K. Hoenig, C. Müller, B. Herrnberger, E.J. Sim, M. Spitzer, G. Ehret, M. Kiefer, ‘Neuroplasticity of Semantic Representations for Musical Instruments in Professional Musicians’, Neuroimage, 56 (2011), 1714-25.

This is a second post inspired by Nadja Tschentscher’s talk at the Goethezeit do; the first is here. Nadja was talking about ’embodied semantics’ (the ways in which abstract concepts and the brain’s sensorimotor system may be linked). One of her ideas was that although the absolutes of the topic might be hard to prove, we might get interested in how some people’s conceptual lives are more embodied than others’. (And perhaps vice versa; perhaps some people’s embodied experience is more conceptualised than others’; I don’t know, and I’m not even sure what that means.)
      In support of this, she discussed the engaging study cited above. The experiment tested what happened in the brains of professional musicians when they were shown pictures of musical instruments, in comparison with the brains of non-musicians. The musicians showed a lot more activation in the auditory centres of their brains, as if the abstract concept of a cello or a bassoon was, for them, hard-wired to the sounds they knew it could make.
      In scientific lingo, ‘intensive sensorimotor experience with musical instruments has been shown to entail plastic brain alterations in cortical perceptual and motor maps’, and in their experiment, ‘the unique intensive experience of musicians with musical instruments establishes a link between auditory perceptual and conceptual brain systems’. These ‘higher-level semantic representations for musical instruments in and adjacent to auditory association cortex… highlight the eminent importance of sensory and motor experience for acquiring rich concepts’.

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* Tom Sperlinger, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation (Zero Books, 2015)

What links this excellent memoir of teaching literature at Al-Quds University in the Occupied West Bank, with the sparks of auditory activation in the minds of trained musicians? Well, not a great deal, but you may see in the end why it came to my mind. I was struck by lots of things in the book – the portraits of colleagues and students, the juxtaposition of familiar classroom challenges with a totally unfamiliar infrastructure, and more – but perhaps most of all I was struck by something Sperlinger said about Romeo and Juliet.
      Sperlinger says that his Palestinian students were engaged not so much by the play’s representation of love, but by the dangers faced by the young couple. I suppose, in the light of the Hoenig et al. essay, we could see this as a result of mental plasticity and sensory experience, as well as of a different set of interests and preoccupations. I have had very little experience of agitated crowds veering between fight and flight, or rapidly changing and escalating threats of violence, and so these things cannot resonate with my sensorimotor experience. I don’t have a ‘rich concept’ of such things, so perhaps my attention is less likely to settle there.
      I find this quite suggestive as a way of thinking about how experience shapes literary response. It’s not really the same thing that the scientists were looking at, which was the influence of expertise; and literary interpretation results from lots of different interlocking factors. Still, I like the thought that experience shapes our ‘rich concepts’; that different groups of people might develop identifiable ‘rich concepts’ that separate them from others; that we could think, therefore, what (for example) the typical Shakespearean audience had seen or heard or felt that tuned them in to aspects of the play that just aren’t striking us right.

* Alfonso Caramazza, Stefano Anzellotti, Lukas Strnad, and Angelika Lingnau, ‘Embodied Cognition and Mirror Neurons: A Critical Assessment’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 37 (2014), 1-15.
* Olaf Hauk and Nadja Tschentscher, ‘The Body of Evidence: What Can Neuroscience Tell Us about Embodied Semantics?’, Frontiers in Cognitive Science, 4 (2013), 1-14.
* Friedemann Pulvermüller and Luciano Fadiga, ‘Active Perception: Sensorimotor Circuits as a Cortical Basis for Language’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11 (2010), 351-60.

