Making the invisible visible; keeping the invisible invisible

Thanks to a wonderful collective of artists and geographers*, I have just had the opportunity to think in a new way about the relationship between the truth and the poetic, the known and the unseeable, and the functions of the kinds of stories that people tell each other in trying to make the world better.

In the context of the larger conversation about 'Intervention and Embeddedness, Art Practice and Environmental Discourse' at the American Association of Geographers conference going on in New York, David Haley, Christine Baeumler, and Simon Read shared thoughts on art as a process, and more, as Haley put it, an 'act of making a process manifest, making things possible,' and also of crafting maps for behavioral procedures that might help us deal with uncertain challenges -- and environmental prompts for them. Read showed his understated process for 'mapping issues that may need questioning,' to feel his way into it, and to document, for his own understanding -- and then for others' -- what that path into challenging questions is like, and how to embark on it, knowing where he came from, but explicitly not determining where to go.

The core theme that impressed me was this dialogue between telling strong directive stories that habits need to be relearned -- public processes need to be highlighted, and made equitable -- and creating spaces that prompt others' creation of exploratory stories. As Baeumler so brilliantly summed it up, as much as we are following that irresistible compulsion to make the invisible visible, we should also embrace a willingness to keep some invisibles invisible. The socially motivated and impeccably structured interventions they discussed highlight compelling parallels to the recurrent theme in OnFiction of the open supportive framework provided by fiction, and art -- poieses -- for creative exploration.

*Particular thanks to the organizers Karen Till and Simon Read
The image above is from Marcus Young's project, Don't You Feel it Too?, discussed in the panel by Christine Baeumler; the project is organized around the premise of 'dancing your inner life in public places.'

Research Bulletin: Developing a focused mind for reading

There has been a growing interest in the neural correlates of narrative comprehension, but so far relatively little of this work has examined developmental issues. Part of the reason why this type of research has been slow to arrive is the difficulty of finding reading tasks that are equivalent (in difficulty, among other things) for both children and adults. A recent paper by Koyama and colleagues (2011) took a novel approach to circumventing this problem, by examining how reading competence relates to a different type of MRI measurement: resting state functional connectivity. Resting state functional connectivity examines the intrinsic associations between regions of the brain, as identified by associations in activity while the brain is at “rest,” or not engaged in any particular task. These associations are thought to reveal the strength of different networks of regions, with some brain areas more tightly coupled than others. This coupling, or association, between areas might represent the result of experience, with brain areas that are commonly co-activated during specific tasks (e.g., reading) becoming more and more “in sync” even when we are not performing that task. Koyama and his fellow researchers looked at the strength of associations for reading brain regions across individuals who varied in their reading ability, for both a group of children (8–14 years) and a group of adults (21–46 years). What they found was that better readers had a stronger coupling between language/speech areas of the brain (e.g., Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area) and more strongly connected motor regions in the brain. They also observed a difference between the two age groups. One such difference was a stronger negative association between a word-recognition area and what’s known as the “default network,” a set of brain regions often linked to mind-wandering (Mason et al., 2007). The same was not found for children, however. One interpretation of this finding is that highly automatized reading, such as that achieved by adult expert readers, involves less mind-wandering whereas this might not be true of proficient child readers. A particular strength of this research is that it acknowledges the importance of examining differences across individuals (in this case, of reading ability) and how these differences might relate to neural measures.

Koyama, M. S., Martino, A., Zuo, X.-N., Kelly, C., Mennes, M., Jutagir, D. R., Castellanos, F. X., & Milham, M. P. (2011). Resting-state functional connectivity indexes reading

competence in children and adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 8617–8624.

Mason, M. F., Norton, M. I., Van Horn, J. D., Wegner, D. M., Grafton, S. T. & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought.

Science, 315, 393–395.

Principles of Poetry

Maja and I have a project: to try and glimpse the inner core of poetry. So this is a follow-up to my recent post on Chinese poetry (click here) and Maja's recent post on short lines (click here). What are the psychological principles of poetry?

