Cognition, Culture, and the Arts

From here, Katja Mellmann focuses on the evolutionary substrates of narrative. Building on the proto-‘narrative’ format of language and on a particular cognitive mood for oral tradition, narrative form increases memorability of the stored information and works as a highly elaborate means of self-objectification and self-knowledge of humans, therefore far from just being purely pleasure-motivated play.

Vera Nünning explores further the interfaces between culture, stories and cognition, discussing narratives as a privileged way of worldmaking by critically addressing the relation between fiction and ‘theory of mind’. Stories, the author argues, interpret and communicate beliefs about the human mind, about human communication and behaviour and enhance the capacity for understanding others. Narrative schemata provide specific and flexible frames for understanding experiences and actions. Therefore, the choice of what to read and which stories to tell can be decisive for the success of narrative training as suggested here.

What are, then, the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of literary reading? This is the question addressed by Susanne Reichl while exploring the act of reading as a way of imposing order on chaos. Readers, she suggests, first normalize the “chaos” of a polyvalent text and thus reduce it to an understandable order, and then expand it again by mapping onto it scenarios available to them within their own sociocultural frame of reference. Such processes, being both social and individual, automatic and conscious, reductive and expansive, are shown on examples by Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Ursula LeGuin, Hanif Kureishi, Anthony Burgess, Lois Lowry or Veronica Roth, whose texts frequently ask for advanced forms of problem-solving and resist any quick and easy reading.

Ana Margarida Abrantes takes the reflection from narrative to the conversation frame as a means of sense-making in the arts. She takes her examples from Philipp Roth’s novel Deception and from a Portuguese dance performance by Tiago Rodrigues presented by Barbora Hruskova. In both cases, fictive interaction serves as a model for cognition in conceptualizing reality, pinpointing as an aesthetic act what otherwise is used as a common strategy of sense-making.

The contribution by Per Aage Brandt opens the final section on cognition and music, taking up the previous topics on sense-making and fictive interaction in time and space, beyond referentiality. Starting with an analysis of meteorological metaphors in the description of music experience, Brandt explains why both artists and listeners mentally see spaces when music is produced and perceived: as a constant relation to the value of beauty, truth or moral good and the imaginary space of the spirits. Arts weaken codes in recombining their components, thus allowing the culturally decisive human mental capacity to immediately transcend the immediate.

The cognitive processes in music reception are further addressed by Elisheva Rigbi who explores the so-called musical prose at the turn of the 20^th century, which at the time was widely considered difficult, to the point of incomprehensibility. Musical prose exposes the listener to a series of isolated, self-contained moments, which hardly can be brought into a cohesive cognitive process. Understanding the challenges that this music meant for the holistic tendency to cognitively prioritize overall temporal patterning in aural experience, is a topic of as much interest to cognitive science as it is to cultural history – the two fields exemplarily explored in Rigbi’s contribution to this volume from the perspective of evolutionary musicology.

It is in this encounter of culture (in its historical dimension) and cognition that further work must be done. We cannot understand the way we think and make sense of what we are doing and how we are living without looking simultaneously at the cognitive conditions of our mind and its material and social performance in culture and along history. The challenges of contemporary societies, from sustainability to Artificial Intelligence (and further pandemic incursions), may make a New Humanism necessary. Such an endeavour will not succeed without interdisciplinary perspectives on narrating, understanding, and reading: where cognition, culture and the arts meet.

Lisbon, Gießen, May 2021

Peter Hanenberg & Wolfgang Hallet