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[personal profile] ellenkushner
Here are a couple of clips from a very interesting NYTimes article on literature, the brain, and evolution:

Some scholars are turning to M.R.I.’s and evolutionary theory to explore how and why people read fiction.

English professors and graduate students . . . say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?

...the narrative technique known as “free indirect style,” which mingles the character’s voice with the narrator’s. ... enables readers to inhabit two or even three mind-sets at a time.... became the hallmark of the novel beginning in the 19th century with Jane Austen, because it satisfies our “intense interest in other people’s secret thoughts and motivations"...


Read the whole thing & discuss - I'll be interested to learn what the Brain Pool thinks.

Date: 2010-04-15 01:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] laurenpburka.livejournal.com
And Aspies/Auties rarely read fiction. (Except, for some reason, Scifi and Fantasy).

Interesting!

Date: 2010-04-15 02:20 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] isabelswift.livejournal.com
thanks for sharing article. Really enjoyed it. Its sort of one of those 'science now proves what we already intuitively know' but not without value & added attractions. And I've just completed my Henry James quotient (3 books in order to have an opinion of an author) so I feel very up on complex brain function...

Date: 2010-04-15 05:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] apintrix.livejournal.com
Hello-- I am a graduate student working in the cognitive science of literature, specifically on the question of immersive/transportative experience. I claim minor expertise!
Here are a few comments:

1) The Neurocritic has a great summary of this article, as well as an exchange over at the British TimesOnline, here: http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2010/04/professor-of-literary-neuroimaging.html

The trouble with neuroimaging with fMRI is that it typically identifies only Regions Of Interest-- that is, it localizes the blood activity that goes on in the brain while the person is doing a task in the magnet by subtracting the brain activity that is happening during a control experience. With a well-defined and understood phenomenon, this can be highly useful-- but think about the experience of reading fiction. What on earth one would use for a *control* that would let one subtractively isolate "Literature"?

Minor pieces can certainly be picked out, and have been for years-- I'm particularly fond of a study that found that literal phrases that used motor imagery, such as "biting the peach", activated motor cortex neurons, while metaphorical phrases that used the same motor terms, like "biting the bullet", did not (the PI for this was Lisa Aziz-Zadeh), but for now, I believe neuroimaging is of limited use for literature, and results need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

2) I have found Literary Darwinists to be similarly reductive. Some of this work is just straight-up anthropology, analyzing folktales cross-culturally in order to make claims about human universals. But what on earth is that supposed to tell us about literature?

The attempts to explain literature _itself_ remind me of an old essay by Ursula LeGuin ("The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"), in which she debunked an old anthropology story about fiction having arisen out of men telling hunting stories. Why couldn't it be women telling gathering stories? Or, you know, gossip about what the neighbors in the next cave were up to? The trouble with any evolutionary argument is that it's all too easy to fall into a highly sophisticated Just So story.

The current Just So story-- that we read fiction because of something having to do with Theory of Mind/Mindreading (the particulars depend on the author in question)-- I find somewhat more persuasive. I think it's been pretty well demonstrated that mindreading really is an essential element in fiction. However, I don't buy that fiction is *all* about Practicing Mindreading Skills. If it were all soap operas all the time, we would (and should!) get very bored with it-- the worldbuilding, the intricate plotting, the philosophical puzzles, not to mention the pure auditory and poetic elements of narrative-- these aren't just trappings on "Henry knows that we know that he knows", they are an important part of the why we do this fiction stuff-- and also (o dangerous question!) what makes some of this fiction stuff better than others.

Why do we feel we have to EXPLAIN literature-- ALL of it, as if it were an established precept that there is a Natural Kind category called "literature"-- before we're even halfway out the gate? Those books sure do sell, though. People love a nice Just So Story. But please, please, let's get much more data-- and there is so little data, particularly cross-cultural data!-- before we start building a whole cosmology.

Date: 2010-04-15 05:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] apintrix.livejournal.com
3) The Myth of the Dying English Department.

It is true that there are too many English graduate students for the jobs available, and that's sad. But as long as there are freshmen who need to learn how to write a coherent essay, We Will Be There. Also, as someone who does cognitive science of literature, I can and will freely say that current cognitive poetics has got nothing on the sophistication, usefulness, and quality of the best work of the New Historicists, the book historians, and, yes, even the Marxist critics (don't knock Jameson until you've read him-- he's got a lot of insight!) They are constantly teaching us about the ways our written (and theatrical) discourses interact with our politics, our religion, our science, *us*-- and telling us things that are much more enlightening about Jane Austen than the fact that Emma can't figure out what the devil is going on with Frank Churchill. The humanities can do work that science just plain can't, because of the constraints of experimental method; and that fact needs to be remembered. It should not surprise anyone that when it comes to literature and culture, we can learn far more things, and a far broader range of things, from careful textual and historical analysis than we can from neuroscience.

In total, I find this article highly premature and overreaching. Cognitive science has a lot of promise for helping us understand literature; fMRI does too, perhaps; but a lot of work needs to be done before there can be any question of them superseding the traditional work of university English departments.

Date: 2010-04-15 06:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lutin.livejournal.com
I also do cognitive science & mysticism/literature. I wonder if you know of any studies looking at the absorption states that come with being immersed in fictive worlds? In addition to the problems you named, one of the problems that I have with the current studies is that they aren't able to consider what's happening when you read a story and the Real World™ diminishes. That seems similar to the absorptive states I've been reading about in the cognitive science of religion literature, where it's more about case studies and questionnaires than magnets. It would be nice to see some brain activity correlation, but I don't know of anybody who's managed that yet. Do you?

Then, Mark Turner's The Literary Mind has some interesting ideas about storytelling and how pervasive it is in our everyday reasoning processes. I don't think he links it to ToM, but Michael Tomasello and co., who are concerned with how communication emerged at all, do.

Date: 2010-04-15 06:24 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] apintrix.livejournal.com
Hi Lutin,

I work on transport/immersion-- which is exactly what you're talking about as "absorption states". However, I do not work on fMRI. The findings I know also come from behavioral studies, but at least Green's and Gerrig's work aren't self-report questionnaire studies.

A lot of the best work on transport comes from advertising research, because transportative states lead one to be easily persuaded. Look for work by M.C. Green (Melanie Green) and follow up her citations. Richard Gerrig's "Experiencing Narrative Worlds" also has some pointers for *why* transport might lead one to be easily persuaded. Victor Nell's "Lost in a Book" addresses the question directly, but from a "softer" perspective. Finally, Csíkszentmihályi's 1990 book "Flow" (which Green also cites) talks about immersive experience more generally.

Do you have any good references to the religion & absorption literature? I might want to cross-ref that too, it sounds like it's relevant! :)

Date: 2010-04-15 12:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elissa-carey.livejournal.com
I read articles that could be loosely termed as "this is your brain on religion" as one of my strange little hobbies, and as I was reading your respective comments, it struck me also that it could be relevant, although I'd argue that transportive states are not quite the same as religious ecstatic states (from an experiential point of view, they do come close, but there's an element missing in the former).

The key, I think -- and it dovetails with your complaints about theoreticians attempting to impose a universality -- is that reading literature is a highly subjective experience. Yes, there are components that we might all share, such as the sensory experiences, but aside from that, the best we might be able to establish for sure is not a universality, but rather categories of reasons why we read literature that end up looking like a Venn diagram.

Date: 2010-04-19 07:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dwesley.livejournal.com
I read Ms. Zunshine's book, but I wasn't enthralled with the narrative style. However, I'm currently reading "On The Origin Of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction" by Brian Boyd and I'm finding it to be an exceptional read.

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