July 820.
So thanks a lot for coming to our second seminar on the theories of unconscious memory.
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.
If you have questions specific to the talk, there'll be time for questions after each talk.
But we'll have a break after the talks and have a drink and with a drink in hand,
begin the discussion where we will hopefully try to relate to peoples to another.
Our chair tonight is Ben Morgan. And so are you able to see that Ben's capable hands?
Thanks. Hello. And thank you for coming to this seminar.
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.
Is that that's a trend.
That's correct. And and has collaborated with Emily amongst other things,
and editing volumes on explorations in cognitive history science and and is a leading figure in thinking
about statistics and rhetoric and how it interfaces with the expanding world of cognitive humanities.
And he's going to be talking further in the field of skills processing.
Thank you for. Briefly, I'd like to thank the balance of the Senate as a great initiative.
I hope to get back on the train to see a couple in the spring that are possible.
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.
Just give me a minute and I'll be back. Okay.
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?
As I said, I'm a professor of rhetoric, and this is at the far end of that is the literary rhetoric,
you know, the style figures, the the structure, the incoming data, and how that affects the process.
And an interest in this question for a bunch of reasons. One, for example, is that the nature of.
Literally reading induced mental imagery, for example, is extremely vague but extremely robust.
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,
film that are made with rejects, know that that's not him, that's not her.
They don't live there. So something is extremely strong and robust, although it's still extremely vague as well.
This question is too too broad.
So I narrowed it down to what happens in the brains and bodies of avid readers during engaged acts of literary reading.
People who really enjoy reading literature and do a lot of it.
Thank you, I presume. Now this all depends on definitions.
What is an avid reader? What is an engaged, active literary reading?
Um, I'm not a social scientist. I'm not going to approach it from that quantitative dimension.
There's a lovely quality. It's quite long, so bear with me. I'll read it aloud.
And this is what I believe an avid reader is.
It's by Harold Brodsky, who's a literary critic.
It's from an essay he wrote called Reading the Most Dangerous Game.
Okay. The act of reading as it really occurs is obscure enough.
Doesn't matter. The decision to read a book in a real minutes, I won't select the book.
I will flirts with a choice. I will dawdled on the odd path of getting it read and then reread the oddities of rereading,
the extreme oddities of the procedures of continuing with or without interruptions to read.
Getting ready to read a middle chapter in its turn after going off a while, then getting hold of the book,
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.
Will well, rifles to remembered scenes from this and other books.
One deals with half memories and the other pleasures and useful is one wonders if one can afford to read.
One considers the limitations and possibilities of this book.
One is humiliated in anticipation or superior, are thrilled in anticipation or nauseated in retrospect,
or as one reads, one has a sense of talk of reviews and essays,
the anticipation or dread and the will to be affected by the thing of reading,
affected lightly or seriously unsettles one's body to some varying degree.
And then one enters the altered temples of reading the subjection of being played upon or passage through phases,
starting with reacting to or ignoring the cover of the book and the opening lines.
This is a humanities version of what I believe an avid reader is,
rather than counting how many books a person reads in a month and how engaged they are during that reading
of a lot more talked about today was partially based on a book I wrote a while ago a literary reading,
cognition and emotion, an exploration of the oceanic mind.
There's just a quote here The theory of the Oceanic Mind maintains that there is a dynamic free
flow of bottom up and top down effective cognitive inputs during engaged acts of literary reading.
And further, that literary itself does not begin when eyes apprehend the words on the page or end when they leave off.
Rather, the mind and brain are actively reading both before and after the physical act of literary text processing starts and ends.
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.
Um, I, I worked out that there are at least five, what I call defective inputs,
the pre reading mood, the location of where a person chooses to read the lies, the literal reading,
mental imagery, and then from the text itself, the themes of the,
of the novel and the characters are embedded in that I suppose, and the style how it's written.
Um, since this I've also, I've also thought that the time is also an important aspect.
This is actually a very rhetorical thing. It's kairos, it goes into the rhetorical situation of a discourse act.
So it's a very old concept going back to the ancient Greeks, really.
I postulated that there was something called a literal reading loop,
and that's what I described in the in the definition that there's a physical reading phase,
there's a pre reading phase, there's a pulse reading phase immediately after the reading.
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.
That's kind of appraisal cognition that that leads to emotion.
So you appraise feeling and then the feeling happens.
And also affective cognition where whether the emotional reaction can happen before the cognitive appraisal
and this had been modelled by Joseph LeDoux in the emotional brain when he talks about the quick and dirty,
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.
And in this of course is also explicit in implicit memory.
I don't want to talk about implicit memory because this this seminar is about on consciousness, of course.
And I wanted to highlight that aspect of my work for, for the, for the seminar.
Now, what is the role of memory during engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers?
Well. This is a very general basic structure of memory, working memory and solid working memory and long term memory,
and have highlighted that in red explicit memory, which also divides into episodic and semantic.
These divisions have been around for about 30 years. You're probably familiar with them.
So I want to talk about digital. Good, good, good, good.
These are standard. So I want to talk about very brief of explicit memory with regard to reading discourse processing.
No reading is learned, of course. We're not born as readers, often with very mixed results.
Some people never learn to read. Some people never learn to read well.
It's a natural. There's a big dispute about whether words, shapes apprehended in the visual cortex.
It's an ongoing dispute between us and music map to the visual cortex and people like Stanislas Tana who say,
yes, they do appear in the in the in the visual cortex.
And Zeki says they don't. Of course, write, reading and writing of very recent developments,
going back to Sumerian scribes, these are just, you know, it's what is it, 6000 years.
It's nothing in in brain evolution in terms to read, you need fixed strategies for processing and comprehension.
My daughter's four, so I'm experiencing this first hand and there are lots and lots and lots of discourse psychological models
out there and this is just one by a Dutch scholar over the broken is called a landscape model of reading.
Like I said, there must be about five or ten of these. And what they all have in common is that specific stages.
Now this landscape model of reading has four stages.
The text carry over from previous sentences, reinstatement from prior cycles and background knowledge.
So what you essentially have is the words, the context with the previous sentence, a bit more context and a limited kind of context.
Nothing too elaborate, maybe something at genre level as a categorisation or something like that.
So it's very constrained. And so the standard was, well, of course the working in, in,
in labs that needed controlled experiments, it's all completely understandable and rational.
Now you can find lots of quotes about the complexity of reading here.
Reading is a complex process, cognitive process in which the reader, through interaction with text constructs, meaning reading,
is extracting information from texts, readings, a complex performance that requires simultaneous coordination across many tasks.
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.
And of course, short term memory plays a role in those interactions between short term and long term memory.
Those are more like talking about in a minute, loans possibly lose a process, a model.
So. Oh, this is this is something that was published quite recently, actually.
It's very interesting studies last year. Hannah is is an autonomous Belgian, a French is a French speaker.
Anyhow, um, he's got a somebody heard of him already, so yeah, yeah.
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,
on, on reading. Now he doesn't look at literature at all.
That's number one. He says that's far too complex. We're not going there.
So, uh, is it work, Mom? We tell him. What? What, lady? I'm going to tell you what he does.
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.
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.
Um, he says there are at least 12 designated areas of the brain involved in, uh, in reading.
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.
And he says the process itself of meaning in the brain is utterly mysterious.
So the the team that's really working on this stuff and.
They don't know how many works. So that gives us some room to theorise.
Humanities scholars. We can step into the. Into the void, I suppose.
I presume. Okay.
Now we're implicit in that. You think that after what I'd said, that most of reading is is quite explicit?
Implicit is, is this primarily a case of procedural memory and priming?
I do a lot of priming, but in a completely different context.
When I teach a course called persuasion in social discourses, it's a rhetoric course with the third year undergraduates.
And we look at how how people are primed by primarily advertisers to make purchases
that they wouldn't ordinarily make about things like nudge theory and stuff.
