Brecht and Curious Incident

The above is because I don't really have a working title for this paper.  Or even a thesis quite yet.  This is just to get ideas down for later use.


A topic that really struck a chord with me from the second half of this class is empathy.  Specifically the empathy a reader feels for fictional characters.More often than not, the goal of an author of fiction is to get an audience invested in a work, and believable characters the reader can connect to is one of the best ways to do it. But what happens when a character within a work has problems empathizing with others, or an author intentionally creates a gulf between audience and characters?  Then you get The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, and the works of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. 


Definitions of empathy: 


Keen: Feeling what we believe to be the emotions of others.


Dictionary.com: 1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.  2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.


Wikipedia: the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being.


Empathy can be distinguished from sympathy as a feeling with, rather than a feeling for.  "I feel what you feel" as opposed to "I feel a supportive emotion about your feelings"


Emotional contagion: "catching" a mood or a feeling


Summarize how narrative empathy might work, quotes from Keen: "Theory of Narrative Empathy," Zunshine "Why We Read Fiction"


Examples from common/popular literature & theater, distinguish between sympathy and empathy again.


Brecht, epic theater, alienation effect:  short bio, clarification of genre, examples of alienation techniques, Mother Courage and her Children


Alienation techniques: opening narrations, geste, learning in dialect performing in Hochdeutsch, stripping away the illusion of scenery, visible lights & wings, timing: set over 10+ years, coherence of story: scenes may be years apart and don't "flow" smoothly, characters distant in and of themselves, subject matter: war, death, "just good business."


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: Autism, theory of mind, and empathy.  Are we alienated from Christopher when we read because of his trouble relating to other characters?  Is he alienated from other people in the same way Brecht desires his audience to be alienated?  


Facts versus emotion: Christopher and Brecht think about situations/death/tragedy instead of feeling about them.


Geste and Christopher's sheet of paper with the faces: complex expressions are hard to interpret.


Differences of scale: A week in 1 small town in England v. 10+ years in at least 3 countries.  One family and one dog versus 30 years of war and 3 dead children


How much Theory of Mind to work in?  Christopher has trouble mind-reading, does the alienation Brecht desires exclude it as well?  Are we supposed to be able to mind-read his characters?


Mother Courage: Is there something special about this play w/empathy because she has to hold herself distant from the world and the deaths of her children?  Doesn't empathize because she's shut herself off, rather than because her brain is wired that way.


Brainstorm complete.  Hope I can pull some good ideas & sensible structure from this.

Are you paying attention?

          Once again, this class seems to come full circle.  In our discussions of alternate cognitions, we land on ADD/ADHD, and come once again to the topic of attention in the brain.  One particular aspect that has caught my eye this time around is the idea of "deep" attention versus "hyper" attention, as explained in the Hayles article.  The former is the ability to focus on one particular stimulus to the exclusion of all else for long periods of time; absorption in the latest Harry Potter novel, for instance.  The latter is the ability to switch focus rapidly between many different stimuli; for instance, your typical multi-tasking modern college student. (I personally must confess that I have 3 tabs open on my internet browser unrelated to this blog post, as well as Duke Ellington and his All Star Road Band playing in the background.)  
          What particularly fascinates me is how our society has changed over the centuries in what kind of attention it prefers.  Earlier on in human history, when hunting for food and then fighting for territory were of prime importance, we favored hyper attention.  The recent series Percy Jackson and the Olympians explains the ADHD of many modern demigods in this fashion. With brains that are hard-wired for the intense stimulation of combat, Percy and many like him just lose interest in the modern classroom. 
           As we moved on and built aristocracies and monarchies, the focus shifted to deep attention.  To be able to pay attention to only one thing for hours at a time, especially literature, art, or music, was a luxury reserved for the upper classes.  Boredom even more so: what the bored mind can create became one of the prevailing themes of the German Romantic.  As Hayles discusses, deep attention eventually took over: our schools and systems of higher education revolve around this type of attention, requiring it of our students if they are to succeed.
          And the wheel continues to turn: with technology becoming so pervasive in modern society, we return to hyper attention.  Ever-present computers, radios, televisions and digital music players bombard people with a constant barrage of stimulation.  This barrage has become so normal to recent generations that it has reached the point of being a security blanket: how many people every day do you see walking around campus with their earbuds in or their headphones on?  Tired of the stimulation of the natural world, we have been spurred on to create unnatural stimulus and have come to prefer it.
          Is it possible to unite these two kinds of attention?  Hayles brings up the example of video games: a very stimulation, interactive environment, but one that you can immerse yourself in for hours.  To connect back to the combat example above, I have found a similar synergy of attention when fencing or performing for marching band: my world reduces to those stimuli useful to me, shrinking down to the fencing strip or the space from goal line to goal line.  All three of these activities require quick reaction time and close attention, and offer rewards in return: whether it's beating the level, winning the bout, or performing a show without being an inch out of place.  I believe that attention,  like so many other things, will find its best use through balance.

