Friday
In revising the neuro-criticism chapter of my book Does Literature Makes Us Better People?: A 2500-Year-Old Debate, I came across a New York Times article published nine years ago that somehow I missed. Annie Murphy Paul’s “Your Brain on Fiction” reports on results that I’ve heard about but never seen close up. According to studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, the brain “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.”
There are implications here for both poetry and fiction. Poetry first. Here’s one of the reported findings on metaphor:
Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.
The same thing apparently happened to the motor cortex when people encountered references to action.
Poetry, of course, makes its home in figurative language. I’m wondering if, since the poems with the most compelling metaphors get us closest to the actual nature of things, whether the brain burns the brightest when it encounters them. (The study didn’t say.) In any event, psychologists now say that, when we read a poem, it’s as though we’re in the actual presence of something that is making us feel or hear or smell or taste or see.
Incidentally, Percy Shelley says something very much along these lines in his Defence of Poetry. Language in its beginnings is barely one step removed from experience:
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.
Fiction is similarly powerful. To quote again from the article,
Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” 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.
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.
And that’s not all:
Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.
And:
Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”
I’ve written posts (for instance, here) on more recent psychological experiments that have verified these findings. In one Theory of Mind study, David Comer and Emanuele Castano had subjects read quality fiction, popular fiction, and non-fiction. There was a noticeable rise in the scores from the quality fiction—meaning that the better the literature, the better readers were able to understand other people.
Or as Paul concludes in her article:
These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.
But then, you never had any doubts, right?