3QD Catch-Up: Affective Technology, Georgia on My Mind

Whenever I publish a new article at 3 Quarks Daily I also publish a somewhat shorter post here at New Savanna. That post links to the 3QD post and comments on it, or perhaps adds some further thinking. But that doesn’t always happen. I’ve missed giving notice for my 3QD articles in July, August, and September. 

The articles for July and August continue the series on Affective Technology that I began in June. That first article was about Poems and Stories. In July I published Emotion Recollected in Tranquility. The phrase is from Wordsworth: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” That is, there is an emotion that we experience at some moment in time. Then, at a later time, when we’re doing something else, or perhaps nothing beyond lazing about as we let our mind wander as it will, that emotion calls to us. We hear it, take hold of it in words, and bring it back, creating a poem in the process. But before that I talk about state-dependent memory, the idea that our ability to remember something depends, in part, on our mental state at the time of remembering. Remembrance works best is there our current mental state resonates with our mental state during the original experience; this resonance is (hypothesized to be) a function of neurochemistry. But what if you can’t establish that resonance? Does that mean that your memory of that experience is gone, at least until you can establish resonance? I conclude by discussing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit.” 

That sets us up for the third article in the series, Coherence in the Self, which I published in August. If our memories are neurochemically sensitive, that implies that our ability to remember the events of our lives depends, in part, on establishing neurochemical resonance with past states of mind and the events that engendered. If we can’t establish that resonance, then those events are lost. Our autobiographical self is shattered, a topic I take up with a discussion of dissociated identity disorder (DID), aka “split personality.” I then go on to argue that, by presenting us with a wide range of emotions, literary texts (and, by implication, other expressive culture) help us to construct neurochemical “scaffolding” that helps us keep in touch with our past. This strikes me as more fundamental than the (moral) improvement folks are forever attributing to (good) literature, though there may be a bit of that as well. Who knows? After discussing play I conclude considering Kenneth Burke on how we use literary texts to make sense of our lives. 

September’s post is a bit different. I discuss five recordings of “Georgia on My Mind”: the original by Hoagy Carmichael, Ray Charles’s 1960 version, a harmonically-dense version by Jacob Collier, a beautiful jazz rendition by Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), and I conclude by another jazz version, this one by trumpeter Lew Soloff. That video is why I wrote this post. Notice that he begins with an a cappella trumpet line he took from the intro to the Ray Charles version. 

 

Soloff’s style is interesting. It’s not swing, bebop, hard bop or cool, but it’s not modal or free either. In a way, it’s a kind of 1960s mainstream, but extended and opened-up (such as Soloff’s passage with only his mouthpiece or his use of the plunger mute) with a freedom that hardly existed before free jazz. That’s what makes it so interesting, that and Soloff’s soulfulness.

Pixar's "Inside Out 2" is helping autistic people understand their emotions

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kerry Magro (@autisticprofessionalspeaker)

Affective Technology @ 3QD

I’ve decided to do a three-part series at 3 Quarks Daily. The topic is affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. The first article is now posted:

Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/06/affective-technology-part-1-poems-and-stories.html

In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. The idea is simple. Although we do not have direct control over our emotions, that is, we cannot will them into existence nor extinguish or diminish them at all, we can manipulate them indirectly through art. In this series, at least in the first two articles, I’ll be concerned with literary texts.

The second article has a working title: Affective Technology, Part 2: Emotion recollected in tranquility. The title phrase is from Wordsworth’s well-known preface to the Lyrical Ballads:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

I expand on Wordsworth’s idea with two ideas: 1) Warren McCulloch’s concept of behavioral mode, which is a theory about the function of the reticular activating system, one of the oldest portions of the nervous system, and 2) an idea from the early 1970s, Charles Tart’s concept of state-specific learning. I illustrate this with an analysis of Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnet 129, Th’Expense of Spirit, which depicts the anguish of a man who cannot prevent himself from abusing women sexually even though he is inevitably overcome with recrimination afterward.

In the third article, Affective Technology, Part 3: Coherence in the Self, I’ll open with dissociative identity disorder (DID), in which an individual mind is fractured in two or more quasi-independent personalities. I will argue that that possibility is inherent in the structure and processes of a nervous system that operates according to McCulloch’s model. Artistic works, however, help us keep a unified personality by providing an affectively ‘neutral’ ground – the Wordsworthian space of tranquil recollection – in which the various modes can coexist.

Some of these ideas have been worked out in further detail in the following papers:

Lust in Action: An Abstraction, Language and Style 14, 1981, 251-270, https://www.academia.edu/7931834/Lust_in_Action_An_Abstraction.

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.

Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004, https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime-Tree_Bower_My_Prison_.

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility [affective technology]

I originally published this in The Valve in May of 2009, where it is followed by an interesting conversation. Keith Oatley elaborated at OnFiction, citing relevant empirical studies.

* * * * *

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

—William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

In his 1997 best-seller, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker suggested that, however important art may be to humans, it is not part of our specifically biological nature:

We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third. (p. 525)

This triggered a backlash of arguments asserting that, no, the arts are not mere mental cheesecake, they are an essential component of human nature, our biological nature.

I was somewhat bemused by the whole fracas. While I have a long standing interest in the neural basis of the arts, I find thinking about biological adaptation to be frustratingly difficult, something I’d prefer to ignore. My editor for Beethoven’s Anvil, William Frucht, however, thought otherwise. And so I dutifully joined the parade of those who shilled for the biological bona fides of art and argued that music was indeed biologically adaptive. Specifically, music reduced anxiety in the group and thereby made it more fit to encounter real challenges and dangers. More recently, and inspired by Pinker's own The Stuff of Thought, I argued that story-telling allows us to share perceptions, feelings, and values that we cannot talk about.

I now have another proposal to offer, one based in a line of thinking I began entertaining in the mid-1970s when I learned about state-dependent memory. I first learned about state dependence when I read a review of the literature on altered states of consciousness in which Roland Fischer reported an experiment originally performed by D. Goodwin (“The Cartography of Inner Space” in Hallucinations, Siegel and West, eds. 1975, p. 199). Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (Searching for Memory, 1996, p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence.

 

Given that motivation and emotion are mediated by over a hundred neurotransmitters and neuromodulators (Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 1998), the state dependent nature of memory has profound implications for our ability to recall our personal experience. As I have previously argued:

If records of personal experience are [biochemically biased], especially in the case of strongly emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's [biochemical state], it is still the same apple.

