Where is a Text?

A Neurological View
Holland, Norman Norwood, 1927-
New Literary History, Volume 33, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 21-38
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2002.0006
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New Literary History, 2002, 33: 2138
Where is a Text?
A Neurological View
Norman N. Holland
W
here is a text? The question lies at the root of much
thinking about literature, but most crucially, at the core of
reader-response thinking, and its difculties with literary
people.
Reader-response criticism has trouble with literary people because
literary people have trouble with reader-response criticism. Imagine for
a moment the familiar scene of a slightly bored academic audience
being addressed by a reader-response critic, me, for instance. I assert
that what you or I know of a text is only your or my conception of it.
Ouch! Red alert! Grumbling ensues and indignant questions. Are you
saying the text does not exist? (Echoing the notorious question of
Stanley Fishs apprehensive student, Is there a text in this class?) No,
I said nothing at all about the existence or non-existence of the text.
(No, I am not Bishop Berkeley nor was I meant to be.) Saying a book is
all in your mind, is not saying the book is not realas real as anything
else (as the good Bishop would have said). Nor is it saying that you do
not feel inspired or moved or pleased or annoyed by the book.
I try to shift the ground. Let me put that another way, more
accurately. What you know of a text is simply the sum of your
perceptions of it. Is that better? Or, still more accurately, perhaps, You
cannot know anything save through some human process of perception
in your brain (seeing it, hearing about it), unless your knowledge is
innate or comes by divine revelation. To me, that seems so obvious as
almost to be tautological, and, to be sure, at this point, the grumbles
usually die down. But not the discontent or the disagreement with the
rst statement.
People will agree to these latter statements, but balk at the idea that
one cannot talk about the text, supposedly an independent thing out
there, in a world of not-me beyond our eyeballs, apart from our
perception of it in here. They fulminate still more if I try to apply the
same reasoning to a movie on a screen or a play on a stage. Even for
someone like me who has been thinking as a reader-response critic for
years, it is hard to avoid traditional phrasings like these:
new literary history 22
That actor made me laugh and laugh.
The cantata is joyous.
Citizen Kane is a troubling movie.
I was moved to tears by the Ode.
It is not hard to poke holes in such phrasings and show that they do not
correspond to the psychology of the event. But it is hard indeed not to
use them.
* * *
Why is it hard? And how?
While teaching a stalwart group of graduate students in a seminar
called The Brain and Literary Questions, I was preparing a class by
reading a chapter in our neuroscience textbook, M. Deric Bowndss
excellent Biology of Mind.
1
I was struck (sic) by a particular passage. That
is, I felt abbergasted. For me, a reader-response critic weary of the
familiar protests, it resonated.
Bownds was describing the brains ability to generate perception
distinct from sensation. He described an experiment involving blind
people. It began with
attaching to their backs a patch driven by a video camera that the subject
controls, a camera whose output to the patch causes the stimulation of multiple
points on the skin. Each point represents one small area of the image captured
by the camera. Within hours, some subjects can learn to recognize common
objects such as cups and telephones, to point accurately in space, to judge
distance, and nally to use perspective and parallax to perceive external objects
in a stable three-dimensional world. . . . After a few hours, the person no longer
interprets the skin sensations as being of the body but projects them into the
space being explored by the body-directed gaze of the video camera. What
develops is not necessarily understanding but a strategy for responding appro-
priately. Test subjects do not locate objects as lying up against their skinany
more than those of us with vision locate objects as lying up against the retina of
our eyes. Instead, they perceive objects as being out there in space. Thus a tactile
sensation of what is happening to me is converted into a vision-like perception
of what is happening out there. More recently another form of sensory
substitution, the conversion of visual images to sound, has proven partially
successful. (BM 18384)
2
Now, that result is surprising for the blind subjects, but it is surely true
that, all the time, we sighted people experience objects as objects
separate from our bodies, not as lying up against our retinas.
23 where is a text?
Why? Why do we describeeven sensethe world as out there, in a
not-me when patently the only way it occurs to us, in us, is as
electrochemical pulses, action potentials, in our neurons, in me?
* * *
One can easily supply an evolutionary answer. Sensing objects as out
there in a not-me world is useful, even essential, for survival. I need to
know that somewhere beyond my skin is a mountain lion, a woolly
mammoth, or Marilyn Monroe. It is not much use sensing any of them
as in my sensory organs. Rather, I need that depth or distal information
to carry on activities essential to all but the simplest animals. We need
that information forin the four Fs of the old medical students joke
feeding, ghting, eeing, and sexual reproduction.
Certainly humans and chimpanzees need to perceive an out there
beyond the self. So do cows or alligators or sharks. If we go further down
the evolutionary tree, octopi need it, but do oysters? I think that is a
moot question. When we get to amoebas, information about something
out there would not help at all. An amoeba probably does better to
sense that the locations of things correspond to sensations at its surface.