The first two articles cited above are reviews of the field of ’embodied semantics’, that is, the extension of the ‘mirror neuron’ theory into the realms of language and concepts. ‘Mirror neurons’ in the motor cortex activate when we witness movement and action; scientists have posited this phenomenon as the basis of many higher functions (empathy, abstract ideas, and so on). The third citation (Pulvermüller et al.) is an example of this sort of work. This field has caused quite a bit of excitement in literary studies, which is why I wrote about it here, and referred to some other pieces by Pulvermüller, amongst others.
      However, the two reviews set out certain objections and doubts about the more developed forms of the mirror neuron theory. They don’t think there is good neuroscientific evidence that activation in the motor cortex and conceptual / linguistic function are causally linked. They think the idea that abstract concepts are developed from the brain’s processing of bodily experience is, on the experimental evidence, a bit of a stretch.
      I had a couple of responses to this, beyond being impressed by this scrupulous turn in the debate. One was: while I respected the scientific rigour with which the evidence was being sifted, I still felt it was absolutely astonishing that there could be any imaging evidence that encouraged people to think that abstract concepts and the motor cortex might be connected. You can see the kind of thing I mean in that previous post. The other thing I felt was a bit of relief at the way I had been quite careful in . The mirror neuron work was very congenial and exciting, but I didn’t over-commit to it being the last word; and sure enough, the debate continues, but I think my essay has not been outmanoeuvred.

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* N. Tschentscher, O. Hauk, M.H. Fischer, and F. Pulvermüller, ‘You Can Count on the Motor Cortex: Finger Counting Habits Modulate Motor Cortex Activation Evoked by Numbers, NeuroImage, 59 (2012), 3139-48.

The two reviews were mentioned in an excellent presentation by Nadja Tschentscher at the ‘Goethezeit’ colloquium I mentioned in my last post. In the course of that talk she introduced some fascinating research that approached the ’embodied concepts’ questions from another angle.
      The essay cited above tests the possibility that some of our knowledge of number concepts derives from the experience of finger-counting. Since that’s how we learn numbers, the argument goes, our mental experience of numbers is based on, and in some sense still involves, a bodily experience. This is a partial validation of the arguments of by Lakoff and Núñez.
      The experiment in Tschentscher et al. strikes me as a very clever one. They sorted participants into those who habitually finger-counted with their left hands, and those who habitually finger-counted with their right hands. They then confronted them with numbers (with no finger involvement involved at all) and saw whether there was activation in the hand areas of the motor cortex. There was, and the righties and lefties showed different results… ‘Despite the absence of overt hand movements, the hemisphere contralateral to the hand used for counting small numbers was activated when small numbers were presented. The correspondence between finger counting habits and hemispheric motor activation is consistent with an intrinsic functional link between finger counting and number processing’.
      I can’t immediately think of a literary context in which this might be very meaningful, but it’s a lovely thing to think about.

There’s a fine line between reflecting thoughtfully on your practice, and talking about yourself. The former can really get in the way of the latter. I have been doing a bit of both recently.

I was invited to write a post for the ‘Comment’ section of Palgrave Communications, an online journal focused on interdisciplinary work. I think it’s available to all, here. This is the first time I’ve ever been sent a link to the article’s metrics, as well as to the article itself, should I ever want to find out how often it’s been read or cited. I dare say the chance to measure one’s impact on the world makes some of my colleagues’ eyes shine. In my eyes? Fear.
      My idea was to get across that interdisciplinary research (in my case, the kind of thing that got me writing this blog about literature and cognitive science) is not only done by confident, energetic, purposeful types who know they are tuned in to the future of academia. It’s also done by fretful, pensive people who are trying to stave off a sense of inadequacy while also addressing difficult intellectual challenges that they really care about and feel inspired by. And it’s not only a meeting of robust and reputable intellectual approaches that exchange ideas equally and harmoniously. It also involves tensions and problems within and between fields.
      I hope I managed to get across that it doesn’t diminish the value of interdisciplinary work if the difficulties involved are part of the project. I also hope I managed to put a good work in for some fantastic work being done in the field (I don’t mean the slightly needy list of my own offerings). It was nice to be asked to contribute to a forum of that sort, something new to me.