If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? That is to say, how does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience?

I suggest that story-telling is a way of accomplishing this. Parents tell stories to children in a setting that is comfortable and safe and those stories are generally calibrated with a sense of what interests and pleases the child, but is not too frightening. Children hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. They are allowed to experience a wide range of emotional behavior in a context where they are safe.

In the course of arguing that literary works trigger emotionally-charged personal memories, Patrick Colm Hogan tells about a two-old boy’s use of the Peter Rabbit story (The Mind and Its Stories, 2003, p. 67):

Kurt . . . hears the Peter Rabbit story and becomes fascinated with it. He listens to the story repeatedly. He then retells the story, such that “real-life events that Kurt had experienced . . . in the company of his mother and grandmother . . . are attributed to Peter Rabbit and his mother.” The fact that Kurt integrates his own memories into his retellings of the story – his explicit “personalization” of these stories . . . suggests that memories played a part in his enthusiastic response to the story initially.

Yes. But also, and in view of biochemical reality, I suggest that the story gives him a way of accessing and organizing those memories.

And not only young children, but teens and adults experience stories in ways that ensure communal approval. In oral cultures, stories are experienced among friends and familiars. One hears the grunts and murmurs of approval of our fellows, the common laughter, but also the communal sighs of disma; these mingle together and establish the story itself as a good and necessary pleasure. In literate cultures we may read stories in private, but we discuss them among our friends, or in school. Theatrical performance, movies and television are frequently experienced in the company of others. In one way or another, literary experience is institutionalized as shared communal experience.

My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.

Thus we do not have to be sexually aroused to recall occasions of sexual arousal, nor do we have to be have to be angry or grieving to recall occasions of great anger or the darkest grief. The stories we have learned in the company of others have created a “level playing field” in the mind, neutral ground from which we can survey the full range of human experience. If we can, perhaps in private, step back from the living of life to recall and examine our feelings and actions, that is because our experiences with stories have created a rich weave of mental prototypes through which we can recall and interrogate even the most densely emotional of our experiences. Conversely, if we cannot do this, then how can we construct a coherent view of ourselves? If the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole? Such a life would seem to be one of almost constant dissociation (cf. my article on the self in life and fiction).

This view is different in emphasis from the common notion that stories are useful because they allow us to gather and share information. My argument is not about the usefulness of the information enfolded in stories, but about how the social situation of story telling facilitates our ability to recall incidents of a kind captured in stories. The usefulness of that information is of little or no account if we cannot access that information except from within very specific states of mind. Story-telling creates a mental arena in which we can review and become self-consciously aware of the full range of our feelings and behaviors, where we can see them in relation to one another.

* * * * *

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider the implications of this idea for the value of psychoanalysis both as therapeutic practice and as a theory of mind.

Literature and Emotion [affective technology]

I'd originally posted this back in 2011, but I'm bumping it to the top 1) on general principle, and 2) because it's relevant to some of my current thinking about literature and our experience of it.

 

A correspondent recently brought up the topic of emotional response to literature. It’s an important topic, one I’ve thought about from time to time, but I don’t have any particular insight into it. Still, I’ve put together a few thoughts.

First, an excerpt my review of William Flesch, Comeupance (Harvard UP 2007). Flesch introduces the notion of vicarious experience, which is the most interesting idea on emotion in literature that I’ve read since Susanne Langer’s more general idea of virtual experience. Then I consider a childhood practice by way of looking at a section from Tom Sawyer, where Tom deals with negative feelings by running away to become a pirate. Finally, I have abstracts about and links to two old posts, originally the The Valve (now defunct), but now copied to New Savanna.

Vicarious Experience: William Flesch

Excerpted from Altrusim, Gossip, and the Vicarious Apprehension of Human Living, Twentieth-Century Literature 55.4, Winter 2009, 629-633.

* * * * *

[Flesch’s] point is that, when we experience fiction, we monitor the lives of fictional characters using the same bio-behavioral “equipment” we use in monitoring our fellows as we keep “score” of their “credits” and “debits” in the “group account.” The need to monitor our fellows gives us a vicarious interest in their actions, and that vicarious interest is emotionally charged.

Flesch develops this notion of vicarious experience through reference to David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in particular, and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The anger we feel upon witnessing transgression comes not through some identification with the victim or victims of the transgression, but belongs to the affective component of our social monitoring system. This anger is, in effect, a sentiment on behalf of the group, not on behalf of any particular individuals. The pleasure we feel in just punishment or just reward, Flesh argues, is similarly vicarious and on behalf of the group, not some particular individual or individuals.

How do we monitor our fellows? There is direct observation, a behavioral mode we share with other animals. But we can also exchange tales about them, we can gossip. Flesch thus argues that fiction is, in effect, gossip about imaginary people.

To my mind, the most important consequence of this position has to do with our emotional engagement in the lives of literary characters. As Flesch remarks in a footnote criticizing “orthodox” literary Darwinists: “they treat literary characters as motivated by the same things that motivate real humans, rather than as representations to whom real humans react. It’s our reactions that psychology can analyze, not the actions of literary characters” (p. 231). Flesch thus does away with the nasty problems inherent in the vague notion of “identification” that he regards as being grounded in a mistaken conception of imitation. Given that vicarious interest “is an irreducible and primary attitude that we take toward others” (p. 15) Flesh goes on to argue that identification, such as it is, must in fact depend on our vicarious experience of a character.

Affective Technology: Mark Twain

Excerpted from my essay, Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November 2004, downloadable from SSRN. I'd be like to hear from anyone who employed this strategy at one time or who knows children who've done so.

* * * * *

When I was young my parents would punish me by sending me to my room. Not only was I thus unable to continue doing whatever it was that I had been doing, but I was also separated from the world in general and, of course, separated from my parents in particular. While confined to my room I would feel aggrieved and brood for a bit and sooner or later imagine a scenario in which I had died somehow. I would continue the story by imagining my parents grieving for me, and saying how they had wronged me, but it's too late now because I'm dead. By then I would start feeling better.

This, of course, is a form of play, though it is not the sort of thing that typically comes to mind when we think of childhood play. But play it is, for it required me to imagine myself in a role quite different from my actual situation. It also required that I imagine a situation in which my parents were as bereft as I felt, thereby making me superior to them.

