P Aul b. A rmstronG How Historical is Reading? What Literary Studies Can Learn from Neuroscience (and Vice Versa) It is a commonplace of our contextualist age that reading is radically historical and that it is consequently a mistake to make inferences about how readers in the past processed texts on the basis of our lived experiences as readers today. 1 Eminent book historian Robert Darnton complains, for example, that many reader-response theorists “seem to assume that texts have always worked on the sensibilities of readers in the same way. But a seventeenthcentury London burgher inhabited a different mental universe from that of a twentieth-century American professor. Reading itself has changed over time.” 2 On this view, phenomenological descriptions of the reading experience are fundamentally flawed because they are ahistorical, universal, and essentialistic. Contemporary neuroscientific research suggests, however, that there are fundamental continuities in how the brain reads that extend across the several thousand year span during which our species has interpreted written texts. According to Stanislas Dehaene, the preeminent neuroscientist of reading, the key fact is that “we take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna.” 3 As he observes, “Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading units” (5). The brain is historical, by this account, because it is a product of evolution, but the emergence of reading in Mesopotamia roughly 6,000 years ago is too recent and too rapid to have been caused by genetic transformations of the brain through Darwinian natural selection. 4 Neuroscientifically considered, this is the crucial mystery that the history of reading must explain. The basic anatomical features and fundamental processes of the brain have not changed significantly between our origins 1 For a critical analysis of this consensus, see my essay “In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 87-113. 2 Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books? ” (1982) in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleary (New York: Routledge, 2006), 20. 3 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 4. 4 Historian Steven Roger Fischer plausibly argues that “Reading in its true form emerged when one started to interpret a sign for its sound value alone within a standardized system of limited signs,” and he claims that the “sign became sound - freed from its systemexternal referent [as in pictographic representation] - in Mesopotamia between 6,000 and 5,700 years ago” (Fischer, A History of Reading [London: Reaktion Books, 2003], 3). 202 P Aul b. A rmstronG in Africa, 17th century London, and the 21st century English Department. Instead, its long-enduring natural capacities must have adapted themselves to the unnatural act of reading written signs. Empirical findings in contemporary cognitive science suggest that phenomenological descriptions of the reading experience are correlated to these long-term neuronal processes. Such models of reading are consequently not irrelevant or mistaken as the historicist debunkings claim. Rather (and importantly), the correlations between neurobiological and phenomenological accounts of reading help to clarify the connections between how we process texts today and how our forebears construed them - connections that demonstrate how meaning-now is related to meaning-then, a crucial (but too often neglected) dimension of reading’s historicity. Neuroscientists have recently discovered the usefulness of phenomenological descriptions of the lived experience of time, embodiment, and intersubjectivity because these provide behavioral models that correlate in mutually illuminating ways with what contemporary imaging techniques reveal about neuronal processes in the brain. 5 These correlations do not explain the so-called “hard problem” of how consciousness emerges from chemical and electrical processes at the cellular level. 6 But they do provide insights that can benefit both science and the humanities about questions of fundamental interest to both - such as, for example, the historicity of the cognitive processes involved in reading written texts. 7 The brain is a contradictory organ with strictly defined, genetically inscribed features and a surprisingly expansive but not unlimited capacity to acquire new functions - a capacity for change that must always take those constraints into account but can do so in ways that show they are often not ultimately determining. Contemporary brain-imaging technologies have mapped the anatomy of the cortex with increasing accuracy and have identified a variety of areas that are hard-wired for particular functions that are lost or impaired if they are damaged. Different regions of the rear visual cortex, for example, respond to orientation, motion, and color; the hippocampus plays a key role in memory-formation; the amygdala is linked to emotions involved in “fear and flight” responses, and the structure of the pre-motor cortex correlates sub-section to sub-section with the various body-parts it 5 For example, see Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999); Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007). 6 The classic analysis of these issues is Thomas Nagel’s essay, “What is It Like to be a Bat? ” Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435-50. Also see Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview P, 2011), 303-6. 7 For a more extensive exploration of what neuroscience and the humanities can learn from each other about the aesthetic experience, see my book How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013). How Historical is Reading? 203 controls. 8 Although neuroscience has become skeptical of the claim of “universal grammar” that posits a “mental organ” for language, it has also long been known that particular regions of the brain (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) are linked to syntactical and semantic functions that go haywire if they are damaged. 9 Patients with lesions to Broca’s area can understand meaning but cannot form coherent sentences (a syntactical disturbance), whereas patients with damage to Wernicke’s area formulate fluent, grammatical, but meaningless sentences (a semantic deficiency). In these and other ways, there are often demonstrable connections between a cognitive function and a particular inherited structure of the brain, but how a particular cortical area reacts may change as it is used. For example, MIT neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher has identified an area of the visual cortex dedicated to face recognition - a hard-wired anatomical feature that, if damaged, can result in “prosopagnosia,” an inability to identify faces. 