that text, context, and textileall have the same root, meaning “woven
thing,” the applicability of Sherrington’s metaphor becomes clear.
However, the human brain is not like a textile loom; it’s multi-dimen-
sional, operates in time, and has an infinite fractal complexity. The texts
it generates are interwoven with all nature and culture. Using Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI), scientists have begun to show what happens
on the neural loom when people use their imaginations. What they’ve
found has interesting implications for what we’ve termed the “level con-
fusion” inherent in deconstructive analysis. Describing the work of
Xiaoping Hu and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in Frontiers
of Complexity, Coveny and Highfield write:The scanner showed that centers of the brain responsible for vision were
activated when subjects used their imagination, although the brain activity
was approximately half as much as when they actually looked. The same
team has revealed a similar phenomenon in the sound-processing centers of
the brain when subjects are asked to imaginesaying words. And they also
found a part of the brain that is involved in forming a mental picture or map,
situated in the fissure between the parietal and occipital lobes.The implications of this for literature and criticism are immense. If, for
instance, while reading Moby-Dickwe can mentally “see” the swelling
ocean, great white whale, and harpoon-clutching crew, then it appears
that, contrary to theory, signifiers doevoke the signified. The meaning of
a text is not wholly indeterminate, but collapses into relatively clear, deter-
minate pictures. Though the imagined details may vary somewhat from
reader to reader, a moving drama unfolds inside our heads, above the level
of decoding, like movie clips transmitted to our PCs.
This discovery has implications for poetry, as well. If merely imag-
ining saying words activates our hearing center, then silent reading must
download a poem’s music like Napster downloading a hot CD to our
home computers.
Thanks to complexity science, we no longer need to imagine an ideal
realm above the mundane world to explain the existence of complex
forms. We now know they arise spontaneously when rules operate on
chance elements through feedback. Nature, it appears, has a bias toward
symmetry and beauty. Studies have shown that neural networks have an
inherent aversion to asymmetrical and irregular patterns, and prefer
symmetrical ones instead, partly because they’re easier to discern from
various viewing angles. Other studies have shown that this human pref-
erence is shared by monkeys and crows. Artistic forms arise just as nat-
ural ones do, through rules and feedback. Since nature is the context in150 Paul Lake