The Literary Mind

Potluck!

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:17:34 -0500

This is the place where you can tell the rest of us what you'll bring for our end-of-semester party. Use the comments section to do so. It'll be half workshop, half celebration. And then we'll have Oliver Sacks as our a post-celebration celebration on Thursday (the 13th).

Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:13:21 -0500

The University of Lincoln (U.K) is publishing what looks like a genuinely interdisciplinary journal, Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts. Maryellen had the idea (rightly) that this might be a forum for some of the work you're all doing for the course. Take a look and see what you think.

Your Final Projects

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:06:05 -0500

The Basics As the syllabus for the course explains, your final projects should expand on materials and discussions central to the course and may be composed in a variety of genres or media: • the academic essay (or review essay) • the literary essay • fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction (if you’re confident with these genres) • podcast, radio program, or short film (if you’re confident with these media) Click on Extended Entry for details.

"His Life Changed in the Blink of an Eye"

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:35:05 -0500

Miramax is releasing a film version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel. It has already played in some festivals and will be released commercially November 30. The promotional copy is pretty standard movie trailer schlock: "When His Body Become His Prison . . . His Life Changed in the Blink of an Eye. . . Imagination Set Him Free." To say that Bauby is set free by imagination is a serious distortion. A more nuanced take might ask how Bauby's imagination is affected by his condition, how it helps him cope, and what its limits are. The trailer belongs to a long tradition of overstating imagination's powers, a tradition that skips right over many of the more interesting asepcts of imagination, focusing instead on an unrealistic notion that imagination can somehow obliterate material reality and therefor "free" us from it. In fact, imagination and physical reality exist in relation to each other, and their relationship is where the really interesting questions lie, I think. But, you can't judge a film by its trailer, and even though the trailer indicates the film provides a lot of back story not included in the book, it also suggests that Schnabel is doing something interesting, experimenting with film techniques--closely cropped frames, a saturated color palette, strong lighting that bleaches out the edges of frames--to capture Bauby's mental states on film. I'm curious to see how well he pulls this off. Here's the trailer, so you can see for yourselves. For an image of Jean-Dominique Bauby himself, see Sarit Golub's blog for Psychology 801.

THE CORPUS CALLOSUM

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:35:48 -0500

I'v gathered some links and illustrations for those of you interested in the anatomy, technique, and history of corpus collostomy--the surgery at the center of Lauren Slater's Lying. An illustration of the Corpus callosum, from above (from David Hubel's "The Corpus Callosum and Stereopsis"). Notice how it fans out and joins the brain's two hemispheres. LINKS "The Corpus Callosum and Stereopsis," from David Hubel's Mind, Brain, and Vision site (Harvard Medical School) "The Neurosurgeon's Interest in the Corpus Callosum" (a historical account) by Joseph E. Bogen (Cal Tech) "Epilespy Surgery" (Neurosurgery at the Washington University School of Medicine) "Splitting the Human Brain" by Paul Pietsch (Indiana University School of Optometry) An illustration of the Corpus callosum, also from above (from Paul Pietch's "Splitting the Human Brain")

Cognition in the News

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:51:39 -0500

This past week, the New York Times devoted the entire Science section to sleep and dreams. Take a look. We're not devoting much time or attention to the sleeping mind in this course, but there are plenty of possible final project topics in this area. The articles in the Times provide a useful introduction into current research and theory of sleep and dreams. If you're interested in following up, I have a lot of material on the topic in my office. (Or, talk to John Rice, he should be an expert by now! Right, John?)

Engrams (and Daniel Schacter)

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:42:04 -0500

A memory is not a thing but an electro-chemical process. This insight--which runs through a lot of contemporary memory theory--is a theme in Daniel Schacter's book Searching for Memory (the one I showed you in class Tuesday night). Brains don’t store memories, whole and intact. Instead, the nervous system registers experience and is permanently altered by it. An engram, in Shacter's words, is “the enduring change in the nervous system (the ‘memory trace’) that conserves the effects of experience across time.”

Cognition Online

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:34:37 -0500

Here are some links to various blogs and web projects that focus on cognition from a wide variety of perspectives. You might choose to review one of these, use some of them as potential sources that may inform your final projects, or just read some of them and respond (and link) to them on your blog. The Neurocritic A blog "[d]econstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology" Mixing Memory An anonymously authored blog the author describes as "[a]n entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about" Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism A special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review A Memory Artist An exhibition of the paintings of Franco Magnani (who is profiled in Oliver Sacks's Anthropologist on Mars) Transliteracies Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading Cognitive Daily A new cognitive science article every day Cognitive Therapy Today A blog hosted by the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research Literature, Cognition, and the Brain A web page featuring research at the intersection of literary studies, cognitive theory, and neuroscience

Faces of Neurobiology

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:36:15 -0500

I thought it might be useful for you to see the faces of some of the neurobiologists we're reading (or listening to). Here they are! Paul Broks Oliver Sacks Antonio Damasio V. S. Ramachandran Julian Keenan J. Kevin O'Regan

"We are all just a car crash or a slip away from being a different person."

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:36:28 -0500

"We are all just a car crash or a slip away from being a different person." --Paul Broks (author of Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology) From time to time, I'll collect links to your blog entries when they seem to focus on similar themes and post them on my page. For this first one, I'm linking to entries where the writers seem a little freaked out by the implications with regard to selfhood of some of the ideas in cognitive science we're still just beginning to explore.

Qualia

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:25:49 -0500

Perception shapes reality. The neurologists and philosophers agree on that. Or, as Douglas Hofstadter puts it, more dramatically (in I Am a Strange Loop), consciousness is “a kind of mirage.” Antonio Damasio calls it a “movie in the brain.”

Books and Blogs You Might Review

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 08:50:56 -0500

I'm pasting a preliminary bibliography of various readings in literature and cognitive science below. I'll be updating it as the semester progresses. It would be great if you all made suggestions for additions in the comments section. You can use this running list to get ideas for your book reviews (and sources for your final projects).

Fuzzy Young Buck (A Consciousness Report)

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:09:57 -0500

It's dusk. I've been alone in the country for a week. It's me and the rabbits, frogs, birds, snakes, and many many insects. I heard a bear was spotted on the property, but I haven't seen it. I've just awakened from a 45 minute nap, and I'm about to turn on my computer. I look out the back window and see a young buck (a male deer, I mean) right outside the back porch--maybe ten feet from where I'm standing. The window and screen between us combine with the misty late-summer air and saturated green of the lawn to make this look more like a painting than reality. The buck's horns are still small and kind of fuzzy like velour. If this is a painting, it's on velvet, not canvas. He's moving in what looks like slow motion. He sizes me up while our old cat, BK, sizes him up. She looks at me as if to confirm that what she's seeing is real. I don't have much of an answer.