Julian Jara-Ettinger, Hyowon Gweon, Laura E. Schulz, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum, ‘Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 589-604.

This is all about the ‘naive utility calculus’. The idea is that from a young age our social thinking is based on an assumption that everyone is just trying to maximise rewards and minimise costs. This simple belief underlies our observations of others, our inferences of their aims, our assessments of their capabilities and qualities, and so on. Jara-Ettinger et al. see this as an explanation of the ‘rich social reasoning’ (it’s ‘surprisingly sophisticated’) that even tiny young humans seem to undertake. The framework is Bayesian, and I am glad now that I wrote a post summarising what this adjective carries with it: see here. The calculus is based on the development of hypotheses according to new evidence, but its basic shape is consistent.
      Another way of putting this ‘calculus’ is a ‘common-sense theory of psychology’, but that doesn’t suggest the underlying mathematical quality to the modelling involved. Indeed, there is some heavy duty mathematics here, but I am not going to get into that. (I have my own naive kinds of calculus…) There are parallels in earlier psychological research, but now, they argue, we can apply ‘new computational cognitive modeling tools’. There are parallels in social and economic theory too, but the point here is ‘not a scientific account of how people act’, but ‘a scientific account of people’s intuitive theory of how people act’. Indeed, this theory might be quite wrong in numerous complex situations, and may make us surprised by things we shouldn’t be surprised by, but the basic toolkit is the basic toolkit, fitted for everyday use, handling standard demands effectively.
      Much of the article is spent outlining the ways in which a naïve calculus works, and the things it might miss. Jara-Ettinger et al. are interested in the ways in which the costs / rewards calculation can involve an ‘agent-invariate structure’, wherein the characteristics of the individual are ignored and the absolute value of costs and rewards takes precedence. Overall they wonder how the simplifications that result from common-sense psychology can be understood better, because they may tell us a lot about ourselves.

*

One novel sprang to mind when I was thinking about this. It related to this calculus in a double negative way, because it represented a central character whose actions were hard to fathom, failing to understand those around him. This was John Williams’s Stoner (1965), which had a revival in 2013, when everyone seemed to be reading it. It’s the story of an English literature academic, so my perception of ‘everyone’ was particular, and inflated. I was one of its , but not because I thought people would thereby Finally Understand Me (I very much hope not). It was because it built towards a series of moving moments in which Professor Stoner encountered the awful opacity of other people (especially his daughter), and I really liked the way that it allowed this to be a failure on his part, and also the essential condition of life, and a sort of experiment in fiction as well. By saying little about what Stoner thinks other people are thinking, it leaves us to infer the particular naivety of his understanding of others, which ends up, for him and for us, as a kind of despair.
      The portrait of Stoner was convincing, but that does not mean it was realistic, exactly, and I don’t think it needs to be realistic to be valuable. In fact it was frustrating to read how inconsistent his sensitivity (to people and poems) could be, and he seemed uniquely and impossibly broken in his own way. Williams has an unflinching style of telling the story that provides a direct encounter. However, we don’t get inside Stoner’s head much more than we get inside other people’s heads in everyday life. Equations like those produced by Jara-Ettinger et al. don’t deliver the particulars of how any mental calculus works in practice. A novel like Stoner can give us a version that might be just as instructive by seeming false as by seeming true, because it asks us to check its hypotheses against our working theories, and thereby to enrich our thinking about what those working theories are, and what’s good and bad about them.

Evan F. Risko and Sam J. Gilbert, ‘Cognitive Offloading’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 676-88.

By cognitive offloading they mean ‘the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand’. It might be using your phone to remember appointments, or tilting your head to look at a rotated image. I see this as quite closely related to ideas about the extended mind or distributed cognition (for which as usual I direct you to Edinburgh’s History of Distributed Cognition project), and sure enough, Clark and Chalmers and others are cited, and the whole idea is seen as a special, tangible case of the larger phenomenon.
      Risko and Gilbert argue that we need to know more about cognitive offloading because of its growing presence in modern lives. It might be argued that wax tablets and notebooks and scratches on cave walls have always been there to help us extend our thinking power, but it’s also hard to deny that electronic devices are enabling and infiltrating our minds in unprecedented ways. And yet experimenting on these things might be difficult, they say, because experimental design usually seeks to control environments and, deliberately or not, to limit physical movement, so the usual flow of cognitive offloading may not reveal itself.

*

They produce intriguing evidence of the ways in which both cognition and metacognition (that is, thinking about thinking; evaluating our thinking) are affected. The latter is important and perhaps unexpected: the experience of using other means to address cognitive burdens, and the prospect of doing so, can distort our self-assessments. So, for example, it has been shown that searching and finding facts online can lead people to believe they know more than they do, and to predict better performance in subsequent, unaided tests. It may or may not be a problem that ‘a human-internet transactive memory system can lead individuals to blur the distinction between what they know and what the internet knows’. It seems to me most worrying when I think about how we might lose track of how utterly reliant we become, thus leaving us completely incapacitated when the power goes down.
      Other results point in another direction. Participants who had access to the internet whenever they didn’t know answers to questions were more pessimistic about their future abilities than those who just had to stop at ‘don’t know’. Here they were less confident rather than more. This probably demonstrates how subtle the framing of questions needs to be when dealing with something so nuanced. But it also shows, as Risko and Gilbert say, that cognitive offloading isn’t just a matter of shoring up some fallible lower-level elements of cognition; it has consequences for higher-level ones too.
      So: we need to think carefully about whether offloading should be encouraged or discouraged, and in which contexts. There’s a world of difference between a worry bead and an abacus (though some elements of construction are kind of similar): but there are pluses and minuses in both cases.

*

The question for me as usual is whether there are ways in which literature can help enrich the questions and answers. I would like to suggest two very different ways in which the idea of cognitive offloading might arise, the first in a novel, and the second in a collection of poems.
      Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is a novel by the great maverick experimentalist of the British novel, B.S. Johnson (1933-1973). The title character decides to manage his life as an exercise in double-entry book-keeping, keeping track of where he feels he has been rewarded and wronged, and offering recompense in either case.
      The destruction he wreaks (society is, after all, kind of annoying) escalates out of control. This is a pretty clear case of cognitive offloading: Johnson has portrayed a character who devolves his moral accounting into a form that requires balancing. In combination with the imbalances of his personality, this creates an easy path towards horrendous acts. The novel hypothesizes a very extreme case of what Risko and Gilbert are discussing, but there is a shared interest in lost bearings, where the offloaded thinking loses its grounding. A closer analysis would reveal some more nuanced propositions about what such a stretched version of the theme might reveal. It was made into a film quite recently, which for some reason I haven’t seen.
      My other suggestion is a lot less obvious. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the enigma of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. My general feeling is that in a variety of ways these 154 poems map out subtleties and complexities in the workings of our minds. The idea of cognitive offloading might offer a context in which to understand certain qualities. Why are they repetitive, restlessly returning to certain key ideas? And why do they seem to reveal a great deal about their speaker (and/or their author) while also seeming to hold a great deal back? Today’s answer is: because they are exploring the way that a form like the sonnet sequence might arise from, and/or trace, the processes of cognitive offloading. Each sonnet is a form in which to think, and also a form in which to externalise a bit of thinking, distancing it somewhat.

* Karl Friston and Gyorgy Buzsáki, ‘The Functional Anatomy of Time: What and When in the Brain’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 500-11.
* Annett Schirmer, Warren H. Meck, and Trevor B. Penney, ‘The Socio-Temporal Brain: Connecting People in Time’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 760-72.

Two quick notes about time…
      Friston and Buzsáki have a big, complex theory about the hippocampus. They think that recent experiments show that our sense of time is made up of separable components: the when and the what. The hippocampus (a brain region that seems to do a lot of major stuff) is responsible for ‘ordinal structure’ – it does the when ‘without reference to particular events’. In interaction with other brain regions, the what is then factored in. They make links with predictive coding and the ‘Bayesian brain’ (I explained a bit about that here), and in the end it gets quite grand: ‘in short, the way we represent ordinal succession and the implicit narratives that predict and explain our senses lead inevitably to behaviour that transcends the rules of classical physics’. Key thing is: our brain’s sequences are special.
      The idea for Schirmer et al. is that timing is crucial in our social lives. When we interact with others, we have to do things at the right moment and at the right pace. And when we are interacting with others, we perceive time differently. So they are in pursuit of an ‘internal clock’, which involves ‘subcortically orchestrated cortical oscillations’ representing information about time, as well as processes which link this information to ‘internal and external experiences’. They hope to ‘give time a social meaning’, and to understand how social interactions work in time, by identifying how different brain regions interact.
      A long time ago I thought about trying to look at literature in the light of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. I think of that as a sociological and political version of what Schirmer et al. are trying to do. Lefebvre wrote about how senses, bodies, and social spaces produced different sorts of rhythms with one another. Perhaps this neuroscientific angle will rekindle my interest in it – I do think that literature (plays: scenic form, plotting, patterns of dialogue; and poems: rhyme, metre, stanza, repetitions and changes; and etc.) offers many versions of the intersections between temporal and social, and that some links could be made.

