Not an Ending

This month I've been hooked on Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' on Channel 4; a satirical take on modern life in the tradition of Orwell's '1984'. The chilling three part series sent up politics, the media and, most of all, our obsession with technology, culminating last night with 'The Entire History of You', a post-modern sexual morality tale without an apparent moral.

It seems to me the 'Black Mirror' series has a few interesting things to say about the brain as well as offering a surreal commentary on the modern world. In the first episode, a fictional Prime Minister is blackmailed into an act of bestiality as the public watches, sickened but compelled. The second imagines a society framed entirely by entertainment in which the only apparent means of escape is through gross reality TV talent shows. The premise of the final episode extends this idea of technological dystopia, showing us a world in which all experiences are stored and archived for later access; nothing can be lost, the past becomes a kind of film to be replayed at any moment. The technology (called 'grain') allows people to reflect back on recent and distant events (by watching 'redos') - for the main character Liam, this becomes a source of sexual jealousy.

The notion of 'grain' and 'an entire history of you' is interesting from a neuroscientific perspective. At a dinner party early in the episode, one of Brooker's characters defends grain technology, arguing that humans are inherently suggestible and easily form false memories of things that have happened to them. Neuroscience, of course, serves as a reminder of just how vulnerable we are to illusions, delusions and disorders. Amnesia, anosognosia and Cotard's syndrome are just some of the neurological disorders that alter a person's constructed sense of self and of their past.

The idea that the 'self' is a narrative is a longstanding one: Proust articulated it in 'In Search of Lost Time', recognising that memory is an act of reconstruction: or, in other words, our memories are not like fiction, they are fiction.  In 1932, Frederic Bartlett published his book 'Remembering' which argued that a memory is not the re-excitation of fragmentary, fixed 'traces' or elements in the brain, but a reconstruction, more akin to imagination. We misremember the past, even as we try to accurately recall it. As Paul Broks puts it: 'We build a story of ourselves from the raw materials of language, memory and experience....confabulation is the construction of an erroneous self-story, signifying the neurological breakdown of the storyteller.'

The 'Sally Anne' test, used
to assess
Theory of Mind

Confabulation is not just an pathological symptom. Our ability to make inferences about the mental states of others - what psychologists call Theory of Mind - also allows us to deceive people deliberately. Brooker's 'The Entire History of You' tackles the interesting issue of how we define truth in relation to experience. The plot centres around a sexual infidelity and a husband's obsession with uncovering it and seems to question whether what we see (and can replay) is somehow more authentic than our patchy memories.

The three episodes of 'Black Mirror' are, in my opinion, linked by their dystopian view of technology, mass media and the effect this has on individual and collective thought and action. In this, Brooker's series is framed by some of the ideas in Iain McGilchrist's recent book 'The Master and his Emissary'. McGilchrist's book uses the notion of fuctional asymmetry in the left and right hemispheres of the brain as a metaphor for different approaches to looking at the world, the first fragmentary, discrete, concerned with close attention and the second holistic, intuitive and concerned with broad attention. Some of his ideas are nicely summarised here. To do his argument a disservice by simplifying it in a blog post, McGilchrist contends that the left hemisphere mode of attention is overvalued in modern Western society and the right hemisphere's broader, embodied mode is undervalued, with potentially damaging consequences.

Why should the left hemisphere's 'style' be unhealthy? McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheric modes of thought should balance and compliment each other. Left hemisphere dominance, however, leads to over-awareness, which (ironically) alienates us from the world: only ourselves and our own thought processes are real. The left hemisphere has a preference for the man made, the abstract, the self-referential: it is as if the map of the world has replaced the world itself. Representations are prized above the things they represent. To quote McGilChrist, 'the more one stares at things, the more one freights them with import', but that import is without meaning, the observer is 'not let in on the secret'. We become trapped in a hall of mirrors (some of them black, perhaps). 

Some might say McGilchrist's argument is speculative, metaphorical rather than scientific, that his extrapolation from brain to society is a step too far. Leaving these criticisms aside, his view of a left hemisphere world characterised by bureaucracy, anonymity, abstraction, alienating technology and social isolation (what Emile Durkheim called 'anomie') bears a striking resemblance to the world created in 'Black Mirror'. 

In particular, McGilchrist believes that the left hemisphere's devitalisation of things generates a boredom which leads to sensationalism, something explored in episode 2 of 'Black Mirror' where the characters are bombarded by images on a screen all day, mostly music and porn channels. The left hemisphere's desire to predict and control the external environment and turn it into a mechanistic system resonates with the notion of 'grain' technology in episode 3, the urge to possess, monitor, review and control the past. 

I was particularly interested in what Brooker's series has to say about the implications of all this for close relationships. McGilchrist tells us that in a left hemisphere world 'sex, the power of which the right hemisphere realises is based on the implicit, would become explicit and omnipresent'. At the same time, intimacy is abstracted, since 'the body has become an object in the world like other objects'. Ironically, 'like most answers to boredom, pornography is itself characterised by the boredom it aims to dispel: both are a result of a certain way of looking at the world.' In the final episode of 'Black Mirror' one character, Jonas, describes how he'd masturbate to 'redos' of old encounters while his wife was upstairs in bed, waiting to have sex with him. In a later scene, a couple have indifferent sex while replaying scenes of their earlier, more passionate nights. When the main character, Liam, becomes obsessed with his wife's infidelity, he's more concerned with stories and representations than with emotions: love in the time of left hemisphere dominance?
It's interesting that McGilchrist believes poetry is the province of the right hemisphere and, as such, offers a stay against the left hemisphere's itemised, functional view of the world. In poetry, different possibilities can exist at once. The truth of poetry doesn't always need to be a classificatory one. I thought I'd end this ramble with a poem by the late, great Andrew Waterhouse which seems to illustrate this and which also happens to be about memory, versions of the truth and romantic obsession, picking up where the last 'Black Mirror' leaves off. Besides, he's far more eloquent than I could ever be:


Not an Ending

He never lived in that valley

or anywhere else. On the night in question

he did not stand by the river or ignore

the new rain or drop stones into the water.

There were no tree songs around him,

no unidentified birds, no flowing to the sea.

Her eyes were not blue. Those were not her boots.

she walked more quickly. He did not hear

her last word or want to. He may

have shrugged, but never shook.

He had no regrets and would not think

of her again. He would not think of her again.

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.

Who is Qualia, what is she?

When I first came across the term, 'qualia' sounded like a great name for a soprano to me. Put simply, qualia recognises the fact that, as Nobel Laureate Gerald Endelman conceded 'events are denser than any scientific description'. As such, it's also an enduring puzzle for neuroscience and, conversely, poetry's default territory. The Oxford Companion to the Mind puts it nicely:

"Examples of qualia are the smell of freshly ground coffee or the taste of pineapple: such exoperiences have a distinctive phenomenological character which we have all experienced but which, it seems, is very difficult to describe."

In other words, tricky ground for anyone interested in relating a philosophy or idea of consciousness to neuronal activity. The act of perception and our experience of perception are very different things, to state the obvious.

The neuropsychologist Paul Broks explores some of these ideas evocatively in his book 'Into The Silent Land'. In the tradition of Oliver Sacks' 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat', Broks takes his reader on a surreal tour of neurological case studies, from the man who believed his brain was visible to a patient convinced his skull contained a fish. The book marks Broks' attempt to reconcile the 'indissoluble' illusion that 'behind every face there is a self" with clinical fact: when we look behind someone's face 'there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain. I know, I've seen'. His mesmerising journey offers no clear solution or answer to the questions he raises, but is extraordinarily illuminating.

Materialist views of consciousness sometimes posit it as a kind of necessary illusion. Daniel Dennett argued that it's a kind of 'virtual machine' running in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for it. V.S. Ramachandran, meanwhile, suggests, intriguingly, that qualia is the product of neuronal activity and only seems subjective when reported via the abstractions of language: 'the barrier between mind and matter is only apparent and arises as a result of language.'. Ordinary language, perhaps. But what of poetry? How is it that poetry uses language in such a way that 'the description of qualia does not seem partial, imprecise and only comprehensible when put in the context of the poet's personal life' (David Lodge, 2002)?

Take Richard Wilbur's poem 'A Hole in Floor', which finds the narrator contemplating a recent gap in the parlour floor made by a carpenter:

...Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.


The radiator-pipe
Rises in middle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
Where the only news is night.
Here it's not painted green,
As it is in the visible world....

Here, the reader is invited not just to share in what might normally be seen as a very mundane act, but to fully inhabit its new strangeness. Wilbur uses what some critics call 'fictive motion' to give a sense of downwards movement; we are almost drawn into the world of the gap in the floor with its peculiar landscape: the radiator pipe 'like a shuttered kiosk' where 'the only news is night'. There are countless examples of poems I could have picked where the poet makes a very specific sensation seem universal - no doubt you'll have suggestions of your own (please do comment!). Readers of poetry will, doubtless, identify with David Lodge's claim that 'lyric poetry is arguably man's most successful effort to describe qualia'. Literature has a unique capacity to describe the dense specificity of personal experience in a way that makes it seem universal. Perhaps it was this that led Chomsky to argue that we can learn more from novels than from psychology about human life.

