n+1 has an excellent article on how neuroscience is making an increasing appearance in novels, not only as a subject, but also as a literary device to explore characters and explain their motivations.

It marks the start of the trend from Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and notes that in more recent years books such as Richard Powers’s The Echomaker, Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances have all drawn heavily from the medical and brain science literature for their main hooks.

What makes so many writers try their hands and brains at the neuronovel? At the most obvious level, the trend follows a cultural (and, in psychology proper, a disciplinary) shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are. This cultural sea change probably began with the exhaustion of “the linguistic turn” in the humanities, in the 1980s, and with the discredit psychoanalysis suffered, around the same time, from revelations that Freud had dis