Contents

Preface

Introduction
IN THE AGE OF MAN: PROGRESS AND ITS PURSUIT

Part I
Prologue: Who Do You Think You Are?

Chapter 1
OFF BALANCE: SURPRISED BY AFFLUENCE

Chapter 2
HABIT AND INTUITION: TUNING THE BRAIN

Chapter 3
ENLIGHTENED EXPERIMENTS:
INVENTING THE MARKET SOCIETY

Chapter 4
 CHOICE: THE BRAIN’S INTERNAL MARKET

Chapter 5
MARKET MAYHEM: OF MUSEUMS AND MONEY

Part II
Prologue: How To Live?

Chapter 6
LOVE: WEAVING THE WEB OF TRUST

Chapter 7
CHARACTER: EDUCATION AND SELF-COMMAND

Chapter 8
HABITAT: MADE TO MAN’s MEASURE

Chapter 9
FOOD: THE STAFF OF LIFE

Chapter 10
IMAGINATION: THE PLAYFUL, CREATIVE BRAIN

Reprise
WISDOM: RETUNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

Acknowledgments
Notes

Index
For Nancy
Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is
unhappy until he has explained America?

E. B. White (1971)

The supreme test of all political institutions and

industrial
arrangements shall be the contribution they make to
the
all-around growth of every member of society.

John Dewey (1920)

Preface

I FIRST BEGAN THINKING about the ideas that were to become The
Well-Tuned Brain in 2008, in the wake of America’s ruptured housing
bubble and the worldwide financial seizure that it provoked.
American Mania had been published a couple of years earlier and
essentially predicted such a meltdown. But why, I asked myself, had
the madness become so pervasive in Western culture? What were we
thinking? Looking back, it defies common sense to believe that any
economic system, but particularly a globalized market system, could
indefinitely sustain itself on debt and speculation.
Amid the wreckage of subprime mortgages, easy money, and
shifting weather patterns, I was not alone in my rumination. As the
workaday treadmill slowed, and the collective anxiety mounted
across Europe and in the United States, the mood was one of angry,
confused reflection. In the public forum, perhaps in fright, perhaps
in hope, we thrashed about searching for villains and plausible
causes. And rogues there were, with the bankers being high on most
lists, but self-reflection and discussions around the part we each may
have played in the economic debacle were remarkably muted. In the
main we preferred to find explanation “out there,” apart from our
personal behavior and our responsibilities as informed citizens.
This intrigued me. The foibles of humankind are no secret but
are written large in the history of our species. Nor are our assets
obscure when it comes to thinking about who we are. One of the
amazing things about modern times is that we have made great
strides in understanding the biology of the brain and its role in
shaping human culture. And yet when thinking about our social and
political organization, we tend to ignore such insights, especially in
commanding our own behavior. The Well-Tuned Brain is my effort to
highlight how knowledge of science can improve self-understanding
and how such insights can serve all of us, and the common good,
going forward. But that is only one part of my agenda. As intensely
social creatures, we have many qualities, some that we are in danger
of forgetting, which are essential to living together constructively in
the frenetic, information-saturated world that we have created for
ourselves. My effort is to bring these diverse elements together,
integrating history, psychology and neuroscience with sociocultural
insight and economic commentary, to craft a cohesive story upon
which to build a balanced future vision.
I am fully aware that this is an ambitious undertaking. As such, I
temper my ambition with humility. We still have much to learn about
human behavior, and inevitably my analysis falls short. But I have
learned over the years that it is easier to criticize than to construct—
to look back rather than forward. Hence, while I take full
responsibility in attempting this synthesis, I make no apology.

Woodstock, Oxfordshire,
September 2014
The Well-Tuned Brain
Introduction

In The Age of Man:

Progress and Its Pursuit
. . . progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s, and not the beasts’.
Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert” (1864)

WE ARE LIVING in the shadow of our achievements.

Our compelling, technology-rich, supercharged world is one
born of explosive economic growth. While over the past half-century
the planet’s human population has increased, more than doubling
since 1950, the global economic output over the same period has
multiplied nearly eightfold. In the developed Western nations this
unprecedented expansion has led to a massive increase in material
goods and in market choice—a shift particularly evident in the
consumer society of the United States, the nation that for over a
century has been the world’s commercial and economic leader.
This invention of the modern world owes much to capital
markets and to the spirit of the European Enlightenment, of which
America has become the Grand Experiment. The material affluence
we now enjoy validates the Enlightenment principle of individual
freedom and the conviction that scientific and technical advance is
best achieved by harnessing human reason within a competitive
marketplace. This grand reimagining of the human condition, one
where we strive to control our place in nature and maximize
economic growth as the source of personal well-being, we now
describe as “progress.”
Since the last ice age, some ten thousand years ago, the Earth’s
climate has been peculiarly stable—a period that geologists call the
Holocene—and that constancy has aided the human ascendancy to
planetary dominance. However, over the past two or three centuries
—indeed since the Enlightenment—we have witnessed a cultural
revolution that has been a faster and more profound driver of that
dominance than anything in history. Catalyzed by an insatiable
curiosity and served by a superior intelligence, we have contrived
ways to unleash the power of fossil fuels, temporarily breaking free
from the living world’s organic-based energy cycle and harvesting to
our advantage the Earth’s great natural resources.
In this energy-rich modern age health and wealth have never
been so abundant: we live longer; the vast majority of our offspring
survive childhood; we are largely literate, and in the developed
economies many individuals enjoy material comforts that for
centuries were beyond the reach of kings. That is not all: as economic
growth continues to quicken and material poverty declines, it is the
American contemporary ideal of material progress that shapes
expectations for China, India, and the rest of the emerging world. As
John Stutz of the Tellus Institute has described it, “We are a global
consumer society poised on the brink of affluence.”
Or perhaps we are courting disaster? We are discovering, in this
headlong pursuit, that our material progress has unintended
consequences, both personal and environmental. In less than a
century we have wrought changes in the Earth’s geology and
biosphere on a massive scale. It is a dubious testimony to our zeal
that the stigmata of some of our most ambitious projects are now
easily detectable from an orbiting satellite two hundred miles above
the Earth’s surface—the disappearing Aral Sea and the vast
excavation of the Athabasca tar sands in northern Alberta being but
two examples. And then in addition, given our addiction to fossil
fuels there is mounting evidence—now reinforced by “superstorms”
such as Katrina and Sandy—that human appetites play a significant
role in climate change.
In a globalized commercial world, human intervention is
suddenly everywhere, monopolizing the ecosystem for our singular
benefit and significantly disturbing its balance. Today’s world is
fundamentally different—a new planet “Eaarth,” as Bill McKibben
has described it—from the ancestral environment that nurtured the
human species. The distinguished biologist E. O. Wilson has
calculated that with seven billion of us now living on this planet, the
human biomass that the Earth must sustain is roughly one hundred
times greater than the biomass of any previous large animal species.
Indeed, some scientists suggest that we can no longer study the
“natural” world in isolation from human action. They argue—
following the lead of the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen
—that we have entered a new geological epoch that is better
described as the Anthropocene: this is The Age of Man.
The implication that logically follows is that in this Age of Man
human destiny lies in our own hands. This poses some tough
questions. How do we intend to survive as a species on a planet of
finite resources when we pursue an economic policy committed to
continuous growth? If we persist in maximizing material
consumption, how do we hope to live within the means of a delicate
and limited biosphere? Such questions not only challenge the
sustainability of human “progress” as we currently define it—within
a competitive global framework of continuous economic expansion
—but also suggest a denial of our fundamental biology as evolved
creatures, dependent for our very existence upon the Earth’s habitat.
Our collective behavior, in its disregard of biology and human
values, falls short of the Enlightenment principle of rationality. So,
for example, while sporadic concern is expressed regarding carbon
emissions and potential ecological pitfalls, we have yet to develop
serious international intent to combat climate change. Resistant to
changing our behavior, we put faith in science and technology in the
hope of discovering a panacea. We have begun to explore alternative
sources of energy to the Earth’s finite supply of fossil fuels; fear of
climate change similarly promotes “green” building codes and
cleaner transport systems. But in the aggregate our vision of the
future is short term and shaped largely by our experience of what has
fostered economic “progress” in the immediate past. As a matter of
cultural habit, we are attuned to a commercial ethos of material self-
interest, consumption, and continued economic growth, with only
marginal concern for the human and environmental impact of such
policies. This is a world where personal and corporate reward is
myopically focused upon competition and immediate advantage,
with little regard for the healthy ecological and social infrastructure
upon which all markets depend over the long term.
A similar myopia and adherence to habit is evident in our
personal lives. Thus, rather than accepting that in the face of
plentiful supplies of food we eat too much, and mostly the wrong
stuff, we turn to the medical profession, hoping for a quick fix to our
growing obesity, ignoring the sociocultural and economic factors
that drive the epidemic. With rising energy costs we feel exploited by
the oil companies but do little to address our personal dependence
on fossil fuels. When millions of “rationally minded” citizens take on
unsustainable debt to buy houses they cannot afford, then later
borrow against that assumed equity to sustain consumption beyond
their means, we first blame the bankers and the regulatory agents
rather than our spendthrift ways and the culture that drives them.
We each want to believe that the crises we face are beyond
individual control, perpetuated by government, big business, or the
indiscretions of others. But such a mindset does not do justice to our
intelligence and to what we know about human behavior. If we are to
think seriously about our responsibilities and to make informed
choices, both in averting serious health consequences and in shaping
a balanced human destiny, it is imperative that we each work to
better understand ourselves. Going forward, we must take ownership
of our behavior, for it is there that our troubles are rooted.
This is the fundamental premise of The Well-Tuned Brain. I argue
that the challenges we face are open to rational problem solving and
to proactive planning, but that first we must accept ourselves for who
we are. The major cultural focus of my inquiry is the United States, a
country that has been my adopted home for thirty years, but the
essence of my argument is broader in range and implication. I suggest
it is time to reflect upon what we have learned about the human
animal—both positive and negative—from the rise of Western mass-
market materialism. By integrating what we now know about the
brain from neurobehavioral science with what we have forgotten
about ourselves as sociocultural animals, we can reimagine the idea
of human progress and bring greater harmony to everyday life. It’s
important, however, that the steps we take be informed and adaptive
to circumstance, for the pitfalls that lie ahead are both ideological
and physical. If we persist along our chosen path, we are in danger of
reducing ourselves to mindless consumers—to the addictive pursuit
of a market ideology where profit is the major prize, and where social
capital and a sustainable habitat are largely neglected. In practical
terms, to reshape the future we need first to better understand and
reshape ourselves.

AT THE PRESENT MOMENT there is much in the way we behave to

suggest that we are confused. For many ordinary Americans the
banking debacle of 2008, which brought the world to the brink of
financial implosion, called into question the prevailing mythology
that only continuous material growth can maintain the nation’s
economic vitality and deliver individual happiness. Yet after a few
months of angry protest regarding the ethics of the banking industry
and anguished self-reflection that the good life may be more than
materialism, we quickly returned to our old habits. Blindly we lapsed
back into the short-term, helter-skelter pursuit of debt-fueled
economic growth. And we persist in doing so despite accumulating
evidence that we are fostering social inequity, making ourselves sick,
harming other species, and perhaps wrecking the environment that
sustains us.
Two simple neurobehavioral questions arise from this puzzling
behavior. First, why is it that human beings tend to consume
excessively when living in a resource-rich environment, and second,
why despite our growing conscious awareness of the challenges we
face do we find it so difficult to change our ways? The answers to
these questions and an explanation for our self-destructive behavior
are to be found in a contemporary mismatch among three cardinal
factors—ancient instinctual strivings that seek short-term reward, an
efficient habit-driven brain, and the material affluence of
contemporary market culture. Succinctly, the human brain is not
“well-tuned” to modern-day circumstance.
First our instinctual strivings: the propensity for
overconsumption is the relic of a time when individual survival
depended upon fierce competition for scarce resources. Achieving
affluence has not changed those fundamental biological templates.
Indeed, the material abundance we have achieved and our adherence
to a model of progress founded on competition and maximizing
economic expansion has served only to reveal and reinforce such
ancient proclivities. Thus the reward-seeking, short-term focus that
is particularly evident in American society today finds its origins in
normal mammalian biology. Our acquisitive mania, with all its
unintended consequences, has emerged not because we are evil but
because in a time of plenty such ancient instinctual strivings no
longer serve their original purpose. Strivings for more food, more
sex, and more safety were once regulated by scarcity of opportunity.
In the consumer society, where enticement and opportunity holds
sway, the tables have turned: what was once our greatest asset is
becoming a fatal flaw.
Second, that we are creatures of habit confounds our instinctual
striving. One reason why we find change and adopting a long-term
perspective so difficult is the illusion that we are in full conscious
control over the decisions we make and have made in the past: we
believe that the enlightened, rational self is dominant in human
affairs. In reality, however, what we now know from brain science is
that much of what we feel within ourselves and perceive about the
day-to-day world is harvested and acted upon preconsciously. In
other words, many of the complex brain patterns that shape our day-
to-day decisions and drive our behavioral routines function in
parallel to, or outside of, immediate conscious awareness. Habit is the
word most commonly used to describe such routines. These are
behaviors that the brain adopts to deal with repetitive circumstance,
behaviors that later become so familiar that little conscious attention
is required, or is necessary, for their automated execution.
Everyday life would be impossible without habits. Habits are the
brain’s way of handling the events of a familiar world with speed and
efficiency, essentially a personal autopilot that when provided with
the appropriate environmental cue knows the routine and takes over
to complete the necessary chore. Once you pick up that toothbrush
in the morning, the complex muscle activity required to effectively
manipulate the brush to successfully clean the teeth follows
smoothly and is completed without thought. The routine of dressing
is similarly automated, as is driving the car along the familiar route to
work. We “think nothing of it” until something unusual occurs, such
as a pedestrian unexpectedly stepping out in front of us, which then
“catches our attention.”
It is through habit that the brain “tunes” itself to optimally
engage the world. Some habits we consciously seek to cultivate, such
as playing a good tennis game or a better round of golf, while other
habits intrude without conscious permission, such as when, under
stress at work, we find ourselves craving doughnuts and drinking
more coffee. Thus habits can be good and bad, even compulsive, and
either way habits are hard to break. While we celebrate the efficiency
habits afford, and in these accelerated times we even boast about our
capacity to “multitask,” we also worry about “poor” habits and their
addictive potential, as in the case of consuming too many sodas or
repeatedly checking e-mail.
But beyond these mundane examples we each have other habits
of which we are much less consciously aware, and yet are crucial to
understand if the potentially addictive bondage of consumerism is to
be avoided. These are habits of mind, patterns of thought, opinion,
and social behavior that are informed by instinct and tuned through
personal experience. Commonly called intuition, these thought habits
largely operate preconsciously and complement reasoned choice,
profoundly influencing how we feel about things, other people, and
ourselves. Intuition, we shall find, has its own distinct brain network
and is the brain’s fundamental operating system when it comes to
efficient thinking. Indeed, probably some 80 percent of our behaviors
and actions are managed by the preconscious intuitive mind.
The third element in the mismatch is cultural change. Habits of
intuitive thought are profoundly shaped, and given meaning, by the
culture into which we are born. And in turn it is the habits of
individuals that collectively shape culture. Our early cultural
experience exerts a continuous and powerful effect not only upon
the language we speak but also on how we characteristically conduct
ourselves as adults, including the values we perceive as important
and the meaning we attach to them. Think of the intuitive process as
a narrative—as a personal story—that is held in the preconscious
library of the mind. Over a lifetime we carefully piece together the
chapters in the story—our personal patterns of intuitive thought—
from the thousands of cultural and social cues that are drawn from
our everyday experience. The stories we construct are passed from
person to person and across generations, and through these shared
habits of mind—in tune with the collective experience—our cultural
beliefs are perpetuated. In short, the intuitive personal narrative and
its individual expression not only shape culture but also are the glue
that holds society together.
Today in the United States and Western nations the master
cultural narrative—the way we habitually think about everyday life
—is written in the language of the market. Each day we confirm the
market narrative at work, at home, and at play. Profit, competition,
and wealth creation have become the dominant and recurring theme
of the national story. While market exchange is far from a complete
expression of the human social values, the drive to maximize market
growth is now entrenched and powerful, dominating life’s meaning.
Commercial product—the brands we buy, the entertainment we
choose—increasingly populates the personal narrative. In
consequence, we find ourselves rewarded less in the role of
concerned citizen than in that of self-seeking consumer. Through
habituation, we have grown indifferent to those aspects of human
culture that fall outside market reference.
“Happiness,” wrote Adam Smith in 1759, “consists in tranquillity
and enjoyment,” and in America it is happiness that has been the
pursuit. But somewhere along the way—conjured from the material
success of the Great American Experiment—we have abandoned
tranquillity for the convenience of immediate satisfaction and
become mesmerized by enticements of our own manufacture. This is
the cultural shift that now drives our biology. Our ancestral hunger
for short-term reward both serves the global market’s need for
continuous economic growth and feeds the abiding hope that with
“progress” the American Dream, one day, can be made material.
Although evidence is accumulating that our fixation on
consumption and wealth creation has failed to deliver to the average
American family the benefits promised—equal opportunity, upward
social mobility, security, and personal well-being, to name a few—as
a nation we find it difficult to move beyond the myth of material
happiness.
While common sense suggests that any civil society requires
more than self-indulgence and shopping to maintain its health and
cultural integrity, the merry-go-round that now serves as everyday
life distracts us from imagining the rational alternatives. We have
created for ourselves a form of trickery, but for the moment the
seduction works: and as I shall explain, it’s an easy habit to acquire.
Thus, driven by the instinctual search for immediate reward, we find
ourselves caught up not in the enjoyment of happiness but in a
relentless pursuit of its material surrogates. We have fallen out of
tune with who we really are, and in consequence the mismatch
continues to flourish.

THE WELL-TUNED BRAIN is divided into two complementary parts.

In Part I, “Who Do You Think You Are?” I reflect upon the lessons
learned about human behavior from our experiment in mass-market
materialism. I begin by investigating the growing challenge of obesity
as an example of the mismatch that I have just outlined. Using the
epidemic as a case history, I explore how, over time, many elements—
biological, behavioral, economic, and cultural—have conspired to
create this public scourge that is now driving us off balance, both
physically and economically. As a physician with expertise in
emotional and social behavior, and with knowledge of the part such
factors play in the development of disease and disability, I illustrate
how the personal stressors engendered by a demand-driven consumer
culture play upon normal physiology, fostering self-destructive habits
that are hard to break. How such habits are formed in the brain and
how the neuroscience of habit brings insight to understanding our
intuitive thought is the focus of Chapter 2.
Self-interest is the engine of the consumer society, but it is habit
and our fascination with novelty that sustains it. To fathom how this
came to be, I reach back, in Chapter 3, to the Scottish Enlightenment
and to the Age of Reason, a time of insatiable curiosity that gave
birth to the Industrial Revolution and provided the philosophical
foundation for Western society today. Not surprisingly it was an era
that had great respect for science and the manufacturing trades. It is
there—in the debates of over two centuries ago—that we unearth the
origins of the “rational” self, a concept that has been of seminal
importance in the creation of the Western democracies and the
capitalist enterprise. My particular focus will be on the work of
Adam Smith, not only his concept of the free-market society as a
balanced self-regulating economic order but also his writings on
moral development, an inquiry that offers profound insights
regarding today’s social challenges, and their potential resolution.
This brings me to how the brain makes choices. I outline from the
perspective of behavioral neuroscience how the fundamental free-
market operating “principles” of reward, punishment, and the
evaluation of risk are reflected in the information-processing
mechanisms of the brain. It is through such brain mechanisms that
we perceive the world, arrive at decisions, and take action, learning
from the results of those actions to refine future behavior. This
activity mirrors what is essentially the brain’s own “internal market,”
seeking to find balance through continuous interaction with a
complex, ever-changing world. So I ask, is it this proclivity of the
brain that makes the give-and-take of the external marketplace so
universally compelling? Is this why barter is ubiquitous in human
society, from the merchant colonies of Anatolia thirty-five hundred
years ago to the globalized megacompanies of today?
In closing Part I, I investigate this possibility and offer another
case history—this time comparing the collapse of the competitive
Bronze Age empires of the Mediterranean to the cultural
circumstances in the United States that led up to, and followed, the
global financial meltdown of 2008. How may we understand the
behaviors that led to such apparently precipitous self-destruction? I
argue that in both instances clues may be found through an
understanding of how the brain’s internal market is distorted by
myopic preoccupation with the short term and by an obsession with
continuous growth. In our contemporary experience, I conclude that
the 2008 financial crisis, the obesity epidemic and environmental
degradation have a common behavioral root that is fed by the
enticements of affluence, degrading the brain’s capacity for self-
regulation.
Material achievements, it appears, are just one ingredient of the
“happiness” prescription. In America, and generally in the world’s
rich nations, we have reached a point in our postindustrial
experiment where intelligent reflection upon what constitutes
human progress is desirable, even imperative. We have discovered
that affluence, like poverty, has the power to throw the biology of
human behavior off balance, potentially fostering a cultural amnesia
that damages character development, encourages self-destructive
habits, and fosters neglect of the sustaining environment.
Starting from this premise, Part II of the book, “How to Live?,”
again poses fundamental questions but goes beyond diagnostic
analysis to outline our strengths in constructing a way forward. How
may we bridle our short-term instinctual cravings to better focus on
long-term environmental and personal challenges? How, in society,
can we foster the habits of character in the young that will intuitively
guide them to independent choice and self-discipline, which will
help them navigate a seductive, debt-fueled consumer culture? In the
helter-skelter of modern life, what knowledge about ourselves have
we forgotten that we need to learn once more? How may we reinvest
in the social skills that served us so well in the past? In sum, how
should we live in this Age of Man?
The barriers to intelligent reflection are many. Present-day
commerce is built on the principle that for the individual having
more is better, simply because for most of human existence we lived
in scarcity. But now, in the rich countries and in the emerging
economies, that circumstance is shifting. For the first time in human
history many in Western society are grappling with how to live under
an avalanche of information, of material goods, of food, indeed with
a surfeit of everything but time. Rather than scarcity we now
confront abundance, although for many, including many living in
the United States, it is an abundance increasingly poorly distributed.
Social and economic progress are disconnecting from each other.
It is the paradox of modernity that as market choice and material
prosperity have increased, health, educational achievement, and
personal satisfaction have reached a plateau. The compelling
Enlightenment vision that science and reason would bring happiness
and steady social progress is now tarnished. In America, despite
extraordinary economic growth, the quality of everyday life has
stagnated for the average citizen while the disparity in wealth
between the rich and the poor has grown exponentially. The
founding narrative of America as a land of equal opportunity is
fading.
Also damaging to the social fabric is that in consumer society
intuitive acts of essential human caring—activities that give pleasure
to the self and bring happiness to others—have been increasingly
removed from their source and placed within the marketplace: the
rearing of children, the care of the elderly, and the preparing of a
family meal being just three simple examples. Such behaviors co-
opted into the gross domestic product are now considered measures
of growing economic wealth. In reality, however, such metrics reflect
not new wealth but the conversion of natural human caring into
commodities and relationships into services. We now pay for things
that we once did for each other out of love or gratitude, thus
removing not only an important source of personal happiness but
also weakening the warp and weft of the social fabric essential to a
balanced social order.
It is challenges such as these, lurking in the shadows of our
success, that I investigate in Part II of The Well-Tuned Brain. In a series
of chapters harnessing what we know about ourselves from common
sense and the behavioral neurosciences, I explore the development of
healthy behaviors that nourish our social order and personal growth
—why and how they are essential to the education of our children, to
a vibrant habitat, to the food we eat, to the creative process, and to
sustaining a human-friendly planet ecology. As will become clear, it
is when these elements are knit together in harmony to support
individual opportunity, well-being, empathy, and personal
responsibility that the social and ecological fabric thrives. It is a
reminder that human progress flows primarily not from simply
amassing material wealth but from self-awareness and from the wise
use of our achievements and our resources to the benefit of
ourselves, of others, of future generations, and of the planet.

FINALLY, IN CLOSING this introduction, a word about my title, The

Well-Tuned Brain. It is a play on Johann Sebastian Bach’s collection of
keyboard music entitled The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1722, when he
was thirty-seven years old, Bach applied for the prestigious position
of cantor to the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, a post that he was to hold
for twenty-seven years, until his death in 1750. Among the cantor’s
responsibilities was the teaching of music to a gaggle of students, and
The Well-Tempered Clavier is essentially the textbook that Bach
assembled to fulfill that duty. A collection of preludes and fugues in
all the possible keys, Bach described his compositions on the title
page as “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning,
and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.”
So what is the meaning of “well-tempered?” To temper, the verb, is
“to moderate, to blend, to free from excess,” and “to adjust according
to need”—in today’s language, “to tune.” Thus to be well-tempered is
to find optimum balance, as in tuning the strings of a keyboard
instrument to achieve harmony across the different keys. That may
seem of little consequence when considering the modern family
piano, which gets tuned once a year to what is called equal
temperament, where it is arranged that all the notes of the keyboard
are the same distance apart in pitch. But as the ancient Greek
mathematician Pythagoras determined long ago, this is a contrivance,
for in reality the intervals between the notes of the musical scale do
not perfectly add up: nature’s math is different. Start with the note C
on a stringed instrument and progress through the octave, and when
you get to the next C, the note has overshot. It sounds out of tune.
This was a big problem in Bach’s time, for the clavier—the early
harpsichord—was notoriously “temperamental” and in constant
need of adjustment. A change in room temperature, or the shifting
humidity provoked by a passing rain, would perturb the instrument’s
delicate balance. To achieve fine performance, the musician and the
keyboard are as one: each depends on the other. Thus Bach, in his
consummate skill, taught not only the art of expression at the
keyboard but also the care and tuning of the harpsichord as an
instrument to be respected and loved for its subtle sensitivity. Equal
temperament was recognized as a practical tuning method, but it
wasn’t standard practice. Many musicians of the time preferred
tuning to irregular temperament, where the intervals between the
notes of the octave were tweaked to personal preference, and the
instrument could be played in all keys without the necessity of
retuning. Bach was in this camp, devoted to the flexibility and
sensitivity of his keyboard instruments. That’s what his workbook
The Well-Tempered Clavier is about.
It is a story that offers only a crude analogy when thinking about
the interactive sensitivity of the human brain and the subtle beauty
of mind, but nonetheless I find it useful and compelling. Just how
Bach made the adjustments to “well temper” his clavier is a subject
upon which experts continue to disagree, but the writings of his
contemporaries suggest it took him little more than fifteen minutes.
Here my analogy with the brain stumbles badly, of course. For each
of us the care and tuning of the brain—and an understanding of the
“music” that is the mind at work—is the commitment of a lifetime,
by necessity. As we shall find, when it comes to the human brain, the
quick fix, analogous to tuning the family piano to equal
temperament, does not serve. Tuning the brain demands knowledge,
attention, and hard work. However, there’s no investment more
worthwhile: striving to be in tune with one’s self simultaneously
makes common sense and serves the common good. The nurturing
of the well-tuned brain offers harmony and hope—to each of us as
individuals and to our collective enterprise.
Part I
PROLOGUE

Who Do You Think You Are?

SEARCHING FOR TRUTH about one’s self is a perennial human

quest. The Greeks found it compelling but challenging. Similarly,
Benjamin Franklin, reflecting upon life in his Poor Richard’s
Almanack, considered three things extremely hard, “steel, a
diamond and to know one’s self.” Today in the hope of probing this
puzzle further, once the exclusive study of theologians and
philosophers, we have conscripted the neuroscientist, the
geneticist, the engineer, and the nanotechnologist.
We have turned now toward understanding the self through
knowledge of the brain. We are at the point where we can map the
living brain, where we can see in real time how those who suffer
with depression, Alzheimer’s disease, or autism have different brain
activity patterns than those of the “normal” brain. We can define
the major networks of the brain and copy them using computer-
based simulation. Stem cells aided by synthetic scaffolding may
soon heal damaged brains and help nerve networks rewire. Neural
engineers are designing robotic systems that can operate at the
interface of the mind and the machine. All this is amazing. This is
science.
 But there is another, equally important challenge for science in
understanding the behavior of the brain and the self. It is a task
more intimately connected with our daily lives and with securing
our future. We need to better grasp why and how the mass
consumer society, in its abundance, plays on certain hardwired
evolutionary drives to remold the brain’s neural pathways, guide our
choices, and shape our habits, compelling the unwary toward
addictive self-gratification. We have discovered that a state of
plenty can have unintended consequences. It is the paradox of our
times.
Chapter 1

Off Balance:
Surprised by Affluence
Man with all his noble qualities . . .
Still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his
lowly origin.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

WHEN THIS BOOK was in its infancy, I spent a year working with
colleagues at the University of Oxford. We found lodging in
Woodstock, a small village just a few miles outside Oxford, where
the pastoral landscape is dominated by Blenheim Palace, the large
country estate that is the home of the Churchill family. It was there
in the early spring that I met Henry, a pheasant who had become a
local celebrity.
It’s no fun being a pheasant on an English country estate. This
was particularly true that year. The winter had been long and hard,
the earth was ice- and snow-covered, and the game hunters had
taken their toll. On some days three or four hundred brace of birds
had fallen to the hunters and their dogs. But not Henry, as he had
been fondly named: this rooster was no gullible youngster. Henry
was shrewd, with long and shiny leg spurs, suggesting that he was
tough and canny enough to have endured a year or two despite the
harsh conditions. And he was a handsome fellow, with his copper-
colored plumage shining mottled and iridescent in the sunlight; his
feathered helmet shimmered a forest green. In his strutting walk and
regal bearing, he had the mark of a warrior. This bird was a survivor.
Then that spring came his downfall: Henry fell unexpectedly into
affluence. His preferred hangout was a pasture by the lake, close to
the neck of an old dam where the water cascaded into the river
below. Over the winter the dam had been repaired, and new drainage
fields had been built to better control the flow of water during the
spring runoff. Late in the project, after the backhoes and trucks had
disappeared, the groundskeepers reseeded the meadow. By early
March all was complete. As the sun strengthened, daffodils thrust up
their heads along the riverbank, the new-sown grass and clover
germinated, and the worms and insects multiplied. For a pheasant
recovering from a winter of privation, it was a banquet like no other.
When it comes to survival, game pheasants are no dumb birds.
They run fast and fly low, and their staccato alarm ensures that most
will take cover before you’ve even seen them. They’re cautious in
their habits, feeding early in the morning and again late in the
afternoon, as the sun begins to wane. During the heat of the day
most pheasants retreat to what the hunter calls “loafing” cover—light
brush or tall grass that affords protection from predators and a little
time for relaxation. Henry, however, in his delight at having
discovered nirvana, began to ignore these survival principles. He
commandeered the wealth of the newly sown field as his private
preserve. There he was to be found each day, even at noon, fully
exposed, head down, feeding away. Never was Henry seen to run;
rather he strutted with head held high, wattles bobbing red against
his purple throat.
Henry grew and grew; no longer sleek but of Pickwickian
proportion, he gained notoriety as the largest pheasant many had
ever seen. Visitors gathered to watch him feed. He began to rival the
water cascade as an attraction to the park. Little boys threw pebbles
to provoke him: he hardly noticed, intent on his self-indulgence. No
screaming sprint into the thicket for Henry. It was as if he had
written those signs around the reseeded field to warn away
competitors, “Newly planted area; please keep off.” With a long
winter behind him and the human predators at bay, Henry had
become complacent, addicted to his personal preserve and the
affluent life. “He’s lost his common sense, has that there bird,”
advised a local countryman one afternoon as we stood together
among a clutch of gawping visitors. “If he don’t kill himself, then the
fox he will.” He was right. Toward the middle of April Henry
disappeared. Only a few days later, walking on the hill that overlooks
the lake, I found a bloodied carcass and a fine set of wings. It was
what was left of Henry; those long shiny spurs were unmistakable.

THE SAGA OF HENRY—how the noble pheasant fell into affluence

and lost his common sense—has the makings of a fine fable, one
worthy of inclusion in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. But also, as do
many fables, it offers a cautionary tale. The growing epidemic of
obesity across the world, a challenge particularly evident in the
United States, suggests that when faced with abundance, we humans
may share Henry’s insatiable appetite.
So did simple gluttony kill Henry? I think not: rather, Henry had
been surprised by affluence. At the center of his undoing was a
calamitous mismatch between his instinctual drive to take advantage
of the moment and the novel, unparalleled plenitude of the seeded
meadow. Thrown off-balance by unprecedented opportunity, Henry
neglected his long-term self-preservation: here was a bird literally too
fat to fly.
On a human scale, a similar challenge is evident today for those
living in America and the world’s other prosperous nations. We too
have been surprised by affluence. Seduced by a compelling, resource-
rich culture—one engineered by our own material success to offer a
paralyzing plethora of everything desirable—we are on a collision
course with our own biology, myopic to the long-term consequences
of our immediate behavior. Our growing obesity is just the most
obvious marker of a cascade of health problems that have been
triggered by the mismatch between our evolved biology and the
behavioral challenges of living in a rapidly changing, competitive,
commercial culture. It is no accident that type 2 diabetes, vascular
disease, anxiety, and depression are found clustered together in their
prevalence and distribution with obesity, for they are all unintended
consequences of a high-stress society. These predominantly
metabolic ills are “ailments of affluence,” or more specifically
ailments suffered by those among us in the affluent society who, for a
variety of reasons, find themselves insecure and continuously
challenged.
Affluence—defined as an abundance of choice at ever-decreasing
cost—has a seductive potential that is pervasive. When exposed to
the pleasurable stimuli and repetitive rewards of today’s consumer
culture, we are prone to excessive behaviors and addictive habits in
many spheres of daily activity. We have come to accept that an
“addict” can become habituated to cocaine, heroin, or alcohol just as
Henry became “addicted” to the pleasures of his meadow. But what is
less understood is that the same neural architecture that in a
“normal” person promotes habituation to the double cheeseburger
also promotes habituation to credit-card shopping, video games,
smartphones, electronic social networks, Internet surfing, stock-
option gambling, pornography, and the countless other novel
“pleasures” that an affluent society has on offer. In such a world of
affluent choice, where the choices play directly to our instinctual
drive for pleasure and reward, self-control has become hard to exert
and sustain.
The capacity for self-restraint is further eroded by a market
culture that not only reinforces such acquisitive behaviors but also
has become economically dependent upon them. With the
globalization of trade the accepted model of human progress has
become one of continuous material growth. Increasingly, commercial
success is measured not by the quality but by the quantity of product
sold. Hence the rich world economies are now focused by necessity
upon inducing and encouraging addictionlike behaviors—in
America consumer spending accounts for some 70 percent of
economic activity. The amount we consume has become a measure of
a nation’s vitality. In today’s society the twin drivers of commercial
growth are the merchant’s discovery that when faced with material
abundance the human brain does not effectively self-regulate desire
and the classical economist’s delusional insistence that it does. As
portrayed in the media, this is the American Dream—a world of
choice, material abundance, excitement, energy, and self-
actualization. But as I shall explore in this introductory chapter,
using obesity in America as my illustration, it is also a world where a
mismatch of physiological and cultural factors promote insecurity,
harmful habits, and the ill health of stress-driven metabolic
disorganization.

AMERICANS, WHILE LEADING the world in material wealth, living

standards, freedom of choice, and extraordinary technological
development, also have the dubious distinction of being among the
fattest people on earth. In 2008 the Centers for Disease Control
estimated that 68 percent of the U.S. population was overweight and
within that group some 33 percent were considered to be obese as
measured by a body-mass index (BMI) above 30. To give some
perspective, the U.S. statistics for obesity are ten times the rate
reported for Japan. Such excessive weight gain reflects physiology out
of balance, not only predisposing millions of Americans to type 2
diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and the tragedy of chronic illness but
also exposing the nation to a massive public health and economic
burden.
Careful analysis suggests that Americans have been slowly
gaining weight for several decades, but there’s no doubt that
beginning sometime in the 1980s the curve began to rise
exponentially. This time scale corresponds with a shift in our dietary
habits away from home-cooked meals to an increased consumption
of preprocessed and energy-dense foods that contain high levels of
refined sugar and saturated fats and, most importantly, are readily
available, tasty, and cheap.
So why, we must ask, do we find ourselves in this fix? After all,
among all the creatures of the earth, are we not the wise ones? Not
only are we sentient in thinking, choosing, and acting, but we also
take pride in learning from experience. In America we tend to think
of obesity as a personal issue. So why, as intelligent creatures, do we
behave insatiably in the face of newfound abundance, much as
Henry did in the newly sown meadow? What did happen to self-
restraint: why can’t we just say no and keep our eating habits under
control?
Unfortunately, as a growing number of citizens have become
painfully aware, maintaining a healthy body weight in America today
—for reasons that range from the genetic and physiological to the
interpersonal and cultural—is just not that easy.
Obesity is now America’s number-one problem in public health.
To understand its roots a good place to start is with our species’s
evolutionary history. Simply stated, for the human animal to live
with an abundance of cheap, tasty food is a unique experience. In
harmony with Henry the fabled pheasant, both metabolically and by
instinct, we human beings are designed for survival during times of
scarcity rather than times of plenty.
Physiologically the equation underlying weight gain is
straightforward: it is the direct result of the body storing excess
energy when, over time, the calories available from the food we
consume become greater than those required to meet metabolic
need. Multiple genes are involved in balancing the energy
requirements of the body, and these not only interact with one
another but also are responsive to changing environmental
conditions. It’s an experience familiar to each of us: think of those
extra pounds acquired from Thanksgiving and other winter feasts.
But for our forebears who struggled repeatedly with inconsistent
food supplies, this capacity to store energy supplies through weight
gain was a major asset. During periods of famine such conservation
could quickly become a life-saving adaptation. Hence people of
African or indigenous South American descent have developed a
greater metabolic facility to conserve and store energy than have
those of European ancestry, where the early adoption of agriculture
gave greater stability to the food supply and an opportunity for the
genome to adapt accordingly. The body’s metabolic programming,
however, does not shift easily. Thus when individuals—particularly
those with a metabolic propensity to conserve calories—consistently
consume a high-calorie diet, and especially when combined with a
sedentary lifestyle, significant weight gain and obesity are
commonplace and a threat to long-term health.
A celebrated, well-studied example of this interaction between
genes and environment is the profound obesity that has emerged in
the Pima Indians of Arizona with exposure to an energy-dense
“Western” diet. In their ancestral habitat these genetically
homogeneous “river people” of Native American migrant heritage
survived through hunting, fishing, and subsistence farming.
Physiologically and culturally they were well adapted to periods of
famine. In the late nineteenth century, however, when American
settlers homesteading upstream diverted the Pima people’s water
supply, the Pima traditions of two thousand years were profoundly
disrupted, with accompanying widespread starvation. Within a few
short decades the replacement diet provided to these river people by
the U.S. government—with its principal ingredients of animal fat,
processed sugar, and white flour—coupled with the development of
a culturally alien, sedentary lifestyle induced not only weight gain
but also type 2 diabetes, which today afflicts some 32 percent of the
population.
The plight of the Arizona Pima is in stark contrast to a
community of comparable genetic inheritance located several
hundred miles south, in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico.
Here where the Pima people have preserved their ancestral traditions
—including a diet of maize and squash supplemented with small
game and fish—the inhabitants of the community have remained of
normal weight with a low prevalence of diabetes.
While the Pima experience is in many ways unique, it serves to
highlight how the rapid development of an environmental-metabolic
mismatch can have powerful and significant consequences. With a
sudden shift in culture and diet, a biology that evolved to conserve
calories and prevent weight loss under conditions of privation will
not only prove ineffective in stabilizing metabolism but will promote
pathological weight gain when the calories consumed consistently
outpace those expended.
Our instinctual behavior presents similar complications in
adapting to affluence. In the course of our evolution not only the
genetic control of metabolism but also our instincts have been
programmed for scarcity. In an impoverished world the consistent
message is to gather and consume whatever is available whenever it’s
available, for such opportunity may not return. But as I shall explore
later, the brain that guides us each day is a jerry-rigged organ of
expedience, one that relies for its core operations on a collection of
mechanisms that evolved long ago. In the face of affluence this
presents a problem. The process of evolution is essentially
conservative, sorting through alternative models of adaptation to
select the optimum environmental fit for success and survival. Those
adaptive mechanisms that have proven valuable are retained from
one generation to the next and also across species. Thus when it
comes to instinctual behavior, a little of Henry’s brain machinery still
lurks within each of us.
In the instinctual game of survival, pain and pleasure are the red
and green lights that shape our behavior and guide the brain’s
adaptive strategy. Fear and pain warn of the threat of harm and
induce retreat, while pleasure is the reward for success, promoting
curiosity and continued exploration. In our evolutionary experience,
pain was commonplace and reward hard-won. In foraging for
something to eat, self-restraint was rarely required. Our ancestral
home in the sub-Sahara yielded little, and what little there was others
wanted too. Thus it was privation and competition that controlled
our energy intake. When good fortune surprised us—when we
stumbled across the abundance of a tree in fruit, or the remains of a
large kill—it was etched in the brain’s emotional memory, and that
excitement seeded the desire to repeat the experience. But such
joyous moments were few and transient at best. In self-interest it was
essential to take immediate advantage of any opportunity presenting
itself. Thus the dopamine-driven, pleasure-generating systems of
reward were tuned to the short term: when you were successful in
the hunt, you gobbled as fast as you could and hoarded the rest,
preferably before some rival appeared to contest the prize.
In today’s affluent world, it’s a different story. In the last decades
of the twentieth century low-cost preprocessed food delivering
goodies high in salt and fat, together with soft drinks laced with
caffeine and corn syrup, became readily available in America and
other rich nations. Such affluence makes us vulnerable. This shift to
a cheap, convenient, novel, and high-calorie diet has been difficult to
resist. In each of us, rational choice is distorted by novelty and
immediate opportunity. So when tempted by such tasty goodies, the
brain’s ancient reward hardware becomes quickly engaged and
dominant, sometimes even to be hijacked into an addictive spiral.
When we respond repeatedly to such temptation, then metabolic
conservation of the extra calories follows, and weight gain is not far
behind. Compounding the situation is that in the short run there is
no physiological penalty for such behavior, only reward. So today as
in ancient times, when the blood-sugar level drops, threatening the
brain’s energy supply, the alarm bells ring—we feel faint and hungry;
but excessive calorie intake carries no subjective warning, just the
feeling of a full belly. It is not like filling the car at the gas pump:
there is no physiological shut-off valve for calories. Thus as obesity
emerges, high blood-sugar levels, which accompany weight gain and
are the harbinger of diabetes, sometimes go undetected for years.
To summarize, today in America, when it comes to what we eat,
the opportunities available have shifted dramatically, but our
instinctual behavior has not evolved. As a matter of rational choice
we may be committed to maintaining a reasonable body weight, but
when we are “surprised” by the convenience of fast food, that
rational commitment is overwhelmed by the ancient brain’s
preference for immediate reward. A sedentary lifestyle and reduced
physical labor, which accompanies rapid technological advance,
complicates the picture. Economic stagnation, especially among
growing numbers of middle-class families, further compounds this
double jeopardy, driving people toward obtaining the most calories at
the lowest cost. In inner-city neighborhoods, where a lack of healthy
food choice is commonplace, this third factor, in confluence with the
other two, has made obesity in America an illness of the poor rather
than of the rich. This is in contrast to past experience, when those
most commonly obese were the wealthy and the privileged, in
demonstration of their status and special access to food.

BUT PREDISPOSING GENES, ancient cravings, and the opportunities

of affluence are only part of this complex story. Although significant
in their contribution, these factors alone are an insufficient
explanation for America’s leadership in the world’s obesity tables.
While the United States has within its diverse migrant population a
significant number of persons of African descent and also many from
South America with an ethnically mixed Native American heritage—
both populations that are genetically predisposed to calorie
conservation and thus predisposed to obesity—individuals of
Caucasian, European origin, especially males, also have become
significantly overweight. Thus the prevalence of obesity reported in
men, as measured by BMI between 1999 and 2010, was 36.2 percent for
Caucasian males, 38.8 percent for African-American males, and 37.0
percent for those of Hispanic background, suggesting that in addition
to genetics there is a common cultural driver influencing all groups.
Highlighting that cultural factors may be important in promoting
obesity are the statistics that although mean body weight increased
across most affluent societies in the closing decades of the twentieth
century, this rise was not uniform; nor was it correlated with a
nation’s per capita income. Despite the deep penetration of
American-style fast food across the world—evidenced by The
Economist magazine’s use of the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac as a
comparative index of purchasing power among different countries—
when it comes to weight gain in most surveys, it is a cluster of
wealthy, English-speaking nations that leads the pack, with America
at its head. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the prevalence of
obesity in this group—the United States, Britain, Australia, New
Zealand, and Canada—was greater than for other rich countries,
including many in Scandinavia and several in Europe with
comparable per capita incomes.
So what distinguishes these Anglophone nations? One
possibility is market philosophy. My colleague Avner Offer, the
Emeritus Chichele Professor in Economic History at the University
of Oxford, has made this suggestion. Offer noticed in the course of
his research on obesity that its exponential increase worldwide
corresponded in time not only with the growing promotion of high-
calorie preprocessed foods but also with the rapid rise of globalized,
deregulated market systems, of which, in the 1980s, the United States
and other English-speaking countries had been early and
enthusiastic proponents. Together with his Oxford colleagues
Rachel Pechey and Stanley Ulijaszek, Avner subsequently conducted
a careful analysis of ninety-six surveys measuring body weight,
across eleven countries, between 1994 and 2004. The investigation
indicated a positive correlation between obesity and the cluster of
liberal “Anglo-American” economies when compared to nations
with a similar gross domestic product per capita but with a narrower
spread of income distribution and a stronger social infrastructure.
Evidence from the American experience provides potential
support for this hypothesis. Lengthened work hours, increased
competition, and greater financial insecurity—frequently associated
with liberal economies—may be inducing pervasive metabolic stress,
which then becomes a mediating factor in promoting weight gain.
Americans work longer hours and take shorter vacations than do
their European counterparts. Furthermore, in today’s technology-
driven society, many of the physical factors that once limited the
workday have fallen away. The convenience of the Internet,
instantaneous electronic communication, and a revolution in
transportation mean that time and distance are no longer barriers to
globalized commercial activity. The growth-focused economy fosters
a demand-driven “fast new world” that never rests, one where the
twenty-four-hour clock increasingly dictates our working life,
crowding out family, physical activity, leisure time, and sleep.
So what is metabolic stress? The fundamental biology of the
stress response—the coordinated brain-body reaction to uncertainty
and threat—is a vital mechanism of adaptation that we share with
our evolutionary forebears, just as we share the brain systems of
reward. It’s another tried-and-true mechanism inherited from our
ancestral past. Once triggered, the human reaction is little different
from that of the young pheasant when the hawk’s shadow falls over
the nest. But we are not pheasants. What is different, given our
intelligence and capacity for learning, planning, and imagination, is
that we perceive stress in ways that are unique to our experience—to
the specific social context in which we live, and have lived in the
past, and to our individual perception of how much control we have
over what’s happening to us. A subjective sense of control is of primary
importance to the human mind. Thus highly competitive work
environments—where time pressure is pervasive and repeated
confrontations are the norm—are commonly experienced as
profoundly stressful. This is especially true for those in subordinate
roles, who frequently lack a sense of personal control in the
workplace.
Chronic stress takes a toll. Physiologically the stress response is
designed to defend us in acute emergency when the brain, through
activation of the autonomic nervous system, places the body on
instant alert. We all have experienced the tingling sensation that
runs down the back of the neck when we are surprised. Next the
heart beats a little faster and the blood pressure rises: the adrenal
glands flood epinephrine into the bloodstream, and subjectively we
feel a sense of increased awareness and tension, even anxiety.
Secondary systems of bodily defense—the endocrine and the
immune systems—are similarly activated to prepare the body for
possible trauma in the fight ahead. But, and this is critically
important, in their evolution each of these systems has been tuned to shut
down quickly once the danger has passed. They are not designed to be
constantly active and on guard. When called upon to be so, they
slowly destabilize the body’s vital balance increasing our
vulnerability to inflammation and illness.
As a young physician, when I was on call around the clock for
seven days a week, it was considered an aberration. But in today’s
global world—with many yoked electronically to their work 24/7—
such exhausting schedules are widespread and frequently accepted
as the norm. Faced with serial deadlines, the brain’s alarm bells ring
repeatedly, and the stress response is continuously in play. In
response the immune system, now chronically activated, floods the
body with cytokines, which are important signaling molecules. When
cytokines are produced in excess, they can increase vulnerability to
chronic metabolic illness, which includes obesity.
Cytokines are small protein molecules, similar to hormones, that
play a role in the metabolism of fat cells; in the obese person they are
actively produced by the accumulated fat, stimulating other
inflammation in the body. Thus cytokines fall under suspicion as
potential mediators between stress and obesity. Indeed, obesity may
be considered a deranged metabolic state of overnutrition, which
generates its own inflammatory process, helping throw the body’s
homeostatic mechanisms—its metabolic gyroscope—off balance.
Once this vicious cycle is set in place, and the brain-body tuning is
lost, the task of reversing the spiral becomes infinitely more difficult,
as any overweight person knows only too well.
Those most affected by chronic work stress in America—and
among whom obesity is prevalent—are the skilled and semiskilled
members of the middle class, both men and women, who toil long
hours with marginal financial security, often to the neglect of their
families and their own health. Since the 1980s the average American
worker has assumed increasing financial risk. Swings in annual
income have become greater, and the minimum wage in constant
dollars has declined, as has job tenure and those receiving
employment-based health insurance. Social inequality—another
index of stress and insecurity—is also growing in America, with this
same middle-class group being left behind. Since the 1980s the
median family income in the United States has been essentially flat,
with a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. As
was reported by the Congressional Budget Office in 2011, the top 1
percent of earners have more than doubled their share of the
national wealth since 1980. In parallel, boosted by the recession that
followed the financial crisis of 2008, unemployment escalated. Thus
for many middle-class citizens workplace competition increased
while job security decreased, engendering a rising level of metabolic
stress that is frequently expressed as anxiety and weight gain.
Adding further to this stress-driven metabolic burden is a lack of
sleep. Most Americans report stealing one to two hours from their
natural sleep time every working night, catching up on weekends,
which only feeds into the cycle of inflammation and chronic stress.
Large population surveys—one including more than a million
participants—find a high correlation between less than seven hours
of sleep and an increased body-mass index. While it is tempting to
consider sleep as merely a suspension of daily activity, in fact it plays
a vital restorative function in knitting up the “ravell’d sleeve of care,”
as Shakespeare poetically described it. And yet in departure from
such understanding many Americans now accept a short night’s
sleep as a necessary evil.
It is a harmful practice. Laboratory evidence is accumulating that
sleep loss further feeds the body’s pro-inflammatory cytokine
response—just as does loss of control and chronic stress—inducing a
threefold increase in the genetic messengers that initiate the
manufacture of cytokines. Even a period of sleep deprivation as short
as one hour can have a significant impact on inflammatory cytokine
production and the hormonal regulation of appetite, which helps
explain why after disrupted sleep one can awaken hungry with the
feeling that a cold is in the offing. In one study of healthy, normal-
weight young men, sleep reduction was associated with striking
alterations in the body’s metabolic functions. In health there is a
daily rhythm of hormone production that is synchronized with the
cycle of sleep and wakefulness. In the young men deprived of sleep,
however, this rhythm was flattened, and the stress hormones such as
cortisol were elevated, suggesting a disturbed tuning of the feedback
mechanisms that communicate between the body and the brain. The
metabolism of sugars was also impaired in these young men. Glucose
clearance from the blood following a glucose challenge test was 40
percent slower when the subjects were in a sleep-deprived state than
when they were fully rested, a change similar to that found in normal
aging and in people during the early stages of diabetes.
 Subsequently, the same team of laboratory-based investigators
studied the daytime blood profiles of the appetite-controlling
hormones leptin and ghrelin, together with subjective ratings of
hunger and food preference. The men in the study were restricted to
four hours of sleep for two days and then allowed a “catch-up” sleep
of ten hours to simulate real-world working conditions. The sleep
restriction time, when compared to the catch-up recovery period,
was associated with an 18 percent reduction in the appetite-suppressing
hormone leptin and a 28 percent increase in the appetite-enhancing
hormone ghrelin. Interestingly, the young men also reported a 24
percent increase in hunger and a similar increase in appetite,
especially for calorie-dense foods with high carbohydrate content.
This suggests that the anecdotal reports of increased craving for fast
food when sleep deprived—I have experienced it myself after a night
on emergency call—may have a metabolic basis. And perhaps even
more important in considering the role that the stress of sleep
deprivation plays in the genesis of obesity is the finding that the vital
balance between the appetite hormones ghrelin and leptin becomes
persistently impaired in those with chronic insomnia.
 Figure 1.1: A cascade of health consequences: Obesity is the most visible of a cascade
of health consequences that flow from the stress-inducing, demand-driven, and time-
urgent economic environment that is the consumer society.

These studies highlight the second important insight to be drawn

from the obesity story. We must conclude that obesity is merely the most
visible of a cascade of health consequences that flow from the stress-
inducing, demand-driven, and time-urgent economic environment that we
have created for ourselves. In tying together the threads of evidence that
I have identified, and that I illustrate in Figure 1.1, it becomes clear
that the antecedents of America’s obesity epidemic and its associated
disabilities are best understood as an interconnected whole, one
within which evolutionary, biological, and cultural elements are
interwoven. From the standpoint of public health planning, this is of
critical importance. Physiologically, these stress-induced disabilities
reflect a dangerous disruption of the homeostatic equilibrium—of
the bodily harmony—essential to healthy living. Thus America’s
obesity pandemic is a warning. Of the health problems plaguing
America, many are driven by the choices we make and the
maladaptive behaviors that follow. Would we not do well, therefore,
to revisit our choice of consumer-driven economic growth and a
workplace strategy that demands 24/7 allegiance?
It seems logical enough. So why then do we continue to fall
victim to self-harm? I believe the answer lies in the profound cultural
shift we have experienced. Under the rubric of progress, we have
been discarding, for several generations, the social mores that
encourage economic responsibility and self-control in favor of the
instant gratification offered by consumerism. Our addictive pursuit
has eroded prudent habits and the capacity for objective choice. Of
even greater impact, however, is that in our myopia we are neglecting
the social institutions that teach such skills to future generations. For
families that rarely meet face to face except perhaps in the car, that
never eat together around a table, and where the parents both work
outside the home, grabbing food on the go, the pattern of life is
hardly one well lived and certainly one unlikely to instill the capacity
for self-restraint in children. In a culture of excess—where
compulsively getting and spending is the norm and where almost the
only choices people make are over what items to consume—the
opportunity for instant gratification will quickly defeat any
conscious effort for self-constraint, be that in appetite, emotion, or
impulse.
Thus if we desire to thrive in the novel, light-speed culture that
we have created—one that is rapidly running ahead of our capacity
to sustain biological, ecological, and economic fitness—we must
employ our intelligence, not as a slave to the fulfillment of short-term
desire, but as a thoughtful, creative force in the design of social
systems that have the capacity to integrate our passions and our
rational purpose for longer-term sustainability. This will be
particularly important as the digital age continues to unfold and the
technologies delivering the addictive novelties—the “electronic
cocaine”—of this coming revolution are perfected. We must give
ourselves time to think and to understand who we are, for we have
much to learn about ourselves from our experiment in mass-market
materialism.
Ideally we must return to the time-honored Delphic maxim
“know thyself,” not in the interest of some abstract philosophy but
rather in the practical terms of understanding our propensity for
novelty and myopic craving. To do so will inform the choices that we
make—both intuitively and consciously—as we grapple with the
opportunities and pitfalls of the technology-rich, market-driven
culture that now shapes our lives.
While America, together with the other rich English-speaking
nations, has been the stalking horse in this growing health crisis, we
are no longer alone in the world. As the “emerging” nations
deregulate their markets, industrialize, and change their traditional
diets, similar problems are becoming wide spread. The World Health
Organization documented in a report published in 2000 that morbid
obesity is now a global challenge imposing substantial economic
burden and a growing threat to personal health not only for those
living in the postindustrial nations but also for those in the quickly
developing world, particularly the Middle East and China.
Inadvertently, the United States and the consumption-focused
English-speaking nations have stumbled upon a new behavioral
maxim: the better human society becomes at providing instant
gratification, the less capable each individual citizen becomes at self-
regulation. We are now visiting upon ourselves the circumstances
that in simple form destroyed Henry. It is the very abundance of
American society—we produce more, consume more, and throw
away more than any other group of people on the planet—that
nurtures our consumptive appetites. In America, and increasingly
across the rest of the world, we are falling victim to enticements of
our own making.

IN JANUARY 2012 new obesity statistics for America were released by

the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association. They engendered some
excitement. The report summarized data collected over a two-year
period between 2009 and 2010 and compared them with those
obtained a decade earlier; it suggested that the exponential growth of
obesity was leveling off. Prevalence surveys among some six thousand
adults and four thousand children indicated that although men had
become marginally fatter over the decade—with the average body-
mass index up from 27.7 to 28.7—for women it was unchanged at 28.5.
While some 78 million people—approximately one in three adult
Americans—remained obese, this slowing was comparatively good
news, given that the nation’s waistline had been expanding steadily
for thirty years and exponentially for over ten.
The flattening statistics also suggested that America was slowly
emerging from denial and beginning to face its problems. In 2008 the
Centers for Disease Control had put the cost of obesity in America
at $147 billion, from the escalating bill for the gasoline consumed in
hauling around our more ample selves to the increased costs placed
against the already overpriced and overburdened health care system.
In America money talks, and it was becoming obvious regardless of
the personal burden of obesity that as a nation we could no longer
afford the self-indulgence of oversized dinner plates and an “all you
can eat” culture.
Potential remedies proposed varied from top-down prohibition
to bottom-up self-help technologies. The first lady, Michelle Obama,
was pushing ahead with her school lunch program—the Healthy,
Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010—and growing vegetables on the
White House lawn; Michael Bloomberg, then the mayor of New
York City, in a bold gesture proposed a ban on the sale in public
places of jumbo-sized sugar-laden soda pops; and a movement to ban
soft-drink machines in schools had gained traction across the
country. Similarly a report, after fast-food chains were required to
post calorie counts, had helped Starbucks customers cut their
consumption by 25 percent, suggesting a gentle tilt toward greater
self-control, at least in the latte set.
At the other end of the scale, in a blending of technology and
self-improvement, health-monitoring applications for the
smartphone were rapidly gaining ground. One example, originating
in San Francisco, was designed to track appetite, exercise, drinking
habits, and sleep with the goal of using the database to “self-
quantify” and shape future behavior. Collecting data to measure
progress and to refine decision making has been standard practice in
organizations for many years, of course, but electronic self-
quantification is different. In addition to monitoring short-term
behavior against long-term goals, it offers a technological fix in
replacing capacities that we have lost, or may never have acquired,
such as the mental control of appetite or alcohol consumption. Here
a technology that was initially designed to extend human
communication had metamorphosed into a prosthetic device.
Given the enormity of the task, however, such efforts represented
little more than a Band-Aid for those Americans already struggling
with obesity. The harsh reality is that in all probability such
individuals will encounter significant ill health in their middle years
and even a diminished life span. If over the long term the epidemic is
to be curtailed, the focus needs to be on children and youth. Of
particular concern in this regard was the evidence that for young
Americans obesity was continuing to increase, especially in boys,
where between infancy and nineteen years the prevalence of obesity
rose from 14 percent in 2000 to 18.6 percent a decade later. In
contrast, for girls the statistics remained relatively steady, rising from
13.8 percent to about 15 percent in 2010.
Unfortunately interventions designed to help adolescent children
eat healthfully, in the hope of heading off adult diabetes, have had
only marginal success and not only in America. A carefully matched
yearlong study of an intensive program of nutrition and optional
exercise for girls between twelve and fourteen years—implemented
across twelve low-income school districts in New South Wales,
Australia—failed to show any benefit. At the outset some four in ten
children were bordering on obesity, with an average body weight of
about 130 pounds. However, only 25 percent of the girls enrolled in
the project chose to attend the lunchtime exercise classes, and only
one in ten took advantage of the home-based physical activity or
nutrition programs. Perhaps not surprisingly, by the end of the year
weight gain in the experimental group was similar to that in the
matched controls, with an average obesity rate of 33 percent for the
school population in general.
The lessons from such studies are painful but valuable. First,
changing established eating behavior is not easy because (as I shall
explain in Chapter 2) we are creatures of habit: foods healthy or
otherwise that we enjoyed as children are those that we continue to
prefer later in life. This has long been known to the food industry, of
course. That’s what McDonald’s Happy Meals are all about: giving
young children exactly the tasty treats they want and exactly the
high-calorie diet that they don’t need. Burger King has a similar
giveaway program, offering cardboard crowns for kids along with
their burgers. Engaging the minds and stomachs of the young is a
powerful commercial strategy because it works. While the public
health concerns are clear, efforts to limit such marketing of junk food
to children meet with fierce industry opposition and also as it
happens from the children themselves, especially those who have
grown up with the enticement of processed food.
In 2010 there was a student rebellion in the Los Angeles school
district, which serves 650,000 meals each day, when healthful foods
such as jambalaya, vegetable curry, lentils, and brown rice were
substituted for the traditional fast-food fare of the school lunches.
Participation plunged 13 percent, as thousands of students dropped
out of the lunch program in favor of an underground market for
chips, candy, and fast-food burgers. It is further evidence that
changing nutrition standards in the face of a culture that is
habituated, perhaps addicted, to fast food is difficult, particularly for
those families in poorer districts where grocery stores are sparse and
preprocessed food predominates.
By adolescence our eating patterns are set, so the second lesson is
that in shaping eating preferences it’s essential to start early.
Contrast, therefore, the L.A. school lunch debacle with a program of
parent training conducted, again in Los Angeles, by Wendy Slusser, a
pediatrician at the Mattel Children’s Hospital. This focused seven-
week program for young low-income Latino mothers who had
overweight children aged between two and four years blended
nutrition, physical activity, and parenting advice. Delivered as an
interactive and participatory exercise in a clinic setting, where the
mothers learned from each other and then practiced their parenting
skills at home, the results were highly successful. In stark contrast to
the Australian program, a 9 percent reduction in weight was
achieved for these younger children in the parent-training group. By
comparison, in the matched group of children where the mothers
were not counseled, the number becoming overweight and obese
increased by 16 percent. This focus on healthy eating in infants and
young children may now be paying off. While obesity rates in general
in the United States were holding steady, in 2014 the Centers for
Disease Control reported a 43 percent drop in the obesity rate among
two-to-five-year olds, the first such decline in any group for a decade.
The Mattel study illustrates something that is obvious but easily
forgotten: that in our development as unique individuals we are
deeply conditioned in our habits through family, culture, education,
markets, media, illusion, and much more. Not so obvious is that
much of this social habituation is acquired intuitively—below the
radar of conscious self-awareness—and that friendships beyond
family also have a powerful influence in shaping our behavior. There
is substantial evidence, for example, that obesity spreads among
friends, much as does the contagion of the common cold. The most
intriguing study in this regard comes from Framingham,
Massachusetts, where a cadre of families (now a network of more
than 12,000 persons) has been followed for over half a century. The
project began in 1948 with a focus upon the natural history of
cardiovascular disease: in 1971 the offspring of the original 5,000
individuals were inducted, and in 2002 the third-generation children
were added to the study, making it one of the most comprehensive
longitudinal health assessments in the United States.
In addition to behavioral and physical measures, including body-
mass index, the Framingham study offers, over three decades,
detailed information documenting the ebb and flow of the social
relationships among neighbors, friends, and relatives. Employing this
remarkable resource, in 2007 Nicholas Christakis of Harvard and
James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, published
an analysis of the spread of obesity in the Framingham community
between 1971 and 2003. This time frame is important because it maps
almost perfectly onto the growth years of the obesity epidemic in
America. The evidence confirms that the company we keep
profoundly influences obesity: we learn our habits in the main from
those we trust.
Clusters of obese individuals were evident in this densely
interconnected social network of 12,067 people at the beginning of
the study. The prevalence of obesity in the sample advanced,
however, over the subsequent three decades, just as it had done in
the nation as a whole. Strikingly, this growth was not random but
was defined by the social bonds that held the clustered individuals
together. Social ties, particularly those between intimate friends,
were much more powerful in predicting the development of obesity
than was geographic distance or even kinship. If an individual had a
close friend who became obese, the chances that he or she would
become similarly overweight increased by 57 percent. Among adult
siblings, if one became obese, the chance that the other would follow
suit increased by 40 percent, and for a spouse by 37 percent.
Although many miles might separate siblings or intimate friends, the
influence prevailed. In contrast, the effect was not seen among
neighbors in the immediate geographic location who had no special
relationship with one another.
Obesity, we may conclude, is contagious among friends. And
indeed, subsequent analyses by Nicholas Christakis and colleagues
using an infectious-disease model suggest that the spread of obesity
through social networks has become a significant factor in sustaining
the epidemic. Only 14 percent of the Framingham study participants
were obese in 1971, but subsequently that number has risen in step
with the rest of the country. “Our analysis suggests that while people
have gotten better at gaining weight since 1971, they haven’t gotten
any better at losing weight,” said Alison Hill, the lead researcher. An
American adult has a 2 percent chance of becoming obese in any
given year, a figure that has increased in recent decades. This number
rises by 0.5 percent with each close friend who is obese. Thus having
four overweight friends double one’s chances of becoming similarly
obese. While in today’s American culture high stress levels, short
sleep, easy access to unhealthy foods, and a lack of exercise continue
to be major drivers in gaining weight, living in a tightly knit
subculture where such behaviors are the accepted norm also
significantly increases the risk of obesity. With two-thirds of the
American population already overweight, such subcultures are now
ubiquitous. In our habits we subconsciously conform to the
behaviors of those who influence our lives.
In the United States, where we are surrounded by an abundance
of food, subtle environmental triggers further promote overeating
and weight gain. Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior at
Cornell University, has shown that myriad cues powerfully influence
and sustain our eating habits and how much we consume
throughout the day. In his book Mindless Eating, Wansink concludes
from a series of studies—conducted both in his laboratory and in
homes, restaurants, and movie theaters, indeed wherever people eat
—that not only “family and friends [but also] packages and plates,
names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and
smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers” may
profoundly sway appetites and consumption. Seemingly
inconsequential factors—such as where we store food, whether it is
easily accessible, or how foods are paired and served—can reflexively
trigger behavioral habits and have a major influence on what and
when we eat. And indeed, I see such idiosyncrasies in my own eating
preferences: a cup of morning coffee triggers a powerful craving for
doughnuts, and in a throwback to my childhood, I find Marmite a
necessity when preparing scrambled eggs on toast.

MUCH OF WHAT WE DO each day is shaped by what we have done

before. We call this habit—perseverate patterns of behavior that
operate largely outside our conscious awareness. Wansink’s studies,
the Framingham analyses of friendship networks, and even the
pleasures I find in doughnuts and Marmite—all are examples that
reflect the brain’s habit mechanisms at work. Habits are essential, as I
noted in my introduction, for constructively and efficiently managing
the activities of the day. But habits can become emotionally charged
and maladaptive, especially when they reinforce short-term,
instinctual striving. This is illustrated by the obesity scourge and by
our response to the novel opportunities and material abundance of
the affluent market society. The emotional reaction, rather than being
one of pleasure, satisfaction, and contentment, is paradoxically to
overconsume, imagining that to have more must be better.
I’m reminded of Cevantes’s classical novel Don Quixote de La
Mancha, written at a time when Spanish society was on the edge of
economic chaos. Riding out from his village, Don Quixote seeks to
find the preferred world of his imagination—as many ride out today
in material pursuit of the American Dream—mistaking hostelries for
castles, herds of sheep for armies, and windmills for threatening
giants. Cervantes delegates the task of keeping his hero grounded in
the real world to the sound habits of Sancho Panza, the good knight’s
faithful squire. Sancho is the voice of common sense, the stable
realist who has come to understand the world in all its mundane
complexity.
I believe Cervantes’s story still has much to teach us. If we are to
reimagine the American Dream in a way that will sustain genuine
human progress—where the health of our species and those with
which we share the planet will continue to thrive rather than to
dangerously decline—we all must seek to know and channel the
common sense of our inner Sanchos. Cervantes’s story is a reminder
that many of the cues that shape and give meaning to our behavior
are embedded in the cultural mores and the belief systems that
surround us and in the intuitive habits of mind that frame and
perpetuate our beliefs and customs. Perhaps most important,
Cervantes’s story, in today’s demand-driven market culture, reminds
us—as does the story of Henry—that if we are to better tune our
behavior to the opportunities and risks of living and working amid
affluence, we must better understand how habit and intuition work.
How does the brain respond to the world in which we find ourselves?
Why is it that we appear to be insatiable? Could it be that what we
often accept as conscious choice is in reality an unconscious reaction
of the mind, governed by instinct, by our imagination, and by our
conditioning as social animals? Could it be that we are not making as
many conscious choices as we believe? It is to that subject that I now
turn.
Chapter 2

Habit and Intuition:

Tuning the Brain
The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and
comprehends more than it can coordinate.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis of Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims (1746)

Watch your habits, for they become your character.

And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

Abi Morgan, The Iron Lady (2011)

IN NEUROSCIENCE IT IS a time of wonder. In my professional

lifetime of over three decades, we have learned more about the brain
than in the whole of human history. It is an organ of extraordinary
complexity—a transducer between the body and the environment—
that has balance, flexibility, and great adaptive power. We know, for
example, that it contains upward of one hundred billion nerve cells,
rivaling the number of stars thought to exist in the Milky Way
galaxy, and that each of these cells has many thousands of synaptic
connections—portals of chemical communication—with its
neighbors. We know too an increasing amount about the anatomy of
the different functional centers that make up the brain, what
responsibilities they have, how they execute their duties, and how
they have evolved.
 The human brain, we have learned, is a hybrid construction as in
other mammals, essentially a hierarchy of three brains in one, with
biological specifications determined by its unique evolutionary
history (see Figure 2.1). Built around a primitive reptilian core
comparable to the brain of the modern-day lizard—and not
dissimilar from that of Henry, the profligate pheasant that I described
earlier—the brain has been supercharged during primate evolution
by the growth of a powerful cortical husk. In humans this cortex—
known to scientists as the neopallium—is about the size of a small
honeydew melon divided into two mirrored halves, which together
make up some 80 percent of the entire mass of the brain. In us the
frontal regions of the cortex—the parts of the brain where choices
are made and actions are taken—are disproportionately large,
supporting the intelligence and complex social behavior that
distinguishes our species.
Early in their growth, millions of years ago, these cortical halves
forced a division of the core structures of the ancient brain by
pushing the hippocampus, the seat of memory formation, toward the
center of the brain and the amygdala, which serves as the brain’s
emotional sentinel, toward the brain’s outer boundary. Later, with
further growth and accentuated by the massive development of the
human forebrain, these two structures, the amygdala and
hippocampus, have been crowded together once again—as if now
confined to the hollowed-out pith of the melon—to form
collectively, with other elements of the reptilian core, the limbic
system that oversees the body’s physiological regulation and serves
our emotional awareness.
The brain’s superhighways—principally the dopamine,
serotonin, and norepinephrine chemical messenger pathways—that
maintain communication among the vital centers of this somewhat
disparate structure have been mapped. Also we have learned much
about the physical and chemical processes that sustain the flow of
information along the brain’s many networks and byways. And as I
shall explain in Chapter 4, we are beginning to understand how
memory—through which we each experience the past and imagine
the future—is dependent upon the strength of the networks that are
forged among brain cells through continuous interaction with the
world around us. It is even becoming generally accepted in the public
forum that it is the activity of the brain that generates the subjective
awareness of “mind” and the ability of each of us to think, choose,
and act as a unique person.

Figure 2.1: The human brain is of hybrid construction and best understood through
the lens of evolution. The ancient reptilian core of the brain contains the basic
machinery that sustains life, while the early layers of cortex, the paleomammalian
cortex that is wrapped around this primitive core, are associated with the evolution of
social behavior. In the human brain the most striking feature is the growth of the new
cortex, comprising approximately 80 percent of brain volume.

The task of the living brain is the continuous processing of

information: the brain is an organ where a kaleidoscopic stream of
stimuli from the larger world is purposefully melded with instinct
and with inner body experience in the dynamic service of survival.
Thus if we are truly to understand how the brain is tuned to its task
of adaptation, and how the mind is conjured, we are necessarily
interested in the relationships among its many parts—how
information flows among the cells, the centers, and the networks that
are the living brain. How does the continuous flow of information
sustain the balance that is life and that shapes us as individuals? And
likewise, given that we are intensely social animals, we must ask—
beyond the biology of the organ and the behavior of the single
person—how information flows among individuals to create the
complex social web that we know as human culture.
Powerful cultural forces shape each of us. Dynamic social norms
—accepted conventions about how to live based on attachment,
learning, common experience, and shared intention—continuously
shape brain development in infancy and continue throughout life to
mold character. At first glance these compelling practices—birthing
rituals, marriage pledges, barter and exchange—often appear to be
culturally idiosyncratic, but they are found on closer inspection to
take similar form across different ethnic and racial groups. This
suggests that evolved physiological mechanisms, generic to the
brain’s function, may help shape our social behavior, much as they
do in language acquisition.
Parenthetically we must note that today’s knowledge of such
physiological mechanisms and of the brain’s cellular function is
founded on reductive analysis—a hallmark of scientific inquiry—
where the whole is divided into its component parts. Modern
neuroscience depends heavily on this method of dissection, which
has proved a powerful tool in understanding the molecular
mechanisms of neuronal function. Technology has been
handmaiden to that creative understanding. Without the revolution
that computer technology has brought to the processing of
information, for example, the brain’s genomic instruction kit would
have remained beyond dissection. We would have only a primitive
understanding of the dynamics of cellular metabolism, and the
ability to image the living brain would not exist.
It is the continuous blending of our evolved biology, personal
experience, and culturally acquired social practice—of which
markets are a prime example—that shapes the behavior of each of us
through the choices we make. Within these swirling, surging inner
and outer worlds we each seek to find ourselves; from among these
elements, through choice, is created the whole of the self. Further, in
navigating this complex world, we assume that all choices are
deliberate and that we actively control how we behave either by
intention or through our ability to respond to changing
circumstances. In short, we take pride in the conscious distinction of
who we are as a person: our likes and dislikes, our assets and our
liabilities.
In what is a uniquely human capacity, we consciously string these
fragments of self-knowledge together to construct a meaningful life
story that tells who we believe ourselves to be: a compassionate
mother, a poor tennis player, a recovering alcoholic, a dedicated
father, and so on. It only takes a moment of reflection to know that
based on this unique story we each have the extraordinary ability to
answer an endless assortment of questions about who we are and
what we think about the world and our place in it. Every day we use
such reflective, evidence-based self-understanding to express
opinions and to negotiate with others as we engage and embrace the
intricacies of human society. This is the conscious mind at work: the
activity of brain systems that both serve our identity and, more
practically, those that we call upon when we must remember a
telephone number or find our way in a city.
However, as I explain in this chapter on the self-tuning qualities
of mental habit, an ability to recall autobiographical detail on
demand and the capacity for conscious problem solving are only the
most obvious of the mental mechanisms through which we engage
the world and find a healthy level of interaction with it. While in our
subjective experience of everyday life we seem to rely on conscious
self-knowledge, much of the time, as a growing body of research
reveals, a complementary system of reflexive perception and action
within our brains is robust. This reflexive system, which operates
largely in the preconscious and unconscious realms, is not only vital to
our efficient navigation of everyday life but also shapes, through
acquired habit, much of what we believe, how we perceive the
motives of others, the moral rules we follow, and what we decide in
subtle but profound ways, sometimes to our advantage and
sometimes not. Think of it, if you will, as the brain’s neural network
for everyday social behavior, the basic operating system that is not
only essential to the personal story that we write but also to the
infrastructure that helps hold civil society together through
interpersonal exchange. This preconscious network of reflexive self-
knowledge is commonly known as intuition.

OF COURSE, THAT THE LIFE of the mind is subject to preconscious

or unconscious forces is not a new idea. Sigmund Freud, more than
any other in recent history, through his exploration of psychoanalysis
and the accessible nature of his writings, brought to public attention
the power of the unconscious in shaping our worldview. These first
stirrings of our contemporary advance in the understanding of
unconscious mental life took place against the intellectually vibrant
backdrop of turn-of-the-century Vienna. As Eric Kandel, the Nobel
Prize–winning neuroscientist, has described in his book The Age of
Insight, the movement toward self-examination that swept up both
artists and scientists in a vigorous dialogue was driven in part by a
reaction to the Enlightenment ideal that only through reason would
progress be achieved.
The industrial society of the nineteenth century valued
discipline, thrift, organization, and faith as the path to human
betterment, devaluing in the process human emotion and instinct,
which the Victorians saw as “base” and “immoral.” Freud’s
revolutionary writings highlighted what he believed to be the psychic
consequences of living in a society that repressed human instinct,
particularly sexual desire. And in support of Freud’s assertion we
would do well to remember that when Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of
Spring, erotically choreographed by Nijinsky, was first performed in
Paris in 1913, the audience rioted. Thus Freud, in striving through
psychoanalysis for a more complex theory of mind, was a pioneer in
asserting that in our behavior we are equally as subject to cultural
and social influences, and to the passions, as we are influenced by
conscious awareness and our ability to use reason.
But the introspective explorations of psychoanalysis are limited
when it comes to defining the anatomy of the living brain and
dissecting the dynamics of neural communication that may support
conscious and unconscious mental life. Although it was first
observed in animal experiments in the late nineteenth century that
the brain exhibits rhythmic electrical activity, it is only with the
advent of modern brain-imaging technology that we have had the
capacity to investigate the workings of the human brain in real time.
First came the electroencephalograph (EEG), through which the
brain’s spontaneous electrical discharge can be measured by
electrodes placed on the scalp. Despite its simplicity this technology
has stood the test of time. Early in my neuropsychiatric career in
London I learned the value of a special type of electrode in the
diagnosis of complex epileptic seizures in children, a technique that
has changed little, even today.
Then in the 1970s came X-ray computed tomography (CT), a
technology that permitted observation of brain structures without
resorting to surgery. But the true conceptual advance arrived with
positron emission tomography (PET), where a rapidly decaying
radioisotope injected into a patient’s bloodstream made it possible to
measure changing levels of regional blood flow in the brain. For the
first time, because blood flow is intimately connected to neuronal
activity, it became possible to obtain real-time images indicating
which anatomical regions became physiologically active when
undertaking simple mental tasks.
Within a few years, in a sudden plethora of riches, the
methodology of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was developed.
The technology of MRI is dependent upon the physics of atoms
exposed to a powerful magnetic field: many of them behave like little
compass needles that then can be made to line up by artful
manipulation of the magnet, yielding a detailed anatomical picture
without PET’s potential hazard of ionizing radiation. Then in the
early 1990s a sophisticated elaboration upon MRI technology made it
possible, again by the measurement of blood flow, to track the
functional dynamics of activity in the living brain.
A useful analogy in thinking about functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) is the experience of flying over a modern
city at night: the relative activity of the city’s districts is reflected in
the clustered patterns of light seen below, with the great highways
that connect these urban centers snaking between them. It’s a crude
picture, you might complain, and it is: but for the first time—just as
the early cartographers contoured the great continents—fMRI offers
the capacity to map the brain’s geography and correlate that with
how it is functioning physiologically. We can literally map the
interactive processes of mind. Objective investigation of the
conundrum that so preoccupied Freud and his Viennese colleagues
—defining the dynamic relationships among brain, cultural
experience, and the conscious and preconscious self—had entered a
new era.

