Rafael Nuñez and Kensy Cooperrider, ‘The Tangle of Space and Time in Human Cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2013), 220-9.

This essay explores the ‘mosaic’ of time perception, and the different ‘spatial construals of time’ (SCTs; e.g. something earlier is behind you; later is ahead) with which human beings habitually make sense of order and duration. It makes a distinction between D-time (deictic – then) and S-time (sequence – after…). It spends a lot of time on data about the contrasting SCTs that have been observed in different cultures. Ongoing efforts to investigate ‘SCTs in the brain’ will need to take account of these, and may help to explain them. The main argument is an emphasis on the ‘patchwork’ nature of time perception. Time is not monolithic.

It is not difficult to think of ways in which literature engages with time perception. Narratives speed up and slow down, and offer ways of representing the experience of sequence and duration. If (as Nuñez and Cooperrider discuss) one way of understanding SCTs is via embodied conceptual metaphor (as in the work of ), then literature, where metaphors do special work and are given special attention, may be a place to ponder where the past is, and so on.

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I would like to sketch a couple of other literary ways in to the topic. Might poetic form be a kind of SCT? Some rhyme schemes and stanza shapes configure time quite differently from one another. The one that comes to mind is the . With more lines than other common forms, and an extra couple of syllables in the last line, it often seems to distend duration.
      Religion provides a context for the thinking about time we might see here. The extra line and the extra syllables create a space for a further turn, of providence perhaps, or of doubt (it does many different things). They may even evoke the ultimate, the last judgment and the next world beyond. In The Faerie Queene there is always something , and the stanza form could be seen as a spatial construal of this attitude towards time.
      Poetic form, then, might be a complex network of SCTs, often probing the problems of spatial construal itself.

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I would like to be a bit more specific about another way in which literature might contribute to an understanding of SCTs. By depicting interactions between different views of time, it may test the possibilities of space as a metaphor for time. Science fiction can stretch us in this way (aliens without childhoods, etc.), but actually the idea is old: from the very beginnings of western literature immortal gods and mortal humans have shared the reader’s attention: how different is the shape of time if you are immortal?
      I want to explore this in reduced form, by thinking about Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fairies in this play are composed out of classical and folk-take elements, and it is not straightforward to characterise their lifespans, and so on. But they call humans ‘mortals’, and the implication must be that they inhabit time in a different way.
      I think the fairies have something like a distinctive SCT to match. Or rather, that they habitually turn to a particular shape (a circle) around both D-time and S-time. Fairies like to dance in rings, and they like to circle the earth. Puck promises to put a girdle round it in forty minutes, and Oberon says that he and Titania ‘’. When Titania lies down with Bottom, she imagines herself capturing the moment, and also the period of sleep, in natural circles:

      So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
      Gently entwist; the female ivy so
      Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
      O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

The Oxford English Dictionary credits Shakespeare with inventing word and/or usage for ‘entwist’ and ‘enring’ here. His vocabulary has to adapt to a distinctive way of thinking – to a distinctive SCT.

I don’t think it’s as simple as saying ‘for immortals, time is cyclical’. It might be helical. But the difference between these things is a sense of forward progression, and that’s a mortal way of thinking about time. We are only getting a glimpse.
      In the final words of the play, the fairies, still interacting with the mortal world, promise to trip and frolic and stray. Perhaps it’s not that time is a circle for them, but that it’s a strange, meandering dance.

The play, then, offers us the chance to recognise a way of construing time that does not fit the usual linear human patterns. This helps us recognise the richness of the mosaic that Nuñez and Cooperrider argue for. For fairies and gods (but also for mayflies, sequoias, viruses, ) time is surely not before or after, ahead or behind, or just there, as it is for us.

Mattia Gallotti and Chris D. Frith, ‘Social Cognition in the We-Mode’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2013), 160-5.

