A narrative method for consciousness research.
Frontiers in human neuroscience January 1, 2013 José-luis Díaz 19 citations
Certain first-person narrations of mental processes, especially internal monologues in which an author declares actual thoughts aloud, are particularly suitable for modeling streams of consciousness. A narrative method to extract and depict conscious processes from such texts requires three steps: operational criteria for selecting a phenomenological text, a system for detecting text items indicative of conscious contents and processes, and a procedure for representing these items in formal dynamic system devices like Petri nets. The method is applied to an interior monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses, and an inter-subjective evaluation of mental attributions from Miguel de Unamuno's Intimate Journal is presented using mathematical tools.