HOW STORIES CONFIGURE experience and organize events in time is an especially intriguing and important example of how literature plays with the brain. As I argued in my previous book on neuroscience and art (2013), reading a literary work typically sets in motion to-and-fro interactions between experiences of harmony and dissonance. A novel, poem, or play may reinforce and refine our sense of the world’s patterns through the symmetry, balance, and unity of its forms, or it may disrupt and overturn our customary syntheses by transgressing established conventions and refusing to satisfy our expectations about how parts fit together into wholes. These kinds of interaction between harmony and dissonance in aesthetic experiences help to negotiate a basic contradiction that is fundamental to our cognitive lives—the contradiction between our need for pattern and constancy and our equally crucial need for flexibility and openness to change. The ability of the brain to play with these competing imperatives is also evident in our capacity to tell and follow stories. For example, plots convert the one thing after another of passing moments into meaningful patterns that draw on, support, and shape our cognitive habits for building consistency and making connections. But the twists and turns in a story also hold our attention by surprising us and compelling us to remain open to the possibility that we may need to reconsider and revise our sense of the order of things. The productive imbalances between the formation and dissolution of patterns in the brain make possible this play between the building and breaking of patterns in narrative, even as the construction and disruption of patterns in the stories we tell each other contribute to the brain’s balancing act between pattern and openness to change.
This book offers a neurophenomenological model of narrative that charts the correlations between our lived, embodied experiences as tellers and followers of stories and the neurobiological processes that underlie and constrain these interactions. Building on the work of phenomenological theorists of reading and narrative (especially Wolfgang Iser and Paul Ricoeur), I construct an account of narrative as an experience-based interaction between the production and reception of figurative patterns. As I explain in the first chapter, experience is already prefigured because understanding is always a process of seeing-as—a recursive, configurative operation of pattern building that characterizes vision, reading, and all other cognitive processes. Narratives take up prefigured aspects of experience (including culturally shared conventions, assumptions, and practices) and reconfigure them into as-if patterns of various kinds (“Once upon a time . . .” and “they lived happily ever after”—or not!). The experience of reading or listening to a story may in turn prompt the recipient to refigure his or her understanding of the world, and the cycle can then begin again through which storytellers and audiences shape, exchange, and reshape their experiences.
This phenomenological account of the production and reception of narrative has a long and varied history on which I draw in the following pages as I explore different, much-discussed topics in narrative theory having to do with the relation between stories and experience: for example, how narrative organizes and plays with the disjunctions of our experience of time (the focus of chapter 2), how plots construct patterns of action (chapter 3), and how the exchange of stories brings different worlds into relation with one another (chapter 4). My contribution to this tradition is the addition of the perspective of neuroscience. What neurobiological processes, functions, and structures underlie these interactions? How is our capacity to tell and follow stories constrained and enabled by our embodied brains? In short, what kind of brains do we have that we are able to tell each other stories, and how do stories affect our brains?
The aim of such an exercise in neurophenomenology is to clarify the correlations between cognitive experience and its biological underpinnings. Correlations are not causation, however. As one introduction to neurophenomenology (Thompson, Lutz, and Cosmelli 2005, 40) observes: “Although neuroscientists have supplied neural models of various aspects of consciousness, and have uncovered evidence about the neural correlates of consciousness (or NCCs), there nonetheless remains an ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of how to relate neurobiological and phenomenological features of consciousness.” This gap is evident in the much-discussed hard problem of how to account for first-person experiences in the third-person language of science (whether an analysis of neuronal activity can explain what it is like to see the color red, for example, a question I take up in chapter 4). It is also central to the problem of emergence, the mystery of how electro-chemical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness (see Deacon 2012 and Nagel 2012).
On the one hand, biologically based processes obviously constrain consciousness and cognition. Members of our species can convert only a limited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum into perceivable experiences of light and color, for example, and our auditory cortex similarly is limited in the acoustical wavelengths it can recognize as sounds. As is well known, the auditory capacities of dogs and bats enable them to hear much higher frequencies than we respond to, and elephants and whales are sensitive to low-frequency sounds that we don’t notice (hence the speculation that some animals may be able to predict an earthquake by picking up low-frequency seismic vibrations [see Bear, Connors, and Paradiso 2007, 346]). On the other hand, describing these constraints and correlating what we can see and hear to our visual and auditory equipment is not the same as explaining causally how experiences emerge. Nor do these constraints and correlations explain what it is like to have visual and auditory experiences. The aim of neurophenomenology is “not to close the explanatory gap (in the sense of conceptual or ontological reduction), but rather to bridge the gap by establishing dynamic reciprocal constraints between subjective experience and neurobiology” (Thompson, Lutz, and Cosmelli 2005, 89). This gap should caution us from jumping from correlation to causation, but it is nevertheless a productive difference rather than a disabling divide, and that is because it allows for comparisons that can be mutually illuminating. As I have argued previously (see Armstrong 2013, 1–12, 175–82) and try again to show in this book, the inability of literary theorists and neuroscientists to overcome the differences between their perspectives is not a bad thing because it gives them the opportunity to exchange insights about matters of mutual concern from distinctive disciplinary vantage points.
We could not tell each other stories if our brains and bodies did not have some of the characteristics I explore in this book, but neuronal activity alone is not sufficient to produce and sustain narrative activity. A brain in a vat could not tell or understand stories. I am referring, of course, to the classic thought experiment in which a brain is imagined to exist in a tub of fluid with sensors attached to it, and the question is asked: ‘Could you (or your) brain tell the difference?’ Evan Thompson (2007, 242) explains: “As conscious subjects we are not brains in cranial vats; we are neurally enlivened beings in the world.” Without a body situating us in a social world, the cognitive equipment provided by our brains could not generate the experiences we exchange in the stories we tell each other. But the features and capabilities of that equipment also constrain and enable the construction of stories.
The brain’s paradoxical temporal processes that I explore in chapter 2 are a particularly good example of this. The timing of various neuronal and cortical processes is curiously disjunctive and nonsimultaneous, with different parts of the cortex reacting at different rates and neuronal assemblies forming and dissolving at different speeds (connections between different parts of the cortex take longer to form than linkages within a specific region of the brain). As Benjamin Libet’s well-known mind-time experiments demonstrate (Libet 2004), one consequence of these disjunctions is that consciousness always lags by as much as a half second behind events to which our perceptual equipment has already responded before we are aware that we’ve done so (as when we slam on the brakes to avoid a child chasing a ball across the street before we are fully cognizant of the danger we’ve already avoided). The experiential correlatives of these neural disjunctions are the kinds of paradoxes that famously make Augustine find time bewildering. As Ricoeur points out, Aristotle’s theory of plots transforms such aporias into stories. If cortical processes were not temporally various and nonsimultaneous, we could not tell stories. Such simultaneity occurs in what neuroscientists call “hypersynchrony,” which characterizes states like sleep and epilepsy (see Baars and Gage 2010, 245–47), and hypersynchrony obviously paralyzes the construction and exchange of stories (among other things).
Elucidating the correlations between the nonsimultaneity of cortical temporality, the paradoxes of experienced time, and the much-discussed contradictions of narrative activity, as I do in chapter 2, can tell us much about the brain-body-world interactions that generate stories. But charting these correlations does not mean that neuronal processes in the brain are by themselves sufficient to produce stories. They aren’t. The experiences we have as embodied social beings are constrained by the kinds of brains we have, and it’s those experiences we exchange when we tell and follow stories. We couldn’t do that, however, if we didn’t have brains, and how we do it depends on various brain-based cognitive capacities that narrative sets in motion.
My analysis of the relations between brain, body, and world in narrative interactions is meant to correct the one-sidedness of some versions of so-called 4e cognition that view consciousness as (count the es) embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended. This movement has made important contributions to the project of integrating bodily processes, social constructs, and technological equipment into accounts of cognition. I regard this as a worthy attempt to do justice to the bodily, cultural, and historical dimensions of experience that the later Husserl, the early Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and various existential and hermeneutic phenomenologists also emphasize, as do such pragmatists as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey—all figures in whose tradition I work in this book. But as I argue in chapter 1, the embeddedness and extendedness of cognition matter because of the ways in which our brains are connected to the world, and those connections go both ways—from the world to the brain and from the brain to the world. In the words of one of the anonymous referees who reviewed this book for Johns Hopkins University press, it is important “not to throw the brain out with the bathwater, so to speak” (a point this reviewer acknowledged while confessing to hold to a more radical view of enactivism than I propose). In their zeal to reject a Cartesian splitting of mind and body, some proponents of 4e cognition go too far in the other direction and neglect brain-based processes that are necessary for socially situated, embodied cognition to do its work. A corrective to such one-sidedness, my neurophenomenological account of narrative offers a model of embodied neuroscience that incorporates brain-based concepts.
Although I am opposed to neural reductionism, I believe that there is much to learn from comparing lived experience and the neural correlates of consciousness, and the aim of this book is to show what such correlations reveal about narrative. The following chapters chart a variety of correlations between our experiences as tellers and followers of stories and the neuronal processes that enable and constrain these interactions, correlations that have various consequences for narrative theory. Not all problems in narratology can be solved by turning to the science, by any means, but some narrative theories are inconsistent with the science, and those discrepancies should give narratologists pause. As the science of cognition and language has changed, so too must narrative theory.
