La Voz de Galicia – March 1, 2026 →
In my other work, connecting the sciences and the humanities through the arts, I have spent the past couple of years working with the scientist Kenneth S. Kosik in a class that serves as a bridge between neuroscience and literature. Science students approach the literary classics through the lens of neuroscience, because as Kosik says, “over many centuries, literature has paralleled the neuroscientific investigation of behavior and feelings with its plots and characters using the powerful tool of words to delve into the human mind.”
This week, in which the assigned literary readings were Melville’s Bartleby and Camus’s The Stranger, alongside an article by neuroscientists Thornton, Weaverdyck, and Tamir which begins: “Social life requires people to predict the future: we must predict what others think, feel, and do to interact with them successfully” I found myself reflecting on the countless ways we inhabit and survive in the society we have built over centuries.
Perhaps Bartleby and Meursault (The Stranger) share many traits. Perhaps they are unable to “predict the future” in order to interact, or have simply stopped wanting to, disconnecting from the world. In reality, we don’t know, and that is the beauty of both works: their ambiguity. And whether we talk about neuronal diversity or apathy, the truth is that, like Meursault, no one escapes being a stranger to their own life or to the life around them; or ending up like Bartleby, setting aside all our obligations as human beings… For our minds are profoundly complex, and sometimes impossible to understand.
