THE BRAIN IS WIDER THAN THE SKY: ANALOGY, EMOTION, AND ALLEGORY Paul Thagard University of Waterloo [email protected] Draft 6, June, 2010 INTRODUCTION Literary allegories are based on underlying analogies, as in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, whose characters proceed on a journey analogous to the paths of ordinary souls toward heaven. Hence we should be able to get a better understanding of how allegories work by applying cognitive theories of analogical thinking. This article is in part an application to allegory of the multiconstraint theory of analogy developed by Holyoak and Thagard (1995), but it goes beyond that theory by considering neurological as well as psychological processes. I am inspired by Emily Dickinson’s evocative poem that begins: The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. I interpret this stanza as pointing to the enormous representational power of the human brain that enables it to portray, not only the universe, but also the person who does the representing. I will describe how new theories of neural representation, encompassing both cognitive and emotional aspects, have the potential to help make sense of many kinds of literary comparisons, from poetic metaphors to parodies to literary allegories. The main text analyzed in this paper is George Orwell’s Animal Farm, whose effectiveness I will explore using the multiconstraint theory of analogy supplemented June 9, 2010 with observations about neural functioning. I will analyze the structure of Orwell’s allegory using cognitive-affective diagrams that illuminate how he uses the fable about farm animals rebelling against their owners to castigate what he saw as the Stalinist betrayal of the ideals of the Russian revolution. The effectiveness of Orwell’s cognitive and emotional representations depend on underlying neural mechanisms for comparisons and evaluations. Putting these processes together generates a cognitive-affective theory of allegory that not only explains successes such as Animal Farm but also less compelling exercises such as José Saramago’s Blindness. Before diving into literary matters, however, I need to provide a quick review of the relevant cognitive and neural theories. ANALOGY, EMOTION, AND BRAINS To grasp how allegories work in the human mind, we need to understand the workings of analogy, emotions, and the brain in general. What follows is only a brief sketch, reviewing ideas that are developed much more fully elsewhere (e.g. in Gentner, Holyoak, and Kokinov, 2001; Holyoak and Thagard, 1995; Thagard, 2000, 2005, 2006, 2010). Analogies are systematic comparisons in which a source situation provides information about a target situation. In allegories, the source is the literary work created by the writer and the target is some aspect of the human condition; for example spirituality is a target for the source Pilgrim’s Progress and politics is a target for the source Animal Farm. Using the literary source to illuminate the real-life target requires people to generate a mapping between the source and the target that reveals what aspects (characters, properties, relations, events, etc.) of the target correspond to what aspects of 2 the source. Readers of Pilgrim’s Progress need to appreciate that its main character, Christian, represents an ordinary person in real life - an everyman. From the perspective of cognitive processing, analogical mapping is a difficult feat, because there are a great many possible ways in which two complex situations can be put into correspondence with each other. Psychological evidence and computer models suggest that our minds handle this complexity thanks to three constraints that help to direct analogical mapping: similarity, structure, and purpose. These constraints work together to ensure that the properties and relations in a source domain can usefully be transferred over to a target domain. The similarity constraint is most obvious. An element of the source and an element of the target are more likely to be put into correspondence with each other to the extent that they are similar with respect to meaning or appearance. For example, it is easy to think of the character Christian as any ordinary person because they are both people and have all their standard traits and behaviors. Structure is more complex, encouraging correspondences that systematically carry over relations from the source to the target. For example, the reader of Pilgrim’s Progress needs to appreciate that Christian’s travelling from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City has the same relational structure as people journeying from the ordinary world to heaven. Purpose concerns the cognitive function that the allegory is supposed to accomplish. In religious allegories, for instance, the primary function is inspirational and pedagogical, using an imagined example to teach people how to live. The purpose of political allegories may include both explaining aspects of a previous historical situation and providing lessons about how to avoid past mistakes. An additional purpose of an 3 allegory may be entertainment, amusing people to see correspondences between an imagined world and the real one. Analogies often perform their functions by generating emotional reactions, such as awe and fear in religious contexts, inspiration and determination in political contexts, and amusement in entertainment contexts. Hence understanding of allegory requires a theory of emotions, which is a highly controversial topic in current cognitive science. Some theorists defend appraisal theories of emotions, taking them to be judgments that evaluate a situation with respect to how well it accomplishes goals. For example, an event in a novel will make the reader happy if the event involves something good happening to a character that the reader likes and thereby satisfies the reader’s goal of wanting good things to happen to favored characters. In contrast, many theorists defend physiological theories of emotions that construe them as reactions to changes in bodily states such as heart rate and breathing patterns. However, these two approaches can be synthesized by a view of emotions as neural processes that integrate appraisal and physiological perception (Thagard and Aubie, 2008; Thagard, 2010). From this perspective, the emotions generated by allegories and other analogies are the result both of judgments that the reader makes about the allegorical source along with its real-life target and of physiological responses that result from reading or hearing the allegory. If this integrative theory of emotions is correct, then emotions need to be understood as brain processes, not as abstract cognitive states. This development is in keeping with the increasing trend in cognitive psychology to understand mental processes as brain processes, not as computations independent of the underlying physical structure (see e.g. Smith and Kosslyn, 2007; Anderson, 2010). According to cognitive 4 neuroscience, we can think of mental representations such as concepts as patterns of firing activity in populations of neurons. A neural representation is not a static object like a word on paper or a street sign, but is rather a dynamic process involving ongoing change in many neurons and their interconnections. A population of neurons represents something by its pattern of firing. The brain, with its 100 billion neurons, is capable of a huge number of patterns: if each neuron can fire 100 times per second, then the number of firing patterns of that duration is (2100)100000000000 , which is far larger than the number of elementary particles in the universe, only about 1080. I call this result “Dickenson’s theorem”, after the poem I quoted earlier: the brain really does have the capacity to represent the sky, the person, and the universe in general. A pattern of activation in the brain becomes a representation of something when there is a stable causal correlation between the firing of neurons in a neural population and what is represented, such as an object or group of objects in the world (Eliasmith, 2005; Thagard, forthcoming). The view that mental representations are patterns of firing in neural populations is a radical departure from everyday concepts, but is increasingly supported by experimental data and theoretical neuroscience. In sum, the mental processes by which a reader represents, understands, and learns from an allegory depend on brain mechanisms for encoding information and using it to produce analogical inferences and emotional reactions. Let us now see how this view applies to one of the most influential modern allegories, Orwell’s (2008) Animal Farm. 5 ANIMAL FARM Since George Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945, it has been widely recognized as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a scathing allegory for the development of communism in the Soviet Union. The book was based not only on Orwell’s knowledge of Russian history but also on his conflicts with communists while fighting for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War. It is easy to construct the analogical mapping that Orwell used to highlight negative aspects of the Russian revolution. Here are some of the correspondences: the farm is Russia, the humans on the farm are aristocratic rulers of Russia before the revolution, the pigs are the communist revolutionaries, the other animals are the workers, the dogs are the secret police, Napoleon is Stalin (and possibly Lenin too), Snowball is Trotsky (and possibly other dissidents), the human Frederick is Hitler, and Boxer, the horse, is an ideal proletarian supporter of the communists. Much more important than the correspondences of individual entities is the mapping of relations between those entities, including the causal relations between events. In Animal Farm the pigs overthrow the humans, just as in Russia the communists overthrew the aristocrats. Orwell clearly approves of both these initial events, but laments their results: the pigs end up betraying and oppressing the other animals, just as the communists ended up betraying and oppressing the workers. Approval and lamentation are clearly emotional reactions, so the analogy that makes Orwell’s allegory work has strong affective dimensions. These can be displayed using a new technique called cognitive-affective diagrams originally developed for analyzing political disputes (Findlay and Thagard, forthcoming). Concept diagrams 6 have been used for decades to analyze the structure of complex representations, but cognitive-affective diagrams add an additional dimension by indicating the emotional significance of the key concepts. (Concept diagrams are often called maps, but to avoid confusion with analogical mapping, this paper refers to cognitive-affective diagrams rather than maps.) Figure 1 provides a diagram of some of the key relations in Animal Farm, using ovals to represent positive concepts and hexagons to represent negative ones. This figure shows how Orwell portrayed his fable as having not only the same relational structure as the Russian revolution, but also has having what he wanted to convey as the same emotional structure. Pigs and communists start out as emotionally positive, but become negative through betrayal of those whom they are supposed to represent. !"#$ )*'%&$ >8:5@6 !"#$ %&"'%($ +,-./).+0 1-/.%2 3+''*&"$/$ '+&%.3)2 ;A5B6; 3+''*&"$/$ 0+.4-.$ 56789:;<8= 56>:9;? Figure 1. Cognitive-affective diagram showing the analogical mapping between Animal Farm and the Russian revolution. Ovals represent positive concepts and hexagons represent negative ones. The source analog (the narrative) is shown on the top, and the target analog (history) is shown on the bottom, with relations in common. 7 Additional cognitive-affective diagramming can illustrate the broader range of correspondences between the emotional status of events in the book and events in history. For example, Snowball’s challenge to Napoleon leads to his exile. Figure 2 shows correspondences between the novel and the history with respect to individuals, relations between individuals, relations between events, and (just as important) between Orwell’s intended emotional connections between the two situations. It is crucial for the success of the allegory that the correspondence between the historical target and the allegorical source maintains emotional as well as analogical consistency, because otherwise the allegory fails to achieve its emotional purpose. Many additional aspects of the analogy could be illustrated by more detailed cognitive-affective diagrams, but I want instead to move on to say more about the underlying cognitive and neural processes needed to appreciate allegories. !"#$%&'' (&)#'*#" !<86;7 (&)#'*#" !"#$%&'' +,&''*"-* *./'* 01#2345 !2&'/" 0?6@70 !2&'/" 01#2345 ;<(=9>;0 67!890: Figure 2. Cognitive-affective diagram showing the relational and emotional correspondences between events in Orwell’s book and in the Soviet Union. The three analogical constraints of similarity, structure, and purpose are all important to the effectiveness of Orwell’s allegory. There is not much visual similarity 8 between Orwell’s characters and the leaders of the Russian revolution; for example, Napoleon is not described as looking at all like Stalin. Moreover, semantic similarity is somewhat confusing in the mapping between the farm and Russia, because all of the characters in Russia were human, whereas only some of the characters in Animal Farm are human (such as the prerevolutionary rulers); and the revolutionary pigs are not humans, although they often behave like them. However, some of the characters have other features that make them similar, for example the ruthlessness of both Napoleon and Stalin, and the cleverness of both Snowball and Trotsky. The long tradition of anthropomorphizing animals in fables for instructive purposes predisposes readers to notice such correspondences. The key relational concepts, moreover, are close to identical, as shown by the occurrence of overthrow, betray, challenge and exile in the depiction of both the fictional source and the historical target in figures 1 and 2. Those figures also make clear the close and natural structural correspondences between Animal Farm and the Russian revolution. These correspondences roughly obey the two key aspects of the constraint of structure: 1-1 mapping and relational consistency. As allowed in the multiconstraint theory of Holyoak and Thagard (1996) but not in the structure mapping theory of Gentner (1983), 1-1 mapping may occasionally be violated, as in the possibilities that Napoleon seems to carry aspects not only of Stalin but also of Lenin. Snowball seems like a composite of Trotsky and other opponents of Stalin, and Boxer corresponds to many loyal workers rather than a distinct example. Still, this complication does not interfere with basic appreciation of the relational correspondence between Napoleon’s exile of Snowball and Stalin’s exile of Trotsky. 9 Relational consistency is maintained, in that the exile of Snowball by Napoleon maintains the ordering in the exile of Trotsky by Stalin. Most importantly, the cognitive-affective diagrams in figures 1 and 2 clarify why Animal Farm is so effective at carrying out its allegorical function. Orwell’s book was neither a barnyard fantasy designed to amuse children, nor a cold war diatribe against totalitarian Russia. It was written around 1943 at a time when the Soviet Union was allied with Britain and the United States in the war against Nazi Germany, and Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher that did not consider it unduly critical of Stalin’s government. The book’s purpose, in addition to entertainment and aesthetic achievement, was to provide a warning about the way in which the Communist Party could be ruthless about stamping out all opposition, as Orwell had observed in the Spanish Civil War. To this end, emotional correspondences shown in figures 1 and 2 are just as important as the relational ones, carrying the main message of the allegory. Napoleon is clearly a reprehensible figure in Animal Farm, and Orwell similarly wants readers to see Stalin as a ruthless and domineering, not (as he was commonly portrayed in 1943) the benign Uncle Joe mobilizing Russia against Hitler. This emotional component of analogical mapping has been emphasized by various writers (Thagard, 2006, ch. 3; Blanchette and Dunbar, 2001; Bliznashki and Kokinov, 2009). Overt political arguments often have the purpose of transferring positive or (more often) negative attitudes from the source to the target analog. For example the American defeat in Vietnam and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan are often used as emotionally negative source analogs to argue against current foreign involvement in Afghanistan. Political allegories are more subtle, leaving the analogical argument to 10