Colin Camerer and Dean Mobbs, ‘Differences in Behaviour and Brain Activity during Hypothetical and Real Choices’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 46-56.

So they’re going to tell me about the difference between real and imaginary? Excellent. The premise is more modest than that, but a very important one, I think. Many experiments test how our minds work by seeing how we react to hypothetical scenarios or stimuli ‘that lack some realistic features’. Do these necessarily elicit our true responses, the ones that would arise in reality, which is what the experimenters are pursuing?
      For example, that classic question: there’s a runaway train, and it’s going to run over five people, but if you press a nearby lever, then you’ll divert the train with the consequence that it will run over one person. What would you do? My reaction tends to be that I refuse to think about something so contrived. But perhaps I’m intimating that my answer would be meaningless, that all the nuances of reality (can anyone see me? how hard is the lever to pull and is it right by me? etc.) would influence things, and that you just can’t imagine what you’d do. I’m probably too grumpy for hypotheticals these days.
      It seems there is evidence that brain activity of various kinds is different in some ways (though there are lots of overlaps) when choices are hypothetical rather than real. There are also differences between realistic and unrealistic visual stimuli. There has been some research into the field. Camerer and Mobbs note that there has been interest in creating ‘ecologically valid’ experiments, something I briefly mentioned here. They’re interested in the ways that real decisions involving future consequences ‘may resemble hypothetical thinking’. In the end they acknowledge the sorts of choices that can’t be made real in an experimental context (e.g. ‘highly rewarding, highly aversive, temporally distant, and morally charged’ ones). And they’re interested in how more realistic methods (e.g. ‘virtual reality, or bidirectional social interactions’) could bridge the gap.
      This whole issue resonates with me: the way the imagination works, what makes things real and/or realistic in the mind, how the act of imagining changes the ways we think and act in the world. These are things that the study of poetics has focused on for millennia. You might say literature has always been the home par excellence of realistic hypotheticals. It’s intriguing to find parallel issues being considered in experimental design. Now — I don’t want to so this again, to do what I so often do, but… there’s no time right now to say more than that.

Jennifer M. Windt, Tore Nielsen, and Evan Thompson, ‘Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 871-82.

Recently I’ve been wondering (only a bit; I have exams to mark) about what leads us to consider how our minds work. The pursuit of knowledge is an end in itself, oh sure, but there are external prompts as well. For the seventeenth century poets I read, for example, there was a theological motive: to know if you were truly feeling faith, a more or less impossible task, you might try to monitor and understand the workings of your own cognition. What about today? Well, a lot of psychological research is carried out in and around economics, business, and marketing faculties: shopping rather than salvation. In the careers of Kahneman and Tversky (biography enjoyed here, worried about here, both interstitially) military service posed a set of questions.
      Well this sort of thing was somewhat on my mind when I read the piece by Windt et al. It’s about dreaming, mind-wandering, and consciousness, and it made me think of recent forays into the subject here and here. In those posts I was suggesting that the writers of Medieval dream vision poems might have interesting things to say about the ways in which our minds work unintentionally. Motivated by their wish to make links between the imagination and the everyday, to pursue unworldly truths in worldly forms, they found themselves spectating upon unintentional shifts of focus and attention, and representing them as moments of poetic inspiration.

*

Windt et al. are working on the different things that happen when we’re asleep. Rather than focusing on REM sleep as usual, they use ‘serial awakening paradigms’ to find out about the previously featureless landscape of ‘dreamless sleep’. Having bothered their poor subjects (‘somnonauts’, I want to call them) sufficiently, and evaluated their reports, they claim to have rendered that landscape featureless no more. They find that people report on sensations and experiences in dreamless sleep, and there are distinct and interesting subtypes. For example, some of the time the ‘immersive character of dreaming’ is missing; some of the time the ‘simulational character of dreaming’ is missing. There may be ‘selfless’ states, and ‘contentless’ states. Ultimately they’re arguing that we need to have a more multi-faceted, multi-dimensional understanding of consciousness, and its lack: it’s not just a single spectrum from ‘on’ to ‘off’.
      This definitely broadens the field in which my poetic dreamers could find themselves. Literature has explored fringe-conscious states in a variety of ways, sometimes (as in the dream visions) aiming to reproduce or harness the sort of cognition that goes on, just off the grid. Unfortunately (I really do have exams to mark) there’s no time to deal with this properly now.

This post focuses on two recent Trends papers about language. They aren’t things that literature might purport to know things about, as far as I can tell, but there’s an obvious overlap of interests.

* Michael C. Corballis, ‘Language Evolution: A Changing Perspective’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 229-36.