MATT LIEBERMAN, A PROFESSOR of psychology and a colleague of

mine at the University of California in Los Angeles, is in the
forefront of these new research efforts to understand how we think
about ourselves. Intrigued since his graduate student days at Harvard,
in the early 1990s, by the challenge of social behavior, Matt is a
pioneer in the fledgling field of social cognitive neuroscience. This
new discipline yokes together the power of the brain-imaging
technologies with the proven experimental methods of cognitive
neuropsychology to examine the neuronal underpinnings of complex
social behavior.
The Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory is based in Franz
Hall, the sprawling home of UCLA’s preeminent psychology
department. Walking north on the campus, beyond the urban
density of the medical center where I work, and crossing the Court
of Science, you’ll discover a venerable portico framed by gnarly olive
trees and shaded by giant eucalyptus and pine. It announces the first
of Franz Hall’s several buildings. Together their architecture
chronicles the growth of the university itself, from the mellowed
brick and stone facades that reflect an early romance with the
academies of northern Italy to a massive 1960s cube of concrete and
reflective glass—a structure that in the late afternoon of my visit was
splashing generous pools of sunlight into the gardens below.
 Matt Lieberman’s corner office is on the sixth floor of that cube, a
place where a wall of windows looks straight into a canopy of pine. I
found him there working on a new book. “It’s about how the brain
got its social network,” he quipped with a smile, rising from his chair.
He’s a man of easy and comfortable manner, with a square jaw and a
close-cropped head of dark hair, now flecked with gray. The room
mirrors that comfort. Books tumble from laden shelves onto the
floor, mingling there in piles. Titles range widely, from those
expected in a psychologist’s workplace to others less familiar;
sociology, cognitive neuroscience, physiology, anatomy, religion, and
evolutionary theory all jostle together. Then there’s philosophy, with
the usual suspects, but in addition you’ll find Fromm, Sartre,
Nietzsche—lots of Nietzsche. On the opposite wall, above a massive
computer screen displaying a grid of MRI images and the unfolding
draft of the book, hangs a large reproduction of Magritte’s Golconde.
The familiar portrait—an urban facade beleaguered by a down-
pouring of bowler-hatted men—seems strangely at home.
Intrigued, I asked Matt how he had acquired such eclectic social
and philosophical interests. “The philosophy is a legacy from my
father,” Matt began. “In his youth he had been working toward a
Ph.D. in philosophy but changed his plans when children began
arriving.” In the 1970s no one was hiring philosophy graduates, so
Lieberman senior switched to law. “But we still had the books,” Matt
went on, “and I grew up reading all that I could find. It was my first
true passion in the world of ideas.”
The interest in cognitive sociology came later. First, as an
undergraduate at Rutgers, Matt had been greatly influenced by Bruce
Wilshire, the professor who introduced him to Nietzsche,
nineteenth-century German philosophy, and the writings of William
James. For Wilshire understanding subjective experience was key in
the study of social behavior. Then, following these leads as a
graduate student at Harvard, Matt discovered brain imaging and
began studying with the renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert,
whose popular book Stumbling on Happiness has brought wide public
recognition to the field of social cognition. “So I was hooked,” Matt
explained. “A large percentage of our waking lives is spent navigating
the social world, and I wanted to know more about how that is coded
in the brain.”
It was one of Matt Lieberman’s early papers, “Intuition: A Social
Cognitive Neuroscience Approach,” written while he was still at
Harvard, that first drew my attention to his research. In it he
proposed that intuitive thinking, rather than being mysterious as it is
commonly construed, is a brain-information-processing strategy—a
habit of mind—that is based on implicit learning. As the term is used
by psychologists, implicit learning is unintentional, a means whereby
facts and cues about the relationships that exist in the world—
information that helps us better navigate—are acquired just by going
about our daily business. An obvious example is how when we go to
live in a foreign country, we pick up some of the local language,
customs, and gestures without really trying. Another is when
walking in a familiar city, we seem to follow an uncanny sense of
direction without much conscious effort. On the flip side, we all have
had the experience of feeling that something is not quite right about
the “energy” in a conversation with someone without really knowing
why, or of being surprised by an unexpected sense of optimism or
opportunity for no immediately discernable reason. Perhaps even
more intriguing, under such circumstances, in our culture we often
find ourselves assuming that these reflexive sensibilities—or “gut
feelings”—have greater validity than do conscious attempts at
rational analysis of the situation.
It is clear that the brain can initiate us to carry out routine motor
behaviors seemingly without bothering the conscious self to
consider the details. So why is it not the same for thinking? Why are
not some processes of thought similarly triggered automatically? We
find no discomfort in accepting that many motor skills and certain
mental abilities—catching a ball, skiing, riding a bicycle, learning to
read and write—become automatic with practice. It is clear, for
example, from watching a baby playing in the crib that the human
animal has an inborn facility—perhaps an “instinctual” desire—to
reach out and grasp at an object. With countless hours of practice
such preprogrammed drives become transformed later in life into an
efficient routine of “habitual” behavior—a reflexive, tuned skill—
that provides the bedrock for the enjoyment of countless ballgames.
So, Matt Lieberman wondered, does intuition—that is, reflexive
self-knowledge based on implicitly learned, social habits of mind—
although more nuanced and individual than something such as
learning to catch a ball, develop and operate in a similar way to motor
habits? And if so, what are the brain mechanisms supporting such
reflexive skills? Matt postulated that if intuitive self-knowledge is
indeed habit based, then the basal ganglia—the same set of nuclei
found deep in the old brain that coordinate the motor programs
enabling us to ride a bicycle or swing a baseball bat—are probably
also involved in how we acquire and sustain our social relationships,
as might be expressed in a preference for particular friends or a
detailed knowledge of favored leisure activities.
Subsequently at UCLA, and in keeping with his maxim that
theories are only opinions until proven one way or the other, Matt
undertook a series of experiments to test whether reflective
(consciously recalled) and reflexive (intuition-based or subconscious)
self-knowledge were served by different brain systems. The designs
were ingenious. In one significant study he recruited two groups of
experienced individuals, one accomplished soccer players and the
other improvisational actors (this was Los Angeles after all) and
compared them against each other in the way they accessed their
knowledge about these two domains of experience—one familiar and
one unfamiliar to each group. Matt’s reasoning went something like
this: those individuals proficient in soccer would have a different
“book of life” experience, a more detailed self-knowledge of the
game, when it came to soccer than would the professional actors, and
vice versa.
Specifically Matt surmised that those individuals intimately
familiar with the nuance of being an actor would be able to reflexively
(intuitively) respond to self-knowledge descriptions pertinent to their
profession (for example, is an actor creative, dramatic, quick witted),
while those unfamiliar with acting—the soccer players—would need
to consciously reflect upon each inquiry prior to making a judgment.
And of course with descriptors involving soccer, he supposed that
the reverse would be true for the two groups. Then if the neuronal
architecture responsible for intuitive and conscious processing were
distinct, this would be reflected in a variation of the regional blood
flow recorded in the fMRI scanner.
The tunnel of an MRI machine is a rather noisy place, and so the
participants were fed the descriptive words, interspersed with neutral
ones, through a set of fiber optic goggles hooked up to a computer
and their responses were recorded by the finger pressing of one of
two buttons. It was clear from the results that indeed there are two
distinct brain systems supporting self-knowledge. While the speed at
which the healthy young subjects answered the two sets of questions
was not significantly different, the fMRI data clearly demonstrated
two distinct yet overlapping neural alliances at work.
When a participant in the study made a judgment regarding the
subject she knew most about—intuitive or reflexive retrieval where
little conscious effort was required—she activated a network of brain
centers that included the nuclei of two ancient structures, the
amygdala, the sentinel of emotion, and the basal ganglia, the home of
habit, together with a section of the new brain known as the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This alliance equates with the
capacity to quickly recall self-knowledge that has been acquired
implicitly. In contrast, when a participant had to choose descriptors
on a less-known subject, she drew on her conscious, reflective ability to
remember explicit, evidenced-based learning. In association with
doing so were activated the lateral prefrontal cortex (part of the
highly evolved “executive” cortex), the hippocampus (the seat of
memory formation), and parts of the medial and temporal cortices of
the new brain (see Figure 2.2).
 Figure 2.2: The neural alliances active in the brain during reflexive (intuitive)
thinking and reflective (conscious) thought. Those regions active during conscious,
reflective thought include the lateral prefrontal cortex (C1), the hippocampus and
medial temporal lobe (C2), and the posterior parietal cortex (C3). Interacting during
reflexive thinking are the brain regions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (X1), the
basal ganglia (X2), the amygdala (X3), and the lateral temporal cortex (X4).
(Illustration based on the work of Matthew Lieberman and presented here with
permission)

MATT LIEBERMAN’S RESEARCH confirms that we are literally of two

minds when it comes to knowing ourselves. And his research is not
alone. The suspicion that two separate but parallel brain processes are
at work in self-knowledge and decision making has been widely
discussed in neuropsychology since 1977, when William Schneider
and Richard Shiffrin first postulated the activity of such distinct
brain mechanisms. Blandly labeled in those early years “Systems 1
and 2,” the concept of dual process thinking is now well established.
It was brought to wider attention in 2011 by the book Thinking Fast
and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel
Prize for economics a decade earlier. The descriptors of the
characteristic behaviors of the twin mechanisms have evolved, but
most simply, reflective conscious reasoning is slow, controlled, effortful,
serial, and rule governed, while reflexive thinking—tuned, intuitive
habits of mind—is fast, preconscious, emotional, parallel, automatic,
and effortless. Think of the notion of “reflecting” actively upon
something that needs a decision versus reflexively “catching the drift”
of an ongoing conversation, and you will have a sense of the
difference.
The mystery that has surrounded the brain’s reflexive processing
of information thus falls away when we recognize that anatomically
the brain structures that are responsible for such intuitive activity are
also the brain centers that support familiar habitual motor behaviors,
just as Matt Lieberman had predicted. In other words, everything we
learn to do well by habit—be that acting, playing soccer, or being
considerate to others—is orchestrated and sustained at its core by
that area of the brain known as the basal ganglia. Located at the base
of the forebrain, this group of brain nuclei—each with a descriptive
Latin name designed to tax the sharpest memory—function together
as a cohesive unit. Historically these brain centers, of which the
corpus striatum (in translation, “striped mass”) is the largest
aggregation, have been understood as the autopilots of the body’s
motor activity. It is now accepted, however, that these same
automatic brain systems operate in a similar fashion when it comes
to managing routine patterns of social engagement and even
individual, personal habits. Such patterns of learned behavior,
triggered by well-known cues and coordinated by the ganglia’s
extensive connections to other parts of the brain, are executed
reflexively, automatically, smoothly, and without conscious effort.
Just as through practice the brain can be tuned to master the game of
tennis, so does experience tune social behavior.
What we call intuition is the sudden, conscious experience of
this process. The mysterious, almost divine subjective sense of
“having a feeling” or “knowing what’s right” about something in fact
reflects the emergence into awareness of preconsciously held
thought patterns, learned long ago. In most instances, however, as
with any automatic control system, the presence of the brain’s
autopilots is barely noticed, until they fail. Such failure is most easily
understood—although the principle is the same for social habit—
when describing a loss of habitually tuned motor function, as in
Parkinson’s disease. Among the most important functions of the
basal ganglia is the subliminal positioning of the body in space,
something that we practice and learn when very young and that later
underpins the capacity to walk, run, jump, and play physical games.
When the nerve cells supporting these abilities are damaged or
degenerate, as they do in Parkinson’s disease, the normally
unconscious, fluid movements of the limbs and body are replaced by
stiffness and slowing. This loss of motor programming—or perhaps
more precisely the incapacity to automatically initiate smoothly
operating neural habits—is associated with degeneration of the
substantia nigra (black substance) of the ganglia, and particularly
with a loss of its dopamine-producing cells.
Here the specific brain chemistry is important in understanding
how habits are acquired. In Parkinson’s disease, where dopamine is
deficient, treatment with L-dopa, a dopamine precursor, significantly
improves the slowing and stiffness for many sufferers and frequently
elevates mood. You will recall that it is the dopamine system—
introduced earlier with the story of Henry—that drives the reward
pathways. Indeed, dopamine is the molecule of motivation,
influencing learning—and the development of habit—through the
reinforcement of reward and punishment. When something is
perceived and experienced as rewarding and pleasurable, either
consciously or preconsciously, we seek to repeat the experience, and
during such moments dopamine neurons in the striatum increase
their rate of firing. Conversely, when action is met with punishment
or pain, or even familiarity and boredom, the striatal dopamine
activity diminishes. This is the brain’s tuning system at work.
It is true across mammalian species. Thus Ann Graybiel, of the
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a leading figure in habit research, has
shown that when rats are trained to run mazes in pursuit of a
chocolate reward, neuronal firings in the basal ganglia are
particularly strong at the beginning and at the end of the learning
process, when reward is imminent. This education of a specific set of
neurons through repeated experience enables the brain to store
information in useful, habitual patterns that later can be quickly
activated when encountering the appropriate environmental cue.
Once triggered, that habitual pattern of behavior then runs
automatically.
The basal ganglia thus are central to the brain’s networks of
habitual motor behavior and intuitive, reflexive understanding,
connecting as they do the new frontal cortex and the ancient limbic
structures in a continuous loop of information processing.
Developing and tuning such reflexive behaviors offers a great
biological advantage, promoting efficient “autopilot” behaviors and
thereby freeing time for conscious appraisal of opportunities and
challenges that require careful thought. These habitual patterns are
robust and preserved over long periods—witness the capacity to ski
or ride a bicycle after many years of abstinence; or the patina of social
grace that often is preserved in the early stages of Alzheimer’s
disease, despite short-term memory deterioration. But these stable
habits of the brain can also plague us, as when texting on a mobile
device becomes so routine that we attempt it while driving a car, or
when an addictive behavior—be it to cocaine, tasty processed food,
gambling, sex or the Internet—gets triggered by an established cue.
The lesson to be learned is that the brain’s tuned patterns of habit
and intuitive thinking—both good and bad—take form through trial
and error, but once laid down, they are notoriously resistant to
change and even more difficult to eradicate.

****

INTUITIVE PATTERNS ARE NOT habits of mind that come

preassembled as part of the brain’s survival kit, as do the essential
primary emotions of anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Rather they are
reflexive mental capacities—a compendium of practiced shortcuts
usually created under familiar circumstances and available for
immediate engagement—that are built incrementally from
experience in association with the primary emotions. This functional
association is evident in the network of anatomical centers that
support reflexive self-knowledge—a network of information flow that
links the ancient structures of the amygdala and the basal ganglia
together with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the new
brain that (as I shall describe in Chapter 4) is important in shaping
reward preference.
So what part does reflexive, intuitive brain tuning play in the
complex social interaction and emotional give-and-take that is
everyday life? How is it that we can take exception to an individual as
“not my type” on first meeting, without even a conversation? Why
do we sometimes startle at a stick in the woods, thinking it to be a
snake, as happened to a countryman friend of mine while walking
through a grove of trees near the U.S. Capitol in Washington? Or
experience feelings of nausea at the smell of a particular food as did I
when, many years ago, I developed an aversion to bacon and cooked
liver. These are all examples of how the brain makes autonomous
and preconscious judgments in the face of a perceived threat.
Take my own acquired aversion to cooked liver as an example.
When I consciously and deliberately thought through the
experience, I was able to associate it with a period in my life when as
a young doctor I had been working under considerable stress. As was
the tradition in Britain at the time, I was on call every other night and
living in the house officer’s quarters. We were given room and board
including breakfast and dinner. While, at the time, I did not
consciously associate the two, I had caught a stomach virus, complete
with the usual symptoms of nausea and vomiting. On the evening
prior to my falling ill the main dish served had been liver, bacon, and
mashed potatoes, an English staple. Although my deliberative self
might have considered these events unrelated, the amygdala centers
of my brain, which as the sentinels of safety receive sensory
information from all parts of the body including the olfactory
system, associated the stomach flu with the smell of the meal. The
two became paired in my preconscious mind, just as for Pavlov’s dog
the conditioned stimulus of the bell became paired with being fed.
Thereafter this reflexive conditioning became absorbed into my
personal narrative. Whenever the smell of liver and bacon was in the
air, I received an emotional alert from my preconscious self,
consciously registered as a sense of nausea.
 Based on noxious experience, my brain “retuned” itself in the
(misguided) interest of self-preservation. Only later, reflecting upon
the events surrounding my sickness, for I had enjoyed eating liver
prior to the episode, did my nausea signal disappear. This, of course,
is an example of association that is simple to understand. But the
question arises: does social “intuition”—the reflexive capacity to
form opinions about those we meet, such as that unexplained
aversion to an occasional stranger—rest upon similar, associatively
tuned brain templates? And how do such associations influence the
life story that we build?

HOMO SAPIENS ARE AN intensely social species and have been so for
millennia. Indeed, Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist and
evolutionary psychologist, has provided evidence that the large
human forebrain evolved not through improved nutrition, as we once
thought, but in response to the competitive challenges of living in
social groups. What drove the growth of the human brain was not
survival in the natural world but a need to negotiate the social
environment. So given that evolution is an exercise in adaptive
parsimony, it becomes reasonable to ask whether the capacity for
intuitive social understanding shares a common neural platform with
other preconscious habit development. This would help explain why
it is that as children mature, within approximately the same time
frame, they come to understand the feelings of others and develop
empathic concern until—in the larger cultural context—they master
the capacity for self-control and delayed gratification that is required
to work collaboratively in large groups.
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, from the Center for
Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, have suggested that fundamental to our development of
such social habits is what they describe as mental “heuristics”—
innate rules originally derived from trial-and-error learning that
promote rapid and efficient (in their words, “fast and frugal”)
decision making. Cosmides and Tooby have suggested that in our
ancestral past such mental rules evolved through trial and error
when we were critically dependent upon one another for safety and
survival. This does not mean, they argue, that such social behaviors
are ancient and instinctual, as are those of a suckling baby. Rather
the notion is that templates of social interaction that facilitate rapid
mutual understanding or that warn of potential interpersonal strife
have been acquired more recently by natural selection—essentially
Cosmides and Tooby consider them behavioral archetypes—that are
then later embellished by individual experience.
Here we again glimpse the mechanisms of the brain’s
preconscious operating systems at work. Building upon evolving
mental templates, social intuition becomes for each of us a
preconscious, dynamic store of self-knowledge and practical
understanding regarding codes of social behavior that is
continuously being upgraded through ongoing cultural and personal
interaction. Via this reflexive preconscious integration, the intuitive
mind complements the deliberation of the reflective conscious self by
facilitating the rapid and efficient assessment of social mismatch,
opportunity, and risk. And on occasion, in the process of this
deliberative integration, “gut feelings” are generated—whether the
fundamental assessment is right or wrong—that in the moment seem
“intuitively” more valid than any conscious reasoning. This helps
explain the reflexive “not my type” stranger reaction. Only later, upon
reflective assessment, is it realized that the individual has triggered an
intuitive template of mind—let’s say he is loud and bombastic in
manner—that is a painful reminder of that distant uncle who always
teased us at Thanksgiving dinner. In this illustration, reflexive
awareness has offered a warning—much as for me as a young doctor,
the smell of liver would reflexively turn my stomach.
And broader speculation then arises. Perhaps in human culture
such integrative archetypes reach beyond the narrative of immediate
personal experience to become the foundation of qualitative
judgments—of ethical and moral beliefs—that are handed down
across the generations to shape the stories that define the social
virtues. The research of Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at
the University of Virginia who has made an extensive study of how
morality varies across cultures and political ideology, throws light on
such musings.
Haidt’s comparative studies have involved some 30,000
individuals worldwide, ranging from the United States and Europe
to South America and East Asia. The behavioral analyses of this
large and varied group of people suggest that there are five universal
templates of mind—involving caring, fairness, loyalty, respect, and
impurity—upon which every culture builds its own set of virtues.
From these data Haidt argues that it is through intuitive social
understanding that we care for each other and willingly adhere to the
concept of fairness that nurtures the human social fabric, even within
the complex societies of our contemporary world. Loyalty to the
family, community, and nation and respect for tradition and authority
also emerge as fundamental concerns, while abhorrence of impurities
—of what we consider the disgusting actions by others, of
contaminated food and of environmental degradation—constitutes
the fifth cluster of intuitive emotion that is common across all
cultural groups. These foundational systems Haidt considers as
intuitive “learning modules” of the evolved mind that during
development, comparable to the acquisition of language, help
children quickly recognize culturally specific virtues and vices.
Reflexive templates of mind that largely facilitate social cohesion
may also help explain why some human practices and institutions
endure, to be found in similar form across many different ethnic and
cultural groups, while other social systems collapse or are discarded
within a few generations. Consider, for example, the barter and
exchange of the marketplace, which is a human institution that has
endured for thousands of years and is of particular relevance to this
discussion. As we struggle with America’s infatuation with
consumerism, understanding our attraction to market temptations
becomes of pivotal importance. Is such infatuation, then, an example
of how the conscious mind can become the puppet of our reflexive
habits?
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, has emphasized that the
brain’s preconscious system of intuitive learning works with what it
observes and that sometimes those observations are inaccurate,
explaining why we can behave irrationally and impulsively under
familiar circumstances. Thus, as was clearly evident in the financial
crisis of 2008—perpetrated by millions of Americans being induced
to assume debt they couldn’t afford—an intuitive sense of good
fortune is not automatically an indicator of accurate judgment.
Intuitive insight can be trusted, Kahneman asserts, only when
operating under experiential circumstances that are regular,
predictable, and stable at the time that the reflexive insight occurs. In
the absence of such stable contingencies, he says, intuition is
unreliable.

TO KNOW ONE’S SELF is not easy. But it is essential in achieving a

well-tuned brain. In seeking such self-understanding we must be
prepared to accept that much of what drives our actions is not of our
conscious choosing: that in the mature, healthy individual it is the
intuitive mind that preconsciously writes our stories and shapes
much of our behavior. We are all “strangers to ourselves,” as Timothy
Wilson, the Sherrell Aston Professor of Psychology at the University
of Virginia and a researcher on self-knowledge, has evocatively
described it. This is not inherently a bad thing. The brain’s
fashioning of a reflexive, intuitive faculty, in complement to the
reflective, conscious mind, ensures the necessary means of stability
and orientation—as by analogy do the keel and the compass of a
sailing vessel—with which to navigate the world with confidence,
safety, and efficiency. Ideally in assuming responsibility for the
mundane tasks of vigilance and everyday interaction, the intuitive
mind preserves the time and focus essential for attention and
conscious deliberation, while adding texture and memory to self-
awareness. Thus in the ideal world habit shapes character, which in
turn shapes the personal narrative of who we are as a unique
individual.
But we do not live in an ideal world. While we remain creatures
shaped in our biology by evolution, it is largely in our relationships
with one another—and the cultural context of those relationships—
that we find meaning. To preserve and enjoy certain individual
freedoms, we strive to live together in some semblance of harmony.
We call this democracy, a social order based upon equality and
reason. At one end of the spectrum, in the private realm, we all have
freedom to make our own decisions and are responsible for our acts:
nobody else has a choice in what we do. At the other end, the legal
realm, we are all subject to strict laws designed to ensure the freedom
of others. In between lies a vast middle ground of public and social
domains where the choices we make and actions we take are not
binding but nonetheless interface with those reasoned norms and
accepted values essential to the maintenance of the cultural fabric. It
is in this vast middle ground that the reflexive, intuitive mind is
largely dominant.
So if we believe ourselves to be consciously in control of the
decisions we make, while in reality much of our choosing is
preconscious and pretuned, dependent upon the accuracy and
efficiency of reflexive habit, what are the social implications? One
hidden consequence, as Kahneman observed, is that reflexive habit
can become distorted and maladaptive, as can any behavior. As is
evident in America’s obesity epidemic, our habits can feed back and
reinforce themselves to create a pathological cycle. This should come
as no surprise. Intuition is powerfully tempered by experience and by
the culture in which we are reared. And in turn it is our intuitive
understanding of the motivation and purpose of others that plays a
vital role in sustaining cultural cohesion. Culture and intuition thus
form a dynamic, mutually reinforcing whole, which is the glue that
holds human societies together—for good or for bad.
So what are the consequences of such self-knowledge when we
are striving to understand our love affair with consumerism? In the
Western democracies, and especially in the United States, the
consumer market is held up as a haven of individual freedom and
conscious choice, one where the decisions we make are rational,
consciously determined, and designed to achieve maximum personal
value. But price and need are not the only factors that influence us.
Emotional striving, culture, and habit also profoundly influence our
decisions in the market, as I have outlined. When we are confronted
by a shifting cultural landscape in an increasingly globalized
consumer society—one now dedicated to continuous economic
growth, competition, and celebrity—how can we continue to believe
that in economic matters we are predominantly rational beings? And
when did we first see ourselves as so rationally endowed?
I posed these questions to Matt Lieberman during our discussion
on that sunlit afternoon in his office at UCLA. “Yes, in modern times
the concept of the self has been changing,” agreed Matt. “Over the
past two centuries the idea of the self has become qualitatively
different from that held by people living in the Middle Ages. Who we
think we are is no longer equated in a transparent fashion with
inherited social status and the dictates of the church. Despite its
many drawbacks the medieval identity was simple and stable. Self-
definition—beginning essentially with the Enlightenment—has
become complex, even problematic.”
By comparison with medieval times, as has been emphasized by
the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, personal identity today is
considered self-determined and choice-driven. But we conceive of
choices as needing to be resolved in a conscious manner. We tend to
discount the power of social tuning. Matt had wondered aloud
whether this explains, as society becomes ever more challenging,
why we find comfort in defining ourselves by “those moments in our
past when we were faced with obstacles for which . . . habit . . . could
not guarantee safe passage.” I found it an interesting notion. Is this
why, amid the shifting “culture” of modern consumer society, with
its social pressures and relentless promotion of products, we
celebrate conscious market choice as the royal road to self-
satisfaction? Is this our only perceived locus of control?
Despite mounting evidence that the intuitive mind powerfully
influences who we are and what we do in the world, we persist in
considering the conscious self to be king. How, during the Age of
Reason, this concept first evolved and later became central to the
philosophical underpinnings of the market society is the subject of
my next chapter.
Chapter 3

Enlightened Experiments:
Inventing the Market Society
Money begets trade . . .
And trade encreaseth mony.
Thomas Mun, “England’s Treasure of
Forraign Trade” (1664)

And who are you? said he. . . . Don’t puzzle me, said I.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67)

DRIVE DOWN THE LEAFY LANES of Oxfordshire, England, on a

summer afternoon, heading west from Blenheim Palace in
Woodstock, and you will come across the village of Combe. It is
clustered on a small knoll, away from the original settlement that
once encircled the watermill buildings nestled along the riverbank of
the meandering Evenlode. As local folklore would have it, a mill has
been at that spot, in one form or another, since before the Domesday
survey of 1086. When the villagers moved uphill in the fourteenth
century to escape miasma and the Black Death, the mill continued to
operate, with waterpower being replaced by steam in the late
eighteenth century. In 2000 Combe Mill was retired from
commercial activity, but even today when “in steam”—as when I
visited in 2012—the mill’s venerable beam engine will hiss and pulse
with life, opening a window to the ingenuity and technology that
first fired Britain’s industrial revolution over two centuries ago.
The Combe engine is of the advanced “beam” design that was
first engineered by James Watt and built by the entrepreneurial
Matthew Boulton in the 1760s in his factory at Soho, now a
Birmingham suburb. Refined steam engines such as these were first
developed to pump water from the copper mines of Cornwall. Fed by
Britain’s prodigious supply of easily accessible coal, these steam
engines helped decouple the nation’s productivity from the
constraining, sun-driven annual cycle of organic growth and
initiated our dependence on fossil fuel. This successfully shifted
motive power from the horse to machines, driving technical advance
in everything from mining, to metallurgy, to textiles, to transport.
Watt and Boulton were both members of the Lunar Society of
Birmingham, the name now given to a group of friends who in the
1760s began meeting informally at Boulton’s house on the Sunday
nearest to the full moon to share ideas, food, and copious drink.
Erasmus Darwin—philosopher, inventor, poet, and the grandfather
of Charles Darwin—who practiced medicine up the road in
Lichfield, was a founding member and close confidant of the
ebullient Boulton. Fascinated by the emerging science of the time,
novel ideas, and their practical application to society (it was said of
Boulton that he never saw a business without conceiving of a way to
improve it), the Lunar men ranged widely in their talents and
influence. Other regular participants were John Whitehurst, a clock
and instrument maker, Josiah Wedgwood, an ambitious young potter
and clever businessman, and Joseph Priestley, the radical preacher
and chemist who first isolated oxygen and whose house was burned
down in 1791 for his outspoken support of the French Revolution.
This colorful cast of characters has long intrigued me. I first
became aware of their exploits when, as a newly minted physician
working in London, I read Robert Schofield’s book The Lunar Society
of Birmingham, which had been published in 1963. This group of
friends, as Schofield captured them, was a “brilliant microcosm of
that scattered community of provincial manufacturers and
professional men who found England a rural society with an
agricultural economy and left it urban and industrial.” Subsequently,
with the pretensions of youth, a small group of us began to meet
regularly at a local pub for “discussions and drink,” modeling
ourselves on the gatherings of the Lunar men. While never as august
or erudite as those who had inspired our gatherings, we nonetheless
had some wild evenings and learned much from one another.
Among the things that I learned was that Robert Schofield, the
author of the book that had first intrigued me, was an American
physicist and historian. This information, which initially surprised
the Englishman in me, soon made much sense, for the Lunar
Society’s connections with America were many. Later, especially
after I migrated to the United States in the 1970s, my fascination with
the lives of the Lunar men was strengthened by my own curiosity
about America, which I came to see as the great social experiment of
Enlightenment principles. Benjamin Franklin—who was in England
during 1758 as the representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly—had
become connected to the “Lunatics” through their common interest
in electricity. And later when William Small—who in the early 1760s
had taught natural philosophy and mathematics to Thomas Jefferson
in Williamsburg—returned to take up a medical practice in
Birmingham, he was soon central to the group’s intellectual life. The
Lunar Society was, in short, a prodigious and broad-based fellowship
among clever, merry men—each driven by enviable energy, intense
curiosity, and a fascination with experimentation—who came
together, as Erasmus Darwin once modestly described it, to indulge
informally in “a little philosophical laughing.”
But beyond the jocularity of their union, as I shall explain in
these next pages, the Lunar men are emblematic of a shifting cultural
vision that eventually would define the modern market society. Like
other clubmen they drank and joked and argued, but they were also
intent upon reforming the culture in which they lived and worked.
Importantly they carried forward a passion for material improvement
that went beyond philosophy to the marketplace. Together with the
leading economic and social theorists of the time—with Smith,
Hume, and Locke—they believed the human mind to be malleable,
and they nurtured dreams of a better future, one where social
benefits would flow from individual talent and the conscious exercise
of rational choice. How these Enlightenment ideas evolved to shape
the economic system of human relationships we now call capitalism,
why the balance of those relationships has shifted in the face of
modern-day affluence, and how with insights from neurobehavioral
science we may understand why that is so, is the subject of this
chapter.

IN THE TIME OF THE Lunar men England was already a thriving

commercial nation and Birmingham a fast-growing industrial center
with smelting and iron trades, textile manufacture, pottery, and a
nascent chemical industry. A century earlier the English Civil War
and the political upheavals that followed had increased the influence
of men of commerce and of wealthy landowners. With the death of
Cromwell, the coronation of Charles II, and the return of the
monarchy in 1660, Britain’s burgeoning merchant class had been well
served. Charles had learned from his exile in the Netherlands—the
Dutch were great traders, rivaling England in entrepreneurial flare—
and besides Charles needed money to pay off Cromwell’s debts and
reestablish his royal household. Bankers were courted from across
Europe and welcomed to London, property rights were accepted, and
private investment was encouraged. In the following decade came
some shaky times as Charles sought repeatedly to assert his authority
over Parliament. After his death, however, and the abdication of his
brother James II in 1688, an alliance with Holland and William of
Orange gave political stability to England and unleashed a revolution
in public finance. By the mid-eighteenth century the productive
powers of the economy had grown substantially. As England grew in
commercial strength, now as a trading nation with a global reach,
there was money to be made.
Philosophical and cultural shifts of great magnitude had also
occurred: faith in rationality and the power of human effort was
ascendant. Of particular significance was the incipient rise of
Protestantism and the decline in influence of the Roman Catholic
Church, which had been dominant in European culture for a
thousand years. In 1704 the armies of the Catholic Sun King, Louis
XIV of France, had been defeated by the Duke of Marlborough at the
battle of Blenheim—a mighty achievement for which John Churchill
was awarded the royal estate in Woodstock, of which Combe Mill
remains part—thus finally securing the Protestant cause against
Catholicism and French imperialism.
As commerce in Protestant Britain flourished, individual
freedom and entrepreneurship were on the rise: religious preference
was tolerated as discriminatory laws declined, farming discovered
science, common lands were fenced, banks were organized, canals
dug, turnpikes built, and local governance strengthened as the urban
population exploded. Between 1730 and 1780 England began its
transformation from an agricultural nation into a “modernized”
emerging industrial force. In step with the growing wealth, domestic
goods—amenities such as curtains, cutlery, carpets, and clocks that
we now take for granted—were suddenly in great demand. To service
the need for greater literacy in the evolving economy, educational
opportunities broadened with the opening of charity schools and
local grammar schools. The demand for books, newspapers, and
pamphlets increased as a new reading public emerged, largely with
middle-class roots and a Protestant commitment to thrift and hard
work. In their goals and ideals the Lunar men, despite their links to
the Royal Society, the Society of Arts, and other clubs of the London
establishment, were members of this new educated elite, individuals
with the freedom, the opportunity, and the money to pursue their
passions and ideas.
Beyond political and commercial ambition these freethinkers
thought deeply about human behavior and the meaning of life. In
what was still an agrarian culture despite growing urbanization, and
with technology yet to emerge as the force that it is today, one lived
close to the natural world. Thinkers were philosophers as well as
scientists. Erasmus Darwin, for example, spent the last decade of his
life focused upon his extraordinary compendium Zoonomia, subtitled
The Laws of Organic Life. In it he proposed not only a comprehensive
theory of disease—that all diseases were “nervous” and “of the
sensorium”—but also that all warm-blooded animals were derived
from a single ancestor. From this “one living filament,” creatures
were differentiated by the action of a “living force” that developed
adaptive functions to meet the struggle for food, shelter, and
protection, with these advantages then being inherited to the
betterment of the species. Thus did the sorting of the ideas found in
Zoonomia first frame the scientific inquiry into evolution that was to
preoccupy Erasmus’s grandson, Charles Darwin, half a century later.
In parallel with this search for the fundamental principles
governing the natural world, there flourished a curiosity about how
to organize society. With the declining influence of the church what
was it that would maintain the moral and social order? Is mankind a
naturally social animal? If so, is that behavior learned or born within
us? What of the freedoms of the individual self? In a shifting culture
how is balance between the individual and society achieved and
sustained? And in seeking such harmony what role can the market
play?

THIS WAS THE AGE OF REASON. The scientific method provided the
intellectual engine for Enlightenment discussion. The gathering and
dissection of facts through experiment, the detection of common
patterns and principles, all contributed to an increase in human
understanding. The mantra essentially went as follows: in the pursuit
of knowledge reason is paramount, for it is through reason that
human progress, no longer tangled in the web of the natural world,
will accelerate. As science and individual freedom flourished, the
thinkers of the time, such as the Lunar Men, felt they held the future
in their own hands: advancing knowledge offered the prospect of
infinite social progress—in medicine, in technology, in education,
and in the trades. And central to all such progress was an
understanding of the reasoning self.
It is to John Locke (1632–1704) that we owe the modern concept of
the self—“that conscious thinking thing,” as he described it—and of
the importance of experience in shaping individual identity. A
physician, who in his thirties had worked with the great clinician
Thomas Sydenham, Locke brought to the nascent study of mind the
rigorous skills of observation, analysis, and comparison that he had
honed in his medical practice. For Locke, a man unfettered by the
concepts of modern-day genetics, the mind began as a blank slate, a
tabula rasa. Through the choices we make we create our identity and
in doing so we draw upon the world around us: every step we take is
connected to the past and to the future—ideas that Lawrence Sterne
explored and satirized in his nine-volume novel The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which first began appearing in 1759.
Through choice and experience, Locke argued, we are each unique in
personality, skill, and social contribution. The civil right to express
such individual distinction was to become the foundation for
Locke’s reasoning on liberty, property, and religious freedom,
thinking that later was to profoundly influence the architects of the
American Revolution.
While today Locke’s ideas may seem utterly mundane, it is well to
remember that self-scrutiny was a rare activity until the sixteenth
century. In this respect Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), with his
introspective essays, may have been the first modern man. Salvation
was a collective enterprise in the early Christian church, and even in
Locke’s time the Puritan doctrine of predestination meant that
salvation or damnation was already fixed at birth—not a great
stimulus to self-reflection. Also Locke’s ideas flew in the face of ready
evidence that the behavior of the human animal is far from rational.
The turmoil of England’s civil strife in the seventeenth century had
left few illusions regarding the foibles of man. It was recognized—as
Thomas Hobbes had asserted in his magnum opus Leviathan, first
published in 1651—that human judgment is unreliable. When left to
our own devices, we are predisposed to perverse passions, to greed,
and to aggression driven by the pleasures and pains of the moment.
In championing the virtue of reason in economic and political affairs,
therefore, the formidable challenge was to explain how rational
thinking could consistently override the passions or the predestiny
of one’s birthright.
 Bernard de Mandeville, on the other side of the fence, saw little
value in further debate upon what he considered to be the perennial
struggle between reason and passion. A man of rascally humor,
Mandeville had a practical, if puckish, interpretation of the human
condition, particularly when it came to markets. Born in 1670,
Mandeville was a Dutch physician who had moved to England at the
age of twenty-nine, ostensibly to learn the language. The mores and
the people were to his liking, and he stayed, quickly acquiring a taste
for British satire. In 1705 he published a doggerel poem, “The
Grumbling Hive,” that later became the preamble to his book-length
essay, The Fable of the Bees, in which he proposed that greed and a
love of luxury were the engines of economic growth and thus to the
public benefit. This did not make Mandeville popular with the
churchmen of the day, who preached virtue rather than vice as a
mechanism of social control. They publicly dismissed The Fable as a
nuisance. But that missed the point. Mandeville’s essay was a
powerful social metaphor: the bee in its industry transforms the
pollen that it acquires, just as Watt’s beam engine later would
transform steam into energy, with profit for both the individual and
society. The seed of an idea had been planted, and after much debate
it would grow, famously through the writings of Adam Smith, into
an elegant defense of self-interest as the bedrock of a free market
economy.
Another at the center of the philosophical debate exploring the
dynamic interrelationship between self and society was David Hume.
Born in 1711, Hume drew heavily on Locke’s ideas of a conscious self
and developed them further. In my opinion, perhaps more than any
other of his contemporaries, Hume led the thinking of the time away
from superstition and idolatry toward the natural sciences. Although
the philosophical tools of introspection and astute observation may
seem primitive compared to the wizardry of today’s investigative
neuroscience, Hume’s thinking was profound and prescient. He was
also precocious, publishing A Treatise of Human Nature, considered
by many scholars to be his finest work, at the age of twenty-six. Of
particular concern to me here is Hume’s interest in the “psychology
of action”—why we behave as we do—and the relative roles of reason
and the passions. For Hume passion was what motivated action in life.
Reason, he argued, while quintessentially human, is rarely what
moves us, as any modern advertising executive knows full well. In
Hume’s analysis, to feel passion was to experience a change in self-
awareness—be it hunger for food or sex or the more complex
strivings of curiosity and social ambition—and it was this shifting
balance between the awareness of personal need and perceived social
circumstances that prompted each of us to act. Reason was thus “the
slave of the passions,” largely relegated to the role of strategist in
helping us achieve emotional satisfaction.
So here lies the paradox. If Hume was correct and indeed reason
is enslaved by passion, then how do avarice and self-interest—as
Bernard de Mandeville argued—emerge as a public good? To ask the
question another way, what constrains and shapes individual greed
and excess, which the eighteenth-century churchmen feared would
damage the moral fabric? If we follow the creed of Mandeville, then
precious little is the answer: in a market society of individual
freedoms we would have to say that avarice is the price of progress.
As his colorful doggerel asserts: “Luxury Employ’d a Million of the
Poor and Odious Pride a Million more. Envy itself, and Vanity were
Ministers of Industry.” In the England of the time, where the
majority scratched out an agrarian subsistence, constraint of
personal initiative—save for the transgressions of the thief and the
smuggler—was the accepted norm. Despite the Enlightenment and
the growing freedoms enjoyed by the few, for the great mass of
humanity the eighteenth century offered little to be enjoyed and
much to be endured. It need not be, argued Mandeville. In
highlighting man’s lust for self-improvement he sought to turn
Thomas Hobbes’s dim view of human nature into something to
celebrate. Mandeville was arguing against mercantilism and the
entrenched social controls of the elite to promote instead “laissez-
faire” economics and individual free choice. In the face of
deprivation, passionate self-interest not only drove us forward; it was
also the engine of human progress.
The “passions,” as the term was used in the early eighteenth
century, are today equivalent to those “primary” emotions that are
readily apparent in the infant, specifically the capacity to express
fear, disgust, anger, and joy. These are the universal emotions driven
by the fundamental instincts of self-preservation—by the drives for
safety, sustenance, and sex—and as I have described in Chapter 2,
they are hardwired into the most ancient part of the brain. The more
complex secondary emotions expressed in adult life, such as pity,
pride, shame, and guilt, were in eighteenth-century parlance
described as the “moral sentiments.” Hume considered these
emotional states to be learned, calmer than the primary passions, and
dependent for their expression upon judgments made against a
moral standard. The sentiments were therefore “susceptible to social
cultivation,” and in Hume’s theory of mind this acquired capacity for
sympathetic social understanding played a vital role in balancing the
drive of the passions in all elements of everyday life, including the
marketplace.
Thus for Hume the self—Locke’s “conscious thinking thing”—is
not a single thing at all but, as he describes it, “a kind of theatre [my
emphasis] where several perceptions successively make their
appearance, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of
postures and situations.” Hume’s dynamic image of the process of
mind as theater is not only evocative—Matt Lieberman might
describe it as a delicate dance of the mind’s reflexive and reflective
processes—but also a metaphor of extraordinary prescience.
Essentially Hume is explaining the continuous appraisal that
behavioral neuroscience recognizes as characteristic of integrated
cortical function—the dynamic give-and-take of information and the
formulation of ideas that is the prerequisite to human choice. As I
shall elaborate in Chapter 4, the major stage setting for this drama is
the orbital-frontal cortex, the most recently evolved and distinctive
region of the human brain that is wedged in above the eye sockets. It
is here, to use Hume’s words, that the brain’s adaptive strategy is
forged—frequently beyond immediate conscious awareness—as
“perceptions” of passion and reason “glide and mingle” to test an
“infinite variety” of alternatives. Hume is describing the dynamic
mental processes that, in those moments before we take action, serve
to inform our thinking, not only through reflective, conscious self-
knowledge but also by drawing on the experience of the reflexive,
preconscious self.

DAVID HUME’S CONCEPT of mind as a dynamic interplay among

competing forces had a powerful effect on his younger colleague and
intimate friend Adam Smith. Smith, the Scotsman whose image is on
the British twenty-pound note, is now celebrated as the patron saint
of capitalism for the economic principles he expounded in The Wealth
of Nations. Born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, just across the Firth of Forth
from Edinburgh, Smith grew up to be a solitary fellow who spent a
considerable amount of time exploring the ideas inside his own head.
As a student in Glasgow between 1737 and 1740, he studied moral
philosophy and was greatly influenced by Francis Hutcheson, a
theologian and freethinker of Scots-Irish descent. Hutcheson had
little time for the narrow musings of Bernard de Mandeville, arguing
instead that in a free market income that was not spent on luxury
would soon find its way to the prudent purchase of something else.
Hutcheson believed the self to be a collection of the senses—those
consciously registered and otherwise—of which benevolence and
morality were particularly important, reflecting an interactive mental
process “by which we perceive virtue or vice, in ourselves or others.”
The interactive principles that lay behind these ideas impressed
Smith and in later years were to profoundly influence his own
thinking, teaching, and writing. After Glasgow came an unhappy
period of private study while Smith was on a scholarship at Balliol
College, Oxford—made palatable only by reading Hume’s Treatise of
Human Nature—after which he returned to Scotland and to the
intellectual excitement of Edinburgh, then the crucible of the
Scottish Enlightenment. There in 1750 he met David Hume, who
soon befriended him.
Adam Smith was not a doctrinaire free trader, as he is frequently
caricatured, but a careful student of human behavior who thought
deeply about social issues. From the influence of his two great
teachers, Hutcheson and Hume, he came to recognize that any study
of society must begin with an understanding of human interaction as
it is expressed in everyday living. Hume had laid the foundations for
a social theory of human nature based on sentiment as a civilizing
process, and Smith soon took up the task with enthusiasm, seeking to
align it with his growing interest in moral behavior, commerce, and
theories of political economy.
In Edinburgh in 1748 Smith began a series of lectures that were to
form the basis of his first great work The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
published in 1759. Smith, in step with Hume, believed that progress
in human affairs was grounded in the passions and the pursuit of
life’s necessities, but he was repelled by Mandeville’s assertion that in
the marketplace public benefits arose primarily from private vices. He
felt that human nature was expressed not only in an instinct for
survival and in the display of the basic passions but also in diverse
capacities—creativity, aestheticism, industry, invention, spirituality,
and compassion being among them. Didn’t these qualities and an
interest in the lives of others, Smith asked, also engage the mind,
satisfy the natural appetites, and foster prosperity? Within this
framework—as Nicholas Phillipson, a leading scholar of the Scottish
Enlightenment and author of Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, has
described it—The Theory of Moral Sentiments “was Smith’s
extraordinary attempt to develop a coherent and plausible account of
the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from
common experience, without descending into Mandevillian
cynicism.” At its core Moral Sentiments is a book about human
interaction and the nature of sympathy, “on which all forms of
human communication ultimately depend.”
In Smith’s analysis sympathy—or what he called “social
sentiment”—went beyond the ability to communicate one’s
compassion to others, as Hume essentially had characterized it, to the
capacity to imagine what others feel, to what today we call empathy.
Consider that you are in a torture chamber, suggested Smith, witness
to your brother on the rack. “Though our brother is upon the rack,
as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform
us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond
our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form
any conception of what are his sensations. . . . By the imagination we
place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all
the same torments, we enter as it were into his body . . . and thence
form some idea of his sensations. . . . And we tremble and shudder at
the thought of what he feels.”
This capacity for fellow feeling through imagination Smith
considered to be the basis of individual moral judgment and the
essential glue that holds a free society together. The moral teaching
of the time—an extension of the Christian virtues—was that we
must first examine our own actions and use the results of this self-
examination to judge the actions of others. Smith turned this idea
upside down, arguing that in practice, as social creatures, we first
observe the (moral) behaviors of others in infancy, and during
maturation, as we become aware that we too are under scrutiny, we
learn to judge ourselves. This iterative process of social exchange,
beginning in childhood, achieves the self-benefit of an objective self-
awareness—an “impartial spectator” or conscience—through which
we develop the ability to judge our own behavior and the capacity for
self-command in expressing ourselves to others. Sympathy alone is
insufficient in holding society together: it is a deeper empathy—the
social sentiment of imagining oneself in the other’s shoes—that fosters
moral development and underpins social order.
In these musings on moral sentiment we find conceptual links
with Smith’s later writings in The Wealth of Nations. The intellectual
thread running through his examination of moral life in The Theory
of Moral Sentiments is that a spontaneous and unintended social order
emerges through the continuous and dynamic exchange of
information among individuals. This concept of dynamic exchange
is also the key principle Smith employs in analyzing the system of
human relationships that is a market economy. Thus as James
Otteson, professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, has
asserted in Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life, Smith’s writings on
human behavior follow a consistent theme, specifically that in the
pursuit of mutual sympathy the exchange leads to an ordering of
morality in society, while the individual search for better economic
conditions spawns the barter and exchange of the market.
 Smith’s insights are profound. Living in society, we are
interdependent and continuously in need of the assistance of others.
We seek such assistance in our own self-interest, but we must also
appeal to the self-interest of others to achieve what we need, both in
seeking affection and in serving our material needs. As Smith
famously noted in The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love.” In the market
as in the free society, we seek to establish bargains of mutual benefit
through a sympathetic understanding of the mindset of others.
While the market may not be the most elegant instance of the
exercise of human motivation, in the words of Adam Gopnik—the
essayist and New Yorker staff writer—“it is the most insistent:
everybody has skin in the game.” Thus, as in sustaining the moral
code, the give-and-take of the market efficiently serves everyday
necessity, finding its own natural order not by some preconceived
plan but through a multiplicity of peaceable, mutually agreed-upon
transactions.
Within this dynamic social framework, Smith asserted, the
survival instinct of self-love—what today we call self-interest—was
God’s “incomprehensible remedy” (or as Mandeville preferred,
mankind’s “lust for self-improvement”) through which a self-
regulating economic order could be achieved. When appropriately
shaped through barter—through mutually beneficial market
exchange—self-interested action made possible a society where the
products of individual labor are fairly traded, guided as if by an
“invisible hand,” thus placing a decent life within the reach of all. In
a free-market economy we all become both actors and spectators
upon the social stage: we pursue our desires but hold greed
consciously in check to win the “sympathetic” acceptance of others
and to enhance our personal reputation within the social group. In
summary, Smith’s argument went, it is the passion of self-love,
together with the instinctual drives of curiosity and ambition, that
fuel the engine of the market society while social sentiment and the
individual conscience of the impartial spectator function as the
regulators of our behavior, placing brakes upon deviance and greedy
excess.
Smith’s formulation of a self-regulating market society is an
idealized conception. Under certain social conditions—such as those
that still prevailed in the predominantly agrarian economy of Smith’s
own time—it does have considerable integrity. Given the adoption of
a few moral rules—a respect for private property, standard monetary
agreements, and honesty in exchange—locally capitalized markets do
sustain their own rational order, precisely because they are built
upon an interlocking system of personal relationships bound by an
accepted morality. But as the eighteenth-century moved toward its
close—even as the Lunar men met in Birmingham and Smith labored
in Edinburgh over what was to become his Wealth of Nations—society
was changing, and Smith’s delicate balance was changing with it.
Today behavioral neurobiology helps us understand why that was so.
Economic markets are complex, homeostatic systems, and like all
such systems they trend toward spontaneous order and equilibrium.
As shown in Figure 3.1, I find it useful to imagine Smith’s conception
of market dynamics as an apothecary’s balance. Using Smith’s
language to describe the functional elements, on the left of the
diagram are found the drivers of market activity—self-interest,
curiosity, love of novelty, and social ambition. From the standpoint
of neurobiology these are instinctual survival behaviors rooted in the
ancient lizard core of our brain. These behaviors are stable and
robust, need little reinforcement, and are the primary passions that
motivate us to get out of bed each morning.
On the right-hand side of Figure 3.1, providing constraint and
modulation, are the behaviors that Smith labeled collectively as
“social sentiment”—the moral self-awareness and self-command
embodied in Smith’s metaphor of the impartial spectator. These
patterns of behavior are intuitive and more complex than the
market’s instinctual drivers. In neurobehavioral terms these are
culturally determined and learned habits of mind that are predominantly
reflexive—that is, preconscious—in operation. In other words, it is the
socially acquired, intuitive behaviors, which Smith proposed as the
moral braking system for self-interest, that are the wobbly variable in
his model. And I mean wobbly because the capacity of these social
sentiments to constrain greed changes with changing cultural
conditions. As the moral sentiment of a society erodes, the market’s
inherent capacity for self-regulation will shift, with unintended
consequences. To pursue my metaphor of The Well-Tempered Clavier,
with the shifting cultural climate harmony is lost as we find ourselves
out of tune.

Figure 3.1: Adam Smith’s concept of a free market economy is best understood as a
dynamic open system that self-regulates. In this ideal conception the engines of
market activity—self-interest, curiosity, and social ambition—are tempered by the
desire to be loved and socially accepted. These latter sentiments, in Smith’s model, are
the brakes that curb greed and excess.

AND INDEED IN THE late eighteenth century a profound shift was on

the horizon. Adam Smith and the Lunar men lived on the cusp of the
wave of cultural change that was to deliver the Industrial Revolution.
In a few short decades Britain moved from the traditional
organization and mindset of an agricultural economy to one
dominated by industrialized, capital-intensive production. The
behavioral impact of this shift, which we now characterize as
“modernization,” was documented in 1887 by the German sociologist
Ferdinand Tönnies, in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which in
translation means “community and society.”
Tönnies, who was born in Schleswig-Holstein in 1855, came from
a rural family with peasant roots. Hence he had witnessed personally
the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the impact that
mechanization and commercialization had upon his native culture.
His brother, engaged in trade with Britain, gave him added insight
into the mind of the merchant and the emphasis on profit, which was
in sharp distinction to the traditional community focus where
agriculture, barter, and the skills of the artisan were dominant.
For Tönnies, the transition from community to society lay on a
continuum driven by this changing economic order. Sociologically
Gemeinschaft is the descriptor for a tightly knit community organized
around family and kinship where simple economic needs are met by
home production and barter. This traditional community is small
and stable. No change in behavior among the participants goes
unnoticed, and the outlook on life is conservative. Moral sentiment
is powerful as a means of social control and is reinforced through
folklore, hierarchy, and an organic solidarity forged by the necessities
of survival. In short, the individual is subservient to the social group.
Gesellschaft, in contrast, is the modern market society, where
Smith’s concept of self-interest and the division of labor drives
efficiency of production such that consumption and continuous
economic growth become essential to its survival. The free
movement of capital and the profitable use of money are at the core
of the enterprise, with market forces being the sole determinant of
price. While the nuclear family still provides a social anchor, it does
not dominate individual behavior, and many transient relationships
exist that are driven by self-serving motives. Material production is
greatly enhanced through this competition among individuals, but
Smith’s idealized conception of market practice being regulated by
social sympathy and moral concern no longer pertains. As the
equilibrium of the self-regulating market shifts and disparities in
wealth accelerate, the moral regulation of individual behavior
declines, and social control falls increasingly to municipal and state
agencies.
Today in the developed economies of the United States and
Europe the cultural narrative that defines us is Gesellschaft.
Ubiquitous merchant enterprises, owned and controlled remotely by
commercial ventures with a global reach, have replaced the local
tethers of parochial self-interest that once bound communities into
closely knit economic and social units. This shift in economic
organization—transforming as it has energy supply, transportation,
and information flow—would have been impossible without the
harnessing of fossil fuels. The energy-rich affluence we enjoy today is
built upon human ingenuity and the coal seams of yesterday, a
history to which the likes of the Combe Mill steam engine stand in
simple reminder.
In the meantime the drivers of human behavior have changed
little since the Enlightenment. Bernard de Mandeville, it seems, was
right after all. Under the rapidly evolving cultural circumstances of a
modern, supercharged consumer society, as in my model of Smith’s
self-regulating economy as an apothecary scale, the balance has
shifted dramatically toward the left. Reason, as Hume observed,
remains the servant of the passions. Instinct—self-interest that spills
all too frequently into greed—is now dominant in motivating market
action. In a misreading of Adam Smith’s contributions, we have
cleaved his philosophy in two and lost its integrity. We focus upon
The Wealth of Nations as a book apart from the warnings inherent in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments; classical economics clings to a model
asserting that market interference is to blame for all economic crises.
Driving this division is the conviction that in economic affairs
human behavior is inherently conscious and rational, a delusion that
flies in the face of common sense and the scientific evidence.
Rationality, to follow the definition of Tony Wrigley, the preeminent
Cambridge economic historian, connotes behaviors that “maximize
economic return . . . when choosing between different possible
courses of action.” Similarly, self-interest is considered the adoption of
behaviors designed to achieve economic advantage for the individual
or nuclear family. In both instances reflective, conscious deliberation
and rational choice are held up as the norm, despite long-standing
evidence that we are not consistently rational. Meanwhile reflexive,
preconscious decision making and the social institutions that shape
our intuitive behavior are largely ignored.
It is true that on occasion, in the middle of striking a bargain
around some opportunity that we are particularly eager to secure in
the marketplace, we may consciously reflect upon the motivations of
the merchant and how we can achieve the desired goal. But most of
the time the choices we make are reflexive and intuitive, tuned through
the imitation of the behavior of others and the memory-driven
templates that have been fashioned from many years of marketplace
experience. Here we observe the power of habits of mind—for
particular brands of merchandise, for a particular merchant, or for
the nostalgia of childhood experience. Thus in the consumer society
does the reflective self become the puppet of reflexive choice.

ADAM SMITH’S An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations was published in 1776, the year the American colonists
declared their independence from Great Britain. Smith was
sympathetic toward their drive for economic freedom, just as many of
the members of the Lunar Society were proponents of an American
republic. Indeed, the United States of America was conceived of as
the Great Experiment—the practical expression of Enlightenment
thinking—a democracy to be validated by individual freedom,
initiative, and hard work rather than by arbitrary authority or
religion. Garry Wills, the distinguished American historian, has
suggested in his book Inventing America that the construction of the
Declaration of Independence reflects the eighteenth-century
preoccupations with Newtonian science and moral philosophy. In it
Thomas Jefferson—who was well versed in the writings of Locke,
Hume, Hutcheson, and Smith, among others—spoke eloquently for
what the leaders of the American colonists thought they were or
could be.
Thus the Declaration is both a political and a moral document.
The body of “self-evident truths”—the pursuit of life, liberty, and
happiness that Jefferson deemed worthy of citation—were those
forged from individual experience and the collective suffrage of
mankind. The philosophical ideal of the Enlightenment presumed
responsibility and an inner strength on the part of those individuals
living in community, reflecting Smith’s understanding of the moral
sentiments. Liberty was viewed as the freedom to nurture one’s own
assets and moral virtues in the pursuit of happiness, and to develop
one’s own abilities in the workplace. The notion of happiness itself
was a dynamic one, reflecting the well-tuned balance of desire and
reason as expressed in personal accomplishment and social
contribution. In this construct, rather than a fixed state of mind, the
emotion of happiness is similar to the concept of price as established
through market-based transaction: an ongoing index of the
subjective worth that is found in social exchange.
Hence, to the enlightened mind, when the desire for gain outran
the ability to satisfy it, the commonsense approach was to bridle
one’s desire or increase one’s productive engagement—or preferably
to do both. Failing such a response, the transactional adjustment is
lost and misery could be expected. Today we seem to have forgotten
that particular lesson. But life in colonial America was challenging—
demanding physical stamina and mental ingenuity—and for the
privileged Founding Few it fit such a philosophical framework.
Indeed, such cultural sentiment is reflected in Benjamin Franklin’s
autobiography and in his thirteen virtues to be pursued in the
development of inner character—perhaps establishing the roots of
the self-improvement model still so attractive to the migrant mind of
the American.
As is now evident, however, America’s Great Enlightenment
Experiment has not worked out entirely as planned. This has less to
do with the erudition of Thomas Jefferson and the framers of the
Declaration than with the nature of the human beast. Fundamentally
motivated by self-reward, in the face of affluence we find ourselves
prone to patterns of addiction, greed, and corruption. These too are
“self-evident truths,” although they are more painful to accept than
those of Jefferson. Such truths Adam Smith clearly acknowledged—
in his rejection of Mandeville, in his understanding of the
development of moral sentiment, and in his optimistic striving to
justify the rational market mind. Smith appreciated that his vision of
a balanced, self-regulating social system based on market exchange
was critically dependent upon an intuitive social understanding, but
he made the mistake of presuming that such moral affinity would
endure regardless of changing circumstances. For Smith in the
eighteenth century, wrapped in Panglossian optimism, the conscious
mind was king in market exchange, as economists of the classical
persuasion still believe. Smith could not foresee a future that within
a century would be fired into astonishing economic and social
change by the discovery and employment of fossil fuel; nor did the
Lunar men or the Founding Fathers.
Even now at the beginning of the twenty-first century we still
don’t quite understand what we have wrought. Despite a naϊve
longing to return to what is perceived as the moral simplicity of the
eighteenth century and the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, as exemplified by the Tea Party movement of the U.S.
Republican Party, the world has changed, and the contingencies that
mold our behavior have changed with it. In the face of affluence and
rampant consumerism our market society is no longer in balance. We
have neglected the social institutions that shape the moral autopilots
of intuitive understanding—the essential long-term investments that
ultimately sustain the equilibrium of the marketplace—and chosen
to favor short-term competition and celebrity. Why we tend toward
such myopic behavior in our approach to future challenges and
where such critical choices are made in the brain is the focus of my
next chapter.
Chapter 4

Choice:
The Brain’s Internal Market
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)

IT’S A WARM SUMMER EVENING. The train breaks from the

darkness of the tunnel with a whooping whistle. Hugging the craggy
hillside, it makes its stately progress toward a small Alpine village.
Immaculate in their distinctive blue, cream, and gold livery, the
coaches of the Orient Express glisten in the fading light. Knots of
people, gathered around the bandstand in the square, turn and wave:
outside a church a young couple, just married, are smiling before the
cameras. In the train’s dining car passengers can be seen sitting down
to dinner amid art deco splendor. Then, with another whistle, the
legendary express rounds a curve and is out of sight, as quickly as it
came.
So what is this—perhaps a paragraph from some article in the
Condé Nast Traveller; a fragment of nostalgia plucked from a personal
diary; or the beginning of a whodunit, Agatha Christie style? Wrong
on all counts, I’m afraid: it’s a description of what happens on many
evenings in an upstairs room of the Los Angeles home of Joaquín
Fuster, a distinguished neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading
experts on memory, choice, and the frontal lobes of the human brain.
Dr. Fuster, who has many passions, has long been a model train
enthusiast.
“I’ve loved trains ever since I was a small boy growing up in
Barcelona,” Joaquín told me when I visited him and his wife,
Elisabeth, for dinner one evening. The couple had met as children.
“When we were small, we went to the same village for the summer
vacation,” she explained. But those were difficult years in Spain.
Joaquín’s father, a physician, had been on the losing side in the Civil
War, and after World War II began, Barcelona became a fractious
place to call home. For Joaquín, a young boy amid the turmoil, trains
and train spotting offered tranquillity.
In Austria in the 1950s Joaquín had developed his special
attachment to the Orient Express. After graduating from medical
school in Barcelona, he moved to Innsbruck to continue the training
in psychiatry that he had initiated in Spain. “I was intrigued by brain
anatomy,” he explained, “and the clinic where I was studying had an
amazing collection of specimens.” This fascination plus patient
responsibilities frequently kept him working late, sometimes to the
neglect of his sleep. But there was a fringe benefit to this nightly
diligence. In the clinic, his room overlooked Innsbruck’s main
railway line, and every evening the Orient Express passed by on its
way to Venice, exactly at midnight. The train was a romantic legend
in Europe, catering to the famous and the wealthy. Adding fantasy
and excitement were the popular mystery tales of Graham Greene
and Agatha Christie, set aboard the Orient Express and written in
the 1930s. “I never tired of that late-night spectacle and the noise and
whistle of the great train,” Joaquín confessed. “I found myself
imagining the lives of the passengers. It became my late evening’s
recreation. That was long ago.” He paused as his miniature express
flashed before us once again. “But as you can see,” he added with a
smile, “the Orient Express is still speeding past my bedroom, and I’m
still thinking about anatomy, memory, and how the brain works.”
THE BRAIN’S SPECIALTY is managing information—its acquisition,
storage, and retrieval—and choosing among alternatives to craft the
actions that are necessary to sustain life. The wiring diagram of the
brain is infinitely more complicated, of course, than any railway
network. But what the two systems do have in common is that the
function of the whole cannot be understood merely through a
cataloging of individual parts. Essential to any dynamic
understanding of the brain is why and how individual centers are
connected and communicate. We are learning, for example, from the
recently established Human “Connectome” Project—employing
modern imaging technology and computer science to map the brain’s
pathways—that there are many nodes of local activity that are linked
together by high-speed, long-distance connections. This is crudely
analogous, in my train metaphor, to how London’s extensive
Underground rail system is connected by express surface trains to
cities in the north and west of England. In both instances the critical
factor is that the parts of the system function together as a dynamic
whole.
The Connectome project has taken an important step forward in
refining our knowledge of the brain’s wiring. But that advance will
just open a new chapter in our self-searching. Contrary to popular
notion, the brain is not programmed like a computer to work in a
serial fashion, but rather functions in parallel with information from
many different senses being analyzed to achieve optimum benefit—a
process not dissimilar to the bartering process that establishes price
in the marketplace. What we know of the principles by which the
brain achieves this wizardry, the role that memory plays in that
achievement, how choices are made, how under ideal circumstance
the passions and reason are integrated in that choosing, and why at
times our best intentions are thwarted by habit and a preference for
short-term reward are the theme of this chapter.
I start with memory in exploring these questions. Memory has
been a fascination for Joaquín Fuster throughout his career—he was
the first to describe the presence of active memory cells in the
primate cortex—for it holds the key to understanding how the brain
learns and chooses. Indeed, as an illustration of how memory works,
let’s take Joaquín’s memory of the Orient Express, which from its
inception is now decades old. To explain the retention and retrieval
of an established memory, we must understand both the brain
structures that enable its creation and also the neuronal mechanisms
that sustain it.
Thanks to advances in neuroscience, we now know something
about the anatomy and physiology of how memory is acquired: we
know, for example, that the hippocampus—you will recall that there
are two, one buried deep in each temporal lobe—is essential to the
acquisition and imprinting of short-term memory. But what about
the retention of memories over decades and their retrieval at will:
where and how does that take place? Here the prime candidate for
memory storage is the cortex, while active retrieval of memory
especially involves the frontal lobes, which have long been the focus
of Joaquín Fuster’s scientific studies.
The brain, like the rest of the body organs, is pliable and renews
itself. Thus cortical neurons and their communication networks are
constantly being built, destroyed, and reconstituted. In Joaquín’s
brain, since his first youthful encounter with the legendary express,
tens of thousands, probably millions, of nerve cells have been
continuously restructuring their connections with neighboring cells in
response to experience; in addition some have died and some have
been damaged; others have been regenerated. And yet over decades
all this activity has taken place without deterioration of the good
doctor’s cherished memory of the Orient Express. Thus on the
evidence it is reasonable to conclude that there is no one specific area
in Joaquín Fuster’s brain where memories of trains are kept: that no
individual nerve cell has that responsibility.
An alternative is that memories pertinent to trains, to train travel,
to model railways, and so on persist within a network—that for
neurons remembering and thinking is a collaborative activity.
Memories pertinent to the Orient Express are thus sustained
through the working relationships—Joaquín calls them cognits—that
have been developed among groups of neurons. Repeated interaction
among these cells has enhanced the richness of the remembrance—
the colors, the smells, the sounds, and the emotions—that
surrounded the original encounter. This Gestalt—this full grouping
—which was first conjured in memory by the grand locomotive
passing near the window of the Innsbruck clinic, is now
continuously reinforced and refined by each new relevant experience
—from the bustle of the Lilliputian village in the upstairs room of
Joaquín’s house to the real-life pleasures of the train journeys he and
Elisabeth take together. Over the years information passing among
brain networks has woven a tapestry of personal knowledge that has
been further enriched through the power of imagination, that
function of mind whereby past memories continuously shape our
hopes for the future.
Memory is essential to the fundamental activities of mind, to
imagination, and to self-understanding. “There is no such thing as a
totally new memory,” Joaquín explained to me during our evening
together. “What we consider self-knowledge is the memory of facts,
the relationship among those facts, and the meaning we attribute to
them—gleaned both from past experience and also from what we
imagine for the future.” And indeed, personal experience confirms
such an understanding. Reflect for a moment: close your eyes and
listen to the stillness or to the sounds that surround you. Quickly
you’ll find your mind drifting off either to some remembrance
associated with what you are hearing, or perhaps into a daydream
about the future. But that image of the future will be closely tied to
your personal memories, which include the culture in which you live.
Memory has the power to capture not only language and pictures but
also smells, sounds, emotions, meanings, and all those essentials that
we associate with the subjective experience of the self.
When we recall a specific personal experience, we are not
summoning to mind a literal reproduction of past events but pulling
together information from different sources, from which we then
“reconstruct” the past experience. While the two hippocampi,
located in the temporal lobes of the brain, are responsible for the
acquisition of memories, long-term memory storage is networked
throughout the cortex: the neuronal traces that constitute memory
are anatomically distributed in overlapping and far-flung regions of
the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes. Thus the retrieval and
association of those trace elements, such as those that you have just
conjured in your mind, and their assembly into meaningful
memories demands the collaboration of many brain pathways. This
is economical in that it avoids the need for us to remember every
detail of what has happened over a lifetime, but it also means that we
can make errors when remembering the past. Conversely, however,
such flexibility in memory is also the key to future planning. By
clustering fragments of previous experience to imagine various
scenarios that might flow from a particular set of circumstances—life
with a particular partner, let’s say, or designing a new house—we
anticipate what the future may hold. Think of it as akin to a seasoned
player strategically planning future moves in a game of chess, only
under real-life conditions: it is the capacity to remember the past that
enables us to imagine the future.
It is Joaquín Fuster’s conviction from long years of study that the
aggregation of information that recreates memories of things past
and that facilitates imagination of the future is physically
represented in the brain’s collaborative networks. The Nobel Prize–
winning work of Eric Kandel, demonstrating that long-term memory
in the aplysia—a large sea slug—is physiologically determined by
changes in the signaling strength of the synaptic connections
between nerve cells, supports Fuster’s assertion and demonstrates
how the fundamentals of neuronal action have been conserved
across evolution. Similarly the pioneering studies of Itzhak Fried at
UCLA, a neurosurgeon who has recorded directly from nerve cells
in the brains of patients undergoing evaluation for epilepsy surgery,
has shown that clusters of neurons can be specifically and
consistently excited by familiar images. Given such evidence, it is
reasonable to conclude that the activity and growth of the mind—
both the reflexive, intuitive mind that I described in Chapter 2, and the
reflective, conscious thinking that we each identify as the self—has its
physical foundation in the connectivity and interdependence of the
brain’s cortical networks. Any single neuron may be part of many of
these active cortical webs—Joaquín’s cognits—and therefore may be a
participant in many memories, learned behaviors, or categorized
banks of knowledge. In short, who we are as unique, sentient, and
free-thinking individuals is a reflection of the brain’s capacity
through its networked communication to distill, remember, order,
and make choices using the scattered information of accumulated
experience.

SO HOW DO BRAIN NETWORKS—these cognits of thought and

memory—come into being? What drives the evolution of their
organization? In simple terms the answer lies in the brain’s capacity to
learn, from birth and even before, through interchange with the
world in which we find ourselves. It’s a further simplification but a
useful one that the back portion of the brain (the posterior cortex)
receives input from the senses, while the anterior region (the frontal
cortex) is responsible for decision making and taking action. Joaquín
Fuster refers to this process of continuous exchange with the
environment as the “perception-action cycle.” Perception in this
context does not mean just an awareness of the world as it enters the
mind through the senses but includes the active sorting of new
information and the interpretation of its meaning based on prior
experience. Essentially, therefore, as Joaquín remarked during our
discussion, perception is a tautology—“we perceive what we
remember as we remember what we perceive.”
This cycle of perception, learning, and action is the fundamental engine
of the mind—both in development and maturity—continuously
processing information from the five senses such that the action
taken, be that intuitive or by conscious choice, will best meet the
challenge or opportunity at hand.
The brain’s learning-memory networks of the perception-action
cycle, which sustain the gathering of information and inform
decision making, are hierarchically organized, and their complexity
evolves as the brain matures. Early in brain development those cycles
fundamental to survival—the infant’s ability to root out the breast
and to suck, for example—have been selectively evolved through the
experience of the species. Joaquín Fuster has termed these essential
networks “phyletic,” from phylogeny, the study of evolutionary
relationships. These reflexive behavioral imprints are genetically
preprogrammed but nonetheless operate across a perception-action
cycle (see Figure 4.1). For the feeding infant, to elaborate on my
example, the sensory perception of the mother’s smell, the touch of the
breast, the taste of milk, and the sound of her breathing trigger the
motor program that induces the action of sucking. As I shall detail in
Part II, refinement of this instinctual cognit begins immediately after
birth when through experience mother and child learn from each
other and quickly develop the mutual, loving attachment that
ultimately is the origin of trust. The sensory inputs meld to create in
the infant’s mind the perception of a unique memory network of
“mother.” And should that rapidly developing memory circuit not be
validated when being cared for by an alien “caregiver,” a different
motor program, one of distress and crying, is swiftly triggered.
Development occurs rapidly in those first months, and soon the
infant is working daily on integrating the information perceived
through the senses in the service of acquiring new motor skills. So if
we return now to my illustration in Chapter 2 of the baby in the crib
grasping for a colored ball, we see that the perception-action cycle is
fundamental to the development of habit and the intuitive mind. Here the
infant is already his or her own teacher, fine-tuning the cycle of
perception and action through trial and error until the closing of the
hand, at just the right moment, is finally mastered and the ability
becomes automated.
 Figure 4.1: The perception-action cycle: Perceiving and sorting information that is
incoming from the senses is the fundamental activity of the brain. Following
assessment, based on the demands and opportunities of the immediate situation, and
tempered by the memory of past experience, action is then taken. Initially these
processes are driven by inherited, instinctual (phyletic) templates. These templates
are rapidly enhanced by interactive experience during the years of brain maturation
and the development of imagination. Ultimately it is the perception-action cycle that
enables conceptual and abstract thought, the capacity that exemplifies human
behavior. (Illustration based on the work of Joaquín Fuster and presented here with
permission)

In contrast to the phyletic preprogrammed memory of the

neonate learning to suck, the networks that support many acquired
and habitual behaviors—face recognition, feeding, walking, social
interaction—develop with less direct genetic supervision. Specific
learning in such instances is driven essentially by the strength of the
stimulus that carries the information. Thus it is the close proximity
of stimuli in time, their repetition and emotional meaning—as we see
in language acquisition and grammar construction—that are the
most important promoters of a network’s development and activity.
Here the immense storage capacity of the human cortex offers an
extraordinary advantage. At birth this “association” cortex, as it is
sometimes called, houses the computer equivalent of many gigabytes
of disk space that are yet to be programmed. With maturation,
however, improved insulation surrounding the neuronal axons,
which are the brain’s superhighways of electrical transmission,
enhances the efficient transfer of information. A bare axon transmits
information slowly, at approximately 20 mph, while those sheathed
in the fatty insulation called myelin can conduct electricity up to 270
mph—as fast as the wind in a tornado.
In computerspeak, myelin offers “bandwidth,” speeding the
brain’s ability to transmit information from one local network to
another. However, this enhancement takes time. In the ontogeny—a
fancy term for the process of development and maturation—of the
individual brain, imaging studies indicate that myelination follows a
genetically driven chronology. Thus the areas of the cortex
responsible for limb movement, essential in learning to walk, and
those domains that receive input from the vital body senses, such as
sight and hearing, acquire their myelin insulation much earlier than
the large association cortex, which continues to mature through
adolescence and young adulthood to serve the refinement of abstract
thought and complex social behavior. In the full-grown human brain
myelin insulation—also called “white matter” because of its pale
appearance when the brain is freshly sliced, in contrast to the pink-
gray color of the areas where the nerve cells aggregate—constitutes
some 42 percent of the brain’s volume. Again lapsing into computer
language, the mature brain thus combines megahertz processing with
gigabyte storage.
This gain in efficiency has great consequence. As the frontal
regions of the cortex develop and the neuronal pathways of the
brain’s association areas become myelinated and efficient, the
growing infant is liberated from mere physical response to immediate
stimuli. Increasingly the child moves toward conceptual thought and
intellectual independence. Language, through which inner thoughts
and emotions can be communicated to others, is the key to this
liberation from the sensory world. Vocabulary expands
exponentially, with symbols and imagination commanding an
important place alongside the information flowing from the senses.
This leads progressively from behavior that is principally driven by
emotional attachment to others, to the use of creative intelligence—
an autonomous form of information processing, focused on the
future, through which goals and projects are conceived and choices
are made among potential action plans. Such activity, now codified
in language, develops from the broad base of knowledge that has
been acquired—both consciously and intuitively—through
continuous engagement with the larger world.
Not surprisingly—although only recently confirmed—this
evolving competence in managing worldly challenge is reflected in
shifting alliances among the brain’s functional networks. As I
explored in the discussion about habit formation in Chapter 2, we
have known for a hundred years that the brain is in continuous
conversation with itself, even when at rest. MRI technology,
however, now makes it possible to explore, even in infants, the
physiological patterns associated with this internal communication
and how they change during development.
That our brain networks are continuously and actively engaged
without our conscious awareness was brought to scientific attention
in the early 1990s, when Marcus Raichle, of the Washington School
of Medicine in St. Louis, reported that the level of brain blood-flow
activity—as measured by PET and fMRI—diminished when subjects
were consciously focused upon a visual task. These results came as a
surprise to the investigators, suggesting that “there was likely much
more to brain function than that revealed by experiments
manipulating [conscious] demands [of the subject].” In the “resting”
state it appeared that the brain was far from idle. Raichle and his
colleagues labeled this robust “resting” neuronal activity the brain’s
“default mode” and proposed that it was evidence of ongoing,
“stimulus independent” activity among the brain’s neuronal centers.
Subsequent studies of individuals at rest—when the subjects lie
quietly in the scanner thinking their own thoughts—have confirmed
these initial findings of intrinsic, well-organized brain activity. Also,
as was suspected, the alliances among the brain’s functional
networks change with age. In the infant cross talk seems to be
determined largely by the anatomical proximity of the neuronal
networks. However, in adolescence and early adulthood—when the
neuronal superhighways have become myelinated—communication
among the major network hubs appears to be driven by common
functional purpose. This is also the age range within which
underutilized neuronal pathways are “pruned”—destroyed—to favor
networks that are being tempered to meet the needs of late
adolescence. In other words, those networks particularly active
survive at the expense of those less engaged with the world. Thus the
networked map of the brain is tuned and adjusted in response to age
and experience.
What is clear from the results of these studies—crude though
they may be in drawing inference from regional blood flow and
electrical activity measures—is that the brain is a busy place, even
when we are daydreaming. In these “resting” states of mental activity
some 60 to 80 percent of the brain’s total energy requirements are
consumed. Furthermore, mental tasks that demand conscious
engagement add little to this resting energy burden. But what is the
purpose of this intrinsic activity? Could it be that the energy
consumed by the brain’s networks at rest is indicative of the
continuous activity of the “perception-action cycle” as we reflexively
process, test, and choose among the particulars of the ongoing flood
of information that we receive? In our daydreaming—I’m reminded,
as I write, of Pooh Bear and his dreams of honey pots—do we catch a
glimpse of the intuitive mind at work, reflexively adjusting to the
chores and challenges of the everyday world and creatively imagining
the opportunities that lie ahead?
Toward the end of my discussion with Joaquín Fuster I asked him
what he thought of such an idea. He considered the proposition
plausible. “The cortex is always active,” he observed. “Through the
perception-action cycle the brain is continuously at work adjusting
behavior—self-organizing, if you will—to seek the best
environmental fit whether we are consciously aware of it or not.” To
Joaquín consciousness is not a specific function of the brain but a
state of heightened activity—especially in the cortex—that evokes
subjective awareness. “To learn only consciously,” he continued,
“would clutter our ability to reflect on what we already know.
Through memory we have a vast collection of information: hence the
brain is acutely attuned to novelty. We continuously assess new
opportunities and track any deviation from the expected—whether
the repositioning of furniture in a room or a change in the emotional
expression of a lover. This information may be brought to conscious
attention only later. Indeed a huge proportion of daily life is
conducted beyond conscious awareness,” he added, “with action
triggered by cues in the environment that intuitively resonate with
established habits.”
Joaquín followed with an amusing story. He had recently
returned from a visit to San Francisco, where he had been giving
some lectures at a professional meeting. One afternoon, free from his
responsibilities, he had gone walking in the Nob Hill district and
found himself irresistibly drawn to visit the Cable Car Museum. This
seemed rather odd as he had visited on several previous occasions,
but he followed his whim anyway and had an enjoyable afternoon.
“My initial decision was certainly not a conscious one,” he reflected,
“but clearly a decision had been made. No doubt my fascination that
afternoon with San Francisco’s cable cars was nested in memories of
my last trip to the city, which in turn is nested within a broader set of
preconscious cognits tied to trams, trains, and public transportation.”
Joaquín laughed. “So here we are back to Innsbruck and the Orient
Express. That’s the perception-action cycle at work. As Freud was
fond of emphasizing—although for different reasons—much of the
time the brain makes choices without our conscious awareness, and
then we rationalize them.”

