Abstract
This chapter mainly analyzes the etymology of the term “recount”, a word that is connected both with the act of counting and the act of narrating, that is, two apparently very different cognitive activities.
From the study of this word, the chapter goes on to analyze the story of these two acts and how they also develop through the invention and use of verbal and written language. This analysis demonstrates the close connection between recounting and counting (calculating) and therefore the close connection between cognitive processes involved in two apparently distant disciplines such as literature and mathematics. These are closely connected in the genre of a list that unifies in itself the intent of enumerating and that of telling. These close connections are the first basis for discussing the way of working of narrative thought.
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In monkeys, manual and facial gestures are closely linked. Ferrari and collaborators (2003) have identified that motor neurons of the mouth of the F5 area of the monkey are activated when the animal observes another individual who performs with the mouth actions related to both ingestive functions (grasping, sucking, etc.) and in response to oral–facial communication gestures (protrusion of the lips, tongue, etc.). The area dedicated to the verbal production in human beings represents, therefore, the evolution of a system originally used for the fine control of the oro-facial actions of monkeys (Petrides et al. 2005).
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Smorti, A. (2020). Count and Recount. In: Telling to Understand. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43161-7_8
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