The Neuromantics – Détails, épisodes et analyse

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 5 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

It’s not unusual to have a “difficulty with names” as one gets older, but that difficulty typically worsens after the onset of a neurodegenerative disorder, such as dementia or stroke or MND. Of course the global impact of those diseases is to impair cognitive function generally. Even so, it seems to be true, as Carlo Semenza discusses in his paper “Retrieval Pathways for Common and Proper Names” (2005), that proper names and proper nouns (Sophie Scott, Eric Morecambe, the Eiffel Tower, Microsoft) are more difficult to retrieve than common nouns, and the current view is that this may be because they are part of a distinct mechanism in the brain that is more resource-consuming.
The damaged brain struggles to find context for a personal name or the title of a film, because those attributions are specific and arbitrary at the same time: they do not refer very far beyond themselves. Whereas a common noun sits within a complex network of semantic associations and contexts (garden, soil, home, territory, belonging, safety), some of which are formed very early on in our lives. This is where it gets tricky, because these common nouns can also have very personal, specific associations (mum, dad), somewhat like proper names, and indeed the whole point of “naming” – a person or a thing or a concept – is that of producing a kind of rightness, something the meaning of which is agreed upon, and apt.
It is this social aspect of naming – embracing the arbitrary and the apt – that Mark Twain examines so tenderly in his Diaries of Adam and Eve (1893, 1905). The two stories are affectionate reworkings of the Genesis myth from the point of view of our supposed forebears, both of whom are unique (the first man and woman) and typical. What Eve, the cleverer of the two, discovers is that she is a kind of poet. To her is given the gift of finding “the best words in the best order” (Coleridge). She looks at animals or places and gives them the right name straight away, because somehow the knowledge is already “common” within her. Alas, it’s all a mystery to poor, illiterate Adam, who thinks Cain and Abel are kangaroos.

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 4 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

Reading is an advanced form of looking – and of looking at faces, in particular. That’s the fascinating story behind Evolution of Reading and Face Circuits during the First Three Years of Reading Acquisition, a paper published in NeuroImage in 2022 by Xiaoxia Fenge et al in which some interesting distinctions are made. The part of the brain dedicated to facial recognition (the fusiform gyrus) is co-opted when we learn to read. But after that ability has been acquired it can’t be lost, or only when it degrades because of brain damage (or dementia). Face-processing, on the other hand – the Ur-form of reading – continues to develop, perhaps because it is such a necessary form of discrimination. We are one of very few animals able to tell other animals apart. Crows (corvids) can also do this. They know the un-Crowiness of the rest of the world. They are also masters of shared attention. From their ability to remember faces comes the ability to know me from you; to hide things, and to give them.
None of this would be news to Ted Hughes, whose great poem sequence Crow (1970) drew on the tradition of bird poetry in English and the exaltation of the winged messenger in ancient myth to fashion a symbolic verse narrative for the post-war era. His titular character is a reader of change and destruction – a ragged Shamanic figure flying between different spiritual traditions who sees the whole of life as a battle for survival and meaning. The sequence is a violent creation myth, and such “making” myths are all about telling one thing from another.
Creation myths also tend to acknowledge disaster in the background: the urge to make is the urge to rescue something from meaninglessness, or save it from loss. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Sandpiper” (1962), the bird is “looking for something, something, something.” And in Sylvia Plath’s “The Zoo-Keeper’s Wife” (1961), an insomniac spouse sees her marriage as an encounter with animals in an airless ark. It’s not all bad news, though, because Plath’s wide-awake suffering is our gain as readers, and a way of looking sadness in the face.

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 5 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

The good news from neuroscientists in Australia (Jiang, et al, 2020), as published in NeuroImage and reported in Psychology Today (“How Some People Stay Sharp After 95”, May 6, 2020), is that very elderly people (90-100 yr-olds) exhibiting strong connectivity between the right and left frontal parietal lobes tend not to experience cognitive decline. The bad news is that, while it may sound like a great idea for nonagenarians to keep walking and learning new things, scientists find it hard actually to demonstrate the benefits of any specific activity in preserving brain function. It’s also hard, ethically, to defend the notion that staying “sharp” represents a “model of successful ageing”.

In the latest episode of The Neuromantics, we stop to consider some of the prejudices at work behind this view of longevity and cognitive health. To whom are we comparing these elderly groups? Often there’s context missing from the discussion (the socio-economic background of any late learner is as significant as the task s/he undertakes) and an unwillingness to accept that our educational development, at any age, has a dual aspect: we make bad choices as well as good ones. A useful guide to the limited predictive value of the things we do to “stay sharp” is the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). In three witty essays – “On the Length of Life”, “There is a Season for Everything”, and “On Not Pretending to be Ill” – the rationalist lawyer and devout Catholic advises us to enjoy a contemplative old age. In particular he tells us to deepen our thinking; to aim for intellectual consistency – the perfection of habit – rather than novelty. “We can always continue our studies,” he suggests, “but not our schoolwork.”

