'Little machines' - the necessary and the sufficient

When I came across a recent Guardian article titled 'Think brain scans can reveal our innermost thoughts? Think again', I didn't have to read down to know who the author was likely to be. Raymond Tallis has been critiquing the grip 'neuromania' holds over our society again and he is particularly lucid in his examination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the things it can and cannot show us.

Put simply, fMRI is a kind of magnetic resonance imaging that measures brain activity by detecting associated changes in blood flow. It relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are linked. So when an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases. Thus fMRI is used in neuroscience to suggest which areas of the brain are activated when, for example, somebody performs a particular activity or responds to a particular stimuli. Popular reporting of such findings might imply that a certain emotion or action is therefore 'located' in that part of the brain.

As Tallis states dismissively, fMRI is a limited tool:

"It seems that pretty well any assertion placed next to an fMRI scan will attract credulous attention. Behind this is something that goes deeper than uncritical technophilia. It is the belief that you are your brain, and brain activity is identical with your consciousness, so that peering into the intracranial darkness is the best way of advancing our knowledge of humankind.....Alas, this is based on a simple error. As someone who worked for many years, as a clinician and scientist, with people who had had strokes or suffered from epilepsy, I was acutely aware of the extent to which living an ordinary life was dependent on having a brain in some kind of working order. It did not follow from this that everyday living is being a brain in some kind of working order. The brain is a necessary condition for ordinary consciousness, but not a sufficient condition."

There's nothing controversial in the caveat Tallis gives here. It seems obvious that the relationship between the mind and the brain is not as simple and causally direct as the activity of trying to pinpoint the neuron that causes a certain emotion might imply (though I'd also argue it's the reporting of fMRI studies rather than the studies themselves that seem to suggest this).

From my ignorant but interested standpoint, I like to think of the mind as the brain's potential: something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And the patterns that fMRI shows us are small snapshots of that potential at work (black and white prints at that). Thinking about the relationship between minds and brains seems as complicated as thinking of the relationship between minds and poems. For my money, the best account of the latter relationship comes from the late Michael Donaghy when he describes a poem as a kind of diagram of consciousness:

“…Consider how any printed page of verse or prose, with all its paraphernalia of paragraphs, running heads, marginalia, pagination, footnotes, titles, line breaks and stanzas, can be understood as a diagram of a mental process….the words in the centre of the page surrounded by their somewhat reserved audience of footnotes and marginalia are a diagram of self-consciousness, a commentary frozen out of the flow of the story, song or poem, out of the voice we’ve entered as we participate.” (from 'The Shape of the Dance').

Donaghy suggests that what we encounter on the page as readers offers us a ‘model of the mind’. If a poem is a diagram of consciousness, a diagram of mental process, then it in turn is influenced by the mental processes of the writer, even if the piece in question is entirely dramatized and fictionalised. 

I was reading at the Bridlington Poetry Festival this weekend with Alan Buckley, and there was some

discussion during and after our reading about the idea of the poem as a 'little machine' for remembering itself (a term coined by Don Paterson). Donaghy's description of the poem as diagram contains an element of the mechanistic too, but it also emphasises that idea of potential - a diagram as a set of instructions for producing something else, something more than itself. It seems to me that concept is crucial to thinking of both the relationship between poems and minds and between minds and brains.

Sounds from the Bell Jar

Having finished 'Mad Girl's Love Song' recently (a biography of Sylvia Plath from the years before she met Ted Hughes) it was interesting to read a study of 'ten psychotic authors' by Gordon Claridge, Ruth Pryor and Gwen Watkins which, unsurprisingly, uses Plath as one of its case studies. The book, 'Sounds from the Bell Jar', mixes literary biography, psychology and psychiatry to examine the lives of ten different writers and assess the often-debated relationship between psychotism and creativity - see my recent post about Daniel Nettle's book on the subject.

Much of the discussion in 'Sounds from the Bell Jar' will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the topic, but I was particularly drawn to the book's concluding chapter which attempts to draw connections between the behaviour and personality types of all the writers surveyed. It finds greater similarities than might be assumed between poets an authors from John Clare to Virginia Woolf, from Christopher Smart to Plath herself.

What characterises the psychotic writer? If these case studies are to believed, the writers in question often exhibited a strange mixture of hypersensitivity and detachment. On the one hand they were 'skinless', giving them a great imaginative capacity but also extreme sensitivity to the external world. However:

"Another characteristic of the psychotic personality seen in our authors, and apparently belying the extreme oversensitivity of their nervous systems, is unusual insensitivity. This may be described as a lack of empathy, even cruelty and an inability to feel naturally in emotionally demanding situations."

The authors quote Strindberg - 'I am hard as ice and yet so full of feeling  that I am almost sentimental' - and relate his admission to a fundamental feature of schizoid personalities: being oversensitive and cold at the same time, sometimes in quite different relative proportions.

Trying to explain what seems a paradox, the authors suggest that "apparent lack of feeling acts as protection against skinlessness, as a psychological - or even physiological - device for dealing with otherwise unbearable pain."

But interestingly, they also offer another explanation for this 'tough vulnerability': "The psychotic individual may be unable to acquire the 'insincere' behaviour demanded by social courtesy: his response may then appear 'insensitive', whereas in fact it represents the true, raw feeling unadmitted by more 'normal' individuals."

Aside from the domain of psychotism (or perhaps not, if you consider them linked) I'm particularly fascinated by how this mixture of oversensitivity and detachment might find a parallel in the writing process itself, at least as far as poetry is concerned. Often, I'll do almost anything to put off the porous kind of state I get into when I'm writing a poem, or about to write a poem. When I'm writing, there's certainly a 'skinless' kind of feeling attached to the process and an element of sensory overload - the poem teems with too many possibilities. It's difficult to know what to leave out, how to shape all these perceptions and thoughts and ideas into a formal whole. At times, I'll do almost anything to numb myself against the prospect of actually sitting down and writing the poem.

Writers: as cold as ice?

Similarly, that detachment comes into play in the editing process (whether that's editing as I write, or editing retrospectively). In my case, the fear of being overwhelmed by whatever it is I'm trying to write about sometimes (maybe often) leads to poems that are excessively pared back, concise to the point of being unsatisfying.

I've written before on this blog about the use of negatives in John Burnside's work (amongst others) and the possibility that reliance on negatives comes from a tendency to over-connect: there seems so much of the world that it's easier to refer to it in the negative, by its opposite. Seen from a McGilchristian framework, of course, the balance of hypersensitivity and detachment might be framed within the processing styles of the two hemispheres.

Which leads to a final, interesting observation that the authors of 'Sounds from the Bell Jar' make: many of the authors in the study had a fear of mirrors

"The suggestion is that it may be a further indication of the unusual way in which the brain hemispheres function in psychosis and in the psychotic personality....some of the disrupted thinking and perception found in psychosis is due to increased emotional arousal 'leaking' from the right hemisphere. But the right hemisphere is also specialised for the perceptual analysis of facial expression.... Combined together, these two right hemispshere peculiarities could account for the disturbing perceptions which psychotics report when they confront their own faces in a mirror."

There seems only one poem to finish with, Sylvia Plath's own 'Mirror'.

Tell us a story

In a recent bout of insomnia, I've been re-reading John Burnside's memoirs, particularly his account of living with apophenia in 'Waking Up In Toytown'. There's a dream-like quality to Burnside's prose that suits the small hours (hours which he notes aren't small at all to the insomniac, in fact they are 'beyond all cartography') and a guiding intelligence to the way he views his past that emphasises the nature of memory as much as what's being recounted.

"Every story is supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end, it doesn't matter what order they come in, as long as they're there. One of the things that makes a memory different from a story is that it might well come with a beginning and an end, but the middle tends to blur or even vanish altogether....Any first meeting is the occasion for a romance that might last a lifetime, a thin, subliminal stratum of scents and sounds that can be awakened years later by the faintest stimulus - even if the moment came to nothing."

