On the Cognitive Turn in Literary Studies

Michelle Ty

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 19,

Number 1, Fall/Winter 2010, pp. 205-219 (Review)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/qui/summary/v019/19.1.ty.html

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On the Cognitive Turn in Literary Studies

michelle ty

A review of Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain (New York: Viking

Press, 2009); Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neu-
roscientific Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2009); and Blakey Vermule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Cited in the text as
RB, NI, and WWC, respectively.

As I see it now, the most formidable task of neuroscience is to

stand up to the accusation that animates Adorno’s words, quoted
here: “There is no form of being in the world that science could not
penetrate, but what can be penetrated by science is not being.”1
In recent decades, scientists have met unprecedented success in
penetrating the skull. Advances in imaging technology allow us
to “see” our brains for the first time, perhaps with a fascination
shared by one who beheld her own photograph when cameras
were still new.
Much of the research in cognitive science is worth remark, as
this small sample will show.2 In 1992, for instance, Giacomo Riz-
zolatti announced the discovery of mirror neurons, a special class
of cells that activate not only when a monkey carries out an action
but also when that action is merely witnessed. Here is one of many
examples: When a monkey grasps a cup, certain neurons fire in
206 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

his brain; oddly, this very same neural network activates when the
monkey watches a colleague take his own turn at the familiar task.3
It has been suggested that mirror neurons may be a site of conver-
gence for perception and action, and self and other. In 2000, Karim
Nader showed that whenever a long-term memory is dredged up,
it passes through a “labile state” before being reconsolidated into
a stable memory. During this period of vulnerability, deep memo-
ries can be changed or even erased with the introduction of certain
protein inhibitors.4 The very act of recall, it seems, changes what
we remember. In 2004, Olaf Hauk found that reading words asso-
ciated with actions of the foot, hand, or mouth (“kick” and “lick”
are choice examples) engages motor areas of the brain that overlap
or are adjacent to the same spots activated when one is actually in
the throes of action.5 Here, we find the suggestion that words have
life beyond the page.
The claim of a growing population of scholars working at the
juncture of the humanities and cognitive studies is that science—
specifically the science of the brain—is now poised to respond
afresh to central concerns of human life usually reserved for the
liberal arts: consciousness, language, art, morality, love.6
Part of the allure of contemporary cognitive science is its prom-
ise of a single complete theory of everything. “Consilience” is what
biologist Edward Wilson called it—“a conviction, far deeper than
a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be
explained by a small number of natural laws.”7 A witness to the
salutary effects of Einstein’s unification of microscopic and uni-
verse-wide physics into a single idiom, Wilson predicted that with
the “jumping together” of various subdisciplines, a newly unified
Science could extend its reach to embrace the humanities. Meta-
physics would once again be just on the horizon.
When, in 2001, French neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux sat
down with Paul Ricoeur for a debate on human nature, he opened
with a vision reminiscent of Wilson’s, claiming that neuroscience
“holds out the prospect of achieving a unified and synthetic view
of what was formerly a question reserved for philosophy. . . . It
now becomes possible, I would argue, for a neurobiologist to le-
gitimately take an interest in the foundations of morality . . . and,
 Review Essays 207

