The Literary Brain: The Neuroscience of Stories

It is not too much to say that I really like The Hobbit. Somewhere in my house is my original copy of the book. A ratty paperback that is water-warped and ragged from being carried to school in opposition of parental threats, stolen and kicked around by bullies on a playground, and tossed in countless garbage cans by teachers who thought they knew better about literature. (Yes, really.) It was even dropped in the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and baked dry in the hot Arizona sun. The spine has long ago been replaced by duct tape and there are over forty tick marks on the inside of the back cover, a younger self's record of reading Tolkien's story of a mousy man turned hero.

This is not about the upcoming movies or even about the book. This is about the stories that consume us and the strange neurochemistry of storytelling.

On a recent episode of Mythbusters (currently available for watching online), where the team did some interesting experiments with an FMRI, seeking to understand whether or not we really only use 10% of our brain. They hooked one of the team up to various machines and had him do math problems and puzzles and tell stories. Nothing they did fired more parts of the brain at once than telling a story.

I wish they had measured while reading a story, but there's only so much you can fit into the time constraints of a TV show.

Thankfully, we don't have to rely on the Mythbusters for all of our scientific data about brain activity and stories. At Michigan State University, there's a project underway to understand the state of mind that leads me and others to get immersed in that world of words, that book that I read differently than all others before it, and possibly since.  It's about what it is about some books that so grab us that we Read Them Differently.

There are some books that just suck you in to their worlds. Some characters that come to us at a crucial time in our development as people and consume us whole. In one big literary gulp, we go down the word gullet, the opinions of teachers, parents, and peers be damned.  For me it was the Hobbit and for others Pride & Prejudice, but whatever your poison, be it Harry Potter or Twilight, the effect is the same.

Recently, researchers have been trying to pinpoint how this works, when and how the story can overtake everything else by monitoring the brain activity of people as they read. And while they have learned a thing or two about the immersive nature of a great book, the most interesting things they've found -- as least for me -- is about the obsessive nature of the reader and the way that a brain falls into a story and doesn't want to come out.

We should all be so lucky as to tell that kind of story.

Here's an interview with Michigan State Professor Natalie Phillips, who is a bit obsessive about Jane Austen via NPR.

RE: "Greed is Good"

Open Letter from the desk of Mr. G. Gekko, Chairman

TO: All Employees 

RE: Setting the record straight on "Greed is Good" 

It has come to the attention of this office that a speech given some time ago has become problematic for the business practices of this firm and this nation. The Chairman has expressed regret (having nothing to do with the current slate of litigation against him) and wishes to set the record straight.

On that day in 1987, when addressing the ethos of his firm and his vision for western culture, he misspoke on rather an epic scale. 

What he meant to say was this:

Read is good. Read works. Read is right.  

Reading clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Reading, in all of its forms; reading for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and reading, you mark my words, will not only save us, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A. 

The chairman expresses his sincerest apologies for any misunderstandings.  If nothing else, unchecked READING is less likely to crash the world economy. 

Semi-sincerely,

G. Gekko, Chairman

Sir Kenneth Robinsion on paying off the creativity deficit...

On Monday, I talked about the diminishing creativity of the American child and a local effort to do something about that.  Or at least a part of it. 

This video was recommended to me at a meeting on Monday where we were discussing what it would mean to create a community writing center on the east side of Tacoma. An under-served, under-resourced community if ever there was one.


At risk of this becoming the "TED is Cool" blog, I'm going to post two more TED videos, making it three in one week.  I trust you will bear with me.


In a 2006 TED Talk, Sir Kenneth Robinson talked about the death of creativity and the under-appreciation of the arts in a global culture that puts a higher value on skills and talents that are of use to industry whilst stripping away the parts of the child that society values less... 




This past year, Sir Kenneth returned to TED to finish his speech (as he puts it) positing a new model for learning.  Replacing a fast food model of education with an agricultural model to grow creative young minds.  He makes some fascinating points, some of them perhaps a trifle utopian.  I would certainly love to see a community that could carry this off...  

Kitchen Geekery 101

What I'm reading and what I'm listening to...

What are you afraid of?

I had a conversation recently with someone who holds a master's degree in a writing discipline but doesn't write.  She tells me that - among other reasons I'm sure - she stopped writing when she read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and realized she couldn't match him.

Wow.  That's a hard mark to hit.

I'm not going to make fun of her.  None of my reasons for writing or not writing are any better or worse than hers.  But it got me to thinking about intimidation and the fears that keep us from writing.  Whether it is fear of rejection (by family, readers, agents, publishers or anyone else), fear of being challenged for what we wrote, or fear that we cannot match the prose of Jonathan Franzen, it's all in our heads.

Some writers compensate for this by retreating into an arrogant defensive posture in which everything everyone else writes is crap compared to your mighty prose.  Personally, I prefer to be aware that I have shelves and shelves of books in my home that were written by writers far more skillfull and gifted than I.  I love all of them and simultaneously I don't care.

Honest.  It doesn't bother me a whit.

Agent blogs and writing books spend a lot of time telling aspiring writers to devote part of their time to market research, reading and comparing yourself to what else is out there and finding where you fit.  Which is well and good as far as it goes.  By all means, read what you want to write and vice-versa -- you certainly don't want to write the sort of book you wouldn't want to read.  I've seen plenty of people try it and it's never pretty.  But I think (as my friend illustrates) that there's a hidden danger there if you're going to get run aground on the shoals of someone else's prose.  Understand what you're doing and how it will eventually be sold.  (I recommend doing some time as a bookseller, there's no better schooling to be had in this regard.) 

The one thing that every author on the shelves of your local bookseller has in common is that they set aside those other authors and wrote the books you are now comparing yourself to.  Maybe we're all arrogant in that way.  There's certainly a bit of ego involved in thinking your daydreams are so cool that everyone else will want to hear about them.

In the end, you must write to your own standard and set that standard at an achievable level.  Raise it on the next one and the one after that, but never so high nor so quickly that you cannot write for the want of attaining your goal of exceeding the latest Pulitzer Prizewinner.

I don't have to write like Isabel Allende or Michael Chabon because I'm not Isabelle Allende any more than I am Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers or Jonathan Franzen.  Nor am I Jane Austen, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London or any of the rest.  I write like me.  I believe the things that I believe, I use the words that I know and the sentence structure that seems natural to me and tell the stories that occur to me in a way I think others will enjoy reading. 

I will always strive to write better, but never to be the next John Updike.  Being the next Scott Perkins is hard enough.

The Dangers of Checklists & Writing Advice...

This post from the blog of mystery author Elizabeth Spann Craig reminds me to underline the point that any writing advice I give here is strictly my opinion.  There isn't a "right way" to do this and in the end (as I've said many times) it boils down to putting your butt in a chair and putting words on a page. 

The chair is optional. 

There are structural things that work better than others, there are ways of starting that seem to attract more readers than others and ways of ending and unfolding your story that seem to work better than others.  But you really should learn those by feel, not by rote -- by reading books, not reading books (or blogs) about how to write.

How do you start your novel?  By putting words on the page.  Even if they're the wrong ones, put words on a page.  It's like parenting, if you wait until you're sure about everything, it'll never happen.  Writers aren't people who talk about writing, they're people who write.  Everything else in writing advice columns, blogs and books borders on the waking the dread hooptedoodle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a novel waiting for me behind this screen and I need to get back to it.

The scent of burning paper...

I was reminded this morning that banned book week is fast approaching. It will begin September 26th and will feature the books that have been banned and/or challenged this past year.

Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and JD Salinger have all been banned at one time or another. Many continue to face challenges from those whose reality cannot encompass the ideas that these writers explore. The desires of a moment or a person are too often allowed to outweigh the long-term good of a culture, and it is this that led all of the authors I just mentioned to face the fire.

Books of religion and history and science have all disappeared from the shelves at one time or another, victims of narrow minds and ideologies that brook no challenge. This is why Charles Darwin sits alongside the authors of the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah on the most-banned lists. Some of the greatest minds and most influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_U.S.

 I challenge you to read something between now and Banned Books Week that someone didn't want you to read. Read anything from 1984 to Huckleberry Finn, to Hamlet or A Wrinkle in Time. Then come back during the week beginning September 26 and tell me about it. If you can, try to read a book you haven't read but only heard about. Then come back and tell us if what you had been told was at all accurate.

I have accumulated a stack next to my chair of books from various banned lists and I will be reading through them as quickly as ever I can and I'll let you know how it goes. Of course, there's no way I can finish them all between now and September 26th, but the reason for having a commemorative week is to remind us that we need to do this every week.

Read.

Read what you want to read. Read what challenges you. Read what people don't want you to read. Read because like muscles and brains, your freedoms will atrophy if they're not exercised. Feel free to recommend great challenging books to your fellow readers in the comments section!

Rethinking Reading

In this article from WIRED Magazine, Clive Thompson proposes a bold rethink of books as static entities. Books have always been a mostly one-sided conversation between the author and the reader. The eBook has the possibility of changing that dynamic, opening up the conversation so that it can flow both ways. This is already being done by allowing a form of digital marginalia. Of old, these were notes and comments jotted in the margins and between lines by those who were inclined to do so. (I used to do this, but these days I tend to use the Post-it). These notes could be added to or commented upon in-turn by the next reader I passed it along to and lie waiting for me on the page until I pick up the book to re-read. It thus became a conversation among friends in a time before Facebook and eBooks... In the digital version, the book would be divided into modules, a chapter or even a paragraph long and shared among readers online utilizing a modular commenting system. In essence, you could think of every section as a blog post with a comments section devoted to it. The other day I was commenting upon the need to recognize the shared-experience of the book as a cultural conversation. A recognition that is notably absent from the sort of Digital Rights Managment that we've been discussing, the sort that says I'm essentially leasing the books in my digital library and the provider can yank them at any time if I do something they don't like... such as loaning my copy of Basbane's divine work A Gentle Madness to a friend. Regardless of how I, my friend or Mr. Basbane might feel about it. This model of the novel as a modular entity, alive with conversation and interaction between readers and writers brings the idea of the novel out of the dusty stacks and off the page to dance among the electrons. An intriguing idea that could be either sublime or devolve into inarticulate chaos, rife with the same trolls and flamewars endemic to other interactive Internet phenomena, easily remedied by allowing us to limit comments we see to our friends list. It's a system that one imagines as allowing the communal aspect of the artform to not only survive but flourish. It still has a long way to go as a viable publishing model, but as Mr. Thompson says in the Wired article: "We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading." Read the article. It really is an interesting direction to explore...