And that's very, very interesting. And.
A spotlight. A key work in this field that is quite old now is Shackleton's work from the late 19 1990s.
And he maps out most of this together with his colleagues.
Um, I'm not to read these. 11 is going to summarise them a little bit.
Um, he basically says they kind of permeate, um, almost all of our everyday lives.
It's all about kind of personal retreat information from a past experience without being aware
that he or she is relying on memory and almost always experiments of being with amnesic patients.
Very interesting stuff, but not really a bit too clinical for us, I think.
But that's a work completion tasks which are basically more priming.
Very interesting. You know how patients can remember something even though they say, I've never seen it before.
Here are some examples. So a skilled typist typing, a skill driver driving, a skilled cleaning, cleaning,
brushing your teeth, tying shoelaces, knocking front door in the house,
reciting the alphabet, signing your name, reciting a memorised poem and plausibly a skilled,
avid reader, reading a work of fiction, an engaged manner.
Lots of question marks that. Procedural memory.
This is one of the important aspects of of implicit memory.
Guiding the process is automatic retrieval, procedural learning.
The motor regions are involved in this as well, according to some neurobiological experiments and habits.
Of course, doing things over and over and over again ties into that procedural.
Procedural memory priming is interesting.
At first they thought it was just a memory in your visual cortex because you've got little memory systems everywhere in your brain.
It's quite strange you think about it. And a lot of this implicit memory in babies develops much earlier than explicit memory.
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.
So they originally thought of experiments, but priming was only a matter of of memory in the visual cortex.
But it transpires that also semantic memory is involved at some level.
So priming is not just perceptual, but also conceptual.
But here we've got to bear in mind what what the also said about anything meaning semantic
based and how difficult that is to pin down when we're talking about reading specifically.
If this all seems familiar, I suppose somebody else did it in a slightly different way.
Uh. Uh, not too long ago. It always makes me think of the first one.
When I think about implicit memory. Okay.
So back to a question.
How can the most cognitive acts of reading and in this case language that's obliterated by allegory essentially involve implicit memory?
How does that work? How might it work? Well, here are the four categories again.
I'm still thinking about this and I'd be interested in your input.
I think pre-reading certainly has procedural memory and priming.
The reading itself, if you're an experienced reader, it's down to your habits and your skills.
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.
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
says that any preparatory cognitive activity that precedes thinking and perceptions of this there's the stuff going on in your brain,
even though it's at a subconscious level. And I should say at this stage, I should have said it earlier.
I'm not sure whether whether consciousness exists, to be honest.
It's a big debate, isn't it? If it does exist, it's probably very fleeting.
And and. Yeah.
So we can talk about that later, if you like. I want to tell you about the boss of Lou's perceptual symbol system,
because I've used this in other articles and it's helped me quite a bit to model how information.
It gets held in the long term memory and interacts with the buffer regions of short term memory, sometimes becoming conscious, mostly not.
So Barcelona had this perceptual symbol system.
Sonny Max At these buffer regions, the kind of schematic memories of perceived events.
This is interaction between short term and long term memory. You actually say is that during retrieval procedure,
simulations can either become acted unconsciously in implicit memory or consciously in explicit memory.
I very much agree with this. And this is his, uh, not very inspiring, but, uh, but uh, uh, he's his little model.
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.
Um, from encoding to storage to retrieval, which he, he looks at a simulation.
So we, you perceive a physical stimulus in this case.
The Chair Um, he talks about these buffer regions as a speech maps.
In fact, he, he has some different levels there.
Um, and these get stored and then these can be then activated non consciously and they can reach full consciousness or not.
It depends you what, no control over that.
But what does come out of is something very well, not very difficult, slightly different because it's been stored.
You don't have to the shape, but it won't be the same.
So I think that during engaged acts of literary reading by avid readers,
many simulators probably never reach full consciousness, but remain unconscious.
And I really believe that. And that probably goes against almost everything that's been discussed in discourse psychology.
