Recent work in cognitive neuroscience has identified a level of neuronal organization, the proto-self, that is inaccessible to consciousness but nevertheless is essential for processing information, interpreting ambiguities, and integrating somatic markers from the body into a coherent representation of body states. So essential is the proto-self that consciousness could not function without it. This talk will develop this idea and discuss its implications for humanistic inquiry.
Katherine Hayles teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her print book, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, was published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2012. Her other books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines, which won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. She is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University, and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles.