Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.
– Archimedes
I’m thinking of my own intellectual life, of course. And I have two examples in mind, 1) my realization that literary form was at the center of my interest in literature, and 2) my recent realization about the impossibility of direct brain-to-brain thought transmission.
Literary form
My first major piece of intellectual work was my 1972 MA thesis on “Kubla Khan.” That thesis focused on the poem’s form and in a sense set the direction for my career, and it led me to focus on computation and the cognitive sciences. In graduate school at SUNY Buffalo I wrote papers that were concerned with form, on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, “The Cat and the Moon”, and Wuthering Heights. I revised the Sir Gawain paper and published it at the time [1], and some years later material from the two Shakespeare papers was the basis of a publication [2]. I also published a paper about narrative form that based, in part, on my 1978 dissertation. So I was examining form from the beginning and yet I didn’t realize that it was the center of my focus.
It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that I realized that it was form I was looking at all along [4]. And that realization came about indirectly. In cruising the web I discovered that the Stanford Humanities Review had devoted an issue to cognitive science an literature. Herbert Simon had written an article setting forth his views [5] and 33 critics had responded. Obviously there was now a group of literary scholars interested in cognitive science. I read their stuff, went to a couple of conferences some of these people attended (Haj Ross’s Languaging conferences at North Texas) and realized that these people were not at all interested in the things I was.
First and foremost, their version of cognitive science did not include computation, which was central to my interest. It was in the course of thinking that through that I realized that they weren’t interested in form either, but I was. And now that I thought about it, form was central to my work in literature, wasn’t it? That puts we into the late 1990s, when I took a detour from literature to write a book on music. So it wasn’t until the early 2000s that I was able focus on form, when I returned to “Kubla Khan” and then “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” with articles in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, and culminating in 2006 article on literary morphology, where I put form front and center [6].
When it was there from the beginning, why did it take me so long to get there?
Brain-to-brain thought transmission
The second case is brain-to-brain thought transmission. I first took the matter up in January 2002 when I posted a thought experiment to Brainstorms, an online community established by Howard Rheingold. In that experiment I imagined we had the technology to do it without harming brain tissue, but how do we determine which neurons to link together in the respective brains? Since brains are unique there is no inherent unique mapping between neurons in two brains. This is unlike the situation with gross body parts, where one person’s right thumb corresponds to another person’s right thumb, and so forth.
It was until a decade later, in 2013, when I put the thought experiment online [7] that I imagined a much simpler and more direct counter argument: How does a brain tell where a given impulse comes from? Brains have no mechanisms for distinguishing between endogenous and exogenous impulses.
Why did it take me a decade to move from the complex argument to the simple one?
What’s going on?
I don’t really know. But it must be a function of how one’s mind is set-up when you first approach a problem. In the case of literary texts, literary criticism is about meaning; that’s what you’re taught in school. More than that, when we read any text for whatever purpose, we’re reading it for meaning. That’s the orientation. In literary study one learns about form, of course, but you don’t focus on it in an analytic or descriptive way.
So, to focus on form I had to break away from my prior training, but also from my natural inclination toward texts. And, come to think of it, this is not simply a matter of will, but of method as well. By the time I made the break I had several examples of close formal analysis from my own work. Those gave me a standpoint from which to make the break.
Is it the same with brain-to-brain thought transmission? That’s not a topic that normally comes up in the study of neuroscience. No one is examining what happens when you link two brains together so we don’t have any specific framework at all. What do we do? We apply a default framework of some kind? Where do we get that framework? Most likely from our experience with electrical and electronic circuits, especially in computers.
And that’s not a useful framework at all. In fact it gets in the way because brain circuitry is not at all like neural circuitry. Anyone who studies neuroscience knows this, of course, but they may not have the knowledge linked strongly to this kind of problem. In my case I had my conversations with Walter Freeman on the uniqueness of brains, and that focused my attention on neurons and on comparison between brains at the single neuron level. Thought was enough to bring me to the realization that we had no coherent and consistent way to link two brains together on the scale of 10s of millions of neurons.
But that wasn’t enough to take me the whole way to the realization that there is no way for brains to identify foreign spikes. But I did do something like that in my review of Auger’s Electric Meme, which I also wrote in 2002 [8]. But why did it take me a decade to connect the two together? What was my new standpoint?
References
[1] William Benzon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Semiotics of Ontology, Semiotica, 3/4, 1977, 267-293, https://www.academia.edu/238607/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight_and_the_Semiotics_of_Ontology/.
[2] William Benzon, At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21 (3): 259-279, 1998, https://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation.
[3] William Benzon, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 16( 2): 129-155, 1993, https://www.academia.edu/235114/The_Evolution_of_Narrative_and_the_Self.
[4] See these two blog posts, William Benzon, How I discovered the structure of “Kubla Khan” & came to realize the importance of description, blog post, New Savanna, October 9, 2017, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-i-discovered-structure-of-kubla.html; Things change, but sometimes they don’t: On the difference between learning about and living through [revising your priors and the way of the world], blog post, New Savanna, July 26, 2020, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2020/07/things-change-but-sometimes-they-dont.html.
[5] Herbert Simon, “Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach.” Stanford Humanities Review 4, No. 1, (1994) 1-26.
[6] William Benzon, Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.
[7] William Benzon, Why we'll never be able to build technology for Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication, blog post, New Savanna, September 26, 2018, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-well-never-be-able-to-build.html.
[8] William L. Benzon, Colorless Green Homunculi, Human Nature Review 2 (2002) 454-462, https://www.academia.edu/41181169/Colorless_Green_Homunculi.
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