How does poetry render qualia so effectively? In part, through effective metaphors which invoke one sensation to give specificity to another, attempt to verbalise the non verbal. In Wilbur's poem, the 'pure street, faintly littered / With bits and strokes of light' helps the reader visualise the whole in the floor, what might otherwise be conceptualised as a blank absence. Poetry may be at ease with qualia, but it doesn't have all the answers either: metaphor, in turn, is a process that can be better understood with reference to neuroscientific theory: something I'll return to later. Neuroscience, I would argue, cannot fully appreciate metaphor without engaging with poetry. Poetry, in turn, can gain from recent neuroscientific work on metaphor.

I'll end with Richard Wilbur, still contemplating the hole in his floor, alive to a greater sense of mystery:

For God's sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
The house's very soul,
Where time has stored our footbeats
And the long skein of our voices?


Not these, but the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.

Words, words, words

I've always enjoyed the scene in Hamlet where the Prince, in reply to being asked what he's reading, simply replies 'words, words, words'. Here's Kenneth Branagh in the role: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_qRvheXEYk

Imagine a language you don't know. Look at the two shapes above. If you had to guess, which one do you think is called 'bouba' in this language and which is called 'kiki'? (While you're thinking, insert terrible, repetitive music here: the kind of thing you get when a company puts you on hold). Done? If you're like about 98% of people, you'll have guessed that the jagged shape is 'kiki' and the splat or blob is 'bouba'. That's what Vilanayur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard found when they tried this experiment with students in 2001. Why does this happen? Is it because the spiky shape reminds us of the letter 'k' and the rounder shape looks a bit more like a letter 'b'? Performing this experiment on non-English speakers who use different writing systems suggests not.

So what on earth's going on? V.S. Ramachandran suggests this experiment offers a clue about the embodied nature of our language. As he says in 'The Tell Tale Brain': "the gentle curves and undulations of contour on the amoeba-like figure metaphorically (one might say) mimic the gentle undulations of the sound 'bouba', as represented in the hearing centres of the brain and in the smooth rounding and relaxing of the lips for producing the curved 'booo-baaa' sound. On the other hand, the sharp wave forms of the sound 'kee-kee' and the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate mimic the sudden changes in the jagged visual shape."

Of course, this is an artificial example: the words and shapes have been invented. But some neuroscientists believe all language is strongly connected to the physical world. To oversimplify things vastly, an evolutionary argument might go a bit like this: in early human life, communication was primarily gestural (what some theorists call 'protolanguage'), then gestures accompanied by expressive vocalisations. There is a link between manual gestures and lip and tongue movements. The origins of language are thus physical and words correspond physically to the things they are supposed to represent. Correspondences might be visual or auditory. For example, words like 'enormous' or 'large' require a physical enlargement of the mouth as they are spoken. If you think about the phrase 'come here', you'll know it's gestured by flexing the fingers of the hand towards the palm. The tongue makes a similar movement as it curls back to touch the palate when you say the word 'here'. Words, it's argued, are fundamentally embodied.

Broca's area in the frontal cortex of the brain (see the picture) contains maps which send signals to the various muscles of the tongue, lips, palate and larynx to generate speech. It's no coincidence that this area also contains many mirror neurons (I'll return to these elsewhere) which help us to connect the oral actions for sounds, listening to words and watching lip movements. Mirror neurons help us to link concepts across different brain maps. They are just a crucial 'jigsaw piece' in the puzzle of language evolution. They suggest evidence for the argument proposed by Feldman (2008) and others that "language and thought are adaptations that extend abilities we share with other animals". They are a bridge between us and the external world.

Thinking of language as something 'embodied', something that arises naturally from the world and from neural networks does not, perhaps, make it seem any less miraculous. A common experience for writers (and, I'd venture to say, poets in particular) is feeling like they don't have 'the right words' for what they want to express. Language does not always feel adequate. A common theme in John Burnside's work, for example, is seeking to be in a state 'beyond' language. This echoes the idea that poems somehow aspire to a kind of silence, without the interference of language at all, a controversial and interesting idea advanced by Don Paterson. P.J. Kavanagh has described poetry as "an attempt to find the music in the words describing an intuition" and any writer who has experienced writers' block will know how quickly that 'music' can seem lost. To quote Anthony Hecht: "Sooner or later even the poem I'm most proud of lies lifeless on the page before me, completely inert and without merit; and I have no idea where another will come from and when."