WHETHER CONSCIOUS OR INTUITIVE, it is choosing among alternatives

that determines action. At times an instinctual drive—intense hunger,
for example—will command the decision-making process. But
outside such circumstances most of the choices that we make, and the
actions that follow, are informed by knowledge gleaned from past
experience and incoming sensory information pertinent to the
immediate situation. As I have been describing in this chapter, the
brain networks that evaluate our perceptions of the world operate
largely outside consciousness. Memory helps guide the analysis,
which is further shaped by novelty and change—these being
fundamental percepts to which the brain is tuned by evolutionary
adaptation. Ultimately, the process through which we make choices
and take educated action is based upon all these streams of
information.
Fundamentally the brain chooses in one of two ways. The first is
through acquired habit, about which we learned in Chapter 2. This
method of decision making is quick, reflexive, and stimulus-driven, with the
brain architecture involved being principally that of the basal ganglia. This
mechanism underpins the brain’s autopilots—tuned preconscious
responses—that initially may have been acquired with conscious
awareness but that have become intuitive. This decision making
operates efficiently in a stable environment where actions taken have
predictable and consistent outcomes.
The second method the brain has for performing decision
making, which is my focus here, is fundamentally through a process
of internal competition, where the relationship between an action
taken—actual or imagined—and its consequence is analyzed and the
information retained and coded for future reference. This process of
goal-directed action and decision making is primarily conscious and
reflective and depends upon the integrity of the orbital-frontal cortex.
The reader will remember that the orbital-frontal cortex, also
known simply as the prefrontal or “executive” cortex, is the most
forward portion of the brain tucked in above the eye sockets of the
skull. Little was known about the function of this densely packed
labyrinth when I was in medical school in the 1960s. In fact the
frontal lobes were a student’s nightmare. Gray’s Anatomy offered the
usual elegant drawings with a Latin name for each of the hills and
valleys of the crinkled surface—names that we were forced to
commit to memory in the absence of any facts to bind our
understanding—but that was about it.
Classical stories in the medical archives, such as the tragedy of
Phineas Gage, did offer intriguing clues, however, and suggested that
the frontal cortices play an important role in planning, emotional
control, and social behavior. In 1848 Gage, working as the foreman of
a railroad construction gang in Vermont, suffered severe brain
damage when a tamping bar he was using was driven by an accidental
explosion to pierce his upper jaw, exiting through the left side of his
forehead. Amazingly Gage survived the ordeal, but from that time on
his calm, responsible behavior was replaced by impulsivity,
emotional outbursts, and social indiscretion. Subsequently,
neuropsychological assessment in persons suffering comparable
frontal lobe damage, combined with brain imaging, has confirmed
similar patterns of behavior and verified the executive role of the
prefrontal region in regulating choice and planning.
But what of the choice that leads to action? What enables that
critical step? Morten Kringelbach, senior research fellow at Queen’s
College, Oxford, and professor of neuroscience at Aarhus University
in Denmark, believes that the key to unlocking these mysteries is
acknowledging the central role of pleasure in driving human
behavior. “Pleasure as a motivating force goes beyond the
evolutionary imperative of physical survival,” Morten explained to
me one afternoon during a visit to his laboratory at the Warneford
Hospital in Oxford. “Think about it. For most of us, sensory
pleasures and social interaction are equally as important as eating,
perhaps even more so. Those who no longer experience pleasure—
those who suffer anhedonia—society considers sick, and many die by
their own hand. Pleasure is central to life.” As director of Hedonia:
TrygFonden Research Group, and an acknowledged leader in
pleasure research, Morten Kringelbach speaks with authority.
As Morten explained to me, the process of choice within the
brain is dynamic and interactive. The picture that is coming together
from human imaging and animal experiments confirms that the
orbital-frontal cortices—there are two of them, left and right, side by
side—provide the integrative forum for decision making, but that the
responsibilities for processing the information upon which any
choice depends are shared among several complementary domains.
Unfortunately some of the old anatomical terms, derived from Latin
—ventral, dorsal, medial, and lateral—remain important in orienting
us to this new geography and need to be repeated here to help with
my explanation. A simple aid to memory and to keeping things
straight, as Morten suggested, is to think of each lobe as a room.
Then, standing in the middle of the right lobe, in front of you is the
ventral surface of the cortex, behind you is the dorsal pole, to the
right is the lateral boundary and to the left is the inner medial wall,
which then abuts the complementary medial wall of the left cortical
lobe. In processing the incoming information, each area has its own
set of responsibilities. In broad terms it is the medial area of the
frontal cortex that continuously monitors incoming information to
evaluate its potential value for pleasure and reward, whereas the
lateral cortex is preoccupied with control, particularly inhibition of
potentially pain-inducing actions and the modification of established
behavior patterns.
From a meta-analysis of many studies, both his own and those of
other investigators, Morten has constructed an anatomical map—
which I reproduce in Figure 4.2—that is useful in understanding how
information flows into this complex region of the frontal cortex, and
the analytic functions that are performed there. In complement to
Joaquín Fuster’s perception-action cycle Morten’s studies confirm
that it is in the posterior part of the brain that perception first
becomes organized. The thalamus, which is the brain’s sensory
collection center, aggregates information flowing from the five
principal senses of taste, smell, touch, hearing, and vision together
with stimuli arising from the body organs and continuously relays it
forward to the posterior (dorsal) region of the orbital-frontal cortices.
As it advances, this rich influx is integrated with information flowing
from the vital emotional centers of the ancient limbic brain. These
centers include the hypothalamus, which is responsible for hormone
release and the homeostatic balance of many essential body
functions; the hippocampus, where memories are created; the
amygdala serving as the brain’s emotional sentinel and social early
warning system; and the insula, which is tuned to receive
information from the body’s inner world.
Thus, essentially, there are two parallel interactive cycles of
perception and action: a “thinking” cycle, or cycle of reason, which
courses through new cortical structures and the lateral prefrontal
cortex, and an “emotional” cycle that integrates information from
the limbic structures and the ventral prefrontal cortex—two cycles
that in their cross talk create a dynamic and balanced whole.
This continuous inflow of primary information then continues
its forward passage to initiate the action phase of the perception-
action cycle. As the gathering of facts continues, knowledge from
networks honed by the memory of previous experience is added to
the mix, and this multisensory assemblage of information is assigned
value regarding potential for reward or punishment. As is evident in
Figure 4.2, the brain area responsible for this evaluative process
receives its name—the ventromedial orbital-frontal cortex—from its
anatomical location. When a potentially rewarding opportunity is
encountered, the executive cortex figures out the value of the
opportunity from its potential for pleasure when compared to
previous experience: it is only then that the optimal behavioral
action is chosen. When we choose something to eat, for example,
studies suggest that the orbital-frontal cortex anticipates the
subjective pleasure and nutritional value of the food available based
on past experience and current information and then decides the
potential reward value of eating it.
Figure 4.2: Choice and the executive brain: The diagram represents the functions of
the frontal cortices (the right half is illustrated) as information moves forward and
choices are made. Decoded sensory information continuously flows into the frontal
lobes from the primary sensors of the brain and body—from the organs of touch,
smell, taste, hearing, and vision. As it advances, the information is integrated through
the activity of the posterior parts of the prefrontal lobes and assigned a reward value
as it moves forward. From there the new information can shape behavioral choice
(through the ventrolateral prefrontal region), be compared with past experience, and
then be stored in memory (in the ventromedial cortex) or be assessed regarding its
potential hedonic (pleasurable) experience. The subjective reward value of the
incoming experience also is modified by the prevailing internal state of the body (e.g.,
hunger). Continuous communication among the prefrontal cortices and other brain
regions, such as the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, further assesses risk and
refines the choices that are made. (Illustration based on the work of Morten
Kringelbach and presented here with permission)
 As Morten suggested during the afternoon of my visit, if this all
seems a little complicated, then try thinking of the process as a
virtual market operating within the brain—a place where
information is collected, value is established, and choices are made.
Imagine that you are in the market to buy something significant, let’s
say a new car. What are the assessments—the checks and balances
that you would go through—to ensure that the vehicle you buy is the
one that will best serve your needs, that you can afford, and that you
will enjoy driving? To make such a choice, most of us first gather as
much information as is possible about the product, its availability,
the company that makes it, our past experience with similar vehicles,
its relative price, and so on.
This process, familiar to each of us, is one comparable in many
ways to that which goes on in the orbital-frontal cortex at the
culmination of the perception-action cycle. Different pathways
within the brain—different functional networks—bring information
to the orbital-frontal cortex where they compete for distinction, just
as in a marketplace. In the brain, however, the index of “support” for
the choice ultimately adopted—or “purchased,” if you will—is based
not on competitive price but on the number of neurons firing in unit
time and/or the signal strength of the synaptic connections between
participating nerve cells, until a level of critical discharge is reached
and action is initiated.
In the brain, making choices is not a sporadic activity but a process
designed to produce continuous, adaptive improvement with pleasurable
experience as the goal. To follow the market analogy, the orbital-frontal
cortex maintains a sophisticated online evaluation of all the business
transactions, including associated opportunities and
disappointments, in which you have been previously engaged—a
comprehensive catalogue that enables rapid response to changing
circumstances. This together with the brain’s network plasticity
offers great flexibility in choice and action.
The reward value—the subjective pleasure—associated with any
prior experience is stored in memory and recorded by the
ventromedial region of the executive brain, a brain area found to be
particularly active in Marcus Raichle’s “resting” blood flow studies.
Thus, as Morten Kringelbach describes it, the ventromedial area of the
frontal cortex is the guardian of preference based upon memories of previous
pleasures. I think of it as that part of the cortex that establishes
hedonistic value and fuels the engines of self-interest—the “animal
spirits”—that drive Adam Smith’s model of the self-regulating
market.
The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is the
braking system of Smith’s model, focused primarily on planning and
making choices that will keep us safe for the future: the ventrolateral
cortex is thus the brain’s agent of “self-control.” Should curiosity or the
pleasures of self-indulgence compromise safety or sensible
adaptation, it is the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, especially on the
right side of the brain, that springs into restraining action. Think of
it, therefore, as analogous to a voice of conscience, or to Adam
Smith’s impartial spectator.

IN THE MARKETPLACE barter is all about balancing the risk of loss

and pain against the reward of pleasure and profit. And that is exactly
what the orbital-frontal cortex has evolved to do. In simplistic terms,
the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is concerned about risk while the
ventromedial prefrontal region is resolutely committed to hedonistic
pursuit. Ideally the two brain regions are tuned through experience
to collaborate when it comes to choice of action. To paraphrase what
David Hume emphasized two centuries ago, while it is passion (the
ventromedial cortex) that drives us, any call to action is played out
within the theater of reason (the ventrolateral cortex) where
“perceptions . . . glide and mingle” to test an “infinite variety” of
alternatives. In reality, however, the two brain regions are inherently in
competition. This becomes particularly evident when the timing of a
reward is entered into the equation. Why, for example, do we
procrastinate in making long-term plans, both as individuals and as a
society? Why do New Year resolutions last only for a week or two? A
personal anecdote will help illustrate my point.
 In Los Angeles, in the neighborhood where I live, there is a small
French-Canadian bistro named Soleil. It’s along Westwood
Boulevard, on a corner close to the bookstore and just down from a
string of Iranian shops. The people who go there seem to like each
other. It’s good value, lively, and unpretentious. Pictures of Vincent
Van Gogh’s famous sunflowers are on the wall, and there’s
something suggestive—intended, I’m sure—of the artist’s little house
in Arles, except I know the cooking is better, much better.
Luc Alarie, the owner-chef, is from Montreal. He’s a big man with
an impish grin: he might be imagined playing hockey for the
Montreal Canadiens, if he weren’t so generous and funny. The menu
is everything you ever hoped for in a French bistro; escargots, boeuf
bourguignon, grilled steaks with peppercorn sauce, and of course
french fries. Once you’ve dug into a basket of those thin, crispy fries
at Soleil, you’re hooked. As a confirmed addict, I try to be
circumspect, going only with friends and insisting that we share.
On the particular January evening I have in mind there were three
of us. We were celebrating something, I can’t recall exactly what, but
we were in a good mood, and so was Luc. There was plenty of banter.
We had eaten well too, despite the New Year resolve to cut back on
the calories: escargots, a tasty coq au vin, wine, and the essential
basket of fries. We agreed we were stuffed and content: no dessert
tonight, thank you, we told Luc when he made his rounds, just the
bill. “Mon dieu, c’est impossible,” cried our host, hands in the air.
“Tonight I have prepared the special Montreal caramel cheesecake,
just for you!” No, no we protested; we’re full. “For this, mes amis, mais
non!” retorted Luc. We protested again, not a bite more, until finally
Luc withdrew, looking crestfallen. We gave a sigh of relief. The bill
arrived. Then suddenly Luc was back, grinning broadly and bearing a
plate with a slice of his latest triumph—the caramel cheesecake—
together with three forks. “Just a little taste,” he explained, placing
the dish proudly before us. We exchanged glances. “Go. Try it,”
added Luc, still smiling. We looked at each other again. Two minutes
later the plate was empty.
There is nothing unique about this little pantomime, of course,
for it is repeated every evening in millions of restaurants across
America. George Ainslie, who is professor of psychiatry at Temple
University in Philadelphia and one of the first to study this
phenomenon, calls it “inter-temporal or delayed discounting”—
when in the face of immediate reward future outcomes are
undervalued. Ainslie’s studies confirm my experience at the Soleil
restaurant: essentially what happened was that the short-term
anticipated pleasure of the tasty cheesecake momentarily outweighed
the long-term value of avoiding rich foods. For the brain in the short
term it is not the logic of a decision but internal barter that
establishes value.
A cornerstone of classical economic theory is that human beings
exercise rational self-interest when bartering and choosing—that
over time we are dependable in decision making, consistently seeking
maximum utility. If this were so, then our preferences could be
described by an exponential curve, where a larger reward would
always have greater value than one that is smaller, regardless of its
timing. Unfortunately such an orderly pursuit of goals is far from the
norm. Laboratory studies confirm Ainslie’s concept of intertemporal
bargaining, with the timing of a potential reward significantly
influencing the final decision. Thus human decision making is best
described as being hyperbolic. As the possibility of receiving a small
reward draws closer in time, it becomes more attractive until, briefly,
it is preferred over a larger opportunity that is delayed.
The study of intertemporal discounting offers a special window
through which to observe the brain’s internal market in operation.
Research using fMRI technology confirms that separate brain
systems are responsible for evaluating immediate and delayed
rewards. In general these studies suggest that short-term
impulsiveness, as we would predict, is driven by the ancient limbic
structures and the nucleus accumbens, which is home to the
dopamine reward pathways. These ancient systems are in league with
the ventromedial orbital-frontal region of the cortex—which is
deeply involved, as you will recall, in tracking the subjective pleasure
associated with prior experience. The assessment of the potential
payoff from investment in long-term reward, on the other hand, is
the responsibility of the ventrolateral regions (the brain’s braking
system) and the dorsal regions of the prefrontal cortex especially on
the right side of the brain—all of which fits well with the analysis
provided by Morten Kringelbach, which I reviewed earlier.
Of particular interest is that both the long-term constraining and
liberating roles exerted on behavior by the ventrolateral orbital-
frontal cortex appears to be independent of reward timing: it’s simply
that the brain’s capacity for constraint loses out to the lure of
potential reward when the short-term bartering becomes intense.
The orbital-frontal network, which we know to be involved in long-
range planning, delayed gratification, and abstract thinking, is
dominant in activity when the potential reward is in the distant
future, but as the reward moves closer in time, its comparative
influence diminishes, and the short-term pleasure seeking of the
ventromedial cortex, the limbic system, and the dopamine-reward
system rapidly prevails in determining choice. This is the same brain
architecture that research has found to be consistently associated
with impulsive behavior and addiction, which helps explain why
other sensory triggers associated with desire—including touch,
smell, and sight—are closely tied to craving and impulsive behavior.
Also, on the mundane level, it aids in understanding why food tastes
that we rarely encountered in our evolutionary history—such as
sweetness reflected in caramel cheesecake—can easily override good
intentions and a well-satisfied appetite, simply because of the
powerful promise of hedonic gratification that such food evokes,
especially when you can see and smell it.

SO WHAT HAVE we learned? One lesson is certain: in our choices, we

human beings are short-term opportunists; we are wired that way. In
the language of neuroscience, without conscious effort to achieve the
contrary, delayed discounting will trump responsibility. Over the
centuries, when we were small in numbers and coping with
dangerous and depriving environments, this propensity to grasp
immediate opportunity served us well in the fight for survival. But
the world is changing: now there are many of us—many billions—
and why, how, and what we choose will make a critical difference over
the long term. Sustaining a focus on the future is particularly
challenging in the consumer-driven society, regardless of political
persuasion, when immediate gratification becomes the coin of the
realm. With the complicity of the conscious self, in our intuitive
habits we find ourselves drawn into a Faustian bargain, one that limits
our capacity for long-term planning. In exchange for an abundance of
immediate choice, delayed discounting becomes the brain’s default
mode; inadvertently we are retuning and rewiring our neural
architecture, further reinforcing our propensity for short-term
opportunism.
On the surface the brain’s two systems of choosing—that of the
reflexive, stimulus-driven decision making of habit and the goal-
directed reflective choice, where the action taken is sensitive to
consequence—appear to be distinct entities. In reality, however, they
overlap in their function and responsibilities, and each can reinforce
the behavior of the other. Both can help determine what we do next.
In a feedback loop of learning and memory, how habits are tuned
either reinforces or inhibits reflective choice.
Habit, as I have noted before, is potentially an intuitive force for good,
both in fostering efficiency of mind and in sustaining the cultural
web that knits together human society. So in Los Angeles, even on a
Sunday morning when there are few cars on the road, I intuitively
drive down the right side of Wilshire Boulevard despite it being an
eight-lane highway with plenty of space for creative maneuvering.
This is habit—reflexive tuning—actively at work supporting public
safety. I do not think about my behavior. When visiting England,
however, even though I was born there, my retuned, reflexive
American mindset is dangerous, and I must consciously pay
attention when driving on the left.
In the social context habit is conformity. Such social norms are
evident in all cultures—in dress codes, in diet, in mannerisms, in
beliefs, and so on—and they can be extraordinarily powerful in
shaping behavior. In our home culture how much time we spend
consciously thinking about any social norm—driving on the right;
whether global warming exists; that self-interest, economic growth,
and the consumer society are good for America—is an inverse
measure of its influence. Once a cultural mindset is pervasive,
however, the orthodoxy becomes self-reinforcing, and we conform
without thinking. We “rewire” the brain’s tuning, or as the
psychologist Joshua Epstein has described it, writing in
Computational Economics, “we learn to be thoughtless.”
In doing so we compromise choice. In “thoughtlessly” becoming
economically and emotionally dependent upon habitual
consumption, we distort the brain’s internal market. The habit
centers of the basal ganglia, now in cahoots with the pleasure-loving
ventromedial prefrontal region and its limbic allies, do battle against
the scolding constraint of its neighbor the ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex. It’s not much of a competition, as I discovered when faced
with Luc’s caramel cheesecake. When immediate opportunity
reinforces our hedonistic preferences, the capacity for personal
restraint loses most of the time. Today, in our headlong,
turbocharged commercial pursuit, we have inadvertently overtaxed
the brain’s internal braking system. As individuals and as a society,
we find ourselves off balance.
Chapter 5

Market Mayhem:
Of Museums and Money
This division of labour, from which so many advantages
are derived, is not originally the effect of any human
wisdom. It is the necessary, though very slow and
gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human
nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the
propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for
another.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

I SPENT THANKSGIVING 2008 in New York City and over that

weekend visited an exhibition, Beyond Babylon, that had just opened
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In retrospect its focus—the
trading practices among Mediterranean city-states in the late Bronze
Age—seems ironic, even satiric. Only ten weeks earlier trading on
Wall Street had taken a dramatic and dangerous downturn, just as
the Bronze Age economy, some four millennia earlier, had staggered
and suddenly buckled.
Over four catastrophic days in mid-September the Dow Jones
average had plunged a thousand points, only to whipsaw back on
talk of possible broad government intervention. By the end of the
week the world had lost Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old investment
bank, and AIG—the insurance giant American International Group
—had declared that to avoid bankruptcy it needed a $70 billion
bailout from the Federal Reserve. It was a week, as The Wall Street
Journal observed with uncharacteristic lament, that was destined to
change American capitalism. Shocks of this magnitude had not been
felt since the Great Depression, and soon the world’s financial
markets were frozen in fear. By early October virtually every traded
asset seemed to be collapsing: in just one week the S&P 500 index
would lose over 20 percent of its value, affecting investors worldwide.
The Great Recession, the first of the new millennium, was under
way. Much as the interwoven fortunes of the Bronze Age dynasties
had suffered, similarly the whole financial fabric of the global
economy appeared ready to rip apart.
Using what I learned from my museum visit and the financial
meltdown of 2008, in these next pages I draw out the common
neurobehavioral threads that have characterized our market behavior
over millennia. But more particularly, using the finance industry as
my case study, I will highlight how the ancient instinctual driver of
myopic self-interest, together with shifting cultural habits and
changing social regulations, eroded self-restraint to trigger market
mayhem. I conclude, as Mark Twain is purported to have observed,
that while human history may not repeat itself, it surely does rhyme,
offering valuable lessons for the future.

MARKETS EMERGE WHEREVER people congregate: along a riverbank,

in a courtyard, and on a village street. The ideal marketplace reflects
human need and desire, a distillate of our labors, hopes and fears. In
contemporary Western culture we accept that fundamental to market
exchange is the freedom to choose. It is the seller and the buyer
together that determine the value of the goods, based on personal
preference. Without the freedom of individual choice and the
protection of property, there is no market. Thus today we defend
markets, as Adam Smith described them, to be “the simple and
obvious system of natural liberty.” This is our contemporary
understanding, but it is one that has been in evolution for thousands
of years.
Barter and exchange are older than the practice of agriculture.
The mutual interchange of favors—the reciprocal grooming seen in
nonhuman primates, or the exchange of gossip in our own species—
plays an essential role in sustaining group cohesion in social animals.
Long ago we learned that such reciprocation was a fine alternative to
fighting: “if you scratch my back, then I’ll scratch yours,” as the
saying goes. Once we outgrew the social economy of the nomadic
hunting band and began to live in larger, relatively stable groups with
tasks divided among individuals, it was a natural evolution to build
upon such reciprocity—be it for affection or to satisfy physical need
—offering to others what we did not require for ourselves. Similarly
as communities grew in complexity, trade among them became
essential to survival. Rarely could a single cluster of individuals,
however skilled and talented, provide everything that was needed,
often even at a subsistence level. Thus as human settlements evolved
—long before money was invented to facilitate market exchange, and
an eternity before Adam Smith published his influential tome—the
division of labor and the trading of surplus goods was a social
imperative.
In the late Bronze Age the Mediterranean was a trading hub. This
was pressed home at the Metropolitan exhibition by a brilliantly
colored satellite image of the eastern Mediterranean, rimmed to the
north by the mountains of Anatolia. It was a reminder that four
thousand years ago this punch bowl of blue water was central to
commerce, supporting a vigorous sea trade that complemented
overland caravan routes and was vital to the transport of grains, oils,
and precious metals among the hinterland empires and their ruling
families.
At the core of the exhibition were artifacts salvaged from a
Bronze Age trading vessel, which had been discovered off the
Turkish coast. Carbon dating of wood found aboard the ship
suggests that it sank around 1300 B.C., making it the world’s oldest
known shipwreck. Cape Uluburun, after which the wreck was
named, is a spit of land on the southwestern coast of Anatolia
situated just before the peninsula crumbles into the Aegean Sea,
creating the scattering of islands that on the map appear as stepping-
stones to Greece. It is an area of stunning beauty, as I can attest from
having sailed there. On many days a turquoise sea complements a
sun-drenched sky of azure blue with scudding white clouds hanging
over red sandstone cliffs. But it is dangerous too: the currents close
to shore are treacherous and the rocks jagged, and with the weather
patterns given to violent storms, even in the summer months, it can
be a deadly place—as it had been for the Uluburun merchants.
The wonderful thing about ancient shipwrecks is that they
provide a unique slice of history, where the mundane details of life—
in peace and in war—are frozen in time. So it is with the Uluburun
wreck: in addition to some ten tons of Cyprus copper plus tin from
Central Asia—potentially enough bronze to equip a small army—it
was carrying amphorae filled with oils, olives, and grains, as well as a
rich cargo of finished goods. This was a vessel of considerable wealth
making its way west to the Aegean Sea.
The late Bronze Age is a particularly colorful period in
Mediterranean history, one remembered and embellished in the epic
poems of Homer. Presuming the carbon dating to be accurate, the
Uluburun vessel would have met its fate approximately a century
before the violent siege of Troy by the Mycenaean Greeks and the
collapse of the other hitherto vibrant trading empires in the eastern
Mediterranean. For the previous several centuries sophisticated
feudal societies had thrived in the region, including the Hittite
empire of Anatolia, a superpower of the era.
Trade had been essential to the growth of the great empires and
cultural centers of the aristocracy, which when not allied with one
another were frequently at war. Money was unknown. Commerce
flourished among these ruling elites as a sophisticated barter system,
the oldest form of human exchange. This practice was ritualized as
reciprocal “gifting”—essentially a prenegotiated contract—where
ambassadors and merchants representing the powerful feudal
families delivered cargoes of dowry or tribute, favors that later would
be repaid through further gifting. Overland caravans connecting the
great cities of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Hittite empires of the
Anatolian peninsula were complemented by the seafaring Syrians
and Canaanites—and the powerful Mycenaean Greeks—who traded
between North Africa, Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean. Driven in
large part by the need to acquire essential raw materials and staple
goods, this economic interdependence also promoted fine
craftsmanship and an expanded cultural understanding.
Bronze was a commodity particularly prized and traded. The dull
brown metal that we now associate with church bells, plumbing
fixtures, and statues commemorating the Great War is one of the
most versatile of alloys. Its discovery—through trial and error in the
smelting of metal ore—had marked a significant technical advance.
Created primarily from copper, strengthened by combining it with
tin, bronze was the essential metal in the manufacture of tools,
weapons, and body armor and was something to fight over, much as
we fight over oil today. With the island of Cyprus being a principal
source of copper ore, sea trade was not only attractive but also
fostered the transport of other cargo: pottery jugs being carried from
Greece were filled with oil or with wine from Egypt, to be exchanged
for grain from Babylonia or ebony from Africa.
Sea voyages during this period of Mediterranean history were
risky and dangerous. Navigation was primitive, and vessels were
square-rigged, which means they sailed best with a following wind,
essentially limiting sea travel to the summer months, when
northwesterly winds prevail in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus a
ship setting sail from Greece had a fair chance of finding Africa. But
the return voyage had to be made counterclockwise, keeping the
coast of the Levant and Anatolia in sight. That helps explain why the
Uluburun wreck was found so close to shore: caught in an
unexpected squall, a heavily laden squared-rigged vessel frequently
ended up on the rocks, with little chance of survival.
And indeed the Uluburun vessel was heavily laden. Personal
artifacts recovered suggest that the merchants had set sail from Tell
Abu Hawam, a Canaanite port in what is now northern Israel. Also,
judging by the number of copper ingots and the dozens of mint-
condition Cypriot bowls and tableware packed in large ceramic jars,
the ship had made call in Cyprus before continuing its journey west,
hugging the shoreline of Anatolia. It must have been just days later,
failing to navigate the rocky promontory of Cape Uluburun, perhaps
in a storm, perhaps through error, that it foundered. Skittering down
a rocky escarpment, the broad-beamed vessel came to rest in deep
water, complete with crew and cargo, there to remain for more than
three thousand years.
Archaeological detective work indicates that three or four Syrian-
Canaanite merchants were aboard the ship. There’s also good
evidence that two Mycenaean Greeks of elite status were traveling
homeward. Two bronze swords and elegant personal effects
including tableware, razors, and beads—all of Mycenaean
manufacture—plus drinking sets and knives from that region
support this conclusion. A third, rather shadowy figure, armed with
sword, spearheads, and a mace, appears to have been from northern
Greece or even the Balkans, implying that he may have been a
mercenary employed for protection of the ship’s company and its
cargo against piracy.
Certainly the Uluburun’s cargo contained much that would
please a pirate. The extraordinary workmanship reflected in the
gleaming objects beckoning from behind their safety glass that
afternoon at the museum was a reminder that the powerful dynasties
of the age not only competed for bronze to maintain their military
might but also sought to outdo one another artistically. I found the
artifacts on display compelling: their beauty dispelled any notion
that a nimble mind, a dexterous hand, and an instinct for design
might be recently acquired human attributes. In this era before
money, prestige items of high quality were a mark of social status,
just as now, and indispensable as gifts. But they were also essential in
the payment of bribes and tolls for those seeking access to goods and
raw materials not available at home.
Since Adam Smith we have come to think of a market economy
as driven by personal choice. You like something, and you have the
money—or the credit—and you simply buy it. Not so in the Bronze
Age. The economy of the time was shaped not by individual
consumption but by the exercise of power among ruling families.
These so-called palace economies were hierarchically organized and
rigidly controlled, with all goods and services being the property of
the ruling monarch. Such communities, sometimes thirty or forty
thousand strong, emerged initially in fertile valleys and were built
upon an agricultural surplus: this was then mobilized to administer a
tithe economy, to sustain an army, to indulge the whim of a priestly-
warrior class, and eventually to support a social elite living in luxury.
A successful agricultural village, where the inhabitants worked side
by side, was thus slowly transformed into a hierarchical society.
Maintaining order in such centrally controlled economies and
protecting the wealth accumulated was not easy for the ruling elite.
Natural hazards were always lurking, but ever present too, given the
cunning of men, was the fear of fraud and deceit. To guard against
such risks, the powerful families assembled not only large chariot-
based armies—hence the voracious appetite for bronze—but also
employed their own overseers. These loyal traders and
“ambassadors,” such as the Mycenaean Greeks thought to have
sailed with the Uluburun, were responsible for determining the
value of the goods traded and for ensuring the security of their
exchange.
The value of most commodities was determined by weight. Thus
some 139 weights were salvaged from the Uluburun wreck, most well
used. Some were cast in the shape of animals—a frog, a duck, a
reclining bull, the head of a lion, and even a fly—presumably for
rapid identification. Accuracy mattered: hence seasoned merchants
had to hand a set of weights for the precise measure of valuable
metals such as gold and silver and another for assessing the value of
heavier goods. In the bulk bartering of oils and grains, volume was
widely accepted as a rough measure of weight and thus value. Two
handled amphorae—the tall elegant earthenware jars, miniature
painted versions of which can be found in every tourist town in
Turkey and Greece—were the shipping containers of the day. When
crafted with a conical base they were easily and securely stowed by
pressing them into the sand of the ship’s ballast. Hence amphorae
were used for the sea transport of just about everything, including
wine, olive oil, grains, fish, and even pottery.
 By the late Bronze Age goods were traded over vast distances and
across lands where diverse peoples spoke many languages and
merchants regularly spent months, even years, away from home and
family. Thus the securing of transactions against the risk of fraud was
an ongoing problem. Although the cuneiform inscription of clay
tablets was widely used for accounting and for sending messages
among the elites, most people could neither read nor write. It was the
widespread adoption of “seal” stones, employing the universal
language of pictures, that first sidestepped this problem and helped
reduce the risk in international trading. A “seal” was a carved
cylinder of rock crystal or some other semiprecious stone that served
to identify the bearer: think of it as the forerunner of the
personalized credit card. The seal was carved with symbolic figures
and pictures that were specific to its owner and to his place of
business, such that when the seal was rolled over wet clay or wax, the
resulting set of images created a unique signature. When it became
time to “seal” a business deal—a phrase that remains with us—this
simple tool provided a tangible record of ownership, receipt, or
purchase.
Bronze Age trade was “profitable” when it sustained a political
alliance. Hence the distribution of goods was driven principally by
relationships among families and palaces, not by individuals and
prices. Profit seeking and haggling were reserved for fringe markets
operating in neutral territory, where powerful but hostile empires
could trade through emissaries. These markets also gave an
opportunity for local producers to trade beyond their immediate
social circle. A fringe benefit of this cultural mix of mogul and
market was the flowering of creativity among many professionals and
artisans. The major dynasties competed for the best warriors but also
for the finest builders, physicians, poets and musicians; and for the
most exotic works of art. The result was a far-reaching web of
international trade fostering extraordinary human enterprise.
AND THEN, MOST SUDDENLY, it all came tumbling down. Within a
few short decades, between approximately 1200 and 1150 B.C., the
economies of the eastern Mediterranean feudal states collapsed,
bringing to an end the Hittite, Trojan, and Greek-Mycenaean empires
and severely challenging the stability of Egypt. Exactly what
happened is still a matter of intense debate among scholars. The
ultimate impact, however, is clear: as Robert Drews suggests in his
authoritative study, The End of the Bronze Age, politically and
culturally the collapse was a catastrophe greater than the fall of the
Roman Empire. At the core of the mystery are descriptions of well-
armed attackers who came in from the western Mediterranean, from
the Aegean and beyond, to decimate vital port cities and commercial
centers. In the nineteenth century archaeologists called them the
“Sea People,” and the name has stuck. It is unclear, however, whether
these marauders were the root cause of the collapse or itinerant
pirates plundering the already internally crippled but still rich feudal
empires.
One controversial but intriguing proposal put forward by
Eberhard Zangger, a geologist educated at Stanford University and
now working in Switzerland, suggests that the events leading up to
the Greek-Trojan war and the siege of Troy in approximately 1195
B.C. hold the key to the riddle. Drawing inspiration from
archaeological evidence and the historical narratives of Homer and
Plato—admittedly stories of literary license that were several
hundred years in genesis—Zangger argues that the equilibrium of
political and military power in the western Mediterranean was
shifting in the late Bronze Age.
The growing strength of these dueling Aegean peoples—the
Mycenaean Greeks and the Trojans—was straining the long-
established and previously dominant Hittite empire of Anatolia,
which was also being challenged from the east by Assyria. Under this
pressure and seeking to control their vital source of copper and the
supply routes of grain from Egypt, the Hittites had invaded Cyprus,
further angering their seafaring western neighbors. Troy and its
allies, for their part, had slowly achieved control of the many islands
in the eastern Aegean from which, some suspect, the “Sea People”
may have come. The Trojans also controlled the important maritime
trade route through the Dardanelles to the Black Sea, thus
exacerbating their long-standing conflict with the Mycenaean Greeks
and ultimately leading to the siege of Troy to which Homer gave
poetic immortality.
While, as some believe, changing weather patterns with periodic
drought and the disruption of local crop production may have
worsened the mounting pressures faced by the rulers of these great
trading dynasties—it is well documented that the Hittites had such
problems—in all probability at the root of their sudden collapse was
a commercial interdependency that had outgrown its asset base,
triggering rivalry, mutual suspicion, and increasing dysfunction. The
wealth of the feudal Mediterranean states was built upon the
exploitation of natural resources that were not evenly distributed—
they never are—and it was this disparity that for hundreds of years
had served to drive a thriving trade. At the center of commerce was
the barter of grain to feed the workforce, copper to equip the armies,
and timber to provide energy for smelting and wood for
construction. As these assets dwindled, the struggle to control
resources essential to economic strength and the defense of
established empires promoted protracted hostilities, as exemplified
by the Mycenaean-Trojan wars.
Just as today fossil fuels are central to our conflicts and struggles
—and to our affluence—so was timber essential to the Bronze Age
economy. In the smelting of ore, charcoal makes a hotter fire than
wood, but under average conditions it takes one ton of timber to
produce about four hundred pounds of charcoal. And that was just
the beginning. The working of metal, clay firing for pottery
manufacture, and the construction of ships, dwellings, and palaces
all demanded timber. By the late Bronze Age the appetite for wood
was straining the natural cycle of organic renewal. Egypt had
practically no trees, and the famed cedars of Lebanon had long been
depleted. Thus in all probability, in the decades prior to their
systemic collapse, the great trading nations of the Bronze Age already
were running out of their energy source, having expanded beyond its
natural supply. A complex, interdependent economy founded upon
intense competition among ruling elites had overreached and
become unsustainable.
The final collapse of these early eastern Mediterranean dynasties
came swiftly. As trade and supply lines became disorganized, critical
shortages of food and fuel began to emerge that made it politically
impossible for the rigidly controlled palace economies to adapt. With
commercial opportunity and military resources declining, the feudal
leadership weakened, along with the capability for defense, opening
opportunities for insurrection by those previously suppressed. Thus
among the bands of hungry seagoing predators were those who in
the aftermath of protracted war plundered to secure their own
survival. The economy of the Mediterranean world stumbled out of
balance. Trade disappeared as vital port cities and palaces of fabled
riches were razed and burned: those who survived retreated to the
countryside in an attempt to secure their future amid a simpler,
agriculture-based economy. As Zangger describes it “civilizations
that had been shaped by aristocrats became societies of herdsmen
and shepherds. When the fighting was over, entire languages and
scripts had vanished.” Indeed it would be several centuries before the
Greek city-states, now revered as the cradle of Western civilization,
grew to prominence and regenerated the familiar cycle of trade,
competition, and conflict.

THE LIGHT WAS FAILING and the air distinctly colder as I left the
exhibition and made my way down the steps of the museum and into
Central Park that November afternoon. With the gray warmth of the
day trapped by the growing chill, a mist was forming over the lake and
spreading among the trees. All seemed curiously in order; but with
the Wall Street mayhem still fresh in my mind, I was in a reflective
mood.
Great museums are part of humankind’s collective memory,
places where a multitude of enduring objects conspire in myriad
ways to tell the story of who we are, of how through curiosity, craft,
and conflict we have sought to shape our world. Amid today’s helter-
skelter existence museums offer up thin slices from the great slab of
memory that is human history. For me an appreciation of what has
passed is the prerequisite to understanding the realities of the
present.
Alone with such thoughts, I turned and made my way back
through the park to Fifth Avenue. The pace of the strollers had
quickened. The vendors too were hurrying, eager to pack their stalls
away before evening fell upon them. Here was the modern-day
vestige of the nomadic Bronze Age merchant—those who, with a set
of weights and a seal of identity in hand, had conducted a vibrant
international trade with little more than a precise memory,
craftsmanship skills, and a good supply of intuitive sense: no laptop,
no cell phone, no barcode, not even an abacus. It was a reminder that
for millennia the fabric of commerce has been stitched together by a
human thread: by our abiding passion for barter and exchange.
So how may we better understand the cycles of expansion,
explosion, and collapse that over centuries have dogged that passion?
What explains the giddy boom and bust of modern finance? For me,
as a behavioral scientist, such oscillations in behavior reflect the
gyrations of a dynamic, open system. In 1969 Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
a father of systems theory, was one of the first to propose the idea
that vital systems—of which the human mind and market economies
are prime examples—avoid disorganization and collapse by
maintaining an interactive equilibration with their surroundings
through the consumption of energy. The fundamental feature of
such self-regulating living systems is the capacity to explore and
adapt to prevailing circumstance by choosing among alternatives.
Friedrich August von Hayek, the eminent Austrian economist
who won a Nobel Prize in 1974 and was influenced in his thinking by
Bertalanffy, was fascinated by the concept of a common thread
linking market and mind. In midcareer Hayek published The Sensory
Order, an exploration of the brain as a self-organizing and goal-
directed system that seeks homeostatic equilibrium through the
prioritizing of competitive information. In his later writings, by
extrapolation, Hayek saw the free market as a similar self-correcting
open system. Markets, he believed, are not a political construct but a
natural product of human social interaction.
In any society the central economic problem is how best to
organize production and employ available resources in order to
satisfy the needs and desires of many different people. Allowing
those individual decision makers to respond competitively to freely
determined prices, Hayek argued, was the best way to order widely
scattered information about the wealth of the material world and its
application to need. The resources of labor, capital, and human
ingenuity would thus be appropriately allocated in a manner that
could not be mimicked by a central planner, however brilliant. Hence
while the market is a result of self-interested human action, Hayek
asserted, its self-correction does not result from human intention.
Rather through the actions of numerous individuals who have the
freedom to choose—equivalent in a biological system to, let’s say, the
individual neurons of the brain—a spontaneous order emerges that
has a well-structured, dynamic, and self-correcting social pattern.
Such thinking is resonant with Adam Smith’s much-quoted
market metaphor from two centuries earlier describing homeostatic
balance: the market in an open society behaves as if guided by an
“invisible hand.” In behavior the human mind and free markets are
both natural, extended orders—open, dynamic systems—created by
the interaction of billions of neurons or millions of individuals.
Through the choosing among alternatives to exert individual
preference, the system as a whole moves toward equilibrium: so do
the economist and the neuroscientist find common ground.
The common operating principle of these dynamic systems,
biological and social, is that they are regulated at all levels of
organization by mechanisms—comparable to the brain’s perception-
action cycle described in Chapter 4—that provide continuous
behavioral correction. These control mechanisms are information-
driven feedback loops operating around set points tuned to survival.
Collectively they integrate knowledge about the supply chain of raw
material and its rate of consumption into a life-sustaining dynamic
whole. Simple examples of such feedback loops are setting product
prices in a market system and, in the living brain, sustaining a stable
supply of glucose energy derived from a wide variety of ecological
sources.
The set points around which such systems operate can adapt to a
changing environment—can tune to prevailing circumstances—but
ultimately the system’s vital equilibrium will be compromised if
driven to extreme. Thus privation of available resources (as
illustrated by dwindling timber supplies in the Late Bronze Age) or
maximization (as reflected today in an abundance of high-calorie
foods) can distort or disable essential regulatory mechanisms. This
disturbs the system’s capacity to sustain its balance. It is an illusion
therefore to think of dynamic systems—markets or brains—as
infinitely adaptive. Consistent and objective feedback of information
is essential not only to growth and resilience but also to exercising
healthy constraint. Without such regulatory feedback instability of
function emerges that if not corrected will lead to collapse.
The economic system of Bronze Age society, viewed within this
dynamic context, was clearly brittle in its capacity to adapt to change.
While opportunity and risk, as in today’s world, were the equation
around which the economic system operated and sought balance,
natural resources were limited and the fear of conflict ever present.
These were the variables constraining economic development. The
drivers of commercial growth were the instinctual behaviors of greed,
self-interest, and fascination for novelty (as I described in the earlier
chapters), but each was distilled now through the acquisitive
appetites of a handful of powerful, intensely competitive ruling
families. Merchants benefited from the security of the regional
monopolies granted to them by the elites, and in return they were
expected to secure the sources of raw materials and exclusive
markets essential to prestige and maintaining dominance. But these
feudal city-states, which were rarely self-sustaining, rigidly
controlled the production and distribution of all staples and luxury
crafts. When resources were abundant, the elites overseeing these
palace economies achieved a precarious social balance with other
powerful families through gifting and barter. During uncertain
economic times without the benefit of accurate, timely
communication, the essential element of trust quickly decayed, to be
replaced by fear and paranoia, spurring aggression, conflict, and
ultimately system-wide collapse.
In biology a disturbance of regulatory feedback is similarly a
prescription for self-destruction, as is confirmed by the uncontrolled
growth of cancer or the self-destructive chaos of mania or anorexia
nervosa. This also pertains to the modern-day “self-regulating free
market,” which is not free in the generally accepted sense of the
word. As Adam Smith postulated, an idealized small market does
produce its own rational order, founded as it is on feedback loops of
self-interested exchange. Extended capital markets too must operate
within established regulatory safeguards if they are to remain in
dynamic equilibrium. What is evident from the study of the cell
turned cancerous is equally true for the market system that falters
through fear or is overwhelmed by greed: regulation matters.

****

SO WHAT EXPLAINS the Great Financial Crash of 2008, given that

American business long ago embraced the theory and dynamic
principles of Adam Smith’s self-regulating free-market ideology?
What went wrong? From the sociological perspective, the answer is a
simple one; as John Komlos, professor emeritus of economics at the
University of Munich, has observed, “we are no longer living in
Adam Smith’s village economy.” The cultural and physical
contingencies, he argues, that regulate modern-day markets—despite
being tempered by central banks and antimonopoly legislation—are
dramatically different from those of Smith’s time, which “presumed a
dominant (self-regulatory) morality that no longer is valid.”
The modern banking industry offers an example of this loss of
“moral tuning” and self-correction. Today’s financial markets are
principally controlled by an oligarch of powerful international
institutions that have become profoundly influenced in their
behavior by the myopic pursuit of short-term profit. This pursuit has
been aided further by a willful disruption of the social mechanisms
designed to provide regulatory feedback and the increasingly
abstract nature of money.
In today’s world, money and finance have replaced the Bronze
Age “gifting” of tangible assets as the principal regulators of
economic activity. Operating a market economy on the basis of
barter is cumbersome: essentially you must first find the person who
has what you want and hope that they will want what you have.
Beyond the village such effort becomes tedious, as the Bronze Age
merchant knew only too well. Some agreed-upon and regulated
system of exchange therefore becomes essential. Thus the ancient
trader’s insignia sealed on clay may be considered the forerunner of
both “money” and credit—a promissory token to be exchanged later
for the goods received or delivered. Over subsequent centuries gold
and silver evolved as an intermediary method of exchange,
simplifying accounting and later functioning as a reserve of value, to
greatly increase the efficiency of markets.
For any market to find equilibrium and operate efficiently,
however, trust among individuals must remain at the core of the
exchange, as in the village economy. Money extends that trust,
inferring that as in a “gentleman’s agreement,” its face value will be
honored. In the modern economy banks in their simple form are
designed to mediate that trust; those depositing their savings in the
bank make it possible for credit to be extended to others. Savers
receive a financial return on their investment while, within certain
limits, still being able to draw upon their funds when needed. Once
upon a time—indeed, within my own living memory—such local
banking was conducted on a handshake. If, as a trusted community
member, you needed a loan for a car, the first step was to consult the
bank manager. In concept the social purpose of today’s financial
industry is comparable: to allocate the savings of American families
to their reliable and most productive use.
But that ethos has changed, and banking has changed with it.
Now the major international banks are increasingly focused, as their
primary mission, upon speculative investment as a source of
increased profit for managers and shareholders rather than upon
customer service. Furthermore, for the average American in the
electronic age, money as a tangible asset is fast becoming invisible,
reduced now to a string of numbers that provide a record of the pay
we receive, the expenses we incur, and the money we owe. In
everyday experience the exchange of silver and gold is no longer
associated with money. Even paper money is disappearing, replaced
increasingly by plastic cards of credit and perhaps, in the near future,
by virtual “bit” money. And yet this abstract concept of “money” has
become ever more central to our lives and tightly equated with “the
market.” The gyrations of abstract-seeming financial markets and the
banking industry are now the world’s metric of economic health. It is
the oscillation of a set of numbers on a computer screen that makes
us rich or poor.
Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit, warned against such abstraction:
“The moment that barter is replaced by indirect exchange mediated
by money, ready intelligibility ceases.” The Greek city-states at the
beginning of the sixth century B.C., arising as a phoenix from the
dark centuries that followed the Bronze Age collapse, were the first to
use money in our contemporary, abstract sense. Most important, as
the Greeks discovered, with money comes a new form of power.
Reciprocity; the sharing of possessions; kinship; ritual; complex
negotiation—with sufficient money such concerns are no longer
primary. It is not trustworthy interpersonal relationships but the
possession of money that determines social dominance, making
possible a predatory power where money alone can satisfy needs and
slake all desires. While it is possible to have too much to eat, too
much to drink, and even too much sex, in the abstract one can never
have enough money. The old instinctual regulatory feedback loops
no longer pertain. Although in mythology the fable of King Midas
decries the appetite for gold and riches as moral travesty, in reality
few individuals in today’s abstract, credit-driven world seek to limit
their acquisition of “money” and its promise of material pleasure.

IN RETROSPECT THERE is a consensus that easy credit, excessive

borrowing, and the complex bundling of home loans helped spur the
U.S. housing bubble and fuel the subprime mortgage crisis that led to
the global fiscal seizure of 2008. Economists give the quaint name
moral hazard to such jeopardy, and yet the story began innocently
enough a decade earlier when a group of young entrepreneurs at JP
Morgan Chase dreamed up a new way to increase their trading profit.
Faced with a global savings glut and low interest rates in the closing
decade of the twentieth century, pension funds and other
endowments were demanding safe, higher-yield investments.
Similarly the big international banks were exploring innovative ways
of managing risk by bundling loans into portfolios that were then
credit-financed and sold on as individual units, thus reducing the
amount of bank capital needed to cover potential defaults.
By the late 1990s, as the excitement of the dot.com boom declined
and with the ongoing liberalization of banking laws, federal
regulators accepted the concept of creating such “credit derivatives.”
The finance industry, including insurance giants such as AIG,
responded with enthusiasm. At first all was well since the portfolios
were constructed largely from the assets of companies with proven
track records. As the opportunities for short-term profit were
recognized, however, there was a hunger for more. Soon home
mortgages, which were in plentiful supply, were being added to the
pot. A herd mentality quickly took hold, and within a decade the
derivatives market had exploded to $12 trillion. But problems were
emerging. The securities were complex and difficult to understand,
even for those selling them, and risk was virtually impossible to
accurately assess. Because the income of the hustlers was tied to the
units sold, however, this detail was largely ignored: credit derivatives,
mortgage-backed securities, swaps, and other mysterious financial
instruments were packaged and repackaged and were soon being
offered across a growing global market, creating unknown trillions in
imaginary wealth.
The poor investment quality of these mortgage-backed securities
was apparently of little concern to the banks selling them, focused as
they were on short-term profit. Research from the University of
Chicago business school, using data collected by government
agencies from three thousand zip-code districts, suggested that the
explosion of mortgage growth was tied to easy credit being offered,
particularly to those individuals least able to afford it. Districts where
households frequently had been rejected for home mortgages prior
to 1996 had the highest rate of approval in the boom years between
2001 and 2005. These districts, which were identified as “high latent
demand” zip codes, were also regions of declining income and poor
employment growth during those same years. In other words, the
standard of risk being applied to loan evaluation was so far reduced
that it became probable that with a downturn in the economy many
individuals would default on their loans.
Fundamentally, for the capitalist enterprise to grow, it must
partner with individuals and harness their desire to invest, buy, or
borrow as a source of new finance. Traditionally, even before the
Industrial Revolution, economic growth was driven by capital
accumulation and investment. With the invention of the modern
consumer society, however, indebtedness through easy credit has
become an accepted vehicle for financial partnership, especially in
the United States. In fact, the “debt economy,” based on an
assumption of continuous growth, is an American invention. After
the Second World War, through the Bretton Woods International
Monetary Agreement of 1944, the U.S. dollar assumed a unique
position in international trade, with the major world currencies
being tied to its value, which in turn was linked to gold. When
Richard Nixon severed this link between gold and the dollar in 1971,
the world’s circulating money supply grew rapidly, fostering easier
credit and an exponential increase in borrowing. In many rich
countries and particularly in the United States, in addition to
government spending private debt was encouraged. The government
gave tax breaks on home mortgages and on corporate borrowing,
making debt acceptable both as a means of driving market growth
and as something desirable, creating in tandem a new economic
paradigm.
The explosion of credit in the American economy—by 2007 debt
had exceeded $50 trillion—not only fostered the housing bubble but
also changed our habits. It distorted self-regulation, diminishing
prudent behavior at all levels of the market, to create a destabilizing
positive feedback loop, as diagrammed in Figure 5.1. The ancient
chain of survival behaviors—the perception of opportunity, risk
assessment, and chosen action followed by the feedback cycle of
reward or punishment—had been compromised by the promotion of
an illusion of continuous economic growth and the cultural
encouragement of myopic, short-term profit taking.
Perhaps for the first time in human history, it was the possibility
of reward rather than of punishment that dominated in the calculus
of risk. In distorting the objective evaluation of risk, easy credit
provides a false sense of security about the future. It retunes the
brain. In addition it feeds our preference for immediate reward—just
as the caramel cheesecake served my short-term pleasure and made
me ignore my long-term goal of maintaining a healthy body weight.
Through using credit we can receive today what we otherwise would
have to postpone until tomorrow, if even then. The debt incurred,
however, also mortgages our future. Easy credit systems, therefore,
can lead to spendthrift behaviors as when we avoid the fine print on
the credit card agreement and fail to notice that debt incurs a 30
percent interest rate. In neurobehavioral terms, easy credit builds
intuitive habits that hijack the brain’s perception-action cycle.
 Figure 5.1: Risk, debt, and the perception-action cycle: Easy credit, tolerance of debt,
and a focus on short-term financial gain distort the natural balance of risk and reward
that is integral to the brain’s perception-action cycle. In the language of dynamic
systems, it fosters a positive feedback loop that is unsustainable, leading ultimately to
implosion and systemic collapse. The 2008 fiscal crisis is an example of such implosion.

In rational moments most of us agree that mortgaging the future

to excessive debt is not prudent behavior. In the run-up to the 2008
fiscal crisis, however, homeowners, investors, the banks, and the
government were essentially doing just that, all accumulating debt
until as a nation the United States was awash in a tsunami of credit.
Greed became rampant as speculative investments and the mortgage-
backed securities bubble grew ever larger. In parallel the leaders of
America’s banking industry emerged as an oligarchy, not dissimilar
in their economic power to the ruling elites of the Bronze Age. This
dominance was reflected—as Deepak Lal, the James S. Coleman
Professor Emeritus of International Studies at UCLA, has observed
—in the finance industry’s changing share of U.S. corporate profits.
Between 1973 and 1985 it had oscillated around 16 percent, but in the
run-up to the global financial seizure it reached 41 percent. Over this
same period an increasing proportion of the profits from these
speculative investments were finding their way into the pockets of
the managers of banks and those directing the insurance and credit-
rating industries.
With a focus on maximizing immediate return, compensation in
America’s finance industry exploded until in 2007 the average
banker’s paycheck was 181 percent of the average executive pay in
comparable private corporations. In a typical scenario, when the
annual profits of a bank were divided, half of that profit was paid out
to the bankers themselves. With everything to gain and little
downside to risk, both intuitive and rational self-monitoring was in
retreat, and Adam Smith’s impartial spectator became an anecdote of
history. Greed and unbridled ambition had co-opted reason.
Justification of the extravagant compensation packages followed a
familiar refrain: driven by the market, substantial bonuses were
needed to retain the best minds. But such profligacy had public
consequences. In Britain in December 2009 the Bank of England
pronounced that “if discretionary distributions [for which read
bonuses] had been 20 percent lower per year between 2000 and 2008,
the major British banks would have generated around 75 billion
pounds of additional capital—more than what was required from the
public sector during the crisis.”
With hindsight the facts are simple. Beginning in the 1980s,
America as a nation largely abandoned any social constraint of its
banking industry, and many other rich countries followed. The
traditional divisions between commercial and investment banks were
removed, and high-risk “casino” banking became commonplace in
both the United States and Europe. Beyond the obvious appeal of
such speculation to our ancient instinctual cravings, in the run-up to
the subprime housing debacle other perverse incentives were also
operating. Derivative financing by the banks, for example, was highly
leveraged, being derived principally from public offerings. With little
of their institutional assets at risk, this further diminished any sense
of personal jeopardy, both for individual bankers and for insurance
agencies such as AIG. In consequence, as the tide of speculative
investments rose, the value of the derivatives sold was no longer
grounded in marketable assets.
 Indeed, in the wake of the debacle the debts of the major private
banks involved were moved swiftly to the public ledger out of fear
that their collapse might bring the world’s financial systems down
with them. Not only were the banks “too big to fail,” but their leaders
were “too big to jail.” Therefore, apart from Lehman, most of the
senior managers of the “megabanks” escaped virtually unscathed
from the crisis, thanks to government rescue. This lack of negative
feedback—specifically the fear of potential punishment for the
choices made—violates a fundamental premise of the corrective
action necessary to promote behavioral adjustment in any dynamic
system. Despite greed and unparalleled risk-taking the oligarchy
involved in the financial crash came away essentially unharmed.

IN CONTRAST, FOR THE MAJORITY of Americans the financial crisis

was of great impact. It is clear in retrospect that growing social
inequality, which only worsened following the 2008 collapse, was also
driving the instability of America’s financial system. In the post–
World War II years between 1952 and the 1980s the richest 1 percent of
American households earned approximately 10 percent of the
national income. By 2007, in contrast, 23.5 percent of America’s
earnings were flowing to the top 1 percent. Such disparities had not
been seen since the 1920s, just prior to the Great Depression.
Patterns of spending across America suggest that this social
disparity was playing a significant role in the ballooning of debt. For
those living at the economic margin, freeing up credit eases many
difficulties—for the short term—and acts as a temporary means to
promote economic growth. Debt-fueled spending on luxury goods
and services by poorer households—what The Economist has labeled
“trickle-down” consumption—in the years prior to the 2008 crisis
had been driven, in part, by efforts to match the profligate habits of
the celebrity rich. Raghuram Rajan, of the University of Chicago
Booth School of Business, proposes in his book Fault Lines that it
was hence a combination of social inequality and the easing of credit
restrictions that helped prime the financial crisis.
 Although the average citizen may find it hard to identify the
social deficiencies that enabled the banking oligarchs to run away
with millions of dollars, many of the perverse incentives that drove
the bankers’ actions have been similarly shaping the behavior of all
of us. While it gives satisfaction to pillory Wall Street and the
international financiers as the villains of the 2008 madness, they are
minor actors when it comes to the larger narrative—a drama of
imprudent habit, debt, and self-deception in which we each played
our part. In the famous words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo cartoon strip, “We
have met the enemy and he is us.” The conflict is within our own
heads; projecting it onto others is an effort at self-solace. Reflecting
upon our own behavior, it is we—in our myopic quest for more—
who collectively drove the credit bubbles and helped make possible
the bankers’ acquisition of their millions. As active agents in
promoting the growth and ultimate overreach of the consumer
society, we must assume our share of the responsibility for its
financial stumbling.
We may argue, of course, that there were extenuating
circumstances. During the last twenty-five years of the twentieth
century the American economy was in recession only 5 percent of
the time, compared to 22 percent of the previous quarter-century.
Reflexively such long periods of uninterrupted expansion foster a
mood of complacency. In our intuitive habits, especially those who
grew up in that era, we began to assume that the good times would
never end. We learned to be thoughtless, falling into the sin of
extrapolation—that the future will be like the immediate past. But
what we failed to acknowledge was that in America’s case a
substantial proportion of that economic growth had been built on
debt that eventually would have to be repaid. Before 1985 American
consumers saved on average about 9 percent of their disposable
income, but by 2005 the comparable savings rate was zero as
mortgage, credit card, and other consumer debt rose to 127 percent of
disposable income. With Uncle Sam similarly awash in red ink, in
our desire for more we have transformed America from the world’s
bank to a debtor nation.
 Ours was a Faustian bargain. In the last three decades, aided and
abetted by the enticements of consumerism, we have been busily
retuning our neural architecture. From the perspective of behavioral
neurobiology, in cahoots with the pleasures of consumption we have
disrupted the brain’s perception-action cycle, resetting the intuitive balance
between the hedonistic ventromedial cortex and the constraining
ventrolateral cortex, thus disrupting the autopilots of the brain’s
internal market. Passion has prevailed over reason: we have created a
bubble-promoting positive feedback loop, favoring short-term self-
interest over the longer-term advantages of prudent self-constraint.

ADAM SMITH BELIEVED that it is the influence of society that

transforms people into independent, moral beings. In Smith’s mind
the process was far from passive, as I explained in Chapter 3; rather it
emerges from lifelong social interaction. Thus, ask who is responsible
for moral development, and there is no single answer because it is a
collective liability. Nor is the shaping of moral sensitivity haphazard;
rather it is founded in objective self-awareness, a quality of mind that
we accrue through the careful study of others—by first imagining
ourselves to be in another’s shoes and then learning from that
experience by comparing the subjective sentiments evoked with the
actions that we observe.
In this way moral concern develops through social exchange. The
process is an iterative one. Ideally, over time one becomes one’s own
best critic, creating in the mind an intuitive capacity to monitor
personal thoughts and actions and to learn from that monitoring,
essentially viewing one’s own behavior from the perspective of an
outsider. You will recall that Smith personified this intuitive facility
as the “impartial spectator,” an entity that helps moderate the
perennial struggle between passion and reason. Think of the
“spectator” as a friendly moderator, working to achieve harmony or,
in Smith’s words, to establish the foundational virtues “of self-
denial, of self-government, of that command which subjects all the
movements of our nature to what our own dignity, honour, and the
propriety of our own conduct, require.”
The collective noun for these basic virtues is character—a sense of
self-direction, an acceptance of personal responsibility, and the
ability to regulate one’s own emotions, especially to defer immediate
gratification in favor of future goals. Character is built, not born.
Ironically, however, just when we need it most—given the character-
draining temptations of the consumer society—discussion of how
“good” character is built is an unfashionable subject, largely ignored
in today’s public debate.
This is regrettable, for the prosocial virtues of individual
character, consistently expressed, underpin the culture of mutual
trust that is essential to civil society. Trust is the sentiment that arises
in a community when honest and cooperative behavior is the regular
and shared norm. The human drive for attachment—Smith’s social
sympathy—and the competitive social behaviors exercised in market
exchange are two sides of the same coin. When individuals
habitually work together in a free society, the integration of these
two fundamental social behaviors—the pursuit of meaningful
fellowship and the search for improved economic circumstance—
become the coinage of success. It is through such interaction that a
stable social order is ensured, together with a market society that
serves both individual initiative and the common good. The lesson is
that markets cannot be divorced from the culture that sustains them:
societies enjoying high trust develop strong social capital and
prosperous economies.
But the reverse is also true. As trust declines, the social glue
erodes. And in the aftermath of the 2008 global debacle, trust was at
low ebb. When for several weeks the international financial system
was frozen in fear, it was a crisis driven by a loss of basic trust among
investors, bankers, governments, and the average citizen.
Subsequently the trust barometer continued its fall as a seemingly
endless list of improprieties emerged: the British members of
Parliament were fiddling their expenses; some elected leaders in the
United States were driving their municipalities toward bankruptcy
with the promise of overly generous pensions; federal agencies were
seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from major
financial institutions, both in the United States and abroad, for their
part in the subprime scandal; and then in the summer of 2012 came
definitive evidence of attempts by major banks to manipulate
LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, which sets the short-
term costs of bank borrowing.
This unfolding story not only calls into question the integrity of
the financial and government institutions involved but also the
moral and ethical character of those in leadership positions. Even
more relevant is that it emphasizes, as I have highlighted in these first
chapters, the value of understanding how the human brain works.
From the perspective of behavioral neuroscience, the 2008 financial
collapse was predictable: fostering individualistic, short-term,
reward-driven, and debt-fueled consumption breeds risk-taking and
addictive behavior. An ethos of unbridled self-interest, gambling,
and casual dishonesty had given birth to greed and fraud in high
places, calling into question whether the market model we now
pursue is in itself destructive of trust, character development, and
cultural balance.
Calls to regulate international finance came thick and fast after
the meltdown, and certainly they are needed. But one doubts
whether, alone, such externally imposed regulations will be enough:
regulators cannot oversee the millions of transactions that go on in
the world, let alone monitor the ethics of those who promote and
oversee them. No, unfashionable though it may be, it is time—in
these days of technical abstraction, time starvation, personal stress,
and family fragmentation—to return to an investigation of how
“good character” may be built and to the social institutions that best
foster that vital construction.
This is my focus in Part II.
Part II
PROLOGUE

How to Live?

THE GREEKS CALLED IT ataraxia, the state of being unperturbed,

of tranquillity and peace of mind. For Epicurus it was the foundation
of eudaimonia, the joy of human flourishing. Two thousand years on,
Adam Smith was in agreement. Smith considered happiness to be
born of tranquillity and enjoyment—the fruit of a well-tuned brain.
But human beings are not given to serenity. Tranquillity does
not come naturally to the human mind: ataraxia is a highly
cultivated state achieved through hard work and the self-discipline
that we call character. Such tuning arises from awareness of the
true nature of the world and an understanding of the limitations of
our being. To achieve such self-command, we must first accept
ourselves for who we are: instinctually driven, curious, self-
interested, focused on the short-term, and ruled by habit. These
core human attributes are tempered by extraordinary powers of
reason—of perception, analysis, imagination, and choice. But we are
also deeply social beings with a need for fellowship. The challenge
of a life well lived is to meld these selves together in harmony,
blending reason and passion to promote individual wellbeing and a
sustainable human future.
 Ours are privileged but confusing times. Nothing is more
antithetical to the cultivation of ataraxia than the narrative of a
debt-fueled consumer society, which in its promotion of material
gluttony and creeping inequality flirts with self-destruction. But
how do we dig out from under this seductive avalanche? Adam
Smith considered three cardinal human values—fairness,
benevolence, and prudence—to underpin a stable social order.
These elements of character are grounded in the bonds of infancy
and crafted over a lifetime. It is through their nurturance and
promotion that social fellowship is exercised. Future thriving, as an
individual and in the social realm, is a matter of conscious choice
and shared responsibility. Healthy children flourish in healthy
families, healthy schools, and healthy communities. Collectively we
prosper in habitats that are designed with humans in mind, and
through markets that foster opportunity and choice. The mix for a
vibrant human future has not changed, as I explain in these next
chapters.
Chapter 6

Love:
Weaving the Web of Trust
Mary had a little lamb,
Whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.

Sarah Josepha Hale (1830)

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are

evidently some principles in his nature, which interest
him in the fortunes of others, and render their
happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing
from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

FOR THE VERMONT SHEEP FARMER the final weeks of winter blend
hope and insecurity. The sun is stronger and higher, but the nights
remain intensely frigid. Despite sunny days the northwest wind can
still knife its way into the bone, even through the warmest parka.
The Easter moon, cresting in late March, promises the coming of
spring but casts its silvered light across frozen pastures. And it’s
there on a clear night that you can see them, in ghostly silhouette.
Out of the woods, and dancing to a mating chorus of howls, yelps,
and falsetto yips, they circle ever closer. It’s lambing season, and after
lean winter months the coyotes are hungry.
During those waning, chilly weeks before springtime the
potential of a coyote raid is just one of the concerns that keeps my
daughter among her sheep on many nights during lambing. Helen
started her flock of sixty or so purebred Icelandic sheep a few years
before her own daughter was born. Indeed Wren, whose birthday is
in February, spent her first lambing season peeking out from a pouch
worn underneath her mother’s down parka, getting a close-up view
of the births and feedings. Every spring since then—Wren is now five
—she has followed Helen around the barn, tending to the newborns,
absorbing the social habits of their mothers, and occasionally being
knocked sideways by a head butt from a ewe who thinks she’s
someone else’s lamb.
The sheep and their ways fascinate Wren. In the warmth of the
house, after barn chores are complete and supper is over, her regular
bedtime request is “more stories about the sheep.” Wren’s favorite is
about Russett, the old ewe with craggy horns and a tarnished copper
fleece. Russett is a baby snatcher; her maternal instinct is so strong
that each year, before she has delivered her own, she tries to steal
lambs from the other mothers. Initially after Russett joined the herd,
Helen was unaware of her tricks. So one morning when she found
Russett with a white ram and Shy, another young mother, with one
white ewe, she presumed that both sheep had delivered single lambs
overnight.
Icelandic sheep are vigorous creatures. After fourteen hundred
years of evolution in the Spartan hills of Iceland, the newborn will
begin nursing within a few minutes of taking breath. In response
ewes “nicker” constantly to their offspring and rapidly know the
infant by its smell and voice. Thus, mother and lamb are bonded
within moments of birth. So seemed to be the case of Russett and
Shy, with both babies nursing well and sticking close to their
mothers. Clearly, thought Helen, the lambs were bonding normally.
So, as Wren’s favorite story goes, all was well until four days later,
when Russett gave birth to her own twins. It was a particularly cold
night, and the new lambs would have needed milk rapidly after
arrival. But Russett’s adopted white ram was already much bigger
and stronger than the newly born twins and was drinking a lot of her
milk. So by the time Helen got to the barn on her routine visit, an
hour or so after the birth, the newborns were chilled and weak, with
tongues so cold that they were unable to suckle. Taking the lambs
back to the farmhouse, Helen bundled them in a box next to the
woodstove and fed them with a stomach tube every hour for the
remainder of the night; one lived and the other died. The one that
survived was Ruby, the farm’s first bottle baby. She lived in the
kitchen for a week and tottered around with Wren, who had just
turned one at the time and was learning to walk.
“Tell me more,” Wren always asks eagerly at this part of the story,
adding sternly after a pause, “you shouldn’t steal someone else’s
babies.” And so her mother proceeds: Helen was now wise to
Russett’s game, and for the next couple of years all was well. Then
just as it seemed that Russett had given up her old habit, the baby
snatching was back. A young yearling named Juno gave birth to
twins, and before Juno knew what was up, Russett had convinced
one of them that she was its mother. Helen, no longer fooled,
separated Russett, but returning the baby to Juno was no easy task.
With the lamb removed, Russett became totally distraught,
throwing herself repeatedly against the wall of her pen, while Juno, a
flighty and confused first-time mother, wasn’t comfortable nursing a
rescued offspring that smelled like another’s child. And so, as it must
be in farming practice, Helen explains to Wren how she returned the
little rejected soul to Russett, hoping that when Russett’s own lambs
arrived, she would manage to nurse them all, which fortunately she
did.
Wren sighs with satisfaction. “But that Russett is bad,” she
comments, offering some moral closure to the tale. “Babies need their
real mummies if the bad wolf comes.” For Wren the sheep stories are
reality-based precautionary tales—much as were the stories of the
Brothers Grimm for children two centuries earlier—for vulnerable
lambs indeed do fall victim to coyote raids. Perhaps that is why Wren
—as an expression of nascent maternal instinct, or out of her own
anxieties—will take my hand when walking among the sheep in
springtime so that together we may ensure that all the lambs know
their mothers and that no one is crying or lost. As the little shepherd
to her flock, Wren already understands the importance of emotional
attachment and social order.
So it was that when Wren was aged three, Ruby, the lamb she had
helped rescue and raise, had her own baby lamb. Much to her
parents’ surprise, Wren was beside herself. Helen couldn’t figure out
what was troubling her daughter until Wren explained through her
sobs that Ruby was her “little sister,” and now with her own baby to
feed things could never be the same. It was a poignant moment in a
young girl’s evolving sense of love and loss. But so too does Wren’s
distress illustrate how attuned we are, even at a tender age, to the
complexities of a social world that is unique to our species.

THE RAPID ATTACHMENT of a lamb to its mother in the late days of

a cold Vermont winter is driven by mammalian instinct, behavior
essential to the lamb’s survival while waiting for the sun-filled,
playful days of spring. The bond is formed immediately, triggered by
the smell and warmth of the mother, for without it the newborn’s
death is certain within hours. Carried within the phyletic memory of
our species, human beings share this mammalian instinct for
parental-infant bonding. From a broad range of studies we now
recognize that the attachments that Wren witnessed and nurtured in
the sheep herd are driven by the same neuronal chemistry as in
ourselves. That which bonds ewe to lamb similarly bonds Helen to
Wren. The chemistry of this bonding is the chemistry of love.
As I shall explore, this same elixir primes the development of
trust and the social bonds essential to building character and
community. Contrary to the competitive images conjured by
Madison Avenue, in a healthy society personal fulfillment is founded
not simply on shopping and self-interest but also on cooperation and
caring. Indeed, a unique capacity for caring and mutual trust is the
hallmark of the evolution of our social behavior as a species and of our
development as individuals. It is in our own self-interest, through better
understanding of others, to promote the flourishing of such
affiliation. How we navigate our early experiences with love and loss
shapes the intuitive self-knowledge that drives much of our social
interaction as adults. In turn, it is the collective expression of such
social sentiment that provides stability to our cultural institution—
infusing meaning into the stories we tell through literature, art,
music, and theater—and sustaining the social webs that provide
many of life’s most valuable rewards.
How, in infancy and early childhood, these interactive social webs
are woven is the focus of this chapter; and why and how, in the
school years, they form the essential lattice upon which learning and
character are built, is my subject in the next. That we understand and
foster a healthy maturational process is vital to our well-being, and
thus the discussion across the two chapters is intimately entwined.
But also there arises a fundamental question as we look ahead: do we
have the collective and political will to nurture and promote the self-
command essential to a sustainable human future?
Let me begin with sexual bonding. What does science tell us
about this elixir of love? Interestingly human beings are among the 3
to 5 percent of mammals that ever practice monogamy, be that
through serial attachment or by selectively mating with a single life
partner. Of those species that have been studied, which team up in
stable pairs and share the responsibility of raising their offspring, it is
the prairie vole—a small rodent that inhabits the grasslands of North
America—that is most celebrated. Like humans these little creatures
have a complicated social organization, and we have learned much
from them about the genetics and chemistry of the attachment bond.
This is because in mating behavior prairie voles are truly steadfast,
usually taking only one partner in a lifetime. Their mountain
cousins, on the other hand, are promiscuous.
What explains such dramatic differences in attachment behavior?
you may ask. It is a question that has long fascinated Larry Young, a
neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at Emory University. As a
graduate student in Texas, Young studied the molecular mechanisms
underpinning variation in the sexual behavior of lizards, before
moving on to Emory where he worked with Thomas Insel, now the
director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington,
D.C. Building on Insel’s pioneering work, Young has discovered
some intriguing differences between the mountain and prairie voles.
To put it simply, summarizing many years of research, in contrast to
its Casanova cousin the faithful prairie vole has many more receptors
for oxytocin and vasopressin—the hormones of attachment and
affiliation—in the brain regions that are most critical to reward and
reinforcement.
These “love” hormones of oxytocin and vasopressin are released
when prairie voles have sex. Simultaneously there is a comparable
rise of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, the reward center of the
brain and an integral part of the basal ganglia where habits are
constructed. In other words, in the prairie vole’s brain the reward
centers of sex and attachment are interwoven. After the first intense
sexual encounter, which can last for several hours, monogamy
becomes driven by conditioned habit that in its repetition continues
to make the prairie couple feel good. In human terms, the little
creatures “fall in love.” However, when the prairie vole’s “love”
receptors are chemically blocked, as Young has done in his
experiments, and oxytocin and vasopressin hormones are unable to
attach to their respective binding sites, the bond between the prairie
partners fails to develop. In its behavior the prairie vole then
becomes a mountain vole.
So was Russett’s thievery, which so disturbed my granddaughter,
driven by a mutant combination of “love” receptor chemistry and
reward? It’s a possibility. We know that in sheep oxytocin has a major
role in mother infant-bonding and that smell, as any sheep farmer
will tell you, also plays an integral part in the process. It was for this
reason, of course, that Juno did not accept her own lamb after Helen
returned it to her. After being suckled by Russett, the infant just did
not smell “right.” And smell is pertinent not only to prairie voles and
sheep but also to us. There’s plenty of evidence that smell and close
attachment are intimately intertwined in human bonding, including
between father and child. There is also considerable variation in the
human vasopressin gene among individuals, which may help explain
why some of us are more consistent and content in our relationships
than are others. Nor, reciprocally, is Wren’s attachment to the lamb
she had nurtured unusual: human infants as young as eighteen
months will show concern for others and will provide comfort to
those who are crying and in distress.

IT IS FROM THIS FUSION of evolved biology and propensity for

mutual caring—phyletic memory forged initially in the crucible of
survival and tempered later by the experience of reward and
reprimand—that human beings crafted the most complex social
order of any creature on this planet. In achieving this evolution it has
helped that the human infant is a magnet for the attention of others,
just as is the frisking lamb in spring. Even Charles Darwin, who
seems to have been a rather shy and retiring man, was fascinated by
the smiles and babbling of young children. Indeed in 1872 he wrote
The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, which is not as famous
as On the Origin of Species but equally important for any reader
interested in social communication. We have all seen it: grown men
bending over a baby carriage, grimacing, and speaking in high-pitched
coos and musical syllables. While babies may seem utterly helpless,
they have an enormous ability to change the behavior of those
around them.
Sarah Hrdy, a professor of anthropology at the University of
California, Davis, suggests in Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary
Origins of Mutual Understanding that it is precisely this ability of
human infants to engage persons other than their biological mother
that sets us apart from the great apes and that builds the platform for
our extraordinary gift of social interaction. She points out—based
on the studies of still-existing foraging tribes in central Africa—that
before the invention of towns and cities, babies spent over half their
time with individuals other than their natural parents. Hrdy believes
that it is precisely because the human infant is so vulnerable, and for
so long, that humankind is uniquely collaborative. Our social success
has its origin in the strategy of “cooperative breeding,” where the
responsibility for nurturing the young was a collective one, simply
because it was necessary.
In all likelihood our forebears lived largely in isolated bands of
extended kinship. In tough times survival depended more upon
collaboration and a healthy web of social relationships than on any
one individual’s heroic success in combat or the hunt. Peaceful
interaction with others enhanced self-preservation and supported
the successful rearing of children, to common advantage. Starvation
was the stark alternative to this reciprocal caring. Thus the working
mother is not a recent invention: indeed, the evidence is that under
demanding circumstances fathers too became caregivers.
The early challenges to human survival were the deprivations of
habitat and an uncertain food supply. Hrdy suggests that intergroup
aggression was probably rare in hunter-gatherers, both in our own
hominid species, Homo sapiens, and in Homo erectus before us. In part
this was because until recently there were relatively few of us on the
face of the Earth. Homo erectus marched out of Africa many hundreds
of thousands of years ago—these particular progenitors were around
for about 1.6 million years before becoming extinct—and yet the
archeological evidence of their presence is sparse. So why, asks Hrdy,
since we were so few in number, would any tribe fight with a
potentially competitive group when moving a few kilometers could
secure an alternative hunting ground?
Support for this live-and-let-live proposition comes from the
extensive studies of Polly Wiessner, a distinguished cultural
anthropologist who has worked among the !Kung and other Kalahari
Bushmen for over three decades. The Bushmen, sometimes called
the San, are the indigenous peoples of southern Africa, having lived
in the same semiarid desert region for some eighty thousand years.
Weissner reports that among the Bushmen people the cultural norm
in sustaining extended kinships is a system of gift giving,
storytelling, and visiting—a social technology similar in function to
the “gifting” economy among the wealthy dynasties of the Bronze
Age that I described in Chapter 5. Fighting among kinships to secure
survival is less common than fighting for a preferred sexual partner.
In many groups the social convention of arranged marriage
discourages even this behavior, recognizing that such self-seeking
competition siphons off energy better spent on the foraging and
hunting that sustains the viability of the group as a whole.
The necessity of maintaining a stable social order, therefore,
appears to be rooted in the extended vulnerability of the human
infant. Gift giving creates long-standing ties and a network of
socially interdependent partnerships that are supportive of children.
From these bonds the capacity for mutual trust emerges, with the
mother as the first trustee. Such caring, expressed generation after
generation, becomes embedded in the cultural intelligence—
commonsense knowledge—that the best hedge against privation and
crisis is to pool risk by networking. As Weissner has described in her
studies of the !Kung, when “the wellbeing of any individual rests
heavily in the hands of others,” the security of the whole group is
enhanced.

BUT WHAT SUSTAINS our sociability in our affluent society? In the

self-absorption of modern times—when we no longer live together in
small economic groups and everyday challenges are refracted through
a commercial lens—is social sentiment eroding? Affluence certainly
taps into our instinctual strivings and fosters myopic self-indulgence,
as I described in Chapter 1. And yet in moments of disaster like
earthquakes and great storms, or following aggressive tragedies like
mindless mass murders, strangers leap to the assistance of those who
suffer. When in 2004 India was hit by a massive tsunami, those who
fared best were not individuals of material wealth but those most
socially connected within their community. Mutual caring, it appears,
remains a collective human attribute.
One expression of this ingrained disposition is the human sense
of fairness, which you will recall Adam Smith considered among the
cardinal virtues of character. Such evenhandedness can be
demonstrated in clever laboratory experiments, such as the
Ultimatum Game first developed by the German economist Werner
Güth. In this game two players are asked to divide a sum of money
between them, or perhaps share some goody such as a slice of cake.
One of the players—the proposer—puts a proposition to the
responder, seated in another room, who then may accept the offered
division or reject it. Under the rules of the game, however, the
responder is not passive: should he or she reject the proposed
sharing, then both players receive nothing. Universally, and this
experiment now has been performed across many cultures,
individuals rarely accept a share lower than 20 percent. But
interestingly this fraction is well below the portion of 40 to 50
percent that the proposer usually offers.
Many researchers believe that beyond the blood ties of immediate
family it is this unique human sense of fairness—together with the
brain capacity to keep track of the many complicated interactions
involved—that enables large groups of individuals to live together in
harmony and trust. Essentially what holds a trusting society together
and marks our humanity is the sentiment that others should be
treated as we wish to be treated. Personal rejection, and the
subjective sense of others being poorly treated, are both experienced
as painful. Thus in context Wren’s worried response to Russett
“stealing” another ewe’s lamb reflects the childhood emergence of
such caring virtues.
From the perspective of behavioral neuroscience, these mirrored
sentiments registering fair and unfair social practice are behaviors
comparable to those I have discussed before, intuitive habits built
from experience upon a phyletic template. As my UCLA colleagues
Naomi Eisenberger and Matt Lieberman have shown—you will recall
meeting Matt in Chapter 2—such habits help shape how we interpret
and react to the complexities of the social world. Furthermore, from
their work and that of others, it is becoming clear that in monitoring
the emotional ups and downs of social interaction the brain uses the
same neurochemistry that encodes physical pain and pleasure.
This explains, as Adam Smith observed in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, why we feel the pain of a brother on the rack. And a
moment of introspection will produce examples from your own
experience. From a mundane episode of modern times, a friend
recently recounted to me how her husband—who has an artificial hip
and suffers chronic debilitating illness—had been subjected to an
unnecessary and intrusive body search at the hands of airport
security guards after his metallic joint triggered the alarms. “I was
enraged at the unfairness of it all: his pain was my pain,” she
recounted.
Our physical and emotional experiences are intertwined. The
reward networks through which the physical pleasures of food and sex
are recorded—the medial orbital-frontal cortex, the amygdala, and
the dopamine-rich nucleus accumbens of the basal ganglia—also
record the emotional pleasures of social engagement and acceptance by
others. Conversely physical pain is registered in the posterior portion
of the cingulate cortex, in the insula, and in structures set deep in the
ancient midbrain. Similarly the emotional distress of social rejection—
measured in the laboratory through the subtle exclusion of a
participant’s avatar in a computerized game of catch—is not only
registered through the same brain structures but the stress that is
induced also triggers an inflammatory immune response. Thus the
brain circuits involved in gauging the social and physical experience
of pain and pleasure are closely linked.
The love hormones of affiliation and emotional regulation, which
as we have seen are so critical to survival in the neonate, also play
their role in adult life through modulation of these social brain
networks. In the Ultimatum Game oxytocin, administered as a nasal
spray to the proposer, increases generous offers by a massive 80
percent, while feeding the responder a diet low in tryptophan, thus
depleting brain serotonin levels, decreases the acceptance rate of
unfair proposals. Habitually programmed brain networks thus are
modulated by emotional chemistry to tune our behavior under
changing social and physical conditions. Each is a pillar of our
survival equipment: mind and body are indeed one. However, while
the avoidance of physical pain is largely instinctual—no second
lesson is needed for a child to avoid a hot stove—the capacity to
understand another’s situation and to modulate one’s emotion
accordingly are mental abilities learned as the brain matures and as
we interact with others. In broad terms this capacity is called
empathy, and it plays a critical role in the development of the well-
tuned brain.

