I will utter things that have been kept secret from the foundation of the world (Matthew 13:35)

ANNOUNCEMENTS: FEBRUARY 1: The due dates for all the assignments are finalized, here. The past authoring assignment will have to be done in the word version. The location for the word version is described here.

Apologies for the confusion. I thought that the advanced program would be ready, but it has been slightly delayed. It will be ready for the future authoring program, however.

Additional guidelines for reviewing can be found here.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

1. The textbook, Maps of Meaning, will be available in class for $50.

2. The first few chapters of Maps of Meaning are available online here: 

• Preface: Descensus ad Inferos

• Object and Meaning

• Two Prosaic Stories

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Table of Contents

Announcements

Instructor and TA

Abstract

Readings

• Primary Text

• Relevant Papers (and suggested completion dates)

Lecture Topics

Writing Assignments and Peer Review

Due Dates and Grade Weighting

INSTRUCTOR AND TA

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (4046 Sidney Smith Hall)

Office Hours for JB Peterson: TBA

TA: Alex Guindon: email tba

Initial TA Office Hours: TBA

Course Home Page: http://psych.utoronto.ca/~peterson/ps10syll.htm

Home page: http://psych.utoronto.ca/~peterson/welcome.htm

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ABSTRACT

This course is based on the book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Maps of Meaning lays bare the grammar of mythology, and describes the relevance of that grammar for interpretation of narrative and religion, comprehension of ideological identification, and understanding of the role that individual choice plays in the maintenance, transformation and destiny of social systems.

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READINGS

1. Primary Text

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2. Relevant Papers and Suggested Completion Dates

Action and its Imitation (January 12)

• Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L. & Gallese, V. (2001). Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action. Nature Reviews, 2, 661-670.

Memory, Novelty and Anxiety (January 26)

• Vinogradova, O.S. (2001). Hippocampus as comparator. Hippocampus, 11, 578-598.

• Ohman, A. & Mineka, S. (2003). The malicious serpent: snakes as a prototypical stimulus for an evolved module of fear. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 5-9.

Dominance and Hierarchy (February 02)

• Kravitz, E.A. (2000). Serotonin and aggression: insights gained from a lobster model system and speculations on the role of amine neurons in a complex behavior. Journal of Comparative Physiology, 186, 221-238.

Higher Order Control (Feb 23)

• Miller, E.K. (2001). The prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience Reviews 1, 59-65.

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LECTURE TOPICS

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WRITING ASSIGNMENTS AND PEER REVIEW

You will be required to produce three written assignments, and to peer review written work for three students over the duration of the course. Two of the writing assignments (1 and 3) are available online. The other one (2) may be an essay or narrative (including poetry).

• Peer Review: Before an author or researcher publishes a paper or a book, he or she has generally received feedback from several anonymous peer reviewers and an editor and rewritten the work with those criticisms in mind. This process may be repeated three or four times, and generally results in a much stronger finished product. Your written work for this class will thus be read by three anonymous students, criticized constructively, and graded. You will receive the average of the top two grades that you were awarded for each assignment. Instructions for Peer Review can be found here.

• Essay or Narrative Writing: Hints for essay or narrative writing can be found here.

Assignment 1, Past Authoring

Past Authoring is an exercise designed to help you understand your personal history more clearly. Every experience that you have had contains information. If you have fully processed the information in that experience, (1) its recollection will no longer produce negative emotion and (2) you have learned everything you need to know from it, at least for now. Any past experience more than a year old (approximately) that still produces negative emotion still has information embedded in it. Writing about such experiences helps extract that information. Writing helps move the information from vague, emotion-laden and imagistic representation to high resolution conscious narrative form.

The assignment can be found online here. Some explanatory material can be found here.

Save the document EXACTLY as YOURSTUDENTNUMBERASSIGNMENTNUMBER.doc. Please post it at the Blackboard Maps of Meaning site (login at http://portal.utoronto.ca/)

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Assignment 2,  Essay or Narrative Writing:   2000 words

The essay is on a topic of your choice.

Assignment 2 is designed to give students maximal freedom of expression. You may write a formal scientific essay, a philosophical essay, a story or a poem.

If you choose to write a short story or a poem (or anything else of a literary nature) make sure you include an interpretive afterword, detailing the relationship between that story or poem and the class material. This means that you have to serve as your own literary critic.

1. The paper should have an appropriate and sufficiently ambitious goal.

2. The paper should be explicitly related to the themes of the class.

3. The paper should incorporate material beyond that which is covered in lecture and in the text, Maps of Meaning, even if that additional material is simply your own thought.

4. The paper should employ an appropriate form for the achievement of its goal. The form should be well executed.

5. Writing should display (in approximate order of importance): clarity, coherence, style, economy, grammar, punctuation. Most papers should include both analysis and synthesis.

6. The goal should be successfully achieved.

NOTE: Assignment 2 should be 2000 words long, double-spaced, in type no smaller than 12-point.

When you have completed Assignment 2, save it EXACTLY as YOURSTUDENTNUMBER2.doc. We will tell you where to post it in the next two weeks.

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Assignment 3, Future Authoring

Future Authoring is an exercise designed to help you lay out a set of explicit goals for your future. In essence, you will be asked to write your own story. Carl Jung once noted that every person lives a story, or a myth. This means (1) that you know your own story, and are acting it out consciously, (2) that you do not know your own story, and may therefore be unconsciously or implicitly acting out a tragedy, or (3) because of your own lack of direction, you serve as a minor character – and, perhaps, a foolish or tragic one – in the stories of other people. Obviously, option (1) is preferable to (2) or (3), but it also requires some conscious effort. The Future Authoring Exercise has been designed to aid that effort.

• A plain Word document version can be found here.

• Some explanatory material can be found here.

Save the document EXACTLY as YOURSTUDENTNUMBERASSIGNMENTNUMBER.doc. Please post it at the Blackboard Maps of Meaning site (login at http://portal.utoronto.ca/)

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DUE DATES AND GRADE WEIGHTING

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This document has been requested times since January 07, 2007.

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J.B. Peterson's home page.