"A Box of Birds" by Charles Fernyhough

This is a high concept novel of ideas with some great characters, some fantastic settings, and some beautiful prose.

In this slightly dystopian novel set in the near future in UK-Dthe narrator is a female neuroscientist, Dr Yvonne Churcher, working with humans and animals to discover the secrets of the Lorenzo Circuit, a critical feature of human memory. Her problem, apart from the obligatory failed love affair, is that she has lost her sense of self. From her study she knows that her consciousness is an illusion: there is no control centre in her brain, she is a seething mass of conflicting thoughts; her identity depends on which thought happens to be uppermost at any one time. 'Me' is a body, a single unified encasing shell. Her mind is, as it were, a box of birds (which is an idea derived from Plato's Theaetetus:

• "I’ll be back to being a network of activity, one neural cluster buzzing another neural cluster, one lot of bio-electrical traffic taking the ring-road around the soul; one deluded meat puppet sizing up another deluded meat puppet and wanting to fight it or fuck it or whatever." (1.1)
• "‘I’m empty,’ I say. ‘There’s no “me” to do the thinking. I’m an illusion. The confection of a restless, pattern-seeking brain.’" (1.3)
• "Plato said the mind is like an aviary full of birds, one for every thought or memory you’ve ever had. They’re all there, all these thoughts and bits of knowledge: the problem is catching them." (1.4)
• "Where does your sense of morality come from, if you’re just a bundle of nerves? Why did you want to come here today, if you didn’t have a self to do your wanting with?" (2.10)
• "Consciousness is a confection, the fantasy of a brain obsessed with finding coherence, and I’ve been trained not to trust it." (2.14)

Another important idea is that promulgated by James and his friends in the squat where he lives. They are mimicking Christ's disciples, all being intended suicides rescued at the apical moment by 'David Overstrand' a semi-mythical figure whose death has (perhaps) been faked. They are named after the places they were rescued, for example 'Level Ten' was on the top floor of a multi-storey car park from which he intended to jump. They believe that what is important is the story that you tell and that there are many possible stories for the same evidence. Thus their animal rights group is called Conscience, Con-Science, because they believe (like certain post-modernist social scientists) that science privileges only the scientific method as a way of arriving at the truth and there are many more.

• "‘Reality?’ Level Ten says. ‘The objective truth about the world that only science can deliver? Nice one, Yvonne: you just told a really good story.’" (2.9)

But the novel is also a fast moving thriller with a number of exotic locations, such as Yvonne's  lab where she experiments on genetically modified mice and her treehouse home, the squat where James and his animal rights activists live, a conference hotel in Florida, a tea hut on the moors, the underground tunnels of an old lead mine,  and a church in Verona. The three principal characters are:

• Yvonne: a neuroscientist haunted by the thought that there is no 'she' in command of her consciousness but only a dynamic ragbag of thoughts and impressions which are scarcely under control. She is recovering from a failed relationship with fellow neuroscientist Marius and now really, really fancies her student James: "The light from his bedside lamp is gilding the arches of his insteps." (2.10) was a line I found utterly original, conjuring up a hauntingly beautiful and even sexy image.
• James: a member of a group of animal rights activists who were each on the point of suicide before being rescued by their semi-divine guru 'David Overstrand'. James copes with his box of birds by telling stories to himself and acting out a variety of different roles so that it hard for Yvonne (or perhaps James himself) to know who he really is ("It’s not what’s beneath the layers, it’s the fact that the layers are there at all. He’s like me, in that respect. The layers are what he is."; 2.16; "Sometimes you can get a better idea of who you are by being someone else. The gods have always known that. The avatars, the incarnations: anyone but who they really are."; 2.24) in particular whether he is her ally or systematically betraying her to the enemy.
• Gareth: a young prodigy computer hacker who insists on calling Yvonne, his tutor, 'Miss'. Gareth wants to recreate consciousness and steals Yvonne's work on the Lorenzo Circuit. This makes him a target for Sansom and he has to go into hiding, where he remains for most of the story.

