Jonah Lehrer is everywhere these days promoting his new book. I've followed his career for a few years and he is really worth listening to. This is his very interesting blog and I've cut and pasted a few entries to give you this sample of his writing..
His new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, comes out next week, on tour talking about Bob Dylan, moments of insight, the immortality of cities and the ideal template for creative collaboration
Frontal Cortex | Wired Science | Wired.com
The best part of book tours are the questions. After spending years with the same ideas and sentences – they become old friends – it’s invigorating to see how people react, to keep track of which concepts spark their curiosity. It’s also fun to consider questions that never occured to me while writing the book. For instance, I was recently stumped by a seemingly obvious query that I hadn’t really considered. It was asked by a 4th grader: “What,” he wanted to know, “is the downside of creativity? Isn’t it possible that humans are too creative?”
I muttered something incoherent about nuclear weapons and human ingenuity creating the seeds of its own destruction. I’m pretty sure I quoted Einstein. But I could tell he wasn’t satisfied, that my answer struck him as facile and trite, which it was. So here’s my attempt to give him a better answer, because I think the absurd success of human creativity comes with a real cost.
One of the scientists I spend a lot of time with in Imagine is Geoffrey West, a brilliant theoretical physicist at the Sante Fe Insititute. (He has done a lot of intriguing work on cities, trying to figure out why cities are “the most important invention in the history of human civilization” and why some cities are so much more innovative than others, at least measured by per capita production of patents.) Although West celebrates the inventiveness of cities – all those knowledge spillovers leads to new knowledge – he is quick to point out that our creativity has its disadvantages. New ideas, after all, have a disturbing tendency to become new things, and things aren’t free.
West illustrates the problem by translating the modern human lifestyle – and we live surrounded by our own inventions – into watts. “A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he told me. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”
The historian Lewis Mumford described the rise of the megalopolis as “the last stage in the classical cycle of civilization,” which would end with “complete disruption and downfall.” In his more pessimistic moods, West seems to agree: he knows that nothing can trend upward forever, that eventually our creativity will make life utterly unsustainable. In fact, West sees human history as defined by this constant tension between expansion and scarcity, between the relentless growth made possible by our creativity and the limited resources that hold our growth back.
Of course, the only solution to the problem of human innovation is more innovation. After a resource is exhausted, we are forced to exploit a new resource, if only to sustain our craving for growth. West cites a long list of breakthroughs to illustrate this historical pattern, from the discovery of the steam engine to the invention of the Internet. “These major innovations completely changed the way society operates,” West says. “It’s like we’re on the edge of a cliff, about to run out of something, and then we find a new way of creating wealth. That means we can start to climb again.”
But the escape is only temporary, as every innovation eventually leads to new shortages. We clear-cut forests, and so we turn to oil; once we exhaust our fossil-fuel reserves, we’ll start driving electric cars, at least until we run out of lithium. Although human creativity has generated a seemingly impossible amount of economic growth, it has also inspired the innovations that allow the growth to continue. So here’s the paradox: creativity is the only solution to the very real problem of creativity.
There is a serious complication to this triumphant narrative of cliff edges and innovation, however. Because our lifestyle has become so expensive to maintain, every new resource now becomes exhausted at a faster rate. This means that the cycle of innovations has to constantly accelerate, with each breakthrough providing a shorter reprieve. The end result is that our creativity isn’t just increasing the pace of life; it is also increasing the pace at which life changes. “It’s like being on a treadmill that keeps on getting faster,” West says. “We used to get a big revolution every few thousand years. And then it took us a century to go from the steam engine to the internal-combustion engine. Now we’re down to about 15 years between big innovations. What this means is that, for the first time ever, people are living through multiple revolutions.”
Needless to say, such revolutions aren’t fun. They’re unsettling and disruptive. But they appear to be the inevitable downside of our ceaseless ingenuity, for creativity comes with a multiplier effect: new ideas beget more new ideas. The treadmill is going fast. And it’s getting faster.
