‘There are people who meditate who find it unpleasant. It’s asking us not to be human’

Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara is professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin. He’s also the author of four books. We’re on a video call to discuss his latest one, which looks at the “new science” of how conversation and human connection influences and shapes our world.

In his last book In Praise of Walking, O’Mara invited readers to explore the benefits to our brains and our bodies of a good stroll. His new book, Talking Heads, examines our more social side, and how this sociability is a defining part of what makes us human, setting us apart from other species such as, say, red ants or orang-utans.

He is interested in how, as social animals, we are in near-constant dialogue with each other. “Our brains create our realities, but we shape them by talking,” is the idea at the heart of the book. O’Mara delves deeply into the ways we use conversations to create our cultures and build entire nations.

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I’m curious about how someone ends up studying the brain, as O’Mara did first in Galway and then Oxford. He remembers exactly what set him off on that path. His parents were on holidays in the US and his dad asked then 16-year-old Shane what he would like to be brought back as a gift. Other teenagers might have asked for the kind of colourfully packaged, additive-soaked American snacks not available in Ireland. Teenage Shane requested “books and newspapers”.

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One of those books, he says, “changed my life”. It was called Broca’s Brain, a collection of essays by the American astronomer Carl Sagan. There was an essay in that book about a French neurologist named Paul Broca who had a famous patient known as Patient Tan. “He had been shot in the left temple with a low-velocity musket ball in the 1870s and lost the ability to engage in articulate speech. He could understand what was said to him but could only articulate one word, that was the word Tan.”

This story fascinated O’Mara: “I was a weird kid,” he smiles. He became engrossed by the idea that you could have theories about how the brain is organised that could then be tested. Patient Tan’s case showed how one theory – that motor programmes for speech and comprehension were in the same part of the brain – was wrong. “You have a patient who could speak prior to the injury but who can’t speak any more, with no damage to the throat, but who can understand you. It shows that comprehension is in one place in the brain and articulation is in another. This was kind of mind-blowing to me ... I ended up being really interested in psychology and neuroscience as a result. And here we are.”

Henry Molaison lived with this kind of blankness where he could talk to you in the moment, but when you left the room and came back to him he wouldn’t know who you were

The idea for Talking Heads began with him thinking about “how we talk about our own autobiographical memories ... I had this general notion that how we conceive of memory is wrong. We think about memory as being in the past, when in fact it’s about the present and about the future ... Memory is there to serve the adaptive needs of the present future. This book allows me to bring together ideas that aren’t really in popular conversation, about memory and things like mental time travel, this amazing capacity humans have which we just take for granted where we can imagine ourselves in five years’ time, or think about the holiday we’re going to have next year.”

Why is this important? “Well, it’s fundamentally core to who we are as humans, and it has allowed us to construct the world we live in.”

The book opens with another famous patient, this time in the US. Henry Molaison was left with profound amnesia after undergoing experimental brain surgery to help with epilepsy caused by a childhood bike accident in the 1930s. “He had damage to a very specific pair of brain regions, and what was remarkable about him was that his life became a sort of continuous present. He couldn’t project himself forward in time ... so his memory was not conversationally updatable. He lived with this kind of blankness where he could talk to you in the moment, but when you left the room and came back to him he wouldn’t know who you were.”

Molaison is a kind of totem in the book. “If you imagine a world inhabited by Henry Molaisons, the world, the culture we have, would not exist ... Humans occupy this kind of amazing sweet spot where we’re able to take a view of what’s happening to ourselves in the future and we can travel back to our past. That’s what has allowed us to construct this amazing world.”

He argues that gossip is not only healthy but “inevitable”, and that mass human gatherings are examples of “collective effervescence” and humans “dissolving peacefully into each other”

What about mindfulness and meditation, the idea that the continuous present is not the worst place to be, according to certain philosophies such as Buddhism. Does he meditate? “No,” he says. “In fact, I’m one of the one-in-five people who find the experience of meditation really aversive. It’s supposed to be this unalloyed good thing, but when you actually look at the literature, meditation is characterised by vast numbers of dropouts ... and there are people who meditate who find it unpleasant.”

