"The Voices Within" by Charles Fernyhough

This very accessible book is about thought. Many (all?) of us seem to have a voice within our heads talking to us. Sometimes these thoughts conduct dialogues. For some people these voices seem not to be their own thoughts; sometimes this sort of voice-hearing is pathologised and voice-hearers can be labelled as schizophrenics or mystics. Fernyhough tells us the very latest research on our inner voices. But he also considers non-academic sources including:

• Literature especially 'stream of consciousness' fiction (Fernyhough himself writes fiction): 
• In Chaucer's Book of the Duchess the 'Man in Black' "spak noght/ But argued with his owne thoght," (p 93)
• The difference between the commandments of the gods in the Iliad and the dilemmas of Ulysses in the Odyssey
• Sports stars commanding themselves out loud to eg focus on the ball
• The private speech of children playing
• Silent reading (first observed  being done by  St Anselm by the not-at-the-time-Saint Augustine)
• Guardian angels

The four voices many of us hear are: (all p 44)

• "Faithful friend (associated with personal strength, close relationships and positive feelings)"
• "Ambivalent Parent (combining strength, love and caring criticism)"
• "Proud Rival (who was distant and success-oriented)"
• "Helpless Child, distinguished by negative emotions and social distance"

Many many fascinating moments:

• We are so committed to the privacy of our inner thoughts that "its alternatives - mind-reading, telepathy and thought invasion - can be sources of humour or horror." (p 4)
• "having a brain gives you: a ringside seat for a show meant for you alone." (p 4)
• "Thoughts are typically coherent: they fit into chains of ideas which, in no matter how haphazard a fashion, are connected to what has come before." (p 7)
• "Some of the mysteries of inner speech become more comprehensible when we rcognise that it has the properties of a dialogue." (p 15)
• "establishing a shared language ... rather than squeezing people's varied experiences into pre-existing categories" (p 29)
• "Dialogic thinking seems to be a useful tool for creativity" (p 107)
• "Self-talk gives us a perspective on ourselves that might be a key ingredient for thinking in a flexible, open-ended manner." (p 113)
• "Very strong evidence for a link between hearing voices and early adversity, particularly childhood sexual abuse. ... A does-response relationship was also observed ... good evidence that an effect is causal" (p 206)
• "People who live through horrific events often describe themselves dissociating during the trauma. Splitting itself into separate parts is one of the most powerful of the mind's defence mechanisms. ... Bentall's analysis is consistent with (although doesn't prove) the idea that trauma ... causes dissociation ... which then causes hallucinations." (p 208)
• "Voices, then, might give us important clues about the fragmentary constitution of an ordinary human self." (p 209)
• "Doing that internal speaking silently will also have clear evolutionary benefits. Talking to ourselves won't be much good if it betrays out position to a predator ... One reason why private speech 'goes underground' in middle childhood is probably that talking to yourself out loud is rarely sanctioned in Western schools. " (p 250)
• "I myself am most likely to experience a full-blown inner conversation when I am grappling with a dilemma. There is almost no research on this topic." (p 252)

This is a great introduction to a fascinating topic. August 2017; 259 pages

Fernyhough has also written The Box of Birds, a thriller based on the concept that consciousness is fragmented. 

"The Eureka Effect" by David Perkins

This book, written for the general reader but tilted towards those who want to learn how to solve problems through greater creativity, describes what Perkins calls 'Breakthrough Thinking'.

Although Perkins describes the breakthroughs made by some great thinkers, such as Archimedes solving the problem of how to measure the volume of an irregular object such as a crown, Edison inventing the light bulb and Darwin discovering Evolution through Natural Selection, Perkins mainly concentrates on the sort of lateral thinking puzzles like solving the riddle of how the man died who was found dead in the desert with no marks around him and an unopened pack on his back. There are a lot of these sort of puzzles which are fun but seem to make the ideas Perkins is peddling seem slightly shallow and unimportant.

