Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists (Explorations in Narrative Psychology)

Rethinking Thought takes readers into the minds of 30 creative thinkers to show how greatly the experience of thought can vary. It is dedicated to anyone who has ever been told, "You're not thinking!", because his or her way of thinking differs so much from a spouse's, employer's, or teacher's. The book focuses on individual experiences with visual mental images and verbal language that are used in planning, problem-solving, reflecting, remembering, and forging new ideas. It approaches the question of what thinking is by analyzing variations in the way thinking feels. Written by neuroscientist-turned-literary scholar Laura Otis, Rethinking Thought juxtaposes creative thinkers' insights with recent neuroscientific discoveries about visual mental imagery, verbal language, and thought. Presenting the results of new, interview-based research, it offers verbal portraits of novelist Salman Rushdie, engineer Temple Grandin, American Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and Nobel prize-winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn. It also depicts the unique mental worlds of two award-winning painters, a flamenco dancer, a game designer, a cartoonist, a lawyer-novelist, a theoretical physicist, and a creator of multi-agent software. Treating scientists and artists with equal respect, it creates a dialogue in which neuroscientific findings and the introspections of creative thinkers engage each other as equal partners. The interviews presented in this book indicate that many creative people enter fields requiring skills that don't come naturally. Instead, they choose professions that demand the hardest work and the greatest mental growth. Instead of classifying people as "visual" or "verbal," educators and managers need to consider how thinkers combine visual and verbal skills and how those abilities can be further developed. By showing how greatly individual experiences of thought can vary, this book aims to help readers in all professions better understand and respect the diverse people with whom they work.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Otis, Laura

Psychology & Counseling

Oxford University Press

Who benefits and who loses when emotions are described in particular ways? How do metaphors such as "hold on" and "let go" affect people's emotional experiences? Banned Emotions, written by neuroscientist-turned-literary scholar Laura Otis, draws on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to challenge popular attempts to suppress certain emotions. This interdisciplinary book breaks taboos by exploring emotions in which people are said to "indulge": self-pity, prolonged crying, chronic anger, grudge-bearing, bitterness, and spite. By focusing on metaphors for these emotions in classic novels, self-help books, and popular films, Banned Emotions exposes their cultural and religious roots. Examining works by Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Forster, and Woolf in parallel with Bridesmaids, Fatal Attraction, and Who Moved My Cheese?, Banned Emotions traces pervasive patterns in the ways emotions are represented that can make people so ashamed of their feelings, they may stifle emotions they need to work through. The book argues that emotion regulation is a political as well as a biological issue, affecting not only which emotions can be expressed, but who can express them, when, and how.

Banned Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel

Mental Health

Many structures in the human body are named after Johannes Muller, one of the most respected anatomists and physiologists of the 19th century. Muller taught many of the leading scientists of his age, many of whom would go on to make trail-blazing discoveries of their own. Among them were Theodor Schwann, who demonstrated that all animals are made of cells; Hermann Helmholtz, who measured the velocity of nerve impulses; and Rudolf Virchow, who convinced doctors to think of disease at the cellular level. This book tells Muller's story by interweaving it with those of seven of his most famous students. Muller suffered from depression and insomnia at the same time as he was doing his most important scientific work, and may have committed suicide at age 56. Like Muller, his most prominent students faced personal and social challenges as they practiced cutting-edge science. Virchow was fired for his political activism, Jakob Henle was jailed for membership in a dueling society, and Robert Remak was barred from Prussian universities for refusing to renounce his Orthodox Judaism. By recounting these stories, Muller's Lab explores the ways in which personal life can affect scientists' professional choices, and consequently affect the great discoveries they make.

Muller's Lab

History

A world-famous neurobiologist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for his scientific research in 1906. The previous year, he published these stories: five ingenious tales that take a microscopic look at the nature, allure, and danger of scientific curiosity. Ramón y Cajal waited almost twenty years to publish these stories because he feared they would compromise his scientific career. Featuring the cutting-edge science of the mid-1880s (microscopy, bacteriology, and hypnosis), they probe the seductive power that proceeds from scientific knowledge and explore how the pursuit of such knowledge alternately redeems and ensnares humanity. Here revenge is disguised as research and common fraud as moral purification. Critical thought vies with moribund tradition and stifling religion for a hold on the human spirit; rigid divisions of class and wealth dissolve before the indiscriminate assault of microbes. One man's faith in science gives him the tools to outwit superstition and win the true love and happiness for which he has sacrificed. Another's bitterness and disillusion are cured by a supernatural intervention that melds the epiphany of A Christmas Carol with the macabre detail of an Edgar Allan Poe story. Now available for the first time in English, Ramón y Cajal's stories reveal a great deal about human nature and the collusion of ambition and greed that prey on the hapless and thoughtless, whether in the name of science, religion, or the state. Laura Otis, whose dual background in literature and science echoes that of the author, has crafted a sparkling translation that captures the wit and imagination of the original.

