Moon & Wilson: Theories of (Embodied) Mind: Some Thoughts and Afterthoughts

 

Michael Moon & Elizabeth Wilson

Theories of (Embodied) Mind: Some Thoughts and Afterthoughts
 

In Spring 2011, Michael Moon (Graduate Institute for Liberal Arts, Emory) and Elizabeth Wilson (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory) teamed up to teach a CMBC-sponsored graduate seminar with the title “Modern Theories of Mind: From Austen to A.I.”  As the subtitle indicates, the course cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and the aim was to carve out and investigate a specific area of inquiry, which Moon and Wilson, taking up a recently emerging thread in the critical humanities, call “theories of mind.”  The lunch was an introduction to, and reflection on, the new field that their graduate seminar braved to explore.

So what is this new field, “theories of mind”?  Wilson, who spoke first, laid out the fundamentals.  Theories of mind needs to be seen against the backdrop of two prominent intellectual strains.  On the one hand, there is analytic philosophy of mind, which, in its current incarnation, aims to understand the relationship between consciousness and the brain, and draws on evidence from neuroscience and neuropathology, in addition to more classical conceptual analyses.  On the other hand, there is the sort of post-structuralist approach characteristic of the so-called “critical humanities,” such as feminist theory and post-colonial studies, which attempt in various ways to advance beyond the Cartesian conception of mind, by focusing on the ways socio-cultural dynamics influence subjectivity.  Theories of mind sees itself as an alternative to both of these approaches.  In contrast to the study of subjectivity in the critical humanities, theories of mind embraces rather than flees from the idea of mindedness.  In contrast to analytic philosophy of mind, theories of mind seeks to expand the conception of mindedness beyond the full-functioning adult brain in an effort to encompass other dimensions of embodied mindedness, such as visceral, infant, technological, and animal.

While theories of mind is broader in scope than most analytic philosophy of mind in going beyond the brain, as it were, it is also focused on a narrower phenomenon: mind attribution.  To what do we attribute mindedness?  What reasons do we have for doing so?  And what are the implications one way or the other?  This is the constellation of questions with which theories of mind concerns itself.  In psychology and philosophy of mind, to treat another human being as if it has a mind is to possess a “theory of mind.”  Wilson described a well-known test for theory of mind – the “Sally Ann test.”  Sally and Ann are puppets in a show that young children of various ages are watching.  The children see that Sally puts a marble in her basket, and then goes off somewhere.  During her absence, Ann takes the marble from Sally’s basket and puts it in her own.  If the children are asked where Sally will look for the marble upon her return, the answer depends on whether or not they have a theory of mind.  Three-year-olds, who lack theory of mind, say that Sally will look in Ann’s basket, because they do not distinguish between what they see and what Sally was able to see.  Five-year-olds, who have developed a theory of mind, on the other hand, are able to make the distinction, and realize that Sally did not see Ann take the marble, and so will assume that it is still in her basket.  The attribution of mindedness is interesting insofar as, at least on one interpretation, we have no direct evidence of any mind but our own.  That is why it is called a theory of mind.  Theories of mind – in the plural – takes its line of questioning from theory of mind, but extends it to raise the question of mind attribution to animals, and robots, for example, as well as the social significance of such attribution.  The idea behind theories of mind is that by opening up the question in this way, we might advance our understanding of subjectivity, and, in general, what it is to have a mind. 

Moon’s presentation consisted in an overview of the 2011 graduate seminar itself – the students involved, the readings, the assignments – as well as some ex post facto reflections.  There were seven students and they read three novels: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and The Call of the Wild by Jack London.  Each novel provided unique fodder for the sorts of analysis characteristic of “theories of mind.”  In discussing Persuasion, Moon introduced the idea of “free indirect discourse,” a style of narrative that combines elements of both first- and third-person perspectives, and a topic discussed at more length in the ensuing Q&A.  Here is an example of free indirect discourse from Persuasion:   

How Anne’s more rigid requisitions might have been taken, is of little consequence. Lady Russell’s had no success at all–could not be put up with–were not to be borne. What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table,–contractions and restrictions every where. To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, he would sooner quit Kellynch-hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms.

