Chapter 47: 4E Cognition and the Humanities

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Okay, let's unpack this.

Welcome back to The Deep Dive, where we take complex, groundbreaking research and, well, give you the shortcut to being genuinely well -informed.

Today we are launching into, I think, one of the most exciting interdisciplinary fields out there right now.

It's this intersection between cutting -edge cognitive science and

the oldest, most familiar forms of human expression, the arts and humanities.

And our mission for this deep dive is to understand a really profound shift in thinking.

We're basing this entire conversation on a single, powerful source, a chapter from the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition called, appropriately, 4E Cognition and the Humanities.

And the central thesis, you know, the main argument of this chapter is pretty revolutionary.

It says that the arts and humanities don't just affect our minds metaphorically.

Right, not just in a, this poem touched my soul kind of way.

Exactly.

They move us and change us quite literally, physically, ecologically.

The novel you're reading, the play you're watching, that sculpture you might see in a museum, these are not passive objects.

They are active agents in actually shaping your thought

That's the core idea right there.

We're moving away from this traditional, honestly centuries -old view of thinking as just computation,

as something locked inside the skull.

The brain in a vat.

Yeah, that black box we call the brain.

Instead, we're shifting towards seeing, thinking as action with the body in the world.

And the moment you really accept that, your relationship with every painting, every poem, every play, it changes completely.

And that shift from internal computation to external action, that is the philosophical groundwork for what we call 4E cognition.

So let's just quickly break down the 4Es again.

Right.

So 4E stands for embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted.

It's this four -pronged statement that says, look, if traditional cognition was like a desktop computer, self -contained box processing information 4E is more like a fully networked, constantly changing mobile device.

I like that analogy.

Your body and the cloud, your social network and the environment, the physical space you're in, they are all inseparable parts of what it means to think.

So the mind is absolutely not contained solely within the skull.

Cognition has to involve the body, the environment, and that dynamic interaction between the two.

And that has huge implications for why we even bother studying Hamlet or Monet.

And so our goal for you, the listener, is really to understand how this new kind of view of cognition fundamentally changes how we view engagement itself.

We're going to explore reading a novel, experiencing live theater, interacting with visual art, and see how they are actually systems of thinking that include us.

Before we jump into some of the really radical claims here, I think it's important that we acknowledge what the chapter sort of sets aside.

Absolutely.

The author is being very strategic here, bypassing some of the really critical, difficult, and frankly unresolved internal debates within the 4 -E framework itself.

So we don't need to stop and figure out the exact difference between, say, inactivism and the extended mind theory.

No, or debate the precise role of internal mental representations.

We're not going to get lost in the weeds of philosophical semantics among cognitive scientists.

Which is a relief.

It is.

The focus here is purely pragmatic.

It's about demonstrating the immense value that cognitive research, taken broadly, provides for studying the arts.

And crucially, showing how the arts can provide evidence back to cognitive science.

It's about creating a dialogue, not settling scores.

Okay, so let's get into that dialogue, because this is where it gets really, really interesting.

This paradigm shift from thinking as computation to thinking as action, it leaves directly to three claims that are so radical, they challenge the deepest wisdom in the humanities.

I mean, they confront generations of received wisdom head on.

For centuries, the entire foundation of studying the humanities has rested on interpreting internal meaning, decoding and analyzing symbolic content.

So let's just lay them out.

What are these three radical foundational claims that the chapters are arguing for?

Okay, the author details them very clearly.

Number one, reading is not just about meaning.

Number two, the staging of the audience is critical to the theatrical experience.

And number three, engaging with art is a form of tool use.

I have to stop you on that first one.

If reading is not just about meaning then,

what was the entire point of my high school English class?

What are the stakes there for the average person who just loves to read a good book?

Well, the stakes are pretty much the entire history of literary scholarship.

For the last few hundred years, that scholarship has been completely steeped in what's called the hermeneutic tradition.

Hermeneutics, right?

That's a word you hear a lot in academic circles, but can you give us a quick accessible definition?

Sure.

Think of hermeneutics as decoding a secret message.

You, the reader, you take the external stimuli, the words on the page, and you process them through your intellect to arrive at an internal, often hidden meaning.

The core question is, what does the text mean?

Exactly.

What is the author trying to say?

It presumes there's a truth hidden inside the text just waiting for you to find it.

That is the classic model.

You analyze the symbolism, you decode the motifs, you figure out the character's internal psychological state, and you output the ultimate meaning.

Yep.

But the 4E challenge completely redefines the purpose of thinking itself.

If thinking isn't about passively processing information into some internal meaning, but is instead about world -making, this dynamic interaction with our environment, then the whole purpose of reading changes.

Okay, let's elaborate on world -making.

That's a big concept.

If thinking is world -making, then what are we actually doing when we read?

We are not reading to attain meaning.

We are reading to enact worlds within which to experience anew.

The text isn't a coded message you have to unlock.

It's more like a set of instructions for a dynamic interaction.

It's a temporary blueprint that allows you to build and inhabit a specific temporary cognitive ecology in collaboration with that book, that artifact.

So instead of asking, what does the murder mean in this novel, we should be asking, what kind of world did this novel force me to build and inhabit, and how did inhabiting that world change the way I feel or perceive things?

That is the key philosophical pivot.

The text is a world -constructing machine, not a meaning delivery device.

And if we take that idea and we extend it to, say, the performing arts, we hit that second radical claim, the staging of the audience is critical.

Right.

Because if cognition is embedded in a specific environment, and it's always effective, tied to our emotions and extended outside of our skin, it challenges centuries of theatrical assumptions.

How so?

Well, traditional acting methods like the Stanislavski system or traditional playwriting from people like Eugene O 'Neill or Tennessee Williams, they focused intensely on the actor's internal psychological state.

Right.

Their motivations, their emotional truth.

The audience's job was to empathize and try to understand that inner life.

And the Fourier perspective just flips that completely.

It says that a spectator's emotion, their attention, it depends far less on what's happening inside the actors on stage and far more on a stage -enacted experience of the spectator's own cognition.

So the performance isn't just happening on stage.

It's a dynamic system that includes and even manipulates the audience.

Precisely.

Which brings us to the third radical claim,

art as tool use.

Now, this is the one that sounds the most reductive on the surface.

Yeah.

Is the chapter arguing that a Monet painting is basically just a very fancy hammer?

What's the nuance we're missing there?

The nuance is all in the definition of tool.

If thinking means using objects in our environment to make changes to our own extended ecosystem, our habits, our perceptions, our capacity for attention, then an interaction with a work of art is way more than just contemplation.

It's functional.

Functional how though?

The author describes it as aesthetic, poetic,

and autopoetic.

Autopoetic.

Okay.

Another big word.

It just means self -making or self -producing.

Yeah.

The art isn't just a representation of the world.

It's a device we use.

And in using it, we change the way we see the world, the way we structure our thoughts, maybe even who we are.

So an example of art as an autopoetic tool might be, let's say I start painting abstract art.

And the process of constantly looking for unexpected connections and textures actually makes me notice new architectural details on my commute to work.

Right.

Or it changes how you organize the objects on your desk.

So the act of creating the art is literally rearranging my cognitive environment.

Precisely.

The art has become part of your self -making environment.

It's a tool that affords new perceptual pathways and solidifies new habits of attention.

This is a complete reframing of the relationship between the audience, the artifact, and cognition itself.

And this movement, this push toward interdisciplinary work, didn't just happen overnight.

It has a cumulative history, which the chapter traces back to earlier work in cognitive linguistics.

Correct.

Interdisciplinary scholars are now actively integrating these 4E insights, but we really have to look at the groundwork that was laid by earlier cognitive approaches in the humanities, even if that earlier work wasn't fully embodied by today's standards.

Right.

It was a necessary first step.

It was.

And to understand that historical arc, we should look at how the humanities first started leveraging cognitive science.

The author points out that this experience for humanists is cumulative.

It's not strictly sequential, like building blocks in the sciences.

Earlier work provided an essential toolkit.

I think the author's own early research into Shakespeare is a perfect illustration of this.

It shows how the integration began with a desire to understand the mechanics of impact.

Like, why do audiences remember certain complicated lines, like hold the mirror up to nature, but let others fade?

That kind of inquiry, it demands an approach that goes beyond simple thematic analysis.

You have to analyze the language itself as a cognitive phenomenon.

And so the author's work began by using cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor theory, because it insists on embodiment, the idea that our metaphors are grounded in bodily experience.

And the detailed example here is that analysis of Hamlet's famous line.

The author didn't just ask what the mirror symbolizes.

They systematically unraveled how Hamlet's idea of the mirror works as a cognitive tool for vision.

And this involved arguing that Hamlet's line relies on what's called a conceptual blend of multiple complex and sometimes conflicting historical ideas of what a mirror even was in that time.

It wasn't one simple reflective surface.

Wait, so we're not just talking about a simple looking glass reflecting reality.

What were these different concepts of mirror that were being blended together?

Let's slow down on this because this detail really shows the difference between traditional analysis and a cognitive analysis.

OK, so the blend involved at least four significant ideas.

First, you have the convex mirror.

This was a common powerful object in art and social life at the time, but it wasn't used for fidelity.

It was used for deliberately distorting and intensifying images.

It made images more than reality.

So a mirror that lies, but in an artistically compelling way.

Exactly.

Second, you have the political tracks of the time, which often use the mirror as a metaphor for proper governance or moral reflection.

You have books called The Mirror for Magistrates.

This was a philosophical or ethical tool.

A mirror as a kind of guidebook for behavior, got it.

Third, there was the new technology of scientific glass being used in instruments, which reflected a brand new skeptical approach to vision itself.

This idea that our tools mediate reality.

They don't just show it.

And the fourth.

And finally, you have the small flat glass mirrors that were newly available from Italy, which offered the possibility of a truer, but very fragile personal reflection.

That is just immense.

So by identifying all these different evoked sources, the analysis shows that the purpose of playing doesn't just evoke one single meaning.

It evokes a set of competing high stakes tools for vision that the audience has to simultaneously hold and try to reconcile.

The cognitive load is enormous.

Right.

And this kind of analytical rigor is so beneficial because it allows humanists to ask questions about poetry that traditional thematic analysis just couldn't access.

However, and this is a crucial caveat in the chapter, we cannot use Shakespeare's poetry to prove a current disputed theory in cognitive science.

And you can't use cognitive linguistics to prove the ultimate aesthetic value of Shakespeare.

Exactly.

It's not about proving.

It's about mutual enrichment.

The rigor is necessary because some of the cognitive theories that humanists adopt can be, well, unstable or highly debated within the sciences themselves.

Ignoring that instability just imperils the scholarly work.

And moving beyond that specific example,

cognitive linguistics was really influential in shaping early cognitive literary theory.

You see it in Donald Freeman's work on Macbeth.

Freeman saw Macbeth as being tightly constructed around these fundamental structures of understanding, known as image schemata.

These are basic non -metaphorical spatial or temporal patterns we use to make sense of the world.

Like path, where life is a journey, or container, where the castle is a vessel for evil, or Duncan's body is a container for life.

Yes, and what's fascinating is Freeman's realization about influence.

The powerful metaphoric structure of the play itself became the conceptual structure for the critics who were writing about the play.

The play's linguistic scaffolding became contagious.

It became the critical scaffolding used by commentators.

That is a direct demonstration of art as a cognitive shaper, even if it's only shaping the internal thought patterns of the critics.

We also saw Eve Sweetser's work on Cyrano de Bergerac.

Right, where Sweetser showed that in Cyrano's famous verbal duels, rhyming is not just decorative, it's a critical part of the intellectual battle.

The winner is the one who can control the relationship between meaning and poetic form, using the physical constraints of the rhyme scheme as a cognitive tool for dominance.

And then Mary Thomas Crane's Shakespeare's brain took this daring leap, suggesting that the language of the early modern period, all the wordplay, the shifting subjectivity, that it actually reflects and illuminates the brain that created it.

This suggests a powerful feedback loop between the brain, performance, language, and culture.

This contributed to what's called neural historicism, which tries to ground the historical study of language in the physical organization of the brain.

It gave a physical reality to language structures.

So this all sounds like a strong existing tradition.

People call it cognitive poetics or narrative theory.

And yet the chapter makes this powerful critique that all this early influential work still suffers from a fundamental flaw.

And this is the crucial transition point to full -on 4E.

The flaw is what the author calls the problem of disembodied reading.

Even when scholars talked about a positioned reader, that position was entirely mental eternal,

a perspective -taking exercise conducted internally.

They were discussing the reader's mind as if it were a disembodied theater, completely separated from the actual reader holding a physical book in a physical environment.

Precisely.

Even influential work on theory of mind and literature treated reading as almost entirely an internal mental activity, independent of the body holding the book or the environment containing that body.

So even when they were using the term cognitive science, they were still conceptually separating the mental experience from the physical acting body.

They were sort of falling prey to that old Cartesian dualism.

Yes, and this brings us to Sean Gallagher's very strong critique, where he argues that some scholars are body snatchers.

