Five - GRAVITY’S INCARNATION

Five

GRAVITY’S INCARNATION

HOW MEMORY STORES AND SHAPES LOVE

Memory is a small word that contains entire worlds. With a minimal exertion of will, anyone can conjure up a vision of places and people long since destroyed by the passage of time, whose impressions remain encoded along winding synaptic paths. Somehow the immensity of the past is dormant within, and parts waken at our command. But memory is more: it defines, creates, and holds a person’s mental world together. As a pioneering physiologist of the nervous system, Ewald Hering, saw it:

Memory collects the countless phenomena of our existence into a singlewhole; and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the attraction of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory.

Hering’s declaration was prophetic. Every individual lives as a spectral vapor in the neural machine, his thoughts, dreams, feelings, and ambitions the evanescent outcome of intricate signals flowing among billions of neurons. The stability of an individual mind— what we know as identity— exists only because some neural pathways endure. The plasticity of the mind, its capacity to adapt and learn, is possible only because neuronal connections can change. The physiology of memory determines the fate of those malleable nodes. It lies at the heart of who we are and who we can become.

A scientific theory of memory is therefore a map of the soul. Every such diagram must attempt to delineate the mind’s Dark Continent: why do people possess emotional knowledge that leaves no conscious trace?

Since time’s beginning, romantic partners have searched for each other with exquisite but obscure deliberation. “In literature, as in love,” wrote André Maurois, “we are astonished at what is chosen by others.” And they are every bit as amazed at us. The very concept of “compatibility” discloses that no all-purpose template for loving predominates. Sexual attractiveness contributes only a minor filter to this selectivity. The number of couples who marry is a minuscule fraction of the many who find each other physically interesting. Not just anyone will do; in fact, to any one person looking for a mate, almost nobody will.

A lover tests the combination of himself plus serial others like a child juxtaposing jigsaw pieces until a pair snaps home. Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity. How do these delicately shaped desires develop? By what means do people learn the discriminating taste that tells them how and whom to love? And why does that knowledge remain opaque to their mind’s eye?

Seventy-five years before the memory science elucidated in this chapter, Sigmund Freud proposed a model of unconscious emotional memory that became an institution. Freud’s unconscious was a psychic Pandora’s box—a repository of thoughts, memories, ideas, and impulses so unpleasant and anxiety-provoking they had to be deleted from consciousness and confined to a mental basement. In concocting his mind cellar, Freud assumed that memories possess the archaeological solidity of a Grecian urn: they can be buried by a sandstorm of repression and, if censorship later weakens, exhumed in pristine condition. “From the repressed memory traces, it can be verified that they suffer no changes even in the longest periods,” Freud wrote. “The unconscious, at all events, knows no time limit.”

The Pandoran metaphor is enticing. Its central image is pleasingly congruous with the conception of world order handed down from antiquity: sweet reason in the heavens above, malefic monsters below, and the planet’s scarred surface a stage for climactic battles between mighty opposites. In practice, the Freudian scheme functions as a bulletproof shield protecting allegations that the unconscious mind contains this or that Boschian beast. If no such creature is ever sighted, one can always attribute the evidential vacancy to repression’s strong chains rather than to overactive imaginations. Freud’s memory model has thus encouraged many a hair-raising ghost story and no small amount of mischief.

The Franklin case is one such nightmare tale. In the most notorious of repressed memory cases, George Franklin stood trial in 1990 for murder because his daughter Eileen suddenly “remembered” that she saw him beat an eight-year-old girl to death twenty years before. No corroborating witnesses came forward. No physical evidence linked him to the crime—not a fingerprint, fiber, or DNA strand. The lifelike details composing Ms. Franklin’s recollected relic had all been published in newspaper accounts decades before. But when a solemn psychiatric expert intoned that Eileen’s forgotten “memory” was inarguably bona fide, the jury believed. George Franklin went to prison. After a federal court threw out the conviction five years later, the district attorney quietly elected not to retry the case. His star witness for the prosecution had meanwhile mutilated her tenuous credibility, after “remembering” that her father murdered two other people—crimes that DNA evidence and an airtight alibi proved he could not have committed.

