The Creative Writer's Mind

The Creative Writer’s Mind is a book for creative writers: it sets out to cross the gap between creative writing and science, between the creative arts and cognitive research. It examines what cognitive psychology, neuroscience and literary studies can tell creative writers about the processes of their writing mind.

Cognitive Neuroscience: Applied Cognitive Psychology

The combination of a replication crisis, the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and recent technological advances, have accelerated the on-going transition of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to the online realm. When participants cannot be tested in-person, data of acceptable quality can still be collected online. While online research offers many advantages, numerous pitfalls may hinder researchers in addressing their questions appropriately, potentially resulting in unusable data and misleading conclusions. Here, we present an overview of the costs and benefits of conducting online studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, coupled with detailed best practice suggestions that span the range from initial study design to the final interpretation of data. These suggestions offer a critical look at issues regarding recruitment of typical and (sub)clinical samples, their comparison, and the importance of context-dependency in each part of a study. We illustrate our suggestions by means of a fictional online study, applicable to traditional paradigms such as research on working memory with a control and treatment group.

International Handbook of Research in Arts Education

Reviewed by: Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible Tony E. Jackson Zunshine, Lisa. 2008. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. $65.00 hc. $25.00 sc. 232 pp. Lisa Zunshine’s Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible is a new entry in the field of cognitive poetics, a field that draws on theories from cognitive psychology to assess how literature affects readers. Her book is divided into three sections, each considering in detail a specific interplay of “strange concepts” and stories. The strange concepts are recurring cultural representations whose nature and significance can be linked to specific ‘cognitive universals’ that have been established in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology. Zunshine taps into these fields in order to study the ways in which “a given cultural representation…engages our evolved cognitive capacities” (2). Cognitive psychological studies across various cultures have concluded that humans come into the world with certain built-in concepts of the nature of living beings, or what may more generally be called ‘natural kinds’ of things (as opposed to manufactured or what may be called ‘artifactual kinds’ of things). In one set of experiments, as Zunshine explains, a child is [End Page 237] presented with a toy animal, say a skunk, that is altered in various ways: limbs are taken away, the fur removed, etc. “When asked to comment on the species of a hybrid animal such as a skunk altered to look like a zebra, even three-year-old children judge a skunk to be a skunk” (8). The skunk is taken for granted to have some “underlying ‘skunkness’” that continues to determine its identity. Only by changing some invisible “essence-conferring innards” of the skunk will a child understand it as having become a different animal. In a broad way the same holds true of many adult understandings of natural kinds of objects. By contrast, from a very young age we understand artifacts—that is, non-natural objects—in an entirely different way. Rather than being constituted by some invisible, more or less mysterious core, an artifact’s entire being is visible for all to see. Its use determines its nature. Even four-year olds think of “artifacts primarily in terms of their functions” (7). The “strange concepts” will have to do with the way stories play with these cognitive universals. It is commonly accepted that everyday essentialist notions always depend on a final, unexplainable, more or less mysterious…well, essence, that cannot itself be further explained in terms of sensible qualities. This means that there is always a potential conflict between our intuitive sense of an essence and our inability to capture that essence in language. “But,” Zunshine explains, “because we (cannot help but) assume that some essence is there, our failure to capture it…does not invalidate our implicit belief in it” (30, emphasis in original). The establishment of this irresolvable, self-perpetuating conflict between our built-in intuitive certainty and our linguistic uncertainty is an outcome of cognitive research, but is not typically in itself the kind of thing upon which cognitive research would focus. But of course it is just the kind of enigmatic conflict that both literature and literary study would find most interesting, and it underlies all the other strange concepts that Zunshine will consider. In the first section this conflict is explained through close-readings of a variety of kinds of texts, but especially in relation to the traditional comic plot that turns on the identity confusions caused by identical twins. Zunshine shows how these stories depend on both the humor and the anxiety of calling into question our intuitive sense of “individual essentialism,” our basic sense that an individual human being is constituted ultimately by “an ineffable special something” that can never quite be captured in language (24). By explaining the similarities and differences between Plautus’s play, Amphitryon, Dryden’s seventeenth-century version of the same story, and different versions of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Zunshine both gives us interesting and new interpretations, and shows us in general how cognitive universals can be related to cultural specificities. As she says, she...

