The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored: An account of narrative processing

ABSTRACT

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams.

KEYWORDS:

• Stories
• narrative
• situation model
• event indexing
• emotion
• neural n
• predictive processing
• creativity

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Andy Clark for conversation and comments on earlier versions of this article, to Nigel Fabb and Elizabeth Finnigan for comments, and to the anonymous reviewers at Philosophical Psychology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elspeth Jajdelska

Elspeth Jajdelska is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde.  In 2016, she completed a masters in Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition and now researches ways that cognitive science can help us to understand literary experience.