Fifth Annual Round-Up

It’s anniversary time again. Five years of the blog!

I wrote a review of the year for 2016-17 here, for 2015-16 here, for 2014-15 here and for 2013-14 here, and here’s another. This one announces a few changes ahead, though.

* I wrote four posts about the early 16th-century poet John Skelton, a maverick talent who seems to me to be revealed interestingly by a cognitively-tuned approach. The trail goes from here to here to here to here.
* I wrote a couple in which I reflected on my experience in trying to design experiments that answered my questions about literature at the same time as answering those of my psychology collaborators: this one and this one.
* The year was bookended by posts about the ways that generalised approaches, and individualised approaches, offered problems and opportunities to psychological research: the former, then the latter.
* I offered a few thoughts about predictive processing and the free energy principle, which offer interesting links with literary questions. Once, twice, thrice. Vera Tobin’s book on surprise, noted here, connects to that general theme.
* And finally, sneaking in under the radar at the time perhaps, was a post about memory, prompted by Jon Simons’s lecture at the Royal Institution. The post is here, and the lecture can be viewed on Youtube: see below. Jon gives a little namecheck to me and to Charles Fernyhough (website here), because we are plotting interdisciplinary work in which literary as well as psychological perspectives on the subjective experience of remembering will be brought together.

And it’s this last topic which is going to become the main focus of the blog for a while. I would like to do something focused that develops and grows over time. It may take a little while for this to get going, but it should be a nice change, for me at least, to have the blog aligning more clearly with my day-to-day priorities.

E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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