Sunny San Mateo, where the Franklin affair unfolded, is thousands of miles and many decades distant from turn-of-the-century Vienna, where the memory doctrine that was to condemn Franklin originated. Freud himself wielded repression, not to charge people with homicide but to declare the subterranean influence of hidden incestuous thoughts. A child’s amorous interest in his parents fixes his attraction to later loves; since revulsion expels this lust from consciousness, he will always be ignorant of his patterned, odious longing. That is Freud’s account of unconscious emotional memory. A dramatic yarn, but at least two flaws undermine the model of memory at its center.

First, a memory is not a thing. Cardiac muscle fibers are objects, but the heartbeat they generate is a physiologic event, a collective flutter that propels life but nevertheless has no mass and occupies no space. A memory is another bodily process, produced by physical objects but itself as immaterial as the soul. If a heart beats once and then rests for a minute, the heartbeat has neither gone someplace nor must it be fetched back against resistance. Memories are the heartbeats of the nervous system, although decades may elapse before any one recurs. They are not objects; they do not travel. And second, modern science has erased Freud’s conviction about memory’s immutability. Memory is not only mutable, but as we will see in the next chapter, the nature of the brain’s storage mechanism dictates that memories must change over time.

Because Freud built his model of memory on counterfeit cornerstones, our century has seen it topple. The doctrine of repressed memory has sunk into disrepute; in many courts, “recovered” accusations are no longer admissible evidence of anything. But have no doubt—unconscious emotional knowledge does exist. A shadow does lie across the landscape of memory, but that darkness is not the sinister specter of censorship.

When the moon passes directly before the sun, the momentary superimposition throws a circle of twilight on Earth’s surface, an umbra. When the two resolve again into separate heavenly spheres, the land beholds a second dawn. Freud did not know that the memory voids he was charting are the penumbral shadows of a perpetual mental eclipse. He could not anticipate that someday science would divide memory into two distinct orbs, a sun and moon whose apparent unity misleads. One of the brain’s memory mechanisms bathes consciousness in a floodlight of facts and specificity, while the other—older, deeper, quieter—illumines our lives with a pale fire all its own.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DIARY

Who got drunk at your wedding? What color were your first lover’s eyes? Which actor starred opposite Myrna Loy in The Thin Man? If these questions generate answers, they do so only by the grace of the explicit memory system. Explicit memory, the more public of the brain’s twin storage machines, encodes event memories, including autobiographical recollections and discrete facts. When you need access to something you once knew or experienced, a moment’s mental sift presents a solution to consciousness. While explicit memory is swift and capacious, a fallacious sense of accuracy attends its frequently erroneous returns. New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain areas as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy. Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism says in The Importance of Being Earnest, “Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.” Sharp Cecily replies, “Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.”

The hardware that creates explicit memory lies within the brain’s temporal area. The most important component is the hippocampus, a graceful spiral of neurons that begins close to the midline and curls its way out into the poles of the temporal lobes.

Nestled deep in the heart of the brain, the hippocampus looks safe from injury. Not so—accidents, strokes, viruses, and neurosurgical enthusiasm can and do decimate the hippocampus. Patients who have lost their hippocampi bear witness to its memory powers, because no explicit memories can be created without one. These patients suffer from that staple of soap opera story lines, amnesia. Daytime dramas focus on a character’s inability to reconstruct an admittedly dizzying array of romantic misadventures, but the real problem for patients without hippocampi is that they cannot record and remember. Their lives are marooned on the island of the present.

One such individual, for instance, we’ll call Mr. Underwood: a sixty-seven-year-old man whose family brought him to the hospital because he seemed confused. Subsequent investigation revealed that he had Korsakoff’s syndrome—the destruction of some vital pieces of the explicit memory system caused, in this case, by decades of heavy drinking.