I have no idea how common this particular mood-altering play scenario is, but something like it seems to have informed Chapters 13 through 15 of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. While the incidents in those chapters may have been based on Twain's childhood experience, those chapters are themselves works of fiction. We can read them in an hour or so, but they depict fictional events that transpired over a course of days.

As Chapter 13 opens, Tom is feeling aggrieved. His aunt had recently punished him for a prank he had played on the family cat and Becky Thatcher was ignoring his romantic overtures.

Tom's mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame him for the consequences -- why shouldn't they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.

Tom encounters his friend Joe Harper, who is of a similar mind, and they join up with Huck Finn and run away to Jackson's Island, where they intend to live a fine life as pirates.

Late in their second day they hear canon shot over the water. Tom concludes that the townsfolk suspected the boys had drowned and so were trying to bring their bodies to the surface. That night—we are now in Chapter 15—Tom slips back to town and sneaks into his house. There he listens to his Aunt Polly and to Joe's mother commiserating over their loss, affirming that, though a bit devilish, their boys were good at heart. These words had a powerful effect on Tom:

Tom was snuffling, now, himself — and more in pity of himself than anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy — and the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.

Tom then returned to the island in time for breakfast and "recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done."

Though I do not recall the details of any of the childhood fantasies I employed to restore my sense of well-being, I rather suspect that Twain's three chapters are more richly realized than anything I managed to conjure up. The most interesting aspect of Twain's story is that the boys ran away to become pirates. That is, within the means available to them, they did their best to become free and autonomous actors rather than being bound to adults in the role of a child. It was from within that bit of adventuresome pretense that Tom overheard the heart-warming conversation. Though sorely tempted, he did not immediately break from his pretended autonomy. Rather he returned to the island and thus afforded Twain the pleasure of extending this theme through four more chapters worth of variations.

Seven Sacred Words: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker has been a severe critic of literary studies. I open the letter by showing that arguments he makes in the final two chapters of The Stuff of Thought can be fashioned into an account of why literature is so important to us. I go on to give a brief and sympathetic account of what’s happened in literary studies since the 1950s. Pinker gives a brief reply. Think of this as a companion piece to my note on emotion recollected in tranquility.

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility

This is another take on why literature is so important. It gives a neural interpretation of Wordsworth’s famous characterization of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility and argues that emotionally charged literature facilitates the creation of an emotionally neutral mental “space” in which memories of all kinds can be evoked. Think of this is a companion piece to my open letter to Pinker.

Literature as Affective Technology

I was hanging out in the Twitterverse last week and became drawn into a discussion, as sometimes happens. The discussion was about computers and narrative occasioned by this tweet from Ted Underwood:

The latest issue of Narrative from @ohiostatepress includes a dialogue about AI and narrative between Angus Fletcher, Jon Chun, and @katelelkins. https://t.co/WaW63f6SsE pic.twitter.com/TtLdcRr5K0

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) February 8, 2022

I blitzed my way through the three articles and had a rather negative reaction to the whole conversation, which I registered in a post, Can computers do narrative?

Since the whole business was tipped off by Angus Fletcher’s initial article – which struck me as being enthusiastically confused about computers and nervous systems – I went cruising the web to see what I could find out about him. I read some things, both by and about him, and discovered that he’d recently published, to extravagant praise, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. It’s a general interest book (that is, non-academic) that argues and attempts to demonstrate that literature interacts with the nervous system in a way that helps us to accomplish beneficial imaginative and emotional work. I note, however, that some regard the book as a self-help conjob. Fletcher can come across that way.

But this project makes sense to me. Kenneth Burke anticipated it in “Literature as Equipment for Living” from The Philosophy of Literary Form (1973, but originally collected in 1941 and published in the 30s). Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that (p. 298):

[…] surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one's campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”

I’ve been there myself, most obviously in a long essay about one of Coleridge’s Conversation Poems:

Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime-Tree_Bower_My_Prison_

I’ve appended the section entitled “Affective Technology,” where I outline my basic approach, drawing on a repeated affective strategy from my childhood, on the incident in Tom Sawyer where Tom sneaks back home to overhear his aunt talking with her friends about his apparent death by drowning, and, of course, on Coleridge’s poem.

* * * * *

When Coleridge published “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (henceforth LTB) he presented it with a short preface:

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

In a general way, it tells much the same story he'd told Robert Southey three years before. As Kathleen Wheeler has pointed out (1981, p. 146) there are discrepancies between the two versions. For example, the July visit of the 1797 letter has been displaced to June in the 1800 preface and the second-day accident of 1797 has been misplaced to the first day in 1800. But the central point remains the same: Coleridge was separated from his friends by an accident. They were able to go walking about in Nature while Coleridge was not. He wrote the poem while his friends were out and about and he was confined to the garden.

But why did he write the preface at all? Wheeler suggests that “the most fundamental function of the preface is to establish some relation between the poem as art and the world of reality” (146). I agree with that, though I find the implications she draws from that to be a bit over complex. Coleridge was simply telling us: That's how it happened, what it says in the poem. My friends deserted me; I was feeling alone; I started thinking about what they might be seeing, started composing a poem on that topic, and, all of a sudden, I was feeling better.

The poem itself says nothing about poetry; it simply reports the poet's thoughts and feelings of an evening. In contrast, the preface does talk about poetry, or rather, about the poem to which it is affixed. By saying that Coleridge himself, like the person who speaks the poem, was alone one evening while his friends went for a walk, the preface indicates to us that the act of writing the poem played some role in the process that brought about a change in his mood. In brief, Coleridge is telling as that poetry is affective technology, a mind-altering activity.

There is nothing strange in that, at least I do not myself find it strange. I would assume that notion is comfortable and familiar to professional students of literature, but I do not really know, because the practice of critical "reading" tends to focus on meaning, not feeling. We may talk about what characters in novels, plays, and poems feel; but we tend not to talk about what readers or play-goers feel, neither in specific (this or that person) or in general terms.

I do not see any way radically to change that situation. Though I will shortly offer a minor bit of personal revelation, I have no interest in calling for a more confessional criticism. Some people can do that well, but I do not think that such writing is a useful starting point for an objective understanding of the mechanisms that underlie this affective technology, though it may provide raw data for such study. I do think that we should pay more attention to just how people actively use literature to change their moods, much like musicologists Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, Charlie Keil, My Music (Crafts, Cavicchi and Keil 1993), and others (cf. Juslin and Sloboda 2001) have been doing. But I am not going to argue for that kind of work in this essay, as it isn't specific enough for my present intellectual purposes. I am more interested in recent brain-imaging studies that reveal deep brain activity in response to music, Anne Blood's work for example (1999, 2001, 2003), or Semir Zeki's work on romantic love (Bartels and Zeki 2000) and beauty (Kawabata and Zeki 2004).

