The Science Behind Peter Pan

[Rosalind Ridley]

Hi, I’m new to this forum but it looks wonderful. I am a retired neuropsychologist specialising in cognition – the structure and mechanisms of the way we think. I came across Barrie’s texts by chance and was amazed to discover that he was aware of many cognitive aspects of child development that were not ‘discovered’ by science until the second half of the twentieth century. This is an astonishing achievement. It seems to me that, like many of his contemporaries, Barrie was deeply influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution. He was very interested in the extent to which human behaviour was instinctive. He was also interested in aspects of consciousness in humans and animals. This is an area of study that has only become of interest to scientists in the last few decades. Barrie appears to have been influenced by the psychological theories of William James (Henry James’s brother). I believe that Barrie’s books ‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ and ‘Peter and Wendy’ are comparable in terms of scientific insights to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and Charles Kingsley’s ‘The Water Babies’. I have analyzed the science in Barrie’s Peter Pan stories and presented them in a book ‘Peter Pan and the Mind of J.M Barrie. An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness’ published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-9107-3.

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/peter-pan-and-the-mind-of-j-m-barrie

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Pan-Mind-J-Barrie/dp/144389107X

See first chapter
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/63233