So, being in the moment is not all it’s cracked up to be? “It’s asking us not to be human, in my view. Our psychological state is one of immense richness. We engage in a continual dialogue with ourselves and with the people around us about an imagined future and a past we continually reinterpret in the service of the present.” Having said that, he believes learning to control our “mind-wandering” tendencies can be a useful tool for those who suffer with intrusive thoughts or PTSD.

This is O’Mara’s fourth book. His first one was called Why Torture Doesn’t Work. He’s aware that once the book is out in the world he can’t control how people receive it. When he wrote his torture book he got emails from people thinking he “wanted to sit down and have a mocha latte with terrorists”. Apart from books, he has his day job in Trinity and writes a Substack on neuroscience, psychology and life called Brain Pizza.

Unlike his book about walking, Talking Heads is not a book that can be easily summarised, but he hopes it will give people “a sense of wonder” and help us look at ourselves as “cognitive agents” in the world. There is lots in it that resonates. He argues that gossip is not only healthy but “inevitable”, and that mass human gatherings – whether a Taylor Swift concert or the Women’s World Cup – are examples of “collective effervescence” and humans “dissolving peacefully into each other”.

All we have to do is look back a few decades and see what this country was like in the 1980s. It really was not a very pleasant place

—  O'Mara on immigration

In one chapter, Our Nations Began as Conversations, O’Mara builds on the thinking of renowned Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson, who called countries “imagined communities”. O’Mara was partly inspired by Anderson in the writing of Talking Heads, and wanted to explore the same ideas from another perspective: “The way people think, our basic human capacities ... how does it all connect with who we are as people?”

The last chapter in the book looks at the futures we imagine together and touches on immigration. What does O’Mara think about the immigration-related protests in Ireland? “I grew up in the 1980s when this was a homogenous country. It was not a pleasant place,” he says. “This was a poor place affected by unemployment and inflation and a dearth of new ideas. Irish people – including me – what Irish people have done for several hundred years, we moved abroad.”

He doesn’t pretend to have any solutions to the current tensions. “My general point regarding it is this: immigration tends to be a very good thing. Societies prosper as the result of an influx of new blood. I remember talking to an American friend about living in America, and he said, what I love about here is ‘hybrid vigour’, which is a phrase stolen from agriculture. But his point was he could walk down the street, get Korean food, Japanese food ... that everything was available [because of immigration]. And I think we’re starting to see some of that here. I’m sure lots of people out there will seek to deny their own history, but all we have to do is look back a few decades and see what this country was like in the 1980s. It really was not a very pleasant place.” The book explores other topical issues such as populism, the pandemic, anti-vaxxers, Donald Trump and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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I confess to O’Mara that some parts of the book melted my head a bit. He’s not offended. Later he says “the world is a complex place and we need to get used to thinking about complexity, instead of howling out for simplicity, because guess what, the world isn’t simple. We’re now a literate species. We are a hyper-social species. We are a trusting species. We’re a species that has a mental existence that extends through time, so we can think different thoughts about our futures – we don’t have to feel imprisoned by the thoughts and the nostrums of the past.”

O’Mara ultimately concludes that even with all the challenges we’ve faced, humans have always possessed the ability to “talk our way into a better tomorrow”. This optimistic outlook seems to have driven everything in O’Mara’s work since he was 16, back when his mind was blown and his life changed by Carl Sagan.

“I’m fundamentally an optimist,” he agrees. “And I think the spread of literacy and education has been one of the most amazingly liberating things for humans. We’re very good at messing things up. But we’re very good at fixing things as well. And what I try to do in the books that I’ve written is to emphasise what binds us together in terms of our common humanity. It’s this astonishing capacity for learning, this capacity that we have for change, our ability to zoom out of the present moment to imagine a better world together.”

Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds by Shane O’Mara is published by Vintage Publishing on August 8th