The Orbiting Sun

Can a short story change your life? If it’s by Philip K Dick there’s a good chance. Years ago I read The Shell Game about a colony of humans on a distant planet fighting a deadly unseen enemy. Every day the humans were attacked, but not once were they able to kill or capture any of their enemies. Oddly, the humans never suffered any casualties either. One day they were dredging a marsh in search of a new, top-secret enemy weapon when they came across the wreckage of a spaceship that had crash landed and become submerged. The ship’s log declared that it was a hospital transport en route to a secure medical facility. Its ‘passengers’, none of whose bodies could be located, were all listed as dangerous paranoid schizophrenics.

Some of the humans reached the apparently obvious conclusion that they were in fact the passengers and the deadly invisible enemy they were fighting was none other than a paranoid fabrication. Others decided that the hospital ship was precisely the secret enemy weapon they had been looking for, an incredibly ingenious trick to make them doubt themselves and set them against each other.

The ruling council was compelled to hold a vote. Five believed the ship was an enemy fake; four believed it was genuine. Instantly, the five attacked and killed the four. They realised that the four had been enemy agents all along and they ordered the colony to redouble its security efforts against this most cunning of foes.

I was astounded by this story because it illustrated in the most dramatic way that once people have a ‘world view’ they can twist any fact to suit their belief system. Indeed, it raises the issue of what a fact actually is. In Philip K Dick’s story, the ‘fact’ of the hospital ship was immediately changed to the ‘fact’ of a secret enemy weapon, bringing to mind Nietzsche’s assertion that there are no facts, only interpretations. This accords with what modern science says about the human brain.

As an example, let’s consider how the brain handles vision. Light is focused by the lens in our eye, falls on the retina (at which point the image is upside down, of course), the information is transmitted via the optic nerve to the visual cortex where the image is processed, put the right way up and we experience the sensation of ‘seeing’. But what is it we are actually seeing? To use the language of Kant, are we seeing noumena (things as they really are) or phenomena (things as they are perceived). The answer is that it’s impossible for a human being ever to see things as they really are. We see only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We don’t see ultraviolet light, we don’t see infrared or microwave radiation even though everything we look at is bathed in these. We are not seeing what is really there, we are seeing a filtered and processed interpretation of what is out there.

Consider one person with normal colour vision and another with colour blindness. If they both look at a carrot, one sees an orange object and the other a grey object. Which is right? We can’t possibly know. Perhaps everything really is shades of grey and those who see colour have created a wonderful fiction, little different from the neural trick that allows those with emotion-colour synaesthesia to see colourful auras around others where none exist.

The compound eyes of insects produce a very different view of the world from that which human eyes see. Birds of prey see distant objects with breathtaking detail. What about how a fish sees, staring up at us from beneath inches or feet of refracting water? In every case, the same object may be perceived entirely differently. No way of seeing is any more right than any other; each has evolved in accordance with the laws of natural selection. Evolution is never concerned with right and wrong, merely with what works in terms of survival and propagation.

However, when it comes to world views, we are now absolutely in the territory of right and wrong, or rather people’s utter delusions about these things.

The Catholic Church says extra ecclesiam nulla salus. It means outside the church there’s no salvation. If you’re not a Catholic you’re on a one-way trip to hell. The Koran says that there are only Muslims in Paradise. The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in the annihilation of all humanity except themselves. Hindus, with their caste system, believe that the lowest of the low, the Chandala, the Untouchables were so wicked in their previous incarnation that they deserve to be treated as human scum. Incredibly, many of the Untouchables actually go along with this. I can’t remember what the Jews say, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any Catholics in the Jewish heaven.

The Presbyterians are a personal favourite. They believe that we are all unspeakably wicked but that God has randomly selected some of us to be saved and the rest, the overwhelming majority, to be damned. (This selection is made even before we’re born, incidentally.) So, if you somehow discover that you are one of the ‘saved’ then you can rape, torture, murder, slaughter, pillage etc to your heart’s content and know that your place in heaven is still reserved for you. This carte blanche for horrendous criminality was the subject of a book called Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by the Scottish writer James Hogg (Scotland has more than its fair share of Presbyterians, it has to be said.) In the book, the young protagonist asks his kirk minister if he is one of the saved. The minister tells him that he is. Cue murderous mayhem.

The Gnostic religious leader Caprocrates believed that the route to heaven was to commit every conceivable sin. The Gnostic sect the Cathars believed that the earth was a place of appalling suffering, cruelty and misery and that the person who made it must therefore be the very definition of wickedness. Since the Bible says that Jehovah created it then he is obviously evil incarnate. The Cathars admired anyone who opposed Jehovah, such as Cain, Goliath, the Philistines, and especially Satan. They were opposed to sex because sex led to babies i.e. more subjects for the evil Jehovah.