conversely, for a philosopher to find material for reflection, even

edification in the results of contemporary neuroscience.”8 In the
closing section of Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene proph-
esies that “research on teaching, psychology, and neuroscience will
merge into a single, unified science of reading.” He anticipates the
coming of a “culture of neurons,” one based on the identification
and collection of a complete set of “cultural invariants,” the un-
shakable neurobiological baseline that restricts and determines all
activities of human culture (RB, 327). This conviction is perhaps
more forcefully expressed by Semir Zeki, the head of Berkeley’s In-
stitute for Neuroaesthetics, who says, “It is only by understanding
the neural laws that dictate human activity in all spheres—in law,
morality, religion and even economics and politics, no less than in
art—that we can ever hope to achieve a more proper understand-
ing of the nature of man.”9 (His project sounds suspiciously like
Hume’s quest for the Science of Man in the Treatise.)10 Needless to
say, this fantasy and its many variations are pervasive.
The present discussion calls on three books published within the
past year, selected in part because each typifies one of three differ-
ent approaches that have gained a critical mass in this burgeon-
ing field. Blakey Vermule’s book emerges on the shoulders of what
is now the dominant school of cognitive studies as they are pres-
ently taken up in literature departments. Recently, the New York
Times garishly announced that “the next big thing in English” is
neuro-literary criticism (or the punchier abbreviation, “neuro lit
crit”).11 Vermule’s title bears a strong affiliation with Lisa Zun-
shine’s touchstone book, Why We Read Fiction. Both scholars’
critical method of choice is indebted to evolutionary psychology,
and might be located in the same constellation as literary Darwin-
ists like Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and William Flesch, whose bi-
ologically grounded theory of fiction, presented in Comeuppance,
casts a long shadow on Vermule’s discussion of some of the same
topics, including the role of gossip in social relations and the curi-
ous fact that we seem to care about characters that we know don’t
really exist. What Vermule has that these others do not is a broader
optic—one that encompasses not only the deep psychic structures
of a species long evolved but also the evolutionary trends in the
208 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

comparatively short history of the literary market. Implicit in her

book is a roughly hewn analogy between capitalism and natural
selection. Vermule’s binocular vision—both sociohistorical and bi-
ological—is her great advantage and handicap. In certain chapters
the cognitive component seems superfluous to her argument, even
distracting, but when these elements do align, one sees the novel in
a fuller dimension.
Vermule locates the edifying power of literature in its fiction-
al characters, which, by her account, are “the greatest practical-
reasoning schemes ever invented” (WWC, xii).12 Narrative is an
“emotional prosthesis,” and its characters are for instrumental use.
“Our eternally premodern brains,” Vermule writes, “have simply
not caught up to the speed and complexity of the vast moving
world—so we use [fictional characters] in place of statistics as tools
to muddle through” (WWC, vii). Theory of mind is the centerpiece
of the neuro-literary critic’s understanding of science. Mind read-
ing, a term oft-circulated within cognitive quarters, refers to the
human capacity to infer and keep track of the intentional states of
others. Most humans are fluent with second-order intentionality
(i.e., “he believes that she believes such and such”), but nearly all
of us meet our cognitive threshold around the sixth order (an ex-
ample quoted in WWC: “I suspect that you wonder whether I real-
ize how hard it is for you to be sure that you understand whether
I mean to be saying that you can recognize that I believe you want
me to explain that most of us can keep track of only about five or
six orders of intentionality”). Vermule’s main contention is that lit-
erature refines this skill and helps readers cultivate “Machiavellian
intelligence”—her name for the cognitive advantages that may have
evolved in the context of an increasingly complex social order.
If Vermule’s argument will have any influence, it will not be in
philosophy or science proper, but more probably in the domain of
literary history. The underlying ambition of her book is to rewrite
Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel once again—only this time from a
space somewhere between Stephen Pinker and Catherine Gallagh-
er. In the middle chapters of the book, Vermule rehearses a fairly
standard account of various formal innovations in the novel, with
special attention to free indirect discourse. She adds to this anoth-
 Review Essays 209

er vector of progress, suggesting that authors adapt their artistic

styles to become more attuned to the deep psychological impera-
tives in their readers. Success in the market correlates with an au-
thor’s ability to exploit our evolutionary biases. Like Watt’s study,
her history culminates with Fielding and Richardson, who mark
the beginning of what she dubs the “high mind-reading tradition of
the English novel” (WWC, 129). In contrast to genres like adven-
ture or fantasy, such novels take social interaction as their primary
concern and feature a narrator with full access to strategic social
information that he or she distributes piecemeal at varying rates. It
remains unclear just how useful such a generic category might be.
In a peculiar way, Vermule’s version of novelistic history reflects,
belatedly and in microcosmic form, our evolutionary upbringing.
Irving Massey’s Neural Imagination situates itself in the domain
of neuroaesthetics, a term coined in 2002 to designate the “scientif-
ic study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a
work of art.”13 Put in terms perhaps more fluent for the humanist,
neuroaesthetics stakes claims for both the reception and the pro-
duction of art. In its best incarnation, this new discipline seeks to
demarcate the limits of what our nervous system is capable of see-
ing, hearing, and perceiving, and it understands how those limita-
tions influence our affective and cognitive responses to an aesthetic
encounter. Because neuroaesthetics concerns itself with the genesis
of an artwork, it also seems to introduce a fresh angle on the some-
times flat pursuits of biographical criticism. (Imagine if we could
know how opium really affected Coleridge’s creative process. Or if
we understood the neural mechanisms of lyric possession.)
The Neural Imagination focuses less on literature-as-instruction
and instead muses on the physiological bases of poetic pleasure.
With regard to genre, Massey and Vermule comprise each other’s
blind spots: Massey stays close to the lyric, whereas Vermule re-
mains committed to narrative. Massey’s hypotheses are imagina-
tive but, as he concedes, still remote from scientific validity. In his
third chapter he connects metaphor to a well-studied neurological
process called the “appeal of the rare.” Our sensory systems are
configured to respond to contrast and rarity. Novelty animates the
perceptual apparatus, even at the microscopic level of retinal cells,
210 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