Perkins uses the metaphor of gold prospecting in the Klondike as an analogy to trying to find the solution to a puzzle. There is, he says, a vast wilderness of possibilities and sometimes the only way to find the treasure is to be "systematic about surveying all the possibilities". But often you are on a "clueless plateau" where there are  "no apparent clues to point in the direction of a solution" (p 47). The solution is to detect hidden clues by doing a search for "incongruities or other suspicious features" (p 54). (I suspect this might work better for the artificial puzzles that he sets up than in real life.) Part of the reason why searches may seem fruitless is that many people are trapped in a "narrow canyon of exploration" (p 47); their thoughts run in channels when they need to think outside the box. The solution is to reframe the problem, perhaps using perverse interpretations (I always want to obey signs saying wet paint). Finally people are lured towards an "oasis of false promise" (p 48) when you are nearly there but not quite so you hammer away at improvements without seeing that the solution lies, again, outside the box.

It is a delightful analogy but I am not sure that there was anything new here.

In a sense, the real meat can be found when he quotes the work of Davidson and Sternberg who suggested that there were three parts to insight:

• select what is relevant 
• compare new ideas with existing concepts
• combine ideas in original ways

It is an interesting and engaging book but I think there is a lot more that could be said on this subject.

August 2016; 269 pages

"Cognitive Dissonance" by Joel Cooper

"We do not like inconsistency. It upsets us and it drives us to action to reduce our inconsistency. The greater the inconsistency we face, the more agitated we will be and the more motivated we will be to reduce it." (p 2)

This book contains a fifty year review of the evidence suggesting that 'Cognitive Dissonance' (first proposed by Leon Festinger in his book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance) leads to attitude change. When we do something that doesn't fit in with our belief about who we are (and we tend to believe that we are "good, competent, and moral people" - p 96), we change our beliefs towards conformity with our actions.

This leads to some quite counter-intuitive outcomes: 

• If we suffer for something, we are more likely to see it as desirable. 
• If we expect to fail and actually fail we tend to repeat the action that has confirmed our view of ourselves rather than trying something different. However, if we expect to fail and actually succeed we tend to change what we do next time, even though that will make the likelihood of failure greater. (pp 25 - 26)

We are very good at avoiding dissonance by denying responsibility. Dissonance does not seem to occur unless we had the freedom to choose the action that lead to the discrepant cognitions, and it does not occur unless the consequences were (a) bad and (b) foreseeably bad. (p 73) When  people are publicly committed dissonance is worse and attitudes change fastest (so if a politician publicly endorses a policy, their attitudes about the policy become more firmly entrenched). 

This book was a very readable account of some of the research on this topic but I was disappointed that the scope was quite narrow. Does not cognitive dissonance occur when a student discovers that their previous ways of explaining the world do not work? This book focusses almost entirely on social psychology. Is not learning the way we adjust our cognitions to avoid cognitive dissonance? This book says very little about HOW attitudes get changed. And what does cognitive dissonance feel like? This book skims over this, using only the description 'discomfort'. 

June 2016, 183 pages

"The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes

Despite the title, the bulk of this book is about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Lowes seeks to explain where each element of the story came from before it percolated in what he calls the "deep well" of Coleridge's imagination to emerge as classic poetry. This book is a brilliant feat of scholarship: he leaves no stone unturned and every image (so it seems) is traced to its source (and often multiple sources). It is an extraordinarily impressive work, although obsessive, exhaustive but sometimes a little exhausting.

I was interested initially because of my work on liminality but well before the end I was determined to read more of Coleridge, his biography, his criticism, and of course his great poems. This man was so much better than Wordsworth!

Mariner is all book work: he had never been to sea before he write the work. He seems to have been a voracious reader with a prodigious memory: he talks about ocular images which suggest that he had a photographic memory. He was also extreme when he talked: he seems to have subjected his listeners to a stream of consciousness that ranged from subject to subject demonstrating an incredible breadth of knowledge and understanding: he was interested in everything. He would have been an amazing person to have met (but perhaps a bit of a bore and certainly a monopoliser of conversations).