THE MENTAL FACILITIES for empathic understanding that are central to

trust and social cohesion develop slowly, founded on the attachments
of infancy. The empathic virtues of fairness, patience, and
compassion for others do not spring fully formed into existence:
rather they are built incrementally and fixed in mind by memory,
meaning, and habit. Let me return to the youthful experiences of
Wren by way of illustration. In what has become a rarity in modern
times, family life and the economic center of Wren’s experience are
one and the same. Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont, where she lives
with her parents and older sister, is not only a working farm but also
the home of the Center for Whole Communities, a foundation
devoted to developing just what its name implies.
In the summer when the center’s workshops and seminars are in
full swing, the place is buzzing with people with distinct opinions
and ideas, many from different cultures and from places far and wide.
Wren’s experience during these summer months is one of varied and
intense interaction. As a result, in her social development she is
constantly struggling to find personal meaning in the intricacies of
her experience—to integrate emotional engagement with a reasoned
analysis of what she is learning. This integration of emotion and
reason is a central task of the web-weaving and tuning essential to
growing up, and it’s not easy.
Wren is small-boned, almost pixielike, with bobbed brown hair
and twinkling hazel eyes. But like all healthy young children, that
little package contains astonishing energy and a curiosity that is
insatiable. Living with animals, adults, and a sister five years her
senior, Wren’s curiosity is well served. In particular she is a fountain
of knowledge about the goings-on at Knoll Farm and the
responsibilities that come with being a farmer. I remember one
evening in the late summer when together we were given the
responsibility of doing the evening chores—feeding the chickens and
collecting the eggs; making sure the sheep were secure in their pen;
and selecting some vegetables from the garden for supper. Wren
made it clear from the beginning that I was her helper. I was given
precise instructions not only on how to conduct myself around the
animals but also on the priorities that we should follow. Central to
the whole was a continuous stream of animated conversation: her
mobile face, expressive hands, and well-modulated voice left no
ambiguity regarding her intentions and my part in our exercise. Thus
when my performance fell short of expectations, I was gently
reminded as to the nature of my duties.
By now you may be inclined to dismiss Wren as a little girl too big
for her britches. But in fact, understanding her behavior within the
context of normal childhood development helps illustrate how
reason and empathic awareness begin to spin the web of habit. Acts
of sharing and working constructively together—behaviors
complementary to empathic concern—are heavily dependent upon
an intuitive conformity to common goals, especially in difficult times.
It is during such times that outliers and nonconformists make things
complicated: better by far to shape behavior ahead of any crisis by
encouraging collaborative habits. Among the Kalahari Bushmen, for
example, children are taught to divide the food they receive and offer
half of it to another: the gifting of their personal beads to a playmate
is another tradition. But in addition to leading by example, another
way of shaping social behavior is by mild and consistent rebuke.
Wren, no doubt having been the object of this technique of
gentle shaping, now intuitively encoded, was interested in practicing
her skills as we worked together around the farm. I was the new kid
on the block and needed to be schooled. Wren had learned the nuts
and bolts of caring for chickens and for sheep not only through
instruction but also from her own observation and the preconscious
assimilation of habit—routines of behavior that she was eager to pass
on to me. At a practical level she saw it as her job to make her wishes
clear and to teach me the important farm routines, but in doing so
she was also exercising her own emerging sense of mastery. In regard
to her own behavior, Wren was beginning to exercise the habit of
self-command, a function of the maturing lateral prefrontal cortex.
TO CONSISTENTLY SHAPE the capacity for self-command, childhood
learning must be built upon those stable emotional attachments that
are forged in infancy. As every attentive parent knows, young
children are able early to make their wishes clear. An innate capacity
to express fundamental emotion through the facial musculature—
signals of fear, joy, pain, and distaste—is apparent within the first few
weeks of life. Similarly babies can read the emotions of others.
Substantial portions of the human brain, particularly the frontal
cortex and the parietal-temporal region, are given over to recognizing
faces and to interpreting the emotions they convey, as new parents
quickly discover when amusing their offspring by pulling funny faces
or sticking out the tongue.
Charles Darwin, experimenting with his infant son, noted that
when the maid pretended to weep, the child appeared sad, despite
being too young to have learned the association. Such emotional
behavior, Darwin concluded, must be built into the pith of the
person—an inherited instinct of survival that engaged the world
instantly. It is in the newborn that the tuning of communication
begins. The young mother interprets a preprogrammed grimace as a
smile, and in the process of caring for her baby she smiles back. The
phyletic neuronal program thus activated in the baby’s brain
perceives the pleasures of that caring as reward, and the pattern
repeats itself. This interactive loop of positive reinforcement within
the security of the developing love bond between parent and child
nurtures the later development of complex social behavior.
Faces fascinate not only babies but also adults. The ability to read
facial expression is essential to our social understanding throughout
life. It is through the face that we perceive the comforting concern of
a lover, or that we relax amid the smiles of friends. Reading facial
expressions is a preverbal, universal mode of human communication.
This capacity is deeply wired, as has recently been confirmed in a
unique study from Israel, which compared the facial emotions in
blind persons with those of sighted members of their families. In joy
and sadness family members who are blind from birth exhibit similar
facial expressions as their siblings. Emotion, expressed instinctually
through the facial musculature, is the primary human language.
Building upon this emotional signaling, the human brain is also
tuned to engage with the social world through astute observation
and mimicry. Implicitly we study and copy the behavior of others,
coming to understand their intent by imagining ourselves in their
place and, by association, the emotion they must be feeling, as Adam
Smith astutely described two centuries ago. We now know that these
fundamentals of imitative behavior are enabled in the brain by what
have aptly been described as mirror neurons. This research has begun
to offer a richer understanding of the brain mechanisms whereby
motor habits develop, and even of how young children build upon
their fascination with faces to master the art of social
communication.
Mirror neurons were discovered accidentally in 1996 by a team of
Italian scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, when studying how the
brain initiates movement. As the story goes, the brain cells being
monitored in one of the monkeys began to fire as the animal
observed a graduate student about to eat an ice cream cone. The
monkey had not moved. Similar observations had been made earlier
involving peanuts and raisins and other kinds of food; when the
monkey heard or saw others eating, even though the animal was not
actively participating in the feast, cells close to the motor area of the
cortex fired in unison.
It was soon discovered using a variety of imaging techniques that
similar mirror neuron systems are peppered throughout the human
cortex and potentially are involved in everything from the silent
imitation of the physical actions of others to intuitive understanding.
In addition to clustering in brain regions responsible for perception
and movement, mirror neurons are found in brain areas associated
with the ability to understand the emotion and intentions of others
—areas such as the temporal lobe, the posterior parietal lobe of the
cortex, and the insula, which plays an important role in our
subjective awareness of inner bodily states and the perception of
pain.
 Marcus Iacoboni, a neurology professor at the Semel Institute for
Neuroscience at UCLA, believes that the insula cortex helps
modulate the instinctual drives of the old lizard brain, thus
promoting empathic understanding. So how does empathy go
beyond sympathy? you may ask. Broken into its elements, empathy is
the ability to “feel” the emotional state of another and to “project” oneself
into the situation they face—and in so doing to create a virtual
understanding of their subjective experience in one’s own mind—
while continuing to “discriminate” oneself apart, as an autonomous
individual.
Thus in an fMRI brain-imaging study, conducted by Iacoboni
and his colleagues, where the subjects were asked to either imitate or
to observe emotional facial expressions, the insula blood flow was
greater during imitation than during observation. This suggests that
the insula is indeed an active player in understanding the emotions
of others. Conversely, and in support of this possibility, the
researchers also found that when the insula region was
neurologically damaged, the sufferer was impaired in recognizing
emotional signals, with empathic understanding compromised.
Beyond the laboratory, however, a fundamental question is what
behaviors do the brain’s mirror mechanisms facilitate in everyday
life? One intriguing possibility, put forward by Rizzolatti, is that they
“provide a direct understanding of the actions and emotions of
others, without [the need for] higher order cognitive mediation.” In
other words—cast your mind back to my conversation with Joaquín
Fuster in Chapter 4—the mirror systems of the brain, acting in concert
with the perception-action cycle, enhance the capacity to make swift,
reflexive choices based upon intuitive habit. This frame of understanding
helps explain, among other things, the extraordinary efficiency of
acquired habits. The brain’s mirror neuron systems not only tune the
physical skills required to improve our tennis game; they also help us
navigate the social world intuitively and efficiently.
The social ability, through these mental gymnastics, to perceive
the intentions of others has acquired in psychology the eloquent title
theory of mind. It is argued that the mental capacity to operate within
a social web of great complexity is an important evolutionary step,
distinguishing our own social behavior from that of other primates.
By observing the behavior of others and going through the subjective
exercise of reproducing what we observe, we gain a better
understanding of the other individual’s thoughts and feelings. By so
doing, we implicitly presume that they too have a mind—hence the
title theory of mind—accepting that the mind observed is unique and
distinct from our own. Indeed, at its zenith, such empathic ability is
often construed as wisdom. But most intriguing of all—and most
tragic—is that in some children this fundamental capacity for social
understanding does not develop normally.
I am referring, of course, to the syndrome of autism. Autism is a
developmental disability where, among other symptoms, the
understanding of the emotional expression of others is impaired.
Indeed, some autistic children are frequently so distressed by the
complexity of social relationships that, if left to their own devices,
they will become preoccupied with inanimate objects and ritual
behaviors. A study conducted by the developmental psychologist
Mirella Dapretto—in which mildly autistic children were asked to
imitate emotional expressions from photographs—revealed that the
brain’s mirror neurons were relatively inactive in autistic children
compared to those whose social behavior was developing normally.
The difficulties experienced by autistic people in the school and
work settings emphasize the extraordinary importance of the social
world in defining who we are. While we each begin forging a
personal self as early as sucking milk, the developmental process
unfolds over time and is far from linear. As Leslie Brothers, a
psychiatrist, has emphasized in her book Friday’s Footprint; How
Society Shapes the Human Mind, while we might like to think of the
brain as a neutral scribe of what we experience—as a good
newspaper reporter might strive for objective assessment—such a
simple metaphor is far from accurate when it comes to the
development and tuning of the self. Rather, it is through continuous
social interaction that a child comes to acquire the cultural habits of
mind that shape the brain’s organization—ultimately honing
through reason the skills of speech and written language—to
complement emotional awareness and build the amalgam of biology,
experience, and imagination that creates personal meaning and a
unique self.

WREN, AT THE AGE OF FIVE and in the quest to understand herself

and her world, is on the cusp of creating her own theory of mind. At
this age the interplay between early childhood attachments and a
growing fascination with cultural experience is actively shaping self-
awareness. Thus Wren is slowly moving from the concrete to the
abstract through fantasy. She has begun the development of the
psychological tools and habits she will require to know why and how
the world presents itself as it does. In her imaginative play she tests
her perceptual understanding through action—becoming the farmer,
the cook, and the mother—by drawing her sister, parents, and those
willing into her games. A box becomes a table, the corner of the barn
a house, the broomstick a horse; and with the family dog as trusted
companion, the garden shed is transformed into a fort from which to
explore the somewhat scary far reaches of the blueberry patch, yet to
be pruned of its spring growth. It is through interactive play that
Wren develops, as do all children, an abstraction of her experience
that is uniquely meaningful to her and separate from the real objects
in her world.
Play is an iterative process. Just as when we learned to ride a
bicycle or to catch a ball—when the task was to coordinate the
brain’s hand and eye motor systems—so do we seek through
imaginative play to integrate the brain’s networks in the perception-
action cycle of emotion and reason. Each generation learns these
truths anew until they become infused with personal meaning and
ingrained as habits of character—those shared canons of ethical
behavior that bind us together in common cause. Wren is at the
beginning of that journey, for it takes a decade or two to achieve the
balance and social maturity that we associate with adulthood. This is
in part because the emotional and reward systems of the ancient
brain come “online” at a much earlier stage in development than do
the frontal cortices, which are heavily dependent upon myelin
insulation for efficient function and objective decision making.
Adolescence, in this regard, is a particularly challenging time.
Frequently forgotten, however, is that much of the behavior that
emerges in the turmoil of adolescence is framed by the experience of
what has gone before. The attachments and habits of mind
developed during the latency years—essentially those between ages
six and twelve—and the peer relationships that are built during that
same timeframe play a significant role in how the “terrible teens”
unfold. Along with budding sexuality emerges a heightened
sensitivity to peer group interaction and social standing, which when
harnessed appropriately is an asset in building character. With the
frontal cortices yet to reach maturity, however, the newly awakened
passions of the ancient limbic brain can also outrun young people’s
nascent capacity for reason and self-control, especially when they are
stressed. Under such circumstances, and commonly when they are in
the company of peers, risk-taking behaviors can rapidly escalate,
sometimes with tragic consequences.
This is where consistent parental and cultural guidance becomes
important. Strong and well-established family ties mitigate such
behaviors. My colleague Andrew Fuligni and co-workers, using fMRI
technology to better understand the brain regions involved, have
shown in a series of studies that meaningful family relationships can
buffer adolescent risk-taking. Employing a measure of self-control
together with the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), which is an
engaging game that correlates well with real-life adolescent risk
behaviors such as sexual promiscuity and smoking, the investigators
studied forty-eight young subjects. In the BART game the
participant has a series of opportunities to inflate a virtual balloon:
the greater in size that the balloon becomes, the more money there is
to be made. But should the balloon become overinflated and explode,
then money is lost. Those youngsters with strong family ties,
especially those who reported contributing to the chores and the
other necessities of living as a family unit—an informal measure of
empathic concern—showed greater restraint in balloon pumping.
Associated with such restraint was reduced fMRI activity in the
brain’s reward centers, and greater activation of the dorso-lateral
prefrontal cortex, which as you will recall is part of the brain’s
braking system and regulator in chief when it comes to emotional
behavior. Such studies suggest that sociability and responsible self-
command are closely aligned in their development with empathic
understanding within the family.
Mary Gordon, the Canadian educator and social entrepreneur,
recognizing the importance of strengthening sociability, believes that
empathic skills can be usefully taught in the school setting. Indeed,
Gordon has demonstrated such in an innovative classroom-based
parenting program that includes children as young as three. Each
class “adopts” a baby, preferably one about six months old at the
outset, and the parent—usually the mother—together with a trained
instructor visits the classroom once a month for a school year.
During a typical visit the students gather around the baby, who is
lying on a blanket, to observe his or her behavior, to ask the mother
questions, and to imagine the child’s temperament, what is being
communicated, the meaning of sounds being made, and so on. The
young students, watching the engagement of mother and baby as the
infant matures over the school year, come to appreciate through their
own empathic awareness not only the meaning of the baby’s
behavior but also implicitly that of their own siblings, family
members, and peers.
The Roots of Empathy program, which began in the 1980s at a
family center in Toronto, is now taught in English and French across
Canada with the endorsement of the Ministry of Education and has
reached more than 68,000 children. Founded on “the wisdom of
babies,” as Gordon describes it, the goal is to strengthen the
development of a child’s moral imagination—the uniquely human
capacity to empathize with others and to respond appropriately in
society. While in the developed nations we remain committed to the
idea that parents and the nuclear family have the most important
influence upon a child’s development of empathic awareness, the
acquisition of those skills is heavily dependent upon being the
fortunate recipient of them. Sadly, as family structures fragment in
the twenty-first century, such consistency in human interaction is
harder to find. This is the cultural inconsistency that Gordon seeks
to mitigate. And indeed the Roots of Empathy program has been
shown to reduce bullying and aggression in school. But Gordon has a
larger goal: in fostering “moral imagination” in children, she hopes to
strengthen the web of self-awareness and responsibility that is the
foundation of sharing and trust.

WE HAVE NOW SEEN that through early bonding, the capacity for
moral imagination, and a consistency in character building, the
human animal is predisposed to creating strong empathic societies.
But in the social webs that we weave, how does the brain keep
everything organized? How do we keep track of the myriad
relationships that are involved? Beyond the cooperative drive, what is
it that distinguishes us from other social animals in sustaining the
capacity for large group living?
Human social groups are far greater in size than those of other
primates, where collaborative relationships are sustained largely by
mutual grooming. But even in the monkey world where affiliation is
highly structured within both social and kinship networks, keeping
track of friends and enemies can be a challenging intellectual
exercise. The ability to do so appears to be associated with brain size.
Robin Dunbar, director of the Institute of Cognitive and
Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, believes that it is
the computational demands of living in social groups that has led to
the unusual growth of the primate cortex; and reciprocally that it is
the size of the new cortex that ultimately determines troop size. In
support of his thesis Dunbar has calculated that the neocortical ratio
—the size of the new cortex compared to that of the total brain—is
highly correlated with mean group size in thirty-six different
varieties of primate.
Dunbar argues that the size of the functional group in human
society is similarly correlated, as in the primate world, with cortical
volume. Human groups are too large to be sustained by social
grooming, of course. Parenthetically Dunbar has calculated,
somewhat puckishly, that if searching for lice and burrs were the glue
holding human society together, then each of us would be spending
some 42 percent of our waking hours doing exactly that! But such
levity aside, Dunbar’s ratio offers some important insights into the
natural social order of human interaction.
In Homo sapiens the new cortex has a volume of approximately
1,000 cubic centimeters while total brain volume is 1,250 cubic
centimeters, a ratio that is 50 percent larger than that found in any
other primate species. By extrapolation Dunbar predicts that in
human society stable group relationships can be sustained to a
maximum of approximately 150 persons. As he suggests, this number
—now referred to as “Dunbar’s number”—has an uncanny
resonance with the size of the many communities recorded early in
human history. So the size of a Neolithic village in Mesopotamia
eight thousand years ago was approximately 20 to 25 family
dwellings, or some 150 persons. Or consider the great eleventh-
century survey conducted by William the Conqueror, familiarly
known as the Domesday Book, which showed the average village
population in England and Wales to be of comparable size at 150 to
180 persons. Similarly throughout history the basic fighting unit in
professional armies has remained stable at around the Dunbar
number. In the Roman era, a centurion commanded approximately
one hundred men, and it varies little in the combat units of modern
times.
Such fighting units have incentives to work together, just as did
the villagers of ancient settlements, or the Kalahari Bushmen in their
collective struggle against a depriving environment. But what of
contemporary democratic societies, where many thousands live
together in cities that in turn are clustered within nation-states that
number millions of souls? How are such vast conurbations
sustained? Beyond the immediate acknowledgement that civic law
and the means to enforce it become necessities, two important
insights help us understand this conundrum. First is knowledge of
the microstructure and self-organizing nature of human social
networks, and second is the critical role played by language.
 Despite Dunbar’s calculation of 150 people being the constraining
limit for meaningful interaction, he has never asserted, as some have
implied, that such groups are uniform in their structure. He merely
predicted that beyond that number of friends and acquaintances, we
have limited brain-processing power to keep relationships organized,
let alone to nurture the extended associations. While modern
technologies have facilitated communication, there is no evidence
they have increased our ability to sustain a larger number of
meaningful relationships.
So what are meaningful relationships? Recent social research
validates common sense: most individuals maintain a cluster of close
confidants but also enjoy a larger group of friends and acquaintances.
Think of your social network, if you will, as a series of concentric
circles with yourself sitting in the middle. The innermost layer—
perhaps no more than five or six persons—is composed of those,
including family, with whom you share personal confidences and to
whom you would turn in times of emotional turmoil. Beyond this
intimate circle lies a group of fifteen to twenty friends whom you
contact frequently—sharing sympathetic understanding and similar
perspectives on life—and with whom you are close enough that their
illness or death would be deeply distressing. A further network of
perhaps fifty individuals—for reasons yet to be explained the
numbers within each widening concentric circle seem to increase by
a factor of three—are those with whom we stay in touch but see only
irregularly. Thus the average social network extends as a series of
hierarchically inclusive subgroupings, with intimacy, meaning, and
trust declining as the time invested in each friendship diminishes.
It emerges, therefore, that the larger the social network, the
weaker are the ties among individuals. The number of intimate
connections that any one person can maintain is limited both by the
time and the intellectual effort required to sustain them. Of course,
some people are better than others at the social network game: Bill
Clinton immediately comes to mind as a paragon of communicative
competence, as were Winston Churchill and Ben Franklin before
him. Individual differences clearly do exist and indeed may be
prewired. Emerging evidence from fMRI studies, for example,
suggests that the ventral portion of the medial frontal cortex plays a
critical role in determining social aptitude, further validating
Dunbar’s hypothesis that it is the new cortex that has given humans
our edge in social communication. But beside social aptitude, the
skill that Clinton, Franklin, and Churchill share is that of
extraordinary verbal facility. It is language—in complement to
intelligence and empathic understanding—that has been critical in
our social success.

WE DON’T KNOW WHEN human language emerged, for it left no

physical trace in the archeological record comparable to the use of
tools or fire. What is obvious, however, is that while people can
speak, our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, have only limited verbal
communication even though they may have a primitive theory of
mind. Yet we share some 98 percent of our genetic material with the
chimp. So what has made the difference? Nature is inherently
conservative in its evolution. Segments of the genetic code that work
well—those templates that code for the building blocks that are well
adapted to environmental circumstances—are retained across
species. Only when a change in code emerges, through mutation or
recombination, and proves itself under the challenge of natural
selection to be more adaptive does evolutionary shift occur.
The first hint that the facility for language might have evolved
from a fortuitous mutation that is not enjoyed by the chimpanzee
came from the burdens carried by a family of individuals living in
London. Among three generations of this kinship—known in the
scientific literature as the KE family—almost half of the members
suffered from difficulties in speaking. Their incapacities were not just
in the articulation of words and the construction of sentences but
also in controlling the fine movements of the face and mouth that are
essential to creating the phonetics that support language expression.
In 2001 the neurogeneticist Simon Fisher, then a graduate student at
Oxford University, together with fellow researchers in London and
Oxford, found that the gene FOXP2 in affected family members,
located on chromosome 7, had an architectural fault that impaired its
regulatory role in the neuronal and neuromuscular development
essential to speech production.
FOXP2 is one of a set of “master” genes, highly conserved during
evolution, that play important roles in setting up the basic machinery
of life. Thus yeast cells, mice, dogs, and the great apes show little
difference in the FOXP2 genes they carry. The human version,
however, differs slightly from that of other primates by two base
pairs, a slight coding difference that was so beneficial that it spread
rapidly through our ancestral population—what scientists call a
selective sweep—potentially to facilitate the development of
language. Interestingly our close cousins the Neanderthals, from
which Homo sapiens diverged 300,000 to 400,000 years ago and who
became extinct some 30,000 years ago, appear to have carried the
same mutation.
The chimpanzee, however, from which we diverged five to seven
million years ago, does not. The small instructional changes in the
human FOXP2 gene compared to the chimp variant determine the
differential activity of a whole cascade of other genes—genes known
to be involved in the brain’s control of motor function and in the
formation of the face, skull, cartilage, and connective tissue. Thus the
human FOXP2 gene guides the activity not only of other genes
within the brain itself but also those enabling the brain’s control of
the mouth muscles, vocal cords, and breathing system essential to
the phonetics of speech. Hence, although the FOXP2 gene should
not be considered, in and of itself, “the language gene,” when it
swept through the human population some 100 to 400 centuries ago,
it does appear to have facilitated the development of complex
language.
This fortunate shift immeasurably improved our social
adaptation by enhancing communication, which facilitated group
size and stimulated cortical brain growth to create a positive
feedback loop that gave Homo sapiens an extraordinary evolutionary
advantage. Conversation proved not only efficient and informative
but also entertaining and fun. Chattering works well with many
different chores and under varied social circumstances.
 What we particularly like to talk about is each other. We call this
new “grooming” behavior gossip, and it’s the bread and butter not
only of Facebook, the talk shows, and the tabloid press but of each
one of us in sustaining everyday social interaction. Eric Foster, a
professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Wharton School, who has made an extensive study of gossip,
concludes that social topics involving everyone present or third
parties are the focus of conversation some two-thirds of the time,
with, perhaps surprisingly for some, “little empirical evidence that
women gossip more than men.”

AS EVERY PARENT KNOWS, along with chatter and language in

childhood comes questioning. From an early age children ask many
questions—by the fourth year, literally hundreds of them every day.
Gossiping in adult life may be understood as an extension of this
developmental stage when children begin to imagine events they have
not witnessed, and people they’ve never met. Through this imagining
we begin construction of the set of inner maps that sustain our own
unique web of sociability. In childhood it’s an essential exercise for
the nascent mind—akin to the physical play that tunes habitual
motor skills—whereby an intuitive order is placed upon the world,
with fact distinguished from fantasy, an essential forerunner to the
formal task of schooling and literacy.
For a five-year-old such as Wren, the questioning marks the early
imaginings of a stable group of attachments that in adulthood
become the basis of consistent, real-life social interaction. The
development of such imagined, fixed systems of interrelationship, as
Maurice Bloch, the Anglo-French cultural anthropologist, has
described them, is the foundation of human culture. Although in
reality all is fluid in the give-and-take of everyday life, it is through
such imaginings, as I shall discuss in Chapter 10, that we craft a
cultural system—political, legal, moral, and social—that is of
enduring capacity. It is this ability to imagine a future of stable social
engagement, with both individuals and institutions, that we call
trust. Trust, in all its complexity—a maturational process nurtured
first by the mother-infant bond, tuned in meaning through empathic
awareness, and honed in efficiency by intuitive understanding—is
something uniquely human.
But in that genesis, trust is also something uniquely fragile.
Reflect for one more moment, if you will, upon the milestones in the
emotional and intellectual development of a five-year-old child such
as Wren, as I have described them here. In just a few short years—
from the early security of a mother’s love through the anxious
ambiguities of novel caregivers, shifting attachments, and the
beginnings of peer sociability—the infant mind adopts the
preconscious efficiencies of habit, slowly forges self-awareness, and
begins to embrace imagination and language. In the ideal world,
these achievements weave the delicate web that sustains a child’s
capacity to place their trust in others. This web of trust, in its
collective expression, is the foundation of human society.
It is also a web easily broken. A depressed mother, marital discord
in the parents, neglect, significant trauma, the privations of poverty,
and the excessive indulgence of affluence: for decades it has been
known that such challenges can compromise not only the
progression of early developmental milestones but also permanently
scar individuals, compromising school achievement and
predisposing them later in life to anxiety, depression, and self-
destructive behaviors. What was not accepted until recently,
however, is that such demanding “external” social conditions have
the power to profoundly influence the most basic of “internal”
biological processes, including the gene expression that shapes our
behavior.
The lesson is that the genetic prescription we each carry does not
alone determine our destiny: but the interaction of that prescription
with family, culture, and experience certainly does, with powerful
effects upon how we think and feel and how we will live in adult life.
This interactive process, pursuing my analogy to Bach’s well-
tempered clavier, may be thought of as the first steps that we take in
the “self-tuning” of the brain—and the beginning of a lifelong
personal journey. For each of us, however, in these helter-skelter
times, the challenge is whether it remains possible to achieve such
qualities of character development when the consumer culture barely
sustains them. And yet how skilled we eventually become in our self-
tuning has important implications, not only for personal resilience
but also for public and social policy—shaping the choices that we
make, the cultural institutions that we promote, the cities that we
build, the food we eat, and the respect we have for the natural
environment. And perhaps most important of all, as the cycle
continues, it shapes how we flexibly educate the next generation of
children for what is an uncertain future.
It is to this latter subject that I now turn.
Chapter 7

Character:
Education and Self-Command
A very young child has no self-command; whatever are
its emotions, whether fear, or grief or anger, it
endeavours always by the violence of its outcries, to
alarm as much as it can, the attention of its nurse, or of
its parents. When it is old enough to go to school, or to
mix with its equals, it soon finds that they have no such
indulgent partiality. It thus enters into the great school
of self-command; it studies to be more and more master
of itself: and begins to exercise over its own feelings a
discipline.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

A Clerk ther was of Oxenford . . .

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

(late fourteenth century)

WE ARE EACH, THROUGHOUT LIFE, both student and teacher. But

how to learn and what to teach? Is it just the facts, as Mr. Thomas
Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times insisted? “Now, what I
want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts
alone are wanted in life.” But of course, as with many of Dickens’s
characters, Gradgrind repents by the end of the saga, recognizing
that facts emerge from curiosity, imagination, and a sense of
meaning. The attempted transformation of children into emotionless
mechanical robots, dutifully spouting rote formulae and facts, just
didn’t work. Human beings with all our hopes and fears, argued
Dickens through his characters, are not utilitarian machines.
That was in the mid-nineteenth century, but the debate goes on.
After all, some facts are valuable—as are the habits needed to acquire
them—and learning factual information even can be made fun. So
believed my own physics master, Mr. Wesson, whom I can see as
clearly now as when he stood before our class at the grammar school,
insisting that the date be written “in my way.” Mr. Wesson had each
of us living in bemused terror: should we be caught looking out the
window, there soon would be a hand on the collar directing that we
pay attention to the work not the world. And yet we loved the man
and his many endearing eccentricities. Probably in his sixties—it’s
hard to judge the age of one’s elders when one is young—Mr.
Wesson had the peculiar habit of leaving his cheeks unshaven,
twirling and playing with the two wiry clumps of facial adornment as
he paced and lectured. That he kept his trousers up with braces,
supplemented by a length of Bunsen burner tubing tied around the
waist, and that he told extremely funny jokes, many of which were
self-deprecating, just added to our fascination. He was an eccentric
and a caring one at that, which in addition to his insistence upon a
disciplined approach to study—“to secure your future, my boy”—
made him an exceptional teacher.
Mr. Wesson, with all his oddities, understood how to craft the
habits of self-reliance that are the foundation of character and
lifelong learning. We all agreed that he had a unique way of prodding
us out of complacency and providing a new perspective on the world.
Thus when in the second year of my lessons with him he died
suddenly from what was rumored to be a carcinoma, there was a
pervasive sadness in the school. Looking back, I remember only
fragments of the facts that he taught me: but the capacity for study
and a fascination with ideas, the qualities at the core of his
instruction, have stayed with me. Beyond the facts, Mr. Wesson was
a great teacher.
SO WHAT MAKES a great teacher? What are the elements of excellent
instruction, and how do they work together to determine high
performance in students? What marks the best performing schools?
Thanks to a program that was established in 2000 by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
which tracks the academic achievement of fifteen-year-old students in
reading, math, and science across its thirty-four member countries,
we are now able to engage such questions, directly comparing
educational philosophy and achievement across varied instructional
systems and cultures.
The results have been surprising. That the major reason for
student failure in school is lack of financial investment, as many
teachers’ unions in the United States have argued, turns out not to
be the driving issue. As I will further explore in this chapter,
disparities in finance are important variables, as are sociocultural
factors, but money alone does not determine differences in scholastic
achievement. Indeed, the OECD’s Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA) suggests that a nation’s financial
investment may account for less than 10 percent of the variance in
overall performance. The United States, for example, recognizing
that it was falling behind other developed countries, increased public
spending per student, after correcting for inflation, by 73 percent
between 1980 and 2005. Nonetheless student achievement measured
by the PISA survey remained stubbornly entrenched in the lower
rankings. While some individual states, most notably Massachusetts
and Connecticut, performed well when considered individually in
the 2009 survey, as a nation the United States ranked 17th, 31st, and
23rd in reading, math, and science respectively. Furthermore,
although in the 2012 survey a slight trend toward improvement was
apparent in the U.S. math and science scores, its international
ranking was essentially unchanged. The United Kingdom, with
average performance in math and science and above average in
reading, similarly did not improve its performance between 2006 and
2012. This is in contrast to other regions studied—Shanghai-China,
Singapore, Canada, Saxony, and Poland being among them—that
consistently have done so.
Intrigued by such differences, the international consulting firm
McKinsey, in a study published in 2007, investigated twenty-five of
the best-performing school systems in the world. It concluded that
three things mattered most: first, securing the best people to become
teachers; second, supporting them in their continuing professional
development; and third, ensuring that high-quality instruction was
consistently and equitably available to every child, regardless of
circumstance.
One country that comes to mind in reading this prescription is
Finland, which stands as an exemplar when measured by the
academic accomplishments of its students. This little country with a
population of some 5.4 million people has consistently achieved an
upper ranking in the PISA surveys since their inception in 2000.
Described by The Atlantic magazine as “the West’s reigning
education superpower,” Finland is also unusual in that it achieves its
high rankings with only small variation among student test scores,
showing that consistently high academic performance is possible
across all socioeconomic groups. And yet on close inspection, by
comparison with the prevailing Western obsession of injecting
market competition into education, or the pressure cooker system of
rote learning and cramming employed in East Asia, Finland’s
formula for success seems something of an anachronism.
Finland’s prevailing philosophy, first and foremost, is to develop
an equitable system of instruction for students—the third element of
McKinsey’s triumvirate. Second is to recruit only those with the best
minds to become teachers, paying them good wages from early in
their career and giving them considerable responsibility and
independence thereafter. In Finland, on the average, 10 percent of
applicants are admitted into the teaching profession: this intense
competition ensures that only outstanding individuals succeed. Over
five to seven years at an established university, the would-be-teacher
earns both an undergraduate and a master’s degree and is expected to
develop a strong academic record in addition to demonstrating
excellent interpersonal skills in the classroom. Once graduated,
teachers have autonomy and freedom in their approach to curricula
development, together with the opportunity and encouragement to
develop their own educational focus. Thus teaching in Finland is a
profession that is desirable, prestigious, and dynamic.
In the Finnish school system exams are infrequent, being
replaced by thoughtful assessments of each student by their
individual teachers, with personalized plans crafted regularly for
refinement and remedial exercise. Rather than a model of intense
competition—of spot tests and a race to the top—instruction is
collaborative, indeed almost leisurely. Students do not enter
elementary school until the age of seven; the day is shorter than in
most schools in the United States or Britain, and creative, playful
engagement with the natural world is encouraged. The result is an
educational environment of low stress with an emphasis on strong
personal attachment, promoting both happy students and satisfied
teachers. It seems too good to be true, but given Finland’s repeated
success in the international rankings of academic achievement,
something is obviously working. Pasi Sahlberg, director of the
Center for International Mobility and Cooperation at the Finnish
Ministry of Education and Culture, in his book Finnish Lessons
emphasizes that it is not competitive school choice that is important
in achieving excellence but rather the equitable distribution of
opportunity for all students, regardless of their economic
background. Finland’s educational system thrives not upon
stimulating student rivalry but through fostering collaborative
learning and strong problem-solving habits.
Constructing educational systems that work is not rocket science,
but neither is it simple. The 2007 McKinsey report, linking
quantitative results from the PISA study with the qualitative insights
of their own investigations, has helped elucidate what distinguishes
high-performing school systems. The findings question, for example,
whether structural reorganization contributes much to student
success. Both Britain and the United States have experimented with
school integration, decentralization, choice, and interschool
competition. Of themselves, none of these models are associated
with consistent improvement in student achievement. Similarly,
from a review of more than one hundred studies, lowering student-
to-teacher ratios alone, independent of teaching practice, appears to
have little impact on student performance except at the lower grade
levels.
So how may we make sense of these findings? If we step back for a
moment and consider the McKinsey report within the context of
what we know about human development, what the Finns have
demonstrated in their thirty-year experiment makes good sense. The
Finnish experience reminds us that it is the personal bond between
trusting students and dedicated, skillful teachers that lays the
foundation for academic success. In the Finnish classroom, to quote
Pasi Stahlberg, the critical ingredient is “placing [personal]
responsibility and trust before [test] accountability.” It is a reminder
that in the free society, beyond the acquisition of facts, education
serves a moral purpose—the development of individual character
and the capacity for self-directed growth. I call it the Wesson effect.
The Finnish experiment promotes some important questions.
Has the Anglo-American model of secondary education derailed
because we have ignored the humanitarian and developmental
aspects of learning? Have we forgotten that throughout life, but
particularly when we are young, we learn best from the trial and error
of personal experimentation, in a secure environment and guided by
those we trust? In the face of growing economic competition abroad
and declining student performance at home, have we opted for the
short-term fix? In choosing corporate-style top-down planning and
metric-driven, market competition—rather than tackling the
perennial challenges of promoting professional excellence, achieving
equal student access, and strengthening the relationships among
teacher, pupil, and family—have we inadvertently encouraged
bifurcation in educational opportunity and student achievement?
From the perspective of the behavioral neuroscientist, four
simple words describe the ecology of educational development:
attachment, meaning, habit, and trust. These words form a progressive
sequence, and they will be recognized as reflecting the maturational
process that I described in Chapter 6. A fifth element is opportunity,
and when that is present, the educational-maturational cycle
continues throughout life. For all of us, as social animals, attachment
is primary; it is within the security of mutual attachment that
personal meaning develops; and from the confidence that social
meaning brings grows empathic understanding and the efficiency of
intuitive habit. It is through the educational-maturational cycle, as
these elements are woven together, that self-awareness develops,
together with personal well-being and the capacity to trust others.
Similarly, through this progression, we develop the skills of self-
reliance—the capacity for self-tuning and the thoughtful adaptation
to circumstance that we call character. Should the sequence be
neglected or disrupted in its maturation, however, then we stumble.
In our struggles toward maturity and autonomy we build upon
our inherited platform of temperament, but it is what we learn from
each other and the habits that we acquire that largely shape
character. From the perspective of neuroscience, think of it as the
brain’s perception-action cycle at work—an extended dance whereby
emotional sensitivity melds with growing intellectual awareness of
the external world to create the intuitive habits, the guiding beliefs,
and the capacity for executive action that characterize mature human
behavior. This, for Adam Smith, was “the great school of self-
command,” an iterative process whereby we become “more and more
master” of ourselves, to exercise the melding of passion and reason
in collaborative harmony. It is through self-command that the brain
is tuned.

THE QUALITIES OF SELF-COMMAND that flow from a broadly based

system of education are also essential to sustaining a vibrant market
economy. The United States was one of the first nations to recognize
the importance of this equation. As Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee
Professor of Economics at Harvard, has detailed in her writings,
America’s promotion of mass education during the twentieth century
played a key role in its economic success and rise to world
dominance. The roots of this achievement are to be found in the
primary school movement of the nineteenth century, later enhanced
by the rapid growth of high school enrollment in the early part of the
twentieth century. By the early 1960s the U.S. high school graduation
rate was over 70 percent, far higher than in the European nations.
This growth went hand in hand with the growing demand for a
literate and skilled labor force to sustain America’s established
leadership in technology, manufacturing, and international trade.
But today, fifty years later, this enviable position has ebbed away.
“Education Slowdown Threatens US,” proclaimed a Wall Street
Journal headline in the spring of 2012. And indeed today, despite
their aspirations many young Americans are not as well educated as
their parents. Remarkably, while 70 percent of high school graduates
enroll in college, many never obtain a degree or diploma; 43 percent
of the students who entered as freshmen in 2002 had not received a
degree six years later. As a result, as a percentage of population, the
United States now lags in the proportion of its citizens attaining a
top college degree. In 2009 fourteen of the world’s developed
countries in the world graduated a higher percentage of individuals
from college than did America. Yet the United States spends a
greater portion of its GDP on higher education than any other
nation.
A partial explanation of these demographic shifts, including the
failure to graduate, is that the cost of college education in America is
soaring, putting it out of reach of many middle-class families. Higher
education in America has bubbled into being a growth industry: fees
at American universities rose five times faster than inflation between
1980 and 2010. In 2013 for the leading private universities of the Ivy
League, the cost of tuition alone was hovering around $40,000 per
year. Even for the public-supported colleges and universities, beset
by cutbacks in state funds, in the first decade of the new millennium
the annual cost of tuition and fees rose 72 percent to just under
$9,000. In consequence, student debt now exceeds that of credit card
debt in the United States, ballooning from $41 billion in 1999 to $87
billion a decade later.
These numbers reflect the growing bifurcation in the educational
opportunities available to young Americans. This is also true for
British students. While America’s leading universities remain among
the best in the world—of the one hundred top ranked institutions, 50
percent are in the United States—and house faculties of
extraordinary achievement in both science and the arts, the rising
cost of attendance is constraining access. The evidence is growing
that America is falling behind in the development of a flexible and
broadly educated citizenry. A 2005 study funded by the Pew
Charitable Trusts, based on a sample of 1,827 graduating students
from 80 randomly selected two- and four-year private and public
colleges, found that of those individuals graduating with a four-year
degree, only 50 percent had basic quantitative and literacy skills, such
as assessing the comparative value of potential purchases or
following the logic of a written argument. This does not bode well
for the nation’s future.
Ideally education helps develop the student’s capacity for creative
thought and communication, which in a democratic society is an
essential social good. Unfortunately, however, in a competitive,
market-dominated culture, it is easy to fall into the Mr. Gradgrind
trap. Prioritizing the acquisition of facts for their economic value has
the inherent danger of stifling a student’s innate creativity by
reducing the learning process to a test-driven product line. The
purpose of attending a “good” school becomes largely to secure a
“good” job, one that will generate the economic returns of the
“good” life, with little attention paid to what living a “good” life
actually entails.
Such an assembly-line approach is in many ways a covert form of
central planning that views young people as commodities to be fit
into preconceived parameters in hopes of ensuring their future
economic contribution. But the relationship between a vibrant
economy and facts acquired in college is not fixed. Given the rate of
technical innovation in the developed economies and the shift away
from direct human labor, it is difficult to predict the labor force
America will need in the next decade, let alone the next century.
Common sense would suggest that it is better to make the cultural
investments necessary to teach students to think for themselves,
providing them with the self-discipline required to hone the
intellectual skills that will serve them and society, over a lifetime of
adaptation and learning.
In a market-driven consumer society such as the United States,
however, not to maximize economic gain is considered failure. The
inherent danger in educating principally to foster market growth,
however, is that while the search for new goods stimulates
technological innovation and consumer desire, the democratic
society’s need for collective wisdom is less well served. Under
economic pressure, as James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield note in
Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, “parents and students no
longer choose the best education that money can buy . . . [but] are
faced with choosing which college . . . will buy them more money.” In
a competitive society it is understandable that families ask how their
investment will serve to secure a lucrative position in the volatile job
market of globalization. But if only an economic analysis is offered to
justify the value of college, then institutions of higher learning fall
short of their broader educational responsibilities. Thus we drift
toward the consumer-oriented university.
The fundamental truth is that buying an education is different
from buying a refrigerator. Students are more akin to fine craftsmen
than to consumers: they are not passive recipients of product but
create knowledge within themselves through interaction with
mentors, peers, and others who have a significant presence in their
lives. The result, a balanced self, is a powerful instrument for
economic good. Thus what guarantees employment and happiness in
a rapidly changing world is what has always guaranteed it: achieving
the ethos—the strength of character and self-command—that
ensures lifelong learning and responsible citizenship. I would argue
that honing the qualities that make for such character strengths—
critical thought, analytical skills, a sense of justice, aesthetic
appreciation, and empathic awareness—is the central task of higher
education. The outcome of such a delicate process cannot be
measured merely in market terms, as when one seeks the “best buy”
refrigerator. Higher education needs to embrace responsibility for
the development of student self-awareness and for disciplined
understanding of the human condition. In short, it is through broad
educational opportunity that we ensure leadership tomorrow.

THE BRITISH ECONOMIST John Maynard Keynes, who graduated

with a mathematics degree from Cambridge in 1904, believed in such
an ethos—that the primary social role of the university is to develop
intelligence and character by honing the student’s skills of reasoning
and communication. Once that foundation is in place, Keynes
argued, the details of any chosen profession are easily acquired.
Today, a century on from Keynes, George Bowen, who lectures in
management studies at Queen’s College and the Saϊd Business
School at Oxford University, is in staunch agreement. I first met
George on a ferryboat that was making a stormy crossing of the Irish
Sea—nothing life endangering but uncomfortable enough to get
people into conversation—and we soon stumbled upon our mutual
interest in education. George, who came to his teaching career after
several decades as an executive in the global textile industry, is a
passionate supporter of the tutorial, which since the nineteenth
century has been the hallmark of undergraduate study at Oxford and
was a tradition informally established long before that.
The essay is the core exercise in developing the skills of reasoning
and communication, George explained to me one afternoon, as we
sat amid portraits of grim-faced kings and long-gone princes in the
senior common room at Queen’s College. “I know it sounds
simplistic,” he said, settling into his armchair with a cup of coffee,
“but the undergraduate literally comes to Oxford to learn how to
write essays. Each week during the academic year the student writes a
mini-thesis on a study topic that is chosen with their tutor.” The
primary objective is to acquire the discipline of making a logical
argument that supports their personal conclusions.
“I tell my students,” continued George, “that if they want to
argue that the moon is green and not yellow, then that is fine. We are
not arguing about right and wrong. I just want to see how well they
can construct an argument and whether the conclusion reached is
logical. I want to see in the first couple of paragraphs what they
understand their topic to be before setting out to explain that
understanding. We don’t want all the answers up front, just an
indication that they have given thought to the topic before they
started writing. The task is then to review the literature in brief, to
develop their argument, and to bring their thesis to an intelligent
conclusion.
“The essays are marked thirty percent on structure, thirty percent
on content, and the rest on the strength and originality of the
argument,” he continued. “This means that the student must not
only become familiar with the primary authorities on the topic, but
also bring their own sources and authors to the party. We do not
want the students to tell us what is in books—they are meant to have
read that stuff—but to juxtapose and integrate their own ideas in
comparative discussion.”
In George’s experience a weekly one-hour tutorial, in
combination with essay writing, enables the mentor to assess the
personal skills and knowledge of each student, progressively raising
the bar until the discipline of analytic thinking is achieved. “So
you’re on your own,” reflected George. “There’s no alternative but to
buckle down and work. We teach a key lesson for life, the secret to
unearthing reliable information, thinking logically, and making
sound judgments.”
In fact, as I proposed to George that afternoon, his real business
at the college was not in teaching management but in the
development of good habits within a supportive and caring
relationship. In mastering the discipline of the essay the student was
honing the brain’s capacity for intuitive learning and releasing the
power of the orbital-frontal cortex—the executive brain—to do what
it does best, to think and to choose. George nodded. “The essay is
merely the vehicle,” he agreed, “while the interactive tutorial format
strengthens the good feelings between student and teacher.” He
found this particularly valuable for some of his foreign students,
including those from the United States, many of whom were
unfamiliar and uncomfortable in offering opinions of their own. “It
comes as a bit of a shock,” George remarked, “because many of them
are used to just assembling facts, to concentrating on content and on
regurgitating the book or the notes, rather than pushing them aside
and thinking for themselves.”
The skill set, I suggested to George, was similar to that of a good
psychotherapist, which is to start from where the individual feels
comfortable and from there to discover what they find meaningful
(that is, to employ the progressive sequence of the maturational
process—attachment, meaning, habit, etc.—as I outlined it earlier in
this chapter) rather than to dive straight into abstract discussion.
“Exactly,” George replied. “So in the beginning, I try to have some
in-depth, meaningful talk with each student: where they’re coming
from, where they are in their thinking, and where they would like to
be in a few years’ time. I build on that conversation and particularly
on areas where they’ve done well. What we’re teaching is often
highly abstract—the creation of wealth, management failure, and so
on—and it’s necessary to relate the essay writing and course of study
to what they can grasp easily, especially at the outset. So I might
connect the abnormal profits in the luxury goods market to a young
woman’s interest in designer handbags. Or I hitch a boyhood interest
in aircraft modeling to the problems of Boeing Aircraft, a company
that despite its dominant position in the industry faces the challenge
of Airbus, which enjoys government support. In short I try to frame
the new with what’s familiar.”
George paused for a moment. “Oxford is a very peculiar place,”
he continued, waving his hand at the assembled portraits on the wall.
“It is a private charity and has been so for about one thousand years.
Students who come here often choose to do so because of the
tutorial system. The essay is our heuristic tool. Rooted in the Greek
literature of Platonic and Socratic argument, it was dusted off during
the Renaissance and reinvented to become a basic educational form.
So the lure of Oxford, and places like it, remains this type of intimate
education. Basically, when it comes to autonomy and discipline, we
practice what we preach: unlike many universities no one sits in on
my tutorials. Presumably if I were doing badly I would be told, but in
general having come out of business this is a very strange
professional world! Productivity and efficiency are not defined the
same way as in the marketplace, but nonetheless individuals with fine
leadership skills continue to emerge.”
But what of today? I asked. Oxford and comparable universities
are elite institutions, to which only a minority of students gains
access. What of the rest? “Yes, that is the challenge,” George agreed.
“But let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees. The goal of a liberal
education is to encourage people to use their imagination and to
think for themselves—no easy task in today’s affluent world of
predigested, instant information. We are privileged here: the
students are bright with strong educational backgrounds, and on
average eager to learn. I accept that privilege, but it distracts from the
point that I’m making. The legacy and history of these ancient
institutions teaches us that human beings learn by example: it is
through the intimate relationship between student and teacher that
thought is disciplined and self-command is achieved. This is the key
to lifelong learning. And it works. As student confidence grows, so
do flexibility and the appetite for facts, which in today’s world are
ever changing. That is the lesson we must take away from here and
from places like it.”

WRITING NOW ABOUT MY conversation with George Bowen, I find

my thoughts drifting back to the English grammar school where I was
a student in the 1950s. George is right. We know that the formula for
academic success lies in the student-teacher dyad maximizing the
progressive sequence of the educational process, for that is how the
human brain, over millennia, has worked its magic. But how in
modern times do we serve the needs of a greater number while
preserving that intimate progression? Ironically, I believe that it was
our zeal to solve this conundrum, while inadvertently forgetting the
role of intimacy in the educational process, that has fostered the
growing bifurcation of opportunity in the Anglo-American model of
secondary education.
Within two decades of my attendance at the grammar school
such institutions had essentially disappeared in Britain, having been
replaced by the “comprehensive” model. The hope for this change, as
George and I discussed during our afternoon together, was to serve
the greater good by improving access to higher education. The effort
was unabashedly a copy of the American ideal—championed by John
Dewey and others early in the twentieth century—that the bedrock
of a democratic nation was universal access to secondary education,
providing opportunity for all.
The shift in Britain had come in reaction to the adoption in the
1940s of a system where children were tested and academically
divided at the age of eleven, sending some 25 percent of them to
grammar school and the rest to schools emphasizing vocational
training and practical skills. In the baby-boomer postwar years, in a
nation seeking to recover its economic vitality, many considered
such constraints wasteful of potential talent. Thus, taking lead from
the U.S. model, the comprehensive school program, which
abandoned the exams at age eleven, was introduced in 1965 with the
goal of increasing the number of students achieving university
entrance. No longer would social class limit educational opportunity.
Certainly at midcentury the U.S. system of comprehensive
schooling was yielding some impressive results. A 1968 study by the
National Academy of Sciences provided evidence that America had
become “the leading producer of mathematical talent in the world.”
And yet acrimonious debate regarding America’s competitiveness
was never far from the surface, especially in the immediate post-
Sputnik period, when fear of Soviet domination began to drive
educational priorities in science and technology. Also America was
growing fast: between 1960 and 2012 the population of the United
States grew 74 percent, from approximately 180 million to 315 million.
High schools too were growing in size and changing in character as
the nation adopted an industrialized, assembly-line approach to
producing the skilled workforce necessary for an expanding
economy.
Consolidated for economic efficiency and requiring large parcels
of land, the secondary school increasingly moved to the edge of town
and adopted a sprawling, sometimes modular design not dissimilar
from the suburban homes that surrounded it. Beginning in the 1970s,
with mandatory busing to promote racial integration in certain
communities, many students found themselves far from home in
unfamiliar neighborhoods; walking to school became impossible.
The physical learning environment also was changing. Following the
energy crisis of the 1970s, school buildings were sunk deeper into the
ground, with a trend toward grouped windowless classrooms and flat
roofs. Gone were the scholastically inspired Gothic and Renaissance
styles of earlier decades, when schools reflected local civic pride: the
new motive was corporate, with minimal ornamentation.
Soon the majority of the new high schools were enrolling 1,500
students or more, with some having 4,000 or 5,000 adolescents. A
supportive educational environment with individual instruction and
a relationship of trust between student and teacher were early
casualties of this impersonal growth. Predictably, as the progressive
sequence of educational maturation was disrupted, a decline in
motivation and academic achievement followed—especially for
students from disadvantaged and low-income families—together
with an escalation of behavioral problems and violence. By 1983 it
was recognized that something was seriously amiss. Amid growing
concern the Reagan administration released A Nation at Risk: The
Imperative for Educational Reform, focused principally upon secondary
school education. Noting that over the previous two decades, as just
one measure of growing mediocrity, there had been a consistent drop
in the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of college-bound seniors, the
commission questioned whether America’s educational system was
up to the task of delivering a workforce that was competitive with
those of the other developed nations.
Over the same time period similarly disturbing trends were
evident in Britain’s effort toward comprehensive schooling. As
George Bowen remarked during our discussion, “the vision of
opportunity through equal access was to be applauded but the
implementation strategy was appalling. We underfunded the new
schools, built bad buildings, and had students packed forty to fifty in
a class. That is not a recipe for success.” Again, in Britain as in the
United States, those children particularly disadvantaged were from
immigrant and deprived backgrounds, with 20 percent of the
students leaving school at sixteen and a substantial number dropping
out even earlier, according to an OECD report published in 2012.
For many families, the comprehensive high school system was no
longer perceived as an adequate preparation for college. Soon in both
Britain and the United States those families who could afford it, and
some who could not, were sending their sons and daughters to
private or parochial schools, Although only 7 percent of Britons are
privately educated—it’s about 11 percent in America—they
disproportionately hold privileged places in business, the
professions, and the nation’s political hierarchy. Thus at Oxford and
Cambridge approximately half the undergraduates have been
privately schooled. A similar pattern of private secondary school
education that secures privilege—and one equally entrenched—is to
be found in America, where mobility between the social classes is
now lower than in most European countries. The industrialization of
the secondary school, designed to secure college entrance for a larger
number of students, has not only failed miserably in its goal but has
also compounded the problems that it first sought to resolve.

THE DISPARITIES AND ongoing failure of America’s industrialization

of secondary education is readily apparent to Susan Corbin, who
juggles each day to remedy its unintended consequences. Since 2000
Susan has taught at El Camino College, a two-year public community
college that enrolls 25,000 students in Torrance, California. Torrance
is an urban, oil-producing region bordering the Pacific Ocean,
southwest of Los Angeles. Not given to despondency, Susan was
smiling broadly on the hot afternoon that we met at a coffee shop,
close to campus. “You’re probably wondering why I’m so happy
today?” she volunteered, as we greeted each other. “Well, it’s early
June, the semester’s almost over, and my students are making
progress. That’s all good news for a community college teacher!”
In her looks, Susan Corbin is as Celtic as her name: brown wavy
hair, blue eyes, and an engaging smile. I had first met her at a hospital
reception a few months earlier, through her husband who is a
physician. That year we were in the midst of California’s budget
problems, which had included draconian cuts to education, and I had
expressed my interest in learning more about how a dedicated
frontline teacher coped with such challenges. In subsequent
conversations it became apparent that Susan’s approach to helping
her mostly disadvantaged but college-bound students improve their
learning skills drew intuitively upon many principles of behavioral
neuroscience, so I became eager to learn more about her method and
practice.
“When I first started at the college,” Susan began, “I was shocked
by the grim reality faced by many of the students. Supposedly I was
teaching college-level courses, and yet some 85 percent of those
enrolled in my classes had only precollege capability in reading and
math. But fascinatingly there was little stigma attached to such
inability.” She had been a philosophy major in college and had
worked as a journalist before going to graduate school, where she
had focused on sociolinguistics and literacy studies, making her an
excellent candidate to take over remedial reading as her initial
assignment. “I was surprised to find in those early weeks,” she
recalled, “that my colleagues were giving vocabulary worksheets to
students whose comprehension was essentially that of early high
school—sort of asking the student to memorize the pieces of a jigsaw
without benefit of seeing the picture on the box cover. That seemed
to me dangerously counterproductive: if you believe as a teacher that
acquiring language and writing skills is stringing words together with
little attention to their meaning, then your students are unlikely to
read with any great skill. I was not immediately popular in the
teachers’ common room.”
Initially being an outsider to the teaching profession—the well-
trodden path of the teachers’ training college had not been hers—
Susan had felt uneasy in taking a rote approach to vocabulary and
literacy. Later, recalling her own experience as a youngster
heightened her discomfort. “My parents when teaching me to read
had invited me to crawl into their laps,” she explained. “My father
was a graduate student at the time, so for all I knew we were reading a
physics book, but with a singsong voice it potentially sounded
interesting to me.” Reflecting upon that experience, Susan realized
that she had never consciously memorized vocabulary. “It’s the
sitting in the lap—the intimacy and shared attention—that begins
the process, not the words on the page. And yet when we’re dealing
with disadvantaged kids in high school, or precollege students in
remedial classes, we somehow think that rote memory is the answer.
Well, I’ve discovered it is not. Remedial students, in particular, need
a sense of belonging. Once that trust is established, then the
successful teacher can focus on gaining the student’s interest,
something equivalent to my father’s singsong voice. Many students
have experienced reading only as something mechanical, with a
college degree a strictly utilitarian step toward a better-paying job.
Vocabulary books just don’t shift that preconception.” Perhaps,
Susan wondered, pondering her dilemma, the students should be
reading rap songs in class or something equivalent. Looking back,
she remembers the thought as seeding an important idea.
Susan learned quickly, in befriending her trainees, that the
majority of her disadvantaged, working-class students thought
differently about education than was the experience in her own
family. Most had few books in the their homes growing up. Although
they were obviously determined and smart, having sought out
community college despite many obstacles, reading a book was a
contrived activity. Written information was something shared in
their families; letters received were read aloud. It was considered odd
to do things by oneself. Thus a student might have acquired the habit
of sitting alone at a desk but without tutoring did not have the
analytic skills to benefit from the lesson in front of them. Similarly
other family members didn’t understand that studying meant two
hours in a quiet corner with the TV turned off.
Furthermore, many of the students in Susan’s classes had already
passed the high school equivalency test, which was confusing to the
parents. “So,” she told me, “I commonly am asked the question, ‘If
my daughter went to high school, why is she now taking ninth-grade
English again?’ It’s one of the missteps in America’s educational
system: the children coming from deprived backgrounds are not
acculturated to the process of learning, so we slip them through their
exams as a short-term fix.” She paused for a moment. “Why study?
Good study habits are tough to build. It’s easy for me to teach the
language of responsibility in the abstract, but not so easy for the
student to be intuitively responsible when faced with the demands
and materialism of their everyday existence. Without the meaning
that comes from understanding, it’s impossible for them to take the
long view.”
“So in the last year or two,” Susan continued, “in remembering
the idea about rap songs, I’ve changed my practice. I provide the
meaningful social context first and start working on habit building
later.” By way of illustration, she described to me how, in a remedial
reading class, instead of giving out the assigned text, she and the
students were reading books as a means of developing good study
habits. “Yes, I know,” she said, smiling again, “it’s mundane, but also
revolutionary in a small way. I start off with The Pact. It’s real-life
biography written by three doctors who grew up on the streets of
Newark, New Jersey, met in high school, and made it into medical
school through friendship and mutual caring. Students love it. The
book speaks to them. Many times I’ve had young men who’ve known
the gang scene here in Torrance—kids who’ve been to jail—weeping
as we read. For these kids the social context strikes home: the young
men weeping in class also had a pact, but the wrong one. The habits
and loyalties of the gang world had not served them. They too
wanted membership and social meaning: they too wanted to be
understood. They just took the wrong turn.”
Once the book has the students engaged—once the emotional
investment in the subject matter and the characters is secure—Susan
begins to emphasize those habits of mind required for self-propelled
study in an academic setting. First she introduces the idea of opinion
and choice as the bases of analytic skill, asking “which passages in
this book are real to your own experience, what resonates with you
emotionally about the story?” She also encourages her students to
speak to each other about their opinions, something which, as Susan
explained, many are afraid to do at first, fearing that they will be
made to look foolish. But with practice and classroom interaction
trust develops. New perspectives emerge, and individual students
begin writing about those ideas that interest them. Susan avoids
complex questions about grammar. “My goal at this stage is to
strengthen the ability to reason from personal experience,” she told
me. Similarly, to get the students to read out loud, she sometimes
suggests that they pretend to be actors—to deliver the words from
the book as if they were their own, thus introducing the skill of
speaking to an audience as an important mode of social
communication.
“My whole idea is to build confidence starting with a familiar
subject, in a secure emotional setting. And it’s not lost on the
students that it all unfolds just from reading together,” Susan
explained, smiling again. “I’m an energetic participant, of course. Just
as it’s motivating to read the pages of a book that is meaningful, so is
it motivating if your teacher responds thoughtfully. I try to establish
the idea that we each read one hundred pages a week, which at first
seems crazy to my students. But because of the trust that has seeded
itself in the classroom—not only between me and the class—but also
among students themselves, they become willing.”
“Then after a few weeks, when we’ve got into our stride, I move
on to The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, by Stephen Covey.
That’s a very different book, of course, and more complicated than
The Pact because it’s asking you to get inside your own head, to be
aware of yourself as a unique individual. It’s more difficult to talk
about our own habits and feelings. So I tell the students they can use
themselves or the characters from The Pact if they are more
comfortable with that. In fact some colleagues scoff that Seven Habits
is too complex, but I’m comforted by the memories of when I was in
school, which I share, that I didn’t understand everything I read,
especially on the first pass. I got what I could out of my lessons, and I
tell my students that’s all you can do. That’s sufficient as a beginning.
“The important thing is to be honest in stretching yourself: to be
learning new ways of doing things, new self-discipline, and to reach
beyond your comfort zone. I tell them learning is a bit like boot camp
for the mind. The students who have been in the service really get
that idea. They’re among the best self-directed students—they know
how to listen and take advantage of what they are told.” She paused
again. “In fact they make me realize,” she continued, “that valuable
life skills should not be confused with going to college. Frankly, I’m
not sure we’ve been straight with the American people. Somewhere
along the road we’ve sold the idea that it’s college that ensures the
future and gives people value. And yet a skilled plumber makes a
good living and is more than valued when needed, as we all know
from personal experience.”
George Bowen had said the same thing. “In Britain we’re always
being influenced by this Athenian image of the public school,
devaluing the skill of the hand against the skill of the head.” Neither
Britain nor the United States has good technical schools. There’s no
tradition of secondary education setting the stage to acquire
vocational lifetime skills. In Germany, on the other hand, about half
of all high school students choose vocational training after the age of
sixteen. More than 40 percent become apprentices: in America the
figure is less than 1 percent. Youth unemployment figures in the two
countries reflect these cultural differences. In the United States
unemployment is about 15 percent for sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-
olds; in Germany it’s half that. It’s a lost opportunity: failing to bring
young people into the workforce is a significant drag on the
American economy.
It also reflects a mismatch between what the labor market needs
and what the educational system is producing. So 15 percent of taxi
drivers in the United States have a degree and 25 percent of sales
clerks, even 5 percent of janitors. Only at the top end of the
educational spectrum, for those with postgraduate degrees, does
education and the job market come together with any precision.
Young people are beginning to take notice. When Siemens, a
German company, opened up fifty apprenticeship positions
comparable to those it routinely offers at home—in mechanical
engineering and computer science—at its North Carolina operation,
it had two thousand applications, but only 10 percent of those
applicants passed the aptitude test.
It was Susan’s opinion that it would not be difficult to realign the
community college system to provide greater support to such public-
private partnerships. In Germany it’s a cooperative model, created
between employers and trade unions, guaranteeing that the
apprenticeship-vocational college program supports the
qualifications needed by industry. The trainee receives an allowance
each month while in training, and about half stay on at that same
company after graduation. “I have a number of students who would
go for that,” Susan said with a smile.

SUSAN CORBIN IS A GIFTED TEACHER, laboring against significant

odds. One is reminded of Albert Camus’s interpretation of the
Sisyphus myth: that in rolling the rock up the hill, “the struggle itself
. . . is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Her tenacity intrigued me. I
suspect the roots of her commitment to teaching are to be found in
her early experience, for she was raised by idealistic parents—young
people disillusioned with the Vietnam War—who had dropped out
to start a school with friends. Thus in her early years Susan had been
essentially home-schooled, joining the public education system when
she was ten. That was in Virginia. “We lived out of the mainstream,”
she explained, “so from the beginning I have looked at teaching and
learning a little differently than my peers.” Those formative years
have bred true: in her caring, insightful approach to teaching, she
illustrates the power of early experience in shaping our intuitive
behavior as adults.
James Heckman, the distinguished economist and Nobel laureate,
is in agreement. In early childhood, poverty of parenting is more
powerful than material privation. Heckman has demonstrated that
approximately half the inequality of lifetime earnings among
individuals can be accounted for “by factors determined by the age of
18.” He faults U.S. public policy in promoting predominantly
cognitive measures to track student performance in school. Such
measures miss the essence of the problem. America’s “testing
mania,” as The New York Times has described it, where Congress
requires states to give annual math and reading tests for middle-
grade students, ignores social skills and the development of
responsible self-command, providing a poor index of what it takes to
succeed in the real world. Heckman puts it well: “lifecycle skill
formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets
motivation . . . and they cross foster each other.” If a child does not,
through parental and adult guidance, become motivated to learn and
engage early in life, it is likely that as an adult he or she will fail both
socially and economically. Rather than the carrot-and-stick approach
of competitive testing and the manipulation of federal support based
on test results, public policy would be better served by repealing such
laws and supporting teachers in building relationships with their
students and their parents, one step at a time. Susan Corbin has
discovered this power of attachment from her own experience, and it
is a similar approach that has proved successful in Finland.
One impediment to adopting such a people-intensive educational
strategy and supporting America’s teachers is the size, diversity, and
economic disparities that exist within the nation. A critical
stumbling block is that children receive a qualitatively different
education depending on the state in which they are born, and the
school district to which they are assigned. This is because the
funding of the public school system in America is heavily dependent
on local property taxes, with state and federal resources often
making only minor contributions. In some states, wealthy school
districts may invest twice that of the poorer ones, and in other
instances, as in California, the ratio can be three to one. It is
estimated that this leaves 40 percent of public school students being
educated in districts that are seriously underfunded.
For a nation as rich as America, such inequity is disturbing,
especially when we recall the finding of the McKinsey study that an
equitable quality of instruction is necessary for high student
performance. With one-third of American students studying in
relative poverty, thus compromising the quality of instruction and
the material resources available to them, we place ourselves in double
jeopardy. Not only are we restricting the potential to develop
independent, skilled citizens, but in so degrading the nation’s future
workforce we also are saddling the economy with an unnecessary
long-term burden. Should such circumstances prevail, what
threatens America’s future economy is not the slowdown in college
attendance but the number of individuals capable of benefiting from
it.
The decline in student performance has prompted vigorous
political debate in the United States and Britain. The disagreements
run deep. Conservative forces, particularly in the United States, have
argued that the educational system can be salvaged only by
privatization and competition. At the other end of the spectrum,
powerful teachers’ unions oppose any such intrusion, defending
their own self-interest and the democratic ideal of one system for all.
The charter school movement has emerged as a controversial
attempt to straddle this divide, especially for the disadvantaged.
Charter schools—and in Britain the recently championed
“academies,” which are now replacing the old grammar school
concept—are publicly funded but independently managed, giving
greater control over curriculum and teacher selection. This shift in
policy potentially offers smaller class sizes and an opportunity to
build basic trust among teachers and students. It is a formula that is
popular with parents in both countries, despite the politics, and the
number of such independent schools is growing.
In the United States in 2013, there were estimated to be more
than six thousand charter schools, teaching some 2.3 million
children. However, although widely spread across the nation, this
effort accounted for only about 4 percent of the total number of
children enrolled in public education. Research into the
achievements of the charter program is patchy in quality. The most
credible studies come from the Center for Research on Education
Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, which uses information
provided by the participating states to create a student data set—with
observations in 2013 from 1,532,506 charter students—matched with a
comparison group of traditional public school students. In a 2009
sample, across sixteen states, CREDO found approximately 17
percent of charter schools to be performing better than the public
schools in the same region, while 37 percent were trailing behind.
One consistent finding of significance, however, is that the charter
schools particularly benefit black and Hispanic students from
disadvantaged families. For example, the KIPP movement
(Knowledge Is Power Program), established in 1994 and operating in
poor neighborhoods across America—in Washington, D.C., some 44
percent of the publicly funded system are charter schools—has
shown that disadvantaged children can perform well and achieve
college entrance when given opportunity, good teachers, and the
necessary resources. These outcomes were confirmed in the survey
reported by CREDO in 2013, in which 54 percent of the sampled
students were living in poverty across twenty-six states.

DISCUSSION OF WHAT we now know about the brain’s maturation

and its impact on the learning process has been largely absent from
the political debate surrounding education. And yet our advancing
knowledge of brain and developmental psychology is of great
practical importance. As children grow into the latency and teen
years, the major maturational challenges they face are sharpening the
capacity for focused attention and strengthening self-regulation,
especially learning how to control immediate emotional impulses in
favor of future opportunity.
The classic work on delayed gratification by the distinguished
psychologist Walter Mischel highlights the long-term importance of
mastering these challenges. From a series of studies beginning in the
late 1960s, Mischel discovered that the ability to defer reward not
only varied among young children but also correlated with success
later in life. In the now-famous “marshmallow test” young subjects
around the age of four were offered a marshmallow, with the
opportunity to receive two if they postponed eating the treat until
the experimenter returned from being out of the room. Around 30
percent of the kids held out for the fifteen minutes of the
experiment, usually by employing various mental tricks that diverted
their attention, such as closing their eyes or looking away. Years later
Mischel found that these children had greater academic and social
achievement. Indeed, those who had been successful in postponing
their reward for fifteen minutes had SAT scores that on average were
200 points higher than those who could wait only thirty seconds.
 Not everybody is endowed with the same capacity when it comes
to self-command. The good news, however, is that persistence and
skillful schooling can enhance the ability to delay gratification.
Walter Mischel explored this with his young “marshmallow”
subjects and found that by teaching them to “reframe” the candy—
literally by imagining it to be a picture and thus inedible—or by
focusing their attention upon another thought or object in the room,
their self-control was strengthened. The further challenge is for the
child, the parent, and the educator to turn these tricks into habits
that become intuitive. The charter school movement—Teach for
America and Teach First in Britain are examples—strive to go
beyond the parroting of Gradgrind facts and statistics as measures of
outcome, working hard to find teachers committed not only to
winning the students’ trust but also to enhancing their academic and
social achievement by fostering self-control and good interpersonal
skills. David Levin, one of the founders of KIPP, is collaborating with
Mischel to embed such skill training into the curriculum. Using
peer-modeling techniques similar to Mary Gordon’s Roots of
Empathy program in Canada, children aged four to eight swap
strategies in class, among themselves and together with a tutor, on
how to refocus attention in the presence of short-term distraction.
Although the brain reaches approximately 90 percent of its adult
size by the age of six, it takes another two decades to achieve
functional maturity and for the neuronal highways to become fully
myelinated—myelin being the fatty layer of insulation around the
axons that is necessary for efficient nerve conduction. This process
of myelination follows a varied time course across different brain
regions. Of particular importance is that in the executive cortex—
specifically the prefrontal cortex and its most lateral, inhibitory
region—maturation lags behind the limbic system, where the ancient
emotional centers of the brain are seated. Also, during late puberty,
the plasticity of the brain increases with a burst of development in
nerve cells and synapses, later to be sculpted by pruning in response
to meaningful environmental interaction. Because of this pruning
the prefrontal cortex again matures at a different rate from that of the
limbic brain and particularly from the nucleus accumbens, which is
the brain’s pleasure center.
These shifting alliances of different brain regions influence the
capacity for self-control. In a series of studies the developmental
neuroscientist B. J. Casey, the Sackler Professor at the Weill Cornell
Medical College in New York, has provided evidence that it is
precisely because these old and the new brain regions mature
differentially that the adolescent years are so complex. In a laboratory
study Casey and her colleagues compared self-regulation in children,
adolescents, and adults who were undertaking a task designed to test
impulse control, with regional brain blood-flow being assessed
concomitantly by fMRI scan. The adolescents, in comparison to the
children and the adults, and in association with poor impulse
control, were found to have increased nucleus accumbens—the
pleasure center—blood flow. In contrast, the blood-flow activity of
the executive cortex in these same adolescents—specifically the
orbital-frontal region—appeared closer to that of children than
adults. This suggests that in its maturation the brain’s capacity for
self-command lags behind that of the ancient pleasure center’s
expression of emotion, biasing adolescent behavior toward choosing
immediate reward over the delayed gratification that serves long-term
advantage.
It is generally accepted that an important mark of maturity is the
ability of an individual to suppress impulsive or inappropriate
behavior, especially in the presence of a compelling incentive. Such
abilities are acquired only slowly, however, and with much practice.
Thus gaining intuitive social understanding and mastering skills in
numeracy and literacy—the essential goals of education—requires a
long-term perspective, including forgoing the pleasured excitement
of risk-taking and impulsive behavior that is so attractive to the
adolescent mind. The teenage age years and young adulthood are
thus a paradoxical time for the educational mission. The brain
retains the extraordinary plasticity of childhood with its heightened
capacity for rapid learning and memory, but self-command remains
elusive, especially in times of emotional stimulation. Thus education
during adolescence should be purposeful, focusing upon the
strengthening of meaningful self-examination and disciplined
exploration guided by a trusted tutor, be that a principal, teacher, or
parent. This quality of instruction is hard work and challenging.
With such guidance, however, the complex maturational stage of
adolescence can assemble the flexible toolkit that will best serve
future opportunity.
Thus the lesson from developmental neurobiology reinforces the
common wisdom and the findings of the McKinsey studies, which I
described at the beginning of this chapter: what works in education
is a mix of high-quality instruction, made consistently and equitably
available to every child, by engaged, dedicated, and well-rewarded
teachers. As Susan Corbin commented during my afternoon with
her in Torrance, “seasoned teachers continuously draw upon their
intuitive skills.” Each semester, each class, each student is different.
“You must be willing to change gears, which is the challenge and the
fun, but it also makes teaching to multiple choice tests and to a
federally mandated curriculum extremely difficult.” There is
economic evidence supporting Susan’s opinion. The National
Bureau of Economic Research, investigating a data set that spans two
decades, has recently shown that gifted, experienced teachers have a
significant “value-added” long-term influence upon student
performance and subsequent employment.

IDEALLY, FORMAL EDUCATION is an extension of early parenting. It

is a process that should harness the young student’s maturational
drive to forge and hone the adaptive skills that will serve lifelong
autonomy and self-directed growth. We describe this collection of
skills for resilience, empathic understanding, self-control, and
prudent planning as character, from the Greek word charaktêr,
meaning “mark,” as in the markings of a coin. Hence in common
parlance character implies the distinctive behavioral marks of an
individual—a person’s qualities and habits that are stable and that
define his or her behavior within a social context.
 Marks of character are commonly labeled “good” or “bad,” with
these labels becoming the basis for others’ “moral” judgment of that
person. There is substantial agreement regarding the cross-cultural
consistency of how such judgments emerge, a subject known as
intuitive ethics. In close parallel is the concept of virtue. Thus the
virtue of compassion is a reflection of empathic understanding; the
capacity to defer gratification is the virtue of prudence; the skills of
attentive concentration and dedication to a task translate into the
virtue of perseverance; and a balanced ability to manage life’s
vicissitudes is the virtue of self-command.
These are the skills of self-tuning that enable each of us to
flourish in society—intuitive habits of mind that foster the
individual talent of being a good teacher, a responsible citizen, or a
fine craftsman. Rather than being fixed in quality, these intuitive
skills provide the practical, everyday wisdom that underpins
tranquillity and well-being, the quality of mind that in the Greek
language is called ataraxia. These too are the skills of resilience,
interaction, and caring that sustain the common courtesies—the
social manners—that facilitate everyday living. It is the quality of
these social skills and how we employ them that determine whether
the culture in which we participate is enhanced or degraded. In
short, individual character is the backbone of vibrant human society.
The development of character in the young is a collective
enterprise. As has been evident in my discussion, in the first few
years the burdens and the opportunities of the effort fall
disproportionately on parents and family. But the execution of these
responsibilities is intimately entwined with the commitments that
the rest of us make in the structural and cultural supports provided
to young households. For example, while in 2011 almost 60 percent of
American women were working outside the home, the United States
is one of the few rich countries that do not require paid maternity
leave. And yet most of us are aware of the importance of fostering a
healthy and stable attachment between parent and infant child,
recognizing that nurturing the first steps on the maturational ladder
is an investment in the future.
 On the other hand, as a culture we seem entirely comfortable
with the commercialization of children’s lives from the earliest age.
The typical American toddler can recognize the logos of its favorite
foods by eighteen months of age, usually from watching television
programs, and will ask for them consistently by the third year. And
that is just the beginning. In 2009 total direct advertising to children
was estimated as between $15 billion and $17 billion. The purchase of
children’s toys tells a similar story. Although the United States has
only 3.1 percent of the world’s children, U.S. families annually
purchase more than 40 percent of the toys “consumed” globally, with
total retail sales of some $20 billion.
As Americans we take pride in being child centered, but today
our behavior goes suspiciously beyond pride to consumerism run
amok. Beyond doubt we have been overindulging our children. But
the damage goes beyond the material. Such profligacy is rapidly
eroding our collective responsibility when it comes to the teaching of
good habits and the building of character. It would seem that as a
culture America has now perfected the art of the mixed message.
While we gain satisfaction from being a nation of can-do individuals
—taking few vacations and committed to a vigilant around-the-
clock, technology-saturated work ethic—our overindulgence of our
offspring does little to prepare them for the challenges of the
workaholic world that we have created. The educational calendar, for
example, is still true to its agrarian roots. At thirty-two hours the
school week in the United States is one of the shortest in the world:
at the other end of the spectrum is Sweden at sixty hours. Long
afternoon hours and a three-month summer recess, designed around
the farming life of decades ago, are now time frequently spent with
little adult oversight. For the adolescent mind this is not only an
invitation to mischief, drugs, and losing oneself in cyberspace but
potentially also the gateway to anguish and significant personal
conflict.
Ironically material indulgence appears to play a disproportionate
role in these challenges. Suniya Luthar and Shawn Latendresse, both
from the Teachers College at Columbia University, have found in a
series of studies that children from high-income families, attending
an affluent suburban high school, had significantly higher use of
tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs than did their matched
inner-city neighbors. In these groupings of wealthy children,
isolation from adult role models, pressures to perform on academic
tests, and a lack of family routine all contributed to low self-esteem
and poor performance in school.
A further irony is that being poor in America offers little
protection against this onslaught of consumerism, which has become
pervasive in all socioeconomic groups. Indeed, the affluent society—
where affluence is defined, you will recall, as a continuous flow of
novelty at ever decreasing cost—increases the jeopardy. Not only do
low-income families suffer from the poverty of opportunity and
choice that comes with being disadvantaged, but also they are
frequently burdened by a poverty of understanding, having little
awareness of how corrosive the cacophony of consumerism can be to
the development of character-building skills.
When it comes to education and the development of character,
America has been running a social experiment on a grand scale.
After three giddy decades of celebrating immediate gratification, self-
indulgence, and profligate spending, we find ourselves wondering
why social manners, patience, and self-control are becoming such
rare American qualities. As a society in myopic pursuit of a dream
made material, we have forgotten how clever we are in imitating
others, especially when it comes to the intuitive development of
habit, be that virtuous or otherwise. The culture of affluence is
eroding prudence and the capacity for self-directed growth, thus
undermining the brain’s capacity to achieve self-command.
It is clear that we have much to do. As the number of people
making poor decisions increases, so do our social, economic, and
environmental challenges. As we work to retrieve a sense of cultural
balance, reinvesting in the human side of education would be a good
place to start.
Chapter 8

Habitat:
Made to Man’s Measure
The more living patterns there are in a thing—a room, a
building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an
entirety, the more it glows, the more it has this self-
maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name.
It is a process which brings order out of nothing; it
cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord,
if we will only let it.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

THE SMALL ITALIAN TOWN of Sabbioneta, like some Hollywood

film set, rises abruptly from Lombardy’s fertile northern plain. Built
in the latter part of the sixteenth century, this exquisite fortified
enclave reflects the ambition of one man, Vespasiano Gonzaga, a
noble mercenary, military engineer, and patron of the arts who in his
dreaming had sought to construct a Renaissance city of perfection.
The visit that bright Sunday in late July had been my first. Our
traveling companion and guide was Hans Wirz, the architect and
expert in urban design who makes his home in Basel, Switzerland,
and has been a friend over many years. In hope of completing the
two-hour journey before the heat of the day, we had left early from
the Villa di Monte, an ancient manor house perched high in the hills
some thirty kilometers from Florence, and the summer refuge of
Hans and his wife Anna, a prominent neuroscientist.
The initial drive had been delightful. When it comes to
considering human habitat, Tuscany provides instruction beyond its
physical beauty. Man’s hand has touched every inch of the landscape.
Bridges and tunnels—plus wayside herds of freshly shorn sheep,
bells clanking as they jostled in protest of our disturbing presence—
dominated the weaving, sinuous road that morning. Evident beyond
the immediate highway were small farms that over the centuries had
tumbled together into villages, nestled now among manicured hills
ribbed with orderly vineyards and a patchwork of harvested fields.
But swiftly, within the hour, as we connected with the Rome
autostrada, such pastoral scenes were behind us. Leaping forward,
released and unimpeded, we were soon heading into the shimmering
haze of the great Po valley and toward Italy’s industrial north.
The summer had been unseasonably hot, and Sabbioneta made
no exception for our early start, greeting us with heat of furnacelike
intensity. Built upon sandy shores—sabbia is the Italian word for
sand—and cradled within a generous meander of the River Po, this
tiny town’s formidable fortifications remain intact. The simple
stucco-faced dwellings that crowd its cobbled streets shelter some
seventeen hundred families. Indeed, take away the parked cars and
the streetlights hanging from overhead cables, together with the
occasional plastic chair, and one has the sense that the architecture
of the place, and even the size of the populace, has changed little
since Sabbioneta’s creation some 450 years ago.
The Gonzaga family, known for their horse breeding, military
prowess, and political maneuverings, dominated the Po valley for
over four centuries, from 1328 until the early 1700s. Although
despotic in the early years of their climb to power, during the
Renaissance the family discovered its gentler side, seeking prestige
and status through patronage of the arts, humanities, and
architectural innovation. As a result, in the sixteenth century
Mantua, the family seat, emerged as a prominent cultural center in
northern Italy. Sabbioneta, just thirty kilometers to the southwest
and one of the smaller city-states ruled by the extended Gonzaga
family, similarly reflects the aesthetic strivings of the period. A town
in miniature, today it stands witness to Renaissance values in art,
architecture, and urban planning.
Vespasiano Gonzaga (1531–91), the mastermind of Sabbioneta, was
by all accounts an intelligent, cultured fellow with close ties to the
Vatican on his mother’s side. Vespasiano had grown to manhood
under the tutelage of Phillip II and the Spanish Court and in his
maturity had been the king’s viceroy in Navarre. As a celebrated
soldier with a passion for the classical architecture of Rome,
Vespasiano had a singular vision. This was to rebuild Sabbioneta, a
small township inherited from his family, as an impregnable fortress
while adhering to Renaissance ideals. He sought to construct the
perfect city for his time—over which he would preside as duke and
patron—complete with palazzi for aristocratic friends, an academy,
an art gallery, public theater, and a summer palace for his own
retreat. Vespasiano undertook this challenge with unwavering
personal dedication: in just over thirty years, within the span of his
own lifetime, an old castle and a tiny village were turned into a
utopian dream.
In keeping with the best military engineering of the day,
combined with the techniques of ancient Roman urban design,
Sabbioneta has a star-shaped plan with the town entirely enclosed
within defensive walls. Inside, a right-angled grid of streets—
essentially a labyrinth of T-traps within which we were quickly lost—
is served by two imposing gateways and two central piazzas, with the
main public buildings distributed between them. It’s a city perfect in
its human scale: even Disney, I mused, could have learned something
from such precise attention to detail. Indeed, the classical symmetry
of many buildings I found reminiscent of Georgian London. As
Hans reminded me, that should have come as no surprise given that
the duke’s designs were greatly influenced by the Venetian architect
Andrea Palladio. Palladio was Vespasiano’s contemporary, and his
elegant constructions, combining function and beauty, were to
become an article of faith in the eighteenth century, profoundly
influencing European architecture and even inspiring Thomas
Jefferson in his conception of Monticello.
 Not surprisingly, therefore, despite Vespasiano being a successful
professional soldier of stoic disposition, Sabbioneta is no bare-bones
military encampment. Informed by the Renaissance ideals of rational
humanism, the duke was a perfectionist in his passion and drew
strength from the ancient world. In this creed visual harmony was to
be found in the mathematical proportions of the buildings and in the
whole-number ratios reflected in the divine proportions of the
human body—as is most famously represented in the image Vitruvian
Man drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. But in distinction to the family
seat of Mantua, which was adapted slowly over centuries from its
Roman origins to embrace a Renaissance vision, Sabbioneta
represents an entirely new town planned and built within one
generation. Thus while the architecture of the little city precisely
reflects the planning conventions of the time, it is an image framed
almost entirely by the aspirations of its inventor. Vespasiano sought
the advice of some of the leading architects of his day, but the design,
scale, and placement of the ducal and public buildings is his own,
inspired by Roman principles. As a result their facades, while simple
and imposing, are strikingly uniform in presentation.
When it came to decorating his palaces and public buildings,
however, Vespasiano sought out and employed the best artists from
across Lombardy, including Bernardino Campi, who established his
own school in Sabbioneta. Many of the frescos survive, and
especially the ceilings have retained their original appearance.
Within the public spaces trompe-l’oeil architectural illusion is
repeatedly featured amid traditional depictions of Greek and Roman
mythology. Complementing the prominent display of Gonzaga
ancestral figures and heraldry, the glorious heritage of Rome, and
Vespasiano’s personal exploits as a soldier are also images revealing a
puckish sense of humor. One mural that caught my eye—while
glancing up at the lavish, domed ceiling of Vespasiano’s private study
in the Palazzo Ducale—depicted the daily passage across the sky of
the chariot of the sun. Perhaps in reference to Phaeton, who in
attempting to drive his father’s chariot lost control and set the world
on fire, a precariously balanced charioteer is depicted wrestling
unsuccessfully to control the flight of two powerful horses; his cape
and tunic balloon above him to reveal, exquisitely rendered by the
muralist, the intimate details of a naked torso.
Undoubtedly Sabbioneta’s most celebrated building, however,
and deservedly so for its design and many murals and statues, is the
Teatro all’antica. Constructed between 1558 and 1560 by Vincenzo
Scamozzi, Palladio’s pupil and illustrious successor, this freestanding
and roofed public theater was one of the first to be built in Europe. In
its innovation it included practicality, with a special entrance for the
musicians and performers, fixed scenery of an urban landscape, and a
sloping stage for greater audience visibility. Finished just before the
duke’s death, it represents the pinnacle of his architectural
achievement. In the creation of Sabbioneta—true to his passion—
Vespasiano crafted a Renaissance gem.

