Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [89]
Second, trying to figure out how the person that you have a crush on feels about you and what you should do based on your far-from-perfect understanding of his/her state of mind requires a complex balancing and adjustment of several metarepresentationally framed interpretations of the situation. For example, you need to try to keep track of the version of that person's thoughts that are based on your own wishful thinking (this would be a metarepresentation with a source tag such as, "I would love it if. . ."); as well as of the version that is based on what your friends think about that person's feelings about you as distinct, for example, from what they thought about it yesterday; as well as of what that person has intimated to you about his/her feelings yesterday as opposed to what he/she is telling you today; and so on. This may sound too involved, but I suspect that the cognitive reality of this process is much more complicated, and it is important for us to get a glimpse of this complexity in order to realize how extremely emotionally/cognitively consuming this endeavor can be. Our Theory of Mind gets fully engaged with this task, "turning on," so to speak, the system of inferences that have evolved to enable us to negotiate the mate-selection process.
But, then, trying to decide which of the ten ostensibly pleasant and law-abiding citizens in our snow-trapped train car is a psychopathic mass murderer could be just as emotionally/cognitively challenging because this task also requires us to process numerous interpretations of our fellow-passengers' mental states with various degrees of metarepresentational framing. Only it is likely that in this case our mind-reading processes activate systems of inferences quite distinct from those used in guessing the state of mind of a potential mate. It is possible, for example, that among the mind-reading adaptations activated in this particular context are those particularly geared toward enabling us to negotiate situations involving violations of social contract and situations involving avoidance of predators.
It seems then that the "economics" of the evolved cognitive architecture of our species could explain why one may have a difficult time dwelling on the absent beloved's possible thoughts while being threatened by a homicidal maniac. Detective stories cultivate in their readers a very particular group of emotions, clustering more often than not around fear. And fear, as Patrick Colm Hogan has compellingly argued, drawing on the work of cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, tends to focus our emotions to the exclusion of irrelevant environmental stimuli. It is just as well that it does, so that upon spotting a lion in the distance, we "do not spend time considering all [our] options, potentially getting 'lost in the byways of. . . calculation."14 The "limitation of procedural schemas"—flee or fight!—and the "narrowing of attentional focus"—THINK LION!—"are both clearly functional here."15
And if calculate we must—as, for example, when knowing that one of our pleasant fellow passengers is, in effect, a predator but not knowing which one—we had better have all of our attention focused on the problem at hand. Trying to figure out who among our present company is a murderer involves not only attempting to read the minds of everybody around us but also constantly imagining our behavior from their point of view, for we don't want the criminal to guess that we suspect him/her. Imagine walking leisurely round the really hungry lion, picking up its tail, and casually patting it on the head, all the while pretending that the lion is not even there. Not an ideal situation for analyzing the feelings of one's beloved.