Who Am I and If So How Many? (10 page)

Among the biggest mysteries involving memory is a second decision memory makes, once it has distinguished the familiar from the unfamiliar: it sorts out the important from the unimportant. We can scarcely take note of every object in a room, but as soon as there is something out of the ordinary, we usually pick up on it right away. Evidently the new and unexpected are particularly important to us, and we store deliberately only what we deem sufficiently important. But who determines what is important? Clearly the sense of importance can have both a conscious and an unconscious origin, which means that declarative and
nondeclarative
memory cannot be divided as cleanly as we have been suggesting. Although neuroscientists all use these terms, this construct is quite hypothetical. A closer look reveals that these handy distinctions are vague and speculative. Strictly speaking, they originate not in brain research but in psychology, and they are no more valid than Freud’s id, ego, and superego. These are practical and reasonably plausible categories, but they cannot be hard-and-fast, for the obvious reason that there is no particular spot with a hard disk called ‘memory’ in the brain that one could describe and in which individual repositories assume specific functions. There is neither a region ‘short-term memory’ nor a site ‘long-term memory,’ and even declarative and nondeclarative memory have no visible location. On a physiological level, neuroscientists have pitifully little to go on.

But if there is no site of memory, how was Eric Kandel able to examine the ‘short-term memory’ of
Aplysia
and observe the synapses of this marine snail strengthen as they learn? The answer is that the biochemical mechanism Kandel was examining appears at quite a few different neurons. In order to conduct the pertinent experiments, all you have to figure out is which neurons are responsible for which bodily functions. Kandel’s crucial
achievement
was showing that experience leaves a trace in the brain, that it causes modifications of the synapses. The plasticity of the synapses enables us to store experiences for the short term, and the synapses of all animals are continually modified depending on
their experiences, within the framework of defined possibilities. Neurons cannot, of course, learn everything; there are limitations to their flexibility. Kandel became a candidate for the Nobel Prize when he succeeded in showing that experiments similar to those with
Aplysia
could also be conducted using rats. In the 1980s, he identified the protein CREB (cAMP response element binding). When CREB is released in a neuron in the brain, the synaptic connections are strengthened, and, as Kandel discovered, the synapses become more efficient in short-term memory. Long-term memory, by contrast, does not originate in qualitative
improvement
within the synapses, but because the
number
of synaptic connections increases in response to CREB. This discovery brought Kandel the crucial breakthrough – and the first
noteworthy
theory of how long-term memory originates. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000, along with Arvid Carlsson of Sweden and Paul Greengard of the United States. Carlsson had laid important foundations for understanding and managing Parkinson’s disease. Greengard discovered how neurotransmitters act on the cell and perform changes in cell reactions in the brain, which is an important foundation for Kandel’s work on long-term memory as well.

Kandel knows that he has only scratched the surface of long-term memory. He was the first to do so, but certainly not the last. There are still quite a few unanswered questions. His experiments had concentrated on the hippocampus of rats, which is responsible for spatial orientation. While rats learned how to find their way through a labyrinth, CREB was released in the hippocampus. Of course, you find the same biochemical activity in other regions of the brain that have no known connection with learning and memory. The process that takes place in the neurons triggered by CREB is a necessary but clearly not sufficient explanation for the formation of long-term memories. If we compare the memory with the system of higher mathematics, we might say that neuroscientists are just at the point of figuring out what a number is.

The manner in which our brain stores impressions and sorts the important from the unimportant – and why it does so – remains a puzzle, but it is clearly the case that for me to remember something deliberately and to pull it out of the recesses of memory on my own, I have to have reflected on and captured the experience in language. Evidently, the human brain is incapable of reflection in the complete absence of language. But if everything we know – or think we know – is linked to language, we have to analyze language itself. Does language assure us a privileged access to reality? Does it impart an objective knowledge of the world?

In the fall of 1914, a young aeronautics engineer sat in a patrol ship on the Vistula River. Since July, Austria-Hungary had been in a war that would go down in history as World War I. But the twenty-five-year-old engineer at the eastern front was not interested in the war, even though he had enlisted in the army. He had discovered a mesmerizing magazine article about a courtroom in Paris and a lawsuit concerning an automobile accident that had occurred a year earlier. Complicated traffic accidents involving automobiles were still a rarity in the metropolises of Europe. To reconstruct the exact course of events, the court re-enacted the accident by means of a miniature model. Miniature houses, a miniature truck, miniature people, and a miniature baby carriage were put into position and moved about. The engineer was riveted. How was it that a model could stand in for reality? First, by making the figures correspond as closely as possible to the real objects, and second, by ensuring that the relation of the figures to one another was exactly analogous to the actual relations among the real objects. If reality can be represented by figures, he thought, can’t it also be represented in the same manner by the figures of thinking, namely, by words? ‘In the proposition,’ he noted in his
diary, ‘a world is as it were put together experimentally.’ In other words, linguistic statements constitute a world.

