Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative

CHAPTER FOUR

Neuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative

OUR INTUITIVE, bodily-based ability to understand the actions of other people is fundamental to social relations, including the relation between storyteller, story, and audience. Stories have social powers because there is a circuit between the configured action emplotted in a narrative and our activity of following the story as readers or listeners as we assimilate its patterns into the figures that shape our worlds. Whether stories can inculcate positive moral attitudes and prosocial behaviors, however, is by no means a simple and straightforward matter. The power of narratives to promote interpersonal understanding, moral behavior, and social justice depends, among other things, on the ability of stories to change the brain-based processes of pattern formation through which we make sense of the other embodied minds with whom we share the world. If stories can promote empathy and otherwise facilitate the cointentionality required for the collaborative activity unique to our species, the power and limits of their capacity to do so depend on embodied processes of doubling self and other through mirroring, simulation, and identification that are basic to the operation of the social brain. The constraints and imperfections of these processes are reflected in the strengths and weaknesses of narratives as ethical and political instruments.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists often make broad claims about how stories can enhance our ability to understand and empathize with others that seem naively optimistic to literary critics and theorists who know that narratives can have a range of disparate, even contradictory effects. Martha Nussbaum and Steven Pinker are prominent examples of such naivete, and Suzanne Keen, one of the most astute theorists of narrative empathy, rightly takes them to task. As Keen (2007, xviii–xix) points out, a similar faith in the social and moral powers of stories informs Nussbaum’s claim that reading novels may create “better world citizens capable of extending love and compassion to unknown others” and Pinker’s assertion that storytelling is a “moral technology” that “has made the human species ‘nicer’ ” by extending “the ‘moral circle’ to include ‘other clans, other tribes, and other races’ ” (see Nussbaum 1997, Pinker 2011). “Well, it depends,” Keen observes, noting many “examples of stigmatized characters who are held up for ridicule and humiliation, to the delight of protagonists and implied readers alike” (xix).

Specious, overly simplistic claims about the capacity of literature to improve social cognition unfortunately also abound in the psychological literature. The most notorious instance is the much-publicized study by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013) that purported to find that “reading literary fiction improves theory of mind”—a claim that led the New York Times to recommend reading “a little Chekhov” to “get ready for a blind date or a job interview” (Belluck 2013, A1). This claim has already become “accepted as conventional wisdom,” as the authors of a less-publicized multi-institutional replication study observe (Panero et al. 2016, e47). A recent survey of the neurobiological bases of morality concludes, for example, with a ringing endorsement of this work: “Research indeed demonstrates that reading literary fiction can improve the capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective affective and cognitive mental states (Kidd and Castano 2013)” (Decety and Cowell 2015, 295). Whether this is true and if so how fiction does this are not at all clear, however. For one thing, the replication study failed to verify Kidd and Castano’s results: “In short, we found no support for any short-term causal effects of reading literary fiction on theory of mind” (Panero et al. 2016, e52; see Kidd and Castano 2017 for their reply). Not surprisingly, this finding did not make the Times.

Analyzing in detail the neuroscientific and phenomenological processes entailed in telling and following stories is one way of meeting this need for a more specific, detailed account of the social powers (and limits) of narrative. Writers and readers activate their cognitive capacities for imagining other worlds when they exchange stories, but there is much evidence in literary and academic circles that this does not necessarily make them more caring or less aggressive and self-involved. Neuroscientific research won’t change this, but it can help to explain the powers as well as the limits of stories to promote prosocial behavior, including empathy and mutually beneficial collaboration. What we need are not overly grand, simplistic assertions about the ability of narrative to facilitate empathy and social understanding but rather careful and detailed analyses of how the contradictory effects of stories relate to the complex, often paradoxical characteristics of embodied cognition.

Empathy, Identification, and the Doubling of Self and Other

In an illuminating analysis of the kinematics of narrative, Guillemette Bolens (2012, 1–3) distinguishes between kinesic intelligence and kinesthetic sensations—“our human capacity to discern and interpret body movements” as opposed to the motor sensations we may have of our own actions, whether voluntary or involuntary: “Kinesthetic sensations cannot be directly shared, whereas kinesic information may be communicated. I cannot feel the kinesthetic sensations in another person’s arm. Yet I may infer his kinesthetic sensations on the basis of the kinesic signals I perceive in his movements. In an act of kinesthetic empathy, I may internally simulate what these inferred sensations possibly feel like via my own kinesthetic memory and knowledge.” The ability to understand the actions represented in a story (what is told) as well as to follow the movements of the narration (the telling) requires both kinds of cognitive competence—the hermeneutic capacity to configure signals into meaningful patterns (kinesic intelligence) and the intuitive sense of how the structures emplotting the actions and the forms deployed in the nar ration fit with my own unreflective, habitual modes of figuring the world (embodied in my kinesthetic sensations).

The kinesic intelligence and kinesthetic empathy that we use to understand stories entail a kind of doubling of self and other that, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, makes the alter ego fundamentally paradoxical. As Merleau-Ponty explains, “The social world is already there when we come to know it or when we judge it” because the intersubjectivity of experience is primordially given with our perception of a common world—and yet, he continues, there is “a lived solipsism that cannot be transcended” because I am destined never to experience the presence of another person to herself (2012 [1945], 379, 374). The kinesthetic empathy Bolens describes is paradoxically both intersubjective and solipsistic, for example, inasmuch as I “internally simulate” what the other must be feeling as if her sensations were mine which, of course, they are not (otherwise I wouldn’t need to infer them on the basis of my own). Following a story is similarly a paradoxical process, with both intersubjective and solipsistic dimensions, whereby my own resources for configuring the world are put to work to make sense of another, fictive, narrated world that may seem both familiar and strange because its figurations both are and are not analogous to mine. Narrative understanding is an as-relation whereby I think the thoughts of someone else but think them as if they were my own—a doubling of the “real me” I bring to the story and the “alien me” I produce by lending it my powers of consciousness (see Iser 1978, 152–59). This doubling overcomes the opposition between self and other (giving me access to another world with an immediacy that is impossible in everyday life) even as it reinscribes it (this other world is fascinating, after all, because it is not my own).¹

The grammatical categories that dominate narratological analyses of so-called fictional minds cannot by themselves do justice to the inherent contradictions and complications that the paradox of the alter ego entails. For example, in her classic study of techniques for representing consciousness, Dorrit Cohn (1978, 5–6) wonders about the apparent, inexplicable absurdity that “the special life-likeness of narrative fiction . . . depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body feels”—states of affairs “whose verisimilitude it is impossible to verify.” From a phenomenological perspective, however, this paradox is indeed wonderful, but it is not mysterious. It is simply an instance of the everyday experience that we are able to intuit automatically what others are thinking and feeling even as their inner lives lie beyond our grasp. As Wittgenstein points out, “We see emotion. . . . We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that [someone] is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored” (1980, ¶570; original emphasis). Others are primordially, originally present to us, but as Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2012, 204) observe, “The givenness of the other is of a most peculiar kind. The otherness of the other is precisely manifest in his elusiveness and inaccessibility.” As Merleau-Ponty explains, “My experience must present others to me in some way, since if it did not do so I would not even speak of solitude, and I would not even declare others to be inaccessible” (2012 [1945], 376). Solipsism is only a problem because we are intersubjectively attuned to one another. Intersubjectivity and solipsism may seem to be mutually exclusive categories, but they are inextricably and paradoxically linked in our lived experience of others.

These contradictions may seem illogical, but they are an existential fact of life. The paradoxical presence and absence of others is, Merleau-Ponty notes, an example of “how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me. . . . [J]ust as the instant of my death is an inaccessible future for me, I am certain to never live the presence of another to himself. And nevertheless, every other person exists for me as an irrecusable style or milieu of coexistence, and my life has a social atmosphere just as it has a flavor of mortality” (381–82). Our ability to share stories that transport us into other lives is evidence of this primary intersubjectivity—something so natural and automatic that we take it for granted—even as, like death, the worlds of others are an inalienable aspect of our lives only because they are always on the horizon, paradoxically present in their absence, immanent in their transcendence.

The paradox of the alter ego is evident in many of the contradictions of our social lives (and, consequently, of stories), one of which is the curious fact that I come to understand my self-for-myself by observing and interacting with others. As cognitive narratologist Alan Palmer (2004, 138) notes, “We cannot learn how to ascribe mental states to ourselves only from our own case: this ability depends on observing other people’s behavior.” This is a paradox, he observes, that stories often exploit: “While it is true that we have immediate access to some parts of our own current mental world, in other ways we have less access to our minds than other persons do,” and the example he cites is Great Expectations, where “Biddy . . . knows the working of Pip’s mind much better than Pip himself does” (128). Chris Frith (2012, 2216) interestingly observes that “there is [experimental] evidence that we are more accurate in recognizing the causes of the behaviour of others than we are at recognizing the causes of our own behaviour. . . . Therefore, our understanding of our own behaviour is likely to benefit from the comments of others”—even if, as the example of Pip also shows (and as we don’t need science to predict), this is likely not to be appreciated.²

This is one of the many ways in which stories stage and explore the paradox of the alter ego that are better understood through phenomenological than grammatical categories. Paradoxically, as Gallagher and Zahavi (2012, 207) point out, “The language we learn for our mental states is a language that we learn to apply to others even as we learn to apply it to ourselves.” By providing us with categories and terms for interpreting other lives, stories also give us tools for understanding ourselves. That is because others are both like and not like ourselves, and this as-relation allows differences to be configured in a vocabulary for understanding ourselves and others that would not otherwise exist. If folk psychology (the conventional wisdom about behavior circulating in a society) is a resource for making sense of others, it also gives us instruments for interpreting our own inner lives as both like and not like what we observe in the social world, and stories are an important source of those tools (see Hutto 2007).

Free indirect discourse is similarly a narratological technique whose contradictions and paradoxes are not reducible to its linguistic features but call out for phenomenological analysis. This double-voiced discourse is a kind of ventriloquism in which the text expresses thoughts of a character which only he or she knows in words that are the narrator’s. Consider, for example, this famous complaint of Emma Bovary’s about her husband’s dullness: “Charles’s conversation was as flat as any pavement, everyone’s ideas trudging along it in their weekday clothes, rousing no emotion, no laughter, no reverie” (Flaubert 2003 [1857], 38). Voicing her private reflections in the language of the narrator, this both is and is not what Emma thinks. After all, the text has just announced a few lines earlier that “she didn’t have the words” to “give voice to [her] elusive malaise” (38), which the narrator then does for her here and in doing so expresses her self-for-herself as she herself cannot—but again, in another twist, with an ironic undertone and through evocative metaphors that are identifiably the narrator’s and not hers. Hence what Cohn (1978, 107, 105) calls the characteristic ambiguity of free indirect discourse, its baffling but intriguing “quality of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t that exerts a special fascination” by “superimposing two voices that are kept distinct” in other, less paradoxical techniques—such as when, for example, a narrative directly quotes a character’s thoughts (“ ‘Charles’s conversation was as flat as any pavement,’ Emma thought”) or paraphrases them with an explicit attribution (“Emma thought that her husband’s conversation was as flat as any pavement”).³

Cohn’s narratological approach proposes various grammatical markers of tense and person to distinguish and define these techniques (see 104–5), but the epistemological and phenomenological ambiguities here cannot be explained by purely linguistic categories. The paradox of free indirect discourse is the paradox of the alter ego—namely, that the narrator thinks the thoughts of someone else but thinks them (or at least gives voice to them) as if they were his or her own, so that the discourse becomes double and split, with the me of the character’s consciousness expressed by the me of the narrator’s language. For the reader, the experience made available by this technique is similarly double and paradoxical, as we inhabit a character’s interiority immediately but also at a distance, through the filter of the narrator’s discourse. The reader consequently has a doubled experience of being both inside and outside a character’s consciousness, participating in her thoughts even as we observe them, granting us privileged access to a self-for-herself whose inaccessibility is simultaneously made evident by the narrator’s presence.

