돈 들릴로의 『언더월드』와 마음의 과학

Don DeLillo's Underworld and the Science of Mind: Focused on Conceptual Blending Theory

This paper is an attempt to study the science of mind in Don De Lillo's Underworld based on conceptual blending theory as proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier in cognitive linguistics. In recent years, it has become fashionable to speak of cognitive science. The fundamental concept of it is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures. This is a nexus of cognitive science and Underworld which shows the aspect of blurring the distinction between human being and the Internet. Blending theory is able to improve on the shortcomings of classical cognitive metaphor theory and additionally posits some much more fundamental theses about the human mind. Investigating the human psyche in the field of natural science, William James approached the human mind from a neuroscientific perspective. He was influenced by Charles Darwin known for his contributions to evolutionary theory. Today the science of mind has been enriched by the foundations of the brain studies. For example, blending could be explained as the binding problem in neuroscience. Gerald Edelman has tried to solve the problem by invoking a conjectural neurobiological process called reentrant signaling which is practically established by the technology of fMRI and the PET studies. As the result of an empirical study of neuroscience, we could understand how our mind works proving blending theory.