1 00:00:00,900 --> 00:00:06,430 July 820. 2 00:00:21,400 --> 00:00:27,340 So thanks a lot for coming to our second seminar on the theories of unconscious memory. 3 00:00:28,180 --> 00:00:35,020 I'll just give you an outline of how we're going to proceed today, which is that we're going to talk one after another. 4 00:00:35,320 --> 00:00:39,700 If you have questions specific to the talk, there'll be time for questions after each talk. 5 00:00:40,090 --> 00:00:45,340 But we'll have a break after the talks and have a drink and with a drink in hand, 6 00:00:45,340 --> 00:00:50,920 begin the discussion where we will hopefully try to relate to peoples to another. 7 00:00:51,610 --> 00:01:00,320 Our chair tonight is Ben Morgan. And so are you able to see that Ben's capable hands? 8 00:01:00,770 --> 00:01:04,660 Thanks. Hello. And thank you for coming to this seminar. 9 00:01:04,850 --> 00:01:15,370 Just three of my friends get my notes. And so I'm very pleased to be introducing as I've come to speak to Michael Bourke. 10 00:01:15,820 --> 00:01:20,340 Is that that's a trend. 11 00:01:21,070 --> 00:01:30,160 That's correct. And and has collaborated with Emily amongst other things, 12 00:01:30,160 --> 00:01:39,880 and editing volumes on explorations in cognitive history science and and is a leading figure in thinking 13 00:01:39,890 --> 00:01:47,560 about statistics and rhetoric and how it interfaces with the expanding world of cognitive humanities. 14 00:01:48,700 --> 00:01:54,010 And he's going to be talking further in the field of skills processing. 15 00:01:55,270 --> 00:02:08,230 Thank you for. Briefly, I'd like to thank the balance of the Senate as a great initiative. 16 00:02:09,270 --> 00:02:13,450 I hope to get back on the train to see a couple in the spring that are possible. 17 00:02:15,430 --> 00:02:20,919 I've been a little well the past couple of days, so I feel it's a decision to sit down and have a glass of water. 18 00:02:20,920 --> 00:02:24,870 Just give me a minute and I'll be back. Okay. 19 00:02:30,340 --> 00:02:38,490 For a long while, I've been interested in this particular question what happens in the minds and bodies of readers when they read literature? 20 00:02:41,230 --> 00:02:47,150 As I said, I'm a professor of rhetoric, and this is at the far end of that is the literary rhetoric, 21 00:02:47,150 --> 00:02:53,470 you know, the style figures, the the structure, the incoming data, and how that affects the process. 22 00:02:55,840 --> 00:03:02,290 And an interest in this question for a bunch of reasons. One, for example, is that the nature of. 23 00:03:03,940 --> 00:03:09,220 Literally reading induced mental imagery, for example, is extremely vague but extremely robust. 24 00:03:09,820 --> 00:03:17,740 You know, many anecdotes, it's not been scientifically proven, but there are many anecdotes of people who have gone to see their favourite novel, 25 00:03:17,740 --> 00:03:21,160 film that are made with rejects, know that that's not him, that's not her. 26 00:03:21,430 --> 00:03:27,340 They don't live there. So something is extremely strong and robust, although it's still extremely vague as well. 27 00:03:28,990 --> 00:03:30,910 This question is too too broad. 28 00:03:32,680 --> 00:03:40,680 So I narrowed it down to what happens in the brains and bodies of avid readers during engaged acts of literary reading. 29 00:03:40,690 --> 00:03:44,380 People who really enjoy reading literature and do a lot of it. 30 00:03:45,310 --> 00:03:51,820 Thank you, I presume. Now this all depends on definitions. 31 00:03:51,840 --> 00:03:56,890 What is an avid reader? What is an engaged, active literary reading? 32 00:03:57,590 --> 00:04:03,700 Um, I'm not a social scientist. I'm not going to approach it from that quantitative dimension. 33 00:04:05,440 --> 00:04:08,979 There's a lovely quality. It's quite long, so bear with me. I'll read it aloud. 34 00:04:08,980 --> 00:04:11,980 And this is what I believe an avid reader is. 35 00:04:11,980 --> 00:04:15,730 It's by Harold Brodsky, who's a literary critic. 36 00:04:16,570 --> 00:04:20,830 It's from an essay he wrote called Reading the Most Dangerous Game. 37 00:04:21,880 --> 00:04:27,880 Okay. The act of reading as it really occurs is obscure enough. 38 00:04:27,880 --> 00:04:32,770 Doesn't matter. The decision to read a book in a real minutes, I won't select the book. 39 00:04:32,770 --> 00:04:39,429 I will flirts with a choice. I will dawdled on the odd path of getting it read and then reread the oddities of rereading, 40 00:04:39,430 --> 00:04:44,440 the extreme oddities of the procedures of continuing with or without interruptions to read. 41 00:04:45,130 --> 00:04:50,800 Getting ready to read a middle chapter in its turn after going off a while, then getting hold of the book, 42 00:04:50,800 --> 00:04:58,360 physically having in one's hands, I think one's mind filled with thoughts in a sort of warm up for the exercise of mind to come. 43 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:02,500 Will well, rifles to remembered scenes from this and other books. 44 00:05:02,500 --> 00:05:10,150 One deals with half memories and the other pleasures and useful is one wonders if one can afford to read. 45 00:05:10,420 --> 00:05:14,140 One considers the limitations and possibilities of this book. 46 00:05:14,560 --> 00:05:20,260 One is humiliated in anticipation or superior, are thrilled in anticipation or nauseated in retrospect, 47 00:05:20,680 --> 00:05:27,409 or as one reads, one has a sense of talk of reviews and essays, 48 00:05:27,410 --> 00:05:32,260 the anticipation or dread and the will to be affected by the thing of reading, 49 00:05:32,740 --> 00:05:38,350 affected lightly or seriously unsettles one's body to some varying degree. 50 00:05:38,350 --> 00:05:44,739 And then one enters the altered temples of reading the subjection of being played upon or passage through phases, 51 00:05:44,740 --> 00:05:49,420 starting with reacting to or ignoring the cover of the book and the opening lines. 52 00:05:51,160 --> 00:05:55,780 This is a humanities version of what I believe an avid reader is, 53 00:05:55,780 --> 00:06:02,770 rather than counting how many books a person reads in a month and how engaged they are during that reading 54 00:06:04,870 --> 00:06:11,169 of a lot more talked about today was partially based on a book I wrote a while ago a literary reading, 55 00:06:11,170 --> 00:06:14,830 cognition and emotion, an exploration of the oceanic mind. 56 00:06:14,860 --> 00:06:21,519 There's just a quote here The theory of the Oceanic Mind maintains that there is a dynamic free 57 00:06:21,520 --> 00:06:27,730 flow of bottom up and top down effective cognitive inputs during engaged acts of literary reading. 