Additional Sources

This is a holding page for readings that may or may not be assigned/referenced in class. I’ve tried to group them loosely by theme; under each heading, resources appear in reverse chronological order.

I’ll keep adding to this page as the semester progresses. Please feel free to send in others to share with the rest of the class!

On (mostly reading) poetry and cognition:

• “Poetry on the Mind and in the Brain” (2019)

• “This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Read Poetry” (2017)

• “The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles” (2017)

• “LET YOUR MIND WANDER” (2017)

• “The Human Brain Is Hardwired for Poetry” (2017)

On literacy and nature:

• ”Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health” (2020)

• ”Reading In and Through Nature: An Outdoor Pedagogy for Reading Literature” (2014)

• “THE ROOTS OF WELLBEING: POSITIVE EFFECTS OF NATURE WRITING” (2020)

• “FINDING HOME: Teaching Nature Writing in the Urban Multicultural Setting” (2000)

On reading, writing, and [cognitive or emotional] empathy:

• “How Reading Fiction Increases Empathy and Encourages Understanding” (2020)

• “Early Research Suggests Our Brains Sync Up With Musicians' During a Performance” (2020)

• “Dissociating Empathy From Perspective-Taking: Evidence From Intra- and Inter-Individual Differences Research” (2019)

  • “Cognitive vs. Emotional Empathy” (2020)<—similar to above, but easier to grasp quickly

• “Cultivating empathy through high-intensity writing practice” (2019)

• “What Do Mirror Neurons Do?” (2019)<—a short and easy intro. video

• “Greater involvement of action simulation mechanisms in emotional vs cognitive empathy” (2018)

• “This is Your Brain on Communication” (2016)<—TED talk by Uri Hasson, lot of fun graphics to watch

  • “Clicking: How Our Brains Are in Sync” (2018)<—an article on Hasson’s work

• “How learning shapes the empathic brain” (2015)

  • “Your Brain Can Learn to Empathize with Outside Groups” (2015)<—a more accessible version of the one above

• “Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy” (2013)<—not about literacy, but might help put the mirror neuron material into context

• “Empathy or Bird Calls: How We Write Matters” (2013)

• The Human Mirror Neuron System, Social Control, and Language” (2013)

• “Improving empathy of physicians through guided reflective writing” (2012)

• “The Mirror Neuron Mechanism and Literary Studies: An Interview with Vittorio Gallese” (2010)

On memory (and memoir):

• “Memory” (2019; episode 1 of The Mind, Explained, on Netflix if you have it)

• “Writing a Memoir Is a Strange Psychological Trip Through Your Past” (2017)

• “Verbal facilitation effects instead of verbal overshadowing in face memory of 4- to 6-year olds” (2016)

• “Structural but not functional neuroplasticity one year after effective cognitive behaviour therapy for social anxiety disorder” (2016)

• Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By (2015, excerpts from Ch. 1)

• “How Does Your Memory Work?” (2014)<—A BBC spot that walks through the basic steps of memory (encoding—>consolidation—>retrieval)

• “Why Verbalization of Non-Verbal Memory Reduces Recognition Accuracy” (2014)

• “Your Memory is like the Telephone Game” (2012)"<—A news article that speaks to the work of the author of the two articles immediately below

  • “Hippocampal Binding of Novel Information with Dominant Memory Traces Can Support Both Memory Stability and Change” (2014)

  • “Neural Correlates of Reactivation and Retrieval-Induced Distortion” (2012)

• “The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-analyses” (2012)

• "Our Storied Lives” (2010)<—An NPR spot on why we turn our lives into stories, and how we use narrative to recover from traumas

• “A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories” (2002)

• “Neural correlates of the episodic encoding of pictures and words” (1998)

On language, literacy, and identity construction:

• Excerpts: The Man Who Forgot How to Read, Howard Engel (2008)

• Excerpt: The Cry of the Gull, Emmanuelle Laborit (1999)

• Excerpt: Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995)

• “A Matter of Identity” (1970)<—excerpt from Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

On literacy and brain health:

• “AI Assesses Alzheimer’s Risk by Analyzing Word Usage” (2020)

• “Illiteracy, dementia risk, and cognitive trajectories among older adults with low education” (2019)

• “Intraoperative linguistic performance during awake brain surgery predicts postoperative linguistic deficits” (2018)

• “The Nun Study: Clinically silent AD, neuronal hypertrophy, and linguistic skills in early life” (2009)

On reflective writing and professional identity:

• “The Journey Back to Oneself: Reimagining Medical Education” (2018; excerpt from Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice)

• “Reflective Writing as a Window on Medical Students’ Professional Identity Development in a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship” (2020)

• “Coordinating the Cognitive Processes of Writing: The Role of the Monitor” (2012)

• Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development (2010; selected chapters available via Google Books)

• “Five Year Experience: Reflective Writing in a Preclinical End-of-Life Care Curriculum” (2008)

On reflective writing and therapy:

• “The efficacy of written exposure therapy versus imaginal exposure delivered online for posttraumatic stress disorder” (2020)

• “Use of Experiential Learning, Reflective Writing, and Metacognition to Develop Cultural Humility Among Undergraduate Students” (2019)

• “Self-compassion induction enhances recovery from social stressors” (2018)

• “Therapeutic journaling in a veterans treatment court” (2015)

• “A Safe Space for Veteran Writers” (2014)

On language development and “universal grammar” (or not):

• “How Language Shapes Thought” (2020)<—a longer lecture by Lera Boroditsky

• “ Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” (2013)<—a counterargument to the work that Boroditsky and others are doing re: language/worldview differences; provides a helpful check on/nuance for the constraints involved with language/worldview studies

  • It might also be worth watching this same speaker, John McWhorter, giving a TED Talk on “4 reasons to learn a new language” (2016)

• “The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science” (2009)

• “Broca’s area and the language instinct” (2003)

• Review of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1995/1994)

On “word poverty” and related issues:

• “Effects of Early Language Deprivation on Brain Connectivity: Language Pathways in Deaf Native and Late First-Language Learners of American Sign Language” (2019)

• “How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies” (2019)

• “What you don’t know can hurt you: The risk of language deprivation by impairing sign language development in deaf children” (2018)

• “Language learning, socioeconomic status, and child-directed speech” (2016)

• “Key to Vocabulary Gap Is Quality of Conversation, Not Dearth of Words” (2015)

• “The Right to Language” (2013)

• “Going Big” (2008)<—a total upper of a listen; the relevant parts are the Prologue and Part I: Harlem Renaissance

On the shift to the digital reading/writing brain, etc.:

• “Neurological Divide: An fMRI Study of Prose and Code Writing” (2020)

  • Related research, as collated by Yu Huang (one of the authors of the presentation above)

• “To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language” (2020)

• “Building Deep Reading Brains in a Digital World” (2020)<—lecture by Maryanne Wolf

• “Building a Biliterate Brain” (2018)<—excerpts from Wolf’s follow-up book after Proust and the Squid

• “Differentiation of Hemodynamic Responses of the Brain with Typing and Writing” (2015)

• “Neuroimaging correlates of handwriting quality as children learn to read and write” (2014)

• “Write to read: The brain’s universal reading and writing network” (2013)

  
  

On bilingual literacies, and also related dyslexias:

• “The Myths and Truths of Dyslexia in Different Writing Systems” (2015)

• “Writing Affects the Brain Network of Reading in Chinese” (2013)

• “Developmental dyslexia in Chinese and English populations: dissociating the effect of dyslexia from language differences” (2010)

• “It's all Chinese to me: Dyslexia has big differences in English and Chinese” (2009)

On literacy, creativity, and cognition:

• “A Review on the Role of the Neuroscience of Flow States in the Modern World” (2020)

  • This article is considering an idea of “flow,” introduced by Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi. The idea is connected to levels of mastery with a task (such as reading or writing) and satisfaction during task performance. Related videos for context:

    • Simple explanation of flow (including a pronunciation of Csikzentmihalyi)

    • TED talk by Csikzentmihalyi

• “Musician Plays Her Violin During Brain Surgery” (2020)

• “Woman plays flute while undergoing open brain surgery” (2018)

• “(Re)visioning the Self Through Art” (2015)

• “Professional training in creative writing is associated with enhanced fronto-striatal activity in a literary text continuation task” (2014)

• “Neural Correlates of Creative Writing: An fMRI Study” (2013)

• “Creativity meets neuroscience: Experimental tasks for the neuroscientific study of creative thinking” (2006)

Did I miss anything? Feel free to text or email me if you need something else!