Philosopher Roger Scruton has observed, “The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.” Myklebust is a linguist and interloper in the literatures of post-classical and medieval cultures who reconstructs prior visions of the world and the texts through which past civilizations rose to consciousness of themselves. His research models the complex metrical cultures of eleventh- and fifteenth-century poets to map the processes by which cognitive bias drives innovation in literary forms and, in particular, how a fortuitous glitch in the neural life of the human person, rooted in subcortical motor regions of the brain, offers a more complete history of English literary history as a game-theoretic enterprise and outlines a roadmap for the clinical rehabilitation of motor disorders.
