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? Read more »
This is the first in a series of three articles on literature consider as affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. In the second article I’ll take a close look at a famous Shakespeare sonnet (129) in terms of a model of the reticular activity system first advanced by Warren McCulloch. I’ll take up the problem of coherence of oneself in the third article.
As an émigré from the dusty, sun-scorched Carthaginian provinces, there are innumerable sites and experiences in Milan that could have impressed themselves upon the young Augustine – the regal marble columned facade of the Colone di San Lorenzo or the handsome red-brick of the Basilica of San Simpliciano – yet in Confessions, the fourth-century theologian makes much of an unlikely moment in which he witnesses his mentor Ambrose reading silently, without moving his lips. Author of Confessions and City of God, father of the doctrines of predestination and original sin, and arguably the second most important figure in Latin Christianity after Christ himself, Augustine nonetheless was flummoxed by what was apparently an impressive act. “When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out for meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest,” remembered Augustine. “I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise.”
About a third of the way through a first-year humanities honors course, one of my more engaged and talkative students pulled me aside after class for a private chat. She waited, clearly anxious, while the rest of her classmates filed out and then turned to me with her eyes already filling up with tears.
Last night I (Danielle Spencer) went to the New York Film Festival screening of Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul) in Alice Tully hall at Lincoln Center. I last joined a large gathering 19 months ago, in March of 2020.
Irish-Canadian author 
A.S.: Liesl, I love the part in your story where a pack of kids is playing “Murder in the Dark” and the young narrator’s crush, who plays the part of the killer, draws near her in the dark yard: “I didn’t try to back away, I thought maybe he was going to kiss me, but then he killed me which was so predictable.”
Novels set in New York and Berlin of the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, just as subculture was at its apogee and the first major gentrification waves in various neighborhoods of the two cities were underway—particularly when they also try to tell the coming-of-age story of a young art student maturing into an artist—these novels run the risk of digressing into art scene cameos and excursions on drug excess. In her novel A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil, second edition 2018), Andrea Scrima purposely avoids effects of this kind. Instead, she concentrates on quietly capturing moments that illuminate her narrator’s ties to the locations she’s lived in and the lives she’s lived there.