I found the overall setting of the book a little problematic. When is is set? An eighty-five year old lady remembers the Shadows: "She’s twenty-four again. England is new. The Shadows cruise down the dual carriageway under our window, quiffs a-tremble, Strats zinging in the breeze. And on the back seat of their convertible Rolls, a young immigrant bride cannot think about dying, can’t see into that distance, cannot even frame the thought." (2.9) This suggests a dating of around 2016. The university town is described as mediaeval and there is a football riot, all very modern day, but the undergraduates are called 'betas' which conjures up images of Brave New World and there are other images which suggest a little higher tech than I am expecting. There is a mixture of fictionalised locations and real locations which threw me. Perhaps this muddle is deliberate and meant to unbalance me, as when Gareth insists on calling his university teacher 'Miss', a title more often reserved for teachers at primary school.

This book is therefore a sort of James Bond thrillers with a wreck of a car, some truly exciting but realistic locations, a convincing reason for the baddies to be bad (they are searching for a cure for Alzheimers which would be fantastically profitable) ,some realistically flawed characters, and some great prose:

• "James has scented it, the doubt that’s at the heart of me. It’s like I’ve thrown open a door onto a party you can hear from the street, only to show that there’s nothing there." (1.1)
• "Rain scores the windows, etching obscure diagrams onto the glass, cross-hatching areas of substance and uncertainty." (1.3)
• "Fixed in oils on the walls, long-dead churchmen avoid each other’s stares." (1.3)
• "Owl-hoots lob back and forwards in the moonlight." (1.5)
• "A fierce burning breaks out on my neck, metastasizes to my armpits, and then fades to a fizzy calm." (1.5)
• "A car is not a self-portrait. Just because my vehicle is falling apart, it doesn’t mean my life is." (1.6)
• "I want to imagine her in an impossible bikini, busty and lithe, the talk of the subcontinent. Now, at eighty-five, her skin has the powdery wrinklings of a nutmeg." (2.9)
• "A thin mouth that looks as though it’s tasting tin." (2.9)
• "A river is the only true absence in a city. You can’t build on it, fill it with rubbish, park your car there. You need that connection with nothingness in the midst of all the chaos." (2.9)
• "Most of the time he’s just another well-spoken beta, with that flat way of talking which is a sure sign that there’s something he’s trying to hide: a privileged background, a dad with a title, one of those bonuses of birth that do so much to smooth the transition into Lycee life." (2.10)
• "He’s too gauche and playground-fresh, too certain that he’s already conquered the world, to pick a fight with." (2.10)
• "He’d bought me two pints of some medal-winning beer, and I was well past my irretrievable blab point." (2.10)
• "College was getting me down. It was full of really safe people who just wanted the dream home and the dream holidays and the whole vacuous affluence deal. They thought having money would give them freedom to make choices. Yeah, choices between this kind of soulless shit and that kind of soulless shit." (2.10)
• "America. When I was a kid and it only existed on TV, I thought it was made of a different substance to the world I knew." (2.11)
• "The shower is so powerful that I come out expecting to see hail-damage on my skin." (2.11)
• "There is a hell specifically for academics, that you can spend your whole life banging away at a problem and there can be people on the other side, banging away at the same rock." (2.11)
• "Around one corner I come across a toy-sized Latino going at the floor with a carpet-sweeper. There is no dirt to sweep up. It feels like a terrible injustice, that this harmless man should be made to waste his time on an utterly clean corridor. He’s the human slave in some apocalyptic future’s robot world, dwarfed by space-station architecture. I want to talk to him, ask how you can have your pointless tasks set out for you in the minutest detail and still manage to go about them with dignity." (2.11)
• "A minibar is a beautiful thing. It gives you no anxiety of choice. You start with the ready-mixed cocktails, move on to the beer and macadamia nuts, and finish with Toblerone and whisky." (2.11)
• "His dog collar is a wonky Möbius strip." (2.13)
• "There’s a bruised looseness under his eyes, signs of sleeplessness." (2.14)
• "Sometimes he has the face of a hassled executive, a kind of clammy, bloated frazzlement. I wonder what happened to the face he deserves." (2.14)
• "Her real name’s Stephanie. Needless to say, she hates her real name." (2.16)
• "It’s one thing getting lost in the fog. But getting lost on a clear blue day, when you can see for twenty miles and still have no idea where you’re going — that’s a whole different kind of lostness." (2.16) Nice metaphor. Gareth has told her that he has given her a clue and it is in plain sight but she just can't see it. Also a metaphor for Yvonne herself, lost in trying to make sense of her box of birds.
• "Every terrifying thing you can possibly imagine can take shape in that darkness. The brain works overtime, making its hypotheses, and they’re never proved wrong. And forests are noisy places." (2.16)
• "I consume it like a shredder." (2.17)
• "I’m the decided, not the decider." (2.19)
• "Your cortex has only got a part-time interest in the truth. For the rest of the time it’s a deceitful egotist, just wanting to suit its own needs." (2.19)
• "When the big stuff happens you feel it directly in your body, opening taps and setting hormonal fires, squeezing the gut like nicotine." (2.21)
• "With their dinner parties and the whole sick rigmarole of suburban fakery; they’d made it so that being alive was no different to not being alive." (2.24)
• "You can’t be bigger than your own story." (2.24) Is this another version of the Godel Incompleteness Theorem?
• "Graceful dying is just the proof of it. She’s going out as she came in, a bundle of automatic routines that can cope perfectly well without the buzz of being here." (2.27)

