The loneliness of the business traveller

Am on the road again. This time in Kiev, city of green avenues and golden domes. I'm here writing a business supplement on Ukraine - my other job, besides writing about psychology etc, is writing about emerging markets, particularly in the former Soviet Union.

Going on a business trip brings home one of the paradoxes of globalization and free market liberalism. On the one hand, it creates a global society that is more and more open, in which you meet more and more people and societies are ever more inter-connected. On the other hand, we are ever more alone and disconnected.

Businessmen are the blood cells of globalization. They travel from country to country, in an endless round of meetings, linking markets together. I remember the eastern Europe advertizing salesman at Euromoney, a magazine I used to work for: he must have been on the road 75% of his life. He lived out of a suitcase. Endless meetings. He knew every senior banker in eastern Europe - in Kiev, Moscow, Budapest, Belgrade. He was a human Rolodex of contacts.

This kind of life takes a ridiculous amount of energy. Believe me - after one day on the road, with say five meetings, I am exhausted. And he does this most days, and has perhaps nine or ten meetings in a day. He once told me: 'You know what the secret is to living on the road? Handwash. On a normal day, I shake 10-20 hands. When it's a big conference or business summit, I must shake 100 people's hands in a day. That's alot of germs and viruses. So after every meeting I wash my hands with handwash.'

People like this guy are the drivers of globalization - meeting people, linking markets, networking, connecting, schmoozing, pressing the flesh.

And yet the life they lead is curiously lonely and isolated. They are on the road most of their lives, in hotels designed to be homogeneous and standardized. They live in rooms that are cleaned by strangers. They are cooked for by strangers. They are driven around by strangers. At the end of the day, they collapse into the hotel bar and drink alone. They sleep alone. Occasionally, for comfort and a feeling of human touch, perhaps they get a massage in the hotel spa, or go to a strip club to pay another stranger to service them.

They live their life among strangers, endlessly networking, but the level of talk is always impersonal - global markets, politics, perhaps some 'personal' chit-chat about sports results or holiday destinations. Because they are always among strangers, their personal lives, their personal idiosyncrasies, feelings and predilections are locked away, like secret files in a corporate safe, while the persona they present to the world is bland and acceptable, like a corporate logo.

The lonely, atomized business traveller is a snap-shot of our society - at once more open and connected, and more isolated and closed. Our infantile consumer needs are pampered and indulged by our corporate lifestyle, while our deeper needs - close human relations, family, community, spiritual meaning - are sacrificed.

We know more and more people, less and less well. We are brought ever-closer, and driven ever further apart. This is the paradox of globalization.

Happy Go Lucky: an interesting failure

I went to see Mike Leigh's new film, Happy Go Lucky, at the Tricycle in Kilburn yesterday, and saw Leigh himself get up on stage to answer the audience's questions after the show. He told us that his film, about an incorrigibly chirpy and upbeat primary school teacher, was supposed to make us feel good, and was a 'positivist' film, or 'anti-miserablist', in Leigh's words.

His words reminded me strongly of Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, who told me in an interview earlier this year that he wanted to see the growth not just of positive psychology, but of "positive journalism, positive economics, positive literature, positive cinema". In fact, he's already started developing courses in English Literature that would use inspirational novels like, say, To Kill A Mockingbird, as re-inforcements of positive character traits.

So Leigh's film could be seen as a pioneering example of this sort of 'positive art' - it's a film that sets out, as Leigh puts it, to create a 'positive feeling' in its audience, that tries to teach us the power of a positive, upbeat attitude to life.

The film raises interesting questions about what great art does to us and how it draws us in. If you think about it, the vast majority of great films, books and plays are about suffering, drama and conflict: Hamlet, King Lear, Heart of Darkness, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, The Inferno, Paradise Lost, Bleak House, The Wasteland. These are not happy books, or books about happiness.

They draw much of their power from the trials and tribulations of their protagonists. As Tolstoy famously put it at the beginning of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Suffering, it would seem, is more interesting than happiness.

Leigh's film challenges this notion. As a member of the audience enthused to Leigh: "Why shouldn't happiness be just as interesting and complex as sadness?"

In fact, I think the film failed, for the simple reason that the main character was not taken on any kind of journey. She started off chirpy and upbeat, and she ended the film chirpy and upbeat. You can't make an interesting film about a character who ends the film in exactly the same place, emotionally, as she began it. It doesn't matter if the character is the greatest optimist or the most tremendous grouch...something has to happen to them, they have to develop and change, if we are to be engaged in their journey.

