I have mentioned Edinburgh’s ‘History of Distributed Cognition‘ seminars before, but they are being posted regularly now, and they are exceeding my already high expectations. The most recent one (at the time of writing) is by John Sutton, and the ‘ecologies’ of memory he discusses are a superb example of how humanities research can work with the idea of distributed cognition, or indeed a wide range of scientific ideas about the mind. The series in general is excellent, and freely available to all. Highly Recommended!

Christopher Summerfield and Konstantinos Tsetsos, ‘Do Humans Make Good Decisions?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 27-34.

It is possible to make humans seem like good decision-makers, Summerfield and Tsetsos explain, if you put them in an orderly experimental context and invite them to undertake a perceptual classification task. However, in real-world scenarios, such as when making economic decisions, humans prove to be ‘irrational’, and their choices vary according to context. Drawing together experiments wherein subjects experience ‘variable or volatile’ decisions even in the laboratory, and their decisions are shown to veer away from the ideal, Summerfield and Tsetsos propose that we have evolved an ‘efficient coding of decision-relevant information’.
      The point is that in a rapidly changing environment, and with a remarkable but nevertheless limited capacity to manage information, the human mind is all too ready to respond to expected rather than unexpected information, and to act along an expected path. This is consistent with the cognitive biases – especially confirmation bias – that are widely observed. However, I like the fact that Summerfield and Tsetsos are ready to question whether the resulting decisions are really bad: they don’t conform to ‘statistical optimality’ but they are designed for, and serviceable in, situations where statistical optimality simply cannot be calculated.

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This made me think about whether literary works are orderly or disorderly environments in which decisions are made. It also made me think about how identifying the particular decision as such, in a complex literary plot or life situation, is not always straightforward. Hamlet has a reputation for indecisiveness: his decision, much delayed, is whether to kill Claudius. Or perhaps his decision is only a decision when he moves to kill Claudius; not killing him is not a decision, it’s an extension of the resting state.
      The hero’s predicament could be seen as a highly complex one, ‘variable and volatile’ in all sorts of ways. Hamlet has to weigh the ghost’s words against the way Claudius and Gertrude are acting, how they are viewed by others, Hamlet’s feelings for his mother, his other emotional entanglements, the problem of whether ghosts can be trusted, and so on. All of this would surely create a situation in which decision-making might revert to the ‘expected inputs’.
      In a revenge tragedy expectation points ruthlessly in one direction: eventually the hero will carry out the necessary act, and then die (or similar). For the audience, then, the ‘expected input’ is manifestly anything that points towards destruction. However, we are often, as in the case of Hamlet, presented with heroes for whom things seem less clear-cut. Hamlet is ill at ease, at odds with his mission in his cast of mind and his tone of voice. The ‘expected inputs’ still point strongly at a decision, but the experience of the individual is out of tune.
      I don’t have a lot more to say about this at this point, not least because the ‘a’ key on my computer (or the ‘’ key as it would rather be called) appears to be in terminal decline. This makes typing very annoying for the time being (until my complete vocabulary refit kicks in). Nonetheless, it seems interesting and productive that literature may configure ‘expected inputs’ and decision points in complex ways that may propose further nuances about these evolved mechanisms.

Barbara L. Finlay and Supriya Syal, ‘The Pain of Altruism’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 615-17.

A very quick post. The argument from Finlay and Syal goes like this: (i) humans experience pain, and express distress, in situations that other animals, including other primates, do not (e.g. in childbirth); (ii) pain and distress engage us in social interactions, as we turn to others to/for help, and social interactions are beneficial to the species; (iii) over time natural selection favoured early humans who experienced and expressed pain, and thus derived the benefits of social cooperation; (iv) hence we are the way we are, with pain and altruism entwined. And there is also (v), the engaging idea that over time we have preferred, and genetically selected, animals which also express pain and reward our need to be altruistic in response.
      This all seems quite Christmassy, doesn’t it? Maybe not, but nevertheless this will be the last post until the second week of January. But before the hiatus… this seems to me like a suggestive piece of evolutionary thinking, which could be pursued in literary examples. Fictions often deal with altruism, whether salutary or problematic. And of course they often deal with pain. Perhaps in some cases pain and altruism find themselves in strange, fraught relationships – in Endgame, or Not I, or Titus Andronicus. And in some cases, perhaps, failures to engage altruistically, or to be engaged with in that way, result from situations where characters do not express distress in the right way – Coriolanus, or Timon of Athens perhaps. I shall probably come back to this some time.

Richard J. Krauzlis, Anil Bollimunta, Fabrice Arcizet, Lupeng Wang, ‘Attention as an Effect not a Cause’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 457-64.

