R.F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days (1972)

This post includes almighty spoilers about this superb novel, which I read recently. Normally I wouldn’t be bothered about that sort of thing myself: I consider myself too sophisticated to rely on such feeble devices as surprise. However, in this case, I was knocked flat by something, memorably, and I don’t want to ruin it. After all, the chance to let out a strangled sob-slash-whimper on a train is quite a rare thing for most people.
      This is a follow up to my discussion of the Predictive Processing conference in Cambridge, which you can read here. As you see in that post, I was very taken by a discussion of how this way of thinking about cognition (in which we are always making predictions, and then modifying them in the light of sensory inputs, and this is how our brains get so much done) might relate to psychotic behaviour. I will quote myself maladroitly paraphrasing Katharina Schmack, I will: ‘Is this a matter of faulty predictions, too strong, or too weak? Is it about a failure to deal with noise in the system, evidence from the world that shouldn’t affect predictions? Is it about problems in the re-evaluation, the feedback from input to prediction? Is it about how you deal with surprises, over-rating them or misjudging them?’.

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So here’s the point I wanted to work with. We have a model there of why those suffering from psychosis might interact dangerously or unhappily with the world. Something is awry in the prediction-input-feedback loop, and what exactly that is might be unclear, or might vary from person to person, situation to situation. Now, it’s pretty obvious that a prediction-input-feedback loop is part of literary experience. We expect certain features of story or form to occur; those expectations are modified, sometimes confounded. We wouldn’t generally say that we are aiming to minimise surprise, which is a core idea in the Predictive Processing model; indeed, most of us would say that surprise can be pleasurable, but a lot of our experience is at least in dialogue with surprise.
      I wonder if there are cases in literature where the expectation-surprise dynamic is distorted such that we find ourselves apprehending the fictional world with a strange energy that shares something with the psychosis described above, giving us a disorienting excursion into a different way of predicting and responding to predictions. I was particularly taken with the idea that what could go wrong is the attention to noise: perhaps some people are unable to tune out those stimuli that should not modify their predictions. Some brief examples…

* How about the literature of jealousy? Do some works draw us into the mindset of a character’s psychosis by distorting our experience of how the world validates, or does not, predictions about it? In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, for example, I think we’re well outside the mind of Leontes when he says ‘there’s no truth in the oracle’, conspicuously failing to modify his predictions in response to evidence. But in Othello, I’d say, it’s not so clear, and perhaps that’s because we have been drawn into his particular distortion of expectation and corroboration — not that we suspect Desdemona of infidelity, but that we are no longer comfortable with understanding what’s just noise, and what isn’t?
* Briefly — Macbeth too? Having supped full with horrors, are we at times stuck in his gruelling mindset, sharing something of his logic as he maps his predictions onto the world?
* How about verse forms too? Surely there are some cases where some nuancing or violation of the rhythm or rhyme unsettles our ability to exist comfortably within a pattern of expectation and modification? I wonder about my current obsession John Skelton’s famous metrical innovation (known as Skeltonics): might they induce a kind of prosodic psychosis, leaving us responding in a spirallingly strange way?

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But here is the point about To Serve Them All My Days. This is a novel about a schoolteacher, David Powell-Jones. Approximately 27% of the way into the novel (can you tell I read it on Kindle?) readers find themselves involved in the episode of the Winterbourne Divorce. This centres on a boy whose parents are divorcing, a big deal in the 1920s. His mother’s scandalous behaviour is in the papers, everyone knows, and he runs away. A search is ongoing, and Powell-Jones has just found, and admired, young Winterbourne’s watercolour paintings. Then a new section starts like this:

Venn’s lorry-driver, emerging from the quarry two-thirds of the way up Quarry Hill, was aware that something was amiss the moment he levelled out on the gradient, about one in six here but steeper beyond the ash coppices that grew on each side lower down the road. He braked as hard as he dared but the speed of the heavily-laden lorry increased so that he made a wild grab at the handbrake, throwing all his weight on it as the vehicle weaved the full width of the road, its speed increasing with every yard it covered.

