I’ve been enjoying Helen Mort’s blog ‘Poetry on the Brain’ recently. She also seems to be working on a two-way conversation between literature and cognitive science. As well as reflections on poems, she tackles scholarship on the subject. I was pleased to be reminded of Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). I feel like I want to distance myself from the more partisan and territorial qualities in this book’s treatment of cases where artists have reached insights (into memory, for example, or perception) before scientists. But maybe only a little.
      Helen Mort’s blog will give you plenty to read while ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’ takes a break until the new year.

Thalia R. Goldstein and Paul Bloom, ‘The Mind on Stage: Why Cognitive Scientists Should Study Acting’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (2011), 141-2.

Goldstein and Bloom think ‘it is now time for cognitive science to take the stage’. They see that have turned to science to understand their discipline better, and they want to return the compliment. This isn’t interdisciplinary reciprocation, though. They think the phenomenon of ‘realistic acting’ is worth investigation, and that it might help them aim for a better understanding of pretence, deception, and/or ‘social cognitive capacities, such as theory of mind or empathy’. What they don’t explicitly allow for is the possibility that writers, actors, directors and audiences might already have valuable insights into these very things.
      I am addressing a very brief essay, which is optimistic and open-minded about the project it proposes. I recognise that it would be a big step to expect a scientific psychological study to look to the world of the theatre for its knowledge about a topic, rather than for a chance to offer insights. However, it seems to me a small step to realise that writers, actors, and directors could all offer considerable expertise in how, for example, empathy works. Their success depends on a shrewd practical understanding of how we see things through others’ eyes.

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Furthermore, even in a constructive spirit I need to note some problems in the things that Goldstein and Bloom take for granted. ‘Realistic acting’ is seen as a new phenomenon; before the 20th century, ‘performance was highly stylized’. They also say that ‘it was not until Elizabethan England that characters had inner states portrayed onstage (via monologues directed to the audience)’. Of course, acting styles change, and I see what they are getting at here; I may need to rely on a similar degree of indulgence whenever I paraphrase developments in cognitive science.
      Nevertheless, I do think that they are relying on a narrow idea of ‘inner states’. In much earlier drama there are representations of anger, confusion, love, and so on, all of which are inner states within some definitions. What there aren’t necessarily are representations of mental processes as we have been taught to recognise them by modern novels, modern acting styles, and other rather specific contexts. I also don’t know what to do with intriguing that suggests most humans routinely attribute intentions (another kind of inner state) to moving shapes. Our social cognition appears to be very resourceful in finding ways to get below the surface.
      In addition, it does seem to me to matter that the notion of what is ‘realistic’ isn’t absolute. One of the priorities of Aristotle’s Poetics, describing the very beginnings of western drama, is consistency in representation (so, for example, a soldier character should not be scared of blood, and should speak like a soldier). What we see as stylized gestures in earlier British acting styles might have struck their audience as very effective ways of communicating convincing impressions and effects. The history of performance and the changing theory of drama over time could add a lot of sophistication to the use of the term ‘realistic’.
      As it stands, though, it’s a problem, as in an arresting claim from the very beginning of the article: ‘One of the main pleasures of contemporary life is the observation of realistic acting in dramatic theatre, television comedies, award-winning movies, and pornography.’ I don’t know what to make of this. The styles of acting that typify theatre, television, and cinema are all different, and within each medium there are further variations. The last item on the list seems a real stretch. As far as I know, pornography has no reputation for realistic acting, only for the unflinching representation of something other media would not. It seems to be better known for bad acting and for extremely unrealistic scenarios.

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It is better to end by welcoming willingness from cognitive scientists to engage with the theatre as an environment in which to learn about cognition. It will obviously take some work to make the case that the intricacies of literary and theatrical terminology and practice should be part of this exploration. Likewise, it will not be simple to make the case that pertinent knowledge is already to be found in plays and performances. That’s something in which this blog hopes to participate.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Roz Oates
(Roz is a Ph.D. candidate with Durham University’s ‘Hearing the Voice’ research team. She presented this project at the This Is My Body conference, featured in an earlier post.)

Exploring the Power of Reminiscence Poetry to Assist those with Cognitive Decline

Recent research shows that poetry provides a medium for those with dementia to speak out about their experiences of living with the disease. Those with medium-state dementia, such as my grandmother, who can no longer write poetry alone, can however be assisted to do so. After going to a talk given by , a poet who has made ‘poems out of the world of people with dementia for the past fifteen years’, I decided that I would try to co-facilitate poetry with my grandmother.

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She was keen to write poems with me. The wider context of our being together and having a cup of tea was crucial to creating and sharing the poems. I therefore made a point of starting the session each time in this way. I then suggested to my grandmother a theme such as ‘going to the seaside when a child’, and we explored this memory together. After that, we started the poem. If my grandmother had difficulty thinking of a first line, I asked leading questions: Why did you like going to the seaside? Did you take a bucket to the seaside? What colour was it? After a short time, my grandmother usually got into a flow, and she did not need me to ask leading questions as often. I read the poem aloud back to her as it grew, so that she would be reminded of what she had said. Afterwards I gave my grandmother a printed copy of the poem. These poems offer helpful benefits by enabling my grandmother to convey the subjective reality of dementia and by restoring personhood and dignity.
      Below is a poem that I wrote with my grandmother about her bedroom in her present nursing home.

My Room is my Castle

My room is my castle.
It has three solid walls,
and a fourth, with a big window.
It’s very warm and comforting
and sometimes I’m alone in it
and sometimes I have friends with me.
It’s a very good way of living
when you’re old and getting tired,
because always the situation can fit
your present needs. It has moveable walls
and a very high ceiling
and if you wish you can reach for the stars.
With the stars come many, many memories
of a life that was young and not so young
and very old.

