Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 2, August 2014
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Armstrong, Paul B. How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-1-4214-1002-9.
Reviewed by
The University of Western Australia
Paul B. Armstrong’s fascinating book is ambitious in its scope and detailed in its execution. He sets out to find the middle ground between art and literature, and the rapidly changing scientific field of neuroscience. He states his central argument in his preface, that is, the neurobiology of the brain experiences the harmony and dissonance that art and literature create. He goes on to describe how the brain achieves the neural pathways to achieve this, and how these experiences are essential to not only confirm our understanding of the world, but also to challenge it. In other words, the duality of artistic expression where continuity and disruption of expectations are fundamental, are also essential elements for healthy mental functioning. He does claim, however, that ‘[t]o discover correlations between neurobiological processes and reports about experience is not to claim causality’ (p. xi). He strongly asserts the defining strengths of both practices, but sees his work as moving across the ‘explanatory gap’: the gap between knowing how something happens and what it is actually like to experience that. For example, the firing of particular neurons causes pain, but this does not help us understand how that pain is being experienced. Likewise with literature and art: we may know which parts of the brain are working in response to particular stimuli from a work of art but we cannot know or generalise about the affect. These affects are built on personalised experiences, cultural references and many other influences. However, this book is commendable in its efforts to pull together critical understandings of works of art and literature through phenomenology, hermeneutics and cognitive literary studies, and to tie these in with research on neurobiology and neuroaesthetics.
Armstrong divides the book into five, fairly long chapters (the discussion covers one hundred-and-eighty-three pages, with thirty-eight pages of notes and index). There are no subsections in the chapters and so each is to be read as a whole without breaks. Whilst Armstrong expertly moves his argument forward in well-constructed paragraphs, linked ideas and illustrations, I feel it would have benefitted from some compartmentalizing to allow for moments of contemplation or consideration.
The preface sets out the current landscape of the battlefield between the arts and neuroscience and the various factions within the two cultures. Armstrong is the diplomat arguing for tolerance and acceptance of each other’s jargon, approaches, justifications and communication strategies, and for a genuine effort to understand the other party’s perspective. He quotes neuroscientist, Marin Slov who ‘wisely advises, “Experimental aesthetics cannot get started without using the insights from traditional aesthetics”’ (p.6). But Armstrong does no set out to resolve the differences between these two discourses but juxtaposes them ‘in order to illuminate the parallels and correlations’ (p. 7), and by a desire to start a conversation.
Each chapter sets out a different challenge or approach to bridging this communication gap, taking us through aesthetic theory, neuroaesthetic research, hermeneutics, neurobiological functioning and many other important and fascinating areas. He is able to traverse these disparate knowledge domains with ease, and confidently lays out his arguments for bringing them together to aid our understanding of art and literature.
He argues that the commonplace notion that a particular region of the brain is responsible for a particular experience is false. Aesthetic experience, indeed all experience, occurs spatially and temporally in many brain regions. Importantly, the brain appears to need patterns and synthesis, what in aesthetic terms may be considered as harmony, but it also requires disruption of those patterns, or dissonance. This harmony-dissonance interaction allows the brain to stay flexible and open to new challenges, avoiding the stagnation of habits. Armstrong goes further, arguing for greater correlations between the fields of neurology and phenomenology when applied to the study of art and literature. He highlights that this would ‘suggest ways in which the lived experience of reading and its aesthetic manifestations relate to fundamental neurological processes’ (p. 21).
He presents us with a competent overview of our current understanding of how our brains function when we experience the world, drawing on research that studies not only reading, but the reception of music and visual art. For a scholar firmly based in the humanities, it is impressive how he has engaged so fully with neuroscience and is able to present its concepts in an accessible way for non-scientists through prose that is a delight to read. He highlights the neurochemistry behind our feelings when we experience art works and when we are instructed or challenged by them. Our brains are playful things, and the complexities of great art help us form and disrupt meaning continually. This, he concludes is what gives art a ‘neurological value’ (p. 53).
Furthermore, Armstrong discusses the similarities of the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics (the concept that interpretation is a circular process), ‘with the “bushy” model of the brain as a decentred, multidirectional ensemble of parallel-processing operations” (p. 54). This is fully discussed in Chapter Three ‘The Neuroscience of the Hermeneutic Circle’. Using mainly examples from studies of vision, he argues that there is a neurobiological basis for our experience of hermeneutic processes. Our brains are constantly cycling between the novel and the routine in order to maintain our ability to respond to our environment. There is a tension between constancy and flexibility. Our neurons wire together to form pathways through repeated firings and this gives us our sense of the world. When that worldview is challenged we have a crisis of interpretation. We maintain our view, form a new one, or live with the contradictions, that is, a ‘flip-flopping’ between the two. Armstrong likens the ‘irreconcilable interpretive conflicts that characterize the humanities’ as having a basis in the biology of brain function and its ability to ‘play’. He suggests that ‘the brain is hard wired for conflicted readings’ and that this is of evolutionary benefit (p. 78).
Armstrong recognises that the brain is influenced by many experiences beyond art and is wary of claims that literature has ‘unidirectional moral or political effects’, or that a study of the brain will fully explain our interactions with art (p.120). He argues that the act of reading is an embodied experience that stimulates both our cognitive processes and our emotions, and supports this with evidence from neuroscience. He goes further in the final chapter, ‘The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego’, arguing that reading can, in part, be likened to the action of ‘mirror neurons’. These are neurons that fire not only when we carry out an action but also in response to witnessing that action performed by another. Whilst he does not draw a direct line between mirror neurons and empathetic reading, he suggests that they play a role in our ability to immerse ourselves in the lives of others as we read.
How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art is a dense book that covers many areas of both humanities and neuroscience. Armstrong has presented us with a coherent argument to open up discussion across the explanatory gap and points us to the tools we need for critical theorists and neuroscientists to work together. He makes perhaps the strongest defence of his approach to art, literature and neurobiology at the end of Chapter Three. He states that an artist’s process involves ‘blocking routine behaviours and automatic cognitive processes and instead promoting playful, self-conscious hypothesis testing’ (p. 90). By doing this, artists, Pied Piper-like, invite everyone, including neuroscientists and neuroaestheticists, to join them on their explorations.