Body snatchers.

Yeah, Gallagher points out the irony.

These scholars claim to be working on embodied cognition, and yet they systematically eliminate the necessary role of the organism -environment interaction in cognition.

They devised a theory of embodied cognition that simply left the body out of the equation.

So if we look at the work of Freeman and Crane, they were focusing on cognitive processes that happen after the linguistic information is already inside the reader.

Right, the internal processing, the image schemata.

But there is no discussion of the hand that holds the book, the shifting light in the room, the physical fatigue of the reader, or the ecology that contains that hand.

And the author insists that this omission is the central challenge that the 4E framework has to overcome in the humanities.

We need to demonstrate, with scientific rigor,

why the body is non -negotiable for thinking.

Which is exactly where the hard evidence comes in.

The empirical proof that the body is not just a vehicle for the brain, it is integral to the cognitive process of language interpretation.

And this evidence is what finally allows us to challenge that old hermeneutic model of reading as just linear decoding.

So let's get into the proof.

Let's start with the most dramatic and frankly strangest example of embodied comprehension.

The pencil -in -the -mouth experiment.

This was the Havas and Colleagues study from 2007.

They created this artificial situation where subjects were forced to hold a pencil in their mouths, which forced their faces into postures that mimicked specific emotions,

completely independent of how they were actually feeling.

It sounds like something out of a weird movie.

So they were basically forced to method act their way through reading a sentence.

In a way, yes.

To mimic a smile, they had to hold the pencil with their teeth only, which pulls the corners of the mouth up.

To mimic a frown, they had to hold it only with their lips, which pulls the corners down.

And what did they find?

The finding was powerful evidence of embodied comprehension.

Subjects responded significantly quicker to sentences relating emotions that were congruent with their enforced facial posture.

Wait, really?

Yes.

If their face was artificially in a smile posture, they processed positive sentences faster.

If their face was artificially arranged in a frown, they processed negative sentences faster.

That is phenomenal.

It suggests that even the subtle physical muscular state of your face is an input and an output for language interpretation.

Your body is literally priming your ability to decode emotion in language.

The finding shows that the body state modulates how the brain interprets language.

We aren't just processing the words sad event internally.

The facial musculature associated with sadness is recruited during comprehension, even if it's artificially imposed.

This just devastates the skullbound theory.

And this isn't an isolated finding.

It gets further reinforcement from work on what are called motor priming studies, which link language comprehension directly to motor preparation.

Right.

Studies by researchers like Bergen and Glenberg show that when subjects read an action sentence, like open the drawer, they are much quicker to perform a corresponding physical action, specifically a hand movement toward their body than a movement away from their body.

Because opening a drawer is usually a movement towards your body.

The mind isn't just picturing the action.

It's physically preparing for it.

Exactly.

The comprehension of the sentence accesses the motor cortex enough to prime one physical action over another.

But what's really fascinating is that this link extends even further to sentences describing abstract metaphorical exchanges.

Like what?

Like you delegate the responsibilities to Anna.

That's where it gets truly interesting.

Delegation isn't a physical act like open the drawer.

It's totally abstract.

And yet studies show that even reading abstract sentences about delegation or transfer of authority still activates the motor systems in similar ways.

And that's because these abstract concepts are often built on foundational physical metaphors of transfer or movement.

The system is recruited for both the literal and the metaphorical.

So we absolutely cannot rely on theories that disembodied language and treat meaning as just some semiotic code.

We need a new way of looking at literature that acknowledges its physical impact.

The literature that literally moves us.

And this realization has spurred what the chapter calls the second generation of cognitive literary approaches.

This new wave foregrounds the embodiment of mental processes and their essential extension into the world through material artifacts and sociocultural practices.

Extension, right.

So we move from the body holding the book to the actual physical object on stage like a prop.

How do those artifacts shift the cognitive load?

This brings us to the work of Barbara Dancy -Gier who focuses on the multimodality of language and theatrical performance.

She argues that complex stories can stretch our cognitive abilities of making sense to their absolute limits.

And they often do so by using physical objects.

And she introduced this concept of dramatic anchors.

Yes, props work as dramatic anchors.

They hold parts of the story or meaning in their physical material presence.

They are material anchors, their physical reality and narrative anchors, their place in the story that contribute to the ongoing conceptualization of the play's meaning.

They basically offload cognitive work.

The classic example is Mark Antony holding up Caesar's mantle during the funeral oration in Julius Caesar.