The doubleness of free indirect discourse is odd, elusive, and paradoxical—but also natural and familiar, so that readers automatically and intuitively know what to do with it and typically don’t stumble over its interpretive challenges, even as narratological theorists struggle to pin it down. As Cohn remarks, “The device is irresistible precisely because it is apprehended almost unconsciously” (107), without the need for special instruction from a critic or the terminology of a narrative theorist. In a rare moment of uncertainty, after offering a series of fine-grained grammatical distinctions, Cohn confesses: “Purely linguistic criteria no longer provide reliable guidelines” for characterizing this technique, a device that “reveals itself even as it conceals itself, but not always without making demands on its reader’s intelligence” (106). The double negative here (“not always without”) is revealing because it suggests how paradoxically unnatural but also natural and familiar this technique seems. Its ambiguities may defy “purely linguistic” or grammatical demarcation, but readers are usually untroubled by them because our ordinary lived experience of the social world has accustomed us to doubled experiences of other minds as intersubjectively accessible and solipsistically opaque, simultaneously both accessible and inaccessible. We can effortlessly understand free indirect discourse because we are familiar with the paradox of the alter ego, but the complications and puzzles implicit in this technique can also seem bewildering and make us marvel when we stop to think about them—and the same is true of the strangely double presence and absence of the others with whom we share our worlds.

Cognitive scientists and psychologists have proposed three ways of explaining the paradox of the alter ego, and the emerging consensus is that all three probably work in combination in the brain’s complicated, messy interactions with the social world (see Armstrong 2013, 131–74, and Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 191–218). The first approach, known as theory of mind (ToM) or theory theory (TT), focuses on our capacity to attribute mental states to others—to engage in “mind reading” through which we theorize about the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others that we recognize may differ from our own. The second approach, simulation theory (ST), argues that we do not need theories to understand the simple, everyday behavior of others but that we instead automatically run “simulation routines” that put ourselves in their shoes by using our own thoughts and feelings as a model for what they must be experiencing. Critics of ST claim it begs the question of how the simulator senses what is going on in the other person, but one possible answer has been provided by mirror neurons that were first discovered in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. As I explain in chapter 3’s analysis of action understanding, these neurons fire not only when the animal performs a specific action but also when it observes the same action by another monkey or an experimenter—not only when the monkey grasps a piece of food, for example, but also when the scientist does the same thing. Although the mirror neuron research has been controversial and is still somewhat unsettled, experiments have conclusively shown that mirroring processes are evident not only in the motor cortex but also across the brain, in regions associated (for example) with emotion, pain, and disgust.⁴ In different ways, all three of these theories—theory of mind, simulation theory, and mirror neurons—are attempts to explain the acts of doubling me and not me that human beings routinely, automatically engage in as they negotiate their way through a paradoxically intersubjective and solipsistic world.

All three processes are involved in the activity of following a story, and narratives differ from one another as they draw more or less and in various, distinctive ways on each of these modes of doubling self and other. Mind-reading skills emphasized by TT of the sort necessary to pass false-belief tests may be invoked by stories that depict characters who act in a surprising or suspicious manner and whose motives and desires we may speculate about or that are told by narrators whose reliability we may have reason to distrust, so that we feel compelled to oppose their versions of the story with counternarratives we invent. Other narratives that encourage immersion in the action of the story may set in motion the automatic, subliminal simulation routines of ST as we involve ourselves in the illusions we construct and get carried away by our vicarious participation in the characters’ dramas, and the embodied, emotional reactions that these involvements may provoke (whether the sympathy of pity, the contagious excitement of represented conflict, or the fear of suspenseful threats) may trigger embodied resonances of the kind identified in the mirror neuron experiments.

Whether and how the activation of these processes in following a story might improve our social skills is unclear, however, because the acts of identification entailed in narrative understanding are instances of doubling that are inherently unpredictable and open to a wide range of variation. This is why the moral and social effects of empathy are notoriously ambiguous, as the scientific literature on the topic amply attests. It is widely acknowledged, for example, that the fellow feeling of empathy does not necessarily produce ethically beneficial, prosocial sympathy and compassion. Indeed, as Grit Hein and Tania Singer (2008, 154) point out, “empathy can have a dark side” because it can be deployed for Machiavellian purposes “to find the weakest spot of a person to make her or him suffer.” Or, as Jean Decety and Claus Lamm (2009) observe, feeling another’s emotional state may cause “personal distress” and result in aversion from the sufferer rather than sympathetic concern and involvement. Because identification is an act of doubling, its consequences are not foreordained, whether in literature or in life. Empathy may promote either pro- or antisocial behavior depending on how the as-relation of identification configures the relation between me and not me.

The doubleness of empathic understanding is evident in the classic definition of identification as Einfühlung, in which one “feels oneself into” the experience of another. Theodor Lipps’s (1903) oft-cited example is the anxiety a spectator may feel while watching a circus acrobat on a high wire, where the thrill of the performance derives from the spectator’s vicarious sense of the tightrope walker’s danger. What Antonio Damasio (1994, 155–64) calls the “as-if body loop,” whereby the brain simulates body states that are not caused by external stimuli, may indeed be set in motion by such a participatory experience. But an as-if re-creation of another’s observed behavior may not produce the same kinesthetic sensations she or he is experiencing. In this case, the cool, calm, and collected professional performer probably does not experience the same fear, anxiety, and excitement as the spectator—otherwise he or she might become paralyzed and fall—even as the spectator’s ability to enjoy the act depends on his or her not being in any real danger. Consider, for example, the famous tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s report of his sensations when he walked between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974: “After a few steps, I knew I was in my element [even though] I knew the wire was not well rigged[,] . . . but it was safe enough for me to carry on. And then, very slowly as I walked, I was overwhelmed by a sense of easiness, a sense of simplicity” (quoted in Nodjimbadem 2015). The thrill of the performance for the spectator is anything but this feeling of tranquility! As Adriano D’Aloia (2012, 94) explains, “The spectator’s subjectivity is not ‘one with’ the acrobat’s subjectivity, but only ‘with’ ”—“side-by-side” in an adjacency that “implies a paradoxical proximity at a distance” (see Stein 1964 [1917]). Empathy entails “proximity at a distance” because identification is a doubling of me and not me and not a merger of subjectivities.

Similarly, when we read about a character’s fictionally represented experiences or identify with a narrator’s point of view, our self does not simply disappear in a merger of ego and alter ego. Rather, setting in motion a paradoxical doubleness that both joins and separates self and other, readers exercise their own powers of configurative comprehension so that another world, based on perhaps different pattern-making structures, can emerge. The result, as Wolfgang Iser (see 1978, 155–59) points out, is a paradoxical duplication of subjectivities, an interplay of the “alien me” whose thought patterns I recreate and inhabit, and the “real, virtual me” whose configurative powers of understanding cause this other world to take shape and, in the process, can find themselves transfigured and transformed. These unpredictable, dynamic, open-ended interactions can only take place because the act of following stories entails doublings of various kinds and is not a static correspondence between or a homogeneous merger of self and other.

The bodily feelings generated by following a story and vicariously, empathically participating in the actions it represents—whether Aristotle’s classic examples of pity and fear or any other of the widely various emotional responses stories can evoke—are consequently double and split. They are as-if emotions that both are and are not the bodily, kinesthetic sensations we would have in an original experience unmediated by the interface of narrative. This doubling helps to explain, for example, why Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment is so thrilling and disturbing. “Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I lend to him,” Jean-Paul Sartre (1965 [1947], 39; original emphasis) observes; “his hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs.” Our identification with the criminal is a peculiar doubling whereby I experience his anger and anxiety as if these emotions were my own because in a sense they are, even as they are also not mine because they are Raskolnikov’s (and I am not an axe murderer). They are my emotions that I project onto him and feel with him, even though I never cease to be me, the reader, who is not the character I both identify with and observe (and the ability to do both is a consequence of the doubling of identification through which boundaries are simultaneously maintained and crossed). It is thrilling to identify with Raskolnikov because we experience the anxieties of an axe murderer—and disturbing, because this crosses boundaries between my everyday world and another, bizarre, and frightening world—but only as if that were happening, so that we can maintain the detachment of an observer even as we experience the emotions of a participant.

The as-if quality of embodied experiences of identification has been widely documented in experimental studies of an observer’s vicarious participation in another’s pain or disgust. Oft-cited experiments by William Hutchison (1999), Tania Singer (2004), and Yawei Cheng (2010), among others, have shown that neurons in the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex fire not only in response to a pinprick or an electric shock but also at the sight of someone else receiving the same painful stimulus—or even to a report that someone else would be poked or shocked. But the responses of observers are also sensitive to individual differences—more intense, for example, if a loved one is receiving the stimulus, or less intense if the witness is someone (like a nurse or an acupuncturist) conditioned to view pain and to regard it as potentially beneficial—and these variations suggest in turn that the “as-if body loop” set in motion by the brain’s simulation routines is a doubling of self and other, not a simple one-to-one match. Similarly, well-known experiments by Bruno Wicker and his group (2003) have shown that the anterior insula responds not only during the experience of disgust prompted by an unpleasant smell but also during the observation of someone else’s disgusted facial expression. But observing another person’s disgust is not likely to result in actual vomiting because the experience both is and is not the same bodily sensation as the feeling it duplicates. Feeling with a character depicted in a story or adopting the attitudes suggested by a narrator would similarly entail a doubling process of simulation and inference as if we were experiencing embodied, kinesthetically original sensations. Our reenactment of these sensations in response to stories makes narrative identifications possible, but these simulations both are and are not like the experiences whose underlying biological mechanisms they draw on and (partially) duplicate.

This doubleness makes the consequences of our emotional responses to narrative more variable and unpredictable than Aristotle’s theory of catharsis suggests. The doubling of the like and the not like in as-if simulations helps to explain the oft-observed paradox that emotions such as fear and terror that would otherwise cause discomfort or pain can instead give rise to pleasure in aesthetic reenactments. Our identification with the tragic hero both is and is not the same as his or her experience, and this makes all the difference. But this doubling also need not result in a purgation of the emotions it simulates because mirroring another’s sensations can instead stimulate and spread them contagiously. As Paul Bloom (2010, 192) observes, experimental evidence shows that “watching a violent movie doesn’t put one in a relaxed or pacifistic state of mind—it arouses the viewer.” Marco Iacoboni (2008, 209, 206) similarly worries that “mirror neurons in our brain produce automatic imitative influences of which we are often unaware,” which in turn may explain why “exposure to media violence has a strong effect on imitative violence.” Representations of violence do not immediately and necessarily provoke aggressive behavior in the viewer, however, because responses depend on several factors that influence what psychologists call “observational learning”—for example, whether the behavior is rewarded and reinforced, whether the model is viewed positively and seen as similar to the observer, or whether the behavior is within the viewer’s spectrum of abilities (see Gerrig and Zimbardo 2005, 199–200).

Aggression is not an automatic response to represented violence because the doubling of me and not me in empathic identification is an as-relation that can be variously configured and can have different outcomes depending on how the negation in the interplay of like and not like is staged and received. The patterns of emplotment that configure the conflictual relations between persons in a dramatized action are widely variable—some representing aggressive behavior as heroic, for example, and others foregrounding the suffering of its victims—and these different plots in turn will be transfigured and transformed in various ways according to the interpretive dispositions of the respondent, who may be thrilled or repulsed and will construct his or her own reading of the story accordingly (responding with sympathy or reacting with horror or with both in some unique combination). The interactions between these patterns of representation and response may result in the transformation of renderings of aggression and conflict into aesthetic pleasure, moral repulsion, or imitative violence depending on how the as is configured in the narrative and on how it is refigured in the listener’s or reader’s response. None of this is predetermined or foreordained.

All of these complications and contingencies are very difficult to measure with the instruments that psychologists like Kidd and Castano (2013) have at their disposal in attempting to assess whether “literary fiction improves theory of mind.” Scientific ingenuity often entails figuring out how faulty, limited measuring instruments might be deployed to reveal states of affairs that would otherwise be inaccessible (as is the case, for example, with fMRI technology, which measures differential blood flow to construct visual images of neuronal activity in the brain). But sometimes the limitations of the instruments only call attention to the complexities that elude them (hence the joke cognitive scientists often tell about why someone who lost their wallet was looking for it under the lamppost—because that’s where there’s light, even though that’s not where it went missing). The Kidd-Castano study takes one black box (literary fiction) and asks how it affects another black box (cognitive and affective theory of mind), and the authors’ findings are vague and questionable because their instruments are blunt and crude. For example, as the authors of the replication study point out, by using “prestigious awards” as a measure of “literary fiction,” Kidd and Castano create a “fuzzy” category (containing authors as diverse as DeLillo, Chekhov, and Louise Erdrich) so that “it remains unclear which aspects of literary fiction might be causally responsible” for the effects they identify (Panero et al. 2016, e47). As the replication study notes, “Other experiments . . . obtained effects on social cognition using popular fiction,” not works regarded as “literary” (whatever that means), with some studies finding “higher levels of theory of mind in readers of romance than readers of domestic fiction and science fiction/fantasy” (e47).⁵ What kinds of acts of doubling me and not me are set in motion by a story can vary widely according to its stylistic and generic features, and even some works of domestic fiction and science fiction or fantasy would no doubt challenge and extend a reader’s abilities to interpret and identify with other minds. For example, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), in which a narrator afflicted with “hyperempathy” navigates the dangers of a violent, dystopian world, is as insightful an exploration of the ambiguities of identification as any modernist psychological novel or (for that matter) neuroscientific study. Literary fiction is too broad a category to register these contingencies.