A first principle seems to depend on what Andy Clark pointed out, that the mind has a deliberative verbal processor and an associative intuitive processor which have utterly different properties. So the mind is a hybrid; we have to negotiate between the different modes. The verbal processor can enable thoughts themselves to be objects of thought. The associative processor is perhaps responsible for concepts and intuitions. A verbal utterance, received by the verbal processor can be purely semantic and syntactic. I can write: "There's a leafless tree outside my window." In these words I can communicate both to myself and you. Perhaps you can think of a tree of this kind. This isn't poetic: you know the sort of thing I mean by drawing on your experience of winter-time deciduous trees. A poetic utterance does this but adds something beyond the semantic and syntactic. It makes connections between and among the words themselves by means such as metres, metaphors, metonyms, multiple interpretations. The psychological effect of an evocative poem is to invite a certain density of reflective thought, which brings a thought feelingfully to mental presence, by its several links with the associative processor. (On this idea of reflectiveness, see Sikora, Miall & Kuiken click here.) If I read, in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 the line: "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," the words seem to become poetic by inviting links from the verbal to the intuitive processor that go beyond the semantic and syntactic because they are multiple and simultaneous. Rather than intuitions one-at-a-time, they invite concurrent intuitions. In this line, I enjoy the iambic pentameter because it's like a heartbeat; I think somewhat poignantly of my own aging as of ruined churches I have visited along the English-Scottish border, picturesque but sad, no longer of much use except as memories of a sort; I connect the singing of birds and the singing of choirs; I wonder what birds were doing, flying about in the churches before they were ruined. All in ten syllables: the span of a single conscious verbal thought. If I had merely written such thoughts (as I have just done), you'd read them one at a time, they'd not be linked, and they'd not be of much interest.

A second principle, as John Keats said in a letter of 27 February 1818, is that: "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity." (In North American usage: it should be unusual but not weird.) The principle was later proposed by Victor Shklovsky: defamiliarization. It was one of the first aspects of literature to be studied empirically, by Willie van Peer. Rachel Giora has shown that brain activation spreads beyond the language hemisphere not in response to metaphoricity, but to unusualness.

A third principle derives from Indic poetics, in which Abhinavagupta said that dhvani, suggestiveness, is the heart of poetry. Suggestiveness implies an intimate partnership: the poet suggests and the hearer or reader creates a shared meaning.

And, as Coleridge said, real "poetry brings the whole soul … into activity." How it does so is what we're trying to understand: trying, but not there yet.

Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical Psychology, 19, 291-307.
Coleridge, S. T. (1817). Biographia literaria, Ed J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 1907).
Giora, R. (2007). Is metaphor special? Brain and Language, 100, 111-114.
Ingalls, D. H. H., Masson, J. M., & Patwardhan, M. V. (1990). The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Keats, J. (1816-20). Selected poems and letters of Keats (Ed. D.  Bush). New York: Houghton Mifflin (current edition 1959).
Shklovsky, V. (1919). On the connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices. In S. Bann & J. E. Bowlt (Eds.), Russian formalism: A collection of articles and texts in translation (pp. 48-71). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press (this edition 1973).
Sikora, S., Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2011). Expressive reading: A phenomenological study of readers’ experience of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Journal of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 5, 258-268.
Van Peer, W. (1986). Sylistics and psychology: Investigations of foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.
Vendler, H. (1997). The art of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Image: The ruined Jedburgh Abbey

Emotion in stories

The prolific Patrick Colm Hogan published two books last year, both of great interest to readers of OnFiction.

The first of these is What literature teaches us about emotion. Hogan has an especial knowledge of Shakespeare as well as an extraordinary familiarity with world literature, and this expertise enables him to bridge between psychology and literary theory, by offering examples in which people interested in the emotions can discover important understandings of specific emotions such as romantic love, grief, and guilt. Such emotions are different from those usually studied in the laboratory; literary studies are thereby complementary to laboratory studies. One might say that literature has allowed a search over a much wider space of experience, and with a far deeper thoughtfulness, than is usual in psychology. The book is also a study of particular works, but with a perspective that is different from that of the usual kinds of literary analysis; it's a study of how these works function specifically to explore and throw light on emotion.

