Life in the background

Robertson Davies's brilliant book Fifth Business opens with a quote that explains the title:

Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.

Davies attributes the quote to the Danish playwright Thomas Overskou, but in reality Davies himself made it up, as he admitted to a scholar almost a decade after its publication when a thorough scouring of Overskou's work failed to turn up any such passage.  To give a rather meta twist to the whole thing, the novel is about a man (Dunstan Ramsay) who feels overlooked and marginalized in life, always the minor character eclipsed by everyone around him -- the one who is essential to the plot but never center stage -- and Davies has stated that the entire trilogy of which Fifth Business is the first installment is semi-autobiographical.

So Robertson Davies, essentially, wrote a memoir disguised as a novel about a sort-of fictional character whose accomplishments were overlooked or misattributed, and opened it with a quote he himself had made up and then attributed to someone else.

Man, there are some layers there to analyze.

I was immediately reminded of Davies's book when I came across a recent paper in the Journal of Research in Personality a couple of days ago.  The study, conducted by psychologists Ryan Goffredi and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri, looks at how we see our roles in our own autobiographical memories -- if we view ourselves as being the main character in our own story, driving the narrative and affecting the outcome, or as a minor character primarily acting as a foil for others' successes.  Interestingly, Goffredi and Sheldon found that people who see themselves in the starring role in their own life's story are generally more psychologically healthy -- they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher scores on assessments for emotional well-being and satisfaction with life.

It's not surprising, really.  A sense of agency in your own life has a huge effect on how you see the world.  The authors write:

These results support our notion that the way in which an individual perceives themselves as a character in their life story is likely to impact their well-being.  When people see themselves as being the agentic force in their lives and make decisions for themselves, as major characters do, rather than being swept about by external forces (and other people), they are more integrated and fully functioning selves.

Such individuals feel more autonomous, more competent and effective, and also experience better relational satisfaction with others, as evidenced by their increased basic psychological need satisfaction.  Conversely, those who see themselves as minor characters are more likely to feel thwarted in getting these needs satisfied, a condition associated with diminished self-integration and well-being.

This cut pretty close to the bone for me, because I have suffered from depression and anxiety my entire adult life, and have also felt very little agency in what goes on around me, but never really thought to link the two.  It's always seemed to me that in most situations I'm the perpetual outsider, not really central to anything or anyone, always trying to find my footing but never really succeeding, and only useful apropos of others' accomplishments.  And when I think of most of the big events in my life, it's always struck me how few of them I honestly was in control of.  Even my choice of a career happened more or less by accident -- and halfway through my first year of teaching, I was about a micron away from quitting, from admitting that I just wasn't up to the job and needed to find some other way of making a living.

But teaching itself is kind of emblematic of that mindset, isn't it?  You are there to facilitate your students' learning and advancement, launching them on their lives and careers and hopes and dreams, while you yourself stay put.  Each year you wave goodbye to one set of students and say hello to the next -- like a rock in the stream, watching the water perpetually flowing away from you and out of sight.

Reading the Goffredi and Sheldon paper, though, I find myself wondering how much of my sense of being "fifth business" in my own life's story is because I'm viewing it through the skewed lenses of mental illness.  After all, what the researchers found was a correlation; so if there is a causation there, which way does it point?  Does depression make you feel like a minor character in your own life, or does being marginalized in actuality lead to a loss of a sense of agency?

Could be both, of course.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Uark Theatre, As You Like It (14523154077), CC BY 2.0]

But perhaps that's why I enjoyed Davies's novel Fifth Business (and its sequels, The Manticore and World of Wonders) so much.  It was easy for me to identify with Dunstan Ramsay -- a man who spent his whole life with circumstance catching him by the tail and whirling him around, who never felt as if he were central to the narrative of his own story.  

The character Percy Boyd Staunton -- who is Ramsay's opposite, very much the main character of every scene he's in, for better or worse -- puts it this way: "If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get."

I have to wonder, though, if that option was ever really open to me.  And, after all, minor characters are necessary, too -- the ones who facilitate the protagonist's success or the antagonist's eventual comeuppance, even if they never reap any rewards for their actions.  It may be a little underwhelming to see your name in the playbill listed in a forgettable role like "Third Male Bystander," but hey, a role is a role.  Life in the background is, at least, usually safe.

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The body exchange

When we think about our own bodies, we tend to externalize them.  It's subtle, but ponder it for a moment; when I say "this is my hand," where is the "me" who is the hand's owner?  We usually put our "selves" in our heads (or hearts), so the rest of the pieces belong to whoever that "self" actually is.

As support of this, consider the unpleasant possibility of losing a limb, a sense, the ability to walk.  Something huge and devastating.  Even with such a major change, most of us feel that our "self" would remain intact.  Switch brains, though (if such a thing were possible) and you wouldn't be you any more -- there's something about that sense of self that resides there, in what my neurophysiology professor called "the meat machine."

René Descartes's illustration of mind-body dualism

Predictably, the reality may be more complex than that.  In a fascinating experiment run at the Karolinska Institutet of Sweden, researchers used virtual reality headsets to give two friends lying near each other the sense that they'd switched bodies.  In "Perception of Our Own Body Influences Self-Concept and Self-Incoherence Impairs Episodic Memory," by Pawel Tacikowski, Marieke Weijs, and Henrik Ehrsson, which came out in iScience this week, we find out that the sense of who we are is much more intimately connected to our bodies than we might realize.

The researchers did personality assessments prior to the swap.  Each participant ranked both him/herself and the friend on a number of characteristics.  While wearing the headsets, they were asked to re-rate both themselves and their friends -- and across the board, while they were in the body swap they ranked themselves as closer to what they had previously ranked their friend!

Another interesting feature was that both before and after the swap, participants were given memory tests.  They were also asked how convincing the illusion was -- how real it seemed that they were inhabiting their friend's body while the headset was on.  Last, how comfortable were they with the illusion?  Did they find it intriguing, exciting, scary, disorienting?  Curiously, the people who were the most comfortable and curious about being "inside a friend's body" did significantly better on the memory tests, leading to the conjecture that a skew between your bodily awareness and your sense of self can interfere with cognitive activity.

"We show that the self-concept has the potential to change really quickly, which brings us to some potentially interesting practical implications," said study lead author Pawel Tacikowski, in an interview with Neuroscience News.  "People who suffer from depression often have very rigid and negative beliefs about themselves that can be devastating to their everyday functioning.  If you change this illusion slightly, it could potentially make those beliefs less rigid and less negative."

The authors write:

[Our findings extend] previous knowledge in several important ways.  First, it challenges a common assumption that self-concept is relatively fixed over time and emphasizes the role of the body in the continuous construction of our sense of who we are; this role has been largely neglected in past social psychology research.  Second, this result shows that perceptual aspects of the bodily self dynamically shape multiple, abstract beliefs that constitute our conscious self-concept rather than only selected aspects of self-representation that are perceptual, body-related, or implicit.  Third, this finding clarifies that the illusory ownership of another person's body not only modifies attitudes toward this person or toward a social group to which this person belongs but also, and perhaps predominantly, modifies beliefs about the self.

What this immediately made me think of is people with body dysmorphia -- often at the root of not only disorders like anorexia, in which a person who is thin to the point of emaciation looks in a mirror and sees him/herself as overweight, but in trans individuals, who often describe the feeling as "not being in the right body."  It's no wonder both conditions are devastating, and linked to depression and suicidal ideation.  What the Tacikowski et al. study showed is that our sense of self is deeply connected to our own bodies -- and a disconnect between the self and the body has profound cognitive and emotional effects.

Naturally, the next step is to find out what's actually happening in the brain during the illusion.  "Now, my mind is occupied with the question of how this behavioral effect works — what the brain mechanism is,"  Tacikowski said. "Then, we can use this model for more specific clinical applications to possibly develop better treatments."  I'm also curious to find out how long-lasting the effects were.  Did this trigger a long-term change in how the person sees his/her friend?  Or did the change evaporate as soon as the headset was turned off and the participant was "back in your his/her own body?"

No question, though, that it's a fascinating result, and worthy of a lot more inquiry.  It gives some new insight into the age-old "mind-body problem" that has plagued philosophers since the time of Plato.  Perhaps the mind and the body aren't as independent of each other as it seems -- and our sense of self is much more tied to our physical flesh-and-blood presence than was apparent.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

To see ourselves

The brilliant Scottish poet Robert Burns packed a lot of truth in these four lines:

O, would some power the giftie gi'e us
To see ourselves as others see us;
It would frae many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.

It's almost a cliché that we don't see ourselves very accurately, both in the positive and negative sense.  We sometimes overestimate our own capacities (resulting in the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency of people to think they understand things way better than they actually do).  At the same time, we often undersell our own abilities, lacking confidence in areas where we really are talented -- sometimes through false modesty, but sometimes because we really, honestly don't realize that we have an unusual skill.

I remember this last bit happening to me.  I have one ability my wife calls my "superpower" -- I remember melodies, essentially indefinitely.  The craziest example of this happened when I was taking a Balkan dance class when I was in my early twenties, and heard a tune I really liked.  I was going to ask the instructor what the name of the tune was, but clean forgot (so remembering other things is not really my forté).  But I remembered the tune itself, after hearing it only a couple of times while we were learning the dance that went with it.

Fast forward thirty years.  I was at Lark Camp, a week-long folk music gathering in the Mendocino Redwoods, and I was heading to lunch when I heard a fiddler and an accordion player playing a tune.  My ears perked up immediately.

There was no doubt in my mind.  That was "my" dance tune.

Turns out it's a Serbian melody called Bojarka.  (If you want to hear it, here's a lovely live performance of it by flutist Bora Dugić.)  I had remembered it, without trying or even playing it again, for thirty years.

What's funny is that I never thought there was anything particularly unusual about this.  With no context, I always simply assumed everyone could do it.  It was only when I started playing with other musicians that I found that my musical memory was pretty uncommon.  (It bears mention, however, that my remembering a tune doesn't mean I can play it perfectly.  Technically, I'm an average musician at best.)

This all comes up because of a recent study that looked at how our close friends think of us -- and even more interestingly, what their brains look like when they're doing it -- and suggests that our pals are way more aware of our core strengths, flaws, talents, and personalities than we might have thought.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons FOTO:FORTEPAN / Korenchy László, Portrait, woman, mirror, reflection, smile, headscarf Fortepan 29523, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "The Neural Representation of Self is Recapitulated in the Brains of Friends: A Round-Robin fMRI Study," which appeared this week in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists Robert Chavez and Dylan Wagner of Ohio State University took a group of eleven close friends and had each of them think about first themselves then the ten others, one at a time, evaluating each on the degree of accuracy of forty-eight different descriptors (including lonely, sad, cold, lazy, overcritical, trustworthy, enthusiastic, clumsy, fashionable, helpful, smart, punctual, and nice), and while they were doing this task an fMRI machine was recording how their brains responded.  The results were nothing short of fascinating.  The authors write:

Using functional MRI and a multilevel modeling approach, we show that multivoxel brain activity patterns in the MPFC [medial prefrontal cortex] during a person’s self-referential thought are correlated with those of friends when thinking of that same person.  Moreover, the similarity of neural self–other patterns was itself positively associated with the similarity of self–other trait judgments ratings as measured behaviorally in a separate session.  These findings suggest that accuracy in person perception may be predicated on the degree to which the brain activity pattern associated with an individual thinking about their own self-concept is similarly reflected in the brains of others.

So while everyone doesn't see you completely accurately, in aggregate your friends have a pretty clear picture of you.

"Each one of your friends gets to see a slightly different side of you," said study lead author Robert Chavez.  "When you put them all together, it is a better approximation of how you see yourself than any one person individually."

So Robert Burns's famous quip is both true and misleading; the way others see us is largely accurate, but if you take a large enough sample size, it agrees pretty well with how we see ourselves.  We may not be so unaware of our own foibles and unusual skills as it might appear at first, and it seems like our attempts to hide who we truly are from our friends aren't quite as successful as we like to think.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]