With no capacity to recall anything he had seen or done after the damage to his brain, Mr. Underwood became locked into an unchanging present. He always thought it was 1985, and he always thought Ronald Reagan was president. He was continually perplexed to find himself in the hospital, because patiently provided explanations evaporated from his mind within minutes of delivery. His regular doctors and nurses were strangers to him, and every encounter necessitated a fresh round of introductions. He enjoyed telling jokes—often the same joke three or four times in ten minutes, the old man blissfully unaware that repetition had robbed his punchlines of any possibility of punch. He was apt to wander off the ward and roam the hospital in amiable bewilderment until someone took the trouble to examine his wristband and find out who he was and where he came from. That he could never know.

Mr. Underwood had suffered a devastating neurologic injury that confined him to the windowless prison of now. A healthy mind flees backward in time every second (Who is that? Where did I leave the car keys? What did I argue with my wife about last night?). Doing so enables us to know what we have been through, where we are, what is going on in the world, and why. Information ran through Mr. Underwood like sand through a sieve. He lived a paper-thin existence, skimming by on the surface of time, further and further from knowledge that could ground him in a relevant world.

If Mr. Underwood’s drinking had devastated his explicit memory machine, how can he remember anything? How can he remember that Reagan was president in 1985, or his wife’s name, or his? The hippocampus is a key player in creating explicit memories, but the memories themselves reside elsewhere. Patients like Mr. Underwood can recollect events that happened up until their brain damage (within a few days), and nothing since.

Or so it was thought for many years. Under scrutiny, patients like Mr. Underwood showed researchers that even without explicit memory, the capacity to learn survives. This discovery was like finding a city on the dark side of the moon. The hunt for a hidden second memory system in the brain was on.

COVERT OPERATIONS

A patient like Mr. Underwood was taught to braid—a skill he was unacquainted with before his explicit memory expired. After he had mastered it, experimenters asked him if he knew how to braid. He replied “No,” a truthful statement from his point of view. Yet when three strips of cloth were placed in his hands he wove them together without hesitation.

If people form memories without realizing it, how could we ever know? Only by observing actions change from experience, and thus deducing what someone must have learned, regardless of what he says. The neural record describing how to braid must be stored differently from the event memory of the instruction sessions this patient could not remember receiving. If we are willing to check self-report at the door, then we may enter the realm of the brain’s shadow learning system.

While explicit memory serves itself up for conscious reflection, implicitmemory does not. That is why it escapes our notice. The gulf between learning and awareness in the would-be weaver gapes just as widely in the healthy brain. All of us acquire wonderfully complicated knowledge that we cannot describe, explain, or recognize.

Consider the following study: the researchers Barbara Knowlton, Jennifer Mangels, and Larry Squire gave subjects the task of predicting the weather in a simple computer model. On each trial, a computer screen showed one, two, or three of the cues pictured on the next page. The subject’s job was to predict whether such hints combined to herald rain or shine in the computer’s phantasmagorical world. Each subject looked at the cues and typed in his answer, and the computer gave feedback, telling him whether his meteorological prognostication had been right or wrong. Then he tried again.

The researchers designed this experiment so that the displayed cues, as unhelpful as they look, did relate lawfully to the ultimate outcome of showers or sun. The relationship between cues and effect, however, was a complex, probabilistic function that even the smartest person couldn’t deduce. By deliberately making the task too difficult for logic to unravel, the investigators hoped to neutralize neocortical reasoning—so that subjects would confront the task with one brain tied behind their backs, so to speak. The cognitive obfuscation succeeded; none of the subjects figured out the scheme whereby clues pointed the way to a weather prediction. Despite their incomprehension, subjects nevertheless steadily honed their forecasting abilities. After just fifty trials, the average subject was right 70 percent of the time. Even though subjects didn’t understand what they were doing or why it worked, they were still able to do it. They gradually developed a feel for the situation, and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.

Clues given to subjects attempting to predict the weather. (Adapted from Knowlton et al., 1996.)

Predicting a day’s real weather involves a different set of clues but, until the advent of modern meteorology, relied on the same process that this study explores. The crisp, empty blue of a morning sky, the direction of wind, a hint of coolness to the air, an indefinable smell just out of reach (and perhaps, for some, a twinge of rheumatism in the knee) can combine to sketch a foreglimpse of afternoon rain or snow by nightfall. “It feels like rain today,” one thinks, while looking at a sky obstinately clear of clouds.