When we think together, do we think differently? This paper considers the possibility that ‘interacting agents’ can enter an ‘irreducibly collective’ mode of thinking (the ‘we-mode’) that ‘expands each individual’s potential for social understanding and action’. The goal of their essay is to find a ‘scientifically plausible model’ for a ‘meeting of minds’.
      They evaluate experiments that suggest ‘the we-mode might work as an implicit and automatic mechanism of mentalizing’. They offer the prospect of pinning down, in future research, how joint action ‘modulates the space of mental activity’, using resources that ‘remain latent until individuals become engaged in particular interactive contexts’.
      The aspiration is to be more specific than social science has been thus far about collective mental activity. Something like Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power might be a brilliant account of experiences and effects, but it does not offer what cognitive science seeks out: an account of unique, distinguishable, identifiable processes that emerge in strictly controlled behavioural or neuroscientific

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Literature is full of collective experience, from the intimate scale (couples, siblings) to the vast (crowds, nations). It seems a small step to think that its many depictions of we-in-action might be able to tell us something. Crowd scenes in plays, for example, give us both a ‘they-acting-as-we’ and a ‘we[audience] drawn into we[onstage crowd plus audience]’ to think about. This still seems like Crowds and Power, though. It might be less easy to make the same move that Gallotti and Frith are trying to make, towards a nuanced appreciation of the we-space and its resources.

I think an interesting place to explore the particulars of the we-mode in literature is in lyric poetry. It is a good place to think about how the word ‘we’ speaks to and for the we-mode. Lyric, and love-poetry in particular, is a testing-ground for pronouns. The ‘I’ has to hold together in emotional crisis. ‘You’ are addressed, something to be reached, resisted, or won over.
      I must admit than whenever I think about ‘you’ in lyric, I think of this song:

It starts with a long ‘you’, and has some long ‘I’s too. But no ‘we’, not even in the funny bit about Madonna.
      Lyric’s links with song suggests a way in which a poetic we-mode might arise. The experience of singing along, or of reading a ‘we’ that suggests singing along, might create ways of feeling and understanding what ‘we’ makes happen.

Instead of focusing on one of those moments, I want to start somewhere that’s rather anxious about the we-mode: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 123. This sequence of poems has a very tightly-wound ‘I’ and it isn’t dominated by mutual experience. Its very first line, though (‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’, Sonnet 1 Line 1) uses the pronoun and actually challenges us immediately. Is the claim self-evident? Do we wish to procreate with the most beautiful partners necessarily?
      Sonnet 123 is one of many that tries to deny the power of time. Change is overstated – there’s nothing new under the sun – perhaps love will last forever. The argument about time is complicated – more satisfying for its defiance than for its intellectual coherence. The pronoun ‘we’ plays a part in the second quatrain (lines 5-8). (I suggest you place your mouse over the highlighted pronouns in order, to see what I am trying to get at. Don’t miss the ‘I’ in the last line.)

      No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change.
      Thy pyramids built up with newer might
      To are nothing novel, nothing strange;
      They are but dressings of a former sight.
      Our dates are brief, and therefore admire
      What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
      And rather make them born to desire
      Than think that we before have heard them told.
      Thy registers and thee I both defy,
      Not wond’ring at the present, nor the past,
      For thy records, and what we see, doth lie,
      Made more or less by thy continual haste.
            This I do vow and this shall ever be:
             will be true despite thy scythe and thee.

We have got rather a long way from Gallotti and Frith, but I think Shakespeare’s poem proposes some differences between how ‘I’ think and how ‘we’ think. The ‘we’ of the poem seem engaged and responsive, where the ‘I’ is separatist, persistent.
      It may be risky to generalise too far from such particular circumstances. It may be difficult to see how this idea of a we-mode could be tested further or verified. Nevertheless, it seems an encouraging start: lyric poetry’s network of pronouns could tackle many facets of the question in the course of representing vivid lifelike experiences (and that’s the thing that literature can do better than a laboratory).

WHAT
Actually, I don’t think there is much to say about this word.

LITERATURE
It would be nice to hide behind the Oxford English Dictionary here, but it seems to me that its definition of ‘literature’ relies on a definition of ‘literary’, and vice versa. I mean the usual range of texts that fall under this term because they’re fictions, or poems, or plays, or prose works that use language or treat reality in such ways that they need a special term to distinguish them from other kinds of writing. Ironically, I suppose I want to say that literature is something that’s read for its own sake, even as I want to say that it offers us insights into how human cognition works (and thus we might attribute it a purpose or value beyond ‘for its own sake’). I don’t expect any examples I come up with will tax anyone’s instinctive definition of literature. In fact, they will come tediously often from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare always seems to come into my mind.

KNOWS
This is the operative word. Writers are often given credit for insights. One of the things they are commonly thought to know about is psychology (motives, emotions, etc.). . Some go a long way towards crediting a special . But what more defined sort of knowledge can there be in a literary work? I’m worried about ‘in’, because this knowledge comes into being when a reader (or a listener, etc.) receives it. It’s interactive as well as inherent. Its validity is difficult to assert except inasmuch as it seems convincing, and/or engaging, and/or new to its receivers. It might seem convincing because it fits our impressions or because it’s pleasingly counter-intuitive. At times I will be tempted to see literary works as experiments into cognition, as they set up scenarios in which certain qualities can be explored. However, they are not experiments in a scientific sense. I suppose ‘knows’, and the terms that follow from thinking it over, are things I want to discuss in this blog. They are what this blog is partly about. Talking of which…

ABOUT
While this is a mostly innocent preposition that needn’t detain us long, the idea of ‘aboutness’ isn’t inert. At times it might seem as if any knowledge (see above) these works have about how thinking works would be incidental – a by-product of telling a story or describing a feeling. At times, though, it might be possible to see these works as being ‘about’ those insights. One to watch out for.

YOUR
Nothing to see here… very general use of ‘your’. No functional difference from ‘the’ or ‘one’s’.

BRAIN
Please forgive me for being deliberately provocative. I could just as well have said ‘mind’. What I really mean here is the whole cognitive system, everything that does thinking (including emotions, senses, etc.). I said ‘brain’, though, as a reminder that my aspiration is to suggest ways in which literature addresses, and even answers, questions about thinking and feeling that are recognizable to cognitive scientists.

This ‘About’ page was written in November 2013; a one-year-in update can be found here.

What Literature Knows About Your Brain was started by me, . I teach English at the University of Cambridge. I specialise in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. Shakespeare is the focus of a lot of my teaching and, recently, most of my research.
           I began reading the work of cognitive scientists in order to refresh my thinking about literature. I think it had a positive effect: I was picking up new ways of understanding recognition, memory, time, perception, and more, all of which were opening up the nuances of literature. However, I felt that many of the works I was studying seemed to be full of insight already. I saw ways in which these literary works already had answers to the questions behind the science.
           I have written , and two articles (one on , and the other on ). I have ongoing and forthcoming work (which I’ll mention in a blog post when it comes out) on perception and attention in drama, on spatial form in poetry, and (one day) a book on memory and . In all this work, at some level, I am interested in what literature knows about your brain.

For several reasons, I have decided to pursue this interest in a blog. First, I don’t think I have enough of the answers, but every bit of I have done has added a great deal to my thinking. I hope that others will post here, and comment here, and I would like this to involve people from a variety of disciplines.
           Second, I keep seeing opportunities to put literature and cognitive science into conversation. I don’t have the time or the intellect to pursue them all properly in the form of full-length articles. Blog posts of about 1000 words give me the chance to start a conversation. I will add them from time to time, but there is a real chance here for people to add their own. Sceptics are welcome, but I hope it’ll be obvious from the way I am doing things that this is meant to be a good-humoured endeavour.

People who want to contribute should just get in touch with me. I am open to suggestions and to different sorts of post. For my part, I’ll be fairly consistent. I plan to use the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences as a way into the problems that cognitive scientists are tackling. I will see if I think literature can help. At times there will be cross-purposes, but I hope that ‘we wouldn’t start from here so…’ can be adjusted to ‘we wouldn’t start from here but…’, and a truly interdisciplinary conversation can result.