Ralph Adolphs, ‘The Unsolved Problems of Neuroscience’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 173-5.

Well, I am looking to be of some assistance here, if I can. Adolphs sets out a list of unsolved problems, under five headings:

(i) ‘Problems that are solved, or soon will be’, e.g. ‘how does sensory transduction work?’
(ii) ‘Problems that we should be able to solve in the next 50 years’, e.g. ‘how do we make decisions?’
(iii) ‘Problems that we should be able to solve, but who knows when’, e.g. ‘How could we make everybody’s brain function best?’
(iv) ‘Problems we may never solve’, e.g. ‘How and why does conscious experience arise?’
(v) ‘Meta-questions’, e.g. ‘How could we build a brain?’

It’s an interesting read, sometimes because the chosen questions are familiar and sometimes because they are not. It does not seem all that optimistic to me: fifty years is a long time, and that’s only the second category. The concession to ‘never’ was unexpected.

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But I am here to help, by continuing to suggest things that literature knows about the brain. And I think a couple of the ‘meta-questions’ can be answered in a way that is, I think, part-serious, part-glib, and part-poetical. The answer is genre: that is, we might do well to approach the mind by means of different forms of thinking, forms of thinking that originate, after all, in its own mechanisms.
      So question XXI asks ‘What counts as an explanation of how the brain works?’, to which I want to answer, in this serio-poetico-glib spirit, how about Ulysses, or Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or Endgame, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses? And I would want to add the necessariness and also incompleteness of all of them together — and they all need reading again.
      And question XXIII asks ‘What are the different ways of understanding the brain?’. To its parenthetical suggestions (‘function, algorithm, implementation’) I want to add lyrically, epically, comically, tragically, novelistically, and on and on, blank verse and ottava rima, prose essay, verse essay, and on.
      I am no more optimistic than Adolphs about solving the problems of neuroscience, inasmuch as they are problems. But all the time I read things out of which crystallize moments of ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ that could be valued more than they are, by more disciplines than they are.
      I have a feeling I am going to come back to this post in the future and furrow my brow a little. I’ll probably blame it on a week of Sicilian sunshine. For now, though: onwards and upwards!

After writing this post and this one, the phrase ‘mystical moist’ was on my mind. It comes from a poem by Walt Whitman, which is featured in a memorable scene in Breaking Bad.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The context and significance of this scene in Breaking Bad would take too long to explain. However, the build-up to this moment, and the development of the character of Gale (who reads the poem) and his relationship with Walt, are among my favourite memories of this brilliant series.
      The more germane question about the poem itself, which follows from the earlier post, is: does the word ‘moist’, here used (I would argue) before it had such specific sexual associations, generate a significant additional response as a result of its phonetic characteristics, or some other effect contained in the word as spoken and heard? Whitman seems to find the sound interesting, because the unusual pairing ‘mystical moist’ repeats two key phonemes. It’s a key phrase in the poem, because it catches the moment at which the speaker has an affecting experience of the stars. They are distant, and so is the experience of the astronomer’s science. But the night air is palpable, and so is the key adjective. So I think there’s a small corroboration here for the idea that ‘moist’ works unusually along a sensory-sensuous pathway.

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The first ‘moist’ post contained a bit of a Youtube glut, but there hasn’t been a proper musical interlude on the blog for a while. Since this is the last post before a shortish Easter break, here is one that will leave you with an impossible dilemma. This is Booker T and the MGs doing a brilliant live version of ‘Time Is Tight’. The question is: which of the four would you like to be in this clip? There are many considerations — great playing, being really into it, headgear, facial hair. You don’t see a lot of Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn but you know he’s loving it. I can’t decide.

In my previous post (which had an unusual concentration of Youtube comedy clips) I reported on a psychological study of word aversion. The word ‘moist’ arouses strong reactions in a significant number of people, and the scientific conclusion was that this is due to semantic connections rather than to the word’s phonetics. I sketched a response to this with passages from Paradise Lost as my evidence. Even before the word gained its sexual associations, I argued, it seemed to have the capacity to generate sensory, sensuous, and even sensual qualities that, in Milton’s poem, were part of the problem of representing Paradise in fallen language.
      I liked the idea that some phonetic combinations make us think about the fact that words are things that are made with mouths, things which pass through intimate solid and liquid and air before they then mean something. I also liked the concrete way in which literary criticism could contribute: the effects I was arguing for in Milton were quite subtle and even abstruse, but if I was making a persuasive case, then I was adding a dimension to the whole question of word aversion.

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So what about Shakespeare? Well, most of his uses of ‘moist’ and ‘moisture’ relate to tearful eyes and rainy weather, but a few take a telling turn towards sensory-sensuous-sensual territory. In Othello, the hero observes that Desdemona’s hand is ‘moist’, and later he elaborates:

This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart:
Hot, hot, and moist: this hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer,
Much castigation, exercise devout;
For here’s a young and sweating devil here,
That commonly rebels. ‘Tis a good hand,
A frank one.

We don’t know whether her hand is sweaty, or just has no dryness, or whether this is all entirely in Othello’s mind. In this mouth several words change their meanings: ‘good’ is said sardonically, ‘frank’ is loaded with suspicion, but ‘moist’ causes a significant pause. Its strength is not just in describing an over-interpretable physical quality; it also comes from the combination of phonemes, which make it linger in the mouth. It is hard to imagine an actor not savouring the word with relish and disgust.

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Shakespeare does most work with moisture in Venus and Adonis. The goddess is definitely inclining towards the sexual when she calls Adonis’ breath ‘heavenly moisture’, and later in the poem the narrator uses the same phrase. It’s not clear, though, that the ‘moist’ root is supplying any additional edge, given that the context is already so intimate.
      I think a clearer case can be made that Shakespeare is exploiting the word’s aversive potential when Venus outlines her alluring qualities to Adonis (who, in the poem, isn’t tempted):

Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow;
Mine eyes are gray and bright and quick in turning:
My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow,
My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning;
My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt,
Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt.

It has to be said that the concept of an aversive word is self-fulfilling to some extent. The article discussed in the previous post made this point. So I have to be careful about not over-investing in the word when it arises. Nevertheless, the word ‘moist’ comes at an interesting point, when the description is about to become tactile — and the rich ideas of dissolving and melting soon follow.
      It comes in a pair of adjectives that, unlike any other in the stanza, is not separated by ‘and’. It requires a stressed syllable but the dominant rhythm of the poem would generally require an unstressed syllable at this point. And it invites our attention to a physical quality that seems comically counter-productive: Venus’s dignity diminishes a bit as the word lingers. I think Shakespeare exploits something like an aversive quality in ‘moist’, probably in its sound as well as its sensory quality.
      This is only a sketch. In the first post, the experimenters used the word ‘paradise’, and that led me to Milton. In this post, I tried Shakespeare, because I always try Shakespeare. It’s likely that there are many places where the aversive potential of ‘moist’ is exploited by writers who are themselves interested in whether it is a question of sound or sense. Might be worth a bit more searching.

P.H. Thibodeau, C. Bromberg, R. Hernandez, Z. Wilson, ‘An Exploratory Investigation of Word Aversion’, Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2014: https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2014/papers/276/paper276.pdf

This is the sort of thing this is all about. This paper aims to understand how certain words produce strong effects. It does not turn towards literature, where creating strong effects from words is a highly evolved practice, or towards literary criticism, where explaining and categorising and arguing for these effects are also highly evolved. I shall, of course, try to make that turn, because that is the sort of thing this is all about. However, it would be nice to think that turn could be made from the direction of science.

