Op-Ed: Did psychology discover Lewis Carroll?

The human mind may be a very unlikely place to go looking for meaning, but that’s exactly what one of humanity’s most humorless sciences has done. Yes, psychology has found a use for Lewis Carroll-like weirdness.

A paper published in Psychological Science has come up with some interesting views on the subject of human responses to weird situations, and the related mental effects. The basic idea is OK-ish. The mind, presumably trying to find a reason to be informed, attempts to make sense out of weird things. It’s programmed to predict, so, confronted with a concerned rabbit dressed in tweeds late for a social engagement, it tries to figure out what that situation means. Ignoring the equally plausible possibility that a well dressed rabbit may not wish to appear rude, the reader is accused of trying to rationalize the situation. How many pieces of string are how long? In short, any hypothetical situation, or anything expressed or seen in a way which isn’t a plodding series of statements of the murderously obvious, speaks to the internal rationalizing pedantic intellectual equivocator of each person. A logic is created, however unnecessarily, to deal with the issues. Yep, that’s why people read and enjoy Lewis Carroll, enjoy Monty Python, and why humor is still a sort of unknown area in psychology. Perhaps if it wasn't, some things about the human mind would be less susceptible to misinterpretation. The concept of stimulus is entirely lacking in this theory, as far as I can see. Humor is a form of logic and a very effective form of stimulus. Logic, in fact, finds humor, and as often as not actively goes looking for it. Different minds work in different ways, with different associations. Anomalies are stimuli, for more than one reason. Steam escaping from a kettle, a spark from two rocks banging together, round things that roll around, there are more than a few uses for anomalies. Even the steam engine, fire, and the wheel were anomalies, once. The actual value of this theory, believe it or not, has nothing to do with a half ass approach to Lewis Carroll. The idea is called “implicit learning”. A group of students were read a “weird” story, and another were read a “normal” story. They were then shown strings of letters and tested on their ability to recognize sets of letters they’d seen. Inevitably, the students whose brains hadn’t been “normalized” to mush did better. They were more alert, and had had some mental exercise beforehand. The New York Times:

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”

What’s more likely to be the basis of better mental performance, interesting stories or mundane recitals of coherent dribble? Ironically, the human brain, for such a chronically ignored and undervalued object, has sufficient sense to pay attention to things that arouse it from its default coma of “normality” when it perceives something less boring. Lack of mental activity means lack of motivation, as well as lack of stimulus. A cow prod is stimulating, but there are other ways of doing it. Psychology is at risk of falling into the conceptual museum that media marketing "psychology" has been in for decades: Everyone is a demographic. The human mind comes in a One Size Fits All version. The same things interest everyone. Stimuli are predictable. There is no such thing as higher brain function in humans. Formula thinking applies in all situations. That's been a real triumph, hasn't it? The death of any science is invariably pedantry, like dogma in religion. If there’s a less appropriate place for pedantry than in the study of the human mind, what is it? At the rate definitions of ever more banal forms of human normality are being produced, the whole of human history could be one big anomaly, because nobody would have ever had the intellect to achieve any of it. For all I know the people who’ve produced this study are human, and may have laughed once or twice in their lives when not under actual duress. If so, may I suggest that the screamingly obvious fact of complex stimuli like Carroll and others as a basis for mental activity isn’t overlooked? I emphasize the word "complex" because there's a lot more to reading Carroll than producing a personal thesis that allows one to rationalize the experience. In terms of increasing motivation, would it be fair to say that those not responding to obvious anomalies may require something more permanent than motivation, like burial? The "zero response" factor is hardly a healthy reaction, is it? There's also a slight problem with "anomalies" as a measure. What's weird to one person may be unspeakably dull to another. There's no set boundary to what's considered an anomaly, except in media where anything not using 1980s scripts is considered artistic, and therefore unsalable. It might also help if the human sciences started considering, however timidly, the concept that there’s no actual law requiring people to be behavioral or intellectual fodder for theories. There are six billion different sets of synapses on this planet. The “average” IQ of 100 (Have you ever actually met anyone with an IQ that low?) is like most averages, a result of sampling, meaning inaccurate by definition. Not everybody is an underachieving vegetable marginally less intelligent than the average piece of furniture. Theories which fit facts at least have the advantage of being partly right, some of the time. This is baseline research, but it's hardly even the beginning of itself yet. If motivation is the object, motivation of what is likely to be the next big issue. Some respect for the weird but wonderful, please.