Just as Descartes had launched philosophy in a new direction at the onset of the Thirty Years War, this aeronautical engineer altered the course of philosophy at the beginning of World War I. More radically than anyone before him, he made the logic of
language
the center of philosophical thought. And this paradigm shift made him one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His name was Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna, the city of Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, Gustav Mahler, and Robert Musil. He was the youngest of nine children of Karl Wittgenstein, one of the most powerful steel magnates of his era. Wittgenstein’s mother was a pianist. The combination of old money and a love of music in the Wittgenstein family bears a striking resemblance to the eponymous family in Thomas Mann’s novel
Buddenbrooks
. Compared to the nine Wittgenstein children, of course, the fictional characters of Thomas, Christian, and Toni Buddenbrook are almost normal. One of the Wittgenstein sons became a famous pianist, but three of the other children later committed suicide. Ludwig was also extremely high-strung and insecure, depressive at times and arrogant and domineering at others. Like all of his siblings, Ludwig was home-schooled. When he was fourteen, he finally went to school, but he was not a good student. He passed his college entrance examinations by the skin of his teeth and enrolled at the university as a student of engineering. Wittgenstein had a passionate interest in technology and machinery, which was not unusual at a time when engineers were revolutionizing life with automobiles, airplanes, elevators, skyscrapers, and telephones.

In 1906, he matriculated at the renowned Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg and in 1908 transferred to Manchester, where he worked with varying degrees of success on airplane motors and propellers, but he was drawn to logic and mathematics. In Jena, he visited the mathematician Gottlob Frege, whose attempts to fathom the general laws of logic in mathematics and
other disciplines went relatively unnoticed. Frege recognized Wittgenstein’s talent and drew his attention to the leading philosophical authorities of the day, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell at the University of Cambridge, whereupon Wittgenstein enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge to study philosophy. Russell initially dismissed the eccentric young
engineer
: ‘My ferocious German … came and argued at me after my lecture … It is really rather a waste of time talking with him.’ But within a few weeks, Russell came to consider Wittgenstein a genius, ranking the brilliance of his ideas above his own. He encouraged Wittgenstein to criticize and improve on his
Principles
of Mathematics
, and he hoped to learn a great deal from the Austrian, who was seventeen years his junior. Wittgenstein threw himself into the project, interrupted only by extensive travels, primarily to Norway, where he had a hut built at a fjord and could enjoy a homosexual relationship with a friend from Cambridge. But he aimed much higher than merely building upon Russell’s logic, and he set about creating his own ‘definitive’ work, the
Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus
. During the war, he continued his studies, and his aspirations soared: ‘My work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.’ He finished the project in the summer of 1918, before the war ended, but it did not appear in print until 1921, when it was published in a journal, and in the following year, as a bilingual book edition in German and English. This slender volume was less than a hundred pages in length, and its consecutive numerical system grouped sections and paragraphs in the quotable manner of biblical chapters and verses. The book enjoyed an enthusiastic reception in Cambridge and in
philosophical
circles throughout western Europe.

What was it that made this formerly poor student the star of the philosophical world? What was the nature of his universally hailed ‘genius’? As the story with the model of the Paris traffic accident shows, Wittgenstein’s innovation was to shift language to the center of philosophical inquiry. As astonishing as it may sound, language had been a neglected area in philosophy until then.
Although philosophers were, of course, well aware that they expressed their thoughts in words and sentences, the dependence of their thoughts and conclusions on language was rarely addressed. Even Kant, who (as we will see in part 2) had shifted the rules governing our experience and thinking to the center of his philosophy, had barely looked into the complexities and necessities of language. Wittgenstein noted the same omission in Whitehead and Russell. How could one make sense of the logic of the human experience and human knowledge of the world while ignoring the language in which this logic is formulated? ‘All philosophy,’ Wittgenstein contended, ‘is a “critique of language.”’

Wittgenstein thought about the traffic-accident model and the way the figures and their relation to one another provided a picture of reality, and he realized that the same thing occurs in a proposition: its words and syntax convey a picture of reality. The nouns (‘names’) correspond to the ‘things’ of the world, and their juxtaposition imbues them with meaning. If the names and syntax agree with the things and their alignment, a proposition is
true
– in principle, anyway, because for a mirror of this kind truly to mirror reality, all constructional flaws in everyday usage have to be remedied and language must be streamlined by eliminating all senseless and nonsensical propositions. Senseless propositions are those that require no reality to ascertain their truth value; for example, ‘Green is green.’ And the truth of nonsensical
propositions
, such as ‘The proposition I am now uttering is false,’ cannot be verified at all, because they have no basis in reality. Wittgenstein was even determined to banish all moral statements from language, because ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not represent things that exist in reality. Morality, he contended, can be expressed only in signs, gestures, or facial expressions, because ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

Wittgenstein dreamed of a precise language that would enable people to grasp and describe reality objectively in all spheres of life. The Ernst Mach Society, a group of positivist-minded scientists and philosophers in Vienna who in 1922 formed the Vienna
Circle, devoted fourteen years to developing the ideas in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
. The project was ultimately an utter failure, which was probably just as well; after all, what good could have come of an authoritarian language forced down society’s throat? How much would be lost if schoolteachers made their pupils stop crafting sentences that featured ambiguity, irony, and metaphors? And even if Wittgenstein’s reform had been limited purely to philosophical language, it still would have been exceptionally dry and devoid of nuance.