Creative writing most often focuses on an individual creative writer's own project, and is generated by that creative writer's personal desire to discover and develop knowledge that can assist their creative practice — specifically for the project at hand, but often with continuing use in future work. Creative writing research is both creative and critical in nature. The range of evidence of creative writing has been only marginally considered by ‘post-event’ arts and humanities subjects, most particularly literature study, and, until recently, creative writing has often been relegated to the role of a satellite to such post-event research. There is now a strongly developing body of understanding about the nature of creative writing, and considerable articulation of the nature of creative writing research, its knowledge base and understanding. This is aided, not least, by the circa 400 students per annum that are undertaking Creative Writing doctoral research degrees in the United Kingdom alone, by the circa 10,000 creative writers in academe that attend subject association conferences every year, and by a deepening subject knowledge supported by contemporary academic and governmental interest in creative practice.

Written symbols such as letters have been used extensively in cognitive psychology, whether to understand their contributions to written word recognition or to examine the processes involved in other mental functions. Sometimes, however, researchers want to manipulate letters while removing their associated characteristics. A powerful solution to do so is to use new characters, devised to be highly similar to letters, but without the associated sound or name. Given the growing use of artificial characters in experimental paradigms, the aim of the present study was to make available the Brussels Artificial Character Sets (BACS): two full, strictly controlled, and portable sets of artificial characters for a broad range of experimental situations.

The newly arisen interest in the representation of emotions in literature, fine arts, media, and other cultural artefacts has caused an “emotional turn” in cultural studies since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Several disciplines are involved in this process: cognitive psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary studies, among others. This enumeration clearly demonstrates that a complex phenomenon such as the development and impact of emotions can only adequately analysed by a juxtaposition of different academic perspectives, thus eliciting an interdisciplinary perspective. One important aspect of the study of emotions is the phenomenon of empathy, a term coined by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909. This term, which has etymological roots in Antique Greek and might be literally translated as “compassion,” was Titchener’s translation of the German notion “Einfuhlung” (i.e., the German translation of the Antique Greek term), which was a seminal concept in German aesthetics and philosophy at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, this concept was strictly refused by philosophers and psychologists inspired by new realism in the 1920s, because they claim that this idea is based on a non-analytical access.

Literature, Culture & CritiqueNotes on the First Callaloo Retreat, March 5–8, 2008 Charles Henry Rowell I founded Callaloo in 1976 as a publishing outlet for Black South creative writers and literary critics whose voices were marginalized to the extent that they had been all but silenced. Once I was able to establish the journal as a visible and viable African Diaspora quarterly by the mid-1980s, I then began deliberately working toward transforming Callaloo into a forum in which creative writers and literary and cultural critics in the African Diaspora could converse—if not to engage each other directly, then at least to read each other’s work, in spite of the tendency of current centers of power within English departments, which seem to encourage the contrary. I have always thought the growing divide between the creative and critical worlds to be superficial and nonproductive at best and collectively paranoid at worst. It is obvious to me that the majority of faculty members of English departments continue to valorize the work of academics (archival, critical, and theoretical) at the expense of that of their creative writing colleagues. Academics have far too long viewed living, not-yet-canonized creative writers as Others—a group of artists that academics, with their institution-sanctioned power, tend to marginalize and construct as mere exotics. Thinking of creative writers in this way, academics have made them an annex to English departments. That is, critical theoretical work is ranked very high in value but the work of the contemporary poet or novelist, for example, is seldom read or even given a tepid applause until the time comes for hearings on tenure or rank change. I have always viewed these circumstances as serious problems, and as a result I have tried to address them in the pages of Callaloo—that is, as they pertain to African Diaspora literatures, and African Diaspora literary and cultural studies. Since the 1980s, I have edited Callaloo with the intention of pulling the creative and critical together: by publishing, for example, poems beside theoretical and critical articles on problems in literature and culture or by printing prose fiction next to essays on the life of a playwright or a visual artist. I wanted the one to see/read what the other is doing. I have thought, in other words, that I could at least get the literary critic to study what some creative writers are producing, and I thought I might engage the creative writer to peruse with interest some of the rigorous texts literary and cultural critics are creating. My efforts to bring the critic face to face with the creative writer—that is, on the page—is stage one of what I am calling a conversation between two subjects: the critical and the creative, the academic and the artistic. My efforts in stage one have not generated the effects that I had hoped they would. In fact, the two groups continue to grow apart. Why? I did not see both sides of the problems—not with the clarity and precision that poet and literary critic Michael S. Collins showed when I discussed the subject with him. In an email summing up his side of our conversation, he wrote: What I was trying to say about critics and creative writers is this: In recent decades, literary theory under the influence of French theorists [End Page 552] such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault has incorporated and elaborated upon a specialized vocabulary that non-initiates sometimes find impenetrable. At the same time, many within the academic critical community find the productions of literary theory to be more profound and more exciting than creative works. Creative writers, on the other hand, sometimes view literary criticism as parasitic at best, badly-written and pretentious at worst. There are often, in other words, built-in misunderstandings between the communities. It is especially telling that academic literary criticism is not even considered for things like the National Book Critics’ Circle award for criticism. The world that rewards creative writers, and that creative writers have to pay attention to, views academic literary criticism as, for the most part, irrelevant. Complicating things further is the fact that...