My new book is out today! Adapted excerpts have run in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, but here’s another glimpse of what’s inside. These are the closing paragraphs of the introduction:
For most of human history, we’ve pretended that the imagination is inherently inscrutable, an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we’ve clung to a series of false myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths aren’t just misleading – they also interfere with the imagination. In addition to looking at elegant experiments and scientific studies, we’ll also examine creativity as it is experienced in the real world. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing method and the drug habits of poets. We’ll spend time with a bartender who thinks like a chemist and an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move. We’ll look at a website that helps us solve seemingly impossible problems and we’ll go behind the scenes at Pixar. We’ll watch Yo Yo Ma improvise and we’ll unpack the secrets of consistently innovative companies.
The point is to collapse the layers of description separating the nerve cell from the finished symphony, the cortical circuit from the successful product. Creativity shouldn’t seem like something otherworldly. It shouldn’t seem like a process reserved for artists or inventors or other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, our brain is automatically forming new associations, as it continually connects an everyday x to an unexpected y. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.
What can novelists learn from Neuroscience?
- March 7, 2012 |
- 12:37 pm |
- Categories: Frontal Cortex, Science Blogs
In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I argued that, even in this age of glittering science, we still have a deep need for the musings and mysteries of art:
And this brings me to Charles Fernyhough, a science writer, novelist and academic psychologist. His most recent project is A Box of Birds, a novel that explicitly attempts to explore the impact of neuroscience on our self-conception. Here’s how Charles summarizes his goals for the fictional work:
LEHRER: You’re a scientist and a writer. My first question, then, is practical: Where do you find the time?
FERNYHOUGH: My academic post is part-time. Writing fiction bites huge chunks out of your life and you have to keep at it every day if you can. I have a supportive employer and an unbelievably giving family.
LEHRER: You argue that “by putting neuroscience into fiction we can find out what kinds of explanations will ultimately be satisfying to us.” Could you explain further? How did writing this book change your view of various scientific explanations? Which ones proved satisfying and which ones proved unsatisfying? I’m thinking here of George Eliot’s great quip that her novels were “simply a set of experiments in life.” Would you agree?
FERNYHOUGH: I’m trying to say something about how we as a species consume the science, rather than about the science itself. Neuroscientific research will stand or fall on the age-old criteria of testability, replicability, methodological rigour, conceptual coherence, and so on. With this project, I’m more interested in what the person in the street takes from the science. I start with a character, Yvonne, who is immersed in this way of thinking about the brain, to the extent that it has come to shape her understanding of her own experience. Modern ideas about diffuse neural systems, parallel streams of processing and all the rest have made her doubt the integrity of her own self. Her understanding of the fractionated, nonCartesian mind has existential effects, and (to the extent that such a thing can ever be determined in the brain) causal influences on her decision-making.
The question then is: what happens to that philosophy when things start happening—for example, when Yvonne is forced to make moral choices? If you’re brought up to believe that freewill is an illusion, what do you do when circumstances force you to act?
When I asked around about this, I realised that people do indeed make sense of their experience and behaviour in terms of brain processes. But I also started to suspect that neuro-level explanations are particularly relevant at the fringes of our experience. They are good at putting us in touch with what, to steal from Freud, you might call the psychopathology of everyday life: those deviations from normal experience that we get with anxiety, depression, déjà vu and so on. The more interesting challenge, for me, is to show whether it’s plausible for a fictional character to make sense of everyday experience in these terms. Does knowing more about the brain help me to understand being in love, or appreciating a work of art, or feeling apprehensive about an important meeting? More, does it affect the choices I make? That’s where the really exciting questions lie.
And, without giving the plot away, that’s also where I think fiction can bump up against the limits of those neuro-explanations. Yvonne discovers a coherence to her existence—something like an old-fashioned self—in the midst of all the neural diffusion. This is a novel, and it has to work on the novel’s terms. But those terms are also those of the ordinary human being. They’re the criteria by which we understand people’s actions in the real world as well as in fictional ones, and that commonality is one reason why novels can be manuals for living. The novelist has got to be asking both the Socratic question (‘How should I live?’) and the Bob Dylan question (‘How does it feel?’). If you cram neuroscience into fiction without taking care of the narrative—without taking care of your characters and their thoughts and feelings—you’ll end up with a mess, and you probably won’t be getting a very good take on the neuroscience either.
Another way of putting this is to say: Why isn’t there more neuroscience in fiction? Is it because the ideas haven’t permeated yet? Or is it because writers don’t feel that these explanations really work in fiction, that they don’t come together to make satisfying stories? I don’t know the answer to that. But I know that we have always looked to writers to reflect our changing understanding of ourselves. If understanding the brain really makes a difference, then those changed understandings should be coming through in novels and other art forms—just as they did with other paradigm shifts in our understanding of humanity, such as Darwinism and psychoanalysis. Maybe what happens in fiction over the next ten years or so is actually the big test. Comparing the kinds of fictions that work and don’t work should tell us something about the sorts of explanations that we, as human beings, need for ourselves. We should fix to do this again in 2022!
I love that line you mention from George Eliot, about seeing novels as experiments. When you write a novel, you’re building a model and putting it in a wind tunnel. You’re looking to see how your characters bear up under the strains you impose on them, how their personal qualities shape their reactions, but also how those qualities are altered by events. Fiction is a way of doing science on the human character – although of course there are so many important differences between the truths of science and the truths of literature.
LEHRER: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be describing novels as a sort of public poll of the science, a means of seeing what “sorts of explanations we, as human beings, need for ourselves.” I can’t help wonder if Eliot had grander plans for her writing. She once declared that her fiction was an attempt to give us a description of life “more sure than shifting theory,” to describe human nature in richer (and ultimately more realistic) terms than that afforded by the science of her day. (Eliot lived, after all, during the heyday of phrenology and social physics.) Do you see fiction as having the potential to reveal complexities and nuances that are left out of the carefully controlled conditions of the lab? Can a novel ever challenge or refute or confirm an experiment?
FERNYHOUGH: I think it’s true that fiction (broadly construed to include movies and drama alongside the genres of written literature) can reveal nuances that we could never get a handle on in the lab. One of the frustrations of doing cognitive science is that you are constantly having to factor out messy human complexities so that you can get meaningful findings. But science can work at different levels at the same time. The science of human experience has to. I’m a developmental psychologist by training, and in that discipline I’ve thought about mind at the personal, social and cultural levels of explanation more than I have at the neural. To give a different example, I’ve been steeping myself recently in the science of autobiographical memory, where researchers routinely listen to people’s unique personal stories as well as putting them in the scanner.
I don’t think a novel can challenge an experiment, because those yardsticks of experimental research — testability, replicability, and all the rest — are not applicable to the novel. One of the mistakes rookie writers make is thinking that because something really happened, it will necessarily make a good story. In the Poetics, Aristotle pointed out that “the function of the poet is not to say what has happened, but to say the kind of thing that would happen.” Something can be real without being plausible. Fiction sets up counterfactuals ¬– alternative realities – and explores how human beings react to and shape those situations. It follows the rules of emotional and behavioural plausibility rather than staying true to the facts of what actually happened.
There’s another sense in which the novel does challenge science, just by sticking around for so long. We’re still reading Eliot; we’re not reading the science of her day nearly so much. Scientific truths are always in the running for being disproved, whereas great literature is supposedly unfalsifiable. I suppose I’d like to twist your question round and ask “Can an experiment ever disprove a novel?” I guess scientific findings could make a work of fiction seem less relevant and true, but it would require a fundamental shift in the way we understand ourselves, of the kind that neuroscience might – just might – bring about.
LEHRER: Why didn’t you think Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” – a novel about a neurosurgeon, featuring several lengthy meditations on reductionism – went far enough? What kind of dialogue between science and fiction would you like to see?
FERNYHOUGH: There’s no question that Saturday broke new ground. For the first time you had a protagonist, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, for whom the human brain, understood through the lens of late twentieth-century science, was the reference point. For me, though, Saturday is still a conventional novel. Neuroscience colours Perowne’s reflections on himself, but he knows who he is, and he’s certain in that knowledge. Understanding something about the wetware underlying his experience doesn’t make him think about himself in a fundamentally different way. It certainly shapes his musings about the mystery of consciousness, but I don’t know if his sense of amazement is different in kind to the wonder of those who have pondered this before him. Henry just knows much more about the brain, and thus sees the gulf of understanding as that much greater.
More importantly, Perowne’s immersion in neuroscience doesn’t change anything in the way he behaves. It doesn’t drive the plot. Neurological causes are effective in the case of the dangerous, damaged Baxter, but the ultimate cause there is a genetic one (Huntington’s disease), rather than a neural one. The explanation is Darwinian rather than Damasian. As far as I can see, nothing Perowne does or doesn’t do is any different as a result of his neuroscientific perspective. Of course it is poetry – a recital of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ — that ultimately acts as a driver of behaviour. Nowhere does Perowne’s insula, for example, push the narrative along in this way. Brain is a correlate, not an engine.
Two other really interesting books are The Echo Maker by Richard Powers and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. In both of these novels you have characters who see themselves materialistically, as biological machines. The Echo Maker gives us the neuropsychologist Gerald, whose clinical knowledge of the brain informs rich neuro-level descriptions of his own experience, but that character’s professional focus is very much on the tragic disruptions of brain damage. Franzen shows us the depressive Gary, with his screwy neurotransmitters, but he rows back from the focus on the brain in Freedom. These are extraordinary novels, but I don’t feel they go quite as far with exploring materialism as they could.
LEHRER: How do you respond to criticism of the neuro-novel? Over at n+1, for instance, Marco Roth has argued that “novelists have ceded their ground to science,” that they are uncritically embracing the latest experiments and favoring superficial references to fMRI data instead of exploring society or the self. The new genre of the neuronovel, Roth writes, “looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, but actually appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.” How would you respond?
FERNYHOUGH: The question I would ask is: are writers just introducing neuro details as local colour, or do new understandings of the brain really change the kinds of fiction that are possible? You could define two tasks for the neuro-novel: firstly to explain human experience and behaviour in terms of neural processes, and secondly to show how that view of mind changes our relationship with those experiences and behaviour; how it affects the choices we make. When I look around at what has been published in the last few years, I see a bit of the first and not much of the second. What I do see lots of is the pathologising that Marco Roth points to in his essay. I don’t see this as specific to the neuro-novel, though. There are broader currents at work. Look at the arguments around DSM-V, and those very reasonable complaints about how ordinary aspects of human experience are being turned into syndromes. It’s not just novelists who are seeing the pathological in everything.
Whatever we make of the ‘neuro-novel’, it has to be judged as fiction, not as science. The novel, any novel, has to be moral: it has to concern itself with human judgements about good and bad, right and wrong. For obvious reasons, these categories have usually been interpreted at the personal level of explanation. The neuro-novel may not be able to change that, perhaps because the neural level of explanation is the wrong one. But our fiction will surely become richer if we try, and so might our science. The challenge for writers, as I see it, is to try to find the moral centre within the neuroscience, rather than just assuming it. I want to see this kind of science in novels, because I want to know what the science means to us as people, and exploring that in fiction is a good way of finding out.
One thing I’m sure about is that the novel is resilient enough to soak up any of these challenges. The novel gobbled up Darwin and Freud; I don’t see why it should choke on David Eagleman. I teach a course on the Science of Consciousness at my university, Durham. We start by thinking about the ‘hard problem’: the question of how a material system could ever support subjective experience. We’re currently in no position to reduce the subjective to the objective, so we need a science of consciousness that does justice to both. And nothing depicts personal experience like the novel does. My students read about the neurochemistry of sexual desire, and then they read D H Lawrence on the subjectivity of it. Somewhere along the way those two endeavours will meet to give us a true science of who we are.
In going deeper into the neuroscience, fiction won’t obviate itself. Art will always contribute something special: subjectivity, and the means for articulating the subjective alongside the objective. It’s not just fiction that can gain from this deepening relationship; the science can become better too.