Curious Controversy

          At last we come to the namesake of this blog: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.  As with the last time I read it, I couldn't seem to put it down for very long at a stretch, finishing it in less than twenty-four hours.  (It feels good to be a bit ahead in this class for once, I must say.)  There's something about this little book that sucks you in and doesn't let you go, like the black holes the main character discusses in one chapter.  It is also a book that has stirred up quite a bit of controversy and internet discussion since its publication
          Our theme for this week is "alternate cognitions," and it is the "alternate cognition" of the main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that has sparked such vehement argument.  The lead is a fifteen-year-old boy named Christopher from the small town of Swindon, England.  It is never stated outright within the text itself, but Christopher shows many symptoms of autism or Asperger's syndrome.  He has an intense interest in science and mathematics to the exclusion of almost all else, is unable to process subtle nonverbal cues, and has many peculiar routines and habits that he must stick to, such as avoiding all things yellow and brown.
          However, the author himself has neither disorder, and therein lies the rub for many people.  These readers say he cannot possibly get inside the head of a person with autism or Asperger's and it is demeaning to try.  Readers who are themselves autistic or who have Asperger's are divided on the verisimilitude of Christopher's actions and thought processes as presented in the novel:  some say that they relate very closely with Christopher, others joining the earlier-mentioned camp who think his presentation is overly-simplified and an affront to people with autism-spectrum disorders.
         It is interesting to me that people can be so deeply divided over the presentation of mental disorders such as autism in fiction.  We have "alternate cognitions" about "alternate cognitions," as it were.  I wonder if something similar would happen if someone who has an autism-spectrum disorder were to write a novel with an autistic main character.  Would similar reactions arise from those who don't share the same symptoms, accusing the author of not being "really" autistic?  Will the literary world ever see something like "The Yellow Wallpaper" for autism?   It's difficult to say, as we have so far to go to fully understand the neurotypical brain.

Colorless Green Ideas

"A noun causes a verb causes another noun. (Add adjectives to taste.)"

~Lerer, "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language"

"When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that come after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty"

~Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography

          Statistically speaking, language is a miracle.  Out of the infinite combinations of words and letters and sounds comes some form of sense that is intelligible.  We can try to speak gibberish, but as long as syntactic structure is retained, we will make some kind of sense.  An odd, Carrol-ian, Stein-ian, sense, but we can never divorce words from their structure or meaning.  In poetry, "colorless green ideas" can "sleep furiously," and the brain does not revolt, even though we know that "colorless" and "green" negate each other, and "furiously" is not an adverb one would usually use to modify "sleep."  Even words that are made up can be put into sentences and still make sense: you can read "Jabberwocky" and know that "mimsy" is an adjective and "borogove" is a noun, despite the fact that their semantic meaning is perfectly opaque.  This idea of an internal grammar fascinates me, and only increases my wonder at the human brain and its most marvelous and mutable invention: language.

