At the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2013

Next week I'll be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival for a series of events on familiar (for me) themes of memory, identity and narrative.

On Thursday 22 August I'll be in conversation with bestselling author Neil Gaiman about his new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane and its themes of childhood memory, the line between fantasy and reality, and a child's discovery of the secrets of the adult world. The event, which is a sell-out, forms part of the series 'Reshaping modern fantasy', for which Neil has acted as Guest Selector. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a deceptively simple and endlessly surprising novel full of mythic echoes, deep psychological resonances and some pretty scary monsters, and I'm hugely excited about discussing it with him.

On Friday 23 August I'll be speaking to the journalist Susannah Cahalan about My Brain on Fire, her extraordinary memoir about her brush with the brain disease, encephalitis. One of the things I love about this book is the author's painstaking efforts to reconstruct this lost period of her life by pulling together a whole range of documents and sources of information, and I'm looking forward to asking her quite how she did it.

And on Saturday 24 August I'll be reading from and talking about my novel A Box of Birds with the Canadian author Colin McAdam, who will be talking about his new book A Beautiful Truth. You can book for the event here.

Hope to see some of you there. 

Someone must know

Image by Brian Negus via Flickr

At bedtimes, we have been reading Michael Morpurgo's tale of blindness and Arthurian legends, The Sleeping Sword. Isaac is fascinated by my half-remembered recounting of the tales of King Arthur, but he is less impressed with my account of the legendary king's ontological status. He wants to know what Arthur looked like, where he lived and when.

'Well,' I say, 'if he was a real person then he probably lived about fifteen hundred years ago...'

'But was he a real person?'

'I don't know.'

'But you must know.'

'I don't. I don't know if there was such a person as King Arthur or not. Some people think there was, and some people think he was just a story.'

'But someone must know.'

'No. No one knows for sure.'

'Does God know?'

I dodge this. I could imagine us having the same conversation about Him Upstairs. What intrigues me is Isaac's conviction that, even if a particular individual doesn't have access to all the facts, someone out there must do. There is a fact of any matter, and at least one individual who holds the key. It's hard to imagine, but we might one day find incontrovertible proof of King Arthur's existence (or otherwise). Then Isaac's demand for definite knowledge will be met. Until then, there is Uncertainty: a great shifting intangible mass of it. It might frustrate his five-year-old mind, but it's the kind of thrilling sense of being out of step with the facts that might, one day, make a scientist.

Running from the Spider-Baby

I've talked a bit about children's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. One much-loved child in the shape of an adult is Father Dougal McGuire, who was on our screens last night in a New Year Father Ted special. In the very first episode, entitled 'Good Luck, Father Ted', Dougal tells Ted about a funfair that is coming to Craggy Island. He tries to persuade him that one of the main attractions is a strange hybrid called the Spider-Baby. On cross-examination, it becomes clear that Dougal is confused about the provenance of this idea. You can watch what follows here. 

Dougal is like a toddler in so many ways. But are toddlers' qualities (I would hate to call them failings or weaknesses) in this respect best described as a confusion between fantasy and reality? In an earlier post, I mentioned how we have tried to reformulate this question as involving a distinction between internally generated and externally generated events. Father Ted's instructional diagram illustrates this quite nicely. What Dougal has to do is distinguish between the products of his own mind—the dream he has had—and the workings of external reality. His mix-up gives life to the Spider-Baby, and made us laugh on a cold night as well. 

Soren Lorensen was here

More adventures for precocious, adverbally-challenged Lola in Lauren Child's I am too absolutely small for school. In this story, Lola's big brother Charlie is trying to persuade her that she needs to join him in getting a school education. As usual, Lola has plenty of reasons why she doesn't need to bother with all that classroom rubbish. In desperation, Charlie suggests that going to school will give her a chance to make lots of new friends. 'But I have friends,' Lola says. 'I've got Soren Lorensen.' 

