Thinking Styles, Kinds of Knowledge, and the Senses: Learning from Scientists and Fiction-writers

Creative Language Technologies

This is episode #11 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 10th of February, 2022. It was my pleasure to talk today with Dr. Laura Otis who comes from a background in biochemistry, neuroscience, and laboratory research, but she is now an English Professor at Emory University. She is the author of multiple academic (but readable) books on the relationship between literature and science, and she has also published six novels. In her blog on creativity for Psychology Today, she writes about how the thinking of creative writers and scientists is connected. Laura tries always to write and talk so as to respect the intelligence and ways of knowing of people in very different fields who build knowledge differently.

We started the discussion with a definition of thought, focusing on the different ways people think and remember. Laura thinks that people’s mental worlds vary greatly. Believing that the world’s 7 billion mental worlds are similar, gives us just a crude, limited, and unrealistic picture of what human thinking involves. In fact, according to her, ‘Is thinking visual or is it verbal?’ is the wrong question to ask. In her interviews, Laura has also tried to see if there is any connection between thinking, feeling, and the senses as she asked her subjects questions like “Do you see anything when you read?” or “What senses predominate in your memories?”

In the second part of the show, we discussed her new project — a book called “The Neuroscience of Craft” on how fiction-writers and scientists can benefit from each other's knowledge about sensory systems. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- What is thought?
- ‘Is thinking visual or is it verbal?’ The Visual — Verbal spectrum approach to thinking
- Differences in the way thinking feels
- An investigator’s training, language, cultural orientation, and even memories can influence a (scientific) study
- How can people with different thought styles learn to communicate with each other better?
- Ways of thinking in education: how can we better interact with our students
- Blending senses in fiction
Note:

Books and papers mentioned:
Laura C. Otis. (2015). Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists. Oxford University Press.
Laura’s Amazon page has links to all of her published books for readers who are interested:

https://www.amazon.com/Laura-Otis/e/B001HMOU9W%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
A link to Laura’s Psychology Today blog:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/laura-otis-phd