Imaginative literature has anticipated and deepened insights currently being scientifically explored in neuroscience. The most prominent of these insights have to do with perception, memory, creativity, dreaming, and the nature of consciousness itself. Readings include Paul Harding’s Tinkers, Borges’ “Funes the Memorious,” Euripides’ Bacchae, Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape, Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska, Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well as poetry and short fiction by authors ranging from Sappho to Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, and Adrienne Rich. You will also have the opportunity to explore these topics through your own creative and reflective writing. Indeed, this course counts on the creative and philosophical engagement of its students. If you are not already a poet or a philosopher, you will be by the end of this course.