Your Brain on Novels

When Sharon wrote about the reader's state of mind on Monday, she wasn't thinking about that soft, squishy stuff inside our skulls.

But I am. 

Cognition and its workings are a bit of a hobby for me. When I nosed around for some science of reading stuff, I found an enlightening (pun intended) article.

Let me start by saying that my new goal as a fiction writer is to light up brains. That's what good fiction does according to "Your Brain on Fiction" by Annie Murphy Paul in the NY Times. The fMRI machine is giving us a glimpse of how the brain reacts to all of the old chestnuts of writing we've been practicing.

For instance, if someone laying in a fMRI machine reads a cliche, the result in the brain is absolutely nothing. No lights. No rush of blood. Darkness. But if the person reads a metaphor, like "the singer had a velvet voice," the part of the brain that processes texture/touch lights up. 

Lights up!

And those strong (specific) nouns and vivid verbs we've been harping on lately, they light up the visual cortex by creating a picture for the reader to "see."

Even nouns associated with smell, like "perfume," "coffee," and "popcorn" turn the lights on in the olfactory part of the brain. This is wild, and yet, so understandable for those of us who read voraciously. (I hankered for pork ribs while reading Gap Creek.)

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated." 

It gets even better. As fiction writers, we can give the reader a vicarious experience that teaches to be more empathetic and social. 

And here's why: 

"Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings...that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective."

For me, this means word choice does matter, that exquisitely crafted characters and stories are worth the time I invest, and that we have scientific proof of what we've known all along: Storytellers play an incredibly important role in the preservation, enhancement, and healing of societies.

How does this information change the way you think about your craft?

Losing Our Way

I think I'll reel for a long time after what Latayne wrote on Monday: that reading a novel can leave a "shadow" in the brain that is detectable in neural scans. She's right: We did suspect all along, but to learn that the effect has been spotted by researchers! If they'd photographed angels, I'd feel hardly less wonder.

Did you ask yourself, reading this revelation, if that shadow on the brain created any noticeable effect on the reader's daily life? It turns out, there is an effect, and researchers David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano have noticed: People who read a certain kind of book - the kind we tend to like best here at Novel Matters - exhibit heightened powers of empathy, the ability to enter into another person's experience and emotion - not to feel for them, but with them.



But not just any book delivers the potion. You won't find it in non-fiction (surprised?) and you won't find it in every kind of fiction, either. David Comer Kidd observed, "Some writing is what you call 'writerly', you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is 'readerly', and you're entertained. We tend to see 'readerly' more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary* [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way."

It makes sense, doesn't it? A relationship with a character that forces you to "find your way" would make good practice for a real human relationship that demands the same. Another researcher, Philip Davies, took it a bit further: "The thing about novels is that they give you a view of an inner world that's not on show. Often what you learn from novels is to be a bit baffled."

None of which will simplify your life. But that may not be the point.

I'll bet you've read some books that have led you into the woods a bit - in a good way. Got any experiences to share? Please do tell. We always love to read what you have to say. 

*See that? He used the "L" word. 

Empathy 102: What I Learned Outside My Door

We writers like to say that a novel's job is to entertain, and nothing more. But few of us really believe it.

At least that's my conviction based on years of reading other author's stories, both good and bad, both CBA fiction and general market. We all hope our writing will entertain you and challenge your cherished assumptions, entertain you and make you a kinder person, entertain you and change the way you vote. And the novels I have loved the best have done all these things for me and more.

The ones I have loved the least have only tried.

And they have failed resoundingly enough to make me cautious about what exactly I would try to do beyond telling the best story I could. The thing I landed on was this: A good story would make the reader see through another person's eyes. It would give her a sustained, 300 page experience of deep empathy.

To do this, I had to climb inside my character's skin while I wrote, to flesh out the way I would feel in her circumstance, to experience the empathy I wished to pass on to my reader.

You yourself may have read something you've written, knowing you've accomplished the thing you'd set out for... but not entirely. I've done that: read my work and known I'd given the reader a 300 page experience of empathy - but not deep empathy.

I believe my year of working at a Resource Center and soaking in all the training my job requires has shown a bit of where the problem lies in my fiction. It begins in the "crawling into the skin" part. I've only ever crawled in as far as my own lifetime experience can take me. My work and training has shown how far that falls short of the mark. This year I have learned a simple, profound lesson:

Lot's of people don't think like I do.

For instance: a person whose parents and grandparents held a socio/economic status different from mine would hold un-questioned, so-obvious-they-never-even-notice-them values that differ profoundly from my own un-questioned values. Not only that, but their values might make perfect sense from where they stand, and untill I manage to stand in that place with them I'll know nothing about empathy.

The extent to which I flesh things out from my own experience is the extent to which I create a character like me, and, probably, like my reader. I could easily bump into Dara at church. I could stand next to Bertie in the checkout line and never notice. Couldn't you?

I'm not sure when, but one day I want to show you the world through the eyes of someone you've never been before. For now, I'll just show you a highly-watchable video from a woman who has changed the way I see the world.




I'd love to read your reactions. Please do share.