Start the Week

Human intelligence and imagination

Tom Sutcliffe and guests discuss how we solve problems and imagine the future. While many people now point to the potential of AI, the prize winning writer Naomi Alderman is interested in the messy magic of human thinking. In the forthcoming BBC Radio 4 series, Human Intelligence she tells the stories of the people – with all their ingenuity and foibles – who built the modern world.

Across history human cultures have devised a wide range of practices to understand, and discover, the mysteries of the past, present and future. The exhibition Oracles, Omens and Answers (at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, until April 2025), co-curated by Dr Michelle Aroney showcases the art of divination. From the use of cards, beads and spiders, to studying the stars, weather and palm lines people have sought ways to clarify and predict the world around them.

Human imagination is not just the tool of fiction writers, but something that’s vital to navigate the world; to reminisce, anticipate and plan for the future. But how does it work? The neurologist Adam Zeman explores the very latest scientific studies in the world of the imagination, in his new book, The Shape of Things Unseen.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Duration:: 46m
Broadcast on:: 30 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Nicola Cocklin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes, Rebellion, Risk and the Radical Power of Youth. She thought right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them, that resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Follow History's Youngest Heroes, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey moms, we know you are moving kids around, and don't have time for the headaches you've experienced at that other auto shop. At Fort Collins 4x4, we maintain your vehicle to keep you on schedule. Our approachable staff, our honest, transparent repair process, and our newly remodeled facility will put you at ease. We want to earn your business. Free Matchbox cars to all accompanying kids. No mansplaining, guaranteed. Fort Collins 4x4, look for the black and grey building on South College Ave. One light north of Trilby, or book online, any time. BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Tom Sackliff, and this is Start the Week from BBC Radio 4, I hope you enjoy the programme. We are talking today about the ways in which the human mind makes sense of the world around it, seeing it clearly enough to survive, coping with its uncertainties, and just occasionally seeing a possibility in it that no one else has seen before. With us to do that are the novelist and alternative world creator Naomi Olderman, about to embark on a series of talks for Radio 4 in which she celebrates great thinkers in history. She has called it "HI human intelligence", as opposed to the artificial kind. Joining her are the neurologist Adam Zeman, whose book The Shape of Things Unseen offers a survey of fascinating and counter-intuitive new findings about human imagination, from the creative power of daydreaming to the neural predictions that make human vision possible. And the historian Michelle Oroni, co-curator of the Bodleian's exhibition Oracles, Omen's and Answers, which is about the unshakable human desire to get some guidance about what just happened and what might happen next. We know what's going to happen next, or at least I do, because I know what I'm going to ask you. Which is, are you worried for the future of intelligence? We've had a year in which all of the news has been about AI. Google, just before Christmas, unveiled this quantum chip which can do a calculation that would take a supercomputer a billion times the length of the universe. Do you have anxieties about the future of human intelligence, or do you think it has qualities that make it unreplicable? Adam Zeman? I think it has properties that, for the time being, make it unreplicable. I mean, we've always been very concerned, haven't we, about new developments in cognitive technology. So the invention of writing was regarded with great anxiety by those present at the time. Regardless of the anxiety about what it was going to do to the human mind, about what it might do, that it might be the death of memory. Because we no longer need to remember anything if we could write it all down. And we seem to have conquered that invention quite successfully. I guess AI probably does pose some exceptional threats, but I don't think that at present it's likely to replicate human intelligence fully. Yeah, some people prefer to change the A to an alien intelligence, and that's a better way of thinking about it, namely. Yeah, well, in some ways, I mean, I tend to call it certainly the ones that produce text, call it a large language model. Because it's not really intelligent, what it's doing is a form of autocorrect, where it's looking for whatever is the next most expected word. So obviously, as a novelist, I asked myself periodically, "Oh dear, is this going to put me out of business?" The thing is that creative writing novels, whatever, what you're doing there is not coming up with the next most expected word. You're coming up with the least expected word. And thus far, I don't think their technology is going to be able to do that. It's been pretty bad so far. You must have been heartened by the early examples of what AI has been in the creative field. I've tried. I've really tried with some of it to get it to tell me a good story and it doesn't. Michelle Oraney, I'm going to ask you to look into a crystal ball as well, and you know about these things. Is AI going to play any part in this kind of area of divination? It's got the sort of randomness, doesn't it? Yeah, look, I mean, it already has. It's pretty easy to teach an AI. Any of the techniques that diviners have always been using, right? And so astrologers have already been teaching AI how to do the calculations that they rely on for their horoscopes. And one of my colleagues at MIT just taught an AI how to do 19th century car-to-mancy techniques. Which