The Social Animal (57 page)

Had he transcended this earthly realm? No. He always had a sense there was something beyond life as science understands it. He had always somehow believed in a God who existed beyond time and space. But he had never fallen in with religion. He had lived a worldly life and, regretfully, had never tasted Divine transcendence.

Had he loved? Yes. The one constant in his adult life had been his admiration and love for the good woman who was his wife. He knew that she did not reciprocate his love with the same strength and devotion. He knew that she had overshadowed him, and their life paths had followed her achievements. He knew that she had sometimes lost interest in him and there had been lonely years in the middle of their marriage. But that didn’t matter to him now. In the end, his ability to be with her and to sacrifice himself for her had been another of life’s gifts. And now, in his vulnerable final years, she was offering back everything that he had given. Even if they had been married only this month, with him immobile and her caring for him in a thousand ways, life would still have been worth living. As the hours ahead had shortened, his love for her had only grown.

Just then, Erica came out onto the porch and asked him if he wanted some dinner brought out. “Oh, is it dinnertime already?” he asked.

She said it was and there was some cold chicken in the fridge she could bring out, with some potato chips. She went back inside, and Harold was left to go back to his reverie. And as he reviewed different scenes from his life, the questions life asked of him—and his assessments of them—dissolved, and he was left with just sensations. It was like being in a concert or a movie. His sense of self faded away. It was like the way he had been in his room as a boy, moving trucks around while lost in some great adventure.

Erica came back out onto the porch and dropped the tray she was carrying and screamed and rushed over to Harold and grabbed his hand. His body had sagged and was inert. His head was on his chin and drool was coming out of his mouth. She looked into his eyes, the eyes she had grown accustomed to looking into all these decades, and she could see no reaction there, though he was breathing. She made a move to run to the phone, but Harold’s hand tightened around hers. She sat back down looking him in the face and weeping.

Harold had lost consciousness but not life. Images flowed into his head the way they do in the seconds before one falls asleep. They came in a chaotic succession. In his unselfconsciousness, he didn’t regard them the way he would have at an earlier time. He regarded them in a way that was beyond words. We would say he regarded them holistically, somehow feeling everything at once. We would say he participated in them impressionistically, rather than analytically. He felt presences.

As I put them down on this page I have to put them in one sentence after another, but this is not how Harold experienced them. There were images of the paths he used to ride his bike on as a boy and the mountains he looked out upon that day. There he was doing homework with his mother, and also tackling a running back in high school. There were speeches he had made, compliments he had received, sex he had had, books he had read and moments when some new idea had broken over him like a wave.

For a few moments, consciousness seemed about to flicker back. He could sense Erica weeping out there and compassion enveloped him. Inside, the swirls in his mind were still interlooping with hers. They were shared swirls that leaped across from her conscious world to his unconscious one. Categories fell away. Tenderness was out of control. His ability to focus attention ended and at the same time his ability to interpenetrate the souls of others increased. His relation to her at this moment was direct. There were no analytics, no reservations, no ambitions, no future desires or past difficulties. It was just I and Thou. A unity of being. A higher state of knowledge. A merger of souls. At this point his questions about the meaning of life were no longer asked, but were answered.

Harold entered the hidden kingdom entirely and then lost consciousness forever. In his last moments there were neither boundaries nor features. He was unable to wield the power of self-consciousness but also freed from its shackles. He had been blessed with consciousness so that he might help direct his own life and nurture his inner life, but the cost of that consciousness was an awareness that he would die. Now he lost that awareness. He was past noticing anything now, and had entered the realm of the unutterable.

It would be interesting to know if this meant he had also entered a kingdom of heaven, God’s kingdom. But that was not communicated back to Erica. His heart continued to beat for a few minutes, and his lungs filled and emptied with air and electrochemical impulses still surged through his brain. He made some gestures and twitches, which the doctors would call involuntary but which in this case were more deeply felt than any other gesture could be. And one of them was a long squeeze of the hand, which Erica took to mean good-bye.

What had been there at the start was there at the end, the tangle of sensations, perceptions, drives, and needs that we call, antiseptically, the unconscious. This tangle was not the lower part of Harold. It was not some secondary feature to be surpassed. It was the core of him—hard to see, impossible to understand—but supreme. Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.

YOU
NEVER
KNOW
HOW
THINGS
ARE
GOING
TO
COME
TOGETHER
. Ever since college I’ve been interested in research about the mind and the brain. But this had been a sidelight as I went about my normal work—writing about politics and policy, sociology and culture. But as the years went by, the same thought kept recurring. The people studying the mind and brain are producing amazing insights about who we are, and yet these insights aren’t having a sufficient impact on the wider culture.

This book is an attempt to do that. It’s an attempt to integrate science and psychology with sociology, politics, cultural commentary, and the literature of success.