People don’t like the word ‘moist’. As Thibodeau et al. say, there is anecdotal evidence for widespread distaste caused by saying or hearing the word. This idea has been around for a while in popular culture. They replicate this in their experiments, showing that indeed some people, especially those who are younger, more prone to neuroses, more socially sensitive, and more likely to be disgusted by bodily functions, experience significant aversion.
      They move on to test theories as to why this aversion should exist. The conclude that semantic connotations are the key reason: ‘moist’ has an association with sex and intimacy, and people find themselves troubled by saying it. Subjects found it particularly aversive after ‘unrelated positive words’ (e.g. paradise) and ‘sexual words’ (e.g. fuck), but less aversive when it followed ‘unrelated negative words’.
      They also considered whether the combination of phonemes – the sound of the word – was a contributing factor, as many said it was. It is a word that travels around lips and tongue and teeth; it brings home to us that words are things that are made with our mouths, things of touch and taste, not just of sound. Thibodeau et al. did not find any equivalent effect in similar sounds – foist, rejoiced – but I think the unique phonetic combination, starting with lips together in ‘m’, is hard to match. A nice theory, which they also doubt, is that ‘moist’ and some other words involve ‘facial feedback’: forming the word involves muscles that make key expressions, e.g. disgust, and this causes an association.
      Although I don’t doubt the coherence of their conclusion that semantic associations are the main cause of aversion, I wouldn’t dismiss the contribution of sound too soon. Speakers linger on it, as it lingers on them, more than they do with ‘hard’ (capable of producing double entendre; phonetically less distinctive). Also, there are some literary instances that point a little way in this direction.

Thibodeau et al. introduced the idea of ‘paradise’, and that made me link up their interest in word aversion with Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. This epic aims to depict various unreachable things – heaven, hell, paradise – and it takes on board the thought that its language for doing so must in theory be inadequate, because it derives from the fallen world. Milton involves his readers in this problem in various ways: one way is by using words that cause problematic associations (of sex, for example – ‘wanton’ is a classic case) when what is being depicted is meant to be sinless and perfect. The aversive qualities of a word like ‘moist’ might be ideal for this purpose, causing a readerly shudder as something unimpeachable is being described.
      The history of the word ‘moist’ is important here, because the specific sexual connotations that are so important in the scientific account do not apply straightforwardly in Milton’s time. In the Oxford English Dictionary the specific sense 1g (‘Of the vagina: lubricated, as in a state of sexual arousal’) dates from 1958. There may therefore be a short-term story in which sexual liberation led to new words for candid description, which in turn led to an aversive backlash.
      Older senses of the word seem relatively tame: 1a is the core sense, ‘Slightly wet, imbued with moisture; containing liquid in a state of suspension or absorption; not dry; damp, humid’, capable of being good (cake) as well as bad (oh, I don’t know – furniture). In Milton’s time it was often used around eyes, to suggest tears or elderly rheuminess. It has another sense, also important in that period, outlined as sense 2 in the Dictionary: ‘Chiefly Hist. Sci. Designating a quality associated with wetness and regarded in medieval and later times as one of the four qualities inherent in all things and characterizing the four elements’.

In Paradise Lost, then, the sexual connotation is not distinctly there, so any sense that the word’s aversive potential is being exploited is more likely to arise from its sound. Most uses of ‘moist’ and ‘moisture’ describe elemental wetness, but on a couple of occasions there may be something to work with. The first passage is part of the creation of the world in Book 7:

The earth was formed, but in the womb as yet
Of waters, embryon immature involved,
Appeared not: over all the face of earth
Main ocean flowed, not idle, but with warm
Prolific humour soft’ning all her globe,
Fermented the Great Mother to conceive,
Satiate with genial moisture, when God said
Be gathered now ye waters under heav’n
Into one place, and let dry land appear.