This gives a helpful summary of theories about the evolution of language, tracing the changing views of some key thinkers (such as Chomsky) and various emerging possibilities. Corballis sees signs of a big rapprochement. I think the essay’s most interesting contributions are to promote (i) the idea that ‘some nonhuman animals are capable of more “advanced” cognition [e.g. mental time-travel, mind-reading] than hitherto realized, suggesting evolutionary continuity rather than a sudden shift in cognition that somehow made humans special’, and (ii) the idea that apes’ use of sign-language ‘raises the possibility that language originated, not from vocal calls, but from manual gestures’.
      There are various strands and nuances and counter-possibilities. Corballis suggests that hand gestures might have blended into mouth gestures and these could have accumulated acoustic components. The arbitrariness of the acoustic code, ‘sustained largely through culture’, however, is not a property of manual gesture. He suggests it might be ‘an early example of miniaturization — tucking the burden of communication into the mouth and freeing the hands and arms for activities such as carrying or making and using tools’, and I found this quite appealing, perhaps because to think of the origin of language as something so linguistically pleasing as ‘tucking a burden’.

* Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, and Klaus Zuberbühler, ‘What Do Monkey Calls Mean?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 894-904.

You’re the kind of reader who knows that when they say monkeys they don’t mean apes, right? Because that does matter, in that it’s a bit more of a thing to analyse the meaning of monkey calls in such a human way, than it would be to do that with our nearer relatives. And I expect you’re the kind of reader who has a clearer idea than I have what we mean when we say ‘meaning’; it seems like a wobbly term.
      Schlenker et al. tell us that field experiments show that monkey calls, while radically different from our languages, might productively be analysed with linguistic tools. They have morphology, syntax, and semantics. They might be addressed in the terms of pragmatics, i.e. by considering not just what is encoded in an utterance but the work of inference drawn by its hearers. Rather than positing complex communicative intentions, they stick to a basic ‘Informativity Principle’ similar to one found in human communication, i.e. priority is given to things which bring new information. This might not seem like a lot, but the more language-like the monkey calls seem, the more (unexpectedly to some) this essay achieves the goal it shares with the Corballis one above, to put back into the maelstrom of animal evolution something that has been taken to prove humans are special.
      One element that caught my eye was an interest in what sounds like turn-taking (often on my mind — see some links from here for example — and more to follow one day, I hope). There is competition among the calls (‘more informative calls are normally preferred to less specific ones’) and protocols among the callers about ‘call sequencing’. This draws on, and is arguing with, lots of complex specialisms; another highly suggestive piece.

Ruth Feldman, ‘The Neurobiology of Human Attachments’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017) 80-99.

This is about measuring the intensity of love. One for the poets, you’d think. And Feldman thinks so too. She wants there to be a dialogue between ‘science and humanities, arts and clinical wisdom’, as we try to understand love, or its more technical cousin, attachment. She starts with this quotation from Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Harmonium’:

      The measure of the intensity of love
      Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.
      For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke
      Ticks tediously the time of one more year.
      And you? Remember how the crickets came
      Out of their mother grass, like little kin,
      In the pale nights, when your first imagery
      Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

Stevens seems to think that if we want to measure feelings we need to think about how we tune into the rhythms of the world around us. Perhaps the environment quickens around lovers, or reveals itself to them. More straightforwardly, perhaps we know we’re in love when the grass is greener, or the butterflies more buttery. I have a strangely specific, intense, and happy memory of the first (and I think only) time I saw the film of A Room with a View: Denholm Elliott telling Helena Bonham-Carter, with his hand on his heart: ‘here is where the birds sing, here is where the sky is blue’.
      Feldman acknowledges a long history of ‘depicting’ the intensity of love: ‘cave paintings, clay figures, story-telling, dance, music, and poetry’. More recently, ‘studies in animal models, particularly rats and monogamous prairie voles, began to uncover the cellular, neural, and endocrine mechanisms implicated in maternal care and pair bonding’. Now, I have this need to maintain that to depict in art is to uncover, and to uncover in experiments on prairie voles is to depict; we’re all friends here. These animal studies are flourishing, she says, into ‘a new field of inquiry – the neurobiology of human attachments’.
      Some key concepts emerging in this field: how the growth of the infant brain is ‘situated’ and ‘dialogical’, playing out in close proximity to mothers; how the plasticity of the brain enables repair of ‘early negative relationships by later benevolent ones’; how ‘human synchrony’ is vital, and in mother-infant contact we see ‘gaze, affect, vocal, and touch modalities’ and ‘physiological coordination’, and all of this is a kind of ‘entrainment’, as the child learns how to live with others (and at all).
      The last of these seems very important and interesting in an interdisciplinary sort of way. It seems humans do ‘bio-behavioural synchrony’ with strangers, in the right circumstances, which suggests a remarkable reliance on and/or capacity for the maintenance of many different levels of attachment. Perhaps we can get in to synchrony with a poet or a poem. Perhaps some sort of rhythmic transfer might put us into the right frame of mind to catch something of ‘the intensity of love… the verve of earth’.
      The most famous possible example of this I can think of is the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet, when they spontaneously produce, in their rapt exchanges of words, a sonnet. Another example could be John Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’, in which the speaker, in a series of closely woven stanzas, presents a vision of harmonious intimacy of body and soul. It’s a witty poem, though, and an elusive one, so it’s not just the thing itself, ready to be measured.

