This is a follow-up to my first post on this topic. There, I suggested that if you want to understand mental time travel in humans, you need to understand the intricacies of the language in which that time travel is described; and if you want to understand those intricacies, you need to see how they emerge in literature’s many representations of people thinking across time.

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Here, I want to deal briefly with the idea that What Literature Knows about this (or any topic) is achieved not just by the writers of literature, but also by their readers, and in particular by literary critics. Literary works are finished by the people who read them. The best critics play a special role in drawing out, fulfilling, and sharing the knowledge that literary works might have about the mind. One of the difficult things about being interdisciplinary as a literary critic may be that, , we don’t quite have a discrete and complete thing that we work on, which offers an inherent set of phenomena that we can discern and account for.

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Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is a history of the representation of reality in western literature, and a classic of literary criticism if ever there was one. It takes representative passages from the whole of the Western tradition, and identifies key developments in the ways in which literature depicted the world. Some of these relate, unsurprisingly, to time, and to mental time-travel. In the first chapter, he deals with two episodes: the moment in Homer’s Odyssey where the disguised hero’s old nurse recognises him by a scar on his leg, and the account of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand [Homer], externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand [in Genesis], the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place alone are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and fraught with background.
(Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by Edward Said (Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 11-12.)

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In the book’s final chapter mental time-travel comes to the fore again. This next extract shows Auerbach drawing out the possibilities of what is often called the ‘stream of consciousness’ in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. The chapter also looks at Proust.

The two excursuses [i.e. two trains of thought that take the narrative voice away from the present place and time], then, are not as different as they at first appear. It is not so very important that the first, so far as time is concerned (and place too), runs its course within the framing occurrence, while the second conjures up other times and places. The times and places of the second are not independent; they serve only the polyphonic treatment of the image which releases it; as a matter of fact, they impress us (as does the interior time of the first excursus) like an occurrence in the consciousness of some observer (to be sure, he is not identified) who might see Mrs Ramsay at the described moment and whose meditation upon the unsolved enigma of her personality might contain memories of what others (people, Mr Bankes) say and think about her. In both excursuses we are dealing with attempts to fathom a more genuine, a deeper, and indeed a more real reality; in both cases the incident which releases the excursus appears accidental and is poor in content; in both cases it makes little difference whether the excursuses employ only the consciousness-content, and hence only interior time, or whether they also employ exterior shifts of time. (p. 540)

Critical habits change. If a colleague today wrote ‘more real reality’ in an essay I would feel obliged to question their confidence about both adjective and noun. Nevertheless the achievement of Auerbach’s book, arriving at so many nuanced suggestions about how literary works are organising their views of the world, and how different eras portray the mind in action, and how readers are drawn into acts of mental time-travel, remains remarkable. I don’t want to undertake a lengthy evaluation of what he says here, and I’ve battled with this post enough. The point is just to propose that what we see in Auerbach’s Mimesis isn’t just observation of What Literature Knows About Your Brain; it is participation in it, and that’s something to keep thinking over.

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I could have done something similar with Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, and others. Individually and as part of a collective disciplinary process, they know a great deal – an indispensable amount – about mental time travel.

Last week I attended a conference at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. ‘This Is My Body’ was co-organised by Olivia Will from the Department of Surgery and by Lucy Razzall from the Faculty of English. It brought together humanities scholars, surgeons, and others, to share ways of thinking about mind and body, identity and experience. You can see the programme here.

It wasn’t built around the idea that Literature Knows Something About Your Brain, but there was general agreement that a strict split between mind and body wasn’t holding on either side of the disciplinary divide, and there were several threads of thinking that made me want to post about the event.

One thing that struck me was how subtly ways of being articulate and inarticulate ran through the conference. A psychiatric patient asked to describe the ‘representation’ of her medically unexplained pain has to interpret the word (), and find her own terms to explain. Hester Lees-Jeffries showed the vivid metaphors and measurements of wounds in Shakespeare and his time – what lay within the bodies afflicted by these wounds was left unexpressed. Roger Kneebone showed a video of an experienced surgeon inviting a colleague to ‘put your finger in there and feel the… er…’, and noted himself that real bodies (as opposed to images in textbooks) have lots of unnamed ‘stuff’ in them. Rowan Williams argued that bodies are never just ‘stuff’ (indeed, he argued that even ‘stuff’ is never just ‘’) – everything has an interactive life in the world (‘rights’, he said, was a related concept) to which we need to attend (‘trust’ was a key word in his assessment of this relationship, and it reverberated in context of doctor and patient).

Roger Kneebone’s explorations of surgery as art and performance were new to me, and if they’re new to you as well, I recommend this video:

You may want to see it in its own window, because I’ve made it rather small, so as not to make too much of a gap in my post.
      There’s a more sober experience of his work, a British Medical Journal paper, here.

Another thing that struck me was the link between art and surgery and the implications of this link. Ludmila Jordanova started off with the art of surgery, including wonderful images from Barbara Hepworth’s hospital works, which you can read about here and elsewhere. We saw rib cartilage sculpted into an ear. We saw the watercolours surgeons painted in their operative notes and textbooks, and the sculpture classes for plastic surgeons in training. There was some resistance (by the multitalented people involved) to the idea that this was really art – it could be functional, effective description for the need-to-know people. Rowan Williams, though, proposed in his talk that there could be no disengaged descriptions, only representations (that word again), and it’s not difficult for a literary person to agree with that.

Another thing that struck me was the difficulty of maintaining the links between mind and body in surgical circumstances. A talk about transplant surgery by Andrew Bradley (Surgery, Cambridge) was full of sensitivity to the families of donors and the anxieties of recipients (can someone else’s heart or hand really be part of you?). But at some point a kidney, drained of donor fluids and held on ice before reaching its recipient (unforgettable video of the kidney colouring again with new blood), is easily thought of as just tissue (or ‘stuff’). Another talk by Kajsa Widegren and Erika Alm (Cultural Science, Gothenburg) on speech therapy for transgender women made me think about the materiality and socialization of the voice: it seems that adding a female voice to other aspects of womanhood means speaking as if you have different vocal chords, but also speaking as if you have a different relationship to the social world. ‘Alexa and the Others’, a film by Conny Karlsson Lundgren which they discussed (see the website here), is well worth chasing up.

The last thing I’ll mention that struck me is a particular link between storytelling and causation. Sarah Gull, a gynaecological cancer specialist, quoted W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Miss Gee’. In the poem a doctor asks ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ to his patient, who has presented far too late with sarcoma. Medical notes do not ask that (all-too-often askable) question, and the doctors present agreed that it rarely seemed a useful or gentle one to raise. But when the stories of patients (with professional discretion, of course, I should probably say) were told, elaborating even just a little on the notes, pathways of possible causation emerged: stories cause causes.

It was an absorbing and thought-provoking event. In a subsequent post I hope that another delegate, Roz Oates, will post about her project linking poetry and memory.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Emma Firestone
(Emma is a Ph.D. candidate in Cambridge’s Faculty of English. She is soon to defend her doctoral dissertation, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Improbable in Shakespeare’)

In my previous post I outlined an experiment that showed how readers attributed greater worth to heavier books, and that this effect increased (rather than decreased, as one might expect) when they knew something about the book. How might this help us think about literature?

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Pursuing this question, one must grant as a basic premise that the immersive experiences which verbal art and theatrical events create for their audiences have at least some continuity with normal lived experience itself, cognitively speaking. Life presents us with situations whose perceptual features, incidental or intentional, consort to influence how we think and react. The theatre, unfolding chronologically in multiple sensory dimensions, does the same. So too do novels and poems, certainly if one accepts the grounded-cognitivist proposal that cognition is modal (meaning that descriptions of sights prime visual simulations, sound-words cue aural simulations, and so on). The mechanisms and resources of our brains are adept both at getting us through life intact and through art with the feeling of engagement, expansion, enrichment. In short, experimental research on cognitive processes aims to describe human’s reception and interpretation of everyday life events, but these processes are surely engaged in the reception and interpretation of art, as well.

From the social-psychologist’s perspective, an advantage to acknowledging art as a form of lived experience is that art brings with it an abundance – sometimes a superabundance – of data reporting its effects on perceiving subjects over time. Experimental social psychology aims to produce controlled, accurate accounts of interpersonal dynamics of all kinds; theatre and literary criticism aim, at least in one tradition, to provide accurate accounts of how individuals comprehend and experience artistic phenomena, from Shakespearean characters to canonical poems. The critical history of any given artwork may not have been explicitly conceived as a phenomenological record of human brains, negotiating situations marked by predetermined perceptual inputs, yearning towards comprehension, gradually reaching judgments of a sort. But from the cognitive-psychological perspective, this is indeed what these reception histories represent.

