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Entangled in associations
Our cognition — and that of many other organisms — is based on associating new information to past experiences. These associations can become complex, and confront us with unpleasant contradictions
Last Saturday at the crack of dawn, the police were called to Broadcasting House, the BBC’s emblematic headquarters in central London. A man wearing a Spiderman mask had climbed up a scaffold around a statue at the entrance, and was attacking it with a hammer and chisel. The scaffold was there for restoration works to the statue after it was damaged in much the same circumstances in January 2022. It depicts two characters from William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Prospero and Ariel, and was made by Eric Gill, a British sculptor and typeface designer (he created the popular Gill Sans typeface) in the early 1930s. Gill was celebrated and revered during his life (he died in 1940) and beyond, until the publication of a biography in 1989, which cited his personal diaries detailing the sexual abuse of his teenage daughters, an incestuous relationship with his sister, and “sexual experiments with a dog”. Since then, there has been an ongoing campaign for the statue adorning the BBC HQ (and his other works) to be removed, with which the two attacks are associated. Why do we (and…