58 00:06:28,210 --> 00:06:34,810 And further, that literary itself does not begin when eyes apprehend the words on the page or end when they leave off. 59 00:06:35,260 --> 00:06:44,170 Rather, the mind and brain are actively reading both before and after the physical act of literary text processing starts and ends. 60 00:06:47,030 --> 00:06:51,650 I went on to model this and I'll show you this very briefly. I'm not going to go into it, but it'll come back at the end. 61 00:06:52,610 --> 00:07:01,310 Um, I, I worked out that there are at least five, what I call defective inputs, 62 00:07:01,640 --> 00:07:09,770 the pre reading mood, the location of where a person chooses to read the lies, the literal reading, 63 00:07:10,130 --> 00:07:16,040 mental imagery, and then from the text itself, the themes of the, 64 00:07:16,070 --> 00:07:21,050 of the novel and the characters are embedded in that I suppose, and the style how it's written. 65 00:07:21,830 --> 00:07:28,640 Um, since this I've also, I've also thought that the time is also an important aspect. 66 00:07:28,940 --> 00:07:36,260 This is actually a very rhetorical thing. It's kairos, it goes into the rhetorical situation of a discourse act. 67 00:07:36,350 --> 00:07:39,950 So it's a very old concept going back to the ancient Greeks, really. 68 00:07:44,830 --> 00:07:48,070 I postulated that there was something called a literal reading loop, 69 00:07:48,280 --> 00:07:53,320 and that's what I described in the in the definition that there's a physical reading phase, 70 00:07:53,740 --> 00:07:57,580 there's a pre reading phase, there's a pulse reading phase immediately after the reading. 71 00:07:57,790 --> 00:08:11,549 And there's a a period when you're not reading. And I also modelled in the roles of, on the one hand, cognitive emotion. 72 00:08:11,550 --> 00:08:17,760 That's kind of appraisal cognition that that leads to emotion. 73 00:08:17,760 --> 00:08:21,780 So you appraise feeling and then the feeling happens. 74 00:08:22,140 --> 00:08:29,459 And also affective cognition where whether the emotional reaction can happen before the cognitive appraisal 75 00:08:29,460 --> 00:08:37,770 and this had been modelled by Joseph LeDoux in the emotional brain when he talks about the quick and dirty, 76 00:08:37,770 --> 00:08:47,940 but basically that he believes that that those messages can skip a lot of high cortical processes and go straight to the motivators like the amygdala. 77 00:08:49,260 --> 00:08:52,680 And in this of course is also explicit in implicit memory. 78 00:08:53,220 --> 00:08:59,490 I don't want to talk about implicit memory because this this seminar is about on consciousness, of course. 79 00:08:59,490 --> 00:09:04,110 And I wanted to highlight that aspect of my work for, for the, for the seminar. 80 00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:12,030 Now, what is the role of memory during engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers? 81 00:09:13,200 --> 00:09:24,280 Well. This is a very general basic structure of memory, working memory and solid working memory and long term memory, 82 00:09:26,050 --> 00:09:32,410 and have highlighted that in red explicit memory, which also divides into episodic and semantic. 83 00:09:32,410 --> 00:09:37,360 These divisions have been around for about 30 years. You're probably familiar with them. 84 00:09:37,360 --> 00:09:40,860 So I want to talk about digital. Good, good, good, good. 85 00:09:40,870 --> 00:09:49,960 These are standard. So I want to talk about very brief of explicit memory with regard to reading discourse processing. 86 00:09:51,270 --> 00:09:58,530 No reading is learned, of course. We're not born as readers, often with very mixed results. 87 00:09:59,220 --> 00:10:02,370 Some people never learn to read. Some people never learn to read well. 88 00:10:03,730 --> 00:10:10,230 It's a natural. There's a big dispute about whether words, shapes apprehended in the visual cortex. 89 00:10:11,190 --> 00:10:19,240 It's an ongoing dispute between us and music map to the visual cortex and people like Stanislas Tana who say, 90 00:10:19,280 --> 00:10:22,559 yes, they do appear in the in the in the visual cortex. 91 00:10:22,560 --> 00:10:27,680 And Zeki says they don't. Of course, write, reading and writing of very recent developments, 92 00:10:27,900 --> 00:10:32,430 going back to Sumerian scribes, these are just, you know, it's what is it, 6000 years. 93 00:10:32,430 --> 00:10:42,810 It's nothing in in brain evolution in terms to read, you need fixed strategies for processing and comprehension. 94 00:10:43,650 --> 00:10:52,799 My daughter's four, so I'm experiencing this first hand and there are lots and lots and lots of discourse psychological models 95 00:10:52,800 --> 00:11:02,370 out there and this is just one by a Dutch scholar over the broken is called a landscape model of reading. 96 00:11:02,370 --> 00:11:08,940 Like I said, there must be about five or ten of these. And what they all have in common is that specific stages. 97 00:11:09,450 --> 00:11:12,360 Now this landscape model of reading has four stages. 98 00:11:13,350 --> 00:11:20,670 The text carry over from previous sentences, reinstatement from prior cycles and background knowledge. 99 00:11:20,680 --> 00:11:30,900 So what you essentially have is the words, the context with the previous sentence, a bit more context and a limited kind of context. 100 00:11:32,160 --> 00:11:36,360 Nothing too elaborate, maybe something at genre level as a categorisation or something like that. 101 00:11:37,410 --> 00:11:44,490 So it's very constrained. And so the standard was, well, of course the working in, in, 102 00:11:45,430 --> 00:11:51,500 in labs that needed controlled experiments, it's all completely understandable and rational. 103 00:11:52,800 --> 00:11:58,770 Now you can find lots of quotes about the complexity of reading here. 104 00:11:58,770 --> 00:12:06,389 Reading is a complex process, cognitive process in which the reader, through interaction with text constructs, meaning reading, 105 00:12:06,390 --> 00:12:14,930 is extracting information from texts, readings, a complex performance that requires simultaneous coordination across many tasks. 106 00:12:14,940 --> 00:12:28,019 So you you get the you get the picture that that reading is as far as discourse psychologies are concerned, a very explicit memory based thing. 107 00:12:28,020 --> 00:12:34,230 And of course, short term memory plays a role in those interactions between short term and long term memory. 108 00:12:34,650 --> 00:12:42,240 Those are more like talking about in a minute, loans possibly lose a process, a model. 109 00:12:43,770 --> 00:12:49,679 So. Oh, this is this is something that was published quite recently, actually. 110 00:12:49,680 --> 00:12:56,669 It's very interesting studies last year. Hannah is is an autonomous Belgian, a French is a French speaker. 