Marco Bernini

Recent post-Cartesian accounts of cognition, notably Peter Carruthers's interpretive theory of self-knowledge, have argued that the felt transparency of our own thoughts, emotions and phenomenal experiences is illusory: access to inner states is sensorily mediated, inferential, and continuous with the mindreading machinery we deploy to interpret others. Yet these interpretive processes are notoriously hard to capture from the first-person stance or in standard experimental paradigms. This chapter argues that narrative fiction offers a privileged probe into this opacity of mind, and uses the point to reassess Dorrit Cohn's "Exceptionality Thesis" - the claim that fiction is unique in granting transparent access to other minds. Post-classical cognitive narratologists such as David Herman and Alan Palmer have rightly challenged Cohn's Cartesian framing, showing that traces of "the whole mind" are distributed across visible actions and environments; but this externalist move risks downgrading the complexity of inner cognition and its fictional rendering. A central move of the chapter is therefore to disentangle the metaphor of transparency as it travels between cognitive science (self-transparency, phenomenal transparency) and narrative theory (the inside and outside transparencies of fictional minds), and to trace how these bear on one another. Through a reading of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, with particular attention to moods and emotions as "dynamic patterns," the chapter shows how fiction renders interpretive processes legible whether they remain below a character's awareness (unconscious opacity) or surface to it (conscious opacity). Fiction, it concludes, is exceptional not in offering transparent access to other minds but to their opacity - and, in so doing, can function as a tool for phenomenological and cognitive investigation.

How can literature enhance, parallel or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Or is literature instead limited to the ancillary role of representing cognitive processes? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Beckett’s narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering cognition and mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology (defined as “introspection by simulation”). Through a detailed analysis of Beckett’s entire corpus and published volumes of letters, the book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) “models” for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind. The book integrates models, problems, and interpretive frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett’s modeling practice of a vast array of processes including: the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the hallucinatory quality of inner speech, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the developmental cooperation of language and locomotion, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, the layered complexity of the mind, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett’s “fictional cognitive models” are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively or descriptively report. As such, the study advocates for their relevance to the contemporary scientific debate toward an interdisciplinary co-modeling of cognition. --- ENDORSEMENTS: "Beckett is presumed to have hated philosophy but his plays tell us otherwise. He disliked academic pomp, but plumbed ideas to the depth. If you appreciate Beckett's theater you may want to use this well-researched book to go backstage and consider the thinking behind the words." - ANTONIO DAMASIO, Professor, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, and Director of Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California "In this meticulously researched book, Marco Bernini addresses the most perplexing aspects of Beckett's writing: his representation of altered states of consciousness, of voice hearing, and of varieties of introspection beyond everyday phenomenological levels of awareness. Through an intricate interweaving of narrative and cognitive theory, paired with arresting close readings, Beckett and the Cognitive Method advances a strikingly new argument that will transform our understanding of Beckett's work." - ULRIKA MAUDE, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Bristol "The word 'landmark' is overused, but I believe it applies to this book. It reflects the author's sparkling intelligence and, at the same time, the book's deep research in philosophy, psychology, the cognitive sciences, narratology, literary criticism, and still other disciplines. Marco Bernini makes a genuine contribution that more than fulfills the promise of a genuine literary-scientific cross-pollinization in narratological and literary discourse." - PORTER ABBOTT, Research Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

This essay reads Marcel Proust's Swann's Way through the lens of extended and enactive theories of cognition, asking what happens to the self when it is conceived not as bounded and internal but as continuously coupled with environments, technologies and times. While distributed accounts of cognition have unleashed the mind from its Cartesian boundaries, they have said comparatively little about how an extended self persists across time. Proust, the essay argues, offers a powerful literary investigation of precisely this problem. His protagonist's self is shown to be distributed along three axes: synchronically, in spatial couplings with rooms and objects; diachronically, in a history of structural couplings stabilised by habit; and heterocosmically, in a plurality of previously enacted and even imagined worlds that re-emerge whenever habit misfires. Drawing on Douglas Hofstadter's claim that analogy lies at the core of cognition, the essay contends that for Proust analogy is at once a cognitive process, an ontological condition, and a writing tool - the "miracle" through which the self is both held together and exposed to its own groundlessness. In conclusion, it suggests that Proust's distributed ontology can expand current cognitive accounts by foregrounding the role of analogy in selfhood and temporality.

This article applies the extended mind theory (EMT) together with Malafouris's notion of "material agency," to the long-standing problem of authorial intentions in literary narratives and creative writing. While "4E" cognitive approaches have recently entered narrative theory through the study of fictional minds and the cognition of narration, the extended mind framework has lagged behind. The article argues that EMT entails a substantial reconsideration of literary intentions, since it provides a distributed account of agency during the act of writing. Drawing on the principles of active externalism, parity, and continuous reciprocal causation, the essay shows that writing is not the offloading of pre-formed mental contents but a technology that actively transforms thought — what Richard Menary calls "thought in action." Words, writing tools, and the imaginative elements they elicit constitute a coupled cognitive system in which the author's mind is extended and supersized. Within this system, intentions are not unidirectionally "built into the doing" but are continuously modified by it, in a "dance of agency" between maker and material. This framework illuminates phenomena widely reported by writers, including verbal parsimony about creative processes, the "illusion of independent agency" of characters, and the porousness of authorial planning under the pressure of textual and imaginative feedback loops. On this basis, the article proposes a revised model of narrative communication that triangulates author, text, and reader, distinguishes "coupled" from "uncoupled" intentions, and places the "cognitive gap" between maker and reader in inverse relation to a zone of "interpretive proximity." All literary authors, it suggests, should be understood as extended mind-workers, collapsing Scheibe's classic distinction between Kopfarbeiter and Papierarbeiter. The essay concludes by calling for a cross-disciplinary integration of narratology, manuscript genetics, and cognitively informed theories of aesthetic creativity - supersizing not only the mind but narrative theory itself.

The article presents an interdisciplinary theory of what it will call “innerscapes”: artefactual representations of the mind as a spatially extended world. By bringing examples of innerscapes from literature (Kafka’s short story The Bridge), radio plays (Samuel Beckett’s Embers), and a creative documentary about auditory-verbal hallucinations (a voice-hearer’s short film, Adam + 1), it suggests that these spatial renditions of the mind are constructed by transforming the quasi-perceptual elements of inner experience into affording ecologies. In so doing, they enable an enactive exploration of inner worlds as navigable environments. The resulting storyworlds display features that resemble the logic and ontology of dreams. Cognitive research on dreams and cartographical studies of the personal geographies of dreamscapes will thus inform the understanding of what innerscapes are, do and can do if used, as the essay argues they should be, as enhancing devices for what Jesse Butler has called ‘extended introspection” (2013: 95).

This chapter proposes a cognitive and phenomenological account of personification as part of a broader human capacity for worlding perceived relations, which I term élanification. Drawing on recent frameworks in cognitive science, philosophical panpsychism, new materialism, and cognitive literary studies, the chapter contributes to current debates on human entanglement with the world by focusing on the dynamic interplay between individual agency and the ascription of vitality, mentality, and intentionality to real, imaginary, or fictional beings and objects. The chapter advances two interlinked proposals. The first is what I call the personification as agency combustion (PAC) principle: rather than co-existing independently, individual agency and personification stand in an energetic, resource-based relationship, whereby personification consumes individual agency as its fuel. The more subjective agency diminishes, the more personifying dynamics are unleashed. The PAC principle is shown to operate across a spectrum of experiences — literary writing and reading, child play with imaginary companions, religious and mystical states (drawing on Simone Weil), and hallucinatory phenomena such as voice-hearing and felt presence — where the lessening of agentive control is inversely proportional to the autonomy and vividness of perceived personified agents. The second proposal is that this combustion of agency unfolds temporally, and that narrative plays a key scaffolding role in progressively layering mentality and intentionality into perceived agents.

This chapter proposes interdisciplinary mind modeling as a new framework for coupling the cognitive sciences, narrative theory, and fictional creativity through shared modeling practices. It argues that both scientists and fiction writers construct purposeful, selective, and simplified representations of the mind—models that serve exploratory rather than purely descriptive functions. Drawing on philosophy of science debates between the “fiction view of models” and the “modeling view of fiction,” the chapter advances the latter, contending that fictional narratives operate as autonomous cognitive models. Through examples from Beckett, Joyce, and Woolf, it shows how literary modeling of processes such as mind wandering and inner speech can both complement and challenge scientific accounts, generating what Bernini terms “exploratory cycles.” These cycles describe iterative loops in which conceptual, empirical, and fictional models inform and refine each other. The chapter also reinterprets structuralist narratology and cognitive literary theory as modeling traditions, linking creative and analytical modeling through shared epistemic drives. The conclusion outlines an ethos of co-modeling and operational empathy, calling for collaborative ecologies that sustain long-term interdisciplinary exchanges. As the theoretical and pragmatic manifesto of the Narrative and Cognition Lab, the chapter envisions mind research as a collective modeling enterprise across disciplinary boundaries.

This article promotes the idea that current cognitive models of mind wandering and inner speech can help us better understanding the phenomenological constituents of what Joyce calls “the mystery of the conscious” as simulated by modernist literary investigations. We rework a model of perceptual decoupling (or how attention disengages from perception) and peripheral awareness (the interplay of focus and periphery in perception).On the other hand, we argue that modernist introspective explorations can challenge, correct and update cognitive models. We also reflect on reading as a process reversing authorial introspective quests (presenting a model of reading as reversed introspection).

