An Eye for the Impossible

The embodied simulation account of aesthetics, proposed by Freedberg and Gallese, assigns a pivotal role to an observer’s body in aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. While originally focused on visual artworks (such as paintings and sculpture), this theory clearly also holds great relevance to the performing arts, in particular dance. In this chapter, the author describes how she was inspired by this theory, as well as earlier work using dance as stimuli and dancers as participants to explore the relationship between embodiment, perception, and brain activity from a non-artistic perspective, to examine how observers’ physical abilities (or lack thereof) shape dance preferences. The author describes her team’s work demonstrating that dance-naïve participants are most drawn to highly complex, impressive dance movements impossible for observers to embody or perform themselves and how engagement of brain regions implicated in translating perception into action appear to be involved in this process.

Vertigo

The chapter ‘Vertigo. Towards a Neurofilmology’ offers an introduction to the book’s contents and methods. The implementation of psychology of perception, philosophy of mind, and suggestions from cognitive neuroscience (in particular the role of ‘mirror neurons’ and the hypothesis of ‘embodied simulation’) has the capability to renew contemporary film theory and to reduce the distance between competing approaches (i.e. cognitivist and phenomenological film studies). ‘Neurofilmology’ adopts an enactive and embodied approach to cognition and provides interpretative tools for the exploration of contemporary cinema. Through a series of recurrent ‘aerial motifs’ in which the film character loses his/her equilibrium—acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift—the cinema offers an intense motor and emotional experience that puts the spectator’s somatosensory perception in tension. At the same time, it provides compensation by adopting embodied forms of regulation of stimuli and a dynamic restoration of gravity and orientation (the so called ‘disembodying-reembodying’ dynamic).

Flight

As a conclusion, the chapter ‘Flight. Towards an Ecofilmology’ offers a synoptic view of the characteristics of the five tensive motifs, carrying out a general anatomy of the strategies used to generate cinematic tension with particular reference to their narrative role in the light of the embodied simulation hypothesis. The fundamental aspect highlighted is the link between the different ways in which the tensive motifs embody intentionality and the dynamic of disembodying-reembodying involved. Accordingly, the motifs can be understood as a means of negotiation between the desire for vertigo and excess and the necessity of bringing overstimulation back beneath the threshold that assures the legibility and reception of the film, in perceptual as well as moral, social, and commercial terms.

Effect of time constraints on the conceptual representation of metaphor processing

What shapes the conceptual representation during metaphor processing? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying the roles of both embodied simulation and linguistic distributional patterns. Researchers have propose that the linguistic component is shallow and speedy, ideal as a shortcut to construct crude representations and conserve valuable cognitive resources. Thus, during metaphor processing, people should rely on the linguistic component more if the goal of processing is shallow and the time available is limited. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments which aim to evaluate this hypothesis. The results supported the role of simulation in metaphor processing, but not the linguistic shortcut hypotheses: the effect of linguistic distributional frequency increased as people had more time to process the metaphors, and as they engaged in deep processing. Furthermore during shallow processing, the processing was easier when the embodied and linguistic components support each other. These findings indicate a complex interaction between the embodied and linguistic components during metaphor processing.

Continuous neural activations of simulation and linguistic information during metaphor processing

Language processing relies on conceptual representations which are composed of two crucial components, embodied simulation and linguistic distributional pattern. The embodied component refers to the reactivation of previous sensorimotor experiences related to the concept (e.g., experiences with a clever student when reading "bright student"); the linguistic component refers to the co-occurrence pattern of the constituent words (i.e., how often "bright" and "student" appear in the same context). In this study, we examined the existence and roles of these components in metaphor processing. Using both a behavioural study and EEG, we studied how these components affected the speed, success rate and neurophysiological activations of metaphor comprehension. We found that, while performance of metaphor comprehension was mainly influenced by the embodied component, the linguistic component was activated before the embodied component reached its peak and could act as a shortcut to construct good-enough representations, such that people found it easier to accept and hard to reject a metaphor when the distributional frequency of constituent words was high. In other words, the linguistic distributional pattern could provide a guide for conceptual representations before the embodied component was fully engaged.

Embodiment and the Animal in Guadalupe Nettel’s El matrimonio de los peces rojos

This article explores an interaction between posthumanist and cognitive discourses through the work of award winning Mexican author, Guadalupe Nettel. I focus on her 2014 anthology, Natural Histories, rereading the central motif of the narrative, that animals ‘are like a mirror that reflects submerged emotions or behaviours that we don’t dare to see’ (Nettel, 9). This ‘reflection’ is not simply the image of the human reflected off the opaque surface of the animal, but rather the humans themselves act as a mirror, simulating the behaviour of the animals with which they cohabit. This can be read as a literary representation of a neurophysiological phenomenon — embodied simulation, an internal mimicry, either perceptible or imperceptible, performed when watching others completing certain tasks, movements or expressions (Gazzola et al. 2007; Uithol et al. 2011; Iacoboni 2009). In particular, the first story, ‘El matrimonio de los peces rojos’, depicts a profound human-nonhuman embodied resonance that moves between linguistic, narratological and characterological levels. A cognitive critical approach to the mirroring between animals and humans in the stories reveals the particular intersection between new paradigms in cognitive science, animal studies, and posthumanism that the anthology develops, each of its narratives intertwining mind, body and nonhuman other in a non-hierarchical network.

