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Behave Chapter 15. Metaphors We Kill By

Author: Robert Sapolsky Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: Status:⌛️

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The clearest human mastery of symbolism comes with our use of language. Suppose you are being menaced by something and thus scream your head off. Someone listening can’t tell if the blood-curdling “Aiiiii!” is in response to an approaching comet, suicide bomber, or Komodo dragon. It just means that things are majorly not right; the message is the meaning. Most animal communication is about such present-tense emotionality.

Symbolic language brought huge evolutionary advantages. This can be seen even in the starts of symbolism of other species. When vervet monkeys, for instance, spot a predator, they don’t generically scream. They use distinct vocalizations, different “protowords,” where one means “Predator on the ground, run up the tree!” and another means “Predator in the air, run down the tree!” Evolving the cognitive capacity to make that distinction is mighty useful, as it prompts you to run away from, rather than toward, something intent on eating you.

Language pries apart a message from its meaning, and as our ancestors improved at this separation, advantages accrued.5 We became capable of representing past and future emotions, as well as messages unrelated to emotion. We evolved great expertise at separating message from reality, which, as we’ve seen, requires the frontal cortex to regulate the nuances of face, body, and voice: lying. This capacity creates complexities that no one else—from slime mold to chimp—deals with in life’s Prisoner’s Dilemmas.

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The height of the symbolic features of language is our use of metaphor. And this is not just flourish metaphors, when we declare that life is a bowl of cherries. Metaphors are everywhere in language—we may literally and physically be “in” a room, but we are only metaphorically inside something when we are “in” a good mood, “in” cahoots with someone, “in” luck, a funk, a groove,* or love. We are only metaphorically standing under something when we “understand” it.*6 The renowned cognitive linguist George Lakoff of UC Berkeley has explored the ubiquity of metaphor in language in books such as Metaphors We Live By (with philosopher Mark Johnson), and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (where he demonstrates how political power involves controlling metaphors—do you favor “choice” or “life”? are you “tough on” crime, or does your “heart bleed”? are you loyal to a “fatherland” or a “motherland”? and have you captured the flag of “family values” from your opponent?). For Lakoff language is always a metaphor, transferring information from one individual to another by putting thought into words, as if words were shopping bags.7

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6. Footnote: L. Boroditsky, “How Language Shapes Thought,” Sci Am, February, 2011.

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Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when ordering all of them on deck, that Kafka’s Metamorphosis isn’t really about a cockroach, and that June doesn’t really bust out all over. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We learn that the orchestral sounds constituting the 1812 Overture represent Napoleon getting his ass kicked when retreating from Moscow. And that “Napoleon getting his ass kicked” represents thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

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This chapter explores the neurobiology of some of the most interesting outposts of symbolic and metaphorical thinking. It makes a key point: these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that “it’s only a figure of speech”—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors.

We start with examples of odd ways our brains handle metaphor, and the behavioral manifestations of those oddities; some have been introduced previously.

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FEELING SOMEONE ELSE’S PAIN

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Consider the following: You stub your toe. Pain receptors there send messages to the spine and on up to the brain, where various regions kick into action. Some of these areas tell you about the location, intensity, and quality of the pain. Is it your left toe or right ear that hurts? Was your toe stubbed or crushed by a tractor-trailer? These various pain-ometers, the meat and potatoes of pain processing, are found in every mammal.

As we first learned in chapter 2, the frontal cortical anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) also plays a role, assessing the meaning of the pain.8 Maybe it’s bad news: your painful toe signals the start of some unlikely disease. Or maybe it’s good news: you’re going to get your fire-walker diploma because the hot coals only made your toes throb. As we saw in the last chapter, the ACC is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. And pain from out of nowhere surely represents a discrepancy between the pain-free setting that you anticipate versus a painful reality.

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But the ACC does more than just tell you the meaning of a painful toe. As we saw in chapter 6, put a subject in a brain scanner, make them think they’re tossing a Cyberball back and forth with two other players, and then make them feel excluded—the other two stop throwing the ball to them. “Hey, how come they don’t want to play with me?” And the ACC activates.

In other words, rejection hurts. “Well, yeah,” you might say. “But that’s not like stubbing your toe.” But as far as those neurons in the ACC are concerned, social and literal pain are the same. And as proof of the rooting of the former in sociality, there isn’t ACC activation if the subject believes the ball isn’t being thrown to them because of a glitch connecting them to the other two subjects’ computers.

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And the ACC can take things a step further, as we saw in chapter 14. Receive a mild shock, and there’s activation of your ACC (along with activation of the more mundane pain-ometer regions). Now instead watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. Pain-ometer brain regions are silent, but the ACC activates. For those neurons, feeling someone else’s pain isn’t just a figure of speech.

Moreover, the brain intermixes literal and psychic pain.9 The neurotransmitter substance P plays a central role in communicating painful signals from pain receptors in skin, muscles, and joints up into the brain. It’s got pain-ometer written all over it. And remarkably, its levels are elevated in clinical depression, and drugs that block the actions of substance P can have marked antidepressant properties. Stubbed toe, stubbed psyche. Moreover, there is activation of the cortical parts of pain networks when we feel dread—anticipating an impending shock.

Furthermore, the brain becomes literal when we do the flip side of empathy.10 It’s painful watching a hated competitor succeed, and we activate the ACC at that time. Conversely, if he fails, we gloat, feel schadenfreude, get pleasure from his pain, and activate dopaminergic reward pathways. Forget “Your pain is my pain.” Your pain is my gain.

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7. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); G. Lakoff, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

8. T. Singer and C. Frith, “The Painful Side of Empathy,” Nat Nsci 8 (2005): 845.

9. M. Kramer et al., “Distinct Mechanism for Antidepressant Activity by Blockade of Central Substance P Receptors,” Sci 281 (1998): 1640; B. Bondy et al., “Substance P Serum Levels are Increased in Major Depression: Preliminary Results,” BP 53 (2003): 538; G. S. Berns et al., “Neurobiological Substrates of Dread,” Sci 312 (2006): 754.

10. H. Takahasi et al., “When Your Gain Is My Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude,” Sci 323 (2009): 890.

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DISGUST AND PURITY

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This is our familiar domain of the insular cortex. If you bite into rancid food, the insula activates, just as in every other mammal. You wrinkle your nose, raise your upper lip, narrow your eyes, all to protect mouth, eyes, and nasal cavities. Your heart slows. You reflexively spit out the food, gag, perhaps even vomit. All to protect yourself from toxins and infectious pathogens.11

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11. P. Ekman and W. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Cues (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975).

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As humans we do some fancier things: Think about rancid food, and the insula activates. Look at faces showing disgust, or subjectively unattractive faces, and the same occurs. And most important, if you think about a truly reprehensible act, the same occurs. The insula mediates visceral responses to norm violations, and the more activation, the more condemnation. And this is visceral, not just metaphorically visceral—for example, when I heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, “feeling sick to my stomach” wasn’t a mere figure of speech. When I imagined the reality of the murder of twenty first-graders and the six adults protecting them, I felt nauseous. The insula not only prompts the stomach to purge itself of toxic food; it prompts the stomach to purge the reality of a nightmarish event. The distance between the symbolic message and the meaning disappears.12

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12. M. Hsu et al., “The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency,” Sci 320 (2008): 1092; F. Sambataro et al., “Preferential Responses in Amygdala and Insula During Presentation of Facial Contempt and Disgust,” Eur J Nsci 24 (2006): 2355; P. S. Russell and R. Giner-Sorolla, “Bodily Moral Disgust: What It Is, How It Is Different from Anger, and Why It Is an Unreasoned Emotion,” Psych Bull 139 (2013): 328; H. A. Chapman and A. K. Anderson, “Things Rank and Gross in Nature: A Review and Synthesis of Moral Disgust,” Psych Bull 139 (2013): 300; H. Chapman et al., “In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust,” Sci 323 (2009): 1222; P. Rozin et al., “From Oral to Moral,” Sci 323 (2009): 1179.

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The linking of visceral and moral disgust is bidirectional. As shown in a number of studies, contemplating a morally disgusting act leaves more than a metaphorical bad taste in your mouth—people eat less immediately afterward, and a neutral-tasting beverage drunk afterward is rated as having a more negative taste (and, conversely, hearing about virtuous moral acts made the drink taste better).13

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13. C. Chan et al., “Moral Violations Reduce Oral Consumption,” J Consumer Psych 24 (2014): 381; K. J. Eskine et al., “The Bitter Truth About Morality: Virtue, Not Vice, Makes a Bland Beverage Taste Nice,” PLoS ONE 7 (2012): e41159.

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In chapters 12 and 13 we saw the political implications of our brains intermixing visceral and moral disgust—social conservatives have a lower threshold for visceral disgust than do social progressives; the “wisdom of repugnance” school posits that being viscerally disgusted by something is a pretty good indicator that it is morally wrong; implicitly evoking a sense of visceral disgust (e.g., by sitting in close proximity to a foul odor) makes us more socially conservative.14 This is not merely because visceral disgust is an aversive state—inducing a sense of sadness, rather than disgust, doesn’t have the same effect; moreover, moralizing about purity, while predicted by people’s propensity toward feeling disgust, is not predicted by propensities toward fear or anger.*

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14. E. J. Horberg et al., “Disgust and the Moralization of Purity,” JPSP 97 (2009): 963.

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The physiological core of gustatory disgust is to protect yourself against pathogens. The core of the intermixing of visceral and moral disgust is a sense of threat as well. A socially conservative stance about, say, gay marriage is not just that it is simply wrong in an abstract sense, or even “disgusting,” but that it constitutes a threat—to the sanctity of marriage and family values. This element of threat is shown in a great study in which subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria.15 All then read a history article that used imagery of America as a living organism, with statements like “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the United States as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration (without changing attitudes about an economic issue). My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the nebulous entity that is the American way of life.

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How cerebral is this intertwining of moral and visceral disgust? Does the insula get involved in moral disgust only if it’s of a particularly visceral nature—blood and guts, coprophagia, body parts? Paul Bloom suggests this is the case. In contrast, Jonathan Haidt feels that even the most cognitive forms of moral disgust (“He’s a chess grand master and he shows off by beating that eight-year-old in three moves and reducing her to tears—that’s disgusting”) are heavily intertwined.16 In support of that, something as unvisceral as getting a lousy offer in an economic game activates the insula (a lousy offer from another human, rather than a computer, that is); the more insula activation, the greater the likelihood of the offer being rejected. Amid this debate, it is clear that the intertwining of visceral and moral disgust is, at the least, greatest when the latter taps into core disgust. To repeat a neat quote from Paul Rozin, introduced in chapter 11, “Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker.” First you’re disgusted by how Others smell, a gateway to then being disgusted by how Others think.

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15. K. Smith et al., “Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations,” PLoS ONE 6 (2011): e2552; G. Hodson and K. Costello, “Interpersonal Disgust, Ideological Orientations, and Dehumanization as Predictors of Intergroup Attitudes,” Psych Sci 18 (2007): 691; M. Landau et al., “Evidence That Self-Relevant Motives and Metaphoric Framing Interact to Influence Political and Social Attitudes,” Psych Sci 20 (2009): 1421.

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16. A. Sanfey et al., “The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game,” Sci 300 (2003): 1755.

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Of course, insofar as metaphorically being dirty and disorderly = bad, metaphorically being clean and orderly = good.*17 Just consider the use of the word “neat” in the previous paragraph. Similarly, in Swahili the word safi, meaning “clean” (from kusafisha, “to clean”), is used in the same slangy metaphorical sense of “neat” in English. Once while in Kenya, I was hitching a ride to Nairobi from somewhere out in the boondocks and got to chatting with a local teenager who was curious about me. “Where are you going?” he asked. Nairobi. “Nairobi ni [is] safi,” he said wistfully about the far-off metropolis. How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen the neatness of Nairobi?

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17. T. Wang et al., “Is Moral Beauty Different from Facial Beauty? Evidence from an fMRI Study,” SCAN 10 (2015): 814.

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Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress—just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.18 And consider how the displaced need to impose cleanliness and order runs and ruins the lives of people suffering from the archetypal anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder. The ability of literal cleanliness to alter cognition was shown in one study. Subjects examined an array of music CDs, picked ten that they liked, and ranked them in order of liking; they were then offered a free copy of one of their midrange choices (number five or six). Subjects were then distracted with some other task and then asked to rerank the ten CDs. And they showed a common psychological phenomenon, which was to now overvalue the CD they’d been given, ranking it higher on the list than before. Unless they had just washed their hands (ostensibly to try a new brand of soap), in which case no reranking occurred. Clean hands, clean slate.

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18. S. Lee and N. Schwarz, “Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance,” Sci 328 (2010): 709.

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But beginning much further back than the “social hygiene” movement of the turn of the twentieth century, being metaphorically neat, pure, and hygienic could be a moral state as well—cleanliness was not just a good way to avoid uncontrolled diarrhea, dehydration, and serious electrolyte imbalance, but was also ideal for cozying up to a god.

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One study was built around the phenomenon of visceral disgust making people harsher in their moral judgments. The authors first replicated this effect, showing that watching a short film clip of something physically disgusting made subjects more morally judgmental—unless they had washed their hands after watching the film. Another study suggests that the washing decreases emotional arousal, as it decreased the diameter of subjects’ pupils.19

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19. S. Schnall et al., “With a Clean Conscience: Cleanliness Reduces the Severity of Moral Judgments,” Psych Sci 19 (2008): 1219; K. Kaspar et al., “Hand Washing Induces a Clean Slate Effect in Moral Judgments: A Pupillometry and Eye-Tracking Study,” Sci Rep 5 (2015): 10471.

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We intertwine physical and moral purity when it comes to our own actions. In one of my all-time favorite psychology studies, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated that the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Subjects were asked to recount either a moral or an immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, the researchers offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil and a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. Another study, showing the same effect when people were instructed to lie, demonstrated that the more adversely consequential the lie was presented as being, the more washing subjects did. Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to at least try to absolve their sins by washing their hands, and this phenomenon of embodied cognition is referred to as the “Macbeth effect.”20

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20. C. B. Zhong and K. Liljenquist, “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing,” Sci 313 (2006): 1451; L. N. Harkrider et al., “Threats to Moral Identity: Testing the Effects of Incentives and Consequences of One’s Actions on Moral Cleansing,” Ethics & Behav 23 (2013): 133.

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This effect is remarkably concrete. In another study subjects were instructed to lie about something—with either their mouths (i.e., to tell a lie) or their hands (i.e., to write down a lie).21 Afterward, remarkably, liars were more likely to pick complementary cleansing products than control subjects who communicated something truthful: the immoral mouth-ers were more likely to pick a mouthwash sample; the immoral scribes, hand soap. Furthermore, as shown with neuroimaging, when contemplating mouthwash versus soap, those who had just spoken a lie activated parts of the sensorimotor cortex related to the mouth (i.e., the subjects were more aware of their mouths at the time); those who had written the lie activated the cortical regions mapping onto their hand. Embodied cognition can be specific to parts of the body.

Another fascinating study showed the influence of culture in the Macbeth effect. The studies just cited were carried out with European or American subjects. When the same is done with East Asian subjects, the urge afterward is to wash the face, rather than the hands. If you are going to save face, it should be a clean one.22

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21. M. Schaefer et al., “Dirty Deeds and Dirty Bodies: Embodiment of the Macbeth Effect Is Mapped Topographically onto the Somatosensory Cortex,” Sci Rep 5 (2015): 18051. See also C. Denke et al., “Lying and the Subsequent Desire for Toothpaste: Activity in the Somatosensory Cortex Predicts Embodiment of the Moral-Purity Metaphor,” Cerebral Cortex 26 (2016): 477. A debate about these findings: D. Johnson et al., “Does Cleanliness Influence Moral Judgments? A Direct Replication of Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008),” Soc Psych 45 (2014): 209; J. L. Huang, “Does Cleanliness Influence Moral Judgments? Response Effort Moderates the Effect of Cleanliness Priming on Moral Judgments,” Front Psych 5 (2014): 1276.

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22. S. W. Lee et al., “A Cultural Look at Moral Purity: Wiping the Face Clean,” Front Psych 6 (2015): 577.

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Finally, most important, this intermixing of moral and physical hygiene affects the way we actually behave. That original study on contemplating one’s moral failings and the subsequent desire to wash hands included a second experiment. As before, subjects were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward subjects either did or didn’t have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a subsequent (experimentally staged) request for help. In another study merely watching someone else wash their hands in this situation (versus watching them type) also decreased helpfulness afterward (although to a lesser extent than the subject washing).23

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23. H. Xu et al., “Washing the Guilt Away: Effects of Personal Versus Vicarious Cleansing on Guilty Feelings and Prosocial Behavior,” Front Hum Nsci 8 (2014): 97.

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Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments. What these studies show is that if those metaphorically dirtied hands have been unmetaphorically washed in the interim, they’re less likely to reach out to try to balance the scales.

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REAL VERSUS METAPHORICAL SENSATION

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Then there are ways in which we confuse literal with metaphorical sensation.

A brilliant study by John Bargh of Yale concerned haptic sensations (I had to look the word up—haptic: related to the sense of touch). Volunteers evaluated the résumés of supposed job applicants; crucially, the résumé was attached to a clipboard of one of two weights. When subjects held the heavier clipboard, they tended to judge candidates as more “serious” (while clipboard weight had no effect on other perceived traits). When you next apply for a job, hope that your résumé will be attached to a heavy clipboard. How else would the evaluator figure out that you can appreciate the gravity of a situation and deal with weighty matters, rather than being a lightweight?24

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24. J. Ackerman et al., “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions,” Sci 328 (2010): 1712; also see: M. V. Day and D. R. Bobocel, “The Weight of a Guilty Conscience: Subjective Body Weight as an Embodiment of Guilt,” PLoS ONE 8 (2013): e69546.

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In the next study subjects assembled a puzzle with pieces that were either smooth or rough as sandpaper, then observed a socially ambiguous interaction. Handle the rough puzzle pieces and the interactions were rated as less coordinated, smooth, or successful (it’s not clear, however, if those subjects were more likely, at home that evening, to use coarse language in describing their rough day).

Next, subjects sat in either a hard or a soft chair (to quote the authors, “We primed subjects by the seat of their pants”). Sit in the former and they were more likely to perceive individuals as stable and unemotional, to be less flexible in economic game play. This is remarkable—haptic sensations in your butt influencing whether you think someone is a hard-ass. Or hard-hearted instead of a softie.

Similar intermixing of the real and the metaphorical occurs with temperature sensation. In another study from Bargh’s group, the researcher, hands full with something, would ask a subject to briefly hold a cup of coffee for them. Half the subjects held warm coffee, half iced coffee. Subjects then read about some individual and answered questions about them. Subjects who held the warm cup rated the individual as having a warmer personality (without altering ratings about other characteristics). In the next part of the study, the temperature of a held object altered subjects’ generosity and levels of trust—cold hands, cold heart. And a more activated insula, as shown in a follow-up study.25

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25. L. Williams and J. Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth,” Sci 322 (2008): 606; Y. Kang et al., “Physical Temperature Effects on Trust Behavior: The Role of Insula,” SCAN 6 (2010): 507.

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Our brains also confuse metaphorical and literal interoceptive information. Recall that remarkable study showing that in a real-world situation, a major predictor of whether a prisoner would be granted parole was how recently the judge had eaten. Empty stomach, harsher judgment. Other work has shown that when people are hungry, they become less generous with money and show more future discounting (i.e., are more likely to want reward X now, rather than wait for reward 2X). Hungering for fame and fortune are just metaphors—yet our brain pulls circuits related to real hunger into the mix. Moreover, we use more abstract levels of cognition when thinking about distant events. Ask people to make a list of the items they’d bring on a camping trip taking place either tomorrow or in a month; if the former, the list contains more specific subcategories. In another study subjects were shown a graph of the average amount of paper used by an office over time. There is a steady increase until the most recent time period:26

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26. B. Briers et al., “Hungry for Money: The Desire for Caloric Resources Increases the Desire for Financial Resources and Vice Versa,” Psych Sci 17 (2006): 939; X. Wang and R. Dvorak, “Sweet Future: Fluctuating Blood Glucose Levels Affect Future Discounting,” Psych Sci 21 (2010): 183.

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Subjects were then asked to predict what would happen in the next time period. Half the subjects were told that the office was nearby. Result: those subjects did a microanalysis, preferentially paying attention to that final X trending downward, perceiving it to be meaningful, the start of a pattern:

Note: Image

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But subjects told that the office was on the other side of the planet tended to view the data points at a macro level of analysis, paying attention to the overall pattern and seeing that downturn as a mere aberration:

Note: Image

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What’s going on in these studies? Metaphors about weight, density, texture, temperature, interoceptive sensations, time, and distance are just figures of speech. Yet the brain confusedly processes them with some of the same circuits that deal with the physical properties of objects.

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The essence of a symbol is its ability to serve as a stand-in for the real thing and, remarkably, we’re not the only species where a signifier, independent of what it signifies, can gain a power of its own. As discussed in chapter 2, if you condition a rat to associate a bell with a reward, about half of rats eventually come to find the bell itself rewarding.

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So we’ve now examined cold drinks and cold personalities; lying through your teeth and then yearning for mouthwash; our hearts aching for someone else’s pain. Our metaphorical symbols can gain a power all their own. But insofar as metaphors are the apogee of our capacity for symbolic thought, it’s thoroughly weird that our top-of-the-line brains can’t quite keep things straight and remember that those metaphors aren’t literal. Why?

The answer harks back to a concept first introduced in chapter 10—evolution is a tinkerer, an improviser. So humans are evolving capacities for abstractions like morality and deep violations of it, for experiencing empathy of unprecedented intensity, and for conscious assessment of the affiliative nature of someone’s temperament—moral disgust, feeling someone’s pain, warm and cold personalities. Given how short a time behaviorally modern humans have existed, this has occurred in a blink of an eye. There hasn’t been enough time to evolve completely new brain regions and circuits for handling these novelties. Instead, tinkering occurred—“Hmm, extreme negative affect elicited by violations of shared behavioral norms. Let’s see … Who has any pertinent experience? I know, the insula! It does extreme negative sensory stimuli—that’s, like, all that it does—so let’s expand its portfolio to include this moral disgust business. That’ll work. Hand me a shoehorn and some duct tape.”

The key to evolution as an improviser rather than inventor is chapter 10’s concept of exaptation—some trait evolves for some purpose and is co-opted when it turns out to be useful for something else. And soon feathers are aiding flight, in addition to regulating body temperature, and the insula helps get us into heaven, in addition to purging our guts of toxins. The latter is a case of what has been called “neural reuse.”27

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27. M. Anderson, “Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain,” BBS 245 (2014); 245; G. Lakoff, “Mapping the Brain’s Metaphor Circuitry: Metaphorical Thought in Everyday Reason,” Front Hum Nsci (2014), doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00958.

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This isn’t to say it’s been an easy process, that magically one day neurons that help make you puke are suddenly involved in running the president’s bioethics panel. It is insanely interesting to me that the most unique neurons in our brains, the recently evolved and slow-developing von Economo neurons, are predominantly housed in the anterior cingulate and insula. And that the neurodegenerative disease frontotemporal dementia, destined to eventually destroy the entire fancy neocortex, takes out von Economo neurons first—there’s something extra fancy (and thus expensive and vulnerable) about those cells. The tinkering and improvising was inspired.

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What’s most interesting is that we see the beginnings of the “I know, let’s persuade the ACC and insula to volunteer for these new jobs” in other species. As we saw in chapter 14, the emotional contagion and protoempathy that a rodent can feel for another one in pain is centered in the anterior cingulate. And full-blown von Economo neurons are also found in those same brain regions in the other apes, elephants, and cetaceans—evolution’s Mensa club—and exist in rudimentary forms in monkeys. It’s unclear if, say, a blue whale wants to wash its flippers after a social-norm violation, but a handful of other species seem to have taken the first steps into this strange new territory along with us.

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Our brains’ confusion of the metaphorical with the literal literally matters. Back to chapter 10 and the evolutionary emphasis on kin selection. We saw the array of mechanisms used by various species for recognizing kin and degree of relatedness—e.g., genetically shaped pheromonal signatures and imprinting on the female whose birdsong you heard a lot while you were still inside an egg. And we saw that among other primates there are cognitive components as well (recall male baboons’ degree of paternalism being predicted by their likelihood of being the father). By the time we get to humans, the process is mostly cognitive—we can think our way to deciding who is a relative, who is an Us. And thus, as we saw, we can be manipulated into thinking that some individuals are more related to us, and others less so, than they actually are—pseudokinship and pseudospeciation. There are numerous ways to get someone to think that an Other is so different that they barely count as human. But as propagandists and ideologues have long known, if you want to get someone to feel that an Other hardly counts as human, there’s only one way to do it—engage the insula. And the surest way to do that is with metaphor.

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Dehumanization, pseudospeciation. The tools of the propagandists of hate. Thems as disgusting. Thems as rodents, as a cancer, as a transitional species, Thems as reekingly malodorous, as living in hives of chaos that no normal human would. Thems as shit. Get the insulae of your followers to confuse the literal and metaphorical, and you’re 99 percent of the way there.

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In a moving, important 2007 paper in Science, the American/French anthropologist Scott Atran, along with Robert Axelrod (of chapter 10’s Prisoner’s Dilemma fame) and Richard Davis, a conflict expert at Arizona State University, considered the power of what they called “sacred values” in conflict resolution.29 These are straight out of Greene’s world of two different cultures of shepherds fighting over a commons, each with a different moral vision as to what is correct, each passionately focused on “rights” whose meaning and power are incomprehensible to the other side. Sacred values are defended far out of proportion to their material or instrumental importance or likelihood of success, because to any group such values define “who we are.” And therefore, not only are attempts to reach compromises on such issues by using material incentives unlikely to be productive, but they can be insultingly counterproductive. You can’t buy us off into dishonoring that which we hold sacred.

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28. P. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000); R. Guest, The Shackled Continent (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004); G. Stanton, “The Rwandan Genocide: Why Early Warning Failed,” J African Conflicts and Peace Studies 1 (2009) 6; R. Lemarchand, “The 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” in Century of Genocide, ed. S. Totten and W. Parsons, 3rd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009), p. 407.

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Notes