But I think it's these kind of things that are important for the avid military reader.
Implicit memory and emotional memory.
A procedural, but also a priming, but also episodic and autobiographical.
You can't rule out explicit memory completely.
I really do think that the two are working together,
but that we really shouldn't underestimate how important implicit memory or unconsciousness is in a very cognitive act.
So this is a typical model that you see all over the place.
You said it needs to be highlighted in text processing.
I think we have actually taken the 45. Now, finally, I think what's important is to set out a kind of climb,
different reading experiences and kind of hypothesise to what extent implicit memory is involved.
And also why?
Because, you know, you have literature, you have poetry, you have all kinds of everyday texts, you know, shopping lists and stuff like that.
Um, you could call it improves the prescriptions.
And of course there's, there's lots more going on here that I'm even touched on the example,
looking at different kinds of readers with regard to how they process texts, all different kinds of readers.
I've just touched here on women and men.
I just read a book by Linda Jacobs, this university, the woman reader,
and she makes a very good case that throughout history women have read very different to how men have read.
So there's a lot to be looked into.
So not definitive conclusions. Hopefully some food for thought.
And I think I'll end up.
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
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,
the perspective perspectives,
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.
And today, he's going to be talking to us about your affections. Thank you.
Thank you very much. I like to think so. And then for organising this.
Thank you very much for for having me.
Also thank cousin Cheryl Barr, who we did this wonderful event on Proustian Madeleine episode, which was a while ago now,
but it involved smelling and tasting and it was this wonderful way of kind of I of a public
engagement event and trying to evoke autobiographical memories with literary scholars,
neuroscientists and those and the philosopher, those sorts of things.
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.
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
are radically reshaping the context of our thinking of what it means to be a human being.
Once again, the human mind and body are sites of contestation, and there is a great concern for cognition and more specifically, memory.
In a 21st century, major power struggles are currently playing themselves out, and scientists and scholars are staking their claim.
And the memory network is kind of intervening in that.
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.
I've got a website here, and if you go there, you will find films, blogs, writings and indeed, as has been says,
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.
So we kind of aim to map and respond to these new contexts from globalisation to the ageing population,
the digital context, those types of new contexts.
And we try to try to bring the sciences and the arts, humanities and writers together.
And one of these things was what has become known as the Soho Experiment, who is neuroscientist called Hugo Speirs,
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.
And we investigated the role of the posterior hippocampus in navigating space in the outside world.
So I'll tell a bit more about that. We were interested in seeing if neuroscience could offer new reinvigorating perspectives on Psychogeography,
which is a revolutionary attitude to life. Now in its sixth decade, Psychogeography involves mapping and subversion of urban planning,
architecture and non-invasive techniques such as ephemera and eye tracking technologies could
potentially make new discoveries about how urban spaces impact on the subject's psychology.
As a literary scholar, I was interested in placing social work in cognitive literary studies and specifically neuro literary criticism,
which is kind of this growing field. Self will self made his extraordinary claim.
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,
he said, I can feel my hippocampus throbbing and I'm not quite sure if he was ironical or not.
But it was a very interesting thing because it kind of suggested that there is this link between walking space,
walking London, for instance, and the writing of a novel.
So this is maybe in the back of her mind, something that we were interested as well,
the kind of correlation between psycho geographic walking and the act of writing a novel.
Spears's mentor, Eleanor Maguire, she first discovered that the posterior region of the hippocampus is significantly larger in London,
black cab drivers compared to, let's say, bus drivers who drive a fixed route.
Black cab drivers are special because unlike that throughout the world, even if you compare them to other taxi drivers in,
let's say, Holland, who use GPS systems, they have to do the knowledge, which is a three year training program.
You have to learn the 25,000 streets of London and they have to do this gruelling test,
choosing two different points and then naming all the streets in the correct order.
Those types of things. Will Self was aware of this research by Eleanor Maguire and his book.
The novel The Book of Dave is referring to that science.
