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Author: Anthony J. Sanford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139851594
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Narratives enable readers to vividly experience fictional and non-fictional contexts. Writers use a variety of language features to control these experiences: they direct readers in how to construct contexts, how to draw inferences and how to identify the key parts of a story. Writers can skilfully convey physical sensations, prompt emotional states, effect moral responses and even alter the readers' attitudes. Mind, Brain and Narrative examines the psychological and neuroscientific evidence for the mechanisms which underlie narrative comprehension. The authors explore the scientific developments which demonstrate the importance of attention, counterfactuals, depth of processing, perspective and embodiment in these processes. In so doing, this timely, interdisciplinary work provides an integrated account of the research which links psychological mechanisms of language comprehension to humanities work on narrative and style.
Author: Anthony J. Sanford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139851594
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Get Book Here
Book Description
Narratives enable readers to vividly experience fictional and non-fictional contexts. Writers use a variety of language features to control these experiences: they direct readers in how to construct contexts, how to draw inferences and how to identify the key parts of a story. Writers can skilfully convey physical sensations, prompt emotional states, effect moral responses and even alter the readers' attitudes. Mind, Brain and Narrative examines the psychological and neuroscientific evidence for the mechanisms which underlie narrative comprehension. The authors explore the scientific developments which demonstrate the importance of attention, counterfactuals, depth of processing, perspective and embodiment in these processes. In so doing, this timely, interdisciplinary work provides an integrated account of the research which links psychological mechanisms of language comprehension to humanities work on narrative and style.
Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421437759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
This book explains how the brain interacts with the social world—and why stories matter. How do our brains enable us to tell and follow stories? And how do stories affect our minds? In Stories and the Brain, Paul B. Armstrong analyzes the cognitive processes involved in constructing and exchanging stories, exploring their role in the neurobiology of mental functioning. Armstrong argues that the ways in which stories order events in time, imitate actions, and relate our experiences to others' lives are correlated to cortical processes of temporal binding, the circuit between action and perception, and the mirroring operations underlying embodied intersubjectivity. He reveals how recent neuroscientific findings about how the brain works—how it assembles neuronal syntheses without a central controller—illuminate cognitive processes involving time, action, and self-other relations that are central to narrative. An extension of his previous book, How Literature Plays with the Brain, this new study applies Armstrong's analysis of the cognitive value of aesthetic harmony and dissonance to narrative. Armstrong explains how narratives help the brain negotiate the neverending conflict between its need for pattern, synthesis, and constancy and its need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. The neuroscience of these interactions is part of the reason stories give shape to our lives even as our lives give rise to stories. Taking up the age-old question of what our ability to tell stories reveals about language and the mind, this truly interdisciplinary project should be of interest to humanists and cognitive scientists alike.
Author: James A. Wise
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893129
Category : Thought and thinking
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This book presents a unique and intuitively compelling way of understanding how humans think. It argues that narratives are the natural mode of thinking, that the “urge” to think narratively reflects known neurological processes, and that, although narrative thinking is a product of evolution, it enables us to transcend our evolutionary limits and actively shape our own futures. In remarkably engaging language, the authors describe how the currency of neural activity in the brain is transformed into the qualitatively different currency of conscious experience—the everyday, purposeful, story-like experience with which we all are familiar. The book then examines the nature of thought and how it leads to purposeful action, discussing, among other concerns, how memories about the past, perceptions about the present, and expectations about the future are structured as plausible, coherent narratives by causation, purpose, and time, and how errors are introduced into one’s narratives, both naturally and by other people (often intentionally), and how those errors bias one’s expectations about the future and the actions taken (or not taken) as a consequence. Each of these discussions is followed by a commentary that ties them to interesting facts and questions from throughout the physical and social sciences. The book is concluded with the argument that narrative thought is what is meant when one uses the word “mind.”
Author: Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591439701
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Psychiatry that recognizes the essential role of community in creating a new story of mental health • Provides a critique of conventional psychiatry and a look at what mental health care could be • Includes stories used in the author’s healing practice that draw from traditional cultures around the world Conventional psychiatry is not working. The pharmaceutical industry promises it has cures for everything that ails us, yet a recent study on antidepressants showed there is no difference of success in prescribed pharmaceuticals from placebos when all FDA-reported trials are considered instead of just the trials published in journals. Up to 80 percent of patients with bipolar depression remain symptomatic despite conventional treatment, and 10 to 20 percent of these patients commit suicide. In Healing the Mind through the Power of Story, Dr. Mehl-Madrona shows what mental health care could be. He explains that within a narrative psychiatry model of mental illness, people are not defective, requiring drugs to “fix” them. What needs “fixing” is the ineffective stories they have internalized and succumbed to about how they should live in the world. Drawing on traditional stories from cultures around the world, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps his patients re-story their lives. He shows how this innovative approach is actually more compatible with what we are learning about the biology of the brain and genetics than the conventional model of psychiatry. Drawing on wisdom both ancient and new, he demonstrates the power and success of narrative psychiatry to bring forth change and lasting transformation.
