quipped, in our monkey past). Philosopher Mark Johnson has persuasively argued for a small set of body-­map schemas, shared by all humans.75 Because our perception and body orientation create a horizon visual field, for example, we tend to organize our thinking on a spatial foundation of center and periphery. The center-­ periphery schema (originating from the body) helps us think. I can think of some ideas, for example, as “way out there,” or some as “focal.” Similarly, our bodies are constantly in a physical relation of attraction, repulsion, compulsion, blockage of movement, unblocking of movement, and so on. These bodily experiences form the template for higher-­order thinking too (e.g., I have writer’s block; I’m compelled by your logic; my theory is blocked by this anomaly, etc.). When an ayahuasca subject takes their “journey” (we’re already in Johnson’s schemas), they often confront menacing faces and death imagery when they close their eyes, then they learn to tolerate the intense experiences, and after that they move past these psychological blockades to resolving images and feelings (i.e., negative affect dissipates).

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The phase of the dismantled self is followed by a creative reconstruction phase of imagery. The person hallucinates and imagines forms coming together, with increasing organization. Forms become more coherent. People report seeing physical shapes self-­assemble and patterns coalesce. Dismantled forms become reborn or resurrected.76 Finally, this phase is followed by the last phase of form expression. Here, like a Tibetan mandala or a matrix of arabesque lines, the subject tends to “see” repetitive complexity, with increased vertical and horizontal attunement. As if the finite terms or forms of creation are set, the subject now expresses them over and over in levels of increasing complexity. My point in sketching this trajectory is to suggest a way that imagination might organically develop its own grammar or logic, as it integrates the second universe within the demands of the adaptive landscape. What is the function or the meaning of this imaginative grammar? At the risk of dramatizing the claim, it is the existential story itself: I did not exist before, I do now, but not for long (and the same is true for everyone I love). The imagination gives us a meaningful simulation rather than a theory about our existence. The more familiar religions of the Pentateuch have also developed common imagery and narratives to portray existential issues. Foundational stories and images of cosmic and personal meaning congealed before they were recorded in scriptures, but once written down or pictorially represented, they traveled even better and influenced the way we think about our existential drama. An imagination grammar in Western religion ties the Bible to Milton, Scorsese movies, and comic books. Other religions also converge with Western concerns of paradise, sin, souls, as well as deep metaphors like the equation of “light” with knowledge or divinity, and “dark” with evil or ignorance. The imagination gives us reentry insights because it provides us with some tested ways of condensing big ideas or events into useful chunks: sacrifice for the community is heroic; suffering is bearable; love conquers all; all things must pass; and so on. The more complex tropes, image schemas, and narratives of religion are not “a priori” or “innate” even in the qualified Darwinian sense, but they were floated as candidates and accepted as adaptive long before any of us were born. The imagination was the great proposer of master-­narrative contenders, and the adaptive landscape winnowed the options. As executive centralized-­state gains more

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control in the evolution of human mind, it orders and organizes cultural frameworks that replicate successful predecessors. Even within an interesting and replicated religious narrative, the elemental parts are also constructed by the movement from stream-­state to centralized-­state consciousness. The hero, the savior, the monster, even the location are often hybrids and magical mixtures of otherwise disparate properties. For example, recall the discussion in chapter 3 of a cognitive blending called “category jamming.”77 The ancient chimeras are evidence of this routine process of stream-­state associational improvisation. As examples, I mentioned the Greek and Roman centaurs, griffins, harpies, mermaids, et cetera, and the Indian Ganesh and Garuda, as well as the Chinese Qilin, Shi (Foo Dogs), and so on. Category jamming violates our folk taxonomy of nature (i.e., by blending types into hybrids) and violates our fundamental categories of animate and inanimate—which might be why zombies are so uncanny. Noël Carroll points out that most horror monsters are disgusting as well as threatening, and we’re especially disgusted by “impurity.” Things that we find impure, and consider as abominations, are usually indeterminate entities—in between normal categories of being. For example, blood, feces, spit, mucus, and vomit all blur the usual categories of me and not me, or human and not human. So, many monsters of the imagination have mucus-­like slime oozing off them, or gelatinous blebbing or sexual undulation, and so on. It is this cognitive mismatch or tangle that explains in part why we are both repelled and drawn to some images. Early cultures of both the West and the East contain dragons in their imaginative lexicons. It’s possible that the representation of a dragon originated in one place idiosyncratically and then migrated everywhere by cultural transmission—travel and trade. But it’s also likely that two universally arousing kinds of creatures, snakes and birds of prey, would be combined spontaneously in stream-­state consciousness and then further articulated, refined, and developed by centralized-­state consciousness. The adaptive landscape (including social structures, affective systems, foraging realities, etc.) would act as a selective niche on imaginative entities. A dragon, which draws on properties of two predators, is intrinsically arousing to our cognitive and emotional equipment. If the new imaginary creature is contextualized well by voluntary creativity (centralized state), it will prove highly memorable, transmittable, and useful.

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Just as the dragon is a hybrid of a raptor and reptile, we have other more contemporary examples of stream-­state to centralized-­state reentry. Many of the creatures of the horror genre—like the “face-­hugger” creature in Alien—are composites of real-­life natural history enemies. Snakes and spiders horrify most humans, so mixing them together into one creature may well amplify the terror. Arachnophobia, or fear of spiders, is a universal human dread—especially in children. If humans evolved in an environment with venomous spiders, then a phobia could have been advantageous for human survival and such a trait could be expected to gain greater frequency in the larger human populations. The six-­eyed sand spider, of western and southern Africa, actually fits that prediction very well. It is a crab-­like spider that hides in the sand and leaps out to capture prey. Its venom is extremely dangerous to children, and one can see how a fear of spiders, in this African context, would have been highly advantageous. So our contemporary arachnophobia may be a leftover from our prehistory on the savanna. Is the evolutionary “memory” of ancient danger somehow rewritten in our contemporary brains (as the innate proponents suggest), or is the child’s developmental system enough to make spiders and snakes horrible? Some evolutionary psychologists expect to find a morphological archetype of “scary spider” somewhere in the inherited brain structure, but a developmental mismatch theory suggests a different mechanism to explain the same universal phobia. Psychologists Donald Hebb and Wolfgang Schleidt separately experimented on fear in animals and found that fear is not a result of a hardwired phobia of specific predators, but a developmental arousal of our cognitive categories.78 When birds and mammals are born, they have flexible categories that store associations. But these categories solidify quickly after birth and become default ways of interpreting the world. When any strange creature appears (one not corresponding to any default categories), the subject becomes aroused and fearful. According to psychologist Mary Ainsworth’s “strange situation” experiments, human default categories solidify around six months old, and babies after that time are much more frightened by anything “strange.”79 The categorical mismatch, according to this theory, causes the fear and arousal. If early Homo sapiens babies spent most of their first year strapped to their mothers or otherwise protected (and off the ground) by parents

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and caregivers, then creepy-­crawlies of every variety would, once encountered, radically disturb the default categorial systems laid down in the child’s first six months. The same argument can be enlisted to explain other cases of predator-­based phobias, like fear of big cats, crocodiles and murky water, and other ecological threats. It also explains similar phobias in our primate cousins (chimps have snake phobias too). And if we add the emerging imagery and stories of early human culture (e.g., cave paintings and gestural reenactments), we can see how “adaptive horror” can be strengthened, reinforced, and transmitted beyond the automatic process of categorial mismatch. The imagination is rooted in our evolved biological systems, but central-­state consciousness (and culture) can give nuanced shape and refinement to fears, hopes, and anxieties. We propose many imaginative memes to the larger cultural environment, and some of them go viral. Reentry, considered evolutionarily, is an ancient trial-­and-­error process, bequeathing us imagery and narratives that have successfully passed through the gauntlet. And this reentry process continues today and picks up speed as we increase the means of cultural transmission. Consider the explicitly therapeutic uses of the imagination in Tibetan Buddhism. Instead of emptying the mind, some forms of Tibetan meditation are carefully filling it up with creative visualization and adaptive imagery. Tibetan Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman explains the importance of the imagination for developing spiritual insights. A Tibetan Buddhist engages in an exoteric and esoteric form of practice. In the exoteric practice, you find a guru friend to help you with meditation exercises and dharma teachings. “Your esoteric teacher, by contrast, is one you imagine and visualize to be indivisible from the Buddha himself, someone who is a living exemplar of enlightenment. You use your mental power of imagination to propel you toward the enlightened state, to mobilize you to become like your teacher.”80 The meditator is encouraged to imagine many details of a heroic Buddha teacher. Sometimes the imaginary Buddha friend is sitting on a tree branch, while various bodhisattvas sit on other nearby branches. The clothing and the voice are carefully imagined. The meditator, in an imagined objectified version, then interacts with and learns from the idealized teacher—discussing dharma, facing fears together, overcoming cravings, and so on. When the meditator reenters normal waking consciousness, she has

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gained some insight into the nature of her cravings, the impermanent nature of things, and the way to increase compassion. All of this happens during a lucid trip inward. The subject seems to toggle between the stream state and centralized state, consulting imaginary beings of her own making that nonetheless reveal truths to her that she cannot perceive in normal waking consciousness. The self must be present enough to guide the journey, but must get out of the way, so to speak, so that the subject can perceive features or aspects of inner life that she could not perceive from the standard first-­person position. So, these are some of the ways that imagination reenters back to normal waking consciousness, bringing in “sparks,” “flashes,” and “lightbulbs.” We now need to understand the two other benefits of this transition from Dionysian to Apollonian consciousness. We need to consider how returning from the stream state brings smarter habits and finally non-­cliché thinking. In the discussion of reentry insights, I emphasized a kind of imagination that stresses the inward mental adventure. There’s nothing wrong with that emphasis, since much creative work happens in our head space. But we cannot lose sight of our central commitment to the embodied mind. Stream-­state consciousness is not just the territory of meditators, drunks, and poets. The stream state is a no-­self state that very active creators visit regularly. In dance, jazz improvisation, martial arts, surgery, gesture drawing, rock climbing, parkour, and so on, the practitioner is not indulging a hypnogogic free play of representations, but a free association of embodied gestures and simulations. Many of these simulations have been deliberately put into the stream state as body-­based memories through practice. When an improvising musician practices her scales, she must attend to the task carefully—enlisting all the frontality that we’ve already discussed. But procedural memory encoding is a kind of muscular conditioning and enlists different brain regions than declarative memory. The main area of the brain involved in motor learning (besides the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices) is the cerebellum—which was discussed in chapter 2. Brain plasticity (Hebb’s rule) wires a stronger neural pathway because repeated practice (neural firing) forms a preferential association in the system. Body memories, like declarative memories, move from

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short-­term to long-­term storage (which is not well understood), and then the improviser needs to retrieve those simulations quickly (which is also not well understood). Self-­monitoring is strong in the learning and practice phase, but reduced in the performance phase. What is clear, however, is that the more a musician “goes to the stream state,” the larger her toolbox of good clichés becomes. After the cold cognition, Apollonian phase of learning, the subsequent creativity training is in hot cognition. The improviser does not simply store muscle-­memory phrases in an unconscious file cabinet and then draw them up when chord conditions trigger them. Some musical moves will be mechanical in that way, but often there is a hot cognition stream-­state mixture of cliché chunks. The magic of musical hypofrontality is a free association of habit chunks, rather than a free association of representations or images. Over an A7 chord, for example, I can spontaneously fuse chunks of A pentatonic scale, A Dorian, and Mixolydian. I can’t do that in an adaptive way, of course, without substantial off-­line learning and practice, but when I do it in a performance, I never do it the same and frequently cannot anticipate the exact mixology. In reentry, then, the habits and clichés built up during practice are spontaneously mixed, mingled, recombined, and reordered. The more an improviser does this reentry toggle, the more she can do it. Finally, the last adaptive benefit of “reentry toggle” is the rare ability to work with no clichés. As we mentioned earlier, psychologists who distracted subjects with mind wandering found that those subjects were superior in solving the Unusual Uses Task—which asks subjects to quickly invent new uses for mundane objects. No-­cliché mind is what the Buddhists call “beginners mind” or the Daoists call “wu wei.” It might, alas, be an unrealistic idealization of flow. It may turn out to be impossible to work without clichés, but the ideal is still helpful in characterizing a unique creative state. The Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 bce) gives us a memorable example of the no-­cliché embodied mind, when he describes the skillful butcher. Butcher Ding was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. Zhuangzi says, “As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee—zip! zoop! he slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to music.”81 Lord Wen-

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hui was astounded, saying, “Imagine skill reaching such heights!” When Wenhui pressed him for the source of his expertise, Ding laid down his knife and explained: What I care about is the Way (Dao), which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. . . . There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room—more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

After hearing this account of skillful cutting, Lord Wenhui paused and said he now understood how to live life itself. This wonderful story captures a mode of hot cognition where the subject is at one with the process. The sensitivity and responsiveness of the butcher to the demands of the job are so in tune that his self-­awareness and cold cognition are unnecessary. Indeed, his movement is so flexible and appropriate that self-­aware centralized-­state consciousness is only an impediment. In this state of flow, the training and the clichés are transcended and the agent becomes one with the Dao (the Way). Of course, this is an idealized version, but it gets to the idea that a skillful improviser can keep the centralized-­state filter wide open (with minimal monitoring and organizing) and allow the stream state to dictate “smart moves” in a shifting environment. No-­cliché mind may not be achievable, but many creative people use this ideal to characterize the highest state of responsive creative flexibility. This brings us to finally resolve the paradox that started our chapter. Recall the mysterious puzzle. On the one hand, everyone recognizes that we must clear our minds and get “in the zone.” We must find our way to the present moment, but the empty egoless present moment is the most

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unimaginative, uncreative instant of human experience. In order to “be here now,” I must actually shut off all the usual imaginative creation of the future (what could be), and the re-­creation of the past (what was), as well as the imaginative possibilities of an alternative present. The present moment is a singularly unimaginative place. So how is flow the emptiest moment and the fullest? The mystery is solved when we apply the stream-­state and centralized-­ state distinction, and remember that the subjective felt experience (phenomenological) of the creative process may sometimes misrepresent the cognitive processing underneath. The reason why the present moment awareness seems empty is because we are turning off a certain style or mode of consciousness—the light of self-­consciousness, which is often bound up with awareness of one’s own volitional effort or agency. But while that prefrontal centralized state has been disabled, all of the underlying embodied machinery is still hard at work—namely, the perceptual, motor, emotional, and memory powers that make up the involuntary simulation system (the stream-­state proto-­imagination). Like a machine that’s running many moving parts, the parts continue to move even when the overhead light is shut off. I’ve been describing the stream-­state or liminal state as involuntary association, hot cognition, and suggesting that this form of animal mind may have dominated our primate ancestors’ inner life. After the prefrontal executive control functions evolved, they took on a management role over the simulations, in part because of their ability to produce future. As Daniel Dennett nicely puts it, the prefrontal mind was selected for because animal hot cognition is “short-­range and easily tricked. For more sophisticated engagements with the world, a . . . farther-­seeing mind is called for, one that can produce more and better future.”82 Nonetheless, when I enter the state of flow, I cancel out the executive control and allow the association simulation system to do its work blind. From the point of view of phenomenal consciousness, the experience is truly empty because I have disabled my point of view. But the stream-­ state associational and simulation system is still whirring (or perhaps bubbling) loudly in the dark. The flow state is a reconnection with the involuntary imagination, while the voluntary imagination goes dormant (hypofrontality). During and after reentry, voluntary imagination makes use of the elements born

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in flow, but the conscious ego really belongs to the frontal, executive, Apollonian consciousness—trying to make the raw elements coherent in the larger context of the adaptive landscape. Those flow practitioners who are trying to empty their mind of its pictorial and linguistic content so that they arrive at pure consciousness may only be disabling centralized-­state consciousness—leaving the contents themselves to mix and associate without a chaperone. This phenomenal “removal” of the contents of consciousness can happen in sitting meditation by careful mental cultivation. But it can also happen via another route altogether, which we recognize as athletic or bodily immersion in activity. Are these the same states? On the one hand, the meditator has arrived at pure consciousness, and presumably she is aware of that pure consciousness unless she’s simply blown out the flame of consciousness altogether and achieved the Nothing (sunyata). The free-­climbing athlete, however, has also blown out the contents of second-­universe consciousness, and in this case she is not conscious of the content-­less state (as some meditators), she is only aware of the present bodily activities. Both of these are erasures of the self, but in the athletic or artistic case of flow, the embodied mind is continuing to solve adaptive challenges. Just as the improviser is harvesting the embodied hot cognition in real time, the writer or poet is harvesting them later—during and after reentry. These are the ways that seemingly empty, egoless consciousness can be one of the deepest wellsprings of creative imagination.

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. MAO ZEDONG

Society is a joint-­stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-­reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. R A L P H WA L D O E M E R S O N

: SIX :

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Trading Fours

The saxophone solo crescendos as the drummer builds an explosive cacophony, and then the horn player signals the readying musicians to jump in again. But this time the guitarist peals a blistering line that seems to run the head melody backward. His eyes squint tighter as he struggles to complete some mysterious phrase that no one can predict, and after four bars the tenor player answers the phrase. He repeats the first part of it so perfectly that the band starts laughing, but he twists the second two bars into a mongrel shout that frightens while it surprises. The pianist takes over the next four bars at the same intensity, but drops it back to the guitarist more gently, and the process starts over. The band is “trading fours”—a time-­honored tradition of improvisers who engage in direct melodic dialogue with one another. Each player gets four measures, of “Imagination” in this case, to say something and respond, all the while keeping track and adapting to the chord changes of the song underneath them. It’s a tour de force of fast-­paced social communication.

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Anyone who has ever “traded fours” in a jazz setting, a hip-­hop freestyle battle, a comedy team improvisation, or a brainstorming business meeting, knows that it is frightening. The stakes feel very high because in just a moment now (here it comes . . .) you must “say something” and it needs to be meaningful, and it needs to fit with what went before it, and it must be fruitful for what comes afterward. And when you’ve blown it, you’re not done yet but must regroup your resources, fight through the ego bruises, and go again. On a good night, it is glorious, and on a bad night, it is hell. The same high-­stakes dynamic occurs, however, in the complex improvisation required when, for example, you ask your boss for a raise. You know she will resist. You have a couple clichéd argument maneuvers to unroll when the time is right, you have a vaguely worded threat of departure, a subtle emotional appeal, an assortment of body language tactics. She has all the same and more. You must “trade fours” with her successfully, and it’s very unlikely that any preset formulation will unfold according to plan. You must improvise together. And what’s true here applies to complex diplomatic negotiations between nation-­states and even lovers. My point is that even when language is in the picture, charting the social waters is often hot cognition improvisation. Just as the improvising imagination allows us to better navigate our physical environment, so, too, does it help us navigate persons and institutions. This chapter is about the sociopolitical imagination. How does the imagination help us forge community? Some of the earliest artistic ornamentations (e.g., beads, body paint, and so on) were ways of creating fictive kin groups—family-­like communities made up of related and unrelated people. A sign, a dance, a story: these create meaningful communities by creating affective or emotional communal experiences. Social bonding does not emerge as a cold cognition cost-­benefit social contract, but occurs in the body and in hot cognition, via the associational networks we’ve been exploring. After the fact, philosophers and evolutionary psychologists can tell a cost-­benefit story about the social contract, but the immediate motives of people are feelings. Once formed, of course, community can be improved or corrupted, and the progress is usually charted by imagination. In his song “Imagine,” John Lennon famously entreated us to imagine “no countries,” “no reli-

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gion,” “no possessions,” and a subsequent “brotherhood of man.” Martin Luther King Jr. invited us to pro­ject a “dream” into future reality and make it so. King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Imagination helps us have empathy for another person, by putting us in their shoes. It helps us envision an alternative reality where greater social justice exists. Dreaming our ideals helps us organize our daily lives and institutions to bring about those ideals. But the imagination is not intrinsically positive and affirmative. Nightmares, of course, are also dreams. In contrast to the egalitarian dreams of liberalism, imagination-­ based xenophobia drives cultures to imagine the worst, and fear tears apart community and fosters “us vs. them” dynamics. In this chapter, we will focus on the role of the improvising imagination in the production of cultural norms. But we’ll also compare the different cultural attitudes toward imagination itself—some cultures prize it as vital while others resent and restrict it.

T H E C U LT U R E S O F C R E AT I N G A N D C O P Y I N G

In 2015 the former CEO of Hewlett-­Packard and U.S. presidential hopeful, Carly Fiorina, said, “I’ve been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate.” She went on to say, “They’re not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial, they don’t innovate, that’s why they’re stealing our intellectual property.”1 The idea that America is innovative while China is imitative is an old saw in U.S. business-­speak. The stereotype has taken on fresh urgency in this era of intellectual property rights and the Chinese black market of imitation designer goods and bootleg entertainment products. There is also a whiff of panic in the criticism, as Chinese students outstrip Americans in standardized test performance. Many stereotypes have kernels of truth, however, and it is worth comparing the value placed upon improvisation and imagination across the East and West. I’ve had the good fortune to be raised under the American banner of innovation, but also lived in China and other Asian countries where conventional replication of tradition is more prized than originality.

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Even under my own roof, my wife, who is a “tiger mother” from Shanghai, China, thinks our son should master the time-­honored wisdom of classical music, math, and so on, whereas I think he needs more flexibility, imagination, and improv in his education. This little clash of civilizations, in my own house, is happening on the geopolitical stage too. In 2014 I was a Fulbright Scholar, teaching in Beijing, China. And before that I taught college students in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When I assign a composition to Asian students, thirty students turn in the same essay (with a few minor idiosyncrasies), because they have all gathered together outside class and compiled the received wisdom on that topic. Some Western teachers mistake this for plagiarism or a lack of originality, but it is not motivated by deception or negligence. Asian students would never be so arrogant as to imagine they could add any valuable drop to the sea of traditional knowledge. If my U.S. students did this, they would fail for plagiarism and lack of demonstrated thoughtfulness. Our Socratic culture prizes originality, and students are expected to be critical of tradition—or at least we require authority to justify itself to us. Confucian culture sees knowledge and art, and their ownership, differently. Is it any wonder that intellectual property is a major political sticking point? Both cultures prize excellence, but in very different ways. The American cult of the entrepreneur has made innovation a kind of secular religion. Will the Chinese, who are now rich (in urban areas) and fully intoxicated by consumer capitalism, encourage more improvisation in education and culture? Will such experimentalism spread from marketplaces to political squares? And conversely, has too much celebration of originality and imagination in our own culture turned the younger generation into quick-­fix addicts of self-­expression, all the while shortening their attention spans for the unromantic grunt work of skill and craft acquisition? The Chinese model of education is built on Kongzi’s (Confucius’s) philosophy of culture. From the Han Dynasty (206 bce) to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911), civil service exams (the “eight-­legged essays,” baguwen) were comprised of Confucian texts and ideals. Meticulous mastery of formal knowledge is emphasized. Even the contemporary high-­stakes national entry exam for college ( gaokao) retains the intense memorization emphasis and can make or break an entire subsequent career. China is still committed to the Confucian idea that wisdom is intrinsically elite—Mao Zedong’s egalitarianism did little to overturn this deep

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conviction. In this commitment, Confucius and Plato (Republic, book VIII) agree.2 Knowledge is not contained in the masses. Rigorous, civilizing education is necessary in order to become the kind of person who can direct public policy.3 Moreover, mastery of cultural knowledge (e.g., music, math, literature, etc.) actually completes the very humanity of the average citizen as well. Culture is not a default environment, but a rigorous acquisition. Failure to acquire such knowledge relegates one to an inferior status. Americans see wisdom in the mob (Federalists not withstanding), whereas Confucians (e.g., Kongzi and Xunzi, etc.) see uneducated human nature as unreliable and dangerous. This drives the idea that educated elites must vet political leaders. Confucian philosopher Xunzi argued that culture and education act upon us like a carpenter repeatedly steaming a plank of wood—slowly and permanently the board is bent to a better shape. Most Americans are resistant to this view of culture, because it is hierarchical rather than egalitarian. But the traditional Chinese emphasis on wisdom is refreshing for Americans like myself who were raised on the worship of business. I’m a professor by trade, and in the Confucian culture of China and Cambodia, I was treated with much more respect than I ever experience in the States. Partly this is because business trumps the liberal arts in American culture. It is also the legacy of our Socratic education system that leads Westerners to always challenge authority and treat it with suspicion, whereas in a Confucian culture, authority figures, people of rank, and elderly people are assumed to be sources of wisdom (until proven otherwise). Our cultures have two different starting points when thinking about social ladders and success. It was common for Socrates to approach “wise” people in the common forum and challenge them to define and defend complex concepts, like justice, courage, and beauty. In short order, Socrates would embarrass and humiliate his interlocutor, who would fail to pass a series of devastating logical critiques. Whatever bits of theory were still standing after this critical method were considered reasonable enough to pass as provisional knowledge. This sifting method of Western knowledge is no respecter of persons and contains no deference for tradition. In fact, the skeptical approach is frequently hostile to established wisdom. As such, it is uniquely positioned to foster and value innovation and deviation from established norms and bodies of knowledge. By contrast, the Confucian paradigm is a respecter of persons and

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treats the age, experience, status, and filial connection as highly relevant to any communication interchange. A traditional Chinese person would never humiliate an elder in a town square, in order to build a better abstract theory.4 The Chinese approach allows for critique, but “saving face” or “giving face” is an important art form in social interactions, and the opportunity for criticism is not the public venue. The difference here is not just at the level of social graces, but the deeper level of knowledge itself. For traditional Chinese culture, true knowledge is already contained in the masterpieces of bygone culture (for Kongzi, it was the Western Zhou period). This conservative approach to knowledge maintains that minor revision, not revolution, slowly polishes ideas to be beautiful, useful, and true. As a good student, your job is to master the classics, not innovate. In fact, Kongzi famously characterizes himself in this tradition, when he says, “I transmit, I do not innovate.” (Analects 7.1) This conservative Confucian view of knowledge has many virtues. From an evolutionary anthropological perspective, we acknowledge that human success in diverse ecological niches has been largely the result of cultural transmission of folkways. But once those niches are themselves socially complex and culturally enriched, then flourishing in them requires more extensive cultural training rather than just native aptitudes. Anyone who has raised a kid knows that (despite them being quick studies) massive resources, attention, repetition, and training are required to give the next generation the cultural tools to survive and flourish. Mastering what has gone before can be the key to surviving and outstripping competition. It is tempting then to read these Confucian tendencies as cultural constraints on improvisation and imagination. It is probably a fair read. China itself seems keenly aware of the issue, and in recent years they have doubled their applications for patents.5 Anthropologist Andrew Kipnis studied educational policies in Shandong Province, China, and found explicit efforts to remedy the creativity problem. He cites a typical conversation with a Chinese parent, who is lamenting the lack of Bill Gates–­ type innovators in China. “Bill Gates didn’t even go to college. When he was young he spent all of his free time experimenting with computers. He didn’t have to spend all of his time memorizing useless information in the preparation for university entrance exams. In China, even primary

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school children are forced to memorize many things. How can China possibly produce a Bill Gates?”6 In response to the creativity gap, Shandong Province initiated “mandatory creativity” courses in the curriculum and eliminated Saturday classes. Unfortunately, even the creativity courses Kipnis observed were more of the usual memorization-­style pedagogy. In the fourth-­grade creativity class, students were required to chant Tang Dynasty poems, repeating aloud and memorizing them. The teacher corrected their pronunciation, but no time was spent discussing what the poems meant. When Kipnis asked the teacher afterward if the students ever created anything themselves in the creativity class, he was told no. The teacher explained that the Tang poems now would somehow make the students more creative later in their adult lives. Given that there are cultural constraints on imagination, two important points need to be made about the cultures of creativity and copying. One, the United States was once the copycat culture. And two, Chinese culture has non-­Confucian innovative traditions that remain dormant currently, but could be resuscitated with little effort—making them a more improvisational culture. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States was slavishly copying European culture. We were not a nation of innovators, and we did not prize imaginative deviations in the way we do now. In 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson published Self-­Reliance, which championed individualism and nonconformity to stultified tradition. Emerson implored American intellectuals to have the courage to go off the rails and stop mimicking European art, philosophy, and culture. Instead of trying to copy the ideas and styles of Kant and Mozart, as well as Classical and Gothic architecture, Americans should be spontaneously creative. He encouraged Americans to improvise, make mistakes, be juvenile and quixotic, like an adolescent boy. According to Emerson, Americans were too intimidated by European culture and lacked confidence in their own youthful dynamism. Consequently, American culture copied well but failed to create. “God,” he cajoled, “will not have his work made manifest by cowards.” Americans, he beseeched, “trust thyself.” Even the rules of logic and scientific consistency should not overly constrain the creative spirit, because “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . .”7

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It should be pointed out, however, that Emerson’s transcendentalism was not a relativism of idiosyncratic individuals against the common good. Rather, for Emerson, like Coleridge, the individual was a microcosm of values and truths that resonated with the macrocosm. If Americans could have the confidence to trust their inner creativity (what he called the “infinitude of the private man”), they would create a higher society and culture. Inner resources of the common man can be maximized once he is courageous enough, and these realizations will echo the deep truths of Nature herself. American philosophers—especially the pragmatists like George Herbert Mead, William James, and John Dewey—continued the refrain that Emerson started, demanding a uniquely American melody. As Leo Steinberg put it, the American celebration of improvisation and innovation “appealed once again to the American disdain for art conceived as something too carefully plotted, too cosmetic, too French.”8 The point is that there is no essentialist form of innovative or imitative culture. Historical circumstance and contingency can turn a copycat culture into a creative juggernaut and vice versa. American culture is still young, for example, and still has early values derived from frontier-­ settling lifeways. Moving west and trying to make a successful go of it in hostile and difficult ecologies gave the American psyche a certain respect and value for pragmatic innovation and improvisation. The pragmatist philosophers like John Dewey wanted us to keep this “experimentalism” at the forefront of American values and education. He argued that learning is active rather than passive, student-­centered learning is better than content-­centered approaches, real-­life experiences provide knowledge, and everything from physics to religion should be validated by an empirical (scientific) method. These tendencies in American intellectual history contribute to a valuing of improvisation and nontraditional knowledge. China, however, has its own philosophies of spontaneous creativity in Daoism and Chan Buddhism. But these values and knowledge theories have not penetrated the wider population to the same degree as Confucianism. Daoism is an ancient form of nativism, which values a return to nature and a way of spontaneous activity that transcends rote memorization or the application of preset rules (as we saw in the Daoist butcher). It is an ancient philosophy of improvisation, but it remains “bohemian”— on the fringe of mainstream Chinese culture. In fact, when Buddhism

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arrived in China, it was dismissed by many Chinese as a species of their own homegrown Daoist bohemia. Arguably, Chan/Zen took as much, if not more, from Daoism—which celebrated nature, individualism, and mystical attunement. Zhuangzi, the famous Daoist philosopher, was fishing on the P’u River when the Prince of Ch’u sent some officials to see him and said, “Our Prince desires to burden you with the administration of the Ch’u State.” Confucius would have jumped at this invitation. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, went on fishing without turning his head and said, “I have heard that in Ch’u there is a sacred tortoise which died when it was three thousand [years] old. The prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest in his ancestral temple. Now would this tortoise rather be dead and have its remains venerated, or would it rather be alive and wagging its tail in the mud?’ ‘It would rather be alive,’ replied the two officials, ‘and wagging its tail in the mud.’ ‘Begone!’ cried Zhuangzi. ‘I too will wag my tail in the mud.’” Buddhism arrived like a rebellious young punk into a China that was already dominated by conservative Confucian philosophy.9 Though Kongzi (Confucius) and the Buddha Gautama were contemporaries, Buddhism (Fojiao) didn’t really enter China for another six or seven hundred years, and when it did, it found a rich intellectual culture that had no particular truck with meditation or individual enlightenment. To Confucian culture, Buddhism (brought from Central Asia) seemed amoral and antithetical to the family-­based social structure of China. Confucius himself, in the Analects, offers a humorous assessment of holy men, who spend their days in meditation. Always a fan of book learning, Kongzi says, “I once spent all day thinking without taking food and all night thinking without going to bed [meditating], but I found that I gained nothing from it. It would have been better for me to have spent the whole time in learning.”10 Contemporary China is a large-­scale society that has only recently emerged from a century of imperialism, civil war, international war, a Maoist centrally planned economy, and a remarkable quantum leap of capitalism. They can be forgiven for preferring stability to cultural values of innovation, revolution, and novelty. But when they perceive themselves to be stable enough, then they have rich Daoist and Buddhist traditions to draw upon for creating more spontaneous and creative edu-

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6.1. Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976) famously said, “Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely.” But the Chinese Cultural Revolution enacted quite the opposite.

cational programs. Moreover, capitalism—for good or ill—will surely provide the most powerful engine for shifting cultural values toward entrepreneurial innovation. And anyone who has been paying attention has noticed that the shift is well under way. This brings us to consider the role of economic culture on creativity. Is culture more imaginative and creative under capitalism or socialism, or some other system? Chairman Mao famously encouraged a period of open criticism and creativity—letting “a hundred flowers bloom” (baihua yundong) in 1956, but then promptly turned on the newly candid critics and creative types in 1957, sending many of them to prison camps. Mao claimed that his hundred flowers campaign had “enticed the snakes from out of their caves.” This crackdown chilled political creativity for decades, and every other totalitarian regime in recent history has sought to control imagination, art, and improvisation. The Left might object that Mao, Stalin, and other totalitarians are not good measures of the socialist potential for creativity, because they were

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not truly socialist. The argument Karl Marx made in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts held that capitalist labor was so exploitative that humans lacked the energy, time, or motivation to explore their creative natures. Working like a slave to survive alienates workers from the products of their own labor (i.e., a factory worker cannot afford the product he is making) and alienates the worker from himself (i.e., repetitive mindless labor atrophies his creative rational powers). So, creativity and imagination is an important part of fulfilling our human nature and need a place within the labor process if work is to overcome alienation. In Capital, Marx claims that imagination is one of the ingredients that differentiate human work from animal work. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-­process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.11

Submitting one’s energy, bodily health, and mental power to the purposeful (teleological) goals of one’s own imagination is one of the highest expressions of human potential, but not, according to socialism, when those goals are set by corporate masters. For their own part, capitalists have long claimed the imagination and improvisation on their side of the fence. The often-­heard argument is that free-­market capitalism stimulates citizens to take risks, try new initiatives, design better technologies, and ply imagination toward entrepreneurial success. Is there empirical evidence that capitalism increases creativity? First, it is not clear that “innovation” should always be equated with imagination or improvisation, since it is often used in business to mean improvement of profits (via some cost-­benefit tweak in productivity or design). Business professor Vijay Govindarajan, for example, argues that

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innovation is just another way of describing the “execution” phase of better efficiency, not creativity per se.12 Moreover, increased wealth is often taken as a sign of healthy creativity, but this assumption is dubious— just the sort of assumption you would expect in a society where success (even creative success) is measured by wealth. Arguably, the evaluation instruments of success are dialed to corroborate the assumptions. Empirical evidence aside, for the moment, what is the argument structure for asserting capitalist creativity? The underlying logic beneath this familiar assumption is more opaque than one might think. The negative version of the argument keys on motivation and ambition, or rather the lack of it. Without the jeopardy of no-­safety-­net free-­market capitalism, it is argued, citizens will become lazy, entitled, unproductive, and uncreative. Presumably then, it’s the danger or jeopardy of poverty that makes Americans creative and imaginative. The quiet pressure of the looming inability to provide basic necessities for one’s family is a force that demands pioneering and original thinking in response. This may be true. Indeed, we evolutionists are always making a similar argument about the Pleistocene selection pressures for the development of human intelligence and creativity. Therefore it may be disingenuous now to discount the argument because it seems depressing and brutal in a contemporary formulation. Starvation is an intense selection pressure whether you’re living in the Rift Valley a million years ago or in New York City today. So, the hidden logic of the capitalist argument is that impending death and competition force imaginative responses. It’s bleak, when so formulated, but it might be true all the same. On the contrary side, the Left—with its more sanguine view of human nature—envisions the true impetus for creativity to be the opposite of pressure. It’s leisure and the ability to forget about competitive survival that spawn truly creative imaginative art and so on. The word “leisure” is skole in ancient Greek, and gives us the word “scholar.” On this view, we require an economic condition that sufficiently satisfies our basic needs, so that we can turn our minds and our imaginations to the higher explorations of music, art, philosophy, pure math and science, and so on. Bertrand Russell, for example, offered a positive view of “idleness” and leisure, lamenting, “The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” And “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminu-

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tion of work.”13 If we reduced our workday to four hours, he suggested, we would have the leisure time to think and reflect on every topic, especially the social injustices around us and the manipulations of the State. Ultimately, it is an empirical question as to which economic structure best supports imagination. Social scientists would need a clear measure of imaginative activity (and this is not obvious or easy) and then a clear access to different economic systems in action (also, not easy). In the meantime, historians and philosophers will argue the point. As it stands now, competing economic systems want to lay claim to imaginative superiority, and that itself reveals the high value of creativity, even within utilitarian modernity. Economics aside, it’s important to reflect on one more comparative cultural ingredient. It’s a complicated ingredient and difficult to wrest from other mixed-­in elements. But simply put, it is failure tolerance or lenience. Yes, some mistakes are fatal, and selection is strong for those, but many mistakes within a stable society are nonthreatening or harmless. Some cultures have high toleration for such trials and errors, and some do not. Something in the U.S. cultural matrix allows for mistakes, blunders, missteps, and experiment failures. Not only do we tolerate mistakes by minimizing their impact on subsequent student prospects, but we celebrate and generously grade “good effort” regardless of the actual achievement. This is not always the case, of course, and many high-­stress parents push to have their child placed in an elite preschool, then on to excel in a selective grade school, then a leading high school, and finally an Ivy League university. In these scenarios, the forgiveness and tolerance of mistakes and wrong turns are minimal. But so, arguably, is the creativity. Immigrant families in the United States, particularly those of humble means, are often more strict, more demanding, and less tolerant of their children’s experimentation and exploration. This is because life for them is more competitive, or at least they perceive it as such. The old saw has some truth: Working-­class laborers push hard and raise children who become white-­collar lawyers, doctors, and business managers. Then those in this white-­collar generation, in turn, often raise children who become artists, musicians, and creatives of some kind. More privileged groups have the leisure to develop more flexible and even playful modes of life. They don’t always actualize this benefit of prosperity—and perhaps they’re not “hungry” enough (because of wealth) for the relevant cre-

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ative ambition—but at least the option for non-­utilitarian creativity is more available. Lenience toward mistakes and failures is tied in with economic issues, but has its own social psychology dynamic as well. Allowing your child to try repeatedly to solve a problem—and failing repeatedly—is an endurance test for most parents, but it is endured because we believe failing is also learning. We tolerate mistakes and wrong turns because we believe that (a) better “turns” or moves will follow, if the child herself is the investigator, and (b) detection of real novel alternatives is discoverable by everyone, even a kid (a democratization of knowledge). Consider the recent parenting debate that emerged after a Chinese American academic and mother, Amy Chua, published her book-­length indictment of American parenting, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.14 Chinese superiority in standardized testing has thrown some American parents and policy makers into a panic. Professor Chua suggests that American kids play too much and don’t work hard enough at mastering knowledge bases and skills. Chinese kids seem hardened for battle by tough-­love boot-­camp childhoods, whereas American kids are just obese and only excel at Xbox and computer games. Many colleges have begun to reverse discriminate against Chinese students in order to keep them from flooding the best academic programs. Some Americans are shocked by the way Asians excel at math and engineering, and secretly wonder about a math gene or some engineering enzyme in the blood. But like many other things in ethnic groups, the answer is not biological. The parents just force math, science, and engineering on their children. The Asian child is not consulted by the tiger parents about what the child wants to study, nor is there an attempt to discern what the child might be naturally good at. That inquiry would be akin to asking the leg of a chair if it wanted to pursue a different function. The happiness of the leg is not the goal of life. The functioning of the chair (the family, in my little analogy) is the real goal of life. Why are Chinese parents so hard on their kids? It’s because the Chinese do not really believe in childhood. They do not see childhood as a special and magical time, like Westerners do. Childhood, for Westerners, is a precious and delicate stage of innocent exploration that must be protected, sustained, and extended as far as possible—before the cruel

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realities of adulthood make their inevitable demands. Westerners see childhood as the Freudian stage of narcissism, a paradise governed by the pleasure principle. As you become a tween and then a teen, Westerners expect your pleasure principle to be replaced by the reality principle— you have to transition from irresponsible princess to responsible citizen. Chinese, on the other hand, see childhood quite differently. For them, childhood is the training ground for adulthood. Being born into a tiger family is like being drafted into the military. Boot camp starts as soon as you can walk. If the child doesn’t like this life of endless academic drilling and discipline, well . . . so what? Childhood is not for the child. It’s for the adult that the child will eventually become, and also for the aging parents who will eventually collect on the parenting debt (via filial piety). Of course, many cultures are very devoted to family, but that doesn’t explain why Chinese are so good at the most challenging academic disciplines. I suspect that the most challenging academic disciplines are forced on the child for two reasons. One reason is simply “no pain, no gain.” If hard work builds character and skill, then just go for the hardest academic fields you can find. This is a long-­standing Confucian precept about life: intense effort and discipline opens every door. Unlike the more hippie Daoist tradition of Chinese culture—which taught that one should just “let it be” naturally (wu wei)—the Confucian model prefers to meddle with and improve upon nature through study, learning, and virtuous action. As we’ve already noted, Confucianism asserts that knowledge is the mastery of wisdom and skills already laid down by traditions of excellence. Knowledge, on this view, does not come from personal insight, originality, or creativity. This, I suspect, is partly why Asians shine at Western classical music and shun improvisational music styles. The second major reason why Chinese parents make their kids study math and engineering is that it is not as dangerous as the humanities. Political upheavals—like Mao’s Cultural Revolution—create major problems for students and experts of the humanities, because ideological education and reeducation always prefer to work with blank slates rather than intractable historians and philosophers. In countries where leaders were trying to start society over from year zero, you could be persecuted for having traditional knowledge. This was a double bind. When your whole culture is built on study (as Confucian cultures are) but knowledge has become politically dangerous, then you protect your children by

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pushing the ideologically neutral disciplines. Math, engineering, and science are always useful. Engineering, for example, is not only intrinsically useful, but its apolitical qualities make it impervious to political fluctuations. Marxists, capitalists, theocrats, democracy proponents, even dictators all need bridges, buildings, and information highways. In a subsequent book with her husband Jed Rubenfeld, Amy Chua argues that some cultures have unique ingredients that produce material and social success.15 For example, Chinese Americans—along with Lebanese Americans, Nigerian Americans, Jewish Americans, and so on—all practice strong traditions of “impulse control.” They don’t spend, but save. They don’t philander, drink too much, or give up on things quickly because they might be difficult. I don’t know whether social science bears out this claim—some cultures excel at impulse control more than others—but there is the psychology literature (mentioned in chapter 5) linking self-­discipline and career success. Notice, however, that overly disciplined minds and cultures might lack the flexibility ingredient that we consider crucial for creativity. Once you develop a very strong impulse-­control mechanism (bound up with the frontality discussed in chapter 5), you might keep applying the brake long after you’ve acquired healthy discipline. It’s a short step, even for a whole culture, to move from highly disciplined to neurotically masochistic. If impulse and even happiness is always deferred, then life becomes a form of self-­denial. If a set of cultural traits can be adaptive, then they can also be deleterious or damaging as well. The inflexibility of tiger parenting undoes some of its own goals. Flexibility requires one to let go of preset plans and flow with fresh changes—adapting in real time. That is not a virtue in the tiger program. And when unpredictable change happens in real life (as it always does), it unhinges people who’ve been raised on a strict diet of preformatted structure.16

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What role does imagination play in human ethics? This question has been heating up over the last few years, after decades of disregard from professional philosophers. Of course, the professionals are often behind the curve, and most people know full well that imagination plays a substantial role in ethical thinking and moral commitments. In this section, we want

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to examine the degree to which imagination and improvisation shape our ethical lives. A history of ethics would notice the early connection of social norms and religion. Most of the early rules of society were either implicit fear-­ based patterns, stemming from alpha-­male dominance (including actual males and invisible divine alpha beings—gods), or cooperative agreements (stemming from kin-­based affiliations). As societies grew into larger groups, religion did double duty as an in-­group adhesive and a behavioral policing mechanism. The moral systems of the Abrahamic cultures are inextricable from the divine commands of the “big god” Yahweh. Ethics in this system is defined by what God wants or what God decrees. Imagination is required for the success of divine command morality because people must envision divinities that are not present to sense perception, and also imagine the future consequences of breaking or upholding the rules. Sure enough, Axial Age religious morality (from the Levant to India) is extremely rich in imaginative content. Devils and spirits harass the impure, and hedonistic paradises await the pure. The secular version of this divine command morality is called deontological ethics, and its main proponent is the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant argued that human reason issues universal moral duties, binding us to imperatives like the golden rule (which Kant secularized in various forms of categorical imperative). The categorical imperative holds that we should always treat other human beings as ends in themselves rather than means to some end. This is intrinsically good according to Kant and holds true regardless of the actual consequences of our actions. His more formal permutation of the imperative is “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.” To see how this works, let’s apply it to a moral question. I’m thinking about lying to my boss to avoid work—should I do it? According to Kant, I must consider my possible action of lying as if it were a universal law, as if everyone lied to his boss to avoid work. Well, that seems bad from an experiential consequential standpoint because then everybody would be manipulating employers and missing work whenever it was convenient, and labor as we know it would collapse. But Kant sees an even deeper problem, a damning logical problem. If we think about it carefully enough, Kant suggests, we cannot even conceive coherently of

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a universal law of lying when convenient. Language itself only works if it can be relied upon, but lying renders language unreliable and contradicts its essential function. Therefore, Kant concludes that rationality alone (without reference to context or consequence) has decided the unacceptable status of lying.17 According to Kant and his devotees, the binding truth of the categorical imperative comes from reason itself (like a mathematical proof ), not from any consideration of consequences. Deontological ethics is what you get when you try to move the religious absolutism of divine command theory to a new foundation—the secular absolutism of Newtonian physics. For many of us, however, the Kantian way of thinking about ethics is deeply flawed and heralds from an obsolete way of thinking about the human mind. After Darwin it is simply antiquated to think of the mind in such absolutist terms, and more empirically minded philosophers now look for the origin of ethics in developmental psychology and anthropology. Experience—derived from trial and error—gives us ethical wisdom, not pure logic.18 Ethics, in my view, is not much different from other social traits that evolved through natural selection (and cultural evolution), and the “ought” is indeed descended from the tested and tried “is.” How do I know I should not hurt my neighbor? Because I have been hurt and do not like it, and I recognize my own susceptibility to pain in my neighbor. “Why I should protect him at all?” is derived from a combination of spontaneous emotional empathy and a commonsensical social contract that vitiates the might-­ makes-­right scenarios. The fact that I can ignore both these influences, and must commit myself to them with regular practice, suggests to me that moral norms are not much different from other sorts of norms (like hunting norms or sleeping norms). It is the consequences of my trial-­and-­ error improvisations, together with the force of cultural education, that lead me to prefer one norm over another. As such, the norms are empirically grounded. This third ethical theory is consequentialism, which claims that our ethical obligations derive from judgments about the positive or negative consequences of our actions. Utilitarianism is the most well-­known school of consequentialist ethics, and it summarizes into the memorable formula: Always act such that you maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And by good, most utilitarians mean “happiness.” On this view, ethics requires reasoning, but not pure reason. Utilitarian logic

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works with the person’s history of pain, pleasure, and happiness, as well as imaginative prediction about future scenarios of pain, pleasure, and happiness. Its calculation method draws heavily upon the powers of imagination, though its proponents rarely acknowledge this. Consider the classic trolley-­car ethics experiment from chapter 4. It’s a thought experiment that asks you to imagine yourself on a bridge overlooking a speeding trolley car hurling toward a group of five unaware pedestrians. The track splits in two directions and you have the track-­ switching lever in front of you. You can, if you act in time, switch the trolley onto the other track, avoiding the deaths of the five pedestrians. But the alternate track has one pedestrian walking unawares and he will certainly die if you do the switch. So, what do you do? Save the many and kill the one? Leave it to run its own course? These and countless other lifeboat scenarios and thought experiments are designed to reveal our ethical intuitions. The vast majority of people, in turns out, will try to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. They’ll crunch the utilitarian calculus and throw the switch to save the five pedestrians. The almost universal utilitarian response led some evolutionary psychologists to posit a “morality module” like the Chomsky language module discussed in chapter 4. The modularity proponents argue that an innate moral circuit evolved during the Pleistocene or even earlier in our primate past and, like a flinch reflex, automatically tilts our judgments/ actions toward a utilitarian value formula.19 We don’t need much reflection or analysis, because the module is unconscious and unlearned. It is a part of our inherited cognitive architecture. When we imagine trolley scenarios or other cases of moral jeopardy, we inevitably trigger the module to resolve the dilemma. While I am Darwinian about the mind and its capacities (from perception to imagination, etc.), I think this moral module hypothesis is wrong. The module theory is not sophisticated enough, given what we know about the evolution of the mind, and it fails to explain the complexity of moral judgments and intuitions. I will argue instead that morality is a by-­ product of non-­moral embodied cognition (in particular, imagination) and retains its depth in human social behavior via a multi-­causal dance of primate affective systems, social learning, cognitive reflection, and cultural learning. Consider, for example, how quickly the supposed utilitarian module is

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impacted when the thought experiment is altered. The outcomes change radically when you replace the lone track walker with your brother or sister, mother or father, or even best friend. The person on the other track is not some abstract stranger, but one of your own favorite people. Now the utilitarian solution unravels quickly. Most people cannot overcome their biases in order to “do the right thing” (in the utilitarian sense). In part, this is because emotions infiltrate judgments significantly, and in this case appear to penetrate the supposed module and derail it. That’s not supposed to happen with cognitive modules, which are alleged to be impenetrable. Neuroscientists started scanning brain activity of subjects who were posed these ethical dilemmas, and definite patterns emerged. The VMPC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regulates emotions (among other things) and works in intimate communication with the ancestral limbic system. When a patient’s VMPC is normal, they almost always answer the ethical dilemmas in favor of their favorites, not in favor of the random majority. Healthy emotional VMPC subjects are guided by their nepotistic biases. But if the emotional VMPC is damaged, the subject becomes extremely utilitarian (hyper-­rational) in their responses. Emotionally compromised subjects have no hesitation (at least in thought experiments) to sacrifice their own kin for the greater good. Scanning technology reveals a correspondence between utilitarian ethics and the cognitive control systems of the brain. Whereas the older socio-­emotional limbic brain, inherited from our mammal ancestors, seems to inform our more biased or loyalty-­ based ethical judgments.20 This is not a fatal objection to modularity. Perhaps it suggests, in fact, that there may be two or more moral modules (a hot cognition filial switch and a cold cognition utilitarian switch), and sometimes they have to compete with each other. I wouldn’t rule this out entirely.21 Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done experimental research like this and argues that there are six such instinctive moral orientations (i.e., care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity), and they often conflict with one another.22 My objections to moral modules—besides their susceptibility to emotion and introspection—is that there is no clear evidence for them in neuroscience, and there is no need to posit them when unspecialized emotional and cognitive systems are sufficient to explain moral judg-

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ments. The speed of normative judgments (e.g., this act disgusts me) is often taken as evidence that they are innate modules, but we’ve already seen that hot cognition systems can be trained to be very rapid (e.g., immediate impulse control, or empathic response to fellow suffering, etc.). It’s popular now to show the hilarious video of Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan’s famous experiment with capuchin monkeys, to “prove” the innate primate instinct of fairness.23 Two capuchins, in adjacent cages, were trained to take a token (in this case, a rock) from a trainer and then trade the token back for a piece of food. Each monkey could easily witness the barter of the other. The food reward for this barter was usually a slice of cucumber, which capuchins like to eat. But grapes are loved by capuchins as a delicacy. If one monkey bartered her token and received only a cucumber slice, but then watched as the other monkey received a grape for the same kind of token, the first monkey would become incensed—refusing to play on, throwing cucumbers back at the experimenter, protesting, and even punishing the lucky grape recipient. This experiment has been widely over-­interpreted by journalists and even scientists themselves to illustrate a fairness module in primates. Well-­intentioned liberal academics regularly intone the experiment as an ancient ethical position that denounces unfairness from grape payment to Occupy Wall Street and beyond. But I submit that the experiment does not illustrate an ancestral fairness module or even a fairness instinct. The actions of the capuchin monkeys are more compatible with mammalian emotional systems, and do not appear to be moral (or normatively principled) at all. Envy and resentment are powerful in social animals, and while they may eventually scale up to social contracts, they are not moral per se. As neuroscientists like Jaak Panksepp and Kent Berridge have shown,24 primates and other mammals have a very strong seeking or wanting system (driven by dopamine). Once this desire system is triggered, it ratchets up expectation—motivating the mammal in powerful ways (toward food, sex, etc.). Now thwarting or frustrating the culmination of that seeking drive immediately activates the rage system and results in behaviors as trivial as tantrums but profound as killing.25 It is relatively easy to explain the capuchin tantrum as a convergence of multipurpose affective and cognitive systems, rather than a moral module of fairness.26 We do not need to resolve this here, but only notice how conse-

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quentialist ethics has had an evolutionary formulation. To my mind, the “moral module” formulation is the wrong evolutionary scenario because it is overly mechanistic and underdetermined by the evidence. But social mammals like humans have no doubt built their ethical norms on the experiences of the consequences of their and their fellow’s actions. The imagination is the important meeting place between remembered experiences, cultural narratives, and future planning. This meeting place is where norms are hatched and spread. A fourth ethical framework is virtue ethics and draws its inspiration from Aristotle and Confucius (Kongzi). Ancient in origin, it nonetheless has strong connections with a contemporary developmental view of moral imagination. According to this system, the ethical life is not about following universal rules or divine commands, but cultivating specific virtues (arete), like courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Virtue ethics looks to heroes of our community or history to inspire us to act with courage, loyalty, or grace. It is a view of ethics based on character, not rules or laws. If you cultivate the right kind of character, through habit, then you will act for the good instinctively, without need for a calculus of the good or a logic puzzle. Using practical reason ( phronesis), the person assesses every situation with improvisational flexibility and orders her actions accordingly. The virtue improviser is able to adjust her response to the unique conditions, but still aim toward the good. So, while Kant is emphasizing the rule of truth telling no matter what the consequences, the virtue improviser can give a falsehood, a lie, confidently when Nazis come to her door and ask if she is hiding Jews in her house. The ideal human ( junzi), according to Kongzi, achieves honor through great virtue or benevolence (ren), and that virtue is demonstrated in social activity for the good of the community. The good of the community is attained by “sympathetic understanding of others” (shu) and loyalty (zhong). The way to become a junzi is to emulate one or apprentice with one, and oftentimes the junzi exemplars exist most clearly in the literary traditions. For many Americans of a certain generation, the Harper Lee creation Atticus Finch is a moral hero, and his fictional life has served as a template for many real people. Indeed, when Lee’s Go Set a Watchman finally emerged, in 2015, many fans were heartbroken because Finch lacked the moral heroism of the earlier book.