In this passage, Austen describes Sir Walter’s distraught reaction to the notion of renting out Kellynch Hall, his ancestral home.  “He” is referred to in the passage, so that we know the narration is third-person, and yet the thoughts are to be taken as the very ones in Sir Walter’s head.  There is a blend of the narrator’s interpretation of the thoughts of the character – which brings with it potential for misinterpretation – and also the direct report of what is going on in the character’s head, as could be related by an omniscient narrator (immune to misinterpretation).  Free indirect discourse therefore engages some of the themes of interest to theories of mind: to what extent are we able to attribute mindedness to others?  To what extent is this attribution always colored by our own conceptions? 

In the seminar, such questions were also explored in the context of artificial intelligences like Frankenstein, as well as animals such as Buck, the dog of The Call of the Wild, a novel which also employs free indirect discourse as a means of exploring thought attribution to animals.  Moon made the surprising and interesting point that, for theories of mind, anthropomorphic attributions are not necessarily to be shunned.  I found this striking and, strangely, rather uplifting.  In my own experience of graduate seminars on post-structuralism, I was taught that anthropomorphism cancels out the “otherness” or “alterity” of the other.  Surely this is a valid concern.  However, if you can’t use analogical means to understand the other, what can you use?  Perhaps it must be admitted that in some cases, at least, anthropormphic understanding is better than none at all.  This possibility seems to be most clearly relevant in the case of animals, with respect to which it seems often hard for humans to grant any mindedness because of the obvious differences between humans and animals (especially non-primates).  Perhaps a dose of anthropomorphism is precisely what is called for!  

This recalibration of our assessment of anthropomorphism seems to me to be exactly the kind of re-thinking that theories of mind promises to foster.  Whereas post-structuralism is right to point to the dangers of analogical mind attribution, it winds up leaving little room for mind attribution at all.  In this case, theories of mind recovered the phenomenon of mindedness, as promised, yet with a focus on the dynamics of such attributions.  In doing so, it contributes a useful alternative to both the post-structuralist analysis and analytic philosophy of the mind/brain.  It will be interesting to see how the field develops.

 

 

Otis & Sathian: Images in the Mind

Laura Otis & Krish Sathian

Images in the Mind

 

Laura Otis (English, Emory) and Krish Sathian (Neurology, Rehabilitation Medicine and Psychology, Emory) came together in the first CMBC lunch of the year to discuss the formation of mental images. 

Otis spoke of work towards a book to be titled, Thirty Thinkers, which draws from interviews with a range of creative people about the phenomenology of their mental imagery.  Inquiry into the phenomenology of mental imagery is nothing new in itself, even if it is only in the last forty years that the study of mental imagery has been taken seriously as a subject of scientific research.  Continental phenomenologists like Sartre, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty pioneered the systematic study of the phenomena of imagination in the first half of the twentieth century.  However, they did so according to the methodology of classical phenomenology – by describing what they took to be the essential structures of the formation of mental imagery by conscious subjects.  In contrast, the interest and promise of Otis’ empirical approach lies in what it reveals about the range of ways in which people form mental images.  The diversity of mental image formation from individual to individual emerged as one of the key take-aways from the lunch.

If you close your eyes and think of the word “bridge,” what do you see?  As you read fiction, what sorts of images do you form in your mind?  These are the sorts of questions that Otis asked the participants in her book research, and she posed them to the lunch participants as well.  The latter reported bridge images ranging from “a covered bridge in Indiana” (absent color) to “the river that runs under a bridge” to less specific, more generic images.  No one reported no images at all, but one participant testified to knowing someone who claims never to form mental images.  The range of responses at lunch was in line with the findings of Otis’ book research.  In response to queries about images formed while reading fiction, some participants in Otis’ study said that they read fiction because forming images is intrinsically pleasant; others reported not seeing anything at all and enjoying simply following the play of language.

