Trapped Inside the Human Brain-- E. L. Doctorow



E. L. Doctorow, one of the towering American novelists of the last 50 years, will visit the Writers Institute next week, to present his new novel, Andrew's Brain (2014), about the human mind and its puzzlements.

More about the visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html

Terrence Rafferty reviewed the novel on the front page of the New York Times Book Review:

"The sense of being trapped in your own consciousness is, of course, an occupational hazard for writers, but it’s not a problem you’d expect Doctorow to worry himself much about. His fiction has always seemed driven by intense curiosity about the world outside him, about the people of other times and how they lived. So it’s odd that in the past few years he has seemed so interested in characters like the Coll­yers and Andrew, who prefer to look inward and shun the wider view. They’re exotic specimens, baffled and lonely and pacing in their cages. It’s touching that Doctorow should want to study them, and although they’re essentially comic figures, he’s strangely solicitous of them; he respects the narrow space they find themselves living in."

More in the NY Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow.html

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Your Brain on Fiction

The New York Times has an interesting op-ed piece by Annie Murphy Paul about the neurological experience of reading fiction:

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings." More.

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This Is Your Brain on Sports

"What your eyes see, your brain plays — as best it can, which is, of course, as variable as our actual playing and living." More.

In honor of Superbowl weekend, and in honor of the UAlbany home team, the New York Giants, we offer you a recent article in Grantland on the neuroscience of watching sports by Le Anne Schreiber, former New York Times sports editor (the first woman to hold that position) and former ESPN ombudsman.

A friend of the Institute and upstate resident, Schreiber has twice participated in the Visiting Writers Series, has served as Visiting Writer in the UAlbany English Department, and is the past instructor of a Writers Institute Community Writing Workshop in nonfiction.

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