Usually, we require that the hero or heroine undergoes some tough trials and tribulations. This is true even in comedies - think of the trials of Shakespeare's comedy heroes. Comedy also comes from conflict, suffering, drama.

But the heroine of Leigh's film, Poppy, confronts hardly any serious trials or obstacles in the two hours of the film, beyond her bike being stolen and her driving instructor being a nutter. Even the hero of your average feel-good Hollywood comedy has to deal with more than that.

So if a film or book is going to be really inspirational, really uplifting, really 'positive', then it needs to put its hero through more suffering. Otherwise the audience feels like it has sat on a train that has gone neither down nor up, just chugging along on an endlessly flat plain.

Elective Affinities

I am reading Anthony Powell's woolly mammoth of a novel, Dance to the Music of Time, which some people adore and others don't. I remember hearing of some old literary gent, it might have been John Julius Norwich, who re-reads the entire 2,0000-page book every year, such is their veneration for it.

The book has its faults - it is claustrophobically social, trapped in the drawing room, like J. Alfred Prufrock, with none of the heights or depths of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or DH Lawrence. Humans, in Powell's account, are little more than hyperactive monkeys, endlessly trying to clamber higher up the social tree.

There are occasional moments, however, and these are what raises the novel above mere drawing-room farce, when the narrator seems to intuit some hidden mystical order behind the whirl of social and political events. The trigger for these moments tends to be the abrupt re-appearance of one of the many characters in the book, who after a long absence suddenly returns into the narrator's life, perhaps at a key moment, or just as he is thinking of them.

The narrator feels almost vertiginous at such moments, as if dream and reality have merged, as if he hears, for a brief moment, the hidden harmony that governs our chaotic and random movements, so that it seems as if we are figures dancing to a higher tune, our movements and relations part of an intricate and coordinated pattern, even if we are unconscious of this pattern.

It is one of the capacities of art and philosophy to raise us up briefly to this mystical vantage-point, to lift us beyond our own immediate egotistic concerns and anxieties, to a glimpse of the cosmic dance of which we are part. Art is like the benevolent adult who lifts us up onto their shoulders so we can glimpse the parade going past.

Stoicism and Platonism both try to raise us to this cosmic perspective, in which we can perceive the Logos, the divine order into which all our lives are weaved like threads in a great tapestry. Thus Marcus Aurelius wrote:

'Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe...how all play their part in the causation of every event that happens. Remark the intricacy of the skein, the complexity of the web.'

Tragedy can likewise guide us from an individual and egotistical perspective, in which life seems grim and not worth the candle, to a cosmic perspective in which we perceive that, in the over-quoted words of Hamlet, 'there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will'. We discern the higher pattern at work, both its justice and its beauty, and this gives us the ability to accept our misfortunes, our suffering, our humiliations, and to carry on living.

The genre of the novel is, perhaps, particularly well-fitted to bring us to this cosmic perspective on time and human agency, because novels are able to follow people's lives over a long period of time (particularly if they are 2000 words long like Powell's book) and they can follow a large number of characters, and show how the the fate of characters weave together, creating point and counter-point, uncanny parallels, correspondences and 'elective affinities'.

Tolstoy's War and Peace is the greatest example of this. There is a cosmic 'elective affinity', for example, between Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and the vain society rake Anatole Kuragin. Bolkonsky is engaged to the lovely Natasha Rostova, but when he is away from Moscow, she is seduced by Kuragin, who ruins their love and drives them apart.

Bolkonsky falls into a deep nihilistic gloom, and then is seriously injured on the battlefield of Borodino. He is carried to a medical tent, and hears the pitiful cries of a soldier next to him who is having his leg amputated.

'My God! What is this? Why is he here?' said Prince Andrei to himself.
In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had been amputated he recognized Anatole Kuragin...
'Yes, it is he! Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully connected with me', thought Prince Andrei.

The memory of who Anatole is and what his connection is with him, and the sight of his enemy so pitifully weak and wounded, suddenly releases within Andrei a well of compassion and pity, a love for both friend and enemy, which redeems him from his former spiritual drought.

Later on, the mortally-injured Andrei is carried on a cart through Moscow, a piece of flotsam on the raging waves of history, and the cart happens to stop next to the carriage of the Rostovs, who are fleeing the city before Napoleon invades. Andrei awakes from his fever to see the girl he was dreaming about:

'When he came to himself, Natasha, the same living Natasha whom of all people he most longed to live with this new pure divine love that had been revealed to him, was kneeling before him. He realized that it was the real living Natasha, and he was not surprised, but quietly happy...
'You?' he said. 'How fortunate!'

Russian novels are full of such coincidences. Are they contrived? Is the novelist creating a comforting illusion that there is a higher pattern to our seemingly random lives?

Milan Kundera argued, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that actually, a good novel makes us aware of the existence of such 'coincidences' in real life. He writes:

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas [the novel's hero] appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza [the novel's heroine] never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

Early in the novel [Anna Karenina] that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition -- the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end -- may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notations as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty, even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, Tomas Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

But the question Kundera skirts around here is - is the cosmic pattern actually and objectively 'out there', as Plato thought, or do we manufacture it ourselves ('an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence...into a motif')? These are two very different views.

Personally, I've had occasional moments when I have felt (and it can only ever be a feeling or intuition) that a greater hand than mine is writing the story of my life, and not just my life, but all our lives, that the conventional reality in which we live, in which we are all separate little egos pursuing our own separate goals, is an illusion, and a greater and in fact somewhat terrifying reality exists beyond this illusion, in which there is no separation between self and other, dream and reality, but we really are one cosmic mind becoming aware of itself.

I say 'terrifying' because one feels vertiginous in such moments. One is no longer sure of the boundaries governing one's life, between self and other, dream and reality. Reality seems to ripple, like a wave. At its most acute, this terror can lead to schizophrenia.

But the majority of us, fortunately, only rise to such vertiginous moments very occasionally. We look up from the book we are reading in a cafe, we look around the room or the street in a sort of reverie, and we seem for a moment to see through everyday life and to sense that some pattern is at work in our lives, some intricate web of destinies and energies...but then a spoon is dropped or a car honks its horn, and the reverie is broken, and we are pulled back into the foaming current of everyday life.

Animal spirits

There's been a lot of discussion in the financial press recently about what exactly caused the crisis that has threatened to bring down the western financial system this year.

Alan Greenspan, former governor of the Federal Reserve, suggested in a recent piece in the Financial Times that the unknown factor that causes bubbles may be what the great economist John Maynard Keynes referred to as 'animal spirits'.

Animal spirits are the unquantifiable, irrational factor in human psychology that means humans do not always behave in line with rational economic models. This is how the Economist's dictionary defines the term:

The colourful name that Keynes gave to one of the essential ingredients of economic prosperity: confidence. According to Keynes, animal spirits are a particular sort of confidence, "naive optimism". He meant this in the sense that, for entrepreneurs in particular, "the thought of ultimate loss which often overtakes pioneers, as experience undoubtedly tells us and them, is put aside as a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death". Where these animal spirits come from is something of a mystery.

Now, scientists claim to have unravelled the mystery as to the origin of these bestial impulses in our supposedly rational economies. A team at Cambridge University took blood samples of City traders after a particularly profitable day's trading, and after a particularly tough day.

They discovered that after a very good day's trading, make traders' blood showed high levels of testosterone, which (the team speculated) may have encouraged the traders to carry on taking risks even when it would have been wise to stop.

Likewise, after a bad day's trading, the traders' blood showed high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, which may have made the traders unusually risk averse, even beyond the point where caution was required.

So the animal spirit behind a bull-run is testosterone, and the animal spirit behind a bear run is cortisol. So presumably in future downturns, rather than pumping billions of dollars into the financial system, regulators will simply pump gallons of testosterone onto City trading floors.

The report is an example of the increasingly popular attempt to bring together psychology and economics, which some people have called behavioural economics, and others have called psychoeconomics. I personally am very interested in psychoeconomics, and shall speak again of it shortly.

Can (or should) we make life decisions based on our dreams?

I was talking to a girlfriend recently who has just started a relationship with a new bloke. This is the first time she has been out with someone for a long time - she was in a long-term relationship at university, which was sort of her first love, but it ended painfully, and she has barely seen that boy since. That was the last time she had let any man really close to her, she said, but now she was embarking on this new relationship.

But then she told me about a dream she'd had, the night before. She was walking up a long tunnel (I know, quite Freudian), then she came to a sort of underground cafe. She sat down at a table in the cafe, and then a person came in and sat down at the next table. It was her former boyfriend from university. They were both really shocked to see each other, and somewhat scared, because they both knew that this couldn't be a coincidence, but that in some profound and slightly scary way, they were meant for each other, even if they'd both made other plans.