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The imagination plays an important part in the virtue approach because our actions are guided by envisioning how the moral hero or paragon would act under similar circumstances. Literature and, nowadays, films play an important role in giving us exemplars of selfless action, charity, courage, and other virtues. Moral simulation, in the virtue paradigm, is more important than applying a formal theory or an abstract rule. We’ve already established that imagination is a master simulation system. Let’s consider how the evolution of cultural simulations, or arts, shapes social norms. Recall that the imagination is working primarily with associational content and excels at shaping emotional links. As mentioned in chapter 4, monster and horror stories have adaptive simulator functions (in addition to non-­adaptive merits). As long as there are real enemies in the world, there will be useful dramatic versions of them in our heads. And these rehearsals are voluntary sketches that both compose and employ our somatic markers. But fear is only one of the emotions that culture manages. Following Leo Tolstoy’s theory, powerful art should “infect” the audience with specific emotional content.27 But while Tolstoy thought the infection should be “Christian love,” contemporary scholars recognize a plurality of legitimate emotional themes and cognitive strategies. We can see now that these virtual rehearsals and strategies can be interpreted in terms of evolutionary fitness. Our big neocortical brains don’t need to actually fall off a cliff to understand what such an accident will do to us—our survival fitness is increased by simply playing out such scenarios in our imaginations. If I, living on the ancient Serengeti, see a friend attacked by a crocodile or lion, then my brain quickly assigns a negative somatic marker (terror) to crocodile or lion morphologies. I don’t need to reason much about it the next time I encounter these creatures. Like other mammals, I need a fast response to such threats—so, fear instincts (that are soft-­wired rather than hardwired) do the trick. But the positive and prosocial emotions are also soft-­wired through developmental experiences (both personal and literary) with joy, care, pleasure, and purpose. Why does art communicate, explore, and even reprogram values better than science? Because art is a secret language that speaks directly to the limbic system. Art doesn’t just tell us about emotional conflicts or clashes of values; it actually speaks directly to our affective system—­bypassing

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the discursive (syllogistic) rationality. Art—like a dream—­triggers the emotions in us directly; it doesn’t represent them to us. The story of a novel or a film may be a representation of another place and time, but the emotional content is a direct infection in Tolstoy’s sense. It is not a representation of a feeling of pleasure, but a contagion of pleasure. Just as stories can create prosocial emotions for cohesion, they can also create xenophobic contagion. If imagination is a major engine of social norms, then the solution to xenophobia and the demonization of the Other is affect replacement, not information enrichment. Just as Tolstoy thought his novels could infect readers with love, Charles Dickens also saw his novels as a way of inspiring prosocial affect and thereby improving social policies. In the 1840s, Dickens was mortified by a government report about the child labor abuses of factories and mines. He knew firsthand about the social injustices in the underclass, and he tried composing pamphlets with stilted titles like “An Appeal to the People of England on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” Dickens’s philosophical and political screeds fell to the ground unread, so he vowed to “strike a sledge-­hammer blow” on behalf of the poor man’s child. This eventual sledgehammer blow, which showed the dignity of poor Victorians and revealed their hidden struggles, was called A Christmas Carol (1843). In W. Somerset Maugham’s book The Summing Up (1938), he reflects on his own ethical novels, including Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge, and echoes Tolstoy’s earlier call for socially conscious art. Art, Maugham argued, should not succumb to elite, aesthete tendencies. It should not turn in on itself in an “art for art’s sake” narcissism, but look outward. “For art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.”28 Art, like religion and political rhetoric, has the ability to cultivate moral sentiments and inspire moral action. As “affect management,” culture has the potential to paint the Other as horrifying (e.g., Islamophobia, homophobia, etc.) or paint the Other as brethren. Reconfiguring the antisocial somatic markers created by political horror is fundamentally a cultural therapy project, but some recent neuroscience pulls back the curtain on how such reconfiguring happens. A team of researchers conducted a series of fMRI studies on emotional regulation.29 The study measured brain activity while male and female subjects were first exposed to disturbing negative images (violence and terror),

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and then tracked the brain activity while the subjects engaged in calming methods (emotional down-­regulating strategies). One of the calming cognitive reappraisal strategies is for people to remind themselves that the horrible image is only a movie or picture. But another method, more common in women, is to diminish negative feelings by enlisting positive feelings (e.g., happy memories) to supersede the adverse emotions. In men, the amygdala down-­regulates more rapidly upon cognitive reappraisal, but in women the amygdala stays more active and appears to be processing positive affect (from the ventral striatum—a reward/pleasure processor). The gender issue aside for our purposes here, the interesting issue is that neuroscience reveals a brain system that helps us replace fear, horror, and disgust with positive emotions. The brain has a therapeutic architecture. Creative visualization and other imaginative techniques seem to improve this therapeutic ability. Recent social psychology suggests that human tribalism (underwritten by amygdala-­based fears about out-­groups) might be inevitable, but also highly susceptible to revision. So flexible and revisable is in-­ group favoritism that it can be weaned off the usual nefarious criteria of blood ties, race, sex, and class, to be reassigned to more benign affiliations. Psychological experiments reveal a whole range of criteria for in-­ group bias.30 For example, test subjects have been shown to award higher payoffs to arbitrary in-­groups, like people who just happen to share the same birthday as the test subject. And in-­group bias can be demonstrably strong when subjects share allegiance to the same sports teams, and so on. A fickleness of tribalism is potentially good news for the project of reeducating bigots, giving new hope to liberalism generally. But of course such flexibility of affective bonds also reduces positive solidarity mechanisms too, like loyalty. Liberalism often forgets that strong tribal forms of socioeconomic organization, like families, still do most of the day-­to-­day living, dying, cooperating, and conflicting well below the radar (and the ideals) of abstract state-­level egalitarianism.31 Many small subsistence groups—like families, tribes, and chiefdoms— continue to struggle for resources inside the larger political frameworks of nation-­states, and this means that the psychology of vulnerability is a daily experience. These smaller us/them dynamics continue to draw on the ancient processing of xenophobia. Therefore, fear and horror, like other emotions, may continue to have usefulness in our contemporary

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biological and political environments. But positive virtues too, like loyalty, are strong in these smaller subsistence groups, and their ethical orientation can hardly qualify as utilitarian. In the background of this whole discussion is the question of empathy. The role of imagination in ethics is intimately connected with our feeling the pain of the Other. Dickens wants us to empathize with Tiny Tim, Jesus wants us to empathize like a Good Samaritan, and (negatively speaking) Hieronymus Bosch wants to us to empathize with the sufferers in his painted hell so that we might stay on the righteous path. Barack Obama assumes the ethical power of the empathic imagination, pointing out that “when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.”32 The strong claim for imagination-­based ethics is that empathic simulation can deliver on the liberal utopia. Martin Luther King’s and John Lennon’s “dreams” are sufficient, on this strong version, to generate moral progress. Cultivating greater empathic simulation of the Other’s suffering is, after all, a large part of Christianity, Buddhism, and many other moral traditions. Let’s consider the pros and cons of imagination-­based ethics. On the positive side, imagination (being perceptually and emotionally rooted) has unique power to activate the motivational system of human beings. Reason is good at cost/benefit calculation, and the assessment of means to ends, but affect-­based imagination pushes me toward moral action. Sentiments, or emotions, cause disgust and outrage toward social injustices (remember Mengzi’s moral “sprouts” in chapter 2). And emotions also cause attraction toward cooperators and congenial people and behaviors. In addition to motivational superiority, the imagination helps us consider strangers as family members (fictive kin). If I imagine what it is like to be beaten, or denied, or even enslaved because of the color of my skin, I enter into solidarity that may, with further cultivation, attain levels of “brotherhood.” The imagination has a long career in service of moral motivation. Consider the memento mori traditions of European religious art. These artworks don’t just remember dead loved ones. They remind all viewers that they, too, will die, and their actions should pave their way to the afterlife carefully. Medieval painters often represented a skeletal incarnation of death coming to claim vain beauties and prideful heroes alike. And mas-

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6.2. The imagination has a long career in service of moral motivation. Consider the memento mori traditions of European religious art. These artworks do not just remember dead loved ones. They also remind all viewers that they, too, will die.

ter anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731) composed sublimely creepy dioramas—using real human bones, dried organs, and wax-­infused body parts—to render scenes as reminders that we will all die and decay. When I witness the suffering of others directly, it triggers my empathic responses, but my empathy can be reactivated culturally in the absence of direct perception. Ethical culture, be it religious or secular, is constantly reminding us—not of principles and rules—but images and stories. Buddhist lore has it that when Gautama was born, his father, King Suddhodana, was warned that the boy would eventually become a wandering holy man. Suddhodana, however, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and become a powerful ruler, so he tried to shelter his son from the outside world. Gautama was provided with every luxury imaginable, so that he should have no reason to leave home and fulfill the disappointing prophesy. Despite his overprotective father’s plans, Gautama made a chariot expedition outside the palace walls and there encountered

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three deeply powerful sights. First, he saw a very old man, struggling and laboring with infirmed limbs, hunched back, and downturned head. The young prince was shocked by this experience, and when the chariot driver explained to him that all people eventually end up in this decaying condition, he grew despondent. Next he happened to catch sight of a maimed person, and again he was surprised and depressed. Last, Gautama came across a corpse lying in the street. In an attempt to undercut human vanity and demonstrate the impermanence of all things, Buddhist scriptures are filled with nauseating details about rotting carcasses and putrid flesh. In the Anguttara Nikaya, for example, the scripture asks, “Did you never see in the world the corpse of a man or a woman, one or two or three days after death, swollen up, blue-­ black in color, and full of corruption? And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to death, that you cannot escape it?” (III, 35). Statues and paintings of the three scenarios of suffering can be found all over Asia. Just as a Christian church reminds its visitors of its empathic message with gruesome crucifixion sculptures, Buddhist temples (especially in Southeast Asia) often contain elaborate statues depicting the suffering of the sinful but also the suffering of the pious (since no one escapes the First Noble Truth, that “all life is suffering”). It is common to see a sculpted cadaver with a carrion bird perched on its belly, picking the entrails out. It was these three experiences—age, injury, and death—that wrenched Gautama out of his sheltered existence and forced him to renounce luxury and leave the palace to find a cure for suffering. But every Buddhist is also conducted, via the imaginative re-­creation of these scenes, to rededicate herself to the dharma. Empathy evolved to foster prosocial behaviors among kin groups, but it is a promiscuous emotion and can be activated and directed toward non-­kin strangers when culture manages it properly. As a simulation system, then, the imagination can reproduce the images and scenarios that strengthen prosocial feelings. But is moral imagination enough? There are a number of constraints and problems for scaling up the imagination to handle large-­scale social ethics. As we’ve seen, imagination is good at activating and directing prosocial emotions like empathy, but empathy has trouble ameliorating big social ethical problems like war and global poverty. Psychologist Paul Bloom thinks we’re too enamored with empathy as the engine of ethics, and he claims that “if you want to

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be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.”33 It’s a poor guide, he writes, because empathy is intrinsically biased—we feel more empathy for people who are more like us, or more attractive, or from the same country. Moreover, he suggests that empathy is inherently narrow, because it works on feelings rather than statistical facts. Many people, for example, feel greater moral motivation toward the suffering puppy they can see versus the millions of faraway refugees they cannot. This skews our responses to suffering and distracts us from helpful policies and philanthropic actions. And finally, even a sufficiently aroused empathy system pointed in the right direction (say, toward helping the most needy group) is not a tenable source for ethics, because emotional exercise of this kind is too exhausting. By contrast, Bloom suggests that compassion is a better guide because it involves care for suffering without actually feeling (mirroring) the suffering yourself. This “solution” seems somewhat ad hoc to me, since compassion is being defined in order to solve the problems of empathy exhaustion, and since compassion can also fall victim to all the biases and narrowness that Bloom attributes to empathy. Nonetheless, these objections do help us recognize a scalability problem for emotional ethics and a peculiar duality of imagination. As a deeply embodied aspect of mind, imagination is grounded in emotions and particulars; but as an infinitely recursive simulator, it is also capable of envisioning entire nations, species, populations, planets, and even solar systems within the space of our moral regard. Imagination can transform a remembered perception of a large crowd of people into a symbol for humanity itself, or transform a particular forest image into a prototype for thinking about the environment generally. But care is indeed different from simply imagining large-­scale realities. It might be that imagination is too particular in its imagery and stories to convey features and feelings at global and even national levels. Care may not scale up to the universal levels that modern ethics expects of it.34 It doesn’t even work well for more local strangers. Some optimists suggest that we can infinitely stretch our domain of care. Jeremy Rifkin voices a popular view in his book The Empathic Civilization that we can feel care and empathy for the whole human species if we just try hard enough.35 This view has the advantage of locating moral conviction in the heart rather than the rational head, but it fails for another reason. Contrary to Rifkin’s quixotic view that empathy is an almost limit-

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less reserve, I submit that care or empathy is a very limited resource. He sketches a progressive, ever-­widening evolution of empathy. First, we had blood-­based tribalism (in what Rifkin calls the time of “forager/hunter societies”), then religion-­based tribalism (after the invention of agriculture and writing), then nation-­state tribalism (circa the nineteenth century), but now we are poised for an empathic embrace of all humanity— and even beyond species-­centric bias to Buddha-­like compassion for all creatures. He argues that empathy is the real “invisible hand” that will guide us out of our local and global crises. Using a secular version of Gandhi’s non-­attachment mixed with some apocalyptic fear-­mongering, Rifkin warns us that we must reach “biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse.” The way to do this, he argues, is to start feeling as if the entire human race is our extended family. As much as I agree with the idea of an evolutionary shared descent that makes us all “family,” feelings of care and empathy are very different from evolutionary taxonomy. Empathy is actually a biological emotion (centered in the limbic brain) that comes in degrees, because it has a specific physiological chemical progression. Empathy is not a concept, but a natural biological event—an activity, a process.36 The feeling of care is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells, flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors (and oxytocin and opioids). Care is like sprint racing. It takes time—duration, energy, systemic warm-­up and cooldown, practice, and a strange mixture of pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order if you ramp up the care system every time you see someone in need. The nightly news would render you literally exhausted. The limbic system can’t handle the kind of constant stimulation that Rifkin and the cosmic love proponents expect of it. And that’s because they don’t take into account the biology of empathy, and suppose instead that care is more like a thought. If care is indeed a limited resource, then it cannot stretch indefinitely to cover the massive domain of strangers and nonhuman animals. Of course, when we see the suffering of strangers in the street or on television, our heartstrings vibrate naturally. We can have contagion-­like feelings of sympathy when we see other beings suffering, and that’s a

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good thing—but that is a long way from the kinds of active preferential devotions that we marshal for members of our respective tribes. Real tribe members donate organs to you, bring soup when you’re sick, watch your kids in an emergency, open professional doors for you, rearrange their schedules and lives for you, protect you, and fight for you—and you return all this hard work.37 In light of the finite stretch of ethical care, Cicero said, “Society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.” According to that logic, the benevolence can indeed trickle up—if every parent, sibling, and child cared for each other properly, there would be less illiteracy, crime, addiction, and so on. But this is a highly contentious issue, one we do not need to resolve here. The last major objection to the strong claim of imagination-­based ethics is one I’ve hinted at earlier. Nothing in imaginative thinking per se guarantees or even tilts us toward the norms of liberalism.38 In the same way that imagination helps a person recognize the subjective interior of a suffering slave, for example, it also helps the bigot deny the same subjectivity. The racist person imagines that the human form before him is more like an animal or an insect than a brother. And by this pernicious association, the imaginative racist is immune from crucial empathic triggering. According to anthropologist Scott Atran, the young male members of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) are motivated to barbaric violence in part by imaginative fantasy.39 They are young disaffected men—­ sometimes from comfortable, middle-­class, ease-­filled lives—who reimagine themselves as righteous warriors beheading infidels. Atran calls this the fatal attraction of jihad and points out that the attraction is for an adventurous life—one that is “sublime” rather than comfortable. The actions of many ISIS members are horrifying and barbaric, but at the heart of their insane mission lies an imaginative aesthetic. They would rather be dramatic, Übermensch-­like, martyrs, than bored, sexually frustrated, products of capitalist democracies. Consequently, the culture of ISIS employs many of the imaginative tropes and technologies used by contemporary Western pop culture—YouTube videos, songs, comics, and so on. Here, then, is imagination hard at work, but it’s nothing like the dreams of Martin Luther King or John Lennon. As George Orwell said, in his review of Mein Kampf in 1940, “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in

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a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”40 Moral imagination needs value norms to pursue. It may play a role in forging those norms, but it cannot be equated with specific norms. The imagination can serve theocratic fanaticism, after all, just as easily as it serves liberalism. This brings us then to a more measured perspective on imagination-­ based ethics. The strong claim is untenable, but a modified or weak thesis is still significant and needs more research and attention in the future. If ethical conviction and action are motivated in large part by emotion, then there may well be an upper limit on the size of one’s moral realm. Reciprocity, cooperation, care, and love all work better in small societies, not nation-­states. But this may be a dose of well-­needed realism, so that philosophers and policy makers reorient away from utopian idealism and toward “harm reduction” approaches to ethics. Here, the improvising imagination still has good work to do. Instead of inventing fantasies of ideal states (be they Platonic or Marxist), we must be responsive to the specific social justice issues in which we are already immersed. As I write this, the news is filled with the heartbreaking story of millions of refugees fleeing war-­torn Syria. Images and video on the news reveal harrowing stories of families struggling to survive as they make their way into Europe. Like others watching the drama unfold, my empathy and my compassion are activated, and I try to find a way to help. I imagine what it would be like if I were shuttling my family across hostile borders and dangerous seas. The news, just like art, gives me the affective triggers, but now I must actively (a) imagine myself in the scenario, and (b) imagine some solution or response, within the context of my already morally stretched life. All of this happens against a values backdrop (c), in which I already imagine a world free of harassment for innocent citizens. Juggling, coordinating, and implementing (a), (b), and (c) is improvisational work. There is no playbook, script, or algorithm for solving these macro- and micro-­ethical challenges. What’s needed is the improvisational, experimental approach of pragmatism. Philosophical pragmatism approaches truth as a function of what works, what is useful to society. It thinks of the good in terms of relative harm reduction, rather than absolute ideals. It embraces the imagination

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as the great engine of change and progress, but it wisely checks the imaginative flights against the realities of society and nature—in other words, imagination may propose options, but scientific experiment (in this case, social sciences) must edit and prioritize those options. I M P R O V I S AT I O N , D O G M AT I S M , A N D THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM

As we’ve seen throughout this book, improvisation is, among other things, an expression of freedom. It assumes freedom, and it creates freedom. An improvising jazz musician is only an instance of a type of embodied mind—a type that our ancestors employed in the African veldt and the European ice ages. That freedom must have saved our lives many times, when the environment changed rapidly and minimized our resources. An improvising culture is a flexible culture, with many more adaptive moves at its disposal. In the case of Homo sapiens, we seem to have benefited greatly from a combination of flexible cultural traditions and some very lucky breaks. Why, for example, did sapiens survive and flourish while Neanderthals simultaneously became extinct? One important aspect of Neanderthal failure may have been their lack of cultural flexibility. Between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens and Neanderthal were both in Eurasia, but habitat changes elicited quite different responses from each group. Their world became increasingly colder during this time frame, but while sapiens expanded out into this colder tundra environment, Neanderthals retreated into shrinking forests and failed to exploit new food resources. The physiological body types of modern humans and Neanderthals were quite different—Neanderthals being larger, stronger, and more physically robust. Their bodies evolved to fit well in the context of forest hunting, where they took down large animals with heavy short-­ range weapons in an ambush style of hunting. By contrast, Homo sapiens emerged out of Africa with leaner, faster, more aerobic physiologies that fit well with plains hunting, which required long-­range pursuit running. These physiological differences were extremely important because the new cold tundra hunting was more like the pursuit hunting of the sapiens than the ambush forest hunting of the Neanderthals. Homo sapiens, then,

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were preadapted to the habitat change because their physiologies could pursue prey over very long distances. However, the cultural changes of Homo sapiens were equally instrumental to their survival.41 Homo sapiens created new weapons, like lighter projectile spears and atlatls. They created better clothing for the colder regions, probably involving improved sewing technology, and they developed better shelter technology to allow them to survive in the colder climates. Why didn’t Neanderthals make these same cultural adjustments? The cultural changes might have made them competitive on the tundra, even if sapiens had a physiological advantage. We cannot know for sure why Neanderthals failed in the arena of cultural flexibility, but our own success may be as much dumb luck as design. Our physiological and projectile advantages (bequeathed from a savanna niche) may have given us too big a head start in the tundra race, and Neanderthals may have gambled intelligently but still incorrectly. “To adapt to a new world,” Kim Sterelny explains, “the Neanderthals needed to embrace a technological, behavioral, and social revolution. The costs and risks of such a revolution would be extremely high. At any given moment, it would often have seemed a better bet to track the retreating habitat, relying on the skills and tools already mastered. The alternative was to chance a risky transition to a new lifeway.”42 Both Neanderthals and sapiens needed to be flexible and try novel improvisations, but sapiens could meet the new challenges from a base camp that already fit better with tundra hunting. Still, this high-­stakes story of adaptation provokes us to think about contemporary cultural tensions between traditionalism and progressivism. As environmental and political challenges threaten to compromise and even destroy traditional lifeways, should we be pushing for greater improvisation or cleaving to tried-­and-­true customs? Arguably, the greatest threats to human flourishing today are wealth inequality (and all the health deprivations contained therein), environmental degradation, and dogmatism. The last of these, dogmatism, is a topic worth our consideration, because it is perhaps the very opposite of improvisational imagination. Stubbornness, inflexibility, and dogmatism in a person try our patience, but in a large-­scale population, the dangers are dramatic and pronounced. Populations that hold tightly to ideologies have great difficulty adapting to change. Partly this is because the dogmatist has con-

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fused the “map” for the “territory.” A very religious zealot, for example, often sees the scripture or ritual as more real than the world it is representing. And such ideological distortions create fictional taxonomies of real people—the zealot tends to replace real people (who are complex and multidimensional) with abstract absolute systems that are blind to actual change. Real diversity is denied in favor of simplistic taxonomies of “chosen people,” vs. infidels, orthodox vs. unorthodox, pious vs. blasphemers, saints vs. devils, and so on. Flexibility in empirical science is often embraced without controversy, because we accept the method as one of constant revision in light of new experiments. But norms are often treated, by religious and secular minds alike, as changeless and closed to improvisation and experiment. Value norms are often treated as absolutes. The pragmatist philosophers like William James and John Dewey took the attitude of a belief, more than the belief itself, to be especially dangerous to human flourishing. After all, even a bad belief can be jettisoned if the attitude toward it is fallible and flexible rather than dogmatically certain. Dewey argued that we should drastically reduce the number of “absolutes” in our cultural matrix and relativize them instead to personal adventures of meaning rather than nation-­state or hemispheric manifest-­ destiny values.43 If you want to be a Christian, that’s great. But if you want to make the whole world Christian, that’s a problem. The overarching theme of Dewey’s philosophy, and James before him, is that an experimental approach to life—one that tests ideas in the realm of action—should guide us in all domains, including religion, politics, ethics, art, and of course science. Dewey argued against sclerotic ideology, absolutism, and essentialism. Too many of us are overconfident about our opinions and tend to view them as gems of certainty, outshining those of other people, cultures, and eras. To all this confident certainty, pragmatists pointed out that truth is fallible, and we can’t be entirely sure when we’ve arrived at it. James, in his Will to Believe, writes, “The faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One may hold to the first being possible without the second.”44

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6.3. John Dewey (1859– 1952). The overarching theme of John Dewey’s philosophy is that an experimental approach to life—one that tests ideas in the realm of action—should guide us in all domains, including religion, politics, ethics, art, and of course science. The human adventure was one great improvisation.

Our ethical claims, like everything else, need to be treated as hypotheses that we test in the social realm. Morality does not fall from the sky as eternal truth. We try out notions of the good in the realm of social interaction, and we validate ones that work for us (e.g., sharing, or caring for the vulnerable, etc.) and eliminate ones that don’t (e.g., slavery). In his essay “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” Dewey says that ethics is not about utopian idealism, but needful matters like how to “improve our education, ameliorate our manners, advance our politics.” Pragmatism, heavily influenced by Darwin, thinks that even ethics is an evolving adaptive response of Homo sapiens’ social life. According to pragmatists, the improvising imagination is a better guide to ethics than outdated Axial Age scriptures. A special kind of education, according to Dewey, can prepare minds to tolerate uncertainty and even thrive in such conditions. Dewey’s message of education reform for the masses had a huge influence on American education—and even early twentieth-­century Chinese education (Dewey traveled throughout China from 1919 to 1921). In the United

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States, “lab schools” were opened to teach students by experiment rather than rote, and in China experimental countryside schools were opened in previously illiterate communities (eventually, however, Dewey’s reform ideas were overshadowed and defeated in China by the revolutionary alternatives of the Communist Party). Of course, American ethics (and foreign policy) can still be quite religious in its perspective, and even our democracy traditions can be asserted with dogmatic gusto. As it’s been pointed out many times, someone who thinks he has God on his side is capable of almost anything. We’ve seen lately that atheists can be just as dogmatic, and China proved this in the Mao era. But China is very different now and frequently aligns with Deng Xiaoping’s famous dismissal of economic dogmatism: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.” Here, Deng suggests that it doesn’t matter if the idea is socialist or capitalist, as long as it helps the people. The future will reveal whether the giant social experiment of China will increase good flexibility or fall back on dogmatism. 45 The improvising mind, then, not only provides the individual with freewill options, but also builds a collective edifice—a virtual reality— for whole communities to inhabit. This is the story of imagination and social norms. Early religion is an adaptive ideology and set of devotional practices—its primary functions include coping strategies, social solidarity, and explanatory approaches. But there would be no hope and no regret without imagination. Coping and creativity are intertwined, and the secular social experiment is as fueled by imagination as the religious. What else is hope but the optimistically imagined future—a mix of desire and ideation? And our memory, which fuels regret, is intensified by our imagined alternative past. In many aspects of life, we want to avoid make-­believe scenarios because they smack of intellectual cowardice, but in some aspects, we actively cultivate the primordial imagination. There’s no reason why this has to be consistent. An important feature of grown-­up pretending is that it can bring about the real thing. In some cases, imagining and pretending may be the only way to realize an actual change in the world. Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has separately studied the rich counterfactual lives of evangelical Christians and schizophrenics. The usual barrier between the counterfactual and factual world, which most of us maintain with ease, is

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not as robust or distinct in some people. When the counterfactual second universe bleeds too far into the factual world, we recognize pathologies like schizophrenia. But otherwise healthy minds will also voluntarily cultivate a breakdown of the barrier, in service of religious insight. God has no face, no obvious form, no clear and unambiguous voice. When you pray, Professor Luhrmann points out, “you cannot look him in the eye, and judge that he hears you back.”46 This is a perennial problem for the believer, according to Luhrmann, but there is an imaginative remedy. For one thing, believers engage in a process of imagining that their dominant ideas, mental events, and feelings are coming from God directly, rather than just their own associational mind. This requires the believer to pick out dominant thoughts from the stream of mental events during reflection and prayer, and it also requires the believer to assign God as the agent responsible for those mental events. Both these requirements apparently get easier with practice and cultivation. Luhrmann discovered that many evangelical women practice this process by doing imaginary “dates” and other “couples” activities, all the while in a virtual “conversation” with Jesus—their imaginary companion. Moreover, following a point made by Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, Lurhmann finds that many evangelicals “pretend” or imagine themselves to be Christ (or Christ-­like) as they interact with people throughout the day. I’m not at all sure that we can choose to believe things in a straightforward manner, nor am I sure this is an advisable path toward intellectual virtue. Habitualizing a belief, on the other hand, sounds possible and indeed ubiquitous. Even some of our more respectable and seemingly justified beliefs may be the result of brute habituation, rather than investigation, logic, and method. But one thing is clear—pretending you are Christ (or Buddha, or Martin Luther King Jr.) can transform the world of action and policy. If I pretend that I am a dog, I do not eventually become a dog. But if I pretend that I am good for long enough, I actually become good. Also, if I pretend that we are friends in the early days of our acquaintance, then slowly we become friends—not solely by an act of imagination, but by the activities that such pretending galvanizes. If you object that psychopaths pretend to be good but never feel the true springs of goodness within them, then I ask you to consider a psychopath who always

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pretends to be a saint all his life and dies with myriad good deeds and no bad ones to his name. His behaviors alone would qualify him as virtuous, in the eyes of most. Pathologies aside, we have psychological data suggesting that we frequently fake it until we make it. Faking a smile or a cry, for example, can actually bring about the real thing. Emotion researchers Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson discovered that a smile that squints the eyes as well as upturns the mouth (called a Duchenne smile, after its discoverer) actually sparks the internal central nervous system to the same neural activity that we associate with joy.47 There is also some evidence that smiling reduces stress and increases endorphins. In other words, smiling can stimulate inner feelings of happiness. The causal arrow between feeling and expression points in both directions. The smile itself is a great case study of improvising imagination, because it enlists an involuntary system (an automatic reflex when you are joyful), but also a voluntary system (willful smiling as social communication). In a face-­to-­face social encounter (which is always an improvised duet), you may shift rapidly between both kinds of smiles. And some of this is under your conscious control while some of it is unconscious, but even the unconscious expressions have been trained up from birth and draw upon a fixed range (or scale) of facial changes. The melody of your social duet is composed while it’s performed, and your smiles are adaptive when they express your inner states, communicate your intentions, ease anxieties in your partner, and so on. You can do this badly or maladaptively, too. There are norms governing the successful improvisation of social smiles, and you can violate them (consciously and unconsciously). For a hilarious example of failed social improvisation, see the YouTube clip of comedian Ricky Gervais trying to teach dramatic actor Liam Neeson how to improvise (BBC program Life’s Too Short).48 The spoof clip reveals how Neeson cannot grasp the framework norms for improvisation and blunders unknowingly into disaster. From the microcosm of smiles to the macrocosm of history, imaginative improvisation has a deeper role to play in how we understand our political world. A handful of historians, for example, are noticing the virtues of counterfactual storytelling. We’re familiar with the artistic license of alternative histories, like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (in which Jews assassinate Hitler), or Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle

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(in which the United States and Allies lose WWII), but scholars like Gavriel Rosenfeld at Fairfield University and Timothy Burke at Swarthmore College are exploring counterfactuals in their history classes.49 Why would imaginary counterfactual histories be healthy or productive? For one thing, such alternative histories can reveal the methods and motives of historians, who usually hide such assumptions behind the façade of objectivity.50 Considering what the world would look like if the United States had abolished slavery in 1775 (when the Pennsylvania Abolition Society formed) is an illuminating exercise because among other insights it considers the economic and moral frameworks of the era. Likewise imagining what the United States would look like if Kennedy and Johnson had created a slavery reparations program rather than an affirmative action program in the 1960s is helpful in thinking about current race realities and possibilities. Second, such imagining can give us a true sense of historical contingency—showing us that if minor accidents had been different (e.g., Churchill had died young, or passengers were able to break into the 9/11 plane cockpits, or your dad never courted your mom, etc.), then big swaths of personal and political history would be completely different. Historians like Rosenfeld and Burke point out that there are good and bad imaginings. Bad counterfactuals are wildly speculative and reveal little but the unbridled creativity of the storyteller. But good fake stories, according to Rosenfeld’s criterion of “minimal rewrite,” change only one or two specific and probable variables, and then follow out the logic of that change. Students in Burke’s classes, for example, were asked to construct scenarios that followed from the possibility that Native American had robust immunological resistance to Old World diseases. This is not an impossible variation (e.g., perhaps their immune systems had been sufficiently primed by very early minimal contact with Europeans), but the ramifications of this little change are huge. If nothing else, such imagined history is helpful in reducing a “manifest destiny” version of our story. As writer Rebecca Onion describes counterfactual history, “Students must figure out what factors matter in writing history, argue for the importance of the factors they’ve chosen to discuss, and deploy the most helpful existing evidence. It’s a tall order, and pretty far from idle speculation.”51 Turning counterfactuals into political futures is an American specialty, because we wear tradition lightly. George Herbert Mead suggested that

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American experience is uniquely adaptive and conducive to imaginative improvisation.52 Not only did the frontier expansion of the pioneers make action more important than reflection, but unlike Europeans and Asians, Americans “did not think of themselves as arising out of a society.” “On the contrary,” Mead explains, “the pioneer was creating communities and ceaselessly legislating changes within them. The communities came from him, not he from the community. And it followed that he did not hold the community in reverent respect.” This self-­confidence may be a form of neurosis, given the interdependence of human beings, but it may also be a crucial prerequisite for having a whole culture that happily sanctions dreaming. The improvising imagination is one of the greatest tools of the open society. It cannot guarantee democracy or liberal values, and it cannot by itself resist the schemes of autocrats and tyrants, but left to its own nature, it champions difference and experience. Cultures that are tied up in many absolutes, rules, and orthodoxies (e.g., ISIS or fundamentalisms of every stripe) are not as adaptable as cultures with few foundations (e.g., Western liberal dedication to human rights). Less is more, because the social organism is not flustered or thrown into stress at every turbulence or rule infraction. The improvising culture is robust and capable of significant shock absorption. Moreover, it has great stores of potential solutions to unforeseen challenges, because experimentation is already a part of the cultural matrix. The improvising imagination may not necessitate democracy, but democracy would be nowhere without it. Understanding how imagination evolved through our phylogenetic pre-­history and our more recent history is a worthwhile project, but of course we also want to ask: What now? Why should we care about this ancient operating system at the root of cognition and culture? As we’ve seen repeatedly in this book, imaginative simulation preps and enhances actions—in everything from hunting, to performing, to athletics, to conversation. It supplements and improves perception and action. It can rehearse previous memories, but also be a mental workspace to build innovative behaviors, tools, and narratives. Simulation in cold cognition (imagination) and hot cognition (improvisation) can go well beyond copying, if the right mind-­set allows it and fosters it. In cases where real perception and action are compromised (e.g., prison, infirmity, poverty, isolation, etc.), imagination can even provide

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a superior virtual reality.53 If centralized consciousness takes a voluntary role in shaping this virtual reality, it can be rigorous and even productive—­ isolation, for example, can be highly creative, as can mutually dedicated social groups with common purpose. If the discoveries of stream-­state consciousness (i.e., default mode network) can be reintegrated into agent-­ directed projects, we can imagine solutions to environmental challenges, ideological conflicts, resource shortages, and many other seemingly intractable problems. I submit that we should focus more on improvisation and imagination in our schools. All general education should have experimental, problem-­ solving components—ones that have no preset solutions, secretly guarded by the teachers. And specific disciplines, from music to medicine, should add a set of “trouble-­shooting” courses to their curriculum as well. Many educators would welcome this level of freedom, but administrators— often obsessed with short-­term measurable outcomes—would need to back off, in order for it to work. Evaluation of learning goals would need to shift toward more long-­term outcomes. And the outcomes themselves could not be as standardized, when the successes of improvisation and imagination are so contextually unique. Sadly, the current trend is more short-­term administrative oversight, not less. The reason why we should encourage more improvisation and imagination in education is not because we need more artists or more entrepreneurial innovation—although those things are welcome by-­products. The main reason is because reality itself is messy, always changing, open-­ ended, and relentlessly coming at you in high speed. Fluid responsiveness, toleration, and a level of comfort with failure and ambiguity are hallmarks of the improvising mind-­set. This mind-­set is flexible but not lacking in conviction. The improviser gets knocked down ten times and gets up eleven. So resilience and thick skin are typical characteristics of the improviser. A recent study by social scientists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog characterizes a potentially dangerous mind-­set that seems to be the opposite of the improviser.54 This mind-­set is thin-­skinned and easily bruised, so to speak, when expectations are not met. More importantly, this mind is uncomfortable with ambiguity and seeks “cognitive closure” wherever possible. It tends to accept prevailing hierarchies of power and institutional structure, thriving within preset rules. And finally, this mind-­set

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shows high degrees of psychological disgust when encountering unfamiliar experiences or norms. Gambetta and Hertog find this mind-­set to be common in engineering students, and even controversially suggest that engineering programs might foster such mind-­sets, by intensive emphasis on decontextualized knowledge, the strict application of rules to problems, and very little to no ethical training.55 I’m not interested in disparaging engineers and leave it to Gambetta and Hertog to make their case, but I do think they have nicely articulated the anti-­improv mind-­set. Life is intrinsically changing, moving, disappointing, and positively surprising. It will do you no good to meet it with unbending expectations. The person who expects the world to conform to their preset calculations and predictions is destined to be miserable, as are many of the people around them. They are uncomfortable with spontaneity and rail against deviations. If we could better foster the improvisational mind-­set—which is as much about character as cognitive style—then we might have a healthier community. If student success is contingent on a very predictable annual exam (like the Chinese gaokao or the American Stanford Achievement Test), then the mind-­set of fixed expectation and training makes sense. Memorization and strict rule application become adaptive in such an environment. But if students were given a different kind of test every year—one without predictable problems or even format—then educating a general improvising intelligence would be more adaptive, successful, and satisfying. I offer this only as an analogy, probably not realizable in anything but the most experimental school. My point is simply this: Which scenario is more like real life? The minds of Homo sapiens evolved in the most volatile environments, not static predictable ones. The imagination is the operating system that evolved in such a variable world. We need to let this magnificent operating system off its leash, to run free in the uncertain, future environment.

: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS :

There are many reasons why a person becomes imaginative. The paths to a creative life are innumerable. But in my case, I think it had something to do with my free-­range childhood. My brothers and I grew up in the generation just before the micromanaged childhood. We were not chauffeured from piano class to fencing, to baseball, to computer coding, to SAT test practice class, or anything really. This lack of structure had its downside. I almost killed myself several times doing risky, stupid stuff: jumping off a house into a swimming pool, rappelling off the back of a football stadium in the middle of the night, trying various controlled substances with abandon, doing various uncontrolled experiments with gasoline and fire, riding a motorcycle into a tree, losing a bet to outrun two mean Doberman pinschers, and on and on. However, having a free-­range childhood provoked a great deal of imaginative improvisation—and not because it was always exciting and adventurous to be turned loose every day into the neighborhood for

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hours. It was frequently very boring to have nothing but empty unstructured time, stretching out ahead of you. But that empty downtime was the key that unlocked a self-­directed experimental approach to life. It forced a kind of inspiration. Some of that inspiration was pernicious, but some of it was highly creative. We spent half the year in a remote forested part of Wisconsin with absolutely nothing to do. Nothing structured, that is. Out of sheer boredom, my brothers and I once constructed an entire Olympics decathlon field, using bits of dead trees and rocks to configure the hurdles, javelins, tracks, and so on. Then we competed. Too much structure in childhood robs us of our spontaneity and imagination. I’m thankful to my parents, Ed and Carol, for turning us loose on the world to build our own structures and discover our own adventures. And I’m thankful to my brothers, Dave and Dan. We were lucky to spark and fuel each other’s imaginations when we were young, and we continue to do so. I have many friends to thank. Some have helped me directly with this project, while others have supported my work generally. Rami Gabriel is my great friend and colleague, and we have chewed on many of these ideas, as co-­teachers and as musical bandmates. I also want to thank Glennon Curran, Tom Greif, Kevin Cline, Brigid Hains, Peter Catapano, Greg Brandenburgh, Alex Kafka, Riva Lehrer, Robert Wright, Julia Galef, Massimo Pigliucci, Qiuxuan Lyu, Steve Corey, Erin McCarthy, Andrew Causey, Teresa Prados-­Torreira, Kate Hamerton, Rojhat Avsar, Tyrell Collins, Raymond Deeren, Michael Sims, Ted Di Maria, Joanna Ebenstein, Michael Paradiso-­Michau, Abbas Raza, Mathias Clasen, Emily Graslie, Jaak Panksepp, and Cheryl Johnson-­Odim. I have been very fortunate to improvise with some remarkable musicians over the years. Early on, I played with Buddy Guy and Bo Diddley, and it led to many other wonderful onstage experiences for a young guitar slinger. Thanks to Howard and the White Boys, Swing Hakim, Peking Turtle, Barnacle Souffle, the Academy of Fists, Saint Bottleneck, and all the great musicians I have improvised with over the years. I wish to express my gratitude to my excellent editor Elizabeth Branch Dyson. Philosophy publishing can sometimes settle into a self-­referential eddy of provincial blather. It is important that philosophers get out more—get out into the world where things get messy and don’t match

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS : 275

one’s insular intuitions. Not only should philosophers travel more, but they should feel free to poach on everyone else’s territory. What good is our skill of conceptual analysis, if we philosophers don’t bring it to bear on the latest bodies of knowledge (in the arts and sciences). Elizabeth understands this and lets me hunt and gather in psychology, anthropology, religious studies, art theory, neuroscience, music, and anywhere else the search takes me. Thanks also to Rachel Kelly and Erin DeWitt for editorial help and manuscript preparation. University of Chicago Press also has a first-­rate promotions manager (and bourbon expert) in Ryo Yamaguchi. I want to thank my dearest Wen Jin for our many adventures together, not least of which is the complex voyage of parenthood. Indirectly, Wen has made me a better improviser. This book and my heart are dedicated to my son, Julien—my great partner in crime. May your mind always stay flexible and open. And may your imaginative spirit match the resilience of your character. After I am long gone, I will meet you in the dream world.

: N OT E S :

INTRODUCTION

1. Like many, I am skeptical of popular and purely speculative re-­creations of deep-­ time prehistory. Stephen Jay Gould warned us, at the onset of evolutionary psychology, that we were entering a new phase of conjectural adaptationism (Panglossianism), wherein every contemporary cognitive tendency, idea, and prejudice would be read back into prehistory and justified on the grounds of natural selection. Stephen Jay Gould, “Exaptation: A Crucial Tool for an Evolutionary Psychology,” Journal of Social Issues 47, no. 3 (1991): 43–65. His prediction came true in the rise of popular modular theories of the mind that assumed hardwired computational processors for everything from language, to morality circuits, to what kind of landscape paintings we prefer. I share Gould’s skepticism and think the computationally minded evolutionary psychologists have over-­interpreted the data. But Gould went too far himself and cordoned off the mind as a mysterious by-­ product of evolution (i.e., exaptation), forever above and beyond the mundane causality of biology. 2. In particular see Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton University Press, 2013); and Robin George Collingwood, William H. Dray, and William Johannis van der Dussen, The Principles of History; and Other Writings in Philosophy of History (Clarendon Press, 1999). 3. Seeming exceptions to this are the sorts of Machiavellian social intelligence theories

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(e.g., Robin Dunbar, etc.), but these tend to model animal social deception incorrectly on modern human representational and inferential cognitive capacities (e.g., theory of mind mechanism). 4. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Harvard University Press, 2006). 5. This quote is often attributed to Einstein but may be apocryphal. Quote Investigator, “Play Is the Highest Form of Research” (2014), http://quoteinvestigator.com /2014/08/21/play-­research/ (accessed October 13, 2016). 6. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999). And also see Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Also Douglas R. Hofstadter, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition,” Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (2001): 499–538. 7. Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (Princeton University Press, 2011). 8. See Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Harvard University Press, 1980); and George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 9. Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012), 485. CHAPTER ONE

1. Early experimental research on chimpanzee problem solving by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler had chimps constructing tools to acquire out-­of-­reach objects; it was reported that chimpanzees would stack boxes or put together tubes to form a long rod in order to reach bananas hung overhead. Wolfgang Köhler, The Mentality of Apes (1925; repr., Penguin Books, 1959). Given this behavior, Köhler suggested that chimpanzees solve some problems not by trial and error or stimulus-­response association, but through a flash of insight. But for a critique of the contemporary interpretation of Köhler’s research, see Daniel J. Povinelli, Folk Physics for the Apes: The Chimpanzee’s Theory of How the World Works (Oxford University Press, 2000). 2. See Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, 2nd ed. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 225. 3. See Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?” Brain Research Reviews 28, no. 3 (1998): 309–69; and Jaak Panksepp and Joseph Moskal, “Dopamine and SEEKING: Subcortical ‘Reward’ Systems and Appetitive Urges,” in Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation, ed. Andrew J. Elliot (Taylor & Francis, 2008), 67–87. 4. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (MIT Press, 1981), 65. 5. Spend time perusing the online videos of the various lectures at the annual “Singularity Summit” (originally at Stanford in 2006, but now in multiple locations), and you will find a fascinating marriage of old-­time transcendental philosophy and new tech-­savvy optimism. In particular see the YouTube videos of “visionary” Jason Silva, called “Shots of Awe” for a taste of contemporary interpretations of flow psychology.

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6. See St. Augustine’s interesting discussion of the hermetic tradition in De Civitate Dei [The City of God ] (Penguin Classic, 2004), bk. VII, chaps. 23–26; bk. XVII, chap. 39. 7. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 4847,” http://www.darwinproject .ac.uk/DCP-­LETT-­4847 (accessed on June 7, 2016). 8. The quote is taken from the three-­page pamphlet that accompanied the “displaying” of John by Tom Merrick Norman at 123 Whitechapel Road (now 259). Tom Norman almost certainly influenced the text, but it remains a significant document. Access online: http://publicdomainreview.org/the-­autobiography-­of-­joseph-­carey-­merrick-­1884/ (accessed October 12, 2016). 9. This 1718 ukaz (edict) is included in Anthony Anemone’s excellent article “The Monsters of Peter the Great,” in Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602. 10. His list of the causes of monsters demonstrates his cusp status—at once progressive and enlightened, but also backward and uncritical. “There are several things,” he says, “that cause monsters”: “The first is the glory of God. The second, his wrath. The third, too great a quantity of seed. The fourth, too little a quantity. The fifth, the imagination. The sixth, the narrowness or smallness of the womb. The seventh, the indecent posture of the mother, as when, being pregnant, she has sat too long with her legs crossed, or pressed against her womb. The eighth, through a fall, or blows struck against the womb of the mother, being with child. The ninth, through hereditary or accidental illness. The tenth, through rotten or corrupt seed. . . . The twelfth, through the artifice of wicked spital beggars. The thirteenth, through Demons and Devils.” Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. 11. See an excellent discussion of this tradition in Katherine Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (Routledge, 1998). 12. See Book 2, Part 1, Chapter 7 of Malebranche, The Search After Truth, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Thanks to my colleague Dr. Katharine Hamerton for suggesting the Malebranche text. 13. The mysterious mechanism that links mother’s mind to baby’s body is not as troubling for Malebranche because of his unique metaphysics of occasionalism. For Malebranche, bodies and minds don’t really act upon each other. Technically, events don’t need to cross some Cartesian divide from soul to body, because all such causal connection is an illusion. Changes in the body and changes in the mind are divinely coordinated parallel events (without direct causal communication). This idiosyncratic “solution” failed to inspire subsequent teratologists, however, and more naturalistic or mechanical explanations continued to mount. 14. See Marilyn Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science,” in the Modern Criticism section of Norton’s Critical Edition of Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (W. W. Norton, 1996). Butler points out that the earliest versions of Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein show him as a scientific bumbler who knows “too little science rather than too much” (404–16). The earliest versions of the story are not indictments of science itself. 15. Next, Lawrence counters the theory that severe monsters are caused by blunt or acute traumas to the mother’s gravid abdomen. For one thing, Lawrence argued, a ma-

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jority of cases of unfortunate offspring are born to women who suffered no such violence. Furthermore, if the heads were caved in or broken in half, then we should discover some excess matter in utero and some bruising or signs of trauma. “How does it happen,” he asks, “that the head should be destroyed in all cases just so far as the orbits?” These and other such arguments refine Lawrence’s belief that internal fusions might arise in utero, causing monsters like conjoined twins or parasite/autosite twins, but sudden external force does not appear to create monsters. William Lawrence eventually overcame the rocky start of his early scientific career. After denouncing his own early work, his career trajectory resumed its upward climb. Being ahead of his time, the next generation, including both Darwin and Wallace, finally acknowledged Lawrence’s foresight in many areas. See Lawrence’s entry “monster” in Abraham Rees, The cyclopaedia: or, Universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature, vol. 14 (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819). 16. In the 1830s Darwin considered the possibility that monstrous birth might be a launching-­pad mechanism (a drastic variation) for the birth of new species. He abandoned this idea around 1838 in favor of natural selection and micro-­mutations. See chapter 11, “Darwin’s Mutants,” in Stephen Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford University Press, 2009). 17. The Chinese have a long tradition of monsters being produced by disturbing maternal perceptions and imaginings. For an interesting discussion of the relevant Qin Dynasty texts, see “The Torments of Imagination” in chapter 2 of Frank Dikotter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (Columbia University Press, 1998). 18. See Edgar Thurston, Omens and Superstitions of Southern India (McBride, Nast & Company, 1912), 54. 19. Excerpts of the recent Fact Book can be found at the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association website: http://www.mdaa.org.au (accessed June 7, 2016). 20. This list was compiled at the website Pregnancy and Childbirth Around the World, http://pregnancyandchildbirtharoundtheworld.blogspot.com (accessed June 7, 2016). 21. See David Crews, “Epigenetics and Its Implications for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology,” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 29 (2008): 344–57; and Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (Columbia University Press, 2012). 22. We’ve come a long way in understanding disability. For starters, we are all monsters. We are all deviations. Variation is the true norm. We must recognize that many women and differently abled children were needlessly demonized and blamed in previous eras—and such tragedies are not past tense in parts of the developing world. Scientific progress, in this story at least, humanized us. To appreciate how far we’ve come, see the wonderfully controversial sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant by Marc Quinn and displayed on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square from 2005 to 2007. A gigantic version was re-­created and featured in the 2012 opening ceremony of the Paralympics in London. It shows a naked and very pregnant Alison Lapper, who was born with phocomelia (defined in Stedman’s Medical Dictionary [28th ed., 2005] as a defective development of arms, legs, or both, so that the hands and feet are attached close to the body, resembling the flippers of a seal). It portrays Lapper, a friend of the sculptor, as dignified—majestic almost,

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in tons of white marble—not to mention healthy and sexual. It’s an arresting image. Of course, we have a long way to go before the old stigmas of disability disappear altogether. Maybe they never will. Still, the imagination is a powerful faculty—however its mysterious mechanisms work—and if the imagination can make monsters, then maybe it can unmake them too. 23. Aristotle’s theory of cathartic tragedy is as relevant here as Freud’s theory of libidinal release. See chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Poetics: Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 24. See the interview “Capone and Eli Roth Discuss Horror Movies,” Ain’t It Cool News, June 3, 2007, http://www.aintitcool.com/node/32868 (accessed June 7, 2016). 25. The unforgettable torture images of cinema are trivial compared to the kinds of “inner monsters” that veterans have to carry around with them. The debilitating effects of post-­traumatic stress disorder are well documented, and we know that long-­buried or repressed memories can resurface even decades later to wreak havoc on veterans’ mental health. For a relatively sensitive discussion of a veteran whose Vietnam memories reawakened decades later, during the invasion of Iraq, see Kathy Dobie, “The Long Shadow of War,” GQ Magazine, January 2008. 26. See Warren Kinsella, “Torture Porn’s Dark Waters,” National Post, June 7, 2007. Writer Stephen King defended the sadistic genre, and particularly Hostel, on the grounds that “sure it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable.” See Mark Olsen, “King of Horror on Horror,” LA Times, June 22, 2007. King’s defense seems almost hard to believe and disingenuous since it’s unlikely that even the most devoted fans of torture porn would refer to it as “good art.” 27. Jeff Nilsson, “Imagination Is More Important than Knowledge,” March 20, 2010, http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/03/20/archives/post-­perspective/imagi nation-­important-­knowledge.html (accessed June 7, 2016). 28. Steven J. Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective,” SubStance 30, no. 1 (2001): 28–54. 29. John R. Smythies, The Walls of Plato’s Cave (Avebury, 1994), 129. 30. Aristotle, De Anima: Books II and III with Passages from, Books 1–2, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford University Press, 1993), 53. 31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett, 1987). 32. Katie Watson and Belinda Fu, “What Is Medical Improv?,” http://www.medical improv.org/about/ (accessed June 7, 2016). 33. Barbara Brotman, “Northwestern Med Students Practice Improv: Seminar Shows Doctors-­to-­Be How Skills Relate to Profession,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 2010, http:// articles.chicagotribune.com/2010- ­02-­15/opinion/ct-­news-­medical-­improv-­20100212 _1_med-­school-­myocardial-­improv (accessed August 15, 2016). 34. Watson and Fu, “What Is Medical Improv?” 35. Quotes from Robert Kulhan and Lakshmi Balachandra are taken from Mark Tutton, “Why Using Improvisation to Teach Business Skills Is No Joke,” CNN.com, February 18, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/02/18/improvisation.business.skills/ (accessed June 7, 2016).

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CHAPTER TWO

1. Quoted in Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 27. 2. Ibid., 28. 3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System,” Cognitive Science 4, no. 2 (1980): 195–208. 4. Quoted in Amanda Smith, “Embodied Cognition: Thinking with Your Body,” Aus‑ tralian Broadcasting Corporation’s RN, September 24, 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/radio national/programs/bodysphere/thinking-­with-­your-­body/5766910 (accessed June 7, 2016). 5. From Gabrielle Roth, “Why Do We Dance,” http://www.drfranklipman.com/why -­do-­we-­dance/ (accessed June 7, 2016). 6. From Beautywesseh, “Dance My Life,” January 13, 2015, http://nouw.com/Beauty wesseh/dancing-­is-­my-­everything-­17069336 (accessed August 18, 2016). 7. A. Kaeppler, “The Mystique of Field Work,” in Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 13–25. 8. Bronwyn Tarr, Jacques Launay, Emma Cohen, and Robin Dunbar, “Synchrony and Exertion during Dance Independently Raise Pain Threshold and Encourage Social Bonding,” Biology Letters 11, no. 10 (2015), http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roy biolett/11/10/20150767.full.pdf (accessed August 18, 2016). 9. Peter Cook, Edward W. Large, Yuko Hattori, Hugo Merchant, and Aniruddh Patel, “Rhythmic Entrainment in Non-­Human Animals: An Evolutionary Trail of Time Perception” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Ad‑ vancement of Science, Chicago, February 2014), https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2014/web program/Session7071.html (accessed June 7, 2016). 10. Megan Phelan, “Animals Can Bop Along to a Beat,” AAAS News, February 16, 2014, http://www.aaas.org/news/animals-­can-­bop-­along-­beat (accessed June 7, 2016). 11. Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parson, “The Neuroscience of Dance,” Scientific American 299 ( July 2008): 78–83. 12. Steven Brown, Michael J. Martinez, and Lawrence M. Parsons, “The Neural Basis of Human Dance,” Cerebral Cortex 16, no. 8 (August 2006): 1157–67. 13. E. H. Hagen and G. A. Bryant, “Music and Dance as a Coalition Signaling System,” Human Nature 14, no. 1 (2003): 21–51. 14. Joseph Jordania, Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution (Logos, 2011), 98. 15. Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Macmillan, 2015). 16. Robin Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution 22, no. 6 (1992): 469–93; R. I. M. Dunbar and Susanne Shultz, “Understanding Primate Brain Evolution,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 362, no. 1480 (2007): 649–58. 17. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Penguin, 2012). 18. Robert A. Barton, “Embodied Cognitive Evolution and the Cerebellum,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 36, no. 1599 (2012): 2097–107.