In the 1970s it became popular to distinguish people who are more verbal in their thinking from those who are more visual or spatial on the grounds of functional differences between the brain’s hemispheres.  While it might seem that participants’ reports in Otis’ study reinforce this dichotomy – with those who read for the words, on the left side, as it were, and those who read for images, on the right – Otis urged that the situation is in fact more complicated, citing Maria Kozhevnikov (Radiology, Harvard Medical School), whose research has challenged the old linear spectrum (from verbal to spatial), and who will speak on the subject of differences between object and spatial imagery at a CMBC-sponsored event on October 10^th.

Sathian posed the question of mental imagery from the neuroscientific perspective: what are the neural substrates of image formation?  How much overlap is there between the neural pathways involved in mental imagery with those involved in visual perception?  Evidence suggests that the overlap is substantial, as might be expected.  PET scans and functional MRIs show that visual cortical areas are active in the formation of mental images.  Damage to these cortical areas, moreover, interferes not only with perception but also with image formation: patients with right parietal stroke, for example, who suffer from neglect of the left side of the spatial field, not only can’t see the field, but they fail to mention anything on the left side when asked simply to imagine a familiar, remembered scene.

Although visual perception and mental imagery share neural substrates, Sathian underscored important differences: while visual cortex subtends the images of both visual perception and mental imagery, the neural pathways that lead to image formation in each case are very different.  Mental imagery stems – in “top-down” fashion – from the frontal cortex, while what we see is received through the eyes.  Sathian was careful to qualify this dichotomy, however, pointing out that in actual cases of perception, and especially in cases of perceiving unfamiliar objects, the activity of mental image formation plays an important role in “interpreting” the data, and therefore in determining the images we actually see. 

One of Sathian’s most intriguing points concerned non-visual imagery.  Object properties are encoded in multi-sensory representations, not just visual ones.  One interesting question of on-going debate is whether spatial imagery is specifically visual, or rather “amodal”?  The question of the relationship between different kinds of sensory imagery is a fascinating one.  In this regard, Sathian left off with a reference to Oliver Sack’s recent book, The Mind’s Eye, in which Sacks discusses the phenomenon of blind people actually becoming more visual in their image formation after the loss of vision.  This would seem to underscore the connection between the tactile and the visual (along with providing an interesting variation on the famous problem of Molyneaux, who in a letter to John Locke asked whether a person born blind, able to distinguish a sphere and cube by touch, would be able, with vision restored, to distinguish the objects with sight alone).

What about a friend who claims never to form images?  Is it possible that images could never appear in someone’s mind?  I must admit, being someone who forms images easily and takes the delight in them that I do in vivid dreams, it is (somewhat ironically?) hard to imagine an inner life without them.  Perhaps those who report no images are merely misreporting their inner world?  Perhaps they are merely less conscious of the images they are forming than others?  In response to this line of questioning, Sathian pointed out that there is some tendency for brain scans to correlate with reports of the vividness of imagery, suggesting that if someone reports a lack of imagery, there may well be some neural basis to the claim.  In addition, Sathian explained, even if someone lacks vivid visual imagery, they most likely form other kinds of sophisticated sensory image, such as auditory or spatial.  For her part, Otis offered the image-less friend her vote of confidence, cautioning against the presumption that others’ inner worlds need be akin to our own.  In illustration, she drew an analogy that elicited laughs from the audience: we don’t talk to one another about our bathroom routines, and in consequence just imagine that everyone’s is just like our own.  We cannot know, however, whether this is the case.  Likewise, since we never see what is going on in other people’s minds, we naturally imagine it to be just like our own.  This is hasty. 

The discussion of the image-less friend nicely encapsulated what were perhaps the chief upshots of the lunch: on the phenomenological side, there is increasing appreciation of the diversity of ways in which and degrees to which people form images in the mind;  on the neural side, advances in brain imaging techniques, and, more generally, advances in the understanding of the interplay of distinct neural functions are helping to make neuroscientific sense of the range of phenomenological reports.  Because of the need to reconcile the phenomenology with the neuroscience, and because of the importance of image formation for the work of both humanists and scientists alike, the study of mental imagery is an apt poster child for collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries.  In other words, it was a perfect subject for a CMBC lunch.   