          This is particularly interesting to me after taking a linguistics class last semester.  Learning how language structure works, and how inherent it is to everything we say or write, and how different languages use these structure patterns differently, opened my eyes to how truly inventive the human race can be.  The fact that we can use things as wildly variable as Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet to get across the same meanings is amazing.  Equally amazing, though, is how fast language can develop.  Lerer mentions in "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language" that a two-year-old learns a new word every two hours.  I remember reading a newspaper article years ago that cited a study positing that children's supposed grammatical errors when learning to talk (ex: double negatives) are actually testing out different possible language patterns in order to find the right one.  

          The one story that has hit me the hardest, though, is Lerer's description of the students at the school for the deaf in Nicaragua.  These students were able to create a language from nothing: they didn't even have the sounds that most people with spoken language are able to experiment with.  Instead, they were able to codify a set of gestures that had meaning to them, and create their own sign language.  Successive generations were able to take the language to a higher level of complexity, to add verb agreement and distinct parts of speech.  A groundwork having been provided, they were able to create their own grammar structure.  There is some controversy about whether this sign language arose entirely independently, but it is still a beautiful example of the triumph of the human desire to communicate.

          From here on out, I will try to ask "did that make sense" less often, and "what does that mean to you" more often.  I'll try out some of my own linguistic experiments, and see where they lead me.  I might create the next "quiz" or "chortle," or stumble on some equally cogent phrase for something never before seen. From new words to new worlds isn't that terribly large of a jump, especially for Homo mendax, man the storyteller.

Curiouser and Curiouser...

"Life, friends, is boring."

~John Berryman, Dream Song 14

          On reading this poem for a second time, images of boredom and what we associate it with appeared to me, as if projected on a mental screen.  Sherlock Holmes, from the new BBC series, languishes on a sofa, repeatedly declaring he is bored while shooting a smiley face into the wall of his flat; Prince Leonce, from Büchner's play Leonce und Lena stretches out on a bench, declaring that everything humans do is out of boredom; and of course, students in a lecture lean on their hands and stare into space as their eyes glaze over.  Life may be boring, but boredom, friends, is interesting.

          Boredom is a fascinating emotion as it seems to be almost completely internally generated.  It is possible to be bored by something, but even that seems to stem from lack of your own engagement.  In contrast to other emotions such as anger or joy, boredom is signified by a near complete lack of response, of a shutting down of mental faculties.  In Domasio's "Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain" it is posited that emotions and feelings grew out of a need to communicate socially, to convey information to others.  What, then, is the purpose of an emotion or emotional state of immobility and disinterest?  Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society, notes that "Man is the only animal capable of being bored."  Are we so attuned to activity that its lack results in withdrawal symptoms?  Or is it a sign that we are becoming--or have we become-- detached from a world that has ceased to amuse us?  Existentialists might say that boredom is merely a little glimpse into the nothing that our life really is, that we fill it with action and noise to avoid the abyss, trying to find an answer.  
          Boredom is also a great motivator in that it is the most pressing phobia of the world of entertainment.  The greatest condemnation a work, whether print or film, can receive, is the stamp of "boring."  Audience boredom, or the fear of it, is what arguably drives writers, editors, producers, networks, and publishers to constantly search for the new and different, or even just the old in a new sparkly package.  How many times have vampires, or cowboys, fantasy worlds gone in and out of vogue over the years, changing and developing each time.  Could we actually credit boredom with the progress of human society?  Staving of ennui with the printing press, moon landing, and one thousand other events?  Are we that afraid of stagnation?
         My own answer to that is no, except for one thing: perhaps boredom could lead to curiosity.  The idle mind wanders to may strange and interesting places, and once it catches on something, the real fun, so to speak, begins!  Making new worlds and new ideas starts with two little words, and can go anywhere from there.  Take some time this weekend and ask yourself "What if?"  Take a ball of thread or a handful of white pebbles with you though, it's a wide world out there, and you'll never know where you'll end up.  Or not, because sometimes getting lost is half the fun!

