This is Your Brain on Culture

Poets vs. Critics: Different Brain Systems

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:18:12 +0000

Years ago, when I was teaching in the legendary English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, one of our poets, Jerry Maguire,convoked a group to read poems. Jerry's idea was to bring poets and critics together in order to compare their readings.

What happened surprised me, at least, and, I think, just about everybody in the group. It turned out that poets and critics read poems quite differently.

The critics concerned themselves with things like repetitions and contrasts of themes and meanings. The poets, however, paid attention to repetitions and contrasts of vowels and consonants, rhythmic patterns, and all kinds of features of the sound of the poems. To be sure, there was a certain amount of overlap, but nevertheless, the poets and the critics were reading poems quite differently.

Now, it turns out, they may have been using different systems in their brains. Kenneth Heilman, a neuropsychologist at the University of Florida, has a fine paper setting out the "information-processing approach" to the various aphasias. He lists eleven different aphasias, and his paper uses the kind of block diagrams computer programmers use to distinguish and interrelate them.

Heilman mentions eight interconnected blocks, some referring to well-known and clearly defined brain regions and systems, others to geography less certain. He mentions, obviously, the auditory cortex (Heschl's gyrus) that somehow--no one knows how--breaks the incoming sounds into phonemes. Then there is a "phonological input lexicon," corresponding to Wernicke's area, that "remembers" the sounds of various words. There is a motor system that makes the sounds of speech and "phonetic-speech movement programs," Broca's area. It embodies the programs for forming various words and other sounds. Both these systems rely on a "phonological output lexicon" that remembers what those words and other sounds are supposed to sound like.

At a still higher level of processing, the brain's intentional systems (anterior cingulate and frontal lobes) create what Steven Pinker calls "mentalese" and stimulate speech production systems to turn those mental thoughts or proto-utterances into physical words and sentences. On the input site, there are object recognition units (ventral temporal occipital lobe) that associate words with perceptions of objects. At, so to speak, the highest level of the whole verbal system, there is a semantic-conceptual field that deals with meanings (probably widely dispersed in the parietal and temporal lobes.

All these are interconnected, mostly by two-way conduction. Heilman shows, in this article, how one can account for eleven different aphasias by the loss of this or that unit or connection between these various units iindicated by the letters n the block diagram. It's a powerful demonstration of the kind of thing an information-processing model can do.

One particular thing this model can do is explain what happened in Jerry Maguire's poetry group. People interpreting poetry have to be more concerned with themes and meanings--obviously. That's what professors and critics are paid to do. People composing poetry have to be more concerned with the output side of things, and what is special about poetry are the sounds. In very simple terms, the poets were reading poetry primarily in terms of Broca's and Wernicke's areas. The critics were reading primarily in terms of that top-level semantic-conceptual field.

No doubt matters are more complicated than that. I always tend to over-simplify. Certainly both groups used all these systems but with different weightings. But I do find this solution to the problem Jerry Maguire's group posed immensely satisfying.

The item I'm referring to:

Heilman, Kenneth M. (2006). "Aphasia and the Diagram Makers Revisited: An Update of Information Processing Models." Journal of Clinical Neurology 2.3: 149-162.

Sexting and the City

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:19:24 +0000

In April 2007, New York magazine began publishing sexual diaries provided by anonymous New Yorkers. Staff writer Wesley Yang got the assignment to do a feature based on his reading all 800 pages worth of diaries and comments. He turned up an amazing range of behaviors. I suppose it's just what you'd expect from what Yang terms "a city as dense, morally libertine, and sexually spirited as New York." I'll leave it to you to read the details, but what he describes is a world of speeded-up sexual encounters of every conceivable kind arranged for almost anonymously with all the speed the 3G network permits. Texting becomes sexting.

This, of course, is just part of the total speed-up that has taken place over the twentieth century and the beginnings of the twenty-first. Think of news: the 1930s saw the coming of radio news, the 1950s, television news. But to get that news,you had to have the set turned on. Now the internet sends instantaneous updates to my PC while I'm doing something else entirely. And, where I used to have to wait for analysis of the news, the bulletin comes with instantaneous punditry and bloggery to tell me what to think about it.

Now think of courtship, a far more complex realm in terms of social relations and the brain (notably its mirror neurons) that supports them. According to my mental encyclopedia, middle-class British Protestants in the sixteenth century invented romantic love, first celebrated in Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion." Among the aristocracy (and perhaps the peasantry) women were married off as bargaining chips to get the adjacent farm, castle, or kingdom. For sex women had courtly love and the men had a bit on the side, both rather difficult in the arranging.

