The Neuroscience of Literary Time Travel: How Literary Works Cross Historical Distance
Paul B. Armstrong
Narrative October 1, 2023 DOI: 10.1353/nar.2023.a908405 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 3 |
| Key points | Argues that the experience of reading across historical distance is supported by embodied neurobiological processes—embodied simulation, action understanding, brain-to-brain coupling, and predictive processing's "free energy" organization—that are ubiquitous in everyday cognition and that aesthetic experience activates and exploits. The author proposes a "neurophenomenological" approach as a way to explain what formalist and historicist accounts leave unaddressed. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT: How do literary works speak across historical distance? When critics attempt to answer this question, they typically invoke biological metaphors that testify to the inability of formal or historical categories alone to explain the mystery of how literary works reach across the boundary between life and death. This essay investigates the embodied cognitive processes that enable literary time travel by undertaking a neurophenomenological analysis of the relation between aesthetic experiences and their neural correlates. A neurophenomenological approach can clarify what eludes formalist and historicist accounts by correlating the intersubjective interactions that constitute aesthetic experience and the transpersonal biocultural processes underlying them. This essay explains how phenomenological theories of reading and aesthetic experience relate to neuroscientific research in four areas: embodied simulation; action understanding; brain-to-brain coupling; and the anti-entropic organization of "free energy" in predictive processing. Correlations between phenomenological theories of consciousness and neuroscientific findings about cognition show how the experience of interacting with past lives as we read is supported by embodied neurobiological processes that are ubiquitous in our everyday cognitive lives and that aesthetic experiences activate and exploit.