The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life (16 page)

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Authors: Shimon Edelman

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Such change need not be shunned, nor should it be embraced, without due consideration. The dynamics of remembering and forgetting and its interplay with the affective value with which memories are often suffused are too complex to be given proper treatment here, but we definitely have the conceptual tools needed to ask the right questions. For one thing, we know that insofar as memories and emotions are part of what a person is rather than something that a person owns, any consideration in this matter will be intensely idiosyncratic.
A chief argument in favor of remembering as much as possible is the opulence of nuance and association that memories bring to ongoing experience. In my mind, this great gift of memory far outweighs the advantages of selective forgetting, which is usually attempted as a remedy for remembered pain. As suggested by studies of subjective well-being, the negative affect associated with a memory fades rapidly with time. The same, however, goes for positive affect, which is why happiness cannot be saved and stored for future use.
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With past affect all but gone, what remains behind and endures is the cognitive essence of condensed experience—a lasting treasure that, like the burning bush in the Sinai wilderness, gives light without being consumed.
In a recent desert experience of my own, I was given a chance to appreciate the potential of remembering things—in this case, some well-chosen words—for helping one see one’s surroundings in a new light. I was walking up a gradually narrowing dry wash, leading into the very fittingly named Smoke Tree Canyon, in the California desert, when the smoke trees’ halfhearted attempts to snag my sleeves with their thorns brought to my mind, of all things, a line from Borges’s “Happiness”: “The calm animals come closer so that I may tell them their names.” I enjoyed this thought so much that I sat down for a few minutes in the shade of the canyon wall to savor the view that evoked it. As I was getting up I saw that I had almost sat on a beautiful, pencil-thin, black- and orange-banded snake—which I could not, unfortunately, inform of its name because I did not know it at the time.
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A Garden of Forking Paths
 
