Thoughts on ‘Thoughts on Thoughts’

I always try to catch a few science sessions at MWF. I didn’t study science beyond Year 10 (somewhat regrettably) besides a bit of psych at Uni, so it’s a special, pleasurable challenge to wrap my head around the concepts and questions raised in sessions such as this afternoon’s Thoughts on Thoughts.

Chris Krishna-Pillay was our engaging and funny host, chatting to cognitive neuroscientist and raconteur Michael Corballis. It was a free session in the Yarra Room and the audience was crowded in, standing and sitting on the floor all the way up to the back. Corballis explained that he came to write ‘popular science’ because in his many years of lecturing he often encountered students who, simply, didn’t understand many of the concepts in the (academic) language they encountered. With the pop science, you have to ‘let loose a little bit’, he said. His latest book Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain features short, sharp chapters that began as magazine articles.

Corballis spoke a lot about language, about what we don’t know (and about what he’s trying to find out) as much as what we do. He believes that language capacities in human beings have evolved incrementally (not with a ‘big bang’, as Noam Chomsky has suggested). He supports the theory that language is related to, and has evolved from, gestures as opposed to sounds and calls, eg. an intentional gesture of an ape grooming another, as opposed to their more emotive and involuntary calls. The gesture theory is supported by the fact that sign language, in MRI scans, lights up the same area of the brain, in the hippocampus, as does speech language. Corballis’ research takes him many places—from the now sequenced Neanderthal genome, to fossil evidence, to studying chimps and bonobos.

Other animals do communicate, but language is separate from the communication of simple concepts. For example, we can’t know, and it’s improbable, that a dolphin or a dog or other intelligent mammal can express ideas of what happened yesterday, or what is going to happen tomorrow. This is part of what makes a language, the discussion of what’s happening, what has happened and what will.

Memory is therefore intertwined with language: ‘the ability to communicate about the non-present’, as Corballis put it, the ‘means of describing things that are not in front of you’. Humans have what he called ‘episodic memory’. Whether animals actually remember an ‘episode’, or whether they are simply ‘conditioned’ to act a certain way is not something that can currently be proved. For example, if a dog buries a bone, and he goes to retrieve it, is he specifically recalling the ‘episode’ of burying it, or is it more instinct, sense, and smell that come in? It is an absolutely fascinating question. And I like that sessions like this place those kinds of (possibly unanswerable) questions in your mind.

To go a step further, Corballis discussed the fact that human beings are capable of having ‘thoughts about thoughts’, and about other people’s thoughts, but we cannot know if other intelligent species have this level of awareness. It is probable that we are unique in this aspect, and that it is tied in with our capacities for language and episodic memory.

We are limited with what we can know about memory, too, because animals and young children (before language) cannot tell us what they remember. Language is inadequate, in many respects, Corballis explained, because there’s more to memory than we’re able to get from language, such as the specificities of sense memory (though of course some of the greatest writers do try, and manage to spark our recognition).

At one point, a question was raised about dreaming. We still do not know the exact purpose of (human) dreaming, though there are many theories. Corballis said that animal dreaming is pretty much to do with the consolidation of memory (ie. a rat coding the maze). He says that human dreams are undeniably strange! Our own dreaming and mental time travels ‘help us frame futures and even our sense of self’, he said, but there will always be a ‘random component’. Dreams can be like Rorschach tests, Corballis said, we can read into them what we will.

—

Michael Corballis will also be appearing on The Story of Science panel, tomorrow (Saturday 1 September) with  Margaret Wertheim, Peter Doherty, Elizabeth Finkel and Leah Kaminsky. His most recent books are Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain and The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilisation.

See some of my previous vaguely sciencey MWF posts:
Lab coats, lit journals & marrying frogs (2011)
Birds of a feather (2011)
Complex life (and our plastic brains), a beautiful fluke (2010)

Uncomfortable truths: gender matters

Women continue to be marginalised in our culture. Their words are deemed less interesting, less knowledgeable, less well-formed, less worldly and less worthy.

If you are in any doubt that gender matters, you need only ask a scientist. Yesterday in ACMI Cinema 2, Robert Brooks, Cordelia Fine and Jane McCredie got together to discuss with Monica Dux the science of sex differences. Fine spoke first. ‘We have a tendency to see male and female as fixed and immovable categories,’ she said. Neurology and biology are called upon and expected to explain existing sexual power differentials, achievement biases, social norms and gender stereotypes. But it’s important to critique this ‘sexist science’, Fine said, because – as she writes in Delusions of Gender – ‘from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers.’ Self-help books and the popular media capitalise on these categories and trends, and refer to ‘the science’ as justification for the status quo.

Brooks picked up where Fine left off. ‘Male and female are seldom as different as we would like to think,’ he said, and nature v. nurture is a false dichotomy. Yes, to understand power and the inequalities of existing power structures, we need to look at the social, political and economic contexts that created them. But this is not incompatible with evolutionary biology. In fact, Brooks argued, engaging with evolutionary biology is essential to understanding the implications those very same forces might have for individual people.

When Jane McCredie spoke, she said she said she found it frustrating how science, in seeking to make everything precise, sought to find clear categories in which to place people. For instance, we could dismiss trans and intersex people as aberrations of type, she said, but to do so would be a failure of nerve. Nobody fits a category unequivocally. Science needs to accomodate all of our differences, not seek to push them back into a pre-existing, restrictive boxes.

It would have been difficult for anyone to come away from this session believing that scientific discourse is divorced from the politics of gender. But if you were in any doubt that there are social and political reasons to argue against this kind of sexism and all others besides, Sophie Cunningham’s A Long, Long Way To Go: Why We Still Need Feminism would have left you with the conviction that sexual inequality is indeed very real, and evident in statistic after sobering statistic. 

In Australia, Cunningham explained, only 58% of women are in the workforce, compared to 78% of men. Only 54% of ASX200 companies have women in management roles, and only 10.7% of executive managers are women. 56% of law graduates are women, but only 25% of practicing lawyers over 40 are women, and those women in law suffer a 62% pay gap. The arts are nowhere near exempt from these kind of telling numbers. When the May issue of Esquire listed 75 books every man should read, only one woman made the cut. The 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin shortlists were all male. Since the award began in 1957, it has been awarded 51 times. Out of those 51 awards, only 13 recipients have been women. In theatre, visual and fine arts, these trends are mirrored, if not worse. And one set of numbers Cunningham didn’t give: in the 16 years since the MWF instituted an opening night keynote address, that headlining festival role has been occupied only twice by a woman – by the same woman: Germaine Greer.

So do these things matter? Cunningham asked. Are women just feeling left out? Earlier in the afternoon, when Fine discussed women’s performances in mathematics, she explained how women who believed that they were ‘naturally’ bad at mathematics performed badly. When they believed that they were bad at mathematics not through any deficiency of their own but because of external factors, their scores went up significantly. Cunningham argued a similar point: ‘Erasure of female talent… has a quantifiable effect on women’s careers and their capacity to earn money.’

Perhaps many of these biases are unconscious, Cunningham said. But if our biases are unconscious, that is no defence against failing to act on their recognition. It is in understanding this that Cunningham and a group of writers, editors and feminists created the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. But change is not just a matter of recognising what exists, but of creating a culture in which that is valued, and in which women are further able to access the means to pursue their vocations. Unconscious inequality requires conscious action to correct it. And because of this, a new wave of feminism, says Cunningham, ‘a fourth wave, if you will, is both needed and soon to arrive.’