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!