Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 5

The earliest stringed instruments currently known to archaeologists are bowl harps. For millennia, people made bowl harps using, for example, tortoise shells as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world’s museums contain many such harps from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500-2000 BC, more advanced harps, such as the beautifully carved 11-stringed instrument found in the tomb of Queen Shub-Ad in ancient Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, started to appear. The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp. It was different from the bowl harp in that its neck was straightened out to allow the strings to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt indicate that harps and tanburs – plus flutes and percussion instruments – were being played together 3,500-4,000 years ago. Archaeologists have also found many similar relics amongst the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation. Many of these instruments have survived into modern times in almost unchanged form, for example, folk instruments of the region such as the Turkish saz and Afghan panchtar. At 3,500 years old, the tanbur which belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose is the earliest known example of this instrument. Har-Mose’s tanbur had three strings and a plectrum suspended from the neck by a cord. The soundbox, which increased the volume, was made of beautifully polished cedarwood and covered in rawhide. It can be seen today at the Archaeological Museum in Cairo. In order to distinguish guitars from other stringed instruments, it is helpful to have a broad definition of the guitar. Music expert Dr Michael Kasha defines a guitar as having ‘a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with sides that curve inwards’. The oldest known visual representation of such an instrument is a stone carving at Alaca Huyuk in Turkey, which shows a 3,300-year-old instrument with a long neck and sides that clearly curve inwards. The name ‘guitar’ comes from the ancient Sanskrit word for ‘string’ – ‘tar’. Many popular stringed instruments used in Central Asia today have existed in an unchanged form for several thousand years, as shown by archaeological finds in the area. Many have names that end in ‘tar’, with a prefix indicating the number of strings, such as the doter, a two-stringed instrument found in Turkestan, and the Persian three-stringed setar and four-stringed chartar. The Indian sitar almost certainly took its name from the setar, but over the centuries it evolved radically, following the Indians’ own aesthetic and cultural ideals. Tanburs and harps spread around the ancient world with travellers, merchants and seamen. The earliest guitar-like instruments to arrive in Europe had, most often, four strings. Many such instruments, and variations with from three to five strings, can be seen in mediaeval illustrated manuscripts. They were also carved in stone in European churches and cathedrals, from the first century AD through until the 13th century. When the four-stringed Persian chartar arrived in Spain, however, it changed in form and construction, acquiring pairs of strings tuned to the same note instead of single strings. It became known as the chitarra. By the middle of the 14th century, the chitarra had become dominant, at least in most of Europe. The earliest known music for the eight-stringed chitarra was written in 16th-century Spain. The ten-string version first appeared in Italy at the same time, and gradually replaced the eight-stringed instrument. A further two strings first appeared in the 17th century, an innovation which guitar makers all over Europe quickly took up. However, this twelve-string arrangement gradually gave way to six single strings across the continent. The six-stringed guitar can thus be said to be a development of the twelve-string, rather than vice versa, as was thought previously. At the beginning of the 19th century, the present-day guitar began to take shape, although bodies were still fairly small and narrow-waisted. The modern classical guitar first appeared in its current form in the mid-19th century, when the Spanish guitar maker Antonio Torres increased the size of the body, altered its proportions, and introduced the revolutionary fan-braced top. His design radically increased the volume and improved the tone of the instrument, and very soon became the norm. This design has remained essentially unchanged to this day. At the time when Torres made his breakthrough, German immigrants to America – among them Christian Friedrich Martin – began making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings, which became widely available several decades later in the early 1900s, offered the promise of a much louder guitar, but the increased tension was too much for the fan-braced top. The stronger X-braced top proved equal to the job, and quickly became the industry standard. At the end of the 19th century, guitar manufacturer Orville Gibson added steel strings to a body constructed like a cello, a combination which produced more volume. The electric guitar was born when pickups were fitted to Hawaiian and jazz guitars in the late 1920s, but met with little success until 1936, when Gibson introduced its famous ES150 model.

A Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.” B Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. C A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. In the language of psychiatry, this woman was “confabulating”. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing. Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that during the Second World War he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moscovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls “honest lying”. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been “suicided” by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom “nothing is wasted”. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material. D The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun. E During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken’s relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken’s charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. They revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit. F Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we felt it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channeled into something socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insightful ones. But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies, and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not.” Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.

A Why do we give people flowers? To offer condolence to those who are grieving. To celebrate. To woo. To ask for forgiveness. We all know intuitively that there is something psychologically universal about the emotional response. In the US alone, the flower industry is now worth about $5bn a year—which suggests that, at the very least, they service a compelling human need. B Recent studies at the Department of Psychology at Rutgers State University of New Jersey investigated claims that flowers are unique among living organisms in their ability to induce profound changes in our emotional state. As the first part of their research, the Rutgers team visited 150 women in their homes. Each was presented with a variety of gifts such as flowers, fruit or sweets. The women were unaware that the study was about the effect of the flowers on their emotions. They were told that it was a study about their daily moods, and that they would receive a gift in return for taking part. Following the presentation of the gift, those receiving flowers were assessed as displaying a much more positive mood than those who got other gifts, and this effect lasted for several days. After receiving flowers, they were also more willing to answer questions concerning their social circle and intimate conversations with friends and family. The results suggest that flowers influence our secondary socio-emotional behaviours, as well as having a strong effect on our immediate emotional expression. C In the second study, the psychologists observed participants being handed single flowers, or alternative gifts, in a constrained and stressful situation—inside an elevator. Contrary to predictions regarding gender differences, both men and women presented with flowers were more likely to smile, to stand closer and to initiate conversation. Several subjects who were given the alternative gift then learnt that flowers were also being handed out, and returned to the elevator and demanded a flower. The scientists used elevators for this study precisely because the most typical behaviour in sparsely occupied elevators is for people to retreat to opposite corners. The subjects who received flowers, however, closed up that space to a considerable extent—indicating that the flowers not only induced a strong positive mood, but brought a significant affiliation among people who had never previously met. D The third study involved regularly sending flowers to a selected sample of men and women. The researchers found not only a profound elevation of mood, but also reliable improvements in other measures of cognitive function, like memory. In this series of experiments, some participants produced such extraordinary emotional displays that the psychologists were totally unprepared for them. Subjects gave spontaneous hugs and kisses to the people who delivered the flowers, and sent invitations to the psychologists to come to their homes for refreshments. E Various evolutionary hypotheses attempt to explain the remarkably powerful psychological effect of flowers. One is that our aesthetic preferences for fertile locations and growing things stem from prehistory, when these clues in our environment could mean the difference between starvation and survival. We may have become hardwired to respond positively to flowers because for early man, finding them in a particular location predicted future food supplies and possibly a better place to rear children. Yet the flaw in this argument is that the showy flowers which humans seem to find most visually attractive are generally found on those plants which yield no edible products. F The Rutgers psychologists' findings show that the various physical attributes of flowers combine to directly affect our emotions through multi-channel interactions. We have evolved preferences for the particular colours, textures, patterned symmetries and specific floral odours which influence our moods. Indeed, previous research has established that popular perfumes, which often have a floral 'top-note', will actually reduce depression. The origins of these inclinations may well be as the evolutionary theories suggest—the patterned symmetries of flowers can be detected easily as a recognizable signal within a wide variety of visual arrays, and a response to certain colour tones is important in finding ripe fruit against a leafy background. But, claim the Rutgers team, these preferences have long been separated from their primary evolutionary use, and become rewarding to us more generally. Thus plants with preferred colours, shapes and odours—despite having no other products—would therefore be protected and dispersed. G The Rutgers study suggests that flowers may have actually evolved to exploit their peculiar impact on humans. The team's theory proposes a plant-human co-evolution, or even domestication, based on the intense emotional rewards that flowers provide. The idea that flowering plants, with no known food or other basic survival value to man, have co-evolved with us by exploiting an emotional niche instead, is very much like the scenario presented for the evolution of dogs. Flowers may be the plant equivalent of 'companion animals': If this is true, then there is a very real sense in which, when you next give flowers, they are using you just as much as you are using them.