* Ken A. Paller and Satoru Suzuki, ‘The Source of Consciousness’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 387-9.
* Alex A. MacDonald, Lorina Naci, Penny A. MacDonald, and Adrian M. Owen, ‘Anaesthesia and Neuroimaging: Investigating the Neural Correlates of Unconsciousness’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 100-7.

The thing about consciousness is… even though it’s a very difficult thing to know better, we need to keep trying. Two recent essays in Trends suggest ways towards progress.

Paller and Suzuki are optimistic that neuroscience can contribute to the subject. One principle for further investigation is that multiple approaches, including dealing with different brain regions and the connectivity between them, are require for dealing with something that is becoming ‘more understandable, although no less amazing’. For me their most arresting observation was about ‘the benefits that this knowledge could bring for society… continuing efforts could characterize types of neural interaction that are essential for consciousness, and thus [among other things] inform concerns about human and animal rights’. Rather than trying to identify the neural mechanisms for consciousness in a positive way, they suggest, it might be easier to look for those mechanisms without which consciousness cannot happen.

*

MacDonald et al. also advocate a negative route to understanding consciousness. Their idea is that studies of anaesthetized patients, where consciousness is lost but other processes in the brain continue, might offer ways of defining what the crucial components are. In anaesthesia it has been shown that simple sensory processes continue, but that other higher order functions stop, especially those which provide connectivity (again) between regions in the cortex that are responsible for the simpler processes.
      Their focus is partly on ‘disorders of consciousness’ – as in patients in vegetative states – where it is of great (and disquieting) importance to ascertain how much consciousness persists. They conclude that ‘neuroimaging evidence for simple sensory processing does not provide any support for preserved conscious awareness’, but ‘functional connectivity between distant cortical regions, particularly between frontoparietal cortices, and/or activity in association cortices in response to complex cognitive processing, does appear to require conscious awareness’. If such connectivity is observed in otherwise unresponsive patients, they may need special attention.
      I have already suggested, in this post, that one literary means of enhancing our understanding of human consciousness is to represent very different kinds of consciousness. I suppose that these experiments have an indirect strategy that’s not all that different. And soon I am planning to write an essay about the boundary between life and lifelessness, consciousness and a lack of consciousness, in Shakespeare. An audience has to think about what changes across that boundary as Lear dies or as Thaisa revives. Instead of activation picked up by fMRI, drama offers different signs, some easier to perform than others, that the fictional mind in question has gained or lost awareness. I hope to show that these signs matter.

I was lecturing the other day about Spenser’s Faerie Queene. For those who do not know: this is one of the greatest poems in the English language, an enormously long and complex epic romance published in two instalments in the 1590s. In it, knights representing virtues go on adventures in which they prove that they truly embody those virtues. I read out a very favourite bit, where the ‘Red Cross Knight’, who quests for Holiness, meets a figure named Speranza, who represents Hope:

Her younger sister, that Speranza ,
Was clad in blue, that her well;
Not all so cheerful seemed she ,
As was her sister; whether dread did dwell,
Or anguish in her hart, is hard to tell:
Upon her arm a silver anchor lay,
Whereon she leaned , :
And ever up to heaven, she did pray,
Her steadfast eyes were bent, other way. (Book 1, Canto 10)

*

The details here have allegorical significance: blue is the traditional colour of hope, so of course it suited her; the anchor is a common symbol, recognising how hope keeps you steady. Her lack of cheer is more noticeable, perhaps, because you might think that Hope would be a bit lighter of heart. But Spenser’s point, tuned in to the religious thinking of his time, is that religious hope is a serious thing. The detail that catches my attention, however, and links back to my previous post about ‘theory of mind’, is the idea that her downcast face could have been due to ‘dread’ or ‘anguish’, but it was ‘hard to tell’.
      Given that each detail tends to mean something, the fact that a key interpretative skill, mind-reading, is evoked but then denied, is striking. Perhaps it is the narrative voice, or Red Cross himself, that proves fallible here; or perhaps Speranza, an allegorical representation of an abstract quality, not a person with a mind, has a special degree of unreadability. The failure to understand what is going on inside her makes us think harder about why Speranza should seem troubled. Inscrutability itself may be meaningful. The dread-anguish pair is, in any case, not a straightforward contrast: unfortunately they are quite compatible. So at this moment in The Faerie Queene simple skills in construing emotions are not going to clear things up.
      Literature does a great deal with theory of mind, but it can also do things with its limitations.