Tea and Empathy (or lack thereof)

"The Storyteller ... tacitly trains ... members of the social group to recognize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states." ~Keen, "Theory of Narrative Empathy

          Our topic this week is that of narrative empathy and the theory of the mind. Narrative empathy is the idea that literary works and storytelling in general can generate an empathic emotional response for their intended audience, get them to "feel the pain" of the characters. Many successful works are praised for the extent to which they accomplish this. Others (cough Hemingway cough) can be denigrated because they are seen a not doing enough to spark empathy. But what happens when an author intentionally attempts to avoid arousing empathy in his work? The answer lies in the epic theater and Verfremdungseffekt of Bertolt Brecht.

          Brecht was a German playwright of the early twentieth century and penned such works as The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and her Children. Brecht tried to keep his plays very much grounded in the intellectual, to try and keep the audience aware that they are watching a play and to make them think about what they see on stage. He was notably displeased when the song "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera became popular because of the catchy tune, with no regard to the bloody, murderous subject matter. To these ends Brecht created the genre of epic theater.

Epic theater was inteded to contrast sharply with typical "dramatic theater," and was designed to distance both the actors and the audience from the action. This distance and lack of empathy desired by Brecht has been termed the Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienation effect." Prolouges before each scene describe what is going to happen in it, draining the plays of much of their dramatic tension. A recent Michigan State production of Mother Courage used silent animated shorts and boxing ring announcers to this end. Scenes and plotlines in epic theater are often fragmentary, with only loose connections between them. In Mother Courage, set during the Thirty Year's war, years can pass from scene to scene, and the whole play covers nearly the entire war.

          This distance from the subject matter is also applied to the characters and the actors in epic theater. Actors were encouraged to learn their lines in their native dialect, but perform in standard stage German, preventing familiarity with their parts. Characters are very flat, do not change, and are often defined by a single trait. Many non-central characters do not even have names. In Mother Courage, besides the titular woman and her children, only the prostitute Yvette is given a name, the rest of the characters being referred to by profession or rank in the army. Even the central charaters of the "children" (they are at least 18 for the majority of the play) are only allowed the depth a single trait will give them: Eilif is brave, Swiss Cheese is honest, and Katrin is kind. Their mother is given no personal development whatsoever, and arrives at the end of the war the same as she was at the beginning: tough, cold, and almost unfeeling, qualities you needed to survive as a camp follower in that time.

           If all of this distance results in the desired lack of empathy, the audience will leave thinking how horrible it is that war has wreaked this destruction on the world, and that war in and of itself is wrong, unlinked to any personal connection. How successful this is though, I am not sure. Humans are empathic creatures by nature, and will find ways to relate to almost anything.



Skeleton Outline for Midterm Paper

Of Cookies and Hobbyhorses:

Memory and Association in Literature

After a month of exploring the literary history of the mind, we’ve dived headfirst into some interesting literature, and some equally fascinating topics in cognitive science. Attention, distraction, memory, association, the physicality of thought and the location of the soul; all have been covered in blogs and three-hour class discussions that leave me wanting more. As fuel to the fire we’ve read some of history’s great authors: Descartes, Sterne, Swift, and Proust, to name but a few. These authors became our “case studies” for the scientific concepts mentioned above. The one topic that I have become personally attached to is that of memory and association, the connections the brain can make without the conscious knowledge of the mind associated with it. When memory and association are brought up in the context of literature, one’s mind naturally jumps to Marcel Proust and his work In Search of Lost Time, where the author sets his story against the canvas of his memory, rebuilding a world for himself as he lies bedridden in his apartment. Proust’s famous trains of associations have been analyzed for almost one hundred years (the book was first published in French in 1913), but I propose that this authorial device began one hundred and fifty years earlier with Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne uses his narration style, his characters, and structural and typographical devices to paint an interesting and challenging portrait of association in the brain.

The most obvious reference to association in the mind in Sterne’s work is the style of narration itself.

Though most neurotypical brains function in very much the same way, no two individual minds follow the same paths of association.

In addition to the narration style, Laurence Sterne also applies the concept of association to his characters.

It is what Sterne does with these associations and devices that really interesting, though.
Proust used his reminiscences to build a world and contemplate the nature of the mind, while Sterne bypasses navel-gazing in favor of humor and satire. Through his chapters and volumes, as well as his typographical idiosyncrasies, he lampoons the nature of the novel at its most basic level. By writing Tristram Shandy as if it is being told aloud, or transcribed directly from thought to page, Sterne keeps his reader guessing, thrown about on a spinning carnival teacup-ride of disorienting associations. And what do we have to cling to throughout this madness but the hope that the main plot will finally progress, that Sterne has a final destination in mind. And in the end, even this meager hope is torn away, as the whole novel is revealed to be a cock-and-bull story told by Uncle Toby to the rest of the family. The connections between Tristram Shandy and the structure of the mind highlight the ridiculous, complicated nature of human consciousness, and showcase how far we are from truly understanding another person’s way of thinking.

How does your Thought Garden Grow?

Flowers, unlike the faces of human beings, appear to be the perfect size for imagining.

~Elaine Scarry, Reading by the Book

          This week I find myself with another reading I can relate to on a deeply personal level.  I grew up around plants my entire life, it's something that comes from being the granddaughter of a farmer and the daughter of a farm girl.  For many years I started my favorite annuals from seed on my windowsill: leggy, lacy bachelor's buttons; nasturtiums with their shield-like leaves and Nickelodeon-splat oranges; and most dear to me, the many-colored pompoms of zinnias, "Last Train to Lilliput" dwarf variety.  On certain summer days my mother would take my sister and I to the Michigan State University 4H Children's garden, which was my own equivalent of Narnia or the magical world of your choice.  Everything was beautiful and colorful, meant to be explored and enjoyed by people of my own age and height.  One bed in particular was a rotating "theme garden," that on one visit was a "wizard garden" devoted to plants with connections to Harry Potter and magic.  I planted my own version the next year, complete with a painted stake to label it.  It was my own place in the beds around our house and I felt proud of it.

          Years later with the wizard garden mostly left to attend to itself, the flowers around my house and around my life still thrive.  One of my biggest reservations about my family potentially moving to Minnesota was the thought of what would happen to the garden after we left. (We're not moving any more, thank goodness!)  We have a "green and white" shade garden on the east side of the house, complete with a Spartan helmet weathervane.  My beer-brewing dad grows hops on the trellis in the back garden, forming a gateway to the tomatoes, herbs, and zucchini we plant every summer to become caprese salad, chili sauce, and bread.  Three different varieties of lavender grow outside the front door, and my mother and I filled five-gallon buckets from my grandfather's peony bushes for my graduation party.

          All this means it makes beautiful sense to me that "flowers are the perfect size for imagining."  Flowers are small enough to be held in the hand but large enough to take up our whole attention when we so wish.  There are worlds of color and texture in a blossom, and the entire plant kingdom is so full of variety.  Reading this chapter, I couldn't help but try the thought experiments it suggests, imagining tiny horses and trees in my little finger or my forehead.  The wonderful thing about flowers and the imagination is that they can fit anywhere in the body you choose to imagine them, from a single lilac flower on the nail of your pinky finger to a stem of foxglove or delphinium as long as your arm.  Lose yourself in a flower and it can become a world, just as a book can.  Look close enough and think big enough, and the details can expand into amazing gradations of abstraction, like the famous works of Georgia O'Keefe. 

