Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists Claiborne Rice Hogan, Patrick Colm . 2003. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. London and New York: Routledge. $85.00 hc. $19.95 sc. 244 pp. The cognitive revolution that has affected so many areas of contemporary thought is currently capturing literary studies as part of its stronghold. In addition to the many popular cognitive scientists who have extended the discipline's reach into the literary mind, like Steven Pinker or George Lakoff, we have begun to see an impact on current literature and also literary criticism. Patrick Colm Hogan's aptly named book, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists, is a solid introduction to the growing range of artistic forms and functions amenable to explanation in the cognitive sciences. For many years now, Hogan has been a prolific scholar of literature who is fully conversant with what we have come to call "theory." His many books and articles rewardingly engage highly theorized sub-topics within literary studies, such as influence, social and cultural identity, professionalism, law, and colonialism, from a serious philosophical, psychoanalytic, and, now, cognitive scientific perspective. Like all of Hogan's work, the current volume is significantly informed by his easy familiarity with the literature, art, and philosophy of many distinct non-Western traditions. The book argues for the cognitive study of the arts because of the benefits such study offers to both the humanities and the cognitive sciences. Specifically, the issues familiarly addressed by humanists (Hogan's term for [End Page 242] humanities scholars) are rarely treated effectively by neurobiologists or psychologists who see in certain instances of art fodder for their own pet theories. Only practicing humanists comprehend the complexity and range of humanities questions and, as such, can be expected to see how what we are beginning to learn about functions of the mind and body can best be applied to humanistic concerns. Such complexity and range in turn challenges cognitive scientists to refine their models and methods. The book's opening chapter, "My Favorite Things," introduces the procedural model that a cognitivist approach to art suggests by analyzing the form of John Coltrane's famous version of the tune "My Favorite Things." Though much less is known specifically about how humans process music than, say, vision, music is a good place to start because it avoids some of the issues of "meaning" that language processing entails. In the course of introducing readers to certain basic concerns of cognitive science, such as short- and long- term memory structures, segmentation, and structuration, he also offers explanations of basic art appreciation issues like boredom, improvisation, and listener variability. Chapter two, "Is It Cognitive Science Yet?", moves on to a lengthier discussion of elements of cognitive science theory that will play a role in all of the analyses to follow. He introduces an overall framework of cognitive science approaches that helps guide the reader through the labyrinth of technical terminology. Briefly, three stages of analysis pertain to any cognitive science approach to a problem: conceiving of the problem in terms of information processing, specifying the exact steps (an algorithmic sequence) that will lead from input to output, and identifying the cognitive architecture that will be necessary for dealing with the problem. Cognitive architecture, in its turn, is understood as having three separate components: structures, processes, and contents. Structure refers to "the general organizational principles of the mind" (30), such as the distinction between long-term and short-term (working) memory. Content usually refers to representations or symbols that have specific locations in structures. Finally, processes are structurally constrained operations that are performed on contents. For example, our mental storehouse of words, the lexicon, is a substructure of our long-term memory system that provides structural links between individual words; the activation of one word primes, or prepares, many other words for access. The meanings of each word, in this view, are representational contents, and formulating a sentence for pronunciation would be a process that at some point involves accessing the lexicon to retrieve the phonemic profile for the appropriate words. Because of the complexities of mental contents and...