What is the unconscious? Where is it? How does it affect our conscious experiences? While such interrogations are far from new, the inquiry has primarily been within the humanities. Modern science treated unconscious mental processes as unsuitable topics for investigation because they were untestable or unfalsifiable. Most notably, Freud’s idea of the unconscious was eschewed by behaviourist psychology because it could not be empirically verified. However, new discoveries in cognitive neuroscience during the last thirty years demonstrate that very little of what goes on in the brain is actually conscious, making it possible not only to re-examine earlier models of the unconscious but also to see the role of the unconscious in the human mind as the new scientific frontier. This network will provide a meeting point where literary scholars and neuroscientists can exchange their research findings on diverse aspects of unconscious memory. In doing so, the network will facilitate links between the ‘two cultures’ of humanistic and scientific inquiry, thereby providing an opportunity for transdisciplinary integration of a vast amount of relevant information coming in from many different areas of research. The initiative is based on the belief that answers to new questions about the unconscious mind are more likely to come from a wide variety of approaches within the neurobiological sciences as well as the humanities, with important technological input from the physical sciences. The network will run a series of neuroliterary seminars and day workshops on key themes. The aim is to bring together interested researchers from across the academic disciplines as well as involve new researchers, students, and people from outside the research community. The network meetings will be structured to generate concrete trandisciplinary research agendas for the production of systematic and multidisciplinary knowledge about the unconscious: the two workshops are designed to draw out the common thread that pulls the concepts and methods of neuroscience into working relations with those in the humanities; while the seminar series will be focussed on discussing concrete research questions from both neuroscientific and humanities-based angles.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 12:30:33 +0000
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