10 One patient with a lesion in this area did not recognize his father at his bedside but immediately identified his voice from the next room. Well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks, himself afflicted with this disability, reports that babies at six months recognize and respond to a broad spectrum of faces, including other species like monkeys, but that the response diminishes over time to kinds of faces to which the infant is not exposed (monkey-faces cease to elicit a response unless this is repeatedly reinforced). As is the case with the visual cortex in general, our face-recognition cells “need experience to develop fully,” Sacks notes, and will develop differently according to how they are used: “To a Chinese baby brought up in his own ethnic environment, Caucasian faces may all, relatively speaking, ‘look the same,’ and vice versa.” 11 Further evidence of how experience fixes and limits the visual cortex is provided by a case that has understandably become notorious in the neuroscience literature. Neuroscientist R. Q. Quiroga discovered a neuron in the anterior temporal region of an epilepsy patient that fired solely in response to images of 8 See Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007). 9 On Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, see Bear, Connors, and Paradiso, 620-25. On the debate about “universal grammar,” see Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and its Importance for Cognitive Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009), 429-48 and the extensive accompanying “Open Peer Commentary,” 448-92. See especially Michael Tomasello, “Universal Grammar is Dead,” 470-71, but also the rebuttal by Stephen Pinker and Ray Jackenoff, “The Reality of a Universal Language Faculty,” 465-66. Evans and Levinson argue that “language is a bio-cultural hybrid” and that “a property common to languages need not have its origins in a ‘language faculty’ or innate specialization for language” (446, 439). For a thorough analysis of the ever-mounting scientific evidence against the Chomskyan model, see Stephen E. Nadeau, The Neural Architecture of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2011). 10 See Nancy Kanwisher, Josh McDermott, and Marvin M. Chun, “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception,” The Journal of Neuroscience 17.11 (1997): 4302-4311. 11 Oliver Sacks, “Face-Blind: Why Are Some of Us Terrible at Recognizing Faces? ” in The New Yorker (30 August 2010), 41. 204 P Aul b. A rmstronG Hollywood film and television star Jennifer Aniston. 12 The “Jennifer Aniston neuron,” as it is known in the literature, shows that brain functions are both anatomically localizable and open to experiential variation. Neuroscience is not phrenology, however, and cognition is not simply a matter of one-to-one correspondence between a stimulus and the response of a particular neuron or cortical region. Fundamental cognitive processes like vision and hearing (both crucial to reading) entail top-down, bottom-up interactions between widely distributed regions of the brain that are reciprocally connected and that get organized in a particular manner for specific tasks and can be realigned (more or less easily, depending on their physiological structure and their history) as the need and opportunity arise. The brain knows the world by forming and dissolving assemblies of neurons, establishing patterns that become habitual through repeated firing. One of the foundational principles of neuroscience is Hebb’s law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” 13 Imaging studies have found, for example, that “musicians have anatomical differences in several brain areas that are involved in motor and auditory processing” - with pianists showing thicker than normal neural connections between the hemispheres of their brains because their instruments “require precise coordination of bimanual movements.” 14 A much-publicized study of London taxi-drivers revealed a correlation between years of driving experience and the size of the posterior hippocampus, an area of the brain associated not only with memory but also with navigation in birds and other animals as well as conditioned fear (all understandably related to the challenges of negotiating London’s streets). 15 Another experimental study has shown that speakers with a command of two languages have more neuronal connections in areas of the brain associated with language-use than individuals who know only one language. These changes can occur over a limited time and then reverse themselves if the activity ceases and the second language is no longer regularly used (a finding, alas, that will not surprise anyone who learned a language as a youth but can no longer speak it). 16 Similarly, volunteers who mastered a simple juggling routine over three months of practice showed differences in scans of their motor cortex before and after their training, but these disappeared when 12 R. Q. Quiroga et al., “Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain,” Nature 435: 7045 (2005), 1102-07. 13 Named for the neuroscientist Donald O. Hebb who proposed it in his landmark book The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (1949; Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002). 14 T. F. Münte, “The Musician’s Brain as a Model of Neuroplasticity,” Nature Reviews/ Neuroscience, vol. 3 (June 2002), 473-78. 15 E. A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 4398-4403. On the functions of the hippocampus, see Mikko P. Laakso et al., “Psychopathy and the Posterior Hippocampus,” Behavioural Brain Research 118: 2 (29 January 2001): 187-93. 16 D. W. Green et al., “Exploring Cross-Linguistic Vocabulary Effects on Brain Structures Using Voxel-Based Morphology,” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10 (2007): 189-99. How Historical is Reading? 205 scans were done again three months after they stopped juggling. 17 Many more examples could be cited. Certain brain regions are hard-wired, then, but this wiring can also change. How the brain learns to read is a complicated process that demonstrates the brain’s paradoxical combination of fixed, inherited characteristics and its capacity to change, adapt, and develop (its “plasticity”). Reading is a relatively late development in the history of our species that could only emerge by exploiting pre-existing neurological systems. What had to occur is what Dehaene memorably calls “neuronal recycling” - the re-purposing of “a cortical territory initially devoted to a different function.” 18 Every new human being must learn to read by adapting genetically inherited circuitry to uses for which it did not originally evolve, and some of the difficulties encountered by beginning readers as well as some of the differences in how easy this learning is for readers in different languages are traceable to mis-matches between the requirements of decoding written signs and the cortical systems that must be converted to this unnatural act. Clinical and experimental evidence suggests that this conversion occurs in a region of the brain devoted to the recognition of visual forms. The first indication of a “visual word form area” (VWFA) dedicated to reading came in the late nineteenth century when a patient who suffered a minor stroke lost the ability to read while retaining the capacity to speak and recognize objects other than written words. Modern brain imaging technology has located an area of the lower left hemisphere that is activated in response to written signs (but not to spoken words, which trigger a different area). The neuroscientist whose laboratory has done the most prominent work on the VWFA, Dehaene calls this area “the brain’s letterbox” (53) and reports that it can be found in the rear visual cortex, on the underside of the brain, sandwiched between the region devoted to recognizing objects and the neurons keyed to faces. This finding is somewhat controversial because the VWFA is not homogeneous and still bears traces of other activity (as one would expect because it is “re-purposed” from other functions), but evidence of its existence and its role in word-recognition is compelling. 19 17 See Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 238-39, where he also discusses the taxi-driver and bilingualism experiments. 18 See Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 144-47. My explanation of the neuroscience of reading is deeply indebted to this fascinating book. For a concise survey of the recent research and an analysis of its implications for the teaching of reading, see George G. Hruby and Usha Goswami, “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers,” Reading Research Quarterly 46.2 (April/ May/ June 2011), 156-72. Also see the chapter “How the Brain Learns to Read” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 26-53. 19 For the debate about the VWFA, see Cathy J. Price and Joseph T. Devlin,“The Myth of the Visual Word Form Area,” NeuroImage 19 (2003), 473-81; Laurent Cohen and Stanislas Dehaene, “Specialization Within the Ventral Stream: The Case for the Visual Word Form Area,” NeuroImage 22 (2004), 466-76, and Price and Devlin, “The Pro [singular, because they find only one] and Cons of Labelling a Left Occipitotemporal Region: ‘The Visual Word Form Area,’” NeuorImage 22 (2004), 477-79. 206 P Aul b. A rmstronG Brain-imaging experiments show that the VWFA is activated by all alphabetic systems, by Chinese as well as Roman characters, and by both the Kanji and Kana scripts used by Japanese. 20 These experiments reveal the niche in the architecture of the brain that has been redirected to a specific cultural activity that arose too quickly for biological evolution to produce with genetic changes, and this is powerful evidence for the mutual accommodation of nature and culture assumed by the hypothesis of “neuronal recycling.” The universality of the niche across cultures with different alphabets is evidence of the restrictions of pre-given cortical structures, even as the conversion of a particular region of visual recognition neurons to an unnatural, learned, culturally variable activity shows the plasticity and adaptability of the brain. The selection of this area of the brain for “recycling” is not accidental but seems to have been a consequence of its role in invariant visual object recognition. The ability to identify the same object, place, or person under different conditions - changes in lighting, distance, orientation, and so forth - is absolutely necessary for human survival. The ability to recognize a visual form invariantly under changing conditions is crucial not only for perceiving objects in the external world but also for identifying words rendered in different shapes: written in upperor lower-case, in different fonts, and even in cursive script (within limits, of course, that my own penmanship constantly tests). It is a defining feature of reading that we are able to recognize the same word “radio” even when it is written as “RADIO” or even “RaDiO,” and this ability is an example of the invariant visual perception of objects. 21 The capacity of neurons in the visual word form area to ignore variations in case and recognize the self-identical word written in different shapes is evidence that cortical functions which originally evolved for invariant visual object recognition have been adapted to the artificial, culturally specific purposes of reading conventional graphic signs. Somewhat speculative but highly suggestive evidence about recurrent preferred shapes across different alphabetic systems further demonstrates the deep neurological link between reading and invariant object recognition. Some of these constraints are attributable to the physiology of vision and the capacity of the retina to register shapes. Others, however, seem to suggest that writing systems developed by drawing on visual markers of object invariance to which the brain had become accustomed long before the 20 For example, see L. H. Tan et al., “Brain Activation in the Processing of Chinese Characters and Words: A Functional MRI Study,” Human Brain Mapping 10: 1 (2000), 16-27, and K. Nakamura et al., “Participation of the Left Posterior Inferior Temporal Cortex in Writing and Recall of Kanji Orthography: A Functional MRI Study,” Brain 123 (Pt 5), 954-67. Also see Dehaene’s summary of these experiments in Reading in the Brain, 97-100. 21 See T. A. Polk and M. J. Farah, “Functional MRI Evidence for an Abstract, Not Perceptual, Word-Form Area,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 131: 1 (2002), 65-72. Polk and Farah’s brain-imaging experiment showed practically indistinguishable amounts of neuronal activity in the VWFA when reading words written all upperor all lower-case and in a mix of letters, and oddly written words like HoTeL or ElEpHaNt triggered the same activity as normally written words. How Historical is Reading? 207 advent of reading. According to evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi, visual signs in writing systems “have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.” 22 Through a statistical analysis of images of naturally occurring shapes, Changizi found that objects often form Tor L-like patterns when they are viewed together - whether placed next to or in front of each other, partially blocking one’s vision of them. Sometimes, but more rarely, an X-shape occurs, as when one branch of a tree crosses another. Three lines forming a triangle seldom occur in a natural scene. According to Changizi, the frequency with which these shapes occur in nature is, surprisingly and strikingly, closely comparable to the distribution of similar shapes found in the world’s written symbolsystems. That is, across the seemingly very different systems of alphabetic signs in use around the world, Tand L-shapes are more common than X’s, and triangular forms rarely occur. This is not accidental, he postulates, but evidence that written signs were developed that the visual brain could easily recognize because they resembled natural forms to which it was accustomed. If Changizi is correct, the visual features shared across the world’s alphabets are based neurologically on patterns coded in the brain as a result of the long evolution of its capacities for invariant object recognition. These findings suggest that the arbitrariness of the alphabetic sign famously posited by Saussure is limited by the visual geometry of familiar natural shapes which the brain is pre-programmed to recognize. The variety of the world’s alphabets testifies to the cultural contingency of the sign (any particular written code is no more necessary than any other), but their geometric similarities are evidence of the brain’s pre-inscribed capacities