Neuroaesthetics, Part 2: Fiction's Effects

Last week I posted a summary of Alexander Kafka's discussion, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, of Eric Kandel's newest book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House).  In this new study Kandel synthesizes his interests in visual art and neuroscience, producing what Kafka judges to be an important text in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. Not more than a week after I read Kafka's essay, I came across Annie Murphy Paul's short essay, "Your Brain on Fiction," in the New York Times' SundayReview section, and could see that she was in direct conversation with Kandel (and Kafka), and any number of other people talking about the relationship between art, the mind, consciousness and the illusion of "free will," and so many other related topics. Had my classes not already concluded I probably would have emailed this essay to all my students, because it in a concise and cogent fashion it walks through a number of fascinating points about what brain scientists are discovering concerning how fiction--and other non-documentary, narrative forms, including films--affects us.  As I like to say over and over, fiction--and art--is hardly frivolous, and as I feel I must point out over and over, the fictional works of a now deceased hack writer and philosopher and economist manquée have already profoundly and disastrously affected and constantly threatening to once again negative affect the lives of 310 million Americans, and potentially many more people around the globe. (The first person who posts the correct name of said fiction writer and at least one of said fiction writer's notorious and scarily popular books will receive a copy, sent by me, all postage paid, of either Nathanaël West's Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust* or Allen Ginsberg's Howl, since I have several extra copies of both books and will gladly send them to you free of charge!) I'll only add that a number of the people I note online breezily ranting about slashing funding for the humanities and arts appear to be deeply influenced by this person's work and unaware of the profound resulting irony.

But back to Annie Murphy Paul's essay, which talks about how brain scans are demonstrating the profound effects of what happens when we "read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters." Fictional narratives--and evocative metaphors, and other forms of figurative language occur in poetry, plays, creative nonfiction, and other literary forms--that is, "stimulate" the brain and can also change how we act in life. I have previously blogged about studies showing that fictional narratives in toto can both provoke empathy and aggression. I also discussed aspects of this operating at the granular level, primarily with metaphor, in my long review last July of James Geary's superlative survey I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). Whereas the other studies utilize psychological tests to gauge the effects of fictional texts, and Geary focuses on the relation between figuration and the mind, Murphy Paul's essay explores how descriptive words in narratives, as well as narratives as a whole, activate particular parts of the brain.

She notes that sensory words, in particular, spark not only the language-processing areas of the brain, but those that deal with those senses, so that "lavender," "cinnamon," and even "soap" make both brain regions fire up, and that according to a 2006 study in the journal NeuroImage, when researchers in Spain had participants read words with strong odor associations alongside more odor-neutral words, an MRI showed their olfactory cortex lighting up for the odor-associated words, but not for the neutral terms. "Coffee" yes, "chair" no. Similarly, last month, a team of Emory University researchers wrote in the journal Brain & Language that when when participants in a study they were conducting read metaphors involving texture--"a rough day"--their sensory cortex, the area of the brain responsible for perceiving touch, became active. Writes Murphy Paul, "Metaphors like 'The singer had a velvet voice' and 'He had leathery hands' roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like 'The singer had a pleasing voice' and 'He had strong hands,' did not."  And, lest you think this is only salient with the five senses, it turns out that descriptions of action also activated parts of the brain distinct from the language-processing centers; participants reading passages about characters grasping or kicking objects experienced activity in regions of the brain associated respectively with arm or movement.

So, you might be say: and? On one level, as Murphy Paul suggests, immersion in textual fictional narratives does entail a form of virtual experience that is hardly surprising to anyone who has ever written even a bad short story or read any fiction at all. On the other hand, it is significant that experimental methods are bearing this commonsense perception about the power of fiction out. The relationship between language, our minds and our bodies is not arbitrary. Let me say that again. The relationship between language, our minds and our bodies is not arbitrary.  Fiction, and literature more broadly, is powerful stuff.  Moreover, Cartesianism and all that has folowed in its wake (or the Platonism of The Symposium) really did get it wrong; the Plato of The Republic, like Aristotle in his Poetics, got it right. Indeed, to quote Murphy Paul, "The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated."  She also cites University of Toronto emeritus psychology professor Keith Oatley, whom I also cited in an earlier blog post, who argues that fiction offers a particularly powerful mode of simulation running in readers minds simular to ones running on computers.