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Nevertheless, one might point to a dearth, a terminological or conceptual gap, in our understanding of where, when, and how art (here I refer specifically to verbal art) engenders evaluations of itself in the course of its unfolding in the perceiver’s consciousness. All written matter, prose and verse, presents to the receptive brain an unquantifiable ocean of information, salient and incidental, signifying and non-signifying – and that is only what is internal to the work itself. There is also the matter of environmental and other variables (psychologists might call them ‘non-controlled’), from the formatting and typesetting of poems in some editions, to the architecture of theatres, to dramaturgical choices of all kinds, to, of course, the perceiver’s individual physical condition, history, knowledge of the work. All this will figure somehow in the thoughts and judgments the perceiver experiences as the work proceeds, and with which he sets the book aside or departs the theatre. The potential inputs seem infinite. That two perceivers might reach the same conclusions about any perceptual event, let alone one so complex as a theatrical representation of a human being imagined by a single mind many centuries ago, seems impossible.

But it isn’t. It happens all the time. One of theatrical and literary reception history’s remarkable, underscrutinized lessons is the frequency with which human beings reach consensus about phenomena so multivalent, they’ve become linguistic shorthand for elusiveness and incomprehensibility. Interpretations of Kubla Khan, Ode on a Grecian Urn, the character of Falstaff, (even) the character of Iago, are nowhere near as numerous as the people who have committed informed, earnest accounts of these events to print over the years. Observing this, I don’t wish to imply that these works are in any respect ‘less complex’ than they have been perceived over the years. Rather, I think that the observation indicates a need for scholars to attend more precisely to the perceptual inputs that compel, in such diverse perceivers, such consistent or at least comparable reactions.

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This brings us back to the study at hand, on the effects of perceivers’ knowledge of the object on the influence of heuristic cues, like conceptual metaphors, on their judgments of that object. An interesting, likewise counterintuitive implication of the study’s counterintuitive findings (i.e. that people with more knowledge of the object were more susceptible to insignificant sensory cues in generating object-judgments) is that more knowledge correlates with more consensus in judgments, not less.

So in connection with the topic of artistic appreciation, the study’s results suggest the obvious: readers and theatregoers who engage intensely with works of art will come to know more about these works than readers and theatregoers whose engagement is shallow (and than those, surely, who are coming to the work for the first time). But they also make some less-than-obvious suggestions, having to do with the nature of that knowledge: about what it is, exactly, that experienced perceivers ‘come to know’. The results suggest that the more one knows about a work of art, the more sensitive one is to elements in the work which are unassertive, unremarkable, even (evidently) totally immaterial to the object itself – but which still exert an important influence on those who would appraise the work’s substance and value.

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The study, though it awaits replication and corroboration from other labs, says something powerful about the extent and depth of sensitivity that informed appreciators exercise, even on low-alert. These participants discovered unawares an objective property of the book that they had not been prompted to notice: that nobody assessing a book for its content would see fit to notice. In acknowledging and utilizing the suggestions of a metaphor, they were in fact being sensitive and discriminating. When trained and committed readers / viewers reach conventional evaluations of complex artistic objects, or respond to sensory cues that in isolation would seem superficial, they may well be doing the same.

M.C. Corballis, ‘Mental Time Travel: A Case for Evolutionary Continuity’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2013), 5-6.
T. Suddendorf, ‘Mental Time Travel: Continuities and Discontinuities’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2013), 151-2.
M.C. Corballis, ‘The Wandering Rat: Response to Suddendorf’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2013), 152.

Three articles, four pages: a brief exchange about whether the ability to travel mentally in time (to put oneself in future or past situations, to revisit events) is special to humans. The authors build on several earlier papers and deal with the consequences of new research suggesting that animals can do something like mental time travel. On the one hand, a case is made for a Darwinian difference in degree rather than kind: our journeys to future and past are scaled-up versions of ones found in rats, crows, and all. On the other, exponentially higher complexity and other considerations are the foundations of human uniqueness. Language, ‘which may indeed be uniquely adapted to communicating the nonpresent, including the outcomes of our mental time travels’, is one possible divider.
      Please forgive a moment of personal time-travel backwards. The notes in the first Corballis piece led me to the work of Nicola Clayton, and I remembered that my daughter was involved in a time-travel related experiment run by one of her collaborators in Cambridge. Aged about four, she played blow football and had to plan a future game. It was all very sweet and too. This got me thinking back to my own cameo in a psychology experiment when, as a student chess player (not a very good one) I had my taxed. If any readers would like to tell me about the research done on their brains, maybe I could do a special post.