The second book is Affective narratology, the emotional structure of stories, in which Hogan shows that the structure of stories is a product of human emotion systems. In one analysis, Hogan focuses on time, and shows that it doesn't spread forward evenly like clock time. It's jagged, with times of intensity and times when nothing much happens. The intense times are the times of emotion. Stories are told in a way that follows this pattern, with a concentration on the moments of emotional significance, and omission of the rest. Although he doesn't discuss it in this book, I was reminded of Frank Kermode's The sense of an ending, in which he depicts the ticks and tocks of clock time as both inexorable and meaningless, so that stories which usually have the sense of an ending can offer us meaning which acts as a consolation. Though I find Kermode one of the most worthwhile of literary scholars, consolation seems such thin gruel. Hogan's idea is better, and closer to the truth. It's our emotional structures that give meaning to life in our loves, our strivings, our disappointments. Stories reflect such structures, and enable us to reflect on them.

In a further kind of analysis in his narratology book, Hogan recounts how life has periods of normalcy, which are interrupted by emotions. Story structure too, follows this pattern, tending to move from a normal period, or an implied normal period at the beginning, to a disruption, and then towards an ending in which a new normalcy is established. Hogan discusses how three emotional story themes are universal and occur throughout the world. He calls these stories of suffering, of the heroic, and of the romantic. He discusses, too, some themes that are less prevalent worldwide: interruption of attachment, the progress of sexual desire, trajectories of revenge, and criminal investigations, each of which is also a development of an emotional theme, starting from a state of normalcy which is disrupted. Hogan ends his book by suggesting stories help us understand and develop the structure of our own emotional lives.

No one has done more than Patrick Hogan to bring literary theory and cognitive science together. It's significant that the interface of this bringing together is emotion.

Hogan, P. C. (2011). What literature teaches us about emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hogan, P. C. (2011). Affective narratology: The emotional structure of stories. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Kermode, F. (1966). The sense of an ending: Studies in the theory of fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Metacognition in the practice of narrating psychological scholarship

* Having just spent most of the past week as a disciplinary outsider at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I have just had a fascinating chance to observe the workings of the social life of psychological stories as they are produced and shared in their native terrain. This experience has made me appreciate narrative scholarship and science studies, particularly the sociological study of the development of scientific knowledge. In the The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Max Weber identifies social scientists as distinctive amongst scientists for taking into account the self-understanding of the actors they study. As a geographer who studies the way that people understand relationships between society and environment, I was attending this scientific meeting to gain a better understanding of the way that psychologists understand their ways of studying society-environment relations. I learned a great deal about constructs developed by social psychologists that may be very useful for addressing environmental management challenges; as an outsider, I also gleaned some insights about the ways that accounts of scholarship were being constructed and narrated that may be of interest both to those concerned with the way narration works and also to people working in society-environment domains, particularly those that deal with the challenges of building communicative action amongst diverse groups.

Such scientists!
Overwhelmingly, the strongest impression one may take away from a meeting such as this is the degree to which psychologists identify themselves as scientists who use empirical methods--and consequently frame their narrations as legitimate to the degree that they are properly scientific. Not only in the sessions, but also (and perhaps particularly) in the hallways, restaurants, and bars across town, the most common--and emphatic--story I heard went something like this: "Now I respect a lot of different kinds of research, as long as it's empirically supported, but X--- doesn't really respect his data!" Perhaps of particular interest from a social psychology perspective, this invocation of scientific identity was rarely accompanied by acknowledgement of intergroup biases, or "in-group / out-group" effects, that might be particularly helpful for understanding the mechanisms of contest between different modes of knowledge production. Instead, especially as a social scientist from a considerably more post-normal discipline, I glimpsed many performative practices that appear to help mark the presentation of valid research (and that are obviously often lacking in the messier social sciences where neither correlation nor experimentation are most often used to support claims, but instead interpretive analysis).

