Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy

Abstract

Based on the increased coverage in the media of developments in the cognitive and neurosciences and the number of books published in the last decade on the subject, one might argue that the 21st century will be the Century of the Brain. While it could be premature to make such a prophesy in the first decade of what will likely be a century full of transformation and upheaval, revolutionary discoveries in the cognitive and neurosciences of the last quarter century require us to reconsider what we think we know about feeling, motive, behavior, identity, and even thinking. Because these sciences deal with fundamental aspects of what it means to be human, there are implications for many fields in the arts and humanities, including theatre, and particularly acting. This comes with a caveat, for popular writings about science can easily be adopted or appropriated by those of us who aren't scientists in reductive and misrepresentative ways. So for the past decade I have been trying to approach my project, which focuses on how science might help us better understand what it is that actors do when they act, with humility and caution. To date, I have dealt mostly with the individual actor's imagination and its relationship to action, and how language might be used to illuminate and enrich the actor's ability to tap into these two key and inseparable components of the actor's work. More recently I have begun to think about how to connect imagination, action, and language to empathy and imitation as used in the actor's work, both in developing a character and in partnered work with another actor.All of the neuro-and cognitive sciences take a monistic view of the person; mind and body are not separate. Rather, they require us to think in terms of "embodied mind" or the "conscious body," depending upon which aspect is being privileged at a given moment. In terms of acting in the 20th and early 21st centuries, there is good reason for holding a monistic view of the actor's process. Stanislavsky, the father of modern approaches to acting , was influenced by late-19th-and early-20th-century reflexologists (an early version of behaviorists) who studied

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