Poetry and the Environmentally Extended Mind

Abstract

Over the last two decades, cognitive scientists working in embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded cognition (the 4Es) have sought to understand mental processes in ways that take us “out of our heads.” They argue that the body and environment beyond the brain are integral components of cognitive processing. In this article, Moses explains how the “postcognitivist” models of mind they are advancing help us appreciate the mediated nature of literary texts and the social and environmental conditions that shape our experience of them. He argues that this new science transforms our understanding of such supposedly “inward” meditative experiences as poetry reading into a more collaborative, individually tailored, and culturally situated activity. By privileging the role that the body and physical and cultural environment play in organizing and constituting thought, these models of cognitive analysis present humanities scholars with a fresh entry point for productive cross-disciplinary engagement with scientists. Such experimentally based theories can expand understanding of how we cognitively encounter texts, here understood in a larger practice-based context. Meanwhile, literary critics can raise into view distinctive cultural objects, such as modernist lyric poems, that meaningfully test the parameters and assumptions of the underlying theories. Moses argues that such poems aim a needed spotlight on the role that affect plays in reading practices and challenge some of the functionalist assumptions of this research. Focusing on poetry’s cognitive complexity may, in turn, contribute to the larger effort, just begun, of resocializing the neurosciences and challenging the “neuroreductionist program.”