Precise language failed not because of any shortcomings on the part of the Vienna Circle but because a precise language represents a profound misconception of human evolution and the basic function of language. The motor driving the development of
language
was quite clearly not the desire for truth and self-knowledge, but rather the social need to communicate. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein regarded language as an exclusive instrument of knowledge. He viewed it with the eyes of a technician and engineer, and he evaluated its usefulness solely according to logic. He shared this inflated view of language with Whitehead and Russell, who regarded logic as tantamount to the world formula of thinking – which it is not. It is one means of thinking among others, and it is only one element of language. Judging everything according to the laws of logic leads to absurd conclusions in the real world.

In order to understand how highly intelligent people like Russell and Wittgenstein came to explain the world exclusively by the rules of logic, we need to picture the charged atmosphere in Cambridge at that time. The pioneer spirit in technology and engineering had extended to philosophy, which had been rather lackluster for several decades but was now flourishing in
Cambridge
. Russell and Wittgenstein could not tell whether they would be leading philosophy to new heights or signaling its eventual end. But they were so taken with their ideas that they believed they could do without many of life’s key components. Their attitude toward the other disciplines that studied the human
condition was dreadfully arrogant. Wittgenstein had read Freud, but since Wittgenstein’s only yardstick was a text’s usefulness for logic, he found psychoanalysis just as unproductive as psychology. As might be expected, he was unaware of recent developments in brain research; Ramón y Cajal and Sherrington were completely unknown to most thinkers in his day.

The range of Wittgenstein’s philosophical knowledge was clearly demarcated, in sharp distinction to Russell’s. Wittgenstein did not dwell on the question of whether man can attain an adequate grasp of objective reality – a question that had been pondered in philosophy at least since Kant – nor did he inquire into the psychology of perception, which was a major issue for many of his contemporaries. And his
Tractatus
made no attempt to address the social context of language and speech. This is the only way to explain why Wittgenstein’s vision of an ideal language bore some resemblance to the language used by Joseph, an
eleven-year-old
boy discussed in Oliver Sacks’s
Seeing Voices
:

It is important to note that Sacks’s Joseph was not a pupil who had Wittgenstein’s precise language thrust upon him, but rather a deaf boy who grew up without sign language for the first ten years of his life. Joseph’s experience of language is devoid of the nuances that arise through usage because he was never exposed to spoken language or signing during his earliest childhood. Even so, Joseph came out with a good grasp of words and syntax, and an
understanding of language that is logical, in a rudimentary sense, but not social.

In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky provided a credible explanation for how we learn language: people are born with an innate sense of language and grammar, and toddlers learn their first language virtually automatically. It grows within them in a manner resembling the growth of their arms and legs. It is, of course, crucial to this process that toddlers imitate the language they hear. Like chimpanzees in the wild, people use only about three dozen different sounds to construct complex sentences. In chimpanzees, it would seem, each sound has a specific meaning. In human development, by contrast, sounds like ‘ba’ or ‘do’ gradually lost their meaning and became mere syllables. Humans combine meaningless sounds to form meaningful words.

Why this process occurred in man and not in other primates is a matter of controversy. One reason may be that the larynx lowered during the development of man, which greatly expanded the linguistic capabilities of human speech. But no one has found a good explanation for that either, though we do know that the region of the brain associated with grammar and the ability to form meanings from a sequence of sounds is Broca’s area, which is located just above the left ear. Until about the age of three, children develop their language skills primarily there. If Chomsky is right and there is an innate sense of grammar of the language we learn first, it would have to be located in Broca’s area, because
second-language
acquisition evidently occurs with the help of adjacent areas in the brain. Broca’s area is associated with speech production, articulation, pronunciation, and the formation of abstract words. Understanding and perhaps also imitation of language are ascribed to another region, Wernicke’s area. This bipartite division, discovered in the nineteenth century, is still valid today, although speech processing is clearly a highly complex process, and neuroscientists have recently begun to include additional areas of the brain in describing it.

At least our native language is learned unconsciously at first, then
‘aped’ in social situations. Its most important function is to understand and be understood. Both grammar and context determine whether something is comprehensible. The sentence ‘It’s black out there’ can mean that I am describing what I see in front of me, but it could just as well mean that I am feeling pessimistic. Wittgenstein loathed sentences of this kind, but language is full of ambiguities. The simple truth is that the meaning of a sentence is formed by the
use
of words, which condemns any idea of a precise language to failure.