David Icke proclaims that Tony Blair and the Queen are giant reptiles. Much as I’m attracted to this idea I can’t in all honesty sign up, though Blair in particular is unquestionably an extremely slippery, slithery creature with a viper’s tongue. He recently said, ‘I only know what I believe.’ I’m unable to draw any distinction between this statement and his long-awaited admission that he’s insane.

Unlike Bliar, I only know those things which the evidence supports. That’s why I’m an atheist and that’s why I admire science. Religious people often accuse science of being some kind of alternative religion. In fact, no scientist ‘believes’ any scientific theory in any metaphysical way. If evidence comes along that contradicts a theory then every scientist acknowledges that the theory must be abandoned or corrected. No scientist dogmatically holds on to discredited theories. If only the same could be said of the religious who will twist anything to suit their crazy world view, just like the human colony in Philip K Dick’s story. God works in mysterious ways, the believers will say if ever they encounter a troublesome incongruity, followed by that old favourite how can we mere mortals hope to understand the infinite mind of God? It doesn’t stop them cutting off the heads of their enemies in the name of the God whose infinite mind they don’t comprehend.

In 1615, the Catholic Cardinal Bellarmine said, on the subject of Galileo, ‘To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.’ Hmmmm.

I hear there are now booklets being sold at the Grand Canyon saying it was created by Noah’s flood. I fear we’re all going to get wet in the next four years.

The Ship of Fools

I have the highest IQ ever recorded in Britain. Actually, I just made that up, but no doubt there’s someone out there who can legitimately make that claim and I wonder how smart they really are. I’ve always found people who join Mensa – the society for people with high IQs – to be rather comical, and indeed quite sad. In the spirit of Groucho Marx, I doubt if any truly intelligent person would join a society for truly intelligent people. But I guess that begs the question of what I mean by ‘truly intelligent’?

To help me answer this question I’ve arranged to meet Nikita Lalwani, a Producer/Director in the BBC’s factual programming division. She’s currently working on a documentary about intelligence, with particular emphasis on child prodigies and hothousing techniques – a subject close to her heart, as will become apparent. Our meeting place is The Globe, a somewhat godforsaken pub four miles outside Bath. The reason for this obscure choice is that Nikita is managing to squeeze in a second career as a would-be novelist and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University College. The Globe, situated just outside Bath Spa’s picturesque Capability Brown campus, is one of the regular watering holes for the creative writers.

Nikita arrives at nine o’clock, in the midst of a noisy gang of writers demanding refreshment from the slightly bewildered bar staff. I briefly wonder what the correct collective noun is for creative writers and I settle on a rejection of writers, given the odds against being successfully published.

Nikita – despite her name, which, for me, will forever conjure an image of a glamorous French female assassin thanks to the eponymous movie – is neither French nor an assassin (though this may change if she doesn’t like what I’ve written about her). Wearing an eye-wateringly loud scarlet T-shirt, she stands out from the crowd. She would anyway given that she has the long dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin of someone whose family roots lie considerably closer to Delhi than Slough. When she notices me mentally donning a pair of shades to protect my eyes from her T-shirt, she tells me that she sometimes wears bright yellow boots. Today, thankfully, they are a sober but fashionable black. Her accent sounds vaguely ‘London’ and betrays none of her upbringing in Cardiff.

Having bought her a pint of Carlsberg, I settle down opposite to begin the interview. However, I’m immediately shocked to find her fellow creative writers mercilessly haranguing me. One jeers at me when I confess that I haven’t brought a Dictaphone and there are loud guffaws when I pull out a scrap of paper to make notes.

‘Look, he’s writing on a napkin,’ someone snorts derisively. Another says that I’m being very selfish dragging Nikita away from the others and that I’d better be finished in ten minutes or there will be trouble.

This isn’t going to plan.

I ask Nikita what her documentary track record is like, and she disarms me by candidly admitting, ‘I’ve made a lot of crap.’ Cue tumbleweed moment. She then confesses to making Rolf on Art. I’m now desperately staring at the ceiling. Get me outta here. However, she neatly retrieves the situation. ‘Oh, I haven’t mentioned my documentary on Georgio Armani,’ she says sweetly. ‘Apart from several telephone calls with Georgio himself, I interviewed in person Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster, and … Samuel L Jackson.’

Name dropper, I curse silently. ‘So, what did Mr Cool Jackson say?’ I ask.

The answer flashes back. ‘He said, “Look at you, you look good today. You look different, different good.”’

Bloody Hollywood megastars!

