Stories and Minds

Stories and Minds
Author: Lars Bernaerts
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0803246420

How do narratives draw on our memory capacity? How is our attention guided when we are reading a literary narrative? What kind of empathy is triggered by intercultural novels? A cast of international scholars explores these and other questions from an interdisciplinary perspective in Stories and Minds, a collection of essays that discusses cutting-edge research in the field of cognitive narrative studies. Recent findings in the philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, among other disciplines, are integrated in fresh theoretical perspectives and illustrated with accompanying analyses of literary fiction. Pursuing such topics as narrative gaps, mental simulation in reading, theory of mind, and folk psychology, these essays address fundamental questions about the role of cognitive processes in literary narratives and in narrative comprehension. Stories and Minds reveals the rich possibilities for research along the nexus of narrative and mind.

Stories and Minds

Stories and Minds
Author: Lars Bernaerts
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496211502

How do narratives draw on our memory capacity? How is our attention guided when we are reading a literary narrative? What kind of empathy is triggered by intercultural novels? A cast of international scholars explores these and other questions from an interdisciplinary perspective in Stories and Minds, a collection of essays that discusses cutting-edge research in the field of cognitive narrative studies. Recent findings in the philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, among other disciplines, are integrated in fresh theoretical perspectives and illustrated with accompanying analyses of literary fiction. Pursuing such topics as narrative gaps, mental simulation in reading, theory of mind, and folk psychology, these essays address fundamental questions about the role of cognitive processes in literary narratives and in narrative comprehension. Stories and Minds reveals the rich possibilities for research along the nexus of narrative and mind.

Minds Made for Stories

Minds Made for Stories
Author: Thomas Newkirk
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780325046952

In this highly readable and provocative book, Thomas Newkirk explodes the long standing habit of opposing abstract argument with telling stories. Newkirk convincingly shows that effective argument is already a kind of narrative and is deeply "entwined with narrative." --Gerald Graff, former MLA President and author of Clueless in Academe Narrative is regularly considered a type of writing-often an "easy" one, appropriate for early grades but giving way to argument and analysis in later grades. This groundbreaking book challenges all that. It invites readers to imagine narrative as something more-as the primary way we understand our world and ourselves. "To deny the centrality of narrative is to deny our own nature," Newkirk explains. "We seek companionship of a narrator who maintains our attention, and perhaps affection. We are not made for objectivity and pure abstraction-for timelessness. We have 'literary minds" that respond to plot, character, and details in all kind of writing. As humans, we must tell stories." When we are engaged readers, we are following a story constructed by the author, regardless of the type of writing. To sustain a reading-in a novel, an opinion essay, or a research article- we need a "plot" that helps us comprehend specific information, or experience the significance of an argument. As Robert Frost reminds us, all good memorable writing is "dramatic." Minds Made for Stories is a needed corrective to the narrow and compartmentalized approaches often imposed on schools-approaches which are at odds with the way writing really works outside school walls.

Insight Into a Bright Mind

Insight Into a Bright Mind
Author: Nicole Tetreault, Ph.D.
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1953360041

Are you bright? Do you know someone who is? Among the bright population, many social, emotional, and intellectual abilities are unrecognized. Bright people are misunderstood and mislabeled as awkward geeks, mad scientists, maladjusted poets, oversensitive artists, hyperactive clowns, or antisocial misfits. Do you want to understand the science behind why intelligent, sensitive, and highly creative brains are simply different? In Insight into a Bright Mind, Dr. Nicole Tetreault translates recent groundbreaking research examining the minds of the most highly intelligent, creative, and intense brains, and explores new directions for the neurodiverse experiences of humans. You will learn how your brain is as unique as your fingerprint, and how your experience is elevated because you are simply "hard-wired" differently! Insight into a Bright Mind is intensely argued in favor of neuroindividuality, superbly researched with the latest scientific data, and deeply invested in engaging with a myriad of bright minds capturing their essence through storytelling and voice. Be liberated to embrace your essence with greater self-compassion and awareness, and unlock your unconventional mind.

The Mind and its Stories

The Mind and its Stories
Author: Patrick Colm Hogan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2003-09-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1139440705

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.

Curious Minds

Curious Minds
Author: Perry Zurn
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0262370298

An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.

Stories and the Brain

Stories and the Brain
Author: Paul B. Armstrong
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421437759

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.

Strangers to Ourselves

Strangers to Ourselves
Author: Rachel Aviv
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2022-09-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0374600856

New York Times bestseller One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazine A best book of the year at Los Angeles Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, Kirkus The acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity. Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives—and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

Human Minds and Animal Stories

Human Minds and Animal Stories
Author: Wojciech Małecki
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429590059

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. "As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story." - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals

The Science of Storytelling

The Science of Storytelling
Author: Will Storr
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 168335818X

The compelling, groundbreaking guide to creative writing that reveals how the brain responds to storytelling Stories shape who we are. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions and mold our beliefs. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human. So, how do master storytellers compel us? In The Science of Storytelling, award-winning writer and acclaimed teacher of creative writing Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can write better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers—and also our brains—create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change. Will Storr’s superbly chosen examples range from Harry Potter to Jane Austen to Alice Walker, Greek drama to Russian novels to Native American folk tales, King Lear to Breaking Bad to children’s stories. With sections such as “The Dramatic Question,” “Creating a World,” and “Plot, Endings, and Meaning,” as well as a practical, step-by-step appendix dedicated to “The Sacred Flaw Approach,” The Science of Storytelling reveals just what makes stories work, placing it alongside such creative writing classics as John Yorke’s Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story and Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. Enlightening and empowering, The Science of Storytelling is destined to become an invaluable resource for writers of all stripes, whether novelist, screenwriter, playwright, or writer of creative or traditional nonfiction.