What warrant!
Emphasizing good science seems to (further) reduce the motivation to explain why a particular approach is a good way to explore a particular question--the "warrant". I know this exposition of alignment between motive and methods is not many people's favorite part of science--for one thing, it often opens up broad arenas for conflict. However, contests over why a particular way to understand a particular question is better than another are also productive, and can be the heart of improvement in the progressive approximation that is the production of science. This explicitness is particularly important in fields that require collaboration or cross-over between different fields (as almost all questions of society-environment do), where multiple expertises have required different and often incommensurate background preparation and knowledge cultures. Disciplinary culture often cultivate implied warrants, since highly coherent disciplines may use similar methods. However, my observations suggest that this culture of implicit warrant encourages over-hasty focus on the calculations and analyses, and less investigation of starting premises and assumptions than is often warranted. It may be that people are discouraged from asking questions about foundational premises by not wanting to appear ignorant of the basics, but it is particularly important to be able to ask when these basics may well exhibit a fundamentally different point of reference (for example, as Michael Burawoy asserts in a recent review of global sociology, "Just as economics takes the standpoint of the economy and the expansion of the market, and politics takes the standpoint of the state and political order, sociology takes the standpoint of civil society and the defense of communicative action." We might add psychology as taking the standpoint of the individual person).

Systemic spillover
How people understand their situation within complex systems is one of the central questions that has compelled me to turn to the behavioral sciences. Given the orders of magnitude in differential impact of behaviors on environments between Euroamericans and others, the question of whether nudging individual consumers to reduce their impacts in minor ways (e.g. through prompting water or energy conservation measures) can scale up to more significant effects has tremendous implications for the future direction of both society-environment policy and scholarship. Although some research on these "spillover" effects--how small improvements might spill over into much more systemic transformations--was presented, it was a tiny proportion of the research dedicated to "sustainability psychology," almost insignificant in comparison to the amount of research dedicated to confirming that specific constructs about environment and society can make measurably changes in people's compliance with social and environmental norms in the laboratory. Although I do not want to downplay the remarkable research expanding our understanding of complicity in and possible change frameworks for the enormous challenges presented by climate change and unequal resource distribution, the contrast between the trivial scale of most interventions and the felt urgency of the challenges may illustrate a few of the significant challenges to addressing social problems from the standpoint of individuals, challenges that I suggest might be made somewhat more approachable by narrating them in somewhat more post-normal science terms:

First, the temporal and spatial scale of thinking about society-environment experience from the perspective of individuals makes it considerably difficult to capture the systemic scale of most socio-environmental dynamics. In almost all of the papers I heard, I felt a palpable urge to ask the scientists involved to take a few steps back in the way they set up their questions--particularly to take critical geographic and historical aspects of socio-environmental dynamics into account.

Second, the impetus to tell adequately scientific stories with authority clearly encourages scholars to tell cleaner rather than messier stories. With all respect to Occam's razor, the cleanest and most parsimonious and flashy stories I heard told were often the most radically problematic (especially, interestingly, when the authors claimed that the conclusions were self-evident, for example in the highly problematic equating of "overpopulation" of short-life, large-family countries with highest environmental impact).

Third, shifting the focus of analysis from the individual to the more systemically entrained individual (and including within the frame of that focus, more metacognitively, the understandings of the researchers involved that shape questions such as those about overpopulation and biophilia), may problematically call into question paradigms of both academic work and also the kind of agentic action in the world that activist scholars would like to encourage.

I am keenly aware in expressing these observations of how easy it is to come across as casting aspersions from the shore as intrepid scholars row themselves about in the shifting currents of a developing field of complex knowledge. I share these observations, however, with the hope that the impressionistic view from shore (or perhaps from another boat sailing by, in this metaphor, encumbered by different currents to row against), helps make visible dynamics that are hard to see from within. For me, so often the voice of setting in this land of character and plot, it was fascinating to step into a storied world where setting was (usually) at best an impressionistic stage set (even in concrete form, sometimes actually limited to a short set of amenity-valenced words such as "butterfly," "mountain," and "tree"). This gave me a much clearer sense of the challenges and implications of focusing on persons as a unit of analysis in socio-environmental work, and I will be interested to see whether inserting explicit awareness of these implications helps address any of the challenges I've noted.

Burawoy, Michael. 2011. The Last Positivist. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 40: 396.