111 00:12:56,670 --> 00:13:01,770 Anyhow, um, he's got a somebody heard of him already, so yeah, yeah. 112 00:13:02,370 --> 00:13:13,019 Um, publishes a lot of articles and a lot which from available on his website and he's got a huge team and he's constantly doing work on, 113 00:13:13,020 --> 00:13:16,260 on, on reading. Now he doesn't look at literature at all. 114 00:13:16,800 --> 00:13:20,760 That's number one. He says that's far too complex. We're not going there. 115 00:13:21,270 --> 00:13:25,020 So, uh, is it work, Mom? We tell him. What? What, lady? I'm going to tell you what he does. 116 00:13:25,020 --> 00:13:35,700 But he doesn't look at literature. Um, he looks at basic words and small phrases and how those are apprehended in the visual cortex. 117 00:13:35,700 --> 00:13:43,890 This is the like I say, he's trying to find word forms in the visual cortex, even though the guy who not the visual cortex say said it's impossible. 118 00:13:44,580 --> 00:13:53,100 Um, he says there are at least 12 designated areas of the brain involved in, uh, in reading. 119 00:13:54,930 --> 00:14:05,880 Um, and this is my favourite quote from, from his work to as work he said he talks about the whole problem of meaning and how it gets coded. 120 00:14:06,600 --> 00:14:11,640 And he says the process itself of meaning in the brain is utterly mysterious. 121 00:14:13,470 --> 00:14:17,640 So the the team that's really working on this stuff and. 122 00:14:19,850 --> 00:14:25,150 They don't know how many works. So that gives us some room to theorise. 123 00:14:25,520 --> 00:14:30,280 Humanities scholars. We can step into the. Into the void, I suppose. 124 00:14:30,330 --> 00:14:35,820 I presume. Okay. 125 00:14:36,110 --> 00:14:46,770 Now we're implicit in that. You think that after what I'd said, that most of reading is is quite explicit? 126 00:14:47,670 --> 00:14:53,550 Implicit is, is this primarily a case of procedural memory and priming? 127 00:14:54,570 --> 00:14:57,120 I do a lot of priming, but in a completely different context. 128 00:14:57,120 --> 00:15:03,180 When I teach a course called persuasion in social discourses, it's a rhetoric course with the third year undergraduates. 129 00:15:05,070 --> 00:15:11,399 And we look at how how people are primed by primarily advertisers to make purchases 130 00:15:11,400 --> 00:15:15,750 that they wouldn't ordinarily make about things like nudge theory and stuff. 131 00:15:15,750 --> 00:15:18,880 And that's very, very interesting. And. 132 00:15:21,740 --> 00:15:30,440 A spotlight. A key work in this field that is quite old now is Shackleton's work from the late 19 1990s. 133 00:15:31,340 --> 00:15:34,880 And he maps out most of this together with his colleagues. 134 00:15:36,420 --> 00:15:40,730 Um, I'm not to read these. 11 is going to summarise them a little bit. 135 00:15:41,330 --> 00:15:47,870 Um, he basically says they kind of permeate, um, almost all of our everyday lives. 136 00:15:48,290 --> 00:15:53,869 It's all about kind of personal retreat information from a past experience without being aware 137 00:15:53,870 --> 00:16:00,320 that he or she is relying on memory and almost always experiments of being with amnesic patients. 138 00:16:01,130 --> 00:16:06,230 Very interesting stuff, but not really a bit too clinical for us, I think. 139 00:16:06,230 --> 00:16:11,240 But that's a work completion tasks which are basically more priming. 140 00:16:11,960 --> 00:16:18,590 Very interesting. You know how patients can remember something even though they say, I've never seen it before. 141 00:16:23,100 --> 00:16:28,890 Here are some examples. So a skilled typist typing, a skill driver driving, a skilled cleaning, cleaning, 142 00:16:29,460 --> 00:16:33,600 brushing your teeth, tying shoelaces, knocking front door in the house, 143 00:16:34,500 --> 00:16:40,379 reciting the alphabet, signing your name, reciting a memorised poem and plausibly a skilled, 144 00:16:40,380 --> 00:16:43,680 avid reader, reading a work of fiction, an engaged manner. 145 00:16:44,040 --> 00:16:49,410 Lots of question marks that. Procedural memory. 146 00:16:50,790 --> 00:16:56,100 This is one of the important aspects of of implicit memory. 147 00:16:57,450 --> 00:17:03,780 Guiding the process is automatic retrieval, procedural learning. 148 00:17:04,680 --> 00:17:11,549 The motor regions are involved in this as well, according to some neurobiological experiments and habits. 149 00:17:11,550 --> 00:17:18,540 Of course, doing things over and over and over again ties into that procedural. 150 00:17:18,930 --> 00:17:21,180 Procedural memory priming is interesting. 151 00:17:21,240 --> 00:17:28,740 At first they thought it was just a memory in your visual cortex because you've got little memory systems everywhere in your brain. 152 00:17:28,750 --> 00:17:37,130 It's quite strange you think about it. And a lot of this implicit memory in babies develops much earlier than explicit memory. 153 00:17:37,140 --> 00:17:44,370 I think as explicit memory doesn't start until about nine months into night, that there's also a memory system in the amygdala, I think. 154 00:17:47,490 --> 00:17:54,270 So they originally thought of experiments, but priming was only a matter of of memory in the visual cortex. 155 00:17:54,270 --> 00:17:58,500 But it transpires that also semantic memory is involved at some level. 156 00:17:59,070 --> 00:18:02,460 So priming is not just perceptual, but also conceptual. 157 00:18:02,670 --> 00:18:10,020 But here we've got to bear in mind what what the also said about anything meaning semantic 158 00:18:10,020 --> 00:18:15,390 based and how difficult that is to pin down when we're talking about reading specifically. 159 00:18:17,760 --> 00:18:22,230 If this all seems familiar, I suppose somebody else did it in a slightly different way. 160 00:18:22,650 --> 00:18:28,260 Uh. Uh, not too long ago. It always makes me think of the first one. 161 00:18:29,310 --> 00:18:33,240 When I think about implicit memory. Okay. 162 00:18:33,240 --> 00:18:35,220 So back to a question. 163 00:18:35,790 --> 00:18:43,220 How can the most cognitive acts of reading and in this case language that's obliterated by allegory essentially involve implicit memory? 164 00:18:43,230 --> 00:18:51,300 How does that work? How might it work? Well, here are the four categories again. 165 00:18:53,530 --> 00:18:56,740 I'm still thinking about this and I'd be interested in your input. 166 00:18:58,090 --> 00:19:02,620 I think pre-reading certainly has procedural memory and priming. 167 00:19:03,610 --> 00:19:08,140 The reading itself, if you're an experienced reader, it's down to your habits and your skills. 168 00:19:09,340 --> 00:19:16,300 Pulse reading. I'm not quite sure about that. It's a non-conscious kind of resonance after a fact where you stay in the novel. 169 00:19:16,310 --> 00:19:27,220 So if it's if it's a moulded you and you've and it has a powerful ending a non reading the something in kind of a psychological set of set 170 00:19:28,030 --> 00:19:35,739 says that any preparatory cognitive activity that precedes thinking and perceptions of this there's the stuff going on in your brain, 171 00:19:35,740 --> 00:19:41,380 even though it's at a subconscious level. And I should say at this stage, I should have said it earlier. 172 00:19:41,590 --> 00:19:44,650 I'm not sure whether whether consciousness exists, to be honest. 173 00:19:45,310 --> 00:19:50,620 It's a big debate, isn't it? If it does exist, it's probably very fleeting. 174 00:19:50,620 --> 00:19:53,850 And and. Yeah. 175 00:19:54,050 --> 00:20:06,010 So we can talk about that later, if you like. I want to tell you about the boss of Lou's perceptual symbol system, 176 00:20:06,010 --> 00:20:12,940 because I've used this in other articles and it's helped me quite a bit to model how information. 177 00:20:15,680 --> 00:20:26,390 It gets held in the long term memory and interacts with the buffer regions of short term memory, sometimes becoming conscious, mostly not. 178 00:20:27,930 --> 00:20:32,650 So Barcelona had this perceptual symbol system. 179 00:20:32,660 --> 00:20:38,300 Sonny Max At these buffer regions, the kind of schematic memories of perceived events. 180 00:20:39,470 --> 00:20:46,010 This is interaction between short term and long term memory. You actually say is that during retrieval procedure, 181 00:20:46,010 --> 00:20:52,710 simulations can either become acted unconsciously in implicit memory or consciously in explicit memory. 182 00:20:52,730 --> 00:21:03,170 I very much agree with this. And this is his, uh, not very inspiring, but, uh, but uh, uh, he's his little model. 183 00:21:04,070 --> 00:21:11,650 Now, a chair is very different from a literary word. Of course, there's a huge jump there, which you can talk about, but this is how he sees it. 184 00:21:11,660 --> 00:21:20,360 Um, from encoding to storage to retrieval, which he, he looks at a simulation. 185 00:21:20,840 --> 00:21:24,739 So we, you perceive a physical stimulus in this case. 186 00:21:24,740 --> 00:21:30,049 The Chair Um, he talks about these buffer regions as a speech maps. 187 00:21:30,050 --> 00:21:32,810 In fact, he, he has some different levels there. 188 00:21:33,530 --> 00:21:45,950 Um, and these get stored and then these can be then activated non consciously and they can reach full consciousness or not. 189 00:21:46,100 --> 00:21:48,710 It depends you what, no control over that. 190 00:21:49,100 --> 00:21:54,440 But what does come out of is something very well, not very difficult, slightly different because it's been stored. 191 00:21:54,440 --> 00:21:57,440 You don't have to the shape, but it won't be the same. 192 00:22:00,890 --> 00:22:05,570 So I think that during engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers, 193 00:22:05,570 --> 00:22:10,670 many simulators probably never reach full consciousness, but remain unconscious. 194 00:22:11,800 --> 00:22:19,640 And I really believe that. And that probably goes against almost everything that's been discussed in discourse psychology. 195 00:22:20,450 --> 00:22:24,560 But I think it's these kind of things that are important for the avid military reader. 196 00:22:25,100 --> 00:22:28,310 Implicit memory and emotional memory. 197 00:22:28,520 --> 00:22:33,670 A procedural, but also a priming, but also episodic and autobiographical. 198 00:22:33,680 --> 00:22:37,460 You can't rule out explicit memory completely. 199 00:22:37,490 --> 00:22:39,500 I really do think that the two are working together, 200 00:22:39,500 --> 00:22:51,080 but that we really shouldn't underestimate how important implicit memory or unconsciousness is in a very cognitive act. 201 00:22:53,330 --> 00:23:00,290 So this is a typical model that you see all over the place. 202 00:23:01,010 --> 00:23:04,580 You said it needs to be highlighted in text processing. 203 00:23:05,160 --> 00:23:21,220 I think we have actually taken the 45. Now, finally, I think what's important is to set out a kind of climb, 204 00:23:21,340 --> 00:23:28,540 different reading experiences and kind of hypothesise to what extent implicit memory is involved. 205 00:23:28,540 --> 00:23:29,320 And also why? 206 00:23:29,800 --> 00:23:37,690 Because, you know, you have literature, you have poetry, you have all kinds of everyday texts, you know, shopping lists and stuff like that. 207 00:23:38,320 --> 00:23:41,830 Um, you could call it improves the prescriptions. 208 00:23:42,760 --> 00:23:48,490 And of course there's, there's lots more going on here that I'm even touched on the example, 209 00:23:49,210 --> 00:23:55,960 looking at different kinds of readers with regard to how they process texts, all different kinds of readers. 210 00:23:55,960 --> 00:23:59,890 I've just touched here on women and men. 211 00:23:59,890 --> 00:24:05,140 I just read a book by Linda Jacobs, this university, the woman reader, 212 00:24:05,140 --> 00:24:12,340 and she makes a very good case that throughout history women have read very different to how men have read. 213 00:24:12,550 --> 00:24:15,850 So there's a lot to be looked into. 214 00:24:16,660 --> 00:24:20,260 So not definitive conclusions. Hopefully some food for thought. 215 00:24:21,460 --> 00:24:23,020 And I think I'll end up. 216 00:24:29,770 --> 00:24:45,730 Introducing passengers to some friends and family is currently leading a big project on memory and it's he's watched lots of aspects of 217 00:24:46,060 --> 00:24:59,020 post-school courses much of the construction of London as long as we talk about it because if we focus on the on memory in the 21st century, 218 00:24:59,030 --> 00:25:00,020 the perspective perspectives, 219 00:25:00,100 --> 00:25:09,940 the aftermath and the first fruits of this new project will appear soon enough to twist in the memory of Tom McCarthy for a moment. 220 00:25:10,450 --> 00:25:14,260 And today, he's going to be talking to us about your affections. Thank you. 221 00:25:14,620 --> 00:25:18,879 Thank you very much. I like to think so. And then for organising this. 222 00:25:18,880 --> 00:25:20,260 Thank you very much for for having me. 223 00:25:20,560 --> 00:25:29,590 Also thank cousin Cheryl Barr, who we did this wonderful event on Proustian Madeleine episode, which was a while ago now, 224 00:25:29,590 --> 00:25:36,549 but it involved smelling and tasting and it was this wonderful way of kind of I of a public 225 00:25:36,550 --> 00:25:41,260 engagement event and trying to evoke autobiographical memories with literary scholars, 226 00:25:41,260 --> 00:25:44,829 neuroscientists and those and the philosopher, those sorts of things. 227 00:25:44,830 --> 00:25:53,080 So. So that's really wonderful. And once again, Michael, already, because you've given me a couple of ideas about, about reading and memory. 228 00:25:53,080 --> 00:26:02,350 So thank you very much and I hope to talk to you afterwards. So a contemporary period is characterised by a multiplicity of revolutions that together 229 00:26:02,350 --> 00:26:07,270 are radically reshaping the context of our thinking of what it means to be a human being. 