Romantic love involved a lot of obstacles and waiting as developed, say, in the comedies of Shakespeare and any number of romantic novels until our own day. Yang writes: "Until recently, being a cad or coquette took a lot of work: You needed to buy a little black book, and you had to go around filling it, and then you had to schedule your calls for a time when the target of your seduction was likely to be at home. The less-self-assured daters in New York faced the sickening anxiety of the first phone call, or the cold approach in the bar."

All that waiting and scheming required prefrontal cortex inhibition of the immediate impulse. But now we have sexting, the essentially instantaneous arrangement of sexual encounters on cellphones, iPods,Blackberrys, netbooks, work computers, and so on. Yang details the complications of these arrangements, sometimes leading to frustration and anxiety. But delay? No. Yet there is still the longing for the old-fashioned kind of love with its waiting and inhibitions.

As Yang puts it, "True love! Who could say these words in public without acute embarrassment? It is nonetheless something that the Diarists keep referencing, despite the impression they convey that it is an ever-receding ideal." And they accept instead the momentary and instantaneous and almost impersonal gratifications reported in "The Sex Diaries."

So does this mean a kind of atrophy of prefrontal cortex so far as our social or sexual relations are concerned? My students seem unable to arrange appointment or movie dates--about their sex I don't know--without endless e-mailing and texting back and forth. Planning seems to be another prefrontal cortex function that is atrophying.

All this leads to a troubling conclusion. In the seventies and eighties we spoke of the dumbing of America. In the tens, will we be seeing that dumbing going even farther and faster, as the Internet speeds up our all social relations, not just the sexual ones, to the speed of light?

Your brain on stories (and poems, plays, or movies)

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:24:37 +0000

Literature and the Brain is out. I've wondered for years, and perhaps you have as well, what is going on in our minds when we cry when Bambi's mother is shot, knowing even as we cry that she is nothing but a drawing on a movie screen. We feel fear as Dracula approaches the heroine's bed. Why? We feel glad when Jane Austen's heroine gets her man. But we know all the time that these characters are mere print on a page or light on a screen.

We believe in these fictional beings and we feel emotions toward them, even when they are as improbable as Brunhilde or Spider-Man. Why?

In both the act of creation by the writer and our re-creation of the work as readers and audience members, we are passive and receptive. Totally involved in perception, we shut down our systems for motor action and the planning of motor actions. For the creator, that means reduced norepinephrine. For us, just sitting in an armchair reading or in a theater watching, we believe in fictional characters and events because reality testing is tied to motor activity. (See my blogs for 7/24, 7/31, 8/6, 8/13.) Because we are not planning to move, we stop doubting. We feel real emotions toward these fictional characters because the dorsal "where-how" and the ventral "what" systems in our brains are getting conflicting information.

And there are other special ways our brains behave with literature as when we have our individual "taste" or value judgments. So far as we know, all human cultures have always had some form of verbal literature. Does that mean that we inherit a propensity for creating and enjoying novels, movies, poems, comic books, and so on? I think not. I think we and all our fellow hominins simply enjoy them because literature gives our brains cycles of wanting and liking, expecting a reward and getting it.

In short, our brains behave in special ways when we are creating or enjoying literature, and this book spells out those ways. What more can I say? If these questions intrigue you as they have intrigued me, you will enjoy Literature and the Brain (www.literatureandthebrain.com). You can get it for $9.95 download, $24.95 paperback, and $44.95 hardcover (or the "heirloom" edition suitable for gifts at Christmas, Hannukah, birthdays, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs).

Inglourious Basterds and the Brain

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:52:14 +0000

I think the critics have completely missed the boat on this one. This is not a movie about Nazis and the Holocaust as Manohla Dargis and David Denby seem to complain. Nor is it a movie about Quentin Tarantino's fondness for old movies or his having comic book fun with violence. The movie uses those to demonstrate human nature. It's about our fondness for violent revenge fantasies and our (perhaps) disgust when we see them acted out in reality. It's about movies and the way they act as wish-fulfilling fantasies. Look at that phallic knife in the poster.