What Kidd and Castano mean by “theory of mind” is similarly too vague to illuminate the paradoxical processes of doubling entailed in following a story. Their study employed two tests for ToM—one test for “cognitive theory of mind” that asked participants multiple-choice false-belief questions about what a cartoon figure Yoni was probably thinking in different circumstances, and another for “affective theory of mind” (the reading the mind in the eyes test) that required participants to choose one of four emotions that was likely expressed by a series of photographs of pairs of eyes. Both tests have demonstrated their usefulness as diagnostic tools to identify rudimentary difficulties with understanding others that someone afflicted with severe autism or Asperger’s syndrome might have, but neither is sufficiently differentiated or complex to distinguish the various kinds of theory building (TT), simulation (ST), or mirroring that might be required to interpret the states of mind portrayed in a story. Answering false-belief questions about a cartoon character’s preferences could involve theorizing or simulating his or her state of mind or even resonating at a sensory-motor level in response to imagined actions. Guessing the emotions suggested by a pair of eyes could similarly prompt theorizing, simulating, or emotional mirroring—and probably all three, in varying combinations, for different respondents. What is going on in the black boxes of cognitive and affective ToM here is unclear.

Understanding others who are paradoxically present and absent, intersubjectively accessible and solipsistically opaque, is a complicated process of theorizing, simulating, and resonating with other embodied consciousnesses, and the interactions of TT, ST, and mirroring mechanisms are more complex than the notion of a ToM module (even divided into cognitive and affective dimensions) encompasses. How these processes are then set in motion by following a story introduces further complications and contingencies that multiple-choice tests about general cognitive and affective competence cannot measure. Hence, perhaps, the confused array of not entirely consistent ways in which Kidd and Castano actually describe the effects of literary fiction, which they variously assert “hones,” “recruits,” “enhances” or simply “primes” ToM (378, 380). If all a story does is “recruit” or “prime” preexisting cognitive abilities, it doesn’t necessarily “improve” them, and what kind of improvement is entailed by “honing” or “enhancing” is not at all clear. The complicated, paradoxical processes of doubling self and other in following a story are more variable and elusive than Kidd and Castano’s instruments and categories can capture.

Oatley’s and Mar’s studies are very prominent in the psychological literature, but they are based on assumptions about the relation between teller, tale, and audience that are crude and mechanical. According to Oatley, for example, “Fiction can be thought of as a form of consciousness of selves and others that can be passed from an author to a reader or spectator and can be internalized to augment everyday cognition” (2016, 618). This model reifies consciousness, regarding it as something that can be transferred unidirectionally from author to recipient, with predictable results (straightforward “augmentation” of preexisting capacities). Conceiving of consciousness as a transferrable object grossly simplifies and misrepresents the dynamic processes that intertwine and mutually transform each other in the recursive circuit of figuration (mimesis₁), configuration (mimesis₂), and refiguration (mimesis₃). On the rare occasion when Oatley does acknowledge that simulation entails doubling, he reduces and contains its effects: “Fiction is a set of simulations of social worlds that we can compare, as it were stereoscopically, with aspects of our everyday world, to suggest insights we might not achieve by looking with the single eye of ordinary perception” (618). The image of a “stereoscope” stabilizes doubling into a static juxtaposition of views that once again has only a single predictable outcome—a simple, positive instructional benefit. Stereoscopic effects can in fact be more peculiar and bewildering than this, but only if the oppositions they set in motion play out indeterminately, without freezing them into fixed form. The doubled effects of thinking another’s thoughts and feeling another’s emotions as we follow a story are potentially more productive—if also possibly more troubling and less benign—than Oatley’s model suggests because the interactions between worlds that narrative understanding sets in motion are more unpredictable and open ended than a stereoscopic juxtaposition or a one-directional transfer of consciousness.

After observing that “simulation theory has emerged as the most common explanatory mechanism” in psychological accounts of the cognitive effects of narrative (they have the work of Mar and Oatley in mind), psychologists Micah Mumper and Richard Gerrig (2019, 453, 457) rightly complain that its workings are typically underspecified: “Although researchers frequently cite simulation as a causal mechanism, the concept has never been associated with concrete claims about what types of processes embody simulation and how those processes unfold over time.” The corrections and refinements that Mumper and Gerrig propose are noteworthy because they all attempt to register the contingencies of consistency building and doubling entailed in narrative understanding.

For example, Mumper and Gerrig argue that making sense of a story may involve what they call “inference making” and “memory-based processing,” guesses about implications and hidden sides (what a character may be thinking or feeling, for example, or what motives or designs she may secretly harbor), and they correctly note that these cognitive processes are not causal mechanisms and do not necessarily require simulation (see 459–61). Similarly, they observe, the feelings represented by stories need not generate equivalent emotions in the reader, which is what the simulation model presumes. Instead, as Mumper and Gerrig point out, a narrative may provoke “emotional appraisals” that result in “mismatches” as well as “matches” between reader and storyworld (462–63). After all, how we may feel about a character or the fictional world may be quite different from (and even radically opposed to) the emotions and appraisals dramatized by the text. Such is the case, for example, when readers of Lolita respond to Humbert Humbert’s rhapsodies about nymphets with disgust and moral repulsion.⁶ Even when stories encourage “narrative participation,” Mumper and Gerrig observe, this may not involve simulation because (think again about Lolita) there may be “circumstances in which readers’ participation likely yields emotional responses that will be dissimilar to the character’s responses” (464). As these amendments and corrections to the simulation model all recognize, fictional renderings of social worlds do not cause a univocal, linear transfer of social cognition but instead set in motion complex, multivalent, heterogeneous processes of doubling, recursion, and inferential pattern formation.

Interesting experimental findings have confirmed that experiences of doubling are triggered by stories. In a recent study that combined the quantitative instruments of psychology and the qualitative methods of phenomenology, an interdisciplinary team from the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University solicited responses from 1,566 participants through the Guardian newspaper and the Edinburgh International Book Festival and, employing a questionnaire that also provided for individual verbal descriptions, asked about their experiences hearing the voices of characters and narrators when reading a narrative (see Alderson-Day, Bernini, and Fernyhough 2017). The principal investigator Charles Fernyhough (2016) is a psychologist and a novelist, and his postdoctoral colleagues are a psychologist trained in quantitative methods (Ben Alderson-Day) and a phenomenologically oriented narratologist (Marco Bernini). The Durham team hypothesized that their survey would elicit reports of “auditory simulation of character’s voices” (99), consistent with fMRI-based evidence that “voice-selective regions of auditory cortex” are activated more by linguistic representations of “direct speech” than by “indirect reference (e.g., ‘He said, “I hate that cat” ’ vs. ‘He said that he hates that cat’)” (see Yao, Belin, and Scheepers 2011). Similarly, they speculated, stories that represent narrators or characters speaking might activate voice-like experiences if their speeches triggered cortical areas that also respond to real voices. And that is indeed what they found, with 79 percent of respondents reporting they heard voices more than occasionally in response to stories and 72 percent describing these as vivid: “Our results indicated that many readers have very vivid experiences of characters’ voices when reading texts, and that this relates to both other vivid everyday experiences (inner speech) and more unusual experiences (auditory hallucination-proneness)” (106).⁷

These experiences were not identical for all readers, however: “The features and dynamics of readers’ descriptions of their voices were varied and complex. . . . [F]or some participants this was an intentional, constructive process, for others an automatic immersion, and for others again an experience that appeared to seep out into other, non-reading contexts” (106). Just as “traits towards having unusually vivid and hallucination-like experiences are thought to exist along a continuum in the general population,” Alderson-Day, Bernini, and Fernyhough suggest, so “participants with more vivid experiences of reading in general would also be more prone to hallucination-like experiences” (100). Understanding stories does seem to entail a doubling of me and not me, then, which for some readers may take the form of hearing characters’ and narrators’ voices, but the extent to which this occurs depends on their preexisting cognitive proclivities. That such a large number of people hear voices when they read but with different degrees of immediacy lines up well with the theory that a real me and an alien me interact in the doubling of my world with a storyworld (my auditory cortex triggered to produce another voice within me) but that this doubling will vary for different readers (as the coupling of real and alien me takes different shapes).

The variability and heterogeneity of doubling call into question Steven Pinker’s much-discussed claims for the beneficial moral consequences of the expansion of literacy and the rise of the novel. Pinker’s description of the reading experience is phenomenological but without an appreciation of its paradoxes. “When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point,” he declares; “not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions” (2011, 175). Endorsing the argument of historian Lynn Hunt (2007), Pinker attributes special moral efficacy to epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) because of their power to produce beneficial experiences of identification: “In this genre the story unfolds in a character’s own words, exposing the character’s thoughts and feelings in real time rather than describing them from the distancing perspective of a disembodied narrator. . . . Grown men burst into tears while experiencing the forbidden loves, intolerable arranged marriages, and cruel twists of fate in the lives of undistinguished women (including servants) with whom they had nothing in common” (176).

This has not been the reaction of all readers, however. Hunt and Pinker oddly overlook the notorious controversies Pamela unleashed, which pitted readers who sympathized with her valiant and ultimately successful efforts to fend off the lecherous advances of her employer, against “anti-Pamelists” like (most notably) Henry Fielding who in Shamela sought to expose Richardson’s heroine as a hypocrite whose real motives were mercenary and self-serving: “I thought once of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue” (1961 [1741], 325). Other skeptical readers accused Pamelists of voyeurism and erotic titillation, debunking their claims of moral edification as a thin veil covering over the vicarious, quasi-pornographic pleasures of reading about repeated episodes of attempted seduction.⁸

Similar ambiguities afflicted the reception of other epistolary novels, as in the notorious case of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1775), which is reported to have spawned a series of copycat suicides across Europe as readers imitated the disappointed hero’s romantic demise, resulting in bans on the novel in Leipzig, Denmark, and Italy (see Phillips 1974). This work also inspired a satiric counterversion by Friedrich Nicolai, The Joys of Young Werther (1775), in which the hero’s suicide is thwarted by a friend who jams his pistol, and the woman who had refused his advances relents. The Werther crisis shows how the doubling of me and not me in acts of readerly identification may produce an unconscious replication of the feelings and actions staged by the story, recalling the concerns of many cognitive scientists that the mirroring processes of identification may not necessarily result in catharsis but may instead promote less beneficial mimetic effects. These doubling processes are not all conscious and self-conscious, contrary to Pinker’s naively optimistic view, and they may consequently have darker effects than the increased ability to imagine another’s perspective, with attendant improvements in insight and sympathy, that proponents of the moral benefits of epistolary novels celebrate. Pinker acknowledges that “ ‘empathy’ in the sense of adopting someone’s viewpoint is not the same as ‘empathy’ in the sense of feeling compassion toward the person,” but he claims that “the first can lead to the second by a natural route” (175). This step is less straightforward and automatic than he suggests, however, because the doubling of worlds that understanding stories brings about may also “naturally” result in conflict, suspicion, and mimetic acts of violence.⁹

Cognitive science cannot predict what the social consequences of narrative will be. The variabilities introduced by the as-if of narrative simulation and the as of doubling are too many and too uncontrollable to support simple, sweeping generalizations about the social powers of narrative. As Suzanne Keen (2015, 139–40) wryly observes, “The evidence for altruism induced by narrative empathy is scanty though the cultural faith in the benefits of narrative empathy is strong.” Claims that stories make us better people by enhancing empathy and ToM or that narratives inherently promote social progress should be met with skepticism because such assertions oversimplify the complex, paradoxical interactions involved in the exchange of stories.

The neuroscience of embodied action and self-other relations does suggest that narratives have social power, however, because of the brain- and body-based processes that they set in motion. And so it is not surprising that some psychological studies report improvement in performance on various empathy and ToM measures as a result of experiences of reading stories. For example, Bal and Veltkamp (2013) provide evidence that “emotional transport” in reading can produce empathy, while Hakemulder (2000) has conducted experiments that demonstrate the capacity of stories to promote rational, “ethical reflection.” These studies need to be taken with several grains of salt, however, not only because of the difficulties of measuring such effects but also because of the variability and heterogeneity of the ways the doubling processes of narrative understanding can unfold. As I have argued, neither the experience of being carried away emotionally by a narrative that Bal and Veltkamp endorse nor the ability to reflect self-consciously about another’s point of view that Hakemulder emphasizes need have morally beneficial effects, and both can have antisocial consequences.

The experimental evidence for the moral and social powers of stories is ambiguous. A meta-analysis conducted by Mumper and Gerrig (2019, 455) comparing multiple studies of the moral effects of stories showed that “lifetime fiction reading had a small positive correlation with empathy and ToM measures. That is, across all the studies we analyzed, as the amount of fiction participants read increased, their empathy and ToM scores also tended to increase by a small amount. We also found nonfiction reading to be positively correlated with empathy and ToM, although the effects were numerically smaller.” It is important to remember, however, that correlation is not causation. As the authors of the Kidd-Castano replication study point out, for example, one confounding factor in such studies is that people with high empathy and ToM may tend to read more fiction (and perhaps nonfiction as well), and so it may be difficult to sort out what is causing what (see Panero et al. 2016, e46). The Mumper-Gerrig meta-analysis could support either interpretation—that is, either reading improves ToM and empathy or the other way around. My cautionary comments about the moral and social effects of stories are not meant to suggest that they do not have beneficial social consequences—just that these effects are likely to be more variable and heterogeneous and harder to measure than the optimistic claims recognize. Simplistic generalizations do not help us understand what the social powers of narrative actually are or how they work, and the ends that those powers may serve are not predetermined by the workings of the brain.

Collaboration, Shared Intentionality, and Coupled Brains

The doubling of worlds in the exchange of stories is a fundamentally collaborative interaction that can promote shared intentionality, a unique human capability that other primates seem to lack. Michael Tomasello (2005, 676) calls “ ‘we’ intentionality” the capacity for “participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint intentions).” “Human thinking is fundamentally cooperative,” he points out (2014, ix). Apes and other nonhuman primates also have “complex skills of social cognition,” but according to Tomasello (2014, 76), their readings of their conspecifics’ intentions “are aimed mainly at competition (i.e., their intelligence is Machiavellian) . . . for food and mates.” In our species, the ability to share intentionality is already evident in parent-infant “proto-conversations” that involve “turn-taking” and “exchange of emotions” (2005, 681, 675)—activities also entailed, of course, in telling and following stories—and such collaborative interactions culminate in what is known as the “ratchet effect” of “cumulative cultural evolution” (2014, 83). We can pass along cultural accomplishments (like, for example, literacy) and build on what previous generations have learned because we can collaborate and share intentionality.

The ability to collaborate is also crucial for language acquisition. Among other reasons, that is because both require a capacity for coordinating attention. As Tomasello (2003, 21) notes, “A number of studies have found that children’s earliest skills of joint attentional engagement with their mothers correlate highly with their earliest skills of language comprehension and production.” “This correlation,” he explains, “derives from the simple fact that language is nothing more than another type—albeit a very special type—of joint attentional skill; people use language to influence and manipulate one another’s attention” (21). This is also why they tell stories. Whether in everyday conversation or in exchanging narratives, communication requires joint attention.

Collaborating with other humans necessitates that I coordinate my perspective and your perspective, resulting in what Tomasello (2014, 43) calls a “dual-level structure of simultaneous sharedness and individuality,” a double structure that combines “joint attention and individual perspectives.” This duality is also characteristic of the doubling of me and not me in the collaborative work of narrative understanding. The joint intentionality that powers cultural collaboration does not produce a union of subjectivities—a merger that overcomes the opposition of self and other. It is, rather, a double structure that relates ego and alter ego, like and not like, without completely eradicating their differences.

This doubling can once again have both beneficial and deleterious consequences. For example, as Joshua Greene (2015, 210) argues, it is probably the case that “morality evolved, not as a device for universal cooperation, but as a competitive weapon, as a system for turning Me into Us, which in turn enables Us to outcompete Them.” For better or worse (and it is both), this “ingroup/outgroup psychology . . . is, in all likelihood, unique to [our] species,” according to Tomasello (2014, 84); “as far as we know, great apes do not have, and early humans did not have, this sense of group identity at all.” The legacy of this development can be seen in oft-documented “implicit group preferences” which, as Jean Decety and Jason Cowell (2015, 280, 289–90) point out, “can directly conflict with moral behavior”; for example, they note, “children do not display empathy and concern toward all people equally” but “show a bias toward individuals and members of groups with which they identify,” and these prejudices may continue on into adulthood. In a comprehensive review of the experimental evidence on ingroup bias and stereotyping by race, age, and gender, Mina Cikara and Jay J. Van Bavel (2014, 245) found that “the propensity to prefer one’s in-group has been observed in every culture on earth and in children as young as five.”¹⁰ The ability to identify with a group makes cooperation and collaboration possible among like me’s, establishing the uniquely human capacity for cumulative cultural development, but it does so by differentiating like me from not me, thereby setting the stage for conflicts between self and other and for distinctively human acts of violence.

Neuroscience has increasingly recognized the need to take into account the various effects of collaboration and joint intentionality that go beyond what is happening in a single brain, but its measuring instruments are extremely constrained in their ability to register these kinds of interactions. Instruments like an fMRI machine or an EEG recorder are designed, after all, for a single, immobile subject. Calling for a “second-person neuroscience,” Leonhard Schilbach and colleagues (Schilbach et al. 2013, 405) consequently lament that “the state of the art in neuroimaging provides severe limitations to studying free-running interactions using the full range of verbal and nonverbal channels.”¹¹ “The dominant focus on single individuals in cognitive neuroscience paradigms,” Uri Hasson and his coauthors argue, “obscures the forces that operate between brains to shape behavior,” and this blindness is unfortunate because “brain-to-brain coupling” may lead “to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation” (2012, 114–15). Behaviors of this kind have long been observed in animals as well as humans. One oft-cited example is the production of songs by some species of birds that involves a complex “dance” between males and females, with performer and listener adjusting their behaviors in light of what the other does (see West and King 1988).¹² Humans also often attune their behaviors to what they observe in others. For example, as Uta and Chris Frith (2010, 167) point out, “When two people ‘tune in’ to each other, they tend unconsciously to imitate each other’s movements and gestures” in a kind of “chameleon effect.” Similarly, people sitting next to each other in rocking chairs soon start to rock in unison, as if somehow linked mechanically (Richardson et al. 2007).

So-called hyperscanning methods that employ innovative, mobile EEG technology to simultaneously record and compare the brain-wave patterns of participants in interactive experiments have begun to document the neural synchronization underlying such coupled behavior. For example, guitar players and pianists performing duets play with accuracy equaling or exceeding the precision of individual performers, and EEG measurements of their brain waves reveal patterns of synchronized oscillatory coupling (Keller 2008, Lindenberger et al. 2009). Similar brain-wave synchronization has been recorded in studies of people gesturing to each other, tapping fingers in rhythm, or playing cards (see Sänger et al. 2011).

The hyperscanning experiments provide interesting evidence that synchronization is not a merger that erases differences but a process of doubling that may vary according to the skills and attitudes of the participants. For example, Chris Frith’s laboratory (2012, 2217) has demonstrated that “two people working together to detect a subtle visual signal can do better than the best one working on his own.” As Frith observes, however, “collaboration on the signal detection task is not always advantageous” because, “if partners have very different abilities, . . . the pair will perform worse than the better partner” would alone (2218). Another hyperscanning study showed that “interbrain synchrony is also dependent on the nature of attachment between team members. For example, during a cooperation task, dyads involving lovers showed larger prefrontal interbrain synchrony than dyads involving friends and strangers, which was also mirrored by their better task performance” (Bhattacharya 2017; see Pan et al. 2017).

Collaborative interactions entail a coupling of differences that sometimes produces better consequences than individuals working alone, but other times worse. Because of the benefits of “pooling information” and canceling out each other’s prejudices, Dan Bang and Chris Frith observe that “groups have been shown to outperform individuals for many problems of probability and reasoning” (2017, 7). They also point out, however, that groups “have their own biases” and “often amplify the initial preference” of a “majority of its members”—and so, surveying the literature on “group decision-making,” they reach the perhaps unsurprising “Goldilocks” conclusion that “individuals who are too similar” and “individuals who differ too much” are equally bad for group performance (10, 13). More like than not like does not always produce a superior interaction. What matters in a successful collaboration is not how differences are overcome but how they intertwine.

Productive synchronization is inherently paradoxical. As Karl Friston and Chris Frith (2015, 391) observe, “communication (i.e., a shared dynamical narrative) emerges when two dynamical systems try to predict each other,” each adjusting its expectations about how the other is likely to behave and reacting accordingly. But this to-and-fro process of mutual prediction and accommodation, anticipation and adjustment, is a contradictory activity that also requires the suppression of activity. For example, taking turns is a practice that demands the skill of knowing when not to act. Similarly, as Friston and Frith point out, successful conversation necessitates that the participants recognize that “one can either talk or listen but not do both at the same time” (391). Reciprocal interaction requires the participants not only to act but also to know when they should not act in order to make the interaction reciprocal. Hence the finding of Ivana Konvalinka’s group (2012, 215) that “when two people engage in a synchronization task, they do better when they both continuously and mutually adapt to one another’s actions—in other words, when they become two followers, instead of adopting a leader-follower dynamic.”

Cognitive scientists who study collaboration point out that reciprocity is both a natural and an unnatural phenomenon. Humans are apparently social animals whose reward systems encourage the risk taking involved in collaboration. Schilbach’s group (2013, 410) notes that some experiments have documented “the involvement of reward-related neurocircuitry during congruent interactions.” Our brains are wired to reward collaborative activity, he suggests, and “Humans appear to have a default expectation of reciprocation” (410). We are inclined to want to reciprocate because we are rewarded when collaboration succeeds. This brain-based predisposition to collaborate is consistent with other evidence that participating in group interactions is intrinsically rewarding (see Tabibnia and Lieberman 2007).

Our species may be predisposed to collaborate, but the to-and-fro of cooperative activity is also risky, fraught, and contradictory. As Frith (2012, 2218) notes, “Thinking about collaboration is essentially recursive: your partner will collaborate only if she is confident that you will collaborate”—and even that is not enough, because she must also be “confident that you are confident” about her—and, he observes, “absolute certainty can never be achieved in this situation.” Because reciprocal interactions are paradoxical and precarious, the openness to others and the suppression of self-interest required to initiate and sustain them are tenuous and can easily break down or go wrong. Frith claims, perhaps correctly, that this uncertainty “does not cause problems in the many real-life situations requiring collaboration” (2218). But it has prompted many cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind to worry about the problem of “free riders” who take advantage of the trust of others without which cooperation fails (see Decety and Wheatley 2015). The natural thing to do, these theorists observe, would be to “ride free” and reap the benefits of the group without contributing. There is also a good deal of evidence, however, that people inherently tend to scorn such behavior—that they will go out of their way to punish free riders even when there is no need to do so (so-called altruistic punishment). Failing to behave reciprocally and collaboratively is perceived as unnatural, then, and is frowned upon by our conspecifics (see Delton and Krasnow 2015 and Flesch 2007).

The paradoxes and contradictions of we-intentionality characterize many forms of cultural production that involve collaboration. Music is a prime example. According to Ian Cross (2003, 48), music “enables the sharing of patterned time with others and facilitates harmonicity of affective state and interaction.” The “communal experience of affect elicited by moving together rhythmically in music and dance,” Cross argues, “could have enhanced cooperative survival strategies for early humans, for example, in hunting or in inter-group conflict” (50). Sandra Trehub (2003, 13–14) points out that an ability to share intentionality is already visible in the predisposition of infants “to attend to the melodic contour and rhythmic patterning of sound sequences” and in their attunement “to consonant patterns, melodic as well as harmonic, and to metric rhythms.” This is early evidence of the ability to coordinate attention and to respond to other-generated patterns of action that is required for any kind of collaborative interaction, including the exchange of stories.

