The disciplinary chasm between neuroscience and the humanities has narrowed in recent years. Notable neuroscientists such as Nobel Prize laureate Eric R. Kandel and Antonio Damasio have used their empirical research on the brain to explore modern art, music, philosophy, and language. Furthermore, humanities scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Adrian Johnston, Brian Massumi, Ruth Leys, and Paul Armstrong have created a dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities, including philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theories on affect and narratology. This panel examines the features of such nascent transdisciplinary collaborations in the neurohumanities. Through each thirteen-minute talk, together, one neuroscientist and three literary scholars with neuroscience fluency explore the biocultural horizon in terms of the interface between literary studies and neuroscientific research on the plasticity of the human “synaptic self.”

In “What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About Ourselves? ” neuroscientist Janet M. Dubinsky introduces how systematic and deductive neuroscientific approaches to understanding the nervous system can be used to elucidate the configuration of human self-knowledge, which humans often self-evidently believe is gained through inductive personal experience and self-reflection via language, literature, and the arts. From a neuroscientific perspective, dynamic neuroplastic changes occur at the neuronal and molecular levels of the brain, and these form the basis of human memory and personal stories. Neuroscience has demonstrated that the process of generating a sense of self is not always harmonious or unified. Because neurons and synapses are components of multiple networks, noise in one network can trigger activation in another, generating spontaneous thoughts that can operate as sources of inspiration or confusion. Exploring dynamic embodied processes in the nervous system, Dubinsky discusses how memories can contribute to the incessant process of human “becoming” and thus shape the future.

Yasuko Kase’s paper “Ethics of Remembering: Memory Reconsolidation and Trauma” experiments a theoretical bridge between neuroscience and literary theory. Specifically, Kase discusses how neuroscientific investigation of a process called memory reconsolidation necessitates the revision of the traditional trauma paradigm. Although the traditional trauma paradigm, created by Cathy Caruth and her followers in the early 1990s, claims that the accuracy and unchangeability of traumatic memory is shielded from symbolic contamination, neuroscientific research on memory consolidation indicates otherwise. Every time a person retrieves a memory, both nonconscious implicit memory and conscious explicit memory can be destabilized and modified. Whereas the process of memory reconsolidation can serve as an opportunity for healing from trauma or for the re-interpretation of traumatic events, memory modification implicates ethical issues because memories contribute to a person’s identity. By examining neuroscientific research on traumatic memories conducted by Joseph LeDoux and others, Kase explores how literary studies on trauma can be engaged with the ethics of remembering.

Next two speakers demonstrate concrete neuro-literary analyses. John Schranck’s “‘Ain’t Never Stopped Till This Day’: The Sound of Traumatic Memory in Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’” scrutinizes collective and intergenerational forms of traumatic memory by focusing on auditory inputs and drawing from neuroscientific research on sonic memory by Daniel Levitin, Daniel Schacter, and Robert Zatorre. Baldwin describes how the traumatic death of the uncle of the unnamed protagonist echoes throughout a family’s collective memory via the sounds of the uncle being hit and killed by a drunken white driver. The impact of the auditory memory is further emphasized through Baldwin’s use of jazz as a catharsis wherein sound recalls, riffs on, and even balms the traumatic sonic memory. Furthermore, the declarative memory of the incident is transmitted from the protagonist’s father, who witnesses the murder, to his mother, and then to the protagonist as racial trauma. Schranck proposes a way to reframe paradigms of “the brain” that move away from an emphasis on a self-contained subject and toward a collective, culturally situated appraisal of the brain and traumatic memory.

Using his own research on deep brain stimulation for treatment of depression, in “Shakespearean Brain Play: The Stage as Neuroscience Lab in Out of Mind," Perry Guevara analyzes the experimental play written and performed by neuroscientist Allison Waters and theater artist Tannis Kowalchuk. Out of Mind rediscovers Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth in a neuropsychiatric clinic. By focusing on the interplay between the brain, bodily experience, and language, which generates emotion, Guevara argues that while the scientific research supporting Out of Mind seeks to instruct the design of neurotechnologies to treat depression, the performance itself aims to disrupt familiar academic protocols with creative elements from theater (i.e., Shakespearean dialogue, physical action, transformation of space) to emphasize the relational, contingent, and dynamic aspects of depression.