Nikita’s street cred is now at max, helped by the fact that for the last few hours I’ve been reading the opening chapters of the novel she’s working on. It has the deliciously trendy title Memory Stick and tells the heart-warming tale of Rumi, a bright young girl of Indian extraction going to school in Cardiff and struggling with demanding parents, a growing interest in boys, a fear of alienation and a quite ruthless competitive instinct. She’s determined to beat the boys at chess, and another of her ambitions is to sit her maths A-level earlier than the famous child prodigy Ruth Lawrence. If Rumi sounds as though she might become insufferable there’s no danger of that. Her weird addiction to cumin seeds is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

I immediately congratulate Nikita on what she has written so far, and make the right noises about its being a sure-fire publishing sensation when she eventually submits the novel. (Actually, it probably will be.) Naturally, I can’t help enquiring how much of it is autobiographical given the obvious similarities between Rumi and Nikita’s younger self. Nikita’s sharp response makes me think I’m about to crash and burn. She tells me in no uncertain terms that I’m way off the mark if I think this is her life story, though she eventually concedes (after I’ve cunningly bought her a second pint of Carlsberg) that perhaps fifty percent reflects her own experiences – though she is resolutely not going to clarify what is the fact and what the fiction.

Being a gentleman (it says here), I move swiftly on, though I’ve made an ungentlemanly mental note of touchy touchy. Meanwhile I’m having to endure yet another barrage of rudeness and impatience from Nikita’s colleagues.

‘Ten minutes, you said,’ one moans. ‘It must be at least half an hour now.’

I’m sure Michael Parkinson never has to put up with this.

Nikita makes a fascinating point about how child prodigies are always gifted in mathematics and chess, never anything else. It’s true. You never hear of a stunning novel by a ten-year old. There are no wonderful paintings, beautiful sculptures, amazing scientific breakthroughs, breathtaking philosophical insights. Mozart played delightful but derivative music as a youngster: the material that made him immortal was all written as an adult.

Nikita then startles me by saying, ‘Maths is like a child’s game.’ She explains that the type of maths at which child prodigies become proficient is not what you’d call creative. It’s about mastering well-known formulae; solving puzzles in an almost mechanical way like a computer. She reckons any kid could do it given enough ‘encouragement’ from parents or teachers. The kind of creative maths involved in solving Fermat’s last theorem is never in evidence.

Hothousing techniques, according to Nikita, don’t produce creative children but automata, children as computer programmes, little calculating machines. She clearly doesn’t relish the memory of the hothousing she herself endured up to the age of about nine. Her parents took a step back at that point and didn’t subject her to the regime that Ruth Lawrence experienced with all-too-predictable results.

‘All gifted children hate their fathers,’ Nikita says darkly. It emerges that while her parents may have stopped hothousing her, they nevertheless made sure she spent an excessive amount of time studying and frequently forbade her from going out with her friends. She was duly accepted by Oxford to study Medicine, but, freed of parental restrictions, the script was written for her to suffer a rapid fall from grace. At the end of her first year she was thrown out of Oxford, and ended up at Bristol studying biochemistry. One month in, still unhappy, she decided to attend an English Literature class where she had a tearful epiphany. This was what she wanted to do. Unprecedentedly, Bristol allowed her to switch. She excelled and after getting her degree she went on to Cardiff where she obtained a masters in broadcast journalism, setting her up for her career with the BBC.

Despite her success, the memory of her teenage traumas still clearly rankles with Nikita, but she acknowledges there was a positive side. ‘My father made me feel special and that never goes away,’ she comments. Moreover, her brother went to Cambridge, was perfectly happy and got a First.

In response to further heckling from the creative writers, one of whom is gasping to drag Nikita away for a fag, I ask Nikita to sum up.

She says, ‘There’s an obsession in this country linking academia with intelligence. I want to get this straight – I wasn’t gifted. I was labelled that way but I never felt comfortable with it. I feel very uncomfortable about the whole thing. I love and respect my parents and appreciate that they think I’m special. Equally, I think they did me some damage.’

At this point, I’m tempted to mention Philip Larkin’s famous lines about parents fucking you up, though not intending to, but Nikita’s friends are now literally dragging her away so I don’t get the chance.

As she disappears, I’m left thinking about some earlier comments she made.

‘I never worry about holding my own in any scenario,’ she said. She denied that this was anything to do with her intelligence. When I suggested that some people are manifestly more intelligent than others, she rejected this out of hand. ‘Some people are more interesting,’ she replied. In fact, it would be an understatement to say that Nikita doesn’t like the word intelligence. ‘I find that word abhorrent,’ she said vehemently at one point, making sure to repeat it just before she left.

Getting to my feet to leave, I clutch my single sheet of A4, covered with my spider’s writing conveying Nikita’s vital quotes. Who needs Dictaphones! I figure that when she’s famous in a couple of years and being hailed as a highly intelligent writer (much to her annoyance), I’ll be able to point to the very first interview she gave.

