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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Illustrations © Lucia Parks and Riccardo Manzotti 2017
Cover photograph © Vincent Grafhorst/Minden Picture/plainpicture

Tim Parks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Song Lyrics from ‘I Threw It All Away’ by Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline, 1969

To Riccardo and Eleonora

Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to Jakob Köllhofer and Jutta Wagner at the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut in Heidelberg for their generosity in inviting me to the city in 2015 and making it possible for me to meet the scientists and thinkers whose work has enriched this book. Thanks also to those thinkers themselves – Sabina Pauen, Thomas Fuchs and Hannah Monyer – for giving me their time, sharing their ideas, having patience with my ignorance, but above all for the gift of their intellectual vitality, which was so encouraging and stimulating. I am very much in their debt.

Intellect to Senses: Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.

Senses to Intellect: Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.

Democritus, fourth century BC

My old familiar opinions keep coming back, and against my will they capture my belief. It is as though they had a right to a place in my belief-system as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.

René Descartes, 1641

I am what is around me.

Wallace Stevens, 1917

Waking

I open my eyes and there are the wall, the wardrobe, the bedside table, the lamp, the tissues, the sheets, the blankets, the smell, the person next to me, the sound of the alarm. Multiplicity. I can’t have one item without the rest.

I open my eyes and there are a part of the wardrobe – the side nearest to me, with a grey satiny wood surface – and a few surrounding patches of the wall which has a silver grey wallpaper with some stains around the bedside table, perhaps splashes of tea. The sheets are glimpsed, parts of the sheets, but also felt; the blanket has its weight, or rather mass, which I perceive as weight, thanks to gravity. I know the person beside me by the warmth and the breathing, but I haven’t seen her yet. Also there’s a window, though that’s behind me surely. Yet I’m aware of it, or think I am, without seeing or touching it. I mean, I know it’s there. I think I know. It’s the light through the window, surely, that I’m seeing on the wardrobe and the wall. What else?

I close my eyes. Now the smell comes to the fore. What is it? Me, my partner, the room, the sheets, the carpet. It’s warm. Or the breath making the smell is warm. Or my body. There’s a strong feeling of my body that I wouldn’t know how to describe at all. Eyes closed, waiting for the alarm to sound again, it is not exactly dark but not exactly light. More a kind of waiting to be dark or light when I open my eyes. For the moment I’m not seeing anything. But I’m not seeing nothing either. Perhaps I’m seeing the inside of my eyelids.

My partner says, ‘Amore,’ in a sleepy voice. And she asks, ‘Are you cold?’ I say no I’m not cold. If anything I’m hot. She’s cold, she says.

I can feel a tug of bedclothes on my body. That makes sense: partner pulling the bedclothes. She has an issue with bedclothes. Awareness of my and my partner’s history. Jokes about bedclothes. I could say something, but don’t.

Suddenly I’m walking along a road by the edge of a wood. I turn to go in between the trees and see a stream at the bottom of a shallow valley, it seems a good place to swim …

The alarm sounds again. It’s set for ten-minute intervals. I must have fallen asleep. So that was a dream and this is reality. The wood, the stream. In the dream I didn’t know it was a dream, but nor would I have been able to say what came before the wood and the stream; I had no memory of the bedroom and the alarm; in the dream I was really in the moment; but now, back with the bedroom and the jingling alarm, I have a memory, or simply awareness, of the wood and the stream and there is some kind of continuity, a sort of me-ness that links them. In the one situation I can compare the experiences, in the other, I can’t. Is that how I know this is reality and that is dream?

Again I open my eyes and see a whole that is made up of bits of all the separate things I see, none of which I see whole, as it were. I mean I see bits of the wardrobe and I could try to imagine the whole wardrobe as something you might walk round in an IKEA showroom, or I can imagine a two-dimensional photo or a drawing of the wardrobe, taken or done in such a way as to suggest three dimensions – I could even draw such a thing myself, come to think of it – but at the same time there are large areas of the wardrobe I will never see, where it backs onto the wall, for example, or underneath where it touches the floor. So when I say I see the wardrobe I mean I see that bit of it that is towards my eye and not blocked by the bedclothes. In fact when I use all these words, bedclothes, wardrobe, wall, lamp, I mean I see only the part of them that I see, though the word seems to refer to the whole thing, the idea of the whole thing. Words are Platonic maybe. They permit Platonism. Word ‘wardrobe’ = idea of wardrobe, not the bit of wardrobe I actually see.

I close my eyes but can’t conjure up any clear image of an entire Platonic wardrobe, or absolute wardrobe, free from any contact with walls and floors. It all seems a lot of effort.

When the alarm sounds my eyes open automatically. I don’t seem to have much choice. It must be the famous conditioned reflex. Waking, you open your eyes and that’s that. Once again I see bits of lots of things – or the parts of those things that are facing me – and now I realise there are no gaps between these parts. I mean there are probably scores of things I see (part of) if I bothered to list them – switch lampshade picture sock (one) tissues (many) carpet floor book wristwatch hinge of wardrobe door – but although I perceive these things as separate there are no spaces between them the way there are spaces between the words that designate them, even when I don’t put commas in the list. The parts I see in the room run directly into the other parts I see. The world has no empty bits (that I can see). Or even fault lines like a jigsaw. Not even around the edges. It’s seamless.

In all directions, then, as I turn my head, or move my eyes, the world continues and will continue wherever I go without any gaps. And the line at the peripheral horizon of vision is not sharp, as in a camera frame, but nor could you call it a fading out. I don’t know how to describe it. There’s no analogy. It is as we know it. There’s an intensity of focus in the centre, the things I’m actively looking at, and then the sense of a periphery that could become focused if I so desired. But for the moment it’s not focused. There’s no edge there, whether hard or fuzzy, but as it were a nothing that might become a something all around the something I’m attending to that will become a nothing as I turn elsewhere. There’s a constant feeling of potential, an invitation to move and change the things I am seeing, to substitute one thing for another. We rarely stay focused in one place for long.

Our hands are touching now. I can feel her fingers. She said she felt cold, and I feel hot but, touching, her hand feels hotter than mine. It’s a pleasure to touch her.

I close my eyes and try to remember some more of the dream, the wood, the stream. There is something there to remember, I think; something is telling me this dream was longer and richer than just the road, the wood, the stream.

But how can something tell me something when it’s all me? Let’s say I have a feeling that there is more to the dream than was immediately recalled. The road was rising slightly as I walked along it – a dark asphalt road – and the wood was to my left when I turned and entered it and saw between the tree trunks the grey earth sloping gently down to the stream. There was more. The stream was shallow. The water was transparent. Which was why I thought it would be nice to swim. I try to focus on this, or put pressure on it, whatever it is one does, but this causes an unpleasant feeling in my head. It’s an effort that something inside me doesn’t want me to make. There is tension. Between parts of me.

The room isn’t there now I have my eyes closed, but nor are the wood and the stream. The smells and warmth are there of course, and the presence of my own body – I can’t cut them out so easily – the same smells as when I had my eyes open, the same feeling of the sheets and the pleasure of the hand touching mine – I haven’t seen it but I couldn’t mistake it as anything but a hand – and the awareness of my partner who must be there otherwise the hand wouldn’t be there, and her voice. A faint sound of traffic too.

Eyes closed, the room isn’t there, but I know I just saw the room and quite recently the wood and the stream. Saying I know I just saw the room is not the same as saying I remember the room. Where exactly is that sock, for example? Blue sock or brown? Don’t know. I remember the sock but not its colour. Actually I don’t even remember the colour of the carpet, though I know this room has one.

So does my experience of the room have the same status as my experience of the wood and the stream? I’m not sure, I’m not sure what status means really. Was it as real? Is that what I mean? Everything is real while it’s happening, isn’t it? Or it wouldn’t be happening. That is: something must be happening even if it might not be the thing you think it is. Otherwise there would be no experience.

Feeling my partner’s fingers stroking my wrist I’m aware of an enormous reluctance to get up; being in bed is so nice and it’s a damp autumn day. How do I know it’s damp if I haven’t looked out of the window and couldn’t tell whether the traffic sound suggested a wet road or not? I don’t know, but I feel as if I did.

The truth is, today will be busy. Not that my schedule is immediately present to me in all its details, but I’m aware that pretty soon I’ll be checking it on my computer and doing all the things I’ve arranged to do, keeping the appointments I’ve set up and calling the people I need to call to set up further appointments. In short, I’ll be making a big effort to be the person I am very aware of being as I wake up.

The person who made these appointments of course. Who would I be if I just dropped my appointments and stayed in bed? Who would pay for the hotel room?

My body feels so cosy in the sheets in the dark brightness of closed eyes and then I remember there were animals in the water. I turned left off the road, walked into the trees and saw a broad stream with animals all walking upstream from left to right. A leopard. A dog. A very large white rabbit. Largest of all, some kind of dinosaur, a man-size lizard walking on hind legs, kind of thing. But without a head, or not something you could easily call a head. I remember thinking this was strange. Like a toy, but life-size.