For the amateur predictor (as most of us are), this inner, so easily ignored sense may be the best available guide. In tasks similar to weather prediction, one study found that conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but not how well they did it.

Knowlton, Squire, and Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory by inventing a novel grammatical structure—a set of complicated, arbitrary steps for assembling “words” in an original and utterly useless language.

This scheme can generate an infinite number of different words using T, V, J, and X, but not all combinations are valid. (XXVXJ is an acceptable word, for instance, but TVXJ is not.) The researchers did not divulge their complex rule system. They simply offered a list of fifty authentic words, and then asked subjects to judge the legitimacy of candidate words they had not previously seen.

Experimenters found that people were able to distinguish new words that adhered to the artificial grammar from those that violated it. What the subjects couldn’t do was specify how they were reaching their correct determinations. Once again, they had mastered the inner workings of an intricate system in a way that they could not render specific. They could only say they were using their intuition.

The “word”-generating scheme in an artificial grammar study. (Adapted from Knowlton et al., 1992.)

Grammatical and nongrammatical “words” in an artificial grammar. (Adapted from Knowlton et al., 1992.)

How could people make these complex judgments absent any understanding of the basis? A part of the brain must apprehend the artificial grammar’s elaborate pattern without involving the neural systems responsible for comprehension. That brain mechanism has to be implicit memory, because patients with hippocampal damage (and no explicit memory) performed the artificial grammar and weather prediction tasks as well as normal subjects did. The brain’s dual memory systems stand as perfect complements: damage to the organs of implicit memory leaves behind normal learning for events, facts, and lists, but obliterates the silent, incremental acquisition of intuitive knowledge human beings depend on.

The scientific study of intuition is just beginning. Researchers are already probing its power. In a 1997 study of uncommon elegance, Antoine Bechara, Hanna and Antonio Damasio, and Daniel Tranel gave people $2,000 in play money and four decks of cards to choose from. Subjects did not know the decks were rigged: turning over a card paid $100 in two decks and $50 in the other two. As in life, the high-paying decks also contained high-penalty cards, where the low-paying decks entailed fewer and smaller fines. Overall, playing exclusively from $50 decks was the winning strategy, but subjects knew nothing of the cards upon first encountering them.

After suffering a few big losses, people began to show tiny elevations in sweating as they considered drawing a card from the risky decks. Bodily tension was the only indicator of an impending hunch; by the twentieth round none could express any verbal inkling that half the cards were stacked against them. After fifty or so turns, people began to suspect that they should avoid the $100 decks, although they couldn’t explain the reason for doing so. After playing eighty cards, two thirds of the subjects had figured out which decks to choose and why. Although the remaining third did not attain this conceptual stage, they were still able to win by using their sharpening intuition.

As we move through the world we tend to presume that success comes from understanding. The brightness of rationality’s narrow beam makes this supposition nearly inescapable. “Reason is the substance of the universe,” Hegel crowed in an age when science still expected to explicate everything. But these memory studies have intuition leading comprehension by a country mile; they reveal our lives lit by the diffuse glow of a second sun we never see. When confronted with repetitive experiences, the brain unconsciously extracts the rules that underlie them. We experience the perceptible portion of this facility as a gathering pressure in the solar plexus, ready for use but defying description. Such knowledge develops with languorous ease and inevitability, stubbornly inexpressible, never destined for translation into words.

Aristotle drew the distinction between knowing that something is so and knowing why. The restless desire of the Athenians to seek causes marked the first unsteady steps of scientific exploration. Their explanations have metamorphosed into myth, but their hierarchy of knowing endured: real knowledge, true knowledge, comes from knowing why. The medieval definition of scientia was just that: cognitio per causas, knowing the cause. The science of our day is confirming the utility, even the supremacy, of knowing that X is so without why. Comprehension’s proper role is icing on the cognitive cake. Reason, as Pascal observed, is the slow and tortuous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it.