Soren Lorensen is Lola's 'invisible friend' or imaginary companion. No one knows what he looks like, but he is well known to the family. If Lola is coming up for school age (making her four or five), she is just entering the peak period for engagement with imaginary friends. Cleverly, Charlie points out that Soren Lorensen will be going to school and so will need Lola to go along to keep him company. Lola admits that Soren will be nervous about starting school, and so she will need to do the honourable thing. Really, of course, she is just using Soren as a mouthpiece for her own anxieties. 

In her preface to the book, Lauren Child explains how the Soren Lorensen character came to be. Soren was the name of the brother of a little girl called Sofie, who made up an imaginary friend of the same name when her real big brother didn't want to play with her. Calling your imaginary friend by the same name as your actual brother puts me in mind of the two sisters described by James Sully, who spent the afternoon wrapped in the elaborate pretence that they were... sisters. For young children, the real keeps intruding into the imaginary.

Lauren Child ends the preface with a note about this intriguing phenomenon. "The very nice thing about imaginary friends," she writes, "is that they will always do what you want to do, and they will always be there when you need them." It seems to stand to reason that the character we have invented for ourselves will be willing and compliant, but it's not actually true. The foremost expert on imaginary companions, Marjorie Taylor, has written of the 'illusion of independent agency' which comes into play in children's interactions with imaginary characters. Many children's invisible friends do not do what they are told. Some, indeed, can be a bit hostile or creepy. Reflecting on how children's imaginary friends can come to take on lives of their own, Taylor has drawn comparisons with a novelist's creation of fictional characters which, in that curious way, soon fail to do the author's bidding. 

So if your child's imaginary friend shows awful table manners, sulks when it can't get its own way, or seems to have a social life of its own, you are just witnessing another aspect of a common developmental phenomenon. Who knows what social skills your child is learning as she tries to exert control over these intransigent mental creations? 

All children are psychotic

Psychosis is a misunderstood term. Journalists are always confusing it with psychopathy, just as they often still insist that a 'schizophrenic' is someone with a Jekyll-and-Hyde-style split personality. (I could blame T. S. Eliot for this, but that would require another post.) In newspaper-speak, calling someone psychotic seems to mean that they are especially nasty and especially cold-hearted, in the mould of Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (I once saw both described thus, within a page of each other, in a British Sunday newspaper). If I were one of the large number of people who suffer in silence from a psychotic disorder, I would feel angry and more than a little betrayed. The irony is that psychosis found favour as a term among those many clinicians and researchers who were tired of the deep-rooted misconceptions about schizophrenia, and who now find that their preferred term has become as semantically garbled as its predecessor. 

In fact, psychosis refers to a group of psychiatric disorders which involve some disturbed relation to reality. The hallmarks of psychosis are symptoms like hallucinations (the perception of entities that are not actually present) and delusions (irrational, unshakeable beliefs about how things are). Among patients who receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, one of the most common such symptoms is auditory verbal hallucinations, or hearing voices when no one is speaking. There is good evidence that these experiences are not confined to those with psychiatric diagnoses. Although voice-hearing can be a distressing, frightening and debilitating experience, several recent surveys have shown that a sizeable minority of healthy people hear voices and live with them quite comfortably. It may be entrenched in our cultural understanding as a first sign of madness, but voice-hearing is a phenomenon that affects people right across the spectrum of sanity and insanity.

It may also be an experience that is particularly prevalent in childhood. Last month saw the appearance of our article on children's susceptibility to imaginary verbal experiences, and the culmination of some research conducted over a number of years in Australia, the UK and the US. The roots of our work lay in some classic studies with adult psychiatric patients. In the 1970s, an experiment by Mintz and Alpert showed that voice-hearing schizophrenia patients (when compared to non-voice-hearing patients) produced especially vivid auditory imagery in the absence of any relevant stimulation. In the 1990s, Feelgood and Rantzen found a similar pattern among healthy adults who scored highly on a measure of susceptibility to hallucinations. Their experiment involved playing college students a recording of white noise and asking them whether they could hear any words being spoken. The students who were more prone to hallucinations were more likely to report having heard voices speaking amidst the noise. As described in his popular book on the psychology of psychosis, Madness Explained, Richard Bentall has suggested that voice-hearing happens because hearers have a difficulty in distinguishing between real and imagined events. Under certain circumstances, the individuals affected become tricked into believing that an experience, like a voice, that they have imagined has actually been perceived from the outside. 