What these speculations suggest is that this automatic act of translat-
ing our inner sensations as information about the outer world devel-
oped a long, long time ago, far down the evolutionary bush. The roots of
this, our unconscious, unavoidable, irreversible projection of inner
sensations onto a not-me world, go very deep.
Unfortunately, though, what served us well when we humans were
hunter-gatherers does not help at all when we are literary critics. It leads
to a great deal of confusion for a modern, philosophical, and inquiring
human, especially if that homo sapiens sapiens happens to be thinking
about a story or a poem or a movie.
Cognitive linguist Gilles Fauconnier sums the situation up nicely: In
the case of perception, the folk theory, an extremely useful one for us as
living organisms, is that everything we perceive is indeed directly the
very essence of the object perceived, out there in the world and
independent of us. And this comment, we shall see, is of particular
interest: The effect is contained entirely in the cause. So is the
extension to language: In the same way, our folk theory of language is
that the meanings are contained directly in the words and their
combinations, since that is all that we are ever consciously aware of. The
effect (meaning) is attributed essentially to the visible cause (lan-
guage). And not just meaning, but even more important, feelings. How
do you feel as you read this poem, see this movie, hear this story? It
makes me thoughtful. It causes a certain feeling in me.
new literary history 24
Fauconnier notes how difcult it is to dispel this feeling that the text
is somehow causing meanings or feelings or sensations in our heads:
Strikingly, just like a perceptual illusion, this effect cannot easily be
suspended by rational denial. . . . The more general illusion that
meaning is in the language forms is both hard to repress and hard to
acknowledge. The illusion expresses our experience of language. We
have no awareness of [the] amazing chain of cognitive events that takes
place as we talk and listen, except for the external manifestation of
language (sounds, words, sentences) and the internal manifestation of
meaning: with lightning speed, we experience meaning. This is very
similar to perception, which is also instantaneous and immediate with
no awareness of the extraordinarily complex intervening neural events.
Fauconnier concludes, It has been, I believe, a major contribution of
cognitive linguistics to dispel this very strong unquestioned assumption.
3
Not only linguistics. We now have considerable evidence from neuro-
science not only of the falsity of this folk theory about language (and
literature) but also of where it came from. It is deeply rooted in brain
mechanisms that evolved along with us from our vertebrate ancestors.
We can now point to these places in the brain. To be sure, our neurons
support this folk theory for excellent reasons, yet it remains, so to speak,
an optical illusion.
* * *
Evolutionary psychology supplies a vital purpose for our translating
the electrochemical pulses in our eyes and ears into things out there in
a world beyond our bodies. But evolutionary psychology does not say
how this is done. The neuroscientists can answer that, perhaps not with
the precision one might like, but enough. Mindful that this is a literary,
not a neuroscientic paper, I have relegated these complexities to an
appendix.
The upshot of that appendicular excursion into brain functions is:
both eyes and ears translate processes in here into objects in a not-me
world quite automatically, willy-nilly, from innate, hard-wired circuits.
After preliminary processing of visual data, as we go further and further
forward in the brain, we perceive objects successively by an eye-centered,
a head-and-body-centered, and an object-centered frame of reference.
To some extent all three say the same thing. More than the other two,
though, it is the last, the object-centered frame of reference, that insists
what you are feeling in here is out there, beyond your body. In a parallel
way, we understand location through our ears as head-centered or
25 where is a text?
object-centered. With hearing, our brains do so even before we begin to
pay attention to the thing out there.
4
No doubt, so far as location is concerned, the brains interpretation
must be accurate, or else we could not survive. As for the contentwhat
is at that location?that we can never know in any absolute sense. We
cannot, obviously, because we can never see or hear it except through
our own senses (or mechanical extensions of those senses) with all their
various peculiarities. Yet the brain converts electrochemical impulses in
our neurons into our perception of an object with such-and-such
properties and so-and-so location in the world out there in the not-me,
and the brain does this quite automatically. Once the process starts, we
have no control over it at all.
At this point, though, I should introduce a sentence I omitted from
the passage I was reading in my students textbook. Bownds was
describing an experiment in which blind people sensed video-driven
tactile stimulation on their backs as objects seen out there in a stable
three-dimensional world as we do with sensations in our eyes. (And as we
do with literary texts.) The patterns projected onto the skin, Bownds
wrote, develop no such visual content unless the individual is behavior-
ally active, directing the video camera via head, hand, or body move-
ments (italics mine). But if the individual does direct the video camera,
after a few hours the prickles on the back seem to be beyond the back,
out there, in the space explored by the video camera. Similarly, infants
(7.511 months) can localize a sounding object in the dark, but their
performance improves when they are allowed to grasp the sounding
object.
5
This result ts very neatly the brain scientists identication of the
areas developing frames centered on the eye, head, body, and object
respectively. The visual information from the visual processing areas at
the back of the head is drawn forward by intentions into, rst, the parietal
cortex, then the frontal cortex. Doing so, the data become more and
more associated with movement. The same thing happens with hearing.
6
We do not have actually to touch the object, though. Out of our mere
moving to see objects, we get the sensation of an object-centered world,
despite its being a world we know only in our own nervous systems for
seeing and hearing. Thus our eyes scanning the page further guaran-
tees that we will feel that the page is in the world of not-me.
That feeling is essential. It is automatic. It is almost impossible to
reverse. It corresponds to what we experience and what our brains are
telling us. To be sure, it is a picture of the world that sometimes deceives
us, as with mirages, hallucinations, optical illusions, or dreams. Mostly,
however, it serves us wellbut not when talking about literature.
new literary history 26
* * *
The brain constructs what are actually electrochemical pulses from
our eyes and ears into a world beyond our skins. And we cannot stop this
activity. Then, as if the poor beleaguered reader-response critic did not
have enough trouble, there is a further, nal step in our unconscious
projection of our sensations into the not-me. We humans have yet one
more reason to believe the feelings we have are in the texts by which
we prompt those feelings.
Think for a moment about the mobile that hangs over the cribs of
most American babies these days. The baby hits the dangling plastic bird
or whatever, and the mobile spins round. Maybe it makes a little pinging
noise. So the baby hits it again. And again. And so the baby learns an if-
then: If I swat this thing, it spins around and makes a noise. Even at this
very early stage the baby is making an if-then, cause-effect inference. We
learn about contingent behavior in earliest infancy. We learn about
if-then.
7
In fact, our ability to attribute causes to effects may even be hard-
wiredinnatealthough there is disagreement about that among the
neuropsychologists. Certainly the sense of cause and effect comes into
play very quickly after birth. At twenty-seven weeks, say the psychologists
of infant cognition, babies know about cause and effect. Certainly a
squalling baby already knows that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Neuropsychologists do not agree on how infants acquire this sense of
cause and effect. Infants may be born with certain core ideas about the
properties of objects.
8
Infants may learn about a variety of phenomena
(unveiling, containing, passing barriers) but maintain them as separate
categories.
9
Infants may be born with an innate idea of animate
(human) agency that at rst focuses on force relations between objects
and so explains the movements of inanimate objects.
10
And some
neuropsychologists say (as Hume and Piaget do) that infants infer
principles like cause-and-effect from statistical regularities in the interac-
tions they observe.
11
However neuropsychologists resolve these issues, we can glean some
agreement. Very early on, at the age of twenty-seven weeks (perhaps
innately therefore), infants show they can distinguish between animate
and inanimate objects, that is, objects whose movements are caused
internally or externally.
12
Understanding internally caused movements
leads via a naive psychology to the social intelligence that we share
with our primate kin. Understanding externally caused movements
leads to a naive physics, including an idea of cause-and-effect. And this
happens at least within the rst two years of life. It is, as you would
therefore expect, hard to overturn.
27 where is a text?
Just how hard shows up in an amusing experiment by V. S. Rama-
chandran and William Hirstein. As they describe it:
The subject sits in a chair blindfolded with an accomplice sitting at his right side,
or in front of him, facing the same direction. The experimenter then stands
near the subject, and with his left hand takes hold of the subjects left index nger
and uses it to repeatedly and randomly tap and stroke the nose of the
accomplice, while at the same time, using his right hand, he taps and strokes the
subjects nose in precisely the same manner, and in perfect synchrony. After a
few seconds of this procedure, the subject develops the uncanny illusion that his
nose has either been dislocated, or been stretched out several feet forwards or
off to the side. . . . The more random and unpredictable the tapping sequence
the more striking the illusion. We suggest that the subjects brain regards it as
highly improbable that the tapping sequence on his nger and the one on his
nose are identical simply by chance and therefore assumes that the nose has
been displacedapplying a universal Bayesian logic that is common to all
sensory systems. Interestingly, once the illusion is in place, if a drop of ice-cold
water is now applied to the subjects nose, the cold is sometimes felt in the new
location of the nose. Rather surprisingly, the illusion sometimes works even if
the accomplice sits facing the subject; the logical absurdity of the situation seems
not to veto the effect. (TL 45253)
Ramachandran and Hirstein derive conclusions about qualia from their
experiment (and another that goes even further, displacing the whole
head). To me, their experiment shows how very, very hard it is to get past
the idea that a sensation in here (in the subjects nger and nose) is
caused by something out there beyond the ngers and nose even if
this involves moving ones nose off ones body.
These experiments also show, it seems to me, that our ability to detect
statistical correlations and to interpret them as cause-and-effect is more
than just an ability. It is a forced inference installed in our brains during
infancy. Other experimenters note that the underlying modularity of
visual processes may enforce such inferences. Our recognition of
causality may be a rather humble perceptual mechanism operating
automatically and incorrigibly, in the words of Alan L. Leslie.
13
As a
result, our perceptions of causality are impervious to general knowl-
edge and reasoning
14
like the resistance to reader-response.
* * *
When a literary critic advocates a reader-response stance to other
critics, still other difculties arise. There is after all, the narcissism of the
interpreting professional. Literary critics and theorists want to be able to
new literary history 28
say what a text really means or what it subverts and decenters or
how it maintains some political hegemony. They want a text that does
things, and they want to claim a truth, an objective value for their
pronouncements on what it does. Hardly an unreasonable desire.
Then, creative writers have too much invested in the idea that they
can make a phrase that will work to give it up. Work in that sentence
offers an interesting ambiguity. It might mean, that will succeed with
my audience. Finethe writer tries to predict response. But work
might mean, that will cause readers to approve it. That, of course,
represents a futile hope. If writers could choose phrases that would
cause readers to approve, every writer would turn out a best-seller that
would resound down the centuries. I think most creative writers mean
the rst sense, but some mean the second, the impossible sense.
Certainly the claim that a line or a word will work sounds thoroughly
confusing to my ear, at least.
Even so, most scholarly writers cling to the hope that they can nd
words that will evoke this or that response in their readers (as, indeed, I
am doing in this paper. I hope to persuade you of the validity of the
reader-response position). Further, critics and reviewers have convinced
themselves that they can see a poem or a movie more clearly, can say
more intelligent things about it, than mere ordinary folk and that the
things they write are True or Facts or Insights, quite transcending the
critics own activities and ambitions.
This professional objection to reader-response, however, comes late in
the sequence of mental processes. First comes raw, unprocessed sensa-
tion. That leads to the brains hard-wired conversion of sensations to
perception of a world out there that is not-me. Then follows the naive
physics we learned in infancy and have been using ever since. It tells us
our feelings are caused by the something out there. All three stages,
which I have isolated for purposes of explanation, are automatic and
inseparable, each following instantaneously and ineluctably on the
previous, and all outside of awareness. Only after all are completed, does
the quite adult professionalism of the writer or critic begin to exert its
inuence, intellectually conrmingirreversibly?the work the brain
has already completed.
After surveying researches into infants naive physics, neuroscientist
Michael Gazzaniga concludes:
To sum up, it appears that selective processes have, over millions of years,
identied brain networks that endow new members of the human species with
crucial information about a variety of matters. Studies on basic perceptual
processes reveal that the young mind comes fully equipped to deal with the
nature of the physical world. The automatic inferences made about the sensory
29 where is a text?
world are surely useful for many species. This early and fundamental system, in
providing principles of perception that are difcult to override, seems to set the
stage for the higher-order inferential mechanisms that appear unique to our
species. When the interpreter [a left-brain narrator-explainer] goes to work on
more complex events, the resulting hypotheses and beliefs about the world also
seem resistant to change.
15
In short, we can hardly escape inferringno, faster than that,
perceivingtext and response as cause and effect, even if doing so is
inappropriate. Hence, having projected our inner sensations to form an
idea of an object out there, we then explain our inner sensations as
being effects caused by that object. We do this even though that very
object is itself our projection from those sensations. Wacky as this sounds, we
use this circular reasoning all the time to negotiate the world around us.
It works, and it is very hard to undo this reasoningas both psycholo-
gists and reader-response critics have found. But it is not simple utility
that makes it so hard to override. It is that these ways of feeling our
sensory experience, these projections, are built into our brains. Talking
about the power or the impact of a work of art expresses our
experience quite exactly, our feeling that texts have agency.
Even reader-response critics say things like His joke made me laugh
instead of I thought what he said was funny.
16
That scene in the movie scared me
instead of I found that scene scary.
17
That lamp is too bright instead of My eye
is receiving too much light. The second phrasings, particularly that last one,
seem forced and articial. By contrast, the rst phrasings seem
commonsensicalobviously trueincontrovertible. Seem.
Our brains acts of projection are sturdy and useful and deeply rooted
and incorrigible. So much so are they that, if someone refers the
sensations of sight or hearing back to where we really know, if we think
about it, that they are taking placein our sense organs and our
brainsthat person is perceived as denying the reality of the object out
there. You are saying the text does not exist!, said in a tone of
outraged virtue. But actually saying that sensations take place in our
brains says nothing at all about the thing the sensations are of.
* * *
Perhaps that is why this neurological approach cannot now, and
perhaps never will be able to say anything about our readings of Oedipus
Rex or Hamlet or Lacan or Das Kapital. The neurological approach
addresses not what critics of particular works say, but what they say about
what they say. The neurological approach puts critics claims back where
they belong, in critics fertile brains.
new literary history 30
I know of only one article in the literature that attempts to tie a
particular text to particular brain processes. Recently, Professor Nina
Pelikan Straus published a neuroscientic study of Jane Eyre in PSYART,
the online journal devoted to the psychology of the arts.
18
Professor
Straus pointed, as other critics have, to the many images of re and gaze
in the novel. She suggested, however, that Janes telling her story and
our reading it through these images both destroy and repair Janes self-
system as described by neuro-psychoanalyst Allan Schore.
19
All of us
have such a self-system, and she suggests further that our own neurologi-
cal echoing of Janes process of repair explains our own intense
response to the novel.
I think her essay is a bold, provocative, and very original effort, well
worth publishing and thinking about. But I also think the audacious task
she set herself may have been doomed from the start. I do not think
neurology will be able to say useful things about particular texts or
particular readings of particular texts for the foreseeable future. All we
know of the brain now is some fairly broad, even universal systems, such
as those described by Schore. Because these processes are so general,
because they apply, not just to reading, but to many, many processes
performed by all human beings all the time, they probably cannot
explain one particular human beings very specic doings, either Jane
Eyres nal re-driven marriage or the enthusiasm some reader feels at
that marriage.
In this essay, I have been pointing to the general brain processes that
all of us use to set texts (and everything else) in a not-me world. Then,
when one of us reads, say, Jane Eyre or Das Kapital I should phrase that,
when one of us offers his or her particular readingno doubt that is
accomplished through various quite precise and quite idiosyncratic
brain processes. Even if we could hook up an obedient literary critic to
one of those immense hospital machines and get a PET or fMRI or MEG
picture of particular processes as he or she read Das Kapital, what would
that tell us about the readers particular reading? Nothing. It would say
that the reading was the result of some highly particular processes in
that readers brain. Are you surprised? I am not.
Ah, but when I say that that readers interpretation is really a wholly
internal affair, within that readers brain, that the reader cannot truly say
things about the text out there in a world outside that reader, then
the howls of protest begin. When I point to general processes by which
we situate events, which are really inside our brains, outside, in the not-
me world, then the philosophical and theoretical objections come
boiling up.
People respond with the same kind of vehement objection as if one
were trying to undo a deep-rooted and long-established psychological
31 where is a text?
coping mechanism. People object as though their repressions and
denials were being dislodged in psychotherapyas, in a way, they are.
That is why reader-response criticism and theory has the trouble it
hasbut the argument applies to other things as well. Although I have
written specically about reader-response criticism, I also sense a tempt-
ing speculation. How many gallons of philosophers ink may have been
spilled in vain over such controversies as realism versus idealism or
Kantian a priori concepts, whose roots lie simply in the neurons that
make our brains minds?
University of Florida
NOTES
1 M. Deric Bownds, The Biology of Mind: Origins and Structures of Mind, Brain, and
Consciousness (Bethesda, Md., 1999), pp. 18384; hereafter cited in text as BM.
2 Paul Bach-y-Rita, A Tactile Vision Substitution System, American Journal of Optometry &
Archives of American Academy of Optometry, 46.2 (1969), 10911. Paul Bach-y-Rita, Neuro-
physiological Basis of a Tactile Vision-substitution System, IEEE Transactions: Man-Machine
Systems, 11.1 (1970), 10810. K. A. Kaczmarek, J. G. Webster, Paul Bach-y-Rita, and W. J.
Tompkins, Electrotactile and Vibrotactile Displays for Sensory Substitution Systems,
IEEE Transactions: Biomedical Engineering, 38 (Jan. 1991), 116.
3 Gilles Fauconnier, Methods and Generalizations, Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations,
Scope, and Methodology, Cognitive Linguistics Research 15, ed. Theo Janssen and Gisela
Redeker (New York, 1999), 99100.
4 Robert J. Zatorre, Todd A. Mondor, and Alan C. Evans, Auditory Attention to Space
and Frequency Activates Similar Cerebral Systems, NeuroImage, 10 (1999), 54454.
5 Linda L. LaGasse et al., Infants Understanding of Auditory Events, Infant and Child
Development, 8 ( June 1999), 85100.
6 Timothy D. Grifths et al., Human Brain Areas Involved in the Analysis of Auditory
Movement, Human Brain Mapping, 9.2 (2000), 7280.
7 Gyorgy Gergely and John S. Watson, Early Socio-Emotional Development: Contin-
gency Perception and the Social-Biofeedback Model, Early Social Cognition: Understanding
Others in the First Months of Life, ed. Philippe Rochat (Mahwah, N.J., 1999), pp. 10136.
8 Elizabeth S. Spelke, The Origins of Physical Knowledge, Thought Without Language,
Fyssen Foundation Symposium, ed. L. Weiskrantz (Oxford, 1988), pp. 16884. Elizabeth S.
Spelke, Ann Phillips, and Amanda L. Woodward, Infants Knowledge of Object Motion
and Human Action, Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, Fyssen Foundation
Symposium, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford, 1995),
pp. 4478.
9 Rene Baillargeon, Physical Reasoning in Infancy, The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 181204. Rene Baillargon, Laura
Kotovsky, and Amy Needham, The Acquisition of Physical Knowledge in Infancy, Causal
Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, Fyssen Foundation Symposium, ed. Dan Sperber,
David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford, 1995), pp. 79116.
10 Alan M. Leslie, A Theory of Agency, Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate,
Fyssen Foundation Symposium, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 12141.
11 Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology
new literary history 32
Tells Us About the Biological Functions of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies,
4, no. 56 (1997), 42957; hereafter cited in text as TL.
12 David Premack and Ann James Premack, Intention as Psychological Cause, Causal
Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, Fyssen Foundation Symposium, ed. Dan Sperber,
David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford, 1995), pp. 18599.
