Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens

Jeff and Darron explore an idea first proposed in episode 12 - developing an analytical cognitive lens that uses concepts from cognitive science and related fields in order to better integrate modern neuroscientific and psychological concepts into our engagement with fiction and our understanding of the actions, motivations, and biases of characters. Starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the The Gilded Age, The Great Gatsby, they discuss how our own experience arriving at a particular book at a particular time influences the way we perceive it, and then apply various concepts such as cognitive dissonance and self-justification, the illusory nature of memory and the self, and how our brains are “tuned and pruned” by experience, to understand why the characters behave the way they do and what that might teach us about human nature.

Notes:

• 2:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - “A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism” from March 2021

• 2:09 - See Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett and Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson

• 2:30 - See the “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” subsection of the Purdue Online Writing Lab website

• 3:04 - See “Psychoanalytic Criticism” (Purdue OWL)

• 3:28 - F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby

• 3:48 - See the entry on “allostasis” from the extended endnotes of How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett and/or the “Allostasis” Wikipedia entry

• 3:50 - See “Confirmation bias”, and the “Cognitive bias cheat sheet” and “What Can We Do About Our Bias?” by Buster Benson writing for Better Humans

• 4:17 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 07 - “Boxing Aristotle” from November 2020

• 5:29 - Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne are both canonical giants of American Literature

• 5:32 - A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

• 8:30 - Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary

• 8:35 - Bo Knows Bo is the 1990 autobiography of two-sport star Bo Jackson which was co-authored by sports journalist Dick Schaap

• 8:49 - Puritanism

• 9:02 - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

• 11:05 - Commenting on how great art seemingly evolves with us, author Virginia Woolf writes that “There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.” See Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

• 12:30 - The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

• 13:49 - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• 14:39 - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which Jeff and I discussed at length in Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - “It’s Alive!” from October 2020

• 14:41 - Jacques Lacan was an influential French psychoanalyst 

• 14:47 - The Mirror Stage

• 15:16 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions and leads to further action and self justification

• 15:23 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson

• 22:50 - See “How Robert Zimmerman Became Bob Dylan” - Born in Minnesota as Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, he arrived in New York in 1961 stylizing himself as a dusty troubadour in the mold of his idol Woody Guthrie and famously told fantastical versions of his personal history all throughout his early career. Before settling officially on the name Bob Dylan in 1961, he had already gone by Elston Gunn, and Robert Allen. In a 2004 interview Dylan said "You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free." and perhaps most tellingly, in the 2019 Martin Scorscese documentary “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story” he says “Life isn’t about finding yourself—or about finding anything, Life is about creating yourself.”

• 23:10 - In “Ballad of a Thin Man” from the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan sings “You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books, You're very well-read, it's well-known”, see complete lyrics from Bobdylan.com

• 23:20 - Released in 2007, I’m Not There explores different aspects of Dylan’s life and career through 6 vignettes where the “Dylan” character is played by different actors

• 26:39 - Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

• 26:40 - The quote “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel Mother Night

• 40:05 - For more on System 1 and System 2 thinking see “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientifc American, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• 41:14 - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, listen to episode 40 of the It’s Not What It Seems podcast where Darron discusses Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert with his brother Doug

• 44:05 - See the entry on “Tuning and pruning” from the extended endnotes of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• 52:55 - See “Feminist Criticism” (Purdue OWL)

• 53:06 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

• 53:39 - See “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich” (The Atlantic, 2011)

• 55:25 - According to American Heritage “Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color is apparently the book that Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby has in mind when he praises “‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard.” Although he had the title and author wrong, he wasn’t all that far off. Henry Goddard was, in fact, the author of the famous eugenical study of The Kallikak Family.

• 55:40 - Fundamental attribution error

• 57:10 - See “Ten Years Later: Timeline of Tiger’s Scandal” (Golf Channel, 2019)

• 57:16 - Douglas Vigliotti (Darron’s brother)

• 1:05:51 - See “Post-Colonial Criticism” (Purdue OWL)

• 1:06:55 - For more on the predictive nature of the brain see the entry on “allostasis” from the extended endnotes of How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett and/or the “Allostasis” Wikipedia entry

• 1:08:29 - The quote “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” comes from George Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel

• 1:11:20 - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut