Mind Wandering: The Science and Narrative

If the twenty-first century has been called "the era of the wandering mind," the twentieth was arguably its aesthetic golden age. From Joyce's challenge - "What about the mystery of the conscious?" - to today's neuroscience of self-generated thought, the wandering mind has become one of the most revealing windows onto the dynamics of consciousness. Yet the conversation between the disciplines that study it - cognitive science on one side, literary narrative on the other - remains surprisingly thin.

This NCL event opens that conversation. Mind Wandering: The Science and Narrative gathers three scholars whose work has shaped how we think about minds that drift, talk, remember, and stray. We will hear from there world-leading expert in the narrative, psychology, and neuroscience of mind wandering, in this order:

3pm: Kalina Christoff, whose neuroscience of spontaneous thought - and her landmark editorial role on the Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought - has redefined how we map the structure and dynamics of the resting mind.

4pm: Jonathan Schooler, whose research on perceptual decoupling and meta-awareness has supplied the field with some of its most influential models of how attention disengages from the present and turns inward.

5pm: Melba Cuddy-Keane, pioneer of cognitive approaches to modernism, whose readings of Virginia Woolf first made the case that literary fiction can tell us something serious about real-world mind wandering.

Together, they will explore mind wandering across two registers that rarely meet: the experimental and the experiential, the data and the text. The event invites researchers, students, and readers curious about the dynamics of inner life into a shared space of inquiry, where the wandering mind becomes both an object of study and a method for thinking.

Please note that this hybrid event is free to attend. The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event.

This event is hosted by the Narrative and Cognition Lab of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, led by Dr Marco Bernini.