Not really. I’m aware of having seen them. I know I had that experience. I think large white rabbit. Using words. I saw a large white rabbit. It was hopping in a standing position, not running the way rabbits really do. It was very white. Like the white rabbits I kept as a child. But I wouldn’t say I have a clear image of the rabbit in my head, like a photo, or a video. On the other hand I know I’m not just using the word. It feels there is something visual there, a sort of waiting for a rabbit to reappear, or the after-image of a sudden rabbit when it’s gone, but not something I can really see, the way I would immediately see the hotel room if I opened my eyes, which I don’t want to, snuggled as I am in the sheets with my partner stroking my hand, feeling extremely comfortable and not wanting to think about today and everything I’m supposed to do. It will be busy.

Very soon the alarm will surely go off again. It’s been quite a long time already.

Why did I dream of animals? There was an emotion of surprise in the dream when the animals appeared, perhaps because they were oddly sized and walking upstream. The rabbit was bigger than it should have been. The leopard and the dog were smaller and nondescript. The dog is only a word now, there is nothing left of it visually, though there must have been something initially, otherwise why would I have thought, dog? Still, I thought leopard too and I’m not really sure I could recognise a leopard if I saw one, I mean, distinguish it from, say, a cheetah, or a jaguar. In any event there was something catlike that I took to be a leopard. Or perhaps I dreamed the word, leopard, associating it with the catlike creature I was seeing. Going back now, to the feeling of surprise on seeing the animals marching together up the shallow stream, it wasn’t unpleasant at all; it was a mildly hallucinatory, dazed sensation, as if something significant were being revealed; and the significance, whatever it was, corresponded to this sensation, this dream state, which of course ended abruptly when the alarm went off and I opened my eyes to the room.

Yes and no. The wood isn’t anywhere now, it’s not next door to the room, but I am the same person who saw it one minute then the room the next.

I feel I am the same person. I feel I give continuity, even if only a posteriori, to the two experiences, dream and reality, the same way I feel I am the same person I was forty years ago, though meeting me forty years ago must have been pretty different from meeting me now.

What we can say is that whatever the nature of the continuity, it’s quite different from the continuity that words give. I can control the continuity of the words (I believe), their being strung together in sentences and paragraphs and essays and stories, but not the continuity of seeing and feeling. Seeing and feeling, everything fits together and there are no empty spaces as my experience moves from the hand stroking my arm to the stream with the headless dinosaur and the white rabbit, then the traffic noises beyond the window, and back to the stain on the wall beside the lamp with the green shade.

Experience is more continuous and more happening at once, as it were, than words where only one thing can be said at a time. Words are linear. They sort things out, pull them out of the mix, conjure each object whole, when I don’t see anything whole, ever.

None of us have ever in our lives seen a single object whole, from all sides, up and down, the way a word denotes it.

But then again, words themselves are only part of the experience mix; there is no space between words and sensations; my partner, for example, now whispering something sweet in my neck as I begin to tense myself for the sound of the alarm which must surely come at any moment.

It’s a little singsong. The alarm. Der, d d d der der! Actually it’s my partner’s mobile. Words on the page can’t do the singsong. Nothing I can say or write, however technical or poetic, can give to you, dear reader, the hateful sound of this alarm which goes off every morning at 7.30, for about ten seconds, Der, d d d der der, then again at ten-minute intervals until at last we get up and turn it off. Hopefully before eight. Of course it is only hateful because it wakes us up. Otherwise it’s not an unpleasant sound at all. It’s the same sound the phone makes when you turn it on. Perhaps I could write something witty and evocative about the sound of the alarm, if I felt inspired. Maybe you would appreciate that. Maybe then you would say: the writer really made me hear the tinny sound of the alarm, and how hateful it was. But you’d be kidding yourself. The witty, evocative description would only give you something witty and evocative. A piece of writing. Words. Not really the sound of the alarm which is going to happen any second now. In fact it seems amazing it hasn’t gone off yet. Has the battery died?

I keep my eyes closed, knowing that when I open them in response to the alarm the world will be there and now it really will be time to get going. Aside from everything else, I’m aware of needing a pee. Actually, now I tell myself I need a pee I’m aware of having been aware of this for a while though I didn’t mention it to myself, as it were. How many selves do I have? Perhaps I mean I didn’t focus on it. The focusing business, that is in the continuous me, didn’t focus on the need to pee. Until now. Needing to pee was there, waiting to be brought into focus. Surprisingly patient.

It would mean I had gone blind, presumably. It couldn’t mean the world really wasn’t there because I would still be able to touch and feel things. If nothing else, I would feel the support of the bed beneath me, and of course the smells. I would just be blind.

But what if I woke and there were no smells either? And no sense of the bed supporting me from beneath. At that point I’d be a vegetable. I’d be brain dead.

