UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Brains with character: Reading and writing neuronarrative Yaczo, T.F. Publication date 2015 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Yaczo, T. F. (2015). Brains with character: Reading and writing neuronarrative. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:27 Sep 2021 BRAINS WITH CHARACTER: READING AND WRITING NEURONARRATIVE TIMOTHY YACZO BRAINS WITH CHARACTER: READING AND WRITING NEURONARRATIVE ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Prof. Dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op dinsdag 29 September 2015, te 10:00 uur door Timothy Francis Yaczo geboren te Columbus, Ohio, Verenigde Staten van Amerika ! Promoter: Prof. Dr. P.P.R.W. Pisters Universiteit van Amsterdam Co-promoter: Dr. J.H. Hoogstad Universiteit van Amsterdam Overige Leden: Dr. S. Besser Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. R. Boast Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. B. Herzogenrath Goethe Universiteit Frankfurt Dr. J.D. Kiverstein Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. J.J.E. Kursell Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. M.D. Rosello Universiteit van Amsterdam Faculteit: Geesteswetenschappen For my sister Vic, the strongest character I know Contents! Introduction .3 Brains in Character Chapter One 34 Reading The Brain that Writes (Its) Self 37 Writing Plasticity 46 Reading Plasticity Chapter Two 52 God Has Metastasized 55 Transforming Genre 61 Metastatic Movements 65 Morphing Plasticity Chapter Three 73 Fear and Panic in Iowa City 74 Situated Sensations 77 “She Is Not Emotionless, But Rather Fearless” 81 Quoting Cultural Anxieties 86 The Laboratory as Literary Space Chapter Four 91 Wonder Under the Bridge 95 The Wonder of Sex 100 Abridging Brains 107 Character Matters Chapter Five 112 Your Brain in 140 Characters 116 The Spy Who Thought Me 124 Context Re-Hashed 131 Cooperative Brain Narratives Afterward 142 Works Cited 146 Acknowledgements 162 Summary 165 Samenvatting 168 I think I will find some theory about fiction; I shall read six novels and start some hares. The one I have in view is about perspective. But I do not know. My brain may not last me out. V. Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (7 December 1925) 2 Introduction: Brains in Character In early 2000, a forty-year-old Virginia schoolteacher began visiting child pornography websites and soliciting sex workers at massage parlors. His activities, which he attempted to keep secret from his wife, were entirely out of character for him. Eventually arrested and convicted of sexually assaulting his prepubescent stepdaughter, a court ordered him to inpatient rehabilitation for sexual addiction or incarceration. Expelled after a short stint in a Sexaholics Anonymous program because he was unable to restrain himself from seeking sexual favors from employees and other patients there, he now faced lockup. The night before his prison sentencing, he came to the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville complaining of a headache. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of his brain “revealed an enhancing anterior fossa skull base mass that displaced the right orbitofrontal lobe” (Burns and Swerdlow 438). In other words, neurologists identified an “egg-sized” tumor growing inside his skull, which distorted the area of his brain “known to be tied to judgment, impulse control and social behaviour” (Choi). According to “orbitofrontal lesion research,” the case therefore “suggests that sociopathic behavior results from a loss of impulse control rather than a loss of moral knowledge” (Burns and Swerdlow 440). The tumor had caused his otherwise- normal sexual and social behaviors to malfunction. After removal of the tumor, his pedophilic behavior ceased, and he returned home after seven months. One year later, in October 2001, “he developed a persistent headache and began secretly collecting pornography again” (438). An immediate follow-up MRI, it turned out, “showed tumor regrowth” in the same area as before (438). The tumor re-resected, the man’s pedophilic behaviors again ceased, and he, as well as his brain, were once more back in character. The tale of the man and his brain traveled promiscuously in culture. After the University of Virginia neurologists Russell Swerdlow and Jeffrey Burns presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association, many news outlets reported the curious case. A fascination common to those reports poses a question of character. The pedophilic character he became—which, especially because of the relapse, Burns and Swerdlow’s report made so clear—had nothing to do with a repressed childhood, a dodgy family life, the exercise he did or did not take, any violent video games played, or his socio-economic situation. Instead, the brain featured squarely as the cause of and solution to 3 the man’s criminal activities. A brain therefore focalizes this narrative of mental health. But the links between the man, his brain, and an abstracted brain character grows more complex, and more storied, over time. Enfolded with a few fictional characters from John Cheever and Donald Barthelme, Daniel Akst recalls the Virginia man’s fateful two years as a parable in Temptation: Self Control in an Age of Excess (2011), neuroscientist David Eagleman popularly relays the character as “Alex” in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011), and he features as the character “Michael” in Adrian Raine’s The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime (2013). What is this connection between brain and character? Given pseudonyms like “Alex” or “Michael” to extract characteristics from a person, writers and reporters alike deposit those brains into cultural literature. Often didactic, brain characters instruct us about the state of our contemporary. Here, the cultural fascination with and circulation of the tumor-induced pedophile story insurrects many psychologically grounded plot arcs commonly ascribed to pedophilia. This function of the narrative tests our atlases of ‘mental health’ by familiarizing us with a different archetype characterized by neurobiology. As Akst teaches, in an age of neuroscience “behaviors once seen as issues of character…have been medicalized,” which risks “subtly absolving us of responsibility and thereby denying our power over an ever broader range of human action” (9). In addition, brain characters instruct us about state-of-the-art scientific knowledge. Concretized by the optics and rhetoric of brain scans, the Virginia man familiarizes us with something called the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex, which, as the story goes, is evidently—and universally—determinant for impulse control, judgment, and social behavior. Finally, as Akst provokes, stories of brains with character ultimately compel us to reassess other cultural characters: those that populate the fictional worlds of Cheever and Barthelme, but, certainly with the Virginia pedophile, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert or even Thomas Harris’s Mason Verger. If certain accounts produce brains with character, what are the stakes of those accounts? What kinds of accountability do they offer or neglect? To what extent do accounts of brains with character shape how we inhabit our contemporary and the history of our contemporary? Crucially, how do accounts of brains with character bear on the accounts we give of ourselves? As the neurosciences unsettle autobiography and biography, how do we inhabit those accounts, and what literacies do they freshly shape? 4 The question of reading and writing those accounts focuses this dissertation’s analysis. How can one write or read about the brain when it is one’s brain doing the writing or the reading? Two aspects with particular weight strike me about the question above. First, the slippage in crossing amongst ‘one’s brain’ and ‘the brain’: this convergence and possible overlap of ‘one’s brain’ and ‘the brain’ enacts both the rhetorical concerns and the material interests involved when speaking about and thinking through neurological issues today. The latter noun—‘the brain’—brings to mind a hunk of wet tissue, while the former recalls that cantankerous old term ‘the mind’: one’s personality, imagination, character, history, and relations. To speak of a distinction between them keeps at arm’s length the idea that consciousness and experience matches up with neural activity. But does it? Is there always already a neurobiological basis for all experiences? That is, does brain activity equal consciousness? Neurophilosophy