230 00:26:08,380 --> 00:26:15,370 Once again, the human mind and body are sites of contestation, and there is a great concern for cognition and more specifically, memory. 231 00:26:15,370 --> 00:26:23,650 In a 21st century, major power struggles are currently playing themselves out, and scientists and scholars are staking their claim. 232 00:26:24,220 --> 00:26:27,910 And the memory network is kind of intervening in that. 233 00:26:27,910 --> 00:26:37,180 And we try to kind of bring scientists, scholars, artists and writers together to think about memory in the 21st century, engage in those debates. 234 00:26:38,800 --> 00:26:46,720 I've got a website here, and if you go there, you will find films, blogs, writings and indeed, as has been says, 235 00:26:46,720 --> 00:26:57,460 that will be a collective anthology of our writings, where we have written around clusters of themes which will be coming out in the next year. 236 00:26:58,390 --> 00:27:05,290 So we kind of aim to map and respond to these new contexts from globalisation to the ageing population, 237 00:27:05,710 --> 00:27:09,940 the digital context, those types of new contexts. 238 00:27:10,870 --> 00:27:16,269 And we try to try to bring the sciences and the arts, humanities and writers together. 239 00:27:16,270 --> 00:27:25,179 And one of these things was what has become known as the Soho Experiment, who is neuroscientist called Hugo Speirs, 240 00:27:25,180 --> 00:27:34,540 who works at UCL, the writer and psycho geographer Will Self, who I'm sure you will know, and a literary scholar, which was me. 241 00:27:34,540 --> 00:27:43,629 And we investigated the role of the posterior hippocampus in navigating space in the outside world. 242 00:27:43,630 --> 00:27:53,680 So I'll tell a bit more about that. We were interested in seeing if neuroscience could offer new reinvigorating perspectives on Psychogeography, 243 00:27:53,680 --> 00:28:02,620 which is a revolutionary attitude to life. Now in its sixth decade, Psychogeography involves mapping and subversion of urban planning, 244 00:28:02,620 --> 00:28:08,109 architecture and non-invasive techniques such as ephemera and eye tracking technologies could 245 00:28:08,110 --> 00:28:15,130 potentially make new discoveries about how urban spaces impact on the subject's psychology. 246 00:28:15,790 --> 00:28:24,459 As a literary scholar, I was interested in placing social work in cognitive literary studies and specifically neuro literary criticism, 247 00:28:24,460 --> 00:28:33,720 which is kind of this growing field. Self will self made his extraordinary claim. 248 00:28:33,720 --> 00:28:41,760 When you and I discussed the project at the start, he says, when he was writing a novel, sort of keeping neutral control over 100,000 words, 249 00:28:41,760 --> 00:28:48,719 he said, I can feel my hippocampus throbbing and I'm not quite sure if he was ironical or not. 250 00:28:48,720 --> 00:28:56,520 But it was a very interesting thing because it kind of suggested that there is this link between walking space, 251 00:28:56,520 --> 00:28:59,579 walking London, for instance, and the writing of a novel. 252 00:28:59,580 --> 00:29:03,440 So this is maybe in the back of her mind, something that we were interested as well, 253 00:29:03,610 --> 00:29:11,400 the kind of correlation between psycho geographic walking and the act of writing a novel. 254 00:29:13,140 --> 00:29:24,150 Spears's mentor, Eleanor Maguire, she first discovered that the posterior region of the hippocampus is significantly larger in London, 255 00:29:24,150 --> 00:29:29,130 black cab drivers compared to, let's say, bus drivers who drive a fixed route. 256 00:29:30,180 --> 00:29:38,190 Black cab drivers are special because unlike that throughout the world, even if you compare them to other taxi drivers in, 257 00:29:38,190 --> 00:29:45,960 let's say, Holland, who use GPS systems, they have to do the knowledge, which is a three year training program. 258 00:29:46,140 --> 00:29:51,000 You have to learn the 25,000 streets of London and they have to do this gruelling test, 259 00:29:52,440 --> 00:29:56,399 choosing two different points and then naming all the streets in the correct order. 260 00:29:56,400 --> 00:30:04,920 Those types of things. Will Self was aware of this research by Eleanor Maguire and his book. 261 00:30:06,140 --> 00:30:09,960 The novel The Book of Dave is referring to that science. 262 00:30:10,350 --> 00:30:20,160 It features a London black cab driver, Dave Rudman, who is whose depressed, psychotic mind slowly unravels after his wife takes away his son, Carl. 263 00:30:23,680 --> 00:30:28,660 The psychologically traumatised mind of a woman becomes racist, misogynist, 264 00:30:28,840 --> 00:30:35,409 a religious fanatic and events he writes down book in a book becomes kind of a new 265 00:30:35,410 --> 00:30:41,260 Bible for a community of surviving Londoners after this apocalypse 500 years later. 266 00:30:42,550 --> 00:30:48,310 It didn't surprise us that Self was kind of interested in working with Nero with neuroscientists. 267 00:30:49,960 --> 00:30:54,490 Some of his characters are often described in a quite subsisting manners. 268 00:30:56,720 --> 00:31:04,900 CE So one of the descriptions of Robin was Dave was sunk inside himself, 269 00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:11,620 and Robin also has this serotonin depletion that gives him this kind of history of depression. 270 00:31:13,180 --> 00:31:20,260 The future Londoners in the Book of Dave even adopt this kind of neurological vocabulary, they say. 271 00:31:20,590 --> 00:31:25,990 I believe he committed it to memory. He is Dave and it was London. 272 00:31:26,230 --> 00:31:32,559 As you may be aware, brain scans have confirmed that the posterior hippocampus in London, cabbies can be considered. 273 00:31:32,560 --> 00:31:36,070 And. That's where the book is buried. 274 00:31:36,310 --> 00:31:40,390 And that's where more to it, just his knowledge. 275 00:31:40,990 --> 00:31:47,200 And this is quite interesting. We also see this kind of scepticism about neurocognitive ism. 276 00:31:47,620 --> 00:31:51,070 There is this kind of irony and absurdity in the language here. 277 00:31:52,720 --> 00:31:59,780 The new Londoners 500 years from now don't really understand that a book is buried in your hippocampus. 278 00:31:59,800 --> 00:32:11,230 It's kind of this metaphor which becomes literal, and that's kind of a surreal way of thinking and self as obviously a surrealist and an absurdist. 