13 Alan M. Leslie, The Necessity of Illusion, Thought Without Language, Fyssen Founda-
tion Symposium, ed. L. Weiskrantz (Oxford, 1988), pp. 185210, 18788.
14 Alan M. Leslie and Stephanie Keeble, Do Six-month-old Infants Perceive Causality?,
Cognition, 25.3 (1987), 285.
15 Michael S. Gazzaniga, Natures Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality,
Language, and Intelligence (New York, 1992), pp. 13637.
16 Norman N. Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), ch. 11.
17 Norman N. Holland, A Digression on Metaphors, The Brain of Robert Frost (New York,
1989), pp. 11234.
18 Nina Pelikan Straus, Gazes, Fires, and Brain-Body Repair in Bronts Jane Eyre,
PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, article 010322. March 27,
2001. URL:http://www.clas.u.edu/ipsa/journal/articles/psyart2001/straus01.htm, Oct. 4, 2001.
19 Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional
Development (Hillsdale, N.J., 1994).
Appendix: The Neurology of Things Out There
For helping a struggling literary critic with this section, I am mightily
grateful to Christiana M. Leonard, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience,
McKnight Brain Institute; and Alonso Riestra, M.D., formerly Post-
doctoral Associate, Department of Neurology, both of the University of
Florida. They kindly checked my neurology and corrected my errors.
Those that remain represent my own creative understanding of a mind-
bogglingly complex eld. And I am, of course, solely responsible for the
paper proper referring specically to literary texts and the difculties of
the reader-response critic.
* * *
Our projection of our sensory data onto the world out there takes
place relatively late in our mental processing. If we consider only vision,
we can skip over the complex path from our retinas through the optic
chiasm and the lateral geniculate nuclei back to the areas of visual
processing at the back of the head in the occipital cortex. But we should
note, in passing, that considerable processing of the visual information
takes place even within the retina. Magnocellular (M) cells specialize for
changes in a light stimulus (size, contour, motion), while parvocellular
(P) cells respond strongly to perceptions of object features such as color
and high contrast, information useful when we recognize an object. The
33 where is a text?
same combination of M- and P-cells function in the lateral geniculate
nuclei and to the same end: treating features of an object separately
from size, contour, and motion. Also, information from the two eyes
begins to combine.
Ultimately the now-binocular information from the retina traverses
these optic pathways back to the primary visual cortex (or the striate
cortex) in the occipital lobes at the back of the head. There, a
complexity of layers and different cell types further segregate the M- and
P-cell information. One can think of these visual processing areas (V1,
V2, V3, and so forth) as lters that selectively amplify color, line, edge,
contour, shape, and motion. Probably, all act simultaneously. They
operate in parallel distributed processing to process separately color,
line, edge, contour, shape, motion, but most important for our pur-
poses, depth. This stage of visual processing also deals with binocular
signals from the eyes so as to represent in the neural pathways a scene in
terms of foreground and background. Somehow, perhaps through
synchronous oscillations or ring of neurons, these separate pieces of
information come together.
The process of perception, however, has probably not yet yielded a
unied sight we are conscious of. The information from the visual
cortices now feeds forward toward the frontal areas of the brain.
Information (for example, about depth) exists as action potentials in
neurons, and they travel from neuron to neuron forward from the visual
centers at the back of the head. They form two parallel, but intercon-
nected, streams. A ventral (or lower) stream leads downward into the
temporal lobe, where, for example, much of language processing takes
place. A dorsal (or upper) stream arches with the dome of the skull into
the parietal lobe.
To some extent these two streams talk to each other, and both carry
the same kinds of information, but each is specialized. The lower
stream, sometimes called the what pathway, the inheritor of the P-cells,
specializes in recognizing objects. The upper, dorsal pattern is a where
pathway drawing on information from the M-cells; it specializes in
spatial awareness and the guidance of spatial actions, like catching a
softball.
Another way of thinking about them would be the lower what
stream and the upper how stream, the latter specialized for doing
things, for various motor actions. This upper stream, for example,
contains a comparatively extensive representation of the outer edges of
the visual eld, and it is specialized for detecting and analyzing moving
visual information.
1
If we think in terms of survival, it is important for the what path to
identify objects out there as chickens or lions, things that are likely to
new literary history 34
aid survival or things that are likely to cause trouble. Similarly, it is
terribly important for the where pathway to be able to locate the lion
or the chicken as something in a specic place in the not-me world, not
just sensations in the within-me world. Reading, from this point of view,
is a special form of object recognition in which the objects are letters,
graphemes, words, or margins, all identied as out there.
At this point, instead of reading, imagine yourself playing in the
departmental softball game, relegated to the outeld, as I always was.
Imagine yourself trying to catch a pop y headed in your direction.
Close your eyes and imagine what your eyes, your head, your arms, your
legs are doing. . . .