Simulating drone and bodily gestures: a behavioral study

According to embodied simulation theory, humans tacitly ‘simulate’ the actions of the other by mapping them in the sensorimotor cortex of the brain. According to the framework of embodied cinema, the meaning-making process in film is considered to be inextricably linked to the interrelation between the brain, body and environment of the viewer. Athough there are a growing number of theoretical and technological studies on the embodied nature of drone flight, to date no studies have investigated the effect of drone footage with and without human bodily movement on spectators’ cognitive behavioral mechanisms. Thus, the present study investigates the relationship between Drone Movement (Ascending, Descending, Still) , Actor Presence (Female, Male, None) and Image Speed (Normal, Slow, Very Slow) on perceived motion, appeal and involvement measures. To achieve these aims, a custom-made, naturalistic set of video stimuli modeled after the staircase scene in the Soviet film The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957) was created using a DJI Phantom Pro 4 Drone. In the experimental task (carried out at the computer), participants were asked to rate video stimuli using a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) ranging from 0 to 100 for perceived Duration, Liking, Movement, and Emotional and Physical Involvement. Results demonstrate that: 1) Ascending and Descending had significantly higher ratings for perceived Duration, Movement and Physical and Emotional Involvement than Still; 2) Ascending had significantly higher ratings for perceived Duration, Movement and Emotional Involvement than Descending; 3) Female and Male had significantly higher ratings for Movement, Physical Involvement and Emotional Involvement than None (No Actor); 4) Normal Image Speed had significantly higher ratings for Movement, Physical Involvement and Emotional Involvement with respect to Slow and Very Slow. Results indicate that drone/actor ascent may evoke more motion and involvement due to perceived exertion or ‘effort’ to climb up the stairs, and that participants resonate more with conspecifics and familiar repertoires, in support of embodied simulation theory. Results also indicate that movement in the drone/actor image modulates perceived time. Neuroimaging studies are needed to investiate the impact of drone movement with or without human bodily movement on cortical sensorimotor activation in the brain.

Metaphorical thinking in our literary experiences of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”

This article explores how literary texts, in this case the novel “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, elicit metaphorical thinking as a major part of readers’ interpretive experiences. Our main argument is that metaphorical thinking does not arise only given our encounter with individual verbal metaphors, but emerges in various ways as part of our habitual forms of imaginative metaphorical understandings. Metaphorical thinking is closely linked to embodied simulation processes by which readers project themselves imaginatively into the lives of story characters. Embodied simulation processes capture readers’ rich phenomenological characteristics (e.g., immersion, absorption, transportation) of literary experience. Metaphorical thinking unfolds in hierarchical layers across different time spans during literary reading.

“The Boundless Realm Where All Form Lies”. Representing Imagination at the Crossway Between Literary and Neurocognitive Studies

According to ancient texts on poetics, the concept of representation is deeply bound to that of “mimesis;” this last was intended in two main ways: as “imitation” and as “world construction.” In Aristotle's Poetics, mimesis is theorized as the main form of “world simulation,” giving rise to the complex universe of fiction. The concept of simulation plays a pivotal role in the neurocognitive theories on the embodied mind: within this frame, embodied simulation is intended as a functional prelinguistic activation of the human sensorimotor mechanism. This happens not only with regard to intercorporeality and intersubjectivity in the real world but also in relation to the process of imagination giving rise to literary imagery and to the reader's reception of the fictional world, since human beings share a common sensorimotor apparatus. Imagination is a central concept in the recent neurocognitive studies since it plays a core role in human life and in artistic production and reception. Imagination has been considered as a complex emergent cognitive faculty deeply intertwined with perception, memory, and consciousness, shaping human life and transforming the limited horizon of our perceptual affective understanding, being, and acting. Although there is an immense bulk of literature on this topic, imagination is still an elusive concept: its definition and understanding change according to different heuristic frames—mainly the philosophical, aesthetic, poetic, and cognitive ones—giving rise to debates about its modalities and effects, particularly in relation to the construction of aesthetic and symbolic constraints. In this paper, we claim that scientific research may take advantage from the literary representation of the imaginative faculties, which occurs in specific tests characterized by dynamic images and motion. In such meta-representation of the imagination, we witness the phenomenological emergence of endogenous dynamic processes involving a cluster of cognitive faculties, activated by triggering the reader's embodied simulation. One of the main German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the second part of his masterwork Faust II, intuitively represents the very process of the imagination and its responding to embodied simulation with regard both to the author's creative act and to its reception by the reader. At the crossway between literary and neurocognitive, this study aims to highlight the advantage offered to future transdisciplinary inquiries by the literary representation showing features and dynamics of the still mysterious phenomenon of the imagination.