ABSTRACT
Beginning an exploration of the evolutionary prehistory of significance discernment and ethical sense, this chapter argues that selective attention helps species modify their ecological niches in ways conducive to greater survival and enhanced flourishing. For prosocial species, environmental features bearing on organic well-being include affective bonds and social relations, both of which become for human ancestors matters of affectively charged and attention-focusing significance. Affectively motivated cognition is further refined through modulations of projection, memory, and experience in which top-down biases in cognitive processing delimit what is discerned as significant even as receptivity to bottom-up corrective input disrupts automated top-down cognitive-interpretative patterns. Such disruption makes significance discernment a problem addressed by integrating somatosensory processing with motor, planning, and executive control functions. As cooperation becomes increasingly selectively advantageous, interest in what others experience and do becomes acute. This is part of broader weavings together of shared attention and joint intentions that help generate imaginative discourse. Acting on various networks in the brain, literary features “speak to” cooperative or selfish emotions, engage holistic or analytical cognition, prime certain dispositions, and bring to mind reservations about others. All this gives literary significance an agency that twenty-first century literary history should be prepared to explore.