The realistic opening gives us a horrifying scene in which the Gestapo Captain Hans Landa (marvelously created by Christoph Waltz) shoots a group of hiding Jews. The next sequence (Ch. 2) goes into comic book mode with the hillbilly Lt. Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) who wants his squad of Jewish assassins to bring him the scalps of all the Germans they kill. From there the film goes even deeper into comic book mode with the Nazis planning an improbable film opening, two plots to kill the attendees (Hitler among them), and a finale in which the Nazis, including Borman, Goering, Goebbels, and Hitler) are all either shot or burned alive, and the war comes to an abrupt end. "For once," Roger Ebert writes, "the basterds get what's coming to them." As the Jewish friend with whom I saw the movie said, walking out afterwards, "I wish!"

That's what the movie is really about: wishing. Tarantino demonstrates to us, sitting peaceably in our theater seats, our own violent wishes, the pleasure we take in repulsively murderous fantasies when they occur in works of art. As Lew Schwartz wrote in the online PSYART discussion group: "We are taken to task for our pleasures." And J. R. Raper in that same discussion: Tarantino shows us "what sub-humans we become through our violence, whether righteous or atavistic."

The style is that of a comic book, yes, but the film builds toward a complex moral issue in a final dialogue between Landa and Raines. Landa has done horrible things, but he has also done a wonderful thing--killing top Nazis and ending the war. Does he not deserve to be forgiven and his evil deeds forgotten? Raines' cheerfully bloody answer is, No!

In effect, Quentin Tarantino is pitting two different brain systems against each other: pleasure-seeking and inhibition. One is our expectation-of-reward system along the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway. A number of studies have shown that revenge, like listening to music or thinking romantically, activates this system.

And surely, sitting in our theater seats, the happy thought of Borman, Goering, Goebbels, and Hitler all being shot or blown up or burned to death activates this system. Revenge is sweet. Brad Bushman a psychologist at the University of Michigan is often quoted for saying that people express anger "for the same reason they eat chocolate."

The opposed system is less clear, but in our ordinary lives some brain system plays a key role in inhibiting aggression. Laboratory rats whse septal nuclei have been lesioned, will respond with unrestrained aggression to the slightest provocation. In general, it must be the frontal lobes that inhibit actions, but that term covers a lot of neuronal territory. Can someone out there help me with this?

Tarantino is playing with these two opposed systems in our brains, and, because we have inhibited our motor systems--because we are "passive" with respect to works of art---we can enjoy the conflict instead of being anxious about it. As I found in writing Literature and the Brain, so many of our special behaviors in creating and re-creating literary works (including films) occur because our motor systems are inhibited.

Items I've referred to:

de Quervain, Dominique J.-F., et al. "The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishmen." Science 305(5688):1254-8.5688 (Aug. 27 2004): 1254-8.

Holland, Norman N. Literature and the Brain. Gainesville FL: PsyArt Foundation, 2009.

Obama's Style Problem as Procedural Memory

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:14:27 +0000

Hemingway has a style. Faulkner has a style. Michael Jackson and Jackson Pollock have styles. But style doesn't belong only to writers and artists. Mathematicians, chess players, scientists have styles even though they are doing abstract intellectual things. Olivier, Brando, Streep--the greatest actors' selves show through no matter what part they play. Politicians have their styles, too: FDR's artful duplicities; LBJ's bulling forward; Reagan's faith in hierarchies.

We all have our styles. We walk, talk, make love, argue, and all the rest in individual ways--styles. These styles which must come--where else could they come from?--from our selves, our personalities, character, or, I would say, styles of being.

Some say self emerges from the midline structures in the brain that are active when we are not doing some psychological task but thinking about ourselves (the "default mode network"). But that network, I think, drives our sense of ourselves. It is inner. I'm talking about self or identity as a style that someone outside ourselves (and perhaps we ourselves) can observe. I follow Grigsby and Stevens in thinking that that style (which they call "character") probably consists of procedural memories dating back to infancy, sources of which we are unconscious. Procedural memories were traditionally defined as motor skills (swimming, biking), but more recent work suggests that procedural memories include non-verbalizable cognitive skills like recognizing faces or reading. (I believe it also includes defense mechanisms.) As such a style of being is probably widely distributed in the brain.

Procedural memories are very hard to unlearn or change. Have you ever tried to improve your handwriting? Your golf game?

Think of such a style of being as a theme in music: established early in the piece but open to infinite variations. But within those variations you the listener can always trace the theme.

