Humanist or Scientist: One Can't Exist Without the Other
I never learned as much about the humanities as when I stepped outside of them. About 15 years ago, I was incubating a research project on the cultural history of sleep. My somewhat cheeky starting point was the idea that history has a bias for people who are awake, leaving roughly one-third of human experience out of the record. This was puzzling, because our society seemed obsessed with sleep — with countless articles, books and podcasts telling us how to fix broken sleep, how to train children to sleep correctly and bemoaning a culture-wide sleep deprivation. Surely the trouble didn’t start yesterday.
As I began to poke around in the literary and historical record for clues to where the trouble began, I leaped at an opportunity to team-teach a course with a brilliant Emory neurologist who specializes in sleep disorders, David Rye. The course we cooked up, “Sleep in Science and Culture,” paired scientific studies of sleep-related phenomena (parasomnias, insomnia, restless leg syndrome, the different sleep phases, dreaming) with texts drawn from literature, history, philosophy and cultural anthropology.
Once, during a discussion of a poem drawing on hypnagogic images formed at the onset of sleep, Rye jumped up to the blackboard and drew a picture of the brain’s activity represented by the poet’s words. On another occasion, our class visited Emory’s sleep clinic late at night, as patients were settling in. Munching on pizza, we gave a great cheer when the first patient’s EEG readout indicated sleep onset, and another one when she entered REM state.
Through course planning and classroom dialogue, I learned a great deal about the science of sleep, but also about my own assumptions and methods as a humanist. For instance, where scientists usually try to isolate observable phenomena from changing conditions, variables of context and subjectivity are what it’s all about for humanists. Relatedly, humanists tend to focus on the singularity of a text or a historical event — the unique factors that make it distinctive — whereas scientists generally want to understand underlying laws.
This experience, and my conversations and collaborations with health researchers over the following years, deepens my sense that the humanities should have a seat at any table where issues important to society are discussed.
What scientific, social, technological, political or economic problem does not have a history? Or does not involve the careful interpretation of texts and contexts? Or is not shaped by cultural systems of belief, or conflicts between different cultures?
Similarly, no humanistic topic is without a scientific dimension. What happens to our brains when we picture a character in a novel? Or what is the best chemical composition of paint to conserve an important artwork? I may have come to that understanding through a study of sleep, but I’m hoping that Emory’s humanities initiative will mean that experiences like mine are not a fleeting dream.
Benjamin Reiss is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English at Emory College. He is both a teacher and writer, specializing in American cultural history, with a focus on issues of health, race and disability. In his work, he tries to capture experiences that have been pushed to the margins of history: sleep, madness, freakishness.
