Stories and the Brain

How do our brains enable us to tell and follow stories? And how do stories affect our minds? In Stories and the Brain, Paul Armstrong analyzes the cognitive processes involved in constructing and exchanging stories, exploring their role in the neurobiology of mental functioning. Armstrong argues that the ways in which stories order events in time, imitate actions, and relate our experiences to others' lives are correlated to cortical processes of temporal binding, the circuit between action and perception, and the mirroring operations underlying embodied intersubjectivity. He reveals how recent neuroscientific findings about how the brain works—how it assembles neuronal syntheses without a central controller—illuminate cognitive processes involving time, action, and self-other relations that are central to narrative.An extension of his previous book, How Literature Plays with the Brain, this new study applies Armstrong's analysis of the cognitive...