Cross and his colleagues (Rabinowitch, Cross, and Burnard 2012, 111) propose the term “musical group interaction” (MGI) to describe “the joint creation of music.” MGI is interestingly contradictory in ways that foreground the double structure of we-intentionality: “At its simplest, each MGI participant may have an almost separate subjective experience of the musical encounter. At its richest, MGI may elicit a complex entanglement between individual players entailing a fluid sharing of intentions, emotions and cognitive processes.” This sharing of intentionality is once again paradoxical, not a homogeneous merger or union of selves but a doubling that simultaneously overcomes and preserves the opposition between self and other: “As intense as [MGI] may become, individuals still feel themselves to be distinct subjects. However, under certain circumstances, this sense of distinction may be elided,” so that “the boundaries separating self and other become blurred and players are led to experience the actions of their fellow players, at least in part, as their own,” and in extreme cases, “one subject may regard another participating subject almost as himself, to the point that one may experience another’s sensations as one’s own” (111, 118). In such a paradoxical experience, the mutuality of coordinated, collaborative activity results in a synchronization of coupled subjectivities so harmonious and intense that borders seem to disappear as one is absorbed by something beyond oneself, even as the actions and interactions that give rise to this shared intentionality are undertaken by separate individuals.

As a to-and-fro interaction between coupled and collaborating but distinct subjectivities, this contradictory state of affairs is precarious and prone to disturbance and disintegration. As Cross and his colleagues point out, “There are many factors that can disrupt the harmony within the group, such as personal conflict, excessive competitiveness, unbalanced musical skills, lack of patience, unwillingness to cooperate and perhaps more than anything else, the great difficulty of stepping aside and accepting the group as a whole where no member dominates but rather all members embark on a joint project” (115). An inherently paradoxical phenomenon, MGI requires both the concentrated, expert application of individual ability and (at the same time) a surrender of will, a letting go of control, and this contradiction is a striking illustration of the double structure of collaborative activity.

The paradoxes of collaborative meaning making are not unique to music. As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, similar contradictions characterize many kinds of games and play. The paradox of play, according to Gadamer (1993 [1960], 104, 106), is “the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player”: “All playing is a being-played.” The game would not exist without the acts of the participants who initiate and sustain it, even as, together, their collaborative activity creates something that seems to have its own agency, its we-intentionality directing, steering, and even controlling the individual intentionalities of the players. According to Gadamer, “the real subject of the game . . . is not the player but the game itself,” which is “what holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there” (106). Similarly, as Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945], 370) observes, “in the experience of dialogue, . . . my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion and are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. Here there is a being-shared-by-two, . . . our perspectives slip into each other, we coexist through a single world.” Like a game or a musical performance, a conversation can sometimes seem to have a life of its own, guiding and eliciting the contributions of the participants, even as it only exists because of their acts and will break down as soon as one party declines to go along.

Games, music, and conversation are all what I have elsewhere (1990, 20–43) called “heteronomous” states of affairs that paradoxically would not exist without the meaning-making acts of individual agents, even as they then acquire a quasi-independent status, over and above and even (sometimes) against the participants, as when the game seems to compel a player to make a certain move, or a musician adjusts her performance to match the rhythm and tonality of the ensemble. Similar effects can be produced by the to-and-fro interactions set in motion by telling and following stories, as a reader or listener finds herself moved to tears by the emotions of a character constituted by her own acts of identification, feeling the feelings of this quasi person as if they were her own (which, to some extent, paradoxically, they are). In all of these cases, the collaborative interaction of coupled subjectivities makes possible the emergence of a shared intentionality that is more than the sum of its individual parts and that seems to have its own agency, even as it results from and would not exist without the activity of the participants who join together in its production.

The comparison of games and stories to music is instructive because rhythmically coordinated action beneath conscious awareness can be both enabling and disabling. The sensation of boundaries dissolving in experiences of rhythmic interaction and harmonic unification recalls Nietzsche’s (1994 [1872]) famous analysis of the Dionysian power of music to overwhelm Apollonian line and form. Dionysian abandon may miraculously, even sublimely transport us outside of ourselves, but such experiences of merger and boundary loss can also result in well-documented contagion effects (the shared “thrills” of an audience response at a concert, for example, or the collective enthusiasm of a crowd at a sports event or a political rally) that disable cognitive capacities for criticism and evaluation (see Garrels 2011 and Lawtoo 2013). Although perhaps less sweepingly powerful, the experience of being carried away by a narrative may similarly transport the listener and seem to erase boundaries between worlds. If not as intoxicating as the Dionysian dissolution that Nietzsche describes, such a merger of subjectivities may facilitate the inculcation of patterns of feeling and perceiving and have a more powerful impact on habitual pattern formation than cooler, less absorbing, less transportive exchanges of signs and information.

The synchronization of coupled subjectivities that can produce experiences of self-transcendence can also be a force for habitualization and social control. For better or worse (and, again, it can be both), the power of stories to reshape or reinforce the listener’s unreflective patterns of configuring the world may increase to the extent that the difference between self and other in collaborative experiences of we-intentionality is reduced, erased, or overcome. The ideological workings of narrative—its ability to inculcate, perpetuate, and naturalize embodied habits of cognition and emotion—are optimized as the not me in the doubling of real me and alien me diminishes or disappears. If stories ask us to suspend disbelief to immerse ourselves in the illusion they offer, this invitation may be a temptation to the dissolution of boundaries that the demystifying suspicions of ideology critique rightly resist in order to shake the hold on us of habits of thinking and feeling whose power we may not recognize because they are so deeply ingrained, familiarized, and naturalized. The capacity of stories to facilitate beneficial social collaboration and to habitualize ideological mystification are two sides of the same coin.

Distributed Cognition and the Social Life of Stories

These complications call for important caveats to the oft-heard claim that a culture’s narratives constitute a valuable source of collective knowledge and social cohesion. Ricoeur (1987, 428) argues, for example, that stories offer “narrative intelligence,” providing “practical wisdom” different from “the theoretical use of reason” in philosophy or science, a cultural reservoir of implicit ways of understanding that Jerome Bruner (1986, 69) identifies as a “major link between our own sense of self and our sense of others in the social world around us.” These arguments have recently been reformulated in the terminology of distributed cognition based on Andy Clark’s influential notion of the extended mind. Surveying the various tools and affordances (to recall Gibson’s [1979] well-known term) provided by the environment that extend our cognitive capacities, Clark (2011, 226) observes that a “linguistic surround envelops us from birth”—a “sea of words . . . and external symbols [that] are thus paramount among the cognitive vortices which help constitute human thought.” These include, of course, the stories we find circulating around us. David Herman (2013, 162, 192) consequently claims that “narrative’s capacity to distribute intelligence—its ability to disseminate knowledge about or ways of engaging with the world—makes it . . . a key instrument of mind,” with a culture’s repository of stories constituting “a society of mind” through the “suprapersonal systems for sense-making” they offer.

Cognition is not limited to what happens inside the skull, then, but this does not mean (as some advocates of distributed cognition seem to think) that what occurs there is unimportant. Clark himself acknowledges, for example, that “the brain (or brain and body) comprises a package of basic, portable, cognitive resources that is of interest in its own right” (224).¹³ Alva Noë (2009, xiii) is certainly correct that “you are not your brain”—“human experience is a dance that unfolds in the world and with others,” as he explains, and “we are not locked up in a prison of our own ideas and sensations”—but the to-and-fro “dance” of we-intentionality depends on what the embodied consciousnesses of the participants bring to the interaction and how their configurative powers shape and are transformed by the doubling of their subjectivities with the subjectivities of various collaborators. The notion of distributed cognition should not replace brain-based analyses of the social powers of narrative, then, but it can usefully supplement them by clarifying the dynamics of the transaction between stories and the cognitive processes of their recipients.

These interactions are in some respects similar to but in other ways importantly different from our involvements with other kinds of external resources that extend our minds into the world. Cognition occurs, according to Clark, whenever “the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system” between the brain and its extensions in which “all the components . . . play an active causal role” and “jointly govern behavior” (222). Like Clark’s examples of a blind man’s stick or a notebook with formulas or directions a user may consult, a culture’s stories may provide navigational equipment or a set of tools that increase our individual mind’s capacities to negotiate its way through the world. Like the resources for problem solving afforded by features of the environment, the preformed patterns that we find already circulating in our culture’s stories offer readily available resources for thinking about commonly encountered situations that we do not have to invent from scratch. As participants in “two-way interactions” in a “coupled system,” however, these extensions of the mind may not leave the user unchanged. The acquisition of language, for example, has powerfully and profoundly transformed the brain. By the same token, just as we need to learn how to use a tool or adapt our practices to the environment’s affordances, so stories can only extend our minds if we let ourselves be shaped by them. We need to learn how to follow stories by acquiring competence in recognizing and responding to the patterns they deploy, and these ways of configuring narratives will only have cognitive power in other realms of our lives if they reshape our brain- and body-based habits of figuring the world.

A culture’s narratives provide patterns of shared intentionality that we can take up by coupling our cognitive proclivities with the configurative patterns they hold ready for our use, and this doubling is a to-and-fro process that may reshape both parties to the interaction. This is not a linear or one-way process. Even learning to follow the instructions for using a particular tool or device can transform not only the user but also the instrument, whether through applications of its features to problems for which it may not have been initially intended or through discoveries that lead to improvements or alterations in its design. As Terence Cave (2016, 48) observes, “affordances are by definition open-ended, since someone or something may always come up with a new use for the most unlikely object.” The responses made possible by what Cave calls “literary affordances” are, he notes, both constrained and “underspecified,” inviting and facilitating particular uses but also leaving open unpredictable improvisations that can transform both the instrument and its users (see 51–62). Once again these interactions can take a variety of shapes depending on both the affordance and the respondent and on what happens in their encounter. The coupled, to-and-fro processes of doubling set in motion by these interactions are not necessarily under the exclusive direction or control of either party.

To follow a story is to engage in a two-way, back-and-forth interaction between the configured patterns of action emplotted in the narrative and the figures through which the recipient experiences the push and pull of the world. These exchanges can take a variety of forms, with different results. As in the experience of playing of a game, the to-and-fro of the interaction can be so absorbing that it may take over and submerge our sense of self in the communal operation of the exchange (offering the pleasure of immersion in a story or reinforcing the ideological power of customary cognitive patterns). Or the reciprocity between story and recipient can open up a space between them for innovative interactions neither partner alone controls but that may transform both—resulting in new interpretations of the narrative, new ways of configuring its elements, or new possibilities of pattern formation that break the recipient’s past habits and reshape his or her world. Stories get reshaped through their transmission as they are refigured in their reception in ways that may then get passed on in their subsequent retelling and rehearing. This circuit in turn can be transformative for the audience—or, again, can inculcate and reinforce existing patterns. The shared intentionality produced through these interactions is heteronomous to the participants; it depends on the configurative patterns both parties bring to the encounter, but it results in the emergence of a state of affairs (the historically shifting and various “lives” of the narrative in and through its reception) that paradoxically transcends them even as it is created by them (see Armstrong 1990, 20–43).

This circuit is not unique to narratives. Skillful use of even a simple tool like a hammer can be such an absorbing experience that the boundary between worker, instrument, and task becomes blurred in the job at hand, and an instrument is susceptible to a wide range of unpredictable, transformative applications (a hammer can be used for building a house or committing murder, with unforeseeably ramifying consequences in both cases). There are differences here that matter, however. Stories are equipment for navigating the world and solving problems, but they are not entirely defined by their instrumental dimension. The as-if of aesthetic experience is potentially more playful and open ended than the use of tools for particular ends, even if those ends can lead to other unforeseeable consequences.

The transactions through which stories are received and transformed in the lives of recipients are to-and-fro interactions whose dynamics may become open ended, playful, and unpredictable to the extent that the narratives serve noninstrumental purposes and can dwell in the realm of the as-if—the realm in which fictions operate, as Ricoeur puts it, according to a double logic of “it was so and it was not” (see 1977, 265–305). If the to-and-fro of play between telling and following stories mobilizes the brain’s habitual sense-making patterns and sets these against its need to test, revise, and change its customary ways of configuring the world, then the as-if of the aesthetic dimension opens up more room for experimentation, flexibility, and play than may be available in the instrumental use of patterns for problem solving (although here too the brain needs to be open to adjustments and realignments in its habitual gestalts when anomalies don’t fit the figures it typically deploys). Paradoxically, perhaps, the pragmatic usefulness of stories for keeping our cognitive processes from congealing into rigid habitual patterns—for holding open their capacity to be reshaped and re-formed—may be enhanced by the noninstrumental play of the aesthetic. Exchanging stories for their own sake is cognitively useful, then, especially to the extent that the play of configuration and refiguration is able to loosen the habitual, ideological hold of any particular set of narrative patterns on our individual and social minds.

