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@article{193174,
        author = {Jeya Vardhani and Dr. B. Pavithra},
        title = {The Architecture of the Mind: Quantifying Grief and the Science of Suffering in Transcendent Kingdom through the Lens of Algorithmic trauma},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {9},
        pages = {3893-3898},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=193174},
        abstract = {This article proposes the concept of Algorithmic Trauma, exploring how modern literary characters express and try to cope with mental health narratives through the jargon of science, digital information and neurocognition. This paper applies the concept to Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (2020), particularly the protagonist, Gifty, a Ghanaian-American Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience that researches reward seeking behavior and relapse in mice. Gifty’s laboratory work is uncovered not as something she just happens to do for a career, but as a complex, scientifically cast coping mechanism to her family’s devastation: her brother Nana’s fatal opioid addiction and her mother’s chronic, debilitating depression.
Gifty tries to “algorithmically” process this chaos, looking for a neurological master-code to explain and neutralise the trauma that defied the traditional language of her Evangelical Christian upbringing. She converts the messiness of human suffering into quantifiable measurement data points, graphs and the controlled variables of her mouse models. This neurocognitive language offers a strong first line of defence so she can compartmentalise and de-personalise the emotional burden of her history by looking at it through the detached, objective lens of brain chemistry (dopamine, basal ganglia, compulsivity).
However, the novel ends up exploring the insufficiency of this purely algorithmic approach. Gifty’s carefully built-up scientific framework cannot explain the full range of her mother’s spiritual agony, the system-wide pressures that contributed to her brother’s addiction, or her own long-standing spiritual and emotional conflicts. The argument in the article is that it is not until Gifty recognises the limitations of neurocognitive language and incorporates the “softer” languages of memory, faith, and subjective human connection that she attains healing. By examining Gifty’s narrative arc, this paper shows the strength and at the same time the ultimate fragility of finding digital and scientific answers to immense human pain, unearthing Algorithmic Trauma as a defining characteristic of the modern literary portrayal of mental health.},
        keywords = {Algorithmic Trauma, Neuro-cognitive Narratives, Scientific Subjectivity, Narrative Medicine.},
        month = {February},
        }