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19. Richard Byrne, Catherine Hobaiter, and Michelle Klailova, “Local Traditions in Gorilla Manual Skill: Evidence for Observational Learning of Behavioral Organization,” Animal Cognition 14 (2011): 683–93. 20. Catherine Hobaiter, Timothée Poisot, Klaus Zuberbühler, William Hoppitt, and Thibaud Gruber, “Social Network Analysis Shows Direct Evidence for Social Transmission of Tool Use in Wild Chimpanzees,” PLOS Biology 12, no. 9 (2014): e1001960. 21. Teaching requires a “theory of mind”—an ability for the teacher to imagine the world from the point of view or perspective of the learner. The teacher must grasp that the learner shares some information but lacks other information, and then the teacher tailors the instruction accordingly. Most animals, even some of our close primate cousins, seem to lack this ability. See Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014). 22. Kim Bard, “Neonatal Imitation in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Tested with Two Paradigms,” Animal Cognition 10 (2007): 233–42. 23. Ibid., 239. 24. Cecilia Heyes, “Where Do Mirror Neurons Come From?” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34 (2010): 575–83. 25. Mirror neurons were first discovered by a team of Italian neurologists in the early 1990s and are commonly believed to be one of the most important recent discoveries in neuroscience. Our ability to feel the suffering or deprivation of another person is part of our instinctual equipment, and we see versions of this sympathy in other social mammals. It starts as simple, almost mechanical, emotional contagion. Babies often cry, for example, when they perceive another crying baby. Emotions are highly contagious for mammals, and we observe that anger, joy, and fear (among others) can spread rapidly through a group, even when there’s no cognitive awareness of what’s going on. Mammal bodies can read other mammal bodies. Mirror neurons are the physical brain pathways that allow mammal bodies to “catch” the “contagions.” One of the original researchers, Dr. Vittorio Gallese, has compiled (together with M. I. Stamenov) a fairly comprehensive story of the discovery and implications: Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language ( John Benjamins Publishing, 2002). I adopt his helpful term “shared manifold,” which he articulates in “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001). For a dissenting view of the importance of mirror neurons, see Gregory Hickok, The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition (W. W. Norton, 2014). 26. Cecilia Heyes, “Where Do Mirror Neurons Come From?” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34 (2010): 575–83. And see R. Cook, G. Bird, C. Catmur, C. Press, and C. Heyes, “Mirror Neurons: From Origin to Functions,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2014): 177–241. 27. One does not need much of a “theory of mind” to accomplish such real-­time communication. Theory of mind is the ability to attribute thoughts and beliefs to others. I don’t need to get access to your cognitions, or formulate your belief states, or have entry into your knowledge (epistemic states). No mind reading, in this sense, is needed for collective behavior and creativity. 28. David Kirsh, “Thinking with the Body,” in Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Confer-

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ence of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. S. Ohlsson and R. Catrambone (Cognitive Science Society, 2010), 2864–69. 29. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 30. Bina Venkataraman, “Specializing in Problems That Only Seem Impossible to Solve,” New York Times, December 15, 2008, http://nyti.ms/1ThPwGa (accessed June 7, 2016). 31. Gird Gigerenzer, Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Oxford University Press, 2000). 32. Gird Gigerenzer, “Smart Heuristics,” in Thinking: The New Science of Decision-­Making, Problem-­Solving, and Prediction, ed. John Brockman (Harper Perennial, 2013), 40. 33. Ibid., 51. 34. Kerri Norman, Sergio Pellis, Louise Barrett, and S. Peter Henzi, “Down but Not Out: Supine Postures as Facilitators of Play in Domestic Dogs,” Behavioural Processes 110 (2015): 88–95. 35. I asked how the parent lions know which cubs are theirs, an identification that seemed pretty smart to me. Mohammed explained the Jacobson’s organ. This vomeronasal organ (named after Ludwig Levin Jacobson, who discovered it in 1811) is a chemoreceptor found at the roof of the mouth in many mammals and some snakes. Pheromones and other chemicals enter into the mouth, are taken up by the Jacobson’s organ, and sent to neural targets in the amygdala and hypothalamus. Sometimes you might see your pet cat doing an open-­mouthed grimace—he is using his Jacobson’s organ to assess a novel situation. When lions clean their own cubs just after birth, chemicals pass from the babies through the parents’ Jacobson’s organ to the adult brain. A chemical fingerprint is recorded, and the identification is set as a permanent record. Whenever the cub’s chemical stimulates the parent’s brain, it fits like a key in a lock. In this way, male lions do not accidentally kill their own cubs, and mothers “know” which cubs to nurture. It’s a clever system, but it is not a case of rational inference or deduction in lions. Infanticide is not some aberrant behavior among mammals. Horrifying as it might seem, it is an entrenched part of reproductive strategy. Some biologists believe that it is a default behavior that gets repressed or gated by a specific chemical signal. The brain hormone oxytocin promotes nurturing behavior in mammals; females generally have more of it than males. When males have sex, however, oxytocin floods their systems and mellows them into kinder, gentler versions of themselves. In many mammals (especially rodents), the male oxytocin peak synchronizes with the birth of their own pups. The mellowing effect of sex actually ensures that aggressive males won’t kill their own pups. 36. Antonio R. Damasio, Barry J. Everitt, and Dorothy Bishop, “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the Possible Functions of the Prefrontal Cortex [and Discussion],” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 351, no. 1346 (1996): 1413–20. Also see extensive discussions of somatic markers in Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Putnam, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Harcourt Brace and Co., 1999). 37. The idea that the brain is shaped into preferred pathways during childhood development was first articulated by Gerald Edelman, who thought experience acts as a selec-

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tion force on neuronal groups and synaptic connections. The details of this soft-­wiring paradigm are still forthcoming, but the general idea has become well entrenched in the last decade of brain science. Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Basic Books, 1987). 38. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. 39. Richard Potts, Humanity’s Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability (Avon Books, 1997). 40. Did emotions really begin to appear with the birth of mammals? Presumably dinosaurs would have had fear and aggression; these useful affects might be distributed throughout the vertebrate clade. But did they “care” about their young, like mammals do? Did they bond? No one really knows for sure. Scientists try to solve some of these deep-­time questions by looking at contemporary reptile brains and behaviors. Most reptiles don’t require parenting: just overproduce your eggs, fertilize, and walk away. Reptiles never evolved care because they didn’t need it. But they did need a fight-­or-­flight response, and of course they have it: it’s located in the lower, older part of the brain, unlike mammalian care, which is in the higher limbic. The fact that some dinosaurs nested, however, suggests that they might have been more like contemporary birds. Perhaps they had some pre-­mammalian affective chemistry system. Alternatively, they might have had hardwired behavioral instincts that only mimic our own parental systems (i.e., analogies rather than homologies). Dinosaur parenting and mammal parenting might be convergent behaviors, without having to “feel” the same in any intelligible sense. Unlike most other non-­mammal vertebrates, birds have remarkably “mammal-­like” parental behaviors, so evolution is filled with contingent and convergent pathways of adaptive behavior. We are only just beginning to crack open the emotional interior of these paths. 41. See Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Belknap Press, 2011). 42. See Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (MIT Press, 2012). 43. D. Müller-­Schwarze, B. Stagge, and C. Müller-­Schwarze, “Play Behavior: Persistence, Decrease, and Energetic Compensation during Food Shortage in Deer Fawns,” Science 215 (1982): 85–87. 44. See Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, “Memory, Imagination and the Evolution of Modern Language,” in Social Origins of Language, ed. Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2014). 45. J. Bock, “Farming, Foraging, and Children’s Play in the Okavango Delta, Botswana,” in The Nature of Play: Great Apes and Humans, ed. A. D. Pellegrini and P. K. Smith (Guilford, 2005), 254–84. 46. The story is reported by Dr. Patricia B. McConnell at her website, The Other End of the Leash, March 5, 2012, http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash /clever-­hans-­revisited (accessed June 7, 2015).

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CHAPTER THREE

1. Bob Snyder, Music and Memory (MIT Press, 2000). 2. Robert L. Solso, The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain (MIT Press, 2003). 3. John Noble Wilford, “Cave Paintings in Indonesia May Be among the Oldest Known,” New York Times, October 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/sci ence/ancient-­indonesian-­find-­may-­rival-­oldest-­known-­cave-­art.html (accessed June 7, 2016). 4. Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 687. 5. C. S. Henshilwood, F. d’Errico, C. W. Marean, R. G. Milo, and R. Yates, “An Early Bone Tool Industry from the Middle Stone Age at Blombos Cave, South Africa: Implications for the Origins of Modern Human Behaviour, Symbolism and Language,” Journal of Human Evolution 41 (2001): 631–78. 6. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, eds., Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics (Clarendon Press, 1992). 7. Klein, The Human Career. 8. Paul Klee, Notebooks, vol. 1, The Thinking Eye, ed. J. Spiller (Lund Humphries, 1961), 105. 9. Shaun Tan, The Bird King: And Other Sketches (Windy Hollow, 2010), 4. 10. P. Lamarque, “Paleolithic Cave Painting: A Test Case for Transcultural Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Rock Art, ed. T. Heyd and J. Clegg (Ashgate, 2005). 11. Kat Wong, “World’s Oldest Engraving Upends Theory of Homo sapiens Uniqueness,” Scientific American, December 2014, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observa tions/2014/12/03/worlds-­oldest- ­engraving-­upends-­theory-­of-­homo-­sapiens-­unique ness/ (accessed June 7, 2016). 12. Gillian M. Morriss-­Kay, “The Evolution of Human Artistic Creativity,” Journal of Anatomy 216, no. 2 (2010): 158–76. 13. Nicholas Humphrey, “Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8, no. 2 (1998). 14. Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012). 15. This strong theory would need to be reconciled with the neuroscience studies of Dr. Robert Solso, which suggest that the normal artistic mind is conceptually dominant as compared with the novice artists, who remain perceptually oriented. Such reconciliation may be easily achieved, however, when we remember the important differences between Nadia’s nonlinguistic brain and the heavily linguistic brain of the adult portrait artist in Solso’s study. 16. Klein, The Human Career. 17. Ruth G. Millikan, “On Reading Signs: Some Differences between Us and the Others,” in Evolution of Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach, ed. D. Kimbrough Oller and Ulrike Griebel (MIT Press, 2004), 15–30.

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18. With some disinterested analysis, we can distill the horror experience of predator fear and other emotionally charged judgments into a parallel process of affect and cognition, a process usually so interwoven that it appears as one unified experience (and in animals always remains so). 19. It is commonly thought that hominid vision supplanted the olfactory system that was stronger in our primate ancestors, but more recent findings complicate the story. Data now shows that our olfactory receptor genes are not much different from other primates, including very old phylogenetic relations like the New and Old World monkeys. Still, the larger point remains intact: humans employ their visual systems much more than smell to navigate their world. Where and when the shift occurred is still under debate. See A. Matsui, Y. Go, and Y. Niimura, “Degeneration of Olfactory Receptor Gene Repertories in Primates: No Direct Link to Full Trichromatic Vision,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 27, no. 5 (2010): 1192–200. 20. I’m using the term “proto-­consciousness” throughout with an important caveat. Technically speaking, I think “consciousness” is too narrowly applied by philosophers and psychologists to mean “conceptually aware” or “self-­aware.” This bias is quite prevalent, and I am trading on it when I invoke a word like “proto-­consciousness” because I want to indicate a level of mind below the sophisticated linguistic and self-­concept level of awareness. Properly speaking, however, I think all animals have some degree of consciousness because I take that word to cover even rudimentary nervous-­system pains and pleasures. Basic sentience is a lower level of consciousness. 21. See Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 7. 22. D. Brang and V. S. Ramachandran, “Psychopharmacology of Synesthesia: The Role of Serotonin S2a Receptor Activation,” Medical Hypotheses 70, no. 4 (2007): 903–4. 23. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 129. 24. Gerald Edelman’s neural Darwinism allows for the useful pruning of associations—even in a sleeping brain—while Antonio Damasio’s somatic markers allow for recoding of emotional salience. See Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Basic Books, 1987); and Antonio Damasio, B. J. Everitt, and D. Bishop, “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the Possible Functions of the Prefrontal Cortex [and Discussion],” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 351 (1996): 1413–20. 25. Arnold H. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (MIT Press, 2006), 66. 26. Murad Ahmed, “Lunch with FT: Demis Hassabis,” Financial Times Weekend, January 31, 2015. 27. The Bayesian approach is an attempt to reverse engineer the mind’s inferential abilities by applying Thomas Bayes’s probability formula: P(A/B) = P(B/A) × P(A)/P(B), wherein we’re trying to infer the probabilities of A and B, and the conditional probability of A given B and vice versa. The answer will depend on the “prior” values we assign to the variables. Our minds make very fast judgments with incomplete information, so Bayesian proponents suggest that our mind has a Bayesian probability calculator woven into its operating system. I find this approach dubious because it doesn’t capture the texture or

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feel of human thinking (not even for excellent chess players), and the model itself provides no real way to establish “priors”—the probabilistic number values for the variables. Connectionism is diverse, and some associational aspects of it are compatible with my embodied view. Interconnected networks of simple binary functions (on/off or 1/0) are structured with a “learning rule” that changes the weights of connections over time depending on inputs. This is how your computer games “learn” your playing style and adjust accordingly. Some connectionists suggest that a symbolic computation is happening between the input and the output of the system, but others think that the connections alone (with strengthened learning) scale up to full human thinking and there is little need for a representational language of thought per se. 28. L. W. Barsalou, “Perceptions of Perceptual Symbols,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, no. 4 (1999): 637–60; P. M. Niedenthal, L. W. Barsalou, P. Winkielman, S. Krauth-­ Gruber, and F. Ric, “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 3 (2005): 184–211; L. W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition: Past, Present, and Future,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2, no. 4 (2005): 716–24. 29. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (Oxford Paperbacks, 1999). 30. Stephen Kosslyn presented a theory of cognitive imagery that allowed for perception-­based pictures in short-­term memory only. He suggested that perceptual images exist temporarily in working memory, but they probably transduce or translate into amodal code in long-­term memory. Barsalou, on the other hand, goes further and argues that even long-­term memory is storage of symbolic derivatives of visual perception. S. M. Kosslyn, W. L. Thompson, and G. Ganis, The Case for Mental Imagery (Oxford University Press, 2006). 31. Barsalou, “Perceptions of Perceptual Symbols,” 581. 32. See the film The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, dir. Mami Sunada (2013). 33. N. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990). 34. Barsalou, “Perceptions of Perceptual Symbols,” 594. 35. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (Basic Books, 2002). 36. Paul Thagard and Terrence C. Stewart, “The AHA! Experience: Creativity through Emergent Binding in Neural Networks,” Cognitive Science 35, no. 1 (2011): 1–33. 37. Ibid. 38. See L. H. Chiu, “A Cross-­Cultural Comparison of Cognitive Styles in Chinese and American Children,” International Journal of Psychology 7, no. 4 (1972): 235–42; and N. Knight and R. E. Nisbett, “Culture, Class and Cognition: Evidence from Italy,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (2007): 283–91. 39. Viktor Lowenfeld, “The Meaning of Creative Activity in Elementary Education,” in Concepts in Art Education: An Anthology of Current Issues, ed. G. S. Pappas (Collier Macmillan, 1970); Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child (Basic Books, 2008). 40. Patricia Tarr, “More than Movement: Scribbling Reassessed,” Visual Arts Research 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 83–89. Also see John Matthews, Drawing and Painting: Children and Visual Representation (Sage, 2003). 41. See N. H. Freeman and R. Janikoun, “Intellectual Realism in Children’s Drawings

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of a Familiar Object with Distinctive Features,” Child Development 43, no. 3 (1972): 1116–21; and also R. Negi, “Visual Realism in Autism,” Delhi Psychiatry Journal 17, no. 1 (2014). 42. F. G. E. Happé and Uta Frith, “The Weak Coherence Account: Detail-­Focused Cognitive Style in Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 36 (2006): 5–25. 43. Dr. Goodenough erroneously believed that the Draw-­A-­Man test would capture intelligence before the shaping influence of culture (language). We now recognize that cultural influence is almost immediate upon postpartum life (and epigenetically, upon pre-­partum life) and the drawing experiment may be capturing an entirely different phenomenon. See Florence Goodenough, Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings (World Book Co., 1926); and Dale Harris, Children’s Drawings as Measures of Intellectual Maturity (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 44. These error corrections are done against one of two intentional goal states: intellectual realism or visual realism. CHAPTER FOUR

1. Leonard Bernstein, Young People’s Concerts (Amadeus Press, 2006). 2. James R. Hurford, Origins of Language: A Slim Guide (Oxford University Press, 2014), 17. 3. Doreen Kimura, Neuromotor Mechanisms in Human Communication (Clarendon Press/ Oxford University Press, 1993). 4. Michael A. Arbib, Katja Liebal, and Simone Pika, “Primate Vocalization, Gesture, and the Evolution of Human Language,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 6 (2008): 1053–76. 5. D. L. Cheney and R. M. Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World (University of Chicago Press, 1990). 6. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957; reprint, Martino Fine Books, 2015). 7. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (William Morrow, 1994). 8. Elizabeth Bates and Jeffrey Elman, “Learning Rediscovered,” American Society for the Advancement of Science 274, no. 5294 (1996): 1849–50. 9. Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? 30 Years Later,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 5 (2008): 187–92. 10. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Harvard University Press, 2006), 17. 11. William Noble and Iain Davidson, Human Evolution, Language and the Mind: A Psy‑ chological and Archaeological Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 12. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 162. 13. An interesting study shows that increases in the mother’s oxytocin accompany motherese verbalization encounters with baby, whereas increases in the father’s oxytocin accompany tactile and proprioceptive contact with the baby. This suggests a neurochemical correlation of positive bonding with some gender stereotypes of human parenting. See I. Gordon, O. Zagoory-­Sharon, J. F. Leckman, and R. Feldman, “Oxytocin and the Development of Parenting in Humans.” Biological Psychiatry 68, no. 4 (August 15, 2010):

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377–82. Unlike other vertebrates, mammals care extensively for their young and other kin. As primates, we share important attachment mechanisms in the brain. Mammal mothers have a distinctive circuit from the hypothalamus, through the stria terminalis, to the ventral tegmental area (VTA), in which the neurotransmitter oxytocin travels. Damage to this system destroys maternal feeling and behavior. Researchers have known about the phenomenon of imprinting for many years. Behavioral scientists, working on animals, have described and successfully manipulated this simple form of bonding for decades. Researchers can get baby birds, for example, to imprint on the scientists themselves, on beach balls, and even on beer bottles. The imprinting occurs because a “window” of bonding opens right after birth and closes quickly, so whatever proximate thing is nearby becomes “mom.” Mammals have the same, albeit more sophisticated, mechanisms for fastening together parents and offspring. Many mammals (and terrestrial vertebrates generally) imprint through the Jacobson’s organ (vomeronasal organ) at the roof of the mouth. Chemicals from offspring are taken up by the mother’s Jacobson’s organ (through smell or oral contact), usually during the cleaning of the just-­born baby, and signals are conducted upstream to target sites in the amygdala and hypothalamus. Humans have a vestigial Jacobson’s organ, observable in our embryonic phase but largely inactive in adulthood. Different species have diverse ways of harvesting the chemical information that bonds them together, but for mammals the resulting brain chemistry of oxytocin is strikingly similar. See Kevin D. Broad, James P. Curley, and Eric B. Keverne, “Mother-­Infant Bonding and the Evolution of Mammalian Social Relationships,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 361, no. 1476 (2006): 2199–214. Mother-­baby bonding is an essential skill for any animal born into a hostile environment. Prey animals, especially herd animals, are born with generous physical adeptness. They can walk and even run within minutes of birth. This mobility is important in a predator-­filled world, but it puts them at great risk of potential separation from their mothers. It’s not surprising, then, that herd animals have very tight windows of opportunity for identifying their mothers and latching on. Failure to lock on to the mother (for any mammal species) usually means death for the offspring, and compromise of gene-­line transmission for the parents. Consequently, natural selection pressures for bonding are significant. In humans and some other primates, however, the oxytocin system spreads beyond the mother-­baby connection and includes alloparents and friends or allies. Oxytocin calms down aggression and dramatically reduces irritability—important mood alterations for new mammal parents. Male moods are equally transformed by oxytocin, which floods the male brain after sex. Male mammals become more nurturing and less aggressive after sex. Recent research has indicated that the oxytocin may also accentuate or heighten negative affect as well, so the causal picture is still unclear. Andrew H. Kemp and Adam J. Guastella, “The Role of Oxytocin in Human Affect: A Novel Hypothesis,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 4 (2011): 222–31. 14. D. Premack, “ ‘Gavagaip’: The Future History of the Animal Language Controversy,” Cognition 19, no. 3 (1985): 207–96.

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15. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Harvard University Press, 1998). 16. Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice (MIT Press, 2012), 49. 17. Michael Wood, The Story of India (2007), episode 1: “Beginnings,” Jeremy Jeffs (director), BBC Two. 18. James R Hurford, Michael Studdert-­Kennedy, and Chris Knight, eds., Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 20. E. Durkheim, The Elemental Forms of Religious Life (1912; repr., Free Press, 1995). 21. Daniel Dor, The Instruction of Imagination: Language and Its Evolution as a Communication Technology (Oxford University Press, 2015). 22. E. Jablonka, S. Ginsburg, and D. Dor, “The Co-­Evolution of Language and Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 367, no. 1599 (2012): 2157. 23. Benjamin K. Bergen, Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning (Basic Books, 2012). 24. Ibid., 13. 25. One way to make this into an empirical question could be to study the ontogenetic development of spontaneous naming sounds in children. But even here the natural experiment would be distorted by the rich linguistic environment in which every child already exists. 26. The exception to this rule may be poetry, which returns to the emotionally rich, imagistic use of language. 27. The letter to Aristotle can be found in Richard Stoneman’s Legends of Alexander the Great (I. B. Tauris, 2012). 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Dennis R. Proffitt, “Embodied Perception and the Economy of Action,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, no. 2 (2006). 30. Charles Baudelaire, Mirror of Art: Critical Studies, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Doubleday, 1956), 233. 31. Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012), chap. 28. 32. Eric Kandel does an interesting breakdown of the neurochemical systems triggered by Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes in The Age of Insight, 436. 33. From “Dreaming of a Wider World,” an interview with Mira Nair in Julie Burstein’s Spark: How Creativity Works (HarperCollins, 2011), 109. 34. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, 2004); Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2009); Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 35. Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 54. 36. Any careful reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, will reveal not only a highly sexualized description of blood drinking, but an erotic characterization of the

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Count himself. Even John Polidori’s original 1819 “The Vampyre” describes the monster as a sexually attractive force. According to critic Cristopher Craft, Gothic monster tales from Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll and Hyde, to Dracula and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, rehearse a similar story structure. “Each of these texts first invites or admits a monster, then entertains and is entertained by monstrosity for some extended duration, until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruption that he/she/it brings.” Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations, no. 8 (1984): 107–33. 37. Stephen Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford University Press, 2011). 38. The comedy writer Max Brooks understands this dimension of monster stories very well. In books like The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, Brooks gives us painstaking, haunting, and hilarious advice about how best to meet our undead foes. For their April Fool’s edition, the otherwise serious journal Archaeology interviewed Brooks, asking him (tongue firmly in cheek): “Does the archaeological record hold any zombie-­related lessons for us today? What can our ancestors teach us about meeting and, ultimately, defeating the undead menace?” Brooks replied, “The greatest lesson our ancestors have to teach us is to remain both vigilant and unafraid. We must endeavor to emulate the ancient Romans; calm, efficient, treating zombies as just one more item on a rather mundane checklist. Panic is the undead’s greatest ally, doing far more damage, in, some cases, than the creatures themselves. The goal is to be prepared, not scared, to use our heads, and cut off theirs.” Brooks is unparalleled in parodying a well-­worn monster tradition, but he wouldn’t be so funny if we weren’t already using monster stories to imagine strategies for facing enemies. 39. Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal. 40. In 2006 Kandahar, Afghanistan, four armed men broke into the home of an Afghan headmaster and teacher named Malim Abdul Habib. The four men held Habib as they gathered his wife and children together, forcing them to watch as they stabbed Habib eight times and then decapitated him. Habib was the headmaster at Shaikh Mathi Baba high school, where he educated girls along with boys. The Taliban militants of the region, who are suspected in the beheading, see the education of girls as a violation of Islam (a view that is obviously not shared by the vast majority of Muslims). My point is simply this: If you can gather a man’s family together at gunpoint and force them to watch as you cut off his head, then you are a monster. You don’t just seem like one—you are one. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1507073/Taliban-­behead -­teacher-­at-­co-­ed-­school.html (accessed June 8, 2016). 41. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton University Press, 2013), 444. 42. Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 43. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (Penguin Classics, 2004), 95. 44. Quoted in Burstein, Spark, 111. 45. These phases are explored in chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively, of Evan Thompson’s Waking, Dreaming, Being (Columbia University Press, 2015).

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46. Ibid., xxxv. 47. Ibid., xxxvi. 48. The quote is taken from the NAfME website, as is the three-­part pedagogical tech‑ nique of Robert Larson. See http://www.nafme.org/no-­fear-­working-­without-­a-­net/ (accessed June 8, 2016). 49. See my discussion of the role of wonder in natural history: Stephen Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford University Press, 2001). 50. Ernest Sosa, “Getting It Right,” New York Times, May 25, 2015, http://opinionator .blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/getting-­it-­right/ (accessed June 7, 2016). 51. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge, 2002). CHAPTER FIVE

1. Michael Tomasello and Malinda Carpenter, “Shared Intentionality,” Developmental Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 121–25. 2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 3. Ned Block, “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,” in The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Guzeldere (MIT Press, 1998), 375–415. 4. F. Crick, “Function of the Thalamic Reticular Complex: The Searchlight Hypothesis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 81, no. 14 (1984): 4586–90. 5. An interesting dissenting argument is made by David Rosenthal, who is unconvinced by the various adaptation theories of consciousness. The operations of executive control, enhanced planning, et cetera can go on just fine without a conscious lightbulb over the top. Rosenthal concludes that consciousness is not an adaptation at all, but an epiphenomenal construction (or by-­product) of language using. Social events and communication lead us to posit the existence of an inner consciousness to “explain” actions and speech by ourselves and others. According to Rosenthal, even the developmental theory of mind mechanism—which purports to recognize the other’s consciousness—is merely a projection of the capacity for talking to yourself into the head of another (but this is not consciousness either). See D. Rosenthal, “Consciousness and Its Functions,” Neuropsychologia 46 (2008): 829–40. 6. Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions (Plenum Press, 1990). 7. See the excellent companion website for the Smithsonian exhibition Hall of Human Origins: http://humanorigins.si.edu/human-­ characteristics/brains (accessed May 5, 2016). 8. One of the more interesting aspects of Rick Potts’s Smithsonian exhibit, with its climate change theory of the brain boom, is the implication it has for the “evolution of mind” debate. The average visitor may not be entirely sensitive to the relevant debate, but they will imbibe Potts’s side of the argument, as it permeates the whole exhibit. The

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debate, simply put, is between those theorists who think the mind evolved as a series of independent problem-­solving modules (like separate gears in a watch) versus those who think that the mind evolved as a general open-­ended problem-­solving intelligence. It’s the debate between modular intelligence versus general intelligence. Perhaps the most famous mental “module” is, as we’ve already seen, Noam Chomsky’s deep-­grammar language program. Chomsky famously argued that our language capacity is too difficult to pick up through general intelligence processing, and so it must be a genetically engraved, brain-­based program that just does one thing: acquire and employ language. The language module has to be activated by specific cultural languages, but the deep grammar is innate. This modular view of the mind was adopted by some influential evolutionary psychologists, like Steven Pinker, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. These evolutionary psychologists applied Chomsky’s module idea to almost every other mental activity. They argued that many of our psychological tendencies were sculpted by evolution during the Pleistocene era, and everything from what kind of food we like to what kind of spouse we’re looking for (with specific hip/waist ratio) is generated by a separate taste module, or mate module, and so on. Our minds, they argue, were built in the Stone Age, and we now inherit these prehistoric modules. The jury is still out on whether they are correct about these specialized abilities, but they certainly win the day in the popular press—where neat, formulaic answers to psych puzzles play well. However, one of the principal claims that anchor the modular theory is that our minds evolved in an extremely stable unchanging environment. If our current minds are assemblages of Pleistocene adaptations, then the era of brain development must have been relatively stable, and the habitat unwavering, so that natural selection could sculpt each module to properly limn the perennial environmental challenges. But Rick Potts and the Smithsonian exhibit are showing us now that the environment was anything but stable during the Pleistocene brain boom era. In fact, the exhibit argues, it was precisely the chaos of this era that created multipurpose problem-­solving minds. If the weather, and therefore the foraging and hunting context, is changing radically, then hardwired specialized modules aren’t going to do us much good. What we need is all-­purpose intelligence that can perceive new challenges and apply general predictive rules and cultural folkways to solving them. Remains of ancient hominins, especially Homo, are found in very diverse habitats in highly fluctuating climates. The encephalization of the brain corresponds with an increasingly flexible, adaptable mind. On this view, our mind might be called the ultimate “jack of all trades.” 9. Z. Kotowicz, “The Strange Case of Phineas Gage,” History of the Human Sciences 20, no. 1 (2007): 115–31. 10. Joaquin M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex (Elsevier, 2008). 11. J. M. Fuster, M. Bodner, and J. K. Kroger, “Cross-­Modal and Cross-­Temporal Association in Neurons of Frontal Cortex,” Nature 405, no. 6784 (May 2000): 347–51. And see Patricia Goldman-­Rakic, “Circuitry of Primate Prefrontal Cortex and Regulation of Behaviour by Representational Memory,” in Handbook of Physiology: The Nervous System, vol. 5, ed. F. Plum, V. Mountcastle (American Physiological Society, 1987), 373–417. 12. J. Glascher et al., “Lesion Mapping of Cognitive Abilities Linked to Intelligence,” Neuron 61, no. 5 (March 2009): 681–91.

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13. See William Saletan’s “Mind Makes Right,” Slate, March 31, 2007. Also see A. P. Shimamura, “The Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Dynamic Filtering,” Psychobiology 28 (2000): 207–18. Also, Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has published many studies that show brain correlations in emotional and cognitive processing. His lab is very active in exploring neural substrates for moral reasoning/emoting. See his website for an extensive bibliography of papers: http://www.emotion.caltech.edu/ (accessed June 5, 2016). 14. J. Decety, K. Michalska, and K. Kinzler, “The Developmental Neuroscience of Moral Sensitivity,” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 (2011): 305–7. 15. Ibid., 306. 16. B. J. Casey et al., “Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Delay of Gratification 40 Years Later,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 36 (2011): 14998–5003. 17. See bk. IV. Socrates says, “The moral of the tale is that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.” Plato, The Republic, trans. B. Jowett (Dover, 2000), 109. 18. It’s important to note that Plato’s account is more complex. In the Phaedrus, he first denigrates love (eros) as a corrupting madness. The erotic drives, he suggests, are completely disruptive of the delicate psychological balance or harmony that makes up the “healthy” rational soul. Lovers are out of their minds. They are out of control—they are not themselves. After sketching the insanity of love and the slavery that flows from such self-­alienation, Socrates radically shifts the discussion to praise love. The erotic drive gets reinterpreted as the “wings of desire,” and these wings are the means by which we human beings rise above the mundane world to experience, if only briefly, the “higher realm.” The process may be irrational and slightly out of control (like an unruly horse pulling your chariot)—but the intense energy of this drive is apparently necessary to lift us to such inaccessible heights. For Plato, love is a kind of insanity, but it is a form of ecstasy that reveals more truth to us than other forms of lunacy. Despite Plato’s ultimate praise for the erotic, most philosophical and religious traditions (particularly in the West) have identified more strongly with his earlier disparaging assessments of eros. More often than not, desire has been characterized as an obstacle to agency. Reginald Hackforth, Plato: Phaedrus (Cambridge University Press, 1952). 19. For a similar modern view, see Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics, Part IV, Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions (Penguin Classics, 2005). 20. G. Urban, “Metasignaling and Language Origins,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 104, no. 1 (March 2002): 233–46. 21. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy ( John Murray, 1990), 58. 22. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1815–17), in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2009). 23. See paragraph 15 of Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1880), http://www .bartleby.com/39/36.html (accessed May 5, 2016). 24. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 313. 25. Ibid., 299. 26. Hume says: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I

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always stumble on some particular perception of other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said to not exist.” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Courier, 2012), I, iv, 6. 27. The Buddha makes similar arguments in the Potthapada sutta (Digha Nikaya) against the metaphysical notions of Atman and also against the notion of a separable consciousness—a res cogitans. In the Mahatanhasankhaya sutta (Majjhima Nikaya), he likens consciousness to fire, and fire exists only on the fuel it burns—never in some pure disembodied form. Maurice Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya (Simon and Schuster, 2005). 28. And, in Buddhism, one goes deeper (as seen in the Abhidhamma scriptures), to discover that beneath the stratum of the five aggregates, there are more fundamental elements of mind and body—almost like atoms of consciousness (and below this, emptiness). Bhikkhu Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: The Abhidhammattha Sangaha of Acariya Anuruddha (introduction only) (Buddhist Publication Society, 1993). 29. Later Buddhist philosophers began to further dissect the five khandas. At first, philosophers of the Abhidhamma began to break down experience into smaller element units, called dhammas. A sensation dhamma of red, for example, and a sensation dhamma of round, and a sense dhamma of sweet, and so on, all converge to form the higher-­ level experience of eating an apple. This approach tried to lay out the building blocks of our daily experience—tried to create a taxonomic classification of experiential occasions. But then a more metaphysical tone arose in the discussions of the Prajnaparamita Sutras (and their competing interpreters, like Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka school and the Yogacara school). In the same way that Gautama had dissected a person into five khandas, the Abhidhamma tradition dissected khanda experience further into elemental atoms (dhammas). And now, the Mahayana philosophers (like those in the Madhyamaka and Yogacara schools) began to argue about the metaphysical status of these atoms. Were the atoms real and self-­subsistent, like Democritus’s atomic building blocks, or were they empty of being, impermanent, and dependent like everything else? One group (the Madhyamaka) took the position that the atoms were empty—that is to say, impermanent just like everything else. While the Yogacara seem to have maintained that the atoms were real in some way (i.e., essential, self-­subsisting, and quasi-­permanent). David J. Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy: Continuities and Discontinuities (University of Hawaii Press, 1992). 30. William James offers a compelling integration of self theories in William James, “The Consciousness of Self,” in The Principles of Psychology, vol. I (Dover, 1950), chap. X. 31. Daniel Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson (Erlbaum, 1992). 32. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (Pantheon, 2010). 33. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 1998). 34. Ibid., 312. 35. Experimentally induced lesions along the PAG are much more devastating to the intentionality or agency of the animal than lesions in the higher areas of the brain. In

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other words, if you cut the brains of rodents in many of the frontal areas, they are still capable of acting as agents in the world (pursuing food, sex, shelter, social interaction, etc.). But if you cut the PAG, the animal loses its ability act as a self-­sufficient agent. It falls apart. This archaic level of self is not cognitive, in the traditional sense of that term. It is what Panksepp calls “primary process consciousness,” and it resides in the intrinsic action-­readiness of the biological system. According to Panksepp, in Affective Neuroscience, beyond the simple integrated motor actions of this self, it is also likely that this centromedial zone provides a “coherent matrix in which a variety of sensory stimuli become hedonically valenced” (310). Antonio Damasio’s book Self Comes to Mind attempts to clarify the similarities and differences with Panksepp’s long-­held theory of a primary self. Circumspect about his own work, Damasio explains that his previous accounts of the self were focused too high up in brain processing, and now he recognizes a brainstem-­based “proto-­self.” This proto-­self, according to Damasio, corresponds more with Panksepp’s primary self, but Damasio wants to locate it even lower down the brainstem (nucleus tractus solitarius) than Panksepp suggested (periaqueductal gray). “In the perspective of evolution,” Damasio writes, “and in the perspective of one’s life history, the knower came in steps: the proto-­self and its primordial feelings; the action-­driven core self; and finally the autobiographical self, which incorporates social and spiritual dimensions.” Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (Vintage, 2012), 10. 36. For mammals, this low-­level ability is accompanied by the archetypical survival systems—the mammal emotion systems: approach when seeking, escape from fear, attack in rage mode, pursue nurturing in panic mode, seek mate in lust mode, and so on. These emotions are forms of consciousness, since they have to be “owned” by the organism for them to work properly. 37. See Paul McCartney’s guarded admission that several songs from the Beatles’ oeuvre were drug inspired: AP, “McCartney: Of Course Those Songs Were about Drugs,” Washington Post, June 3, 2004, p. C02, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-­dyn/articles /A11258-­2004Jun2.html (accessed June 5, 2016). 38. Some meditators claim that they have experienced the empty field consciousness that forms the background of all mental content. It’s hard to know what to make of this. I’ll intone Wittgenstein’s rule from the Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus,” trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (Routledge, 1994). 39. Graham Nash, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life (Crown, 2013), 110. 40. Ibid., 145. 41. Robert Gonzalez, “10 Famous Geniuses and Their Drugs of Choice,” IO9, August 16, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/08/16/10_famous_geniuses_who_used_drugs_and _were_better_off_for_it_partner/ (accessed May 5, 2016). 42. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, 1990). Also see Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial, 2014). 43. Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not to Try (Crown, 2014) is a helpful tour of the pre-­ Buddhist Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Daoism.

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44. Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (repr., Penguin, 1971), 15. 45. The Buddha, in the Samyutta Nikaya (35.206), offers a simile of “The Six Animals.” Imagine, he says, that your six senses (remember that the mind is also considered a sense in Buddhism) are like six different animals: a snake, crocodile, bird, dog, hyena, and monkey. Imagine now that each animal is bound on its own rope leash, but all of the ropes are tied together in a central knot. Since each of these animals has its own respective habitat, they will all pull, crawl, or fly toward that habitat home. The crocodile will struggle to get to the water, the bird to the air, the monkey to the forest, and so on. But when the animals become exhausted and can no longer struggle, they will submit and surrender to whichever animal happens to be strongest on that day. This, according to the Buddha, is what it’s like to live without mindfulness. Our senses are drawn toward their particular pleasures, and we haphazardly pursue whatever is momentarily strongest. We are locked in an internal struggle—a roped-­up six-­animal “tug of war.” Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom Publications, 2000). The solution, according to the Buddha, is to live in the present without attachment and slavery to sensual and intellectual cravings. He says that you should take your six animals and tether them to a strong stake or pole. In this way, they will still struggle for their respective pleasures, but they will grow tired and then stand, sit, or lie down right there next to the stake. The discipline and restraint of mindfulness brings this peacefulness, this equanimity. For many of the Beats and other Western artists, poetry itself is a kind of mindful meditation. Most of them agreed that art is a therapeutic process. But is the therapy designed to celebrate the self or annihilate the self ? There is a Romantic strain in the Beat ethos (and Western artists generally)—one that always accompanies bohemian cultures no matter what decade or century. It’s this Romantic tendency to celebrate the individual and see art as narcissistic expression (i.e., the misunderstood genius) that makes an uneasy partner with the Buddhist strain in Beat culture—a strain that tries to root out and dissolve the ego into emptiness (sunyata). As Coleridge saw, however, there is deeper resolution to the tension between the self-­interest of Romanticism and the self-­annihilation of mysticism. Recall our earlier quote in this chapter: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” For the more enlightened Romantic, that self which is discovered in the authentic act of creation is the boundless cosmic self (simultaneously Atman and Brahman), not the petty self of a human personality, twitching for a spasm of narcissistic expression. 46. The DMN was named as such in 2001. Marcus E. Raichle et al., “A Default Mode of the Brain Function,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, no. 2 (2001): 676–82. 47. “Heather Berlin on Genius and Creativity” Big Think, http://bigthink.com/videos /heather-­berlin-­on-­genius-­and-­creativity (accessed June 7, 2016). 48. Judson A. Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 50 (2011): 20254–59. 49. First, sitting quietly and focusing on the breath as it moves in and out, the Bud-

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dha was able to quiet the mind and body. In this jhana, one detaches from the usual sense desires and moves inward to watch the bubbling flow of thought itself. This first jhana is accompanied by feelings of delight and pleasure. From here, one moves to the second jhana—the cessation of thought itself. The constant discourse inside our mind, running like an incessant commentary on all experience, is finally silenced. When the inner discourse finally shuts up, one has arrived in the second jhana. This trance state is still accompanied by a refined sense of delight and joy. But now, one is able to move to an even deeper level of concentration. In the third jhana, the active feeling of joy ( piti)—which is like a form of rapture—evaporates and leaves behind only the awareness of happiness (sukha). Finally even this sukha passes away and, in the fourth jhana, only the purest equanimity, empty awareness, remains. The mind has been utterly cleansed. Samadhi meditation is a prized form of mental training in Buddhism because it gives greater powers of concentration to the practitioner. It also reveals the deficiency or conventionality of the usual subject/object (knower/known) distinction. In ordinary consciousness, we are always separate from the object of our experience—separated by words and labels (symbols and signs), separated by mental representations (ideas), and even separated by sensual representations (sense data impressions). Jhana meditation empties the mind of its usual representational activity and gives the practitioner an awareness that is beyond the usual subject/object duality. But for all those impressive achievements, jhana meditation was not the breakthrough technique for the Buddha. The problem with jhana meditation, according to Gautama, was that it did not have the practical insight (vipassana) to overcome the problem of suffering in our daily lives. Jhana meditation is a great head trip, but we need something else to help find peace in our day-­to-­day lives. 50. According to the Mahasatipatthana sutta, a Buddhist should look at her body in a clinical detached way. “Just as if a skilled butcher, having slaughtered a cow, were to sit with the carcass divided into portions, so a monk reviews his own body . . . in terms of its elements.” My body is made up of chemicals, like everything else, and these are capable of rearrangement into new forms, or eventual decay. “Again, a monk, as if he were to see a corpse in a charnel-­ground, thrown aside, eaten by crows, hawks or vultures, by dogs or jackals, or various other creatures, compares his own body with that, thinking: ‘This body is of the same nature, it will become like that, it is not exempt from that fate.’” Maurice Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya (Simon and Schuster, 2005). 51. Stephen Asma, The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha (repr., HarperOne, 2006). 52. For a discussion of the Apollo and Dionysus cults in ancient Greece, see E. R. Dodds’s still classic text The Greeks and the Irrational (University of California Press, 1997). 53. Jing Lu et al., “The Brain Functional State of Music Creation: An fMRI Study of Composers,” Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 12277 (2015). 54. An fMRI study by Rachel Smith et al. shows that mind wandering can be done with or without awareness. Subjects who are deeply immersed in mind wandering and unaware of it show activation of the temporal cortex—suggesting strong interaction with

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long-­term memory (a reservoir of representations), but reduced frontality. By contrast, when the subject is aware that they are mind wandering, their lateral prefrontal cortex is activated. These researchers, however, warn that we should not easily equate mind wandering with the default mode network (DMN), as it seems to have so many executive aspects too. See R. Smith et al., “Mind-­Wandering with and without Awareness: An fMRI Study of Spontaneous Thought Processes,” Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 804–9. 55. Aaron L. Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment (Oxford University Press, 2010). 56. Charles Limb and Allen Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLOS ONE 3, no. 2 (2008): e1679. 57. Gabriel F. Donnay et al., “Neural Substrates of Interactive Musical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of ‘Trading Fours’ in Jazz,” PLOS ONE 9, no. 2 (2014), http://journals.plos .org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088665 (accessed June 7, 2016). 58. Claire Landsbaum, “What a Neuroscientist Said about Eminem’s Brain,” Science of Us, March 3, 2015, http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/03/what-­a-­neuroscientist-­said -­about-­eminems-­brain.html (accessed June 7, 2016). 59. A. Dietrich, “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness: The Transient Hypofrontality Hypothesis,” Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003): 231–56. 60. Cal Fussman, “Woody Allen: What I’ve Learned,” Esquire, August 8, 2013, http:// www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a24203/woody-­allen- ­0 913/ (accessed June 7, 2016). 61. Donnay et al., “Neural Substrates of Interactive Musical Improvisation.” 62. The social improvisation is characterized by activation of language areas linked to processing of syntactic elements in music, including inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, and deactivation of angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus, brain structures directly implicated in semantic processing of language. 63. Donnay et al., “Neural Substrates of Interactive Musical Improvisation.” 64. See M. Ritsner, The Handbook of Neuropsychiatric Biomarkers, and Endophenotypes and Genes (Springer, 2009), 20. 65. A. Dijksterhuis, “Think Different: The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Preference Development and Decision Making,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (2004): 586–98. 66. Dijksterhuis’s research is not without controversy, and some researchers have not been able to replicate his findings. See Alison Abbott, “Disputed Results a Fresh Blow for Social Psychology,” Nature News, April 30, 2013, http://www.nature.com/news/disputed -­results-­a-­fresh-­blow-­for-­social-­psychology-­1.12902 (accessed June 7, 2016). 67. See Orison Swett Marden’s interview with Alexander Graham Bell in Marden’s How They Succeeded (Lothrop Publishing, 1901), 33. 68. Benjamin Baird et al., “Inspired by Distraction Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation,” Psychological Science (2012), http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012 /08/31/0956797612446024.abstract (accessed June 7, 2016). 69. Benjamin W. Mooneyham and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Costs and Benefits of

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Mind-­Wandering: A Review,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 67, no. 1 (2013): 14. 70. Here I’m following the path laid down by Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002). Atran articulates these three mental categories as a common evolutionary landscape. I disagree with his characterization of the emotions as “modules,” however, and think that the systems approach of affective neuroscience (e.g., Jaak Panksepp’s work) is more accurate and changes the analysis of culture significantly. See Asma, The Need for Religion (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Also, here I add the other obvious “landmark” of an embodied landscape—namely, the ecological niche, broadly understood to include changing niches, resource challenges, and so on. 71. It’s at least possible that the sensus divinitatis is found within the stream-­state domain. There is nothing in the storied tradition of sensus divinitatis to rule out the stream state as its true field of being, and plenty of psychedelic description within the mystical literature to warrant the assignment. 72. Emmons’s research is not necessarily a confirmation of the recently popular view, developed by Paul Bloom in Descartes’ Baby, that all children are “natural dualists.” Bloom and others have argued that the ubiquity of very early dualist assumptions in babies suggests that mind/body dualism is innate rather than learned. Emmons’s research suggests that children have a different way of carving up their own subjectivity, such that their independence from bodily existence is not intelligence-­based but feeling/desire-­based. See Natalie Emmons, “Immortality Instinct,” Aeon, July 2015, http://aeon.co/magazine/psy chology/is-­the-­feeling-­that-­were-­immortal-­innate/ (accessed June 7, 2016). 73. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Cambridge University Press and British Museum, 1987), 551. 74. F. Echenhofer, “Ayahuasca Shamanic Visions,” in A Field Guide to a New Meta-­Field: Bridging the Humanities—Neurosciences Divide, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford (University of Chicago Press, 2011). 75. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Also see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (HarperCollins Publishers, 1999). 76. The compositional creative phase sounds reminiscent of Freud’s later theory on the Eros (and Thanatos) dynamic. Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, Civilization and Its Discontents (W. W. Norton, 2005). 77. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990). 78. Donald O. Hebb, “On the Nature of Fear,” Psychological Review 53, no. 5 (1946); Wolfgang Schleidt, Michael D. Shalter, and Humberto Moura-­Neto, “The Hawk/Goose Story: The Classical Ethological Experiments of Lorenz and Tinbergen, Revisited,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 125, no. 2 (2011). 79. Mary D. Salter Ainsworth and Silvia M. Bell, “Attachment, Exploration, and Separation: Illustrated by the Behavior of One-­Year-­Olds in a Strange Situation,” Child Development (1970): 49–67.

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80. Robert Thurman, The Jewel Tree of Tibet (Atria Books, 2006), 1. 81. Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi): Basic Writings (Columbia University Press, 1996), 47. 82. Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (Basic Books, 1997), 80. CHAPTER SIX

1. See Carly Fiorina’s interview at the Iowa Freedom Summit (published January 24, 2015) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwCMoxnoK78 (accessed on June 7, 2016). 2. See Tongdong Bai’s The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012) for a nuanced comparative analysis of the roots of Western and Eastern political philosophies. 3. Daniel Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2015). 4. In this regard, and in many others, the Red Guard tradition of public criticism is not a reflection of traditional Chinese culture. 5. Alexander Harney, “China’s Copycat Culture,” New York Times, October 31, 2011, http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/chinas-­copycat-­culture/?_r=0 (accessed June 7, 2016). 6. Andrew B. Kipnis, Governing Educational Desire (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 68. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-­Reliance and Other Essays (Dover, 1993), 36. 8. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 62. 9. Buddhism itself, when considered historically, can be considered as a kind of bohemian counterculture traveler. At its birth, it came kicking and screaming against dominant Hindu society. But even when it traveled north into China and south to Sri Lanka, it came up against entrenched hierarchic indigenous ideologies. 10. Confucius (Kongzi), The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (Penguin, 1979), XV.31. 11. Karl Marx, A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 of Capital (Penguin Classics, 1992), 198. 12. See Vijay Govindarajan’s “Innovation Is Not Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, August 3, 2010. 13. Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (Unwin, 1963). 14. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Bloomsbury, 2011). 15. Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (Penguin, 2014). 16. Along with the wonderful desire for excellence that the tiger program instills in children, there is another troubling dimension as well. Chinese parents unwittingly instill in their offspring the feeling that they are never good enough. It’s the opposite problem of American parenting, which over-­coddles and affirms everything our kids do. American kids make up for their lack of skills with boundless self-­esteem. This can make them very fragile when failures eventually come along. But the tiger program creates a different problem. Chinese kids are tough and modest about their own copious skills, but they also never feel entirely accepted, acknowledged, or esteemed. In fact, one reason why Chris-

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tianity seems to be exploding in China is because it offers the privately soothing balm that “you are somebody” and “Jesus loves you,” even if you were undistinguished and unremarkable in school and career (the face-­saving public arena of Chinese success). 17. Kant offers three different formulations of the categorical imperative. The first formulation is “Act only accordingly to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.” The second formulation is “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.” And the final formation is “Every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.” Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Hackett, 1993). There are many arguments against Kant’s ethics in general and the lying case in particular, including the fact that language only needs partial reliability to function quite well as a communication system. Also, as many philosophers have pointed out, application of the universalizing categorical imperative to most other mundane dilemmas (e.g., should I do my laundry at midnight on Monday?) also leads to weird moral violations. Jean-­Paul Sartre also demonstrates the vapid nature of the categorical imperative when applied to concrete dilemmas, in his essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” But I am not interested here in detailing the many counterarguments to Kant’s philosophy. I am obviously much more sympathetic to the tradition that grounds ethics in emotion. 18. Some philosophers believe it is impossible, or at least gauche, to derive an ethical “ought” from a factual “is,” but careful reflection reveals this belief to be a leftover of pseudo-­religious theories about two worlds (facts vs. values, or phenomena vs. noumena, or mechanism vs. purpose, or mundane vs. divine). As a thoroughgoing naturalist, however, I reject the two-­world assumption and find these traditional binaries less dichotomous than others imagine. 19. Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong (Harper Perennial, 2007). 20. William Saletan, “Mind Makes Right,” Slate, March 31, 2007. Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has published many studies that show brain correlations in emotional and cognitive processing. His lab is very active in exploring neural substrates for moral reasoning/ emoting. See his website for an extensive bibliography of papers: http://www.emotion .caltech.edu/. 21. See Stephen Asma, Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2012) for an argument in favor of two such evolved systems. But I take an agnostic position there regarding the modularity status of these two systems. 22. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2012). 23. Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” Nature 425 (2003): 297–99. 24. See Kent Berridge “Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience Psychology Laboratory,” Inquiry 52, no. 4 (2009): 378–98. And Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2004).

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25. Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (Norton, 2012). 26. My suspicion is that fairness is a latecomer on the evolutionary stage. Hierarchically arranged animal groups would distribute food on a different model than egalitarianism. Dominant animals get more and subordinates get less—that is a different kind of fairness—a meritocracy notion of just deserts. Presumably dominant animals do more to further the survival of the group. But even before this early social system of resource distribution, blood ties must have trumped most competing claims on resources. I suspect that true fairness developed in tandem with the cognitive advances of Homo neocortical evolution. A contentious debate in the evolution of mind is whether animals need cognitive skills (i.e., theory of mind, or intentional stance, etc.) in order to recognize the agency of other creatures. Or are these complex social hierarchies navigated instead by precognitive skills (i.e., sensory-­motor and affective patterns)? This is relevant to the question of how fairness might have evolved. Does an animal have to have a theory of intentions to recognize that its tribal conspecific is experiencing a fair or unfair distribution of resources? Or are non-­theoretical emotional expectations enough to generate a social system of reciprocity and then fairness? 27. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin, 1995). 28. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, in Mr. Maugham Himself (1938; repr., Doubleday, 1954), 673. 29. Kateri McRae et al., “Gender Differences in Emotion Regulation: An fMRI Study of Cognitive Reappraisal,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 11, no. 2 (2008): 143–62. 30. Henri Tajfel, Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 31. Allen W. Johnson and Timothy K. Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Stanford University Press, 2000). 32. President Obama’s Xavier University Commencement Address, August 11, 2006. http://obamaspeeches.com/087-­Xavier-­University- ­Commencement-­Address- ­Obama -­Speech.htm (accessed June 7, 2016). 33. See Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy,” Boston Review, September 10, 2014. 34. See my argument about the psycho-­physical constraints of care, “The Myth of Universal Love,” The Stone, New York Times, January 5, 2013. 35. Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Penguin, 2009). 36. Affective neuroscience—including research by Jaak Panksepp, Richard Davidson, and others—has converged on the idea that care is actually a mammal emotion, part chemical, part psychological. 37. Our tribes of kith and kin are “affective communities,” and this unique emotional connection with our favorites entails great generosity and selfless loyalty. There’s an upper limit to our tribal emotional expansion, and that limit is a good deal lower than the “biosphere.” 38. Philosopher Jesse Prinz offers a compelling conceptual clarification of empathy. It is often assumed to be a species of prosocial care, but it may be an intrinsically neutral

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mirroring ability. Perhaps empathy is not an emotion per se, but an ability to share or mirror an emotion. On this account, empathy is the mirror itself, and it simply reproduces whatever comes before it. It comes with no preset value settings or normative content. As such, empathy would be a precondition for downstream evaluations (e.g., moral reasoning and behavior), but not the font of goodwill. I find this argument compelling, and if true it may be that empathy is the same simulation system I’ve been sketching throughout this book, but with regards to special ethically normative content. Jesse Prinz, “Against Empathy,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 49, Spindel Supplement, 2011. 39. Scott Atran, “Jihad’s Fatal Attraction,” The Guardian, September 4, 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/04/jihad-­fatal-­attraction-­challenge -­democracies-­isis-­barbarism (accessed June 7, 2016). 40. George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf,” New English Weekly, March 21, 1940. 41. Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice (MIT Press, 2012). 42. Ibid., 69. 43. John Dewey’s pragmatic A Common Faith tries to preserve aspects of religious experience, while jettisoning the troubling metaphysics. In this admirable work, he laid down a template for both today’s moderate skeptics and interfaith optimists. Unfortunately, Dewey’s road has failed to accommodate the robust chain between denominational metaphysics and meaning, and more recent kindred spirits have agreed to celebrate merely aesthetic and ethical aspects of religion while denouncing the magic as reprehensible or primitive. These purely diplomatic maneuvers have been stopgap measures, and do not get to the heart of the tension. Dewey’s insight, that almost anything can be “religious” if we understand its unique blend of enthusiasm and existential scope, needs to be updated and revitalized with recent insights from social psychology, neuroscience, and cross-­cultural philosophy. 44. William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays (Dover, 1960), 13. 45. I have lived in China on and off for several years. These days, more Chinese than American intellectuals are familiar with John Dewey’s philosophy, and the interest is growing rapidly. Many translations of Dewey’s writings are currently under way on the mainland, and there have also been recent conferences on Dewey’s philosophy in Beijing and Shanghai. Indeed, my own undergraduate Chinese students all knew about John Dewey, while my American undergrads have no idea who he is. The current renaissance of Dewey and pragmatism in China stresses the secular ethics dimension as a way to remind a growing wealthy class of the common good. Chinese people have been atheists for thousands of years, and pragmatism is very congenial with the deeply secular Confucian ethic. When I asked my Beijing students recently to explain Chinese pragmatism to me, I expected them to cite Deng Xiaoping’s famous dismissal of economic ideology: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.” But they went all the way back to Confucius and reminded me that when Kongzi was asked how we should best serve the ghosts and spirits, he replied that we should first figure out how to serve human beings. Only after we solve the problems of the here and now should we worry about the supernatural realm. Many dogmatists cling to an absolute notion of ethics because there is no clear way to adjudicate among competing notions of the good. For them, opening the door to impro-

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visation is a slippery slope to relativism. But just because we cannot find an eternal measure of the good that finally resolves cultural moral disagreement does not mean that we are powerless to judge between them. The solution is context. The ethical life is not the bureaucratic application of fixed rules to real-­life dilemmas, nor is it a mystical intuition of transcendental truth. The improviser is not composing the ethical life in some unconstrained self-­serving manner—a charge often leveled by the bureaucratic moralists. Rather, we can make reasonable judgments at the personal and political level by combining historical and cultural understanding with basic objective facts about human biology. Combining historical, cultural, and biological knowledge informs our deep conviction that concentration camps are bad. But other ethical disagreements are less clear. For these, we will have to improvise “step by step.” Mozhe shitou guo he is a Chinese idiom that Deng Xiaoping used to describe how China should move forward. Without any obvious road map, historical precedent, or abstract idealism, China was to move into the future slowly and carefully—like when you “ford a river by feeling each of the stones with your feet” (Mozhe shitou guo he). That is improvisational state-­craft, and the effects have been better than ideological approaches. 46. Tanya Lurhmann, When God Talks Back (Vintage, 2012), 73. 47. Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson, “Voluntary Smiling Changes Regional Brain Activity,” Psychological Science 4, no. 5 (1993): 342–45. 48. Liam Neeson learning to be a stand-­up on BBC’s Life’s Too Short, uploaded on November 17, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqA577_IoBk (accessed on June 7, 2016). 49. My discussion of historical counterfactionalism is informed by Rebecca Onion’s excellent article “What If ?,” Aeon, December 8, 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/what-­if-­his torians-­started-­taking-­the-­what-­if-­seriously (accessed June 7, 2016). 50. Nota bene, neither I nor any of these counterfactual historians are total skeptics about objective history. The point of these counterfactual scenarios is not to suggest relativism and the impossibility of objectivity. Rather, counterfactual histories bring underlying assumptions and agendas into greater focus, such that more complete, accurate, and objective histories can be written and understood. 51. Onion, “What If ?” 52. George Herbert Mead, “The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting,” International Journal of Ethics 40, no. 2 (1930): 211–31. 53. See Susie Neilson’s fascinating story of convict Johnny Perez, who used imagination to survive the deprivations of prison life. “How to Survive Solitary Confinement,” Nautilus, January 2016, http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/how-­to-­survive-­solitary -­confinement (accessed May 5, 2016). 54. Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education (Princeton University Press, 2016). 55. Gambetta and Hertog were intrigued that many jihadists had engineering backgrounds, and they argue that this is correlation not cause. Nonetheless, the correlation is not trivial or accidental. The inflexible mind-­set is the shared trait between religious fundamentalists and certain kinds of engineers, and this produces the odd correlation.