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Literature gives us lots of ways of thinking about mental time travel. Narratives can move from one time to another, in any direction. We get to see the effects of characters remembering, or planning, or prophesying, on themselves, and other characters: is the wider cognitive environment affected by the mental time traveller? Can there be co-travellers? An extreme instance would be ’s novel Albert Angelo. This has a hole cut through several pages so that the reader can, in effect, see the future.
      The thing I want to focus on, though, is language. In this post I want to suggest that in literature we often see explorations of the ways words themselves can travel in time. They are not just the means of reporting back; they are a medium in which time can be traversed, enabling but also constraining what humans can do.
      Macbeth says, of Duncan’s murder: ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’. Shakespeare works with the very particular ways that the English language creates tenses. If reaches into the future; between the it were and the ’twere the ’tis strikes a present note (it is); but the three instances of done propose something completed. Time is of the essence, and Macbeth wants to get past it quickly, so he posits a future present in which the terrible deeds are done… done… done in the past. I think when an audience hears these complex lines it’s a stretch to follow Macbeth in his time-travel; just as we’re feeling rushed, he says quickly.

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But I don’t want to say much about Shakespeare in this post. I want to talk about a different time-travelling work and its language. Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape features an old man playing a tape of his younger self looking back on his even younger self. A full version, performed by Patrick McGee (the actor for whom Beckett wrote the play), is available on Youtube:

You may want to see it in its own window, because I’ve made it rather small, so as not to make too much of a gap in my post.
      The tape’s future is the old man’s present, its present is his past; the tape’s past is the old man’s past, but in different ways. Words trace these pathways with lives of their own. The voice from the past uses the word ‘now’ as a reel of tape comes to an end:

Here I end this reel. Box – (pause) – three, spool – (pause) – five. (pause) Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.

In the timeframe of the tape’s voice the fire ‘now’ is anticipatory. He is prepared to do without happiness because of a creative force that will continue. But in the timeframe of the listening, older Krapp, that ‘now’ has failed to travel to a future; it is locked in the then.

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Elsewhere another, stranger word has a more subtle place in time:

Back on the year that is gone, with what I hope is perhaps a glint of the old eye to come, there is of course the house on the canal where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity (Krapp gives a start), and the – (Krapp switches off, winds back tape a little, bends his ear closer to the machine, switches on) – a-dying, after her long viduity, and the –

The voice on the tape is musing on time gone and to come, but the listener is arrested by the word ‘viduity’. He has to look it up, finds out it means ‘widowhood’. And the particular linguistic time-travel of Krapp’s Last Tape grinds to a halt, because this word has taken its own unique journey through time, and has arrived incomprehensible. So, one thing that literature might know about your brain is that language is indeed a wonderfully adapted medium for reporting on mental time travel, and must be crucial to the special qualities of the human version of this capacity. Language is also travelling in time, and often it isn’t a smooth journey. Writers have been showing us about this all along, and I don’t think we can investigate mental time travel in humans adequately without learning from them.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Emma Firestone
(Emma is a Ph.D. candidate in Cambridge’s Faculty of English. She is soon to defend her doctoral dissertation, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Improbable in Shakespeare’)

Is The Catcher in the Rye an important novel? There may be more and less weighty reasons to believe it is. How do more and less considered reasons relate to one another?

Chandler, Jesse, David Reinhard, and Norbert Schwarz, ‘To Judge a Book by its Weight You Need to Know its Content: Knowledge Moderates the Use of Embodied Cues’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2012)

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At every conscious moment, our bodily and perceptual experiences are influencing what we think and feel – or more precisely, which thoughts and feelings present themselves to us most naturally and effortlessly. This is not news, or shouldn’t be. Obviously different social and sensory environments invite, and incite, different tempos and behaviors and even habits of mind. Most of us find it perfectly plausible that being warm and comfortable might increase our incidence of companionable thoughts, maybe even measurably so. Most of us would not dispute the good sense of studying in the company of focused and serious others.

