Deviate, page 13
While Darwin was indisputably brilliant—not to mention fanatically curious—he might not have uncovered the evolutionary process if it hadn’t been for the assumptions that being one of the younger siblings in his family, or a “laterborn,” gave him. This is one of the arguments of the evolutionary psychologist and MacArthur “Genius” Frank Sulloway. In his research, on which he continues to build with powerful new studies, Sulloway has shown that where you fall in the birth order of your family strongly affects your personality traits, behaviors, and perceptions. This is because we are all competing to win the time and attention of our parents, and depending on where you fall in the “sibship,” you develop different strategies and biases for succeeding at this. As Sulloway memorably describes it, “The result has been an evolutionary arms race played out within the family.”53 This doesn’t mean that siblings are consciously fighting their older and younger siblings in a cutthroat Darwinian battle for mommy and daddy’s love; rather that the structures of families inevitably affect who we become, since we get better at different things as a function of behaviors that more naturally fit our birth order. Firstborns, for example, tend to win their parents’ favor by taking care of their younger siblings to some degree, and thus generally develop a high degree of conscientiousness and respect for authority figures. Laterborns, in contrast, strengthen “latent talents” that will garner them parental attention. For this reason they’re more open and adventurous, and less reverent of authority. How each sibling must act in order to “succeed” inside the ecology of the family becomes a matter of perceptual assumptions, recorded in the brain through a history of trial and error that has its own kurtotic statistical weight.
So, is the point that Charles Darwin saw differently simply because he was Darwin kid number 5? (Interestingly, Alfred Russel Wallace, a scientist who was developing ideas about evolution similar to Darwin’s at around the same time but who published less, was also a laterborn.) Or is it that if you’re a first-born or only child, you should just call it a day and forget about being innovative? The answer is no to both. The point is that the assumptions your brain has developed from multiple sources of experience over different timelines don’t just shape your perception… they are you. They are the layers of “empirical significance” that you have attributed to stimuli, which define the reality you perceive… how you perceive yourself and others, and thus how you lead your life. But what are assumptions, physically speaking, in the brain?
We know now that all perception ultimately comes down to deciding whether to go toward or away from something, and this even crosses species. This going-toward-or-away is an essential part of why we perceive what we do, and assumptions inescapably influence the direction we choose to go in. So how does this process create our perception?
Assumptions are deeply physiological… electrical, in fact. They are not just abstract ideas or concepts. They are physical things in your brain, with their own sort of physical “laws.” This is what one could call the neuroscience of bias. The reality we see projected on the “screen” of perception begins with the flow of information our five senses take in. This stimulus (or stimuli if there are more than one) creates a series of impulses at your receptors that move into your brain (the input), becoming distributed across the different parts of your cortex and other areas of your brain until they eventually settle on activating a response (motor and/or perceptual… though the separation between motor and perceptual isn’t as distinct as was once thought). That is basically the whole of neuroscience in one sentence, with an emphasis on “basically.” Perception is nothing more than a complex reflex arc, not unlike that which causes your leg to kick out when the doctor hits your patellar tendon underneath your kneecap. At bottom, our lives are in fact nothing more than millions and millions of sequential knee-jerk reflexive responses.
What you experience at any moment is just a stable pattern of electrical activity distributed throughout your brain—an unromantic view of perception, but it is nevertheless roughly accurate. Over the course of your life, the electrical patterns generated in your brain in response to stimuli become ever more “stable,” which is called an attractor state in physics.54 Dunes in the desert are an example of an attractor state, as are whirlpools in a river. Even our galaxy is an attractor state. They all represent emergent, stable patterns that arise from the interactions of many individual elements over time. In this sense, they have their own stable energy state, or momentum (in that they can be difficult to shift), that is most natural to continue in (though the brain states of children are not as stable as those of adults). What evolution does is to select some attractor states or, more accurately, a sequence of attractor states—as more useful than others.
The electrical patterns are created by the neural pathways that link the different parts of the brain… a staggeringly complex, sprawling superhighway of connectivity that is your brain’s infrastructure. These patterns make some behaviors and thoughts very probable, and others not. Studies have shown that the more connectivity you have in this superhighway, the more likely you are to have more diverse and complex assumptions (e.g., stronger vocabulary and memory skills).55 Yet in spite of the brain’s prolific interconnections and the importance of these interconnections in your perceptions, the number of neuroelectrical pulses that your perception actually entertains and uses throughout its life is very small. That is, relatively speaking, because their potential is nearly infinite.
The cells in your brain constitute the Cartesian You. By “Cartesian,” I’m referring to the French philosopher René Descartes, who espoused a mechanistic view of human consciousness, out of which came his famous phrase cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” Your thinking, and therefore your being, depends on the cells that constitute your brain’s railroad system, allowing the electrical patterns—like trains—to follow their reflex arcs. Counting the number of these cells is itself an interesting story. For years, neuroscientists have cited and re-cited that there are 100 billion neurons in the brain. (Neurons are nerve cells that receive and send signals through synapses in the nervous system.) It’s a nice, round, weighty number. It also happens to be wrong.
