Last week I was in the Potteries, famously dubbed by Arnold
Bennett “the Five Towns”, of Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton and Longton –
but ironically not Stoke-on-Trent, the most well known of them all, the lazy synonym
for the whole area. Hanley, not Stoke, is what counts for the “city centre”
round here. Nor, among the official Five Towns, is Newcastle-under-Lyme,
despite being less than a couple of miles up the hill from the centre of Stoke,
a bustling node of commercial activity in its own right, and situated well
within the overall built-up area of North Staffordshire.
Newcastle u/L is one of those towns that feels as though it
should be somewhere else; there is absolutely no sense of it being in the
Potteries. Arriving there, one has crossed an invisible but profound mental
divide somewhere along the Hartshill Road. Psychologically it’s west-facing,
and one feels the pull of rural dairy-farming counties like Cheshire or
Shropshire, and even a sense of the Welsh hills, surely somewhere over there in
the blue yonder.
We must all have come across other localities that feel
misplaced – to cite just three metropolitan examples: Greenwich, which should
be detached from south-east London and re-attached to Portsmouth or somewhere
else bluff, breezy and naval; Woolwich, which seemingly belongs in a
particularly nasty part of the Midlands; and Croydon, another increasingly
unpleasant wasteland, which surely is an escapee from greater Manchester, and
should be towed there, becoming one of those grim high-rise satellite hubs
whence operate child murderers and serially homicidal medics. Newcastle u/L is
another of these place-out-of-place specimens, though a charming and uplifting
one.
Intriguingly - often annoyingly if we are inclined to go on
about it to our companions - places frequently remind us of other places, or we
detect similarities or commonalities, analogies and the like. That’s one of the
techniques we use for remembering and making sense of places. So Wisbech attracts
mention of Leiden or somewhere else watery and Dutch; Whitstable with its
Thames barges prompts recall of Maldon (Essex); we detect factors (visual as
well as conceptual) that connect Sheffield and Pittsburgh; Coney Island
improbably suggests New Brighton, and vice versa; Coventry and Plymouth (or even Dresden and
Düsseldorf) contain layouts, designs and zeitgeisty aspirations which mentally
we connect in a hazy kind of manner. The reasons are usually tangible or even
obvious, and relate to architecture, tradition or function, industry or
historical circumstance, to geographical arrangement. Brooklyn to Manhattan
will always act as the role model for Gateshead to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, or
Birkenhead to Liverpool.
Slightly less tenable are the associations we make with
places for what we might call “public” reasons (such as a catastrophe, or the
birthplace of someone famous), or “private” ones (we once missed a train there,
heard some bad news there, or went to college with someone who had grown up
there).
Thus we can consider a spectrum of more or less sensible
reasons why our geographical environment should be psychologically – though
very subjectively - wired up the way it is.
But then there are those locational private associations for
which no reliable logical explanation can be found. Associations that make no
sense and offer no useful information. About a mile from where I live is a long
road, popularly used as a commuter rat run, called Boundary Road. It’s quite
hilly, goes up and down a bit, is lined by fairly expensive housing, has a few
shops and a school, but is otherwise unremarkable. As far as I know it
celebrates no political boundary, although until the last few decades or so was
right on the edge of the built-up area. Oh, and one other thing. For as long as
I can remember there’s one particular stretch of it that invariably makes me
think of Bournemouth.
Not much like Bournemouth, is it. The only reason I can find
for this apparent absurdity is that, when I was ten, I suffered from pneumonia,
and afterwards went on holiday to Bournemouth to help with my recuperation.
Bournemouth acquired very exciting and positive attributes in my young mind
(most of those attributes have now vanished, thanks to experience), and it may
be that Bournemouth was the topic of conversation on an early post-illness walk
with my parents along Boundary Road – which in those days would have been
largely devoid of motor vehicles. Other than that explanation, it’s not a
reasonable association to make, and even when claimed as some sort of location-based
analogy for healthful recovery it’s completely bonkers. But, yes folks, that’s
how we are. Bonkers – that’s the beauty of human thought.
In his 2006 work “The Human Touch – Our part in the creation
of the universe”, the playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn remarked
that “there’s no limit to the volume of analogical
traffic that our thinking can bear, to the layers of sense that can be read
into something …” Growing up in suburban Surrey he may have had his own version
of Boundary Road to savour, but in any event his is an assertion with which I
can agree. Anything can remind one of anything. And occasionally does.
Association is the process by
which we think, how one thought leads to another. When hypertext first became
popular, people noticed that it represented something that we do all the time. They
said “it’s so natural, it’s how we think”. No longer restricted by the formality
of sentences we were able to let rip exactly as we felt inclined, for the mind
is a minefield – a mindfield – of potential “hot links”. Boundary Road to
Bournemouth is an implausible but, clearly, valid exemplar of this principle.
Just try popping it into a classification system, though, and its converse, an
information retrieval system, and see what chaos results. You would think that
there should be a limit on what associations are sensible. Well, you might be
right to think that, but in practice, there’s no such thing. And for that we
should be grateful, for if it were so, genuine creativity would be even more elusive
than it already is
.
Douglas Hofstadter – famously,
gloriously - is a polymathic American cognitive scientist who has investigated the
processes of analogy and creativity more deeply than just about anyone. His
core ideas can be found in several major volumes, one of which is his 1997
classic, “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies”. One crucially relevant contribution that Hofstadter makes
to our discussion here relates to what he calls the implicosphere, a
multidimensional conceptual space, which allows the placing of concepts with
their blurry edges, and the mapping of one mental structure onto another. This
has potential for explaining some kinds of creativity, and also for linking
Boundary Road and Bournemouth. Simply put, it’s word association taken to its limits
of plausibility, to the region of extremely thin semantic atmospheres, to the
outer suburbs of meaning where homegoing office workers zip along avoiding the
congestion on the ring road.
Most of our concepts are wordless,
claims Hofstadter, gathering around a conceptual skeleton that - somewhat
paradoxically – traditionally had no name of its own. Therefore to rectify this
deficiency he coined the term "implicosphere" to mean all the
potential (infinite, indefinable, unpredictable) concepts which can be fused or
attached to such conceptual skeletons, all those terms or ideas which have the
potential to be seen as possessing similarity to a core concept. Here, I
suppose, the core concept is “Boundary Road”.
Selection
of valid candidates for inclusion in an implicosphere appears to be more or
less subjective, being effected unconsciously and automatically. It involves a
very rapid, instinctive, complex and multifaceted kind of indexing,
analogy-formation, and classification by association, and the principle is not
restricted to words per se. Thoughts
about places – atmospheres, imagery – can also be relevant. Thoughts about anything.
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