EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

IN March 1898, a group of scientists set sail from London for the Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea. The purpose of their embarkation was to study local islanders in the hope that they would learn important lessons about the way the human brain works.

Equipped with various colour photographs and some ‘footer shirts’, the researchers were confident these would prove irresistible to the natives.

For the following 15 months or so, they conducted a series of tests – one scientist would measure people’s sight, another hearing, another skin sensitivity, and so on. On their return to London, the team presented their findings to the British Association For The Advancement Of Science.

The exercise was a total disaster. Far from showing any major differences between the way in which a Bornean tribesman perceived the world and, say how a Cambridge academic did, their tests revealed almost no variations at all. The Association believed that only one conclusion could be drawn: the tests had been hopelessly botched. As a result the scientists’ efforts were poo-poohed with their reputations smeared and blackened.

Over the next few years, though, doubts began to creep in. Maybe the fact that there were no key differences between people’s senses wasn’t actually a blunder after all, but rather a discovery of huge significance and relevance. Viewed from the aspect that, far from being a human evolutionary ladder – as was generally accepted – in which the British stood at the top with everyone else on the lower rungs, maybe the inference implied by the group was that we were all essentially the same.

With their reputations restored, the scientists set out once again, and were eager to find out and track how the human brain developed in the way that it did. Originally, smell was by far the dominant sense, but as mammals began to evolve such as when they began to live in trees, sight, sound and taste surged to the fore.

The difficult part, as far as the scientists were concerned, was how to measure things that seemed to defy analysis – like pain or the way people react to stress.

One of the members of the original expedition, a psychologist called William Rivers, conducted a series of experiments with a fledgling neurologist. The two men would sit in the neurologist’s rooms in Cambridge, with Rivers pulling out the hairs of his fellow researcher and sticking needles into various parts of his body. The results were recorded.

Not surprisingly, the neurologist found that he could work for only an hour at a time before he started to feel a bit queasy. In between sessions, the two men would engage in bursts of vigorous exercise such as running or horse-riding. The results were encouraging, but what they really wanted was a kind of mass experiment in which large numbers of people could be subjected to the same trauma to see how they reacted. They didn’t have to wait long.

In August 1914, World War I was declared. Within months, Rivers and his fellow scientists were confronted with what amounted to the biggest laboratory on Earth.

A number of different aspects came under observation, but none interested them more than the effects of prolonged exposure to gunfire. Although it was another of the original expedition team members, Charles Myers, who coined the phrase ‘shell shock’, it was Rivers’s work at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh (where poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were among his patients) that proved the most significant.

At first, Army doctors would label traumatised soldiers ‘Mental’, ‘Insane’ or even ‘GOK’ (‘God Only Knows’). But as the war went on and it became obvious that soldiers were not faking their symptoms, attitudes started to change and treatments started to improve.

Yet, the psychologists were still feeling their way in the dark. William McDougall, another researcher who had also set sail on the original expedition, treated a soldier called Percy Meek, who had been a basket-weaver in Norfolk before the war. As well as having severe shell shock, Meek was diagnosed as suffering from amnesia.

Under hypnosis, he revealed that he was visited every night by the ghost of a German soldier whom he had killed on the Marne in 1914.

After a while Meek stopped seeing the ghost, but his condition became even worse – his twitching became more pronounced, he lost the power of speech and spent all day playing with dolls. There is an astonishing archive film of him cowering in a wheelchair with a teddy bear on his knee.

McDougall was inclined to write him off as a helpless case, but then, in 1917, something extraordinary happened: Meek made a spontaneous recovery.

His memory and his speech came back, and within another year he was teaching basket-weaving to fellow patients – proof perhaps that the brain is even more complex and mysterious than McDougall and his colleagues had ever anticipated.

As Ben Shepherd proved with his critically acclaimed A War of Nerves: Soldiers And Psychiatrists 1914-1994, the author writes exceptionally well about how the mind functions under duress.

Shepherd’s account of how a small group of scientific researchers defied ridicule in their quest to learn how the brain works is as stirring as it is dramatic. Whilst it is clear from the narrative that he possesses a sharp eye for absurdity, there’s also a broad streak of sympathy that runs throughout.

It’s tempting to see Shepherd’s story as an illustration of how psychology has developed in this country. There may have been quite a few wrong turns as this science has developed, but eventually its pioneers steered a path through a fog of confusion to reach a greater understanding of who we are and how we got to be that way.