The Kekulé Problem

Published in Nautilus on 17 April 2017 under the subtitle “Where did language come from?”, with an introductory note by David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, recalling two decades of conversations with McCarthy about the unconscious mind. The essay takes its title from August Kekulé’s account of arriving at the ring structure of benzene through a dream of a snake seizing its own tail, and asks why the unconscious — a biological system that guided animal behavior long before speech existed — delivers its solutions as images, dreams, and stories rather than in plain language. McCarthy’s answer is that language is a recent arrival in human evolution, one that spread through the brain “very much like a parasitic invasion” without being designed for it, and that the far older unconscious has never learned to speak in it.