Nevertheless, in recent years, researchers in social psychology and related fields have been demonstrating the depth and ubiquity of these effects with such consistency and, sometimes, inherent drama that the whole theoretical area implicated – i.e. perceptual and situational influences on cognitive functions, especially ‘higher’ ones, like attribution and judgment – has not only acquired new prestige as a research topic, but actually moved to a central position in cognition research. Within ‘embodied’ or ‘grounded’ cognitive studies, one particular phenomenon has grabbed the interests of more humanities-oriented audience: the phenomenon whereby common metaphors consistently predict behavioral effects. First described decades ago by George Lakoff and collaborators, ‘primary’ or ‘conceptual’ metaphors convey abstractions in .

Since about 2006, research has shown that when we engage some physical or perceptual representation linked metaphorically to a conceptual domain – warmth, height, cleanliness, distance, etc. – there might be striking behavioral and cognitive consequences. Studies have shown, for instance, that making upward motions with the hands provides subjects with readier access to positive anecdotes, and downward motions, to negative ones. Handling warm objects increases ones ‘warm’ interpersonal behavior and tendency to think others worthy of trust. And thoughts of guilt-inducing events made participants eager to wipe their hands with antiseptic towels.

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A recent study by Chandler, Reinhard and Schwarz (2012) considers factors that create variation in a metaphor’s capacity to influence individual judgment. They look at one variable in particular: the perceiving individual’s knowledge of the object to be judged. These researchers handed participants a book, then asked them to evaluate the intellectual impact of that book. Some of these participants handled a book that contained a concealed weight. At issue was whether any relationship might be identified between the perceivers’ knowledge of the book and the influence of on their perceptions of the book’s importance and if so, what that relationship might be.

You might predict that the more the perceiver knows about the book, the less his or her evaluation should be affected by perceptions of physical weight. On the other hand, some studies actually point to the opposite prediction. These suggest that people only draw on metaphorically-derived information when they consider themselves capable of judging. Bodily sensations (e.g. of weight) may only bring applicable, metaphorically linked concepts (e.g. of importance) to mind when some knowledge (e.g. about the target’s importance) is already present and available. In conditions of zero, low, or insufficient knowledge, perceptual or situational cues simply cannot find a foothold in the perceiver’s cognitive process of assessment.

Chandler et al. tested these diverging predictions deliberately. Three separate studies manipulated or measured participants’ knowledge of a book, whose importance and impact they were then asked to judge. To summarize briefly, their findings did not support the assumption that the less the perceiver knew about the book, the more influential the embodied metaphors would be. To the contrary, the book’s physical weight only influenced judgments of its importance when participants knew something about the book’s content and reception. When participants completely lacked knowledge of the book, its physical weight had no effect on their judgments; but so long as they knew something – even if that information was limited to back-cover summaries and blurbs – then they happily drew on embodied-situational inputs to inform their views.

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The researchers went further, testing whether participants’ actual (objective) knowledge of the book’s content and reputation, as well as their subjective knowledge (how much they thought they knew), moderated the impact of the concealed weight on their judgment of the book’s worth. They predicted that people who knew the book (The Catcher in the Rye, as it happens) in detail, being capable of building strong and coherent representations of it without any contextual clues, would not be significantly affected by the book’s relative heft. This prediction, too, turned out to be incorrect. The book’s weight did not influence participants whose knowledge of the book was low (as revealed by a short quiz). But it did influence those whose knowledge was moderate and high, including those who scored the highest marks on the quiz.

These findings highlight the fact that actual, pre-existing knowledge of an object does not protect against the influence of incidental sensory or ‘merely’ metaphorical information on judgments of that object. In fact, it increases the perceiver’s susceptibility to information of this sort. The authors note that they did not test participants whose knowledge of the books in question might rate as ‘very high’ or ‘expert’, and that their results might well change when higher levels of expertise are involved. Citing research into , though, they speculate that experts might be as likely to search for supporting perceptual evidence as novices.

There’s something very suggestive about this idea that instinct is enhanced by expertise, not just in sports or music (for example) but in cultural interactions of a kind that are implicit at least in a lot of literary critical activity. That will be the subject of another post – coming soon.