Language, then, can quickly seem like an empty vehicle. Here's John Burnside's poem 'Septuagasima' *:

Septuagesima

Nombres.
Estan sobre la patina
de las cosas.
-- Jorge Guillen

I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,

The gold skins newly dropped
from God's bright fingers, still
implicit with the light.

A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,

as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms

we might have known
before the names,
beyond the gloss of things.

I'll let him have the last word for now.

* For a clear explanation of this poem, the site 'Ready Steady Book' is a good bet.

As the poet said to the neuroscientist...

It's 2011, and we've got brains on our minds. In March this year, Nikolas Rose gave a lecture in which he suggested we are living in 'The Age of the Brain', an idea Radio 4 has also explored recently with its 'Brain Season', examining the history of neuroscience and the links between this flourishing discipline and social policy.

Without question, cognitive neuroscience - the study of the biological processes that underlie the way we think - has enjoyed a renaissance in the last 20 years and has an increasing media presence. No wonder. Clinical case studies make for fascinating reading: we're easily captivated by remarkable stories of phantom limb patients, or people who radically change after sustaining a brain injury (for a witty account of some of these, see cracked.com). But neuroscience isn't confined to the clinical. Its increasingly seen as a discipline that has ideas to offer the humanities and even politics - so much so that sceptic Raymond Tallis has warned against 'neuromania', the reductive idea that understanding the nature of neural activity is a way of understanding practically everything else, from 'neuroaesthetics' to 'neurolaw'.

I'm not a neuroscientist, my background's in a different way of understanding the world: what Michael Ruddy called the 'heart language' of poetry (I won't call myself a 'poet' - as Don Paterson says, 'poetry, like murder, describes an act, not necessarily a permanent disposition'). So what's all this got to do with me?

Art is by no means separate from neuroscience's influence and many theorists have turned their attention to it. In his book 'The Tell Tale Brain', V.S. Ramachandran suggests a theory of aesthetics, based on his experience as a scientist of the brain. Meanwhile, cognitive poetics often draws on neuroscience. Evidence such as the discovery of 'mirror neurons' has been used to explain how readers experience texts. Writing in the TLS in 2006, A.S. Byatt looked at John Donne's work in terms of some of these ideas, concluding 'I do not imagine that we are yet within reach of a neuroscientific approach to poetic intricacy'.

I believe she's right. Poetry, mysterious enough to those who write it, remains still more mysterious to neuroscience (discussing synaesthesia, Ramachandran concedes 'we don't have the foggiest idea of how metaphors work or how they are represented in the brain'). Experimental processes seem very distant from the intuitive, contextual acts of reading and writing. I don't believe we'd benefit from attempting fMRI scans on poets absorbed in scribbling a masterpiece any more than we'd gain from using a sonnet to explain a brain lesion. But that doesn't mean that poetry and neuroscience can't have an interesting dialogue.

In 2007, Jonah Lehrer published a great book called 'Proust was a Neuroscientist', about the ways in which artists from Whitman to Woolf have artistically anticipated or pre-empted key discoveries in neuroscience. His contention is that real insight comes from combining different ways of exploring the world: 'the reductionist methods of science must be allied with an artistic investigation of our experience...the experiment and the poem compliment each other. The mind is made whole'.

I'm a first year PhD student at Sheffield University, blundering my way through three years research into how and why this might be the case, whether neuroscience and poetry would have anything interesting to say to each other if they met in a bar on a dark night. In particular, I'm looking at metaphor, synethseia, apophenia and the ultimate problem for both poets and neuroscientists: how to reconcile our subjective experience of the world with our means of understanding and expressing it?

Like writing poetry, doing a Phd can be a strange business. So, to stop myself losing the plot entirely, I considered a diet of whisky for the next few years or perhaps talking constantly to my two docile dogs ('I've got this new theory: hear me out and you'll get a pork pie'). Then I decided to...start a blog instead. This site isn't intended as a weighty source of academic work, but a forum for sharing sources and ideas, however speculative they might be. I won't be posting heavy articles, just links to things of possible relevance and interest to various topics. Above all, I'm interested in other people's opinions, theories and drunken brainwaves, whatever form they might take... So please feel free to join me on this perilous journey through poetry, the brain and everything in between.