which, without making recourse to the brain, lose focus when ex-
posed to consistent patterns and, conversely, react strongly when
confronted with the unexpected. Moving beyond the cellular level,
neurobiologists hold that organisms have a fundamental need to
pick out novelty and assess its salience (NI, 4). Metaphor, Massey
suggests, can create “contrast enhancement,” or a state of alert-
ness. He also makes the conjecture, which he offers with a caveat
about dissenting opinions within the scientific community, that the
experience of metaphor may be enhanced by a neural facilitator
like oxytocin, a hormone that has been associated with the sexu-
al functions of orgasm and lactation. Oxytocin is also thought to
facilitate learning by “loosening the synaptic connections in which
prior knowledge is held” (NI, 97). His intriguing theory is not
entirely without ground, but as yet it cannot stand on two feet.
Elsewhere he makes less-speculative claims regarding the resem-
blance of certain forms of poetic language to the speech patterns of
those who suffer from neurological disorders such as aphasia and
Tourette’s syndrome.
Perhaps the most redeeming aspect of Massey’s book, and what
may ultimately lead the reader to forgive some of the author’s more
fanciful claims, is his sustained reflection on the limitations of his
project. We find at the beginning of The Neural Imagination an at-
tempt to understand what kinds of questions cognitive science and
the humanities are fit to answer. What he concludes, in its most
distilled form, is this: “Neurology is . . . of great value in explor-
ing the ‘how’ of aesthetic processes, if not necessarily the ‘why’ or
the ‘what for’” (NI, 18). More specifically, he understands neuro-
science’s contribution to aesthetics as twofold: first, scientists can
localize the events of artistic production or reception (i.e., when an
author narrates a character using third-person voice she activates
her right inferior parietal cortex) (NI, 16); second, once neurologi-
cal patterns of behavior are established, we can demonstrate their
function in an artistic context (Monet’s painting manipulates the
relations between visual systems that deal with color and lumi-
nance). The great value of neuroaesthetics, as Massey sees it, is
the prospect of a more expansive vocabulary for talking about art.
Distinctions between focal and peripheral vision, for example, al-
 Review Essays 211

low us to speak more intelligibly about painting. Despite these ben-

efits, Massey insists that moral and aesthetic judgment will always
elude cognitive science: “even if we localize the neurology of altru-
ism or observe the behavior of some brain area during an ethical
dilemma, we still cannot turn over our ethical decisions to a brain
function; somebody still has to decide what is right” (NI, 19).14
As the only certified neuroscientist of the trio, Dehaene is the
odd one of the bunch. He is a professor of experimental cognitive
psychology at the Collège de France and is the director of the Cog-
nitive Neuroimaging Unit, which is located at a Neurospin Center
in Saclay, a commune not too far outside of Paris. In Reading in the
Brain, Dehaene explains that our genes did not and could not have
evolved in order to enable us to read.15 Literacy is not an adaptive
ability; instead, writing systems evolved within the constraints of
the brain. He also furnishes an account of four aspects of reading—
one synchronic, involving a description of the neural equipment
shared by all humans, regardless of culture. He couples this analysis
with structural comparisons of various languages in order to show
how diverse scripts all capitalize on, or are rather restricted by, our
neural apparatus. Throughout the book, Chinese and the Chinese-
reading brain are his limit case. An interesting logic recurs: Dehane
uses examples of cultural and linguistic diversity as evidence of the
universality of culture. The other three aspects of reading that De-
haene pursues are diachronic: first, he describes how children ac-
quire language and reading skills as they move through the pictoral,
phonological, and orthographic stages; second, he describes what
happens physiologically during an act of reading (which parts of
the brain activate, how our eyes move); and third, he offers a hy-
pothesis about how our ability to read might fit within the broader
context of our evolutionary history. Underneath all this is a reaction
against what he dubs the “‘standard social science model,’ [which]
holds that human nature is constructed, gradually and flexibly,
through cultural impregnation” (RB, 6). Later in the book, he says
with great resolution, “Biological inertia keeps the upper hand over
cultural innovation” (RB, 172).
Dehaene is in the business of brain cartography, or what Massey
refers to as localization. More than a third of Dehaene’s book is
212 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

