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in a given context—that writers such as James can play their games of under-telling and underinterpreting. Though, as James's readers well know, his usual game consists rather in overreporting his characters' thoughts and feelings, saturating us with the nuances of their mental states—a saturation, again, made possible by our evolved hankering to know what other people think. We want to know it so badly (though clearly some of us more badly than others) that we can take (and many of us even enjoy) the intense mind-reporting of The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and What Maisie Knew.

To return to my earlier speculations of why we read fiction, I can say that by imagining the hidden mental states of fictional characters, by following the readily available representations of such states throughout the narrative, and by comparing our interpretation of what the given charac

6: The Novel as a Cognitive Experiment

ter must be feeling at a given moment with what we assume could be the author's own interpretation, we deliver a rich stimulation to the cognitive adaptations constituting our Theory of Mind. Many of us come to enjoy such stimulation and need it as a steady supplement to our daily social interactions. Viewed within this context, even the act of misinterpretation of the protagonist's thoughts and feelings does not detract from the cognitive satisfaction allowed by the reading of fiction.6 To give a new twist to the well-known dictum, from a cognitive perspective, a misinterpretation of a character's state of mind is still very much an interpretation, a fully realized and thus pleasurable engagement of our Theory of Mind.

At the same time, as Phelan rightly points out:

The misinterpreter of James can still achieve cognitive satisfaction, but chances are that the misinterpretation will yield less satisfaction than the more accurate interpretation. This is so not because the accurate interpretation is always going to offer more cognitive satisfaction, but because, in the case of James, getting him right is going to take us deeper into the relation between behavior and mind, and, thus, offer us richer cognitive satisfactions than we'll typically derive from getting him wrong. For an author whose experimentation with Theory of Mind is not as rich as James's, misinterpretation may end up adding things to the experience of reading that do offer more cognitive satisfaction.7

The latter observation rings equally true when we think of a variety of interpretive techniques that allow us to make a given text newly exciting precisely by reading more into its treatment of "the relation between behavior and mind." In fact, it seems that a majority of literary-critical paradigms—be that paradigm psychoanalysis, gender studies, or new historicism—profitably exploit, in their quest for new layers of meaning, our evolved cognitive eagerness to construct a state of mind behind a behavior.

But, as I was asked once after giving a talk on ToM and literature, What about those parts of fictional narratives that ostensibly have nothing to do with reporting or guessing characters' minds? If we like reading fiction because it lets us try on different mental states and seems to provide intimate access to the thoughts, intentions, and feelings of other people in our social environment (even if those people do not really exist and the social environment that we "share" with them is an illusion), what about, say, descriptions of nature? Why interrupt the pleasurable workout of our mind-reading adaptations with passages that either do not prod us toward inhabiting and guessing other people's minds or do it in a pointedly circuitous way (e.g., by anthropomorphizing)?

First of all, descriptions of nature are quite scarce even in those works of fiction in which they seem to be overrepresented. It is possible that our perception of some fictional texts as abounding in such descriptions owes simply to the fact that relatively rare as they are, they stand out and, as such, receive a disproportionate share of our attention. I remember how surprised