Nuar Alsadir and Patrick House
Laughing in Four Dimensions

Poet, nonfiction writer, and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir and neuroscientist and writer Patrick House delve into our psychic landscapes, where consciousness, perception, and selfhood take shape. Together, Alsadir and House consider how a sudden burst of laughter, whether caused by a slip of the tongue, comedy, or even direct brain stimulation, can fundamentally expose or rearrange the contours of experience. 

Alsadir builds on Animal Joy (Fitzcarraldo Editions/Graywolf Press, 2022), a hybrid work of memoir, essay, and ode to being alive, and Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry, 2017), a series of micro-essays, fragments, poems, and sketches probing the trouble with first-person address, alongside more recent essays, to consider how moments of interruption—Freudian slips, laughter, displacement, misrecognition, even boredom—disrupt the apparent coherence of the speaking subject. Across psychoanalytic thought and experimental prose, she unspools how the first person subject is staged through language, performance, and time. Laughter, in particular, emerges as a kind of break in self-possession: a bodily event that exceeds interpretation while exposing the mechanisms by which meaning is ordinarily held together. 

House’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (St. Martin’s, 2022) similarly approaches consciousness through a sequence of shifting perspectives, each chapter offering a distinct conceptual lens on how the brain produces experience. A central reference point is the clinical case reported in Nature in which electrical stimulation during brain surgery induced uncontrollable laughter in a teenage patient, which could be turned up like a dial. This single neurological event becomes a kind of experimental anchor for House’s thinking across neuroscience, philosophy, analogy, and lived experience, each revealing a different facet of how perception and subjectivity are produced.

Their conversation traverses clinical, poetic, and philosophical attention, questioning how agency and a sense of self are shaped by forces both internal and external. Laughter recurs as a site where control breaks down and the construction of selfhood becomes suddenly visible. Alsadir’s poetic and psychoanalytic approaches come into contact with House’s shifting explanatory frames for consciousness to ask how laughter might unsettle the stories we tell ourselves about coherence, agency, and self-possession.

Nuar Alsadir is a poet, nonfiction writer, psychoanalyst, and professor whose work explores selfhood, embodied knowledge, unconscious communication, and what it takes to feel alive. Drawing on psychoanalysis, literary theory, and philosophical inquiry, Alsadir’s writing traces how the psyche speaks through form, gesture, and affect. Her most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf/Fitzcarraldo, 2022), is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive, attending to the serious nature of laughter through a field of references spanning Freud’s joke theory, laugh tracks, poetry, humor, and the presence of her daughters, who disrupt the text to pull her back into immediacy. She is also the author of Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and BOMB. She teaches in NYU’s Creative Writing MFA program and is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

Patrick House is a neuroscientist and writer fascinated by the mysteries of the mind, consciousness, and the strange ways brains can be manipulated. He received his PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University, where he studied the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii and its ability to alter animal behavior, including changes in fear responses and risk perception. House is currently the writer-in-residence at Stanford’s Center for the Explanation of Consciousness, where he explores topics like free will, elegance, and artificial intelligence. His first book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (St. Martin’s, 2022), delves into how our brains tell themselves stories, blurring the lines between mind control by parasites, technology, or even fiction. His essays and profiles on brains, robots, virtual reality, and related subjects have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle, and has written science fiction at OpenAI alongside an early version of ChatGPT. House also spent several years at Kernel, a neurotechnology startup developing noninvasive brain imaging tools.

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Image: Sabine Alsadir Knutsen