How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art

Preface

Preface Why should a professor of literature like myself find neuroscience so fascinating ? That is a question I have often asked as I found myself swept away by a growing sense of excitement and urgency while reading the technical, often dauntingly difficult neurobiological literature about action potentials, neuronal assemblies, phase-locking oscillations, mirror neurons, and so forth. Why immerse myself in this tough stuff when I could be reading a novel? At the risk of sounding naive and trite, I attribute this fascination in part simply to my interest as a humanist in what makes us human. That is an interest that neuroscience and literary studies share. Literature matters to me, among other reasons, for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story. What has surprised and excited me, however, is the plethora of unexpected convergences I have come across between the experimental findings of neuroscience and what I know as a literary critic and theorist about reading, interpretation, and the aesthetic experience. Again and again, while reading neuroscientific accounts of the structure and functions of the brain, I have been struck by how these matched up with views I had developed from a lifetime of thinking, teaching, and writing about the experience of reading and the interpretation of literary texts. These similarities are extensive and deep, I think, for reasons that have to do with fundamental brain processes at play in the aesthetic experience. Working out these parallels and convergences in detail is the primary purpose of this book. My central argument is that literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance that set in motion and help to negotiate oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning— basic tensions in the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis , and constancy versus the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. The brain’s ability to play in a to-and-fro manner between competing imperatives and mutually exclusive possibilities is a consequence x Preface of its structure as a decentered, parallel-processing network consisting of reciprocal top-down, bottom-up connections among its interacting parts. Experiences of harmony and dissonance of the sort typically associated with art facilitate the brain’s ability to form and dissolve assemblies of neurons, establishing the patterns that through repeated firing become our habitual ways of engaging the world, while also combating their tendency to rigidify and promoting the possibility of new cortical connections. The claim that art is associated with play, harmony, and dissonance is not surprising, of course. As I explain in the first chapter, there is a long tradition going back at least to Kant and continuing up to the present day that views play as integral to the aesthetic experience. I also show there that an opposition between viewing harmony as the distinguishing feature of art and viewing dissonance as such is pervasive in the history of aesthetics. This is not accidental, I argue, given the centrality of play, harmony, and dissonance to the functioning of the brain. What would be disconcerting would be to find that the way the brain works did not match up with the reports that readers, critics, and theorists have offered over the years about what happens when they experience literature and art. That these accounts keep returning to play as a central feature of the aesthetic experience—while diverging drastically in the sorts of to-and-fro interactions they find promoted by art (culminating in unity, synthesis, and balance or provoking defamiliarization through disruption and transgression)—is a fact about human experience to which the history of aesthetics testifies, and it is a fact that neuroscientific accounts of the brain help to explain. We have the kind of brain that thrives by playing with harmony and dissonance, and the experiences that have so widely and typically been reported about encounters with art and literature are correlated in interesting ways with basic neuronal and cortical processes. How these processes relate to particular aspects of reading and interpretation is what is surprising and (to my mind) fascinating. For example, it turns out that the age-old claim of hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, that understanding is inherently circular finds confirmation in the neuroscience of reading and vision. The contemporary hermeneutic theory that describes reading as a process of gap filling and consistency building is corroborated by the findings of neuroscience on how...