Psychoanalysis, whatever its deficiencies as science, has over the course of a hundred years, taught us to "listen with the third ear." That is, you listen for choice of words, more for how something is said than what is being said. You listen for the style. A practiced interpreter can then put into words that character, personality, style of being, identity (or more accurately, identity theme).

I did it with Ronald Reagan in 1989, but more recently, at the International Conference in Literature-and-Psychology in Lisbon, July, 2008, I suggested that the group before its next annual meeting discuss online the language of then-candidate Barack Obama, inferring an identity or style of being.

I suggested at the time two themes that I derived from reading Obama's pre-speechwriter autobiography, Dreams from my Father. One, he wants to bring people together. (Many people have noted this, and look at his hands in the graphic.) Two, he does so after an initial failure or obstacle which must be overcome by people's coming together. Thus, although the title of his first book suggests an ideal father, in fact, he first found that his father was a failure in his career and in his relationships. But the book ends with Obama bringing the hitherto divided halves of his father's family together.

In the New York Times (07/28/08) David Brooks, though no psychoanalyst, picked up that first theme in Obama's Berlin speech. "Obama used the word "walls" 16 times . . . and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down." "'People of the world,' Obama declared, 'look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.'"

Recently (1/19/09), the New Yorker printed a 1996 interview with the Obamas in which he showed this characteristic theme of conflicted dualism resolved. "All my life," Obama said, "I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background--very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country--the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life." Again, listen for the dualisms: "Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is . . . . But I also think . . . [t]here is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her."

Brooks in a later column (08/05/08) introduced another theme. He called Obama a "sojourner," one who stands apart, who is "of" causes and institutions but not "in" them: the famous Obama "cool" or distance. In that 1996 interview, Obama went on in a remarkable passage to describe his marriage in terms of that distance:

[W]hat sustains our relationship is I'm extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It's that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

Less happily, in 2009, we come to the health care debate. Obama's character says, resolve these opposing views (say, government option vs. keep government out). But now he faces an implacable, ideological opposition that sees no advantage in having the walls come tumbling down or the two sides come together. It seeks only, as one Republican senator put it, to "break him." The opposition he faces will not vote for anything he proposes, even so innocuous a Supreme Court appointment as Sonia Sotomayor.

In this context of stitching together a health plan, the question becomes, from a psychological point of view: can Obama adapt this core identity, this pervasive style of being, to this polarized situation?

I believe that one cannot change core identity but you can transform it from dysfunctional to functional. In my 1985 book, I gave examples of individuals whose core identity persisted, one through a successful psychoanalysis and another through Chinese torture and brainwashing.

Can Obama adapt his style of being and resolve the health care debate on which his presidency depends? His legacy depends upon it.

Some items I have referred to:

Grigsby, Jim and David Stevens. Neurodynamics of Personality. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.

Holland, Norman N. The I. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985. Available at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/theihome.htm

Holland, Norman N. "The L-Shaped Mind of Ronald Reagan: A Psychoanalytic Study." Psychohistory Review 17.2 (1989): 183-214. Available at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nholland/online.htm#reagan

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (4 and last)

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:50:13 +0000

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.

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (3)

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:28:37 +0000

In my first two posts on this subject, I said that when we are "transported " by a literary work, 1) we have "poetic faith " in even the most improbable things, and 2) one can demonstrate this faith experimentally, and 3) the experiments suggest a dual system in the brain, a rapid system that believes what is perceived and a slower system that judges the probability of what is perceived and believes or disbelieves accordingly. (Forgive me for going on at this length, but this topic has fascinated me since I was a boy.)

We don't show this credulity just with literary works. We show it in everyday life all the time. as "lie blindness." Psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert cites research showing that "people are particularly poor at ignoring, forgetting, rejecting or otherwise failing to believe that which they have comprehended."

Charles F. Bond, Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo (who also blogs for PT) have described this work in an elaborate meta-analysis. They synthesized research from 206 documents and 24,483 judges who were trying to recognize lies. They derive a number of conclusions, for example, that people are more accurate in judging audible than visible lies. But the upshot, they conclude, is that the average person discriminates lies from truths at a level slightly better than chance. "In their daily interactions people accept without reflection much of what they hear. "

Science writer Natalie Angier summarizes this line of research: "In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they'd do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth. "

This "truth effect" or "lie blindness" makes sense evolutionarily. Your basic hominin gets away faster from something that looks like a snake-and suffers fewer fatal snakebites-if she believes right away that what she has seen is a snake and immediately jumps back without checking. We would have lower odds of surviving higher odds of being snakebit if we went though the full two-step process of first perceiving, then assessing (as described by Gerrig and Gilbert in my previous post).

