Life, Literature, Consciousness, Language

According to a recent article written by Jeff Grabmeier, "'losing yourself' in a fictional character can affect your real life." New studies performed by researchers at Ohio State University have shown that after reading a book, a person's thoughts, at least temporarily, may start resembling one of the novel's characters. In other words, the reader's 'real life' will be affected by events and people from a fictional world. "In one experiment," Grabmeier opines, "the researchers found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election several days later." These changes, called 'experience-taking' by one of the study's co-authors, Lisa Libby, are ratcheted up if the characters and the situations are similar to the person's outside experiences. In another experiment, 70 heterosexual males were asked to read a story about another student. If the character was revealed to be gay near the end, the students had a higher incidence of 'experience-taking'. Geoff Kaufmen, the graduate student who led the study, said of the results, "Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes." However, it doesn't happen on cue. The person reading must forget about their own person and start to fully identify with the character in the story. This would be why first person stories had a greater effect on the research subjects, and may also explain why many novels and movies contain a 'straight man' that introduce the audience into the author's world.

Our minds have a tough time separating 'reality' from the world of a book, as reported by Annie Paul in her article for the New York Times. When we read words, the same area of our brains that are activated when we experience them 'light up', as shown by Spanish researchers in 2006. “The brain” according to Paul, "... does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley [...] has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that ‘runs on minds of readers just as computers simulations run on computers.’” More research has gone far to prove that the limits of self and perception are still far from known. In one study, subjects fitted with goggles which streamed video directly into their eyes of another body could feel what was being done to it. This is known as the ghost limb phenomenon—when an amputee feels like the part of them missing is still there. “These experiments have demonstrated how remarkably easy it is to ‘move’ a human centre of awareness from one body to another,” a Swedish group of researchers write and is reported in an article in Wired written by Alexis Madrigal. “This speaks directly to the classical question of the relationship between human consciousness and the body, which has been discussed by philosophers, psychologists, and theologians for centuries.” Experiments like the ones I described above may explain the spiritual aspect of reading. These characters, the works themselves, contain figurative spirits which can influence our perceptions of the world around us.



(Susan Schaller, author of Man without Words)

It is often the ego which goes the furthest in influencing our perception of self because it tells how we are doing based on our relative position to those around us and the narrative it constructs of past events. Leonard Shlain, in his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess, says that the invention of the alphabet fundamentally altered the way our consciousness functions. The act of reading requires the pin-pointing of our vision (like hunting) and also allows our mind to conceptualize abstract ideas better, as well as start seeing ourselves as individuals cut off from everything else. I have covered this much better in other blogs and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy goes a long way to show this dichotomy. An article written by Greg Downey for Neuroanthropology.net asks what "human thought would be like without language?" I want to emphasize that there is a huge difference between being literate and being in an oral culture. I am not sure if the author of the article is aware of this, however. Downey, for his part, describes the author Susan Schaller, who wrote Man without Words. In her book, she describes teaching a deaf Mexican man not only sign language, but that there was language at all. In this passage, the man finally comes to the realization of the shared symbology of language:

What happened is that I saw a movement. I stopped. I was talking to an empty chair, but out of my peripheral vision I saw something move. I look at Ildefonso and he had just become rigid! He actually sat up in his chair and became rigid. His hands were flat on the table and his eyes were wide. His facial expression was different from any I’d seen. It was just wide with amazement!

And then he started-it was the most emotional moment with another human being, I think, in my life so that even now, after all these years, I’m choking up [pauses]-he started pointing to everything in the room, and this is amazing to me! I’ve thought about this for years. It’s not having language that separates us from other animals, it’s because we love it! All of a sudden, this twenty-seven-year-old man-who, of course, had seen a wall and a door and a window before-started pointing to everything. He pointed to the table. He wanted me to sign table. He wanted the symbol. He wanted the name for table. And he wanted the symbol, the sign, for window.

The amazing thing is that the look on his face was as if he had never seen a window before. The window became a different thing with a symbol attached to it. [emphasis added, GD] But it’s not just a symbol. It’s a shared symbol. He can say “window” to someone else tomorrow who he hasn’t even met yet! And they will know what a window is. There’s something magical that happens between humans and symbols and the sharing of symbols.

That was his first “Aha!” He just went crazy for a few seconds, pointing to everything in the room and signing whatever I signed. Then he collapsed and started crying, and I don’t mean just a few tears. He cradled his head in his arms on the table and the table was shaking loudly from his sobbing. Of course, I don’t know what was in his head, but I’m just guessing he saw what he had missed for twenty-seven years.

This is the perennial tension between the masculine right and feminine left--a battle which has stretched back to the beginning of time, according the secret tradition as chronicled in Mark Booth's The Secret History of the World. As humanity progressed from a hunter-gatherer society, to an agricultural one, and into the modern world, peoples' minds also began to transform. These changes seemed to coincide with the invention of language, the alphabet, typography, and now, the internet. Of course correlation does not mean causation. However, many have pointed out that a child's ability to form memories happens around the time they begin to talk. Is collective humanity not similar to a child learning to speak? Research by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf (not the Klingon) suggest that "language biases perception, affecting how people are capable of perceiving, making some ideas or even qualities of the phenomenal world, more or less difficult to perceive." For example, Schaller discovered that the deaf man had the hardest time understanding the concept of 'idea' of everything they discussed. She also discovered that Ildefonso found Western man's sense of time to be strange. Schaller gives this example:

I try to meet him once a year and I always ask him, “When was the last time we saw each other?” I ask him a “when” question because it tickles me. Time was the hardest thing for him to learn. And he always prefers to say “the winter season” or “the Christmas time.” He wants to point to a season or to a holiday. It’s not a cognitive problem. To this day, he thinks it’s weird that we count time the way we do. He can do it, but he doesn’t like it. Think about it. For twenty-seven years, he followed the sun. He followed cows. He followed the seasons. It’s that rain-time of the year.

This is similar to an oral society's sense of time. a need for lists, catalogs, laws, and calendars seemed to arrive with literate culture. Shlain goes as far to suggest that the right brain itself is a complex organ to perceive time--"death is the mother of beauty". All tragedy and stress comes from our knowledge that some day we shall die. But a pre-literate culture puts more emphasis on the cyclical aspects of nature, not a beginning and end. This is obvious from their stories passed down to us--they are a patchwork of different voices, meandering, and never truly ending. Rather than being homophonic, like pure speech, they are the polyphonic sounds of the community echoing the natural world. Downey says that "anthropologists still tend to agree that understandings of time can differ, and that Western treatment of time as a kind of flow through undifferentiated, measurable durations is just one version or inflection of the sense of time with its own distinctive emphases." The language we speak preconditions us to think a certain way. It may even blind us to what is directly in front of us, similar to George Orwell's 'Newspeak' which set out to eliminate words so the Authoritarian-controlled populace had less words to use.

In fact, once a culture develops language and then writing, it seems to change the way they think in drastic ways. They actually begin to forget the way they had once thought. Scholler says of her friend, Ildefonso:

The only thing he said, which I think is fascinating and raises more questions than answers, is that he used to be able to talk to his other languageless friends. They found each other over the years. He said to me, “I think differently. I can’t remember how I thought.” I think that’s phenomenal!

Knowingly, Downey says of Scholler's revelation, "Language was not simply an addition to his cognitive repertoire; it may have displaced or disrupted other forms of thought and interaction." When a culture develops an alphabet, it is highly unlikely they will go back to the conditions before there was one.

Leonard Shlain argues that the masculine left brain has been waging a winning war on the feminine right since the invention of written language, with Mark Booth imagining Saturn/Satan/Set (Saturn being the Titan of time and civilization) as a great snake trying to kill the Mother via the Western esoteric tradition. One can examine the works of Francesco Colonna in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili near the invention of typography and see its relation to Marduk's slaying of Tiamat in the Babylonian culture near the invention of the cuneiform and see just how closely they resemble each other. The feminine right brain is linked with the untamed, holistic, natural world. There is no sense of hierarchy, boxing, or separation, only one identity moving in tandem with everything else, a real sense of change NOT building toward something. It is framework of 'home' and 'support'. The masculine left brain is instead tied to order, geometry, hunting, pin-pointing, and the sense of ego and self. Its great desire is a static universe, completely boxed and controlled. It is the conscious and the right is the unconscious (the part of our mind which controls breathing, our heart-rate, walking, blinking, etc.). The feminine is also joined with the spiritual, the invisible/mirror of typical experience, while the masculine puts an emphasis on what can be seen, the material aspect of existence. The magical aspect of reading, where we commune with inner spirits which cannot be explained and can interfere with our lives, is the Mother's sphere playing out in us. The masculine deals with written culture's need for a beginning, middle, and end--a complete story--and Western man often translates this need to his own life.

An abstract God was given birth to by one of the first written cultures, the Hebrews. This culture famously denigrated the female half of consciousness. It symbolically cherished the matzah, a dry, flat bread that resembled the desert the Hebrews walked through. It was also made without yeast, a classic symbol of female sexuality--growth and rising. "Growth is implicitly associated with the female," Shlain writes, "Dough composed of four elemental feminine symbols--water, salt, grain, and yeast--becomes the quintessential foodstuff called 'the staff of life.' Dough rising slowly in an oven is metaphorical for a baby growing in a mother's womb, 'a bun in the oven' in modern parlance" (108). Instead they honored a King-God who offered his servants manna from above. The Hebrews also forced new brides to shave their heads (hair is a symbol for fertility) as well as disallowed females from participating in important religious ceremonies. Pigs, likewise, were forbidden. This may have had to with their love of rolling in mud--another Goddess symbol. Demeter, a Greek Goddess, was often shown with a pig by her side. This change began with written culture's tendency to honor the conscious over the unconscious. The examples I gave above dealing with free-floating identity do not fit well with the masculine ego. It centers identity strictly in the head, with its memories, emotions, and desires. The female half recognizes a more complete picture of existence. The morphing, cyclical world that contains both good and evil things. It is more willing to accept the horrors of life, while the left brain tries to sweep them under the mat until they emerge again, more terrible than before.



An article on The Guardian website titled "The brain... it makes you think. Doesn't it?" has a neuroscientist and former professor of geriatric medicine debate whether the conscious or unconscious has a greater effect on society's actions. David Eagleman, the neuroscientist, says that "a person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection." Raymond Tallis, on the other hand, argues that to understand a single brain is as silly as trying to understand the "whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn." In other words, he argues that the unconscious is unimportant in the scheme of things. The human world is instead driven by the masculine ego--the hunter, the pin-pointer--and its interactions with other egos via social and business-like interaction. Tallis even goes as far to claim that if the unconscious really is such a driver of human action, then how would Eagleman be aware enough to write a whole book about it? I see the tension of the masculine and feminine conscious playing out in a strange way here. Usually it is the humanities-focused person arguing for a more inclusive reality based on reading/unconscious experience and the natural scientist on the other, rallying for the hardline material ego to have its day (which it usually does). Now its the social scientist angered with the scientist's thought of an feminine 'unconscious' controlling the minds of men instead of the masculine 'conscious'. Again, like always, we should meet in the middle.