Burnside's memoirs brim with the idea of the narrative self, the way we make our own stories up as we going along, trying to make sense of the seemingly random and painful things that happen to us. I've written before on 'Poetry on the Brain' about Benjamin Libet's experiments into the gap between intention and action and the implications for our notion of free will, the way the conscious self is alerted to actions that the body is already performing.

We often believe we act much more consciously than we do. This, in turn, relates to the left hemisphere's tendency to confabulate. As Michael Shermer puts it in 'The Believing Brain' (2011), the story-weaving capacities of the left-hemisphere are not necessarily more instructive: the neural network he calls the ‘left hemisphere interpreter’ is adept at reconstructing events into a logical sequence and a story that ‘makes sense’. But its reconstruction may not be faithful, it is biased towards that necessity of ‘making sense’. And it engages in confabulation. In 'The Telltale Brain' (2011), V.S. Ramachandran discusses anosognosia, the denial of paralysis seen in some patients after a stroke which affects the right hemisphere. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with constructing an internally-coherent belief system:

‘If there is a small piece of anomalous information that doesn’t fit your “big picture” belief system, the left hemisphere tries to smooth over the discrepancies and anomalies in order to preserve the coherence of the self and the stability of behaviour. …the left hemisphere sometimes even fabricates information to preserve its harmony and overall view of itself’ (2011:267) 

The right hemisphere, by contrast, is concerned with detecting these discrepancies, is sensitive to paradox and contradiction. To quote Iain McGilchrist:

'Paradox means, literally, a finding that is contrary to received opinion or expectation. That immediately alerts us, since the purveyor of received opinion and expectation is the left hemisphere. I

called it a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking, those of the left hemisphere, are not adequate to the nature of reality. But – wait! Here it seems that the left hemisphere, with its reliance on the application of logic, is stating the opposite: that it is reality that is inadequate to our ordinary ways of thinking.’ (2010: Kindle Locations 3846-3850). 

Patients with a right hemisphere stroke who are paralysed on the left side of their body will deny that they are paralysed at all. Ramachandran believes this clinical evidence relates to ‘the kinds of everyday denials and rationalisations that we all engage in to tide over the discrepancies in our daily lives’ (2011:267). McGilchrist connects confabulation to a shift in Western philosophy in which paradox gradually became conceived of as something more and more problematic.

Poetry often makes a show of that confabulation or misremembering, makes a virtue of the narrative self. We are not who we think we are. We are adept story tellers. In a sense, the version of events a poem offers might be as accurate as anything we're likely to tell ourselves. John Burnside is always sensitive to that in his own poetry, alive to the prospect of parallel lives. In 'Documentary' (from 'The Hunt in the Forest', 2009), he imagines

somewhere from one of those slightly too plausible films
where the street is a parallel street in a parallel world

and everything is altered slightly, though not that much,
only another version of what we know

going about its business, our parallel selves
brighter and more successful than we seem...

(from 'Documentary')

But there's nothing overly-sentimental about the parallel worlds evoked in Burnside's work. As he reflects in 'Waking Up In Toytown', the glamour we touch even our most painful memories with is artificial, a product of the narrative tendency. And that's just fine. To quote him:

"Didn't F. Scott Fitzgerald say somewhere that the difference between a sentimentalist and a romantic is that the sentimentalist is afraid that things won't last forever, whereas a romantic is afraid that they will?"

Against the Arbitrary

Previously on 'Poetry on the Brain', I've written about Merlin Donald's theory of language evolution from mimetic origins, the role of mirror neurons in action perception and (via the indomitable Raymond Tallis) Saussure and the arbitrariness of the sign. All these themes are brought together in a lucid paper by Michael Corballis from 2009, 'Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Language'.

Since its discovery (and all the attendant hype), the mirror neuron system in humans has been associated with language, not least because when these neurons were first identified in monkeys, they were located in area F5 of the monkey’s frontal cortex, an area considered the homolog of Broca’s area (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998), which was also the first area implicated in language (Broca, 1861). In monkeys, the mirror system mostly responds to actions that are object directed. In humans, it responds to those that are not, suggesting a key role in the origins or symbolic understanding and a relationship to linguistic symbols. At some point in human evolution, its evident that the mirror system adapted from its function in primates and assumed an additional role in language.

