Here’s the previous article: Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories
In his 1997 best-seller, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker suggested that, however important art may be to humans, it is not part of our specifically biological nature:
We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third. (p. 525)
This triggered a backlash of arguments asserting that, no, the arts are not mere mental cheesecake (nor chocolate cake either), they are an essential component of human nature, our biological nature.
State-dependent memory
I would like to offer a speculative proposal about why the arts, the literary arts in particular, are central to human life. This proposal is based on a line of thinking I began entertaining in the mid-1970s when I learned about something called state-dependent memory. I first learned about state dependence when I read about some experiments originally reported by D. W. Goodwin in Science in 1969. Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober, they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval in this 1996 book Searching for Memory: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence.
Given that motivation and emotion are mediated by over a hundred neurotransmitters and neuromodulators the state dependent nature of memory has profound implications for our ability to recall our personal experience. As I argued in The Evolution of Narrative and the Self:
If records of personal experience are [biochemically biased], especially in the case of strongly emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn’t part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person’s [biochemical state], it is still the same apple.
If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? Generalizing, if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole? Such a life would seem to be one of almost constant dissociation. How does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience and thereby construct a coherent view of oneself in the world?
What about stories?
Let us consider the first stories that we hear. We hear them when we are young, very young. They are generally quite simple, and they are told to us by our parents in a setting that is comfortable and safe. We hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. We are allowed to experience a wide range of emotions, just a little, in a context where we are safe.
That, I suggest, is the behavioral core at the center of our capacity to construct a coherent account of ourselves. Listening to stories, and, in time, telling our stories, creates a psychobiological ‘space’ in which one can access stories of all kinds of events, actions, and feelings. It is but a step from recounting the actions of fictitious creatures to using those accounts as templates on which to model accounts of one’s own life.
Patrick Colm Hogan has provided a bit of evidence on this. In The Mind and Its Stories (2003, p. 67) he talks about a two-year-old boy’s use of the Peter Rabbit story:
Kurt . . . hears the Peter Rabbit story and becomes fascinated with it. He listens to the story repeatedly. He then retells the story, such that “real-life events that Kurt had experienced … in the company of his mother and grandmother … are attributed to Peter Rabbit and his mother.” The fact that Kurt integrates his own memories into his retellings of the story – his explicit “personalization” of these stories . . . suggests that memories played a part in his enthusiastic response to the story initially.
Yes. But also, I suggest, the story gives him a way of accessing and organizing his own memories. The life is being constructed on models provided by art.
And not only children, but teens and adults as well. As we grow older the wider community takes the role that the parents serve for the very young. They provide a sense of security and acceptance. In oral cultures, stories are experienced among friends and familiars. One hears the grunts and murmurs of approval of our fellows, the common laughter, but also the communal sighs of dismay; these mingle together and establish the story itself as a good and necessary pleasure. In literate cultures we may read stories in private, but we discuss them among our friends, or in school. Theatrical performance, movies and television are frequently experienced in the company of others. In one way or another, literary experience is institutionalized as shared communal experience.
My suggestion is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.
Thus we do not have to be sexually aroused to recall occasions of sexual arousal, nor do we have to be angry or grieving to recall occasions of great anger or the darkest grief. The stories we have learned in the company of others have created a “level playing field” in the mind, neutral ground from which we can survey the full range of human experience. And not only stories, but poems, pictures, sculpture, and music, all the expressive arts serve create this cultural “safe space” that allows us to step back from the living of life to recall and examine our feelings and actions, that is because our experiences with stories have created a rich weave of mental prototypes through which we can recall and interrogate even the most densely emotional of our experiences.
It seems to me that William Wordsworth anticipated this general idea in a well-known passage in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads:
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
As a particularly vivid example, let’s consider one of the best-known and most discussed sonnets in the English language, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit.” Here’s the sonnet, with modernized spelling:
1 The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
2 Is lust in action, and till action, lust
3 Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
4 Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
5 Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
6 Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
7 Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
8 On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
9 Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
10 Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
11 A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
12 Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.