In playing with words, more than in any other cognitive domain, the process of gaining experience by assimilating an utterance or generating a new one is constrained to visit a particular sequence of categorical representations—digital units such as phonemes or words. The resort in language to sequentially ordered associative memory showcases the spirit of functional thrift that permeates cognition: never invent a new solution to a problem if an existing solution to another problem can be adapted instead.
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In Chapter 4, I called this solution PaThS (paths through possibility space). Because in language the space of possible strings of representations (sequences of units) is discrete, it is best visualized not as a field across which one can blaze a trail any which way, but as a set of stops connected by a rail network.
The thing to visualize is, moreover, not some perfectly ordered railroad yard (say, the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof), with immaculate tracks and an ironclad schedule. Imagine instead a loopy maze of crisscrossing tracks that may have gaps, dead ends, and seemingly redundant parallel segments—the subterranean labyrinth of cart tracks running through the network of mining tunnels in Steven Spielberg’s
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, prone to all manner of sabotage and beset by avalanches, floods, and occasional lava intrusions, the equivalents of various common irregularities of natural speech, such as disfluencies or utterances that get abandoned in midsentence.
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The stops along these tracks are words; the routes that carts take through the system spell out longer utterances. The selection of words and their order within the utterance are constrained by the labyrinth’s layout, by the existing connections, by the settings of the switches, and by whatever repair work or volcanic eruptions may be in progress. The point of language being usually communication, the chosen words and the order in which they appear are also constrained by the speaker’s intent, which the utterance can no more than hint at.
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In choosing and stringing together the words for this last paragraph, I have been very, very careful, lest too much of my intent get lost in transit between my brain and yours. I avoided using the word “meaning,” which is infamous for being as difficult to define as it is easy to misconstrue. (I shall return to it a bit later, when it is safer to do so.)
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Instead, I wrote “intent,” about which people’s intuitions tend to be generally on the right side of progress in cognitive science. I also made a point of noting that utterances proffer clues about intent, rather than ferrying explicit content.
What, then, is this intent that shapes linguistic behavior? The seas around the shoals of semantics, the discipline charged with answering such questions, are bestrewn with wrecks of theories that foundered under the weight of their own mathematical armor. To traverse these treacherous seas, we need a craft that sits light in the water and responds well to the breezes of common sense—not a battleship but a dinghy. Let’s see if we can build one out of the materials at hand, using the conceptual tools accumulated over the course of the last several chapters and keeping in mind in particular evolution’s knack for recycling. Perhaps a computational stratagem that works elsewhere in cognition is involved in implementing intent too.
A particularly handy and versatile tool in our kit is the idea of distributed representation that takes the form of coordinated activity of multiple units and circuits in the brain. It would make sense for language to be similar to visual or auditory perception, where a face or a sound can be represented by the activities evoked in a set of units tuned to other faces or sounds, as well as to motor control, where a novel action can be generated by interpolating the activities of units tuned to a few select members of the space of possible actions.
The intent behind an utterance is, then, a surge in the activities of a “cloud” of representations in the mind of the speaker. The immediate origin of some of these activities is external, in that they pertain to various perceptual aspects of the speaker’s present situation; other activities arise internally, having to do with memory (both retrospective and prospective), simulated actions, and motivation. Eventually, the dynamics of communicative intent transforms this activity into motor commands that deliver into the world an externally observable act—the only medium through which the memes behind the intent can reach another mind.
As the utterance hits the listener’s sensory apparatus, it evokes an interplay of representations with very similar dynamics
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that involve perceptual representations, predictions based on episodic memories, simulations aimed to evaluate possible courses of action, motivational accounting, and the ubiquitous emotional effects. This ensemble activity is the whole point of the communication event that just unfolded—in fact, it is now safe to reveal that this is the meaning that got across. There is no need for further interpretation; the buck, as it were, stops here. Pressing the question of the meaning of “meaning” any further would be like calling for a proper definition of a dance while insisting that it is not the same as the sum total of the coordinated motions of the dancers.
All this computation takes place in the listener’s brain in the course of routine, nonlinguistic cognition as well. The distinction of language is that it is capable of instilling in the listener percepts, thoughts, and actions pertaining to situations that are not—indeed, cannot be—immediately present, such as tomorrow’s weather or the conversation between Kalypso and Ulysses. Behavioral studies and brain imaging show that a person listening to a story gives in to a kind of guided hallucination, in which the representational processes unfolding in the mind’s war room reflect not just the directly perceived world along with the internally generated anticipatory data and plans, but also an invented world that is induced by the narrative.
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The critical step in communication is to impart proper structure to the utterances that do the inducing. Intent is multifaceted (the technical term is multidimensional), it may have complex dynamics (including simulated events that play out over time), and the communication channel afforded by a string of words is narrow, all of which makes it difficult to pack into an utterance enough clues from which the listener’s brain can form a reasonably well supported guess as to what the speaker meant to say. In charge of this process is a cognitive structure that serves as the grammar of language—a network of
constructions
or templates that manage the selection, inflection, and sequencing of words.
Constructions range in their complexity from indivisible morphemes (such as “post-”) that can be prepended to a certain class of stems to denote a particular temporal relation, and words (such as “dog”), to larger structures in which some of the elements may vary from one instance to the next, such as “
X
range[ε/s] in [ε/its/their]
Y
from
U
to
V
,” which is the template that I used to put together this very sentence. This last one is like a partially filled form that you may be required to complete in a doctor’s office. Parts of this form, such as the words “range,” “from,” and “to,” are prespecified. Others, denoted by symbols (
X, Y, U, V
), indicate “slots” where other constructions of particular types must be inserted. Yet others, which appear between brackets, indicate choice: one of the listed items (or none, if ε is listed as one of the options) must be chosen from each set.
In each case of communication, the grammar of the language that is being used needs to recruit out of its midst a squad of constructions that would represent faithfully enough the intent of the speaker, all the while evoking reliably enough a reasonable interpretation of it in the mind of the listener. The members of this ad-hoc team must then interact among themselves so as to generate approximately the right words in approximately the right sequence for the job. (Mistakes in this process are definitely tolerated, and even if an utterance comes out as a dud, another attempt at communication would often set things straight.)
To understand how this process works, we must remember three things about grammars. First, constructions that make up a grammar are codified patterns of language use. Second, those patterns may be combined—strung together or nested within one another—to form an intricately structured network of paths between words. Third, this network of constructions grows out of an evolutionarily older, but similarly structured, network of representations that shapes all behavior.
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A guarantor of the decent performance of this system is the constant evolutionary pressure on the memes represented by the constructions in question. Populations of constructions, along with the links that connect them to each other and to the rest of the mind, evolve to mediate between intent and interpretation; those that underperform fall into disuse, get disconnected from the rest of the network, and eventually disappear in a puff of neurotransmitters.
Returning to the example of the construction anchored by the word “range,” we may note that within the network of grammar it is surrounded by a “halo” of possible paraphrases, some very probable, others less so. Distances within this halo—a measure of semantic slack, as it were—correspond to shades of meaning.
Depending on how much slack is allowed, the statement that dogs range in size from miniature to humongous can be paraphrased by saying that they vary in measurements between tiny and very large, or that they differ in dimensions between compact and huge, or, stretching it a bit, that they fluctuate in magnitude between small and big. The twinge of unease that one may or may not feel about this last paraphrase (depending on whether or not it evokes in one’s mind an image of a pulsating dog) is a handy estimate of the subjective semantic distinction between
“range” and “fluctuate.”
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The network of constructions, in which neighborhoods are defined by contextual similarities and semantic distinctions, serves as the representation space for language—a garden of forking production and interpretation paths.
To see how language works, then, ask yourself, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Do I understand this sentence?”
If it were set down in isolation I should say, I don’t know what it’s about. But all the same I should know how this sentence might perhaps be used; I could myself invent a context for it. (A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction.)
 
 
. . . Phrased
like this
, emphasized like this, heard in this way, this sentence is the first of a series in which a transition is made to
these
sentences, pictures, actions. ((A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction.))
 
Every familiar word, in a book for example, actually carries an atmosphere with it in our minds, a “corona” of lightly indicated uses.—Just as if each figure in a painting were surrounded by delicate shadowy drawings of scenes, as it were in another dimension, and in them we saw the figures in different contexts.
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Seeing grammar in this light, we realize that the network that embodies it may be quite idiosyncratic and that meaning is therefore at least partially subjective. This discovery may feel like a letdown for someone who expects language to be perfectly universal and perfectly supportive of communication, but it is of course perfectly in line with the central role of experience in shaping the mind. It is shared experience, which rides on top of shared environment and biology, that promotes effective communication. Because you and I inhabit the same planet, because our brains and our bodies are alike, and to the extent that our minds grew out of similar experiences, you can talk to me and hope to be understood.
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