279 00:32:12,130 --> 00:32:14,170 It's also interesting, perhaps, 280 00:32:14,170 --> 00:32:27,219 that self uses the word buried in a sense that self is interested in unconscious knowledge being hidden behind a surface layer of the conscious mind. 281 00:32:27,220 --> 00:32:30,310 And we may want to talk about how that might may work. 282 00:32:30,640 --> 00:32:36,820 So I think Self is not really interested in the clean rationalised space of the of the A to Z, 283 00:32:37,960 --> 00:32:42,640 which have this kind of seductive but fallacious Euclidean logic. 284 00:32:43,060 --> 00:32:52,090 His aim is to fearlessly bore down into the complexities of the psyches through his linguistic pyrotechnics and his idiosyncratic iconography. 285 00:32:52,450 --> 00:32:58,720 As one character says in his novel Dorian, What I want to Know doesn't appear in the A to Z. 286 00:33:00,610 --> 00:33:07,030 More recently, there have been more experiments with or interest in the brains of cabbies. 287 00:33:07,270 --> 00:33:16,810 There was this project called A Cabbie Shelter, which was involved a couple of visual artists and a writer. 288 00:33:17,710 --> 00:33:20,140 One of the artists was Cathy Prendergast, 289 00:33:20,830 --> 00:33:30,590 who created this large scale drawing of the 2320 routes to make up the knowledge which she then superimposed onto the A to Z. 290 00:33:30,610 --> 00:33:39,069 I have got the image with the A to Z and the drawing superimposed, but this is quite interesting. 291 00:33:39,070 --> 00:33:44,170 The runs, these are called runs drawn in translucent ink show the crisscrossing, 292 00:33:44,170 --> 00:33:47,710 overlapping and layering of the routes and the connections between them. 293 00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:57,200 The work is reminiscent of an anatomical drawing of veins defined by the boundary of the six mile radius of London that cab drivers learn. 294 00:33:57,850 --> 00:34:06,730 Check. Charing Cross is the centre of London in that respect and the image of the at 25 of the map itself conjures up the image of a brain. 295 00:34:07,480 --> 00:34:12,990 The drawing refers to both the city as an organism and the sinuses of the brain. 296 00:34:14,020 --> 00:34:19,389 And I think this is really interesting. I don't want to get into much detail now, 297 00:34:19,390 --> 00:34:29,260 but but there is this kind of humanist tendency to take humanist organic structures to kind of humanise the metropolis, these incredibly big cities. 298 00:34:29,260 --> 00:34:37,690 And we may want to think about the uses of that and where neuroscience fits fits in, for instance. 299 00:34:38,410 --> 00:34:42,160 So writers and artists are very much drawn to neuroscience, 300 00:34:43,390 --> 00:34:50,680 and they are interested in how neuroscience can help them think about the subjective self and how we relate to the world. 301 00:34:51,610 --> 00:34:59,470 Neuroscientists such As You Go are also drawn to understanding how neuroscience can illuminate artistic processes, 302 00:34:59,620 --> 00:35:03,730 reading activities and how the imagination works. 303 00:35:05,380 --> 00:35:08,560 And I've got a bit of problem with that. We'll explore that later. 304 00:35:09,460 --> 00:35:20,110 They do want to explore how culture works in the brain, how a novel takes place in the brain, and how music, for instance, affects the mind. 305 00:35:20,120 --> 00:35:27,230 So, Fiona Shaw, the. She recited The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot in an ephemeral scanner. 306 00:35:27,940 --> 00:35:33,519 Daniel Margulies and Chris Sharpe have used ephemeral scanning to show how strongly 307 00:35:33,520 --> 00:35:38,049 and beautifully the mind responds to Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, 308 00:35:38,050 --> 00:35:43,840 for instance. There's all these kinds of experiments involving fMRI scanning. 309 00:35:45,310 --> 00:35:52,209 Neuroscience has much to offer. I think when we think about the relationship between the bodily materiality and relationship 310 00:35:52,210 --> 00:35:58,030 with the mind and the new feel of neuroprosthetics and neuro literate is flourishing. 311 00:36:00,100 --> 00:36:06,700 We are kind of guilty of that as well. We put Will Self in the scanner as I'll show you in a second. 312 00:36:07,450 --> 00:36:08,830 But the consensus, I think, 313 00:36:12,190 --> 00:36:22,390 in the humanities is that we should be cautious in overestimating the new Romania that is kind of currently operating in society. 314 00:36:23,890 --> 00:36:30,070 There are loads of neuroscientist who think that they have revolutionised life and they can 315 00:36:30,070 --> 00:36:35,140 know everything about how the world works and how the mind works and those types of things. 316 00:36:36,160 --> 00:36:41,560 We should resist the idea that all human cognition depends on neural activity activity alone. 317 00:36:42,880 --> 00:36:46,330 Cognition and memory are only partially produced by the brain. 318 00:36:46,360 --> 00:36:51,580 I want to argue, and there are complex workings, phenomenological kind of inputs, 319 00:36:51,880 --> 00:36:56,140 culture, language, gender, which will determine our relationship to the world. 320 00:36:57,040 --> 00:37:03,790 And to invoke Freud, we are prosthetic gods whose mind extends out into the world, 321 00:37:04,060 --> 00:37:08,290 connects with other people and places via our bodies and technologies. 322 00:37:10,420 --> 00:37:22,330 These external factors, which I think are very important, the power of those external forces kickstarted psychogeography in the mid 1950s in Paris. 323 00:37:22,930 --> 00:37:34,150 The Situationist International, led by de Boer, came up with this artistic militant movement which had quite radical, subversive underpinnings. 324 00:37:36,230 --> 00:37:47,650 I know they came from dadaism and surrealism, and they reacted against the modern Cosmopolis, which they thought as a space of alienation. 325 00:37:49,390 --> 00:37:55,870 This is kind of what the board defines psychogeography as it could set for itself 326 00:37:55,870 --> 00:38:00,280 the study of precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, 327 00:38:01,390 --> 00:38:06,070 consciously organised or not, on the emotions behaviour of individuals. 328 00:38:07,780 --> 00:38:13,899 This makes it sound very scientific, but it isn't. It's kind of mocking science partly, 329 00:38:13,900 --> 00:38:20,320 and it takes up a number of strategies which are ludic playful in order to kind of 330 00:38:20,500 --> 00:38:26,440 get away from the rational strategies that are part of planning and architecture. 331 00:38:27,130 --> 00:38:32,620 The De Reve, for instance, drifts unconscious, drifts through the city and day to animal, 332 00:38:33,700 --> 00:38:42,580 the rerouting and the hijacking of normal hierarchical kind of cultural structures which they turn against itself 333 00:38:43,120 --> 00:38:53,230 and self as kind of an extension of these kinds of ideas of kind of subverting and being politically recalcitrant. 