WHAT NEUROSCIENCE TELLS US ABOUT THE ART OF FICTION

(This article first appeared on Damien G Walter's blog some years back. The relationship between creative writing and neuroscience has pretty much remained the same, I'm sorry to say)

One of the very first pieces of advice I ever received about writing fiction was to shorten my sentences whenever a scene’s tension rises. It’s a good piece of advice, I’ve found, one as fundamental to romance as to action.

The reasoning goes that, subconsciously, your body is ‘speaking’ the words you read and your breathing patterns begin to reflect this. In turn, breathing faster stirs your brain and nervous system, releasing endorphins (the Iggy Pop of opioid peptides).

You may well have got this advice early on too, but let’s stop and think about it because it’s some heavy shit. Your fiction, done right, can alter the chemical equilibrium of a reader’s body. Not as much as running a marathon, admittedly, but a startling amount for anyone slouching on a beanbag. Absolute Derren Brown stuff. And yet…

And yet the trail pretty much ends there. As far as writer-development goes, it seems no one wants to look under the hood. Plough through several ‘how to write’ books and, if their take on creativity is not outright spiritual, it’ll at least imply story and prose arise from some vague platonic realm. I find this a real shame, given science’s recent breakthroughs in understanding the brain.

For instance, the line ‘He had leathery hands’ has just stimulated your sensory cortex in a way ‘he had rough hands’ can never hope to. Pop that first line in the middle of your favourite SF trilogy and the effect rises exponentially. The brain, it seems, doesn’t make much of a distinction between reading and actual doing. Words such as ‘lavender’, ‘coffee’ and ‘soap’ will similarly affect the sensory part of the brain, whereas ‘John grasped the object’ not only stimulates the motor cortex, but the part of it governing the action of grasping itself.

Want more? Well, your prospective reader’s ‘theory of mind’ is only so generous. Compare-

“Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate”

To:

“Peter said that Paul believed that Mary suggested Jane liked chocolate”

Evolution has gifted you with comprehending the former with relative ease. For the purposes of survival, the ability to visualise three mind-states is more than adequate. Add a fourth, however, and you suddenly have to engage in a different, more analytical, mode of thought. A fifth, and understanding drops by 60%. So, the protagonist of your epic suspecting the dragon fears the princess is more than acceptable. Anymore (and I’m looking at you here, Virginia Woolf), and you’re dealing in bad craft. Your reader will be flung from your prose-world like they’re in an ejector seat. Simple as.

Perhaps all of this is knowable enough through sheer writing instinct. Still, nice to have it verified. Yet elsewhere, neuroscience is answering one of literature’s greatest debates: Does reading improve our morality?

The answer seems to be ‘yes’ (but not always in the way we might think).

Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, 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. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels.
(New York Times, 2012)

See? The more you scribble, the more you’ll make the world a better place. Doesn’t matter what kind of scribbling, either. The empirical evidence suggests there are no ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’ reads, merely simulations for our brains to engage with and analyse. Presumably, a full and varied diet of fiction is preferable to one based solely on ‘true’ literature- something that flies in the face of our culture’s preconceptions.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ravenously hungry for these kinds of titbits. Ideally, I’d like someone far more qualified than me to contextualise it all into a neuroliterary guide to writing (I’m not sure ‘neuroliterature’ is even the correct term, which is a sign of just how threadbare matters are). Why is the writing industry—with all its guides, blogs and workshops—so sluggish in this regard? Even literary academia (not a place famed for its evidence-based approach, let’s face it) is beginning to grasp the matter. Why can’t we?

Fear of dissection, maybe. Suggest we scan a thousand reader’s brains so as to get a clearer picture of what The Great Gatsby (to give a blog-relevant example) actually does to us and the reaction, I suspect, would be one of visceral horror. Words like ‘crude’ and the ever-reliable ‘reductionist’ would fill the air (the latter being nonsense; if anything, we’d only be adding to matters). Many relish the fact that at the heart of writing lies that most overrated of things- a mystery.

There’s is nothing to be gained in preserving mystery. The craft of writing will be better off without it. I picture a future for writing that dispenses with mystery wherever it can, that embraces the astounding strides in thought-organ research. Ideally, a future where neuroimaging both miniaturises and becomes widespread, augmenting the craft of authors, critics, agents and publishing houses.
Picture Amazon book reviews of the twenty-thirties:Was this magnetoencephalograph useful to you?

The Venus and Mars Delusion

All articles about male and female human brains are required to have a picture like this. Sorry; it's just the law.

Another day another piece of science journalism 'proving' men and women's brains are 'hardwired' differently. Inevitable as Johnston's death and taxes. The manner in which these fresh claims, typically bereft of further studies, rocket to the top of the media (in a way quantum entanglement, say, doesn't) says more about our species's narcissism and neuroses than anything else.