Corballis shares Merlin Donald's belief that language evolved from gesture and emotive vocalisation. Indeed, he's careful to point out that language need not necessarily involve vocalisation at all, pointing to the sophistication of sign language. The fact that the kind of language we are familiar with today seems far from mimetic (the exception being words that contain elements of onomatopoeia) is not convincing evidence that language did not evolve from gesture. As Corballis puts it:

'Signs....tend to become less iconic and more arbitrary over historical time in the interests of speed, efficiency and grammatical constraints.'

Iconicity is squeezed out by the requirements of speech in context. The arbitrariness of words is not a necessary property of language, but results from expedience. He gives the interesting example of changes in sign language, from gestures which mimic what they describe quite directly to more succinct, abstract gestures.

Mirror Whippets

Indeed, speech, as Corballis defines it, is perceived as gesture by the mirror neuron system. It is a gesture produced by the lips, velum, larynx, the root of the tongue and other parts of the body (leaving aside the more overt gestures that still often accompany speech): gesture is not confined to movements that are visible. Speech and manual gestures share their roots in the mirror neuron system, where they are perceived in terms of intention.

One question which often seems to challenge mimetic theories of language evolution is the problem of how the transition from gesture to speech occurred. Was it the equivalent of The Big Bang? A sudden shift to vocalisation? Corballis suggests a gradual transition process which involved a greater reliance on using the face. Gestural communication would always have involved some facial movement and he suggests that a gradual addition of sound made certain facial expressions more accessible. Like Merlin Donald, he believes the evolution of language was shaped by social pressures (generated by larger social groups) and, crucially, the need to mentally 'time travel', to be able to reference events in the past and the future in order to communicate clearly.

Corballis' article is particularly strong where it challenges many of the assumptions inherent in linguistic theory. He cites Tomasello’s (2003) observation that linguist’s conceptions of language have traditionally been shaped by the languages of literate, Western populations. Language varies according to cultural requirements, in fact.

‘Across the world, languages may vary as much as the material cultures themselves do. In non-western societies, with relatively few material artefacts, language may take a rather different shape….but is nonetheless finely tuned to the needs and customs of the culture…Prior to the emergence of autonomous speech, a largely gestural form of language would presumably have served almost as well, but for the psychological (rather than linguistic) disadvantages of the visual modality relative to the auditory one.’ (2009:33)

In keeping with the crux of Michael Corballis' argument, I'll leave you with Stevie Smith's poem 'The Face', which you can read in full here.

Neuro-inspiration

Whippets & fiction

In a short article for the Guardian Review this Saturday, Charles Fernyhough considered the relationship between neuroscience and fiction. If neuroscience is fast becoming one of the most debated disciplines of our time (in the way something like psychoanalysis was in the past, for example), surely the questions it raises about the nature of experience should be ripe for novelists to explore?

"If tracing behaviour and experience to its neural underpinnings really offers a new understanding of humanity, aren't novelists bound to draw on it in revealing how their characters understand themselves? In one sense, neuro-explanations seem to challenge the mechanisms by which novels work. Neuroscientists warn us that we may have no freewill, no "self" at the helm; their work shows that our memories are leaky reconstructions and that even our visual perception of the world is a system of illusions. How do these messages change what we do, how we feel, how we decide to live? Fiction is a perfect medium for exploring these questions."

Fernyhough points out that most attempts to incorporate the findings of neuroscience into fiction focus on the pathological, on neural disorders. The one counter example he gives is Ian McEwan's 'Saturday', in which the violent behaviour of a character called Baxter turns out to have a genetic rather than neural cause (for all the novel's focus on brain science and the fact that its central character is a neurosurgeon). At the dramatic denoument of 'Saturday', Baxter's behaviour and outlook is not changed by the findings of neuroscience, but by an earnest recital of a poem - Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'. I for one have always found the conclusion of 'Saturday' singularly unconvincing, for all its optimism. The instantaneous, transformative effect of a poem supports my wildest hopes, but runs contrary to my experience as a writer (or, more specifically, my experience as someone who spends a lot of time reading poems aloud). Poetry has a private magic, but its effects are seldom so immediate and public.