The conceptual distance between any of the various conventional vocabularies of literary analysis and that of brain imaging is, alas, more of a canyon than a gap and I do not propose to close it. But I can toss a few cables across the canyon in hope that others will find them useful in constructing a bridge. Thus I will use John Bowlby's work on attachment to conceptualize the relationship between mother and infant. Bowlby was trained as a psychoanalyst, but came to reconstruct the dynamics of that relationship in terms of behavioral biology and informatics. I will then propose simple neural relationships in which to think about Winnicott's work on transitional objects and elaborate on the model by drawing on L. S. Vygotsky's account of language learning. That will lead us directly to Norman Holland's recent work on the neuro-psychoanalytic foundations of literary experience.

Loss and Restoration

When I was young my parents would punish me by sending me to my room. Not only was I thus unable to continue doing whatever it was that I had been doing, but I was also separated from the world in general and, of course, separated from my parents in particular. While confined to my room I would feel aggrieved and brood for a bit and sooner or later imagine a scenario in which I had died somehow. I would continue the story by imagining my parents grieving for me, and saying how they had wronged me, but it's too late now because I'm dead. By then I would start feeling better.

This, of course, is a form of play, though it is not the sort of thing that typically comes to mind when we think of childhood play. But play it is, for it required me to imagine myself in a role quite different from my actual situation. It also required that I imagine a situation in which my parents were as bereft as I felt, thereby making me superior to them.

I have no idea how common this particular mood-altering play scenario is, but something like it seems to have informed Chapters 13 through 15 of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. While the incidents in those chapters may have been based on Twain's childhood experience, those chapters are themselves works of fiction. We can read them in an hour or so, but they depict fictional events that transpired over a course of days.

As Chapter 13 opens, Tom is feeling aggrieved. His aunt had recently punished him for a prank he had played on the family cat and Becky Thatcher was ignoring his romantic overtures.

Tom's mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame him for the consequences -- why shouldn't they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.

Tom encounters his friend Joe Harper, who is of a similar mind, and they join up with Huck Finn and run away to Jackson's Island, where they intend to live a fine life as pirates.

Late in their second day they hear canon shot over the water. Tom concludes that the townsfolk suspected the boys had drowned and so were trying to bring their bodies to the surface. That night—we are now in Chapter 15—Tom slips back to town and sneaks into his house. There he listens to his Aunt Polly and to Joe's mother commiserating over their loss, affirming that, though a bit devilish, their boys were good at heart. These words had a powerful effect on Tom:

Tom was snuffling, now, himself — and more in pity of himself than anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy — and the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.

Tom then returned to the island in time for breakfast and "recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done."

Empathy and music

Original Research

Wallmark Z, Deblieck C, and Iacoboni M
Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening
Front. Behav. Neurosci., 06 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00066

Abstract  

The social cognitive basis of music processing has long been noted, and recent research has shown that trait empathy is linked to musical preferences and listening style. Does empathy modulate neural responses to musical sounds? We designed two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to address this question. In Experiment 1, subjects listened to brief isolated musical timbres while being scanned. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to excerpts of music in four conditions (familiar liked (FL)/disliked and unfamiliar liked (UL)/disliked). For both types of musical stimuli, emotional and cognitive forms of trait empathy modulated activity in sensorimotor and cognitive areas: in the first experiment, empathy was primarily correlated with activity in supplementary motor area (SMA), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and insula; in Experiment 2, empathy was mainly correlated with activity in prefrontal, temporo-parietal and reward areas. Taken together, these findings reveal the interactions between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of empathy in response to musical sounds, in line with recent findings from other cognitive domains.

Introduction

Music is a portal into the interior lives of others. By disclosing the affective and cognitive states of actual or imagined human actors, musical engagement can function as a mediated form of social encounter, even when listening by ourselves. It is commonplace for us to imagine music as a kind of virtual “persona,” with intentions and emotions of its own (Watt and Ash, 1998; Levinson, 2006): we resonate with certain songs just as we would with other people, while we struggle to identify with other music. Arguing from an evolutionary perspective, it has been proposed that the efficacy of music as a technology of social affiliation and bonding may have contributed to its adaptive value (Cross, 2001; Huron, 2001). As Leman (2007) indicates: “Music can be conceived as a virtual social agent … listening to music can be seen as a socializing activity in the sense that it may train the listener’s self in social attuning and empathic relationships.” In short, musical experience and empathy are psychological neighbors.

The concept of empathy has generated sustained interest in recent years among researchers seeking to better account for the social and affective valence of musical experience (for recent reviews see Clarke et al., 2015; Miu and Vuoskoski, 2017); it is also a popular topic of research in social neuroscience (Decety and Ickes, 2009; Coplan and Goldie, 2011). However, the precise neurophysiological relationship between music processing and empathy remains unexplored. Individual differences in trait empathy modulate how we process social stimuli—does empathy modulate music processing as well? If we consider music through a social-psychological lens (North and Hargreaves, 2008; Livingstone and Thompson, 2009; Aucouturier and Canonne, 2017), it is plausible that individuals with a greater dispositional capacity to empathize with others might also respond to music-as-social-stimulus differently on a neurophysiological level by preferentially engaging brain networks previously found to be involved in trait empathy (Preston and de Waal, 2002; Decety and Lamm, 2006; Singer and Lamm, 2009). In this article, we test this hypothesis in two experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In Experiment 1, we explore the neural correlates of trait empathy (as measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index) as participants listened to isolated instrument and vocal tones. In Experiment 2, excerpts of music in four conditions (familiar liked/disliked, unfamiliar liked/disliked) were used as stimuli, allowing us to examine correlations of neural activity with trait empathy in naturalistic listening contexts.