In fact I’m feeling so benign I think I’ll even be able to forgive the nasty creative writers!

Man and Dog

So, I’m having a pint of Fosters in Fitzgeralds. It’s about nine o’clock and the pub is busy considering what night it is. I’ve always regarded Thursday as an odd night – too soon for the buzz of weekend freedom and too late to be a refuge from weekday tedium.

The door flies open and there he is – or, rather, they: a man and his dog.

All my life I’ve disliked dogs and I dislike them even more right now. Dogs and pubs don’t mix. You don’t have to write it down as a rule because it’s so damned obvious. Imagine a dog dipping its long tongue into your pint when you’ve turned your back for a second, a dog with its snout sniffing your pub meal, the self-same snout that pushed excrement around the local park earlier in the day. Imagine it crawling under the table, manoeuvring between your legs, flicking you with its flea-ridden tail. Perhaps it will bark, even howl. It might snarl and bite. As I say, a recipe for trouble.

Of course, the dog itself isn’t to be blamed. It didn’t look at its watch and decide to pop out for a pint because it was a dreary Thursday night. The dog is the agent of trouble, not the cause. The man has that distinction. This guy is probably late thirties/early forties. He’s wearing a camouflage jacket and an olive hat, a bit like an Indiana Jones hat except it has a hard circular rim. He’s unshaven, but when he takes off his hat, his hair is grey-black and neatly cut. I’m surprised because I’d taken him for a Big Issue salesman, but the tidiness of his hair suggests something else.

He strides around the bar, taking large, confident steps. As if he owns the place. A few people nod at him and he nods back. He’s with his people. I stare at the scruffy, mangy dog following him. It looks like a greyhound that’s had a bad experience in a car-wash. It has a peculiar, brownish colour, streaked with random white flecks. Emaciated, it has an almost desperate look its dark eyes. I’m thinking Big Issue again. I found out several months ago that Big Issue sellers get an additional weekly allowance if they own a dog. So now, all over the country, they’re all dogged up. They underfeed their pet (good for the sympathy vote) and spend the rest of the allowance on extra booze and fags. Once again, the law of unintended consequences has made its appearance, and no one has noticed, as usual.

The man and his dog disappear around the corner. Out of sight, out of mind, I hope. Five minutes later, I look up and the man and his dog are sitting directly opposite me. The man is preparing a roll-up. He’s really ticking off everything on my hate list. Can’t they bring in that smoking ban a few months early? His dog is looking at me and I know it’s only a matter of moments before it will be padding over to annoy me. On cue, there it is, disappearing under my table, rustling past me.

I’m trying to think serene thoughts. I knew it was a mistake not to have signed up for yoga classes. Perhaps anger management would be better, but I’m probably too angry for that.

Luckily, the dog doesn’t linger and wanders off to some other table. It probably wishes it had an owner who took it for a walk in the park in the fresh air. I look at the man smoking his roll-up and notice him giving high fives and firm handshakes to a number of people. I loathe this person.

They say there are two sides to every story, but I have no interest in the dog man’s story. I’ve rejected it even before he tells it, just as he’s rejected mine. If he thought of me at all he wouldn’t have brought his dog into the pub and he wouldn’t be blowing smoke in my face.

I start contemplating the golden rule of PR: you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. It’s worse than that. You don’t even get a first chance.

The First Time

My first sexual experience had nothing to do with sex. Well, I was only ten. Give me a chance. For six weeks I had lain in bed with heavy bandaging on my right leg to protect the twenty-five stitches that had been used to knit together the two halves of my thigh. They had been parted by a broken milk bottle that got in my way during a game of commandos in the woods near my house.

I was under strict instructions from the doctor not to move my leg and, above all, not to scratch my thigh no matter how itchy it became. Well, how itchy could it get? I wondered. Six weeks later, I knew exactly. People with broken legs often push knitting needles down the inside of their plaster casts to get at an itch. No such option was open to me. During those six weeks my right hand was permanently glued to my thigh as I attempted some kind of gentle rotating rubbing motion directly over the six-inch-long line of stitches, hoping the movement would somehow seep through the bandages that were providing impenetrable defences for the itch. I had begun to assign human qualities to it – it was Red Itch, a nasty little creature that stuck to my thigh like a limpet and wore a permanent smirk. ‘Come and get me,’ it taunted, knowing I could never get near. I was terrified of doing anything that might cause the stitches to burst. I couldn’t bear to think of the wound reopening and blood gushing out. It might never heal.

A keen footballer, I dreaded the thought of not being able to kick a ball again. I wondered if I’d be a cripple. Maybe my right leg would grow more slowly than the left. Maybe it wouldn’t grow at all. How would the muscles repair themselves? How would all the blood vessels get in working order again? It was hard to imagine that I’d ever again be able to run around freely. Perhaps I would become a scary Long John Silver character, feared and loathed by all of my (former) schoolfriends, hobbling along school corridors while everyone fled before me.

