Syntax and pathways

Abstract

A series of thought-experiments bring together literary criticism and neuroscience to explore the possibility that the shapes of mentality formed by literary language, in particular syntax, lock into, shift and modify established pathways of the brain. The two ordinarily strange bedfellows thus complement each other: literature offers the best model of relatively unprogrammed human thinking, that is to say, human thinking not tied to preconceived conceptual agendas; brain science in turn offers a means by which the inner reality of imaginative language may perhaps be persuasively visualised. Highly challenging though carefully chosen problems from the real world of literary studies provide good hope of determining whether neuroscience is worth the humanist's candle – and whether that candle can illumine the neuroscientist's research.