Unconscious Memory

Professor Michael Burke and Dr Sebastian Groes give the second Unconscious Memory talk. 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.

Three speakers examine Authenticity in the 8th Unconscious Memory seminar. ‘Trust in Experts’ Prof Andrew Parker, Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Oxford, will discuss how brain activity is altered by trusting the advice of experts and will explore the extent to which we can trust the images of neural activity delivered to us by modern brain scanners. 'The Experience of Spontaneity' Dr Hannah Drayson, Digital Art and Technology, Plymouth University, will talk about Nail Biting Tigers: Hypnotic Metaphors, with special reference to psychotherapy and literature. ‘Realisations’ Prof Matthew Reynolds, English, Oxford, will explore ways in which accuracy, honesty or fidelity are asserted in translation, autobiography, and other modes of writing and re-writing

Semir Zeki gives a presentation entitled; The Neurobiology of Beauty, and Gerhard Lauer gives a talk entitled, Is there an Aesthetic Experience in this Experiment? The Chair is Professor Andrew Parker.

Andrew Mayes, and Angus Nicholls, give a talk for the Unconscious Memory seminar series. THE NEURAL BASES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS Andrew Mayes, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Manchester University, will discuss whether conscious and unconscious memory have radically different neural bases or whether they, in fact, share a system. IS THE UNCONSCIOUS A CONCEPT OR A METAPHOR? Angus Nicholls, Reader in German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, will discuss why the unconscious cannot be rendered conceptually and requires a metaphorical approach.

Professor Gordon Shepherd (Yale) ‘Reassessing Mechanisms of Autobiographical Memory’ and Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (St Catherine’s, Oxford) ‘Madeleines and Neuromodernism’. Chaired by Dr Sowon Park (Corpus Christi, Oxford)