We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.I went on to (grandiosely) propose the formation of a fourth culture, which would “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.” There are many wonderful examples of such works, from the novels of Richard Powers to the mathematical essays of David Foster Wallace.
And this brings me to Charles Fernyhough, a science writer, novelist and academic psychologist. His most recent project is A Box of Birds, a novel that explicitly attempts to explore the impact of neuroscience on our self-conception. Here’s how Charles summarizes his goals for the fictional work:
I’m hoping it works on several levels: as a pacy thriller set in a near-future world of experimental brain research; as a love story between a neuroscientist and an animal rights campaigner; and as a clash between two of the predominant philosophical positions of our age. One is the materialist view that science has (or will have) all the answers and that ‘we’ are nothing more than bundles of nerves and chemical reactions. The other is the Freud-inspired position that underpins the culture of therapy: that the stories we tell about ourselves and our pasts have the capacity to change our future.If that sounds intriguing, you can support the book over at Unbound. As a fan of his writing, I was eager to ask Charles a few questions about the relationship between science and art and why a scientist might feel compelled to explore the world of fact in fiction.
There have been some good modern novelists who have used neuroscientific ideas in their work: Ian McEwan, Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen spring to mind as three of the most successful. But I want to take it a little further.
For example, can you bring the neural level of explanation into the story and still create something that works as a fiction – or are you always drawn back to old-fashioned ideas of self, subjectivity, love and so on? Does neuroscience really change our understanding of who we are? For me, the only way to answer these questions was to write a novel that dramatised them.
LEHRER: You’re a scientist and a writer. My first question, then, is practical: Where do you find the time?
FERNYHOUGH: My academic post is part-time. Writing fiction bites huge chunks out of your life and you have to keep at it every day if you can. I have a supportive employer and an unbelievably giving family.
LEHRER: You argue that “by putting neuroscience into fiction we can find out what kinds of explanations will ultimately be satisfying to us.” Could you explain further? How did writing this book change your view of various scientific explanations? Which ones proved satisfying and which ones proved unsatisfying? I’m thinking here of George Eliot’s great quip that her novels were “simply a set of experiments in life.” Would you agree?
FERNYHOUGH: I’m trying to say something about how we as a species consume the science, rather than about the science itself. Neuroscientific research will stand or fall on the age-old criteria of testability, replicability, methodological rigour, conceptual coherence, and so on. With this project, I’m more interested in what the person in the street takes from the science. I start with a character, Yvonne, who is immersed in this way of thinking about the brain, to the extent that it has come to shape her understanding of her own experience. Modern ideas about diffuse neural systems, parallel streams of processing and all the rest have made her doubt the integrity of her own self. Her understanding of the fractionated, nonCartesian mind has existential effects, and (to the extent that such a thing can ever be determined in the brain) causal influences on her decision-making.
The question then is: what happens to that philosophy when things start happening—for example, when Yvonne is forced to make moral choices? If you’re brought up to believe that freewill is an illusion, what do you do when circumstances force you to act?
When I asked around about this, I realised that people do indeed make sense of their experience and behaviour in terms of brain processes. But I also started to suspect that neuro-level explanations are particularly relevant at the fringes of our experience. They are good at putting us in touch with what, to steal from Freud, you might call the psychopathology of everyday life: those deviations from normal experience that we get with anxiety, depression, déjà vu and so on. The more interesting challenge, for me, is to show whether it’s plausible for a fictional character to make sense of everyday experience in these terms. Does knowing more about the brain help me to understand being in love, or appreciating a work of art, or feeling apprehensive about an important meeting? More, does it affect the choices I make? That’s where the really exciting questions lie.
And, without giving the plot away, that’s also where I think fiction can bump up against the limits of those neuro-explanations. Yvonne discovers a coherence to her existence—something like an old-fashioned self—in the midst of all the neural diffusion. This is a novel, and it has to work on the novel’s terms. But those terms are also those of the ordinary human being. They’re the criteria by which we understand people’s actions in the real world as well as in fictional ones, and that commonality is one reason why novels can be manuals for living. The novelist has got to be asking both the Socratic question (‘How should I live?’) and the Bob Dylan question (‘How does it feel?’). If you cram neuroscience into fiction without taking care of the narrative—without taking care of your characters and their thoughts and feelings—you’ll end up with a mess, and you probably won’t be getting a very good take on the neuroscience either.
