* Randolph F. Helfrich and Robert T. Knight, ‘Oscillatory Dynamics of Prefrontal Cognitive Control’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 916-30.
* Sepideh Sadaghiani and Andreas Kleinschmidt, ‘Brain Networks and APLHA-Oscillations: Structural and Functional Foundations of Cognitive Control’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 805-17.
* Scott R. Cole and Bradley Voytek, ‘Brain Oscillations and the Importance of Waveform Shape’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 137-49.

This blog is about what literature knows about your brain (I promise), and it also has to be about why it would be literature that knows these things. There are various kinds of answer to this: they might relate to what happens to language in literature, to the cultural roles that literature plays, and they might relate to the forms that literature takes, the ways it organizes our words and our thoughts into certain shapes in space and time. These three essays made me think about the latter possibility: this idea of oscillation, waviness, as a characteristic of the brain, might somehow map onto or be spoken to by the motions of literary forms, the manipulations of cadence in prose, and especially in verse.
      Now I’ve heard it said that the iambic rhythm of poetry (unstressed-syllable-then-stressed-syllable, unstressed-then-stressed, unstressed-then-stressed, etc.) is like a heartbeat, or like footsteps as they walk or run. Could we say that this pattern is like the on-off of brain function — of ‘thought’ — as it’s observed by the scanners? Obviously the safest answer is ‘not really’, but maybe this field of ‘oscillatory dynamics’ could have room for different spheres and manifestations?

*

First let’s get real about the Trends essays that really don’t offer much crossover at all. Sadaghiani et al. are talking about very rapid oscillations that don’t lend themselves to interdisciplinary generalisations. Cole et al. are also involved in very technical and specific business that doesn’t give me a literary loophole. They build on the observations that the waveforms of neural oscillations aren’t sinusoidal, i.e. they aren’t regularly shaped curvy waves: ‘these nonsinusoidal features may provide crucial and so far overlooked physiological information related to neural communication, computation, and cognition’. It all seems like very clever stuff, from the observation to the prospects for future research, but as far as my selfish purposes are concerned there is still only the most general parallel to offer with the waveforms of poetry and prose.

*

Might Helfrich et al. be more promising? Yes, in that they are a bit less clear that the oscillations are all super-fast (though deep down I know they are), and Yes, in that the focus is on the large scale, on the ‘profoundly rhythmic quality’ seen in ‘the functional architecture of cognition’. This is irresistibly suggestive, to me at least. However, there has to be a bit of No as well, as we are still deep in the electrical patterns here, far from the conscious or the personal.
      They are interested in the prefrontal cortext (PFC), which seems to be the part of the brain responsible for ‘executive control of goal-directed behavior’. They turn to a nice metaphor to capture its work: it ‘serves as a conductor to orchestrate task-relevant large-scale networks’, and in that role it proves ‘highly flexible’, able to ‘rapidly integrate task-relevant information according to the current contexts and demands’. It seems that research shows ‘neuronal oscillations have a causal role for perception and cognition’ (perhaps a loosely understood causal role, but a causal role nonetheless), and Helfrich et al. extend this to other higher cognitive functions.
      Concluding, they say that ‘accumulating evidence supports the notion that endogenous oscillatory activity in large-scale networks has a causal function for goal-directed behavior and constitutes a promising direction for future research to unravel core mechanisms of goal-directed behavior’. (‘Unravel’ again, just like two posts ago; does this metaphor suggest something about a current idea of the mind as a knotted, knitted thing?) This leaves me thinking: what poem would I quote now, to show how an oscillatory-style rhythmic pattern contributes to the processing of complex material into something heading towards a goal? And then I think, what poem would I not quote to make that point? I think I will leave things general at this point, observing a long-range stand-off between the rhythms of brain and verse. Perhaps I’ll bump into a poem at some point that’s perfect for making things more specific.

* Tarek Amer, Karen L. Campbell, and Lynn Hasher, ‘Cognitive Control as a Double-Edged Sword’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 905-15.
* M.D. Rosenberg, E.S. Finn, D. Scheinost, R.T. Constable, and M.M. Chun, ‘Characterizing Attention with Predictive Network Models’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 290-302.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I am going to do some work on 17th-century devotional poetry. I’ve always enjoyed teaching Herbert, but I’ve never considered writing about him. Recently, though, poems like this one have been making me think:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

The way it makes you think is what’s making me think. Religious poems like the ones in Herbert’s The Temple (1633) allow readers to spectate upon the speaker’s spiritual experience, and they also allow them to shadow, simulate, replicate, and question their own versions of that experience — either as a possible journey anticipated by the poem, or as a journey already undertaken (or in progress) to be compared with the poem’s way of setting it out.
      ‘Prayer’ is a list of things that prayer is, metaphorically (perhaps not), or that it is like (but it doesn’t say that), or that it can be (if you do it right, or wrong). Each of its propositions is interesting in itself, but I am interested most of all in the movements between them. It seems to me that the pace of considering each instance, and the pace at which the poem wants to add the next, do not match: so readers speed up and slow down, interrupt themselves, qualify themselves, and so on. I think this engages, and tests out, various cognitive capacities in relation to religious questions: our ability to make connections, the , the way in which we pay attention, and more. Attention has been the focus of a couple of recent Trends pieces, one of which at least is pertinent hereabouts.