devoted to mapping the sites of the brain required for grapheme-

to-phoneme conversion, which simply means translating written
words into corresponding speech sounds. (For the curious of heart,
reading activates the left occipito-temporal region.) He concedes
that while word recognition can be localized, semantics, or how
we make meaning of words, remains “utterly mysterious” (RB,
111). The method that underlies Dehaene’s experiments is prev-
alent within the larger body of cognitive research: scientists first
select some human behavior or condition—sleeping, addiction,
aphasia, depression—and then use imaging technology to isolate
these phenomena spatially. The tacit goal is to generate a univer-
sal representation of the human brain that eliminates differences
across individuals.
The assumptions about what imaging technology actually dis-
closes are often hidden under conventions of speech. In scientific
parlance, people will often say that various regions of the brain are
“activated” under certain conditions. This verb implies much. The
most sophisticated imaging technology, fMRI (functional mag-
netic resonance imaging), yields a multicolored brain image every
two to three seconds. The subject being examined must remain
still throughout the entire process. Resolution for localized neural
events is approximately two to five millimeters. This is not a neg-
ligible margin of error, for a patch that small can house millions
of neurons. The fMRI operates according to the following logic:
wherever there is neural activity there is an increase in blood flow;
at active sites, there is also a reduction of hemoglobin molecules
that do not transport oxygen; these molecules are paramagnetic,
and can modulate a magnetic signal; these modulations are thought
to correspond to mental and psychological states.16 In a memorable
analogy, Alva Noë likens brain images to a police sketch—useful,
but hardly a direct vision of the culprit.17
In the concluding chapter of the Neural Imagination, Massey
poses an even greater challenge to the enterprise of brain cartog-
raphy when he asks just how neurology can ever catch up with
thought. He argues for the priority of the imagination over sci-
ence: “if you posit a neurological equivalent for twoness, you must
still have invented twoness in order then to discover it, whether at
 Review Essays 213

the physical or at the neurological level. What, then, is the neuro-

logical status of the invention of twoness?” (NI, 179). Massey then
puts the same question to higher-stakes concepts like intentionality
and meaning.
It’s no trifle to say that we know more about the brain than ever
before, or more accurately, that we know the brain in a way that it
has never before been known. Enthusiasm might lead us, however,
to forget that there still exists a wild expanse between brain and
mind, and mind and being. What we are remains stubbornly irre-
ducible to what goes on amidst our cortical folds.
The remainder of this review attempts to diagnose the demands
that cognitive science exacts on the humanities, and suggests how,
in turn, the humanities might respond to such an occasion. Neuro-
science has become a prominent feature of the contemporary intel-
lectual landscape because it shores up old questions about deter-
minism. The contest between genetic necessity and neuroplasticity
has replaced the trite antagonism between nature and nurture.
While some scholars look to neuroplasticity as “a possible margin
of improvisation” within an otherwise fixed genetic code, others,
like Dehaene, consider it a false hope. For the French neuroscien-
tist, there is no real contest between nature and nurture, for “all
learning rests on rigid innate machinery” (RB, 142).18 Some believe
that neuroscience will have the final word because it will someday
establish by empirical means the upper and lower limit of human
agency. It will not.
Vermule’s book is unique in its attempt to bring different forms
of determinism into relation. In some sense, Vermule tries to dig a
basement underneath Marx’s economic base. The market becomes
the epiphenomenon of a biological substrate, and cultural activ-
ity rests atop these material conditions. There is much work to be
done in terms of understanding how different systems, each with
an allegedly total logic, can interact. Freedom and its limits have
been a long-standing concern for the humanities. The controversy
provoked by neuroplasticity and genetics is, in a way, a rehashing
of what it means to be a subject already subjected. On such mat-
ters, humanists ought to have much to say.
A second point: Interdisciplinary scholarship between the arts
214 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

