Story and the Brain

Catalog description

An interdisciplinary course about the power of storytelling. The aim is to provide students with an understanding of how storytelling shapes our minds and how our brains shape the stories we tell. The course explores topics such as empathy, emotion, mindreading, memory, and imagination and how they relate to narrative. We will read foundational works from the cognitive sciences alongside literature and television from the 20th and 21st centuries by Lynda Barry, William Faulkner, Thomas King, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Designed to introduce students to think across disciplinary fields of literary studies, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.