Narrative and the Mind

Narratives are not only products of human minds, but also constitutive to them. Stories help to integrate information about events, agents, motivations, experiences, and their interconnections, and as such, are a key tool for understanding the world, others and ourselves.

This role of narrative in human cognition has been a topic of interest to scholars, scientists and professionals. Stories have been described as an ideal vessel for communicating knowledge, conveying experience, forming identities, training empathy and perspective-taking, or negotiating values.

However, narrative thinking has also been associated with simplification, anthropocentrism, affective biases and other cognitive shortcuts that can hamper the understanding of complex realities. While human minds are predisposed to narrative thinking, they are not limited to it. The contemporary ubiquity of stories as tools for thinking and communicating thus asks for scrutiny and reflection.

This edition of the Netherlands Winter School on Narrative focuses on the interplay between narrative and the mind. During the one-week course, lectures and workshops will examine how cognition is informed by narrativity, and how narratives are shaped by our cognitive engagement.

The set-up of the winter school is strongly interdisciplinary, combining a variety of perspectives on narrative, from diverse fields such as psychology, literary and cultural studies, and cognitive science. Speakers include Lisa Zunshine, Jan Alber, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Barend van Heusden, Jens Brockmeier, Stefan Kjerkegaard, Marina Grishakova, Gerben Westerhof, Anneke Sools and Marco Caracciolo. On the final day, the symposium “Narrative, Complexity and the Playful Mind” will engage with the question of narrative’s capacity for representing complexity, and with audiences’ activities in engaging with complex stories.

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