My friend said she'd woken up somewhat disturbed by this dream, because the boy in question was actually getting married in a few months, while she was about to start on this new relationship. And yet here was her unconscious, apparently telling her that she and her ex from an unsuccessful relationship many years back were soul mates. And you can't argue with your unconscious....can you?

So, she asked me, her friendly amateur psychologist, should she listen to her dream? Should she seek out her first love, appear at the church during his wedding, banging the windows and shouting 'Elaine! Elaaaaaine!' (or whatever his name is).

Well, I didn't know quite what to say. But it seems to me, that dreams are mysterious and by no means straight-forward communicators. Even the ancients, who fully believed that some dreams were messages from the gods, also accepted that other dreams could be misleading. Thus Virgil in the Aeneid declared that dreams came from one of two gates or portals. If a dream came from the gate of horn it was...no, not a wet dream, but a true dream, a message from the Gods. And if it came from the gate of ivory, it was a false dream.

But how are we meant to tell the difference? Isn't horn pretty much exactly like ivory? Well,the only way to tell where a dream comes from is to follow its advice. And if it turns out to be really bad advice, then it was probably from the gate of ivory. Easy, eh?

For example: When I was living in Moscow, I went to stay in a famous old monastery, called Optina, in March 2005. Optina is a famous place in the Russian Orthodox tradition, a place considered to have great spiritual energy, a place that's inspired everyone from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. I went there around this time of the year, back in 2005, to write an article about it. I was, I should add, pursuing a girl at that time, back in Moscow - a Russian-American Jewish girl, who had intoxicated me with her saucy wit and lively eyebrows.

So I stayed in Optina for a few nights, living a most pious existence, waking up at 6am to struggle through the snow to church; eating diced carrots and cold potatoes for lunch (it was Lent); and being given long, mind-bending religious instruction by the Archimandrite of the monastery.

And then one night, I had a dream. In the dream, I was walking arm-in-arm down the street with this sexy young Jewish girl, and then we came across an ex of mine, my first love. And in the dream, we talked for a bit, and then said goodbye, and I walked on happily with the Jewish girl.

I awoke feeling full of the joy of spring, thanking the spirits of Optina for giving me this dream. The dream was telling me, it was clear, that the first phase of my love life was over, and I was embarking on an exciting new phase with the Jewish girl. I went back to Moscow that very afternoon, excited by the prospect of my burgeoning romance.

Sadly, the dream turned out to be from the gate of ivory. The Jewish girl led me on a merry dance for several months, allowing me to make ever bolder declarations of my feelings, only for her to declare that I was a 'short-ass' and she was still into her tall and handsome boyfriend. Curse you, gates of ivory!

I do believe that sometimes dreams can tell us things our conscious minds do not know or cannot face. But other times, they lead us up the garden path. So it's extremely risky, if not outright foolish, to try and second guess our unconscious and make life-decisions based on our dreams. We can only ever see the wisdom or foolishness of dreams in retrospect, when the future has proved them either to be made of horn or ivory. We might use dreams to try and understand our own feelings or wishes, but that's a different thing to using them to predict the wishes of the universe.

Going back to my friend, does her dream mean that, in her heart of hearts, she wishes she was back together with her university sweet-heart? Well, he's getting married, and it didn't work out in the past so it probably wouldn't work in the future either, even if he wasn't getting married, which he is. So she better just deal with it. That's not a dream. It's reality, baby.

Oddballs on the Tube (1)

I moved back to live in the UK in July, having lived in Russia before. One of the most annoying things about living in London is all the time you have to spend sitting on the Tube.

On the other hand, this being London, you can always rely on some 'mentally divergent' character to get onto your carriage and display their crazy mind-plumage for anyone to observe. Any students of psychology out there - put down thy books and take up thy Tube map.

Yesterday, I encountered not one but two unusual characters on my Tube journey home. The first got on the carriage at Oval, I believe. He was around my age - 30 or so - and quite well-dressed, smart, unremarkable-looking. The only thing that was out of the ordinary about him was that the first three fingers on his right hand had sellotape wrapped around them, forming a sheath or cellophane mitten.

He sat down, and proceeded to brush himself off using this mitten. Thoroughly. He brushed off the whole of the outside of his jacket, and then brushed off the suit jacket underneath. It was hypnotizing, like a cat licking itself clean.