One of the things that makes Paradise Lost so great is its willingness to show the stretch and strain of its linguistic resources. Faced with describing the beginning of the earth, it gives us plain speech from God, but manifest effort from the narrative voice. ‘Fermented’ is a brilliant word, and the reader has to reorganise and quieten some associations of the word (beer, yeast, bubbles, wine) to get at what is happening here. The key phrase, ‘satiate with genial moisture’, i.e. ‘sufficiently full of the generative fluids necessary for creation’, is compact and, I would argue, allows the phonetic pull of ‘moist’ to give physical texture to what is being depicted. This texture is helpfully vivid but it is also problematic: the word draws us into a physicality that we cannot really imagine. My suggestion here is that Milton is exploiting a quality in the word which, while not exactly aversive, engages more senses than are necessarily comfortable.
      The second passage is part of Adam’s description of his own creation, when he woke to find himself in paradise. Again ‘moisture’ refers to the word’s spontaneous fertility:

So spake the Godlike Power, and thus our sire.
For man to tell how human life began
Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?
Desire with thee still longer to converse
Induced me. As new waked from soundest sleep
Soft on the flow’ry herb I found me laid
In balmy sweat, which with his beams the sun
Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed.

We have to translate our own experiences of waking ‘in… sweat’ into something wondrously and innocently delightful. And we have to make ‘reeking moisture’ into a lovely mist. ‘Reeking’ also had fewer negative connotations then, and could more readily just mean ‘steaming’. In ‘moisture’ again I think there is again a pause, where sensory turns to sensuous and even to sensual, as the word creates a texture, an oral savour, that is hard to fit into the scene. Perhaps we are meant to let the word roll around the mouth, and then realise how far we are from truly appreciating Adam’s experience.
      These are not cases of word aversion, but they are instances of the word that suggest that a great writer, who was utterly immersed in the possibilities of words in numerous languages, recognised its capacity to engage our senses in complex ways.

SEQUEL COMING SOON: Murder Moist Foul, in which I turn to Shakespeare.

* Alessandro D’Ausilio, Giacomo Novembre, Luciano Fadiga, and Peter E. Keller, ‘What Can Music Tell Us About Social Interaction?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), forthcoming (available online at the time of writing)
* Valorie N. Salimpoor, David H. Zald, Robert J. Zatorre, Alain Dagher, and Anthony Randal McIntosh, ‘Predictions and the Brain: How Musical Sounds Become Rewarding’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 86-91.

Both these essays describe qualities in the experience of music that might map on to the experience of literature. D’Ausilio et al. note, however, that music is an ‘ideal domain’ for considering an aspect of cognition because ‘it offers a promising solution for balancing the trade-off between ecological validity and experimental control when testing cognitive and brain functions’. With more variables, arguably, in drama or reading novels, or at least different ones, it may yet be difficult to translate between the two.
      Nevertheless it is suggestive that they see musical ensembles as environments in which they might discover a great deal about social cognition and social interaction. This ‘microcosm’ involves cooperation and communication of various kinds, conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit. True enough, I think; but I miss – as usual, and understandably – an allowance that one string quartet might have its own special knowledge and ideas about social cognition, different from another quartet’s. Likewise I think that a play is another microcosm in which social cognition operates tangibly if not so measurably, and that plays too are the fruits of knowledge about how minds work when they interact. It should be possible to tap into that knowledge, and this is the focus of some of my current work.

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Salimpoor et al. gather recent experimental results that offer insights into musical pleasure. This results, they argue, from interactions between ‘the sensory, cognitive, and emotional systems with reinforcement circuits’; or, more technically, ‘an intricate interplay between the dopaminergic system and cortical regions that contain previously acquired sound templates, track temporal and hierarchical structure, integrate emotions with reward value, detect internal states, assign reward value to stimuli, and make value-based decisions about reward-related stimuli’.
      The point is, we have evolved to reward ourselves chemically for the exercise of our ability to predict, whether fulfilled or not (ideally, not too far either way), on the basis of remembered patterns. Individual musical tastes, and the different musical tastes of groups, arise because we have our own distinct experiences of sounds, and these then give us different predictions. This is quite a familiar idea in relation to poetry, I think, and Reuven Tsur’s work on ‘cognitive poetics’ has already defined the attraction of rhyme and metre in terms of expectation, surprise, and the like. Nevertheless the new neuroscientific depth and specificity with which they tackle the topic seem promising.