Articles & Essays   Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 18 Number 3, December 2017

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Carole Brooks Platt is an author, blogger and public speaker.  Born in Philadelphia, PA, she has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (A.B. cum laude), la Sorbonne (diplôme annuel, mention bien), Georgetown University (M.S.)  and Rice University (Ph.D). 

The theme of other voices, other selves began with her mémoire on Surrealist André Breton’s Nadja; her thesis on the voices and visions in Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine; and her dissertation on conflicting mythic voices in three women writers in French: Anne Hébert, Marguerite Yourcenar and Lucette Desvignes. She worked on the French Desk and in Public Affairs at the Department of State in Washington, D.C. for nearly ten years and taught French language and literature for more than 20.

Carole has published articles in esoteric, literary, psychohistorical, and scientific journals, focusing on the characteristics of dissociative creativity in atypical minds. In addition to her early academic research, she has published articles on other voices, other selves in Keats and Hugo and the psychological origins of divine voice. Her most recent articles use neuroscience, attachment theory and psycho-biography to explain how genetic predisposition, early trauma and later stressors have enabled great poets and theorists, including Blake, Keats, Hugo, Graves, Rilke, Yeats, Merrill, Plath and Hughes, to access creative language using dissociative practices. 

Carole regularly attends the Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, AZ; in 2010, she presented her research there.Her work was originally informed by Julian Jaynes's theory on the hallucinatory origins of poetry and prophecy in the right hemisphere of the brain. She has updated his early study with the latest neuroscientific research and was an invited speaker at the Julian Jaynes Conference in Charleston, WV, in 2013. More recently, she was invited to a private symposium on "Further Reaches of the Imagination II" at the Esalen Center for Research and Theory in Big Sur, CA, along with like-minded professionals. She was also invited to speak at the Poetry by the Sea global conference in Madison, CT, May 2016; but, unfortunately, she was unable to attend.  She has spoken at poetry events and academic settings in Houston, TX, and presented at the Jung Center of Houston on February 23, 2017 .

Her book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, brings together all of her literary and neuroscientific research and was considered an Amazon Hot New Release in Neuropsychology and Poetry / Literary Criticism in August 2015.

 

She blogs at rightmindmatters.blogspot.com and regularly updates links to new neuroscientific research on the brain, hemispheric differences, atypical lateralization and handedness at

 https://www.facebook.com/RightMindMatters.