Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance by Donald Beecher (review)

Donald Beecher's Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds takes the current research in cognitive science, philosophy, and evolutionary psychology to read a variety of early modern texts. Rather than seek a single, sustained reading of early modern literature, the book focuses on an overarching question—what use can literary studies make of current cognitive research—and uses readings of those texts as case studies that could be replicated by literary scholars working on other eras. Much of the book's assertion about using contemporary science pushes back against a critical commonplace that modern humans today are somehow radically distinct from early modern humans. While Beecher acknowledges that, culturally, we are quite different, he also argues that based on evolution of the brain, we are closely linked through a "common biogenetic heritage" (22). That is, the human brain has not evolved since the early modern era so significantly as to render our experience of emotion or our response to external stimuli all that different from our forbearers. This use of cognitive science, Beecher acknowledges, has some limitations in terms of presenting culture as biologically determined and perhaps more universal than postmodern thinkers would like; but Beecher's studies are generally careful to avoid the worst sins of the misuse of evolutionary psychology: Beecher is more interested in our commonalities than our differences, and he uses cognitive psychology to focus on those mental processes that humans have in common.

The ontological questions that arise from the current conversation about the relationship between the biological origins of our experiences and our desire for self-determination mirror, Beecher argues, the early modern conversations about selfhood. With that as a starting point Beecher probes the knotty complex of self, mind, and brain. In each of the eleven studies of the book, Beecher pairs a cognitive response to stimuli—something of our primordial brain, like laughter, tears, or the fight-or-flight response to fear—with one or two early modern texts. Some of the studies focus on the nature of fictional characters, including repeated explorations of the audience's willingness to grant ontological status as human to them. For example, in the study on A Yorkshire Tragedy, Beecher looks at the way that rage works within the text, motivating the protagonist of the play to act in ways that are ostensibly illogical, but ultimately understandable, because the character's behavior is recognizable as human nature. Other studies look similarly at how the human brain reacts to stimuli and—due to the nature of our associative thinking—then categorize those reactions onstage or in us. In this, Beecher builds on the theoretical foundations of both current thinking in psychology and reader-response theory, drawing the two together to talk about our relationship with characters.

Other studies also consider the way that the cognitive structures can inform our thinking about genre and form. In an engaging study of memory, Beecher discusses how Spenser's The Faerie Queene and North's translation of The Moral Philosophy of Doni mimic the performance of memory in their structures. Beecher argues, "[W]hat literature means is what memory does" (145). Book 4 of The Faerie Queene teaches morality through various story lines, but those story lines are interwoven throughout the book: the reader doesn't simply follow one story line to its conclusion before moving on to another story. This is, according to Beecher, much like the way that our brains create long-term memory through a process of mapping connections or interleaving information. "Reading Spenser," Beecher says, "is good cognitive practice" (176).

Throughout these studies, Beecher reaches no single answer to his overarching question. Rather, these studies are much like the essais of Michel de Montaigne: these are attempts to understand the mind and consider the ontological status of the human being, whether real or fictional. Ultimately, Beecher argues, it is those cognitive processes that we have in...