SO WHAT CAN THE urban planner of today learn from the little town
of Sabbioneta? This was the question I posed to Hans Wirz when late
in the afternoon, dusty and parched, we sat down for a beer in the
shade of the Palazzo del Giardino, beside the long gallery where
Vespasiano once kept his collection of Greek and Roman sculpture.
“One immediate lesson,” Hans replied without hesitation, “is
that top-down planning rarely works. For all its classical beauty and
attention to detail, Sabbioneta has no genius loci, no spirit of place.
The town reflects one man’s will: the duke’s will, the soldier’s will.
Vespasiano planned Sabbioneta with accomplished architects and
artists but essentially ignored the people who lived and labored
there. So beyond the vision of the duke, nothing grew organically.”
During the duke’s lifetime, Hans went on to explain, the town
worked as a fiefdom, but after his death, when the control of the city
passed to his son-in-law, rioting ensued. It soon became clear that the
people of Sabbioneta no longer felt a special relationship with their
ruler, and Vespasiano’s daughter decamped to Naples as a quieter,
safer place to live. The sixteenth century was a dangerous period in
Italy’s history. Whereas both England and France became unified
monarchies, Italy remained a patchwork of city-states and warring
factions. The duke, as an intellectual and a military man, had risen to
the challenge. Sabbioneta’s fortifications, which Vaspasiano had
designed, served brilliantly and together with a large garrison of
troops kept the townspeople safe. But when it came to filling in the
details that make up the verve of city life, things hadn’t worked so
well.
“As we have seen, the plan of the town is rigid and hierarchical,”
observed Hans. “It proved difficult for the duke to create a
community that worked beyond his beautiful buildings. He was
determined, for example, to construct a theater that rivaled that of
the Duke of Mantua, but when it opened there was no natural
audience. So Vespasiano dressed up his soldiers and his farmers and
they came and they clapped, but it was contrived. There was no spirit
of place.
“So after the duke was gone, Sabbioneta rapidly became a sleepy
backwater,” he went on, “and it so remains today, which is why it is
architecturally so well preserved. And the town’s location didn’t
help: that’s the next lesson. Sabbioneta, even in its years of glory, sat
apart from major trade routes—even from the river—so there was no
vibrant merchant exchange with other communities, such as that
which fueled Mantua or the great city-state of Florence.”
Hans contrasted Sabbioneta’s prevailing circumstances with
those of the Tuscan towns and villages through which we had passed
early that morning. There among the pastoral hills, in his opinion,
were to be found examples of how landscape, architecture, and
economic necessity can come together to sustain a natural synergy,
“with the right buildings in the right topography.” Over generations
the talent essential to securing human habitat took advantage of
both landscape and climate: to exploit a water supply, to command
the best pastures, sometimes for defense. But always, in distinction
to the creation of Sabbioneta, there was a functional imperative
behind the buildings constructed, usually in the service of sustaining
individual families and community.
Our conversation lapsed. The shadows were lengthening across
the square, and the air felt decidedly cooler. I realized we were facing
north, shielded from the worst of the summer heat by the stone walls
of the garden palace. Clearly, I mused, our conversation was not
giving Vespasiano sufficient credit: here in the shaded garden we
were enjoying some of the exact same architectural principles that
Hans had been describing. I was reminded too of the old New
Hampshire farmhouse that has long been my home in America, a
perfect example of habitat constructed with materials at hand. Built
in the late 1700s, it sits facing south on a protected knoll halfway up a
larger hill that overlooks a brook and open fields. An old maple tree
on the southwest corner shades it from the summer sun and provides
the air conditioning. A massive chimney built of fieldstone and brick
stands at the core of the house, providing central heating for the
winter and affording each principal room a hearth. Timber-framed
and clapboard-sided from wood that was cut and milled locally, it is
an example—just one among many—of houses constructed during
the European settlement of New England, from materials at hand, as
the climate allowed, and within the technology of the time.
I reflected aloud upon the ingenuity of such New England
homesteads, and Hans nodded in agreement. “As in any vibrant
economy, a spirit of place is created and sustained by the needs and
actions of ordinary people,” he observed. “That’s why autocratic,
top-down planning rarely works.” Vespasiano had ignored this
principle because he could, through his wealth and power as a duke,
and Hans believed that modern technologies have the capacity to
promote a similar blindness. “Just because we are able to construct
something without restriction, technically speaking, does not
guarantee people satisfaction or sustainability. Today we have the
capacity to drop a box, literally by parachute, to any spot on the
planet’s surface, with heating and air conditioning available at the
touch of a switch. But that’s not a marriage with topography. It’s not
a sustainable symbiosis of man and nature.”
“Swept away by modern technology, as we frequently are, it’s
important to recognize another reality,” Hans continued. “Using
modern sophistication, we can build houses and urban centers that
possess the same unifying qualities that are found in the old villages.
All you need are talented architects, flexible urban designers, and
creative engineers working in harmony with the real people who will
be living there. Then technology becomes a tool and not an end in
itself. Many little Tuscan towns are just as desirable to live in today as
they were two centuries ago. They are adaptable to today’s uses.
Flexibility is the essence of sustainability.”
Beers finished and thirsts quenched, we faced a long drive ahead,
and it was time to leave Sabbioneta. The setting sun had disappeared
beyond the fortifications and most of the day’s visitors with it. As we
walked to the car, Hans was summing up, energy undiminished,
much as he might do before his students in London, Paris, or Basel.
“So in architecture and urban planning,” he explained, waving his
hand in the direction of Vespasiano’s long gallery, “to say that
something is sustainable doesn’t mean that it is fixed in time, as are
these monumental buildings.” In Hans’s mind sustainability
depended on how intelligently a project was conceived. “In modern
analogy think of it as a question of hardware and software. The
hardware is the brick, the marble, and the concrete of the
construction itself; the software is human need and the differing
viewpoints held by those whom the structure will serve, both as
individuals and through time.” Over a succession of generations
needs and interests change: the software of life adapts. And in a
sustainable building the hardware also has the capacity for
functional change, while retaining its integrity. The old house
changes from a dwelling to a farm; it turns into office space or
becomes a shop. But through all these different uses—these different
twists and turns—fundamentally the same structure remains. “So it’s
integration of the shifting patterns of people and place that create
the genius loci that is essential to human habitat,” Hans concluded.
“Vespasiano missed that on his first pass: but he was an intelligent
man. Who knows—if he had lived another decade or two, such
integration might have happened here.”

IT IS THROUGH THE PATTERN of events that we experience—

through events that repeat themselves—that we discover and
remember the character of a place. Many of these happenings are
mundane and repetitive, occurring over and over again, but
collectively it is the habits of everyday life—breakfasting in the
kitchen, catching up with the news, preparing for work, returning
home, eating supper, going to bed—that define the built
environment. It is these patterns, anchored in time and space, that
give the human world its structure.
Thus it is through memory and habit formation that the
structures in which we live come to shape the way we think about
habitat and its relationship to the natural world. We each have our
own points of reference. So for me one image of the old New
Hampshire farmhouse that is etched in my memory is of the kitchen,
where in the chill of early winter the woodstove is crackling and the
supper is being prepared. And another image, this time of Italy and
summer, is the light of the late evening sun reflected in the pines and
the olive trees at the Villa di Monte, a tranquillity played out against
a cacophony of motor horns as an endless stream of cars, their
occupants eager for supper, wind up the long hill to the town of
Arcone.
An awareness of place and the ability to creatively express that
self-awareness is something that starts early. Remember the games of
childhood, of playing house? For Nancy, my partner, who grew up on
a farm in Michigan, the favored location for such games was the
granary at her grandmother’s or an empty corncrib, which had the
added advantage that looking out between the slats, you could see
those approaching. “We preferred dimly lit places,” she says. “We
swept away bugs and grain and cobwebs—real acts of bravery and
tasks into which we would need to be coerced, had we been at
home.” Old utensils, jars, towels, rags, tin cans—whatever the grown-
ups might not notice—were smuggled in. “Tables were made from
stacking grain boxes. This also worked for chairs. Our rags were our
tablecloths. We picked flowers, made mud pies and milk shakes and
weedy salads. We hung things on make-believe windows—though
we never wanted a real window, for someone might actually see us. It
was our own pretend world, and we wanted no adult to shatter the
illusion.” Secret, intimate, and memorable places were created within
that corncrib, places for pretending and for fantasy with imagination
being the essential ingredient. “But rarely did we make a bed,” recalls
Nancy. “There was never time for sleeping.”
Christopher Alexander, a celebrated architect and tireless
advocate for connecting human values to home construction and to
urban planning, believes that it is through such memories that we
first understand the true relationship between our surroundings and
ourselves. The urge to build, he argues, is a fundamental human
drive, as much a part of human instinct as the begetting of children.
But to master the language through which such instincts can be
expressed in design, we must first build a generative grammar.
Alexander has described this intuitive sense as pattern language. Just
as language gives us the power to create an infinite variety of
sentences, through pattern language we have the capacity to design
an infinite variety of spaces that are vibrant and alive. How are family
patterns of interaction served by the layout of a home? Where is the
window best placed in a room so that the light may enter and the eye
be drawn outward? What is the most comfortable place to sit near
that window, so that one may enjoy the outdoors from the warmth of
the house? In answering such questions Alexander believes that an
understanding of pattern language offers an infinite supply of
practical solutions. The focus upon need, memory, and imagination
in the development of human habit, he asserts, is a “timeless way of
building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it ever
was.”

SOME WOULD DISMISS Christopher Alexander as an incurable

romantic. However, his focus upon improving the architecture of
place—of facilitating through design the natural patterns and
spontaneity of human interaction—has increasing resonance for
those planners involved in meeting the challenges of the modern
world. In large part due to the dominance of the automobile, life in
the affluent society today has become centrifugal—that is, far-flung,
time expensive, and disruptive of family patterns and community
engagement. Alexander has not been alone in being disturbed by
such trends as destructive of human caring. For example, in New
York City, as early as the 1960s, the pioneering work of William
Whyte and Jane Jacobs offered visionary insights into the nature of
big city life and how an understanding of behavioral patterns is
essential to the favorable design of public space.
Jane Jacobs, the American-born Canadian activist, first became
fascinated by urban life when living in Greenwich Village in the
1950s. Working as a freelance writer, she found herself intrigued by
how the dynamics of small market interaction—routine shopping
and other mundane chores—often assumed greater social meaning
and helped frame acceptable behavior. Particularly she noted that
adults working and shopping in neighborhoods where they lived
would take responsibility for the safety and disciplining of children
playing in the street. Over time, she suggested, it is this interaction
and sharing of experience that helps shape the character of
community members, creating a sense of pride, belonging, and social
coherence. At a time when cities worldwide were bulldozing “slums”
and replacing them with high-rise dwellings remote from economic
life, Jane Jacobs was arguing for the exact opposite—for greater
density, cohesion, and human diversity—as the essential bedrock of
urban living.
William Whyte, sociologist, author of The Organization Man, and
an early mentor of Jane Jacobs, helped validate much of Jacobs’s
thinking through his own meticulous observation. In 1969, while
working for the New York City Planning Commission, Whyte began
a decade long, camera-based study of public spaces in the city that
culminated in the publication of both a documentary film and the
now-classic volume The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, first
published in 1980. These were not surveys of community life but
rather the study of specific public squares and other gathering places
tracking the behavior of local residents and that of transient
urbanites, through time. What makes an inviting public space?
Whyte asked. How are they used, and by whom? What makes them
work or fail? What is the importance of ambience; of seats, and trees,
and fountains; of sunshine and shade? What of location, the
surrounding streets, and the abutting buildings: what role does the
space play in creating and sustaining a vibrant community?
The pioneering work of Whyte and Jacobs offers insight into the
behavioral patterns that emerge in communities when individuals
have the freedom to interact and to choose their own preferences.
But the flip-side lesson of their work is that the strength of a
community is significantly dependent upon the character of the
people who live there and, furthermore, that successful urban
development is by necessity an expression of that collective
character. Thus, as in city planning in general, the design of public
space without “bottom-up” engagement is unlikely to be successful.
There is a living example of this truth just a few blocks from
where I live in urban Los Angeles. While it is a green and sunny city,
we have few neighborhood parks, and a well-meaning local council
in recent years has been determined to change that. Unfortunately,
in my neighborhood at least, the plan was carried forth apparently in
ignorance of Whyte’s principles, with little local consultation and
even less interest in the activity patterns that a new public space
might foster. Thus, even though the local library is not far away,
when a vacant building site sandwiched between a drugstore and a
parking lot suddenly sprouted trees and a surrounding fence—to be
locked at night against vagrants—there was little neighborhood
interest or enthusiasm. The lesson again is that top-down planning
doesn’t work: it didn’t in ancient Sabbioneta, and neither does it in
contemporary Los Angeles.
But a lack of forward thinking is only part of the problem. There
is another variable that helps explain the failure of my neighborhood
park. Los Angeles is not a walking city: life is unthinkable without a
car, and Angelinos drive everywhere, even to the neighborhood
library. It was not always so. In 1920 metropolitan Los Angeles had
the longest streetcar network in the world, established at the turn of
the century by tycoon Henry Huntington. At the time, to build the
tramlines had been in his best interest as a real estate developer.
Indeed Huntington’s streetcars survived, somewhat diminished,
until the 1940s, when the system was purchased by a conglomerate of
automobile, oil, and tire manufacturers led by General Motors, again
in their own best interest. That was essentially the end of efficient
public transport in Los Angeles. We had nothing but buses and cars
until—in a twenty-first-century reawakening—light rail has begun to
make a comeback.
Nonetheless in Los Angeles urban life remains totally dependent
on the automobile, not only to get around but also economically.
Some 38 percent of the downtown area is devoted to parking, and
private lots are a $5 billion-a-year business. For over half a century
much of the city’s landscape has been designed for and by the
automobile, and yet traffic congestion is the worst in the nation, with
the average commuting time on weekdays being over an hour. Living
in an apartment close to the university where I teach, I manage to
avoid all that, but I’m probably one of the few who walk to work.
Indeed, when I first arrived in the city, kindly folk would occasionally
stop to ask if I needed help, so ingrained is the habit of the motorcar.
My assistant, on the other hand, drives each day from Valencia, a
planned suburban community some thirty miles north of the city. If
one uses the Interstate 5 highway, the travel time is pegged by Google
Maps at thirty to forty-five minutes, but that figure rises by 50 percent
in the morning rush hour, and in the evening, her homeward journey
is frequently doubled to over ninety minutes. And there is irony
here. Victor Gruen, the architect who designed Valencia and who in
the 1960s invented the shopping mall and did much to shape
suburban America, was a man who hated cars. It had been his vision
—he was an Austrian immigrant who had fled the Nazi occupation of
Vienna with little more than the clothes on his back—to recreate the
vibrancy of a pedestrian-friendly, market-driven European city
center—reflected in the dense urbanism of the shopping mall Gruen
designed—together with a series of supporting neighborhoods
interconnected by walking paths. Valencia would be, as an early
enthusiast described it, “an island of reason in the path of
metropolitan sprawl.”
In comparison with many other suburban areas in America,
Valencia has done well, especially for young families. Until the
collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 the planned-community
neighborhoods had continued to grow, with light industry and small
businesses keeping pace. In 1987 Valencia merged with several
neighboring communities to create the city of Santa Clarita, with a
population of some 150,000 persons and an annual family income
approximately double the U.S. average. But Valencia, despite the
presence of the Six Flags theme parks, is still unmistakably a
suburban enclave. Single-family homes dominate, and while the
Spanish-style city center is safe and tidy, complete with fountains
and landscaping, a cinema and restaurants, there is little spirit of place,
as Hans Wirz described it. Public transport is absent, and despite the
many bike paths, most people drive—some 50 percent of them,
including my assistant, commute each day to work in Los Angeles.
For five decades the motorcar has been the American way, and old
habits are hard to break.

BUT TIMES ARE CHANGING. While Valencia fared better during the
Great Recession than many suburban areas in California, housing
prices dropped 35 percent from their peak in 2007. Early in 2014, as I
write this, while prices are again rising, some three hundred homes
are on the market, with approximately a third of them bank-owned or
in various stages of foreclosure. This is not good news, except when
compared to such fringe communities as the Franklin Reserve
neighborhood close to Sacramento in central California: there of the
ten thousand suburban homes that were built between 2003 and
2006, many now stand empty and abandoned. In 2014 home
ownership in these areas is at its lowest since the 1970s. This blight is
continuing to spread. Some estimates suggest that by the third decade
of the new millennium, there may be a surplus of some twenty
million family homes in suburban America.
It is tempting to ascribe this upheaval in the suburban real estate
market to the collapse of the housing bubble, the recession that
followed, and higher gas prices. Growing evidence, however, suggests
otherwise—that while this “perfect storm” may have been catalytic, a
structural shift in sentiment is also under way. While for sixty years
American families have been moving to the suburbs with the
expressed intent of freeing themselves from urban blight, the trend
now seems to be in the opposite direction. Car-dependent suburban
sprawl may have reached its limits. With an increasing number of
Americans now living alone, busy, walkable, and densely knit urban
centers, especially those served by rail-line transport, are becoming
increasingly attractive to both young and old. This movement is
reflected in real estate sales, where home prices have dropped
particularly in those areas that necessitate a long commute. Space in
urban residential neighborhoods now costs 40 to 200 percent more
than in suburban areas that are isolated from shopping, work, and
entertainment. Similarly suburban towns with walk-about urbanlike
centers, such as Valencia, are more desirable than those lacking such
attractions. Suddenly it seems that when given the choice, folks like
lively spaces, varied shops, and busy pavements, just as William
Whyte predicted.
This shift in the American spirit suggests that some deeply
ingrained habits are being called into question. It was in the
compelling embrace of the shopping mall and suburban living that
the American Dream first became manifest for many middle-class
families. Beginning in the post–World War II period, and fostered by
generous tax incentives, the march of the mall into suburbs and
exurbs became unstoppable, with destructive consequences for the
economy of many town centers. But today, as urban living has begun
a renaissance, the ability to recreate the suburban enclave into a
pedestrian friendly and more interactive environment is challenged.
With approximately 23 square feet of box store retail space per
capita, the United States leads the world by a long way, and with
some discomfort. Our nearest rival, Canada, manages only about 60
percent of that, and in Europe Sweden heads the pack with just over
3 square feet per capita.
Furthermore for the automobile, the matchmaker in this
suburban romance, the bloom is also off the rose. While the
recession and high gas prices have taken their toll, there appear to be
longer-term factors in play here too. Young Americans are neither
buying cars nor driving as much as did their parents’ generation.
With shopping online and home delivery, why fight the traffic to the
mall? And when it comes to just hanging out, social media help keep
us in the swing. America is not alone in this trend: car use, whether
measured by trips taken or distance driven, is also declining in
Britain, Sweden, and France. And with transportation and housing
costs now eating some 50 percent of the typical family budget, it is
not only the young that are looking for alternatives. Why not move
back to the city, dump the car, invest in a smartphone, use public
transport, and stay connected at half the cost? And if you really need
to travel to odd, out-of-the-way, places there is always a car rental
service or the convenience of Zipcar, the world’s fastest growing car-
sharing company, with close to one million members.

IN 2010, 82 PERCENT of Americans lived in an urban environment:

it is estimated that by 2050 that figure will have risen to 90 percent.
When we consider that cities are responsible for some two-thirds of
the energy we use and 60 percent of the water, and produce about the
same proportion of greenhouse gases, the technological challenges to
achieving a sustainable, balanced future are enormous. But so too are
the opportunities for enhancing human habitat. The “new
urbanism,” as it has become known, is also a potentially healthy
development, in every sense of the word, promoting both exercise
and social interaction in the individual and efficiency in energy
consumption. Change will not be easy, however. The task of
developing such new habits and the infrastructure to support them
will be particularly difficult in the freeway-sprawling, car-focused,
metropolitan areas of the Sun Belt such as Los Angeles, Phoenix,
Atlanta, and Houston. But other, smaller cities—Portland, Oregon, is
the poster child—have already taken giant steps toward the goal of
establishing a “progressive” urban culture where most people bike or
take the train to work, recycle materials, and generally live closer to
the organic cycles of the natural world.
If this shifting sentiment sounds like a trend toward a European
lifestyle, adapted to American frontier ways, it is because it is.
Portland frequently compares itself to the little town of Freiburg im
Breisgau, in Germany, or to Zurich in Switzerland, where the
citizenry share the Portland dweller’s love of trams and dramatic
views of distant snow-capped mountains. Hans Wirz, the Swiss
urban planner whom you met earlier in this chapter, knows both
cities well, and on a recent visit to London I sat down with him to
gather further insight.
Hans teaches from time to time at University College London, in
the renowned Bartlett School of Architecture, which promotes itself,
modestly, as a “world-leading faculty for multidisciplinary education
and research for the built environment.” On this occasion,
appropriately, Hans had just finished an introductory student lecture
on “What is good urban design,” which I attended. And not without
a certain sense of nostalgia, I might add, for I had been an
undergraduate at the college in the 1960s before going on to study
medicine at the university hospital across the street.
Hans agreed that Europe and the United States were indeed
experiencing similar cultural shifts. “It’s all about density,” he
explained. “Density is the key word. You need a minimal density, of
so many inhabitants per square hectare, to justify and sustain
tramways or an underground system. Suburbs are just not dense
enough: then inevitably comes dependency on the motorcar. And
that is not the future,” he added emphatically. Hans believed there
were ten or twenty towns in Europe that had found the right mix.
“When you get it right the advantages are rapid and real,” he
asserted. “You still have your own dwelling unit, a maisonette or
terraced house, with all the privacy that offers, but in addition you
enjoy convenience and choice—walking to get your groceries or go
to restaurants, coffee houses, theater, health services, and so on—
each within easy distance.” The challenge in modern urban planning
therefore is to take old towns of a certain density, or to build new
communities within them, while artfully shifting the emphasis away
from the built environment per se to seeing it as the backbone to
creating a first-class quality of life.
While the ideal is that this new vision comes together in happy
confluence, in reality it usually takes good political leadership to
initiate such change. “In all the successful cases that I know, there is a
mayor—and that includes Sam Adams, the mayor in Portland,
Oregon—and a municipal council that has ambitions to go in this
direction,” said Hans. “There has to be a reservoir of community
talent, the right kinds of engineers and architects who know how to
do it, and the population has to be ready, sufficiently enlightened to
support this kind of social change. At the personal level motivations
vary—perhaps to reduce personal costs by consuming less energy,
maybe not even to have a car, or simply to broaden social
opportunity and increase excitement. And of course, the business
community must be in on the plan too, especially in the housing
market, with committed developers who are willing to use modern
technologies like photoelectric paneling, heat pumps, and so on. The
whole culture must change.”
As Hans had described in his lecture earlier that day, urban
redesign is not something that is accomplished overnight. The
conception and management of a large project is usually a process to
be counted in years rather than months. And it is a rigorous one,
with clear indices to be considered when measuring the outcome.
Function, order, identity, and appeal are the hallowed objectives of any
design effort, and it is the collective judgment of those who live the
experience day by day that determines the success or failure of any
gestalt that is created. Just as we perceive the world at large through
the five senses—feeling, seeing, hearing, listening, and smelling—so
do we appraise the built environment and act accordingly, in the
classical action-perception brain cycle of Joaquín Fuster, which I
described in Chapter 4. A subjective sense of balance, of an engaging
ambiance, is key. Such moments come when the pieces fit together in
the mind of the participant, and to maximize that potential, much
research is required at the front end of any project. Urban design is
by necessity an interactive, iterative, and democratic process.
Investors, residents, merchants, and the public authorities all must be
involved in defining the project’s objectives and ultimately in
reviewing and choosing among the proposals created. Only then
does construction begin.
Hans considered that in Europe the best examples of such
successful change are in Germany, agreeing that Freiburg im
Breisgau was indeed one, and Tübingen another. He himself had
been working for some time with the city of Saarbrücken, once an
industrial and transport center that is now seeking to reinvent itself.
It was, as Hans observed with characteristic self-effacement, a
process “that takes much persistence and some patience.” Then he
added quickly with a smile, “But when brownfield sites have been
converted into fantastic residential areas with lots of colorful,
interesting architecture and many smiling faces, you don’t need a
questionnaire to measure the outcome.” And such renewal is not
limited to new construction: such success, Hans assured me, can be
achieved equally well in historical towns and established urban
centers. I knew that to be true for I had witnessed it myself in
London’s Marylebone, a district just one mile west of University
College. That afternoon, with time to spare, Hans and I stepped out
to check on progress.

AS A MEDICAL STUDENT, during my clinical years, I lived in

Marylebone High Street, now a fashionable shopping area that sits
below Regent’s Park and runs parallel with Baker Street to the west.
In those days, however, Marylebone was far from fashionable. Indeed,
seedy would have been a better description. It was dangerous at times,
with some fairly shady characters lurking in the backstreets. But that,
of course, was how I could afford to live there. For five pounds a week
I found a room over a music shop right next to a little graveyard,
which is all there is left today of the church where Lord Nelson and
Lady Hamilton christened their illegitimate daughter, Horatia, in
1803. The place was full of history. My room, on the third floor, was
tiny. Quite literally I could stand in the middle and touch everything
that was in it: my sway bed, a little writing table, an electric cooking
ring, a miniature hand basin, and a small gas fire that took shilling
coins. It was an efficient space. The only downside I recall was the loo,
the lavatory, and its placement. It was at the back of the building, on
the second floor, and cantilevered out over a schoolyard, like some
limpet mine. But I was happy there at number sixty-five on the High
Street, and the little place served me well.
After graduation I returned to Marylebone occasionally. The
music shop became a place for sandwiches and then a café, and the
gravestones next door grew a little more moss, but otherwise little
seemed to change. I moved to America: decades passed. And then in
the late summer of 2005, while participating in a workshop organized
by London’s Central St. Martins College of Arts and Design, I met
Patricia Michelson, who had been born in Marylebone and owned a
cheese shop, La Fromagerie, just off the High Street. However, as I
soon learned, this was no ordinary cheese shop, but one considered
by experts to be among the best that England had to offer. It was my
introduction to the reinvention of Marylebone as a dynamic,
thriving, and eclectic urban enclave.
The renaissance began, as Patricia described it, around the new
millennium, when the leadership of Howard de Walden Estates
embarked upon a ten-year program to upgrade the High Street. Some
history is necessary here. London is an unplanned city, and the
“estate holdings” by old aristocratic families are an idiosyncratic part
of its development. Howard de Walden is one of those “estate
holding” families and owns some ninety acres of prime real estate
across London’s West End, including Marylebone High Street.
What is called the district of Marylebone today is part of
London’s great expansion during the eighteenth century, when the
city moved west and north to gobble up residual farmland and what
remained of noble hunting grounds. The architecture is Georgian,
with a Palladian flavor, although the facades are not uniform as in
Sabbioneta. Indeed, far from it, as many great architects contributed
over decades to create a varied and pleasing townscape. Beyond the
High Street itself, which in its lower portion follows the meandering
path of what was once the Tyburn River, is found a grid of streets
and landscaped squares that now host a mix of residential and
commercial properties, churches, small colleges, and at least one
celebrated recital hall, all contributing to the richness of the
community. Although most of the property is designated as historic
and “conserved,” this has not detracted from the continuous renewal
and reimagining of the functions behind the facades. Hence, while
the Georgian character of Marylebone has been retained, the use of
its buildings has evolved in dynamic synchrony with the changing
needs of those who live and work in the neighborhood. Beyond their
beauty, these venerable old buildings—evoking Hans Wirz’s
definition—have a sustainability that is timeless.
It was against this backdrop that in the year 2000 or so the de
Walden Estates began their effort to revitalize Marylebone High
Street, which had grown tired and dowdy, just as I experienced it
when a student. The plan was simple enough: by attracting the right
mix of merchants, retailers, and artisans to bring energy, novelty, and
value to the commercial heart of the district, they sought to create a
villagelike atmosphere that would serve local residents while being
worthy of London’s reputation as one of the world’s great
destination cities. This was, in a phrase, “bottom-up” urban
planning. After anchoring the north and south ends of the street
with an upmarket furniture retailer and a fine grocery store, the
leadership focused upon leasing the many smaller shops.
Consciously rejecting the major chain brands, even though that
would have produced greater immediate revenue, they targeted the
recruitment of independent, entrepreneurial small business owners
who believed in the transformation, offering them highly
competitive leases and a responsive management. It was, as Patricia
Michelson described it, “an opportunity to grow with the High
Street” in a mixed-market environment—with butchers, bakers, and
even candlestick makers—supported by an appreciative, closely knit
community of local residents and a strong carriage trade of
international visitors.
The turnaround was dramatic. Marylebone is well served by
public transport, and within three or four years the foot traffic
tripled. Not only were revenues up in the retail marketplace, but the
income from the surrounding residential and commercial properties
soared as Marylebone become the desirable place to live and to work.
This spirit is evident every year at the Marylebone summer fair,
which attracts upward of thirty thousand visitors, and in the farmers’
market that is held each Saturday throughout the year. An active
retailers’ association similarly encourages cooperative activity and
organizes special events, further supporting genius loci—the spirit of
place. The Marylebone Journal, a bimonthly magazine, covers topics of
local interest, including commerce, medicine (the London Clinic is
part of the Harley Street community), food, and drink, together with
highlighting the arts and local history.

AND THERE’S PLENTY of history to celebrate in Marylebone: many

notables, and some scoundrels, have made their home in the district.
Charles Dickens, for one, was living on the High Street when he
came up with the idea for A Christmas Carol. What fascinates us
about Scrooge, of course, is that in his misanthropy he is a species
outlier. As social creatures, we are not by nature isolates but thrive on
being together; and we are good at the game. On crowded evenings in
Marylebone the street is thick with a mixture of bustling, hurrying,
laughing, and high-spirited people, but there is little jostling to be
felt. There is no bumping into one another: humans are too clever
and adept for that. We intuitively read subtle body cues and glances,
even when moving in crowds, and plan a path accordingly. In the
modern world living together in cities has become our adopted
habitat. We now need to get smarter at designing the city, preferably
with the focus on accommodating people rather than the automobile,
which implicitly has dominated our planning over the last century.
Slow progress is being made: urban living has the potential to be
healthy. Taking London as an example, controls on the burning of
fossil fuels are now firmly in place; gone are the acrid, choking fogs of
my student days. But there is much left to do. The transformation of
our urban environment must be in harmony with our need for a
sustainable future, leaving room and flexibility for individual
projects and personal expression. The generic challenge is that
which I have been emphasizing throughout these pages: we must
fight our affluence-primed, instinctual myopia and look to the long
term. Today, as an example, in the face of the obesity epidemic
(Britain sits just behind the United States, with 64 percent of its
population being overweight or obese), we urgently need an urban
environment that encourages physical activity, with broad sidewalks,
safe bike lanes, public recreation areas, and interesting exercise
opportunities built into it. With a little creativity it’s an achievable
goal. That exercise can be made fun, for both children and adults, is
exemplified by the experimental musical staircase built at the
Odenplan entrance to the metro system in Stockholm. Step on the
treads, and they play notes just as do the keys of a piano. Within
hours of its opening, apparently, there was a 66 percent increase in
those choosing to use the stairs rather than the adjacent escalator.
Striving to create vibrant city communities also makes economic
sense, as is evident in the Marylebone experience. People of all ages
wish to live in such places. We know that those engaged in active
urban lives, walking, cycling, and using public transport, are
healthier and happier than those who must fight traffic to drive into
the city each day. The demographics reflect this trend: well-educated
young people—college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and
thirty-four—are migrating to inner city neighborhoods at twice the
rate of those choosing to settle in the outlying metropolitan areas.
Similarly, at the other end of the age spectrum, retirees are
increasingly opting to “age in place,” to remain in the city and in
close proximity to lifelong friends and familiar shops.
But most critical in fighting the scourge of obesity is revitalizing
our relationship with the food we eat and where it comes from. The
intertwining of settlement and food production is as old as human
history, with the city melding “dining room, market and farm.” The
built environment of the city and the farmer can still intersect in
mutually beneficial ways when planners, designers, and architects
work together. Fostering a renewed awareness of this natural cycle is
already revitalizing communities across America and in Europe.
Indeed, evidence of that spirit of renewal is there in Marylebone
High Street, a few doors down from number sixty-five, where I lived
as a student.
Started in 2008, the Natural Kitchen is the partnership of two
successful food men, Andrew Jordan and John Bartlett, chef and
butcher respectively, with half a century of experience between
them. With a first-floor café, food to go, a delicatessen, and an
organic butcher’s shop on the premises, it aims to bring locally
produced food back into the city center. “Healthy choices that are
easy, affordable, and engaging,” as Harriet Burwood, the general
manager, describes their philosophy: and where possible, choices
made with humor it seems. As Hans and I passed by that evening, a
delivery of produce was being taken inside. It was difficult to miss the
bold labeling on the boxes: “Warning: Real Food. Side effects may be
elevated energy levels, increased sex drive, rejuvenated sense of
productivity and glowing skin.” It’s just part of a habitat made to
man’s measure.
Chapter 9

Food:
The Staff of Life
Husbandry is, with great justice, placed at the head of
human arts, as having a very great advantage over all
others, both with regard to antiquity and usefulness. It
had its birth with the world, and has always been the
genuine source of solid wealth, and real treasures; for it
will furnish the people with everything necessary to
render life happy and desirable.

The Complete Farmer (1777)

Agriculture is surely the most important of all human

endeavors—by far the main source of our food, by far
the world’s biggest employer, with by far the greatest
impact on our fellow creatures and the fabric of the
earth itself. It is the foundation of everything that we
might aspire to achieve, from good health to world
peace to wildlife conservation. It is the thing we
absolutely have to get right. To succeed we must treat
farming as an exercise in applied ecology.
Colin Tudge, “Small Is Beautiful,” Literary Review (December 2013)

FOOD AND EATING are essential to all living creatures, yet in the
human experience they are so much more. The sensual pleasure of
eating is the most accessible of the instincts and the one that is
infused most readily with social meaning. From the earliest strivings
of our species the task of feeding ourselves has been a collective
effort, one that fosters social interaction and primes curiosity.
The history of food is the history of human cultural
development. In retrospect we see agriculture as the civilizing force,
as the invention that broke our dependency upon the variable
offerings to be gleaned from the natural world through hunting and
gathering. It is in such husbandry—in the artful cultivation of plants
and the domestication of animals—that we have sought to overcome
the seasonal limits of our food supply. In complement, in our
curiosity, we became fascinated with fermentation and used it to our
advantage in making bread, cheese, beer, and wine. But when it
comes to innovation in what and how we eat, it is in the cooking of food
that we are truly distinct. Among the earth’s creatures it is man, and
only man, who exploits fire to cook. It is through cooking that we
translate nature’s offerings into something entirely different and
uniquely human.
In our ingenuity we have transformed the pain of hunger and
privation into the pleasures and celebration of the harvest. The
annual feast days found in each and every culture stand in evidence
of our artistry. What we grow, gather, and herd remains a singular
link with the natural world, while what we eat and how we prepare it
is shaped by the culture in which we live. As the historian Massimo
Montanari has described it, “Food is culture.”
When we eat together, we strengthen the bonds we have both
with each other and with our culture. But in the helter-skelter
modern world, such communion is becoming an increasingly rare
event. In the closing decades of the twentieth century life around the
table changed in America and even across Europe. A hectic lifestyle
and the prepackaged processed meals of the “Western” diet now
threaten traditional mealtime practice and also public health. A time
famine has enslaved us to speed, disrupting the rhythm of life and
the social resilience that has been built around food and its
preparation. Today in America, more often than not, we eat alone.
As great a change is that we are no longer close to the source of
what feeds us. Food production, from tillage to table, has become
industrialized, driven by profit rather than palate. Across America
the preponderance of what we eat comes from the same few food
conglomerates, selling essentially the same products through the
same vendors in the same megastores. As an example, Wal-Mart, not
generally known as a grocery store, accounted for about 25 percent of
food sales across the United States in 2013, a sum amounting to a
staggering 55 percent of its American business. Just a handful of
supermarket retail chains, led by the United States and Europe,
dominate the world’s food markets, accounting for approximately 30
percent of all global trade. Even for those in constrained economic
circumstances preprocessed food is now so cheap and so calorie rich
that obesity is emerging as a primary public health problem across
the globe.
It is a paradox of achievement that we now find ourselves facing
an age of food abundance with a brain programmed for scarcity, as
did Henry the fabled pheasant. For us Americans, this challenge goes
beyond biology, however, for it is confounded by our cultural
relationship with food and with the food industry. Producing more
processed calories than we should consume as a citizenry, we have
become ignorant and wasteful, perhaps even disrespectful toward
what we eat. In the 1700s it was generally known—so I am informed
by my friend Patricia Michelson, proprietor of La Fromagerie in
Marylebone—that cows should be encouraged to graze on wild
grasses, for then the milk made better cheese. Sadly, two centuries on
and divorced from the natural ecology, most of us have lost the
ability to judge such particulars. Guidance about eating and the
intuitive pleasures of taste discrimination are no longer schooled in
the local market, from the experiments of mother’s kitchen, or
through lively discussion around the table. Indeed the average
American family now spends more time driving around in the car
together than gathering for a family meal.
In today’s fast-food culture we have exchanged the poverty of
physical hunger for a poverty of self-understanding. We have
confused frenzy with efficiency, trading quantity for quality and
losing sight of the broader pleasures surrounding food and its
consumption. Food’s traditional cultural role in society has been
distorted and in some instances overwhelmed by aggressive
marketing. Eating together is an antidote to stress. The daily sharing
of good food can offer cohesion and solace when the workaday
experience no longer provides personal meaning and space for
reflection. It’s a reminder that what makes us human is not just
physical survival and individual success but also the pleasures that
flow from empathic bonding with others. The cultivation and
sharing of good food serves the greater function of helping cultivate
ourselves: in a disparate world the table becomes a place of gathering
and reunification. And it is here too—through a greater knowledge
of the food we eat and where it comes from—that we can rediscover
our connection with the natural world.
I believe such rediscovery is essential to the future health of our
nation. In Chapter 1 I detailed how Americans have the dubious
distinction of being among the fattest people on earth, a
circumstance explained in part by the high-stress, demand-driven
lifestyle that we have adopted. But there is also much to suggest that
the disruption of local food sources and the relentless
industrialization of our food supply—especially in supplying the
cities where most of us now live—has helped foster our present
plague of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers.
Inadvertently we have made ourselves sick. As Michael Pollan, the
journalist and activist, has whimsically observed, it is as if we
Americans have “ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the
human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished.”
Driven by growing concern over this epidemic, of late Americans
have taken a renewed interest in what they are eating. In the United
States approximately 50 percent of meals and snacks are prepared
outside the home. People have begun asking questions: What goes
into those meals? Where does the food come from? How is it
prepared? What are the ingredients, and who is providing them?
What are the links between the nation’s health and the increasingly
shrink-wrapped “food” that we consume?
To date such questioning has not inspired any noticeable change
in the staple American diet of hamburgers and fries. But it has
fostered citizen-based movements seeking a return to traditional,
locally grown food sources and greater social responsibility on the
part of the food industry. As a result, farmers’ markets, community
networks, and grocery stores devoted to “organically” grown food
have seeded themselves across the country. In the media the
selection, preparation, and cooking of food has become something of
a popular sport, with specialized magazines, trendy restaurants
competing to offer novel cuisine, and celebrity chefs holding forth on
television. Americans are not alone in these efforts, as is exemplified
by the Slow Food movement that began in Italy in the 1980s and now
has chapters across Europe and the United States. In 1999 the
initiative was extended to the Slow City—a place where the
inhabitants celebrate the slow course of the seasons and their
relationship to local taste, health, and custom without excluding
social and technological advance.
I believe we are on the cusp of social change in America. Our
awareness of food is shifting, moving beyond a mere commodity of
consumption to a place once more at the center of human culture
and human health. It is the genesis, pitfalls, and promise of this
shifting cultural awareness that I examine in these next pages.

IT WAS THROUGH EXPERIMENT—from trial and error—that

humankind first distinguished what is edible from what is to be
avoided. In the care of the body, Galen’s principles of medicine,
which dominated Western thinking for two thousand years, were
based on balancing the elements of the universe, two by two, as hot
and cold, dry and moist. A man was healthy when the four elements
of the body—air, fire, earth, and water—were paired off in harmony.
Cooking followed these principles through the skillful combination
of ingredients to achieve an appetizing, nutritious diet.
Medicine and cookery evolved from the same body of wisdom,
where pleasure and health were considered mutually reinforcing
around the consumption of good food. We once knew nothing about
what today’s biochemistry tells us regarding antioxidants, for
example, and their ability to mop up those molecules in the body that
might otherwise damage cells. But instinctively we are drawn to such
foods, as are other creatures. Much as we may now enjoy the sight
and taste of blueberries—high in antioxidants—on breakfast cereal,
Martin Schaefer, a scientist at the University of Freiburg, has found
that the European blackcap, a small bird of the warbler family, also
enjoys them, using the color and taste of fruits high in antioxidants
as a guide to foraging.
Prior to the modern-day technical revolution in medicine,
instruction in dietetics was the primary therapeutic intervention for
most ailments. Pick up any medical text from the nineteenth century
or visit the apothecary shop at Colonial Williamsburg, and you will
see what I mean. Later, as medical science came of age, the focus
turned to “deficiencies of nutrition,” something that I remember
from my own days in medical school: a shortage of vitamin D causes
rickets, an inadequate intake of vitamin C produces scurvy.
In contrast to these “deficiency” diseases, it would appear today
that the pendulum has swung, and the major challenge for the health
sciences is to understand excess. We are getting fat simply because
we eat too much and the wrong stuff. The seductive onslaught of a
processed diet rich in animal fat, sugar, and salt—constituents that
we crave, for they were scarce and hard to come by in Paleolithic
times—has hijacked our culinary tastes. This is part of the story, but
suspicion is growing that we are losing something vital to our health
through the industrial “processing” of food, which frequently has
the prime objective of increasing shelf-life in the grocery store.
Perhaps those reassuring lists of “nutrients” found on the back of the
cellophane packaging are not a substitute for what the body receives
when we eat food fresh from the garden. Perhaps dietary deficiencies
persist; perhaps indeed we are both overfed and undernourished.
It is well to remember that the deficiencies driving rickets and
scurvy were of man’s manufacture. The blackened skin and bleeding
gums of those who had been too long at sea were familiar scourges
for centuries before scurvy was recognized as a deficiency of the
ascorbic acid that is contained in fresh fruit and vegetables. Scurvy
was an illness of circumstance just as was, and is, the bone softening
that marks the rickets of childhood, driven by a lack of vitamin D.
Malnutrition can precipitate that deficiency, but so did the sun-
blocking, smoke-filled atmosphere of England’s northern cities
during the long transition from an agrarian economy to the
Industrial Revolution.
With hindsight it all seems so simple. But what are the
deficiencies that we may be facing now with the industrialization of
our food supply? The evidence there is not yet clear. But slowly, in
the face of ignorance, an awareness of the distinction between
nutrition and food is returning, reinforced not by science but by the
simple intuitive sense that we know a tasty vegetable when we meet
one. And as in the stories of scurvy and rickets, science is beginning
to catch up in aiding our understanding. Even in diseases such as
cancer evidence is accumulating that a diet rich in fresh fruits and
vegetables plays an important role in combating the recurrence of
illness, switching off genes that promote rogue cells and encouraging
those metabolic processes that inhibit them.
Compared to our ancestral hominid diet, to which we became
genetically attuned over five to seven million years, the coming of
agriculture—just ten thousand years ago—ushered in profound
changes in what we eat and how we live. The ancient mixed diet of
plants and some meat, which had varied dramatically with local
climate and geography, shifted toward uniformity, especially after
the cultivation of grains. The staple crops that have supported the
growth of civilization since—barley and wheat in the Mediterranean
and the Middle East, millet and rice in Asia, and maize in the
Americas—were not discovered by chance but selected and
propagated by early farmers in parallel with hunting and gathering.
Subtly at first and then more rapidly as livestock was domesticated,
the shifts in diet have fostered genomic discordance, promoting a
mismatch between our ancient evolved experience and the novel
culture.
Through natural selection we strive constantly to adjust to these
changes, sometimes with success. A good example of where we now
understand the underlying human biology is the story of lactose—
the sugar present in milk—for which the necessary digestive enzyme
lactase diminishes rapidly after weaning in childhood. For the
majority of the world’s peoples this is a normal metabolic shift that in
adult life makes the digestion of animal-milk products difficult,
inducing the syndrome of lactose intolerance. However, in some
minority populations—like those European farming cultures where
the consumption of dairy products has been the norm for many
generations—lactase persistence has emerged through the natural
selection of genetic variation.
Doubtless there have been many such adaptive shifts in the
genome that we are yet to understand, but in general it is safe to say
that our cultural evolution has dramatically outstripped our capacity
to cope, both behaviorally and physiologically, particularly since
industrialization and the advent of advanced technology. Some 70
percent of the total daily energy typically consumed by Americans—
the dairy products, cereals, alcohol, vegetable oils, and the
ubiquitous refined sugars, particularly fructose, contained in cookies,
cakes, crackers, soft drinks, and snack foods—would have
contributed little or none of the calories present in the
preagricultural diet. In consequence, having replaced the plant foods
that once sustained us with a highly processed dietary intake, we
must now juggle rising blood glucose levels, changing fatty acid
composition, shifts in chemical balance, a reduced level of fiber, and
the challenges of chronic metabolic stress. Collectively these shifts in
body chemistry drive our modern-day “diseases of civilization.”
While it has been fashionable to seek unitary explanations for these
disorders, for example, that cardiovascular disease is related to
excessive fat intake, the mounting evidence is that in our
postindustrial diet multiple factors play their part—both what is in it
and what isn’t—and together conspire with lifestyle to generate
disease.
While in the United States we no longer believe in the humoral
theories of Galen, humankind is still hungry for securing the balance
that promotes health, as evidenced by the billions spent on such
wellness “enhancers” as ayurvedic supplements, exotic grains, and
herbal teas. Is this some preconscious attempt to return to the
natural world, to tap again into the intuitive power of phyletic
memory? Does such striving reflect our estrangement from the land
that feeds us? If so, why has that happened? What drives the
industrialization of our food chain? To answer these questions, we
must further consider the role of the city, where most of us now live.

THERE ARE ESSENTIAL LINKS between the growth patterns of a city

and how it eats, as Carolyn Steel has described in Hungry City: How
Food Shapes Our Lives. Carolyn lives in London and is a practicing
architect—one with a passion for food, I might add—who also
teaches the principles of sustainable urban design at Cambridge
University. “Feeding cities,” she explained to me when we first met in
2009, “arguably has a greater physical and social impact on us and our
planet than anything else we do. Think of it: for a city the size of
London enough food for thirty million meals must be produced,
imported, sold, cooked, eaten, and disposed of every single day. And
something similar is happening each day for every city on earth.”
Framed in this way, it seems self-evident, given the gargantuan
nature of the task, that supplying and satisfying the appetites of the
modern city shape our relationship with food. “Historically it was
grain production, essential to the baking of bread, that first fed the
hungry city,” Carolyn explained. “A navigable river and fertile lands
in close proximity were essential if an urban center was to thrive:
that in the beginning was London’s strategic advantage. And open,
central markets provided the necessary infrastructure in managing
food delivery.”
Indeed, I knew that truth for myself. The great, specialized
markets of central London—Covent Garden for fruit and vegetables,
Billingsgate on the river for fish, and the Smithfield meat market—
were all still operating in their original locations when I was a
student in 1960s London. Today, for the moment Smithfield remains
on site, but both Covent Garden and Billingsgate have moved out of
the city center to cheaper land and better transportation.
Supermarket supplies to London, as in other metropolitan areas,
now arrive mainly by truck in the dead of night from someplace
unknown and far away.
 Cattle that once arrived on the hoof and later by rail now are
slaughtered remotely, and it is the refrigerated carcass that satisfies
the daily demand of butcher’s shops and restaurants for “fresh”
meat. Indeed, the majority of modern city dwellers live thousands of
miles from the landscape that feeds them. In the urban setting we no
longer have an emotional connection to the source that provides
what we eat, yet the production and merchandising of food still
shapes the way we live. Carolyn put it to me succinctly: “those vital
activities that were most visible in the life of the preindustrial city
have become essentially invisible.”
Perhaps most startling is that this profound cultural shift has
occurred comparatively swiftly. For Adam Smith agriculture formed
the basis of a nation’s wealth, but he considered interdependence
with the city as necessary to drive continuous improvement. “The
great commerce of every civilized society, is that carried on between
the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. The country
supplies the town with the means of subsistence, and the materials of
manufacture. The town repays this by sending back a part of the
manufactured product to the inhabitants of the country. The gains
for both are mutual and reciprocal,” he wrote in The Wealth of
Nations. But less than a year later The Complete Farmer, my much-
thumbed leather-bound compendium of 1777 from which comes the
epigraph to this chapter, records in detail how rural life in England
was already breaking from its ancient agrarian roots.
A century earlier Parliament had encouraged the enclosure of
common lands, replacing them with the hedged, privately owned
rectangles that we now consider to be the typical landscape of
Britain. This refinement in farming increased crop yield, as a greater
proportion of solar radiation reached the open fields. It was just the
beginning. Subsequently the discovery and harnessing of fossil fuels
dramatically reduced the traditional dependence on the annual
organic cycle of energy renewal. In parallel, thanks to the likes of the
Lunar men, science-driven innovation proceeded apace.
Mechanization and a canal system for transportation significantly
enhanced agriculture production and distribution. By the mid-
nineteenth century the advent of the steam locomotive brought the
emancipating spread of the railways, and the need for physical
proximity between city consumer and country producer began a
rapid decline.
But the city’s demand for food was growing. A population
explosion in the industrializing urban centers and the specter of
Malthusian catastrophe shifted the focus of attention. In feeding the
hungry hordes, now the economic objective was to produce
agricultural goods as abundantly, cheaply, and reliably as possible. In
achieving that goal, the vagaries of nature had become the chief
enemy. The massive and unprecedented growth of industrial centers
—towns that could no longer reliably feed themselves from the
surrounding countryside—demanded new farming methods. So
began the transition from Adam Smith’s time-honored, sustainable
“agri-cultural” practice to what today is known as industrialized
“agri-business.”
In driving this transition, biological chemistry was to play an
essential role. In the early nineteenth century Justus von Liebig, in
Germany, and Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, in France, both made
pioneering contributions to agricultural science. Comparing the
nitrogen content of animal manure, blood, bones, and fish in 1836,
Boussingault discovered that a fertilizer’s effectiveness was directly
proportional to its nitrogen content. Plants need many nutrients to
thrive—phosphorus and potassium among them—but they are
particularly dependent upon nitrogen, which in the natural order of
things is taken from the atmosphere and fixed in soil by microbes
living in certain legumes and in manure. This is the process that
provides the basis for sustainable soil renewal through crop rotation.
However, the natural reservoirs of reactive nitrogen are limited.
Liebig was one of the first to recognize this limitation and
propose the direct application of nitrogen-based agents such as
ammonia as artificial fertilizer to plant roots. Then in 1908 the
German chemist Fritz Haber patented a process where, in the
presence of iron oxide, under pressure, and at high temperature,
three atoms of hydrogen and one atom of nitrogen could be
combined into the pungent gas that is ammonia. Rapidly
industrialized by Carl Bosch, this “fixation” of nitrogen from the
atmosphere had many uses, but principal among them was the
production of explosives and artificial fertilizer on a massive scale. In
regard to the latter, because of Haber’s discovery, it is estimated that
the yield from one hectare of arable land more than doubled, from
supporting 1.9 persons in 1908 to 4.3 persons today.
This was an astonishing achievement, but it was not the result of
artificial fertilizers working alone. By the middle of the twentieth
century the search for increased yields had become the stimulus for
plant breeding and new crop-growing methods. Most famously
Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist working for the
Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s, began using hybridization
methods specifically to develop grains that would benefit from
readily available nitrogen. The result was a series of high-yield dwarf
varieties of wheat and rice that after 1970 rapidly swept across the
world. By 2000 these carefully bred seed varieties accounted for an
astounding 86 percent of the wheat grown in Asia, 90 percent in
Latin America, and 66 percent in the Middle East and Africa.
Similarly the new breeds of rice accounted for 74 percent of that
staple being grown in Asia and 100 percent of that in China.
But there is paradox here, as Carolyn Steel made plain during our
discussion. In step with the triumph of feeding billions of people, the
rush to industrialized farming has had a dark side. Blind to the
longer-term view, we have been interfering with the cycles of nature
on an unprecedented scale, promoting the use of poorly tested
fertilizers and weed killers, plus a conveyor belt approach to animal
husbandry. The devastating drought that turned the great plains of
America—the breadbasket of the world—into dust during the 1930s
gave us pause and sparked early debates that continue today
regarding the merits and limitations of organic and industrialized
agriculture.
“The great Dust Bowl certainly was a wake-up call,” explained
Carolyn. “I think it inspired the rigorous, ecologically designed soil
experiments undertaken by Lady Eve Balfour here in Britain, those
which she described in her classic book The Living Soil published in
1943. And of course there was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962,
which exposed the destructive use of DDT and changed America’s
pesticide policies. These were the pioneers, but I fear their insights
have had little impact on the average city dweller. Our industrialized
approach to feeding ourselves remains pretty much beyond general
awareness. It seems that the closer we live together, the further we
get from an appreciation of nature.”
There is truth here. The “green” revolution, as some have labeled
Norman Borlaug’s postwar success in chemical agriculture and plant
hybridization, has been essential in feeding the seven-plus billion
human beings now on the face of the earth. The world output of
cereal grains tripled between 1950 and 2000 although the area of
cultivation increased only by 10 percent. However, partnering with
such extraordinary yields have been unintended consequences, and
most are not environmentally friendly. Many of the new grains have
proved less resistant to disease than anticipated and therefore
require pesticides to sustain their growth. Agents developed in
wartime to kill lice on soldiers will certainly kill bugs in the field, but
slowly they destroy other things too, including birds, insects, and
other creatures essential to biodiversity.
Also the new varieties of high-yield seeds require not only
artificial fertilizers but also large amounts of water, creating both
shortages and unforeseen problems. Nitrogen run off from fields has
poisoned fish and shellfish in many coastal regions by reducing the
oxygen in the water and encouraging the growth of algae and weeds.
In India—specifically in the Punjab, the cradle of India’s “green”
revolution—the heavy drawdown of the region’s water through deep
wells has caused a dramatic fall in the water table, lowering it fifteen
feet in just the decade between 1993 and 2003. Indeed the depletion of
groundwater has become so severe that many farmers in the region
are unable to satisfactorily irrigate their crops, with yields dropping
in consequence. And India is not alone; the Great High Plains
Aquifer that lies beneath the vast midwestern plains of the United
States, stretching from South Dakota and Wyoming to the Texas
Panhandle, is also failing. A half-century of center-pivot irrigation—
the deep wells and rigs that create the patterned circles of crops so
evident when flying over the territory—has dramatically reduced the
available groundwater, drying creek beds and endangering this vital
agricultural region during periods of drought.
The lesson is familiar. In our zeal to solve an old problem—in this
case hunger—we create a new one. It is increasingly apparent that the
“green” revolution, relying as it does on fossil fuels together with
massive fertilizer and pesticide campaigns, disrupts biodiversity and
the capacity of the living soil to maintain the ecological balance
essential to the production of healthy food. This is potentially
counterproductive, increasing the risk of rapidly evolving pests and
destructive crop diseases that will further disrupt the world’s food
supplies. The processed and fast-food conglomerates that dominate
in feeding the masses of the hungry city, but which are heavily
dependent on industrialized farming and cheap transport to reduce
their costs, perpetuate and exacerbate these potential pitfalls.
“We are as dependent on food conglomerates as ancient city
dwellers were on their king or emperor,” ventured Carolyn during
our discussion. “Yet unlike them we have no direct relationship with
those feeding us—apart, that is, from when we hand over the cash at
the till. Supermarkets supply eighty percent of our food in Britain. In
the name of efficiency we have streamlined nature itself. Even more
ironic is that we city dwellers have been sold the idea that food is
cheap,” she continued. “Nothing could be further from the truth.
The only way to sustain that illusion is by externalizing and hiding
costs. So in reality a third of the globe’s greenhouse gases are derived
from industrialized food production, which also consumes some
seventy percent of the water we use. The American diet takes ten
calories of energy to put one calorie of food on the table, so buying a
hamburger should cost around two hundred dollars. It is a system
both expensive and wasteful: Britain throws away 6.7 million tons of
household food a year—one third of all that we buy. Clearly the
prevailing economic model for feeding ourselves is unsustainable.”
For Carolyn Steel life is full of fascinating puzzles. How we sort
through them helps shape the way we think, and urban food
distribution is one such puzzle. Thus it follows for an individual with
a flair for urban design that if the places where we live are shaped by
food, then food is potentially a creative tool through which to build
better places. The logic goes something like this. With
industrialization, civic centers built around vibrant food markets are
largely a thing of the past. Food no longer comes to the urban center
but to peripheral megastores: we drive out of the city to buy what we
eat. Within the city itself the “good” food goes were the money is,
while the poorer city districts become “food deserts”: de facto
commerce is designing our cities.
But food is culture. Food is a shared necessity and frames a
shared way of thinking. Food goes beyond what is on the plate to
show us that the mundane elements in life are connected: food
carries meaning and values. So when we pause to see the world
through food, we come face to face with the kind of world we are
creating. In short, for Carolyn Steel thinking about food gives
permission to think again about big ideas. “What kind of society are
we trying to produce?” she asks. “When we talk about food systems,
we ask how are we going to feed the world? We be should asking what
sort of world do we want to feed? We’ve got the question the wrong way
round.”
The implication of such thinking is that we need a second green
revolution and a real one this time, one less dependent on
industrialized agriculture and the heavy use of fossil fuels. We must
balance a blind faith in the technology of monoculture with organic
fundamentalism. Fortunately this shift is already in process for we
are wiser now. When singularly pursued, industrial agriculture and
organic farming both fall short in the feeding of billions. What is
needed is a third way, combining ancient wisdom with modern
technology. A dynamic network of local farms supported by strong
infrastructure must supplement the globalized food chain. Such is
the philosophy of the Slow Food movement—a system where the
consumer and the producer once again have a dynamic relationship
such that production more closely equals demand and waste is
reduced. But in the twenty-first century where are those
knowledgeable local farmers to be found?
OJAI IS A SMALL TOWN some ninety miles north of Los Angeles.
Nestled up against the mountains, it remains a farming community
growing mainly citrus fruit and avocados. It has also become a haven
for prep schools, artists, and entertainment industry refugees from
big-city life. The main street has a park and an arcade of shops with
Spanish-style facades. There is also a small movie theater tucked in
next to the post office; the theater looks back to the heyday of
Hollywood before it was harassed by televisions and electronic
tablets. In the foyer they still sell popcorn from a glass cabinet framed
by mahogany columns, and on the walls are photographs of bygone
stars.
One bright afternoon in the fall, just days before Thanksgiving, I
attended the screening of a new documentary made by one of the
townspeople, a woman who is enthused about organic farming but
also deeply moved by the tragedy of war. Ground Operations was the
film’s simple title.
The theater was packed. As the film opens, two shadowy figures,
wrapped in armor and clutching heavy weapons, cautiously pick
their way through a blanket of fog. Slowly the mist clears, and two
young men, now in T-shirts and jeans, are walking down a farm track
in bright sunshine. The camera pans outward over the mountains to
reveal a sun-blessed valley, spectacular in its autumn foliage.
Focusing down, we find ourselves standing in front of a herd of
curious cows, who are solemnly investigating the camera and quietly
chewing.
Then with a crash the silence is broken: the screen is leaping
toward us. Suddenly we are back at war, as amid the whickering of
gunfire a massive explosion craters the road in front of our vehicle
and spins it sideways. . . .
“It’s ironic,” declared Delanie Ellis, the film’s producer, when we
met the next morning at breakfast. “Rural America has sixteen
percent of the population and yet provides forty percent of our
military personnel. Disproportionately kids from the farm belt are
fighting our wars in the Middle East. And many are coming home to
no jobs. Returning veterans need real opportunities—to heal, to pay
bills, take care of families, to start a new life. They’re not
complaining. They will tell you they chose to serve. But to be
roughed up in war and to come home to a void is to me a double
tragedy. That’s where I know farming can help.”
Delanie is a woman of passion and energy, while at the same time
intensely practical. Those who know her well say that it has always
been so. As a girl growing up in the San Fernando Valley before it
was overrun by the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, she loved horses
and open space; that ended abruptly when her father changed jobs
and moved the family into the city. After college her filmmaking
career began promisingly in Hollywood but sputtered and slowed in
one of the industry’s many economic downturns. In self-defense she
retreated to a small family-owned beach house in Ventura County,
only to fall in love again, this time with the village of Ojai and with
gardening. “I taught myself from books,” she declared unabashedly,
“and I made lots of mistakes. But they were good mistakes. Failure
teaches you how complicated and difficult growing real food can be.
It makes you appreciate the product.” She was hooked. Even when
the economy rebounded, she did not go back to L.A. “My daughter
and I,” she added proudly, “have been gardening and cooking
together since she was two.”
Inspired by her new passion, Delanie returned to directing films,
focusing on documentaries. The first was on preserving farmland.
“The short answer to that challenge is better urban planning,” she
quipped, “going up, as in Europe, not going out.” Next was a film
about farmworkers; another focused on land stewardship. Then she
met Michael O’Gorman, the founder of the Farmer Veteran
Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rejuvenating small
farms by strengthening the network of veterans in agriculture. For
Delanie it was a project made in heaven. “As a filmmaker, I was on to
the idea immediately, much as a hungry flea jumps on a dog.” Ground
Operations was the product.
A series of screenings across California and the Northwest
followed, connecting returning veterans to one another, to local food
producers, and to businesses. “We always start with food—with a
supper of local produce—then the veteran speaks, and then the
film,” explained Delanie. “It’s a prescription that’s memorable. The
stories told by these young men and women are heartbreaking and
inspiring in the same breath. It’s living testimony to how the scars of
war—the traumatic stress, the damaging effects of concussion—can
heal and joy can return, not to mention the real goods that they bring
to the table. In Santa Monica recently one young artisan brought
mead wine made from his honey; another was making ketchup from
his heirloom tomatoes. The audience couldn’t get enough of them:
from warrior to farmer—from bayonets to pruning hooks—and with
business savvy too.”
America needs battalions of such artisans. Of the more than 320
million people who live in the United States, less than 1 percent
consider themselves farmers, and they are an aging group. There are
eight times as many farmers over sixty-five as there are farmers under
thirty-five. Production is increasingly concentrated in the
industrialized sector of our farming enterprise. In the 2007 census
taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a mere 187,816 of the
2.2 million farms registered in America accounted for 63 percent of
all agricultural products sold. America’s vital base of small farms,
those with incomes between $100,000 and $250,000 that supply local
markets, has been eroding for decades. And perhaps most important
is that the transgenerational knowledge base of seasonal husbandry,
of sustainable crop rotation and other organic practices, has been
eroding with them.
“To feed the growing demand for local markets, it’s estimated
that we need one hundred thousand new farmers each year for the
next ten years,” Delanie explained during our conversation at
breakfast. “That’s where veterans can make a difference. It’s a great
union. Small-scale farming needs a mix of talents and the ability to
make do with what you have. That’s something the veteran
understands and has practiced repeatedly, frequently under fire.
They know machines: they know what it takes to make something
run and to keep it running. And they understand risk and strategic
thinking. These are the people we need in local farming—people
who don’t give up when things get tough. And for the sixty-year-old
seasoned farmers doing the training, it’s an opportunity: they love
the eager energy that the young people bring. Yes, it’s a great union:
the kids from the farm belt are coming home.”
When it comes to educating young farmers, such apprenticeships
follow an organized tradition in America. The 4H clubs—pledging
head, heart, hands, and health—have been in the game for a century
or more. Supported by state colleges, county agents, and enthusiastic
families, the movement remains strong in the Midwest and in rural
areas. I speak from experience: my two daughters Kate and Helen,
growing up on a small farm in rural New Hampshire, reared enough
heifers between them to help pay their way through college; Kate
ended up a large animal vet, and Helen is a sheep farmer.
Indeed, it has been suggested—as a twist to the story—that
American agriculture’s pursuit of biotech innovation, yield, and
profit has its roots in the aggressive promotion of novel farming
practices by the land grant colleges and their 4H extensions during
the settlement of the Midwest in the late nineteenth century. From
the start, compared to many European countries, the United States
has treated the growing of food as a commodity to be maximized and
traded rather than an extension of culture, cuisine, and conversation.
So if a hybrid seed outgrows the seed corn saved from last year’s
harvest and increases yield, then more to the good. It’s a different
way of thinking. Perhaps such thinking helps explain the
industrialization and bifurcation of American agriculture into large-
and small-scale farming during the later part of the twentieth
century?
I asked Delanie what she thought. “That’s possibly true,” she
replied swiftly, “but it’s not an either-or proposition. We will always
need some big agriculture,” she said. “We’re not going to be growing
wheat or soybeans on a five-acre farm. And cattle need big areas for
grazing, so there’s always going to be a place for that. But we need a
balance between big and small. A major problem at the moment is
that big agriculture has a grip on farm legislation in America.
Originally the farm bill was set up during the Great Depression to
keep farmers on the land—because there was no food—and to save
people from starvation. But that has changed: now the farm bill is
essentially a subsidy for the ‘agri-business’ with minimal assistance
to the small ‘agri-cultural’ farmer. For example,” Delanie continued,
“did you know that you can’t use food stamps at the Ojai farmers’
market? Does that make sense with the obesity problem we have in
this country? Essentially federal policy dictates that the poorest
people can use food stamps only to buy processed food.”
Delanie paused. “We need better balance between industrialized
monoculture and diversified, sustainable local farming. The inner
city is a food desert: why not bring real food production to within
sight of the city walls and improve the health of those who live there?
Our returning veterans can help do that: impact ten to twenty
percent of the market, and the politics will follow. The teenagers
have no summer jobs—we can change that. Many in America are
suffering from poor nutrition—we can change that too. So my work
with veterans is just a small contribution to solving a much larger set
of problems. But the bottom line is that for reasons of both economy
and health we must reestablish a direct relationship between farmer
and consumer.”

TO REESTABLISH SUCH a relationship in America may now be

possible. After more than half a century of federal subsidies that have
favored intensively farmed monocultures fostering overproduction
and low prices, food costs again are rising. Among the factors driving
these increases are that China has doubled its appetite for meat; the
movement to develop domestic biofuels is consuming one-third of
America’s annual maize production (filling your gas tank with
ethanol requires about as many corn calories as does feeding an
individual for a year); the cost and availability of water for factory
farming is rising; and fossil fuels are increasingly expensive to extract.
Paradoxically these increasing costs offer an economic opportunity
for small-scale producers interested in developing a sustainable
business model through supplying fresh food to their local city
neighbors.
Several elements are in place to encourage such
entrepreneurship. First, approximately 80 percent of small farms
selling at the local level are situated in metropolitan counties or close
to them. Research also suggests that 30 percent of shoppers will
change where they buy their food in order to purchase local
products. It’s a classic case of back to the future. City leaders, as of
old, are learning that they can improve a region’s economy by
facilitating strong relationships with local farms and at the same
time, as a bonus, potentially improve public health.
And the influence goes further. The greater interest in locally
grown and organic food is changing not only the habits of customers
but also in turn the habits of the groceries that serve them. In Los
Angeles Whole Foods, which trades on “providing food that is good
for you,” is growing against its traditional competition. In response
Safeway Stores and other established grocers, including Tesco—an
upstart from Britain—have launched small neighborhood stores that
sell fresh produce. The avowed goal in typical Madison Avenue
jargon is to offer the shopper a “new lifestyle experience.” Even Wal-
Mart, the world’s largest retailer, is developing a smaller grocery
chain known as Marketside—purchasing from local suppliers—
which goes to affirm, as Delanie Ellis believes, that ideological
movements at the social margin can change not only consumer
habits but also established market practice.
These new city stores offer convenience by reducing the number
of choices in each product category—too much choice confuses: few
shoppers need fifteen varieties of ketchup—making it easier for the
individual to buy wisely when pressed for time. Hence such stores
carry only about 15 percent of the inventory found in large grocery
chains with about half of the items on display being fresh fruits and
vegetables, local meats, cheeses, and healthful pre-prepared foods.
Some of the stores are hybrids, preparing and serving food on the
premises, as typified by the Desert Rain Café in Sells, Arizona, which
is run by the Tohono O’Odham Nation. The goal is to return locally
sourced, nutritious indigenous foods to the Pima diet as a first step in
combating the obesity epidemic.
Other stores have emerged from the opposite direction, being
developed by the farmers themselves. Some of these are backed by
established resources such as the Blue Hill restaurant at Stone Barns
in the Hudson Valley, while others have grass roots. The Farmer and
the Cook, run by Steve Sprinkle and Olivia Chase, is such an
example in Ojai. Here a simple restaurant and market garden shop
are the backbone of a program in “community-supported
agriculture,” where subscribers pay $100 a month to take home
freshly harvested vegetables, sustainable fruits, and varieties of herbs
throughout the year. With sixty subscribers it has a waiting list and
reflects the extraordinary enthusiasm for locally grown produce that
is emerging across America.
But enthusiasm does not necessarily equate with sustainability.
Objectively the challenge in remaking a viable fresh-food system is
formidable. Certainly the consumer and the farmer are the critical
elements of such a system, but they must be knit into a dynamic
whole by an infrastructure that makes it possible for farmland to be
preserved and farms to be run effectively as a business while at the
same time large institutions within the city can purchase regionally
produced fresh food directly and efficiently. In simple terms we need
unfettered local markets that work.
As my friend and colleague Michael Smith of Gypsy Meadows
Organic Farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire, has described it, the
mechanics of local farming separate into two parts—the growing of it
and the getting rid of it. “The growing is hard work,” says Michael,
“but in some ways it is ridiculously easy: plants grow. I don’t mean to
diminish it, but it is simple. If you know what you’re doing and pay
attention to things, you grow better plants and so on. But selling it—
how you market the stuff—that’s not so easy, especially if you have
the old-fashioned idea that the cost of purchase should reflect the
cost of production. To hold down costs, an efficient infrastructure is
essential, and in most communities we don’t have what’s needed.
Sustainable fresh-food economies are not built on the backs of local
farmers’ markets.”
In California, three thousand miles to the west, Larry Yee would
agree with Michael’s assessment. Cofounder and president of the
Food Commons, a national think tank dedicated to a new economic
paradigm for sustainable farming, Larry has worked tirelessly for over
three decades, both nationally and through the University of
California Cooperative Extension, to develop innovative practices in
local food marketing. Establishing a networked infrastructure of
physical, financial, and distributional support is a central challenge
in remaking any local fresh-food system. To do so is not easy.
Success requires a combination of local leadership, community and
political support, and consistent financial investment, often
including philanthropy to serve as a pump primer.
The Philadelphia-based Common Market is one shining example
of achieving such success. When Tatiana Garcia-Granados and Haile
Johnston, both graduates of Wharton, the University of
Pennsylvania’s school of business, set up home in the Strawberry
Mansion district of North Philadelphia in 2002, they soon discovered
that they were living in a fresh-food desert. Working initially with
neighborhood groups to establish a farmers’ market, the couple
quickly realized that the problem ran much deeper. With no stable
customers and no delivery system, the connections that had once
existed between Philadelphia and its surrounding farmland
atrophied. For lack of customers local farmers were rapidly going out
of business.
Tackling the problem at its source, in 2008 Garcia-Granados and
Johnston founded the not-for-profit enterprise Common Market as a
distribution link between threatened farms and Philadelphia’s fresh-
food-deprived urban communities. Troubled by the health
disparities clearly evident in many poor neighborhoods and
recognizing the role healthy food plays in enabling young children to
succeed, the pair focused Common Market’s initial efforts on
cultivating institutional customers, particularly schools and
hospitals. This strategy had the double advantage of adding freshly
picked produce to the meals fed to those most in need of it while at
the same time stabilizing the market for local producers. With a $1.1
million development grant from the Kellogg Foundation and a
generous credit line supplied by the Rudolf Steiner Foundation
program for social finance—to pay farmers rapidly and fairly, thus
shielding them from institutional tardiness—the Common Market
has moved forward quickly.
 In 2011 Common Market’s customers included more than fifty
public and charter schools in Philadelphia and New Jersey in
addition to local groceries and hospitals. And the statistics are
compelling: working with Common Market, the farmer on average
earns 76 cents on every food dollar compared to less than 12 cents
when working with conventional food distributors. And the food is
indeed fresh, traveling less than 200 miles from farm to table
compared to an average of 1,500 miles for conventional food sources.
Thus Common Market’s locally grown fruits and vegetables are
picked to order and usually sold within seventy-two hours of being
harvested. It’s all part, as Haile Johnston describes it, of establishing
from birth to death a “whole life–good food” continuum.

PETER FORBES, MY SON-IN-LAW, has long asserted that good food

starts with good land. “What we eat and drink is our most important
daily relationship to the land,” Peter observed as he carried a skillet of
freshly prepared home-reared lamb to the table. “The marinade is
yogurt and ginger,” added Helen, “and Wren scrubbed the potatoes
and made that beautiful salad.”
The occasion was suppertime at Knoll Farm a year or so ago:
excited voices, the dog barking, the enticing sizzles and smell of the
lamb, and the clatter of cutlery. It was late summer. That particular
evening we ate in the small solarium just off the kitchen, looking out
at the pond and the massive old barn. The farm chores were
complete. The sheep had been gathered up from the field for the
night. It was a precaution against the coyote: with the llama having
recently died, they had lost their protector. The chickens were
returned to their coop, enticed by fat cuttings from the lamb and by
their grain. Wren had set colorful napkins and name tags around the
table, except for her own place because she knew where she would be
sitting. Fresh cucumbers in rice wine, shallots, red greens, and new
potatoes complemented the lamb. The salad of three varieties of
heirloom tomatoes—red, green, and saffron yellow—finished the
spread. “It’s all from Knoll Farm,” Wren whispered to me proudly as
we sat down. I nodded and smiled in appreciation.
This was a special meal. I rarely miss an opportunity to visit my
daughters and their families, but on this particular occasion I had
gone to Vermont to learn from Helen and Peter about their decade of
farming experience. I wanted to get beyond the nostalgia and
romance of covered bridges and the fall colors to learn about what it
takes to build an economically viable farming enterprise in a rural
community. Fayston lies close to Waitsfield in Vermont’s Mad River
Valley, a picturesque tourist area in the summer months and a
destination for serious skiers during the winter. I was curious. How
much did local farming fit into what was increasingly a transplanted
city culture? Was the production and marketing of fresh food taken
seriously?
“It depends on who you ask,” Helen explained. “Those who have
lived here for generations always grew their own food, so to them it’s
no big deal. People who have summer homes or have moved here
recently from urban areas find it a complete revelation to start eating
locally. They seize on the idea that good food brings good health; and
it’s also about neighborly support, getting together and learning new
skills. It’s a new culture for them: it’s exciting, it catches on, and it’s
good for us. Farmers’ markets are a huge trend in Vermont. The
amount of money generated by farmers selling directly to the public
is three or four times that of most states. That’s one index of local
interest. And of course it’s an entirely different community
experience,” she added. “That’s probably why it is so appealing to the
newcomer. There’s far more human interaction in buying fresh food
from a local farmer than there is in picking packages off the shelf in a
chain store.”
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, farmers’ markets
grew rapidly across the country. “All states have seen huge
increases,” said Peter, “perhaps multiplying tenfold to some ten
thousand in all.” Peter considered that the trend was about
rediscovering relationships, not only with food but also with each
other. “That’s why Michael Pollan’s books have sold so many copies;
that’s why sustainable agriculture is blooming. In this technology-
saturated world the local food movement is about human
connection. Cynically one might consider it romanticism, but here
in Vermont it’s real. And it’s happening in other parts of the country
too. Local farming is cheaper and healthier, and it’s more fun for
both producer and customer.”
As the name implies, Knoll Farm is a hill farm, 140 acres of
hillside pasture and sugar maples that has been farmed since 1804.
The land and buildings are on the National Register of Historic
Places and are conserved by the Vermont Land Trust. Central to the
farm’s economy is its herd of purebred Icelandic sheep, known for
their fleece and mild flavored meat. Each spring forty to fifty lambs
are born and raised by their mothers on milk and grass until about
eight months of age. The best animals are sold for breeding or kept to
strengthen the flock, and the rest are purchased as meat by local
restaurants and individuals. In complement eight varieties of organic
berries are grown for local markets and sold to farm visitors picking
their own. A shop, situated at the farm and open between June and
October, offers the berries, other produce, jams, eggs, grass-fed lamb,
wool, yarn, blankets, and sheepskins. The enterprise turns a profit
but would need to get larger to support the family as the sole source
of income. Hence as for many small farms, the family income is
supplemented by outside activity, with Helen working as a writer and
editor and Peter lecturing widely on land conservation and
leadership. Workshops on sustainable farming practice and summer
retreats in collaboration with the Center for Whole Communities,
which serves environmentalists and social activists around the
country and makes its home at the farm, complete the picture.
Both Helen and Peter enjoy the diversity of what they do,
believing that the way they farm and approach the stewardship of
their land—with the next generation in mind—is more important
than any one aspect of the business. “Some people might criticize our
work here as being at the margin,” Peter said, “but it is at the margin
that change occurs.” And it is true: Scott Nearing had been at the
margin—as had Eve Balfour and Rachel Carson—but Nearing’s
example helped catalyze the land trust movement decades after his
death.
 In Peter’s mind, reengaging with why, how, and what we feed
ourselves can return a sense of meaning even to the busiest of lives.
So for the soccer mom from Annapolis “who has got debt up the
wazoo and two kids she’s trying to raise,” going to the local farm to
pick up the week’s vegetables becomes a meaningful moment in an
otherwise hectic life. The kids get to see what a carrot looks like, and
the mother gets to connect with her neighbors. “That’s when stuff
begins to change,” asserted Peter. “Such little moments are
happening across the country. In the age of the Internet the food
movement offers real connection to who we are as social beings.
What started at the margin in small towns in Vermont and on the
coasts is beginning to have national impact. And not just in the rural
areas. Think of Just Food in New York City, Growing Power in
Milwaukee and Chicago, and People’s Grocery in Oakland. There’s
something like twenty-two hundred CSAs—community-supported
farms—in the United States right now, and the numbers are growing
fast.”
I reminded myself once again: food is culture, and it runs deep.
Within the subcultures of America there are great traditions around
food and food preparation. Those shared family memories of
cooking with grandmother, of chatting, of savoring the soup are real
and pervasive. The cultural experience is bigger than food alone: it’s
a collective memory that conjures ethnic identity and ancestry to live
again in the immediate moment.
Taking the long view of history, the era of industrial agriculture is
just a tiny blip in the farming experience. But as Helen remarked
during our supper together, “industrialization has become so
pervasive that the last two generations in America have no memory
of how to get a tomato out of their backyard.” So to succeed, the
“real food” movement must go beyond privilege, romantic images,
and glossy picture books to reeducate and to reorient the next
generation of children—and do so early, forging lifelong habits of
healthy eating and good food. During World War II many American
communities and families supplemented their local food supply by
planting a “victory” garden. By 1943 there were more than 20 million
such gardens—at homes, in parks, and in the schools—producing
more than 8 million tons of fresh food. This is now happening again
with school garden programs across the country, driven in large part
by the obesity epidemic and a growing concern for long-term public
health. It is the beginning of a cultural reawakening. Through such
programs children are learning to make different choices, seeding
islands of hope for the future.
Peter reminded me during our evening together of the geological
term terra refugere, which refers to those fragments of land that were
untouched as the last ice age moved south, small pieces of the earth
that were sometimes a quarter acre, sometimes less, where plant and
microbial life survived. Today much of our natural world, including
the habitat that sustains us, derives from those conserved islands of
refuge. The return to sustainable practices in agriculture seeks to
further preserve that refuge, both to retain the legacy of a way of life
that honors the complexity of our planet’s ecology and to refine that
understanding in the future interests of human health and thriving.
Chapter 10

Imagination:
The Playful, Creative Brain
My shaping spirit of imagination . . .

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802)

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my
imagination. Imagination is more important than
knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles
the world.