I’m often interested by the ways in which cognitive scientists try to relate higher human capacities (consciousness being a particularly tricky case) to more basic functions that we largely share with animals (perception, for example). There seem to me to be lively, crucial, and unresolved debates about how to understand these higher capacities, which may be capable of managing and directing the more basic functions, or which may be by-products of those functions. It’s an ongoing question whether something like consciousness is a thing at all, and whether or not it’s something that utterly divides humans from other animals.
      In this article Krauzlis et al. take a critical look at attention. In their view, it may not be right to think of attention as a kind of oversight over limited perceptual resources. Rather, they portray it merely as a ‘by-product’ of ‘value-based decision-making’. That is, what seems to us like a directable and distractable aspect of consciousness is more likely to be determined by evolved mechanisms to assess ‘the animal and its environment’ and to foster productive decision-making. Attention doesn’t guide us to what matters, it is the result of a set of unconscious (and relatively primitive – though this is not the term of Krautzlis et al., and I am holding at arm’s length to the point of near-deletion… but not quite) calculations about where the situational priorities in the environment are to be found.
      I have thought quite a lot about attention in Shakespeare’s plays, and tried to deal with some difficult questions. How do they seem to think an audience’s attention can be directed? How do these assumptions fit the ways scientists think, and/or how are they conditioned by his first viewers’ environments, especially in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres? One scene that has been of interest is the last one in Measure for Measure. Amid all the tense and qualified mercy and reconciliation of the last scene, one figure stands out: Barnardine. He is a criminal who was (on the play’s terms) deservedly headed for execution, but he has been drawn into the plot and benefits from an undeserved reprieve.
      To say he ‘stands out’ is not quite accurate. The interesting thing might be that he does not. There is so much else to attend to on the stage, and of course many of these things are more urgent, more emotionally engaging, and actually more problematic (because an act of gratuitous leniency isn’t so troubling as a patched-up marriage scenario like that between Angelo and Mariana). I think it’s of some interest to think about how and why a character might be disregarded on literary grounds, and what relation that might have to the cognitive characteristics of regarding and disregarding. It may be only a small adjustment to our sense of a scene like the one in Measure for Measure, to see our tendency to ignore Barnardine as the result of an unconscious ‘value-based decision-making’ rather than of something more like conscious allocation of attention.
      It may have a bit more significance as an indication of what Shakespeare was working with, and working on. Barnardine is not just there in order to be ignored, of course. He is there to make an issue of that ignoring, to bring whatever part of the mind is bothered by his presence into dialogue with that part of the mind that focuses on its own advantage and what looks like the advantage of everyone. Some think that Barnardine comes close to taking over the play, or at least that he represents a vital resistant voice. Even without going this far, it is still worth thinking, in the light of Krautzlis et al., and somewhat in the face of Krautzlis et al., that there is another kind of attention that matters a lot, a deliberate choice to look at the things which do us no favours, but which reveal the problems in the set-up that our instincts incline towards accepting.

* Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla, K. Sathian, ‘Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex’, Brain and Language, 120 (2012), 416-421.
* Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and Antonio Damasio, ‘Embodied semantics for actions: Findings from functional brain imaging’, Journal of Physiology – Paris, 102 (2008), 35-39.
* R.H. Desai, L.L. Conant, J.R. Binder, H. Park, M.S. Seidenberg, ‘A piece of the action: modulation of sensory-motor regions by action idioms and metaphors’, Neuroimage, 83 (2013), 862-9.

As soon as I published a book which addressed the topic of metaphor (Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition) I quickly started learning more things about it – things I might have included. I suppose that’s the nature of a topic like that. Still, since then I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about metaphor in the context of Relevance Theory, a branch of cognitive pragmatics. I recently attended a brilliant workshop in Oslo (details here) where I found yet more reasons to like the way that Deirdre Wilson, Robyn Carston, and the other speakers, all thought about the topic.

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I feel less guilt about the work on metaphor that has come out since my book, and which has helped me see the significance of other, earlier work. The three articles listed at the top all show how scientists have been interested by the ways in which metaphor is embodied – how neurons which activate when we experience rough textures also activate when we hear or read a metaphor like ‘life is rough’. This is the outcome of Lacey et al., listed above.
      Earlier Aziz-Zadeh and Damasio had explored the ways in which metaphor, like other language, creates sensori-motor responses, and suggested how the evolution of metaphors works. They think that ‘when first encountered, a metaphor like “grasping the situation” may have used hand representations [that is, hand-related neural areas would have activated in response] in order to be understood’. However, once the metaphor is familiar to the individual, and especially when it is culturally embedded (‘lexicalised’, or ‘dead’; I prefer ‘lexicalised’), there may be no need for such representations. Novel metaphors, then, excite more vivid sensory interactions – which isn’t that surprising in itself, but the way in which it is situated in sensorimotor parts of the brain is arresting.

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Recently Desai, Conant et al. have taken this further with an analysis of the different brain activations associated with different kinds of language. They compared four categories as follows:

LITERAL: the instructor is grasping the steering wheel very tightly
METAPHOR: the congress is grasping the state of affairs
IDIOM: The congress is grasping at straws in the crisis
ABSTRACT: the congress is causing a big trade deficit again

They then tested the motor activation associated with a ‘grasp’. The results suggests an increasing level of motor activation from ABSTRACT at the bottom – effectively zero – to IDIOM (where the action-word is incorporated in a culturally-familiar form) to METAPHOR (where there is attention to the physical side of ‘grasping’) to LITERAL. Again, it is not all that surprising, but to find this degree of motor-tuning in language adds to the idea that our language and thought are interestingly embodied. They do express caution at the end: fMRI analysis is not time-sensitive (as I discussed here), so it is possible that a brief period of motor simulation could have occurred in the ‘idiom’ case, before the wider context impinged.
      We know more and more about what happens in the brain when we do this, see that, feel something else. Even without leaping to conclusions, and even with plentiful scruples (electrical activity in neurons is not thought itself; and these distinctions between, say, literal and metaphorical are not always stable in literary language, which may suggest useful further lines of investigation), some compelling patterns are emerging. The ‘embodied metaphor’ I mentioned in my book in relatively general terms is increasingly being pursued, and enriched, in experiments.