Six impossible things before breakfast
Acting, lying and mimicking are our human superpowers
An image from Boston last fall but still with the trusty Leica M11 Monochrom. At the time I saw the strong geometry of the pipes. But the camera showed me the light/dark contrast of the scene. The car is a total accident since it probably was doing 60 mph.
This week on the blog, I’ve posted a few notes on my feelings about how Substack fits into my writing flow and a bit of back and forth with Dave Rogers on group identification in the recent election.
Any literary agents out there? I have my second draft of a 75,000 word manuscript that’s my intellectual memoir of how I’ve come to terms with my unconventional conclusions about how to relate brain function to how we decide. I’m working with an editor now to get it into better shape with the help of a pro. I’ve solicited representation from agents through the usual channels without success. If any of my readers here are agents or know of one who might be interested in representing my writing, please drop me a line.
The act of creating a new self on stage
My own acting career began in grade school. I loved getting up in front of a crowd, introvert that I was, and pretending to be someone else. I had the lead in a couple of high school productions, but during my college days I chose science over art as my professional direction. Through my career in academia and drug development those acting skills have been valuable in all kinds of situations, since we often need to be someone not quite ourselves in order to gain some benefit.
Not only does the brain present to us what we perceive as a stable, integrated self, it allows us to be a different person for a while. I was watching Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer not long ago and was struggling to identify the actor playing Lewis Strauss. This was half way through the movie. The actor seemed so familiar. Then I remembered that Robert Downey Jr. was in the cast. Was that him? I hadn’t seen him yet, right? Of course once I “decided” that was RDJ, I knew it was and of course I couldn’t unsee it ever again. But for me, that has always been the mark of great acting. When an actor inhabits another character so deeply you are seeing the character, not the actor portraying him. Some actors are better at changing physically to become someone else, changing voice and mannerisms. Others look the same and are physically recognizable yet the same body is inhabited by a ghost of another person.
Even more interesting is the way an actor in a series, filmed over many years at intervals, can come back to perfectly recreating a character year after year, particularly when that character changes over the course of the story. I’m thinking now about Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad where he portrayed a character over 11 years, bringing him to life in journey from high school teacher diagnosed with cancer to his death as a criminal.
The social utility of acting ability
While acting is skill born of talent, training and diligent practice, it seems to be a human ability we’re all born with. Being able to deceive others by “putting on an act” is a valuable social ability that we put into action daily whether it’s presenting a certain false impression , lying, or telling a story where we relate what others said by mimicking their tone or facial expression. The best story tellers make you believe you’re there by perfectly reproducing the voice, physical mannerisms and word traits in their vivid recounting.
“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'
I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
― Lewis Carroll
I started this series a few weeks ago talking about cognitive dissonance and how we imagine ourselves to be a consistent, integrated self while we’re constantly shifting and changing how we present ourselves. I asked the question, if we change behavior based on social context so much, how can we ever understand who we really are, what we really believe, or what we really value? We know we have an implicit model of proper behavior based on our innate set of social rules of behavior with an overlay of culture that comes from the environment we’re born into and live in over the years.
But, in everyday life, as when acting a part in a play, we can change our motives, behaviors, and language as easily as we can effect actions like tying our shoes or driving our cars. So while we have a model of how to behave, we’re not puppets. Ants and spiders seem to be more mechanistically tied to instinctual behaviors. We’re more complex than that, which is apparently very useful since we devote so much energy expenditure to our very large brains which seem in large part devoted to facilitate social interactions. It makes us unpredictable, an advantage in the endless moves and countermoves of evolution, trying to get a bit better than our prey in order to eat and a bit better than our predators to survive. If the system is to persist, all must be in balance and it appears that it leads to ever more complexity in behavior.
Contradiction is inherent in brain function
There’s no logical requirement for the brain to exclude contradictory statements, unlike logic and “rationality”. Biology simply doesn’t function that way. In the end the brain must accurately model the world in order to be maximally useful. There’s no getting around brute facts like gravity. But socially, we’re mostly far removed from that necessary grounding.
So our big brains are capable of believing things that are not true. It’s actually a skill and talent to lie, to act out a pretend way to be. We can convincingly say things we know are not true when we lie. We tell stories that are not true with ease for pleasure or personal gain. We tell stories of imaging that we know to be impossible even as we tell the story with all the conviction of a witness in court. And we say and try to believe things we hope are true as when we pray to possible God for recovery from illness. We do this even when we know without doubt there’s no causal connection between our spoken formula and the pathological processes in someone else’s body.
Somehow there is a secret self. One that we hide from the world that knows what’s what. The identity that is watching our performance as we strut about on stage pretending to be a king or a genius. The one that speaks through the social identities the brain presents to the world. It’s that function that needs feedback in order to know whether its work in the real world is an accurate representation of that model of what it’s trying to be. In engaging with the world, are we accomplishing what we want? Honest evaluation is the only possible basis of changing the brain’s actions in the world.