334 00:38:54,520 --> 00:39:02,290 So this is quite interesting. I thought that Self went into the scanner with us. 335 00:39:03,070 --> 00:39:11,860 He had to do this kind of route, walking Soho, memorising specific bits, cafes, corner shops, all sorts of things. 336 00:39:12,250 --> 00:39:18,969 And the next day he was he was scanned and you go used ephemera images in order 337 00:39:18,970 --> 00:39:26,620 to kind of see how has the hippocampus responded to the questions he was asked. 338 00:39:26,620 --> 00:39:31,840 You had to do particular routes and kind of reconstruct those routes afterwards. 339 00:39:32,770 --> 00:39:38,110 There is this this is self brain or a representation of his brain. 340 00:39:38,120 --> 00:39:48,030 I'll come back to that later to kind of talk himself through his decision making processes during that experiment. 341 00:39:48,490 --> 00:39:52,630 And you, those team had two different hypotheses. 342 00:39:54,130 --> 00:40:01,450 He thought that cells, hippocampus would be extremely active because he's a psycho geographer. 343 00:40:01,450 --> 00:40:06,340 He thinks about space, so he's very much conscious of how to make spatial decisions. 344 00:40:07,300 --> 00:40:16,900 He would also be much more engaged in the debrief after the scanning, which would also confirm that kind of hypothesis. 345 00:40:17,350 --> 00:40:22,030 And he was right. This is. 346 00:40:22,360 --> 00:40:28,900 A graph that we end up with, and this is Self's kind of performance. 347 00:40:29,350 --> 00:40:34,690 And so you've kind of got off the map, but he's he's done extremely well, as you can see. 348 00:40:35,410 --> 00:40:44,120 So this is interesting. He's an extremely engaged plotter. 349 00:40:45,200 --> 00:40:50,160 He's thinking about space all the time. So that's very interesting. 350 00:40:50,870 --> 00:40:57,500 I think so. The problem is, of course, there's only one test subject. 351 00:40:58,340 --> 00:41:04,190 He was part of 24 other case studies. But this doesn't say anything about writing. 352 00:41:05,480 --> 00:41:10,760 So the upshot of this is that it's quite limited in terms of what we've proven. 353 00:41:12,440 --> 00:41:16,370 One man's brain doesn't constitute any kind of solid scientific evidence. 354 00:41:16,730 --> 00:41:23,810 And Will he wrote this piece for Esquire as well, chronicling the whole project and experiment. 355 00:41:24,590 --> 00:41:27,320 He also noted the limited ness of the feelings. 356 00:41:28,610 --> 00:41:38,300 So I want to discuss before before discuss the value of the Soho experiment and looking at maybe some future research. 357 00:41:39,140 --> 00:41:44,330 I'd like to identify also some instructive failures of the experiments, 358 00:41:45,140 --> 00:41:54,530 and this involves maybe a kind of a glitch between on walnut neuroscience and the way in which humanities think about space. 359 00:41:56,060 --> 00:42:05,420 Most neuroscience who do this kind of scanning these kinds of experiments, they start with John O'Keefe and Leonardo's. 360 00:42:05,420 --> 00:42:09,140 The hippocampus is a cognitive map from 1978. 361 00:42:09,920 --> 00:42:14,780 And this is quite interesting because O'Keefe and Nadel. 362 00:42:18,910 --> 00:42:24,430 Uh, our interest in psychological space rather than physical space. 363 00:42:25,330 --> 00:42:26,530 But the interesting thing is, 364 00:42:26,530 --> 00:42:36,940 is that they reject the modern notion that any investigation into absolute space should entail a relative or relational theories of space. 365 00:42:37,720 --> 00:42:47,830 So for O'Keefe and Adele, the concept of absolute space is primary, and its elaboration does not depend on prior notions of relative space. 366 00:42:47,830 --> 00:42:56,080 And and this is kind of what they formulate in the introduction about the idea that they 367 00:42:57,100 --> 00:43:06,970 basically keep this kind of Euclidean space and relative space doesn't really exist for them. 368 00:43:08,230 --> 00:43:16,360 So they they do agree that we move throughout space. We're in this room, we've got subjective perceptions, but the room itself is the room. 369 00:43:16,360 --> 00:43:23,980 This is it. And that is quite interesting because for literary scholars and writers and psycho geographers, 370 00:43:25,180 --> 00:43:30,460 they have problems with the rejection, I think, of privileging absolute space. 371 00:43:30,700 --> 00:43:38,650 One of the major modernist revolutions was the incorporation of non-Euclidean geometries and the theory of relativity. 372 00:43:39,070 --> 00:43:48,520 And I think the most famous example is James Joyce's parallax, which replaced subjects and objects into a relational, subjective paradigm. 373 00:43:50,500 --> 00:43:56,410 This is also related to the psycho geographers. I'm really familiar with this theory. 374 00:43:56,620 --> 00:44:05,680 Theorists of Space knows that we cannot simply analyse objects in space, but we must also focus on space itself. 375 00:44:06,340 --> 00:44:11,380 Space is not a passive receptacle, so space is never innocent. 376 00:44:11,800 --> 00:44:21,940 It's not a given, but is produced by laws and powers which inscribe their powers into the behaviour of the individual human being. 377 00:44:22,690 --> 00:44:32,950 So I think that that is very important and I think that maybe neuroscientists can maybe learn from that experience 378 00:44:32,950 --> 00:44:40,750 as well and incorporate that into their working day practice in their in their practices as scientists. 379 00:44:41,200 --> 00:44:53,020 And I think the title, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, is kind of this weird affirmation of the point that self-made earlier, 380 00:44:54,460 --> 00:45:01,180 that people often tend to think of the metaphor that I've got a brain in my brain about a map in my brain. 381 00:45:01,360 --> 00:45:12,579 They kind of think that that is real in a sense. And we don't have a cognitive we don't have a copy of map in a hippocampus. 382 00:45:12,580 --> 00:45:21,250 It's an organ that does that. And so it's interesting that the first two lines in that book are interesting as well. 383 00:45:21,250 --> 00:45:25,420 They say scientific theories have been likened to maps like maps. 384 00:45:25,420 --> 00:45:29,530 They provide a means for finding one's way in an unknown domain. 385 00:45:29,980 --> 00:45:34,690 So, again, this is constant taking, literal metaphor. 386 00:45:34,700 --> 00:45:41,360 So I think this is very important and in many ways the practice of FMA writing does the same thing. 387 00:45:42,310 --> 00:45:47,560 This is something that Boris Kachka has warned us about ephemera. 388 00:45:47,560 --> 00:45:55,690 I can take pictures of the brain at work tracking auction and flows to selected chunks while a patient performs a sign tasks. 389 00:45:55,690 --> 00:46:00,100 This is what we did with self. Of course most active sections are just lit up. 390 00:46:00,250 --> 00:46:10,209 Very beautiful, sometimes in dazzling colours referring to seem to show clumps of neurones and mit thought mirror. 