I still wasn’t convinced my leg had been saved. I had seen wounded soldiers in TV movies having their legs amputated because of gangrene. What was gangrene? I didn’t want to ask in case my worst fears were confirmed. All I knew was that I had a wounded leg and I had been playing commandos. I imagined opening my eyes one morning and finding myself surrounded by people holding me down and wielding shining saws, ready to hack through my leg. ‘It’s to save your life,’ they would say. ‘It’s all for the best.’ Yeah, right. What good is a one-legged footballer? I was the school captain, player of the year. Was there any fate worse than not being able to play football again?

I had already become a freak show. A small box-room behind the sitting room had been converted into a bedroom for me. Grudging older brothers and sisters took it in turns to supply me with food and drink, never missing an opportunity to mercilessly tease me. Never mind the gangrene, the amputation, the never playing football again, they said. I had missed so much school I was sure to be backward. I’d have no friends, I’d never go to university and never get a job. I would be locked away in some special home for hopeless cases. Cheers, guys. I appreciate the support.

I was never able to see TV because we only had one and that was in the living room for the rest of the family. I could hear it, of course, and that was a particularly cruel and unusual torture, especially when a war movie was on or a big football match. I was always missing the big event, always being left behind.

Then there was the issue of, er, waste disposal. I couldn’t walk and had to remain immobile in my bed, so there was no prospect of making a trip to the toilet. What goes in must come out, so what to do? My parents recruited my siblings for a task which so infinitely horrified them that I think it took them days, and huge bribes of Cadbury’s chocolate, to finally agree. When nature called, I would knock three times on the wall and minutes later a grumbling brother or sister would appear with the appropriate containers. They would leave the room and reluctantly return an eternity later to collect the results.

A huge chorus of distressed and appalled screams invariably greeted the sight of my waste products as they were ferried through the living room en route for the toilet. So, I had been gradually stripped of all dignity and had no prospects whatever of leading a happy and normal life. Yet one thing made all other considerations irrelevant. The itch.

When you have a really bad toothache it sometimes seems that all the suffering on earth could not match the pain you are enduring. I remember with one toothache episode that after taking pain killers and realising they’d made absolutely no difference, I actually wished I would die. The itch was ten times worse.

Then the day of salvation came. My mum told me that a district nurse was coming round the following morning to clean the wound and change the bandage.

I didn’t get a moment’s sleep that night. I was more excited than at any Christmas. I was counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds when the infernal itch would be banished.

I recall nothing about the nurse other than that she was bossy and utterly unsympathetic. But who cared about that? As far as I was concerned her only purpose in life was to relieve my itch. She carefully unwound the bandage as if it were attached to some ancient Mummy. At last my wound was revealed and what a sight it was – all sorts of disgusting gunge had seeped out of my torn flesh and formed a yellow, suppurating crust. Here and there the top row of stitches peeked through. Efficiently, the nurse took out a bottle of purple liquid from her medical bag, poured it onto some cotton wool and got ready to clean the wound.

Her hand hovered as I silently begged her to get on with it.

‘This might sting a bit,’ she warned. A sting was nothing compared with the itch. Why was she torturing me by taking so long? If I’d known any swear words I would definitely have used them.

At last, her hand plunged downwards and the antiseptic on the cotton wool made first contact with the wound. Did I say sting? The pain was unbelievable and yet through it all I was aware of the most delicious, indescribably gorgeous sensation. My itch was being scratched. My friends and I had been furtively speculating about sex for what seemed like years. What did it feel like? Now, without any doubt, I knew. This was sex. After all, nothing could possibly be better than what was happening to me right now.

The nurse expertly moved along the length of the wound, teasing the crust away from the flesh, rubbing and scrubbing as I simultaneously winced and grinned. At last, all twelve upper stitches were clearly visible and the wound looked fresh, clean and not bad at all. A new bandage was applied and, miracle of miracles, I was utterly itch free.

Two weeks later, the stitches were removed. Three months later, I was captain of the football team again, playing better than ever. I was top of my class and the envy of everyone for having a really cool scar on my thigh. ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger,’ Nietzsche said. If I’d heard of him when I was a ten-year old I would certainly have agreed. But, best of all, I had enjoyed my first sexual experience and I was able to cast a smug look over my friends, knowing I was so much more mature.

The Human Aura

(Based on ‘Colourful spin-offs of cross wiring’: The Guardian, October 21, 2004.)

When I met Jamie Ward, a psychologist at University College London, I didn’t notice anything unusual about him. Certainly there were no strange colours mysteriously surrounding his body suggesting that he might be about to kill himself in the next few days.

