Obituary: Michael Corballis, the mind scientist and 'time traveller'

Wednesday, 5 January 2022

Professor Michael Corballis preferred a wandering mind to mindfulness.

Michael Corballis: scientist, writer; b September 10, 1936; d November 13, 2021.

Time travel is possible. In fact, it’s not only possible – we do it constantly.

Psychology professor Michael Corballis and a German-born colleague, Thomas Suddendorf, coined the phrase “mental time travel” to describe the way that the human mind can revisit past events, imagine future events and even put itself in the minds and experiences of others, whether fictional or real.

“Mental time travel is absolutely critical,” Corballis told Stuff journalist Nikki Macdonald for a profile in 2014. “If you were simply locked into present tasks, or the present world, you wouldn’t be able to plan anything, you wouldn’t be able to recover past memories, you wouldn’t be able to tell stories.

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Engineering and cartooning’s loss was psychology’s gain and New Zealander Michael Corballis was globally renowned for his work on the mind.

“I think it’s part of the human condition to escape from the present and go off into plans for the future. You can try things out with controlled mind-wandering. You can try out your dinner party and see who is going to come and how it’s going to work.”

Corballis, who died on November 13, aged 85, had a distinguished academic career.

Born in Marton in 1936, he grew up on a sheep farm as the oldest of four brothers. In his teens he boarded at Whanganui Collegiate School, where “rugby, cricket and rowing were more important than scholarship”, as he told Times Higher Education decades later.

“In my third year, my mother agreed that I was not cut out for farming, and after much consultation with her professional acquaintances it was decided that engineering was the best fit to whatever talents I possessed (architecture was a close second).”

The origins of language also fascinated Michael Corballis.

After studying first-year engineering, under a mentor “who was a world authority on pre-stressed concrete”, Corballis switched to science and arts at the University of Auckland, ending up with masters degrees in mathematics and psychology. He said the mix of arts and science suited his “dilettantish disposition”.

He also worked for an insurance company and briefly flirted with becoming a cartoonist, before one of New Zealand’s professional cartoonists told him it was “a soul-destroying occupation”.

He did his PhD in psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, under the supervision of Professor Dalbir Bindra and later joined the faculty at McGill, but the University of Auckland lured him home in 1978. He was professor of psychology there for the following 30 years, and remained an emeritus professor until his death.

He and his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1962, had two sons. Paul is a cognitive neuroscientist, and Tim is a successful novelist. Barbara predeceased him in 2020.

The eminent cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker was among those taught by Corballis at McGill. After Corballis’ death, Pinker praised his “urbane, charming, witty, irreverent” former teacher. He also described Corballis as “among the world’s deepest and most creative cognitive scientists”, who “illuminates every subject he takes on with insight, wit and charm”.

Corballis’ many achievements included a Distinguished Career Award from the International Neuropsychological Society in 2013, Auckland University’s inaugural Creativity Fellow in 2014 and the Rutherford Medal in 2016, “for foundational research on the nature and evolution of the human mind, including cerebral asymmetries, handedness, mental imagery, language and mental time travel”.

The Rutherford Medal is described as “a prestigious award instituted by Royal Society Te Apārangi, with the support of the Government, to recognise pre-eminent research, scholarship or innovation”.

Other awards included the New Zealand Association of Scientists’ Shorland Medal in 1999, a James Cook Research Fellowship from the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2000 and the Hunter Award from the New Zealand Psychological Society in 2006.

He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association of Psychological Scientists, the American Psychological Association and the Royal Society Te Apārangi, and an honorary fellow of the International Neuropsychology Symposium and the New Zealand Psychological Society.

He was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2002 for services to psychological science.

His publication record over the course of a long career included more than 460 scientific articles, reviews and book chapters, and 14 books. His final book, Adventures of a Psychologist: Reflections on What Made Up the Mind, was a memoir that also covered the evolution of cognitive psychology.

As a writer, he had an enviably light touch and the rare ability to make difficult scientific subjects clear to an ordinary reader. His other titles include The Lopsided Ape, From Hand to Mouth, The Recursive Mind, Pieces of Mind and The Wandering Mind.

In The Lopsided Ape, he expanded on the observation that humans are the only primates that are predominantly right-handed. His argument in From Hand to Mouth was that human language evolved out of gestures and hand signals that predated speech by millions of years.

There are times when hand gestures remain more useful than words, as he explained in 2002: “For example, tell me what a spiral is.”

He was still working within weeks of his death from cancer. But he stopped teaching a few years earlier, as “at my age it is more of a chat than a lecture”. Former students and colleagues remember his generosity, support and intellectual curiosity.

His intellectual range was shown in his choice of his four favourite books for a Stuff feature in 2017. He picked Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Martin Gardner’s The Ambidextrous Universe, short stories by Saki that reminded him of boarding school, and Janet Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo. Of the Darwin book he said, “I wish I had written it, but I was a century too late.”

His love of Frame connected with an idea that humans are storytelling animals who crave narratives, as he said in 2014: “To continue to survive in the complex worlds we have created, we need to allow the mind to wander – to play, to invent, to be creative.”

He thought that mind-wandering was far superior to the fad of “mindfulness”, which narrowed the mind’s focus.

Corballis attracted controversy in the last months of his life. He and two other Royal Society fellows, professors Robert Nola and Garth Cooper, were subject to a Royal Society complaints process for putting their names to a controversial letter published in the NZ Listener. The letter was critical of mātauranga Māori, or Māori knowledge, being taught as science at NCEA level within a framework that saw “western science” as a tool of colonialism.

The Royal Society in turn criticised Corballis and the other signatories for promoting a “narrow and outmoded definition of science”. It dropped the complaints process against Corballis after his death, although not its case against Nola and Cooper.

Sadly, the divisive “culture wars” nature of the argument has overlooked some nuances.

On his Mind Matters blog in 2020, Corballis wrote: “The Māori ‘worldview’, at least as captured by mātauranga Māori, surely belongs in the humanities, because it has to do with culture, history, and tradition rather than with scientific progress. Indeed, a strong injection of Māori culture and scholarship may well save the humanities from further decline and neglect, at least in the universities.

“The inchoate postmodern blanket within which mātauranga Māori seems to be shrouded, though, may also be more destructive than constructive with its air of condescension and European angst. We need positive affirmation of Māori art, culture, language, storytelling, values and, increasingly, literature – and not just for Māori themselves, but for all of us.”

January 13, 5:38pm: This obituary has been updated. Corballis was supervised at McGill by Professor Dalbir Bindra, not Donald Hebb, who was the chair of the department.

Sources: The University of Auckland, michaelcorballis.com, Mind Matters blog, Times Higher Education, Stuff (Nikki Macdonald).