The mind is not a landscape

At the start of Richard Wilbur's celebrated poem 'The Mind Reader', the narrator, a man burdened with the gift of entering 'the stony oubliette of someone else's head' tells us:

The mind is not a landscape, but if it were
There would in such case be a tilted moon
Wheeling beyond the wood through which you groped,
Its fine spokes breaking in the tangled thickets...  

The path is then described in rich detail, a maze of ‘hemlocks’ and ‘dilapidated cairns’ that eventually lead to where some lost object is shining, stored in the ‘dream-cache’ of the mind, since ‘nothing can be forgotten, as I am / not permitted to forget.’

Thus a familiar conceptual metaphor (the notion that the mind is a landscape or terrain, taken up by Hopkins in his poem Mind Has Mountains) is first denied by Wilbur, then extended. The notion of 'mind as landscape' gives us a clear way of imagining what something invisible might look like.

Image by Hector Garrido, Andalucia

Leaving aside the complicated relationship between mind and brain (discussed briefly in my last post), neuroscience implicitly relies on landscape metaphors when referring to the structure of the brain too. Any description of the brain sounds inherently geographical: 'hemispheres' reminds us not just of the two areas divided (and connected) by the corpus callosum, but also of half the earth. Its lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal) are sometimes likened to countries: we speak of 'borders' and even 'boundaries'. An inevitable result of the metaphorical nature of even very everyday, ordinary language. Even the concept of 'coritical folds' vaguely reminds us of the undulations of landscape. The gyri are often described as hills and the sulci as valleys. The brain, then, has its own geography.

Nonetheless, this 'geography' can be a perplexing one. In 'Into the Silent Land', Paul Broks admits:

'Go into the skull, visit the brain's interior workings and you will find that there is nothing much to see. Not a spark of colour or a whisper of sound and no signs of intelligent life. As you wander through this silent land you can describe its geography adequately enough in the third person, but, quite obviously, not the first.'

Elsewhere, Broks neatly summarises the tenets of his discipline, neuropsychology as follows:

1. The brain is the organ of the mind
2. The mind is modular
3. The modularity of mind is reflected in the workings of the brain.

The notion of modularity is a central tenet of neuroscience and helps us to categorise our understanding of brain function more easily, just as our notion of countries or other geographical areas helps us conceptualise something that's actually too large for us to visualise - the entire globe. This applies to work on neural networks, which are groups of neurons that fire in relation to particular functions: with language, for example, it's not the case that each concept has a particular neuron devoted to it, nor is it true that a given concept is represented all over the brain (to complicate matters further, bear in mind that when scientists talk about neurons, they're really talking about an 'ideal type' of neuron used to represent neural activity). Instead, we think of 'networks' for particular actions or functions. But just as geographical boundaries allow movement across them, so the brain is modular but inter-connected.

Some brains, perhaps, are more interconnected than others. Like the narrator in Richard Wilbur's 'The Mind Reader', some people are particularly 'gifted' when it comes to making connections. V.S. Ramachandran's work on synaesthesia focuses on what he calls 'cross-activation' in the unusual experiences synaesthetes have (for example, always seeing colours in numbers). His argument is that:

'...synesthesia results from an excess of neural connections between associated modalities, possibly due to decreased neural pruning between (typically adjacent) regions that are interconnected in the fetus.' 

This 'sensory cross-activation hypothesis' suggests that synaesthesia is to do with seeing more connections than usual. Ramachandran makes a tentative attempt to link synaesthesia and metaphor, since metaphors in language involve mapping across different conceptual domains. He suggests it's not surprising that synaesthesia is more common (about 7 times more common) amongst artists since synaesthetes may be better at linking unrelated ideas.

Thus however we try to 'map' the brain, the georgaphy of someone else's mind can seem to remain a complete mystery. It made me think of this recent poem by Jacob Polley, to do with the nature of metaphorical understanding:

October

Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn't turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered and complete

The moon';s no fruit and has no seed
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind's a different, distant world
the same moon will not leave.