Tatyana Chernigovskaya, a Russian scholar working in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and the study of consciousness, is often quoted as saying:
Each of us is born with our own neural network; moreover, young children have more neurons than adults, because those that are not needed disappear. Then the text of our life is written upon this neural network. When the moment comes to meet the Creator, each of us will present our text, and everything will be visible there: what we ate, what we drank, whom we associated with. Unless a person has Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, the brain stores all the information it has passed by, smelled, tasted, drunk, and so on — it is all there. If you do not remember it, that does not mean it is not in the brain. There are many ways to prove this; the simplest is hypnosis. That is why I keep saying: you must not read stupid books, associate with idiots, listen to bad music, eat poor-quality food, or watch talentless films. If we lose our minds and eat shawarma on the street, it can be removed from the stomach, but never from the head: what has fallen in is lost.
“The brain stores all information… That is why you must not read stupid books…”
Apart from the logical error — the second statement does not follow from the first — there is something even more interesting here. The error is connected with the very attitude toward culture and the psyche expressed by the whole passage.
The first claim can in itself be a subject of scientific discussion:
“The brain stores all the information it has passed by… If you do not remember it, that does not mean it is not in the brain.”
Taken literally, “stores all information” is, of course, an extraordinarily strong claim. But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that a great many influences really do leave traces that are inaccessible to voluntary recall.
And then comes:
“That is why you must not read stupid books…”
But this “that is why” does not work.
From
A: what we perceive may leave traces
it does not follow that
B: we should perceive only what has already been judged to be of high quality.
To get from A to B, we would need a whole chain of additional assumptions:
everything that remains in the brain influences us → bad content necessarily influences us badly → this influence cannot be transformed → an encounter with something bad cannot produce anything valuable → we can reliably distinguish “bad” from “good” in advance.
Every link in this chain is questionable.
Whenever I encounter this statement by Chernigovskaya, I think of Anna Akhmatova:
Anna Akhmatova
I have no need for armies of the ode,
Or for the charm of elegiac schemes.
For me, in poetry, everything should be out of place,
Not as it is with other people.If only you knew what rubbish
Poems grow out of, knowing no shame —
Like a yellow dandelion by the fence,
Like burdock and wild orache.An angry shout, the fresh smell of tar,
Mysterious mildew on the wall …
And suddenly the poem is sounding — spirited, tender,
To the delight of you and me.
For these are almost opposite models of the psyche.
In one, the psyche is imagined as a kind of room that must be protected from contamination: put a bad book, bad music, or a bad person into it, and they will remain there and spoil you.
In Akhmatova, by contrast, the psyche appears as a generative system. Something accidental, lowly, unpleasant, banal, comic, or ugly can give rise to something of an entirely different order.
Akhmatova is therefore more than a beautiful literary association. Her “rubbish” points to a principle that fits remarkably well with a generative understanding of the psyche:
Psychic content does not arrive from outside in ready-made form. It is generated by the psyche itself.
If a person hears “bad music,” that does not mean that a small, unchanging piece of “bad music” is now lodged inside the psyche.
Independent reality acts upon the organism, while psychic content is generated by the psyche. Interaction with the same object can result in the generation of entirely different psychic content.
There is therefore no simple function connecting the quality of a stimulus with the quality of the psychic content that arises:
bad on the way in → bad on the inside.
Nor is the reverse
high culture on the way in → high-quality psychic content on the inside
guaranteed in the slightest.
One can spend a lifetime reading great philosophers and produce banalities.
Or one can overhear an absurd sentence on a bus — and an idea grows out of it.
Akhmatova’s
“what rubbish / Poems grow out of”
can almost be generalized:
We do not know in advance what “rubbish” a thought may grow out of.
This is a stronger objection to Chernigovskaya’s statement than simply saying that one should not call other people “idiots.” The problem runs deeper: her statement implicitly assumes a passive model of the psyche, in which the quality of psychic content is determined by the quality of the material consumed.
But if the psyche is a system that generates content, then the relation
“bad on the way in → bad on the inside”
simply does not follow from the way the psyche works.
Mozart Listens
The attitude toward what is supposedly “low-quality” is shown even more precisely in Alexander Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri.
Akhmatova speaks about what creative work may grow out of. Pushkin places before us two different responses of a creative mind to an imperfect object.
Mozart is on his way to see Salieri when, outside a tavern, he hears a blind fiddler playing Mozart. He finds the poor performance so funny that he brings the old man along to entertain Salieri:
Mozart
Just arrived. I was coming to see you,
bringing something I wanted to show you;
but as I passed a tavern, suddenly
I heard a violin … No, my friend Salieri!
Never in your life have you heard
anything funnier … A blind fiddler in the tavern
was playing Voi che sapete. Marvellous!
I couldn’t resist; I brought the fiddler along
to treat you to his art.
Come in!A blind old man enters with a violin.
Something by Mozart for us!
The old man plays an aria from Don Giovanni; Mozart bursts out laughing.
Salieri
And you can laugh at that?
Mozart
Oh, Salieri!
Can it be that you yourself aren’t laughing?Salieri
No.
I do not laugh when a worthless painter
smears Raphael’s Madonna before my eyes;
I do not laugh when a contemptible buffoon
dishonours Alighieri with a parody.
Go, old man.Mozart
Wait: here, take this,
drink to my health.
Mozart has by no means lost his ability to distinguish good playing from bad. Quite the opposite: to hear the comedy in a bad performance of his own music so acutely, he must know extremely well how that music can sound.
His openness therefore does not mean the absence of standards.
Salieri listens and rejects.
Mozart listens — and keeps listening.
The blind fiddler does not become a great musician because Mozart laughs. But his bad playing becomes an interesting event.
And this is precisely where the scene becomes so revealing for our question.
The object is, so to speak, “low-quality”: a bad musical performance.
Yet the result of the interaction with it is by no means “low-quality psychic content.”
What arises is comedy.
The bad performance does not transfer its “badness” into Mozart’s psyche. Something else arises there.
We can almost place the three reactions side by side:
Chernigovskaya: bad music → don’t listen.
Salieri: a bad performance of Mozart → a desecration of high art.
Mozart: a bad performance of Mozart → laughter.
The same kind of “bad” material — and a completely different psychic result.
Pushkin thus offers an almost literary demonstration of the theoretical proposition:
The quality of an object does not determine the quality of the psychic content generated in interaction with it.
Mozart and Akhmatova
Pushkin’s Mozart and Akhmatova suddenly appear as kindred spirits.
In Akhmatova, a poem grows out of something that possesses no obvious elevated status.
In Pushkin’s Mozart, something artistically bad can nevertheless generate new psychic content — in this case, the comic.
Both stand against the idea of sterile creativity: the idea that one must surround oneself exclusively with the best in order to produce the best.
Salieri’s world, by contrast, is hierarchical: high and low, master and craftsman, Raphael and the worthless painter, Mozart and the blind fiddler. The low beside the high is contamination.
For Mozart, the boundary between good and bad does not disappear.
But it remains permeable to interaction.
Chernigovskaya: Don’t let the bad in.
Salieri: The bad contaminates the good.
Mozart: He hears the bad — and laughs.
Akhmatova: Poems grow out of “rubbish.”
And the model proposed here adds only one explanatory sentence:
Psychic content does not arrive from outside in ready-made form; it is generated by the psyche.