Right.

First, Antony uses the cloak as a powerful symbol.

It stands in for Caesar's victories and Rome's glorious past.

But then he strategically points out the holes left to the murderers' daggers.

And at that moment, the cloak becomes a material metonymic device.

A metonym being a figure of speech where a thing is referred to by something closely associated with it.

So the cloak becomes a stand -in for the murder itself.

Precisely.

By pointing out the physical tears, Antony is using the material object to place the brutal reality of the murder literally and visibly in front of the spectator's eyes while he describes the betrayal.

The physical object is doing the work of memory and emotional priming.

And the cognitive effect is immediate and collective.

The bloody cloak initiates a riot.

The funeral oration doesn't just convince the crowd psychologically.

The sight of that physical artifact inspires the collective body of the crowd to want revenge and make physical change.

The material object affords a violent response while it anchors the memory of the murder.

That physical artifact is integral to the cognitive, emotional, and collective motor experience of the audience.

The body of the crowd is literally moved by the material object, illustrating that meaning is distributed outside the individual brain.

This moves us perfectly into the second half of our deep dives.

Viewing art and performance not as passive objects for internal interpretation, but as external technology and tools that actively shape our thinking and form a cognitive ecology.

The idea of art as a functional tool has been championed by Ellen Spolsky.

She argues that it is through the impurities of fiction, meaning the inherent artifice and strangeness of art, that we work through difficult social and cognitive problems, like reconciling conflicting belief systems.

So the strangeness of fiction is not a bug.

It's a feature.

It's designed to engage our flexible cognitive systems.

Absolutely.

And Spolsky's work is deeply historical.

She examines how religious art, architecture, and sacred relics historically function as an external technology that expanded the cognitive power and communicative reach of individuals and communities for centuries.

The cathedral, the painting, the relic, they were tools for collective memory and shared understanding.

They were devices the church used to offload and distribute complex theological concepts across a populace that might have been illiterate.

Exactly.

But she makes an even more profound point for the integration of these fields.

Works of art, she argues, are not just better understood through reference to cognitive science.

They are, in fact, sources of evidence for cognitive science.

Wait, I need you to unpack that.

Yeah.

How can a painting be evidence for science?

Well, they invite systematic examination for the performances they require of the humans who engage with them.

So while a work of art alone isn't empirical evidence in the traditional scientific sense, the conversation across the disciplines observing the patterns of human engagement with art might lead to controlled experiments to systematically examine these artifacts and their cognitive impact.

So art asks questions that science can then try to answer empirically.

Right.

It can generate hypotheses about how human brains and bodies interact with the world.

It really flips the script.

And Matt Haler expands this idea of the artifact as a cognitive tool even further, linking it directly to the extended mind component of 4E.

He argues that humans are mediated and co -constituted by our engagement with material artifacts.

We are not just users of art.

We are actively shaped, molded, and completed by it.

Co -constituted.

That suggests we aren't fully formed until we interact with our technology or our art.

Exactly.

Haler posits the existence of a visual grammar, the underlying rules we use to make sense of what we see.

And this grammar can be expanded or shifted by artifacts like e -readers, for instance, which manipulate the way we meaningfully conceive of our potential for action or our sense of spatial organization.

So the key takeaway here is the link to the extended mind.

The expert use of artifacts is fundamentally part of what it means to be human.

We use equipment as extensions of our bodies and the cognition they're entwined with.

The book is part of your memory system.

The map is part of your navigational system.

And this is why the deployment of cognitive science in theater and performance studies has such huge immediate potential because performance inherently deals with embodiment, interaction, and external artifacts.

It's naturally 4E.

Rhonda Blair captured this early on by insisting that traditional methods of American acting training based on Stanislavsky's system already presumed an embodied mind.

The training was designed to facilitate the actor's dynamic engagement through and with the body and senses.

It was already acknowledging that the actor's experience, the character's emotional truth, was simultaneously imaginary and real, residing in the physical being, not just a mental idea.

And John Litterby takes this a step further using a more abstract scientific model, dynamic system theory or DST.

This views the actor's work not as psychological mimicry but as a system responding to stimuli.

So DST views the art of acting as fundamentally about being present and responsive to perturbations in a system.

The performance is not a static script.

It's a dynamic evolving environment.

Right.

He used the example of a Katie Mitchell production of The Waves to demonstrate this by staging the construction of the story itself using a complicated mix of video and live action.

That staging demonstrated boundary conditions and phase synchrony.

The emotional impact wasn't immediate.

It accrued over time, felt fully only through the audience's active cumulative process of constructing the story.

A demonstration of a dynamic system in flux, creating emotion through systemic instability.

And this systematic whole environment view leads us directly to the concept of distributed cognition and Evelyn Tribble's groundbreaking work, Cognition in the Globe.

She applies the 4E paradigm shift directly to Shakespeare's theater.

And Tribble's starting point was wonderfully pragmatic.

How on earth did playwrights and players manage the massive cognitive load of writing, learning, and performing five or six different complex plays per week for a demanding audience?

Where was the memory stored?

Where was the mental bandwidth coming from?

The traditional answer would be, well, they must have had exceptional, isolated memories, individual genius.

But the answer she finds isn't in the genius of the individuals.

It's in the system.

The Globe Theater, its players, and its entire environment functioned as a system that created and perpetuated cognition.

So distributed doesn't mean it was parceled out.

No.

It means it was spread over the entire cognitive environment.

The total cognitive load, the memory, the intention, the action were shared across everything.

So what was included in that cognitive environment for the Globe?

It includes all the constitutive elements,

the audience, with their expected reactions and known conventions, the props, those dramatic anchors we talked about, the backstage plots, which were physical notes on sequencing,

the highly structured verse and rhyme.

And even the nonverbal elements, like the girl selling oranges to the groundlings.

Exactly.

She was part of the ever -present, dynamic environment.

And when we view cognition this way, our investment in the idea of the isolated individual internal agent has to be questioned.

It shifts from, how did Shakespeare remember all this?

To, how did the system of the Globe remember and perpetuate all this?

This is why Tribble and John Sutton describe performances as cognitive ecologies, multi -dimensional contexts where we remember, think, and act collaboratively on the fly in rich ongoing interaction with our environments.

Remembering, attending, intending, and acting are understood as distributed, co -constructed, system -level activities.

And within that ecology, the material objects on the stage, the setting itself, are key.

This brings us back to Timu Pavalanen's application of Gibsonian affordances to performance.

Pavalanen argues that the ecology of a stage performance is defined by its affordances.

The objects on stage are not just symbols.

They enable and constrain actions for the performers.

And affordances are the possibilities for action.

An environment or object offers an organism, right?

A chair affords zitting, a stair affords climbing.

Yes.

And Pavalanen argues that these affordances constrain the performer's actions, which, in turn, enables and constrains the range of interpretations the audience is liable to come up with.

If a character has a literal locked cage on stage, that material object immediately limits the affordances for action and, thus, the cognitive pathways the audience can follow.

The environment itself is a cognitive participant.

This systematic view allows us to move from theory to practical application, looking at works of art that are actively staging 4E cognition and using them as tools for new understanding.

The arts, in this view, provide us with a new pair of calipers.

That's a term from the philosopher Alvanoe.

He defines a concept, not as a fixed label to slap on a thing, but as a dynamic pair of calipers.

A tool with which you can pick the thing up, measure it, and engage with it.

The arts are providing new conceptual calipers, challenging our established categories of self and cognition.

And every artifact is designed to afford certain engagements while dissuading others.

The artist inherently has a folk theory of how the audience will consume their work, and the work itself presumes and enacts the subject in its use.

We can trace this in the historical development of art.

Take the shift from mimetic, realistic art to impressionism.

Consider Monet's Water Lilies.

That massive canvas, right?

Covered in thousands of small, distinct dabs of color.

That painting actively moves you, the viewer, to the position necessary to take the large piece in.

You cannot appreciate it up close.

The colors just dissolve.

You have to stand back and squint.

And in doing that, in actively composing the color and shape into an image yourself,

the viewer becomes acutely aware of the operation of their own visual system.

You realize the work necessary to actively compose the image isn't just done by the artist, it's being completed by you, the perceiving subject.

Unlike earlier art, where the skill was assessed based on mimetic ability, capturing the scene as it really is, impressionism foregrounded the perceiving subject.

This experience, therefore, presumes and enact the modernist's fascination with the individual self and the differences in perception.

It creates a self that's concerned with its own process of seeing.

So art, then, stages a shifting conception of who we are, offering us new cognitive tools, new calipers to handle the world.

And this perspective is especially useful when looking at theater.

Let's return to Alvin Noe's critique of what he called modern theater.

He argued that most people imagine modern theater as sitting quietly while actors pretend behind a fourth wall in a purely symbolic space.

And Noe called this a presence -denying experience.

Why?

For Noe, this format denies real presence, which he defines as skillful engagement with the world, how things show up for us.

The audience is reduced to inactive eyewitnesses, just trying to extract the story and the internal meaning, rather than witnessing an actual event that requires their physical cognitive engagement.

Right, like at a rock concert or a sporting event.

Exactly.

The author of the chapter, however, challenges Noe's categorization, suggesting a nuanced counterargument.

What's the counterargument?

The author suggests that what Noe calls modern theater, plays like Eugene O 'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, was not denying presence arbitrarily.

It was simply staging the dominant scientific and philosophical paradigm of its time.

Which was the Freudian self.

Precisely.

That kind of theater staged a cognition committed to individuality, the internal life, the subconscious, and the deeply entrenched Cartesian split between body and mind.

It staged the Freudian self as the center of action.

So that theater genre may have denied Noe's preferred version of presence, but only because the science and psychology of the time did too.

That's a brilliant reframing.

The theater was holding the mirror up to the dominant cognitive science of the 20th century.

And now contemporary theater, informed by this 4E movement, is actively moving away from finding meaning toward enacting an experience.

It's experimenting with the art form to stage embodied cognition.

And the author offers a perfect counterexample.

A stand -up performance of As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe in London.

This is the absolute opposite of the dark, silent, psychological drama.

The environment itself is the antithesis of a closed system.

The audience, the groundlings, are packed tightly together, standing for three hours in an open yard.

They're subject to the weather, helicopter interruptions overhead, a growing chill,

crying babies.

It sounds physically exhausting and cognitively distracting.

It is, but in a functional way.

The audience is constantly moving, bumping into each other, shifting perspective, ebbing and flowing like a murmuration of starlings.

They laugh, they adjust, they respond collectively and physically.

So the experience, the author argues, is intrinsically one of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition.

The physical discomfort, the interruptions, the collective movement, it all renders salient, a conception of self that is collective and ecological, not merely psychological and individual.

The play is not asking the audience to sit back and decode internal meaning.

It's asking them to actively participate in a shared unstable physical reality.

Okay, let's move to the most radical and detailed example of staging the audience.

A production called Absent by the company DreamThings Speak created by Tristan Sharps.

This is immersive, non -linear performance that actively stages the audience's cognition.

The entire experience is a cognitive experiment.

Spectators are directed to Shoreditch Town Hall and immediately asked to check in as a hotel guest.

This immediately confuses all the conventions.

Are they acting?

Is this real?

They're cast as a character type, relying on frames that announce a theatrical experience, even as those frames are constantly dislocated.

The cognitive environment is layered immediately with artifacts.

For instance, there's a copy of the Evening Standard newspaper available at the bar, which features a buried story about a duchess being evicted from the very Shoreditch Town Hall hotel.

This sets up this strange, unsettling frame of time and identity dislocation right from the start.

And then the spectator is led into what appears to be a small, modular hotel room, the kind of capitalist hell described in the fictional promotional material.

Right, and rectangular frames on the walls come alive, showing these sepia -toned videos of the duchess's past.

And then you see a live actor, the older drunken duchess, packing on the other side of a mirror wall.

The audience is invited to peep through literal peep holes into slightly different -sized videos and rooms, creating an unsettling sense of fragmentation and voyeurism.

The disorientation just deepens when the spectator sees a video projection of the drunken, weaving duchess walking down a hall.

And her lack of balance is so convincing and jarring that it forces the spectator to hold onto the wall to maintain their own sense of balance.

The perception of her disorientation becomes physically enacted in the viewer.

That is a direct, measurable physical perturbation caused by the art.

Then comes the dollhouse effect.

They move into a room with miniature, replicated versions of the same space on all sides, each at a slightly different scale or perspective.

This actively confuses the spectator's sense of balance, proportions, size, and shape, making them feel disoriented or even drug, as the author puts it.

The audience is now hyper -aware of their own feeling perceptual system.

And the ultimate cognitive revelation occurs later, when the audience realizes they have been cycling through the same contemporary modular room the entire time, simply looking back on different layers of time.

Time is layered like geologic strata paint, wallpaper, cement on the excavated walls.

We've lost any clean sense of size, time, and narrative causality.

And near the end, you enter the large ballroom which you had seen in a video projection of its destruction.