and sciences doesn’t have to conduct itself as an import-export

business. We are mired in a metaphorics of distance. The figuration
of science and humanities as “two cultures” that are leagues apart
reduces the scholar’s task to a kind of bad travel writing, even ex-
oticism. We anticipate that a translation between this world and
the next will be bad. Instead, we might, without neglecting differ-
ences between disciplines, find where our two cultures are already
intertwined.19 In this way, literary critics will finally be able to do
more than harness the explanatory force of empirical science. Take,
for instance, the research paradigm of neuroaesthetics. Supposedly,
cognitive science threatens to displace the humanities with its po-
tential to “explain” things like the willing suspension of disbelief
or the dynamics of literary identification. As mentioned previously,
experiments in this field often target certain aesthetic concepts and
seek after their physiological bases. Neuroscience may indeed put
pressure on these theories, but insofar as scientists plumb the pag-
es of aesthetic philosophy for new ideas, the humanities still hold
considerable influence over the research agenda of empirical study.
Or consider the problem of brain imaging. For scientists, that the
fMRI offers only an indirect representation of the brain is either
something to fret over or to brush under the carpet. Lucky for us
humanists, the mediated is our specialty.
Finally, since the appellation given to the “cognitive turn” has so
far been taken for granted, we might now pause to ask from what
and to where we are turning. One doesn’t have to look hard to see
that here and elsewhere in literary studies, French theory has suc-
ceeded New Criticism as the resident straw man—inhuman, soul-
less, incendiary, a mere scare tactic.20 “Within the poststructural-
ist paradigm,” literary Darwinist Joseph Carroll begins, “the rich
world of experience has been emptied out, and in its place we have
been given a thin and hectic play of self-reflexive linguistic func-
tions. This is a dreary and impoverished vision of life and literature;
worse, it is a gratuitous and false vision.”21 In an attempt to make
literary studies rich again, he and scholars like Vermule return to
the concerns of the “naive” reader, one who remains preoccupied
with theme and treats characters as analogues of real people. Such
an admission supposedly allows us to “care about literary charac-
 Review Essays 215

ters . . . [and] to moralize about them, just as we moralize endlessly

about each other” (WWC, 176).
It’s not just happenstance that the cognitive turn has coincided
almost perfectly with the critical renewal in ethics. There is a deep
affinity between projects like Vermule’s and the neo-Aristotelian
return to ethics ushered in by Martha Nussbaum’s literary didacti-
cism and Wayne Booth’s throwback to a book-as-friend ideal of
reading.
These two separate yet synchronized movements indicate that
we are in the midst of an even larger return to humanism. This
migration is propelled by a particular myth, one that tells the story
of our escape from the dark ages of epistemological uncertainty fo-
mented by poststructuralism. If we are to make a return to certain
corners of humanism, so be it. But let’s take care that this return is
not a repetition.

Notes

1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,

trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 26. Edmund
Jephcott’s translation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)
substitutes “knowledge” for “science.” In both versions of the sen-
tence, the meaning remains apposite to the present discussion.
2. My examples are not given in the spirit of scientific rigor but are ad-
mittedly quite suggestive. As compensation for taking some liberties
in making these scientific findings digestible, I have provided citations
for less-digestible sources when applicable.
3. While the case presented here involves only visual stimuli, research
has shown that mirror neurons are multimodal, meaning that they
respond to multiple senses. Hearing, not just seeing, another mon-
key rip a piece of paper produces neural effects similar to those that
occur during the grasping exercise. A similar neural network is be-
ing mapped in humans. The evidence for the human mirror system
is more indirect, because scientists aren’t often permitted to implant
electrodes directly onto human brains. Information about single neu-
rons in humans is often restricted to a small body of research on
epileptic patients who had already consented to invasive surgery for
other reasons. Many scholars have made speculations about the mir-
ror system’s role in language acquisition, imitation, empathy, and
216 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