Here is a link to the podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/images-in-the-mind/id503937750?i=122583440

Rushdie: Narrative: Films and Texts

Salman Rushdie
Narrative: Films and Texts 

In an eagerly anticipated CMBC lunch seminar that filled to capacity minutes after registration opened, Emory University Distinguished Professor and acclaimed writer Sir Salman Rushdie shared his views on the nature and role of narrative in the arts. Focusing on similarities and differences in how narrative functions in literature, film, and television, Rushdie led a fascinating discussion with student and faculty attendees on the challenges of tailoring narrative to the specific medium in which it is presented.

Rushdie began the session by talking about the forces that shaped his thinking about narrative. As a child growing up in Bombay, India, Rushdie was immersed in the narrative tradition of “wonder tales” – folk stories with fantastical elements such as the genies and magic lamps of The Arabian Nights. Despite their extraordinary premises, such stories should not be dismissed as mere escapist entertainment. According to Rushdie, they have the same potential to reveal human truths as more naturalistic forms of writing. The Western notion that realism represents truth is an illusion, Rushdie suggested; fantasy is simply another route to the truth. For Rushdie, the fantastical nature of the stories to which he was exposed as a child served to highlight the separation between fiction and reality, showing how each could inform our understanding of the other. Another major influence on the young Rushdie was the style of cinema now known as Bollywood. At the time, Rushdie explained, popular cinema in India tackled major social issues such as poverty and gender inequality, demonstrating that narrative could be both entertaining and socially significant.

Turning to the function of narrative in literature, Rushdie noted that good literature does not always require a strong narrative thrust. Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is driven primarily by language and character, not by plot. At the same time, literary fiction and narrative need not be regarded as separate genres, as exemplified by the engrossing works of Dickens and Defoe. Unfortunately, when literature and narrative do diverge, the reader tends to favor the latter, with Rushdie citing as evidence the mass consumption of the Twilight series and other popular works of questionable literary merit. Rushdie believes that the separation of narrative from literature has been to the detriment of literature, and in his own writing, he seeks to bring the two back together. He likens writing to conducting an orchestra, in that the writer possesses many different instruments, each suited to playing different types of music. With each novel, the challenge is to choose instruments that will best showcase the music that the writer wants to conduct. Over the course of a writer’s career, he will ideally make use of the entire orchestra.

Rushdie went on to observe that films, unlike novels, must create narrative engagement – not to mention emotion, intellectual stimulation, and psychological depth – without being able to provide a direct window into the minds of their characters. Whereas a novelist can fully mine a character’s internal life (even without a first-person narrative), and can often enter and exit a character’s mind freely, this interiority is much more difficult to achieve in film. According to Rushdie, the challenge for screenwriters and directors is to find the dramatic action that reveals a character’s thought process – to show, not tell. Skillful screenwriters are able to highlight the difference between what people say and what they think, all from an external perspective. Skillful directors use the camera to create meaning, choosing exactly what the world captured by the camera should contain. Much of the meaning of a film, Rushdie suggested, is created in the editing room, with sequences of shots forming a nonverbal rhythm that dictates how viewers should experience the film. Novels, in contrast, are less prescriptive; because they exist to some degree in the reader’s interior space, there is more active engagement with the work. In film, techniques of cinematography, montage, and music are used to engage viewers in a narrative that is given to them essentially fully formed, rather than shaped and elaborated by the viewers’ own minds.

One issue that came up during discussion was why books tend to be regarded as artistically superior to their film adaptations. Rushdie suggested that the primary reason may be that books must almost always be condensed for the screen. In preparing the screenplay for his novel, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie made a list of scenes that he regarded as critical to the story. As it turns out, half of the scenes will not be included in the final version of the film, to be released later this year. The experience illustrated to Rushdie the need to consider the essence of his novel – the parts of the story that, if omitted, would result in the film no longer being an adaptation of the novel. “Adaptation,” Rushdie mused, “is a great lesson in the fact that the world is real.” It seems that adapting a novel for film is inevitably a balancing act between faithfulness to the original work and the need for purity of storytelling due to the narrative limitations of the medium. Even when a film achieves the right balance, some viewers remain unsatisfied because any deviation from the novel is regarded as unacceptable. I wonder if such purists feel so strongly because they engaged in particularly elaborate mental imagery while reading the novel. Perhaps the richness of one’s internal experience of a novel is inversely related to one’s enjoyment of the corresponding film adaptation.