Albert Einstein, in Saturday Evening Post (1929)

THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY can “really mess with

your head,” as one spindly adolescent described it to me during a
recent visit. Even its location along a disheveled stretch of Venice
Boulevard, at the edge of Culver City in Los Angeles, seems
incongruous. Sandwiched between a carpet shop and a real estate
office that appears permanently closed, and surrounded by gas
stations, mini-marts, and automobile body shops, the Museum of
Jurassic Technology (known fondly as the MJT by devotees) is in the
last place where one would expect to find “an educational institution
dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public
appreciation of the lower Jurassic.”
Even the museum’s name is enigmatic. “The lower Jurassic—isn’t
that something to do with dinosaurs?” I asked the friend who
introduced me to the place. “No, not a dinosaur in sight,” she replied.
And that, I was to learn, is the point. The MJT is designed to keep
you off balance: it’s a place of not quite knowing.
Later, when I met the founder and proprietor, David Wilson—
who won a MacArthur “genius” award for exceptional creativity in
2001—I began to understand. A soft-spoken, bespectacled, and mild-
mannered man with a gray-peppered, Abe Lincoln–style beard,
David is quietly passionate about his work. In its original meaning a
museum is dedicated to the muses, he explained, as a place where the
mind can stand apart from everyday affairs. The early vehicles for
such mental transportation were Wunderkammern, or wonder
cabinets, collections of curiosities first accumulated by the wealthy in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The MJT, in seeking to
be a haven for the curious mind, draws from that tradition.
Perhaps in harmony with those early collectors of natural history,
David Wilson was first a student of etymology—of the urban variety:
bedbugs, carpet beetles, and similar pests—before studying film at
the California Institute for the Arts. Both subjects have inspired
him. Indeed, the meticulous construction of the museum’s exhibits
reflect that for a decade animation and special effects provided the
bread and butter for David and his wife, in addition to supporting
the nascent MJT. It was, as he described it to me, no easy task.
Indeed, perhaps the museum would never have come into being but
for dedicated friends and colleagues—the true collaborators—who
“got stuck on the idea.” With no fixed entry fee the “economics of
the place are at best a miracle.” The ideal is that of the Fields Museum
in Philadelphia, founded in 1802, “open to all people, including
children and the fair sex”—a place where the learner is led always
from the familiar object to the unfamiliar, guided along “by a chain
of flowers into the mysteries of life.”
Initially, before the museum settled on Venice Boulevard, the
“MJT traveled to any place that would have us,” Wilson explained,
“adding more and more material—heavy glass cases, etc.—until it got
to be ridiculous. Then we decided we must bring the people to the
museum rather than the other way around.” In those early days of
settlement, often the good proprietor could be found playing his
accordion in the street outside the museum, to pass time but also in
hope of luring the public into his labyrinthine world of dimly lit
rooms and astonishing brain-teasers.
Within the walls of three modest townhouses, the MJT now
fosters an experience unique in Los Angeles and beyond. The
exhibits, although cloaked in history and formality as in a traditional
museum, invite a different state of mind, provoking first curiosity
and then a playful unease, as the storytelling unfolds in ways that
challenge credulity. From the miniature painted image of Pope John
Paul II, sculpted from a human hair, to the stink ant of the
Cameroon, dead from the fulminating fungus growing from its head;
from the “vulgar knowledge” of past generations that dead mice (on
toast) may solve bedwetting, to the ingenious entrapment of the
Deprong Mori, the piercing devil, a bat that is thought to penetrate the
solid walls of buildings—each exhibit employs strangeness as a probe
for thinking. Today in our information-saturated, technology-driven
world, where mystery is fast being relegated to crime novels and
horror films, it comes as a challenge and a surprise. As the spindly
adolescent colorfully observed, “It messes with the head.”
Gregory, the anthropologist friend who was with me that
afternoon, commented as we left the MJT that “probably the most
terrifying insight from the many exhibits is that, with attention to
detail, you can make anything seem significant to the human mind.”
He reminded me that four volumes on the life of barnacles by
Charles Darwin had been the groundwork for The Origin of Species.
“Beyond what many may hastily dismiss as ridiculous,” Gregory
added, “there emerges a compelling aesthetic quality—an example of
what the mind can achieve stringing single grains of truth together
on the thread of one’s own imagination. Perhaps the real genius of
human intelligence is to create the story that enables the threading.”
I found that to be true. It is the brain that spins the tale. But also true
is that after a while the mind becomes restless and curious, striving
for closure. There is a compulsion to lift the curtain—to discover the
Wizard of Oz. This, I believe, is the playful magic of the MJT. In
promoting what appears to be reasonable, David Wilson adds a pinch
of madness that disrupts the comfortable habits of everyday life,
much as the proverbial grain of salt keeping reason from spoiling.
The MJT, in its ingenious spinning of stories, leaves us hanging
between wonder and disbelief. Breaking the hard shell of certainty, it
is a museum devoted to celebrating the creative power of the human
imagination.

A SENSE OF WONDER is what comes from the intellectual rummaging

that curiosity induces, but in our search for understanding it is the
act of imagining that fills in the gaps of mental knowledge.
Imagination offers the capacity to distance oneself from the
surrounding world and then to reconstruct that world, bringing to
mind something not wholly present. It is a unique ability of the
human animal, and it underpins much of the everyday behavior that
we take for granted: storytelling, hoping for a better future, the
fantasy play of childhood, the empathic concern for another’s
circumstance, the visceral engagement felt when reading about Harry
Potter’s exploits—all are dependent upon the capacity to conjure
images in the mind. Imagined reconstruction is the mental projection
through which art is created, religious beliefs are sustained, scientific
hypotheses are explored, and material technologies are advanced. In
short, imagination and creativity are the brain’s kissing cousins and
the wellspring of cultural vitality.
The seeds for imaginative thinking are planted in infancy.
Comparing the early intellectual development of our closest living
relatives, the great apes, with that of the human infant, it becomes
apparent that there are intriguing similarities—such as facial
recognition, imitation, and rough-and-tumble play—but also major
differences, particularly in the complexity and progression of social
interaction. For example, young children from about the age of
eighteen months are helpful to others—witness my granddaughter’s
fascination in assisting with the sheep herd. Young chimpanzees
raised by humans will demonstrate similar altruistic interests,
although not reliably.
 In the few laboratory studies that have directly compared
children between two and four with chimpanzees and bonobos in the
same age range, developmental differences—particularly in the pace
and pattern of social engagement—are readily apparent. By the age of
four, children are substantially ahead of the young apes in attentive
capacity, and many have become adept in figuring out the motivation
and needs of others. For example, the majority of children quickly
solve the puzzle of fitting together three pieces of plastic pipe after
the experimenter has “failed” to do so, whereas most of the young
apes seem pleased to receive what they consider to be a new
plaything—examining, throwing, and banging the pipe lengths
together but rarely seeking to join them.
The challenge of the puzzle is instructive in dissecting how the
young mind works. Problem solving demands close attention, but the
young participant must also be able to imagine what the
experimenter is attempting to achieve, and it is here that the human
infant excels. Indulging in such guesswork is the beginning of what
later will emerge as empathic understanding—the ability to imagine
oneself in another’s place—but it starts with the capacity to watch,
listen, and imitate the behavior of others. Both apes and humans are
capable of imitation—such as copying sticking out the tongue—
shortly after birth, but in humans such crude “hardwired” responses
recede as the capacity for play evolves. The solitary activities
characteristic of the infant soon give way to a preference for peer
interaction, with both species consistently using facial expression to
communicate and build alliances. In tracking and engaging the social
interaction going on around them, however, human infants rapidly
outstrip young chimpanzees. As I have noted in earlier chapters,
infusing objects with meaning and sharing them with others in
pretend play is a distinguishing feature of human infancy, one that
places us apart from our primate cousins.
This capacity for imagination, which is central to the game of
pretend, strengthens further as language evolves. Charades are the
alternate, imaginative world in which we practice navigating the
complexities of human society—learning about the emotional
idiosyncrasies of others, juggling multiple perspectives, and
distinguishing fact from fantasy. The child is “mummy” to her teddy
bear, while remaining herself. The distinction is clear to the youthful
mind: at one and the same time Teddy is a real live friend in whom
secrets may be confided while also being just another stuffed animal,
albeit a special one. It is through Teddy’s exploits, and those of other
imaginary friends, that the young child first invents narratives and
comes to appreciate a causal chain of events: Teddy loves to sit down
and have tea, but in his excitement he frequently spills his cup
because he’s clumsy. So it was in my own childhood. In my early
forties, when my mother died suddenly, a scruffy, eyeless bearlike
creature with a broken leg was discarded from her house by
unknowing relatives: many of my childhood fantasies went with him.
It is through imagination and such make-believe that we first
learn to think in parallel, on two levels at once, a practice that is
fundamental to human cognitive development and one in which
children quickly become skilled. As the eminent developmental
psychologist Paul Harris has documented in The Work of the
Imagination and Trusting What You’re Told, children weave together
what is learned from their own observation and imaginative
exploration with information gathered from others whom they
consider trustworthy—much as Susan Corbin described to me how
she first learned to read by crawling into her father’s lap with a book
in hand. This highlights a special talent of the human animal: we
love to educate each other, and we delight in shared understanding.
Unlike other species we learn from what we are told and the
testimony of others. Being taught by those we trust locks in rapid
cultural progress: as individuals we do not need to discover
everything anew for we are willing to defer to others and to their
knowledge. The veracity of that commonsense knowledge is then
personally ascertained by distilling it through our own imagination
and cross-checking it with what we have previously experienced—
which parenthetically is why after an hour or so at the Museum of
Jurassic Technology one begins looking around for the proverbial
Wizard of Oz.
Make-believe games are the harbinger of a lifelong propensity to
consider alternatives to given assumptions. It is the human
advantage that in our individual development we build not only on
imitation but also upon imagination to embellish the knowledge
acquired by previous generations, an evolving talent that is clearly
evident in human rituals, technology, cooking practices, and
attempts—both good and bad—at engineering the natural
environment. In contrast, other primates do little to advantage
themselves and to shape their habitat. The ape may learn adaptive
tricks and the use of primitive tools from parents and peers, but
rarely does that knowhow persist beyond one generation.

PRETEND PLAY, AND THE storytelling it evokes, may be considered

the childhood training ground for later problem solving and
creativity—a prelude to “imagining the future,” as Joaquín Fuster
described it to me—reflecting the uniquely human capacity to gain
insight and invent novelty through the melding of abstraction and
distilled memory. These are talents in continuous use: within the
fast-moving, dynamic world of the subjective self it is imagination
that writes the screenplay, making each of us whole as a person. But
one may ask, where in the brain’s mental workspace do we conjure
such magic?
Let’s consider music as a way into the question: what is it about a
series of transient sounds that can be so engaging that we call it
music? For most individuals the stimuli of the individual “musical”
notes are abstract, having—in distinction to language—no inherent
meaning. And yet on the physiological level we know that music can
evoke definitive and impressive responses in mood and in thought,
even for those of untrained ear.
That music has no self-evident function troubled the precise
mind of Charles Darwin. And yet, he mused, music is more powerful
than the spoken word in its capacity to unify the emotions of great
crowds, “making heaven descend upon earth” or stirring up “the
sense of triumph and the glorious ardour for war.” In The Descent of
Man, published in 1871, Darwin ruminated upon this conundrum.
“As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical
notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily
habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with
which he is endowed . . . [and yet] . . . they are present . . . in men of all
races.” The human attraction to music, Darwin tentatively
concluded, might best be explained as an instrument of courtship
and propagation—the romantic arts of singing and of dancing, and
of poetry too, having similarly “arisen during the earliest ages of
which we have any record.”
Perhaps one source of Darwin’s difficulty was that while “music
expresses itself through sound, sound in itself is not yet music,” as
Daniel Barenboim, the celebrated pianist and conductor, has
perceptively observed. Music, a ubiquitous but culturally diverse
activity, has its natural place alongside abstract thought and
language: it is a function not of sound but of how the brain works.
As in language, the brain imposes its own organization on the pitch
and sequence of the sounds we perceive. At its most evolved, the
shaping of this order is the craft of the musician, acting upon
perception to create the rhythm and harmony of the singing voice, or
that of instrumental music. In short, music—both in its creation and
in its appreciation—is an exquisite example of the brain’s
perception-action cycle at work, the dynamic core function of the
adaptive brain that I explored in Chapter 4.
With this insight we edge closer to engaging my question. Music,
in its riches, has universal appeal because it engages the perception-
action cycle in a special way, bonding through imagination the
immediate stimuli of the notes themselves with the reflexive
understanding of the intuitive mind. A well-shaped musical theme—
in its capacity to evoke half-forgotten thoughts, images of persons or
places, a familiar fragrance, the echo of a past passion—draws upon
intuitive memory to initiate a dialogue between emotion and reason,
which in turn gives rise to further association. This capacity of music
to bind the identity of nations is the stuff of anthems, but in private
we each have our familiar themes. For me, as a single example among
many, I find J. S. Bach’s suites for the unaccompanied cello to be
deeply moving. I need only those early sonorous notes of the first
prelude to be immediately transported back in time. Once again I can
feel the sticky heat of London on a late summer’s evening, and the
sweet taste of cheap Greek wine, and relive my youthful desire to one
day reliably produce such all-embracing sound.
That talent never emerged, despite my longing. But now, as a
neuroscientist reflecting upon that imagined moment—in my mind’s
eye as real as any stage set—and coupling the experience with the
knowledge gathered from recent brain-imaging studies, an
understanding of the networks that delineate the brain’s imagination
workspace comes a little closer.
As we all know from personal experience, musical sounds can
evoke a range of emotion, including distinct discomfort in response
to dissonance. Stefan Koelsch of the Max Planck Institute for
Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, has taken
advantage of this truth. In a study of individuals without musical
training, employing pleasant and unpleasant music to evoke emotion
while measuring the brain’s response, Koelsch has used fMRI
technology to track the temporal shifts in blood flow across
anatomical regions. It will come as no surprise that the amygdala—
the brain’s sentinel of emotion—is activated by both pleasant and
dissonant music. In addition, the hippocampus—playing a critical
role in memory processing and recall—and also the associated
cortical areas that surround these core brain structures, were found
to have increased blood flow. In complement, the basal ganglia,
important you will remember in the acquisition of intuitive habit,
appear to be essential to following the musical beat.
Experiencing pleasure in music heard, however, recruits other
brain networks beyond these core activities, including the medial
prefrontal region that monitors pleasure and the executive and
planning areas of the frontal cortex. In addition, because the blood
flow in these areas increases as the pleasant music progresses and is
appreciated, the results suggests that these are brain regions
intimately involved in processing the structure and sequencing of
the music that is heard. If, by now, you have the impression that
there is a lot going on in the brain when music stimulates the
imagination, you are correct. It is clear from these studies that when
listening to music—as when J. S. Bach transports me back to my
youthful love affair with the cello—that the brain is a busy place.
Similarly in reading a novel—as when the child (or adult, for that
matter) is engrossed in a Harry Potter story—the emotional imagery
evoked in the mind commands the brain’s full engagement. Thus we
may conclude that when the imagination is at work, the mind is
actively connecting and exercising the whole brain.
But the evoked imagery from listening to music or reading a book
is distinct from coming up with a new tune, writing a story, or
deconstructing the image of a violin to create a cubist painting. It is
in witnessing such achievements that we find ourselves face to face
with creativity, the kissing cousin to imagination. Of course, just
uttering a unique sentence, which we do hundreds of times each day,
is creative: but what of “when, from the sight of a man at one time,
and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaur,” as
Thomas Hobbes observed in Leviathan, written in 1651? How do we
create such novel visual images from familiar or abstract forms?
What are the brain networks that support the inventive facilities of
mind?
Peter Ulric Tse and his colleagues at the department of
psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College, in Hanover,
New Hampshire, are honing in on these questions through a series of
studies designed to better define what they call the brain’s “mental
workspace.” To do so the researchers employ a synthesis of fMRI
techniques, neuropsychological challenge, and network analysis.
First, to explore the brain’s network patterns when involved in a
creative process that can be studied in the laboratory, the team
developed one hundred abstract images. These serve as visual stimuli
that can be imaginatively manipulated in the mind of the
experimental subject, while simultaneously the brain’s regional
cerebral blood flow is being measured in an fMRI scanner.
During the experimental sessions the fifteen participants are
asked to mentally combine these abstract stimuli to create novel,
complex shapes. Subsequently, in a second phase of the study, the
shapes generated are either mentally dismantled back into their parts
or are simply maintained in the mind’s eye, depending on
instruction. The researchers conjecture that to process the abstract
visual cues, and to support the mental gymnastics required in
imaginative thinking, coordination among the brain’s distributed
networks would be essential. This has proved to be so. A
multivariate analysis of brain blood flow, Tse and his team reported,
confirmed a “widespread and interconnected information-processing
network . . . that supports the manipulation of visual imagery,” with
the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex of the “executive” brain and the
posterior parietal region taking the coordinating roles.
Taken together, Tse’s studies and those investigating the
perception and appreciation of music suggest that the workspace of
the brain employed in mustering imagination and creativity is
extensive and varied, drawing upon the network of dynamic,
interdependent systems that support emotion, working memory, the
reasoned sorting of information, and choice. These identified
networks are comparable to the cognits described by Joaquín Fuster,
as when the reflexive, intuitive mind and the conscious, reflective
mind come together in the functional harmony of the perception-
action cycle. Imagination reflects this continuous exchange but
transcends immediate experience to craft stories of the past and
assemble future dreams, all refracted through the tinted lens of
subjective meaning. Creativity—demanding a prodigious and
disciplined memory, plus the courage to break old thinking habits—
extends the imaginative manipulation of abstract concepts in the
brain, translating them into ideas and actions that become
appreciated and validated by others. This is the zenith of human
intellectual achievement, a special wisdom that is anchored in the
biology of the human brain and uniquely expressed in its most
mature mode of operation.

IMAGINATION IS THE MENTAL capacity that sets us apart as a species,

and not only in our biology. It is also the pervasive driver for many of
our social and cultural achievements. In hindsight the Enlightenment
is commonly considered the Age of Reason, when the writings of
Isaac Newton first held sway and the scientific revolution made
possible thinking about the material world without reference to a
divine power. But this is simplification. In the eighteenth century
both David Hume and Adam Smith recognized the essential nature
of imagination in making it possible to think about things not
immediately present, be they mundane, of science, or in the arts. This
“shaping spirit of the imagination,” as Samuel Coleridge described it
in 1802, fills mental gaps in perception and provides coherence to
experience. From childhood onward imagination is the glue that
helps hold us together both as individuals and as social beings.
Imaginative thinking sets us apart from other animals because it
releases us from attending exclusively to the immediate. Whereas the
dog can attend to, see, hear, and smell a horse, as can we, and can
similarly perceive a man, in the awareness of the dog’s brain these are
distinct information files. Most certainly the normal dog’s brain does
not combine the two and image Hobbes’s centaur: such confusion
would not serve the animal’s survival. For the dog unimodular
attention is essential. The human brain, in contrast, has evolved the
capacity for cross-modular attention, where distinct information files
not only can be cross-referenced against other networks but can also
be integrated with them to create novel, symbolic forms, as we first
do in the fantasy play of childhood. To quote Peter Tse, “It is not
simply that there is more connectivity in the human brain, it is of a
different kind.”
So when did this difference in the thinking capacity of Homo
sapiens first become evident—setting us apart from Homo erectus and
Homo neanderthalensis, our forebears in the hominid line? Richard G.
Klein, the Bass Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Stanford
University and a leading authority on the tools and artifacts created
by early humans, sets the date at 40,000 to 50,000 years ago—that is,
in the Upper Paleolithic, also called the Old Stone Age. It was during
this period, notes Klein, that a dramatic shift is found in the fossil
record, a transition from the long-standing and widely spread use of
archaic stone implements to “the burgeoning of unequivocal art and
personal ornamentation,” suggesting the emergence of a “capacity
for abstract or ‘symbolic’ thought.”
 In the archeological record of western Europe this mushrooming
of creative talent is reflected in the ancient cave paintings of France
and Spain, the oldest of which date back some 30,000 or 40,000 years.
This time frame coincides with the period when early modern
humans, migrating out of Africa with new social skills and novel tool
making to their advantage, arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. The
migration brought them into close proximity with the Neanderthals,
a stone-tooled, cold-adapted hunting-and-gathering people who had
lived in the region and across much of Eurasia for more than 200,000
years. The invaders—commonly referred to as Cro-Magnon man, a
name derived from the cave in southwestern France where in 1868
their remains were first discovered—appear to have lived in
organized settlements, clothed themselves, carved bone ornaments,
and chipped flint to make weapons. The archeological evidence
suggests that their numbers grew rapidly. Indeed Klein, among
others, has proposed that it was this explosion in the Cro-Magnon
population and their superior creativity that contributed—despite
some cross-breeding—to the ultimate extinction of the
Neanderthals, approximately 30,000 years ago.
What promoted this sudden explosion of innovative practice in
the Cro-Magnon? In primate and hominid evolution previous
advances in adaptive behavior had been tied to brain growth (you
will recall the work of Robin Dunbar in Chapter 6), but judging by
the size of the skull’s cavity the Neanderthal brain was as large as or
larger than that of early modern Homo sapiens. In Cro-Magnon the
relationship between brain morphology and behavioral advantage
shifted. Does this imply a neural rewiring—a move toward cross-
modular thinking and flexibility of attention—perhaps driven
initially by a fortuitous mutation in the genome? If so, was this
change comparable in its impact to the slight variation in base pairs
found in the human FOXP2 gene—which I discussed in Chapter 6
and which appears to have been the critical variable in the
development of sophisticated language? Is this the epoch in the
evolution of human biology that heralded the birth of our prodigious
imagination?
 The 30,000-year-old cave paintings of France and Spain are
spectacular but also sophisticated in their aesthetics. Principally the
images are of the large animals that then roamed Europe; bison,
stags, mountain goats, horses, mammoths, and ancient auroch cattle,
interspersed with abstract renditions of the vulva and stencils of the
human hand. Judith Thurman, after making a personal visit to the
caves of Ardèche in south-central France in 2008, described the
collective impact as “a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the
flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls.” That
these images are reflective of nascent human imagination, there can
be little doubt.
But, one is compelled to ask, is symbolic meaning embedded in
these glorious creations? It’s a subject of continued debate. Were the
caves simply a practical refuge from a brutal, shifting climate for a
nomadic, hunting people? Or did they serve as temples for ritual
celebration of religious, shamanlike beliefs at the interface between
worlds tangible and intangible? The role of the shaman—
extrapolating from the beliefs of today’s remaining hunter-gatherer
societies—was to travel between these worlds, to visit the ancestors,
to commune with spirits, past and future, and to return with wisdom
relevant to the challenges of the moment. So did the cave paintings
play a role in these worlds of the imagination, with the shaman as the
mystical guide? To some, that the artwork is largely remote and
clustered around passages or fissures in the rock face supports such
claims. Similarly, it is argued that the many hand stencils—the hand
is placed against the wall and paint is blown around it, such that the
image blends with the rock—may reflect ritualized efforts at
communication with the gods of the underworld.
Setting aside the specifics of such speculation, Maurice Bloch,
professor in anthropology at the London School of Economics,
believes that the very existence of the cave paintings of the Upper
Paleolithic has broad social significance. He believes these artifacts
are a bellwether, signaling a radical shift in human ingenuity and the
social order. “Religious-like phenomena,” he argues, “are an
inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans . . . the
capacity to imagine other worlds . . . an adaptation that lies at the very
foundation of modern society.” In other words, it was the fluidity of
their imagination—of which the cave paintings stand as early
evidence—that distinguished Cro-Magnon, the early modern
humans, from their forebears.
Human society, Bloch asserts in harmony with Adam Smith,
exists as a system of social order because of the interactions among
the people who live within it. In this sense human social organization
is little different from that of the great apes, the closest of our
surviving relatives. Chimpanzees, for example, create long-term
coalitions, as do we; they are self-centered but solicitous of kinship;
they sometimes share food; and they are not beyond a little
Machiavellian politicking when necessary, another behavior that we
hold in common. Bloch describes these social interactions in
anthropological terms as “the transactional social,” as in the
behaviors essential to Smith’s concept of barter and exchange. These
behaviors, however, are to be distinguished from “the transcendental
social,” which is fundamentally the product of imagination and
pervasive in the determining the complexity of human culture.
Neither chimps nor any of the other great apes exhibit such
behaviors.
In human societies the transactional and the transcendental are
inextricably intertwined. This is readily apparent in the organization
of the market society, where in concept the transaction of goods is
central. The abstract ideas of money, value, and transgenerational
possession that make the market viable, however, are the products of
imagination: these latter are transcendental concepts. Fundamentally,
transcendental social behaviors reflect the human search for order
and meaning. Life is characterized by its transience, proceeding
through birth, development, reproduction, aging, and death. So what
is the larger purpose? Human self-awareness drives such questions
and the continuing quest for explanation. In our imagination we can
construct processes of transcendence that help answer such puzzles
—creating worlds and social roles that order existence beyond the
determining biology of the life cycle. As a compassionate physician,
as a good mother—even in death, and beyond—it becomes possible
to see oneself as transcendent of time and mundane interaction to
become part of a larger, all embracing, transgenerational social
network.
Through these transcendental behaviors—like the spiritual
trans-world communications of the shaman—imagination has
traditionally provided stability and meaning in a changing world.
Thus in navigating a multifaceted social order, imagination serves as
a touchstone. The adaptive logic, Bloch argues, is simple enough. If
human beings can simultaneously entertain fact and fantasy—the
transactional and the transcendental—and do so from an early age,
then doesn’t it make sense that society will be similarly layered?
What begins as role-play, and is acted out in childhood, continues as
a culturally franchised reality that is complementary to everyday
experience—one that can be lived in, that others can be drawn into,
and through which forebears can be celebrated. As contemporary
stereotypes assert: “I am an American: I live in a land of opportunity
and freedom, made possible by the vision and sacrifice of the
Founding Fathers”; or “As a Christian, I am in communion with the
Son of God, who is my savior.” Such sociocultural structures—
secular and religious—create time-resistant, stable networks of
complex social relationships that transcend and complement the
immediate. This is the historical contribution that imagination
makes to stability and to the sustaining values of human culture.

TODAY, HOWEVER, THE SUSTAINING values of human culture are

changing. An invasive “technology of the intellect” is eroding the
traditional role of imagination in society, particularly in the gadget-
driven, time-starved, rich world. Neil Postman, the American author
and cultural critic, writing in 1992 described this new society as a
“technopoly,” the implication being that the master narrative framing
the human story has shifted. We are now in the thrall of our
machines.
On May 11, 1997, the chess grand master Garry Kasparov, the
reigning world champion, sat down with IBM’s Deep Blue. It was a
rematch, played under classical tournament regulations. A little over
a year before, Kasparov had beaten the computer and its retinue of
human assistants by four games to two. This time it was different: the
supercomputer, which had been “upgraded” and was now
programmed to systematically evaluate 200 million possible moves
per second, ultimately won three and a half games to Kasparov’s two
and a half, by “brute number-crunching force.” It was an impressive
achievement by the IBM team, although whether the victory had
anything to say about the nature of human imagination and creative
intelligence is another matter. Deep Blue, as Kasparov himself
pointed out, is intelligent only in the way that a programmable alarm
clock is intelligent—“not that losing to a ten-million-dollar alarm
clock made me feel any better,” he added ruefully.
Deep Blue’s symbolic victory nonetheless promotes important
personal and cultural questions. In this era of intellectual
technology, if brute-force programming can deliver the best chess,
why labor to become a grand master? Why strain the mind and
memory? Why bother with all that work? And yet Garry Kasparov, as
a human being, has little doubt that learning to play chess is an effort
inherently worthwhile. As he described it in his 2007 book, How Life
Imitates Chess, the noble game offers “a unique cognitive nexus, a
place where art and science come together in the human mind [to be]
refined and improved by experience.” Chess, the fifteen-centuries-
old war game of strategy and skill—and a game symbolic of human
thought—is an unparalleled laboratory for the training of memory
and imagination and the evaluation of risk.
By comparison, despite the impressive technological triumph that
Deep Blue represents, its inanimate number-crunching capacities fall
far short of human ingenuity. Its achievements in winning the game
of chess against Grand Master Kasparov are not to be equated with
the intelligence of the human mind. If indeed Deep Blue “thinks,”
then it does so in a linear fashion: it does not understand process. It
has none of the intuitive, cross-modular sensibilities that in human
terms offer the brilliance and satisfaction of a chess game well played
or of a life well lived. By contrast, as Kasparov has emphasized, when
we set out to master in our mind the intricacies of chess, the game
becomes a teacher of such sensibilities.
 One does not need to be a chess grand master to experience the
Deep Blue effect and the impact that technology now has on how we
think and process information. Relatives from the Deep Blue family
are hard at work in society and have pervasive influence in
structuring many elements of daily life. I have come to find the laptop
computer on which I write these words extraordinarily valuable,
indeed indispensable, especially when formatting and editing.
Similarly the new voice recognition computer software that I use at
times to improve my typing speed is more helpful, and makes fewer
mistakes, than the last version that I purchased some years ago. Of
course, neither of the programs, nor those that went before them,
understand a word of what I’m saying in a conceptual sense. Rather,
in “typing” the letters and words that appear on the page as I speak,
my voice detector is merely stringing together phrases that are
common in everyday language, programmed to key on phonics. The
system is impressive, and these are now standard technical tools of
the writing trade, but they do not think for themselves.
Not so when reading the words that I have written, as you are
now doing: reading remains an ancient art. Your mind continuously
imposes an unseen order: an intuitive set of rules—as familiar to you
as are the rules of chess to Garry Kasparov—enable you to link the
ink marks that you see on the page to words that you can hear in
your head. Your brain perceives these little marks and, drawing upon
intuitive memory, acts to give them meaning through which you, as
the reader, then come to understand my intentions. The brain
collects information, sorts it, chooses from among its elements, and
through imagination claims it for its own. It is something that only
the human brain knows how to do, and our attempts to technically
duplicate the process remain far behind. This is both good news and
bad. On the good side of the ledger, we can reassure ourselves that
we remain in charge of our machines, if we choose to be so. But on
the negative side it is clear that when it comes to processing the
massive volumes of information that today’s technology-driven
society generates, the human brain can be a limiting factor. That in a
nutshell is how Deep Blue can win at chess, without understanding
the principles of the game.
 The written word has been around for a long time—even the
printing press has been with us for six hundred years—but it is
computer technology and increasing access to the World Wide Web
that have precipitated the tsunami of information that now floods
everyday experience. As an index of that assault, Bloomberg
BusinessWeek has estimated that the average person processes 63,000
words of new information each day, which in volume is
approximately equivalent to the words contained in a good-sized
novel. Information has moved from the local market and the
coffeehouse, the television set and the newspaper, to reappear in
digital form on the laptop and the smart phone. Today we do not
seek information: it confronts us, traveling with us wherever we go.
Worse than that, the relentless flow of information is a powerful,
distracting force. The Pew Research Center’s mobile technology fact
sheet for 2013 informs us that in that year 90 percent of American
adults had a cell phone and 58 percent owned a smartphone. Some 44
percent of individuals reported sleeping with their phones to avoid
missing calls and other updates during the night, and 29 percent
“couldn’t imagine living without” the convenience. Perhaps even
more surprising, the technology is evenly spread across all age groups
and shows little variation based on household income or ethnicity.
Three-quarters of smartphone owners use their devices as a memory
bank for telephone numbers, for e-mail and street addresses, and for
directions (even in their hometown), while of the 55 percent of those
who go online, some three-quarters are discontented with the speed
at which it happens. For the majority a personal connection with the
Internet has become “essential.” This reflects a massive cultural shift
in how we communicate and how information is processed and
received. Nor is America unique: the statistics for other
industrialized nations are comparable.
Today, in airport lounges and coffee shops, there is a disturbing
absence of voices and of conversation. We receive our information
not by word of mouth but through e-mail, Facebook updates, Google
searches, unsolicited advertising, and a blizzard of other trivia. We
each have a physical presence in the world, but life is increasingly
conducted elsewhere, through the touchscreen interface of our
electronic gadgetry. Technology dominates the cultural
environment, and we are beginning to feel the weight of its presence.
Characteristically, with technology having created the problem, it is
through technology that we mindlessly seek a solution. So why not,
as BusinessWeek has boldly championed, get a new app for your
smartphone—with the attractive name of Cue—that will scan your
e-mail, social media, and other communications, collecting them
together in one simple, searchable in-box? In that way you can
receive all 63,000 words that constitute the novel of the day in a
unified dispatch. But of course, the words will still need to be read.

THE PROCESSING OF INFORMATION has been industrialized, much

in the same way as previously we industrialized farming and food
processing and perfected the assembly-line production of the
automobile. The motivating philosophy behind those earlier
innovations was economic efficiency, maximum production in the
minimum of time, as first popularized by the work-management
theories of Frederick Taylor, at the turn of the twentieth century. An
increased profit margin was the principal goal, while reducing cost to
the consumer. These objectives remain primary in the business of
technical innovation. But it turns out that enhancing human muscle
power, or increasing the efficiency of making a journey, is rather
different from helping humans think, especially when selling product
remains the key motivation. Purchasing a snowblower to help with
winter’s chores, or buying a ticket on a train, does not invade one’s
privacy or decision making, but it is becoming increasingly evident
that shopping online certainly can.
The Internet, from its beginning as a bunch of cables and
networked servers, has become an ideology influencing how we
think, behave, and live day by day. At the end of the first decade of
the twenty-first century, essentially four intensely competitive and
wealthy companies—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon—
dominated the consumer Internet. From the data they have amassed
—the personal data sets that have made their corporations rich—
each of them has more knowledge about all of us than we have about
ourselves. Ironically much of the information that these businesses
gather we first offer willingly. Online social media encourage us to
collect our own data and publicly advertise them to friends, to
recommend the restaurants where we eat, the music that we listen to,
and much more beyond. These are the data we give away, to then
have them given back. When we search a question on Google, the
now-familiar warning appears: “Cookies help us deliver our services.
By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.” Buy things
from Amazon, and a similar but cryptic warning emerges. Cookies
are the secret to one-click shopping and those personalized,
ubiquitous recommendations that visit us each day. That’s how
Google makes money: click on an advertisement, and Google’s cash
register rings. I book a flight to New York, and a host of energetic
supplicants instantaneously appear seeking to rent me a car, find me
a hotel, or become my escort for the evening.
It appears sometimes that I’m more welcomed online than at my
favorite restaurant. Every foray has uncanny relevance to what I have
purchased or thought of purchasing; similar online greetings are
evoked by places I have visited or those I have merely considered
visiting, frequently only in fantasy. Suddenly, it seems, without
realizing it was happening, I have outsourced not only my memory
but also my curiosity and my imagination. Add to that the publicly
available information that appears to be regularly vacuumed up from
the corners of the Web—age, race, educational level, children, house,
cars, political contributions, and magazine subscriptions—and one
may forget worrying about the surveillance tactics of the National
Security Agency: one’s profile is already there on the Internet. To live
in the electronic world today is to live in the public eye. This is Neil
Postman’s technopoly made manifest.
So what is this new culture doing to the way we think? Nicholas
Carr, the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our
Brains, believes that the impact is profound. From both his personal
experience as a writer and from a careful review of the research
literature, Carr sees the world online as “chipping away [at the]
capacity for concentration and contemplation.” As a seductive
gateway to just about everything, the Internet encourages “cursory
reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning.”
While “it’s possible to think deeply when surfing the Net,” Carr
contends, “just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a
book, that’s not the type of thinking that the technology encourages
and rewards.” Drawn in by hyperlinks, video clips, and inviting
sidebars, the mental modus operandi becomes one of switching
rapidly from reading to watching to listening—garnering along the
way a trove of information but building little insight or lasting
knowledge. Living close to the Internet, Carr suggests, fosters a
“juggler’s” brain.
The juggler’s brain has much in common with what in the past
has been labeled the multitasking brain—when in a delusion of
enhanced efficiency we undertake several chores at once, as in
answering e-mail and listening to the radio while speaking on the
telephone. In reality such efforts degrade our mental ability, dividing
our attention and interrupting the brain’s smooth processing,
encoding, and storing of information. Yet as I know from my
teaching of medical students, such practices are now commonplace
in the classroom, with significant impact on student learning. Indeed
careful, well-controlled multitasking studies suggest that Web-
connected laptops or other devices, to be used ostensibly for note-
taking, offer a powerful temptation during lectures—even for the
most disciplined scholar—distracting not only the individual
involved but also those sitting in close proximity.
So is the playful, creative human brain in jeopardy of being
hijacked by the Internet? Perhaps hijacked is not the right word, but
the Net is certainly seductive and potentially addictive. It must be
remembered, also, that as a migrant animal, we are predisposed to
such seduction: we are by nature distractible and focused on the
short term. It is part of our survival kit: we are constantly vigilant, on
the lookout for threat, opportunity, and social reward. Thus in many
ways, by feeding our fascination with novel information and the
delights of shopping, the Internet taps into our ancient proclivities as
chance-driven hunters and gatherers—much as our ancestral
cravings for salt, fat, and sugar have helped stoke the obesity
epidemic. Compelling and powerful, the interactive technology of
the Internet offers the consumer immediacy of information and the
illusion of innovation and knowledge. Despite spreading confusion
at times, as startup companies come and go with the speed of meteor
showers, the Net is nonetheless steadily reshaping the way we live.
In Silicon Valley and Seattle there is no confusion. There the
story is all about market share. Through their dominance of the
information economy, the big four of the consumer Internet have
developed a business plan that works, especially for themselves and
their shareholders. Indeed, as the cultural historian Michael Saler, a
professor at the University of California, Davis, has observed,
“Information only appears to be free on the Internet. In reality,
ordinary users provide personal information to companies, and
receive services in return: a form of barter. The monetary value that
people provide to the information economy is both ‘off the books’
and in the pockets of the Internet corporations.” We’re trading
privacy for product.
As these corporate data-collection systems grow ever more
powerful, the information we leave behind us—the so-called “digital
exhaust” of Web searches, credit card purchases, mobile phone
activity, and the like—is increasingly swept into analytic commerce.
This exploitation of what is called Big Data is considered the next
wave of opportunity in the tracking and quantification of behavior.
In this hyperconnected world, what we think, feel, and desire has
moved from the intimate security of one’s own head into the online
glare of the public arena. For the first time in human history we are
outsourcing to machines, and to the whims of others, our habits, our
thinking, and ourselves.

AS IN THE LATE 1990s, in the final, fulminating years of the dot-com

bubble, once again we are in danger of becoming blind to our own
future. The invention of the World Wide Web goes beyond brilliance
to being both a splendid convenience and a life-enhancing tool: but it
is not, in itself, a way of life—unless we choose to make it so.
 Thus it may seem that kids have a natural fascination with
electronic gadgets. And indeed, the kaleidoscopic and interactive
nature of the touchscreen is inherently compelling, particularly to
infants. In reality, however, what children are fascinated by is what
their parents are doing, which in truth is spending an inordinate
amount of time with similar gadgets. Inadvertently, so do we teach
children habits that constrain them in exploring the larger world.
Similarly, if we no longer make eye contact when speaking with them
because we are checking our e-mail, then with frightening speed that
socially isolating habit will be adopted. As in the obesity epidemic,
the child will be drawn along by an addictive compulsion comparable
to that of reaching for a sugar-laced soda.
The ability to focus attention consistently on something of
interest, to hold it in memory, to dissect it in reflective, conscious,
awareness, and further to analyze its meaning is a talent of mind that
the modern human has built over millennia. Today, in thrall to the
Web’s “technology of the intellect,” we are busily dissipating such
capacities. When reflexive habit and imitation replace memory and
imagination, much is lost in the reflective realm. The smartphone, for
example, is a handy depository for memory, but in relying on it
exclusively, we risk losing not only a data bank of telephone numbers
should we misplace the instrument, but also the facile function of the
brain’s working memory. Increasingly we make connections on the
touchscreen but fail to do so in the brain: the Web’s connections are
not to be confused with those of the mind.
Do you remember the telephone numbers of your closest friends
when the cell phone battery dies, or even your own number, for that
matter? Can you be sure that you have been given the correct change
when the restaurant’s cash register is on the fritz and credit cards are
useless? In its role as the body’s chief processor of information, the
brain requires constant engagement and practice. Proximity in time
to emotion, memory, and repetition of experience are important
strengtheners of the brain’s networking activities. When the
processing stops, just as when one stops exercising a muscle, the
brain loses its tone. It’s simple enough: the human brain sustains
high performance by continuous vigilance and interaction with the
real world, not by Web surfing and outsourcing. Thinking with the
tips of your fingers doesn’t work.
In our blind pursuit of technology, we also risk compromising
other talents—a practical understanding of the world and the
pleasures of craftsmanship being among of them. It is through
diligent attention to the crafting of skills, broadly defined, that
imagination, creativity, and technical understanding come together.
The American sociologist Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, argues
that such skilled practice provides an anchor against the rising tide of
materialism. Being skillful in body and mind builds and sustains a
sense of mastery and individual accomplishment. Before
industrialization this was easier to understand as a concept, and to
achieve, than it is now. Then the majority of people knew how to
make the few things they used. The exact opposite is true today. Now
few of us have a working knowledge of the tools we use every day, let
alone how they are made. In the presence of our automated
machines, most of us are now passive observers. The servant has
become the master.
And yet for each of us, the drive for our own mastery remains.
One of the privileges of being human is to have a mind that can be
explored, tuned, and refined over a lifetime of experience. The brain
is an extraordinary instrument, and when well tuned, it offers
extraordinary reward. Garry Kasparov knows that, as did J.S. Bach
before him. Slowly, as I have described in these immediate past
chapters, as the mind matures and we grow comfortable in who we
are, we learn to refine our sense of self and come not only to
appreciate the talents that are vested within us but also to value and
celebrate the many achievements and caring concerns of others—
those social investments that collectively make society whole.
Imagination plays a critical role in this ongoing personal and
cultural tuning. Imagination is not something mysterious that is
occasionally unearthed during the education of a particularly gifted
artist, or a talent confined to the ruminations of business
entrepreneurs. Rather, as I have explained, imagination is the
melding of diverse brain talents—of perception, emotion, memory,
habit, and choice—in a way that is uniquely human and broadly
shared among us. The sense of wonder that feeds imagination is with
each of us every day and in every moment. But competing now, as
our imagination must, with a seductive materialism and a global
industry that is manufacturing novelty on a massive scale, that sense
of wonder must be fostered beyond the market.
There’s no need, however, for the commercialized, technical fix of
an electronically programmed brain gym: rather, make use of the
mundane, and you will rediscover the living world. Look in on the
“being,” on the presence, of things around you. Rekindle the art of
paying attention. Such a life-view costs nothing in the material sense
but offers an infinitely rich opportunity to engage both curiosity and
imagination. Rather than being frustrated by the queue in the
grocery store, wonder about the life of the person in front of you,
and perhaps start a conversation; take a child to the park—without
your cell phone—and watch what they do when you let them
wander; compare the facades of the buildings around where you
work and see if you can figure out when they were built, without
succumbing to Google; read a good novel, in a quiet, well-lighted
space in a comfortable chair; take up tennis, gardening, or chess;
perhaps learn to tune the harpsichord; and if all else fails, visit the
Museum of Jurassic Technology. In the modern idiom, be mindful.

WHETHER IT IS IN the service of survival or a product of attentive

curiosity, a fertile imagination has been at the foundation of adjusting
to change and creating new knowledge since the days of Cro-Magnon
man. It is particularly important now, as many of the familiar
dimensions of everyday life shift around us, that we do not abandon
our sense of wonder—we must continue to affirm that complexity
and not knowing are the prelude and stimulus to knowing. Given
today’s challenges, it is imperative that we willfully harness our
imagination.
Imagination is a valuable tool of exploration, for the individual,
for science, and for society, blending as it does the reflexive and
reflective elements of mind. But as also is clear, what engages the
imagination is for each of us both distinct and varied. As the
personal stories recounted in these pages illustrate, for one it may be
the excitement of creating a local food distribution system: for
another, seeking to map the social brain, or creating a novel approach
to teaching, or understanding the brain’s internal market, or
designing an efficient transport system—in the larger world the list is
infinite. In envisioning the future it is not the subject itself but the
focus, the commitment, and the skill—the self-tuning—that an
individual brings to a subject that ultimately determines the power of
the imagination to create change. Essential, too, in this mix, is the
self-discipline and strength of character to step back from, and to
question, the habit-patterns of everyday life, together with the
cacophony and demands that feed them.
Change is not easy, and changing our social behavior is especially
difficult. It takes a collective effort—the melding of the imagination
of many people. Also, as any creative individual knows, even the
most brilliant insights, backed by sound and detailed analyses, rarely
lead smoothly to the “right” solution. At some juncture a courageous
but informed leap often becomes necessary. We call this wisdom: the
vision to reach beyond the immediacy of the moment, better to
embrace the history and realities of the larger world, so to reimagine
them.
 REPRISE

Wisdom:
Retuning for a Sustainable Future
Mankind achieved civilization by developing and
learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what
his instincts demanded. . . . Man is not born wise,
rational and good, but has to be taught to become so.
Man became intelligent because there was tradition
[habits] between instinct and reason.

Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988)

Gross National Product does not allow for the health of

our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of
their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry
or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our
public debate, or the integrity of our public officials.

Robert Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

LET ME RETURN to where I began this book. Besides reimagining

progress and regaining balance within the natural ecology, there is
another important piece of the puzzle to be considered. In our social
evolution as a species, biology and culture run on parallel tracks, but
they do so at different speeds. Thus biology, quickly and disruptively,
can be outpaced by cultural change. As I have detailed, a significant
number of the challenges that we face in the developed world are
rooted in this mismatch.
To better grasp how this puzzle comes together, I take you back to
a primary source of knowledge about evolution. In the Pacific Ocean,
straddling the equator approximately six hundred miles off the coast
of Ecuador, is found the Galápagos archipelago. This remote
collection of volcanic islands, as Charles Darwin described them
when he traveled there, is “a little world within itself.” Today it
remains so, thanks to the vigilance of the Ecuadorian government
and the Galápagos Conservancy. Located at the confluence of three
ocean currents, and with the volcanic and seismic activity that
formed the islands eight to ten million years ago still ongoing, the
Galápagos is the ecosystem—unique in its vegetation and wildlife—
that emboldened Darwin in his conception of the principles of
evolution.
Hence in the summer of 2013 I was pleased to help organize a
special meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), Evolution, the
Human Sciences, and Liberty, on the island of San Cristóbal, at the
Galápagos campus of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Our
topic was in keeping with Friedrich Hayek’s founding vision of an
association broadly invested in the natural sciences—one that would
advance “the principles and practice of a free society.”
The most easterly island in the archipelago, San Cristóbal, is
where Darwin’s ship, the HMS Beagle, first made landfall on
September 17, 1835. Indeed, just a short walk from the university
study center, to commemorate the spot where Darwin stepped
ashore, there is an unflattering statue of the man. A mile or so to the
south now exists Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, the administrative
center of the Galápagos and a thriving town of more than six
thousand people, but otherwise one’s first impressions are
remarkably similar to those Darwin recorded in his diary.
The rocky shoreline of the island is black volcanic lava, twisted
and buckled. Scarlet, scurrying crabs visibly mottle its surface, in
contrast to the black marine iguana—“imps of darkness,” was
Darwin’s description—that lurk among the rock crevices. Today
there is no litter of giant tortoiseshells, as Darwin observed. The
surviving descendants of these ponderous creatures—once preyed
upon by visiting whalers as a ready source of meat and terrapin soup
—are now a tourist attraction, living protected lives. Sea lions,
however, remain ubiquitous and when resting from fishing are
usually found sunning themselves on public benches along the
promenade.
The Beagle’s epic voyage was well into its fourth year when
Darwin reached the Galápagos. The idea that common principles
underlie nature’s order was already forming in his mind, and the five
weeks of land expeditions, specimen collecting, and sailing among
the nineteen islands only strengthened these thoughts. Darwin
found the natural history of the archipelago to be “eminently
curious,” with subtly different flora and fauna inhabiting the
individual islands. Created by volcanic plumes thrusting up from the
earth’s core, and with the major formations thirty to sixty miles
apart, it was unlikely that the existing land mass had ever been
united above the ocean. The flightless cormorant; the iguana; the
blue-footed booby; the hawks; the giant tortoises—Darwin’s
fascination grew as each new encounter revealed to him that “the
different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by different
sets of beings.” Almost against his will, he wondered whether he was
witnessing accommodations by living creatures to a varied
environment. This disturbing thought called into question the
stability of individual species, which in Darwin’s time were
considered immutable categories, with each unique plant and animal
being the product of divine creation.
To complicate things further, there were the Galápagos finches.
As Darwin confessed in his Journal and Remarks of the Beagle’s
journey—published in 1839, after his return to England—at first he
failed to recognize the significance of a “most singular group of
finches, related to each other in the structure of their beaks, short
tails, form of body and plumage.” I find such oversight easily
understood. Despite their fame in scientific circles, Darwin’s finches
are unassuming birds. The small hostelry where I was staying
overlooked the harbor. With a fresh breeze off the ocean, and the
weather being what it is on the equator, there is little need for
window glass, so every morning the finches were in eager attendance
at my breakfast table. Just as Darwin described them, the birds have a
short tail and scruffy black plumage and are about the size of an
English sparrow. The variations in beak size and shape are readily
apparent. So too, regardless of beak size, is their preference for
scrambled eggs.
Upon Darwin’s return to England, with careful study of the finch
specimens at the Zoological Society of London, thirteen distinct
Galápagos species were identified. Evolved from a common ancestor,
probably a ground-dwelling seed eater of South American origin,
over millennia, the survivors of this generic stock had adapted to fit
the varying and differing habitats of the individual islands. “One
might really fancy,” wrote Darwin perceptively, “that from an
original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species has been
taken and modified for different ends.”
In all birds the beak is a vital life-supporting tool. Pecking away at
scrambled eggs, of course, is easy. But for seed-eating birds, small
variations in beak formation and strength can make a big difference,
especially during times of drought. With some kernels harder to
crack than others, the deeper and stronger beaks provide an
advantage. The principles of such adaptation have been validated by
the research of the British evolutionary biologists Peter and
Rosemary Grant, both professors at Princeton University, who have
spent decades in the Galápagos. The Grants have demonstrated that
changing climatic conditions do indeed dramatically alter the nature
and quantity of the finches’ food supply. Under changing
circumstances, variations in beak structure of individual birds then
determine survival through natural selection, confirming the
fundamental principles of evolution that Darwin set forth in The
Origin of Species. Published in 1859, this groundbreaking work was to
change the course of human thought.

BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION, in its essence, is a gradual process of

variation, selection, and replication whereby living things, in the
service of survival, find adaptive fit with changing environmental
circumstances. Friedrich Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of
Socialism, professed his great admiration for Darwin, “as the first who
succeeded in elaborating a consistent theory of evolution in any
field.” Hayek was quick to add, however, that the dynamics of
Darwin’s understanding had deep roots in earlier sociocultural
writings, including those of Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith.
Indeed, by 1838, within two years of the Beagle’s return to England,
and when a comprehensive theory of evolution was beginning to
occupy him, it is clear from his notebooks that Darwin had read
Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects and The Theory of Moral
Sentiments.
In their ideas Smith and Darwin, and Hayek too, are much in
accord. The common conceptual thread binding together an
understanding of the social order and evolutionary biology is that
complex social and biological systems, interacting freely with their
circumstances, inherently organize, adapt, and find balance. As John Kay,
the British economist, described it, reflecting upon the MPS
Galápagos meeting in the Financial Times, evolution is a generic
process through which “designs of extraordinary complexity and
efficiency can be achieved without the aid of a designer.”
Hayek described such spontaneous, self-organizing, and self-
correcting designs as systems of extended order. In the biological world,
environmental circumstances naturally select from a range of physical
attributes and behaviors to foster the optimum fit for survival of the
living organism. Similarly, in the social arena, including market
systems, adaptive strategies emerge from the behavior of many
individuals selecting options that best fit individual opportunity and
their collective needs. In each instance, it is through the dynamic
dance of variation and selection—without the aid of an omnipotent
designer—that systems of extended order emerge and evolve. There
are also differences, however, between the biological world and
human society in the dynamics of how these systems organize and
are perpetuated, two of which are particularly important as we strive
to regain our place in the natural order.
 First is the divergent time course of adaptation, as I noted in
opening this chapter. In simple terms, in the biological evolution of
any organism, including us, it is spontaneous mutation that drives
genetic variation and environmental fit. Thus, when it comes to
human biology, we can no more determine the course of our
evolution than can the Galápagos finch or any other living creature.
Human biology, given the length of time between individual
generations, evolves slowly.
On the other hand, social and technological advances evolve at a
comparatively rapid pace. Each generation transmits valuable
knowledge and behavior to the next, powerfully shaping cultural
inheritance. Since the Enlightenment and the harnessing of fossil
fuels, in particular, our sociocultural evolution has run ahead of
biological adaptation.
The second important difference, as Hayek recognized, is that
while a free society is dynamic and open in function, it is not freely
self-organizing. Beyond kinship and familiar neighbors, he asserted,
what holds societies together as they grow in size and scale is not just
self-interest and attachment but also the cultural rules and rituals
that we learn from one another and that are passed down over
generations. In Hayek’s words, sitting between instinct and reason, it
is “tradition”—what, in this book, I have described as intuitive habit
—that holds the social order together. In cultural evolution, aware of
it or not, the habits we acquire play a role in cultural design. But as
we shall find, traditions are at times rigid, confining our ability to
adapt appropriately in times of need.

****

IT IS THROUGH HABIT that the brain is tuned to prevailing

circumstances. Or more precisely, I should say it is in acquiring habit
that the brain tunes itself. This preconscious tuning, you may recall,
is in the service of reflexive efficiency and essential to daily living. But
beyond the mundane, depending upon the resilience of the tuning
achieved, habits may be a blessing or a curse. Without deliberate and
reflective self-appraisal, it is frequently difficult to know the
difference between those habits that are adaptive and those that are
impediments. This is because tradition and habit intuitively bind us
to past experience, making behavioral change difficult.
As animals, our evolved biological propensities reinforce these
circumstances. Evolution has no plan; rather the process is one that
selects the best available fit from strategies that have worked in the
past. This can be particularly maladaptive when, for example, the
evolving cultural narrative reinforces our innate, instinctual,
proclivity to seize upon short-term opportunity, regardless of the
longer-term consequences. The result—as is evident in the affluent
society—is a Faustian alliance that in the myopic pursuit of reward
can kindle epidemics of obesity, financial excess, and the denial of
future challenges.
Today one of the habits disruptive to a healthy and sustainable
cultural narrative is how we conflate measures of economic growth
with the idea of progress and social well-being. That has not always
been so. Defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the act of
journeying and moving forward, or advancement to a better state,
progress has been the animating idea of Western civilization since the
Enlightenment. The concepts of liberty, tolerance, equality of
opportunity, and social order emerged then as expressed human
aims, and it was accepted that society’s common purpose was to
realize these goals. Each technical advance, each gain in knowledge,
each improved utility would bring us closer to perfection and to
happiness; progress was dependent upon freedom and the human
will. This powerful lodestar is now waning. Increasingly, the word
progress is framed in economic terms and is becoming synonymous
with increased production of goods and services.
Within this construct the objective measure of progress is the
gross domestic product (GDP), which seeks to quantify the growth of
a nation’s annual domestic economy. That well-being will improve
with money available to secure the necessities of life makes sense, of
course, and studies from across the world suggest that as income rises
to the equivalent of approximately $10,000 per year, that is exactly
what happens. Beyond that yardstick the picture is mixed. Hence in
2013 the GDP of the United States was $15,800 trillion, yielding a per
capita GDP of $53,143. More than 70 percent of the total
expenditures, $11.501 trillion, were accounted as personal
consumption. Nonetheless, despite this growth in income and
expenditure, indices of subjective well-being, such as personal
happiness, have been stable in the United States since the mid-1960s,
when the average American’s income was approximately one-third
of that achieved in 2013.
In America shopping is a tradition. Objective evidence that
money does not buy happiness has little effect on shopping behavior.
Consumer spending has driven U.S. economic growth for decades,
climbing to 75 percent of GDP in 2007, just before the global
financial crash. Furthermore, as the subsequent recession tightened
its grip and credit was squeezed, a growing social inequality was
revealed. American society was splitting into the haves and the have-
nots. This was no news. For a decade a majority of the American
citizens surveyed had been telling the pollsters from NBC News and
The Wall Street Journal that the nation was “on the wrong track.” The
main result of this protestation was the hardening of political
ideology. “What happened to our country’s stride and spirit?” asked
the New York Times journalist Frank Bruni in the spring of 2014.
Although the United States, at that time, remained the world’s
wealthiest nation, as measured by the GDP, two-thirds of Americans
already believed that China was the world’s leading economic power.
Also becoming evident, as I have documented, was the bad news that
in Europe social mobility was increasing, while the performance of
the American school system lagged behind that of many other rich
countries. Washington, for its part, amid partisan bickering, was
encouraging a return to home-based manufacturing and greater
consumer confidence. The Tea Party was in its ascendance. Nostalgia
was in the air.
I caricature the situation to illustrate my point. The GDP’s
faithful indexing of the goods and services produced no longer
serves to reflect the growing discomfort of many middle-class
American families; nor can it document the future challenges we
face. GDP accounting makes no distinction between the quantity
and quality of growth, as is evident, for example, in the escalating
level of U.S. health care spending compared to that of other rich
countries, despite the poor outcomes achieved in many illnesses. Nor
are environmental factors and issues of sustainability and waste
considered: when a farmer preserves seed from which to grow next
year’s crop, it does not register; a living forest contributes to GDP
growth only when the trees in it are logged; and the value of fisheries
is measured in the tons of fish caught, as if their supply were infinite.
Similar questions pertain to water and soil conservation, together
with the extraction of the earth’s raw materials, and the list goes on.
The accounting of GDP has become dissociated from the social
currency and natural resources that will be necessary to sustain us in
the future. The United States is in the grip of a tradition-driven
mythology, one where it is assumed that the future is best defined by
the past, with economic growth remaining the fundamental strategy,
and GDP our measure of success. Within an evolutionary
framework, our circumstances are best described as a decline in
adaptive fit—a growing mismatch between what we do and the
sustainable well-being of ourselves and the planet. And yet our
behavior does not change.

****

SO IS THIS A MORAL ISSUE? I think not, at least not at its foundation.

Rather, it is a problem that grows from the human’s rigidity of habit
—another mismatch between biology in its broader context and the
speed of our cultural advances. From the behavioral perspective,
given our intelligence, it is a failure of rational accommodation to
changing circumstances. Hayek was correct in identifying tradition as
the guardian of culture, but equally tradition can impede the dynamic
evolution of cultural adjustment.
In the developed world, as measured by product, for over two
hundred years we have been adapting triumphantly to what once
appeared to be an infinite supply of natural resources and easily
accessible energy. Having discovered this treasure trove—this
unusual niche of environmental opportunity—ingenuity and hard
work have led to phenomenal growth in human societies and to our
numbers on this planet. It is this experience that frames our cultural
habit, and it is the framework to which the developing countries
aspire.
Assuming leadership of the Industrial Revolution from Great
Britain in the late nineteenth century, with less than 5 percent of the
world’s population the United States now consumes approximately
25 percent of the world’s resources. Indirectly the nation’s major
investments in infrastructure, in technology, in economic growth,
and in living standards are all tied, in one way or another, to
consumption of fossil fuels. Diligence and cultural tradition have
reinforced opportunity to reward the United States with
extraordinary material wealth. With brains long tuned to abundance,
we Americans are inclined to deny the future and its forebodings. In
our cleverness and flourishing, we have transformed the planet’s
ecosystem by ignoring it. This is the dark side of our success. But as
the global economy has grown and the world’s population has
exploded, it is a reality that can no longer be ignored. We are hoisted
by our own petard. In alliance with the brain’s instinctual reward
systems, intuitive habit now holds reason hostage.
It was Darwin’s dynamic theory of natural selection, and his
brilliance as a thinker, that first gave weight to the idea that new
organisms could appear and old ones disappear, with different
creatures populating the earth at different times. It has been
estimated that there have been five mass extinctions over the past 500
million years caused by extremes of climate change. Increasing
evidence suggests that we may now be entering the sixth, aided by
our own ingenuity and cavalier dominance.
In this Age of Man we are again losing species at a rapid rate.
Without a course correction and a change in our behavior, Homo
sapiens may soon be facing the same fate. If we continue to pursue
maximization of material growth as a global economic strategy, with
little regard for human well-being and the health of our planet, then
potentially we are flirting with our own extinction. We are building
our own doomsday machine, one that is slower in its impact than
acute nuclear disaster but that is of similar epic proportions over the
long term. The coming crisis—given our growing knowledge—
presents a moral issue only if we choose to ignore it.

AS OGDEN NASH, the American humorist and poet, prophetically

observed before his death in 1971, “Progress might have been all right
once, but it has gone on too long.” I find myself imagining the fate of
the urban finches that shared my breakfast table during my visit to
the Galápagos, should they be faced once more with seed foraging
after decades of feeding on scrambled eggs. Deprived of their ease,
the adaptive retuning of their behavior to the realities of the natural
world would be no simple task.
Nor will it be a simple task for us, but fortunately we are not
finches. As individuals we have the knowledge to imagine adaptive
strategy beyond exponential growth. But do we have the collective
will to change our habits? Do we have the determination to retune
the way we think? If human progress is to be made rational and
sustainable, the complex interaction between our instinctual drives
and our cultural choices must be tempered and brought into balance.
To achieve success, this will be necessary for each of us. In resonance
with my metaphor of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (which you will
recall from the introduction), our efforts at cultural standardization
—as in tuning the today’s family piano to equal temperament—will
get us only so far. Tuning our habits to accept the uniformity of
consumerism squeezes out flexibility and ingenuity. Bach’s
“customized” approach, as in tuning his clavier, is what we need.
Human beings are so good at simply copying the behaviors of
others that, when the drumbeat is demand-driven and attention-
grabbing, we stop thinking for ourselves and forget the future: in the
consumer society we become imprinted on immediate reward. Such
ingrained habits—embedded in our culture, politics, and business
practices—are dangerously soporific when it comes to changing
anything. The social engineering of 1950s communism, which so
preoccupied Hayek, and the oligarchies of crony capitalism that are
prevalent today do not work. The order they create is brittle and
snaps under duress. That social balance can be achieved through
top-down intervention is a “fatal conceit,” to borrow Hayek’s phrase.
Nor will that balance be fostered by excessive social standardization
and legal oversight, as Phillip K. Howard, the American lawyer and
social critic, has argued in his book The Rule of Nobody: Saving
America from Dead Laws and Broken Government.
No, rather it is the creativity of resilient, knowledgeable, and
innovative individuals working together that we need. It is through
self-awareness—the wisdom acquired over a lifetime of self-tuning—
that we will progressively take ownership of our behavior. To shape a
sustainable future, we must each challenge the preconscious,
personal narrative of habit. Through this conscious process,
harnessing the extraordinary powers of human reason—of
perception, analysis, imagination, and choice—the dynamics of
biology, ecology, and cultural change can be thoughtfully aligned
and brought into closer harmony. Insights from neuroscience and
evolutionary theory will help us navigate the social transformation.
We also need to take on the responsibility for rational problem
solving and active participation in crafting and strengthening the
social institutions that enhance education, independent choice, the
development of character, and social fellowship. In reality, the future
we create will be determined by the individual choices we make. We
must again, consciously, respect and embrace our place in the natural
world.

THE GOOD NEWS IS that we do not start from scratch when it comes
to seeking the change that we need. Throughout the United States
and across the world there are many individuals who are thinking and
working “outside the box” of consumerism. I have had the privilege
of profiling a tiny sample of such individuals in these pages. A stirring
of public sentiment for change is apparent and widespread. Social
inequality is of growing concern in America and Britain and is on the
political agenda. Since the recession that began in 2008, many
Americans have become savers again, in part by necessity. In what
may be just a Panglossian moment, the addictive appetite for material
goods appears to be waning, especially in young people. Similarly, as
weather patterns become extreme and the unusual becomes the
routine, the idea that global warming may have human consequences
has begun its move to center stage. Things are changing, but slowly.
Industry, again by necessity, has begun to pay attention.
Businesses, especially those with global reach, are awakening to the
threats that resource limitation, climate change, and extreme weather
events pose to their profits and their traditional practices. As one
example, the global giant Coca-Cola, was chastened in 2004 by the
loss of its license to operate India’s largest bottling plant in
Plachimada, Kerala, where the company was drawing nearly one
million liters of water each day from underground aquifers,
destroying the local agricultural economy in the process. Similarly
Nike, the manufacturer of athletic shoes, with seven hundred
factories in forty-nine countries, many in Asia, has felt the impact of
extreme weather. In Thailand in 2008 floods shut down four
factories, and sporadic drought threatens the company’s supply of
cotton.
Responding to these economic concerns and to spreading
anxiety, in 2014 the challenges of a changing environment featured
prominently on the agenda of the World Economic Forum—the
pantheon of the world’s business and political leaders—that is held
each winter in Davos, Switzerland. That year no fewer than thirty-
five sessions were devoted to climate change, green investment, and
the potential for a sustainable, “circular” economy. The latter, a
concept first proposed in the 1970s by the Swiss architect Walter
Stahel, is seen as a substitute for the existing linear industrial model
of progressive, resource-depleting growth. Pertinent to my
discussion here is that the model of “circularity” takes inspiration
from the regenerative dynamics of biological systems.
Essentially, it is argued, the industrial economy favored today
harvests raw materials—both those grown through photosynthesis
and those from the earth’s natural resources—to manufacture a
product, which is then discarded as waste at the end of its useful life.
A circular economy, on the other hand is designed to be regenerative
from the beginning: foodstuffs and other organic products return to
the soil; source materials from the earth’s supply, including
petroleum derivatives such as plastics, are cycled for remanufacture.
Durable goods are designed for disassembly such that they may be
upgraded at minimal cost. Everybody wins—the consumer, the
manufacturer, and the planet.
Dame Ellen MacArthur—the British yachtswoman, who in 2005
at the age of twenty-eight was knighted after achieving what was
then the fastest single-handed circumnavigation of the globe—
brought the circular economy to popular attention in 2010, when she
founded a charity explicitly for the purpose. MacArthur proved to be
an articulate spokeswoman, and the program rapidly garnered wide
interest, with significant international companies—including
McKinsey, Philips, Cisco, Kingfisher, and Renault, among others—
providing partnership and financial support.
For MacArthur, primed by her professional experience in yacht
racing, the conservation and reuse of resources through commitment
to a circular economy makes both environmental and business sense.
“When you set off around the world, you take with you everything
that you need for your survival,” she explained in a 2014 interview.
“For three and a half months you are on a boat with everything that
you have . . . only so much food, only so much diesel. As you watch
those resources go down, you realize just what ‘finite’ means, because
in the Southern Ocean you’re 2500 miles away from the nearest
town. I realized that our global economy is no different. It’s powered
on resources that are ultimately finite.”

THERE IS SOMETHING POETIC about a charismatic and

accomplished woman, one who understands and knows the seas,
championing the call for an ecologically sensitive economy. Staring at
the Pacific Ocean roiling against the rugged volcanic shore—as I did
sitting on Darwin’s beach one afternoon during my Galápagos visit—
it is difficult to imagine that a presence so vast and powerful could be
vulnerable. But sadly it is so. The oceans cover approximately 70
percent of the earth’s surface, and yet through our exploitation and
inattention they have become dangerously degraded. The story offers
a cautionary tale, but one not without hope that sustainable practices
can be achieved.
Coastal pollution from industrial agriculture, warming
temperatures, acidification, and the destruction of habitat—each of
these has taken its toll on marine life. But most destructive of the
ocean’s finite resources has been their depletion by industrialized
fishing. We have allowed our myopic propensity for short-term
reward to cripple many fishing grounds. Britain’s Dogger Bank
fishery, once a fine source of herring, collapsed in the 1960s, and the
Newfoundland cod-fishing grounds followed in the 1990s. Overall it
is estimated that the global fishing catch rose from 35 million tons a
year in 1950, to 150 million tons in 2009—well above what the oceans
can sustain. Some of the most preferred commercial fish—cod, tuna,
haddock, and flounder—are so depleted that they face extinction by
2050. The French-born Marine biologist Daniel Pauly, a professor of
zoology who runs the Sea Around Us Project at the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver, estimates that the biomass of big
fish in the sea has decreased by more than 95 percent over the past
century. We are heading rapidly toward the creation of marine
deserts.
In efforts to manage this looming, man-made disaster of
ecosystem decline, the development of marine reserves has been
popular with government authorities. One such reserve was first
established in the Galápagos islands in 1974 and was extended to
protect a radius of forty nautical miles around the archipelago in
1998. As in all coastal regions, but as is particularly evident in the
Galápagos, the marine ecology and that of the landmass are
intertwined. Many birds, including the unique flightless cormorant,
are entirely dependent on the sea for their food supply. And so too
do the local human fishers depend on the marine reserve for their
economic livelihood, in supplying fish to the island population and
to those visiting Galápagos National Park. Thus wisdom is called for
in balancing these human needs, while at the same time sustaining
the entire ecosystem of the archipelago. Zoning is essential to
constrain human activity, but it must also be sensitive to changing
environmental circumstance and the varying profitability of the
fisheries.
Evidence from a variety of studies across the world emphasizes
that an understanding of human behavior is essential in managing
marine resources or any other ecological system. As contrived carve-
outs of the natural world, these complex, dynamic systems will find
their own extended order if protected from predatory practices. But
they also represent an economy that is a vital source of human
sustenance. Around the world approximately 1 billion people depend
on the ocean for their nutrition and livelihood. As a microcosm of
the larger challenge, such systems therefore offer valuable insights
into how sustainability can be achieved.
One thing that clearly does not work in shaping human behavior
is to appeal to moral virtue without regard to self-interest. Reason, as
David Hume understood, is the slave of the passions. This edict
holds true in fishing. In changing behavior incentive-based systems
are essential. Hence in commercial fisheries, just declaring a region to
be a marine preserve and imposing catch limits usually backfires.
Such regulation increases short-term, myopic behavior, leading to
competitive large-scale “race to fish” practices where less valuable
species are dumped from the reported catch. The trick is to turn
personal short-term interest into a genuine sense of shared, long-
term responsibility.
A proven way of achieving this shift is to provide fishermen with
individual fishing rights to a specific territory that are long term and
secure. Such strategies work especially well if those involved are
bound together in a collective enterprise of mutual advantage. Then,
as the vitality of the ecosystem’s extended order returns through
greater knowledge, good husbandry, and fair practice, the catch
improves in quality and everyone wins, including the fish and other
marine life. As you may have realized, what I am describing is a
fisherman’s version of Mischel’s famous marshmallow test, which
you will recall from Chapter 7. As it is in childhood, so it is in
fishing: delayed gratification pays off.
 Indeed, using such a paradigm in her research, Ayana Elizabeth
Johnson, a marine biologist with the Wiatt Institute, in Washington,
D.C., who has a passionate interest in the sustainable use of ocean
resources, has explored the role of behavior and social factors in
shaping conservation success. In a clever study, originally conceived
for her Ph.D. thesis at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, Johnson studied the time preferences and resource
management approaches of 350 fishermen and scuba divers in
Curaçao and Bonaire, of the Netherlands Antilles, in the Caribbean.
In a design similar to that used by Mischel, Johnson offered the
participants enrolled in the conservation study $50 at a future date or
a smaller amount immediately and logged their preferences. The cut-
off that emerged as an acceptable immediate reward was around $35:
below that number—which was about the cost of a case of the most
popular local beer at the time—most individuals were prepared to
wait for the larger sum.
But the details are interesting. Not surprisingly, being hard up
financially played a major role in the decision making. That was
particularly true for the local fishermen who frequently had families
to support: the scuba divers, often young people from Holland,
tended to be wealthier. This difference also played out in the attitude
of the two groups toward conservation: the fisher’s income depended
on taking fish out of the ocean, while the scuba divers—dependent
on the tourist trade for their living—benefited from keeping fish in
their habitat. The implications of Johnson’s studies are clear: if
sustainable fishing practices are the goal, then behavioral preferences
and the socioeconomic issues that shape those preferences must be
taken into consideration. Behavior matters.
If sustainable ecosystem practices are to succeed, the importance
of understanding human behavior must be placed front and center.
Without systems of balanced incentive, individuals acting in their
own interest will deplete any common resource, to the detriment of
the greater good. The American ecologist Garrett Hardin famously
described this dilemma in his 1968 paper published in Science
magazine, provocatively titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
Hardin, being an expert on population growth, expressed a certain
Malthusian misanthropy in his writings. But he was also a systems
thinker and a great believer in the destructive consequences of
selfishness—including death and starvation as the feedback
mechanism through which the extended order would eventually
return to equilibrium. Ideally, some less drastic method of self-
correction is to be fostered.
The political economist Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize
for economics in 2009, and who studied common resource
management across the world—from lobster fisheries in Maine to
irrigation systems in Nepal—felt more sanguine about human
nature. In her research she found that communities with investment
in the long-term viability of a local resource frequently developed
successful and sophisticated systems of governance. The critical
factors are the size of the community involved and the relationships
among the principal players invested in the shared resource. And yes,
of course, we are back to Adam Smith: small communities, with the
interlocking interests of the participating members, do find their own
extended order.
Hayek was right. The understanding that promotes social order
and human progress is widely distributed among us: it is a function
of the personal relationships we build and cannot be duplicated by
top-down planning. But as Ostrom’s studies demonstrate, such
relationships are weakened and tend to be replaced by self-interest as
communities grow in size and drift toward anonymity. Our challenge
today, in the shadow of extraordinary material achievement, is to
reverse that process of social erosion. I share Ostrom’s sanguinity:
I’m optimistic that collectively we can acquire the wisdom to sustain
a vibrant and balanced society. As I have outlined in these pages, the
challenge is one of assuming personal responsibility for the health of
our families, our schools, and our communities, and for the ecology
that feeds us. In our educational practice, in the workplace, and
around the table, it is through the rewards of mutual attachment that
collective change becomes possible. Throughout the adventure that
is human history, cooperation has repeatedly proven to be more
interesting and more profitable than unbridled self-interest. I believe
that cultural sentiment, deep down, has not changed.
AS I WRITE THIS, spring has come to England after a long cold
winter. The daffodils know that, the geese on the lake know it too,
and in our bodies so do we. It is part of the seasonal cycle of being.
Each living creature is embedded in the natural world; human beings
do not stand independent of it. Each of us, as a self, is a pattern of
interaction: take away the interaction, and you take away the person.
This is the ecological vision. Ecology is a word that in Greek means
“household.” And as in the case of a household it is not the
disagreements and the competition among the members of the family
that determine its health but their compassion and collaboration.
The ecology of the family is a multitude of sympathetic, synergistic,
and symbiotic interactions. Personal freedom and individual
responsibility are forged, honed, and expressed within this ecology.
Our science, in its inquiry, first takes this ecology of nature and
reduces it to a series of elements. The human mind, in awe at the
complexity of it all, finds it easier to think that way—in a linear
fashion. We have made great progress with this method in
understanding the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and in moving forward
with our social enterprise. And there is more to learn. It is exciting
and seductive to believe that, in teasing biology apart, we may find a
path and an efficiency that will serve our immediate and greater
purpose.
But if we are serious about understanding our future on this
planet, then science, broadly defined, must also be committed to
integration—to understanding and respecting the complexity of the
ecological paradigm. How, we must ask, with our new-found
knowledge, can we better imagine ourselves in the natural order of
things? How may we better assume the responsibilities that will
secure for future generations a sustainable human experience? How
may we better tune the human brain for the complexities and
challenges ahead? Seated now at the keyboard, in this Age of Man,
how may the musician find greater harmony? It’s a metaphor, of
course. But it was through metaphor that we first sought to
understand our world.
Acknowledgments

I HAVE HAD MUCH HELP in putting this book together. First, I have
been blessed in my own education and in my professional
development with fine teachers, colleagues, students, and friends
who have taught me much, not only about ideas and about thinking
but also about life and about myself. That education is ongoing.
Some mentors are referenced here in these pages, others are not—
but to each I give thanks.
I am particularly indebted to Morten Kringelbach, to Joaquín
Fuster, and to David Gregory for helping frame the arguments that I
have set forth, and for many of the discussions that have refined
them. Each gave generously of his time and offered sage advice. In
addition, both Joaquín and David carefully critiqued the full
manuscript, as did my partner, Nancy Main. In each instance I
benefited greatly from their comments. Similarly Hans Wirz helped
improve my understanding of the practical challenges facing today’s
architects and town planners, as David McGough sharpened my
knowledge of the complex debates that confound policy making in
public education. Deepak Lal, through his lucid writings and
illuminating debate, sharpened my respect for economics. A special
thanks is also owed to those who permitted the inclusion of their
personal stories. All, in offering their insights and experience, have
immeasurably enriched the narrative.
I owe particular thanks to Zoe Pagnamenta, my literary agent and
longtime friend, for her unflagging support. Without Zoe’s
consistent, caring, perceptive vision and wise counsel, I would have
been lost long ago. In the early stages of structuring the book, as with
past writings, Helen Whybrow provided insightful editorial
guidance. At Norton, from the beginning, Angela von der Lippe
championed my efforts to meld science and social commentary. Amy
Cherry, now my editor at Norton, enthusiastically continued that
endorsement and, to my great benefit, employed her many talents
both to refine the manuscript and to shepherd it through the process
of publication. Finally, on the production side, I am deeply grateful
to Betsy McNeely, who miraculously, and quickly, through her
artistry transformed my clunky PowerPoint slides and rough
scribbles into the clear grayscale drawings that illustrate the text.
At UCLA, on the academic front, I particularly thank Fawzy
Fawzy, my trusted colleague and friend, and the many colleagues
who, in our discussions, have been willing to cross the usual
boundaries of science to share their ideas. Particularly at the Semel
Institute, thanks to the personal interest and generous support of
Jane and Terry Semel, we are blessed with such cross-disciplinary
opportunities. This eclecticism greatly facilitated my early research,
as did a period of sabbatical spent at Oxford University, made
possible through the generosity of Guy Goodwin, George Bowen,
and Paul Madden, the provost of Queen’s College. Special thanks
also to Matthew Neilson, of the Blenheim Estate, whose efficiency
and kindness helped secure a quiet haven for thinking and writing,
one to which I have consistently returned. And finally, sincere
thanks to my staff; to Tracey Alberi for all her support, and to
Sharon Chavez, without whose humor and unwavering good
judgment nothing would have gone smoothly, my greatest gratitude.
Once again, together with Fawzy Fawzy, it was Sharon who gave me
time.
 Notes

Introduction

1 “. . . progress, man’s distinctive mark”: “A Death in the Desert” is

one of several dramatic monologues by the English poet Robert
Browning (1812–69), published in 1864. Here Browning attempts
to define the place of humankind as being between God and
the beasts, and progress as the mark of our intellectual
distinction.
1 explosive economic growth: Angus Maddison, Contours of the World
Economy 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2 the power of fossil fuels: E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English
Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
2 economic growth continues to quicken: “Global Poverty: A Fall to
Cheer,” Economist, March 3, 2012.
2 the emerging world: “Mammon’s New Monarchs: The Emerging-
World Consumer Is King,” Economist, January 5, 2013; John
Stutz, “The Three-Front War: Pursuing Sustainability in a
World Shaped by Explosive Growth,” Sustainability: Science,
Practice and Policy 6 (2010): 49–59.
2 the disappearing Aral Sea . . . Athabasca tar sands: Robert Kunzig,
“Scraping Bottom: Once Considered Too Expensive, as Well as
 Too Damaging to the Land, Exploitation of Alberta’s Oil Sands
Is Now a Gamble Worth Billions,” National Geographic
Magazine (March 2009); Philip Micklin and Nikolay V. Aladin,
“Reclaiming the Aral Sea,” Scientific American, March 17, 2008.
3 human appetites play a significant role in climate change: Katherine
Leitzell, “Greenland’s Glaciers and the Arctic Climate,”
National Snow and Ice Data Center, September 21, 2011,
Nsidc.org; “The Melting North, Special Report: The Arctic,”
Economist, June 16, 2012; Justin Gillis, “Satellites Show Sea Ice
in Arctic Is at Record Low,” New York Times, August 28, 2012;
“Climate Change: The Heat is On,” Economist, October 22,
2011; Thomas Kaplan, “Most New Yorkers Think Climate
Change Caused Hurricane, Poll Finds,” New York Times,
December 3, 2012; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis,
www.climatechange2013.org.
3 a new planet “Eaarth”: Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a
Tough New Planet (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011).
3 The distinguished biologist E. O. Wilson: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Enter
the Anthropocene—Age of Man,” National Geographic, March
2011.
3 The Age of Man: Jan Zalasiewic et al., “The New World of the
Anthropocene,” Environmental Science and Technology 44 (2010):
2228–31; “A Man-made World: Science Is Recognizing Humans
as a Geological Force to Be Reckoned With,” Economist, May
28, 2011.
4 the indiscretions of others: Daniel Henniger, “The Age of
Indiscretion,” Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2012.
6 difficult to change our ways: William Rees, “What’s Blocking
Sustainability? Human Nature, Cognition and Denial,” in
Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 6 (2010): 1–13.
9 “Happiness . . . consists in tranquillity and enjoyment”: Adam
Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; reprint edition
Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), bk. 3, chap. 3.
9 the American Dream: Jon Meacham, “Making of America: Keeping
the Dream Alive,” Time, June 21, 2012; Gus Speth, “What Is the
American Dream? Dueling Dualities in the American
Tradition,” Grist, June 25, 2011, Grist.org.
9 the myth of material happiness: Michael Foley, The Age of Absurdity:
Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2010); and Hilke Brockmann and Jan Delhey, eds.,
Human Happiness and the Pursuit of Maximization: Is More Always
Better? (New York: Springer, 2013).
13 sustaining a human-friendly planet ecology: Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth? The
Transition to a Sustainable Economy (UK: Sustainable Development Commission, 2009).
14 The Well-Tempered Clavier: For a concise discussion of tuning and temperament, see
Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. John Owen Ward, 10th ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 1012ff. Also see Bradley Lehman, “Bach’s
Extraordinary Temperament: Our Rosetta Stone,” Early Music 33, no. 1 (2005): 3–23, and
Early Music 33, no. 2 (2005) 211–32. Lehman believes that what appear to be mere
decorative hieroglyphics on the face page of Bach’s workbook are, in fact, the key to his
tuning method. Rather than random doodles, the looping illustration at the top of the
frontispiece is a specific diagrammatic guide to the tuning method Bach used. See John
Marks, “Better than the Da Vinci Code,” Stereophile (February 2007): 47–53. For those
interested in a comprehensive history of this debate and Bach’s tuning method, see
Ross Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New
York: Norton, 2007). Duffin, a distinguished professor at Case Western Reserve
University, believes that Lehman is correct in his interpretation of Bach’s tuning
methods.

