Telling stories, he briskly informs us, is not the luxury we may imagine, nor the fringe activity of people filling idle hours.
Stories are the building blocks of human thought, the absolute necessities of life.
Stories and parables, in their endless variety, are the means by which the brain works. A University of Maryland professor of English, he also works with the university's neuroscience and cognitive science program, though at the moment he's at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a famous incubator of ideas like those Turner hatches in The Literary Mind . His title describes not a bookish mind but the ordinary human mind. It is our mind. The literary mind is the fundamental mind.