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  • On the Cognitive Turn in Literary Studies
  • Michelle Ty (bio)
A review of Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain (New York: Viking Press, 2009)
Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009)
Blakey Vermule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Cited in the text as RB, NI, and WWC, respectively.

As I see it now, the most formidable task of neuroscience is to stand up to the accusation that animates Adorno's words, quoted here: "There is no form of being in the world that science could not penetrate, but what can be penetrated by science is not being."1

In recent decades, scientists have met unprecedented success in penetrating the skull. Advances in imaging technology allow us to "see" our brains for the first time, perhaps with a fascination shared by one who beheld her own photograph when cameras were still new.

Much of the research in cognitive science is worth remark, as this small sample will show.2 In 1992, for instance, Giacomo Rizzolatti announced the discovery of mirror neurons, a special class of cells that activate not only when a monkey carries out an action but also when that action is merely witnessed. Here is one of many examples: When a monkey grasps a cup, certain neurons fire in [End Page 205] his brain; oddly, this very same neural network activates when the monkey watches a colleague take his own turn at the familiar task.3 It has been suggested that mirror neurons may be a site of convergence for perception and action, and self and other. In 2000, Karim Nader showed that whenever a long-term memory is dredged up, it passes through a "labile state" before being reconsolidated into a stable memory. During this period of vulnerability, deep memories can be changed or even erased with the introduction of certain protein inhibitors.4 The very act of recall, it seems, changes what we remember. In 2004, Olaf Hauk found that reading words associated with actions of the foot, hand, or mouth ("kick" and "lick" are choice examples) engages motor areas of the brain that overlap or are adjacent to the same spots activated when one is actually in the throes of action.5 Here, we find the suggestion that words have life beyond the page.

The claim of a growing population of scholars working at the juncture of the humanities and cognitive studies is that science—specifically the science of the brain—is now poised to respond afresh to central concerns of human life usually reserved for the liberal arts: consciousness, language, art, morality, love.6

Part of the allure of contemporary cognitive science is its promise of a single complete theory of everything. "Consilience" is what biologist Edward Wilson called it—"a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws."7 A witness to the salutary effects of Einstein's unification of microscopic and universe-wide physics into a single idiom, Wilson predicted that with the "jumping together" of various subdisciplines, a newly unified Science could extend its reach to embrace the humanities. Metaphysics would once again be just on the horizon.

When, in 2001, French neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux sat down with Paul Ricoeur for a debate on human nature, he opened with a vision reminiscent of Wilson's, claiming that neuroscience "holds out the prospect of achieving a unified and synthetic view of what was formerly a question reserved for philosophy.… It now becomes possible, I would argue, for a neurobiologist to legitimately take an interest in the foundations of morality … and, [End Page 206] conversely, for a philosopher to find material for reflection, even edification in the results of contemporary neuroscience."8 In the closing section of Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene prophesies that "research on teaching, psychology, and neuroscience will merge into a single, unified science of reading." He anticipates the coming of a "culture of neurons," one based on the identification and collection of a complete set of "cultural invariants," the unshakable neurobiological baseline that...

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