Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative

by Paul B. Armstrong

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.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published May 26, 2020

About the author

Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English and former Dean of the College at Brown University. He was previously a professor and a dean at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has also taught at the University of Copenhagen, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Virginia, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. He is the author of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art; Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form; Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation; The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford; and The Phenomenology of Henry James. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End and of the fourth and fifth Norton Critical Editions of Heart of Darkness.

Reviews

[Felix Da Costa Gomez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being an English major with a minor in Creative Writing, I was very interested to see the ways in which literature could adopt scientific theory and implement it into writing, as well as how neuroscience could adopt studies in narrative theory to learn more about the brain. I’m very grateful to this book, as it helped me give a name to the things I’ve previously understood, but I didn’t think these concepts had a name up till now.

A big takeaway for me was the topics of statistical regularities and affordances, statistical regularities being described as certain pools, such as genre, and the ‘stereotypes’ or ‘tropes’ that make up that genre. Affordances come into play with statistical regularities as tropes you are willing to sacrifice when writing genre fiction. In the name of personal preference, I will use the term “compromises” instead of Affordances. When writing Fantasy, it is widely understood that magic is an integral part in Fantasy and often times, the two are inseparable. People who read Fantasy enjoy magic, that’s a statistical regularity. Now, are you willing to compromise and remove magic from a Fantasy narrative? If so, what are the consequences and rewards?

This book has also provided a deeper understanding of neurophenomenology and the doubling of the self that occurs when reading narrative, and it’s something that’s fascinating but difficult to explain.

When chatting with a classmate that is pursuing a degree in the sciences, I asked her if the scientific terminology used in this book was accurate. She articulated that while the theory was describe accurately, its applications to narrative theory only vaguely touched on what the original scientific theory entailed. Therefore, I remained critical as someone uninterested in science, not knowing fully what I was getting into.

I recommend this book to people that are interested in breaking down narrative, but if you’re already an avid writer, I am not sure how the ultra specific technical terms will impact how you go on writing stories. 4/5.

[Mills College Library]

809.923 A737 2020