J.W. Schooler. J. Smallwood, K. Christoff, T.C. Handy, E.D. Reichle, M.A. Sayette, ‘Meta-Awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (2011), 319-26.

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I found this a very interesting article, perhaps because I am easily distracted. Mind-wandering is defined as ‘engaging in cognitions unrelated to the current demands of the external environment’. Schooler et al. identify two key processes: ‘perceptual decoupling’ (the capacity to disengage attention from sensory information) and ‘meta-awareness’ (the capacity to take deliberate note of ongoing conscious activity). The findings are varied: mind-wandering interferes with the sensory task at hand (of course); awareness of engaging in mind-wandering is only intermittent (and the feeling of having been aware may be constructed in retrospect – we feel we must have known so we imagine that we did).
      Perhaps the most interesting thing for me is the suggestions about the functionality of mind-wandering. Yes, it interferes with concentration on the immediate environment. But the capacity to disengage, and the capacity to think about the contents of consciousness, may be uniquely human. Their product, mind-wandering, may be a by-product of evolved capacities, or it may have evolved functions in itself: for example (Schooler et al. suggest) it may help in the process of planning the future, in multitasking, in ‘’, and in creativity. There is, perhaps, a happy medium between the over-focused (narrow, limited) and the over-distractable (diffuse, never finishing things), but as far as we can tell it’s the latter which makes us different from the brute beasts.

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What might a poem know about mind-wandering? This is one of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sonnets, which imagines love as a battle in which his mistress’s displeasure sends his passion fleeing:

      The long love that in my thought doth harbour,
      And in my heart doth keep his residence,
      Into my face presseth with bold pretence,
      And therein campeth, spreading his banner.
      She that me to love and suffer
      And wills that my trust and
      Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence
      With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
      Where with all unto the heart’s forest he fleeth
      Leaving with pain and cry,
      And there him hideth and not appeareth.
      What may I do when my master feareth?
      But in the field with him to live and die?
      For good is the life, ending faithfully.

It is not a straightforward matter saying what this is about. Of course it is about the lover’s plight, and finds a painful but humorous conclusion, that the courageous thing to do, in a hopeless fight, is to die bravely. Since this is a close imitation of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch (as many of Wyatt’s love poems are), it is also about a relationship with earlier poetry. The yield of this aboutness is not so clear, but Wyatt is exploring the way in which a lover’s voices is composed out of other voices, and the way that the voice of English poetry may find itself within and around the achievements of other languages.

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However, it often feels, when reading poetry, that we’re doing well when we get beyond the first level of aboutness and see something else (‘subtext’ is often the word used) emerging. Wyatt’s image of the ‘heart’s forest’ is very arresting. It is not there in the Petrarch. It represents the inward recesses of the human as a tangled, place. The poem, I think, finds itself somewhere unexpectedly sharp-edged as a metaphor turns out to be very suggestive about what the mind and its emotions are like.
      Towards the end of the poem I think there is another shift of attention. This depends quite a bit on other poems by Wyatt, and on the ways in which critics have got used to thinking about Wyatt. He often manages to find resonance between the servitude of love and the servitude of the subject in Henry VIII’s court. The shift of gender towards the end gives us a male master (the heart, despite being fearful of the lover, still rules the speaker’s life), a battlefield metaphor that suddenly seems a bit more literal, and a loaded political word: ‘faithful[ly]’. The poem seems again to find itself doing something different from its primary ostensible business.

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Is this poem mind-wandering? On the one hand, it seems to lose focus on the presumed perceptual business, and it begins exploring topics where we might see creativity, planning, awareness of the dangers around (all positive reasons for mind-wandering in general). On the other hand, we might credit this as the poem’s main outcome, the benefit of its process, perhaps even its – not the result of a failure to keep on task. Furthermore, the mind that’s wandering is not simply the author’s mind, since as a reader I was aware of helping with the wandering; and although a poem might look like a representation of a thought-process, it is not a mind however much it likes to wander.
      Perhaps a better question would be: what does this poem think (or know) about mind-wandering? Between writer, text, and reader, I think, there is a pretty deep exchange about the benefit, hazard, inevitability, pattern, purpose (etc.) of the human tendency to deviate from the point. It seems likely that literature will celebrate the benefits of thinking outside the moment; it could not exist without that capacity and it may train that capacity.

Not long ago I declared a moratorium on posts about mental time-travel (a third post on the topic seemed like enough). Then I decided to go to hear and give a lecture at Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education, and a new post came to mind.
      There will be a video of the lecture here soon; at the time of writing, it’s just the abstract. They blog about their shared project here. You can find them doing a TED talk about wordless communication here.
      Their talk at the ICE centred on the imagination (or what they called the ‘imagination system’ as opposed to the ‘knowledge system’) and its role in memory and prediction. I was struck by their very broad idea of the imagination. Sometimes, as I understand it, scientists and philosophers talk about mental ‘imagery’ to denote inward pictures of pasts or futures or elsewheres or could-bes, to avoid friction with popular ideas of fancy and fiction; Clayton and Wilkins used the more loaded term to draw in a huge range of thinking outside the immediate context. I liked having my narrower but (I realise) problematically under-formed idea of imagination tested by the feeling that something particular and specific could be merged into a much larger category.

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… And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown …
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1)

This seems familiar: it is with the imagination that literature reaches things that have never been seen before, or never could be seen. ‘Unknown’, though, could be less adventurous. It might just mean ‘never actually witnessed’.
      A few years before A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed Edmund Spenser included a figure representing the imagination in The Faerie Queene. Phantastes can see ‘things to come’, and his chamber has ‘Infinite shapes of things dispersed ; / Some such as in the world were neuer , / can deuized be of mortall wit’.
      Again, this seems familiar: imagination is how we conjure up the impossible. But Spenser doesn’t actually tell us about these unseen things. Instead, there is detail about other shapes in Phantastes’ chamber, ‘daily seene, and knowen by their names…’, such as ‘hags, centaurs… lions, owles, fooles’. Owls? Well, I have seen a number of owls. And centaurs? I’ve never seen one of those, but a centaur is composed out of two .

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Perhaps Shakespeare and Spenser are hinting at the Clayton / Wilkins version of imagination, which stretches rather than breaks with the known. We look in vain for the truly impossible in Phantastes’ chamber. As I thought about the continuity between predicting possible futures and imagining impossible ones, I thought of chess (I often think of chess). Is a chessplayer’s ability to remember variations seen before, and to calculate variations that would follow from decisions made over the board, a kind of imagination?
      I want to say no: in chess the parameters are finite, all the necessary information is present. There are far, far too many possibilities to calculate – they are as good as infinite really – but projections of outcomes are bounded by possibles and probables. They can never truly be ‘unknown’.
      Incidentally, if you have any interest in chess there’s a nice relic on Youtube: a of classic BBC series The Master Game. I like the one that features Byrne and Korchnoi. Both players tell us their thinking in retrospect, but it feels authentic enough. It isn’t the most creative of games – no dazzling sacrifices – but even here it begins to feel OK to think of some of the processes as imaginative. Korchnoi believes, on the basis of memory and prediction, that he will be alright, but he cannot know this. Byrne, deep down, knows he won’t. Even so, to call these acts of imagination sits a bit uneasily.

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There are some developed taxonomies of imagination. Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft have simulation (i.e. the ability for mental activity to happen ‘off-line’, separately from the world) as the mechanism by which imagination is defined. They distinguish between creative imagination and recreative imagination. The former is what I am gesturing after here, and they set it aside pretty quickly after noting that Hume called it . They focus on the latter, which denotes the ability to see the world from a different perspective.
      These categories may be helpful in organising particulars about the subject, but they don’t get closer to pinning down the art-centric idea of imagination that I was worrying about in the Clayton / Wilkins talk. I am not even sure whether I prefer the artistic imagination to be a special case. I do think, though, that the resonant load the term carries from its artistic contexts across history shouldn’t be discarded too readily.

I think this is the last post I’ll write about mental time travel (after this one and this one). I’m coming back to the subject because I think my examples thus far have dealt with reminiscent imagining, but not enough with future planning. Scientific research into mental time travel is particularly focused on the evolutionary advantage that lies in the ability to put memory and foresight together. Some of the most ingenious experiments attempt to catch other animals in the act.

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Human plans in reality and in fiction seem a great deal more complicated than those observed in, say, . When humans work together, plans can overlap and cohere, but they can also diverge and interfere. William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying involves the reader in a family’s gruelling journey to bury a matriarch. Changing narrators give their own perspectives with varying degrees of lucidity.
      The plan to bury Addie Bundren in Jefferson overlaps with her husband Anse’s wish to get some new teeth. When the family arrives, however, they soon find themselves being introduced to a new mother figure:

‘It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,’ pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. ‘Meet Mrs Bundren,’ he says. (Penguin Modern Classics edition, p. 208)

Was this Anse’s plan all along? Either to find himself a new wife as quickly as possible, or to make an assignation with someone he had lined up? His sons and daughter don’t know (or don’t say); perhaps the same is actually true of him. A distinction could be made between the publically acknowledged plan, the privately preferred plan, and the unconsciously operating plan. As I Lay Dying doesn’t give us characters who make this distinction apparent.

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Meanwhile, on the Bundrens’ wagon, other future-oriented scenarios are emerging. The passing of time on the journey is set against other time-critical considerations. Dewey Dell is pregnant but has a plan for a termination. The decomposing body in its coffin is attracting disapproval and carrion birds. Cash’s broken leg is failing to heal, and the narrative voice (Darl, in this case) expresses himself resonantly as they make an effort to relieve the pain:

‘If it’ll just help you,’ pa says. ‘I asks your forgiveness. I never foreseen it no more than you.’
‘It feels fine,’ Cash says.
If you just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time. (p. 166)

Darl eventually ravels out into an act of arson and is sent to an asylum. The family’s eventual solution is to seal Cash’s leg in cement, so it will not be jarred by the wagon’s bumpy journey. This is obviously a bad idea, and later an appalled doctor promises much pain and not much mobility. In this novel there are some truly terrible plans, some mundane ones, some mysterious ones, and they all have their distinctive timescales. We sense one grinding by as another stalls.

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As I Lay Dying is hardly unique among novels for featuring a group of characters journeying, or pursuing complex, partially shared goals in some other way. It is distinctive for opening up so many fictional consciousnesses and yet making their mental time travels so idiosyncratic and opaque. I think this complexity must be a quality of the mental time travel that is wound into the turbulent lives of humans. In our woven social existences it must be typical that plans are always being modified, abandoned, rediscovered, revealed and concealed (from ourselves as well as from others) because of their interactions with the plans of others. I don’t think there’s a more illuminating way of exploring the experience and consequences of that than in literature.

Delphine Oudiette, James W. Antony, and Ken A. Paller, ‘Fear Not: Manipulating Sleep Might Help You Forget’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 3-4.

The very day that I published my previous post, which talked about sleeplessness and its psychological consequences, I checked Trends in Cognitive Sciences and found this article in the January issue. It made me think about Macbeth again.

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Oudiette et al. are interested in whether traumatic memories (such as in the debilitating condition Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) can be ‘attenuated’ by manipulations of sleep. Research suggests that during sleep memories are consolidated (made ‘stronger and more enduring’) when ‘patterns of brain activity are spontaneously reactivated’. It appears to be possible to tinker with these processes. In an experiment on mice that had been trained to associate electric shock with a particular smell, fear responses were heightened after a period of sleep in which the odorant in question had been reapplied. In a slightly different experiment on humans, later fear response was actually lessened when the associated smell was introduced during sleep.
      The authors acknowledge that they are a long way from a therapeutic treatment for traumatic memory like that in the film . However, as they say, interventions during sleep might well be less painful than reliving or facing traumatic experiences, which other therapies often involve. It’s an intriguing idea, however sketchy.

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This made me think of two fictional comparisons. One (a bit of a stretch) was an episode of , which featured Vietnam war special forces troops who had undergone brain surgery that removed their need to sleep. Rather than making them more effective, it caused their brains to gain strange powers (e.g. telekinesis). Without sleep to regulate it, the X-Files writers seem to be saying, the potential of this organ might get out of control.
      The other instance is, as I said above, Macbeth. I quoted these lines in my previous post:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.

I discussed there how the hero’s lack of sleep is part of his psychological and moral degeneration. The new article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences made me think further about what Shakespeare might be exploring about sleeplessness. Macbeth is deprived of sleep by conscience (although since he claims to hear a voice proclaim that he has ‘murdered’ sleep, there may be supernatural agents involved). Without sleep, he lacks one key way in which to process all the fears and memories of his insecure, murderous reign. The link isn’t all that close or exclusive – there are other reasons, including just simple habituation, why Macbeth has become inured to horror – but they are two prominent parts of his psychological decline.
      This is debilitating. The hero is anxious, restless. Lady Macbeth is not very different: she sleepwalks, restlessly trying to wash out bloodstains. But perhaps, like the X-Files soldiers, Macbeth is released and transformed. He can do terrible thing after terrible thing partly because he never consolidates the effects they are having on him. It’s interesting that he is so specific about his lack of response in . In one of the experiments discussed by Oudiette et al., this is the measure of fear that they use. Shakespeare is interested in the relationship of sleep and fear, and Macbeth is a compelling portrait of one extreme set of causes and effects.

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The more I think about it, the more it seems probable that memory therapy during sleep might happen. The road towards the Lethe pill (standard kit for those in combat zones) or the night-time phobia clinic will surely be littered with terrified mice, and traumatized monkeys, and unanticipated consequences in humans. Ingenuity may yet prevail. As is often the case, the differences between literature and cognitive science, in what they can offer to an understanding of sleep, involve ethics. The scientific experiments arrange clear and controlled versions – you might say, simplified travesties – of what fear is really like. Fictions can set up scenarios that would never be allowed in the laboratory and yet which compose (counter-intuitively, even with the witches and all) more realistic versions of these powerful emotions. But the fictional knowledge (that vexing aspiration again) does not refine into categories, physiological theories, or hopes of therapy. People do keep going back to Macbeth, though, learning from it each time, partly through the implicit, exploratory question it is asking of our understanding of the mind – ‘so, could this be what it would really be like?’.

Todd F. Heatherton and Dylan D. Wagner, ‘Cognitive Neuroscience of Self-Regulation Failure’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (2011), 132-9.
Ilia N. Karatsoreos and Bruce S. McEwen, ‘Psychobiological Allostasis: Resistance, Resilience and Vulnerability’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (2011), 576-84.

Heatherton and Wagner are interested in why sometimes we lose self-control. After being subjected to a , dieters eat more than non-dieters, one lapse disabling all their restraint. Neuroimaging suggests that brain regions pertaining to rewards, on the one hand, and self-control on the other, are involved in a sometimes precarious balance. Self-regulation exercises help; drinking alcohol does not. Further research could get further into the way that external stimuli and internal control mechanisms interact.
      Karatsoreos and McEwen develop the idea of ‘allostasis’, an adaptive resilience to changes and challenges, as an alternative to the more negative-seeming ‘stress response’. In addition to exploring how allostasis work at a molecular level, they discuss the effect of sleep-deprivation on the ability to adapt. When their circadian rhythms are compromised, mice do badly in changed mazes; jet lag shrinks the medial temporal lobes of air crews. Karatsoreos and McEwen end up wondering about modern life, where sleep-deprived humans face an unprecedentedly hectic environment.

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Tragic dramas are often thought of as intensely psychological, in a loose sense at least. And in tragedies, adaptive resilience (or indeed, stress), and self-control, might both come into play. The point of this post is to ask what a literary work – Macbeth, in this case – might offer to anyone trying to understand such things. I want to start with two quirky, detailed connections, before suggesting something more substantial.

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‘That Which Hath Made Them Drunk Hath Made Me Bold’
This is what Lady Macbeth says about wine: it has given her courage, and removed her inhibitions. She turns to the same idea when berating her husband: ‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress’d yourself?’ Later in the play, a drunken porter takes his time opening the door; at a (surely not teetotal) banquet, Macbeth sees a ghost. Alcohol loosens minds at several key points in the play. This feature of the play, part of an atmosphere in which self-regulation fails and disaster breeds, looks a little different after reading Heatherton and Wagner.
      The play turns to self-regulation in the long scene set in England (4.3). Malcolm tests Macduff by claiming to have boundless appetites: ‘my more-having would be as a sauce / To make me hunger more’. This is just a ruse, the point being to make sure Macduff is on the side of right, not just against Macbeth. However, it brings the psychology of restraint back into focus, in a play where Macbeth, having fallen once, is capable of further, escalating violence.

‘Sleep No More’
We cannot blame the wine for the murders in Macbeth. It would be even harder to blame disrupted circadian rhythms for its atrocities. Nonetheless, the play makes an issue of sleeplessness:

      Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
      Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
      Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
      The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
      Balm of hurt minds, chief nourisher in life’s feast, —

‘What do you mean?’ asks Lady Macbeth of her husband, when he speaks these lines. . By the end of the play she and her husband both suffer from bad sleep:

      I have almost forgot the taste of fears;
      The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
      To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
      Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
      As life were in’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;
      Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
      Cannot once start me.

Macbeth is remarking on his indifference to horror, which might be thought of as a distortion of adaptive resilience, if not a failure. Having murdered sleep, he has wrecked allostasis. In the light of Karatsoreos and McEwen, this aspect of the play resonates a little more specifically and acutely. The wine and the sleeplessness together look like fragments of psychological insight. They don’t come together to form coherent conclusions (or even knowledge) about the mind, but they suggest ways in which discoveries in details, as well as in the thematic mainstreams, could be thought-provoking.

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I would like to suggest a way in which Macbeth offers something more structured. Heatherton and Wagner end up by recognising that failures in self-regulation involve external factors (such as the nature of the tempting stimuli) and internal factors (such as the neurological make-up of an individual). They wonder how the contributions of external and internal are to be figured in each individual case. In Macbeth, there are equivalents to these external factors (opportunities and circumstances; the workings of the witches) and internal ones (what we are told, and what we have to infer, of his character).
      Some readers would privilege external or internal in their interpretation of the play. I would suggest that Shakespeare does not resolve the question, that in Macbeth’s unique and extreme case, the interaction between causes of different origins is something like alchemy, a mixing of ingredients that produces an extreme result. The play proposes that disentangling the contributions of internal and external may not be possible; that many things about human beings happen in the feedback loops between internal and external; and that seems like a believable (and appropriately tragic and horrifying) answer to the emerging scientific question.