She's a maniac, (neuro)maniac...

Sometimes, it's a good idea to take a step back and ask yourself what you're doing. A maxim I find particularly vital after a 4th pint of Thornbridge Jaipur, but also useful in the rest of life. Whilst never a fan of Craig Raine's particular brand of Martian poetry (tending to agree with Michael Donaghy's acerbic remark that some Martian poets "died off when exposed to earth's bacteria"), re-reading 'A Martian Sends A Postcard Home' recently, I was reminded of the value of looking at the world as if for the first time. Luckily, all good poetry affords us many ways of doing that.

Having recently been introduced to the work of D.A. Powell, he seems an interesting example of a poet who takes nothing in the natural world for granted, who enjoys upending and unsettling even quite innocuous scenes. The first poem in his 2009 collection 'Chronic', called 'no picnic' is a typically kaleidoscopic piece which invites us to consider

the parallax of bodies which are and are not ours

      uncomfortable shift, uncomfortable shuffle

so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness
that easily fall among the dropseed: a rind, a left behind

The poem keeps changing perspective, until we aren't sure exactly what's real any more, who is watching what. Watching bluejays 'provoke each other', the narrator says:

      if I could make the world my own and be satisfied
I'd  say that you did not see them, nor hear their anxious fuss
      but you were watching. I, in fact, was not.

Almost any of D.A. Powell's poems you choose to read will offer an interesting shift in perspective. It's important to question the way we look at things occasionally because, as Iain McGilchrist makes clear in 'The Master and His Emissary', "the kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation." Raymond Tallis' new book, 'Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity' has prompted me to think about what kind of attention to the world neuroscience affords us.

A neuroscientist by training, Tallis is also a true polymath and the breadth of his knowledge is remarkable. Whilst he believes that neuroscience is one of our most remarkable achievements (the "queen of the natural sciences", no less), Tallis fears that we're all becoming neuromaniacs, hypnotised by the doctrine that 'you are your brain'. His objection is not to science, but scientism - the belief that science can provide us with an exhaustive picture of humanity (a notion that he fears is reflected in the burgeoning fields of the neuro-humanities: indeed, in blogs like this!). As he puts it succinctly:

"To seek the fabric of contemporary humanity inside the brain is as mistaken as to try to detect the sound of a gust passing through a billion-leaved wood by applying a stethoscope to isolated seeds."

Tallis makes a convincing case for the limits of both neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, demonstrating the methodological limitations of fMRI and other brain-imaging techniques (a "risible simplification of human behaviour") and also the more philosophical problems neuroscience has in accounting for some aspects of conscious experience, such as the sense of self, intentionality and the simultaneous appreciation of unity and distinctness. In particular, he believes that "neuroscience's failure to find a basis or correlate of the self is not evidence that the 'I' is an illusion, but that neuroscience is limited in what it has to say about us.". As such, many mysteries about human consciousness remain and we should be wary of explanations that try to posit matter as the answer to everything. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy...

Unsurprisingly, Tallis is especially scathing about the idea of applying ideas from neuroscience from the arts, the kind of thing attempted in the recent Channel 4 series 'What Makes a Masterpiece'. He finds such approaches highly reductive and mounts a systematic attack on A.S.Byatt's speculative attempt to link the poetry of John Donne to mirror neurons, arguing that, in doing so, she ignores everything that is most interesting about his poems and their relationship to other work. Far from being illuminating, literary criticism that has its basis in neuroscience is no more than a "simplifying discourse."

I don't disagree with him, for the most part. But I don't think his objections make a genuine dialogue between neuroscience and poetry impossible or a waste of time. Neuroscience is one very specific way of accessing partial truths about the human condition. Poetry is another. As long as we recognise that poetry can tell neuroscience as much as neuroscience can tell poetry, we avoid the 'neuromania' that Tallis so fears. 