This is one of those books which I will remember for a while. It has some brilliant characters and some powerful ideas. I am not sure that the thriller genre is best suited to it. It is a novel of ideas and that sits ill with the fast pace and conventions of a thriller. I loved the locations and the luxuriousness of the prose nudge it towards the genre of literary fiction. 

A novel in which the author has attempted a great deal. It may not have been perfectly realised but it is still powerful and haunting. April 2020

The author is a genuine scientist whose research into the voices we hear in our heads is summarised in the very readable book: The Voices Within.

"Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith

This is a beautifully written book about the intelligence of octopi and cuttlefish which are cephalopods. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is ... because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” (p 9) Along the way it becomes an enquiry into what it means to have a consciousness. “For some animals, there's something it feels like to be such an animal. there is a self, of some kind, that experiences what goes on.” (p 10)

It starts tracing the evolution of the nervous system. After all, even bacteria can react to stimuli and therefore may be said to have some version of sentience:

• “The bacterium will swim in a straight line as long as the chemicals it senses seem better now than those it sensed a moment ago. If not, it’s preferable to change course.” (p 17)

The crucial factor is that the bacteria can in some sense detect the actions they themselves take. This feedback loop between sensory input and action and sensory input is the beginning of self awareness. And because one bacterium can detect things that other bacteria do it is the beginning of communication and socialisation. So when cells begin to get together in multicellular organisms we have the rudimentary mechanisms for a nervous system.

• “The receptors on the surfaces of bacterial cells are sensitive to many things, and these include chemicals that bacteria themselves tend to excrete” (p 18)
• “If a chemical is both produced and sensed by a particular kind of bacteria, it can be used by those bacteria to assess how many individuals of the same kind are around.” (p 18)
• “Chemicals that are made because they'll be perceived and responded to by others ... brings us to the threshold of signalling and communication.” (p 19)

At this stage I was getting excited. After all, Andy Clark in Surfing Uncertainty, working in the world of artificial intelligence, suggests that a computationally frugal solution for intelligence involves an organism making an expectation and comparing the sensory data with the expectation so that a simple error reduction algorithm can improve the expectation. This involves a feedback loop and here we see something similar being evolved from the simplest forms of cellular life.