Emma Firestone and Raphael Lyne, ‘Purity and Disgust in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays’, in Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives, ed. Robbie Duschinsky, Simone Schnall, and Daniel H. Weiss (Routledge, 2016), pp. 238-55.

Right at the end of last year, just in time to hit the 50th anniversary of Mary Douglas’s anthropological classic Purity and Danger, this came out. It’s a collaboration between me and my former PhD student (and friend to the blog) Emma Firestone.
      We look at what are traditionally thought of as Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ (mostly Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well), and ask why we find both (i) a distinctive concentration of disgust-inducing language, especially in the form of metaphor, and (ii) tendencies towards anxiety, pessimism, and dissatisfaction, in audiences and critics.
      Inspired by findings in ’embodiment’ psychology, which suggest links between physical disgust and harsh moral judgment, and between purity, cleanness, and leniency, we propose that patterns of gross language in these plays have something to do with the way that readers’ and critics’ assessments of right and wrong appear to be thrown off balance. We don’t commit to straightforward causation but we think there’s a meaningful correlation.
      Emma is more of a veteran in this field than I am. She has written a great essay picking up on the famous experiment in which holding a hot drink made people more positively disposed towards strangers. See ‘Warmth and Affection in Henry IV: Why No One Likes Prince Hal’ in Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Johnson, Sutton, and Tribble (2014).

Derek Attridge, The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015)

Because I write a blog called what this one’s called, people sometimes assume I am well on top of the latest reading around the subject. Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up with pretty obvious things, though: this is an example. Attridge’s book follows up his own The Singularity of Literature (2004) and aims to continue its ambitious project to define literature, to understand the way in which it works, to explore how readers should perform their roles best, and to establish its potential as a contributor to our ethical lives.
      It has a whole chapter on ‘what literature knows’ (not particularly about your brain, but still). One key point is how ready many scrupulous thinkers are to attribute agency to works of art — they are said to know things, remember things, show things, and so on. We’ve all been there. Attridge addresses a range of philosophical and critical work on the matter. Michael Wood (briefly mentioned on the blog here) is prominent, as is Peter de Bolla, who happens to have an office very near mine. I didn’t remember that in Art Matters (2001) de Bolla asks what Barnett Newman’s painting ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’ knows; I wouldn’t have been so alert to the idea back when I read it. I do remember quite a few things, though: it’s thanks to that book that I am listening to Glenn Gould play Bach’s Goldberg Variations even as I write this.
      Attridge argues that the knowledge in question is a property of the event of reading and its effects on the reader, rather than something inherent to literature itself. Here is a selection of key moments:

A full engagement with a work of art involves such processes of thought and feeling [i.e. a varied range of responses and questions prompted by it]; and if the work seems to know things that we don’t, it’s because it brings us to the limits of our own understanding, raising questions and making connections that have not hitherto been part of our mental — or physical — universe. (p. 254)
…
Works of art don’t ‘know’ or think, then, though they can involve the viewer, reader, or auditor in a performance of knowing or thinking. If they appear to have these human capacities, it’s because in responding to their alterity, singularity, and inventiveness [these are key words in Attridge’s definition of literature and its qualities and functions] we find our cognitive faculties engaged and tested; our familiar maps prove inadequate, and we move into new and strange territory. When Wood says, as I noted earlier, ‘What literature knows, what a novel or poem or play knows, is strictly, unfiguratively, what I now know before I read the text’, I’m tempted to correct him: what makes us want to say that literature knows is the experience of challenge or discovery that makes us different after reading the text.
…
We act out our knowing, our wanting to know, our wanting to know what it’s like to know or not to know; or rather these things are acted out in the experience that is the event of the artwork. If we are different after this experience, it’s not because we have added to our store of knowledge, it’s because, in gaining access to the work’s alterity, singularity, and inventiveness, we’ve discovered new ways of knowing (and perhaps new ways of not-knowing). Ascribing to works of art the capacity to think or to know (or to smile) is one way of registering metaphorically that process of discovery — or rather of continual discovering, since we don’t have any treasure to show when we stop listening or looking or reading. And that, of course, is why we go on doing it. (p. 258)

In some ways, this works pretty well for me. I recognize this way of describing the value of literature as dynamic, situational, repeatable, and rewarding in that it modifies the reader’s thinking. And yet it seems at odds with one of the ways I’ve been thinking about literature in this blog, as a store of knowledge about the mind that has been built up over time as the result of the efforts of writers who, without necessarily knowing it, were passing on the fruits of their observations and hypotheses. By ‘store’ I don’t mean something so tangible that it simply does not need the ‘event’ of attentive reading that Attridge describes. On the other hand, I am suggesting something that has a bit of tenacity, something to which literary people can point and say to the sceptical ‘look, see what we have here’.