And if you don't believe me, I'd better hand over to Norman MacCaig, whose poem 'An academic' warns against the limitations of scientism far more succinctly than Tallis ever could. We find the poem's subject sitting at a 'fat desk', 'starching' his brains like 'the tone-deaf man / in the orchestra:

What a job this is, to measure 
lightning with a footrule, the heart's
turbulence with a pair of callipers.
And what magician, who can
dismantle Juliet, Ahab, Agammemnon
into a do-it-yourself kit of semantic gestures.

And there's little to answer to MacCaig's final stanza:

I'm a simple man - I believe
you were born, I believe it
against all the evidence.
I would like to give you
a present of weather, a
transfusion of pain.
 

A Second-Hand Emotion

Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch
as Watson and Holmes.

However commercial the occasion itself may be, on Valentines Day, it seems apt to think about the role emotion plays in our waking (and our reading) lives. But, cynic that I am, the emotion I'm going to begin with isn't love but fear. A recent episode of the BBC's re-vamped Sherlock Holmes updated the legend of the Hound of the Baskervilles, setting it in the modern day south west of England and casting scientists as the villains. The story hinged on mind control, on the production and release of a chemical to generate fear. The notion that instincts and feelings might be 'manufactured' in this way seems terrifying enough. But can fear and other emotions be primed by more innocuous things than chemicals?

There's been a significant body of work done over the last couple of decades on the role emotion plays in cognition, notably by Jospeh LeDoux and Antonio Damasio, and the prime candidate for their study has been fear. LeDoux, who maintains that emotion is part of the 'mental trilogy' that makes us who we are, has looked at how the amygdala receives information about objects and events from sensory processing areas in the thalamus, more complex information from sensory processing areas in the cortex and thus determines whether danger is present and how we react. In particular, LeDoux has examined how emotional experiences can condition our responses, because we remember aspects of the context as well as the direct, emotional stimulus itself. Thus emotion is a process: an affective appraisal of a thing, followed by both characteristic physiological and behavioural changes and cognitive monitoring of the situation. We have an emotional memory system which is different from declarative memory. As such, anything can become imprinted on emotional memory and can trigger an emotional response in the appropriate circumstances.

This is perhaps best illustrated by a case study from the 20th century French doctor Edouard Claparede whose patient had sustained damage to her medial temporal lobe memorysystem and was unable to recognise people; each time Claparde left the room, even for a short period of time, she greeted him on his return as if for the first time. One day, the doctor concealed a tack in his hand which caused the patient pain when she shook hands with him. Whilst the patient still failed to recognise her doctor from then on, she refused to shake hands with him when introduced. Though she may have had no declarative memory of the incident with the tack, Robinson argues she had an emotional memory of it. This idea is supported by cases of medial temporal lobe damage the neuroscientist V.S.Ramachandran cited in his Reith Lectures (2003), in which the emotional response to, for example, seeing a mother figure might become separated from some of its associative stimuli (e.g vision) but remain triggered by others (e.g auditory perception – a patient might react emotionally to speaking to his mother on the phone, but not to seeing her).

I would argue this notion of emotional memory can be (speculatively and loosely) applied to poetry and, specifically, poetic imagery. Some poetic images act as 'cues' in broadly the same way that environmental stimuli do, activating the emotional memory system of the reader (and, of course, the poet in the process of writing). This is partly why, as Don Paterson says ‘poetry remains an invocatory form’. (‘The Lyric Principle’). A poem, or even an image within it, can act like Claperde’s tack. Anthony Hecht’s 1967 poem ‘AHill’ describes its narrator having ‘a vision’, (though ‘it was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints, / And perhaps not a vision at all…’) which transports him from a sunlit Italian piazza with its ‘clear fretwork of shadows’ to an entirely different landscape:

…even the great Farnese Palace itself

Was gone, for all its marble; in its place

Was a hill, mole-coloured and bare. It was very cold,

Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.

The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap

Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,

And the only sound for a while was the little click

Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.

