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What novelists can teach neuroscientists about consciousness.

by Michael Pollan

Ask about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill-defined as unconsciousness. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self-described misfit in the field. “There is something inherently poetic in consciousness that’s evading scientists right now,” Christoff Hadjiilieva told me during one of our conversations. “Most scientists don’t value the free movement of the mind, because they don’t believe anything good can come of it. They want every effort of the mind to be rewarded, preferably with a publication.”

She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes.

A self-described “paintoonist,” Mr. Moriarty created cartoons with spare dialogue that reminded his admirers of poetry or Samuel Beckett’s plays.

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“It’s as if Edward Hopper had taken up songwriting,” the comic artist Chris Ware wrote in The Believer magazine in 2009. “For lack of a better word, it’s poetry — I believe the first that comics has ever seen — and poetry as fresh and affecting now as when first drawn.”

I am a big fan of the Brattleboro Words Project. I believe it is a great model for many small and rural communities to use language and storytelling to connect and elevate their sense of place and history.

In December 2016, a new National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) ‘Creating Humanities Communities’ grant was announced to stimulate inter-organizational collaboration on shared humanities projects in rural states. That call for proposals provoked Lissa Weinmann, a local writer and entrepreneur who had recently opened 118 Elliot, a gallery and community space on the site of one of the old watercures in Downtown Brattleboro, to email 40 heads of various groups in town to invite them to gather at 118 Elliot to brainstorm about what such a project, centered on Brattleboro, might look like.

That brainstorming session attracted a diverse group of people, many of whom had never met. They collectively envisioned shared work that would highlight the Brattleboro area’s unique but little known tradition of writing, printing, publishing with a dash of storytelling and creative innovation thrown in. All expressed a commitment to highlight the role of previously under-represented voices as well as the land itself in this exploration.

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God seldom features in fiction. Having been dispensed with by Enlightenment philosophes around the time the first novels were emerging, he must have seemed irrelevant. The novel was new and God was old. Even clergy, who were facing an existential crisis of great literary potential, seemed infra dig to most novelists. There were new professions to explore: revolutionary, businessman, detective.

And it wasn’t enough that God was no longer necessary – neither was our need for spiritual nourishment. For the first time, and for most people, it was possible that life on Earth was better than it was in heaven.

VATICAN CITY (OSV News) — Pulitzer Prize winners, a Nobel laureate, celebrated novelists, and authors from nearly a dozen countries met at the Vatican June 24 for an audience with Pope Leo XIV, who spoke about the importance of books to reveal who we are and “our inner dialogue with God.”

“Writing, as you know, is an act of truth, of revelation, for it reveals who we are, what we believe and hope for, the world we strive toward and the future of which we dream,” the pope said in his speech to the writers. “In this pursuit of truth, we sense that truth is subtle, revealing itself to us in our inner dialogue with God and in our open and respectful dialogue with our neighbors.”

Among those in attendance were Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse, a Catholic convert and one of Norway’s most decorated writers, along with Pulitzer Prize winners Elizabeth Strout and Marilynne Robinson. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of “Everything Is Illuminated,” and Irish author Colum McCann, who wrote “Let the Great World Spin,” winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, were also among those who met the pope.