what scientists have called “embodied simulation.” One of the neu-

roscientists most involved in mirror systems research, Vittorio Gal-
lese, has reported that his own work has been influenced by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. It’s little surprise that many of those working with
mirror systems have an inclination toward phenomenology. For a
useful introduction to mirror neuron research, see Marco Iacoboni,
Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Oth-
ers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008); and Giacomo Riz-
zolatti, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emo-
tions, and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
For something more technical, see Maksim Stamenov and Vittorio
Gallese, Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002); and Christian Keysers and Lu-
ciano Fadiga, eds., The Mirror Neuron System (New York: Psychol-
ogy Press, 2009).
4. Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, and Joseph LeDoux, “Fear Memories
Require Protein Synthesis in the Amygdala for Reconsolidation After
Retrieval,” Nature, August 17, 2000, 722–26. Nader’s is one of the
foundational experiments in support of the reconsolidation theory
of memory. His experiment involved administering electroshocks to
lab rats. Nader found that if rats were injected with a protein syn-
thesis inhibitor just after the trauma, they would fail to generate any
corresponding fear memories. Nader then allowed fear conditioning
to proceed without the introduction of chemicals. He found that he
could effectively “erase” the fear memory in rats if he injected the
protein synthesis inhibitor during the brief window of time when the
memory was being retrieved. Recently (and perhaps alarmingly), Na-
der began using these findings to treat patients with post-traumatic
stress disorder.
5. Olaf Hauk, Ingrid Johnsrude, and Fridemann Pulvermüller, “Somato-
topic Representation of Action Words in Human Motor and Premo-
tor Cortex,” Neuron January 22, 2004, 301–7.
6. There are far too many neuroscience crossover books to list here.
With regard to neurobiological accounts of morality, Laurence Tan-
credi’s Hardwired Behavior (2005) and Richard Joyce’s The Evolu-
tion of Morality (2007) are among the most widely read.
7. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York:
Vintage, 1999), 4.
8. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A
Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Na-
 Review Essays 217

ture, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 2000), 11. Hereafter cited as WM.
9. Semir Zeki, “Statement on Neuroesthetics,” http://neuroesthetics
.org/statement-on-neuroesthetics.php.
10. Consider this passage from the introduction of Hume’s Treatise of
Human Nature: “’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation,
greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them
may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or an-
other. Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion,
are in some measure dependent on the science of Man. . . . Here then
is the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in our phil-
osophical researches, to leave the tedious lingring method, which we
have hitherto follow’d, and instead of taking now and then a castle
or village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or center
of these sciences, to human nature itself.” Neuroscience seems to be
resurrecting an old tactic of British empiricism. Like Hume, Zeki and
other cognitive scientists position themselves at the forefront of an
emerging super-discourse on human nature. Only now, the Science of
Man is replaced by the paradigm of neurobiology. Hume, Treatise of
Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.
11. Patricia Cohen, “The Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They
Know That You Know,” New York Times, March 31, 2010. Hereaf-
ter cited as “NBT.”
12. Michael Holquist makes a different though not unrelated claim about
literature’s value. He argues that good literature is edifying in a specif-
ic, cognitive way. He plans to test his hypothesis at the Haskins Labo-
ratory in New Haven, where he and a research team will monitor
twelve subjects in an MRI machine as they read passages of increas-
ing literary complexity. Holquist describes his project: “We begin by
assuming that there is a difference between the kind of reading that
people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a news-
paper, that there is a value cognitively when we read complex literary
texts” (quoted in “NBT”).
13. Suzanne Nalbantian, “Neuroaesthetics: Neuroscientific Theory and
Illustration from the Arts,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33, no.
4 (2008): 357. The two central book-length studies in the field of neu-
roaesthetics are V. S. Ramachandran’s The Artful Brain (New York:
Fourth Estate, 2005) and Semir Zeki’s Inner Vision: An Exploration
of Art and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
14. Paul Ricoeur made a similar point in the debate with Changeaux
218 qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.1