Rosenberg et al. are trying to come up with an account of attention. The focus is twofold. First, they want to understand what sort of a thing attention is — and they think that it is ‘a network property of the brain’ (i.e. it is about how parts of the brain interact, not the workings of a particular region). Second, they want to make predictions about attentional abilities, and here the first point becomes relevant, because ‘the functional architecture that underlies attention can be measured while people are not engaged in any explicit task’. They posit that ‘the neural architecture that supports attention function is reflected in the brain’s intrinsic functional organization’.
      So they can use fMRI to measure each person’s ‘unique pattern of functional connectivity’ while they are in a resting state — not focusing on anything — and then predict how good at attention they’ll be. I suppose the idea is that constructing attention-based experiments and measuring capacities in the moment is harder than just saying ‘lie there’ and switching on the big machine. I don’t feel like over-indulging the pertinence of this finding to a poem like Herbert’s ‘Prayer’, but it is tempting to think about attention as something that is about the interaction between things, and that has fundamental links with the resting mind.

I’d make a stronger claim for the relevance of Amer et al. to a reading of the poem, on quite general terms. They are asking the question ‘what’s so great about focus?’. They argue that there is evidence that ‘a broader focus of attention, afforded by reduced control’, is actually beneficial to some learning, problem-solving, and memory tasks. This is especially (but not exclusively) true of older adults, who seem to have a different ‘processing style’ that means they have performed poorly in some laboratory tests, but appear to function quite capably outside.
      Interestingly they set this against the brain-training industry, which is all about ‘improving cognitive control to enhance general cognitive function and moderate age-related cognitive decline’. They’re doubtful about benefits of such programmes, and are interested in alternative strategies. Again the focus is on the elderly; they wonder if we can ‘take advantage of the natural pattern of cognition of older adults and capitalize on their propensity to process irrelevant information’. Apparently studies show that ‘distractors can be used to enhance memory for previously or newly learned information’.
      While their therapeutic focus is aimed at one age-group, the general point about the illusory advantage of cognitive control seems to apply more widely. And I find that very interesting in the context of 17th century religious verse. Why would you need to keep such a tight grip on your attention, when the goal is to have God give you the gift of faith? And how can a poem create the kind of gaps and meanders that make it seem like the mind is open, prepared for salvation in the sense that it has relinquished the false aspiration to save itself?
      There are other strands in the essay — the difference made by the time of day; the difference made by mood; the difference made by the combination of relevant and irrelevant information. The latter two at least seem to offer possibilities to an understanding of poetry. One of the most suggestive Trends essays I’ve read for quite a while.

I’ve been on a trip, and when I go on a trip, I tend to catch up with Trends in Cognitive Sciences. I hoovered up lots of interesting stuff from the end of last year and the first few issues of this year. These will feature in the next few posts, as will a few holiday snaps — and said snaps will keep appearing well after anyone remembers why they are here, which is a bit odd but at least they’ll soothe my copyright-paranoia.
      Before the Trends-fest, brief notes on a couple of items that reached me via more mainstream media. The first was on the BBC website, the second was mentioned on a colleague’s Twitter.

(i) MEMORY REVOLUTION!

This is partly interesting because of what the scientists are saying (in an article in Science), and partly because of how it has been covered. See the BBC report here, for example. It starts excitedly: ‘what really happens when we make and store memories has been unravelled in a discovery that surprised even the scientists who made it’! Problem is, we’re still an enormously long way from this. The ‘making’ and ‘storing’ involved are convincingly linked to certain brain regions but what is made or stored is far from ‘unravelled’, or so it seems to me. I tend to think of the ‘making’ and the ‘storing’ as to a large extent metaphorical, when I am feeling snooty.
      Nevertheless, the bit of research in question has more than just good PR on its side. Ingenious manipulation of the brains of mice (what’s that? oh — my moral compass is wobbling a bit) suggests a new paradigm for memory creation. Old story: everything starts as a short-term memory in the hippocampus, then it converts over time into long-term memory in the cortex, if necessary. New story: memories are formed in the hippocampus and the cortex simultaneously, but they’re not available for several days in the latter. There is a link between the two though. This is clever stuff, and surely the beginning of some big new thinking.
      And yet, the quibbler in me… the BBC report says ‘the experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to human brains too’, and of course I follow, and I’m a friend to comparative cognition, I really am, but there’s quite a lot of reach in that ‘thought to’. Who has much idea what a ‘memory’ is in a mouse? And yet… ‘researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of individual neurons — they could literally switch memories on or off’. Now, I’ve seen worse abuses of the word ‘literally’ (I sat near some noisy Durham undergrads on a train once, and it was carnage; not literally). But that’s not a perfect use of ‘literally’, to my mind.

*

(ii) MANIPULATING THE BIASES!