Author: Christopher Comer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350127817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Stories can inspire love, anger, fear and nostalgia – but what is going on in our brains when this happens? And how do our minds conjure up worlds and characters from the words we read on the page? Rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the brain have cast new light on how we engage with literature. This book – collaboratively written by an experienced neuroscientist and literary critic and writer – explores these new insights. Key concepts in neuroscience are first introduced for non-specialists and a range of literary texts by writers such as Ian McEwan, Jim Crace and E.L. Doctorow are read in light of the latest scientific thought on the workings of the mind and brain. Brain, Mind, and the Narrative Imagination demonstrates how literature taps into deep structures of memory and emotion that lie at the heart of our humanity. It will be of interest to readers of all sorts and students from both the humanities and the sciences.
Author: Patrick Colm Hogan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139440705
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
There are profound, extensive, and surprising universals in literature, which are bound up with universals in emotion. Hogan maintains that debates over the cultural specificity of emotion are misdirected because they have ignored a vast body of data that bear directly on the way different cultures imagine and experience emotion - literature. This is the first empirically and cognitively based discussion of narrative universals. Professor Hogan argues that, to a remarkable degree, the stories people admire in different cultures follow a limited number of patterns and that these patterns are determined by cross-culturally constant ideas about emotion. In formulating his argument, Professor Hogan draws on his extensive reading in world literature, experimental research treating emotion and emotion concepts, and methodological principles from the contemporary linguistics and the philosophy of science. He concludes with a discussion of the relations among narrative, emotion concepts, and the biological and social components of emotion.
Author: David Williams
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739143999
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Until recently, scientific and literary cultures have existed side-by-side but most often in parallel universes, without connection. The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Nature by David Williams addresses the premise that humans are a biological species stemming from the long process of evolution, and that we do exhibit a universal human nature, given to us through our genes. From this perspective, literature is shown to be a product of our biological selves. By exploring central ideas in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, linguistics, music, philosophy, ethics, religion, and history, Williams shows that it is the circuitry of the brain’s hard-wired dispositions that continually create similar tales around the world: “archetypal” stories reflecting ancient tensions that arose from our evolutionary past and the very construction of our brains. The book asserts that to truly understand literature, one must look at the biological creature creating it. By using the lens of science to examine literature, we can see how stories reveal universal aspects of the biological mind. The Trickster character is particularly instructive as an archetypal character who embodies a raft of human traits and concerns, for Trickster is often god, devil, musical, sexual, silver tongued, animal, and human at once, treading upon the moral dictates of culture. Williams brings together science and the humanities, demonstrating a critical way of approaching literature that incorporates scientific thought.
Author: Alex Rosenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026234842X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired. To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
Author: Jessica Wahman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739187988
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind provides an original framework for a non-reductive approach to mind and philosophical psychology. Jessica Wahman challenges the reductive (i.e., mechanistic and physicalist) assumptions that render the mind-body problem intractable, and claims that George Santayana’s naturalism provides a more beneficial epistemological method and ontological framework for thinking about the place of consciousness in the natural world. She uses Santayana’s thought as the primary inspiration for her own specific viewpoint, one that draws on a variety of sources, from analytic philosophy of mind to existentialism and psychoanalysis. This outlook, narrative naturalism, depicts sense-making as a kind of storytelling where different narratives serve different purposes, and Wahman offer a unique worldview to accommodate a variety of true expressions about the world, including truths about subjective existence. Motivated by a desire to challenge the reductionist approaches that explain human motivation and experience in terms of neuroscience and by the increasingly pharmacological interpretations of and solutions to psychological problems, Wahman’s overarching purpose is to reconstruct the issue so that neuroscience can be embraced as an indispensable story among others in our understanding of the human condition. When placed in this context, neurobiological discoveries better serve the values and practices associated with human self-knowledge and well-being. Narrative Naturalism will appeal to those interested in American philosophy, Santayana scholarship, pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and metaphysics.
Author: Joseph Fins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052188750X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Joseph J. Fins calls for a reconsideration of severe brain injury treatment, including discussion of public policy and physician advocacy.
