Part I: Attributing Minds
- We engage in mind-reading when:
- We ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action.
- We interpret our own feelings based on our proprioceptive awareness.
- We intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description
- We compose an essay, a lecture, a movie, a song, a novel, or an instruction for an electrical appliance and try ot imagine how this or that segment of our target audience will respond to it.
- We negotiate a multilayered social situation, and so on
- Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment, incorrect though our attributions frequently are.
- By studying autism and a related constellation of cognitive deficits, cognitive scientists began to appreciate our mind-reading ability as a special cognitive endowment, structuring our everyday communication and cultural representations.
- We think this adaptation must have developed during the "massive neurocognitive evolution" which took place during the Pleistocene (1.8m to 10,000 years ago). The emergence of a Theory of Mind "module" was evolution's answer to the "staggeringly complex" challenge faced by our ancestors, who needed to make sense of the behavior of other people in their group, which could include up to 200 individuals.
- Our evolved cognitive architecture "prods" us toward learning and practicing mind-reading daily, from the beginning of awareness.
- Autism is highly heritable, and its key symptoms, which manifest themselves in the first years of life, include the profound impairment of social and communicative development and the "lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretence." It is also characterized by a reduced interest in fiction and storytelling.
- People with autism can have difficulty understanding the mental state of belief (in the sense of entering into another's mind to understand what they believe).
- Temple Grandin: "Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing - an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of those social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the many-leveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it.
- The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call "characters" with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, desires and then to look for the "cues" that would allow us to guess at their feelings and thus predict their actions. Literature pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates ToM mechanisms that had evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain aware that fictive characters are not real people at all.
- In Mrs Dalloway, our ToM allows us to connect Peter Walsh's trembling to his emotional state (in the absence of any additional information that could account for this body language in a different way), thus usefully constraining our interpretive domain and enabling us to start considering endlessly nuanced choices within that domain.
- This elimination of irrelevant interpretations can happen so fast as to be practically imperceptible.
- Stanley Fish: our mental operations are "limited by institutions in which we are already embedded."
- We have cognitive adaptations that prompt us to "see bodies as animated by minds".
- Mind-reading is effortless in the sense that we "intuitively" connect people's behavior to their mental states although our subsequent description of these mental states could run a broad gamut from perceptively accurate to profoundly mistaken.
- The awareness of one's mental state makes possible the enjoyment derived from the manipulation of this state. Our enjoyment of fiction is predicated - at least in part - upon our awareness of our "trying on" mental states potentially available to us but at a given moment differing from our own."
- In the real world, my social survival absolutely depends on being able to imagine - correctly, incorrectly, approximately, self-servingly, bizarrely - other people's thoughts, desires, and intentions around the clock.
- On some level, our evolved cognitive architecture does not fully distinguish between real and fictional people.
- At every step, The Wings of the Dove is telling an attentive reader "These immensely complex, multi-leveled, ethically ambiguous, class-conscious, mutually reflecting and mutually distorting states of mind your are capable of navigating. This is how good you are at this maddening and exhilarating social game. Did you know it? Now you know it!"
- We assume that there must be a mental stance behind each physical action and we strive to represent to ourselves that possible mental stance even when the author has left us with the absolute minimum of necessary cues for constructing such and interpretation.
- It gets harder to follow the meta-representation of levels of minds in statements like The New Yorker cartoon "Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel", and this can trigger a momentary cognitive vertigo which may render us increasingly ready either to laugh or to quake with apprehension.
- Woolf wanted to increase the pace of her explorations, to be able to "embody, at last" as she would write several years later, "the exact shapes my brain holds".
Part II: Tracking Minds
- Metarepresentation - keeping track of the sources of our representations, is a particular cognitive endowment closely related to our mind-reading ability.
- Self-awareness cannot occur without metarepresentation - the cognitive mechanism that enables us to be aware of our goals, our intentions, and the intentions of other people.
- The failure to monitor the source of a representation can lead to schizophrenics perceiving "their own thoughts, subvocal speech, or even vocal speech as emanating, not from their own intentions, but from some source that is not under their control," whereas the "inability to monitor willed intentions can lead to delusions of alien control, certain auditory hallucinations and thought insertion."
- The majority of autistic children fail to develop ToM. They are unaware that other people have different beliefs and intentions from themselves.
- Both the metarepresentational ability and the ToM are not perfect in some abstract, context-independent sense. Instead, they are good enough for our everyday functioning: however imperfect and fallible, they still get us through yet another day of social interactions.
- The ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what, and when they thought it, is crucial for understanding the majority of fictional narratives, which center on the characters' reweighing the truth value of various cultural and personal beliefs.
- It is likely that stories explicitly labeled as fiction (eg Little Red Riding Hood) are never stored "without a source tag".
- Don Quixote suffers from a selective failure of source-monitoring. He takes in representations that normal people store with a restrictive agent-specifying source tag such as "as told by the author of a romance" as lacking any such tag. He thus lets the information contained in romances circulate among his mental databases as architectural truth, corrupting his knowledge about he world that we assume has hitherto been relatively accurate.
- Since we cannot but conceive of narrative agents as human or human-like, it is a basic cognitive requirement of ours that we attribute to them information-processing activities and internal knowledge representations.
- Six types of unreliable narrators:
- Misreporting, Misreading, Misregarding - We must reject their words and reconstruct an alternative
- Underreporting, Underreading, Underregarding - We must supplement the narrator's view
- Once any unreliability is detected all the narration is suspect.
- In Clarissa, the protagonists are mostly confined to their writing-desks, reporting to their respective friends in painstaking detail their endeavors to guess, second-guess, plant, anticipate, and interpret each other's thoughts. In Lovelace we have an early instance of an unreliable narrator.
- Mind-reading is a crucial aspect of our everyday existence, but a character too occupied with figuring out other people's states of mind, and, worse, flaunting his ability to "see through" other people, runs a grave metarepresentational danger: he can easily lose track of himself as the source of his representations of the other person's mental world.
- The reason schizophrenics go on reading minds even though they do it all wrong is that, unlike individuals with autism, who know that their inferences of mental states are likely to be wrong, schizophrenics know well from past experiences that it is useful and easy to infer the mental states of others and will go on doing this even when the mechanism no longer works properly.
- Our brain is the focus of the novel's attention, its playground, its raison d'être, its meaning, whereas the characters are but the means for delivering this kind of wonderfully rich stimulation to the variety of cognitive adaptations making up our ToM.
- The writer who creates an unreliable narrator runs an exciting and terrible risk: his or her readers may wind up believing the narrator's version of events.
- A novel featuring a first-person unreliable narrator thus exploits a particular niche in our cognitive makeup. Although source-monitoring is an integral part of our information management, exaggerated and unrelentingly strong source-monitoring can be cognitively expensive and thus not our defautl state of mind. It seems that we are not automatically open to incurring this large cognitive cost.
- Apparently, in Lolita, our tendency to register possible sources of representations and to subconsciously keep track of them overrides our conscious awareness that all of those sources are spurious, nonexistent, fabricated by the crafty narrator who wants to win us over to his side.
- Humbert obliterates himself as the source of our representations of Lolita and presents us instead with snapshots of other minds (including Lolita's own) that support his interpretation of events.
- Nabokov made the cultivation of a mental vertigo in his readers into his trademark as a writer. Will our reading experience change as we gradually articulate the ground rules of the cognitive games that his novels play with us? Will we start putting a premium on consciously prolonging and cultivating those moments of cognitive uncertainty when we both believe and disbelieve, know and don't know, see and don't see.
Part III: Concealing Minds
Conclusion: Why Do We Read (And Write) Fiction