is with cards. So using cards to answer questions about the unknown, and I've been asking the AI a lot of questions. And it's disturbingly accurate. Yes, I think you have an AI fortune teller in the exhibition, don't you? You can pose questions to it. We do. We do. We do. OK, Naomi, I'm going to come back to you because you're doing this big series of talks. I'm called H.I. Obviously, that implicitly confronts AI. Why was that? Listen, we're having a lot of conversations and thoughts right now about what is artificial intelligence going to be able to do? And where is it going to take us? And to my mind, the real problem would be if we mistake artificial intelligence for human intelligence, there are things that can do brilliantly well. It can iterate. It can repeat things again and again and again, much faster than human brains can. And without getting bored, that means they can do fantastic things. But I really wanted to have a think about what it is that human minds do and how we do it. What are the ways that people throughout history have managed to do what a computer can never do? To assimilate, to understand, to make an empathic leap between one mind and another. To work out what it is that is going on around us and to come up with a new explanation. So when you think of somebody like Darwin, who's a pretty obvious example of someone coming up with an incredible new thought, the question that he poses himself is not a question that a computer would ever pose for itself. That question, how did this all get here? And is there a reason that, you know, we go and have a look at, he makes all these collections of specimens from the Galapagos and then he spends 30 years thinking about them. Why are these fossils so similar to this? Why are these birds skeleton so similar to these? And by the process of bringing all that together, he comes up with a brand new thought. I think we need to actually respect ourselves more than maybe we are. I saw somebody from some tech company the other day saying the value of intelligence is going to go to zero. And he thinks yourself, no, the value of doing certain things very repetitively is going to be less. But the value of a brilliant person encountering the world, working on it hard, accumulating a large amount of information and coming up with a new conclusion is not going anywhere. You've chosen 25 people to represent this idea. What was the criteria for inclusion? You've got thousands you could choose for. Right, right. I mean, you know, hopefully, hopefully we'll be able to do many more or we'll do them in a different way. But what I was looking for for this was to be able to not group people necessarily by historical incident or by country, but to look at what links thinkers together. So I looked for theme. So our first theme is disruptors. And so we have everybody there from Socrates to Mary Wollstonecraft to Malcolm X and talking about how those people engage with the world that they were in and said, look, we're just doing this wrong. There are parts of our world where our thinking is not good enough and we need to think harder. We're talking about teachers. We're talking about collectors. We're talking about. It would be an example, a collector, the accumulation of knowledge and then the application of other. Yes, exactly. And I think what's so wonderful, I mean, what's been such a privilege about getting the time to really delve into all these minds is to really understand that are people do in fact think differently. There is no one correct way to do it. You might come out of school thinking that if you don't think in the way the teachers expect you to, you've done it wrong, but in fact, we need the collectors and we need the disruptors and we need the teachers and, you know, none of these are different impulses. Are you finding your categories secure because obviously something like Copernicus could be a disruptor, but he could also be a systematiser, I mean, you need both, don't you? My categories are almost entirely arbitrary in the sense that I'm drawing out the links between the different people, but you could certainly put every single person in several different categories. So, you know, we have Mary Wollstonecraft in as a disruptor, but if you wanted to do a series about people who think by talking or think by arguing, that would also be her. And if you wanted to put diogenes into a series about how people who live their philosophy, you could also do that. So, I'm pulling out, you know, interesting strands. When I think about it, I sometimes think of it as putting together a hand of cards and going, "Oh yeah, these cards can go together in lots of different ways, but I'm just compiling a selection like this." Your tarot reading, intellectual history of cards and men. How important is the human element here? I mean, you mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft and in your talk on her, you talk about this kind of disastrous relationship she has, this brilliant woman who succumbs at one point to an obvious con man. I mean, I say obvious. Right. Yeah, the trouble with terrible con man is that they are brilliant and he did completely deceive her. Yes. But it wasn't just her intellectual responses that were in play. It was her emotional responses and all of those fed into what she wrote. Right. Exactly. And this is her argument. Her argument is to say, "We cannot either of us either be rational or emotional. We must all somehow assimilate all of that in order to live a rich, full human life." And I think when you think about Mary Wollstonecraft's life, you have to think, "Right. She has come from a very, very difficult situation." Her father was certainly abusive towards her mother. She's bringing that into her relationships, but she's also bringing that into her politics, where she's talking about, "Well, how did I end up in this situation? How is it that my father was able to spend all of my inheritance before I turned 18 so that I had nothing left to live on?" Those are personal questions for her, but they're also, of course, extremely large political questions. And I think