Karin Kukkonen
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on a page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Rolf Reber, Professor in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Oslo, and our topic is the question of how one studies the artful mind in a scientific way, or from a psychological perspective. Thank you for joining us, Rolf.
Rolf Reber
You're welcome.
Karin Kukkonen
So the artful mind is a title of an article, that you published a couple of years ago, and I'd like to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit more about what an artful mind is – and why is it interesting to study that?
Rolf Reber
The artful mind is a mind that looks beyond the artwork. At its making, and in the context of its making, it is a mind that tries to understand an artwork, and not a mind that just reacts to it – as some theories in neuroscience would have it.
Karin Kukkonen
Tell us a little bit more about those theories in neuroscience. What does it mean to react to an artwork, as opposed to understand it? I think that's the expression that you used.
Rolf Reber
An artwork is an artefact made by an artist who has an intention to make that artwork, and who creates it according to his or her plans. And this artist is also influenced by a culture, by a history, and it would be interesting to look beyond the artwork. To look at these intentions, at the history. And this is also important to understand the artwork. So, this is what I mean with the artful mind – that it is a mind that understands the artwork and does not only react to it.
Karin Kukkonen
So this would be the mind of someone who actually goes to a museum because she wants to see the latest Much exhibition. So she knows – “this is an artist I've seen before”. She knows something about the historical context of the artist, so all of these things that you were talking about, on the side of the person who produces the work of art, that is also relevant for whoever is put in front of the painting.
Rolf Reber
Yes, it is relevant for understanding the work of art. And, of course, you could go to a museum and just enjoy the beauty of Munch paintings – but many people go to museums and they simply do not understand the art they see. They are confused, and even with Munch, they may say: “Oh, there are more beautiful paintings than Munch”, but if you understand what his achievement is, then you can also enjoy it. So you could be in the shoes of the artist, trying to reiterate that achievement and see what the original idea is.
Karin Kukkonen
So you try to think about not just, you know, the situation in which the artist was when making a painting –like, say, The Scream – but also how difficult it was to make that at all.
Rolf Reber
How difficult it was to arrive at an idea. For example, one of Munch’s paintings, which is a girl sitting in a chair, was a scandal, because people thought it was blurred. And this painting nowadays seems quite normal, so we have to imagine what an achievement that painting was at that time.
Karin Kukkonen
To think in new ways and… so, this whole context is actually necessary to understand, as opposed to react?
Rolf Reber
Yes, and to understand also the originality of ideas.
Karin Kukkonen
And that's something that you suggest psychology – or the scientific study of art and aesthetics – should pay a lot more attention to?
Rolf Reber
Yes, than they have done before, because it has been neglected. And there have been two camps: Namely, the psychological, neuroscientific one, that just thought that the appreciation of art is a brain process, whereas sociologists, philosophers or art historians, they thought of art in historical terms. So these were the two extreme camps, and I think to unite those two camps, and to look at the brain processes as influenced also by contextual, for example, historical information – that would be a feat.
Karin Kukkonen
So you have been working mostly on art – I mean, our example was Munch and paintings. Do you think this kind of challenge, or this kind of need, is also something that applies to literature?
Rolf Reber
Yes, of course. Reading is not just processing the text, or maybe identifying with the main characters, but understanding historical context and the intentions of the author, for example. And we can now also build on what we have said before, we can try to get a new idea: What is the originality, for example, in a novel or in a poem?
Karin Kukkonen
From the kind of knowledge that literary studies has…?
Rolf Reber
Yeah, for example…
Karin Kukkonen
… because we know what else was around?
Rolf Reber
… the kind of knowledge we have about literary studies, about literary history, about the author… About the context in which the author lived, and so on.
Karin Kukkonen
So that would mean that a reader would get quite a different experience, depending on whether they've just taken a lecture course in the 19th-century novel, they would read George Eliot differently?
Rolf Reber
I think so, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
And this is something that is interesting for the study of the mind in psychology, just as much as it's interesting for literary studies?
Rolf Reber
Yes, one major question in psychology is whether some thought, feeling or behaviour is universal or bound to historical time and culture. Literature can help answer the question, by showing that some themes are universal across time and cultures. For example, in every time and culture, we find love, compassion and joy, but also hatred, intrigue and despair. Of course, we also have things that are culture dependent, and we notice that when we read some literature from a foreign country, and we simply do not understand it – we are confused.