          The particular describability and imaginability of flowers makes them, I think, a perfect center for the focus and reverie of the mind we've talked about earlier in this class.  Scarry herself points out that poets often use flowers as springboards into more difficult imagery, as Proust used his madeleine to delve further into memory.  From botanical fireworks to mental gymnastics, how does your thought garden grow?

Books, Glorious Books

"[R]eading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man."

~Sir Francis Bacon

How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight! -- of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantuamaker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?         
 ~Lamb, "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading"

         For the first time in this class, I find myself wholly supportive of one of our writers.  My feelings about books and reading much resemble those of Charles Lamb.  Books can be friends, companions, escapes, immersive worlds.  Different kinds of books are suitable for different times and situations:  glancing over the newspaper as you eat breakfast, or losing yourself in a novel on a dreary November day.  But the real connection came as he began to talk about bindings and the outward state of books.  I believe, like Lamb, that worn and tattered books show that they have been loved, while pristine gold-leaf edges and immaculate leather covers only serve to intimidate and discourage the eager touch of the reader.  Many of the books I have personally known and loved show such signs of devotion and treasured schlepping.  The spine of my copy of The Westing Game is broken in multiple places from fevered re-readings and lunchtime proppings-open.  My sister's Goblet of Fire has a cover reconstructed and retained via Scotch tape.  Both of our copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix bear punch stains from my grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary party.  Les Miserables has Dutch lavender and a French rose pressed within the pages from a three-week bus trip.  And one of my all-time favorites, Sharon Creech's Chasing Redbird, will always show the rippled-page battle scars of being rescued from the lake one summer.  The states of these volumes and all the rest of my favorites bear witness to the love I have for them, joy not of Lamb's "thousand thumbs", but of two thumbs a thousand times over.  Books leave their marks on us, and we on them.  They give us new ideas and in turn store the memories of each reading.
          At the very beginning of his essay, Lamb quotes a contemporary of his and mentions an acquaintance who has left off all reading in hopes of being more "original," not digesting the "forced product of another man's brain."  My mind immediately leapt to Walter Shandy and his dictum that all of a man's reasoning must be his own.  Lamb, however, delights in this feature of books.  To read is the one of the only ways to know what another person's thought process is like.  I, like Lamb, "love to lose myself in other men's minds."  Reading not only gives you insight with regard to the mind of a character, but to the author as well.  In reading someone's writing, you can gain an insider knowledge of how their mind works, of what they value and esteem.  No other technology or form of entertainment yet conceived allows a person to peer so deeply into the consciousness of another.  And now it's time to change topics before I become paranoid about what my writing style says about me.          
          Samuel Johnson, from whose essay comes the above Bacon quote, also makes reference to the popular eighteenth-century notion that libraries were filled with so much "useless lumber," and also refutes this view.  He uses Bacon as a springboard to launch into a discussion of what makes a balanced wise man.  Johnson focuses on three main actions that should be practiced in equal measures: reading, writing, and conversation.  Reading exposes a person to new ideas and different points of view, conversation allows a person to explore these ideas and perpectives, reason about them, and draw conclusions, and in writing these new conclusions and reasonings are recorded for later knowledge-seekers to discover.  Keeping these three in balance prevents intellectual stagnation and promotes progress: if a scholar is engaged in each in turn, he cannot help but learn and grow.  Advice on the academic profession that still rings true today.  I wonder how many modern researchers and professors still practice Bacon's model, whether consciously or not.