for invariant visual object recognition. The sign is arbitrary and can vary because the brain is plastic and adaptable, but its variations are limited because this plasticity is constrained. Reading is historical, but it changes on different time-scales. The properties of the visual cortex involved in the construal of written signs are a product first of all of the long evolutionary history of the human brain’s development that produced its particular features and abilities different from (and similar to) other mammals whose origins we share. A shorter but still considerable period was then required for these cortical structures and processes to be re-purposed through the “neuronal recycling” that allowed reading to emerge - a reorientation of cortical functionalities that must be repeated again and again as this enduring cultural capacity is handed down through education from generation to generation (reading is an unnatural act, and not everyone learns how to do it, and some brains have more trouble with it than others do). On the smallest temporal scale are the individual variations that may occur in the wiring of readers with different personal histories (including their habitual hermeneutic practices as members of distinctive 22 Mark Changizi et al., “The Structures of Letters and Symbols Throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes,” American Naturalist 167.5 (May 2006), E117. For a further discussion of Changizi’s work, see Dehaene 176-79. 208 P Aul b. A rmstronG interpretive communities). If reading practices change historically during the relatively brief (from an evolutionary standpoint) period after literacy was introduced, these are instances of the short-term neuronal developments caused by repeated cortical activity that is responsible for the variations that can occur in the brains of taxi-drivers, pianists, or fans of Jennifer Aniston. 23 Walter Ong may be right that “more than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” but this fundamental change occurred several thousand years ago when visual capacities for invariant object-recognition came to be “recycled” for the purposes of reading. 24 This change re-purposed but did not biologically alter the meaning-making processes of the brain. Subsequent changes in the technology of textual reproduction, from print to the internet, and in the extension of literacy beyond the privileged few to a mass public readership may have had profound social, political, and cultural implications, but the basic cortical and neuronal processes underlying these developments have not changed. The three primary characteristics of the reading experience identified by phenomenological theorists are broadly consistent with neurological processes that have remained pretty much the same since the human species evolved: 1. Reading is a to-and-fro process of building consistent patterns and filling in textual indeterminacies; 2. Reading is an anticipatory and retrospective activity of projecting and modifying expectations; 3. Reading is an intersubjective doubling of my thought-processes with the intentionality embedded in the text. 25 These aspects of the reading experience are all likely to be common to 17th as well as 21st century readers because they are based on structures and functions of the brain that go back to the African savanna and that we share with species that preceded us. On the first point: One of the curiosities of contemporary neuroscience is that it has rediscovered the hermeneutic circle. 26 Visual experience is fundamentally hermeneutic, for example, because it entails both selection and 23 Criticizing the radical historicism of cultural studies of vision and visuality, Philip J. Ethington similarly argues for distinguishing on neuroscientific grounds between different historical time-scales in his interesting essay “Sociovisual Perspective: Vision and the Forms of the Human Past” in A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities- Neuroscience Divide, ed. Barbara Maria Stafford (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011), 123-52. 24 Walter Ong, “Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness” (1997) in The Book History Reader, 134. 25 See Wolfgang Iser,“The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), 274-94, and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978). For a concise summary of phenomenology’s theories of interpretation and aesthetic experience, see my article “Phenomenology” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 562-66. 26 See the chapter entitled “The Neuroscience of the Hermeneutic Circle” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 54-90. How Historical is Reading? 209 combination. Inputs from the external world are filtered and differentiated according to the variable sensitivities of the receptors on the retina (rods and cones) and of the pathways transporting them (largeand small-ganglion cells that lead to the optic nerve). These separate, distinctive signals are then structured into coherent patterns by the reciprocal interactions among visual systems within the cortex. There are as many neuronal connections returning from the rear visual cortex to the forward areas of visual processing as there are leading back from the retina. Because of the interactions produced by these reciprocal connections, the brain makes it possible for us to see by combining parts into meaningful wholes which in turn give meaning to the parts. Despite centuries of visual metaphors of knowledge that depict the mind as a “mirror,” the sensation that we have that we are watching a full-color picture that corresponds point-by-point with the external world is an illusion - a complex illusion that the brain constructs so efficiently that we rarely notice the hermeneutic machinery that produces it. As neuroscientist of vision Semir Zeki explains, “The brain is . . . only interested in the constant, nonchanging, permanent and characteristic properties of objects and surfaces, those characteristics which enable it to categorise objects” even if (or precisely because) “the information reaching it from the external world is never constant.” 27 The regularities we recognize in the irregular details reaching us through our various sensory systems enable the hermeneutic construction of patterns (or “categories”) that create meaningful relations between parts and wholes, and these gestalts are useful navigational tools. Neuroscientists of vision are particularly intrigued by the perceptual shifts that can occur with those ambiguous figures that first seem like a duck but that may change into a rabbit, or an urn that may transform into two faces, because they make visible the brain’s quest for pattern and its capacity to reconfigure part-whole relations. When the information at the brain’s disposal is incomplete, it will often fill in what is absent consistent with the pattern it perceives, as in the case of the well-known “Kanizsa triangle” which, as Zeki notes, “the brain tries to make sense of . . . by ‘finishing it off’ in the most plausible way, and interprets the pattern of luminances . . . as a triangle.” 