For example, the Ancient Mariner experiences:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green and blue, and white

and Lowes finds the sliminess is a description of Captain Cook, which Coleridge read; the oiliness from voyages of Father Bourzes; the burning from Purchas; the witches from Macbeth (and they go "about, about"); the death-fires from Priestley's Opticks when he describes light from putrescence and Will o' the Wisps in burial grounds; and the crawling things from Frederick Martens accounts of a voyage to Greenland and Spitzbergen!

In another example the poem talks of "snowy clifts" and Lowes tracks down travelogues which talk of cliffs or clefts or even clifts until he finds a Captain Wood who writes of 'snowy clifts'.

Lowe also speculates about the famous Albatross. This, he suggests, is not the huge white bird most people know but the rather smaller black 'albitross' which is mentioned in another travelogue and is of a size where it might be possible to be hung around someone's neck.

Far from being a fantasy, the Ancient Mariner has science woven deep into its fabric. The very journey could be traced on a map; he sails down into the South Atlantic, rounds the Horn, is becalmed in the Doldrums near the Equator, crosses the line twice and circumnavigates the globe.

The Ancient Mariner himself, Lowe shows to be partly based on The Wandering Jew ("the deathless stranger passes still, like night, from land to land") , an old myth and a key part in The Monk which was a best seller as Coleridge was writing the Mariner (pp 225 - 228). But Coleridge also knew the Sicilian's Tale, in which a Franciscan monk holds the guests at a wedding spell-bound (p 229) and mesmerism was in fashion (p 231) and he tried writing with Wordsworth a poem about the Death of Abel and of course Cain is a killer doomed to wander the earth (pp 233 - 235). Don't forget the Flying Dutchman (p 253). All of these influences merged together in Coleridge's mind. There is the scary bit in the poem where male and female demons, Death and Life-in=Death, play dice for the soul of the Mariner and Life-in-Death wins: "For the Mariner's fate at the fall of the dice is the fate of the Wandering Jew - the doom of the undying among the dead." (p 256) Finally, of course, the Mariner is Ulysses (p 262).

Coleridge read and read and read.

Lowes describes the imagination as an "incongruous, chaotic and variegated jumble" (p 4) which waits for "the informing spirit which broods over chaos ... the formlessness out of which eventually form was wrought." (pp 6 - 7); "Chaos precedes cosmos ... surging and potent chaos" (p 12). What Coleridge called the hooks-and-eyes of the memory "will lead us to the very alembic of the creative energy." (p 41). This then is a journey through "chartless tracts" (p 51) which "assumes the existence of what Coleridge called 'the twilight realms of consciousness' [in Biographia Literaria 2: 120]" (p 51); to find the origins we need to disengage "the strands of an extremely complex web" (p 51). "The web of creation, like the skein of life, is of a mingled yarn" (p 60): we separate the threads and lose the integrity of the whole (p 60) And Coleridge talked of the streamy nature of association , which thinking curbs and rudders [Anima Poetae, p46]. But "the difference between art, in whatever sphere, and the chaotic welter of the stream of consciousness lies not in their constituents, but in the presence or absence of imaginative control." (p 85)

Most true it is that I have look'd on truth

Askance and strangely.

Shakespeare Sonnet 110

"The imagination is an assimilating energy. It pierces through dissimilarity to some underlying oneness in which qualities the most remote cohere." (p 105)

"Not only on the fascinating fringes of early maps, but universally, the advancing territory of the known is rimmed and bounded by a dubious borderland in which the unfamiliar and the strange hold momentary sway." (p 105)

"The borderland between the unknown and the known keeps merging on its hither edge with the familiar, at the same that its outer edge is pushing on into the unexplored." (pp 105 - 106)

A dead dog at a distance is said to smell like musk [so scandal viewed from afar isn't too bad; Coleridge's Notebooks]

That which is firme doth flit and fall away,

And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

Spenser Ruines of Rome 3

There are two forces in life: the deliberate and the chance: Epictetus says that one should carefully and skillfully make use of what is thrown ... Outward things are not in my power. To Will is in my power.
Epictetus  The Encheiridion Book 2 Chapter 2

He mentions Setebos, a demon first described by Magellan. In further reading (Coleridge was always looking up his sources!) I have discovered that Setebos, who is also mentioned by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Robert Browning in Caliban Upon Setebos, was one of twelve demons who appeared when a Patagonian 'giant' died.

