Books by Marco Bernini
Cognition and Poetics Series, 2021
Does literature merely represent cognitive processes, or can it enhance, parallel, or reassess th... more Does literature merely represent cognitive processes, or can it enhance, parallel, or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Samuel Beckett's narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology. Through a detailed analysis of Beckett's entire corpus and published volumes of letters, this book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) models for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind.
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Papers by Marco Bernini
Modern Fiction Studies, Dec 1, 2022
This article promotes the idea that current cognitive models of mind wandering and inner speech c... more This article promotes the idea that current cognitive models of mind wandering and inner speech can help us better understanding the phenomenological constituents of what Joyce calls “the mystery of the conscious” as simulated by modernist literary investigations. We will rework a model of perceptual decoupling (or how attention disengages from perception) and peripheral awareness (the interplay of focus and periphery in perception).On the other hand, we argue that modernist introspective explorations can challenge, correct and update cognitive models. We also reflect on reading as a process reversing authorial introspective quests (presenting a model of reading as reversed introspection)
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The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary, 2021
Booming Western interest in mindfulness and meditation has significantly mainstreamed breath and ... more Booming Western interest in mindfulness and meditation has significantly mainstreamed breath and breathing practices. Mobile apps guiding breath-focused meditation are democratising, more or less carefully, earlier Buddhist intuitions of a tight, looping relation between body and mind, breath and mental states. Cognitive sciences too are starting to take the link between breathing and consciousness seriously. Breath is treated, for example, both as a symptom of stress disorders (such as hyperventilation in anxiety or OCD) 1 and a possible attenuating cure for distressing mental states. 2 The therapeutic power of breathing is also key to the working of sensory deprivation technologies such as floatation tanks 3 or sonic cradles. 4 The cross-methodological benefits of looking at Buddhist practices, and at the relationship between breath and consciousness, for a better
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Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2020
■ Stories transport readers into vivid imaginative worlds, but understanding how readers create s... more ■ Stories transport readers into vivid imaginative worlds, but understanding how readers create such worlds-populating them with characters, objects, and events-presents serious challenges across disciplines. Auditory imagery is thought to play a prominent role in this process, especially when representing characters' voices. Previous research has shown that direct reference to speech in stories (e.g., He said, "I'm over here") may prompt spontaneous activation of voice-selective auditory cortex more than indirect speech [Yao, B., Belin, P., & Scheepers, C. Silent reading of direct versus indirect speech activates voice-selective areas in the auditory cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 3146-3152, 2011]. However, it is unclear whether this effect reflects differential processing of speech or differences in linguistic content, source memory, or grammar. One way to test this is to compare direct reference effects for characters speaking and thinking in a story. Here, we present a multidisciplinary fMRI study of 21 readers' responses to characters' speech and thoughts during silent reading of short fictional stories. Activations relating to direct and indirect references were compared for both speaking and thinking. Eye-tracking and independent localizer tasks (auditory cortex and theory of mind [ToM]) established ROIs in which responses to stories could be tracked for individuals. Evidence of elevated auditory cortex responses to direct speech over indirect speech was observed, replicating previously reported effects; no reference effect was observed for thoughts. Moreover, a direct reference effect specific to speech was also evident in regions previously associated with inferring intentions from communication. Implications are discussed for the spontaneous representation of fictional characters and the potential roles of inner speech and ToM in this process. ■
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Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism. Edited by Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press., 2020
Where does the self stop and the rest of the world begin? Clark and Chalmers already paved the wa... more Where does the self stop and the rest of the world begin? Clark and Chalmers already paved the way for an application of the extended mind theory to the problem of selfhood and identity, when in their seminal paper they asked ‘What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so’ (2010: 39). However, how can the self persist in time if it is chiefly constituted by a series of constantly renewed couplings, enactions, and extensions? If the self does persist, what are the processes responsible for the temporal unification and synthesis of what enactivists call different ‘sensorimotor contingencies’ (O’Regan and Noë 2001)? If the self does not persist, what kind of phenomenology and new ontology underlies, or results from, this shift? This essay focuses on these questions as they relate to an extended and enactive view of the self in the space-time trajectory explored in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2005) – the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s work is regarded as the monumental literary research on temporality, self and memory. I will argue, however, that extended and enactive frameworks can provide important new insights on the key claims and findings of Proust’s literary endeavour.
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Frontiers of Narrative Studies (Gerald Prince, ed. Special Issue on "Geographical Narratology"), 2018
The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call " innerscapes " : artefactual... more The essay presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call " innerscapes " : artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka's short story The Bridge), radio plays (Samuel Beckett's Embers), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer's short film, Adam + 1), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called 'extended introspection " (2013: 95).