you can often see that and there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with being able to look at somebody's life and say, "Ah, the reason that this thing kept you coming back to it is because it was so important for you." I mean, certainly you could say that about Malcolm X as well as a thinker who is living through a philosophy to explain what had happened to him in his life. Even Peter Ramos, who was the inventor of the textbook, is someone who as a young person had had to become a servant to a wealthy man in order to be able to get his education at university. So then he invents something that will enable anybody to get an education if they've got that book. He's very interesting character, Peter Ramos, isn't he? He finds himself at odds with the kind of current philosophical attitudes and takes on Aristotle, which is a truly shocking thing to do at the time. Right. At the time, which is France sort of in the early enlightenment, maybe a bit before the early enlightenment, at the time, Aristotle was – this is the Cinequine on – everybody was teaching and thinking and understanding him, and if you understood Aristotle, people thought you understood everything. And Peter Ramos just comes in and says, "No, number one, you haven't translated him properly, you're misapplying, and also, he's just wrong about some things." Internally, he came here and said all sorts of things like that. Right, exactly. And he got banned from teaching by the University of Paris for seven years for that. It's interesting, he also sounds to have been a kind of pretty pugnacious and belligerent character, which then also feeds into the nature of your intellectual thought. Adam Zemann, there is a connection with your work here. Being embodied is crucial to intelligence, isn't it? It is indeed. And our embodiment is typically invisible to us, isn't it? A moment to moment to experience the conversation we're having now depends on countless teeming, invisible, highly complex processes occurring with our brain, consuming oxygen, consuming energy, which may include digestion or – indeed, so not just brain, but indeed body more widely. And we are also drawing on a vast stock of knowledge which we've accumulated over the course of our lifetime, which again, tends to be invisible to us, hence the idea that we are constantly predicting the world into being, predicting ourselves and the world into being on the basis of that accumulated knowledge. Namely, part of you honouring these thinkers is you often present them as a sort of – and I can see why you're doing it because it's a radio talk and you want to arrest – but you often present them as the single route to the future. So, say Michael Faraday, for example, you wouldn't be able to listen to this programme without his work. Now, do you really believe that or would somebody else have got there? Yeah, this is a question that we can never answer, you know, a historian can never really answer a counterfactual. If you want me to have my novelist hat on for a moment, I think probably somebody would have got there. But at the same time, we might as well honour exactly how it did happen and to understand how that happened at that moment. So, you know, Faraday is an incredibly interesting person. He's extremely religious and for him understanding the way that electricity works is a way of understanding the world that God has created. I think it's so fascinating because perhaps we would tend these days to think, "Oh, there's science versus religion," but actually, for a lot of early scientists, this idea that you were exploring God's natural creation was very much what they felt they were up to. And Michelle Orennan, this is exactly your field, isn't it, at this moment, on which science and religion meet and cross over with each other? Yeah, well, that's right. I mean, I think when we talk about science and religion, I've got to remember that what we think of science and religion are very modern concepts. And something that I work on, like the history of astrology, is something that is kind of halfway between the two, if we were going to be using our own definitions. But for most of pre-modern history was actually Canada's a science, right? Or some kind of art that had technical skill, right? And it relied actually on Aristotle's worldview, more so than any kind of religious kind of idea. You can obviously, Faraday is a case in point, you can obviously arrive at a truth by means of beliefs that might not be provable or not be scientifically provable. Is there a place in your talks for thinkers who might have been wrong? I mean, Freud comes to mind. Right. He's a influential thinker, hugely influential on creativity and the way we think about ourselves in the world, but absolutely flat wrong in some of his theories. I mean, I think almost everybody was wrong about something, weren't they? So we, I talk about George Washington, who we might not think of as a thinker, but one of the things he did was to pioneer the peaceful transfer of power, or something that's been really has come into question in the last few years. So that idea that you can have, as it were, a king, and then the king will just piece fully step down, and then the next one will arrive, very, very new. Now we can also look at George Washington and say, he was a slave owner, that he didn't see anything wrong with that. Do you think that quality, his, that ability, you know, in concert with others at the time, to think actually there might be a way of just handing over power. Do you think it is a process of imagination, does it involve imagination? I'm going to move us around to Adam, who knows all about his imagination, I'm curious. You know, something that I don't know, we can't go and do brain scans on all of these people, is, is to say, well, how much of their thinking is because of the way their brain is structured, and that one person can come up with a set of thoughts because their neurons just happen to fire in this particular way, and that's the thumbprint of their mind that we see on their work, and somebody else will have a different thumbprint because