Literature and Neuroscience

Ashley Taggart

• 📅Tuesday, March 4, 2025
• 🕥10:30 – 12:30
• 🏟Newtownpark Pastoral Centre (map)

Ashley Taggart is head of the Drama Department in University College Dublin, working primarily in the field of drama and playwriting, with a special interest in the influence of evolutionary theory, and the new brain sciences. He has written film, TV, and award-winning radio dramas. He has also worked as a professional writer /editor of plays and screenplays. In 2021 he wrote, in conjunction with Prof Chris Comer, a neuroscientist, a book entitled, Brain, Mind and the Narrative Imagination (Bloomsbury Press).

The worlds of Art and Science seem to be irreconcilably opposed. Yet it is only in the last few hundred years that this gulf has arisen. Prior to that, the study of the natural world, and the world of the mind were seen as one. New breakthroughs in the Brain Sciences (cognitive science, neuroscience) are giving us fresh insights into fundamental and universal faculties of the human mind that are directly relevant to all the arts, not least those relating to narrative – literature in all its forms. Although this study is at an early stage, it has exciting things to tell us about attention, memory, emotion, imagination and even the self, which are stranger than could have been previously ventured.