A Retinal Twitch, A Misfired Nerve Cell: The Neuroscience of The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper builds upon previous cybernetics scholarship to explore the neuroscience in The Crying of Lot 49, focusing on the neuronal action potential. In 1952, the cybernetics-influenced action potential was elucidated, a process which decreases entropy through feedback loops to transmit information. Lot 49 exemplifies what happens when the action potential stops properly communicating. This communication failure occurs because the clues that the protagonist Oedipa associates with the Tristero organization increase information entropy, which breaks her neuronal feedback loops and subsequently increases the thermodynamic and informatic entropy of her nervous system. Oedipa drinks alcohol in an attempt to combat the Tristero’s entropic effects on herself, but the attempt backfires as the entropy of her nervous system continues to increase and culminates in seizures. Oedipa believes her seizures are divine interventions that provide energy despite the fact that they derive from all the Tristero information saturating her. This misguided belief overtakes Oedipa because the type of epilepsy she suffers from is temporal lobe epilepsy, whose seizures symptomatically impart consciousness loss, amnesia, and religious hallucinations to mask their entropy. Consequently, Lot 49 captures the blossoming of modern neuroscience from cybernetics in the mid-20th century by intertwining neuroscience with its themes of entropy.