The Literary Mind

Potluck!

2007-12-05T02:17:34Z

This is the place where you can tell the rest of us what you'll bring for our end-of-semester party. Use the comments section to do so. It'll be half workshop, half celebration. And then we'll have Oliver Sacks as our a post-celebration celebration on Thursday (the 13th).

Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts

2007-11-19T13:13:21Z

The University of Lincoln (U.K) is publishing what looks like a genuinely interdisciplinary journal, Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts. Maryellen had the idea (rightly) that this might be a forum for some of the work you're all doing for the course. Take a look and see what you think.

Your Final Projects

2007-10-31T17:06:05Z

The Basics As the syllabus for the course explains, your final projects should expand on materials and discussions central to the course and may be composed in a variety of genres or media: • the academic essay (or review essay) • the literary essay • fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction (if you’re confident with these genres) • podcast, radio program, or short film (if you’re confident with these media) Click on Extended Entry for details. ]]> Genre You’ll want to be sure that you choose a genre or medium with which you have enough experience (or time and confidence) to illuminate questions or problems central to the study of literature and cognition. Your projects should be motivated by the pursuit of understanding genuine questions and should be composed with a clear sense of audience in mind. We will devote considerable time to drafting, exchanging feedback on, and revising these projects. What Do I Mean by "Expand on Materials and Discussions Central to the Course"? Whatever your choice of genre, it's a good idea to identify a question (or set of questions) to give you focus and motivate your project. Such questions should, obviously, be clearly related to the course's focus on the many ways that research in cognition, perception, emotion, and consciousness can help us understand literature (or the arts in general). The possible questions are many, but I'll give you a few examples: • A scholarly essay might bring together research in literary criticism and cognitive science to focus on a question like this: How do Virginia Woolf's and Lauren Slater's narratives represent key differences (and similarities) between early twentieth- and early twenty-first-century understandings of consciousness? • A short story might involve a narrative that dramatizes a question like this: What's the relationship between ordinary perception and hallucination? • A podcast might draw on memoir and memory theory to explore questions like these: How many types of memory are there, and how do different types (say semantic and episodic or conscious and unconscious) shape identity? • A web version of a critical essay, enhanced by film stills and embedded video, might explore a question like this: How do film adaptations of literary works that foreground consciousness use visual language to represent the first-person experience of characters? Help with New Media Projects If you decide to make a podcast, web site, video, or any other new media project, I can help you get the help you might need with the necessary software or equipment. That said, you should be sure you shape such projects so that they're manageable. Deadlines Tuesday, November 20 Proposal, including "motivating question(s)" (on your blog) Tuesday, December 4 Reflection on your progress (on your blog) Saturday, December 8 Drafts to Writing group (by e-mail; to be workshopped in class on Tuesday, December 11) Friday, December 21 Final Projects due Peer Review Groups See assignments for peer review groups below. Members of each group will read and respond to each other's proposals (Nov. 20), Reflections (December 4), and Drafts (December 8). Follow the same procedures we've used for in-class workshops: Start with the positive and suggest where the potential lies, but pay your peers the respect of taking their work seriously and giving it your honest critical assessment. Group 1: Jessica, Rebecca, Chris Group 2: Jennifer, Maryellen, Andrew, Dominik Group 3: Arielle, Valerie, John Rice Group 4: Lucy, John Currie, Jenna

"His Life Changed in the Blink of an Eye"

2007-10-31T16:35:05Z

Miramax is releasing a film version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel. It has already played in some festivals and will be released commercially November 30. The promotional copy is pretty standard movie trailer schlock: "When His Body Become His Prison . . . His Life Changed in the Blink of an Eye. . . Imagination Set Him Free." To say that Bauby is set free by imagination is a serious distortion. A more nuanced take might ask how Bauby's imagination is affected by his condition, how it helps him cope, and what its limits are. The trailer belongs to a long tradition of overstating imagination's powers, a tradition that skips right over many of the more interesting asepcts of imagination, focusing instead on an unrealistic notion that imagination can somehow obliterate material reality and therefor "free" us from it. In fact, imagination and physical reality exist in relation to each other, and their relationship is where the really interesting questions lie, I think. But, you can't judge a film by its trailer, and even though the trailer indicates the film provides a lot of back story not included in the book, it also suggests that Schnabel is doing something interesting, experimenting with film techniques--closely cropped frames, a saturated color palette, strong lighting that bleaches out the edges of frames--to capture Bauby's mental states on film. I'm curious to see how well he pulls this off. Here's the trailer, so you can see for yourselves. For an image of Jean-Dominique Bauby himself, see Sarit Golub's blog for Psychology 801.

THE CORPUS CALLOSUM

2007-10-30T18:35:48Z

I'v gathered some links and illustrations for those of you interested in the anatomy, technique, and history of corpus collostomy--the surgery at the center of Lauren Slater's Lying. An illustration of the Corpus callosum, from above (from David Hubel's "The Corpus Callosum and Stereopsis"). Notice how it fans out and joins the brain's two hemispheres. LINKS "The Corpus Callosum and Stereopsis," from David Hubel's Mind, Brain, and Vision site (Harvard Medical School) "The Neurosurgeon's Interest in the Corpus Callosum" (a historical account) by Joseph E. Bogen (Cal Tech) "Epilespy Surgery" (Neurosurgery at the Washington University School of Medicine) "Splitting the Human Brain" by Paul Pietsch (Indiana University School of Optometry) An illustration of the Corpus callosum, also from above (from Paul Pietch's "Splitting the Human Brain")

Cognition in the News

2007-10-25T16:51:39Z

This past week, the New York Times devoted the entire Science section to sleep and dreams. Take a look. We're not devoting much time or attention to the sleeping mind in this course, but there are plenty of possible final project topics in this area. The articles in the Times provide a useful introduction into current research and theory of sleep and dreams. If you're interested in following up, I have a lot of material on the topic in my office. (Or, talk to John Rice, he should be an expert by now! Right, John?)

Engrams (and Daniel Schacter)

2007-10-25T16:42:04Z

Searching for Memory (the one I showed you in class Tuesday night). Brains don’t store memories, whole and intact. Instead, the nervous system registers experience and is permanently altered by it. An engram, in Shacter's words, is “the enduring change in the nervous system (the ‘memory trace’) that conserves the effects of experience across time.” ]]> According to this idea (which Schacter borrows and adapts from an early 20th-century psychologist, Richard Semon), when something happens to you—a city bus full of people in Halloween costumes whirs by, for example—multiple senses, emotions, and cognitive functions process it, in overlapping "tracks." Neural networks that comprise each track communicate with each other, strengthening their previous connections. The engram is not something you can locate or look at. It’s the strengthened connection at the points of intersection among the networks. To recall the trace, you’ll require a retrieval cue—say, a bus whirring by, minus the Halloween costumes. When you see someone who looks like an old friend, memories of that old friend are fabricated. When you search for the word on the tip of your tongue, you are firing cues to trigger your brain to respond. When it doesn’t, it’s because it can’t re-connect enough pieces of the engram to spell that particular word. You feel close because the networks are largely there. But a few missing synapses make the word elusive, even if it that word is very familiar, like the name of a neighborhood you lived in just two years ago. When you perceive an event—say, the sensation of snapping your first lost tooth out of the gum—your synaptic networks respond to nerve stimulus to dose you with pain but also with the curious satisfaction of the snap. In the process, neuromodulators re-shape brain chemistry and structure, subtly but permanently. They chart a relationship between the pain and the satisfaction—and the vast selection of other sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences the experience engenders. The memory that results is a guide for future action. The members of the snapping tooth network diffuse, wandering off to play their other roles, prepared, though, to call another meeting if the organism loses another tooth, or needs to recall the experience twenty years later to tell a story at a dinner party. Memories are always approximations, because an engram will never reconvene in its original form, with all members present in their exact configurations. Things change. Cells die, or grow apart, or just get too busy or distracted. This is why a story recounted repeatedly, ritualistically over holiday meals, can become memory. Individual experience can become collective memory because stories resemble experiences enough to trigger identical neural systems. Story and experience can become indistinguishable.

