The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science puts cognitive scientific disciplines in conversation with theatre and performance studies. Under the general heading of ‘cognitive science,’ we include the methods and insights of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary studies and those social scientific approaches that have been influenced by these three disciplines. Cognitive scientists are committed to discovering and validating empirical evidence about perception, imagination, empathy, the emotions, movement, consciousness and other areas of human behaviour that can provide reliable insights across the varieties of our species’ cultures, histories and languages. Theatre and performance scholars have long understood the general relevance of these areas of knowledge to acting, spectating, training, criticism, history and other parts of our field, but have mostly relied on traditional concepts of mind and body to investigate them. In the past 20 years, scholars and scientists have begun to systematically apply the empirical knowledge derived from the cognitive sciences to how we practise and think about varieties of performance. We are happy that several of the leading investigators in this emerging interdiscipline have contributed chapters to our Routledge Companion.
Many of our authors have significantly advanced the field of theatre, performance and cognitive science. Several of the early books in our field primarily applied insights from cognitive studies to theatre theory, history and dramatic criticism. These included James Hamilton’s The Art of Theater (2007), my own American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War (2003), Amy Cook’s Shakespearean Neuroplay (2010) and Evelyn Tribble’s Cognition in the Globe (2011). Tony and Helga Noice were the first cognitive investigators to focus on acting with their The Nature of Expertise in Professional Acting: A Cognitive View in 1997. Joining that book were Rhonda Blair’s The Actor, Image, and Action (2010), John Lutterbie’s Toward a General Theory of Acting (2011), Rick Kemp’s Embodied Acting (2012), Gunter Lösel’s Impro Talks (2017) and Vladimir Mirodan’s The Actor and the Character (2018). Several anthologies edited or co-edited by our writers contained essays that made significant contributions to the interdisciplinary conversation. These included Cognition and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, (2011), ed. by Ana Margarida Abrantes, Affective Performance and Cognitive Science (2013), ed. by Nicola Shaughnessy, Fictive Interactions: The Conversation Frame of Thought, Language, and Discourse (2016), ed. by Esther Pascual, Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness, and Engagement (2015), ed. by Pil Hansen and Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (2016), ed. by Gabriele Sofia.
As the dates of these titles suggest, our field has grown substantially in the last five years. There are now two book series specialising in publishing monographs in performance and cognitive studies – Science and Performance, at Bloomsbury Metheun, and Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance at Palgrave Macmillan. In addition to possibilities for presentations at several academic conferences, the field now has an annual international conference, Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities, which frequently features papers in theatre and performance. A sampling of the titles of published monographs in the last few years gives a good indication of the continuing vigour and broadening range of the field: Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer (2014), Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (2015), Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition, and the Imperative for Theatre (2017), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre (2017), Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (2018), Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theater: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement (2018) and The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre (2018).
In the midst of gathering essays for this book, we soon realised that discrete divisions among the topics we wanted to cover in The Companion would be impossible to carve out. Many of our contributors are practicing artists as well as scholars, for instance, and the same insight from cognitive science could as easily serve to justify an artistic choice as a scholarly point. Consequently, we decided to welcome the inevitability of overlap among the major parts of our anthology. We have divided our 30 essays into four major parts, each containing an introduction and from five to nine of our chapter essays: I Artistry, II Learning, III Scholarship and IV Translational Applications. In the hope that our readers will treat these part titles as general aims rather than watertight categories, we have placed those chapters oriented towards the goal of improving the artistry of performances in Part I, located essays investigating the evolution and psychology of learning – both in and out of school – in Part II and plunked pieces primarily intended to assist scholarly investigations in Part III. Our title for Part IV, Translational Applications, nods to the scientific concept of ‘translational research’ and is intended to demonstrate how the confluence of knowledge from performance and the cognitive sciences may facilitate action in such areas as therapy, emergency services and political change.
Given the scientific difficulty of some of our terminology and our desire to reach as many readers as possible, we have also included a lengthy Glossary at the back of the book. For the rest of this General Introduction and for all four of the part introductions, we will emphasise in bold print those terms that that also appear in the Glossary. Please look them up if you wish a richer understanding of their meaning than what we can provide in our introductions.