Ward laughed when I told him this. He’s well qualified to comment on the popular myth that there are people out there with psychic powers who can see colourful auras around others, giving them direct access to our ‘hidden emotions’. These powers have supposedly extended to allowing psychics to know when people have been suffering from suicidal depressions and to predict the day of their death.

After reassuring me once again that he was hale and hearty, Ward said he’d been fascinated for several years about the idea that we might have auras that others could interpret. He wanted to know if there was any scientific basis for this seemingly outlandish idea. Now he says that the allegedly psychic phenomenon may be nothing more than a rare condition known as emotion–colour synaesthesia. His study of a woman known as GW who suffers from this condition is published in this month’s Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Ward’s research indicates that some people may indeed see colourful auras around others, but nothing paranormal is going on. ‘These colours do not reflect hidden energies being given off by other people,’ Ward says, ‘rather they are created entirely in the brain of the beholder.’

If that seems even more implausible than the psychic theory then welcome to the bizarre world of synaesthesia, a condition found in approximately one in every two thousand people. In sufferers, stimulation of one sense produces a response in one or more of the other senses. So, for example, when a sufferer sees a certain breed of dog, they might hear a certain piece of classical music. When they see a different breed, they might hear an Elvis Presley song. Others may experience shapes with tastes or smells with colours. The range of unexpected combinations is effectively infinite. Scientists increasingly believe that the cause of these surprising associations is cross-wiring in the brain.

In a normal person, visual signals are processed exclusively in the visual cortex. But what if inappropriate neural wiring caused the auditory cortex to be triggered too? Then a sound would be experienced even though no sound was made.

In Ward’s study, GW could see colours such as purple and blue in response to people she knew or when their names were read to her. For example, James triggered pink, Thomas black and Hannah blue. These colours spread across her whole field of vision.

Ward commented, ‘The ability of some people to see coloured auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mythology throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such talents could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synaesthesia.’

When I queried his use of the word gift, Ward admonished me for describing those with the condition as suffering from it. Synaesthesia rarely has any debilitating effects. In fact, arguably those with it can have deeper, more stimulating experiences than the rest of us.  Indeed some scientists have speculated that neural cross-wiring of this kind may lie at the root of creativity, and may exist in all of us to some degree, allowing us to make connections that would never otherwise be apparent.

As I take my leave of Dr Ward, I can’t help think I’m missing something. Maybe there was a time long ago when human beings could routinely see each other’s aura. A useless ability perhaps, but there’s no doubt it would make life a lot more colourful.

Autism and Theory of Mind

(Based on Mind Reading by Sanjida O’Connell, Arrow)

Here’s a test for you. A woman says to a man, ‘I’m leaving you.’ His reply is, ‘Who is he?’

So, what’s going on?

Most people have no trouble in analysing this situation. The man and women are probably in a relationship. The man believes that the woman is seeing someone else and now that she’s announced she’s leaving, he’s assuming she’s going to live with the other man. He wants to know the identity of his rival.

Straightforward, huh? Well, not for everyone. There are people who would look at these two quotes and have no idea of how they related to each other. They would think that my analysis amounted to some kind of magical mind reading. After all, how could I possibly know all these things? All we’re actually told is that a man and a woman are speaking and they have said two sentences that, on the face of it, have no obvious link. To fill in all the other details, to make the unstated connections, it is necessary to possess something called Theory of Mind. This is the name given to our ability to understand the intentions and beliefs of others. In effect, it’s mindreading.

Some people do not possess Theory of Mind and, as a result, their ability to understand others can range from limited to non-existent. Even for those of us with Theory of Mind, there was a time when we did not possess it. That was when we were infants.

A simple test can be applied to young children to see if they have developed Theory of Mind. You hold up a tube of Smarties and ask a child what they think is inside. Naturally, they say Smarties. You then remove the lid and reveal that the tube is in fact full of chocolate raisins. You replace the lid and ask the child what their best friend, who is waiting in the next room, would say was in the tube, dutifully pointing out that the other child has not seen you removing the lid and showing the true contents of the tube. Up to the age of about four or five the child will give ‘Chocolate raisins’ as the answer.

Remarkably, if you ask the original child what they thought the tube of Smarties contained when you first showed it to them they will now say, ‘Chocolate raisins.’ It’s as if they’ve completely forgotten their original answer. The child cannot yet grasp the concept of false beliefs. Because they now know that the Smarties tube is full of chocolate raisins they think everyone else must know that and that they themselves must have known it all along too.

It might be argued that the child told a lie by saying that the Smarties tube always contained chocolate raisins. In fact, a young child can’t comprehend a lie. Because they have no idea of false beliefs it’s impossible for them to deliberately plant false beliefs in the minds of others. In other words, a Theory of Mind is essential for lying.