*

Feldman is proposing a scientific model of ‘the quality of attachment’ in humans. It’s about dopamine, the inhibition of inhibitory neurons, the reward circuit, higher order processes, expectation and representations, mentalizing, top-down inferences, these and other things feeding into the ‘global human attachment network’. This idea of inhibiting inhibitions is eye-catching. It models a cognitive process in a certain way that resonates with the ways one might think sociologically or morally or indeed in terms of literary responses and effects.
      There are three concluding ideas which assuage those who might think that understanding love was not a substantial enough goal. First, it has health benefits. Second, we need to understand it as a way to seeing its flip-side, conflict, out-groups, etc. Thirdly, in order to do this well, Feldman things that we need to work properly ‘at the crossroad between science and humanities’. The ‘biologically based evolutionary perspective, which provides mechanistic understanding but pays little attention to the individual, is supplemented by perspectives that focus precisely on the individual with his or her experiences, expressions, and aspirations, and are committed to the individual’s well-being, health, and thriving’.
      I have nothing against the individual. Indeed, some of my very favourite people are individuals. The scientific research is very single-person-based in some ways, focused in on, at most, intimate pairs; but I see that the individual is not fully realized in that form. I’m just still stuck on ‘the verve of earth’. Perhaps the hardest thing to pin down in the lab is the way that love changes everything: our disposition towards the world and the world’s disposition towards us. Someone might object that this isn’t about what love is, just what it feels like. To which I can only say at this point: there’s no need for that word ‘just’, since in this case the difference between the thing and what a thing feels like needs to shrink.

In my last post, I got swept up by discussions of brain oscillations. Underlying the mind’s directional, end-pointed work are waveforms, on-and-off switchings. Somehow or other these two things are necessary to one another. I thought about poetry, with the up and down of metrical stress, as an oscillating form that goes somewhere. There were provisos. Rapid changes in brain activity play out on a very different timescale from those of an iambic poem.
      Nevertheless, it stuck in my mind, and I thought of a poem that seemed, in interesting ways, to work with different sorts of underlying motions as it thinks its way towards understanding. This poem is John Donne’s ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’. Its speaker describes a journey heading away from the rising sun, and heading away also from the sight of the Crucifixion, the thing that comes into view as the day dawns. The poem ranges metaphorically from cosmic grandeur to bodily wretchedness and finds a way, eventually, to ‘turn’ towards Christ.
      I’ve been tempted towards thinking that this is something like the ‘neural sublime’ that I discussed not long ago. The poem makes me think of the clip-clip of the swaying horse, it makes me work through the regularity of its metre, with patterned stresses and rhymes, and it sets up bits of adventurous thinking that rise and fall. These turn into the ‘turn’. Perhaps that conversation of oscillating energy into directional energy is not just analogous to how our brains seem to work; perhaps it delivers that neural-sublime encounter with those workings. I am not ready to go there, quite, I should say. This is partly because of a chicken-and-egg problem: I am looking at the poem because of things I’ve been thinking about the mind, so it seems a potentially false step to then go back and discover those characteristics of the mind as if it’s a result of reading the poem.
      I’ll let the poem speak for itself, mostly, and I won’t try to explicate all its complexities. But there will be a few comments here and there — if you hover your mouse or equivalent over highlighted words, they’ll blossom.

      Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
      The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
      And as the other Spheares, by being growne
      Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
      And being by others hurried every day,
      Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
      Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
      For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
      
      This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
      There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
      And by that setting endlesse day beget;
      But that Christ on this Crosse, did ,
      Sinne had eternally benighted all.
      Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
      That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
      Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
      What a death were it then to see God dye?
      It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
      It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
      Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
      And tune all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes?
       that endlesse height which is
      Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
      Humbled below us? or that blood which is
      The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
      Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
      By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne?
      If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
      Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
      Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus
      Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us?
      Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
      They’are present yet unto my memory,
      ,
      O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
      I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
      Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
      O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
      Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
      Restore thine Image, , by thy grace,
      That thou may’st know mee, I’ll turne my face.