Chapter 1: OFF BALANCE

19 “Man with all his noble qualities . . .”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871; 2nd
edition London: John Murray, 1890), p. 619: “We must, however, acknowledge, as it
seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the
most debased, with benevolence that extends not only to other men but to the
humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the
movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man
still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
22 Affluence—defined as an abundance of choice: Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence:
Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
23 a body-mass index above 30: The BMI is derived by dividing a person’s body weight by the
square of their height. Normal range of the index is considered to be between 18.5 and
24.9. An index of 25 is overweight: this translates for a man 5 feet 9 inches in height into
a weight of 170 pounds. An index of 30 or over is obese.
23 U.S. statistics for obesity: Sixty-eight percent of the U.S. population is overweight and of
that group some 33 percent are considered to be obese. The most up-to-date data sets,
 from which these figures were taken, and maps of the spread of the epidemic over the
past two decades, state by state, are to be found on the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention website at www.cdc.gov. The data reflecting obesity around the world date
to 2009 and are gathered from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development and reported in Trenton G. Smith, “Behavioural Biology and Obesity,”
in Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, and Stanley Ulijaszek, eds., Insecurity, Inequality and
Obesity in Affluent Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
23 Americans have been slowly gaining weight: John Komlos and Marek Brabec, “The Trend
of Mean BMI Values of U.S. Adults, Birth Cohorts 1882–86, Indicates That the Obesity
Epidemic Began Earlier than Hitherto Thought,” Working Paper no. 15862, National
Bureau of Economic Research, April 2010.
23 shift in our dietary habits: A. Drewnowski and N. Darmon, “Food Choices and Diet Costs:
An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Nutrition 135 (2005): 900–4.
24 Multiple genes are involved: S. O’Rahilly, “Human Genetics Illuminates the Paths to
Metabolic Disease,” Nature 462 (2009): 307–14; Yung Seng Lee, “The Role of Genes in
the Current Obesity Epidemic,” Annals of the Academy of Medicine Singapore 38 (2009):
45–47.
25 Pima Indians of Arizona: P. H. Bennett, “Type 2 Diabetes Among the Pima Indians of
Arizona: An Epidemic Attributable to Environmental Change?” Nutritional Reviews 57
(1999): S51–S54; and Eric Ravussin et al., “Effects of Traditional Lifestyle on Obesity in
Pima Indians,” Diabetes Care 17 (1994): 1067–74.
26 a jerry-rigged organ of expedience: Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution (New
York: Plenum Press, 1990); Peter C. Whybrow, “Dangerously Addictive: Why We Are
Biologically Ill-Suited to the Riches of Modern America,” Chronicle Review: The
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 2009.
28 a common cultural driver [in obesity]: K. M. Flegal et al., “Prevalence of Obesity and
Trends in the Distribution of Body Mass Index Among U.S. Adults, 1999–2010,” Journal
of the American Medical Association 307 (2012): 491–97.
29 the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac: See “Big Mac Index,” Economist, January 14, 2012.
29 pervasive metabolic stress: Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, and Stanley Ulijaszek, “Obesity
Under Affluence Varies by Welfare Regimes: The Effect of Fast Food, Insecurity, and
Inequality,” Economics and Human Biology 8 (2010): 297–315; Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey,
and Stanley Ulijaszek, eds., Insecurity, Inequality and Obesity in Affluent Societies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012); and Trenton G. Smith, “Behavioural Biology and
Obesity,” ibid., pp. 69–81.
30 a demand-driven “fast new world” that never rests: Peter C. Whybrow, American Mania:
When More Is Not Enough (New York: Norton, 2006).
30 A subjective sense of control: Peter C. Whybrow, A Mood Apart; The Thinker’s Guide to
Emotion and Its Disorders (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), pp. 169–94.
31 When cytokines are produced in excess: J. G. Cannon, “Inflammatory Cytokines in Non-
pathological States,” News in Physiological Science 15 (2000): 298–303; S. W. Coppack,
“Pro-inflammatory Cytokines and Adipose Tissue,” Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
60 (2001): 349–56; and K. P. Karalis et al., “Mechanisms of Obesity and Related
Pathology: Linking Immune Responses to Metabolic Stress,” Federation of European
Biochemical Societies Journal 276 (2009): 5747–54.
31 chronic work stress in America: Peter Gosselin, “If America Is Richer, Why Are Its
Families So Much Less Secure?” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2004.
32 Social inequality: Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society
Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012); Charles Murray, “The New American
Divide,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2012; and Andrew Hacker, “We’re More
Unequal than You Think,” New York Review of Books, February 23, 2012. Despite
lengthening work hours and fewer vacations (in 2007 Americans labored nine weeks
longer per year than Germans and four more than British), by 2007 the median wage in
the United States had been stagnant for two decades, with growing disparity between
rich and poor: See Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007
(Congressional Budget Office, October 2011). In this growing inequality America is not
alone: a similar trend is occurring in Britain. See review by Nick Cohen, “The Haves
and the Have-Some-Mores,” Literary Review, May 2012.
32 lack of sleep: D. F. Kripke et al., “Mortality Associated with Sleep Duration and Insomnia,”
Archives of General Psychiatry 59 (2002): 131–36; Peter C. Whybrow, “Time Urgency, Sleep
Loss and Obesity,” in Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, and Stanley Ulijaszek, eds.,
Insecurity, Inequality and Obesity in Affluent Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012).
32 sleep loss further feeds the body’s pro-inflammatory cytokine response: S. J. Motivala and
M. R. Irwin, “Sleep and Immunity: Cytokine Pathways Linking Sleep and Health
Outcomes,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (2007): 21–25; and K. Spiegel, R.
Leproult, and E. Van Cauter, “Impact of Sleep Debt on Metabolic and Endocrine
Function,” Lancet 354 (1999): 1435–39.
33 the appetite-controlling hormones leptin and ghrelin: K. Spiegel et al., “Brief
Communication: Sleep Curtailment in Healthy Young Man Is Associated with
Decreased Leptin Levels, Elevated Ghrelin Levels and Increased Hunger and
Appetite,” Annals of Internal Medicine 14 (2004): 846–50; V. D. Dixit et al., “Ghrelin
Inhibits Leptin and Activation Induced Pro-inflamatory Cytokine Expression by
Human Monocytes and T Cells,” Journal of Clinical Investigation 114 (2004): 57–66; and S.
J. Motival et al., “Nocturnal Levels of Ghrelin and Leptin and Sleep in Chronic
Insomnia,” Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology 34 (2009): 540–45.
34 health problems . . . driven by the choices we make: “Americans Have Worse Health than
People in Other High-income Countries,” News from the National Academies, January 9,
2013, NationalAcademies.org.
35 a culture of excess: Jeanne Arnold, Anthony Graesch, Elinor Ochs, and Enzo Ragazzini,
Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open their Doors (Los Angeles: Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology, 2012); and Judith Warner, “The Way We Live Now:
Dysregulation Nation,” New York Times Magazine, June 14, 2010.
36 Delphic maxim “know thyself”: This ancient Greek aphorism, used extensively by Plato in
his dialogues, is purported to have been inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of
Apollo at Delphi. See Timothy D. Wilson, “Know Thyself,” Perspectives on Psychological
Science 4 (July 2009): 384–89.
36 morbid obesity is now a global challenge: See “Obesity: Preventing and Managing the
Global Epidemic,” WHO Obesity Technical Report Series (Geneva: World Health
Organization, 2000), p. 894; “Growing Pains: Chronic Diseases in Developing
Countries,” Economist, September 24, 2011; “The Big Picture,” Economist, December 12,
2012; and “A Sense of Crisis as China Confronts Ailments of Affluence,” Science 328
(2010): 422–24.
37 exponential growth of obesity was leveling off: Cynthia L. Ogden, Margaret D. Carroll,
Brian K. Kit, and Katherine M. Flegal, “Prevalence of Obesity in the United States,
2009–2010,” NHCS Data Brief no. 82, January 2012, www.cdc.gov. For a detailed report
regarding California, see A Patchwork of Progress: Changes in Overweight and
Obesity Among California 5th, 7th, and 9th Graders, 2005–2010 (Los Angeles: UCLA
Center for Health Policy Research and the California Center for Public Health
Advocacy, 2011). For the decline in childhood obesity reported in 2014, see “Obesity
Rate for Young Children Plummets 43% in a Decade,” International New York Times,
February 25, 2014; and Cynthia Ogden et al., “Prevalence of Childhood and Adult
Obesity in the United States, 2011–2012,” Journal of the American Medical Association
311 (2014): 806–14.
37 Potential remedies: Joy Pullmann, “Michelle Obama’s School Lunch Program Leaves
Children Hungry,” Washington Times, October 2, 2012; “Lexington: Stick or Carrot?”
Economist, June 9, 2012; and James Surowiecki, “The Financial Page: Downsizing
Supersize,” New Yorker, August 13–20, 2012.
37 health-monitoring applications: “The Quantified Self: Counting Every Moment,”
Economist Technology Quarterly, March 3, 2012. Free smartphone applications were
also proliferating rapidly. One popular weight-loss and calorie-counting program,
MyFitnessPal, had gained wide use by 2012 but had not been objectively evaluated.
Unfortunately this was true of many of the electronic devices purported to enhance
self-regulation.
38 interventions designed to help adolescent children: David R. Lubans et al., “Preventing
Obesity Among Adolescent Girls: One-Year Outcomes of the Nutrition and Enjoyable
Activity for Teen Girls (NEAT Girls) Cluster: Randomized Controlled Trial,” Archives
of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 41 (2012): 1–7.
39 we are creatures of habit: “Economics Focus: The Marmite Effect,” Economist, September
25, 2010; Mark Bittman, “Selling Junk to Kids Department,” New York Times,
November 7, 2011, Bittman.blogs.nytimes.com; and Teresa Watanabe, “Los Angeles
Schools’ Healthful Meal Program Panned by Students,” Los Angeles Times, December
17, 2011.
39 in shaping eating preferences it’s essential to start early: Wendy Slusser et al., “Pediatric
Overweight Prevention Through a Parent Training Program for 2–4 Year Old Latino
Children,” Childhood Obesity 8 (2012): 52–59.
40 obesity spreads among friends: Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, “The Spread
of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine
357 (2007): 370–79; Alison L. Hill et al., “Infectious Disease Modeling of Social
Contagion in Networks,” PLoS Computational Biology, November 4, 2010, doi:
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000968.
42 subtle environmental triggers further promote: Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We
Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam Dell, 2006).
Chapter 2: HABIT and intuition

45 “The mind of man is more intuitive”: Luc de Clapiers (1715–47), the marquis of
Vauvenargues, was an impoverished French nobleman and friend of Voltaire. See The
Reflections and Maxims of Luc de Clapiers, Marquis of Vauvenargues, ed. F. G. Stevens
(London: Humphrey Milford Press, 1940).
45 “Watch your habits”: Abi Morgan is a British screenwriter. This quotation is taken from
Morgan’s film script The Iron Lady. The 2011 film explores Margaret Thatcher’s career as
a politician told in flashbacks during the struggles with memory loss and dementia that
developed in her later years. The full quotation is within the context of a scene (page
55) when her doctor asks, “Margaret, What are you thinking?” Margaret answers,
“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become
actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they
become your character. And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny. What
we think, we become. My father always said that.”
46 The human brain . . . unique evolutionary history: See Paul MacLean, The Triune Brain in
Evolution (New York: Plenum Press, 1990). MacLean, a neuroscientist working at the
National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, was the first to propose the concept of a
“triune” brain as an aid to understanding the mix of primitive and evolved behaviors
characteristic of human beings. MacLean’s research, spanning thirty years, led to the
general acceptance of the limbic system as the anatomical home of emotion. For those
interested in the evolution of the human behavior, it is a text worth exploring, being
full of anatomical and research details while adding a philosophical, sometimes
whimsical, view of the complexity of human development. For a brief essay by Paul
MacLean on his basic concepts and ideas, see Human Evolution: Biosocial Perspectives, ed.
S. L. Washburn and E. R. McCown (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings Publishing
Co., 1978), pp. 33–57.
46 the frontal regions of the cortex: Joaquín M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex (New York:
Academic Press, 2008).
50 Sigmund Freud, more than any other: See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,
abridged ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1961). In his writings Freud drew upon a long
history of thought on the subject of the subconscious. In the fourth century B.C. Plato
had embraced dreams and the imagination as evidence of preconscious knowledge.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, pillars of the German philosophical tradition, set the
stage for Freud’s dynamic theory of mind, which argued that instinctual strivings, early
experience, and memories beyond conscious awareness helped shape our everyday
behavior. But perhaps most immediately Freud’s investigation had roots in the
psychological writings of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), who had a significant
impact on German education in the nineteenth century and formulated his own
dynamic theory of the unconscious mind, complete with the concept of repression,
thus greatly influencing Freud and Josef Breuer in their early studies of hysteria. For
further discussion, see Peter C. Whybrow, “The Meaning of Loss: Psychoanalytic
Explorations,” in Peter C. Whybrow, Hagop S. Akiskal, and William T. McKinney,
eds., Mood Disorders: Toward a New Psychobiology (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), pp. 81–
93.
50 a reaction to the Enlightenment ideal: Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight (New York:
Random House, 2012).
51 modern brain-imaging technology: Michael I. Posner and Marcus E. Raichle, Images of Mind
(New York: Scientific American Library, 1994) provides a concise and useful history of
the mapping of the brain. Over decades wiring diagrams of the motor and sensory
systems in the brain were slowly drawn from the study of those who suffered stroke
and other neurological disorders or needed surgery for uncontrollable epilepsy. This
progress was accelerated by electrode studies in living animals, including nonhuman
primates. But the secrets of the mind—those complex activities of brain that conjure
the living self—remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the last decades of the twentieth
century that advancing computer technology coupled with applied biophysics made it
possible to begin mapping the processes underpinning human thought and emotion.
Magnetic resonance imaging technology (MRI) has been the linchpin in our advance.
The physics of this opportunity lies in a discovery made by Linus Pauling in 1935, when
he found that the amount of oxygen carried by hemoglobin—which gives blood its red
color—changes the magnetic properties of the hemoglobin molecule, making it
possible to differentiate between arterial and venous blood. As neurons become active
in a brain region, blood flow increases, with oxygen-rich hemoglobin displacing that
which is depleted. Technically the gradient of this change is detectable by
measurement of the shifting magnetic properties of the hemoglobin at the site of
metabolic action, giving a quantifiable measure of brain activity.
52 social cognitive neuroscience: Matthew D. Lieberman, “A Geographical History of Social
Cognitive Neuroscience,” Neuroimage 61 (2012): 432–36; and Matthew D. Lieberman,
“Social Cognitive Neuroscience: A Review of Core Processes,” Annual Review of
Psychology 58 (2007): 259–89.
54 the renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert: Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New
York: Knopf, 2006).
54 intuitive thinking, rather than being mysterious: Matthew D. Lieberman, “Intuition: A
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 109–37.
55 brain can initiate . . . routine motor behaviors: Scott B. Kaufman et al., “Implicit Learning
as an Ability,” Cognition 116 (2010): 321–40.
55 reflective . . . and reflexive . . . self-knowledge: Matthew D. Lieberman, Johanna M. Jarcho,
and Ajay B. Satpute, “Evidence-based and Intuition-based Self-knowledge: An fMRI
Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (2004): 421–35. As an aid to
communication Lieberman has labeled the neural centers activated in the conscious
processing of evidence-based information about the self, a process that draws heavily
upon memory and the retrieval of personal information, as the C system (C for
reflective). The intuitive, preconscious neural network, which has the capacity for self-
judgment based upon accumulated evidence without resort to explicit conscious
retrieval, he has dubbed the X system (X for reflexive).
57 two separate but parallel brain processes: William Schneider and Richard M. Shriffrin,
“Controlled and Automatic Human Information Processing I. Detection, Search and
Attention,” Psychological Review 84 (1977): 1–66.
58 the concept of dual process thinking: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).
59 as in Parkinson’s disease: In Parkinson’s disease before treatment with L-dopa, individuals
are less capable of learning from positive feedback. See Michael Frank, Lauren
Seeberger, and Randall O’reilly, “By Carrot or by Stick: Cognitive Reinforcement
Learning in Parkinsonism,” Science 306 (2004): 1940–43. Similar underlying mechanisms
seem to operate in other brain disorders such as attention deficit disorder and in the
compulsive repetition of movements and thoughts. Similarly dopamine activity is
 excessive in drug addiction and other addictive states such as habitual risk-taking that
are also examples of habit behaviors that are difficult to overcome. Just as chocolate
cake makes us feel good and want to eat it again, so can myriad social behaviors make
us feel rewarded.
60 across mammalian species: Ann M. Graybiel, “The Basal Ganglia: Learning New Tricks
and Loving It,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 15 (2005): 638–44; Terra Barnes et al.,
“Activity of Striatal Neurons Reflects Dynamic Encoding and Recoding of Procedural
Memories,” Science 437 (2005): 1159–61; Kaytl Sukel, “Basal Ganglia Contribute to
Learning but Also Certain Disorders,” Brain Work (New York: Dana Foundation, 2007);
and Ann Graybiel, “The Basal Ganglia: Moving Beyond Movement,” Advances in Brain
Research (New York: Dana Foundation, 2007).
61 the brain makes autonomous and preconscious judgments: See Joseph E. Ledoux,
“Rethinking the Emotional Brain,” Neuron 73 (2012): 653–76; and Ledoux’s earlier book
on the same subject, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
62 an intensely social species: Susanne Schultz and Robin Dunbar, “Encephalization Is Not a
Universal Macroevolutionary Phenomenon in Mammals But Is Associated with
Sociality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107, no. 50 (2010): 21582–86.
63 mental “heuristics”—innate rules: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind:
Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992).
64 how morality varies across cultures: See Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir, “Morality,” in
S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed.
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), vol. 1. Increasingly Haidt has turned his
attention to the moral foundations of politics and how to transcend the “culture wars”
of political partisanship using the findings of moral psychology. See J. Haidt, J.
Graham, and C. Joseph, “Above and Below Left-Right: Ideological Narratives and
Moral Foundations,” Psychological Inquiry 20 (2009): 110–19. For a report in the popular
press on the same subject, see Clive Crook, “US Fiscal Crisis Is a Morality Play,”
Financial Times, July 4, 2011.
65 intuition is unreliable: Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, “Conditions for Intuitive
Expertise: A Failure to Disagree,” American Psychologist 64 (2009): 515–26.
65 “strangers to ourselves”: Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive
Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
67 “Yes, in modern times the concept of the self”: See also Matthew Lieberman and Naomi
Eisenberger, “Conflict and Habit: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to the
Self,” in A. Tesser, J. V. Wood, and D. A. Stapel, eds., On Building, Defending and
Regulating the Self: A Psychological Perspective (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), pp.
77–102.
68 personal identity today is . . . self-determined and choice-driven: Roy F. Baumeister; “How
the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research,” Journal of
Personality and Social Research 52 (1987): 163–76.
Chapter 3: ENLIGHTENED EXPERIMENTS

69 “Money begats trade”: Thomas Mun, “England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade,” in John
Ramsay McCulloch, ed., A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce
(London: Political Economy Club, 1856). Little is known about Thomas Mun save that
he was an eminent merchant of London in the mid-seventeenth century and a director
of the East India Company.
69 “And who are you? said he”: Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (London: Folio Society, 1970), bk. 7, chap. 33, p. 399. Sterne (1713–68) was an
English parson and humorist who rocketed to fame at forty-six after the publication of
the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy.
69 the Domesday Survey: Commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, the survey
reviewed more than thirteen thousand hamlets and towns in England and Wales and
was completed in one year. See www.domesdaybook.co.uk/oxfordshire1.html.
70 Combe Mill was retired: The historical details regarding the mill are taken from Guide to
Combe Mill (Combe Mill Society, 2009). Further information may be found at
www.combemill.org.
70 steam engines . . . initiated our dependence on fossil fuel: E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the
English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
70 the Lunar Society of Birmingham: Robert Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); and Jenny Unglow, The Lunar Men: Five
Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).
71 “a little philosophical laughing”: Erasmus Darwin to Matthew Boulton, March 11, 1766,
quoted in Unglow, Lunar Men, p. xv.
72 Charles needed money: See Jenny Unglow, A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), particularly pp. 289–304.
73 William of Orange gave political stability to England: J. R. Jones, Country and Court:
England 1658-1714 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
73 the battle of Blenheim: Charles Spencer, Blenheim: Battle for Europe (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 2004).
74 “nervous” and “of the sensorium”: Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia: The Laws of Organic Life
(1794) is essentially a medical text that explores the functioning of the body, including
anatomy, psychology, and pathology. Darwin had studied medicine at Cambridge,
receiving his degree in 1755, and he maintained a busy practice for most of his life.
75 felt they held the future in their own hands: See William Hutton, An History of Birmingham
(1783), online at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13926. “Every man has his fortune in his
own hands,” wrote Hutton (1723–1815), a printer and local historian.
75 “that conscious thinking thing”: John Locke (1632–1704) was the son of a country lawyer
who had served with Cromwell; partly through those connections Locke attended the
Westminster School and went on to Christ Church, Oxford. There he was exposed to
some of the best scientific minds, men who were breaking with the Aristotelian
tradition and moving toward systematic observation as the bedrock of science and
medicine. In 1666 he met Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the
richest men in England, becoming his personal physician, secretary, and political
 operative. Living with Ashley in London, Locke found himself at the center of English
political life during the turbulent reign of Charles II. Ashley believed that England
would prosper through trade and persuaded the king to develop the Board of Trade,
the legal body that administered the American Colonies before the revolution. Locke
became its secretary, including drafting the constitution of the Carolinas in America.
Throughout, Locke remained a philosopher in his thinking. His An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, with his reflections upon the nature of the self, first appeared in
1688; he made several revisions before his death in 1704.
75 self-scrutiny was a rare activity: Roy Baumeister, “How the Self Became a Problem: A
Psychological Review of Historical Research,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
52 (1987): 163–76.
75 Michel de Montaigne: Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question
and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (UK: Other Press, 2010).
76 human judgment is unreliable: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was a pessimist, although
perhaps he may be excused given what he experienced. Born in the time of Elizabeth I,
he endured the cruelty and chaos of the English Civil War, including the beheading of
Charles I. Hobbes’s greatest fear over his long life was the threat of social and political
chaos. Only science, he asserted, and “the knowledge of consequences” offered hope in
overcoming human frailty. Hobbes was committed to the emerging scientific method;
indeed, the mechanistic reasoning that he employed was in some ways a personal
means of avoiding the messy emotional and political time in which he lived. He saw the
body and its control by the head—the brain—as comparable to the need for the body
politic to have a head that would decide what should be done. His thinking, however,
was constrained by this mechanistic viewpoint when it came to describing human
nature. A medievalist at heart, in the political realm his vision was darker still: in the
face of declining religious influence, he asserted, only sovereign autocracy was capable
of sustaining a stable social order.
76 greed and a love of luxury were the engines: Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or
Private Vices, Public Benefits (1732; reprinted Oxford University Press/Sandpiper Books,
2001).
76 with profit for both the individual and society: See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An
Interpretation: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1969).
77 “psychology of action”: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1738; reprint edition
London: Everyman’s Library, 1939).
79 the patron saint of capitalism: Of the numerous books written about Adam Smith, one
that best balances the philosopher and the economist is Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam
Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Another is
James Buchan, The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas (New York: Norton, 2006).
80 “by which we perceive virtue or vice”: For a concise discussion of Francis Hutcheson’s
contribution to Enlightenment philosophy and his influence on Smith’s thinking and
writing, see Phillipson, Smith: Enlightened Life, pp. 24–55.
81 “on which all forms of human communication”: Ibid., p. 148.
81 “Though our brother is upon the rack”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759;
reprint edition Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1976), sec. 1, chap. 1, p. 48.
82 in the pursuit of mutual sympathy: James R. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
82 “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776;
reprint edition New York: Random House, 1994), bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 15.
83 “it is the most insistent”: Adam Gopnik, “Market Man: What Did Adam Smith Really
Believe?” New Yorker, October 18, 2010.
86 the transition from community to society: Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society,
trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Dover, 2002). Tönnies first published Gemeinschaft
und Gesellschaft in 1887.
87 “maximize economic return”: E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 8.
88 preoccupations with Newtonian science and moral philosophy: Garry Wills, Inventing
America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Doubleday, 1978).
89 happiness is similar to the concept of price: Jason Potts, “The Use of Happiness in Society:
An Evolutionary/Hayekian Approach to Happiness Economics,” Proceedings of the Mont
Perelin Society, Annual Meeting, 2010.
90 the Tea Party movement: “Lexington: The Perils of Constitution-worship,” Economist,
September 25, 2010.
Chapter 4: Choice

91 “Give me the liberty to know”: John Milton, Areopagitica, in Defense of the Right to Publish
Without License, November 23, 1644. The speech was given before Parliament and
published simultaneously as a pamphlet.
92 Joaquín Fuster: For Fuster’s autobiography, see Joaquín M. Fuster, The History of
Neuroscience in Autobiography, ed. Larry R. Squire (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 7:58–97.
92 the Orient Express: Jonathan Bastable, “Orient Express, 1982,” Condé Nast Traveller, April
2009.
93 Human “Connectome” Project: Francis Collins, “The Symphony Inside Your Brain,” NIH
Director’s Blog, November 5, 2012, http://directorsblog.nih.gov/the-symphony-inside-
your-head. See also A. Paul Alvisatos et al., “The Brain Activity Map,” Science 339
(March 7, 2013).
94 the hippocampus: That the hippocampus is essential to memory formation is dramatically
and tragically demonstrated by the case of Henry Molaison, known during his lifetime
as HM. Henry, born in 1926, developed epilepsy in his teens and by the age of twenty-
seven it had become intractable with as many as eleven severe seizures each week. The
seizure activity was localized to the temporal lobes of the brain, which contain the
hippocampus and the amygdala; both of these structures were removed in an effort to
control the seizures. The control of epilepsy was achieved but with the startling and
immediate result of his complete loss of the capacity for recent memory, although
distant memories, acquired before the surgery, remained intact. Henry lived until 2008,
but his incapacity to remember recent events persisted throughout his lifetime. He
became the object of considerable neuropsychological study; the tragedy of his
disability has contributed enormously to our understanding of the role of the
hippocampus in memory acquisition and retrieval. For the original article published by
the surgeon who performed the operation, see William Beecher Scoville and Brenda
Milner, “Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions,” Journal of
Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20 (1957): 11–21; it was reprinted in Journal of
Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 12 (2000):1ff. For a popular review at the time of
HM’s death, see “Obituary: HM,” Economist, December 20, 2008.
94 the frontal lobes: Joaquín M. Fuster, The Prefrontal Cortex, 4th ed. (London: Elsevier Press,
2008); and Fuster, The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
95 a tapestry of personal knowledge: Joaquín M. Fuster, Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
96 to remember the past . . . enables us to imagine the future: Daniel L. Schachter and Donna
Rose Addis, “Constructive Memory: The Ghosts of Past and Future,” Nature 445 (2007):
27.
96 the fundamentals of neuronal action have been conserved: Eric R. Kandel, “The Molecular
Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialog Between Genes and Synapses,” Nobel lecture,
December 8, 2000; in Bioscience Reports 24 (2004): 477–522.
97 clusters of neurons can be . . . consistently excited: For an elegant and concise summary of
the work of Itzhak Fried and his colleagues, see Rodrigo Quiroga, Itzhak Fried, and
 Christof Koch, “Brain Cells for Grandmother,” Scientific American 308 (2013): 30–35.
100 the fatty insulation called myelin: George Bartzokis et al., “Lifespan Trajectory of Myelin
Integrity and Maximum Motor Speed,” Neurobiology of Aging 31 (2010): 1554–62.
101 “there was likely much more to brain function”: Marcus Raichle and Abraham Snyder, “A
Default Mode of Brain Function: A Brief History of an Evolving Idea,” NeuroImage 37
(2007): 1083–90.
102 the brain’s functional networks change with age: Damien Fair et al., “Functional Brain
Networks Develop from a ‘Local to Distributed’ Organization,” PLoS Computational
Biology 5 (May 2009); and Jonathan Power et al., “The Development of Functional Brain
Networks,” Neuron 67 (2010): 735–48.
105 the tragedy of Phineas Gage: John Van Horn et al., “Mapping Connectivity Damage in the
Case of Phineas Gage,” PLoS One 7 (May 2012), doi:10.1371/journal.pone/0037454.
110 the central role of pleasure in driving human behavior: Morten L. Kringelbach, “The
Human Orbitalfrontal Cortex; Linking reward to Hedonic Experience,” Nature
Reviews: Neuroscience 6 (2005): 691–702; and Kringelbach, The Pleasure Center: Trust Your
Animal Instincts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
110 a brain area . . . particularly active . . . in “resting” blood flow studies: The ventromedial
prefrontal cortex is consistently active in fMRI and PET studies of the brain’s default
networks. It appears to be one anchor in the cross-talk among the several centers of the
“executive” brain. The other is the posterior cingulated cortex, which is part of the first
layer of the “new” cortex that wraps itself around the older limbic brain structures. For
a summary see Tina Hesman Saey, “You Are Who You Are by Default,” Science News,
July 18, 2009.
110 The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex . . . braking system: Jessica Cohen and Matthew
Lieberman, “The Common Neural Basis of Exerting Self-Control in Multiple
Domains,” in Y. Trope, R. Hassin, and K. N. Ochsner, eds., Self Control (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 141–60.
112 “inter-temporal or delayed discounting”: George Ainslie, “Précis of Breakdown of Will,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 635–73.
113 separate brain systems . . . immediate and delayed rewards: S. M. McClure et al., “Separate
Neuronal Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Awards,” Science 306
(2004): 503–7. For a commentary, see George Ainslie and John Monterosso, “A
Marketplace in the Brain?” Science 306 (2004): 421–23. The timing of a reward is also
important, with immediate reward dominating long-term decision making. See S. M.
McClure et al., “Time Discounting for Primary Rewards,” Journal of Neuroscience 27
(2007): 5796–804; and Lucy Gregorios-Pippas, Philippe N. Tobler, and Wolfram Schultz,
“Short-term Temporal Discounting of Reward Value in Human Temporal Striatum,”
Journal of Neurophysiology 101 (2009): 1507–23.
114 the brain’s two systems of choosing: Bernard Balleine and John O’doherty, “Human and
Rodent Homologies in Action Control: Corticostriatal Determinants of Goal-Directed
and Habitual Action,” Neuropharmacology 35 (2009): 48–69.
115 “we learn to be thoughtless”: Joshua M. Epstein, “Learning to Be Thoughtless: Social
Norms and Individual Computation,” Computational Economics 18 (2001): 9–24. A
variation of this phenomenon is the “Einstellung effect,” where in solving problems we
persist in approaching tasks with a biased mindset that has been developed from
previous experience. See Merim Bilalic, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet, “The
Mechanism of the Einstellung (Set) Effect: A Pervasive Source of Cognitive Bias,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (2010): 111–15.
Chapter 5: MARKET MAYHEM

117 “This division of labour”: One of Smith’s most famous quotations from The Wealth of
Nations focuses upon exchange as the core activity of the social relationships from
which the various institutional arrangements we call the “free” market then develop.
See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776;
reprint edition New York: Modern Library, 1994), bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 14.
117 Beyond Babylon: Joan Aruz, Kim Benzel, and Jean Evans, eds., Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade,
and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2008).
118 destined to change American capitalism: “The Week that Changed American
Capitalism,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2008.
118 “the simple and obvious system of natural liberty”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. 4, chap. 9,
p. 745.
119 Barter and exchange are older than the practice of agriculture: Smith employed a four-
stage theory of economic history—hunters, herding, agriculture, and commercial
society—based upon the taxonomy laid down by Henry Home, later Lord Kames, in
Sketches on the History of Man (1734). In the hunter-gatherer society, competition for
resources was resolved by seeking new territory; herding provided opportunities for
larger groups to be sustained, but few laws were required because social control was
provided by the family unit; settlement and agriculture were a social order of greater
complexity requiring agreements and obligations. Finally in commercial society clear
regulatory practices were required to protect property and to distribute responsibility
across individuals and the social group. Honesty in practice is fundamental, both in
respecting of the property of others and in establishing the fair price of the goods to be
exchanged. Most important, those involved in the exchange must demonstrate
integrity, without which trust erodes and the market culture’s delicate web of social
interaction is rapidly destroyed.
119 In the late Bronze Age the Mediterranean was a trading hub: Karl Polanyi, Conrad
Arensberg, and Harry Pearson, eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Chicago:
Henry Regnery Co., 1971); and S. C. Humphreys, “History, Economics, and
Anthropology: The Work of Karl Polanyi,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 165–212.
119 a Bronze Age trading vessel: The Uluburun was salvaged by George Bass, considered by
many to be the father of underwater archaeology. Bass founded the Institute of
Nautical Archaeology, which has a major research center in Bodrum, Turkey, where
many of the Uluburun artifacts are on display. See Dale Keiger, “The Underwater
World of George Bass,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, April 1997.
120 Commerce flourished among these ruling elites: “The First Civilizations of Europe: 3000–
600 BC,” Hammond Concise Atlas of World History (HarperCollins, 1998).
123 palace economies: M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1954; reprint edition New York:
NYRB Classics, 2002).
123 The value of most commodities was determined by weight: The weight of the volume of
water filling an amphora was called a talent, in ancient Greek meaning “scale” or
“balance.” Talent, as a unit of mass, was also the name given to a unit of precious metal
of equivalent mass. This represented the first stage of currency development, where
 valuable metals including copper ingots were held as the receipt of purchase for stored
grain or other commodities. The concept of gold and silver as money grew only later as
trade became organized. It was to be many centuries, however, before Alyattes, the
father of Croesus, had the bright idea, around 600 B.C. in Anatolia, of guaranteeing
the weight and purity of the precious metals circulating in his dominion, thus greatly
simplifying trading.
125 the economies of the eastern Mediterranean feudal states collapsed: Robert Drews, The
End of the Bronze Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Eric H. Cline,
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
126 the equilibrium of political and military power: Eberhard Zangger, “Who Were the Sea
People?” Saudi Aramco World, May–June 1995.
126 the siege of Troy to which Homer: Joachim Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an
Old Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Caroline Alexander, The War
That Killed Achilles: The True Story of the Iliad (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009).
127 bands of hungry seagoing predators: Mark Schwartz, “Darkness Descends,” Ancient
Warfare 4 (August–September 2010): 4.
128 the great slab of memory that is human history: Madeline Bunting, “The Memory of
Humankind Preserves Our Global Sanity,” Guardian, March 15, 2007.
129 interactive equilibrium with their surroundings: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems
Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1969).
129 the brain as a self-organizing and goal-directed system: F. A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An
Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976).
129 Markets . . . a natural product of human social interaction: F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit:
The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
130 “invisible hand”: While the metaphor of the “invisible hand” is much quoted, in fact
Smith used it sparingly. In The Wealth of Nations, for example, it appears in relation to
foreign trade as follows: “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign
industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a
manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and
he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which
was no part of his intention” (book 4, chapter 2). Today classical economists extend the
meaning of the phrase to infer cooperation without coercion.
132 “we are no longer living in Adam Smith’s village economy”: John Komlos, “A Critique of
Pure Economics,” Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs 55 (2012): 21–57.
133 “The moment that barter is replaced”: Hayek, Fatal Conceit,> p. 101.
134 the fable of King Midas: Richard Seaford, “World Without Limits: The Greek Discovery
That Man Could Never Be Too Rich,” Times Literary Supplement, June 19, 2009. In
mythology the story of King Midas offers a cautionary note. Midas, the king of Phrygia,
“was a wise and pious king.” One day he was offered a wish by the god Dionysus.
“Midas asked that everything he touched should be turned to gold. He soon regretted
his indiscretion, for even the food he ate immediately turned to gold. Dionysus took
pity on him and sent him to purify himself in the river Pactolus, which thenceforth
flowed with gold dust.” New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Crescent
Books, 1989), p. 150.
134 entrepreneurs at JPMorgan Chase dreamed up: Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of
J.P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial
Crisis (New York: Free Press, 2010). Finance began as a service industry in support of
commerce and development. Acting as a “market-maker”—buying and selling stocks,
commodities and other financial instruments—the goal was to make profit from the
price differentials between the bid and the sale, thus providing liquidity in the market
and facilitating trade. See also Gillian Tett, “Genesis of the Debt Crisis,” Financial
Times, May 1, 2009.
135 “high latent demand” zip codes: “Chain of Fools: Hard Evidence That Securitization
Encouraged Lax Mortgage Lending in America,” Economist, February 9, 2008.
136 “debt economy,” based on an assumption of continuous growth: James Suroweicki, “The
Debt Economy,” New Yorker, November 23, 2009.
136 making debt acceptable: Richard Duncan, The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper
Money Economy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
136 The explosion of credit . . . changed our habits: “Buttonwood: Duncan Dough Notes, A
Thought Provoking Analysis of the Debt Crisis,” Economist, July 7, 2012. Private
indebtedness in the United States grew from 120 percent of GDP in 1980 to 300 percent
in 2009, which was proportionally higher than in 1929 at the start of the Great
Depression. As part of this increase, the household debt that fueled the mortgage
bubble, which first began leaking in 2007, rose from $6.5 trillion in 2000 to almost $15
trillion by 2008. Michael Clark, “It’s Private Debt, Not Public Debt That Got Us into
This Mess,” Seekingalpha.com, May 7, 2012.
138 the finance industry’s changing share: Deepak Lal, “The Great Crash of 2008: Causes and
Consequences,” Cato Journal 30 (2010): 265–77. Goldman Sachs as the leader of the
banking oligarchy had helped facilitate the growth of the credit economy by promoting
liberalization of capital requirements. Two treasury secretaries and innumerable
government advisers had been recruited from the firm. In parallel to the nation’s
growing indebtedness the finance industry had been lobbying Washington to diminish
its financial oversight of its activities. Most of this effort had been focused upon
dismantling the controls—notably the Glass-Steagall Act—that had been put in place
after the Great Depression in an effort to curb financial speculation. In this legislation
retail banks—those traditionally dealing directly with the customer in evaluating loans
and managing deposits, which were covered by federal insurance to a specified limit—
were distinguished from investment banks, which were free to gamble in the open
market. The principal argument mounted against this “firewall” legislation was that it
stifled healthy competition. After years of slow erosion the act was finally repealed in
1999 under President Clinton. In a similar move toward deregulation, the City of
London had opened its financial markets to global competition and electronic trading
in the 1980s.
138 “if discretionary distributions”: Patrick Hosking, “Bank Says Crisis Could Have Been
Avoided If Bonuses Had Been 20 Percent Less,” Times (London), December 18, 2009.
138 With hindsight the facts are simple: Martin Wolf, “The World after the Financial Crisis,”
in Nick Kuenssberg, ed., Argument Amongst Friends: Twenty-five Years of Sceptical Inquiry
(Edinburgh: David Hume Institute, 2010).
139 “too big to fail”: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Realities Behind Prosecuting Big Banks,” New
York Times, March 12, 2013; Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, The Banker’s New Clothes:
What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It (Princeton: Princeton University
 Press, 2013); and “Prosecuting Bankers: Blind Justice, Why Have So Few Bankers Gone
to Jail For Their Part in the Crisis?” Economist, May 4, 2013.
139 the oligarchy . . . came away essentially unharmed: U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,
April 13, 2011. In this bipartisan report on the collapse of the global financial system the
Senate Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that “the crisis was not a natural
disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products, undisclosed conflicts
of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies and the market itself
to rein in the excesses of Wall Street” (pt. 1, p. 9). See also Gretchen Morgenson and
Louise Story, “Naming Culprits in the Financial Crisis,” New York Times, April 13, 2011.
139 social inequality . . . instability of America’s financial system: Chrystia Freeland, “The
New Global Super-Rich No Longer Look So Benign,” Financial Times, January 2, 2010;
Robert B. Reich, “The Limping Middle Class,” New York Times, September 4, 2011;
“Free Exchange: Body of Evidence; Is a Concentration of Wealth at the Top to Blame
For Financial Crises?” Economist, March 17, 2012.
140 combination of social inequality and the easing: Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How
Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
140 “We have met the enemy”: The American cartoonist Walt Kelly (1913–73) first used the
quote “We have met the enemy and he is us” on a poster for Earth Day in 1970,
http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm.
140 the American economy was in recession only 5 percent of the time: “US Business Cycle
Expansions and Contractions,” National Bureau of Economic Research,
www.nber.org/cycles.html.
141 the sin of extrapolation: Probably the first individual to describe the phenomenon was the
economist Hyman Minsky, who in the mid-twentieth century drew attention to the
role that the finance industry played in exaggerating economic cycles. See
“Buttonwood: Minsky’s Moment,” Economist, April 4, 2009.
141 economic growth had been built on debt: David Manuel, “Savings Rates in the United
States Have Collapsed Since Mid-’80s,” Davemanuel.com, January 1, 2010,
http://bit.ly/1sC111t.
142 “of self-denial, of self-government . . .”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759;
reprint edition Liberty Fund Classics, 1976), pt. 1, sec. 1, chap. 5.
142 Character is built, not born: Richard Reeves, “A Question of Character,” Prospect, August
2008.
143 As trust declines, the social glue erodes: CESifo Group Munich, EEAG Report on the
European Economy 2010, http://bit.ly/Vj4Biq; Veronica Hope-Hailey, “Trust Is in Short
Supply—If We Want Our Economy to Grow, We Need It,” Guardian, January 23, 2012;
Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton, “How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest
Institutions,” Atlantic, April 20, 2012.
143 a seemingly endless list of improprieties: “MPs’ Expenses Scandal: The Timeline,”
Independent, February 2010; Francesco Guerrera, Henry Sender, and Justin Baer,
“Goldman Sachs Settles with SEC,” Financial Times, July 16, 2010; “Banks Shares Suffer
As J.P. Morgan’s $2 Billion Loss Raises Heat over Risk-Taking,” Financial Times
Weekend, May 12–13, 2012; “Dimon and His Lieutenants Caught in the Spotlight Over
Risk Management,” Financial Times Weekend, March 16–17, 2013; “The LIBOR Scandal:
 The Rotten Heart of Finance,” Economist, July 7, 2012; and “Retirement Benefits: Who
Pays the Bill?” Economist, July 27, 2013.
143 greed and fraud in high places: Chrystia Freeland, “Is Capitalism in Trouble? CEOs Are
Growing Nervous. Can They Help Save Our System From Its Worst Excesses?”
Atlantic, December 2013.

Chapter 6: LOVE
147 “Mary had a little lamb”: The nursery rhyme was published in 1830 by Sarah Josepha Hale,
an American self-educated writer and novelist. It is now generally accepted, although it
was denied by Mistress Hale just before her death, that the poem was built upon three
stanzas written by a young man named John Roulstone. Roulstone is purported to have
witnessed firshand Mary Sawyer’s pet lamb following her to school in Sudbury,
Massachusetts. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), p. 354.
147 “How selfish soever man may be supposed”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; reprint edition Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), sec. 1, chap. 1. Just as Smith
built his theory of commerce upon the human propensity for barter and exchange and
the efficiency of the division of labor, so did he argue that those sentiments in man’s
nature that “interest him in the fortunes of others” are the foundation of organized society.
148 Helen started her flock: Helen Whybrow, “Lambing Time,” Vermont’s Local Banquet, no.
16, (Spring 2011). Wren, the youngest of her family, lives with her sister, Willow, and
her parents, Helen Whybrow and Peter Forbes, at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.
150 the Brothers Grimm: Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were German literary scholars born just
eighteen months apart in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Their collection of
German folk tales, first published in 1812, contained several stories of wolves and their
escapades, perhaps the most famous of which is Little Red Cap (Rotkäppchen), now
known as Little Red Riding Hood. For an excellent translation, see Grimm’s Complete
Fairy Tales, trans. Margaret Hunt (San Diego, CA: Canterbury Classics, 2011).
152 the faithful prairie vole has many more receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin: For
original studies, see Thomas R. Insel and Lawrence Shapiro, “Oxytocin Receptor
Distribution Reflects Social Organization in Monogamous and Polygamist Voles,”
Proceedings National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 5981–85; Larry J. Young and Zuoxin
Wang, “The Neurobiology of Pair Bonding,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (2004): 1048–54; and
Larry J. Young, Anne Z. Murphy Young, and Elizabeth A. D. Hammock, “Anatomy and
Neurochemistry of the Pair Bond,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 493 (2005): 51–57.
For an easily accessible summary, see “The Science of Love: I Get a Kick Out of You,”
Economist, February 14, 2004.
153 smell and close attachment are intimately intertwined in human bonding: R. H. Porter, J.
M. Cernoch, and F. J. McLaughlin, “Maternal Recognition of Neonates Through
Olfactory Cues,” Physiology And Behavior 30 (1983): 151–54; and “Paternity and Parental
Investment: Like Father, like Son,” Economist, June 18, 2009.
153 human infants . . . will show concern for others: Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello,
“Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees,” Science 311 (2006):
1301–3.
153 the smiles and babbling of young children: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals was first published in 1872, thirteen years after The Origin of Species.
It had been long in genesis, however, for there is evidence that Darwin began keeping
notebooks about the possible interaction of inherited traits and emotion back in 1838.
In Victorian times emotion was a tricky subject, tied in the public mind to spirituality,
good and evil. A scientific understanding of human behavior was thus likely to receive
public and church opposition. Hence Darwin in his book focused on the expression of
human emotion in animals rather than the other way around.
153 babies . . . change the behavior of those around them: Morten Kringelbach et al., “A
Specific and Rapid Neural Signature for Parental Instinct,” PLoS 3 (2008): 1–7, doi:
10.137/journal.pone.0001664. In a study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) the
investigators provided evidence that within milliseconds the adult brain responds to
unfamiliar infant faces but not to the faces of unfamiliar adults.
154 “cooperative breeding”: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of
Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Hrdy presents
a powerful argument for the unique nature of human cooperation. What other primate
species, she asks at the beginning of her book, is willing to spend several hours locked
up together in a metal tube (an airliner) and emerge at the other end with all limbs
intact and no combat deaths? No other ape has such a capacity for tolerance and
mutual understanding—behaviors that Hrdy believes evolved from collaborative
childrearing practices.
155 Kalahari Bushmen: Polly Wiessner, “Taking the Risk Out of Risky Transactions: A
Forager’s Dilemma,” in F. Salter, ed., Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), pp. 21–43. See also “Where Gifts and Stories Are
Crucial to Survival: A Conversation with Pauline Wiessner,” New York Times, May 25,
2009. For a rich first-hand account of the nomadic life of the Kalahari Bushmen before
and after the encroachments of industrialized culture, which has annexed some 95
percent of their habitat, see Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People (New
York: Vintage, 1959). Thomas, an anthropologist, lived with the Bushmen from the
1950s to the 1980s. See also Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (New
York: Random House, 2004).
156 in moments of disaster: Shankar Vedantam, “The Key to Disaster Survival? Friends and
Neighbors,” National Public Radio, July 4, 2011. Stories of group support are
consistently present in the news reports that follow natural disasters. See as another
example a press story following the Rancho Bernardo fire in southern California,
which destroyed seventeen hundred homes: Molly Hennessy-Friske, “Amid Ashes,
Neighbors Rally and Life Stirs Anew; They Lost So Much, but They May Have
Regained a Sense of Community,” Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2007.
156 the Ultimatum Game: Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze, “An
Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,” Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization 3 (1982): 367–88; and Hessel Oosterbeek, Randolph Sloof, and Gus Van de
Kuilen, “Cultural Differences in Ultimatum Game Experiments: Evidence from a
Meta-Analysis,” Experimental Economics 7 (2004): 171–88.
156 unique human sense of fairness: Our cousin the chimpanzee does not appear to share this
human trait of evenhanded concern. In ultimatum studies designed to explore whether
chimps are willing to split unsolicited rewards, such as raisins or chocolate, the
predominant results suggest that their preference is to share little. While some
ambiguity exists, it appears that in the chimp world, although theft is quickly
punished, the responder is insensitive to unfairness. Experiments by Keith Jensen,
Joseph Call, and other scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
 Anthropology in Leipzig have shown that essentially when it comes to raisins,
chimpanzees are willing to accept just about any offer. Parenthetically, it appears that it
is not we humans who are the rational maximizers, as championed by neoclassical
economists, seeking the greatest personal advantage in every transaction, but rather
our close cousins the chimpanzees. Keith Jensen, Joseph Call, and Michael Tomasello,
“Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game,” Science 318 (2007):
107–9; Keith Jensen, Joseph Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Chimpanzees Are Vengeful
But Not Spiteful,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (2007): 13046–50;
and Ingrid Kaiser, Keith Jensen, Joseph Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Theft in an
Ultimatum Game: Chimpanzees and Bonobos Are Insensitive to Unfairness,” Royal
Society of Biology Letters 10 (2012): 0519. A dissenting voice is that of Darby Proctor and
her colleagues of the Yerkes National Primate Center who reports that “humans and
chimpanzees show similar preferences in dividing rewards,” Reply to Henrich and Silk,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 14, 2013.
157 such habits help shape how we interpret: Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman,
“Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social
Pain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 294–300; and Matthew D. Lieberman and
Naomi I. Eisenberger, “Pains and Pleasures of Social Life,” Science 323 (2009): 890–91.
There is considerable overlap in the chemistry of pain and pleasure. For example, the
opiate morphine is used in medicine to reduce physical pain, and genetically
manipulating the brain’s opioid reward system reduces attachment behavior in blind,
deaf, and hungry newborn mice. See Anna Moles, Brigitte Kieffer, and Francesa
D’Amato, “Deficit in Attachment Behavior in Mice Lacking the μ-Opioid Receptor
Gene,” Science 304 (2004): 1983–86.
157 the emotional distress of social rejection: George Slavich et al., “Neural Sensitivity to
Social Rejection Is Associated with Inflammatory Responses to Social Stress,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 14817–22.
158 In the Ultimatum Game, oxytocin . . . increases generous offers: Paul J. Zak, Angela A.
Stanton, and Sheila Ahmadi, “Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans,” PLoS ONE
2 (2007).
158 a diet low in tryptophan . . . decreases the acceptance rate of unfair proposals: Molly
Crockett et al., “Serotonin Modulates Behavioral Reactions to Unfairness,” Science 320
(2008): 1739.
158 The empathic virtues of fairness, patience, and compassion: “Patience, Fairness and the
Human Condition,” Economist, October 6, 2007.
160 shaping social behavior . . . by mild and consistent rebuke: Robert Boyd et al., “The
Evolution of Altruistic Punishment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100
(2003): 3531–35.
160 young children . . . make their wishes clear: Lynne Murray and Liz Andrews, The Social
Baby: Understanding Babies’ Communication from Birth (UK: Children’s Project, 2000).
This book is a detailed and practical guide to understanding the first year of infant
development and engaging with the newborn child.
160 Substantial portions of the human brain . . . recognizing faces: The discussion here is
informed by these sources: Doris Tsao et al., “A Cortical Region Consisting Entirely of
Face-Selective Cells,” Science 311 (2006): 670–74; Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore,
“Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 (1977): 75–
78; “Your Mother’s Smile,” Economist, October 21, 2006; C. E. Parsons et al., “The
Functional Neuroanatomy of the Evolving Parent-Infant Relationship,” Progress in
 Neurobiology 91 (2010): 220–41; and Gill Peleg et al., “Hereditary Family Signature of
Facial Expression,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 15921–26.
161 mirror neurons: For general summary, see, “A Mirror to the World: Empathy with Others
Seems to Be Due to a Type of Brain Cell Called a Mirror Neuron,” Economist, May 14,
2005; and Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times, January 10, 2006.
A key original study is G. Rizzolatti et al., “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of
Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research 3 (1996): 131–41. For a comprehensive scientific
review, see Giacomo Rizzolatti and Liala Craighero, “The Motor-Neuron System,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–92; and Giacomo Rizzolatti, Maddalena
Fabbri-Destro, and Luigi Cattaneo, “Motor Neurons and Their Clinical Relevance,”
Nature Clinical Practice Neurology 5 (2009): 24–34.
162 the insula cortex helps modulate: Laurie Carr et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in
Humans: A Relay From Neural Systems of Imitation to Limbic Areas,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 100 (2003): 5497–502.
164 mirror neurons were relatively inactive in autistic children: Mirella Dapretto et al.,
“Understanding Emotions in Others: Mirror Dysfunction in Children with Autism
Spectrum Disorders,” Nature Neuroscience 9 (2006): 28–30.
164 it is through continuous social interaction that a child: Leslie Brothers, Friday’s Footprint:
How Society Shapes the Human Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
166 risk-taking behaviors can rapidly escalate: B. J. Casey, S. Getz, and A. Galvan, “The
Adolescent Brain,” Developmental Review 28 (2008): 62–77.
166 meaningful family relationships can buffer adolescent risk-taking: Eva Telzer et al.,
“Meaningful Family Relationships: Neurocognitive Buffers of Adolescent Risk
Taking,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25 (2013): 374–87. The development of strong
family ties is independent of family income. Indeed there is some evidence that in
high-earning families ($120,000 and above) the teenagers drink, smoke, and use more
hard drugs than do typical high school students. Rates of anxiety and depression are
particularly high in girls. See Suniya S. Luthar, “The Culture of Affluence:
Psychological Costs of Material Wealth,” Child Development 74 (2003): 1581–93. These
and similar studies suggest that the key to adaptive development in the transition from
latency to adolescence is the integration of the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex and
affective systems to effectively modulate emotion and behavior. J. H. Pfeifer et al.,
“Longitudinal Changes in Neural Responses to Emotional Expressions: Associations
with Resistance to Peer influence and Risky Behavior During the Transition from
Childhood to Adolescence,” Neuron 69 (2011): 1029–36.
167 an innovative classroom-based parenting program: Mary Gordon, Roots of Empathy:
Changing the World Child by Child (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2005). For the original use
of the term moral imagination in describing empathy, Gordon credits Thomas E.
McCollough, The Moral Imagination and Public Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press,
1991).
167 as family structures fragment . . . consistency in human interaction is harder to find:
Jeanne Arnold et al., Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open their Doors
(Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute Press, 2012).
168 the computational demands of living in social groups: Robin Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as
a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution 20 (1992): 469–93.
169 the new cortex . . . is 50 percent larger: J. H. Stephan, H. Frahm, and G. Baron, “New and
Revised Data on Volumes of Brain Structures in Insectivores and Primates,” Folia
 Primatologica 35 (1981): 1–9.
169 “Dunbar’s number”: Robin Dunbar, “Co-evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size and
Language in Humans,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 681–735.
170 the larger the social network, the weaker are the ties: Sam Roberts et al., “Exploring
Variation in Active Network Size; Constraints and Ego Characteristics,” Social
Networks 31 (2009): 138–46; and Penelope Lewis et al., “Ventromedial Prefrontal Volume
Predicts Understanding of Others and Social Network Size,” NeuroImage 57 (2011): 1624–
29.
172 the gene FOXP2 in affected family members: C. S. Lai et al., “A Forkhead-Domain Gene
Is Mutated in a Severe Speech and Language Disorder,” Nature 413 (2001): 519–23.
FOXP2 is highly conserved in evolution; see W. Enard et al., “Molecular Evolution of
FOXP2, a Gene Involved in Speech and Language,” Nature 418 (2002): 869–72. There is
a slight coding difference in humans that appears to have been shared with
Neanderthals: Johannes Krause et al., “The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern
Humans Was Shared with Neanderthals,” Current Biology 17 (2007): 1–5; and “The
Neanderthal Genome,” Economist, May 8, 2010. But it was not shared with chimps:
Genevieve Konopka, “Human-Specific Transcriptional Regulation of CNS
Development Genes by FOXP2,” Nature 462 (2009): 213–17.
173 Chattering works well with many different chores: “Chattering Classes: The Rules for
Verbal Exchanges Are Surprisingly Enduring,” Economist, December 23, 2006.
Conversation is a sophisticated form of gossip. Honed to an art form in eighteenth-
century France and in the coffeehouses of the Enlightenment in England, conversation
is by definition an interaction. It is a game of language. Dale Carnegie with How to Win
Friends and Influence People set down the ground rules: remember names, listen well,
express genuine interest, smile, focus on the other individual not yourself, and make
them feel important. For enthusiasts, conversation becomes one of the great pleasures
of life and the basis for a civilized society.
173 We call this new “grooming” behavior gossip: Gregory Rodriguez, “A Community of
Fans: Believe It or Not, Celebrity Gossip Can Be Good for You,” Los Angeles Times, July
2, 2007. In July 2013 typing Paris Hilton, the name of the self-styled celebrity, into
Google generated 199,800,000 hits in 0.21 seconds. Typing in the words Queen Elizabeth
yielded 191,500,000 hits in 0.25 seconds, and that included both Elizabeth I and
Elizabeth II. Is this a bad thing? Does a greater fascination with Paris Hilton, who has
nothing but a hotel chain, money, and youth behind her, than with the Queens
Elizabeth, who reflect the rich history of England, suggest that there is something sick
about modern society? Not necessarily, argues Rodriguez: celebrity gossip may be good
for us. In a survey of English schoolchildren, celebrity attachments appear to serve as
pseudo-friends, discussions about whom served to strengthen interaction among real
friends. For some young women the opportunity to indulge in celebrity gossip avoided
otherwise awkward silences. Sports gossip seemed to play the same role for men.
173 “little empirical evidence that women gossip more”: Eric K. Foster, “Research on Gossip:
Taxonomy, Methods and Future Directions,” Review of General Psychology 8 (2004): 78–
99. This study, from the University of Pennsylvania, reminds me of the 1980s, when I
too was teaching there. In those days the faculty club was a large and lively place—I’m
sure it still is—and especially at lunchtime. The tables in the dining hall were round,
some five feet across, and so closely packed that when the chatter in the room grew to
its crescendo, it was impossible to hear the comments of those sitting across the same
table. I remarked upon this one day, which brought much laughter from my senior
colleagues. Professors, they explained, unlike psychiatrists, prefer to talk rather than
 listen. Thus it mattered little that the detail of the conversation at the table was lost in
the cacophony, especially as the drift of the argument was usually clear. More
important was the gossip of those persons sitting immediately behind one’s chair, at a
separate table. Thanks to the size and placement of the tables in the room, those
discussions could be followed with ease, despite the noise. Eavesdropping at lunch was
the perfect pastime for academics concerned with the gossip of the day.
173 imagined, fixed systems of interrelationship: Maurice Bloch, “Why Religion Is Nothing
Special but Central,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 363
(2008): 2055–61; and, Paul L. Harris, The Work of the Imagination (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2000).
174 “external” social conditions . . . “internal” biological processes: George Slavich and
Steven Cole, “The Emerging Field of Human Social Genomics,” Clinical Psychological
Science (January 2013), Cpx.sagepub.com.
Chapter 7: CHARACTER

176 “A very young child has no self-command”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; reprint edition Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), pt. 3, chap. 3.
176 “A Clerk ther was of Oxenford”: Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Norton Critical
Edition, 2005), lines 287 and 310 of the General Prologue and the story of the Clerk. In
modern English: “A clerk there was from Oxford who studied philosophy long ago . . .
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”
176 “Now, what I want is facts”: Charles Dickens’s Hard Times was first published in 1854 in
serial form. Dickens’s social criticism is focused on the utilitarian theory of Jeremy
Bentham and James Mill—the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of
people. Dickens believed this philosophy destroyed initiative, especially in working
people oppressed by the Industrial Revolution.
178 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): For a review, see
“The Great Schools Revolution: Dresden, New York and Wroclaw,” Economist,
September 17, 2011. While the United States as a whole performs comparatively poorly,
there is considerable spread across individual states. For details of this performance
and a discussion of the international rankings of individual states in the United States,
see Catherine Gewertz, “In Math, Science, Most States Surpass the Global Average,”
Education Week 33 (2013): 6.
179 the international consulting firm of McKinsey: “How the World’s Best Performing
Schools Come Out on Top,” McKinsey on Society, September 2007, http://bit.ly/1oJ18Hc.
For a summary see “How to Be Top. What Works in Education: The Lessons
According to Mckinsey,” Economist, October 20, 2007.
179 Finland . . . an exemplar: Anu Partanen, “What Americans Keep Ignoring About
Finland’s School Success,” Atlantic, December 2011.
180 equitable distribution of opportunity for all students: Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What
Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland? (New York: Teachers College
Press, 2011).
181 decentralization, choice, and interschool competition: National Assessment of
Educational Progress, America’s Charter Schools: Results from the NAEP 2003 Pilot Study
(2006).
181 student-to-teacher ratios: Eric Hanushek, The Evidence on Class Size (Rochester, NY: W.
Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy, 1998); S. M. Shapson et al., “An
Experimental Study on the Effects of Class Size,” American Educational Research Journal
(1980): 141–52; Karen Akerhielm, “Does Class Size Matter?” Economics of Education
Review (1995): 229–41; and Alan B. Krueger, “Economic Considerations and Class Size,”
Economics Journal (2003): F34–F63.
183 America’s promotion of mass education: Claudia Goldin, “Exploring the Present
Through the Past: Claudia Goldin on Human Capital, Gender and the Lessons from
History,” World Economics 8 (2007): 61–124.
183 “Education Slowdown Threatens US”: David Wessel and Stephanie Banchero,
“Education Slowdown Threatens US,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2012.
184 the cost of college education in America: “Higher Education: Not What It Used to Be,”
Economist, December 11, 2012; Tamar Lewin, “College May Become Unaffordable for
Most in US,” New York Times, December 3, 2008; “How to Make College Cheaper,”
Economist, July 9, 2011; “Student Loans: College on Credit,” Economist, January 10, 2009;
Jordan Weissmann, “How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich,”
Atlantic, May 2013.
184 falling behind in the development of a . . . broadly educated citizenry: J. H. Pryor et al.,
The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2012, Higher Education Research Institute,
UCLA, http://www.heri.ucla.edu; Lois Romano, “Literacy of College Graduates Is on
the Decline,” Washington Post, December 25, 2005. For the complete report see The
Literacy of America’s College Students, American Institutes for Research, Report 636,
2006, http://bit.ly/1pNMsEh.
185 “parents and students no longer choose the best education”: James Engell and Anthony
Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2005). Not only in the United States is the cost of a university education
rising rapidly. In an effort to contain costs Britain, a leader with America in higher
education, has introduced market concepts in the evaluation of academic productivity
and “top-up” fees for domestic students such that the cost of attending university will
soon be comparable to that of the United States. See Simon Head, “The Grim Threat
to British Universities,” New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011; “Paying for
University: Tinkering with the Ivories,” Economist, July 2, 2011; and “Foreign University
Students: Will They Come?” Economist, August 7, 2010.
186 buying an education is different from buying a refrigerator: Peter C. Whybrow, “My, My,
Haven’t We Grown?” Times Higher Education, January 6, 2006.
186 the primary social role of the university: John Maynard Keynes quoted in Keith Thomas,
“What Are Universities For?” Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 2010.
190 universal access to secondary education: Daniel Tanner, “The Comprehensive High
School in American Education,” Educational Leadership (May 1982): 606–13.
191 The physical learning environment also was changing: An Honor and an Ornament: Public
School Buildings in Michigan, Michigan Department of History, Arts and Libraries,
September 2003.
192 something was seriously amiss: National Commission on Excellence in Education, A
Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983), http://bit.ly/1fzyocj.
192 Britain’s effort toward comprehensive schooling: OECD, Equity and Quality in Education:
Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools (OECD Publishing, 2012),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264130852-en. See also Graeme Paton, “OECD: Fifth of
British Teenagers ‘Drop Out of School at 16,’ ” Daily Telegraph, February 9, 2012.
193 privately schooled: “Private Education: Is It Worth It?” Economist, March 1, 2008. See also
“Staying on Board: In Both Britain and America Recession Has Done Little to Dent
the Demand for Private Education,” Economist, July 4, 2009.
193 mobility between the social classes: “Like Father, Not like Son: Measuring Social
Mobility,” Economist, October 13, 2012.
196 The Pact: Sampson Davis et al., The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a
Dream (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003).
197 The Seven Habits: Steven R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful
Lessons in Personal Change, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2004).
198 In Germany . . . more than 40 percent become apprentices: Edward Luce, “Why the US Is
Looking to Germany for Answers,” Financial Times, April 15, 2013; and Eric Westervelt,
“The Secret to Germany’s Low Youth Unemployment,” National Public Radio, April 4,
2012, http://n.pr/1lUu6hg.
199 It’s a lost opportunity: Clive R. Belfield, Henry M. Levin, and Rachel Rosen, The Economic
Value of Opportunity Youth (Civic Enterprises and W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 2012),
http://bit.ly/XhmoIu.
199 rolling the rock up the hill: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942; reprint edition New
York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000).
200 “by factors determined by the age of 18”: James Heckman, “Schools, Skills and
Synapses,” Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International 46 (2008): 289–
324.
200 America’s “testing mania”: “The Trouble with Testing Mania,” New York Times, July 14,
2013. In 2001, in response to declining international performance on student testing,
the U.S. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, designed to hold schools
accountable for yearly tests administered in exchange for federal aid to education.
Previous studies had shown some acceleration and student performance especially
when linked to teacher ability, but unfortunately the demand for testing in many
instances drove schools away from good teaching to essentially focus upon teaching to
the test and in some instances even committing fraud as in Atlanta. Michael Winerip,
“Ex-schools Chief in Atlanta Is Indicted in Testing Scandal,” New York Times, March
29, 2013. Also unfortunately the multiple choice tests employed do not test reasoning
skills, which are much better determined by open-ended essays. Most of the high-
ranking nations in the PISA surveys have not chosen to implement repeated
standardized testing. In contrast, the United States has fallen victim to prescription
formats that purport to provide fundamental rules for success. The facts are to the
contrary: it is what we learn from each other—trust, curiosity, craft, and social skills—
that is important in determining personal and economic achievement.
200 the public school system . . . local property taxes: “Editorial: Why Other Countries
Teach Better,” New York Times, December 17, 2013.
201 The charter school movement: Diane Ravitch, “The Myth of Charter Schools” (review of
the film Waiting for Superman directed by Davis Guggenheim), New York Review of Books,
November 11, 2010; “Charting a Better Course,” Economist, July 7, 2012; U.S.
Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of
Education 2013, NCES 2013–037, Charter School Enrollment.
201 in Britain the recently championed “academies”: For general articles regarding changes in
the British school system, see “Transforming British Schools: A Classroom
Revolution,” Economist, April 24, 2010; “Bagehot: Lessons from a Great School,”
Economist, February 4, 2012; Sian Griffiths, “Me and My 350 Schools,” Sunday Times
(London), February 21, 2010.
202 Research into the achievements of the charter program is patchy: See Center for
Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Multiple Choice: Charter School
Performance in 16 States, June 2009; and CREDO, National Charter School Study, 2013,
2013, http://credo.stanford.edu.
202 the KIPP movement: David Levin and Michael Feinberg established the nonprofit
Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) in 1994, in New York and Houston respectively.
They were inspired by a two-year stint in the Federal program Teach for America. KIPP
has now grown into America’s largest nationwide charter program with (in 2013) 141
 schools in twenty states and the District of Columbia, serving 50,000 students, 86
percent of whom come from low-income families. KIPP’s website is http://kipp.org.
202 the classic work on delayed gratification: W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, and M. L. Rodriguez,
“Delay of Gratification in Children,” Science 244 (1989): 933–38. For a lucid and
accessible update of Mischel’s research over the years and its employment in the school
setting, see Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t!: The Secret of Self Control,” New Yorker, May 18,
2009.
204 brain regions mature differentially: B. J. Casey, R. M. Jones, and T. A. Hare, “The
Adolescent Brain,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 111–26; A.
Galvan et al., “Earlier Development of the Accumbens Relative to Orbitofrontal
Cortex Might Underlie Risk-Taking Behavior in Adolescents,” Journal of Neuroscience
26 (2006): 6885–92; B. J. Casey et al., “Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Delay of
Gratification 40 Years Later,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2001):
14998–5003; and W. Mischel et al., “Willpower over the Life Span: Decomposing Self-
Regulation,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6 (2001): 252–56.
206 experienced teachers have a significant “value-added”: Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman,
and Jonah E. Rockoff, “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and
Student Outcomes in Adulthood,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working
Paper no. 17699, December 2011; and Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, “Measuring the
Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates,” NBER
Working Paper no. 19423, September 2013. For a summary, see “Free Exchange:
Knowledge for Earnings’ Sake,” Economist, October 12, 2013.
206 character: A useful, although simplistic, aid to memory—and a differentiation prevalent
in the older psychology literature—is that character reflects acquired, predominantly
intuitive behaviors. This is in contrast to temperament, which is considered an inherited
emotional style already evident in infancy. The personality of an individual is then the
sum of these two behavioral elements. For further explanation, see Peter C. Whybrow,
Hagop S. Akiskal, and William T. McKinney, Jr., Mood Disorders: Toward a New
Psychobiology (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), p. 185.
206 intuitive ethics: Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir, “Morality,” in S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, and
G. Lindsey, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons,
2010), vol. 1.
207 structural and cultural supports provided to young households: Olga Khazan, “The
Countries Where Women Have the Best Lives, in Charts,” Atlantic, March 2013.
207 the commercialization of children’s lives: Juliet Schor, “America’s Most Wanted: Inside
the World of Young Consumers,” Boston College Magazine, Fall 2004; Juliet Schor, Born
to Buy (New York: Scribner, 2004); L. M. Powell, J. L. Harris, and T. Fox, “Food
Marketing Expenditures Aimed at Youth: Putting the Numbers in Context,” American
Journal of Preventive Medicine 45 (2013): 453–61; and Anup Shah, “Children as
Consumers,” Global Issues, 2010, http://bit.ly/1AdLyFN.
208 we have been overindulging our children: For a review of books focused on the dangers
of overindulgence in childhood, see Elizabeth Kolbert, “Spoiled Rotten: Why Do Kids
Rule the Roost?” New Yorker, July 12, 2012; and Judith Warner, “Kids Gone Wild,” New
York Times, November 27, 2005.
208 the educational calendar: “The Underworked American,” Economist, June 15, 2009.
208 material indulgence: Suniya Luthar and Shawn Latendresse, “Children of Affluence:
Challenges to Well-Being,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 14 (2005): 49–53.
209 social manners, patience, and self-control . . . rare American qualities: Richard Reeves,
“A Question of Character,” Prospect, August 2008.
Chapter 8: HABITAT

210 “The more living patterns there are”: Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), epigraphs to chaps. 1 and 7.
210 The small Italian town of Sabbioneta: Sabbioneta was designated a UNESCO World
Heritage Site in 2008 as an exceptional testimony to Renaissance urban planning;
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1287. Much has been written about the architecture of
Sabbioneta, but a good beginning is the carefully prepared official guide, Umberto
Maffezzoli, Sabbioneta: guida alla visita della città(Il Bulino: Edizioni d’arte, 1992). See
also Andrew Mead, “Cracking the Code of the Ideal City,” Architectural Review,
September 21, 2011. For an offbeat but in-depth study of the city and the mind of its
creator, Vespasiano Gonzaga, see James Madge, Sabbioneta, Cryptic City (London:
Bibliotheque McLean, 2011).
211 The Gonzaga family, known for their horse breeding: The Gonzaga family and the city of
Mantua played a significant role in the feuds and infighting that gripped Renaissance
Italy for over two centuries. For an engaging read on the excesses and the cultural
achievements of this era, see Kate Simon, Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988). The Gonzagas were essentially mercenaries or
condottieri—literally “contractors”—who provided military services for a fee. The
employment of private militia was the norm in Renaissance Italy. Venice in its long
fight with the Ottoman Empire was one of the first city-states to engage a mercenary
garrison, and several leaders of the Gonzagas provided military service to that city. The
practice existed throughout Europe and particularly in northern Italy as the Habsburgs
and other powerful groups sought to control the Italian peninsula. Vespasiano
Gonzaga, from a minor branch of the Gonzaga family, was a classical example of
someone who prospered as a mercenary. Educated in the Spanish royal court from the
age of eleven, he benefited from military and diplomatic service to Philip II and later
received contracts from the Habsburgs, which together with the land inherited and
acquired by marriage led to his wealth. See David Parrott, The Business of War: Military
Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
212 the techniques of ancient Roman urban design: Jan Pieper, Sabbioneta: The Measuring
Shape of an Ideal City (2012), http://bit.ly/XhoWGx. In this fascinating report Pieper,
from the faculty of architecture at the University of Aachen, analyzes the floor plan of
Sabbioneta employing Roman techniques, which traditionally lay out the street map by
working backward from the outer square or rectangle of walled city. The town plan is
further oriented astronomically, along the axis of the sun’s rising on the birthday of the
founder, Vespasiano Gonzaga, which was December 6.
213 the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio: Bruce Boucher, Andrea Palladio: The Architect in
His Time (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998).
216 the old New Hampshire farmhouse: Henry L. Williams and Ottalie K. Williams, Old
American Houses 1700–1850 (New York: Bonanza Books, 1967).
219 Christopher Alexander, a celebrated architect: Alexander is a maverick in the world of
architecture. Born in Vienna in 1936, he grew up in England, studied mathematics at
Trinity College Cambridge, and then migrated to the United States in 1958. After
completing a Ph.D. in architecture at Harvard, he remained on the faculty working on
cognition, then moved to Berkeley in 1963, where he taught for some thirty years.
 Fundamental to his work and writing is that people can and should design for
themselves. This idea stems from Alexander’s observation that most of the beautiful
places in the world are not constructed by architects but have evolved from the day-to-
day activity of the individuals living and working there. This truth applies not only to
the buildings themselves but also to the details of their internal structure.

Take, for example, the design of a welcoming window seat.

Close your eyes and concentrate on the images you remember.
Make them live. The entering light, the shape of the window
itself, the seat; use the power of imagination to call up scenes
from memory. This provides the “pattern language.” Keep it
simple. Most important, instructs Alexander, is that once it is
conceptualized in the mind, the window seat can be drawn, and
if it can be drawn, it can be built. This is the “timeless way of
building.”
Alexander is best known for the trilogy based upon pattern
language that was published by Oxford University Press in the
1970s: A Pattern Language (1977), The Timeless Way of Building
(1979), and The Oregon Experiment (1975), which describes how
Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental
Structure at Berkeley developed and implemented a master
plan for the University of Oregon.
220 Jane Jacobs, the American-born Canadian activist: Like Christopher Alexander, Jane
Jacobs (1916–2006) believed in the power of people to create their own habitat. See
Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” Fortune Magazine, April 1958, and Jacobs, The Life
and Death of Great American Cities (1961; reprint edition New York: Modern Library,
2011), in which she defends the organic growth of the city and offers a powerful critique
of the urban renewal concepts of the 1950s. She was particularly opposed to downtown
expressways that sliced through tightly knit neighborhoods and was influential in the
cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York. When problems of
suburban sprawl are considered in the context of urban planning, many of her
arguments remain valid today. For a succinct review of Jacobs’s influence, see Penny
Lewis, “Salvation by Brick,” in Dave Clements et al., eds., The Future of Community:
Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated (London: Pluto Press, 2008).
221 William Whyte, sociologist: Whyte (1917–99) believed in the sanctity and preservation of
public space and was indirectly responsible for the establishment of the Project for
Public Spaces, a “nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to
helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities.” The
website is http://www.pps.org/. See William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban
Spaces (1980; reprint edition Project for Public Spaces, 2001).
222 Los Angeles had the longest streetcar network: Robert C. Post, Street Railways and the
Growth of Los Angeles (San Marino, CA: Golden West Books, 1989).
222 Los Angeles . . . totally dependent on the automobile: Pavement Paradise: American Parking
Space (Culver City, CA: Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2007).
222 average commuting time on weekdays: Tom Tom, North American Congestion Index 2012.
Tom Tom, a European company founded in 1991, focuses on developing software
products for mobile devices including route planners and navigation devices. Its
website is http://corporate.tomtom.com.
223 Victor Gruen, the architect who designed Valencia: For an interesting profile of Victor
Gruen and his legacy, see Andy Logan and Brendan Gill, “Talk of the Town: New
City,” New Yorker, March 17, 1956; and Malcolm Gladwell, “Annals of Commerce: The
Terrazzo Jungle,” New Yorker, March 15, 2004.
223 Valencia has done well: See “America’s Suburbs: An Age of Transformation,” Economist,
May 31, 2008; on housing market trends there in 2014, see the town’s website,
Valencia.com, as well as Trulia.com (accessed May 2014).
224 times are changing [in suburban America]: Christopher B. Leinberger, “The Next Slum:
The Subprime Crisis Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg,” Atlantic, March 2008; Hudson
Sangree and Phillip Reese, “County Homeownership at Lowest Level Since ’70s,”
Sacramento Bee, May 12, 2014.
224 areas that necessitate a long commute: “Median home prices across the nation continue
to decline, but some experts are noting a link between falling house prices and
commuting distances. Suburbs where commuters drive an hour or more to work are
seeing some of the sharpest drops in prices.” Kathleen Schalch, “Home Prices Drop
Most in Areas with Long Commute,” National Public Radio, April 21, 2008.
225 the shopping mall and suburban living: “Birth, Death and Shopping: The Rise and Fall of
the Shopping Mall,” Economist, December 22, 2007; and Christopher B. Leinberger,
“Here Comes the Neighborhood,” Atlantic, June 2010. Comparison statistics on retail
space are from “Planet Money: Most Mall Space? That Would Be Us,” National Public
Radio, February 20, 2009; and “The United States Has Too Many Stores,” Motley Fool,
June 15, 2009, http://bit.ly/Y4LwCc.
225 for the automobile . . . the bloom is also off the rose: “Editorial: The Road Less Traveled:
Car Use Is Peaking In the Rich World,” and “Briefing: The Future of Driving. Seeing
the Back of the Car,” both in Economist, September 22, 2012. For a discussion of the
shift in the purchasing preferences of twenty-to-thirty-year-old Americans, see Derek
Thompson and Jordan Weissmann, “The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials
Aren’t Buying Cars or Houses and What That Means for the Economy,” Atlantic,
September 2012.
226 the technological challenges to achieving a sustainable . . . future: These data are taken
from a report from the Siemens Company, “Smarter Neighborhoods, Smarter City,”
2012, http://bit.ly/1usgZM0.
226 Portland, Oregon, is the poster child: “The New Model: Portland and ‘Elite Cities,’ ”
Economist, April 15, 2010.
230 La Fromagerie: As Patricia Michelson tells the story, she first became enamored of cheese
while on a skiing holiday in France. Subsequently, selling Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage
and other cheeses out of her garden shed in Highbury, London, she found that the
neighbors were also enthusiastic. The next step was to open a cheese shop, in 1992.
Teaching herself the fine art of cheese husbandry, Patricia began selling carefully
sourced artisan cheeses from around Europe and from England and Wales. But more
than that she became interested in the subtle skill of maturing and caring for cheeses,
including rare and unusual varieties. Ten years later there was a second store in
 Marylebone. Her prize-winning books, The Cheese Room (2001) and Cheese (2010), have
secured her reputation as a leading aficionado. See her website
http://www.lafromagerie.co.uk.
230 Howard de Walden Estates: Three hundred years ago London was essentially what is now
Westminster, and it was crowded. After the plague of 1666 and the Great Fire a year
later, there was pressure for expansion. Aristocratic property owners began developing
their farmland estates around the capital through a leasehold mechanism whereby they
leased their land to builders and speculators for ninety-nine years. The leaseholder
collected the rents on the properties that they built, but the family estate retained the
title to the land and had oversight regarding the style and function of the buildings
constructed on it. That system remains in place and, politics aside, has provided
unusual stability, character, and consistency to the development of the several districts
that in aggregate are now considered “central” London.
231 a sustainability that is timeless: Tony McGuirk, “My Kind of Town: Marylebone,
London,” Architecture Today, July 2, 2008.
233 obesity epidemic [in UK]: “NHS Choices: Latest Obesity Stats for England Are
Alarming” (2013), Child and Maternal Health Intelligence Network, Public Health
England, http://bit.ly/1AdTGpG.
233 an urban environment that encourages physical activity: Thomas Eitler, Edward
McMahon, and Theodore Thoerig, Ten Principles for Building Healthy Places
(Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2013). For the Piano Staircase, see
http://www.thefuntheory.com/piano-staircase.
233 revitalizing our relationship with the food we eat and where it comes from: See Karen
Franck, ed., Food and the City (Fletcher, NC: Academy Press, 2005).
234 the Natural Kitchen is the partnership: The Natural Kitchen is located at 77-78
Marylebone High Street, London, W1U 5JX.