This is a mistake that is particularly likely to occur in childhood. Young children have rich imaginative lives, but they also have a rather weak understanding of the boundary between reality and fantasy. Asking children to decide whether an experience is internally or externally generated may therefore be a tall order. We wondered whether one indicator of children's susceptibility to such confusions might be their reporting of imaginary companions. Dating at least as far back as Julian Jaynes' classic (and controversial) study of the origins of consciousness, several observers have noted that engaging with an imaginary playmate bears similarities with the experience of hallucinations. In a 2001 article, a team from the Isle of Wight found that children (aged 9–11) who admitted having had an imaginary companion were more likely to report hearing words in a recording of a human voice which had been treated so that the language was unintelligible. In our own study, we made some improvements to methodology and found the same results in two younger samples of children (ages 4–8). Children who reported having an imaginary friend were more likely to say that they heard words being spoken in a recording of jumbled-up, meaningless speech sounds, and this relation could not be accounted for by any obvious factors like age, gender or IQ. 

There are several reasons why children might be susceptible to confusing an imagined experience with a real one. Although kids often show a good understanding of the distinction between fantasy and reality, they can give out rather mixed signals when asked whether their imaginary friends are real or not. My niece, Annabel, had an imaginary friend called Mr Plate, who liked eating peas but was very badly behaved. When I asked her whether Mr Plate was real, she was indignant. Of course he was only pretend; how could I possibly think otherwise? And yet when I asked her whether I, a reality-rooted adult, would be able to meet and talk to Mr Plate, she promised that this could be arranged. I think we can get too caught up on the question of whether children know the difference between what is real and what is not real. Much more fruitful, in my view, is to ask what children understand about their own mental experience. In the strange world of childhood, what is internal is also external. Thoughts bleed into reality, as what is objectively real gradually takes up residence in the world of the mental. Drawing the boundary of one's individual mind, as a hermetically sealed entity that is unknowable to others, is a childhood's work.  

One issue is that young children have a rather weak understanding of how thinking operates. Indeed, they probably do not start to think, in the sense of experiencing a predominantly verbal stream of consciousness, until they have had a chance to internalize the linguistic social dialogues that are going on around them. In Chapter 8 of The Baby in the Mirror, I look at the work of the great Soviet psychologist, L. S. Vygotsky, whose writings have transformed our understanding of how thinking develops in childhood. Vygotsky argued that the ongoing internal conversation we call 'thinking' develops when the child's social interactions become reconstructed internally, in their own private experience. The implications of this theory, such as that our thinking has the quality of a dialogue with ourselves, are profound. But one simple implication is that inner speech arrives in children's heads at a certain point in development, and therefore, for a time, will seem unfamiliar. It is possible that young children have these experiences of hearing internal voices engaging with each other in the dialogue of thought, but simply do not recognise them as thinking. Instead, they may attribute them to some external agency, such as an imaginary friend. 

This still leaves us with a paradox. Psychologists such as Marjorie Taylor and Stephanie Carlson have argued, on the basis of their own careful empirical studies, that engaging with imaginary companions is generally a 'good thing' for children's development. Some studies, for example, have shown that children with imaginary companions do better at tasks measuring social understanding and creativity. And yet our view of imaginary companions seems to depict such children as having a weaker grasp of how thinking works. The solution to the paradox may lie in the unexamined assumption that what may be a cause for concern in adulthood must also ring alarm bells when it occurs in childhood. A child's mind must be a strange place to be. Trying to project oneself imaginatively into these unfamiliar spheres of existence is exhilarating, but not always straightforward. 

