Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

The Real Cognitive Neuroscience Behind Severance

I haven’t caught up with the second season of Severance yet, but I will because I’m interested in both the dichotomy of inside vs. outside stories and the use of science fiction elements to portray aspects of human existence. In this article two neuroscientists explore the question “Can a person’s mind really be surgically split in two?”

The Sociopolitical Impact of A Passage to India

“E. M. Forster’s novel captured not only the tensions between colonizers and colonized but also the fraught internal politics that shaped India’s fight for independence.”

JSTOR, the “nonprofit library for the intellectually curious,” discusses how Forster’s 1924 novel reflects the social and political reality of the movement for India’s independence.

How to make your life feel more meaningful

One of the key aspects of life story creation is to give one’s life meaning and purpose. But what might those abstract terms mean in relation to ordinary, everyday living? Steven Heineis, Distinguished University Scholar and professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia, finds the answer to this question in connection, as he explains in his recent book Start Making Sense. Here he offers some advice for developing meaningful connections at home, at work, and in the community. “With a sense that life is meaningful, one can stand stronger in the face of the slings and arrows thrown at us by these uncertain times.”

The New Patron Saints of Lesbian Fiction

Rachel Gerry, who works in a bookstore, has noticed a trend of “queer plotless fiction,” books that “speak to queer ongoingness”: “Awake to the ways in which queer people have long carved new models for conducting life outside of heterosexual narratives, these books are invested in the ways one flips the script on the page, imposes one’s will, creates something new.”

Gerry addresses this trend as experimentation with literary form, “where queerness meets most closely with experiment.” Authors of these books are examining queerness as, among other characteristics, “freedom . . . from plot as it is imposed from without,” from all the thoughts and words “that are implanted in us when we are young.”

These writers are convinced of language’s ability to recalibrate life, of a book’s potential to participate in reality. This belief is what makes their work gutsy and interesting. It’s what allows them to create worlds they might wholeheartedly live in.

Is the Hard Problem Really So Hard?

“The qualities of our experience seem impossible to describe scientifically, but maybe we’re just not thinking about them right.”

They call it the hard problem of consciousness, but a better term might be the impossible problem of consciousness. The whole point is that the qualitative aspects of our conscious experience, or “qualia,” are inexplicable. . . . Qualia can’t be grasped intellectually. They can only be experienced firsthand.

Science writer George Musser muses on what scientists and philosophers call “the hard problem”: explaining the process and experience of human consciousness. The qualia, or “qualities of experience,” he discusses include “the redness of red or the awfulness of fingernails on a chalkboard.” 

Both philosophers and scientists have been pondering how to understand and communicate the essence of human experience for centuries. But I’d like to offer an answer to the question: read fiction. Literature communicates on a level that is often below consciousness; this fact explains why the most difficult books to review—to find words to explain—are often the ones that move us most profoundly, that let us experience what life is and what it means to be human on the most basic level.

When Language Is Lost, What Can be Gained?

Charlotte Rogers discusses an affliction that must strike horror into the hearts of writers and readers: aphasia, “a communication disorder that impairs the ability to speak, write, and understand language”:

Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language? If I were struck by aphasia today, what would be left unsaid, to my family, my friends, my readers? What secrets burden us in remaining untold? How might we express ourselves if we’ve lost our words? And for authors in particular: Is a writer without words still a writer at all?

Rogers looks at two recent books to answer such “existential questions”: (1) Austral, a novel by Carlos Fonseca that features “a writer rendered irreversibly mute by a stroke before she managed to communicate a secret trauma of her past”; and (2) Glad to the Brink of Fear by James Marcus, a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson that “recounts the life of the transcendentalist philosopher, including his final affliction with what the medical profession might now call primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a neurodegenerative condition whose pathological terminus is either Alzheimer’s disease or frontotemporal dementia.” 

Rogers discusses aphasia against the backdrop of her own experience watching her mother, who has PPA. Rogers concludes, “This, then, is the gift of aphasia, and even of writer’s block: it is only in its restriction that we grasp the limits, as well as the potential, of language.”

The Hallucinatory Thoughts of the Dying Mind

“Delirium exposes the gap between the ideal and the reality”

Linguist Michael Erard looks at delirium, another affliction that may affect language ability. History and literature have conditioned us to listen for a person’s dying words and expect to hear a pithy statement about the meaning of life or the experience of death. But in fact, delirium, which sets in as the body is dying, may affect cognitive functioning and influence a person’s dying utterances. 

Cultural taboos arise from a basic feature of the human mind

“Unquestioned community rules on marriage, dining and even black cats often stem from our hunger to explain random events”

Kevin (Ze) Hongis, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Macau and a research associate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, tackles the subject of taboos, those “unquestioned rules about what to avoid.” He attributes such unquestioned rules to a human need to find cause-and-effect explanations for random occurrences. These invented explanations “solidify into social norms that are passed down through generations. Even if the original rationale for the rule, however tenuous, gradually fades from memory, it can leave behind a prohibition that persists.”

Almost all of us have acquired at least a few such often unspoken beliefs—like the admonition to avoid crossing the path of a black cat—from the culture we grew up in. Hongis emphasizes that “false causal attributions can embed themselves into public consciousness, creating taboos that persist in the face of contrary evidence.” And he cites as an example “the fear of vaccinating children, which has persisted in certain communities despite overwhelming evidence disproving its primary premise: that vaccines cause autism.”

He concludes with this encouragement: “In considering the origins of taboos, we might all benefit from re-examining our own unquestioned rules. This is not a call to abandon caution, but an invitation to think critically about why we follow the rules we do.”

“Simple, Wholesome Food” for a New American Nation

“In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Americans faced understandable anxiety about what their society would look like—and what they should eat.”

This article from JSTOR points out how “newly independent Americans” addressed the subject of what citizens of the new republic should eat to distinguish themselves from “old English ways now tainted by association with monarchy” and “the luxuries and hypocrisies” of European culture. 

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown