Narrative, Cognition, and Community

Narrative, Cognition, and Community: The Human Reader explores the relationship between literature, cognition, and lived experience, asking why we read and what happens when we do. Bringing literary studies into dialogue with cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it shows how narrative both shapes and is shaped by memory, perception, emotion, embodiment, and the ways we make sense of ourselves and others.The volume foregrounds the human reader in an age of machine-learning systems trained on human narratives, inviting reflection on what remains distinctive about human acts of reading and interpretation. Through discussions of literature alongside trauma, legal testimony, embodied health, and 12-step recovery programs, it demonstrates that storytelling is central not only to aesthetic experience but also to everyday social life.As a foundational work in the field of neurohumanities exploring narrative's role in human engagement with the world, the book argues that storytelling is a fundamental cognitive and social practice, one that assumes renewed significance in the age of artificial intelligence.