Alex Rosenberg - How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories

1. The fall of France, MayJune, 1940.
2. Furthest extent of German advance during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.
3. The Boxology of the theory of mind. From Nichols et al., 1996, fig. 1.
4. Picture symbolizing rain.
5. Five regions of brain identified by both fMRI and TMS as loci that work together to deploy a theory of mind: the left and right temporoparietal junction (LTPJ and RTPJ); the left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG); the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), and the posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pMPFC). From Schuwerk, Langguth, and Sommer, 2014, fig. 1. Courtesy of Frontiers in Psychology.
6. Necker cube.
7. Boxology of the theory of mind sets out marching orders for the research program of neuroscience. From Nichols et al., 1996, fig. 1.
8. Road sign showing direction to Paris.
9. Map of France represents that Paris is the national capital.
10. . With permission from Mattias Karln/The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.
11. Different kinds of dedicated cells in the hippocampus of the rat brain. Grid cells, head direction cells, and boundary cells all feed into or have projections to the place cells; all these cell types in the rat brain hippocampus are shared by the human brain hippocampus. From OKeefe, 2014, fig. 2.
12. (A) Different-sized dots identify the grid cells sensitive to larger and larger spaces in the rats environment. (B) The waves represent theta wave oscillations from the grid cells that combine at the place cells to locate the rat. From Kubie and Fox, 2015, fig. 2.
13. Cartoon model of theta sequences and phase precession in the CA1 area of the hippocampus. Preplay and replay panels A and C will be important later in chapter. The theta sequence and phase precession diagrams illustrate how place cells carry information about the rats locationby firing rate of distinct cells and by when they fire in a theta oscillation. From Dragoi, 2013, fig. 1.
14. Theta waves are drawn below the track, and successive place cell circuits in the hippocampus are excited as the rat moves through different places in the track, with signature firing patters. These are recapitulated in away reverse replay starting with reward location and then recapitulated in forward replay during sleep for consolidation. From Girardeau and Zugaro, 2011, fig. 2.
15. . Courtesy of Getty.
16. . Courtesy of New York Times.
17. . Courtesy of Mattias Karln/The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

Its almost universally accepted that learning the history of somethingthe true story of how it came aboutis one way to understand it. Its almost as widely accepted that learning its history is sometimes the best way to understand something. Indeed, in many cases, its supposed that the only way to understand some things is by learning their history.

How History Gets Things Wrong explains why all three of these suppositions are wrong. Cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and, most of all, neuroscience are in the process of showing us at least three things about history: (1) our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long evolutionary pedigree and a genetic basis; (2) exactly what it is about the human brain that makes almost all the explanations history has ever offered us wrong; and (3) how our evolution shaped a useful tool for survival into a defective theory of human nature.

Many readers may find the first of these assertions easy to accept. Our recourse to historytrue storiesas a means of understanding is proverbially second nature. If science can show its literally first nature, bred in the bone, a part of what makes us tick, somehow genetically hardwired, it may help us understand features of human life and culture that are ancient, ubiquitous, and fixed beyond change. But the next two assertions will strike most readers as literally incredible. How could all the explanations history offers be wrong, and how could evolution by itself have saddled us with any particular theory, let alone a theory of human nature that is completely wrong?

The three assertionsthat our confidence in history, our taste, our need for it, indeed, our love of history is almost completely hardwired, that history is all wrong, and that its wrongness is the result of the later evolution of what was originally hardwiredare pretty much a package deal. The second and third hard-to-accept assertions build on the first one, and they do so in ways that make them hard to reject. If cognitive psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and, most of all, neuroscience between them explain why we are so attached to history as a way of understanding, they also undermine historys claim to provide real understanding of the past, the present and the future.

Just to be clear, historians are perfectly capable of establishing actual, accurate, true chronologies and other facts about what happened in the past. They arent wrong about feudalism coming before the Reformation or whether Italy and Japan were on the Allies side in World War One. Moreover, historians working in archives, for example, retrieve documentary evidence for important events in human history that have disappeared from collective memory or were never even noticed. More important, many written histories, especially those produced in the academic departments of universities, are more than just accurate chronicles. The approaches to the past that many professors of history employ can provide powerful new and better explanations of well-known historical events and processes, often by identifying causes previously unknown or ignored (as we will see). Academic history is more than, and usually different from, true stories.

But academic history isnt the history that we consume to explain individual human actions and the lives they constitute, or to understand famous creative, political, public, and scientific achievements, fateful choices and their all too often tragic consequences. Thats because nowadays academic history is rarely narrative. The history that professors write these days has been deeply influenced by the sciencessocial, behavioral, even naturaland it rarely seeks to explain individual achievements or even lives, singly or taken together. Academic history often makes use of storiesrecords, letters, diaries, chronicles that people write downas evidence for its explanations. But it is not much given to explaining by telling these (true) stories.

The history that concerns us here explains the past and the present by narrative: telling storiestrue ones, of course; thats what makes them history, not fiction. Narrative history is not just an almanac or a chronology of what happened in the past. It is explanation of what happened in terms of the motives and the perspectives of the human agents whose choices, decisions, and actions made those events happen.