First Annual Round-Up

The blog is a year old. I’m surprised and pleased by how easy it’s been to produce posts at pretty much a weekly rate. I’m grateful for guest contributors who have written excellent material. I’m grateful to readers for their comments and encouragement. I still hope for the kind of interaction and conversation that I refer to in the ‘About’ page, but a year is not a lot of time to get something like that going, especially since the strategy so far has basically been ‘‘.

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I would like to offer a bit of reflection on what’s been achieved (and not yet achieved), and this post might also give new readers an easy way of reaching old posts. Lots of topics have been broached, and some have been considered at length. I have chosen to feature these here not because I think they are necessarily the best posts, but because in a series of posts I seem to get a bit further into the dialogue between literature and cognitive science.

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* So, if you like, you could look at a handful of posts about time in thoughts and texts: in order, here, here, here, here, and indeed here.
* Or you could see what I think literature has to tell scientists about wandering minds: firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly.
* I enjoyed thinking about music and cognitive dissonance here and also here.
* Ah, the vivid days when I got interested in self-recognition and mirrors, the results of which are in this post and this one too. Well, they meant something to me.
* And you might also follow a quartet of posts about how our brains, and our literary works, make us forget things. I started here, persisted here, consolidated here, and sealed the deal here.

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Finally, I have made intermittent attempts to work at the terms of the blog’s title. The nuances of what I thought I meant by ‘know’ and ‘about’ bugged me here and here. It’s been easy to find diverse things to write about in posts, but it hasn’t proved all that easy to use this format to set about the large questions underlying the idea that Literature Knows things About Your Brain — things that can mean something to literary people, psychologists and all. But that’s in the nature of the questions rather than the format. Plenty to do in the year ahead!

In case you don’t know, this is a reference to the film Field of Dreams.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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