Verified by 
Neuroscience
Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (4 and last)
We believe in Spider-Man because he acts and we don't.
Posted August 13, 2009
If you have followed me so far, I thank you for your patience. So far we have seen: 1) with literary works, even the humble comic book, we suspend disbelief; that is, 2) in order to comprehend, we believe; we have poetic faith; 3) we believing humans detect lies poorly, no better than by chance, and literature is a form of lying-. Why do we have 'lie blindness"? Now we come to the crux. In literature (and other arts), we believe because we don't act on narratives we are perceiving. And that's odd.
It's odd because the primary business of any brain is to move its body--to act in relation to what that body and brain perceive. When we simply listen to someone narrating, however, we do not act to change what we are hearing. Suppose someone tells you that a bomb is about to go off three blocks away. During the time you are listening to them, you don't act. You believe. Only after you have finished listening and believing, do you decide whether they are telling the truth or not and what you are going to do about it. You inhibit action during the narrative. If this person were pretending, you would not reliably detect the lie.
The point is--and the experimental literature we looked at in my second blog on this subject says as much--to comprehend any narrative, we believe it during the narrative. After it is over, we decide whether to continue belief and whether or not to disinhibit our motor systems and act on the basis of what we have perceived.
Animals' play follows this same inhibition of action. Watch a pair of lion cubs playing in one of Public TV's nature programs. They get their teeth around one another's necks in what would be a killing bite, but they stop. They inhibit that final bite. In play, the players do not act in a final, damaging way, otherwise it would not be play. Play serves human children the same way. Children need to learn when and how much to act, and they learn through play. Animals' or children's play inhibits actions, and play is the prototype of a literary experience.
Frontal lobe inhibition limits actions, and that is essential to play. This essence of play carries over into the world of literature. Throughout the history of aesthetics, philosophers have agreed that what we bring to works of art is a special way of attending to them, an "aesthetic attitude." They have offered many ways of describing it: aesthetic contemplation, being not personally involved, concentrating only on the aesthetic object, being "distanced," viewing in a non-practical way.
Many theorists have observed this phenomenon, but it was Kant who enlarged the idea and established "disinterestedness" as a cardinal element in an appropriate response to artistic works.
Kant’s word was interesselosigkeit, lack of interest. "Interest" in this context means having an aim or purpose, like having a business "interest" in what is happening or an investment in one’s critical opinion. (Disinterested, one must sometimes remind students, does not equal uninterested.)
What makes art art, then, is that we agree not to be practical. We will not act or plan to act in order to deal with what is represented in the work of art while we are enjoying it. We may cry or laugh in response to what we are reading or watching, we may turn pages or look through our opera glasses, we may add to the shopping list after a commercial, but we don’t plan to do anything to the work of art itself, especially while we are involved with it.
Experiencing aesthetically, we do not try to save Spider-Man from Doc Ock. Neither do we desire to possess the work of art or to take up any particular attitude or purpose toward it. We are not studying it or planning a critical article or observing our own admiration. Our "delight," in Kant’s words "is not based on any inclination of the subject (or any other deliberate interest)." We feel "completely free in respect to the liking which [we accord] to the object."
Not acting on literary works, then, is what turns off our testing the reality of what we are seeing. "Perception," asserts Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind, "is itself tangled up with specific possibilities of action—so tangled up, in fact, that the job of central cognition often ceases to exist." Neurologist Rodolfo Llinás writes, "What I must stress here is that the brain’s understanding of anything, whether factual or abstract, arises from our manipulations of the external world, by our moving within the world and thus from our sensory-derived experience of it." And two specialists in frontal lobe function, Robert T. Knight and Marcia Grabowecky, say, "Reality checking involves a continual assessment of the relation between behavior and the environment." In sum, without movement or the impulse to move or some plan to act on what we perceive, we need not check its reality, and we don’t.
Why does absence of action lead to absence of reality-testing? Our brains seek our survival and reproduction through goals that we must imagine ahead of time. To plan actions, therefore, we imagine situations. That is, if I want to push the chair in front of me aside, I have to imagine where I want the chair to be in order to tell my arms and legs to make the necessary moves. I have to imagine something that is not actually the case, a "counterfactual." I feed forward to my systems for planning motions the future position of the chair, which is not what "is." Conversely, having moved the chair I feed back its present position to the position I desired and, if it matches, I stop moving the chair. If it doesn’t match, I continue to move it. Again, I have to imagine things that are not the case, the former and future positions of the chair, in order to move it. To act effectively on my environment, I have to have an idea of what is and is not physically real. But if I am not planning to act, I don't need reality-testing.
In general, we humans simulate in order to arrive at the best, the most appropriate physical actions. To do so, we must be able to imagine unrealities and know that they are in fact not physically real. Reality-testing guides action, but if we are not acting, we need not reality-test. If we are reading about Spider-Man in a comic book or watching him onscreen, and if we are absorbed in the experience, "transported," so that we are not planning to act on what we are seeing, we don't judge its reality. Naturally, we can be snapped out of that transport by all kinds of disturbances, but as long as we are in it, we believe.
If we lose the ability to imagine unrealities, to create narratives, we cease to judge reality. Some brain-damaged patients have trouble generating either appropriate actions or alternative versions of reality.These patients suffer from lesions in a particular region of the most anterior part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. This is the region above and to the side from your eyebrows, the dorsolateral surface of the prefrontal cortex (Brodmann areas 9 and 46). This region is apparently essential to simulating internal models for actions.
We can surmise, then, that this is the region that our transport into the world of a literary work inhibits. One neurologist has told me in conversation that patients he has seen with frontal lobe damage become more and less involved in movies depending on the region of damage. Damage to dorsolateral circuitry decreases interest and response. Damage to the orbitofrontal region leads to an inability to inhibit responses to a movie. The patient reacts too much.
In short, then, after four(!) blogs, we have a neuropsychological basis for Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith." We inhibit those frontal lobe systems that prompt us to action, and they stop assessing the reality of what we are perceiving. We believe--for the moment.
Some items I have referred to:
Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge MA: MIT P. 51.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. and Ed. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. 1790.
Knight, Robert T. and Marcia Grabowecky. 1995. "Escape from Linear Time: Prefrontal Cortex and Conscious Experience." The Cognitive Neurosciences. Ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge MA: MIT P. 1357-71. 1360.
Llinás, Rodolfo R. 2001. The I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge MA: MIT P. 58-59.
I am also drawing on a recent essay of mine and my latest book:
Holland, Norman N. 2008. "Spider-Man? Sure! The Neuroscience of Suspending Disbelief." Interdisiplinary Science Reviews 33 (4):312-320. Available at http://tinyurl.com/c4f6v8.
Holland, Norman N. 2009. Literature and the Brain. Gainesville FL: PsyArt Foundation. Available at www.literatureandthebrain.com.