Implicit memory ensures that camouflaged learning permeates our lives. Spoken language, for instance, is based on a labyrinthine array of phonological and grammatical rules that native speakers know but could not explicate; most could not even recognize the rules when spelled out in plain English. We can tell instantly, as Steven Pinker observes in The Language Instinct, that thole, plast, and flitch are not English words but they could be, where vlas, ptak, and nyip cannot be English. Most of us have no idea why this superficially capricious distinction prevails—the quixotic “Why not nyip?” is immediately suppressed by its indisputable feeling of foreignness. “My brother can be died,” as Pinker notes, will grate on the mind’s ear, despite its coexistence with permissible homologues “My ball can be bounced” and “My horse can be raced.” Only a handful of grammarians can explain why. Implicit knowledge makes language structures available for automatic use but not reflection. Children learn to speak without instruction; they absorb linguistic rules as a sponge absorbs water. Every language is intricate, but none is chaotic; the underlying uniformities reveal themselves to the neural systems poised to pluck recurring patterns out of a sea of experience.

Behind the familiar bright, analytic engine of consciousness is a shadow of silent strength, spinning dazzlingly complicated life into automatic actions, convictions without intellect, and hunches whose reasons follow later or not at all. It is this darker system that guides our choices in love.

Denise Levertov again:

Look inward: see me

with embryo wings, one

feathered in soot, the other

blazing ciliations of ember, pale

flare-pinions. Well—

could I go

on one wing,

the white one?

Fly into love’s country on light and no shadow? Not a chance, as we shall see.

A CHILD’S GARDEN OF MEMORY

A child’s dual memory banks mature at different rates. The structures generating explicit memories are immature at birth, and they require years of neurodevelopment to become fully functional. Implicit memory needs no warm-up; it is operational before a baby is born. In later life, the explicit memory system slowly degenerates as decades advance, while the implicit system retains its youthful robustness.

These separate maturational courses, like skewed lines in space, chart divergent trajectories for knowledge. Once a person sees the other side of thirty, he finds his power to retain individual bits of data on the wane. As the years pass he can expect to strain for the names of acquaintances, where he left the car keys, or sometimes the car. But his intuition endures and accrues. The brain’s division of memory labor upholds the adage: you never forget how to ride a bike. People don’t forget any capacity that depends on feel rather than fact. Because explicit memory doesn’t work well at either end of a lifetime, people cannot retain event memories before the age of two. Freud declared in a letter of January 24, 1897, to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess, that he had retrieved a patient’s memory from eleven months of age, allowing him to “hear again the words that were exchanged between two adults at that time! It is as though it comes from a phonograph.” Freud’s brilliance notwithstanding, he is claiming for his patient a recollective precocity that outstrips Mozart’s musical one.

If infants are not recording autobiographical incidents, what are they learning? Because a baby has minimal motor control, he cannot readily demonstrate his prowess, but several clever experiments have affirmed that infants are formidable students. By monitoring infants’ physiologic reactions to novelty, researchers can determine which events elicit nothing more than the autonomic equivalent of a yawn—and thus they can tell what’s new and what’s known to an infant’s mind.

These techniques prove that babies remember their mothers’ voice and face within thirty-six hours of birth. Within days, an infant recognizes and prefers not only his mother’s voice but also her native language, even when spoken by a stranger. You might think this knowledge comes from postpartum interactions—quick learning indeed. But a newborn doesn’t recognize his father’s voice, indicating that neonatal preferences reflect learning before birth. The auditory system’s rapid development in utero and the watery womb’s excellent sound system surround the fetus in a symphony. Bathed for nine months in his mother’s vocalizations, a baby’s brain begins to decode and store them—not just the speaker’s tone, but her language patterns. Once born, a baby orients to the familiar sounds of his mother’s voice and her mother tongue, and favors them over any other. In doing so, he demonstrates the nascent traces of both attachment and memory.

Like the acquisition of spoken language, emotional learning happens implicitly. Even with the help of his intrauterine head start, a child takes many months to comprehend full sentences and a bit longer to produce them. Facial expressions, tone of voice, and touch carry a mammal’s emotional messages; as we saw in chapter 3, a baby is born fluent in that signaling system. Implicit memory is the brain’s sole learning component in the first years of life, when mother and child are bound together through their limbic connection.