News Article Reporting the Research

Milla Bengtsson, People With Higher Empathy Process Music Differently In The Brain, Reliaware, June 12, 2018. From the article:

Individuals who deeply grasp the pain or happiness of others also differ from others in the way their brains process music, a new study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA suggests.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

Culture as a Force in History: the United States of the Blues

I have long thought of cultural evolution as a driving force in human history, perhaps even as THE most important driving force, but making an argument on the issue is difficult do in an intellectual environment where cultural evolution is hardly even recognized as an important historical process. At least one problem has to do with our conception of historical actors. There is, of course, the Great Man or Great Woman – gender makes no different though the historical record is biased toward men – who discovers things, leads armies and states, and so forth. We’ve got city-states, nation states, and empires, large commercial concerns, and social classes, all historical actors we know how to conceptualize. But culture? Other than the Great Culture Makers, male and female, where are the actors and what do they do?

The actors in cultural evolution are, of course, people, all of us. And what we do is that we try to live as good a life as possible. Collectively, we constitute the culture, and our actions, in the large and over the long term, constitute cultural evolution.

American Popular Music in the 20th Century

Back in the previous millennium, near the end, I did make one explicit argument about culture as a historical force. The argument was not a general one but rather was about a specific set of cultural formations, American popular music in the 20th century. And I didn’t frame it as an argument about cultural evolution, but simply as an argument about music: Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues (in Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies, Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed., Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 189-233, 1997).

I‘m not going to try to summarize the whole argument, but I’d like to look at enough to give a sense of the terms of the argument. Here’s the abstract:

European-American racism has used African America as a screen on which to project repressed emotion, particularly sex and aggression. One aspect of this projection is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express through music from European roots. Thus twentieth century expressive culture in the United States has been dominated by an evolving socio-cultural system in which blacks create musical forms and whites imitate them. It happened first with jazz, and then with rock and roll. The sexual revolution and the recent florescence of blacks in television and movies suggests that white America has had some success in using black American expressive forms to cure its affective ills. The emergence of rap, from African America, and minimalism, from European America, indicates that this system is at a point where it is ready to leave Western expressive culture behind as history moves to the next millennium.

The fundamental dynamic is thus psycho-social We’re dealing with psychology at the individual level–for that’s where psychology takes place, in individuals–but where certain characteristics are typical of whole groups. In a section on the cultural psychodynamics of racism I sketch that out in some detail:

Freud argued that, in general, much behavior is driven by unconscious desires. Moving beyond the individual psyche, he argued, perhaps most explicitly in Civilization and Its Discontents (1962), that Western civilization is built on a foundation of emotional repression. Racism is a society-wide manifestation of that repression. The basic point is simple: many of the characteristics racists have attributed to blacks are simply the repressed contents of their own hearts and minds which they have projected onto African Americans (Baldwin, 1963, p. 95 ff.; Gay, 1993. pp. 69 ff.; Morrison, 1992, pp. 37 ff., 51-52; Young-Bruehl 1996). In particular, the heightened sexual desire and potency, and the greater emotionality, which whites have insisted on seeing in blacks has more to do with unconscious white desire than it does with black behavior.

In an essay originally published in 1947, Talcott Parsons (1964, pp. 298-322) explored the dynamics of aggression, arguing that Western society is so structured that aggressive impulses are often generated in situations where they cannot be directly expressed, creating a need for ethnic and national "Others" who can be scapegoated. Calvin Hernton explored the sexual dynamics of racism in a study originally published in 1965 (and reprinted in 1988). Erik Erikson made a general theoretical statement in the final chapter of his Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968, pp. 295-320). He argued that no culture has been able to adapt the full biological range of human desire and feeling to its patterns. Each culture cultivates some characteristics at the expense of others. The neglected characteristics may then coalesce into a negative identity which members of a given society will often project or displace onto members of some other society or culture. Joel Kovel (1984) has undertaken an investigation of American racism in which he argues for different psychological processes in the North and the South. Most recently, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996) has undertaken a psycho-social analysis of prejudice–including anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia in addition to racism–in which she identifies various kinds of racism and attempts to identify the historical conditions which give rise to them...

However, if the lynching is the prototypical scene of racist violence, there is a contrasting prototypical scene of racism, one which is not dominated by physical violence. Consider those nightclubs, such as the Cotton Club, where the performers were black but the clientele was exclusively white. Why did all those white people seek black entertainment? No doubt most of them came for the erotic floorshow, but some of them were interested in the music. Why? The question is not a new one, and the answer is obvious--in the same way that the applicability of Freud to racism is so obvious that it has been little discussed. European Americans have liked African-American music because it has expressive powers which are lacking in European and European-American music (Crouch, 1990b, p 83; Keil, 1966, p. 49; Small, 1987, p. 154; Williams, 1983, p. 254). In particular, as we've seen above, African-American music is comfortable with sexuality, while European music is not. People may have come to the Cotton Club to see black bodies enact jungle pseudo-rituals on stage; but they left with the expressive sound of African American music boring into their brains….

Unfortunately the psychodynamics of racism doesn't end here. The need for projective psychological relief is an equal opportunity affirmative action agent of social destruction. Black Americans have demonized whites even as they have been demonized. The Black Muslims provide the most obvious example, with Elijah Muhammad's story of the evil Mr. Yacub who created a race of “blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils--savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees.” These white devils then turned a black “heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting” (Haley, 1965, p. 167; for different examples, see e.g. Crouch, 1990c, pp. 200-202, 231-244; Early, 1989, pp. 199-207; Young-Bruehl, 1996, 481 ff.). Considering that African Americans have legitimate grievances against European Americans, the problem of sorting out the justified anger from the projective demonization seems hopeless. From that hopeless confusion Dr. Martin Luther King, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz–aka Malcolm X, Detroit Red, Malcolm Little–struggled to discriminate right from wrong and thereby exercised moral and political leadership which gave hope to millions.

Given that as a fundamental psycho-cultural dynamic of American culture and society, the logic of the cultural argument becomes obvious. But listening to and then imitating black music, with its obvious sensuality, white America becomes more comfortable with its sexuality and therefor has less need of projection as a mechanism of psychic relief. The largest part of the article then traces out the back and forth dynamic in which popular music gave expression to sexuality and then, with hip-hop, anger.

Literature, Emotion, and Unity of Being

I've uploaded a new working paper. Here's the SSRN link:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2495398

Abstract and introduction are below.

* * * * *

Abstract: Unity of being is both an aesthetic and an ethical ideal and it is about organizing desire, action, and emotion into a pattern of overall coherence. Such patterns are necessarily culture specific and somewhat arbitrary in their disposition of underlying biological materials. Stories involving often painful and embarrassing aspects of human behavior provide a means of publicly acknowledging and affirming the bewildering diversity of our behavior. Thus publically affirmed, these nonfictions are the means of constructing the neural 'scaffolding' on which we recall and organize the events of our lives.

