Per uno sposalizio tra neuro-cognitivismo e critica computazionale: l’esempio del gender

Abstract

In the last twenty years computational criticism has proved to be a model of distant reading functional in search of morphological constants and thematic archetypes: with Franco Moretti it even nourished the ambition, applying to Aby Warburg's Pathosformeln, to find the algorithm of the representation of emotions. In the same years, in completely separate laboratories of the scientific community, scholars of neuro-cognitivism and neuroscience researched and photographed through magnetic resonance the perceptual constants and the way in which the brain processes reality, with the only variations brought about by the contexts. historical-environmental. This paper proposes a methodological alliance of computational criticism and neuroscience to make the search for the way in which the hereditary transmission of information proceeds more and more refined and evidential; in particular, we focus on the studies conducted by both sides on the effects of gender in relation to the reading of reality and the production of fictional worlds, with examples concerning the neuro-cognitive evolution of the Euro-North American populations between Otto and Nocevento. The awareness of the role of the new computational tools offered by modern technology, capable of processing massive amounts of data at an exponential speed incomparable with respect to the past, joins here the certainty that neuroscience is also making a fundamental contribution to the study of humanities.