Eventually, the cold and silence disappear and the narrator is removed from the ‘plain bitterness’ of the scene and restored to sunlight and friends. Yet the poem concludes:

All this happened about ten years ago

And it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last, today,

I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left

Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy

I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

On one level, then, ‘A Hill’ is a piece that describes emotional memory in operation. Within the narrative, the ‘vision’ can be seen as a mysterious, traumatic evocation of something long lost from the narrator’s declarative memory. But within the poem itself – the poem considered as a discourse between author and readers – the hill in question acts as an emotional cue that can trigger a reaction in the reader. Don Paterson reasons that because poetry is a form of brief speech, because the poem is surrounded by white space, we assume that everything said within it has significance: ‘the white space around the poem…becomes a potent symbol of the poem’s significant intent.’ The poet August Klienzahler makes knowing reference to this in his piece ‘The Old Poet, Dying’ in which a poet on his death bed asks the narrator about a certain ‘big shot’:

-  You know that poem of his?

Everyone knows that poem

Where he’s sitting indoors by the fire

And its snowing outside

And he suddenly feels a snowflake

On his wrist?

- That’s not going to be just any old snowflake,

now, is it?’.

(See Ange Mlinko's interview with Iain McGilchrist in 'POETRY' for more on this).

Poetry, then, is an over-signifying enterprise. As Don Paterson puts it, the reader enters into a kind of ‘contract’ with the poet in which they assume things within the poem have a connotative rather than merely denotative meaning. Thus we assume the poem’s images and metaphors are not arbitrary. If Paterson is right, when the reader approaches a poem, they are already primed to react associatively to it and this makes an emotional response more likely. It also explains why some readers may claim to have got ‘a feeling’ from a poem which they struggle to paraphrase. Much of this effect may be due to the activation of emotional memory systems, as distinct from declarative memory. 

Neuroscientists Lancker and Pachana (1998) have discussed the relatively impoverished nature of written speech when it comes to conveying emotion: we have no inflections of tone to help us determine what's really being meant (interestingly, in normal life, the tone that somebody says something in will override the content of what they are saying when the two are at odds). However, they believe that written speech can overcome this by using 'discourse units' (of which, of course, a poem is one). Once again, form and prosody makes the poem different from other types of writing; they help in invoke rather than merely evoke.

I might be a cynic as far as February 14th's concerned, but it wouldn't be quite right to end with a fearful piece of writing. I'll finish with one of my favourite love poems instead, a piece by Michael Donaghy which is particularly apt because it deals with the nature of perception. It also has something interesting to say, I think, about how the poem creates its own reality. It's simply called 'The Present':

For the present there is just one moon

though every level pond gives back another.

But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon,

perceived by astrophysicist and lover

is milliseconds old. And even that light's

seven minutes older than its source.

And the stars we think we see on moonless nights

are long extinguished. And of course

this very moment, as you read this line,

is literally gone before you know it.

Forget the here-and-now. We have no time

but this device of wantonness and wit.

Make me this present then: your hand in mine 

and we'll live out our lives in it.

Whippet love: do animals experience emotions?

Mirror, mirror, in the brain

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love and dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four-cornered...

So begins Sylvia Plath's 'Mirror', an iconic piece that symbolises our poetic obsession with our own reflections. There's certainly something compelling about the way they sit and, as Plath puts it, 'meditate on the opposite wall', the way they are blank until animated by a face. The way we never quite see ourselves as we are in them. Anyone who has read 'Alice Through The Looking Glass' as a child might have nurtured a secret belief that mirrors are the doorways to another world: when I was hardly tall enough to peer into my gran's mirrored bathroom cabinets, I used to angle the doors so that they showed multiple versions of the back of my head and I could believe the people in the glass weren't really me, but the small population of a different world that I could reach through and touch at any time.

Peter Redgrove and Paul Muldoon (amongst many others) have joined Plath in attributing sinister qualities to mirrors at times. Muldoon's 1983 version of an Irish poem by Michael Davitt has them murderous, saying of a father: 'it was the mirror took his breath away'. Later, the narrator admits:

I was afraid that it would sneak
down from the wall and swallow me up
in one gulp in the middle of the night.