Karin Kukkonen
So we don't understand the emotion as such, or we don't understand…? So, I'm trying to think about – you know – what does this look like? Emotions are, of course, very physical experiences – and you get a lot of descriptions of physical experiences in, let's say, a novel. But the way in which that is framed, of course, depends on what kind of cultural protocols you have – whether this is an acceptable emotion or not, or whether it's something you would express or not.
Rolf Reber
The experience of emotion is probably universal, with the exception of some emotions that seem to be difficult to understand – for example, the Asian emotion of “amae”. That could be difficult to understand for us. But what may change are triggers of emotions. For example, in a culture of honour – as we had in the past – the triggers of emotions, of anger, are quite different from what triggers anger nowadays. Nowadays, if someone violates my honour, I mean… So what? But that was not so 200 years ago. And it is still different in some countries, where there is an explicit culture of honour.
Karin Kukkonen
Even though, of course – I mean – anger is one of the foundational emotions of Western literature as well. If you think of Iliad, which starts with the wrath or the anger of Achilles.
Rolf Reber
In Western culture of the past, there was also a culture of honour.
Karin Kukkonen
Do you think literature is a way of understanding, that… maybe not understanding it completely, but we talked about responding versus understanding earlier on. Would you, I mean, from a psychological point of view, say that reading about Achilles’ anger, or reading about the emotion of “amae” in a Japanese novel – is that a chance of getting closer at understanding, as opposed to just responding to a display of…?
Rolf Reber
I think it depends on how it is written. If it is written in a way that we can understand – that it helps us understand. But if it is written for the initiates, for those who know the culture, then maybe we are just confused. But of course, literature has the role that we can experience things that we cannot experience in real life. So it is a kind of a testbed for – for example – experiences of love, intrigue, war or peace, that we may not experience in real life.
Karin Kukkonen
We might not want to experience.
Rolf Reber
We might not want to experience, depending on what it is. But we can also have dreams – or we can also read about dreams, that we could not have in real life.
Karin Kukkonen
So it's something that, if I understand you correctly, it's something that might give us… If it's a good translation, I guess there is a work to be done when you translate something, in translating not just the words but also – say – make an emotional response more accessible. So if that's true for literature – from what you just said, about this sort of testbed of different kinds of emotions – is that perhaps also a source of knowledge for the study of emotions, not just the psychology of emotions in literature, but the psychology of emotions in general? Can psychology learn something about being human from literature, or is that too big a claim?
Rolf Reber
Yes, I think we can learn something. So one thing we can learn: Are these emotions universal, or are they culture bound? If different cultures experience emotions differently, or have different triggers, we can see that in different literatures by comparing them. We can also learn about emotions in history. And culture of honour seems to be a whole system of triggers and emotions, that were very usual in that society. So we may learn something about a whole society and how it managed – or, a fancy word in literary studies is how we “negotiated” the emotions in the past.
Karin Kukkonen
And that is an important source of knowledge for psychology as well?
Rolf Reber
Yes, it gives us a space of possibilities. And of course, psychology… We can only test people in the present and not in the past, and that is where literary studies can come in. And these historical studies could show, “yeah, this is like that in the present, but in the past other things were possible“, and show us, that what we have nowadays – and nowadays, almost everything is influenced by the Western culture – that this is not the only way we can experience emotions. So I think literature plays an important role in showing us, that what we may think is universal is not universal at all.
Karin Kukkonen
You were talking about the space of possibilities that becomes bigger for psychology because of literature – or once psychology takes literature into account – and I guess that is also a good way of describing literature as such, that it's sort of… it's rich.
Rolf Reber
A space of possibilities, yes.
Karin Kukkonen
It's a space of possibilities of imagining how things could be otherwise. But of course, when you expand the space of possibilities, then you also need to find a way of judging that; then you need to find a way of navigating – or negotiating, if that's the word you prefer. So you need to have some kind of judgement, some kind of critical – you might call it critical feeling. I understand that you've written a whole book on the topic – for finding your way around. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that. There's something you’ve called critical feeling… Maybe you could start by telling us what it is?
Rolf Reber
Yeah, critical feeling is about using feelings to optimise personal or group outcomes. This concept is derived from critical thinking, which is the use of reasoning to optimise outcomes. Critical feeling can, for example, be used to refine our taste in art, music, wine – and of course, literature.
Karin Kukkonen
What does that look like, refining your judgement with critical feeling?
Rolf Reber
There are several levels of, let's say, reading. And maybe it's important to state that no level of reading is a priori worse than another. But – you could read shallowly: just identify with the characters, just for enjoyment, for pleasure – and that's it. Now, there is some literature you want to read because it brings you some moral enhancement. When you do that, then you may expose yourself to that literature, because you want to learn more about it, and you want to get a feeling for that morality. So this would be how you could refine your moral taste. You, of course, could also try to expose yourself to forms of literature to get a taste for it. And, I mean, there are mechanisms like – for example – discrimination learning that, to my knowledge, have not been explored in reading and in literary reading, that could lead to a refinement of taste.
Karin Kukkonen
What is discrimination learning?
Rolf Reber
I mean, the basic paradigm is that you learn a pigeon to peck at a button to get food. And after the pigeon has learned to peck the button, you teach the pigeon that it gets food when a green light comes up. Then the pigeon can peck the button – or the key – and get the food. When a red light lights up, nothing happens. Or, you could even punish the animal by a light foot shake, or something like that. So this is discrimination learning, that you learn: If there is a green light, there is a positive consequence. If there is a red light, there is no or even a negative consequence.
Karin Kukkonen
So, if you do certain things, then you're going to get the reward. At the end of the story, you're getting to marry the princess – is that analogue?
Rolf Reber
The analogue would be… Now, you could now proceed through wine tasting.
Karin Kukkonen
Let’s do that.
Rolf Reber
Wine has different taste, but if you're not educated in that, you would not taste much of a difference. But if someone tells you: “Look, if you now attend to this after taste here – and do you not have like an…?”. Then it's also this naming of the tastes, and it has been found that this discrimination learning has little to do with verbalization. It has much more to do with that you learn to differentiate these tastes. And, I think, in the same way you can learn to differentiate forms in literature.
Karin Kukkonen
So if we take colours as an example, you would learn that this is still blue, and this is already green...?
Rolf Reber
Yes, exactly.
Karin Kukkonen
So, things that would be continuous – you can make a distinction between them.
Rolf Reber
Or, for example, if you know the concept of “coral” as a colour, then you do not just say “red” to it, for example, but you learn to differentiate in finer and finer degrees. And I think that you could also do with literature, with form, or with morality – that you get finer distinctions. What is good, and what is bad? What is beautiful and not beautiful? And maybe you punish yourself, because a lot of literature you can no longer read – because you do not like it anymore. But you would get more out of what you have learned, so to speak.
Karin Kukkonen
You start to see more colours – or you see more moral…?
Rolf Reber
Yes, or when it comes to poems, when it comes to novels, the beauty of the language – you can enjoy it much more because you know that language. And I'm not sure – that would be an interesting topic for research – whether it's really knowing, or whether it's a kind of getting the feeling, and whether you can get that feeling without knowing it.
Karin Kukkonen
So whether you need someone to tell you that this is morally good or this is morally bad, or whether it's something that you can learn implicitly while you're reading.
Rolf Reber
Yes. I mean, it's like learning your native language: If someone makes a mistake, you know that is a bad mistake, without knowing explicitly the rules of the grammar.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, you don't know how to correct them?
Rolf Reber
And I think… The same way we could think of reading literature, looking at art, learning about morals – that we learn it like our native language. The question of course is, is there a window of opportunity? Would we have to learn it as a child, in order to have a chance to refine it as an adult, or is it enough when we begin as adults? Because we know, when we learn a foreign language after the age of 14 or so, we probably will not get it to perfection – or it's hard, much harder.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, but maybe with literature it's possible? I'm thinking that, you know…
Rolf Reber
It's an empirical question.
Karin Kukkonen
It's an empirical question, okay. So this could be a study?
Rolf Reber
That is the main exit for questions we don't know – that we say, “it's an empirical question. We have to examine it.”
Karin Kukkonen
So literature is something that, if I understand you correctly, literature is on the one hand something that you develop a critical feeling for? So you develop a sense of refined understanding of literature – you can handle several narrators, you can handle the fact that the story doesn't have an end – so you develop a way of… You know where to pay attention?
Rolf Reber
Yeah. And maybe also the feelings become different. In a shallow reading, you just enjoy, for example, the victory of the characters, or the marriage of the female character with the prince. Whereas, with understanding literature, you begin to enjoy also the construction, the idea, how the writer has done it.
Karin Kukkonen
So you develop this artful mind approach?
Rolf Reber
Yes.
Karin Kukkonen
And that seems to be similar to appreciating French wines. Then, while you were talking, it seems also that literature is a way of getting critical feelings about something else. If I understand you correctly, if you read a lot of literature, you can also explore, say, certain moral questions or systems, which I imagine is harder to do with French wine?