It's physically damaged, chairs knocked over, but the destruction is incomplete.

There's still the scent of perfume and music playing.

The violence is interrupted.

We are positioned as coroners or forensic investigators desperate to establish a causal chain.

What happened?

Who did it?

When did it happen?

But this desire for a clean singular causal chain of events is deliberately frustrated.

The meaning refuses to be confined by a narrative frame.

And this failure forces the audience to confront their innate compulsion to find agents, causes, and effects, leaving them instead with the sheer presence that Noe describes, that skillful, unsettled engagement with what is showing up for them.

You know, traditional theater is structured around intention, cause, and effect.

Claudius wants to be king, which causes Hamlet to act, which causes Polonius's death.

We organize the world this way through intentional agents taking actions and causing effects.

But this show challenges that organizational compulsion.

The destruction of the ballroom in Absent is not cleanly caused by one person.

It allows us to see the fallibility of relying on clean causal chains to explain complex systems.

Right, and this is where the chapter draws on the philosopher N.

R.

Hanson.

Hanson argued that our attempt to find a cause is fundamentally motivated by our assessment of something as an effect.

So we decide something is an effect and then we work backward to find a cause that fits our explanation.

Precisely.

Hanson stated, There are as many causes of X as there are explanations of X.

The real world, like the Globe performance or the Absent production, is a dynamic system always in flux.

What counts as an event or an agent is often only visible post -hoc, rendering it shaky ground for deep, singular meaning -making.

So this kind of contemporary theater frustrates the desire to find meaning and instead rewards engagement.

It forces spectators to be actively aware of their own deep -seated cognitive compulsion toward narrative structure and causal chains.

And by standing in the Globe or being forced to navigate the strained, modular spaces of Absent, the spectator becomes aware of the need to renegotiate the collective agreement to manage individuality.

Untethered from their protective seat, they become aware of the collective self, the shifting, dynamic, one, none, all.

The environment becomes strange, requiring new navigation skills and new ways of thinking that are fully 4E.

So this entire deep dive shows how the cognitive turn has infused literary and theatrical scholarship with a fresh jolt, opening up new avenues for inquiry that are arguably far more exciting than anything new historicism or psychoanalysis offered decades ago.

But we know challenges remain.

Yes.

There is still lingering skepticism from some scientists who demand more quantitative rigor than the arts traditionally provide.

And conversely, there's fear from some humanists who worry about universalizing or positivist approaches stripping the unique subjective value from art.

And the author suggests that the biggest problem is linguistic.

Despite the definitive rejection of Cartesian dualism in much of the sciences,

our everyday language still separates the body from the mind and emotions from thinking.

We're stuck with a dualistic vocabulary.

And the radical solution proposed in the chapter is to stop using clumsy, redundant phrases like embodied cognition, if philosophically there is no such thing as disembodied cognition.

We should just say cognition.

The term itself is a linguistic attempt to right a Cartesian wrong, but it just perpetuates the dualistic thought.

That's powerful.

If we accept that all cognition is embodied and embedded,

then embodied cognition becomes a redundant term.

And we can finally move on from the internal versus external debate.

And the exciting conclusion here is that now that the brain is no longer viewed as a black box or a static computer, the humanities have expertise in the very areas scientists are urgently studying, feeling, wanting, imagining, and world making.

The humanities are no longer just consumers of scientific theory.

They are producers of essential knowledge.

Inter discourse is vital.

The humanities provide what the sciences often cannot.

New language and new ways to see and stage, and thus to understand and use the full implications of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended minds.

Contemporary art, literature, music, and performance suggest a richer perspective on old language for 4E cognition, offering us new conceptual tools, new calipers to interact with the world and understand the self.

We have completed a pretty thorough exploration of this chapter's main contributions.

4E shifts art from a vehicle for internal hermeneutic meaning to a functional tool for external world making, demonstrating that thinking is action in the world, not computation in the brain.

And that fundamentally changes how we understand our relationship to art and to each other.

So the next time you hold a book or step into a performance space, or even stand in front of a painting like Monet's Water Lilies, don't ask yourself what the story means.

Ask yourself instead,

what cognitive system is this artifact asking me to enact?

And what kind of self individual and psychological or collective and ecological is it creating in the process?

That is the ultimate challenge posed by the convergence of 4E cognition and the humanities.

It offers us a profound new way to understand why art matters.

From all of us here, thank you for diving deep with us.

And finally, a warm thank you from the Last Minute Lecture Team.