Fernyhough concludes that novelists might be reacting to the focus neuroscience places on evidence, on locating the genesis of experience:

"Fiction exists for its own purposes, and writers and readers will rightly resist attempts to turn it into "evidence" for or against anything. It's possible that neuroscience is just too new for its ideas to have permeated literary fiction in the way that those other paradigm-changers, Darwinism and psychoanalysis, did."

When I look back on the few poems I've written this past year that have been inspired by neuroscience in some way, it seems they're largely concerned with the pathological too. Perhaps, in my case, that's because some of the most compelling or 'creative' writing in neuroscience deals with the pathological - I'm thinking in particular of writers like Oliver Sacks and the fascinating case studies they draw upon.

I'll leave you with my short piece about the notion of Phantom Limb Syndrome, which fails to break with the tradition in fiction Fernyhough is describing.

Phantom Limb Syndrome

- to know there must be more of you
than what your skin contains.

At night, you reach across the city,
stroke her neck without leaving your chair.

The hand you do not have can do piano scales.
It knows each of her fingertips.

It plucks discretely at your coat buttons.
Sometimes, it takes you by the shoulder,

steers you down the street. You’ve cupped
Belize and found it light.

You’ve held the Alps. You’ve let the Dead Sea
trickle through your opening fist.

You’ve still not touched her
everywhere.

Thinking without words

The author, surrounded by several types of snow...
Photo by Andrew Marshall.

In my first poetry pamphlet, 'the shape of every box' (published by tall-lighthouse back in 2007) there's a poem called 'The Word for Snow', which takes as its starting point the notion that the Inuit have twenty-two words for snow. It's a claim I've since heard disputed - some say they only have two: a remarkable rate of attrition.

The idea of all these different words for snow is often connected to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the '80s, which claims that there is no extra-linguistic reality, that our conception of the world is shaped entirely by language. In other words, someone who really did have a plethora of words for snow would live in a very different world from someone who only has one. Thoughts, then, are determined by language.

Writing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in his book 'The Language Instinct', Steven Pinker dismisses it abruptly as a "conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere...'

It is difficult, of course, to conceive of thought without language when we're busy communicating about these problems linguistically.

Pinker goes on to make his case rather more persuasively with evidence variously drawn from the logical capacities of aphasics, the way that Turing's machines could reason without language and the capacities of children to solve logic problems before they have acquired language. More interestingly for writers, he talks about those moments when language seems inadequate to express what we wanted to say, when words fail us - those moments when the poem forms only a shadow of the thoughts that generated it.

He also cites examples of creative inspiration coming from a seemingly extra-linguistic source:

Coleridge.

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that visual images of scenes and words once appeared involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opium-induced). He managed to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting in the poem we know as 'Kubla Khan', before a knock on the door shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been the rest of the poem."

I agree with Pinker's instinct to challenge the (now often challenged) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but his substitution of 'Mentalese', the language of thought, merely seems to replace one problem with another. If there is a separate 'language of thought', how can it be accessed, discussed and how does it differ from verbal language? Once again, the discussion seems to confuse consciousness and thought, using the term 'thought' to mean different things at different times.

It only seems fair to leave you with the poem I wrote, inspired by an incorrect premise - a poem that has since been revised to play down the reference! It's taken from my forthcoming full collection, 'Division Street' which will be published by Chatto & Windus late this summer.

Twenty Two Words for Snow 

The lawn was freezing over
but the air stayed empty,
and I wondered how the Inuit
would name this waiting –
our radio playing to itself in the bathroom,
the sound from the street
of ice-cream vans out of season
in this town where we don’t have

twenty-two words for anything,
where I learned the name
for artificial hills, the bridge
where a man was felled by bricks
in the strike. From the window,
I watch the sky as it starts to fill.
In the kitchen, dad sifts flour,
still panning for something. 

Strong imagination: poetry, psychotism and genes

Following from the discussion on 'Poetry on the Brain' a while back about Kay Redfield-Jamison's 'Touched With Fire', linking bipolar disorder and the artistic temperament, I've been reading Daniel Nettle's 'Strong Imagination', which explores similar themes. Nettle sets out to take seriously the claim Shakespeare has Theseus make in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' that

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact...

Nettle is concerned with the extent to which mental illness (specifically affective disorders and schizophrenia) is part of a continuum - "madness is not so much a mental malfunction as a state of horrible hyperfunction of certain mental characteristics." It is an interaction between genetics and environment. People have different, inherited susceptibilities to psychotic incidents or affective disorders which are subsequently triggered by life events. Thus a potential trigger might be a relatively minor life event for someone with a genetic propensity to illness. Discussing the biological and humanistic traditions in psychiatry, he tries to take something from each, focusing on neuroscience as much as sociology.

Considering how the disorders he discusses might be related to creativity, Nettle covers much of the same ground (and cites some of the same studies) as Redfield-Jamison, looking at incidences of mental illness in the families of successful artists and the extent to which "creative individuals have often sought to cultivate something very close to the schizotypal experience as a way into their work." Wary of the Romantic notion of the mad author or artist, Nettle adds several caveats. Firstly, many of the studies he and Redfield-Jamison cite "do not demonstrate an association between psychotic traits and creative capacity so much as an association between psychotic traits and creative recognition. This may reflect something about what contemporary Western culture chooses to bestow value on." He is also careful to show how mental illness is, of course, debilitating and prevents creative output rather than facilitating it. Writers, he argues, are people of great self-discipline, organisation and, often, strong ego, things that may be undermined in illness.

Crucially, Nettle distinguishes between psychosis and psychotism. The genes he is trying to explain the persistence of are those of the latter, not the former. And he makes the case for psychotism being related to creative output and thus being kept in the population throughout evolution because it has a useful function. Heightened creativity comes from psychotism, but not psychosis. He takes examples of artistic endeavours being prized highly in Inuit cultures and other societies to suggest an artistic universal, enduring throughout time. What could that use possibly be? Nettle thinks it is to do with social and sexual display.

"There is an obvious similarity between the peacock's tail and what goes on in the Inuit dance house....at the very centre of the struggle to survive, one suddenly encounters a thing of deep impracticality and showiness, in which individuals compete to impress each other...Human creative performance could well be, at root, a form of sexual display."

The central characteristic of human display, according to this model, is not a physical characteristic but a cerebral one. The argument is not meant to imply that the conscious (or even unconscious) motivation on the part of the creator is to attract a mate, nor that people appreciate art because of a subconscious drive for sex, just that the reason the drive to create has stayed around is because of its usefulness in sexual selection: "it is a theory about the evolutionary significance of cultural performance, not its human significance."

I'm still sceptical about Nettle's equation of psychotism, artistic creativity and sex, perhaps bearing in mind Raymond Tallis' wry observation that 'great artists are more often biological losers than they are alpha semen spreaders’. Occasionally, Nettle's logic breaks down. Discussing gender differences in rates of depression, for example, he suggests that the excess of classical depression in women might be because men are responding to their problems of low mood in different ways:

"There is evidence to suggest that this interpretation is the right one. For one thing, when the numbers of men who are alcoholic or impulsively violent are added to the numbers who are depressed, the total is about the same as the number of women who are depressed."

Of course, to compare these gender differences accurately, you would actually need to factor the numbers of women who are alcoholic or impulsively violent into the comparison too, if these problems are to be considered evidence of depression - Nettle seems to be forgetting that some women might also express their depression in these ways. The statistical comparison does not hold water.

Nonetheless, 'Strong Imagination' is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the artistic temperament. Perhaps Nettle's most telling observation in the whole book is about the objective folly of creative endeavours:

"To ride through a difficult and enervating task, week in, week out, quite alone, without any validation from the outside world, one has to sustain an unreasonably enthusiastic mood. In fact, one has to be in a mood which, from the point of view of most other activities in life, is pathological. One should not blast on with unabashed cheerfulness in a relationship that gives nothing back for months, or persevere in an economic activity that seems to be yielding nothing."

Something all poets can identify with, if nothing else.