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Angus Fletcher

Angus Fletcher is a professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative. His research has been called "life-changing" by Brene Brown and "mind blowing" by Malcolm Gladwell; has been endorsed by psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors such as Martin Seligman and Antonio Damasio; and has been supported by institutions from the National Science Foundation to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2023, he was awarded the Commendation Medal by the U.S. Army for his "groundbreaking research" with U.S. Army Special Operations into primal intelligence.
Primal Intelligence

Books

Primal Intelligence

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 286 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 45th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-18, 2026 Seattle, Washington Hyatt Regency Seattle Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these authors at

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence

How are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? In 2021, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative—renowned for collaborations with NASA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—announced they had the answer. They named it Primal Intelligence. It offers a new neuroscientific framework for understanding intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense—the four pillars of Primal Intelligence.

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