Stephen Matheson

Souls will come up regularly in this blog, for lots of reasons. For one,
disembodied spirits (wandering souls, I presume) are everywhere in
Shakespeare, and his very conception of death seems to be the separation
of the soul from the body. I can\'t very well bring up Shakespeare
without conjuring ghosts or visions thereof. Such visions are utterly
commonplace in Western literature and thought, and Shakespeare certainly
didn\'t cook them up (I recall spirits fluttering out of dead warriors
in the [Iliad]{style="font-style: italic;"}, and that little piece of
work was conceived just a few millenia before the Bard). The picture of
someone \"giving up the ghost\" ([hilariously
pictured](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VcKz8Jnlu0&NR=1) in [\"Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?\"]{style="font-style: italic;"}, if you remember
that little gem) obviously inspires Romeo:  

> Now, Tybalt, take the villain back again  
> That late thou gav'st me; for Mercutio's soul  
> Is but a little way above our heads,  
> Staying for thine to keep him company:  
> Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him.  
>   
>
> ::: {style="text-align: center;"}
> \--Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene I (The Oxford Shakespeare)  
> :::

::: {style="text-align: left;"}
We need souls in our poetry, even when our poetry has no soul.
[Hamlet]{style="font-style: italic;"} without souls? No such thing.  
:::

  
And of course, we need souls in Christianity. We\'re essentially
[dualists](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29),
meaning that we believe in everlasting souls encamped (or entrapped) in
mortal bodies. Right?  
  
Well, actually, no. I\'m just a biologist, but some of my best friends
are philosophers, Christian philosophers, and darn good ones at that.
It\'s a story for another time, but suffice it to say for now that many
hard-thinking Christians are [advancing a physicalistic (or
\"materialistic\") view of human
persons](http://books.google.com/books?id=Rmn8Kahjdv8C&pg=PP1&dq=kevin+corcoran&sig=eHjk_e1nM1E2ItkHZcjOXJ-7lc4#PPA201,M1),
[some while claiming that biblical evidence for belief in immaterial
souls is quite
thin](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oMc8xEeK1EYC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=joel+green+souls&ots=6UEggmm4_F&sig=S_aBT4gRVDsvC-5AYLTa6blUR3w#PPA127,M1).  
  
But whether or not you\'re an agnostic on immaterial souls, you should
find the notion of \"embodied emotion\" interesting, because:  

- It\'s cool science, and of course you love cool science;
- You\'re a human, and humans, it seems to me, are dualistically
  inclined;
- Souls are linked to various cognitive phenomena, including emotion;  
- You\'re reading a blog called [Quintessence of
  Dust]{style="font-style: italic;"}, for heaven\'s sake.

The [18 May 2007 issue of
[Science]{style="font-style: italic;"}](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol316/issue5827/index.dtl)
features a \"Behavioral Science\" theme, and includes a [brief
review](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5827/1002) of
some new applications of theories of embodied cognition to the study of
human emotion. The author, Paula M. Niedenthal, contrasts such theories
with traditional models of human cognition built around the image of
brains (and minds) as computers, and identifies the following assertion
as distinctive of theories of embodied cognition:  

> \...that high-level cognitive processes (such as thought and language)
> use partial reactivations of states in sensory, motor, and affective
> systems to do their jobs. Put another way, the grounding for knowledge
> \-- what it refers to \-- is the original neural state that occurred
> when the information was initially acquired. If this is true, then
> using knowledge is a lot like reliving past experience in at least
> some (and sometimes all) of its sensory, motor, and affective
> modalities.

The idea, then, is that when you think, you are in some ways reenacting
the scenario or the information itself. You are thinking with your whole
body, not just with the meat-based computational soul-center in your
skull. (As cool as that thing is.) If you are, like I am, a fan of
[Antonio Damasio](http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/bci/) and his
ideas, then you\'re already familiar with this type of thinking and
theorizing, and with the connection he makes between emotion and
consciousness.  
  
So\...body is connected with emotion, emotion with cognition\...doesn\'t
this mean, then, that your body \-- muscles, bones, tendons, mundane
animal machinery \-- can influence, even control, your cognition? Hello,
Professor Descartes? If you just smile, can that make you happy?  
  
Well, consider some of the wild stuff in this article. In one
experiment, subjects were registering their perception of a projected
image by moving a lever. When they saw the image, they were to quickly
move the lever. The participants surely thought the experiment was
measuring their reaction time, and they were partially correct. But they
probably couldn\'t have discerned the variable of interest: whether the
lever was pulled, toward the body, or pushed away. In the experiment,
images were flashed, some that would be emotionally positive, some
negative. Subjects who were pushing the lever away responded more
quickly to negative images, and vice versa.  
  
Maybe I\'m the only one, but that kind of thing really messes with my
dualistic impulses. (And I\'m not a body-soul dualist.) But there\'s
more. The author describes some of her group\'s work, in which activity
in 4 facial muscles was recorded while subjects were judging the
emotional content of certain words. Here\'s her synopsis of the
results:  

> \...individuals embodied the relevant, discrete emotion as indicated
> by their facial expressions\...in the very brief time it took
> participants to decide that a \"slug\" was related to an emotion (less
> than 3 seconds), they expressed disgust on their faces.

The author also describes the elegant control experiment: the subjects
looked at the words in print and determined whether they were written in
all caps. No such embodiment was detected in the facial muscle
recordings.  
  
You might think, \"gee, it must take a lot of time to do all that
embodying work when making decisions.\" You\'d be right: the author
describes experiments that show timing costs associated with switching
systems (or modalities):  

> They are slower to verify that a \"bomb\" can be \"loud\" when they
> have just confirmed that a \"lemon\" can be \"tart\" than compared to
> when, for example, they have just confirmed that \"leaves\" can be
> \"rustling.\"

And you might wonder whether we could alter your emotional state by
forcing you to embody a particular state. Suppose we force you to smile;
will this make you happier? Call me silly, but my initial response to
this hypothesis is to scoff. But wait: inspired scientists are testing
hypotheses very much like this one.  
  
In the last experiment described by Prof. Niedenthal, each subject was
asked to determine whether a sentence described something pleasant or
unpleasant, while holding a pen in his or her mouth. Huh? Have a look at
[Figure 1](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/figsonly/316/5827/1002)
(you don\'t need a subscription to
[Science]{style="font-style: italic;"}): holding a pen with the lips
precludes smiling, and even seems to embody the opposite; holding a pen
with the teeth forces the lips into a smile. I suppose you know what\'s
coming:  

> Reading times for understanding sentences describing pleasant events
> were faster when participants were smiling\...sentences that described
> unpleasant events were understood faster when participants were
> prevented from smiling.

\"Smile and laughter comes thereafter.\" Pretty corny stuff; it can
still make me faintly nauseous (another embodied emotion, clearly). But
maybe it\'s true. And if the eyes are the windows of the soul, what does
that make the jaw muscles?


Souls will come up regularly in this blog, for lots of reasons. For one, disembodied spirits (wandering souls, I presume) are everywhere in Shakespeare, and his very conception of death seems to be the separation of the soul from the body. I can't very well bring up Shakespeare without conjuring ghosts or visions thereof.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Say cheese! Or, evidence that facial muscles are the puppet-strings of the soul