Why does my name not appear in this entry? Because I asked for it to be removed. This entry is outdated from the very moment of its publication. Presenting it as a current summary of the neurobiology of narrative in 2011 would have been an embarrassment to me and, I believe is (or ought to be) an embarrassment to Cambridge University Press.

How did all this happen? I submitted to the editor — who, by the way, is blameless and as powerless as I in this evolution — a final manuscript on 15 August 2007. Then I waited. And waited. And waited, as months turned to years with no proofs from Cambridge University Press (CUP). The story that I eventually got was that this long hiatus was due firstly to the departure of the CUP staffer responsible for the volume, and then to CUP’s decision to outsource the copy-editing to an offshore firm with a less than fastidious approach to deadlines. A full two and a half years later, on 11 January 2010 I received a heads-up that the proofs were coming and on 1 March 2010 the proofs turned up, along with a prohibition on making “substantive changes” that “would be likely to result in a reduction or addition in the number of lines” and a request to provide corrections within a fortnight’s time.

In the meantime, of course, research on the neurobiology of narrative and discourse hadn’t stood still. In particular, I found eighteen publications that had appeared since spring 2007 and were germane to the article. This work is very significant in that it moves the field from the domain of single words and sentences towards an understanding of whole discourses and contexts — which really is what I wanted the article to be about in 2007, had I been able at that time to find sufficient material.

Integrating all this new work would, of course, have required complete rewriting of the article, and I wasn’t about to stand back and permit the August 2007 manuscript to be presented as a reflection of the current state of the field. This is why, on 12 February I telephoned CUP to protest that, after they had sat on the manuscript for two and a half years, I needed an opportunity to update it, so as to avoid publication of an article that would constitute an embarrassment to me and to them. The person at CUP who is responsible for this book is Frank Smith. Mr Smith, so far as I can tell, does not communicate with authors. Instead his assistant directs callers to his voice mail to which, again so far as I can tell, he never listens. I left him a detailed message on 12 February, with telephone and email contacts for me, and I specifically asked for a response. Nothing happened. On 25 March, after I rang again, and again spoke with his assistant, and again was offered the opportunity to speak to Mr Smith’s voice mail, I gave up and asked the editor to replace my name with a statement that “This entry is current as of 15 August 2007.” (And thanks to clause 77(8) of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, CUP must honour my stated wish to be known — or unknown — by whatever pen name or designation I specify.)

What new results have appeared during the intervening years?
Kuperberg & al. (2010) extend the point already made in the article, about the generality of the N400 evoked potential not just to sentence-level semantic incongruity but to discourse-level contextual incongruity — in this particular report, causal incongruity. Yarkoni & al. (2008) along with Hagoort (2008) support this notion of a contextual integration mechanism that operates in parallel with other processes and spans representational levels from words and sentences to entire narratives, with parametrically increasing levels of activation of neural integrative hardware — but Yarkoni & al. also introduce the notion of a categorically distinct integration mechanism at the whole-narrative level, associated with activation of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

Conversely, Thierry & al. (2008) show that syntactic rule-breaking can take place without disrupting this early, N400-related process of semantic evaluation, and speculate that such a device may reflect an important literary tool. Burkhardt (2007) suggests that the late positivity elicited by such syntactic rule-breaking may be reflect the updating of a discourse context which is being maintained in working memory. Nieuwland & al. (2007), using fMRI, likewise find independent processes and networks associated with semantic versus syntactic resolution.

Menenti & al. (2009) associate right inferior frontal gyrus with the effect of discourse context, and left inferior frontal gyrus with the effect of context external to the discourse (‘world knowledge’) — a contextualisation that’s impaired when a discourse establishes a local context. (Yaacov Trope terms this global-contextualisation process ‘psychological distance,’ and observes that physical distance or perspective on a scene influences the abstractness of terms used to describe that scene.) Martín-Loeches & al. (2008) extend these findings to variations in situation models and degrees of global coherence. Awad & al. (2007) and Troiani & al. (2008) find similar patterns for narrative production as have been identified for narrative comprehension.

Whitney & al. (2009) associate right precuneus (medial parietal lobe) and anterior cingulum with comprehension of narrative shifts. Speer & al. (2007) add right middle frontal gyrus and right temporal lobe. Similarly, Lillywhite & al. (2010) identify right inferior parietal cortex as active during processes of discourse compression, along with a cognitive control process that activates middle frontal gyrus.

Mano & al. (2009) associate posterior cingulum and right temporo-parietal junction with a reader’s (listener’s) shift from egocentric to allocentric perspective. Speculatively, posterior cingulum might be more associated with the more concretely spatial aspect of such shifts and temporo-parietal junction with the more abstractly social aspect. In the same vein, Almor & al. (2007) suggest that common neural substrates – in particular the intraparietal sulcus – implement referential and perceptual integration. Mason & Just (2009), Yarkoni & al. (2008), and Wilson & al. (2008) add to this list of perspective-related systems the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and Mason & Just address the example of autism to illustrate the relationship between neural connectivity and narrative connectivity.

References

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Awad M, Warren JE, Scott SK, Turkheimer FE, Wise RJ. A common system for the comprehension and production of narrative speech. Journal of Neuroscience 27(43):11455-11464 (24 October 2007).
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Burkhardt P. The P600 reflects cost of new information in discourse memory. NeuroReport 18(17):1851-1854 (19 November 2007).
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Hagoort P. The fractionation of spoken language understanding by measuring electrical and magnetic brain signals. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 363(1493):1055-1069 (12 March 2008).
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Lillywhite LM, Saling MM, Demutska A, Masterton R, Farquharson S, Jackson GD. The neural architecture of discourse compression. Neuropsychologia 48(4):873-879 (March 2010).
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Mano Y, Harada T, Sugiura M, Saito DN, Sadato N. Perspective-taking as part of narrative comprehension: a functional MRI study. Neuropsychologia 47(3):813-824 (February 2009).
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Mason RA, Just MA. The role of the theory-of-mind cortical network in the comprehension of narratives. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1):157-174 (1 January 2009).
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Menenti L, Petersson KM, Scheeringa R, Hagoort P. When elephants fly: differential sensitivity of right and left inferior frontal gyri to discourse and world knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21(12):2358-2368 (December 2009).
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Whitney C, Huber W, Klann J, Weis S, Krach S, Kircher T. Neural correlates of narrative shifts during auditory story comprehension. NeuroImage 47(1):360-366 (1 August 2009).
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Wilson SM, Molnar-Szakacs I, Iacoboni M. Beyond superior temporal cortex: intersubject correlations in narrative speech comprehension. Cerebral Cortex 18(1):230-242 (January 2008).
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Yarkoni T, Speer NK, Zacks JM. Neural substrates of narrative comprehension and memory. NeuroImage 41(4):1408-1425 (15 July 2008).
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