Will Neuroscience Kill the Novel?

That's the question recently posed by Big Think.

From the post...

I thought of Woolf’s pronouncement last December, when I read this New York Times article about neuroscientists’ quest to map the human brain in its entirety. The project is only the latest to signal a scientific revolution in our understanding of the self—one that puts Freud’s essentially literary revolution to shame. A century after Woolf’s epochal moment, I wonder if we're witnessing an even greater cultural watershed.

The implications stagger the mind, or at least engorge the frontal lobe. How will a deterministic, neurological account of motivation change our notions of “guilt” or “innocence” before the law? How will a precise grasp of the neurobiology of attraction affect the human mating dance? (I can’t wait for that pharmaceutical arms race.) And most compelling from Woolf’s perspective: how will knowing our own brains so well change literature?

All fiction has, at its heart, the enigma of character. Its most basic pleasures involve analyzing how human beings act, speculating as to what motivates their actions, and, ultimately, judging those actions. What happens if science largely co-opts the first two projects, and undermines the legitimacy of the third?