28 When phenomenologists describe reading as an experience of building consistency and filling in indeterminacies, these constructive activities have deep foundations in the neuroscience of perception. Turning to the second point, consistency-building in reading as in life is a temporal process of projecting expectations about pattern that will then be modified, refined, and overturned as experience unfolds. 29 Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela has shown that Edmund Husserl’s complex, nuanced description of the “retentional” and “protentional” horizons of the ever-passing moment is correlated neurologically to how neurons fire (how 27 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 5. 28 Semir Zeki, “The Neurology of Ambiguity,” Consciousness and Cognition, 13 (2004): 181. 29 See the chapter entitled “The Temporality of Reading and the Decentered Brain” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 91-130. 210 P Aul b. A rmstronG they generate “action potentials”) and to how neuronal assemblies form and dissolve. 30 The metaphor “horizon” suggests the paradoxical boundedness of the present and its connectedness to the past and future. Like a “horizon,” the present offers a perspective that is limited in its view, but that points beyond its boundaries - to what we expect (across the “protentional horizon”) based on what has been (the “retentional horizon”). A melody, for example, is not an objective entity but a horizonal figure that we can perceive only because the present moment paradoxically includes the immediate past and future. Rhythm similarly only exists in and across time. Reading likewise is a temporal phenomenon characterized by the creation and dissolution of patterns as we make our way through a text - “a continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories,” as Wolfgang Iser explains (Act of Reading, 111). Neuronal assemblies come and go, in a cycle of excitation and relaxation that exhibits a particular periodicity. This rhythm is a natural property not only of single neurons but also of collections of brain-cells, and it is the neural correlate of our consciousness of time passing. This sense of time passing is the lived experience of history, but it is based in turn on electro-chemical processes that have long endured not only in humans but in all species with neurons that generate action-potentials. The emerging consensus in neuroscience is that the temporality of brain rhythms is probably the key to understanding how the brain builds consistency - what neuroscientists call the “binding problem,” how different regions of the brain coordinate their activities. As Varela explains, “for every cognitive act, there is a singular specific cell assembly that underlies its emergence and cognition” (274). In these assemblies, “brain regions are . . . interconnected in a reciprocal fashion” with populations of neurons exchanging charges back and forth and generating oscillating brain-waves that coordinate their interactions (273-74). When we listen to music at a concert or watch a music video, for example, regions of the brain interact from the far corners of the cortex - auditory neurons in the mid-brain, motor and sensory areas across the central sulcus as we tap our feet or recall playing an instrument, the visual cortex as we coordinate what we see and what we hear, and areas of the cerebellum and the amygdala as we respond emotionally. As Varela explains, the synchronization coordinating a population of neurons is “dynamically unstable and will constantly and successively give rise to new assemblies,” and “the fact that an assembly of coupled oscillators attains a transient synchrony and that it takes a certain time to do so is the explicit correlate of the origin of nowness” (283). After an assembly is synchronized through a wave-like pattern of oscillatory excitation, it relaxes and 30 See Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness” in Naturalizing Phenomenology, 266-314, and Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (1905-10; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964). How Historical is Reading? 211 must form again - or be replaced by another assembly. This pattern of phases corresponds neurologically to the horizonality of the passing moment as we read, listen to music, or zone in and out during a lecture. The third phenomenological dimension of reading - the doubling of my consciousness with the thoughts, emotions, and attitudes held ready by the text - enacts what Merleau-Ponty memorably calls “the paradox of the alter ego.” 31 Relations with others are paradoxical, he argues, because they are simultaneously both intersubjective and solipsistic. “The social is already there when we come to know and judge it,” he explains, because the intersubjectivity of experience is primordially given with our perception of a common world. And yet, Merleau-Ponty continues, “there is . . . a solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable” because I am destined never to experience the presence of another person to herself. 32 Reading is similarly paradoxical. It is, on the one hand, a solitary experience in which one does not directly encounter one’s interlocutor. And yet, on the other hand, this private experience allows us to feel and know from the inside the presence of others to themselves and to see the world through another’s perspective as we ordinarily cannot in real life. Neuroscience has proposed three ways of explaining the paradox of the alter ego, and the emerging consensus is that all three probably work in combination in the brain’s complicated, messy interactions with the social world. 33 The first approach, known as “theory of mind” (ToM) or “theory theory” (TT), focuses on our capacity to attribute mental states to others - to engage in “mind reading” through which we theorize about the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others that we recognize may differ from our own. The second approach, “simulation theory” (ST), argues that we do not need “theories” to understand the simple, everyday behavior of others but that we instead automatically run “simulation routines” that put ourselves in their shoes by using our own thoughts and feelings as a model for what they must be experiencing. Critics of ST claim it begs the question of how the simulator senses what is going on in the other person, but an answer may be provided by a third approach that was proposed by a team of neuroscientists in Parma led by Giacomo Rizzolatti who discovered “mirror neurons” (MN’s) in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. 34 These neurons fired not only when the animal performed a specific action but also when it observed the same action by another monkey or an experimenter - not only when the monkey grasped a piece of food, for example, but also when the experimenter did the same thing (the perhaps apocryphal story is that MN’s were first discovered when 31 See the chapter entitled “The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego” in How Literature Plays with the Brain, 131-74. 32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1945; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 362, 358. 