Pater Familias

HOW NEUROSCIENCE SUPPORTS VIRGINIA WOOLF. Jonah Lehrer explains how neuroscience supports Virginia Woolf’s view that the mind is, as her character Mrs. Ramsay says, “always ‘merging and flowing and creating.’” Experiments show that short-term memory can hold an experience for about ten seconds. And the neurons which are activated are distributed all over the brain. Lehrer also explains how neuroscience supports Woolf’s view that the self emerges from paying attention. “Whenever we pay attention to a specific stimulus—like a pear on a dinner table—we increase the sensitivity of our own neurons.” When Mrs. Ramsay focuses on the fruit, “she is literally altering her own cells.” That which directs the attention can be considered the self.

THE SELF EMERGES BY PAYING ATTENTION. Jonah Lehrer illustrates Virginia Woolf’s view of the mind with a passage from TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Mrs. Ramsay has stopped paying attention to the dinner table conversation, which is about mathematics. Her eyes drift over a bowl of fruit on the table. “With a ‘sudden exhilaration,’ her mind becomes ‘like a light….piercing through the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral.’” The book follows her glance as she decides she does not want a pear. Lehrer concludes that: “Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention [emphasis in Lehrer].” The self is what selects from the stream of impressions that the mind receives.

COMPETING SELVES OR SIMPLY A MYRIAD OF IMPRESSIONS? I posted recently on the research of psychologists who view the human mind as made up of competing selves. Jonah Lehrer writes in PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST that Virginia Woolf‘s view was that “we emerge from our own fleeting interpretations of the world…. [W]e…invent…a perceiver for our perception. The self….is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.” Lehrer says that for Woolf, “the self is an illusion [emphasis in Lehrer].” Note that Woolf is dealing with a different kind of mental activity than the psychologists who focus on how we make decisions. Woolf is dealing with how we experience the world and how we experience the feeling of being ourselves.

MODERNISM AND THE MIND—AND A BOOK RECOMMENDATION. Almost two years ago, I posted here on how Proust seemed to have anticipated some of the findings of behavioral psychologists described in Daniel Gilbert’s STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS. I then found out and posted that Jonah Lehrer had a book coming out entitled PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST. The book is very rewarding. Lehrer has lots of insights from neuroscience on writers and artists such as Proust, Whitman, Cezanne, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. As an example, Lehrer writes that: “this vision of a mercurial mind, a self divided against itself, was one of the central tenets of modernism.” Lehrer illustrates this proposition with citations to Nietszche, Rimbaud, William James, Freud and T.S. Eliot. And then he connects it all to neuroscience.

THE WILL POWER OF A TRUE STOIC. The Sidestep blog posted here on a good example of the will power of a Stoic for whom an exception to a principle is unthinkable. The example comes from A MAN IN FULL by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe’s character says, “To a Stoic there are no dilemmas. They don’t exist.” Wolfe’s character then tells a story about a Stoic named Aggripinus. A frightened historian rushes in to see Aggripinus and says:
“The most terrible thing has happened. I’ve been summoned to appear in one of Nero’s plays. If I do it, I’ll be humiliated before everybody in Rome that I care about. If I don’t I’ll be killed.”
“I’ve received the same summons,” says Agrippinus.
“My God,” says the historian, “you, too! What do we do?”
“You go ahead and act in the play,” says Agrippinus. “I’m not going to.”
“Why me and not you?” says the historian.
“Because you’ve considered it.”