Narratives for Neuroscience

Roel M Willems; Samuel A Nastase; Branka Milivojevic

doi:10.1016/j.tins.2020.03.003

Narratives for Neuroscience

Trends Neurosci. 2020 May;43(5):271-273. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2020.03.003.

Authors

Roel M Willems¹, Samuel A Nastase², Branka Milivojevic³

Affiliations

¹ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: r.willems@donders.ru.nl.
² Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. Electronic address: snastase@princeton.edu.
³ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: b.milivojevic@donders.ru.nl.

PMID: 32353331
DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2020.03.003

Abstract

People organize and convey their thoughts according to narratives. However, neuroscientists are often reluctant to incorporate narrative stimuli into their experiments. We argue that narratives deserve wider adoption in human neuroscience because they tap into the brain's native machinery for representing the world and provide rich variability for testing hypotheses.

Keywords: event cognition; experimental design; language; naturalistic stimuli; open data; social cognition.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

Emotions*
Humans
Narration*

Grants and funding

R01 MH112566/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United States