264 • NOTES
The various sensory deprivation experiments also show that without
patterned input of information, the organization of consciousness tends
to break down. For instance, George Miller writes: “The mind survives
by ingesting information” (Miller 1983, p. 111). A more general claim
is that organisms survive by ingesting negentropy (Schrodinger 1947).The negative quality of the television viewing experience has been
documented by several ESM studies, e.g., Csikszentmihalyi &. Kubey
(1981), Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984), Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, &
Prescott (1977), Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (in press), and Larson &
Kubey (1983).120 Mental imagery. For some of Singer’s work on daydreaming, see Singer
(1966, 1973, 1981) and Singer &. Switzer (1980). In the last decade, a
widespread “mental imagery” movement has developed in the U.S.121 The Bunuel reference is from Sacks (1970 [1987], p. 23).
Reciting names of ancestors. Generally, the task of remembering
belongs to the elder members of the tribe, and sometimes it is assigned
to the chief. For example: “The Melanesian chief... has no administra
tive work, he has no function, properly speaking.... But in him
... are enclosed the clan’s myth, tradition, alliances, and strengths.... When he delivers from his own lips the clan names and the marvel
ous phrases which have moved generations, he enlarges time for each
one___The chiefs authority rests on a simple quality which is his alone:
he himself is the Word of the clan” (Leenhardt 1947 [1979], pp. 117-18).
One example of how complex kinship reckoning can be is illustrated by
Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Nuer of the Sudan, who divide their
ancestors in maximal, major, minor, and minimal lineages, all connect
ing to each other for five or six ascending generations (Evans-Pritchard
1940 [1978]).
122 Riddles. The rhyme translated by Charlotte Guest, as well as the mate
rial on the following page, come from the famous account Robert Graves
(1960) gives of the origins of poetry and literacy in The White Goddess.
Graves belonged to that wonderful period of British academic life when
serious scholarship coexisted with unfettered flights of the imagina
tion—the period when C. S. Lewis and R. R. Tolkien taught classics and
wrote science fiction at Oxford. Graves’s mythopoetic reconstructions
are controversial, but they provide the layperson with a feeling for what
the quality of thought and experience might have been in the distant
past, to an extent that one cannot get from works of more cautious
scholarship.123 Rote learning. H. E. Garrett (1941) has reviewed the experimental
evidence that contributed to the demise of rote learning in schools; see