33 A good summary of these debates can be found in Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 206-8. 34 See Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain - How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). 212 P Aul b. A rmstronG an experimenter eating an ice-cream cone sauntered through the lab and detectors wired to the monkeys’ motor cortices started going crazy). This finding has led to an explosion of experimentation to determine whether similar “mirroring” mechanisms at the neuronal level might underlie such key social behaviors as imitation, learning, and communication. One especially intriguing property of some mirror neurons is that they respond to the observation not only of actions but also of objects on which these actions have been and can be performed. “Canonical neurons,” as they are called, fire both when a monkey observes an experimenter grasping a cup, for example, and when it simply sees the cup. Parma neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese reports that “brain imaging experiments in humans have shown that observation of manipulable objects like tools, fruits, vegetables, clothes, and even sexual organs leads to activation” of cortical areas “involved in the control of action” relevant to those objects. 35 Because of the workings of canonical mirror neurons, we may feel indirect but nevertheless bodily resonances with others through a whole range of artifacts, from tools to works of art (including books) that are part of the human motor repertoire. For example, brain-imaging experiments have shown that the experience of viewing pictures of classical sculptures invoked “motor resonance congruent with the implied movements portrayed in the sculptures.” 36 Other experiments have shown that reading action words provokes activity in cortical areas related to the same kinds of physical movement. When we read the verbs “throwing” or “kicking,” for example, the cortical areas associated with those actions also fire. These responses are so specific to our bodily habits that leftand right-handed subjects register responses to action verbs in opposite hemispheres of their brains. 37 Language is symbolic action, and sentences are manipulable artifacts that bear traces of human agency and may trigger our canonical mirror neurons in response. Pioneering phenomenological aesthetician Roman Ingarden argues that the meaning-units in sentences are characterized by “derived intentionality” - “a borrowed intentionality, one that is conferred on them by acts of consciousness” that they are no longer in direct contact with (the writer is not present and may even be dead) but that nevertheless still inhabit them. 38 35 David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2007), 11(5): 200. Freedberg is a Columbia art historian with whom Gallese has collaborated to explore the aesthetic implications of canonical neurons. 36 Cinzia Di Dio and Vittorio Gallese, “Neuroaesthetics: A Review,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2009), 19: 683. They discuss Cinzia Di Dio et al., “The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures,” PloS ONE (2007), 11: e1201. 37 See Olaf Hauk and Friedman Pulvermüller, “Neurophysiological Distinction of Action Words in the Fronto-Central Cortex,” Human Brain Mapping (2004), 21: 191-201; Véronique Boulenger et al., “Cross-Talk Between Language Processes and Overt Motor Behavior in the First 200 msec of Processing,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2006), 18: 10, 1607- 15; and Roel W. Willems et al., “Body-Specific Representations of Action Verbs: Neural Evidence from Rightand Left-Handers,” Psychological Science 21.1 (2010): 67-74. 38 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (1931; Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1973), 125-26. How Historical is Reading? 213 This derived intentionality, originated by the meaning-creating activity of the writer, needs the activity of the reader to be once again animated and filled out. The act of reading responds to the inert marks on the page as traces of activity that can be re-vivified, and the neurobiological correlates of this miracle are the mirroring functions that the experiments linking language and motor action have identified. Experiments have shown that mirroring processes are evident not only in the motor cortex but across the brain, in regions associated (for example) with emotion, pain, and disgust. 39 The brain’s capacity to resonate in these ways to direct and indirect evidence of the behavior of others is primordial and long-enduring (the evolutionary roots of the disgust response are probably the need to identify and avoid rotten food). If reading allows us to reach across history to worlds long gone but preserved in the traces they have left behind, this trans-historical merger of horizons is made possible by the neurobiology of the brain. It is consequently a mistake to regard reading as so radically historical that the experience of a 17th century London burgher would have little or nothing in common with that of a 21st century English professor. Texts would indeed work on their sensibilities in much the same way because the same neurological processes would be set in motion then as now when the brain reads. Following Hebb’s law (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), different experiences with texts, people, and other cultural and natural objects would of course establish different proclivities for pattern-formation from one age to another, and these differences in turn make it possible for perceivers to find pleasure and meaning in radically opposite aesthetic phenomena - in experiences of harmony, balance, and symmetry, for example, as opposed to dissonances, disjunctions, and disruptions. But these differences too are a manifestation of longstanding, fundamental, even universal neurological processes. The brain is a peculiar, at times paradoxical, but eminently functional combination of constancy and flexibility, stability and openness to change, fixed constraints and plasticity, and these contradictory, paradoxical qualities are reflected in the workings of literature and aesthetic experience across history and cultures. The brain’s contradictions make us historical beings, but our histories work out neurobiological oppositions that are basic to the life of our species (and not unique to our species alone). Literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance that set in motion and help to negotiate oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning - basic tensions in the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis, and constancy versus the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. 40 The brain’s ability to play in a to-and-fro manner between competing imperatives and mutually exclusive possibilities is a consequence of its structure as a de-centered, parallel-processing network consisting of reciprocal top-down, bottom-up connections among its interacting parts. Experiences of harmony 39 For a comprehensive survey of this research, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 40 See How Literature Plays with the Brain, especially 12-24 and 43-53. 