The remainder of this introduction will begin with a summary of the major paradigms that have dominated studies in the cognitive sciences from the 1940s until 2000, and then provide a discussion of enactive, embodied and distributed cognition, three contemporary fields that are having a major impact on practice and scholarship in theatre and performance. Recognising that the science behind this work will be new to many of our readers, we will introduce some of the key scientific concepts you will encounter in several of the chapters, along with some salient examples, so that reading the essays may flow more smoothly. Our part introductions will use these concepts and categories to connect the science to the specific areas of theatre, performance and related areas of research discussed in the part essays to come.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, behaviouralism dominated the study of human psychology and sociology and also shaped many scientific findings about performance and the theatre. Behavioural scientists confined themselves to observable behaviour and excluded mental and emotional processes. In general, the behaviouralists believed that the brain, in addition to controlling the internal workings of the body, generated individual and social behaviour by responding to external stimuli. Because they assumed that stimulus-response operations provided the basis for most behaviour, the behaviouralists believed that cognition, per se, was relatively unimportant. Also, because people could exercise little control over their goals and intentions, they could be conditioned to do almost anything; there were no predispositions and constraints in their minds and bodies as the result of their evolution that encouraged or prevented them from responding in ways that society had programmed them to do. Behaviouralism influenced significant practices in theatre studies, from Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanical ideas about performing to the method of acting of Lee Strasberg.
After some psychologists demonstrated that mental processes did matter for behaviour, cognitivism emerged in the late 1950s to challenge behaviouralism. Partly because psychologist George A. Miller was the first to show that early computers could perform some of the same kinds of information processing as the brain, the cognitivists looked to the computer as a possible model of the mind. Jerry Fodor advanced one of the most influential versions of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) in the 1970s. In Fodor’s theory, a person’s mind uses mental representations corresponding to the realities of the internal and external world in order to facilitate her (or his) cognition. Later critics of CTM would point out that Fodor could not explain how the person’s sensory experiences of the world could be translated into the symbolic representations needed for his (or her) mental computations.
When CTM had difficulty accounting for a growing range of cognitive phenomena, connectionism emerged as the next major approach in cognitive science in the 1980s. Connectionism was less a fully realised paradigm than a means of explaining the speed and fluidity of parallel processing in the brain by the mathematical modelling of cognition as the changing organisation of neurons and neuronal networks. The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, which can ‘wire together and fire together’ in a nearly infinite number of networks through changes in electrical impulses, chemical signaling, fluctuations in blood flow and shifts in the utilisation of oxygen and glucose. Connectionism arose partly to explain the results of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the technology that locates neuronal activation by charting increased cerebral blood flow when activities involving the mind are performed. FMRI studies are valuable because all thought involves neural processing that remains beneath conscious awareness. The limitation of such studies is that correlating the primary brain location with external activity does not always point to causation. Speaking, for example, generally activates blood flow to Broca’s area in the brain, located in the prefrontal cortex, but other areas also ‘light up’ when we speak. While the overall findings from brain imaging studies have been helpful, they also demonstrate further complexities still to be explained in our neural mechanisms.
When Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch proposed enactivism in their book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), they knew that scientists had not yet found enough evidence to support enaction as an accepted scientific paradigm. Even in 2010, after many enactivists had substantiated several of the claims of enaction and clearly distinguished it from previous cognitive paradigms, philosopher of science John Stewart called enaction a ‘proto-paradigm’ (2010, 1). Despite progress since then, enaction remains a paradigm-in-waiting for most mainstream cognitive scientists in 2018. Accordingly, we will discuss enactive cognition in one of the following three parts of this introduction that deal with significant contemporary fields of investigation.
Since the turn of the century, the meanings of ‘cognition’ have escaped from the brain, moved to the rest of the body, animated intentional action and even colonised the environment. For the majority of theatre and performance artists and scholars working in the cognitive sciences, cognition is ‘embodied,’ ‘enactive’ and ‘distributed.’ We shall examine salient examples in these categories and summarise the science behind each of them in turn.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, getting cognition ‘out of the head’ and ‘into the body’ has proven to be the most accessible arena of cognitive science for many academics in theatre and performance studies. Most cognitive scientists working within a non-representational version of connectionism also accept many of the major insights of embodied cognition.
Minding is embodied not simply because the brain needs a body to function, but because the active body shapes the kinds of concepts that the mind produces. We know, for example, what the action of grasping a stick, a handle or another person’s arm entails. But why do cultures around the world that have a word meaning ‘to grasp’ also use the same word to denote understanding – ‘grasping’ – an idea? Because ideas cannot literally be grasped – to speak of ‘grasping an idea’ is a metaphor. Many metaphors extend our embodied notions of movement and space to make sense of our experience. When we say, ‘Life is a journey,’ for example, we map the notion of walking from one place to another onto the duration of a person’s natural life, thereby gaining a physical sense of what it means to live. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff and cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson investigated the embodied nature of many metaphors in their book Metaphors We Live By in 1980, and much of their work since then builds upon and extends these ideas.
Insights into embodied cognition that started with cognitive linguistics also flourished in other areas of the field. Cognitive scientists influenced by the philosophical tradition of phenomenology have drawn attention to the need to distinguish between the body as an object of study and the body as the centre of personal experience. As a result of proprioception, the awareness we have of our body when it moves, as well as the visual and tactile knowledge we understand through movement, we know that embodiment centres much of the knowledge we gain through our own actions. In How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), cognitive phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher usefully distinguishes between body image and body schema. A person’s body image is largely defined by how the person feels about her or his body when looking in the mirror; personal health, local weather and social pressures shape body image. In contrast, a person’s body schema is typically less conscious; it results from the accumulated knowledge over a lifetime of what ‘my body’ is able to do. ‘I can walk, run, grasp, climb a tree, play tennis, enact a role, etc.’ Clearly, actors and other performers can benefit from a heightened awareness of both their body image and body schema.
The importance of embodied approaches in the cognitive sciences is reshaping how we understand social cognition, those interactions among people in the same society that facilitate the creation and enforcement of new social norms and that encourage social cohorts to cooperate on projects that can be mutually beneficial. Since the 1970s, many psychologists have assumed that people needed a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) – some notion of how the beliefs, intentions and desires of others would likely affect their behaviour – before they could successfully interact with others. While there are different conceptions about how ToM operates, most psychologists agreed that successful social interaction depended upon it. Many proponents of embodied cognition, however, now question the need for a mental theory about how other people’s minds work as a prerequisite for effective sociality. Daniel Hutto (2008) and other advocates of embodied cognition, for example, point to primary and secondary modes of intersubjectivity that occur in the normal development of all infants and children as providing the basis for later social interactions. Infants learn to track eye movements and imitate facial expressions, and one-year olds can already read the emotions of adult care-givers. This early basis for social interaction occurs before infants have any interest in or ability to develop a theory of mind. Building on this base, the growing child watches the actions, observes the emotions and may even construct imagined narratives about others to figure out effective ways of interacting in society.
Finally, embodiment plays several key roles in the cognitive operations of memory. The senses of the body often provide mnemonic registers of past events; smells, sights, sounds and tastes bring back specific memories and emotions. We learn and recall procedural memories through physical repetition and refinement; how to ride a bike or play the violin are good examples. Learning skills in apprenticeship situations often involves procedural memory as well and, especially in traditional cultures, has historically been an important part of the socialisation of teens into adulthood. Lawrence Barsalou proposes an embodied understanding for what is usually termed semantic memory – the memory of arbitrary, decontextualised categories in language, such as the word ‘dog.’ According to Barsalou, we do not recall dogs as a general category; instead, we remember experiences with specific dogs in concrete situations, and we simulate one or several of these embodied experiences (remembering and reenacting specific sounds, sights, and interactive emotions) every time we hear someone say, ‘Dog.’ Even our understanding of dictionary-like definitions of general categories, in other words, may work through embodiment.
The enactive approach to cognition builds upon many of the assumptions of embodiment. In terms of past cognitive paradigms, it does not rule out most versions of connectionism, but it does challenge the representationalism of computational ToM. Called ‘enactivism’ because its proponents believe that all animals, including individual humans, effectively ‘enact’ (rather than represent) the world in which they live to enable their flourishing, this paradigm links perception to action. In brief, we perceive the (social, material, spiritual, etc.) world in ways that are useful to us and act within that perception (often unconsciously) to ensure our survival. Our minds do not manipulate symbolic representations of what is ‘out there’ in an attempt to arrive at an objective perception of reality, but use our direct experience of memory and the senses to search for what is necessary to predict events and survive in the future.
Five intertwined principles constitute enactive cognition: autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment and experience. All living systems possess autonomy, in the sense that they interact with other systems as self-governing agents; they do not simply respond to external stimuli or internal demands. Enactive agents also use their senses to understand their social and physical environments. Further, meaning emerges for people in the course of taking action. According to several enactivists, ‘[The emergence of ] meaning is not to be found in elements belonging to the environment or in the internal dynamics of the agent, but belongs to the relational domain established between the two’ (DiPaulo, Rohde, and DeJaegher 2010, 40). Spectators at a play, for example, do not find meanings in the performance or in themselves, but in the experience – ‘the relational domain’ – established between the spectator and the performance. For enactivists, the body is much more than a functional way of taking action in the world. All animate bodies allow for varying degrees of openness to the world through the senses and shape how cognition occurs in the mind. Regarding experience, enactivists emphasise that experiences transform our bodies and brains over time. In younger animals especially, new experiences can link memory to learning to enable new capabilities, interactions and identities.
