Unconscious Memory and Mental Space

Professor Michael Burke and Dr Sebastian Groes Chaired by: Dr Ben
Morgan (Worcester, Oxford) Professor Michael Burke (Utrecht):
'Implicit Memory in Literary Discourse Processing' Michael Burke,
Professor of Rhetoric at Utrecht University, explores the role of
implicit memory during acts of literary reading. Drawing on his
theory of the literary reading loop, he looks at the role that
unconscious top-down inputs play and what it takes for such inputs
to be able to overrule the incoming rhetorical bottom-up linguistic
prompts and reach conscious awareness. Dr Sebastian Groes
(Roehampton): 'Neurofictions? Literary and Neuroscientific
Perspectives on Psychogeography' Principal Investigator of the AHRC
and Wellcome Trust-funded Memory Network and English Literature
lecturer, Dr Sebastian Groes talks about his collaboration with
writer and psychogeographer Will Self and neuroscientist Hugo
Spiers (UCL) on research into the brains of London's black cab
drivers, memory and spatial navigation. The project shows that
consillience between literature and neuroscience is hard to
achieve, but that our capacity to process narratives arose from a
primal spatial processing system in the hippocampus, which has a
vital role in creating semantic maps for spatial sentences, and for
narrative memory and narrative processing.