Can emotional memories be recorded outside the explicit system? Antonio Damasio has shown they can. Damasio’s patient Boswell is like Mr. Underwood—he has no explicit memory. Damasio and Daniel Tranel observed, however, that Boswell’s bonding behavior was not diffusely random; he seemed particularly attached to a certain nursing aide. Intrigued by his affectionate selectivity, Tranel and Damasio designed an experiment to test Boswell’s ability to form and preserve emotional memories. The investigators briefed three coconspirators on how to act: “Good Guy” was flattering and solicitous to Boswell, “Neutral Guy” reserved and bland, and “Bad Guy” downright unpleasant. Boswell later truthfully denied memory of meeting any of them—that knowledge never found its way into his long-term storage. But when forced to choose whom he would ask for gum or cigarettes, he stuck with Good Guy more often than chance predicted. Without event memory, without the ability to remember a name or a face, Boswell retained an emotional impression.

The poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote that the devil’s finest trick is convincing the world he doesn’t exist. Implicit memory has done the same. Ask someone about his emotional memory, and he’ll begin by recounting the jarring discontinuities that catch his retrospective eye—the faithful dog hit by a car when he was five, the family’s move from Bakersfield to Boston when he was nine, the high school prom made miserable by a rebuff from the raven-haired beauty his heart was set upon. What could be more natural than assuming that the traumas that tower in memory have affected us most? Some of them do leave their mark, but the slow and surreptitious implicit system is the true scribe of emotional learning.

A child enveloped in a particular style of relatedness learns its special intricacies and particular rhythms, as he distills a string of instances into the simpler tenets they exemplify. As he does so, he arrives at an intuitive knowledge of love that forever evades consciousness. He owes the ignorance of his own heart not to repression but to the brain’s dual memory design. The frustrating illegibility of love’s book is, as software makers say of problems with their programs, a feature and not a bug.

The brain’s implacable condensation of precepts is its strength and its downfall. Implicit memory extracts a principle for the same reason that Mallory scaled Everest—“because it is there.” Encountering an early series of consistent instances can implant an erroneous generality in a child’s mind. This mental machinery distills and does not evaluate; it cannot detect whether the larger world runs in accordance with the scheme it has drawn forth from the emotional microcosm of a family. Just as grammatical English emerges from our lips automatically, a structured pattern of emotional relatedness emanates from each of us.

We play out our unconscious knowledge in every unthinking move we make in the dance of loving. If a child has the right parents, he learns the right principles—that love means protection, caretaking, loyalty, sacrifice. He comes to know it not because he is told, but because his brain automatically narrows crowded confusion into a few regular prototypes. If he has emotionally unhealthy parents, a child unwittingly memorizes the precise lesson of their troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million other crippling variations. Tolstoy was right: happy families are blandly similar (much in the way that healthy bodies are), and unhappy families unique in the exact and varied configurations of their pathology.

Take, for instance, a young man unhappily single with good reason. For as long as he can remember, his romances travel the same track. First, the shock of love with its vertiginous rush and the sweet fire in his spine. Mad mutual devotion follows for weeks. Then the first alarming note: a trickle of criticism from his partner. As their relationship settles in, the trickle becomes a torrent and the torrent a cataract. He is lazy; he is thoughtless; his taste in restaurants is banal and his housekeeping habits a horror. When he can’t stand it any longer, he breaks off the relationship. Blessed silence and relief descend. As the weeks drag by into months, his newfound ease slides over into loneliness. The next woman he dates reveals herself (after a brief time) to be the doppelgänger of his recently departed ex. Without a woman, his life is empty; with her, it’s misery.

These incessant cycles are the present-day echoes of a primal duet, a long-remembered melody from implicit memory. Taken together, his girlfriends present the sketch his mind recorded of his mother—an intelligent and creative woman, but with a short temper and a tendency to externalize and blame. His young brain absorbed that equation; he expects to find that archetype wherever people love. For reasons we will outline in the next chapter, he cannot find anything else. Left to himself, he will not realize there is something else to be found.

