Download or read book Brain Mind and the Narrative Imagination written by Christopher Comer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Stories and the Brain written by Paul B. Armstrong and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Brain Mind and the Narrative Imagination written by Christopher Comer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life written by Molly Andrews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-27 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been widely acknowledged that in the past few decades, there has been a 'narrative turn' - an interest in the storied nature of human life. However, very little work has discussed the role of imagination. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life looks at how stories and imagination come together in our daily lives, influencing not only our thoughts about what we see and do, but also our contemplation of what is possible and what our limitations are. Without imagination, we are forever doomed to the here and now. But our imaginations are always influenced by our own particular experiences, which we recount to ourselves and others through stories - both told and untold. Combining scholarly research with personal experience, Andrews examines how story and imagination come together in different areas of life such as education, politics, and aging. She focuses on the importance of the narrative imagination when listening to the experiences of others who have very different experiences of the world, asking if it is ever possible to understand the suffering of others. She asks what kind of stories influence our thinking about who we are becoming in our aging selves. In the chapter on teaching, she looks at the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship and the stultifying effect of some educational practices and policies on the imagination. The discussion on education and global citizenship leads directly into the chapter on political narratives, where Andrews uses the example of Barack Obama as one of the most strategic storytellers of our time. Narrative and imagination are integrally tied to one another; this is immediately clear to anyone who stops to think about stories real and imagined, about the past or in a promised, or feared, future. In asking why and how this is so, Andrews directs us to ruminate on what it means to be human.
Download or read book Brain Mind and Imagination written by Thomas Czerner and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-18 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you read only one book about the brain, it should be this one. Dr. Czerner translates the discoveries of dozens of world-renowned authorities into a page-turning story about the mystery of consciousness and the awesome power of the human imagination. We imagine everything we know and feel - even the objects right in front of us. Neuroscience is warning us that the old adage, "seeing is believing," is dangerously misleading. We each see a world that is molded by our past experience, our prejudices and the stories told by those we trust and love. This book deals with what may be the most important topic of our time. Our future hinges on the world we imagine for ourselves. Brain researchers are exploring how each of us builds that world anew.
Download or read book Mind Brain and Narrative written by Anthony J. Sanford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Imagination and the Meaningful Brain written by Arnold H. Modell and published by Bradford Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the biology of meaning that integrates the role of subjective processes with current knowledge of brain/mind function.
Download or read book Imagination written by Jim Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We don’t think of imagination the way that we should. The word is often only associated with children, artists and daydreamers, but in reality, imagination is an integral part of almost every action and decision that we make. Simply put, imagination is a person’s ability to create scenarios in his or her head: this can include everything from planning a grocery list, to honing a golf swing, to having religious hallucinations. And while imagination has positive connotations, it can also lead to decreased productivity and cooperation, or worse, the continuous reliving of past trauma.The human brain is remarkable in its ability to imagine—it can imagine complex possible futures, fantasy worlds, or tasty meals. We can use our imaginations to make us relaxed or anxious. We can imagine what the world might be, and construct elaborate plans. People have been fascinated with the machination of the human brain and its ability to imagine for centuries. There are books on creativity, dreams, memory, and the mind in general, but how exactly do we create those scenes in our head? With chapters ranging from hallucination and imaginary friends to how imagination can make you happier and more productive, Jim Davies' Imagination will help us explore the full potential of our own mind.
Download or read book Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation written by Keith D. Markman and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 811 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past thirty years, and particularly within the last ten years, researchers in the areas of social psychology, cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience have been examining fascinating questions regarding the nature of imagination and mental simulation – the imagination and generation of alternative realities. Some of these researchers have focused on the specific processes that occur in the brain when an individual is mentally simulating an action or forming a mental image, whereas others have focused on the consequences of mental simulation processes for affect, cognition, motivation, and behavior. This Handbook provides a novel and stimulating integration of work on imagination and mental simulation from a variety of perspectives. It is the first broad-based volume to integrate specific sub-areas such as mental imagery, imagination, thought flow, narrative transportation, fantasizing, and counterfactual thinking, which have, until now, been treated by researchers as disparate and orthogonal lines of inquiry. As such, the volume enlightens psychologists to the notion that a wide-range of mental simulation phenomena may actually share a commonality of underlying processes.
Download or read book A New Theory of Mind written by James A. Wise and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media written by David Ciccoricco and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do writers represent cognition, and what can these representations tell us about how our own minds work? Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media is the first single-author book to explore these questions across media, moving from analyses of literary narratives in print to those found where so much cultural and artistic production occurs today: computer screens. Expanding the domain of literary studies from a focus on representations to the kind of simulations that characterize narratives in digital media, such as those found in interactive, web-based digital fictions and story-driven video games, David Ciccoricco draws on new research in the cognitive sciences to illustrate how the cybernetic and ludic qualities characterizing narratives in new literary media have significant implications for how we understand the workings of actual minds in an increasingly media-saturated culture. Amid continued concern about the impact of digital media on the minds of readers and players today, and the alarming philosophical questions generated by the communion of minds and machines, Ciccoricco provides detailed examples illustrating how stories in virtually any medium can still nourish creative imagination and cultivate critical—and ethical—reflection. Contributing new insights on attention, perception, memory, and emotion, Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media is a book at the forefront of a new wave of media-conscious cognitive literary studies.