The social power of stories to defamiliarize, disrupt, and play with the cognitive patterns that hold us in their grip calls for a different “cognitive politics,” however, than the program of “therapy” through repetitive “cognitive retraining” that Mark Bracher (2013) advocates. His pedagogical program proposes the use of social “protest novels” to expose and rectify “faulty cognitive schema” that result in injustice: “One must get people to repeatedly recognize, interrupt, and override the old, faulty schema elements when they are triggered, and to activate instead the elements of the new, more adequate schema” (25–26). This is a particularly egregious demonstration of the kind of mechanical, reductive thinking that schema theory can lead to.¹⁴ One can agree with Bracher’s criticism of what he calls “four key faulty assumptions about . . . human nature” (see 8)—the assumptions that people are fully “autonomous,” defined by “essences,” separated “atomistically” from each other, and “homogeneous” (“simply good or bad”)—without endorsing any particular conception of justice or injustice. These assumptions are not a “faulty schema” that can be reversed and replaced by a “new, more adequate schema.” The figurative processes of seeing-as are much more variable and pluralistic than this rigid dichotomy acknowledges (see Armstrong 1990). As Bracher’s critique of essentialism itself suggests, humans are biocultural hybrids who can organize their social and cognitive lives in a variety of ways, and science cannot (and should not try to) prescribe any particular mode of interpretation or any specific moral or political order.

Bracher’s reverse cognitive engineering through repetitive reinforcement of correct cognitive categories is not only a morally and politically questionable assertion of dominance and authority; it also fails to recognize the power of the as-if in narrative interactions to suspend and challenge the habits that hold sway over our sense of the world’s patterns. The to-and-fro interactions through which we exchange stories can upend conventional, naturalized patterns of we-intentionality and open up different, perhaps more enlivening possibilities of collaborative interaction. Bracher’s program of therapeutic, repetitive retraining would stomp out the very unpredictable, open-ended play that potentially gives our experience with stories emancipatory power (and what a dreary, Gradgrind-like place Bracher’s classroom must be!).

Justice is a historically contingent, culturally variable, and essentially contestable concept that narratives can help to reshape and re-form through their play with our cognitive habits. The play of the as-if in aesthetic experiences and the unpredictable to-and-fro of narrative interactions can have political consequences by making possible the kind of negotiation and realignment of social and moral categories that Judith Shklar (1990) describes in her analysis of how the “sense of injustice” develops and changes in democratic societies. What counts as an “injustice” rather than a “misfortune,” she argues—the kinds of things that a society regards as unfair and not merely unfortunate (the suffering caused by racial discrimination, for example, versus the harm and loss resulting from a natural disaster like a volcano or an earthquake) and that thus demand political remediation rather than charitable assistance—is a culturally and historically variable state of affairs that can change through argument and debate in democratic communities. How these boundaries get drawn and redrawn may be powerfully influenced by the stories we tell each other. These lines are necessarily fuzzy, but their contestability is precisely Shklar’s point—“Yesterday’s rock solid rule is today’s folly and bigotry,” she observes (8)—because questioning and readjusting these categories is, she argues, the crucial work of democratic exchange.¹⁵ The kind of reconfiguration of injustice that Shklar describes is facilitated by the sort of open-ended, to-and-fro exchanges that the potentially transformative play of stories with our configurative habits can promote (see Armstrong 2005).

Cognitive science can help us analyze and understand the coupling processes of we-intentionality that these different political and pedagogical programs set in motion, but it cannot decide between them. The synchronization of coupled subjectivities can reinforce the cognitive habits of the participants—or, as in Bracher’s program, restructure them through repetitive retraining. Or, as in the politics of play that I prefer, the to-and-fro of as-if interactions as we tell and follow stories may expose the limits and the contingency of our cognitive constructs and open them up to transformation through the noninstrumental effects of the aesthetic. Once again, neuroscience can help us understand the social powers of narrative, but these powers can serve various ends, and their consequences are not foreordained.

An interesting recent hyperscanning experiment has documented various kinds of brain-to-brain synchronization that different pedagogical activities may produce. Employing EEG skullcaps to record the brain-wave patterns of twelve high school seniors during eleven classes spread out over a semester, neuroscientist Suzanne Dikker and her colleagues (2017) found evidence of significant variations in brain coupling that led one commentator to conclude that “classroom engagement and neural coherence do go hand in hand” (Bhattacharya 2017, R347). Perhaps not surprisingly, brain-to-brain synchronization was greater when students were “watching videos and engaging in group discussions” than when “listening to the teacher reading aloud or lecturing” (Dikker et al. 2017, 1376). Even more, “students showed the highest pairwise synchrony during class with their face-to-face partner” compared to side-by-side or nonadjacent student pairings (1379). Although perhaps intuitively obvious (most students would probably agree that a discussion or a film is less likely to be boring than a lecture), these findings are important because they provide material evidence of the neural processes of brain-to-brain coupling that underlie collaborative interactions in the classroom and elsewhere.

Interpreting their evidence, the experimenters conclude that “students’ neural entrainment to their surrounding sensory input”—that is, “the teacher, a video, or each other”—varies according to “joint attention.” Or, in technical terms, “brain-to-brain synchrony increases as shared attention modulates entrainment by ‘tuning’ neural oscillations to the temporal structure of our surroundings” (1380). That is, oscillations of neuronal assemblies in my brain resonate in synchrony with your brain waves (“tuning” resulting in “entrainment”) as we attend jointly to phenomena unfolding in time. Collaboration produces oscillatory brain-to-brain coupling (we-intentionality) as we coordinate our perspectives in temporally unfolding, to-and-fro interactions with each other and the world we share (the video we watch or the lecture we listen to or the discussion we participate in). Joint attention requires the ability to double me and not me in experiences of shared intentionality, and this doubling is the two-in-one cognitive structure underlying successful collaborative activity all the way down to oscillations at the neural level.

Exactly what was going on in the heads of these high school students can’t be detected by an EEG apparatus, however, and the synchronization of their brain waves doesn’t mean they were all thinking the same thoughts, any more than the members of an orchestra performing harmoniously by blending the sounds from their different instruments would have identical experiences or neural signatures. Synchrony, again, is not homogeneity but a harmonization of different processes and perspectives. If a film or a group discussion is more successful at inducing immersion in a collective activity than a reading or a lecture, that is probably because they encourage involvement through individual meaning making, creating more possibility for imagination, emotional resonance, and active contributions from participants in a joint enterprise. A didactic exercise may aim at getting a group to react in unison, and it may succeed if it can compel joint attention into patterns of synchronization that coordinate the intentionality of its members (“Repeat after me”). Joint attention can result in groupthink, but different group activities may produce synchronization with more or less uniformity among the participants (rooting for one’s hometown sports team versus exchanging arguments in a lively debate would both produce brain-to-brain synchronization but with different degrees of homogeneity). In this experiment, curiously, the activities that were less coercive resulted in greater brain-wave synchronization, and that may be because they were more conducive to promoting the to-and-fro of shared intentionality, the paradoxical combination of active contribution and immersive letting go that characterizes collaboration.

How brains synchronize is crucial to understanding the to-and-fro interactions set in motion by the experience of telling and following stories, and another recent experiment has produced suggestive results about the intracortical patterns underlying these exchanges. Extending its innovative work on intersubject correlation analysis of fMRI images, Uri Hasson’s laboratory (Silbert et al. 2014, e4687) analyzed the cortical activity generated by producing and understanding a narrative—first mapping “all areas that are reliably activated in the brains of [three] speakers telling a 15-minute-long narrative” and then comparing the time course of this activity with areas “activated in the brains of [eleven] listeners as they comprehended that same narrative.” This study compared not only which cortical areas were activated by telling and hearing a story but also the temporal progression of this activity in both speakers and listeners—not only “the spatial overlap” of brain regions but also how “the neural activity is coupled . . . during production and comprehension” (e4687). Some regions didn’t overlap (speaking and listening are different activities, after all), and some overlapping areas didn’t respond similarly over time, but other parts of the brain that were activated by both the production and the comprehension of the story were temporally correlated—that is, their firing was coupled and synchronized. Evidence of temporally synchronized brain-to-brain coupling was especially marked in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with “reward-based learning and memory, . . . empathy, and theory of mind,” and the precuneus, an area on the superior parietal lobe that has been linked to “a wide spectrum of highly integrated tasks, including episodic memory retrieval, first-person perspective taking, and the experience of agency” (e4692–93). These are brain areas that one would expect to be coupled during experiences of collaboration and joint attention, and that is what this experiment showed—temporally correlated synchronization across a network of cortical regions associated with understanding and identifying with others and coordinating attention and memory. If stories exert social power by setting in motion and synchronizing neuronally based cognitive activity across the boundaries between self and other, the temporal coupling of responses in areas having to do with memory, perspective taking, empathy, and agency would be evidence of just the sort of brain-based interactions that the doubling of worlds in narrative understanding would produce.

As is almost always the case, however, this experiment raises as many questions as it answers. Although the synchronization of cortical activity that it documents is powerful evidence of the intersubjective sharing of a story’s intentionality, it isn’t exactly clear how we should understand the different roles of the speakers and listeners in the experiment or how these compare to the various subject positions that can be coupled in the process of telling and following stories. The three speakers in the experiment are not identical to the author of a story, for example, because they recited a prescripted narrative that they did not create. But they are also not quite equivalent to a story’s narrator, because that is a position within the narrative that the recitation actualizes along with other roles (a story’s different characters, for example, or the explicit or implicit narratee). Like the oral recitation of a poem that can be regarded as a way of interpreting the work, a speaker enunciating a preestablished story belongs to its comprehenders as much as to its producers. The experiment nevertheless does indeed register the shared intentionality entailed in an exchange of narrative figuration inasmuch as all fourteen participants (three speakers, eleven listeners) responded in their different but correlated, synchronized ways to the configurative patterns of meaning in the narrative. But the point remains that the speaker-listener relationship in the experiment does not line up exactly with the relation of teller, tale, and audience. And this imprecision means that the experiment’s claim to have recorded the brain-to-brain coupling entailed in telling and following stories is not entirely accurate.

Similarly, the questions narrative theorists endlessly debate about the relation between the various subject positions that can be configured in narrative exchanges—for example, the author, the implied author, the narrator, the narratee, the authorial audience, and the actual audience—are left ambiguous by this experiment.¹⁶ These distinctions matter to the experience of a listener or reader because they indicate different modes of narrative intentionality that the subjectivity of the recipient may engage and double with—for example, coupling my consciousness with the intentionality of the narrator or the narratee, or projecting an implied author that my consciousness assumes it is in relation with, or aligning my individual response to the story with the perspectives of other respondents that I either know or imagine are (or have been or will be) coparticipants in its reception (fellow readers, listeners, critics, and interlocutors through whose responses a story lives on, the actual audience no author can ever fully anticipate). Interactions, couplings, and synchronizations of different kinds would occur in all of these doubled relations, but the instruments of neuroscience are not able to register what these experiences are like.

An important issue left open by this experiment is the relationship between its measurements of brain-to-brain coupling and the kinds of synchronization that occur across broader expanses of time and space in the social life of stories. Audiences from different social worlds and historical periods that respond to the same story are no doubt synchronizing their brains as they reactivate the intentionality of the narrative and thereby participate in the transmission of its we-intentionality across its history of reception, but this kind of cross-cultural, transgenerational collaboration is impossible to measure through a hyperscanning EEG experiment or an intersubject correlation analysis of fMRI images. The patterns registered in this experiment’s recording of coupled brain activity provide material evidence of how different brains can synchronize in response to a story, and if this can happen across fourteen subjects who separately entered and left an fMRI machine at different moments as they recited or listened to a narrative, then the correlations across space and time measured in this particular case could plausibly be extended to imply similar synchronizations across even greater temporal and spatial divides. The scanning technologies may not be able to provide precise measurements of these widely dispersed interactions, but the experimental evidence nevertheless warrants the inference that similar brain-based synchronizations and processes of doubling are at work (or, better, in play) in the interactions across history and culture through which stories exercise their social power. When I hear a story from long ago or far away, I do often feel that my world is resonating with another world, and perhaps the brain-to-brain couplings registered in this fMRI experiment are the material, biological basis of that mysterious, ephemeral experience.

