Andrew, this is extremely interesting stuff & you are brilliant about it.
all hard to explain & you make it seem so -- discursible -- ! E.
At 09:47 PM 10/20/00 +0100, you wrote:
>
>In response to David Lee Miller's comments on the fantasy of the present
>moment, another aside, perhaps not totally unrewarding.
>
>Leaving behind psychoanalysis for the moment, and turning instead to
>current neuropsychological research being done in my own backyard:
>neuroscientists studying the relationship between cognition and emotion in
>a Medical Research Council unit here in Cambridge have focused some
>concentrated attention on just this issue. It has been suggested that
>people suffering from Major Depression may respond to therapy emphasizing
>'experiential' rather than 'intellectual' forms of cognition, perhaps
>because a core causal factor in the onset of depression could be an
>inability to escape cyclical and omnipresent intellectualizing of
>experience ('persistent rumination' is one of the core symptoms of Major
>Depressive Illness; see the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, version IV)
>linked to disrupted functioning of frontal regions (if you are interested
>in neuroanatomy, the relationship between prefrontal cortex (known as
>'pfc') and limbic structures seems to be particularly important).
>
>Some clinical psychologists have emphasized 'experiential' modes of therapy
>in treating depression because these modes of thought encourage depressed
>patients to put aside intellectual cognition--a main feature of which is a
>sense of 'detachment' that may well have something to do with the 'exile of
>the present moment' inevitable, as David Lee Miller has pointed out, when
>one is considering this subject from an intellectual perspective. The
>alternative--'experiential' cognition--emphasizes not thought, but a kind
>of 'inhabiting the present' through the performance of repetitive tasks or
>through the pursuit of some activity that is felt to be 'second nature'. To
>imagine what I am suggesting, think of a well-loved hobby or personal
>pursuit in which you feel you lose yourself--'experiential' modes of
>consciousness are reported by people during activities like singing,
>knitting, running, meditation, playing guitar, and perhaps most
>importantly, yes, during sex (particularly by women, I should add; men
>don't seem to consider lovemaking as 'inhabiting the present' so much as
>'pursuing desire').
>
>It has been hypothesized that this putative intellectual/experiential
>polarity may have something very important to do with the relationship
>between mood and cognition. It may be too simple to suggest that mania and
>depression represent extreme forms of inability to process emotional
>cognition, or that they are states of hyper-intellectualization. On the
>other hand, there is something (neuro)biological about this idea of the
>'fictional present', and the potential importance of emotion to this idea
>is, I think, very exciting. For we *can* experience the present, but only
>in those moments where we are not thinking about it; *think* once, and the
>present moment has already become a piece of history. The very act of
>thinking about time, then (like the act of speech, like the act of
>observing a particle at a given point in space with a given velocity),
>destabilizes the relation between the subject of thought and the subject
>doing the thinking. What I want to emphasize here, though, is that current
>research in neuropsychology suggests an important alternative to this
>intellectualization of loss in the present, namely the experiential mode of
>consciousness--akin perhaps, in its meditative quality, to sleep and death
>('the little death'; I may invite further scorn on myself by likening this
>to that other consolation offered Heisenberg, namely wave-particle
>duality--as de Broglie made clear, we never need ask the question of the
>particle's position and velocity in the first place; catch the wave,
>Werner). Emotional, experiential being, in this formulation, can restore
>our sense of presence, leading to happiness.
>
>New brain imaging technologies show important differences in neuronal
>activation during the performance of 'executive function' tasks (memory,
>planning, etc.: emphasis on pfc) as compared to 'experiential' or
>'affective' tasks involving emotional components (emphasis on ventromedial
>areas, limbic structures). These differences suggest that differing neural
>function may be linked--causally or symptomatically, as you like--to the
>'modes' of consciousness I have been discussing above. In fact, the Dalai
>Lama is collaborating in a forthcoming study here on the therapeutic
>potential of experiential, meditative cognition in the treatment of
>depression; it will be interesting to explore the results of this study, as
>it will for (I think) the first time bring into explicit conversation these
>ideas of 'presence' and 'inhabiting the present', on the one hand, and
>intellectual versus affective cognition on the other. My own hypothesis,
>based on my experience with the 'elation' of pursuits such as running and
>singing, is that this and further studies will start to demonstrate links
>between a) different ways of experiencing time, b) different 'modes' of
>thought, c) different brain activation, and d) different levels of
>contentment.
>
>As I often maintain (again to my general discredit), The Faerie Queene is
>the Book of Life: if it's out here, it's in there. How 'content' is Amoret,
>who in sweet ravishment pourd out her sprite? She is the 'lodge' of
>Scuadmour's 'affection', filled with an emotion so fully that, in effect,
>time stops for her in the tableau of the hermaphroditic union, likened
>(otherwise I think unaccountably) to a marble statue. Spenser may not have
>had a PET scanner at Kilcolman (although you never know, Harriot could have
>had one down in Youghal), but the intuition that deep emotional experience
>expands to fill the present--stopping time and absorbing our
>intellectualized pasts and futures--is not a thought for our age only, but
>of all time.
>
>andrew
>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Elizabeth Fowler
Associate Professor
Department of English
University of Virginia
219 Bryan Hall
PO Box 400121
Charlottesville VA 22904-4121
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804-924-6627
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