For example, as I explain in chapter 1, the recursive, nonlinear dynamics of the cortical processes and brain-body-world interactions responsible for language call for jettisoning the structuralist assumptions that still haunt some versions of cognitive narratology. Contemporary neuroscience has discarded the formalist, modular explanation of linguistic development and brain functioning on which the project of identifying orderly, universal structures of mind and language was based. The formalist model of innate, orderly, rule-governed structures for language is inconsistent with what we now know about the unstable equilibrium of the temporally decentered brain and the probabilistic processes through which neuronal assemblies synchronize, desynchronize, and resynchronize. The taxonomic ambitions of some kinds of cognitive narratology that aim to identify and classify the frames, scripts, and preference rules that purportedly underlie our ability to tell and understand stories should be treated skeptically because this program oversimplifies and reifies the interactive neurobiological processes at work in language and cognition.
Narratologists love to build classificatory schemes, taxonomies that sometimes leave even the most devoted students of narrative theory lost in a terminological fog. Rather than reject classification altogether, we should ask whether a given scheme has heuristic value for pointing out aspects of narrative experience that might otherwise be invisible. But a taxonomic model and its accompanying terminology should not be reified or ontologized. Cognitive formalism is not consistent with the best science and should be abandoned in favor of the kind of pragmatic, interactionist approach that I describe in the first chapter. As I explain there, a number of promising versions of such an approach are gaining prominence on the narratological scene, and one of the reasons for favoring them over the models proposed by formalist cognitive narratology is that they line up better with the science.
Chapter 2 explores the neuronal and cortical underpinnings of the ways in which narrative organizes our experience of time. The asynchronies of neuronal and cortical timing processes are curiously correlated to many of the much-discussed paradoxes of narrative temporality—the interactions of the time of the telling and the time of the told, for example, and the different chronological permutations that Gérard Genette (1980) has famously analyzed. Our experiences of narrative temporality are correlated to the temporality of brain processes on multiple levels, from short-term millisecond interactions among neuronal assemblies up to long-term interactions of memory and imagination. These correlations suggest how the work of narrative in organizing our experience of time goes up and down and across multiple dimensions of embodied temporality that are dynamically, recursively, mutually formative. Narratives play with our experience of time in how they emplot events (the level of story) as well as in how they are told (the orderings of the discourse), and these interactions can be powerfully formative because of the many kinds and levels of cognitive timing processes they coordinate and relate to one another.
Chapter 3 examines the relation between the role of action in cognition and the organization of action in narration and emplotment. Ample, well-known experimental evidence demonstrates that the brain is responsive to linguistic representations of action (the same sections of the motor cortex firing, for example, when we read about kicking or throwing a ball as when we perform those actions [see Pulvermüller and Fadiga 2010]). Motor equivalence and action understanding are by themselves not sufficient to account for language, however, inasmuch as people who suffer from different kinds of physical incapacities can still make sense of actions they cannot perform. But narrative imitations of action can profoundly influence cognitive processes in many areas remote from motor control because our capacity to act in the world is intimately and inextricably involved in our ability to understand the world. As this chapter explains, the pervasive role of action in perception and cognition undergirds the power of represented patterns of action to reinforce or reconfigure patterns of cognitive activity. The ways in which action coordinates different modalities of perception in our everyday experience of the world help to explain the interaction of different kinds of action in narrative—the interaction between emplotted actions (the story), the act of narrating (the discourse), and the activity of reception (reading, listening to, and making sense of narrative).
Some influential 4e models describe cognition as simulation because it is grounded in embodied experiences that are reactivated when analogous situations recur. Chapter 3 shows that this process of reenactment is more paradoxical than is often understood because a simulation is an as-relation, both like and not like what it recreates. Mechanical and causally deterministic models of simulation do not do justice to the variability of these as-relations—how, for example, a prior experience can be reconfigured to meet a novel cognitive challenge, its traces recombined in not entirely predetermined or predictable ways. As this chapter also demonstrates, a causal model is similarly unable to explain the heterogeneity of the different metaphors for embodied experiences like pain and anger that make us biocultural hybrids. Some of these figures are grounded in widely shared, bodily based experiences, but others are unique to the conventions of the cultural and historical world we happen to inhabit and may be at odds with the configurations that prevail in another culture or period even though we have the same bodies and brains.
