Not an Ending

This month I've been hooked on Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' on Channel 4; a satirical take on modern life in the tradition of Orwell's '1984'. The chilling three part series sent up politics, the media and, most of all, our obsession with technology, culminating last night with 'The Entire History of You', a post-modern sexual morality tale without an apparent moral.

It seems to me the 'Black Mirror' series has a few interesting things to say about the brain as well as offering a surreal commentary on the modern world. In the first episode, a fictional Prime Minister is blackmailed into an act of bestiality as the public watches, sickened but compelled. The second imagines a society framed entirely by entertainment in which the only apparent means of escape is through gross reality TV talent shows. The premise of the final episode extends this idea of technological dystopia, showing us a world in which all experiences are stored and archived for later access; nothing can be lost, the past becomes a kind of film to be replayed at any moment. The technology (called 'grain') allows people to reflect back on recent and distant events (by watching 'redos') - for the main character Liam, this becomes a source of sexual jealousy.

The notion of 'grain' and 'an entire history of you' is interesting from a neuroscientific perspective. At a dinner party early in the episode, one of Brooker's characters defends grain technology, arguing that humans are inherently suggestible and easily form false memories of things that have happened to them. Neuroscience, of course, serves as a reminder of just how vulnerable we are to illusions, delusions and disorders. Amnesia, anosognosia and Cotard's syndrome are just some of the neurological disorders that alter a person's constructed sense of self and of their past.

The idea that the 'self' is a narrative is a longstanding one: Proust articulated it in 'In Search of Lost Time', recognising that memory is an act of reconstruction: or, in other words, our memories are not like fiction, they are fiction.  In 1932, Frederic Bartlett published his book 'Remembering' which argued that a memory is not the re-excitation of fragmentary, fixed 'traces' or elements in the brain, but a reconstruction, more akin to imagination. We misremember the past, even as we try to accurately recall it. As Paul Broks puts it: 'We build a story of ourselves from the raw materials of language, memory and experience....confabulation is the construction of an erroneous self-story, signifying the neurological breakdown of the storyteller.'

The 'Sally Anne' test, used
to assess
Theory of Mind

Confabulation is not just an pathological symptom. Our ability to make inferences about the mental states of others - what psychologists call Theory of Mind - also allows us to deceive people deliberately. Brooker's 'The Entire History of You' tackles the interesting issue of how we define truth in relation to experience. The plot centres around a sexual infidelity and a husband's obsession with uncovering it and seems to question whether what we see (and can replay) is somehow more authentic than our patchy memories.

The three episodes of 'Black Mirror' are, in my opinion, linked by their dystopian view of technology, mass media and the effect this has on individual and collective thought and action. In this, Brooker's series is framed by some of the ideas in Iain McGilchrist's recent book 'The Master and his Emissary'. McGilchrist's book uses the notion of fuctional asymmetry in the left and right hemispheres of the brain as a metaphor for different approaches to looking at the world, the first fragmentary, discrete, concerned with close attention and the second holistic, intuitive and concerned with broad attention. Some of his ideas are nicely summarised here. To do his argument a disservice by simplifying it in a blog post, McGilchrist contends that the left hemisphere mode of attention is overvalued in modern Western society and the right hemisphere's broader, embodied mode is undervalued, with potentially damaging consequences.

Why should the left hemisphere's 'style' be unhealthy? McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheric modes of thought should balance and compliment each other. Left hemisphere dominance, however, leads to over-awareness, which (ironically) alienates us from the world: only ourselves and our own thought processes are real. The left hemisphere has a preference for the man made, the abstract, the self-referential: it is as if the map of the world has replaced the world itself. Representations are prized above the things they represent. To quote McGilChrist, 'the more one stares at things, the more one freights them with import', but that import is without meaning, the observer is 'not let in on the secret'. We become trapped in a hall of mirrors (some of them black, perhaps). 

Some might say McGilchrist's argument is speculative, metaphorical rather than scientific, that his extrapolation from brain to society is a step too far. Leaving these criticisms aside, his view of a left hemisphere world characterised by bureaucracy, anonymity, abstraction, alienating technology and social isolation (what Emile Durkheim called 'anomie') bears a striking resemblance to the world created in 'Black Mirror'. 

In particular, McGilchrist believes that the left hemisphere's devitalisation of things generates a boredom which leads to sensationalism, something explored in episode 2 of 'Black Mirror' where the characters are bombarded by images on a screen all day, mostly music and porn channels. The left hemisphere's desire to predict and control the external environment and turn it into a mechanistic system resonates with the notion of 'grain' technology in episode 3, the urge to possess, monitor, review and control the past. 

I was particularly interested in what Brooker's series has to say about the implications of all this for close relationships. McGilchrist tells us that in a left hemisphere world 'sex, the power of which the right hemisphere realises is based on the implicit, would become explicit and omnipresent'. At the same time, intimacy is abstracted, since 'the body has become an object in the world like other objects'. Ironically, 'like most answers to boredom, pornography is itself characterised by the boredom it aims to dispel: both are a result of a certain way of looking at the world.' In the final episode of 'Black Mirror' one character, Jonas, describes how he'd masturbate to 'redos' of old encounters while his wife was upstairs in bed, waiting to have sex with him. In a later scene, a couple have indifferent sex while replaying scenes of their earlier, more passionate nights. When the main character, Liam, becomes obsessed with his wife's infidelity, he's more concerned with stories and representations than with emotions: love in the time of left hemisphere dominance?
It's interesting that McGilchrist believes poetry is the province of the right hemisphere and, as such, offers a stay against the left hemisphere's itemised, functional view of the world. In poetry, different possibilities can exist at once. The truth of poetry doesn't always need to be a classificatory one. I thought I'd end this ramble with a poem by the late, great Andrew Waterhouse which seems to illustrate this and which also happens to be about memory, versions of the truth and romantic obsession, picking up where the last 'Black Mirror' leaves off. Besides, he's far more eloquent than I could ever be:


Not an Ending

He never lived in that valley

or anywhere else. On the night in question

he did not stand by the river or ignore

the new rain or drop stones into the water.

There were no tree songs around him,

no unidentified birds, no flowing to the sea.

Her eyes were not blue. Those were not her boots.

she walked more quickly. He did not hear

her last word or want to. He may

have shrugged, but never shook.

He had no regrets and would not think

of her again. He would not think of her again.