What if I felt convinced that I still had all my faculties, that I was perfectly awake and capable of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, etc., just that there was nothing there for me to see hear smell touch?

How weird would that be? A sort of floating free. Ultimate detachment. I’m not sure I can imagine it even.

The reality is that when the alarm goes off – it’s been an amazingly long time now – and I open my eyes, the world will be there just as surely as I am there and my body is there. In a way you could say the world is as reliably attached to me as my body. Or I to it. I mean, I can move my eyes to different parts of the room, the world, but I can’t separate seeing and the world. We’re a whole.

Perhaps it’s like when, as a child, you pushed a suction cup against a wet windowpane and couldn’t pull it off. You could move the rubber cup across the pane, maybe it was a plastic arrow you had fired at the window, but you couldn’t detach it.

What a crazy analogy. Where did it come from? Was it stored in the brain somewhere, or instantly concocted?

The fact is I can feel, or at least remember, feel-remember, my hand tugging gently on the toy arrow and the suction cup resisting, sliding across the glass, but refusing to come free; a bizarre collaboration between childhood experience, brain chemistry and language. We’re back with words again. I wouldn’t have come up with this analogy if it wasn’t for language, which loves analogies. In fact, the only way I can maybe detach myself from the world, or enjoy that illusion, I mean detach myself from the immediate world of the room, of this morning, here in Heidelberg, September 2015, is by concentrating on the words and a sort of momentum they have when they get going so that the things in the solid world around you slip into the background. Because my attention isn’t focusing on them, but on the words.

In that case, then, to separate myself from the world I need to keep talking to myself, ten to the dozen. However on this occasion my talking to myself has led to the conclusion that I can’t ever really detach myself, my waking consciousness, from the world around me. When I open my eyes I just won’t be able not to see the silver grey wallpaper. We’re suckered together.

Could you say then that the world immediately around me is as much me as my body? In the sense that it’s equally inalienable?

And are words too perhaps just another manifestation of the world? Another category of things I couldn’t shake off even if I wanted to?

‘The alarm. Do you think the battery’s dead maybe? It seems it should have gone off by now.’

Colours

Let us pass over some experiences on the way to breakfast. I’m in Heidelberg to meet various professors and talk about what consciousness is. I’m in Heidelberg to spend a few pleasant days with my partner. Stepping into the hotel breakfast room it’s hard not to be aware of possible eyes on us. My partner is half my age. Slightly less to tell the truth; the tipping point will come in a year or so when she hits thirty-one. Figure it out for yourself. Such asymmetrical relationships are supposed to have something wrong with them. Various authorities, religious and secular, maintain that it’s far healthier when couples are more or less the same age. This view does not correspond to our experience, mine and my partner’s I mean; to us our relationship seems absolutely fine. In fact, it’s rather shocking to discover how wrong the alleged authorities can be in this respect. How many other things might they be mistaken about, you wonder? For example, my friend Riccardo Manzotti has recently demonstrated that the current model purporting to explain what happens when we experience colour after-images is quite wrong. But that is another conversation. Right now, taking a table in the breakfast room, we’re aware of two or three gazes assessing whether we are father and daughter or older man and mistress enjoying an illicit fling. But how could we be father and daughter, when we look so completely different? People sense these things at once; vast quantities of experience are brought to bear without even thinking, I mean without consciously reflecting. The sharp observer simply knows. The hotel maid, for example, a big girl in her late teens trussed up in a starched white apron with a little black cap, immediately assumes an air of complicity; she’s going to be well disposed to our supposed transgression.

And this would be the kind of thing one could so easily write about of course: how two people’s lives suddenly tangle together in the most unexpected and incongruous ways and how other people react to that. That is the stuff books are made of. Usually. I mean novels. Because that’s the way we tend to think of our lives, projecting things backward and forward in stories. And also because words, sentences, which run linear fashion through time, gathering energy as they go, are good at that, good at telling stories that also move through time: people meeting and falling in and out of love, finding and losing jobs, striving and succeeding, striving and failing. In fact, a lot of our lives seem to be made up of words, imposing some kind of shape and momentum on the precarious, barely describable business of actually being here, moment by moment, in the world: waking up to the wardrobe and the wallpaper, drifting in and out of dreams while the ten-minute interval of the alarm seems first cruelly brief, then disturbingly long. Stories are more familiar to us than living itself. Easier to be inside. Which is why we like novels, I suppose. Biographies, histories and memoirs too. I love them. Experience unfolds in them in a way that makes sense, altogether ignoring those redundant experiences between waking and breakfast: the obligatory visits to the bathroom, the struggle to figure out how the hotel shower works, the dazzled feel moving among gleaming reflective surfaces, the need to put your glasses back on to read the small print on the tiny coloured bottles: shampoo or shower soap? How could you ever keep a story going, or even an argument about the nature of consciousness for that matter, if you started to look at how life, how consciousness, actually is?