The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, found women's brains typically had a greater connectivity between the left and right hemispheres, equipping their owners for social skills, intuition and memory while male brains showed greater connectivity betwixt front and rear of either hemisphere (specialized for map reading, shooter games and reciting entire sketches from Monty Python's Flying Circus).

Well, I'm not going to deny these findings, but I'm skeptical of the interpretation. Certainly not while our culture is so close in time to the Victorian age and the legal ownership of wives by their husbands.

You see, here in the 21st century we talk a good equality fight but on some fundamental, subconscious level true equality terrifies us. All of us in the west, whatever gender, grasp for the comforting certainties of a regimented past and if we're too grown up nowadays to take it from the Old Testament we'll happily quaff it from a webpage with a computer generated illustration. Patriarchy is as much a comfort blanket as a cudgel.

A paragraph (tellingly) toward the end of the article had this to say:

Male and female brains showed few differences in connectivity up to the age of 13, but became more differentiated in 14- to 17-year-olds.

Hmm. So not as 'hardwired' as we may have been told. A hormonal leveling-up at best. Yet by what quantity? If the study showed we were born a certain way I'd happily swig down the 100% proof bio-determinism. But with this difference of connectivity occurring so late in the day isn't it possible experience is in play here as much as hormones? Whichever way you cut it, there's space for a fat-assed reasonable doubt to sit itself down.

Imagine my smug delight to find science writer of the year Robin McKie agrees with me.

It is biological determinism at its silly, trivial worst. Yes, men and women probably do have differently wired brains, but there is little convincing evidence to suggest these variations are caused by anything other than cultural factors. Males develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are expected and encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasized by teachers and parents.

As the years pass, these different lifestyles produce variations in brain wiring – which is a lot more plastic than most biological determinists realize. This possibility was simply not addressed by Verma and her team.

(It's worth reading the entire article; far more knowledgeable than this one)

Another takeaway, this time McKie quoting (the presumably emotional and multi-tasking) Professor Dorothy Bishop:

They talk as if there is a typical male and a typical female brain – they even provide a diagram – but they ignore the fact that there is a great deal of variation within the sexes in terms of brain structure. You simply cannot say there is a male brain and a female brain.

Layman though I am, it makes a lot of sense to me. Whenever faced with these men/women/mind hack jobs I always think 'Well, how different can our particular species genders afford to be?' I mean, a human child is an expensive and long term project in evolutionary terms.

 How many years must pass before they're mature enough to survive alone? Eight years? Ten? Thirty seven? In a prehistoric world of sabre-toothed predators and no hospitals neither parent could be guaranteed to see the whole run through. A tribe isn't guaranteed either and so mommie hominid should have a temperament to become daddy hominid in the event of the latter's death. And vice verse. In light of that, I'm tempted to think rigid social gender differences came into play much later, with the invention of agriculture and the excess population that allows. 

Oh, sod it, have another one

But, hey, enough of my just-so stories. The internet's full of 'em enough. What interests me more is taking the hard results of this latest study and interpreting it in a less deterministic, do-as-yer-told manner. Because, I feel, it leads to somewhere far more interesting and perhaps a lot more hopeful.

If we take the astounding plasticity of the brain as a starting point and accept the majority of the gendered mind is culturally imposed and learned, it still makes sense the 'average' woman's brain has more inter-hemispherical connections than a man's. Her brain would have adapted to the expectations of the civilization she lives in. Ditto men.

But--and here's the thing--cultures alter their shape as they flow, much like a river. I dearly wish we could take the scanning techniques used in the study back to the middle ages and run the same experiment every half-century thereon.

Would we discover the brains of our ancestors to be more gender divided than our own? Have the Enlightenment, women's suffrage, the Geneva convention and progress generally made our brains more androgynous? Is social media pushing us further in that direction? And is this a steady process or is it accelerating?

A different sort of evolution, I guess, where memes pool into hard neurobiology. And one, for once, where individuals are truly in control of the driving wheel.

Mary Wollstonecraft, yesterday

Consider Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman and mother of Mary Shelley. Perhaps her neurobiology was exceptionally 'male' for the 18th century (or, I'm tempted to think, male enough to get listened to and female enough to say something that actually mattered). Her philosophy dispersed amongst a readership who brought their daughters up just that little more equally. A century or so later, we have Pankhursts and Luxembourgs aplenty, and so on unto the modern working woman. The Wollstonecraft mind-state, once so rare, becomes the norm.

The same would apply to men here. George W Bush and Dick Cheney's brains, as assuredly vile and bullish as they are, probably lack the 'masculine' neurobiology of Genghis Khan or Alexander The Great. Extrapolating trends towards the future, then, we see a future of uni-gendered minds almost certainly less neurotic than our own.

Okay, I'm taking an idea for a walk here (or 'talking bollocks' to use the technical term) and not claiming any expertise or authority. But, to my map-reading, car-parking brain at least, it seems a shame that, now we can see gender (which is a different thing to sex of course)-- actually see it rendered in front of our eyes--we let such a discovery play into the hands of patriarchal regression.