* Sara M. Schaafsma, Donald W. Pfaff, Robert P. Spunt, and Ralph Adolphs, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Theory of Mind’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 65-72.
* Cecilia M. Heyes and Chris D. Frith, ‘The Cultural Evolution of Mind Reading’, Science, 344, 1243091 (2014). DOI: 10.1126/science.1243091

Literary critics have responded to few things in cognitive science as energetically as they have responded to ‘mind-reading’ and ‘theory of mind’. In the work of Lisa Zunshine, for example, or indeed in my essay mentioned here, it has been apparent that the ability to read other minds (and the need to, and the problems with doing so) are an area of common interest. So it’s interesting to find two recent essays urging a rethink of the field.
      Schaafsma et al. start from the premise that the term ‘theory of mind’ has gained currency in a number of disciplines, but it has become ‘vague and inconsistent’. They propose that from a scientific point of view it needs to be ‘deconstructed’ into basic component processes as represented by neuroimaging results, and then reconstructed into a more complex human capacity, such that ‘theory of mind’ becomes, in their nice phrase, a more ‘scientifically tractable’ concept.
      Their view is that there is no specific network in the brain responsible for something that could discretely be called ‘theory of mind’. However, it is probably composed of these more basic processes. They make an analogy with memory, which is conveniently thought of as a single thing but is better thought of, again from a scientific point of view, as a set of simpler mental operations that interact.

*

Schaafsma et al. cite the Heyes and Frith article as potentially a strong new intervention in the field. The premise here is that the capacity to read minds is best thought of as an analogy with the ability to read ‘print’ (their term; I can’t see a difference with writing in general). That is, it is part of cultural learning, not something that can be explained purely or mainly in relation to the individual mind.
      They make a very important distinction between ‘implicit’ mind-reading, which ‘emerges from observing the behaviour of others… the learner observes the actor, who need not be aware that he or she is being observed’. This is not their subject. They are concerned with ‘explicit mind reading’, which ‘emerges from the deliberately instructive behaviour of others’ where ‘both actor and observer are actively engaged in a communicative process’.
      They argue that ‘no amount of individual learning – implicit mind reading, introspection, and watching the behaviour of others – would be enough for the development of explicit mind reading. If a group of human infants managed to survive on a desert island, in a cruel Lord of the Flies-like experiment, they would be no more likely to develop a theory of mind and become explicit mind readers than to develop a writing system and become literate print readers’.

*

My sense is that literary interest in ‘theory of mind’ tends to concern the ‘implicit’ kind: it’s the nuances of observing behaviour and construing intentions that animates novels and plays so much. However, it may also be that when this ‘behaviour’ includes speech, in which others read veiled feelings, that it finds a grey area between implicit and explicit.
      Perhaps in the end neither article is addressing a problem that literary critical interest in ‘theory of mind’ has struggled with – we have been dealing with the concept in fairly general terms, as it is manifest in, and underlies, social interactions. However, these two sharply thought and argued essays offer some important and pertinent prompts for thought.

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Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakitis, ‘Changing Bodies Changes Minds: Owning Another Body Affects Social Cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 6-12.

Experiments have shown that implicit biases against people of other races (that is, statistically significant negative associations for one ‘outgroup’ or another) are common and stubborn. Maister et al. describe some experiments that offer a novel way of diminishing these unconscious effects. It seems that what they call ‘manipulations of body-ownership’, wherein subjects are presented with illusory evidence that they in fact have a body of another race, result in modifications to cognitive biases, as if the experience of inhabiting a body produces an affinity that stops an outgroup being an outgroup any more.
      The experimenters give subjects the impression that a filmed hand, or face, or whole body, is in fact their own. By making a black woman look into a ‘mirror’ (actually a screen) in which a white woman’s face is being stroked in the same way that hers is, it is possible to give the subject a very limited, but apparently significant experience of actually owning a body of another race. The result of this experience, within the duration of the experimental process at least, is a reduction in implicit biases against the race in question. Maister et al. hypothesize that the ‘self-concept’ of an individual is derived partly from their sense of inhabiting a particular body, with its particular characteristics. It is this self-concept that generates the dynamics of ‘same’ and ‘other’ that drive prejudice; and this self-concept can be manipulated with body-ownership illusions.
      In the ‘Outstanding Questions’ box on p. 11 there are two pretty big ones: (i) ‘What is the time course of these effects? Are they persistent over time? (ii) Do these changes in implicit associations have behavioural consequences in daily life? Any socially productive consequences of these findings – avatar-based racist rehabilitation campaigns? – are evidently a long way off. Nevertheless the authors are hopeful that their model of body-ownership and self-concept offers a relatively simple way to understand and then to get past harmful biases.
      The experiments rely on the brain’s resourceful efforts to reconcile touch-sensations with visual evidence. Nevertheless, they seem to be immersive experiences wherein the sensory and intellectual lives of ‘others’ are brought, in a very limited way, to life. In this respect they have something in common with literature. Fictional experiences are not so vividly or mundanely prosthetic as those in the experiments; but still it seems possible – though perhaps glib – to imagine that white readers of The Color Purple had their implicit biases tested or modified by exposure to a version of the experience of African-American characters.

*

My mind turned to Shakespeare as always, and I wondered whether Othello or Shylock, characters that gave Shakespeare’s first audiences a vivid version of what it is to live in Europe as a Moor or a Jew, would seem to offer anything salutary to compare with the body-ownership idea. What I found seem to me like two famous but troubling moments in the plays where there is an initial move towards the possibility of shared experience, before it is quickly diverted. Shylock famously invokes common humanity:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.

The main difference with the experiments cited above is of course that there is no illusion that any part of Shylock’s body is actually ours. However, there is in invitation to situate one’s familiar experience of having eyes and senses, feeling hurt and disease, and so on, in a Jewish body – to recognise the things that unite society’s groups. Shylock follows this through quickly, however, into what is really at stake: this is all about revenge, and the only commonality that really matters is revenge, and any well-meaning attempt to in-group the out-group is rebuffed. Knowing an ‘other’ isn’t a simple matter of temporary empathetic inhabitation.

*

Othello is welcomed into Brabantio’s home and finds himself drawn deeper into his family. The physical difference between the Moor and the Venetians is referred to frequently, but when he begins to relate his adventures, the scene offers the possibility that this will reveal more similarity than difference. His struggles will be everyone’s – they will feel his pain, and their bias against him will diminish. Desdemona is an open door for this and it duly happens. But the speech turns towards the unrelatable as if to ward off attempts to over-relate:

Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak, — such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse.

Just when it seems as if Othello will reveal himself to have lived a life anyone could understand, pity, love, and feel, he turns briefly towards things that are hard to believe in or empathise with: encounters with strangely shaped humans in far-off lands. Later in the play the exotic magic of his handkerchief may play a similar role.
      There are enough differences between what is happening in the experiments, and what’s happening in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, for any attempt to make them speak to one another to be rather difficult. Maister et al. have an idea that a physical experience of inhabiting a certain kind of body – however illusory it may be – reconditions bias against such a body. Intuitively this seems believable, and the experiments demonstrate the possibility in a concrete (and blunt) way. Shakespeare, perhaps, turns instead to the particularity of the difference of Shylock and Othello: he won’t let them settle into anything like the role of an ownable other.

I enjoyed this article. It’s about how surprisingly little progress cognitive scientists and philosophers are making towards an understanding of consciousness. I like its story of how the Hard Problem of consciousness came to be thought of as such. I like the image of some of the finest scientists and philosophers cruising among the Greenland icebergs, at an oligarch’s expense, and yet failing to agree.
      Not long ago I realised I had missed this talk at Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH: quality acronym; Oxford’s TORCH is a good effort but not quite on the same level). Luckily there’s video so one prominent philosopher’s point of view can still be heard. John Searle is pretty categorical that consciousness is real, and not just an illusory by-product of cognitive processes, and he also seems optimistic that neuroscientists will pin something useful down soon. (I wonder if a deeper understanding of the Default Mode Network — mentioned more than once in this blog already here and here — and other things like it yet to be discovered, will help. But that may prove to be an over-interpretable red herring in due course…)
      As the Guardian article says, some people think that consciousness may just be something that won’t be explained, any more than certain basic laws of the electromagnetic world can be questioned. I think it seems rather early in the history of neuroscience to go that far. The article also mentions a new play by Tom Stoppard called The Hard Problem, which looks like it’s going to broach the topic. How was this the first I’d heard of it? And now it’s all sold out until April.
      Once at a conference I went to a panel that spent some time discussing ‘cognitive approaches’ to literature — basically any attempt to understand literature in the light of cognitive science, the kind of thing I am doing in this blog. One speaker made two key complaints about the field, (i) being that it was not offering anything therapeutic, and (ii) being that it was not saying anything about consciousness. I wasn’t sure what to think about either point. The first seems to expect a cognitive criticism to be too much like a psychoanalytic criticism; the second seems a bit harsh since it’s not cognitive criticism, but cognitive science itself, that is struggling with the topic.
      Literature might be something that depends on consciousness: it seems to rely on reflective awareness, or at least to give us a strong sense of it. It also represents other consciousnesses, and up to a point, it allows us to think we are experiencing them. These consciousness may be quite different from our own (psychotic humans, animals, gods, aliens, androids, etc.). My daughter () wrote a story recently from the point of view of a literary character, aware of her own special vulnerability at the hands of an author, and her own particular existence in time, and imagining how she’d shape her life if she could. And if she can do it, Joyce and Proust and all can’t be too far behind. Indeed, one of the very first posts in the blog looked at how Shakespeare’s fairies talk about — and thus by inference we suppose they think about — time in a special way.
      This aspect of literature may not really have much chance of solving the Hard Problem(s), but one of the most remarkable thing that consciousness can do is to simulate other consciousnesses and imagine their differences. Literature knows a lot about that, in practice at least.