Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Larry Barsalou and Tim McDonough
In the first lunch meeting of the Emory Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture (CMBC), Larry Barsalou (Psychology) and Tim McDonough (Theater Studies) introduced the notion of grounding in scientific psychology and in the theatre.
Larry spoke first about the last-decade shift in cognition from the computer metaphor to embodiment. The computer metaphor assumes cognition that relies on a file-like symbolic organization of concepts and facts. However, there is no evidence for this view. By contrast there is growing empirical evidence for embodied cognition. Larry highlighted three areas:
1. Cognition is grounded in our perceptual system. Scanning the brain of a person who thinks of a piece of chocolate cake reveals a simulation of the experience of chocolate cake. The brain imaging of the person shows activation of the same visual and reward brain circuits that are related to the real experience of looking at a chocolate cake, smelling it, and eating it. A similar simulation is observed when showing a person under the scanner a picture of a hammer. The motor regions that respond to handling a hammer get activated as though the person is really handling a hammer.
2. But people are not limited to brains. We do have bodies. And in well-controlled experiments, when people are asked to think about the elderly, they follow this priming by walking and acting more slowly. When people are asked to push against a table they demonstrate greater negativity to following event than after pulling the table towards themselves.
3. Finally, people do not represent objects in a vacuum. When asked to represent a chair, the chair is described in a room or in the theatre, it’s situated. When people describe worms they look down, and they look up when describing birds. And similarly when they listen to a story about a canyon or a skyscraper.
Larry made two more points: The notion of social mirroring. When we observe the actions of another agent we neurologically emulate the other agent and mirror the actions that we witness. This seems to be the mechanism for generating empathy, and is intimately linked to our ability to simultaneously hold more than one perspective. The ability to hold more than one perspective develops with age and emerges only later as a kid grows up and can add to her or his perspective those of others.
“Embodiment is the heart of acting,” Tim began. Facial expression, gestures, and body language express a whole physical way of being. They are the character’s mask and also his way of occupying space and being in the world. We observe bodies that try to hide; others that try to be noticed. We can also read the emotional biography of a person by observing the person’s body, like the dog’s tail between his legs.
Developing a character through the character’s physical life is called working from the outside in, from the external body to the internal world of the character. This is how Sir Laurence Olivier worked. When you meet a grizzly bear, first you run and only then do you experience the fear. From the physical events one reaches the emotional. Sometimes, for stylistic reasons, one wants to subtract some of the physical expressions. To achieve this, Tim asks his student actors to first act with full involvement of the body, and then retain the feelings and energies by imagining the original body behavior, but this time act while sitting on their hands.
In Henrik Ibsen’s play, the protagonist Peer Gynt peels an onion as a metaphor of his life, where in each peeled layer he identifies a stage of his life. At the end, there is no core. Maybe we are all onions. Life may be a collection of performances. Maybe we are like Dionysus – the patron of the theatre – with no face, only many masks.
The Greeks spoke of unity of time and place in the theatre. If a messenger comes from a different place or time, his mask is different. The story told in the theatre is always in the present no matter where and when it happened. To be in the present is the challenge and the job of the actor. And this is done through the body.
Memories, we have recently learned, are reenacting the events remembered. (A recent article in the New York Times is relevant) .They activate the same brain circuits as the events themselves. Similarly, enacting physical expressions of an emotion brings up the emotion.
So do words. Tim brought an example of King Lear.
And then Tim reminded us that “using these words of rage makes you angry.”
Steve Everett of the music department wondered whether there are health benefits to acting, which as Tim had mentioned is often cathartic. And whether there are possible evolutionary advantages for imitating.
Eugene Winograd (Psychology), John Snarey (Ethics), Dierdra Reher (Portugese Literature), Philippe Rochat (Psychology), Laura Pokalsky (Computing Support), Deborah Thoreson (Music), and Melissa Sexton (Comparative Literature) discussed the somatic nature of social life, relating it to Larry’s mention of mirror neurons and Tim’s emphasis on how essential to the theater the audience is. Bob McCauley (Philosophy) added that even some perceptions, like optical illusions, are not universal and can be culturally effected.