: INDEX :

Abhidhamma, 296nn28–29 ACC (anterior cingulate cortex), 67, 206 access consciousness, 181–82, 192 Acheulean, 96, 133, 156, 180 adaptive body modeling: adaptive improvisation’s origin in hot cognition, 73; deductive problem solving, 71; fast vs. slow processing of information, 70; heuristic problem solving, 70–71; heuristic’s role in decision making, 71–72; hot and cold cognition systems, 69–70 Adolphs, Ralph, 295n13, 304n20 “advance and expand” exercise, 51 affect, 23–24 affective neuroscience, 6, 75, 79, 184, 195– 96, 301n70, 305n36 Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp), 79 Age of Insight (Kandel), 12, 149

Ainsworth, Mary, 220 Alexander the Great, 147–48 Alien (Scott), 120, 164 Alison Lapper Pregnant (Quinn), 280n22 Allen, Woody, 208 Anemone, Anthony, 279n9 animism, 157, 214 anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), 67, 206 anterior vermis, 60 Apollonian states, 205, 223 arachnophobia, 220 Archaeology, 292n38 arch schema, 92 Aristotle, 2, 4, 32, 45–46, 119, 161, 191, 250 Arrival, The (Tan), 122 art: affect management role, 251–52, 254–55, 260; appearances of with regard to language, 12, 96–97, 138; calland-response meaning and, 11; call

308 : INDEX

art (continued ) for uniqueness in American efforts, 235, 236; cave paintings, 95–96, 101–2, 103, 104; element of imagination in, 3–4, 107, 120, 166, 167; element of social interaction in, 11; impetus for creativity and, 241; knowledge production and, 172; mimetic balance in artistic creations, 2, 190; perceptual sophistication needed to create a sculpture, 99–100; Picasso’s process, 93; second universe of artists, 39; seen as separate from knowledge, 105, 232; spontaneity and, 17–18, 51; therapeutic process of, 298n45; Venus figurines, 42, 43, 97, 100. See also drawing; jazz “ask for” exercise, 51 Atran, Scott, 259, 301n70 autistic children, 103, 127, 128 automatism, 117 axial schema, 92 ayahuasca, 216–18 Balachandra, Lakshmi, 52 Bard, Kim, 66 Barrett, Louise, 10 Barsalou, Lawrence, 112, 288n30 Barton, Robert, 64, 65, 114 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Chua), 242 battle trance, 62 Baudelaire, Charles, 149 Bayes, Thomas, 287n27 Bayesian models of intelligence, 112, 287–88n27 Beats, 199, 201, 298n45 behavioral parsing, 65 Bell, Alexander Graham, 211 Berkeley, George, 113 Berkowitz, Aaron, 206, 207 Berlin, Heather, 202 Berlin, Isaiah, 190 Berridge, Kent, 249 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 205

Block, Ned, 181, 197 Bloom, Paul, 256–57, 301n72 Bosch, Hieronymus, 120 Brahmin, 143, 156, 157 Brang, D., 107 Braun, Allen, 207 Breton, André, 117 Brewer, Judson, 202 Broca’s area, 185 Brooks, Max, 292n38 Brosnan, Sarah, 249 Brown, James, 155 Brown, Steven, 60 Bryant, Greg, 61 Buddha, 176 Buddhism, Chan, 236–37 Buddhism, Tibetan: allowance for creativity, 236–37; argument that all things are interconnected, 194; fictional self in Buddhist philosophy, 193–94, 296–97nn28–29; levels of reality in, 193–94, 296n28; meditation states of the Buddha, 203, 299n49; mindfulness and, 200–201, 298n45; paradox in creativity, 178, 224–26; story of Gautama’s three experiences, 255–56; therapeutic uses of the imagination in, 221–22; understanding of the body, 203, 299–300n50; viewed as a liberal philosophy, 237, 302n9 Burke, Johnny, 131 Burke, Timothy, 268 business improv, 52 Butler, Marilyn, 279n14 Capital (Marx), 239 capitalism: China and, 232, 237–38; creativity in a culture and, 238–41; innovation and, 232; moral imagination and, 259–60 captain model of imaginative improvisation, 26, 27 care system, 258–59, 305n27

INDEX : 309

Carpenter, Malinda, 178 Carroll, Joseph, 152 Carroll, Noël, 219 categorical imperative of Kant, 245–46, 303n17 category jamming, 121–22, 219–20 cave painting, 95–96, 101, 103, 104 centralized state of mind: access consciousness, 181–82, 192; adaptive theories of consciousness, 183–84, 293n5; awareness of self in animals, 182–83; category jamming and, 219–20; cerebral localization of cognitive abilities, 186, 187; climate change and, 185–86, 294n8; first-person perspective and, 181; layers of the brain, 184–85; modular-mind debate and, 294n8; phenomenal consciousness and, 181, 184, 192, 225; prefrontal cortex and self-control, 186, 295n13; question of what brain functions support selfconsciousness, 183; reentry phase of imaginative work (see reentry phase); representational thinking and the prefrontal cortex, 186; self-consciousness and, 182, 197; stream state vs., 180–81; subsuming of involuntary impressions under voluntary projects, 162–64; types of consciousness, 181–82. See also insight flashes; self, the cerebellum, 60, 64 Chan Buddhism, 236–37 Chauvet caves, 95, 103, 104 children: Chinese view of childhood, 242–43; imagination and improvisation in childhood play, 82–84; imprinting and the mother/child bond, 290n13; innate belief in immortality, 215, 301n72; stages in the development of drawings, 126–27; toddlers’ inability to synchronize movements, 59–60; transition to visual realism in drawing, 127–28, 289n43

chimpanzees: cerebellum expansion, 64, 185; evolution of visual art, 102; improv demonstrations, 18, 278n1; inability to synchronize movements, 59; innate phobias, 221; lack of collaboration, 178; maternal bonding in, 81–82; sense of self, 183; simulation abilities, 66; social learning by, 65–66. See also primates China: capitalism and, 232, 237–38; conservative Confucian view of knowledge, 234; creativity gap, 234–35; cultural differences with the United States, 232–33; current beliefs in a causal connection between fetal health and the mother’s emotions, 35, 280n17; existing philosophies that allow creativity, 236–37; focus on non-humanities academic disciplines, 243–44; improvisational element in its economic system, 265, 306n45; inflexibility of the Chinese parenting style, 244, 303n16; parents’ education philosophy, 242, 244, 303n16; potential for China to become more creative, 237–38; preference for stability over innovation, 231, 237–38; psychological cost of Chinese education philosophy, 303n16; traditions of oral storytelling, 152; value placed on improvisation and imagination, 231–34; view of childhood, 242–43; view of education, 232–33. See also Buddhism, Tibetan Chomsky, Noam, 79, 135, 136, 294n8 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 252 Chua, Amy, 242, 244 Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, 19 Cicero, 259 Clapton, Eric, 26 climate change, 185–86, 294n8 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 93 cognitive fluidity, 9

310 : INDEX

cold cognition: centralized consciousness and, 182; conscious suppressing of, 87, 210; deductive problem solving, 71; evolution of, 88, 119, 185–86; imagination’s pathways and, 168–69, 174; language improvisation and, 146, 173–74; moral modules and, 248; social bonding and, 230; stream state and, 223, 224; system workings, 69–70, 72, 73, 87–88. See also adaptive body modeling; hot cognition Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 190–91, 298n45 comedy: association with improv, 52, 170; example of improvisation in, 1; functional promiscuousness of, 22; grammar of stories and, 152; knowledge production and, 172; reliable clichés use, 21. See also humor Common Faith, A (Dewey), 305n43 community. See sociopolitical imagination Conard, Nicholas J., 95 Confucius. See Kongzi (Confucius) Congo (chimp), 102 connectionism, 288n27 consciousness: adaptive theories of, 183– 84, 293n5; human proto-­consciousness and dreams, 106, 110–11; self-­ consciousness, 182–83; types of, 181–82 consequentialism, 246–47, 249–50 Coote, Jeremy, 96 Cornell, Joseph, 123 Cosmides, Leda, 79, 294n8 counterfactual thinking: adaptive nature of, 115; alternative histories and, 267– 69, 307n50; cognitive fluidity and, 9, 157; creation of possibilities by, 40–43, 149, 169–70, 190; executive control in, 110; in religions, 158, 213, 265–66 count-off, 16–17 creative body: collective functions of dance, 57–58; coordinated signaling using dance, 61–62; embodied cognition and (see embodied cognition);

emotional intelligence and, 86–89; imitation through mimicry (see simulation system); neuroscience of dancing, 60–61; parallel between rhythmic drums and body movement, 56; prehistorical use of adaptive synchronized motions, 62; pre-sapiens’ communication through gestures and mimicry, 84–85; relationship between dance and emotional management, 57, 63; representations of abstract concepts using bodily experiences, 56–57; spontaneous improvisation and, 62; synchronized movement and, 61–62; theory of mind and, 84–85, 283n21, 283n27; uniqueness of entrainment to humans, 58–60 creativity: allowance for in Buddhism, 236–37; brain-­switching process in, 209; capitalism and, 239–41; conditions conducive to, 240–41; controlling through self-agency (see self, the); creativity gap in China, 234–35; data on primate creativity, 277n1; economic culture and, 238; focus of books on, 8; imagination and, 1, 2, 4, 5; impetus for art and, 241; localization in the brain, 6; mechanisms behind imaginative thoughts, 124; meditation and mindfulness and, 204–5; models of, 26–27; paradox in, 178, 224–26; relation to serotonin levels, 107; religious mythology’s reliance on imagination and, 157–59; resource deficiency and, 19; role of goals in, 5; stream state of mind and, 27 Crick, Francis, 183, 198 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 178, 199 Dalí, Salvador, 39, 149 Damasio, Antonio, 77–78, 195, 196, 287n24, 297n35 Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues (Guy), 48

INDEX : 311

dance: ability to communicate environmental information, 58; appeal of synchronized body movement, 58; collective functions of, 57–58; coordinated signaling using, 61–62; as a demonstration of our fitness to potential mates, 58; evolution of synchronized movement, 61–62; idea that it is a communication system, 208; investigation into knowing through, 63; parallels between the “grammar” of dance and the grammar of language, 137–38; prehistorical use of adaptive synchronized motions, 62; relationship to emotional management, 57; spontaneous improvisation and, 62; uniqueness of entrainment to humans, 58–60. See also creative body Daoism, 236–37 Darwin, Charles, 29, 34, 40, 130, 216, 280n16 David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, 185, 294n8 Davidson, Richard, 267, 305n36 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 166, 167 Davis, Miles, 1, 2, 14 De Anima (Aristotle), 45–46 Decety, Jean, 187 deep-grammar language theory, 79, 126, 136, 294n8 default mode network (DMN), 202, 206, 207, 209 Delson, Eric, 95 Dennett, Daniel, 25, 130, 195, 225 deontological ethics, 245–46, 303n17 Descartes, 192–93 Descartes’ Baby (Bloom), 301n72 developmental psychology, 7, 69, 97, 126, 246 Dewey, John, 90, 160, 236, 263, 264–65, 305n43, 306n45 Dharma Bums (Kerouac), 199 Dick, Philip K., 267

Dickens, Charles, 252 Diddley, Bo, 47, 48 Dietrich, Arne, 207 Dijksterhuis, Ap, 210 dinosaurs, 285n40 Dion, Mark, 123 Dionysian states, 205, 223 DMN (default mode network), 202, 206, 207, 209 Donnay, G. F., 207, 208 dopamine, 58 Dor, Daniel, 144 Dracula (Stoker), 292n36 Draw-a-Man test, 128, 289n43 drawing: archaeological timeline of, 99–100; children’s transition to visual realism in, 127–28; conceptual processes needed for, 97–98; figurative cave art, 95–96, 101, 103, 104; perceptual aspects of, 98, 100; stages in the development of drawings, 126–27; tethered and untethered improvisation in, 101–2; visual thinking and, 94. See also art dreams: components and processes in, 165; contribution of dreams to waking interactions, 119; current dream psychology’s view of involuntary imagination, 118; evolution of proto-­ imagination to imagination and, 165–66; human proto-consciousness and, 106, 110–11; neurochemistry of the brain when dreaming, 106–7; phases of dreaming, 166; self-­agency while dreaming, 166; teleology of, 110–11; utility of dream activity, 108– 9, 287n24 Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, 52 Dunbar, Robin, 63, 139 Durkheim, Emile, 142, 214 Dutch Hunger Winter, 37 Dutton, Denis, 152

312 : INDEX

Echenhofer, Frank, 216 Edelman, Gerald, 284n37, 287n24 Edison, Thomas, 166 education: Chinese view of, 232–33, 242, 244, 303n16; Dewey’s views on, 264– 65, 306n45; role of imagination and improvisation in, 270, 271; U.S. view of, 232, 233, 264–65 Einstein, Albert, 40 Ekman, Paul, 267 Elephant Man, 30, 279n8 embodied cognition, 56, 210, 247; cognitive architecture of imagination (see creative body; neuroscience); emotional intelligence and, 89; heuristic problem solving and, 71–72; improvisation and, 87–88; model for how percepts and concepts are integrated in the mind, 119–20; model of knowledge that allows for achieving understanding through, 117; organization of dynamic imagery, 115; sensory simulation system (see simulation system) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 228, 235 Emmons, Natalie, 215, 301n72 emotional intelligence: animals’ ability to read subtle body language, 86; embodied communication and, 87–88; emergence of, 89; impetus of changing family structures in emotional flexibility, 88–89; impetus of ecological extremes in early improvisations, 88; moral improvisation and, 89; of pre-sapiens, 81; role of play in development of, 85 emotion and improvisation: adaptive behavior in childhood play, 82–84; birth date of human cognitive skills, 80–81; computational model of the mind, 77; developed flexibility of our emotional systems, 81–82; dominance of emotion-based life in the history of mammals, 78–79, 81; element of emo-

tional state in improv, 73; embodied imaginative work, 85; environmental change element in brain development, 80; general intelligence theory of brain development, 79–80; module theory of brain development, 79, 80; non-representational nature of emotions, 109; pre-sapiens’ communication through gestures and mimicry, 84–85; questions about the emotional life of dinosaurs and reptiles, 285n40; rational mind’s connection to the limbic brain, 77–78, 79–80; relationship between brain growth and improvisation, 80; somatic marker hypothesis, 78, 284–85n37, 287n24; study of the emotional lives of animals, 75–77; utility of fear in animals, 74–76; utility of lust among animals, 76–77. See also hot cognition Empathic Civilization, The (Rifkin), 257 endorphins, 58 entrainment, 58–60 epigenetics, 28, 37 epinephrine, 58 Escher, M. C., 123 Estep, Dan, 86 ethics and imagination: adaptive response to social life and, 264; argument that care and empathy can solve large-scale social problems, 257–58; art’s role in affect management, 251–52; biology of empathy and care, 257; categorical imperative in deontological ethics, 245– 46, 303n17; connection between social norms and religion, 245; consequentialism’s evolutionary formulation, 249–50; consequentialism’s reliance on imaginative prediction, 246–47; consideration of a fairness module in primates, 249, 304n26; correspondence between ethics and cognitive control, 248, 304n20; developmental

INDEX : 313

origin of ethics, 246, 303–4n18; divine command view in religions and, 245; dogmatists’ difficulty with adapting to change, 306n45; empathetic simulation through imagining situations, 254–56; imagination’s role in moral motivation, 254–56; imaginative stories used to inspire prosocial affect, 252; imaginative thinking’s moral neutrality, 259–60, 305n38; improvisational approach to pragmatism and, 260–61; limits of as a basis for philanthropy, 256–57; limits to care as an emotional resource, 258–59, 305n27; therapeutic effect of positive visualization, 253; utilitarian morality module hypothesis, 247–49, 250; virtue ethics’ allowance for improvisational flexibility, 250–51 Ethnicity and Disability Fact Book, 35 evolutionary psychologists, 10, 71, 216; cognitive fluidity and, 9, 277n1; failure to consider environmental changes, 80; failure to consider social needs of primates, 8, 230; module theory of brain development and, 7, 56, 70, 79, 220, 247, 294n8; theory of mind appearance and, 84–85, 144 failure tolerance, 241–42 fairness, 249, 304n26 FFA (fusiform face area), 94 Fiorina, Carly, 231 first-person perspective. See centralized state of mind; self, the flint knapping, 22, 41, 42, 45, 99, 100 flow psychology, 278n5 Frankenstein (Shelley), 34 free will, 128–29, 180, 289n44 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 39, 117, 118, 161, 214 Fridrich, Jessica, 71 Fu, Belinda, 51, 52 functional promiscuousness, 22

fusiform face area (FFA), 94 Fuster, Joaquin, 186 Gage, Phineas, 186, 187 Gallese, Vittorio, 283n25 Gallup, Gordon, 182–83 Gambetta, Diego, 270, 271, 307n55 gap-fill schema, 92–93 Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), 120 Gates, Bill, 198 Gautama, 194, 255–56 general intelligence theory of brain development, 79–80 Generation of Animals (Aristotle), 32 Geoffroy, Isidore and Étienne, 34 Gervais, Ricky, 267 Ghana, 36 Giger, H. R., 120, 149 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 71, 72 Goldman-Rakic, Patricia, 186 Goodenough, Florence, 128, 289n43 Go Set a Watchman (Lee), 250 Gottschall, Jonathan, 152 Gould, Stephen Jay, 277n1 Govindarajan, Vijay, 239–40 grammar: deep-grammar language theory, 79, 126, 136, 294n8; of jazz music, 137; meaning of the grammar developed by imagination, 218; parallels between the “grammar” of music and dance and the grammar of language, 137–38; task grammar system in language, 137; theory of a universal grammar for stories, 152; underlying grammar in the ayahuasca journey, 217; universality of image grammar, 116 Gray, Patricia, 59 Guy, Buddy, 27, 47, 48 Habib, Malim Abdul, 292n40 Hagen, Edward, 61 Haidt, Jonathan, 248 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 194

3 14 : INDEX

Harlequin’s Carnival (Miró), 120 Harris, Dale B., 128 Harvard Business School, 52 Hassabis, Demis, 111 Hebb, Donald, 220 Hertog, Steffen, 270, 271, 307n55 Hetts, Suzanne, 86 Heyes, Cecilia, 66, 67 Hindus. See India hip-hop freestyle, 1, 3, 207, 230 hippocampus, 107–8 Hirst, Damien, 123 Hobaiter, Catherine, 65 Homo erectus: ability to imagine an image, 41, 42; ecological changes forcing adaptations, 88; emotional intelligence of, 81; evidence of figurative art, 102; evolution of play and, 83; imaginative prediction and, 16; impetus for brain expansion, 185, 186; involuntary simulation and, 165; processing of waking life, 109; proto-imagination of, 180; storytelling by, 134; synchronized movement and, 61, 62. See also Pleistocene era Homo sapiens: cognitive fluidity and, 9; cold cognition and, 88; connection between language and imagination in, 146–47; cultural flexibility of, 261–62; emergence of figurative art, 95–96, 103–4; employing of imagination, 43; evolution of play in, 82–83; expansion of improvisation and innovation, 180; learned adaptive behavior and, 220– 21, 264; simulation system and, 61, 117, 133, 161–62 horror films, 38–39 Hostel (Roth), 38–39 hot cognition: adaptive improvisation’s origin in, 73; control of, 189–90, 249; cultural work of religion and, 156; deliberative reason in, 160; dominance during improvisation, 99, 174–75, 210–

11, 226, 269; dreams and, 217; heuristic problem solving and, 70–72; imagination’s pathways and, 146–47, 168–69, 174; language improvisation and, 145– 46, 173–74; moral modules and, 248; social bonding and, 230; stream state and, 223, 224, 225; system workings, 69–70; thinking with your body (see creative body). See also cold cognition; emotion and improvisation Howard (band), 48 Hrdy, Sarah, 82 Hume, David, 89, 176, 193, 296n26 humor, 23, 52, 170. See also comedy Humphrey, Nicholas, 103 hunting parties, 21–22 Hurford, James R., 132 hybridizing frames, 40 hylomorphism, 32 hypnagogic phase of dreaming, 166 images. See visual thinking imagination: activity of (see improvising imagination); aptitudes encompassing, 25–26; Aristotle’s description of, 45–46; characterization of as cognition, 4, 5; conceptualization as a mental process, 5–6; concern with the particular and the emotional, 4; contribution to the community (see sociopolitical imagination); creation of an internal environment of the mind (see second universe); creativity and, 1, 2, 4, 5; ethics and (see ethics and imagination); executive control in (see self, the; voluntary imagination); human culture and, 1–2; interpretations of what it is, 2, 3–4; Kant’s view of, 46; philosophers’ leap from perception to conceptualization, 46–47; power of, 3; problem with an algorithmic approach to, 5, 7; relevance of human prehistory to the exploration of, 8–9,

INDEX : 315

11–12, 277n3; religious beliefs and (see religious culture); role in defusing negative emotions, 189; theories about the origins of, 7; therapeutic uses of, 221–22; thinking with images (see visual thinking); treatment of creativity in most books, 8 improvisation: adaptation’s contribution to, 18, 278n1; affect and, 23–24; animals’ limited ability to improvise, 25; challenges posed by elite musicians, 47–49; constancy of engagement in, 6; element of desire in, 24; embodied communication and, 87–88; emotional impact of completing, 24; emotion and (see emotion and improvisation); flexibility of, 22–23; free will and, 25; humor use, 23; imaginative faculties necessary for, 25; imaginative thinking and (see improvising imagination); impetus of ecological extremes in man’s early history, 88; mixing of frames in, 23; reading of feedback in real-time, 24; relationship with imagination, 3–4, 5; resource deficiency’s contribution to, 18–19; spontaneity and, 17–18; trial-and-error approach in, 22 improvising imagination: access to knowledge and, 6; adaptation and, 18, 278n1; adaptive innovations and, 6–7; adaptive use of resources, 4–5; anti-­ module nature of, 7; appearance in prelinguistic evolutionary history, 9–10, 12; captain model of, 26, 27; embodied imaginative work (see creative body; embodied cognition); emergency or high-stakes conditions and, 20; evolutionary history of call-andresponse, 11; examples of in different disciplines, 1, 2, 6, 51–52; functional promiscuousness of improv, 22; intuition and, 18; knowledge to be gained by studying embodied interactions,

10–11; muse model of, 26–27; natural or self-imposed disciplines and, 19–20; reentry phase, 27; reliable clichés use, 21–22; requirement for constant engagement, 6; resource deficiency and, 18–19; role of goals in creativity and, 5; shared language of (see tools and norms of improvisation); simultaneous performance and composition, 21; social interactions element in, 11, 22; spontaneity and, 17–18 India, 35, 156, 157–58 Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino), 267 In Gods We Trust (Atran), 301n70 Inhelder, Bärbel, 126 innovation: acceptance of in communities, 66, 83; capitalism and, 232, 238–41; executive control of the imagination and, 174; Homo sapiens and, 180; improvising imagination and, 6–7, 23, 156, 167; preference for stability in China and, 231, 237–38; promotion of in a culture (see education); recursion and, 124–25; storytelling and, 133–34; strategy of, 62, 180; susceptibility to natural selection, 65; in tool making vs. visual art, 96; value of in Western cultures, 12, 231, 232, 233, 236 input spaces, 124 insight flashes: adaptive biocultural landscape and, 216; category jamming and, 219–20; children’s innate belief in immortality, 215, 301n72; common mental categories among humans, 213–14; evidence of innate general cognitive tendencies, 215–16; imagination and the patriarchal view of God, 214–15, 301n71; imagination’s ability to give reentry insights, 218–19, 221; investigations of causes of universal phobias, 220–21; meaning of the grammar developed by imagination, 218; religion and mythology’s dependence

316 : INDEX

insight flashes (continued ) on imagination, 213, 218; sequence and phases in ayahuasca adventures, 216–18; shared imagination archetypes among humans, 214, 216; therapeutic uses of the imagination, 221–22 intellectual property rights, 231 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 39 intuition, 18 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 259 Jacobson, Ludwig Levin, 284n35 Jacobson’s organ, 284n35, 290n13 Jamaica, 36 James, William, 195, 236, 263 Jataka Tales, 150–51 jazz: brain activity during improvisation, 207; the bridge in the melody, 155; example of improvisation in, 1; grammar of music, 137; high-stakes conditions in, 20; importance of a song’s melody, 131; improvisational challenges posed by elite musicians, 47–49; improvisatory solos, 177; job of the rhythm section, 55–56; melodic strategies that follow spatial schemas, 92–93; musical scaffolding in, 91; musicians’ means of learning a complex tune, 132; preparation for the count-off, 15–16; reliable clichés use, 21; shared intentionality in human social life and, 178; shared language in, 49; social-interaction element of, 11, 22; steps in teaching improv, 168–69; trading fours, 228 jhana meditation, 203, 299n49 Jobs, Steve, 198 Johnson, Mark, 217 Jones, Chuck, 19 Jordania, Joseph, 62 Judith and the Head of Holofernes (Klimt), 149 Kaeppler, Adrienne, 57 Kahlo, Frida, 123

Kahneman, Daniel, 69–70 Kandel, Eric, 12, 103, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 46, 119, 161, 194, 245– 46, 303n17 Kerouac, Jack, 199 khandas, 194, 296–97n29 Khmer culture, 158 Kimura, Doreen, 134 King, B. B., 27, 47, 166, 167 King, Martin Luther Jr., 231, 254 King, Stephen, 281n26 Kinzler, Katherine, 187 Kipnis, Andrew, 234 Klee, Paul, 98 Klein, Richard, 96, 97 Klimt, Gustav, 149 Köhler, Wolfgang, 278n1 Kongzi (Confucius), 232, 233, 234, 237, 250 Kosslyn, Stephen, 114, 288n30 Kulhan, Robert, 52 Kurzweil, Ray, 63 Lamarque, Peter, 100 language: ability to decouple imperative content from indicative content, 145– 46; birds’ and animals’ communication abilities, 135; cognitive fluidity and, 9; cold cognition system and, 174; complexity of the construction of, 135–36; counter-nativist arguments about the development of linguistic capacity, 136; creating stories with (see storytelling); emergence of vocal interactions as a form of grooming, 139–40; evidence that pictorial thinking evolved first, 103–4, 286n15; means by which a syntax system can lead to, 137; mindconducting aspects of communication, 144, 146; module theory of brain development, 79, 80, 136; nativist argument that human linguistic complexity is innate, 135–36; objectivist view that representational language is essential to thinking, 138; parallels

INDEX : 317

between the “grammar” of music and dance and the grammar of language, 137–38; possibly contemporaneous appearances of art and, 96–97; prelinguistic emergence of improv skills, 9–10; rise of orthodoxy in linguistic culture, 142–43; ritual dimension of languages expressed without real words, 140–41, 143; social dimension of, 139–42; start of symbolic cultural norms in history, 143–44; task grammar system, 137; theory of language as an imagination-instructing system, 144, 164; “theory of mind’s” connection to language development, 136–37; timeline of, 80–81, 138 Lapland, 36 Lardon, Robert, 168–69 Large, Edward, 59 Lascaux caves, 95, 101, 103 lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC), 207 Lawrence, William, 34, 279–80n15 Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (Lawrence), 34 Lee, Harper, 250 Legends (band), 48 Le mystère Picasso (Clouzot), 93 Lennon, John, 230, 254 Lewis, C. S., 266 Life’s Too Short, 267 Limb, Charles, 207 limbic brain/system: activity of the emotional brain during sleep, 107; art and, 251; brain location of imagination and, 149, 185, 206, 248; creativity and, 26; emotions and cognition and, 70, 76, 77, 189, 258; evolution of, 285n40; evolution of behavior and, 78–80, 187; rational mind’s connection to, 77–78, 79–80; synchronized movement and, 60–61 Lincoln, Abraham, 172 lions, 76–77, 284n35 Lost Thing, The (Tan), 122

Lowenfeld, Viktor, 126 lPFC (lateral prefrontal cortex), 207 lucid dreaming phase of dreaming, 166 Luhrmann, Tanya, 265, 266 Luther, Martin, 159 MacLean, Paul, 184 Magnus, Albertus, 32 Mahayana philosophers, 296n29 Malebranche, Nicolas, 33, 279n13 Malthus, Thomas, 40 Man in the High Castle (Dick), 267 marshmallow experiment, 187–88 Marx, Karl, 239 Maugham, W. Somerset, 252 Maw, George, 29, 34, 280n16 McBee, Cecil, 55 McClelland, James Lloyd, 77 Mead, George Herbert, 165, 195, 236, 268–69 medial geniculate nucleus, 60 medical improv, 50–52 meditation: degree of executive control in, 202–3; limited commonality with creativity, 204–5; mindfulness and, 201–2; states of the Buddha, 203, 299n49; therapeutic uses of the imagination and, 221–22; Zen meditation and the shift into the zone, 201 Mengzi, 89, 254 Mere Christianity (Lewis), 266 Merrick, Joseph, 30, 279n8 Metamporhosis of Narcissus (Dalí), 39 metaphysical imagination: argument that horror films have a therapeutic effect, 38–39, 281n23; attribution of birth anomalies to maternal emotional experiences, 29–33, 279nn9–10; belief that a woman’s imagination was highly susceptible to unhealthy impressions, 32–33; belief that psychological images have a long-range impact on people, 38–39; cultural imprint of theories about, 37; Dar-

318 : INDEX

metaphysical imagination (continued ) win’s analysis of the plausible causes of a deformed animal, 34–35; demise of theories of, 35; effect of stress on maternal and fetal health, 36, 37; emergence of a sense that psychology can affect the body, 33; evidence of an epigenetic switch, 37; folk beliefs in a causal connection between fetal health and the mother’s emotions, 35–36, 280n17; idea that disabilities can be caught, 35–36, 281–82n22; past belief that imagination has physical effects, 28–29; possibility that imagined outcomes led to healthy precautions, 36–37; questioning of theories about the causes of fetal deformities, 34, 279–80n15 Michalska, Kalina, 187 Millikan, Ruth, 105 mimetic balance in artistic creations, 171, 190, 213 mindfulness: the Buddha’s explanation of life without, 298n45; domains of, 203; limited commonality with creativity, 204–5; the self and, 200–201, 298n45 mind wandering, 111, 125, 146, 202, 206, 211–12, 223, 300n54 Miró, Joan, 120 mirror experiment, 182–83 mirror neurons, 66–67, 283n25 Mithen, Steven, 9, 41, 137 MIT Sloan School of Management, 52 Miyazaki, Hayao, 115, 124, 125 Modell, Arnold H., 40–41, 110 module theory of brain development: anti-module nature of improvising imagination, 7; consideration of a fairness module in primates, 249, 304n26; debate over, 294n8; emotion and improvisation and, 79, 80, 301n70; language and, 79, 80, 136; morality module hypothesis, 247–48, 250

Monson, Ingrid, 55–56 monster tales, 153–54, 155, 292n36, 292n38 morality module, 247–48, 250 moral psychology, 153 Morris, Desmond, 102 Mousterian, 96 Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association, 35 Munch, Edvard, 149 muse model of imaginative improvisation, 26–27 music: activation of brain language areas during improvisation, 208–9, 300n62; brain activity during composition, 206–7; co-evolution with language, 9; connection with imagery, 92–93; heuristic judgment and, 71; idea that it is a communication system, 208; improvisation and, 10, 19–22, 23, 26–27, 48; improv techniques in jazz (see jazz); musicians’ means of learning a complex tune, 132; parallels between the “grammar” of music and the grammar of language, 137–38; recursion in, 137, 138; reliable clichés and, 21, 165, 167; shared language in, 49; steps in teaching musical improv, 168–69; storytelling using, 151; stream state and, 223; use of image-based metaphors when describing, 92–93; Zen philosophy and, 199 mythology, 141, 143, 156–57, 158, 159, 213, 216, 218 Nair, Mira, 152, 163 Nash, Graham, 198 Neanderthals: cognitive development of, 10; degree of cultural flexibility, 261– 62; evidence of kin bonds in, 82; prob­ able use of imitation, 83. See also Homo erectus; Homo sapiens; Pleistocene era Neeson, Liam, 267 neuroscience: activation of brain language

INDEX : 319

areas during musical improvisation, 208, 300n62; affect defined, 23–24; affective neuroscience field, 75–77; biology of empathy and care, 257; birth date of human cognitive skills, 80–81; brain activity during improvisation, 206–7; brain activity during REM sleep, 107–8; brain area relevant to biological identity, 196, 297n35; brain-­switching process in creativity, 209; cerebral localization of cognitive abilities, 186, 187; cognitive fluidity, 9, 12; connection between cognition and emotions, 77–78; connection between coordinated movement and the cerebellum, 64; correlation between representational thinking and the prefrontal cortex, 186; correspondence between utilitarian ethics and the cognitive control systems, 248, 304n20; of dancing, 60–61; dominance of the limbic system in prehistoric man, 78–79; emergence of creative improvisation skills in, 9; environmental change element in brain development, 80; evidence that the DMN and TPN communicate during imaginative activity, 206; experiences that connect the visual and motor domains, 68; general intelligence theory of brain development, 79–80; imaginative faculties necessary for improv, 25; imprinting and the mother/child bond, 290n13; intellectual approach to the mind, 5; layers of the brain, 184–85; localization of creativity in the brain, 6; localization of human agency in the brain, 187–88; mechanism by which lions know their own cubs, 284n35; mental leap from a remembered image to a representation, 43–44; mirror neurons, 66–67, 283n25; modular brain development theory,

79, 80, 247–48, 250; natural selection pressures for bonding, 290n13; neurochemical correlation between bonding and parenting stereotypes, 289n13; neurochemistry of the brain when dreaming, 106–7; neuroimaging of imagination, 2; prefrontal cortex’s role in self-control, 186, 295n13; process of imagination, 6; question of how the brain constructs an imaginary object, 43; question of what brain functions support self-consciousness, 183; of social bonding, 139–40, 289–91n13; social learning’s connection to the neocortex, 63; somatic marker hypothesis, 78, 284–85n37; teleology of dreams, 110–11; theory of an ancestral deep self, 196–97; therapeutic value of positive visualization, 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 205 Nigeria, 36 no-cliché thinking, 223–24 Noë, Alva, 63 norepinephrine, 107 Norman, Kerri, 73 North American Indians, 36 Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, 51 Of Human Bondage (Maugham), 252 Oldowan, 96, 180 Onion, Rebecca, 268 On Monsters and Marvels (Paré), 31, 279n10 Orwell, George, 259 oxytocin, 139, 289n13, 290n13 PAG (periaqueductal gray) brain region, 196, 297n35 Panglossianism, 277n1 Panksepp, Jaak, 75–76, 79, 108, 195, 196, 249, 297n35, 305n36 Paracelsus, 28 Paré, Ambroise, 30–32, 279nn9–10

320 : INDEX

Paris Manuscripts (Marx), 239 Parsons, Lawrence M., 60 periaqueductal gray (PAG) brain region, 196, 297n35 Peter the Great, 30, 279n9 Phaedo (Plato), 216 Phaedrus (Plato), 188–89, 295n18 phenomenal consciousness, 181, 184, 192, 225 Philippines, 36 philosophy: analytics of imagination and, 172; argument against the U.S. as a copycat culture, 235–36; Buddhist (see Buddhism, Tibetan); categorical imperative of Kant, 245–46, 303n17; debate over specificity of mental images, 113; Dewey’s advocacy of flexibility in life, 263–64, 305n43, 306n45; of education in China, 232, 242, 244, 303n16; interpretations of imagination in, 3–4; interpretations of the self, 192–96, 296–97nn26–29; leap from perception to conceptualization, 46–47; Mahayana philosophers, 296n29; Mengzi on innate emotional responses, 89; understanding improvisation and, 7; Vedantic, 204; view of intuitive experience, 18, 29; Zen focus on the present, 199–200 Piaget, Jean, 126 Picasso, 90, 93, 101 pictorial mind: argument for a prelinguistic syntax system that governs images, 114–15; brain-as-a-computer model of the mind, 111–12, 114, 287–88n27; bridge from body state to abstract concept, 111; cognition activity’s simulation of reality, 112–13; cognitive imagery theories about memories, 288n30; development of prelinguistic organization of dynamic imagery, 115; evidence that mental imagery is managed in the brain, 114, 288n30; gram-

mar of images, 116; human capacity to form generic mental images, 113–14; model of knowledge that allows for achieving understanding through embodied cognition, 117; recursion and language, 115; re-stating of propositional logic using visual logic, 116; scope of the syntax systems used to organize our world, 115–16. See also visual thinking Pinker, Steven, 79, 136, 294n8 Plato, 28, 93, 121, 188, 216 play: adaptive behavior in childhood play, 82–84; development of emotional intelligence and, 85; imagination and, 9 Pleistocene era: communication through gestures and mimicry, 84–85; dominance of the limbic system in prehistoric man, 78–79; figurative cave art, 95–96, 101, 103, 104; instinctive use of prediction by prehistoric man, 16–17; relevance of human prehistory to the exploration of imagination, 8–9, 11–12, 277n3; shared intentionality in human social life, 178; social learning’s connection to the neocortex, 63; strength of Pleistocene simulation, 162; tethered and untethered improvisation in drawing, 101–2; theories about the origins of imagination, 7; use of adaptive synchronized motions, 62 Poe, Edgar Allan, 149 Popper, Karl, 160, 174 post-traumatic stress disorder, 281n25 Potts, Richard, 80, 185, 294n8 precuneus, 61 prelinguistic communication, 8, 9, 10, 45, 83, 92, 114, 128, 136, 137–38, 196. See also language primates: ability to string together behavioral steps, 64; brain evolution,

INDEX : 321

185; capability to build up complex sequences from subroutines, 65; consideration of a fairness module in, 249; embodied communication and, 10; engagement in social learning through imitation, 65–66; engineering improvisations of, 18, 278n1; inability to be teachers, 66, 283n21; inability to synchronize movements, 59; maternal bonding in, 290n13; risk of over-­ interpreting data on creativity, 277n1; sense of self, 182–83; shared intentionality in, 178. See also chimpanzees Prinz, Jesse, 305n38 Proffitt, Dennis R., 148–49 proto-consciousness, 106, 110–11, 128, 287n20 psychology: belief that thoughts can lead to concrete manifestations, 33; developmental, 7, 69, 97, 126, 246; evolutionary (see evolutionary psychologists); knowledge to be gained by studying social primates, 10–11; moral, 153; social, 242, 253, 305n43 qualia, 181 Quinn, Marc, 280n22 Ramachandran, V. S., 107 Ramayana, 151–52, 157 Razor’s Edge, The (Maugham), 252 recursion, 115, 125, 137–38, 161, 162, 165, 174 reentry phase: flow state and, 225–26; insight flashes and (see insight flashes); no-cliché thinking and, 223–24; smarter habits and, 222–23; stream state reintroduced to centralized state, 27, 212–13 reliable clichés: contribution to improvisation, 21–22; reframing characters and objects based on, 122; use in improv, 21–22, 165, 167, 223, 224; use in

language, 49; vocal clichés use in communities, 142 religious culture: art’s role in affect management, 251–52, 254–55; connection between social norms and, 245; counterfactual thinking in, 158, 213, 265–66; dependence on imagination, 213, 218; dogmatists’ difficulty with adapting to change, 262–63, 306n45; reliance on imagination, 157–59, 215, 245, 266, 301n71; shared human tendency to imagine God as parental, 214–15; tendency to reign in improvisation, 159; traditions and rituals’ cultural importance, 156 REM sleep, 106–7 repairing, 95 representations: of abstract concepts using bodily experiences, 56–57; affective component of, 41; brain activity and, 186, 206, 300n54; childhood scribbling and, 127, 129; cognitive view of imagination and, 5; correlation between representational thinking and the prefrontal cortex, 186; decoupling of the emotional imperative content from the indicative content, 145–46; element of level of intentionality in, 44–45, 111; evolution of representation of perceptual domains, 100–101; executive control in, 44, 183; language development and, 9; mental leap from a remembered image to, 43–44, 97; mimetic balance and, 171; non-­representational nature of emotions, 109; objectivist view of representational language, 138; perception and, 43, 46; prelinguistics of, 134, 208; recursion and, 115; simulation system and, 69; universality of image grammar and, 116; virtual thinking and (see second universe) reptiles, 285n40

322 : INDEX

Rifkin, Jeremy, 257–58 Rosenfeld, Gavriel, 268 Rosenthal, David, 293n5 Roth, Eli, 38–39 Roth, Gabrielle, 57 Rubenfeld, Jed, 244 Rubik’s Cube, 71 Rush, Otis, 47, 48 Russell, Bertrand, 240 Ruysch, Frederik, 255 Salaam Bombay! (Nair), 163 Saletan, William, 295n13 samadhi meditation, 203, 299n49 Samyutta Nikaya, 298n45 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 303n17 schizophrenia, 209, 266 Schleidt, Wolfgang, 220 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 158 science fiction, 164 Scott, Ridley, 164 sculpting, 42, 43, 97, 100 Second City, 1 second universe: affective component of knowledge, 41; of artists, 39; belief that imagination is causal (see metaphysical imagination); bias inherent in exploring our understanding of imagination, 45; bodily and mental prep from anticipation, 16–17; counterfactual thinking and (see counterfactual thinking); degree of imagination required in early tool making, 41–43; domain crossing in imaginative thinking, 40; element of level of intentionality in representation, 44–45; mental leap from a remembered image to a representation, 43–44, 97; philosophers’ view of imagination, 45–47; role of the unconscious in imaginative thinking, 40; of scientists, 40; surrealism and the imagination, 39–40 self, the: activation of brain language areas

during musical improvisation, 208, 300n62; affective neuroscience theory of an ancestral deep self, 196–97; Apollonian vs. Dionysian states, 205; argument against adaptation theories of consciousness, 293n5; associational processing and creativity, 191; awareness of self in animals, 182–83; brain activity during improvisation, 206–8; brain area relevant to biological identity, 196, 297n35; brain location of human agency, 187–88; brain systems involved in a switching process in creativity, 6, 209; the Buddha’s explanation of life without mindfulness, 298n45; Buddhist understanding of the body, 203, 299–300n50; centralized state of mind and (see centralized state of mind); conceptualization of flow as both the emptiest and the fullest moments, 225–26; conscious facilitation of improvisation, 207–8; creative persons’ use of intoxicants to enter a stream state, 197–99; degree of executive control in meditation, 202–3; DMN and TPN communication during imaginative activity, 202, 206, 207, 209; element of free will in imagination, 180; emergence of self in precognitive ability, 196–97, 297n36; emotions and the rational mind, 188–89, 295n18; evidence that individual development is increasingly rational, 187; evolution of “the knower,” 297n35; executive control of imagination (see voluntary imagination); experience of time in imaginative thought, 200; factors in productive imagining, 212; feedback loop in improvisation, 208–9; fictional self in Buddhist philosophy, 193–94, 296–97nn28–29; first-person perspective evolution (see central-

INDEX : 323

ized state of mind); flow experience from positive immersion, 199; forms of consciousness (see consciousness); human ability to gain control over involuntary reflexes, 189–90; idea that music, dance, and imagery are communication systems, 208; imagination’s role in creating a context that defuses negative emotions, 189; impetus behind advances in human improvisational ability, 179; improvisation’s requirement of sensitivity to surroundings, 178; knowledge consequences of the unconscious stream state, 209–11; meditation’s limited commonality with creativity, 204–5; meditation states of the Buddha, 203, 299n49; mindfulness and, 200–201, 203–5, 298n45; mind wandering and creative problem solving, 211; mind wandering and future thinking, 212; modalities of agency, 191–92; paradox in creativity, 178, 224–26; phenomenal consciousness and, 181, 184, 192, 225; philosophers’ interpretations of, 192–96, 296–97nn26–29; Plato’s exploration of the parts of the psyche, 188; process of fancy in imagination, 191; reentry phase of imaginative work (see reentry phase); Romantic view of imagination, 190; secondary and primary imagination, 190–91; self-­consciousness seen as a family of biopsychological processes, 197; shared intentionality in human social life, 178; stream state achieved through flow or the zone, 199–200; transient hypofrontality’s facilitation of improvisation, 207–8; viewed as something not directly experienced, 194–95; view that the self is social and autobiographical, 195, 197; Zen meditation and the shift into the zone, 201;

Zen philosophy of focusing on the present, 199–200 SELF (Simple Ego-type Life Form), 196, 297n35 Self Comes to Mind (Damasio), 297n35 Self-Reliance (Emerson), 235 sensus divinitatis, 301n71 serotonin, 58, 107 Shakespeare, William, 176 shaping, 94–95 Shelley, Mary, 34 Shiva, 122, 143, 156, 157 signs. See storytelling Silva, Jason, 278n5 Simone, Nina, 54 Simple Ego-type Life Form (SELF), 196, 297n35 simulation system: connection between coordinated movement and the cerebellum, 64; domain between automatic simulation and symbolic modeling (see adaptive body modeling); embodied imaginative work, 85; executive control of, 69; experiences that connect the visual and motor domains, 68; improvisation’s unconscious use of associational communications, 68–69; mirror neurons and, 66–68, 283n25; modes of imagination and, 161–62; parental nurturing’s influence on social learning, 66; primates’ behavioral parsing ability, 64–65; primates’ engagement in social learning, 65–66; social learning’s connection to the neocortex, 63; storytelling and (see storytelling); thinking with your body (see creative body). See also embodied cognition Singularity Summit, 278n5 “Six Animals,” 298n45 smarter habits, 222–23 Smith, Rachel, 300n54 Smythies, John R., 43

324 : INDEX

Snyder, Bob, 92 social psychology, 242, 253, 305n43 sociopolitical imagination: adaptive changes that helped Homo sapiens survive, 261–62; advocacy of an experimental approach to life, 263; argument that capitalism increases creativity, 239–41; argument that creativity flourishes when pressures are lifted, 240–41; argument that creativity rises in response to stressful situations, 240; argument that some cultures excel through impulse control, 244; China and creativity (see China); costs of Neanderthals’ failure to adapt, 262; creativity and economic culture, 238; Dewey’s views on education and pragmatism, 264–65, 306n45; dogmatists’ difficulty with adapting to change, 262–63; economic element in levels of failure tolerance, 241–42; ethics and the moral imagination (see ethics and imagination); evidence of flexibility in affective bonds, 253–54; hot cognition element in social communication and bonding, 230; human ability to create real emotion by first faking it, 267; imagination’s role in community, 230–31; imaginative improvisation’s role in our understanding of our political world, 267–69; importance of the attitude of a belief to human flourishing, 263; improvising imagination’s necessity in a democracy, 269; life advantages afforded from imaginative simulation, 269–70; mind-set that is opposite to improvisation, 270– 71; philosophers’ argument against the U.S. as a copycat culture, 235–36; promotion of a culture of innovation (see education); religious beliefs’ requirement for imagination (see religious culture); role of imagination and

improvisation in education, 270, 271; smiles and improvising imagination, 267; socialist societies’ potential for creativity, 238–39; social psychology element in failure tolerance, 242; trading fours in jazz, 228; utility of imaginary counterfactual histories, 268–69, 307n50; value placed on improvisation and imagination in the East vs. the West, 231–34; Western skepticism about established wisdom, 233 Socrates, 233 Solso, Robert L., 94, 286n15 somatic marker hypothesis, 78, 284–85n37, 287n24 Sosa, Ernest, 172 Sphex wasp, 25 Stamenov, M. I., 283n25 Steinberg, Leo, 236 Sterelny, Kim, 140, 262 Stoics, the, 189 Stoker, Bram, 292n36 storing, 94 storytelling: accuracy in imaginative work, 172–73; adaptive components of imagination, 149, 163–64; commonality of mythologies in cultures, 140–41; components and processes in dreams, 165; contribution to a healthy personal psychology, 159; emotion of wonder in imagination and improvisation, 169–70; evolution of language (see language); evolution of proto-imagination to imagination, 165–66; examples of imaginative embellishment of events, 147–51; functions of imaginative communication, 132; human tendency to unconsciously exaggerate perceptions, 148–49; imagination’s alignment with reason, 159–60; imagination’s cold and hot cognition pathways, 168–69, 174; imagination’s role in a symbol being

INDEX : 325

a symbol and not a stimulus, 144–45; imagination’s role in helping prepare for real-life events, 155; imagination’s simulation of simulations, 167; imagination system described, 165, 174; impetus behind the rise of voluntary simulation, 161–62; implications for imagination as language is untethered from its referent, 146–47; implications of a symbol-enriched simulation system, 164–65; improvisational features in religions, 158–59; improvisation system described, 165, 174–75; involuntary vs. voluntary simulation, 161, 162, 163; Jataka Tales, 150–51; knowledge theory of imagination and improvisation, 172–74; memory capacity’s prelinguistic expansion, 132; mimetic balance in artistic creations, 171, 190; monsters’ role in our moral imagination, 153–54, 155, 292n36, 292n38; phases of dreaming, 166; prelinguistic means of storytelling, 134; prevalence of a recognizable narrative arc to stories, 152–53; productive variations in innovation, 156; re-creation in imaginative work, 166–67; relationship between truth and the imagination, 170–72; religion’s tendency to reign in improvisation, 159; religious mythology’s reliance on imagination and creativity, 157–59; religious traditions and rituals’ cultural importance, 156; ritualistic oral tradition example in India, 141; self-agency while dreaming, 166; signs and embodied storytelling, 134; simulation modes of the imagination, 161; sincerity in imaginative work, 172; steps in teaching musical improv, 168–69; storytelling without words, 141–42; strength of Pleistocene simulation, 162; subsuming of involuntary impressions

under voluntary projects, 162–64; “test” and see utility of improvising with a narrative matrix, 165; theory of a universal grammar for stories, 152; theory that storytelling endures because it bestows adaptive benefits on humans, 152; traditions of oral storytelling, 151–52; trust in a culture of shared signs and collective rituals, 142; unconscious nature of some innovations, 133–34; utility of a baseline of simulation and sequencing abilities, 133; value orientation in imagination, 160; work done to achieve imaginative works, 170; work of imagination and improvisation, 170 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 172 stream state of mind: achieved through flow or the zone, 199–200; achieving smarter habits and, 222–23; category jamming and, 219–20; centralized state of mind vs., 180–81; creative persons’ use of intoxicants to enter, 197–99; creativity and, 27; knowledge consequences of, 209–11; no-cliché thinking and, 223–24. See also insight flashes Stumpf, Carl, 86 Summing Up, The (Maugham), 252 surrealism, 39, 117 synesthesia, 107 Syria, 260 Tan, Shaun, 98, 122 Tarantino, Quentin, 267 task grammar system, 65, 67, 69, 114, 133, 137, 161, 208 task positive network (TPN), 202, 206, 207, 209 tethered improvisation, 101–2 theory of mind, 84–85, 136–37, 283n21, 283n27 theta wave system, 107–8

326 : INDEX

Thompson, Evan, 165 Thurman, Robert, 221–22 Thurston, Edgar, 35 Tibetan Buddhism. See Buddhism, Tibetan Tolstoy, Leo, 251 Tomasello, Michael, 178 Tooby, John, 79, 294n8 tools and norms of improvisation: “advance and expand” exercise, 51; applied in medicine, 50–52; applied to a conversation in a second language, 49–50; applied to business, 52; applied to leadership and negotiation, 52; applied to playing jazz, 49; “ask for” exercise, 51; bridging mechanisms use, 50; “yes, and” exercise, 51–52 torture porn, 39, 281n26 TPN (task positive network), 202, 206, 207, 209 transient hypofrontality, 207–8 trolley-car ethics experiment, 136, 137, 247 truth and the imagination, 170–72 Turing, Alan, 77 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 172 University of Washington, 51 untethered improvisation, 101–2 Unusual Uses Task, 211, 223–24 Urban, Greg, 189 Van Heusen, Jimmy, 131, 137, 155 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 26 Vedantic philosophy, 204 Vedic tradition, 143 ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), 187, 248 Venus figurines, 42, 97, 100 veterans, 38, 281n25 visual thinking: activity of the emotional brain during sleep, 107; appearance of three-dimensional figurine sculpting, 97; appearance of visual art in history, 96; archaeological timeline of drawing

and sculpturing, 99–100; brain activity during REM sleep, 107–8; conceptual processes needed when drawing, 97–98; connection between music and imagery, 92; creativity’s relation to serotonin levels, 107; dreams and human proto-consciousness, 106, 110– 11, 287n20; emotion/cognition complex’s role in fear response, 105, 145, 287n18; evidence of material improvisation in cave painting, 95–96; evidence that pictorial thinking evolved before language, 103–4, 286n15; evolution of representation of perceptual domains, 100–101; evolution of visual art, 101–2; executive control of imagination (see voluntary imagination); executive function involved in image making, 94; figurative cave art, 95–96; human proto-­consciousness and, 287n20; human reliance on visual images for sensory input, 105–6, 287n19; idea that images are a communication system, 208; imperative meaning in images, 105; mysteries of imagery, 93; neurochemistry of the brain when dreaming, 106–7; nonrepresentational quality of emotions, 109; perceptual motor-based simulation’s transition to thought (see pictorial mind); perceptual sophistication of drawing and sculpting, 98, 99–100; personal and social motivations for creating visual design, 102–3; Picasso’s work processes, 93; Platonic view of the worth of imagery, 93–94; possibly contemporaneous appearances of art and language, 96–97; processes involved in sketching, 98–99; restraints on involuntary imagination, 109–10; steps in visual improvisation, 94–95; teleology of dreams, 110–11; tethered and untethered improvisation in

INDEX : 327

drawing, 101–2; use of image-based metaphors when describing music, 92–93; utility of dream activity, 108–9, 287n24 VMPC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex), 187, 248 voluntary imagination: agency and, 129; category jamming of anatomical features, 121–22; category jamming of the natural with the artificial, 123; children’s transition to visual realism in drawing, 127–28, 129; conceptual blending process in improvisation, 124–25; creating stories for social learning (see storytelling); creativity mechanisms behind imaginative thoughts, 124; dream psychology’s view of involuntary imagination, 118; embodied cognition model for how percepts and concepts are integrated in the mind, 119–20; fantasy view of imagination, 120; imagination’s occupying of both mental and physical space, 125; influence of growing linguistic cognition on the interpretation of visual information, 128, 289n43; integrator view of imagination, 119– 20; limits to imaginative fusions, 122; popular conception of the imagination, 119; possibility of a genetic component to image making, 125–27; question of why we have an imagination, 120; reentry phase of imaginative work (see reentry phase); reframing

characters and objects based on clichés, 122–23; role of volition in imagination, 128–29, 289n44; significance of the contribution of dreams to waking interactions, 119; surrealism’s focus on the juxtaposition of objects, 117; universal stages in the development of children’s drawings, 126–27; view that the integrator imagination is a prerequisite for the fantasy imagination, 120 Waal, Frans de, 249 Watson, James, 199 Watson, Katie, 51, 52 Whedon, Joss, 39 White Boys (band), 48 wildebeest, 74–75 Will to Believe ( James), 263 wonder in imagination and improvisation, 169–70 Wordsworth, William, 190 Wren, Sherry, 14 Xiaoping, Deng, 265, 306n45 Xin, 89 Xi You Ji, 152 Yates, Mark, 57 “yes, and” exercise, 51–52 Zedong, Mao, 228, 232, 238 Zen Buddhism, 178, 201, 224–26 Zhuangzi, 223–24, 237