NEUR249

Humanities (HU)

(Brains, Minds, and Madness in Literature.) Stories invite us into the minds of others. As readers, we step into another's consciousness: into fictional memories, sensations, and narratives that feel real, as the words of often-dead writers become part of our own brain-matter. Yet, how do our theories of the mind and its operations relate to literary representations of a character's interiority? And what can contemporary neuroscience teach us about literature, or about our own minds on literature? In this course, we examine stories and theories of the mind across time, exploring scientific writing about the brain alongside literary masterpieces from Virginia Woolf to Vladimir Nabokov. Moreover, we consider the close connection between sanity and insanity, examining the representations of madness and other neurological ailments in brains gone "wrong." After learning to "read" the mind in literature, students will create their own aesthetic of the brain gone "right" or "wrong", creating narratives versed in the newest neuroscientific research on the pleasures and dangers of reading the "minds" of another. No Prerequisites.