LITERATURE AND MIND RECOMMENDS
Lit and Mind students and faculty introduce the book that got them interested in minds and literature. Browse for some great ways into the interdisciplinary field of mind studies!
Why we read fiction: Theory of mind and the novel (2006) by Lisa zunshine
Recommended by Aili Pettersson Peeker
The book that got me hooked on studying how minds are represented in fiction is Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Zunshine, who happens to be a graduate of UCSB’s English PhD program, proposes that one reason for why we like to read about made-up characters in made-up worlds is because it stimulates the same ability we use to read the minds of people around us in real life — it stimulates our theory of mind. Using historical texts from the Western literary canon as well as examples from contemporary culture and detective fiction, Zunshine explains how we use our theory of mind without even noticing in our daily lives and how reading fiction exploits this ability to understand others, but also why it is more complicated than the idea that reading fiction makes us better mind-readers might suggest and how neurological diversities like autism and schizophrenia affect mind-reading. It’s a fabulously accessible introduction for people within the humanities who want to know more about cognitive approaches to literary studies and for anyone outside the field who is interested in how ideas from the cognitive sciences can help us understand why humans love to tell and read stories.
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain (1994) By Antonio Damasio
Recommended by Maddie Roepe
By the time I was in third grade I knew that I wanted to study literature for the rest of my life; something about the way that certain stories could make me feel just didn’t compare to anything else. I think that many of us, including myself, use literature (and art more generally) to get in touch with and/or help make sense of our emotions, but it can be difficult to value those feelings when they at times seem to take over our lives or distract us from our long-term goals. Descartes’ Error offered me a revelation: emotions, as complex as they are, are actually central to everyday thinking. To think of the mind and the body as separate is to fundamentally misunderstand the human condition. Through accessible analyses of clinical case studies using contemporary brain-imaging technology, eminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio proposes that emotions are the essential foundations of any and all decision-making, particularly as we navigate the world as embodied, socially-situated beings. In addition to being widely-cited and extraordinarily influential, his book has helped shape a path for my own research that takes seriously the influence of emotion as a cognitive tool, both in life and in literature, by considering the ways in which emotions are really produced, understood, and shared.
1984 (1949) by george orwell
recommended by jackson rainville
I first read 1984 by George Orwell in high school and was fascinated by the ways it reflects social conditioning in modern society. It was not until I returned to this novel in a Literature and Mind class my senior year at UCSB that I realized the ramifications of social conditioning on interpersonal relations. Reading 1984 through the lens of Mind inquiry allows a completely new understanding and appreciation of its function in our lives.
One of the main themes of the novel is Big Brother’s implementation of Newspeak, a condensed language of socially correct words and phrases. Newspeak forfeits Oceania’s citizens’ ability to express their full experience by eliminating words used to describe private responses, such as emotions and introspective beliefs. By restricting language to a grid of socially sanctioned language, citizens cannot make sense of how they feel about specific interactions because language is what allows humans to consciously recognize or define their feelings and thoughts. The consciousness produced by Newspeak yields a society of brainwashed comrades as they perceive all interactions to be objective services for Big Brother. Submitting to the conditioned way of life forced upon them, the citizens of Oceania forfeit their personal philosophy, relationships, and subjectivity in the name of Big Brother.
Understanding the relationship between language and thought has deepened my appreciation for 1984 as it has made me more aware of how I express my own cognitive states as well as how they are produced. When reading this iconic novel through an interdisciplinary lens, not only can the reader recognize the societal impacts of social conditioning, but also the importance of language in our mental perception of reality.
jazz (1992) by toni morrison
recommended by lupita barragan
Toni Morrison introduces us to the world of Jazz by brilliantly encapsulating most of the plot in the first paragraph. Instead of using a linear plotline, the narrator shifts through different characters and settings, emulating jazz music and its solos. We meet Violet and Joe, an older couple suffering through a declining marriage, Dorcas, Joe’s lover, and her antiquated aunt Alice, Golden Gray, and Wild Woman, Joe’s mother. All of the characters are connected somehow, functioning as individual instruments working together to create an intricate ensemble. By adopting the structure of jazz music, Morrison tells the story of post-1920’s Harlem and the dynamic relationship between two imperative parts of her characters’ identity: their newly acquired freedom in a city that embraces their individuality and the deep-rooted trauma that resulted from the social construct of slavery.
I read Jazz in my first literature and mind class at UCSB. I was captivated! The evocative structure in which trauma and sorrow is conveyed through the rhythm, beat, and improvisational nature of the novel explores the process of memory as a conscious act. Morrison delves into the limits of cognition as memories surface and become coherent, only to fade out into someone else’s stream of consciousness. Every character has a different concept of reality, and you can’t quite trust any of them, but you can trust that you are in for a unique literary and musical experience that demonstrates the importance our perception has on relaying our own narrative.
Gӧdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Recommended by Rebecca Baker
The book that first got me interested in cognitive science is Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gӧdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Its byline, “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll,” couldn’t be more accurate for the delightful joy of discovery and interdisciplinary possibility conjured up by the book’s many playful puzzles, meditations, and alacritous sideways leaps between levels of analysis. Originally published in 1979, it was one of the first cognitive science texts to combine “hard” scientific knowledge with creative writing, humanistic inquiry, and philosophical speculation. Through the framing logic of “strange loops” (paradoxical, self-referential, and recursive systems that don’t seem to be quantifiable in the normal sense of the word), Hofstadter explores the hard problem of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, rather than a strictly mechanical and linear process.
Although this book arises from the foundations of first-generation digital computing and cognitive science, and thus contains a number of points that are now outdated/simply wrong (the idea of the brain being just like a computer, for instance!) Gӧdel, Escher, Bach nevertheless stands out as one of the first serious attempts at exploring and reveling within the analogies, homologies, and bridging metaphors between STEM and humanities disciplines with regard to the human mind/brain, thus paving the way for research initiatives such as UCSB’s Lit and Mind Center to exist at all. Quite appropriately, form mirrors content: Gӧdel, Escher, Bach is a bricolage of technical/mathematical explanations, reportage on exciting advances in AI, biographical reflections on the lives of proto-cogsci thinkers (such as Alan Turing and Charles Babbage), Platonic dialogues between two archetypical interlocutors—Achilles and the Tortoise—on the nature of consciousness, and complex analysis of visual/musical artwork evoking what we, in literary studies, might refer to as “negative capability.” I will be forever grateful for the sense of wonder this book inspired in me, the idea that all intelligent systems are creative, adaptive, and complex in ways we can never fully explore. This foundational axiom has shaped my path as a scholar and teacher ever since.