Embodied Simulation Theory: Imagination and Narrative

The timely and thought-provoking essay by Siri Hustvedt provides a fascinating account of the relationship between imagination and memory and discusses this relationship against the background of different disciplines like psychoanalysis, cognitive neuroscience, and phenomenology. Hustvedt sheds new light from the inside on the process of artistic creativity by emphasizing that the bodily affective self is at the roots of the narrative self. In the present commentary, I present and briefly discuss recent scientific results corroborating Hustvedt’s thesis and propose how embodied simulation theory can account for many aspects of the relationship between artistic production and its aesthetic experience.