Murphy Paul concludes her case by citing some of the material I previously pointed to regarding the effects of fiction on creating empathy--though she doesn't cite the aggression studies--and locates this in "novels" (though the studies show that movies have a similar effect, though many fictional TV shows appear not to), but I would argue that any kind of fictional, textual narratives, from short stories and tales up through full-length works, including ones purporting to be "nonfiction" but which are actually mostly made up, probably have the same effect. (Think James Frey.) She also makes a quick slide from "novels" and "fiction" in general to "great literature," which she avers "enlarges and improves us" (and that was part of Samuel Richardson's aim, as it has been many another fiction writer), but I think she's leaving out the fact that all kinds of fiction, including much that isn't "great" or barely "literature" at all, can have powerful effects on readers, for good, yes, and sometimes for ill, or sometimes with no evaluative appraisal possible. You have read the book, been affected in ways even you don't grasp, and how you act in the world, who's to say. The effects of the wretched novelist I describe above we know are hardly "enlarging or improving," unless selfishness, greed and antisociality are considered moral and social "goods". There too is a great deal of fiction, particularly from the 19th century on, that aims not towards moral uplift but towards simply getting the reader to think about the world, and words themselves. It is deeply ethical, even as it does not push us in one direction or another. I think of Moby Dick, say, or The Red and the Black, or the stories of Anton Chekhov and the countless writers, including this blogger, who toil in his wake.  And, what are the aims of those beloved and not-so-well-written Twilight novels, or the newest sensation, the Hunger Games trilogy?  Do we know or even need to know? Do the writers? Do readers? Do scholars? Because readers are not setting these works without things occurring between their ears....

One final point I'll make that links back to the first half of Murphy Paul's essay is this: I always stress to my students that attentiveness to language itself, including precision in description, but especially sensory description, use of figuration, varied syntax, and vivid verbs, alongside the other fundamentals--character, plot, voice, tone, dialogue, pacing, structure, beginnings and endings, etc.--are key to improving their work. I can see from their revisions that they grasp this, but in the future, I will use this article as another persuasive device. Stronger verbs than compound formations using the necessary but weak verbs "to be," "to have," "to get," etc., are often hallmarks of beginning writers, and it's thrilling to have confirmed what I try to convey, but also experience myself when reading fiction, mine or others: that our brains start firing when we read words that evoke the senses, or activate our mirror neurons, and immerse us in a world that at least initially exists only on the page but comes a real world to and in and for us--that is, if we or someone else can properly create it.

*A bonus point to the first person who posts the name of the popular cartoon character named after one of the key characters in this second, marvelous West novel.

Quarter's Over + Neuroaesthetics, Part 1: Eric Kandel

At 3 pm today, all grades had to be in, and mine were, so I officially have concluded the winter quarter! And what did winter quarter comprise, in addition to committee work: three fully enrolled (or two-and-one-half) courses, two with undergraduate (introductory and advanced theory and practice) fiction writers, the other with undergraduate (and graduate) literature and theory students; three honors theses (one I was advising, which was recommended for departmental honors!--congratulations, Steve!); one MFA thesis (that I advised, and which is now approved!--congratulations, Libby!); supervising, with colleagues in the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, a group of of excellent undergraduate poetry students who were working with high school poetry students; and guiding three brilliant undergraduate researchers whose summer projects I hope get funded. In ten weeks. I almost cannot believe that the quarter is now over, but this is spring break week, so I'll be trying to read a little for pleasure, watch not too much TV, get out and about, and prepare for the quarter that rolls in next Monday and other great things to come, about which I'll say more soon. I also am going to try to blog a bit more, so I hope I can manage a few more posts than 1-2 per week. We'll see.

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Several times over the past few years I've blogged about neuroscience and literature, and so two recent articles I came across snared my attention. In this post, I'll talk about the first, Alexander Kafka's Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Eric Kandel's Visions," used a review of a new book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House), by Kandel, the Nobel Laureate brain scientist and Columbia University professor, to discuss his contributions the burgeoning field of "neuroaesthetics," or the disciplinary nexus where brain and cognitive sciences and aesthetics, or theories of art, intersect. Kafka's piece opens with a snippet of Kandel's study--and let me state for the record that I do not agree with Kandel's essentializing view of women's affect, as expressed in this initial excerpt--to introduce the neuroscientist's attempt to read an image by the fin de siècle, Vienna Secessionist plastic artist Gustav Klimt, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1901, oil on canvas, Austrian Gallery Belvedere, above right), via certain formal and expressive features that connect to the "neurochemical cognitive circuitry" of you, the viewer. What do I mean? Quoth Kandel:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