I hear the crack of the bat. My eyes follow the ball as it arcs toward me,
and as it goes higher I tip my head back to watch it and I start running
toward it, my arms outstretched and ailing, and if Im lucky, I hold my
two outstretched hands cupping it before it can plummet to the ground.
If we play that over in slow motion, paying particular attention to what
our brain-minds were doing, we can see roughly three stages. I rst
tracked the ball with my eyes, then with my head, and nally I ran
toward it and tried to catch it with my limbs, indeed, my whole body. If
we put those stages in the language of the neuroscientists, I rst
perceived the ball in an eye-centered frame of reference, then in a head-
and-body-centered frame of reference, and nally in an object-centered
frame of reference.
Following the softball, we maintain the eye-centered frame of refer-
ence by a series of smooth pursuit movements of the eye that track the
stimulus, keeping a receptive eld linked to whatever our attention
engages. Long ago, Helmholtz suggested that the reason the world
appears to stay put when we move our eyes is that the muscular effort to
make a saccade also adjusts our perception to take that eye movement
into account.
2
The motor activity of the eyes pursuit also updates the
brains representation in the lateral intraparietal cortex of the position
of the stimulus. And recent experiments observing the ring of single
perceptual neurons conrm his 150-year-old hypothesis.
3
The parietal lobe contains the representation of our own body
schema, and damage to the parietal lobe may produce decits in our
ability to recognize our own body parts. Conversely, in a well-functioning
parietal lobe, the dorsal (where) visual system and proprioceptive
system (the representation of the body) interact to guide action of our
own body parts onto objects in the space out there, beyond our bodies.
Other neurons (in the ventral intraparietal cortex) specialize in
moving stimuli, being sensitive, for example, to the speed and direction
of a softball. Curiously, these same neurons also respond to somatosen-
sory stimuli, like a light touch at some point on the face or head. As a
35 where is a text?
result, a given neuron in the ventral intraparietal cortex responds to
stimulation of a certain location on the skin surface and to the visual
stimulus aligned with it. The two are linked because, surprisingly, visual
receptive elds on the retina shift to accommodate the eyes moving. A
neuron in your ventral intraparietal cortex that responds strongly to a
visual stimulus approaching your mouth also has a somatosensory
receptive eld around your mouth. It will re in response to such a
stimulus whether you are looking up, down, or sideways. In short, the
combined visual and somatosensory elds in this area of the brain are
dened with respect to the skin surface of the head. The receptive elds
in this area are head-centered.
The third, object-centered frame of reference arises in the frontal
cortex, where it is characteristic of the organ that the farther forward
you go, the more abstract are the regulations of behavior. The least
abstract of these areas, the primary motor cortex, lies at the top of the
brain just in front of the central sulcus (or groove) dividing the parietal
cortex from the frontal lobe. Neurons in this area encode levels of
activation for muscle groups; they may also encode movement trajecto-
ries. Neurons in the primary motor cortex and the premotor cortex (just
in front of the previous area) contain body-maps.
In effect, areas in the frontal cortex specialized for different motion
tasks reach back into the visual processing areas in the parietal cortex.
4
They pick up information relating to the reference coordinates for their
particular task. Thus, looking will get eye-centered information, tracking
will get head-centered information, reaching and grasping will get hand-
centered information, and dodging or escaping will get body-centered
information. It is these structures that acquire and use head- and body-
centered information for the hands trying to catch the ball, guiding
facial and arm and leg movements.
Just above and in front of the premotor cortex lies the frontal eye
eld, directing the eye movements that follow the softball. (These areas
in the thinking part of the brain apparently respond more to the
intentions to make such movements than to the movements themselves,
which are governed by more primitive and unconscious centers in the
brain stem.) Further, the frontal and parietal systems combine informa-
tion to allow the smooth tracking of a moving target like the softball.
There are further complications in that the vestibular networks govern-
ing balance act with the cerebellum to suppress reexes that would keep
the eye looking at the same point in space.
In the net result, eye, head, and body all track the softball. When
someone tells you to keep your eye on the ball, it is these complex
interactions involving widely separated parts of the brain that do it for
you. At this late point in the continuous and nearly instantaneous
new literary history 36
process, the eyes are rmly committed to an object-centered frame of
reference.
Finally, the prefrontal cortex, the most frontward part of the frontal
cortex, neurons in the upper and outermost areas of the frontal lobe,
provides working memory for spatial (and nonspatial) forms. This
information, designed to be available for tasks, is, of course, object-
centered. By this point in this complex, but, for all practical purposes,
single and instantaneous process, you are seeing the softball, which was
originally only a retinal sensation, as denitively out there in the not-
me world.
5
I have not written about the crack of the bat. I havent, because
neuroscientists have not learned as much about our ways of locating
objects in auditory space as they have in visual space. Further, auditory
localization differs from visual. Some neuroscientists assert that the
auditory systems divide the incoming information into a what stream
and a where stream, like the visual system, but others disagree.
