Dynamic Subspace

Tag: neuroscience

  • Updates to the Neuroscience and Science Fiction Literature Chronological Bibliography

    Brain illuminated from within and transparent face. My brain MRI scan used with ControlNet. Image created by Stable Diffusion.

    Following my recent updates of the Generative AI and Pedagogy Bibliography and Skateboarding Studies Bibliography, I’m happy to announce that I’ve made significant changes and additions to the Neuroscience and Science Fiction Literature Chronological Bibliography that I created on 2 April 2015 but hadn’t updated since 2019.

    Overall, the page now has a table of contents that helps with understanding and navigating the page’s wealth of information. In the primary source list, I added headings and dividers for decades and years with the titles in each year being alphabetized by author’s last name. Also, the biggest improvement was reformatting each entry in the latest MLA style with information gleaned from my research and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Those stories and chapters that I did not have on hand are therefore listed without inclusive page numbers (I will add these as I source each item). In the secondary sources list, I reordered these alphabetically by author’s last name as these are a reference source and chronology isn’t as important as it is for the primary source list.

    The number of sources listed in the primary source list increased 61% from 103 to 166. Each includes parenthetical notes about the specific brain-related narrative elements. Many thanks to James Davis Nicoll and the commenters on his “Get Out of My Head: SFF Stories About Sharing Brain-Space With Someone Else” (Tor.com, 8 Nov. 2018) article for contributing some of the new titles to the primary source list.

    The number of second sources increased 141% from 17 to 41, which includes a French title that I can’t wait to get my hands on: Laurent Vercueil’s Neuro-Science-Fiction (Le Bélial, 2022).

    I’ll continue adding to this bibliography as well as the others that I maintain as a part of my research interests. If you have a useful source that I should add, please send it my way. Also, I’m open to collaboration, so let me know if you’re likewise inclined and would like to discuss a project!

  • Notes from Dr. Laura Otis’ LMC Distinguished Speaker Presentation at Georgia Tech

    Dr. Laura Otis presenting in GT Library's Ferst Room.
    Dr. Laura Otis presenting in GT Library’s Ferst Room.

    Today, Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication invited Emory University’s Dr. Laura Otis to give a presentation in the Library’s Ferst Room. Dr. Otis’ presentation was titled, “The Surprising Antics of Other People’s Minds” [read the abstract here].

    In Dr. Otis’ work, she aims to show with data that she has collected from interviews with an admittedly small number of English-speaking people from the United States that:

    1) visual thinking and verbal thinking are not opposites and they cannot be separated,” 2) there is no such thing as a visual thinking type or a verbal thinking type–every mind is unique, and 3) visual and verbal inclinations are not destinies. Anyone can develop visual or verbal skills with practice.

    She also offered two suggestions for literary studies:

    1) refer to visual imagery in readings, because this might help include more students who may feel excluded by verbal readings, and 2) take reader’s visual imagery seriously, because this might help reconnect the reader to creative writing as co-creator of its imagery.

    You can download my handwritten notes on Dr. Otis’ talk and the Q&A session from the event as a PDF from here.

    I enjoyed Dr. Otis’ presentation, and it provided me with a new insight into something that I had already read and thought about but in a more biological sense: we each think differently, because our brains are wired differently. Our experience of the world and life, which includes our biology, environment, and culture, leaves its indelible trace on our brain’s physical wiring. As we live, our brains wire themselves to accommodate new memories, abilities, and ways of thinking. It makes sense that all of these experiences would shape our thinking, but more importantly, we can exert our own conscious control over our thinking by adopting reflective practices and training/practice to improve abilities that we already have to greater or lesser degrees.

  • Neuroscience, the Neuronovel, and Science Fiction

    Several conversations with Tammy Clewell on the neuronovel rekindled my interest in the biology of the human brain. As a result, I have decided to do some research on the neuronovel and its relationship to science fiction. The neuronovel, with its emphasis on the hardware of the brain over the software of psychology, is arguably a hard science fiction topic (albeit most lacking an extrapolative element). Additionally, novels traditionally seen in terms of psychological explanation can be re-read with neuroscience in mind (pun intended).

    I am building a list of science fiction novels and short stories that specifically addresses the neuronovel’s emphasis of brains over mind. What titles of novels or short stories from approximately 1950 to the present can you recommend that emphasize brains over mind, and the brain’s influence on one’s sense of self and understanding of the world. This would include brain trauma over psychological trauma, neuroscience over psychology, depictions of creating or developing brains and how that shapes one’s engagement with the world, introspection or internal dialog that might have a biological explanation rather than a psychological one, etc. Two sets of works that immediate come to mind are Asimov’s robots (they exhibit psychological problems, but there is an emphasis on those behaviors resulting from the way they are hardwired), and Dick’s VALIS novels (the author’s 2-3-74 events can be more simply diagnosed as the first in a series of unfortunate strokes).

    This is a very rough sketch at this point, so please bear with me as a work through it. All suggestions are welcome and much appreciated.