Kandel's reading is full of speculation, but Kafka goes on to point out that cognitive scientists like Kandel, who began his career as a clinical psychologist before shifting into research on the vertebrate brain of the snail Aplysia, work for which he received his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, have increasingly been looking at the connections between aesthetics and the brain, through experimental testing methods like brain imaging and cognitive tests, in some key ways underpinning what artists have always known and argued--art matters, works in certain ways, and should not be taken or dismissed lightly, as it still too often is.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, oil on canvas, Neue Galerie)

Kandel is not the first brain scientist to write on what is becoming known as neuroaesthetics, but, Kafka says, he did set forth a research agenda of sorts in his 2006 memoir, In Search of Memory (W. W. Norton & Co.), asking, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?" His pursuit of answers to these questions over the last decade has resulted in his new study, which addresses these questions in relation to the work of three major Viennese Expressionist visual artists, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. (How covenient it must have been for his research to have the Neue Galerie so close!) Klimt's ornately patterned, carefully composed and exquisitely colored canvases, which I admit I find transfixing, serve as the means for Kandel to talk about a constellation of issues, from the historical to the discursive to the formal. Among Kandel's foci are the influence the anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl and similar figures from the Vienese and Central European world of this epoch had on all these artists, the circulation of ideas put into play by figures in the circle around Sigmund Freud, and the rich background of contemporary research on perception.  Importantly, Kandel also, Kafka says, makes a case for a negative-capability approach to scientific "reductionism," arguing that it does not diminish the power or beauty of the artworks to identify the neural foundations of how artworks work in and on our brains, but enriches our understanding of them.  Yet he is not attempting to collapse art and science into each other; according to the article, he cites the late biologist and author Stephen Jay Gould's desire for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."

Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest/Beech Forest
(1903, oil on canvas, Private Collection.)

Thus a newly developing field: neuroaesthetics, which is about a decade and half old, though its origins lie in the work of figures like Freud who, Kandel notes, did recognize a deep relationship between perception and affect but who not have the benefit of advanced experimental techniques we now do. Yet with those new techniques and findings, one of the points that Kandel, and peers like Semir Zeki of University College London appear to be making, is that scholarship in the arts should incorporate more of this material, a suggestion that may raise hackles among some humanities and arts scholars, as well as brain scientists, who find the search for neural correlates to aesthetic--affective, social and other kinds of experiences--to be problematic. In The Age of Insight, Kandel neurology and brain science in relation to visual art alone, but Zeki says that there is a "faculty of beauty" in the brain not dependent upon the "modality" through which its trasmitted, but which can be activated by a music, visuality, or both, as well as by other sources (including language, as I've written about before, and will continue in part 2 of this post) too. Ultimately, though, the implications go beyond aesthetics, towards a deeper understanding about human experience. We may not yet have an answer for the question What is art for? but we increasingly know, at levels artists have intuited but which scientists can now answer with ever greater clarity, at least with regard to our perceptions and emotions, How does art work?

Update: an unsurprising skeptic, the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton, on "The Brain Drain" (i.e., as the tagline says, "Neurosciences wants to be the answer to everything. It isn't"), in The Spectator.

Quotes: Nicholas Carr + Richard Holbrooke

"The constant distractedness that the Net encourages--the state of being, to borrow another phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets, "distracted from distraction by distraction"--is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion  of our mind that refreshes  our thinking when we're weighing a decision. The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.
     "In a 2005 interview, Michael Mezernich [Emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco] ruminated on the Internet's power to cause not just modest alterations but fundamental changes in our mental makeup. Nothing that 'our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability,' he described the Net as the latest in a series of 'modern cultural specializations' that 'contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at [and that] the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.' He concluded that our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure.'"--Nicholas Carr, from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 119-120. (H/t and thanks to Lisa Moore)

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Could the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) have put things more simply and candidly as his last words as he was being wheeled into surgery? Is there anything concerning the ongoing foreign policy disasters, warmaking, failed nation-building, and budget busting to fill the coffers of the military-industrial complex that this current president (and any future ones) need pay more attention to? Here's a suggestion: why don't each of us print out this statement, properly quoted and attributed, on a postcard (to save money) or a piece of paper, and send it to our Congresspeople? (We might even consider sending one at least once a week for the month of January, as a wakeup call to them. Perhaps I'll organize this on the other blog, and let's see how this goes...)

""You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." - Richard Holbrooke