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

It is remarkable that it is only over the last few decades that literary studies have begun to take into consideration the nature of the mind, both in terms of its representation in literary works and in terms of how the cognitive capacities of authors and readers engage with works and bring those works into being. Several reasons can be posited for this, including the so-called art and science wars and, more fundamentally, the manifest gap between scientific research on the brain and the mental states that are (though often unwittingly) a focus of cultural and literary analysis. The difficulty of attempting to bridge this gap is evident in the fact that, as Donald Beecher describes, his magnum opus is the outcome of a decade of research.

Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds opens with a lengthy introduction on some of the debates to date on the pros and cons of taking cognitive science into account. His own view emerges from "Literary Darwinism," which forms one of the first-wave cognitive humanities approaches. Such approaches tend to be problematic due to the extent of their universalizing assumptions, which position them in opposition to the relativizing extremes of postmodern and sociocultural constructivism that continue to dominate the field of literary studies. These approaches have remained marginal partly on account of their tendency to omit due attention to the nuances and variations that contribute to the richness of cultures and literature – for example, by flattening the complexities of different genres of romance into the universal markers of human mating rituals. We can see evidence of first-wave notions in Beecher's comment that "a common genetic inheritance has wired all our minds alike, when it comes to such matters as emotional production." Certainly, there are shared general features across persons; however, as he himself points out later, "[t]he hedonics of love are felt and experienced in personal, cultural and temperamental ways." Indeed, work in the sciences has been turning its attention to the transformative and dynamic effects that natural and cultural resources and environments can have on brains and genes. Recent research in cognitive linguistics and on embodied and distributed cognition have highlighted the fundamental role our specific bodies and environments can play in constraining and enabling our general human cognitive capacities; our brains are not just "adapted" but also "adaptive." Cognitive processes display both continuities across persons and periods and are historically situated and culturally inflected. While Beecher's emphasis remains on literature as capturing aspects of universal features of cognitive processes, he offers a much more sophisticated account of how human cognitive traits and biases are evidenced and come into play in our appreciation of literature. That there are also such continuities is itself evident in the power that works from the Renaissance (and earlier) still hold over readers today.

The eleven chapters generally pair a Renaissance literary work or works with a topic from recent cognitive science, such as "theory of mind," often delving deeply into the development of the subject in philosophy of mind and cognitive scientific research. On the one hand, these might be judged unnecessarily lengthy digressions, and, on the other, they may prove of interest and helpful to readers that are new to the cognitive humanities. Such attention also means that recent work in second-wave cognitive literary studies and narratology is not much in evidence. However, this in itself may be taken as a mark of the emergence of cognitive literary studies as a fully-fledged creature of increasing span, such that encompassing the entire field becomes unwieldy for an individual work. All in all, Beecher's monograph is an important advance in terms of setting out some of the ways in which an understanding of cognitive processes necessarily underpins a grasp of literature.