Abstract
The mind and brain processes of the literary reading mind are most accurately defined as oceanic: the mind is an ocean. This is the essential premise that I put forward in my book Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge, 2011).1 The statement is of course a metaphor. It follows in a long line of metaphorical apprehensions of the human mind, from Plato’s notion of the mind as a wax tablet to the more modern — some might say reductive — ideas of the human mind as a machine or a computer.
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Notes
Stephen M. Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, The Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 447–448.
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© 2016 Michael Burke
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Burke, M. (2016). The Oceanic Literary Reading Mind: An Impression. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56642-6
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