This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary model for oneiric experientiality, which makes the case for dreams being immersive, and for immersive worlds. It compares dream and waking lives, and it provides conceptual, phenomenological, and ontological contrast by adding also our experience of fictional worlds to the mix (via the concepts of fictional immersion and ‘saturation’). The chapter argues that dreamworlds share some ontological and phenomenological properties with fictional worlds that are missing in our waking reality (or, vice versa, they lack properties that the real world displays). To capture, explore, and partly explain dreams’ phenomenological and ontological specificity, the chapter proposes a new model for dreams’ immersive experiences that it calls ‘heightened narrowed immersivity’ (HNI). The chapter concludes by suggesting that HNI supports recent theories proposing an evolutionary value for dreams against the brain’s overfitting—a function that HNI extends to fictional indeterminacy too, thus linking dreamworlds and fictional storyworlds even more.

Despite the universal nature and significance of dreaming, the psychological sciences have had a historically uneasy relationship with dreams as a topic of study. The past three decades, however, have seen this wheel turn again, with advances in cognitive research provoking a reawakening of sorts. Such research is provoking new questions not just about dreaming but also its relevance for consciousness, the self, social cognition, and our relationship with reality. This introduction outlines how the volume aims at answering these questions by grouping them under four key clusters (narrativity, permeability, immersivity, and reportability), in an interdisciplinary framework encompassing not just the psychological sciences but the full breadth of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It also contextualizes this volume within the history of an interdisciplinary project at Durham University, Threshold Worlds: Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition, which was an incubator for the ideas and directions that structure the volume. The project included the design and implementation of a novel interdisciplinary survey, which is reported for the first time in this volume, including reflections and analysis from several of the contributing authors.

This article promotes the idea that current cognitive models of mind wandering and inner speech can help us better understanding the phenomenological constituents of what Joyce calls “the mystery of the conscious” as simulated by modernist literary investigations. We will rework a model of perceptual decoupling (or how attention disengages from perception) and peripheral awareness (the interplay of focus and periphery in perception).On the other hand, we argue that modernist introspective explorations can challenge, correct and update cognitive models. We also reflect on reading as a process reversing authorial introspective quests (presenting a model of reading as reversed introspection).

nence of fictional characters in readers’ lives once they have finished reading books. Reflecting on empirical data from a study of four hundred readers of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the article provides a model and a theoretical framework to account for readers’ reporting how fictional characters “stay with them” after readerly immersion (i.e., “experiential crossing”). To date, cognitive literary theories of immersion have focused exclusively on the other direction of transit: namely, how our real past experiences can sustain or enhance our experience of a literary narrative. By contrast, how fictional elements from a storyworld can surface or transmigrate into real-­life cognition has been basically ignored. The emersivity of fictional characters is intriguing and complex because it raises important issues regarding the possibility of entertaining in the real world intersubjective relations with non-­ actual beings, or what the article calls phantasmal intersubjectivity. The article concludes by claiming that the emersivity of literary characters can provide further empirical and theoretical ground to support claims about the impact of literary narratives in everyday life. It also argues for the relevance of emersivity to the broader study of permeability between imaginative and real worlds in human consciousness.

This article develops a fictionality-based approach to artificial intelligence, proposing that human–AI interaction unfolds through the dynamics of character engagement. Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and AI studies, it examines large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and LAURA(modeled on Laura Palmer) as fictional objects of relation—emergent agents whose apparent minds arise through interpretive stances, narrative framing, and phenomenological opacity. Integrating Dennett's notions of real patternsand intentional stancewith theories of characterization and fictionality, it identifies four illusions—of independent agency, independent identity, codependency, and independent poetics—through which users perform mind-building and world-probing exchanges with AI. Distinguishing between designedand emergent fictionality, and between AI immersivityand emersivity, the article shows how linguistic patterning and cognitive projection together sustain real yet imagined forms of intersubjectivity. While such patterned engagements enable genuine cognitive and creative extensions, they also expose the ethical perils of counterfeit people. Fictionality, however, offers a training ground for double exposure—the capacity to navigate what is both real and fictive at once. The article concludes by proposing a view of human–AI interactions as introspection by computation: AI as a technology that extends self-knowledge through the externalization of mind.

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.

[This volume was the first book-length introduction in Italian to the field of cognitive approaches to literature and narrative.] Possono le scienze cognitive (filosofia della mente, psicologia, neuroscienze, linguistica cognitiva) gettare luce sui processi di comprensione e interpretazione dei testi letterari? Quali sono le promesse e i rischi di questo dialogo interdisciplinare? Questo volume cerca di rispondere alle numerose domande sollevate dagli approcci “cognitivi” alla letteratura e alla narrazione che si sono fatti strada negli ultimi due decenni, per lo più in ambito angloamericano e tedesco. A partire da un esame attento dei modelli preesistenti, il libro costruisce un percorso coerente e originale in un campo tanto ricco di stimoli quanto ancora in corso di definizione. [Can the cognitive sciences - philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive linguistics - shed light on the processes of understanding and interpreting literary texts? What are the promises and risks of this interdisciplinary dialogue? This volume sets out to address the many questions raised by the "cognitive" approaches to literature and narrative that have emerged over the past two decades, primarily in the Anglo-American and German contexts. Starting from a close examination of existing models, the book charts a coherent and original path through a field as stimulating as it is still in the process of being defined.]