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Tory maintained a cautious and "scientific" attitude to his own visual imagery, taking pains to check the accuracy of his images by every means available. "I learned," he writes, "to hold the image in a tentative way, conferring credibility and status on it only when some information would tip the balance in its favor."17

Because the argument of my essay focuses on literary texts, I have so far dealt and will continue dealing with verbal or verbalizable metarepresentations, such as, "Eve says it is raining outside." Torey's emphasis on holding images in a "tentative" way—visual metarepresentation, if you will—reminds us that, as Sacks points out, "there is increasing evidence from neuroscience for the extraordinary rich interconnectedness and interactions of the sensory areas of the brain, and the difficulty, therefore, of saying that anything is purely visual or purely auditory, or purely any-thing."18 In other words, whether we agree with Baron-Cohen and Sperber, who think that metarepresentational ability evolved primarily to model human minds, or with Cosmides and Tooby, who suggest that its gradual emergence must have responded to a broader variety of cognitive challenges faced by our ancestors, it seems that its functioning today informs our interaction with the world on more levels than we are immediately aware of.19

2

METAREPRESENTATIONAL ABILITY

AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

CT have considered above three conjectural instances of our taking in any J- new information as an architectural truth. Now it is time to ask what really happens when the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to store information under advisement are damaged. A number of neurological deficits, such as autism and schizophrenia, have been linked to the failure of metarepresentational capacity, as have several kinds of amnesia. To begin with the mildest functional instance of such a failure, children develop a mature Theory of Mind around the age of four, and it is suggestive that just before that (typically, from three to four), they can go through so-called childhood amnesia, that is, a tendency to "believe that they actually experienced events that never happened, if they are asked about these (fictitious) events repeatedly," a consequence, perhaps, of having an immature "system for source tagging."1 (This is not to say, of course, that as adults

2: Metarepresentational Ability and Schizophrenia

we are immune to developing false memories through external suggestion. Unless we replace the evolutionary framework with the teleological, no such immunity can be expected when we have an immensely complex system, such as our metarepresentational capacity, functioning in an immensely complex world.)

Then there are also important studies of adult patients with amnesia induced by head trauma. Such patients, it turns out, often "experience highly selective memory loss, typically displaying intact semantic memory with impaired access to episodic memory."2 Since it has been hypothesized that episodic memories are processed via metarepresentations (that is, by enabling people to form self-reflections, for example, "I thought that I would be afraid of the dog"3), the study of such selective impairment may lead to new insights into our metarepresentational ability.

Furthermore, Christopher Frith has suggested that since "selfawareness cannot occur without metarepresentation," that is, the "cognitive mechanism that enables us to be aware of our goals, our intentions, and the intentions of other people," specific "features of schizophrenia might arise from specific abnormalities in metarepresentation."4 The failure to. monitor the source of a representation thus can lead to patients' perceiving "their own thoughts, subvocal speech, or even vocal speech as emanating, not from their own intentions, but from some source that is not under their control," whereas the "inability to monitor willed intentions can lead to delusions of alien control, certain auditory hallucinations,