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.
The psychologically traumatised mind of a woman becomes racist, misogynist,
a religious fanatic and events he writes down book in a book becomes kind of a new
Bible for a community of surviving Londoners after this apocalypse 500 years later.
It didn't surprise us that Self was kind of interested in working with Nero with neuroscientists.
Some of his characters are often described in a quite subsisting manners.
CE So one of the descriptions of Robin was Dave was sunk inside himself,
and Robin also has this serotonin depletion that gives him this kind of history of depression.
The future Londoners in the Book of Dave even adopt this kind of neurological vocabulary, they say.
I believe he committed it to memory. He is Dave and it was London.
As you may be aware, brain scans have confirmed that the posterior hippocampus in London, cabbies can be considered.
And. That's where the book is buried.
And that's where more to it, just his knowledge.
And this is quite interesting. We also see this kind of scepticism about neurocognitive ism.
There is this kind of irony and absurdity in the language here.
The new Londoners 500 years from now don't really understand that a book is buried in your hippocampus.
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.
It's also interesting, perhaps,
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.
And we may want to talk about how that might may work.
So I think Self is not really interested in the clean rationalised space of the of the A to Z,
which have this kind of seductive but fallacious Euclidean logic.
His aim is to fearlessly bore down into the complexities of the psyches through his linguistic pyrotechnics and his idiosyncratic iconography.
As one character says in his novel Dorian, What I want to Know doesn't appear in the A to Z.
More recently, there have been more experiments with or interest in the brains of cabbies.
There was this project called A Cabbie Shelter, which was involved a couple of visual artists and a writer.
One of the artists was Cathy Prendergast,
who created this large scale drawing of the 2320 routes to make up the knowledge which she then superimposed onto the A to Z.
I have got the image with the A to Z and the drawing superimposed, but this is quite interesting.
The runs, these are called runs drawn in translucent ink show the crisscrossing,
overlapping and layering of the routes and the connections between them.
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.
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.
The drawing refers to both the city as an organism and the sinuses of the brain.
And I think this is really interesting. I don't want to get into much detail now,
but but there is this kind of humanist tendency to take humanist organic structures to kind of humanise the metropolis, these incredibly big cities.
And we may want to think about the uses of that and where neuroscience fits fits in, for instance.
So writers and artists are very much drawn to neuroscience,
and they are interested in how neuroscience can help them think about the subjective self and how we relate to the world.
Neuroscientists such As You Go are also drawn to understanding how neuroscience can illuminate artistic processes,
reading activities and how the imagination works.
And I've got a bit of problem with that. We'll explore that later.
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.
So, Fiona Shaw, the. She recited The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot in an ephemeral scanner.
Daniel Margulies and Chris Sharpe have used ephemeral scanning to show how strongly
and beautifully the mind responds to Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring,
for instance. There's all these kinds of experiments involving fMRI scanning.
Neuroscience has much to offer. I think when we think about the relationship between the bodily materiality and relationship
with the mind and the new feel of neuroprosthetics and neuro literate is flourishing.
We are kind of guilty of that as well. We put Will Self in the scanner as I'll show you in a second.
But the consensus, I think,
in the humanities is that we should be cautious in overestimating the new Romania that is kind of currently operating in society.
There are loads of neuroscientist who think that they have revolutionised life and they can
know everything about how the world works and how the mind works and those types of things.
We should resist the idea that all human cognition depends on neural activity activity alone.
Cognition and memory are only partially produced by the brain.
I want to argue, and there are complex workings, phenomenological kind of inputs,
culture, language, gender, which will determine our relationship to the world.
And to invoke Freud, we are prosthetic gods whose mind extends out into the world,
connects with other people and places via our bodies and technologies.
These external factors, which I think are very important, the power of those external forces kickstarted psychogeography in the mid 1950s in Paris.
The Situationist International, led by de Boer, came up with this artistic militant movement which had quite radical, subversive underpinnings.
I know they came from dadaism and surrealism, and they reacted against the modern Cosmopolis, which they thought as a space of alienation.
This is kind of what the board defines psychogeography as it could set for itself
the study of precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organised or not, on the emotions behaviour of individuals.
This makes it sound very scientific, but it isn't. It's kind of mocking science partly,
and it takes up a number of strategies which are ludic playful in order to kind of
get away from the rational strategies that are part of planning and architecture.
The De Reve, for instance, drifts unconscious, drifts through the city and day to animal,
the rerouting and the hijacking of normal hierarchical kind of cultural structures which they turn against itself
and self as kind of an extension of these kinds of ideas of kind of subverting and being politically recalcitrant.
So this is quite interesting. I thought that Self went into the scanner with us.
He had to do this kind of route, walking Soho, memorising specific bits, cafes, corner shops, all sorts of things.
And the next day he was he was scanned and you go used ephemera images in order
to kind of see how has the hippocampus responded to the questions he was asked.
You had to do particular routes and kind of reconstruct those routes afterwards.
There is this this is self brain or a representation of his brain.
I'll come back to that later to kind of talk himself through his decision making processes during that experiment.
And you, those team had two different hypotheses.
He thought that cells, hippocampus would be extremely active because he's a psycho geographer.
He thinks about space, so he's very much conscious of how to make spatial decisions.
He would also be much more engaged in the debrief after the scanning, which would also confirm that kind of hypothesis.
And he was right. This is.
A graph that we end up with, and this is Self's kind of performance.
And so you've kind of got off the map, but he's he's done extremely well, as you can see.
So this is interesting. He's an extremely engaged plotter.
He's thinking about space all the time. So that's very interesting.
I think so. The problem is, of course, there's only one test subject.
He was part of 24 other case studies. But this doesn't say anything about writing.
So the upshot of this is that it's quite limited in terms of what we've proven.
One man's brain doesn't constitute any kind of solid scientific evidence.
And Will he wrote this piece for Esquire as well, chronicling the whole project and experiment.
He also noted the limited ness of the feelings.
So I want to discuss before before discuss the value of the Soho experiment and looking at maybe some future research.
I'd like to identify also some instructive failures of the experiments,
and this involves maybe a kind of a glitch between on walnut neuroscience and the way in which humanities think about space.
Most neuroscience who do this kind of scanning these kinds of experiments, they start with John O'Keefe and Leonardo's.
The hippocampus is a cognitive map from 1978.
And this is quite interesting because O'Keefe and Nadel.
Uh, our interest in psychological space rather than physical space.
But the interesting thing is,
is that they reject the modern notion that any investigation into absolute space should entail a relative or relational theories of space.
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.
And and this is kind of what they formulate in the introduction about the idea that they
basically keep this kind of Euclidean space and relative space doesn't really exist for them.
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.
This is it. And that is quite interesting because for literary scholars and writers and psycho geographers,
they have problems with the rejection, I think, of privileging absolute space.
One of the major modernist revolutions was the incorporation of non-Euclidean geometries and the theory of relativity.
And I think the most famous example is James Joyce's parallax, which replaced subjects and objects into a relational, subjective paradigm.
This is also related to the psycho geographers. I'm really familiar with this theory.
Theorists of Space knows that we cannot simply analyse objects in space, but we must also focus on space itself.
Space is not a passive receptacle, so space is never innocent.
It's not a given, but is produced by laws and powers which inscribe their powers into the behaviour of the individual human being.
So I think that that is very important and I think that maybe neuroscientists can maybe learn from that experience
as well and incorporate that into their working day practice in their in their practices as scientists.
And I think the title, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, is kind of this weird affirmation of the point that self-made earlier,
that people often tend to think of the metaphor that I've got a brain in my brain about a map in my brain.
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.
It's an organ that does that. And so it's interesting that the first two lines in that book are interesting as well.
They say scientific theories have been likened to maps like maps.
They provide a means for finding one's way in an unknown domain.
So, again, this is constant taking, literal metaphor.
So I think this is very important and in many ways the practice of FMA writing does the same thing.
This is something that Boris Kachka has warned us about ephemera.
I can take pictures of the brain at work tracking auction and flows to selected chunks while a patient performs a sign tasks.
This is what we did with self. Of course most active sections are just lit up.
Very beautiful, sometimes in dazzling colours referring to seem to show clumps of neurones and mit thought mirror.
This is Jonah Lehrer, which we will get into warned of the machine's deceptive allure the important
thing and conclude it is not to confuse the map of the place for the map.
Map of the place for the place itself. Thank you very much. So maps are representational.
And I think there is this glitch sometimes which happens in a neuroscientific practice.
There's on other levels as well. The neuroscientists don't really include thinking about language, about linguists kind of structures.
And when you were scanning, just to give an example, one of the 24 cabbies,
they all said or one of them said, yeah, I was scanning my brain, I was scanning my brain.
And clearly the test subjects were taking over that neurological kind of language,
but there was no kind of mechanism to going to think through the implications of that.
So this is important and this is where I think the humanities can have a role to play.
A couple of other points to make is that the dominance of the visual, I think, is also quite detrimental for neuroscience.
We have all sorts of other senses that are active as well, and I think the dominance of the visual,
particularly in ephemera, blinds us to the ephemera and methodologies itself.
Edward Hutchins has done research into the ephemeral practice itself.
He's been looking at how scientists use gestural language and material structures present in a socially and culturally constituted environment,
and they call the ephemeral practice action as cognition.
So the point is that even neuroscientists, they do not just think with their brains, but they also use their bodies gesture.
So the body is very much involved in thinking in the lab as well.
So there's a couple of things that you and I have been talking about and see how we can learn from one another.
And that's kind of an ongoing discussion.
But there is something interesting as well that we kind of discovered and we will self discovered this for us.
He wrote this article, Esquire, as I said,
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.
He said watching Lorelai move the cursor across the screen of a laptop, bringing different bits into my brain or my brain into view.
It occurred to me that it wasn't accidental, that many of the first narrative fictions took the form of journeys picaresque,
in which the heroes have odd encounters along the way for perhaps the very structure and functioning of the human brain is implicit,
implicit in such schemas. And this is a very interesting idea, I think.
And this chimes in with O'Keefe and Abdul's book.
In the first place, they note that the hippocampus is not just the organ that maps place and space,
but it's also the organ that organises the deep structure of language.
So there is maybe this overlap between space and language processing.
They say sentences about the location of objects or the occurrence of events in physical
space have an obvious and natural representation within a spatial map structure.
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.
I don't think I've got too much time to get into that.
The idea of place cells which are made in every space that you enter is being placed in the hippocampus.
I'm wondering how those places can be used during the reading experience.
So when I say London or Trafalgar Square or Amsterdam, it immediately kind of conjures up an image as well.
And I'm wondering how that there's potentially an overlap.
So there's interesting way of bringing reading into thinking about space as well.
So to conclude, the Soho experiment had mixed results.
We will write, as we'll continue to draw experience from the amazing developments taking place in neuroscience,
and we will continue to let it inform our thinking about identity, selfhood, psychology.
It hasn't kind of affirm for me that it's better maybe to think about how the brain is represented
in literature rather than thinking about how literature responds in the brain at this stage.
I think that is very important.
I also hope that neuroscience will incorporate and talk to humanities scholars a bit more and incorporate some of our practices into the discipline.
Mental mapping, I think, is a trope that does unite our disciplines.
So that's important.
And we could, I think, together explore going beyond the binary of simply investigating the brain and culture and culture in the brain.
If we unite these by exploring the interchange between the real experimental experience spaces that we remember, which are.
Title for Construction of Imaginary Worlds through reading, but also vice versa.
And I guess I'm not sure about the thing that that soul was kind of calling out the complete discrepancy,
discreet ness of the imagined world and our kind of real experiences.
That's it. Thank you.