Then he disposed of the cellophane sheet, scrunching it up in his satchel, and seemed prepared to refrain from eccentric behaviour for the time being. But then I noticed, in his hand, was a small roll of sellotape. And as the passengers boarded the train at Waterloo, he was ever so quietly wrapping this sellotape round his fingers again, to create a new sheath, a new protective device, a new hand-condom to give him safe contact with the nasty filthy outside world.

I was tempted to lean forward and ask him why he needed this device. He seemed fairly rational and professional, perhaps he would explain in calm terms. I assumed he had some form of obsessive compulsive disorder, and was terrified of germs, like Howard Hughes of The Aviator fame. I wondered what he thought of people like me, holding on to the carriage pole with reckless abandon, and some perverse part of me wanted to lick the pole, just to show him how little I cared for personal hygiene. But I didn't. I just got off the Tube at Tottenham Court, and left him to his eternal self-ablutions.

As always with the Irrational, his behaviour was rooted in an (initially) rational response to a real threat. The Underground is filthy and germ-infested. Think of all those grubby hands on the hanging handles, all those feet on the seats, all those greasy palms on the escalator hand-rests. We should have a complete liniment rub-down after each journey, just to de-germ ourselves. Yet somehow we survive. We let the germs and bacteria get a free ride on us. We are their Tube system.

What his case illustrates, perhaps, is the sheer excess baggage that having an emotional disorder entails. The sheer effort and energy of it: no sooner has he rubbed himself down completely, than he has to take out his sellotape and begin the whole process again.

And the compromises you make for it. A large part of his brain functions completely normally - he goes to work, he probably works quite successfully and mingles socially, he travels home from work. And yet his mental illness, his disorder, tries to come along too, like a parasite, tries to get as much obedience from him as possible. And he tries to give it as much obedience as possible, while maintaining his tenuous position as a member of human society.

So many people with minor mental illnesses have to try and keep up this balancing act - both placating their inner demon, which demands their obedience and feeds off their energy, while also placating external society, which demands that they obey conventional behaviour. So they sit and look normal on the tube, while slowly and quietly winding the sellotape around their fingers...

And the other oddball? I'll tell you about them another time.

A Theory of Everything

I saw a fascinating documentary on BBC 4 yesterday, about the search for a Theory of Everything in modern physics. About 90% of it went over my head, but I was at least fascinated by the search for a theory which explained both the very big - black holes, supernovas, the Big Bang etc - and the very small - sub-atomic particles, Quantum mechanics, etc.

I was struck by the beauty and poeticism of some of the attempts at the TOE, such as the symmetry theory, which suggests the universe started to grow as a perfect, symmetrical orb, before breaking into multiplicity and confusion, in which the universe was a riot of different and sometimes opposing forces. That theory reminded me of Gnostic or neoplatonist ideas of how the godhead began as one, but then fell into duality and confusion.

Even more inspiring to the imagination was string theory, or the idea that all of existence is connected along threads, and these threads send out vibrations, like the strings on a guitar, not just through the three dimensions we are aware of, but possibly through as many as 11 or 13 dimensions, and through multiple universes. Trippy!

I don't begin to understand how these physicists arrived at such bold statements as claiming there are 11 dimensions, or how you could possibly set out to prove this.

But nonetheless, let's say that physicists do eventually discover a TOE, perhaps in the near future...It strikes me it wouldn't really be a theory of everything unless it also explained consciousness, and not just consciousness, but higher and lower states of consciousness, and how our consciousness relates to these multiple dimensions and these cosmic vibrations, both how it is affected by them, and how it, in turn, can affect them.

Some New Age figures (such as Ken Wilber) are, of course, far ahead of me and are already working in this area, or at least are using advanced physics as a springboard for their own metaphysical speculations and theories, of going with the Cosmic Flow etc.

It also strikes me how similar this effort is to the Medieval and Renaissance study of alchemy. We find it difficult now to imagine why so many great minds devoted much of their lives to alchemy, why they locked themselves away in dank basements and struggled (always in vain!) to turn lead into gold, usually bankrupting themselves in the process.

But the reason alchemy and Renaissance magic in general was so enticing to the Renaissance scholar was precisely because it seemed to offer a Theory of Everything - both of the movement of the planets (the macrocosm) and the movement of our souls (the microcosm). It connected the human psyche with the cosmos, and suggested that by exploring the one, we also explored the other. 'As above, so below', as alchemists put it.