Even common sense will mislead him. He might think, as many reasonable people do, that analyzing childhood pivot points will resolve his troubles. The simplicity of this supposition appeals to both patients and psychotherapists—how easy for us to believe in a single, concentrated cause for complexity, and how hard to find visceral satisfaction in the accretion of infinitesimal influence that is more often nature’s way. Hot on the trail of fugitive Mnemosyne, a therapist may root around in the patient’s explicit past as he might a musty kitchen cabinet, looking to “uncover” the event memories of unpleasantness that, once wrenched into the daylight, can deliver redemption.

Turning psychotherapy into a treasure hunt for the explicit past is misguided. Exposure to a style of relatedness imprints a person with its grammar and syntax. The perceptive observer can see the stamp of that knowledge everywhere: in dreams, work, relationships, in the way he loves his wife, his children, and his dog today. Autobiographical memories are useful, because the pattern gleams there, too, often stark and unadorned. But explicit memory is not a shrine. Every day the patient parades the jewels of memory that the therapist seeks; they are woven inextricably into the tapestry of his life. He can no more leave the mark of his past behind than he can his face or his fingerprints. All are visible to someone who looks in the right place.

People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it doesn’t count for much in the neural systems that evolved before understanding existed. Ideas bounce like so many peas off the sturdy incomprehension of the limbic and reptilian brains. The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, prevents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. The sheer volume and variety of self-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it.

REALITY FLIGHTS

Implicit memory warps our window on the world—one of many mental mechanisms that do so. The brain never permits naked reality to intrude into consciousness; all inbound sensory impressions pass through a process that sands the rough edges off an inhospitably complex universe. For a demonstration, close an eye, push gently on the corner of the other—and the world dips or lurches several degrees, as if it were not your fingertip moving a millimeter but the hand of God shaking the planet. The brain doesn’t detect the eye’s position but tracks only the ocular movements it commands. When it orders no eye movements, the brain assumes none occurred—accurate in every situation save one. Displacing the eye manually shifts the light falling on the retina. The brain concludes that with eyes immobile, the world has turned. All experience comes to us through similar layers of invisible and occasionally dubious deductions.

But like the Wizard of Oz, your brain encourages you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The retina registers color only in the central thirty degrees of the visual field. Visual virtuality, on the other hand, is an omnidirectional chromatic canvas— with many hues inferred and presumed and painted in for our viewing enjoyment. Assuming the world is the way it looks is the neurally prompted so-called naïve realism to which most of us unwittingly subscribe. Among the many certainties in life, Umberto Eco writes, one is supreme: “All things appear to us as they appear to us, and it is impossible for them to appear otherwise.”

Our internal realities are mock-ups of unparalleled persuasive power. The tangle of neurons that make up a person, after all, are the same ones that generate the disparity between reality and experience. Of course, glitches do occur. If a virtual world misrepresents reality only slightly, we call that an illusion; if the discord is substantial, a hallucination. Psychosis is a sweeping and catastrophic disparity between the individually virtual and the clean, hard edge of the veridical. Even digestive sensations have their own replica in the brain, thus enabling strange illnesses—like that of a woman who, after a stroke, felt the food she swallowed travel down her throat and descend into a nonexistent cavity in her left arm, a disquieting disruption in visceral virtuality. The limbic brain, too, models the world, making our emotional realities a set of neurally generated phantoms loose in the mind.

Reality is thus more personal than daily life suggests. Nobody inhabits the same emotional realm. Many people live in a world so singular that what they see when they open their eyes in the morning may be unfathomable to the rest of humanity. When one woman looks at an attractive man, she sees someone who wants to possess her and stifle her creativity; another sees a lonely soul who needs mothering and is crying out for her to do it; a third sees a playboy who must be seduced away from his desirable and unworthy mistress. Every one of them knows what she sees and never doubts the identity of the man in front of her faithful retinas, her fanciful brain. Because people trust their senses, each believes in her own virtuality with a sectarian’s fervor.

It’s the rare person who glimpses the expanse of his own subjectivity, who knows that everything before his mind’s eye is the Hindu’s maya— an elaborate dream of the world worthy of a god, but reverie just the same. Only a person of surpassing wisdom doubts his own mind enough to remark, as the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson once did when reversing himself on a point of law, “The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.”