Cookies, Tea, and Epiphany

"An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?"  ~Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"A madeleine can easily become a revelation"

~Lerer, Proust and the Method of Memory



          Ah, the realm of memory:  good times and bad, trauma and nostalgia both.  But how does it actually work?  Our readings for this week explore this mysterious aspect of the brain, from Decartes' animal spirits and nerve pores to Proust's self-constructed world.  From Tristram Shandy in the 1700s to In Search of Lost Time in the 1900s, authors have explored the world of memory and association and, without knowing it, hit upon phenomena science would discover.
          Lerer puts his focus on Proust and the mechanics of memory.  Proust delved into his own memory, says Lerer, because even though he was sickly and bed-ridden, "it was there ...  that he would live forever" (p. 76).  Being able to spend limitless hours remembering, and thinking about remembering, Proust was able to discover how his brain worked.  The famous episode with the madeleine is a prime example.  The taste and smell of the tea and cookie arouse memories from the narrator's childhood visits with his aunt, and modern science tells us that it is those two senses that are closest linked to memory.  Taste and smell are connected directly to the hippocampus, the seat of long-term memory, unlike the other three senses, which are processed first by the thalamus.
          Something that struck me about the Lerer reading was that memories can be changed.  We can lie to ourselves about what we remember, whether it is a beauty mark moving around the beloved's face, as in Proust; or complete fabrication, as in Freud's psychoanalysis of Viennese women.  The "real" memory, the objective view of what happened, is lost forever amid the changes we mold onto our recollections.  What we choose to remember then begins to tell us more about ourselves than about events as they actually occurred.  Thus does Proust move on from tea and cookie to contemplating his mind.
          Another thing that jumped out at me from all the readings this week is the power of association.  Experiencing or remembering a certain moment or stimulus leads the brain through a fascinating chain of earlier experiences related only by how we feel about them.  Proust exploits his own inexplicable associations, such as that of a starched napkin with the Atlantic, and uses them as stepping-stones on the way to deeper contemplation.  Lerer holds that Proust understood that our own idiosyncratic train of associations is what makes us unique, what creates our specific personality.  And by tracing the weave of our neural connections, however strange, we can know ourselves.
          Knowing ourselves by the traces of our brain's associations makes, I think, an interesting connection with Tristram Shandy.  Stearne's concept of the "hobby-horse" and "hobby-horsical nature"  could be interpreted as a path of association so strong that like all roads to Rome, all trains of thought, however far removed, eventually lead there.  If personality arises from neural patterns, than those strong associations, like Uncle Toby and his military fortifications, are thus easy to  define.  And it is in exactly this manner that Tristram chooses to define his Uncle Toby's nature by the hobby-horse of military fortification that rules his thoughts.  This correspondence between the authors makes me wonder if Proust ever read Tristram Shandy, and what Stearne would say if he could read In Search of Lost Time.  Cookies and battlements, ditches and starched napkins, all on the road to epiphany.

What? Sorry, I didn't see you there...

"The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives.  For it applies itself more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are

present to it but that do not affect it and do not belong to it."

~Attention: Theory and Practice, p4,

quoting Malebranche

"When we are reading an interesting book, twenty people may converse round about us without our hearing one word they say; when we are in a crowded playhouse, the moment we become interested in the play, the audience vanish from our sight and in the midst of various noises, we hear only the voices of the actors."

~Practical Education, p99

          For this week, we were assigned the first chapter of Attention: Theory and Practice by Addie Johnson and Robert W. Proctor.  The chapter is divided into five parts, each detailing a particular era in the field of research on attention.  First, the philosophical period, when psychology is first growing into a science: quite a bit of theory and analysis, but relatively little experimentation.  With the 1860s came the first practical experimentation on attention, mainly by measuring reaction time to gauge the speed of mental processes.  At this point, attention was at the center of the field of psychology, but the focus was mainly on the effects, and not the mechanism.  In the period from World War One to the 1950s, research in the field of attention waned, but did not quite die out.  The famous "Stroop Task," where a test subject is presented with incongruent color words and is asked to name the ink color (ex: for blue the answer would be red), arose at this time.  From the 1950 to 1974 interest in attention burgeoned, and focus shifted to the actual mechanism of attention.  Models of information processing began to arise at this time, beginning with Broadbent's filter theory.  From 1975 to the present day the focus has been on different models of attention and their applications in ergonomics and neuropsychology.