No one needs to remind me that this is a perilous enterprise. The study of the mind is still in its early stages, and many findings are under dispute. When a journalist tries to apply the findings from a complicated discipline to the wider world, it is easy to miss nuance, and the distinctions that the specialists hold dear. Moreover, there is a natural resentment of people like me, who have platforms like
The New York Times
,
PBS
, and Random House, and who often try to capture the gist of a lifetime’s worth of research in a paragraph or a page.

Nonetheless, I thought this enterprise was worth undertaking, because the insights gained over the past thirty years really are important. They really should reshape the way we think about policy, sociology, economics, and life in general. I’ve tried to describe these findings while playing it safe scientifically. I’ve tried to describe the findings that are reasonably well established, even if there is still some disagreement about them (there always will be). I’m aware that I am not a science writer. I have not tried to describe how the brain works. I almost never venture into the complexities of which brain region is producing which behavior. I have merely set out to describe the broad implications of this work.

There is no way to do this in a manner that satisfies all the researchers all the time. I have at least tried to give credit to the original scientists as often as possible. I have tried to direct readers to sources where they can read about the original work and draw their own conclusions about its implications. I have also incurred debts to many people who helped me with substance and style.

Jesse Graham of the University of Southern California policed the book for scientific errors. His wife, Sarah Graham, provided a sensitive literary reading. The psychologist Mindy Greenstein, author of
The House on Crash Corner
, read most of the manuscript, and Walter Mischel of Columbia read a part. Both offered crucial suggestions. Cheryl Miller, formerly of
The New York Times
and now of the American Enterprise Institute, did a superlative job of research, copyediting, and fact checking. Her intelligence and competence are legendary among those who have been fortunate enough to work with her. My parents, Lois and Michael Brooks, read the book, offering large thoughts and careful editing suggestions. They applied their usual high standards. My
Times
colleague David Leonhardt also offered invaluable feedback.

I benefited from conversations with many researchers. But I should at least thank Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, Antonio Damasio of
USC
, Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, and others who steered me in the direction of relevant research. I should also thank the leaders of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, Edge, the Templeton Foundation, the Center of Neuroscience and Society, and other organizations who let me participate in conferences and panels with people in the field.

My editor, Will Murphy, was an unfailingly wise and encouraging presence. My agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, have been ardent champions. My speaking agent Bill Leigh read the manuscript and offered sage counsel. My associates at the
Times
—Reihan Salam, Rita Koganzon, Ari Schulman, and Anne Snyder—have earned my undying gratitude. I consulted roughly twenty-four million people in my search for an acceptable title, of whom I would certainly like to thank Lynda Resnick and Yossi Siegel.

Of course, I need to thank my kids, Joshua, Naomi, and Aaron. And it is a pleasure to thank my wife, Sarah. As she can attest, I may write about emotion and feelings, but that’s not because I’m naturally good at expressing them. It’s because I’m naturally bad at it.

INTRODUCTION

1
The most generous estimate
Timothy D. White,
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 24.

2
“Some researchers”
White, 5.

3
“removed the earth”
John A. Bargh, “The Automaticity of Everyday Life,” in
The Automaticity of Everyday Life
, ed. Robert S. Wyer (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1997), 52.

4
“I looked at her face”
Douglas R. Hofstadter,
I Am a Strange Loop
(New York: Basic Books, 2007), 228.

CHAPTER
1:
DECISION
MAKING

1
Playboy
bunnies tend
David M. Buss,
The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
(New York: Basic Books, 2003), 47-58.

2
Even the famously thin
Daniel Akst, “Looks
Do
Matter,”
The Wilson Quarterly
, Summer 2005,
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=648&AT=0
.

3
The orbicularis oculi muscle
Steven Johnson,
Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
(New York: Scribner, 2004), 25-26.

4
Men consistently rate
Ayala Malakh Pines,
Falling In Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 33.

5
Women are sexually attracted
Peter G. Caryl et al., “Women’s Preference for Male Pupil-Size: Effects of Conception Risk, Sociosexuality and Relationship Status,”
Personality and Individual Differences
46, no. 4 (March 2009): 503-508,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-4VC73V2-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03/31/2009&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3f12f31066917cee6e3fbfdc27ba9386&searchtype=a
.

6
Zero percent say yes
David M. Buss, “Strategies of Human Mating,”
Psychological Topics
15 (2006): 250.

7
Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman
Matt Ridley,
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
(New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 251.

8
People rarely revise
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, “First Impressions,”
Psychological Science
17, no. 7 (2006): 592.

9
His research subjects could predict
Charles C. Ballew II and Alexander Todorov, “Predicting Political Elections from Rapid and Unreflective Face Judgments,”
Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
104, no. 46 (November 13, 2007): 17948-53.

10
He was tall
Ridley, 298.

11
A woman may be partner
John Tierney, “The Big City: Picky, Picky, Picky,”
New York Times
, February 12, 1995,
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-big-city-picky-picky-picky.html
.

12
They imagine there is
Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss, “Error Management Theory: A New Perspective on Biases in Cross-Sex Mind Reading,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78, no. 1 (2000): 81-91.