Introduction: Unity of Being Through Literary Experience

When I first introduced the term “unity of being” it was a placeholder. I needed a concept and I knew why I needed that concept, but I didn’t quite know to define or discuss it. So I named it and talked around it. This set of notes is an initial attempt to discuss unity of being.

Unity of being is central to my thinking about literature and my thinking about the disciplines of literary criticism, for it is at the border between naturalist criticism and ethical criticism, connecting and dividing them at the same time. One central task for the naturalist critic is to infer a culture’s realization of unity of being through an examination of its literary texts. But the naturalist critic is not in the business of asserting what unity of being should be, not for his or her own culture, much less for any other culture.

That is the job of the ethical critic. What is beautiful? What is the good life? What texts advance the good and the beautiful, and why? Those are the central pursuits of ethical criticism. They are about how one should achieve unity of being.

A given critic may, of course, practice both naturalist and ethical criticism. But they are different disciplines with different requirements. We must learn to make the separation so that we can deliberately choose to function in the naturalist or the ethnical mode, as the occasion demands.

Two Meanings

When I introduced the term “unity of being” in a post entitled Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism I gave it two meanings, more or less, as follows:

In real time, unity of being is, well, unity of being. I don’t mean to be perverse, but I don’t know of any general term, though perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow will do, or the phrase “being in the moment.” As far as I know flow always happens spontaneously in that we cannot flip the mind’s flow switch at will—I rather doubt there’s such a thing as a flow-switch, rather it’s a matter of balance. But we can do things that will increase the likelihood that the mind will flip into flow.

One of those things is to read, in the basic ordinary sense of the word, a literary text. Or listen to a story, watch a play or movie. Whatever. In this sense, unity of being is psychological, it happens in the mind/brain in real time.

But unity of being, I believe, is also a reasonable way to talk about how individuals and peoples live their lives in the large, from years to decades to centuries. One wants everything one does, 24/7/365, to fall into a coherent pattern. A pattern more or less attributed to the nature of the world. To the extent that one cannot achieve unity of being one feels, well, perhaps alienated is the most general concept for it. In that literary texts are (always) about the world, they point toward unity of being in the large.

As far as I know there is no one way of life that yields unity of being in the large nor is there one way of organizing texts that yields it in the small. In the large it is a matter of how one chooses to live, where that one can be an individual or a group. In the small it is a matter of craft and one’s knowledge of its ways and means.

While these two senses – (1) as aesthetic flow, (2) as a coherent way of life – are related in that literary texts are about the world and how we live in it, it is the former sense that most interests me in this brief working paper.

As aesthetic flow, unity of being is a phenomenon that happens in the brain and nervous system. I currently believe, but cannot argue strongly, that this phenomenon can be defined in universal terms but that the means of constructing and enabling it are culturally specific. The means must be discovered by an encultured group and must be learned individuals in the group.

Neuroaesthetics

Given my longstanding interest in the arts and in the brain you’d think I’d be interested in something called neuroaesthetics, wouldn’t you? Well, in principle I am. In practice, I’ve moved on, or back, whatever. I really have to get down to analyzing and describing particular works.

Still, if the idea of neuro aesthetics excites you, where would you go online to find out more? Well, you could go where I go, to the Wikipedia. As I already aware of much of the material mentioned in that article (mostly Zeki, Ramachandran) I went right to the list of external links.

I don’t know whether Semir Zeki is responsible for coining the term, but he’s probably the researcher most identified with neuroaesthetics. His institute has a website where you’ll find lots of stuff, including links to publications (and not just from his lab), and Zeki’s blog.

The International Network for Neuroaeathics appears to have a wealth of material, including links to articles (theory, visual arts, music, dance, facial attractiveness, expertise, design, and neurophysiology), books, and media coverage.

Here’s a useful critique of this emerging field: Conway BR, Rehding A (2013) Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty. PLoS Biol 11(3): e1001504. This passage from the conclusion has special resonance for me:

The field will benefit from developing models relating observations from the humanities to the careful neuroscience that has uncovered computations at cellular resolution within the value-judging structures of the monkey brain. These structures, not coincidentally, are analogous to those identified in fMRI studies of beauty in humans. Some neurons within these structures encode the value of the choices on offer, while others encode the value of the selected choice. Moreover, the neurons adapt on different timescales, displaying “menu-invariant” firing at short timescales and adaptable behavior on longer timescales. This adaptation may account for our ability to make choices across vastly different scales, for example from a restaurant menu in one instance and from houses offered for sale in the next instance [48]. It seems entirely reasonable—even likely—that these neurons are also implicated in the thorny task of deciding what is beautiful. Reformulated in this way, neuroaesthetics is decoupled from beauty and can exploit advances across a range of empirical neuroscience, from sensory encoding to decision making and reward.

This business of time-scales will come up later in this post, where I reference a “perspectives” piece by Son Preminger.

Mode and Behavior, a Working Paper

I've collected seven posts on behavioral mode and made them into a working paper, Mode and Behavior, which I've uploaded to SSRN, here (PDF) and to Academia.edu, here (PDF). I've copied the introduction below and then listed and linked the individual posts below that.

* * * * *

This document collects a number of blog posts on the theme of behavioral mode. In this form the idea originates with Warren McCulloch, one of the grand old men of neuroscience and cybernetics. This conception would also give basic credence to the psychoanalytic conception of organ modes—oral, anal, and genital—though, ironically, McCulloch had little use for Freud—he entitled one of his papers “The Past of a Delusion” as an allusion to Freud’s The Future of an Illusion.

McCulloch’s idea is simple: The most basic decision any vertebrate can make is to commit to some mode of behavior—such as exploring, eating, courting, fighting, playing, etc. Any more specific direction is elaborated from within one of these modes. What gives McCulloch’s idea its force is his argument (and accompanying model) that modal commitment was mediated, not by the most sophisticated and evolutionarily advanced brain tissue, but by the most elementary and evolutionarily old brain tissue. This tissue, known as the reticular formation or the reticular activating system, is at the core of the brainstem. In effect, it has veto power over the cerebral cortex, but also, the power to activate the cortex.

The seven posts in this document explore the implications of McCulloch’s conception of behavioral mode. In particular, these seven posts explore the implications of mode for our understanding of art and our construction of the self. They also lay the foundations for a pluralist view of the world.