Download or read book Narrative and Consciousness written by Gary D. Fireman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers and literary critics. The research presented in this volume should appeal to the general reader and researchers enmeshed in these problems.
Download or read book How Authors Minds Make Stories written by Patrick Colm Hogan and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same cognitive processes as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations.
Download or read book Understanding the Human Mind written by Jason Browne and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if you could use the most confusing parts of your own brain to create the reality of your deepest desires? Whether you think about your dream life on a daily basis, or you haven't given it much thought, why isn't it yet your reality? We try hard to bring our desires to life. We exert large amounts of energy and work towards getting the things we want. But then how come so often it seems that the exact opposite is what happens? Or that no matter how hard we try, things just don't turn out the way we want them to? The answer to this question lies deep within the maze of the human mind. However, although the mind is certainly a complex organ, we can still understand it rather easily and, in fact, use these complexities to our advantage. Much of what becomes our reality is simply the product of what we think about our reality. Wait, what? Right. This statement is so simple and yet so profound at the same time, that most of us have probably just experienced a mental hiccup. Did you know that your imagination is the #1 determining factor in what your future will look like? Imagine that. The problem is that most of us are so completely unaware of this that our imagination, or our subconscious operating system, often make decisions without our explicit consent. And when this happens, it creates a reality for us that is quite different from our desire. But you can change all of this. You can navigate this maze that is the human mind and develop new tools, techniques, and various mind hacks that will enable you to harness the force of your imagination and begin to use it for good. You can use it to create the life of your dreams. In Understanding the Human Mind: The Powerful Force of Imagination, you'll discover: Why every interpretation of "What is reality?" ultimately concludes the same thing, and how you can use this answer to change all aspects of your life Revolutionary insight into the subconscious mind and how you can become best friends with your own Why the conscious mind doesn't get to decide how things will be and how accepting this will empower you towards success A progressive new look at how your imagination is what determines your future The science behind how our imagination works and why it is so powerful How simply changing the way you speak to yourself could change your entire perspective The daily habits you should adopt today that will help you to control your imagination and build the life you want ... and so much more. Knowing how the brain works and understanding the science behind how it isn't something that only the elite or super intelligent have access to. There is a straightforward path to truly becoming one with your own mind and then literally thinking your way into the life you've always wanted to live. With just minutes a day of active and determined focus, all of your dreams can soon become reality. If you're ready to dive deep into the human mind and use a new awareness to free yourself from everything undesirable, then scroll up and click the "Add to Cart" button right now.
Download or read book Stories on My Mind written by Gregg K. VandeKieft and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Remapping Your Mind written by Lewis Mehl-Madrona and published by Bear. This book was released on 2015-07-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to retelling your personal, family, and cultural stories to transform your life, your relationships, and the world • Applies the latest neuroscience research on memory, brain mapping, and brain plasticity to the field of narrative therapy • Details mind-mapping and narrative therapy techniques that use story to change behavior patterns in ourselves, our relationships, and our communities • Explores how narrative therapy can help replace dysfunctional cultural stories with ones that build healthier relationships with each other and the planet We are born into a world of stories that quickly shapes our behavior and development without our conscious awareness. By retelling our personal, family, and cultural narratives we can transform the patterns of our own lives as well as the patterns that shape our communities and the larger social worlds in which we interact. Applying the latest neuroscience research on memory, brain mapping, and brain plasticity to the field of narrative therapy, Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy explain how the brain is specialized in the art of story-making and story-telling. They detail mind-mapping and narrative therapy techniques that use story to change behavior patterns in ourselves, our relationships, and our communities. They explore studies that reveal how memory works through story, how the brain recalls things in narrative rather than lists, and how our stories modify our physiology and facilitate health or disease. Drawing on their decades of experience in narrative therapy, the authors examine the art of helping people to change their story, providing brain-mapping practices to discover your inner storyteller and test if the stories you are living are functional or dysfunctional, healing or destructive. They explain how to create new characters and new stories, ones that excite you, help you connect with yourself, and deepen your intimate connections with others. Detailing how shared stories and language form culture, the authors also explore how narrative therapy can help replace dysfunctional cultural stories with those that offer templates for healthier relationships with each other and the planet.
Download or read book The Body Keeps the Score written by Bessel A. Van der Kolk and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.
