Кен Робинсон - The Element

The probability is that fish make those dramatic tight shifts in direction by following the movements of the fish that lie directly in their field of perception. What appears to be a masterwork of choreography is probably little more than an especially elegant version of follow‐the‐leader. To illustrate the point, there are now computer programs that simulate the effects of swarms and schools with remarkable accuracy.

A similar principle seems to drive the operations of one of the oldest and most successful creatures on earth, the ant. If you’ve seen an ant wandering aimlessly across your kitchen floor in search of a morsel to eat, you don’t get a sense of a highly developed intelligence at work. Yet the work of ant colonies is a miracle of efficiency and success. Ants depend on what’s known as swarm intelligence, the nature of which is currently the subject of intense study. While they have yet to understand fully how ants have developed such sophisticated teamwork, researchers do know that ants achieve their goals by fulfilling their own very specific roles with military precision.

For instance, when looking for food, one ant starts on a path, leaving a trail of pheromones. The next ant follows this trail, leaving a trail of its own. In this way, a large collection finds its way to the food source and carries it back as a team to the colony. Each ant works toward a global goal, while no one ant takes the lead. In fact, there seems to be no hierarchy at all within ant colonies. Even the queen’s one function seems to be to lay eggs. These patterns of coordinated group behavior in fish, ants, mosquitoes, and most other creatures are principally to do with protection and security, with mating and survival, and with getting food and not becoming food themselves.

It’s much the same with human beings. We aggregate as groups for the same essential and primal purposes. The upside for us is that groups can be tremendously supportive. The downside is that they encourage uniformity of thought and behavior. The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.

Culture: Right and Thong

Beyond the specific social constraints we may feel from families and friends, there are others that are implicit in the general culture. I define culture as the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups. Culture is a system of permissions. It’s about the attitudes and behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in different communities, those that are approved of and those that are not. If you don’t understand the cultural codes, you can look just awful.

I’ll always remember a man I saw who got it miserably wrong on a beach in Malibu in California. He strutted slowly into our midst, a vision of the unexpected that caused a beach full of strangers to form a deep bond of helpless camaraderie. He was about forty. My guess was that he was some sort of executive, and I could imagine that in certain settings he cut a distinguished figure. But here, he did not. In a land of physical culture and tread‐mills, he was pale, hairy, and inhabited a sagging body that clearly spent its days at a desk and its nights on a barstool. One can forgive a man for all of these things. But not for wearing a nylon, leopard‐print thong.

The thong clung to his groin like an oxygen mask. A stretch of elastic held it in place, skirting his waist and threading tightly between his bare buttocks. He paraded down the length of the beach, apparently delighted that every eye was turning to him in a slow Mexican wave of amazement. He gave the impression of a self‐appointed role model of physical attraction and sexual magnetism bathing in the bright sunlight of popular acclaim. This wasn’t the majority opinion, however. “At least he might have waxed,” said the man next to me.

Why was this so hypnotically amusing for us all? It wasn’t just that he had such an outrageously high opinion of his attractiveness. It was also that he was so far out of context. The outfit and attitude might have worked in the south of France, but in Malibu, for various reasons, it was all wrong. There’s an unspoken code for men on California beaches. It’s a curious mixture of peacock display and public modesty. Oiled torsos and rippling muscles are fine, but naked buttocks are not. All over America, there’s this intricate mixture of prurience and prudishness.

Shortly afterward, my wife, Terry, and I were in Barcelona. There are beaches there that line the harbor in the city center, and every lunchtime during the summer the local offices spill out and young men and women head to the city beaches and sunbathe topless, in thongs at the very most. In Spain, that’s completely accepted. It would be odd there to see someone in a pair of knee‐length shorts and a T‐shirt. The culture simply accepts that people can wander around virtually naked on the beach.

All social cultures promote what I’d describe as “contagious behavior.” One of the best examples is language, and more particularly accents and dialects. These are wonderful illustrations of the impulse to copy and conform. It would be odd for someone born and raised in the Highlands of Scotland or the Badlands of Montana not to speak the local dialect of English with the local accent. We’d be amazed, of course, if a child born there spontaneously started speaking French or Hebrew. But we’d be just as taken aback if the child spoke the local language in an entirely different dialect or accent from everyone else. The natural instinct of children is to copy and imitate, and as they grow they absorb not only the sounds they hear but the sensibilities they express and the culture they convey. Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating.

The cultures in which we are raised do not only affect our values and outlook. They also shape our bodies and may even restructure our brains. Language, again, is a prime example. As we learn to speak, our mouths and vocal organs adapt to make the sounds our languages use. If you grow up speaking only one or two languages, it can be physically difficult to create the sounds that other languages require and that other cultures take for granted—those guttural French sounds, or the lispy sounds of Spanish, or the tonal sounds of some Asian languages. To speak a new language, we may have to retrain our bodies to make and understand the new sounds. But the effects of culture may go deeper still—into the actual structures of the brain.

In the last few years there has been a series of fascinating studies into differences in visual perception between people from the West and from East Asia. These studies suggest that the cultures we grow up in affect the basic processes by which we see the world around us. In one such study, Westerners and Asians were asked to look at a series of photographs and to describe what they saw. A number of marked differences emerged. In essence, Westerners tend to focus more on the foreground of the pictures and on what they consider the subject. Asians focus more on the whole image, including the relationships between the different elements. For example, one photograph showed a jungle scene with a tiger. Typically, the Western observers, when asked what they saw, said, “A tiger.” To Western readers of this book, that may seem reasonable enough. However, Asian observers typically said, “It’s a jungle with a tiger in it,” or “It’s a tiger in a jungle.” The difference is significant, and it relates to larger cultural differences in the Western and Asian worldviews.

In Asian art there is often much less emphasis on portraiture and the individual subject of the sort that is common in Western art. In Asian cultures, there is less emphasis on the individual and more on the collective. Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks has emphasized the importance of critical reasoning, logical analysis, and the separation of ideas and things into categories. Chinese philosophy is not based as much on logic and deductive reasoning and tends to emphasize relationships and holism. These differences in perception may lead to differences in memory and judgment. At least one study suggests that over time they may also lead to structural differences in the brain.