And it didn't just combine planetary movement with emotional movements. It also synthesized this with a proto-Jungian theory of archetypes and dream imagery, of how the Cosmic Mind speaks to us through images.

Alchemy is, of course, discredited now as a theory of the external universe, though it still retains some credibility as a theory of subconscious imagery, thanks to Jung's rehabilitation of Renaissance magic.

But I wonder if it will ever be possible to combine psychology with physics? I have sometimes thought the movements of the mind, its dissociations and re-unifications, are best understood as laws of physics, or natural laws. Jung spoke of the psyche obeying natural laws. So too did the Stoics, for whom physics and ethics were inextricably linked.

Well, this is the first post to muse on the matter. We must consider further on another date.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Fascinating article in the FT's magazine today, by futurologist Michio Kaku. It looks at how researchers in artificial intelligence are realizing quite how far AI is from approximating the functionality of the human brain.

One of the big problems, says Kaku, is getting computers to feel:

Some people have even suggested that our emotions represent the quality that most distinguishes us as human. No machine will ever be able to thrill at a blazing sunset or laugh at a joke, they claim. Some say that it is impossible for machines ever to have emotions.

But to scientists working on AI, emotions, far from being the essence of humanity, are actually a by-product of evolution. Simply put, emotions are good for us. They helped us to survive in the forest, and even today they help us to navigate the dangers of life. For example, “liking” something is very important in evolutionary terms, because most things are harmful to us. Of the millions of objects that we bump into every day, only a handful are beneficial to us. Hence to “like” something is to make a distinction between the tiny number of things that can help us, compared with the millions of things that are harmful.

When robots become more advanced, they, too, might be equipped with emotions. Perhaps robots will be programmed to bond with their owners or caretakers, to ensure that they don’t wind up in the garbage. Having such emotions would help to ease their transition into society, so that they could be helpful companions rather than rivals of their owners.

Computer expert Hans Moravec believes that robots will be programmed with emotions such as fear to protect themselves. If a robot’s batteries are running down, the robot “would express agitation, or even panic, with signals that humans can recognise”, he says. “It would go to the neighbours and ask them to use their plug, saying, ’Please! Please! I need this! It’s so important, it’s such a small cost! We’ll reimburse you!”’

Emotions are vital in decision-making, as well. People who have suffered a certain kind of brain injury lose the ability to experience emotions. Their reasoning is intact, but they cannot express feelings. Neurologist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California, who has studied these people, concludes that they seem “to know, but not to feel”. He finds that such individuals are often paralysed in making the smallest decisions. Without emotions to guide them, they debate endlessly over their options, leading to crippling indecision.

Scientists believe emotions are processed in the “limbic system”, deep in the centre of our brain. When people suffer a loss of communication between the neocortex (which governs rational thinking) and the limbic system, their reasoning powers remain intact but they have no emotions to guide them in decision-making. While the rest of us might have a “hunch” or a “gut reaction” that propels us, these people feel no such thing.

As robots become more intelligent and are able to make choices of their own, they could likewise become paralysed with indecision. To aid them, robots of the future might need to have emotions hardwired into their brains, to set goals and to give meaning and structure to their “lives”.

But automatic or programmed emotional responses can go wrong. They can go haywire and become out of kilter with reality, like Hal, the paranoid android in 2001 Space Odyssey, or Marvin, the depressed robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

What I find truly remarkable about the human brain is its capacity for meta-thinking: its ability to become aware of how its emotional reactions have become irrational or disfunctional, and then its ability to re-programme itself so that its emotions function more effectively. This is basically what CBT does.

Critics of CBT say that this sort of approach to the human brain is too mechanistic, treating like mind like it was a computer dashboard, rather than a holistic entity. But this disregards the extent to which people who go through CBT therapy fit it into their own personal growth narratives. They effectively change narratives, from a 'I'm useless and no good' narrative, to a 'I'm beginning to get better and learning to conquer my mental demons' narrative.

So CBT can be integrated into a holistic sense of personal development, and indeed, it will only succeed if the individual makes it part of his or her personal life narrative. If they 'own it', in other words.

What does this have to do with computers? Well, that's another thing that computers lack - a sense of personal narrative, a sense of their existence in the past (or memories) and a sense of what their existence might be like in the future (or plans and dreams). This self-awareness, this ability to tell the story of one's life, is one of the essences of being human, in my opinion. But perhaps, as a journalist/story-teller, I would say that.