The experimenters, of course, use face to face lies, not the lies and pretenses that make up admired works of literature. But when Angier refers to "the stylishly accoutred fable, " she is hinting at literature and what literary critics have traditionally called "the willing suspension of disbelief, " which might better be called "poetic faith. " In other words, our lie blindness parallels our willingness to believe in the pretenses and lies of stories, plays, and movies.

So far as evolutionary psychology is concerned, however, the two situations are completely different. Suppose I see a snake on my closet floor and jump back (I'm writing from Florida, after all). In life, we need to believe and act on something novel in our environment--it might be a life-threatening danger. If we are mistaken, if it was just a belt that feel off a pair of trousers, all I lose is my effort. If I had not acted, though, I might be dead. But that's not at all the case with the arts. There what we are perceiving cannot be a danger, and we know it. Yet we believe anyway, even though that "poetic faith" or "suspension of disbelief" can serve no evolutionary purpose. Why do we do it then?

If we can understand why we don't disbelieve fictions, we may be able also to understand why we can't detect lying in life. I think we can understand, and I think the answer is surprisingly simple. It has to do with the way our brains work when we are comprehending a narratve. Stay tuned for my next and last blog about the "willing suspension of disbelief. "

Items I have referred to:

Angier, Natalie. 2008 "A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit." The New York Times Dec. 23: Section D, Page 1.

Bond Jr., Charles F. and Bella M. DePaulo. 2006 "Accuracy of Deception Judgments." Personality and Social Psychology Review 10.3: 214-34.

Gilbert, Daniel T. 1991. "How Mental Systems Believe." American Psychologist 46.2 (Feb): 107-19.

I am also drawing on an 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.

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (2)

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:39:46 +0000

Why do we willingly suspend disbelief? Transported by a film, tv, or story, we believe or at least we do not disbelieve in what we are perceiving even when it is obviously not true. This is totally unadaptive behavior. You cannot explain it evolutionarily. Even infants would recognize that Spider-Man's webbing among the skyscrapers does not follow the laws of physics. People have been using Coleridge's phrase, willing suspension of disbelief, to describe this phenomenon for more than two centuries. It describes very well the feelings we have in situations that Coleridge could never have imagined, like Spider-Man. But to explain the phenomenon, we need modern psychology and neuroscience.

Psychologist Richard Gerrig has convincingly rewritten Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief. Gerrig notes that we end up believing only some information from a fiction. That is, if I am reading Sherlock Holmes stories, I will take away information about hansom cabs and gazogenes as part of my permanent knowledge. But I will not believe that there was a Sherlock Holmes or a Dr. Watson. One can explain this phenomenon, Gerrig claims, by saying that we believe all and then we disbelieve some.

To justify this position, Gerrig introduces an idea from philosophy. Spinoza believed that, in order to comprehend what we perceive, we must at first believe it true. Only then, if necessary, do we disbelieve it. Psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert defines belief in this context as propensity to behave. In his view, people automatically accept what they perceive, get ready to act on it, and only on second thought, with a little extra effort, unaccept it. Gilbert cites a long line of research showing that people are particularly poor at ignoring, forgetting, rejecting or otherwise failing to believe that which they have comprehended. We suffer from "lie blindness."

Following Spinoza and Gilbert, Gerrig asserts that simply comprehending something automatically includes belief. When we read a fiction, says Gerrig, we presume that all the information that comes our way is true until we deliberately unaccept some. We process fiction (and plays and movies), he claims, by two different systems. One is unsystematic. It simply perceives and believes what it perceives. The other system is, in Gerrig and Gilbert's term, systematic, and it assesses the reality of what we are sensing.

This second, systematic reality-testing is turned off for moments or minutes by our knowledge that what we are watching is in fact only a story, only a play, or only a movie. We cannot change it. Fictional information is persuasive because it is processed via some nonsystematic route. Belief in fiction [that is, in the factual representations in a fiction-nnh] is determined not by a critical analysis, but by the absence of motivation or ability to perform such an analysis. Thus readers, he claims, will have to expend explicit effort to understand fictions as fictional.