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Next week I’ll also be a little bit inward-turning when I talk to a conference called ‘Embodied Cognition and the Goethezeit’, organised by my colleague Charlotte Lee and others. This is an effort to explore what some aspects of cognitive science might offer to those studying German Romantic literature and thought (and vice versa, I’ll be muttering, and vice versa). I’m there, along with another colleague, Tim Chesters, to say a bit about what cognitive approaches have been doing in our field, renaissance literature.
      I am going to ask whether there are particular reasons why the approach has flourished in my period. It isn’t that difficult to think of reasons why renaissance literature and thought might be amenable to consideration alongside recent advances in cognitive science: a changing intellectual climate might in various ways have opened up crucial questions, and certain key writers and genres might have fostered new ways of reaching the mind through language. I think in the end I’ll step back from the brink and say that it’s not as if other periods have not been addressed by cognitive critics, and many of the cultural and intellectual themes I could bring up will have their equivalents elsewhere. Things are often changing.
      Still, it’s been useful facing something I’ve faced lightly in my blog, which is why Shakespeare in particular always comes to my mind. It’s only partly because I don’t know about anything else. It’s also because special conditions of language, literary landscape, and intellectual culture combine in his work to enable countless vivid encounters with something now thought of as embodied cognition.

In the paper I mentioned in my previous post, I talked about the problems of understanding animal minds, and I said that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers moments where animal experience is vividly evoked. I said something similar about Venus, the goddess. For example, we hear that ‘a thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways’ (i.e., in her panicky grief, a thousand different passionate emotions carry her in a thousand different directions). Usually that ‘thousand’ would be hyperbolic: intensity is conveyed by an excessive number. However, given that this is the goddess of love, her passion is superhuman, and what would be hyperbolic in a mortal may be literal in an immortal. I think the moment of self-correction this causes in the reader — we think we get it and then we see we probably don’t — is one way literary representations can expose to us, and expose us to, what it is like to be something very different.

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I had divine perspectives in mind when I went to London to see the Oresteia at the Globe. The question of how gods see the world, and how humans see the world, is implicit throughout this trilogy by Aeschylus. Apollo tells Orestes that he must avenge his father — that’s crystal clear to the god. Doing so, which means killing his mother, is monstrous in itself, and it brings potentially horrendous consequences down on Orestes because he offends other laws and other gods. Immortals deal in contradictory absolutes, but it’s the mortal’s problem.
      This all comes together in the third play, the Eumenides, where justice is served. Before the play I thought this would be by far the most challenging part to convey to a modern audience. The first two are revenge tragedies, full of fear and tension, and a long tradition of drama links us to them. The third, on the other hand, is a trial, with added preaching about the democratic institutions of Athenian civilisation.
      I shouldn’t have doubted. The last thing I saw by this director, Adele Thomas, was her Knight of the Burning Pestle at the Globe’s indoor Wanamaker Playhouse. That play also had a reputation for being tricky, but she and her team made it look easy. They did the same with the Eumenides. With, if anything, more preaching, they turned to the audience and told them how the things that hold justice together are necessary, priceless, essential, strange, contradictory, and precarious, and all this means they should be celebrated even more. Or so it seemed to me, anyway. The experience was as dramatic as any action-packed horror.

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The final decision that Orestes should not be punished any more for murdering his mother hinges on a strange moment of divine perspective. The court combines humans and gods. The human vote is tied, six to six, so the goddess delivers the casting vote in favour of Orestes. She tells us why: since she was born from her father’s head (cool story), she sympathises with the father rather than the mother. That’s it. Now, the decision she enables is the human and humane one: poor Orestes is a victim as well as a killer. Is Athena glossing over the necessary compromises of justice with a bit of bluster?
      It’s interesting, maybe, to see this as an encounter with divine perspective, in that it makes little sense to us, but is lucidity itself to Athena. The gods have been brought into the courtroom, they have made their cases, and humans have been allowed to offer an opinion. In the end, though, something apparently capricious makes the crucial difference, but we should probably see that it is only apparently capricious. In Greek Tragedy, immortal authority and immortal ways of seeing the world don’t fall neatly into line according to our categories. They are how they are, just beyond our comprehension.
      At the Globe, the audience didn’t seem to respond to Athena’s justification with much anxiety. The feeling that a celebratory ending was imminent was getting strong. Also, I think that the numerous disparaging and misogynist remarks earlier in the Oresteia had probably made other people immune to it. They weren’t, as I was, giddy with niche-excitement at the arrival of their favourite complicated moment.