People with severe autism have no Theory of Mind. A mother with three sons, the oldest two of whom were autistic, realised that the youngest was normal because he dragged her outside to show her the tree in which his football had become stuck. Her other two sons would have been certain that she knew exactly where the ball was without having to be told because, just like the kid with the Smarties tube, they could not understand the concept of someone not possessing the same knowledge that they had.

Nothing is stranger than autism. It’s still not clearly understood, but promising theories are emerging. One of the favourites is that the autistic brain is wired slightly wrongly. All normal human beings have a special part of the brain dedicated to working out what other people’s faces are telling us i.e. reading all the tiny movements of facial muscles that can reveal whether someone is bored, enthralled, in love, angry, sad, hateful, impatient, anxious, nervous, sexually attracted to us etc. MRI scans show clearly where in the brain this face-processing activity is taking place. In autistics, an adjacent area is activated. This adjacent area is the one that is active when normal people are looking at inanimate objects such as tables or chairs. In other words, when an autistic is looking at your face, he’s seeing something that it no more significant to him than a hat or a cardboard box. This may be the prime reason why autistics have such poor social skills and show little interest in others. In fact, severe autistics can’t even recognise their own face if they see it in a mirror or on video. One autistic person was shown a video of himself taken twenty years earlier. In the video, he was wearing a bright yellow shirt and sitting in the front of a bus. As he watched, the autistic showed no flicker of recognition of his younger self and the only thing that seemed to interest him was the yellow shirt, which he mentioned repeatedly. Interestingly, if autistics can’t read faces at all, there may be some people who have the opposite issue to deal with and may have a kind of super-sensitivity to facial signals. Successful illusionists such as Derren Brown may enjoy this kind of advantage.

Eye-tracking studies have shown that when autistics are confronted by faces they rarely look at the eyes. Most of their attention is directed at the mouth. If they are shown a scene from a movie where one person is talking and another person is sitting silently but exhibiting strong emotion, the autistic will ignore the silent person and focus on the mouth of the speaker. Movement appears to be of much more interest to them than static displays of powerful emotion.

Hearing is also a problem for autistics. Research indicates that they find it difficult to filter what’s important from what isn’t. Thus the voice of someone speaking to them is treated with no more importance than background noise. They hear a kind of bedlam and they usually choose to tune out the discordant noises and behave as if they’re not listening at all. This would explain why autistics don’t seem to enjoy talking to people and often actively try to avoid conversations. Noise can be terrifying for them. One autistic described raindrops as sounding like machine-gun fire. Waves at the seaside were more like tidal waves. Trains scared him half to death.

Recently, some autistics have benefited from a piece of equipment that filters out background noise and can be worn like headphones. By allowing them to focus on the sounds closest, such as human voices, their conversations become much more productive. Huge improvements in their communication skills have been observed.

Another recent theory suggests that autism may be caused by the loss of so-called mirror neurons. When we use our hands to pull, push, pick up etc. certain neurons are activated in our brains. These same neurons are seen to fire when we watch others pulling, pushing etc, as if we are mentally mirroring their actions. It is now being speculated that whenever we watch someone else doing something, the appropriate mirror neurons fire in our brains, allowing us to read and understand another’s intentions. This, in fact, may be the physical basis of the Theory of Mind. A person in whom these mirror neurons were defective or missing would be predicted not to possess Theory of Mind. Perhaps this is the elusive cause of autism.

Mindreading is usually associated with the paranormal but the fact is that every normal person mindreads with great success every day. Quite simply, we are astonishingly good at knowing what others are thinking. The downside is that this allows us to be astonishingly good liars and frauds. So, while we’ve evolved all of these great techniques for mindreading, we’ve evolved just as good techniques for misdirection. It’s usually when you think you understand someone perfectly that you discover you don’t understand them at all.

The Difference between Empathy and Sympathy

‘The Nazis empathised with the Jews but certainly didn’t sympathise with them.’

Many people find this a perplexing sentence since they’re uncertain of the difference between empathy and sympathy. Many consider the words interchangeable. Some think of empathy as a kind of souped-up sympathy.

Sympathy means to feel with another person: whatever they feel you feel too. In contrast, empathy is about imagining what you would feel if you were in the other person’s position. Dr Lauren Wispe has given the following definition:

‘In empathy one substitutes oneself for the other person; in sympathy one substitutes others for oneself. To know what something would be like for the other person is empathy. To know what it would be like to be that person is sympathy. In empathy one acts as if one were the other person. The object of empathy is understanding. The object of sympathy is the other person’s well-being.’