G-S gives an example in technology developed to aid the blind. There is a system that uses a camera to change vision into tactile sensations on the skin of a blind person. The person soon learns to experience “objects located in space” BUT “only when the wearer is able to control the camera.” (p 80)

Of course, multicellular life had to evolve before cell specialisation could start developing proper nervous systems. But this wasn't as difficult as it might at first look. It has evolved independently more than once. “The transition to a multicellular form of life occurred many times, leading once to animals, once to plants, on other occasions to fungi, various seaweeds, and less conspicuous organisms.” (p 20)

And once predation begins (probably in the Cambrian) each organism must be aware of the others which adds further urgency to the evolution of sensory-action feedback loops. “From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.” (p 36)

The only thing that makes animals different is that they have greater capacity to take actions and so need to be even faster at sensing their own actions. “All living things affect their environment by making and transforming chemicals, and also by growing and sometimes by moving, but it is muscle that gives rise to rapid, coherent action on large spatial scales. It makes possible the manipulation of objects, the deliberate and rapid transformation of what is around us.” (p 82) This “interaction between perception and action” is critical. (p 83)

And the next stage for feedback loops is our own thoughts. G-S suggests that the internalization of language, “Vygotsky’s transition ... was also an important evolutionary event.” (p 152) He spends some time on inner speech:

• “When we look inside, most people find a flow of inner speech, a monologue that accompanies much of our conscious life.” (p 138)
• “Ordinary speech functions both as input and output ... We both speak and hear, and we can hear what we say. Even talking to yourself out loud can be a useful way of approaching a problem.” (p 144)
• “In speech, the creation of an efference copy enables you to compare your spoken words to an inner image of them; this can be used to work out whether the sound ‘came out right’.” (p 145)
• This then means that we can “put together sentences that we don't intend to say, sentences and fragments of language that have a purely internal role. ... We can put things in order, bring possibilities together, can list and instruct and exhort.” (p 147) This is particularly useful for Kahneman’s [ref Thinking, Fast and Slow] “System 2” thinking, the “slow, deliberate style of thinking we engage in when we encounter novel situations ... [which] tries to follow proper rules of reasoning, and tries to look at things from more than one side.” (p 147)
• This resonates with the “workspace theory of consciousness” (p 149)
• Inner speech is especially prominent when “we bring attention to bear on our own thought processes, reflect on them, and experience them as our own.” (p 152)
• “When you write something for yourself to read ... it is a communication between your present self and a future self.” (p 155)

There is also an interesting argument about ageing. Why do species age at different rates: trees last hundreds of years, humans perhaps a hundred, cephalopods mostly two? The idea is that “When molecular accidents put mutations into the population ... the late-acting mutations will be cleaned out less efficiently than early-acting ones.” (p 166) “So mutations with good effects early in life and the bad effects later in life will accumulate; natural selection will favour them.” (p 167) Therefore some populations have evolved such that the bad mutations tend to affect them later in life ... and it seems like spontaneous ageing. The life-span is thus partly a matter of evolutionary chance and partly governed by the balance of reproduction and predation. When the octopus lost its hard shell it became much more susceptible to predation which meant that it had to live its life a lot quicker because, sooner or later, a sharp-toothed fish would eat it. Presumably humans are mostly prey to diseases which, sooner or later, will get them, so they are able to evolve genes which allow then to fight the diseases for a while even at the cost of dying later.

Other thoughts from this brilliant book:

• Cuttlefish sometimes deeply ignore visitors to their watery world. “Being ignored so deeply makes you wonder if you are entirely real in their watery world, as if you are one of those ghosts who does not realise they are against.” (p 118)
• “When animals did crawl onto the dry land, they took the sea with them. All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.” (p 200)

A readable and intensely thought-provoking book. March 2018; 204 pages

The author has now written a sequel: Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

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

"The Decisive Moment" by Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer is a neuroscientist who wrote Proust was a neuroscientist. He also writes a blog called The Frontal Cortext. 