It seems that every image in the Ancient Mariner has been traced to its source material. Then he does the same with Xanadu, a much shorter poem and one avowedly based on a dream. We learn about the Old Man of the Mountains who allegedly gave his followers hashish and transported them while asleep into a pleasure garden and when they awoke convinced them they had been in Paradise so they would go and murder anyone he asked even at the expense of their own lives and that is why we get the word assassin from hashish. He explains why the damsel with a dulcimer came from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, where the Nile (a sacred river) was supposed to be sourced near a kingdom called Amhara which might have melded into Mount Abora. And the man with floating hair is taken from a memoir of Speke about an Ethiopian Ras on the warpath.

And Lowe more or less debunks the idea that Coleridge wrote poetry under the influence of opium. The meticulous research that lies behind each of the images of the Mariner (perhaps not so much Xanadu) suggests a tightness of control that drug addicts can rarely achieve. The essence of creativity is the remixing of ideas. We all do it. The difference with a genius is the obsessive research, the intense control and, perhaps, the ability to select the word that encapsulates all the ideas in one extraordinarily vivid image.

This is a superb book. May 2016; 397 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Discarded Image" by C S Lewis

This is a book about the Medieval world view written by the master of medieval literature who also happened to be the author of the Narnia books (and therefore of interest to me in my researches into liminality) and a Science fiction trilogy starting with Out of the Silent Planet.

Lewis argues that the Medieval Model, their cosmological picture of the Universe, appeared in modified form throughout their poetry, even down to Paradise Lost.

Lewis sees medieval man as fundamentally "an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems", instancing the codes of chivalry and courtly love, the Summa of Aquinas and the Divine Comedy of Dante (p 10)  but what particularly distinguished the medieval academic from those of either before or after was his heavy reliance on the written word: "They are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue." (p 11) But Lewis is writing about literature and what he calls the "backcloth for the arts" selects from the Model of the Universe "only what is intelligible to a layman, and only what makes it appeal to imagination and emotion." (p 14)

He writes briefly about dreams. Microbius, following the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus from the 1st century AD, divides dreams into five, the first three useful (because prophetic) and 'true': (p 63)

• allegorical (p 63)
• prophetic giving a vision of the future (p 64)
• oracular: listening to someone forecasting the future (p 64)
• preoccupied: reviewing the events of the day (p 64)
• surreal including nightmares (p 64)

Lewis goes through the hierarchies of angels of pseudo-Dionysius and is very detailed about the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius but it is his side sayings that are best.

We learn, for example, that Medieval man had little sense of aporia:

• "All sense of the pathless, the baffling and the utterly alien - all agoraphobia - is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky." (p 99)
• Dante "is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea." (p 100)
• Medieval literature is swamped by the classics and 'even' Arab influences and there is very little room for old Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon influences save for some of the old romances and ballads,"things that can only live on the margins of the mind" (p 9)

There are one or two horrible bits of racism when he speaks degradingly of Africans trying to ape Western culture; he clearly thinks they are too savage.

But there are also a number of little gems:

• the Antipodes was the region where people had their feet on backwards (p 28)
• "Nothing about a literature can be more essential than the language it uses" (p 6)
• the words feigned, figment and fiction have a common root (p 65)
• as do the words 'grammar' and 'glamour' which both mean scholarship (p 187)
• "The beauty of clothes is either theirs (the richness of the stuff) or the skill of the tailor - nothing will make it ours." (p 83) ... "Nobility is only the fame ... of our ancestors' virtue." (p 84)
• "Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape." (p 101)

Overall this was a well-written and delightfully illuminating book.

March 2016; 223 pages

Read my review of the biography of C S Lewis: a tender account of a man who was first class mediaeval scholar but became a best seller in three different ways.