The neuroscience delusion TLS

The capacious frame of reference in which the work is located – evident to the critic but not to the author – places the former in a position of knowing superiority vis-à-vis the latter. The work becomes a mere example of some historical, cultural, political, or other trend of which the author will have been dimly aware, if at all. The differences between one author and another are also minimized. Like hypochondriacs, theory-led critics find what they seek

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The switch from Theory to “biologism” leaves something essential unchanged: the habit of the uncritical application of very general ideas to works of literature, whose distinctive features, deliberate intentions and calculated virtues are consequently lost.

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While aficionados of Theory regarded individual works and their authors as, say, manifestations of the properties of texts, of their interaction with other texts and with the structures of power, neuroscience groupies reduce the reading and writing of literature to brain events that are common to every action in ordinary human life, and, in some cases, in ordinary non-human animal life. For this reason – and also because it is wrong about literature, overstates the understanding that comes from neuroscience and represents a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity – neuroaesthetics must be challenged.

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For Byatt, reading Donne’s poetry leads to the formation of “mental objects”, and the excitement induced by the poetry is due to the specific nature of the mental objects created in the reader. Byatt summarizes Changeux’s account of the construction of mental objects from the activation of a large number of neurones in different layers of the brain. His account is hierarchical. He distinguishes between: “the primary percept – a mental object constructed by direct contact with the outside world”; “the image” (an object of memory); “the concept” (memory with diminished sensory content, an “algebra” derived from the isomorphs of perceptual acts); and “linked or associated concepts”. These correspond to increasingly complex contents of consciousness physically realized in ever more complex linkages in the brain. While Byatt admits that “we are not yet within reach of a neuroscientific approach to poetic intricacy”, she reports that she was “convinced on reading Changeux that the neurones Donne excites are largely those of reinforced linkages of memory, concepts, and learned formal structures like geometry, algebra and language”.

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by adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by John Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and other Metaphysical poets; between reading the Metaphysicals and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and a vast number of other activities – such as getting cross over missing toilet paper. That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose. But that is the price of overstanding.

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no adequate theory of qualia

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that apparent localization of human feelings in bits of the brain is a kind of artefact.

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people read quite differently; or that there is a difference between reading a poem for a first, a second, or a hundredth time; or between reading it as a naive, delighted, or bored reader, and reading it as an erudite critic.

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little premature

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Although direct stimulation of the brain in the waking adult may generate quite complex hallucinations – even awaken elaborate memories – this occurs only because neural activity is associated with such experience under normal conditions. The experiences arrived at by the anomalous route are parasitic on those that are had in the ordinary way.

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Under normal circumstances, experiences are had by a person, not by a stand-alone brain.

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overlook

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Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

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