Danger Modes

Note: November 2015: Bloggingheads.tv has changed their backend software, so the clips I've embedded below no longer appear. But the links work.

Think of this as a pendant to my series of posts on mode and behavior. It involves no general discussion but, rather, is about one or two modes. And I’m not discussing them. The discussion is by Jessica Stern, author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, and Garance Franke-Rota, who writes for The Washington Post. The discussion takes place on bloggingheads.tv and centers on Stern’s book, which centers on her own rape, at 15, and its aftermath.

My interest is narrower, in passages in this nine-minute section of the conversation. Consider this statement by Stern where she’s talking about war correspondents are writing to her.



Here’s a rough transcription:

War correspondents are saying, gosh, I really know exactly what you’re talking about, that I become calm when I’m endangered. And some have said I think I’ve become addicted to living in this kind of situation. Danger, addicted to living in a dangerous situation. I think what happens is one is very well equipped to deal with danger, and certainly happens in a war zone. [Where one] goes into a state that is life-preserving in a war zone, but is not life-affirming at home. I got a really moving email from a psychologist who said that she is very good at dealing with high-risk situations, and she tries to be a good mother and a good wife, but she thought she was much better at her work, which is kind of heart-breaking. One letter saying you know me, you know me. I am someone who can handle dangerous situations and cannot necessarily handle normal life.

Here’s another clip, first Franke-Rota:

But I also sometimes wonder [about] that stilling quality that you describe. I mean like where that comes from in human nature. What is that? It seems very primal; that is something that people experience. Is that what animals feel like when they get eaten. That quality of stillness in the middle of chaos. I wonder how deep it goes in our biology, the capacity for moving in a calculated way, in the midst of something very disastrous.

Stern: Yeah, I think it’s very hard to know, in advance, how we’ll react to abject terror and whether this fight-flight-freeze. Freezing is another reaction, it does feel quite animal, and so does the capacity to remain calm in chaos. You feel animal, I agree with you. You feel completely physical; it’s a chemical reaction. It doesn’t feel like something one can control. It might be nice to bring that on in certain situations. I don’t think it’s something you can will to happen, or maybe you can train yourself to.

It’s hard to know exactly what they’re talking about — fighting, fleeing, or freezing strike me as being different modes (especially freeing, which IS an animal survival technique) — but that apparent fact that one cannot WILL such a state suggests to me that it is a modal state. The whole tenor of the discussion suggests that it is very basic and deep in our behavioral biology.

Earlier posts in this series:

• Mode & Behavior 1: Sonnet 129
• Mode & Behavior 2: McCulloch’s Model
• Mode & Behavior 3: Music, Language, and Beyond
• Mode & behavior 4: Affective Technology
• Mode & Behavior 5: The Autobiographical Self

The second post is the one most directly relevant to this post.

ADDENDUM: Gordon Marino has an interesting column in The New York Times on the moral value of learning to box.

Boxing provides practice with fear and with the right, attentive supervision, in quite manageable increments. In their first sparring session, boxers usually erupt in “fight or flight” mode. When the bell rings, novices forget everything they have learned and simply flail away. If they stick with it for a few months, their fears diminish; they can begin to see things in the ring that their emotions blinded them to before. More importantly, they become more at home with feeling afraid. Fear is painful, but it can be faced, and in time a boxer learns not to panic about the blows that will be coming his way.

Mode & Behavior 5: The Autobiographical Self

This is, I suppose, the last in my series of posts about behavioral mode (I’ve listed the others at the end of this post). In this post I take up the problem of autobiographical continuity: if our memories are neurochemically ‘keyed’ to emotions, desires, and moods, then how can we possibly construct a coherent account of our lives? Won’t any attempt to remember, to reconstruct, the past be biased by our current mood?

I argue that play-acting and story-telling are the keys to this problem. Through those imaginative activities we create a psycho-cultural space in which it is possible to assemble a coherent autobiography. I am thus arguing the art provides the prototypes through which we recollect our lives.

Note: This post is based on two earlier pieces, a post at The Valve, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, and a long article originally published in PsyArt, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction (abstract and link to PDF). The PsyArt article contains documentation that I’ve omitted from this post.

Autobiography and Dissociated Identity Disorder

In two recent books Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens) has articulated a theory of the neural self. Damasio distinguishes between a core facet that is an integrated representation of one's body states and an autobiographical facet. These selves—Damasio does refer to these systems as selves even as he refers to the neural self to mean both of these systems—are best conceived as processes, not things, and are subserved by extensive networks. Neither of these processes is the master process that runs the whole show—Damasio rejects the notion of such a process. As its name suggests, the autobiographical self organizes the historical events of one's life and imagines future events. The core self organizes sensations from the body's interior milieu and somesthetic and kinesthetic senses into an on-going evaluation of one's current body state.

But I’m not interested in the core self. I’m interested in the autobiographical self. In particular, in the problem of establishing a continuous and routinely accessible representation of the events of one’s life.

Let’s approach this indirectly by considering dissociative identity disorder (DID), an extreme pathology in which the neural self is fractured. In DID, also known as multiple personality disorder, one biological individual exhibits several different identities, each having different memories and personal style. In Thigpen and Cleckley's classic study (The 3 Faces of Eve) Eve had three personalities; Schreiber's (1973) Sybil had sixteen. Although there has been some controversy over whether or not DID is real or simply the effect of zealous therapeutic invention and intervention, there is no doubt that at least some cases are genuine (Schachter, Searching for Memory 1996, 236-242).

These different identities have different personal histories. The events in one personal history typically are unknown to the other histories. Each identity will have blank periods in its history, intervals, obviously, where another identity was being enacted. And the different "persons" are often unaware of one another. Further, the different identities seem to have different personal styles, different modes of speech, of movement, of dress, and so forth. Thus both the core and autobiographical selves seem to be riven.

We do not, so far as I know, understand why or how DID happens. It is not, however, the result of the sort of gross destruction of brain tissue that underlies anosognosia. Noting that different the identities seem to favor different moods and that "memories established in one mood state are often more readily recalled in that same mood state than in a different one," Daniel Schachter (p. 238) suggests that "different moods and roles come to be labeled with separate names. Different selves emerge to handle different desires and emotions. This suggests problems with brain neurochemistry.

