C LIT 27 Neurohumanities Summer 2018

In chapter 4 of Levitin’s “This is Your Brain on Music” , I found myself wondering why artists, more specifically musicians create or have the ability to make their work unpredictable. What part of the brain drives these individuals to design a song that goes against the expectations of the listener’s brain? When I posed this question in class, Juliana had suggested I research the work of Nancy Andreasen, a prolific neuroscientist who has been generating research about how the creative mind works. To date there has been very limited research done regarding creativity, and the methods that have been used have not been properly quantified. One of the few methods that did shed some light on the abilities, and habits of those deemed creative is the “case study method.” Andreasen describes it as simply interviewing creative types, and asking them about their daily activities, and what inspires them. Similar studies have asked the question of whether high IQ correlated with a high degre...

Option One: Drawing on Proust’s Madeleine Episode, revisit your “out of the blue” memory from the beginning of class. Would you now describe the memory as voluntary or involuntary? Why so? The memory that came to my mind at the beginning of class was a day I had spent at the lake with a friend of mine a few years back. For some reason I remember the way my hair lay on my shoulders, the warmth, and the purple bathing suite I was wearing. I remember sitting on the front of my friend’s paddle board with my legs in the ice cold water, as she guided me through how to use it. The goose bumps on my legs, and the slight anxiety I had about standing up on the board. I attempted to operate the  stand up  paddle board for the first time that day. I looked off in the distance at a small island just off the shore, and felt a rush of calm. I was then able to  stand up , and although it was awkward, paddle boarded successfully for the first time. It was a very pleasant, a...

The material covered in unit one of this course deals with several interesting topics including; loss, memory, emotion, the soul and neural processing. The topic I found most interesting was the concept of the soul, and way in which science has begun to explain this concept in a more analytical way. Plato (424-343 BCE) for example, viewed the soul as endless, an entity that continues even after death: So the soul is immortal and has been many times reborn; and since it has seen all things, both in this world and in the other, there is nothing it has not learnt – From Plato, Meno (c. 382 BC) The soul in his eyes was an all knowing entity with infallible memory, and no need to learn anything new, as there was nothing it did not know already. He believed there to be 3-parts to this soul that included the Appetitive, Rational, and Spirited. The first dealt with the excess of pleasure and pain, and their increase of deviant behavior. The 2 nd which contemplates the form, deals with...

Question: Drawing from (quoting) a passage from Ch. 7 of Schacter and Milton (or Borges), what connection can you make between loss and memory or loss and emotion? Said another way, what does Milton allow us to say about Schacter, or Schacter about Milton, that we couldn’t get reading either alone? Response: Ch. 7 of Schacter deals with the pain associated with the persistence of a terrible memory. One that for example Donnie Moore wished he could forget, however the mechanisms of his brain would not allow for.  “With the passing of time, Angel’s players and fans eventually recovered from the deflating loss. But Donnie Moore never did. He was haunted, sometimes overwhelmed, by the memory of Henderson’s home run.”  If only he could have forgotten the moment completely, the feeling of shame, regret and utter confusion attached to this seemingly impossible loss. It appears that Moore’s emotional connection to the memory was so powerful; that it would not ...