The Neuroscience of Literary Time-Travel: How Literary Works Cross Historical Distance

Abstract

The dead seem to come alive again when we read a literary work from the past and feel the strange but intimate presence of other subjectivities inhabiting our consciousness and our bodies. The power of literary works to speak across historical distance may seem mysterious, even mystical, but it must have a material basis in our neurobiological equipment for making sense of the world.  What is often referred to as the “life” of a literary work calls for an explanation that goes beyond formal or historical categories.  Elucidating this complex, contradictory state of affairs requires a neuro-phenomenological analysis of the relation between aesthetic experiences and their neural correlates, an analysis that integrates phenomenological theories of reading with neuroscientific research on action understanding, brain-to-brain coupling, and the temporal horizonality of predictive processing.  Reading is a process of doubling whereby we simulate cognitive processes held ready in a text, awaiting reactivation through our participation as we fill in its absences and make its world present.  Because embodied brains can oscillate rhythmically together, we can interact with the activity embedded in a literary work and respond to the opportunities that these afford for reciprocity and collaboration.  We speak with the dead by unbinding and binding cognitive energy, and the liveliness of their voices is a consequence of how our interactions with their patterns of meaning-making activate and sensitize our arousal systems. 

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