A review of the psychological literature in this field suggests that this second system (involving memory via the hippocampus) weighs the reliability of the source of the information and the compatibility of the new information with already stored data. It would be some such second system that concludes, It's only a story and disbelieves, while the first system suspends disbelief and grants "poetic faith" for the duration of the transport. In this way, narratives trump reason.

Gerrig has experimented with readers' responses for a number of years. He and his associates have repeatedly demonstrated what they call anomalous suspense. Gerrig had his subjects (Yale students) read (on a computer, sentence by sentence) a little story. At the end of the story Gerrig would ask the subject to say whether a certain sentence was true or false. One version was called the no suspense version. Here is one of them:

George Washington was a famous figure after the Revolutionary War. Washington was a popular choice to lead the new country. Few people had thought that the British could be defeated. The success of the Revolutionary War was attributed largely to Washington. His friends worked to convince him to go on serving his country. Washington agreed that he had abundant experience as a leader.

The other version of the story was designed to create a little uncertainty about the outcome. In other words, this second version was designed to create suspense. Here is one of those:

Washington was a popular choice to lead the new country. Washington, however, wanted to retire after the war. The long years as general had left him tired and frail. Washington wrote that he would be unable to accept the nomination. Attention turned to John Adams as the next most qualified candidate.

Gerrig then asked the Yalies to say whether this sentence, George Washington was elected first president of the United States, was true or false.

What Gerrig found was that the response time was significantly longer for subjects who had read stories that created some suspense, some uncertainty, as to whether Washington would be our first president or not. Gerrig called this phenomenon "anomalous suspense." The suspense is anomalous because the Yale students knew perfectly well that in fact George Washington was elected our first president. So why the slight hesitation? Gerrig concluded that the answer came more slowly because the suspense, the uncertainty in response to the narrative, made the subjects believe in some temporary way that maybe George Washington didn't become America's first president.

You can see the same phenomenon in children. They have heard the story of Jack and the Beanstalk a zillion times, but every time, when the giant chases Jack, they get excited-will the giant catch him? Will he escape? When I was a child, one of my favorite stories was The Little Engine That Could. I can distinctly remember heightening excitement and suspense as the engine neared the top of the mountain. Yet I knew all the time that this was the little engine that could and did. As adults, we experience anomalous suspense when we see a movie like Casablanca for the umpteenth time. Will Rick put Ilsa on the plane with Laszlo? We know at one level of our minds that he will, but we still feel suspense. As Gerrig says, you have to actively construct disbelief.

Notice too that the narratives Gerrig used were non-fiction. They were factual stories about American history and pop culture and other things his Yale subjects would know. And this anomalous suspense happens in daily life. For example, a neighbor tells me about her nearly having a catastrophic auto accident. I know perfectly well that the accident did not happen, for my neighbor is standing there before me. Yet I will feel fear and worry and suspense about the fatal possibility. Such suspense doesn't make sense in the light of what I really know, but if I am transported by the narrative, I grant what Coleridge called poetic faith to the story, be it fiction or non-fiction.

What Gerrig's experiments imply is: if you subject yourself to any narrative, you believe it for the time you are making coherent sense of that narrative. In Descartes' terms, comprehension entails belief. Following a narrative brings anomalous suspense, whether the story is fiction or non-fiction. We momentarily believe with both. You have to construct disbelief actively, deliberately, and usually after the narrative is over.

The next question, then, is, What turns off our memory-based knowledge and, especially, what turns off our knowledge that fictions are not true? Stay tuned.

Some items I've referred to:

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1907 [1817]. Biographia Literaria. 2 vols. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ch. xiv.

Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Ac.tivities of Reading New Haven: Westview Press, Yale University Press, 1998.

Gilbert, Daniel T., Douglas S. Krull, and Patrick S. Malone. "Unbelieving the Unbelievable;: Some Problems in the Rejection of False Information." Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 59.4 (Oct 1990): 601-13.

Prentice, Deborah A. and Richard J. Gerrig. "Exploring the Boundary Between Fiction and Reality." Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology. Ed. Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. 529-46.

I am also drawing on an 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.

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (1)

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:26:25 +0000

For those moments when we are really into a poem, story, movie, play, or even a comic book, we simply don't bother about likelihood and lifelikeness. We willingly suspend disbelief. We believe the fiction, at least for the moment. We have what one reader described to me in a questionnaire as escapism, a feeling of joyful unreality, lack of any worry. Escapism does in fact play the key role, provided we understand what we mean by escapism.

