I am writing to invite you to Conscious and Unconscious Narrative: Literature, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience, a panel discussion featuring Siri Hustvedt and Lionel Naccache, moderated by Leah Kelly, on THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in Buell Hall, East Gallery.

*Please forward to interested students, colleagues and members of your listservs.

We all spend our time constructing fictions, telling stories to ourselves and to others. Narration is deeply rooted in the human mind, at a conscious and unconscious level. Producing a narrative is a way of giving meaning to factual experience. Are the fictions created by the human brain and those imagined by novelists of the same nature? American writer Siri Hustvedt and French neurobiologist Lionel Naccache express their original and incisive views on these questions, in conversation with Leah Kelly, an American neuroscientist.

This event is co-presented with the Villa Gillet, as part of the Walls and Bridges Fall 2011 Festival. Walls and Bridges, the Franco-American arts and ideas series, is returning to New York for a third season. Curated by the Villa Gillet (director: Guy Walter) and presented by France's Conseil de la création artistique (general representative: Marin Karmitz), Walls and Bridges is a 10-day series of performances and critical explorations uniting French and American thinkers and performers from social sciences, philosophy and live arts. This season's wide selection of events spans more than 20 debates, concerts, dance performances, screenings, exhibitions and even a transatlantic haute cuisine picnic. More information at www.wallsandbridges.net