Weber, Max. 2010 [1949]. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry Finch with a new introduction by Robert Antonio and Alan Sica. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

*Thanks to Julian Hermida for the image; searching "metacognition" returned more images of diagrams than anything else I have ever searched. This may explain a lot of my affection for cognitive psychology.

Interactive Fiction

At the end of November, I attended the Fourth International Conference on Digital Interactive Storytelling, in Vancouver (ICDIS 2011, click here). My informants tell me that interactivity is the wave of the future. It's not audio-books or the Kindle that publishers should be worrying about, but the new art-form in which one doesn't just listen to, watch, or read a narrative: one participates and helps to create the narrative that unfolds as one interacts with its characters. This is a theme that Janet Murray, who gave a very engaging talk at the conference, foresaw in her lovely book Hamlet on the holodeck (1997).

Where are we with this new genre? The critical instance is Façade, a interactive one-act play which came out in 2005, written by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, based on Edward Albee's Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. In Façade one is invited into the apartment of a couple, Grace and Trip, who are in the middle of a serious marital quarrel. As with most online games one can walk about in the scene, the perspective of which changes as one moves and—here is the innovative part—in Façade, one can take part in conversations with the characters, and thereby influence what happens. Some of the things one says will result in one's being thrown out of the apartment, others will precipitate one of the apartment's inhabitants leaving, and so on.

Façade took Mateas and Stern three person-years years to write, substantially more than most artistic projects, and it doesn't seem to have been succeeded by anything that builds on it. Yes, the video game industry overtook the movie industry some years ago in its world-wide financial sales. Yes, in video games one can move about, and where one chooses to go affects what one sees and what can happen. That is to say you can go here rather than there. You can face this fierce opponent rather than that one, or find this object you're seeking rather than that one. But, except for engaging in fights, interactivity of person with fictional characters doesn't seem to beckon to the captains of the video game industry. Why not?

Video games engage people in action, often of a violent kind, but also in ways that include problem solving and exploration—you can visit places like virtual Saint Petersburg or virtual Istanbul. Interactivity with fictional characters can be seen as the next big challenge for artificial intelligence. A big accomplishment of artificial intelligence has been to understand how to create visually realistic scenes in which one can move around, scenes that are as detailed and visually convincing as anything one can see in the movies. If you want to see  an example, you can look at trailers of the Tolkien-like world of the video-game SkyRim. But I can't run SkyRim on my computer. It requires too much computing power. One of my informants, who enjoys video games, told me he has at home a very fast computer that he uses specially for such games. Secondly, a great deal of the computing power goes into the visuals, and rather little into understanding language or interpersonal interaction.

In Façade, you converse with the characters, Trip and Grace, by typing on the keyboard, but the program only allows input at certain points. What is understood is picked up from keywords in a way that was demonstrated by Weizenbaum (1966) in his program "Eliza." One of the bases of what happens in Façade derives from Games people play (1964) in which Eric Berne showed how some of people's interpersonal interactions are games of power and dominance. With such game-like interactions together with keywords that the program recognizes, the program calculates indices of affinity between the player and each character, and between characters, which then influence characters' facial expressions, and what they say and do.

Façade seems to me to be full of good ideas. When I played it (after some difficulty downloading it, because it wouldn't run on my fairly new Mac), I found it didn't afford me a very convincing experience of the flow of conversation. Putting this another way, although the ICIDS conference I attended had lots of smart people engaged in various kinds of innovation, it seems that artificial intelligence has some way to go to reach the kind of sophistication in the understanding and generation of language that it has achieved in visual processing, and there seems to be some way to go before a workable theory of story generation is developed, that can generate character interactions in response to player contributions. Hamlet hasn't yet appeared on the holodeck. The next steps may be made by people who are both skilled writers of fiction who are also deeply immersed in artificial intelligence.

Albee, E. (1962). Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. New York: Signet.

Berne, E. (1964). Games people play. New York: Grove Press.

Mateas, M., & Stern, D. (2005). Façade: a one-act interactive drama. Procedural Arts.

Mateas, M., & Stern, D. (2007). Writing Façade: A case study in procedural authorship. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Second person: Role-playing and story in games and playable media (pp. 183-208). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: Free Press.

Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA—A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9, 36-45.