Some of Rushdie’s most intriguing observations concerned the nature of narrative in television. Rushdie, like many critics today, believes that we are currently in a “golden age” of television drama, due in large part to the creative freedom afforded to writers by cable networks, which place few restrictions on sex, violence, and nudity. Unlike screenwriters, the writer of a television show is typically the central creative artist. The show can also evolve while it is airing, with the audience influencing the narrative through its response to particular characters or plotlines. Moreover, the narrative format is unique in that the story deliberately does not finish; the writer must craft a compelling dramatic arc, but must continually end on a question mark so that the audience keeps tuning in. This open-ended format, Rushdie noted, would be unsatisfactory in a novel or film, in which resolution is expected. Sometimes certain questions remain unresolved even at the end of a series’ run. Rushdie suggested that, because of the inherently serial nature of television, it may be virtually impossible for a series to tie up all loose ends in a way that satisfies die-hard viewers. Nevertheless, the greatest strength of a television series, according to Rushdie, is that it happens over time. Viewers are able to track a character’s emotional life through events spanning months and years, allowing the narrative to take on the complexity of a novel. [Rushdie fans will be delighted to learn that he is currently developing a television series for Showtime called The Next People, with a “paranormal sci-fi” premise.]

Rushdie’s insightful remarks left me wondering how narrative operates in other art forms. Rushdie described film as a descendant of painting and theater, with painting providing the form and theater providing the dramatic conventions. In the visual arts, narrative is most readily apparent in realistic works. In contrast to the wonder tales of Rushdie’s youth, it may be difficult to evoke a sense of narrative in less representational art because of the limitations of the two-dimensional canvas. In theater, there may be greater narrative engagement than in film or television because characters’ internal lives are often more accessible on stage than on screen. Devices such as soliloquies and asides, though perhaps specific to certain theatrical genres, allow the audience into a character’s mind. Moreover, there is a certain narrative freedom to the stage, as two actors can be standing side by side even while their characters are in different places or time periods. Ultimately, the unexpected ways in which narrative can manifest across art forms suggests why we never tire of experiencing new adaptations of our favorite stories.

Ender: Handwriting: Brain, Hand, Eye, & Ear

Evelyne Ender
Handwriting: The Brain, the Hand, the Eye, the Ear

Earlier this semester, the CMBC hosted a lunch seminar helmed by Dr. Evelyne Ender, Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. In a wide-ranging talk, Ender discussed her ongoing work on graphology, the interdisciplinary study of handwriting as a window on human expression and creativity.

From her perspective in the humanities, Ender explores the connection between what art offers and what research in cognitive science has revealed about the mechanisms underlying artistic expression. She is particularly interested in the tools humans use to express their humanity, focusing specifically on handwriting. In a world in which writing increasingly occurs on the computer screen rather than by the tried-and-true method of applying pen to paper, we may easily forget the degree to which handwriting fulfills, as Ender put it, “a deeply ingrained human need for communication.” Moreover, recent work in neuroscience suggests that the act of handwriting may itself give rise to substantial cognitive benefits. Ender pointed to a recent commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory, who argued, on the basis of neural evidence, that instruction in handwriting at a young age facilitates the development of literacy skills, presumably by linking specific hand movements to the visual recognition of letters and words. This tight coupling between human perception and performance suggests that the study of handwriting may uncover clues about the workings of the human mind. A collection of readings selected by Ender for the seminar (on haptics, rhythm and timing, the structure of symbols, and the history of stenography) offered further evidence of the growing scientific interest in handwriting.

