Literary Distributed Cognition & Memory

Present and past are interwoven and are reciprocally constitutive. Our lives’ entwined cognitive, emotional, physical and sociocultural experiences lay down pathways of prediction and potentiality. Those interwoven strands of present and past anticipate the future, as our perpetually expanding, diminishing and ever shifting horizons, shape our phenomenological experiences. Merleau-Ponty described it in terms of ‘each gesture or each perception’ being ‘situated in relation to a thousand virtual coordinates’, whether we are moving through a familiar space, where immediately one is aware that ‘looking out the window involves having the fireplace to my left’, or  chatting with a close friend where ‘each of his words, and each of mine contain, beyond what they signify for someone else, a multitude of references’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 131). These mental panoramas encompass the spatial, the social and the inner mental life. Our mental movement through these panoramas shifts seamlessly between the actual and the counterfactual; the past, present and future; the real and the fictional; the present and the possible. The capacity to anticipate the future and the goings-on of another’s mind stretches beyond the potentially actual into a capacity to imagine fictional places, times and people. Our flexibility, such that we are able to use things in the world to think with, extends to the domain of language and literature (Anderson 2015).

Language, and particularly the consciously crafted language of literature, triggers a rich array of responses that are grounded in our sedimented emotional, physical and cultural histories. This involves both sharing among individuals as well as divergences in our particular responses. Theatre and film also make use of the expressive affordances of the sensory material world in real or virtual form respectively, from physical gestures to natural and sociocultural objects and environments. These advantages over the simply verbal accounts of printed stories are countered by the significant development in literary texts of the means to communicate the workings of other minds, rather than just depict it from an external perspective, such as via subjective reports or physiological expressions. At the same time, all three share techniques and devices that compensate for their artificiality and make use of these to reawaken or heighten experience. D.H. Lawrence’s description (below) brings into our own minds either consciously or non-consciously instances when we’ve strained to make something out in the dim distance:

As one reads the eyes and mind also attentively strain along the words towards the figure as if one has a kind of second sight, by means of the author’s imagination figured forth in words. Literary works are cognitive mediators, which by immersing us in them (to a greater or lesser extent), make us aware of our immersion in life, while also (to a greater or lesser extent) revealing the aesthetic structures whereby we are immersed in fiction, so inviting reflection on the more mundane structures that shape our daily lives. These works are able to operate in this powerful way partly because of the way in which they become part of our cognitive system, as they build upon the structures of our personal memories. We flesh out fictions via inferences grounded in memories, and in the process recalibrate our memories.

Recent research on episodic memory, which involves the creation and storing of personal memories, suggests that mental scene construction, whether past, future or fictionally oriented, is a reconstructive process (Hassabis and Maguire 2007). Those with damage to the hippocampus, a brain area associated with the episodic memory, when asked to think about their route to work or their upcoming holiday, or to imagine that they live in an underwater world, will in all three instances not be able to verbally sketch out any kind of detailed picture or storyline. Impaired capacity to recollect goes hand in hand with the impairment of the imagination, which is necessary for engagement with literature. Lost is the wonderful capacity of imagining through words a perceptual experience and then the later recollection of such an imaginary perceptual experience, either within or beyond the thought-world of the literary work. These literary experiences ‘flash upon that inward eye’ at times more vividly than the mundanities of daily life (Wordsworth): they fuse into and supplement our thousand virtual coordinates, in relation to which we orient ourselves in a literary work and in the world. Such is the extended cognitive reach that literature can give to most of us and that the episodic memory facilitates.

Miranda Anderson, University of Edinburgh (2016)

A version of this blog was written for the Royal Soceity of Edinburgh funded project on Cognitive Experience of Verbal and Screen-based Narrative (see 'Links') .

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Miranda. 2015. The Renaissance Extended Mind. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hassabis, Demis and Eleanor A. Maguire. 2007. ‘Deconstructing episodic memory with construction.’ Trends in Cognitive Science 11.7: 299-306.

Lawrence, D.H. 1994. ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.’ Collected Stories. New York: Everyman’s Library.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge.

Wordsworth, William. ‘Daffodils.’ Poems of Wordsworth. Edinburgh, Nelson Classics.