214 P Aul b. A rmstronG and dissonance of the sort typically associated with art facilitate the brain’s ability to form and dissolve assemblies of neurons, establishing the patterns that through repeated firing become our habitual ways of engaging the world, while also combating their tendency to rigidify and promoting the possibility of new cortical connections. The claim that art is associated with play, harmony, and dissonance is not of course surprising. There is a long tradition going back at least to Kant and continuing up to the present day that views “play” as integral to the aesthetic experience, and an opposition between viewing either harmony or dissonance as the distinguishing feature of art is pervasive in the history of aesthetics. This is not accidental, I would argue, given the centrality of play, harmony, and dissonance to the functioning of the brain. What would be disconcerting would be if the way the brain worked did not match up with the reports that readers, critics, and theorists have offered over the years about what happens when they experience literature and art. The fact that these accounts keep returning to “play” as a central feature of the aesthetic experience - but that they diverge drastically in the sorts of to-and-fro interactions they find promoted by art (culminating in unity, synthesis, and balance or provoking defamiliarization through disruption and transgression) - this is a fact about human experience to which the history of aesthetics testifies, and it is a fact that neuroscientific accounts of the brain help to explain. We have the kind of brain that thrives by playing with harmony and dissonance, and the experiences that have so widely and typically been reported about encounters with art and literature are correlated in interesting ways with basic neuronal and cortical processes. Neuroscience can provide useful instruction to literary studies about the neurobiological processes underlying these aesthetic phenomena. The empirical findings from the laboratory will not replace the intuition and imagination necessary for literary interpretation, and the so-called “hard problem” of how experience (aesthetic and otherwise) emerges from neuronal activity resists reduction and the dream of “consilience.” 41 But sometimes scientific research can falsify or at least modulate the claims of literary and aesthetic theory. For example, the linguistic sign is indeed arbitrary, contingent for its meaning on variable alphabetic and phonetic conventions, but these differences are constrained by certain apparently universal constraints that have to do with constant properties of the visual and auditory systems. 42 This 41 The classic statements advocating neural reductionism and “consilience” are Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) and Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1998). For a critique of their claims, see the “Epilogue” of How Literature Plays with the Brain, especially 176-80. On the intractability of the “hard problem,” see Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 42 In addition to Changizi’s research on the visual properties of signs (cited above), experiments on the auditory system have shown that speakers from very different languages typically associate a curved, rounded blob with the sound “bouba” and a sharply angled shape with “kiki” (see V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A How Historical is Reading? 215 central dogma of contemporary theory is confirmed, with modifications, by the findings of science. Relativistic claims about the unbridgeable historical divide between the “mental universes” of different eras or cultures are not consistent with the neurobiology of reading, however, and should not be taken seriously. Interesting and difficult questions remain about what is constant and what can vary as the brain’s plasticity adapts to changing experiences, but these are modifications of longstanding, evolutionarily stable processes of reception that are illuminated by theories of reader response often erroneously dismissed as “universal” and “essentialistic.” Science cannot answer all the questions humanists ask, but it can show that some answers are wrong and some theories more probable than others. What can neuroscience learn from literary studies? Interest in “neuroaesthetics” has exploded in recent years, but neuroscientists working in this field have all too rarely called on the expertise of humanists as is otherwise customary in science when investigators’ interests cross into unfamiliar domains and specialists in those areas are enlisted as collaborators. 43 Elementary, avoidable errors often result. One common mistake is the assumption that aesthetic experience can be localized in the brain, on the model of, say, face-recognition or motor-control - a hypothesis popularized by the pioneer of neuroaesthetics Semir Zeki, who purports to explain artistic beauty as a response of the “reward system” in the frontal cortex (a muchwatched video shows him pointing to a patch of color on an fMRI image and pronouncing that it is the location of beauty in the brain). 44 Aesthetic experiences set in motion far-reaching to-and-fro interactions across the cortex and between the brain and the body that are not localizable in any single region of neural anatomy. This suggests a second fallacy - the mistake of assuming that distinctive features can be found to demarcate art from non-art or literary from non-literary works. 45 Such demarcations are dubious on aesthetic grounds, but they are also scientifically questionable given the characteristics of the brain as a reciprocally interacting collection of functionally specific but malleable regions that respond similarly to art and to life. It is impossible to differentiate cleanly and definitively aesthetic from non-aesthetic experiences or to separate out processes of the brain that are unique to art. Aesthetic Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human [New York: Norton, 2011], 108-9). 43 In addition to the collaboration between Freedberg and Gallese, an important exception is G. Gabrielle Starr, who works with neuroscientist Edward A. Vessel on the “default mode network.” See her book, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2013) and their article, “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 66 (2012): 6. 44 Semir Zeki, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 17, and H. Kawabata and S. Zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1699-1705. Zeki’s TEDx talk “The Neurobiology of Beauty” (1 July 2012) has been viewed more than 11,000 times on YouTube (www.youtube.com/ watch? v=NlzanAw0RP4; accessed 13 January 2015). 45 See the chapter “The Variability and Limits of Value” in my book Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990), 109-33. 