As well as finishing off a big project or two, I’ve been writing a short paper for a conference this week. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland) is descending, conveniently, on the college where I work. This is them, and this is there. My talk builds on an interest in knowing other minds, especially animal minds, that I’ve discussed on this blog (oh, you know, here and here). Here’s my abstract:

In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, I will argue, there are moments where the interior worlds of a horse, a hare, a boar, and a goddess, are vividly evoked. The only significant human presence, however, remains opaque. In the environmentally-aware Shakespeare criticism of Robert Watson, Gabriel Egan, and Simon Palfrey, it’s apparent that the problem of other minds is an ecological problem. How we go about deciding whether we can know what it is like to be a bat (Thomas Nagel’s classic question, turned over in Peter Hacker’s essay ‘Is There a Thing it is Like to be a Bat?’) has consequences for how we conceive of an interconnected, interdependent world, or don’t. I will focus most of all on what a poem, and the criticism of a poem, can contribute to our thinking about interfaces between heterophenomenology (Daniel Dannett’s contested term) and environmentalism.

That still sounds alright, I think, but I have a turn or two to make. There’s an overlap between two literary-critical approaches (the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘ecocritical’), and maybe there is something interesting to be done with that overlap. It’s a shame I misquoted the title of Hacker’s essay (Is there ANYTHING it is like…), and carried that misquotation through to the very title of my essay. Not least because being precise about language is one of Hacker’s main points. Oh well — I think audiences find it endearing when a paper starts with an apology. Nobody likes a cleverclogs. I will probably post about how it goes.

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I have been thinking a bit more, ahead of the conference, about heterophenomenology — Daniel Dennett’s proposed method for approaching an understanding of other minds, an attempt to compose, from detailed inferences, a sense of what it must feel like to be something else. I read a more recent piece of his — ‘Heterophenomenology Reconsidered’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2007), 247–270. It comes at the end of a special issue in which fifteen other essays offer critiques of his earlier work.
      One new thing I took away from it was that, in the face of some precise objections, Dennett seemed to defend heterophenomenology as an approximation for now, workable until scientists decisively solve the key problems. The essay ends like this:

The Cartesian vision — Cartesian materialism or the original Cartesian dualism — is undeniably compelling, and once we see that there is no — can be no — Cartesian Theater, we have to find a safe haven for all our potent convictions. It sure seems as if there is a Cartesian Theater. But there isn’t. Heterophenomenology is designed to honor these two facts in as neutral a way as possible until we can explain them in detail.

Along the way, he turns to fiction as an analogy, in a way that makes me hopeful (it’s suggestive of fruitful dialogue, and a positive valuation of literary insight) and fretful (as I was in the first post on the topic — the portrayal of fiction is a bit blunt at times). So when it comes to reports of introspection, ‘heterophenomenology takes such purported references almost at face value — the way we take a novelist’s references — by using the category of a theoretical fiction that stands in, pro tempore, for face value reference until the science is in’.
      Dennett, then, is optimistic about the science, or perhaps he is pragmatically deferent towards it because that creates space for his way of thinking. Not surprisingly, I think pausing on the fiction is worth a try. That’s partly because I think we may well have a long wait before we get scientific answers to the hard questions about consciousness, but mostly because I think novelists (and poets and dramatists and all) have been doing heterophenomenology rather well, and for a long time.