of just what's gone on in there. I think with George Washington, we can certainly see that he was shaped by the process of battle, which is a pragmatic process. People fall, and then you've got to find a way to replace them, and you have to do that swiftly and successfully if you're going to win a battle and keep an army together. So then does that sort of experience, which I know that you've written Adam back trauma, that feels like a very intense traumatic experience, but an experience which leads to something great, does that then mean that you absolutely know how to do that. Somebody goes, we've got to replace them, that's just what we do. And a version can play its part in creating new ways of being and living, presumably, as well. Adam Zeman, your book is called The Shape of Things Unseen, a new science of imagination. Can we just clarify terms, actually? I went ahead of myself a bit there. What do you mean by imagination? The key sense which I have in mind in the book is our capacity to detach ourselves from the hero now, recollect the past, anticipate the future, enter the virtual worlds of science or art, indeed create the virtual worlds of science and art. So that's the key sense. There's a slightly more basic sense in which it has to do with forming images, sensory images of absent things. So when we visualize an apple or imagine the sound of thunder or feel the velvet with our mind's fingertips, so to speak, we're engaging in a slightly simpler form of imagination than the one I've just outlined. My intuition would be that that simpler form of imagination is the building brick of the larger one. I would say it's, for most of us, it's a key component. One interesting, recent discovery is that some people may lack sensory imagery and yet behind the imaginative and creative. Yes, you write it. You write about AFan-tasics. In fact, I think you coined the word AFan-tasic, so what does that mean? So AFan-tasier is the lack of an eye's mind. It turns out that about 3 or 4% of the population lack the ability to visualize, and many of those folk in fact have very thin or absent sensory imagery generally. And yet, are functioning normally and often magnificently. Sometimes in a field which would seem to absolutely necessitate the ability to visually imagine things. I mean, an animator at Pixar who has no ability to summon an interior picture of the thing. That's right, indeed. Ed Kuttmall, who was the president of Pixar and who won the touring prize of his discoveries in computer animation, was one of the first people to approach us after we coined the term, explaining that he recognized this characteristic in himself. Why is it that you regard imagination as an absolutely kind of pivotal hallmark of human thought? Of what it is to be human. I think it's fundamental to human creativity, and human creativity is fundamental to culture and culture is really what makes us what we are. Can apes and dogs daydream in your view? So I think it's very likely that they can. If you watch a dog twitching on a bike, it's a different thing, isn't it? It's a daydreaming is knowing that you are dreaming. So I would suspect that they may also daydream to some degree. So we know that one of the really interesting discoveries over the last 10 to 20 years in neuroscience has been of the brain's resting state networks and in particular the default mode network. So this is a network of regions in the brain which is particularly active when we're at rest. If you slide someone into a scanner and just ask them to chill, this is the set of regions that will be the most energetic and it turns out that the set of regions is involved in recollecting the past, anticipating the future, thinking about other minds, thinking about moral decisions. In fact, many of the things that divination engages with, the default mode network is present in other animals and I think it's quite likely that they do enjoy some kind of imaginative life. I think what is distinctive about us is that we have evolved to share what we imagine. We are extraordinarily accomplished mind sharers and that ability relates to language but actually I think it's more fundamental than language. I want to step back one step which is you quote the neuroscientist Anil Seth at one point saying this. We tend to think of perception as occurring outside in but mostly it happens inside out. In other words, what we are thinking absolutely frames how we see the world and there's no getting away from that. I think that's right. I think that's true in a simple sense and in a sophisticated sense. The simple sense is that where we to open our eyes with no prior education and vision, we would not be able to make any sense of the world. We can't help reading words and we really read the visual word much as we read words but our education and vision is lost. We have no recollection of the years we spent learning how to interpret the world. And so we never look at anything without a kind of theory about what it might be and a system of checking. Going backwards and forwards and checking whether it meets that theory or not. Exactly. So experience has been described as a control hallucination. I was very struck by the findings you write about which is that imagining something, simply imagining something can have an effect on our perceptual apparatus. If you ask somebody to imagine something very bright, their pupils can't straight. Yes. It's a lovely experiment, isn't it? And it illustrates the broad idea that sensory imagination is a kind of weak perception. There's no lots of evidence for this. So if you imagine your front door, you're going to be weakly activating the areas of the brain that would become active when you look at your front door. You of course also be activating areas of the brain that are involved in organising that mental act. So if we asked our listeners now to use an example you use in your book, to imagine holding in their hand a tulip, turning it round in the light, thinking hard about what colour it is, sort of rubbing their hands across the leaves and feeling what a tulip leaves feels like. What is happening in their brain as they do that? So for most of us, those of us with sensory imagery, there will be activation of just the regions that you would be using to control your hand, motor regions, regions in the visual brain that would be looking at the tulip, appreciating its colour, appreciating its shape, perhaps if you're somebody with olfactory imagery, which some of us have, you might be able to detect a faint scent of tulip. So we'll be activating those sensory regions which we use in perception. And so there is a large overlap in the brain between perception, imagination, recollection and in some cases action. So if you imagine running for a bus, you're going to be using your motor courtesies to do so. Naomi Alderman, you wanted to come in there. This has explained something to me about writing novels. Sometimes when you write a novel, you're imagining a situation or you imagine a scene and you find that you have learned something from the process of that writing where either you've learned something about people or even, I've imagined a scene so strongly that I can then know something about what that room is like. Even if I haven't been there for 30 years, there's both memory and a kind of exploration. And when you say that, "Oh, right, imagination is weak perception," I'm like, "Oh yes, that's what I'm doing when I'm sitting down writing a novel." You're weakly perceiving the world. You're weakly perceiving the world. Yes. Or at least you can only weakly perceive a world that doesn't exist. But even that, I think it is true, actually, and that is also what's presumably so engrossing about a novel is if you're going into an imaginary world of any sort, you're being invited to weakly perceive something that doesn't exist. There's no other door to get into that place. Michelle, Aroni, you wanted to come in. I'm so fascinated by this idea that what we imagine impacts us physiologically. I'm just so curious. I mean, what kind of experiments might we be able to do with animals to answer this question of whether or not they daydream and whether or not they imagine? I mean, if we know that we salivate because we're thinking about food or our pupils dilate or constrict because we're thinking about brightness or darkness, can we kind of follow that through with animals? Yeah. I mean, there's one nice example of a process which we know occurs in the brains of animals because it was discovered there in which I think links with human imagination. This is the process of replay. So if an animal explores a new environment, a sequence of cells in the hippocampus will become active. And we know that those cells then replay that activity in periods of rest and periods of sleep afterwards. Now, that may be an unconscious process, but it's quite possible that on occasion it's conscious. So perhaps some of our mind pops when a location we're familiar with suddenly comes into mind mysteriously, which happens to many of us, perhaps, where we're kind of catching the breath of replay there. It's the process, the same with speech. I mean, I imagine, like a lot of people, I have a lot of mental dialogues. And they're very often a way of kind of internally working out either what I think or mending an unsatisfactory conversation after it's happened. Is the same process going on there? You're lighting up the kind of... That is right and auditory hallucinations probably have a similar explanation. They occur when that sort of replay is active in your auditory cortex, but somehow you have lost the awareness that it's self-generated. Do they require, as it were, a turning down of the volume on the external stimuli? That's generally true of introspection. So we become less sensitive to the external environment when the default mode network is particularly active. It's a you've turned down the outside world, but I mean, I used it as a child here. My name being called as I was dropping off to sleep. Yes. Very vivid and would wake me up because I thought it was real. Yes, it would be. But obviously, I was sort of... my brain was calming and perhaps fabulating or creating something. Yes. Yes. There's a kind of loosening of connection between the networks in the brain, which allows its intrinsic activities to become more conspicuous as sleep approaches. We are drifting in a very natural way towards Michelle O'Roney's field of knowledge. And before I move there, the fact that these two processes, thinking about something and imagining something, are in effect a kind of weak mirroring of actually seeing it, puts an enormous premium, doesn't it, on some mechanism in the brain that says, "No, this isn't happening." Indeed. Some mechanism that tells us, "Is there any knowledge about, as it were, how that operates?" So there is... the brain probably uses some rules of thumb. So if experience is very vivid, and if it's effortless and if it's consistent with context, then it's probably experience of the real world. Whereas if the opposite is true, it may well be self-generated. There are, of course, exceptions to that. So daydreams, for example, can be quite effortless and very vivid. So we probably do rely, to some degree, on a kind of reality checking mechanism. And this is likely to reside in our frontal lobes. And there is indeed good evidence that an area, at the very tip of the frontal lobes, plays a key role in enabling us to distinguish self-generated and externally generated experience and action. Sometimes, of course, we have hallucinations that are not controlled hallucinations, as in sort of introspection and imagination and creative imagination. You write very interestingly about the number of people, bereaved people, having very vivid hallucinations of the people they've lost. What is going on there in terms of the brain, do you think? So Francis Galton, in the 19th century, said that the visionary experience is actually much more common than we take it to be. And indeed, many probably most brief people will occasionally sense the presence of their loved one. They may see or hear or feel their loved one. And it seems that when the brain is deprived of sensory experience, it