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Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
Interacting with imaginary companions (ICs) is now considered a natural part of childhood for man... more Interacting with imaginary companions (ICs) is now considered a natural part of childhood for many children, and has been associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes. Recent research has explored how the phenomenon of ICs in childhood and adulthood relates to the more unusual experience of hearing voices (or auditory verbal hallucinations, AVH). Specifically, parallels have been drawn between the varied phenomenology of the two kinds of experience, including the issues of quasi-perceptual vividness and autonomy/control. One line of research has explored how ICs might arise through the internalization of linguistically mediated social exchanges to form dialogic inner speech. We present data from two studies on the relation between ICs in childhood and adulthood and the experience of inner speech. In the first, a large community sample of adults (N = 1,472) completed online the new Varieties of Inner Speech-Revised (VISQ-R) questionnaire (Alderson-Day et al., 2018) on the phenomenology of inner speech, in addition to providing data on ICs and AVH. The results showed differences in inner speech phenomenology in individuals with a history of ICs, with higher scores on the Dialogic, Evaluative, and Other Voices subscales of the VISQ-R. In the second study, a smaller community sample of adults (N = 48) completed an auditory signal detection task as well as providing data on ICs and AVH. In addition to scoring higher on AVH proneness, individuals with a history of ICs showed reduced sensitivity to detecting speech in white noise as well as a bias toward detecting it. The latter finding mirrored a pattern previously found in both clinical and nonclinical individuals with AVH. These findings are consistent with the view that ICs represent a hallucination-like experience in childhood and adulthood which shows meaningful developmental relations with the experience of inner speech.
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Readers often describe vivid experiences of voices and characters in a manner that has been liken... more Readers often describe vivid experiences of voices and characters in a manner that has been likened to hallucination. Little is known, however, of how common such experiences are, nor the individual differences they may reflect. Here we present the results of a 2014 survey conducted in collaboration with a national UK newspaper and an international book festival. Participants (n = 1566) completed measures of reading imagery, inner speech, and hallucination-proneness, including 413 participants who provided detailed free-text descriptions of their reading experiences. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that reading imagery was related to phenomenological characteristics of inner speech and proneness to hallucination-like experiences. However, qualitative analysis of reader's accounts suggested that vivid reading experiences were marked not just by auditory phenomenology, but also their tendency to cross over into non-reading contexts. This supports social-cognitive accounts of reading while highlighting a role for involuntary and uncontrolled personality models in the experience of fictional characters.
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Narrating Complexity. 2018. Edited by Susan Stepney and Richard Walsh. New York: Springer., 2018
Complex systems exacerbate a common problem for scientific enquiry: the difficulty of creating mo... more Complex systems exacerbate a common problem for scientific enquiry: the difficulty of creating models able to discriminate fundamental elements or patterns from random behaviours or corollary components in the event or process at issue. This chapter argues that a similar tension between order and randomness has been a chief modelling problem of Samuel Beckett’s narratives, tied to his interest in a specific kind of complex system (the mind) and its emergent properties (consciousness and the narrative sense of self). Building on narratology, complex system frameworks, cognitive theories of emergence and of scientific modelling, this chapter introduces the idea of “fictional cognitive modelling”. Through this concept, the chapter analyses Beckett’s treatment of narrative devices as formal tools for the creation of “exploratory models” able to atomise the emerging unity of conscious experience and of a narrative sense of self into its core components (defined as the “narrative dynamic core”). It concludes by suggesting that Beckett’s narrative method shows how literature can occupy a proper position in the investigation and exploration of complex systems.