Rolf Reber
There may not be so much morality in French wine, as there is in literature…
Karin Kukkonen
An empirical question?
Rolf Reber
Now, I think this can be solved philosophically, but… Of course, by reading literature, this is not explicit learning of moral values and maxims. But it is living-through those values – and so, it's more addressed to feelings than it would be if we learned moral treaties about how to behave, or something like that. So it's not explicit teaching, but it's living-through.
Karin Kukkonen
It's no checklist.
Rolf Reber
And you also examine things. So, in literature you have the opportunity to examine from different sides – also from the dark side, so to speak. And then, you feel through it and learn through feeling.
Karin Kukkonen
So you learn something that's real, in a way, but you learn it through fiction.
Rolf Reber
Yeah, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
So it doesn't actually have to be a representation of fact, in order to work?
Rolf Reber
It seems to be real because you… Your work of imagination helps to make it real, and to get to the feeling.
Karin Kukkonen
I mean, the question of fiction and truth is – of course – something that's discussed quite a lot in the media, and not with relation to literature, but with relation to issues like fake news – to issues of whether we can trust things that are presented as fact. And that's something where your research has been quite important as well, I understand, in the investigation of fake news.
Rolf Reber
Yeah, some 20 years ago we published an article where we have shown, that if you show statements in a dark font on a white background, then they are charged as more probably true, than if you show that statements with lower contrast. So that, just making them more readable makes them seemingly more truthful. This shows – and this was also the goal of the experiment – to show that processing fluency, the ease with which you can process statements, would influence truth judgments. So, if it is easy to understand, then you believe it. Actually, there are quotes going back to Napoleon, and explicitly in Hitler's Mein Kampf, where repetition and ease play a prominent role. So we are not the first to find that out. Others have intuitively found out that, and we are just doing some systematic work to show that these intuitions are, one could say, unfortunately true.
Karin Kukkonen
From how you describe the principles according to which you feel that something is true, in fake news through repetition and clarity or ease of perception, is quite interesting, isn't it? Because these are very different principles to the ones according to which we think literature is true, the ones we think fiction is true. I mean, fiction doesn't work very much through repetition, or it's not overly clear.
Rolf Reber
Oh, I think there are many sources of fluency in literature. First, I would claim there is some repetition. I mean, there is this famous Chekhov quote, that you should not introduce a pistol in the first act if you don't use it in the fifth – if not someone is killed in the fifth.
Karin Kukkonen
If it doesn't get fired.
Rolf Reber
So there is a kind of priming, so that you are receptable to this pistol in the fifth act. There are – I'm sure –there are repetitions there. I mean, this is what Vera Tobin writes in her book, Elements of Surprise, where she shows how writers plant some things into the text, that we forget But when it comes again, then it makes sense to us, and it helps us to make sense that it is hidden there. That would be an example of how fluency also works in literature. Actually, I think literature does not work according to the principles of critical thinking to get at the truth. Literature goes much more for feelings, as political speeches for example. Now, with political speeches, it would be great if they would go for critical thinking of the people, but they exploit the feelings. And literature… I think good literature does not exploit the feelings of the reader, but at least maybe play with them, and hopefully also uncover them at some point.
Karin Kukkonen
As an example of ideal use of critical feeling?
Rolf Reber
Yes – yeah, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Do you have a recommendation for our listeners, on what is a good book to read – to experience that?
Rolf Reber
At the moment, I try to get some rest from the hectic of everyday life. I have read Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer, which in English translation is Indian Summer. So if you, I mean… It is as if you had all the time of the world. And actually, Stifter is very good at planting those cues that later all play a role. So maybe… You may even be bored during the first chapters. I mean, it's a 800 or 900-page work, but it all comes to a resolution. I think it's a great read, because it really is very peaceful, very restful, a kind of an old-fashioned utopia – it's not a utopia that you would have nowadays. But it's a very peaceful and calm book. And at the moment, I'm reading the Witiko, also by Adalbert Stifter. But I have read too little in order to recommend it.
Karin Kukkonen
Perhaps at the next podcast then?
Rolf Reber
Next podcast, next year, I may recommend it, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Thank you so much for taking us all the way from Munch and the artful mind to fake news, critical feelings and Adalbert Stifter.
Rolf Reber
Yes, thank you, Karin.
Karin Kukkonen
Thanks for joining us. And also, thanks to everyone listening to this podcast. We hope to have you along again soon.