Cognition Online

2007-10-05T17:34:37Z

Here are some links to various blogs and web projects that focus on cognition from a wide variety of perspectives. You might choose to review one of these, use some of them as potential sources that may inform your final projects, or just read some of them and respond (and link) to them on your blog. The Neurocritic A blog "[d]econstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology" Mixing Memory An anonymously authored blog the author describes as "[a]n entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about" Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism A special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review A Memory Artist An exhibition of the paintings of Franco Magnani (who is profiled in Oliver Sacks's Anthropologist on Mars) Transliteracies Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading Cognitive Daily A new cognitive science article every day Cognitive Therapy Today A blog hosted by the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research Literature, Cognition, and the Brain A web page featuring research at the intersection of literary studies, cognitive theory, and neuroscience

Faces of Neurobiology

2007-09-11T16:36:15Z

I thought it might be useful for you to see the faces of some of the neurobiologists we're reading (or listening to). Here they are! Paul Broks Oliver Sacks Antonio Damasio V. S. Ramachandran Julian Keenan J. Kevin O'Regan

"We are all just a car crash or a slip away from being a different person."

2007-09-11T13:36:28Z

"We are all just a car crash or a slip away from being a different person." --Paul Broks (author of Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology) From time to time, I'll collect links to your blog entries when they seem to focus on similar themes and post them on my page. For this first one, I'm linking to entries where the writers seem a little freaked out by the implications with regard to selfhood of some of the ideas in cognitive science we're still just beginning to explore. ]]> Arielle writes about her response to reading about Anton's delusion (when a blind person believes s/he can see) in Carter's Exploring Consciousness. In response to the Radio Lab episode, "Who Am I?" Maryellen writes about the idea of a "provisional self" (and its parallel in Vedanta philosophy). On a related note, Jessica responds to thinks, wondering how well we can ever know even our intimates (given the "provisional' quality of selfhood Lodge dramatizes). On a brighter note, Arielle links to an article that suggests some practical applications (with regard to reading) for the ways our brains construct (rather than reflect) reality.

Qualia

2007-09-11T13:25:49Z

I Am a Strange Loop), consciousness is “a kind of mirage.” Antonio Damasio calls it a “movie in the brain.” ]]> The philosophers call the basic units, or tracks, of the movie qualia—and the neurologists have adopted the term. Qualia are the subjective qualities of any given perception. The redness of red. The painness of pain. The wetness of wet. The philosophers use a sadistic thought experiment to explain the concept. Imagine Mary the Color Scientist. She is raised from birth in a colorless room, with gloves on, no mirrors, nothing that would allow her to see the color of her own body or the color in anything around her. Then, a team of scientists teach her everything there is to know about color—about light and waves, the rods and cones of the eyes, the neural pathways that produce sight. Once she knows everything there is to know about color, Mary is released. Will she be surprised by the sight of a red scarf? Philosophers line up on one side or the other. Some try to reconcile the two. Some argue the thought experiment misses the point. The neurologists can’t explain how the brain produces the subjective feeling of red. They use the term “explanatory gap” to describe the fact that they can explain how the brain perceives red, but not how it endows the perceiver with the conscious sense of redness. What they do know is that the redness is not in the world alone. The eyes and brain manufacture redness. The neurologists agree that our eyes see only a partial picture of the environments we fix our gazes on. Our brains fill that picture in, largely through expectations built on past experience, mood, temperament, and physical state. Humans can compare notes and agree that though they can’t share each other’s qualia, what they are sensing seems similar, if not identical. But with a different set of eyes and a different type of brain, it is anyone’s guess what a dolphin or a cricket or a being from another galaxy might see when shown Mary’s red scarf. Some evolutionary biologists call the perceptual world of any given species an Umwelt—meaning a species specific sense of the world, which emerges from each species’ unique sense organs. Humans like to think of the human brain as the apotheosis of perceptual organs, but other species can sense information lost to us. Certain butterflies can detect each other’s ultraviolet patterns and certain birds can navigate based on a sense of the earth’s electromagnetism. If what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel depends not just on sense organs but on mood, personality, experience, intelligence, and a host of other subjective qualities unique to each individual, then it’s no leap to say that every human possesses a distinct Umwelt. We are forever looking for ways to test and match each other’s Umwelts, to sense in unison. This is what love feels like. It’s what art sometimes feels like. It’s what spiritual transcendence feels like. Ever-present but hardly noticed rituals help groups of people to climb over the explanatory gap and match up the shape of each other’s realities.

