I’m pleased to report that this paper has now been selected for inclusion in the 2026 four-volume reference work Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science—a collection intended to map the intellectual development of AI as a field contributing to cognitive science.

You can read about mental perturbance, that paper, and a more recent paper on the same topic here: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Them.

As part of the learning from stories project, I also briefly explored Repetition As a Cognitive Device in Stories and Song, arguing that repetition in art (story, song, etc.) functions because it resembles mental perturbance. And mental perturbance is fundamental to human cognition and emotion.