No one appears to know where the figure of 100 billion first emerged, and each scientist who cited it seems to have assumed it to be correct for a terrible if fairly understandable reason: because they’d heard it from someone else. With wonderful irony, it more likely reflects an inherent bias we have to wholeness, and so in this case the round number of 100. This changed in 2009 when the Brazilian researcher Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel implemented a remarkably clever innovation and proved that the figure was an erroneous assumption… a received idea that had inadvertently disguised itself as a fact, a scientific meme.56 (More on memes shortly.) Through a brilliant research method that involved liquefying four brains donated to science, Herculano-Houzel discovered that on average we have 14 billion fewer cells than we thought, which is itself the number of cells in a baboon’s brain. Though not an insignificant reduction, the 86 billion we do have is still a lot of neurons. So the thinking-therefore-being you is all these neurons and how they talk to each other (and of course with the rest of your body and environment, lest you think that you are only your brain).
Now let’s return to the relatively tiny number of electrochemical patterns your brain engages when you perceive. The cells that make up your brain form 100 trillion connections. That is a massive number, but what does it really mean? Since the potential connections form the possible reflex arcs that shape behavior, what’s really at stake is how you will respond… what you perceive and whether the perception you produce will be good or bad, innovative or complacent, risk-taking or conservative. So what we’re talking about is possible responses versus actual ones, and the possible ones are almost inconceivably numerous. For instance, imagine humans had only 50 brain cells instead of 86 billion. (Ants have approximately 250,000 brain cells, so having 50 would make you an exceedingly elementary organism.) Yet if you took those 50 brain cells, each with 50 connections, and came up with all the possible ways that they could connect to each other, the number of different possible connectomes (as a set of connections is called) would be greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. Just 50 neurons! Now consider all the potential patterns that 86 billion cells forming 100 trillion different connections could make. The number is pretty much infinite. Yet our perceptions in practice aren’t infinite—far from it, in fact. They are a mere minuscule subset of what is objectively possible. Why? Because of our assumptions, which come from experience.
These experience-driven biases define and limit the synaptic pathways through which our thoughts and behaviors come into being. Hence, the relationship between a stimulus (input) and its resulting neural pattern (output) that is a perception is constrained by the network architecture of your brain. This electrochemical structure is a direct representation of the empirical process of shaping the brain by trial and error. It is a grid of possible responses shaped by experience, from seconds to millennia ago, from enriched environments to impoverished ones. Our reflex arcs, then, are contained not just in our bodies as such, but in our ecology. Layers upon layers of history passed down into you, which means that most of the experiences that shaped your “frog” (and turkey) brain happened without you even being there. Yet this evolutionary history is what determines the “reality” of so much of what you perceive and how you behave. Combine this species-level experience with your own lived empirical history, and you have your own unique tapestry (or more accurately, embedded hierarchy) of assumptions that allow you to survive at the same time that they threaten to limit the electrical currents—that is, the ideas—that produce your responses.
In short, your assumptions make you you. This means pretty much everything you perceive about your own conscious identity would be on the line if they were ever to be doubted. Yet the process of creating these brain-based biases that give you your “you-ness” also endows us with the unique people the world so badly needs (whom I’ll refer to as “deviators”).
Near the end of 2013, an infant boy in Guinea became infected with the Ebola virus, an extremely painful and contagious hemorrhagic fever with a fatality rate of approximately 50 percent. After this “index case”—the first person infected—Ebola spread throughout West Africa with alarming speed and by early 2014 hit epidemic proportions, the first time this had happened since the virus’s discovery in the 1970s. It spread to a total of nine countries, the worst hit of all being Liberia, where nearly five thousand people died. It was also in Liberia, in the summer of 2014, that a 40-year-old Liberian-American citizen named Patrick Sawyer visited his sister, who had contracted Ebola and died while he was there caring for her. After his sister’s funeral, on July 20, Sawyer flew to Nigeria, where Ebola had yet to spread from its neighboring countries. When he arrived in Lagos, Nigeria’s most crowded city, Sawyer collapsed at the airport, racked by vomiting and diarrhea. Doctors of the public health system happened to be on strike at the time, causing him to end up at the private hospital where the Nigerian doctor Ameyo Adadevoh worked.
Dr. Adadevoh was a woman who seemed to have medicine “in her blood.” Her father was a highly respected pathologist and university official, and she had inherited his same rigor when it came to her profession. She had wavy black hair and large dark eyes that projected a serious gaze in the halls of First Consultant Hospital in Lagos, where Dr. Adadevoh was a senior endocrinologist. When Sawyer arrived in her hospital, she was the attending physician. He claimed that he only had a case of malaria, but Adadevoh wasn’t convinced. He tried to leave the hospital, but she refused his request, convinced that he should be tested for Ebola, even though she’d never treated anyone infected with the disease before. Sawyer became very upset, and she and her colleagues ended up having to physically restrain him. During the ensuing chaos of this altercation, his IV popped out of his arm, spraying blood on Adadevoh. They were finally able to subdue him, but the struggle didn’t end there.
While Adadevoh and her fellow doctors were waiting for the results of Sawyer’s test, the Liberian government put diplomatic pressure on Nigeria to release him to them. Again, Dr. Adadevoh refused. With no secure transportation method available in the country to guarantee that he wouldn’t risk infecting anyone else, she and her colleagues fought to maintain his quarantine—and won. By neutralizing their “patient zero,” they could now focus their energies on mobilizing Nigeria’s response to contain the impact of Sawyer, who had passed his virus on to twenty people.
On October 20, 2014, three months after Sawyer arrived in Nigeria and Adadevoh became his doctor, the World Heath Organization officially announced that Nigeria was Ebola-free, a spectacular and heartening feat amid so much suffering in the region. As the Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent wrote at the time, “It may not sound like tremendous news, given that the death toll is still rocketing elsewhere in West Africa. But given how bad it could have been, it’s something to be extremely thankful for. I could just as easily be writing now that Ebola had claimed its 10,000[th] victim in Nigeria, and was on its way to kill hundreds of thousands more.”57 As global media soon broadcast, this victory was largely thanks to Dr. Adadevoh, who tragically wasn’t able to see the impact of her work. Sawyer died of Ebola, along with seven people who caught the virus from him—one of the victims being Adadevoh herself, who died on August 19, 2014. Since her death, Adadevoh has been lionized as the hero that she was—the person who, along with her colleagues, protected Nigeria from what would have surely been an extremely fatal outbreak if Sawyer hadn’t been kept in quarantine. Their brave response—in the face of the assumptions of others—has become a model for other countries around the world, and an example of the right assumptions working. Adadevoh’s story offers a vivid illustration of how assumptions produce useful thoughts and behaviors, and also of how these assumptions can be specific to a person creating ideas that others are unable to see.
Let’s take a look at how Dr. Adadevoh’s assumptions shaped her thoughts and perceptions (leaving mostly aside the process by which her assumptions came into being), to better understand how your neural patterns shape yours. To do so, it’s time to introduce an important new concept central to getting more and better ideas from those 86 billion electrically charged cells in your head.
Your Space of Possibility
The space of possibility is the patterns of neural activity that are possible given the structure of your network (or connectomes). Collectively, your neural network determines all the different possible patterns inside your head. In other words, it contains the matrix of perceptions/ideas/behaviors that you are capable of having, which means it contains a lot (but again, its potential is far from infinite). These perceptions/ideas/behaviors run the gamut from the most luminous, earth-shaking ones, to the most banal, humdrum ones… most of which you’ll never actually experience, but are theoretically possible given a certain concatenation (network linking) of stimuli. Moreover, outside this space are those perceptions and ideas that don’t, indeed can’t, arise in your brain and can’t occur to you, at least at that moment—which arguably are much more numerous than the ones that are possible. Your assumptions (i.e., the connectivity between brain cells that is your history) determine the boundaries and everything that falls within—and hence the structure and dimensionality of your space of possibility. Note also that each of these patterns is related to others, some being more similar to each other and others less so.
Now, while an infinite number of neural patterns are theoretically possible, not all of them are useful. Let’s consider Adadevoh’s actions inside the schema of the space of possibility. She had an assumption that she shared with Nigerian government officials: that the spread of Ebola needed to be contained as quickly and completely as possible. Where she differed from others was in how to effect this, which led to her second assumption: that Sawyer needed to be kept in quarantine in the Lagos hospital, as opposed to the officials who assumed that the best response was to get Sawyer out of the country and back to Liberia as fast as possible. Because Adadevoh had different assumptions, she had a different space of possibility, which meant she had different potential states of brain activations… manifested as ideas, thoughts, beliefs, actions, and so on. These different assumptions encoded in the physiology of her brain represented her own unique history, which allowed her neurons to generate a ‘next possible’ perception (an attractor state) that people without the same wiring (assumptions) couldn’t generate. Again, we are focusing here not on what that history was as such, but simply on the fact that because of it, what was possible for her to perceive was not possible for others to perceive. She was not making a “big jump”… for her. The “big jump” she was making was from their perspective since they were blind to what she could see, simply because they had different spaces of possibility. To begin with, Adadevoh was a seasoned professional who not only knew but followed medical best practices, even in a moment of conflict and danger. So she had sound convictions, but even more important, she had the courage to pursue them. In spite of pressure from the government, she put the collective well-being of her countrymen ahead of possible damage to her career. As such, the value of sacrifice for the good of people beyond herself was an essential assumption that guided her perception and her actions. It shaped her space of possibility as much as her technical medical training did. In other words, she had hard-won knowledge plus courageous intention.