Elsewhere in contemporary poetry, this obsession with mirroring finds expression in an interest in symmetries and doubling. That's certainly true of the work of John Burnside, illustrated best, perhaps by 'The Good Neighbour', the title poem of his 2005 collection, which imagines a strange, similar 'other' who the narrator has never met, going about his business quietly:

He watches what I watch, tastes what I taste:
on winter nights, the snow; in summer, sky.
He listens for the bird lines in the clouds
and, like that ghost companion in the old
explorers' tales, that phantom in the sleet,
fifth in a party of four, he's not quite there,
but not quite inexistent, nonetheless...

Eventually, this shadowy doppleganger sets his book down and checks the clock:

...cell by cell, a heartbeat at a time,
my one good neighbour sets himself aside,
and alters into someone I have known:
a passing stranger on the road to grief,
husband and father; rich man; poor man; thief.

No wonder we're obsessed with doubling: the discovery of mirror neurons in the brain (see Rizzolatti, 1992; 2004) has been one of the most eagerly seized-upon neurological findings of recent years. From initial studies with primates, Rizzolatti and colleagues were able to show that recognising and responding to the actions of others does not simply depend on visual interpretation and the activity of higher-order visual areas but on specific neurons that fire only when we see / imagine someone else performing an action. This generates as much neural activity as when we perform those actions ourselves. Though the bulk of the work on mirror neurons was done using monkeys, in humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

The implications of mirror neurons are, of course, vast. As Rizzolatti puts it, there's a strong possibility that such research might "show that the intuition of Adam Smith – that individuals are endowed with an altruistic mechanism that makes them share the fortunes” of others – is strongly supported by neurophysiological data. When we observe others, we enact their actions inside ourselves and we share their emotions." Thus "it is very plausible that the mirror mechanism played a fundamental role in the evolution of altruism." Scientists like V.S. Ramachandran have suggested that mirror neurons might be crucial to the development of Theory of Mind (our capacity to attribute certain states and intentions to others: a kind of 'mind-reading') and thus important in imitative language development, for example.

Of course, mirror neurons are something of a dream come true for literary theorists too, particularly those seeking to provide a cognitive framework for the way we read literature (cognitive poetics). They imply the possibility that we are so imaginatively engaged with a piece of writing that, on a neurological level, we really do see ourselves doing the things described in the work. A.S. Byatt published a fascinating essay in the TLS in 2006 in which she argued that the pleasure John Donne's poetry offers us is "the pleasure of extreme activity in the brain":  he makes his readers feel "the particular excitement of mental activity itself", concerning himself with the various schemas we have constructed to map our mental activities.

She argues that, in poems like 'To His Mistress Going To Bed', Donne inadvertently and instinctively appeals to what we now call 'mirror neurons', particularly with the couplet:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.

Byatt contends: "Donne's adverbs of a flow of movement...are an appeal to mirror neurones. And the mirror neurones that respond to "Before, behind, between, above, below" are not picture-making neurones, but locations on the body of both writer and reader. They are the more powerful because they are purely brief firings in the mind of its deep habit of imagining motion in the body, and linking these images to other emotions, to form concepts and map them with grammar." 

I'd say the phrase 'appeal to mirror neurons' is a little too strong. Poets do not deliberately 'appeal' to our cognitive capacities. They write poems. The effect of those poems may unconsciously depend on some aspects of neurological and cognitive function. All the same, it certainly suggests a compelling way of looking at a number of texts.

Does our cultural obsession with mirrors and mirror neurons come from a form of empathy or a kind of narcissism? Sometimes, there's no telling. The only way to conclude this discussion with a suitable level of ambiguity is to turn to one of Paul Muldoon's earliest (and, in my opinion, best) poems, 'Wind and Tree.' The poem begins by speculating

In the way that most of the wind

happens where there are trees,

Most of the world is centred

About ourselves.

In the wind, the trees are brought together until they seem to hold each other, until they are almost 'breaking each other' - this mixture of violence and tenderness seems intended to make us thing of human relationships. Muldoon concludes:

Often I think I should be like

The single tree, going nowhere,

Since my own arm could not and would not

Break the other. Yet by my broken bones

I tell new weather.

We're left none the wiser, but infinitely wiser at the same time, unsure if we're alone any more, grappling with someone else, or just wrestling with ourselves.