No, if we start writing about the present moment and all the whirl of perception and cogitation that goes with it, we’ll be overwhelmed. We’ll never capture it all. And we’ll bore the reader silly in the process. The genius of language is omission. It misses most things out, almost everything in fact; it invites the reader to board a fast train across the unnecessarily cluttered landscape of ordinary experience.

Or if we do try to say it all, to describe what being alive is like, I mean, at any specific moment, we’ll be so worried about boring our readers that we’ll start to make it fancy, start to redeem the avalanche of moment-by-moment perceptions in a little rhythm and rhyme, a little poetry maybe. We’ll try to make our account attractive. Ulysses-like. But what will be attractive will be the writing, not the moment itself. We’ll start getting interested in the delivery rather than the thing delivered, the way everyone is far more interested in Ulysses the book, its stream-of-consciousness style and controversial author James Joyce, than in anything his book actually talks about: Dublin, masturbation, newspaper advertising, funerals, prostitutes.

I want to avoid that. In fact the problem that faces me on this trip to Heidelberg is how to focus on the business of being conscious, how to invite you to focus on it, but without literary intent. We’re not going to do prettiness. Or melodrama. Or even polemics. We’re simply going to ask: can we ordinary folks say something useful about consciousness, observing our own experience, from moment to moment, these next couple of days? And then we’re going to ask, do the models, the explanations, whatever, that we have of consciousness, the version of events that our various authorities sign up to, make sense? Do they fit with what we experience second by second? And if not why not? Fortunately we’ve booked appointments with some smart people to discuss this.

All the same, I can’t help stopping to consider the glories of the breakfast buffet in this Heidelberg hotel. Basically there’s a black stone counter around two walls in a corner. At least it looks like stone. Then there are silver trays on this counter laden with fruits, pale green melons cut into slices, pineapples opened in symmetrical triangles, plump round strawberries laid one by one directly on the silver tray, figs slit open to display their meaty interior (just slightly more maroony than the shiny red of the strawberries), and in the middle of the tray, I mean of each tray, the bristling flourish of a pineapple top, its circles of dark green leaves sprouting up one inside the other then folding outward in a triumphant, crest-like flourish of vegetation.

Between the trays – sorry, we haven’t finished yet – are three-tiered bowls raising apples and grapes and oranges and kiwis high above the other foods, and candles in silver candlesticks with electric lights on top and, because this is Germany, plates with gherkins and radishes split open to enjoy the contrast of white inside and pink out, and thin slices of tomatoes and red, green and orange peppers, arranged symmetrically on beds of lettuce, with slices of cheese and rolls of ham beside bowls of boiled eggs and baskets of crusty bread rolls with sesame seeds and dark brown loaves wrapped tight in white cloths so you can slice them without transferring your bacteria to the bread.

Behind this cornucopia, along both walls of the corner where the counter is, runs a mirror just high enough to double this explosion of colour which is made all the more intense by bright overhead spotlights sunk into the ceiling. Actually, more than double it, since from the angle I’m standing at to fork fruit into my bowl, the mirror in front of me gives back not just the fruit, but the mirror on the other wall too, in a dazzling multiplication of wonderful things to eat wonderfully arranged and constantly replenished by the attentive hotel staff.

All this without even mentioning the gleaming white plates and polished cutlery and the tall silver urn with boiling water and above that a shelf of teapots and of course the inevitable Twining’s tea dispenser with its prettily coloured sachets. The book I have just been reading, The Quest for Consciousness by Christof Koch, describes colour and indeed perception in general as a ‘con job’: there are no blues or greens or reds out there in the world, Koch says, they are all generated in your brain, a cooperation between the visual cortex and three groups of clever cone-shaped cells in the retina transforming the light frequencies bouncing off different surfaces into the illusion of colour. In reality, then, and Koch is pretty much in line with received opinion here – ‘received opinion’ and ‘various authorities’ being more or less equivalent terms – all this breakfast buffet is happening in my head and the strawberry I just spooned into my bowl and will soon pop in my mouth is red nowhere but in my head. Although of course my brain is famously made up of grey gelatinous stuff.