Chapter 9: FOOD
235 “Husbandry is, with great justice, placed”: The Complete Farmer, or a General Dictionary of
Husbandry in All Its Branches, was published in London in 1777 by “a society of
gentlemen” devoted to the “encouragement of arts, manufacturers and commerce.”
The quotation is taken from the preface, entitled the “advertisement” of the book.
This extraordinary compendium is a dictionary of agricultural practice in the late
eighteenth century “delivered in the plainest and most intelligent manner, and
enriched with all the discoveries hitherto made in any part of Europe.” It stands as an
unusual reminder of what was once common practice, but is now largely beyond public
awareness, in “the art of tilling, manuring, and cultivating the earth, in order to render
it fertile” within the natural cycle of the seasons.
235 “Agriculture is surely the most important”: Colin Tudge is a British science writer and
broadcaster. This quotation is from Tudge’s review of Paul McMahon’s Feeding Frenzy:
The New Politics of Food (London: Profile Books, 2013). See also Colin Tudge, So Shall We
Reap: What’s Gone Wrong with the World’s Food—And How to Fix It (London: Penguin
Books, 2004).
236 it is in the cooking of food that we are truly distinct: Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire:
How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2010); and “What’s Cooking?”
Economist, February 21, 2009. Cooking is a uniquely human attribute. No society is
 without it. Indeed, it can be argued that the human brain, consuming as it does 25
percent of the body’s energy, would be difficult to keep supplied without cooking to
provide nutrients in easily digestible form.
236 “Food is culture”: Massimo Montanari, Food Is Culture, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
237 Food production . . . has become industrialized: Barbara Farfan, “World’s Largest
Supermarkets and Groceries, 2013,” About.com, http://abt.cm/1nPmjkl. In 2013 global
food retail sales were more than $4 trillion annually, according to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture. See also Stephen Leeb, “Wal-Mart Fattens Up on Poor America with
25% of U.S. Grocery Sales,” Forbes, May 20, 2013, http://onforb.es/1yw3U21.
237 divorced from the natural ecology: Paul Levy, “Good Enough for the Welsh,” Times
Literary Supplement, November 9, 2007 (a review of Joan Thirsk’s Food in Early Modern
England, Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760).
238 “ushered a new creature onto the world stage”: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An
Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2008); Jason Epstein, “A New Way to
Think About Eating,” New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008; and Michael Pollan,
“Farmer in Chief: What the Next President Can and Should Do to Remake the Way
We Grow and Eat Our Food,” New York Times Magazine, October 12, 2008.
238 Americans have taken a renewed interest in what they are eating: C. M. Hasler, “The
Changing Face of Functional Foods,” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 19,
supp. 5 (2000): 499–506.
239 cooking of food has become . . . popular sport: “Does a trend signify a movement, even a
revolution?” asks Jane Handel, the editor of Edible Ojai, one of a network of magazines
“to celebrate local foods, season by season.” See “Editor’s Note,” Edible Ojai, Spring
2008, http://bit.ly/1l38PHf. Edward Behr’s maverick quarterly publication The Art of
Eating has achieved a similarly vaunted reputation. See Joshua Chaffin, “No Artificial
Sweeteners,” Financial Times Weekend, January 11, 2009. Over the same decade a flood of
popular books extolled good food; see Joline Godfrey, “Armchair Feast: A Celebration
of Books, Articles and Stories About Food and Agriculture,” Edible Ojai, Spring 2008.
Among the celebrity chefs, Britain’s Jamie Oliver (of the Naked Chef book and
television series) has been one of the more provocative, striving to improve unhealthy
diets in the U.K. and the United States.
239 the Slow Food movement: In 2008 the Slow Food Movement had 85,000 interconnected
member groups in 132 countries. See its website at http://www.slowfood.com.
240 the color and taste of fruits: H. Martin Schaefer, K. McGraw, and C. Catoni, “Birds Use
Fruit Color as Honest Signal of Dietary Antioxidant Rewards,” Functional Ecology 22
(2008): 303–10.
241 diet . . . combating the recurrence of illness: P. Greenwald, C. K. Clifford, and J. A.
Milner, “Diet and Cancer Prevention,” European Journal of Cancer 37 (2001): 948–65.
There are large international differences in the incidence of many cancers, and
epidemiological studies suggest that diet plays its part. The exact molecular
mechanisms through which protection or vulnerability is induced, however, have yet
to be specifically defined in human studies. See Marjorie L. McCoullough and Edward
L Giovannucci, “Diet and Cancer Prevention,” Oncogene 23 (2004): 6349–64; and D. W.
Dawson et al., “High-Calorie, High-Fat Diet Promotes Pancreatic Neoplasia in the
Conditional KrasG12D Mouse Model,” Cancer Prevention Research 6 (2013): 1064–73.
241 agriculture . . . ushered in profound changes in what we eat: Tom Standage, An Edible
History of Humanity (New York: Walker & Co., 2009).
242 the story of lactose: Nabil Sabri Enattah et al., “Identification of a Variant Associated
with Adult-Type Hypolactasia,” Nature Genetics 30 (2002): 233–37. The findings support
the theory that originally all humans, beyond infancy, were lactose intolerant and that
the ability to drink milk as an adult is related to a genetic variation that permits
continued production of the lactase enzyme. Without this specific enzyme, the lactose
in milk passes through the stomach undigested and is acted upon by bacteria in the
large intestine, producing the bloating and gaseous sensation well known to those who
are lactose intolerant.
243 our postindustrial diet: Loren Cordain et al., “Origins and Evolution of the Western
Diet: Health Implications for the 21st Century,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 81
(2005): 341–54. Growing evidence suggests that high-fructose corn syrup, which is
prominent in soft drinks and in processed foods, may play a significant role in the
development of obesity and type 2 diabetes, in that the body metabolizes it differently
from glucose and may lead to fat accumulation in the liver and ultimately greater blood
lipid levels. See Costas Lyssiotis and Lewis Cantley, “F Stands for Fructose and Fat,”
Nature 502 (2013): 181–82.
243 links between the growth patterns of a city and how it eats: Carolyn Steel, Hungry City:
How Food Shapes Our Lives (London: Random House UK, 2009). In this fascinating
history Steel covers the birth of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent and the
development of domesticated grains before turning to the contrast between the city-
based civilization of Rome and the invading Gothic hordes. The lesson to be learned
from this clash of cultures is that historically there are different ways of securing a food
supply. In Athens many owned farms beyond the gates of the city, and similarly in
Rome the cultivated land surrounding the densely populated areas were considered
equally important to the city itself. But away from the Mediterranean, Europe was still
covered in dense forest. The Germanic tribes lived by hunting and fishing and
pasturing horses, cows, and pigs in the forest. The greater part of their diet consisted of
milk, cheese, and flesh—a life that seemed uncivilized to the organized Roman mind.

But in its time Rome became an aberration, a city of

perhaps a million people heavily dependent on grain supplies
from conquered territories. After Rome’s fall, urban
civilization declined, and hunting cultures restored the concept
of forest as privileged territory. It was the beginning of
feudalism, where typically the lands around the villages and
towns were owned by a feudal lord and worked by peasants.
Urban civilization began to make a comeback during the
Renaissance. Self-sufficient communities with protective walls
and market gardens became the template for a new type of city.
Such fortified communities developed in Europe and still can
be seen in parts of Tuscany with city and country in harmony.
As Steel comments, “Look after your countryside, and it will
look after you.” For a concise overview of her work and
 thinking, see her TEDxDanubia 2011 talk at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLOHsc86Ikc.
244 “The great commerce of every civilized society”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
(1776; reprint edition New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1994), bk. 3, chap. 1.
246 pioneering contributions to agricultural science: For general discussion, see Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press,
2002), particularly chap. 8; V. Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the
Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Jan
Willem Erisman et al., “How a Century of Ammonia Synthesis Changed the World,”
Nature Geoscience 1 (2008): 636–39.
246 an American agronomist: Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) was born into a Norwegian
farming family in Iowa. As a young man during the Depression, he visited Minneapolis
where he was disturbed by the soup kitchens and the hunger he witnessed. First
devoting himself to a better understanding of plant disease, he began breeding new
seed varieties to achieve higher yields, first in Mexico and later across the world. He
died in 2009 at ninety-five. See his obituary, “Norman Borlaug, Feeder of the World,”
Economist, September 19, 2009.
247 Lady Eve Balfour here in Britain: Eve B. Balfour, The Living Soil (London: Faber &
Faber, 1943). Eve Balfour (1899–1990) was a key figure in creating the organic gardening
and farming movement and one of the founders of Britain’s Soil Association. In a
classic experiment, she divided the land of her estate at Haughley in Suffolk, England,
into two sections: one was farmed “organically” and the other “conventionally” with
chemical fertilizers. The Living Soil records the results and her insights regarding the
Haughley experiment. “The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and
indivisible,” she asserted. Throughout her life she practiced what she preached and
died at ninety-one.
247 the destructive use of DDT: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1962). Rachel Carson (1907–64) was an aquatic biologist who turned her attention to
environmental conservation and to the dangers of synthetic pesticides in the 1950s.
Many of these chemicals had been developed during World War II and had come into
common use in the postwar period as weed control agents, particularly DDT. Carson
spent several years documenting the environmental damage of these products and
their potential danger to human health and to the food chain. Although initially
bitterly opposed by the chemical industry, Carson’s work ultimately led in 1970 to the
establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
248 the Punjab, the cradle of India’s “green” revolution: “Punjab Heading for Water Crisis,”
Times of India, June 20, 2012.
248 the Great High Plains Aquifer: Michael Wines, “Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust,”
New York Times, May 19, 2013; and Dan Charles, “Kansas Farmers Commit to Taking
Less Water from the Ground,” National Public Radio, October 21, 2013. China has an
even worse challenge; see “Water: All Dried Up,” Economist, October 12, 2013. In
response farmers are beginning to consider ancient grains untouched by factory
agricultural practice, including sorghum: this staple crop in the dry lands of Africa
demands less water but is hardy and nutritious. L. Dykes and Lloyd W. Rooney,
“Sorghum and Millet Phenols and Antioxidants,” Journal of Cereal Science 44 (2006):
236–51.
249 a system both expensive and wasteful: There is massive confusion in the pricing of food,
with a market distorted in part by government subsidy and other inducements. For a
window into that confusion, see “The End of Cheap Food,” Economist, December 8,
 2007. See also Tristram Stuart, “No Appetite for Waste,” Financial Times Magazine,
July 4–5, 2009. An English writer, environmentalist, and campaigner, Stuart writes
about waste in Britain. In the United States it is estimated that 8 to 10 percent of
“perishable” goods are discarded, which means that each year retailers dump food
worth about $20 billion: another $28 billion worth is thrown out by American
households and restaurants. See “Shrink Rapped: America’s Food Retailers Should
Wage a Tougher War on Waste,” Economist, May 17, 2008.
250 What is needed is a third way: “The 9 Billion-People Question: A Special Report on
Feeding the World,” Economist, February 26, 2011; and Sarah Murray, “Business and
Food Sustainability: How to Feed People and Save the Planet,” Financial Times Special
Report, January 27, 2010.
251 a new documentary: Ground Operations: Battlefields to Farmfields (2012), a film produced
by Dulanie Ellis, www.facebook.com/GroundOperations.
252 Farmer Veteran Coalition: Casey Simons, “Helping Veterans, Helping Farmers: Michael
O’Gorman’s Farmer-Veteran Project,” Food First: Institute for Food and Development
Policy, July 23, 2012, www.foodfirst.org.
253 Production is increasingly concentrated in the industrialized sector: U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, “Ag 101: Demographics,”
www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html.
254 the aggressive promotion of novel farming practices: “Lexington: Farming as Rocket
Science,” Economist, September 7, 2013.
255 30 percent of shoppers will . . . purchase local products: Cynthia Pansing et al., Changing
Tastes: Urban Sustainability Directors Network (Arlington, VA: Wallace Center at
Winrock International, 2013); Jerry Hirsch, “Natural Selection Among Grocers,” Los
Angeles Times, November 3, 2007; Jerry Hirsch, “Grocery Stores Down Size to Better
Fit Local Needs,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2008; and Corby Kummer, “The Great
Grocery Smackdown,” Atlantic, March 1, 2010.
256 Desert Rain Café: Ted Robbins, “Arizona Café Makes Healthy Fare for Native
Americans,” National Public Radio, June 19, 2009. For the café’s website, see
www.desertraincafe.com.
257 the challenge in remaking a viable fresh-food system is formidable: Don Shaffer,
“Remaking the Food System,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, September 30, 2013,
http://bit.ly/1sCCSrE.
258 the Food Commons: Larry Yee, “The Food Commons 2.0: Imagine, Design, Build . . . ,”
October 2011, http://bit.ly/1p6ngcI.
258 the Philadelphia-based Common Market: For details of Common Market programs, see
Commonmarketphila.org. See also Dianna Marder, “Philadelphia’s Common Market
Wins $1.1 Million Grant,” Inquirer, Philly.com, June 30, 2011; and “Common Market
Boosts Urban Access to Fresh Food, Helps Local Farms Thrive,” RSF Social Finance,
September 6, 2012, http://bit.ly/1oMOuFS.
259 “What we eat and drink”: Peter Forbes, The Great Remembering: Further Thoughts on
Land, Soul, and Society (San Francisco: Trust for Public Land, 2001). Peter Forbes,
photographer, writer, and conservationist was for a decade the leader of the
conservation efforts undertaken in New England for the Trust for Public Lands. In
2001, with Helen Whybrow, he cofounded the Center for Whole Communities, a land-
based leadership development and learning center based at Knoll Farm in Fayston,
Vermont; see its website, www.knollfarm.org.
263 World War II . . . “victory” garden: Mary MacVean, “Echoes of Victory,” Los Angeles
Times, January 10, 2009. In Los Angeles in 2013, there were 1,261 registered urban
agriculture sites—school gardens, community gardens, and commercial sites. Urban
farmers travel, on average, 13.9 miles to deliver their produce. Data from UCLA’s
Luskin School of Public Affairs, August 15, 2013, Cultivatelosangeles.org.
Chapter 10: IMAGINATION

264 “My shaping spirit of imagination”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”
(1802). Coleridge, depressed about his marriage, addicted to opiates, and in love with
Sara Hutchinson (the sister of Wordsworth’s future wife), fears that his poetic powers
are waning: “afflictions bow me down to earth . . . rob me of my mirth . . . [and] what
nature gave me at my birth, my shaping spirit of Imagination.”
264 “I am enough of an artist”: Quoted in George Sylvester Viereck, “What Life Means to
Einstein: An Interview,” Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929.
264 The Museum of Jurassic Technology: Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder
(New York: Random House, 1995). The MJT gained a certain notoriety that was not
entirely welcomed by its founder, David Wilson. See Jeanne Scheper, “Feasting on
Technologies of Recycling in the Jurassic,” Other Voices 3 (May 2007),
http://bit.ly/1BeotUK; and Gemma Cubero, Mr. Wilson’s Ways of Knowing, October 2011,
http://bit.ly/1pNZyBm. For a virtual visit, see Inhaling the Spore: A Journey Through the
Museum of Jurassic Technology, a film directed by Leonard Feinstein, 2006. A jubilee
catalogue, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, was published in 2002 by McNaughton
and Gunn.
267 Comparing the early intellectual development of . . . the great apes, with that of the
human infant: Data taken from Giada Cordoni and Elizabeth Palagi, “Ontogenetic
Trajectories of Chimpanzee Social Play: Similarities with Humans,” PLoS ONE,
November 16, 2011; Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, “Altruistic Helping in
Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees,” Science 311 (2006): 1301–3; Victoria Wobbler
et al., “Differences in the Early Cognitive Development of Children and Great Apes,”
Developmental Psychobiology 56 (2014): 547–73.
269 children weave together: Paul L. Harris, The Work of the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000); and Harris, Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn
from Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Harris is the Victor S.
Thomas Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
271 music can evoke definitive . . . responses: Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in
Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
271 “making heaven descend upon earth”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871;
reprint edition London: John Murray 1890), pt. 3, chap. 19, p. 569.
271 “music expresses itself through sound”: Daniel Barenboim, Everything Is Connected:
The Power of Music (London: Orion Books, 2007).
272 employing pleasant and unpleasant music to evoke emotion: Stefan Koelsch et al.,
“Investigating Emotion with Music: An fMRI Study,” Human Brain Mapping 27
(2006): 239–50. For a discussion of the beat in music and activation of the basal ganglia,
see Jessica Grahn, “The Neurosciences and Music III: Disorders and Plasticity,” Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences 1169 (2009): 35–45.
273 When the imagination is at work, . . . the whole brain: Vincent Costa et al., “Emotional
Imagery: Assessing Pleasure and Arousal in the Brain’s Reward Circuitry,” Human
Brain Mapping 31 (2010): 1446–57.
273 “when, from the sight of a man”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 2.
274 the brain’s “mental workspace”: Alexander Schlegel et al., “Network Structure and
Dynamics of the Mental Workspace,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110
(2013): 16277–282.
275 both David Hume and Adam Smith recognized the essential nature of imagination:
Robin Downie, “Science and the Imagination in the Age of Reason,” Journal of Medical
Ethics: Medical Humanities 27 (2001): 58–63.
276 “It is not simply that there is more connectivity”: Peter Tse, “Symbolic Thought and the
Evolution of Human Morality,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology,
vol. 1, The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007).
276 “the burgeoning of unequivocal art”: Richard Klein, “Out of Africa and the Evolution of
Human Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 (2008): 267–81.
276 the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain: Jean Clottes, Cave Art (London: Phaidon
Press, 2008). Clottes is the historian who assembled the team that explored the
Chauvet caves (named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, who discovered them in 1994) in the
Ardèche region of south-central France. For background to that find and for the debate
surrounding the significance of European Paleolithic cave painting see, Judith
Thurman, “First Impressions: What Does the World’s Oldest Art Say About Us?” New
Yorker, June 23, 2008.
276 close proximity with the Neanderthals: “Cross breeding may have given modern humans
genes useful for coping with climates colder than Africa’s, but the hybrid offspring
probably suffered from infertility.” Ewen Callaway, “Modern Human Genomes Reveal
Our Inner Neanderthal,” Nature News, January 29, 2014.
278 communication with the gods of the underworld: Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters:
Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists (New York: Anchor, 2007).
278 “Religious-like phenomena”: Maurice Bloch, “Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is
Central,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 363 (2008): 2055–61.
280 “technopoly”: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York:
Vintage Books, 1993).
280 sat down with IBM’s Deep Blue: Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the
Computer,” New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010; and Garry Kasparov, How Life
Imitates Chess (UK: Arrow Books, 2008).
283 the tsunami of information: Barrett Sheridan, “Is Cue the Cure for Information
Overload?” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 19, 2012.
284 the statistics for other industrialized nations are comparable: “Mobile Technology Fact
Sheet,” Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project,
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet.
284 the work-management theories of Frederick Taylor: Sonia Taneja, Mildred Pryor, and
Leslie Toombs, “Frederick W. Taylor’s Scientific Management Principles: Relevance
and Validity,” Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship 16, no. 3 (2011).
284 enhancing human muscle power . . . different from helping humans think: James Fallows,
“The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel,” Atlantic, November 2013.
285 privacy . . . shopping online: Alice Marwick, “How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined,”
New York Review of Books, January 9, 2014.
285 four intensely competitive and wealthy companies: “Another Game of Thrones,”
Economist, December 1, 2012.
286 “chipping away [at the] capacity for concentration”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the
Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
287 a powerful temptation during lectures: Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas Cepeda,
“Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers,”
Computers and Education 62 (2013): 24–31.
287 “Information only appears to be free on the Internet”: Michael Saler, “The Hidden Cost:
How the Internet Is Using Us All” (a review of Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier),
Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 2013.
287 the “digital exhaust” of Web searches: Tim Harford, “Big Data: Are We Making a Big
Mistake?” Financial Times Magazine, March 29–30, 2014.
289 such skilled practice provides an anchor: Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
289 Being skillful in body and mind builds . . . a sense of mastery: Daniel Charny, Power of
Making: The Importance of Being Skilled (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011);
and the exhibition catalog Design and the Elastic Mind (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 2008).

Reprise: WISDOM
293 “Mankind achieved civilization by developing”: F. W. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors
of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
293 “Gross National Product does not allow”: Robert F. Kennedy, speech delivered at the
University of Kansas, March 18, 1968, http://bit.ly/1l6CSMy.
294 the Mont Pèlerin Society: The MPS was established by a group of scholars, mainly
economists, who sought to strengthen the values of Western democracy and classical
liberalism in the post–World War II period. Convened in April 1947 by Friedrich von
Hayek, the society is named after the place of its first meeting, Mont Pèlerin, near
Montreux, Switzerland.
294 the HMS Beagle: Originally constructed as a frigate and launched in 1820, the Beagle was
soon refitted as a survey vessel, making three voyages between 1826 and 1843. Charles
Darwin, at twenty-two, was chosen as the “gentleman naturalist” to accompany Capt.
Robert Fitzroy on the second expedition, which made extensive surveys of South
America before moving on to the Galápagos. The voyage (eventually a
circumnavigation of the globe) took five years. See Alan Moorehead, Darwin and the
Beagle (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), for a friendly, well-illustrated read about the
epic expedition. For Darwin’s original descriptions and insights, see Charles Darwin,
The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches, ed. Janet Browne and
Michael Neve (New York: Penguin Classics, 1989). The quotations employed here are
from chapter 17, which describes Darwin’s visit to the Galápagos Islands. For a list of
Darwin’s complete publications, see http://darwin-online.org.uk/.
295 the Galápagos finches: From their seed-eating ancestors in South America, some finch
species, while preserving their seed-eating preferences, are distinct for having evolved
into cactus dwellers, with a longer, thinner beak, or in becoming seed-eating tree
 dwellers. More than half of the defined species of the Galápagos are now tree-dwelling
insect eaters. See Jonathan Weiner, Beak of the Finch, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
297 “as the first who succeeded in elaborating”: Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The
Errors of Socialism. Quotations and references to Darwin’s diaries are taken from The
Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. W. W. Bartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), vol. 1, chap. 1. I am also indebted here to Larry Arnhart for his essay, “The
Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism,” presented at the Mont Pèlerin Society meeting,
June 22–29, 2013. For an introduction to Hayek, his philosophy, and his writings, see
John Cassidy, “The Price Prophet,” New Yorker, February 7, 2000.
297 “designs of extraordinary complexity”: John Kay, “Darwin’s Humbling Lesson for
Business,” Financial Times, July 3, 2013.
298 it is “tradition” . . . that holds the social order together: Hayek, Fatal Conceit, vol. 1, p. 21;
and Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (New York: Norton,
2012). Pagel, an evolutionary biologist, employs the concept of social learning rather
than tradition in his argument, but he essentially comes to the same conclusion—that
social learning acts on societies and sculpts them.
299 the idea of progress: This short history draws upon J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An
Inquiry into Its Origins and Growth (1932; reprint edition New York: Cosimo, 2008). John
Bagnell Bury (1861–1927) was an Irish historian and classical scholar who for the last
twenty-five years of his life was the Regius Professor of Modern History at the
University of Cambridge.
300 gross domestic product (GDP): The original variant of the GDP, the gross national
product (GNP), first formulated in the 1930s, was the brainchild of Simon Kuznets, the
Russian-born American economist who received the Nobel Prize for his work in 1971.
Both measures (they differ only slightly), in addition to tracking the internal dynamics
of a nation’s goods and services, enable the important comparison of aggregate
economic activity across nations and across time. But as Kuznets emphasized, the
measures were not intended to provide a sensitive index of well-being, except as it may
be inferred from material consumption. See Robert Fogel et al., Political Arithmetic:
Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013).
300 well-being will improve with money: This is a complex and debated area of investigation,
although most national-level comparisons find that wealthier countries tend to be
happier. See E. Deiner and E. M. Suh, “National Differences in Subjective Well-
Being,” in E. Kahnemann, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz, eds., Well-being: The Foundations
of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), pp. 434–50. But
evident from World Bank data is that after GNP per capita reaches around $9,500, the
correlation with well-being weakens, and further increases in GNP have a diminishing
impact on happiness scores. See D. G. Meyers, “The Funds, Friends and Faith of Happy
People,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 55–67; and Zakri Abdul Hamid and Anantha
Duraiappah, “The Growing Disconnect Between GDP and Well-Being,” World
Economic Forum blog, May 16, 2014, http://forumblog.org/2014/05/growing-disconnect-
gdp-wellbeing/. For a balanced review and analysis of the continued value of GDP, see
Jan Delhey and Christian Kroll, “A Happiness Test for the New Measures of National
Well-Being: How Much better than GDP are They?” in H. Brockmann and J. Dehey,
eds., Human Happiness and the Pursuit of Maximization: Is More Always Better?
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp. 191–210.
300 in 2013 the GDP of the United States was $15,800 trillion: The data presented here are
from About.com: US Economy, prepared by Kimberly Amadeo. Gross national product
 (GNP) includes economic output by all persons and businesses considered American,
regardless of their location. Gross domestic product (GDP) includes all products made
and sold in the United States, regardless of the national ownership of the
manufacturer.
300 gross domestic product (GDP): GDP has four main components. The first is personal
consumption, which in 2013 accounted for 70 percent of what the United States
produces. This category is subdivided into durable goods—cars, refrigerators,
furniture, et cetera—and nondurable goods, such as food and energy, and services that
are consumed. The latter accounts for 48 percent of U.S. consumption, a significant
rise since World War II. The other three categories are business investment,
government spending, and the net exports of goods and services.
300 In America shopping is a tradition: Shopping also drives indebtedness. By the early 1990s
annual personal savings, which were 8 to 10 percent of income between 1946 and 1980,
had fallen below personal indebtedness to credit card companies. In 2007, just before
the global financial crash, household indebtedness in the United States reached 132
percent of disposable income. Statistics quoted will be found in the following sources:
“Dropping the Shopping,” Economist, July 25, 2009; Paul Starr, “A Different Road to a
Fair Society,” New York Review of Books, May 22, 2014; David Leonhardt, “All for the 1
Percent, 1 Percent for All,” New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2014; and Annie Lowrey,
“Recovery Has Created Far More Low-Wage Jobs than Better-Paid Ones,” New York
Times, April 28, 2014.
300 “What happened to our country’s stride and spirit”: Frank Bruni, “America the
Shrunken,” New York Times, May 4, 2014.
301 no distinction between the quantity and quality of growth: Roger Boyd, “Economic
Growth: A Social Pathology,” Resilience, November 2013,
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-07/economic-growth-a-social-pathology.
302 the United States now consumes approximately 25 percent of the world’s resources:
Randy Scheer and Doug Moss, “Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of US
Consumption on the Environment,” Scientific American, September 14, 2012.
303 we are again losing species at a rapid rate: Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014); S. L. Pimm et al., “The Biodiversity of
Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution and Protection,” Science Magazine,
May 30, 2014.
303 “Progress might have been all right once”: Douglas Parker and Dana Gioia, Ogden Nash:
The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005).
303 If human progress is to be made rational and sustainable: James G. Speth, The Bridge at the
Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
304 Nor will that balance be fostered: Phillip K. Howard, The Rule of Nobody: Saving America
from Dead Laws and Broken Government (New York: Norton, 2014).
304 the creativity of resilient, knowledgeable, and innovative individuals: Brian Walker,
David Salt, and Walter Reid, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a
Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006).
305 public sentiment for change is apparent: See Dan Ariely, “Americans Want to Live in a
Much More Equal Country [They Just Don’t Realize It],” Atlantic, August 2012. U.S.
society is far more uneven in terms of wealth than Americans believe it to be.
Furthermore Americans want much more equality than both what they have and what
 they think they have. These are Ariely’s conclusions from a survey of 5,522 people
interviewed about wealth in America. Those surveyed guessed that around 9 percent
of wealth was owned by the bottom two quintiles (40 percent) of the U.S. population
and 59 percent by the top quintile (20 percent), while in reality the bottom 40 percent
had only 0.3 percent of wealth, and the top quintile 84 percent. John Rawls, A Theory of
Justice (1971; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), defines a just society as one that an
individual is willing to enter, with knowledge of the conditions, at any social level;
using that definition, then the preference of the respondents was for a society more
equal than any other in the world, with 32 percent of the wealth belonging to the
wealthiest quintile, and 11 percent to the poorest. Political persuasion made little
difference in the preferred distribution.
305 Industry . . . has begun to pay attention: “The Cost of Doing Nothing: Climate Change
and the Economy,” Economist, June 28, 2014; Coral Davenport, “Industry Awakens to
the Threat of Climate Change,” International New York Times, January 23, 2014; Paul
Brown, “Coca-Cola in India Accused of Leaving Farms Parched and Land Poisoned,”
Guardian, July 23, 2003; and “Indian Officials Order Coca-Cola Plant to Close for
Using Too Much Water,” Guardian, June18, 2014.
306 the World Economic Forum: The forum is a Swiss nonprofit foundation “committed to
improving the state of the world,” founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab. Funded by one
thousand member companies, it is based in Geneva and has an annual budget of
around $5 billion. See its website, http://www.weforum.org.
306 a sustainable, “circular” economy . . . Walter Stahel: The circular economy seeks to
decouple wealth from resource consumption through the practical application of
systems theory and dynamic feedback. For a concise introduction, see Michael
Braungart and Bill McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
(New York: North Point Press, 2002).
306 Dame Ellen MacArthur: “Navigating the Circular Economy: A Conversation with Dame
Ellen MacArthur,” McKinsey and Company, February 2014, http://bit.ly/1bNilUJ.
307 pollution . . . has taken its toll on marine life: Daniel Pauly, 5 Easy Pieces: The Impact of
Fisheries on Marine Ecosystems (The State of the World’s Oceans) (Washington, DC: Island
Press, 2010); Jonathan Leake, “Fish Stocks Eaten to Extinction by 2050,” Sunday Times
(London), July 11, 2010; and Greg Stone, “The Five Biggest Threats to Our Oceans,”
World Economic Forum, June 5, 2014, http://forumblog.org/2014/06/challenges-worlds-
oceans/.
308 [marine] reserve . . . in the Galápagos islands: Data from Galapagos Conservancy,
http://www.galapagos.org/conservation/marine-conservation.
309 incentive-based systems: R. Quenton Grafton et al., “Incentive-based Approaches to
Sustainable Fisheries,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 63 (2006): 699–
710.
309 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Daniel Kaiser
Saunders, “Time Preferences and the Management of Coral Reef Fisheries,” Ecological
Economics (April 2014): 130–39; and Svati Kirsten Narula, “How the Famous
Marshmallow Study Explains Environmental Conservation,” Atlantic, March 2014.
310 destructive consequences of selfishness: Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”
Science 162 (1968): 1243–48.
310 Elinor Ostrom . . . common resource management: The most comprehensive guide to
Ostrom’s work is Amy Poteele, Marco Janssen, and Elinor Ostrom, Working Together:
 Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010). She died in 2012 at the age of eighty-eight.
311 collectively we can acquire that wisdom: Cross-cultural studies have proposed definitions
of wisdom that share common elements. These include: rational decision making
based on general knowledge of life; prosocial behaviors involving empathy,
compassion, and altruism; emotional stability; insight or self-reflection; decisiveness in
the face of uncertainty; and tolerance of divergent value systems. See Dilipe Jeste and
James Harris, “Wisdom—A Neuroscience Perspective,” Journal of the American Medical
Association 304 (2010): 1602.
 Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s
search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

Page numbers beginning with 315 refer to endnotes.

abstract thinking, 99, 100, 113, 270, 271, 275–76

see also imagination abundance, 12, 21–23, 24, 26–27, 36, 42, 131
academies, 201
acquired aversion, 61–62
acute emergencies, 30–31
Adams, Sam, 227
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Phillipson), 81
Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Otteson), 82
addiction, 60, 113–14
addictive habits, 7–8, 22–23, 27, 35, 60, 90, 113–14, 143, 205, 287, 322
adolescents:
dietary habits of, 38–39
myelination in, 100, 102
risk-taking by, 165–66, 205, 336
self-control in, 204–5
advertising, 207, 284
Aegean Sea, 120, 121, 125, 126
affluence, 19–44, 155–56
and jerry-rigged brain, 26
sedative power of, 22
self-control and, 22
surprised by, 21–22
Africa, 24–25, 28, 247
African-Americans, 28
Age of Insight, The (Kandel), 50
Age of Man, (Anthropocene), 3, 12, 303
Age of Reason, 10, 68, 74–75, 275
agri-business, 245–46
agriculture, 25, 86, 123, 242, 244–63, 328–29
 cities and, 44–45
community-supported farms, 262
federal subsidies for, 255
organic, 239, 251
pollution from, 307
refinement in, 245
subsistence, 25
Agriculture Department, U.S., 253
AIG (American Insurance Group), 118, 135, 139
Ainslie, George, 112
Alarie, Luc, 111–12, 116
alcohol, 22, 38, 208, 242
Alexander, Christopher, 210, 219–20, 344
altruism, 268
Alyattes, 329
Alzheimer’s disease, 17, 60
Amazon, 285
American Mania, xv American Revolution, 75
ammonia, 246
amphorae, 120, 124, 329
amygdala, 46, 56, 60, 107, 157, 273
analytical skills, 186
Anatolia, 11, 119–20, 121, 122, 126, 329
anger, 61, 78
Anthropocene (Age of Man), 3, 12, 303
antioxidants, 240
anxiety, 22, 31, 32, 174, 336
apes, learning by, 270
aplysia, 96–97
Apollo, 319
appeal, 228
Apple, 285
Aral Sea, 2
architecture, 210–24, 343
public spaces in, 220–24
in Sabbioneta, 210–18
see also urban planning Arcone, 218
Ardèche, 277–78
Areopagitica (Milton), 91, 326
art, 125, 151, 212, 267, 276
ascorbic acid, 241
Ashley, Lord, 324
Asia, 242, 247
Assyria, 126
ataraxia, 145–46, 207
Athabasca tar sands, 2
Athens, 349
Atlanta, Ga., 226
Atlantic, 179
attachment, 48, 98, 101, 142, 150–53, 180, 182, 200, 207, 298, 311
attention:
cross-modular, 276
education and, 202
 unimodular, 276
auroch cattle, 277
Australia, 29
autism, 17, 164
automobile, 220, 222–23, 225, 232
axons, 100, 204

babies, see infants Babylonia, 121

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 14–15, 175, 273, 290, 304, 316
Balfour, Eve, 247, 262, 349
Haughley farm experiment of, 349–50
Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), 166
bankers, banking industry, xv, 4, 5
commercial vs. investment, 138
loss of moral tuning in, 132
1980s changes in, 138–39
pay of, 138
trust in, 133
Bank of England, 138
Barcelona, Spain, 92
Barenboim, Daniel, 271
barley, 242
barter, 11, 65, 86, 117, 119, 128, 132, 133
Bartlett, John, 234
basal ganglia, 56, 58–60, 115–16, 152, 157, 273
Bass, George, 329
Baumeister, Roy, 68
Beagle, HMS, 294, 295, 354
beam engine, 76
beer, 236
behavioral archetypes, 63–64
benevolence, 80, 82–83, 146
Bentham, Jeremy, 339
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 128–29
Beyond Babylon, 117, 119, 128
Big Data, 288
Big Mac, 29
bike lanes, 233
Billingsgate, 244
Birmingham, England, 70–72, 84
bison, 277
Black Death, 69
Blenheim, battle of, 73
Bloch, Maurice, 173, 278–79, 280
blood, 246
blood-sugar level, 27
Bloomberg, Michael, 37
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 283, 284
blueberry, 240
blue-footed booby, 295
Blue Hill restaurant, 256–57
Board of Trade, 324
body-mass index (BMI), 23, 317
bonding chemistry, 150
bones, 246
Borlaug, Norman, 246, 247, 349
Bosch, Carl, 246
Boulton, Matthew, 70
Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste, 246
Bowen, George, 186–90, 192, 198
box store retail space, 225
boys, obesity in, 38
brain, 5, 143
blood-flow activity in, 101–2
complexity of, 45–46
cortical networks of, 97
dynamic understanding of, 93, 106
electrical activity of, 51
energy requirements of, 102
genomic instruction kit of, 48
growth of, 62–63, 168–71, 277
habit-driven, 6–8
as hybrid construction, 46–47, 47
“internal market” of, 11, 291
as jerry-rigged, 26
and knowledge of self, 17–18
learning capacity of, 97–98
maturation of, 202, 205
modern understanding of, xvi, 45–46
motor function controlled by, 172
nerve cell connections in, 94–95, 96–97
networks (cognits) in, 95, 97, 98, 103, 275
neural engineering of, 17–18
parallel functioning of, 93–94
plasticity of, 204
pliability of, 94
role in human culture of, xvi
self-regulation of, 11
“tuning” of, 15, 59–60, 175, 291
see also specific areas and functions brain, marketplace of, 93–116
pleasure in, 105–7, 108, 109–10
as reflective, 104
brands, 9
bread, 236
breakfast cereal, 240
breast, 98
Bretton Woods International Monetary Agreement, 136
Breuer, Josef, 321
bronze, 121, 123
Bronze Age, 117, 119–20, 123–25, 138
brittle economic system in, 130–31
collapse of, 125–26, 127–28, 134
energy sources depleted in, 127, 130
gifting in, 132, 155
timber necessary for economy of, 127, 130
trade in, 124–26, 127
Brothers, Leslie, 164
Brothers Grimm, 150, 333
Browning, Robert, 1, 315
Bruni, Frank, 300
building codes, green, 4
Burger King, 39
Burwood, Harriet, 234
business investment, 356

Cable Car Museum, 103

caffeine, 27
cakes, 242
California, 200
budget problems of, 194
Call, Joseph, 335
calorie conservation, 24–25, 28
calories, 26, 27
Cambridge University, 193
Campi, Bernardino, 213
Camus, Albert, 199
Canaanites, 121
Canada, 29, 179
box store retail space in, 225
canal system, 245
cancer, 241, 348
Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 176, 338–39
Cape Uluburun, 119–20, 122
capitalism, 72, 79, 118, 304
capital markets, 1
caramel cheesecake, 112, 114, 116
carbohydrates, 33
carbon emissions, 3
cardiovascular disease, 23
caring, 13, 64, 151, 153–56, 161, 196, 207, 220, 290
Carnegie, Dale, 337
Carr, Nicholas, 286
Carson, Rachel, 247, 262, 350
Casey, B. J., 204–5
cattle, 244
Caucasians, 28
cave painting, 276, 277–78
cedars of Lebanon, 127
celebrity, 67, 90, 338
cell phones, 283
cellular metabolism, 48
Center for International Mobility and Cooperation, 180
Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), 202
Center for Whole Communities, 158–59, 351
Centers for Disease Control, 23, 36–37, 40, 317
Central Park, 128
Central St. Martins College of Arts and Design, 230
cereals, 242, 247
Cervantes, Miguel de, 43–44
character, 142–43, 144
communities formed by, 221
education and, 206
temperament vs., 342
charcoal, 127
Charles I, King of England, 325
Charles II, King of England, 72, 324
charter schools, 201–2
Chase, Olivia, 257
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 176, 338–39
cheese, 236, 256
Cheese (Michelson), 346
Cheese Room, The (Michelson), 346
chess, 280–83
Chicago, University of, 135
childhood mortality, 2
child rearing, see parenting children:
empathy in, 63
imagination in, 267–70
obesity in, 38–39, 319
self-command in, 35, 63, 160, 166, 176, 200, 203, 204
socialization of, 65, 160–65, 173
see also education; infants chimpanzees, 171, 335
altruism in, 268
coalitions of, 279
FOXP2 gene of, 172
China, 2, 36, 179, 301
meat consumption in, 255
rice in, 247
choice, 49, 91–116
in market, 123
pleasure and, 105–7, 108, 109–10
Christakis, Nicholas, 41–42
Christie, Agatha, 92
Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 232
chronic illness, 23
chronic stress, 30–32
Churchill, Winston, 170, 171
circularity, 306
Cisco, 307
cities, agriculture and, 244–45
Civil War, English, 72, 76
Civil War, Spanish, 92
clay, 127
climate change, 3, 115, 306
Clinton, Bill, 170, 171, 331
Clottes, Jean, 353
Coca-Cola, 305
cocaine, 22
cod, 308
cod-fishing, 308
cognits (brain networks), 95, 97, 98, 103, 275
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 264, 351
Combe Mill, 69–70, 73, 87, 324
commerce, 333
commercial products, 9
commercial society, 328, 329
Common Market, 258–59
commons, 310–11
communication:
neural, 45, 46, 51, 94, 97, 101, 102, 108
social, 30, 38, 131, 153, 161–62, 170–72, 181, 185, 186–90, 197, 284
community, 86, 146, 311
character formation by, 221
community college, 199
community-supported farms, 262
commuting, 345
compassion, 206
competition, 67, 86, 155
Complete Farmer, or a General Dictionary of Husbandry in All Its Branches, The, 235, 245, 347
Computational Economics (Epstein), 115
computed tomography (CT), 51
Congress, U.S., 200
Congressional Budget Office, 32
Connecticut, 178
consciousness, 49, 77, 97, 104
see also reflective system constraint, 113
consumerism, 65, 90, 207–9, 304, 305
as addictive, 8
instant gratification of, 35
neural architecture retuned by, 141
self-knowledge vs., 67
consumption, 4
control, sense of, 30
cookery, 240
cookies (computer), 285–86
cookies (snack), 242
cooperation, 142–43, 151
cooperative breeding, 154, 334
copper, 121
Corbin, Susan, 193–99, 200, 205–6, 269
cormorants, 295, 308
corn syrup, 27
corpus striatum, 58
cortex, 46, 47, 162
as always active, 103
executive, 105, 107–8, 204
limb movement controlled by, 100
medial, 57
medial orbital-frontal, 157
orbital-frontal, 79, 105, 107, 109–10
posterior, 97, 107
primate, 94, 168
social bonding and, 168
ventrolateral, 141
ventrolateral orbital-frontal, 113
 ventromedial, 113, 141
volume of, 169
see also frontal cortex; occipital cortex; parietal cortex; prefrontal cortex; temporal cortex
cortisol, 33
Cosmides, Leda, 63
Covent Garden, 244
Covey, Steven, 197
crackers, 242
Craftsman, The (Sennett), 289
cravings, 114
creative intelligence, 101
creativity, 13, 125, 185, 267, 270, 273–74, 275, 277, 289, 304
and Internet, 287
credit, in U.S., 136–38
credit cards, 141, 184
Crete, 121
critical thought, 186
Croesus, 329
Cro-Magnon man, 277–78, 291
Cromwell, Oliver, 72, 324
crop rotation, 246
cross-modular attention, 276
Crutzen, Paul, 3
cultural balance, 143
cultural evolution, 242–43, 298
cultural narratives, 8–9
culture, 67
information flows in, 48
obesity and, 28–29
culture change, 6, 8–10
cuneiform, 124
Cyprus, 122, 126
cytokines, 31, 32–33

dairy, 242
Dangerfield, Anthony, 185
Dapretto, Mirella, 164
Darwin, Charles, 19, 70, 74, 266, 303, 317, 333–34, 354
on facial expressions, 153, 161
in Galápagos archipelago, 294, 295–97, 307
on music, 271
Darwin, Erasmus, 70, 71, 74, 324
Davos, Switzerland, 306
DDT, 247, 350
“Death in the Desert, A” (Browning), 1, 315
debt, xv, 4, 12, 137, 331, 356
credit card, 184
economic growth and, 5–6, 136
growth of, 141
of poor families, 140
student, 184
debt economy, 136, 146
deceit, 123
Declaration of Independence, 88–89, 90
Deep Blue, 280–83
“Dejection: An Ode” (Coleridge), 264, 351
delayed discounting, 112–13
delayed gratification, 113, 202–3
Delphi, 36, 319
democracy, 66
density, of cities, 227
depression, 17, 22, 174, 336
Deprong Mori (piercing devil), 266
deregulation, 36
derivatives, 139
Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 19, 271, 317
Desert Rain Café, 256
Dewey, John, ix, 190
diabetes, 27
inventions in fight against, 38
type 2, 22, 23, 25, 348
Dickens, Charles, 176–77, 232, 339
digital exhaust, 287–88
Dionysus, 330
disease, 74
diseases of civilization, 243
disgust, 78
division of labor, 117, 119
dollar, 136
Domesday Book, 69, 169, 324
Don Quixote de La Mancha (Cervantes), 43–44
dopamine, 27, 46, 59–60, 113, 152, 157, 322
dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, 166
dot-com bubble, 134–35, 288
Drews, Robert, 125
drugs, 208, 336
Dunbar, Robin, 62, 168–71, 277
Dunbar’s number, 169–71
Dust Bowl, 247
dynamic systems, 82–84, 129–31

“Eaarth,” 3
Earth Day, 332
ecology, 312
economic growth, 1, 67, 115
commitment to, 3, 4, 301, 302
as debt-fueled, 5–6, 136
driven by investments, 136
Enlightenment and, 1–2
economic stagnation, 28
Economist, 29, 140
education, 12, 13, 146, 175–209, 269–70
character and, 206
charter schools, 201–2
comprehensive model of, 190–91
in Finland, 179–81
 knowledge and communication taught by, 186–90
labor market and, 198–99
moral purpose of, 181
perception-action cycle in, 182–83
privatization of, 201
purpose of, 185
self-command and, 183, 203, 206
self created by, 186
self-examination and, 205
spending on, 178
in U.K., 190–93, 198, 201
U.S. performance in, 178–79, 183–84, 199–202, 301
Egypt, 121, 125, 126, 127
Einstein, Albert, 264
Eisenberger, Naomi, 157
elderly, care of, 13
electroencephalograph (EEG), 51
electronic gadgets, 288
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 325, 338
Ellis, Delanie, 251–55, 256
e-mail, 283, 284
emerging nations, 36
emotional memory, 26, 95–96
emotions, 10, 35, 50, 64, 67, 101, 157, 165, 205, 275, 273, 290
awareness of, 46, 56, 62, 107, 164, 273
in children, 174, 176
distress and, 157
habits and, 43, 115, 158
limbic system and, 46, 107, 165, 166, 204
pleasure, 77, 157, 205
primary, 61, 78
reason and, 272
reflexive thinking and, 58
regulation of, 42, 158, 159
secondary, 78
signaling of, 103, 153–54, 160–63
empathic awareness, 167
empathy, 13, 81–82, 86, 142, 158, 162, 186
see also sympathy endocrine system, 31
End of the Bronze Age, The (Drews), 125
energy consumption, 228
Engell, James, 185
England, 215
growth in commercial strength of, 72–73
“England’s Treasure of Forraign Trade” (Mun), 69
enlightened self, 7
Enlightenment, 1–2, 71–75, 78, 80, 87, 89, 298
happiness and, 13
idea of self in, 67
present disregard of, 3–4
progress and, 299
reaction against, 50
Enlightenment, Scottish, 10, 80
entertainment, 9
environment, environmentalism, 6, 11, 12, 13
genes and, 24–26, 28
see also climate change Environmental Protection Agency, U.S., 350
Epicurus, 145
epileptic seizures, 51
epinephrine, 31
Epstein, Joshua, 115
equality of opportunity, 9, 13, 299
equal temperament, 14
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 324
essays, 187–90
estate holdings, 230
ethanol, 255
eudaimonia, 145
Eurasia, 277
Europe, 25
Slow Food Movement in, 239
evolution, 62–63, 66, 74, 171, 303
discovery of, 294–97
as without plan, 299
Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty (meeting), 294
exchange:
of information, 82, 87, 269
market, 9, 48, 65, 82, 83, 90, 117–21, 123, 128, 132–33, 142, 215, 279, 328–29
social, 50, 82, 89, 120, 142, 328
see also sharing executive cortex, 105, 107–8, 204
exercise, 42
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, The (Darwin), 153, 333–34
extended kinship, 154–55
extreme weather, 306

Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 76, 77–78

Facebook, 284, 285
face recognition, 99
facial expressions, 153, 160–63
facts, 176–78
fairness, 64, 146, 156, 158, 335
family, 35, 40, 146, 174–75, 336
collapse of, 167
famine, 24
Farmer and the Cook, The, 257
farmers, 253–54
farmers’ market, 239
Farmer Veteran Coalition, 252
fast-food chains, 37, 207
fat, 25, 27, 240, 287
saturated, 23
Fatal Conceit, The (Hayek), 133, 293
Fault Lines (Rajan), 140
fear, 26, 61, 78, 131, 160, 176
Federal Reserve, 118
feeding, 99
fertilizers, 247
feudalism, 349
Fields Museum, 265
finance, 330
Financial Times, 297
finches, 295–96, 298, 354
Finland, 179–81
Finnish Lessons (Sahlberg), 180–81
fish, 25, 124, 246
Fisher, Simon, 171–72
fisheries, 307–11
fishing, 25
Fitzroy, Robert, 354
Florence, 215
flounder, 308
fMRI, 101, 113, 162–63, 166, 170, 204, 274–75
food, 12, 13, 233–34, 235–63, 291, 347–48
deserts of, 249, 255, 258–59
high-calorie, 130
history of, 236
industrialization of supply of, 238
locally produced, 216, 234, 239, 256–61
organic, 239, 251, 256, 306
overconsumption of, 4
processing of, 23, 60, 240–41, 248–49
waste of, 249, 250, 350
Food Commons, 258
foraging, 26–27, 155
Forbes, Peter, 259–63
forebrain, 46, 58, 62–63
fossil fuels, 2, 87, 127, 245, 298, 302
climate change caused by, 3
finite supply of, 3
Foster, Eric, 173
Founding Fathers, 88–90
see also Jefferson, Thomas 4H clubs, 253–54
Fowler, James, 41
FOXP2 gene, 172, 277, 337
Framingham, Mass., 40–42
France, 215, 277–78
driving in, 225
Franklin, Benjamin, 17, 71, 89, 170, 171
Franklin Reserve, Calif., 224
fraud, 123, 124
free markets, 11, 328
Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, 226, 228
French Revolution, 70
fresh-food deserts, 249, 255, 258–59
Freud, Sigmund, 50–51, 52, 103–4, 321
Friday’s Footprint; How Society Shapes the Human Mind (Brothers), 164
Fried, Itzhak, 97
friends, 40–42
Fritz Hall, 52–53
Fromm, Erich, 53
frontal cortex, 46, 60, 92, 94, 97, 100–101, 105, 106–7, 108, 110, 160, 165, 166, 171, 273
fructose, 242
fruits, 240, 241, 256, 257
Fuligni, Andrew, 166
function, 228
functional magnetic resonance imagine (fMRI), 52, 56
Fuster, Elisabeth, 92, 95
Fuster, Joaquín, 92–93, 94–95, 96–97, 228, 270, 275
on perception-action cycle, 97–100, 99, 102–4, 107

Gage, Phineas, 105

Galápagos Islands, 294–97, 298, 307, 308, 354
Galen, 239–40, 243
gambling, 60, 143
garbage, 249, 350
Garcia-Granados, Tatiana, 258–59
gas prices, 224
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Tönnies), 86
General Motors, 222
genes, 24–26, 28
genius loci (spirit of place), 232
Germany, 198, 199
labor in, 318
Gestalt, 95
ghrelin, 33–34
gifting economies, 120–21, 132, 155, 160
Gilbert, Daniel, 54
girls:
anxiety and depression in, 336
obesity in, 38–39
Glass-Steagall Act, 331
global financial crisis, xv, 11, 32, 65, 117–18, 128, 132
blame for, xv
lack of self-reflection in, xv
lack of trust in, 143
regulation and, 143–44
globalizaton, 22, 29
global savings glut, 134
global trade, 237
global warming, 3, 115, 306
glucose, 33, 242–43
Golconde (Magritte), 53
gold, 124, 132, 133, 136
Goldin, Claudia, 183
Goldman Sachs, 331
Gonzaga, Vespasiano, 210–14, 216–18, 343, 344
Google, 284, 285
Gopnik, Adam, 83
Gordon, Mary, 167–68, 203
gossip, 119, 173, 338
Gothic style, 192
government spending, 356
Gradgrind, Thomas (char.), 176–77, 185, 203
grains, 120, 124, 242, 243, 247–48
Grant, Peter, 296
Grant, Rosemary, 296
gratification, delayed, 113, 202–3
Graybiel, Ann, 60
Great Britain, 29
Great Depression, 118, 331
Great High Plains Aquifer, 248
Great Recession, 117–18, 224
Greece, 121, 124
greed, 131, 138
Greeks, 17, 189
on ataraxia, 145–46
money used by, 133–34
Mycenaean, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126
green building codes, 4
Greene, Graham, 92
green revolution, 246–48
Gregory, 266–67
Grimm, Brothers, 150, 333
grooming, 119, 168–69
gross domestic product (GDP), 13, 355
components of, 356
as measure of progress, 300–301
RFK on, 293
of U.S., 355–56
gross national product (GNP), 355
Ground Operations (film), 251, 252–55
Growing Power, 262
Gruen, Victor, 223
“Grumbling Hive, The” (Mandeville), 76
gut feelings, 55, 63–64
Güth, Werner, 156
Gypsy Meadows Organic Farm, 257

Haber, Fritz, 246

habits, 12, 45–68, 174, 273, 288–89, 299, 302, 304
basal ganglia as home of, 56
definition of, 299
in education, 182
emotions and, 43, 115, 158
overconsumption and, 6–8, 10, 42–44
perception-action cycle important for, 99
reflective choices and, 115
self-tuning of, 49–50
habits of mind, 8, 54, 88
see also intuition Habsburgs, 343
haddock, 308
haggling, 124
Haidt, Jonathan, 64–65
Hale, Sarah Josepha, 147, 333
happiness, 9–10, 89
material achievements and, 11
Happy Meals, 39
Hardin, Garrett, 310
Hard Times (Dickens), 176–77, 339
Harris, Paul, 269
Haughley farm experiment, 349–50
hawks, 295
Hayek, Friedrich August von, 129, 133, 293, 297, 298, 302, 311
health, 2, 6, 12
health care, obesity and, 37
health insurance, 32
Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, 37
hearing, 100, 107, 108
Heckman, James, 199–200
Hedonia: TrygFonden Research Group, 106
hedonic gratification, 114
Henry (pheasant), 19–21, 22, 24, 26, 36, 44, 46, 59, 237
herbal teas, 243
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 321
herbs, 257
herding, 328
heroin, 22
heuristics, 63
hierarchy, 123
higher education, 183–84
high-fructose corn syrup, 348
high school, 183, 191–93
high-yield seeds, 248
Hill, Alison, 42
Hilton, Paris, 338
hippocampus, 46, 57, 57, 94, 326
memories and, 96
Hispanics, 28
as students, 202
Hittite empire, 120, 121, 125, 126
HM, 326
Hobbes, Thomas, 76, 78, 273–74, 276, 325
Holocene, 2
Home, Henry, 328
homeostatic equilibrium, 34, 84–85, 85, 107
home prices, 345
Homer, 120, 126
Homo erectus, 154, 276
Homo neanderthalensis, 172, 276–77
Homo sapiens, 62, 154, 169, 172, 277, 303
honesty, 83, 142–43, 329
hormones, 31, 32–34, 107, 157, 158
and bonding, 152
horses, 277
house, playing of, 218–19
housing bubble, U.S., xv, 4, 134
Houston, Tex., 226
Howard, Phillip K., 304
Howard de Walden Estates, 230–31, 346
How Life Imitates Chess (Kasparov), 281–82
How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 337
Hrdy, Sarah, 153–54, 334
human biomass, 3
Human “Connectome” Project, 93
human population, increase of, 1
humans, as social creatures, xvi
Hume, David, 72, 78–79, 89
on imagination, 275
on reason and passion, 77, 79, 87, 309
humors, 239–40, 243
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (Steel), 243–44, 348–49
hunter-gatherers, 154
hunters, hunting, 25, 26–27, 119, 155 328
Huntington, Henry, 222
Hurricane Katrina, 3
Hurricane Sandy, 3
husbandry, 247, 347
see also agriculture Hutcheson, Francis, 79–80, 89
Hutchinson, Sara, 351
hyperbolic discounting, 112–13
hypothalamus, 107
hysteria, 321

Iacoboni, Marcus, 162

Iberian Peninsula, 276
IBM, 280–81
ice age, 2
Icelandic sheep, 147–50, 152–53, 261
identity, 75, 228
iguanas, 295
illness, 31
Images of Mind (Posner and Raichle), 321
imagination, 81, 174, 264–92
as melding of diverse talents, 290
seeds for, 267–70
as tool of exploration, 291–92
imitation, 288–89
immune system, 31
impartial spectator, 82, 110, 138, 142
implicit learning, 54
impulsive behavior, 35, 65, 105, 113–14, 202, 204–5
maturation and, 205
impurities, 64
India, 2
Coca-Cola plant in, 305
green revolution in, 48
tsunami in, 156
industrialization, 249, 262–63, 284
Industrial Revolution, 85–86, 136, 241, 302, 339
industry, 305–6
infants, 101, 153–54, 160–61
information integrated by, 98–99
inflammation, 31, 32
information, 93, 95–107, 99, 108, 109, 274–76
exchange of, 82, 87, 269
feedback loops and, 130
on Internet, 287
processing of, 11, 46–48, 54, 58, 60, 62, 79, 284–88
saturation of, 12, 266, 283
storing of, see memory infrastructure, 257, 302
inner cities, 28
Insel, Thomas, 152
instant gratification, 36
instincts, 87
for love, 150–51
for short-term rewards, 6
Institute of Nautical Archaeology, 329
insula, 107, 162–63
intelligence:
creative, 101
of technology, 280–84
interest rates, 134
Internet, 30, 285–88
addiction to, 60
creativity and, 287
information on, 287
shallow nature of, 286
interrelationships, 173–74
inter-temporal discounting, 111–12
intuition, 8, 50, 55–57, 59, 64, 67, 88, 97, 104, 198
foundations of, 62
patterns of, 61
see also reflexive system “Intuition: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach”
(Lieberman), 54
intuitive ethics, 206
Inventing America (Wills), 88–89
invisible hand, 129–30, 330
Iron Lady, The (film), 45, 320
iron oxide, 246
irregular temperament, 15
Israel, 161
Italy, 215
Slow Food Movement in, 239
Ivy League, 184

Jacobs, Jane, 220–21, 344–45

James, William, 54
James II, King of England, 72–73
Japan, 23
Jefferson, Thomas, 71, 88–89, 90, 213
Jensen, Keith, 335
John Paul II, Pope, 266
Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth, 309–10
Johnston, Haile, 258–59
Jordan, Andrew, 234
Journal of the American Medical Association, 36–37
joy, 78
JP Morgan Chase, 134
Juno (yearling), 149, 153
Just Food, 262
justice, 186

Kahneman, Daniel, 58, 65, 66

Kalahari Bushmen, 155, 160, 169, 334
Kames, Lord, 328
Kandel, Eric, 50, 96–97
Kasparov, Garry, 280–83, 290
Katrina, Hurricane, 3
Kay, John, 297
KE family, 171–72
Kellogg Foundation, 258
Kelly, Walt, 33, 140
Kennedy, Robert, 293
Keynes, John Maynard, 186
Kingfisher, 307
kinships, 134, 298
Klein, Richard G., 276, 277
Knoll Farm, 158–59, 259–63, 351
knowledge, 12, 15, 75, 95, 104, 107, 155, 186, 253, 264, 266, 287, 289, 291, 298–99, 303, 309, 312
see also self-understanding, self-knowledge Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), 202, 203,
341–42
“know thyself,” 36, 319
Kringelbach, Morten, 105–7, 108, 109–10, 113
!Kung, 155
Kuznets, Simon, 355

labor, division of, 117, 119

labor market, education and, 198–99
lactose tolerance, 242, 348
La Fromagerie, 230, 237, 346
laissez-faire economics, 78
Lal, Deepak, 138
language, 101, 169–71, 174, 271
evolution of facility for, 171–73, 277
Latendresse, Shawn, 208
lateral prefrontal cortex, 57, 57, 107
L-dopa, 59
learning modules, 64–65
Lebanon, 127
Lehman Brothers, 117–18
Leonardo da Vinci, 213
leptin, 33–34
Levant, 121
leverage, 139
Leviathan (Hobbes), 76, 273–74
Levin, David, 203
liberation, 113
liberty, 299
Lieberman, Matt, 52–57, 57, 58, 67, 68, 79, 157, 322
Liebig, Justus von, 245–46
life spans, 2, 38
limbic system, 46, 60, 113, 115–16
emotions and, 46, 107, 165, 166, 204
literacy, 2, 73, 184, 194–95, 205
Literary Review, 235
literature, 151
Little Red Cap, 333
liver, 61–62, 64
Living Soil, The (Balfour), 247, 349–50
Locke, John, 72, 75–76, 77, 78, 89, 324
London, 230, 232, 243–45, 331
Marylebone neighborhood of, 229–34, 237
London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 143
long-range planning, 113
Los Angeles, Calif., 39–40, 221–23, 226
agriculture in, 351
automobile in, 222–23
Louis XIV, King of France, 73
love, 147–75
chemistry of, 150–53, 168
and extended kinship, 154–55
and facial expressions, 153, 160–63
instinct for, 150–51
in sheep, 147–50, 152–53, 261
loyalty, 64
Lunar Society, 70–72, 73–74, 75, 84, 85, 88, 90, 245
Lunar Society of Birmingham, The (Schofield), 71
Luthar, Suniya, 208

MacArthur, Ellen, 306–7

MacLean, Paul, 320–21
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 51–52, 101, 321–22
Magritte, René, 53
Main, Nancy, 219
maize, 25, 242, 255
Malthus, Thomas, 297
Malthusian catastrophe, 245
mammoths, 277
Mandeville, Bernard de, 76, 77–78, 80, 81, 83, 87, 90
Smith’s rejection of, 90
Mantua, 212, 213, 215
manure, 246
marijuana, 208
market narrative, 8–9
markets, 74, 80
choice in, 123
culture’s effect on, 143
emergence of, 118–19
equilibrium of, 34, 84–85, 85, 86–87, 90, 110, 129–30
 invisible hand of, 129–30
money equated with, 133
obesity and, 29–30
in pleasures, 13
self-interest as bedrock of, 77–78
social understanding and, 78
Marketside, 256
Marlborogh, John Churchill, Duke of, 73
marshmallow test, 203, 309
“Mary had a little lamb” (Hale), 147, 333
Marylebone, London, 229–34, 237
Marylebone Journal, 232
Massachusetts, 178
material comforts, 1, 2
materialism, 5, 10, 35
material self-interest, 4
maternity leave, 207
math, 179
Mattel Children’s Hospital, 40
maturation, 63, 82, 98, 99, 100, 151m 158, 166, 167, 174, 182–83, 188, 192, 202, 205, 206, 207, 290
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 335
McDonald’s, 29, 39
McKibben, Bill, 3
McKinsey, 179–80, 181, 201, 205, 307
meals, 13
meaning, 182
meat, 244, 256
China’s consumption of, 255
mechanization, 245
medial cortex, 57
medial orbital-frontal cortex, 157
medial temporal lobe, 57
median family income, 32
median wage, 318
medicine, 240
memory, 46, 47, 57, 66, 93, 99, 103, 107, 158, 220, 273, 288–89
acquisition of, 94–95, 97
choice and, 108, 110, 115
collective, 128, 262–63
emotional, 26, 95–96
habit and, 218
Internet and, 283–85
long-term, 96
networks of, 95, 98, 99
phyletic, 99, 150, 153, 161, 243
short-term, 60, 94
and subjective experience of self, 95–96
training of, 282–82
working, 275, 290
memory cells, 94
memory loss, 17, 60, 320
men, obesity in, 37
mercantilism, 78
merchants, 86
Mesopotamia, 121, 169
metabolic stress, 29–32
metabolism, 24–26
metal, 127
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 117, 119, 128
Michelson, Patricia, 230, 231, 237, 346
Midas, King, 134, 330
Middle Ages, 67–68
Middle East, 36, 242, 247
milk, 98
Mill, James, 339
millet, 242
Milton, John, 91, 326
Mindless Eating (Wansink), 42
minimum wage, 32
Ministry of Education and Culture, Finnish, 180
Minsky, Hyman, 332
mirror neurons, 161–64
Mischel, Walter, 203, 309–10
model trains, 91–92
modernization, 85–86
Molaison, Henry (HM), 326
money:
appetite for, 134
equated with markets, 133
evolution of, 119
in Greece, 133–34
trust extended by, 133
monkeys, 162, 168
monogamy, 151–52
Montaigne, Michel de, 75
Montanari, Massimo, 236
Monticello, 213
Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), 294, 354
moral hazard, 134
moral imagination, 167–68
morality, 64–65, 74, 77, 132, 309
Adam Smith on, 80–84, 89, 90, 141
Founding Fathers and, 88–89
society’s influence on, 84–87, 90, 141–42
Morgan, Abi, 45, 320
mortgage-backed securities, 137–38
mortgages, 135, 141
subprime, xv, 134
tax breaks on, 136
mother-infant bond, 148, 150, 153, 174
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Hrdy), 153–54
motivation, 197
mountain goats, 277
mountain voles, 152
multitasking, 7
Mun, Thomas, 69, 323
Museum of Jurassic Technology, 264–67, 270, 291
museums, 128
music, 151, 271–72
mutations, 171
Mycenaean Greeks, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126
myelin, 100–101, 102, 165, 204

Nash, Ogden, 303

National Bureau of Economic Research, 206
National Institutes of Health, 320
National Register of Historic Places, 261
Nation at Risk, A: The Imperative for Educational Reform, 192
Natural Kitchen, 234
natural resources, 2
nausea, 61–62, 64
Navarre, Spain, 212
navigation, 121–22
NBC News, 300
Neanderthals, 172, 276–77
Nearing, Scott, 262
negotiation, 134
neocortical ratio, 168
neonates, 98–100
neopallium, 46
nerve cells, 45, 59, 94–95, 96, 97, 100, 109, 204
net exports, 356
Netherlands, 72
neural engineering, 17–18
neural networks, 18, 22, 50, 56, 57
rewiring of, 114, 141, 277
neurons, 51, 95, 129, 130, 321
myelination of, 100–101, 102, 204
New England, 216–17
Newfoundland, Canada, 308
New South Wales, Australia, 38–39, 40
Newton, Isaac, 275
New Year resolutions, 111
New York, N.Y., 37, 220–22
New York City Planning Commission, 221
New York Times, 200, 300
New Zealand, 29
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53, 54, 321
Nijinsky, Vaslav, 51
Nike, 305–6
nitrogen, 246, 248
Nixon, Richard, 136
No Child Left Behind, 341
norepinephrine, 46
novelty, 131
nuclear family, 86, 88
nucleus accumbens, 152, 157, 204
numeracy, 205
Obama, Michelle, 37
obesity, obesity epidemic, 4, 10, 21–44, 237, 240–41, 287, 288
ailments of, 22, 23
childhood, 38–39, 319
in children, 38–40
cost of, 37
in emerging nations, 36
by ethnicity, 28
feedback loops in, 67
government fight against, 37
high-fructose corn syrup and, 348
leveling off of, 36–37
market economy and, 29–30
as number one U.S. health problem, 24, 29, 233, 317
as personal issue, 24
in Pima Indians, 25–26
school garden programs and, 263
spread in social networks, 40–42
stress and, 7, 22, 23, 31, 34
technology in fight against, 37–38
as undetected, 27
wealth and, 28
occipital lobes, 96
oceans, 307–9
Odenplan, 233
Offer, Avner, 29
O’Gorman, Michael, 252
oils, 120, 121, 124
Ojai, Calif., 250–55
olive oil, 124
Oliver, Jamie, 348
olives, 120
On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 153, 266, 297
ontogeny, 100
opportunity, 182
orbital-frontal cortex, 79, 105, 107, 109–10
order, 228
ore, 127
Oregon Experiment, The (Alexander), 344
organically grown food, 239, 251, 256, 306
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 178, 192, 339
Organization Man, The (Whyte), 221
Orient Express, 91–93, 94–95, 103
Ostrom, Elinor, 310–11
Otteson, James, 82
Ottoman Empire, 343
overconsumption:
cultural change and, 6, 8–10
of food, 4
habit and, 6–8, 10, 42–44
instincts and, 6
reasons for, 6–10
in resource-rich environment, 4, 6–10
Oxford University, 187–90, 193
oxytocin, 152, 158

Pact, The (Davis, Jenkins, Hunt and Page), 196–97

Pagel, Mark, 355
pain, 26, 157, 335
Palazzo del Giardino, 214
Palazzo Ducale, 214
paleomammalian cortex, 47
Palladio, Andrea, 213
parenting, 13, 40, 154, 155, 167, 206
poverty of, 199–200
parietal cortex, 57, 96, 160, 162, 274
Parkinson’s disease, 59, 322
Parliament, British, 245
passion, 141
reason vs., 77, 111, 309
pattern language, 219–20, 344
Pattern Language, A (Alexander), 344
pattern of events, 218
Pauling, Linus, 321
Pauly, Daniel, 308
Pechey, Rachel, 29
pensions, 143
People’s Grocery, 262
perception-action cycle, 97–100, 99, 102–4, 107, 130
consumption and, 141
in education, 182–83
risk, debt and, 137
personal consumption, 356
personality, definition of, 342
personal ornamentation, 276
personal satisfaction, 12–13
PET, 101
Pew Charitable Trusts, 184
Pew Research Center, 283
pheasants, 19–21, 22, 24, 30
Philips, 307
Phillip II, King of Spain, 212, 343
Phillipson, Nicholas, 81
Phoenix, Ariz., 226
phosphorus, 246
phyletic memory, 99, 150, 153, 161, 243
phylogeny, 98
Pieper, Jan, 344
Pima Indians, 25–26
Plachimada, India, 305
plasticity, 204
plastics, 306
Plato, 126, 319, 321
play, 165, 173, 268–69, 270
pleasure, 26–27, 105–7, 108, 109–10, 157, 335
from music, 273
Pogo, 140
Poland, 179
Poor Richard’s Almanack (Franklin), 17
Portland, Oreg., 226, 227
positron emission tomography (PET), 51, 52
Posner, Michael I., 321
possessions, 134
posterior cortex, 97, 107
posterior parietal lobe, 162
Postman, Neil, 280
potassium, 246
pottery, 124, 127
poverty, 174, 208–9
of parenting, 199–200
prairie voles, 151–52, 153
preconscious mind, 8, 50, 63–65, 84
see also intuition; reflexive system predestination, 76
prefrontal cortex, 79, 105, 204
dorso-lateral, 166, 274
lateral, 57, 57, 107
medial, 273
ventral, 107, 108
ventrolateral, 110–11, 115–16
ventromedial, 60, 110–11, 115–16, 327
preprocessed food, 23, 240–41, 248–49
addiction to, 60
pretend, 269, 270
Priestley, Joseph, 70
primate cortex, 94
profits, 86
profit seeking, 124
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 178, 179, 341
progress, 2, 4, 9, 12, 13, 293, 299, 303–4, 315
measure of, 300–301
reimagining, 5
self-awareness and, 13–14
social vs. economics, 12–13
unintended consequences of, -3
Project for Public Space, 345
prudence, 146, 206
psychoanalysis, 50–51
psychology of action, 77
puberty, 204
public recreation areas, 233
public space, 345
Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, 294
punishment, 59
Pythagoras, 14

Raichle, Marcus, 101–2, 110, 321

Rajan, Raghuram, 140
rationality, definition of, 87–88
rationalizations, 104
rats, 60
reading, 179
Reagan administration, 192
reason, reasoning, 50–51, 87, 141, 186–90
passion vs., 77, 111, 309
recessions, 140–41
reciprocation, 119, 134
recombination, 171
Reflections and Maxims (Clapiers), 45
reflective system, 55–56, 57, 57, 63–64, 88, 97, 114–15
reflexive system, 49–50, 55–56, 57, 64–67, 84, 88, 97, 114–15
regulation, 143–44
see also self-regulation relationships, 170
Renaissance, 189, 192, 210–14, 343, 349
Renault, 307
reptilian brain, 46, 47
Republican Party, U.S., 90
resources, 302
common, 310–11
respect, 64
responsibility, 168
rewards, 59–60
immediate vs. delayed, 113
risks and, 110–11, 136–37, 137
rice, 242, 246, 247
rickets, 240, 241
risk, 11, 63, 108, 155, 253, 281
addiction to, 143, 205, 322
adolescents and, 165–66, 205, 336
financial, 32, 131, 134, 135, 138, 139, 143, 331
rewards and, 110–11, 136–37, 137
Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 50–51
rituals, 48, 134
Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 162, 163
Rockefeller Foundation, 246
Rodriguez, Gregory, 338
Roman Catholic Church, 73
Rome, 349
Roots of Empathy program, 167–68, 203
rote memory, 194–95
Roulstone, John, 333
Royal Society, 73
Ruby (lamb), 150
Rudolf Steiner Foundation, 258–59
Rule of Nobody, The: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government (Howard), 304
Russett (ewe), 148, 149–50, 152–53, 156

Sabbioneta, Italy, 210–18, 222, 230, 343–44

safety, 6, 62, 63, 78, 110, 220
Safeway Stores, 256
Saler, Michael, 287
salt, 27, 240, 287
San (Bushmen), 155, 160, 169, 334
San Cristóbal, 294
S&P 500 index, 118
Sandy, Hurricane, 3
San Francisco, Calif., 38
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 53
SAT scores, 192, 203
saturated fats, 23
Saturday Evening Post, 264
Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (Engell and Dangerfield), 185
savings rate, 141
Sawyer, Mary, 333
Saxony, 179
Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 214
Scandinavia, 29
scarcity, 12, 24, 26, 237
Schaefer, Martin, 240
Schneider, William, 58
Schofield, Robert, 71
school garden programs, 263
school lunch, 39–40
schools, see education Schopenhauer, Arthur, 321
science, 4, 10, 13, 18, 73, 75, 77, 88, 178–79, 184, 191, 241, 245, 281, 291, 312
Science, 310
Scottish Enlightenment, 10, 80
Scrooge, Ebenezer (char.), 232
scurvy, 240, 241
Sea Around Us Project, 308
“seal” stones, 124
Sea People, 125, 126
security, 9, 23, 29, 32, 136, 155, 161, 174, 182
seizures, 326
self:
brain and knowledge of, 17–18
as collection of senses, 80
creation of, 164
education and, 186
Hume’s view of, 78–79, 80
Locke’s ideas on, 77
memory and subjective experience of, 95–96
modern idea of, 67–68
rational and enlightened, 7, 10
self-awareness, 13–14, 17–18, 77, 168, 174, 279
in education, 182, 186
of place, 218–19
self-control, 63, 160, 183, 203, 206
affluence and, 22–23
erosion of, 22–23, 24
self-destructive behaviors, 174
self-gratification, 18
self-improvement, 89
self-interest, 10, 77, 110, 115, 131, 141, 143, 151
self-preservation, 78
self-regulation, 36, 297
age and, 204–5
education and, 202
of living system, 129
of markets, 34, 84–85, 85, 86–87, 90, 110, 136
self-understanding, self-knowledge, 49, 50, 65–66, 75–76, 79, 81–82
brain and, 17–18
consumerism vs, 67
education and, 205
reflective vs. reflexive, 55–56, 57–58, 57, 64, 88, 97, 114–15
Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, 331–32
Sennett, Richard, 289
Sensory Order, The (Hayek), 129
serotonin, 46, 158
Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, The (Covey), 197
sex, 6, 78, 166
addiction to, 60
bonding in, 151–52
promiscuous, 166
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 324
Shakespeare, William, 32
Shallows, The: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Carr), 286
shamans, 278, 280
Shanghai, 179
sharing, 134, 156, 159, 168
of experience, 170, 220, 238
see also exchange sheep, Icelandic, 147–50, 152–53, 261
Shiffrin, Richard, 58
shopping, 255–56, 300–301, 356
sidewalks, 233
Siemens, 198–99
sight, 100, 114
Silent Spring (Carson), 247, 350
silver, 124, 132, 133
Singapore, 179
Sisyphus, 199
Sketches on the History of Man (Kames), 328
skills, 200
sleep, 42
lack of, 32–33
Slow Food Movement, 239, 250, 348
slums, 221
Slusser, Wendy, 40
Small, William, 71
smartphones, 283, 289
applications for, 37–38
smell, 107, 108, 114, 153
Smith, Adam, 10–11, 72, 79–84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 147, 157, 161–62, 176, 279, 325
on agriculture and cities, 244–45
on cardinal human values, 146
on division of labor, 86, 117
education of, 79–80
 on exchange, 328
fairness praised by, 156
four-stage theory of economic history of, 328–29
on happiness, 9
Hume’s influence on, 79, 80
on imagination, 81–82, 275
on impartial spectator, 82, 110, 138, 142
Mandeville rejected by, 90
markets described by, 77, 118–19, 129–30, 131, 132
on morality, 80–84, 89, 90, 141
on personal choice, 123
on self-command, 84, 183
on self-regulating markets, 11, 84, 85, 87, 90, 110, 131, 132, 297
on small communities, 311
on society’s influence on morality, 141–42
tranquility praised by, 145
Smith, Michael, 257
Smithfield meat market, 244
smoking, 166, 208, 336
snacks, 242
snakes, 61
social aptitude, 170–71
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, 52–53
social feelings, 145–46
chemistry of, 151
social grooming, 119, 168–69
social inequality, 6
growth of, 32, 139, 305
obesity and, 32
social interaction, 61, 63, 99, 129, 141, 151, 154, 157, 164, 173, 226, 236, 268–69, 279, 329
social learning, 355
Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, The (Whyte), 221
social media, 225, 284, 285
social mobility, 9, 193, 301
social norms, 115–16
social order, 13, 66, 74, 82, 143, 146, 150, 153, 155, 169, 278, 279, 280, 297, 298, 299, 311, 325, 328–29
social sentiments, 81–82, 84–85, 155–56
Society of Arts, 73–74
soda, ban on over-sized, 37
soft drinks, 242
Soil Association, 349
Soleil, 111–12, 116
South America, 24–25, 28
Spain, 92, 212
speculation, xv
spirit of place, 223–24, 232
spontaneous order, 129–30
Sprinkle, Steve, 257
Squash, 25
stags, 277
Stahel, Walter, 306
Stahlberg, Pasi, 180–81
standardized tests, 341
Starbucks, 37
Steel, Carolyn, 243–44, 247, 249, 250, 348–49
stem cells, 17
Sterne, Laurence, 69, 75
stimuli, 22, 47, 62, 100–101, 114, 274
music as, 271, 272, 273
stink ant, 266
Stockholm, 233
stories, 151
Stravinsky, Igor, 50–51
stress, 42
chronic, 30–32
metabolic, 29–32
obesity and, 7, 22, 23, 31, 34
striatum, 59–60
Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert), 54
Stutz, John, 2
subprime mortgages, xv, 134, 143
substantia nigra, 59
suburbs, 223–25
sucking, 98, 99
sugars, 23, 25, 33, 240, 242, 287
supermarkets, 237
superstorms, 3
sustainability, 217–18, 231, 257
sustenance, 78
Sweden, 208
box store retail space in, 225
driving in, 225
sweetness, 114
Sydenham, Thomas, 75
sympathy, 81–82, 86, 142, 162, 317
see also empathy synapses, 45, 96, 109, 204
see also neural networks Syrians, 121
System 1, 58
System 2, 58
systems of extended order, 297–98
systems theory, 129

talent, 329
taste, 107, 108, 114
Taylor, Frederick, 284
Teach First, 203
Teach for America, 203
Tea Party, 301
Tea Party movement, 90
technology, 1, 48, 302
intelligence of, 280–84
technopoly, 280
Tell Abu Hawam, 122
temperament, 167, 182, 342
Temple of Apollo, 319
temporal cortex, 57, 94, 96, 162, 326
 medial, 57
terra refugere, 263
tests, 200, 341
Thailand, 306
thalamus, 107
Thatcher, Margaret, 320
theater, 151
theory of mind, 163, 164–65
Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 80–82, 87, 147, 157, 176
Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 58
thirteen virtues, 89
Thurman, Judith, 277–78
timber, 127, 130
time famine, 237
Timeless Way of Building, The (Alexander), 210, 344
tin, 121
tobacco, 208
Tohono O’Odham Nation, 256
tolerance, 299
Tom Tom, 345
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 86
Tooby, John, 63
tortoises, 295
touch, 107, 108, 114
touchscreen, 288
toys, 207
trade:
Bronze Age, 124–26, 127
global, 237
tradition, 299, 355
“Tragedy of the Commons, The” (Hardin), 310
tranquillity, 9, 92, 145–46, 206, 219
transcendental social behaviors, 279–80
transcience, 279
transport systems, 4
Treatise on Human Nature, A (Hume), 77, 80
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 69, 75
Trojan war, 125–26
Troy, 120
trust, 133, 142–43, 168
chemistry of, 151
in education, 182
Trust for Public Lands, 351
Trusting What You’re Told (Harris), 269
tryptophan, 158
Tse, Peter Ulric, 274–75, 276
tsunami, 156
Tudge, Colin, 235, 347
tuna, 308
tuning (music), 14-15, 316
Turkey, 124
Tuscany, 349
Twain, Mark, 118
type 2 diabetes, 22, 23, 25, 348

Ulijaszek, Stanley, 29
Ultimatum Game, 156, 158, 334–35
Uluburun wreck, 119–23, 329
unconscious mind, 44, 50, 51, 59, 321
Underground, 93
unemployment, 32
youth, 198
unimodular attention, 276
United Kingdom, 179
driving in, 225
education in, 190–93, 198, 201, 340
expense report scandal in, 143
obesity in, 233
United States, 5
box store retail space in, 225
cultural narrative in, 8–9
driving in, 225
eating outside of home in, 238–39
economic growth in, 1, 301, 302
education in, 178–79, 183–84, 191–93, 199–202, 208, 301, 340
explosion of credit in, 136–38
founding of, 88–89
GDP of, 300–301, 355–56
Grand Enlightenment Experiment of, 89–90
ideal of material progress in, 2
lack of maternity leave in, 207
median wage in, 319
municipal pensions in, 143
obesity as number one health problem in, 24, 29, 233, 317
percentage of farmers in, 253
Slow Food Movement in, 239
universities, cost of, 340
University of California Cooperative Extension, 258
urban agriculture, 351
urban environments, 225–26, 232–33
urban planning, 219, 227–29, 243
bottom-up, 231
urban renewal, 344
urban sprawl, 344
utilitarianism, 339
utility, 117
utility maximizing, 112–13

Valencia, Calif., 223–24, 225

vascular disease, 22
vasopressin, 152, 153
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis of 45
vegetable oils, 242
vegetables, 241, 256, 257
Venice, 343
ventral prefrontal cortex, 107, 108
ventrolateral cortex, 141
ventrolateral orbital-frontal cortex, 113
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, 110–11, 115–16
ventromedial cortex, 113, 141
ventromedial prefrontal cortex, 60, 110–11, 115–16, 327
verbal facility, 171
Vermont Land Trust, 261
victory gardens, 263
Vienna, 50, 52, 223
Villa di Monte, 211, 218
vision, 107, 108
vitamin C, 240, 241
vitamin D, 240
Vitruvian Man, 213
vocabulary, 194–95

wage, median, 318

walking, 99
Wall Street Journal, 118, 183, 300
Wal-Mart, 237, 256
Wansink, Brian, 42
war, 251
Washington D.C., 202
Watt, James, 70, 76
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 79–80, 82–84, 87, 88, 117, 245, 330
Wedgwood, Josiah, 70
well-being, 9
Well-Tempered Clavier, The (Bach), 14–15, 85, 175, 304
Wesson, Mr., 177–78
Wesson effect, 181
Western diet, 236–37
wheat, 242, 246, 247
White, E. B., ix
white flour, 25
Whitehurst, John, 70
Whole Foods, 256
Whybrow, Helen, 148, 150, 254, 259, 260, 261–63, 351
Whybrow, Kate, 254
Whyte, William, 220–21, 225, 345
Wiessner, Polly, 155
William I “the Conqueror,” King of England, 169, 324
William III, King of England, 73
Wills, Garry, 88–89
Wilshire, Bruce, 54
Wilson, David, 265–66, 267
Wilson, E. O., 3
Wilson, Timothy, 65–66
wine, 121, 124, 236
Wirz, Anna, 211
Wirz, Hans, 210, 212–13, 214–18, 223–24, 226–29, 231
wisdom, definition of, 292, 358
women:
 gossiping by, 338
in mother-infant bond, 148, 150, 153, 174
obesity in, 37
wonder, 267
Wordsworth, William, 351
working mothers, 154
Work of the Imagination, The (Harris), 269
World Bank, 355
World Economic Forum, 306
World Health Organization, 36
World War II, 92, 263
World Wide Web, 283, 288
Wren (author’s granddaughter), 148, 149–50, 156, 159, 160, 164–65, 173, 174, 259
Wrigley, Tony, 87–88
Wunderkammern, 265

X system, 322

Yee, Larry, 257–58

Young, Larry, 152

Zangger, Eberhard, 125–26, 127

Zipcar, 226
zoning, 308
Zoological Society of London, 296
Zoonomia: The Laws of Organic Life (E. Darwin), 74, 324
Zurich, Switzerland, 226
 Also By Peter C. Whybrow, MD

American Mania: When More Is Not Enough

A Mood Apart: The Thinker’s Guide to Emotion and Its Disorders The
Hibernation Response: Why You Feel Fat, Miserable, and Depressed
from October Through March—and How You Can Cheer Up Through
Those Dark Days of Winter (with Robert Bahr) Mood Disorders:
Toward a New Psychobiology (with Hagop S. Akiskal, MD, and
William T. McKinney, Jr., MD)
Copyright © 2015 by Peter C. Whybrow, MD

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