Another way of putting this is to say: Why isn’t there more neuroscience in fiction? Is it because the ideas haven’t permeated yet? Or is it because writers don’t feel that these explanations really work in fiction, that they don’t come together to make satisfying stories? I don’t know the answer to that. But I know that we have always looked to writers to reflect our changing understanding of ourselves. If understanding the brain really makes a difference, then those changed understandings should be coming through in novels and other art forms—just as they did with other paradigm shifts in our understanding of humanity, such as Darwinism and psychoanalysis. Maybe what happens in fiction over the next ten years or so is actually the big test. Comparing the kinds of fictions that work and don’t work should tell us something about the sorts of explanations that we, as human beings, need for ourselves. We should fix to do this again in 2022!
I love that line you mention from George Eliot, about seeing novels as experiments. When you write a novel, you’re building a model and putting it in a wind tunnel. You’re looking to see how your characters bear up under the strains you impose on them, how their personal qualities shape their reactions, but also how those qualities are altered by events. Fiction is a way of doing science on the human character – although of course there are so many important differences between the truths of science and the truths of literature.
LEHRER: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be describing novels as a sort of public poll of the science, a means of seeing what “sorts of explanations we, as human beings, need for ourselves.” I can’t help wonder if Eliot had grander plans for her writing. She once declared that her fiction was an attempt to give us a description of life “more sure than shifting theory,” to describe human nature in richer (and ultimately more realistic) terms than that afforded by the science of her day. (Eliot lived, after all, during the heyday of phrenology and social physics.) Do you see fiction as having the potential to reveal complexities and nuances that are left out of the carefully controlled conditions of the lab? Can a novel ever challenge or refute or confirm an experiment?
FERNYHOUGH: I think it’s true that fiction (broadly construed to include movies and drama alongside the genres of written literature) can reveal nuances that we could never get a handle on in the lab. One of the frustrations of doing cognitive science is that you are constantly having to factor out messy human complexities so that you can get meaningful findings. But science can work at different levels at the same time. The science of human experience has to. I’m a developmental psychologist by training, and in that discipline I’ve thought about mind at the personal, social and cultural levels of explanation more than I have at the neural. To give a different example, I’ve been steeping myself recently in the science of autobiographical memory, where researchers routinely listen to people’s unique personal stories as well as putting them in the scanner.
I don’t think a novel can challenge an experiment, because those yardsticks of experimental research — testability, replicability, and all the rest — are not applicable to the novel. One of the mistakes rookie writers make is thinking that because something really happened, it will necessarily make a good story. In the Poetics, Aristotle pointed out that “the function of the poet is not to say what has happened, but to say the kind of thing that would happen.” Something can be real without being plausible. Fiction sets up counterfactuals ¬– alternative realities – and explores how human beings react to and shape those situations. It follows the rules of emotional and behavioural plausibility rather than staying true to the facts of what actually happened.
There’s another sense in which the novel does challenge science, just by sticking around for so long. We’re still reading Eliot; we’re not reading the science of her day nearly so much. Scientific truths are always in the running for being disproved, whereas great literature is supposedly unfalsifiable. I suppose I’d like to twist your question round and ask “Can an experiment ever disprove a novel?” I guess scientific findings could make a work of fiction seem less relevant and true, but it would require a fundamental shift in the way we understand ourselves, of the kind that neuroscience might – just might – bring about.
LEHRER: Why didn’t you think Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” – a novel about a neurosurgeon, featuring several lengthy meditations on reductionism – went far enough? What kind of dialogue between science and fiction would you like to see?