Shaking my head (a kaleidoscope of colours), I try to figure out the tea urn. It’s a handsome thing, quite tall with a tap at the bottom and a kettle affair on top. Near the tap is a red switch, but no indication of whether it’s on or off. So is the water hot or isn’t it? Can I find out by touching the outside of the urn, or is the insulation such that it always remains cool? Am I supposed to turn the thing on myself? Assuming it’s presently turned off. Is that permitted? Or should I ask the waitress? She has disappeared. I hate tea that is not hot. And do I remove the kettle from the top and pour from that, or do I put my cup, or one of the other smaller teapots under the tap beneath the urn? I don’t know. The hotel staff are obviously under strict orders to keep everything very shiny because as I bend to study the urn I see my face in its silvery finish, though distorted of course, stretched horizontally as the urn curves away from me. The con job of perception plus the distortion of the curved mirror. Yet I recognise clearly enough the puzzled look on my face as I choose the tap and get it wrong, my tea is barely warm, damn!

Back at the table, we debate whether I should have another attempt at the urn. My partner thinks I should ask the maid, but neither of us speaks German, or not fluently, and I don’t want to appear stupid. Why not? Who cares whether the maid thinks I am stupid? She is not an authority. Or even a peer. And she already seems to think I’m here at the hotel with my bit on the side. But apparently I do care. The maid is a human being and I don’t want other human beings to judge that I don’t know what’s what when it comes to tea urns.

Or is it rather that I want the pleasure of figuring out the urn for myself? I want the small triumph of securing myself my hot water all on my own. The woman I am going to see this morning, Professor Sabina Pauen, sets up experiments about children’s ability to learn at very slightly different ages. Can a child at twenty-two months distinguish between functional and non-functional features of a simple tool? What about at twenty-four months? ‘Typical experiment’ – I explain to my partner as she checks the nutritional info on a yoghurt carton – ‘there is a long transparent plastic tube with a reward stuck in it. To push the reward out you need a stick-like instrument long enough to go right through the tube. There are three instruments of different lengths with handles of different colours. Only one is long enough to do the job. The kid sees an adult take one of the sticks, with, say, a blue handle, push the reward out and make a delighted face, after which the reward is given to the child. Then the child is handed a new tube, reward inside, together with the three tools. Does the child understand what to do? Does he or she choose the right tool, the one with the blue handle?’

‘Anyway, when the kid has figured it out, they take a break, then repeat the experiment, but changing the handles on the tools so that the tool that works now has, say, a red handle. The blue won’t work this time.’

‘So the question is: can a toddler distinguish between the functionally relevant length and the functionally irrelevant colour?’

‘Maybe they’d be eager to impress their parents anyway, or just themselves. They want to feel good, that they figured it out. Regardless of the reward.’

‘But what if the child rebels against the parents’ achievement obsession and refuses to get interested in the tube game?’

I shake my head. ‘The fact is a lot of these experiments are done with electrodes stuck to the kids’ heads so they can register brain activity in the frontal cortex.’

I’m reluctant to do this, thinking of the maid shaking her head over my wastefulness as she clears the table.

I cheat. I wait for someone else to go to the urn and watch what he does. It’s a middle-aged German man. He presses the red button on the side of the urn which now lights up. It hadn’t seemed like the kind with a light inside. I’m incompetent. It was easy. He waits. I go and wait behind him. There are about a dozen people in the breakfast room which has tall, straight-backed chairs, all a silvery grey (in my head), a fitted carpet, which (in my head) is black with small white crowns in a pattern running diagonally to the rectangle of the room. What I would like to ask Christof Koch is whether the colours are more of a con job than the shape and size of things, especially since Koch is convinced that our entire experience of the world is located in the head, an image, as it were, or representation, in the theatre of the mind. Galileo of course thought that the only things really out there in the world were shapes, numbers and movements; everything else – colour, sound, taste, smell, etc. – was just added in by eyes, ears, tongues and noses. Merely subjective, not even existing outside the human race. So that really to know an object you had to measure it in every possible way, with scientific instruments, and study its shape and mass and movements, but none of the things that might normally engage you, its colour, smell, feel. Perhaps this is why I never took up science.

My tea comes out piping hot. I now know something more about tea urns. Of a certain kind. Never again will I be humiliated by lukewarm tea in a German hotel breakfast room. So presumably something has shifted in my brain. It is different from what it was ten minutes ago. This is part of the burden of Professor Pauen’s research, that the child’s brain, in its period of maximum plasticity, is actually changed by the little learning games her team takes him or her through. In one experiment, for example, young children are shown sequences of photos very rapidly, perhaps faces, both familiar and unfamiliar, male and female, perhaps animals, perhaps items of furniture. The child’s response is measured through an electroencephalogram which records brainwaves – surges of electrical activity in the brain – their intensity and the exact number of milliseconds they occur after seeing the photo. Result: after scores of nine-month-old babies have been sat in front of a screen with electrodes attached to their heads it seems fairly certain that they can distinguish between categories of animals and furniture and between men and women, men’s and women’s faces that is. Rather more interestingly, it’s also clear that they react less intensely when a photo is a repeat of a previous photo, even when they only saw that previous photo for half a second. So, in that very brief space of time the brain changed, it learned something, as I now have learned that I have to switch the urn on and wait before turning the tap for my hot water, even though I have not learned what the cute silver teapot on the top of the urn is about. Is it a functional or a non-functional feature?

Returning to my seat, second cup of Twining’s Breakfast Tea in hand, the room is abruptly altered by an apparition. A woman sails in with a bright yellow hat.

I should say that all the other folk in the room could be described, at first glance, as nondescript. Is that a contradiction in terms? You know what I mean and I do not intend to be disparaging. I too am nondescript. None of these people are sending out any particular signals or inviting attention in any way. There are the middle-aged German man and his wife to the left of us, a young Japanese couple sitting by the window, an Arab family, husband, wife and remarkably well-behaved toddler. All dressed in the most ordinary ways. The Arab mother’s black headscarf seems utterly ordinary. Aside from that she is wearing jacket and jeans.

Everyone is going about their breakfast business in a discreet fashion. Which means I suppose that we share a sense of how one behaves at breakfast in hotels. Any subdued conversation is rendered indistinguishable from table to table by softly played pop music of the 1970s variety, ‘Super Trooper’, for example, at this particular moment. Which again seems to fit with the casual clothes, the hush of the carpet, the grey (in our heads) upholstery. In fact, I hardly noticed any of this until now. We were all integrating in the hotel milieu, making ourselves invisible. Perhaps conforming is the word. Is this because the millions upon millions of similar impressions our brains have received over the years have rendered us somewhat similar, or at least similarly disposed (programmed, wired?) for having breakfast in hotels? All the scientists I read who are studying the brain use computing analogies. Pauen’s babies ‘process’ images and ‘encode’ and ‘store’ them. It seems the natural way to talk about the brain, though of course there’s nothing natural about computers. Or breakfast in hotels.

In any event, across the unrippled surface of this early morning conformity, somebody tosses the pebble of a bright yellow hat. Actually, our new arrival is all yellow: yellow shoes, yellow blouse, yellow cardigan, yellow fingernails. But it’s the hat that does it. And when I say bright, I mean bright. A hat at once voluptuously round, yet seemingly rigid. Flat on top, a sort of inverted saucepan pressed onto permed hair, but with a very generous brim, perhaps two feet in diameter. It seems to pull all the room’s light towards itself and then send it bouncing off in a lemony dazzle. After her, and she moves with a very female sway, trails both a heady perfume and a rather less exciting husband. The perfume is flowery and fruity. The husband is dressed in white.

If colours and smells are a subjective con job, nevertheless this lady, in her early sixties I’d reckon, certainly knows how to predict and manipulate our response to chromatic effects. Her hat turns every head. She takes a table by the window, beams a charmingly complacent smile around the room as if to welcome us into her atmosphere of sunny self-congratulation – even her lipstick is yellow – then calls cheerfully to the young waitress, whom she knows by name. Her husband is admirably at ease with her exhibitionism. Even proud perhaps. He too greets the waitress and unfolds the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

‘Of course, the yellow is all in our heads,’ I remind my partner. ‘And the smell.’

‘Still, there’s no getting away from it,’ she points out. ‘Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t stop making it up. And we do both call it yellow.’

I had been meaning to use our breakfast chat to discuss Professor Pauen’s experiments and thus prepare myself for my interview. Instead it’s impossible not to talk about this yellow. We’ve been taken over. The lady is elaborately made-up, yet exudes a sort of performed naturalness. And the performance enchants. Why is she so different from the rest of us? How come she and her husband can order food to be brought to their table while we had to go and forage for ours at the buffet, arriving at a decent cup of tea only through a process of trial and error? Is it that while our brains are all programmed, or resigned, to conformity, she, having received different impressions over the years, or, more likely, having processed (whatever that means) the same impressions very differently, is a free spirit? Or is she simply obeying different imperatives? Her behaviour is, as my partner remarks, using an Italian idiom, ‘tutt’un programma’. She didn’t invent this look. It seems to have been cut out of the Kodachrome photography of a 1960s fashion magazine; it’s something she once saw, I suggest, that sank so deep into her psyche that she is still reproducing it.