          Just four pages into the chapter, the above quote from Malebranche caught my attention.  Naturally we do not constantly and consciously perceive everything around us, as that would drive you crazy, but it is interesting to consider how we filter information and how far away "the back of your mind" really is.  Later in the chapter Proctor and Johnson reference Cherry and his "cocktail party phenomenon," which lead to the first models of attention as a filter. 

          Even more interesting to me are the times when we seem to completely block out stimulus from the world around us in favor of one single thing.  Hasn't everyone experienced this at one point or another in their lives?  The book example from Practical Education has happened to me personally.  What goes on in our brains when we create these little worlds for ourselves, and when we're startled out of them?  Is it different if we're concentrating on different sensory forms of stimuli, such as reading a book when compared to listening to music?  What about when there is no sensory stimulus at all, and the brain is simply "lost in thought"?

          An interesting case study in this field from the world of literature would be Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes.  He is an expert at narrowing his attention down to the most minute detail, seeing everything.  When working on a case this focus becomes so acute that Holmes can forget to eat for days on end.  The downside of this attention to detail comes when the great detective is temporarily out of work: he must either lose himself in personal experiments (focus on a single source of stimulus) or lapse into lethargy, retreating into his mind ("lost in thought").  What would science discover with Holmes hooked up to an EEG in these periods?  We can only speculate.

Squaring the Circle

"Experience is never limited and it is never complete, it is an immense sensibility,

a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of

consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its tissue."

          ~Consciousness and the Novel, p51,

            quoting Henry James

But none hath yet by Demonstration found
The way, by which to Square a Circle round:
For while the Brain is round, no Square will be,
While Thoughts divide, no Figures will agree.

~Cavendish, "The Circle of the Brain cannot be Squared"

         The sections of Lodge's Consciousness and the Novel we were assigned this week discuss how consciousness has been presented in a few different literary areas.  First in the rise of the novel: the autobiographical nature of Defoe, Richardson's epistolary first-person, and the omniscient third-person of Fielding.  Pros and cons of each style are discussed, and then a blend of the two: the "free indirect" style used by Jane Austen.  Lodge then moves on to Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, with the last described as coming "as close to representing the phenomenon of consciousness as any writer has ever done in the history of literature" (p.56)  Lodge concludes with a discussion on postmodern novelists and writing styles, contrasting earlier authors who focus on internal dialogue, such as Virginia Woolf, and those who focus on external dialogue almost to the exclusion of all else, such as Evelyn Waugh.
          One of the first things that struck me about this reading was Lodge's comparison of the experience of reading a novel to that of individual consciousness.  With the advent of the printing press, books became more readily available, and "exactly the same story could be experienced privately, silently, by discrete individuals" (p.40).  This experience, notes Lodge, mimics the "silent privacy of the individual consciousness" (p.40).  I've been an avid novel reader all my life, but this connection still surprised me.  After this revelation, it only makes sense that novel writers would try to represent personal consciousness.
          Though many authors have come close to representing consciousness, and Lodge suggests that Joyce came the closest, one still gets the sense that consciousness can never be fully captured.  The above quote from Henry James expresses this quite succinctly, comparing consciousness and experience to an ephemeral spiderweb, without limits and always growing.  I thought that this quote paired nicely with with the Margaret Cavendish poem we also had to read for this week: "The Circle of the Brain cannot be Squared."  Even the title of this work expresses the feeling that the consciousness and the brain cannot be fully understood, however scientists and philosophers might try to analyze and divide it.
          These two quotes make for an interesting contrast with our readings for Descartes from this week.  Descartes says that we can know our minds better than the world around us because the only reason we know the world around us exists is through our minds--  the classic "cogito ergo sum" definition of man.  My question for Descartes about his definition would be yes we know our mind exists, but how much do we actually know about it, apart from the fact that it exists and perceives?  I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on him though, considering the concept of consciousness was new when he was doing his work.  I eagerly look forward to delving deeper into novels and the mind!