will seek it desperately, in some cases. And sensory experience, in that case, being the presence of the person. And sometimes, the self-generated activity will rise above a threshold, which means that we perceive it as external, generally not for long. Most brief people aren't deceived for more than a few moments, but nevertheless, the experience can be... But that checking system you were talking about just then, momentarily, sort of lets it through. Yeah. That's right. Naomi, you were nodding your head there. I was. My mother died last year. And there was certainly one occasion, just two or three weeks after she died, that as I was saying goodbye to my father at the door, I absolutely saw her standing behind him. I thought to myself, well, it's because I'm so used to seeing her in that place, that all of my memories are filling in for me, probably, that it made me realize that what's actually happening when I'm perceiving is often the time remembering. So I'm not necessarily constantly filling in all the details afresh of what my parent's front hall looks like. I know what it looks like, and I'm also expecting to see my mother there. That was how I explained to myself, anyway. You were predicting her. Right. Right. Did it perturb you? In the sense that it was my mother, not really, because it was nice to see her. But, obviously, there is something, you know, if that had gone on happening over a long period of time, I think that would have upset me quite a lot. Michelle Aroni, the experiences like that, and the fact that they're quite common, make it obvious why people think there is more to their life and more to the world than, as it were, what we can feel and touch and concretely prove. And that's your kind of area of study in this exhibition. We tend to think of it as entirely future-directed divination, but it's not, is it? It covers everything. Yeah, that's right. And I like to think of divination as technologies for making known the unknown, right? And that might be a lot of the time, the unknowns of the future, but so much of it is actually directed at the mysteries of kind of the past as they play out in the present, right? So something like, "What caused my toothache?" or "Who stole my wedding ring?" Or basically, "What is the hidden cause of the problem that I'm facing now?" So really, it's about diagnosis. This exhibition at the Bodleham, every single human society, by the look of it, from the year Dot has had this notion that you might be able to kind of look into mysteries, but the results have always been mixed to be tactful. So why is it that we persist with it? I think one thing that I've learnt in curating this exhibition is that you can divine with just about anything, sand, water, eggs, birds, stars, anything, pick something, anything in this room. We could find it because it's about patterns, right? And I think that there might be something, you know, that a neurologist might want to say about pattern detecting, right, and how this is a very natural kind of human thing to do. But I think, you know, you raise the question about accuracy, and it's a tricky one. But what I would say is that actually, oftentimes, the people who are consulting to find us care less about accuracy rather than how helpful it is to making a decision in the moment. And I think we can actually kind of find something similar when we think about the predictions of economists, right? Or even meteorologists, right? I mean, how often does the weather report get it wrong, but still we find it useful, partly because we're using it not so we know for sure what's going to happen, but what we should do now? Do I bring an umbrella to work today or not? It may get it right a little more often than opening up a chicken and looking at the entrails. Yeah, you're so right. I mean, there's a different level of accuracy there, absolutely, absolutely. Leaving aside the whole question of whether any particular method works or not, does the history of divination offer kind of valuable historical evidence about past societies? Can we learn things about them that we wouldn't otherwise know without? Yeah. I mean, in a way, studying divinations kind of like a mirror into human anxieties, a window rather into human anxieties, right? And so what I find so fascinating is that we have records of what people ask diviners in ancient Mesopotamia and they're the exact kind of things that we are anxious about today. A new job. A new job? Yeah, should I? That's right. Does my friends secretly hate me? We see this come up again and again and again. Is this the right person to marry? Is my partner cheating on me? Would my business do better if I moved to a different country? Is it safe enough to ship my goods overseas with this company or should I try a different company, right? These are kind of very universal concerns. And historians and anthropologists too like to point out that anxiety and fear are culturally contingent because in every single society, things are risky in different ways, right? But actually what we find again and again is that humans are just very anxious creatures and we want answers. We don't like uncertainty at all. It's rather unnerving in some of the cases. You have a Mesoamerican booklet which you can consult and on very important binary questions, should I marry this person or not? And it's a yes, no answer. Is there evidence about the degree to which people followed these? Yeah, so this is one of the areas where the historical record doesn't really come through, right? We actually really have very little idea about what people in the past did with these answers. And oftentimes what anthropologists find today is that often people are given an answer and they don't like it at all so they choose not to do it, but they nevertheless still reflect on the experiences having been useful, right? Because they've almost outsourced the decision in a way. So they've said, okay, well here are my options, what do you think? And then once they've been given, okay, well it's this, they think, actually no, that's not what I want at all, right? So it's almost like a therapeutic