It has long been believed that individual human memory has been strengthened by the storage, representational, reproductive, and connective capacities of technologies and media. However, such views of how memory works are being challenged amid today’s digital maelstrom. In particular, the Internet and social media platforms have profoundly transformed the ways individuals receive, store, share, and lose information. Memory has become more externalized, networked, and transactive, yet at the same time unwieldy, opaque, and inaccessible. This volume assembles scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and media and communication studies to synthesize emerging social and cognitive science research on the impact of the Internet and social media on remembering and forgetting. They probe whether human memory is being threatened or given new life through a shift from a healthy reliance to a dependency on digital media and technologies. The expert contributors showcase their original theoretical and empirical research to expose the effects of human entanglements with the Internet and social media for memory representation, expression, and socialization in individuals and the implications for the family, community, and society. Gathering the leading international scholars of memory studies together, this volume offers a new interdisciplinary agenda of inquiry into the digital remaking of individual, collective, and cultural memory.

The Creative Writing program at the University of East Anglia – the longest established in the UK and the first of its kind outside the USA – was founded in part as a reaction against a Theory-driven conception of Literary Studies that was felt to be indifferent to questions of aesthetic value and the authority of authorship. In this article I trace the history of Creative Writing at UEA and outline my understanding of the nature of the relationship between creative and critical practice in order to examine questions of knowledge that hinge on the following three questions: What does Literary Studies know? What does Creative Writing know that’s different? What might Literary Studies know that Creative Writing doesn’t need to know? The answers to these questions, I suggest, may offer an argument against the incursion into the Creative Writing workshop of pedagogical approaches that derive from Literary Studies and are blind to the importance of ‘non-knowing’ in creative practice.

This article addresses the experience of designing and conducting life-writing workshops for a group of clients with severe mental illness; the aim of this pilot study was to begin to determine whether such writing about the self can aid in individual ‘recovery’, as that term is understood by contemporary health professionals. A considerable amount has been written about the potential of creative writing in mental health therapy; the authors of this article provide a brief summary of that literature, then of the concept of ‘recovery’ in a psychology and arts therapy context. There follows a first-hand account by one of the authors of being an arts therapy workshop facilitator in the role of a creative practitioner. This occurred in consultation with, and monitored by, experienced mental health professionals.