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The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture, 2016
Within cognitive science and narrative theory, the ‘transparency of the mind’ is a shared optical... more Within cognitive science and narrative theory, the ‘transparency of the mind’ is a shared optical image to describe the accessibility of cognitive processes and phenomenological experiences. This seeming terminological convergence, however, conceals important differences and potential confusion about what is transparent to whom, or what higher or lower degrees of transparency imply in terms of accessibility. Cognitive science speaks of a transparency of the mind in at least two kinds of cognitive scenarios. One is the so-called transparency of self-knowledge or self-transparency (T1), according to which the mind is said to be transparent to itself. A second condition of transparency is in relation to outward perceptual experiences where, inversely, transparency indicates the introspective inaccessibility of phenomenal states or their ‘phenomenal transparency’ (T2). When looking at the colour blue, the classic example goes, we can just attend to the colour blue and not to the experience itself because we see through the process channelling that experience. Both assumptions have been recently disputed or substantially revisited by new strands in cognitive science, which advocate that perception and self-knowledge are instead inherently opaque. Within this alternative account of the mind, encompassing a range of perspectives that the chapter will group and present as the ‘interpretive cognition’ framework, transparency is considered just an illusory feeling resulting from the positive outcome of successful interpretive mechanisms coping with a vast array of opaque stimuli in inner cognition and outward perception. Drawing on the hypotheses raised by the ‘interpretive cognition’ framework, and especially on its reappraisal of inner transparency (T1), this chapter aims at addressing, refining and reassessing an equally recent debate in narrative theory about the transparency of fictional minds. With a particular focus on moods and introspective opacity (conditions in which the embodied, anti-Cartesian dimension of cognition is particularly relevant), the chapter uses Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) as a case study to show how narrative fiction can transparently bring interpretive processes to the fore, either when this mediation is unperceived by the experiencing character or when opacity becomes perceptible to her.
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The continuity and contiguity between animal and human beings in Beckett’s work has been the subj... more The continuity and contiguity between animal and human beings in Beckett’s work has been the subject of sustained critical attention. The recurring dehumanisation or degen- eration of his characters’ mental faculties and behaviours has largely been analysed as an ‘ostensible animalization’ of human nature – following a reading of the ‘crea- turely’ spectrum as a regression from the human to the animal. In contrast, this article considers the creaturely level in Beckett’s narrative as occupied by undeveloped human cognisers as opposed to (and sometimes rancorously opposing) fully fledged Humans. If Beckett’s formal minimalism has been extensively foregrounded, this essay draws on contemporary cognitive science and phenomenology in order to define and examine what the author calls Beckett’s cognitive liminalism – his literary explora- tion of liminal states of cognition and experience, of which the concept of the ‘creature’ constitutes a foundational element.
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In recent years, cognitive science has progressively entered the epoch of “4e cognition” in which... more In recent years, cognitive science has progressively entered the epoch of “4e cognition” in which the mind is considered as embedded, enacted, embodied and extended. However, among these second-generation perspectives, the extended mind theory (Clark and Chalmers 1998) seems to have lagged behind in the narratological discourse. According to this view, the human mind extends into the world when coupled with external cognitive tools like computers or material symbols such as language. This article seeks to apply the extended mind theory to the problem of literary intentions by putting the key principles of the theory in relation to the act of narrative worldmaking. In so doing, I suggest that EMT entails a reconsideration of the concept of authorial intentions in that it provides a distributed account of agency during the writing activity. In the last part of the essay I elaborate on the further implications of this reappraisal for literary interpretation.
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This article provides a reading of The Unnamable in the light of contemporary cognitive theories ... more This article provides a reading of The Unnamable in the light of contemporary cognitive theories of self and self-consciousness. By drawing on Daniel Dennett’s account of self as a ‘centre of narrative gravity’ and on the three- levels model of self proposed by Antonio Damasio, the article foregrounds significant analogies with Beckett’s literary journey into cognition, even before and beyond The Unnamable. It concludes by arguing that a cognitive approach to his narrative work can offer a framework for interpreting the extent to which Beckett has been able to explore the mind, generating through language and narrative devices experiences which sciences can only discursively report.
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In this article we advocate a bottom-up direction for the methodological modelling of interdiscip... more In this article we advocate a bottom-up direction for the methodological modelling of interdisciplinary research based on concrete interactions among individuals within interdisciplinary projects. Drawing on our experience in Hearing the Voice (a cross-disciplinary project on auditory verbal hallucinations running at Durham University) we focus on the dynamic if also problematic integration of cognitive science (neuroscience, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind), phenomenology, and humanistic disciplines (literature, narratology, history, theology). We propose a new model for disciplinary integration which brings to the fore an under-investigated dynamic of interdisciplinary projects, namely their being processes of distributed cognition and cognitive integration.
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Despite the recent proliferation of scientiic, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verba... more Despite the recent proliferation of scientiic, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucina- tory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowl- edge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate method- ologies to analyze a wider range of irst-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: (1) cultural, social, and historical; (2) experiential; and (3) biographical. We go on to show that there are signiicant potential beneits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include (1) informing the development and reinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; (2) “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and (3) suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic inter- vention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplin- ary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientiic enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.
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Journal of Gadda Studies, 2011
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Book Reviews by Marco Bernini
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Books by Marco Bernini
Papers by Marco Bernini
Book Reviews by Marco Bernini