Escapism in the arts means that we know we are not going to act to try to change the work of art. Our brains are not generating impulses to act to change what we are paying attention to the way our brains do in everyday life. In life, we act or at least contemplate acting on the basis of what we perceive or believe. But not with fictions. (In philosophical terms this is Kant's "disinterestedness," the basic attitude of humans toward art.) Ordinarily, our brains test the reality of the things in our environment with which we have to cope. Transported with a literary work, we do not plan to act, and therefore our brains stop testing the reality of what the literary work portrays--Spider-Man.

In most of life, simply to survive, we need to be able to tell what is real (or probable) from the information our senses give us. I need to know whether that is really a Hummer bearing down on me or just a car chase on a movie screen. I need to know whether what I am seeing is a dream or reality. Were I the hunter-gatherer beloved of evolutionary psychologists, I would need to know whether I am really hearing a lion's roar or just some fellow-hunter's skillful imitation of one. The ability to decide these things would confer an evolutionary advantage, to say the least. Indeed, the inability to decide them would doom the organism. Hence this ability to judge probability or realism must be present very far down the evolutionary bush. It must involve the deepest of the systems for our emotions, particularly fear.

Yet, somehow, when we watch Superman jump over a building or when we read a fairy tale or science-fiction, we put this primeval ability aside. That is why our not doubting puzzles me so much. Babies begin to understand probability and realism as early as six months. As infancy researchers like Alan Leslie or Elizabeth Spelke have shown, even an infant could tell that something is odd when Spider-Man starts swinging through a cityful of skyscrapers on his webs. Yet in adult everyday life, we give up realism all the time for various kinds of media experiences. Our brains are behaving in a totally unadaptive wayone reason evolutionary explanations for literature fall flat.

The nineteenth-century poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented the term we use to describe this credulous aspect of our trance-like state of mind when transported by a literary work. He was justifying his writing about persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic (in the older sense of the word, extravagant or fantastic): "Kubla Khan," "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," or "Christabel." He asked that his readers grant him that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith. He asked us not to disbelieve, at least for the brief period of experiencing the poems, the improbabilities that he had written and that his readers were about to read. That stance, he said, constitutes a kind of imaginative or empathic belief, which he called "poetic faith."

Coleridge's phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief," has lasted more than two centuries, probably because it describes very well what we feel is happening in a lot of situations that Coleridge could never have imagined, like Spider-Man webbing his way among skyscrapers. When we read that "some rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born," we don't doubt. We have poetic faith in what we are reading or seeing. How can that be?

As we shall see, Coleridge's second phrase, "poetic faith" describes this strange phenomenon more accurately than willing suspension of disbelief. We don't just not-doubt. We believe. To see how and why we can draw on two lines of research in experimental psychology and one line of research in neuroscience. Stay tuned.

Some items I have referred to:

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1907 [1817]. Biographia Literaria. 2 vols. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ch. xiv.

Leslie, Alan M. 1995. "A Theory of Agency". Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. A Fyssen Foundation Symposium. Ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 121-41.

Spelke, Elizabeth S., Ann Phillips, and Amanda L. Woodward. 1995. "Infants' Knowledge of Object Motion and Human Action." Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. A Fyssen Foundation symposium. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 44-78.

I am also drawing on an 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.

Krzysztof Kieślowski and Correlation/ Causality

Norman N. Holland, Ph.D. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:22:34 +0000

I really should have called this blog "Krzysztof Kieslowski and the mesolimbic dopaminergic system" but that just looked too formidable. Instead I'll write in English. The gist is that the films of this great filmmaker play into a system in our brains that finds causal relations in co-occurrences. I'll explain.

I've just finished watching (on DVD) Kieslowski's A Short Film about Killing (1988), a remarkable film which took the jury prize at Cannes in 1988. It begins with three unconnected characters wandering around Warsaw: a taxi driver, a young hooligan, and a tyro lawyer. In this part of the film we witness various events that seem to have no relation at all to one another. I wonder, what's going on here? As the film progresses, however, the hooligan strangles the cabbie and the lawyer ends up defending the young man and witnessing his hanging.