IntroductionAs the teaching staff working in a university postgraduate program—the Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) at Central Queensland University, Australia—an ongoing concern has been to ensure our students engage with the digital course content (delivered via the Moodle learning management system). This is an issue shared across the sector (La Pointe and Reisetter; Dargusch et al.) and, in our case, specifically in the area of students understanding how this online course content and tasks could benefit them in a program that is based around individual projects. As such, we are invested in enhancing student engagement both within the framework of this individual program and at an institution level. Like many institutions which now offer degrees which are either partially or fully online, the program in question offers a blended learning environment, with internal students also expected to engage with online materials (Rovai and Jordan; Colis and Moonen). The program was developed in 2011, first offered in 2012, and conducted two and sometimes three terms a year since then.Within the first year of delivery, low levels of student participation in online learning were identified as problematic. This issue was addressed using strategies that made use of characteristic strengths among our creative industries students, by developing and linking a peer-to-peer mentoring approach to our blended learning course design. Our challenge in this (as project facilitators and as teachers) has been to devise strategies to shift the students from reluctant to engaged online content users. A key strategy has evolved around introducing peer-mentoring as an intrinsic behaviour in the courses in the program. While not using a full case study approach, we do offer this singular instance for consideration as “much can be learned from a particular case” (Merriam 51). The below is based on our own observations, together with formal and informal student feedback gathered since 2012.Mentors and MentoringThe term mentor can have different meanings depending on the context in which the phrase is used. Ambrosetti and Dekkers note that “it is evident from the literature that there is no single definition for mentoring” (42). Drawing on an array of literature from a number of disciplines to qualify the definition of the term mentoring, Ambrosetti and Dekkers have identified a series of theorists whose definitions demonstrate the wide-ranging interpretation of what this act might be. Interestingly, they found that, even within the relatively narrow context of pre-service teacher research, words used to identify the term mentor varied from relatively collegial descriptors for the established teacher such as supporter, friend, collaborator, role model, and protector, to more formalised roles including trainer, teacher, assessor, and evaluator. The role to be played by a mentor—and how it is described—can also vary according to parameters around, and the purpose of, the mentoring relationship. That is, even though “mentoring, as described in literature, generally involves supporting and providing feedback to the mentee without judgment or criteria” (43), the dynamics of the mentor-mentee relationship may influence the perception and the nature of these roles. For example, the mentoring relationship between a teacher and pre-service teacher may be perceived as hierarchical whereby knowledge and feedback is “passed down” from mentor to mentee, that is, from a more authoritative, experienced figure to a less knowledgeable recipient. As such, this configuration implies a power imbalance between the roles.The relationships involved in peer-to-peer mentoring can be similarly defined. In fact, Colvin and Ashman describe the act of peer-mentoring as “a more experienced student helping a less experienced student improve overall academic performance”, and a relationship that “provides advice, support, and knowledge to the mentee” (122). Colvin and Ashman’s research also suggests that “if mentors and mentees do not have a clear sense of their roles and responsibilities, mentors will find it difficult to maintain any sort of self‐efficacy” (122)—a view that is held by others researchers in this field (see Hall et al.; Reid; Storrs, Putsche and Taylor). However, this collective view of peer-to-peer mentorship was not what we aimed to foster. Instead, we wanted our courses and program to both exhibit and inculcate practices and processes which we felt are more in line with our understanding of the creative industries, including a more organic, voluntary and non-hierarchical approach to peer-to-peer mentorship. This could use Ambrosetti and Dekker’s less hierarchical descriptors of supporter, friend, and collaborator listed above.Student CohortThe student cohort in this program regularly includes on-campus and distance education students in approximately equal ratios, with those studying by distance often geographically very widely dispersed across Australia, and sometimes internationally. The students in this program come from a diverse spectrum of creative industries’ art forms, including creative writing, digital media, film, music, and visual arts. Most enter the program with advanced skills, undergraduate or equivalent qualifications and/or considerable professional experience in their individual areas of creative practice and are seeking to add a postgraduate-level of understanding and scholarly extension to this practice (Kroll and Brien; Webb and Brien). Students also utilise a wide range of learning styles and approaches when developing and completing the creative works and research-informed reflective reports which comprise their assessment. All the students in the program’s courses utilise, and contribute to, a single online Moodle site each term. Some also wish to progress to research higher degree study in creative practice-led research projects (Barrett and Bolt) after completing the program.Applying Peer-to-Peer Mentoring in a Project-Based ProgramThe student cohort in this program is diverse, both geographically and in terms of the area of individual creative industries’ specialisation and the actual project that each student is working on. This diversity was a significant factor in the complexity of the challenge of how to make the course online site and its contents and tasks (required and optional) relevant and engaging for all students. We attempted to achieve this, in part, by always focusing on content and tasks directly related to the course learning outcomes and assessment tasks, so that their usefulness and authenticity in terms of the student learning journey was, we hoped, obvious to students. While this is a common practice in line with foundational conceptions of effective learning and teaching in higher education, we also proposed that we might be able to insure that course content was accessed and engaged with, and tasks completed, by linking the content and tasks in Moodle to the action of mentoring. In this, students were encouraged to discuss their projects in the online discussion forum throughout the term. This began with students offering brief descriptions of their projects as they worked through the project development stage, to reports on progress including challenges and problems as well as achievements. Staff input to these discussions offered guidance—both through example and (at times) gentle direction—on how students could also give collegial advice to other students on their projects. This was in terms of student knowledge and experience gained from previous work plus that learned during the program. In this, students reported on their own activities and how learning gained could potentially be used in other professional fields, as for example: “I specifically enjoyed the black out activity and found the online videos exceptional, inspiring and innovating. I really enjoyed this activity and it was something that I can take away and use within the classroom when educating” (‘Student 1’, week 8, Term 1 2015). Students also gave advice for others to follow: “I understand that this may not have been the original intended goal of Free Writing—but it is something I would highly recommend … students to try and see if it works for you” (‘Student 2’, week 5, Term 1 2015). As each term progressed, and trust built up—a key aspect of online collaboration (Holton) as well as a fruitful mentoring relationship (Allen and Poteet)—joint problem solving also began to take place in these discussions.As most of the students never interact face-to-face during the term, the relative impersonality of the online discussions in Moodle, although certainly not anonymous, seemed to provide a safe platform for peer-to-peer mentoring, even when this was offered by those who were also interacting in class as well. As facilitators of this process, we also sought to model best-practice interaction in this communication and ensure that any posts were responded to in an encouraging and timely manner (Aragon). As a result, the traffic within these forums generally increased each week so that, by the end of the term, every student (both external and internal) had contributed significantly to online discussions—even those who appeared to be more reluctant participants in the beginning weeks of the term. Strategies to Facilitate Peer-to-Peer MentoringSeeking to facilitate this process, we identified discrete points within the term’s course delivery at which we would encourage a greater level of engagement with the online resources and, through this, also encourage more discussion in the online discussion forum. One of the strategies we employed was to introduce specific interactions as compulsory components of the course but, at the same time, always ensuring that these mandated interactions related directly to assessment items. For example, a key assessment task requires students to write reflectively about t

Mobile phones have rapidly evolved into multipurpose digital devices that shape how children learn, communicate and interact with their surroundings. Over the past decade, the prevalence of smartphone use among children has increased dramatically, transforming traditional educational approaches. This article offers a comprehensive, research-based examination of the effects of mobile phone use on children’s education. Drawing from contemporary studies in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, developmental science and educational technology, it explores the positive contributions of mobile learning, such as enhanced accessibility, personalised instruction, improved digital literacy and inclusive learning opportunities, while also addressing potential risks, including academic distraction, reduced attention spans, behavioural addiction, cyberbullying, sleep disruption and impaired social development. The analysis is grounded in relevant theoretical frameworks, including cognitive load theory, sociocultural learning theory, constructivism, behaviourism and ecological systems theory. Through these perspectives, this study offers nuanced insights into the complex interactions between technology and learning environments. The article concludes with evidence-based recommendations for parents, educators and policymakers to promote the safe, balanced and developmentally appropriate integration of mobile phones in education. More than 50 peer-reviewed scholarly sources were referenced to ensure academic robustness and credibility.

Researchers of systems for Digital Entertainment have resorted to Artificial Intelligence to create characters that are more adaptable to new situations, less predictable, with fast learning capabilities, memory of past situations and a variety of convincing and consistent behaviors. Recent studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience analyze the fundamental role of personality and emotions in human cognition, based on the notions of perception, attention, planning, reasoning, learning, memory and decision making. These notions can be characterized as modules in a formal model to describe the personality and emotions of autonomous agents, whose manifestations can be directly dependent upon personality and emotional states. Future research in affective computing must explore how emotions interact with other modules in agent architectures (such as memory and decision making), as well as how emotions influence the interactions with other agents [1].