As I read this, I was full of forboding, because it seemed like this agent of horrendous destruction was out of proportion to the Winterbourne plot; and I honestly think I had already slightly wondered whether the divorce episode was going to be enough to sustain the chapter. (There’s something in the punctuation. Delderfield is very good, I think, at creating paragraphs that are full of momentum; he does it here partly by avoiding commas.) Sure enough, this lorry crashes into Powell-Jones’s wife Beth’s car, killing her and one of his twin daughters, seriously injuring the other. The rest of the chapter describes him finding out, fleeing onto the moors in despair, and being found, ironically, by Winterbourne. The chapter completes one trajectory with the poor boy’s desperate and poignant query as to whether Beth was out searching for him when the accident happened.
      I think the structure of the chapter is superb, but (or rather, and) it also left me disoriented. In some ways it was a matter of simple surprise, a moment in fiction where prediction error slaps you in the face, but without real-life consequences. But perhaps, in the light of the Predictive Processing field, I think that for a while the novel inculcated a new configuration of prediction, sensory input, noise, feedback, and so on. The usual rules that fiction depends on, which help us judge the significance of the things we encounter, were suspended for a while.
      It would be consistent with my probings above to see this as a replication of something like psychosis, a syndrome in which the meaning of things, and dealing with those meanings, were all out of joint. That’s probably pushing it a bit too far. But I still think that literature can change our angles, training and then disrupting our predictions and our prediction errors, giving them a wider framework and a chance to do better next time, in books and in life. This might be a rather large thing for literature to be doing, over and over again.

Predictive Processing: Reconstructing the Mind?
(A conference at CRASSH, Cambridge, 1-12 January 2018, details of the programme here)

I’ve mentioned Predictive Processing (PP) and the Free Energy Principle (FEP) before in a post, and this was a two-day event gathering philosophers and cognitive scientists (and a few interlopers) to consider the state of play. Although I have set out on the voyage through the poems of John Skelton that I mentioned in my previous post, it seems timely to say a few things about what I took away from it (before I forget).
      The basic point of PP is that a great deal of our cognition is based on predictions which are then modified by feedback from the world. Perception, for example, is efficient but sometimes flawed because we are always constructing what we expect to see in advance, and modifying these constructions as we pick up new information. Social situations, for another example, involve constant ongoing predictions about the behaviour of others, and these too are constantly changing when there are prediction errors.
      What FEP adds is an underlying pattern. Systems interacting with their environments seek to minimise the amount of ‘free energy’: for a mind in the world, this means aiming for the smallest difference between predictions and evidence, between the internal model and the sensory input. Most pithily, this could be summed up as an effort to minimise surprise.
      These two things are becoming very influential in the science and philosophy of the mind (as was demonstrated by the conference). Experimental design and abstract models are both working with PP, using it as a premise and testing its possibilities.

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The thing that really struck me overall was the range of perspectives currently engaging with Predictive Processing and Free Energy. At the conference there were papers tackling this as a philosophical matter in the broadest way, and there were others approaching it as a practical means of understanding psychiatric disorders.
      In the first of these categories, the last session brought together Karl Friston, the originator of the Free Energy Principle (outstanding website here), and Jakob Hohwy, author of The Predictive Mind (Oxford, 2014; another high-quality website here), which I’d recommend alongside Andy Clark’s book discussed in this post. Hohwy went so far as to say (or so it seemed to me, somewhat light-headed in the rarefied air of philosophy) that we should see the avoidance of surprise as a quality of Things That Exist. Friston’s breakneck paper reconciled many things with many other things by means of equations, and again communicated the apparently limitless reach of this way of thinking.
      Friston himself noted the large number of papers rethinking various psychological disorders, spectrums, and syndromes in the light of Predictive Processing. There was a terrific paper from Katherina Schmack (see here) about the ways we might understand psychotic characteristics in the light of the Predictive Processing Model. Is this a matter of faulty predictions, too strong, or too weak? Is it about a failure to deal with noise in the system, evidence from the world that shouldn’t affect predictions? Is it about problems in the re-evaluation, the feedback from input to prediction? Is it about how you deal with surprises, over-rating them or misjudging them? It was a very interesting set of questions, and I’ll definitely be thinking more about them.