What seemed disconnected and random at first turns out to be tellingly interconnected. And this is Kieslowski's aesthetic: the incidentals of a shot, the people in the background, say, turn out to play crucial roles in the overall plot. For example, the ten segments of the magnificent Dekalog (1989-90) interconnect with episodes from one story turning up in another. The abortion in Dekalog II, for instance, becomes an ethics problem for the class in Dekalog VIII. A reappearing "witness" (is it Kieslowski himself?) links all the films. In the Three Colors trilogy, characters in the background in one film turn up in central roles in another. And all the central characters appear in the final scene in Red. Throughout the trilogy, key colors recur as does green in A Short Film about Killing. To try to recount all these interconnections would take a book and indeed there is such a book. Annette Insdorf details these interconnections—"echoes" she calls them—in her book on Kieslowski, and she spells many of them out in her excellent commentaries on the Kieslowski DVDs.

These recurrences form the dominant element in Kieslowski's aesthetic. It is as though, behind the scattered happenings of our daily lives there is a hidden pattern. If you are religious, you might think of it as the "hand of God," or what is called in Christian writings, "Providence," an invisible hand guiding human affairs. If you are not religious, you might think of this as a delusion. This is the kind of thing that fuels conspiracy theories. Coincidences can't just be coincidences; somebody is rigging this.

Either way, Kieslowski's aesthetic acts out a basic pattern in our brains. Jaak Panksepp has identified what he calls the SEEKING system. Panksepp points to a system that underlies all our other emotions (like Freud's libido); he calls it the SEEKING system. Basically, this is a dopaminergic system that responds automatically and unconditionally to information from the body like "I'm thirsty" or "I'm hungry." And this network also learns about things in the environment that predict satisfactions. It responds to stimuli that predict rewards, not to the rewards themselves. You can think of this system as a foraging system, the thing that makes a rat sniff around looking for goodies. The system is active all the time during the day and during REM sleep."The mammalian brain," writes Panksepp, "contains a ‘foraging/exploration/investigation/curiosity/interest/expectancy/SEEKING' system that leads organisms to eagerly pursue the fruits of their environment." Although at first without cognitive content, SEEKING translates correlations in environmental events into perceptions of causality. It gives us our drive to seek evidence for our hypotheses and to perceive the world as confirming our hypotheses.

One component of SEEKING is the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. It has to do with the feelings associated with this SEEKING behavior. The mesolimbic system originates in the midbrain—it's "meso"—and more specifically in the substantia nigra. The "limbic" in its name refers to the limbic system, where emotions originate. The mesolimbic system projects dopaminergically on through the nucleus accumbens and up into the limbic system. It produces that invigorated feeling, that sense of anticipation, that we have when we actively seek thrills and other rewards. Think of Freud's libido.

This system allows animals to become acquainted with the diverse configurations and rewards of their environments and thereby establish realistic and adaptive expectations. The brains of organisms try to make causal sense of the correlated events to which they are exposed. It leads animals to spontaneously behave as if cue-reward coincidences reflect causal relationships. In conditioning lab animals, the experimenter decides when and how rewards will be given, but the animal comes to believe its own behavior obtains the food pellet. Skinner, for example, described his pigeons as having "superstitions." This is exactly the feeling that Kieslowski is playing on.

Now, what happens in my mind when this artist acts out a brain pattern basic to all of us mammals? What does that do to my response? One answer would be that it strikes a responsive chord in us. "That feels right." Delusional it may be, but this aspect of Kieslowski's world rings true to me because it resonates and draws on processes in my own corticolimbic system. Rationally, I would dismiss these Kieslowskian connections as outrageous concidences. Finding some occult force in them is a delusion. But emotionally, they are resoundingly true because they coincide with the operations of a powerful system in my brain. Like Skinner's pigeons, I become superstitious. I feel as though some mysterious hand was guiding events. (It is, of course, Kieslowski's hand which functions like Skinner's, creating co-occurrences.)

Is this, then, how artists "impose" their visions on us? By simulating in their art systems that coincide with those already in our brains? I don't know, but it's a fascinating speculation. I'm curious to know what you out there think.

Writings I've referred to:

Alcaro, Antonio, Robert Huber, and Jaak Panksepp. 2007. "Behavioral Functions of the Mesolimbic Dopaminergic System: An Affective Neuroethological Perspective." Brain Research Reviews 5(2, December): 283-321.

Insdorf, Annette. 1999. Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski. New York: Hyperion.

Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univerisity Press. 161-162.

Skinner, B. F. (1948). "`Superstition' in the pigeon." Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38: 168-1