mentioned above. When the neuroscientist suggested that the most

vital question facing contemporary science involves how to reconcile
neuronal descriptions and their outward manifestations, Ricoeur re-
sponded, “It’s not only the anatomical and the behavioral that have
to be related to each other, for they both fall under the category of ob-
jective knowledge; but observed and scientifically described behavior,
on the one hand, and, on the other, personal experience” (WM, 18).
Ricoeur is not alone in thinking that science falters before subjective
experience. Alva Noë takes a similar stand when he persists in saying,
“you are not your brain.” See note 18.
15. Dehaene advances a hypothesis of “neuronal recycling” to circum-
vent what he calls the “the reading paradox.” This paradox hinges
on the fact that literacy is of recent date and as such cannot be con-
sidered an adaptive capacity. Given that reading abilities could not
have been targeted by evolution, it is noteworthy that humans have
specialized cortical mechanisms finely tuned for the recognition of
written words. Dehaene theorizes that reading was predicated on our
ability to “recycle” existing neural architecture. He insists that lit-
eracy and other cultural activities do not just arise out of the sheer
force of innovation but instead develop by capitalizing on the “fringe
plasticity” in select neural systems. The “neuronal recycling” hypoth-
esis is one of two deep investments he has in the book. The other
has to do with education. Dehaene wants neuroscience to change the
pedagogy of reading at an institutional level. To teach children to
read properly, the Chomskian-influenced whole-language movement
must be fully abandoned. Because the determining factor of literacy is
a person’s competence in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion—turning
marks into the appropriate sounds—phonics is what teachers must
bring to the classroom.
16. Dehaene mentions other technologies, such as EEG and MEG (elec-
tro- and magnetoencephalogram), that monitor the brain in real time.
These methods, like the fMRI, remain indirect. The EEG and the
MEG assume that neural activity generates low-level electrical and
magnetic responses that can be detected at a distance. When many
neurons receive electrical inputs simultaneously, they generate a weak
current that can then be measured. PET (positron emission tomogra-
phy) yields three-dimensional images of the brain without the two- to
three-second interval required of fMRI. PET has fallen out of favor
because the process involves injecting radioactive isotopes into the
body.
 Review Essays 219

17. Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Les-
sons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang,
2009), 20. For Noë, even more problematic than these technological
limitations is something he calls the foundation argument. He para-
phrases this fallacious but common form of reasoning as such: “The
fact that we dream, and that we can produce events in consciousness
by directly stimulating the brain, shows that the brain alone is suffi-
cient for consciousness” (172). Noë objects to this argument on three
counts. First, arousing certain experiences by manipulating the brain
doesn’t necessarily mean that all events of consciousness can likewise
be produced. Second, concerning the successful stimulation of hallu-
cinations by direct action on the brain, “the best we can say is that . . .
the brain plus the actions of the manipulating scientists are sufficient
for the occurrence of hallucinatory events in consciousness” (174).
Finally, when scientists induce perceptions by direct brain manipula-
tion, they alter existing states of consciousness; they do not generate
it afresh. One cannot then conclude that the brain alone is sufficient
for consciousness or that consciousness depends only on the activities
of the brain.
18. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Se-
bastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 8.
19. This now routine trope of “two cultures” was inaugurated and pop-
ularized by C. P. Snow in a lecture given at Cambridge in 1959. I
am hardly insinuating that a problem of translation does not exist
between cognitive science and literary studies, or more broadly, the
discourse of science and the arts. My grievance against the “two cul-
tures” paradigm is that figuring science and the humanities as “two
polar groups” has severe limitations as a point of departure for inter-
disciplinary endeavors—not to mention that it relegates the general
public to a marginal role. Snow, The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
20. Even the popular press is privy to this antagonism in literary studies.
An article in The Observer sums up the sentiment succinctly: “Forget
structuralism or even post-structuralist deconstruction. ‘Neuro lit crit’
is where it’s at.” Paul Harris and Alison Flood, “Literary Critics Scan
the Brain to Find Out Why We Love to Read” (April 11, 2010).
21. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and
Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 25.