Stories as a Cognitive Archive: What Is It Like to Be Conscious?

Cognitive literary critics have recently argued that neuroscience has much to learn from literature because of its understanding of phenomena that defy objective measurement or physical analysis. The central issue here is the problem of qualia, the dilemma of how to explain the first-person, lived experience of a sensation like seeing red (see Humphrey 2006). This problem is the topic of Thomas Nagel’s memorably titled essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) in which he argues that conscious experience—for example, a first-person, lived sensation like seeing red—cannot be adequately explained in the objective terms of science. Nagel’s critique is aimed at the program of neuroscientists like Francis Crick (1994, 3, 9) who, defiantly proclaiming “you’re nothing but a pack of neurons,” contends that “the neural correlate of ‘seeing red’ ” is objectively definable. “The scientific belief is that our minds—the behavior of our brains—can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them,” Crick argues, and so “we may be able to say that you perceive red if and only if certain neurons (and/or molecules) in your head behave in a certain way” (7, 9). This assumption informs much work in “neuroaesthetics,” the field pioneered by British neuroscientist Semir Zeki, who purports to explain artistic beauty as a response of the “reward system” in the frontal cortex (see Zeki and Ishizu 2011). His much-watched TED talk (which has thousands of views on YouTube) shows him pointing to a patch of color on an fMRI image where experiences of beautiful art and music intersect and pronouncing that this is the location of beauty in the brain.

There are a number of problems with this claim, among them that aesthetic experiences set in motion far-reaching to-and-fro interactions across the cortex and between the brain and the body that are not localizable to any region of neural anatomy (see Conway and Rehding 2013). Equally important, however, is the question of what fMRI images can and cannot show about consciousness. These striking color images look like snapshots of the brain in action—neurons firing in response to beauty—but this appearance is deceiving. For one thing, fMRI technology offers only an indirect measurement of cortical activity, tracking differences in blood flow to parts of the brain with a considerable temporal lag. Even more, however, Zeki’s images are nothing more (or less) than visualizations—pictorial representations of statistical measurements of differential blood flow averaged across a group of twenty-one subjects—and are therefore more like graphs or charts than photos. Crick may be right that we only can have an experience of beauty or anything else if neurons fire, but these images are at most vivid statistical displays; they are not what it is like to be conscious of music or visual art.

A closer approximation of neuronal activity may be provided by single-cell measurements of the electrical activity of individual neurons, a more direct and specific technology of measurement than fMRI, but ordinarily not possible in human subjects due to ethical restrictions. Occasionally, however, as with epilepsy patients prior to surgery, it is necessary and permissible to insert probes into the brains of live human subjects and record electrical activity, and interesting experimental findings sometimes result—as in one notorious case in the neuroscience literature where a single neuron was discovered in the face recognition area of an epilepsy patient that responded exclusively to images of actress Jennifer Aniston and not to pictures of her and her ex-husband Brad Pitt or to other faces or objects (see Quiroga et al. 2005). This is what Crick is looking for—the neuronal activity underlying an experience—but it is not what it is like to be conscious of Jennifer Aniston.

Hence Nagel’s skepticism that first-person experience can be captured by the terms and concepts of the physical sciences. As he argues, “Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view” (1974, 437). Further, he claims, “even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat) one must take up the bat’s point of view” (442n). Whether humans without sonar echolation can ever do this is debatable, but what strikes a literary critic (and what Nagel does not seem to recognize) is that “point of view” is also a literary term with a long, sometimes controversial history in the theory of the novel. Whether and how a point of view (of a human, if not a bat) can be rendered in a work of fiction so that the reader can imaginatively recreate its lived immediacy is a nontrivial question that has been much debated in narrative theory.

When David Lodge (2002, 16) claims that “literature constitutes a kind of knowledge about consciousness which is complementary to scientific knowledge,” it is no accident that the example he chooses is a novel by Henry James, a writer famously associated with point of view in fiction. After the cognitive scientist in Lodge’s novel Thinks . . . (2001, 42–43) explains “the problem of consciousness” (that is, “how to give an objective, third-person account of a subjective, first-person phenomenon”), the other lead character who not coincidentally happens to be a creative writer replies: “Oh, but novelists have been doing that for the last two hundred years,” and as proof she recites from memory the opening lines of The Wings of the Dove. As Lodge observes, “We read novels like The Wings of the Dove because they give us a convincing sense of what the consciousness of people other than ourselves is like” (2002, 30). This accomplishment is not unique to James (the other example Lodge’s writer cites is a poem by Andrew Marvell), but James’s experiments with point of view are of special cognitive interest because they seek to represent not primarily the what of the world but the how of its perception by consciousness. This thematization of perception lays bare processes, problems, and paradoxes that are involved whenever literature and other arts attempt to render subjective experience.

James’s experiments with perspective and focalization are instructive because the access literature provides to qualia is not as straightforward as Lodge suggests. The artistic representation of experience is not, after all, a matter of simply offering up consciousness for direct inspection or of immersing us fully and immediately in another world. The like in what it is like can only be rendered by the as-if of aesthetic staging (see Iser 1993). When literary works from whatever genre or period attempt to re-create what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, they can only do so by using styles, conventions, and techniques that are not identical to the subjective experience they seek to represent. Cave (2016, 14) is correct when he argues that “literature offers a virtually limitless archive of the ways in which human beings think, how they imagine themselves and their world.” To mine this archive, however, requires an appreciation of the aesthetic variability of the as-if in rendering the cognitive experience of what it is like to be conscious.

The curious thing about Lodge’s example, consequently, is that James renders the consciousness of Kate Croy not immediately and directly but through a recognizable, finely wrought, and notoriously controversial literary style:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once—she had tried it—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. (2003 [1902], 21)

Even in these two sentences one can recognize James’s distinctive manner. Following his well-known method of representing a scene indirectly through the point of view of a “central intelligence” (which is why Lodge chooses this example), James’s novel opens by depicting Kate’s perceptions and reflections (her sight of herself in the mirror, for example, and her annoyance at her father’s delay) and even her tactile sensations (the feel of the tacky upholstery). James is sometimes criticized for portraying characters with huge heads and nonexistent bodies, but here Kate Croy’s consciousness is haptically embodied. Just as visible in this passage as what Kate is thinking and feeling, however, is James’s writing (even how he renders the materiality of touch by the rhetorical trick of turning adjectives into nouns [“the slippery and the sticky”]).

This is not stream of consciousness (whatever that hopelessly vague term signifies) but rather a finely balanced structure of phrases and clauses that calls attention to its verbal play. The style itself implies a presence and a perspective other than the character’s—giving us a doubled sense of observing Kate from an implied narrator’s viewpoint while also inhabiting her interiority. We are there, watching with her, even as we also watch her—and also as we watch James and marvel at his style (or despair, because how can we do all three things at once—an understandable frustration that prompted his brother William to complain and to admonish Henry just to get on with it and tell us what’s happening in the story). What it is like to be Kate Croy at this moment in time, as James portrays it in this passage, is a complex product of aesthetic staging.

Lodge credits the invention of free indirect style with giving novels extraordinary power to open up inside views into other lives (see 2002, 37–57). This technique is indeed a manifestation of the paradox of the alter ego, as I have argued, but it is not simply natural, immediate, and transparent. A biocultural hybrid, its doubling of self and other is both an enactment of basic, embodied cognitive processes and a contingent historical construct—a stylistic convention that only emerged through a long history of literary experimentation and that can be deployed in a variety of ways for different purposes. There is an enormous difference, for example, between the biting ironies of Flaubert’s free indirect style in Madame Bovary and the generous sympathy informing James’s depiction of Isabel Archer’s consciousness as she sits up all night reflecting on the disappointments of her marriage in the famous chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady or the notoriously ambiguous, undecidable detachment of Joyce’s rendering of Stephen Dedalus’s sensibility in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Literature may have powers to render what it is like to be conscious that the objective measures of science lack, but the as of the as-if still leaves a gap between the re-creation of another point of view in art and the immediacy of first-person consciousness.

This gap is both disabling and empowering. It prevents literature from ever completely transcending the divide between one consciousness and another, but it also makes it possible for art to stage versions of other lives and to experiment with different ways of doing so. If the as of representation prevents a work of fiction from presenting qualia immediately and directly, it also allows writers to display and explore various aspects of perceptual experience through cognitively distinctive styles. One of the ways neuroscience can assist literary theory is by identifying and describing the cognitive processes that a particular narrative technique seeks to represent and recreate. It is not enough to specify the formal features or grammatical markers associated with techniques like point of view, stream of consciousness, or interior monologue. As Alan Palmer (2004, 64) points out, “There are vast areas of the mind that are not addressed within the speech category approach” that governs narratological analyses of fictional minds. Because different narrative methods for representing consciousness foreground different aspects of human understanding, a particular strategy for depicting the life of the mind will not be fully elucidated until its cognitive implications have been analyzed and explained, and for this work the ideas and theories of neuroscience can be immensely useful. Scientific concepts alone are not enough to explain the epistemological implications of a particular technique because the as of its staging of what it is like to be conscious in one way or another requires careful explication that is attuned to the aesthetics of style, but attempting to interpret the way a cognitive process is staged in a narrative without consulting the sciences of the mind is to deprive oneself of valuable analytical tools.

The need to analyze the cognitive assumptions and aims of a representational style is especially evident in the notorious difficulty of defining the aesthetic of impressionism in literature and painting. Impressionism is a fascinating example of the way in which literature, painting, and other arts provide a cognitive archive that can be mined for evidence of how the question of what it is like to be conscious has been explored by artists in different genres, periods, and cultures. As evidence of the biocultural diversity of our species’ cognitive life, this archive is historically varied, inasmuch as the like in what it is like and the as of the as-if can be staged in a variety of different ways, even as it is also characterized by universal epistemological structures and processes that have been constant over recent evolutionary time.

Historically, the impressionist project began with a desire to radicalize the aesthetic of realism by exposing and thematizing its epistemological conditions of possibility. Both visual and literary impressionists had become impatient with the conventions of representation because they were inconsistent with the workings of consciousness and consequently seemed artificial. The paradox of impressionism, however, is that the attempt to render faithfully the perceptual processes through which consciousness knows the world thwarts mimetic illusion building. The result is art that can seem strange, baffling, and unrealistic and that calls attention to itself as art (the formal qualities of the picture plane or the textuality of narrative discourse). This paradox points the way to the abstraction and antimimetic textual play that characterize the aesthetic of modernism. The reasons for these changes have to do with the elusiveness of consciousness as a target of representation. Impressionism gives rise to modernism because of the instabilities of an aesthetic of qualia.

The term “impressionism” is so heterogeneous that it might seem to defy definition, covering artists ranging from the painters in Monet’s school to the literary impressionists who led the novel’s transition from realism to modernism (especially Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, but the term has sometimes been extended to include almost any writer who attempts to render subjective experience, from Walter Pater and Stephen Crane to Joyce, Proust, and Virginia Woolf). What “impressionism” generally designates, however, is an interest in developing representational techniques that would do justice to first-person perceptual experience.¹⁷ How to render the subjective experience of a sensation or a perception with paint or words is the distinctive challenge of impressionist art, and the difficulties (perhaps impossibility) of attaining this goal are responsible not only for the heterogeneity of impressionism but also for its many paradoxes and contradictions.

Impressionism exposes the gap between the as of the as-if re-creation of another point of view in art and the immediacy of first-person consciousness by attempting to overcome it, and this is why it is such a paradoxical phenomenon. Consider, for example, the contradictory aims and effects of Monet’s painting “Impression: Sunrise” (1872), often cited as emblematic of the impressionist aesthetic. An attempt to render a visual sensation at a particular moment, under specific conditions of light and atmosphere, this painting exemplifies Zola’s description of impressionism as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament” (quoted in Rubin 1999, 48). Aiming to capture accurately and precisely the experiential effects of a moment, it is both objective and subjective. Hence the paradox that impressionism has been regarded as not only more scientific but also more personal and phenomenal in its approach to representation than the conventions of realism it challenges (see Lewis 2007). The claim to the greater realism of Monet’s painting of the sunrise is both its truth to the atmospheric conditions of the moment and its truth to the perceiver’s visual sensations. In a further important complication, however, it can only represent this perceptual experience in an arrangement of colored brush strokes, and so another contradiction of this painting—one that looks forward to modernism’s focus on the picture plane—is that its atmospheric, sensational effects depend on relations between color contrasts (red versus blue), shapes (the intense, off-center circle of sun and the sketchily indicated ships), and brush strokes (vigorously and roughly applied in the sky and the water) that emphasize its tangibility as a made object (even signed and dated by its maker in the lower left corner).