And that, of course, brings us back to behavioral mode (as laid out in the second post). I thus note that Damasio himself has argued that the RF and closely associated structures play a critical role in "managing body states and representing current body states. Those activities are not incidental to the brain stem's well-established activation role: they may be the reason why such an activation role has been maintained evolutionarily and why it is primarily operated from that region" (Feeling, 274). That is consistent with Warren McCulloch’s model.

My suggestion about DID, then, is that the mechanism that switches between one identity and another is fundamentally neurochemical. Each identity favors a particular mode, or, more likely, a set of modes. An identity becomes regnant when brain neurochemistry favors it. The perceptions and memories relevant to the modes of that identity will become easily arousable while those relevant to other modes will be all but impossible to arouse. Among individuals unaffected by DID the neurochemical milieu will bias cortical tissue toward a particular set of perceptions and memories but will not necessarily make other perceptions and memories impossible to reconstruct. In the case of DID this neurochemical process is taken to an extreme where whole ranges of perceptions and memories become absolutely unavailable depending on what neurochemicals are currently active. The state space of the brain has become fractured along neurochemical lines, breaking the self into many selves.

Note that this explanation of DID not only tells us how the brain switches from one identity to another—RF control over cortical arousal—but also suggests that the various neural selves do not have to be in physically separate tissue. They can exist within the same volume of neural tissue. They are differentiated by chemical sensitivity, not by physical location.

Of course, one doesn't have to think about this model too long before suspecting that it gives us more than we've bargained for. After all, neurochemistry is known to be implicated in various neurological and psychiatric problems, and one can easily imagine it to be implicated in problems where we currently have no specific knowledge. But ALL THAT is not my immediate concern. For my purposes it is enough to note that neurochemistry thus seems to present a barrier to autobiographical continuity. One does not automatically have access to all the events the brain has registered. Autobiographical continuity is not given in the nature of the nervous system. The continuity and coherence of the neural self depends on complex matters of the neurochemistry of mood and emotion.

If our memories for life events are keyed to neurochemistry, then how can we possibly remember the events of our life at any time and place? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's biochemical state, it is still the same apple. If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? That is to say, how does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience?

Mode & behavior 4: Affective Technology

While this is the fourth in a series of posts about behavioral mode, it can be read independently of the first three, which you will find here, here, and here. This post is a somewhat revised excerpt from a long and detailed analysis of Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” which I published originally in PsyArt, online here, downloadable here. You’ll find more detailed citations there.

Let us begin with the passage from Augustine’s The City of God which served as an epigraph for the first post in this series (Book 14, Chapter 17):

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called "shameful." Their condition was different before sin. . . . because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man. For they were not created blind, as the unenlightened vulgar fancy; . . . Their eyes, therefore were open, but were not open to this, that is to say, were not observant so as to recognize what was conferred upon them by the garment of grace, for they had no consciousness of their members warring against their will. But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty which made nakedness indecent.

Augustine is here complaining about sexuality, and offering the interesting speculation that, before humankind’s fall from grace, sexuality was under the control of the will but that afterward, alas, such control was lost.

Augustine was thus complaining, in different terms, about the modal system, that the sexual mode was not subject to the will. One cannot become aroused at will, nor can one quell arousal simply be willing it to be gone. The ‘members’ in question cannot be raised and lowered as readily as one raises and lowers one’s arm.

The problem is hardly confined to sexuality. One cannot become hungry at will, nor curious, affectionate, playful, angry, and so forth. One can fake many of these things, and more, and sometimes one can fake it until it becomes real, after a fashion. But faking it is not so easy as simply raising or lowering one’s arm. It is a more elaborate activity.

And literature is one of its more elaborate products. Through literature we manipulate the modal system. Reading a text (or watching a film) is certainly an act of will. It is something we can choose to do. And once started, we can also choose to stop – though that may sometimes be difficult. I find it particularly interesting that, at least in our culture, we will use story-telling as a way of easing young children off to sleep. Sleep is, of course, a modal behavior, and entering into it can sometimes be difficult — for adults as well as for children. Why is it that an appropriate story can help easy the transition? Is it the kinship between dreams and fiction?

Literature itself is modal behavior, one of the uniquely human modes. It is a mode that seems ‘designed’ to evoke the reticular or lower modes (see the second post in this series) by presenting the mind-brain with cues that will trigger those modes. In the classic formulation of Ernst Kris (Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art 1952), the creation and understanding of art involves a regression to earlier modes of experience, but a regression that is in service of the ego. In the more recent formulation of Norman Holland (2003), such regression involves an overall pattern of brain activity that is quite different from those obtaining when we engage the real world. The brain is not in reality mode, it is in a different mode. Thus Holland tells us (2003):

In psychoanalytic terms, Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief is a regression to an oral merger of infant and nurturing other in a potential space. In neurological terms, we could say that regression means shutting down some "higher" system that modulates "lower" systems. In the case of the willing suspension of disbelief, the prefrontal cortex inhibits action and the planning of actions so that we no longer are aware of the unreality of the fictions we are dealing with, but it does not - cannot - inhibit the corticolimbic systems that give rise to our emotions. They run freely on, busily prompting us to actions, to approaches and avoidances, we never perform, but the psychological feelings and the physical signs of emotion persist.

Thus it is that in the comfort and security of that mode we can allow ourselves to explore other modes.

Let us consider some examples. First I want to look at the preface Coleridge wrote for “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” Then we’ll detour through Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and a bit of my childhood, and return to Coleridge.

In the garden-bower

When Coleridge published “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” he presented it with a short preface:

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

In a general way, it tells much the same story he'd told years before in a verse letter to his friend Robert Southey three. The central point remains the same: Coleridge was separated from his friends by an accident. They were able to go walking about in Nature while Coleridge was not. He wrote the poem while his friends were out and about and he was confined to the garden.

The poem itself simply reports the poet's thoughts and feelings of an evening. In contrast, the preface talks about the poem to which it is affixed. By saying that Coleridge himself, like the person who speaks the poem, was alone one evening while his friends went for a walk, the preface indicates to us that the act of writing the poem played some role in the process that brought about a change in his mood. In brief, Coleridge is telling as that poetry is affective technology, a mind-altering activity.

Coleridge’s theme, loss, is, of course, a major theme in our imaginative life. It pervades much of our literature. It crops up in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer in a way that’s particularly meaningful to me, as Twain presents an incident that mirrors a strategy that I had used to deal with parental rejection.