Cognition and the reception of cultural products
Image by Thomas Skirde from Pixabay
Research in the humanities generally underestimates the role of our evolved dispositions in the processing of incoming stimuli. Unlike the “blank slate” approach espoused by many literary critics nowadays, the reception of cultural products depends on a complex mixture of schematized cultural information and information processed by our senses, which goes through much older parts of the brain and is much more susceptible to our evolved biases. An awareness of this complex interplay between cultural information and our evolved dispositions, can reveal much about the “whys” and “hows” of our fascination with fiction and other cultural products.
To get a taste of this research, see my review article A Scientific Turn in the Genre of How-to Fiction Writing Manuals? published in the Spring 4.1. issue of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. You can also check out my MA thesis, titled A Structural Analysis of the Monomyth in Contemporary Action Cinema: Dredd, John Wick, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