Books and Blogs You Might Review

2007-09-01T13:50:56Z

I'm pasting a preliminary bibliography of various readings in literature and cognitive science below. I'll be updating it as the semester progresses. It would be great if you all made suggestions for additions in the comments section. You can use this running list to get ideas for your book reviews (and sources for your final projects). Literature and Cognitive Science

Literature and Cognitive Science:

A Selected Bibliography for English 781 (The Literary Mind)

Fiction and Drama

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Picador, 2002.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Vintage, 2004.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage, 2006.

The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1990.

---- The Unconsoled. New York: Vintage, 2005.

---- When We Were Orphans. New York: Vintage, 2001.

LeGuin, Ursula. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003.

Lloyd, Dan. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness. Boston: MIT Press, 2004. *See also Literary Criticism and Philosophy.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Laurel Leaf Books, 2002.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992.

---- Pale Fire. New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.

---- Speak, Memory. New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.

Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Picador, 2007.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

---- Macbeth. New York: Washington Square Press, 2003.

---- The Winter’s Tale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Saramago, José. Blindness. New York: Harvest Books, 1999.

---- The Cave. New York: Harvest Books, 2003.

---- Seeing. New York: Harvest Books, 2007.

Stevenson, Henry Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Signet Classics, 2003.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 2002.

---- To the Lighthouse. New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2007.

---- The Waves. New York: Harvest Books, 2006.

Creative Nonfiction and Autobiography

Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. New York: Vintage, 1997.

DeQuincy, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Vintage, 2006.

Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. X. New York: Basic Books, 2007. *See also Literary Criticism and Philosophy.

Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2006.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-Pack. New York: Modern Library,

2003.

Slater, Lauren. Lying. New York: Penguin, 2001.

---- Prozac Diary. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Cognitive Science, Neurobiology, and Psychology

Blackmore, Susan. Consciousness: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Broks, Paul. Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004.

Carter, Rita. Exploring Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Brain. New York:

Penguin, 2005 (originally pub. 1994).

---- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harvest Books, 2000.

---- Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harvest Books, 2003.

Doidge, Norman. The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York: Viking, 2007.

Edelman, Gerald. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

---- Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

---- Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Edelman, Gerald and Giulio Tononi. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Mind. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2003. *See also Literary Criticism and Philosophy.

Hartmann, Ernest L. Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1998.

Hobson, J. Allan. 13 Dreams Freud Never Had. New York: Pi Press, 2004.

---- The Dream Drug Store: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness. Boston: MIT Press, 2002.

---- Dreaming: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

---- Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind. Boston: MIT Press, 1999.

Johnson, Steven. Mind Wide Open: The Neuropsychology of Everyday Life. New York: Scribner, 2005.

Kandel, Eric R. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

Kramer, Peter D. Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self. Darby, PA: Diane Publishing, 1998.

McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1993.

Ramachandran, V. S. A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers. New York: Pi Press, 2005.

---- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of Human Consciousness. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

Ratey, John. A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings. New York: Vintage, 1999.

---- Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Vintage, 1996.

---- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

---- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Schacter, Daniel L. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

---- The Seven Sins of Memory. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Literary Criticism and Philosophy

Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. New York: Penguin, 1993.

---- Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2003. *See also Cognitive Science, Neurobiology, and Psychology.

Fireman, Gary D., Ted E. McVay, Jr., and Owen J. Flanagan. Narrative and

Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, 2003.

Flanagan, Owen. Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: Center for

the Study of Language and Information, 2003.

Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

---- I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. *See also Creative Nonfiction and Autobiography.

Holgan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Lloyd, Dan. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness. Boston: MIT Press, 2004. *See also Fiction.

Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

States, Bert O. Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

---The Rhetoric of Dreams. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Turner, Mark, ed. The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition.

New York and London: Routledge, 1998.

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Blogs and Web Projects

Anonymous. The Neurocritc. http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/.

Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research. Cognitive Therapy Today. http://cttoday.org/.

Chris (Anonymous). Mixing Memory. http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/.

Franchi, Stefano and Güven Güzeldere. Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism. A Special Issue of the Stanford Humanities Review. 4.1 (Spring 1994). http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/toc.html.

Magnani, Franco. A Memory Artist: An Artist Paints His Childhood Home from Memory. http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/magnani/index.html

Munger, Dave and Margaret P. Munger, eds. Cognitive Daily: A New Cognitive Psychology Article Nearly Every Day. http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/.

University of California (Santa Barbara). The Transliteracies Project: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading. http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/category/research-project/.

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Fuzzy Young Buck (A Consciousness Report)

2007-08-27T20:09:57Z

It's dusk. I've been alone in the country for a week. It's me and the rabbits, frogs, birds, snakes, and many many insects. I heard a bear was spotted on the property, but I haven't seen it. I've just awakened from a 45 minute nap, and I'm about to turn on my computer. I look out the back window and see a young buck (a male deer, I mean) right outside the back porch--maybe ten feet from where I'm standing. The window and screen between us combine with the misty late-summer air and saturated green of the lawn to make this look more like a painting than reality. The buck's horns are still small and kind of fuzzy like velour. If this is a painting, it's on velvet, not canvas. He's moving in what looks like slow motion. He sizes me up while our old cat, BK, sizes him up. She looks at me as if to confirm that what she's seeing is real. I don't have much of an answer. When reality looks like a moving painting (on velvet), it feels like a dream, and since I'm awake, this dream would be a hallucination. The buck turns its head and starts to walk, still slow, like the air is thick, around the side of the deck. He's probably after the apples that have been falling from the tree by the deck. For some reason, we don't have much of a problem with deer eating our plants and trees, so I just watch, wondering if he'll make his way toward the garden. He doesn't. BK and I watch him for 10 or 12 minutes before he makes his surreal (and still very slow) way into the woods. I never thought I was actually hallucinating or dreaming, but those 10 or 12 minutes of waking consciousness felt hallucinatory, dreamy. It was one of those experiences where real life feels unexpectedly unreal. If Antonio Damasio and others are right and the "feeling" of consciousness is an active creation of the brain, then ordinary consciousness shares more with hallucinations or dreams than most of us tend to assume. Damasio suggests that this feeling of consciousness is created when an organism perceives an object. In other words, it's the act of perception that gives rise to consciousness--rather than consciousness somehow recording objects in the outside world. But we never perceive an object in isolation. In this case, the buck, its fuzzy horns, the light at dusk, the grass, and my cat (among others) all contributed to the hallucinatory quality of the consciousness I felt. The fact that I was still groggy from my nap didn't hurt either, and this brings up another important fact--that physiological and environmental factors also play a big part in the interaction of organism and object. We won't see or feel the same object the same way from one day (or even one moment) to the next. That said, the next time I saw that buck (a week or so later), it did trigger that same hallucinatory feeling (though not as strongly this time). Anyway, the experience helped me sympathize with The Turn of the Screw's governess in a way I hadn't before. If you haven't read it yet, you'll see what I mean in a couple of weeks.