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I couldn’t attend the whole event, and one paper I missed turned out to make some interesting links with art. (I was kept updated by Micah Allen’s Twitter feed, @neuroconscience, which is generally a good source.) There is an online paper I tracked down by the speaker, Anil Seth (many interesting strings to his bow, see website), which you can read via here. I hope it’s not contraband.
      Seth’s point is that there is an overlap between Predictive Processing and ideas in the phenomenological theory of art. In particular, he brings in E.H. Gombrich’s idea of ‘the beholder’s share’, a phrase used in Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1961) to capture the way that the viewer of art does things to form their experience of the picture — and thus to make the picture itself. For Gombrich, then, as for many at the conference, perception is inference.
      The essay linked above turns to a number of twentieth-century artworks in the Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist traditions, to show how art and cognitive neuroscience ‘can work together to elucidate generative contributions to human perception and phenomenology’. It’s intriguing to see famous paintings set alongside photos of everyday scenes manipulated according to principles (of, say, peripheral perception) predicted by cognitive science. This essay was a real find.

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I got a lot out of a nice paper by Sam Wilkinson, about what we mean by ‘explanatory power’. The point was that defining what made a good explanation is not a straightforward matter. It depends on identifying the right question and the appropriate framework in which to answer it (and that means catering to the situation of asking as well as the intellectual domain). It also depends on achieving a useful level of precision, identifying not just why X but why X and not why, etc. Predictive Processing, it was argued, had an interesting sort of explanatory power. I thought for a while about what the explanatory power of literature might be, when it comes to knowing things about your brain. I reckon, generally, that it’s true that a key challenge lies in identifying the questions to be asked and answered, ones that might reach outside the narrow disciplinary world, and that’s something I am not especially good at.
      More particularly, I was struck by Wilkinson citing what seems to be an established distinction (though new to me) between the likeliness of an explanation and the loveliness of an explanation: explanatory power, for better or worse, depends on the latter as well as the former. I think there is a possible third term related to things I’ve said on this blog before, liveliness, that is helping me (just a little) think of how to characterise the contribution literary criticism might make to philosophical and cognitive discussions. This ‘liveliness’, as well as being a sweet wordplay on loveliness and likeliness, incorporates the classical principles of mimesis (representing reality in a believable way) and enargeia (creating vivid images), and could be seen as a rather useful characteristic when we’re trying to get across explanations about how the mind works.

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This has become a rather long post, and I have more to say. So it will be in the next post that I try to suggest some ways in which literary criticism could pick up on ideas about Predictive Processing, the Free Energy Principle, and all!

After my slow start to the blogging year, it’s time to get cracking. In this post I’ll mention one or two things I learned at a recent conference, and I’ll set out some plans for the next few months.

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I went to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York, to participate in a panel about the use of the pronoun ‘we’ (also: ‘us’) in poetry, which was put together by Bonnie Costello. This was another link in what’s now a fairly long ‘we’ chain, mentioned for example here.
      The panel was excellent, but I couldn’t attend as much of rest of the conference as I had planned, owing to the notorious snowstorm that led, in my case, to a detour to Montreal. There were bits of gloom and frustration about that, but in retrospect I think British Airways did well by us, and I was quite excited to see a little bit of the city, to speak a little bit of French, and to experience my personal best cold temperature (-20C).