6
In any
case, visual processing, through all its various stages, maintains a rough
map of what corresponds to the lights and shadows on the retina. The
brain, however, seems to handle sound frequency information differ-
ently from information about sound location. Frequencies are plotted
out linearly, like a frequency response graph for a stereo amplier. By
contrast, location seems to be handled panoramically. That is, the
brain does complicated processing with each neuron that is involved.
Each of these carries information about many locations, and informa-
tion about any one location is carried by a large number of neurons.
The brain apparently calculates location from this information.
7
Further complicating the picture, auditory spatializing works differ-
ently for near objects and far.
8
If the source of a sound is far away, the
brain triangulates its location from the time difference between the
signals reaching the two ears. If, however, an object is close to the head,
the ear works with the phase differences between sound entering the ear
canal directly and sound reected from the external ear, the pinna.
Since everyones pinna is shaped differently, this means (astonishingly)
that each of our brains learns to code differently for our differently
shaped ears. To make matters still more complicated, the brain calcu-
lates the horizontal angle for a sound (azimuth) differently from the
vertical angle (elevation).
Auditory processing has something of a map in its midbrain process-
ing (inferior colliculus), and those neurons project to premotor neu-
rons in the brainstem and spinal cord that orient the eyes and head
toward important stimuli. In the forebrain, however, the brain appar-
ently breaks up information about location into clusters associated with
different complex motor actions and other functions in the frontal
37 where is a text?
lobes. As with the visual system, the specialized motor areas in the
frontal lobes reach back into the sensory areas for the information
appropriate to the task at hand.
Further, the auditory system specializes hemispherically to some
extent. The left hemisphere does more with information about what
and the right with information about where, although both hemi-
spheres do both. The visual system, too, specializes hemispherically. It is
the right parietal lobe that supports spatial functions and the left
temporal lobe that supports recognition (except perhaps faces, which a
specialized area in the right hemisphere recognizes).
Thus, the brain calculates from sounds information about what and
where, in the parietal lobes, specically, the inferior parietal lobules.
The information is partially specialized: right for what and left for
where. The left lobule is a region associated with the where stream of
visual processing. Higher processing centers in the prefrontal cortex
then reach back for this information and feed it forward to the
appropriate motor systems. Where and what go to upper and lower
areas, respectively, in the prefrontal cortex, quite near the endings of
the localizing process for the eyes.
9
That proximity, therefore, raises the
possibility of further processing that combines auditory and visual
localizings so that we hear the crack of the bat and the ight of the ball
as one phenomenon. While I have described a bat arcing a ball, there is
no difference in principle between trying to catch a softball out there,
in a not-me world, and trying to interpret a text out there.
NOTES TO THE APPENDIX
1 Melvyn A. Goodale et al., A Neurological Dissociation between Perceiving Objects and
Grasping Them, Nature, 349.6305 (January 1991), 15456. Heather Carnahan and Ronald
G. Marteniuk, Grasping versus Pointing and the Differential Use of Visual Feedback,
Human Movement Science, 12.3 (May 1993), 21934. Melvyn A. Goodale, and A. David
Milner Separate Visual Pathways for Perception and Action, Trends in Neurosciences, 15.1
(January 1992), 2025.
2 Hermann Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics (New York, 1866/1924).
3 Carol L. Colby, J. R. Duhamel, and M. E. Goldberg, Oculocentric Spatial Representa-
tion in Parietal Cortex, Cerebral Cortex, 5 (1995), 47081. Carol L. Colby and Carl R. Olson,
Spatial Cognition, Fundamental Neuroscience, ed. Michael J. Zigmond et al. (San Diego,
1999), pp. 136383.
4 Richard Passingham, The Frontal Lobes and Voluntary Action, Oxford Psychology Series
21 (New York, 1993).
5 In the preceding section (on visual processing), I am relying on Colby and Olsons
Spatial Cognition, which is from a standard textbook.
6 Khalafalla O. Bushara et al., Modality-specic Frontal and Parietal Areas for Auditory
and Visual Spatial Localization in Humans, Nature: Neuroscience, 2 (August 1999), 75966.
L. M. Romanski et al., Dual Streams of Auditory Afferents Target Multiple Domains in the
Primate Prefrontal Cortex, Nature: Neuroscience, 2 (December 1999), 113136.
new literary history 38
7 John C. Middlebrooks, Cortical Representations of Auditory Space, The New Cognitive
Neurosciences, ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 42535. S. Furukawa
and John C. Middlebrooks, Coding of Sound-source Location by Ensembles of Cortical
Neurons, Journal of Neuroscience, 20 (February 2000), 121628.
8 D. S. Brungart and W. M. Rabinowitz, Auditory Localization of Nearby Sources: Head-
related Transfer Functions, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106.31 (September
1999), 146579. D. S. Brungart, N. I. Durlach, and W. M. Rabinowitz, Auditory
Localization of Nearby Sources: II. Localization of a Broadband Course, Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 106.41 (October 1999), 195668.
9 Robert A. Weeks et al., A PET Study of Human Auditory Spatial Processing,
Neuroscience Letters, 262 (1999), 15558.