My grandmother’s description of her room as ‘my castle’ suggests a level of contentment, where she feels protected. Although it ‘can fit her present needs’ as she says, she also seeks a fantastical dimension. The room has ‘moveable walls’ and ‘a very high ceiling’ that allows her to reach for the stars. This seems to give her comfort, while enabling her to bridge together the different phases of her life from the young to the very old.

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Poetry particularly lends itself to facilitating communication with someone with dementia. As poetry is often learnt in infancy, its rhythms and sounds make it the most memorable language. The free verse form which my grandmother uses allows her to use short phrases, without feeling the pressure to provide cohesive sentences that prose demands. Poetry also brings vivid images into my grandmother’s mind, such as the castle, which is associated with security, and then comfort. At the point where my grandmother struggled to think of a new line, using a cat puppet to act out the next sentence helped with creating a flow. This also added to the enjoyment that she found in creating the poem. Overall, the process seems to have helped my grandmother, who is unable to accept her present life with dementia, to reflect on positive memories of past lives, and this encourages her to communicate more.
      Creating these poems also provided a focus for the time I spent with my grandmother, and she felt encouraged that we were doing something productive together. In her own words, ‘writing poems is like playing bat and ball’, as we engage in this collaboration. Even though her memory is now very compromised, the poetry stays in her mind to some point, as she can remember that we write poetry together.

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This process has triggered my interest in beginning a research project, where I will co-facilitate poetry with several patients who have early to medium stage dementia, using the same method that I did with my grandmother. By showing what qualities poetry has to convey the sense of loss for the dementia sufferer, I will investigate how metaphor is a primary agent in gaining the dementia sufferer some self-assurance and sense of identity. In the ‘now-orientated existence’ of dementia, argues that the metaphors the dementia patient uses to describe the past may provide insight into their current experience of the disease.
      However, I am also interested in whether it is the case that these poems, by bringing together true and false memories – for they may well not all be true – can lead to an overall gain in true memories. So to establish the reliability and accuracy of a person’s recollections, I will compare the content of the memory before writing a poem, with that presented during the process, then after. I also plan to revisit the same recollection on a separate occasion, when I will ask the dementia sufferer about the same theme, such as visiting the seaside, so as to produce a second poem, and see if similar images and connections are generated.

This is a follow-up to my first post on this topic. There, I suggested that if you want to understand mental time travel in humans, you need to understand the intricacies of the language in which that time travel is described; and if you want to understand those intricacies, you need to see how they emerge in literature’s many representations of people thinking across time.

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Here, I want to deal briefly with the idea that What Literature Knows about this (or any topic) is achieved not just by the writers of literature, but also by their readers, and in particular by literary critics. Literary works are finished by the people who read them. The best critics play a special role in drawing out, fulfilling, and sharing the knowledge that literary works might have about the mind. One of the difficult things about being interdisciplinary as a literary critic may be that, , we don’t quite have a discrete and complete thing that we work on, which offers an inherent set of phenomena that we can discern and account for.

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Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is a history of the representation of reality in western literature, and a classic of literary criticism if ever there was one. It takes representative passages from the whole of the Western tradition, and identifies key developments in the ways in which literature depicted the world. Some of these relate, unsurprisingly, to time, and to mental time-travel. In the first chapter, he deals with two episodes: the moment in Homer’s Odyssey where the disguised hero’s old nurse recognises him by a scar on his leg, and the account of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand [Homer], externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand [in Genesis], the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place alone are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and fraught with background.
(Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by Edward Said (Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 11-12.)

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In the book’s final chapter mental time-travel comes to the fore again. This next extract shows Auerbach drawing out the possibilities of what is often called the ‘stream of consciousness’ in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. The chapter also looks at Proust.

The two excursuses [i.e. two trains of thought that take the narrative voice away from the present place and time], then, are not as different as they at first appear. It is not so very important that the first, so far as time is concerned (and place too), runs its course within the framing occurrence, while the second conjures up other times and places. The times and places of the second are not independent; they serve only the polyphonic treatment of the image which releases it; as a matter of fact, they impress us (as does the interior time of the first excursus) like an occurrence in the consciousness of some observer (to be sure, he is not identified) who might see Mrs Ramsay at the described moment and whose meditation upon the unsolved enigma of her personality might contain memories of what others (people, Mr Bankes) say and think about her. In both excursuses we are dealing with attempts to fathom a more genuine, a deeper, and indeed a more real reality; in both cases the incident which releases the excursus appears accidental and is poor in content; in both cases it makes little difference whether the excursuses employ only the consciousness-content, and hence only interior time, or whether they also employ exterior shifts of time. (p. 540)

Critical habits change. If a colleague today wrote ‘more real reality’ in an essay I would feel obliged to question their confidence about both adjective and noun. Nevertheless the achievement of Auerbach’s book, arriving at so many nuanced suggestions about how literary works are organising their views of the world, and how different eras portray the mind in action, and how readers are drawn into acts of mental time-travel, remains remarkable. I don’t want to undertake a lengthy evaluation of what he says here, and I’ve battled with this post enough. The point is just to propose that what we see in Auerbach’s Mimesis isn’t just observation of What Literature Knows About Your Brain; it is participation in it, and that’s something to keep thinking over.

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I could have done something similar with Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, and others. Individually and as part of a collective disciplinary process, they know a great deal – an indispensable amount – about mental time travel.