Dogs, Love, Brain Scans, and the Long Eighteenth Century
Human subjects climbed in an fMRI to have their brains scanned while reading a Jane Austen novel for an article published by a literary scholar and a team of scientists at Stanford in 2012. As our “because science,” “reasonable” culture would have it, neuroscience was somehow necessary to prove what literary scholars have known all along: that “paying attention to literary texts requires the coordination of multiple complex cognitive functions” and “teaching close, critical reading could serve–quite literally–as a kind of cognitive training, teaching us to modulate our concentration and use new brain regions as we move flexibly between modes of focus” (Hiner). The article was published just one year before a similar attempt at moving from feeling to knowing, via neurology: the 2013 Wall Street Journal bestselling book How Dogs Love Us that involved training dogs to climb into an MRI scanner to prove they empathize with human emotions and really do love us, which any “dog person” could have told them. While I personally do not plan on forcing my dog to take a lie-detector test, I did enjoy applying neurologist Dean Buonomano’s nonfiction bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time to A Christmas Carol, and these neurological studies do illuminate a few areas within the field of eighteenth-century British literary/cultural studies in which I am interested: (1) the period’s literary/cultural interest in interiority—the relationship between interior and exterior states, (2) the power of the written word to exert cognitive, emotional and moral effects on readers, as was incessantly argued during the period, and (3) how said power was/is wielded on behalf of, but also against, the dominant social structure.
Using technology to translate feeling into knowledge is itself a product of the Enlightenment, and since a similar emphasis on “reason” pervaded the literature during the eighteenth-century including novels and essays that decried them as corrupters of women and the youth, it is not surprising that literary scholars specializing in the period would turn to cognitive cultural approaches on literature to justify (funding) it. We still reside in the Age of Reason, so dominant culture insists on science to assert the “value” of (1) literature and (2) (other) animals, both of which have “served” humanity for thousands of years. While I find the questions such studies pose illuminating, I prefer to use theory and interpretation (interiority as opposed to exterior observation) to work through them. Some of my recent essays, for example, include “Using the Capitalist’s Tools: Race, Class, Sex, and (Commodity) Fetishism in the Early Protest Art of Stedman/Blake and Wedgwood/Hackwood,” “‘Full of Spotlesse Truth’: The Mirror and the Female Self As Reflected in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” and “Marketing Empire: Military and Companionate Marriage Recruitment in ‘Warrior Women’ British Broadside Ballads,” all of which reveal structurally induced setbacks through intersectional and synthetic readings. I plan to apply ecocriticism and animal studies similarly to show how writing is/was used for/against similar intrusion onto animals and the environment.
Works Cited
Berns, Gregory. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain. New Harvest, 2013.
Hiner, Amanda. “Theory of Mind, Cognitive Cultural Studies, and Eighteenth-century Literature.” The Eighteenth Century Common, 14 March 2018, 18thcenturycommon.org. Accessed: 14 January 2020.