No. My partner doesn’t see this lady as someone who has succumbed to an impression, rather as an agent who calculates the most effective strategy for drawing all attention to herself. Women are always the harshest critics of other women. In any event, I’m aware, folding my napkin, that the yellow hat has made such an impression on me that I will always remember this breakfast, this hotel, because of it. I will be able to start with the yellow hat and then retrieve the rest of the scene from that; my position in the room in relation to the wearer of the hat, and hence to all the others, the Japanese, the Arabs, the middle-aged German couple, the windows and the splendid spread of food mirrored from two walls in all its silver and fruity colours, much the way one remembers a dream starting with the one fragment you were left with on waking, the view of the stream through the tall trees of the wood.

Inside Out

I now have forty minutes to look through my notes before the first interview. But let’s recap. About two years ago I received an email from a man called Jakob Köllhofer inviting me to participate in a project which involved ‘sending writers to the scientists of various departments of Heidelberg University to find out whether the “Sciences” could come up with a concept of “new metaphysics”’. I was intrigued by Köllhofer’s use of inverted commas but perplexed by the idea. How can observation of the world and even consequent reflection and speculation ever lead one to the why of the world’s existence? One might prove the Big Bang theory, but learn nothing of why it happened, or why it happened when it did. Or whether it had to happen. And even imagining one did learn all those things, there would be the enigma of what came before, and then before that again.

However, after a further exchange of mails it emerged that Köllhofer was primarily interested in the question, whether in people’s minds science was substituting religion. This seemed more a matter of anthropology than hard science, something I might reasonably comment on. Also, the original invitation said that Köllhofer’s employer, the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, could offer ‘a considerable honorarium’. Who would not be curious to know what was meant by ‘considerable’ in a phrase like this? And then there would be the opportunity to meet some top scientists and talk about consciousness.

Because for some years now I have been fascinated by consciousness, hungry and thirsty to think and talk about it. Which is as much as to say that for some years I have been in an intense conversation with Riccardo Manzotti, one of the most intense and extended conversations of my life. And in fact, returning to our hotel room and sitting at the tiny desk provided, I made the mistake of checking my email before looking at my notes on Sabina Pauen. Sure enough there was a message from Riccardo including a link to a review by the philosopher Alva Noë of the film Inside Out. It’s not every day you see a philosopher reviewing a film, so I now made the further mistake of glancing through this review, rather than rereading Pauen’s paper on ‘Object Categorization and Socially Guided Object Learning in Infancy’.

No doubt you remember Inside Out, a Pixar animation. A girl, Riley, goes through some emotional turmoil when her father gets a job in a different town and she has to move and adapt. But the big idea of the movie is to portray Riley’s psyche in the form of five tiny people dashing about inside her head, all competing for the controls that lead her to act and respond in this or that way. These little homunculi, uncannily similar to the characters in other Pixar animations, explicitly represent the emotions Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, but since they also seem to be fully formed individuals the film raises the question, which Alva Noë claims his own son put to him halfway through the movie, as to whether these tiny folks inside Riley’s brain have further and tinier folks inside their brains. Also, what is it that gives Riley the sense of being one person rather than five, or five times five, or five times five times five? And so on.

It’s hardly surprising that a Pixar animation might not be the non plus ultra when it comes to psychology, ontology or metaphysics, but the interesting thing is that Inside Out was widely acclaimed as innovative, insightful and educative, this as it presented poor Riley as little more than a puppet at the whim of her five incompetent puppeteers. Is this really how most people think about the relationship of mind to body? Noë glosses:

Descartes (1596–1650) offered, but did not endorse, the idea that the body is a ship and the self resides in the body the way a pilot resides in the ship. Hume (1711–1776) advanced the idea that there is no self, that what we call the self is in fact just a bundle of perceptions, feelings and ideas. Contemporary cognitive science combines these two ideas in a most awkward synthesis: we are the brain, which in turn is modeled not as a self, but as a vast army of little selves, or agencies, whose collective operations give rise to what looks, from the outside, like a single person.

Reading this I can’t help but envy Noë’s powers of synthesis, which are very far from awkward, and I wonder if Sabina Pauen has seen Inside Out and would be willing to discuss the issues it raises: above all, is conscious experience really all locked inside the head, with people inside people peering out at each other as if through periscopes (an effect achieved in Inside Out by having the homunculi use their eyes to look at screens which record the material captured by the cameras that are Riley’s eyes). Or is it, conscious experience, in some way also outside

Also by Tim Parks

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Tim Parks

OUT OF MY HEAD
On the Trail of Consciousness

Acknowledgements

Waking

Colours

Inside Out

Also by Tim Parks

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Tim Parks

OUT OF MY HEADOn the Trail of Consciousness

Acknowledgements

Waking

Colours

Inside Out

OUT OF MY HEAD
On the Trail of Consciousness