Shane O鈥橫ara (Bodley Head)
HUMAN conversation is highly structured, and those structures are often consistent across languages. In face-to-face conversation, we tend to take turns speaking for about 2 seconds, with a gap of about one-fifth of a second between exchanges. This gap is so short that it is comparable to the response time to a starting pistol, and it is only possible because we anticipate what people are going to say based on just their first few words.
Indeed, our use of language has evolved to become so efficient that we can decode the word 鈥渃at鈥�, for example, and link it to the animal involved more quickly than we can identify the sound of a cat meowing.
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In Talking Heads: The new science of how conversation shapes our world, Shane O鈥橫ara argues conversation isn鈥檛 just important to us as individuals, it is at the very heart of our societies. He is well placed to tease this apart, as professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, having spent years exploring different areas in neuroscience.
O鈥橫ara explains that the institutions around which we are organised, whether they are parliaments, churches or sporting organisations, are all maintained with some combination of meetings, boards or assemblies, and all of these are centred on conversation.
Of course, the back and forth that is essential to conversation would be useless without memory. O鈥橫ara recounts the tale of Henry Molaison, who, in 1953, went through an experimental procedure to treat epilepsy in which the hippocampal formation in his brain was excised. His epilepsy did improve, but he unfortunately lost the ability to form new memories. This was so incapacitating that he had to live in a protected community.
It is an often-told tale and a much-studied case, but here O鈥橫ara goes beyond Molaison鈥檚 own story and asks us to imagine a world in which we all lacked the ability to form new memories. None of our institutions could be maintained in such a scenario, and no amount of conversation could help. The seamless interweaving of language and memory is central to our societies.
Another vital connection here is how we share stories. Janice Chen, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has run experiments where people鈥檚 brains were imaged as they watched movies. She found that different people responded in the same way as a story unfolded.
Related work by Asieh Zadbood at Columbia University, New York, asked participants to recount the story of the film they had just watched to another person. She found that the responses of the listeners were very similar to those of the people relating the stories when they had originally watched the movie.
This is how storytelling allows collective memories to be formed and to act as a powerful binding agent within society.
But there is another key twist here. As important as memory is, other studies have shown that we spend 24 per cent of our time thinking about the future, compared with just 5 per cent recalling the past.
O鈥橫ara suggests that gifted political leaders use our collective memories of the past to offer an enticing vision of the future and that, in this way, modern nation states have been formed and continue to evolve.
Of course, this collective remembering is a process that will always be selective, and not always healthy. O鈥橫ara points out that we are better at recalling past wars than past plagues and wonders how we will remember the covid-19 pandemic, and how that might affect the quality of our preparedness for the future.
Much of the history and sociology discussed in this book won鈥檛 be new to readers, but O鈥橫ara interweaves anecdotes with research findings in a way that manages to link it all to neuroscience. This is an intriguing approach, and makes for an enjoyable read.
Tom Tierney is a writer based聽in聽Dublin, Ireland
