Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind. Guy Claxton

Times

      If Dunbar’s speculations are anywhere near the mark, it would mean that our genes are still equipping us to master living in communities of 150 people. Yet in our industrialized, urbanized, televised society we rarely operate in groups of such a size. On the one hand, the nuclear family (with all its current variations), plus an individual’s active friendships, may number only a dozen or less. From this point of view, once we have developed our intimate relationships and observed each other about as much as we can, we are left with unfulfilled gossiping-inclinations, and unused gossiping-capacity. What do we do? We read the tabloids and become addicted to TV soaps. They will provide us with instant ‘Neighbours’ to get to know, and to have feelings and opinions about. Even though we will probably never meet Princess Diana or Michael Jackson, we add them to our list of ‘virtual acquaintances’, and prepare ourselves rigorously for encounters that are never going to take place. The spare capacity of the social brain gladly seizes on the next salacious revelation of ‘what Prince Charles is really like’.

      On the other hand, the social institutions of which we are part – the schools and corporations in which we study or work – frequently contain a thousand or more people. And the media daily introduce us to dozens more. The modern teenager flails about in a maelstrom of faces – different classmates and teachers, ‘real’ heroines and ‘fictional’ characters whose reality status is hardly distinguishable – and almost always escapes into a restricted world of ‘brightness’, ‘naughtiness’ or fanatical devotion to some sports team or rock star.

      While the smaller groups leave us with spare capacity, the larger groups are too hard to handle; our brains, big though they are, cannot enable us to develop a relationship with every shop assistant or taxi driver we meet. (The central humour of the Crocodile Dundee character, you may remember, lay in his attempts to apply his ‘small group’ social habits to New York, by, for example, endeavouring to pass the time of day with every cab driver and policeman he ran into.) The global village has grown far too big, while the local community is far too small; so we top ourselves up with celebrities.

      These are truly the days of the ‘fragmented mind’, and the problems that such a culture poses for the brain-mind are formidable. How are the separate files to be kept apart, so that you instinctively know how to be with different people; and yet integrated in such a way that your developing array of social skills distils out into a general purpose savoir faire? This is the problem to which we return, after the brief excursion of this chapter, in Chapter 7.

      Just before we do so, however, we should pause to note one vital conclusion. Humankind is indelibly sociable. Just as it is etched into our bones that we are biological systems, both greater than the sum of our internal parts, and inextricably entwined, moment to moment, with larger systems, so it is also written on our hearts that we are meant to belong.