process. Yes, it's not divination. It's revelation. Right. It's of your own state of mind. Exactly. It's like tossing a coin and then you say, well, I'll do it out of three if you don't like the answer. Right, exactly. It's that tossing the coin where your reaction to it tells you what you knew already. I mean, it makes me wonder whether we were talking about Freud just before, whether what's some of what's going on there is tapping into the things that the brain knows that we're not necessarily consciously aware of, that there's subconscious stuff. So it could be very accurate if it's saying, does this person hate me and the auspices in the guts of a bird say, well, it's very favorable to Mercury in this way? And they go, ah, I knew he didn't like me. Adam is saying, well, what do you think about this? I presume you're skeptical as a man of science about the accuracy of these methods. I guess I'm somewhat skeptical about the accuracy, but I was reflecting that actually divination in a way plays the same role as nervous systems are thought to, so in modern theories of predictive brain function, the brain is thought to minimize surprise, and that's used in a somewhat tactical sense. That's exactly what people are trying to do, isn't it, when they go to diviners, they're trying to reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises? Michelle Oraney, the one feature that seems to be consistent to all of these different forms, and there are many different forms, you know, looking at the entrails of foul, putting out cards, palmistry, randomness is quite important, isn't it, for the person who is going to be the professional diviner. They need this sort of blank space on which to work, or not blank, but from which meaning can be extracted. Yeah, that's right. And because as long as there's been diviners, which is basically as long as humans have been around, there have been people who have accused diviners with, you know, sometimes pretty good reasons of being con men, right? And so one of the ways that the diviners have sort of tried to avoid this accusation is to in build randomness into their procedure, right? So that they say, well, I didn't impact the result, right? I just threw the cards on the floor, and this is how they landed, or I just opened the book at random, and this is how it landed, where in some countries in Africa, I shook the objects in the basket, and I just saw the way that they fell, right? Right. So it's meant to be kind of a technique for revealing a true message underneath the randomness. Or in the case of spider divination, the spider decided not me. The spider divided. Yeah. That's right. The spider divination is from Cameroon, I think, isn't it? Yes. And you, it's kind of partly cut a mancy, but you let the spider do the shuffling. Yeah, that's right. So you essentially have leaves made of cards made of leaves that are sitting above a hole in the ground where the spider lives, right? And what happens is the spider comes up to eat, and when it does, it moves the cards around. And crucially, in this technique, you have a stick and the stone and one means yes, one means no. And the spider moves the leaves around and the stone around, and it gives you a binary answer, right? And so the spider makes the decision for you. One of the things that was very fascinating about that is that there obviously is a sort of proto-scientific application, because they sometimes check the spider. They do. Were they calibrate the spider? They calibrate the spider. Yeah. Surprisingly regularly, I mean, when you've got, when you ask it a question, you know, the calibrating question is often am I here alone, or will I be drinking beer tonight, right? Somewhere where you know what the answer is. And if the spider says gets the answer wrong, then goodbye to that spider. But I guess it's a 50, you know, 50/50 chance. So often the spiders do pass, right? You might have to run a few trials. Yeah. But the notion there is that the spider is let you down as it were not the system. Well, that's exactly right. But oftentimes when diviners get things wrong, they say blame the artist, not the art, right? It was my fault. Everything's just too complicated, but actually the theory still remains, but I obviously made a mistake in there somewhat. So in a sense, it's kind of like intellectually humble in some kind of way. It is a consistent theme, certainly in the catalog to this exhibition. This idea that there is a utility to it, which is unconnected to whether it's true or not, that it is a system for thinking about things, you know, for example, on tarot, individuals can use the cards themselves to prompt reflection about their own lives. Do you think that's a kind of core reason that people keep going back to this? I mean, for example, in astrology, that people use it as a way of thinking about that. It's like therapy, I think. I think all of us need some sometimes set aside to reflect on our lives and plan for the future. There's a way to do it in sort of a controlled environment where you have someone, you know, oftentimes a diviner, giving you bespoke advice, right? So many of the decisions we have to make, you know, we could look at the statistics to try and make a decision, but oftentimes we just kind of want to chat with someone actually and think about what's best for us. And this is why it does survive so well. And occasionally have a contradictory voice as well, perhaps. Sorry, Naomi, you wanted to come here. Yeah, it occurs to me that it also gives you certainty and a certainty that the gods or whatever have decided that this is the right answer. So if you're thinking between, shall I marry this person or that person, they both seem perfectly fine, actually the gods coming in and saying, no, marry this person for the rest of your life. You're going to say, well, this was the marriage. It was ordained for me. So therefore, if this person seems quite annoying at times, that's probably the I just need to work hard. Well, that's right. And in a lot of these cases, you're never going to know if the other one was better, right? Because you can't go back