Our bodies and brains dynamically engage all of the principles of enaction to survive and thrive in the world. Cognitive scientists call this complex system the perception-action cycle and use the mathematical modeling of dynamical systems theory (DST) to describe it. In How Brains Make Up Their Minds (2000), Walter J. Freeman describes the major stages and components of the perception-action cycle:
Our actions emerge through a continuous loop that we can divide into three stages. The first stage is the emergence and elaboration within our brains of goals concerning future states. The goals are in nested layers, ranging from what we do in the next few seconds to our ultimate survival and enjoyment of life. The second stage of the loop involves acting and receiving the sensory consequences of actions and constructing their meanings. In the third stage, we modify our brains by learning, which guides each successive pattern.
(2000, 91–2)
Then the loop repeats itself, leading to more goal-setting, acting and learning. Freeman notes, as well, that the entire process is suffused with emotion, which regulates the system throughout.
Given the importance of emotions in the perception-action cycle, it is not surprising that enactive approaches to cognition have challenged traditional understandings of emotional experience. Scientists have long understood the neuronal and chemical basis of our emotional lives. Traditionally, however, most scientists held that our emotions require a cognitive ‘appraisal’ of a situation in order to trigger an emotional response. For example: see the bear, appraise bears as dangerous, respond with the emotion of fear. When linked with the Theory of Basic Emotions, this assumption about cognitive appraisal preserved the age-old distinction between reason (i.e., appraisal) and emotion and ensured that episodes of anger, surprise, disgust and so forth would be over after they ran their course and individuals could return to a kind of bodily homeostasis that allowed for ‘normal’ functioning. Scientists like Giovanna Colombetti, however, in her The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (2014), have found persuasive evidence that our emotions always pervade our perceptions of the world; there is no separate ‘time out’ for appraisal that comes between perception and response. Further, Colombetti emphasises the action-based reality of our emotional-cognitive lives. Emotions exert pressure on our behaviour all the time because they carry with them specific action tendencies.
Empathy provides a window into the emotional lives of others. According to enactivist Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007), empathy begins in the mirror neuron systems of our bodies. Networks of mirror neurons effectively ‘mirror’ intentional motor activity produced by another person and perceived by the empathiser. If a spectator watches an aerialist take a step on a high wire, for example, the same group of neurons is activated in the observer’s brain as in the aerialist’s; it is almost as if the observer had taken the step himself. Through ‘mirroring’ the action of another, an empathiser can attune him or herself to the emotions of the other person. As early as nine months old, an empathiser can begin to assume the perspective of another – to see the world through the other’s eyes. Toddlers can take the next step, the practice of reiterated empathy, by which, as Thompson explains, ‘I can empathetically imagine your empathetic experience of me and you can empathetically imagine my empathetic experience of you’ (2007, 398). Thompson’s final level of empathy, usually attained when a child is around six years old, is ‘moral perception,’ the capacity to experience ‘other-regarding feelings of concern’ (401). For Thompson, empathy gradually gains in complexity from affective attunement to the possibility of ethical response.
In addition to providing an important basis for moral development, empathy helps people to predict the emotions and beliefs of others. In his Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (2017), philosopher of cognitive science Andy Clark joins connectionist modelling to aspects of embodied and enactive cognitive science to advance a theory about predictive processing. Clark is interested in understanding how ordinary people think about what will likely happen to them and their friends and relatives in both the near and distant future. His model expands the complexity of the perception-action cycle, noted earlier, to include how memory and expectation join with immediate information from our senses to create recurring loops of processing that gradually refine our predictions. As Clark notes near the end of his book, ‘The upshot is a hugely complex cognitive-emotional-action-oriented [psychological] economy whose fundamental guiding principles are simple and consistent: the multilevel, multi-area, flow of prediction, inflected at every stage by changing estimations of our own uncertainty’ (2016, 237).
Also known as ‘situated’ or ‘embedded,’ and occasionally as ‘extended’ cognition, distributed cognition moves human cognitive operations beyond the brain and body and into the environment. In most uses, however, extended cognition differs from distributed cognition. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, a scientist who has investigated the puzzle of consciousness, pushed for an extended understanding of cognition in 1998 when they claimed that a note written on a piece of paper and used as an aid to memory ought to be considered a part of cognition just as surely as a brain inside of a body. In his article on ‘Extended Cognition’ (2014), however, cognitive scientist Ken Aizawa has questioned whether such aids to memory actually contain the properties or undergo the processes of cognition. Many advocates of embodied and enactive cognition have also found problems in the definitional logic of Clark and Chalmers’ claim. The consensus among scientists following these approaches generally restricts cognition to living, autonomous animals. Nonetheless, the proponents of extended cognition, sometimes aligned with scientists who assert that computer-based robots can think, continue to press for an understanding of extended cognition that would include the possible cognitive properties of inanimate objects.
In contrast, advocates of distributed cognition are interested in how animate species use objects in their environment to assist them with tasks that require cognitive effort, but they do not attribute cognitive properties to the objects themselves. Clearly, we off-load cognitive tasks all the time to clocks, cars and computers; long before we had these tools, our ancestors used sticks and stones for hunting, fighting and other tasks that required careful planning and execution. In Cognition in the Wild (1995), cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins initially coined the term distributed cognition to denote the many kinds of cognitive activities needed to sail an ocean-going ship. As Hutchins pointed out, the cognition necessary for this task was distributed among sailors with different kinds of know-how, involved tools ranging from charts and maps to heavy machinery and required a high level of training and social organisation. The same levels of cognitive networking and cooperation, of course, are necessary for many theatrical productions. In short, even more so than ants, buffalo, chimpanzees and other social animals, the ability to build complex networks of distributed cognition is a special talent of our own ultra-social species. Hutchins used the term ‘cognitive ecology’ to describe this approach (Hutchins 2010a, 1) because it emphasises the interplay that occurs between animals with cognition and their social and physical environments.
The American perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson (1904–1979) pioneered an ecological approach to cognition. He used the term ‘affordance’ to describe the spatial ‘fit’ between animals, including humans, and specific objects and areas in their biological niches. Certain kinds of caves ‘afford’ bears with an opportunity for hibernation, for example, just as the height and dimensions of specific rocks and downed tree trunks afford humans with a seat for sitting. The material features of all environments, in other words, both enable certain kinds of actions and constrain others. Gibson’s ecological sensibility has been an important asset to theatre and stage designers, who must take account of the potential affordances of their spaces for the movements of spectators and actors.
Hutchins extends Gibson’s ecological sense of relational affordances into the arenas of social and technological networking. Applying Gibson’s notion to Hutchins’ case study of navigation, one could say that the social and educational training of the ship’s crew, together with all the technologies that enable navigation, ‘afford’ the captain of the ship the ability to navigate successfully in the midst of nearly all contingencies. Hutchins emphasises that the proper unit for the analysis of cognitive systems should not stop with individual brains and bodies. In some systems, he states, ‘high-level cognitive functions such as memory, planning, decision-making, reasoning, error detection and correction, computation, learning, and so on can be identified and analyzed in the culturally organized activities of groups of people in interaction with one another and with technology’ (2010b, 426). Not surprisingly, Hutchins’ analysis of distributed cognition networks has influenced scholars of systems’ management operations and historians interested in understanding how past groups of artisans or professionals were able to work together effectively on massive projects that required extensive networking and coordination.
Aizawa, Ken. 2014. “Extended Cognition.” In The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, 31–8. London and New York: Routledge.
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2009. Chapter 14: “Situating Concepts.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, 236–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Andy. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Colombetti, Giovanna. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
DiPaolo, Ezequiel, Marieke Rohde, and Hanne DeJaegher. 2010. “Horzions for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play.” In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, edited by John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. DiPaolo, 33–88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freeman, Walter J. 2000. How Brains Make Up Their Minds. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutchins, Edwin 2010a. “Cognitive Ecology.” Topics in Cognitive Science (1): 1–11.
Hutchins, Edwin 2010b. “Enaction, Imagination, and Insight.” In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, edited by John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. DiPaolo, 425–50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutto, Daniel D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
McConachie, Bruce. 2015. Evolution, Cognition, and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, John. 2010. “Foundational Issues in Enaction as a Paradigm for Cognitive Science: From the Origins of Life to Consciousness and Writing.” In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, edited by John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. DiPaolo, 1–32. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.