Robert Sapolsky's article, "To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome," published on Pocket Worthy, explains a fundamental paradigm shift in cognitive science which I, as total non-scientist had no knowledge of whatsoever.
"Starting at least with Descartes, there has been the dualist distinction between “mind” and “brain,” or in a spinoff that has particularly engaged neuroscientists recently, between “cognition” and “emotion.” In the standard view, the latter two are functionally and neurobiologically separable, and are in some sort of perpetual, epic struggle over the control of your behavior. Moreover, this dichotomizing has typically given rise to the view that one of the two, in some sense a mixture of ethics and aesthetics, should dominate the other.
A dichotomy between cognition and emotion, we now know, is false, clearly explored in neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 1994 book, Descartes’ Error. The two endlessly interact, both functionally and neurobiologically. And most importantly, they’d better, because what we view as normal function requires extensive integration of the two. "
While it probably surprises no one who's encountered post-structuralism that dichotomies of understanding are typically false and misleading, this work explains how cognition and emotion, once thought to be opposite and conflicting brain processes, are interwined in a healthy brain. The article that explains how this phenomenon is centered around a emotionally horrifying delusional syndrome where the cognitive function, recognition, is divorced from the emotional function, familiarity. People with Capgras syndrome recognize loved ones, but do not feel familiarity for them, so they believe that their loved one has been replaced by a double.
(originally appeared on Nautilus and was published November 10, 2016)
While the majority of us haven't experienced this syndrome, our cultural objects report its terror in the horror trope of the Doppleganger. You've seen this movie: The Changeling, and Us.
Before I could even begin to start down the rabbit hole of what the necessary interplay of ethics and aesthetics for healthy cognition would do to my reading of Wayne Booth's The Morality of Fiction, I came back to the incomprehensible boogeyman of my postmodern literature and narratology experience: Nabokov's Lolita.
WTF is going on with people's readings of, responses to, and productions of this text? I realized, functionally, that readers were being seduced by the aesthetic beauty of the text into losing their damn minds (actual academic language) and reinterpreting the text, in a way that now seems to be a symptom of mass delusion, altering details to allow the aesthetic pleasure of the text to co-opt what should otherwise cause moral disgust. People's memories of, and readings of the text, constantly seem to change Lolita into a teenage vixen in order to romanticize Humbert Humbert. But Nabokov's text is unrelenting in reminding its readers that she is a prepubescent child victim. So by what mechanism does this deluded reading arise?
Putting aside for the moment (how?) that the text itself tells us what it is doing, that it makes clear that Humbert Humbert himself deploys this technique of aesthetic mystification over his victims (except for Dolores, his victim, whom he fills with disgust), reader responses to the text are startlingly divergent. As in, I can not understand a theory of that explains how people interact with a text that can explain the scope of how differently different people read this text.
BUT CAPGRAS SYNDROME. I didn't even get all the way through the article, which applies this cognition/emotion interaction to the uncanniness of Facebook cultural phenomenon, before I had to stop. OMG LOLITA finally makes sense. In Capgras syndrome, the emotional response of familiarity interacts with the cognitive function of recognition and creates an uncanniness that gives rise to an explanatory delusion. The brain recognizes the subject (loved one), but the subject is unfamiliar (stranger). To reconcile these two opposites, the emotional response straight up trumps the cognitive response and the delusion that the subject has been replaced with an imposter, a ghostly double, a doppleganger, a freakin dastardly uncanny look-alike occurs.
This framework for understanding cognitive FAILURE (kidnapping and raping an 11 year old is not ROMANTIC, YA'LL KNOW THIS) as a delusion caused by irreconcilable tension between the aesthetic and the ethical actions of the brain FINALLY illuminates the bizarre phenomenon created by Nabokov's text.
I've struggled with how I feel about Nabokov for a while. Obviously he is a genius, because his texts poke and prod at the reaction they stoke in his readers, building on each other to explore the lengths to which human ethics and cognition can be subverted by aesthetics and emotion. But without any sort of revelation to the general audience, this philosophical and artistic experiment seems dangerous and unethical. There are real consequences, that extend beyond the pages of his book and the life of Dolores, to letting loose the aesthetic machinery of a romanticized child predator loose on our cultural consciousness. A culture already inclined to excuse sexual exploitation of teenage female children now has a compelling and powerful mode of overwhelming its small tremors of moral outrage in aesthetic justification. As gross old dudes on the internet often say, "If God didn't want us to have sex with teenagers, then why is that when women are most attractive?" Basically a very bad paraphrase of Humbert Humbert's philosophy on "nymphettes."
Watching our culture consume this text over the past 60 years really drives home the widespread and pervasive ways in which art, aesthetics, cultural constructs that tell an emotional story, can overpower and derail our ethical (also culturally constructed) norms. I'm sure there's a lesson there, for me, on PSYOPS, that is pertinent to today's iteration of viral propaganda as a cheap and effective tool of international conflict by driving democratic decay. I'm also sure there's an interesting corollary, which is what delusions occur when our ethical framework overwhelms our aesthetic judgements? (Thomas Kincaid paintings?) But Nabokov as a cognitive science genius 30 years before Descartes' Error explained his experiment is enough of a revelation for me today.
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