FERNYHOUGH: There’s no question that Saturday broke new ground. For the first time you had a protagonist, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, for whom the human brain, understood through the lens of late twentieth-century science, was the reference point. For me, though, Saturday is still a conventional novel. Neuroscience colours Perowne’s reflections on himself, but he knows who he is, and he’s certain in that knowledge. Understanding something about the wetware underlying his experience doesn’t make him think about himself in a fundamentally different way. It certainly shapes his musings about the mystery of consciousness, but I don’t know if his sense of amazement is different in kind to the wonder of those who have pondered this before him. Henry just knows much more about the brain, and thus sees the gulf of understanding as that much greater.
More importantly, Perowne’s immersion in neuroscience doesn’t change anything in the way he behaves. It doesn’t drive the plot. Neurological causes are effective in the case of the dangerous, damaged Baxter, but the ultimate cause there is a genetic one (Huntington’s disease), rather than a neural one. The explanation is Darwinian rather than Damasian. As far as I can see, nothing Perowne does or doesn’t do is any different as a result of his neuroscientific perspective. Of course it is poetry – a recital of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ — that ultimately acts as a driver of behaviour. Nowhere does Perowne’s insula, for example, push the narrative along in this way. Brain is a correlate, not an engine.
Two other really interesting books are The Echo Maker by Richard Powers and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. In both of these novels you have characters who see themselves materialistically, as biological machines. The Echo Maker gives us the neuropsychologist Gerald, whose clinical knowledge of the brain informs rich neuro-level descriptions of his own experience, but that character’s professional focus is very much on the tragic disruptions of brain damage. Franzen shows us the depressive Gary, with his screwy neurotransmitters, but he rows back from the focus on the brain in Freedom. These are extraordinary novels, but I don’t feel they go quite as far with exploring materialism as they could.
LEHRER: How do you respond to criticism of the neuro-novel? Over at n+1, for instance, Marco Roth has argued that “novelists have ceded their ground to science,” that they are uncritically embracing the latest experiments and favoring superficial references to fMRI data instead of exploring society or the self. The new genre of the neuronovel, Roth writes, “looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, but actually appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.” How would you respond?
FERNYHOUGH: The question I would ask is: are writers just introducing neuro details as local colour, or do new understandings of the brain really change the kinds of fiction that are possible? You could define two tasks for the neuro-novel: firstly to explain human experience and behaviour in terms of neural processes, and secondly to show how that view of mind changes our relationship with those experiences and behaviour; how it affects the choices we make. When I look around at what has been published in the last few years, I see a bit of the first and not much of the second. What I do see lots of is the pathologising that Marco Roth points to in his essay. I don’t see this as specific to the neuro-novel, though. There are broader currents at work. Look at the arguments around DSM-V, and those very reasonable complaints about how ordinary aspects of human experience are being turned into syndromes. It’s not just novelists who are seeing the pathological in everything.
Whatever we make of the ‘neuro-novel’, it has to be judged as fiction, not as science. The novel, any novel, has to be moral: it has to concern itself with human judgements about good and bad, right and wrong. For obvious reasons, these categories have usually been interpreted at the personal level of explanation. The neuro-novel may not be able to change that, perhaps because the neural level of explanation is the wrong one. But our fiction will surely become richer if we try, and so might our science. The challenge for writers, as I see it, is to try to find the moral centre within the neuroscience, rather than just assuming it. I want to see this kind of science in novels, because I want to know what the science means to us as people, and exploring that in fiction is a good way of finding out.
One thing I’m sure about is that the novel is resilient enough to soak up any of these challenges. The novel gobbled up Darwin and Freud; I don’t see why it should choke on David Eagleman. I teach a course on the Science of Consciousness at my university, Durham. We start by thinking about the ‘hard problem’: the question of how a material system could ever support subjective experience. We’re currently in no position to reduce the subjective to the objective, so we need a science of consciousness that does justice to both. And nothing depicts personal experience like the novel does. My students read about the neurochemistry of sexual desire, and then they read D H Lawrence on the subjectivity of it. Somewhere along the way those two endeavours will meet to give us a true science of who we are.
In going deeper into the neuroscience, fiction won’t obviate itself. Art will always contribute something special: subjectivity, and the means for articulating the subjective alongside the objective. It’s not just fiction that can gain from this deepening relationship; the science can become better too.
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