Read the orignal article:
"Five things Alice in Wonderland reveals about the brain" David Robson, BBC Future
Leia a tradução do artigo para o português:
"Cinco coisas que Alice no País das Maravilhas revela sobre o cérebro".
"The White Queen and mental time travel
t's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do YOU remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone.
Later on in her journey, Alice has lengthy discussions with the White Queen. She is one of Carroll’s most baffling creations, claiming to have a strange form of foresight. In fact, her comments on memory are themselves surprisingly prescient. “Since the mid-2000s neuroscientists started to realise that memory is not really about the past, it’s about helping you act appropriately in the future,” says Eleanor Maguire at University College London, who often uses the White Queen to illustrate the idea. “You need to project yourself forward to work out the best course of action.”
One possibility is that we imagine the future by pulling apart our recollections and then piecing them together in a montage that might represent a new scenario. In this way, memory and foresight use the same “mental time travel” in the the same areas of the brain. Maguire, for instance, has studied people with damage to their hippocampus; the injury means that they can’t remember their past, but she has found that they also struggle with forward thinking. “We asked them to imagine meeting a friend next weekend – and they just couldn’t do it.” The same was true when they were asked to imagine a future visit to the seaside. “They knew there would be sand and sea but couldn’t visualise it in the mind’s eye.” In other words, unlike the White Queen, they are stuck forever in the eternal present.
Can you think impossible thoughts?
“There's no use trying,” Alice said: “one CAN'T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Continuing her exploration of human imagination, the Queen extolls the virtues of thinking about the impossible. The passage speaks to Gopnik, who first read Alice when she was three years old and now spends her career studying how we build our imaginations.
She has found, for instance, that children who play pretend and practice “believing the impossible” tend to develop more advanced cognition. They are better at understanding hypothetical thinking, for instance, and they tend to develop a more advanced “theory of mind”, giving them more astute understanding of other people’s motives and intentions. “A lot of what they do in pretend play is take a hypothesis and follow it out to the logical conclusion,” says Gopnik. “What’s interesting is that Carroll was also a magician and you can see that same ability to take a premise and to take it out to a crazy conclusion.”
Alice’s adventures are full of surreal encounters that could help anyone exercise these skills. Travis Proulx at Tilburg University in the Netherlands has examined the way that surreal and absurdist literature, like Carroll’s, influences our cognition. He has found that by violating our expectations in a strange, alien world, fantastical stories pushes our brains to be more flexible, making us more creative, and quicker to learn new ideas. So if you are in a rut and feel like stretching your mind, you may find no better solution than an evening with Alice. “I have no doubt it stimulates these mental states that enhance learning and motivate us to make new connections,” says Proulx."
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