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Introduction and Overview: Who, What, Why Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

7. A Simple Story of a Complex Mind?

Author : Merja Polvinen

Published in: Narrating Complexity

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The human mind has been described both as an emergent feature of dynamical neuronal networks, and as dependent on narrative structures. This chapter explores these two descriptions, and asks whether the irreducibly narrative representational techniques used both in popular science and literary fiction can accurately convey the systemic, nonconscious functions of the brainmind. Analysis of the use of narrative agency in David Eagleman’s popular-science book Incognito and Peter Watts’s science-fiction novel Blindsight suggests that, through the process of enacting a narrative representation, it might be possible for readers to gain a sense of the systemic functioning of their own brains, even when that systemic functioning is not being replicated in the representation as such.

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previous chapter Discussion and Comment (Sense and Wonder)
next chapter Discussion and Comment (A Simple Story of a Complex Mind?)
Footnotes
1
The term derives from Jaak Panksepp’s “BrainMind” (2005, Appendix C), originally introduced as a way of avoiding a mind-body dualism in talking about human cognition and consiousness.
 
2
Eagleman adds to Marvin Minsky’s (1988) thinking the suggestion that rather than there just being a multitude of specialized “subagents” in the brain, those agents are in constant competition with each other for the “single output channel of your behavior” (Eagleman 2012, p. 107).
 
3
Eagleman also uses the second person pronoun as a central character in Incognito. In this he follows an established convention of popular psychology and self-help books, and the fluctuation between “the brain”, “your brain” and “you” forms a rhythm which moves in accordance with whether Eagleman is discussing neural functions or the level of human experience. There is one further protagonist—“we”—which appears when Eagleman’s discussion of human behaviour moves to failures of cognition (e.g., visual illusions on p. 18). Presumably the change occurs to avoid the implication that specific readers alone, and not humanity in general (or even Eagleman himself), fail in such a way: consider the rhetorical effect of “Why do you fail to perceive these obvious things? Are you really such a poor observer of your own experiences?” in comparison with the “we” used in the original on p. 21.
 
4
Dennett’s version of the narrative self has engaged the imaginations of many literary authors, such as the American novelist John Barth, who finds the idea to be in perfect concert with his own fascination with the figure of Scheherazade—a character who told herself into life and who is, for Barth, “the (fictionalistical, as-ifish) scenario-spinner that is the continuously auto-creating self of every one of us” (Barth 1995, p. 196; emphasis original; see also Polvinen 2008, pp. 141–186). For arguments against the idea of a narrative self, see Strawson (2004).
 
5
Emotions have become much more central for the cognitive sciences since the 1990s, and emotional episodes have also been seen in terms of dynamical patterns (Colombetti 2014, pp. 53–82).
 
6
For a detailed reading of the benefits of nonconscious cognition in Watts’s novel, see Hayles (2017, pp. 96–111).
 
7
Thus, when Di Paolo, Rhode and De Jaegher speak of a child imagining a spoon to be a car, they focus on the embodied action of the play, rather than on the possibility of a storytelling frame for the action: “When a child skillfully supplements the perceptual lack of similarity between a spoon and a car by making the spoon move and sound like a car, he or she has grasped in an embodied manner the extent to which perception can be action-mediated. With his or her body, the child can now alter sense-making activity, both on external objects, as well as his or her own actions and those of others” (2010, p. 78).
 
Literature
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Metadata
Title
A Simple Story of a Complex Mind?
Author
Merja Polvinen
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Narrating Complexity

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64712-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-64714-2

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64714-2_7

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