One other panel that really got me thinking grew out of Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Bodley Head, 2017). It looks like I have never featured this on the blog, which is odd because the topic of empathy (broadly defined) is so often raised at the interface between literary criticism and psychology. What Bloom means by empathy is placing oneself in another’s situation, and he argues that this has been shown to be a force for divisions and biases. Much better, he says, is an effort at ‘rational compassion’, where we don’t rely on our emotional links to inspire us to good works.
      This seems like a very good argument to me, though (as he said in his talk) it has proved easy to misunderstand. One respondent was Patrick Colm Hogan, mentioned several times on this blog, who didn’t misunderstand the point. He spoke up for what he called ‘simulation’ of other points of view, arguing that while the ‘spontaneous’ empathy that Bloom describes is one kind of problem, a more processed, considered and considerate version may be a powerful means of linking people together. It’s an interesting field, where the terms used bring a lot of baggage with them.

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* M.E. Panero, D.S. Weisberg, J. Black, T.R. Goldstein, J.L. Barnes, H. Brownell, E. Winner, ‘No Support for the Claim that Literary Fiction Uniquely and Immediately Improves Theory of Mind: A Reply to Kidd and Castano’s Commentary on Panero et al. (2016)’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112 (2017), e5-e8.; doi: 10.1037/pspa0000079.

Bloom mentioned this recent article, which is the latest turn in a debate I’ve mentioned before. An essay by Kidd and Castano said that reading literature offered measurable benefits in reading other minds… and others are shedding doubt on it. It will be interesting to see how this develops (it’s a live issue, as I noted in this recent post). My own instinct is towards scepticism, but of course it’s great news for me and my Faculty if literature really does make you a better person.

Now for some plans. In the first few months of 2018 I plan to…
* … continue to feature interesting cognitive science articles and think about their literary implications …
* … try something NEW: I am going to write a bit about my experiences of collaboratively designing and executing proper psychology experiments (fascinating, mostly unsuccessful ones) involving literature …
* … try something else NEW and rather BIGGER: I am going to write in a diary-like way about the poet John Skelton, an early-sixteenth-century maverick who does strange things to my mind and must surely in some way know something about your brain… the idea here is to use the blog to share thoughts in progress, intriguing quotations, methodological problems, and so on.

I’m looking forward to all this, especially the last.

My list of items to be discussed in blog posts has become rather long. Typically I like to describe the argument of a recent psychology article, to offer (perhaps) some sort of critical generalist thoughts about what I think is interesting or problematic, and then to make a literary connection, often ending in a bit of analysis of a passage or two, aiming to see What Literature Knows About Your Brain. This can take a while, and it means that it can take a long time to shift the stockpile.
      I feel motivated to speed through a few things, because in the new year I have some plans for the blog and I don’t want to delay them. This will be the last post before a Christmas break, and in the first one of 2018 I’ll set out the plan. Here, therefore, I am going to race through some things that might have merited more attention under other circumstances.
      It’s only fair to admit that this blog acts to some extent as a kind of diary for me: I often find myself searching for an idea or a scientist’s name, to find that post I once wrote. So I will be fulfilling that function. I also hope, of course, that it serves to share things with readers, so I’ll be doing that too. Here’s a list of the topics to be touched upon….

1. Unwanted Thoughts
2. Free Will
3. More Free Will
4. Fear
5. Distributed Cognition
6. Foraging Cognition
7. Reason
8. Detail

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1. UNWANTED THOUGHTS
Follow this link to find out about some research in Cambridge that explores how we control unwanted thoughts. I think it might be interesting to think about how literature might work with something like unwanted thoughts. There are all sorts of times when things haunt our reading, or get between us and what we think we should be feeling.

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2. FREE WILL
Itzhak Fried, Patrick Haggard, Biyu J. He and Aaron Schurger, ‘Volition and Action in the Human Brain: Processes, Pathologies, and Reasons’, Journal of Neuroscience, 37 (2017), 10842-10847.
You can find this essay here. How could an attempt to survey the science of free will not be interesting?

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3. MORE FREE WILL
Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, ‘Implications of a Culturally Evolved Self for Notions of Free Will’, Frontiers in Psychology, 30 October 2017: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01889.
This one says that our interest in free will relates to aspects of the self which are culturally specific: we need to think about how these concepts have evolved in societies as well as corresponding in some ways to biological mechanisms. How could an attempt to survey the science of free will in relation to the history of culture not be interesting?