I don't say much about imaginary companions in the book, because it covers a developmental period when pretend friends are not really yet in evidence. In fact, Athena's friends have been almost exclusively real ones. Her brother is much more of a fantasist. Isaac doesn't yet have a distinct, named imaginary companion, but he is always telling us about his 'other house', where there are pet lions and reindeer and pigs that keep breaking into the kitchen and making a terrible mess on the floor. 'Is your other house real,' I ask him, 'or only pretend?' He is adamant that it is as real as this one is. I ask him whether I might be able to go to his other house one day, and he says yes, although—and I detect a subtle attempt to protect his fantasy—it is a long way away and I would probably fall asleep on the way. 

So: all children are psychotic. There is some truth in the statement, if we accept that experiences that can be abnormal in adulthood can be perfectly typical in childhood. Young children's experiences have some similarities with the unusual perceptions and beliefs that both healthy adults and psychiatric patients report, and they may also share some common underlying cognitive mechanisms. One thing that's certain is that we need to use the term 'psychosis' properly, and concentrate on the specific experiences that we want it to refer to. If we are careful to do that, understanding the strange world of the young child could have benefits that extend far beyond the playground. 

(With apologies to Douglas Coupland for the title.)

Waiting for Mr Claus

With a fender-bending crash, Lightning McQueen scores a victory against his old adversary, the battered NYPD patrol car that has been setting land-speed records up and down our hallway. The toy-trashing ceases momentarily, then Isaac's voice calls from the other room. 

'How does Father Christmas get down the chimney?'

'He has to squeeze in really tight.' 

'But his tummy's too big.'

I feel a white lie turning into a black one. 'He can just about make himself small enough to fit down a chimney.'

'But how?'

'You know, like when you're trying to squeeze into a narrow space and you pull your tummy in.'

I'm not trying to fend off a child's creeping doubt, not yet. Unlike his older sister, who now accepts talk of Father Christmas with the shrugging tolerance of someone who knows she is being spun a yarn, Isaac still subscribes willingly to the Santa Claus story. In The Baby in the Mirror, I suggested that the toddler Athena's willingness to enter into pretence scenarios foretold her eager self-immersion in the imaginary storyworlds of middle childhood. When you are pretending, you follow the rules of the world you have created, no matter how far-fetched they might be. But you don't lose sight of the fact that that world is invented; you keep one foot in the real world, even when the imaginary action is at its height. 

Many developmental psychologists, such as Jacqueline Woolley and Paul Harris, would argue that children deal with these made-up contexts pretty much as adults do. Kids are not fundamentally confused about the distinction between fantasy and reality, any more than adults are immune to such boundary-blurrings. And yet Santa Claus, and other fantastical entities like the Tooth Fairy, may present us with a special case. Isaac knows that the old man we saw at Alnwick Gardens yesterday, who sat in his grotto dishing out presents supplied by an elf with a walkie-talkie, was not the genuine article. He knows that there is a realer version out there, planning his visit in the dead of Monday night. Given that he will see no other evidence of that visitor than a chewed carrot and an empty sherry glass (and maybe, if he's good, a well-stuffed stocking), it is perhaps surprising that his belief in the bearded one is so strong. My own white or off-white lies probably make little difference in this regard. In one study, children's strength of belief in such figures hardly correlated with parental encouragement of those beliefs. Isaac would probably have come to buy in to the Santa myth anyway, with or without the efforts we have made to make him seem real. 

Perhaps this explains Isaac's concerns about the practicalities of Mr Claus' arrival. He is not trying to point out logical flaws in the Father Christmas story, so much as fit a fact that he is already pretty certain about (Santa's existence) into his existing understanding of the world. He is more concerned with the logic of how that story can happen than with the bigger metaphysical picture. Santa is a flesh-and-blood person of certain fixed dimensions, who has to worry about squeezing through narrow spaces just as any other rooftop-travelling geriatric would have to do. In time—perhaps when he is better able to think through the practicalities of single-handedly performing several billion overnight deliveries—Isaac will probably imbue Santa with supernatural powers to go with his purely physical accomplishments. As with other metaphysical matters, children look heavenwards for explanations when physical ones fail to suffice. Jingling his bells, Santa will attain the powers of a god, just before he vanishes from Isaac's life for ever.