In other words, sympathy is altruistic while empathy may or may not be motivated by good intentions. Going back to the Nazis, it was critical for them to be able to control the Jews arriving in huge numbers every day at the death camps, so they put considerable thought into imagining how Jews would feel as they stepped off a train at a strange place. At Treblinka they made the train station resemble a reassuring, picturesque station that you might find anywhere in rural Germany. As the Jews disembarked, they were told that they could now have a nice shower to refresh them after their long journey. What could be more natural? The Nazis had understood exactly how the Jews would be feeling. So, plenty of empathy from the Nazis, but not a shred of sympathy.

Empathy is perhaps easier to understand than sympathy. We simply need to ask ourselves, ‘How do I imagine I would I feel if I were that person?’ But, regarding sympathy, how can anyone actually feel what someone else is feeling? How can you truly substitute another for yourself, as Lauren Wispe’s definition requires? And why, as in the Nazi case, is it easy to resist sympathy?

A research team at University College London took pairs of lovers and gave them mild electric shocks. Using brain-imaging techniques, the scientists were able to see which parts of the brain were activated when the shocks were administered. Some of the activated areas were associated with the physical feeling of pain and other areas with the emotional feeling of pain.

The scientists then told one partner that they were about to give the shock to the other partner. Again, they took brain scans and this time something very revealing occurred. For the partner not receiving the shock, the scans showed no activity in the areas associated with the sensory experience of physical pain, but all the areas associated with the emotional feeling linked to the electric shock were triggered.

Dr Tania Singer, the head of the UCL research team, was asked what she thought would happen if, instead of happy couples, she had used pairs of people who hated each other. Would the results be identical? She agreed that this was likely to be the outcome.

The significance of this is that whether you love or hate someone, if you know they are about to suffer pain that you have previously experienced yourself, the parts of your brain linked with the emotional experience of that pain will be automatically activated. Whether you are then sympathetic or not is a higher order intellectual process, relating to your beliefs system. SS guards were trained to regard Jews as sub-human, so that’s exactly how they treated them.

I always feel uncomfortable when I encounter people who sell The Big Issue. I’m sure the reason for that is that I immediately empathise with them on the basis of tough times I’ve had or could imagine myself having, and then I immediately say to myself that there’s no need for them to live like this given that we have a welfare state. Moreover they are in this position probably because of alcohol or drug abuse. So, no sympathy from me. Irritation, in fact. Yet underneath it all, parts of my brain have been activated by the person’s plight.

So, I’m in full-scale cognitive dissonance mode. I feel one thing and I’m thinking another, contradictory, thing.

Are we entitled to draw the following conclusions?

1) With empathy, we are dealing with the emotional feeling of pain, reflecting what we imagine another is experiencing.

2) With sympathy, we should also be able to feel the actual physical pain of the other. Except there is no mechanism for this to take place. A physical feeling of pain quite simply cannot be transmitted from one person to another. If someone slaps my face, there is no way for you to feel the physical pain I have experienced.

3)   Sympathy is probably best considered as empathy accompanied by strong identification with the other person. With the Nazis, their empathy towards the Jews was accompanied by extreme non-identification, leading to no manifestation of sympathy.

IQ

All sorts of things are involved in intelligence. Aldous Huxley thought body shape was important. He believed that most intelligent people were of the tall, skinny type – ectomorphs. Athletic, medium builds – the mesomorphs – were too busy pursuing physical pleasure to spend much time thinking. The fatter types – the endomorphs – were too lazy and too attached to the comfort zone.

What about personality type? There’s a theory that extroverts suffer from low ‘cortical arousal’, hence their need for other people. They’re incapable of sitting quietly and doing the hard, isolated work of the intelligentsia.

Many of the greatest thinkers and artists have been known to suffer from depression. Is this one of the keys to intelligence?

Nietzsche pointed out that very few of the world’s greatest philosophers were married. Is domestic bliss fatal to intelligence?

Bertrand Russell believed that St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas could not be ranked amongst the greatest philosophers because their thinking was too constrained by the need not to contradict their Catholic faith. Oddly enough, Russell himself is probably excluded from the ranks of the greatest thinkers by his need to endorse a liberal view of the world. His hostile comments concerning Nietzsche, the most illiberal of thinkers, are simply embarrassing.

Unlike Russell, Nietzsche was unafraid to reach the harshest conclusions about the human condition. He saw no reason why ‘the truth’ should be favourable to human beings. Every religion offers hope to humanity but why should there be hope rather than despair? Nietzsche asked the astonishing question about whether lies are much more conducive to survival than the truth. Are we programmed to delude ourselves?

Nietzsche believed that many people were alive purely because they were able to cling to the lifebelt thrown to them by religion. But what if that lifebelt were taken away?

Nietzsche also thought religion had committed a fatal error in promoting the search for the truth as the greatest good since, he believed, that search would invariably expose the lies and delusions of religion.