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4. FEAR
M.S. Fanselow and Z.T. Pennington, ‘A Return to the Psychiatric Dark Ages with a Two-System Framework for Fear’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 100 (2017), 24-29, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29128585.
This is a spirited retort to the ideas explored in this post, where I cited Joseph LeDoux’s proposal that scientists of the brain mechanisms related to fear should not present themselves as discovering things about the subjective experience of that emotion. Fanselow and Pennington see this as a big backward step.

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5. DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
I’ve mentioned the work of John Sutton before, and I’ve mentioned the Imperfect Cognitions blog before, and now there’s interview with the former on the latter, pretty much here. I think it offers some very good pointers in the field of distributed cognition.

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6. FORAGING COGNITION
Alexandra G. Rosati, ‘Foraging Cognition: Reviving the Ecological Intelligence Hypothesis’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 21 (2017), 691-702.
This article asks a big question — how did human intelligence evolve? — and offers an unexpected answer. Often sophisticated behaviour has been associated with the need to live in social groups: the need to keep track of, and make the the most of, complex interactions led to all sorts of smart adaptations. Rosati points to research that suggests that some qualities of human cognition may have evolved around foraging, a relatively solitary activity. Some of the key work focuses on other primates: it shows that some key cognitive skills used in finding food (e.g. ‘spatial memory, decision-making, and inhibitory control’) vary according to the particular foraging circumstances of different species. There is fascinating detail on lemurs, and on tool-use. As a result, Rosati proposes that an ‘ecological’ account of mental evolution, complementary to a social account, should be explored further. Could we maybe think about the evolution of certain genres in relation to this? Could, say, the characteristic shapes of epic and romance be seen as relics or adaptations of this link between thinking and foraging? No time to think about that too deeply…

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7. REASON
I enjoyed a little e-book by Tom Stafford (he does the Mind Hacks blog, and his homepage is here), called For Argument’s Sake: Evidence That Reason Can Change Minds. A lot of interesting work in cognitive science uncovers our habitual biases, the ways in which our decision-making is a lot less reasonable than we’d like to think. Nevertheless, Stafford shows, we are reasoners and we feel the benefit in all sorts of ways. I found this quite cheering.

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8. DETAIL
And finally… recently I cut the same material from one article and one conference paper. Evidently I have been trying to find a home for it and failing. Perhaps this is it.
      If you’ve read more than a few posts on this blog you’ll have noticed that I pay close attention to the details of literature, and therefore I must think that if literature knows anything about your brain, it knows it in detail, in the details, in the nuances and the subtle shifts. In this respect I find myself in tune with a quite recent article by David Davies, but out of tune with a quite recent article by Greg Currie.
      Davies makes a distinction between the rich texture of the scenarios created in literature, and the constrained clarity of those favoured by philosophy and cognitive science; ‘the detail seems central to how they are intended to work’:

The point of a scientific or philosophical thought experiment can be paraphrased in a way that allows it to be brought to bear on the more general cognitive concerns of the work in which it figures. But such paraphrases of the fictional narratives in canonical works of fiction threaten the distinctive kind of understanding we take such literary works to provide.
(David Davies, ‘Fictive Utterance and the Fictionality of Narratives and Works’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 55 (2015), 39-55, p. 53.)

Davies is arguing in his essay as a whole about the nature of fictionality, its specific properties and defining characteristics. As it turns out, detail is not in itself the hallmark of fictionality (since some brief fictions may lack detail). Nevertheless, the relationship of this quality to the ‘understanding’ offered in literary works is highly suggestive. It is in the thickness of representation, rather than its distillable core, that literature’s contribution to knowledge may reside, Davies argues. The myriad potential observations that could arise at any number of moments in the process of fiction are more arresting and disconcerting than a summative paraphrase, and they may also be a distinctive route towards insight.
      Currie turns, in an essay entitled ‘’, to the question of detail as he develops an argument about literary insight. He argues for the same criteria to be applied to literature as are applied to other fields offering insights into the mind: ‘It cannot count as the generation of insight merely that people have the feeling that insight has been generated’. Nor can the writer’s ‘creativity’ be relied upon as a source of relevant insights, because there is evidence that many successful artists have a poor grip on their own minds, let alone the minds of others. Complexity of style, ‘so often taken as a sign of cognitive richness and subtlety’, is seen as a problem: it may lower vigilance, and may increase literature’s ‘power to spread ignorance and error’.
      This offers a sharp qualification of Davies’s point about detail. Perhaps literature’s richness in this respect devalues its claims; any argument for the value of the subtleties afforded by details might need to acknowledge that they offer diversion as well as focus. Really, though, much as I enjoy Currie’s bracing and rigorous interventions against everything that I stand for professionally, I think Davies is 100% right, and I will continue to practise what he preaches.

Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition, ed. Michael Burke and Emily Troscianko (OUP, 2017)

I finally caught up with this collection of essays. I think it’s important, not least because it takes the two-way nature of the literature-and-cognitive-science conversation seriously. It also made me remember what still seems to me a worthwhile exchange (in the post and the comments) between me and Emily Troscianko, way back when. (It was about how much literary scholars should commit to scientific models of the mind.)
      The introduction to Cognitive Literary Science (pp. 1-16) does a good job introducing the interdisciplinary field, and makes a key turn towards seeing literature as a way of contributing to scientific debates. The editors make some noteworthy predictions (p. 13), as follows:

… there will be more truly collaborative projects in the future;
… 4E cognition (i.e. seeing the mind as embodied, extended, embedded, and enactive) will ‘stay big, but grow more differentiated’;
… there will be more work on variations between readers (there’s on this, and it’s an interesting can of worms);
… there will be new thoughts about whether reading makes us better people;
… people will develop more ‘ecologically valid’ ways of studying reading;
… there will be experiments in the 4E style on the ‘haptics, kinaesthetics, and ergonomics’ of reading.

All of this sounds like it might well come true, and I am also hopeful about collaborative projects; I have some irons in the fire myself. I can’t give the lowdown on every essay but I thought I’d note a few things that struck me.

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Patrick Colm Hogan’s is pleasingly upbeat about what Arthur Miller knows about your brain: ‘The play has implications for our understanding of the human mind. Specifically, it indicates that emotional memories are organized into stories, which is to say, particular causal sequences. These causal sequences are not necessary or law-like, nor even probabilistic. Nonetheless, they serve as models for construing and simulating later events: defining their causal configurations, filling in intentions or unobserved actions, reconstructing relevant memories, and so on. In consequence, the play suggests that one’s emotional responses are not responses to the current situation alone. They are, rather, responses to the current situation as organized and partially re-simulated by tacit references to narratively structures emotional memories.’

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Merja Polvinen’s has interesting things to say about the imagination, and in particular how scientific experiments sometimes simplify what is meant by imagination in theory and practice. Polvinen mentions a landmark essay by Kidd and Castano which argued that fiction makes us better people; it has been mentioned on this blog at least twice, here (where the point was that there had been a failed replication) and also here (in a very pertinent guest post by Emily Trosciano, whose essay ‘Reading Imaginatively: The Imagination in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Literary Studies’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 42 (2013), 181-98 is exploring similar themes to Polvinen’s).

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Karin Kukkonen some music for my ears when she says that the ‘literary genre of the fantastic… can serve as a repository of “found science”’.

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David Herman’s has given me great stuff to think about in relation to my ongoing interest in animal minds, mentioned most recently here. As he says, his aim is ‘to steer a course between the Scylla of the radical inaccessibility of non-human minds and the Charybdis of experiential homogenization or flattening, by arguing that mind-ascribing acts, rather than occurring in decontextualized, one-off acts of attribution, always unfold within particular arenas of practice, or discourse domains’. His analysis looks at how non-fiction and fiction aren’t so different in the language used, or how prolific they are, when attributing mental states to animals.

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These are a few highlights, then, but I’m omitting essays by some major luminaries. Overall, I think it’s a landmark collection.