Why we try.

(This blog is an add-on to my book The Animal and the Thinker. Some posts will make more sense if you have already read the first two.)

Humans do the strangest things. Climbing to the top of a mountain… because it’s there. Spending many thousands of hours assembling a collection of old stamps or coins – stamps that will never again allow us to post a letter – or of moths and butterflies preserved in display cases. (As a child I did a lot of that. On the farm we made our own entertainment.) It is simply not conceivable that a mouse, a cat or a chimpanzee would climb to the top of a mountain when there is nothing that they want at the top. We are born to take up a challenge, and it really doesn’t matter what that challenge is. Going back to Lorenz and the innate releasing mechanism, for us the mountain triggers our own IRM, and we are driven to pit ourselves against it. Just as Lorenz thought, the IRM needs to discharge.

(When my older son had just learned to stand, I saw him beside a bookshelf. The bottom shelf was just above his head, and holding himself upright, he was reaching, reaching to put something on the shelf. At last he succeeded and turned away with visible triumph. I thought, “Cute…”, and at that moment I realised that this is what God says when our new research report is at last accepted in some high-profile journal. We burst with satisfaction, and God says, “Cute…”) (Don’t worry, I don’t actually believe that a superpower is watching, but I find it amusing to think what they would say if they were.)

(Another example, less cute. One sunny afternoon in the 1990s, my great friend and postdoc Rob Ward and I were in front of a computer screen. We were spending hours watching long streams of stimuli flashing at a rate of just a tenth of a second each. We couldn’t work out why sometimes we could see them and sometimes we couldn’t and we wanted to know. An hour or two in we realised that the other person in the office had started to laugh. We didn’t know what the joke was, but we started to laugh too. It turned out we were the joke. He couldn’t believe that two highly trained individuals would spend hours trying to understand why we could see a patch of colour but not a straight line, both flashed for just 100 msec on a computer screen. Just for that moment he was God.) (And we never did figure out the answer.)

We are born to take up a challenge, and as the ethologists realised, taking up a challenge is built firmly on Pan’s aggressions. We say we are getting our teeth into something. We go into battle against a mathematical problem and when we fail to solve it we say it has defeated us. I promise you, symbols on a page did not go into battle. They did not defeat anybody. They just sat there. We are the ones who went into battle.

It’s easy to see why, in his/her infinitely flexible ecological niche, H. sapiens has to be prepared to work on pretty much anything. I think that aggression has at least three parts to play:

First, like many social species with their pecking orders, we compete to rise in the esteem of others. As a twenty year old undergraduate, I went to my first scientific talk. The speaker was quite eminent, and I sat at the back, drinking in this new world. At the end there was the usual rush of discussion – in Oxford in 1973 the discussion was lively to say the least – with academics of all ages competing to contribute. I began to think I knew why the speaker had got the results he had. My heart pounding, I put up my hand and made my suggestion, and from the front, Anne Treisman – Anne Treisman the sparkling superstar of these discussions, Anne Treisman whose mind was like quicksilver – Anne Treisman turned around and looked at me approvingly. In another post I shall say more about Anne Treisman, and that winter evening I walked home through the darkness of the Oxford Parks with my heart singing. I felt that this world was thrilling, and I was a part of it. Human beings – in my not very original opinion, especially the men (more of this later too) – will go to great lengths to show they are the best at something. (Anne Treisman meanwhile couldn’t have hidden it if she’d tried.)

Second, it is not just the esteem of others that matters. Perhaps even more important, it is the esteem of ourselves. This is useful, because with Spock at our disposal we can choose a competition that we happen to be good at – and we can change the rules for what counts as success. For non-academics among you… for us academics, publishing research papers is the currency. Everything depends on it. We submit our paper to an academic journal, and its fate is decided by two or three reviewers. When I submitted my first paper as a graduate student, it was a disorganised mess. (In the 1970s we took professional training rather less seriously.) When the reviews came back, they were surprisingly generous in their own British way. One of them began, “Somewhere inside this sprawling, over-long, ill-constructed piece is a worthwhile paper trying to escape.” The evening I read these reviews, I spent an hour walking back and forth across a bridge over the river Cherwell, wondering disconsolately if I was really not suitable for this line of work. Now fifty years have gone by and, somewhere along the way, I began to believe that if reviewers hate your paper it means you’re really onto something. (That does not apply to my first paper, which really was a mess.) Generally people hate something that challenges what they think they know. Nowadays I love hostile reviews. I keep the worst to show to younger colleagues and cheer them up. I especially like the reviewer who wrote that our paper was “utterly theoretically bankrupt”. I like to think of this person sitting there simmering… he or she has written “theoretically bankrupt” and now they are thinking, “no, that’s not enough – it needs an ‘utterly’.”)

Third, as I already said, the aggression that evolved to compete with others has now been adapted to compete with the problem. The problem becomes the enemy, and we use all our rage to subdue it. Here is one of my all-time favourites (from before the era of deep fakes):

(Again, just consider how unimaginable it is that a cat would arch its back and spit at a desktop computer. For a cat, only a very small number of things – mostly, other cats – can release rage.)

I would be horrified to count the number of times per year that something goes wrong and I snap, “For fuck’s sake!” Earlier this year I told my second son that, for New Year, I was resolving to be more Zen about all the little things that I did wrong as I proceed into my 70s and body and brain begin to weaken. He said, “How’s that going for you then?” (I love it that my boys are so effortless in the way they pick on me.)

In an earlier post I mentioned Viktor Frankl, and if you have still not read Man’s Search for Meaning, you really should. For Frankl, our relations with others were a major source of meaning… of course. Another was achievement… the sense that we have tried something difficult, something we have chosen to value, and we have done it well. We need our family and friends, we need victory over our rivals and our enemies… and we also need to understand what those ******* mathematical symbols are trying to tell us.