and make that decision. Yeah, if I stay in this city with my business or if I move elsewhere, well, if I've decided that then I will work hard on it because that is what the gods have ordained for me. It seems actually, I mean, in a world of, you know, constant Tinder app swiping, actually that's very useful for someone to say, no, this, this is your decision. Go and live it now. In a way, a belief in combat, perhaps like surprisingly, a belief in faith can be freeing. And also, this is very often operating. I mean, the reason people go to diviners in the first place is that they are poised on a seesaw, which is very equally balanced. Right. The decisions they find hard to make and will seek advice about. There is an element of confirmation bias here getting on as well, isn't there? Sorry, Adam. I was just going to say that your catalog suggests that the thinking of the diviners wasn't entirely deterministic. So I had the impression that sometimes people would have the opportunity perhaps to change their fate, so to speak. Yeah, that's right. The prediction would be made but might not be unalterable. Actually very few systems of divination are completely deterministic. So many of them are actually really quite flexible. And with astrology, for example, or something like palmistry, the idea is that what the patterns are revealing is actually natural tendencies, right? And they might be tendencies in your own character that maybe you should probably work to fix, or maybe tendencies for something to go wrong in your life that again, you should make sure you make the right decisions or actually make sure you're prepared so that the worst doesn't happen. We talked a little bit about its relationship to scientific method, divination, and clearly in astrology, astronomy is sort of inconceivable without it. It's the bedrock for all of that knowledge that comes. What is its relationship to politics? Because it's a powerful alternative voice about what's going to happen, what people might want to happen. Yeah, well, in almost every historical society, there's been diviners acting in courts and governments, giving advice, right? And they're doing the same kind of jobs that today's epidemiologists did, today's economists, political pundits, right, meteorologists, the exact same kind of work. And if you can kind of imagine the case of astrology where your worldview is telling you that the stars influence life on Earth, then if you can kind of tap into that and get insights into that, well, yeah, it's actually quite useful to know, should I go to war with this person? Is there a flood coming up that I should be worried about, right? So these are paid employment roles in government. You might have some anxieties about the person who is making those decisions and whether they have been got at. Yes. Externally. Yes. And also another thing that's a bit troublesome about having an astrologer in court is they're very good with propaganda, right? So you can say this ruler was ordained to be leader, but you can also, when you get kicked out because you've lost the favor of the king, say, actually, I was wrong all along, this person is destined to die very soon, right? And so astrologers are, yeah, yeah, in trouble a lot of the time. Okay. I made one prediction, which is that we would run out of time before we'd run out of things to say about what we're talking about. And we have, we didn't talk about bibliomancy, I actually went online because you can go online. If you drop a Bible open, it tends to open at the same place, but if you go online, you can get a random verse. I clicked on it dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place under wrath for it is a written vengeance in its mind, I will repay, saith the Lord. That was my biblical lot today. Don't know how that relates to us, but thank you very much to all of you for that coming and talking to us. Name me, Alderman's series on human intelligence starts on BBC Radio 4 from next Monday, the 6th of January at 1.45, and then it continues for three weeks. Adam Zemmons, the shape of things unseen, a new science of imagination is out on the 16th of January. And you can see Oracles, Omens and answers co-curated by Michelle Oroney at the Bodleian Library in Oxford until the end of April, and there's a book to go with that. Next week, Matthew Syed takes over the airwaves with a new series, 25 years of the 21st century, and start the week, we'll be back on Monday the 13th of January for now. Thank you and have a very happy new year. Thanks for listening to this edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 produced by Katie Hickman, and if you're after more conversations on art, science, history and politics, you can find many, many more on the BBC Sounds website. Yoga is more than just exercise, it's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space after the yoga classes, it felt amazing. But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in a house and not feeling like they can leave. A lot of secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry with the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations. You just get sucked in so gradually, and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't understand. Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network, I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice and further people to not be hurt for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets Season 6 – The Bad Guru – Listen Wherever You Get Your Podcasts Hey Moms, we know you are moving kids around. And don't have time for the headaches you've experienced at that other auto shop. At Fort Collins 4x4, we maintain your vehicle to keep you on schedule. Our approachable staff, our honest, transparent repair process, and our newly remodeled facility will put you at ease. We want to earn your business. Free matchbox cars to all accompanying kids. No mansplaining, guaranteed. Fort Collins 4x4. Look for the black and grey building on South College Ave. One light north of Trilby. Or book online anytime. anytime. (upbeat music)

Producer: Katy Hickman