Ender’s discussion of her current project, entitled The Graphological Impulse, began with a review of the rather peculiar history of graphology. Nineteenth-century France saw the development of a method of analysis of basic personality and character traits based on the examination of one’s handwriting. This method manifested perhaps most strikingly in hiring practices, with employers demanding handwritten letters of application to be analyzed by a graphologist. In some cases, job candidates whose handwriting suggested a personality profile unsuitable for the desired profession were eliminated from consideration. Because no correlation between handwriting and high-level character traits has ever been empirically established, graphology is now regarded as a pseudoscience. Nevertheless, Ender maintained, an analysis of handwriting may provide insight into what it means to be human. Ender suggested that humans possess a fundamental drive to physically inscribe, scribble, doodle, sketch, outline – just a few of the manual movements we employ to (quite literally) make our mark on the world. Ender characterized this drive as an impulse, strong enough to transcend physical limitations. She recounted the famous case of Nannetti, a patient held in a primitive psychiatric hospital in Italy. Prevented from using writing tools, Nannetti felt such a need to leave a written trace that he carved stories into the walls of the hospital with none other than the metal buckle of his hospital uniform.

Ender’s project is organized as an in-depth case study of the intersection between the composer Frederic Chopin and the novelist George Sand, who came together both creatively and personally for a brief period during the nineteenth century. For Ender, this exchange between two groundbreaking artists highlights the interaction between the creative brain and the external environment, with art reproducing a specific phenomenological experience of being in the world. According to Ender, the exchange between the brain, the body, and the world is no more evident than in the handwritten page. To illustrate this idea, Ender presented slides from a handwritten draft of one of Sand’s classic novels. The remarkable grace and fluidity of the script were evident in the slides, which also demonstrated the complexity of semantic and oral “coding” exemplified by Sand’s prose. Sand is said to have written for long stretches at night in a free-flowing, “disinhibited” manner. Despite such apparent spontaneity, Ender noted that writing page after page of script with minimal corrections, ultimately producing a nearly print-ready piece after some thirty hours of manual labor, is an extraordinary skill. To put pen to paper in such an expert fashion requires an underlying mastery of the mappings between sound and visual form, grammatical knowledge, proficiency with spelling, manual dexterity, fine motor control, among many other sophisticated abilities. As I enjoy the relative luxury of typing this commentary on my computer – making countless edits and deletions, consulting my word processor’s built-in thesaurus, cutting and pasting at will, creating a backup copy with the click of a button – I am even more impressed at Sand’s achievement.

Of particular interest for Ender is the degree to which the quality of an artist’s handwriting is correlated with the fluidity of the creative experience. When Sand swapped pens while writing, for example, did this refreshing of instruments also serve to refresh her ideas? And when she was writing prose that was especially lyrical, did she engage in correspondingly rhythmic auditory imagery? Ender proposed that such questions might be fruitfully addressed through interdisciplinary exchanges between the humanities and the sciences. Cognitive science research exploring the nature of cross-modal sensory representations, such as those between vision and audition, might be particularly informative. Some individuals, known as synesthetes, experience consistent mappings between visual and auditory stimuli (e.g., certain letters and words invariably evoke certain colors), and such mappings have been regarded as exceptional cases of the type of everyday cross-modal associations that we all experience (e.g., the association between speech sounds and the mouth shapes that produce them). It might be interesting to examine whether such perceptually rich representations are more likely to be elicited by writing figurative or metaphorical language than by merely comprehending it. Such a possibility suggests how one important aspect of creativity, namely the ability to draw links between seemingly disparate sensory phenomena, might be operationalized. The richness of one’s mental imagery during the artistic process might, for example, predict the ultimate creative impact of one’s product.

Ender’s presentation left me wondering whether handwriting, rather than providing a unique window on the creative mind, might be better characterized as but one of many skilled, highly automatized behaviors through which we, perhaps unwittingly, express our creativity. For example, although the primary purpose of walking is to get us where we need to go, no two people walk the same way. The idiosyncratic gaits we adopt may, like the distinctive output of our pens, reveal much about our individuality. One might also argue that spoken – as opposed to written – language, in requiring the complex, rapid-fire coordination of multiple parts of the vocal tract to convey intention and meaning, is an even more impressive creative feat (and arguably more fundamental to human expression, given that not all languages have writing systems). With technological advances comes the temptation to bemoan the loss of older, “purer” forms of communication. But although handwriting may be in danger of becoming a lost art, we will surely find other, no less striking ways of manifesting the creative impulse within us.