The effects of these contradictions on the viewer are paradoxical and double, simultaneously immediate and reflective. Monet’s painting is both an incitement to vicarious immersion in a momentary sensation and a call to reflect on the cognitive conditions it simulates as well as on the artistic techniques whereby it criticizes the unnaturalness of realism. As the art historian James Rubin (1999, 115) perceptively notes, “Monet’s techniques concentrate on purely visual phenomena to create a fascinating interplay between presence and absence—an interplay that calls attention to representation and illusion.” Oscillating between presence and absence, this painting seeks to render a first-person experience that it is not and cannot be, and its effort to create a simulacrum of experience foregrounds the material, technical means through which it seeks to do so. This contradiction has the paradoxical effect of promoting aesthetic reflection about the formal features of the work (the abstract play of colors on the picture plane that is a harbinger of modernist abstraction) even as it incites the viewer to re-create an as-if doubling of the original moment of sensation—a simulacrum of the moment that both is and is not what Monet experienced. The qualia of the sensation of the sunrise is both there and not there in Monet’s painting, and this duality sets in motion an oscillation between sensuous immersion and cognitive, aesthetic reflection.

These oppositions are evident in the conflict between two famous beholders, John Ruskin and E. H. Gombrich, who disagree about impressionism because they emphasize contrary poles of its defining paradoxes. According to Ruskin’s well-known formulation, “The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight” (1857, 6n; original emphasis). Ironically and inevitably, this account of primordial perception prior to the imposition of conventional categories relies on metaphors—fanciful comparisons to how a child or a blind person would see that are not strictly accurate. As the neuroscience of vision has discovered, the rear visual cortex will atrophy if it fails to receive stimuli during critical periods of early life that allow it to organize itself. This was one of the central findings of the now-classic experiments that won Thorstein Wiesel and David Hubel (see 1965) their Nobel Prize. Without establishing patterns of response to orientation, movement, and color, the visual brain loses its ability to make neuronal connections, and so a blind person who was suddenly granted vision literally could not see. Monet’s painting is not how either a child or a sightless person would perceive the scene, then, but this “not” is evocative rather than merely erroneous because it makes possible a comparison that uses the as-if of figurative language to suggest in memorable terms what it is like to have an original sensation (an experience of qualia which, of course, is not strictly speaking reproducible). Ruskin may be scientifically wrong, but there is something figuratively right about the phrase “the innocent eye” as a metaphor for qualia that explains why it has endured.

Famously objecting that “the innocent eye is a myth,” Gombrich (1960, 298) insists on the role of “the beholder’s share” in perception and painting: “Seeing is never just registering. It is the reaction of the whole organism to the patterns of light that stimulate the back of our eyes.” This is indeed a central doctrine of contemporary neuroscience, which understands vision as a to-and-fro process of assembling inputs back and forth across the visual cortex in interactions between the brain, the body, and the world (see Livingstone 2002). In ways Gombrich insufficiently credits, however, impressionism also entails purposive play with pattern. Monet’s painting relies on gestalts and constructs for its effects, not only in the formal alignment and juxtaposition of shapes and colors on the picture plane but also in the viewer’s ability to recognize features of the scene (the ships and the harbor, the rising sun, its reflection on the water) that both are and are not there. The oscillations between presence and absence characteristic of the viewing experience are not evidence of formlessness but are the product of an interplay of figures and patterns. Ruskin and Gombrich are both wrong as well as right about what Monet is up to. Ruskin correctly understands that impressionism is an attempt to render qualia, but Gombrich is right that to do so it must deploy the aesthetic and cognitive resources of the as-if to suggest what it is like.

As with the oscillations between presence and absence set in motion by “Impression: Sunrise,” this contradiction foregrounds the fact that qualia cannot be given directly and immediately in painting or literature but can only be re-created, simulated, and staged through manipulations of the as-if. Hence Ford’s claim that “the Impressionist must always exaggerate” (1964 [1914], 36), advice that would seem to fly in the face of his doctrine that the author and the text must disappear. Distortion is inevitable in painting or literature, however, because representation necessarily renders something as something other than itself. Rather than seeking to disguise this dilemma through mimetic illusion making, the disruptions of impressionism expose it.

Impressionism consequently has much in common with Viktor Shklovsky’s well-known aesthetic of defamiliarization. The purpose of art, according to Shklovsky (1965 [1917], 12), is “to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception” and thereby to “recover the sensation of life, . . . to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” The effects of such defamiliarizing techniques can be paradoxical, not only revivifying perception but also promoting reflection about how habit blunts sensation and calling attention to artistic forms that resist naturalization. This doubleness is akin to the effects of distraction and bewilderment that Ford describes as characteristically impressionist:

Indeed, I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass—through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects the face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other. (1964 [1914], 41)

This is an experience of doubling, an oscillation between presence and absence—simultaneously a heightening of perception and an interruption of automatic processing that prompts the viewer to reflect about an odd optical effect, a peculiarity that is aesthetically interesting even as it foregrounds otherwise unnoticed aspects of consciousness. This duality both renders qualia—what it is like to have a visual sensation—and calls attention to the way in which the staging of what it is like requires a manipulation of the as (here figured as an experience of decentered consciousness as if we were in two places at once).

If the as of representation prevents the impressionists from presenting qualia immediately and directly, it also allows them to foreground and explore various aspects of perceptual experience, and the differences in how they do this are reflected in the multifariousness of the impressionist aesthetic. For example, James makes point of view a central principle of novelistic composition because of his fascination with the constructive powers of consciousness—how we know the world by “guess[ing] the unseen from the seen” (1970c [1884], 389) and composing patterns from a limited perspective that leaves some things hidden and indeterminate. Readers of What Maisie Knew or The Ambassadors are given a simulacrum of what this composing power is like—an as-if experience of seeing the world as Maisie or Strether do—but also are able to note ironically what these characters probably fail to observe or too imaginatively fill out (so that we share the child’s bewilderment even as we understand the narcissistic machinations of adults that baffle her, and we are not as surprised as Strether is when he learns that the “virtuous attachment” between Chad and Madame de Vionnet is not purely chaste). By thematizing a character’s perspective on the world and dramatizing how it is constructed according to certain assumptions, habits, and expectations, James allows us to immerse ourselves in another consciousness (experiencing what it is like to share their point of view) even as we also observe its characteristic limitations and blind spots and notice the disjunctions between its hold on the world and other points of view that would construe things differently (the adults who cruelly laugh at Maisie’s naive questions or Woollett’s worries that Strether has been carried away by the Parisian Babylon). This doubleness calls attention to the constructive powers of cognitive pattern making that we ordinarily do not notice in everyday perception and that traditionally realistic fiction tacitly employs to portray objects and characters by unfolding a series of aspects that display them.

Conrad’s and Ford’s ambiguous, fragmentary narratives deploy different techniques for similar cognitive purposes. In Lord Jim, the inconsistencies between the different perspectives Marlow receives on the titular character resist synthesis into a coherent point of view and consequently leave him frustrated and bewildered: “They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation” (1996 [1900], 49). Marlow’s glimpses of Jim remain fragmentary and disconnected, and their refusal to synthesize foregrounds the drive to build consistency among elements in a pattern that is necessary for lucid comprehension. In Ford’s impressionistic masterpiece The Good Soldier, the similar inability of the narrator Dowell to reconcile different versions of events as he revisits and revises his many mistaken assumptions and beliefs also leaves him baffled. “I don’t know. I leave it to you,” he repeatedly tells the reader even as his narrative draws to its inconclusive close (1990 [1915], 282). The notorious ambiguities of both of these novels challenge and defy the reader to do a better job of fitting evidence into consistent patterns. In wondering whether to trust or doubt their narrators’ explanations and interpretations, we replay their uncertainties in our own experience, and the refusal of fragments to cohere calls attention to the ordinarily invisible work of cognitive pattern construction.

One of the curiosities of impressionist experimentation in both painting and literature is that it must resort to such complicated technical innovation in order to render the seemingly simple, self-evident presence of consciousness to itself. But this contradiction is also a defining characteristic of modernism. For example, after denouncing the “tyranny” of plot and the “ill-fitting vestments” of conventional representation that fail to capture life’s “luminous halo,” Virginia Woolf memorably demands in her classic manifesto “Modern Fiction” (1984 [1921], 149–50): “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.” She recognizes as well, however, that rendering first-person experience in all of its immediacy requires techniques and conventions, and so she worries that her generation will be condemned to “a season of failures and fragments,” “smashing” and “crashing” and “writing against the grain,” because “the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use” and more adequate techniques have yet to be invented (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1950 [1924], 117, 116, 114, 112).

Hence the seeming paradox that the effort to render what it is like to be conscious produces a panoply of stylistic innovations, from Woolf and Joyce to Faulkner and beyond, a technical variety that the over-used umbrella term “stream of consciousness” drastically oversimplifies. The issue is not which of these modernists’ distinctive modes of stylistic experimentation gets the “luminous halo” of qualia right. Is “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse a more accurate representation of the “atoms” than “Sirens” or “Oxen of the Sun” in Ulysses? Is Benjy’s narration in The Sound and the Fury a more faithful rendering of consciousness than his brother Quentin’s or Jason’s—or Mrs. Ramsay’s, or Leopold Bloom’s, or Molly’s? The absurdity of these questions suggests that this is not the right way to frame the problem. What the experiments of the modernists and the impressionists reveal, rather, is that the quest to render the what it is like of qualia requires the deployment of the as-if of representation and that this is open to endless variation. That is why modernism, like impressionism, is a heterogeneous assembly of styles for rendering consciousness rather than a unified epistemology or a homogeneous aesthetic.

The point is not that James, Conrad, and Ford or any of the great modernists are more or less right about consciousness but rather that their different technical experiments with figuring what it is like to be conscious use the as-if to stage in the reading experience various dimensions of cognitive life that neuroscience explores from its different perspective. The variability of the as in the as-if and the like in what it is like is what gives rise to the variety of stylistic experimentation through which impressionism and modernism stage and explore consciousness, never getting “it” quite right because they are always staging what it is like, a process of experimentation, innovation, and variation that makes representation historical.¹⁸ Literature can never completely, fully capture what it is like to be conscious any more than science can, but the experiments of impressionism and modernism can help us to understand why this is so, even as they attempt to transcend the limits of the as-if and convey an experience that is beyond their grasp.

Impressionism and modernism are especially clear and compelling examples of how the arts provide a cognitive archive that can offer perspectives on the embodied life of consciousness that complement what neuroscience can disclose. The focus of these aesthetic movements on what it is like to be conscious thematizes cognitive processes at work in the configuration of experience in any rendering of the as-relations through which we know each other and our worlds. The as-if of aesthetic staging in whatever historical, generic, or cultural mode manipulates and makes visible the ordinarily invisible patterns of seeing-as through which we construe the world and, in the process, may potentially transfigure and transform them.¹⁹ Music, the visual arts, and literature stage the as-if in different ways, but they all have cognitive value because their manipulations of the as-structure of their particular aesthetic domains can affect the as-relations through which cognition operates.

In the case of narrative, as I have tried to show in this book, by taking up the figurations through which we experience the world and configuring them into the patterns of discourse and story (the telling and the told), the stories we exchange may then reconfigure the as-relations that animate and define our everyday cognitive lives. This circuit of the three types of mimesis has generated an archive of figuration—the record of the social and historical life of stories—that testifies to the playful plasticity of our embodied cognitive powers. This archive is an intersubjective reservoir of shared intentionality that is not only a witness to what it has been like to be conscious in different periods and cultures; it is also an invitation to us to synchronize with other brains through the traces of their cognitive lives that await us in the stories they have left behind. The cognitive archive of the world’s stories is an invaluable record of the social powers of narrative in other times and places. Those powers are not merely locked in the past, however, but can reach across historical and cultural distance as we couple our brains with the patterns of concord and discord that other members of our species have configured into stories.

CHAPTER FOURNeuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative

Empathy, Identification, and the Doubling of Self and Other

Collaboration, Shared Intentionality, and Coupled Brains

Distributed Cognition and the Social Life of Stories

Stories as a Cognitive Archive: What Is It Like to Be Conscious?

CHAPTER FOUR

Neuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative