The Literary Mind.pdf

110 THE LITERARY MIND
nation at work. It may seem that this process of combination must be secondary
and parasitic: surely stable and integrated concepts (horse, horn) and small spatial
stories (horses run, horns impale) must be in place and must have arisen by
elementary processes of perception and memory before second-order processes
like integration and blending can work on them.
Only very recently—in the last few years—has neuroscience begun to suggest
that the opposite might be true. It would be a mistake to hang too much at
this stage on the specific details of the various neuroscientific theories that have
arisen, but a general principle is emerging, and it is this: At the most basic levels
of perception, of understanding, and of memory, blending is fundamental.
When we perceive or remember or think about a particular horse or horse in
general, the horse seems to us whole. At the seemingly simple level of vision, a
horse just looks like a visual whole. It is whole in our sight. Our recognition of
it seems whole, not piecemeal or fragmented.
We expect our neurobiology to work at least loosely the way our perception
seems to work, and we think (wrongly) that introspection reveals at least roughly
how our perception works. We expect our phenomenology to indicate the nature of
neurobiology. But it does not. It appears that there may be no anatomical site in
the brain where a perception of a horse or a concept horse resides, and, even more
interestingly, no point where the parts of the perception or concept are anatomically
brought together. The horse looks to us like obviously one thing; yet our
visual perception of it is entirely fragmented across the brain. What the brain
does is not at all what we might have expected. The visual perceptions of color,
texture, movement, form, topological attributes, part-whole structure, and so on
occur in a fragmentary fashion throughout the brain and are not assembled in
any one place. This is a surprise, like the surprise of learning that although the
visual field is projected upside-down onto the retina because of the simple optics
of a lens, there is no place in the brain where that image is reassembled and turned
right-side-up. The qualities we believe our perception to have are in many ways
not at all the qualities that neuroscientists are finding in the neurobiological
activity that underlies perception.
As Gerald Edelman writes, "Objects and many of their properties are perceived
as having a unitary appearance; yet these unitary perceptions are the consequences
of parallel activity in the brain of many different maps, each with different
degrees of functional segregation. Many examples could be cited; a striking
case is the extra-striate visual cortex, with its different areas mediating color,
motion, and form, each in different ways."
How, then, do these fragments end up seeming to us like one perception or
one concept—one horse? This is known in neuroscience as the "binding problem."
The binding problem is part of a more general problem, integration. For