Took "Fiction, Paintings, Film & The Cognitive Sciences"

Heard about this course through word-of-mouth. It was in the "Romance Literature" section of the course catalog...

Introduced concepts such as embodied cognition, theory of mind, the power of narratives, mirror neurons, etc. and how they apply to movies and literature. Authors we read included: V.S. Ramachandran, Daniel Kahneman, Laurie Santos, Michael Gazzaniga, Yuval Harari, Nassim Taleb, Steven Pinker, and George Lakoff.

For the final paper we wrote a cognitive analysis on The Great Beauty, an artistic film with aesthetically stunning scenes that reveal the reality of Rome's decline.

This video is a summary of the class in 6 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F2tvJSz3CE