Vacation Stories: FIVE SCIENCE FICTION TALES

Literature & Fiction

RAMÓN Y CAJAL, SANTIAGO

Short Stories & Anthologies

University of Illinois Press

In Membranes, Laura Otis examines how the image of the biological cell became one of the reigning metaphors of the nineteenth century. At the heart of her story is the rise of a fundamental assumption about human identity: the idea that selfhood requires boundaries showing where the individual ends and the rest of the world begins. Otis focuses on the scientific and creative writing of four physician-authors: American neurologist S. Weir Mitchell; Spanish neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who won the Nobel prize in 1906 for proving that neurons were intact, independent cells; British author Arthur Conan Doyle; and Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Membranes also compares the scientific and political thinking of German scientists Rudolf Virchow, the founder of cellular pathology and an active liberal politician, and Robert Koch, who discovered the bacteria that cause cholera and tuberculosis and whose studies of foreign bacteria provided a scientific veneer for German colonialism. Finally, the book presents a unique reading of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.
Otis argues that belief in impermeable personal and national borders is increasingly dangerous. Defying the traditional boundary between science and the humanities, she concludes by proposing a notion of identity based on relations and connections.

Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Medicine and Culture)

History & Criticism

Johns Hopkins University Press

How does the past live in us? Do we inherit our ancestors' memories as we do their physical characteristics? 
In the nineteenth century, mainstream science embraced a long-standing superstition: the belief that memory could be inherited. Scientists reasoned that, just as bodies were reproduced from generation to generation, so were thoughts, memories, and cultural achievements. Heredity and identity were no mere family matter, but the basis of nations. The glories and sins of the past were not gone: they remained in the tissues of living people, who could be honored or blamed accordingly.
Organic Memory surveys the literary and scientific history of an idea that will not go away. Focusing on the years between 1870 and 1918, Otis explores both the origins and the consequences of the idea that memories can be inherited. The organic memory theory contributed to the genocidal programs of the Third Reich, and it erupts in pop-psychology, racist propaganda, and ethnic cleansing.
To track the spread, intensity, and endurance of this especially powerful idea, Otis singles out major authors whose work reinforced or ridiculed belief in organic memory. They include writers who were internationally influential yet who simultaneously represented their national traditions: Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The debates over the human genome project and the explosions of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, in Azerbaijan, Somalia, and elsewhere demonstrate how seriously organic memory continues to affect modern medicine and politics.

Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Texts and Contexts)

University Of Nebraska Press

Ginny has already survived more than most people. Abused as a child, she now lives an isolated life as a housekeeper at the Run-Rite Inn in a small Texas town. Her closest bonds are with the rooms she cleans, which she attempts to protect from abusive guests. The inn's devoted manager, Jake, who knows every hinge on every door and the personality of every room, encourages Ginny to think beyond dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing. But little does she know that he has dreams beyond what the inn provides and will do just about anything to make them come true.When Ginny sees signs that human traffickers are using the inn, she struggles with her intense fear of people. As she begins to suspect that Jake is involved with the illegal operation, she hesitates to intervene, tempted by higher-paying work. But then a shocking discovery brings her face-to-face with her own past, leaving her with no choice but to act--even if it means turning against Jake.Clean is the gripping story of an abused housekeeper who must overcome her inner fears to help women held at a cheap motel by human traffickers.

Clean: A Novel

Literary

iUniverse

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Otis, Laura. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Otis, Laura

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Otis, Laura. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists (Explorations in Narrative Psychology)

Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists (Explorations in Narrative Psychology)

Banned Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel

Muller's Lab

Vacation Stories: FIVE SCIENCE FICTION TALES

Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Medicine and Culture)

Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Texts and Contexts)

Clean: A Novel