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 4 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

We’re on to the hard stuff now: sub-saharan baboons and grooming as a tool for promoting longevity, rogue males, currencies in friendship, feral children, niche succession, the mythical hinterland of the Peak District in weird fiction, and 1980s Variety Club Sunshine Coaches.

One of the main findings of “Social Bonds. social status and survival in wild baboons”, a fascinating (and recent) paper by Fernando A. Campos et al, is that male baboons who are “strongly bonded” to older females (ie groomed by them) live longer. But dominant males without these tactile platonic relationships with females have shorter lifespans. Why? And do we need to revisit some assumptions about dominance itself? If grooming by females is so crucial, then is the troop really “led” by the alpha male?

In Climbers (1989), a novel by 2020 Goldsmiths Prize-winner M. John Harrison, scaling peaks is another kind of bonding, or grooming, for humans. The end of manufacturing in the 1980s turned UK’s industrial heartlands into places of acute socio-economic deprivation, with a high incidence of (often male) suicide and substance dependency. What Harrison’s book makes clear is that the road back to social cohesion is participatory, though the most interesting participants may not look much like alpha citizens. His central chapter, “Escapees”, is an allegorical fantasy about lost and directionless children who take over a landscape and a niche vacated by more responsible adults.

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 3 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

The human brain doesn’t work out of the box: it has to learn tasks; processing has to be developed. By “grey matter” we mean the 80 billion or so brain cells with which we’re born, but it’s the fatty white matter – or myelination – growing along the cells’ axonal projections, connecting different parts of the brain, that make it work faster and better. In this episode of the Neuromantics, we take a look at the surprising effects of that learning process on the neurophysiology of older people, as studied by Yuko Yotsumoto et al, in “White Matter in the Older Brain is More Plastic than in the Younger Brain” (2014).

Both the young and the elderly can do new things. In Yotsumoto’s experiment, they learn to pick out letters against a variety of backgrounds (and both age groups get better at it). But MRIs show that the really marked changes in white-matter arrangement are confined to older participants. Why? Is that a good or bad thing? And how might these changes be related to more general cognitive decline, where, because the grey cells are dying off, white matter no longer has much to connect?

Maintaining a connection with the world, as well as suffering its loss, is one of later life’s challenges, and nowhere is it more beautifully evoked than in Alice Munro’s short story about the strange plasticity of affection, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, first published in the New Yorker in 1999. Fiona has Alzheimer’s and goes into care. But it’s her unworldly and rather selfish husband, Grant, who finds himself changing, unlearning assumptions, and being driven by love to an act of uncommon kindness.

The Neuromantics, S2, Ep 2 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

How do birds know where things are? “The keys are where you last saw them”, we often say, meaning that, as mammals, we have to recall both an internalised map of location and the lost keys’ visual identity (their shape and colour) in order to find them again. And for a long time it was thought that birds did something similar, matching object cues to spatial memory. New research is taking us on a different journey. In “Taking An Insect-Inspired Approach to Bird Navigation”, by David J. Pritchard and Susan D. Healy (2018), the picture that emerges is of an avian world much closer to that of insects, driven by action and motion parallax, where hummingbirds “see” in a way that only reveals itself when movement starts, where spatial memory is prioritised over object identification. Move a feeder six feet to the right, and the bird misses it. Why?

Maybe we’re a bit like that, too. Expecting our minds to be broadened by travel, we find ourselves flummoxed by the reality. Rather than confront it, we look for ways to confirm the original hypothesis, the expectation. Three pin-sharp tales of disorientation demonstrate just this problem with human navigation. In the first, “The Long Crossing”, by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (from The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2001; translated by Avril Bardoni), a group of penniless Italian immigrants looks forward to arriving in the United States. In the second and third, “BF and Me” and “Teenage Punk”, from A Manual For Cleaning Women (Picador, 2015) by Lucia Berlin, the journeys are developmental: an old lady cuts a drunk handyman some slack, a dawn safari shifts in the memory. Experience changes us. Even so, it takes a lot to stop us believing in a stable identity.

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 1 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

The verse produced in Baghdad by the Abbasid dynasty poets Abdullah Al-Mu’tazz (ninth century) and Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma’aari (tenth century) speaks to us across the years in vivid and at-once familiar translations by Abdullah Al-Udhari and George Wightman (Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster, Penguin Classics, 1975). The poets’ subject-matter is the beauty of natural phenomena and human frailty; how language conserves that beauty and frailty; why honouring the earth matters. The poems also address impermanence and wonder. There are frank admissions of disappointment in others (“Some people are like an open grave”), meditations on celestial mystery (“The Comet”), and everywhere the sense that life-cycles never repeat exactly. Tradition and cultural transmission entail variation.

Something similar might be said about psychological development – very few behavioural preferences are inherent and even these can be environmentally shifted. All babies respond to faces, but children in different cultures, with different ideas about politeness, look at them in different ways.

Visualisation isn’t a given, either. In a fascinating paper on the interdependence of visual imagery and sensory-motor skills (“Mental rotation and the human body: Children’s inflexible use of embodiment mirrors that of adults”, by Markus Krüger and Mirjam Ebersbach), the authors show how the ability of children to perform mental rotation tasks depends on knowledge of how the body works: if kids can see anatomical orientations reflected in standard cube combinations, they can rotate these combinations (more) successfully. Psychologists already knew this was true of adults, but the extension of “use of embodiment” to children is revealing. It suggests that “imagery” isn’t a discrete ability, but one that’s formatively bound up with sensorimotor processes and only separated from them over time.

Everything is conditional, in other words – a fact worth bearing in mind as you listen to this first episode in season two of The Neuromantics, recorded in lockdown, and always responsive to a changing environment . . .

The Neuromantics – Episode 10 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves

Laughter is a social lubricant, but to what end? What does it help us do, in a group, that strengthens that group’s social bonds? All is revealed in Episode 10 – the Season 1 finale – of The Neuromantics, your monthly meeting of scientific and literary minds.

According to Alan Gray, Brian Parkinson and Robin Dunbar, in their 2015 paper on the Intimacy of Self-Disclosure, laughing in company increases our willingness to trust others with personal information – and it’s the laughter itself that does this, not our mood (affect), or whatever it is that prompts the laughter. Which is just as well, because there’s no scientific mean for the comical: we all laugh at different things and for different reasons.

But it’s always some kind of exchange, and comic exchanges have their manipulative shadow side. Who better to illustrate that than the great Shirley Jackson, doyenne of the literary macabre? “Trial By Combat”, from her classic collection, The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), takes the polite but sociable relationship between two tenants of a furnished apartment block and turns it into a terrifying study in mysterious intentions and helplessness. What gives other people their power over us? And why do we submit?

NB: This is a ‘lockdown’ recording, with associated glitches in sound quality. But don’t worry! We’ll be back in the studio soon for the start of Season 2.

The Neuromantics – Episode 9 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott

How real are our conceptions? And if they’re real – if the mental world has substance of some kind – then what about imaginary companions and the voices we hear when we reason with ourselves? Are they disturbances or auditory perceptions? What role can they play in fostering self-reliance, and in child development and learning as a whole?

Welcome to the ninth instalment of The Neuromantics, your monthly guide through the disputed territory between science and literature. In this episode, we’re looking at inner voices and self-reflection, the emotions they carry, their cause and purpose. Are they, in some cases, a simple response to absence? Two Old English poems from the tenth century – The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament – feature narrators who wrestle with separation and solitude in different ways. And our journal paper, Imaginary Companions, Inner Speech, and Auditory Hallucinations, by Charles Fernyhough et al, takes things further: how might the “experiential crossing” of internal dialogue with such companions serve other imaginative acts – fiction, poetry, and drama, for instance?

Finally, when the inner life appears more real than its outward expression, should we worry?

The Neuromantics – Episode 8 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott

Pleasure seekers, you have arrived at your destination. In Episode 8 of The Neuromantics, your essential guide to neuroscience, art and literature, we look at the relationship between music and the body’s natural opioid system. What evidence does the pleasurable experience of listening to – and making – music provide for the existence of a neurochemical reward system, and why does that reward system respond so positively to it? What is the importance of habitual fulfilment (“the familiarity effect”) to learning? What is musical “taste”? Our psychological conductors are Adiel Mallik et al, and their paper, “Anhedonia to music and mu-opioids: Evidence from the administration of naltrexone” (2017) can be read, here: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41952

A different road to pleasure, or at least relief, is taken by the late great American poet Amy Clampitt in her 1985 poem, “Babel Aboard the Hellas International Express” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25006756?seq=1), which describes a riotous train journey from Greece to Germany, where no one speaks the same language but everyone gets the message. And, finally, Guy de Maupassant: are money worries and mortal fears the same thing? And who knew “The Devil” (http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/TheDevil.html) was such a stickler for ritual?

Last stop: polyamory in San Francisco. Which days of the week are best for Relationship Anarchy?