Our distorting minds

In a chapter called The Vain Brain, we hear that we frequently overlook professional defeats and concentrate instead on our positive achievements. Another chapter, The Emotional Brain, points out that our capacity for rational conduct is constantly undermined by our emotions; we are prey to anger, sexual passion and jealousy, even when these drives run counter to our reasonable plans for ourselves. The Pigheaded Brain focuses on our reluctance to accept new information even when it is patently correct, while The Bigoted Brain deals with our tendency to lump together unpleasant traits of which we are ourselves guilty and to project them on to other racial and social categories, sparing our own egos in the process.

These themes are, of course, ancient ones. An exploration of how and why humans are deluded has been a staple of philosophy and literature from the dawn of time. The Socratic injunction to “know oneself” was premised on the idea that a cursory glance into the contents of our minds will rarely offer us an accurate picture of reality. Meanwhile, the charms of a good novel tend to be built on our ability to observe characters running into trouble because they refuse to accept awkward truths about their condition. Jane Austen’s humour is founded on her portrayal of self-deception and vanity.

Therefore, Fine cannot recommend her work on the basis of the originality of her theme. Her claim to distinction must rest on the superior way in which psychologists are able to answer ancient puzzles about ourselves. So what is it exactly that psychologists know about human beings that others do not?

The answer to this question can be one of the more disconcerting that a first-year psychology student will face. Expecting to study the mysteries of the mind, students soon realise that they have set off down a far less glamorous and unusual path, for their field requires them not so much to explore new insights as to test old and quite simple ones according to a rigorous and patient scientific method. Psychology emerges as, depending on your point of view, either a gloriously or horrifyingly pedantic discipline.

The desire for scientific accuracy accounts for why around 90% of Fine’s book is the description of experiments. These are a staple of the literature (made familiar to many through the work of Oliver Sacks), and come in two forms, which have unwittingly acquired a semi-comic edge through repetition. Firstly, there are experiments involving accident victims who, by falling down the stairs or skidding off the road, have knocked out a physical bit of the brain that turns out to be responsible for a given psychological function. We come away from reading of these experiments with a better sense of the way that our thoughts arise from specific regions of the physical brain — as well as deeply grateful that we haven’t yet lost command over the bit that prevents us from shouting obscenities at strangers or imagining we are Napoleon. The other staple test involves putting students, mostly American university ones, through lightly sadistic “experiments” that offer statistical evidence to back up such common-sense ideas as that people will be nasty to their colleagues if an authoritative figure tells them sadism is acceptable. One rarely leaves accounts of such experiments any the wiser about life, although one does sometimes wonder if there are any American college students left who have never yet been canvassed by a psychology prof.

Fine’s consistently well-written and meticulously researched book is an object lesson in the way that the needs of the lay person and the scientist diverge. Our criteria of proof in everyday life are infinitely lower than those of science. When a writer such as La Rochefoucauld tells us, “We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,” it would be rare for an ordinary reader to ask for scientific proof to back this up. The charm of the insight is indeed based on the minimalism of its evidence.

A result of reading this book is a certain sympathy for psychologists, who must slowly wade through all our common-or-garden insights, testing and probing them, rarely coming up with anything surprising. They must run tiresome experiments to prove that feelings of guilt do arise after lying or that we don’t always tell ourselves the truth, and must give these insights an exhaustive safety check, like a government inspector led by byzantine legislation to perform an audit far above and beyond ordinary requirements.

If there are faults in this book, they are hence less those of the author than of the discipline in which she operates. In fact, the fluency of the writing leaves one with the feeling that the author’s real vocation might lie in writing about human nature with a little less of the baggage of her field. Her touching vignettes about life with her young son and her rational but tender husband suggest the buried presence of someone who could in future rewardingly illuminate the workings of the mind with the studied casualness of a gifted novelist.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £9.49 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst