Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (2020)

A quick post… It’s a busy time, but something has been on my mind.
      Recently I wrote a post inspired by a psychological study trying, and interestingly failing, to demonstrate the reason why our minds aren’t constantly assailed by memories of the past and projections of the future. This must be the result of inhibitory mechanisms, the idea was, so perhaps we could just find a way of dialling down those mechanisms and the floodgates would open. It didn’t happen. So we’re left with the question, why it is our minds are ever free from all the things that could crop up?
      It might be interesting to think of these three collections by Claudia Rankine (mingling poetry with prose and images too) as explorations of the ways that specific social circumstances can affect the capacity of the mind to restrain the flood. Rankine presents the contemporary African-American experience as a constant battle with racism, and as well as featuring stories of victims, she tests out some of the many pathways an individual could take through life, facing or trying to avoid the pressures. I took two complementary things away from them: first, a sense of the myriad emotions, stories, sources, disciplines, tones, and tactics that a thoughtful person might sense as pressures on their own thinking, and second, a sense of what it might take, and what it might be like, to find a moment of reprieve.
      The point might be an implicit hypothesis: one reason why our minds might not be assailed by thoughts of past and future is that social comfort, a feeling of being in place and protected, quietens things. The alternative — a feeling of being constantly pressured and doubted (it was in reading Rankine that I really got my head round the idea of a microaggression) — might lead to the sort of sifting, worrying, raging, hybrid forms in Rankine’s work (including, for example, in Just Us, an apparently anxious but often pointed facing-page fact-check of the text). So these works make me think that the question of why any ‘I’ may not be flooded with thoughts has some relation to whether the relevant sense of ‘we’ is precarious or not. Rankine’s works also offer depictions of what it might be like, as a certain sort of person, to experience the flood.

Cecilia Heyes and Caroline Catmur, ‘What Happened to Mirror Neurons?’, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2021): DOI: 10.1177/1745691621990638

This is another catch-up post in this restart phase of ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’. What, indeed, has happened to mirror neurons, which used to be the talk of the town? They were the talk of the blog back in the day, too: several references here and an update here. As I mention in the latter post, I wrote an article (this article) in which I thought a bit about the implications of this field for understanding hand-holding in Shakespeare.
      The science of mirror neurons, for the uninitiated, is associated most of all with Vittorio Gallese, especially by those in the humanities, because he has been so open to dialogue with people working on art and literature. The key phenomenon observed in early experiments was that that there was activity in brain regions associated with movements when those movements were observed, as if the brain responded to actions in others with a kind of inward mirroring. The function of that mirroring became the focus of adventurous thinking: is this the mechanism for inferring intentions and/or achieving empathy? Is this the key to artistic experience?
      Even in those early days some were sceptical about this push beyond more basic kinds of action appraisal. Now, in a round-up of recent work, Heyes and Catmur give a steady assessment of what they think is a reasonable level of excitement. We shouldn’t go too far, they think: in relation to action understanding, ‘mirror-neuron brain areas contribute to low-level processing of observed actions (e.g., distinguishing types of grip) but not to high-level action interpretation (e.g., inferring actors’ intentions)’. There is a similar pattern in other aspects of cognition: speech perception, imitation, autism, and more. As they say, ‘mirror neurons contribute to complex control systems rather than dominating such systems or acting alone […] at a relatively low level’.
      It’s not doom and gloom at all, as these are still remarkable features of the neural architecture: ‘Although disappointing relative to some early claims, we argue that these discoveries should not discourage further research on mirror neurons. […] Mirror neurons should not be tarnished; they are yet to fulfill their true promise’. On their own, their contribution may not reach the heights of the early hopes, but as part of larger networks, they are still fascinating. I think probably there were some over-excited responses to mirror neurons from people in the arts when they first became widely known. There were also some measured ones, and there is still room for more of those.

* Jonathan Smallwood, Boris C. Bernhardt, Robert Leech, Danilo Bzdok, Elizabeth Jefferies and Daniel S. Margulies, ‘The Default Mode Network in Cognition: A Topographical Perspective’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22 (2021), 503-13.
* Yaara Yeshurun, Mai Nguyen and Uri Hasson, ‘The Default Mode Network: Where the Idiosyncratic Self Meets the Shared Social World’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22 (2021), 181-92.

The Default Mode Network (DMN) has been with me all the way through this blog. It is a set of brain regions which earned its name when it was noticed that activity continued there when other attention-demanding tasks were not in progress — when the brain reverted to a sort of default mode. It became associated with inward-turned processes such as mind-wandering, for example, and I got really keen on that, writing various posts (e.g. here), and a lecture that got published in the Journal of the British Academy.
      Naturally I am interested when there is further research on the DMN, and here we have two recent papers in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that show scientists still tackling quite fundamental questions. Smallwood et al. consider the ‘topographical characteristics’ of the DMN — what do its component parts seem to be linked to by proximity? — and zero in on the auditory system which, they suggest, ‘allows these regions of the DMN to capitalize on the capacity for language processes to organize cognitive function, perhaps through the vehicle of inner speech’. So when our minds wander — or perhaps in dreaming — there may be some sense of an ‘inner voice’ involved, or so the physical contiguities suggest, at least.
      Yeshurun et al. are interested in how the brain ‘integrates incoming extrinsic information with prior intrinsic information to form rich, context-dependent models of situations as they unfold over time’. They propose that the DMN is not simply involved in looking inwards; instead it is ‘central for integrating external and internal information, allowing for shared communication and alignment tools, shared meanings, shared narratives and, above all, shared communities and social networks’. And as they aptly notice, this is about as ‘default’ as it gets, a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Scientists are interested in the ways that the DMN links things up — and so am I. It appears that many key questions are open, though.
      There is still a process of catch-up in these posts; it is enjoyable sifting through the things I have been missing. I am allowing myself to hope that soon I will feel able to take The Turn and begin putting some literary examples into the mix, with their own questions to ask and answers to give.