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.