I wrote a cheery account of reading Michael Lewis’s book about the psychology pioneers Kahneman and Tversky. So I was interested to read this less cheery piece by Tamsin Shaw in the New York Review of Books. It’s not surprising that a deeper understanding of cognitive biases is leading to attempts to exploit those biases. I suppose that sort of exploitation has been happening throughout human history, but in the age of social media and fake news a more specific understanding of the processes involved might make it all the more dangerous.

Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

I was talking to someone the other day about What Literature Knows About Your Brain (the topic; not the blog), and I mentioned this book as a way of making the case. Although, within the cognitive theory field, it’s a bit of a classic, I’ve never mentioned it in a post before. So, a brief note on the matter.
      Nobody should speak roughly about the sublime as an idea in classical and post-classical poetics, but roughly speaking the point about it is that some things (powerful poetry, for example; or a very big mountain) have the capacity to lift us beyond the everyday and into more elevated realms of thought and experience. Richardson had the neat idea that our minds are, like the universe, awe-inspiring in their magnitude and complexity, and that when we encounter the workings of our brains we are outside and above normal bounds.
      Literature might take us there. It might have ways of manoeuvring our thinking into a vertiginous perspective on its own patterns, ebbs and flows, short-circuits, and sharp edges. Literature is a product of the mind, and reading puts the mind to work, and sometimes the harmonics between the thinking on both sides get us deeper into (no — this is sublimity; gets us higher into) the way we think.
      That’s the rallying cry I take from Richardson, anyway. It transports a classic notion into a new field. It acknowledges the contributions to knowledge made by cognitive science, but it recognizes that our minds are in many ways a mystery, and there’s no way we can observe them from the outside. It suggests a literary towards a special sort of insight. Highly recommended.

John J. McGavin and Greg Walker, Imagining Spectatorship: From the Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford, 2016)

I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while, ever since Greg Walker gave a talk in Cambridge addressing some of the key themes. The book is a response by two early drama experts to the ideas about theatre developed by cognitive theorists. Their two key responses are united by a resistance to the general and to the automatic; they don’t like the way that some scholars have depicted dramatic effects as predictable and sub-personal. So they focus on…

(i) the situational, i.e. / e.g. They say that in early theatres the particular physical positions and angles from which spectators viewed a play made a big difference to what they saw, felt, and thought. Your place in the theatre interacted with (and often reflected) your place in society. Some saw it all from a position of authority, some saw fragments from the margins or from within a crowd. The point is: you need to understand those historical conditions and thereby not generalise about theatrical effects.

(ii) the reflective, i.e. / e.g. They say that the ‘cognitive turn’ has described a lot of unconscious mirroring, simulating, and interacting with the action on the stage, and has undervalued the role of the audience member’s conscious thought. In Medieval and Renaissance drama there is a lot of confrontational emphasis on what the audience makes of the action and the questions it raises, so it makes sense to attend to how an audience would deliberately think things through.

(from the title-page of , written c. 1500)

My general thought as I read the book was partly ‘we need both, don’t we?’, which is not a very dynamic response. Still, perhaps it’s not entirely obvious that a fully engaged historical awareness can nevertheless be informed by the proposals about shared human resources (between diverse individuals, and across time) that have been taken from cognitive science. This is an important creative tension in any attempt to understand the literature of the past. And we also need to remember that responses to artworks engage us at every cognitive level, and that our reflective functions are infused with non-reflective functions, and vice versa (I dare say).
      My more specific thought was a sort of counter-intuitive doubt about the difference made by physical position in the performance space. It has two components, one anecdotal and one theoretical.
      I once went to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe in London, to see The Knight of the Burning Pestle. I had the worst seat in the house. It wasn’t even a seat — a few of us stood, leaning at a barrier, on the balcony right at the side of the stage. Restricted view? Very much so. You could say it told me about my place in the world. On the other hand, the tickets did cost 10 quid and were available at short range, so I didn’t grumble much. I ask myself now how much my sense of the play was inflected by that position. I can remember discomfort, that it got better after some people in the same boat gave up, and that there were some specific bits of the action that I simply couldn’t see. On the other hand, I feel that I really saw the play, and loved it, and got the benefit of numerous things that were facing somewhere else.
      Why? Well my reading of some studies of perception and social cognition leads me to think that we are very responsive to what others can see, and what they are attending to. In fact I wrote about this very thing in an article alluded to here. While we may see things physically from the side, our awareness of how a play looks may be mediated by those seeing it head-on, by those close up, by those far away, and so on. We may always be constructing fuller images of plays based on inferences about what others can see, as well as living in our own perspectives. So although I literally couldn’t see the actors when they gave certain speeches that day at the Wanamaker, that doesn’t simply mean I was not watching (perceiving, remembering, etc.) them and the rest of the action of the play.
      Again, of course, we need both. For some observers at some plays my location would have impinged more, or differently. McGavin and Walker are right that cognitive theories are sometimes based on modern theatres that homogenize spectatorship, and that there is a need to attend to the situational differences in the households and streets and oddly-shaped theatres where earlier drama took place. But the particular is interacting with the general, and it’s a provocative thought that social cognition may broaden our perceptual worlds with surprising consequences.