Then We Came To The End : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Then We Came To The End

Posted on: January 2, 2008 9:57 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

If, like me, you're sorely missing new episodes of The Office, then I've got the novel for you. It's Joshua Ferris' fantastic debut novel, and it's a sad/funny tour of office life. (Keep in mind that I've never worked in an office, so I have no idea how authentic the novel really is. But it feels authentic, and that's even more important.) I won't bore you with a summary of the plot, since what really interests me about the novel is the narration, which unfolds from the first person plural. Consider this excerpt:

We knew what "Your anger" meant because we suffered from the same anger from time to time. We suffered all sorts of ailments - heart conditions, nervous tics, thrown out backs. We had the mother of all headaches. We were affected by changes in weather conditions, by mood swings, and by lingering high school insecurities. We were deeply concerned about who was next, and what criteria for dismissal the partners were operating under.

It's a testament to Ferris' talent that the "We" never feels like a cheap literary gimmick. Instead, it serves to magnify the incredible consistency of human nature. We really all do suffer from heart conditions and lingering high school insecurities. Everyone really eats too much chocolate cake and worries about their skin. Most of us try to be nice, but sometimes wish we were nicer. Etc, etc, etc. In other words, it's startling how easy it is for Ferris to generalize about our condition, to collectively describe the seemingly idiosyncratic tics of the individual. (Horoscopes and fortune cookies take advantage of this universality.)

On the one hand, this is depressing. When I'm sad, I want to be uniquely sad. When I'm happy, I want my happiness to be my own.

And yet, we are trapped by our common descent. Our brains are full of the same chemical stuff. We are walking sacs of dopamine and serotonin, a pulsing limbic system strapped to a too small prefrontal cortex. Although we are fully convinced that our selves are special, exclusive and rare, the fact of the matter is that most of our thoughts can be easily parceled into the We category. We aren't that unique, even though We think We are.

Anyways, it's a good book.

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Comments (4)

The lack of The Office is killing me!!

I spent New Years in Burlington VT, a town that is under consideration as a permanent living location. Burlington is a pretty cool place - busy, full of good food and a nice downtown. It's also full of plenty of young and liberal crunchy types. I had the funniest sensation walking around town: if I moved here, I would no longer be unique! There would be lots of foody / photographing / outdoorsy / academic minded people driving Volvo wagons and cursing the Iraq war, and the thought of being so typical did not make the idea of moving there appealing. This of course led to the "why am I so narcissistic that I need to be superficially unique? that's stupid" line of thought.

We want to be unique, just like everybody else . Is the wish to be unique a biological necessity? Perhaps uniqueness is a drive to diversify behavior, which would benefit populations as a whole through natural selection. Or, maybe striving for uniqueness is just the immediate (American) culture we've grown up in. Commercials everywhere certainly send that message - create your own unique identify from mass produced consumer products!

Posted by: Rachael | January 2, 2008 12:13 PM

Isn't it great that some of us land on this need for uniqueness in adulthood after spending so much of our time in the tween and teenage years painfully striving to conform? Of course I know several adults who are still working under the conformity model.

It reminds me of the line from The Life of Brian by Monty Python.

One guy yells to the mob, "You're all individuals!"
One of the mob answers, "I'm not."

I guess I agree with Jonah, we really are very similar, it's why literature works, because it speaks to us in our own language right? It expresses our feelings/thoughts better than we do ourselves. It illustrates something that we already knew or felt and it resonates with us because it is like us. Otherwise there wouldn't be a best seller list.

Posted by: amybuilds | January 2, 2008 3:41 PM

we are alike in our uniqueness (or conceptions of uniqueness)... it's plagued me for years, not being able to figure this one out. and then i remember that what i love about life are the questions, more so than the answers. or the answers that are only pretending to solve anything, but really are just asking something new, or from a different angle.

this problem blindsided me again most recently after speaking with my 19 year old brother, who was having serious issues with college, pot, the futility of academia, not running (after being used to his grueling cross country training), etc. basically, being a college sophomore.

which is worse, being told you're just like everyone else (at least everyone else with your general socioeconomic and educational background)? or being told you are completely alone in your depression and no one can relate to you or know what you're feeling? i tried so hard to be empathetic, but without being sympathetic. i knew pretty much what he was going through, having only come out of my own existential crisis/sophomore slump a few years before, but at the same time, not at all. he was in a completely different part of the country, out in the mountains (i went to school in the city), smoking too much pot and hanging out with too many hipsters (i went to school mostly with binge-drinking nerds and economists).

so i guess what i'm trying to say is, we can be both unique and not so unique. i am constantly amazed by the beauty of what science and the social sciences have come up with about the human body, and the human condition. if we share most of our genome with fruit flies, how different can each one of us really be? and that, to me, is the logical next agenda for civil and human rights activists - how can we possibly condone the ill-treatment of people so like ourselves in almost every way? but at the same time, look at the cultural, social, artistic diversity of the world, and how can we not agree that evolution has left more than enough wiggle room for us to be individuals and collectives at the same time.

most of the contradictions in life aren't really so, anyway. and when they are, that makes things that much more interesting.

Posted by: maya | January 3, 2008 6:30 PM

This post and the follow-up comment remind me of Milan Kundera's Immortality, where the character Agnes bemoans the false individuality of a person's face or gestures, even those which are seemingly most distinctive. "The gesture revealed nothing of that woman's essence, one could rather say that the woman revealed to me the charm of a gusture. A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations."

Posted by: Hayden | January 7, 2008 11:12 PM