13 All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
14 To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Let’s set the final couplet aside for a moment and consider only the first twelve lines. These direct our attention back and forth over the following sequence of actions and mental states:
Desire: Protagonist becomes consumed with sexual desire and purses the object of that desire using whatever means are necessary: “perjur’d, murderous, bloody . . . not to trust” (ll. 3-4).
Consummation: Protagonist gets his way, having “a bliss in proof” (l. 11)
Shame: Desire satisfied, the protagonist is consumed with guilt: “despisèd straight” (l. 5), “no sooner had/ Past reason hated” (ll. 6-7).
Just to solidify the point, let’s look at some lines. Line 4 looks at Desire (“not to trust”), then line 5 evokes Consummation followed by Shame. Line 6 begins in Desire then moves to Consummation, followed by Shame at the beginning of line 7, whose second half begins a simile derived from hunting. Now line 10, which begins by pointing to Shame, then to Consummation, then to Desire, and concludes be characterizing the whole sordid business as “extreme.”
The poem’s final couplet asserts, in effect, that reason is powerless in this situation. Knowing that rancid meat can make you ill will prevent most people from eating rancid meat, but the knowledge that sexual desire will lead you to guilt and disgust is not powerful enough to prevent you from walking to the trap.
The question I want to ask is: Why, why is reason powerless? How could it be that foreknowledge is powerless? One might offer the observation that, when one is in the pursuit of sex, one simply doesn’t think about the guilt-driven aftermath. Accepting that as true, it explains nothing. Why does sexual pursuit make it difficult or even impossible to imagine consequent guilt and recrimination? That’s the question.
The answer, as I have already suggested, is state-dependent memory. Brain is an electrochemical machine, with its activities being mediated by over 100 neurotransmitters. Memories, concepts and ideas were ‘stored’ in chemically specific circuitry such that they are most accessible to consciousness when the neurochemical environment matches the conditions under which they were created? Let us speculate that the moral strictures governing honest and honorable behavior are encoded in neural structures most strongly active in a certain mood, having a characteristic neurochemical profile. However, as sexual desire grows, the neurochemical state of the brain changes and mood shifts; moral strictures are no longer readily brought to consciousness; anything goes. Once desire is satisfied the brain then returns to a mood in which the neurochemical profile allows morale precepts to come to the fore. When morality sees what has just been done, morality is outraged. We can further speculate, as outrage grows, another neurochemical change occurs, inducing yet another mood, and the brain’s neurochemical profile is no longer conducive to reason and morality. In giving way to outrage, morality has undermined itself. In such a mind-and-brain, reason hasn’t a chance.
In this context the apparently gloomy admission of the concluding couplet, which holds the preceding twelve lines in view and asserts that you can’t escape, has, I believe, a paradoxical restorative effect. The final couplet restores a sense of sociality. The horror and shame of the first twelve lines resides, not only in the violence, but in the destruction of social mutuality; the lusty animal is “not to trust” (l. 4) and “Mad in pursuit and possession so” (l. 9). The final couplet begins with the admission that “All this the world well knows” (l. 13) and, in so affirming, restores the lusty and despised animal to society.
We are all like this; we know it; we can’t escape. Thus the shame, guilt, and anxiety which is evoked in the first twelve lines is assuaged and order is restored through the simple and basic, if only momentary, realization that we are all in this together. Every one of us. Maddening though it is, being subject to lust cycle doesn’t absent one from the human community; for we are all subject to it.
Lust, of course, is not the only activity that’s conducive of obsession and compulsion. Such activities are legion. This suggests that the repertoire of stories, poems and other expressive culture is critical to social functioning. If a society would deny its members stories about, say, violence or sexuality, then how can those individuals integrate their own sexual and violent feelings and actions into their selves? How can they think about those things in a coherent way?
Thus Pinker was wrong. Art is not mental cheesecake. On the contrary, it is necessary for mental coherence.