His essential thesis in this book is that we are not the rational beings that we like to think we are, nor can we be. Our emotions are essential to us being able to make decisions and to make the right decisions. Many micro decisions are made faster than we can think (for example a batsman hitting a cricket ball that was bowled at a speed that makes it impossible to react by thinking. These decisions are made by our subconscious which has learnt how to make the right decisions based on long practise. He gives the example of a radar operator during the Gulf War who spotted a blip on his screen moving towards an aircraft carrier. The blip was moving in the same place and at the same speed as a friendly plane; nevertheless he took the decision to shoot it down. Later it was found to have ben a missile. No analysis of the tapes could provide evidence of why his hunch had been correct; his decision was made essentially on his gut feeling. But later it was realised that the blip had first appeared 3 sweeps of the radar later than a normal plane and it had been this (and the hours of staring at radar screens) that had aroused the fearful feelings in his subconscious.

But Lehrer also provides examples of situations where rationality has conquered emotions (thank goodness), for example the firefighter who, realising that he couldn't outrun a fire, decided to set the hillside in front of him alight and then lie down on the smouldering remains, thereby creating his own firebreak. Then there was the pilot whose plane lost all hydraulic control to ailerons, flaps, undercarriage, everything. The only way he could steer the plane was to fire the two engines at differential rates. He worked this out by a process of careful rational thought while the plane was falling through the air.

Things I learned and linked with:

• The Dweck experiments in which students praised for their intelligence on a first test chose easier subsequent tests and scored worse on a final test than matched students praised for the efforts on the first test who chose harder intervening tests and therefore challenged themselves and learned faster. (p5-57)
• A quote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics: "Anyone can become angry, that is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy." (p107)
• ADHD as a manifestion of the retarded development of the pre-frontal cortex which renders the sufferer unable to resist the temptation for immediate gratification. During adolescence the pre-frontal cortex of an ADHD sufferer can be 3.5 years behind 'normal'; however they usually catch up by the end of adolesence. Teenagers find it hard to resist temptation if the consequences are delayed; the solution may be to make the consequences immediate. "When West Virginia revoked driving permits for for students who were under the age of 18 and who dropped out of school, the dropout rate fell by one-third in the first year." p113
• 'Choking' happens when you start to think about an action that has moved into the unconscious competence arena, like a golf player who starts thinking about the swing that has become natural to him. Moving something back from unconscious competence into conscious competence means that the rational mind starts to interfere with processes that have been filed away into the subconscious; this causes mistakes. p135
• Too much information can distract and confuse experts who have learned to act using instinct. "College counselors were given a vast array of information about a group of high school students. The counselors were then asked to predict the grades of these kids during their freshmen year in college. The counselors had access to high school transcripts, test scores, the results of personality and vocational tests and application essays from the students. They were even granted personal interviews .... The counselors were competing against a rudimentary mathematical formula composed of only two variables: the high school grade point average of the student and his or her score on a single standardized test .... the predictions made by the formula were far more accurate than the predictions made by the counselors .... While the extra information considered by the counselors made them extremely confident, it actually led to worse predictions." p155 This makes me think of our sixth form interviews!
• "Being certain means that you aren't worried about being wrong." p202
• There are two types of thinkers: hedgehogs and foxes (there is a Greek saying that the fox knows many thinfs but the hedgehog knows one big thing). Hedgehogs are certain. They ignore contrary information. "The fox relies on the solvent of doubt. He is skeptical of grand strategies and unifying theories." p231
• CRM (Cockpit Resource Management) is the training programme that tries to convince air cockpit crew to dissent from the view of the pilot. p242-3. Using it during cardiac surgery at Nebraska Medical Centre has raised the percentage of 'uneventful' surgeries from 21% to 62%.

A fascinating book, not as magisterial as Irrationality but a quick light read through the mechanisms of decision.

April 2010; 247 pages