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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

a child’s narrative skills are related not only to a achment but are
heavily dependent on her mother’s communicative style, on maternal
scaffolding of the child’s u erances and what has come to be called
“elaborateness.” Highly elaborate maternal styles of reminiscing with
a child turn the back and forth of dialogue into a co-created story, and
the more elaborate the mother’s verbal style, the more predictive it is
of her child’s future narrative abilities. 35
Research on the social brain in neuroscience includes findings
on experience-dependent changes in brain development in animals
from insects to human beings. There is convincing evidence that the
nervous system as a whole and the plastic brain, in particular, grows
and changes through a person’s encounters with a world of others. 36
The startling discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex of
the macaque monkey in the early nineties has led to a new under-
standing of the physiology of human dialogical interaction, from
which Vi orio Gallese developed his idea of “embodied simulation,”
the pre-personal, direct apprehension of the actions and emotions of
others, a neurobiological theory that both echoes and draws from the
philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. 37
Daniel Stern, the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and infant re-

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Alyssa McCabe, Carole Peterson, and Dianne M. Connors, “A achment Se-
curity and Narrative Elaboration,” International Journal of Behavioral Develop-
ment 30, no. 5 (2006): 398-409.
35 Robyn Fivush, “Maternal Reminiscing Style and Children’s Developing
Understanding of Self and Emotion,” Clinical Social Work Journal 35, no. 1
(2007): 37-46.
36 See Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Ma er of Mind (New
York: Basic Books, 1992), 226. See also Bryan Kolb and Robbin Gibb, “Principles
of Neuroplasticity and Behavior,” in Cognitive Neurorehabilitation: Evidence and
Application, 2nd ed., ed. Donald T. Sturs, Gordon Winocur, and Ian H. Robert-
son, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6-21, and Margaret Sheri-
dan and Charles A. Nelson, “Neurobiology of Fetal and Infant Development:
Implications for Infant Mental Health,” in Handbook of Infant Mental Health, ed.
Charles H. Zeanah Jr. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012), 40-58, and James E.
Swaim, “Baby Stimuli and the Parent Brain,” Psychiatry 5, no. 8 (2008): 28-36.
37 Vi orio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Ex-
perience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 23-48.

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