391 00:46:10,210 --> 00:46:17,830 This is Jonah Lehrer, which we will get into warned of the machine's deceptive allure the important 392 00:46:17,830 --> 00:46:21,640 thing and conclude it is not to confuse the map of the place for the map. 393 00:46:22,590 --> 00:46:27,510 Map of the place for the place itself. Thank you very much. So maps are representational. 394 00:46:27,510 --> 00:46:34,590 And I think there is this glitch sometimes which happens in a neuroscientific practice. 395 00:46:35,490 --> 00:46:46,670 There's on other levels as well. The neuroscientists don't really include thinking about language, about linguists kind of structures. 396 00:46:46,680 --> 00:46:53,340 And when you were scanning, just to give an example, one of the 24 cabbies, 397 00:46:53,940 --> 00:46:58,979 they all said or one of them said, yeah, I was scanning my brain, I was scanning my brain. 398 00:46:58,980 --> 00:47:04,950 And clearly the test subjects were taking over that neurological kind of language, 399 00:47:05,490 --> 00:47:09,660 but there was no kind of mechanism to going to think through the implications of that. 400 00:47:11,040 --> 00:47:18,600 So this is important and this is where I think the humanities can have a role to play. 401 00:47:20,340 --> 00:47:30,450 A couple of other points to make is that the dominance of the visual, I think, is also quite detrimental for neuroscience. 402 00:47:30,840 --> 00:47:37,530 We have all sorts of other senses that are active as well, and I think the dominance of the visual, 403 00:47:37,680 --> 00:47:45,810 particularly in ephemera, blinds us to the ephemera and methodologies itself. 404 00:47:47,310 --> 00:47:53,850 Edward Hutchins has done research into the ephemeral practice itself. 405 00:47:55,050 --> 00:48:04,010 He's been looking at how scientists use gestural language and material structures present in a socially and culturally constituted environment, 406 00:48:04,380 --> 00:48:08,420 and they call the ephemeral practice action as cognition. 407 00:48:08,430 --> 00:48:17,310 So the point is that even neuroscientists, they do not just think with their brains, but they also use their bodies gesture. 408 00:48:17,610 --> 00:48:22,440 So the body is very much involved in thinking in the lab as well. 409 00:48:23,550 --> 00:48:31,230 So there's a couple of things that you and I have been talking about and see how we can learn from one another. 410 00:48:31,470 --> 00:48:33,360 And that's kind of an ongoing discussion. 411 00:48:34,140 --> 00:48:41,220 But there is something interesting as well that we kind of discovered and we will self discovered this for us. 412 00:48:42,180 --> 00:48:44,700 He wrote this article, Esquire, as I said, 413 00:48:45,780 --> 00:48:58,680 and he had this idea when he was watching his brain being kind of being analysed by Lorelei, was he was a neurologist in charge. 414 00:48:59,370 --> 00:49:07,590 He said watching Lorelai move the cursor across the screen of a laptop, bringing different bits into my brain or my brain into view. 415 00:49:07,860 --> 00:49:14,760 It occurred to me that it wasn't accidental, that many of the first narrative fictions took the form of journeys picaresque, 416 00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:22,440 in which the heroes have odd encounters along the way for perhaps the very structure and functioning of the human brain is implicit, 417 00:49:22,770 --> 00:49:28,410 implicit in such schemas. And this is a very interesting idea, I think. 418 00:49:28,470 --> 00:49:31,790 And this chimes in with O'Keefe and Abdul's book. 419 00:49:32,340 --> 00:49:41,010 In the first place, they note that the hippocampus is not just the organ that maps place and space, 420 00:49:41,430 --> 00:49:46,320 but it's also the organ that organises the deep structure of language. 421 00:49:46,330 --> 00:49:51,300 So there is maybe this overlap between space and language processing. 422 00:49:52,590 --> 00:49:57,690 They say sentences about the location of objects or the occurrence of events in physical 423 00:49:57,690 --> 00:50:02,940 space have an obvious and natural representation within a spatial map structure. 424 00:50:05,160 --> 00:50:15,090 This is very interesting, I think. So this may enable us to think about how we can use the hippocampus in different ways and place cells. 425 00:50:15,570 --> 00:50:17,970 I don't think I've got too much time to get into that. 426 00:50:18,180 --> 00:50:26,850 The idea of place cells which are made in every space that you enter is being placed in the hippocampus. 427 00:50:27,600 --> 00:50:33,990 I'm wondering how those places can be used during the reading experience. 428 00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:41,790 So when I say London or Trafalgar Square or Amsterdam, it immediately kind of conjures up an image as well. 429 00:50:41,790 --> 00:50:46,890 And I'm wondering how that there's potentially an overlap. 430 00:50:46,900 --> 00:50:54,510 So there's interesting way of bringing reading into thinking about space as well. 431 00:50:55,890 --> 00:50:59,730 So to conclude, the Soho experiment had mixed results. 432 00:51:00,990 --> 00:51:07,860 We will write, as we'll continue to draw experience from the amazing developments taking place in neuroscience, 433 00:51:08,250 --> 00:51:14,790 and we will continue to let it inform our thinking about identity, selfhood, psychology. 434 00:51:16,650 --> 00:51:24,360 It hasn't kind of affirm for me that it's better maybe to think about how the brain is represented 435 00:51:24,360 --> 00:51:29,790 in literature rather than thinking about how literature responds in the brain at this stage. 436 00:51:31,260 --> 00:51:33,150 I think that is very important. 437 00:51:33,810 --> 00:51:44,730 I also hope that neuroscience will incorporate and talk to humanities scholars a bit more and incorporate some of our practices into the discipline. 438 00:51:45,720 --> 00:51:49,200 Mental mapping, I think, is a trope that does unite our disciplines. 439 00:51:49,200 --> 00:51:50,280 So that's important. 440 00:51:51,240 --> 00:51:59,970 And we could, I think, together explore going beyond the binary of simply investigating the brain and culture and culture in the brain. 441 00:52:00,600 --> 00:52:09,510 If we unite these by exploring the interchange between the real experimental experience spaces that we remember, which are. 442 00:52:10,120 --> 00:52:16,100 Title for Construction of Imaginary Worlds through reading, but also vice versa. 443 00:52:16,110 --> 00:52:24,090 And I guess I'm not sure about the thing that that soul was kind of calling out the complete discrepancy, 444 00:52:24,270 --> 00:52:29,460 discreet ness of the imagined world and our kind of real experiences. 445 00:52:30,210 --> 00:52:31,230 That's it. Thank you.