216 P Aul b. A rmstronG experiences may feel “special,” but the neuronal interactions that give rise to them typically involve many if not all of the ordinary neurobiological processes regularly activated in everyday life (we read Shakespeare, after all, with the same cortical functions and anatomy that supported hunting and gathering on the African savannah). Play, harmony, and dissonance are not exclusively aesthetic phenomena, for example, and they set in motion a wide range of cortical, neuronal processes that are not unique to art. For these and many other reasons, neuroscience can never hope to provide a full and adequate account of art. But aesthetic experiences can provide key insights into the workings of the brain because they exemplify the play of its complex, reciprocal, to-and-fro processes of pattern formation. Science cannot explain art, but art and the humanities are potentially invaluable resources for neuroscience - if, that is, the members of the so-called “two cultures” can learn to talk to each other. Works Cited Armstrong, Paul B. Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. ---. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. ---. “In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age”. New Literary History 42 (2011): 87-113. Bear, Mark F., Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso. Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007. Boulenger, Véronique et al. “Cross-Talk Between Language Processes and Overt Motor Behavior in the First 200 msec of Processing.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2006) 18(10): 1607-15. Changizi, Mark et al. “The Structures of Letters and Symbols Throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes”. American Naturalist 167: 5 (May 2006): E117-E139. Cohen, Laurent and Stanislas Dehaene. “Specialization Within the Ventral Stream: The Case for the Visual Word Form Area,” NeuroImage 22 (2004): 466-76. Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention New York: Viking, 2009. Di Dio, Cinzia et al. “The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures”. PloS ONE (2007), 11: e1201. Di Dio, Cinzia and Vittorio Gallese. “Neuroaesthetics: A Review”. Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2009), 19: 683. Ethington, Philip J. “Sociovisual Perspective: Vision and the Forms of the Human Past”. A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide. Ed. Barbara Maria Stafford. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011, 123-52. Evans, Nicholas and Stephen C. Levinson. “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and its Importance for Cognitive Science”. 429-48. ---.“Open Peer Commentary”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 448-92. How Historical is Reading? 217 Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleary, eds. The Book History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Fischer, Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. Freedberg, David and Vittorio Gallese.“Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(5) (2007): 197-203. Gallagher, Shaun and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge, 2008. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. Green, D. W. et al. “Exploring Cross-Linguistic Vocabulary Effects on Brain Structures Using Voxel-Based Morphology”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10 (2007): 189-99. Goldberg, Elkhonon. The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Groden, Michael and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Hauk, Olaf and Friedman Pulvermüller. “Neurophysiological Distinction of Action Words in the Fronto-Central Cortex”. Human Brain Mapping (2004), 21: 191-201. Hebb, Donald O. The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. 1949. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Hruby, George G. and Usha Goswami. “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers”. Reading Research Quarterly 46.2 (April/ May/ June 2011): 156-72. Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Translated by J. S. Churchill. 1905-10. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G. Grabowicz, 1931. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. ---. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Kanwisher, Nancy, Josh McDermott, and Marvin M. Chun. “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception”. The Journal of Neuroscience 17.11 (1997): 4302-4311. Kawabata, Hideaki and Semir Zeki. “Neural Correlates of Beauty”. Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004): 1699-1705. Kim, Jaegwon. Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 2011. Laakso, Mikko P. et al. “Psychopathy and the Posterior Hippocampus”. Behavioural Brain Research 118: 2 (29 January 2001): 187-93. Maguire, E. A. et al. “Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 4398-4403. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. 1945. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Münte, Thomas F. “The Musician’s Brain as a Model of Neuroplasticity”. Nature Reviews/ Neuroscience, vol. 3 (June 2002): 473-78. Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ---. “What is It Like to be a Bat? ” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435-50. Nadeau, Stephen E. The Neural Architecture of Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 218 P Aul b. A rmstronG Nakamura, K. et al. “Participation of the Left Posterior Inferior Temporal Cortex in Writing and Recall of Kanji Orthography: A Functional MRI Study”. Brain 123 (Pt 5): 954-67. Quiroga, R. Quian et al. “Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain”. Nature 435: 7045 (2005): 1102-07. Petitot, Jean et al. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Polk, Thad A. and M. J. Farah, “Functional MRI Evidence for an Abstract, Not Perceptual, Word-Form Area”. Journal of Experimental Psychology 131: 1 (2002), 65-72. Price, Cathy J. and Joseph T. Devlin,“The Myth of the Visual Word Form Area”. NeuroImage 19 (2003): 473-81 ---. “The Pro and Cons of Labelling a Left Occipitotemporal Region: ‘The Visual Word Form Area,’” NeuorImage 22 (2004), 477-79. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: Norton, 2011. Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Corrado Sinigaglia. Mirrors in the Brain - How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Translated by Frances Anderson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Sacks, Oliver. “Face-Blind: Why Are Some of Us Terrible at Recognizing Faces? ” The New Yorker (30 August 2010): 36-43. Starr, Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Starr, Gabrielle and Edward A. Vessel. “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network”. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6: 66 (2012). Tan, Li Hai et al. “Brain Activation in the Processing of Chinese Characters and Words: A Functional MRI Study”. Human Brain Mapping 10: 1 (2000), 16-27. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Willems, Roel W. et al. “Body-Specific Representations of Action Verbs: Neural Evidence from Rightand Left-Handers”. Psychological Science 21.1 (2010): 67-74. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1998. Zeki, Semir. Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. ---. “The Neurology of Ambiguity”. Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004): 173-196. ---. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.