As chapter 4 explains, similar problems call into question the frequently heard claim that simulating social experience by reading or listening to a story predictably and automatically increases empathy or improves our ability to understand other minds. Narrative reconfigurations of experience may produce many different effects, some pro- and some antisocial, which they would not do if the process of fictional simulation were a linear, one-way causal mechanism. Narratives entail doubling processes whereby my world is brought into relation with a world it is not, and this is not a cause-effect relationship. The contradiction of such doubling, whereby I use my cognitive powers to animate a world that is both like and not like my own, enacts what phenomenology calls the paradox of the alter ego. Social relations of all kinds, including the telling and following of stories, are fundamentally paradoxical because they are inextricably both intersubjective and solipsistic. As phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty have explained, we are always intersubjectively involved with others in a world we share because we assume, for example, that the view of another perceiver will fill out what we cannot see in a manner consistent with our perspective, even as the inescapably solipsistic my ownness of experience prevents us from ever knowing another person’s self-for-themselves (what Heidegger calls the Jemeinigkeit of an unshareable experience like death [his example] or childbirth [my wife’s]).
Because reading or listening to stories entails a doubling of worlds, it can take many different, unpredictable forms. A mechanistic model of cognitive simulation fails to recognize the variety and unpredictability of these doublings. The circuit of figuration through which we exchange experiences as we tell each other stories may indeed shape and reshape our lives, but it does not necessarily have uniformly beneficial effects, as some psychologists and philosophers wishfully proclaim. The experimental findings about the moral and cognitive effects of reading are consequently interestingly contradictory, as the fourth chapter explains. A phenomenological account of the paradoxes of self-other relations in narrative interactions explains how stories can promote either conflict or care, aggression or compassion, imitative violence or an expansion of our capacity for sympathy. The doubling of as-if relations in narrative simulations of experience can also shed light on some of the contradictions in collaborative interactions that a growing number of neurobiologists have begun to explore as recognition spreads in the scientific community that studying a single brain in the isolated confines of an fMRI machine oversimplifies the real-life interactions of embodied brains in a social world.
As much as students of narrative have to learn from neuroscience, so neuroscience stands to learn from narrative theory. Some of the most advanced work in neuroaesthetics has been accomplished in the field of the neuroscience of music because these two-way exchanges across the explanatory gap have been so successful there. Many neuroscientists who have studied music are themselves musicians, and they consequently understand and respect the need to let their research be instructed by concepts drawn from music theory (for example, see Patel 2008 on language, music, and the brain and Koelsch 2012 on music and perception). By contrast, the neuroaesthetics of the visual arts is often marred by basic mistakes that are a consequence of the presumption and naivete of vision scientists who go into a museum and think that their knowledge about the neurobiology of vision is sufficient to explain what they see (for critiques of some prominent instances, see Conway and Rehding 2013 and Hyman 2010). Neuroaesthetics requires good aesthetics as well as good science.
The neuroaesthetics of literature has lagged behind other areas of neuroscientific study of the arts in part because literature is such a complicated and heterogeneous state of affairs but also because an adequate theoretical framework has been lacking (for attempts to remedy this deficiency see Starr 2013, Zeman et al. 2013, and Jacobs 2015). As I show, structuralist cognitive narratology cannot provide such a framework because its assumptions about language and the brain are inconsistent with the best science. A neurophenomenological model of how reading and narrative play with the brain may begin to address this need, however. The rich and diverse resources of phenomenological theories of reading, interpretation, and narrative on which this book draws may provide the sort of aesthetic framework to guide such investigations that music theory offers the neuroscience of music.
This book attempts to speak to multiple audiences, from readers with a general interest in the cognitive humanities to narratologists and neuroscientists. Students and scholars interested in cognitive criticism and literary theory will find, I hope, that this book sheds light on the age-old question of what our ability to tell stories reveals about language and the mind. That is an issue that has fascinated generations of specialist and nonspecialist readers alike. For cognitive critics, as I have explained, the book corrects the mistake of neglecting brain-based concepts in analyzing embodied cognitive processes, and it provides instead a neuroscientifically informed model of embodied, enactive cognition. For narratologists and narrative theorists, the book offers many large and small suggestions for how to refine our understanding of narrative interactions in light of the findings of neuroscience. For neuroscientists, last but not least, the book aims to provide a theoretically informed framework for studying the cognitive processes involved in narrative that is necessary to guide the formulation of research questions that are based not only on good science but also on good aesthetics.
Such a framework may be helpful to cognitive scientists who recognize the importance of stories as evidence for studying brain-to-brain coupling and the nonlinear dynamics of what Stanislas Dehaene (2009) calls our “bushy” brains. The to-and-fro play with pattern that characterizes reading and narrative is potentially fertile territory for exploring the dynamics of the brain web and the connectome that are increasingly at the center of neuroscientific investigation (for example, see Varela et al. 2001 and Raichle 2011). Narrative is a much-underutilized model for studying such processes, and neuroscience is impoverished by neglecting it. A scientist who happens upon the arcane, often bewildering world of narratology and narrative theory might not immediately see how the technical terms and concepts that circulate there could be of use to neuroscientific research, but perhaps this book can point the way.